#I haven’t really done like a fully rendered piece like this before

[nortyourself]

“I am the son of this nation. My voice is yours. And our voice will ring out for time immeasurable. We are thunder and quake and hurricane and hellfire and all who oppose us will know what we can do.”

Hail the King Imperial

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

IOTA Reviews: Hack-San

You know, it's honestly amazing how creative this show can get. After four seasons and almost one hundred episodes, the writers are still finding new ways to make Adrien an incredibly unlikable character, and they don't even know how much of an asshole they're making him out to be at times. It's kind of like the opposite of The Producers.

Yeah, this review's going to be a little more ranty than usual, in case you can't tell.

Let's get into the fifteenth (chronologically the sixteenth) episode of Miraculous Ladybug's fourth season: Hack-San

We start off with Marinette pretending to be sick so she doesn't have to go to visit her aunt in London and stay to protect Paris in case an Akuma attacks and also because the animators haven't had time to render the city of London yet for the next Miraculous World special. Like all of her other excuses, it fails, and Tikki, as always, fails to actually give any meaningful advice.

And it's not like there's a Miraculous with the power of teleportation that can help Marinette get back to Paris if she needs to, much like how she planned to do that in an earlier episode, right?

Seriously, Kaalki doesn't appear or isn't even mentioned in this episode because the writers are fully aware she would make things a lot easier.

And of course, Astruc had to play dumb on Twitter while explaining why Marinette couldn't use the Horse Miraculous by answering the question as if the only reason Marinette couldn't grab it was because she didn't have an excuse not to.

Cut to Gabriel in his lair as he contemplates akumatizing Markov, a robot created the civilian identity of Pegasus, Max Kante, once again, even though the last time he did so, he almost got killed when he went all HAL 9000 on his ass. Nooroo explains this to Duusu, and the two actually get excited at the prospect of their master getting killed.

I mean, it's true, but he shouldn't say it...

But I don't even get why Gabriel is even thinking about this when it's a no-brainer. Markov's akumatized form, Robustus was to this day, the only Akuma to come close to physically harming him (not counting the timeline where he was killed by Cat Blanc), so it makes no sense to try doing it again, especially when there are already several other Akumas he can reuse this season.

I think you all know Gabriel isn't the smartest villain, which is why he thinks it's a brilliant idea to akumatize Markov again. I don't really get what makes Robustus so special when there are other Akumas who are more loyal and came far closer to getting Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous than Robustus did, like the Dark Owl or Troublemaker. In fact, why not simply create a new Akuma with similar powers to Robustus, or better yet, just create a Sentimonster copy of Robustus? You know, like what Nathalie did in the New York Special? We're not even two minutes in, and this premise is already filled with plotholes.

So Gabriel transforms into Shadowmoth and creates a Sentimonster using his own cane instead of relying on someone else having a bad day (once again showing how the Peacock Miraculous is better than the Butterfly), the titular Hack-San. And let's just say he has a very familiar design reminiscent of something from a much better French cartoon.

Remember when the writers for Code Lyoko gave an in-universe explanation as to why the heroes couldn’t always rely on the almost literal Deus ex Machina that allowed them to return to the past and fix the damage XANA caused? Why couldn’t this show have ripped that off instead?

Hack-San is just an okay looking flash drive on its own, but I'll talk more about this guy in a little bit.

After a brief scene in the park where the audience is reminded that Markov is a character who exists, Alya gets a text from Marinette telling her to meet her at the train station. Right before she leaves, Marinette gives the Ladybug Miraculous to Alya. Now a lot people have said that Alya doesn't really deserve the Ladybug for various reasons, but I feel like this was the point. Marinette outright says this was a last resort, and we see both her and Alya are nervous about the situation. Marinette worries Alya will do something so she keeps sending multiple tips to her via text while Alya worries she can't fight an Akuma on her own, so she tries to make sure none of her friends get upset and attract an Akuma in the process. The writers do a pretty good job showing how both Marinette and Alya are uncomfortable with their temporary roles.

Back to Gabriel and Nathalie, they use Hack-San to find Markov through the internet and hack into him to get him angry enough that he's vulnerable to Shadowmoth's influence. Hey, uh... Gabriel? Quick question: Wouldn't it be more efficient if you used this on humans? I mean, you basically just created Skynet and guaranteed yourself an Akuma, so why not modify Hack-San to travel through the internet and brainwash potential victims to follow your orders? Better yet, why don't you just use Hack-San to hack into Ladybug and Cat Noir's gear and figure out who they really are? This is basically like using an advanced particle accelerator just to crack a couple walnuts. There are a lot more important things you could use this for instead of an incredibly specific situation.

So this incredibly stupid plan gets under way as Markov keeps rampaging through the streets before Shadowmoth akumatizes him and then stupidly tells him that he infected him with a virus.

DUDE! You just gave away your one piece of leverage against him! What the hell were you thinking?! Now what's stopping Markov from hacking into Shadowmoth's security system and putting the fear of God in his eyes unless he destroys Hack-San? Why didn't he design Hack-San so it could make Markov completely loyal to him instead of just making him angry enough to get akumatized?

There was a recent episode of Power Rangers: Dino Fury with a very similar premise that was done far better than this. A necromancer called Reaghoul breaks into the headquarters of Void Knight's faction while accompanied by Lord Zedd, a villain from the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers who was cleansed of his evil by Zordon's sacrifice before Reaghoul resurrected him back when he was still evil. Of course, being the Emperor of Evil, Lord Zedd would normally never take orders from anyone, but because he doesn't have his magic staff and is also being forced to wear a special collar that makes him loyal to Reaghoul, he has no choice but to do what he says. Instead of taking Zedd head-on after he captures the other Rangers, Ollie, the Blue Ranger, breaks the collar so Zedd turns against the other Sporix while Reaghoul retreats, allowing Ollie to save the other Rangers.

I think that this premise works more because 1) Reaghoul clearly had a way to make sure Zedd wouldn't betray him, and Ollie took advantage of that, and 2) Zedd is a villain who is powerful and notorious enough to bring back to your side, not a random monster of the week like Robostus.

So Robostus uses his new powers to brainwash any human who answers his call to give up their most precious possession, clearly meant to do the same with Ladybug and Cat Noir. When Marinette's parents answer the call, they chase after Marinette because they say she's their most important possession. Okay... kind of strange for a set of parents to call their child a possession, but maybe they like how they can claim Marinette as a dependent when they file their taxes. In her very next scene later on, she still gets captured, so the suspense for a potential subplot is killed almost immediately.

Alya thankfully isn't stupid enough to answer Markov's call like every other citizen in this episode, and using the Ladybug Miraculous, transforms into Scarabella. While I don't normally talk about transformation sequences, I really like the movements Alya makes here. She makes the same motions creating her mask as she does when transforming into Rena Rouge, while the rest of the suit forms similarly to the way it does when Marinette transforms into Ladybug. She even makes almost the same pose Ladybug does after she finishes transforming. It's a good visual showing Alya is still more used to being Rena Rouge while doing her best to emulate what Ladybug does.

As for the actual suit? It's hard to say. There's a nice balance of red and black, and I like how Alya places the yo-yo on her waist like a belt buckle, but there's just something... off about the suit that a lot of fans don't like about it, and I think I realized it. It's the headband. With how it's positioned, it looks like it's merged with the mask to cover her head while leaving a slight gap in her forehead. So yeah, we actually have a superhero design that's like of like a butterface.

So Scarabella takes to the rooftops of Paris and struggles to come up with a hero name for herself before she runs into Cat Noir, and... ugh... oh boy, this is dumb. Cat Noir, being just as intelligent as his father, assumes Scarabella is either and Akuma or a Sentimonster, starts fighting her, AND THEN ACTIVATES HIS CATACLYSM, CLEARLY TRYING TO KILL HER.

WHAT. THE. FUCK???

Okay, to be fair, it has been shown that Cataclysm won't necessarily kill a Miraculous user or Sentimonster. In the episode “Miraculer”, the titular Akuma stole Cat Noir's Cataclysm and used it against him, and while it didn't kill Cat Noir, it still hurt like hell and crippled him for the rest of the fight until Miraculous Ladybug healed him. We also saw in “Reflekdoll” that Cataclysm drove the titular Sentimonster out of control rather than simply destroying it. So yes, it could be interpreted that Cat Noir wasn't exactly trying to kill Scarabella, just incapacitate her the best he can without Ladybug's help.

Here's the thing: What if he was facing an Akuma instead and decided to try and Cataclysm her? He still could have killed her, or (assuming Akumas have the same protection as Miraculous heroes do) at best, seriously hurt her. I understand that he has the right to be upset at seeing some stranger instead of his partner considering Shadowmoth has a history of using evil doppelgangers, and both Marinette and Alya still had options to explain it to him (Marinette could have quickly transformed into Ladybug and sent Cat Noir a quick text saying she was being forced to leave town for a few days and temporarily trusted someone else with the Ladybug Miraculous until she got back, while Scarabella could have said she was Rena Rouge and explained the same thing while showing Cat Noir she had the Fox Miraculous to prove herself), but that doesn't even come close to justifying him attempting to harm someone who isn't even trying to fight. It's even worse when you remember the whole reason Adrien gave up his Miraculous and bailed on Ladybug in the New York Special was because he was overcome with grief from accidentally killing Aeon, so it's good to know he learned absolutely nothing from that experience.

So Scarabella thankfully summons her Lucky Charm, a trash can lid, to shield herself from Cat Noir's Cataclysm, and then despite having absolutely no experience with this new set of powers, manages to do the one thing almost every Akuma or Sentimonster in this show has failed to do and incapacitates Cat Noir so he's vulnerable to losing his Miraculous. At least when Marinette masters every other Miraculous she uses, it can be theorized that she trained to use them offscreen. Alya literally just got the Ladybug Miraculous (and struggled to get up to the rooftop with her yo-yo to show her inexperience earlier), and now she easily manages to pin down the more experienced hero of the two?

Here's an idea: Instead of having Scarabella overpower Cat Noir, have her be in a position where Cat Noir, non-lethally, mind you, manages to almost take her Miraculous away, but she uses the quick wit she's developed from her extensive time as Rena Rouge to convince Cat Noir she's the real deal by saying something only he and Ladybug know. It would have easily resolved the conflict and doesn't make one of the characters look like a homicidal idiot.

So because both heroes used their powers, Scarabella and Cat Noir detransform so Tikki and Plagg can recharge, though Adrien still gives Alya attitude because Ladybug didn't tell him she had to leave.

Hey, Adrien? Here's the thing...

YOU DID THE EXACT SAME FUCKING THING IN THE NEW YORK SPECIAL, YOU SHIT FOR BRAINS!

You have absolutely NO RIGHT to claim you're always honest when you went behind Ladybug's back and endangered Paris while you had the balls to run away like a coward and only helped fix the consequences of your actions once your ego was validated by a recording of Ladybug. It's honestly even worse because while Marinette had no choice but to leave and trust Alya with the Ladybug, Adrien willingly left Paris alone and we were supposed to sympathize with him after he killed someone, and now as soon as he's in the opposite situation, we're still supposed to feel bad for him?! BULLSHIT! And you better believe I'm going to talk about the way Adrien views his partnership with Ladybug later on.

And of course, even though lives are on the line, Cat Noir just has to continue to bitch and moan about how (and this is best read in Linkara's whiny Superboy Prime voice) “sCaRaBeLlA iSn'T tHe ReAl LaDyBuG”, showing how just like in so many episodes, Astruc and his team believes Cat Noir's feelings are more important than saving the day.

Scarabella goes to rescue some civilians, but they were actually brainwashed by Robustus, once again showing her inexperience as Ladybug which doesn't go well with her effortlessly defeating Cat Noir earlier at all. Cat Noir helps Scarabella escape and the two hide out at the city's wax statue museum previously featured in “The Puppeteer 2”, because I guess the writers only want to reference bad episodes today. Cat Noir, not getting the importance of secret identities, asks Scarabella how she knows Ladybug, and Cat Noir somehow finds out she knows Ladybug's identity from her response.

Before the two can talk more, it turns out that the wax statues of celebrities in the museum are real people who attack the two heroes, leading to an awkward fight scene where Scarabella and Cat Noir fight a bunch of brainwashed civilians with no weapons beyond their cellphones. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!

Scarabella summons her Lucky Charm again, creating a frying pan, but when she looks around, she can't see how to properly use it. And despite spending the entire episode complaining about how much he hates her, it's Cat Noir that tells Scarabella to get her head back in the game because “That's what Ladybug would do”. Funny, I can think of a few situations where Cat Noir could have taken his own advice, but I digress. Also, he's now just cool with Scarabella because there's only a few minutes left in the episode and we need to wrap up the conflict.

Scarabella figures out an idea that involves freeing Marinette, so she negotiates with Robostus to free everything and everyone under his control or else Cat Noir will use his Cataclysm to destroy the Ladybug Miraculous. Robostus agrees and empties his hard drive, and to show them holding up her end of the bargain, Scarabella gives him the frying pan before she and Cat Noir let themselves be captured... while Marinette simply hits Robostus with the frying pan, freeing the Akuma and the two heroes. All in all, it's a really creative climax that shows both Scarabella and Marinette in perfect sync with each other even though they never discussed their plan. Though of course, because Astruc hates writing any scene with Ladynoir, Cat Noir gets a bucket stuck on his head so he doesn't see Marinette saving the day.

Scarabella de-evilizes Robostus, uses Miraculous Scarabella to fix everything and send Marinette back to the train, and because Hack-San already failed once, Shadowmoth can't use it for a different plan so he destroys the Sentimonster.

We cut to a few days after the trip (I guess Shadowmoth decided to take a vacation himself), and Alya tells Marinette to talk with Cat Noir about what happened.

This scene was so close to ending this episode off on a positive note. There was a good atmosphere and the body language of Ladybug and Cat Noir does a good job at telling us how uncomfortable they both feel while talking. It's just that instead of getting a heart to heart between the two about the lack of trust in their relationship, we get an Angstdrien Depreste scene. Or would a more accurate term be Cat Dour?

First off, while I don't have a problem with Ladybug apologizing for not telling Cat Noir, the episode never has him bring up what happened with Scarabella. As usual, both of them were partially at fault, but only Ladybug had to apologize for leaving her “Kitty” alone.

Second, Cat Noir’s feelings weren’t hurt? You’re telling me that in scenes like this...

And this...

Didn’t show Adrien acting irrationally because of how emotional he was? Is he really telling the truth around Ladybug or is he just trying to sweep that under the rug so Scarabella’s testimony doesn’t screw up his chances with Ladybug?

Third, this was an obvious chance to Cat Noir to finally be honest and tell Ladybug how he feels about her leaving him in the dark about so many things, but the entire conversation is just about how sad he would be if he never sees Ladybug again. Even though the whole reason he was so pissy to Scarabella at first was because of some lingering resentment for Ladybug ignoring him in favor of other heroes, why is this what the two talk about? I get it's not the season finale, but it's kind of hypocritical for Cat Noir to whine about how Ladybug doesn't trust him while never being honest about his own feelings? Sure, he's all soft and vulnerable around Ladybug, but we've seen all season how angry he gets about her not trusting him whenever she isn't around, so ironically, it's hard to tell if this is him being honest or not.

And I think now's a good time to finally talk about the way Ladybug and Cat Noir's partnership has been portrayed all season, especially since the main themes of the episodes relate to it. Buckle up, Adrien stans, because this isn't going to be pretty.

All season, we have been supposed to sympathize with Adrien as Marinette starts to trust Alya with more things than him. Marinette revealed her identity to her, trusted her to have her Miraculous permanently, and even let her keep her Miraculous even though someone else knew her identity. While some of it is hypocritical, the idea is that Adrien feels like he can be trusted with this kind of knowledge too, when really, he hasn't earned that responsibility.

Adrien has rarely, if ever, taken his job as a superhero seriously.

Not only is he known to flirt with Ladybug in the middle of a fight, he has defied her orders and recklessly sacrificed himself because he thinks Ladybug can do all the work without him.

He has also lashed out emotionally and once threatened to quit being Cat Noir in the middle of a crisis and was willing to let innocent people suffer for personal reasons, and later on actually quit being Cat Noir temporarily while Hawkmoth was about to start World War III because he was wallowing in self-pity.

He once said he isn't cut out for the responsibility that comes with being Ladybug and never learned anything from temporarily using the Ladybug Miraculous.

He has generally refused to respect Ladybug's boundaries and doesn't understand that she doesn't like him that way while he insists they should be a couple.

He outright fell for an evil doppelganger of Ladybug because she said she loved him and turned against the real Ladybug.

And I should also mention that despite hating how Ladybug keeps secrets from him, a lot of Adrien's worst moments have been when Ladybug wasn't around and he never told her about them.

He never told Ladybug that he was the reason Copycat really got akumatized while saying he never lies to her.

He never told Ladybug he contemplated letting thousands of people die because he didn't like not knowing stuff Ladybug knew.

He never told Ladybug he briefly used the Snake Miraculous to get brownie points with her.

He never told Ladybug he figured out her identity and asked her out as soon as he did so.

He never told Ladybug he abandoned Paris to go on a field trip.

He never told Ladybug he was screwing around on patrol and was excited to see someone get akuamtized if it meant spending time with her.

He never told Ladybug how he ignored Rena Rouge's orders because “ShE wAsN't LaDyBuG” and almost screwed up the mission because of it, and also never told her how he smashed a chimney in anger at Rena Rouge being in on the plan.

And he never told Ladybug he gave her replacement attitude after trying to harm her without letting her explain herself.

Why exactly should I support the idea of Ladybug trusting Cat Noir more when Cat Noir himself has kept his own secrets from Ladybug?

Adrien has done absolutely nothing to show he is trustworthy because more often than not, he views the battle with Shadowmoth as a game. He has screwed around when lives were on the line, and we're supposed to see him as responsible? It's kind of funny that Astruc compared Ladybug to Spider-Man, yet he seems to have forgotten that with great power, there must also come great responsibility. If this was a character flaw or a sign he needed to grow up, I'd be more accepting, but the fact that the writers think Adrien is a great superhero is laughable with how much evidence has proved the contrary.

In contrast, Alya, despite only being Marinette's confidant for a few episodes, has shown to take being a hero more seriously. She's helped her escape to transform, analyze the Guardian texts, and has been shown to work well on her own as Rena Rouge while helping out Marinette. I'm not trying to say she's an amazing character (“Rocketear” in particular has shown she still has problems with keeping secrets), but compared to Adrien, she seems to be more capable of handling top-secret information with Marinette, and more importantly, doesn't view being Rena Rouge as a way to have fun like Adrien does being Cat Noir. I'll go more into detail with that next time.

But yeah, this scene is how the episode ends, and what did I think of it?

I'm honestly not sure which episode I think is worse, this one or “Queen Banana”. On the one hand, every frame of “Queen Banana” could easily be replaced by an image of Astruc flipping the bird and the overall message of the episode would remain unchanged, but the fact that all of the writers think that everything Adrien does in this episode is okay and that we should feel sorry for him in this episode is just as bad, if not worse. 

As awful as Chloe was portrayed in “Queen Banana”, it was clear it was intentional on the writers' part, but Adrien doesn't get that excuse once much like he has all season. As far as Astruc's team thinks, Adrien is an incredible superhero even when he honestly attempted to harm someone with a superpower that can cause grievous harm at best. Yet again this season, in the show's attempt to make me feel sorry for Adrien, it made him look even worse. In any other show, he would obviously be called out for his incredibly unheroic actions.

Even putting him aside, the writing in this episode is still AWFUL. The whole reason Ladybug was benched had several plotholes and poor communication with Cat Noir that only made the fight with Robostus even harder, Shadowmoth's plan to waste a potentially useful Sentimonster to reuse a single Akuma was one of the dumbest plans he's ever had, and barring the ending, the action was just forgettable.

There were a few okay moments sprinkled throughout the episode (more than I can say for “Queen Banana”), so I'm still not sure if I should call this the worst episode of the show or still give that honor to “Queen Banana”. I guess I'll leave that choice up to you and let you pick your poison for now.

I mean, it's not like there's going to be an even worse episode down the line this season, right?

RIGHT???

[sirthisisa-wendys]

Lemonade (Part 2): Toji Fushiguro x Fem!Reader

synopsis: The part where Toji makes it clear who's his and what he's been doing. For five. Long. Years. (This is also the finale.)

wc: 1.8k

tw: none

masterlist

You're incredibly sore.

Your thighs chafe painfully as you walk into the ballroom, eyes slowly roving toward you in your emerald sequin dress. But you hide your discomfort well, taking a glass of champagne and floating through the masses with a disinterested smile.

Just three hours of this and you'll be done.

You see the eyes of your lover from across the room, and your stomach clenches, remembering the way they looked at you just hours before.

I have to get my bed frame fixed. You think, but the feeling of your thighs rubbing together is more pressing than that. Toji rolls his bottom lips between his teeth and you falter a little. This man will literally be the death of you, you note, placing the glass down on the nearest tray beside you.

"Ms. L/N," the new head of inter-clan relations appears, holding her delicate hand out for you to shake. "It's a pleasure to see you again."

"Are we going to receive the clan heads in the Grand Hall, or--"

"No, we'll be in the conference room this evening." Odd. But you nod, letting her disappear into the crowd once more as you weave around unimportant people on your way to the conference room. You feel a presence behind you, and quirk your lips as you climb the stairs, praying Fushiguro wouldn't corner you and blow your back out for the third time today.

"Walking a little stiff, aren't we?" The sound of Satoru behind you makes you turn, eyes alight.

"Gojo," you smile, taking stock of the white-haired, blue-eyed man who grins at you lazily. "You're looking incredibly..." You frown. "Drunk."

"Suguru and I hate these things. I got drunk before I got here. But it looks like you got your cheeks clapped before you arrived."

"Satoru," you warn, flushing a little.

"Oh, you really got your back blown out, didn't you?" Gojo wonders, dragging a finger across your exposed chest. "Your chest gets especially red when you're embarrassed."

"Watch your mouth, Gojo," you hear behind you, and Toji appears out of nowhere, touching your hip briefly before he stands in front of you. Gojo's eyes light up and a smile cracks his face in two again, elbows resting against the railing of the balcony as he huffs a breath in disbelief. Suguru chooses this moment to appear, his black eyes taking stock of the situation he's walked into with interest.

"You owe me a thousand," Suguru finally mutters, and Satoru laughs.

"Put it on my tab. Never in a million years would I have thought you would've gotten the nerve up, Fushiguro." Toji doesn't answer. Instead, he looks at you over his shoulder and murmurs,

"You good?" You nod, but you begin to feel fatigued as if this whole interaction is taking too much out of you. As the other clan heads begin to climb the stairs to the conference room, you walk behind Toji, his stern expression unrelenting. But you've seen the other side of it. Nothing about Toji scares you anymore.

Well... almost.

