#But . language and culture differs wildly. Every body remember this

[mirainotes]

Regarding Zero Talking

Hi i firmly believe the characters in zero talking are NOT siblings.

1. It just doesn't make sense? One of them is in a high powerful position, some sort of ruler and the other is a maid. Why in the world would these two characters be siblings. i assume if they were then they would be roughly in the same like. class? socially?

2. the only place we get that they could be siblings from is the lyrics in the song saying "sister" in all katakana and a tweet where harugoha calls them siblings (shimai in kanji).

HOWEVER. This is NOT literal. it's a japanese term originating in the 1900s usually abbreviated just to S/esu to describe a very very close relationship between two girls. this often gets used in Yuri and stuff. the term shimai is also used here sometimes as far as i can find so it isnt odd that harugoha would use it to describe them.

Basically. he's just using yuri tropes. they are not siblings. thank you all.

edit: PLEASE LOOK AT MY REBLOG!!! I go a lot more into depth about the history of the term S and link sources nd stuff. Im not just making things up i promise.

[sleepingdeath-light]

relationship hcs ; white pearl cookie

requested by ; 🍾 anon (12/08/23)

fandom(s) ; cookie run

fandom masterlist(s) ; hub | specific

character(s) ; white pearl cookie

outline ; “white pearl! relationship and smut hcs ~ 🍾”

warning(s) ; none, just fluff!

white pearl cookie is a complete and utter sweetheart who wouldn’t even dream of treating you like anything less than her greatest and most precious treasure — someone who approaches your relationship with a genuine innocence and earnestness that you can’t help but be endeared by no matter how long you’ve been together

she tells you the most wonderful stories about her sisters and her childhood in sugarcrown, her descriptions so vivid that you can’t help but get enthralled in every tale she spins — holding her as she gesticulates wildly and looks between the moon and you with an unmatched brightness in her eyes that is only rivalled by the beauty of her smile, feeling almost as if you were in that memory with her (mind overcome with images of that beautiful citadel, it’s wonderful citizens, and the royal family with their magnificent gems and the power they represented)

she’s someone who is incredibly easy to love because she fits so naturally into your life without any effort at all: an incredible listener who gives the sweetest reassurances, someone who gives the warmest hugs despite her body always being wet and chilled from living in the ocean, a partner who remembers and adores all of the little things about you (quirks and habits you don’t even notice yourself), and a woman who loves you wholly — good and bad — without ever making you feel indebted or needy when you ask for anything from her

all of her sisters notice that something about her has changed once the two of you start seeing each other — she’s happier, brighter, and carries herself in a lighter way than usual — but she only ever tells frilled jellyfish cookie about you because she isn’t quite ready to have that conversation with the other gem mermaids yet (she knows they’d love you, how could they not, but it’s a world of difference between talking to her dearest friend about her lover and introducing the idea of you to her family)

she uses a few pet names for you along the lines of ‘my love’, ‘dearest’, and ‘my moon’ (with the latter being incredibly traditional for mermaids to call their partners), and she’s highly receptive and flattered by any pet names you choose to use with her — bonus points if it includes a reference to the sea but she’s happy with anything and everything you might want to call her (the cornier/more likely to make her laugh the better in her eyes, so don’t worry about that)

she enjoys participating in all of the main love languages, but she has a particular soft spot for quality time and physical touch (especially if they come hand-in-hand) — e.g. you laying on a dock with your legs dangling in the water whilst she lounges between your thighs and rests her head on your chest, your arms wrapped around her as you each point out the constellations and discuss their meanings between your cultures (bonus points if you fall asleep like that in each other’s arms)

sometimes (well… often) you’ll catch her just staring at you with a lovestruck smile on her face whilst she rests her head on her arms — humming along to whatever you were talking about whilst continuing to smile and stare in a way that makes your heart flutter (if you mention it she’ll get flustered herself and dip back into the water to try and compose herself — it’s really cute but try not to laugh too much, the poor girl might not resurface for a while longer if you do)

[granulesofsand]

🗝️🏷️trafficking, RAMCOA in medium detail, child abuse, active threat, and more!

I have information I need to spit out before it gets cycled through, but I can’t think well enough to make it generally useful. Uhm. Words.

- it’s so hard to comprehend language rn. We have longer running programs built to stop us remembering or sharing secrets, but also we are being cued. I can’t tell what they know about what they’re doing, but every time I turn around at least one of them is staring. I’m sitting in a locked bathroom because they are always right there

- the grandparents know more physical cues than our immediate family, and they’re super touchy and insistent on sitting across from us. It’s not those things alone that are weird, but in combination with the effects their gestures have it seems off. The cues aren’t all impossible to replicate unintentionally, but it would be damn hard to use them in a row or in regular speech.

- they know too much, but also not enough. Our mom talks to them about everything, regardless of what we ask or if she says she won’t. There are some things, like abuse incidents they supposedly weren’t there for, that they bring up details about. Usually with another cue, but idk why they’re tying them like that, I don’t think we connected them before. They also get confused about events we know they were there for or told about, and sometimes they follow it up with a forgetting or innocence cue. They’re old, but they’re the type to point at houses and talk about specific parties thrown there or quirks the occupants had.

- they’re very nice until they’re not. I actually think this is mostly cultural. They don’t talk bad about anyone until they leave the room, they speak politely even when they’re throwing slurs, they use perfect table manners and volunteer to help around the house. We fought with them today about whether sex and labor trafficking of children was okay, and they think it is. We feel so bad about cutting them off until they start talking about how different races are the downfall of the country. Again, they are just conservative old white people.

- our parents are dissociative. We weren’t sure if it was alters or just memory and state change before, but they respond to certain cues with switching and pick up different accents and behaviors based on the cue. Key word is cue, cause we thought maybe it was just social interaction until we saw them respond to a more obvious cue, and then a few more subtle ones.

- the trafficking conversation. Some of us fight with them a lot just because we aren’t part of the same group anymore and wildly expanded our vows since then. I think most people know sex trafficking is bad? The physical labor might be a generational thing, but both explain some of our trauma with them. They legit don’t think sexual abuse is bad. Or hitting, or slavery, or torture. A lot of the dangerous stuff is plainly traceable to their everyday beliefs. Not exaggerating or bending words either, they either used those words or their dictionary definitions.

- ways they’ve cued us, in minimally triggery wording; uncommon foods, uncommon touch patterns, direct quotes of media used to structure our system, uncommon hand shapes and gestures, situationally inappropriate body language, object pairing to produce trained responses, references to training events, word salad of cue words that makes no outside sense, muttering cue phrases from directly behind or next to us, holding hands up to deliver cues, tossing cue phrases into conversation to achieve desired effect, etc.

- they mentioned and named the religious groups we were trafficked in without prompting. No driving nearby, no ongoing conversations, no related objects in the proximity, I don’t know why they brought them up. In the same vein, they keep talking about corporal punishment and commenting on people’s outfits. No point, no prompt, just to bring it up. We came into the room our whole family was in and they were talking about how different races were better because they disciplined their kids harder, then started making racist comments about the groups they were talking about.

- our family all start using language and cues they usually don’t, which might still be normal, but it was really sucky to not only have the misgendering and misogyny, but also the comments about Asian people from our half Asian father. They regress past years of dragging them out of toxic beliefs to make the grandparents smile. It’s not DID related, but I still hate it.

- we have suicide, sh, forget, denial, crazy, and other programs running now from cues they used. The grandparents don’t cue for funsies like the rest of our family, but they do it as often. If we didn’t have the knowledge we do now, we wouldn’t be surviving for the next school year. Thinking back (read: looking at journals), our last big suicide attempt was right after the car ride home from their house. We’d been clean for almost a year, unless I’m thinking of the wrong attempt. There were multiple, at least two within a day of leaving their house.

I’m scared. We lock the doors when we sleep near them and set up items to tell if we’ve been active without remembering it, but the most I can do is talk to friends in case the worst happens. It looks like we won’t die from torture, so there’s a sliver of hope. We’re gonna deal with consequences later, but Im hoping the last forget and sleep cues cover my tracks some. I hate it here. That’s all I’ve got.

[rainofdauwuand0w0]

Late night thoughts #9

I’ve seen someone say on going from twitter to tumblr are going from a burning building to a building that used to be burning but was reclaimed by nature...and I kinda see that alot, honestly one of the reasons I stopped and applied a rule for myself for how many people I follow was because of twitter, due to how drama, difference of opinions (talking about stuff like, the most harmless ones “oh I dislike this character from this show, thats my opinon”) and that section of twitter would suddenly have these two people going at it wildly, like two savage beasts trying to prove who is right or wrong, or sometimes one is just wilding over it and the other who had the opinion is just like okay....go away now please but the other won’t let up. I know this site has it’s own problems of course, that comes with the website, I’m not a naive kid anymore, I know nothing is perfect, and we can only make progress to make something better and such. But I am glad this site exists, because it honestly helps while whatever is happening to twitter is happening, the cons are starting to show up once more in my feed, and it annoys me at times when it comes to the cons of twitter, how the culture is there, I think...when it eventually dies fully, it will still be screaming as it’s body burns like a pheonix...but there may not be a rebirth, the internet may take a step in a new direction and also artists, content creators, and others who use the platform in some way for business, are gonna have to put their eggs in different baskets, and it will be scary and I do feel bad, but at the same time it shows the faults of twitter itself in my opinion, you wanted feedback? all eggs in the basket, now on the world’s stage, people who use online, regularly, occasionally, and once in a blue moon during the day can now see you. And I am glad other sites exists too and when it came to artist’s and such, I started saving carrd’s and personal shop links when i was paranoid the site may shut down either the next day or soon, because I still want connections to get to that cool art or posts of said art, and it just is the only thing my brain thought of when it came to saving artists I wanted to commission or were just cool overall, and I think that shows one thing I am thankful for when it comes to twitter, those that I met on there that were cool or chill. I think as a closing thought...I think in my mind, yeah twitter will die, but not like myspace, it will still be loud and wild as it is finally silenced...and for once in life....the connectivity of such a site ceases to be, both a pro and a con, the con part being obvious, not as much easy interaction with people all over the world with various languages, able to ask for help from all over, but at the same time, we will find things out at our own speeds for once more, our minds not being constantly reminded of how horrid the world can be every few moments after scrolling for too long. The many thoughts of how horrible the world can be...we will remember them, but they won’t show up like the reoccurring stress inducers they are, which adds so much anxiousness to those of us who have a twitter, no more stupid drama over disliking a character or having a difference on opinions on what game genre’s are cool or fun to yourself but not for others and vice versa, no more icebergs from communities of media from mainly twitter, no more weird “twitter culture”. the silence will be loud, but the silence will be a nice change of pace.

[magnetothemagnificent]

I'm sorry but I'm a little confused. firstly its clear that the points against circumcision in the post you debunked are wildly out of place and driven by Antisemitism and Islamophobia. I mean we should be at a point where we all know that theres no real valid reasoning from a hygene-point of view for or against circumcision.

heres where I'm confused and might be ignorant about though: is it so bad to wait for people to be able to consent to a circumsision?

I man there's still a i think valid point about the loss of sensitivity and the irreversibly of it all.

or am I missing something?

thanks!

In Judaism, circumcision is required/encouraged as soon as an infant is old enough, so at least eight days old for a full-term newborn. Most Mohalim are extra cautious about jaundice and tend to wait even longer than eight days.

But here's the thing... circumcision is more painful for an adult, especially without anesthesia. There's also the element of actually remembering it, whereas infants do not. It's why Jews-by-choice are so praiseworthy in my opinion, because many get circumcised as adults, which is really really hard physically and mentally. Even Hatafat Dam Brit, which is the drawing of blood for men who were already medically circumcised but not ritually circumcised, can be painful given how sensitive the area is. Just look at Abraham, he was the one to start the tradition of circumcision, and he was circumcised as an adult and was in immense pain.

And there really isn't a loss of sensitivity with circumcision, all my sources have shown that.

And circumcision is technically reversible, one of the first cosmetic surgeries developed was circumcision reversal thousands of years ago for Jews who were afraid of antisemitism in ancient Greece and Rome due to the social standards of circumcized penises being inferior and marking someone as a Jew or un-Greek or un-Roman. In fact, the cultural obsession with having an "intact" penis is due to antisemitism. Ask yourself why you think a circumcised penis is so bad, if there's no actual medical difference to it as my sources have shown? Just the language itself, "intact", shows that anti-circumcision activists view circumcized penises as inferior and incomplete. Which is, of course, antisemitic.

I get it, none of us want to hurt babies. But preservation of life and the body is super important in Judaism, and so circumcision wouldn't be performed for so long if it wasn't such a medically sound procedure. It's not fun, but it's not supposed to be fun, and really in the case of a Brit Milah, the parents are in more emotional pain than the baby. But parents have been risking their lives to circumcize their sons for thousands of years, it's that important to Judaism.

At the end of the day, if you're Jewish and don't want to circumcize your son, that's your decision, but circumcision is something that's been part of Judaism since the beginning, and it's deeply important, as well as spiritually connecting a baby to an unbroken chain of ancestors who've done the same. It's said that Elijah the Prophet himself visits every Brit Milah.

[hopefullystillatheatrestudent]

okay so i’ve been going crazy these past few days. all about cockles/jensmish and obsessively watching their panels or reading the transcripts BECAUSE. THEY ARE LOUD. LIKE. i saw some fancams on twt and i thought people were just exaggerating but noooooooooo!!!???? so, getting to the point. you said that how do we know that jensen is performing masculinity? because jared isn’t and THAT IS A BIG BRAIN MOMENT. ON POINT. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. a particular moment from gag reel that jumps out (which you’ve talked about) when jensen goes ‘cas, you are my baby daddy’ and misha goes, ‘i know i love you too’ and jensen goes, ‘i didn’t say i love you’ and misha goes, ‘i know you wanted to’ and jensen says, ‘i love you’ WHAT THE FUCK! that was NOT a joke. yes, people took it as a joke and had a good laugh BUT I HAVE WATCHED IT TOO MANY TIMES AND IT LIVES IN MY MIND RENT FREE BECAUSE IT WAS NOT A PERFORMANCE. THAT WAS JENSEN. THAT WAS MISHA. jensen has a had trouble with the pda and being all touch feely (the breakup theory) and he gradually grew into it, accepted it and misha was right there all along, never pushed it. it was like a deancas au but tbh, 99% of destiel is because of cockles and we all know it. i just. jensen has latched onto dean as an emotional support because he tunes with it. understands it. projects on to it. yeah, i just had to say it and get it off my chest. (and what about those poetry pages on instagram? alma? what is your opinion?) btw, you have a lovely blog and your analysis are right on target.

so there is a LOT i’m going to address here(how dare you bring up [gunshot] i HAVE to talk about it now) so again!!!! under a cut it goes but i hope you appreciate my rambles anon it seems like you do :,)

1. jared vs. jensen and performing masculinity. hell yeah man. jared and jensen are both just ‘guys from texas’ but they are still so vastly different. today i actually had a revelation that i’m pretty sure has to do with me being bi. and it’s that i have a group of straight friends(that i love dearly but they care too much about hockey and pitbull imo could not be me) and i have a group of queer friends(who are also batshit[affectionate]). and it’s like whichever group i hang out with a different side of me emerges? they’re both me, it’s just that certain aspects of who i am as a person only surface depending on who i am around. however, i will say i feel like i watch what i say around my straight friends more. i see that very clearly in jensen as well. around jared during panels and on set, he’s definitely putting on an air of machismo and engages in typical guy talk. i do think an element of it is performative, because he wants validation from jared that they’re still just two dudes from texas taking on the world together despite his sexual identity. does that make any sense??? i hope so. but when he’s with misha he is an entirely different person and his sense of humour becomes wildly different. the machismo fades away, he’s way less caught up in what people think about him, lets his guard down, etc. to go back to my original point which is how j2 are different in that regard....jared does not do this. he is a constant. he does not flip a switch between ‘performing masculinity’ and ‘not’ because he isn’t performing any part of who he is. he just IS. so yeah these two are similar in many regards but there’s somewhat of a dissonance between them when it comes to how they perform masculinity because one of them is putting on a show and the other is merely being.

2. that crypt scene blooper(here just in case you need to see it again. do it. as a treat.) when i tell you i have easily seen this over thirty times??? since it first came out??? i mean it. it is such an overlooked(r*mantic) moment and it means so much more than people think it does. i’ve talked about the context behind it, and i think that’s why this blooper was so meaningful, so i’ll mention it again. jensen and misha had a LOT of trouble with this scene. the reason is that jensen couldn’t wrap his head around why dean would be saying these things, if i remember correctly, and both of them sat down and scoured over how they should play it for a while before filming(teamwork ;) teammates *ahem*). [to be honest we all know why jensen had a hard time with that scene and it is because it is blatantly romantic. rip to him but i would simply give in to it at that point but oh well] so anyway, their heads were scattered going into shooting, which is NEVER a good headspace to be in for a scene, ESPECIALLY not a pivotal one. but they had each other to help them through said weird energy on set that couldn’t possibly have invoked the best feelings, especially considering jensen STILL doesn’t think he played that correctly(but he praised misha on his performance :,) ). and with that context every single part of that video hits haRD 

-’stop pulling my face towards your crotch’ i think this is objectively hilarious because it really really looks like jensen is pulling HIMSELF towards misha’s crotch. again, you’re fooling no one, jensen. misha’s wheezing laugh and the way he wraps himself around jensen is also,,,sweet??? like i don’t know how else to describe how i see it but this moment really reads as jensen, in his weird ‘constructing elaborate rituals’ way is asking for security through a physical touch from misha and he happily obliges and gives jensen what he needs. because i mean...watch it again. jensen ‘fights back’, but not really at all, actually. pretty wimpy counterattack. he literally lets himself be smothered by misha, and i would literally describe what they end up doing as cuddling. 

-’i need you, cas. you’re my baby daddy’ i love having an actor’s perspective on things bc i think i can explain what’s going on here. jensen just delivered what was(in his own mind) a rotten take of the lines he’s most scared of delivering. so the scene was already messed up. therefore; ensuing fuckery is warranted to help him feel better. but there’s also for sure more than meets the eye for what he says here because of misha’s reaction after??? like he seemed genuinely touched. first of all, he’s saying ‘you’re my baby daddy’ as half-jensen, but not necessarily dean either(because he didn’t say the previous lines as true to his character...you get it), to misha, not cas. i think i’ve made this point before, but every single innuendo in the gag reels is to misha specifically, never once cas. therefore; logical conclusion: ‘you’re my baby daddy’ was for misha and it meant something deeper than we think because of what follows it

-this part. jensen’s giddy ass smile after he sees misha crack and then misha says ‘yeah, i know’ (can i just say his voice when he says this is so intimate???? like am i intruding guys??? sorry i’ll let myself out) also he is smiling SO BIG

- ‘i know’ ‘why are you laughing?’ ‘no i know i love you too’ this analysis is already so long but i still want to get into what THAT whole exchange means. ‘why are you laughing?’ to me sounds like jensen’s pretending to be affronted by misha laughing at something that is serious. and it’s serious because he quite literally meant ‘i love you’. he did. misha knows it. misha’s really REALLY good at cutting the bs and just getting to what people are actually trying to say. he has an innate sharpness to his sense of humour. so yes, misha is being 100% accurate when he says ‘i know, but you wanted to say it.’ misha isn’t lying here. jensen did want and mean to say ‘i love you’. and then he actually does say it(in a jokey way but not really). 

- so yeah. it is actually so romantic??? like in a weird way jensen was professing his love for misha here?????? and that’s why this clip will NEVER. ever. get old. 

3. jensen having trouble with pda and projecting onto dean: we can all call ourselves dean coded cas girls but NO one deserves that title more than jensen ackles himself. he is dean winchester but marginally less repressed because he actually did admit he was in love with his best friend and let himself be happy, and pretty early on too. one year and two months as opposed to twelve years. so. happy deancas au is correct. and yes about the pda thing: one day i want to write my own post about both of their body language when it comes to each other, but all i can tell is jensen, even in the early days, couldn’t help himself from flirting with misha, but if misha ever crossed a line, jensen would not be happy. clearly he’s come around, however. what i find sweet is that misha always follows jensen’s lead when it comes to how much affection they’re allowed to show each other onstage. it touches my soul

4. destiel is cockles fault. yeah. and the thing is everyone knows it, too. even non-cockles shippers will explain early destiel as entirely dependant on jensen and misha’s wild chemistry. and that chemistry is easily explained by the fact that misha and jensen are literally just wildly horny bisexuals who were crazily attracted to one another and were falling in love on screen before our very eyes. and when you have THAT insider info(which sounds cray doesn’t it!!!! the destiel actors are in love irl??? huh???) everything really does click into place. why destiel got SO popular when the show and actors never ever intended for it to happen.(i know some people think misha was playing cas as gay the whole time for shits and giggles, and i won’t deny that[especially considering he found out early on that destiel was why he was staying on the show], but i don’t think he really wanted it to amount to anything, nor did he care??? i mean he has the real thing with jensen, for one, so their characters aren’t really as important. for two, he loves joking about destiel because it’s a cultural phenomenon and it’s fascinating, and i’m sure he did ship it because he’s unhinged, but i don’t think it was vastly important to him either way.) destiel got popular because everyone was and is unintentionally reading into the real deal. i could pull up countless gifs that people have used as destiel proof that is actually just jensen and misha being messy. mainly jensen. if i’m being honest.  the symbiotic relationship between destiel and cockles is why i’ve stayed onboard the destielcule and shellerscape for three solid months now; because it is utterly fascinating to witness and kind of super beautiful, too. 

5. alma(and others). so. i do NOT want to really REALLY get into this in its entirety here and now so i will just give you my opinion on if i think alma is misha or not. also; i don’t want to mention the other poetry accounts here bc i feel like that’s a bigger breach in privacy, but a lot of people do know about alma now. way too many, actually. this is why we can’t have nice things. anyway-to answer your question-there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that yes, misha is running that alma poetry account. i am 100% certain. some people think it’s actually three people and they’re all connected to misha in some way but that is so needlessly complicated. as it goes in psychology; the easiest explanation is probably the right one. it’s just one person running that account, and it is misha collins. i don’t know why it’s so hard to believe KNOWN POET misha collins(who is known to spend most of his free time writing poetry anyway) would have created a secret poetry account to write about his intense secret relationship under an alias and also get legitimate feedback since no one used to know it was him. oh and the handwriting is identical??? you are blind if you do not see that i am sorry. and a million other things prove it’s misha too but yeah all you need to know is yes. it’s him. it would take a literal livestream from a random woman on that account to convince me otherwise. and honestly not even that because a random woman could technically still log in if misha asked her too. so. it would take a hell of a lot to convince me otherwise, clearly. that said DO NOTTTTTTTTTTTT GO ONTO THAT ACCOUNT WITH A SUPERNATURAL RELATED USERNAME AND COMMENT THINGS THAT ARE COCKLES RELATED. ARE YOU BRAIN DEAD WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT’S OKAY. sorry i got heated but god please just don’t be dumb so many people have already gone way too far 

6. thank you for your lovely compliment on my analyses!!! i love doing them but i don’t know if people actually like reading them so i really appreciate it

[jamespotterthefirst]

Enchant Me

Pairing: Dr. Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Dr. Lilac Allende) Word count: 2.5K (sorry!) Warning: None  Author’s Note: AU where Ethan is the one asking MC questions for the fMRI scan (book 1, ch 6).

Catch up here.

