#I’m sure it broadly applies unfortunately

[multiversegideons]

I wish more women would find passions in life so that they can fill their lives with their own interests instead of feeling the need to be with a man because of their loneliness

[imfluentinfangirlandgay]

Wye Junction - Ch 3

Emmet goes about his business as Electrode's Warden. Ingo refuses to give up on his missing caboose.

Word Count: ~1400

“So, anything else come to you yet?” 

Emmet recalled his last Pokemon, fighting off the sudden wave of disappointment he felt. He had lost. For the first time since arriving in Hisui, he had lost. 

“Hmm.” Nope! Not really. He relayed this to Rei, who watched him with interest. 

“Aww man, I was really hoping it would help. Maybe next time I can bring other Pokemon and see if they help! You said you remembered having a long electric type right? Maybe I can find it! And I can battle you with it!”

Electric, weak to ground type, invest in a ground-type or a Pokemon with Lightning Rod ability - wait abilities are not things that exist, why- 

“Perhaps! I hope you ride the Subway again!” Emmet pointed at the boy in the way he often did, making him smile. 

“Do you know what that even means?” Rei asked him. 

“Nnnope! Not a clue!” Emmet grinned broadly. 

Rei laughed. “We should do this again sometime. Do you have stuff to do?” 

Emmet nodded, letting Crobat back out and beginning to work on healing it with potions. “Yes. I must check in with my Lord and ensure the lights are on in Wayward Cave. Adaman wished to discuss the state of the Highlands with me.” 

Rei mirrored what Emmet was doing with his Typhlosion, offering it pats and a berry as he gently took its paw and applied a poultice to it. “Ok! I’m nearly finished with the Pokedex now and Volo seems interested in showing me something so I might drop off the map for a day or two. I’ll be around though just to have a battle!” 

Emmet grinned brilliantly. “I am Emmet. I like winning more than anything else. I will not hold back.”

“Good.” Rei finished up and stood from his crouched position. “It was cool to see you again! I feel like I remembered a little bit from that battle, but its hard to tell at this point. We need to battle again! I gotta go, but I’ll see you around!” 

Emmet waved goodbye as the boy took off, calling Lord Braviary to pick him up and fly him out over the Highlands, back to Jubilife. Emmet focused his attention back on his team, allowing his hands to fiddle idly with the healing materials as he fell into the simple routine of healing. 

It had been two weeks since Lord Electrode had been quelled. That was the event that stuck out the most in Emmet’s mind, though the sky cracking and turning red and Rei having to fight multiple deities single handedly was also a rather big one, too, Emmet supposed. His Lord had been sticking close to Emmet since his quelling, which Emmet was more than happy about. The first several days, he did not want to let Electrode out of his sight, worried that somehow he would get quelled again or fall under some other danger that Emmet could not foresee. It was not until Adaman had come and almost physically pried him away that he’d stopped being such a mother Ursaring over his Lord. (Not that his Lord had minded. He had seemed to enjoy the attention, in fact.) 

Between the quelling of Electrode, the quelling of Lord Avalugg soon after, and then getting banned from the town of Jubilife and having to fix the entire world, Emmet had not been able to see the boy much. He rather liked him! He really did! The boy reminded him of… someone, though he could not say who. He had great skill in battle and with Pokemon and he was always so positive and excitable. It made Emmet long for something, though he could never be sure of what. And he seemed intent on helping Emmet remember his past. Which was a bonus. No one else had ever been this dedicated to helping Emmet. 

He would do something nice for the boy, Emmet decided. Had he mentioned needing some Pokemon for his compilation? Emmet strained to remember. Unfortunately, he could not think of anything. So maybe that was out. Perhaps he could get some healing items! Though the boy seemed rather adept at making his own things… did he need ingredients? His bag had been close to bursting with things… hmmm…

Ah, yes! Emmet would train his team to become even stronger. Perhaps he could change some members around so that he could provide some surprise to him! That would work! Perfect!

Emmet grinned as he went about his duties, now with a goal in mind. He had a couple days to prepare for the next time he ran into Rei. He would finish here and then find some new Pokemon! Yes, it was perfect! It would give Emmet something to do! 

—----------------

“That’s…” Ingo felt his chest tighten. “That’s his handwriting. He’s… that’s him. I had no doubts, but…” Ingo looked critically at the worn leather book in his hands. It was yellowed with age, practically ancient, stained and torn. 

But the words, written in an odd ink that Ingo could not readily identify, likely harvested from some ancient Octillery or perhaps some plant, spelled out words that Ingo would recognize if he were dead. 

I am Emmet. 

This only worked to further prove to Ingo that Emmet was, in fact, in the past, somehow. Ingo’s mind reeled. How had he gotten there? Cynthia had offered no explanation for that, other than how some history books were changing even as they sat and looked over them, almost before their very eyes. 

“I must find him.” Ingo lifted his eyes from the book, gently placing it back down. “I must bring him home, by any means necessary. He does not belong in the past.” 

Cynthia, a blonde woman wearing all black (something he could appreciate), sat across from his and Elesa at the table they occupied, showing them the artifacts that her people had just uncovered recently. “I agree, though I do not yet know how to get there. You see, Sinnoh’s Champion, Lucas, also disappeared a couple months ago. We were not sure where he went… until I saw this.” She slid another piece of paper across the table to him. It was a photograph. 

In it was a boy, maybe the age of fourteen or fifteen, with dark hair and dark eyes. He wore a colored cap and a bright scarf and odd clothing, grinning as he posed with a peace sign on his fingers in front of a very odd-looking Typhlosion. It had long ears and a dopey grin and odd, ghostly flames emerging from the back of it. 

“That’s him. Lucas. He…” she trailed off. “I do not want to alter history too much, but they seem to be doing it as we speak. I do not know if it would be detrimental to the timeline or not if we were to go get them somehow-”

Ingo stopped listening. Truthfully, he didn’t give a single Rattata’s ass about the timeline. The timeline was already messed up because his twin brother was in the wrong part of it. And he was going to get him back. One way or another. 

“I see.” Ingo realized he had interrupted, but oddly enough found that he did not care. “I will devise a new schedule. I will return with my other car in tow. I will not remain uncoupled from him. In the process, I can bring you your Champion back.” 

“Ingo-” Elesa started, but his booming voice interrupted her. 

“I will not be delayed. I am part of a two-car train, and it cannot run on the tracks without its partner. I will find my brother. I will bring him home. Any way I can.” Elesa stopped talking, looking at him with wide eyes. He rarely used this version of his voice, with a razor’s edge seeping into the tone he used, ready to cut not only the silence, but any opposition he faced. He knew his eyes were empty. He knew he looked too severe, too cold, too gone. 

He was done. He wanted to feel again, and to do that, he needed Emmet. 

Nothing else was said as he stood and left the room, Chandelure emerging from her ball and following him, sensing his distress. If he was not going to have help, so be it. He was getting Emmet back with or without aid. He was a Subway Boss. He was capable of tracking trains, he did it for a living. 

He had his brother in his sights. He just had to jump tracks…

[Start] - [Previous] - [Next]

taglist: @ruyi-years

[mooniefics]

in the grand scheme of things [ 3 ]

pairings : zeke jaeger / reader, referenced eren jaeger / reader

word count : 5.5k

tags : unhealthy relationships, relationship discussions, implied cheating, drinking, break ups, mutual infidelity, dubious morality, love triangles

warning : descriptions of alcohol and drug use

summary : you and eren hadn't been doing the best these past few months, and no one that you knew seemed to have any answers for you, or pointers in the right direction. who better to offer you some sound, insightful relationship advice than his older brother. or so you thought.

— originally posted 1 / 28 / 21 on ao3 —

✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ:  *:·ﾟ✧*:·ﾟ✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ*:·ﾟ✧*:·ﾟ✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ:*·ﾟ✧*:·ﾟ✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ:*

sasha  3:47 pm hey u down to party tonight?? jean told connie he could get us into another one of the azo parties again

you sighed at the sight of the notifications on your phone from its place on the passenger's seat, pensively drumming your fingers on your steering wheel. the most recent party of the most popular fraternity chapter on your campus you'd attended had been the last party you'd subjected yourself to attending—the halloween party where you'd gotten ditched out and subsequently cheated on. though you could admit that it had been fun in the moment, especially when you had caught the struggle between sasha and historia when she saw your roommate snap a picture of her kissing the standoffish sophomore that always helped her with her english lit homework, ymir, rather than the fraternity guy she was meant to be with.

the memory of that night, at least the time before you'd realized your boyfriend and his annoyingly attractive best friend were nowhere to be found, made you consider. classes did start back up next week, and the most eventful thing you'd done over the break was your quaint little family get-together for new year's eve—and your two rendezvous with zeke, meetings that you were slowly beginning to feel more and more skeptical about as time went on—and you were sure that your second semester would drown you in work just as much—if not more—than you'd had in your first semester. so as soon as you came to a stop at a red light, you picked your phone up to shoot her back a message, laughing to yourself when she replied instantly.

               you  3:51 pm party on a wednesday?                            really?

sasha   3:51 pm come onnnn please??? i heard nikos gonna be there! ur rlly gonna make me go all alone??

so that was why she wanted to go, to see the foreign culinary major that somehow always managed to send her back to the dorm with a large plate of food and a blinding smile plastered on her face for at least the next hour. you were honestly surprised that they hadn't gotten together yet, considering how many common interests they'd shared.

a pleasant thought suddenly popped into your head, the thought that she was probably asking you because mikasa had already declined, meaning that she wouldn't be in attendance. armin was out in turkey with eren, ensuring his absence. that fact made you feel a bit less anxious about accepting sasha's invitation. you could catch up with the friends you'd been unable to see while you were off-campus—or too swamped with work to be able to reach out to—let loose one last time before you were trapped back in the monotonous cycle of working, sleeping, crying, and eating for the next couple months until spring break. your mind had been made up.

                          you  3:52 pm    fine. i'll go as moral support. but no promises u won't have  to babysit after you've had ur                          fun with nikolo  this break has been rough for                                       me lol

sasha  3:53 pm oh god my i loveyou so much already picking out our outfits

you chuckled to yourself, slipping your phone into the cupholder as the brake lights of the car in front of you flashed off and you eased your foot onto the gas. you made it back to the dorm relatively quickly, sasha more than elated to see you even though you didn't have any food to bring back for her. and just as her text message had read, she'd already laid out one of your nicer dresses and a set of heels that didn't absolutely kill your feet by the end of the night by your bed, digging through the closet with a pile of discarded clothes growing on the floor.

"thanks sash," you giggled, "but don't you think it's a little to be getting ready? what time's the party?"

"connie told me seven-thirty, but jean said for us to come an hour later so we aren't the only ones there." she spoke over her shoulder, huffing as she tossed another piece of clothing aside, "but i wanna look good! i'm gonna hop in the shower as soon as i find the right thing to wear."

holding out your dress before you, you frowned. it was simple, black and made of a sheer, clingy material with lace accents decorating the low neckline, thin straps that bared the entirety of your shoulders and a modest amount of cleavage. it was one of your favorites, but the half-healed bruises scattered across the skin that would be exposed by it wasn't ideal.

"oh, don't forget to take a cheap coat that you don't mind forgetting. it's kinda chilly out, and i always end up losing track of mine during the night."

you let out a breath of relief, remembering that covering up a bit more would be weather appropriate. "yeah, i'll wear a long-sleeved undershirt and something light on top." perfect.

you waited until sasha had gathered her toiletries and scurried off to the nearest bathroom to change clothes, feeling your face heat up at the thought of zeke, the initial deep pigmentation having faded out over the last two days but still a very visible shade of faint red. you were fully dressed upon your roommate's return, earning an excited slew of compliments from her as she wrapped up her hair in a towel and settled down beside you to get started on her makeup.

you were actually grateful for how early she'd insisted on getting ready considering how long she'd agonized over her eyeliner, or how many times she'd applied and removed her lashes, complaining that "something was off" or "it just didn't look right". your suggested time of arrival came in no time at all, and by then sasha was more than eager to start rushing you despite the pace she'd been moving at earlier.

"hurry!! if niko brings food, i don't wanna get there by the time it's all gone!" she whined, jiggling the doorknob to your room impatiently, "for the thanksgiving party, he brought a charcuterie board with all these nice cheeses on it and it was so good, he looked so happy watching me eat it, it was so cute!"

you chuckled softly at her enthusiasm, shoving the last of your things into your clutch, zipping up your phone in the small inner pocket to insure that you didn't drop it and forget on the floor of someone's house this time. "i'm sure that even if we got there late, he'd set aside plenty of food for you."

the walk to the fraternity's designated house was made much shorter by sasha's insistence, practically dragging you along by the wrist the whole way at a near jog. you couldn't deny that you were feeling a bit nervous about the whole ordeal, knowing that you would have sasha, connie, and jean at the very least, but unaware as to what you would really do besides mill around. at the halloween party, you'd been able to play the variety of drinking games that had been set out for the guests with eren and his friends, but now you weren't entirely sure who to stick to for the majority of the night.

you didn't want to bother jean or connie after they'd gotten secured you an invite, and you were sure that sasha was expecting to be able to spend some time alone with the guy she'd came to see in the first place, meaning you'd have to spend a majority of the night alone, or the unfavorable option of mingling with unfamiliar people. but you realized that was a pill you'd have to swallow as you approached the steps of the house, nearly tripping up over your feet from the speed that sasha was hauling you along at, watching her furiously knock at the door.

there were people wandering about in the yard, some on their phones, most likely waiting for their own friends to arrive, and a smoky stench of something that definitely wasn't just tobacco wafting from the group of men camped out on the porch murmuring amongst each other. you could hear the volume of the music inside the house, almost able to feel it thrumming across the floor if you focused enough.

"thomas!" she exclaimed at the sight of a younger-looking blonde boy when the door opened, whose existence you honestly had no idea about until just now, grinning so broadly it made your own cheeks hurt for her, "jean invited us!"

"oh, come right in." he beamed right back, calling loudly over his shoulder, "yo, jean, your friends are here!"

the inside of the house looked just as you expected, already crowded to max capacity, jean having to maneuver past the throng of people gathered near the front to approach the two of you. "damn, i feel like i haven't seen you in forever." he did his best to speak over the music, wrapping you up in a friendly squeeze, "glad to see you could finally make it." he turned to sasha. "niko's already in the kitchen, by the way. asked when you were coming just a few minutes ago."

sasha's face lit up with glee, turning to you, silently asking for permission to go off on her own as if you could ever deny her and her overly-eager expression. "go get 'em, tiger." you smiled, giving her a few pats on her shoulder to send her off on her way, watching her disappear into the crowd in record time.

but before apprehension of her absence could set in, you felt jean's arm sling around your shoulder, pulling you into his side. "c'mon, you didn't think i was gonna ditch out and let you hang alone all night?" you giggled, turning your head up to look at him properly for the first time.

you'd first met jean in your statistics class, an unfortunate requirement for your major of choice, and initially bonded over your mutual connection through sasha. they'd been good friends in high school, and you'd just moved into a room for at least the next year with her, so you figured it'd do you well to have someone who could get you in her good graces in the event that you two didn't get along. but, thankfully, you two were just fine on your own, and sasha and jean became your first friends outside of the small group you and eren shared.

the only real conflict of interest between the two of you seemed to be your aforementioned boyfriend, and you couldn't really be upset at him for that. eren could be difficult to get along with even at the best of times, he wasn't a terrible person—at least before he'd cheated—but he wasn't exactly the most friendly either.

"is this piercing new?" you asked, reaching up to brush your thumb over the small earring hugging the shell of jean's ear.

"yeah, got it for new year's. pretty hot, right?" you snorted, earning a grin from him, "by the way, if you need to use the bathroom just tell me, the one on the main floor is fucking filthy. and also probably has no toilet paper."

"will do." you could feel the tension ebbing away in his company, at least when you ignored the annoyed glances other girls were sending your way when they noticed his arm around you, "so, what's on the menu for tonight?"

"well, we probably have every kind of alcohol known to man," he said, leaning down to speak into your ear as he began to guide you through the crowded first floor, "beer kegs are out back, junk food and all the inexpensive shit is in the kitchen." he stopped at the opening to a hallway, smile evident in his voice. "but i'm feeling pretty generous tonight, so if you want some of the good stuff we have stashed, just say the word."

"wow, such a gentleman. do you say that to every girl that comes in?" you playfully replied, thankfully far enough away from the music now that you didn't have to talk at nearly a shout.

"only the ones i like." he added a terribly over-exaggerated wink, earning another small laugh from you, "so, what'll it be? vodka, tequila, or triple sec?"

you blinked up at him. "that's it? when you said 'good stuff', i imagined a little more variety."

"beggars can't be choosers, sweetheart. and anyways we're a frat, not a restaurant, so either take your pick or go enjoy some cheap wine while you watch nikolo and sasha drool over each other."

you rolled your eyes, feigning anger in the face of his attitude, huffing out your answer. "surprise me then, frat boy."

"good answer." he said with a grin, "wait here."

he disappeared down the hall, leaving you to stare in silence at the wall before you and listen to the barely muffled sounds of the party going on just a few meters away. you opened up your clutch to fish out your phone, opening it to find your text conversation still open, catching a glimpse of connie's name. you felt a little guilty that you'd almost forgotten about his expected presence, seeing as he had messaged you and you hadn't heard anything from sasha or jean yet. you decided to shoot him a quick text letting him know that you and sasha had arrived, not surprised when he didn't respond as quickly as he usually did, knowing that he was already wrapped up in getting high out of his mind somewhere here or doing so elsewhere.

you opted to kill time tapping through your feed, making it a point to quickly scroll past any posts with armin's handle attached to them. the thought of eren having fun halfway across the world was both pleasant and disheartening at the same time. you felt stupid for still clinging on to the second thoughts about ending things the second he got back. sure, all the dots connected suspiciously well to create a picture that led to the clear conclusion of cheating, but eren wasn't good at hiding things. you remembered the time in your junior year when he'd barely been able to keep your surprise party that your friends had organized you a secret before one of them slipped up about it and exonerated him from blame, and you couldn't help but ask yourself if he was really capable of hiding such a terrible deed when he couldn't even conceal the harmless types of secrets from you.

the more confrontational part of you said that that was ages ago, that both you and him had changed so much since your time in high school, and maybe one of those changes was what made him put so much distance between the two of you these last months rather than hang around you and risk airing out his dirty laundry. you knew you should be angry with him, you would be more than right to be angry with him, but you force yourself to stop clinging to the simpler times, the days when he'd look at you like you'd put the stars in the sky and said all he ever wanted to do was be around you. you couldn't believe how much had changed in so little time.

