#Random gold prediction filter
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jypsyvloggin · 2 months ago
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How to get the Man or Woman Imprint Filter on TikTok?
Man or Woman Imprint Filter on TikTok The Man or Woman Imprint filter by @davide.fumarola is picking up traction on TikTok, with over 11.4K videos using it so far. As the name suggests, the filter reads your thumb imprint and tells you if you give off masculine, feminine, or neutral energy. How It Works All you have to do is press your thumb on the screen. The filter then gives you a…
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themsource · 10 months ago
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Crime N(ever) Pays
Rating: M Pairing: UF!Sans/Frisk TW: Smoking
Sans frowned as he searched a pocket of one of the many basketball shorts littering his bedroom floor, his crimson colored eyelights glancing up at his ceiling with growing irritation as he dug around only to feel a few crumpled receipts and random G lining the inside.
“ya gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me…” He grumbled as he threw the shorts down and went over to his dresser to search his barren sock drawer.
And of course, even that was empty too.
He slammed it shut. “the fuck does a guy have ta do to get a damned smoke around here!?”
Sighing, Sans ran a hand over the top of his skull. He could have sworn he’d bought more than one pack last week, three at most the last time he’d gone out shopping on his day off, but from how it was looking he hadn’t.
Unless he was finally losing his mind.
of course i’d lose my marbles after gettin’ out of the underground… just my fuckin’ luck…
Letting out a huff he stomped out of his room, not bothering to hide his frustration as he slammed his bedroom door shut behind him. Predictably his brother’s voice echoed out from the kitchen as he made his way grumpily down the stairs, “DON’T SLAM THE DOORS! I JUST REPLACED THE FRAMES!”
Sans rolled his eyelights as he ignored him.
“i’m goin’ ta the store! be back in a sec!”
“DAMNIT SANS, DINNER IS ALMOST READY! I SWEAR IF YOU AREN’T BACK IN TEN MINUTES I’LL—”
The rest of his brother’s diatribe was forgotten as it faded in the background, Sans’ eyelights honing in on and dilating as they locked on Frisk seated on the couch. She’d come over to spend the weekend with them as was tradition since they came topside six years ago, the skeleton brothers being her second favorite friends to visit aside from Alphys and Mettaton, and she never missed a visit much to Sans’ amusement and Papyrus’ joy.
But the fact she was there wasn’t what drew the older skeleton brother’s attention.
It was what was dangling from his lips, piping red at the tip as it burned crisp and hot before a gentle plume of white smoke drifted up into the air.
At first, Sans was shocked.
Ever since she turned eighteen Frisk had been trying more daring things and sampling more questionable vices, experimenting, as all teenagers and young adults should. However seeing her dare to do that in his and Papyrus’ house was mind blowing. 
Frisk knew how Papyrus could get, he didn’t like anything questionable going on in his home, especially one of the habits he found the most deplorable: smoking. Sans actively had to make sure he stepped outside every time he wanted to light up. It was the very reason he’d even built their doorless balcony, as a place he could go without worry about upsetting his bro and to avoid being an open target for other monsters back when they were still a hundred feet in the dirt.
But then he quickly became amused as he smirked at her.
Sans went to make a cheeky comment about Papyrus’ latest gardening hobby and how that might tie into a pretty little plot with the Frisk’s name on it, before he narrowed his sockets.
There was a gold band with the MTT insignia on the filter.
…was that one of his cigarettes?
Frisk glanced up at him just as his eyelights flickered up, and their gazes locked.
A sweat drop ran the side of her cheek.
this little shit!
Well, she wasn’t so little anymore, in fact she was taller than him now by about an inch, but that didn’t change the fact that stealing his smokes was such a bratty move he wanted to literally bend her over his knee and spank her.
…his eyelights drifted down to her small chest, perky beneath her sweater dress despite its modest size.
On second thought, doing that probably wouldn’t have been the best idea. He knew the moment he felt any supple part of her press against him he would more than likely try to push the envelope. It was no secret how attractive she’d gotten or well developed. 
Sans was a man, a skeleton monster, but still a man, and he’d noticed a long time ago now before many others had, the surprising and captivating changes Frisk had gone through.