_____________

Green eyes meet his briefly before hurriedly glancing away, the movement so fleeting that he could have attributed it to his imagination. Except, the way his stomach flutters as a result is very real and very annoying to Ethan. When at last he forces his treasonous mind to the task at hand, he determines she is nervous, the tense energy radiating from her almost palpable in the bright imaging lab. 

Guilt takes root in his stomach as he begins to regret asking this of her. The flimsy request for her help, blurted out after he reluctantly turned down her party invitation, seems downright embarrassing now. What the hell had he been thinking? 

He pauses to consider that therein lies the problem: He hadn't been thinking. What a dangerous and inane side effect of being in her presence. What a humbling yet disconcerting notion that all it takes to disarm an intelligent, highly educated man is a pair of clever, emerald eyes, a lovely dusting of freckles, and a pretty smile. 

Ethan opens his mouth to offer himself up as the subject instead, but Lilac gives him a brave, determined half smile. Her cheeks flush and he can see the visible effort she spends in getting the words out. “There is no dignified way of saying this, so please don't fire me,” she begins, not looking at him. 

“I won't fire you for changing your mind, Rookie.”

Lilac shakes her head. “It's not that. It's just that I'll need an injection of the magnetic contrast media…” Her eyes swivel to meet his pointedly, as though expecting him to catch her meaning from it. 

Ethan is not following and that much must be evident in his face because she sighs. 

“I can't have any metal on me,” she continues, face growing bright pink to the root of her dark hair. “So I'll have to remove my bra.”

Silence. 

“I… Erm... That's…” Ethan's ears flare with heat, his throat feeling suddenly dry. “That's true. I'll leave the room.”

“No need,” she assures him, already peeling off her coat. Before Ethan can even react, she reaches behind her back and under her blouse. 

He is momentarily frozen, eyes watching her expertly work the clasps, before hastily turning his back on her and busying himself with the gadolinium. The way his heart clamors wildly at his ears is guarantee enough of the sinful thoughts his mind will torture him with later, thoughts of Lilac undressing in many different ways for him. 

Get it together, Ramsey. 

“I'm ready,” she announces to his sheer relief. 

That relief is short-lived, however, when his eyes catch a glimpse of the lacy, bright red garment on the floor, unsuccessfully concealed by her discarded lab coat. Every inch of his traitorous body reacts on sight, reducing him to just another weak-willed man, uninhibited by the mere sight of a bra. 

Lilac, meanwhile, watches him from where she lays on the table, decent enough in her loose fitting blouse. That lopsided smirk of hers makes a reappearance and it only makes his thoughts sputter further. 

“Stay still,” he manages to instruct, his voice quiet and gentle. 

When his fingers palpate the veins in her arms, Ethan struggles to think of much else but the feel of her soft skin against his, incinerating his fingertips. He makes the mistake of meeting her eyes, finding that all traces of humor are long gone as she watches him, lips slightly parted. A white hot current of tension crackles between them, dangerous and capable of consuming him whole. With a surge of recklessness, he finds that he wants it to. The blazing look she fixes him with makes Ethan wonder if she wants it too. 

Swallowing hard, Ethan forces himself to glance away. 

After a brief pause, she teases, “You do know how to perform an intravenous injection, don't you?” 

“Ha. Ha,” he returns sarcastically. Her own genuine laughter rings around the imaging lab. 

Ethan injects her with ease and presses the button to slide the table inside the magnet enclosure, hiding that infuriatingly distracting smile from view. Soon after, he sits at the workstation, checking on Lilac through the glass and powering up the magnet. 

“How's it looking up there, Doc?” 

“Like a brain,” he says dryly. 

“So...average?” 

“Very average.” 

“Ouch.”

Ethan allows a resigned grin, shaking his head and feeling a wide lightness spread in his chest. Silence ensues after their banter and he realizes she waits for his question. 

A thrill shoots through his core at the ocean of possibilities before him. At last, he can catch a true glimpse of the mystery she has proven to be. Isn't that what he longs to know the most ? Isn't the enigma that is Lilac Allende the true allure for him? Isn't that the reason he can't stop thinking about her? 

He can ask anything, and finally know the answer. 

“Do you prefer cats or dogs?” 

There is an anticlimactic pause and Ethan wants to slam his head against the console. 

Really, Ethan? Cats or dogs? 

Lilac is silent, so silent Ethan wonders if the speaker system is working. 

“That's the type of question you have for me?” 

Ethan rolls his eyes. “Just answer it, Rookie.”

The image shows activity in the temporal lobe at the use of the nickname. 

“I like them both,” she answers before Ethan can interpret the previous reading. “Though dogs tend to love me almost instantly.”

An uninvited mental image of Jenner, paws on her chest, tail wagging at blurring speed upon meeting her, crosses his mind. Ethan dismisses it as an impossibility, unable to think of a scenario where both creatures would meet. 

“We have a family dog back in LA named Lobo,” she continues. 

“Wolf?” 

“The third,” she adds cheerfully. “My parents name all of our dogs Lobo or Oso.”

The memory elicits notable activity in the hippocampus. Ethan is unable to see her face but he finds the reminiscent lull of her voice utterly endearing. Catching his own reaction with a flare of annoyance, he dismisses it, clears his throat, and moves on to the next question. 

“What inspired you to become a doctor?” 

The longest pause yet befalls them. Already there is activity in the right temporal cortex, peaking his own curiosity. Every second that she doesn't answer is agony. 

Finally, she says, “Pass.”

“Excuse me?” 

“I pass on this question. I plead the fifth.”

“Overruled.”

“You can't do that,” she protests, though he can hear the laughter in her voice. 

“Just answer the question, Rookie.”

There is a loaded, tense silence that slowly tapers to a boiling point, then—

“You.” 

Ethan blinks, speechless. 

“Don't you remember?” she says, an edge of embarrassment dripping from her voice. “You signed Landry's book for me.”

“Who?” he blurts out. Not waiting for an answer, he asks, “Wait, so you didn't keep that book, Rookie? I am offended.”

“No, my copy is much more worn, annotated, and well-loved,” she explains with a chuckle. 

A small whirlwind of emotions takes root in Ethan, who is still at a loss for words. 

“In a literal sense, your research inspired me to go to med school,” she continues, interpreting his silence as encouragement to go on. “I read your book from cover to cover as an undergrad and was so inspired, for once in my life I knew where I had to go. I wanted to be here, at Edenbrook, working alongside the best.” 

Ethan's throat is tight as he listens, the activity in the scan completely forgotten. 

“The more sentimental reason I was inspired to be a doctor is, of course, my parents.” Lilac pauses and clears her throat as a pretense. “They– They came to this country in pursuit of a better life, leaving their family and everyone they loved behind. All to be in a brand new place, not knowing the language or the culture, often taking up backbreaking jobs for miserable pay...to be looked down by many as inferior. All that sacrifice, for us.” Her voice cracks at the last few words. It takes her a moment to recover. “That sacrifice drove me through my worst days in medical school. It's what drives me today.”

She says this with a renewed, fierce pride that evokes a surge of admiration from him. It tears through his chest unlike anything he has ever experienced before, but then again, she is unlike anything he had ever seen before. Wildly, he wishes they were sharing something so precious face to face. His hand flexes reflexively as his mind imagines sweeping a thumb across the ridge of her cheekbone. 

“If not a doctor, what career would you have chosen?” He is surprised by the gentleness of his own voice, the sound foreign to his ears. 

When she speaks, she sounds almost like her usual, cheeky self. “A beauty guru.” 

“A what?” 

“It's people online filming their makeup routines.”

Ethan has never heard of anything so pointless in his life. “Be serious.” 

“I am! There might still be some videos online of my failed attempts,” she says, laughing. “But in terms of a realistic career, I would've probably chosen to be a homicide detective or a forensic pathologist.”

He raises his eyebrows at this, stunned for a moment at their shared interest in detective work. “Why?” 

Lilac mulls over her answer in a characteristic silence. “Obviously, there is the allure of gathering evidence and solving a mystery.” A deliberate pause, then—“But I always thought that was a bit selfish.” 

“Selfish?” 

Ethan can't help the outburst. After all, connecting the pieces of an unknown puzzle is precisely why he once considered that career. 

“Yes, some doctors want to deliver the perfect diagnosis in a self-congratulatory way. To help the patient, yes, but to walk away with the gratification of having conquered a mystery.”

His itch to argue is quelled by his curiosity and so he says nothing. 

“I wanted to be a detective to solve the mystery as a way to fight for the voiceless.” Her voice drops to almost a whisper as she admits this. With a rush of satisfaction, Ethan realizes he is probably the first one hearing this reasoning. “There is something sick about being able to name notorious serial killers without a problem, but we can't do the same for their victims. They are the ones whose stories should be told, whose memories should be celebrated. They are the ones who deserve the accolades and the justice of finally solving that mystery.”

Ethan has no rebuttal for the first time in his life. 

As his brain struggles to reconcile the young doctor's words with the inexplicable thundering of his pulse, Lilac laughs. 

“No offense, Dr. Ramsey, but I was expecting a different line of questioning here.”

Ethan forces himself to recover. “How so?” 

“If I were asking you questions, I'd be a lot noisier,” she says, unabashed.

Ethan allows a chuckle. “That's not surprising,” he comments. “What type of questions would you be asking?” 

“I don't know…” She trails off pensively. “Maybe your type?”

Ethan's mouth goes slack. He recovers enough to say something, though he is not sure what. Luckily, he doesn't have to know because she continues, “I'd definitely ask about relationships, past and current.”

By this point, his heartbeat is an uproar in his hearing. The brash comments should be concerning coming from a subordinate but he feels like a fraud when he considers chastising her. Though he would never admit it out loud, the answers to those questions intrigue him to the point of restlessness. 

“Fine,” he allows quietly. “Answer those.”

A surprised little laugh comes through the speakers. “Really?” 

“Yes, let the record show this was your idea, Rookie,” he says in what he hopes is a casual tone. “What was the first one you mentioned? Ah, yes—What's your type?” 

The image of her brain activity, which Ethan had forgotten to glance at until that moment, lights up at the amygdala. An emotional response. 

He can sense the reluctance in her silence. 

“Tall. Definitely taller than me,” she begins at long last, her voice dignified, as though she is forcing herself to push past any bashfulness. “Dark hair.”

The answer is exasperatingly vague. The descriptors easily fit the surgical intern he saw her kiss all those weeks ago and the muscular paramedic who glances at her with besotted eyes every chance he gets. 

“Intelligent,” she continues. 

The diagnostician in him almost discounts Lahela on the sole basis of being a surgical intern. 

Lilac clears her throat so subtly, he almost attributes it to static in the speakers. “Someone with a dry sense of humor and sarcastic to a fault,” she says, a lot softer now. “Someone who can keep me on my toes.”

The scan displays activity in the frontal lobe, similar to what he saw when he called her “Rookie”. The small media room, despite having the air conditioner at full blast, feels suddenly sweltering. 

“What did I say next for my questions?” she asks, saving his mind from traveling a dangerous path. 

“Relationships.” 

“Right,” she says with an exhale. 

Ethan says nothing, afraid even the slightest sound will discourage her. 

“Past relationships are… complicated and mercifully ancient history.” On his screen, he sees the most activity yet. A visible reaction in the right hippocampus, the amygdala, both sides of the prefrontal cortex, and the insular cortex— undeniable anger. 

Lilac, however, does not elaborate any further. Instead, she hurries on, “Current relationships are also complicated, frustrating, and nonexistent.” 

The words hang between them, like a pendulum. He is convinced they carry more meaning but Ethan's own brain feels abuzz with activity, too tumultuous to formulate follow up questions. When his eyes fall on the clock, he notes they have been at this for almost an hour. 

“I think we're done here,” he says. 

He leaves the media room, deliberately pausing outside the imaging lab to give Lilac enough time to put all of her clothes back on. By the time he enters the room, she is throwing on her coat, hands raking through her shiny hair. 

“Everything working okay?” 

“Like a charm,” he responds, mind still spinning. 

An incessant stab of dread begins to pierce through him as they prepare to go back to work. His mind wanders to Naveen, weak and alone in his room, and icy twines of fear take root deep in Ethan’s stomach once again. 

“Thank you… for the assistance.”

Lilac flashes him an easy smile. “Any time.”

Ethan manages an awkward nod turning to leave. Something powerful holds him back before he can take another step. As full fledged panic about facing Naveen's new symptoms grips him, he wants nothing more than to confide in her. 

He stops and turns to face her. 

Lilac tilts her head to one side, watching him curiously. 

The magnitude of what he is about to do hits him like a train and his newfound courage vanishes at once. With a grimace, he waves the idea off and exits the room. 

______

Author’s Note: A HUGE thank you to everyone who sent me questions Ethan could ask. I tried my best to include them here. 

“Do you prefer cats or dogs?”-- @drethanramslay

“What inspired you to become a doctor?” -- Anon and @scorpiochick8

“If not a doctor, what career would you have chosen?” @scorpiochick8

The not so subtle questions about her love life-- @eramsey28

Answering the career question wit banter, then with a serious answer. -- @whippedforethanramsey 

Ethan’s slightly jealous thoughts about Bryce and Raf-- @schnitzelbutterfingers 

Sorry if I didn’t include all requests! This would have been 20 pages long if I hadn’t trimmed some of it lol. 

I swapped some of the dialogue from the original. Also, I’m so sorry to @takeharryandgo​ for the horrible brain science here. Forgive me, Doc.

What Lilac said about her parents is exactly how I feel about mine. So I just had to include that here.  

Finally, I intend to continue these from Ethan’s POV. However, for personal reasons, I will keep my next few projects under wraps. 

______

Tags:  @openheart12​ | @ethandaddyramsey​ | @noboundariesplease​ | @silverlitskies​ | @infinitiestones | @flyawayboo​ | @paulfwesley​ | @hatescapsicum​ | @myusualnerdyself​ | @thatysn​ | @choicesyouplayandmore​ | @chasingrobbie​ | @trappedinfandoms​ | @togetherwearerapture​ | @nooruleman​ | @caseyvalentineramsey​ | @axwalker​ | @parkerattano​ | @i-bloody-love-drake-walker​ | @kaavyaethanramsey​ | @edith-eggs1​ | @choices-lurker​ | @jens-diamondchoices​ | @tefigranger​ | @ethanrcmsey​ | @coffeebeandragon​ | @senator-adrian-raines-wifey​ | @aestheticartwriting​ | @binny1985​ | @mvalentine​ | @sanchita012​ | @drethanramslay​ | @ramseysno1rookie​ | @takeharryandgo​ | @aworldoffandoms​ | @desmaranj​ | @ josieplayschoices | @magicalshepherdtreeprofessor | @oofchoices​ | @ethxnrxmsey​ | @octobereighth​ | @colossalpainintheass | @kopenheart12​ | @lilyvalentine​ | @honeyandsunfl0wers​ | @virtualrain202 | @enmchoices​ | @tyrilstouch​ | @rookie-ramsey​​

@dulceghernandez |  @lion-ess24 | @emotionalswift2 | @the-soot-sprite |

[eponymous-rose]

I’ve also further progressed in my Vorkosigan re-read! Memory was as wonderful as I remembered (Illyan and Miles going fishing via improvised hand grenade out of boredom is always a highlight). 

I love the way Bujold structures her books---I talked about that a bunch with Mirror Dance---but Memory is just brilliantly laid out. Miles is spiraling, Miles fucks up, Miles gets fired (the closest pop-culture parallel I can think of is a superhero having to permanently revert to their mundane secret identity), Miles’s friends manage to yank him out of the mire, and then... surprise bizarre out-of-sequence murder mystery! The victim’s not dead! Miles keeps finding clues out of sequence and realizing he was meant to be framed! And god, you’re so sure it’s Haroche right at the start and then you have that moment of “oh well shit of course he thinks Miles might have it in for the boss that just eviscerated his identity” and so you’re still surprised when that first instinct was right! And then he offers Miles his life as Naismith back. Even Cordelia placed a bet on Miles giving up his life as Vorkosigan. And... he doesn’t. Mirror Dance was about Mark fracturing himself to survive. Memory is about Miles dragging himself back together to live.

I love how Illyan takes the loss of his memory chip---it’s fundamentally a piece of him gone, but it’s also freedom from thirty years of being a tool of his emperor (and then of Aral), and his embracing this destruction of his identity and learning to move forward is such a great foil/foreshadowing for Miles’s revelation. Everything in this story is about moving forward, not without regrets, but moving forward. It’s so fitting that the romance story going on in the background is Alys and Illyan, two 60-somethings, falling in love (and god, I love the scene where Miles wanders in on them in the morning and thinks something like “huh that dress is more of an evening style isn’t it?” and then like ten hours later the penny drops).

And god, Miles and Elli. I love how this was done, how it’s made apparent that you can love someone, and they can love you, and you can be very good for each other in a lot of ways, but your circumstances can still be such that marriage will annihilate one or both of you. It’s nobody’s fault, but the inevitability and recognition of it means it’s not always a devastation: “He could feel the letting-go in them, with the easing of the tension and the terror, with the slowing of every pulse of their blood. Not pain, or not so much pain, but only a just sadness, a due measure of melancholy, quiet and right.” Even when they’re quite bizarre relationships, the relationships in these books are very mature and well-thought-out from a narrative point of view, and this is a wonderful example.

Just a really, really lovely book:

No wonder he was laughing. He wasn’t mourning a death. He was celebrating an escape.

“I’m not dead. I’m here.” He touched his scarred chest in wonder.

[...]

Harra Csurik had been almost right. It wasn’t your life again you found, going on. It was your life anew.

Aaaand on to Komarr! God! I love this book! The most Miles possible meet-cute for his future wife: board at the home of her family on an investigation, have combat flashbacks on a shopping trip with her, and wind up watching her husband die horrifically while chained to a rail on a planet with a toxic atmosphere, knowing if he reacts too strongly he’s likely to have a seizure that’ll dislodge his own breathing mask, killing him in the same terrible way. You know. Rom-com stuff.

Speaking of relationships portrayed well, Ekaterin and Tien’s disaster of a marriage is extremely chilling in its realism. Even as you absolutely detest Tien, you can see how Ekaterin got yanked into that orbit, and it’s all all all so tied in with the very same aspects of Barrayaran culture that we’ve seen Miles face: Tien destroys everything because of his perception of what the response would be to his illness (where Miles, for better or worse, never had the option of hiding it), and because of his shitty insecurities about Ekaterin’s fidelity (echoes of a young Aral come to mind). We’re given explanations (his brother’s literally impossible-to-live-up-to example) but are never expected to see them as excuses, which is a very fine line to walk. The end result is a believably fucked-up relationship that draws on parallels with every single time you’ve ever thought to yourself about a friend, “Oh god sweetie you can do so much better than him”.

And Ekaterin’s thoughts about being bound to this marriage are right along the lines of the most stick-in-the-mud traditional Barrayaran loyalties we’ve seen Miles exhibit, all tangled up in language about honor. And even though it very shortly (and mortally) becomes a moot point, I love that she gets the chance to decide to leave Tien in spite of that. 

I also love the scene between Tien and Miles, talking about Nikki’s jumpship obsession, partly because of the obvious contrast between the two of them, but mostly because it illustrates how much of Tien’s awfulness is because he’s just... fundamentally a bitter coward with no imagination.

"Well, every boy goes through that phase, I suppose. We all outgrow it. Pick up all that mess, Nikki.”

Nikki’s eyes were downcast, but narrowed in brief resentment at this, Miles could see from his angle of view. The boy bent to scoop up the last of his miniature fleet.

“Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them,” Miles murmured.

“That depends on whether your dreams are reasonable,” said Vorsoisson, his lips twitching in rather bleak amusement. Ah, yes. Vorsoisson must be fully aware of the secret medical bar between Nikki and his ambition.

“No, it doesn’t.” Miles smiled slightly. “It depends on how hard you grow.”

The alternating POVs between Miles and Ekaterin are charming because we get to see Miles from an external (non-hostile) point of view and get all excited about each small revelation, and then we get to see Ekaterin both from Miles’s point of view and from the point of view of her own very active inner monologue, giving us insights we would otherwise have missed since she, as Miles says in the understatement of the century, has a tendency to underreact.

Their relationship is built up very carefully: there’s an obvious mutual interest practically from the first, but they both have reason to be cautious. There are those moments of genuine rapport early on, and then the shopping trip! It’s such a clever revelation, and so layered!

Miles was traumatized at Dagoola IV by watching Beatrice fall from the shuttle in front of him: he reached out to try to catch her, and just missed, and she died. And then we have this perfectly safe little parallel, with himself and Ekaterin falling off a water feature in a shopping district, and he manages to catch her, this time... and they both go over. It’s cute and oddly triumphant...

...and then he realizes exactly what it means. If he’d caught Beatrice, he’d have gone over with her. They’d both be dead, and that revelation hits right after he’s had a whole book to figure out just how badly he wants to live. And to Ekaterin, it’s a very quick summary of what and who Miles is: he’s the man who would not let go. BUT Ekaterin ALSO frames her leaving Tien in that context: she’s not just watching him fall, but purposefully releasing her hands. It’s so twisted and so complicated and such a weird little microcosm of their respective states of mind. And while part of it is Ekaterin giving Miles the little push he needed to properly process that trauma, fundamentally and on a larger timescale it places Miles as the “I’ve been in this hole before and I know the way out” path to Ekaterin’s healing. It’s so well done.

There’s also a hell of a parallel in the physical aspect of Miles’s seizures coming on unexpectedly in moments of great stress versus the psychological aspect of Ekaterin’s whole coping mechanism being built on trying desperately not to flinch or show strong emotion.

(And I don’t know where else to put this but special shout-out to the running gag of Vorkosigan House getting gradually overrun with cats, to the point where Miles starts, apropos of nothing and on a totally different planet, asking strangers if they’d like a kitten.)

These kids! Will they make it work? I may be only halfway through the book, but I have a funny feeling things might work out...

Also, here’s the “rescue” scene in full, because it delights me so:

The root-compacted soil of the edge sagged under her weight, and she began to slide precipitously forward. She yelped; pushing backward fragmented her support totally. One wildly back-grappling arm was caught suddenly in a viselike grip, but the rest of her body turned as the soil gave way beneath her, and she found herself dangling absurdly feet-down over the pond. Her other arm, swinging around, was caught, too, and she looked up into Vorkosigan’s face above her. He was lying prone on the slope, one hand locked around each of her wrists. His teeth were clenched and grinning, his gray eyes alight.

“Let go, you idiot!” she cried.

The look on his face was weirdly, wildly exultant. “Never,” he gasped, “again--”

His half-boots were locked around... nothing, she realized, as he began to slide inexorably over the edge after her. But his death-grip never slackened. The exalted look on his face melted to sudden horrified realization. The laws of physics took precedence over heroic intent for the next couple of seconds; dirt, pebbles, vegetation, and two Barrayaran bodies all hit the chilly water more or less simultaneously.

The water, it turned out, was a bit over a meter deep. The bottom was soft with muck. She wallowed upright onto her feet, one shoe gone who knew where, sputtering and dragging her hair from her eyes and looking around frantically for Vorkosigan. Lord Vorkosigan. The water came to her waist, it ought not to be over his head---no half-booted feet were sticking up like waving stumps anywhere---could he swim?

He popped up beside her, and blew muddy water out of his mouth, and dashed it from his eyes to clear his vision. His beautiful suit was sodden, and a water-plant dangled over one ear. He clawed it away, and located her, his hand going toward her and then stopping.

“Oh,” said Ekaterin faintly. “Drat.”

There was a meditative pause before Lord Vorkosigan spoke. “Madame Vorsoisson,” he said mildly at last, “has it ever occurred to you that you may be just a touch oversocialized?”

[content-to-convert]

VIDEO DIDN’T KILL THE RADIO STAR...