"ta-da!" jean's voice interrupted your self-pity, a tall plastic cup suddenly occupying your vision, "long island iced tea for the lady. with a straw."

"christ, jean, are you trying to kill me?" you guffawed, taking the cup from him anyways, "my first real party in months and this is what you start me off with?"

"at least give it a try! after i took all that time to make it for you.." he furrowed his brows at you, only relaxing after you took a tentative sip. it was surprisingly not as strong as you thought it would be, a little on the sweeter side, but it served as a good distraction for the burn of five different alcohols sliding down your throat. "pretty good, isn't it?"

"meh. five out of ten." you snarked, giggling around the straw between your lips.

"typical," he lamented, clutching his hands over his heart, "all you and sasha ever do is use me."

"don't lie to yourself, jean. you love us."

you didn't know if it was the dim lighting casting a shadow over his face, but you could swear that you saw his cheeks flush at your assertion. "anyways.. speaking of love, you still dating that asshole? eric?"

"eren." you corrected, laughing at the error, "and, well, it's complicated."

"complicated? then i'm assuming he fucked up big time, considering he's not even here with you this time around."

you took a long sip of your drink, fiddling with the bendy part of your straw, the thought of his infidelity weighing heavily on your heart. "well he'd probably be here if he wasn't out of town, he's been planning to take his trip for a while now.."

jean shot you a displeased look. "i seriously don't know how you put up with that guy, you're selling yourself short honestly. planning on breaking up with him anytime soon?"

you cast your gaze to the floor, thankful that the warmth of the alcohol in your stomach was helping to ease the cool hollowness settling deep into your chest. "oh hush. you don't even know the whole story, jean."

"well i know enough. if you're in the market for any new guys, i'll scout out someone nice for you." you scoffed at his offer, but didn't outright deny it either, unable to help smiling along with him when he smirked and nodded over to the party in the other room, "now, come play me in beer pong, then you'll really have something to complain about."

─── · 。ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

zeke could confidently say that his night had been utterly unremarkable.

another quiet day spent working at the library, where he'd actually glanced at the door more times than he was willing to admit with the hope that it would be you walking in. he'd actually been quite tempted to message you, to ask what you were doing, if you had anywhere between two and three so that maybe he could see you, but he'd ultimately decided against it. he couldn't quite figure out the exact cause of his newly-found infatuation with you, but the rationality of it didn't concern him as much as it probably should've, he was simply pleased to relive the very recent memories of your encounters together and anticipate your next meeting—at least until his younger brother returned.

eren had attempted to goad a reaction out of him with an assortment of unsavory texts calling him just about every name in the book, a constant stream of questions asking why he did it, or what he'd done to deserve such a thing, and even a few desperate pleas begging him to say that it wasn't really you. of course, he'd ignored all of them, and he wondered if eren was trying to contact you as well, knowing that you wouldn't be able to see the messages even if that was the case, though still curious nonetheless.

but for the moment, he was lounging at his usual downtown bar, seated in a booth beside reiner and across from porco at their rescheduled night out, since both marcel and porco were unable to make it yesterday, the latter sulking after his noisy attempt to flag down the waitress ended in failure.

"is marcel actually gonna make it tonight?" reiner asked, plucking a stick of celery from the appetizer platter in the middle of the table.

"no clue." porco replied, sipping his mojito, "said he got caught up at work again, so either the let down text is gonna come any minute now, or he's gonna show up for an hour and then disappear."

zeke chuckled. "post-marriage life sure is tough, i guess."

"you can say that again. he's always calling me, freaking about the idea of kids and his mortgage and stuff that i didn't even think about until he complained about it, scary shit."

"you say that like you're not two years away from being his age."

porco began what was sure to be one of his smart-ass replies, but the waitress had finally approached their booth, hiding her annoyance with his friend with a forced smile as she took the orders for their entrées. zeke pulled his phone from the back pocket of his jeans when he felt it buzz, feeling the slightest hint of disappointment by the fact that it wasn't you.

"who is it? your new girlfriend?" reiner grumbled, smirking when porco shot up in his seat.

"girlfriend?!" he exclaimed far too loudly.

"yup. zeke didn't tell you he's dating a high-schooler?"

so much for "your business", zeke thought to himself. "oh, fuck off. she's in college." he frowned at his roommate, only met with another tired expression of disappointment.

"just barely." reiner turned back to the man across the table, "it's one of his brother's ex-girlfriends too."

porco stared at him incredulously, eyes wide and judgmental, falling back against the cushion of the seat with a low whistle. "shit zeke.. that's kinda fucked up, don't you think?" he seemed uncomfortable by the unexpected revelation, "you're almost thirty and you're screwing around with someone who's probably not even twenty? is this an afraid-of-getting-old thing? mid-life crisis??"

"she's an adult, she can make her own choices." zeke didn't appreciate the sudden scrutiny, finishing off his old fashioned in the hopes that the bourbon would wash away the self-conscious feeling settling unpleasantly in his gut, "not my fault that her choice happens to be wanting to be around me rather than the guys her age."

"what ever happened to you and pieck? she's hot—"

"and actually over the legal drinking age."

both porco and zeke pointedly ignored reiner's interaction as the former continued. "—i thought it was working out between you two.. what happened?"

zeke shrugged. "just wasn't the right fit for me. but you liked her, didn't you? before we had our thing." he looked up at his friend, forcing a casual grin, "maybe you could give that shot now."

he felt a bit more at ease seeing porco's ears and cheeks flush red, now fiddling with the lime garnish on the rim of his glass. "we still talk here and there.. i don't really know much about what she's up to these days."

before he could answer with more words of encouragement that detracted from the previous, morally-incriminating topic, his phone began to vibrate, and he felt his heart leap into his throat at the sight of your name on the screen. "sorry, gotta take this."

he tugged on his jacket and slid out of the booth, ignoring reiner's chastising glance and porco's bewildered look, passing the waitress who was now carrying a platter with their food and refills on his way out. the cool night breeze was refreshing in comparison to the awkward, almost cramped atmosphere that had developed over their discussion, his breath coming is foggy puffs in the chilled, january air as he pressed the answer button. immediately upon raising the phone to his ear, he was met with a blurred assortment of background noise, able to discern the muffled sound of music and the sound of footsteps outside of whatever room you were in.

"hello?"

"oh, zeke, you answered!!" he could hear in your voice that you were clearly intoxicated, much more than you had been when you were at his house, words stringing together and ending syllables unnecessarily drawn out.

he felt uncharacteristically worried at the realization that you were at a party, one that sounded quite large and crowded, most likely crawling with unsavory individuals that he knew prowled around those sorts of events when he himself was in college. "are you alright? where are you right now? do you need me to pick you up?"

zeke was already digging around in his coat pocket to check if he had his keys, more than prepared to take off without his meal or saying goodbye to his friends inside. "'m at a party on campus, 's okay. in the bathroom. just thinking."

zeke didn't feel eased at all at the sound of loud knocking coming from somewhere, hearing you becoming distant for a moment as you presumably pulled the phone away from your ear to call out that the bathroom was occupied. there was shuffling on the other line, then silence for a short moment. "can i ask you something?"

zeke frowned. the idea of not being able to know who was monitoring you in this state wasn't sitting well with him. "go ahead."

"but don't call me stupid, ok? i already know it's a stupid question, but i still wanna ask it."

"there's no such thing as stupid questions." he assured you, ignoring the buzz of a text notification, most likely porco or reiner telling him to come back in before the burger he ordered got cold.

"do i really have to break up with eren?"

zeke felt something odd flicker in his chest, that unfamiliar feeling he'd felt when he caught you staring at you and his brother's one-sided chat logs, but yet the affirmative answer he thought he would be able to give with no problem sat on the tip of his tongue, undelivered. he thought back to that face reiner had made when he told him who you were, and porco's hesitant words trying to rationalize his actions but ultimately failing to do so.

zeke didn't understand why he felt so conflicted all of a sudden. this was meant to be a simple ordeal, one where he got what he needed to teach eren a lesson and moved on with his life. but now here he was, concerned about your whereabouts, focusing hard enough on your muddled words that he managed to catch the wobble in your voice that betrayed your own state of emotional unrest. he realized a moment too late that he hadn't said anything, hearing a small sniffle on your end before we began speaking.

"god, i can't believe i said that out loud, you must really think i'm dumb r'now, but.. i just can't let go of what we had." he was sure that you were crying now. "i keep thinking about what you said, an' you're right. he's been an ass to me, he practically ignored me for, like, three months, probably fuckin' cheated on me with his hot best friend, so i can't understand why i just wanna keep trying to fix things... and its so confusing 'cause everyone just keeps telling me to enjoy myself an' have fun, but i have no idea what i even want anymore, and i don't even know what we are right now and i can't fuckin' believe i cheated on my boyfriend with his fuckin' older brother and i don't know what i'd ever do if he found out."

by the end of it, you were letting out small, hiccuped sobs, breath fast and uneven just as it had been the night he'd invited you over. he honestly didn't know what to say, listening to you cry, staring at the steam of his breath as it dissipated out into the night. you were a good person, someone who was undeserving of such treatment from either him or eren, but it was simply an unfortunate coincidence that you had been caught in the fray.

he took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts, preparing to deliver an affirmation similar to the one he'd given you a few days ago when you first laid all your relationship troubles out on the table, but there was a rapid, more insistent knocking at the bathroom door on your end. he could hear a female voice calling out your name, and the jiggling of the door knob.

"hold on," you paused, sniffling, "it's my roommate."

you steadied yourself enough to say that, tossing the phone somewhere before he heard the sound of the door unlocking. "there you are!! are you seriously wasted already? it's only, like, eleven?! why are you crying???" your roommate sounded tipsy, but nowhere near as intoxicated as you currently were, which eased zeke's initial worry, "jean! can you c'mere for a sec! wait, were you calling someone?"

there was a brief pause, and zeke could practically see your tiny nod and teary eyes in his head, then heels clicking over tile and the sound of the phone being lifted, followed by a hurried, "hey, this is her roommate! she's fine, gotta go!"

then silence, just him and the faint noise coming from inside the bar behind him. he didn't know what to think. from the sounds of it, it seemed like your friends were taking care of you for the time being, friends who names he vaguely remembered you speaking of when you'd been detailing your time at the halloween party—people that were unfamiliar to him, people he wasn't sure that he could trust. and a small part of him, a tiny voice at the back of his head, scoffed at his flimsy mask of worry that barely hid the true emotion, his possessive nature, driving his desire to go pick you up and bring you back to the apartment to take care of so you'd have to be there with him another morning with your thankful gazes and blunt, half-awake words.

he knew he was in no place to begin laying judgement at these unknown people in your life considering what he'd done, but it was an innate sort of feeling, the thought that always clouded his mind when he laid eyes on people that were younger than him, that he knew more than them, that somehow he would always be above them in an invisible hierarchy. that same feeling that he felt when he found himself looking down at you.

"zeke?" a warm, friendly voice broke him out of his thoughts, his eyes turning up from the ground to find a tired-looking marcel standing before him, "what are you doing out here by yourself?"

"smoke break." the lie slipped between his lips before he even thought of the fact that there was no cigarette between his fingers, no scent of smoke in the air or clinging to his clothes, "glad you could make it, everyone's inside. pretty sure porco already ordered you something."

but instead of immediately heading inside for zeke to come after him, marcel stood for a moment, lips drawing back and eyebrows knitting into a concerned expression. "is everything okay?"

zeke thought for a moment, giving a non-committal shrug in response.

"still having family troubles?"

despite having been quite fixated on his negative feelings revolving his own younger brother for the last few days, zeke had almost pushed out a majority of the sordid details of the entire situation out of his head, which now seemed to all flood back with such a short, simple question.

"you could say that." zeke scratched the back of his neck, now wishing he'd actually had a cigarette to take his mind off of all these turbulent thoughts, "all the arguing and shit subsided already, but..."

"anything from your dad?" marcel's voice was almost tentative asking that, frowning when zeke said nothing, "sorry.. didn't mean to be insensitive about it."

"it's not insensitive. just," he swallowed, tucking his phone back into his pocket and reaching out to push open the bar door, a silent, less embarrassing way to signal that he no longer wanted to talk about it anymore, "just kind of fresh. that's all."

they both stood in silence for a moment, marcel's eyes wandering his face, features expressing a clear concern, but thankfully, he didn't push the issue any further, simply following him inside like zeke wished he would've done minutes earlier to save him the trouble, proceeding to the booth housing their friends. the conversation didn't wander back to the topic of him and his morally dubious relations nor his current familial situation, much to his relief, making it much easier for him to just allow the conversation to flow around him, finding himself not having much of an appetite or desire to speak much with so much on his mind.

for a moment, zeke wondered to himself if this was a punishment from the universe, feeling so downtrodden on what was usually one of his more enjoyable nights in the week. not to say that they were always amazing to be around, but spending time with porco, reiner, marcel, and sometimes bertholdt made up most of the meaningful social interactions he had, and to have lost out on it today of all days just seemed like some odd form of karmic justice as a result of him behaving so selfishly.

but he held out for the rest of the evening anyways, going through more drinks that he probably should've, finding easier to tune in to porco and reiner's usual bickering, marcel's attempts to quell them, the ambient sound of bustling waiters and clinking glasses and plates to bury down any thought of you or his family or what was to come at the end of the week, the consequences with much more magnitude in his life than an just an unpleasant night out.

✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ:  *:·ﾟ✧*:·ﾟ✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ*:·ﾟ✧*:·ﾟ✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ:*·ﾟ✧*:·ﾟ✧·ﾟ: *✧·ﾟ:*

previous chapter⥽

[baixueagain]

I keep seeing post saying how radfem are bad, but I can't exactly grasp and remember /why/ exactly and what are their believes making them bad. I know TERF and SWERF comes from them, so I have maybe a vague idea, but I just can't seem to get it fully and I would prefer being able to caught on post that have their rhetoric. Sorry if this is something you already explain before, just ignore it if you dont wanna answer

This is a very long and complex question with a long and complex answer, and unfortunately I don’t have a lot of spare time or energy these days, but I’ll try to make this concise. It’ll be skipping over a lot, so don’t view it as comprehensive or anything, but I’ll do my best.

Basically, a lot of radical feminist ideas seem perfectly worthwhile on the surface, because, well, they come from feminism as a whole. Women are oppressed as a class under a systemic, pervasive, and diverse set of cultural and societal patterns broadly labelled as patriarchy. Seems reasonable, yeah?

Well, the question comes down to “where does patriarchy come from, how is it perpetuated, and how do we dismantle it?” The truth is, there are a lot of answers to this question, none of them easy, and it varies across time and space and even within communities. 

Radical feminism, however, have a tendency to erase these nuances and look for approaches which can be applied across the board. While there are radical feminists who delve more deeply into the nuance, as a whole within the movement it gets distilled into some very basic points:

1) There are essential differences, not only on a cultural level, but on a biological and ontological level, between male and female.

2) Males have found and will find ways to oppress, exploit, or abuse any and all of these differences in females

3) These methods of oppression, exploitation, and abuse can be found at all levels of human sociability and society

Again, on the surface this doesn’t seem that different from what other branches of feminism might be saying, and it’s easy to agree with it based on a simple observation of the world. 

This is where things get complicated. Again, while some radical feminists do recognise the nuance of situations, the movement as a whole is one towards distillation, towards finding basic essentials. The problem is that it is very difficult to find basic essentials across all humankind, let alone across individual cultures, and the process of distillation tends to erase nuances that many individuals consider key to their self-definition and lives.

These key tenants taken from this “distillation,” for example, are then extrapolated into some of radical feminism’s most popular talking points:

1) how you feel about your gender is inconsequential compared to the lived reality of biological maleness or femaleness

2) all forms of sex work are exploitative, primarily in the form of males exploiting females, in part because it relies on males being in a position of economic power over females.

3) all forms of interaction between the sexes, including sexual activity itself, need to be deconstructed and freed of anything which supports patriarchal norms

4) all forms of female existence must be deconstructed and freed of anything which supports patriarchal norms.

There are others, of course, but again, I’m short on time and energy here.

But I’m sure you can see from the four points I’ve listed that this is where the distillation process of radical feminism begins to erase the lived realities of actual human beings. While it may seem all very neat and tidy in theory, human individuals are not nearly so neat and tidy, nor are the societies we build. This makes the above talking points not a basis for praxis, but rather the perfect recipe for killing nuance, erasing individuality, and denying non-conforming groups of their dignity and volition.

Talking point 1, for example, is where the TERF weed starts to grow. Talking point 2 is where the SWERF weed grows, and so on.

I hope that helps.

[scripttorture]

I’m not sure if you’ll be comfortable answering those, but with recent police brutality in the U.S, I want to write about police torture of protestors and protestors’ feelings. I have a wheelchair user Latina girl and a blind Black trans man. They will be arrested together after the trans man tries to talk down a cop (inspired by a real video) and I wanted them both to be tear gassed. I have experience with police brutality, but was not arrested.