Admittedly, he couldn’t help still feeling tempted to teach her a lesson though. One in a way that he knew he would enjoy the longer he stared at her and took in her beautiful figure and increasingly worried and guilty expression.
While Sans was feeling more and more tempted, Frisk was becoming more nervous.
She didn’t like that cold and calculating look in his gaze.
“is that mine?” He drawled, his voice a dark and menacing pitch as his eyelights gave a soul piercing pulse of maliciousness with how they brightened and dimmed.
Frisk instantly regretted her actions.
She hadn’t seen that look since the underground when they’d first met, his voice harsher and words acidic.
Truth be told, Frisk hadn’t wanted to steal his cigarettes, but she’d been just so curious to try them, and she’d known both Toriel and Asgore wouldn’t have allowed her to buy them when she was just seventeen.
‘It’d only be one cigarette’, she’d promised herself back then, and then one had turned into two, and then three. Before she knew it she’d been stealing Sans’ packs on the regular and had developed a habit by the time her birthday rolled around a week later.
Not a habit really… she didn’t smoke every day, maybe twice a week, but she did start hoarding when she did take them.
And this time she had to admit that maybe she’d been a bit too greedy, otherwise Sans wouldn’t have come down so unexpectedly to go get more and seen her. She knew this was typically when he’d be out on the balcony, he always went for a smoke before dinner, and she’d ruined the nightly ritual.
Five minutes was all she usually took, and apparently all she needed to get caught.
It was just bad timing that Papyrus was currently in the middle of having the bathroom cleaned and she’d been forced to try and sneak it in the living room while the younger brother stopped to make the evening meal.
Frisk would've gone outside to smoke, but she knew that she’d have gotten busted for trying to go out in the snow based on suspicion alone. The brothers knew she hated the cold. It was why she always wore sweaters and the like.
She swallowed thickly the longer Sans pinned her in place with his glare. Frisk did NOT want Sans to get angry. He still scared her to this day with his temper even if it wasn’t nearly as bad as all those years ago.
“U-um…” She pulled the cigarette away, trying to speak through a lungful, “Sans I—”
Frisk didn’t get a chance to speak and explain herself.
Sans was across the room in one moment, and right in front of her the next, his hand cupping her chin. 
Right before he leaned in and captured her mouth with his.
Frisk jolted, the ridges of his grin coming down to lock with her lips in the facsimile of a kiss as he held her in place and pried her pliant lips easily apart with his tongue in a single brush. A whimper almost slipped out but died where it rose within her filled chest.
He stole her breath, literally.
Sans gently drew the air from her lungs, as if a caress, with a single soft and deep inhale.
Frisk was frozen, her heart hammering as her cheeks flushed and her eyes opened to reveal their golden hues in stunned silence.
Sans’s SOUL gave a spine-tingling thrum at the sight. 
Frisk rarely opened her eyes, if ever. How she managed to navigate with them closed he never knew, and had often thrown it up to the fact that she carried more magic within her than the average human nowadays, allowing her to see without seeing.
Those honey colored irises did more to him than the kiss did.
He pulled back, his hand still cupping her chin as he brushed a gloved thumb along the side of her jaw and slowly blew out a breath, exhaling the smoke that’d been shared between them with another fiery pulse of his eyelights.
Sans' tone was rough, an octave lower from the tainted air with thickened accent, “shouldn’ smoke sweetheart, it’s bad fer ya.”
She was still frozen, locked in place like a statue, as he casually released her chin to reach down into her sweater’s right pocket and pulled out one of the two missing cigarette packs. With a glance he saw there was only one missing from it.
He was willing to bet she’d already smoked the other one.
With a hum he straightened and tapped the pack against his palm, causing one of the sticks to shoot up right before he plucked it free with his teeth as he pulled out his lighter and lit it. Sans took a deep drag and closed his sockets, savoring it.
It was relieving, but not as satisfying as it’d been when he’d stolen Frisk’s.
He glanced down at her as he blew out another billowing cloud through his sharp teeth. 
“stay away from my smokes, capiche?”
Frisk could only nod, her hands trembling as she looked down and timidly bit her lip.
cute.
