#I still need to figure out. piano. and sewing lessons.

[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

I REALLY DO HAVE BICEPS NOW

[monster--boyfriend]

@anthonypanics tagged me in this and then I promptly drafted it and forgot. But what's more tumblr than that? Also these things are just fun and feel like classic old school tumblr

were you named/named yourself after anyone?

I did in fact name myself and yes all three names were after someone or something. The first, Jasper, was after the Steven Universe character and no I don't regret that. She was and still is massively important to me as a character. My middle name, Aspen, I chose as well. I really wanted some kind of tree and after looking at a lot of symbolism behind various trees, the Aspen stuck with me. Of it's many different historical meanings, strength through diversity stuck with me the most. My last name, which I also changed, I took from my grandmother. It was her maiden name. I always admired it, always liked how it felt so much closer to what little culture I have, and so I took it. And as an extra little treat just for me, my initials spell Jam. Which I want so bad to be my nickname but no one has ever picked up on it.

when was the last time you cried?

I can't even remember? I think maybe it was last year? It happens so rarely now it's hard to remember. Medication is a magical thing

do you have kids?

No and I don't think I'll ever be able to parent any on my own. I would like to but I just don't think that I could possibly afford to care for any kid by myself. I'd need a partner who wanted to parent as well.

do you use sarcasm a lot?

I had to think about this because I actually think I'm slightly less sarcastic than I used to be. Like I'm still very sarcastic but I don't always default to it

what's the first thing you notice about people?

If we're not talking about like, visual aspects, then the first thing I almost always figure is if someone is some level of geek or nerd or the likes. I stand out enough visually that I will have people comment on my outfit very often in public. The way they comment tells me a lot about them in most cases. People who are some kind of nerd or even sort of in some kind of fandom, will likely recognize something on me and comment on it Or sometimes they will comment on something else and it can tell me that while they might not be fannish folk, they have similar political ideas as me. Or even inversely just the look I get from others tells me they find something if not everything about me distasteful.

what's your eye colour?

I'm sorry, I'm a blue eye haver

any special talents?

I have a fairly good sense of direction and learn the layout of places very quickly. I'm generally really good at not getting lost or if I do get lost, figuring out how to get unlost pretty easily.

scary movies or happy endings?

If I could only pic ONE I'd probably end up taking the scary movie. A lot of my favourite have been in the realm of horror lately so

where were you born?

Vancouver, BC. Lived here my whole life. Probably gonna die here too unless I somehow acquire a large amount of money. In which case I'll just move to Vancouver Island.

what are your hobbies?

I do be enjoying drawing again recently. But I also like sewing and I'm learning to embroider. I also love gardening and foraging. Cycling as well.

have any pets?

what sport do you play/have you played?

When I was in 4th grade? I think it was 4th, I played soccer at recess but that's about it. I wasn't in any organized sports. I was however briefly in gymnastics, dance, modelling, swimming, and I took piano lessons.

how tall are you?

I don't know, I think 5'5"? I'm not actually sure anymore.

dream job?

I don't even know. I don't think my body could do the kind of work I would find actually fulfilling and enjoyable now. But also some of that factory work on How It's Made looks good.

I'll tag @queerrbyrd @nebelung-dragon @umberisk @avoidingdestiny @cosmichorrorcocoa @mind-altering-bugs @minecraftgender @eispeon aaand that's all the mutuals I can remember off the top of my head but feel free to anyone do it and say I tagged you I'm tagging you in my mind

[esmeiolanthe]

Row homes

So I’ve decided to build a whole ‘hood from scratch. I want a unified look, with a limited color palette. I want that unified look to be vintage-ish, preferably 1950′s and before. These restrictions make building a real challenge, which I am enjoying.

While looking at vintage floor plans and such, I have come to find that I really like Art Deco (c. 1910-1939) as an architectural style, and especially Art Moderne/Streamline Moderne (1930s-1940s). I had previously built rowhomes in a different style, but after deciding on a basic look for the ‘hood, I had to redo them.

They look really good.

Here is a picture from on the center lot. You can see that even on the lot, the other two houses flow into this one seamlessly. Click the picture to enlarge it if you don’t believe me!

More pictures below the cut, because I like showing off. Click on pictures for a closer look. Sorry, couldn’t get captions to work.

The row houses look pretty darn good from ‘hood view, too!

I do eventually want to default replace the mailbox and trash can, but finding a good default replacement for the mailbox is hard. I’d like something that looks more urban, perhaps even like a mail slot or a box that hangs on the wall by the door. Maybe I’ll find one someday.

Or even learn to make my own. I’ve finally got copy/paste recolors figured out after just 15 years, after all!

Here is the top (fourth) floor. Two bedrooms (requiring Inaccessable Beds if you want a double bed in there), a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, and a small room that could be for sewing, or storage, or laundry, or whatever. Probably not another bathroom because it has two windows in it, but you never know.

Here is the third floor. There are three bedrooms, two of which can hold double beds. Or at least, there are three rooms. They could be for painting, or music lessons, or whatever, I guess.

Here is the second floor. Two rooms and a half bath. The room across the front of the house would be a weird shaped bedroom, but maybe for kids or something?

Here is the first/ground floor. The game thinks it’s the second floor because of how it’s coded to read basements, and technically it isn’t on the ground, because of the basement.

There’s a kitchen, an “airlock” of sorts for entering the house (is that called a vestibule?), and a ladder to the basement. The stairs are open underneath, so any of the under-the-stairs items could fit in there. The ladder is still usable even with an under-the-stairs item there, so I can pretend there’s a trapdoor in the closet floor, or a door in the back of the shelf, or something like that. (Looks weird, but it works.)

The ladder may be usable with other under-the-stairs options, but I haven’t tried.

There is a full basement. I am building this as a functional basement which is also intended as a bomb shelter because it is for an apocalypse game. There’s room for up to two bunk beds and a card table with two chairs (not placed). Note that the usable area of each floor is 8x8 or less and the house is raised off the ground, making it apoca-legal. I don’t know if basements are apocalegal, but I don’t care. It’s easier to take away the ladder and fill in one floor tile to make the basement inaccessable than it is to build a basement on an already-existing lot.

There’s a chemical toilet, in case you need to pee while hiding from bombs. There’s a (decorative) washer and dryer. I fully intend to recolor this functional laundry detergent at some point in the next decade so I can have a working laundry room. (All the functional machines out there are too modern for my taste.)

The little square of swimming pool hidden in the foundation is so the water overhaul mod works. This particular lot is not in view of any water, but this is intended to be cloned for row houses to go in multiple spots, some of which might be in view of water. It’s just easier to put it in right from the start.

This is what the back of the house looks like. I intend to fence in the backyard, but not yet, since I want to shrink a copy of the lot. Then I can fit a 1x3 version backed up against a 1x2 version and perfectly fill a [whatever]x5 space.

I will be building (or rather, adapting) corner and side lots to match, so that I can go around the whole block with fairly small lots. I prefer to play small lots.

Here is a picture of the front room. You can see how I have thoughtfully placed outlets that do exactly nothing, but they look nice and are in places where they might logically be handy. There are a minimum of two outlets in all rooms except the bathrooms.

The green part in the corner is the outside curved step poking in. I can’t move it without making the front look awful. Flooring and rugs won’t cover it, either. Fortunately, furniture does, so this is a great spot for a piano, bookcase, refrigerator, or anything else that hides the floor anyway.

I am proud of the overall look of the place. I am especially proud of the attention to detail with the light switches. See how the switch by the door “controls” two lights? (It’s really just decorative.) One is the kitchen light, and one is the back porch light! I am so clever!

I’ve got them at the bottom of the staircases too. It is completely ridiculous how proud I am of this.

This table and lamp combo is not a permanent fixture. It deliberately doesn’t go with anything and doesn’t fit the personality of any of the sims who might live here. It’s just here to remind me to put a lamp at the top of the stairs on the fourth floor so you can turn off the stair light and still find your way in to whatever room you want. I even put an outlet on the wall, which you can only just barely see. I am proud of that, too.

So there you have it -- what’s been keeping me amused lately. I have been having such fun with this. Seriously, I spent probably 30-45 very happy minutes getting the light switches and outlets juuuust right.

[senorarelojes]

Fic: But Not Tonight (4/?)

Summary: Dave asks his best friend Alan to go to the prom with him. Pairing: Dave/Alan Notes: One of the silly little things I wrote for @pinksyndication @what-could-have-been @songsofgayanddevotion @rvphinas-blog!

Part 1: here. Part 2: here. Part 3: here.

.

Over the weekend, Dave’s mum and sister take him to Eastgate to shop for his prom clothes. Nothing catches his fancy, especially not the hideously old-fashioned tweed suits that his mother keeps insisting that he try on. Dave sneakily texts Alan to find out what he’s planning to wear so that he might get something matching, but Alan keeps insisting it’s a surprise.

In the end - with Sue as mediator - Dave and his mum finally agree on a single breasted white blazer from Topman, coupled with slacks, a black shirt and a skinny grey tie. The blazer is a little too loose around the waist for Dave, so when they get home, Sue fetches her sewing kit and helps him take it in a bit.

“Very fetching, very smart,” Sue teases him when Dave models the whole outfit in front of her full-length mirror as a trial run. When he stares at himself all he can see is a pale and terrified kid, he doesn’t feel smart. “Alan is a very lucky bloke.”

“What if he doesn’t like it?” Dave is aware that he’s just being dramatic, but it’s Sue - the only person who knows him better than Alan - so he doesn’t care. “What if he thinks I look hideous and changes his mind?”

“Then he’ll be the stupidest bloke in Essex,” Sue says firmly, grabbing Dave’s shoulders to turn him back to the mirror, her eyes quickly scanning his outfit for anything else that needs fixing. “But we both know he’s not stupid, right? You’re always going on about how smart he is.”

Dave is unable to help the dreamy smile that appears in the mirror. “He really is.” 

Sue rolls her eyes in affectionate exasperation. “Alright, alright, Romeo. Now come on, prom boy-- corsage, yes or no?”

***

Dave doesn’t see Alan much for the next few days leading up to prom, because Alan is busy with his Grade 8 exams as well as his final project for AV Club. They still text like normal, which assures Dave that Alan hasn’t changed his mind and they really are going to prom together. 

On the day before the prom, he's hanging out with Fletch and Mart in Fletch’s room and discussing the logistics for the dance. They have pooled together enough money to rent a fancy limo now, because Dave has thrown in all his savings from working at Asda all summer and Alan told them in the group chat to add in his earnings from giving the neighbourhood kids piano lessons. “Vince said his cousin works at the car rental place,” Fletch informs them, counting their combined money along with his and Martin’s contributions. “So he can get us a really good discount.”

“Thank fuck for Vince.” Dave twists one of his rings around and around his finger, wondering if his nerves will abate anytime soon. “So what time are we setting off?”

“I’ll go pick up the limo from Vince at 7.30,” Fletch says decisively. “Then we’ll go by the quickest route: first I’ll go pick up Mart, then we’ll swing by Alan’s, then you’re the last stop.”

Martin’s shaking his head. “No need, we can just pick up both Dave and Alan together. Right?” he says, shooting Dave a knowing look.

“Why?” The frown between Fletch’s brows deepens as he turns to Dave. “You two getting ready together?”

“Erm--” Dave rubs the back of his neck.

“Oh come on, An.” Martin is laughing now. “Haven’t you figured out that they’re each other’s dates?”

Dave’s face suddenly feels way too warm as Fletch’s mouth drops open in shock. “What the fuck?” 

“Andrew, language!” Mrs Fletcher scolds from the kitchen.

“Sorry, mum!” Fletch calls back with a wince, glaring at Martin and Dave who are giggling at him.

“Wait, how did you know?” Dave asks Martin. “Did Al tell you?”

“No, but you’ve been bloody nervous for the past few days,” Martin astutely points out. “You weren’t even this nervous when you first asked Joanne Fox to go out with you. So I inferred it must be someone truly important.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Dave says a little sulkily, although he doesn’t know why he’s bothering since he’s pretty much caught. Martin might be the quietest person in their group, but he’s also the most perceptive, and Dave has heard him make some horrifyingly shrewd observations over the years.

“True,” Martin says thoughtfully, picking up Fletch’s battered ukulele to strum on it. “However, for the past few days, you and Alan have been sending each other these annoying little emojis in the groupchat--”

“So that’s what those were about?” Fletch interrupts. Martin shoots him a pitying look.

“Have you ever seen them do that before?” he patiently points out.

“Alright, point taken, Sherlock,” Fletch huffs at him.

Martin turns to flash Dave his trademark crooked grin. “So, am I right?”

Dave figures they might as well know about it now instead of finding out tomorrow, so he quickly nods while Martin looks smug and Fletch is still blinking in amazement.

“Wait,” he says tentatively. “So the eggplant emoji Alan sent wasn’t about what he had for dinner?”

Dave can’t help it, he bursts out laughing while Martin pats Fletch’s knee in consolation.

[theluckiestwitchathogwarts]

Winter Love

HELLO hi @coffeecomicsgalore this is my @mlsecretsanta fic for you! I had so much fun writing this one, happy holidays! Massive thank you to @adrienettes-hamster for beta-ing!

Also on FFnet and AO3!

Mid-November is when the chill of the impending winter started to set in. Not cold enough for snow, but cold enough that Ladybug had begun to notice her kitty shivering while on patrols. Granted, she was quite cold herself, but she was handling it better than Chat Noir.

“Do you need to stop, Chat?”

“No, I’m fine,” he stuttered out between chattering teeth.

“Chat, go home and get warm. We can patrol again tomorrow night.” Her voice was soft but commanding, and his ears drooped. “I’ll bring some hot chocolate, okay?” His ears perked up a bit at the mention of that.

“Okay then. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he replied with a small smile, turning and bounding away with his staff.

She watched him for a moment before turning herself, luckily only needing to travel a few blocks to her own home. The dull light of the lamp she had left on before heading out cut into the darkness. It was still relatively early in the night, only around 9 o’ clock, but she knew that her parents would already be in bed, ready for next morning’s early rise.

Marinette landed on her balcony and hopped down through the skylight onto her bed before calling off her transformation. When Tikki swirled out of the earrings and into her hands, she was also shivering.

“Yeah, it is a bit too cold tonight,” Marinette mumbled to her as she cupped her hands around her kwami. “Let me grab us some hot chocolate, okay?” Tikki nodded, her little head bobbing up and down as vigorously as Chat’s jaw was. Marinette gently slid her onto her pillow then climbed down the ladder to the rest of her room, then the ladder to the rest of the apartment. Finding her favourite mug clean and ready to be used, she ducked down and grabbed the teacup she had hidden for Tikki. It was almost matching with her favourite design, covered with florals over a white background, and it had belonged to one of the dolls from her childhood doll house.

Marinette hummed while she filled the mugs with the still-steaming hot chocolate from the flask her mother had left out for her. She wondered whether or not it would snow soon, and if it would shut the school down. Would the snow mean Hawkmoth would slow down on attacks? Or would he send out more akumas?

She wondered about her friends. Alya would probably spend most of the time babysitting her sisters, Marinette by her side of course. Nora might be home for the winter. Nino would probably be glued to his computer, creating new tracks and networking with other DJs. Adrien…

Adrien would keep up his studies with Nathalie. Marinette knew how tough his dad was on him based on how detailed his schedule was. Mandarin lessons, fencing, piano, modelling and school? And she thought she was busy between school, sewing and saving Paris. Then again, saving Paris was never on a set schedule. She supposed she and Adrien weren’t too different in that aspect.

Adrien had been shivering a bit in class recently. While everyone else bundled up in their warmest sweaters and thermals, Adrien’s outfits didn’t seem to hold the same temperature. Did Gabriel favour style over comfort? The very thought burned Marinette.

She stopped pouring as she realised it was about to overflow her mug, and set the flask down with a hardened resolve. This Christmas, she was going to knit something warm for her two favourite people. The gears in her mind began ticking over as she thought of what to give each of them. She still had Adrien’s head measurements from when she created the hat for the contest a year or two back, and his body’s measurements from the designs she had made for her website... maybe a sweater? Or a beanie?

She didn’t have Chat’s measurements though. She supposed if she worked hard and fast enough she might be able to squeeze in a blanket. Now she had to think of patterns for both...

Marinette made her way back up to her room, carefully balancing the mugs in one hand as she pushed the trap door up then set them down on the floor to climb inside.

“Tikki?” She called out gently. “Hot chocolate has arrived.”

She set them down on the bench by her computer as she opened up her sketchbook. Knowing it would take longer, she began working on the blanket’s design, but stopped short as she realised that while she knew her partner, she didn’t really know him. She vaguely remembered his favourite colour was green, and funnily enough was a cat person, both literally and figuratively. Marinette began to worry that what she makes wouldn’t be good enough for him, or that he wouldn’t like it.

“What are you working on, Marinette?” Tikki asked sleepily while sipping her hot chocolate.

“Both Adrien and Chat Noir haven’t been dealing with the cold well, so I figured I’d knit them both something warm for Christmas,” Marinette replied as she began writing in some notes. Tikki peered over the book and looked back at Marinette.

“A blanket? Will you have time to make that? Christmas is only a month away.”

“I know, but I figured if I work on it in all of my spare time then I might be able to get it done in time. Hopefully there’s a few snow days in the next few weeks,” Marinette said as she glanced out the window. The window stubbornly continued to show no sign of snow, though there was the twinkling of stars between the clouds.

Tikki took another sip of her drink. “Who’s the blanket for?”

“Chat Noir. I have Adrien’s measurements, so I was thinking either a beanie or a sweater, but I’m not sure of Chat’s. What do you think?” Marinette picked up a green pencil and began to shade in the sketch. In each corner there was a small, blocky cat face with light whiskers.

“He does tend to wear that short sleeved top a lot. I think sweater.”

Marinette hummed and nodded in agreement. “I think you’re right. What about the middle of this?” She held the page up to Tikki, who had ditched the now empty cup and was snuggled into her neck. “I was thinking maybe the initials C.N. but that might be too obvious.”

“What about a Yin Yang symbol, but a ladybug as the white dot and whiskers on the black dot?”

“Tikki, you’re a genius!”

And so Marinette got to work, having most of the yarn colours she required already. Quite a few rows in, she started to nod off and, seeing that it was now well past her bedtime, climbed the ladder to her bed and whispered goodnight to Tikki.

----------------------------------------------------

“That’s… a lot of yarn, Marinette,” Alya said with mild concern. “You surely haven’t gotten this low by now?

