#MARRIAGE VOWS ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON

[gilliebee]

[hotforharrison]

Life has been kind of crazy in the worst possible way this month.

It feels like so much more than 3 weeks since the day I filed for divorce on July 1, which was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

I meant every word of my vows on that Thursday afternoon in September 2010 when my marriage began. I thought we were going to be each other's person for the rest of our lives, not for that to slip through my fingers because I was careless with his heart, and I can't put into words how deeply I regret it.

I never expected his embrace to hurt the way it does now, and the worst part of it is that he's the only one here to hug. He was the biggest source of my comfort for so many years, and even if he was here to hold me right now, it wouldn't be the same. What we had is completely gone.

It still kill me that I don't remember the last time we had sex, the last time we shared the bed we slept in together every night, and I woke up to him like I did so many times over the years.

He told me that we could have sex again on a friends with benefits basis, but I don't want to. It would destroy me.

Anyway, the power has been back on for a full week now after 8 days without in the godawful Texas summer heat, with only a few brief interruptions, mostly tonight when we had a thunderstorm.

We've spent the last week and a half, starting before the power even came back on, getting quotes from contractors for repairs for the extensive damages. The hurricane damages to the house I live in are in the tens of thousands of dollars.

(The house was downgraded from what was my home before my marriage ended because it feels like I'm surrounded by the devastating loss and ghosts of him and the love and life we shared for so long. It's agonizing just being here a lot of the time.)

We're not sure what the homeowners' insurance is going to cover for the repairs, which is terrifying, and we need to figure out how to work with FEMA if the insurance isn't helpful.

I'm also worried the HOA we're in will start giving us problems if we can't get the repairs done very quickly.

This month has been such shit in so many ways.

I desperately need my weekly counseling sessions, and my counselor cancelled this week. I've had only one of my weekly appointments this month due to cancellations and the hurricane, which is taking its toll on me.

In more positive and hopeful news, I had an appointment last Thursday with my job counselor at the state run employment program I was accepted into.

They'll pay fully for my schooling, textbooks, and supplies to get a degree or certificate from a local community college and offer job placement services after graduation.

I need a job I can do remotely, and I originally intended to pursue a year long certificate program in medical billing and coding. However, all of the local programs required on campus courses and capstones, which I cannot do.

I looked into every single fully online degree or certificate program that the local community colleges offered that aren't any longer than two years (my ex-husband agreed to let me stay here rent free for a few years while I get myself sorted) and settled on an Associate degree program in mobile/web application development.

I applied for the program today.

I wanted something with a decent level of job security, and I don't think phones are going anywhere. There's the possibility of freelance work on the side as well.

Considering and pursuing a career in technology is nothing new to me.

I went to a public university for an information technology program for 2 years after I graduated from high school, followed by a technical school for computer network operations for a year.

I never ended up working in the industry because it was saturated at my time of graduation, and they wanted me to have experience for an entry level position, which I found endlessly ironic.

I was told more than once by potential employers that I should have done an internship before I graduated to gain experience, which would have been fantastic to know while I was still in school and not with the days ticking down until I had to start repaying my student loans.

I desperately hope that I can transfer some of the roughly 20 year old credits over from the university I went to to cover the general education portion of the degree and maybe trim off a semester. (While technology absolutely has changed since the 2000s, some things haven't changed, like an introductory English or history course.)

[camillafanfiction]

Love changes everything - Chapter 1

9th October 1975, Bloehyde Manor

The wind blew cold and heavy, rattling on the shutters. Thank goodness the horses were safe and sound in their stables, the dogs had curled up in the hall and 10-months-old Tom was fast asleep in his cot in his own room. Thank goodness she sat here on her comfy sofa and had her nose stuck in an exciting thriller, the radio quietly playing some classical music. Thank goodness she had decided against that birthday bash of one of her husband's comrades at the Ritz. Usually, Andrew expected her to join him, but Camilla had felt a bit sick and she knew, too, Andrew wouldn’t be lonesome tonight anyway. She was nowhere near to accepting her husband’s ongoing affairs with all sorts of girls, but she herself found great comfort in her friendship with the Prince of Wales. If it were up to Charles, she would be sleeping with him and she wasn’t sure how much longer she would be able to resist his constant courting. It was just way too wonderful to be adored and loved like that. And she still loved him, too. Camilla, however, was rather unwilling to break her marriage vow. Charles had rung her earlier today - they spoke most days and these were the highlights of both their days. Maybe, if Charles was going to try and kiss her again, she would just follow her heart and kiss him back. Or maybe she would hiss at him and push him away if Andrew would be very sweet again the upcoming weekend. Today was a Thursday and tomorrow afternoon Andrew would come home to spend the weekend with his wife and son. He’d be the perfect husband and bring some small presents for either Tom or Camilla. Or maybe he wouldn’t… Usually, he just brought flowers when he had slept with one of her best friends, so she’d be happy if she wasn’t going to receive any. 

Right after they had spoken their vows two years ago, Camilla had had hopes that Andrew would finally stop his philandering, but she knew now that it was never going to stop. But he still was her husband and she loved him. That was why she’d married him. They were perfect for each other or so she had once thought. Now she sometimes found herself wondering what her life would look like had she not accepted his sudden proposal. Andrew was a wonderful father, at least, and they worked well as a team in front of everyone. Everything else would fall into place one day, Camilla was sure. 

The radio beeped in an unsettling way, startling Camilla from her book. These had to be the 10 p.m. news already, she sighed to herself and yawned heartily. She really got lost in books way too quickly when she was all on her own. The old grandfather-clock struck 10 p.m., it was always a little late, and drowned out the news. Apparently, there had been another IRA bombing again, but Camilla hadn’t understood where. As she was scuffling to the radio, the reporter was already talking about something else, so Camilla just turned it off with a shake of her head and went upstairs. There was some rustling in Tom’s room, so she peeked in, but found her little boy fast asleep in his cot. Tom was her and Andrew’s pride and joy. They’d had to wait a bit longer than expected for his arrival, but that made the joy of his being even bigger. Tom was a happy baby and everyone seemed to be besotted with him. Especially Charles, his god-father, took a great fancy to him. He often came to visit Tom - and even more often to visit Camilla, too. It calmed Camilla’s heart a little to know that Charles loved her son so dearly even though he disliked Andrew so much. Till that day Charles couldn’t understand why out of all the men she had chosen Andrew, not him, Camilla knew. Of course Charles, like humiliatingly everyone in their circle, knew about Andrew’s affairs, and he despised Andrew for it, for not treating Camilla the way she deserved it. But it didn’t matter. She had chosen Andrew, she was stuck with him forever, they would have more children and maybe one day Andrew would realise what an amazing wife he had. 

Having brushed her teeth, Camilla shuffled to her bed, flopped down and fell into a deep sleep immediately. Today had been exhausting: a baby, two dogs, a house with a big garden and several horses didn’t just exist on their own. They all needed care and love and during the week Camilla was the only one to give it to each of them. And only sometimes she was aware that she might also need someone to look after her and to love her, too.

In fact, Camilla had fallen so tightly asleep that she only subconsciously noticed the doorbell, the knocks on the door and the voices that called “Mrs. Parker Bowles!” She murmured something in her sleep, but eventually turned on the lamp on her bed-side table to take a look at her watch. It was half past one in the morning. What on earth would someone want from her at that time of the night? They had certainly woken Tom, he was crying, she sighed.

Camilla wasn’t one to be afraid, Allington was a peaceful village and a burglar wouldn’t shout her name like that. Had one of the horses been afraid of the storm and escaped the stable, she mused as she threw on her dressing gown. Well, she would find out soon, she thought to herself as she grabbed her baby, walked down the stairs and called “I’m coming!”. A second later she flung the door open and looked into the frowning faces of a middle-aged police officer, a brigadier of the Blues and Royals and a tearful major, Ernest, one of Andrew’s comrades. She instantly knew something was wrong. “What’s with Andrew?”, she uttered before her face turned pale and her knees wobbly.  

X

Trevor Davidson, the Prince of Wales’s private secretary, knocked two times at the office door and then peeked in. “Sir?”, he asked quietly and bowed his head. He knew Charles was working on a speech for an upcoming engagement, though it was almost around one in the morning, and he hated being disturbed. But Trevor knew, too, that the Prince needed to hear the news he had.

“Hm?”, Charles replied without looking up or paying any further attention to Trevor. He was in a flow and wanted to finish that speech. He had no time for chit chat now. 

“Sir, I have some news regarding the bombing.”, Trevor tried again. 

Charles had heard a little bit of the detonation and had immediately known that the IRA had struck again. Half an hour later he had been told that, indeed, there had been an IRA attack on Green Park Underground station, just opposite of the Ritz. If only there was a way to teach humankind peace and harmony…! “Yes?”, he asked, raising his head and eyebrows expecitionally. 

Trevor took a deep breath, he wasn’t quite sure how to put what he had to say, but decided to say it as it was. “You might be aware that a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Parker Bow-”

For a moment Charles heard his blood rushing through his veins and felt his pulse quickening but then firmly interrupted his secretary, “Mrs. Parker Bowles is not staying in London tonight.” 

Trevor nodded. “No, Sir.” 

Charles sighed relieved. “Go on then.” His fingertips thumbed on the table. 

Trevor nodded again, gathering his thoughts. “Major Ernest Aldersham was hosting a party at the Ritz tonight and Major Parker Bowles was in attendance. While he was at the restrooms he noticed something ominous.” Charles didn’t want to know why, when and how Andrew frequented a lavatory at the Ritz, but tried to look patient at his secretary while he continued. “Major Parker Bowles knocked on the door and was immediately run over by the terroroist who was constructing a bomb in that very restroom. The Major, however, bounced back and run after the man, fully aware that the latter had a bomb in his arms. He chased him out of the hotel, but couldn’t hinder that the Irishman threw the bomb at the undergroundstation. The terrorist was able to chase away in his getaway car, but Major Parker Bowles was instantly killed by the bomb.”

There was a moment of silence in which the prince’s face turned grey and pale. “The Major is…”

“Dead, Sir. Yes.”, Trevor confirmed, feeling uncomfortable.

“Are you a hundred percent sure it is Major Parker Bowles?” Charles asked, praying that this was a factual error.

“Yes, Sir.”

Charles' blood froze. He had to function now. “Does Mrs. Parker Bowles know already?”

“As far as I know there’s a squad on its way to her.” Trevor was well aware of the rumours surrounding the prince’s very special friendship with Mrs. Parker Bowles, they were well circulating in the royal household, but Trevor had never paid any attention to them. He had seen them together twice and to him it was as plain as the nose on their faces that the two of them were in love. But it was neither his place to judge nor to be interested in. 

“I will go and see her!” Charles declared not quite to Trevor’s surprise.

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day. Happy Hump Day!

Yesterday was six hours of teaching! It’s challenging, make no mistake but, fortunately, I am good. No … like … really good! It’s the best show in town! They shake my hand or fist bump me at the end of the lesson and thank me! I love that! I really appreciate that! Hard work but so rewarding! Yesterday, we analysed the K-Pop industry; a million miles from the UK music industry but very interesting. At the moment, there are only two UK acts in the Global Top 10 (Harry Styles and Ed Sheeran), whereas there are THREE Korean acts in the Global Top 10. Would we have more acts in the Global Top 10 if we returned to the days of One Direction, and even Spice Girls, Boyzone, Westlife, All Saints and Take That? The global market loves boy bands and girl groups singing pop music. Why have we stopped doing that?

Saw a very interesting idea on my X (Twitter) feed the other day and saw a very interesting video on TikTok a few days later. Both posts are connected. The idea might seem a bit controversial but I really like it. The idea is: marriage licenses should only last for 20 years. Then, at the end of 20 years, the couples can decide whether they want to re-new their vows or not. Divorce is very expensive, so why not? If things are going good: no problem. If things are going bad: both parties just walk away. And this ties in to a video I saw of a woman explaining why men are so reluctant to get married; divorce courts always favour women and might even make the man homeless! He loses half of everything and she probably gets the kids too. Who needs that? Of course, there is a such a thing as a prenuptial agreement but how many ordinary couples sign that? In fact, this explains why some men are reluctant to even embark on a relationship! Commitment issues? No. Not wanting to be homeless issues!

Big love to my buddy Stevie Dundee, who has involved me in his Scorpio celebration at The White Lion (Streatham) on Saturday, November 4th. There will be four Scorps in attendance: me, Stevie, Jigs and Dee DeeMure plus a supporting cast of top quality jocks. I remember first meeting Stevie down the road at another pub. He was promoting club nights at this place and it was hot’n’sweaty, and then there was a basement downstairs that was dark, hot’n’sweaty. I think we can safely assume that Stevie likes hot’n’sweaty because, as you know, The White Lion is what I call a ‘get down’ place. They don’t just dance, they get down! If you’re anywhere near Streatham High Road on that day, it would be lovely to see you.

Once I finish at 4.00 today, my weekend begins! Working from home Thursday and Friday. Thursday night, I shall be at John Saunderson’s networking event at Tileyard. Not really work. More a right laugh! This beautiful girl who works at LCCM is showcasing there, so I’m looking forward to seeing her. I shall also be taking countless selfies of me and some other old geezers.

On Saturday night, my crazy, little niece Katie-Frou is hosting a baby shower. Yes, she is bringing a new granddaughter into my life! You know what that means; I will be TOTAL PUTTY in the hands of this little girl. Sunday afternoon: The Trouble and I will have a quick meet up with one of our favourite people (and her daughter).

Have a wonderful and well-endowed Wednesday. I love you all. Yes, a crazy, bald man loves and cares about you.

[minimel-fics]

Moral of the Story - Part 2

Hank Loza X OC

Their marriage took a turn for the worst, but they made a vow that neither of them had the heart to break.

Slightly messy because I wrote this in 30 minutes while devouring a plate of hashbrowns at 10pm. I've also decided that part 3 might be a possibility

Part 1

Masterlist

Warning: Mentions of child death before birth

---

“Damn, Tranq you miss a check-in with your parole officer or lawyer or some shit?”

The clubhouse was quiet, which was not unusual at such an hour on a Thursday afternoon, the only sounds were the low hum of music and the light chatter from the Mayans scattered around at the tables. Ruth pulled the lapels of her blazer so they sat flatter against her blouse as she felt the weight of the entire Charter’s eyes on her.

“Two beers, Prospect.” Hank seemed to ignore the man who made the comment, turning to another with bulging arms behind the bar.

“I’m Ruth.” As hard as she tried to shake her entirely professional habits it didn’t seem that her body wanted to cooperate as she reached out to shake the hand of the man that had made the original comment. “Ruth Loza.”

“Angel Reyes.” He sent her a smirk that she was sure he had used to whoo many women during his spare time, “You never mentioned you had a hot sister, Hank.”

“Actually, we are married.” Ruth found herself feeling more satisfied than she should as the men scattered around the room seemed to simultaneously choke on their beer or inhale of cigarette smoke, “I just stopped by to get our divorce papers signed.”

“When the fuck did you get married?” Another member asked, the young lady that was seated beside him seemed to be the one most intently watching the scene unfold.

“We haven’t seen each other in a long time and with how we ended I don’t blame Hank for wanting nothing to do with me.”

“To 25 years together but mostly apart.” Hank took his beer from the bar countertop, raising it into the air in a short toast. “And to our future finally apart in the eyes of the government.”

“We gotta hear this story.” Angel insisted as he sat back in his chair.

“You know Huggie from the Oakland chapter? He’s my brother.” Ruth started as she made herself comfortable on a rickety bar stool.

“Ain’t he in jail for murder or something?”

“He’s got a few months left on his sentence. Anyway, he is the reason why we met.” She leaned her elbows on the counter, feeling as her expensive jacket melded onto the sticky surface, “I was supposed to be at the biggest party of my freshman existence but I bailed and stayed home to study. Huggie and Hank were trying to lay low from whomever it was that Hug had pissed off at the time and this big, burly sweetheart here caught my eye.” She bumped her shoulder against Hanks playfully as she sent him a wink.

“The purple velour tracksuit covered in Cheeto dust had me hooked.”

“I got pregnant and dropped out of school, Hank wanted to make things right so we got married. Don’t get me wrong we loved each other but we were just kids- we had no business getting married.”

The small reminiscent smile slipped off Hank’s face as his fingers peeled at the label on his beer bottle, “We ended up losing the baby to an irreparable heart defect before he was born.”

“Neither of us knew how to grieve that loss, we were both angry and we often misplaced that anger toward each other. I threw myself back into school and Hank became Huggie’s right-hand man.”

“The school thing must have worked out?” The girl asked, the man beside her revealing her name as Letty when he hissed at her for interrupting the story.

“A lot of years and a lot of work paid off, I’m now a pediatric surgeon in L.A.” Ruth explained, sending the girl a smile to show she did not mind the interruption. “We got into an argument one night and realized that maybe we just needed some time apart. At the time we were not planning to have complete radio silence for 20 years but I guess our paths were just too different. In our wedding vows, we said that we wouldn’t do anything final like this for 25 years.”

Letty perked up, her eyes growing large as the length of their union was revealed. “And this is 25 years? Did you ever meet someone and fall in love?”

“I never did.” Ruth shook her head, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear as she stole a shy glance toward Hank to see how he would answer.

“No.” The words were quiet as they slipped from the large man’s lips. He swivelled on the stool to look at the man behind the bar, “You got a pen, prospect?”

Neither Hank nor Ruth noticed the room slowly empty as the documents were removed from the envelope and spread across the slightly sticky bar. Ruth stayed silent as she let Hank read through each page of the documents, not wanting to distract him as he flipped the pen between his fingers. Her eyes drifted from the bottles of booze lining the shelves to the side of Hank’s face, scanning his profile and getting lost in her own reverie. She thought about the heated argument they had gotten into when choosing what colour paint they wanted to repaint the nursery after finding out that they would not be bringing their baby home and every argument they had found themselves in during the short amount of time it took to paint the room. Her thoughts slowly drifted to a memory she always held close to her heart: the day Hank had originally painted the nursery a pale blue colour because he had been so sure that they were expecting a son. She smiled to herself as she remembered his insistence and how she had accidentally gotten paint on his face while touching up a spot he had missed, the love-filled moment they had shared as they embraced in the nursery before their passion-filled shower to rid themselves of the blue paint.

Ruth sucked in a sharp breath as Hank’s hand hovered over the line at the bottom of the page.

“Hank, wait!”

----

@drabbles-mc I did a second part :)

[thepastisalreadywritten]

By: Caroline Davies

Thursday, 8 September 2022, 18.30 BST

Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning monarch in British history, has died at the age of 96.

Prince Charles, 73, heir to the throne since the age of three, is now king, and the Duchess of Cornwall is now Queen Consort.

In a statement, Buckingham Palace said:

“The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The King and the Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.”

The royal family’s official website carried the message: “Queen Elizabeth II 1926-2022” along with the official statement issued by Buckingham Palace.

Coming to the throne at the age of 25, she successfully steered the monarchy through decades of turbulent change, with her personal popularity providing ballast during the institution’s more difficult times.

At her side for most of it, the Duke of Edinburgh remained her “strength and stay” during a marriage that withstood many strains imposed by her unique position.

Despite a family life lived under the often challenging glare of publicity, Elizabeth II remained a calm and steadfast figure, weathering the divorces of three of her children, and the crisis precipitated by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

Flags on landmark buildings in Britain were being lowered to half mast as a period of official mourning was announced. Royal residences that are open to the public will be closed.

There were undoubted low points, but the mass outpourings of affection on her silver, golden and diamond jubilees testified to the special place she held for millions. When there was criticism of the institution, it rarely translated into a personal attack on her.

Fifteen prime ministers served her, attesting to her deep knowledge, experience of world affairs and mastery of political neutrality.

They stretched back to Sir Winston Churchill, who was still prime minister when she assumed the throne, with resolve and far earlier than she had expected, on the premature death of her father, George VI, in 1952.

It is expected the bells of Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral will toll their bells at midday on Friday, and ceremonial gun salutes will be fired in Hyde Park and at Tower Hill in London.

That resolve continued to sustain her. In her silver jubilee message in 1977, she said:

“When I was 21, I pledged my life to the service of our people and asked for God’s help to make that vow. Although that vow was made in my salad days, when I was green in judgment, I do not regret nor retract one word of it.”