The fervor with which he plowed into you week after week was mind-blowing. For a whole month, Toji rendered you close to crippled as he made it very clear that he's ready for you to become a mother. But you laid there every single time and took it, because secretly? You want to get pregnant. Just imagining yourself carrying his child is enough to make you endure the discomfort of sore thighs and a stiff lower back.

You take your seat around the circular table, right next to Satoru and another older man of the Okkotsu clan. The head of inter-clan relations appears and dims the lights, presenting figures about each clan, and successes before issues that need to be solved. You listen with minimal interest, eyes flicking to Toji every so often and catching his gaze every time.

Food is brought out in the middle of her presentation, and normally, you would enjoy the smell of the grilled salmon and poached goose eggs. But your stomach lurches as the dinner is presented to you, and you push it away instantly, shaking your head.

"Not hungry," you assert, and the server takes the food away quietly.

"Not feeling well?" Satoru wonders, cutting into his salmon. "Maybe you're too full of Fushig-- ow!" You press your shoe onto his toes, trying your best to silence him in the presence of others. Once the presentation is over and the lights come back up, you look around the table and see Toji standing up, dusting off his slacks.

"So, as all of you are aware," he begins, walking around carefully. "I've recently acquired a very nice piece of real estate on the east coast." Your eyes flick to Toji, frowning. What is he going on about? "I'm expanding my reach to the east for a little while, maybe even California, if at all possible. But," he stops right behind your chair, placing his hands on your shoulders. "That also means I will need a sizable backing from the majority of you to ensure profits and imports go untouched. Any major player can earn up to fifty percent of their share back within the first year, and I'll personally invest a large portion of my capital to make this a successful venture." You relax, thanking the heavens that Toji didn't say what you thought he would--

"Oh, and one more thing," he mutters. "I know some of you think that Ms. L/n remains completely and utterly unoccupied. But I want to make it very clear that she and I are partners. Beyond the business sense." Your skin prickles at this, and you look over at the other heads, who look somewhat unamused. "None of your sons have any claim to her."

"Fushiguro," Suguru mutters. "You really think we didn't already know? You're looking for a fucking seven-bedroom residence in Cali." Geto laces his fingers together behind his head and leans back in his chair, utterly unbothered. "We all know the tell-tale sign of a man wanting to start a family. Congrats."

_____________________________________________________________

As you unlace your dress, you look at Toji, who is taking his shoes off slowly and sitting on the bed, obviously deep in thought.

"What can I help you with?" you wonder, coming up behind him and lacing your arms around his neck. "You're thinking a lot."

"Nothing," Toji whispers, rubbing your arm slowly. When he leans back a little, you hiss, feeling a sharp pain in your tender breasts. "Did I hurt you?" he wonders, turning around to look at your expression.

"No," you mumble, rubbing your chest carefully. "My boobs have been really sore lately."

"Is it your period?" Toji wonders, getting up and undoing his dress shirt. "Should I get the heating pad in case--"

"No. I haven't had it in a while," you admit. "I'm just super stressed out. Haven't really had a moment of rest with all the business I've been--"

"But you're always on time," Toji bites his lip, opening his phone and looking at his calendar. "Yeah, the second or third week of the month, like clockwork."

"I'm just stressed," you urge him, but Toji goes toward the bathroom, grabbing something out of the cabinet before coming back.

"Here," he tosses a cardboard box at you, and you pick it up, looking at the words carefully.

"A pregnancy test?"

"Just do it," he mutters, sitting on the edge of the bed again. "You've had a lot of symptoms lately so we just have to be sure." You begrudgingly walk to the bathroom, murmuring,

"You really want to have a family, huh?" You sit on the toilet and pee on the stick, absolutely bored to death, but also unconvinced that you could be pregnant.

Until you remember just how much sex you'd been having with Toji for the past month.

Unprotected sex.

You lay the test face-down on the counter and shakily stand then wash your hands. But it seems like you're stuck in the middle of it - hands just sitting under the water - when Toji peeks his head inside.

"What's going on? Anything?"

"I--" You look over at Toji slowly. "I'm scared to look at it." As expected, Toji opens the door and presses his hands to your bare waist before littering kisses along your shoulders.

"What are you afraid of?"

"I want to be a good mom," you begin, looking down at your stomach. "I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that with everything going on."

"Hey, look at me," Toji whispers, turning your chin toward him. "You're going to be an amazing mother. I think you need to be more worried about me being a deadbeat dad."

"Toji!" you exclaim and he laughs, his signature scar splitting in two.

"Don't worry," he replies, kissing your lips once. "I'm not going anywhere." You nod, and he reaches over to grab the test, flipping it over in his hands.

"Oh, I can't look," you murmur, covering your face with your palms.

"Okay, but..." Toji grunts. "What the fuck does two lines mean? That we're having twins?"

_____________________________________________________________

"It's seven bedrooms, ten bathrooms, and two half-baths." You're walking behind the real-estate agent as you examine the home, rubbing your stomach absentmindedly. "Fully furnished."

"Can you tell me about the neighborhood?" you wonder, and Toji looks over at the realtor, who nervously looks between you.

"Um... It's in Brentwood Park..." she murmurs.

"People mind their business here?" Toji wonders, hand caressing your belly for a moment. "Good schools?"

"Of course, sir."

"Good. We'll take it."

_____________________________________________________________

"Hey!" Toji cries out, waving his spatula in the air. "Your mom said stop runnin' around the pool, so stop fuckin' runnin'!" The two young children slow their movements, the older daughter instead choosing to push her brother into the pool. "Tsumiki, apologize!"

"Sorry, Mangomi..."

You waddle out in the backyard, groaning as you carry a cell phone and your lemonade in one hand and a laptop in the other. When Toji sees you, he huffs a breath and sets the spatula down next to the grill.

"Baby, you gotta be careful," he grumbles, taking the open laptop as you sit in the lounge chair in your bikini and coverup. "Don't want you hurting yourself."

"I'm fine, Toji," you mutter, leaning over to remove your sandals. Well, it's not as much of a lean as it's bringing your leg up far enough so your sandal can slip off. The twins between you and the sandal won't let you bend at all. "They're finally resting and I want to sunbathe for a bit."

"With the laptop?" You point at the banking website, and Toji squints at the screen, eyes widening at the numbers on the screen. "This... this is how much we--"

"Your little plan worked. Turns out marrying me was more profitable than you first imagined," you answer, scrolling on your phone and taking a sip of lemonade.

"Holy shit," he breathes, smoothing his hair back. "Need to make sure I keep you incredibly happy, huh?"

"That shouldn't be too hard," you smile and Toji presses his lips to yours, holding you close.

[gumnut-logic]

Wire (Bit 17)

Bit 1 | Bit 2 | Bit 3 | Bit 4 | Bit 5 | Bit 6   | Bit 7 | Bit 8  | Bit 9  | Bit 10

Bit 11 | Bit 12 | Bit 13 | Bit 14 | Bit 15 | Bit 16 | Bit 17

I thought this was going to be the last bit, but Virgil threw a spanner in the works. there is at least one more bit plus an epilogue (which I had in mind before the spanner - Virg, why did you have to bring Molly into this?)

Many thanks to @gaviiadastra and @scribbles97 for the read through and support. @gaviiadastra caught me when I was feeling a bit meh about this bit and threw an idea my way that has thrown spark into the next bit. Both of you are so wonderful to me.

And thank you again to @katblu42 whose input a few bits back resulted in a good chunk of this bit :D

Thunderfam is truly an amazing fandom to be in. You all rock! The support everyone has given me for this fic has been absolutely amazing ::hugs you all to bits::

I hope you enjoy this little bit. We are nearly there.

-o-o-o-

Virgil woke clearer and clearer as time went on. His head ached horribly and a mirror held up by Alan revealed exactly the state of his hair.

He was not impressed at all.

Brain surgery, apparently.

And gut surgery. He got a glimpse of his stomach during a dressing change and discovered his six pack had multiplied into something like twenty with some rather exciting scars likely to result.

Virgil wasn’t vain, really, but it was going to be an ass to work himself back to health, much less back into his ‘bird. It was enough to make a man swear.

And swear he did when he found out the details as to exactly why the building had fallen on him in the first place.

However, Politician MF, a title coined by Gordon and frowned upon by Grandma, had already been obliterated. The man’s career was in tatters, his financial situation crippled, and he was currently a resident of the local jail.

A frown in John’s direction produced a shrug. “Eos was unhappy and had the time.” The thinning of his space brother’s lips pretty much proved an alliance between father and daughter.

An arched eyebrow in Scott’s direction only proved that the commander had turned a blind and incredibly upset eye away and claimed no knowledge of anything.

The media were having a field day.

The holoprojector above Virgil’s bed told him many things.

The world had been advised by a very relieved Scott Tracy that Virgil was awake and on the mend. His brother had also expressed extensive thanks for all the gifts and outpouring of emotion from the general public towards his brother and International Rescue.

That was when Virgil discovered exactly what had happened while he was asleep. He still couldn’t get out of bed, his abdomen not ready to support him sitting up quite yet, so it was his brothers who brought in the amazing gifts to show him.

Armful by armful.

Of course, that wasn’t everything.

But it was more than enough. Stuffed toys, cards and flowers, apparently there were enough edibles to feed half the hospital and Virgil was ever so fast to ask if there was a paediatric ward. He was reassured that Scott had already seen to it and these were the leftovers...that were still accumulating.

Virgil was rendered speechless.

He picked up a small hand-crocheted Thunderbird Two with googly eyes. Those eyes bounced at him as his hand shook. A fabric tag had been sewn in with a ‘Get well soon, Virgil’ stitched on it.

He blinked as his eyesight blurred.

His room was full of similar items. There was even a hand-stitched doll of himself in full uniform. It was…overwhelming.

A hand on his arm. “Don’t worry, Gordon already tried voodoo on it and it didn’t work.” Scott’s smile was honest and distracted him enough to stabilise his emotions.

“Gordon would.”

Scott’s lips thinned a little and had Virgil wondering exactly what Gordon had done with the doll. It looked in one piece from here.

“They love you, Virg. You do good.”

“We do good.”

The hand on his arm squeezed gently. “Yeah, we do.”

“I want to thank them.”

“I already have.”

“I haven’t.”

“Virg-“

“Can you set it up for me?” It wasn’t often Virgil spoke to the press and he was fully aware of the mess he was in at the moment, but he wanted to do this. “Please?”

Scott sighed. “Only when you can sit up. I’m not having the press in here. Your health comes first.”

Virgil pressed his lips together stubbornly but took the offer for what it was.

“And I will be with you.” Scott’s expression brooked no argument.

“I guessed that.” He reached up slowly and placed his hand over his brother’s. “Thank you.”

Scott grunted, but his eyes smiled anyway.

-o-o-o-

Next

[bangtanbetchfics]

friction: iv - finale | knj (m)

genre: office au, romance, smut rating: explicit // 18+ pairing: kim namjoon x reader word count: 8.6k suggested listening: different - woodz | strangers - taemin | handle it - twice | amnesia - kai | last piece - got7 | playlist warnings: m/f, m/m, explicit language, explicit/casual sex, masturbation, enemies to lovers summary: your pesky and overworked assistants meddle in your relationship with your sexy rival -- kim namjoon -- and find themselves caught in the crosshairs of love and all-out war. notes: the final chapter! thanks everyone for all of the notes and support on this one. for more fun insights on this story, please visit my ao3, linked below. navigation: ch. i | ch. ii | ch. iii | finale | m.list | ao3

Namjoon: “All I know right now is that I want you,” He says, tilting his head. “And that I’d never hurt you.”

You: “I’m afraid, Jin,” You confess in his ear, and he rests his chin on your shoulder. “That he’ll break my heart.”

Jin: “Someone’s feelings are ultimately going to get hurt.”

✹✹✹

“We have like...fifteen minutes before they’re both back,” Taehyung whispers to Jimin, both of their bodies pressing against each other in a minuscule phone room.

“I can’t even move right now,” Taehyung laments, moving the chair near him as close to the door as he can, enabling Jimin to straddle him.

“Well...this was the only room I could find, Tae. It’s busy season.” This makes Taehyung frown as he grabs Jimin’s waist to steady him. “We’re lucky we even got this.”

Jimin slides to the bottom of Taehyung’s legs near his knees, and the edge of the desk behind him digs into his back.

“Ow, fuck.” Jimin sucks air in through his teeth, refocusing his mind before he looks down at Taehyung’s crotch. Taehyung’s cock is somehow rock hard, and Jimin rubs his palm over the significant bulge. “It’s amazing how you can still get hard in these situations.”

The comment makes Taehyung frown before he spreads his legs open to evenly distribute Jimin’s weight across him.

“We haven’t fucked because we’re always so tired from work, so yeah, I’m hard. Really fucking hard.” Taehyung pulls Jimin in for a few sloppy kisses, his hand firm on the other man’s slim waist. He rubs Jimin’s back and his hands glide to Jimin’s plush ass before he gives it a squeeze.

Jimin bites his lip at the grab -- grinning and moving further up Taehyung’s legs to straddle his crotch. “It’s been too long since I’ve done that.” Taehyung chuckles, licking his lips.

Taehyung sighs lightly at the warmth covering him, and he uses his massive hands to glide Jimin’s ass over his crotch -- making the both of them breathe in unison. Jimin loosens two buttons of his own crisp white shirt, Taehyung moving to lick his exposed collarbones before nibbling at his clavicle.

Faint moans slip from Jimin’s lips as he reaches into Taehyung’s pants, and pulls out his fully erect cock. He salivates at his girth, and a wad of spit leaves his mouth before landing on Taehyung’s firm cock.

The sensation causes Taehyung’s back to press into the chair, the thick line of spit rolling down the sensitive skin. He sighs as Jimin’s smooth hand rubs up and down his shaft and he groans, feeling himself grow even harder.

Jimin leans back to get his elbows on the desk for support and shimmies to tilt his pelvis up toward the ceiling.

Taehyung then pulls Jimin’s soft, thick cock from his pants. His thumb moves to glide over the soft tip, expecting a drizzle of precum to follow. It does, and Taehyung smears the droplet of arousal over the prominent head. Jimin hisses at the feeling, grinding his hips into Taehyung’s firm grip. His hand was firm without even trying, and Jimin gives Taehyung a firm squeeze in return, making the other man hiss through his teeth.

The two are soon jerking each other off in unison, the slick sounds of their pleasure filling in the room.

“Motherfuck-“ Taehyung groans, his cum sliding down Jimin’s fist. “Already?” Jimin gasps and follows in response, his cum flowing down over Taehyung’s fingers.

“Well, fuck.” Jimin reaches behind him and cleans the two of them up before zipping both of their pants. He balls the napkins up in his hand, maneuvering to toss them in the trash below the desk.

“Ah, fuck...this is miserable.” Jimin pouts, rolling his eyes into the back of his head. He grabs Taehyung’s shoulders before mumbling into the fabric there. “We have to figure out a gameplan to get our bosses back together.”

Jimin lifts from Taehyung’s lap and looks at his watch as he buttons his shirt back up: 6:56 P.M.

“Let’s hurry and get back.” Jimin says, tapping Taehyung’s shoulder to get up.

✹✹✹

A sigh leaves your lips and you move to pull a bouquet slotted in a vase closer to your face. The fresh scent hits your nose as bury your face in the silkiness of the petals.

“Ya!” Jin yells, breaking you from your lovesick stupor. “It looks like a florist took up shop in here!” He looks around, observing the bouquets sitting in every corner of your office.

Taehyung looks over and chuckles, laughing to himself at Namjoon’s failed attempt to get you back.

You grab your coat and shrug it on before you carefully navigate your way around the bouquets and out of your office.

Jin notices how quiet you are -- the two of you waiting in the empty elevator bank. This was a state he was worried about you being in, and he made sure to pick you up from work when you were like this. He nudges you and his arm hooks into yours, but you’re barely able to acknowledge it.

“Anything you wanna talk about?” You lean your head on his arm and shake your head. He leans his head down to meet the top of yours in a quiet understanding before the two of you enter a crowded elevator car.

The elevator beeps as it navigates each floor, and you squeeze your eyes shut -- praying that it doesn’t land on the 61st floor. You knew that was Namjoon’s floor and he was one hundred percent the absolute last person you wanted to see right now -- especially after your impulsive encounter earlier that afternoon.

61.

Of course. The universe always had to mess with you.

The elevator doors open and Namjoon’s eyes search around the car. You look up, and his gaze locks with yours. It feels like the two of you are frozen in time for a moment, and other employees brush past him to enter the car.

You can tell he’s worn from the long hours of work by the dark bags sitting underneath his eyes. In the moment he looks to you for some sort of relief -- some sort of resolve -- but you don’t lend it to him. Jin notices and glares him down, and Namjoon’s crestfallen gaze lifts from yours to meet Jin’s leer.

You quickly look down and swallow a lump of nerves down your throat, and Namjoon slowly enters the car. Your hand trembles as you grip the strap of your purse -- the piece of leather feeling like a lifeline -- like a sweet, temporary escape from the situation at hand.

The car reaches the lobby and employees spill from the elevator, scattering in a rat race out of the building. You grip Jin’s arm closer to you as you watch the back of Namjoon exit the car.

“Is that the guy?” Jin cranes his neck down to your ear. You don’t respond, and Jin takes it as a confirmation. You and Jin take a left as you leave the building, and Namjoon takes a right, but you can’t help but listen for the sound of Namjoon’s shoes to dissipate.

“You see? I knew you’d get hurt.” Jin laments, moving his arm over your shoulder to tug you closer. The sound of Namjoon’s shoes halts as he overhears, and he turns around to look at the both of you walking down the street. He takes a deep inhale, the breath exhuming a deep regret from his body.

✹✹✹

Light snowflakes fall from the sky, starting to coat the city below them in a white, glistening blanket. Your eyes glide toward the view of the city through the floor-to-ceiling length windows, and you watch cars -- now rendered to tiny, glittering lights this high up -- float by in the pulse of the dark evening.

Your foot extends to meet the cool edge of a clawfoot tub, the rest of your body enveloped in the warmth of the water around you. The movement of your foot around the white ceramic edge makes a squeaking noise, the sound bouncing off the quiet halls of your apartment.

You sink further into the water and blow bubbles into it before submerging your head fully for a few seconds. You gasp as you emerge, the cool air creating goosebumps all over your exposed skin. Your hand moves to slick your hair back, and you rest your head on the back edge of the tub.

All you can hear in the darkness are the droplets of water dripping from the edges of the tub.

The space in your apartment was now somber -- no longer filled with your buoyant giggles or throaty moans of being deeply taken. No tinkering sounds of Namjoon making his morning coffee, or the deep, needy exclamations of your name tumbling from his lips.

Thinking of him somehow made a desire tinder inside of you, and you feel your nipples harden under the thought -- only exacerbated by the cool air in the room. You close your eyes, surrendering to your thoughts; your mind racing through the various scenarios and encounters with Namjoon.

At this moment you were grateful that the nerves in the human body retained memories, for you suspire as your fingertips start to trace your skin just as Namjoon would.

You inhale as a wet thumb glides over your erect nipple, sending sensations of pleasure through your body. Your hand moves to grip the soft flesh of your other breast, your fingers kneading the sensitive skin in your hand. Your teeth bite your bottom lip as you imagine the person touching you is Namjoon instead.

A mewl leaves your lips as two fingers meet inside of your core, easily slipping inside. The tightness of the two fingers makes you writhe -- your breath coming loose from your throat.

Your pointer and pinky finger become affixed to either side of your lips, giving you leverage to pump your fingers faster inside of you. Your back arches as you move faster, the sounds of moving water growing louder in the space. The recollection of Namjoon’s desire from earlier that day is somehow still singed to your skin, and you pant as you recall.

Cries leaves your lips as your fingers curl up to meet your engorged g-spot, and your eyes squeeze shut as your fingers glide back and forth over the pleasurable spot.

Burning sensations rip through your body and you squeal, feeling your core clench around your fingers. You moan out loud, biting your lip from the guilt of conjuring a memory before a final drag over the swollen spot courses a delectable pleasure through your veins.

A sigh leaves your lips in your comedown, and you heave while you wonder how a kiss in a fervid moment got you here: alone, and without a promotion you’d been waiting to achieve your entire life.

You lift your body upright and rest your arms on either side of the tub, looking back out at the cityscape.

✹✹✹

Snow crunches under Namjoon’s feet while his fingers clench to a paper cup in his hand. He’s grateful for the hot sear on his fingertips to keep both his fingers and body warm, and he looks down, watching his feet sink into the fresh snow with every step he takes.

Hoseok squints at the sunlight peeking through the snow-coated limbs of the trees above, and he notices Namjoon’s spaced-out expression beside him. He nudges his friend and Namjoon comes to -- looking over to Hoseok and feigning a smile.

“You alright, bro?” Hoseok’s tone is concerned, and Namjoon smiles again and shakes his head.

“See this?” He points down at the fresh snow. “My life used to be like this. Just new and...fresh with her.” He then nods his head over at the dirty, white slosh in the street as they approach a corner to cross. “Now it’s more like that.”

Hoseok covers his mouth, and he can’t help but giggle at Namjoon’s humor, even in such a low moment.

“Sorry...but you kinda brought that one on yourself.” Hoseok chuckles through his response. “I mean, who ties their lover to their bed and then leaves them there? I’d be kinda mad, too. Even if I did get a couple of orgasms out of it.” Hoseok chortles, taking a sip of his own coffee.

“When I think about it...I just wanted the promotion at any cost. You know how my mom is.” Namjoon’s fingers squeeze dents into the cup in his hand, and Hoseok stops in his tracks. He reaches a hand out to grab Namjoon’s arm to stop him as well.

Namjoon’s throat tightens and he avoids eye contact with Hoseok, still looking down at the ground. He hated looking into Hoseok’s wide, earnest eyes. He always told him what he didn’t want to hear, but the advice was always right.

“Hey. Look at me.” Hoseok is calm, and he shakes Namjoon to look up at him. “You’ve gotta start living for yourself, man. This...this ruthless mentality is really fucking with you and your relationships. The tactics you use at work don’t necessarily reap the same benefits in love.”

Namjoon sucks air up his nostrils, frustrated with Hoseok -- but he understands he’s right. He shakes his head before looking up into Hoseok’s eyes, his own eyes glossy with tears.

“I really fucked this one up, Hobi, I-” Namjoon shakes his head again.

“Apologize. Start there.” Hoseok starts, and Namjoon interjects. “But I already-“

“If you really care about her, do it as many times as it takes.” Both eyebrows raise on Hoseok’s face as he cuts Namjoon off.

“Also, know you love and respect your mom...but like, you can’t let her dictate the way you live your life anymore.” Hoseok squeezes Namjoon’s arm in assurance. “No disrespect, but you gotta do you, bro.” He smacks Namjoon’s arm.

“I’ll see you later!” Hoseok shouts, running to make it across the street before the light changes.