VIDEO DIDN’T KILL THE RADIO STAR it just made him dress nicer 

By Pat Mellon 

Speaking of your brand evolving, PODCASTS are now a wise bullet to have in the arsenal of promotional weapons. In the early 2000's, for instance, you didn't have the option to record and distribute a PODCAST. The technology didn't exist to even IDENTIFY, much less create one- if you typed PODCAST into an email in 2002, it would have been flagged as a misspelling. 

But now, thanks to Audioblogging, re-branded as PODCASTING thanks to the iPOD, you can reach a targeted captive audience in a car on a long commute, with content that they've actually sought out. It's essentially a radio infomercial for the lifestyle of your product, without the PAID-PROGRAMMING aftertaste. Plenty of people have been slow to warm to the idea of such self-promotion and have waited to see if the technology and its effectiveness sustained or if it waned, the way QR codes did, or video discs did until the invention of the DVD. It can be an amazingly powerful part of your brand. 

Many rejected podcasting, as I did initially, as a waste of energy. In fairness, early on when there were no networks for podcasting and its business model was less focused than now, it smacked of self-congratulatory volunteer work. I saw it as an infringement on my profession. I have 15 years of radio hosting experience. I saw podcasts as competition. In my short-sighted view then, I didn't see the full potential of a podcast. I just saw it as people wanting my job. But as time went on, I began to see the ways, at least in terms of in-car entertainment, that podcasting was the future. And like the cryptic fortune cookie says, "Kill Your Darlings". Or maybe go with the less-confusing, "Reinvent Your Business Constantly. The End Goal May Be The Same But The Tools and Methods Evolve Constantly" which is a Ken Tucker quote I saw on a Snapple Cap. Or even the more direct, "You Have To Reinvent To Stay Fresh and In The Game" which Madonna said once. 

But early on, I saw it as the enemy - the way news journalists must have felt when FREELANCERS started getting a lot of the work in the late 90's. I thought, "If all you need to broadcast is a computer and an opinion, why the hell did I major in Broadcasting? It's like everyone becoming a Youtuber or a Social Media Influencer (seriously, that is NOT a good name. It's just saying what you're doing. It lacks creativity, like naming the glass thing you drink out of a "glass". Or the room with the bed a "bedroom". Or the thing you swing on a "swing". Or the... Sorry-I'll move on.) Anybody can become a Social Media Influencer these days, (and if they're under 14 and haven't been trying for half their lives then you might want to make sure they're breathing) and that means fame, sometimes money, but more important: LIKES. I overheard my 8 year-old playing with her friends and they were pretending there was a genie or something granting wishes and one girl asked for a pony, and another asked for a house of chocolate, and my daughter asked for a million LIKES on her video. LIKES are currency for pre-teen popularity. And LIKES or even merely PAGE VIEWS can be currency in the grown-up world of business. My point is that anyone with a computer and a camera can make money on Youtube if they hustle. It's simply the new normal. It's great, if not dangerous. We've yet to see the fallout of a generation raised on Youtubing, unless, of course, you count cautionary tales like Logan Paul or Jo Jo Siwa, both of whom are rich. It's simply another entertainment option for kids. I kinda thought podcasting was that, but for adults who only wanted quasi-fame; to show-off. But it's bigger than that.

If you're a plumber, for instance, and you want to maximize business, you probably want a decent social media footprint, some solid YELP reviews, and maybe even a podcast. Toilet clogged? Click here for an interview with master plumbers from all over. It's not the ONLY thing you should do. It's ONE of the things you should do.

On the consumer side, you have to realize that traffic, especially the bumper-to-bumper kind, is GOLD to a radio talk show host. People listen the most in their cars, so DJ's in New York and Los Angeles, the #1 and #2 radio markets depending on who you ask*, for instance, who entertain on the radio, are always on their toes to stay funny and relevant because it's so easy to push a button and change the station.

Then suddenly there was a new game in town. People were bypassing the radio altogether and plugging external sources into car sound systems, removing the commercials and unwanted Morning Zoo shenanigans, and rendering my entire college education and training void. My only hope was wishing death to the podcast movement, which I think I did a couple of times on the radio accompanied by a sound effect of a toilet flushing (Take THAT, Podcasting!). It didn't work. I kept hearing the word. Podcast. (eerie voice) PODD CAAAST! My head was in the sand. People would say to me, "you should do a podcast" and I'd cringe and wildly swing fists at imaginary ghosts who were accusing me of "Resting on your laurels" and "Holding on too tight.”

It took a while, but I get the appeal and, more importantly, the power of the Podcast. It's like a book-on-tape for the 21st century- 10 times as cool, though, because it's technologically relevant, and can be different every time you listen. So we agree that podcasts are real. And we acknowledge that there is room for many things on the dashboard of a car, be them outlets, or additional buttons. And we agree that the the way we do business is always changing and we have to adapt to some degree. So why all the hub bub? Because we can't have an intelligent conversation about the delicate existence of Podcasts without talking about Shane Gillis, the comedian who was hired and fired by Saturday Night Live in the same week last year. We need to understand the power of what it was that torpedoed his streetcar (tune into Mixed Metaphors with Pat Mellon Tuesdays on The Podd Couple, right after Poddamnit at 8, and Pod of Thunder with Gene Simmons at 8:17) He and a buddy do this show, this podcast, it's like a radio show but you don't listen to it on your grandpa's Victrola, you tether your MP3 player to the radio inside grandpa's Camry, and there's bad language, which there never is on traditional, boring old dumb talk radio, so right away, it's awesome (honestly, the only difference between Howard Stern on radio and Howard Stern on satellite is the F word) and the internet allows curses and take that, Mr. Suit and Tie, and this is going to be amazing. And on one particular show from 2018, Gillis said "chink" when describing someone in Chinatown. Not a huge scandal, but I guess you'd have to ask Roseanne Barr if the internet can get you into to any kind of trouble. She was exiled from the the entire US for a social media post that mentioned race and monkeys. And the same new normal that allows John Q. Anybody to do a podcast ALSO watches everything you do online and will sink you if it sees something it does not like. America can be confusing that way. Freedom of speech and freedom of complaining about freedom of speech are always at each other's throats, it seems. And you can't have it both ways. The guy who alerted the world to Bill Cosby's dating rituals online is loved by many but is also shunned by others, but that guy knows what he did and he knows not to complain about the ones who, well, complain. It's the price you pay.

The point is, you need to constantly be hustling and using all of technology’s modern tools to get your product out (they’re not burning DVD’s anymore) and maybe one of those avenues is a podcast with salty language, and maybe that podcast exists among your body of work that clients can enjoy whenever they want.

But we live in a new age of retroactive outrage. Eddie Murphy was on SNL and is arguably the most talented person the show has produced. He did a stand-up special in which he explores “What if Mr. T were a Faggot?” It was inflammatory and it was insensitive and it was homophobic (though that buzzword was still a decade from conception) because the premise of the joke- the attribution of homosexual behavior to a big, strong, black man being marginalized as solely predatory sodomy - crossed the line. When I spell it out like that it looks horrible. But it’s a simple comedic device: assigning unlikely behavior to someone for comedic purposes. It’s the fish-out-of-water gag. It’s why we had Mork, and Alf, and Balkie from Perfect Strangers. It’s Freaky Friday. It’s why The Rock playing a babysitter or a tooth fairy is funny. Murphy did this AFTER he was on SNL. But if has been released before he auditioned, do you think he’d have been hired? 

  Of course he would have. Because the Mr. T thing was a small part of that special (though, I recall, an extremely quotable part) and the people who didn’t like or appreciate the language didn’t have the bionic megaphone of the internet so they could get their outrage all over your conscience. The point is that your podcast is a reflection of your brand. You have to weigh your desire to speak freely and loosely with your desire to keep the Cancel Culture at bay. At a MINIMUM, though, you should keep things clean for your clients, listeners, and most importantly, your potential customers. Shane Gillis missed out of being on SNL and fame, instead on infamy because he broke one of society's biggest rules:he said something controversial out loud. Granted, it was in bad taste, but if that were a crime half of us would be in jail. It's just important to remember that your language on a work-based podcast should be professional, which I realize cannot be defined easily, but maybe stay away from slang and cursing. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.

[stella-mayne]

Character's Full Name: Zoey Ligaya Zilwick 

GENERAL INFO:

Name origin: Zoey is Greek meaning life. Middle name is Filipino for Joy

Nickname, if any: Zo & Zozobear and Lia (her tiyas call her this)

(if so, explain its origin – e.g. who created it?): All her close friends/ family call her Zo. Zozobear is her dad’s nickname and her aunts call her only by her Filipino name or a shortened version. Lia.

Place of birth: Philippines

Religion:  Ex Roman Catholic- currently doesn’t subscribe to religion

Degree of religious practice: Non-existent 

Current address: Castle in Russia 

Sexuality:  Zoey’s open to connections with people of any gender but has only ever been heteromantic in the past.

Marital status: Single pringle.

List any significant previous romantic partners: Nate, and there were two exes back in college.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE:

Height: Zoey stands at a whooping 5′2

Weight: Around 120? Her weight rarely fluctuates- no matter how crappily she eats.

What is his/her body type: slim/ slender

Eye color?- Milk chocolate brown

Skin tone:Tan in the summer, olive in the winter. She looks sickly in Russia.

Any prominent features/ other distinguishing marks?: Zoey has the slightest sprinkling of freckles on her face which are only visible if she’s bare faced. The sheerest of tinted moisturizers cover them up.

 Zoey also has four moles dotting her shoulder blades, three on the left and one that’s identically placed to the middle on the left on her right. 

Whom does s/he most look like (e.g. famous person or relative)?: She takes most after her mom- with her dark tresses and similar smiles.

General health (good, excellent, poor...)?: Pretty good, though she does get paranoid at the slightest sign of an illness (which most times is simply the common cold)

Any chronic conditions?: Insomnia- which is why she makes her special treats.

How does s/he dress (mark as many as appropriate):

Does s/he dress to be noticed? Why? Her sole intention is not to be noticed but she does get noticed often due to her style. She she’s style as a form of expression and takes full advantage of it.

Any special jewelry? She mostly sports rings- which is the only thing she takes off when preparing pastries.

If so, why is it special? Zoey wears crystals often, her favourite being a rose quartz ring that was given to her by her dad.

SPEECH AND LANGUAGE/COMMUNICATION:

Pace (does s/he talk fast, average, slow?): When she’s nervous or excited it sounds like she could pass out from the lack of breaths she takes in between sentences. On the average, if it’s just a regular schmegular conversation it’s average pace.

Accent or dialect, if any: Mostly a Filipino accent and but it’s tainted very slightly with a Canadian twang.

Voice tone: Her tone is average- can get high pitched at times.

Any favorite/habitual words/phrases or curse words?: “Shit” is her favourite curse when she burns herself while cooking-- a direct result of her not wearing the appropriate chef apron. 

A phrase she prefaces things often with is “I mean...” which she singsongs/ drags out

Describe general vocabulary or speech pattern: she sounds educated but not pretentious. Can sound cultured from time to time depending on the topic.

Common gestures: Hands in pockets, digging her nails into her arm in uncomfortable situations- sometimes enough to break skin.

EVERYDAY BEHAVIOR / HABITS:

Morning Routine:

Describe the character's morning rituals- 

Though Zoey sets an alarm she absolutely hates hearing it- it puts her in a bad mood. So she’s trained herself to wake up a couple minutes before it sounds. In Russia her bed is a twin, but in Canada thought it’s a full she sticks to the right side of the bed. She starts everyday by jotting down what snippets of her dream she remembers into a dream journal before doing a yoga flow and or mediation. 

She’s usually very chipper in the morning, especially after she’s had her first iced coffee. Almost always having a light breakfast of fruit or a granola bar.

Dinner:

Zoey unabashedly indulges in more than a fair share amount of take out. After working all day in a kitchen she hardly ever goes into hers. If she’s not ordering in she’s eating out with friends.

Bedtime:

Being an occasional insomniac Zoey resorts to her special treats to get a good night’s rest. If she’s had one she knocks right out, if not- unless she’s beat from a day’s work- she tosses and turns and her mind goes into overdrive. (Because of this her dad got her a weighted blanket last Christmas). 

Zoey dreams regularly and most times it’s cryptic but she has dreamt things that happened before. Her precognitive dreams are almost always right.

THE PAST:

Was his/her childhood happy? Troubled? Dull? (And does the character remember it accurately?) Zoey had a very stable upbringing in a loving, well off two parent home. She considers herself very lucky for having the childhood she did.

Earliest memory: Her dad squeezing an orange for her because she was too weak to do so herself.

Happiest memory: Bringing her baby sister home

Significant past jobs: She was a barista- it taught her patience.

First crush or romantic love?- Oliver Wilde- green eyed, dark haired cutie in middle school

What was his/her first sexual experience?- A handsy makeout session in the back of her private high school. 

Is it a positive/negative memory? Positive. 

RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS:

How in general is she perceived by...

Strangers? Friendly? Warm/ inviting.. fidgety? 

Past spouse/lovers? Sweet? Kind hearted? Generous?

The opposite sex? Cute?

Anyone who angers him or her? Idk. Zoey rarely gets angry. 

What do most people consider likeable about him/her? That she’s compassionate.

What do most people consider his/her biggest flaw? Her anxiety or that she’s too much of a people pleaser

Any secret attractions? If so, does the other person know it? Has there been any actual romantic/sexual activity? 

A given is that she’s still attracted to Nate. And she’s pretty sure he’s aware. She’s also very attracted to the Russian prince- again, Zoey is not the most discrete as her nerves and anxiety tend to give her away. 

No sexual activity with the aforementioned. Though some can argue romantic activity such as signs/ actions of affection.

In romantic relationships, is s/he generally monogamous or uncommitted? (If the latter, is s/he honest w/ partners?)

She’s a monogamous hoe. Like. Once she’s into you she’s into you. And she can be very clingy but in the cute mature way not I’d die without you. 

Though she may eventually hold feelings for two people at once. 

Is his/her sexual behavior inhibited, average, experimental, or reckless? Has this changed

(and if so, why)?

Definitely inhibited. She is not the type to casually hook up (though she has in college) because she’s afraid of creating soul ties with strangers or people whose hearts she doesn’t know well. 

When she is involved with someone she trusts and has feelings for she is open to experimenting with things like Tantric sex etc. 

Worst end of a relationship (could be friend, romantic, colleague...): Obviously the one with Nate as it was out of her control and sudden. It was because of the abrupt end that she hasn’t healed from it completely or found closure. 

Whom does s/he most rely on for practical advice? Her mom

Whom does s/he most rely on for emotional support? Her dad

MENTAL ATTITUDE/PERSONAL BELIEFS:

Any psychological issues (e.g. phobias,depression, paranoia, narcissism, etc.)? As if it weren’t obvious Zoey suffers from anxiety. It was so bad that she would pass out at times. However the psychological issue she’s in denial about is her depression. Which gets worse nearing the anniversary of her sister’s death. A part of her doesn’t want to acknowledge or admit her depression to herself and family because she doesn’t want them to worry that she’d share the same fate as her sister.

Is s/he an optimist or pessimist? She’s a realist, now. Though she can easily be painted or mistaken as an optimist. 

Personal philosophy:

What is his/her biggest embarrassment? Possibly getting caught making kush cupcakes by her boss’ son. Yeah that takes the cake- pun intended.

Does s/he believe in fate or destiny? Is s/he superstitious? Very superstitious. And she believes in fate and destiny more than the average human. 

What are his/her own favorite attributes (physical and personality)?- Zoey likes her fingers. They strike her as being very delicate and perfect for playing an instrument to showcase them.. like piano. 

She loves that she’s friendly and people warm up to her instantly. 

What about least favorite? Zoey wished she was braver in expressing her feelings. 

Biggest regret: Not picking up the damn phone when her sister called her in class. 

Other regrets: Sometimes taking the job in Russia. Not questioning her breakup with Nate more/ advocating for them or herself. 

Biggest secret(s): Her sister’s death. She rarely discusses it with anyone. 

Does anyone else know these secrets? Her family. 

How does s/he react to a crisis? She’ll probably have a panic attack so intense she’ll pass out... or puke. Once that’s subsided she’ll probably come around to trying to find a solution 

How does s/he react to change? Zoey is very adaptable but not when it comes to something like death. That’s the one thing she still struggles to grasp and accept. 

LIKES/FAVORITES:

Food: Italian (pestp pasta)

Drink: Iced coffee

Book: The fifth agreement

Film: The Lake House (cuz like fate and serendipity) 

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

On JK Rowling, Dumbledore, lycanthropy, and cultural context

I want to address an idea I’ve been seeing pop up a lot recently, which is that JK Rowling added Dumbledore being gay and lycanthropy being a metaphor for AIDS years later in order to seem progressive, and I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about why these claims bother me (since I’m definitely not mad on Jo’s behalf because she’s been dead to me since 2016), and I think it really comes down to this. These claims are based entirely off of how things are today and show a fundamental disregard for the cultural context at the time that’s concerning and feels dismissive to the people who lived through it. Basically, it goes hand in hand with the lack of knowledge and sometimes intentional rewriting of our community’s history that’s so prominent on this site.

Note that I am not arguing that Dumbledore is good rep or that the lycanthropy-HIV metaphor was well executed (or even a good idea in the first place). I just wish people would stop treating these things like JK Rowling said them yesterday as opposed to 12 years ago.

1. Dumbledore being gay 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in July 2007 and Jo first publicly said Dumbledore was gay and in love with Grindelwald in October 2007, so the idea that she added it years later is just factually untrue. It came out three months after the release of the final book. 

Let’s take a look at public attitude towards queer people in 2007. I’ll preface this by saying that I’m American, so I’ve done my best to find data on the UK, but most of my info is from the US.

In 2007, in the US, Gallup reported that only 59% of adults surveyed believed consensual sex between two people of the same gender should be legal, that 46% of adults believed that same-sex marriage should be legal and come with all the same rights are marriage between a man and a woman, and that 50% of adults favored a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Despite all that, only 22% of surveyed adults answered that they thought gays and lesbians (the language in the poll) should be more accepted in the US and 27% of adults thought gays and lesbians should be less accepted. Jumping back to 2005, 43% of respondents didn’t think gay people should be hired as elementary school teachers and 36% didn’t think we should be hired as high school teachers. I mention these numbers specifically because they’re relevant to Dumbledore. 

On the legal side of things, there were enforceable sodomy laws on the books in 13 states until 2003, four years before Deathly Hallows came out and Jo announced that Dumbledore was gay. In 2004, the fact that Kerry was in favor of same-sex marriage was considered a significant liability in his presidential campaign because even a lot of democrats still didn’t support it. In October, 2007 when Jo did that interview, same-sex marriage was legal only in Massachusetts, civil unions were legal in four states, and domestic partnerships were legal in three states. Meanwhile, twenty-five states had constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and twelve of those states also had constitutional bans on other rights, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships or extensions of employment benefits to same-sex partners.  

In the UK in 2007, just under 40% of adults believed that same-sex relationships were morally okay, 17% strongly agreed that same-sex marriage should be legal, and just under 45% believed that a same-sex couple could raise a child as well as a man and a woman. A 2005 Gallup poll found that, 38% of Brits believed homosexuality should be more widely accepted, 15% thought it should be less widely accepted, and 44% thought the currently level of acceptance was about right. 

On a more personal note, my high school hired its first openly gay teacher in 2008, and the fact that he was gay was considered pretty scandalous among the student body. We had a gay band instructor, but he only ever referred to his partner as his roommate. When we did debates in social studies classes, same-sex marriage was always one of the issues we had to debate over. Of the eleven people I went to high school with whom I now know are queer, only three of them were out in high school. That’s how uncommon it was at the time to come out before you were relatively independent. 

So this idea that announcing that a prominent character who was a headmaster at a school and had a close relationship to the teenage boy main character in a wildly popular children’s book series was gay would have been a popular move in 2007 is pretty laughable to anyone old enough to remember what 2007 was actually like. No one was using support for queer people just to bolster their public image unless their product was specifically marketed towards queer people, because the general wisdom at the time was that it would hurt them too badly with straight audiences. In fact, if memory serves, the queer fandom’s reaction to Dumbledore was initially pretty positive because it was more than we ever thought we were going to get. I didn’t start seeing people talk about how it wasn’t enough or about how the entire plot line was homophobic until maybe 2012.

You can’t use today’s context to interpret why someone made a decision in 2007 because it’s difficult to overstate how different things are now. The only reason to want to look pro-gay in 2007 was if you genuinely thought it was the right thing to do.

2. Lycanthropy and HIV

I was genuinely surprised when this caused a stir when JK Rowling tweeted (?) about it in 2016 because I was pretty sure she’d talked about lycanthropy being a metaphor for HIV years ago. It turns out I was right. She discussed it during the copyright trial she was involved in in 2008 (you can find it here, on pages 72-73). So it didn’t come out until nine years after Prisoner of Azkaban and three years after Half-Blood Prince (when Fenrir Greyback was introduced), but it’s not something she first mentioned on twitter in between tweets about how she meant for Nagini to be a Korean woman in 1989. It was before she was shooting off her mouth about ridiculous stuff every other day.

Regardless, I can understand why that would feel like her pulling something out of left field today because HIV doesn’t get talked about as much, but you have to remember that these books were written in the 90s at the height of the AIDS crisis. It’s difficult to imagine how much that permeated our culture if you didn’t experience it, even for someone like me who was in elementary school in a white suburban area and, as far as I’m aware, didn’t know anyone who was HIV+. My school had a how-not-to-get-AIDS assembly every year.  They probably showed us every movie in existence about kids with HIV. After-school TV shows did special episodes about how you shouldn’t be “blood brothers” with your friends because of AIDS. 

So when my friends and I were reading Prisoner of Azkaban as middle schoolers in the early 2000s, those memories were still fresh in our heads. We didn’t need to be told lycanthropy was supposed to be a metaphor for HIV because it had just been a huge issue five years ago and we knew enough about HIV and how the people who had it were treated to see the parallels. I imagine it was even clearer to the people who read PoA right when it first came out in 1999. It didn’t even occur to me that the metaphor is less obvious to people who are younger until I started seeing claims about this was just something she made up years after the fact and was like, "What do you mean this wasn’t clear to you when you read the book?” It fits perfectly with the general public’s preoccupation with and faulty understanding of AIDS in the late 90s. You just have to acknowledge that things have changed in the past twenty years.

I know that this comparison calls on a lot of stereotypes that are homophobic and otherwise bigoted against people who are HIV+, but those aren’t arguments against the metaphor existing and being intentional, they’re arguments about why that’s not a good thing. Fenrir Greyback is straight out of a 90s detective show. The “person with AIDS who wants to infect other people because they’re bitter about it” was such a common trope that almost every crime drama in the 90s and early 2000s did an episode about it. The “adult man gives a young boy HIV” thing grew out of the “gay men are pedophiles” and “queer people want to recruit your kids” stereotypes. These were prejudices Jo had that misinformed her writing.

I don’t have a whole lot to say on this one other than that given when it was written and how close it fits, including how much it draws on negative 90s-era stereotypes about people who are HIV+, I would honestly have a harder time believing it wasn’t intentional than believing it was.

Anyway, really my point is that it wasn’t always 2019 and if you’re using only today’s culture to inform your opinions about why someone made a certain decision a decade or two ago, not only is your understanding of the situation going to be incomplete, but the fact that it’s incomplete is going to be obvious to anyone who remembers what things were like during the time period you’re trying to talk about.