Often portrayed as old-fashioned, during her reign many steps were taken to keep the monarchy up to date with rapid societal change.

Out went debutante “coming out” presentations, in came garden parties, receptions, luncheons, almost weekly “away days” to provincial towns and regular walkabouts, allowing personal access on a vaster scale than ever before.

Out, too, went tax-free status on her private income, and that of the Prince of Wales, though she fought hard until she was convinced public opinion was firmly set against her.

The laws on succession were changed, with the abolition of primogeniture, allowing first-born daughters to accede over sons, and those in the line of succession being allowed to marry a Catholic, although not to be one.

Rarely did she publicly reveal private anguish. Her plea for a fair understanding towards the end of 1992 – her annus horribilis, a year rocked by royal scandal and a row over finances – was unprecedented.

A devout, churchgoing Christian, the Queen’s annual Christmas broadcast, which she scripted herself, revealed a woman of unshakable faith.

She took her position as head of the Church of England seriously, even when it required her to sidestep Charles’s civil marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles by absenting herself from the register office part of the ceremony. Nevertheless, it was a marriage, between two divorcees, that was unthinkable when she came to the throne, but one she ultimately embraced.

She was left bereft at the loss of her lifelong companion, Prince Philip, who died in his sleep at the age of 99 in April 2021 during the Covid pandemic.

She sat alone and bereaved in St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle, during the poignant funeral, hugely scaled down because of coronavirus restrictions.

The royal couple, married for 73 years, had spent the last months of his life together in lockdown, shielding at Windsor Castle because of their vulnerability to the virus due to their advanced years.

To cap this turbulent time for the monarchy, the Queen then contracted Covid, suffering mild cold-like symptoms, shortly before she marked her platinum jubilee.

As Queen of the UK and 14 other realms, and head of the 54-nation Commonwealth, Elizabeth II was easily the world’s most recognisable head of state during an extraordinarily long reign.

As age gradually caught up with her, and she had mobility issues, she was seen less often at public events.

In April 2022, she did not attend the state opening of parliament, instead issuing letters patent, authorising the Prince of Wales and Duke of Cambridge, as counsellors of state, to deputise for her.

It was only the third time in her reign that she had missed a state opening, the other two being when she was pregnant in 1959 and 1963.

The mobility issues meant the Queen remained in Balmoral in September 2022 rather than return to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the new prime minister. The outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, and his successor, Liz Truss, travelled to Scotland instead.

Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was born on 21 April 1926 at her maternal grandparents’ home at 17 Bruton Street, in London’s Mayfair district, and was not expected to accede to the throne.

But at the age of 10, the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, over his love for the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, and her father’s rushed coronation as substitute king, changed the path her aristocratic life could have been expected to take.

The world witnessed her transformation from shy princess to young Queen, attracting the same global fascination as Diana, Princess of Wales, would 30 years later. Even in middle and later years, she retained photogenic regal glamour.

But she seemed most content in a thick jacket and headscarf, walking her corgis or tramping Balmoral’s highland moors.

“You can go for miles and never see anybody; you can walk or ride, it has endless possibilities,” she once said.

Watching her thoroughbreds pass the post was another great pleasure, and her love of horse racing once subconsciously manifested itself during the 2003 state opening of parliament when she announced details of a national hunt service bill rather than “health service.”

The image of a queen who kept cereal in plastic boxes and fed toast to her corgis while a gruff Philip breakfasted next to her listening to a battered old transistor radio, did much to endear. So, too, did the two-bar electric fire she used in 2013 and beyond to heat her palace audience room, and “revelations” that her favourite TV programmes included Last of the Summer Wine and The Bill.

When required to subject herself to popular culture, such as a pop concert, she would oblige, with earplugs in place. Her parachuting stunt – when a body-double landed in the middle of the London Olympics opening ceremony – illustrated well that she did often get it.

Illnesses were rare as she enjoyed robust health. At 85, she was still carrying out 325 engagements a year. Long-haul travel was only curtailed when she reached 87, and Philip 92.

She was the most widely travelled of any world head of state. Coming to the throne as the empire collapsed and with Britain’s status as a world power diminishing, she believed the flourishing of the Commonwealth to be among her greatest achievements.

She visited every Commonwealth country bar Cameroon, which joined in 1995, and Rwanda (2009). She visited Canada more than 20 times, Australia 16, New Zealand 10 and Jamaica six.

In 2011, Elizabeth became the first British monarch in a century to visit the Republic of Ireland.

The following year, she shook hands in Belfast with the Sinn Féin politician Martin McGuinness, putting aside the personal tragedy of the IRA assassination of “Uncle Dickie”, Lord Mountbatten, her distant cousin and Philip’s uncle.

In 2002, her golden jubilee, her sister, Margaret, and mother, Queen Elizabeth, died within eight weeks of each other.

Her relationship to both had been close, as they were among the few individuals in whom she could confide the pressures and frustrations of her position.

As many nations today mourn a queen, one family is mourning a mother of four, a grandmother of eight, and a great-grandmother of 12.

NOTE: Edited

[nerdyqueerandjewish]

I follow historian Heather Cox Richardson on facebook and every day she does a write up about political history - I found yesterday’s on abortion and the anti-abortion movement really interesting

September 2, 2021 (Thursday)

In the light of day today, the political fallout from Texas’s anti-abortion S.B. 8 law and the Supreme Court’s acceptance of that law continues to become clear.

By 1:00 this afternoon, the Fox News Channel had mentioned the decision only in a 20-second news brief in the 5 am hour. In political terms, it seems the dog has caught the car.

As I’ve said repeatedly, most Americans agree on most issues, even the hot button ones like abortion. A Gallup poll from June examining the issue of abortion concluded that only 32% of Americans wanted the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision overturned, while 58% of Americans opposed overturning it.

"’Overturning Roe v. Wade,’" Lydia Saad of Gallup wrote, “is a shorthand way of saying the Supreme Court could decide abortion is not a constitutional right after all, thus giving control of abortion laws back to the states. This does not sit well with a majority of Americans or even a large subset of Republicans. Not only do Americans oppose overturning Roe in principle, but they oppose laws limiting abortion in early stages of pregnancy that would have the same practical effect.”

While it is hard to remember today, the modern-day opposition to abortion had its roots not in a moral defense of life but rather in the need for President Richard Nixon to win votes before the 1972 election. Pushing the idea that abortion was a central issue of American life was about rejecting the equal protection of the laws embraced by the Democrats far more than it was ever about using the government to protect fetuses.

Abortion had been a part of American life since its inception, but states began to criminalize abortion in the 1870s. By 1960, an observer estimated that there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal U.S. abortions a year, endangering women, primarily poor ones who could not afford a workaround.

To stem this public health crisis, doctors wanted to decriminalize abortion and keep it between a woman and her doctor. In the 1960s, states began to decriminalize abortion on this medical model, and support for abortion rights grew.

The rising women's movement wanted women to have control over their lives. Its leaders were latecomers to the reproductive rights movement, but they came to see reproductive rights as key to self-determination. In 1969, activist Betty Friedan told a medical abortion meeting: “[M]y only claim to be here, is our belated recognition, if you will, that there is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process….”

In 1971, even the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention agreed that abortion should be legal in some cases, and vowed to work for modernization. Their convention that year reiterated its “belief that society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves” but also called on “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

By 1972, Gallup pollsters reported that 64% of Americans agreed that abortion was between a woman and her doctor. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans, who had always liked family planning, agreed, as did 59% of Democrats.

In keeping with that sentiment, in 1973, the Supreme Court, under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a decision written by Republican Harry Blackmun, decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing first-trimester abortion.

The common story is that Roe sparked a backlash. But legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel found something interesting. In a 2011 article in the Yale Law Journal, they showed that opposition to the eventual Roe v. Wade decision began in 1972—the year before the decision—and that it was a deliberate attempt to polarize American politics.

In 1972, Nixon was up for reelection, and he and his people were paranoid that he would lose. His adviser Pat Buchanan was a Goldwater man who wanted to destroy the popular New Deal state that regulated the economy and protected social welfare and civil rights. To that end, he believed Democrats and traditional Republicans must be kept from power and Nixon must win reelection.

Catholics, who opposed abortion and believed that "the right of innocent human beings to life is sacred," tended to vote for Democratic candidates. Buchanan, who was a Catholic himself, urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats before the 1972 election over the issue of abortion. In 1970, Nixon had directed U.S. military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law; in 1971, using Catholic language, he reversed course to split the Democrats, citing his personal belief "in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”

Although Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern had similar stances on abortion, Nixon and Buchanan defined McGovern as the candidate of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion," a radical framing designed to alienate traditionalists.

As Nixon split the U.S. in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for women's rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses; she said: “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society. Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are ‘second-class citizens’ and ‘abject slaves.’ Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”

Traditional Republicans supported an activist government that regulated business and promoted social welfare, but radical right Movement Conservatives wanted to kill the active government. They attacked anyone who supported such a government as immoral. Abortion turned women's rights into murder.

Movement Conservatives preached traditional roles, and in 1974, the TV show Little House on the Prairie started its 9-year run, contributing, as historian Peggy O’Donnell has explored, to the image of white women as wives and mothers in the West protected by their menfolk. So-called prairie dresses became the rage in the 1970s.

This image was the female side of the cowboy individualism personified by Ronald Reagan. A man should control his own destiny and take care of his family unencumbered by government. Women should be wives and mothers in a nuclear family. In 1984, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish "pro-choice" women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother. They wanted an active government to give them rights they didn't need or deserve.

By 1988, Rush Limbaugh, the voice of Movement Conservatism, who was virulently opposed to taxation and active government, demonized women's rights advocates as "Femi-nazis" for whom "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." The complicated issue of abortion had become a proxy for a way to denigrate the political opponents of the radicalizing Republican Party.

Such threats turned out Republican voters, especially the evangelical base. But support for safe and legal abortion has always been strong, as it remains today. Until yesterday, Republican politicians could pay lip service to opposing the Roe v. Wade decision to get anti-abortion voters to show up at the polls, without facing the political fallout of actually getting rid of the decision.

Now, though, Texas has effectively destroyed the right to legal abortion.

The fact that the Fox News Channel is not mentioning what should have been a landmark triumph of its viewers’ ideology suggests Republicans know that ending safe and legal abortion is deeply unpopular. Their base finally, after all these years, got what it wanted. But now the rest of the nation, which had been assured as recently as the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that Roe v. Wade was settled law that would not be overturned, gets a chance to weigh in.

[reading-writing-revolution]

September 2, 2021 (Thursday)

In the light of day today, the political fallout from Texas’s anti-abortion S.B. 8 law and the Supreme Court’s acceptance of that law continues to become clear.

By 1:00 this afternoon, the Fox News Channel had mentioned the decision only in a 20-second news brief in the 5 am hour. In political terms, it seems the dog has caught the car.

As I’ve said repeatedly, most Americans agree on most issues, even the hot button ones like abortion. A Gallup poll from June examining the issue of abortion concluded that only 32% of Americans wanted the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision overturned, while 58% of Americans opposed overturning it.

"’Overturning Roe v. Wade,’" Lydia Saad of Gallup wrote, “is a shorthand way of saying the Supreme Court could decide abortion is not a constitutional right after all, thus giving control of abortion laws back to the states. This does not sit well with a majority of Americans or even a large subset of Republicans. Not only do Americans oppose overturning Roe in principle, but they oppose laws limiting abortion in early stages of pregnancy that would have the same practical effect.”

While it is hard to remember today, the modern-day opposition to abortion had its roots not in a moral defense of life but rather in the need for President Richard Nixon to win votes before the 1972 election. Pushing the idea that abortion was a central issue of American life was about rejecting the equal protection of the laws embraced by the Democrats far more than it was ever about using the government to protect fetuses.

Abortion had been a part of American life since its inception, but states began to criminalize abortion in the 1870s. By 1960, an observer estimated that there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal U.S. abortions a year, endangering women, primarily poor ones who could not afford a workaround.

To stem this public health crisis, doctors wanted to decriminalize abortion and keep it between a woman and her doctor. In the 1960s, states began to decriminalize abortion on this medical model, and support for abortion rights grew.

The rising women's movement wanted women to have control over their lives. Its leaders were latecomers to the reproductive rights movement, but they came to see reproductive rights as key to self-determination. In 1969, activist Betty Friedan told a medical abortion meeting: “[M]y only claim to be here, is our belated recognition, if you will, that there is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process….”

In 1971, even the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention agreed that abortion should be legal in some cases, and vowed to work for modernization. Their convention that year reiterated its “belief that society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves” but also called on “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

By 1972, Gallup pollsters reported that 64% of Americans agreed that abortion was between a woman and her doctor. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans, who had always liked family planning, agreed, as did 59% of Democrats.

In keeping with that sentiment, in 1973, the Supreme Court, under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a decision written by Republican Harry Blackmun, decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing first-trimester abortion.

The common story is that Roe sparked a backlash. But legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel found something interesting. In a 2011 article in the Yale Law Journal, they showed that opposition to the eventual Roe v. Wade decision began in 1972—the year before the decision—and that it was a deliberate attempt to polarize American politics.

In 1972, Nixon was up for reelection, and he and his people were paranoid that he would lose. His adviser Pat Buchanan was a Goldwater man who wanted to destroy the popular New Deal state that regulated the economy and protected social welfare and civil rights. To that end, he believed Democrats and traditional Republicans must be kept from power and Nixon must win reelection.

Catholics, who opposed abortion and believed that "the right of innocent human beings to life is sacred," tended to vote for Democratic candidates. Buchanan, who was a Catholic himself, urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats before the 1972 election over the issue of abortion. In 1970, Nixon had directed U.S. military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law; in 1971, using Catholic language, he reversed course to split the Democrats, citing his personal belief "in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”

Although Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern had similar stances on abortion, Nixon and Buchanan defined McGovern as the candidate of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion," a radical framing designed to alienate traditionalists.

As Nixon split the U.S. in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for women's rights in general. Railing against the Equal Rights Amendment, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses; she said: “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society. Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are ‘second-class citizens’ and ‘abject slaves.’ Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage. They are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”

Traditional Republicans supported an activist government that regulated business and promoted social welfare, but radical right Movement Conservatives wanted to kill the active government. They attacked anyone who supported such a government as immoral. Abortion turned women's rights into murder.

Movement Conservatives preached traditional roles, and in 1974, the TV show Little House on the Prairie started its 9-year run, contributing, as historian Peggy O’Donnell has explored, to the image of white women as wives and mothers in the West protected by their menfolk. So-called prairie dresses became the rage in the 1970s.

This image was the female side of the cowboy individualism personified by Ronald Reagan. A man should control his own destiny and take care of his family unencumbered by government. Women should be wives and mothers in a nuclear family. In 1984, sociologist Kristin Luker discovered that "pro-life" activists believed that selfish "pro-choice" women were denigrating the roles of wife and mother. They wanted an active government to give them rights they didn't need or deserve.

By 1988, Rush Limbaugh, the voice of Movement Conservatism, who was virulently opposed to taxation and active government, demonized women's rights advocates as "Femi-nazis" for whom "the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur." The complicated issue of abortion had become a proxy for a way to denigrate the political opponents of the radicalizing Republican Party.

Such threats turned out Republican voters, especially the evangelical base. But support for safe and legal abortion has always been strong, as it remains today. Until yesterday, Republican politicians could pay lip service to opposing the Roe v. Wade decision to get anti-abortion voters to show up at the polls, without facing the political fallout of actually getting rid of the decision.

Now, though, Texas has effectively destroyed the right to legal abortion.

The fact that the Fox News Channel is not mentioning what should have been a landmark triumph of its viewers’ ideology suggests Republicans know that ending safe and legal abortion is deeply unpopular. Their base finally, after all these years, got what it wanted. But now the rest of the nation, which had been assured as recently as the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that Roe v. Wade was settled law that would not be overturned, gets a chance to weigh in.

[kookie-doughs]

Y/N L/N AND THE HALFBLOODS

Percy Jackson X Reader -Y/N L/N met Percy Jackson and everything was now ruined.

CHAPTER 8: I Really Hate Water

The next few days I settled into a routine that felt almost normal, if you don't count the fact that I was getting lessons from satyrs, nymphs, and a centaur. Each morning I took Ancient Greek from Annabeth and sometimes Luke, and we talked about the gods and goddesses in the present tense, which was kind of weird. I discovered Annabeth was right about my dyslexia: Ancient Greek wasn't that hard for me to read. At least, no harder than English. After a couple of mornings, I could stumble through a few lines of Homer without too much headache. The rest of the day, I'd rotate through outdoor activities, looking for something I was good at. I had struck around with Percy the whole time unless it was dinner time or night where I spent with Luke. Chiron tried to teach Percy and I archery, and we found out pretty quick he wasn't any good with a bow and arrow. He didn't complain, even when he had to desnag a stray arrow out of his tail. It was hilarious. While I on the other hand, could compete against Merida and Hawkeye with wining in favor of me. Foot racing? He sucked. The wood-nymph instructors and I left him in the dust. I told him not to worry about it. They'd had centuries of practice running away from lovesick gods. But I guess, it was a little humiliating to be slower than a tree. And wrestling? Forget it. Every time he got on the mat, Clarisse would pulverize him. Luckily I took some martial arts class back then and stood some chance against her. "There's more where that came from, punk," she'd mumble. The only thing he really excelled at was canoeing, and that wasn't the kind of heroic skill people expected to see from the kid who had beaten the Minotaur I guess. But hey, He's better at canoeing than me. I don't even know how I drowned all the time. Percy had to save me a couple of times. I knew the senior campers and counselors were watching us, trying to decide who our Olympian parent was, but they weren't having an easy time of it. I was as strong as the Ares kids, or as good at archery as the Apollo kids. I have Hephaestus's skill with metalwork, luckily I didn't have Dionysus's way with vine plants. Luke told me Percy might be a child of Hermes, a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I got the feeling he was just trying to make him feel better. He really didn't know what to make of me either. Despite all that, I liked camp. I got used to the morning fog over the beach, the smell of hot strawberry fields in the afternoon, even the weird noises of monsters in the woods at night. I would eat dinner with cabin eleven, scrape part of my meal into the fire, and try to feel some connection to my real parent. Nothing came. I tried not to think too much about my mom and dad, but I kept wondering: if gods and monsters were real, if all this magical stuff was possible, surely there was some way to save them, to bring them back.... Even D/N would do...