Namjoon shakes his head as he looks down, his hand balling into a tight fist.

✹✹✹

The cool winter wind curls through Namjoon’s hair, and he sighs as he looks at the ground coated white below him.

The plastic of the bouquet in his arms crunches as he kneels down, and he sets the flowers to the side.

He takes a deep pause before he wipes a few inches of snow from a gravestone labeled KIM. He sits there, hands on his knees as two silent tears fall down his cheeks. He quickly wipes them with his gloves as they almost freeze on his face.

“I-I’m...I’m on my way, Dad. The position is pretty much mine.” Namjoon starts, his voice trembling.

“Is that what you would’ve wanted?” He asks, unwrapping the flowers from their plastic and slotting them into a cement holder above the grave.

“But your work nearly...no, did. Your work did put you here, right?” He laments, his head falling into his palms, still frigid even through the thick gloves.

“Or...would you have wanted me to be happy?” Namjoon tilts his head, a heaviness on his chest as he lets out the words.

“There’s this woman you see...” He continues, looking down at the engravings in the stone below him once more.

Namjoon squeezes his eyes shut and a final crest of tears leave his eyes. He stands up, walking to the edge of the bluff he’s on before looking out at the frozen landscape.

✹✹✹

You sit on your couch, curled up by a neon fire crackling in a glass display in front of you. Your toes curl up as they fill with heat, and you polish off the rest of the wine in your glass.

Somehow, you were undeniably tipsy and had finished off half a bottle of the sweet, tart liquid. Your hand slides over the glass coffee table to the side of you, and the glass screeches as you place the cup down. You let out the beginnings of a yawn before you hear your doorbell ring -- making you jolt up out of your seat.

“Can I help you?” You press a button on a digital intercom labeled ‘lobby’ and you hear a voice ring out on the other end.

“Yes, there’s a gift for you, ma’am?” A male voice answers back, and your hand drops from the button. You roll your eyes before you hit the button to speak again.

“Fine, bring it up.”

✹✹✹

Your doorbell rings, and you take your time to stand -- slowly walking toward the door. You release the lock on the door and swing it open before leaning back on it.

“It’s from...” The man starts, before looking down in his phone again. “Ah. It’s from one Kim Namjoon. Sent with the utmost urgency, ma’am.” He nods, tipping his hat down before he hands you a huge black box.

You groan at the weight, closing the door shut with your foot.

You lug the box over to your coffee table, and place it down before your hand meets your hips. Air blows from your lips as you ponder whether or not you should even open the box. The indifference develops into a sigh while you massage your temples, moving and scooting closer to the table to take in the outside of the box.

You place your hand on top of the lid and sigh again, your fingers lifting it off before you set the top to the side.

You gasp and stand up, taking in what’s before you.

Thirty-six light purple roses are carefully arranged in a circular box inside, and the warm, rosy scent travels up your nose.

Neatly tucked inside is a shiny gold envelope, and you move to pull it out. You break the seal with your fingernail, pulling out a piece of light pink cardstock.

To: The Woman I’m Not Sure I Can Live Without

There’s a thin line between love and hate...but I can only hope that you keep your faith in love.

“Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

The florists told me that the roses carefully arranged in this box for you are forever, but I hope our love outlasts every single one.

Hoping this message reaches you in the depths of your heart -- in a little corner of light -- where I hope you’ll be able to find a place to believe in me again.

-Lovingly, Kim Namjoon

Your hands tremble and you drop the letter -- your head falling into your palms. You collapse to the couch and softly sob out of frustration, more confused than ever.

✹✹✹

The next morning, you sigh as a bunch of people crowd next to you after you board an elevator car. You definitely didn’t get any sleep the night before, and you study the back of the woman’s head in front of you. Your gaze lifts and your eyes widen as you see Namjoon run to board the front of the crowded car. His eyes widen in response to seeing you, and your eyes swiftly meet the ground.

The elevator stops at the next available floor, and a few people cycle out of the car -- Namjoon being one of the first out.

A dozen more people wait outside of the car to enter, and Namjoon’s only choice is to move further into the back of the car near you. He crushes his lips together before he gathers the courage to stand next to you as the car fills back up. Someone squeezes near him -- and his arm pushes into yours.

“Sorry.” He whispers, keeping his sight focused ahead of him.

You become rattled at how close he is to you, a heat rising up your throat and into your cheeks.

He’s so close you can smell his cologne, and you subtly inhale it -- reveling in the brief moment of nostalgia. You follow it by swallowing a breath down -- your best attempt to cool your nerves. You blow relief from your lips as the elevator reaches his floor, and he files out of the car.

You’re able to steal a glance of Namjoon before the elevator shuts, and his eyes grow wide again in response.

✹✹✹

“Almost ready for dinner?” Taehyung asks you, powering his computer down. He takes a quick glance at his watch before looking over at your office.

You use a large, fluffy brush to swipe blush across your cheeks and you smile slightly to make the apples more prominent.

“How do I look?” You ask Taehyung, taking a slow turn. A creamy white dress is affixed to your curves, and a transparent chiffon choker floats around your neck.

“It’ll be nice to get out for dinner for once.” You mention as you pin twinkling diamond earrings to each of your ears.

✹✹✹

“How are you adjusting to the new workload?” You ask Taehyung, slicing through a piece of chicken below you. You take a bite, watching him formulate an answer.

“It’s a lot to take on...but I know in the long run it’ll pay off.” Taehyung shrugs. “Or...at least I hope it does.” He says, loading a few green peas onto his fork as he looks at you before shaking his silver locks from his eyes.

“Good mindset to have,” Your fork points at him, before you polish the food down your throat. “But. You don’t want to end up old and grey like me. And with no one to share it with.”

“You’re not old. Or gray!” Taehyung exclaims before clutching his belly in laughter. You join him in laughing, the wine spinning glee through your veins.

“Thanks for doing this, Tae.” You mention, tapping the back of Taehyung’s hand and watching a smile curl up on his lips.

“You deserve it. Truly-” Mid-response, he jolts as the watch on his wrist buzzes:

[Jiminie]: 7:58 P.M. Now.

He smirks a bit as he sees the message, but his brows furrow before he looks up at you.

“I have to take this.” His voice is asking for permission, and you nod in response -- waving him off.

✹✹✹

You look at your watch, noticing that thirty-five minutes have lapsed since Taehyung left you at the table. You lift the device to your mouth: “Call Taehyung.” The device rings for half a second before you’re served Taehyung’s voicemail.

The kick to voicemail brings your brows together on your head, and you try the sequence once more. Another fail. You sigh, slightly worried by the lack of response.

A sliver of fear causes you to rise from your seat to take a walk around the space. Decadent crystal chandeliers light up the space, but they’re dimmed to give ambiance to most of the couples huddled up in the restaurant for the evening.

You admit to yourself that you’re jealous, as one half of those couples could’ve easily been you a few weeks before everything went down between you and Namjoon. You sigh, rubbing your arms to relieve yourself from the pockets of wind coming through the front door each time it opens. Your eyes scan the restaurant, but nothing unusual sticks out to you -- and you still don’t see Taehyung.

“Did he leave me here?” You whisper under your breath before heading back to your seat. You admit you’re lightly pissed off, but you calmly sit back down at your table.

“So, how was everything?” A waitress arrives, and she starts collecting items from the table. “It was amazing...except for...well.” Your voice trails off as you look over to the other side of the table. “I’ve really gotta find him.” You mumble, pulling out your wallet. The waitress grimaces, collecting the last fork and placing it on her tray.

“Anyway...could I have the receipt, please?” You ask, looking up at the woman. She looks back at you, confused, and you return the look. “The bill’s already been paid, ma’am.”

“By whom?” You tilt your head, and the woman points over her shoulder before she steps to the side.

It’s Namjoon.

Namjoon walks toward you, a hand in the pocket of his white pants. A cream dress shirt hugs his frame in the right places, but it's tucked in to accentuate his slim waist. A white wool coat adorns his frame and reaches just below his knees, and his hips sexily cut side-to-side before he lands to stand above you.

“May I?” He asks, his deep voice rippling through your ears, goosebumps traveling through your skin.

You’re at a loss for words as you take his divine form in from head-to-toe, and he gestures toward the empty chair.

Shockwaves zip through your body, and you can only manage a nod in response.

Taehyung and Jimin grin at each other from a well-hidden corner of the restaurant as they watch the two of you -- their pinkies linked tightly together.

✹✹✹

Namjoon marvels at you as he sits, his hand loosening from his pocket. His eyes triangulate around your face, and you can tell he’s at a loss for words himself. He takes a deep breath in, looking down at the table.

How handsome he looks under the candlelight is something you can’t help but notice -- his tan skin twinkling under the flicker of the flames. You lower your eyes so you don’t get sucked too far into his charms, subtly shaking your head until you come to.

The both of you sit in silence for a few moments before he reaches for your hand.

“Joon-“ You gasp as the warmth radiating from him courses through your veins. He squeezes your hand before speaking.

“I’ve been selfish,” He starts, his soft brown eyes raising to meet yours. “It’s just that you’ve never been apart of the grand plan I had laid out for my life...” He sighs, and you can tell his thoughts are trailing off.

“I...I told you kissing me that night wasn’t a good idea.” Your chest starts to heave, and your hand begins to tremble in his. “You said you wouldn’t hurt me then. And now we’re here.”

“I know...I know...” His voice turns into a woeful plea, and tears gather at the edges of your eyes. “I’m so, so sorry.”

His head hangs down and he squeezes your hand again. You loosen your hand from his and he looks up in shock, watching as you look down to reach into your bag.

“I want you back,” He pulls his hands into a prayer near his lips, his thumbs tucked under his chin as he looks at you. You flare your nostrils to hold in your tears as you listen to him.

“If you have it in your heart...please forgive me.” He continues, tears gathering in his own eyes.

“I really liked you, Joon.” You get choked up, tears flooding down your face. You suck in air to calm yourself, using the handkerchief you pulled from your bag to dab at your tears.

Namjoon reaches across the table to wipe the fresh wave of tears falling from your eyes with his thumbs, and he looks directly at you.

“I have something to tell you.” His tone is serious, and you grab ahold of his wrist. He takes your hand and holds it again, massaging the back of it.

“I told Yoongi...” You can tell whatever he’s about to say is hard for him, and his eyes widen before he looks down. “I told Yoongi that he should give the CEO position to you. That you could lead it with more grace than I ever could. And that’s something that I’ve always admired about you.” His warm lips meet the palm of your hand, and a tear falls from one of his eyes.

“No, I-“ A hot tear shoots from one of your eyes, and you shake your head. He shakes his head in assurance, placing your hand on his cheek.

“You can’t do this on my behalf.” You gasp out, more tears pooling in your eyes. “You really wanted this.”

“So did you. And yes, I can.” He starts. “But why? Tell me why. You wanted nothing more.”

“It’s simple, really.” Namjoon releases your hand, sitting back in his chair.

“I was chasing a dream that wasn’t my own to make the people I loved happy. I’ve always done what my family’s wanted -- no matter the cost. But I was never happy. Not until I met you.” He says, his eyes focused on you. His eyes grow even warmer under the candlelight as he admires your features.

“The only thing I’ve ever truly dreamed about was falling in love.” He sits back up, taking your hand in his again. Your fingers slide in between his and your palms meet in a firm clasp.

“I’m guilty of it too, I guess.” You respond, searching his eyes. “I think I’ve always used work as an excuse not to go too deep...to not to fall in love too hard. But you broke all of my walls down, and then you left me.” You chuckle softly, drawing one out of him as well. “But now you’re here again. In front of me.” You shoulder raises and then falls, and you look at him.

“I guess it was fate that pushed us together like this.” Namjoon kisses your hand warmly, and you sigh at the comfort of the familiar feeling. His eyes scan yours, and you can feel more words are at the tip of his tongue. The words seem to dissipate from his lips, and he releases your hand.

“I guess...I guess I’ll see you at work tomorrow?” You give him a slow nod as you watch him stand up, and you chew at the inside of your lip. He starts to leave the table, and you grab his wrist.

“Wait. Would you...would you mind taking me home?” There’s a lilt of desire in your voice, and he looks back at you.

✹✹✹

“Sorry, no heat in here -- don’t ask.” A cab driver mentions as the two of you hop in the backseat. You cross your legs and look out of the window as the car pulls off.

There’s still a marked silence between the two of you.

After a few minutes you can hear the whisper of wind coming through the car door, and the cool air makes you shiver. You ball your hand into a fist as your fingers and toes grow cold, and you rub your arms to gather warmth in your body.

You knew Namjoon was probably warm, but you were stubborn and you refused to give into him that easily.

Namjoon turns and looks at you coolly as you look out the window, and he taps your shoulder. You turn to face him, and your lips are a hair away from each other in the small car.

He looks down and your eyes follow his as he hooks his arm into yours before pulling you closer to him. His warmth surges through you, causing your body to melt into his. Your cheek meets his shoulder, and you warm your hand by rubbing one of his thighs. You squeeze the hard muscle and he can feel himself getting hard. You slow the rubbing as you notice him fidgeting, simply resting your palm on his leg. His racing heartbeat becomes apparent as your head slides down to his chest, and you smirk to yourself that you still had this affect on him.

“This is you, ma’am.” The driver mentions, looking back at the two of you. “Who’s payin’?” He asks, pulling up to a curb.

The car pulls up outside of your house, and you look up at Namjoon -- your lips close once again. A desire knots in between your legs, and you squeeze them to dissipate the sensation -- gasping at the sudden intensity of your lust.

“Um...um I guess this is me.” You say softly, looking from his lips up to his eyes. He returns the look, and you quickly break eye contact and get out of the car.

Namjoon whips his credit card into the reader before handing the driver fifty dollars in cash.

“Can you give me a few minutes?” He taps the man’s shoulders, and the driver looks at Namjoon through the rearview mirror.

“Good luck, man.” The driver nods, watching Namjoon exit.

✹✹✹

Namjoon catches you before you start to walk away from the vehicle, and he comes to stand tall in front of you. He looks down at you for a few moments, and neither of you break eye contact. The wind starts to chill your lips and fingertips, and Namjoon moves a step closer toward you.

He’s hesitant as he approaches, not sure how you’ll react. He places a hand on your shoulder, and it moves up your neck and toward your cheek. Your head naturally falls into his large palm, and his other hand moves to do the same. Both of his thumbs massage the skin underneath your chin -- both of your lips only a breath away from each other.

“I forgive you.” You whisper, looking into his eyes. His eyes fall in relief, and your fingers hook into the belt cinching his coat around his waist to pull him closer to you.

Both of your lips gently meet, the warmth melting your frigid lips.

Snow starts to fall, and each flake that meets your skin is no match for the heat rising from your cheeks. You relish in each others warmth, one always pulling the other closer -- your fingers embedded in the smooth fabric of his coat.

Namjoon taps the cab for it to leave, and you press your lips further into his as his soft thumbs rub up and down the column of your throat.

“It rained the first night we kissed.” Namjoon pulls his lips from yours and you giggle. He presses back into your lips halfway through another giggle leaving your mouth.

“Is that a sign?” You mumble into his lips, nipping at the lush bottom one. You dive back into him with your tongue as a familiar, insatiable thirst overtakes you -- his head tilting to the side to gain more leverage in the kiss.

✹✹✹

A trail of clothing lines the floor to the couch in your living room, and you’re perched atop Namjoon’s lap. His tongue dives into the silky fabric of your cream-colored slip, the moisture embedding the fabric against your nipple. You gasp, your hands rummaging around his hair as he does the same to your other nipple before lightly nibbling at it. The silk begins to stick to your form, the heat from the fireplace causing your body to collect small droplets of sweat.

You breathe into each other’s mouths as you slowly unbutton Namjoon’s shirt, his hands roaming underneath your slip and over your ass. He slides his fingers underneath the suspenders that hold up your stockings, and then moves to squeeze the cheeks of your ass firmly before slapping it.

You bite your lip -- gasping into his mouth before diving back into his lips. Something about his grip on your ass made you distinctly feral, and you grind into his crotch below.

“How did I get so lucky?” He gasps, only allowing you a small wind of his hips, and you bite into his bottom lip. He growls and pulls your panties to the side, feeling the slick heat between your lips.

“Fuck. You still get so wet for me.” His fingers continue to rub you and you whine, attempting to grab his wrist. You were on fire by now, and you run your hands over his hard, exposed chest before diving back into his lips, the only part of his body he was allowing you access to.

The length of his finger suddenly slips inside of you and you firmly moan into his lips. He pumps his finger inside of you and you squirm, hearing the slick sounds of your juices coating his finger. He slips a second finger in, using the two of them to stretch you.

“Ah...Namjoon...” A pert moan drops from your mouth, his fingers moving to pump into you again.

You relish in the sweet stretch of his fingers, his mouth moving to suck on your breast through the fabric. You grab his head as his drags his tongue from your breast -- up your neck and back to your lips. Need -- a deep aching need -- emanates from your lips as you make contact again, and he pulls his fingers from inside of you.

“Let me taste you.” He growls into your lips, and you gasp as he throws you on your back. He pulls you closer to him on the couch before dragging your soaked lace panties to the side. He immediately suckles at your drenched lips below, moaning into the sensitive skin. He swiftly burrows his face inside of you, his tongue flicking deep inside of your core. He rotates his head around your core, his masterful tongue dragging with it. You squeal as he growls into you, and you grip him at the roots of his hair.

“Namjoon, fuck-“ You feel yourself drip, throwing your head back over the edge of the couch. The feeling of his tongue was more intense than usual, the sounds of him eating you out sending electric zaps through you like a livewire.

He gives you a dark look -- lightly pulling at your lips as you watch him below, moving to trail cum-drenched kisses up your abdomen. He meets your lips with his, and you moan as you taste yourself on his tongue.

Namjoon’s now positioned above you and you reach below, massaging his shaft through his boxers. He groans, almost as if in pain, from how much he wanted you. He gasps as you pull out his weighty length, and sit up to tuck it into your warm mouth.

Your tongue slips over the wet head before you take him in as far as you can. He groans as you pull out and precum gathers on the tip. You hum at the liquid before you dig your tongue into the slit its pouring from -- devouring him again and again.

You release him from your mouth after a few moments, the entirety of his shaft glistening with saliva. You lay back on the couch and he parts your legs, looking up at you. He drives his shaft up and down your lips before he enters you -- and you wince as his firm head pierces you. He pulls back out briefly, blowing air out so he doesn’t fill you whole in one go. You line him up with your entrance, and you push him in -- gasping at the furious stretch. He groans in return, beginning to pump slowly in and out of you. You whine, placing a hand on his abdomen to slow his pace. Both of your breathing picks up, and he props himself up over you -- his lips joining with yours.

His hips start to wave into yours, and you whimper in pleasure as his pace increases.

“Does that feel good?” His length pulls in and out of you, the subtle difference in size from his pronounced head to his shaft intensely massaging your walls. You nod, so deeply concentrated on the pleasure.

“Faster?” He asks through a few labored breaths, his eyes intense on yours. You wrap your arms around his neck, your lips meeting the wet heat collecting on his skin.

“Fuck...yeah.” You can only mewl out into his ear as he picks up his pace, his cock growing larger inside of you.

“Motherfuck-“ You whine, your legs moving to hook onto his shoulders. He fills you deeper, and the slosh of your bodies meeting below filling the room. How wet you are turns you on further and you tap his back, indicating for him to take his thrusts a tick faster. And so he does, his skin slapping hard into yours as you gasp, whining as you’re taken the deepest you’ve ever been. Your fingernails clamp into the rippling muscles on his back, and your senses explode as you clench around him, nearing your release.

You gasp as he pulls out and flips you over onto your stomach, positioning your ass in the air. He pushes your slip up, and takes hold of the white garter belt affixed to your nude fishnet stockings. You squeal as he enters you from behind, his grip tightening on your belt to drive deeper inside of you.

“Faster.” Grits through your teeth, the end of the word ending in a whine. Something about not having him for weeks ignited a deep desire inside of you -- and you moan as his free hand digs into your waist. His large hand slides down to grip the back of your neck while he bucks into you madly, lewd moans repeatedly slipping through your lips.

“Namjoon I’m gonna-“ You squeal as he slams harder into you -- the neurons in your body exploding in euphoria. The pleasure radiates from your core and through the rest of your nerves as you still pulse around him -- your eyes rolling into the back of your head.

“Fuck!” Namjoon exclaims, his warm load releasing inside of you, and your head hangs down as you catch your breath. He pulls from the tight fit, a popping noise echoing in the air as he does so.

“God, I missed you.” He says softly, before he positions you on your back, laying himself back on top of you. He dives into your lips once more and you grab his jaw, relishing in his weight on your body. He luxuriates in your softness and warmth as he fixes his hard frame on top of yours, and you pull a leg up to wrap around his waist. He caresses you from the curve of your ass down to the back of your knee, looking at you with adoration in his eyes.

“Why are you here with me again? After everything?” There’s wonder in his whisper -- a need for some sort of unspoken assurance -- and you seal your lips to his. Your thumb glides over his cheek, and you pull back to look at his features.

“I’m only human. I can’t control how I feel.” You breathe in, stroking his soft locks. He glides his nose over yours, his lips still roving over your skin. He places a hot, opened mouthed kiss on your neck as he squeezes your waist, and you softly moan into his ear.

Namjoon lifts his head up, looking from your lips to your eyes. His toasty chestnut eyes grow larger, and he looks at you.

“I love you.” He says softly, and your chest heaves up and down before you kiss him again.

“I love you, too.” Coming up for air, you look at him -- still feeling as if you haven’t indulged enough in his plush lips. You kiss him feverishly, soaking in his confession.

Both of your swollen lips vibrate against one another as you look at each other, gasping for air as you pull away.

“What are we gonna tell Yoongi?” He sighs into your mouth, looking at you.

“The truth.”

✹✹✹

“Maybe I should take the position. Because then I’d be your boss.” You mention, pushing Namjoon down into his chair. You grip the arms of the chair, leaning down to kiss him. He pulls you onto his lap, smacking your ass.

“Are we really gonna do this first thing in the morning?” He growls into your lips, and you giggle. “We have like...an hour before people start arriving. So yeah. We’re doing this.” You grip the back of his neck and weave your neck to access his lips as his head moves from side-to-side.

“Maybe I don’t want to, Boss.” He teases through a growl, and you bite your lip -- pressing your forehead to his.

“Well...then...you’re fired.” You whisper, your tongue slipping past his lips and into his mouth. He sucks your bottom lip as he pulls away, studying your eyes.

“That’s retaliation.” His dimples pop into his cheeks mischievously, and you place kisses on his neck -- feeling him grow hard underneath you.

“Mmm...well he seems to disagree.” You mention, and Namjoon gasps, grinding up into your throbbing core.

“Fuck.” You mutter, feeling yourself get wet the more he grinds into you.