“hey boss! c’mere, somethin’ i wanna show ya!”
Frisk jolted, and gasped in shock and betrayal as Sans took another drag and filled the air with more gray tinged vapor, before abruptly shortcutting to his balcony and leaving her to her fate.
“WHAT IS IT SANS—”
Sans leaned against the wall of the house and chuckled as soon as he heard the realization and offence in Papyrus' voice.
“FRISK! HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING?! IN MY LIVING ROOM!?”
Sans glanced up at the starry sky as he listened to the chaos inside, his thoughts all circling back to how Frisk’s lips had felt against his. He secretly hoped she did steal another pack from him.
He welcomed her to try.
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vnderoos · 5 years ago
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how did it end up like this? ✷ george weasley
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(gif is not mine, credit to the owner) warnings / language, underage drinking word count / 13.1k
masterlist in bio ↴
THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE GREAT HALL that morning was nothing short of pleasant as Y/N walked through the large doors, her eyes flickering over the smiling faces of the other students. Part of her was happy that something as simple as a quidditch match was enough to get the whole school excited, but the other part of her thought the day couldn't move on any faster. She just wanted to watch Gryffindor hand Ravenclaw their asses on a shiny, silver platter, and there was no doubt in her mind that she'd get to witness it later.
In fact, she was sporting her red and gold sweater to prove it. It wasn't any old quidditch sweater, though. It was one that Molly Weasley had made for her last summer when she broke her arm after Ginny and the boys tried to teach her how to play, deciding she looked better rooting for them on the sidelines instead. She remembered how Molly had been hesitant to present it to her—like a sweater made from the woman's own hands wasn't all she had wanted after seeing the ones she'd made for Fred and George. I thought you could wear it when you cheer on our boys, she'd said, knowing how close the girl was with her twin sons, and Y/N would never forget the beaming smile on her face when she nearly cried at the sight of it. She had worn that sweater with unbeatable pride ever since.
When Y/N approached the Gryffindor table, Harry, Ron, Ginny, and the twins were all wearing their team sweaters and she couldn't help but grin as she slipped onto the bench beside George. "Lovely day so far, isn't it?" she hummed as she sidled up to the boy, her thigh and shoulder pressing into his own, and despite the flip of her stomach and the fluttering of her heart, she blamed it on wanting to be closer to the group as a whole. A few of their eyes flitted to her as she settled in and soft greetings filtered from their mouths at her presence.
George was, by far, the happiest to see her. A dreamy smile spread across his lips as he looked at her, his little heart pattering when her first instinct was to invade his personal space. He didn't mind in the slightest, of course, and to prove it, he slipped his arm behind her and grabbed her hand. "I reckon it'll get better after the match," he replied, totally oblivious, in true Weasley fashion, to the way her cheeks flushed as she intertwined her fingers with his. The gesture was so normal for them that he barely thought anything of it and none of their friends seemed to question it, either.
Fred, who might've looked like his twin save for the shape of his nose and a couple of scars in random places, seemed a lot more invested in the game. "Yeah," he agreed confidently, crossing his arms on the tabletop. "'M sure the Ravenclaws'll soil themselves after we whip 'em on the pitch," he added, a crooked smile settled on his lips and Y/N couldn't help but laugh. "And someone's going to catch the snitch for us tonight, too, eh, Harry?" The older twin jutted his chin out towards the boy, whose dark eyebrows lifted slightly at his name.
Harry's green eyes darted between Y/N and Fred, before he nodded his head. "Oh, yeah, yeah," he said, his expression flickering from surprised to something more certain—more confident. "Cho is a great seeker, but I'm afraid I'm a bit better," he joked, a smile playing on his lips and Ginny scoffed from beside him, throwing a lock of her bright red hair over her shoulder.
"Bit cocky this morning, are we?" Ginny asked teasingly and Y/N could see the way that Harry's pale cheeks prickled with pink. Fred let out a loud laugh. She glanced over at George who fought a small chuckle and she couldn't help but do the same when she realized they had the same thought. She tilted her head down to hide her amusement as George's thumb brushed over the back of her hand, wondering how two people could be so oblivious.