I started to understand Luke's bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn't they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn't my parent, whoever they were, make a phone appear? Thursday afternoon, three days after we'd arrived at Camp Half-Blood, I had my first sword-fighting lesson. Everybody from cabin eleven gathered in the big circular arena, where Luke would be our instructor. We started with basic stabbing and slashing, using some straw-stuffed dummies in Greek armor. I did okay. At least, I understood what I was supposed to do and my reflexes were good. The problem was, I couldn't find a blade that felt right in my hands. Either they were too heavy, or too light, or too long. Luke tried his best to fix me up, but he agreed that none of the practice blades seemed to work for me. We moved on to dueling in pairs. Luke announced he would be Percy's partner, since this was his first time. And then my turn after his, so I had to train with another kid from the cabin. "Good luck," one of the campers told us. "Luke's the best swordsman in the last three hundred years." "Maybe he'll go easy on me," Percy said. The camper snorted. By the time he called a break, I was soaked in sweat. Everybody swarmed the drinks cooler. Luke poured ice water on his head, which looked like such a good idea. I turned to talk to Percy and he had done the same. "Okay, everybody circle up!" Luke ordered. "If Percy doesn't mind, I want to give you a little demo." I wanted to try going against Luke as well. I wasn't confident with my skills. The Hermes guys gathered around. They were suppressing smiles. I figured they'd been in his shoes before and couldn't wait to see how Luke used Percy for a punching bag. He told everybody he was going to demonstrate a disarming technique: how to twist the enemy's blade with the flat of your own sword so that he had no choice but to drop his weapon. "This is difficult," he stressed. "I've had it used against me. No laughing at Percy, now. Most swordsmen have to work years to master this technique." He demonstrated the move on me in slow motion. Sure enough, the sword clattered out of his hand. "Now in real time," he said, after Percy had retrieved his weapon. "We keep sparring until one of us pulls it off. Ready, Percy?" He nodded, and Luke came after him. After a while of clashing, Percy tried the disarming maneuver. His blade hit the base of Luke's and he twisted. Clang. Luke's sword rattled against the stones. The tip of Percy's blade was an inch from his undefended chest. The other campers were silent. He lowered his sword. "Um, sorry." For a moment, Luke was too stunned to speak. I had a huge grin on my face. I had no idea why, but I was proud. I was so close on giving him an encore and all that. "Sorry?" Luke's scarred face broke into a grin. "By the gods, Percy, why are you sorry? Show me that again!" I didn't want to. The short burst of manic energy had completely abandoned me. But Luke insisted. This time, there was no contest. The moment our swords connected, Luke hit my hilt and sent my weapon skidding across the floor. After a long pause, somebody in the audience said, "Beginner's luck?" Luke wiped the sweat off his brow. He appraised at me with an entirely new interest. "Maybe," he said. "But I wonder what Percy could do with a balanced sword... ." My time with Luke wasn't as amazing as Percy's was but I wasn't that bad. Friday afternoon, I was sitting with Grover and Percy at the lake, resting from a near-death experience on the climbing wall. Grover had scampered to the top like a mountain goat, but the lava had almost gotten me. Percy and I's shirts had smoking holes in it. The hairs had been singed off our forearms. We sat on the pier, watching the naiads do underwater basket-weaving, I was resting my back on Percy's since I felt like any moment they'd drown me. Percy then ask Grover how his conversation had gone with Mr. D. His face turned a sickly shade of yellow. "Fine," he said. "Just great." "So your career's still on track?" He glanced at me nervously. "Chiron t-told you I want a searcher's license?" "Well... no." I had no idea what a searcher's license was, but it didn't seem like the right time to ask. "He just said you had big plans, you know... and that you needed credit for completing a keeper's assignment. So did you get it?" Percy said. Grover looked down at the naiads. "Mr. D suspended judgment. He said I hadn't failed or succeeded with you yet, so our fates were still tied together. If you got a quest and I went along to protect you, and we both came back alive, then maybe he'd consider the job complete." "Well, that's not so bad, right?" "Blaa-ha-ha! He might as well have transferred me to stable-cleaning duty. The chances of you getting a quest... and even if you did, why would you want me along?" "Of course I'd want you along!" Grover stared glumly into the water. "Basket-weaving... Must be nice to have a useful skill." I tried to reassure him that he had lots of talents, but that just made him look more miserable. Percy and him talked about canoeing and swordplay for a while, then debated the pros and cons of the different gods. Finally, I asked him about the four empty cabins. "Number eight, the silver one, belongs to Artemis," he said. "She vowed to be a maiden forever. So of course, no kids. The cabin is, you know, honorary. If she didn't have one, she'd be mad." "Yeah, okay. But the other three, the ones at the end. Are those the Big Three?" Grover tensed. We were getting close to a touchy subject. "No. One of them, number two, is Hera's," he said. "That's another honorary thing. She's the goddess of marriage, so of course she wouldn't go around having affairs with mortals. That's her husband's job. When we say the Big Three, we mean the three powerful brothers, the sons of Kronos." "Zeus, Poseidon, Hades." "Right. You know. After the great battle with the Titans, they took over the world from their dad and drew lots to decide who got what." "Zeus got the sky," I remembered. "Poseidon the sea, Hades the Underworld." "Uh-huh." "But Hades doesn't have a cabin here." "No. He doesn't have a throne on Olympus, either. He sort of does his own thing down in the Underworld. If he did have a cabin here..." Grover shuddered. "Well, it wouldn't be pleasant. Let's leave it at that." "Why though? What would children of Hades do then? How would they fend themselves?" "I-I don't know... Its not my idea not adding Hades!" He shrieked as if he was at fault and felt guilty. "But Zeus and Poseidon—they both had, like, a bazillion kids in the myths. Why are their cabins empty?" Percy changed the subject. Grover shifted his hooves uncomfortably. "About sixty years ago, after World War II, the Big Three agreed they wouldn't sire any more heroes. Their children were just too powerful. They were affecting the course of human events too much, causing too much carnage. World War II, you know, that was basically a fight between the sons of Zeus and Poseidon on one side, and the sons of Hades on the other. The winning side, Zeus and Poseidon, made Hades swear an oath with them: no more affairs with mortal women. They all swore on the River Styx." Thunder boomed.. . . . . .. I said, "That's the most serious oath you can make." Grover nodded. "And the brothers kept their word—no kids?" Grover's face darkened. "Seventeen years ago, Zeus fell off the wagon. There was this TV starlet with a big fluffy eighties hairdo—he just couldn't help himself. When their child was born, a little girl named Thalia... well, the River Styx is serious about promises. Zeus himself got off easy because he's immortal, but he brought a terrible fate on his daughter." "But that isn't fair.' It wasn't the little girl's fault." Grover hesitated. "Percy, children of the Big Three have powers greater than other half-bloods. They have a strong aura, a scent that attracts monsters. When Hades found out about the girl, he wasn't too happy about Zeus breaking his oath. Hades let the worst monsters out of Tartarus to torment Thalia. A satyr was assigned to be her keeper when she was twelve, but there was nothing he could do. He tried to escort her here with a couple of other half-bloods she'd befriended. They almost made it. They got all the way to the top of that hill." He pointed across the valley, to the pine tree where we'd fought the minotaur. "All three Kindly Ones were after them, along with a horde of hellhounds. They were about to be overrun when Thalia told her satyr to take the other two half-bloods to safety while she held off the monsters. She was wounded and tired, and she didn't want to live like a hunted animal. The satyr didn't want to leave her, but he couldn't change her mind, and he had to protect the others. So Thalia made her final stand alone, at the top of that hill. As she died, Zeus took pity on her. He turned her into that pine tree. Her spirit still helps protect the borders of the valley. That's why the hill is called Half-Blood Hill." I stared at the pine in the distance. The story made me feel hollow, and guilty too. A girl my age had sacrificed herself to save her friends. She had faced a whole army of monsters. "Grover," Percy said, "have heroes really gone on quests to the Underworld?" "Sometimes," he said. "Orpheus. Hercules. Houdini." "And have they ever returned somebody from the dead?" "No. Never. Orpheus came close... . Percy, you're not seriously thinking—" "No," Percy said. "I was just wondering. So... a satyr is always assigned to guard a demigod?" I looked over to him warily. "Not always. We go undercover to a lot of schools. We try to sniff out the half-bloods who have the makings of great heroes. If we find one with a very strong aura, like a child of the Big Three, we alert Chiron. He tries to keep an eye on them, since they could cause really huge problems." "And you found me. Chiron said you thought I might be something special." Grover looked as if I'd just led him into a trap. "I didn't... Oh, listen, don't think like that. If you were—you know—you'd never ever be allowed a quest, and I'd never get my license. You're probably a child of Hermes. Or maybe even one of the minor gods, like Nemesis, the god of revenge. Don't worry, okay?" I got the idea he was reassuring himself more than us. "What about me?" They looked at me. "Chiron said you didn't know I was a half-blood..." "We didn't. When you didn't forget who... Mrs Dodds was. We thought you just saw through the mist. Then when I saw you with Percy that night... and your parents aware of me and the camp. I assumed you were... a half-blood." "How about now? What do I smell like?" He looked at me gingerly then at Percy, "Nothing. You smell too human. Even for a very minor god. That's why there are plenty of satyrs then are confused as to why there's a human here. That night after dinner, there was a lot more excitement than usual. At last, it was time for capture the flag. When the plates were cleared away, the horn sounded and we all stood at our tables. Campers yelled and cheered as Annabeth and two of her siblings ran into the pavilion carrying a silk banner. It was about ten feet long, glistening gray, with a painting of a barn owl above an olive tree. From the opposite side of the pavilion, Clarisse and her buddies ran in with another banner, of identical size, but gaudy red, painted with a bloody spear and a boar's head. I turned to Luke and yelled over the noise, "Those are the flags?" "Yeah." "Ares and Athena always lead the teams?" "Not always," he said. "But often." "So, if another cabin captures one, what do you do— repaint the flag?" He grinned. "You'll see. First we have to get one." "Whose side are we on?" He gave me a sly look, as if he knew something I didn't. "We've made a temporary alliance with Athena. Tonight, we get the flag from Ares. And Percy's going to help." The teams were announced. Athena had made an alliance with Apollo and Hermes, the two biggest cabins. Apparently, privileges had been traded—shower times, chore schedules, the best slots for activities—in order to win support. Ares had allied themselves with everybody else: Dionysus, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Hephaestus. From what I'd seen, Dionysus's kids were actually good athletes, but there were only two of them. Demeter's kids had the edge with nature skills and outdoor stuff but they weren't very aggressive. Aphrodite's sons and daughters I wasn't too worried about. They mostly sat out every activity and checked their reflections in the lake and did their hair and gossiped. Hephaestus's kids weren't pretty, and there were only four of them, but they were big and burly from working in the metal shop all day. They might be a problem. That, of course, left Ares's cabin: a dozen of the biggest, ugliest, meanest kids on Long Island, or anywhere else on the planet. Chiron hammered his hoof on the marble. "Heroes!" he announced. "You know the rules. The creek is the boundary line. The entire forest is fair game. All magic items are allowed. The banner must be prominently displayed, and have no more than two guards. Prisoners may be disarmed, but may not be bound or gagged. No killing or maiming is allowed. I will serve as referee and battlefield medic. Arm yourselves!" He spread his hands, and the tables were suddenly covered with equipment: helmets, bronze swords, spears, oxide shields coated in metal. "Whoa," I said. "We're really supposed to use these?" Luke looked at me and laughed. "Unless you want to get skewered by your friends in cabin five. Here—Chiron thought these would fit. Do you want to be border patrol with Percy or come with me?" I smiled at him, "Tempting offer but I think I'll stay with Percy." "Your lost." He smirked then ruffled my hair. I went over to Percy who was holding a shield was the size of an NBA backboard, with a big caduceus in the middle. Our helmet, like all the helmets on Athena's side, had a blue horsehair plume on top. Ares and their allies had red plumes. "Looking at real good." I laughed. He frowned at me. "Like you look that different." "I am sporting this helmet just fine excuse you." I said picking up a dagger from the table. Annabeth yelled, "Blue team, forward!" We cheered and shook our swords and followed her down the path to the south woods. The red team yelled taunts at us as they headed off toward the north. Percy and I managed to catch up with Annabeth without him tripping over my equipment. "Hey." She kept marching. "So what's the plan?" Percy asked. "Got any magic items you can loan me?" Her hand drifted toward her pocket, as if she were afraid I'd stolen something. "Just watch Clarisse's spear," she said. "You don't want that thing touching you. Otherwise, don't worry. We'll take the banner from Ares. Has Luke given you your job?" "Border patrol, whatever that means." "It's easy. Stand by the creek, keep the reds away. Leave the rest to me. Athena always has a plan." She pushed ahead, leaving me in the dust. "Okay," he mumbled. "Glad you wanted me on your team." "I don't want to be near the creek." I said anxiously. "Maybe I should just go with Luke..." Percy then took my hand. "Since when have I ever let you drown? Don't worry. I'll be there for you." He smiled. With a pout and a worried look I stuck out my pinky said, "Promise me." "I swear I will never let you drown. I will save you with all I can." He swore connecting our pinkies. "Everyone knows pinky promises are better than Styx." We laughed and made our way to our station not letting go of each other's hands. It was a warm, sticky night. The woods were dark, with fireflies popping in and out of view. Annabeth stationed us next to a little creek that gurgled over some rocks, then she and the rest of the team scattered into the trees. The bronze sword, like all the swords I'd tried so far, seemed balanced wrong. The leather grip pulled on my hand like a bowling ball. There was no way anybody would actually attack me, would they? I mean, Olympus had to have liability issues, right? Far away, the horn blew. I heard whoops and yells in the woods, the clanking of metal, kids fighting. A blue-plumed ally from Apollo raced past me like a deer, leaped through the creek, and disappeared into enemy territory. I lied down on the ground. "This is so boring." "Stand up, who knows when an enemy will show up." He scolded pulling me up. "I don't know... I think I'd rather shrivel and die." I shrugged. "Plus I know I got a knight in shining helmet to save me." "I mean yeah of course you do." "Luke's like few meters away after all." I smirked. He turned to me with a frown and a 'not funny' face. Which made me laugh. Then I heard a sound that sent a chill up my spine, a low canine growl, somewhere close by. I stood up and Percy pulled me behind him as he raised his shield instinctively; I had the feeling something was stalking me. Then the growling stopped. I felt the presence retreating. On the other side of the creek, the underbrush exploded. Five Ares warriors came yelling and screaming out of the dark. "Cream the punk!" Clarisse screamed. Her ugly pig eyes glared through the slits of her helmet. She brandished a five-foot-long spear, its barbed metal tip flickering with red light. Her siblings had only the standard-issue bronze swords—not that that made me feel any better. They charged across the stream. There was no help in sight. I could run and leave Percy. Or I could defend myself against half the Ares cabin with no more than 9 inch dagger and Percy Jackson. I managed to sidestep the first kid's swing, but these guys were not as stupid the Minotaur. They surrounded me and Percy, while Clarisse thrust at us with her spear. Percy's shield deflected the point. My hair stood on end. "Electricity. Her stupid spear was electric." Percy groaned and I pulled him back. Another Ares guy slammed me in the chest with the butt of his sword and I hit the dirt. They could've kicked me into jelly, but they were too busy laughing. "Y/N!!" Percy yelled but he had a sword pointed at his throat. "Give her a haircut," Clarisse said. "Grab her hair." I managed to get to my feet. I raised my dagger, but Clarisse slammed it aside with her spear as sparks flew. Now my arm numb. "Oh, wow," Clarisse said. "I'm scared of this guy. Really scared." "The flag is that way, let her go!" Percy told her. "Yeah," one of her siblings said. "But see, we don't care about the flag. We care about a guys who made our cabin look stupid." "You do that without my help," I told them. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to say. Someone took a hold of Percy so the sword was no longer pointed at him. Two of them came at me. I backed up toward the creek, tried to raise arm, but Clarisse was too fast. Her spear stuck me straight in the ribs. If I hadn't been wearing an armored breastplate, I would've been shish-ke-babbed. As it was, the electric point just about shocked my teeth out of my mouth. One of her cabinmates slashed his sword across my arm, leaving a good-size cut. Seeing my own blood made me dizzy—warm and cold at the same time. "No maiming," I managed to say. "Oops," the guy said. "Guess I lost my dessert privilege." "Y/N!! I will kill you all!!" He was thrashing around. "Let her go! She can't swim!!" "It's fun seeing your girlfriend suffer ain't it?" Clarisse laughed. The guy finally pushed me into the creek and I landed with a splash. They all laughed. I figured as soon as they were through being amused, I would die. I was sinking. I couldn't breathe. The water was pulling me for what felt like 10 meters deep. Blood were coming out at every wound I had. I was loosing consciousness. Help me. Please... -With Percy- Clarisse and her cabinmates came into the creek to get you, but you weren't there. "Hey, she's missing?" One of the cabinmate said. "What? It's like 3 meters deep. She's just there." Clarisse scoffed. "I's telling you she's can't swim! Water pulls her down! I will kill you if she doesn't survive!" Percy managed to get power from somewhere and got out of the hold. He knew what to do. I swung the flat of my sword against the first guy's head and knocked his helmet clean off. I hit him so hard I could see his eyes vibrating as he crumpled into the water. Then he jumped down. Hoping to see you somewhere. Muttering your name over and over in hopes to catch you. Save us He heard from his right. When he turned he finally saw you at the bottom. He swam with all could and got a hold of you. To haul you up. Finally surfacing, Percy panted and laid you of the ground. Pumping your chest. When the water finally came out of your mouth. Percy turned to glare at the people. Ugly Number Two and Ugly Number Three came at me. He slammed one in the face with his shield and used his sword to shear off the other guy's horsehair plume. Both of them backed up quick. Ugly Number Four didn't look really anxious to attack, but Clarisse kept coming, the point of her spear crackling with energy. As soon as she thrust, he caught the shaft between the edge of my shield and my sword, and I snapped it like a twig. "Ah!" she screamed. "You idiot! You corpse-breath worm!" She probably would've said worse, but Percy smacked her between the eyes with his sword-butt and sent her stumbling backward out of the creek. -Back to you- Coughing myself awake. Water came out of my mouth. "Percy..." I called. He turned so fast that I was surprised his neck didn't snap. "Y/N!" He ran to me and pulled me in a hug. I couldn't move, I felt tired and weak. "I want to sleep." I could feel my wounds stinging. Cold air hitting it. I felt sore despite barely moving. Then I heard yelling, elated screams, we both turned and I saw Luke racing toward the boundary line with the red team's banner lifted high. He was flanked by a couple of Hermes guys covering his retreat, and a few Apollos behind them, fighting off the Hephaestus kids. The Ares folks got up, and Clarisse muttered a dazed curse. "A trick!" she shouted. "It was a trick." They staggered after Luke, but it was too late. Everybody converged on the creek as Luke ran across into friendly territory. Our side exploded into cheers. The red banner shimmered and turned to silver. The boar and spear were replaced with a huge caduceus, the symbol of cabin eleven. Everybody on the blue team picked up Luke and started carrying him around on their shoulders. Chiron cantered out from the woods and blew the horn. The game was over. We'd won. Percy carried me still with an angry expression and tense body. I wanted to reassure him but I knew it wouldn't work. Luke looked over and saw us. I could see his sudden shift of emotion. He wanted to approach but he was surrounded by every cabin. We then heard Annabeth's voice, right next to us in the creek, said, "Not bad, hero." I wanted to turn to see her but I couldn't. I could barely keep my eyes open. "Where the heck did you learn to fight like that?" she asked. The air shimmered, and she materialized, holding a Yankees baseball cap as if she'd just taken it off her head. She was now in front of us. I felt Percy tense up once more. "You set us up, You put us here because you knew Clarisse would come after me, while you sent Luke around the flank. You had it all figured out." Annabeth shrugged. "I told you. Athena always, always has a plan." "Because of you, Y/N is like this." The venom in his voice were obvious. "I came as fast as I could. I was about to jump in, but..." She shrugged. "You didn't need help." "I didn't. But Y/N did! And what did you do?! She could've died!" Percy was shaking. I could feel it. "Calm..." I managed to whimper. "What's that?" Annabeth pointed at Percy's neck. "A sword cut, obviously." "No. It was a sword cut. Look at it." The blood was gone. Where the huge cut had been, there was a long white scratch, and even that was fading. As I watched, it turned into a small scar, and disappeared. "I—I don't get it," Percy said. Annabeth was thinking hard. I could almost see the gears turning. She looked down at our feet, then at Clarisse's broken spear, and said, "Step out of the water, Percy." "What—" "Just do it." He came out of the creek and immediately I could feel myself better. Percy almost fell over, but I managed to hold him. "I got you." I panted. "Oh, Styx," she cursed. "This is not good. I didn't want... I assumed it would be Zeus... ." Before I could ask what she meant, I heard that canine growl again, but much closer than before. A howl ripped through the forest. The campers' cheering died instantly. Chiron shouted something in Ancient Greek, which I would realize, only later, I had understood perfectly: "Stand ready! My bow!" Annabeth drew her sword. I drew my dagger and pushed Percy behind me. There on the rocks just above us was a black hound the size of a rhino, with lava-red eyes and fangs like daggers. It was looking straight at me. Nobody moved except Annabeth, who yelled, "Percy, Y/N, run!" She tried to step in front of me, but the hound was too fast. It leaped over her—an enormous shadow with teeth—and just as it hit me, I was pushed aside as Percy stumbled backward and its razor-sharp claws ripping through his armor, there was a cascade of thwacking sounds, like forty pieces of paper being ripped one after the other. "Stop that!!" I screamed and somehow managed to grab her. She turned to me sharply and stared me down. As if she was waiting for the perfect opportunity to jump me. It approached me and settled down at my feet, sitting down as if she was an obedient dog. She watched as I catch my breath. From the hounds neck sprouted a cluster of arrows. The monster fell dead at my feet. By some miracle, I was still alive, and wasn't even hurt. I instantly turned to look uat Percy. His chest wet, and I knew it was badly cut. Another second, and the monster would've turned him into a hundred pounds of delicatessen meat. Chiron trotted up next to us, a bow in his hand, his face grim. "Di immortales!" Annabeth said. "That's a hellhound from the Fields of Punishment. They don't... they're not supposed to... How did..." "Someone summoned it," Chiron said. "Someone inside the camp." Luke came over, the banner in his hand forgotten, his moment of glory gone. Clarisse yelled, "It's all Y/N's fault! Y/N summoned it!" "Be quiet, child," Chiron told her. We watched the body of the hellhound melt into shadow, soaking into the ground until it disappeared. "You're wounded," Annabeth told Percy. "Quick, Percy, get in the water." "I'm okay." "No, you're not, Y/N get him to the water," she said. "Chiron, watch this." "No... She doesn't do well in water..." Percy choked. I carefully swung his arm around my shoulders and without thinking twice, I stepped back into the creek, the whole camp gathering around us. Instantly, I felt weak. I could feel the pulling me down. Some of the campers gasped. Percy who could barely stand few minutes ago got a hold of me. I could feel my consciousness loosing once again. "Look, I—I don't know why," Percy said, trying to apologize. "I'm sorry... But I need to get out of here. Y/N---" But they weren't watching Percy's wounds heal. They were staring at something above our head. "Percy," Annabeth said, pointing. "Um..." By the time I looked up, the sign was already fading, but I could still make out the hologram of green light, spinning and gleaming. A three-tipped spear: a trident. "Your father," Annabeth murmured. "This is really not good." "It is determined," Chiron announced. All around us, campers started kneeling, even the Ares cabin, though they didn't look happy about it. "My father?" Percy asked, completely bewildered. "Poseidon," said Chiron. "Earth shaker, Storm bringer, Father of Horses. Hail, Perseus Jackson, Son of the Sea God." Percy looked down at me. I wasn't sure what but I had the feeling it was somewhere along the lines, 'I am the reason you drown every time you step on water.' "You're claimed..." I managed to squeak. Percy stepped out of the water. "Congratulations." I smiled weakly.