[hiraeth-doux]

A Road Paved In Gold (14/21)

Summary: Steve Trevor didn’t die in the sky in Belgium, but his survival came with a price he couldn’t have ever imagined.

A/N: Hey, look who is still alive. I know it’s been a while and technically I’m still travelling but I didn’t want to make you guys wait for two more weeks or so, so here we go! Hope you will enjoy it  and please let me know what you think! ♡♡  And thank you for your patience!

AO3 |  FF.net

Gotham, 2017

Slipping into their old patterns was the easiest thing. One day, the world seemed to be falling apart before Steve’s eyes and nothing made sense, and then suddenly it was like the past several decades had never happened. There was comfort to familiarity, to knowing each other enough for the adjustment to the change in their relationship to not be grating, but there was also a thrill to discovering small details about one another that had come to be since 1952.

While Steve remained a drifter he had always been, Diana’s life turned out being stitched together of habits and routines that fascinated him to no end. She went running almost every morning, claiming that it helped her keep her head clear. There was a path circling the lake, and even though it had nothing on the trails crazing through Themyscira, she seemed to enjoy it well enough. Although, if Steve woke up before she left, she wouldn’t put up a fight if he tried to cajole her back into bed. He couldn’t get enough of her – the sound of her voice, her laughter, the way her fingers would sometimes skim casually over his body and set his blood on fire.

Even away from Paris, she worked a lot, sending emails and making phone calls in more languages than he could recognize, effortlessly juggling her duties as the Curator of Antiques with her life as a heart and soul of the League. If she had allowed it, he would be more than happy to spend his days watching her, the easy grace with which she moved about the house, the way she spoke to the dealers and her assistant and the other Curators about something or other that made his mind reel.

On top of that, despite having an affinity for tea, she seemed to have a special relationship with the coffee maker in the kitchen that only tolerated her and Alfred and couldn’t stand everyone else, and she could type texts faster than Barry (at his human speed), much to the frustration of the latter.

It took Steve all of three days to pick up on all of that, and when he oh so proudly laid out his observations to her at some point, she called him ‘such a spy’, which made him laugh until his stomach hurt.

The old things had come back, too. Those that remained dormant in his mind – like what side of the bed she preferred to sleep on, the way she tended to reach for his hand without thinking, how she tilted her head when she was curious or puzzled. All the details that he missed about her that made him ache on the inside for so long that he thought he would wither and die from a heartbreak.

She was his Diana still, the woman that he had loved for so long that he could no longer remember what it was like not to, but also so much more that Steve could hardly comprehend how one person could contain all the wonder and beauty of different worlds within her. A clash of times and contrasts. To him, she was still a Princess of the Amazons who once got confused by a revolving door, but now she was also a woman who used emojis in text messages and easily understood pop culture references. She still read the works of the Greek philosophers, in Greek, but was also fond of Lord of the Rings and the novels of Hemingway and Huxley. It was, he had to admit, a lot to wrap his mind around.

It was new, but also not, and he loved every moment of pulling everything that they were and all that they were meant to be to the surface, watching a puzzle fall into a complete picture. She was open and honest and unapologetic about her feelings, and the onslaught of quips that Steve half-expected from the members of the League never came, although he was tempted to ask if there was ever another bet going on, and maybe he and Diana deserved to be in on it. Except it didn’t really matter because he had already won a jackpot, and who cared about the rest?

“It wasn’t permanent, you know,” she told him one night, tracing lines on his skin with his fingers, her cheek resting on his collarbone.

“What wasn’t?” Steve asked, sleepy, too sated and relaxed to think straight.

“I’m not weaker than I was before.” Her voice was soft, but he went still, hanging on to every word, suddenly very awake, his hand that was tracing the line of her spine frozen just beneath her shoulder blades. “I thought about it, about what you said, and I suppose it’s not impossible that my mother was right, but if bringing you back cost me some strength, it came back again.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the ceiling, wondering if they had wasted all this time for nothing, if he had actually ruined nearly seven decades for them both, or if she only managed to heal properly because he was not around. There was no way of knowing it for sure, and he knew that dwelling on it would only cause pain to them both, but it was hard, so very hard to not think of it. She wouldn’t lie to him, and she wouldn’t have said that if she wasn’t sure.

Where it left him was another thing altogether.

As if the list of unforgivable things he had done wasn’t long enough already.

Diana lifted her head and pulled just far enough away from him to look him in the face.

“What are you thinking?” She asked, reading his inner turmoil chase across his features, anguish and regret mixed into something that had no name.

“But what if the next time--” he started, the damned habit of thinking ten steps ahead because back in the day it was his only way to survive rearing its ugly head again.

She touched her thumb to his lower lip and smiled that divine smile of hers. “Then so be it.”

He didn’t speak of it again, vowing silently to himself to live forever if he had to. If that was what it took to keep her safe.

---

A few days after moving into Diana’s room, Steve woke up just after dawn, his eyes raw and his mind as foggy as the early November day outside the glass wall of her bedroom, pale wisps clinging to the remnants of frozen grass. It was early still, but Diana’s side of the bed was empty, and even half-sleep, he missed her desperately.

Steve ran his hand over his face, rubbing his eyes. He buried his nose into her pillow, hoping for the slumber to claim him once more, but it never came. He blinked his eyes open, slowly and unwillingly, waiting for his head to clear. There was a sound that he first mistook for the ever-present patter of rain against the glass, but when he turned his head, he found Diana sitting at the desk to the left from him, her fingers flying over the keyboard of her laptop.

For a few moments, he simply watched her, taking her in, all of her so achingly beautiful that he wondered half the time if he was dreaming. One of her legs was tucked beneath her thigh, and her hair was loose, falling down her shoulders in heavy waves, and she was wearing nothing but her underwear and a tank top - a very thin one - and he decided that next to having her in bed next to him and without any clothes whatsoever, this was the second best view he could possibly wake up to.

And then she looked up and saw him study her with sleepily eyes, breaking into a smile so bright and wonderful that it made his chest constrict fiercely. And Steve thought, I could never love anyone more than I love this woman.

“Hey,” he croaked, stifling a yawn.

“Morning,” she whispered, seemingly no longer caring about whatever it was that kept her so wildly occupied not a few seconds ago.

“Why are you up?” Steve grimaced a little. “S’early.”

And they had a late night. A very last night.

“Work,” she responded, amused, as she watched him fighting a losing battle. “Go back to sleep, Steve.”

He rolled onto his side, claiming her half of the bed and murmured, “C’mere,” in that thick, sleep-laced voice that never failed to undo her in the best way. He stretched and tucked Diana’s pillow under his cheek, watching her gaze trail along the outline of his body beneath the sheet slung over his waist, weighing the options. He knew the look. He liked that look very much. He particularly liked the things that often followed soon afterwards.

“I do have responsibilities, you know that, right?” Diana pointed out, an eyebrow arched and her chin resting on the heel of her hand propped on her desk.

“Mm-hm,” he hummed noncommittally, barely bothering to contain a smile that threatened to split his face in half. “At 7 in the morning?”

“It’s past noon in Paris,” she countered, clearly enjoying his impatience.

He scrunched his face, struggling for an argument that could tramp her sense of obligation in favour of something, well, less productive but much more fun. It was far too early for that, though. Thinking, that is. His thoughts were tumbling aimlessly into one another without much aim or purpose.

And so, he opted for looking at her, taking in the glint in her eyes and a quirk of her eyebrow and the way her tank top was hugging her body just right even though it did seem entirely excessive, all things considered.

How on earth he managed to survive without her for so long was beyond him.

At last, Diana caved in, never a fan of this game. She uncured from her seat and crossed the room, padding barefoot across the soft carpet and then lowering down on the edge of the bed beside him. The mattress dipped beneath the weight of her body, and Steve moved closer to her, reaching for her hand. He kissed her knuckles, watching her watch him with that small secret smile of hers that never failed to make him feel like he was losing his mind.

And then he dropped the pretences too because resisting the temptation was too bloody much for this early hour. He pushed up to sit and tugged her to him until she was close enough for his mouth to brush against hers.

“Hi,” he said again.

“Hi,” she whispered, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

God, he loved her smile. That smile alone could end wars and bring peace to the world, he thought.

His hand pushed into her hair, tangling in her black mane, the strands soft as silk between his fingers, bridging what little space was left between them. Her response was immediate, her body leaning into his touch and, encouraged, Steve bit gently at her bottom lip, coaxing a low moan out of her. She sighed softly against his lips. A wave of heat seared through him, blinding in its intensity.

“Steve,” she started without conviction when his lips moved across her cheek.

“Hm?” His mouth latched on the underside of her jaw, his thumb running slow circles on the back of her neck. “It’s too early to be out of bed and wear so many clothes.”

Her fingers curled around his wrist, although in protest or encouragement he wasn’t sure. She didn’t stop him though, so he hoped it was the latter.

“I’m practically naked,” Diana argued, amused.

“Not naked enough,” he murmured, nuzzling into the tender spot behind her ear. “Let’s fix that.”

“Steve.”

She drew just far enough away to be able to find his gaze, her hand resting on his ribs and making the early-morning process of putting his thoughts together into something more or less coherent nearly impossible.  

Still, he sighed, although not relinquishing the physical contact, his hand merely dropping to rest on her waist. “So, what’s this about?” Steve asked, his eyes darting toward her laptop that glowed in the dimness of a gloomy morning.

“A quarterly report and some shipment forms that needed my approval,” Diana explained, her fingers strumming absently along his skin. “Pierre is worried about the exhibition we’re opening later this month.”

Pierre, her assistant. The very one who somehow always knew to call at the most inconvenient times – even more so than Barry who texted pretty much nonstop, and it was often very had to tell whether it was an emergency or a new cat meme. Having been instantly added to his contact list was an interesting experience, Steve had found out very fast.

With Pierre, on the other hand, everything was an emergency. And maybe it was, but Steve had yet to figure out how exactly he expected Diana to fix them all from across half of the world. He was curious, though. He had seen Diana in many roles – a woman, a lover, a warrior. Yet the idea of her working at the Louvre – the Louvre – intrigued him greatly and he wondered what she was like as a boss and how she was different in that role from the Amazonian demi-goddess he was far more familiar with.

She was bossy, for sure. Had been for as long as they had known each other.

“Rightfully worried or panicking because you’re here and not there to supervise?” Steve clarified.

Diana laughed. “A little bit of both, I think.”

“Well, he’s a big boy.” He paused and frowned. “He is, isn’t he?”

She nodded, smiling. “He is. But some of those things are my job, not his.”

“He’s doing fantastic, I’m sure.” His fingers curled around her neck to draw her closer, his mouth finding hers again as he thought, This is what every morning should be like for as long as I breathe.

Steve’s hand slid down her neck, trailing the length of her arm before slipping around her waist.

“Steve.”

“Mm.”

His mouth abandoned hers and started to inch its way toward her neck once more, his teeth grazing lightly along the sensitive skin as he moved closer toward the spot that worked like magic. Her breath caught in her throat and Steve smiled to himself, feeling her resolve crumble. His fingers traced along the hem of her tank top before sliding underneath it, searching for skin. Christ, he loved her so much it almost hurt in that impossibly pleasant way that he wanted to never stop.

“Steve,” Diana tried again, albeit without conviction, trailing off as her spine arched under his touch.

He inched her tank top up, and then some more, kissing his way down her neck and toward her collarbone and wanting nothing more than to pull her to him and stay in bed for another hour, or five. Or the rest of the day, for that matter. They could make good use of that.

Was the wanting ever going to go away? He had no idea. He had no idea how what he felt for her could ever go away, or even fade. How much time could one person need for something this consuming to cease to be? Several lifetimes, for certain. And he didn’t want it to. Didn’t want to not feel this burning for her, the need simmering beneath his skin, the elation that filled him at the mere thought of her smile. Didn’t want the pricking of his skin at the sound of her voice whispering to him in the dark to ever ebb.

He turned his head, pressing his mouth to the pulse point just under her jaw, her blood throbbing rapidly against his lips. Pleased, he trailed his hand down her back and lower still, his fingers tracing the hem of her panties along the curve of her thigh, moving slowly closer to where she loved to be touched, both of them very much aware that once he got there her resistance wouldn’t stand a chance. Diana muttered something he didn’t catch, desire pulsing in his blood.

“Steve.”

With a hand on his chest, holding him firmly in place, she pulled away and took a steadying breath, dazed – much to his satisfaction, but also amused beyond measure by his rather confused look, caused by the sudden lack of contact.

“I wasn’t done,” he protested and tried to reach for her, but damn the Amazon strength that, with just a small nudge, had him on his back again.

“I have a meeting with a curator of the Gotham Museum of Art in an hour,” Diana said, steering the conversation in a different direction while she so very obviously tried not to laugh at the defeated look on his face. “To see if maybe we could do a collection exchange. They seem to be quite interested.”

“I can be quick,” Steve promised eagerly and heatedly and with as much conviction as he could muster, completely ignoring the second part of her statement. “And efficient. I can be very efficient,” he added when she tilted her head and arched an eyebrow.

He grinned.

“Don’t I know that,” Diana smirked and leaned over to kiss the corner of his mouth, her hand still holding him against the sheets. “And I prefer to take my time with you,” she whispered. “Tonight.”

Steve swallowed, watching the fire flare up in her eyes, his own body responding to it in an instant.

“How about I take you for lunch when I’m done?” She offered as a truce, taking pity on his wounded expression and, well, some other parts of him.

“I’m not sure I can wait that long,” he admitted, his gaze dropping to the bow of her mouth and then further down to the expanse of her skin disappearing in the cleavage of her shirt. “I’m hungry now.”

She laughed and stood up, and it took him a whole of two seconds to start missing her terribly.

“You’ll have to manage, I’m afraid,” she said, sitting back down at the desk.

Steve turned on his side and propped up on his elbow. “Hey, how come it’s always you taking me places?”

Diana glanced at him. “Because you don’t know the city.”

He made a face and ran his hand over his hair, trying to smooth it down and failing spectacularly. “Yeah, fair point.” He paused. “But how about I take you out for a change?”

Her eyes narrowed skeptically. “Where?”

The corner of his mouth curled upwards. “I have an idea.”

Diana turned off her laptop and closed it before crossed the room again until she was standing right before him, and Steve’s gaze traveled unashamedly up and down her legs.

“I’m sure you do.”

“Outside of this room, I swear,” he added, looking up. “Unless….” He let the sentence hang between them, his suggestive tone more than a little hopeful.

She shook his head, laughed, and leaned down to kiss him once more, her hand stroking his stubbled cheek. “I’ll come get you here at 1, yes?”

Steve craned his neck to chase her lips. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Sleep,” she murmured, her face not an inch away from his. “I promise you we won’t have time for it tonight.”

He smiled. “Tease.”

“You started it.”

He did, and he regretted nothing.

Steve chuckled, pulling her pillow closer and inhaling her scent that still lingered on it as Diana headed toward the bathroom. “Yeah, well, who wouldn’t?”

---

By the time Diana came out of the shower and got dressed, Steve was already asleep again, sprawled diagonally across the bed with his arms wrapped around her pillow. She smiled and walked over to the bed, more than a little tempted to wake him up and allow him to get her out of her clothes this time. So very tempted. They had done that before, and the memory of those moments stirred something warm in her chest, her whole body humming with need for his touch.

However, she did mean it when she said that some of the tasks her assistant was doing now were not entirely his responsibility, and had Diana been in Paris, it would have been a different story. Here, though, her resources were limited and time zones were an issue to be considered, and it wasn’t like she could take care of physically arranging the collection from another continent. Steve’s amusement regarding Pierre’s dependency wasn’t unreasonable, and while personally, Diana found it rather endearing, she did appreciate his hard work nonetheless, and the least she could do while she was here was finish the negotiations that had started months ago and were still nowhere near complete.

If nothing else, it made her feel a little bit better about still being in Gotham even though there was, technically, no need for it and no reason for her to stay, except for the man snoring softly into her pillow right now, tangled in the sheets, and her desperate need to hold on to this time with him, like this, for just a while longer.

She had lovers after Steve, people she was comfortable with and cared about, but never once was she scared of losing anyone the way she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. She wasn’t ready to let go just yet.  

Lips curved into a smile, Diana crouched down near the bed. She stroked her hand through Steve’s hair, mindful of not disturbing him, and then pressed her lips to his forehead, breathing him in and trying to ignore the longing building up in her chest with all her might.

No one had ever had the kind of power over her that Steve wielded, and not once was she willing to give it to anyone so gladly.

His face scrunched a little at her touch, and she whispered a quiet I love you, unable to stop herself. Unable to stop saying it, period. Needed to say it for every day that she had spent missing him, the words whispered into his skin when they were making love and repeated again and again as they lay basking in the content afterglow.

And then, after a moment of hesitation, Diana stood up before she had a chance to change her mind and crawl back into his arms, the rest of the world be damned. She walked quietly out of the room, closing the door behind her and doing her goddamn best to ignore a pang of panic in her chest. It was still new, and half the time it felt like a dream and she was terrified out of her mind to wake up and find out that he was still gone.

She got it now. Used to having him slip right through her fingers, she understood the despair lurking behind Steve’s eyes, a reflection of her own fears that made her want to avert her gaze because they were too painful to see.

There was no one in the kitchen, even though the coffee machine was on and a bitter smell of the fine Arabica was hanging in the air. She was not surprised. Both Barry and Arthur liked to sleep in and Alfred often read in the study before breakfast if there were no urgent matters for him to attend to. Such as patching Bruce up after a rough night, which, if she recalled correctly, was a fairly frequent occurrence. Her gaze lingered for a moment on her semi-transparent reflection. The temperature kept going down steadily during the past week and the glass wall overlooking the dark, gloomy forest was fogged up at the corners. It was bound to snow in a week or two, she thought absently.

Diana reached for a cup holder, looking for the mug that she had claimed as hers when she stayed here for the first time, trying to decide if she could afford to have a proper breakfast, and then reconsidered when she noticed that the light over the staircase leading down to the Batcave was on.

Maybe she could stop by a coffee shop near the museum later, she decided.

Downstairs, Bruce was half-buried under the hood of the Batmobile, tugging and pulling at something that Diana couldn’t see. He glanced up when he heard the sound of her footsteps before turning his attention back to the problem du jour again, although it was more than enough for her to notice his weary look and dark circles under his eyes. He was a morning person alright, when he had to be, but she still couldn’t help but wonder if he was already up or still.

Diana crossed the distance between them and paused near the bumper of the car, peeking inside as well out of sheer curiosity.

“You need to sleep sometimes, you know?” She said, folding her arms over her chest.

“No rest for the wicked, or however that saying goes,” Bruce muttered without looking at her.

“You don’t have to take it to extremes,” she noted, smiling. “Is there anything bothering you, Bruce?” She asked when it went unnoticed.

“Why would you think that?”

Ha made a grab for a wrench from the toolbox sitting atop the tubes and hoses.

“You haven’t been around much lately.”

In the past few days, every time she tried to catch him for a proper conversation he was either out, or on the way out, or very obviously trying to come up with an excuse to escape. If Diana didn’t know any better, she would have assumed that he was avoiding her on purpose. And quite frankly, his inability or unwillingness to even meet her eyes right now spoke volumes.  

Bruce straightened up and turned to the work bench, looking for something among the assortment of tools spread out there, his back to her.

“Maybe you were too preoccupied to notice,” he said as he picked up a screwdriver.

“Can we talk?” She offered softly, watching the back of his head, then his profile as he leaned forward again.  

“About what?”

She didn’t waver. “The benefit in Gotham two months ago.”

His hesitation was brief, yet it didn’t escape her attention.

“What about it?” Bruce asked, his voice pointedly nonchalant, and then cursed when he dropped the screwdriver into the depths of the Batmobile, the metallic clang oddly loud in the suddenly quiet room.

Diana didn’t want to do it. Regretted not doing it sooner, unbidden guilt blossoming in her chest. She didn’t owe him anything, never had, but it didn’t mean that she didn’t see that he was hurting and that it was her fault, one way or another.

“You know what,” she murmured.  

This time, Bruce did look up, his gaze tired but sharp, his expression uncompromising, although she could see a flicker of doubt flash across it, like he couldn’t quite decide if he should deny it or brush it off or pretend that he had no idea what she was talking about. She braced herself for either one.

He chose neither.

“It was a kiss, Diana. Not a proclamation of undying love.” He pushes up to stand and picked up a rag to wipe his hands that were stained black with motor oil and dirt. “Alcohol and boredom are a dangerous combination. I should know. If nothing else, we are both aware that there is no such thing as undying love to begin with.”

Everything about him was daring her to disagree.

She didn’t, even though she didn’t believe that it was nothing. Certainly not for him. Hadn’t been for a long time. Her inability to reciprocate his feelings didn’t make her blind, although it might have made her look the other way more often than not.

“You seemed to have made the decision,” Bruce added when the pause started to stretch between them. He moved closer to her until they were only inches apart and she could smell cold and whiskey and that rubbery scent of the Batsuit on him. “Is there anything that I can say that can get you to change your mind?” The question was rhetorical, but there was desperate, hungry yearning behind his words.

She met his gaze, held it, wondering for just a moment—

It didn’t matter, though.

“No,” she shook her head.

Simple.

Honest.

He was wrong on another account, too. There was such thing as an undying love. It was real, and it was burning in her chest with such intensity that it was hard to breathe, and she never wanted for it to stop. Not even for a second. Just as she was certain that it never would.

Diana didn’t say any of that, though. Knew that she didn’t need to.  

Bruce was a good man, and she cared for him deeply, but the matters of his heart were none of her concern, no matter how much he wanted them to be. They would have worked, she thought. In another lifetime, if the stars were aligned differently, they could have worked. Maybe. He was driven, his passion matching hers, and there were so many things that they viewed similarly. She never considered it seriously, but she toyed with the idea.

And then she would have probably hurt him when it turned out that he wasn’t enough. Zeus knew it had happened before.

“What if he never returned?” He asked suddenly.

Diana felt her whole body deflate. “Don’t go there, Bruce,” she breathed, shaking his head.

He watched her for a long moment, and then nodded. “Why did you make it sound like he was dead, when…” he faltered not sure how to finish the sentence.

“I never said that,” she countered. “You assumed because of the old photograph.”

Because who wouldn’t? As a rule, his people didn’t get to live to be over a hundred years ago. Not often. Certainly not without ageing. So why did she feel so foul about never correcting him? For allowing him to believe a lie?

“How?” Bruce pressed, and this time there was curiosity to him.

Because I love him, Diana thought, and like always, it made her soul unfurl until it took so much space in her chest that she could barely inhale.

“It’s complicated,” she responded. “And it doesn’t really matter.”

He nodded again and stepped away from her, choosing not to push, breaking whatever spell kept them captive in a bubble of trust that burst before her eyes.

“Well, I’m glad…” He started and faltered once more. “If you’re happy.”

“I am.” Diana looked around the cavernous room before turning back to him.

Bruce cleared his throat. “Do you still love him? After all this time?”

She didn’t hesitate. “I do.”

“I’m glad.” He repeated and looked away. “You deserve to be happy.”

They remained silent for a few moments, both searching for words that didn’t seem to come.

“When I go home, he’s coming with me,” she said after a while.

Bruce stepped back to the work bench. “So, you’ll be a package deal, then?” He asked.

She smiled tentatively, not quite certain if it was a joke, but liking his wording for some reason. “Afraid so.”

His lips twitched a little, but the smile didn’t linger. “You should be careful with Waller. She is going to use him against you,” he spoke.

Her own smile faded as well, replaced by a slight frown. It wasn’t that she never thought about it – she didn’t trust that woman and wasn’t going to start now. But it was one thing to merely have that thought cross her mind, and something else entirely to have someone else put it into words.