Ron, on the other hand, didn't seem quite as enthused at their exchange as everybody else. "Don't think anyone asked your input," he muttered, his mouth filled with half of his biscuit, and a couple of crumbs fell from his lips as he spoke. Y/N's eyebrows lifted as they fell on the tabletop and she opened her mouth to make a quip about it, but the moment passed and Hermione took it upon herself to swat Ron in the arm. "Ow, what was that—"
In the middle of his moaning, Hermione cut him off with a sharp look. "She's your sister. Be nice, Ronald," she instructed in a motherly tone, before letting her eyes settle on his mouth. It was dusted in pieces of his biscuit and she shook her head at him in disappointment, but annoyance soon took over. "And where are your manners?" she chided.
"Yeah, Ronald. You're lucky mum's not her to wack you with the dishrag, but from the looks of it, you might get a book to the head instead," Ginny piped up again, referring to the dog-earred novel that sat next to Hermione's plate of food, and the group erupted into laughter. Y/N threw her head against George's shoulder, laughing into him, and she could feel the rumble of his chest as he let out his own chortles.
Even Hermione was giggling, but Ron got so flustered, even his ears turned pink. "Oh, shut it, Ginevra," he whined, after swallowing his foot for once. "I hope you fall off your broom during the game," he told her and Ginny hadn't been too far off, because Hermione picked up her book and gave him a good smack in the shoulder. His head whipped to the girl beside him and he gave her an offended look, lifting his hand to rub his shoulder, before he looked at Y/N. "The abuse I get from this one. George is lucky that you're so passive," he muttered and she nearly felt her heart stop in her chest.
The breath felt like it'd gotten sucked right out of her lungs and her eyes widened. She looked over at George when she couldn't find the words to speak for herself and she found his cheeks nearly as red as Ron's had been before. "What's that supposed to mean, Ronnykins?" he asked, making a halfhearted attempt at a silly nickname to keep the mood light and it only partially worked.
Either way, it had bought Y/N enough time to get over her initial shock of the question. "George and I are friends, of course, he's lucky," she hummed. "But you and 'Mione are what, exactly?" she asked, taking pleasure in the way that she directed the spotlight to him instead, and Ron seemed to sink into himself. Y/N and George laughed after that, but he couldn't help but let her words bobble around in his head.
Friends.
Sometimes, it was a little scary how good Fred Weasley was at predicting the outcome of quidditch games. It was like the game ran in his blood, and considering how he and George played on the field, maybe it did. He was the sole reason why a Gryffindor win never came as a surprise to Y/N, and this one was no different. When Harry had disappeared beneath the bleachers with Cho Chang, in a race for the snitch, the crowd had fallen silent, waiting with bated breath.
She knew it was impossible, but she liked to think that every time Harry's fingers wrapped around that winged ball, she could feel it in her very soul. When he'd flown out from underneath one of the Ravenclaw stands waving his fist in the air and flashes of gold streaked through his glove, she wasn't the least bit surprised. In fact, she called it instinct.
With Gryffindor already in the lead and the snitch in Harry's fingers, the win was official. Y/N could feel it radiating through her body, chills spreading through her limbs, and through the rest of their house, triumphant uproar filling her ears as soon as the game was called to a close.
Merlin, she loved quidditch. Especially that part, where the whole school would watch in suspense, and then when the snitch was caught, it would be absolute chaos.
As a cheer ripped itself from Y/N's own lungs, loud enough to make her throat raw, and her eyes surveyed the team on their victory lap, looking for her favorite troublemaker, she figured that maybe she just liked the chaos. She stood up on her seat when she spotted his flash of red hair beside his brother, identifying him by the hook in his nose, and she knew he'd seen her when he lifted his hand in a wave. She grinned back at him, flailing her arm in the air, and when he and Fred made their way to her side of the pitch, they shouted her name in passing. She just laughed and shook her head as they flew by.
Y/N took it upon herself to meet the team down on the bottom of the pitch after they'd landed and everyone else had dispersed, heading back to their common rooms to either wallow in the loss or, in Gryffindor's case, relish in that fantastic win.