Previous | Masterlist | Next

UwU Here's another chapter I am sorry for some holes in the story -kookie-doughs

Taglist?

@gayer-than-the-gayest-gay @the-natureofme @booknerd-3000

[babygirlwolverine]

god where have you been my whole life?????🥺💜🌷 a match made in heaven indeed haha

I'm the wow in this relationship!? trust me you are!!!! for real, you're so sweet.

OMG AND YOU WANT AN AUTUMN WEDDING TOO!? I - where have you been my whole life !???

I love Disney too. Who is your favorite princess? mine is Belle, I'm such a bookworm that I relate.

OH AND YEEESS! Small intimate weddings are my favorite too. As for your idea of location, maybe we can say our vows in a cute little building and the reception could be in like a small garden/forest.

Btw, your vows would be mindblowing. Your writing is just amazing. I always like to read your fics or drabbles. So yes, your vows *chef kiss*

What about music??? What kind of music you like, who is your favorite artist?

Oh god I think I extended this too much, sorry

I hope that everything went awesome with your exam and day in general. 💍💜🌷

Marriage anon!! I’m so sorry it’s taken me a few days to reply, it’s just been so busy!! I hope you’ve been doing well these past few days!

asdfafsjdsaljdsd stopppppp omg you’re gonna make me cry I swear!! where have YOU been all my life??? 🥺💜🌷💖 I’ve needed you in my life for so long and I’m so glad I’ve found you now!! Written in the stars heheh

YES!!! You are absolutely are the wow in this relationship!! You’re too precious for words and you’ve lit up the world with sunshine!! asdfljafshshg just gonna sob over you saying i am!!!! i’m convinced you’re the sweet one here (with you sending that other ask as well saying I’m not annoying I just adshfashfshgf i have no words to describe how sweet you are!)

YES YES YES I ADORE AUTUMN WEDDINGS OMG!!! We need to have fall smells like cinnamon and apple and pumpkin at the wedding too!!! Seriously where have you been, my love??? My heart has been yearning for you!!!

OMG yes thank god you love Disney too omg i shall bring you to the theme parks often and we’ll watch all the movies!!! My favorite princess is Rapunzel!! (My ultimate favorite character is Tinkerbell but she’s not technically a princess) Omgggg Belle is one of my top favorites and I’m so glad she’s your favorite and that you’re a bookworm!! You just get more perfect by the second!! <3

OH GOSH I’m so happy you like small intimate weddings too omg it’s going to be so cute and special! We’ll have to invite some of our closest besties from the desticule too ;) ooooh yes, that sounds perfect for the location to have the vows in a cute little building and the reception in a garden/forest! The perfect mix! Maybe the building can have a nice view? Like being able to see the mountains?

ooooooh darlin’ I’m going to write you the most romantic and tender vow you will ever hear!! Oh gosh, you saying my writing is amazing is literally making me blush so hard!!! Just knowing you enjoy reading my fics and drabbles has made my entire day! I’m literally speechless I just want to give you all my love! I never think my writing is any good, so hearing my lovely fiancé say they like my writing is a dream come true! I shall endeavor to make you melt with the most beautiful vows <3

Ooooh music, okay, we gotta have some soft songs but also some upbeat songs to. I’ll honestly listen to almost all music (not much of a fan of country music though) but my favorite is probably pop. Although i love some classic rock too! Favorite artist… oh God I have so many. I love the Jonas Brothers. Oh, also some Ed Sheeran because peak love song quality. Definitely Queen. Honestly any music will make me happy. What do you like? I wanna know what songs you really love?

no omg you definitely didn’t extend it too much! Don’t apologize omg i loved this long message from you and getting to share our excitement over wedding planning!

my practice exam went…. Well… idk yet. Won’t get the grades until end of October but i dont think it went very well. But that’s okay. I’ll just know what subjects I need to focus on during my clinical rotations. Now i’m much more worried about the fact I have the first surgery of 3rd year on Thursday afternoon and my first exam in my toxicology class on Thursday morning. So thursday is gonna be one heck of a stressful day, but it’s gonna be alright. I hope you had a wonderful weekend and that youre doing well!! 💍😘🌷✨

[jokerssmileblr]

Break up with your girlfriend

J never liked going to school, he thought it was a waste of time. The only reason he even bothered to attend was because of Y/n, the one person who stood by him, helping him clean up the cuts his father delivered to his tanned skin. The person who he let cry on his shoulder when her heart was broken.

His only issue was that he’d fallen in love with you over time...But you were dating that dumber than dog shit jock, Hugh.

“Break up with your girlfriend” J said casually one Thursday afternoon

“And why should I?” Hugh asked

“Because you don’t love her” he shrugged

“And you do?” Hugh laughed

“I know her better than you” Hugh reared his fist back, connecting it to J’s nose

“Don’t say things you don’t know, freak” Hugh spat, storming off

“One day you’ll wish you had listened to me...” J growls lowly, adjusting his bag and walking away

Nobody had heard from J, he didn’t turn up for the 10 year school reunion. He didn’t even turn up to your engagement party.

You felt slightly offended. Sure, he started avoiding you during your senior year of high school but you thought he’d at least want to catch up. It had been years since you last spoke.

Your wedding ceremony was just minutes away and nobody was able to stop the nerves flowing through you.

Every bride was nervous on their wedding day. But you felt like something was going to happen, whether it be good or bad, you weren’t sure.

“Y/n?” The soothing voice of your mother was muffled through the dark oak door “They’re ready for you”

“Give me a minute” You call back, picking your diamond drop earrings which your father gifted to you

“Something doesn’t feel right…” You murmured to yourself, putting the earrings in and adjusting your veil

You open the door, carefully walking through the foyer towards the entrance.

Something isn’t right…

“You look divine, Y/n” Your father exclaimed, walking up to you and kissing both your cheeks

“Thank you, dad” You hesitantly breathe out, you turn to face the large double doors, sliding your hand through your father's outstretched arm

The doors open and you look up, seeing your family and friends standing up and watching you through tears.

“Don’t let me fall…” You whisper, squeezing your father's arm

“I promise” He replies, walking in time with you

Your eyes connect with Hughs and you feel more uneasy.

Something isn’t right…

You close your eyes and when you open them, your facing Hugh, his hands intertwined with yours.

You look around and notice everyone is staring at you expectantly.

“Your vows” The officiant says and you nod quickly, gulping slightly and trying to remember the words you’d written just weeks before

“We first met in high school...You were a high school jock and I was just me, you make me feel...complete” The word complete felt foregin on your tongue

He never made you feel complete…

“...You made me feel safe and at home” Lies… “You helped me become the person I am today...” Lies…

“I love you Hugh Harrington...Always have...Always will”

Stop lying!

“If anyone has any objection towards this marriage, speak now or forever hold your peace” The officiant said

The room was dead silent and he took it as a way to continue

“Alright then, by the power vested in me-”

“I object!” A voice stated calmly,

Your eyes flew to the person standing in the doorway, their greasy green hair shone in the sunlight making them look almost angelic. It was the man who you saw on TV a few days ago...

“I object to this wedding” He says, walking down the aisle, stopping at the bottom of the stairs

“...J?” You whisper, eyes squinting slightly

“In the flesh ah sweetcheeks” His extravagantly painted red lips quirk up into a smile, revealing a row of yellow rotten teeth

“What are you doing here?” You ask, noting a smell of gunpowder coming from his jacket

“For the wedding, of course!” J exclaims, pulling out a perfectly cursive written invitation from his jacket “You did invite me after all”

“You invited him?” Hugh asked, pointing a finger at J “You invited that...that freak! To our wedding?! When I told you that you could invite anyone, I didn’t think you’d invite that creep”

“He was my friend” You reply sharply, jabbing a finger at his chest

“Yes! He was your friend, he isn’t presently, where was he all these years?”

“Busy.” J grunts “Had some business to ah deal with” J adjusts his eggplant purple and you notice a slight shimmer coming from the inside of his jacket

“Now...To the objection” J starts “You cannot marry this man, Y/n. He isn’t who he says he is”

“Keep your mouth shut, clown” Hugh warns

“What are you gonna ah do? Hmm? Break my nose again? Which by the way, healed nicely if I do say so myself” J smiles smugly

Hugh moves to take a step forward but J steps back, pulling open the side of his jacket to reveal grenades.

“Let’s not take a-nother step, hmmm” J tsks, everyone gasps loudly as do you, taking a step back and nearly tripping over your feet

“What do you want?” Hugh growls, clenching his fists together

“I want you to ah break up with your girlfriend” J states simply

“And what if I don’t?” Hugh asks, face going red

“Well I’m sure everyone would love to know what you're really doing when you say your ‘going on a business trip’.” J casually says. Hugh’s face goes pale

“Shut it, freak” Hugh stammers

“Freak….Is such a hurtful term” J nods pouting slightly “It could almost...hurt my feelings”

“You have no feelings!” Someone in the crowd shouts “You kill people without batting an eye”

“Great point, sir” J exclaims “But if I didn’t have feelings...then why do I love Y/n?” Your eyes shoot up and you look at J with a wide eye expression

“You love me?” You whisper

“Course I do” J scoffs, like it was the most obvious thing in the world “Why else do you think your man-whore of a fiancé broke my nose?” J makes a whistling noise and suddenly the room was filled with men in clown masks carrying large guns and explosives

“Now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way” J starts, pacing slightly “You could give your blushing bride to-be to me…”

“Or?” Hugh asks

“Or we can do it the hard way. But, a coward such as yourself would obviously choose the easy way. You’re too greedy for life”

“You’re wrong” Hugh says “I will not let you put your filthy hands on my fiancée”

“Ah….” J sighs to himself, turning to look away “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that” He suddenly turns around, pointing a gun at Hugh

“Actually” He giggles “I was hoping you’d say that”

BANG

Gunshots were fired and you scream in horror as Hugh falls on top of you, his blood staining your white gown. You look around and notice everyone was running away, J’s goons shooting at them.

“He should’ve listened to me when I told him all those years ago…” J tsks, putting the gun down and walking towards you.

You whimper, taking a few steps back and tripping over, falling into a heap on the carpeted floor

“Awe, don’t be like that doll, I don’t bite” J remarks, kneeling in front of you “You and I are gonna have so much fun!”

The last thing you remember before passing out was J picking you up bridal style and walking out of the reception

[tommo-stylinson]

It started out as a joke. 

The Losers were huddled around the coffee table at Ben and Bev’s, digging through the leftover candy from the trick-or-treaters. Richie’s hand had landed on a blue-raspberry flavoured ring pop, hidden at the very bottom of the bowl. He’d taken it out of the package, dropped to one knee, and gave some over-dramatic, half-drunk speech to Eddie, professing his love. Everyone had burst into laughter, Eddie included, but he played along. He’d pulled Richie to his feet, jumping into his arms with enough force to knock Richie into the armchair, and screamed “yes!” as they both fell over. 

A few days later, Richie had walked through the living room, where Eddie was watching tv. There were two girls exchanging vows on the screen in what should have been a heartwarming moment, but Eddie had his nose turned up. “What’s with that face?” Richie had asked, stopping at the arm of the couch. 

Eddie huffed, gesturing wildly to the screen. “Their colours are all wrong! Green and orange? It’s awful!” 

“Oh? So what will the colours be for our wedding, oh, cute fiancé of mine?” Richie teased, pinching Eddie’s cheek as he did. 

“Us? Blue and purple maybe? What do you think?” 

“I think it’s perfect.” 

From then, it seemed to become their new favourite topic of conversation. From deciding what the wedding invitations would look like, to the colour of the chairs, to their entire wedding party. One day Eddie had even come home from work with a dozen cupcakes in hand, all different flavours. When questioned, he simply declared “well, we need to decide on a cake, don’t we?” 

It was a typical Thursday night when the joke came to a halt. The two of them were tucked into the couch, beer and chips on the table, trying (and failing) to answer the Jeopardy questions. The category was islands, the answer, Bora Bora. 

“That’d be a nice spot for the honeymoon, don’t you think?” Richie asked, pulling up a photo of the island on his phone. “Unless you’re the ‘backpack across Europe’ honeymooner.” 

“Planning the honeymoon already?” Eddie teased, wiggling his toes which had squeezed their way under Richie’s thigh sometime during the second episode. “We haven’t even picked a wedding date.”

“You pick,” Richie insisted. “It’s your special day.” 

“It’s your special day too!” Eddie pointed out, shoving at his shoulder. 

“Yes, but I’m just happy marrying my Spaghetti. You’ve already been through one of these. I want this one to be infinitely better,” Richie told him with a wink, his cheeks heating up. Eddie was quiet for a few moments, his eyes trained on the TV as the contestants told Trebek about their lives. Richie followed his gaze, figuring Eddie didn’t have an answer.

“September. The second or third weekend of September.” His voice was quiet, almost unsure. “Wh-what do you think?” 

Richie turned back to him to find him sitting up, his knees bracketing Richie’s body, his face only a few inches away. “Sounds perfect,” Richie told him honestly, his eyes falling to Eddie’s mouth. He swallowed heavily, his heart thundering in his chest. 

Neither of them moved. 

“We should probably find a wedding planner,” Eddie whispered, his mouth turning up slightly. Richie nodded, mirroring his smile, but didn’t say anything back. “I think we’ve figured everything else out.” Eddie’s hand was on his thigh, way too high to be friendly. 

“Are we waiting until marriage?” Richie asked, his brain and heart going a thousand miles per minute. Eddie cocked his eyebrow, pulling back slightly, and let out a soft laugh. 

“We don’t have to,” he whispered, leaning back in, maintaining eye contact that made Richie want to drop his gaze with nerves. He felt a smile spread across his face and he leaned towards Eddie too, tears prickling at his eyes. 

“Thank fuck for that,” Richie whispered Eddie’s breath already in his mouth. He pressed forward the last few centimetres, his hand going to the back of Eddie’s neck, his tongue already pushing past his lips. 

They ended up calling the wedding planner the next afternoon. 

[teshknowledgenotes]

THE E-MYTH REVISITED NOTES

WHY?

A lot of successful people recommend this book and the concepts in this book about businesses should benefit my life, whether it's stocks or starting my own business.

NOTES

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse, then I am as guilty of being an ordinary man as the next guy, and on occasion have ascended to the warrior state.

In the 25 years of life, I have experienced near financial and business disaster as well as incredible victories, have created new companies to expand my dream, vision, purpose and mission beyond what is included in this book, have seen my marriage collapse and with it lost control over my company, without even a glimpse of what is going on wit it. At the same time, I discovered what power I do possess, why it is important, and why in the end, everything depends upon my determination to live my life authentically, to pursue my vision unceasingly, and to live it to the fullest of my being.

My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because if their insatiable need to know more.

The problem with most failing businesses I've encountered is not that their owners don't know enough about finance, marketing, management, and operations they don't, but those things are easy enough to learn, but that they spend their time and energy defending what they think they know. The greatest business people I've met are determined to get it right no matter what the cost.

Chapter 1: The Entrepreneurial Myth

Picture the typical entrepreneur and Herculean pictures come to mind: a man or woman standing alone, wind blown against the elements, bravely defying insurmountable odds, climbing sheer faces of treacherous rock all to realize the dream of creating a business of one's own.

The legend reeks of nobility, of loft, extra human efforts, of a prodigious commitment to larger than life ideals. Well there are such people, my experience tells me they are rare. Of the thousands of business people I have had the opportunity to know and work with over the past two decades, few were real entrepreneurs when I met them. The vision was all but gone in most. The zest for the climb had turned into a terror of heights. The face of the rock had become something to cling to rather than to scale. Exhaustion was common, exhilaration rare. But hadn't all of them once been entrepreneurs? After all, they had started their own business. There must have been some dream that drove them to take such a risk. But if so where was the dream now? Why had it faded? Where was the entrepreneur who had started the business?

To understand the E-Myth and the misunderstanding at it's core, let's take a closer look at the person who goes into business. Not after he goes into business, but before.

For that matter, where were you before you started your business? And if you're thinking about going into business, where are you know?

Well, if you're like most of the people I've known, you were working for somebody else.

What were you doing? Probably technical work, like almost everybody who goes into business.

You were a carpenter, a mechanic or a machinist.

You were a bookkeeper or a poodle clipper, a drafts person or a hair dresser, a barber or a computer programmer, a doctor or a technical writer, a graphic artist or an accountant, an interior design or a plumber or a salesperson. But whatever you were, you were doing technical work. And you were probably good at it. But you were doing it for somebody else. The one day for no apparent reason something happened, it might have been a feeling that your boss didn't really appreciate your contribution to the success of his business.

Inside your mind it sounded something like this: “What am I doing this for? Why am I working for this guy? Hell, I know as much about this business as he does. If it weren't for me, he wouldn't have a business. And dummy can run a business, I'm working for one.”

The thought of independence followed you everywhere. The idea of being your own boss, doing your own thing, singing your own song, became obsessively irresistible.

Once you were stricken with an Entrepreneurial Seizure, there was no relief. You couldn't get rid of it. You had to start your own business.

In the throes of your Entrepreneurial Seizure you fell victim to the most disastrous assumption anyone can make about going into business. The fatal assumption is: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does that technical work. And the reason it's fatal is that it just isn't true. In fact it's the root cause of most small business failures! The technical work of a business and a business that does the technical work are two totally different things! But the technician who starts a business fails to see this. To the technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure a business is not a business but a place to go to work.

The real tragedy is that when the technician falls prey to the Fatal Assumption, the business that was supposed to free him from the limitations of working for somebody else actually enslaves him. Suddenly the job he knew how to do so well becomes one job he knows how to do plus a dozen others he doesn't know how to do at all. Because although the Entrepreneurial Seizure started the business, it's the technician who goes to work.

And suddenly, an entrepreneurial dream turns into a technician's nightmare.

The technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure takes the work he loves to do and turns it into a job. The work that was born out of love becomes a chore, among a welter of other less familiar and less pleasant chores. Rather than maintaining its specialness, representing the unique skill the technician possesses and upon which he started the business, the work becomes trivialized, something to get through in order to make room for everything else that must be done. Every technician suffering from an Entrepreneurial Seizure experiences exactly the same thing. First, exhilaration, second terror, third exhaustion, and finally despair. A terrible sense of loss not only the loss of what was closest to them, their special relationship with their work, but the loss of purpose, the loss of self.