Part 2- How do they arrest blind people and wheelchair users? I understand mobility aids are usually taken away. Does this apply to canes for blind people? Also, I was going to have them in holding for 1 day with no treatment for their eyes after being tear gassed. Is this realistic or do you think police should pour water on them? I was going to involve the arrested characters all going on hunger strike, which might cause the police to transport them to booking faster. Does this sound okay?

-

‘Comfortable’ feels like the wrong word for all of this subject to be honest. I don’t think I could do this if I was comfortable, I am incandescent with rage. I am furious that the world we live in is still infested with this pointless, preventable brutality. Yes I am essentially a ball of rage and ferrets.

 And a portion of that is about the fact it only really makes the news when it affects wealthy countries. Seeing the response in Kenya and Nigeria to these movements/events in the West has been… interesting.

 Let’s start off with some definitions here because I think that will help as we discuss the story idea.

 Realism in the context of these discussions doesn’t necessarily mean ‘this would happen to 100% of people in this situation.’ If we’re talking about torture techniques used and treatment of particular groups in society then it’s less a case of ‘does this happen or not’ and more a case of ‘how often does this happen?’ ‘how likely is this?’

 Most modern torture is ‘clean’, which means that it doesn’t leave obvious external marks. But you do still get incidents (including in rich Western countries) where scarring torture occurs. They just a lot rarer.

 And, continuing this example, if a writer came to me asking about writing a scarring torture in a modern setting I’d warn them about the implications that can go with that. I’d talk about how survivors of clean tortures are dismissed and belittled. I’d talk about how the harm clean tortures do is downplayed. And I’d say that while there’s nothing wrong with wanting to use a scarring torture in a story, when we do it’s important to be aware of the context: that scarring tortures are rare and that they’re not ‘worse’.

 Everything you’ve described for your story is possible and it’s the sort of thing that’s more common in the country and time period you’ve chosen for your story.

 I’ve found it difficult to get hold of larger studies focused on the US. A lot of the statistical analysis I’m seeing focuses on mental illness or doesn’t draw a distinction between mental illness and physical disability. That can be pretty common when you’re looking up stuff about disability. It can be a helpful approach in some respects, showing how the disabled population broadly is discriminated against. But it also masks things that affect particular sub sections of the disabled population by lumping everyone in together.

 The Prison Policy Initiative has a page here you might find helpful, but most of these articles focus on mental illness and low IQ. Solitary Watch has a frankly horrifying list of cases in a prison where the disabled were routinely denied treatment and left in neglectful conditions that amount to torture. (The list includes a blind man denied a cane for 16 years.)

 Based on individual cases I’ve read I’d say that what you have planned is realistic, in the sense that it is possible. Similar things have occurred in America.

 In the absence of clear statistics on the number of disabled people in custody in the US, let alone how they’re treated, I’m finding it difficult to say how common this would be.

 Part of the problem is a lack of consistent standards or definitions across the country. This is from a Reuters investigative piece on deaths and abuse in US jails: ‘Seventeen states have no rules or oversight mechanisms for local jails, according to Reuters research and a pending study by Michele Deitch, a corrections specialist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. In five other low-population states, all detention facilities are run by state corrections agencies. The other 28 have some form of standards, such as assessing inmates’ health on arrival or checking on suicidal inmates at prescribed intervals. Yet those standards often are minimal, and in at least six of the states, the agencies that write them lack enforcement power or the authority to refer substandard jails for investigation.’ (Emphasis mine, full article series can be found here. It contains video footage of torture (beating), some graphic descriptions of racist abuse and miscarriage.)

 What this means for you is that there’s massive variation between jails in the US. The variation affects everything from the structure of the jail itself, to staffing levels, to workplace culture, to oversight, to provision of medical care. Basically some jails are a lot more abusive and dangerous then others.

 It’s also difficult to identify problem facilities because, as the Reuters article points out, a lot of the relevant statistics aren’t released to the public. Reuters came up with their statistics by examining jail records and reporting of deaths or abuse in local newspapers over a period of several years.

 In some of the accounts from US prisoners I’ve read people were allowed to keep wheelchairs. In others they were taken away.

 The cases where wheelchairs were taken were generally reported as part of a wider pattern of torturous neglect. I do not have enough evidence or cases here to say that that’s always the case: I don’t think this proves that prisons or jails which take mobility aids always neglect disabled prisoners. Because I don’t know whether taking a mobility aid, in and of itself, would be reported if it wasn’t happening alongside prisoners being left lying in their cells for days, unable to eat or clean themselves.

 I’ve tried my best to read about disability generally over the years. Because I live in the UK most of what I know about disability is based here. I know about attitudes in Saudi, where I grew up and a little about Cyprus where my family is from.

 Based on what I know about disability generally I’d say that when mobility aids and canes are taken away neglect and abuse are more likely. And I think that would include being left in a cell, having been tear gassed, with no water.

 In terms of physically arresting people with disabilities, well there are problems with abuse of disabled people the world over. I’ve heard stories from a lot of different countries about people being ripped out of wheelchairs, being tackled, being dragged. Unfortunately a lot of people are taught to doubt disability and to treat obviously disabled people with contempt.

 But you should remember that I read about the worst case scenarios. My knowledge is focused on abuse and ideas about what encourages or discourages it. Which can skew the perception of how common these things are. (I really wish I could find some decent statistical data here, the absence is maddening.)

 I think part of the way to approach this is to break it down and figure out how many groups these characters are being passed between. I don’t actually know how the booking in process in the US works. (I’m sorry but the nature of the blog is that I’ve got a lot of broad knowledge, I’m not an expert on every police system in the world.)

 The standard of treatment could easily vary between the people making the arrest and the people actually holding the prisoners.

 And all of this means that I think you’ve got a lot of leeway here. There’s a big range of things that are possible here. So there’s scope to choose how bad it’s going to be.

 You’re already doing that to some extent with the way you’ve planned this out and thought it through. That’s good, it’s important to work within your limits and focus on the elements you’re interested in.

 There will be real cases similar to your story that went a lot worse and there’ll be cases where things went a lot better. No one story can capture everything and that’s OK.

 I think these characters will probably be acutely aware that things could go very badly for them. They’ll probably have heard stories about people of their race, disability and gender being abused or even murdered by police. Use that in the story. Try to bring some of that fear and rage and defiance into the story.

 I’m not sure what kind of cultural weight hunger strike carries in the US. I can link you to my masterpost on starvation which outlines the physical and psychological effects of hunger.

 I also want to leave you my masterpost on solitary confinement, because I’m aware that US jails and prisons often put vulnerable prisoners straight into solitary.

 It’s really clear just from your question that you’ve already put a lot of thought into this and done a fair bit of reading. Keep going.

 You’re probably going to need sensitivity readers. It’s also probably going to take a lot of time, editing and re-reading to get this story as good as you want it to be.

 And it’s going to be hard. Researching this stuff is incredibly exhausting. For the love of gods take breaks. I’ve got a guide to researching difficult topics here. It can be hard to follow the advice there, hell I struggle to sometimes, but you can’t let this stuff poison you.

 I hope that helps :)

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[nommy-thoughts]

Mastication Concentration

Summary: Logan usually chews gum while he studies, but today he is out. Remus volunteers to take its place.

Contains: Hard-ish vore (idk exactly where it falls. There’s chewing, obviously, and even rough chewing at points, but the only injuries sustained are bruises). Brief mention of digestion.