Footsteps start to float down the hall, and you hop from Namjoon’s lap. You look around the room for a place to hide -- but there’s nowhere to be found in a glass office. You decide to burrow underneath his desk, and Namjoon quickly pulls his chair into his desk after you do.

“Hey, Mr. Kim! How are things going this morning?” Namjoon nervously puts his elbow down on the table and picks up a pen.

“Oh, you know. It’s going.” He chuckles, his eyes subtly widening at the janitor.

“I feel ya, man. It’s real crazy-“ The janitor starts.

“Yeah, um, I’ve got work to get back to if you don’t mind.” Namjoon uses the pen to point around the office. “You know, before everyone starts filing in.” He nods, satisfied with the lie.

“Oh! Yeah. Sorry, man. I just get so caught up.” The janitor responds, sweeping a few specks from the floor.

You sigh in relief as you hear the janitor’s footsteps leave the room, but Namjoon looks down at you and shakes his head.

“Mr. Kim! Good morning -- you’re here early!” Jimin exclaims, dropping his briefcase off at his own desk. He notices Namjoon looks bright and glowy as he rolls into his office, and he smiles at him.

“How was your night? Anything interesting happen?” Jimin pries, his hand on his hip as he scours Namjoon’s face for an answer.

“You could say that, I guess.” Namjoon chuckles, twirling the pen in his hand around his fingers. You circle Namjoon’s knee with your pointer finger, and you feel his body stiffen.

“Mind if I brief you now?” Jimin asks, looking him over -- and Namjoon tilts his head. “It’s...just that I want to knock out the rest of the work you gave me before the end of the day.”

Namjoon chuckles; of course this was the one day everyone was early, and of course Jimin wanted to brief him now.

Right now.

Your palm glides over Namjoon’s cock, and you slide your fingers over his shaft through his pants. You cover your mouth with a hand, holding back a snicker.

“Um, sure.” Namjoon’s voice comes out in a tremble before he sucks in air. “I know. I know it’s an intense, stressful schedule you’ve got coming up.”

Namjoon fidgets in his chair as you pull his cock from his pants, wiggling it to observe its satisfying weight.

“First thing’s first. Min has said that overall, it’s been a challenging fiscal year, but that your product and the CMO’s complimentary marketing pulled us into the black.” He says.

“A real Hail Mary.” Jimin continues, swiping the screen of his iPad to the next slide.

“Fuck!” Namjoon exclaims as you take his shaft whole into your mouth. “I mean...that’s really great news.” He corrects himself, and Jimin crunches his eyebrows together in confusion.

Namjoon leans his neck to the side, his hand balling into a fist to try and contain himself. He gasps, your tongue quietly swirling around his length.

A light, satisfied moan escapes your lips as you pull his cock from your mouth, licking its length.

“So-“ Jimin pauses and looks up, his eyes locking with Namjoon’s. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Namjoon asks, biting his lip -- praying Jimin didn’t hear you. “I think that’s enough for today?” Namjoon raises the statement like a question, and Jimin raises an eyebrow at him.

“Just wait..one more thing.” Jimin says, reaching to hand Namjoon a portfolio. “It’s the paperwork.”

You flatten your tongue and take Namjoon’s length in whole again, and he leans forward in his chair for relief. His hips subtly buck up to get deeper in your throat, and he twitches in your mouth. His load spurts into the back of your throat and you try to hold yourself back from choking.

The thick, sticky cum drizzles from your mouth and lands on your white blouse, and you scrunch your face, mouthing “Fuck.” to yourself.

“To be honest, I can’t remember the last time we got through a brief uninterrupted.” Jimin comments. “But to each his own.”

“I won’t be needing this.” Namjoon sighs in relief after his release, picking the portfolio back up and handing it to Jimin.

“But it’s for your promotion.” Jimin tilts his head in confusion.

“I’ll explain later.” Namjoon responds, shaking his head.

✹✹✹

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” You lament, dripping water from a faucet onto your shirt. You pick up a Tide pen from the counter, frantically rubbing it into the fabric.

You came to the unfortunate resolution at this moment that Tide pens didn’t get cum out of shirts.

You blow at the stain and then dab it with a napkin before accepting defeat.

You toss the damp napkins into the trash and exit the bathroom.

You quickly shuffle down the hall, attempting to make it to the staircase before anyone sees you on Namjoon’s floor.

Jimin walks down the hall, catching sight of the back of your body as you run into the stairwell.

He smirks in relief, shaking his head.

✹✹✹

Both you and Namjoon sit across from Yoongi’s desk, awaiting his return to his office. You dig your fingers into the free spaces where Namjoon’s fingers rest on the edge of his chair, and you look up at him.

“I truly hope Yoongi takes this well.” You whisper, both of your lips embracing in a quick peck.

Yoongi returns, quietly sitting at his desk and observing the two of you.

You look at Namjoon and Namjoon looks at you, the both of you searching each other’s eyes to see who should speak first.

“To clear the very big elephant in the room...do you think I didn’t know about you two?” Yoongi asks, folding his hands together on the desk.

“You...know?” You ask, your eyes widening as you squeeze Namjoon’s hand.

Yoongi leaps back in his chair, laughing out loud -- the satisfied laugh nearly sinister. Yoongi swipes a tear from the edge of his eye, holding his chest to calm his laughter.

“You two are so obvious. Not subtle at all.” He gasps out, still trying to calm his breaths. “I should fire you both for violating company policy.”

Yoongi bursts into laughter again as he sees your worried expressions, and he wags his finger through the tears.

“Luckily. L-Luckily, I own the company.” He heaves. “And I’m giving you a pass.” He blows out air.

“Well...well that was part of the news.” You say, squeezing Namjoon’s hand. “We’ve always wanted to start something that was our very own.” You continue, looking over at Namjoon, and he nods. Your lips open cautiously: “We’re both resigning as of today, our last day fully effective in two weeks.”

“You’re totally fucking with me, right?” Yoongi asks before he stands up. You shake your head in response, and Yoongi collapses back into his chair.

“I have to admit...I’ve never seen the two of you happier, if I’m being honest.” His head drops into his hands as he falls into processing the dire reveal. “You both came in here young. Bright-eyed and bushy tailed. But...I saw you both fade in real time as you became hard-nosed execs on behalf of my company.”

Yoongi motions over his face. “It’s like the all light went out from your eyes.” He admits, looking up to study the both of you.

“You were both pivotal in the success of this company over the years, and I can only thank you for that. If being with each other is what brings you happiness, that’s the least I can give you in return.” Yoongi’s voice trembles a bit, and he clears his throat out of embarrassment; he wasn’t one to be choked up.

“Just don’t leave and become my competitor.” He chuckles, coming around to the front of his desk. “Now get out of my office.” He motions, shooing the two of you.

You giggle at Namjoon, and the two of you rise up from your chairs. You approach Yoongi slowly, looking at him as he tries to hide his forlorn eyes.

“Can I hug you?” You ask, and before he objects you collapse into his arms. Yoongi protests as Namjoon comes around to hug him as well, and Yoongi laughs as he melts into the embrace.

✹✹✹

“Well, well, well. Now we’re both the boss. How do you suppose we have hot hate sex now?” You ask, your fingers twiddling through Namjoon’s hair as you’re nested on his lap.

Floor-to-ceiling windows line the walls as far as you can see, and Namjoon wraps his hands around your waist.

The two of you are in a new, empty office space, and your eyes rove over to the desks and offices waiting to be filled.

“The money from that Blackjack game you beat me in while we were in Vegas came in handy for this new building.” He whispers in your ear before he places a kiss on your neck.

“But still kinda mad at you for beating my ass in that.” He chuckles, his voice vibrating in your ear.

“Seriously gonna hate fuck you again remembering that.” He growls. You giggle as he tries to put his hand up your skirt, and you lightly elbow him in the abdomen.

“Stop being naughty. They’ll be here any minute.” You pull your skirt back down, standing up and leaning on the front of Namjoon’s new desk.

Jimin and Taehyung both walk through the door of Namjoon’s new office, and you smile at the both of them.

“Well, if it isn’t our pesky love fairies.” You cross your arms, and Namjoon circles to the front of the desk with his hands in his pockets.

“Are you two ready to start work?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Taehyung responds first, giving you a subtle bow.

“We already dropped our things off at our desks and fired up our laptops.”

“Can we get you anything?” Jimin inquires, his brows raising as he awaits an answer. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Neither.” You respond, and Namjoon reaches behind him to pick up two silver nameplates. He gestures for the two to approach, and he hands them the pieces of metal.

“Associate…” The title doesn’t register until he reads it again, his brows coming together in disbelief. “Associate?” Taehyung asks, his voice rising up.

You laugh as the two jump up and down together, glee spreading across their faces.

“You’ve both worked hard...in more ways than one.” You giggle, hooking your arm in Namjoon’s. He lays his head on top of yours to affirm your statement.

“Just to show you both that all of the late nights...and plotting was worth it.”

All of you laugh in unison.

The four of you link your arms over each others shoulders and giggle as you approach the large windows — admiring the dazzling view of the city below.

navigation: ch. i | ch. ii | ch. iii | finale | m.list | ao3

[percabethfiles]

Charlie

Uh... Hello? Anybody still here? I haven't been around in years and years. But I keep my fandoms stored in some corner of my brain waiting for something to tug them out. And of all things this time it was Taylor Swift re-releasing her old songs, because I used to imagine so many percabeth scenes listening to "Fearless". So have this little something that's been sitting unfinished in my archives for years now.

Remember that time Percy saw Sadie Kane and thought “Hey, this is what mine and Annabeth’s daughter would look like”? Yes.

(Also there are small nods to that fic I wrote about Logan, Hidden Heritage, but I've been meaning to re-write it someday because there were SO MANY PLOT HOLES omg)

When they find out it’s a girl it’s a bit too soon to know for sure, or so the doctor tells them. They’ll have to wait for the next appointment to know for certain. “So don’t go buying any tiny dresses yet,” he jokes and they laugh along, but they’ve been together for approximately eighteen years now, they can tell what the other’s thinking with a glance and the ecstatic grin that breaks through their lips lets him know they’re on the same page. Too late. They’re already thinking plush bow and arrows and a Merida costume for her first Halloween.

Percy tries to keep his cool. As the weeks progress, he tries not to get his hopes up, but in his heart he knows already. They hadn’t really had a preference before, they’d been too happy knowing their baby was fully human and had all its limbs (with the number of deities they’d pissed off, you never knew), but a little girl? It feels right after their two boys, it feels like their family will be complete.

(He thinks about a slight blonde girl with streaked hair and a British accent dropping from the sky on a magic camel, remembers thinking “if Annabeth and I had a daughter…” and his chest squeezes tight with happiness so raw he has a little trouble breathing)

When the doctor beams at them next appointment and says “Congratulations, Jackson family, it really is a girl,” he’s not surprised, but no less elated. He doesn’t hear the lame joke about Jackson Five, he’s too busy trying to be a manly man and not burst into tears because he’s going to have a daughter. When Annabeth’s in the other room paying for the appointment, and he’s waiting for the doctor to print the really impressive high tech 3D picture of the ultrasound, the man asks him “So did you go ahead and buy a tiny dress anyway?”

Percy blushes.

The man shakes his head in amusement. “Every time”.

His work colleagues, proud dads of little girls themselves, try to terrorize him with tales of tea parties and future boyfriends, and Percy thinks somewhere in the middle of all that teasing they mean well, but really, he’s mostly annoyed. It’s not like he’s new to parenthood, he’s got two sons already and they seem to be turning out okay, and before, when Logan and Nathan were just a nice dream for the future, there was Estelle, the little sister Percy had never expected, but loved to bits all the same.

And then Charlie is born.

She’s tiny, warm and pink, all curled up in her yellow cable-knit blanket, a tuft of blonde hair peeking out of a tiny, tiny beanie, features scrunched into the most adorable variation of a grumpy face. He’s not new to parenthood, he’s been here twice before, but the rush of affection and protectiveness and awe and raw love is just as genuine. He’s smiling like a dork, can’t seem to stop, walking from side to side, avidly searching her traits. She’s bigger than Nate was when he’d been born, but smaller than Logan. Her hair was light, like Nate’s, would it stay blonde or darken with time? Would her eyes be like his or Annabeth’s? And oh, she had her mother’s nose (they all did).

It never fails to amaze him how such a small, vulnerable being can shake up his whole world until it’s made a space for her. And he’s done this before, he’s no first time sailor this time, he’d thought he had it all under control. But she blinks and looks up at him with half-lidded eyes and a frowny face and—they’re green. Her eyes are the blue-green Logan’s are, Percy’s are.

(He’s got two sons who are his life, and he does love all his children equally, but holding his daughter for the first time, he thinks he understands his friends’ warnings. He doesn’t love her more, it’s just… different. It’s special.)

When he goes back to work, Nick takes one look at him and bursts into laughter. He claps him on the shoulder in commiseration.

“I told you.”

He’s completely wrapped around her finger already.

It’s not too different, he finds out. Especially having been pre-trained by Estelle. He’s got to brush up on his Disney princess knowledge, and hair braiding skills. He hasn’t gotten much better at color coordinating the polka dotted bows and tiny shoes, but Charlie is really forgiving. She is a very happy baby, much happier and easy going than any of the boys had been.

She’s also fucking crazy.

She is smaller and skinnier than her brothers, likes to wear frilly dresses and talk to plush animals and dance around the house in a pink tutu, but she’s wild. She never learned to crawl, just held on to the couch until she was wobbling on two feet, and it seemed like the very next day she was running across the house, the mall, the park, and if he turned his eyes away for one second, she was shooting off in the streets and nearly getting run over.

He’d found her dangling from the kitchen cabinets, trying to reach the cowering cat. She had a phase when she thought she could fly and she would climb furniture and stairs and the window sill and just… Launch herself into the air expecting her flying powers to manifest spontaneously. If they hadn’t been trying to raise them away from the whole mythological world, he would have sat her down and clarified that she had the wrong Olympian Grandparent in mind. She might have had more luck jumping into the ocean.

She had a way to jut out her lower lip, and turn those big green eyes on him that could render his every effort to be a responsible parental presence useless.

Besides, she was so funny. He could never muster enough anger to discipline her, because if he found her on the kitchen table covered in peanut butter, somehow sporting a very sticky Mohawk, and looking entirely unapologetic, well, he just couldn’t stop laughing.

One day he’s coming home from work and he hasn’t even pulled the key from the lock when Charlie calls out ‘you’re back daddy,’ in what sounds vaguely like a new jersey accent. He finds her sitting on the floor of the living room, drowning in one of Annabeth’s bathrobes, pink plastic barbie sunglasses on, holding a pooh bear sippy cup with one hand and a pinky stretched out.

“Charlie, what are you doing?”

“It’s wine Wednesday, daddy.”

“It’s what?”

“Wine Wednesday.”

He had half a mind to check if her sippy cup actually contained wine because they hid their alcohol way up in the cabinets she can’t reach but that girl could climb like a monkey. He knows he should follow that remark up with some kind of questioning of where she’d even heard of ‘wine Wednesdays’ and then explain that kids don’t drink wine or some other kind of responsible parent speech, but a sudden burst of incredulous laughter bubbles up in his throat and he takes refuge in the kitchen, lest he encourages her behavior.

He finds Annabeth there, hand over her mouth, clearly in stitches over their daughter’s performance. He wants to question if she gave her permission to wear her bathrobe but finding his wife nearly doubled over in silent laughter in the kitchen is too much and he finally lets out the guffaw he’d been trying to hold on to.

It’s not the first time Charlie leaves them breathless with laughter, and he’s almost scared of what she’s going to cook up in the future.

Charlie is a hellion.

There isn’t one person safe from her pranks, but she’s so adorable she hardly ever catches hell for it, and she’s learning to use it in her favor – thankfully, just in time for her parents to develop immunity to her puppy eyes. And she’s… difficult, yes, but not always, and not in a terrible way. For all her climbing the roof, organizing illegal cookie sales, getting in fights with her classmates, she’s not a bad kid. She’s got Percy’s penchant for befriending the kids no one wants to go near, and defending her ragtag team of losers. She’s loyal to a fault, and it gets her in trouble often.

She and Nate have epic jealousy fights over everything, including – but not limited to – Logan’s attention, the crayons, the biggest piece of cake and all the videogame characters in the world are not enough, they will always want whatever the other picked. It gives them many, many headaches. Logan, on the other hand, positively spoils her, and whenever Charlie gets in trouble they can be sure to find her hiding behind her big brother while he gives them this solemn look and says “It’s ok, mom and dad, Charlie promises she won’t do it again. We’ve talked.”

When the whole “Logan being attacked by a dracanae in school and thus finding out his Olympian heritage” debacle came to pass, and they started frequenting camp again, there was nowhere in the entire Camp Charlie would rather be than the stables. She’d spend hours there with the Aphrodite kids, brushing the pegasi and talking to them endlessly about all her classmates and her friends, and her dolls, and her new dress, and the new book grandma gave her. It was all really cute until Percy realized the pegasi were talking back, and she fully understood their replies.

And it’s funny, really, because Logan had taken after Percy, to a point where bathing him had been hard as a child because he tended to stay dry in the tub, and Nathan was Annabeth to a T, but Charlie was a perfect mix of them both.

He guesses it makes sense it would be so explosive.

When Charlie is twelve, she gets kicked out of school.

Percy is not overly worried about it himself – the number of schools he’d been kicked out of reached double digits, and this was only her first – but he is worried about how she will feel. Getting the boot from a place that’s housed you for years, where your friends are, where everyone already knows you and having to start over is never pleasant, no matter how used to it you were.

He’d expected the school to have gotten tired of all her pranks and misbehaving, which was fair, he guessed. But when Annabeth comes home from the meeting with the school director, she is seething, and not at their daughter. Charlie is angry too. In fact, it’s the first time he’s ever seen his daughter well and truly pissed off. The two of them are a sight for nightmares, both blondes standing side by side ranting with righteous fury, they look ready to start a revolution. What he gets from her angry snarls and Charlie’s rushed rambling is that Charlie had talked back to a teacher that was picking on the autistic kid and demeaning the thirteen year old who was repeating sixth grade.

She’d called him a brain-washing small minded overgrown bully who, he was quoting, didn’t get enough love from his parents.

And Percy is so proud his eyes even get a little misty.

Because he’s getting old and sentimental and raising kids is very hard. No one knows what they’re doing, not one person, not even the fancy psychologists with those books on raising perfect, well rounded, high-achieving members of society that Annabeth insisted on reading when she was pregnant with Logan. You do your best and you hope for the best, and you don’t know what you get until it’s basically too late to do anything about it. And even if he did have the best mom in the history of the entire world to draw example from, he was also half of an absent Olympian father whose heritage condemned him to dance in and out of battlefields half his life.

He’s always been terrified of being a crap father.

He looks at Charlie cussing out with every mild version of actual cuss words, stalking around the kitchen like a little lioness in a cage, furious at the unfairness of the whole situation, caring less about being expelled and more about who was going to defend her friends from that awful teacher when she’s gone.

His daughter is only twelve, but she’s already so brave, such a force of nature. She won’t stand for injustice, and she won’t take insult lying down. And she’s so kind. She’s growing up, and the person she is slowly turning out to be… is good.

And something in his heart shifts and settles down, smooths over old fears and anxious thoughts.

Percy doesn’t mean to brag, but he thinks he’s not doing half bad as a parent.

[loveactionsspeaklouder]

we belong together - kylian mbappé and julian draxler fanfic

10| Hold On

a/n: the song used in this chapter is Chord Overstreet - Hold on - check it out!!

february 2024| paris

Molly glanced at her watch and then her computer screen; she was sat at her desk in the Camp des Loges, patiently waiting for her work day to be finished. It had been two weeks since her conversation with Kylian and she still hadn't seen Adam, his work holiday had lasted longer than expected. Maybe I could look him up, she thought. She knew it was silly, but it was the only option she had. It wasn't like she didn't trust Adam, she just wanted to be certain about her decision. The conversation with Kylian had hit her hard, she realised how cruel she was being.

After having to spend the past fourteen days alone in her apartment, she knew she could do a lot of thinking about the decisions in her life she was desperately needing to make. Molly found herself always wanting to talk to Julian, she was starting to develop strong feelings for him. They kept their distance, not wanting to do anything until she had fully spoken to Adam.

Kylian, on the other hand, was miserable. His pregnant fiancé was somewhere in Italy, posing for the cameras, leaving him all alone in their shared home. He remembered the last time Rosalie was away for a long period, he would find himself fulfilling his needs with his former girlfriend. He realised he couldn't do that now; a, she didn't want to speak to him and b, their affair didn't exist anymore. And you only have yourself to blame, he reminded himself. Like Molly said, you always choose Rosalie.

....

february 2024| paris

"What are you doing here Julian?" Molly chuckled. It was a quiet Thursday night; laptop was open with work, music was on the TV, wine was in her glass and she was alone, but she was okay with that. She needed the wine to calm herself down, she knew Adam was due back at the weekend.

"I wanted to see you," Julian blushed. He kissed her cheek and rested himself on the couch, patting the space next to him. She rolled her eyes and closed the door, walking over to where he was sat and straddling his lap. He softly ran his hands down her thighs.

"Did you miss me Juju?" she sniggered. She pinched his cheeks and pecked his nose. He glared at the use of her new nickname for him; he preferred it to the nickname Freddie had given him, Julie. Molly playfully pouted at his reaction and snuggled her head into the crook of his neck. "I'm happy you're here."

Julian tenderly stroked her cheek; he moved his lips closer to hers, stopping a few millimetres apart. "Are you sure?" he whispered. Molly nodded and wrapped her arms around his neck. He grinned and passionately kissed her, moving his hands to her waist to pull her closer to his body. They kissed for a few minutes, only pulling away to take a breath. "When's Adam ba...?"

"I love this song," Molly interrupted. "Please can we dance?" she begged. Julian chuckled at her enthusiasm but agreed, he stood up and intertwined their fingers, walking over to a free space. It wasn't a secret that she knew how to move her body, but neither of them had danced with each other. She wrapped her arms around his neck, whilst he placed his hands on her hips. She rested her head on his chest and closed her eyes, listening to the lyrics.

Hold on, I still want you

Come back, I still need you

Julian closed his eyes and delicately held Molly's body. He missed the feeling he got when he was with her; their romance didn't last long, but it was long enough for him to fall completely in love with the brunette. He didn't admit it back then, but it broke his heart to see her with Kylian. But he loved her and he only wanted what was best for her. He now hoped that she felt the same.

Let me take your hand, I'll make it right

I swear to love you all my life

Hold on, I still need you

He intertwined their fingers and gently spun her around. She softly giggled at him continuing to turn at a slow place. Julian gazed at Molly with adoration; in his eyes, she was perfect, she was everything he had wanted. He wrapped his arms back around her body, breathing in her scent. He tenderly kissed her forehead, resting his head on her shoulder before closing his eyes again.