Chapter 2: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician

No, The Technician isn't the only problem. The problem is more complicated than that. The problem is that everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician. And the problem is compounded by the fact that while each of these personalities wants to be the boss, none of them want to have a boss. So they start a business together in order to get rid of the boss. And the conflict begins. To show you how the problem manifests itself in all of us, let's examine the way our various internal personalities interact. Let's take a look at two personalities we're all familiar with: The Fat Guy & The Skinny Guy.

Have you ever decided to go on a diet?

You're sitting in front of the television set one Saturday afternoon, watching an athletic competition, awed by the athletes' stamina and dexterity.

You're eating a sandwich, your second since you sat down to watch the event two hours before.

You're feeling sluggish in the face of all the action on the screen when, suddenly somebody wakes up in you and says “What are you doing? Look at yourself, You're Fat! You're out of shape! Do something about it!”

It has happened to us all. Somebody wakes up inside us with a totally different picture of who we should be and what we should be doing. In this case, let's call him The Skinny Guy.

Who's The Skinny Guy? He's the one who uses words like discipline, exercise, organization. The Skinny Guy in intolerant, self righteous, a stickler for detail, a compulsive tyrant.

The Skinny Guy abhors fat people. Can't stand sitting around. Needs to be on the move. Lives for action. The Skinny Guy has just taken over. Watch out things are going to change.

You have a new lease on life and by Monday night, you've lost two pounds. Tuesday night you get on the scale another pound gone.

On Wednesday you can't wait to get on the scale. You strip down to your bare skin, shivering in the bathroom, filled with expectation of what your scale is going to tell you. You step lightly onto it and look down. What you see is nothing. You haven't lost an ounce. You're exactly the same as you were on Tuesday.

Dejection creeps in. You begin to feel a slight twinge of resentment “After all that work? After all that sweat and effort? And then nothing? It isn't fair” But you shrug it off. After all, tomorrow's another day. You go to bed, vowing to work harder on Thursday. But somehow something has changed.

You don't know what's changed until Thursday morning. It's raining. The room is cold. Something feels different. What is it? For a minute or two you can't quite put your finger on it. And then you get it: somebody else is in your body. It's The Fat Guy! He's Back! And he doesn't want to run. As a matter of fact, he doesn't even want to get out of bed it's cold outside.

All of a sudden you find yourself in front of the refrigerator. Food is now your major interest. The marathon is gone, the lean machine is gone, the sweats and barbells and running shoes are gone. The Fat Guy is back. He's running the show again. It happens to all of us, time and time again. Because we've been deluded into thinking we're really one person.

And so when The Skinny Guy decides to change things we actually believe that it's I who's making that decision. And when The Fat Guy wakes up and changes it all back again, we think it's I who's making that decision too. But it isn't I. It's we.

The Skinny Guy and The Fat Guy are two totally different personalities, with different needs, different interests, and different lifestyles.

That's why they don't like each other. They each want totally different things.

When you're The Skinny Guy you're always making promises for The Fat Guy to keep. And when you're The Fat Guy, you're always making promises for the Skinny Guy to keep. It's not that we're indecisive or unreliable, it's that each and every one of us is a whole set of different personalities, each with his own interests and way of doing things. Asking any one of them to defer to any of the others is inviting a battle or even a full scale war.

Well this is the kind of war going on inside the owner of every small business. But it's a three way battle between The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician. Unfortunately it's a battle no one can win.

The entrepreneurial personality turns the most trivial condition into an exceptional opportunity. The Entrepreneur is the visionary in us. The dreamer. The energy behind every human activity. The imagination that sparks the fire of the future. The catalyst for change.

The Entrepreneur lives in the future, never in the past, rarely in the present. He's happiest when left free to construct images of “what-if” and “if-when”.

The Entrepreneur is our creative personality always at its best dealing with the unknown, prodding the future, creating probabilities out of possibilities, engineering chaos into harmony.

Every strong entrepreneurial personality has an extraordinary need for control. Living as he does in the visionary world of the future, he needs control of people and events in the present so that he can concentrate on his dreams.

The managerial personality is pragmatic. Without The Manager there would be no planning, no order, no predictability. The Manager is the part of that goes to Sears and buys stacking plastic boxes, takes them back to the garage, and systematically stores all the various sized nuts, bolts, and screws in their own carefully identified drawer.

If The Entrepreneur lives in the future, The Manager lives in the past. Where the entrepreneur craves control, The Manager craves order.

Where The Entrepreneur thrives on change, The Manager compulsively clings to the status quo. Where The Entrepreneur invariable sees the opportunity in events, The Manager invariably sees the problems. The Manager builds a house and then lives in it, forever. The Entrepreneur builds a house and the instant it's done begin planning the next one. Without The Manager there could be no business, no society. Without The Entrepreneur, there would be no innovation.

The Technician is the doer. “If you want it done right do it yourself” is The Technician's credo.

The Technician loves to tinker. Things are to be taken apart and put back together again. Things aren't supposed to be dreamed about, they're supposed to be done.

If The Entrepreneur lives in the future and The Manager lives in the past, The Technician lives in the present. He loves the feel of things and the fact that things can get done.

As long as The Technician is working, he is happy, but only one thing at a time. He knows that two things can't get done simultaneously, only a fool would try. So he works steadily and is happiest when he is in control of the work flow.

As a result, The Technician mistrusts those he works for, because they are always trying to get more work done than is either possible or necessary.

To The Technician, thinking is unproductive unless it's thinking about the work that needs to be done.

As a result, he is suspicious of lofty ideas or abstractions. Thinking isn't work, it gets in the way of work. The Technician isn't interested in ideas, he's interested in “how to do it”. To The Technician knows that if it weren't for him, the world would be in more trouble than it already is. Nothing would get done, but lots of people would be thinking about it.

Put another way, while The Entrepreneur dreams, The Manager frets, and The Technician ruminates.

The Technician is a resolute individualist, standing his ground, producing today's bread to eat at tonight's dinner. He is the backbone of every cultural tradition, but most importantly of ours. If The Technician didn't do it, it wouldn't get done.

Everyone gets in the Technician's way. The Entrepreneur is always throwing a monkey wrench into his day with the creation of yet another “great new idea”

On the other hand, The Entrepreneur is always creating new and interesting work for The Technician to do, thus establishing a potentially symbiotic relationship. Unfortunately it rarely works out that way. Since most entrepreneurial ideas don't work in the real world.

The Manager is also a problem to The Technician because he is determined to impose order on The Technician's work, to reduce him to a part of “the system”. But being a rugged individualist, The Technician can't stand being treated that way. To The Technician “the system” is dehumanizing, cold, antiseptic, and impersonal. It violates his individuality.

The fact of the matter is that we all have an Entrepreneur, Manager, and Technician inside us. And if they were equally balanced, we'd be describing an incredibly competent individual.

The Entrepreneur would be free to forge ahead into new areas of interest, The Manager would be solidifying the base of operations, and The Technician would be doing the technical work.

Unfortunately out experience shows us that few people who go into business are blessed with such a balance. Instead, the typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician.

If it's that within each businessperson there are three personalities, rather than just one, can you imagine what a mess that makes? If one of you wants this, and another of you wants that, and a third wants something entirely different, can you imagine the confusion that causes in our lives? And it's not only the personalities inside each of one of us that confuse us but all the others we come in to contact with as well: in our customers, in our parents, in our friends, in our spouses, in our lovers. If this is true, and all you need to do is discover whether it is or not is to take a look at yourself from day to day, as though from above, as though from someone else, to observe yourself as you go through the day you would see the different parts come out. You would see them playing their respective games. You would see how they fight for their own space and the sapce of all the others and sabotage each other as best they can. In your business you would see how one part of you craves a sense of order, while another part of you dreams about the future. You would see how another part of you can't stand being idle, and jumps in to bake, and to clean up, and to wait on customers, the part of you who feels guilty if she isn't doing something all the time.

In short you would see how the Entrepreneur in you dreams and schemes, The Manager in you is constantly attempting to keep things as they are, and The Technician in you drives the other two crazy. You would see that it not only matters that your personalities are not in a balanced relationship with each other but that your life depends on gaining that balance. That until you do, it's a war! And it's a war no one can win.

You would also see that on of your personalities is the strongest of the three (or four, or five, or six), and that she walways manages to control the others. In fact, if you watch long enough, you'll being to understand how devastating the tyranny of your strongest personality is to your life. And you'll see that without balance, without all three of these personalities being given the opportunitiy, the freedom, the nourishment they each need to grow, your business cannot help but mirror your own lopsidedness.

So it is that an entrepreneurial business, without a Manager to give it order and without a Technician to put it to work, is doomed to suffer an early, and probably very dramatic, death. And what a Manager-driven business, without an Entrepreneur or a Technician to play their absolutely critical roles, will put things into little gray boxes over and over again, only to realize too late that there's no reason for the things or the boxes she put them into! Such a business will die very neatly.

And that in the Technician driven business, without the Entrepreneur to lead her and The Manager to supervise her, The Technician will work until she drops, only to wake up the next morning to go to work even harder, and the next, and the next. Only to discover, long after it's too late, that while she was working someone moved a freeway through the store!

An entrepreneur does the work of envisioning the business as something apart from you, the owner. The work of asking all the right questions about why this business, as opposed to that business? Why a pie baking business rather than a body shop? If you are a baker of pies, it's easy for you to decide to open up a pie baking business. But that's just the point. If you are a baker of pies and are determined to do entrepreneurial work, you would leave your pie baking experience behind you and engage in the internal dialogue with which every truly entrepreneurial personality is wonderfully familiar.

You would begin to say to yourself, it's time for me to create a new life. It's time for me to challenge my imagination and to begin the process of shaping an entirely new life. And the best way to do that anywhere in this whole wide opportunity filled world is to create an exciting new business. One that can give me everything I want, one that doesn't require me to be there all the time, one that has the potential to be stunningly unique, one that people will talk about long after having shopping in it the very first time, and as a result of that delightful experience, will come back to shop there again because it has such a special flavour to it. I wonder what that business would be?

So the work of an Entrepreneur is to wonder, to imagine and to dream. To see with as much of herself as she can muster the possibilities that waft about in midair someplace there above her head and within her heart. Not in the past but in the future. That's the work the entrepreneurial personality does at the outset of her business and at each and every stage along the way. I wonder. I wonder. Just as every inventor must. Just as every composer must. Just as every artist, or every craftsperson, or every physicist must. Just as every baker of pies must. I call it Future Work. I wonder is the true work of the entrepreneurial personality.

CHAPTER 3: INFANCY: THE TECHNICIAN'S PHASE

It is self evident that businesses, like people, are supposed to grow and with growth comes change.

Unfortunately most businesses are not run according to principle. Instead most businesses are operated according to what the owner wants as opposed to what the business needs.

And what the Technician who runs the company wants is not growth or change but exactly the opposite. He wants a place to go to work, free to do what he wants, when he wants, free from the contrainsts of working for The Boss. Unfortunately, what The Technician wants dooms his business before it even begins.

To understand why, let's take a look at the three phases of business's growth: Infancy, Adolescence, and Maturity.

Understanding each phase, and what goes on in the business owner's mind during each of them, is critical to discovering why most small businesses don't thrive and ensuring that yours does.

The boss is dead and you, The Technician are free at last. Finally you can do your own thing in your own business. Hope runs high. The air is electric with possibility. It's like being let out of school for the summer. Your newfound freedom is intoxicating.

In the beginning nothing is too much for your business to ask. As The Technician, you're accustomed to "paying your dues" So the hours devoted to the business during Infancy are not spend grudgingly but optimistically. There's work to be done and that's what you're all about. After all your middle name is Work.

And so you work. Ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Seven days a week. Even when you're at home, you're at work. All your thoughts, all your feelings, revolve around your new business. You can't get it out of your mind. You're consumed by it, totally invested in doing whatever is necessary to keep it alive. But now you're doing not only the work you know how to do but the work you don't know how to do as well .You're not only making it but you're also buying it, selling it, and shipping it. During Infancy, you're a Master Juggler, keeping all the balls in the air.

It's easy to spot a business in Infancy, the owner and the business are one and the same thing.

If you removed the owner from an Infancy business, there would be no business left.

It's even named after you Joe's Place, Tommy's Joint, Mary's Fine Foods so the customer won't forget you're The Boss.

And soon if you're lucky all of the sweat, worry and work begin to pay off. You're good. You work hard. The customers don't forget. They're coming back. They're sending in friends. Their friends have friends. They're all about Joe, Tommy and Mary. They're all talking about you.

If you can believe what your customers are saying, there's never been anyone like Joe, Tommy, and Mary. Joe, Tommy, and Mary are just like old friends. They work hard for their money. And they do good work. Joe is the best barber I ever went to. Tommy is the best printer I ever used. Mary makes the best corned beef sandwich I ever ate. Your customers are crazy about you. They keep coming, in droves.

And you love it!

But then it changes. Subtly at first, but gradually it becomes obvious. You're falling behind. There's more work to do than you can possibly get done. The customers are relentless. They want you they need you. You've spoiled them for anyone else. You're working at breakneck speed.

And then the inevitable happens. You, the Master Juggler, begin to drop some of the balls!

It can't be helped. No matter how hard you try, you simply can't catch them all. Your entusiasm for working with the customer wanes. Deliveries, once early are now late. The product begins to show the wear and tear. Nothing seems to work the way it did at first.

Joe's haircuts don't look the way they used to. "I said short in the back, not on the sides" "My name's Fred, that's my brother and I never had a crewcut!". Glitches start showing up in Tommy's printing, typos, ink smudges, wrong colors, wrong paper. "I didn't order business cards, I ordered catalog covers" "Pink? I said brown!"

Mary's best tasting biggest stack of corned beef in the world suddenly looks like pastrami? Another irritated voice calls out: "Where's my pastrami sandwich? This is corned beef!" And yet another "What are these garbanzo beans doing in my meatloaf?"

What do you do? You stretch. You work harder. You put in more time, more energy.

If you put in twelve hours before, you now put in fourteen.

If you put in fourteen hours before, you now put in sixteen.

If you put in sixteen hours before, now you put in twenty. But the balls keep dropping!

All of a sudden, Joe, Tommy, and Mary wish their names weren't on the sign.

All of a sudden, they want to hide.

All of a sudden, you find yourself at the end of an unbelievably hectic week, late on a Saturday night, poring over the books, trying to make some sense out of the mess, thinking about all of the work you didn't get done this week, and all of the work waiting for you next week. And you suddenly realize it simply isn't going to get done. There's simply no way in the world you can do all that work yourself! In a flash, you realize that you business has become The Boss you thought you left behind. There's not getting rid of The Boss!

Infancy ends when the owner realizes that the business cannot continue to run the way it has been, that in order for it to survive, it will have to change. What that happens when the reality sinks in, most business failures occur. When that happens, most of The Technicians lock their doors behind them and walk away.

The rest go on to Adolescence.

When a Technician turned business owner is suddenly confronted with the reality of her situation, a sense of hopelessness can set in. The challenge can seem overwhelming.

There's nothing wrong with being A Technician. There's only something wrong with being a A Technician who also owns a business! Because as a Technician turned business owner, your focus is upside down. You see the world from the bottom up rather than from the top down. You have a tactical view rather than a strategic view. You see the work that has to get done, and because of the way you're built, you immediately jump to do it! You believe that a business is nothing more than an aggregate of the various types of work done in it, when in fact it is much more than that.

If you want to work in a business, get a job in somebody else's business! But don't go to work in your own. Because while you're working, while you're answering the telephone, while you're baking pies, while you're cleaning the windows and the floors, while you're doing it, doing it, doing it, there's something much more important that isn't getting done. And it's the work you're not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you've not known yet.

There's nothing wrong with technical work, it is, it can be, pure joy. It's only a problem when The Technician consumes all the other personalities. When The Technician fills your day with work. When The Technician avoids the challenge of learning how to grow a business. When The Technician shrinks from the entrepreneurial role so necessary to the lifeblood, the momentum, of a truly extraordinary small business, and from the managerial role so critical to the operational balance or grounding of a small business on a day to day basis. To be a great Technician is simply insufficient to the task of building a great small business.

If your business depends on you, you don't own a business you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world because you're working for a lunatic! The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

The purpose of going into business is to expand beyond your existing horizons. So you can invent something that satisfies a need in the marketplace that has never been satisfied before. So you can live an expanded, stimulating new life. You can't have a business and just expect to do the technical work. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't ignore the financial accountabilities, the marketing accountabilities, the sales and administrative accountabilities. You can't ignore your future employees' need for leadership, for purpose, for responsible management, for effective communication, for something more than just a job in which their sol purpose is to support you doing your job. Let alone what your business needs from you if it's to thrive: that you understand the way a business works, that you understand the dynamics of a business, cash flow, growth, customer sensitivity, competitive sensitivity, and so forth.

If all you want from a business of your own is the opportunity to do what you did before you started your business, get paid more for it, and have more freedom to come and go, your greed - I know that soudns harsh but that's what it is your self-indulgence will eventually consume both you and your business. The exciting thing is that once you let go of your Technician side, once you make room for the rest of you to flourish, the game becomes more rewarding than you can possibly imagine at this point in your business's life.

CHAPTER 4: ADOLESCENCE GETTING SOME HELP

Adolescence begins at the point in the life of your business when you decide to get some help.

There's no telling how soon this will happen. But it always happens, precipitated by a criss in the Infancy stage.

Every business that lasts must grow in to the Adolescent phase. Every small business owner who survives seeks help.

What kind of help do you, the overloaded Technician, go out to get? The answer is as easy as it is inevitable: technical help. Someone with experience. Someone with experience in your kind of business.

When things get crazy at your business and you run around like a lunatic/mad man. You're hopelessly, helplessly at a loss. For you to behave differently you would need to awaken the personalities who have been asleep within you for a long time- The Entrepreneur and The Manager - and then help them to developer the skills only they can add to you business.

But The Technician in you won't stop long enough for that to happen.

The Technician in you has got to go to work!

The Technician in you has got to catch the balls!

The Technician in you has got to keep busy. The Technician in you has just reached the limits of his Comfort Zone.

CHAPTER 5: BEYOND THE COMFORT ZONE

Every adolescent business reaches a point where it pushes beyond its owner's 

Comfort Zone - the boundary within which he feels secure in his ability to control his environment, and outside of which he begins to lose that control.

The Technician's boundary is determined by how much he can do himself.

The Manager's is defined by how many technicians he can supervise effectively or how many subordinate managers he can organize in a productive effort. The Entrepreneur's boundary is a function of how many managers he can engage in pursuit of his vision.

As a business grows, it invariably exceeds its owner's ability to control it - to touch, feel, and see the work that needs to be done, and to inspect its progress personally as every technician needs to do.

As the business grows beyond the owner's Comfort Zone as the tailspin accelerates, there are only three courses of action to be taken, only three ways the business can turn. It can return to Infancy. It can go for broke. Or it can hang on for dear life. Let's take a look at each.

Getting Small Again.

One of the most consistent predictable reactions of The Technician turned business owner to Adolescent chaos is the decision to "get small" again. If you can't control the chaos, get rid of it.

Go back to the way is it used to be when you did everything yourself, when you didn't have people to about, or too many customers, or too many unpayable payables and unreceivable receivables or too much inventory.

In short, go back to the time when business was simple, back to Infancy. And thousands upon thousands of technicians do just that. They get rid of their people, get rid of their inventory, wrap up their payables in a large bag, rent a smaller facility, put the machine in the middle, put the telephone by the machine, and go back to doing it all by themselves again.

They go back to being the owner, sole properietor, chief cook and bottle washer, doing everything that needs to be done, all alone, but comfortable with the feeling of regained control.

And all of a sudden you are struck with the reality of your condition. You realized something you've avoided all these years. You come fact to face with the unavoidable truth: You don't own a business, you own a job! What's more, it's the worst job in the world! You can't close it when you want to, because when you leave there's nobody there to do the work.

You can't sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?

Your dream is gone, the only thing left is work. The day-to-day grind of purposeless activity.