“The way you tried to?” She asked, surprised by the sharp edge in her voice.

“Diana--”

“Don’t think that I forgot, Bruce. Don’t think I forgot that you tried to use him to manipulate me.”

He winced, his palm running over the back of his neck. “I won’t. Trust me, I won’t.”

She squared her shoulders. “And if you do it again, I am going to walk out this door and never come back.”

He exhaled slowly, his eyes earnest. “I know, and I’m grateful that you haven’t already.”

“I won’t let Waller come anywhere near Steve,” she said.

His frown deepened. “She might not ask.”

Diana scoffed. “I’d like to see her try.”

“She’s going to have to go through all of us if she has to,” he noted.

She shook her head. “It’s a nice sentiment, but I’m sure it won’t come to it.”

Bruce’s jaw set tautly.

“It is not a sentiment, and it will come to it. Because what do you think is going to happen if she can’t get to him?” He asked, and this time her brows knitted together, his voice cutting deep. “She won’t come for you, she’s not an idiot. And she won’t come for Steve because it’s the same as coming for you. So, it stands to reason that she will try to do it through the next best target. Barry. Victor. The rest of us.” He rubbed his forehead. “You think she’s above hurting someone for her own gain? She’s done it before and she’s very good at covering up her tracks.”

Diana’s lips pressed into a tight line. “I will never let it happen.”  

He lowered his hand, his eyes weary. “It’s not your job to keep watch. Not like that.”

She was shaking her head. “What do you want me to say, Bruce? What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to understand what’s at stake here.”

“You think I don’t?” She demanded, furious. “You think I’m clueless?”

“I think you’re blindsided when it comes to Steve Trevor.” The jealousy in his voice caught her off guard. Jealousy he had no right to own. “He is your Achilles heel, if you please.”

Diana bristled at his accusation. “And Alfred is yours, and Barry’s father is his. Lois. Mera. Victor’s father. Steve is not my weakness because he loves me and I love him, he never has been.” If nothing else, he had been the opposite, showing her the side of strength she never knew existed. “We all have people we care about. It doesn’t make any one of them stand out among the others.”

“But it does,” Bruce insisted. “Waller wants more from him than she’s letting on. She can’t not to. He’s 136 years old, for heaven’s sake! However that works….” He stopped abruptly, his jaw working for a few moments. “It’s all too—convenient. The timing, his sudden return after all those years…”

“Whatever it is, she won’t get it,” Diana said firmly, cutting him off, and Zeus help her, she felt sorry for Amanda Waller – if the woman tried to cross her path, Diana wouldn’t hesitate. “Never.” She bit her lip, then exhaled slowly, remembering why she was here and what this was supposed to be about. “Bruce…” she started.

“Don’t,” he interjected, lifting his hand up.

“You are deflecting.”

His face closed off instantly.

“Don’t pity me. It was a kiss. I have never expected anything from you, not then and certainly not now.”

“I’m not--”

He gave her a look and Diana cut off, not wanting to lie but also unsure what the truth was anymore.

“It’s better that way. For the team. For everyone. All of this,” Bruce gestured vaguely around them, “it’s bigger than you and I, and if he’s the one…” He trailed off. This was nonsense and they both knew it, but she was not going to argue, knowing all too well that they could drown in what-ifs if they allowed themselves to. “Just be careful.”

“I’m sorry,” Diana said softly, for not feeling the same way or for admitting it, or for losing her temper minutes ago, she wasn’t sure, but hoped he knew.

For hurting him.

There was a heavy feeling between them, and maybe she wasn’t completely ready to forgive him for his words, for the things he had done, but there was fear behind his motives, not malice, she knew that much. She wasn’t sure if it made it better, but it didn’t make it worse.

“Don’t be. It’s me who should be sorry for… well, a lot of things.” Bruce took a breath and then chuckled wistfully. “Your Captain Trevor is one lucky man.”

She felt the tightness in her chest ease. “I would argue that I am.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Of course, you would.”

Her gaze darted toward the staircase, and then back to Bruce. “You really need to get some sleep.”

---

When Steve woke up again, the early morning fog that never failed to turn this place into a scene straight out of a gothic novel was gone and the sun that offered all the light but none of the warmth had crept over the treetops, flooding the bedroom with a soft glow.

He scrubbed his hand over his face and rolled onto his back, squinting around the room, half-expecting to see Diana at the desk or rummaging through the closet but not surprised when he found it empty. A pang of longing jolted through him. It had been a few hours, and he already missed her to the point of fierce ache in his chest.

There was a text from her on his phone, a quick good morning that she had sent an hour and a half ago, and Steve smiled, rereading a brief message several times. In his mind, he could easily see her typing it after she parked the car outside of the Museum or maybe in the elevator, and he hoped that she wished she was here instead as desperately as he did. He could think of a few ways for them to make good use of this morning.

Not that he expected her to cancel her life for him. It was not Diana’s fault, after all, that he had crashed back into her world with the grace of a bull in a china shop. Nor was it her problem that he would much rather spend all his free time between the sheets with her making up for the lost years than do, well, anything else.

Not that Steve had nothing to do, for that matter, he reminded himself.

In the past few days, he had managed to upgrade Bruce’s security system, which even Diana had a hard time getting around when they tested it and he learned - not without surprise - that she was quite spectacular at bypassing them when she needed to. He was also going to have a look at the firewall in the Batcave, as a part of his agreement with Bruce. God only knew what he had on those servers, including the half-fake file he had on Steve.

Better safe than sorry, Steve figured.

Which, come to think of it, could be a project for the morning.

Maybe.

Except that it meant going down to the Batcave, which Steve was more than a little reluctant to do. It was the one place in the house where Bruce seemed to gravitate to the most, and ever since he and Diana… well, fixed things, there was a not so discreet undercurrent of tension between the two of them.

Sometimes, he could practically hear an endless array of what-ifs running through Bruce’s head. All the things that Steve refused to venture into for fear of losing his mind.

He could still try, though. It wasn’t like they could keep this up forever.

At least that was the plan when he finally made his way to the kitchen only to find Victor fiddling with the coffee maker. Barry was sitting at the kitchen isle, slouched over a bowl of cereal. He glanced up from his breakfast and offered Steve a small wave.

“Morning,” Steve said, pausing for just a second, curious. “It’s Tuesday,” he pointed out.

“Your point being?” Barry asked, shoving another spoonful into his mouth, his words garbled as he chewed.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

The young man shook his head. “They’re painting the lab. I’m allergic to that stuff.”

“Huh,” Steve blinked and turned to Victor.

“Don’t look at me,” Victor said. “I’m just hiding here. My dad’s been a bit overbearing lately, after what happened at the S.T.A.R. Labs.”

A faint frown creased Steve’s forehead. “Are you doing okay?” He asked, eyeing the Cyborg with apprehension.

He still wasn’t entirely sure how the healing worked for someone like Victor to begin with, but he looked fine, for a half-robot. Come to think of it, having a self-regenerating tissue was quite handy, perhaps. If nothing else, it was so much more convenient in their line of work than dealing with the vulnerable human bodies that could be easily incapacitated and took weeks to heal.

It fascinated Steve to no end. That, and the mechanics of it. Jokingly, he asked Diana the other night if he could take Victor apart to see how he worked and put him back together, and she laughed until she had tears in her eyes.

The memory made his mouth curve in a smile, slight colour rising on his cheeks. He didn’t mean it, of course. Not in a literal sense.

“Yeah.” Victor turned back to the coffee maker, his lips pressed together. “Considering my definition of okay.”

Steve nodded. “Acting up again?” He asked, his gaze darting toward the machine.

Vic nodded. “Alfred asked me to have a look. I think it’s the power cord because everything else seems to be fine, but I can’t…” he frowned.

“Diana seems to be the only one who has a way with that thing,” Steve said and pulled a carton of orange juice from the fridge. He could get coffee later. Or he could also ask Alfred to throw the evil thing out and get something less temperamental.

Vic chuckled. “Yeah, Di’s a woman of many talents.”

“Dude,” Barry hissed theatrically, snapping his head up, his eyes comically wide. His pointed at Steve. “That’s his girlfriend.”

Victor rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean it like--”

“I know, it’s okay.” Steve patted him on the metal shoulder, smiling. And added, “She really is.” He started toward the pantry but then stopped and turned to Victor again. “Can I ask you something?”

Vic shrugged without looking at him. “Sure.”

“Does it, uh… does it hurt?” Steve gestured vaguely toward the metal parts of him, too curious to shut up now that the words were out of his mouth.

This time, Victor glanced at him, his lips curving into a faint smile. “No. Not anymore.” At the counter, Barry was hanging on to every word, his breakfast forgotten. “I know it did, when I… you know, in the beginning. But I don’t remember much of it, it’s all blurred.” He shook his head, and Steve wondered if maybe it was for the best, a blessing in disguise.

Once, back in 1917, he got shot. A graze that was more of an inconvenience than an actual injury that left him with a scar on his left shoulder. He was sent to the field hospital to have it checked nonetheless, and that experience was like nothing he had ever had before. There were people there with their limbs torn off by the mines, people with half their faces melted off in the fire. The war was a nightmare, but that tent? That tent was hell. He had never seen this much pain in one place, so concentrated and all around them. It was like a living, breathing thing, taking up the inside of the canvas tent and suffocating them all.

Steve knew that few of those men lived, but those who did – well, he could bet his very soul that they would rather not remember the days of unbearable agony. He certainly didn’t want that for Victor.

“Right now, it’s odd,” Vic added. “It feels… okay, but strange. I do have the whole ‘phantom limb’ thing going on when my leg or my back would itch and it wouldn’t go away for hours, and it both the most and the least human thing about this whole…” He glanced down himself and then met Steve’s eyes. “Whatever this is. But no, it doesn’t hurt.”

“Man, this is the coolest thing ever,” Barry blurted out.

Victor looked at him. “Which part?”

“The—the ghost… whatever.” He lifted another spoonful of cereal to his mouth. “All of it, really.”

“You think?” Victor asked flatly.

“It does sound fascinating,” Steve admitted.

“And he can play video games with his brain,” Barry added, for what felt like a hundredth time, to Steve’s memory.

“Yeah, that’s the biggest perk of being only half human,” Victor deadpanned.

“Exactly!” Barry agreed, not hearing the sarcasm in the Cyborg’s voice.

“I guess having built-in weaponry could come in handy now and then,” Steve offered before Vic had a chance to come up with a retort.

“Yeah,” Victor nodded, “and also this.”

He pressed his spread-out fingers to the side of the coffee maker, his brows pulling together in concentration as if he was hooking to the machine’s mainframe. And then he curled his hand into a fist and smacked the whole thing with it. It sputtered for a moment, and after a few seconds, the main console lit up and the air filled instantly with the bitter smell of percolating coffee.

“I could have done that,” Alfred noted, appearing in the kitchen in that exact moment.

“You’re welcome,” Victor grinned at him.

“Captain,” Alfred nodded.

“Alfred,” Steve echoed, amused.

He grabbed a cup from the holder but paused and looked over his shoulder, having to stifle a smile.

A speedster, a cyborg, a butler, bickering about something amongst themselves.

Somewhere in the house, an Atlantian was probably still snoring away – if there was one thing that Steve noticed about Arthur it was that he decidedly wasn’t a morning person. Not in the slightest. That, his distaste for the water jokes – the last time Barry suggested that he tried talking to the river cutting Gotham in half, the very one that was known for toxic waste floating in it, alongside with two-headed fish, he had to make a very fast escape because Arthur did not appreciate the humour. Or that time when Bruce asked him to part the water of the lake like in the Biblical story and Steve thought that the Batman was in for his first real flight.

And somehow along the way, while he was busy putting the broken pieces of his life back together and trying to find his heart again, they all managed to crawl under Steve’s skin without him even noticing and found home there.

In a few hours, he would see Diana again, and the mere thought of her made his heart spring into a gallop. He had missed her, but he didn’t realize how much until he didn’t have to anymore, and being back with her left him with a sense of vertigo, the ever-terrifying sensation of free fall that he didn’t want to break.

How could less than a thousand lifetimes of this ever be enough?

---

Their first date after the war, after Steve had healed and they returned to London, was a dinner at a small restaurant not far from his apartment that he booked on Etta’s recommendation because he had never stayed in the city long enough to discover any places more sophisticated than the bars frequented by Sameer and Charlie in between their missions. The ones that supplied cheap alcohol and trouble above all else. The ones that were not suited for a princess – he chose not to think of having taken her to one before (as Etta reminded him helpfully).

They were on a mission, he had told himself. It didn’t count. He was not trying to…to make an impression then. Mostly. Yet, he still yearned to fix it.

Hence, the dinner.

He remembered the red checkered tablecloths and flowers on each table and an actual menu with a selection of options - something that he was so unaccustomed to that he could barely bring himself to pick something. He remembered smiling like a moron because he didn’t seem to be able to ever stop, and Diana’s inquisitive gaze when he tried to come up with a sensible enough explanation as to why any of that was a big deal when they were already sharing not only their meals but also a bed since the day she had found him in that field outside of the airbase in Belgium – something that he couldn’t quite put a finger on himself. He remembered the awestruck and curious look on her face and thinking that they were doing it all wrong.

Okay, not wrong but the other way around, and it both amused and scared him, the newness of it and the lack of… rules, perhaps.

He took her to bed before he took her out for dinner – and no, sharing a bland stew by the campfire on the night they stayed with Chief didn’t count as one. He loved her before he truly knew her. He almost lost her before they had a chance at anything. But then again, nothing had ever been normal about them, so maybe it wasn’t much of a surprise that he struggled to find his footing. Maybe it was about making their own normal, or so he was thinking as he watched her watch him in the faint light of a dancing flame that night, a tender smile on her lips and a life full of wonder stretching infinitely before them.

But that was a long time ago, a whole century, to be exact. And even though Steve still remembered that night with striking clarity, they did manage to make their own rules that seemed to have worked much better than anything he had ever learned prior to meeting her, social rules be damned. Diana didn’t care much for appearances and gestures. She wanted him, she wanted to be loved, and those were the things that Steve could give her so easily and gladly that he was nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste.

And this, it turned out, had never changed.

“Okay, you have to be able to reach the handlebars comfortably,” Steve was telling her now, on a cold November afternoon nearly a hundred years later, as his hands curled over Diana’s, her skin warm against his palms.

He had spent the past half hour going in great detail over the anatomy of his motorcycle and showing her the switches and the clutches and the levers, making her repeat his words back to him so he knew that she got it right. It was slightly more nuanced than the car, and even though she preferred manual transmission to the automatic, as he had learned, and the principle here was very similar, he wanted to make sure--

“This is your idea of taking me out?” Diana asked, not without amusement.

Sitting behind her, his chest pressed against her back and the hair that escaped a loose bun on the nape of her neck whipping against his face, Steve let out a short laugh. “Don’t tell me this is not fun.” And then, unable to resist the temptation – because when was he ever? – he dipped his head and kissed the back of her neck.

“You’re being distracting,” she warned him, but there was a smile in her voice.

“I learn from the best,” he noted, and she laughed. “Okay, so…” He cleared his throat.

“It’s pretty straightforward,” she said, turning her head slightly to the side.

Truth be told, this morning when he promised her that he had a plan he didn’t exactly have one. He just thought that he would figure it out by lunch. It didn’t bother Steve one way or another that she seemed to be the one to always choose where they went – which was her bedroom more often than not (which was something that he had no business complaining about). However, there was a burning need simmering inside of him to do something for her, break out of their routine, however non-invasive it was. It had been so long since he could have her all to himself, even for a short while, that he craved it beyond comprehension.

Neither he, nor Diana walked through the past century without emerging on the other side with more than a little bit of cynicism clinging to their bodies like a second skin. He had expected it from himself, what with the first war effectively stripping him of the delusions he might have had when he was younger and the subsequent ones leaving him with a hard shell around his soul to protect it from further pain, but seeing it in her – albeit much less pronounced and bitter than his own – was still something that Steve wasn’t quite prepared for.

The fact alone didn’t bother so much as sadden him. There were many things that he had always wanted desperately to shield her from, and knowing that he had failed on all accounts felt like a punch to the gut that left him breathless.  

It was not his place to stop it, to get her not to give up – and god help him, he would never blame her if she had. Time was starting to take a toll on him as well. There were moments when he ached to know what his expiration date was, exactly. Queen Hippolyta made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t immortal like her daughter, and there were many a night when Steve lay awake scared of closing his eyes for fear of never opening them again because there were no rules to his life.

God only knew what Diana went through on her own, what demons were lurking in her mind, haunted by the memories of pain and loss.

There was nothing that Steve could do to fix it for her.

However, he could try to coax the old Diana out of her hiding. He had never expected her to remain the same, much like he knew that he would be a different person at the end of this journey – there was no point in fighting the inevitable. But their old selves, brittle and frayed at the edges, were still there somewhere, deep down, buried under a layer of disappointment and pain and fear.

And so when she came back to get him around lunch time, he gave her knee-length skirt a sceptical look and suggested that she changed into something more practical. Intrigued, Diana obliged without arguing. And then he drove them to the harbour, nearly empty this late in the season with the chilly wind blowing from the water and angry waves crashing against the stone and concrete below, and said that it was time for her to learn how to drive a motorcycle.

All things considered, it definitely wasn’t the worst idea he had ever come up with.

And there it was, a familiar glint of surprise in her eyes mixed with something that made Steve’s chest fold in on itself. A feeling that was most certainly worth dying for. He wanted—

He wanted so badly for her to never stop being surprised. He wanted her to never, ever stop wondering.

The air was cold, biting at their cheeks and noses even though Steve was more than a little certain that Diana only wore her jacket because it was a social convention, to stop strangers from gawking at her. A dozen rather puzzled seagulls were floating over the water coloured in gold by the sun that no longer bothered pretending that the winter wasn’t near, casting odd looks in their direction, and he felt his blood flowing in his veins like it hadn’t in a very long time.

“Are you hungry?” Steve asked as Diana fiddled with the controls under the dashboard.

“Yes,” she admitted, glancing at him. “A little.”

“Well, maybe you could drive us somewhere later,” he offered, and she smirked. “Ready?”

Diana nodded, and he caught a glimpse of another smile that took root in his chest, spreading all the way into the tips of his fingers and his toes before springing into a full bloom across his face and he was beaming like a lovesick idiot that he was. God, he was so crazy about her that his heart was about to burst.

Steve leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her shoulder, sliding his arm around her – not to be thrown off the bike if she started it too abruptly, and also because he wanted to never stop touching her. He ran his hand across her stomach. “Okay, let’s do this.”

It took her a few attempts, but Diana got it right after a minute or two, waving him off with, “I got this, Steve,” as she brimmed with stubborn determination to figure things out on her own that he loved so.  

And then… and then there was swerving, and the wind tearing at the folds of their clothes and slapping wisps of her hair against his face. And laughter. And a time or two when Steve thought that they would fly through an embankment and straight into the frigid water - and if they did, it would probably be worth it. The bike stalled; Diana had to restart it half a dozen times before she got a hang of it, and when she came too close to end of the pier, he had to grab the handlebars over her hands and steer them back to safety.

He could feel her excitement flowing in his own veins like it belonged there.

And suddenly, none of this felt like a bad idea anymore.

The past few days felt surreal, too good to be true even. It was almost like someone climbed into his head and pulled everything he had dreamt of and prayed for and made it real, and even better than anything he could ever have imagined.

However, Steve wasn’t delusional about this honeymoon phase lasting forever. Soon enough, their lives would have to fall back into some sort of rhythm. Diana had a job, and he had one hell of a task cut out for him if he wanted to work with the League. Waller’s radio silence bothered him more than he was willing to let on and he itched to find out what caused it. He needed to know what they were up against before it was too late, and that thought was a constant presence in the back of his mind.

But it wasn’t ending today, and hopefully not tomorrow; and right now, neither of them needed to think about any of that. Not for a little while.

“I gotta admit, you weren’t half bad,” he said when the sun started to inch toward the horizon and the shadows around them began to grow longer and Diana finally brought his bike to a stop with a jerk.

“Not half bad?” She echoed, incredulous and mock-insulted, as Steve propped it on a kickstand and slid off, missing the close contact with her instantly.

She climbed off too and stepped to him, pulling him to her by the lapels of his jacket. Steve didn’t resist, his lips stretching into a smile the moment before they met hers.

“You were good,” he murmured against her mouth, drawing her closer to him by her hips.

One of her hands slid up his chest and curled around the back of his neck, her body alive and languid against his. He could taste the thrill of the past few hours on her tongue, feel it in the way her fingers slid into his hair as she kissed him.

“A natural,” Steve added, smiling.  

Diana hummed in agreement and then stepped back. She reached for his hand and weaved her fingers through his. They walked toward the end of the pier, listening to the cries of seagulls nearly swallowed by the furious roar of the water and the singing of the wind. Before them, the ocean was stretching endlessly all the way to the places somewhere out of their reach.

Diana paused before the railing and peered into the distance, longing for something that she couldn’t quite put into words building up inside of her. Steve could feel it thrumming in her blood.

He let go of her hand and moved to wrap his arms around her from behind. He pressed a kiss to the back of her head before resting his cheek against her temple, his gaze following hers. The wind was ferocious here, but the view was breathtaking – fierce and powerful, the ocean smelling of salt and seaweed and places they couldn’t see. He could certainly understand the appeal even if they were a few seconds away from being blown away.

“You were right,” Diana said after a few moments. She ran her hand along the sleeve of his jacket until her fingers reached his wrist, curling around it, her touch soothingly warm. “It was fun.”

Steve chuckled. “Hey, I promised you a good time.”

“You always do, and you always deliver,” she responded matter-of-factly, and his skin flushed at the implication she didn’t even bother to hide.

The Diana he knew back in the day was far less proficient in suggestive banter, but Steve had to admit that he rather enjoyed it now, even if half the time it ended with his heart racing for dear life and him struggling for words, a quick-thinking and articulate spy that he was.

Much to Diana’s immense amusement.

“You know, we could have just stayed in your bedroom,” he pointed out, and she laughed, the warmth of it making his very soul unfurl in his chest. For a while, they just stood there, watching the seagulls diving toward the water and soaring back into the sky as he held her close, her body nestled neatly into the circle of his arms and his heart hammering against her shoulder blades. “Do you miss it?” Steve asked after a few minutes. “Themyscira?”

The name of the island still rolled with difficulty from his tongue. Their time spent there remained one of his most cherished memories – not so much the heavenly island as the look on Diana’s face when she was there, the easiness to her, her body language relaxed and at ease. There was nothing there to warrant any worry, never had been. And yet Steve couldn’t help but wonder now and then how their lives might have turned out if they never went there at all.

A pang of shame shot through him, hot and burning, making him want to claw it from under his skin. The island was Diana’s home and she loved it, and she longed for it even when she didn’t want to admit it. He had no right to take it away from her. Yet, if his conversation with the Queen never happened—

A sigh flowed from his chest. He wouldn’t have to run away from something he never knew existed.

“I do,” Diana said after a moment. “But I know they are well. It is enough.”

She turned to rest her forehead against his cheek, and Steve reached absently to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Do you ever wish that we never went there?” She asked as if reading his mind.

“No,” Steve responded, surprised that he actually meant it. “I wish that some things had turned out differently. I wish that your mother was wrong.” He took a breath. “But no, I never wished that we didn’t go. You missed them, and I wanted answers.”

Be careful what you wish for, he thought. Most of the things he knew about the Greeks and their mythology was from Diana, and the awful irony of opening his own Pandora’s Box through her wasn’t lost on him. Speak of unexpected.