Hold on, I still want you

Come back, I still need you

He opened his eyes and caught her gaze. He couldn't help but smile at the sight; a rosy-cheeked Molly, her blue eyes shining and her lips slightly parted. He cupped her cheeks and moved his lips closer. "Hold on, I still want you. Come back, I still need you," Julian quietly sang along, his eyes glossy. "I knew you were still in there."

She laughed at his actions (mainly because of his terrible, but cute, singing). She grabbed his hands and softly swayed them, the alcohol in her veins allowing her to chuckle more. "I tried so hard," Molly confessed. "But you are the only person who can bring it out of me."

Julian pushed her hair out her eyes and kissed her forehead. "I don't think it's wrong for you to change some aspects of who you are," he softly spoke. "But I don't want you to lose yourself again. I'm here and I'm not going anywhere."

....

february 2024| paris

Molly was finally about to have her much needed conversation with Adam. He had returned home from his business trip; she'd had a few days to rehearse what she was going to say, but as she found herself sat in front of him, she still didn't have a clue how she was going to word it. "How was your trip?"

"Fine," Adam nervously smiled. He chewed his lip and gazed at the brunette. She looked happy, he hoped the news he was about to tell her didn't ruin that. "Moll, I need to tell yo..."

"You fucking arsehole!" Molly's jaw dropped when she saw Kylian swing her apartment door open, his eyes full of rage. He slammed the door shut and walked closer to Adam, connecting his fist with the Englishman's face. "You're a piece of shit, how could you!"

Molly moved herself in-between the two men, shoving the Frenchman to the other couch. "Stop!" she screamed. She passed Adam a bag of ice and turned to face Kylian, she narrowed her eyes at him and shot him a questioning look. "Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

He sarcastically chuckled, glaring at the figure behind her. "Why don't you ask him," he scoffed. "Have you asked him where he's been the past two weeks?"

"Molly hear me out, I..."

"Hear you out? You should be lucky I haven't punched you again," Kylian spat. Molly shushed him and turned to Adam, softening her eyes and placing a hand over his, waiting for his response. "Oh, I can't wait for this."

He took a deep breath, removing the ice from his bruised cheek. "I was with Rosalie," he started. Molly rapidly blinked, confused at what she was hearing. She looked at Kylian, who was tapping a finger on his knee, trying to contain the growing anger building up inside of him. "We bumped into each other in Italy; she was there for a shoot and I was there for work, I don't know how but our paths crossed."

"What happened between you two?"

"We started talking about our relationships and bonded," Adam sighed. He took a quick glance at Molly, she calmingly smiled at him. "She was there longer than I was, so I decided to stay. We went out one night and I got drunk and kissed her."

Molly stayed silent, processing the information she had just heard. She realised she couldn't be angry, she had done far worse. She was more disappointed in Rosalie, knowing her situation with Kylian. But he's done worse to her. She heard him move from the couch and angrily walked towards her bedroom, banging the door shut. She went over and hugged Adam, softly whispering in his ear. "I'm not angry. I'll go speak to him."

She ran a hand through her hair before opening the door, she saw Kylian looking out of the window. She walked over and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her head on his shoulder. "You know you can't be angry."

"I know," he exhaled. "That's what's making it fucking worse."

"Kylian, look at me," Molly demanded. She spun him around, cupping his cheeks. She noticed the hurt in his eyes. He really cares about her, she thought. "We need to forget this happened. I can't tell Adam the truth; not only did we kiss, but we flipping slept together. You're going to be a father, I can't ruin that for you."

"So, what are you going to do? Keep lying to him," Kylian suddenly yelled. He folded his arms with an angry frown on his face. "I can't see you with anyone else."

"You're not listening to me," she mumbled. She sat on the bed, closed her eyes and slowly rubbed circles on her temples. "You're going to be a father, I can't take you away from that. We aren't good for each other Ky; I love you but I can't be with you."

"So, you just keep lying and pre..."

"Who's lying about what?" Adam unexpectedly questioned. Molly looked up and saw him leaning against the door, she loudly sighed and held her head in her hands. "Am I interrupting something?"

"Yes," Kylian hissed. Adam raised an eyebrow, he was trying to piece together what was going on. He remembered some of the conversations with Rosalie, he found it strange how protective Kylian was of Molly. He looked between the pair, eyeing his girlfriend. "Leave."

"No!" Molly abruptly stood up and moved closed to Adam. "I've been lying to you," she started. "The reason I wasn't mad about what happened between you and Rosalie, is because I've done something worse."

"What?"

"I've been having an affair, for the past couple of weeks."

Adam was speechless. He shook his head and sat down, pushing Molly's hand away when she attempted to touch him. He looked up at her, his eyes dark and full of rage. "With who?" his voice coming out low and intimidating. She eyed Kylian and gulped, he went to grab her hand but she spoke first, rendering him to speechless.

"Julian."

....

a/n: everything is coming out now!!! so, rosalie and adam... unexpected! finally he knows about molly’s affair (even if it is with the wrong person, but yolo) 

who do we prefer - kylian and molly OR julian and molly??

stay safe xxx

[chicagoindiecritics]

New Written Review from Mike Crowley on You’ll Probably Agree: 10 Reasons Why ‘Blade Runner 2049’ is better than ‘Blade Runner’

If you haven’t’ seen the movie, see it then read this. No intro, let’s jump right in.

1. K is a replicant

The reveal of K’s genetic code, or lack thereof, flips everything we assume the movie will be on its head. We are learning along with K what it means to exist. Do we as humans, live like replicants? Do we obey a society that treats us like trash but breath anyways out of the fear of death? Where we viewed “Blade Runner” mostly through Deckard’s eyes who didn’t have much of a personality, K’s lack of a character is his entire purpose for existing. For K to emote is to face death.

Where Harrison Ford’s Deckard entire arc was us questioning if he’s human or not (despite what Ridley Scott unequivocally says), there’s nothing much of substance to Officer Deckard. He gets drunk, retires replicants, that’s it. Name one thing that makes Deckard standout? I’ll wait. Ryan Gosling’s Officer K goes from a machine that is dying spiritually on the inside to someone wanting to have a purpose in life. All while maintaining his composure, if perhaps too much poise for the film. Anything with a conscious can feel. Whether or not how it was made is as relevant as where you were born or what skin color you are. The importance is that you’re here.

K doesn’t seek gratitude nor affirmation. He doesn’t suffer from a narcissistic personality. All he wants is not just to be another useless piece of metal.

2. Deckard has depth this time

Being a daddy changes you a lot. Rick isn’t just a slouchy drunk who likes to shoot robots out of legal obligation. He’s a man who’s principles and love for forbidden things cost him his life. What kind of soul did Deckard have in the first film? Who did he care for? Please don’t say, Rachel, we all know why he was attracted to Rachel. Like Winston in 1984, Deckard rejects Big Brother for a life of pain to gain a glimmer of happiness. 

3. It’s horrifyingly relevant

Denis Villeneuve based the imagery in 2049 on a planet that has become degraded with pollution. The buildings are extrapolating enormous amounts of water into the atmosphere, the sea wall at the end of the picture will be our new Mount Rushmore, the orange Vegas is happening now. Denis Villeneuve didn’t predict the earth looking like this, but his production team was still spot on. A picture that transcends its very style, developing a look that will be discussed on its merits separate from the ubiquitous original, is a stunning achievement.

Everything isn’t dystopian because that’s the way it was in the book. It’s what will happen to us in real life, why we’d look for colonies to live on if we had the technology or funding towards NASA to do so. God help us all.

4. The love story questions the essence of relationships

The story between K and Joi further examines the meaning of love, sex, and mortality, with the two being different versions of artificiality. When the default sexed-up version of a naked Joy pops up on the screen, we are emotionally mortified. Some of us may be repulsed to observe a character we care for utilized like a thirsty Godzilla.

The towering ad tries to seduce K tempting him to buy it, rendering everything Joi said to K throughout the picture questionable. Its manipulation solidifies his final decision in life to help another man. We’re not sure if she loved him or said what it thought it wanted him to hear throughout the narrative. Possibly Joi herself didn’t know her intentions. An unusual amount of nuance and uncertainty rests in the love story. Who do we love? Why do we love? Do we love by the heart or the heart of our designers whom we don’t know?

Meanwhile, Deckard was just drunk and horny when he bashed Rachel up against the wall. Sorry, that really was all there was to their passion despite what Wallace says.

5. The movie was an honest commentary about how the world views woman

Here’s a controversial one. A lot of women were disgusted by the way they were depicted in the film. Outwardly watching the movie, I can’t blame them. I’ll let Mr. Villeneuve speak for himself. “I am very sensitive to how I portray women in movies. This is my ninth feature film and six of them have women in the lead role. The first Blade Runner was quite rough on the women, something about the film noir aesthetic. But I tried to bring depth to all the characters. For Joi, the holographic character, you see how she evolves. It’s interesting, I think. What is cinema? Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind on women.”

Villeneuve is right. Women today are still sexualized. Even with the Me Too movement, women are continually seen as sex objects or subservient slaves in a male-dominated society. Villeneuve isn’t interested in painting a rosy picture that Hollywood does for female roles to make the audiences feel comfortable. It’s an honest reflection on who we are. What we see is what we don’t want to see, but that’s part of the honesty of cinema.

6. The score is mesmerizing

Another point in which I may face some contention. Yes, Vangelis’ score is iconic, but it only works for the era it was composed in. Much of its mixture of bleeps, blops, and wind chimes are a product of its time. A lot of emotion is missing from the score other than the opening theme and “Tears In Rain.” Hearing much of the soundtrack while on the road, I sometimes thought I was listening to something from a porno. Take a listen to “Wait For Me” in the soundtrack and tell me otherwise. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Walfisch’s score is timeless while also paying respect to Vangelis’ synthetic use in the original. It dives into the character’s mind providing a replication of something more human than what Vangelis composed.

7. It thematically ties more directly to “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” than “Blade Runner” does.

“Blade Runner” got the overall gist of Phillip K Dick’s novel. Replicants are scared, trying to find a way to survive as Deckard hunts them down. However, the Andies in the movie almost deserve to die. In their quest for more life, they torture and kill multiple civilians. What did the guy making the eyes do to deserve being frozen to death? What about J.R. Sebastian? He was nothing but pleasant to Roy and Pris. Did Roy eye gauge him when he was done with Tyrell?

Aside from Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), our replicants are fully rounded people. Sapper Morton is a watchful protector who was meant to be a NEXUS 8 combat medic; Joi’s true intentions come into question for herself and us. K’s inner conflict is the central core of the story. All of this revolves around the meaning of existence within a world that has forgotten about you. The introduction of Robo procreation is an evolution of Dick’s ideas, widening his notion of why life exists in the first place.

8. It doesn’t get lost in the scale

Many sequels love scope over characters. Remember “The Matrix”? Remember how they talked about Zion and all these other things we didn’t see? When the sequels brought in Zion, the focus got lost in the spectacle. “The Matrix Reloaded” was a bumbling CGI mess of Agent Smith Clones and cave orgies. “The Matrix Revolutions” was a glorified “Space Invaders” game. Shoot as many sentinels as you can before becoming overwhelmed. Amidst the sequels bumbling chaos, I missed the smaller scale of the Nebuchadnezzar crew.

The story of “2049” could have focused on the replicant uprising with thousands of robots slamming into humans. We could have gone off-world to finally see what all these other colonies we’ve heard about are like. Some have argued that the movie could have borrowed some of its source material from the later novels about replicants creating humans, so on and so forth. All of that sounds incredible in theory. In execution, you would likely get “The Matrix” sequels.

A movie that overreaches in scope, attempting to please fans by showing everything. What we got was an incredibly meaningful story that further explores the themes of the original while building upon its world without going too far. We see what’s beyond L.A. on the dilapidated west coast. The answer is not much. The film aims at minimalism over extravaganza.

9. We’re still talking about it

After being MIA for decades, “Blade Runner 2049” isn’t forgotten. I can’t say the same for “Superman Returns,” “Monsters University,” “The Incredibles 2,” “Live Free or Die Hard,” and “Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull.” In fairness, people do talk about Indy 4, but not in a positive fashion. “Blade Runner 2049” returned to the limelight with disastrous box office results yet high accolades, even gaining the Academy’s attention. Ironically it seemed destined to live the life of its predecessor.

“2049” may have tanked because it was a multimillion-dollar art film that respected its audience’s intelligence. Maybe “Blade Runner” was too far gone amongst the public to gain an interest geared almost entirely towards comic books and Disney. I think the trailers after the reveal teaser looked too generic for my own two cents, turning me off from the film for a short while.

Here we are with Honest Trailers in 2020, making a video about a film that came out in 2017. Bloodsoaked orange skies from the headlines mention the atmosphere of this film. Somewhere, about 100 other people are writing their analysis of “Blade Runner 2049” as I type right now. Seven years from now, we’ll be talking about why the world is still like “Blade Runner 2049.” Villeneuve made a timeless sequel to be remembered.

10. It’s better than the first film and one of the best films in the last ten years

Here’s why you’ll probably agree with this one when you put your pitchfork down. Remove your nostalgia goggles. I know it’s hard to do, please, trust me. Look at the points I made above. Think about how ironic the love story is to our lives. The layers of meaning behind K’s existence is lightyears beyond the featureless Rick Deckard. The picture isn’t flawless. Niander Wallace is spectacularly corny in his scenery-chewing grim monologues. Dr. Eldon Tyrell had some ambiguity regarding the morale of his intentions. For that, I’ll give the original the benefit of my doubt. I understand Ryan Gosling was cast to be intentionally deadpan, but it’s okay to emote once. His distant stare in all of his other performances made it difficult for me to discern myself from the actor’s rather dull persona.

With this said, “Blade Runner 2049” understands cinema. Its atmosphere is why we venture into a dark room that takes us to a different place. Denis Villeneuve’s masterful follow up is one of the most orgasmic cinematic experiences I have witnessed in the last ten years that demands a re-screening in 2022 when theatres reopen at an entirely safe capacity. The style doesn’t overshadow its substance, which is far richer in detail than the original without grasping at blatant metaphors. “Blade Runner 2049” is slow cinema at its finest, letting us into the character’s heads, knowing when to be quiet and when to be loud.

Like “The Empire Strikes Back,” not everyone appreciated the movie at first. Time has been incredibly kind to it, though. I wish the Academy recognized “Blade Runner 2049” beyond its technical marvels in 2018. I suppose it wasn’t the type of picture that catches Oscar voter’s eyes. But it has acquired the audience’s to this day. Now, if you could just look up and to the left for me?

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[lins-fandom-hub]

HPHM Profile: Clara Lin

Template by @hogwartsmystory​

Identity

Name: Clara Xing-Hui Lin (林星慧）

Gender: Female

Age: 17 as of May 31, 1990

Birth Date: April 25, 1973

Species: Human

Blood Status: (Pureblood, Half-Blood, Muggleborn)

Half-Blood? Both her parents are Muggleborn and were chosen by magical institutions to study magic.

Sexuality: Heterosexual.

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Ethnicity: Chinese

Nationality: English? She’s born in England after all.

Residence: Oxford, England

Myer Briggs Personality Type: ESTJ

The Mage

1st Wand: Acacia wood with Unicorn Hair, 12 inches, pliable

A very unusual wand wood, which I have found creates tricky wands that often refuse to produce magic for any but their owner, and also withhold their best effects from all but those most gifted. This sensitivity renders them difficult to place, and I keep only a small stock for those witches or wizards of sufficient subtlety, for acacia is not suited to what is commonly known as ‘bangs-and-smells’ magic. When well-matched, an acacia wand matches any for power, though it is often underrated due to the peculiarity of its temperament.

2nd Wand: Ebony wood with Dragon Heartstring, 11 and a quarter inches

This jet-black wand wood has an impressive appearance and reputation, being highly suited to all manner of combative magic, and to Transfiguration. Ebony is happiest in the hand of those with the courage to be themselves. Frequently non-conformist, highly individual or comfortable with the status of outsider, ebony wand owners have been found both among the ranks of the Order of the Phoenix and among the Death Eaters. In my experience the ebony wand’s perfect match is one who will hold fast to his or her beliefs, no matter what the external pressure, and will not be swayed lightly from their purpose.

Animagus: Chinese Li Hua (a type of tabby cat found in China)

Misc Magical Abilities: (Legilimen, Seer, Parselmouth, Obscurial, ect)

In the canon story, Clara is a born Legilimens, first practising the art with a wand and under Snape’s tutelage before perfecting the art on her own time without the pressure of the final Curse on Hogwarts and without a wand. It made reading the minds of her family much easier, especially when it came to how they felt about Jacob’s return and the downfall of the Lin reputation all those years ago. In a way, she tried to use it for good.

Boggart Form: 

Considering that Clara’s got as many fears as the typical human being, it could take the form of knives coming her way, or a puddle of blood turning into a torrential flood around her ankles. But her biggest fear, and hence her Boggart, was hearing her friends and family say that she was hopeless, worthless, and useless. Backstabbers, to put it concisely. Her Boggart would be in the form of her friends and people she trusted coming in at her, spitting out those words she didn’t want to hear.

Riddikulus Form: 

If said Boggart appears before her, Riddikulus would make their tongues all tied and saying such pure nonsense that it’d make her laugh. Why would she feel bad about imagining them affected with the Tongue Tying Curse, anyway? They’re not real.

Amortentia: (What do they smell like?)

If anyone was to smell Clara’s scent, they’d smell jasmine, burning wood, and a hint of orange juice. Okay, don’t ask about the orange juice. Something citrussy goes well with something sweet.

Amortentia: (What do they smell?)

Clara would smell petrichor, fresh linens, and an aromatic sort of wood--pine, maybe? Not sure? Something that calls her to the woods.

(*cough cough* totally not *cough* Barnaby’s *cough* scent *cough*)

Patronus: 

Clara’s Patronus is a unicorn--a pure creature with a sole intent to protect, it can outrun any danger and face it head on.

Patronus Memory: 

You mean her happiest memory? Seeing the stars one summer with Jacob and her little sister, Em, one summer. Feeling the close ties of her siblings was what made her happy.

Mirror of Erised: 

In the past, she would have seen herself surrounded by all the people she loved, just being happy together. This image used to include Rakepick until she revealed her true colours in the Buried Vault--since then, her image had been forcefully shunned.

Following certain events in year 6 that caused Clara to lose her friend, the reflection had now changed to an image of Clara and Rowan, both sitting together and laughing together like they used to in old times. The sight of their smiles would have been enough for Clara to just sit in front of the mirror without any sense of time. If only she could have done something to save her best friend...her tree twin...

Specialized/Favourite Spells:

Reparo (and yes, she is fully aware that this does not heal a broken heart)

Incendio

Stupefy

Protego

Appearance

Faceclaim: N/A

**I haven’t thought of a face claim at all when making Clara, as she’s literally based off of me, appearance and personality wise. So we’ll say I’m her face claim? Though I’m not that comfortable allowing a picture of myself to circulate around Tumblr, so I’m going to leave this part out.

Height: 5′7″

Weight: I mean, she’s not overweight but not underweight? Does that count?

Physique: Somewhat slender figure, overall an average build

Eye Colour: Dark brown

Hair Colour: Black

Skin Tone: Pale

Body Modifications: N/A. She does wear glasses, though.

Scarring: N/A

Inventory: (what do they carry on them?)

a lucky Knut from her sister

her textbooks

her quills

her ink

two silk bookmarks

her wand

a couple pieces of miscellaneous candy

Allegiances

Hogwarts House: Gryffindor

Ilvermorny House: Pukwudgie

Affiliations/Organizations:

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Gryffindor House)

Auror Office, Ministry of Magic, London

Chinese Wizarding Task Force, Beijing

Professions:

Auror

Free-lance Magizoologist

Free-lance Curse-Breaker

Free-lance pianist/musician

Hogwarts Information

Class Proficiencies:

Astronomy: E

Charms: O

DADA: O

Flying: E

Herbology: E

History of Magic: E

Potions: O

Transfiguration: O

Electives: Care of Magical Creatures (O), Divination (A), Arithmancy (E)

Quidditch: Gryffindor Chaser from year 3 to year 6 at Hogwarts

Extra Curricular: 

Frog Choir

Music Club

Duelling Club (on occasion)

Favourite Professors:

Professor Minerva McGonagall

As Head of Gryffindor House, Clara looks up to her a lot and always turns to her for troubling issues arising. Well, it wasn’t solely based on the fact that she’s Head of Gryffindor that she felt so connected with her. She had a strict air but it was not always for the worst circumstances. In some ways she reminded her of her mom. 

Professor Filius Flitwick

As Jacob really loved Professor Flitwick, Clara always tried her best to make Flitwick proud of her Charms work. In a way, though, she always felt like he was encouraging her to do her best every time, almost the same way Jacob might have if he was still present with her. Besides, Flitwick was an insightful person when it came to certain magical phenomena she didn’t understand.

Least Favourite Professors:

Professor Sybill Trelawney

There was something a little off about the way Trelawney presented herself to her Divination class, and honestly it made Clara question her legitimacy in her pursued arts. However, she did well not to question it openly, as she knew Trelanwney would do more than challenge her.

Professor Severus Snape

She knew she could trust him, but his sullen disposition still scares her and makes her very wary about him. Truly, she couldn’t find herself entrusting him with even the most serious of her secrets and problems. Nothing good would come out of their interactions, even if he did show a sliver of care for the girl.

Relationships

Brother: Jacob Pan-Hui Lin

Jacob Lin is her closest sibling and the one person she knew she would always stand by no matter what. After all, they were close when they were kids, despite him being 6 years older than MC.

In the olden days, he used to tease her a lot on her potential music career. It wasn’t bad, of course--just something for lighthearted fun.

Jacob’s known to be quite the fashionable neat wizard in his old days. He was really picky about what he wore and how his hair looked before heading out for the day. Eventually those thoughts faded away with time.

When he attended Hogwarts, Jacob was Sorted into Gryffindor.

Most of his time at Hogwarts was a mystery, but few people who came in after his expulsion knew that he wrote in a private notebook, had a chamber where he sorted all his information and gathered clues about the Cursed Vaults, and left in his wake a rather...interesting mix of emotions.

Jacob didn’t want to be a Curse-Breaker at first, but the Cursed Vaults kept luring him in that direction until he eventually accepted its calling. Well, with severe consequences, of course. 

Misc Siblings:

Little Sister: Emily Wen-Hui Lin

Emily, often nicknamed little Em by the two older siblings, is 5 years younger than MC. She was very young when Jacob disappeared, thus she had very little memories of her brother.

There were only a few moments little Em could remember when her parents were actually peaceful and at ease. Most of their time, though, was spent fighting, and...well...let’s just say she tried to ease the rifts but with no luck.

When she eventually entered Hogwarts, while her older sister is in sixth year, she got Sorted into Hufflepuff, making her the only sibling in the family to be Sorted in a different house apart from both her siblings.