Finally, you close the doors. There's nothing to keep you there anymore.

According to the Small Business Administration, more than 600,000 such businesses close their doors in the United States every year.

The true question is not how small a business should be but how big. How big can your business naturally become, with the operative word being naturally?

Because whatever that size is, any limitation you place on its growth is unnatural, shaped not by the market or by your lack of capital even though that may play a part but by your own personal limitations. Your lack of skill, knowledge, and experience, and most of all, passion for growing a healthy functionally dynamic extraordinary business.

In this regard getting small is, rather than an intentional act, a reaction to the pain and fear induced by uncontrolled and uncontrollable growth, both of which could have been aniticipated provided the owner had been prepared to facilitate the growth in a balanced, healthy, proactive way.

So if the natural disposition of every business is to either grow or contract, and it is, there is no denying that then 'getting small again' is the natural inclination of the Technician turned owner to shrink from the unknown, to shrink from the business she has created, to contrain the business from creating demands on her to which she feels hopelessly inadequate to respond appropriately. In short businesses that get small again die. They literally implode upon themselves.

Your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.

To educate yourself sufficiently so that, as your business grows the business's foundation and structure can carry the additional weight. And as awesome a responsibility as that may seem to you, you have no other choice, if your business is to thrive that is.

It's up to you to dictate your business's rate of growth as best you can by understanding the key processes that need to be performed, the key objectives that need to be achieved, the key position you are aiming your business to hold in the marketplace.

By asking the right questions, such as: Where do I wish to be? When do I wish to be there? How much capital will that take? How many people, doing what work, and how? What technology will be required? How large a space will be needed, at Benchmark One, at Benchmark Two, at Benchmark Three? Will you be wrong at times? Will you make mistakes? Will you change your mind? Of course you will! More often than not. But, done right, you will also have contingency plans in place. Best case, worst case. And somtimes you will simply fly by the seat of your pants, you will go with the flow, follow your intuition.

But all the while even while you're guessing, the key is to plan, envision, and articulate what you see in the future both for yourself and for your employees. 

Because if you don't articulate it, I mean, write it down clearly, so others can understand it, you don't own it! And do you know that in all the years I've been doing this work with small business owners, out of the thousands upon thousands we've met, there have only been a few who had any plan at all! 

Nothing written, nothing committed to paper, nothing concrete at all.

Any plan is better than no plan, because in the process of defining the future, the plan begins to shape itself to reality, both the reality of the world out there and the reality you are able to create in here.

And as those two realities merge, they form a new reality, call it your reality, call it the unique invention that is uniquely yours, the reality of your mind and your heart uniting with all the elements of your business, and your business with the world, shaping, designing, collaborating, to form something that never existed before in exactly that way.

And that is the sign of a Mature company. A Mature company is started differently than all the rest. A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a busienss that works not because of you but without you.

CHAPTER 6: MATURITY AND THE ENTREPRENEURIAL PERSPECTIVE

Maturity the third phase of a company's growth is exemplified by the best business in the world. Businesses such as McDonald's, Federal Express and Disney.

A Mature business knows how it got to be where it is and what it must do to get where it wants to go.

Therefore, Maturity is not an ineveitable result of the first two phases. It is not the end product of a serial process beginning with Infancy and moving through Adolescence.

Companies like McDonald's, Federal Express, and Disney didn't end up as Mature companies. They started out that way! The people who started them had a totally different perspective about what a business is and why it works.

The person who launches his business as a Mature company must also go through Infancy and Adolescence. He simply goes through them in an entirely different way.

It's his perspective that makes the difference.

His Entrepreneurial Perspective.

A Technician's Perspective differs from the Entrepreneurial Perspective in the following ways:

1) The Entrepreneurial Perspective asks the question: "How must the business work?" The Technician's Perspective asks "What work has to be done?

2) The Entrepreneurial Perspective sees the business as a system for producing outside results for the customer resulting in profits. The Technician's Perspective sees the business as a place in which people work to produce inside results, for The Technician producing income.

3) The Entrepreneurial Perspective starts with a picture of a well defined future, and then comes back to the present with the intention of changing it to match the vision. The Technician's Perspective starts with the present, and then looks forward to an uncertain future with the hope of keeping it much like the present.

4) The Entrepreneurial Perspective  envisions the business in its entirety, from which is derived its parts. The Technician's Perspective envisions the business in parts, from which is constructed the whole.

5) The Entrepreneurial Perspective  is an integrated vision of the world. The Technician's Perspective is a fragmented vision of the world.

6) To The Entrepreneur, the present day world is modeled after his vision. To The Technician the future is modeled after the present day world. The Entrepreneurial Perspective  adopts a wider, more expansive scale. It views the business as a network of seamlessly integrated components, each contributing to some larger pattern that comes together in such a way as to produce a specifically planned result, a systematic way of doing business.

With the Technician's perspective, however the scale is narrower, more inhibited, confined principally to the work being done.

As a result, The Technician's business becomes increasingly oppresive, less exhilarating, closed off from the larger world outside.

His business is reduced to stes that fail to take him anywhere other than to the next step, itself nothing more than a replica of the one before it.

Routine becomes the order of the day.

Work is done for work's sake alone, forsaking any higher purpose, any meaning for what needs to be done other than the need to just do it. The Technician sees no connection between where his business is doing and where it is now.

Lacking the grander scale and visionary guidance manifest in the 

Entrepreneurial Model, The Technician is left to construct a model each step of the way.

But the only model from which to construct it is the model of past experience, the model of work. Exactly the opposite of what he neds if the business is to free him of the work he's grown accustomed to doing.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MODEL

The Entrepreneurial Model is a model of a business that fulfills the perceived needs a specific segment of customers in an innovative way.

The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer's attention against a whole shelf of compeiting products (or businesses).

Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what's done in a business and more to do with how it's done. The commodity isn't what's important the it's delivered is.

When the Entrepeneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks "Where is the opportunity?" Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not The Entrepreneur.

"How will my business look to the customer?" The Entrepreneur asks. "How will my business stand out from all the rest?" Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed.

The Technician on the other hand, looks inwardly, to define his skills, and only looks outwardly afterward to ask, "How can I sell them?" The resulting business almost inevitably focuses on the thing it sells rather than the way the business goes about it or the customer to who it's to be sold. Such a business is designed to satify The Technician who created it, not the customer.

To The Entrepreneur, the business is the product.

To The Technician, the product is what he delivers to the customer.

To The Technician, the customer is always a problem. Because the customer never seems to want what The Technician has to offer at the price at which he offers it.

To The Entrepreneur, however the customer is always an opportunity. Because The Entrepreneur knows that within the customer is a continuing parade of changing wants begging to be satisfied. All The Entrepreneur has to do is find out what those wants are and what they will be in the future. As a result, the world is a continuing surprise, a treasure hunt to The Entrepreneur.

To The Technician, however the world is a place that never seems to let him do what he wants to do, it rarely applauds his efforts, it rarely appreciates his work, it rarely if ever appreciates him. To The Technician the world always wants something he doesn't know how to give it.

The question then becomes, how can we introduce the entrepreneurial model to 

The Technician in such a way that he can understand it and utilize it?

The answer is unfortunately we can't.

The Technician isn't interested.

The Technician has other things to do.

If we are to be succesful at this, what we must do, instead is to give the undeveloped Entrepreneur in each of us the information he needs to grow beyong the limitations of The Technician's Comfort Zone so as to experience a vision of a business that works.

What we must do instead is to provide out inner entrepeneur with a model of a business that works, a model that is so exciting that it stimulates our entrepreneurial personality, out innovative side to break free of The Technician's bonds once and for all.

What we must do, instead is to discover a model that sparks the entrepreneurial imagination in each of us with such a resounding shock that by the time The Technician wakes up to the fact it will be too late, The Entrepreneur will be well on his way.

But at the same time, if the model is to work, if the model is to awaken The Entrepreneur within each of us to begin to rebuild our businesses around the Entrepreneurial Perspective they so desperately need to flourish, The Manager and The Technician need their own models.

Because if the Entrepreneurial drives the business, the Manager must make certain it has the necessary fuel for sustenance, and that the engine and chassis are in a good state of repair.

If The Technician is to be satisfied, on the other hand, there must be a model that provides him with work that satisfied his need for direct interaction with every nut and bolt.

In short, for this business model of ours to work, it must be balanced and inclusive so that The Entrepreneurial, The Manager, and The Technician all find their natural place within it, so that they all find the right work to do.

CHAPTER 6: THE FRANCHISE PROTOTYPE

The success of the Business Format Franchise is withotu question the most important news in business.

Over the course of one year, Business Format Francises have reported a success rate of 95% in contrast to the 50 plus percent failure rate of new independently owned businesses. Where 80% of all businesses fail in the first five years, 75% of all Business Format Franchises suceed! The reason for that success is the Franchise Protoype.

The Franchise Prototype is the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business. Without it the franchise would be an impossible dream, as chaotic and undisciplined as any business.

The Prototype acts as a buffer between hypothesis and action. Putting ideas to the test in the real world rather than the world of competing ideas. The only criterion of value becomes the answer to the ultimate question "Does it work?". In the Franchise Prototype the system becomes the solution to the problems that have beset all businesses and all human organizations since time immemorial. The system integrates all the elements required to make a business work. It transforms a business into a machine or more accurately because it is so alive, into an organism, driven by the integrity of its parts, all working in concert toward a realized objective. And, with its Prototype as its progenitor, it works like nothing else before it.

At Ray Kroc's McDonald's, every possible detail of the business system was first tested in the Prototype, and then controlled to a degree never before possible in a people intensive business.

The french fries were left in the warming bin for no more than seven minutes to prevent sogginess. A soggy french fry is not a McDonald's french fry. Hamburgers were removed from the hot trays in no more than ten minutes to retain the proper moisture.

The frozen meat patties, precisely identical in size and weight, were turned at exactly the same time on the griddle.

Pickles were placed by hand in a set patter that prevented them from sliding out and landing in the customer's lap.

Food was served to the customer in sixty seconds or less. Discipline, standardization and order were the watchwords. Cleanliness was enforced with meticulous attention to the most seemingly trivial detail.

Ray Kroc was determined that the customer would not equate inexpensive with inattentive or cheap. Nowhere had a business ever paid so much attention to the little things, to the system that guaranteed the customer that her expectations would be fulfilled in exactly the same way every time. The Franchise Prototype is the answer to the perpetual question "How do I give my customer what he wants while maintaining control of the business that's giving it to him?

To The Entrepreneur, the Franchise Prototype is the medium through which his vision takes form in the real world.

To The Manager, the Franchise Prototype provides the order, the predictability, the system so important to his life.

To The Technician, the Prototype is a place in which he is free to do the things he loves to do, technical work.

The Franchise Prototype is the model you've been looking for. The Franchise 

Prototype is the model of a business that works. The balanced model that will satisfy The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician all at once. It is being used at McDonald's, Federal Express, Disney Land etc.

CHAPTER 9: WORKING ON YOUR BUSINESS, NOT IN IT

It is critical that you understand the point I'm about to make. For if you do, neither your business nor your life will ever be the same. The point is: your business is not your life. Your business and your life are two totally seperate things. At its best, your business is something apart from you, rather than a part of you, with its own rules and it own purposes. An organism, you might say, that will live or die according to how well it performs its sole function: to find and keep customers.

Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely neccessary for you to do so.

Think of your business as something apart from yourself, as a world of its own, as a product of your efforts, as a machine designed to fulfill a very specific need, as a mechanism for giving you more life, as a system of interconnecting parts, as a package of cereal, as a can of beans, as something created to satisfy your consumers deeply held perceived needs, as a place that acts distinctly different from all other places, as a solution to somebody else's problem.

Think of your business as anything but a job!

Go to work on your business rather than in it, and ask yourself the following questions:

How can I get my business to work, but without me?

How can I get my people to work, but without my contanst interference?

How can I systematize my business in such a way that it could be replicated 5000 times, so the 5000th unit would run as smoothly as the first?

How can I own my  business, and still be free of it?

How can I spend my time doing the work I love to do rather than the work I have to do?

If you ask yourself these questions, you'll eventually come face to face with the real problem: that you don't know the answers!

And that's been the problem along!

But now it should be different. Because now you know what you don't know. 

Now you are ready to look the problem squarely in the face.

The problem isn't your business it never has been.

The problem is you!

It has always been you and will always be you. Until you change, that is.

Until you change your perspective about what a business is and how one works.

Until you begin to think about business in a totally new way.

Until you accept the undeniable fact that business, even a very small business like yours, is both an art and science.

To successfully develop a serious business you need a process, a practice, by which to obtain that information and, once obtained, a method with which to put that information to use in your business productively.

[sareyen]

Das Haus am See: The Lake House Cherik AU  (Part 2/3)

Read on ao3

Chapter 2

A Lake House Cherik AU: Charles and Erik both lived in the lake house, Charles in 2017, and Erik in 2019. By magic or fate, the two find out that the house’s letter box is able to send letters through time - and, in doing so, the two fall in love despite living in two different years. They vow to meet in the future, but fate is fickle, and time waits for no one.

Unfortunately, with all the work he had to do, Erik couldn’t stay near the lake house for the entire weekend, not with so much work piling up.

If it were any one but Charles, Erik would have maybe postponed visiting – it wouldn’t be the first time Erik cancelled his plans for work, something that had contributed to the end of his marriage with Magda.

But Charles… Gott, Charles. Charles, who was so sure that he would have waited two years for Erik to call. Charles, whom Erik believed had waited 2 years for him to call, but for some reason or another, couldn’t answer.

In the week of waiting, Erik had searched up everything he could online about someone named Charles F. Xavier, but found practically nothing – considering the man had so many PhDs, Erik thought that something would come up on university pages. While his name was listed on some university sites – Oxford and Cambridge, in particular – there were no pictures of the man anywhere. No social media accounts seemed to match the Charles that Erik knew, no journal publications, no news articles.

Even though it felt like Erik knew Charles, the man was still an enigma. With the social media search being a bust, Erik tried to track the man down through their only shared connection – the lake house.

Unfortunately, the real estate company couldn’t tell Erik much about the property, even though he had lived there for over a year. With the squabble over its ownership, everything regarding the property, including government records and the like, had been clamped down, leaving Erik with nothing more than empty air to chew on.

So, the only thing he could do was talk to Charles.

Eventually, Erik was able to leave work – for once, Shaw was still in the office after Erik left, seemingly in the throes of a strained phone call with the Graymalkin client – Francis Graymalkin’s sister, Erik surmised.

From what Erik has observed over the past week, settling the Graymalkin estate was an absolute nightmare – the man’s death had been sudden, and his will had been some sort of mess. It didn’t help that the man was a multimillionaire, and when a multimillionaire’s belongings were up for grabs, estranged relatives always emerged from the woodwork, which was apparently what was going on right now two years after his death.

But, that was Shaw’s headache, not Erik’s.

Erik had his own life to worry about.

Erik left for the lake house very early on Saturday morning, the week after his lengthy conversation with Charles. Considering Erik only had the weekend off, and that he had to return on Sunday in order to get his work completed, he had to make the most of the time that he did have.

When Erik parked his car in front of the lake house, he smiled when he saw that the flag was down.

Erik had never walked so fast in his life.

As Erik expected, there was a letter waiting for him, his name printed on the front in Charles’s handwriting that Erik believed he could recognise anywhere.

I do hope you managed to get here safely, my friend. It is a long drive from NYC, though hopefully by your time they’ve fixed that bottleneck along the highway – it was a nightmare in 2017, let me tell you. But, if you’re reading this, then I can assume you made it here safely, which I’m grateful for.

Responding to your last message, I can say that I have read The Once and Future King before, but that was a long time ago, so long ago that I can’t even remember where my own copy is – so, I’m also grateful that you have lent me yours. I can see that it is well-loved, the spine is basically falling apart. But, Erik, I’m mortified to know that you’re someone that dog-ears your books. It’s blasphemous, and may or may not be a deal-breaker for me.

Unless you can persuade me otherwise?

Erik laughed, shaking his head at Charles’s words, all of his frustration with Shaw ebbing away at the first curl of Charles’s lettering.

***

Charles knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t sleep the morning Thursday came, and instead camped outside wrapped up in a blanket with a cup of tea in a thermos, keeping a stern vigil on the letter box. He knew it was irrational, and that Erik had a life and a job – there was no way Erik would get there at 2am on what would be a Saturday for him, but there Charles was, sitting and waiting.

Charles had just gone inside to have breakfast at 11am, and had walked back out mid-chew and carrying a bowl of cereal when he noticed that the letter box’s flag was up.

Charles promptly choked on his mouthful of cereal, milk and cornflakes spurting all over his lawn and down his pyjama shirt.

Charles raced to his spot in front of the letter box, placing his bowl beside him as he pulled out his pen from the pocket of his robe, the flag flicking down.

I did make it here safely, thank you, but I regret to inform you that no, they haven’t fixed the bottleneck along the highway. In fact, it’s probably gotten worse, the asphalt falling to pieces. There have been a few car accidents along the highway, especially when it rains. Do you think you can put in a complaint to the council or something in back where you are in 2017? Then, hopefully, they would have it fixed by now.

And I’m glad you enjoy the book – but, like you said, I’ve only let you borrow it. I’ll be expecting you to return it to me in 2 years, in person.

Charles looked at the letter, awed, his heart clenching.

And he realised that yes, he may be a little bit in love.

***

Erik talked to Charles for almost the entire Saturday, up until he had to leave at sunset to make it back to NYC in one piece. They talked about everything – the future, politics, books. At one o’clock in the afternoon, they both ordered delivery pizza – the same one from the same shop – and pretended that they were eating together.

Charles had asked Erik, seemingly teasingly, if this was a date. Erik replied back that it was, not teasing in the slightest. Erik swore that he could feel Charles’s blush through his words, and the German smiled at that thought with far too many teeth.

Again, parting from Charles and the letterbox was painful, but that was life, wasn’t it? Erik was used to parting with people, but it was somehow more painful with Charles. Erik thought that it was probably because the chasm between him and Charles was more vast than any other – time was a formidable foe. At least, this time, Charles didn’t leave Erik empty handed.

Let’s go for a walk together then, my friend. What about your Wednesday evening, after you finish work? The weather forecast in 2017 says it’ll be a surprisingly sunny day for me – not sure if it’ll be the same in 2019, though.

Here’s a list of the route I’ll take around NYC – and maybe you’ll find something I’ve left you.

Until next time, my friend.

So, it was that Wednesday that Erik shrugged out of his work clothes and into some comfortable jeans and a T-shirt, as well as a waterproof jacket since, unlike in 2017, the weather was moderately cool and drizzly. Still, Erik thought that the day was beautiful.

Erik pulled out Charles’s letter, even though by this point he had read it so many times he could recite it.

I’m standing in front of your apartment complex right now, Erik, but in 2017 it’s more like a construction site. From what I would think is the front entrance, turn right and walk east along the street, past the Starbucks I’m sure will still be there.

Erik chuckled, glancing at the Starbucks just a few doors down from his sprawling apartment complex, as Charles said. Erik let his feet step to the cadence of Charles’s words, following the man on his walk. Charles pointed out the things he saw, similar but different to the things Erik witnessed on his own walk, but with Charles’s letter warm in his hands Erik could imagine the man walking beside him.

Erik followed Charles to the park, where he directed him amongst the trees, before telling him to stop by a specific bench by the fountain.

Read the plaque on the bench, Erik. This is my gift to you.

Erik raised a brow, bending down to peer at the little metal slab bolted into the rain-damp bench.

‘To Erik, my dear friend from the future Two years is a long time But maybe you can rest your legs here on our walk while you wait for me to catch up.’

Erik choked, mouth popping open. Charles had bought Erik a bench. In Central Park.

Charles’s letter made a bit more sense, now – “wait for me”.

So, Erik sat on his bench and waited. And waited. And waited.

But, Charles did not come.

And Erik walked back home, alone and despondent.

***

Sitting in the study in the lake house, Charles pinched the bridge of his nose, letting out a groan before rolling his neck. His spine ached a little from being hunched over his desk all day, the words coming to him relentlessly. It had been a while since Charles felt so alive, so eager to tell a story – his and Erik’s, story.