Marinette shrugged, or at least shrugged the best she could with her arms piled up with rolls of yarn. “I’ve got a few commissions and wanted to be sure. I can use what’s left to make some gifts as well.”

Marinette had dragged Alya on a shopping trip for materials after school the next day. She had some pocket money saved up from chores and her birthday. Half an hour later, they emerged from the fabric store with a lot of yarn and some new shearing scissors, an early gift from Alya.

“Ooh, who’s commissioned you? It must be a big project!”

Marinette almost stumbled, unsure if she should tell Alya, even if she did have the perfect cover up for it. But then again, she knew her best friend.

“Uh, Ladybug commissioned a blanket as a gift for Chat Noir. Apparently they’re having a tough time on their night patrols with the chill.”

Alya’s eyes bugged out of her head and she squealed, “Oh my god, that is so cute! She’s totally in love with him!”

This time Marinette did really stop. “No way! She did not give off that vibe at all when she came around! It’s just really cold at night!”

“Babe, you don’t just commission a whole BLANKET for your friend!” Alya shook her by her shoulders, a few rolls threatening to fall out of Marinette’s arms, who gasped a loud “careful!”

“They’re friends, Alya, and friends can share a blanket when it’s cold. Can we please drop it?”

Alya huffed and rolled her eyes. “Sure, but you know I’m right!”

----------------------------------------------------

Later that night, Marinette was zooming through rows of knitting on her balcony. She barely stopped for a few bites of the dinner that her mother had brought up earlier. When her hands began cramping, she turned back to her sketchbook to work on the design for Adrien’s sweater. She figured it best to keep it simple, and made it light green in shade with darker green and black accents. When the cramping had lessened, she picked up the needles again and started knitting furiously again.

Around 8 o’ clock, Tikki nudged her and reminded her that she needs to meet up with Chat Noir. Marinette thanked her and transformed, grabbed the bag of treats she had snuck up earlier, then leapt off the balcony with her yoyo flying off into the distance.

She found Chat Noir on their rooftop an arrondissement away, huddled next to the chimney for warmth.

“Chaton, look what I brought!”

His ears perked up and his lips curved into a wide smile. “That doesn’t just smell like hot chocolate, m’lady. Is that…” his eyes lit up as she lifted the Dupain-Cheng bakery box out of the bag after the flasks, “croissants? And macarons?”

She matched his smile and replied, “all of the above, plus pain au chocolat. Only the best for the cat hero of Paris!” She had to set down the box quickly as he crushed her in a hug. She wrapped her arms around him as well, happy that he was happy. She didn’t miss his murmur of “what did I do to deserve you?” and simply hugged him tighter, almost shielding him from the cool wind. He let go after a few more moments, diving for the flask of hot chocolate and sitting against the chimney.

“Half hour of snacking before we make the rounds?”

“Works for me,” Chat Noir replied in between sips, visibly settling down as the drink warmed him up from the inside. “How did you get the Dupain-Cheng goods? Aren’t they closed by now?”

“They are, but I picked them up just before they closed for the day, so they’re pretty fresh.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, she did get them from the last batch her father made for the day.

Chat Noir hummed as he bit into a macaron, savouring the taste. “They are the best in town, no competition.”

“You’re not wrong there.” Ladybug took this moment of comfortable silence to take the top off of her flask and have a long drink of her hot chocolate. They sat together, shoulder to shoulder against the chimney and the wind started to settle down.

The sun had well and truly set by now, the moon as bright as ever with the stars shining like the streetlights below them. Tonight, there were no clouds, and nothing above them but the open sky. Ladybug loved the sight, and found it to be the second best perk of being a superhero, the first being partnered with Chat Noir. Her friend, Chat Noir, she thought, thinking back to Alya’s words earlier in the day. She was in love with Adrien and absolutely, definitely, totally had no such feelings for Chat Noir.

----------------------------------------------------

Marinette was exhausted, to say the least.

It was now the beginning of December, and the blanket was just over half done. She had resorted to bringing in her spare needles and knitting before and after class to start on Adrien’s sweater, and ignored anyone and everyone that asked about it with a small blush.

She also resorted to ignoring any pressing by Alya on Ladybug’s “commission” of the blanket, which had not died out as time had gone on. Alya wanted to know everything from the words Ladybug said to her expression and body language as she spoke about Chat Noir. Marinette now highly regretted giving in and telling her anything.

Thinking of the blanket, she thought about the surprise she was given when Chat Noir dropped in a few nights before.

A gentle rapping on the window shook Marinette from her concentration as she began a new colour for the Yin Yang. She looked around as she heard the telltale swoosh of Tikki hiding and saw Chat Noir waving from her balcony with a sheepish look on her face. She set down the blanket, laying it flat on the floor, and climbed up her ladder to open it.

“Chat Noir? What are you doing here?”

“Forgive me, but I saw your light on while I was out for a run. It’s getting very cold and my own place is a bit too far for me right now. Do you mind if I warm up in here for a few minutes?”

She wasn’t aware of any patrol they had planned. She double checked the day it was in her head and confirmed yes, it was their night off.

“O-Of course you can, would you like anything to eat or drink?” She moved aside for him to jump in, and watched as he looked around the room in wonder.

“Some hot chocolate, if you have any, please,” he replied, eyes moving from the chaise to the various mannequins and designs strewn about the room.

Marinette dearly hoped he wouldn’t know it was the same he had had just a few weeks ago, and a few times since as the temperature continued to drop.

“S-Sure thing, I’ll be right back.”

She climbed down after him, throwing a panicked glance to where Tikki was hiding and subtly gestured for her to follow. She climbed down the trapdoor to the kitchen and turned to Tikki.

“What is he doing here?” Tikki asked.

“I don’t know! It’s not patrol night! He’s going to recognise my recipe for sure!” She began to pace the kitchen.

“Calm down Marinette, he might just think you sell it here. You said you bought the treats from here didn’t you?”

“I mean yeah, but what if his civilian identity comes here often enough to know it’s not sold?” Marinette could not keep calm, but she kept her voice quiet. No need to freak out both her parents and her unexpected guest.

“New product for winter?”

That stopped Marinette in her tracks. “That could work.” Her nerves stilled, she grabbed two mugs and the flask, filling them and turning back to Tikki again with a smile. “You always know how to calm me down.”

Tikki giggled, “Kwami of luck and maybe logic as well. You best get back to him, we’ve been down here for a while now.”

As if on cue, they heard a soft knock on the door, and an even softer, “You okay down there?”

Marinette took the mugs by the handles, calling back, “Can you please open the door?”

The trapdoor opened as Marinette climbed up, and Chat Noir hastened to take one from her hand, and helped her up with his other one. Claws brushed her wrist as his grip tightened on her hand and while she shouldn’t have been surprised, his strength as he pulled her up caught her off guard slightly.

“I just couldn’t find my mug, I always have hot chocolate in it,” she raised her mug as she spoke.

“That’s a nice one. And this is really good,” he said, taking a sip. Marinette watched his eyes as a hint of recognition flickered over them, but he didn’t say anything about it.

“It’s a… family recipe. We just began selling it in the bakery for the winter.”

His face relaxed, and Marinette let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

“What are you knitting?”

Man, if this cat didn’t stop. Sure, it’s an innocent question on his part, but Marinette was getting increasingly worried about hiding the truth.

“Oh! Uh, it’s a blanket for a friend of mine. They’re a… big fan of you and Ladybug.”

“And the other needles? I like the different shades of green on it.”

“That’s going to be a sweater, for another friend. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of warm clothes so I’m hoping this will help him.”

“That’s a really lovely gesture, Marinette. One of my friends is into fashion as well, you would get on great with her.”

Marinette hummed in agreement, then said, “I hope you don’t mind me returning to it, I’m trying to get them both done by Christmas.” “Of course not. I should get going now though,” he tipped his mug towards her, empty already, “Thank you very much for the drink, Princess.”

Marinette’s jaw dropped slightly and almost dropped her needles as well. “I-I… you’re welcome, a-any time.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” he replied suavely, adding a wink. Marinette waited until he was safely back out onto her balcony before rolling her eyes with a smile, and got back to her knitting. Stupid cat and his flirting.

Seeing that Madame Bustier was running late, she took Adrien’s sweater out of her bag and began to knit. She had switched out her small clutch for a larger, water-proof bag once she realised she’d need to bring the yarn and needles to class in order to finish it in time. Most of the class had been asking about it so far, including Nino and Alya, but Adrien had been quiet about it until now, when he walked in right as Marinette started another row.

“Hey Marinette, you’re early. What are you making?”

“Oh! Adrien, sweater- hi, uh, I mean-”

“It looks great so far. Green would look nice on you.”

Marinette squeaked and went bright red. “O-oh, uh, thank you, but it’s for a friend,” she giggled nervously.

“Well then, they’re a lucky friend!” Adrien smiled as he began unpacking his notebook and pencil case, and turned to the front. Madam Bustier walked in a moment later, gesturing for Marinette to put away the needles. Marinette didn’t miss the slight shiver that Adrien had to his frame, nor the goosebumps beginning to raise on his arms and the back of his neck.

----------------------------------------------------

“Chat Noir!”

It was the week before Christmas, and Marinette was in the home stretch of finishing this blanket. She was knitting on her balcony, hot chocolate by her side and just sheltered from the light snowfall. But now, she could just see the silhouette of the cat hero a few roofs away. He turned his head in surprise and as a result, almost fell off of his staff. She waved her hand, gesturing for him to come over to her.

As he got closer, she called out, “What are you doing out in the snow? It’s way too cold for someone in a skin-tight suit to be out here!”

“But Princess, you’re out here too!” he called back, now standing in front of her.

“I am wrapped up in sweaters and fuzzy pants, with a blanket over me, not a skin-tight suit, as I said! You should be at home, as warm and wrapped up as I am,” she finished on a gentler note as his ears drooped.

“I… don’t want to be home right now. I got into a fight with my father. Can I stay here for a bit?”

Her heart dropped and her eyes filled with sympathy for him. She knew it was a bad situation, but not leave-the-house-in-the-middle-of-winter bad. “Of course you can.”

She opened the skylight, carefully plopping down her almost-finished blanket and needles, then climbed in after it. He shook the snow from his hair, passed her half-empty mug of hot chocolate to her and hopped down onto the bed. She put the mug on a ledge next to her bed and said, “Do you need a hug?”

Almost immediately, he wrapped her in a bear hug not unlike the one he gave Ladybug a few weeks prior. She raised her arms just in time and curled them around his neck and if she happened to feel a tear or two slide onto her shoulders, she didn’t mention it.

Her hands weaved themselves into his wild hair, holding him close. She stayed silent, knowing words couldn’t convey the comfort she tried to give him. His arms were so long, they almost doubled back to himself. Together, they shivered, as he cried onto her shoulder silently and the wind blew through the skylight above. She untangled one of her hands to reach up and close it, but Chat Noir took this as a sign to let go and step back. Her other hand still tangled, she lost balance and they fell, Chat Noir landing on top of her as she hit the bed with an “oof!”

Marinette drew in a sharp breath as Chat Noir’s head hit her collarbone. That’s going to leave a bruise, she thought with a wince.

“I’m so sorry, are you alright?”

“Yeah, just knocked the breath out of me,” she replied, finally removing her hand from his hair. She sat up as he hurried to get off of her and sat at the end of her bed, both of their eyes wide open.

“So, um-”

“I-”

They both tried to speak at once, giggling when they stopped. Chat Noir gestured for her to speak first, so she did.

“Do you want some hot chocolate?”

“Please,” he replied gratefully, moving aside so she could climb down the ladder, following after her. She returned after a few minutes, setting their mugs down next to her computer. “Can you pass me down the blanket, please? I’m so close to finishing,” she asked as she held out her arms for it to be dropped into. She stumbled when it landed; it felt heavier than she expected it to be. Oh well, she thought, this means it should be extra warm.

She got settled in her desk chair, the blanket flowing down past her feet as Chat Noir settled on her chaise with his mug. They sat in a comfortable quiet, the only sounds in the room coming from the whirring of her computer, the clacking of the needles and a sip from Chat Noir every once in a while. She’d look up from time to time, and see his bright eyes staring back at her with a shy interest. There were hints of dried tears on his face, and she subtly elbowed the tissue box beside her towards him.

At last, she finished the last row of the blanket. She cast off, spreading it out on the floor and stepped back to look at her work. Chat Noir joined her, looking over it in wonder.

“How long did this take you?”

“Just under a month. I’ve been knitting as fast as I can and spent almost every waking moment on it. Except for when I’ve been at school, which I spent working on this,” she said as she pulled out the sweater for Adrien. “It’s for my friend Adrien. His father doesn’t really let him wear clothes that would give him comfort. I mean, I get that as a model he’s always representing the brand, but what kind of father chooses style over comfort for his own son? I’m surprised he hasn’t frozen to death already,” she tried to lighten the end of her rant as she realised she was getting angry.

He took a gentle hold on her elbow, and she looked up to face him. He had an odd look on his face, like he was embarrassed, though he had no reason to be.

“You’re an amazing friend, Marinette, and I’m sure he is going to love yo- it.”

She beamed at his praise and set it down on the chair, hugging him again with her whole body, his own arms wrapping tightly around her.

“Thank you for the hot chocolate, but I think I should go before my father realises I’m gone.”

She squeezed him tighter for a moment and whispered, “Will you be okay there? You know you’re welcome at any time, okay?”

He squeezed her back and replied, “I think I’ll be okay, but I will let you know,” and stepped back, taking care to not step on the blanket. She watched as he climbed the ladder and up onto the balcony, only looking back to wave her goodbye. She waved in reply then folded the blanket up, putting it into the bag she had reserved for patrols.

With only half a sleeve to go, she picked up the needles and set herself back down on the chair, continuing her work on Adrien’s sweater.

----------------------------------------------------

Conveniently enough, the next morning was announced to be the last school day before holiday break, as the weather predicted heavy snowfall for the coming days. Unfortunately though, it gave Marinette only today to give the now-completed sweater to Adrien. It was wrapped and labelled to and from (both Marinette and Alya made sure of it) but Marinette was frozen when she reached the classroom, causing Alya to bump into her back.

“Marinette! You can do this,” she heard her hiss, but she just couldn’t. There Adrien was, sitting and laughing at something Nino had said. She squeaked, almost losing her balance trying to step forward, which caught Adrien’s attention.

“Hey Marinette! What’s that you have there?”

Alya nudged her, and this time she did start to slip. This is how I die, she thought with a great internal sigh.

Quick as lightning, Adrien was in front of her, keeping her steady with concern masking his face.

“You okay?”

Marinette couldn’t do anything but stammer. “U-uh, you, I- gift! For you!”

“F-For me?”

He looked down to her hands, which were now shaking with the present between them.

“I-I mean…” Marinette looked helplessly back to Alya, who gave her a gentle nod, then looked back to Adrien and took a deep breath. “Yes, it’s for you. Merry Christmas, Adrien.”

The whole class was silent now, watching the two. Even Chloe watched, clearly fuming with a glare in Marinette’s direction.

He took it from her gently, their hands brushing for a moment. Marinette could swear she felt a spark, something warm in the cold room when they touched, but it disappeared as the package left her hands. She didn’t expect for him to set it down and sweep her into a hug so loving it reminded her of Chat N- no. No feelings for Chat Noir, only Adrien.

“Thank you,” he whispered into her ear with a squeeze.

In the middle of winter, Marinette felt like she was on fire. She tentatively raised her arms to hug him back, only for him to step back at the same moment and suddenly she was cold again.

“You’re welcome,” she whispered back as he turned away to open the gift. His eyes lit up with happiness as he unfolded the sweater, gushing, “I’m the lucky friend?!”

Marinette giggled, “You have my lucky charm, remember?”

That made Adrien snort, “Marinette, I think you are my lucky charm.”

The class dissolved into a chorus of “aww’s” and the two suddenly remembered where they were, both blushing furiously. Fortunately for them, Madame Bustier walked in to start seconds later.

He wore the sweater proudly for the rest of the day, and home, as far as Marinette saw.

----------------------------------------------------

“Tikki, spots on!”

Later that night, Marinette transformed once again into Ladybug. She made sure the lamp was on and her goodie bag was secured around her body before launching off of the balcony towards their meeting place for patrols. The snow was falling lightly, looking magical in the night. Chat Noir was already there, holding his own bag that fell by the side of the swea- sweater?

Her jaw dropped and she almost missed her target with the yoyo. Chat Noir caught on evidently as his face dropped with fear and he reached out for her.

“Ladybug, are you okay? What happened there?”

“Where did you get that sweater?”

His face split into a grin as he ran his claws along the accents. “Oh, isn’t it so cool? A friend gave it to me for Christmas!”

The pieces both fell together and shattered at the same time. Her face dropped in shock. “But I… y-you… I mean… Adrien?”

His mouth fell open and he stuttered back, “M-Marinette?”

They stared at each other in shock for a few moments before Chat Noir snorted, which made Ladybug break and they both just burst into laughter. It felt unbelievable, but made so much sense to the pair. The two who always got everyone to safety so they could be alone; they felt like idiots. Finally their laughter died down, but as Ladybug brought out the Dupain-Cheng box, they started up again. More things began making sense and they couldn’t help themselves.

They found their way to each other, holding on like they’ve been separated for years.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Ladybug mumbled. Chat Noir’s body shielded her from the oncoming snow as they held each other.

“I can’t believe it either. We thought we were smart,” he laughed, and she could hear his smile.

“You’re gonna love this then,” she stepped back and opened her back, pulling out the blanket. She actually thought he might cry then and there. She held it towards him, who took it with such soft hands.

“You made this, for me?”

“I didn’t know your measurements- well, as it turns out I do, but I figured it would be something for us to keep warm under before patrols.”

“Marinette, I love you.”

They both paused, the phrase seemingly slipped out on its own, but she couldn’t help but reply, “I love you too.”

Winter patrols suddenly became a lot warmer.

[regrettablewritings]

How They Spend the Quarantine (Tadashi Hamada, Lucifer Morningstar, Dewey Finn, Wade Wilson, Harley Quinn, & Benoit Blanc)

Just a fun (?? is that even responsible to say?) little thing I’ve been thinking about while slogging through this neverending hellscape of an extended lockdown.

Tadashi Hamada

When San Fransokyo was ordered to go into a lockdown, there were mixed feelings.

At first, Tadashi had a hint of optimism that this would mean more time to work on his prospective projects . . . But then he quickly realized that his projects mostly required tools and space offered by the campus. He could technically make do at home, but it wouldn’t quite be the same considering the garage was considered Hiro’s space.

Somberly had to clean out his lab and take whatever he could home.