Wordcount: 2.9 K

[more of my vore writing]

~~~~~

“Do you have any gum?”

The sides in the living room look up. Logan’s on the stairs, leaning over the banister and looking down at them.

“Gum?” Patton repeats.

Logan nods. “I’m out,” he says. “I’ve already drunk five mugs of tea, I can’t just keep making more. And chewlery is just too squeaky right now, and I’m trying not to destroy any more shirt collars. So, do you have any gum?”

They exchange glances. Nobody, it seems, has gum. Then Remus perks up excitedly. “Ooh!”

Logan, relieved, starts to say, “You have—”

“Me!”

Logan pauses. “What?”

“Chew on me!” Remus elaborates, bounding to his feet and hurrying over to the stairwell. He grabs a railing in each hand, looking up at Logan imploringly.

Logan makes a face. Then pauses. Reconsiders. “That… that actually might be a worthwhile stim,” he admits. Remus squeals happily, and Logan adds, “But no injuries. I don’t want blood in my mouth; I don’t like the taste.”

Remus rolls his eyes. “Oh, fine. I’ll be durable.” But he’s still grinning broadly. With a dramatic flourish, he summons the shrinking device. Scampering around the corner and up the stairs next to Logan, he sets it. Then, with a flash of sickly green light, he appears to vanish. Logan knows, however, that in reality, Remus has simply shrunk out of Logan’s eyeline. He looks down, and sure enough, there he is.

The device, no longer supported by Remus’s hands, falls from the air. It nearly strikes Remus in the head, missing by less than an inch, and crashes into the carpeted floor beside him. It bounces, skiddering off the step. It continues to fall, bounce, and roll its way down the entire flight of stairs, but nobody pays it much mind. They can always resummon it when they need it again.

Logan bends down, scooping up the now miniature Remus into his hand. He considers his fellow side for a moment, then nods, lifting Remus to his lips. A moment before he inserts him, however, Logan pauses.

“When was your last shower?”

“Does Thomas’s last night count?”

Logan frowns. “As I recall, you just sat on the soap tray, making various random thoughts pop into Thomas’s head, and didn’t even get wet, let alone wash.”

“That’s true.”

“No, it doesn’t count. When did you last wash?”

Remus thinks back further, absently shimmying his shoulders as he does so. After a few moments, Logan sighs.

“Not recently enough,” he concludes. Remus in hand, Logan heads up the stairs. In the bathroom, he plops the shrunken creative side into the sink and turns it on. Squeezing a large dollop of hand soap into his palm, Logan begins to lather Remus up, rubbing the soap into his clothes and skin. Remus squirms. He’s not trying to get away, but he quite enjoys being a slippery problem, and if it means that Logan has to apply a bit more force to get the job done, well. Remus likes being manhandled.

Due to Remus’s constant movement, getting him clean takes rather longer than it needed to, but in the end, Logan is satisfied. He holds Remus directly under the streaming faucet to rinse off, considering the spluttering that results to be fair payback for making things difficult.

“Okay, you’re clean.”

Remus cheers. “Now eat me!”

“I’m not going to eat you,” Logan corrects. “I’m going to chew on you. There’s a difference.”

Remus shrugs. “Not a big one.”

“I suppose not.” Logan considers his shrunken friend for a few moments more, then nods, heading back toward his own room. Once inside, he sits down at his desk.

“C’mon,” Remus pleads. “Put me in your mouth already!”

Logan does so, head first to shut him up. Remus isn’t small enough to fit entirely inside his mouth, so his legs dangle from between Logan’s lips.

As Logan settles back into his study routine, he slowly begins to lick and suck on Remus like a piece of candy. He doesn’t taste like a piece of candy, but thanks to the sink bath Logan just gave him, he doesn’t taste bad, either. Along with the licks, Logan tugs absently on Remus’s ankle, like he might with the stick of a lollipop.

After about a minute, Logan summons the shrinking device with a gesture. He adjusts it, and he activates it again. Remus shrinks.

Logan slurps Remus the rest of the way into his mouth. Positioning him lengthwise along his lower left molars, Logan gently bites down. Remus is somewhat soft and squishy, but there’s some firmness to him too. Logan uses his tongue to move Remus across his mouth to the other side, trying a bite there too. He nods to himself. The sensation is different than that of gum or chewlery, sure, but he believes this will work. Logan returns to his studies.

Inside of Logan’s mouth, it is dark, and warm, and wet. In other words, it’s perfect. Logan’s tongue, bigger than Remus’s entire body, lifts him, crushing him against the roof of Logan’s mouth and knocking the air from his lungs with the force. Pinned in place by the enormous squishy muscle, Remus can’t even wiggle. Logan overpowers him without hardly trying. Echoing all around him, Remus hears an enormous glk as Logan swallows the saliva that had been building up around him.

He has never found the nerd more attractive than in this moment.

Logan’s tongue drops, and Remus drops with it. The large muscle tilts under him, rolling Remus around Logan’s mouth. He’s quickly dizzy and disoriented, and the first time that he has long enough to get his bearings is when Logan shifts him between his back teeth again so that Remus lies, sprawled on his front, across the bumpy teeth. They lift, pressing Remus’s back against the equally bumpy ceiling, and slowly squeeze all the air from his lungs. Logan holds him like that, delightfully snug, for several long seconds. Remus considers blacking out from the lack of oxygen, but decides that he’d rather stay conscious to enjoy the rest of the experience. If he gets bored — which he doesn’t expect to happen, but you never know, he’s had incapacitating boredom strike at the weirdest and most inconvenient moments before — he can pass out then.

After a while, the pressure releases. Remus gasps in a breath of — not fresh air, not really, he is inside a mouth, after all. But it doesn’t smell that bad, either. Unfortunately. All that dental hygiene must’ve given Logan un-bad breath. Actually, Remus realizes, he can smell some of that tea Logan said he drank, though not well enough to guess at what kind it was.

Logan bites him again, the same way. And again. It’s rhythmic, soothing. After a while, Logan moves him over to the other side, and does the exact same kind of crushing bite over there.

After he’s done that enough times that Remus has gotten used to it and is getting bored, Logan changes it up. He moves Remus to the front of his mouth and nibbles on Remus’s ankles with his front teeth. Since his ankles are, of course, boney, they don’t provide much give. If Logan hadn’t made him promise not to, this would have been a good opportunity to break something. Remus wonders, then, if breaking an ankle really would be a breach of that promise. On the one hand, Logan had said “no injuries,” which would technically include broken bones. On the other hand, the only reason he had given was blood, and if Remus just made sure his skin stayed intact, he wouldn’t bleed.

Before Remus could come to a decision, Logan moves him again. Apparently he didn’t like this position nearly as much as the one before. Logan’s tongue pushes at Remus, shoving his legs between teeth and lips, til he can feel the cold outer air on his toes. He wiggles them.

Logan nibbles on Remus’s calves now, which have more muscle to pad them, though not from all angles.

Remus decides that bruises are acceptable under their terms. Logan won’t feel a crunch or taste blood, but Remus will be able to tell the difference. And really, the way Logan’s biting him, his shins should be bruising. And now they are. Remus grins.

Logan shifts again before long. He pushes Remus even further out his mouth, so that Remus’s hips balance uncomfortably on Logan’s front teeth. They’ll be bruising too. His legs stick out of Logan’s mouth. Since his hips are still inside, and a fair portion of his thighs are supported by Logan’s lips, and since he’s lying on his face, meaning his knees bend up, not down, Remus’s legs don’t dangle. He wonders if he’s big enough to kick Logan in the nose, but before he can try, Logan pinches his legs between his fingers, rendering him immobile. Then Logan bites.

His teeth slip off Remus’s hips, thrusting into his stomach instead. Remus’s stomach, having no bones in it, offers considerably less resistance than Logan was probably expecting, and Logan’s teeth sink deep.

Remus nearly pukes. The only thing that stops him from actually doing so is the realization that if he throws up in Logan’s mouth, Logan will spit him out and probably not put him back in again, perhaps not ever. So Remus swallows the bile, forcing it to stay down with sheer willpower.

The pressure against his gut releases, and Remus gulps down air. He has only a second’s reprieve before Logan bites down again, but this time it’s a bit slower, a bit gentler. He still presses his teeth far enough into Remus’s midsection that the shrunken Creativity muses that if not for his promise of no injuries, he’d be bitten in half by now.

Logan seems to like the squishiness of Remus’s gut. He keeps him there for a good while, squishing Remus’s stomach in on itself with his teeth and making its contents want to squeeze up and out his throat each time. It takes a lot of Remus’s concentration to keep the mix of acid and partly-digested food inside, until he remembers that he can simply banish it from reality. It takes only a quick gesture to do so, and then, stomach empty, Remus can finally enjoy the sensation of being chewed on without distractions.

Two bites later, Logan presses his teeth hard into Remus’s stomach, and then slowly pulls his lower jaw back, effectively heimliching Remus. It’s a good thing Remus had banished his breakfast, because otherwise, there was no way he’d be able to keep it down. Logan rocks his teeth forward again, not stopping when they bump Remus’s pelvis. Slowly, Remus finds himself being pushed out of Logan’s mouth. He can feel Logan’s upper teeth scraping along his back, bumping each vertebra as they go.

He can feel cold air on his butt. He’s more outside Logan’s mouth than in, at this point. Logan’s upper teeth are behind Remus’s shoulders, shoving his face down into Logan’s tongue, and his lower teeth, though considerably less deep into Remus’s stomach without an opposing force to hold him in place, force Remus’s butt to stick up in the air.

Logan holds him there for just a second before reversing directions. His teeth slide up Remus’s belly until they catch on the bottom of his ribcage. Slowly, he’s dragged back inside Logan’s mouth, back to where he started. Logan’s teeth press harder and harder into him as they go, smushing Remus’s organs. (He’s not exactly sure what he’s got right there, but he’s pretty sure there are some organs getting smushed right now. Maybe a spleen? Yeah, Logan’s probably smushing Remus’s spleen.)

After Logan’s got Remus back where he started, he does it again. And again. Over and over, Logan pushes and pulls Remus around, not once releasing the pressure. He doesn’t exactly heimlich Remus again, since his teeth are sinking in at the wrong spot for that, but Remus feels reasonably certain that his spleen is paste by the time Logan switches it up again.

Logan slurps Remus all the way into his mouth, and for a few seconds, the lack of crushing pressure is disorienting. Remus lies on his face, catching his breath.

Then Logan tilts his tongue, and Remus rolls like a log til he lands on something hard and bumpy. Logan’s teeth, he realizes. He’s on his side, facing Logan’s cheek — he thinks; it’s too dark to actually see, but based on the direction he’d rolled and the side he’s lying on, he’s pretty sure Logan’s cheek is in front of him, and his tongue behind — with one arm flopped over him and the other pinned awkwardly underneath. His head smarts from striking the tooth, and so does one knee.

He’s only given half a second to make these observations, because Logan immediately bites down. He chomps, really, with enough force to immediately break all of Remus’s ribs if only he hadn’t promised not to get hurt. The teeth separate, and Remus finds himself suspended for a moment, the soft flesh of Logan’s cheek in front of him and the slightly rougher tongue behind supporting him so he does not fall. Logan chomps again, and this time as he releases, he spins Remus with tongue and cheek so that Remus lands on his face once more. Chomp. Spin. Remus lies on his other side. Chomp. Spin. Now on his back. Chomp. Spin. Back to the first side.

It occurs to Remus, as Logan continues to aggressively chew on him, that the nerd is finally treating him as what he’s standing in for, as gum. Remus isn’t quite as squishy, but Logan doesn’t appear to mind.

Remus wonders if Logan will try to blow a bubble with him. That might be fun, being stretched out like gum.

Logan doesn’t, though. He just chews Remus up for several minutes, not even pausing to shift him to the other side. Vaguely, between bites, Remus wonders what the nerd is studying right now. What emotions translate to chewing so intensely? Is Logan reading something exciting? Something infuriating? Is he trying to puzzle out some twisty bit of logic? It doesn’t really matter in the moment, but Remus still finds himself curious.

Eventually, Logan’s bites slow again. He grips Remus (lying on his face again) between his teeth and, almost gently, especially compared to moments before, slowly crushes the air out of his lungs. Remus’s spine goes pop pop pop. There’s a particularly satisfying pop at his hips. After a second, Logan releases the pressure. He shifts his jaw around, dragging his teeth across Remus’s back. Remus sighs happily, relaxing. It’s almost like a massage.

The sensation is pleasant enough that Remus almost falls asleep. Perhaps he does fall asleep. He certainly loses track of what Logan does after that.

Some time later, he has no idea how long, Logan spits him out. Well, no, he’s gentler about it than that. Logan sticks a finger in his mouth and uses it to drag Remus out. He pinches the spit-covered Creativity between thumb and forefinger, looking him over.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Logan asks.

Remus grins and flips him off — almost his equivalent of a thumb’s up, in the current context. “Why’d you stop?”

“I have concluded my studies for the time being,” Logan answers. “Thank you for your assistance. You were quite helpful.”

Remus beams.

“Would you be amenable to repeating this experience at a future date?”

Remus grins. “You wanna chew on me again?”

Logan nods. “As I said, you were quite the aid to my concentration.”

Remus wiggles happily. “Yeah I wanna do it again!”

“Excellent. Would you like me to swallow you now?”

“Will you digest me?”

“No.”

Remus droops, pouting. “Aww.”

“However,” Logan adds, “I intend to get an actual snack as well, and I have no objections if you wish to observe as it digests.”

Remus considers for half a second, then nods, accepting those terms. “Can I get stomach burns?”

“No, I would prefer not to digest you at all, even superficially.”

“Fiiiine.” But there’s no hiding that Remus is eager to be eaten, even with the restrictions. “Chew me up one more time before you swallow?”

“Very well. Anything else?”

Remus shakes his head, reaching up toward Logan’s mouth and making grabby hands. Logan chuckles.

“In you go, then,” he says, lifting Remus up. He dangles him above his gaping maw, and Remus stares down into it, his heart thudding in delighted terror. Then Logan drops him.

Remus screams as he falls, flailing in the air. He lands on Logan’s tongue, and the mouth snaps shut after him. Before he can get his bearings, Logan’s shoved him back between his teeth, chewing forcefully on him.

Then Logan swallows, and Remus slides head first down his throat, whooping all the way. He gets stomach acid in his mouth when he splashes into it.

Bobbing back up to the surface, Remus flicks his fingers, creating a light so he can see his surroundings. At the moment, he appears to be the only solid in here. But not for long, he thinks with a smirk, settling down against the wrinkled wall.

Maybe he can even convince the nerd to leave him in here through dinner. If Logan objects to Remus skipping a meal, Remus can just have some of Logan’s portion. Isn’t like the big guy would miss the amount it’d take to fill Remus’s tiny gut right now, anyway.

[seafleece]

Hey, random question, but what do you think are the M9's love languages?

oh, anon, you absolutely did not sign up for this and i am so sorry, but here we are. i had to look up the five types and keep them in the google doc to remind myself what they were, but uhh here’s almost 4000 words of character analysis and discussion of debatable quality

jester: 

my initial thought was quality time— an obvious and painful one, as it’s the one her mother wasn’t able to provide. i think the sleeper, though, for jester, is acts of service. 

with beau, this especially shows up in reference to healing— jester having a more healing-focused cleric around is a big relief, especially for someone so close to warlock status that she almost was one, but very notably, she very much wants to heal beau. she specifically apologizes for not doing so in the chantry, and attributes that to beau’s absence rather than anything else; more generally, there’s a huge amount of distress on jester’s part when beau is hurt, and that she wants to be the one to heal beau (notably, with the gorgon, she RAN to beau, was immediately upset both times beau started getting petrified, and even dissuaded caduceus or caleb from using their turn to heal beau so she could instead, making sure to be Right There even while nott was applying the oil). she also seems to really value the instances when beau does things for her, especially since there are specific acts that beau reserves for jester (engaging with religion in any capacity, wearing a dress for jester and more broadly allowing jester to pick her clothes, a concept which beau probably has an explicitly negative association with from her mother).

it’s also muddled jester up the worst when it comes to relationships she understands less— the “kiss” with fjord in the temple that was a vehicle for giving jester air, most specifically, comes to mind— and she’s really come to terms with this by realizing that romantic feelings weren’t really what he was expressing, and that it wasn’t necessarily what she was feeling, either. it’s noticeable in how she describes her relationship with the traveler— she feels like her service to him is doing little things for him, and asks, when she’s unsure, when the traveler failed to act on her behalf when they were kidnapped, if she did something wrong to make him angry, and literally desecrates a temple to make up for it as soon as they’re back in town.

and the thing is, quality time isn’t really what was lacking in her relationship with marion— marion probably did have time to spend with jester for at least a little while every day. the problem is that marion simply couldn’t provide jester with things that she needed: access to the outside world and companionship. she had to learn from near-scratch how to navigate relationships of varying intensities, and it shows with her initial zeroing in on fjord as an iteration of the dashing sailor her momma told her about, as well as her more slow-burn come to trust and really invest in and love beau, because she’s never had a relationship like that with a girl, and maybe didn’t even know it was something she could have, or something she could want.

jester’s her proudest when she’s doing things for other people, even if they maybe wouldn’t love her doing it if they knew— threatening beau’s dad because she hates that he hurt her, hearing that beau was thinking about leaving and marching in to modify memory a hag, writing astrid a letter because caleb seems like he liked her, asking essek if he likes caleb because caleb seems to like essek, painting yasha’s room in the xhorhaus, finding outfits for everyone. she struggles with how to rein in showing it and thinking first about the potential consequences, and is unsure how to navigate what it means when she’s shown it in return, but it’s messy and heartfelt and sincere. with her mom, she really clearly appreciates when her mom does do things for her— providing a home for her friend’s family, allowing the m9 to stay in the chateau, coming to the party with them despite her agoraphobia. i’m sort of banking on a scene where jester talks to her about it, apologizes for leaving, and reaffirms that it means a lot to her that marion is stepping out of her comfort zone for her.

beau: 

words of affirmation. this is NO DOUBT something her parents didn’t give her, maybe ever. this is baked into her relationship with them— she knew that her father wanted a boy, he probably Told her this, and she wasn’t one. it’s something she could literally never be, an aspect she would be forever resented for, that would tinge everything her father ever said to her. her mother also probably didn’t give her much if any affirmation, as she was trying to police and fix beau’s behavior to avoid thoreau’s anger for both of them, and never properly elaborated to beau that her intention was to keep beau from being punished (not that it would have made it okay, for the record). it’s also why her conversation with her parents in 92 immediately threw her off, because for once they actually told her she’d impressed them, that she’d done good, and it’s rough as hell to see that. 

unfortunately, it’s also the thing she’s least likely to get from everyone else unless she’s at her worst, because almost everyone else, including fanon, seems to have profoundly absorbed this idea that beau is rude and abrasive and sarcastic and she’s just. not. she might have been at the start, but she’s always been especially soft with jester, she and caleb are very mutually assured about the sort of affection they show each other, she’s always been either openly flirting with or just sort of tenderly awkward with and trying around yasha, she and caduceus have a fun and pretty peaceful dynamic i always love to see, and we know caduceus, for at least a while, considered beau his favorite. 

then, there’s the characters she’s known for butting heads with the most: fjord, with whom she’s developing a sibling dynamic to rival hers with caleb and really obviously is ride or die for; nott, who used to openly insult beau and just about everyone else, and who is now 1/3 of the chaos crew beau is also in; and molly, whose death was a HUGE turning point for beau in terms of a) taking stock of her morals and how she intended to act on them and b) expressing love for someone so you know they know it, before it’s too late. 

jester seems to see this the most, no surprise there, and dairon also sees a lot of potential in beau not because she’s strong or fast (she’s from a martially focused monastery), but because she’s smart. dairon talks about and to beau very affectionately compared to other mentor/guardian figures she’s had, and i think it means a lot to her coming from both jester and dairon. she certainly returns the favor for both of them.

fjord: 

this one isn’t immediately apparent, so i’m gonna start by talking about the nature of his relationship with caduceus (and see where it gets me). 

okay, i lied, i’m starting with molly.

fjord and molly had a thing. it’s clear in retrospect, and i’ve talked about it, but i think it has to do with where fjord was in his quest to reinvent himself. molly was someone who, for all intents and purposes, had flawlessly become a new person— not necessarily because of a concerted effort to change who lucien was, but a different person nonetheless. fjord wanted desperately to believe that that was attainable for him, and thus saw a lot in investing in molly. molly was a silent affirmation that fjord could really pull this off, could really reinvent himself and be fine.

also, molly was hot. enough said.