Francis Graymalkin’s new novel, “Days of Future Past” was coming together chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph. The novel was vastly different from Charles’s previous work, and was essential a love story between an engineer named Max Eisenhardt living in the year 2019 and a genetics professor called Wesley Gibson living in 2017.

Well, that’s what the characters would be called in the final version. In the incomplete draft, Max was called Erik, and Wesley called Charles.

Charles had just written the final paragraph in chapter 13, in which Max went on a walk alongside Wesley, crossing through Central Park where Wesley had gifted the older man a park bench.

Smiling to himself, Charles looked at the certificate park management had sent him after he made a hefty donation of $10,000, allowing him to lay claim to one of the benches in the park. Giddy and with a fluttering feeling in his stomach, Charles allowed his fanciful imagination to envision the future between him and Erik.

Charles’s plan for 2019 was to lead Erik through the letter to the park bench dedicated to him, and then to appear. As a cheesy romantic, Charles imagined his future self emerging from behind a screen of trees brandishing a bouquet of bright carnations. Red ones, perhaps, because they symbolised love – and Charles was sure that he loved Erik.

Charles imagined Erik’s shock, and even though he had never seen the man’s face before, he’s sure that the expression on the man’s face would be beautiful. Then Charles could tell Erik that he loved him, and has loved him for two years – and hopefully, Erik could say the same.

Charles had to wonder, though – Erik had told him that Charles hadn’t picked up his phone call, two years in the future. Charles frowned at the thought. Charles doubted that his feelings for Erik would wane, even as new as they were. Charles had never felt anything like this before, and he doubted that two years would change that, not when he knew that Erik would be waiting for him at the end of it all.

Maybe Charles had changed his phone number. That was the most logical explanation.

Charles ignored the small kernel unfurling in his gut that, maybe, something else had happened.

But Charles was sure that he would have gone to meet Erik at the park, two years from today. Charles had already written it down in pen in his calendar, circling it bright red as to not forget.

Charles vowed to himself that, no matter what, he would meet Erik there.

Closing the screen of his laptop, Charles took a moment to check his phone, having ignored it while working. Charles found that, though the isolation at the lake house did wonders for his creativity, Charles had been a little starved for human interaction lately (despite his weekly correspondence with Erik via letter box).

Charles saw that he had two missed calls from Raven, calling her back as he reclined in his chair. His sister picked up on the first ring.

“Charles! You finally decided to call me back, huh?!” Raven screeched into the writer’s ear, the man wincing.

“I was busy writing, Raven. You know how it is,” Charles said, Raven silent for a moment.

“So, you got over your writer’s block? Good for you, Charles. I wonder who thought it would be a good idea for you to get out of the city. Maybe you should thank that person, they’re really very intelligent, don’t you think? Maybe you could even buy them a thank you gift, too… A little birdy told me that they’ve been looking at a particular Dior bag recently,” Raven said, playing at being coy.

Charles just sighed, too used to and too fond of his sister’s antics.

“Thank you, Raven. Yes, you were right, getting out of the city was a good idea. Send me the link to the bag and I’ll get it for you,” Charles said, Raven squealing and chanting “Love you, love you, love you!” which made Charles smile, shaking his head.

“Oh! But you distracted me! I was calling to see if you were free this Saturday?”

Charles was going to focus on writing his and Erik’s story on Saturday after finding out what happened on their park date – because it was a date, was it not? A date, booked two years in advance.

Raven could apparently smell her brother’s excuse through the phone, cutting him off swiftly.

“Please, Charles! You know my friend, Angel? She’s getting married on Saturday, and I had RSVP’d a plus one, since Irene and I were gonna go together, but… Irene and I are going through a rough patch right now, and I don’t want to go to the wedding alone!”

“Raven, I really do have… plans,” Charles said, wondering if telling Raven that said plans were him sitting in his house thinking about a man living two years in the future inside a mail box would end up with her committing him to a mental hospital.

It probably would.

“Charles, what plans could you possibly have all the way out there?”

“Raven,” Charles groaned, his sister pleading.

“Please, Charles? Just this once. Pretty, pretty please!”

Charles had never been able to deny his younger sister anything, and reluctantly agreed. Raven squealed, screaming “Love you, love you, love you” again, before promising to send Charles the details of the wedding.

Raven soon hung up promptly to browse dresses online for the wedding, leaving Charles in his quiet study. Sighing to himself, Charles wheeled his desk chair to the side slightly, reaching across his table to a small lockbox, unlatching it and smiling as he pulled out the first piece of paper contained within it, letting himself float amongst the comforting words of Erik’s letters.

***

At the wedding reception, Raven immediately drifted away from Charles to chat and dance with some of her friends, and Charles wondered why she needed him to come with her in the first place. She was clearly fine on her own.

Charles spent most of the night just hovering by the buffet, figuring that at least there was free food and wine, and he did end up sharing a dance with his sister partway through the evening. Still, the majority of the guests were much younger than Charles, and while the party was only getting more and more wild as the drinks poured, Charles was already knackered.

Needing to get some fresh air, Charles meandered outside onto the balcony of the countryside mansion Angel and her now-husband had hired for the reception, nursing a full glass of wine in his hand. The balcony overlooked a sprawling garden lined with neatly trimmed hedges, the quiet fountain in the middle of it gleaming silver with the moonlight.

Charles was busy admiring the quiet peace of the garden when the French doors to the balcony opened behind him. Charles jumped, whirling around, eyes locking with the surprise guest – it was a tall, handsome man with hair that shone a little auburn. His steely grey eyes locked with Charles, surprised to see someone already on the secluded balcony as well, and Charles noticed a slight shadow of ginger scruff across the man’s angular jaw. Like Charles, he wore a suit, but with his lean legs and narrow waist, Charles thought that the man pulled off the polished look far better than he did.

“Sorry,” the man mumbled stiffly. “I didn’t realise someone was already out here.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Charles said, letting out a soft laugh that was carried away by the wind. “Not quite sure why you’d be surprised, though. You would hardly be the only one wanting to get out of there.” Making a point, Charles shuffled along the balcony’s railing he was leaning on, making space for the man.

The left corner of the man’s lips curved up with barely-visible amusement as he stepped through the balcony’s threshold, closing the doors behind him. When the man made his way to stand next to Charles, he pulled out a cigarette from an inner pocket of his suit jacket and held it between his lips. As he held a lighter near the end of the cigarette, the man gave Charles a sideways look, questioning.

“You can smoke,” Charles said, shrugging. “You’re the one that will get cancer though, my friend.”

The man snorted at that, lighting up and taking a deep drag from the cigarette, exhaling through his nose. Charles ignored the bitter curl of the smoke through the air, the man tapping some of the ash off on the balcony’s banister with long, slender fingers.

“I’ve been trying to quit,” the man suddenly murmured quietly, Charles humming in response. “I did quit, while my wife was pregnant. The first time.”

“But you started again after your child was born?”

“No, I started after the child was miscarried,” the man said, the empty tone in his voice only making him seem full of anguish, though his face betrayed nothing when Charles glanced at him.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Charles supplied, the man shrugging, tapping some more ash off his cigarette before snuffing it out against the stone banister.

“It is what it is,” the man said, like he was trying to convince himself.

“Just because it is what it is, doesn’t mean you have to pretend that it doesn’t hurt,” Charles said, his balcony companion turning to him with a raised brow. Charles let out a huff of breath into the night air. “But, you probably don’t need a stranger at a wedding giving you a pep talk.”

“Not really. I’ve had enough of pep talks, especially after the second miscarriage,” the man mused, Charles’s eyes softening.

“Then let’s talk about something else. How do you know the lovely couple we’re celebrating here tonight?” Charles asked, the man giving Charles a small smile.

“I don’t know them personally. My wife is one of the groom’s co-workers. I’m just here for the free food,” the taller man said, Charles chuckling. “You?”

“My sister is friends with the bride, and I’m also just here for the free food. Oh, and the open bar,” Charles said, gesturing to the half-empty glass of wine he had balanced on the balcony rail. “But, frankly, even the wine isn’t enough to make me want to go back in there. I always loved a good party, but lately I’ve come to realise that I’m no longer a spry twenty-something-year-old.”

“Can’t keep up with the kids these days?” the man said, smiling with a show of straight, white teeth. Charles huffed again, though he couldn’t help his own smile that was beginning to grow on his face. For some reason, this man reminded Charles of his Erik, who teased him good-naturedly through his hand-written prose.

“Oh, no. I just don’t want to steal their thunder,” Charles said, waving his hand in the air, winking. The man let out a chuckle at that, before turning away from Charles to stare off into the distance once again.

“Sometimes I wish I could go back to how things were when I was their age,” the nameless man said, Charles leaning his chin on his palm while resting across the balcony, glancing at the man beside him. The man felt Charles looking at him, and laughed under his breath, almost incredulous. “Sorry. I don’t know where this sentimentality came from. I’m not usually like this.”

“It’s weddings,” Charles said, shrugging. “Makes people sentimental. That, plus the wine.”

“Mm, you may be right. Weddings. They remind me of my own, and how… much things have changed,” the man said, Charles remaining silent, before tentatively reaching out to pat the arm of the man beside him, just once. That light touch seemed to make the taller man falter a little, throat clogged. “I just don’t know what I’m doing with my life anymore.”

“Just because someone stumbles and loses their way, it doesn’t mean they’re lost forever,” Charles responded quietly, the man beside him freezing, before turning to Charles with slightly wide eyes.

“Is that a quote from Francis Graymalkin? From the second novel in the X tetralogy?” Erik asked, Charles blinking. This man has read his books?

“Yes, it’s from when Professor X-”

“-Talks to his younger self, and gives him a pep talk, of sorts,” the other man responded, eyes alight. Charles laughed at the way the man brightened the moment he began to talk about Charles’s books, warmth spreading inside him.

“Indeed. I take it you’re a fan?” Charles said as he picked up his wine glass, bringing it to his lips while the other man nodded, a smile on his face.

“I am. Francis Graymalkin is one of my favourite authors, his work has gotten me through some… tough times. ‘First Class’ is one of my favourite books, probably second only to The Once and Future King,” the man said, Charles pausing, lips pressed against his wine glass.

That’s Erik’s favourite book.

No. There’s no way…

Coincidence?

Fate?

“You…” Charles started, just as the French doors behind him opened, for the second time that night. Charles and the man turned simultaneously to look at the interloper, revealing a pretty woman with dark brown hair and neatly trimmed bangs, a little rounded in the belly – pregnant – and a slightly stiff smile on her face.

“Magda,” the man beside Charles breathed out, the woman giving him a slightly tired look.

“I was looking for you everywhere, Erik,” the woman said, and Charles almost dropped his wine glass.

ErikErikErik.

“Sorry, I was just…” Erik said, glancing at Charles, who was staring at him with an indecipherable expression on his face.

“I know you don’t like big gatherings, but at least tell me when you’re going to get some fresh air,” Magda said, hand cradling her baby bump. “I just wanted to tell you that it’s probably a good time to go home, it’s best that I don’t strain myself… because you know…”

Erik’s face darkened a little, likely thinking about the previous miscarriages, nodding immediately. Erik flicked his spent cigarette onto the stone beneath his feet, walking over to his pregnant wife.

ErikErikErik.

“It was nice talking to you,” Erik said to Charles, small smile on his face. “And thanks, for reminding me. That, you know – ‘I’m not lost forever’.”

Erik gave Charles another tiny smile before stepping beside his wife, large hand splayed against her lower back, intimate and protective.

Charles could only watch as the man he loved walked away, blue eyes trained on the back of a man that was still too young to recognise Charles at all.

In the silence of the night, the sounds of the wedding muted as the French doors closed, Charles remember another line from his second novel.

“Countless choices define our fate: each choice, each moment, a moment a ripple in the river of time. Enough ripples, and you change the tide… for the future is never truly set.”

“How right I was,” Charles sighed to himself, draining the rest of his wine in one large gulp and revelling in the warm haze that swept over him.

***

I saw you, you know – on the 25th of February, 2017. You look good in a suit.

Erik stared at the letter Charles had sent through the letter box, heart hammering.

‘I’ve met Charles before?!’ Erik screamed in his mind, rifling through two years’ worth of memories to try and find the one with Charles. 25th of February, 25th of February. Erik couldn’t pinpoint a specific time or event, that period of his life a vague collection of moments labelled ‘Mid-Magda’ and ‘Post-Magda’. Magda’s third miscarriage was towards the end of that month, and it wasn’t long after that that they had put their divorce into motion. Erik’s memories were hazy regarding everything else, his mind focused on his broken marriage.

But he had met Charles back then? And he couldn’t even remember it?

In novels and film, the meeting between two people was always cataclysmic and seemingly life-changing. The world stops turning, time freezes, and the protagonists always think ‘Oh, this is fate, isn’t it?’. But when Erik had supposedly met Charles, time did not stop, and the world did not stop turning.

Erik couldn’t even remember him.

When did we meet, Charles? This was two years ago for me, and I can’t remember you and my memories aren’t clear.

Erik hoped that Charles wouldn’t feel disheartened about the fact that Erik couldn’t remember him, not when Erik didn’t even know what he was looking for at the time. Erik had been so lost, and…

Suddenly, it clicked in Erik’s foggy head, just as the flag on the letter box moved.

It was at Angel’s wedding. You were with your wife.

Erik swallowed thickly, his suspicions realised – the man on the balcony, the one with the smooth English accent and ocean-blue eyes. The man that quoted Francis Graymalkin, the man who told Erik that he wouldn’t be lost forever. The man that Erik never got the name of.

That was Charles?

Why didn’t you say anything?

Erik frowned, brow crinkling and wrinkles gathering on his forehead.

You didn’t know me back then, so what could I say? ‘Hi there, Erik – I’m your pen pal you’ll start writing to 2 years in the future by shoving paper into a magical time-warping letter box’. You’d think I was mad.

And besides, you were married.

I assume that’s not the case in 2019?

Erik could feel Charles’s hesitation through his penmanship, how his ink grew lighter like he was wary of pressing too hard into the thick note paper. Erik quickly replied.

Magda and I divorced not long after the wedding. Not long after our third miscarriage.

Erik did not know what else to say after that, sending the two sentences as they were. Charles took a moment to respond, Erik biting the inside of his lower lip in anticipation and nervousness.

I am sorry to hear that, my friend.

Erik smiled wryly.

You’re not really sorry, are you?

Another pause in Charles’s reply.

I am sorry – I can’t imagine that it would have been easy for you. But… I can’t say that I’m disappointed. Does that make me a bad person, Erik?

Erik chuckled, gazing down at Charles’s words fondly – now that he knew what the man looked like, even if his two-years-ripened memories were a little fuzzy, he could picture Charles nervously biting on his lower lip, which Erik recalled as being unnaturally red like wine.

Maybe. But if it helps, I’m glad that you feel that way – it appears that we are both terrible people.

But, on another note – you’re a fan of Francis Graymalkin? I shouldn’t be surprised, not when you seem to share his naïve beliefs.

Erik could imagine Charles scoffing, blue eyes rolling as the man crossed his arms over a lithe chest.

Really, Erik? Let’s talk about you for a moment. You’re a fan of m his work as well, and yet you can’t seem to let go of your divisive separatist ideas.

Erik laughed, feeling heat flare in his belly. Suddenly, the image of arguing with Charles face-to-face, maybe over a drink in front of a warm fireplace, a chess board between them quickly being forgotten as they chatted relentlessly.

I assure you, Charles – I firmly believe that Magneto is correct, even if Francis Graymalkin turned him into a foil for the Professor.

I prefer to think of them as two sides of the same coin – frankly, one cannot exist without the other. In the end of the fourth and final book, they united and began walking the same path, did they not?

Yes. Even with their differences, they came together, in the end.

Do you think it could be the same for us?

Erik kneeled by the letterbox, waiting for Charles’s response. Erik had been thinking about this for a while, ever since Charles had failed to appear during their walk through the park, and not to mention when the man had failed to answer Erik’s phone call. Erik knew that he liked Charles, more than he has liked any one before – even maybe more than he had liked Magda when they had first started dating.

But, Erik has known too many failed relationships to risk being hurt again, especially when Charles had already failed to keep his promise twice. Maybe Erik was the naïve one now – was it perhaps foolish to think that a divide of two years was surmountable?

Yes, for Erik, seeing Charles would be like no time has passed at all. But for Charles – sweet, genuine Charles – it would be two years. Two years of waiting for Erik, who didn’t even know that he existed. On the balcony at the wedding, Charles had known Erik, while Erik hadn’t even given him a second thought. Erik couldn’t imagine how that would have felt.

Maybe two years was too much. Or, maybe Charles’s feelings for Erik just weren’t enough.

‘One last chance,’ Erik thought to himself, as he opened the letter box, reading Charles’s response.

I’d truly like to believe so, my friend. I want nothing more.

How about we meet for dinner, exactly two years from tomorrow – March 3rd, 2019. I’ll make a reservation, and I’ll see you there. You should choose the restaurant – it would be a shame if I made a reservation for a place that went out of business before 2019.

Erik swallowed, running his fingers over the date. A promise written in ink.

Erik preferred it to be written in stone.

Make a reservation for Genosha.

Done. See you at 7pm in two years and a day, Erik.

Yes. See you tomorrow, Charles.

***

For Erik, tomorrow came quickly, but he could imagine that the same could not be said for Charles.

Erik spent most of Sunday morning on March 3rd, 2019 lying on his couch just watching the clock tick on, a monotonous countdown until 7pm. At four, Erik showered. By five, Erik had ironed his dress shirt and black slacks. By half-past-five, Erik’s shoes were polished and his hair dried. By six, Erik was doing up the buttons on his shirt and tucking it into the waist of his trousers, sliding a sleek leather belt through the beltloops. By six-thirty, Erik was on the subway heading towards the restaurant, Genosha.

And, at ten-to-seven, the manager of Genosha was asking Erik if he had a reservation.

“Yes,” Erik said, a little breathless as the woman smiled at him patiently. “A reservation for two for 7pm. It should be under Charles. Or maybe Erik.”

The woman’s eyes seemed to widen with recognition as she looked at Erik, before a smile began playing at her lips.

“Oh, we’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” the woman said, crossing the name ‘Charles’ off her reservation book. Erik glanced down at it, noting that the woman had jotted down in the margin ‘the two years from tomorrow reservation!’, making Erik’s heart squeeze.

“Yes, two years,” Erik mused, the woman smiling in understanding, likely having been the one to take Charles’s initial reservation two years ago. She didn’t say much more as she ushered Erik to his table, low-lit with tea lights.

“Would you like to order a drink while you wait?” the woman asked, Erik shaking his head.

“No, I’ll wait for him.”

Charles has been waiting for 2 years, after all. What was ten minutes?

“Very well, sir,” the woman said, giving him another gleaming smile, before ducking back off to greet some other patrons.

Erik nervously smoothed the ironed legs of his pants, then began fiddling with the white table cloth, and then making his hands busy by straightening all of the cutlery in front of him.

Erik checked his watch – 6:58pm.

Two minutes, then.

Two years. What was two minutes compared to two years?

The minutes ticked by, and 7 o’clock came and passed. The manager stepped in with some water just after 7:00, filling Erik’s glass and asking him again if he wanted something to drink. Erik declined.

7:05pm.

7:10pm.

At 7:15, Erik ordered a glass of wine.

7:25pm.

7:40pm.

8 o’clock.

Erik caught the manager looking at him with a forlorn expression from the front of the restaurant, but her expression could not even touch the turmoil brewing inside Erik’s chest.

Erik’s hands were tightly fisted under the table as he found his eyes growing hot, and he gritted his teeth.

He was not going to cry, not over something like this. Erik rarely cried. In recent times, he could only pinpoint three times that tears had slipped from his eyes – his mother’s death, the first miscarriage, losing Magda.

So, Erik was not going to cry over someone who couldn’t keep a promise. Not over someone who clearly didn’t care about Erik.

***

On his Thursday (and Erik’s Saturday), Charles waited eagerly for Erik to respond to the letter he had placed in the early hours of the morning. It would have been just under a week ago that Erik and future Charles would have had dinner together at Genosha, and Charles was giddy thinking about what would happen now.

Would Erik tell him how well it went? Would he have a photo of the two of them together, a Charles that was two years older than the one he currently knew?