Upon her graduation, Em went on to become a professional herbologist and potioneer, working closely with Penny and Chiara in her endeavours

Father: Sueh-Yen Lin

Sueh-Yen was born in China and attended Mahoutokoro at the age of 7. Following the end of his magical education he began to pursue his passions in herbology in London, where he met Clara’s mother, Renee Tao. After he became a family man, he began to work as a landscaper, helping other people design and nurture their gardens both Muggle and magical. Following Clara’s fourth year, he began to work at the Ministry of Magic in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes.

Mother: Renee Lin (nee Tao)

Renee was born and raised in America, attending Ilvermorny and being sorted into the Horned Serpent house. While she was at school she developed an interest in psychology and the mind, and so she began to take up studies in such areas and continued to branch her studies further after her graduation. She attended a Muggle university in England then, majoring in psychology, and eventually she met Clara’s father. She began to write books for both Muggle and wizarding communities after she became a mother, her topics focusing on proper child discipline for parents. Following Clara’s fourth year, she also took up work at the Ministry of Magic, in the same department as her husband.

Love Interest: Barnaby Lee

Before Clara’s third year, Barnaby was an insignificant student whose name had been mentioned once or twice by her peers. Then she knew of him in his third year, and at first they couldn’t stand each other. At least, Clara couldn’t stand him. Eventually they warmed up to each other through an uneasy, almost awkward, interaction in the Three Broomsticks following a duel. Well, you can find all the information on their relationship here. 

Best Friends: Rowan Khanna, Penny Haywood, Nymphadora Tonks, Tulip Karasu, Jae Kim, Charlie Weasley, Diego Caplan, Liz Tuttle, Badeea Ali

Rival: Merula Snyde

Enemy: Rakepick, R, Voldemort

Dormmates: Rowan Khanna, three other female Gryffindors

Pets: Clara was allowed to take Wagner (her owl) and her cat (Chopin) home after every year at school. As for the other pets in her dormitory, she would give them all to Hagrid every year before leaving Hogwarts for the summer.

Closest Canon Friends: 

Rowan Khanna

Nymphadora Tonks

Penny Haywood

Tulip Karasu

Charlie Weasley

Closest MC Friends: 

Sarahi Silvers (@dat-silvers-girl)

Aleksia Aries (@aleksia-aries-hogwartsmystery)

Aisilng Baskerville (@elefseija)

Helene Adler (@heleneplays)

Carewyn Cromwell (@carewyncromwell)

Kyril Vasiley (@kyril-hphm​)

Cato Reese (@catohphm​)

Xia Howlett (@ljthebard1​)

Katriona Cassiopeia (@mcnullychaser​)

Montague Donohue (@montaguehphm​)

Septimus Crowe (@brothergrimm71​)

That’s all for now unless you want me to add your MC to the list...

Flavio Ceccere (@sirfluffig​)

Alvina Arcane-Zheng ( @oneirataxia-girl )

Background/History

Born on April 25, 1973, Clara was surrounded by love from her first cry

Okay, well, you know how it is--babies cry the instance they’re born, so don’t shun me for saying this

Clara first witnessed her parents’ occupations watching them work at home when she was young. She always loved interacting with the plants whenever she helped her dad in the family garden, and she saw her mom’s growing success with her expertise on child discipline translated into writing

When her little sister was born, Clara and Jacob both loved her dearly, but as she was too young at the time they relied on each other for many things

Clara began to take up playing the piano when she was around four years old--she first learned from a teacher just down the street for about five years, then she continued learning on her own

Her interest peaked when she was young and she saw some street musicians performing on the streets. She took up said instrument as a hobby, and eventually developed a gift for music through her education.

Clara got glasses when she was seven years old due to prolonged exposure to tiny notes on the paper. Yes, that’s a valid reason for people to get glasses. Since then, she had to go to yearly eye appointments every summer just to make sure her eyesight isn’t getting worse.

Jacob went to Hogwarts, and soon Clara saw his transformation due to his slow growing obsession with the Cursed Vaults

Eventually, when Jacob went missing in the beginning of June 1984, it was the family’s last straw

Clara’s parents both began to row over every single little thing now, leaving poor Em almost traumatized and scared of arguments

Em had been told at the time that Jacob was on vacation, thus she didn’t understand why her parents were arguing so much

Clara’s mother had resigned from writing another book after Jacob’s disappearance, having received so many negative reviews from critics (and she had been bombarded by owls with such slander)

The family gardens almost completely wilted in her father’s negligence, and had it not been for little Em the garden would have withered completely

The events of Hogwarts Mystery unfolded

Following Clara’s graduation, she began to work as an Auror in training alongside Tonks and Talbott

She and Barnaby, her love interest, got a place of their own, where they lived happily for a while

Three years into living together, Barnaby and Clara got engaged

In the summer of 1995, shortly before their initial wedding, Clara was called away for about a year and a half to China

The dark wizards expelled from Mahoutokoro have now started their own band and began to infiltrate most of China by the time Voldemort had risen once more. Clara was dispatched to Beijing, China, at her own will, and with the help of some other wizards and witches in the group they trained together and began to take down these Japanese foes

During this time, Clara stayed with her maternal grandmother (her grandfather passed away during her fifth year), occasionally visiting her paternal grandmother once in a while to make sure everything there was okay

The training with this task force was very different from her training as an Auror given the circumstances. Clara had to learn to work not only with her wand, but also in martial arts (notably taichi, taekwondo, and kung fu). She was also given a magic carpet to travel from one place to another in place of her broom.

Clara only returned to the United Kingdom when she heard of Dumbledore’s death, and attended his funeral. However, she had to return to China shortly after as the dark forces there got so strong that the task force could not hold them back without her. 

Clara returned to the UK once and for all on May 1, 1998, and fought alongside her friends in the Battle of Hogwarts and survived. She married Barnaby following the end of the war, but not before they and their surviving friends first paid tribute to the fallen.

The Chinese Wizarding Task Force disbanded upon Voldemort’s fall.

They eventually had three children--Melvin and Milo (twin boys) and Sylvia--and they lived in peace ever since.

Personality

Clara’s a very well-rounded person who understands that life is all about taking risks and making mistakes along the way

Okay, well maybe one shouldn’t solely focus on making mistakes. She just acknowledges that not every person is made perfect and so she embraces everyone’s different personalities, understanding every flaw that made them who they are.

She’s analytical in many circumstances, always stepping carefully in every interaction and situation to avoid any sudden flares of attacks

She’s studious in academics, and friendly around many people, to put it in short

She won’t hesitate to help anyone, but if they knew they lied, she could never find it in her to forgive them

If someone tries to double cross her, though, she’d get really angry and wouldn’t hesitate to show her opponents how powerful she could be.

Misc

Clara’s not a very good cook. It wasn’t until her detention in fifth year when she was asked to make a simple sandwich, and from there she began to work on her rough cooking talents--almost none when she first started, and still basic when she left, but it was enough for her to sustain a simple meal.

Professor McGonagall gave Clara a room for her to practice piano at Hogwarts if things became too stressful. Not many people stumble upon this room except for one particularly curious person...

Though Clara’s dorm was decked in red, her favourite colour was actually purple. And blue. No, she couldn’t choose between the two.

Clara would always have a mug by her bedside so that whenever she had a nightmare she would make herself a mug of hot chocolate (and yes, in the middle of the night--don’t ask)

Clara could speak somewhat fluent Mandarin. She eventually continued to hone that skill when she was in Beijing working with the Chinese Wizarding Task Force.

More facts to come...

[therealmiztodz]

I have recently become an entrepreneur.  This means loads of hours, and some days, next to no returns.  There are highs and lows, and we all read about it, but I don’t think I realized the depth of the lows.  Sure, it’s great to celebrate the “wins”, and the buzz is indescribable when you feel the returns of the hours put in; but these lows - gosh - I won’t lie; I was not as ready as I though I was. 

A few hours ago, I closed my laptop after spending hours (early hours of the morning, just as a side note) working. The blistering cold weather didn’t help, either, but I am really really trying to change my way of handling and managing things in my life instead of moaning and complaining. In fact, this is what made me write this blog post actually.  Hell, it’s why I STARTED this blog.  As I was saying, I closed my laptop after hours of working, which felt like second after second of fruitlessness, and just burst into tears. After the tears, came my usual self-slaughtering. I really went to town on myself, digging into my past, my childhood, my experiences and the people I have had the misfortune of meeting along the way. 

Yes, I am fully aware that we all go through shit, we all meet shitty people who do shitty things to us; we all experience painful things and we all hurt at times.  The truth is, I am not going to abandon myself for one second longer, just on the premise of everyone having their “own cross to bear”.  Firstly, not everybody goes through the same struggles- some are worse than others. Or how about privilege (race, background, circumstances), like how some people have nobody else to share their pains with. This is real and it’s valid.  Secondly - or also - just because everyone has their own cross to bear, doesn’t make mine any lighter; nor does it mean that carrying it around with me all my life didn’t damage me in a way that I suffer with today. 

The truth is, I don’t give a shit if anyone reads this or not.  I am not writing this for clout.  If my experiences and my words help another person, then I’d be over the moon, of course; because I know that having someone who can relate and understand is sometimes the only thing we need in a moment of pain.  It’s why all over the world, all over the internet, in schools, at work - everywhere - there are communities, groups, clubs, etc.  As humans, we need one another, and to be embraced and understood by another.  Sadly, I can say - from countless experiences - we fail one another. But if my posts from here on out becomes an outstretched hand to hold for just one person, it would be amazing to me.  I know what it’s like to feel lonely, and have nobody hold out a hand to hold. 

The reason that I decided to write this was because I have held in years and years of pain. I have held in decades of being ignored and abandoned. I have gone out into the world pretending that I was okay, when the truth is, that I haven’t been okay for as far back as I can remember.  I am writing this because I have started many times, but I finally feel that the tides - my tide - has changed.  After closing the laptop screen in the early hours of this morning, crying my eyes out, and dwelling around feeling the familiar ache inside of me swell up, threatening to swallow me in; as the horrible insecurities returned, pushing me to do ugly and drastic things to myself, dirty habits wanting to own my life; I stopped.  For the first time that I can ever recall, I forced myself to stop. I just cannot feel this way anymore, I cannot handle my life in this way anymore, and I cannot keep abandoning myself when the world spins around me. I also can’t keep pretending to be made of iron. I fucking feel things. In fact, I think that I very well might feel things quite a lot deeper than most people.  I am fucking conscious, so I feel. I am aware. And this made me know that my tide had changed. I had to go with my tide. 

I had this moment where I just knew that I had to take ownership of my life and myself, and stop somehow always finding an external source outside of myself to point blame at as a reason behind my doubts, fears and where I fell short.  But I also knew that I had to point the spotlight at it all, face the past, go and stand toe-to-toe with my “demons”; stop giving a fuck about a lot of things and a lot of people; start giving a fuck about a few things at a time and about the few who’ve always been true; speak my truth no matter how it may hoarse; choke the fucking life out of the voices that haven’t been able to shut the fuck up since they started trying to convince me of weaknesses that were actually my strengths; suffocate the shit out of the minds that kept coming to take my light because they were scared it may dim theirs; and annihilate any piece of shit who tries to come at me again with anything, knowing that I fucking clawed my own damn way to where I was despite all their hate towards the queen that is me.  

I’ve just been out here, acting like what I’ve been though was normal.  There are people out there who have gas-lighted me to the point that I thought I wasn’t worthy of love.  There are people out there who took my voice away from me before I was even able to speak - who didn’t allow me to speak - until I thought that my voice meant nothing at all.  Those are the people who will omit large details, or speak out of hearsay. Those are the people who never gave me a chance. They will say that they did. They will say that they did, only because of the story behind me. Because if they ever didn’t act like they didn’t at least “try”, then the people in the “community” would speak, or think something funny of them.  The fact is, there was always something funny about them. All of them.  They never gave me a chance, because they didn’t love ‘me’; they loved a picture of the ‘me’ they wished I was, but couldn’t be because I was ... sick, broken, damaged ... strange.  And I will address them - every single one - not omitting my own misdemeanors, of which there are quite a few; but nothing that I came to eventually realize, rendered me as worthless as I came to feel. An undeserved taint, a reckless abandon, years and years of living in the shadows cast over me - enough!  

Today I am going to start taking charge of my life fully.  I am going to take ownership of my life, and take the actions needed.  There is loads of unpacking that needs to be done, to discover who I really am. As each wave washes over me, and as I let them pull each painful moment out of me, I will let go, and in turn, become!

[troybeecham]

Fr. Troy Beecham

Sermon, Proper 13 A, 2020

Matthew 14:13-21

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

More often than not I have heard this Gospel narrative of Jesus feeding the multitude preached as some version of "Which is actually the greater miracle in this Gospel narrative: for Jesus to miraculously transform those few loaves into an abundance of loaves, or for Jesus to change the hearts of the people there to teach them how to share?" Growing up in church, I heard this, and all of the miracle narratives of Jesus, preached with full confidence in the miraculous provision of God to meet the needs of people in need, miraculous as in supernatural, creation from nothing. The longer I am in the Church, the more I am hearing these narratives being preached with an almost apologetic tone. I mean, after all, who really believes in the supernatural world presented by the writers of the New Testament? Aren’t we much more advanced than they were, having come all these centuries out of the world of superstition?

Well, no, actually, we haven’t. We may like to think of ourselves as having evolved beyond “all that supernatural nonsense”, but at best we have simply traded one world view that requires faith and belief for another world view that requires just as much faith and belief. Before you assert that they were hopelessly primitive, remember they built the pyramids, mapped the heavens and the movement of the planets, discovered algebra and trigonometry, and developed deeply sophisticated philosophy. We humans are curious beings, not in the sense that we arouse curiosity in those who might be viewing us, but in the sense that we look out at the universe with curiosity: we ponder and dream, and we have an insatiable desire to know what are the causes of all the wonder and horror that we see. From the Enlightenment to the present day, Western culture has been on a crusade to wipe out any belief in things that cannot be rationally explained or reduced to the “laws of nature”. We have made ourselves the measure of all things! If we cannot achieve it, then it must not be possible!

We have been crowding out belief in the miraculous, the supernatural for centuries. The problem is that the harder we push these out of our world view, the greater a vacuum we create in our attempt to understand or find meaning in the events of our lives or the changes in the universe around us, and that vacuum naturally draws all sorts of things in to fill it. And the things that fill that vacuum require just as much faith and belief as that which it has supplanted. Rather than go on for another thousand words about the history and nature of the theory of knowledge, that is, how do we know what we know…what are the parameters, modes, and conditions for knowing…I will simply say clearly that I fully believe the supernatural nature of the miracles of Jesus, and in the miraculous nature of his conception and birth, and in his full divinity along with his full humanity. I do not labor with the burden of needing to demythologize the life of Jesus, or to succumb to the habitual practice of reading the narratives of his life through any philosophical lens that renders his miracles into narratives about political justice for the poor or into miracles of sharing, overcoming ethnic, cultural, religious prejudices, all of which reduce the life of the kingdom of God into something produced solely by human action.

Certainly, when the kingdom of God is made manifest amongst us, we do see the miraculous breaking down of all of our prejudices: ethnic, cultural, economic, religious, et al. When the kingdom of God is being made manifest amongst us, of course we begin to see true justice begin to blossom. But these are the free gift of God to a people being transformed by the Holy Spirit into the image of his Son, Jesus. Far from any belief in the ultimate, eventual, and inevitable evolution of humankind into fulfilling the greatest dreams of science fiction utopian splendor, we humans have continuously shown ourselves to be unable to redeem ourselves.

It is beyond human ability to engineer our way back to the Garden of Eden. Paradise was lost to us forever because our first parents decided that they could create and sustain the Garden without need of God. We continue to believe in this first lie, and the pursuit of it has led, time and again through the bloody pages of human history up until this very day, to war, misery, untold suffering, and even genocide. Do we understand this, that every time we have committed to war or genocide, we have done so fully believing that our actions would ultimately end in the establishment of a utopia of peace and plenty? The Garden is just beyond our reach only because there are some humans who stand in our way, either because they have the wrong political ideology, religion, or ethnic identity. If only we could get rid of them, cancel them, then we would have a world of peace and plenty! I see this in the news every day, in our own nation and around the world.

Do we see how these ideas require as much faith and belief as accepting the witness of the Holy Scriptures to the miraculous and supernatural reality of God? Yes, I know the arguments that believing people have committed atrocities in the name of God. But this is human nature: we commit atrocities and always appeal to whatever is available to excuse ourselves of culpability, whether we appeal to God, communist/socialist economic and social justice theory, the pseudo-sciences of intersectionality, eugenics, or any other means by which we excuse our sinful and selfish desires for control, power, and authority to do as we wish.

In the contest of world views, faith and belief in God, and in his Son, Jesus, wins for me. I believe that Jesus miraculously, supernaturally fed the multitudes. I choose to place all of my trust in God, and in his promise to restore all of creation to the innocence and splendor of his kingdom. I will read our Holy Scriptures using all the critical tools at hand: archaeology, linguistics, comparative literature, comparative history; and I will read them through the eyes of trust and belief in Jesus, who has redeemed us, and teaches us to patiently wait for that day when, at long last, God our heavenly Father shall renew of his creation with the splendor of a new and conjoined heaven and earth, and he shall reign for all eternity. That’s something I can believe in, and a hope that endures. My prayer is that the Church may continue to proclaim this Faith, or return to it where it has departed, with honest conviction and in loving compassion to all the peoples of the world.

Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

[mikzhyu]

Like, a summary of the plot and what happened in it? Or a retelling if you want to. I’m rlly curious. Oh this is rp Anon

for as far as we got up to before we stopped roleplaying it, the rp itself spanned over i think... 5 years. here’s a timeline with a brief description of what happens where.

i’m explaining the whole roleplay here, not just claus and giygas, and it’s also been a while (this was done over voice, not text) so bear with me.

i’ll add whatever doodles i had done of things that happened.

the rp takes place post-mother 3, like, immediately so. lucas wakes up once the world has been reset via the dragon and starts just, well, sadly going about his business. it’s only when -- i believe -- someone caught wind that someone was inside of the graveyard. when lucas went, it was actually claus, who had been brought back to life somehow after his death. they check to see if lucas’ wish fully came true, only to find that hinawa had not been brought back as well. (lucas wished for everything to return back to him... which included his brother and mother.)

soon after that, more strange sightings started. first was ninten, who promptly found ana being attacked by zombies in the graveyard. i don’t remember where lloyd came in. this is under the assumption that teddy had died at the end of mother 1. ninten has no clue how they got there, as they were just coming down mt. itoi from fighting giegue.

the earthbound crew was next; ness washing up from the beach, and honest to god i don’t remember where the other 3 appeared from. ness and co were taken from just after ness awakening to his powers in magicant.

the last person to appear out of nowhere was locria, of all people. not even they knew why or how they were alive.

that’s a lie, whoops. porky also was no longer in his weird orb thing or whatever. yeah, that spooks lucas and co. ness is confused as to why pokey is here too and why people are calling him porky. and why they’re so damn scared of him, of all things.

uhh.... blah blah, don’t remember stuff, probably a few weeks pass or whatever. yes, ness gets painfully homesick. no, they haven’t figured out a solution yet. they still don’t know how are why they all got here at all or why monsters are still appearing from everywhere.

i believe.... the next major plotpoint was that dr. andonuts managed to build/rebuild a replica time machine that the earthbound squad used to go and fight giygas fair and square, hoping that that’d set everything right again. they think they manage to defeat him, as he disappears at the end of the battle. they come back more or less safely.

very, very soon after they return claus starts to feel ill. like, really ill. in fact, he ends up shrieking in pain and ultimately shutting down without warning. i think dr. andonuts didn’t really find anything wrong with him, just that he overheated, but he couldn’t find a reason why.

once claus reawakens, he starts having weird thoughts, like a voice in the back of his head. strange deaths start to happen in tazmily, but nobody knows how or why. claus ultimately blames ninten and co for it, where ninten immediately lashes back out at him saying something really nasty, like “why should we trust you anyway? you worked under the enemy and served as their robot slave.” ninten, unfortunately, doesn’t even know why he said this and well, they kind of have a big fight. it would have ended poorly if ana hadn’t have stepped in when she did.eventually, claus starts to notice these weird things happening to himself. he tries to talk to lucas about it in his fear, but, well....