caduceus, on the other hand, offered something different. caduceus came along right before fjord’s willingness to help uk’otoa was first tested— fjord rose to the occasion, but the whole time there was someone new along, someone whose faith in his deity seemed assured. assured, that’s something fjord never had.

afterward, he got to see what it meant to believe in a god like that, and he started to want in. caduceus seems like a very honest person— though really, it’s just because m9 doesn’t know the right questions to ask him— and his god is the god of the sea, too, right? fjord really lost a rock in molly the way i don’t think a lot of people realize, and it’s why his swallowing the summer’s dance felt so meaningful. he was keeping a part of molly with him, and i wonder if he misses that part of his falchion. after he lost his inspiration for recreation, he started to put stock into authenticity as the answer, and caduceus as the vehicle. and the wildmother was very accepting, too, took him in like a lost sheep.

where fjord is now, i think he values the covenant (which i realize i actually define later, so if i forget to reorganize these before i post, then oops) in a similar way to caleb. more specifically, though, he decidedly the word owe in talking to beau about the group’s relationship, which, among other things, speaks to acts of service. fjord has work to do to earn his place as a paladin of the wildmother (and a good amount of work to do indeed, if getting trounced by darrow was any indication), and he feels the need to repay caduceus for his help, companionship, and guidance. fjord also gets hurt and KO’d. a lot. i think he takes it on the chin as his role in the group— that’s his job, and he has faith in caduceus and jester to keep him up. they’re not done yet, they haven’t finished serving one another, so beau leaving is of considerable offense (near-mutinous, to be specific).

caleb: 

words MEAN SHIT to caleb, you can tell in the way he talks. everyone remembers the times he’s told nott he loves her, he responds best to beau because i think he really loves the way she talks, he shows his feelings in really passionate speeches to nott, to beauregard, and most recently to essek. there’s absolutely a reason why so many goddamn quotes from campaign 2 are attributed to this dude, and it’s because he monologues like a fucking champ. their group is named after his accent. 

as for receiving love, though, i think it’s a little different. we know from talks that he’s placed a lot of value on the things jester has done for him, and moreover to be herself as someone who gives recklessly, but as far as we know he doesn’t intend to do anything with it. with nott, i’m tempted to create a new category that’s something like a covenant? he and nott agreed to travel together and help each other under the worst conditions, and they’ve stuck to this fastidiously. this covenant, this commitment to the group, is something he extends to everyone— he is not willing to walk away from this, and hasn’t been for a long time, he believes in all of them, truly, what they can do— and cherishes the fact that everyone has kept this, except for two very specific moments. beau, when she introduced the threat of her leaving the party, and yasha, when she was taken over by obann. for beau, he actually seemed fairly quiet compared to fjord, and i’m not sure yet on why this is, other that i think he trusted fjord and jester to talk her down. as for yasha, he seems to be really invested in commiserating with yasha as two haunted ones (literally), and sees her as someone who also really values the group but sees her ability to belong as tarnished by what she’s done. 

for the purposes of this, i’m gonna refer to it as that, as a covenant (yes i’m a failed church kid, what of it) and as separate from acts of service, because it’s more akin to the promise of one major, permanent act of service to each other. i wonder if it’s this steadfastness in that idea that partially led caduceus to continue and develop the idea of his role, because caleb and the rest of team cockroach, as i call them, were gonna keep that covenant if it killed them, and caduceus could keep them from getting killed, at the very least, if he entered into it.

but anyway, that covenant now extends to essek, if he decides to take it. and if he does, that will mean something infinite to caleb, i think. 

caduceus: acts of service.

okay. i wanna talk about caduceus and danger.

caduceus doesn’t heal himself. we know this. he heals everyone else, and not himself. 

i’ve been checking critrole stats on this, and if i’m reading correctly, he has taken the most damage (157) in one episode than anyone else. and it’s not a small margin. the closest is yasha (129) and i’m almost certain that’s from the episode where she decided to literally get attacked until she passed out. i was trying to guess which episode this was from, and then it hit me: probably the episode where he fucking died, right? because it really just never came up again.

caduceus has: started to drown at least 3 times in his first month on the job, been killed by nott, been beaten near to death when yasha was charmed, and been very quietly and very badly stabbed in the back by a disappearing assassin. he’s also died at home, as a family tradition.

there’s a million better meta posts about caduceus’s relationship with death, or even about him not healing himself, but I just want to set it as potential precedent for the idea that caduceus, to some degree, sees value in himself as someone who doesn’t mind dying in a fight. for one thing, it’s been a temporary thing almost from day one with m9, as jester immediately invested in diamonds when they got back to town. it’s not his first rodeo, either, and his family has normalized death to an, and i say this more because of how it’s affected him rather than because i dislike the idea of normalizing death, an upsetting degree.

giving healing, that’s his job, but eliminating himself as someone who needs help or healing, well, that’s healing in a way, too, right? if he doesn’t get healed, it’s more for everyone else. worst comes to worst, jester can heal him if need be. or, y’know. not heal him.

caduceus’s relationship with m9 has noticeable transaction rhetoric, and i wonder where that really fits in with his family. obviously, his role in the family was implied as the one who stayed behind, and his parents definitely imparted a need for him to be stable, a role he’s continued to fill for m9 to his quiet detriment but i think he’s also jumped on the opportunity to finally be the older one, the wiser one, of the group. there’s a power caduceus has over the group that’s really understated— they just sort of listen to him, even if what he’s saying doesn’t actually make sense, because he started with nott, beau, and caleb as a wise savior, a protector, and upon finding the others, it’s not like jester, fjord, or yasha were filling that role. molly certainly wasn’t either— it’s funny, how in retrospect caduceus seems inevitable to the group because they really didn’t have anyone like him. the closest thing to a voice of reason they had was fjord and caleb, and early on, caleb was not in great standing because of his and nott’s perceived standoffishness, and fjord threw up ocean water, so like, what’s up with that, right?

at the very least, he definitely believes he owes the mighty nein something, a role to fill, a job to perform. a service to act out, if you will. his job is to heal, and he does less healing if he heals himself. he seems to view him taking a hit as a win, in a way— it’s a hit that someone else doesn’t take.

i have a lot of hope that reconnecting with his family and seeing how he’s grown while they haven’t allows him to revisit his notions of what he needs to be, and i have a lot of hope that moving forward, he’ll be able to invest more in the other motif he’s developed, which is gift-giving: fjord, with the star razor; his sisters, with the hat (which seems small but like. boy’s had it for a while) and the flute; and, most recently, in helping jester pick out everyone’s outfits. it allows him to feel like he’s giving something to the people he cares about without it hurting him.

yasha: 

truly everything. it’s hard to get a read because yasha really just soaks in all the love m9 wants to give her. if i had to guess further, i’d say we should look at her and molly’s relationship, because molly’s the only character we’ve seen her unabashedly love, and the thing that stood out most to me was physical touch. that echoes really depressingly with her “fight” in 89— she got something out of being that close to someone, even if it felt like reparation or atonement, and i think the only person in m9 who’s been really unafraid to touch yasha is jester.

i’ll admit i have a soft spot for yashter, but, like, it’s there, right? the obvious trust, the faith jester has in yasha and the fear and turmoil when that was tested? i remember really clearly jester giving yasha a piggyback ride in zadash in an early ep, and like— when’s the last time someone was strong enough to do that? when’s the last time someone wanted to do that for yasha? everyone’s mistrusted yasha to some degree for the entire run of the campaign, and, like, how much did her hopes to get close to everyone else just evaporate after the king’s cage? does she really even believe she can have it again? she was so close— jester trusted her fully, she and beau were in a comfortable mutual place with flirting, she’d talked to caduceus and jester about zuala, she even felt comfortable picking up nott and throwing her around (which, by the way, i love their dynamic).

she seems to have leaned more into the protective, threatening stance since they got her back, which, if she’s comfortable with it, is just fine— maybe she’s shifting more towards acts of service, but i just hope it isn’t her just accepting the idea that everyone will always be afraid of her, that she won’t be close like that again. because molly wasn’t afraid of her. jester wasn’t, and i don’t think she is, now— but fjord showed a lot of distrust, and i think yasha’s scared of the degree to which she hurt beau and how to even broach that discussion, and she attacked them, how could they ever forgive her or trust she wouldn’t do it again? 

(i wish i had a happier end to this, so i’ll just say that she did seem comfortable last ep, and that she may or may not have interest in getting a tattoo from jester? interesting stuff.)

veth: 

on a person to person level, veth definitely feels she and caleb are acting on the promise they’ve made to help each other— now she’s reached it, things are a bit more nebulous, but it’s obvious she wants to stick around for him. i’ll admit, her words to everyone in 97 were a bit surprising to me— she hasn’t really been good at conveying emotion like that before unless she’s desperate or really upset, and i imagine it was something she started planning in her head to say to everyone as soon as the first ritual didn’t work. that might be, i think, what she felt as relief, just not being able to articulate what she wanted to say to everyone.

as for her family, veth believes she owes her best self to yeza and luc— she kept herself from them not because she couldn’t have gone back, but because she felt like someone else, like someone worse, and the exaggerated tendencies from her previous life only reinforced this— she didn’t believe she deserved to be around them, before now. before caleb, i don’t know if she had any hope for returning to them at all, and he changed that entirely.

i’m also very interested in why veth is able to reconcile her marriage with yeza as veth with her loving caleb as nott, and if she sort of considers herself as two different people. we’ve seen so little of what she feels comfortable expecting from other people— for now, i’d say acts of service seems appropriate? but maybe something closer to just. fulfilling promises.

bonus: for the other two who are considered part of the mighty nein

kiri: 

words of affirmation. i’m a HUGE kenku stan, anyone who’s played d&d with me knows this, and i’m especially fascinated with the relationship with words when you can only speak the words you hear/remember. on the most basic level, if you speak to kiri, you are giving her a gift, you’re giving her the ability to speak, too. and if those words are affirming, then she can say them back! and you’re giving them to her, in a sense, to use as she pleases and repeat them to herself, even, and i just love that image— her, to herself, saying “i love you” in other people’s voices. i’m ride or die for kenkus, and kiri started it.

essek: 

okay, so almost everyone in the m9 could be read as needing words of affirmation, because it’s so clear that they need more love and knowledge of love than they’ve received, and have found it in each other. essek has quite literally found it in m9 for the first time. he absolutely needs all of these, like, ASAP, but i think it’s what everyone says to him that get him the most. caleb’s speech, obviously, but it’s also them casually referring to him as their friend, it’s jester’s messages, even if he’s busy. it’s important to say, though, that i think it’s a specific type of affirmation: things that have nothing to do with his magic ability (and moreover, any of these gifts that have nothing to do with it). essek’s built his entire life on the idea that he is someone incredibly powerful and smart for his age— m9 are probably the first people to make him feel like he was more than that, because they want to know about the rest of him, and in becoming friends with them, he’s confronting the fact that he doesn’t really believe there is a rest of him. they want to know a part of himself that he at best has neglected and has been neglected by others, and at worst that he believes does not exist. when they talk about him as a friend, it adds to who he can be. he’s seeing, for the first time, that he can exist as someone else than his abilities and his ambition.

i initially started off with words of affirmation and he clearly needs that, but i think he really just needs all of these in a very specific way: he needs to feel love that is not based in merit, that pertains to who he actually is in this life rather than what he can become in the next, that values the life he’s living right now, because he’s not getting that from the dynasty. it seems like a low bar, maybe, to people who only have the one life, as far as we know, but his arc this campaign shows that it really, really isn’t.

[kuroopaisen]

wow!! i didn’t know you’re a history major!!! that’s super awesome, I’m going to go into my first year of uni soon and applied as like general english lit stuff but I’m a very conflicted person and have a big interest in history too! If it doesn’t bother you and you have time I would love to hear about your experience as a history major and what you’ve learned and such!!! phew long long message sorry!

omg no don’t apologise! i love rambling hhh it’s incurable 

also !!!!!!! first year of uni!! that’s exciting!! i’m not quite sure how it works in other countries, but it sounds like you’re going into a bachelor of arts, which means you’ll likely have a bunch of free elective subjects (i’ve heard american unis have a mandatory elective year??? i’m not sure fklfj). 

my number one piece of advice: take advantage of those as best you can. my original plans for uni were to do a major in psychology and korean. suffice to say it didn’t end up panning out like that. i did anthropology as an elective in my first year and fell in love, and history sort of... happened? i’ve always been interested in history (both as a person and a writer), so i did a lot of really interesting electives before taking the plunge and making it my major. 

i even had international relations listed as my major for a while :’) so i totally get what it’s like to be conflicted! my second and third years were plagued with doubt and confliction over what i wanted to study and how it would affect my future and all that; so trust me, allow yourself to experiment and try things out. 

as for history specifically, check if your uni separates modern and ancient history!! some don’t and some do, and you can usually focus on an area of interest via the subjects you choose. for example, i’ve done a lot of subjects related to the middle ages!! for example, i studied witchcraft! that was a super fun course. 

but i’m also interested in the nineteen hundreds, so i’ve been doing more courses recently on that time period (one of them is on the history of genocide which is... very heavy, but i think it’s valuable knowledge to have). 

in terms of what a history degree teaches you... a lot of the skills you develop are quite similar to what you’d work on in an english degree, tbh? being able to Write Well, analyse and synthesise information, pay attention to details, archive information, etc. an arts degree more broadly tends to develop similar skill sets, so choosing your majors is really a matter of choosing what interests you. 

i will say, a history major is a lot of writing. essays, mainly, so keep that in mind. also, i know the stereotype is that history departments are dominated by stuffy old white men, but that hasn’t been my experience at all :’) and my uni (unfortunately) leans on the conservative side. tbh i have a fondness for arts professors in general, but that’s not what we’re talking about here sfklfjkl

anyway, if you have any questions, please feel free to message me! you can dm me @rowann as well <3 

[leakyrocktarot]

Hiii,

I saw the love readings and was wondering if you could do a career one? Idk what all details you’ll require for that. But I hope this does it:

Initials - SA.

Virgo Sun, Pisces Moon, Taurus Ascendant.

I’m at a crucial point in my career right now. This toxic job I’ve had for a year and a half is ending soon. And I’ve applied to a bunch of places. One place I really wanna go to has broadly offered me a job but it’s taking time and nothing is set in stone yet. I’m hoping I get clarity soon. Or am able to get another exciting opportunity elsewhere. Soon. Cause I don’t have the means to go on without a job. So I really wanna know what/ if anything good is gonna work out for me in the coming week and month. Please help! I’ve been really stressed. 😭

Hello!! You got the hermit in reversed. You may be feeling isolated, and alone at your current job. You may be choosing to stay reclusive, not wanting to be social with your coworkers. This is definitely not an ideal situation. It is ultimately up to you if you want to leave but make sure you are in a good place before doing so. You should never stay in a toxic environment even though it brings stability. You may be restricting yourself to career options. Do remember you are powerful to do what you please, follow your dreams and where your heart leads you.

As for the job that has broadly offered you a position, I pulled the king of wands reversed. Unfortunately this may also not be the best work environment as the king of wands reversed stands for; Rude, Bullying, Tyrant, Impulsive, Abusive, etc.

As for the coming week, you have the ten of swords. You may be pushed to your wits end at this time unfortunately. I pulled the six of swords for a general message on your situation and you are definitely meant to leave your current place of employment. Please make sure you have the means to do so first and with the four of swords you are being asked to rest and recuperate.

All is not lost, with the sun, there is a chance for you to be happy and joyous in a new position, but first you might have to leave your current job or your current living situation.

[radicalposture]

Hey, so were you diagnosed with autism/adhd as an adult? If you don't mind me asking, was that difficult to achieve? I'm 25, and I've often thought I might have adhd, but I've held off on looking into it because I hear it's extremely difficult and expensive to get it tested and diagnosed as an adult.

yes I only got diagnosed last october, I was 25 then too! it was kind of a weird journey for me, all of my siblings and my dad got diagnosed with autism or adhd one after the other and I was still saying “but I can’t really be autistic/adhd” right up until I actually got diagnosed lol. but since then my whole life suddenly makes sense for the first time and I really think things are gonna be ok! this applies to autism/adhd/other neurodiverse stuff but autism and adhd is what I know, but I hope it applies broadly as well

so unfortunately yes, it can be pretty expensive to get through the whole process. depends on where you live of course, I live in Ireland so even though we do have public healthcare I would probably have been on a waiting list for upwards of two years to see a terrible psychologist who didn’t know anything about adhd/autism so I went to a private psychologist. I already knew her pretty well bc my siblings had been to her and I knew she knew what she was talking about and I felt comfortable with her. seeing her cost me around €900 which is definitely a lot, different psychologists have different rates but the price can go up depending on what tests u get done. the more tests you do the more expensive it will be as a general rule (at the same time I saw a different psychologist who had a lower flat rate so idk what the “rules” are about this tbh) I got a standard assessment as well as autism and adhd tests which is why it was so expensive. it used up pretty much all my savings lmao but after getting a diagnosis I was able to apply for disability allowance (which was a hellish process) and I got rejected and had to appeal the decision but I got it in the end, which is fortunate bc I quit my job lol.

recently I wanted to look into medication so I had to go to a psychiatrist because you can’t get a prescription for stimulant medication from a gp in most countries I think? BUT he’d only see me if I got rediagnosed by his psychologist, so that was another €300 for each of them. I did get prescribed ritalin in the end but I’ll have to get the prescription refilled a few times a year bc it’s a restricted medication, which will mean paying €100 ish for each time I do. fortunately I don’t actually have to pay for the medication itself bc I have a medical card.

so yes, it can be expensive! all told it’s cost me almost €2000 to get it all sorted and will keep costing me maybe €300 a year from now on, so it’s definitely something you have to budget for. especially depending on where you live, I imagine things are v different from country to country. also I’m very fortunate bc I still live with my family so I’m free of some financial pressure and I’d been saving for it for a while but I know how hard it is to countenance paying out that kind of money, and wondering whether it’s worth it.

as to whether it’s difficult to achieve I think you’ve got to break it down because official diagnosis is only part of it. so if you think you do have ADHD I’d look at it from a couple of different angles:

1. self acceptance/understanding is absolutely the most important thing. I know people who’ve never been to a psych who know they’re autistic/adhd and really flourish, I also know people who have official diagnoses but who won’t accept it themselves and reject help/support and they’re making things so hard for themselves. so the most important thing is to educate yourself about what adhd means and, more importantly, what it means for you. everyone’s brain is different and understanding exactly how your brain works and why you think/behave the way you do is the most important thing you can do. there are a lot of resources out there, especially online, - I’ll put a link to a google drive of books and things I have at the bottom - and it can be good to connect with others online as well. having people who Get It and can help you is really paramount, I know often our irl families/friends can sometimes let us down so sometimes the only support you can get is from following ppl on twitter or something. the adhd subreddit is weirdly helpful and supportive, it’s great to be able to throw out a question like “I think like this am I insane y/n” and have other people go “nah ur fine” it’s very validating (also validation/external perspectives is super important for adhd bc we can be extremely bad at self assessment). so yes, the most important thing is firstly to know thyself by 1) educating yourself and 2) listening/connecting with others like u.