Cue the rest of the group (sans Fred and Hiro) griping that at least his style of science could travel well enough to be somewhat continued off of university grounds.

Helps do delivery for The Lucky Cat. It helps him get out the house, and it’s simply helpful altogether.

Uses Baymax frequently to make sure everyone down to Mochi is sanitized, and nobody’s running a fever.

Nearly as frequent a sanitizer as Aunt Cass.

He starts most days prepared to be productive, only to stop and poke fun at Hiro, who’s almost always got his eyes trained on a video game.

Tadashi realizes three hours later that he, too, has been playing the game as Player 2.

Learned how to make facial masks with Aunt Cass. He already knew how to sew a little but frankly, making the masks made him realize he could have a new hobby on his hands. He’s currently trying to figure out how to make Mochi a little vest . . .

Lucifer Morningstar

B o r e d. A s. F u c k.

At first, he thinks everyone being forced to go home would work in his favor -- surely some rule-breakers would sneak out and try to bunk up with the Devil, right?

Well . . . Kinda? Once Chloe found out and scolded him about it, the idea died real fast. Plus, he realized he wasn’t quite fond of the possibility of being around someone who could pop up with a disgusting human sickness at any point during their time with him. Smearing their snot all over, coughing into his Egyptian cotton sheets . . . Nope, never mind, he is perfectly content having the penthouse to himself, thank you very much!

Except he’s not.

The poor bastard is going crazy by himself -- he’s just not used to being without some kind of company!

“At least in Hell, you could tell there were people around you based on the screaming!” he’d whine at his phone during his hourly video chat with Chloe.

Oh yes: The video chats. He tries to make them hourly with anyone he can get a hold of (namely, his long-suffering detective) but this clearly never plays out as he would like for it to: If he had it his way, everyone would respond in an instant and let him bounce mainly one-sided conversations off of them -- basically, what he did before all this went down.

What usually winds up happening is he gets hung up on or nobody answers him at all out of sheer annoyance over his clinginess.

Ironically, he’s not exactly crazy about when Amenadiel initiates those “family calls”. He insists it’s healthy and normal for them to do this and even calls Luci out on the hypocrisy, but let’s face it: Lucifer finds it obnoxiously gushy and weird.

He works his way into Linda’s video appointment books to help him cope with his boredom and admitted need for interactions. She doesn’t mind offering him counsel, but once Lucifer starts attempting to butt in during others’ appointment calls, it becomes an issue.

Has, at some point, gotten buzzed down in Lux and streamed himself attempting to pole dance. It drew quite a bit of attention.

He’s managed to gain a bit of a following and some companionship by streaming himself playing piano and singing. It’s not the same thing as having an actual audience, in his opinion, but it will have to do for now.

He’s never been one to binge with regards to TV shows or movies, but after the first week, he decided to binge watch every work action star Wesley Cabot was ever in.

Makes sure his staff still gets paid well. After all, he’s pretty well-off; there’s no need to make an innocent bartender’s life a living hell just because some other rich bastard fucked up, yeah?

Going off this, should he need to order to-go or anything, we already know he tends to tip as handsomely as he looks.

Dewey Finn

Kids were being sent to Horace Green on tuitions worth more than what some people saw in half a year -- of course the school was going to continue classes online!

While technically an afterschool instructor, the program is popular enough for parents to expect it to continue, and for Dewey to be kept on payroll.

Initially, he was pretty smug: He’s one if, if not, the youngest teacher-figure at Horace Green, so surely that means he’s more tech savvy than his older, stiffer coworkers, right? For once, he’s ahead of the curve!

Wrong: Figuring out Zoom was a headache, and then there was the realization of just how dependent his classes were on actual physical presence.

Plus, let’s be real: Dewey’s Internet connection was decent on its own, but craptastic when compared to those of his wealthier students. The lag is strong with this one.

Has definitely accidentally messed up the background on his screen. Somehow wound up with the Beetlejuice background and got so frustrated, he wound up keeping it there for two whole sessions.

In spite of the slight issues regarding lag, they pull through and try to resume lessons as best they can.

Tries to keep optimism by pointing out how this is a new form of entertainment they could be pioneers in.

Some days, it’s just going so wack or everyone’s so bleh that Dewey just assigns for them to watch a music documentary or something.

“Okay, kids, Mr. Finn’s hungover and clearly Summer is the only one who went to bed before 3am. So what I’m gonna have you do is watch . . . Prrrbbbb . . . Amadeus.” “How is Amadeus rock-related?” “It had a rock single, shut up. Anyway, we meet back next class and talk about what we saw, m’kay? M’kay. Over and out.”

Next class, he’s filled with dread as Summer produces an in-depth analysis of the relationship or lack thereof between character and the presence of talent as evidenced by Mozart’s abilities juxtaposed with his immature presentation and -- Dewey just can’t keep up. Sure, Summer, why not?

When he’s not busy teaching, however, he’s using the lockdown to work on some new material. Or just screwing around.

Otherwise, let’s be real, Big Boy’s living the high life in a place of his own: Playing video games (Animal Crossing, recently got back into Team Fortress 2, is trying to finally finish Ocarina of Time); eating a not very great diet; staying up late, napping at weird times; all in the name of quarantine.

If he orders delivery or to-go, he tips the best he can.

Wade Wilson

On one hand, murking never goes on lockdown. But on the other . . . He’s already technically not well, why risk that even with his mutation?

Oh, fuck I just remembered he lives at the X Mansion, never mind turn back turn back oh god give us free --

The situation is tense to say the least. There’s Wade, who’s sensible enough to know why the quarantine is in place . . . and then there’s everyone else, who knows Wade’s full of shit.

And by everyone, I “coincidentally” mean Colossus, Nega Sonic, Yukio, Domino, Cable, and Russ because the already small world of the sequel just got smaller by the fact that everyone is bound to a large but nonetheless single estate whose size has probably decreased from that of the First Class timeline.

You know those videos of the usual Quarantine Characters? Wade is somehow yet still unsurprisingly all of them, save for the frequent sanitizer. He raids the pantry frequently, sleeps at all hours, considers scooting a swivel chair down the halls exercise for the thighs, blasts video games, and so on.

Going back to the sanitizer thing, it’s not that he’s just not exactly known for being tidy. Colossus occasionally does drag him out of bed at a decidedly decent time (read: any time before 11am) to try and get him excited about cleaning up around the mansion, but it rarely ends well. At this point, the safest option is to just remind Wade to wash his hands for 20 seconds as necessary.

Has acquired a Switch and visits everyone’s island, often to bonk them on the head with a net or gift them with weird crap they don’t necessarily want. For the “friends” from Sister Margaret’s, he has somehow acquired their Dodo Codes. Nobody knows how he did this. 

Facetimes Dopinder frequently.

“Precious, you’re the beacon of light in this cold, cruel world.” “I miss you, too, DP --” “Sshshsh! I’m having a moment . . .” *weeps*

On the many occasions he orders delivery, he tips by giving the delivery person something expensive from the mansion that they can sell. Prof. X is loaded, after all. Plus, he more or less isn’t even present in this universe, it’s not like he’s gonna miss anything he can’t see/probably doesn’t even know exists in his house. The problem is, Colossus does exist and does notice and does care when things go missing. Leading to many a delivery person getting caught up in shenanigans at that weird school in the boonies that they either don’t get paid enough to deal with or couldn’t pay to make up.

“Oh, pawn shops are closed?” asks the man who looks like a skinned avocado if avocados had human skin. “Don’t worry, lemme hook you up -- I know some guys --” “DEADPOOOOOLLL!!” roars a Russian accent from inside the house. “WHERE IS THE BRONZE BUST OF THE PROFESSOR!?” The poor delivery person’s eyes widen as they realize that the odd cargo they’ve been presented with apparently holds some value of some kind. But before they can flee, the avocado man blurts, “Shit! Leave the pizza in the bushes, look me up on my Youtube page, byyyeeee!!”

In his defense, Wade does hold up his end of the deal. Much like the Dodo Codes, nobody knows what strings he pulled. They just accept it and move on.

Harley Quinn

Surprisingly compliant.

She’s crazy, not stupid: Staying at home may suck, but what sucks more is making things harder on people who may not fair so well. Besides, she’s spent time in a maximum security prison -- she can handle staying cooped up in her own home. At least home has TV, books, and snacks.

When she hears people are still going out without masks or plotting to have a protest, she strongly considers firing up the old Fun Gun and popping the next sign-carrying Karen she sees with a tit full of cadmium yellow powder.

Seriously, stay the fuck home and fuck up your own hair; this is the perfect time to make mistakes with your looks, it ain’t like you got anywhere to be or anyone to impress.

“STAY THE FUCK HOME, BITCH!” P O W!!! “JUST GO GREY ALREADY, WE ALL KNOW YOUR HAIR AIN’T THAT COLOR ANYMORE, YOU’RE THREE YEARS FROM BEING IN THE GODDAMN AGE-BRACKET!!!” P O W!!!!

Only leaves her new apartment to grab groceries and to take Bruce on a walk. She actually refuses to steal or cause a scene during this shitshow because she may be a bad guy, but she sure ain’t evil.

So far, there haven’t been complaints about the fact that she’s walking a hyena down a public street. Maybe it’s because there’s hardly anyone out? Maybe it’s because Gothamites just can’t be bothered to be fazed by it . . . Or maybe it’s because she made him a little mask for his snout.

“In this house, we wash our hands for at least 20 seconds, kid.”

Lets the forest reclaim the earth, so to speak. She was never really shaving anything for anyone but herself before, but now it just seems especially pointless.

Spends almost every day in a kigurumi. To give her a semblance of routine, she has a pink bear one she calls her “Sunday Suit.” She doesn’t know it’s not Sunday because the days just blur but Cass just doesn’t have the heart to tell her; she seemed so proud of herself . . .

Like everyone else, she’s gotten Animal Crossing. She’s trying to create an all-preppy island with a few exceptions (Astrid = Aesthetic, m’kay?)

Tips nicely when ordering delivery.

Benoit Blanc

As young and spry in nature as the gentleman sleuth would like to think of himself, he would really rather not test the dangers of the situation and go about all foolhardy -- he’s staying home!

In theory, it’s only logical and therefore perfectly fine. But in practice . . . God, he wishes he’d invested more in things to occupy himself with when home.

It wasn’t that Benoit was never home, he just never felt too much of a need to invest in a fancy entertainment center -- the fanciest he ever got was an iHome.

The beginning of the quarantine served as the perfect time for him to read over case files, catch up on paperwork, even catch up on some reading he’d been putting on hold since God knows when due to cases popping up left and right. But that dried up quicker than he’d assumed, and that’s when he was faced with what a man of his mind dreads the most: Boredom.

Finally caved and decided to hook up Amazon Fire.

Expected to use the one-month free trial on Netflix and be just fine but once the lockdown in his area got extended and he realized he wasn’t going to be able to catch up with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend at this rate, he caves even further and buys a subscription.

Fully delights at the influx of platforms uploading Broadway recordings; when The Show Must Go On put on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, followed by The Phantom of The Opera, it was a treat, I tell you!

Sanitizes often, despite hardly ever leaving his house besides to have a smoke or to go grab groceries. Honestly, it’s less about cleaning at this point so much as it is finding something to occupy his focus when he feels there’s nothing else to so.

Takes zinc after every meal to help lessen the intensity of any ailment that might hit him.

Definitely owns a facemask. There’s a good chance it’s from Marta or one of his relatives, and there’s another good chance the pattern is as flamboyant as his clothing. He’s delighted.

Benoit tries not to rely too much on delivery,  as he’d much rather just cook. On the rare occasion where tipping comes up, however, he gives as generously as he can.

Bonus: There’s a slight chance he might have acquired a companion to foster early on in the quarantine. Benoit hadn’t had a pet since childhood, a crime of which he was admittedly melancholic of his own involvement. However, his surprisingly busy lifestyle just wouldn’t suit a four-legged friend, now could it?

Well, now there’s time to. Besides, it would certainly ease the potential feeling of loneliness to have someone or something with whom he could interact with.

Admittedly, when shelters began encouraging people to invest time in taking home a companion, he’d been looking more for a comrade on the canine side of the spectrum -- but darn, if Duke wasn’t a handsome cat.

A lovely grey-and-white cat with eyes that matched his own, Duke has become the one Benoit monologues to (because in all honesty, the man is a performer at heart, in need of an audience to speak his mind to and portray a thought before). Plus, he doesn’t appear to mind it when Benoit finds himself belting out in tone-deaf notes to showtunes while washing the dishes: The mark of a true companion.

At this rate, he’s probably not going to keep fostering Duke when things calm down -- he’s probably going to just straight up adopt him.

Stay safe & healthy!

[agerefandom]

Forever More

Fandom: Phantom of the Opera

Words: 1,900

Characters: Christine Daaé /Erik (The Phantom)

Summary: Established relationship: a sugar sweet fanfiction exploring Christine and Erik’s life together with a focus on Erik as a traumatized age regressor and Christine’s attempts to re-parent him. 

Warnings: Erik and Christine are married as adults, but Christine thinks of adult!Erik and regressed!Erik as different parts of her life. Erik’s scars are present, and anxiety-ridden regression is mentioned but isn’t the focus. Erik calls Christine ‘Mama’ when he’s young. There is also a bathing scene with suggested nudity.

Note: Nobody requested this, I just rewatched one of my favourite stage productions of the show and the need for this fanfiction was consuming me... so here it is, brought to life! I hope at least one other regressor enjoys this ^-^ 

Christine had always known that living with Erik would be an adjustment, but there were many parts of it that she didn’t expect.

She had known that his sheet music would spread across the music room, always multiplying. She had known that he would have bad days, withdrawn or angry, that there would be nights when he wouldn’t come to bed because he was working or didn’t want to be near her. She had known that he would go back to wearing his masks sometimes, that he would leave entirely and go wandering through the catacombs or into the countryside.

Christine had also known that he would always return to her, removing his mask and kneeling at her feet, pressing his cheek to her thigh as she ran her fingers over the uneven scars on his head. This was their quiet ritual of forgiveness, marking his return as her husband.

There were other things about Erik that she hadn’t expected.

Christine was out during the day, teaching dance and singing lessons to children in the city, travelling from house to house. Erik made himself helpful, doing the chores, sewing Christine’s dresses, making their meals. Sometimes Christine felt like she had a new housekeeper instead of a husband, but she appreciated the help and made sure Erik received her thanks for every meal and new outfit.

Erik was a creature of many moods: sometimes he was playful, sometimes he was soft, sometimes angry or distant. Christine learned to navigate his emotional tempest, the times when she needed to leave before they fought and the times when she needed to wait him out.

Sometimes Erik was young. It used to happen when he woke up from nightmares, confused and afraid. He would cling to Christine, sobbing and vulnerable in a way she rarely saw. He was different in this space, but he was so different from day to day. It took her a while to realize that it was something different from his mood swings. He seemed disoriented in this space, confused by the house and even by Christine herself. He flinched at every movement but melted into her arms when she held him, clinging to her nightgown with a white-knuckled grip.

Christine asked Erik about it in the day, and he twisted his hands together, his shoulders squared. Said that sometimes he couldn’t remember that he’d grown up. Sometimes he thought he was still a child, lost and alone, but it always passed and he would come back to himself.

Christine’s heart broke for the boy that Erik had been, and what he couldn’t move on from: that abandonment, that fear that had been part of him for so long.

So she started to care more for Erik when he was young. Christine had never been very confident at sewing, but she modified a few patterns designed for children and made Erik a kilted suit, like the boys had worn when she was young. To her gratification, little Erik loved the kilt, running his hands over the fringed edges, and she ended up sewing three more from the same pattern so that he could wear them when one was dirty.

Erik started to be young more often, a few evenings a week, and they talked about it again. She assured him that she loved caring for him, that this was special to her, fulfilling a maternal spirit she’d never really intended to nurture. Christine told him that she always wanted to spend time with her husband, but she loved her little boy as well. Erik looked at her with that deep uncertain awe that he had sometimes when she told him that she loved him. It always made her heart feel like it was pressing against her ribs, like she wanted to take Erik and press him into her chest where he could be safe inside of her forever.

Christine knew that was impossible, but at least she could cradle him when he was young, teach him the love that his first mother had not given.

It became another part of their lives together, like the drawn curtains, and their country home, and Erik’s paintings scattered around the walls.

“Mama!”

“Erik!” Christine ran to embrace her little boy, wrapping her arms around his chest and squeezing tight. He was so much taller than her, but he fit inside her arms perfectly. “Little one, how have you been?”

“Mama!”

Erik wasn’t very talkative when he was young, and Christine thought he was probably very young indeed. Maybe two or three at the oldest, and she always wished she could carry him.

“Have you been drawing?” There were papers scattered across the floor. Erik was very proper about keeping his art on the desk when he was working, so it was probably a result of her little boy having fun with Erik’s art supplies. “May I see?”

Erik knelt to scoop up a handful of papers from the floor and held them up to her, smiling widely. Christine loved that expression. It had been hard-earned, and the switch from the scared little boy flinching at everything to an enthusiastic trouble-maker had been a long road. Erik still had his hard days as a boy, of course, days where he wouldn’t stop crying or where he was more confused than normal, but they were far less common than they had been when Christine had started caring for him.

“Oh, thank you.” Christine accepted the papers and started flipping through them. They were all charcoal drawings, and heavily smudged. That would explain why Erik had black all over his face: she had assumed that he’d gotten into the fireplace again. She would have to clean his hands before he started climbing on the furniture.

Erik was a talented artist as a grown man, but the ability did not translate to his younger self. Christine thought she could make out a stringed instrument in one of the drawings, and a figure with long hair in another. Most of them were scribbled messes of black, covering the page. Christine carefully shuffled the pages into an orderly stack and placed them on the table.

“Those are amazing, darling. We’ll have to add them to our scrapbook.” She had come across advertisements for children’s scrapbooks in a periodical and had immediately started buying the blank books to keep her little Erik’s work and interests in. He liked to help her arrange the clippings, and she liked having a record of his younger self. She would ask him what he’d been drawing when he was older again, writing his interpretations underneath. Her husband was always embarrassed but indulgent in the face of Christine’s enthusiasm.

“Scrapbook!” Erik echoed. He liked to say words back, usually in a way that made sense, but sometimes Christine thought he just liked the sound of certain words.

“We’ll do that later,” she told him, kneeling down to join him on the floor. “Right now, we need to get you washed off.”

“No!” Erik made a grab for the papers Christine had left on the table, and she intercepted his charcoal-smudged hands, gently interlacing their fingers.