Or, would Charles accompany Erik to the lake house and tell the past him that everything turned out as Charles hoped it would, and assure him that it’s alright to still have hope.

Charles could only wait, feeding his anticipation with fanciful scenarios in his head.

The note Charles had left in the letter box was simple:

Erik, please tell me I recommended the tuna nicoise to you. The tuna nicoise at Genosha is to die for.

It took a while for Charles to gain a reply, which wasn’t surprising considering Erik had to travel from NYC to the lake house every week.

As Charles was envisioning him feeding Erik said tuna nicoise, the letter box squeaked, and Charles immediately leapt to his feet. Pulling out the letter, Charles licked his lips, unfolding it.

The words that he read made all of the colour from his face drain, Charles’s usually pink cheeks turning ashen.

You weren’t there. You didn’t come, Charles. Again.

‘No,’ Charles thought to himself, before speaking out loud. “No, no, no, no, no. That’s impossible. I would never…”

Charles felt frantic, reading into Erik’s words – the harsher-than-usual slope of his lettering, the way the ink seemed to rip into the page. Erik was angry, or disappointed, or both.

And it was future-Charles’s fault.

I don’t understand. Erik, something must have happened. I am so, so sorry, my friend. I would never… At least, the me writing this to you, right now in 2017, can’t even fathom the idea of not showing up. I’ve thought of nothing else since.

I have two years, Erik. We can try again.

Charles shoved the letter into the letter box, gnawing on his lower lip. The response was surprisingly swift.

No, Charles. It’s too late. It already happened, more than once, and every time it didn’t work.

“No,” Charles gasped, voice cracking as his eyes grew wet, Erik’s words growing blurry behind the veil of tears. “No, please.”

Charles’s hands were shaky as he wrote, his cursive wonky across the page. Some of the ink smeared as the tears that slid down his cheeks dribbled onto the page.

Please don’t give up on me, Erik. Remember Professor X and Magneto – they waited for each other for years. Decades. They meet again, time after time. They have another chance.

Please.

Charles loosed a sob as he saw the flag on the letter box shift up and down, and part of him dreaded opening it to read Erik’s reply.

Life isn’t a book, Charles. No matter how much we may wish it to be.

I let myself get lost this time. I got lost in this fantasy where time seemed to stand still. You helped me forget my troubles, even for a short while.

But, Charles – I have to learn to live the life I’ve got. I can’t wait for you to show up, and you couldn't keep your promise. We clearly don’t want the same thing.

So, please don’t write any more. I won’t be coming back to the lake house. Don’t try to find me.

Let me let you go.

Charles cried, writing frantically across the paper, a litany of ‘please’ and ‘Erik’ and ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’.

Charles sent his plea, but the letter box didn’t move again.

Next chapter (3/3) → 

[carmenlire]

Come and Go

Written for BTS Aspec Week over on twitter!

read on ao3

There���s no place else that Yoongi would rather be, even if he feels a bit like an intruder.

The beach is deserted for the wedding, just a few dozen guests and a beautiful archway set into white sand, the very definition of romantic with its tulle and flowers and other fanciful yet understated adornment.

Taking a deep breath, the fresh salt-tinged air relaxes him, if just for a moment. Before he can quite get his bearings though, before he can remind himself that no one has to know what he’s thinking, that he’s happy for Jimin and Jungkook and that’s all that matters-- the processional music starts.

Because their wedding was so small, Jimin and Jungkook have a single violinist off to the side and they play a delicate song that floats along the breeze, notes dancing around the guests and adding to the twilight ambiance.

Yoongi might not consider himself an expert at this sort of thing but he can’t deny that it’s a stunning moment to pin to his memory.

Jin’s elbow nudges him and Yoongi meets his eyes for a split second, enough to exchange a fond if exasperated eye roll, before they’re standing and looking towards the back where the to-be newlyweds stand arm in arm, waiting one last dramatic moment before heading down the aisle together.

And maybe Yoongi gets a little choked up at seeing two of his best friends looking so completely in love, so impervious to anything around them except each other.

He watches them walk down the aisle, beaming grins so wide their cheeks must ache, and remembers when he first met them all those years ago. Jungkook was the last addition to their tightly knit circle of friends and as soon as Jimin had tripped in the dining hall they all met at every afternoon and spilled his salad all over Jungkook’s back, the rest had been history.

It’s been seven years that seems like a blink of an eye to Yoongi.

Rolling his eyes at himself-- if anyone heard him, they’d no doubt call him an old sentimental man no matter that he’s still shy of thirty-- he lets himself sink into the moment and enjoy seeing his friends so incandescently happy.

When Jungkook and Jimin reach the archway, the guests sit down and Yoongi takes the opportunity to look around. He sees Hoseok and Taehyung bury their faces into their matching handkerchiefs that they’d bought just for the occasion and smiles softly as he sees Namjoon discreetly wipe at the corner of his eye.

Shifting a little in his seat, Yoongi turns to face Seokjin and he bites a lip at his best friend’s red eyes and damp cheeks.

Jin sees him looking and narrows his eyes in a dare. He’d been caught vehemently swearing to anyone who would listen that he wouldn’t cry during the kids’ wedding, that he was far too suave and his face far too beautiful to ruin with tears.

Yoongi raises a brow, quirks his lips in a grin that threatens to take over his face. Jin glares and turns resolutely to watch the ceremony, ignoring Yoongi’s smug look.

He still doesn’t acknowledge him even as he takes the tissue Yoongi subtly pushes into his hand.

And so the ceremony starts and all at once, Yoongi feels the same pervasive heaviness that usually makes his heart ache become a little more leaden.

Weddings are a double-edged sword for Yoongi. He loves seeing his friends happy and being part of their special day. But the accompanying feelings, the toll it sometimes-- often-- takes on his mental health is always a little too much to ever get used to.

He listens to the officiant start on a winding speech about love and its power, it’s indescribable beauty. He listens and he knows what the words mean one by one but when they’re all strung together-- that’s when language fails Yoongi.

He’s almost thirty and he’s never felt like the officiant describes. He’s never been overcome with longing, breathless with anticipation.

That’s never been in the cards for him and at this point, Yoongi doesn’t think it will ever be meant for him. Relationships allude him and even if he can plainly see how happy strangers are, how loved and in love his friends are with their partners, he feels so far removed from their reality that it’s almost laughable.

Next to him, Jin shifts in his seat a little. Yoongi looks over and there’s a soft smile on his friend’s face. He looks like he’s reliving some pertinent memory, like he understands, like he’s not feeling weightless under the knowledge that he’s not like everyone else here.

Because that’s the thing about weddings and relationships in general-- Yoongi usually (re: always) feels like an outsider. Romantic love is wonderful in the movies but in real life it’s nothing but a mystery and one that Yoongi doesn’t particularly care to piece together, if he’s being completely honest.

The officiant trails off and Yoongi watches as Jimin takes a deep breath before turning towards Jungkook. Then, he’s reciting his vows that he’d agonized over for weeks. He’d even consulted Yoongi at one point when he was desperate, claiming that his hyung was such a talented songwriter, surely he’d be able to help, but Yoongi had felt put on the spot, like he was being tested on material he’d never even heard of before.

It was different writing hypotheticals-- usually when Yoongi writes love songs he feels like he’s parroting everyone around him, like he’s spent his whole life observing like a studious little alien and is just regurgitating what everyone else says love is when he pens down lyrics in his own messy writing.

Jimin doesn’t make it through his vows without a tear slipping but Jungkook has hardly started before he’s a sobbing wreck. He looks at Jimin between the tears and Yoongi feels so indescribably out of place. The emotion is so strong for Yoongi to feel so completely removed.

Sometimes he wonders if he’s broken. He’s spent a lot of time wondering what’s wrong with him.

Listening to Jungkook’s vows, Yoongi feels unmoored for the thousandth time even if he’s far more secure in himself than he was when he was younger.

Weddings mess with his head, make him remember when he was young and all he wanted was to fall in love, to complete the picture-perfect idea of what life was supposed to be-- marriage, kids, white picket fence.

Yoongi’s long since learned that he’s not that kind of person and that there’s nothing wrong with that. Romance isn’t for him even if he likes to indulge in romcom marathons with his roommate every Thursday night.

It feels like the blink of an eye before the ceremony is done and Jungkook and Jimin are officially lawful wedded husbands. Shaking his head a little to clear it, Yoongi smiles and cheers as he stands proudly and watches two of his best friends share their first kiss as husbands.

They look so happy and Yoongi is so happy for them.

The reception that follows is a raucous affair and Yoongi finds himself downing more shots of soju than is probably wise but then Hoseok had already thrown up before dinner had even been served, so at least he’s ahead of someone here.

It’s late at night and the fire on the beach is burning bright, the music loud and bass heavy, all of the older relatives having retired for the evening already, and it’s just the seven of them left.

Yoongi looks around the fire, eyes heavy but heart full, and knows that there’s no place else he’d rather be.

Still, he’s definitely feeling drunker the longer he sits still so with a heaving sigh, he hauls himself to his feet. Of course, he stops by the open bar and orders another drink because he doesn’t want to completely kill his buzz but he tells himself he’ll savour this one, won’t just tip and chug.

New drink in hand, Yoongi moves away from the fire, down the beach a little ways until the light fades away and he’s left surrounded by nothing but waves and shadows.

Sitting down in the sand and definitely not thinking about how he’s probably ruining his dress pants, Yoongi sighs again and this time it’s even heavier, seems to empty his soul out when he exhales.

Left alone to his thoughts, they inevitably turn a little maudlin. Damn weddings, he thinks wryly, and lifts his cup up to take a small sip of his whiskey sour.

He watches the waves almost hypnotically for awhile, at least until his thoughts start crowding together like they always do when he’s drunk-- and sometimes when he’s sober too and just can’t stand another minute of pushing things down and away and out of sight.

Smiling a little, Yoongi wonders if he even knows what love is. He knows that’s probably ridiculous but he catches himself in moments like these-- the quiet, lonely moments-- wondering if he even knows how to be human, if he’s not a step behind everyone else because he’s fundamentally missing something.

He knows that’s probably bullshit. Probably.

“Ah hell,” he groans out loud, rubbing his hands over his face.

That’s the thing, he thinks, just a little sad. Yoongi was always very confident in what he wanted, at least when he was young. He wanted the cookie cutter idea and it wasn’t until he got to college and started learning that there was a whole great big world out there outside of the conservative, ignorant views of his hometown that he realized cookie cutter was never an option for him, was never going to be an option.

He still remembers learning about the ace spectrum and thinking, huh. That’s interesting. I wonder what that must be like.

And then he remembers meeting people occasionally and wondering if they were it, if this was it. But as soon as they expressed an interest, as soon as he accepted a date, he was suddenly over it all. He remembers joining dating sites when the guys would start teasing him for his lack of a love life but feeling like he was just going through the motions, no one ever catching his eye and the thought of pursuing a real relationship leaving lead in his stomach.

He remembers seeing the spectrum again a few years later and thinking huh. Is this what it’s like?

Being ace was an easier thing to accept than the prospect of being aromantic. But Yoongi’s firmly an adult and there’s still never been anyone who’s caught his eye. He runs into someone sometimes and he tries to picture something with them but he’s almost immediately repulsed at the practicalities of it.

He doesn’t think love is for him. He doesn’t think romance is for him.

In his better moments, he’s getting better at acknowledging and accepting that romantic love is not the end all be all it’s painted as. He loves his family and his friends and Holly and that’s enough for him-- he just can’t help but occasionally cave to society’s ideals that tells him that if he’s unattached, there’s something wrong with him.

“You look like you’re thinking deep thoughts, Yoongi-chi.”

Smiling before he’s even aware of it, Yoongi looks up and sees Jin staring down at him with a fond smile of his own. It’s a little faded but so warm that Yoongi doesn’t even feel the ocean breeze for a moment.

Wiggling a little in the sand, he motions towards the spot next to him. “Got a penny,” he asks and Jin laughs as he gingerly sits down next to Yoongi, close enough to that their thighs are brushing.

“For you, I’ve got two,” Seokjin says softly and something in Yoongi slides into place.

Yoongi takes a deep drink, then lets out a slow breath. He feels his muscles relax for the first time in hours, now that it’s just them.

Yoongi’s favorite place just might be right next to Jin.

Letting his head fall until it’s resting on his best friend’s shoulder, Yoongi hums, lets the sound linger as he thinks of what he wants to say. He knows that he can say anything and Jin will treat it with respect and a certain gravitas that he likes to pretend he doesn’t possess.

Finally, without letting himself think too much, Yoongi just mumbles, “Weddings. You know?”

His head is jarred a little as Seokjin laughs quietly, more an exhalation of worry than anything else. “Yeah, I know,” he replies gently.

Shifting closer, Yoongi closes his eyes and focuses on his breathing. It’s quiet between them in the way Yoongi craves-- in the way Seokjin has also confessed he needs, when the pressure to be light drags him under and he feels his careful facade cracking.

Yoongi feels the gentlest kiss to his the top of his head and it’s that little gesture that gives him the courage to say, “I love you, hyung. You know?”

Seokjin doesn’t laugh this time, and his voice is a whisper as he just repeats, “Yeah, I know. I love you too Yoongi-yah. You know?”

And this time, it’s teasing and fond and Yoongi’s heart aches because this is what he wants, what he needs and Jin just gets him in a way he didn’t think was possible before he’d learned what all those big words mean and what they meant to him specifically.

His smile is big enough for his gums to show as he laughs and tilts his head up to meet Jin, who’s already looking down at him. “I know,” he says brightly, feeling good, so good.

Jin sighs, wrapping an arm over Yoongi’s shoulder and pulling him down so that they’re laying on their backs and staring up at the night stars, the sound of the ocean just feet away.

It feels like they’re in their own little world, safe from everything, removed from it all.

“What would I do without my forever roommate,” Seokjin muses to himself and Yoongi snorts as his best friend continues. “Who else just knows that Pride and Prejudice is the pinnacle of romance and that cold pizza is better than hot and who else could I take to a wedding only to have them ditch me to sit in the dark and think big thoughts by themselves.”

Laughing, Yoongi mildly replies, “I do believe I was the one who booked our plane tickets.”

Seokjin just waves a lazy hand through the air. “Semantics, Yoongi-chi.”

They fall silent after that and Yoongi almost thinks he could fall asleep like this, with Jin so close and the rest of the world so far away. Curling into his best friend’s side, Yoongi doesn’t know how anyone else could call what they have less just because they aren’t in love, because they're friends-- the best of friends-- but nothing more.

He’s lived with Seokjin for a decade. A few years in a shitty dorm and several years later in a considerably nicer complex and Yoongi couldn’t imagine his life without Jin. They get meals together and explore the city together and when he needs a hug, Jin never hesitates, and when his hyung needs quiet and shadows, Yoongi welcomes him with open arms.

There’s never been anything more to it and Yoongi wonders for the thousandth time that he’s found someone who understands even when Yonogi didn’t know it himself.

The whiskey drips through his veins saccharine slow. Yoongi feels a little dizzy but in the good way, the safe way when he has Jin to hold onto, to keep him from spinning out of control.

In the back of his head, Yoongi knows they shouldn’t pass out on the beach, that it’s probably at least a misdemeanor and that there’s no telling what their friends won’t do to wake them up when they notice.

It’s been a very long day, though. Yoongi’s confronted his feelings-- his confusion, uneasiness, mild repulsion-- for romantic love and all it entails. And he’s made it to the other side.

His hyung is already asleep under his ear and snoring a little.

Yoongi has picked out a little moment of happiness for himself and he’s loathe to cut it short, wants to sink into the feeling of feeling loved and loving someone else, trusting in the threads of their friendship to keep him upright another day.

With that in mind, Yoongi lets the hushed crash of the ocean lull him to an easy sleep.

[let-it-raines]

@csprompter: “Emma and Killian dancing in their house after they get married, just because they can”

Just a little drabble because I know I’ve been slacking on my prompts lately, and the @csprompter page is an absolutely brilliant idea ❤️

Music is playing when Emma walks in the front door. It’s Elvis, the deep tone of his voice immediately recognizable, and she smiles to herself even though tilting up the corners of her mouth the slightest bit is exhausting. It’s been a day full of paperwork, obnoxious phone calls, and having to file complaints that weren’t really complaints, and all she wants is to take her bra off and curl into the soft depths of her bed and never leave. She doesn’t even need something to eat for dinner. All she needs is to be covered by a fluffy white comforter that blocks out the rest of the world so that she doesn’t have to think about anything else.

It’s only Tuesday, and she has absolutely no idea how she’s going to make it through the rest of the week. Maybe she could fast forward the days with her magic, but that seems like a fantastic way to mess with an already messed-up timeline that likely doesn’t need any extra help from her. And what if something really big happens on Thursday? Would she simply never know about it? Would she ever get a chance to live that moment? There are simply too many questions for her to ask and not nearly enough answers.

So magic-ing away the week is probably not her best idea.

Toeing off her boots next the front door, she quietly makes her way into the house, planning on going straight up to the bedroom to change clothes and wipe the makeup from her face so that she doesn’t have to worry about it later. That’s where she finds Killian. He’s humming along to the music, his hips slightly swaying, and folding their laundry. He’d had a dentist appointment this afternoon, so he left the station early and has apparently come home to do laundry. It’s either him being kind and considerate or him simply not wanting her to fold the laundry since she apparently does it the wrong way.

Thirty-two years old, and she is unable to fold her laundry in whatever this correct way is that Killian folds his laundry. She’s about ninety-nine percent sure it’s the way he was taught to fold his uniform in the Royal Navy. Bless the Royal Navy for teaching him so much, but sometimes she could do without the fastidiousness in how he folds a t-shirt.

“Hey,” Emma sighs in greeting from the doorway, making Killian twist his head to look at her, a closed-lip smile curling from one side of his mouth to another.

She loves that smile, especially because of how she thinks of it as hers, the soft little one that he gives her when they’re at some kind of town event her mother has put together and they’ve been separated from each other. It’s usually when Leroy is complaining to her about something and she’s damn tired of having to take care of the town in every single aspect. But then she looks across the people and across the room and finds Killian already looking at her, her smile on his face, and for that little moment, none of her problems matter.

Being in love doesn’t solve problems, doesn’t make the difficulties of life go away, but having a partner to share each day with makes those problems weigh a little less heavily on her shoulders.

“Hello, love,” Killian greets, patting the pants he’s folding and walking over to her so that he can dip his head and softly brush his lips over hers, the cool metal of his hook touching one hip while his warm hand touches the other. “I knew that I recognized your footsteps walking through the house. I’m glad you’re home.”

Emma hums, running her lips over his once more as the upbeat pace of “Jailhouse Rock” changes to the slow beginning chords of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”

“I am too. It was a long day. I want to sleep forever.”

Killian nods his head before arching a brow, his smile curling away into a smirk. “I’m sorry. You can go to bed as soon as I finish the laundry and as soon as you allow me to have your hand for a dance.”

“What?” she laughs, placing her hands on his chest. “Are you serious?”

“Why of course, Swan.” He rolls his eyes, like there’s no reason for her to question his antics, and really, there shouldn’t be. This is something they’ve done before, many times actually, and she likes to think that it’ll continue, even if she plays reluctant. “You are my dancing partner for life. I believe it was in our marriage vows.”

“It was not.”

“I’ll pencil it in,” Killian hums before tugging her closer.

He sways to the music, gently at first, and Emma takes the opportunity to wrap her arms around the back of his neck so that her fingers curl into the strands of hair there, feeling the softness that’s as familiar to her as the freckles on her own skin or the scar on Killian’s cheek. Familiar, too, is the sound of Killian’s heartbeat, the steady proof that he’s alive and well right below her cheek, and while most people take that for granted, she does not. With everything they’ve been through, she can’t.

For even on the horrible days, the ones where she’s annoyed by little things or big things or something in between, she’s thankful to have someone who knows the sound of her footsteps as she moves throughout the house and who knows that maybe she needs to softly sway to music before being spun around in enough circles to make her dizzy. Emma needs someone to make her laugh and to be her shoulder to cry on, and she’s lucky enough to have finally found that someone.

Even if Killian nearly drops her when he decides to dip her as the song ends.