2. is it important to have an “official” diagnosis? no and yes. obviously you don’t need a diagnosis from a doctor to know what you are, and 70% of the things needed to help you flourish are going to come from your own research and the support systems you make. and if you cant afford or access a psychologist or psychiatrist it doesn’t make it any less real or bar you from educating yourself/accessing resources etc. HOWEVER. if you can get a good diagnosis then I really would go for it, bc: 1) it opens a LOT of doors to official resources, whether that’s access to welfare, supports and accommodations at school or college, medication, etc etc. a lot of the time the supports we need are behind this diagnostic paywall, which sucks but it is what it is :/ so that’s one consideration. 2) it can be really validating and help set your mind at ease about whether you “really” have adhd or if you’re “faking”. like I said I didn’t believe that I was “allowed” to be autistic before I got diagnosed. I also didn’t consider that I might have adhd, I went in thinking I’d just get the autism diagnosis so it wasn’t something I would have found out on my own probably. so it can be good to get an outside opinion, especially as, like I said, we can be really bad at self assessment. 3) it feels good to know you have a piece of paper to throw at rude family members/teachers/doctors who don’t believe it’s real 4) if you can find a good psychiatrist/psychologist it can be such a good thing to have that support and to get genuinely good advice from a professional you trust. doesn’t always happen but if u can find one it’s a godsend

wow this got long. to summarise, if you think you have adhd or anything else I would

research and educate yourself. for adhd probably the best thing to do is read driven to distraction and delivered from distraction, written by two psychiatrists who are adhd themselves. they’re both in this google drive along with loads of other resources I’ve collected, there’s also books about autism as well. as a disclaimer not everything/everyone here has my 100% endorsement some of it is there for academic/historical interest or only parts are helpful but by and large it’s useful. also watch this video and feel Seen

look for a good psychologist/psychiatrist if you’re going for a diagnosis. see if there’s an adhd organisation in your country/area and if they can recommend anyone. a lot of the time you’re better going to a child/educational psychologist who’ll see adult clients as they tend to Get It more. do look for someone who is clear about having experience in adult adhd bc unfortunately even qualified psychologists get a LOT wrong so make sure you get someone who knows what they’re doing before you give them your money

yes it can be really expensive. but if you’re needing to access things like medication or welfare I think it’s well worth the trouble and the money. my sister got diagnosed in her second year of college and was able to save her degree bc of extensions on projects and things like that (I didn’t get diagnosed until after college and spent four years torturing myself I WISH I had known) and it can be something that’s better done sooner rather than later. So if it’s something you can do without putting yourself in financial danger I think it’s good to bite the bullet and go for it. like I used up basically all my savings BUT I now can access disability payments and medication so it was worth it for me. it’ll be different for everyone so use your judgement obviously

anyway hope this helped! let me know if you need anything else! and good luck on your journey

[beca-mitchell]

Folllowing someone purely because they are the President, is not a good enough reason to follow someone. As a citizen, you have a duty of care to your fellow citizens to call out your leaders/government when they routinely fail you as a society.

Blind patriotism is what has gotten America into this position in the first place. This idea that you defend your “leader”, your flag, your anthem and your military no matter what, even when they’re wrong.

That is the kind of idiotic thinking that has cost more American lives to stupidly naive gun policies, attempts at passing inhuman and unequal human rights laws that prevent any people colour, creed or gender that it isn’t white male and Christian from feeling safe and seen, and has wiped out over 200,000 Americans because the government DID NOT ACT during a global pandemic, it’s astonishing.

So I’m sorry but no. Because he is the “President” is not a good enough reason to follow someone. If anything, to me it shows how completely oblivious and ignorant he is to his own white privilege that he can follow both sides of the political aisle and have it not affect his life in anyway way.

People like Trevor and Tyler will never suffer the consequences of a Republican White House. And they will never have to live with the fear that they will be prejudiced against because of their gender, skin colour, religion, economic background or sexuality.

They will never have to live in fear every time a police office pulls them over, or worry about whether or not a loved one will be racially profiled because they speak with an accent that is purely white American.

As far as I’m concerned those who stay silent against Trumps blatant displays of racism, xenophobia, sexism etc, or who try to cover for it by saying “yeah but he’s great for the economy” are complicit in that rhetoric. Because silence and inactivity can be just as deadly and just as damaging as speaking the actual words. That goes for Tyler too.

good points all around! i think this applies broadly too, not just about your very specific targeted point towards t*ler and co. 

too many people find it easy to use every ounce of privilege they have and then turn around and point fingers at *you* (general ‘you’, not you in particular, anon) for seemingly overreacting to something. it is what it is and unfortunately i’ve met too many people like that. i’m sure we all have.

[solacefruit]

Hello there! I hope you're doing well and had peaceful holidays! I'm a big fan of your fanfics and I'm honest; I'm currently analyzing your fanfics to find out what you did to make your stories so powerful, so I can use that knowledge to improve my own writing. One thing I want to improve is my eloquence. Is there anything aside from writing and reading that helped to improve your eloquence? You are so good at writing! Hope it's okay to ask this. Thank you and have a great day!

Hello there! This has been in my askbox for ages and I’m sorry I couldn’t get around to it sooner. Thank you for your patience--and the lovely compliments! It’s so nice to hear that you’ve enjoyed my work. It really brightens my day. 

Unfortunately, though, there’s no trick or one sure method to improving your skill with words: it is really just a combination of practice and exposure. 

If you exposure yourself to a range of writing styles, read broadly and critically, and generally think analytically about how good writing works etc., you’ll develop and cultivate your sense of taste as a creator. You’ll learn new words and new ways of using words, and you’ll start forming your own opinions about the works you read--and crucially, what you like, what you dislike, how you would want to do things. It’s also vital and healthy to consume media (in whatever ways you want) so as to provide your creative mind with fuel.

If you practice writing--in whatever ways you like--you’ll build your creative muscles and reflexes, just like you would if you were regularly exercising your physical body. You get more adept at intuiting what needs to be done to tell the story you want, and you get more able to precisely apply language to achieve what you’re aiming for. You also battle it out with your inner critic and build up a very necessary immunity (or rather, partial immunity, because everyone experiences self-doubt) so that you don’t stifle your own work while you’re in the middle of creating it. 

I personally think there’s also something to be said for the experience of living as a resource when it comes to good writing. The more things you experience, the more you think about and interact with the world, the more you will have to draw on when it comes to nailing concrete, specific details in your stories, or when it comes to capturing a particular kind of emotional moment. 

Going for a nice walk on a lovely day, for example, and paying attention to the way the clouds move, and the activity of the insects, and the sound of the ground under your boots is a really important part of becoming a skillful writer, I think. Writing is ultimately the skill of manipulation, and it is easier to sell a beautiful lie if it’s made with flecks of truth throughout, you know? At least that’s how I feel about it. 

Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful than this, but I wish you the best of luck with your writing!

[thepapergirlandthespiegelman]

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Initial impressions

Titles can be deceiving.

CW: child abuse, childhood trauma, mental illness, depression, anxiety

I think I can recall hearing about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at some point in the fairly distant past, though I can’t be sure. What I can say with relative certainty is that if I did encounter it, I probably wasn’t very likely to read it. I probably assumed that HPMOR was one of those obnoxiously misguided and pedantic critiques of fiction by scientists who neither know how to utilize suspension of disbelief, nor understand the basic nature of symbolism. At best, I might have imagined it to be a piece attempting to discover or construct a coherent logic from the magic within the Harry Potter universe, just for the pure amusement value, the absurdity of attempting to apply logic to that which defies it. I could see the appeal of that, but probably not 122 chapters worth of it.

After actually reading the first ten chapters of HPMOR, however, I can say that my first guess was incorrect, and my second guess was insufficient. HPMOR does capitalize on that humorous absurdity, but that’s hardly the core of the story.

One major reason for my misperceptions was a lack of familiarity with the difference between science and rationality. In layspeak, we often use these terms near interchangeably, and while they do go hand-in-hand to some extent, they’re not the same. Science is a method of obtaining knowledge. Rationality is an approach to living life, which dictates utilizing philosophy and science to obtain desired outcomes. You can be a scientist and be completely irrational, which actually reflects back on my initial concern; there are some scientists who will attempt to use the theory and language of science to denigrate works of art, completely ignoring the point of art.

HPMOR itself deals with this problem, not only the conflation of science with rationality, but the conflation of science and rationality and aptitude and general intelligence. The very first chapter highlights how AU Harry’s (Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, HJPEV for short) father is a professor, knowledgeable about science, presumably quite intelligent, and yet behaves incredibly irrationally. Rather than attempting to settle the dispute about the existence of magic objectively, he refuses to entertain the idea on principle, saying, “Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!”

And here’s where the real story begins to unfold. What makes HPMOR hit hard, at least for me, is not the discussion of science and rationality in the abstract, or even the very useful, illustrative scenarios, but the emotional struggle of trying to be a rational person in an irrational world, especially when you’re a child. In so many ways, HPMOR is a story about the trauma of growing up as a so-called “gifted” child. Almost every chapter that I read was painfully reminiscent of my own childhood:

Seeing my parents speculate and argue endlessly over things that could be proven;

Attempting to reason with them only to be shut down;

Having my value in their eyes dependent on their perception of my intelligence and academic performance, being praised for when I was perceived to have succeeded in these matters, while at the same time having my perspective completely ignored when it came to anything that mattered;

Being mocked relentlessly for things I did when I was younger, ignoring the incredibly rapid growth that defines childhood;

Constantly feeling as though, as HJPEV puts it, I was being treated as “subhuman,” my feelings, thoughts, and opinions all invalid because of my age;

Feeling so, so frustrated that the people who were supposed to protect me were so absurdly, ridiculously, unfairly, woefully, tragically ill-equipped to do so.

I became hopelessly isolated from my parents, and my self-esteem became self-degrading. Being told over and over again how what I felt or thought didn’t matter because I was only a child made me doubt and disrespect my own emotions and doubt my very sanity. I don’t think that my parents meant to gaslight me, but that’s exactly what they did. For years, and years, and years, and it hurts. so. much. It...I cannot express how much it hurts.

And I am left with all of this damage, these lines of irrationality programmed into my brain, this obsessive need to to be perceived as intelligent in order to believe that I could be loved, in order to merely function, this irrationality that I hate so much because it hurt me so much is now encoded into my very being and it fills me with existential horror to this day.

It was difficult for me to get through as much of HPMOR as I did, and I genuinely wonder if it would be detrimental to my mental health to go on. It triggers both the suffering that comes with remembering past trauma as well as the compulsions that have resulted from that trauma. Hearing HJPEV list all the books he’s read sends a bolt of anxiety down my spine, knowing that I will never measure up to people like him, I will never have read enough, I will never be smart enough, I will never...be...enough—

Enough. I know when to stop torturing myself.

I was shocked to see how quickly HPMOR itself comes to the conclusion that what HJPEV has endured is a form of child abuse. It took me years to become comfortable using the words “abuse” and “trauma” to describe my experiences, and HPMOR introduces the word “abuse” in Chapter 6! I give HPMOR’s McGonagall much less credit than HJPEV does, but even so, it’s kind of astonishing to me to see an adult pick up on the existence of abuse in a so-called gifted child, even in fiction. I find myself wondering how I might have turned out differently if I had had someone like McGonagall in my life, or someone better than McGonagall in my life, who had told me in no uncertain terms, “What is happening to you is abuse, it is not okay, it is not your fault, and while I’m unable to legally extricate you from your unfortunate circumstances, I will do everything in my power to protect you.”

Because that didn’t happen. No one told me that I was abused or damaged. They told me that I was “smart,” “gifted,” “advanced,” or “mature”; and if they noticed anything odd about my behavior, it was because I was just “quiet,” “shy,” “introverted,” or “diligent.”

I also find myself wondering if I might have been a little different if I had read HPMOR when I first had the chance. But then again, I don’t know if I would have understood it as I do now, after years of studying psychology and working to heal myself.

God, seeing it all laid out so starkly, things I worked years to understand, in a few short chapters of someone’s fucking fanfiction*...I sure do feel like an idiot.

But then, this whole conversation has primed me to feel those feelings.

I must not undervalue myself. I am not playing that game. That game is the problem.

One thing does irritate me, though. Putting aside my misconceptions about HMPOR specifically, there’s this huge barrier to entry to the rationalist community in general. I think people perceive (correctly, as far as I can tell) that it is a community of highly intelligent people, who are highly skilled in STEM disciplines, particularly math. The one friend who could have introduced me to all this was someone who I saw as hopelessly more intelligent than I, and that perceived disparity made it incredibly difficult to approach him even as I admired him, envied him, and desperately needed the things that he could teach me. (I don’t know what things were like on his end. I still don’t.)

We’ve already seen that someone can be highly intelligent and completely irrational. I wish we could take that logic a step further and really make clear that rationality is not something that requires high intelligence. As with learning anything, intelligence helps, but intelligence can’t be a prerequisite for this skillset, because literally everyone should have it. I guess this might be controversial, but so far as I can tell, rationality is just the best way to go through life. And of course, knowing the best way to move forward is especially critical for those of us leaving behind dark pasts.

For fuck’s sake, this doesn’t have anything to do with quarks or discrete math or machine learning. It has everything to do with reducing human suffering.

And I wish...I really wish that there was a way to share this world with my friends. The only reason that I made it here is that I’ve constantly existed on the borderline, wavering around the threshold of what is broadly considered intelligent, attempting mastery of both STEM and humanities, science and art. As much as I doubt and denigrate myself, I am able, if I really want to, under certain favorable circumstances, to convince myself that I belong here. Not all of my friends have the same privilege. I have friends who have lived their whole lives believing that they just aren’t that smart, or that they aren’t any good at math or science. Maybe they decided early on that that stuff wasn’t for them, or maybe they tried and felt like they failed. I know that, for many people, academic language is frustrating, triggering, or otherwise completely inaccessible. I know that many people will find HJPEV absolutely insufferable and most of what he says incomprehensible.

And I’m really not sure what to do about that. I’ve not sure how to convince people that striving for rationality is both possible and worthwhile for everyone, and if I do convince them, I’m not sure what to actually show them that will make any sense to them.

I don’t know. Maybe it does have a bit to do with math. Because a lot of what I get from rationality, I can get from other places, be that art or psychology or witchcraft, but the stuff that is unique does tend to be the mathematical and statistical thinking. And philosophical thinking, academic thinking. Talking about things with precision...That’s always been my problem with trying to translate the academic into ordinary speech, it feels like all the precision is being lost. To be precise, you need unique words, and unique words tend to be obscure, and people find obscure words upsetting.

Obviously, this isn’t a problem I’m going to solve in this blog post. But it’s something to think about.

So, I guess that’s my review of the first ten chapters of HPMOR, if you can call it that. If one of the purposes of fiction is to unlock a bizarrely intense cocktail of existential horror and unadulterated wrath deriving from the wrongs of one’s childhood—and I certainly believe it is—then HPMOR succeeds spectacularly.

*Edited to add: In my unfortunate compulsion to drag myself down, I often drag down other things or people too. I shouldn’t trivialize the value of fanfiction. And, quite honestly, I really shouldn’t be surprised that it could be a source of profound insight. After all, writing fanfiction has been one of my own ways to cope with and sort through my emotions and illnesses for a long, long time.

[notyetneedcoffee]

Old Fashion Way Pt. 2

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader

Warnings: This chapter is pretty PG

Steve Rogers held the door open for you, waiting for you to go first. You smiled, relishing in the little gestures of his old fashion upbringing. On some men it may have come off as condescending, but the effort just felt polite and caring coming from him. At the sidewalk he stopped, catching your hand in his.

He carefully examined your smaller fingers entwined with his own. A soft smile touched his lips. “Would it be alright if I held your hand on our way there?”

Squeezing his hand a bit tighter, you actually felt yourself blushing. What the hell? There had been a fair share of previous lovers in your life. Prudish didn’t apply to you. Yet here you stood in front of Steve as he asked you the most innocent of questions, and it warmed you to your toes.

“I would love that.” A smile brightened your face. “You can hold my hand whenever you want.”

With a barely suppressed giddiness, your journey towards the diner and your promised breakfast continued. He chuckled to himself. When you arched an eyebrow his way, he stopped and pulled you closer. A large hand rested on your hip, the other cupped your face. Steve soft lips fell upon yours for a brief kiss.  

“You know,” He blue eyes took on mischievous glint. "Now that it’s okay to touch you, I’m going to want to do it all the time.”

“Mmm, I like the sound of that.”  

Steve’s stomach audibly growled.  

A laugh exploded from your chest and you playfully rubbed his belly. “And that sounds like we need to feed you.”  

He looked sheepish, taking your hand again. “I should warn you, I always need to be fed.”

The diner turned out to be more of a café, eight tables in a simple homey setting. Half full, a few people glanced your way when the little bell over the front door rang. An older woman with a pleasant smile and wink called out, “pick any table, sweetheart.”

Steve led you to a spot and held out a chair for you. Absently you wondered if he put himself in the corner on purpose, just so the whole dining room and front door remained in full view. He leaned across the small table, capturing your hand.

The waitress wondered over with two coffees and two waters. “Morning, Captain.” She smiled brightly. For a woman in her seventies, she was beautiful. “I see you brought a friend.”

“Thanks, Barb.” Steve grinned. “Yeah, this is Y/N. This is Barb. She makes the best pies in the city. I’m telling you, they’re fantastic.”

“You keep saying that just so I cut you extra large slices.” She playfully swatted him with her order pad. “Do you want anything other than coffee?”

“I’m good. Thank you.” You smiled.

“I know what you want,” Barb winked at Steve before asking you. “Should I give you a minute?”

“Predictable, huh?”

“Oh yes, dear. When the Captain comes in for breakfast it’s always a stack of pancakes, three eggs medium, crispy hashbrowns, bacon and side bowl of fruit.”  

Steve shrugged. “She’s right.”

“Could I please get the short stack and the fruit?”

“That’s all?” Steve looked incredulous.  

“That’s it. Not all of us just ran a marathon.” You teased.

“Sure thing, Sweetie.” Barb smiled. “I’ll bring it right out.”

“What time is your first appointment?” Steve doctored up his coffee with cream.

As you were about to say something an early twenty-something woman stepped up to the table cradling her cell phone to her chest. “You’re Captain America, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Steve smiled, however it did not make it to his eyes.

“I knew it!” She practically squealed, looking over her shoulder at another girl. “Lacey it is him!”

Your thumb rubbed over his, recognizing the look in his eyes. Steve wanted to crawl under the table. Unfortunately, Lacey’s friend didn’t notice. In fact, she held her phone out to you. She looked confused when you didn’t move.  

“Take our picture with him.” She insisted. Lacey stepped up a little more cautiously.  