“We’ll change you into your kilt afterwards,” she told him, and Erik’s expression changed to a less defiant one. Christine tried not to smile, even though the victory trilled in her chest. “Come on, little maestro, Mama wants you to play for her before dinner and you can’t touch the piano with dirty fingers.”

After that, Erik followed her to the bathroom willingly. Christine removed his clothes, waving away his attempts to help. He had clearly not been planning to be young when she got home, and he was still wearing his usual suit. Most of the charcoal smudges were on his dark wool trousers, which wasn’t much of a problem, but she didn’t want him to get it on the white shirt he was wearing.

She kissed his cheeks to distract him while she undid the buttons, paying equal attention to both cheeks, although she was gentle when she brushed kisses around the scars on his right side. He laughed, a carefree sound that she never heard from her husband. They both had lovely laughs, but they were so different. She loved them both so much.

Once Erik was free of his suit, she laid his clothes on the railing and sat her little boy down on a stool, bringing the washbasin over to clean his hands and face. He squirmed and whined, and she kissed his face again, cleaning off the charcoal with practiced sweeps of the sponge.

When the washing was done, she led him to their bedroom and pulled out his favourite outfit, a dark green kilt with a plain shirt and a vest. They had an English storybook with illustrations of a boy wearing an identical outfit, and it was one of Erik’s favourite stories when he was young like this.

With newly clean fingers, Erik dressed himself, although Christine swept in to tuck his shirt and straighten his collar.

“There we are,” she said, stepping back to admire her work. “My handsome boy.”

Erik blinked up at her contentedly, his right eye only closing halfway because of the scar tissue that layered his eyelid back on itself.

“What do you think, Erik? Do you want to play for Mama?”

“Sing!” Erik popped up from the bed, reaching for Christine’s hand.

“Yes, darling, of course I’ll sing for you.” She drew him close and kissed his forehead, running a hand over his head. She’d convinced him to shave what little hair he had on his head, and now it was a soft surface of wrinkled scars and divots, perfect for running her hands over when they were cuddling.

“Sing!!” Erik protested, pulling away from her embrace. Things were clearly not moving quickly enough for him.

“Yes, yes, alright,” Christine relented, letting him pull her down the hall to their music room. Erik’s piano stood in the center, stacks of sheet music all around. He was much neater with his paintings because he had to be: his music wasn’t threatened by a stray foot stomping on them.

Erik sat on the piano bench and Christine sat beside him, resting her hand on his knee. “What will you play me today?” she asked as Erik placed his hands on the keys.

He didn’t answer with words, simply beginning the song when she was done speaking. Christine wasn’t sure why Erik was so talented at music when he was young, yet could hardly draw a straight line with charcoal. Perhaps it was something to do with his natural talents, or something else entirely, but Christine wasn’t complaining as he went straight into one of the most recent operas they had been learning together.

His memory for music was less jumbled than his other memories when he was young. Sometimes when he couldn’t even remember Christine, she could get through to him by singing familiar lullabies, soothing him slowly and bringing him back, helping him to remember that he was safe, that she wouldn’t hurt him, that she was safe.

Erik played, and Christine sang. He loved to hear her sing, even though he didn’t know that he was the one to teach her. For now, she was his mother, and she was proud of his music, and that was all that mattered.

She was making sure that he knew he was loved, now and always. Forever more.

[dwellordream]

“...Historians concur that live-in domestic service was primarily an urban phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. One estimate suggests that between 15 and 30 percent of northeastern city-dwellers hired live-in domestics. The historian David Katzman, who has generated the most refined statistics, demonstrates that even within relative geographical proximity, city-dwellers hired servants more often than did rural dwellers, and city-dwellers with large pools of foreign labor more than city-dwellers without. Nationwide at midcentury there was one domestic servant for every ten families, with a considerably higher ratio in large cities like Boston and New York. 

A greater proportion of Bostonians hired domestic servants than did residents of any other northern city, with 219 servants per thousand families. With traditions of household service born in slavery, even after the Civil War, the South led the nation in its reliance on domestic servants, with Atlanta in 1880 boasting 331 servants per thousand families. Even in the South, though, the difference between city and country was notable, with Atlanta in 1900 hiring four times as many servants per thousand families as in the rest of Georgia. Together these figures suggest the flourishing of an era in the history of Victorianism. It was common for American bourgeois city-dwellers on the Atlantic seaboard, even ones of modest means, to rely on the labor of maids to sustain their households.

Of course, the end of the story is popular cliché. With the opening of more lucrative and less degrading jobs for young women as sales clerks, ‘‘typewriters,’’ and teachers, the ‘‘servant problem’’ became terminal, and by the First World War, American housewives could not depend on the hiring of live-in domestic help to assist them in their housework. It is significant, though, that even when ‘‘necessity’’ suggested the reintegration of daughters into the domestic economy, they were gone for good. The culture had put girls to other uses, from which they would not return to their mothers’ sides.

We still might ask why girls were often excused from domestic labor— especially given the compounding weight of the advice literature recommending otherwise. The answer lies in the increasing role played by daughters and servants in the bourgeois quest for refinement. Even when the gross number of live-in servants declined as production moved out of the home, the hiring of at least one domestic remained a prerequisite for middle-class status. The statistics on who hired servants bear out the middle-classness of this phenomenon, with 65 percent of servants in the Northeast in 1860 working in households with no other servants. In an increasingly mobile and prosperous society, hiring servants was one way to demonstrate standing, a concrete and conspicuous way of demonstrating what you had left behind. 

One historian argues that the cultural importance of servants should be measured in the amount that some less prosperous families were willing to spend to hire them—sometimes as much as one-third of family income. Clearly, the freeing of daughters from steady household work and the hiring of domestic servants of lesser, often foreign, status went in tandem with the changing purpose of the home itself. Eighteenth-century households had required helpers to assist in domestic production. The homes of the mid– nineteenth century elite instead featured housework ‘‘as the creation and maintenance of comfort and appearance,’’ in the words of the historian Christine Stansell. 

As the Beecher sisters observed, families were increasing ‘‘in refinement’’ such that they no longer wished to live in close intimacy with ‘‘uncultured neighbors,’’ far less daughters of foreign shores, who were working as servants. Thus one mill-owning family in rural Vermont made a point of hiring Irish help rather than the daughters of neighboring farmers, who might object to eating in the kitchen and expect to be ‘‘one of the family.’’ Architects reflected such changes by midcentury, such that servants’ quarters were designed as discrete parts of the house, with back stairs and separate entrances. Custom increasingly favored uniforms and servant dining tables in the kitchen. 

At the same time that middle classes aspired to higher standards of comfort and appearance in accordance with new possibilities, women’s primary responsibility shifted from the supervision of a household manufactory to family nurturance, the raising and socializing of children. Much has been written about the evolution of new ideals for motherhood following the American Revolution, as women gained responsibility for raising virtuous citizens. ‘‘Republican mothers’’ shaped new daughters as well as new sons. Initially considered necessary allies in the steady work of processing the stuff of survival, the daughters of middle-class families became themselves the prime products the home produced—the embodiment of the principles of sensibility and refinement. 

Mothers’ new responsibilities did not erase old ones. The historian Jeanne Boydston has appropriately criticized the readiness of her colleagues to mistake the ideology of domesticity for reality, arguing that by no means did the productive work of the home cease with the industrial revolution. Instead, Boydston argues, the emphasis on the emotional task of mothering tended to eclipse from view, but not eliminate, the continued real labor—the making of clothing, the putting up of preserves, the carrying of fuel—still carried on in the middle-class home. She is right in her argument that ‘‘paid domestic workers did not free the mistress of the household from labor.’’ 

But even Boydston acknowledges that domestic servants instead did the work that would have been done by other females in the household—including adult female relatives and daughters. An interesting case in point is the urban family of woman’s rights advocates Henry Blackwell, Lucy Stone, and their daughter Alice Stone Blackwell. As Boydston tells us, Lucy Stone, who was raised on a farm, still kept chickens, worked a garden, and tended a horse and cow, even as she lived a prosperous middle-class existence outside of Boston. Alice Blackwell later remembered that ‘‘she dried all the herbs and put up all the fruits in their season. She made her own yeast, her own bread, her own dried beef, even her own soap.’’ 

In her lively diary, however, Alice Blackwell reports doing little household work. Such chores as emerge in her diary were designed to interrupt her incessant reading, which was thought to be responsible for her bad headaches. Thus her cousin, visiting the household, ‘‘had undertaken to find me something to stop my reading: churning; and I churned in the cellar till the butter came.’’ In fact, advice writers who had failed in their efforts to promote domestic work for daughters on other grounds often focused on the value of domestic labor as a source of exercise. The Beecher sisters observed that if girls did strenuous housework, their parents would be spared the expense of gymnasiums. ‘‘Does it not seem poor economy to pay servants for letting our muscles grow feeble, and then to pay operators to exercise them for us?’’ 

Louisa May Alcott, whose collected opus represents a powerful gloss on the domestic debates of late-Victorianism, repeatedly suggested the healthfulness of housework, ‘‘the best sort of gymnastics for girls,’’ according to Dr. Alec in Eight Cousins. Her Old-Fashioned Girl explicitly contrasts the healthy republican daughter skilled in domestic arts with the languid late-Victorian belle, afflicted with boredom because of her lack of home chores. Mothers undoubtedly continued both to supervise and perform much household maintenance, but they did so assisted by domestics rather than their own daughters. What did middle-class girls do instead of housework? 

This was a question which greatly concerned commentators, who asked, as did Mary Livermore in 1883, ‘‘What shall we do with our daughters?’’ Mary Virginia Terhune, too, lamented the passing of housework as girls’ raison d’être and with it ‘‘that prime need of a human being—something to do.’’ Parents found a range of things for daughters to do, including the ornamental skills of sewing, playing piano, writing and reading associated with self-culture. Increasingly, also, they sent daughters to school. Common schools designed for both sexes did not include sewing. 

In later years, the Beecher sisters observed, ‘‘A girl often can not keep pace with her class, if she gives any time to domestic matters.’’ And they noted, ‘‘Accordingly she is excused from them all during the whole term of her education.’’ Girls themselves noted the increasing power of lessons in any competition with housework. Agnes Hamilton remarked that first her French tutor and then her German homework prevented her from doing her ‘‘share of Monday’s work.’’ It was not long before the work of some girls was reassigned. 

Those who were serious about domestic education, such as a composer of ‘‘An Ideal Education of Girls’’ that appeared in an 1886 issue of Education, suggested, in fact, that this disjunction be acknowledged. A girl should receive the same education as a boy until the age of twelve, its author suggested. At that time a girl should drop out of school for two years and learn the complete running of a household, returning to school only with that formal apprenticeship accomplished. Only such complete separation of activities would allow the household its due.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Daughters’ Lives and the Work of the Middle-Class Home.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

[juliandev0rak]

Defining Moment 🧳✨

Eleven: Defining Moment — what was their coming-of-age moment? A point where everything changed?

echoes of the past event

@arcana-echoes​

Beatrice Viano, she/ her

The South End, Vesuvia

12 years before the events of The Arcana, Beatrice is 14

Words: 2266

Warnings: mentions of parental emotional abuse, no specific details are given but just in case- this does deal with a child leaving an emotionally abusive household so please feel free to skip this post if you’d like

It’s now or never.

The last two years have been hard for Beatrice. With her sister gone, all of her mother’s attention has been focused on her, which has been far from a good thing. Her mother had devoted herself to Beatrice’s education whenever possible, running her tailoring business on the side. Sewing and washing the fine clothing of wealthy women had always made her mother envious for a better life, and she views her daughters as the way to do that.

Beatrice, and her sister before her, had been educated to catch the eye of an upper class, wealthy gentleman. Her mother had tried to arrange a marriage for Freya, which had fallen through, but she has high hopes for Beatrice. Her education mostly consists of training Beatrice to be a proper lady, practicing etiquette and the piano, learning to walk with poise and grace, and most of all learning how to speak correctly. “Good girls are seen and not heard” had been drilled into her since birth. Beatrice is good, she does what she’s told, but it’s still never enough.

Her mother’s corrections are swift and harsh, she is never good enough, or quiet enough, but she is smart enough- too smart actually. Her mother tells her that it's unbecoming for a lady to know so much, how will she get a husband if she runs her mouth like that? Beatrice doesn’t want a husband, she wants a friend. Since her sister left she’s been all alone in the house, not even allowed to go out to the market without her mother. 

Freya had run away from home, and her mother spends every moment making sure Beatrice doesn't follow suit. The house has always been a prison of sorts, but now the warden has become even harsher. Her mother hates magic most of all, so Beatrice has to hide her abilities. It’s impossible to live here knowing that just across town her Aunt Cora has a magic shop and could teach her, if she could only get out.

Part of her feels obligated to stay with her mother, she’ll be all alone if Beatrice leaves and despite her flaws, she’s still her mother. But, deep down, she knows that the only future she has to look forward to if she stays is being married off to the highest bidder. So she bides her time.

She spends her days pretending that nothing is wrong. She practices piano, she does her etiquette lessons and works on her needlepoint samplers, but in her head she’s plotting. Her mother takes her with her whenever she leaves, and it would be difficult to slip out unnoticed any other time.

However, she gets incredibly lucky when one of her mother’s customers requests a house call. It’s too important of a client for her mother to bring Beatrice along, so she’ll have a few hours in the house alone. She begins to plan her getaway, trying to figure out a way to pack her belongings without raising suspicion. 

When her mother leaves that afternoon with a warning of “Be good, Beatrice.” she rushes into action. It’s now or never, and she can’t risk losing this chance to get away. She’ll never be able to live with herself if she doesn’t try to learn how to use her magic, if she doesn’t try to make her life what she wants it to be. 

Beatrice gathers her things in a hurry, wishing she knew more magic to help her with the process. On a whim she throws on her father’s old green cloak. It’s the only thing she has of his and though she never really knew him, she wants to remember him. He’d left when she was too young to remember, and he’s still out there somewhere. She’s often thought about going in search of him, but as she’s gotten older she’s realized he probably wouldn’t be too happy to see her given the circumstances. 

Bag in hand, she opens the door to leave, trying not to think too much about what she’s about to do. She’s scared, she knows her mother won’t let her return if she leaves and she hasn’t seen her aunt in years so she has no guarantee that her aunt will even take her in. But she has to do it, she has to try.

She has a good sense of direction so she makes it to Center City in no time, but she has to ask for directions from there. Trying to find the magic shop without knowing its name is easier said than done. When she arrives it’s still light out and there’s a sign proclaiming that the store is open so she walks in, unsure of what’s to come.

The store is bustling, a dozen customers peruse the various shelves. She spots her Aunt Cora, who looks a lot like her mother, in the corner of the store talking to a customer. So Beatrice walks over, trying to catch her eye.

“I’ll be right with you in a moment, dear.” Aunt Cora says when she notices her approaching, she turns back to the customer then whirls right back to Beatrice. “Oh, Beatrice! Darling, whatever are you doing here?” 

She excuses herself from the customer and runs over to greet her niece. Aunt Cora pulls her into a hug that Beatrice tries not to recoil from. After she deems it long enough that she won’t be impolite, Beatrice pulls away and tries to explain but she’s cut off by a barrage of questions.

“Is Ada here with you? Does she know you’re here?” Cora asks, speaking of Beatrice’s mother.

“No Ma'am, I left without her knowledge.” Beatrice explains, staring down at her shoes to avoid looking at her Aunt, but the voice of her mother reminds her that making eye contact is polite so she raises her head. “My sincerest apologies for the intrusion, I wanted to, that is, I had hoped-” 

 “My, aren’t you a polite girl.” Cora laughs, cutting off her stuttering explanation, “It’s ok, Beatrice you aren’t intruding at all. How about I close the shop early and we can talk? Just give me a few minutes, you can head up the stairs over there and I’ll be right up.” Cora gestures to the corner of the shop where the entrance to her apartment must be.

“Thank you Ma’am.” Beatrice resists the sudden urge to curtsy and tentatively makes her way to the stairs. 

“Call me Cora!” Cora calls after her, shaking her head sadly as she watches Beatrice politely nod in response.

Beatrice opens the door to the apartment and is delighted to find it cozy and quite charming, though a bit too cluttered for what she’s used to. She sets her bag down and takes a seat on the edge of the couch. Her aunt had seemed happy to see her at least. A minute passes in tense silence until she hears footsteps on the stairs. 

“You know,” Cora says, entering the apartment, “your sister Freya arrived in a very similar fashion not so long ago. Am I to assume your visit is for similar reasons?” 

“She came to see you?” Beatrice asks, removing her bag from the couch so Cora has a spot to sit. 

“Indeed she did, she wanted to leave Vesuvia.” Cora explains, eyeing the way Beatrice’s face tightens at the mention of her sister, “But something tells me you’d rather not talk about your sister. Why don’t you tell me why you’ve come to see me?”

“Can you train me?” She asks, wanting to get it over with. If her aunt rejects her she’d rather know now. “I have magic but I can’t, my mother doesn’t, she-”

“You don’t have to explain, I know my sister’s aversion to magic. I knew you had some ability, but is it really something you’d like to pursue?” Cora smiles as Beatrice nods, “In that case, I’d be happy to train you.”

“Thank you Aunt Cora!” Beatrice says excitedly, but a moment later her expression sobers and she continues, “Only.. it’s not just that, I would need somewhere to stay.” 

“Well of course! I wouldn’t want my new apprentice to stay anywhere else! I’ve got a guest room that’s just perfect for you.” Cora grabs Beatrice’s hand and pulls her up. “Let’s go see it, shall we?” 

The room is small but it’s got a lovely window and looks less cluttered than the rest of the apartment, which is perfect for Beatrice. Once she’s all settled in, her small bag of belongings unpacked neatly, her aunt brews them some tea and they talk about magic. It’s the most fun Beatrice has had in years, being able to talk about her interests freely. It’s getting dark by then and her aunt suggests dinner and an early night so they can get started on magic training in the morning. 

Beatrice offers to fill a cooking pot with water and does it with her magic. “I’ve always been rather good at conjuring water.” She explains, “I can use the moisture in the air.” 

“Really! That’s quite something, I’m sure we’ll be able to develop that skill even more with time.” Cora smiles, just as she reaches for the pot there's a loud pounding on the shop door downstairs. “That’ll be your mother.”

“Aunt Cora, please don’t make me go back there. I want to stay here and learn!” Beatrice pleads, grabbing onto Cora’s arm, “I promise I won’t be a burden, if I go back now she’ll never let me out.” 