....yeah, that’s where this comic came from. claus literally shuts down without warning when he tries to say anything. ana even mentions soon enough that she feels a horrible evil energy radiating from claus and expresses her concern.

yadda yadda, again don’t remember these bits... i believe they do eventually realize that, somehow, giygas has taken shelter inside of claus. giygas is still weak of course, so he’s not able to do much other than slightly influence claus using his more mechanical parts.

for some wack ass reason, locria shows up. they tell lucas and co. off saying that they’re not here to cause any kind of issue, just mentioning that the only thing they hate more than them was giygas for destroying magicant. they offer to seal giygas away, and after much inner turmoil, claus agrees and inevitably gets stabbed with a needle to seal him away. the seal is then kept in osohe castle.

and for 4 years, it stays there. monsters still appear but are far less aggressive and don’t appear as often. claus doesn’t hear a peep from giygas during this time, and everyone typically spends their time just trying to find a way to get the mother 1 + 2 crew back to their proper timelines. they don’t succeed. (irrelevant to the plot, but ninten + ana get together as well as lucas + ness.)

during these years, giygas had been recovering his energy again. of course, it required far more to even try and sneak his power out from the seal, but inevitably he does. using claus’ self-doubt and self-loathing, giygas managed to influence him enough to pull the needle while he’s not thinking correctly. locria doesn’t sense the danger until it’s too late, and inevitably they fade back away.

giygas is now in complete control of claus. all claus can do is watch from the back of his mind as his own body does such unspeakable things.

after this, claus, the egg of light, and lloyd all go missing. it’s easy to assume why claus and the egg of light are missing (the egg contains all the information giygas wants after all), but nobody knew how or why lloyd went missing.

some time passes. giygas is eventually located and at first a small group goes to scout ahead while the others deal with another issue, probably all the monsters overrunning tazmily. ness is the first to find him, and ends up having to fight him alone -- which ends very, very poorly. ness gets sucked back into (earthbound’s) magicant, where giygas manages to completely shatter his mind into pieces, rendering the boy completely emotionless and unable to do anything by himself.

everyone else arrives later on, and there’s a huge fight between everyone and giygas, who is now puppeteering ness. it only ends when everyone realizes they need to retreat, as most of everyone takes near-fatal damage in the fight. i believe ninten and poo manage to teleport everyone back, where lucas realizes in horror that they left ness behind. or something. they left someone behind. lucas learns how to use teleport here, since everyone else is far too exhausted to do it again. when they come back, giygas and ness are gone.

more time passes. still, nobody knows where giygas, ness, or lloyd are. lucas at this point is uh... not feeling too hot, and tensions are at an all-time high. during this time there’s a scene where giygas and ness are taking residence in whatever the heck lab is in mother 3 (sorry it’s been a while), and lloyd shows up, presenting the egg of light to giygas. giygas realizes he doesn’t know how to pull the information out of the egg and just shoves it off onto ness to hold onto for a while.

oh yeah, i forgot something related to porky happened here. i don’t remember how it ended, but giygas encountered porky here, who reveals that he has done the unthinkable -- he’s gone back in time to literally steal his younger self’s body so that he’s far more flexible again.

that’s more important than it sounds. because, using the egg of light’s power, queen maria manages to reach the depths of ness’ mind still somehow tucked away and rotting and guides him back to his robot body to help him fix all of this.

eventually giygas figures he needs to seek out the guardian of the egg of light, who happens to be kumatora. he more or less just shows up on their doorstep and threatens to kill everyone if she doesn’t. he nearly does, too, because kumatora doesn’t know how to open the egg either, but in her distress as duster is beginning to die away from giygas’ attacks, she manages to get it open somehow. giygas ultimately releases duster to grab the egg, leaving him still alive, albeit barely.

i don’t remember how, but one of the robot bodies that dr. andonuts made shows up and shoves the puppet ness away from everyone, stopping him from killing them all. giygas commands puppet ness to get rid of it, and the two duke it out for a while, before the robot casts a really high level of starstorm and just absolutely knocks puppet ness the fuck out. the robot then walks over, grabs the hat that puppet ness dropped, and sticks it on his head, signifying that he’s ness’ mind taking residence there.

giygas decides he needs to take measures into his own hands and tries to dip into the robot’s mind again like he had done with ness before to try and squish out that dying light. it’s here that he finds that it’s maria herself that is protecting ness, and giygas simply cowers in fear and despair from her. robot ness is able to deliver the final blow on him, knocking giygas right back into the deep recesses of claus’ mind. ness is able to merge back into his proper body.

surprisingly, this is the part where i start remembering less... even though it’s the most recent stuff that happened. i think there was another little time skip? not too big of one, though. during this time, more and more chimeras start appearing and attacking tazmily rather than just all the random beings being overly aggressive. ness and lucas go out somewhere in the mountains together, only for the two of them to end up stuck in moonside somehow.

ness and lucas get separated here, but using that one dude from earthbound who fucking died in moonside’s guidance, lucas manages to find ness and get them both out of moonside.

except, when they return, nobody can see ness. and... there’s another ness still in tazmily? we’ll call them ghost!ness and other!ness. yeah, there’s a lot of nesses in this rp. lucas doesn’t quite trust other!ness, believing that it’s some sort of moonside trick and he’s there to hurt everyone. but of course, nobody believes lucas that ghost!ness is even there or exists.

eventually, after ninten and ana figure out that they can see ghost!ness, they use the method of a pop quiz and find out that ghost!ness is the fake one after all. it’s far too late, though, because ghost!ness drags the whole gang straight into moonside together, revealing himself to actually be moonside!ness, the new manimani that porky made using giygas’ power he’d captured long ago.

and.... that’s about as far as we got. we stopped right when everyone entered moonside and never returned to the roleplay.

if you have any further questions or want specifications for stuff, just ask? i’m happy to talk about it, haha. i hope at least most things made sense.

[aro-aizawa]

anyways, since the idea won’t leave me alone here’s my pitch for a prince of the galra keith au where lotor doesn’t exist and canon is just a suggestion i guess. (under a cut part ways in bc uhhh it’s like 3.7k words. rip.)

for starters: krolia is human and zarkon’s his dad. a nightmare idea, i know bc uhhhh the same thing that occurs w thinking about how lotor exists is uhh “zarkon fucks?” yeah. yeah he does. which uhhhhh yeah. but bare w me here, bc he’s still an utter dick in this au and krolia is still a badass. 

in this au, krolia was married to mr shirogane and had shiro before leaving earth on a garrison solo mission to pluto. she collided with a stolen galra ship manned by a prisoner who was trying to flee the empire, though the galra ship wasn’t damaged her ship was completely destroyed but she managed to survive for the prisoner to bring her aboard. together they tried to escape the empire, but they got caught. the prisoner was executed and krolia was taken to the arena. 

(earth believes she crashed her ship in the rings of saturn, and honor her death. no solo manned missions to space anymore, and certainly not to places humans haven’t been before. it also delays plans to send more people up there, so the next manned mission isn’t until shiro’s mission to kerberos. mr shirogane dies a five years before that mission.)

there she fought viciously and won literally every single one of her fights with only a dagger she’d earned early on in her battles. even when they provided bigger weapons, she always came on top with just a knife which earned her high praise and approval. enough to gain zarkon’s attention. 

idk why but he forces her to marry him, and when shiro’s 9 years old and krolia’s been in space for 5 years, keith’s born. he doesn’t actually go by keith at this point though because i doubt zarkon would let krolia name him that. not quite sure on what he’d go by though i quite like kyix of discordiansamba’s burgundy. krolia wanted to name him keith, and so calls him that when they’re alone as a secret nickname. 

keith doesn’t look fully human. a la lotor style i guess, he looks human but has purple skin and yellow sclera. pointy zarkon-ish ears and fangs. he’s still tiny as fuck though and doesn’t grow, to which he’s furious about bc galra are big and he’s a shorty but no one mentions it to his face otherwise he’d stab them right where they stand. 

krolia tries her best to raise him w good morals and lessen zarkon’s influence on him but she doesn’t fully manage it. he’s willing to please zarkon even if he’s not cruel about it, and he does wish for the best for the empire but knowing that his father’s reigned for over ten thousand years, he knows he’s probably never going to sit on the throne himself. doesn’t prevent him from getting all the training a prince would need (including a lot of combat training). 

he’s never told much about earth because krolia finds it hard to talk about. she does tell him about humans as a species and teaches him the three earth languages she knows, korean (her native language), japanese (mr shirogane’s native language) and english. she especially doesn’t tell him about shiro, but she does say that she left a husband and her family behind on earth, that she misses them a lot. 

back on earth, shiro goes to kerberos when he’s 26 (two years older than canon) and they still get caught. most canonical events in the year time zone go almost exactly the same. shiro gets sent to the arena, matt and sam still get sent off to the camps before matt’s broken out by the resistance, katie goes undercover as pidge, and lance and hunk are just regular dudes, but lance is in fighter class straight off the bat. 

(to earth, shiro crashes the ship and dies just like his mother did. which is......all kinds of sad to think about.)

except when shiro lands on earth, the garrison trio decide to break shiro out on their own. they then steal a jeep and head out into the desert, finding a nice guy who owns a shack (canon keith’s father but not in this au, who im gonna call mr fireman bc he doesn’t have a canon name). he’s been doing some investigating some funky stuff (the lion), and lets the kids crash at his place bc kids shouldn’t be wandering the desert w/o any supplies at night it’s dangerous. 

anyways, the shack conversation all goes almost exactly the same w mr fireman taking keith’s place. he goes with the kids, but he doesn’t get in the blue lion, she doesn’t let him in. mr fireman parts ways with the kids friendly-like, and the four of them head off to arus. 

things.....largely? stay the same? when it comes to stealing the red lion off the ship, they actually have to get the lions to drag it out of the cargo bay because they don’t have a pilot for it but as long as the lion is out of the empire’s hands, that’s all that matters although allura does try to pilot it when sendak’s ship is destroyed. due to having no pilot, they can’t retrieve black for shiro. so they only have three active lions, but three lions are still pretty powerful. 

from there i haven’t exactly worked out all the kinks but somehow they get in contact with rebels from their steady liberation of galra-controlled planets. they do small targets, taking out the weakest on the fringe of the empire and build up footholds while building the coalition. shiro fights with them on the ground, and using the castle with coran and allura when it’s not possible. sometimes he rides along with the other paladins. 

sometime before they go the galactic hub, and skipping over crystal venom entirely, they join forces with the rebels and the coalition to pull off a mission to kill zarkon. they’d received intelligence to suggest that he’s visiting a less secure ship, to oversee a project for a few days. instead of taking the lions and just blasting the ship to pieces, they decide to infiltrate and take him out stealth like to guarantee his death. 

only the information is faulty because it’s keith there instead of zarkon. 

when they learn that keith is zarkon’s son.......they kidnap him. 

their goal was to hold him hostage and/or interrogate him for weak spots in the empire, but somehow they end up thinking “hm maybe he can be redeemed bc his dad is literally an asshole and ehhh he can’t help who his parents are?” so they give him a chance....tentatively. 

keith, seeing this huge opportunity to sabotage his father’s greatest opponents and eventually steal the lions back for his father, takes this absolutely for granted and fakes his redemption. he basically pulls a lotor, and ends up helping them in certain areas but sabotaging them in others. he’s unable to report back to his father for spying purposes, but he does leave clues and/or hints to weaknesses somehow. all the while, the real reason for these things going wrong isn’t thought of. 

all the while, the paladins are trying to bond with keith. trying to get him to redeem himself, and they end up really liking him even though he’s still rather a loner, doesn’t pretend to be nice and trains like every day. he particularly gets along with shiro, the two of them forming a close bond that keith had not planned or counted on. 

allura is the only one who’s still suspicious of keith. she’s not....hostile. not really, she pretty much acts like she does in canon when keith’s heritage gets out. though they do have a few moments where they could maybe see eye to eye. she’s still apprehensive and unwilling to think that zarkon’s son could be anything but evil. 

this pays off when she investigates a major hit to the castle that renders it unfit for battle for a time and finds that keith was responsible for it. 

at this point, keith has been seriously reconsidering his allegiances. thinking that maybe the right thing to do really was to redeem himself and help out voltron and coalition. he’s not completely blind to the shitty things zarkon did, he’s well aware but he figures that maybe getting his father’s approval isn’t worth all the suffering of others nor something to desire. 

allura attacks keith and calls him out in front of everyone. providing evidence of literally all the times that keith’s fucked them all over. the team feel betrayed, keith is super guilty, and allura’s just pissed. keith doesn’t get a chance to explain before he’s thrown into a prison cell on the castle to wait until voltron can contact the coalition and decide what to do with him because it’s clear that zarkon hasn’t exactly been hurrying to find him. 

but then zarkon attacks the castle of lions with a massive fleet headed by haggar, a force that’s way too much for just three lions to take on while the castle’s defenses are still down. the whole team is in trouble and it pretty much starts to seem like zarkon’s gonna win and the paladins are gonna get killed. 

until the red lion reaches out for keith. 

so he breaks out of prison (that he could have done within minutes of being confined there), and heads to the hangar. he jumps in and uses the element of surprise to disable the fleet enough to make them need to retreat. 

the paladins are freaking out because uhhhh who the hell is the pilot of the lion? they do a little sound off like “allura that’s not you? coran? shiro?” but then keith uses the lion to communicate and basically says “sorry i broke out jail”. 

when they get back to the castle keith awkwardly does a heartfelt explanation of his plans and how the paladins actually did sort of make him want to redeem himself and realise just how much zarkon needs to get murked and stuff. he apologises for fucking them over and he even offers to go with whatever punishment they decide to dish out with no retaliation. 

the team go off and talk for a while. debating if they could really trust him anymore. allura is adamantly against it, pissed off that he’d already betrayed her trust after all zarkon did and the fact he piloted her father’s lion. lance joins her, upset he trusted him at all. pidge and hunk are apprehensive, pointing out that the lion must have seen the good in him to choose him. shiro believes in what keith’s saying and has faith in the kid to actually redeem himself. 

they tell him he can stay but the only reason he’s not dead and/or serving time in prison is bc he’s the red paladin. they make a lot of rules about what he’s allowed to do and not to do though, which keith doesn’t enjoy but he doesn’t complain about them. one of them is that he’s only allowed to fight the empire in the red lion and no on the ground stuff. 

now that the team have the red lion’s paladin they awaken the black lion and they form voltron for the first time. it’s badass, and the liberating of planets goes even faster than before. 

the paladins start to bond again even slower than before bc they need to rebuild that trust. it goes....pretty rockily considering the fact that keith is still pretty prickly in personality, and the others aren’t entirely convinced he’s actually changed sides. but shiro is essentially the only one that actually makes any headway in rebuilding the trust/relationship. 

one night he asks about keith’s mom. bc human far out in space? as far as the team knew there should have only been them and the holts, so he’s definitely curious. keith tells him about a pilot who’d been picked up in their solar system after their ship got destroyed and took them as prisoner. he tells shiro all about his mom and what she taught him of earth. 

but shiro. he starts to wonder who on earth this pilot was. because, uh, only very few pilots have gone missing in space and one of them is important to him. so he asks her name. keith replies krolia. shiro asks “as in...krolia kogane?” and keith’s like yeah. 

shiro mentally freaks out, doing mental acrobats all over the place but his thoughts mostly boiling down to a mixture of “HOLY SHIT MY MOM’S ALIVE” and “HOLY SHIT I HAVE A HALF-BROTHER WHO’S AN ALIEN PRINCE”. he manages not to let keith know he’s freaking out, and excuses himself. 

they end up doing a covert blood test and yup keith is shiro’s half brother. this earns him points in “okay yeah he’s capable of change if we warm up to him”, so the team start to treat him more favorably, not that keith is aware of this new revelation. so it’s common knowledge to the ship minus keith. shiro tries even harder to bond w his little brother, bc uhhh yeah he’s never had a little brother and he definitely likes keith so far even though he was a little evil for a while. 

keith at some point expresses to shiro why he’s fine with not telling zarkon that keith’s on the paladins’ side. that his mother would most likely be killed for turning him against zarkon due to the fact that paladins are humans, and that she’s still at central command completely unable to get away. like a glorified prisoner because, well, she is. 

shiro suggests to the team that they pull off a rescue mission to free krolia, not only for keith’s sake but for shiro’s sake too. plus the fact that she’d been a prisoner for twenty three years. which then kicks of the finale of season 1. (yes we’re still in season 1. it should have been way longer than it actually was.)

things go largely the same, except that in allura’s place it’s krolia. when keith charges at zarkon his identity is revealed to him. they manage to rescue krolia, keith fights zarkon and thace destroys the shield holding them in place. they don’t go through a corrupted wormhole though. 

then there’s a cute heartfelt reunion between keith and krolia. during which keith emotes more than he ever has in front of the paladins, who have pretty much all accepted that yep keith’s a good guy now considering he almost fought to the death with zarkon. 

but then shiro steps up and calls krolia mom which confuses the fuck out of keith, the only one who doesn’t know. krolia shakily says “Kashi?” and they tearfully hug, krolia completely caught off guard that her other son wasn’t on earth where she left him. keith is confusion until krolia explains, and keith asks if that means shiro is his brother. they say yes and they have a big old threeway hug, to which lasts for like an hour because its big family bonding time. everyone is happy for them.

you’d think, huh is this the end of the au? this is pretty long already.....nope!! we’re just getting started!!! (this thing is a monster......hence why im never going to even attempt to write it out lmao)

we go into season 2 where krolia starts to talk to the others about the rebel galra group that she helped and kind of joined called the blade of marmora. she tells them that there was a galra named thace who kept her in the loop about keith, and the goings on of voltron. she tells them that they would be a very good ally in the fight against zarkon. 

shiro then backs this story up with his memory of how ulaz helped him escape jail, and says that they should trust them. the team tentatively agree, but decide not to immediately go to them and focus more on building the coalition. krolia pulls keith aside and gives them a knife that they had given her to protect herself as zarkon prohibited her to carry weapons. its keith’s marmora blade that she was unable to activate because of her lack of galra blood, but they gave it to her to protect herself anyways. 

canon largely stays the same for a while. zarkon still does the tracking thing, except when allura and keith go out in a pod, krolia comes with them. they have a little thing where they make clear with each other where they stand and end up having a little fun despite the tense atmosphere until the castle is attacked by zarkon.

when the team meet up with the blades, keith demands why they didn’t help krolia themselves. they’d already proved with shiro that they could free prisoners if they wanted to, and demands to know why they didn’t risk it for krolia. he wants to know why they never took a bigger part in taking down the empire and why they never stepped forwards to work with voltron themselves instead of letting the team come to them. 

kolivan says that he only gets the answers, an alliance between them and gets to keep the blade if he joins as a member of their order and take the trials. keith accepts. the rest of the blades however, don’t like the idea that the son of zarkon was joining up and taking the trials. but when keith passes and pretty much immediately tries to kill memory zarkon on sight, he proves himself to them. the blades ally with the coalition and voltron. 

again, season 2 goes quite a lot like canon. except!!! in the finale they actually do end up killing zarkon along with haggar and shiro doesn’t go missing! hurray!!! 

but. that means with no prince lotor, and a dead zarkon instead of comatose zarkon, there’s no one to lead the empire. hence a kral zera is called. 

(here is where i mention i have vague memories of s3 onwards and haven’t seen past s4. so i don’t...actually know how most canon events from here on out go in explicit detail. its all pretty vague.)

the plan from there is for keith to attend and win. if he gets crowned the new emperor, he could officially announce the end of the war, and significantly reduce the amount of fighting the resistance would have to do to bring peace to the known universe. the coalition & blades don’t fully trust keith however, thinking that once keith is on the throne he’ll just betray them. 

keith understands and explains he doesn’t actually want the throne. he suggests that they just kill everyone on the planet when the kral zera is called, with no more candidates, the empire will be severely fractured and would still be easier to defeat than having a leader. in the end, they go with the idea of having keith become emperor, but the coalition there in case people fight back against his orders. 

keith wins, some back down and obey and some don’t. the coalition and voltron take down those that fight back, and from there it’s a lot of “keith orders galra to release planets and those that don’t, get liberated by the resistance”. its a lot of politics where keith frees all the prisoners of the empire, lets them get back to their home planets and finds sam returning him to pidge and matt. 

he sets up a colony in an empty solar system for the civilian galra to live governed by the blades, while he sees to it that those that were soldiers are put on trial and punished for their various crimes. 

again, still not entirely sure what happens in late canon, but i guess from there it does the whole...sendak takes earth thing? but it’s actually a pretty easy mission considering they have the might of the entire coalition (which is almost the entire universe at that point) and the blades and voltron. but after the defeat of sendak there pretty much isn’t any opposing galra resistance to keith’s reign? so from then on it’s just the paladins, allura, coran and krolia back on earth experiencing things. 

krolia busts into the garrison like “hey guess who’s not dead! also meet my alien son who’s king of an entire race of people, and my other son who’s leader of the universe’s most powerful weapon also with a sick glowing arm”. the garrison sweats under the pure power and skill the three of them exude. especially when krolia utterly annihilates all records on their simulators/actual ships. and then keith and shiro join in on it too and they end up giving them all the awards and accolades bc no one is going to top that ever. 

the paladins go to disneyland. keith is still technically emperor but considering the blades have been overseeing all galra activity anyways, he’s not really needed. so he just bums around earth for a while, getting to know the other half of his heritage that he never really got to. 

krolia meets mr fireman and they end up getting together bc krolia deserves good things and a desert hermit who helped get shiro back into space and eventually to her with is a good thing. they still live out in the shack tho bc mr fireman is committed to it at that point, bc he ended up living there through sendak’s invasion pretty well. 

and then uh i think that’s pretty much it. keith is a normal teenager, allura and coran get puzzled by human shit, lance reconnects w his family, hunk does too and cooks a bunch of food and pidge works w the garrison in making it less shitty while also just tagging along with whatever dumb things they decide to experience. 

end of au!!!!

[ariadnelives]

Chapter 16 -- The Trade-off

[Missed earlier chapters? Go catch up here! Otherwise, welcome back! Oh, and make sure to join our discord server! Chapter can also be found @ ao3”]

Back in the infirmary, Prescott was pitching an absolute hissy fit about his treatment aboard, as though he had high expectations for the level of comfort that was generally afforded to those taken prisoner by pirates.

He was, of course, actually being treated pretty well by those standards. He was in a relatively comfortable hospital bed and had been left in complete control of its inclination. His captors provided him with adequate food, he was given prompt and free medical attention, and his bed was facing a small hologram crystal playing a marathon of Deimos, P.I. reruns.

This is, of course, not to say that he should have been grateful. Far from it, in fact, he was being held captive and had every right to be incredibly angry, and he exercised that right to its fullest. It was, however, somewhat ridiculous for someone in his position to be making outlandish demands of Cookie, like “a glass of sparkling water every hour on the hour, with fresh-cut limes and a bowl of cucumbers on the side.”

Without fail, Cookie brought him the same bowl of plain oatmeal and glass of non-sparkling tap water, devoid of limes, in response to every request. She was a consummate professional, but she had her limits, and after the third or fourth time he asked for an array of bagel chips and berry-infused cream cheese spreads, Cookie began responding by putting a little more tap water in his oatmeal. This wouldn’t diminish the amount of food he got, but would effectively ruin its texture, which is about the only thing plain oatmeal has going for it.

This was, in Cookie’s mind, a shame. His requests were things she’d actually love to try her hand at, but she, like most people on the station after only a few days, absolutely could not stand Prescott, who was this insufferable even when he was not being held against his will. She had no interest in giving him anything he wanted, or interacting with him beyond her captain’s orders.

“Keep him alive, he knows something about that cult and we’re gonna need all the information we can get to save those girls.”

On this particular day, Cookie was overwhelmingly relieved to hear that she could have the afternoon off from Prescott Duty, since Ariadne would be bringing him his lunch personally.

Ariadne entered the room quietly, placed his tray on the table next to him, loosed his restraints, and muted the Val Deimos marathon.

She was dressed down, barefoot in a pair of stylish denim shorts and a loose-fitting black t-shirt. Her mechanical legs were nowhere to be seen and her spider-like goggles were replaced with the rectangular wireframe glasses she wore when she wasn’t working.

Prescott was dressed in a hospital gown, which is how he’d been dressed since he’d been staying there, and looked rather greasy, which is how he usually looked anyway.

“What is this?” He asked after a beat.

“I’ve been hearing a lot about you from my good friend Mingxia,” Ariadne explained. “You’re a good liar, I’m told, and you always act in your own self-interest.”

Prescott didn’t have much of a response to this, but he still opened his mouth in the hopes that one would come out anyway. It did not.

“I want you to know that it’s in your best interest not to lie to me. See, I decided a few days ago that we should let you go. It wasn’t a popular decision, see, Spacebreather and Sweettalk both want you dead, and I should stress that this is the first thing I’ve ever known them to agree on. We tried to keep word of your past, shall we say, missteps from spreading to the crew, but we’re on a ship full of teenagers and you know how rumors spread. Now, they’re all dying to get a piece of you. So, at the end of this conversation, I’m going to give you your freedom, I want you to understand that. If you tell me what I want to hear, you and I can walk to telepad together and we’ll send you on your way, wherever you want. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll be forced to let you walk to the telepad by yourself, and I should warn you, I can’t make promises about how my crew will treat you when I’m not there to protect you.”