“I did,” she admitted, her finger circling absently over the juts of his knuckles. “But I wanted you more.”

He stayed quiet for a while, watching the water, inhaling the ocean. Diana had always been drawn to it for as long as he could remember, the wistfulness in her gaze whenever she would look at the waves crashing against the beach never escaping his attention.  

I wanted you more.

“Are you cold?” Steve asked softly, tightening his grip on her.

“No,” Diana shook her head, her hair brushing against his face.

He smiled. “Right. A goddess. So above our trivial human concerns.”

“Doesn’t mean that I don’t like you holding me,” she told him.

“You know, I…” Steve started and faltered. He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry and his blood pounding fast in his ears. He could say anything now and it wouldn’t matter. She wouldn’t know the difference. Still, when he regained his ability to speak, he went for the truth, “I saw you once. In Paris, at the Louvre. About a decade and a half ago.”

His heart was thudding in earnest by the time he fell silent to the point of him feeling dizzy.

Diana stayed quiet, and a hot wave of panic rose inside of him, making him want momentarily to turn back the time and swallow the words before they came out of his mind. With her, he always was either fumbling for words, or spilling his soul without thinking twice, and he wasn’t certain which one was more frightening.

They never taught him that. When they were schooling him to be a spy, no one ever told him that there was nothing as disarming and terrifying as loving someone with everything that he was.

“I know,” Diana said so softly that he almost missed it. “I saw you, too.”

Steve’s brows pulled together and he glanced down at her, wanting desperately to read her face but she remained staring straight ahead.

“You—you did?” He asked.

Surely, he had to have heard her wrong.

“It was April and we had just opened a new exhibition the previous week. You were standing in front of a Monet painting and looking at it like you were trying to find the answers in it unknown to mankind since the creation of the universe,” she said quietly. “And I thought… for a moment, I thought that you came back for me.”

Steve felt his body go rigid, and when he spoke, his voice came out hoarse and raw.

“Diana…”

“I didn’t think that it was really you,” she admitted, her fingers running absently over the back of his hand.

“You didn’t?” He echoed.

Diana shook her head. “I used to see you often after you left. I’d notice a man with the same haircut or hear someone speak in your accent, and think…”

Her voice caught, and she trailed off. Steve pressed his lips to her temple. She turned in the circle of his arms, her hands snaking under his unzipped jacket to rest on his waist. She might not have felt the cold the way he did, but her cheeks were pink from the wind, and cool to the touch when he reached to loop a piece of hair around her ear.

It fell right back across her face moments later.

“I went to an art show in Geneva once, shortly after I moved back to Paris,” she continued, taking his hand in hers and intertwining their fingers. Her eyes were watching his thumb running over her knuckles. “There was a father with a young girl, his daughter, on the plaza in front of the gallery. She ran over to him and he caught her in his arms and put her on his shoulders. She was laughing the whole time. From the back, he looked so much like you that I was certain…” Her other hand twitched on his side. “Until he turned around, I thought it was you.”

Steve could see it in his mind – a sun-bathed square and the light reflecting off the windows, flocks of bold pigeons and toddlers chasing after them between congregations of tourists with cameras. And amidst them all, a woman frozen to a spot. He recalled the way he felt when he saw Bruce kiss her at the benefit and it was akin having someone stab him in the heart and twist the knife for good measure.

Whatever that encounter felt like for Diana, it couldn’t have felt good.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, bowing his head closer to hers until their faces were almost touching.

“I hoped that it was you, and prayed that it wasn’t,” she said, her gaze drawn back to the waves, and for once, Steve wished that he couldn’t see her expression. The anguish chasing across her features was unbearable. “That day, I was so jealous I couldn’t recognize myself. More than I’ve ever been before.” Her lips twitched humourlessly. “Which is ironic, considering the history of my people.”

“And here I was thinking that you were above something that mundane,” Steve muttered.

Diana turned to him, the concerned lines around her eyes smoothing out, her lips curving into a proper smile.

“You’d think so, but in reality, no one feels deeper or more passionately than gods.” She sighed. “I knew that it wasn’t you when that man turned around, but before then, I stood there and watched them. And I thought that there was nothing that I wanted more than for you to be happy. But even more than that, I wanted you to be happy with me.”

Steve took in a shuddered breath and looked up from the knot of their hands. He found her gaze.

“I’m happy with you, Diana,” he said quietly, his voice earnest. “I’ve never been happier than when I am with you. Then. Now. A million years from this moment.”

It was silly thing to say. Silly and sentimental and like it came straight from one of those tacky greeting cards that people gave to each other because their own words didn’t seem enough. The words that, if someone else said them, would have grated on his own ears. The words that, if said in front of Sammy and his friends, would have made him a laughing stock for weeks on end. Steve didn’t care. He wanted to be tacky and sentimental, he wanted to sound like a cliché. If that was how he felt, then so be it.

Diana’s features softened and a teasing comment he half-expected never came.

“I tried to find you, in the 1960’s, after Etta passed away,” she said after a moment. “I thought you’d come to her funeral, and when you didn’t, I tried…”

Steve grimaced a little. “I’m pretty damn good at hiding.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I—” he cleared his throat. “I didn’t know about Etta until it was too late.” The memory was bitter and painful, aching still in his chest. Of all the things he would never forgive himself for, losing track of the people he loved was one of his biggest regrets. “I spoke with her daughter, about a month after…” He shook his head. “I went to say goodbye to Charlie, though. You should have seen how mad he was at me for—” his lips tugged upwards at the corners at the memory. “Well, for losing you.”

Diana let out a small laugh. “I can imagine. Sameer was just as bad.” She ran her hand back and forth along his side, her touch warm even through his shirt. “I saw him in Paris a few times, and the man had a foul mouth on as many languages as I could count.”

“All about me?” Steve chuckled.

Diana’s eyebrow arched. “Of course.”

“I went to his show once, when he was touring in Belgium,” Steve confessed. “He beat me with a bouquet that he received from one of his devoted admirers.” She laughed again. “Said it was a much better use for it. And called me names, too, that I’m not going to repeat in the presence of a lady, and told me to go find you.” He let out a breath. “I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it.”

“You didn’t,” she murmured, lifting their hands up to her mouth and pressing a kiss to his fingers. “You were hurting.” The wind picked up and then died down just as suddenly, and odd calm settling over them. “Although I still wish you’d listened to him.”

Steve did, too. Wished he’d listened to Etta when he called him a moron and some other unflattering words. Wished he’d listened to Sammy when he told Steve to get his ‘sorry ass back to Paris and stop being an idiot’ – direct quote. Wished he’d listened to Charlie whose lungs were collapsing the last time they spoke and who still managed to make Steve feel like he was the one who had drawn the short straw. The latter probably should have clued him in, but the wound was still raw and bleeding, and he chose to let it scar rather than poke at it.

“I miss them,” he said.

“I miss them, too,” Diana sighed.

They spoke of their friends some more, trading old stories and filling in the gaps that each of them had. Steve never met Sameer’s grandkids, and Diana knew little to nothing about Charlie who seemed to be the most adamant of them all to cut the ties with the past for fear of falling into a pit of despair that the war had dragged him into all over again. He missed Etta terribly, but keeping an open communication was a tempting getaway to coming back and he was scared. Diana did, though. She never forgot, and he gave her a story from before they met for each one that she had from after he had left.  

“Does the League ever remind you of them?” Steve asked when they both fell silent, realizing that he was practically shaking from the chill by that point, his toes numb cold stones in his boots.

“Sometimes,” she smiled. “I think the League is far less reckless than your boys.”

Amused, he shook his head. “I beg to differ.” And added, “I think that if they all met, they’d have liked each other.”

She let out a small laugh. “They would have,” she agreed, leaning into him.

“Do you remember Veld?” He asked after a moment, his voice low. “The night after the liberation? Dancing?”

She tilted her head, curious. “Yes. Of course.”

“Remember how I told you that I didn’t know what life without the war was like?” She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were flicking between his, waiting for him to continue. “I still don’t think I do. Probably never have.”

Diana let go of his hand, her gaze searching his, and it was as hard for Steve to look at her now as it was when she had first asked that question and he came up empty.

She put her hands on either side of his face, and her mouth formed into a small smile that made something snap inside of him.

“I love you,” she said quietly, her right thumb running over his cheekbone. “I will always love you.”

His gaze dropped from her eyes down to her mouth and the temptation was too strong to resist. He leaned forward and kissed her, her lips warm against his. She pulled him to her, weaving her arms around his neck and allowing his hands so slip underneath her jacket and around her waist, palms roaming over her back, her shoulder-blades, everywhere he wanted them to be, drawing her closer to his chest until he could feel her heartbeat as clear as his own.

She gasped against his mouth when one of his hands slipped beneath the hem of her shirt, startled by the cold of his touch to her skin. A low groan formed in the back of her throat, her lips parting against his and sending a shiver of a different kind down Steve’s body. He didn’t hesitate, kissing her the way he wanted to kiss her every moment of every day that they were apart, frantic and almost panicky, needing to put into his touch everything he knew not how to express with words.

Diana was the one to break the kiss, pulling back a little, her eyes dazed and dark with want when they found his, knocking what little air Steve still had left in his lungs out of him. She was breathing hard, her chest heaving against his, and although it had never been about pride with them, he was stupidly pleased to know that even after all this time he was still able to kiss her senseless, quite literally so.

“Take me back home, Steve,” she whispered, and it came out as a demand, her voice hoarse, her exhales puffing out in small clouds between them.

The corner of his mouth lifted. “I thought you were hungry,” he reminded her, his fingers running back and forth along the base of her spine beneath her shirt.

Diana’s hand flexed, curling around a fistful of his shirt under his jacket.

“I am.”

---

Funny how some mistakes were meant to keep biting one in the ass for as long as one lived, apparently.

There wasn’t a day when Amanda Waller didn’t regret forming Suicide Squad – she got nothing out of it and lost more than she wanted to admit – and yet it was the one thing that somehow seemed to haunt her no matter how much she tried to put it behind her.

If she knew to set her attention on Justice League earlier, a lot of things could have gone very differently, yet here she was, still trying to clean up the mess in Midcity while dodging everything else coming her way and seeing no way out.

And on top of that, she had managed to grossly miscalculate her steps with the League as well, which felt like a cherry on top of the crap cake of the situation she was in. When she first found the photograph and discovered that Steve Trevor was alive, he was meant to be her trump card. Instead, she was left with nothing to bargain with. Bringing him in was a mistake. The one that she couldn’t fix now.

There had been nothing in his scant file on his personal relationship with Wonder Woman, and as far as Waller was concerned, Diana Prince had never been in a romantic relationship at all. She should have known better.

At the time, Waller was going for half-gratitude from a certain demi-goddess in hopes of getting in her good graces, and half-shock to shake up the seemingly established peace in the League. God knew, she needed to have an upper hand with them for once, and briefly, Bruce Wayne’s reaction was almost worth it. Her own superiors had been breathing down her neck for months now, urging her to gain control over half a dozen people who could tear this city apart without breaking a sweat with no consequences whatsoever and, if nothing else, her continuous failures in that regard were starting to drive her up the wall.

Yet, what she ended up with was rejection and animosity, driving her further away from her goal than she had ever been. And she needed to fix it ASAP. There was only so much her superiors would put up with before they decided to get someone else involved, someone who, in their opinion, might be better suited for the task, but Amanda Waller had not spent several decades of her life doing her damned best to keep peace here to simply hand over her victories to anyone else and walk away.

The problem was, she was running out of time.

Ice cubes clinked softly in her glass when Waller lifted it to her lips and took a small sip, aware of the burning trail the alcohol would leave in her throat. It was almost midnight and the hallways outside of her office had been quiet for hours. She couldn’t bring herself to leave though, not yet. She needed to find a way to get Steve Trevor to cooperate – of them all, she suspected, he was the only one without a personal grudge against her. Or, at the very least, it was not supposed to be a big one. She needed to get him on her side, find a way to cooperate with him. If her intel on the nature of his relationship with Wonder Woman was correct – and she suspected that it was, based on both of their reactions on the day Waller brought him in – then he was her best hope.

And if that failed… Well, there should be a way to make him compliant, she figured. They did, after all, had an agreement, which essentially made him a property of the Government of the United States, but she didn’t want to use it against him unless she absolutely had to. Which, truth be told, was more likely to happen than not.

Waller chose not to think of how his girlfriend might take it yet.

A knock on the door gave her a start, making her hand jerk so that a few drops of an ember liquid spilled on the papers spread out in front of her.

“Yes?” Waller snapped, frowning at the slight nervous uptilt in her voice.

The door opened a crack and a tech whose name she never bothered to learn poked his head into her office. “Director?” He adjusted the glasses that kept sliding low on his nose.

“Yes?” She repeated coolly.

“We have a problem.”

She almost laughed at that. Of course, they did. When was the last time they didn’t? It only seemed like a logical ending to her already shitty day. She stifled it though, her frown deepening momentarily.

“What is it?” She demanded when the man didn’t say anything else.

He crossed the room, walking over to her desk and the extended his clenched fist to her and opened it. On the palm of his hand were a few small pieces that looked like—

Waller pressed her lips into a tight line.

“Bugs,” she muttered.

The man cleared his throat. “These were found on the first level. We are scanning the whole building now.”

“How?” She snapped, eyes drilling into a tech who seemingly shrunk under her glare.

“We are checking the security footage—” he started.

“Nobody leaves until the building has been cleared,” Waller stopped him.

He nodded. “Yes, Director.”

When the door closed behind him, Waller leaned back in her chair and let a long breath through her nose, trying to clam blind rage rising inside of her.

“Bruce Wayne.”

---

“Thank you.”

Perched on the kitchen counter and wearing nothing but her panties and Steve’s button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up half to her elbows, Diana watched him rummage expertly through the freezer, searching for the stash of ice-cream that she knew Alfred always kept for her visits.

Her gaze followed the defined lines of his arms, the taut muscles of his back, lingering on the dimples that disappeared into the waistline of his jeans riding low on his hips. She bit her lip, trying to swallow a smile, and vowed silently to try and get him to be shirtless – or, better yet, naked – more often. Why on Earth was he even allowed to cover a body like this was beyond her.

She had always found Steve attractive but missing him somehow intensified it to a point where she could barely keep her hands off of him. Their relationship had never been about physicality, per se. Their connection running deeper than just sex. Diana was in love with him, she cared about him in a way she had never cared about anyone else. She missed him achingly whenever they were apart even for a brief period of time. However, it didn’t hurt that she found him handsome as well, reminding her of the pictures of ancient gods from the books that filled row upon row of shelves in the library on Themyscira. Lean muscles and easy grace.

And right now, she certainly enjoyed it.

Steve glanced up at her, his eyebrow quirked and his face puzzled. His hair was tousled comically after the past few hours that they had spent reminding one another unapologetically and a with as much fervour as they could muster just how really and truly well they fit in every sense Diana could think of.

“Huh?”

“For today,” she clarified, her hands gripping the edge of the counter, her legs crossed at the ankles. “I don’t believe I said this. I should have.”

He grinned at her. “I believe you did.”

“Not in words,” Diana pointed out, her head tilted ever so slightly.

“Ah-ha!” Victorious, he pulled a pint of ice-cream from the back of the freezer – Alfred’s attempt to keep the other members of the League from so much as looking at it, which Diana found amusing to no end, considering that they all knew better than to even try. “You were very convincing in other ways,” Steve promised, moving toward her.

It was past midnight, the house around them dark and quiet. For fear of disturbing anyone else, they chose to forgo turning on the overhead light, sticking instead to a smaller lamp over the stove that cast a warm glow around them while the corners of the kitchen remained drowned in shadows. Hunger, as it turned out, was a force to be reckoned with, and while skipping dinner in favour of far more exciting activities wasn’t nowhere near Diana’s list of regrets, a late-night snack seldom was a bad idea.

Steve stopped in front of her, his elbow brushing against her leg, and just like that the familiar warmth stirred in her belly as it often did even at the small touches that punctuated their routines. It amused Diana beyond measure that he would barely even look at her in the presence of the other members of the League because it was ‘unprofessional’ to be ‘personal’ in front of them, which, consequently, only made her want to put her hands all over him even more.

But there was no one else here now, Alfred and the rest of them fast asleep, and when Steve was within her reach, she draped her arms around her neck and reeled him closer, watching his eyes widen as she did so.

He was a damn good spy, and even though she might have been a little biased in her assessment, Diana was certain that she had never met anyone better. With or without her, he still singlehandedly obtained the intel to stop the Great War. With or without her, she knew that he would still go against the orders of his superiors to save the lives of innocent people. With or without her, she was sure, he would have still climbed into that airplane. He wasn’t just good. He was excellent.

And yet, there was something intoxicating in knowing that he could barely ever hide his feelings when it came to her, in seeing the desire in his eyes even when he didn’t mean for it to show.

“Oh, other ways,” Diana echoed. “Yes, of course.”

“I like other ways,” he promised to her. “I like them a lot.”

“Good to know,” she murmured, touching her mouth to his, reminded pleasantly of the moment several hours ago when he peeled her clothes off her body only to reveal the same black set underneath them that she wore on the night they went to Metropolis, thin lace clinging so close to her skin that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other one began.

Diana watched him stare at her, slack-jawed and more than a little desperate, drinking her up as his eyes moved down her body and then back up, his rather undignified gaping making her want him even more. His need was so raw she could feel it in her core. And she promised to herself to wear something like that more often. Every day, if she could. If only to have Steve look at her the way he did tonight. She was quite adamant to make it happen for as long as he would let her.

“So, about that story that I was trying to tell you when we were so rudely interrupted,” he started, drawing away from her. One hand still resting on her hip, Steve pulled open a cutlery drawer near her left thigh, fumbling for cutlery.

“You mean, when our clothes fell off?” She teased, one of her arms still slung over his shoulder.

“Hey, an interruption is an interruption,” Steve brandished a spoon in her direction, and Diana laughed. “And they didn’t just… fall off.”

“Yes, I remember you being very diligent with removing those that didn’t,” she told him with as much seriousness as she could muster.

“God,” Steve exhaled and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t,” he said, pointing at her. “Don’t do that.”

“What?” Diana asked innocently, her fingers running absently along the base of his neck.

“You know what,” he grumbled.

She raised her hands up, biting her lip so she wouldn’t burst out laughing. She took a breath. “Okay, I’m sorry. Please, keep going.”

He regarded her suspiciously, but then only shook his head.

I have never loved him more, she thought, watching him, her lips pressed together around a smile.  

“So, a week after I get deployed and come to London, I go to this bar around the corner,” Steve continued from the moment where they had left off when something far more appealing became a priority. “The kind of place where you go looking for trouble.”

He twisted the lid off the ice-cream tub.

“Were you looking for trouble?” Diana asked, curious.

He chuckled. “No, I was looking for a drink and didn’t know any better.” He passed another spoon to her. “So, I walk in, and there’s a brawl over… At the time, I had no idea what it was over, to be honest, but it was messy and loud, and apparently it was all a fault of one particular man who no one could find.” He let out a short laugh. “You know why? Because he was hiding under a woman’s skirt.”  

A spoon reaching for ice-cream, she paused and looked at him. “You’re joking.”

“Honest to god truth.”

She blinked, a mental image wild in her mind, and then laughed, having to clasp her hand over her mouth not to wake anyone up.

“And that is how you met Sameer?” She asked.

Steve smirked and offered her a half-shrug. “And that is how I met Sameer. The bravest man I’ve ever known was hiding under a skirt. And doing damn fine down there.”

She was shaking her head now. “Lucky Sammy.”

“Poor woman,” he corrected. “She turned out being the owner’s wife, and he was not pleased with any of that. Not the fight and certainly not a strange man getting closely acquainted with his wife’s undergarments.”

“I can’t believe it,” she muttered.

Diana knew about their first mission together, knew the story of them meeting Chief, and a million small moments in-between, but this… How Steve failed to mention something this impossibly entertaining was beyond her.

“As it turned out, I was the only person there not after his head,” Steve added, trying to swallow back his own laughter. “Sammy lost a game of cards and couldn’t pay up, and talking his way out of it didn’t work out, so…”

“What happened?”

“I had to grab him and run, or they’d probably come for his blood.” There was fondness in his voice that made Diana’s chest constrict. “We’d been inseparable since.”

He had to be feeling it too, she was thinking now. The dread and exhaustion of watching everyone he loved die. A slight crack in his voice when he mentioned their names, the wistfulness in his gaze. She saw them too for they reflected her own.

“You do know how to find trouble, Steve,” she noted nonetheless, her heart full and her chest tight with affection.

He grinned at her. “You should know.”

Diana hummed, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. She was not going to argue, all things considered.

“This is delicious,” she said, taking a bite of ice-cream.

Heavens bless Alfred for remembering about her weakness. He didn’t have to, and she would never have asked – not at Bruce’s home where he already allowed his comfort to be disturbed for the sake of the League. Which only deepened her gratitude towards the older man.

“I’m glad you’re so easy to please,” Steve noted.  

Her eyebrow arched. “Am I, now?”

He scooped some ice-cream with his spoon and lifted it up to her lips. She licked it clean without breaking the eye contact as she watched his smile slip and his eyes turn dark. Her stomach tightened, heat starting to simmer in her veins. His hand that still rested on her side flexed, fingers digging into her skin through the thin cotton of the shirt she was wearing.  

Diana’s hand curled over the side of his neck. She uncrossed her ankles and pulled him to her until he was standing between her parted knees. The warmth of his mouth against her cold tongue sent a shiver down her spine, a low sound of appreciation rising in the back of her throat. He tasted of vanilla and caramel and want, and she was drunk on it, on the feeling of him, on the heat of his body under the palms of her hands.

“You are trouble, angel,” Steve murmured.

“Sorry,” she breathed.  

“You’re not.”

She smiled against his lips. “Not really, I’m not.”

His hands clenched the fabric of her shirt, tugging her close, and Diana thought absently that this was exactly how they ended up without any dinner in the first place. Or lunch, if she recalled correctly. Somehow, somewhere along the way, Steve Trevor had turned entirely into her sole sustenance, and she was in no hurry to have it any other way.

Her hand closed over his jaw, tilting his face up, her body responding to his touch on its own volition.

“Diana…” he started, a warning in his voice, when she buried her fingers in his hair, bowing down to kiss him properly.

“There’s no one here--”

“Ohmigod!”

A yelp caused Steve to jerk away from her so fast that they both nearly tumbled down to the floor, his hand flailing to grab the marble counter to catch his balance. His blood flowing in earnest and his heart thudding in a panicked frenzy, he turned to the door to find Barry standing there, his mouth agape.

He was wearing flannel pajama bottoms with a yellow duck print and a loose Lord Of The Rings t-shirt, a pair of massive headphones sitting on his head like a perfect finishing touch. His eyes were cartoonishly wide as his gaze slid over Steve’s bare chest and an endless expanse of Diana’s legs peeking from under the hem of the shirt that she barely bothered to button properly, at which point his face turned scarlet red.

He looked away quickly. “Oh my god,” he repeated. “I’m so sorry.”  

“Barry,” Diana started, her smile sympathetic.

“I’m sorry,” he stuttered. “I didn’t hear you.” He yanked the headphones off, and by now even the tips of his ears were crimson. “I—I didn’t think anyone was here, this late.”

“Really… sorry about that,” Steve grimaced.

“No, no, it’s cool.” Barry’s gaze darted for a second toward them, and then snapped away just as fast. “I was just—I thought I’d have a snack, because there’s no such thing as a bad time for a snack.” He paused, looking mortified, “Except there is, apparently. And it’s not good for you, anyway. I think. Eating late, that is. So….”