“Shh.. it’s ok Beatrice, I have no intention of letting my sister stifle your magic any longer.” Cora soothes. “This is your home now, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll go talk to her.” 

Cora leaves and Beatrice locks the door behind her just in case. Part of her wants to know what her mother has to say, but she doesn’t want to chance her mother seeing her. She can hear raised voices but no words, and it’s a good five minutes before Cora comes back.

“It’s just me!” She calls as she knocks on the door, Beatrice lets her in and she collapses on the couch, looking quite tired. “She never gets easier to deal with.” 

“What did she say?” Beatrice asks nervously, still standing by the door. 

“Her exact words were quite harsh, but to summarize she’s made it clear that if you’re not home by tomorrow morning you’re.. well you’re not welcome back.” Cora frowns, gesturing for Beatrice to join her. She sits next to her aunt and allows herself to be pulled into a hug. She feels like crying, but she won’t do that here. 

“I need to stay here, I have to learn magic.” She says resolutely, hoping her voice won’t break. 

“With that determination you’ll go far Beatrice, and you’re welcome here as long as you like.” Cora smiles encouragingly. “Now, have you met my familiar yet? He lives in the stove.” 

Later that night Beatrice tosses and turns in her new bed. She thinks she’s made the right choice, but it’s hard to know that yet. It’ll get easier, she tells herself, your magic will get better and Aunt Cora said you can read as much as you want here. It all becomes a bit too much and she starts crying despite her efforts not to. In the past she would have had Freya there to wipe away her tears, but it’s been just her for a while now, and it’ll be just her from now on. 

Beatrice startles as she hears a noise in the hall and sits up in bed, pulling the covers around her in the chill of the room. She listens closely as her bedroom door knob rattles and she ducks her head under the covers, trying to hide her sniffing.

“Beatrice, sweetheart, it’s just me.” Aunt Cora says quietly, sitting on the edge of her bed. Beatrice tentatively peeks her head out of the blankets and sees Cora looking at her with sympathy. “I know how hard it was for me to leave home when I was around your age. My mother was very similar to yours in a way, that’s probably where my sister got it from.”  

They sit in silence for a minute, Beatrice not knowing whether she should respond. Silent tears still run down her face and she hopes it’s too dark in the room for her aunt to notice. 

“You don’t have to suffer alone, Beatrice. You aren’t alone here.” Cora puts her hand gently on Beatrice’s head and ruffles her hair. Before she can stop herself Beatrice pulls herself out of the covers and into her aunt’s arms. Her aunt hugs her, saying soothing words under her breath as Beatrice continues to cry quietly. “I’m so proud of you for knowing what you want and going after it, Beatrice. I have no doubt that someday you’re going to be a wonderful magician, but my real hope for you is that you’re happy.” 

“Thank you.” Beatrice murmurs, pulling back from the hug. Her aunt smiles at her and brushes Beatrice’s hair out of her face. 

“Would you like to light a candle to keep in your room? Just in case you decide to read during the night or anything.” Cora suggests, and Beatrice is glad of the topic change.

“Can I use my magic to do it?” She asks, giving her aunt a weak smile.

“But of course!” Cora says, pulling a candle from her robe pocket with a flourish. “Apprentice Beatrice, your training starts... now!”

[emsylcatac]

Heyy, I wrote a little dumb and fluffy Adrinette thing tonight inspired by Marinette’s instagram story here and some discussions with friends ♥

(also yes still figuring out the concept of AO3 and finding titles haha)

* * * * *

Adrien was bored. That much wasn’t new. Having free time when stuck at home and not being allowed to go out with friends wasn’t much fun. He had already finished his homeworks, and he had worked on his piano lessons so many times that just sitting on the bench hadn’t any appeal anymore. So Adrien was bored.

He turned on his phone and opened his Instagram page. No news from his friends since the last 30 seconds. He closed the app. He sighed. He re-opened the app. Still nothing.

This wasn’t working either to cure him from his boredom. He let his head fall on his pillow in frustration. He glanced in Plagg’s direction. The little piece of cheese was lightly snoring on top of one of his oh so precious camembert. Adrien glared at him with envy. It was unfair. Maybe he should try to sleep, too.

...Or not, if the constant tapping of his right hand’s fingers on his mattress was any indication. He brought his phone in front of his eyes again. And that’s when he saw it: the little light blinking, indicating a new notification.

Adrien straightened up as fast as lightning on his bed and switched on his phone.

“Marinette has updated her story!”

He smiled at that. Marinette was always sharing cute baking tips or pictures of the bakery’s pastries (yum!), or shared some snippets of her designs. It was —in Adrien’s opinion— very refreshing from all of Chloé’s makeup selfies or new shoes, to name only those.

Adrien clicked on the notification to load the story.

“Circle skirts are my favourite 1 afternoon sewing project! Highly recommend if you’re trying to start making your clothes! Anyone else working on learning a new skill? ♥” is what greeted him, in a cursive and pink font. Adrien chuckled. Well, he thought, some people know how to occupy their free time.

He unconsciously made a quick inventory of the objects in his room but soon realised that fabric, sewing scissors and needles weren’t amongst his possessions. Too bad, he was not going to learn how to sew a circle skirt today.

The story disappeared all too soon and Adrien clicked on it again to watch it a second time. This time, he noticed that there was some other text above that looked like... her search history?! He quickly read from the bottom to the top:

“levain cookies”

“scrunchies diy”

“bon appétit”

“draw off”

“adrien agreste catwalk”

“circle skirt tuto—”

“—adrien agreste catwalk”?!

Adrien did a double take and— yes, that was indeed well his name, as in Adrien, as in Agreste, as in catwalk, no, that one was not his name, but he did catwalk a lot, yes, that was him alright.

He let the story vanish and stared blankly straight ahead. Why would Marinette look for me doing a catwalk on the internet? He thought. Unless she wanted to see a model wearing a circle skirt? But I don’t think I have ever worn one, have I?

“Plagg,” he said out loud, “why would Marinette look for me doing a catwalk?”

Plagg grumbled loudly. Oh, right. He had been sleeping.

“Sorry...what did you say?”

“I asked why Marinette would look for me catwalking. On google,” Adrien repeated.

Plagg slowly blinked his eyes at him and flew in his direction, looking annoyed.

“I...do not...know,” he answered tiredly. He then wiggled his eyebrows. “Maybe she just likes to watch you doing it. Because she likes you.”

Adrien frowned. It didn’t make any sense!

“I know that she likes me, Plagg. We’re friends, remember? No, I meant...why didn’t she just ask me?”

“Ask you what?”

“To do the catwalk for her?” Adrien raised an eyebrow at his kwami. “I am booored out of my skull today! I could do that for her once she takes a break from her sewing!” Adrien grabbed his phone eagerly and started to type out a message.

“Waaaait wait wait wait wait. You want to do what?” Plagg said in a panic.

“Offering Marinette to catwalk for her,” Adrien replied, still typing. “So she doesn’t need to look it up on the internet.”

“Hum...I don’t think that’s...such a good idea, you know…”

Adrien lifted his head to Plagg, just after having hit “sent”. “Why not?”

“Well, because—”

A ‘ding!’ interrupted him. “She said yes!” Adrien exclaimed. “I’m calling her now.”

Plagg’s eyes widened but there wasn’t much he could do now.

“Hey, Marinette!” Adrien waved at her through his device.

“Hi, Adrien! What did you want?” she asked, her voice muffled and deformed by the phone.

“I saw your story and how you looked up for me catwalking on google and—”

What sounded like a high-pitched scream cut him off, and Adrien saw her disappearing from his screen.

“...Marinette?”

“I AM HERE!” she shouted, while her head popped on the screen again. He chuckled. She was funny.

“I thought that since I didn’t have much things to do right now, maybe I could do a catwalk demonstration for you if you wanted?” he asked happily.

Another high-pitched screech. Maybe there was a spider scaring her in her room?

“Sorry, hum, YES OS COURFE! I mean, of course! Please! Only if you want to Adrien, I don’t want to force you or anything but hum, I would very much appreciate the view— I MEAN, like you—it!— if you do.”

He chuckled. “Alright then. Let me set up the phone...there, it should be good. Are you ready?”

She nodded eagerly.

Adrien prepared himself. And then, like he was used to doing, he did his best model walk from his desk to his window. He was halfway through it when he heard a loud “BANG” coming from his phone. He turned around only to realise that Marinette had disappeared from the screen and that her camera was seemingly pointing towards her ceiling. He rushed back to his phone.

“MARINETTE!” he called, worried, “ARE YOU ALRIGHT?”

She didn’t answer. “...Marinette? Youhou, Marinette??” Adrien grabbed his phone and approached his face of the screen, hoping to catch a better glimpse of her that way. It didn’t work. He turned it around, to try and move her camera. It didn’t work either.

Adrien started to panic. “Marinette, can you hear me? Oh my god, Marinette, please say something! Where are you?”

He started to shake his phone frantically, hoping it would somehow reanimate her.

“Plaaaaagg, this is not working!” he said.

“What? What’s happening?”

“I heard a loud sound and then, nothing! What if she fainted?” he was still shaking his phone in every way. “Why is this not working?”

“...Adrien. Shaking your phone is not going to do anything.” Plagg uselessly informed him. Thank you, Plagg.

“Well, what else am I supposed to do, uh? You’re really not helpful right now.”

“What you’re doing isn’t helpful either, you know.”

“At least I am trying something, Plagg!” Adrien snapped.

“...Plagg?” a faint voice said.

Adrien brought his phone back to his face. “Marinette!” he exclaimed, relieved to see her again. “You’re back! What happened?”

“I think...I think I fell off my chair. Did you just say...Plagg?!”

“Errrr...noooooo… Not at all…! I was saying…‘wow, what a plague, this spider climbing on my wall’! Hehe.”

Marinette blinked in the phone. “Oh. So it wasn’t you saying Chat Noir’s kwami’s name then.” she said, still dizzy.

“Pfffffft, Chat Noir? Hahaha, as if! I mean— Wait. Did you just say Chat Noir’s kwami’s name? As in, Plagg the kwami?” Adrien asked, surprised. Plagg was making huge NO signs with his paws.

“...How do you know Chat Noir’s kwami is named Plagg?”

“Well, how do you know Chat Noir’s kwami is named Plagg?” Adrien contered.

“You told me!” she said.

“And you told me!” he replied.

A beat of silence passed.

“Oh my god…”

“You are…”

They dropped their phones and screamed, pointing a finger at the screen.

Once they stopped, they picked up their phones and came face to face with each other. They screamed again.

They took deep breaths and tried to calm down. Adrien recovered first.

“Well…,” he said faintly, “at least now I can show you what a real catwalk is.”

“Adrien…” she warned, raising a finger to her screen.

“Plagg—”

“Don’t…!”

“—Claws out!” he shouted, letting his transformation wash over him.

He looked at the screen. Marinette fainted.

[svankmajerbaby]

5,8, 11,12,13, 23 & 25 ?? :P

thanks for the ask! sorry for taking so long to answer, i was on mobile :^(

5. character you were most surprised to end up writing? the toy story characters, to be quite honest. i have always loved the franchise but i never really thought i had much to write about it... i didn’t even question much the whole “who’s andy’s father??” thing i think a lot of people in the toy story fandom wonder a lot. but when toy story 4 came out i felt like there were a lot of stories i wanted to know. of course, i needed to know what had happened to bo peep, and how her relationship with woody would have changed after so long of being apart; that led me to reexamine their relationship based on who they were as characters, and go on a whole character analysis of both woody and bo as what they had probably gone through and which were their formative experiences... and after that i just needed to start writing down everything i had in my head. 8. favorite genre to write? i think i’m on the fence between family drama/romance and horror, with a bit of science fiction sprinkled in. the thing is, while family drama, romance and horror come easy more or less, i always get carried away with sci fi, needing to plan the new futuristic worlds, how it is different from tthe present, how characters interact with this world, etc. 11. what aspect of your writing do you think has improved the most since you started writing? definitely dialogues!! if there’s something i’m proud of (more or less) is how far i’ve come when writing dialogues. now i feel they’re a lot more natural and realistic, though just how good they are at communicating vital info is anyone’s guess really...

12. your weakness as an author fsghsdjhsdgdj i really don’t know, it’s going to be just my assessment of what i think i should improve on... i think i’m not too good at rhythm and flow, like i feel my stories aren’t very well organized and can feel boring at times or stilted, in a way. when i reread my finished stories/completed chapters i often find myself wanting to skip over scenes i feel are dull to get to the more fun stuff :^/ i do that with a lot of books tho, especially on the second or third read tho, so idk 13. your strengths as an author i think i’ve improved a lot on my dialogues?? i think. i used to hate it, because it always felt like such a chore while i enjoyed much more writing lush descriptions of environments and places and emotions and memories... but now i can spend pages and pages in a free flow of consciousness while inhabiting these characters and arguing from their points of view. this can become a weakness tho -im kind of feeling lately that i’m relying too much on dialogue instead of just... yknow, actions. which are hard to write too. 23. any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing? i don’t really know what “obscure life experiences” mean, but i’ve done things like trekking a mountain and walked through a forest and taken piano lessons and been in a car crash and seen an armed robbery and had regular anxiety attacks so i feel i can describe all of these more or less accurately... apart from that, there’s a lot of things i have to rely on other people’s experiences or accounts to write them properly, so i do a lot of research in general. im sorry im not sure what to answer fdsgfsgh i don’t really get this question 25. copy/paste a few sentences or a paragraph youre particularly proud of i’m still of the mind that The Best Thing I’ve Written So Far is a frankenstein/barbie fanfic that i feel is just... exactly what i wanted it to be, and tbh i don’t see any changes i would do to it, it’s both what i wanted to read and what i wanted other people to see. it’s a fanfic, so it’s not at all original, and i’ve borrowed quite a few words from the original (excellent) text, but i think i’ve added some ideas of my own... idk im just really really proud of it.

“It’s alive,” she whispered to Willard, or perhaps to herself.

But Vivianna was not overjoyed. She was not proud. And she was not happy at all. As soon as she could see what she had done, what she had brought to life, she recoiled in disgust and withdrew the light from it, as if, in darkness, it would disappear like a child’s nightmare.

Vivianna had attempted to make her creature in her image: she sought, as she was brought up, only the most delicate and striking beauty. She saw no reason as to give life to a being devoid of pleasant features, of perfectly shaped limbs, of the most perfect pieces she could manage to get her hands on. And so, Vivianna had fished her parts from very select places: the most cared-for, elite parts of the cemetery, where models and actresses were buried as they left too soon, too young; the dumpsters of shopping malls and large stores, where the broken mannequins were disposed of, but which could still be of use. She had washed everything so meticulously, taking the grime and the blood from nails, from crevices, better than the most professional mortician. Vivianna had used her sewing skills to attach the disparate limbs, to select and put together those fingers she found the nimblest, the lips she found the fullest, the feet she found the daintiest. When good parts were not available, that’s when the mannequins came of aid. She used heat to melt the plastic of the mannequin parts into the flesh, to attach everything neatly, cleanly, perfectly. Perfectly. Vivianna had never worked on anything as much, with as much attention to detail, with so much effort and hope. In her mind, the creature –her very own doll –would be perfect.

Perfect! Her own creation, perfect! As the heat of life animated the body, the seams became evident, the lines between skin and plastic. The scars of the stitching, that which Vivianna had done by hand, had not healed as well as she had expected; a newly beating heart pounded blood into the veins, and that blood leaked and dripped slowly through the badly sealed holes of the doll’s body. And beyond the skin… Vivianna felt sick to her stomach. She had attempted, in her pursuit of perfection, to copy herself –but even better, even more beautiful, with all those features Vivianna wished would be enhanced. But in her pursuit, the body’s proportions were extreme and deeply uncanny. It was all about small, off measurements: the bust, slightly too big for any human; the waist, just a bit too small, small enough to be wasp-like; the length of the legs, leaning toward the monstrous. And the features –the huge, blue, glassy eyes, surrounded by long, full lashes; the full, reddened, vein-crossed lips, which the doll could barely open in a forced pout; the tiny, thin nose, through which the doll tried its best to breathe; and the full head of blonde hair which, in the process had burned in places, or had become dirty and frizzy and greasy and stringy. Perhaps, Vivianna managed to think, it was what the magic of animation did to her creature: as a still figure, much like a mannequin, it could be slightly unsettling but, all things considered, a thing of beauty; but in the flesh, moving like –or how it imagined like –a person would move –something was so terribly off in how it moved, in how the body reacted to the movement, in how everything was placed and tried to place itself in the space.

[quicksilversquared]

The Designer and the Twins

When Adrien volunteers to look after Alya's twin sisters for a bit but ends up having to go to a piano lesson instead, it forces Mr. Agreste to step in and look after the girls himself. How hard can babysitting two young girls be?

As it turns out, it can be VERY hard.

links in the reblog

                                          tumblr give me back my line break

Gabriel Agreste was in the middle of a round of edits on some evening dress designs Saturday afternoon when he heard the front doors open. He spared only a single glance in that direction- no doubt it was Adrien, returning from whatever outing he had managed to persuade Nathalie to allow, just in time for piano lessons- before returning his attention to his work.

The squeals of excitement yanked his head back up a moment later. He frowned, sitting up fully and staring in the direction of the atrium. Two voices- young, definitely girls, and sounding nearly the same- exclaimed over how large it was, how there was no color, how the other should look at the big painting, could they play in the plants-

Gabriel Agreste pushed himself up out of his chair and strode to the office door, scowling out into the atrium. The first thing he saw was Adrien, trying his best to contain two young girls that came up to hip-height. They were running to and fro, trying to look at everything all at once.

He cleared his throat, unimpressed. Adrien's head whipped around, but the girls didn't slow down at all. Gabriel spared them a glance, then turned his attention on his son. Adrien was cringing a bit as he watched the girls tugging at a door, but he straightened as he turned to Gabriel.

"Father, I can explain," Adrien said quickly, gesturing to the girls. "These are Alya's sisters. I was helping Alya bring some books for our project back to her house so we could work on it there during the week, but then her bike hit a hole and it fell over and she got a really bad cut on her leg. So her older sister had to bring her to the hospital because she'll probably need stitches, but her younger sisters still needed to be watched, so..."

"So you offered," Gabriel finished, entirely unamused. "Forgetting, I'm sure, that you're meant to have piano lessons in three minutes? Your instructor is already waiting for you in the lounge."

Adrien froze, gaze shooting back to the twin girls. They had finally paused in their exploration, glancing between Adrien and Gabriel with wide eyes. "Uhh..."