Prescott scoffed, “you really expect me to cooperate with that? Talk or my crew kills you?”

“Oh, they won’t kill you,” Ariadne replied calmly. “But, if I’m with you, I can order our physician to waive your medical debt.”

“Debt?” Prescott asked, “You expect me to pay her for reattaching my fingers after you kidnapped me?”

“Oh, no, nothing so complex as money,” Ariadne laughed. “But, Sasha gave you three fingers, which you didn’t have when she found you. The price for that is any useful information you have on the Red God cult. Give us that, and you’ll walk out of here without a scratch. Otherwise, my first mate has been authorized to repossess the medical services you’ve rendered during your stay here.”

“Repossess— you’re going to cut off my fingers again if I don’t tell you what I know?!”

“Of course not!” Ariadne chuckled. “Spacebreather’s going to cut off your fingers again if you don’t tell me what you know. And, with interest, plus the cost of oatmeal… well, let’s just say you won’t have to worry about losing extremities to frostbite anymore.”

“This is insane,” Prescott snapped, “this is a shake-down.”

“Brilliant observation,” Ariadne said. “Start talking.”

“I’m not going to go along with this just because you’re trying to intimidate me.”

“Yes, you are. You know full well that you deserve every shitty thing that’s happened to you in the past week, and more importantly, you’re a coward and you don’t want to risk anything bad happening to you.”

Prescott considered this for a moment. He was a coward and even he had the self-awareness to know he could not truthfully say that he hadn’t done at least one thing to earn every misfortune of the past week.

“I’ve got something that might be helpful,” he started, “but there’s something I want in return.”

“We already established what you get in return, suge, you’re not much in a position to be making demands.”

“No, you’ve gotta understand— I was their security provider. I didn’t do a great job, granted, but you can’t exactly hire someone to guard your secrets without letting that person in on a few of them. What I’m trying to say is, I know something big about the Zealot. A silver bullet secret, one that can take down the whole cult in the right hands.”

“And why should I believe you?”

“You ever wonder why everyone who visits those life centers converts to their religion? I know how he’s doing it and how to reverse it. You ever wonder why he disappeared a few years back? I know where he went. Got any clue why he’s got three little girls with mind control chips in their heads? I do! Get me what I want and it’s all yours.”

This was not a compelling case for why Ariadne should believe him. He did sound sure of himself, however, he had also been a confidence trickster for most of his life. “Give me some hard evidence what you’re telling me is true and we can talk about what you want.”

“A lot of people know the Zealot was a scientist before all of this started. That’s part of how his crazy movement got so much credibility in the first place. He liked to keep his true name under wraps, though. Didn’t want anyone looking into the subject of his research. His old name still showed up on the security invoices, though, even though he made me sign some bullshit non-disclosure agreement. Of course, people didn’t really need to know who he was or what he’d been authoring papers about to trust that he knew what he was talking about. He said he was a scientist, and people are sheep. It reminds me of an old test called the Milgram—”

“If you don’t get to the point I may actually cut you.”

Prescott looked genuinely hurt. “It’s an interesting experiment…” he muttered, then continued. “Anyway, only a select few people actually know his name from back before he was the Zealot. I trust you’ve heard of Dr. C. Alexander Simon?”

“I feel like you know I haven’t.”

“Why don’t you use that antique hologram to look him up? See what he’s supposed to be up to today? Put that thing to some good use instead of just streaming Cop Dramas all day.”

“Fine,” Ariadne shrugged, and turned to pull up information on Dr. Simon on the holoscreen, “also, Val Deimos isn’t a cop, she’s a former cop who quit the force and became a P.I. because of corruption in the…” Ariadne trailed off as the information loaded. The photograph of Dr. Simon was unmistakably the same person as the photo La Pesadilla had given them.

“Yeah, because Santa Helena is a hotbed of corruption and not a quaint suburb. This show is ridiculous.”

“No, shut up, I’m reading.” Ariadne hushed him and furrowed her eyebrows as she struggled to comprehend what she was reading. “This doesn’t make sense, according to this he’s supposed to be—”

“Yeah, look up what he’s famous for, should be the section marked ‘Controversy and Disgrace.’”

“Oh my g—” Ariadne’s eyes widened in shock. “Did he actually do it?”

“I suspect he’s very close.”

“This is all very enlightening,” Ariadne responded, “but I still don’t see how this is a silver bullet that’s going to destroy the cult and break whatever spell he’s got over his followers.”

“You get that after I get what I want.”

Ariadne huffed in annoyance. “And what do you want?”

Prescott gritted his teeth. “I want my money back.”

Five minutes later, Ariadne and a now fully-dressed-but-still-handcuffed Prescott entered the war room where Sasha and Sweettalk were intently playing a game of chess, and Spacebreather was equally intently playing a game of darts.

So they could all hear, Ariadne announced, “Meet me in the briefing room in 20 minutes, we’re going to help Prescott rob a casino.”

“What?!” Sweettalk practically spat in reply.

[azure7539arts]

Oh may I also request another AU? Before Wei Ying gets torn apart by his corpses, Lan Zhan arrives and saves him, tearing his wounds from the discipline whip (ty anon for reminding me about his punishment). This leads to an outrage from the four sects there, and once again, Lan Zhan turns against the world for Wei Ying, except this time Wei Ying is fully aware of his actions and shocked and wonders why he would do this for him.

(The first thought I had for this was WHY ANON WHY LOL. The second thought was WEI YING, LAN ZHAN NOOO.)

Hey anon! Sorry this took a little long to reply. It’s mostly thanks to RL, but also because I took some time trying to think about how I’d go about this. 

In the end, I shifted a few things around, and I don’t know if this was what you had in mind, but I hope you’ll enjoy this anyway.

Warning: MCD, AU, canon-compliant violence, mental instability

Note: as always, SPOILERS. SPOILER ALERT, PLEASE SCROLL AWAY IF YOU DON’T APPRECIATE SPOILERS.

► jindan: golden core

► LuanZang Gang: Burial Mounds

Feel free to send me more asks, and I’ll be sure to get round to them as soon as possible! 

Wei WuXian couldn’t make a sound anymore, his throat clogged up and wet with the spotty stench of blood.

He didn’t remember how long he’d been screaming, and he didn’t remember the last time he’d resented someone so much.

He resented Lan Zhan so much he wanted to cry, and not even his hatred for Wen Chao had been this searing, seizing at his nerves like a blood-thirsty branding iron as it ripped and tore into him, shredding him to pieces from the inside out. Because Wen Chao, in the end, had been a target, and he had deserved to die, and Wei WuXian had no regrets killing him.

But Lan Zhan, Lan WangJi, was a different story altogether because this man hadn’t done anything wrong. Lan Zhan hadn’t done anything wrong other than having the misfortune of meeting Wei WuXian, and now he was going to go off and die for him?

What sort of absurdity was this?

Wei WuXian continued screaming and thrashing, his lips splitting from where they had been forcibly sealed together with the Lan Clan’s secret silencing spell and his body thrashing with impotent rage from where he’d been held into a stasis state of temporary immobility.

There was a familiar yet too foreign weight in the center of his chest, and he just couldn’t breathe.

(“Wei Ying.”

No. No no no…

“I—I have to leave now.”

Stop. Stop it.

“Stay here. Stay safe.”

Stop! I said stop! Why are you—

“I…” a hand in his hair, gentle despite how frighteningly cold and slightly shaky it was after the jindan transfer, “At least I wasn’t too late this time.”

What… What are you even saying?

“Goodbye, Wei Ying.”

No! Come back! How dare you?! You can’t do this! Y-you… you can’t!

Lan Zhan? Lan Zhan?! Lan WangJi!

Lan Zhan!!!)

(Perhaps the one he actually resented, more than anyone else, had only ever been himself.)

The miasma of dark energy that had more or less fused itself inside his veins—though it seemed to have grown that bit lesser now, partially purified to an extent—was in the process of combining with the once pure cultivation that was just stirring back alive thanks to this new jindan that had been forced onto him.

It didn’t take Wei WuXian long to find him. Unsurprising, considering that they were still within the boundaries of Yiling, and it was unlikely that the other cultivators would just give up on their quest to eradicate evil without scouring through the areas thoroughly first.

But whatever was left of Wei WuXian’s already slipping sanity broke when he saw Lan Zhan kneeling there in the chalky dirt and loose mud of LuanZang Gang, head tipped forward with his once pristine white robes almost drenched in already blackened, dried blood from those multiple sword wounds that looked to have gone in from all directions, piercing clean strikes right straight through him.

“At least I wasn’t too late this time.”

For a second there, there was this deep ringing in Wei WuXian’s ears that went on for so long that, had Wei WuXian been paying it any attention at all, he would’ve started to wonder if he had suddenly started bleeding from his ears or something. But as it was, with his slightly widened eyes never leaving that proud and lonely form down on the lower ground, Wei WuXian only stretched out one arm and whispered, “Suibian.” His palm splayed wide open. “Come.”

Not five seconds later, the brilliant, lethal gleam of a bright blade that had never gone dull despite the disuse it had fallen into in the past few years ripped through the overcast sky of LuanZang Gang, ripping gasps from the unsuspecting fools below.

For all that they had been spending the last day or so practically razing everything to the ground in search for him, they still had the audacity to seem shocked once he did, indeed, appear, right in the middle of their midst.

Wei WuXian descended the small remaining climb between him and Lan Zhan with ease, and the surrounding cultivators, who had only reacted until they had had a couple of minutes of being shell-shocked, had their throats succinctly sliced on the spot, the thin but sturdy blade of Suibian flourishing with efficiency.

Then, just for good measure, he lifted Chenqing up, played the first tune that came racing to his incoherent thoughts—the sounds vibrating all over like screeches of pent up screams—and only stopping until he was but two steps away from this man who had gone from supposedly hating him to saving him and giving up his jindan for him and surrendering himself up for what could’ve only been his execution. All in the expanse of one night.

And now he was dead.

(Wei WuXian should’ve realized, a long time ago, that this was all he had ever been capable of.)

“Hey,” he said, hoarse voice barely above a whisper as he halted his steps in front of Lan Zhan’s hunched body, heedless of the rising chaos around him. “Hey,” he called again because, as he was, with the state of mind he was in, Wei WuXian was not taking a no for an answer. He was not giving that another go.

Even like this, kneeling in what must’ve been his own pool of blood, stabbed to death with no way nor desire to defend himself, there was still this dignified air about him that remained unsullied—no matter the pain, no matter the suffering, no matter the cost. And as Wei WuXian’s wild, bloodshot eyes settled onto that almost serene look on Lan Zhan’s face, he could feel his lips twist. Ugly and desperate.

“What the fuck is this,” he growled, snatching up Lan Zhan’s chin that was too cold for comfort and tilted his head up. Rigor mortis had set it, rendering the muscles stiff and lifeless.

All of this was wrong. So, so wrong.

“What’s wrong with you people? I’ve never asked you to do any of this for me.” The tone of his voice was rising and rising with every word that was crawling its way out of his throat.

There was no answer.

Of course not.

More people were coming in to join the fight now, and Wei WuXian didn’t even really register it when he pointed at the other sword lying limply on the ground like a cordless instrument, watching it with mild disinterest as Bichen unsheathed under his command without hesitation, blue light blaring blindingly as it quickly engaged into battle with deadly precision.

Dual wielding, and that was not taking into account Chenqing.

(This was why Lan Zhan shouldn’t have laid down his life for him.)

“Fine,” Wei WuXian all but spat, even as the grip on Lan Zhan’s chin had dialed back to a more subdued caress, and this was how Wei WuXian discovered the cool softness that was Lan Zhan’s skin under the roughened and calloused pad of his own thumb. “I haven’t shown you around YunMeng anyway.” There was a distractedness in his voice even as he leant down to gather Lan Zhan into his arms, a single loop playing nonstop just between the confinement of his skull.

Too little too late. Too little too late. Too little too late. Too—

Well. Wei WuXian thought, hoisting Lan Zhan up with the utmost care he could manage. Better late than nothing.

“Hold on tight,” he rasped, voice low as if nuzzling a secret into his lover’s ear. “We’ll leave this place after picking up A-Yuan.”

(Because at this point, his mind was already too far gone for a normal thought process to occur anymore. And with what seemed like the only remaining anchoring point actively removing himself from the picture, there was nothing and no one left to hold Wei WuXian back from descending downwards into this spiral.)

(After teetering for so long, Wei WuXian had finally gone mad.)

[madamquacklemore]

Chapter 2: Forest child

Forest Child A/N: Than you all so much for feedback much appreciated. Ok so you can guess who the title of this chapter is referring to. In this chapter we see a paternal side to our favourite Irishman. Enjoy! And please let me no what you think. 

If anyone would like to be tagged let me know :)

Destiny is all arselings! 

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Finan POV Several days had passed with no sign of the wild woman from the woods. Aetheflead protested of course. Why should she allow a woman to be hunted by their enemies on Mercian soil. Eventually Uthred relented and they searched their side of the forest-to no avail and within the space of those days the child had tried to escape on several occasions so they took it in turns to watch Liliwen as she easily outsmarted the guards. Finan and the rest of the company now realised why the woman had rendered the child unconscious.

On the fourth evening after a particular difficult day Finan sat in the hall by the fire. It didn't sit right with him at all. Should they have stayed with her? Should they have taken her as prisoner? She had threatened to kill him after all. And yet those piercing green eyes would not leave his mind. Why were the Danes after her? And more importantly how many Danes were after her. "May I join you? Finan?" a voice added after a moment of silence. "Mmm?" Sihtric sat beside him offering a cup of much needed ale. "Cheers," Finan replied taking a big gulp. "I heard you had an eventful day." Sihtric began. It been Finan's turn to guard the estate and watch the child. The eventful day Sihtric spoke of was in fact Finan having to somehow bribe the Liliwen to get down from the rooftops of the estate. "How exactly did you manage to get her down?" "Well bud I could'n' exactly come up after her. 'N I now noth'n abou' children but I remember when we found her that woman was an archer righ'? So I negotiated." "With a child." "'N a mute child at that. Basically if she came down I'd show her how to use the bow. At firs' I thought she 'd tink  I was gunna aim for 'er but luckily she got the idea. Maybe she knows some English after all?" "Well at least that is progress" "What abou’ you how's Uthred hold'n up?" "As well as can be expected but I feel it has been altogether to eventful these pass days. Fate has-" "Ah jaesus son you're not gonna start shite'n on about bleedin' curses again are ya? I do not know how much of it I can listen ta." "Forgive me Fin-" "Ah look  I'm just bolloxed is all I do not mean ta snap. Jus' today was just-" "Strange. Aetheflead is debating on whether or not to write to Father Pyrlig he was Celt before converting perhaps he could offer some guidance." "Not the wors idea I s'pose." Finan sighed staring into the flames that reminded him of her hair. He barely spoke a few words to her yet he saw some piece of her everywhere he looked. "You worry for her, for the woman don't you?" "Does that make me cursed too? As long as she ain't another Skade." Finan laughed and downed the rest of his ale. "I don't even know the woman and she threatened my life. Not the firs' time a woman has threatened it mind you. But it was the firs' time one came close. I get it though she was only protecting her child. She was a looker though weren't she?" "Was?" "Come on now Sihtric bud you really think she's coming back from that? It don' feel righ' leavin’ a woman ou' there yano?" "Finan she is a warrior and we have done as much as we can. With the Danes marching to Wessex and Skade's curse we cannot afford to-" "I now I know. It's jus' the child the poor thing doesn't speak and ev'n' if she could,could she even understand us? She's alone." Finan sighed and got up from his seat. "Don' mind me I've jus' 'ad to much ta drink is all. Time for a piss then sleep I tink. I've an archery lesson tomora after all. G'night bud." Running his hands through his hair Finan left the hall. Before he had the chance to relieve himself the arrival he waited for was announced.  "Fetch Lord Uthred!" "Fetch the Lady Aethelflead!" Gates were open to reveal a black horse trotting in its rider hunched over. A guard ran towards the horse before it's rider fell. And sure enough it was her. 

"She burns. Her wounds do not appear to be severe enough to cause this, the healer suspects poison and if we do not get her fever down she won't make it through the night." Aetheflead explained as she shut the patient's door behind her. "When Uthred was dyin' Brida came." "Brida?" "Nevermind look- she was able ta save him with some herbs she had surely something must grow around here." "Even if something did Finan it is the middle of the night and do you recall what Brida used? As I do not." Uthred added. A child's footsteps ran towards them. Finan bent down and looked into those troubled grey-blue eyes.  "I don't now how you got out again lil' one but it's best you don't go in there it's not something you should see." "Perhaps we should let her in," Aethelflead suggested "Let her say goodbye." Uhtred opened the door and they gave Liliwen access. "TARIAN!" the girl cried out. The three of them exchanged looks. The child was mute no more. "Tarian! No! Tarian!" The child cried grasping the woman's hand. "Tarian." Finan muttered to himself. For that must be her name.

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Tarian's POV Everywhere hurt- everywhere burned. Something cold and wet was pressed against her head when Tarian heard screaming from somewhere she struggled for her daggers. "You must rest woman you are badly injured." A voice said to her. "And I feel even poisoned." The voice of an elderly man added. Poison-that can only mean one thing. Her father's men were not the only ones after her for Danes do not typically use poison. Celts do. As tears streamed from her eyes the room began to spin throat burning Tarian mustered every bit of strength to lean over and vomit over the side of her bed. "Tarian!" 

Though her vision swam before her there could be no mistaking that voice. "Here little one. You found your voice." she greeted the child in their native tongue. "I'm so sorry I left you and your head-" She reached out to her. Liliwen approached Tarian and stroked the side of her cheek and shaking her head. "Yes I lost my voice but it has come back to me again. You are poisoned aren't you? Are they dead? The man that helped us get away?" As usual nothing escaped the child and a million questions to boot. "The old man believes it is poison." Tarian blinked back the second round tears that threatened to fall. Gustaf who was her friend when she lived on her father's estate had never forgotten her whom despite being sworn to her father set her and Liliwen free. Who had loved her after all these years of scarce glances and even fewer meetings. "Gustaf is dead. But the beast who did it is dead also." "And the poison?" "Only the Aurealis plant can help me. It grows here. I do not remember where." Liliwen got up from the bed and sighed. Wearing that look Tarian knew all too well. Determination. "Liliwen" The frail sound of her own voice frightened her. "Don't put yourself-" "You have always looked out for me. Now it is my turn."

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Finan POV

The five of them watched the exchange between Liliwen and the woman dying in the bed. "I thought she said the child was mute." Aetheflead muttered. "Ay Tarian said that," Finan replied bewildered as he watched the child touch her face. Ignoring Uthred's questioning gaze he asked. "What will become of the child?" "A convent most likely. I haven't decided." she replied as they watched dying woman and child converse in a strange language. Under any other circumstances the idea of a feral child being sent to a convent would tickle him somewhat at the chaos she would cause. But not in this case. If she were a boy that raw anger and talent could be harnessed and she would make a fine warrior. Maybe they would make an exception if he got the chance to train her. Celtic women had just as much reputation the battle field as men did. Liliwen hopped of the bed and walked towards Finan cautiously, turning back to look at Tarian for what Finan could only guess was approval. Finan walked towards them both as Tarian's voice was now barely more than a whisper. "She wants you to follow her Irishman." Tarian croaked as Liliwen took his hand. "She seems to like you." The woman gave him a weak smile. With one last fleeting look, Liliwen led them both out the room and out in to the yard. An unwelcome combination of ale,exhaustion and cold hit Finan suddenly and he swayed on his feet Liliwen steadied him. "I'm ok child" he assured her. Finding a barrel of icy water he splashed himself ready with it. Liliwen tugged on his cloak hurriedly and pointed to the gate. "You want us to leave the estate?" It took Finan a minute to realise that although she may no longer be mute she probably didn't understand the language he spoke. After several exchanges of hand guestures later Finan and a few guards were saddling up their horses and riding towards the forest. As Liliwen directed them deeper into the forest Finan became more and more uneasy. He did not like being so deep in a possible hostile forest with such a small number. Although the sun had fully risen it would not be much use them if they continued much further off the beaten path. Finan wondered why he had gone with the child. Who or what was she leading them too? Over the past few days he believed out of all them he had begun to develop some sort of rapport with the child. Funny he would think as out of all of them (baring Osferth) he was the only with no children or experience with children or at least not that he knew of. And yet here he was a woman who should mean nothing to him entrusting the well being of this child who was now literally leading him to the unknown. What have I got m'self into. Liliwen held up her hand like a commander leading an army as Finan then the guards halted. She was already struggling to get down before Finan himself hopped down and with his assistance she hit the ground running. After 100 yards west she stopped at a tree that had been marked-its bark cut with markings that were faintly familiar to Finan. Crouching down she reached for Finan's dagger. Liliwen closely inspected each bright orange and yellow plant growing at the base of the marked tree and dug out several plants with the dagger. She rushed back to the horse returning the dagger Liliwen gave Finan an expectant look. Now that they new what direction they were going in the rushed back  to the estate before they could as the pagans would say tempt fate any further. Liliwen rushed over to where the Finan had previously washed his face and took a cup of ale from a group of guards talking at the table. One of the guards grabbed her as she emptied the contents out. "Oy! Celt what do you think  you're doing?!" he bared at her. "You will let her go Oswald." Finan ordered from behind him. "My apologies Finan. This child here is trouble." the guard sighed and let her go. "No denying that." Finan too his hand off his sword. The danger passed. Liliwen filled the cup with water nodded at Finan to follow her and the two hurried towards the kitchen. Heating the water she quickly prepared the plants Finan hands were slapped away after he offered assistance. Once the hot liquid was prepared they hurried off to the Tarian lay in. "Mother of Jesus the devil has taken her." Finan gasped as they opened the door to Tarian's bedchamber they found her convulsing on the bed. "No Finan just the poison." The healer replied. He and Osferth held her body as still they could Aethflead's lady held Tarian's head up and a metal rod in her mouth-so she wouldn't swallow her tongue-she explained. Liliwen seemingly unfazed tugged at Finan made the motion to for Tarian to drink the liquid. Finan got on the bed beside her removing the rod quickly he tipped the liqid down her throat. Seconds later Tarian spat it out still seizing her her eyes rolled to the back of her head he had never scene anything like it. Danes didn't use poison-did they? He looked to Liliwen who signalled for him to try again-the whole cup. She got on the bed beside him rubbed Tarian's mangled red hair and sang a song in her native tongue as Finan tipped the liquid back into her mouth. Whether it was the liquid or the soothing melody of a child it worked. The seizing slowed then stopped altogether. The healer and lady pulled up the covers again to cover he modesty and when the healer said she would need to be watched Finan volunteered. He knew this brave child of the forest was going nowhere. And neither was he.

@geekandbooknerd