“It’s not—” Steve looked toward Diana’s his eyes pleading. “We were just--”

“Never mind,” Barry interjected, nodding more to himself than for their benefit. “I’m just gonna…” He started toward the balcony, then stopped abruptly. “Wrong way.” Steve had never seen anyone put this much effort into avoiding looking at something. The Flash turned on his heel. “I’ll see you later.”

“Barry,” Diana tried again, her voice kind, but he was already gone in a whoosh of wind that left a faint smell of ozone and a few sparks of electric discharge behind.

Steve let out a sharp breath and scrubbed his hands over his face, pushing his fingers into his hair. His shoulders slumped forward.

“I’ll go talk to him,” he said.

Diana’s hand curled over his arm. She shook her head, finally tearing her gaze away from the dark doorway and turning to Steve. “I don’t think he’s going to talk to you now. Better give him some space, perhaps.”

A flash of doubt rippled across his face as he debated her words, and for a moment, she thought that he was going to argue, but then he stepped back toward her. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching her features soften.

“Do you think we broke him?” He asked, his voice miserable and his face matching Barry’s red suit.

“He’ll be fine,” Diana promised, shaking her head a little and trying very, very hard not to laugh. “I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

“No, I’ll do it,” Steve sighed.

Her eyebrow quirked. “Because you’re a man?”

His lips twitched a little. “Because he has a hero-worship thing going on for you,” he explained. “He probably won’t even hear a word you’ll say. He’ll just… stare.”

She rolled her eyes a little. “That is not true.”

“Just—just trust me on this,” he shook his head, feeling her hand rest on the nape of his neck.

“It’s not like he doesn’t know about those things,” Diana whispered, scratching her nails through his hair.

A strangled sound formed in the back of Steve’s throat. “Oh God….”

“He has a girlfriend…” She continued, then paused and corrected herself, “A lady friend. Iris. He is not very fond of discussing his personal life.”

“And now he is all too aware about ours. Besides, it’s not the same,” Steve muttered, wincing. “Hell, it’s like walking in on your parents--” He stopped abruptly and dropped his forehead on her shoulder with a groan. Another mental image that he didn’t need. “Not that we’re his…” he added, mortified. “I need to stop talking now.”

He scrunched his face and Diana rubbed a soothing hand over his back.

“We weren’t doing anything,” she pointed out.

“We were,” he protested. “Sort of.”

“It was only a kiss.”

“I don’t think it matters,” he said, his voice muffled and pained.

Diana pressed her lips to the crown of his head.

“Steve.”

He looked up at her, his cheeks still flushed.

“I think we need take this party back to your room,” he offered. “Just to be safe. In case someone else wakes up to get a glass of water, or… I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes.

She bit her lip, studying him for a few moments and he felt his stomach drop.

“What?” He asked, lowering his hand.

Diana’s eyes flicked between his.

“I have to go back to Paris at the end of the week,” she said.

He blinked, momentarily confused by the sudden change of subject. Weren’t they just about to discuss some sort of obligatory therapy for the Flash? He could even think of a few ways to foot the bill to Bruce.

Her words sunk in slowly.

Paris.

“Oh.”

It wasn’t like Steve didn’t see it coming.

Diana had spent every morning this past week going through her emails and making phone calls and arranging video chats, digging through electronic catalogues that her assistant kept sending her – damn him – and signing forms and permits and other things that Steve didn’t entirely understand. She had a whole life to go back to.

The only problem was that Paris was far away from Gotham. Very far away, in fact.

Was she even coming back?

For a moment, he imagined being here without her, in this house that looked like an aquarium – according to Barry, who appeared to have strong opinion about glass walls – having to endure heavy silences that tended to hang between him and Bruce Wayne.

The prospect was dreadful.

Maybe he should just leave, too. Find a place in the city--

For one unbearable moment, Steve remembered with startling accuracy what waking up without her for the past several decades had been like, his chest aching from missing her already.

“There is an exhibition coming up,” Diana added, watching him, and he tried not to let his disappointment show, knowing that he was failing spectacularly. “Pierre would have a heart attack if I’m not there. And some other things that I need to take care of, on top of that. Like the recovered painting. I requested for it to be sent to the Louvre for proper assessment before we return it where it belongs.” Her fingers smoothed down his hair before her hands came to rest on his cheeks, framing his face. “And I also thought that maybe you and I could have some alone time.”

Steve stared at her. “Alone time?” He repeated dumbly.

Her gaze darted toward the dark hallway. “I love them, but it can be a little hectic here, no?” He nodded absently, his eyes never leaving her face. Diana turned to him. She traced the line of his jaw with her thumb. “Would you like to come with me?”

“To Paris?” He clarified.

She smiled. “I mean, you don’t have to--”

“Would you want that?” He interjected before she went any further. She could have asked him to move to Neptune, and he would have followed her gladly and without a single question asked.  “Would you want me to go with you?”

Diana’s smile widened, blossoming into something entirely majestic.

She nodded. “I would want that very much.”

To be continued.... 

[lonelyghosts-stuff]

I respond to this post in a joking matter by saying this:

To which someone chose to respond like this, bringing up irrelevant facts like my race and my enjoyment of the MCU.

Me, really not feeling like I want to be passive, directly addressed the hypocrisy and issue in what they said.

To which they decided to insult me based on my race once more.

Why thank you! Crackers are quite delicious! It’s true, I am a snack!

To which they replied again with another immature insult targeted at my race.

This is not okay. Attacking ANYONE based on their race is not okay. Racial discrimination does exist; this is true and always has been and unfortunately always will be. But here’s a life lesson, two wrongs don’t make a right. If you were wronged by someone of another race, for example a white person, that doesn’t mean you should go around treating every white person like crap. Same goes for everyone else. When people fight racism with racism, they’re not solving anything. All that comes about is more of a divide. More conflict. More hate. And trust me when I say this, the world does not need any more hate.

For real equality we need to come together. Acknowledge our similarities and embrace and celebrate our differences! What makes us different is good! We are the human race! How cool is that that no two humans are the same? How cool is it that people can have different colors of skin, face shapes and body types, hair colors and types, and other features like freckles, moles, birthmarks, stretch marks, and more? I think that’s pretty incredible! And that’s not even getting to the incredibly range of cultures and traditions, languages, FOOD, and so much more! We are so diverse as people, the differences don’t stop just within races and ethnicities. Two people from within even the same family can look wildly different and have interests and talents that are even more different! Each of us are unique but we also share things that bring us together! Where some of us may struggle, others can help us and vice versa!

I mean, the USA was supposed to be a boiling pot where people from all over would get together and share their cultures and learn from each other, but too few still seem to remember this, or are even allowed to embrace it. We end up instead embracing the tired tradition of mankind throughout history of “getting even”. But getting even isn’t truly getting even. All it does is tip the scale, but not in a good way. Back and forth the scale is tipped. When one side rises up and pushes the other down, soon the other side will fight to come to the top. And if that side pushes the other side down in revenge, the vicious cycle continues.

Discrimination won’t stop if more people are discriminated against or treated unfairly. What we can do is support each other to bring us all on equal playing fields and then work together to maintain it. Don’t tell people they’ll never succeed thanks to others. Tell them, despite others in the world who may try to keep you down, you can succeed, especially since you have so many others to count on and support you! Don’t blame someone for the actions of another. Work with them to ensure those actions never happen again!

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

—Abraham Lincoln, 1858

[whitelippedviper]

Pop Comics #4: Saga #46. Come Mush with Me

This article originally appeared on my patreon, which you can subscribe to for as little as one dollar a month.  As a patreon subscriber you get to see these and other articles sometimes weeks before everyone else.  Subscribe now.

It’s a new week in me writing about a popular comic from last week.  For the purposes of this column I am defining popular as top ten on Comixology’s weekly list.  This week I’m tackling one of the most popular books in all of comics, and last week’s most popular comic overall: Saga #46. Saga #46 is written by Brian K. Vaughn with art by Fiona Staples, with lettering/design work by Fonografiks.

The last Saga comic I read was the first issue.  I might have made it to the second issue. But I really only remember that I read the first issue.  I only mention this because it’s a context that like with a lot of these monthly comics speaks to that I’m really reading a lot of them from a more mechanical place than someone who has really taken the time to become invested in the work and the characters, and I’m admitting that is to my detriment in terms of giving a complete critical sense of the thing.

Saga #46 starts with some guy with a TV head freeing a horned girl that’s tied up with a tentacle from a lynching being executed by two horse people, and this non horse cowboy dude.  TV dude frees Horn girl, and she’s like “I didn’t even WANT you to save me” for some reason.  And then we cut to a horned dude with his pregnant but unconscious non horned wife and kid.  They are in some field outside a house, where this giant multi-titted fox doctor runs a kind of planned parenthood clinic. Horned dude is very pro-life, so he and the fox have a discussion about abortion with no real resolution.  The whole thing is kind of setup like the Fox, who calls herself an Endwife, is going to kill the wife. But that doesn't happen in this issue.  I don’t know why these people are in this field or how they just happened to come to this particular house at this exact moment--but hey that’s what happens when you jump right in on issue 46 of a comic.

 While horned dude is arguing with Fox doctor about abortion, upstairs the kid is singing her imaginary friend into non-existence for some reason.  And then meanwhile the TV Dude and the horned girl are getting drunk and arguing about dumb shit, so they of course want to fuck, and the last page of the book is just a page of them “shockingly” kissing. One of the interesting things to me reading this issue of Saga is that Fiona Staples has been drawing this one book for about 5 years.  Which I know is a thing that happens a lot in comics, but it’s interesting to see how her art has changed from the first issue aka the last time I saw her art not on a cover.  

This is an image from Saga #1:

Here’s one from Saga #46:

It might be hard to tell from my shitty phone pic of the second image, but if you look at the chins in both images you can see it.  Her style has cleaned up quite a bit since the first issue.  Her lines are a lot smoother now, and there are a lot fewer of them.  Which is fine.  But one of the issues that is constant in Staples style is she makes these soft kind of smudgy backgrounds that really hamper your ability to like visualize the world Saga takes place in.  And it makes sense that she is that kind of artist, because her strengths are in her forms.  She’s really good at facial expressions and body language.  Her characters are pretty good actors.  People like that don’t per se need to be fussing with backgrounds that much because they can evoke so much dramatically with the acting.  Like a great example is a lot of Guido Crepax comics.  Which have no backgrounds generally, but rather focus on body language and whatever mechanisms are interacting directly with the body.  As a reader, with an artist like that, you can totally fill in the backgrounds with your own imagination.  The issue here though is this is a sci-fi setting, being done by a writer who doesn’t seem to have a lot of aptitude for building a coherent space narratively, so the weight of the setting is put so much on Staples, and it goes against what she is most effective at as an artist.

And then her ability to make these trashy character designs for Saga into something that at least looks like it belongs on the body it belongs on comes from this same family of artistic predilections.  I mean each individual creature in Saga looks like you just put different body parts into a blender and then drew what came out.  Even down to the clothes people wear. The fashion is all over the place.  Horned girl in this is wearing like this asymmetrical cut dress with boots and leggings, and then the TV guy is wearing a suit with huge tails, and then the family later in the comic just look like standard comic clothes from like the background of a Spider-man comic.  And then the like horse people wear western cowboy clothes.  And then the fox doctor doesn't wear any clothes? 

 The effect of all of that is that you don’t really get much of a sense of culture or like “this is what this world is like because people dress that way”--like Star Wars, for example, takes place across so many planets but there are kind of basic style points that the series coheres around and then the differences just delineate that “oh this is a desert planet, this is a forest planet” ect.  So without that kind of coherency in the character design you spend a lot of time on a Saga page scrambling for a foothold, and usually you could skate on this kind of fashion if the backgrounds were there to say “oh this is where we are at” but they aren’t.  So the flaw of the incoherent designs is only amplified because they are the only defined thing to look at on a page.  So the effect is a mushy undefined sci-fi experience that looks as ill defined in issue one as issue 46, and that’s coupled with the scripting conventions which cram in all kinds of anachronistic political concerns from present day earth USA.  Like in this one issue we get an abortion debate and an argument about romance novels? And there are cowboys talking with a shitty southern accent?  Huh? But I digress.  My point about Staples art was that in cleaning up her line and going more minimalist, she’s stripped her work of the element that was propping up everything else.  That rawer dirtier line, and those thick scattered ink brush strokes gave her work a POV, a focus. Like I said, her strength is the form(just look at her cover work), so those lines being the only thing with edge on the page gave her figures more force than they have in this later issue.  Back with the older more jagged style her backgrounds still faded into nothing mush, but that was fine because you had shit on the bodies that you were focused on.  It was interesting to look at those lines and those brush strokes.  You didn’t NEED backgrounds.  But you can’t not have backgrounds, AND draw your forms in a clean smooth style AND expect to carry a writer who is all over the map(even though obviously no one cares since she and the book win every award they go up for--so why not simply things I guess?  You get paid either way--so from a practical drawing 50 issues of a thing point of view I think it makes a lot of sense--but it is quite cynical toward the reader I think).  

Which this was my general reason I never got into Saga to begin with: I just couldn’t find the anchor point.  As a sci-fi world this is like sub-serenity, which is also something I hated.  There’s something cynical to Saga in that it feels like it’s just a cut and paste of things people liked on tumblr five years ago, and it just keeps going refusing to die, at this point I guess carried on by it’s own momentum because I would imagine if you’ve read 45 issues of Saga, you are going to read 145 really easily.  But I don’t get why people aren’t asking for more.  Like Twin Peaks ended the other day, and I’m pretty sure I follow everyone who was watching the show.  Like Lynch made something truly great and amazing.  And...nobody watched it or gave a shit.  I get that that’s a thing that has always been that way.  And will always be that way.  But so, comics are this niche nerd thing, which has as its flag standards things like Dune, Star Trek or Star Wars--how is milquetoast space opera skating so easily?  I’d have thought that if there was one genre that comics really exercised discernment on it would be space opera sci-fi.  

And not only is Saga skating, it’s winning every award it can.  To most people in comics, they would say this book is a testament to the possibilities of the medium.  And I don’t know if that’s a taste thing in terms of I don’t have the right taste for comics(and I get it on both sides, it's like every year the Eisners and the Ignatz awards have a competition to see who can give more trophies to shit I give less of a fuck about), or if the people saying those things have just never read the things I have and if they had they’d feel differently?  I think it’s the former, because I feel like if I made the biggest Saga fan read Queen Emeraldas they’d not understand why I like it.  

Am I doing it wrong?  I bet the average Saga fan is much happier about life than I am.  Like it must be really cool to live in a reality where the things you like are award winning and wildly popular.  That must be insanely validating. Which none of this is to say I hate Saga.  Or maybe I do.  I don’t know.  I just feel nothing towards it.  And it’s a testament to its success that despite feeling nothing about it, the book is such a force in comics, that I still ended up writing about it. 

 And I mean, how great would it be to love a book like this and get so much out of it? And I'd have so many people eager to talk about it.  I wish I loved it or  I wish I hated it.  But I don't. Also this is a lame kiss to take up a whole page for:

Like I get that a kiss between someone with a mouth and a screen is difficult, but that is actually something that should be an opportunity to draw something pretty terrific, particularly for the last dramatic page of a book.  The scale is also not saying anything.  We are caught between love in a giant fantastic world, and great love in a mundane place if that makes sense.  If you zoom in more the focus can be more the mechanics of the kiss.  If you zoom way out, it’s like this dramatic camera spinning moment on top of a mountain.  But at this shot it’s uncommitted I think, and I think with the characters centered in the frame so much as well it’s just not very dramatic for such a moment that is I think supposed to be dramatic.  Instead of being the truth of what this moment means for these two characters, I think it lands more like the idea of the idea of a kiss between these two ideas.  A cliche.  It’s especially disappointing because as you can see going through Staples cover work, and hell most of her interiors, something like this should be a real playing into a real strength.  But I think the mushiness of the decision making of scale screws it up.  The only way this page hits with you is if you have as a reader really bought into the idea of it happening enough to carry the image in your mind.  But that shouldn’t be enough, and I think it’s worth asking for more. 

And this is a lame thing to write:

[inyournightmares97]

MY REACTION

In which Choi Youngjae finds out that the cold, sexy popular girls aren’t always what they seem. 

Warnings:Strong language, angst

Word Count: 4.9k+

Every single cell in my body reacts,

From my head to my toes,

everything reacts

“Your posture is wrong,” Jieun said coldly. “How long are you going to dance with your legs? I told you, swing your hips. Your hips are up here, for your information! You look like a grandmother, what’s even sexy about you?”

The other girl stiffened but kept her mouth shut. Jieun was one of the best dancers around. She could curse at the other girls and they would all take it silently, because they needed her. The university’s annual cultural festival was coming up. Dance performances were a huge part of it, and it was a fact that Jieun’s team always went home with the prize.  Not to mention her performance attracted all the male attention.

“Sorry, unnie-“

“Let’s do it again, from the top. Watch my hips. It’s not sexy if you’re stiff as hell.”

Jieun played the music and stood at the front of the dance studio, facing the mirror. She could feel the eyes of the other girls on her, watching as she re-did the dance move perfectly. They had chosen AOA’s Miniskirt to cover for the performance. It was one of the sexiest choreographies of the year and most of the male students were already anticipating watching their female classmates dance to it. Jieun pushed her long hair out of her face coolly and then went back over to the speaker.

“I’m playing it from the beginning, one last time. Forget all the other motions, let’s focus on hip movement, that’s the highlight of the whole song,” Jieun ordered firmly. She knew the girls would obey. They didn’t want to embarrass themselves by messing up such a sexy dance in front of the whole university. “Then we’ll call it a day. Last one, girls.”

All the girls looked relieved. Jieun led them through the last song coolly. She could tell that the other girls were staring at her in envy; she knew that she looked unbelievably sexy when she danced. Jieun had been an idol trainee at an entertainment company in high school. She’d quit training, for reasons that many speculated about but nobody knew. There was a rumour that she’d gotten kicked out of the company for sleeping with a male trainee. There was another which said she’d beaten up another girl in school.

None of the rumors dared claim she was kicked out because she lacked talent.

“Are you coming to the party later today?” one of the girls asked Jieun once practice was over. They were all grabbing water and wiping off sweat with their towels. She sounded excited. “It’s at Jackson Wang’s house; you know him, that guy who keeps winning all the athletic champion-“

“I know Jackson Wang.”

“Right. Of course. So are you going?” she asked eagerly. “His parties are usually awesome, and there’s usually a lot of hot guys there. He’s friends with almost all the guys on the football team. Do you know that guy called Jaebum? He’s so sexy, I swear it’s like he-“

Jieun cut her off. She was tired of the girl’s rambling. “I’ll think about it,” she replied simply. Then she picked up her bag and headed out, so that she wouldn’t have to talk to her anymore. Jieun knew about Jackson Wang’s parties. They were wild, in every sense of the word. She had been to a couple of them before. Jieun wasn’t certain if she wanted to get drunk so close to the dance performance. Then again, maybe she just needed a break. There would be plenty of alcohol, and plenty of hot guys. What more did one need?

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I know that the sweeter it is, the more dangerous

The more dangerous it is, the sweeter

But I didn’t want to lose you

“Whoaaa! Score!” Bambam whisper-yelled as he ran into the living room where the older boys were playing and failing at a game of beer pong. He grabbed Jackson’s arm and tugged excitedly; his cheeks were drunkenly flushed. “Hyung, you’ll never believe it, but about half of the girls from the dance club just walked into the party!”

Jackson grinned. “Sweet! I invited them earlier.”

“How do I look? Is my hair okay?” Bambam demanded, smoothing down his hair that was slightly sticking up in the front. He was bouncing on his feet nervously. Youngjae chuckled and turned Bambam so he could press down the offending hair. Poor Bambam had been trying to score with a girl from the dance club since forever.

“There. You look great,” Youngjae reassured him.

“Thanks, hyung! Waah, I feel good today!” Bambam pumped his fist in the air. “In fact, I’m feeling so good, I think I’m going to over and talk to Jieun-sunbaenim.”

Jinyoung, standing nearby, scoffed into his drink. “Don’t be stupid. Kang Jieun? Go for one of the freshman, Bambam, they’re more your level. You’ll humiliate yourself if you try to hit on Jieun. You didn’t hear how she turned down Suho-sunbaenim? The Student Body President?”

Bambam pouted. “Maybe she likes younger guys.”

“Yes, Bambam. One of the sexiest women in college prefers hormonal, freshman frat boys to the handsome Student Body President who has top international companies battling to recruit him once he graduates,” Jinyoung replied. He turned to Youngjae and nudged him. “Yah, will you please say something? This idiot is going to make us all look bad.”

“Jinyoung-hyung is kind of right,” Youngjae admitted. He flushed and rubbed the back of his neck. Jieun was extremely talented and attractive, but she also had a certain coldness about her that made her unapproachable. “In high school, she dated our Class President for over a year. He ended up going to Seoul University, he was that smart.”  

“I forgot that Youngjae-hyung went to high school with Kang Jieun,” Bambam mused. He grinned. “Is it true she used to be an idol trainee? With one of the big companies?”

Youngjae blinked. “Uh, yeah.”

“Why did she quit?”

“I don’t know. It not like we were close or anything,” Youngjae muttered. That was an understatement. Youngjae had been an extremely quiet and invisible person in high school and Jieun had been among the most popular girls. He had probably spoken to her a total of three or four times throughout high school. ‘She was popular back then, too. Although she was kind of different.”

“Different, how?” Bambam asked curiously.

Youngjae shrugged. “She was… nicer, I guess? Everyone liked her. This one time she got a modelling job, and she bought chocolates for the whole class with some of the money she earned. She seems colder now. I don’t know why she quit being an idol trainee. There were way too many contrasting rumours.”

Jinyoung smiled and nudged him. “You seem to remember a lot about her. Is there something you're not letting on?”

Youngjae flushed and laughed nervously. “What are you saying? She was just really popular. Don’t you remember the popular kids from your high school? Everyone does!”

Bambam pouted. “I think it’s a pity, hyung. If I had gone to high school with Kang Jieun-sunbaenim then I definitely would have used that as an excuse to talk to her in college. She might have remembered you, you could have actually gotten close to her! What a waste of an opportunity.”

“Yah. Weren’t you going to go hit on the dance club girls?”

Bambam’s eyes widened. “Oh, that’s right! Okay, wish me luck, I’m going over to those freshman girls there. Phew.” He smoothed down his hair again and took a deep breath, before squaring his shoulders and walking off. Jinyoung and Youngjae watched him leave, amused. He was probably going to embarrass himself but they decided to leave him be.

“Yah, we’re out of plastic cups!” Jackson called out loudly, as the guys finished their round of beer pong. “Can someone get some more? I’m going to decimate you, Mark Tuan, just wait and see. We just need new cups.”

Youngjae volunteered to get them. He pushed his way through the crowded living room, past sweaty bodies dancing wildly to the loud music, and reached the kitchen. It was relatively empty in here. Most of the food was set out in the living room, anyway. Youngjae reached up to open a few cupboards. He could have sworn that there were extra stacks of plastic cups here. He’d bought them himself and put them in Jackson’s kitchen earlier. He was rummaging through Jackson’s boxes of muesli and protein bars, when he heard footsteps.

“Uh, excuse me?” a soft female voice asked.

Youngjae jumped, knocking over a few boxes of muesli. They fell to the floor and he turned around quickly, hurrying to pick them up as he looked at the figure standing in the doorway. It was Kang Jieun. His eyes widened at the sight of her. Jieun was standing quietly in the doorway, leaning slightly against the frame.