"Were none of your other friends available to help?" Gabriel demanded. "Or were none of them willing?"

"They- well-" Adrien shifted from foot to foot, looking uncomfortable. "Nino is on the other side of the city- he's got family over, apparently, and they were going to a roller garden- and Marinette is busy right now, Alya said. She's already babysitting Madam Chamack's daughter, and Manon is a handful just by herself."

Gabriel glanced at the two other girls. They were giggling over something between the two of them. Then he looked back at Adrien, who was looking a little stressed, and he considered.

Adrien had to attend his piano lesson, of course. He had gone without lessons for a while now because his instructor had been gone on vacation and then sick leave for several weeks already, and there were several things that Gabriel had already asked the instructor to work on so that Adrien would be able to perform at the Gabriel winter investor's dinner. Adrien wouldn't be able to concentrate or learn a thing with the twins around, that was obvious. They were unruly and Adrien had absolutely no experience with kids. He wouldn't be able to control them. Gabriel, however, had raised a kid- or helped raise a child, at least, considering that Emilie and their old nanny had done most of the work so that he could focus on designing- and was aware of how to keep kids under control.

There was no other option, really. If the twins went along for the lessons, Adrien's instructor could very well quit and then Gabriel would have to waste some of his time finding a suitable replacement. A quick mental cost-benefits analysis confirmed that, and he sighed before addressing Adrien. "Very well. I'll watch them while you attend your lesson. As soon as it's over, though, remember to come collect them at once."

Adrien lit up. "Really? You would do that, Father? Thank you so much!"

"No more lollygagging now, go," Gabriel instructed, and Adrien scampered off as instructed. The twins made to follow, until he cleared his throat. "Girls, you'll be coming with me. Adrien has lessons right now."

"Lessons! Ew!" they chorused in almost disturbing unison, turning away from Adrien at once. "Lessons are yucky! They're boring and we have to sit still!"

...okay, yeah, forget almost disturbing unison. That was disturbing unison.

"We'll come into my office," Gabriel continued. "And then I'll, uh..."

He came up blank. It had been too long since Adrien had been the twins' age, and Gabriel hadn't exactly been a particularly involved parent at that time. He would have Nathalie search up some activities, or perhaps take over the babysitting herself, but she was currently out on lunch break.

Surely he could manage alone until she came back. She was due to return any time now.

"Can we have juice?" one twin asked, tugging at Gabriel's sleeve as they entered the office.

"And cookies?" the other added on, tugging the other sleeve.

Gabriel resisted the urge to rip his arms away from both of them. That would no doubt end in tears, and he neither wanted to nor knew how to deal with tears. "I- fine. Wait here for one minute, I'll page the kitchen staff to bring up juice and cookies."

"Yay!"

Well, so far, so good, Gabriel figured as he headed across the room to Nathalie's intercom to order two cups of juice and two plates of cookies. It was important to keep kids fed and hydrated, and getting them a small snack would keep them from whining. They could sit down on the floor and eat, and he could return to his designing and actually get some work done.

"Can we see what you're drawing?" one twin wanted to know as soon as Gabriel had ordered their food and headed back to his desk. "Is it something pretty?"

Her sister pushed her. "Dummy, adults don't draw! They only write!"

"No they don't! Look, see, all of the drawings of dresses!"

Gabriel stiffened as he suddenly found himself surrounded by two small, curious girls, one on either side of his chair. "Now girls, go back over to the door and wait nicely-"

"Why are you drawing dresses?" one twin asked. "Boys don't wear dresses! Can you draw a dress for me?"

"I design-"

"I want a dress, too!"

"But I asked first!"

Gabriel moved his sketchbook and the loose pages of designs out of their reach. "I am trying to work here, girls, go-"

His movement bumped his computer mouse, minimizing the window that he had up and revealing the one behind it, which was the Ladyblog. That was an immediate distraction for the twin terrors at his elbows.

"Look, it's the Ladyblog!"

"Our sister runs that! Does she know you look at it?"

"Everybody in Paris looks at it!"

"Yeah, because Ladybug is so cool! MIRACULOUS LADYBUG!" they cheered in unison, both miming throwing a Lucky Charm up into the air.

"You should design something for Ladybug!"

"Are you any good at designing?"

"Do you sew, too? I don't see any needles!"

"You asked for juice and cookies, sir?"

Gabriel tried not to slump in relief as the twins promptly abandoned him to run to their chef, who did quite a good job of not reacting as he handed out two cups of juice and two plates of cookies before making a hasty exit. Now that was them distracted for the time being, so he could actually think about what to do next. Clearly the twins would not be content to simply sit in silence until Adrien came to collect them- they didn't seem at all intimidated by his raised voice, which suggested that they probably got ordered around quite often but never saw any real consequences- so he would have to find some way to entertain them. Without, of course, exerting any real effort himself. He had work to do, after all, and couldn't be bothered with spending any extended amount of time dealing with kids.

Even as he thought that, his Miraculous started to warm. Somewhere in the city, someone was upset enough to get akumatized. Gabriel almost automatically moved to get up and head for his elevator before realizing that he couldn't. There were two very, very nosy pairs of eyes in his office, and they would absolutely blab about anything strange that they saw. And with their sister running the Ladyblog...

He scowled and sat back down. Within a couple minutes, his Miraculous started cooling back down again, the opportunity gone.

"We want to watch cartoons!"

Gabriel startled out of his thoughts, his attention going back to the twins. They had finished off their cookies already- and he was going to have someone come up and clean, because there were crumbs all over the floor and one of the girls had clearly spilled a bit of her juice- and were headed back over for him, this time with chocolate-smeared fingers and sticky hands.

He panicked for a moment, then realized that they had literally just handed him a distraction- cartoons. While he had heard plenty in the news lately telling parents not to let their kids get raised by screens and to limit TV time, he was neither the parent of these two little terrors nor their guardian, and so that didn't apply to him. But he did know that he would have to find some age-appropriate cartoons for the girls to watch, because otherwise he would have their parents coming after him with "concerns" and he really had neither the time nor the patience to deal with that. They would no doubt do the same if he yelled at the girls to get them to behave, so he had to watch himself.

"All right, all right, I'll set up some cartoons- if you promise to sit still and watch," Gabriel told them. "No running around or anything."

"We promise!"

Gabriel tried not to grumble as he headed for Nathalie's computer. He knew that she had Netflix on her computer because she liked having cooking shows on in the background as she worked her way through particularly tedious paperwork, which he normally rolled his eyes at but right now he couldn't be more grateful that she had a resource like that on hand for him to borrow. She was logged in, which was good, and Gabriel went ahead and flipped through the listings of cartoons.

...he really wasn't familiar with what was age-appropriate for kids that small. Gabriel didn't know what any of the shows were- he had no reason to be- so the most he had to go off on was the pictures. And pictures could be misleading. He had seen enough commercials recently to know that there were some very young-looking designs for shows that had much more adult humor. So after a couple minutes of waffling with increasingly impatient twins at his elbow, Gabriel picked the youngest-looking show- surely it would be safe- and clicked on it, letting the first episode load a bit before turning the computer to the kids. It took a minute to get them seated- they were each convinced that the other was closer, which resulted in a bit of pushing back and forth before Gabriel finally got them to cut it out- and then he could finally, finally get back to his seat and start up his work on reviewing the designs again.

It had only just occurred to him that these two had made up the akuma Sapotis and that they had been quite the handful as akumas. They hadn't listened when he warned them about the trap, only wanting to run around and eat what they wanted and go to the amusement park and stay up and night and watch cartoons and...and not listen to rules.

Gabriel was starting to suspect that maybe things wouldn't go quite as smoothly as he had initially thought, but now the twins were settled in front of the computer screen and listening to some show with obnoxious music and high-pitched voices. It was distracting, but he could tune it out well enough. It took a few minutes for him to get back into the designing groove and figure out where he had left off. The design that he was reviewing was from one of his younger designers, which meant that it was easy enough to pick out where the lines needed to be altered just a touch and mark a change in the type of fabric. The piece was original and creative, though, inspiring enough that Gabriel set it aside for a moment to grab another sheet of paper, sketching out the starting lines for a matching suit to go along with the dress. It would be close-cut, absolutely tailored to perfection and creating a bit of an illusion of broader shoulders.

These pieces would end up on the runway, Gabriel was positive. Paired pieces were always popular.

He had just started scribbling down detail on the side of the paper when he glanced up briefly and spotted Nathalie's computer playing to an audience of...zero.

Frowning, Gabriel sat up fully. The sound of giggling caught his ear, and he spun around to see one twin crouching next to one of his mannequins, the hem of the dress there draped over her head like a wedding veil.

"No playing with the dresses!" Gabriel barked, and both girls jumped before scrambling away from the mannequin. He frowned over at the dress- he would have to get it cleaned soon to remove any chocolate-y fingerprints that might have gotten on the fabrics- before returning his attention to the girls. "I thought you were watching cartoons!"

"Those cartoons are boring," the first twin complained. "They're for babies."

"They're so dumb," Twin No. 2 chimed in. "I don't wanna watch a baby show. Do you have fabric scraps we can play with?"

Gabriel frowned. All of the fabric scraps that he had around the office were exclusive Gabriel print samples, or silks and embroidered pieces or things that he had beaded. They weren't things that he wanted ruined or accidentally going home with the girls. "No. And you promised-"

"But it's a baby show!"

Movement by the door caught Gabriel's eye, and he turned in relief to see an unimpressed Nathalie standing there, surveying the scene in front of her. He opened his mouth to ask her to take the girls- surely she could entertain them elsewhere in the house- but Nathalie beat him to it.

"I'll be taking a late lunch now," Nathalie told him, turning to stride right back out the door. "I will see you in a bit, Mr. Agreste."

"You were just out on lunch, Nathalie!" Gabriel objected, jolting straight up in his chair.

"And I was just summoned to the Gabriel building on urgent business," Nathalie continued as though she hadn't heard him, pulling out her phone and consulting it as though an email had just come in. "So I have to go sort that out. I will be back...at some point."

And before Gabriel could protest, she was gone. He gaped after her for a few seconds- she was his employee, she couldn't do that!- then turned back to the girls still tugging at his elbows, trying not to growl in frustration.

He had to remember, if he lost his temper, it would get back to their parents. If it got back to their parents...

So Gabriel took a deep breath, glanced at the clock- was it broken? Surely more time had passed than that!- and then turned back to the twins. "Okay, what do you want to watch?"

The girls lit up, hopping up and down and yammering at him faster than he could follow. He let them tug him up out of his chair and towards the computer, having them point out the show that they wanted to watch instead. They then spent five minutes arguing over which show they wanted to see out of a pick of four or five things before settling on one. Sighing with relief (and trying his best to ignore the headache starting to build at the edges of his temples), Gabriel clicked on the first episode that came up, arranged the computer to the twins' satisfaction, and returned to his seat. He glanced up as the cartoon started to play and- okay, he could already tell that the cartoon was a bit less babyish than the first one, though it still had annoyingly high-pitched voices for all of the characters. The girls seemed content, so Gabriel gave himself a pat on his back and returned his attention to his designs. Several minutes later, he was just getting back into designing mode. He picked up his pencil, and-

"We've seen this episode already!"

"Yeah! I don't wanna see it again, I already know what happens!"

"We've seen this so many times!"

Gabriel let out a long breath through his nose as he was unceremoniously ripped from designer mode yet again. The twins were already clambering to their feet, clearly ready to abandon their activity and start tearing through his office again. He stood before they could get too far, strode to the computer, and maneuvered back to the menu to pick out another episode. It started playing, and the twins sat back down.

Hopefully he would get more than three minutes to himself this time.

They got past the intro without incident, and Gabriel turned his attention back to his work. He had almost gotten back into the groove when the complaints started up again.

"I've seen this already! This is an old episode!"

"Really old!"

"I'll change it, I'll change it, just keep sitting!" Gabriel said hastily, completely willing to agree to anything to get them to shut up already. Thank god he and Emilie had gotten a nanny to get Adrien past this age, and thank god that they had only had one kid. Having two or more- having twins- would have been a nightmare. And hadn't Adrien said that there were four kids in the Ladyblogger's family? That would be awful. "How many episodes of this have you seen?"

There was some whispering between the two girls, and then some arguing. Finally they resurfaced with a shrug and an unhelpful "I don't know".

Small children were maddening.

Gabriel selected another episode, this time just a little further along. There weren't that many episodes listed, so if they had selected this show it meant that there had to be some that they hadn't seen yet, right?

Apparently not. Over the next thirty minutes, the girls kept interrupting him every few minutes, taking anywhere between three to six minutes to recognize an episode and start complaining. At one point, they lost interest in the cartoons entirely and started asking if they could have cake. With a groan, Gabriel realized that he shouldn't have given in so easily to their request earlier. It had been a test to see how much they could get away with, and he had failed it.

He also missed another prime akumatization opportunity. Two so close together was rare, and yet he couldn't slip away and take advantage of it.

"Of all the days for Adrien to have a two-hour lesson instead of a one-hour one," Gabriel groaned as he pushed his work to the side again to put an end to the complaining that had started anew. The twins were looking antsy now that so much time had passed without them watching all the way through an episode, and he had to wonder how much longer he would last.

Would it be possible for him to go online and hire a babysitter to finish up the time? If they stayed in the house, surely no one could complain? But it seemed unlikely that he would be able to find someone on such short notice, and it would take time for them to arrive. Besides, finding a babysitter online would require actually having more than a couple consecutive minutes to focus on that, and he didn't have more than a couple consecutive minutes, not with the girls needing constant attention.

Three more episode switches later, and Gabriel was ready to start pulling his hair out. Right before he was about to snap at the girls to just sit down and enjoy an old episode, the door buzzer rang. Gabriel dove for it, welcoming the interruption. Maybe Nathalie had sent a babysitter. Maybe the twins' family had finally decided to come pick them up. Maybe-

It was one of Adrien's classmates, the designer girl- Marinette Dupain-Cheng, he remembered. Next to her stood another very small child, her brown pigtails barely reaching the bottom of the camera.

He couldn't deal with another small child, he really couldn't.

"I'm here to collect Ella and Etta!" Marinette said with a cheerful wave at the camera. "Adrien texted me and said that he left them with Mr. Agreste?"

"He did," Gabriel said at once, noting the way that Ms. Dupain-Cheng startled. Clearly she had been expecting Nathalie at the other end. He pressed the button to open the gates. "Enter."

"Who was that?" one of the twins wanted to know at once. "A new babysitter?"

"Yes-" Gabriel started, but they were already on their feet and racing out to the atrium. Just as they got there, Marinette stepped in with the other small girl in tow. She took one look at the racing girls and raised one eyebrow, planting her free hand on her hip.

"Ella! Etta! Is that how we behave indoors? And when we are guests in someone's house?"

Much to Gabriel's surprise, both twins slowed down and shook their heads. "No..."

"I didn't think so." Marinette turned her attention to Gabriel. "I hope that they've been behaving themselves."

Gabriel opened his mouth to answer before thinking better of it. He didn't need to admit to a fourteen-year-old that he had been having trouble keeping two five-year-olds in line, not when they had settled down so quickly at her demand. Instead, he changed the subject. "Are the twins' parents finally back home to take them? Or your friend?"

Much to his surprise, Marinette shook her head. "No, not yet. Alya needs stitches and a tetanus shot, so she and Nora aren't going to be home for a while, and their parents are super-busy right now and can't leave work early. We're going to go over to the TV studio to drop off Manon and after that, I was planning on taking Ella and Etta back to their apartment so that they won't be destroying anyone else's house." She paused, glancing over in the direction that faint piano music could be heard coming from. "I. Uh. If it wouldn't be too much to ask, I would really appreciate it if Adrien could come over and help out, so I'm not the only one watching these two."

"I will send him over once he finishes his piano lessons," Gabriel promised at once, partly so Marinette wouldn't change her mind about taking the twins and partly because Adrien had offered to take up that responsibility in the first place and he needed to understand what following through would be like so that he wouldn't do it again in the future.

A chorus of whining followed Gabriel's words, and he looked over to see both twins pouting at Marinette.

"I don't want to go on a walk!"

"Yeah, that's too far! And it's too hot!"

"I want to stay here and watch cartoons and eat cookies!"

"And drink orange juice!"

The small girl holding Marinette's hand stomped her foot and turned to her babysitter. "I want cookies, too!"

"Cookies and no walking!"

Gabriel's headache spiked as the whining got louder, but Marinette only frowned at them. "Manon, you've already had cookies. Also that's too bad, we're going on a walk. No, you don't get a say in this. Now thank Mr. Agreste and we'll be leaving."

"But I don't want to!"

"Yeah!"

"If you don't behave, I'll tell your parents and you won't get dessert for a month and you'll have to go to bed early," Marinette warned them, and Gabriel watched in utter disbelief as the twins straightened up and promptly fell into line next to her. "Now what do we say to Mr. Agreste?"

"Thank you!"

Gabriel could only nod in response as the group headed back out the door, following Marinette down the steps and across the courtyard like a line of little ducklings. He waited until they had exited the gates and turned the corner before heading back into his office and collapsing into his chair.

He could deal with uncooperative suppliers and diva clients all day long, but two young children wore him out in a heartbeat. If Ms. Dupain-Cheng hadn't shown up, he- he-

He didn't know what he would have done. His patience had been gone, he had been at his wit's end, and the twins had just been whining and whining and whining.

Ms. Dupain-Cheng deserved a reward of some sort for coming in and rescuing him from those little monsters, Gabriel decided as he reached across his desk for some aspirin. Nothing obvious, of course, because he couldn't let on that he had had any problems with the twins, but she hadn't had to come over and add two more little terrors on top of the handful of a girl that she had already been babysitting. She could have just continued with her day and assumed that he was fully capable of dealing with the twins until Adrien finished his piano lesson, which is what he assumed most teens her age would have done.

Perhaps he would grant her immunity from getting akumatized, Gabriel decided after a minute's thought. He wasn't experienced enough to be able to identify individual imprints himself, but Nooroo could and he could block her imprint's emotions from getting picked up by the Miraculous upon request. Gabriel had heard talk that it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience for those who hadn't gotten akumatized voluntarily. Something about how their memories during that time were fuzzy or lost completely, which was terribly disorienting. He hadn't experienced the same, of course, and neither had Nathalie, but the two of them were special cases. Everyone else had to deal with holes in their memories and a nagging sense of confusion, neither of which were pleasant.

Yes, that was what he would do. It would be a way to express his thanks without giving away that he was doing that at all, Ms. Dupain-Cheng would no doubt appreciate being able to express her emotions safely, and it wasn't as though it would be any great loss to him.