“Don’t you think asking would be appropriate? We’re here to have breakfast, too.”  

She actually rolled her eyes, causing your teeth to grind. “Please take our picture.”

“I didn’t mean for you to ask me.” Your nose flared and brow furrow.  

“Y/N, it’s okay.” Steve soothed. “Listen, Miss?”

“Ashley.”

“Ashley, I appreciate you’re a fan, but I’m here to have a meal with a friend. I’m sure you understand that we’d just like to be left to our own company.”

“Okay,” She still waved her phone. “But it’s just a picture.”

“None of that nonsense in here.” Barb returned to the table with a full pot of coffee and sharp wave of her hand. “You don’t have to put up with people interrupting your meal, young lady, don’t you go interrupting other people’s. Go on back to your table.”

The girls retreated reluctantly. Steve gave them a less than convincing smile. Commenting, “It was nice to meet you.”

“Does that happen often?” You whispered after they left.  

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess so. They’re usually not so, um, impolite. Although it’s weird when I realize someone is taking a picture or something without my permission.”

Privacy, anonymity, never came to mind when you thought about what it would be like to be involved with Steve Rogers. It should have. There were many news clippings with sightings or tidbits about Captain America showing up at this event or that. It just never registered that anyone on his arm would be subjected to the same.  

“What’s wrong?”

“Hm?” You weren’t sure how to broach the topic without seeming rude. “Oh, I guess I never really considered how much... attention... you get, away from your missions, I mean.”

“I try not think about it too much.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I suppose if I did, it would bother me a lot more.” Steve studied the look on your face. “You know, I don’t want to drag you into all of it. I’ll understand if it’s not... If I’m not...”

“Steve,” You reached for his hand again. “If it becomes an issue, we’ll talk about it. Let just try going out and see where it leads. Could be fun.”

He laughed.  

The high ceiling made the modest sized bedroom feel larger than it was. It may be an older building, but the owners did a great job of restoration. Steve leaned out of the bathroom, grinning broadly. “You should see this, Y/N.”

Following him, a delighted little yip escaping your lips. A huge claw foot tub sat along the wall in the bathroom. It was deep, and big enough for two. “Wow.” You leaned into Steve’s side. “I really like this place.”

His fingers ran through your hair, touched your face. “It’s only a couple blocks from my place, too.”

“I know.” Wet tongue moistened your lips.  

Steve watched the motion, unconsciously mirroring it. His head tipped low, lips grazing over your own. Your fingers caught his belt loops and pulled him closer. The kiss deepened, wet and heated. A deep rumble erupted from his chest as he pulled you tighter against him.  

“Damn, sweetheart. I could kiss that mouth of yours all day.”  

His large hands cupped your ass, pulled you off your feet and onto the bathroom counter. Your legs wrapped around his narrow waist. Steve breathed heavy against your lips. Your response came as another kiss. His full, soft lips worked over yours. Tasting and licking, Steve took his time thoroughly devouring your mouth.  

“Uh, excuse me.” A voice called out.  

Steve pushed away, still keeping his hands on your hips.  

“We’ll be there in a moment!” You called to the property manager.

“You going to get it?” Steve bit his lip.

“I think I will. You gonna help me move my stuff up those stairs?”

“I’ll carry every bit of it.” He grinned into your neck, planting kisses along your sensitive flesh. “Especially if it means we get to spend some time in that tub.”

Wow. Steve Rogers wants to get naked. Just this morning you didn’t think you were even on his radar. “Mmm. I’ll bring the bubbles.”

He laughed, lifting you off the counter. “Come on.”  

It took another hour for you to complete the lease paperwork. Steve looked adorably uncomfortable when the property manager asked if your boyfriend would be on the lease as well. You were told the check would take a couple days, and as long as everything cleared, you could have the keys on the first of the month.

“I have an idea, if you want to spend a little more time together today.” Seeing your car down the street, you pulled at Steve’s hand. “You bought me breakfast... and lunch. Want to come by my place? I could make dinner. We could watch a movie.”

“You’re going to cook for me?” Steve beamed.

“Just wait until you taste my pot roast.” You giggled.  

Steve leaned in close, rubbing his nose along yours. His voice rumbled low, words only for you. “That’s not the only thing I'd like to taste.”

Holy crap. Coming from him, that’s one of the sexiest things you’d ever heard.  

With a grin, you placed your car keys in his hand. 

[flipomatic]

Internship Chapter 16: Day 10-11 - Emira

First Chapter Previous Chapter

Emira had wanted to practice parts of the fireworks spell ever since she saw Jen perform it, but hadn’t had a chance until now. She’d spent the evening yesterday identifying and writing down some of the involved spells, which had taken a long time. She still wasn’t sure if she had it all right; it was probably wrong, but she wanted to try it.

This led to Emira standing in the back yard of her house, with a bottle of water in case of sparks. She had identified three layers that she thought she could cast together, so she was starting with those.

They were all part of the explosion, hence the need for water.

The first was the base spell, that provided the fire and the motion. It was a fire propulsion spell that allowed fine control of the blast. Emira had never cast it before, but she understood the theory and was confident in her abilities.

She carefully drew the magic circle, which triggered the spell. The fire appeared 10 feet off the ground. Emira had to move her finger to direct the fire, which she hadn’t seen Jen doing, but she managed to make it move in a firework like way. She let the spell drop, with a small sigh of relief. As a bonus, she didn’t set the grass on fire.

The second spell was a shimmer spell. It would make the whole thing shine and pop. This one was easier, and was similar to other spells Emira had cast. She tested it quickly, and was satisfied with the results.

The third spell was the hardest one. It magnified the image at a distance. In order for these fireworks to not be dangerous, they had to be a suitable distance above the ground. The third spell very discreetly magnified them, so they would be easier to see from the ground. It had to be applied consistently and broadly, which made it challenging. The location had to be exact as well, to make the image as crisp as possible.

Emira drew the circle for it, the largest circle of the three spells. She set it up in front of her, looking through it at a tree in the distance. It seemed to work, magnifying the tree in a satisfying way.

Emira dropped the spell, then stretched out her hands. She was going to try to cast all three.

First she cast the third one, putting up the magnifying layer overhead. Then she had to create the fire. She was able to cast the fire spell, but when she drew the circle for the shimmer spell the magnifying layer dropped.

Emira scowled, cursing her lack of focus, and tried again.

Again, the spell failed. That didn’t stop her though, and she kept at it.

After another ten attempts, she was able to fire off all three spells together. It made for some pretty good fireworks, she thought, but not nearly as good as what she saw the day before.

Maybe tomorrow she would ask.

_______________________________________________________

When Emira had wanted harder jobs, this was not what she meant.

She and Jen had been sent out to help a plant witch grow their magic crops. They said the crops wouldn’t grow because there was too much sunlight.

Emira had never heard of that, she always thought too little sunlight would be a more likely culprit. She didn’t know anything about plants though.

Unfortunately, it was another bright and shining day on the Boiling Isles. This led to Emira and Jen making illusion cloud cover, lots of illusion cloud cover.

It was a simple spell, but it took a lot of focus and effort to maintain it properly over a wide area. If a single bit of sunlight came through, they would have to start over.

By the time they were done, Emira felt exhausted. Jen was still perky as usual; if she felt drained at all, she didn’t let it show.

When they got back to the coven, they stopped to chat outside. They had spent all day at the farm, so it was almost time to go home. Jen was still holding her palisman staff, since they hadn’t gone back to the office.

“Great work on those clouds today.” Jen offered a complement on Emira’s spell casting; it sounded sincere. “You did a good job keeping them thick enough to keep the sun out, while still covering the sky fully.”

“Thank you.” Emira was surprised that Jen had been watching. After all, she had covered a lot more sky than Emira did. “I was worried about over extending the spell.”

“That was a possibility.” Jen raised one hand to her chin, thinking about it.

Emira nodded. “Yeah.” She glanced at her scroll to check the time.

“Ready to head home?” Jen asked, clearly having noticed the gesture.

“Soon.” Emira replied, not wanting to go without asking about the firework spell she tried to build the night before. “I was wondering, do you think you could show me the layers for the firework spell? The one you did a few days ago.”

Jen’s eyes widened in surprise, just for a moment, before she smiled. “Of course!” She spun her palisman staff, planting it in the ground. “Which part did you want to see?” The spell seemed to be too complicated to break down the entire thing at once.

“The end portion, when they explode.” Emira specified the part she tried to figure out the night before.

“Alright. There are six spells contributing to that effect.” Jen said in an even tone, as if that wasn’t wildly impressive. Six layers, Emira was having trouble with just three. Emira could only gape as Jen continued explaining. “Three of them form the core, while the others are more for flair. If you’re trying to learn the spell, those first three are the most important.”

Emira blinked a couple times, snapping back to attention. “What are the spells?”

“Let me show you.” Jen lifted her hand, drawing a spell circle in the air. A fireball appeared, hovering in the air. “Layer one is a fireball, this is the easiest layer of the spell.” She drew another circle, adding in another spell. This caused the fireball to stretch and morph. “The second spell moves the fire.”

“You don’t do those with the same spell?” Emira remembered the spell she was using before, that had the movement and fire as part of the same spell.

Jen maintained the spells as she shook her head. “That ties your casting hand to the flame, so it’s not efficient.” Oh, that made sense. Jen then cast one more spell, changing the color and shine of the flame. “Third is a colored shimmer spell. This needs to be added multiple times for different colors.”

This was a completely different shimmer spell than the one Emira had been using. It was more complicated too, with the color mixed in. Jen dropped the spell and the fire vanished.

“Thank you for showing me.” Each part of this spell looked manageable, but combining them would certainly be a challenge.

“You’re very welcome.” Jen hadn’t so much as broken a sweat while layering those spells. “I’m happy to help.”

The two talked for a couple more minutes after that, mostly about what jobs they had lined up for the last day of the week.

Emira said goodbye to Jen, but stayed even after the witch left. She had gained so much information in that conversation; she absolutely wanted to try the changes to the spell.

She knew that she shouldn’t do it inside the coven; the building was made of wood.

Emira walked around the outside of the building to look for a good spot, and found a small grass field on one side. It wasn’t as large as at home, but the punishment for accidentally setting the grass on fire would be far less than at her house.

The first thing she did was cast each layer on their own. This was fairly easy, since the spells themselves were mostly simpler than the ones Emira was using the night before.

When it came time to combine them, however, she started to have trouble. She had more freedom in her hands with this new combo, but the shimmer spell always seemed to snap the whole thing.

Emira tried multiple times to cast the spell, making sure to keep it high enough off the ground to avoid accidental arson. Each time, when she tried to layer in the third spell, the fire spell would fizzle out.

After a few attempts, she took a break to work specifically on the shimmer spell. Instead of trying to layer it, she instead tried to cast it multiple times at once. That way she could get the feel for having it layered in a more controlled setting.

Emira was able to layer it a few times over itself, creating a weird multicolored sheet in the air. This worked alright, though it still felt unstable.

After that, Emira tried again to cast the spells together. Again, adding the third layer in caused the spell to fail. She cursed loudly with the failed attempt.

What was especially astounding to her, when she thought about it, was that Jen usually did this with six spells, not three.

Before Emira could worry about those later three layers, she had to master the first ones.

All of the sudden, Emira felt like she was being watched. It wasn’t a concrete feeling, more like a gut feeling. She turned to look towards the coven building, locking eyes with the secretary.

He must’ve heard the commotion and come to look, since he was watching her cast with wide eyes.

Emira turned away from him and walked back towards the front of the coven.

She would try again later; it was time to head home.

Next Chapter

[is0gild]

Ice Cream and Fire Oven Pizza - Chapter 3

Pairing: Elsa x Lea/Axel || Side Pairing: Riku x OC

Summary: Modern AU. She's an introvert ball of nerves who works at Ice Palace, a mall food court ice cream shop. He's the outgoing, sassy goofball who works at the Pizza Planet across the way. Hilarity, snark, and fluffy romcom hijinks ensue.

Word Count: 5,841

FIRST CHAPTER || PREVIOUS CHAPTER || NEXT CHAPTER

Credit for super friggin’ cute and super friggin’ amazing cover art goes to the super friggin’ talented ky-jane here on tumblr!

I’d done it.

I’d gotten a job.

My very first job.

And I was already regretting it big time.

But really, could you blame me? I’d had to interact with three, count them, three people so far. Would the torture never end? No, because it had only just begun! And those were just my boss and coworkers, I hadn’t even gotten to a customer yet. I was dreading that inevitable moment as it drew ever nearer with each passing second.

Oh, and did I mention the uniform? Because, dear lord, if I’d known this is what I’d be signing up for, I probably never would have applied in the first place. For starters, I had to wear a light blue fitted, long sleeved, off shoulder blouse which, granted, wasn’t that bad. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. It was paired with a black mini skirt that stopped a couple inches short of the knees. Can you believe it? A mini skirt.  I didn’t see any of my male coworkers sporting booty shorts, no, they got to be fully covered up in white button ups, blue vests, and black slacks. Talk about sexist!

But a job was a job, and I had to start somewhere.

And that somewhere just so happened to be the Ice Palace - a small ice cream shop located in the food court of a local mall known as Dusk Town Center.  The walls of the little parlor were decorated in a jagged, cerulean, semi-transparent plastic, simulating the whole frozen castle vibe. The mascot was Sven the Reindeer, which was actually sort of weird to me. I mean, I get it, reindeers are up where it’s cold and snowy all the time, but weren’t they really more of a Santa thing? I just couldn’t really picture them chilling in a frosty throne room, you know what I mean? But hey, I guess it just gave the marketing team an excuse to sell cute caribou plushies, which were everywhere - dangling from the ceiling, sitting atop the cash registers, filling boxes upon boxes in the back… basically anywhere there wasn’t ice cream, there was a stuffed, huggable, googly eyed little deer.

All in all, not exactly a dream job, but pickers can’t be choosers. Especially when the picker, aka me, had flunked out of twenty-some-odd interviews before finally landing this one. Don’t get me wrong, Rayne and Riku had been great teachers. The problem had been with the pupil. No matter how hard they tried to iron out all my nervous habits and anxiety-induced rambling, a few quirks had still managed to slip through. This had led to no small number of awkward moments and don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-yous. But at last I’d managed to keep it together long enough in one interview to trick someone into hiring the trainwreck that was me.

Just my luck it had to be the frigging food court ice cream place with the stupidly short skirts.

It was my first day on the job. The guy who was training me had left me alone after setting me up with a handful of orientation videos to watch and telling me to come get him when I was done. I was seated in one dark corner of this small room that was part storage space, part break area. Before me was a tiny TV atop a VCR that could only be from the Stone Age. Seriously, I didn’t even know such relics were still in circulation anymore. The videos were just about as dated and mind-numbing as you’d expect. They included one such gem as, now that I was a valued employee of Ice Palace, I wasn’t just a part of team but a family. It also felt the need to cover the obvious, things like don’t be rude, don’t handle the product without washing your hands first, don’t kiss, grope, or otherwise manhandle coworkers or customers, don’t go getting yourself locked in a freezer… you know, things I would never, ever do in the first place, not in a million years.

Suffice it to say, I was bored out of my skull.

That said, this was way better than having to talk to an actual human being. So it probably wasn’t hard to imagine my disappointment when the credits at last rolled on the final tape.  Sighing, I rose from my chair and clicked off the ancient television set before turning to face the door across the room.  My fellow employee that I needed to check in with now was somewhere on the other side of it.

Where the customers were.

Waiting.

Lurking.

I shuddered.

I then took the opportunity to fidget with my skirt, tugging at the hem a bit.

Note to self: use first paycheck to invest in some tights. This whole bare legs thing just was not working for me. 

Ugh, why a mini skirt of all things?! I mean, come on, it was the Ice Palace, shouldn’t we be dressing more the part? I’m thinking Inuit attire, I’m talking fur-lined boots and layers upon layers of thick, fuzzy coats covering me from head to toe. But a skirt? It just wasn’t realistic! If I were in a real castle made entirely of frost, I’d be freezing my rear off right about now!

I then adjusted the black cap with a blue bill atop my head that sported our cursive logo, complete with a teeny doodle of a palace, before tightening my ponytail that stuck out the hole in the back. I’d opted for that over my usual braid. Figured it would make it harder for me to fiddle with my hair when I got anxious.

Unfortunately, I had now run out of trivial (but one hundred percent necessary) ways to procrastinate.  Guess there was no putting it off any longer.  I slowly approached the door, watching it grow more ominous with every step that brought me closer to it. Halting in front of it, I reached for the knob. But then I stopped, hesitating before retracting my hand and looking back over my shoulder towards a second door on the opposite wall, a green Exit sign glowing over it.

The door to freedom.

Perhaps it wasn’t too late for me to follow my dreams and become a hermit. I could always buy a fake beard. No one would ever know the difference.

My eyes darted back and forth between the two doors, my breath becoming shallow and my heartrate quickening. Then, biting down on my lower lip, I took a step towards that Exit sign and-

“There you are!”

I froze with a wince before turning my back on that tantalizing exit, instead facing my coworker who was now leaning in through the other door. He was tall with brown eyes and his head shaved bald beneath his own cap. A thin, black goatee wrapped around the friendly grin he was shooting my way as he now fully stepped into the room to join me, looking quite dapper in his vest and neatly ironed pants.

I chuckled nervously, clasping my hands behind my back.  “Er, yeah… here I am.”

Drat. So close!

“Was wondering if you’d gotten lost, figuring as how you should’ve been long done with those videos by now.”

“Nope, was just… on my way, Lucius.”

“Ah ah!” he chided, waggling a finger in my face before gesturing to his work attire. “When I’m in the uniform, it’s Frozone.”

I blinked.  “...Fro...zone?”

He nodded solemnly.  “Yup. Because when I’m on the clock, I’m in the zone.” That last word was emphasized with a wide sweep of his outstretched hand before he tacked on dramatically, “The Frozen Zone.”

“...I see.”

He seemed to take great pride in his work.

I wondered if I would ever be that dedicated.

...or if I ever even really wanted to be that dedicated.

“So, um… Mr Frozone… what’s next?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder back towards the door he’d come in through. “Figured we could get you up front now, start familiarizing you with the space and equipment.”

“R-really? So soon?” My fingers twitched, reaching for my braid before remembering it wasn’t there. Instead I settled for crossing my arms. “You think I’m ready for that?”

Answer: A big fat no.

“Well, let’s see here.” He started ticking off fingers, “You’ve watched the videos, you’ve had the grand tour, you’ve-”

“No I haven’t!” I said quickly, shaking my head.  “Had the grand tour, that is.”

“No? Well alright then.” He stepped past me and further into the room, then stopped and pivoted around to face me, spreading his arms out to either side of him.  “Here it is, in all its glory. Just breathe in that majesty.”

This cramped break-slash-storage room was it, apparently. Besides the TV and VCR in one corner, most of it was filled with giant, industrial-grade fridges for housing all the ice cream. Plus a couple of large metal sinks, plus the aforementioned boxes upon boxes of reindeer plushies. Squeezed into one corner was a humble couch that’d seen better days, along with a small table with a couple rickety-looking chairs. A giant bulletin board hanging from one wall completed the look, covered in workplace guidelines, announcements, and different colored flyers.

“Oh.” I pursed my lips to one side.  “Very, ah… very majestic.”

“Isn’t it just?” he nodded, hands on his hips as he smiled broadly. “Welp, that’s that. Now let’s get you up to the registers to continue your training.”

I hummed thoughtfully.  “Maybe I should watch the videos one more time. Just to make sure, that… uh...”

Reason… reason… dear god, please, come up with a reason, any reason!

“...that I... didn’t... miss anything?”

He laughed. “You’re thorough and detail oriented. I like that.” He planted his hands on my shoulders and steered me towards the door of doom. “Feel free to rewatch those tapes on your own time, but for now, let’s move on.”

“But-”

He gave me a gentle but firm push and I stumbled through the door and straight into my own personal hell.

Alright, fine, maybe I was being a bit over dramatic. There weren’t even any customers in line at the moment. Seemed like it was just after the lunch rush and most of the people had already eaten and cleared out. There were just a couple families left dotting the tables out there in the otherwise empty food court beyond our countertop.