“Uh-sorry- hi-“ Youngjae mumbled, nervously. He wondered why he was turning to complete mush in front of her, the way he used to in high school. Youngjae had gotten a lot more confident and relaxed since he started college, but the sight of Jieun made him feel like the invisible class nerd again.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Jieun said calmly, reaching down to help pick up a box and setting it on the counter. As she moved closer to him, Youngjae could smell fruity shampoo and a faint whiff of alcohol coming off her. His cheeks burned as he stared at her dark hair brushing her shoulders.  

“Uh-thanks-“

“I was just wondering if you knew where the bathroom was?” she asked, once they had picked up all the boxes. “It’s my first time in this apartment and I can’t seem to find it…”

“Oh. Uh, it’s down there, to the left. It’s in a corner so you wouldn’t notice it at first,” Youngjae explained, trying to cool down his beating heart. Stop it! She’s literally just asking you for directions, what are you so excited about? As Youngjae looked at her more closely, he noticed that her eyes were slightly unfocused. She was drunk.

“Thanks,” Jieun mumbled. She stumbled slightly as she walked out of the kitchen. Youngjae reached out to help her, but Jieun had already caught herself on the doorframe and managed to make her way out unsteadily. Youngjae stared after her for a few seconds, before shaking himself out of it.

Plastic cups, he reminded himself, hitting himself lightly on the side of the head. Jackson wants plastic cups. Find them, you idiot. Youngjae hurried to put the boxes of muesli back into the cupboard, silently wondering how Jackson could eat so much of it, as he hunted for the plastic cups again. He finally found a large stack tucked into a corner and pulled them out triumphantly. He was unwrapping the plastic wrapper around them, when someone entered the kitchen again.

“Um… sorry,” Jieun said as she leaned against the doorway again. One hand was clutching it tightly to keep herself upright. Youngjae nearly dropped the stack of cups, but managed to catch it again quickly. “Is there maybe another bathroom? There’s a couple having sex in that one and they’ve locked the door. I don’t think they’re coming out anytime soon.”

Youngjae made a face. “Jackson’s going to kill them. Uh… there’s actually just one bathroom in this apartment.”  

Jieun closed her eyes and leaned her head against the doorframe lightly. “Great,” she mumbled.

Youngjae cleared his throat as he looked at her nervously. Her cheeks were flushed pink and she seemed to be having trouble standing upright. He fumbled with the plastic cups in his hands. “But, um… if you really need to go… I live just down the hall, you could use the one in my apartment.”

Jieun opened her eyes to look at him slowly. “Really? It’s not a problem?”

“Of course not. I’ll come unlock my apartment for you.” he clutched the plastic cups tightly in his hands as he slowly walked out of the kitchen, gesturing for Jieun to follow him. She did, but she ended up tripping over her own two feet and clutching onto the wall to support herself again. “Are you okay?” Youngjae wondered, eyes widening as she straightened up slowly.

“Fine,” Jieun mumbled. “My legs turn to jelly when I get drunk. I’m fine.”

Youngjae nodded, but paused as they reached the crowd of people in the living room. Was she going to be able to weave through all these people when she could barely walk? He turned and looked at her doubtfully. “Uh- if you need help walking through here…”

Jieun silently grabbed hold of Youngjae’s shoulder to support herself as he pushed through the crowd of dancing people. He was extremely aware of her touch. Her slender fingers were gripping onto his shoulder and when someone pushed her, Jieun’s other hand came up and grabbed Youngjae’s t-shirt. By the time they had made it to the front door of the apartment, his face was flushed red. Jieun slowly let go of him.

“Are you okay?” Youngjae asked once they stepped out into the hallway. It was surprisingly cooler out here and much emptier. The smell of sweat and alcohol and the loud music was gone. He turned to look at her face, checking if she was fine.

Jieun nodded. “I’m not as drunk as I look,” she reassured him calmly. It was true. Her speech wasn’t even remotely slurred and her eyes seemed fine. “I only drank a little, but it just goes straight to my legs somehow. My brain is fine, but my body just loses balance.”

“Surprising for a dancer,” Youngjae said quietly, as he led the way down the empty hallway. Jieun followed him slowly, one hand against the wall to balance her shaky footsteps. Part of Youngjae wished she would grab onto him again, but he knew it was a too much to hope for.

“You're Choi Youngjae, right?” Jieun asked suddenly.

Youngjae whirled around, eyes wide. She knew him? “Uh-“

“Why do you look so surprised? We went to high school together,” Jieun replied. She pushed her hair out of her face lightly, looking down at her own shaky steps to balance herself. “We were even in the same class. You played piano once during the school play.”

Youngjae’s heartbeat was thudding. “Yeah, I just… didn’t think you would remember. I was kind of invisible back then. We didn’t really hang out with the same crowd.”

Jieun smiled bitterly. “Some crowd. Half of them stopped talking to me once I quit being a trainee. They probably just hung around because they thought I would be famous one day. Must have been a disappointment to them; they wasted all their time with me.” She turned and looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “I thought you would at least come say hi, since we joined the same university.”

Youngjae cleared his throat. “I… I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

“Hmm. People must think I’m a real bitch, huh?” she mumbled.

“What? No, not at all-“

“It’s fine. Forget it.”

Youngjae found himself feeling flustered as they reached his apartment door and he fumbled with his keys to unlock it. He had never even thought of approaching Jieun because he was confident she wouldn’t care about him. Yet, somehow, there was something in her eyes that looked almost hurt. He fumbled with the lock a few times before finally managing to open the door. He grabbed for the light switch and clicked it on.

“Uh- come on inside…”

Jieun followed him quietly. His apartment was slightly messy, and Youngjae flushed as he quickly pointed her towards the bathroom. “It’s right through there.”

“Thanks,” Jieun mumbled.

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“Youngjae-ssi! Can you get us some extra paper from the storeroom?”

Youngjae bit his lip as he hurried down the school corridor to fetch whatever they needed from the storeroom. Their class was preparing for the school festival and he was often stuck doing mundane tasks like these. It was a result of his lack of any particular talent, as well as his inability to say no to people.

He reached the storeroom, but noticed that the door was already slightly ajar. There was smooching noises coming from inside and Youngjae’s ears turned red as he heard a female voice let out a slight whimper. Was a couple making out inside? What had he just walked into? He took a step back.

“Oppa- oppa, stop. I told you, we need to talk,” the girl whispered faintly. Youngjae's eyes widened. There was no mistaking that voice, it was Kang Jieun. She sounded a little strained and there was more smooching sounds. “Oppa, please.”

“We can talk later,” the male voice whispered. There was no mistaking that either; it was the Class President and Jieun’s boyfriend. Jieun and Min-jun had been dating for over a year; everyone knew about them. It was hardly a secret, they were one of the most popular couples in school. “I haven’t seen you in so long, you’re always practicing at your company-“

“I know,” Jieun mumbled. “But I need to talk to you about this.”

Min-jun sounded slightly annoyed. “Okay, hurry up then. The teacher’s going to start looking for us soon.”

Jieun took a shaky breath. “I… I don’t know how to tell you this,” she whispered quietly. “But the company’s been putting a lot of pressure on me lately. This one freshman girl told my trainer that I’m dating someone from school. They want me to break up with you. The trainer says I won’t be considered for the debut team unless I end my relationship.” Her voice was cracking. “Oppa, I don’t know what to do, it’s been driving me insane-“

Min-jun was silent for a moment. “You must have known this was going to happen.”

“I didn’t think it would happen so soon,” Jieun admitted. “I thought I could hide it from them for a bit longer. Oppa, if we manage to convince people we’ve broken up and stay away from each other for a couple of weeks then maybe we can start seeing each other again-“

“Forget it,” Min-jun said with a dry chuckle. “Let’s just take this as a sign and stop it here. I need to start focusing on my college entrance  exams too, so it’s for the best.”

Jieun sounded unsure. “Exams… but those are months away. You want to take a break for that long?”

“No, I’m saying let’s end it here.”

“End…” she trailed off. “But until when?”

Min-jun laughed. “Yah, are you stupid? End as in, end. We would have broken up after graduation anyway. It’s not like we would have lasted. I’m going to Seoul University and you’re either going to debut as an idol or model or whatever you want. It wasn’t as if this was serious, we were just fooling around.”

“Fooling around?” Jieun repeated.

“Don’t tell me you thought we would last beyond high school!” Min-jun exclaimed.

“I did,” she said firmly. “We’ve been dating for a whole year-“

“So, what? It was fun, I like you. But there was never any future here, Jieun. It’s not my fault. You’re the one that wants to debut as an idol, expose your body on tv for horny men to lust after. Things like that are only cool in high school, Jieun-ah. People at Seoul University will laugh at me if I tell them my girlfriend is an air-headed idol that uses her sex appeal to get famous.”

Jieun sounded angry. “I thought you supported my career choices.”

“I do. You’re talented.”

“Then how dare you-“

“At least develop some self-awareness, Jieun,” Min-jun said sharply. “Half the guys here might want to sleep with you. But find me a single one that would be willing to introduce you to their mothers. You did this to yourself, don’t blame me.”

There was a long silence.

“Sorry, Jieun-ah. Good luck with your career.”

There was a noise from inside the storeroom and Youngjae froze. He quickly ducked around the corner and hid himself as the door opened and Min-jun walked out. His footsteps disappeared down the corridor and faded away. Youngjae came out from behind his hiding place and paused in front of the storeroom door.

He could hear quiet sobs from inside. Youngjae peeked in through the gap in the door and spotted Jieun sitting on the ground, knees pulled up to her chest and hair covering her face as she sobbed silently. He stared at her for a few minutes, fingers frozen on the door handle, before silently deciding to walk away. It was none of his business.

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My entire body reacts, it reacts first,

When I see you, when I hear your voice.

It keeps reacting, it reacts again

I really don’t want to, but what do I do?

I can’t control myself.

Jieun splashed water on her face in the bathroom sink and looked at her reflection. Her cheeks were slightly red from the alcohol, but she looked fine otherwise. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She hated thinking about high school. Why did this Youngjae person have to show up in front of her today? He was only bringing up unpleasant memories.

Youngjae seemed to have changed too, though. Jieun remembered him as a quiet, shy guy that sat in the back of class and somehow got taken advantage of by all the other boys. He’d really hit the jackpot in college. He was friends with people like Jackson Wang and Im Jaebum. Not to mention, Youngjae seemed to have attained some sort of late puberty and become surprisingly more handsome after high school.  

Jieun shook her head and wiped her face dry before stepping out of the bathroom. The cold water had sobered her up a little and she felt confident enough to walk home.

She found Youngjae sitting in the living room. He was cross-legged on the couch, making kissy faces at a tiny little white dog that was yapping at his feet. It was adorable and Jieun couldn’t help but giggle at the sight of it. She approached the couch quietly and the little dog broke out of Youngjae’s grip to come over and sniff at Jieun’s feet suspiciously.

“Ah-sorry-“ Youngjae apologized.

“It’s fine, he’s adorable,” Jieun replied, reaching down to pick up the dog in her arms. Deciding that she was still a little unsteady on her feet, she quickly sat down on the couch and placed the sniffing dog on her lap. “What’s his name?”

“Coco,” Youngjae replied. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “You like dogs?”

“To be honest, only the small ones. Big ones scare me,” she admitted with a shrug. Jieun smiled as Coco pushed his nose into her hand. “So it’s a little presumptuous of me to claim to be a dog lover. This guy’s cute, though.”

Youngjae nodded and rubbed the back of his neck. He looked nervous and he bit his lip. “Actually, I want to say something to you. Earlier… when you were saying that I didn’t come and greet you once we started college? I wanted to apologize for that. I honestly didn’t mean to offend you. I realize now that it was kind of rude of me not to greet a classmate.”

Jieun smiled bitterly as she patted the top of Coco’s head. “What are you apologizing for? It’s not as if I bothered to come up and talk to you.” she shook her head. “That’s not true. I probably avoided you on purpose. High school is just bad memories, I wanted a new start. I wanted to hang around with people who knew nothing about me.”

“Ah… well, it’s not as if I knew much about you to begin with.”

Jieun sighed and turned to look at him. There was something about Youngjae that instantly made her feel comfortable, like he was trustworthy. Youngjae seemed like the kind of guy who couldn’t hurt a fly. People like him made Jieun feel ashamed of her own selfishness.

“Well, as long as we’re being honest,” she said quietly, “I guess I should thank you for not spreading rumours about me. In high school, and in college. I’m sure a lot of people would have been interested in hearing about how Min-jun and I broke up.”

Youngjae blinked. “What?”

“You were the one listening outside the storeroom the day he dumped me, right? I saw you. You paced around outside for a bit while I was crying, and then you left.” Jieun sighed and stroked Coco softly. “Waah, it’s still humiliating no matter how much I think about it. Thanks for not telling anyone.”

“It’s not…” Youngjae flushed and cleared his throat. “It was none of my business.”

“If only everyone thought like you.”

There was a brief silence and the only sound was Coco yapping happily as he tried to climb further up Jieun’s chest. Youngjae sat frozen in his seat, fists clenched and palms sweaty. He turned and looked at Jieun firmly, a burst of confidence coming over him. “I don’t think you should have felt humiliated, though. Min-jun was the one who was wrong.”

Jieun laughed harshly. “He wasn’t wrong. He was an asshole, sure, but he wasn’t wrong.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because,” she replied with a sharp glance towards Youngjae. “I’ve yet to find a guy to prove Min-jun wrong. Did you know that there’s a video of me performing Sunmi’s 24 Hours circulating among the freshmen frat boys? I’m told some of them use it to masturbate.” She laughed and shook her head. “And you know the worst part? I don’t even care anymore. I’ve gone beyond the point of shame. They can do whatever the hell they want.”

Youngjae was silent.

“I’m worse than you thought, aren’t I?” Jieun asked with a dry chuckle. She slowly set Coco down on the floor and stood up. “Anyway, I think I’ve overstayed my welcome. I’ll head out now.”

“If they’re using it to masturbate, then they’re sick,” Youngjae replied firmly. “I don’t see how it reflects on you in any way. I don’t think your problem is how other people see you. I think your problem is how you see yourself.”

Jieun turned and glared at him. “And how do I see myself?”

“The same way guys like Min-jun see you,” Youngjae replied quietly. He stood up and stepped closer to her. Jieun’s eyes were sharp, but there was something that wavered in them as he moved nearer. “But I don’t think you should. I think you should see yourself the way I saw you,” he said quietly.

“And how did you see me?”

“I saw that you were willing to risk your career to be with him. I saw that you loved him a lot, and that no matter how much attention you got, you were always faithful to him. You weren’t as cold and bitter back then. Even now, I think it’s a front.” He took a deep breath. “Because when people are accusing you of something, it’s sometimes easier to give in and accept what they’re saying than take the efforts to prove them wrong.”

Jieun looked up at him silently. She could see Youngjae’s lips trembling. He was clearly nervous, he wasn’t used to speaking to people this way. Even now, there was a flicker of doubt in his eyes as he wondered if he’d gone too far, crossed some sort of line. Jieun stepped closer to him and slid her hands up his chest slowly. Youngjae shuddered as one of her hands slid to the back of his neck, fingers grasping gently at his hair. His heartbeat was thudding.

“You say all that,” Jieun whispered softly. Her other hand fisted in his shirt near his collar. “But you’re just as physically attracted to me as any other frat boy here. I can feel your heartbeat thudding.”

Youngjae closed his eyes. “I never said you weren’t attractive.”

“Then?”

“You are attractive and sexy. But I think there’s more to you inside than you let yourself show. You’re nervous too. You’re not as cold as you look. My words are affecting you.”

Jieun moved closer until she could feel his nervous breath against her skin. Her fingers stroked the back of his neck consistently and she looked up at him. “Are you sure?” she asked quietly.

“I-I’m sure.”

“Are you willing to risk it?” she asked again. “You might regret this.”

“I won’t.”

To prove it, he leaned forward and kissed her first. Jieun’s lips were soft and warm, and she let out a soft gasp as his arms wrapped around her and pulled her closer. Youngjae felt his head spinning. Part of him couldn’t believe this was happening, but he forced himself to stay calm. He kissed her softly, gently. Jieun felt her heartbeat thud. She had never been kissed that way before. I’m going to love you, his lips told her soundlessly. There was something pure about his embrace that made her feel warm inside.

“What if I change my mind tomorrow?” Jieun asked quietly, as she pulled away. Youngjae’s lips were pressing against her jawline softly, leaving butterfly kisses that made her skin tingle. “What if I leave in the morning and never look at you again?”

Youngjae looked down at her softly.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “But for now, I’m going to believe that you won’t.”

But, I still had a small belief that you will love me,

So even when I gave you my all,

It didn’t feel like a waste.

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[tipsycad147]

How To Enhance Your Magic With Music

SL Bear

Imagine you’re riding home in the car after a long day. You turn on the radio, and you hear it: The first few notes of a song you love. The artist starts to sing and you know every word. You’re instantly revived. You turn up the volume and forget about your troubles for a moment because it’s time to sing and dance in your seat until the next red light. You’re not just sitting in your car doing the same boring thing for the hundredth time. Suddenly, your heart speeds up, the rhythm catches you and you feel great!

Music as a magical medium is nothing new. Witches have long turned to music to not only set the mood but also as part of their craft. Because although candles and incense do a great job of making a ritual feel witchy, music is different. Some say music and the physical effect it has on us is magic unto itself. Not a difficult concept to accept, especially when you think about your favourite song and how it has the ability to make you remember, make you feel, make you get up and dance.  This is the spell music casts on all of us.

Every culture and civilisation in the world today creates music, and scientists study music’s effect on our cultures and brains to understand human evolution itself. Understanding music gives insight into prehistoric cultures’ beliefs, language development, and ancient migratory paths and interactions between humans in and out of Africa. Creating and listening to music isn’t just something people do for fun; it’s beneficial to us in many ways. Studies have shown music soothes our nerves and reduces tension. Singing as a group builds bonds between people. Music is interwoven in human biology.

Scientists will tell us that music enchants us in many different ways. Music is now being studied as a method to help patients heal and improve the quality of life for patients in hospice and the elderly in group homes. In 2017, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine produced a study which showed patients recovering from spinal surgery actually reported decreased pain when music was used as part of their therapy. Beyond medicine, studies have shown that listening to happy music increased creativity and encouraged better solutions when faced with problems. Science also shows a link between music and positive emotions and memories, but I’m sure most of us could have told them that.

If you have any doubt about the power of music, think of how often the powers that be have tried to ban it. Rock and roll was the devil’s music that conservative leaders fretted had the power to turn the youth into degenerate criminals. Fast, pounding rhythms, wild guitar riffs, and of course the uninhibited dancing that accompanied this music obviously harkened back to pagan rituals that organised religion feared and tried to stamp out. Apparently, certain music had the power to turn listeners away from Christian values and was a threat to the establishment. Plus, it was loud. So intertwined is music with witchcraft and free-thinking individuals, it’s no wonder attempts were made to demonise it by organisations that rely on conformity.

Recognising the power of music comes naturally to practitioners of witchcraft, though. Music is not a threat to magical practice — it is an important tool to enhance the craft. A 2004 survey of witches in the UK showed that only 3% of respondents did not use any kind of music in their practice. The vast majority of witches relied on music before, during, and after rituals, usually to enhance the mood but also to add potency to their spells and improve concentration. Witches cited simple drumming — which built in intensity like a racing heart — in particular as a powerful means to refine and strengthen their casting. Another important use for music was calling spirits with particular chants and songs. Participants reported that repeating a chant would help focus and subdue the conscious mind and let the subconscious mind open up, revealing hidden thoughts and powers. It also aided in absorbing new ideas.

No discussion of magic in music can pass without acknowledging voodoo and its musical influence. Music is essential to voodoo ceremonies. Possession, or being overtaken with a divine spirit (a loa), is facilitated by music. During slavery, white people feared the power of African religions (both in and of themselves, and their potential to unite) and sought to suppress voodoo ceremonies, even creating a law which made the use of drums and other instruments by slaves illegal in 1740. African practitioners of voodoo, who melded their religion with Christian denominations in America, brought their beliefs about the importance of music in worship to the church. Voodoo’s musical style, rhythms, and beats survived and thrived in black congregations and have become hugely influential in American music through gospel, rock, and soul.

Enhancing Your Magic With Music

So how can modern practitioners of witchcraft harness the power of music? Pretty simply, it turns out. Some may find the idea of learning to play an instrument daunting, and it can be. Music, as an art, is not as forgiving as other mediums. The eye may accept imperfect or wildly subjective art as aesthetically pleasing, but the ear is much more discerning. We don’t mind if a photograph is a little overexposed but play the wrong note — even a melody we’ve never heard before — and it sticks out like a sore thumb. Thankfully, you don’t have to be a musical prodigy to use music in your spellwork.

Using An Instrument

To begin, your choice of instrument is important. Instruments belong to different “families.” These are generally woodwind, brass, percussion, strings, and keyboard. Some people have tried to make these families neatly align with things such as the elements. Indeed, some analogies between instruments and other things can be intuited. For instance, the crisp sound of violin strings makes me think of winter or water. Percussion feels earthy. Brass is loud and bright — like a shining sun and blooming flower in spring. Woodwind feels light, full of life and breezy renewal. These connections are naturally subjective. Finding these symbolic connections, however, will help you choose an instrument which gives more meaning to your magical tunes.

Once you have chosen an instrument, it’s time to play! If you’re just starting out creating music and musical spells, keep it simple and don’t be overwhelmed by the possibilities. Let the notes speak to you. Your ear is an innate music lover, so trust it. If you’re noodling around on a guitar or drum, or even a music app (some can offer a whole digital orchestra), and you hear a couple of notes that sound right together, chances are you’ve stumbled upon a chord.

Of course, choosing to study music will help you find these more easily, in addition to scales, etc. You can create many tunes and melodies with just a few chords and you’ll be able to start making a soundtrack to your spellwork. When you create your tune, try simple ways to embellish it, like moving it up or down a key to change the pitch. A lower pitch can set a whole new mood, bringing solemnity and resonance, and moving up a key will brighten it up, both of which can better reflect a spell’s purpose. Even if you just work with a few notes, their combination and rhythmic possibilities can be endless. Since drumming and rhythm can have such a powerful effect on the mind, you may also choose to just pick up a makeshift mallet and start pounding out a beat. The thing to remember is the intent behind your playing and whatever magic you’re performing. As always, this is what’s important. Put thought and feeling into your creations. While they may not be musical masterpieces yet, they are still capable of enhancing your spellwork.

Vocal Methods

You may choose to forego instruments altogether and just sing or chant. Even if you’re not gifted with the best voice, a simple, repetitive chant will help hone your mind and put more energy into your intention when you cast. Science has shown that singing releases chemicals in the brain which make us feel good, lower stress, and induce calm. In other words, exactly the state of mind you want to be in when focusing intention and performing a spell!

One option is to sing or chant your intention. Start softly and then build volume (like the drumbeat mentioned above), to build strength in your spell. Another option is to find a poem or lyric which you think fits with your intention and sing that. You may just want to add a song or chant at the beginning and end of your spell or ritual that makes you feel good. It’ll put you in the right mindset and focus your energy. If you feel like it, move and dance around to the music. Adding that little extra physical element is a powerful way to use your own body to channel that music magic.

Adding music to your witchcraft can be as simple as putting on your headphones or quietly chanting, or as complicated as learning a whole new skill. However you choose to incorporate it, music will guide your magic to powerful new places and make you part of a fabulous tradition of witches who rock!

https://thetravelingwitch.com/blog/how-to-enhance-your-magic-with-music