There would always be other people to akumatize, after all, and giving one normal teenage girl a free pass out wasn't going to make any big difference in the long run.

[ofjuliette]

[ brittany snow, thirty-two, cisfemale, she/her ] ━  did y'all see [ juliette “jules” hammond ] walkin’ into [ frostford public library? ] they’ve lived in frostford for [ sixteen years, ] and you can catch ‘em around town working as a [ librarian/author ]. I reckon they’re pretty [ effervescent & charismatic ] but I hear they can also be kinda [ garrulous & uncoordinated. ] if ya see ‘em around, be sure to say hi. ━ [ teenage pregnancy? ]

hey hi hello i’m hope and i’m watching scooby doo rn.  juliette’s intro is kind of long and i wasn’t sure if teenage pregnancy was technically a trigger or not so i just put it there just in case.  jules’ intro is kind of long but ??? she’s my baby.  there’s some wc at the bottom of the post but they’re p basic bc i’m trash™️ 

CHILDHOOD years -- 

juliette is the only daughter of marjorie and elias hammond.  she was born in greenwich, connecticut and lived in a big mansion.  juliette’s father is of old money and her mother is a former model turned socialite and housewife once juliette was born.  

juliette was born on november 19th, 1986 which was during the first big snowstorm of the year.  in fact, she was almost born in the car on the way to the hospital because of the snow.  

marjorie and elias never planned to have more kids, so they were happy with juliette and spoiled her with everything she could have ever wanted.  

in her childhood juliette spent a lot of time doing modeling ads for baby clothes.  marjorie was very much a “pageant mom” for the first five years of her daughter’s life until elias convinced marjorie to let juliette pick her own passions.  

juliette picked the arts and took piano and vocal lessons, when she got older she also learned other instruments such as the guitar, violin, and flute.  but her favorite would always be piano.  

she went to private school in greenwich, where she had to wear a uniform and the school was all grades.  

juliette was one of the smartest in her school, and wound up skipping two grades in elementary school because she wasn’t being challenged enough.  

during her early years there were many vacations that her parents would take her on and she often went into the city to visit her father at work or catch a broadway show with her mother.  

her father worked long exhausting hours and her mother often filled her time with chairing certain social events and causes.  

jules was often left alone after school in the care of their maid/nanny/chef winifried.  winnie is the adult who gave juliette the nickname of jules first, and winnie was with her all her life until she turned thirteen and her parents decided they didn’t need a nanny anymore.  winnie was also older at that point, so they hired someone new to help around the house for a couple of months until winnie retired.  

juliette was always outgoing as a kid, loved talking to new people and making friends.  she was the kind of kid who wanted to make sure everyone felt included.  and she was popular, if not just for her parents money and connections, but also for her own charismatic and charming personality.  

as a child she often entertained the idea of becoming a singer or somethin in the spotlight like her mom, but as the years went on it was harder and harder to hold onto a dream like that.  

TEENAGE years -- 

juliette was never a rebellious type, as she was content with how her life was.  sure, if she had things entirely her way she would have spent more time with her parents but otherwise juliette was a happy girl.  

she was still in touch with her old nanny once winnie left the household, often writing her letters and calling the woman whenever she felt she needed someone to talk to. 

in her early teen years juliette decided she wanted to go back into acting in commercials and such.  this led to a couple of claire’s commercials and even a guest spot in a mary kate and ashley olsen film ( winning london, if you want to know ).  

acting and singing were a big thing during her schooling.  she was always involved in the drama department in some form if it wasn’t on stage it was backstage helping out.  

she got to be good with a needle and thread, sewing a couple of mishaps in her high school productions to save money on sending them out.  

juliette was in a couple of local competitions for singing, but never anything big.  she did sing the national anthem at her high schools games though.  

juliette was in a pretty serious relationship at the age of fifteen-sixteen with someone in her high school.  they were two years older than her, since she had skipped a couple of grades, and she sincerely thought she was going to wind up marrying him after graduation.  

except at the end of september juliette was going to her doctor for a check up when she found out she was pregnant.  of course, her mother and father were shocked.  and her then-boyfriend left juliette once he found out.  juliette’s parents moved the teen into their apartment in the city with her father and she transferred to a different school for the rest of the year.  

juliette gave birth to a baby girl on april 29th, 2002.  her daughter, francesca winifred hammond was 7lbs and 4 ounces and 19 inches tall. 

juliette had always known she was going to keep her daughter, but still holding her baby in her arms after she was born was a whole other experience and it really was like wow i’m a mother.  she cried.  

juliette wasn’t at her high school graduation, but if she had been she may have been the valedictorian.  she still graduated in the top of her class.  

originally, juliette had been planning on going to columbia for their english program.  

but she decided instead to take a gap year and focus on being a mom.  

during this time she worked at a bookstore and had begun writing her own stories.  

she published her first book--a children’s “novel” just before her seventeenth birthday ( more like september of 2003 ).  it’s dedicated to her daughter.  

juliette soon realized that she wanted to move away from home.  it was too much of a reminder of what she could have been doing and what her parents wanted for her, and what she had thought she wanted.  she needed to find herself and figure out her life on her own.  

so juliette quite literally picked up a map and got in the car she’d gotten for her sweet sixteen and started driving down the highway with her daughter.  

of course, she’d told her parents beforehand.  she’d had a whole sit down conversation about moving out and on her own.  her parents were hesitant, since she was only seventeen at the time.  but they eventually agreed so long as juliette stayed in touch with them.  which she did.  

she happened upon frostford when she got a flat tire just outside of city limits.  

and frostford was everything that her hometown was not, so she wound up moving here at the age of seventeen, just before christmas time.  

her parents obviously paid for the house she lives in still.  it’s not like the mansion or even the city apartment she was used to when she was running around growing up but it has a porch and a yard and enough room for her and frannie, which was all jules wanted.  

for the first couple of years i’d imagine it was hard for her to fit in.  since she was seventeen and graduated high school prior, so most people her age were still in school.  and i’m sure more of the town busybody gossips would have been talking about how she’s seventeen with a baby.  so that wasn’t easy.  

but even with that, juliette did her best to get to know people and figure out a place for herself among the town.  

TWENTIES to NOW -- 

juliette had worked as a waitress for a couple of years while she was going to school.  despite coming from money ( and having her parents send her money every month to help out ) juliette was always determined to both pay her parents back for the house they bought her and make her own money.  

by the time frannie was in kindergarten jules was working at the diner during the day and going to college classes on her days off and taking some night classes.  

juliette graduated from college with a degree in library sciences and english literature.  

throughout frannie’s childhood, juliette worked on other books for kids.  she wanted the types of books she had read when she was a kid but something that her own daughter would love.  and frannie did love every book that juliette wrote.  

for a good six or seven years ( from the time juliette was nineteen until she was twenty-five ) juliette was known mostly as one of the more prolific children’s authors under 30.  she’d written well over 40 books since her first published children’s novel.  many of the novels are following one single story/character, but each novel is part of a whole universe where characters from one side story do pop up in others as well.  

juliette then graduated to young adult fiction, where she’s pretty much stayed since.  she writes mainly mysteries and historical projects.  she likes to balance her novels with a bit of different time periods.  and yes, she does in fact know that joseph turner the main character of her first original novel appears as a side mentioned character in her latest work.

juliette has worked at the frostford public library since she graduated from college.  she’s always loved to be around books.  

like i said back then, she often loved to daydream of being someone in the limelight when she was growing up.  you can still catch her singing a few tunes or hear the piano playing a melody from her house if she leaves the windows open, but otherwise she’s really given up on that part of her life. 

spends a lot of time with her daughter.  i imagine she’s had no contact with frannie’s father since everything that happened between them in high school.  

sometimes she wonders what it would have been like to go for singing, but make no mistake that she is in fact blissfully happy with how her life turned out.  she’s got her daughter, a blossoming career, and a happy home.  maybe the only thing she sometimes really wishes for that’s realistic is somebody to share it with? 

PERSONALITY AND MORE -- 

juliette is still as kind as ever.  she’s very charismatic and effervescent.  she doesn’t like to let anyone see her down ( even if she definitely has her moments of not being so well ). 

you wouldn’t know if she’s down unless you know her well enough.  but the signs are usually that she’s playing the piano a lot, she’s wearing a lot of loose fitting long sleeved things ( she likes to tug on the sleeves as a habit ), and her house smells like she’s been baking.  

jules often calls frostford her home and refers to greenwich/manhattan as the place where she was raised.  

juliette has a mix of a new york accent and a southern drawl from all the time she’s lived down south.  it’s definitely not so pronounced.  but when she’s angry ( which is rare, she’s not the type to raise her voice usually ) you can hear the northern accent come out.  

she will never be found without a pen ( colored ink, usually purple ), a notebook, and a reading book.  as she’s ready for any kind of situation or inspiration to strike her.  

her favorite candies include milk duds and twizzlers, and she’s a sucker for a home made pie ( she can make a good apple pie and a nice lemon meringue herself ).  

she absolutely loves when it rains, definitely the kind of person you’d find running out in the rain and dancing in it.  

quite clumsy.  she’s not a ballerina ( no matter how many lessons she had as a kid ) as her balance is always off.  

she’s talkative as hell when she needs to be and can tend to ramble on if you don’t 

is 100% a mom friend, is always there for her friends and anybody who she considers a friend.  

loves scooby doo and nancy drew.  kind of likes those simple mysteries that you could read over and over again.  one of her favorite books of all time is that was then, this is now by s.e. hinton. also loves a northern light by jennifer donnely and the luxe series by anna godbersen.  

POSSIBLE CONNECTIONS -- 

first friends in town

neighbors 

“enemies” who became friends 

frenemies 

people who know her writing 

co-workers 

for some reason i cannot think of any more connections but these were p basic anyway?? so uh come and plot with me and we can figure stuff out lol. 

@frostfordstart

[theincompetentgenius]

Hello! Can i have a “life generator” for the arcana please? :) I’m a bi 5’9 girl with curly brown hair and hazel eyes. I’m antisocial, and closed off to most people. I have a sarcastic and dirty sense of humor, and i’m childish. I love to playfully tease people. I’m a gryffindor, and quite stubborn. I get jealous easily. I LOVE animals. My hobbies are shopping, singing/piano, and archery. I’m a tomboy, and i live in hoodies. I’m honestly pretty touch starved. Thanks in advance!!

Thank you for being my first request! It took a lot longer than I expected, but I still had lots of fun doing this. I also realized how garbage my writing has become and how I lack any creativity, but that’s another issue for another time.

Thank you for your interest in the world of The Arcana! In a few moments, you will be reborn.  Loading simulation in 3 …… 2…… 1……..

B A C K G R O U N D

You were born into a wealthy family where the pressures of society were the laws of the house. Your father was attempting the climb the unspoken social latter of Vesvusia and he could not risk having his children act out of line. Fortunately, he was constantly out mingling with the high-tiers, leaving you with eons of freedom. Your mother attempted to teach you the ways of a lady, but it was not long before you turned away from the pink ribbons and ran towards the bow and arrow. She soon came to accept your differences, but you did learn to enjoy certain aspects of being a lady. However, your father soon learned of your rather rebellious behavior and sent you to a center to become more ladylike. Although you despised the suffocating corsets and endless sewing, your piano and singing lessons kept you from falling apart.

F R I E N D S  

Nadia, Navra, Nazali

As time passed, you had become one of the top pianists and vocalist in the entire community. What baffled the people was that you would only perform in a black tunic: a sign of protest against the center’s practices. The contrast in your talent and personality attracted a large audience, curious to see what you had to offer. One day, you had woken up to see the entire room emptied of its people. Gold ornaments and red carpets stood in their place. You were quickly notified that a few of the Satrinava sisters were coming to visit and your instructor wanted you to play for them. Not only were you nervous about playing in front of royal, but you were also worried about their judgy eyes analyzing your outlandish appearance. You even contemplated wearing a pink, puffy ballgown, but you chose to stay true to yourself and prepared for the event.”

“The three sisters strolled into the building, their presence more illuminating than the chandelier above your head. Once they were seated, you did not waste time with formal introductions. The audience of three listened in silence as your fingers danced on the piano keys and your voice soared across the room. You sang about your woes within the center, yearning for an ounce of freedom. Had you looked across the room, you would have noticed the wet film of their eyes. After your performance, Navra to you and grabbed your hand.

“That was the most beautiful I’ve ever heard in my life! You must play for me at my parties.” The strength of her handshake nearly ripped you apart.

“Leave the poor girl alone. You don’t want to scare her away already,” Nazali pulled her back.

Amid their bickering, you heard a cool voice from behind. “Do you feel imprisoned trying to live the life of a lady?” You spun around and saw a pair of red eyes staring back at you.

The blunt and sudden nature of the question had caught you off-guard. You had no intention of angering the princesses, but your tongue would not allow you to conform to their ways. The room went silent as the other sisters stopped their arguing and turned towards you. They were waiting for your answer.

“Yes,” You said.

The sisters exchanged glances. The pink-haired sister took the moment of silence to formally introduced herself as Nadia Satrinava, the youngest of the sisters. You curtsied in return, but her next question nearly knocked you off your feet.

“Would you like to perform at my palace? Where you are free to live as you like?”

Other friends: Portia, Mazelinka

R O M A N C E

As the royal musician, you were forced to interact with individuals who you would rather avoid after every show in the palace. Years had gone by and the only person you didn’t want to thrash was Portia. The rest were snobby, misogynistic, or outright stupid. However, there was one gem you had met during this time.

You had finished a romantic ballad for a smaller crowd that day. Nadia had asked you to perform as a part of her appreciation banquet to those working against the Red Plague. As you prepared to retire to your room, a young man with copper hair and an eye-patch appeared by your side.

“What a marvelous performance! Your voice is almost as beautiful as you.” A devilish grin was plastered over his face. It seemed more slappable than most. “Excuse me, where are my manners? My name is Dr. Julian Dovarak.“

“Sir, I’d like to know how you got past security,” Your voice was stone.

“That’s just one of my many talents. Let me tell you about how I nearly decapitated a monster with simply a bow and arrow.” You began to tune him out instinctively, yet you couldn’t ignore the charisma exuding from him. As he droned on, you decided to give him a chance. It was a matter of time before you were laughing in his tales. Dramatic, but entertaining.

“I liked your story, but I’m still calling security. You did invade my privacy after all,” You said.

He put his hands in the air. “There’s no need for that. I simply thought you enjoyed my company, but I may have misread the situation. I’ll be on my way.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy your company. It’s just…. I could have it elsewhere. Especially since you seem to have no problem sneaking up on me when I’m alone”

It took him a moment to register the joke as he responded with confused laughter. Suddenly, his eyes grew wide and his cheeks were crimson. His confidence crumbled. There was nothing left of the old Julian; only a stuttering mess. You felt the muscles of your face pull an upward grin as laughter bubbled in your stomach. Never had you met someone so bold yet so flustered. So much for his bravado.

“I’m just teasing you. I wouldn’t call security on you, because you’re not as irritating as everyone else.” You laughed as he attempted to pull himself together.

He cleared his throat, prompting the return of his mischievous grin. “I’m flattered. Of course, if you would like a more private encounter, that can always be arranged.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

F I N A L   F A T E

When the first round of accusations against Julian came around, you could not believe them. The man who had become so dear to you could not have committed murder. You weren’t sure what the details were, but your instincts told you that there was more to the story.  However, it was impossible to find reliable answers when Julian had fled the city and the only witness was Consul Valerius. You wanted to search for him, but Portia held you back.

"Chasing him will only bring you more danger.”

Although you wanted to pack your bags and take the first ship to Julian’s location, you knew it was unreasonable and irrational. During Julian’s disappearance, your relationship with Portia grew stronger. The two of you would reminisce about the good times and the best of Julian’s embarrassing moments. Soon, the two of you were able to move past Julian and make terrific memories on your own. Life began to move smoothly again. The two of you spent lots of time running errands. After a few witty exchanges, you found yourself on the floor with tears in your eyes. Portia would clutch her stomach from all the laughter. Sometimes you felt that the two of you had become delirious, but no one ever enjoyed life by staying sane.  

Yet one fateful day, you saw a flash of red and black zoom behind you. At first, you thought nothing of it. Probably some guards chasing after a thief or a child playing a game. However, the figure had stopped and you dropped your groceries. The infamous Dr. Dovarak was standing in front of you.

“Julian?”

Against your better nature, you ran after him. You already lost him once, you weren’t about to lose him again. But once you arrived at his spot, he had disappeared. You kicked the loose rubble beside you out of frustration. Your eyes had not been playing tricks on you; that was Julian. You went back to Portia and told her everything that you had seen. At first, she assumed you were messing around. However, she became uncertain as she saw the pleading look in your eyes.

That was not the last time you had seen the doctor. Your paths had crossed again when you walked into a rowdy tavern after a long day. All you wanted was a refreshing drink and some time away from the palace. Lost in your thoughts, you sat in the nearest booth and took a sip of your mug.  You nearly spat it out when you looked to your right.

“What are you doing here?”

You were face-to-face with the man who you had been searching for all this time. But now that he was in front of you, there was something off about him. He seemed tired.

“Hello darling, long time no see. How is life? I’m sure it must be dandy without me.” He flashed his famous grin that you had come to love.  A rush of anger seared in your stomach. The man had been missing for nearly three years, yet he acted as if his absence was a mere joke. Did he not realize the pain he had caused for you and his sister was unrepairable?

“No. Don’t play this game with me.” You gripped his wrist and demanded that he tell the truth. His smiley facade disappeared and he turned away. There was no way from him to explain that he had lost his memory without sounding insane or incriminating. All he could do was play the role of the villain.  

But you were not giving up so quickly. Although you couldn’t get Julian to give you the information you wanted, the two of you began to meet more often (despite the risk of Julian getting caught). As he worked through his layers of problems, you stood by his side and helped lighten his darker days

You notified Nadia that you were no longer going to play for the palace and packed your bags, joining Julian in his quest to clear his name and learn the truth about Lucio’s murder. During this time, Julian was able to look past his fears and learned to confide in you. It was not long before you two had declared your love for each other and secured a relationship.

After Julian’s name had been cleared and the second wave of the Red Plague disappeared, the two of you decided to become pirates. After the drama in Vesuvia died down, Julian was craving some form of adventure. He asked you to come along with him as he could not see himself doing anything without your support. Although you were unsure of the chaos the new lifestyle would bring, you decided to join him. Julian bought a new boat while you recruited crewmates to keep the ship running smoothly. It was not long before you and Julian set out for the seas, enjoying the wild adventures each day would bring.