Swallowing my nerves and inhaling deeply to calm myself, I glanced around my more immediate area. I was a bit curious after all, seeing as how this was my first real time on this side of the cash register. But really? There wasn’t much to it. There was a giant frozen display proudly presenting a rainbow of different flavored ice cream. Beneath it behind the counter were some small metal doors that seemed to be some more refrigerated storage space. In one corner was this fancy looking ice cream machine, with stacks on stacks of empty cups and cones beside it. There were some large menus overhead on the back wall and beneath them, a snowman crudely painted onto the door that I had just been so unceremoniously shoved through. Then of course, those plastic “ice” walls and reindeer dolls overflowing from every crook and cranny that they could conceivably be crammed into.

That about summed it up.  That, plus the burly blonde guy manning one of the registers that would be my second coworker.

He turned his head, giving me a look that admittedly wasn’t quite a scowl, but wasn’t exactly warm and inviting either.

I gulped and unconsciously took a step back, immediately bumping into something. Looking over my shoulder, that something turned out to be a someone: Lu… erm, I mean, Frozone.

Hand on my shoulder once more, he guided me forward and I took a few reluctant steps closer to the other man.  “Elsa, you remember Kristoff from earlier, right?”

I gave a weak nod and raised my hand in a tiny wave. “H-hi again.”

He only continued to fix me with a dull stare.

“Oh yeah, you two are going to be fast friends, I can already tell,” Frozone beamed. “Now Kristoff here is going to be taking over your training and showing you the ropes up here. There’s a new shipment in back that I should get to sorting out, but just give a holler if you need me.”

“Wait!” I snatched at his sleeve as he turned to leave through the back door.  My eyes darted from him to Kristoff and back before I whispered, “Do you really have to go?”

I had actually been growing comfortable around him. He seemed nice.

This Kristoff guy on the other hand seemed, erm… how should I put this… shall we say, grumpy?

Frozone chuckled, tugging himself free of my grasp and patting me on the head. “I’m flattered, girl, but I’m a taken man. Honey is the light of my life and trust me, you do not want to get on that woman’s bad side.”

“Wha-?” I blinked a couple times. “No, that’s not what I-”

Annnnnnd there he went, calling a cheerful, “Have fun, you two!” over his shoulder as he disappeared into the back.

Sighing, I turned to face Kristoff and was greeted once more by that same deadpan expression.

Oh yeah. So much fun.

Taking a cautious step towards him, I cleared my throat and rubbed my left elbow.  “So… that Frozone… really seems to take his job seriously, huh?”

“...don’t even get me started,” he said flatly.

So he speaks.

Barely.

I tried again. “What do I call you? Kristoff okay? Or just Kris? ...Kristo?” I was met with total silence. “...Oh, maybe that’s already short for something, like… Kristopher? Kristofel? Kris...toforos?” Mayday! Mayday! I was beginning to enter nervous babbling territory. Send help. “Or perhaps, oh! Do we all get theme names? Like Frozone? What would yours be? Are you the, uh… hmm, the, um… the Iceman?”

Face unchanged and dead serious, he said at last, “Oh yeah. That’s me. The Iceman. I love ice. Ice is my life. I eat, drink, and breathe nothing but ice. At night, I go to my ice house, eat my ice dinner, tuck myself into my ice bed, and cuddle with a bag of ice like it’s a teddy bear.”

“...really?”

If possible, his eyelids drooped even further.  “No.”

“Oh.”

I knew that.

He heaved a soft, grumbling huff. “Kristoff is fine. Let’s go, new girl.”

He left his station behind the cash register to walk over to the display housing the frozen tubs, slapping a hand down on top of the chilly glass. “Ice cream,” he explained dryly. He then bent down to open one of the metal doors below, pulling out what appeared to be a plastic wrapped, solid bar of sugary sweetness on a stick. “More ice cream.” He tossed it back in with the rest just like it, kicking the door shut. He then picked up a rounded, steel utensil. “Ice cream scoop. You know how to use one, right?”

“Ah,” I brightened. “Yes, of course!”

“Congratz, you’re at least as competent as a four-year-old.”

Hey now, rude.

Returning the scoop to where he’d found it, Kristoff then walked over to the giant machine in the corner. As I approached it as well, I began to appreciate just how much of a monster this thing truly was with all its buttons, switches, levers, and tubes on it. It was actually kind of intimidating. What on earth could they all even possibly do?

“Combo soft serve/milkshake machine,” Kristoff continued on in his bored monotone as he planted an elbow atop the thing, leaning against it. He pointed at a big lever on the left over one tube. “Ice cream.” Next at another big lever, this one on the right over a second tube with some sort of gizmo sticking out of it. “Milkshakes.” His index finger shifted down to three large buttons running down the bottom right corner in front, first indicating the top one. “Turns it on and off.” Then the bottom button. “Flavor swapper.”

“And this one?” My fingers drifted towards the middle button.

“No touchy,” he lightly swatted my hand away. “That one makes it angry. And trust me, you won’t like it when it’s angry.”

I tipped my head to one side. “...why would there even be a button like that?”

He shrugged, intoning airily, “No one knows.”

I quirked an eyebrow at him, then shook my head, my gaze returning to that monstrosity of a machine. “What about all those other levers and switches on the side?”

“Woah, slow down, newbie. You gotta learn to crawl before you can walk. For now, just stick to the basics.  Ice cream. Shakes. Off and on. Flavor,” he pointed to each one in turn again as he listed them off before giving me yet another dull look. “Am I going too fast for you? Maybe you should be writing this down.”

It was my turn for some eyelid droopage. “I think I got it.”

“Good. You’re ready for your first customer then. And as luck would have it,” he pointed past me, “here he comes.”

“What?!” I spun around on my heel. Some guy had just entered the food court on the opposite end from the Ice Palace, but was making a beeline straight for us.

Panic mode initiated. Hands? Clammy. Face? Blanched. Heart? Pounding. All systems a go.

“Relax, new girl.” Kristoff slapped me on the back, forcing a tiny oof out of me. “I know this dude, we all do around this place. He and his girlfriend are mallrats that’ll spend hours here, visiting all the stores and making friends with everyone. You should have no problem. Total training wheels.”

His words did nothing to ease my growing nerves and I must have been doing a terrible job of hiding it because he snorted, “You’ll be fine.  Just step up to the register.” He waved a hand towards it.

I swallowed hard, then numbly walked over to it.

“Smile,” he pointed to his own grin that he now had plastered on for show, looking remarkably strange on a man I had seen zero emotion from all day.  I forced my own smile and he flinched. “Ehh, maybe not so much.” I toned it down a bit. “Better. Now just say, ‘Welcome to Ice Palace, how may I take your order?’ and the rest should be a no brainer.”

Easy for you to say, buddy.

Taking a small shaky breath, I looked away from him and towards the customer once more just as he closed in on the counter. He had bright blue eyes, brown spiky hair, and a huge grin that just about literally split his face in two.

Okay, Elsa, you can do this.

“Welcome to Ice Palace, how…”

Oh fudge, I’d already forgotten the line! My mind was drawing a complete blank. The blankest of blanks.

“...uh…”

Panic, panic, panic!

“...how… you… order?”

Hi, yes, one stammering idiot at your service.

I heard the smack of Kristoff’s facepalm before he whispered under his breath, “Eh, close enough.”

Seemingly unfazed by my mental malfunction, the guy just continued to flash those pearly whites. “Hey there, could I get two bars of the Paopu Paradise ice cream please?”

“Ah… y-yes, right away!” I darted over to the frozen display case, picking up one of the scoops and reaching for the sliding glass door in back. However, I froze when I heard a throat clearing and turned to see Kristoff jerking a thumb towards the freezer space below.

...oh right, bars. He’d said he’d wanted bars of ice cream.  Fumbling to put the scoop back, I bent down to open the cold door, located the stack labeled “Paopu Paradise” and snatched two off the top before straightening back up and thrusting them proudly over the counter into the customer’s face.

Another throat clear.

I glanced at Kristoff again, who mouthed the word ‘munny’ at me.

...minor detail.

“Er, yes… that’ll be, uh…” I stared down at one of the plastic-sheathed ice creams, spinning it around by the stick, as if looking for the price tag.

Kristoff groaned before tiredly commanding, “Cash register.” I hastily moved to stand in front of it once more.  He pointed to one of the keys. “Push that one.” Done. “Now that one and that one.” Done and done. A munny total appeared on the register’s little black screen and he gestured for me to go on. I read off the amount and the customer, still sunny faced as ever, handed me the munny. To my credit, I only flinched slightly when the cash drawer noisily popped open, allowing the munny to be deposited.

After slamming it back shut, I looked to Kristoff again, worrying my bottom lip between my teeth.  “Now?”

He closed his eyes and gave me a solemn nod.

Feeling my muscles relax slightly, I turned back to the customer, offering him his two ice creams once again.

“Thanks!” he chirped, taking them both in one hand and ripping the plastic off one before immediately chomping down hard into the frozen treat, making me wince.

Jeez, this guy must have had the teeth of a viking!

After swallowing the bite, he licked his lips and eyed me curiously. “You’re new, right?”

“Gee, how did you ever guess?” Kristoff deadpanned. I merely turned my head to narrow my eyes up at him.

Ignoring the comment from the peanut gallery, the guy offered his free hand to me. “You’ll probably be seeing me around a lot, so figure I should introduce myself. I’m Sora! Nice to meetcha!”

I hesitated before taking his hand gingerly and shaking it.  “...Elsa. A pleasure.”

He froze mid-lick of his ice cream bar, blinking at me.  “Elsa?” Lowering his snack a little now, he cocked his head. “Hey, you just moved in with Riku and Ray, didn’t you?”

My head rocked back at that.  “How did you-?”

“Stalker,” Kristoff stretched the word out in a low singsong.

Sora’s eyes widened. “Wha? No, no, I know Riku! He’s my cousin and my best bud! He’d mentioned renting out their spare room to an old gal pal of Ray’s and that you were going through a bit of a rough patch, that’s all!” That blinding grin was slowly returning. “Hey, if there’s any way I can help out too, just let me know!”

“Oh.” My brow furrowed. “Uh… thanks…”

...you complete and total stranger.

“Don’t mention it! We’re friends now!”

Ah. My mistake. We were friends.

Apparently.

“Anyway, gotta run,” he waggled the second unopened bar slightly, “Kairi’s waiting for me and she’ll murder me if I let this melt! See ya around!” He waved good-bye to us over his shoulder as he walked off, happily slurping away at his own ice cream. I found myself absently returning the wave, one corner of my lips twitching up.

That guy? Bit of an oddball. But he seemed sweet.

“Not bad, newbie,” I heard Kristoff say as he poked the bill of my Ice Palace cap down, making it cover my eyes.

“Really?” I asked, righting my hat and looking up at him. Surprise of surprises, he was actually smiling.

...okay, it wasn’t so much a smile as it was a faint tightening of the mouth. But hey, I’ll take it.

“Not great, either,” he shrugged. “Not even remotely. But it’s a start. You’ll get better at it as you go. Now let’s cover-”

“Yo, Kristoff!”

Recognizing Frozone’s voice, we turned to see him poking a head out the door to the back.  “Could you give me a quick hand with moving a particularly heavy box?”

“Sure thing, be there in just a sec,” Kristoff called. Frozone (gah, it will never not be weird calling him that) nodded before disappearing once more.

My insides shriveled somewhat.  “You’re leaving me by myself up here?”

He gave my arm a light, reassuring pat. “I’ll be real quick, promise. It’s dead right now, so you probably won’t even have to deal with a single customer before I get back. If you do, don’t worry, you’re a natural. Just take their order, easy-peasy. And if you need help, tell the customer to wait a moment and come get me.”

I once again was reaching for my braid. It once again was not there. “What if they don’t want to wait a moment?”

“Just tell ‘em we’re out of whatever flavor they want and say ‘Let me see if we have any more in the back.’ Got it?”

“I guess so…”

“Good! Be back before you know it.” He jogged off and out the door, but a second later, he was leaning back through it again. “Remember, you say…” he twirled a finger sideways, prompting me.

“...let me see if we have any more in the back?” I ventured in a tiny voice.

He gave me a thumbs up. “Perfect.” Then he was gone again.

I moved to stand at the counter once more, inhaling and exhaling slowly. “Let me see if we have any more in the back,” I repeated, muttering it softly to myself as I eyed the food court warily.

He was right though, it was basically a ghost town out there. Everyone had already eaten for lunch and had all probably packed themselves back into the various stores by now. Plus it was a weekday. Thank goodness my first day hadn’t been on the weekend, I most certainly was not ready for the stampede of shoppers that would have come with that! As it was right now, there were only a few folks out there milling around for an afternoon snack and luckily none of them seemed to be craving ice cream. So I could maybe relax… at least for the moment.

Today… actually wasn’t going too bad so far. The job itself didn’t seem all that terrible. I was getting along with my coworkers, even that Kristoff fellow. He’d acted all tough at first, but seemed actually somewhat friendly underneath that cool exterior. I’d even helped my first customer! And with minimal mistakes, no less!

Maybe… maybe I could actually do this!

Okay sure, was I still a bit of a tangled ball of anxiety inside? Yes. Would I continue to be with each new customer? Oh, without a doubt. But with time, maybe, hopefully, it would lessen? At least somewhat?

A girl could dream anyway.

Regardless, I was doing it. The whole independence thing. Taking control of my life. I still had a long way to go, but this little ice cream job was the first small step. If I could do this, then maybe, just maybe there wasn’t much I couldn’t do. It wouldn’t be easy, and there was still a lot more for me to figure out. Like, a lot more. But I could and would. I just needed to believe in myself.

Feeling just a bit more on the chipper side now - an emotion that I hadn’t truly felt in a long time - I glanced around the food court again, really taking it all in this time, especially the other brightly colored restaurants that formed our neighbors.

There was The Big Olive, which served greek food. Currently a woman with heavy lavender eyeshadow and thick brown hair tied back into a long ponytail with curly fringe stood behind the register, idly flipping through a magazine. Then there was a chinese place called Mushu’s Kingdom with a cute little red dragon at the tail end of the logo. Next, there was Beast Burgers. I’d thought Kristoff cranky, but the big, hairy guy working there at the moment made Kristoff look like a cuddly puppy. Right beside that was a Cajun/Creole-style restaurant called Frog Legs, followed by a place called Sugar Rush, which looked like it served mostly pastries and any other sweet that wasn’t ice cream. Judging by the several large signs they had up, they seemed particularly proud of their cinnamon buns, which looked to be more frosting than bread.

Then there was a Lucky Cat Café, which was basically a coffee empire that had a shop located practically on every last street corner in the universe. I recalled that’s where Riku had purchased my mocha from the day I had officially moved in with Rayne and him. He’d probably bought it from this exact one that I was looking at right now. The mall was only a couple short blocks away from our apartment after all, which made it extra convenient that I’d managed to get the job here.

At that moment, I could see a woman with shoulder-length blue hair working the register while her coworker, a younger guy with short, messy blonde hair, blended a frothy drink nearby. They both were wearing green visors with felt feline ears sticking out the top. The blonde gave the grey cat with stripes perched atop their muffin display counter a quick pat on the head as he passed it by to reach the awaiting customer. It was only when I saw the creature’s tail twitch that I realized that was an actual living, breathing cat. Huh. A pet? Kept in the food court? How odd. It must have been very well trained. Probably just napped in that single spot all day, every day.

Last but not least, directly across the way from the Ice Palace was a Pizza Planet, its green logo sporting a giant, round pizza pie with a Saturn-like ring wrapped around it.  It tied neck-and-neck with our ice cream parlour for most over the top decorations. The interior was designed to look like the inside of a UFO and was littered with toy rocket ships and little green alien squeeze-dolls everywhere. Stationed at the cash register was a girl with short raven hair, clapping and cheering her coworker on.

Said coworker was a tall, lanky guy who, like his fellow employee, was decked out in a dark grey polo with red trimmed sleeves and collar, accompanied by a pair of black fingerless gloves and khakis underneath his black, snuggly-tied full-body apron. His long, wild crimson hair trailed down past the nape of his neck and spilled out in spikes over his open-topped red visor. He was grinning cockily as he spun not one, but two massive discs of pizza dough, one on each index finger.

He tossed one up high into the air before catching it and starting it spinning on his fingertip again. Then he was using some sort of wizardry to send the dough half rolling, half flying across his shoulders as he swapped the other disc to his left hand, freeing up his right to catch the first saucer of dough just in time and keep it whirling, much to his coworker’s delight.

It was as he was giving one of the circular slabs of dough another toss up that he seemed to realize he’d gained a second audience member. His eyes shifted to meet mine and then widened as his whole body locked up.  The disc still balanced on his finger spun off and toppled to the ground.

As for its airborne twin?

Splat!

Right on top of his head, covering his whole face.

A very unladylike snort escaped me, followed by a burst of long and uncontrollable laughter that I tried to smother behind my fingers. I was still laughing when he lifted the dough enough to peek one eye at me, expression unreadable as he slowly raised his other hand in a small twitch of a wave.

My giggling, along with my heart, abruptly stopped as I gasped, paled, squeaked and ducked down behind the counter.

...I’d laughed at him.

Oh my god, I can’t believe I’d laughed at him!

Heart thudding in my ears now, I stayed in a low crouch in my hiding spot, trembling hands gripping the edge of the countertop above me as my tongue dried to literal sandpaper.

Had he heard me laughing? Had he seen me laughing? What am I saying, of course he saw! That’s why he’d waved!

Oh dear lord, what did the wave mean? Was it an angry wave? An ‘I see you laughing at me, jerkface’ wave? A ‘How dare you mock me thusly’ wave? A ‘You have besmirched my honor, villain, now we must duel to the death’ wave? No, no, no, I didn’t know how to duel! What kind of duel would it even be? Pistols at dawn? I knew nothing about using a frigging pistol! Or any gun for that matter! I was dead! I was toast! I was-

Wait! No! Stop! Get a hold of yourself, woman! Gah, calm down and stop letting your imagination run wild with completely ridiculous notions!

I screwed my eyes shut, breathing in deep through my nose and holding it as I counted to ten before releasing.

It had probably just been a normal wave. A ‘Hello there, yes, I’m a dork who drops pizza dough on my head’ wave. He probably wasn’t mad, nor did he want to seek vengeance in blood. He was probably now just standing there, confused by the crazy weirdo who’d dived for cover behind her counter like she was in a war zone under enemy fire.

Alright. Time to pull myself back up. This was salvageable. Just stand and… I don’t know… wave back? Yeah, that sounded like a plan. Okay, you got this.

My legs tensed as I prepared to stand once more. In three… two…

What’d I’d failed to consider, as I’d be learning in two frightfully short seconds, was that there was another possibility. Another string of events that could have and, in fact, were set in motion the moment I’d dropped into hiding. That instead of just staying behind his own counter, the redhead had gotten curious about my odd reaction and had decided to take it upon himself to investigate. Therefore, he’d announced to his coworker that he was taking his ten, allowing him to leave his little pizzeria and cross the food court on a course heading straight for the ice cream shop directly across the way.

I have to wonder… and I mean really, really wonder… what were the odds?

The odds that he’d stop in front of the counter right across from where I was concealed.

The odds that he’d be leaning over it to look down at me exactly as I was springing back up to stand.

The odds that his lips were positioned just perfectly for my own to come crashing into his as I looked up.

 That’s right.

I’d frigging kissed him.

...Hey, universe? It’s me, Elsa. If you’re listening, now would be a really great time for me to spontaneously develop the ability to rewind time by, say, I don’t know… thirty seconds so I can make completely different life choices.

...No? Not happening?

Well fudge.

Author's note: BEHOLD! There, at long last, having traded his spinning chakrams in for spinning pizzas, is our favorite Fire Boy! Or rather… there his lips are anyway… hehehe… xD Trust me, the fun is only beginning, you're in for one rollercoaster of a ride with this story!

So here we finally get the main setting for a majority of this story - what is basically the universe of KH transformed into a mall xP So many stupid little references will abound in the chapters to come, I'm sure you'll get sick of it! And I know Frozone/Incredibles isn't in KH, but that is a travesty which I had to correct by including him in this fic! I mean, c'mon, he's perfect for working at an ice cream shop alongside Elsa! As for Kristoff, I know he's normally a big ol' softie, but don't forget he had his whole tough guy routine when he first met Anna at the beginning of the movie! And as you can see, he's already starting to warm up to Elsa. And all the food court restaurants and faces (yes, even the cat) this chapter were KH/Disney references, some might be more obvious than others tho… but if any were too vague, Elsa will get to meet a lot of them in the chapters ahead so that should clear 'em all up! Oh, and ice cream flavor names! I'm not gonna miss an opportunity to steal all those ice creams from BBS, but come on, this was Sora, so OF COURSE I had to make up something that was Paopu flavored for him! I imagine the description of the Paopu Paradise flavor on the menu is something like: "Made with real Paopu fruit straight from Destiny Islands with little star sprinkles swirled in! Legend has it if two people share this ice cream, their destinies become intertwined."

In any case, on to the more pressing question… how will our lil ball of nerves Ice Queen handle this mortifying "greeting" with her new redheaded friend that she has yet to even learn the name of? Hope you stay tuned to find out in the next chapter! Thank you so much for reading!

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