T H E   E N D

[seelenvollpilot]

Here, laid out a small oneshot. While I post here because I have difficulty with uploading to the site. Cherik and Christine. This is their first lesson.)

It was already late evening when Christine was returning to the room under the stage temporarily provided by Jean-Claude. The work is not dusty, but tedious. Her heavy duty costumes lay on her elbow. Reaching the table, she dumped clothes on it, sighing with relief. Here the pebble fell off, it is necessary to embroider it, but here the fabric has gone all together! Yes, there was a lot of work and time was running out. Hanging up the costumes, mentally putting off all worries for tomorrow, Christine remembered the man that she had met two days earlier. On the girl's face flashed a glimpse of reverie. He appeared to her like a spirit, silently stepping on the floor. He admired her voice; about this Christine didn't even dare to dream. He is probably a theatrical person and knows a lot more. The musician, he wears a mask, trying to keep incognito, declares that he doesn't want to teach anyone except her. Right, he is a strange man...

Leaving the skirts and preparing for them boxes of sewing, she sweetly stretched, covering her mouth with her hand. After extinguishing the light everywhere, Christina went to the room with props. There she is today and will spend the night. In crowded but not mad. A pleasant, loved smell of skin and stage make-up hit the nose, causing the shadow of a smile to slip on the girl's face. Finding a candelabrum in the twilight, Christine struck a match and a dim light lit up all around. But suddenly, from the depths of the room, someone's fast breath came, and then a soft voice called her.

- Christine...

The girl shuddered in surprise, looking into a dark corner. Everything froze, plunged into the tangible silence of the night. Slow steps were heard on the floor, and Christine saw how darkness dissipated and the murmuring light revealed a tall figure in a black frock coat. A white mask that opens only the lips and a rounded chin with a small dimple.

-Is it you? - embarrassed by the sudden appearance, Christine lowered her head.

- Goodnight. - the man said, coming closer, but when there were two steps to the girl, he stopped, as if an invisible wall had grown in front of him. - I was not mistaken and found you.

Christine wanted to argue, but something stopped her. Light blue eyes looking at her with awe and slight embarrassment.

- Let's go, - he said, turning to Christine. - we need to hurry. And I so want to devote you to the secrets of Music...

He stopped at the door and looked at the girl. Christina, amazed to the depths of her soul, still stood on the spot, but then she woke up as if from a drowsiness. She hastily pulled off her shawl from the crossbar, and hurried to follow the man. Passing the stairs, the rotunda, a tall dark silhouette and a small bright figure disappeared in the corridor. They did not go for long, the man cautiously warned Christina to be careful. He stopped in front of the high doors.

- I ask you to. - the man leaned slightly, opening the door.

Christine, nodding, walked quickly past, being in the dark. She felt the slightest hesitation in the air and a light breeze. In the distance, a small light began to glow and now two, three such lights flashed on the chandelier candles, reflected in the mirror surface of the piano lid.

- Come on, mademoiselle.

Christine, a little slow, modestly approached the instrument. The man watched her every step, as if noticing something for himself, and from this, it seemed, the air left the lungs faster from excitement. He jerked up his head and, stroking the ruffles that had got out from under his vest, said:

- Christine, do you want to continue? - in a deep voice slipped a spark that runs only in anticipation of something new.

Smiling nervously, the girl nodded and lowered her head, folding her arms.

- Perfectly. - suddenly briskly on the exhale said the man. His hand jerked in a strange gesture, as if he wanted to touch her back. - Then I would like to start playing you something...

Christine watched in amazement as he sat down on the couch at the piano and opened the lid. A light touch of thin fingers to the keys and a soft melody filled all the space around. Something gentle, quiet, having its own charm. The first minutes of the game the man followed his hands, and then raised his head, peering into the eyes of the girl. There was something in those eyes that made Christine look at their expression for a long time, and then hide her gaze in confusion. Good and so sad...

But then the melody ended and Christine regained consciousness from obsession only when the man was beside her.

- I will teach you to sing and develop your voice to unprecedented heights. You will be tired, but believe me, you will become the Music itself...

Touching the fingers of her hand lightly, he led the girl closer to the instrument.

- Position yourself so that I feel comfortable.

Christine stood in the deepening of the piano and crossed her arms on her stomach. But the man was silent.

- To sing well, you need the right position.

- "Singing lessons? Look how she is standing!" - Madame Carlotta’s mocking words surfaced in the girl’s head, and she lowered her eyes shyly.

- Raise your head. Straighten and lower the shoulders. Stretch out.

Christine felt like one of his palm touches her back. Fingers flew up to the chin, forcing an invisible gesture to stretch the neck.

- Relax, Christine. - he was silent, as if he did not dare to say something. - You are too tense. Feel the fullness of peace.

Christine turned around facing the views of a man. Frightened by such closeness, she lowered her eyes and smiled. It could not be hidden; he, too, was embarrassed, correcting her tense posture.

- And now I would like you to sing this line.

He returned for the instrument and sang notes.

Thoughts in the girl's head messed up. She closed her eyes for a moment and turned her head away. His voice was not like everything she had heard before. A little sat down, velvet and incredibly soft. What is this?

Driving off awkward embarrassing thoughts, Christine tried to focus on the notes. He bowed his head and held out his hand in an inviting gesture.

Four first notes... fifth. Her voice suddenly broke. The man looked up, trying to say something, but Christine interrupted him.

- Ah... - she paused, picking up a word. - M-maestro, I do not think that I will succeed.

The girl saw his eyes open, and then quiet, frightening tenderness splashed into them. What struck him so?

- Christine, - he replied after a while. - Do you really think so? Never dare to humiliate yourself. I believe in you. Try again.

He was preparing it for a long time, and Christine felt his indifferent singing and inaudible instructions. Two hours passed completely unnoticed, as if one moment. The exhausted but happy girl breathed a sigh of relief, looking into the teacher's eyes with a smile.

- I think today should be finished. I advise you to drink hot tea so that the next day your voice will be as light as it is today.

He nodded discreetly and turned, heading for the door. But almost at the very exit he was called:

- Maestro, - the girl took hold of her dress and sat down in a cubicle. - Goodnight.

The man bowed his head to the side, but the corners of his lips rose up, and his light blue eyes continued to look with a quiet sadness.

The door slammed behind him and Christina was left alone. What feelings this first real acquaintance, the first lesson caused in her. Maestro. The girl giggled awkwardly, remembering this tall slim figure. For the first time Christine lived in anticipation of a miracle...

[ginnyzero]

My Fashion Connection

I’ve been trying to pin down lately why I love fashion and fashion design. Because I don’t love clothes and designing clothes and the choosing of fabrics because of the glitz and glam of high end runway shows and the glossy pages of Vogue magazine and adulation of famous design houses. Most of that I didn’t even know about until I went to school. I didn’t choose fashion because of any of those things. I really wanted to go into Computer Game Design because of games like Myst.

Growing up in a very small town in the middle of the southern tier of New York, fashion wasn’t anything that anyone in our town was interested in except the town pageant queen who had a ‘reputation.’ It’s dairy country. My town was and is much more interested in dirt bikes, hunting and fishing and kegger beer parties. There were a couple of families that were more well to do and worked at Cornell or IBM and thus wore nicer clothes but out of a town of say 50 to 100 people, there were more cows and farmers and retirees. It’s the type of town when two of the young people marry each other, the entire town becomes related.

My mother is a home sewer. I hate the term sewer in professional capacity because it has the connotations of a house wife sitting at home making amateur garments. My mother made a lot of my sister’s clothes growing up and when she started sending me to Christian schools with dress codes, she also made clothes for me. (Mostly jumpers.) Eventually she either got tired of sewing or felt that we needed to buy things to keep up appearances and she stopped. (This ended up with us shopping in budget discount overrun boutique shops. Yes. A thing. Family Dollar and Dollar General didn’t exist yet! And mother hadn’t discovered the “joys” of the Salvation Army and second hand or they simply weren’t close enough to shop at.)

In a tiny town, you have to drive almost an hour in every direction to get to anything that remotely resembles a fabric shop. Except, between our tiny town and the city of Ithaca we got lucky, because out in a nowhere more nowhere than our nowhere was a tiny fabric shop run by a petite old woman named Leona.

To get to Leona’s shop, you took this very twisty road over and through the hills and turned right when you finally hit another ‘major’ road. And then off to the left less than a mile was a huge stand of pine trees and in the middle of these pines was a dirt drive. You’d drive up the hill between these tall pines the rocks in the dirt crunching under your tires that opened onto a clearing on top of a hill that held a farm. Leona ran her shop out of her home, a one story mixture of a red roofed, white trailer with an add on to make it an L shape. The barn hadn’t been kept up and the red stain was fading and the barn was falling apart. You parked on the edge of the drive, hoped it hadn’t rained lately and it wasn’t pure mud so you could get back out. (If you got stuck, there was always the local farmer with a tractor and chains to pull you out.) You had to park on the edge because despite the fact the farm wasn’t an active farm, she rented out the land and your cars needed to be out of the way for the tractors to get through.

She had the shop in the add on built on the back of the trailer. Firewood piled up next to the screen door and cats lounged everywhere. Leona liked hoarding things so the walkway had gnomes, garden statues and benches and wheelbarrows and yes, there was a tiny garden windmill in the middle of the circular drive. If it was winter, salt crunched under your boots and you had to walk carefully across the ice covered mud slush. If it was spring or summer, there were flowers peeping up among the grass.

And once you crossed the threshold, warmth, Leona smiling with her curly short white hair and the measuring tape around her neck behind the measuring counter. Bolts and bolts of colorful and textured fabrics lined the walls and the blank spaces of walls over tables were old fashioned wall paper in dark red with ducks or cream and pink rose prints and warm golden colored wood panels. Painted sawblades provided decoration. The clock might have been a novelty item, a cow or a cat or even something with shears for the hands. I can’t remember. (There might have been all three.) It smelled mostly of sawdust, dust and in the winter, the sharp smell of a burning fire from the potbelly stoves. Leona’s help were also middle aged or older ladies like her and they weren’t quite as friendly, but they were helpful.

Leona stocked her shop by going down to NYC and buying overruns from the warehouses. (Overruns are fabrics that designers don't end up using and fabrics manufacturers make too much of because they predict more sales than they make. Most fabric retail stores are stocked by overruns.) She mostly had colorful cotton prints and upholstery fabric. There was a little fashion fabric and by the time I hit high school, she had things like stretch velvet. She mostly sold to quilters and people like my mother. Cornell doesn’t have a fashion design program, only a science textiles program, but she’d occasionally get students. Her hours were irregular. I don’t know if she ever turned a profit. She encouraged touching the fabric. (Though she didn’t like children taking bolts out of the shelves for good reason.) She didn’t mind that I wandered about away from my mother. She always remembered me no matter how much time had passed.

But every time I go into a fabric shop, there is still that bit of magic from going to Leona’s. When I returned from college, I wanted to go and show Leona some of my projects. She died before I got the chance and I still regret that.

Professional shops like Mood, Britex, B&J’s and to an extent the discount fabric warehouse that I used during college in San Francisco make me shake my head because the workers don’t always feel helpful. They don’t make you feel like every customer is important. They aren’t like Leona, as frail as she was, with her sunny smiles and slightly raspy voice, glasses, and cheerful attitude and love of textiles.

I also had Barbie. I’ve talked about Barbie and my love of Barbie. I would play with Barbie rather than with baby dolls. (My baby dolls took lots of naps according to my mother.) And I loved the clothing packs. I loved dressing and undressing her and trying new outfits out of the outfits I had. Barbie was a safe present to buy for me when I was growing up, because a) that meant my group of Barbie’s got new clothes and b) if this Barbie had different color hair or skin then I got more variety in my Barbies. (My favorite was the long red headed mermaid with the teal outfit. This was back when the tail was a “Skirt” you could take on and off.) I had maybe one Ken and I inherited a lot of clothes from my older sister who grew out of Barbie about the time I started getting interested. Some of them were homemade but I couldn’t get my mother to make more and she wouldn’t teach me how to sew to make them myself. (In fact, she said it was too hard and downright discouraged it. Guess who doesn’t really like sewing? Me.)

Today, I love Monster High and Ever After High, but if they’d existed when I was a child, I wouldn’t have gotten them because of my parents’ extreme dislike of anything related to monsters, ghosts or Halloween. (I am a November child people. This is ridiculous. Come on, I share a birthday with Bram Stoker. OKAY.)

And somewhere in that time, (1992 apparently, man, I was younger than I thought) when I was getting a pittance of an allowance and had saved money from Christmas, I had enough money to buy a new Barbie or a Crayola Fashion Design stencil/tracing kit. This was before Project Runway. This was before the idea that these Fashion Drawing kits were thought to be remotely popular. No one thought that little girls might like drawing clothes! (Go figure.) The Easy Bake Oven was still the biggest and most innovative thing for a girl’s toy. But Crayola came out with a stencil kit with a bunch of papers that had design outlines, and pattern rubbing plates and a light box. Everything in the kit was meant to fit in the light box. The light box was plastic, pink and ran on D batteries (not included bummer.) And I had just enough money to buy it or a new Barbie. (I think my only other difficult choice that compares to this was the Star Craft Battle Chest and something else and I chose the Battle Chest.)

(I can't believe I found a picture of that, someone is selling one on ebay.) Because, I mean, a new Barbie would only give me one set of new clothes, with this fashion design kit I could draw clothes, lots and lots and lots of clothes. I had always been an artistic child. I liked drawing. This had never really been encouraged except in the “here, have another set of colored pencils, pastels, watercolors, no lessons included.” So, here was Barbie in paper form! I didn’t have to take the clothes on and off. I could just trace what they had on the sheets or try to come up with stuff myself.

Pages of my Fashion Design Kit Now

I’m not going to say I was very good at it. The point was, I had fun, this was something to do that didn’t involve playing a game on the computer or reading a book or practicing my piano and I hadn’t gotten into writing at this age. So, from using this stencil, I started with encouragement of one of my friends, to try and make it more real life proportion and draw the figures myself (once again without any sort of drawing classes. The art classes at my school were a joke.) I bought sketchbooks and took them to school with me. I started writing because of this same friend.

It was frankly an escape. My allowance never grew bigger. So, it went towards buying new books to read, sketchbooks and replenishing my Crayola colored pencils. (Though Imperial ones were better but I only got those out of the colored pencil color by number kits.) I didn’t buy fashion magazines. The idea of fashion as a career wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t have a career on my radar. College was one of those, “I’ll think about it later,” things.

The girls at my school who were cheerleaders and liked fashion weren’t precisely my friends and felt like complete foreigners and strangers to me. I didn’t ‘get’ them. We had our groups and we stuck to them. Having arrived to this school after the groups were formed, I fit nowhere and living so far away from everyone else, there was no way that I could feasibly see to hang out with them after school in order to get to know them well enough to fit into one of the groups at all.

Magazines were a luxury in our house. Vogue never made it into the house ever. It took until after 7th grade and a major fight that we even got the newspaper. So by the time I hit eleventh and twelfth grade and college was ‘mandatory’ and I had a list of requirements for what college I could go to, I had to look through what the colleges offered versus what I was interested in and thought I could be good at. (Let me say that writing wasn’t considered because my mother was very anxious about me being able to have a ‘real job.’) And the practice test for the ACT in 10th grade came with this odd employment aptitude test thing to help you find the job that would be the right fit. (Goodness knows if it was remotely accurate.) Fashion design was in my “right fit” category. And between all the majors, there was a tiny college in Ohio that happened to have a Fashion Design degree under their Health and Human Services Major. And since the only computer graphics and gaming major I could find was at a Calvinist college in Michigan, I thought the Mennonite College in Ohio was probably a better idea.

I didn’t read fashion magazines. I didn’t know really how to sew. (Sewing lessons with my mother were a complete disaster.) I couldn’t make a pattern. I had absolutely no portfolio. There were three things I liked, writing, computer games and drawing clothes. And let’s be clear, I wasn’t that great at drawing clothes and my designs at the time probably weren’t that innovative. I had to make a choice and what very little information I could glean from the Ithaca Public Library (seriously, you’d think having Ithaca College and Cornell, the library would be better,) fashion seemed the way to go. It was a massive industry. It had to have work available after I attained my degree.

Oh to be that young and naïve again. Probably sheltered is the better term.

I was over a year and a half into my fashion degree at this tiny college when someone finally thought to clue me in that “to get a design degree you have to have an art minor.” Realizing that this was utterly ridiculous and that making patterns in ¼ of the size wasn’t really going to get me anywhere after trying to talk with one of the other students about whether or not we could really get work after going to this school, (I’m sorry, sweetie, I hope you realized I was trying to convince myself as well as you,) I transferred out and into the Academy of Art. (And this took another large fight.)

Where, I had a lot of credits but I essentially had to start from the beginning. So, having those credits wasn’t actually to my advantage because the numbers of credit hours earned made it appear that I had more experience than I did. This got me more scrutiny and really a worse college experience.

Let’s understand something, I grew up in New York. The Fashion Institute of Technology is part of the SUNY system of colleges. I was a New York resident. It would have been fairly cheap for me to go to FIT. My parents didn’t want me in NYC or at a secular school. Parsons was always out of the question because it’s as costly as Cornell and I understood that. FIT would have been an extremely LOGICAL CHOICE.

Oh well, I loved San Francisco. I loved the big city/small town feel of it and the ability to walk most places and the public transit. If it wasn’t so expensive to live there, I might still be there.

So, schooling wore away at me, but it didn’t dim my love of creating clothes. My love of creating clothes was never founded or predicated upon the idea that success was a runway show and a big fancy store and my name in lights. I didn’t want to be the next Coco Chanel. I didn’t know who she was and at the time I started drawing clothes, I frankly didn’t care. My going into fashion was me going “here is something I love and enjoy doing, can I make a job out of it? Yes. Yes. I can.”

No one can take that from me. I might get bored or tired, but you can’t take the love of creating away from me.

And by the way, I still don’t read Vogue. It’s out of date before it’s printed and 75% advertisements. I also still don’t care about a runway show or seeing my name in lights as a “name” of a brand. That’s not the fashion price point I do or understand. And that’s okay, despite the push by fashion schools to design for that price point and that should be your goal, there is a lot more to fashion than ready to wear. Maybe that gives me an advantage, maybe it doesn't. That's not my connection to fashion. Magical fabric shops, Barbie, Crayola, the joy of creating, those are my fashion connections. And those are a lot more tangible than a runway or a name in lights by my account.