Harry was the first one she saw when she stepped onto the grassy field, his dark hair matted to his sweaty forehead and his green eyes glittering with the satisfaction of securing the win, and she let out a squeak when they locked eyes. So worked up with pride for her house and her beautifully athletic friends, she couldn't keep herself from skipping up to him excitedly. "Harry," she said firmly, clapping him on the shoulders while he looked at her with a smile. "You, my friend," she paused, pointing a finger at his chest, "are bloody brilliant," she said, lifting that same hand to tweak his nose and he laughed.
Ron, who was standing only a couple of feet away, made his way over, a small laugh spilling from his lips, and Ginny wasn't far behind. "You know, if you weren't so clumsy, I bet you'd make a great captain, Y/N/N," the redhead teased and her eyes darted over to him. His fingers were wrapped around the handle of his broom and he was so sweaty, his robes were clinging to his skin.
Y/N broke out into a smile at the keeper. "Yeah, well, I think we all remember what happened over summer," she said and Ginny chuckled from the side. "See?" She jutted her thumb over towards the girl and locked their elbows together.
Ginny looked over at her with a small shrug. "S'okay. I think we'd all crash and burn if we didn't have you cheering us on every match, anyways," she said, earning nods of agreement from the boys and Y/N rolled her eyes.
"Oh, whatever." She patted Ginny's hand with her own, before she took a look around. "Anyone seen the boys?" she asked, her eyes flitting back to the three and Harry nodded towards them. Fred and George were off to the side a couple of feet, talking with Katie Bell and Angelina Johnson. Fred's broom was propped against his side and his hands were stretched out in front of him, a smile wide on his face as he spun up one of his stories. Y/N let out a huff of amusement. "Well, I'm gonna go congratulate them on the win, but you guys did amazing," she said, sliding her arm out of Ginny's and letting her eyes bounce off of all of them. "See you later." And with that, and a couple of quiet goodbyes, she was off towards the twins.
Y/N could see Angelina smile and nod at her as she ran excitedly towards the group and George spun around to meet her eyes. His red hair was damp with sweat, tucked behind his ears to keep it from falling into his eyes, and his skin glistened with the glow of a good game. She adored post-match George, he was prettier than usual. "Hello, darling," he hummed, making her heart melt in her chest, and he held his arms out to her. "Come to gush over us, have you?" he teased, but she hardly even registered it as she threw her arms around his shoulders. George wasn't even fazed by the impact—as this was something she did after every match, win or lose—and he lifted her up off of the ground, giving her waist a good squeeze before he set her back on her feet.
"Oh, I absolutely did," she said, pulling out of his arms so she could look at the other three, but he managed to keep an arm around her waist. "You all did so good, I'm so proud," she hummed. "You two and Alicia were marvelous. I mean, those last few scores were beautiful," she said, making the girls all bashful. "And Fred—" she started, but George couldn't help but look down at Y/N as she praised them all, warmth spreading through his chest at the way her eyes sparkled when she talked about the game, her words fading out for him.
Y/N was no different than she usually was after they'd won, but he often forgot how endearing she was when she rambled on about something she was passionate about. George curled his fingers slightly and brushed the tips along her side softly, watching her curiously as she went through their plays. Part of him hated that they were so close, because it made the frequent urges to kiss her to much harder to ignore. She was with him all the time and it was all he thought about anymore, even though he knew that just one peck might ruin everything. He was so certain that she thought of him as nothing more than a best friend that he kept it to himself.
Well, himself and Fred.
It was so bad sometimes that Fred would have to smack him to draw him back to reality.
George's train of thought came to a screeching halt when Y/N turned towards him. She always saved him for last, which he didn't mind. In fact, it made him feel more special, because she'd focus all her attention on him, then, and he'd get to walk her back to the common room. "And George—bloody hell—when you saved Alicia from that bludger, I nearly lost my voice. That was so badass," she said.
He could feel his stomach swirling with joy and his cheeks heating up at her words, and he caught Fred wiggling his eyebrows from over Y/N's head. That git, he thought to himself, but he kept his smile for her. "You think?" he asked and she nodded her head quickly. "Well, since we've all got something to celebrate, then," he paused, looking at Fred and the girls with a mischievous grin, "I propose we break out a bit of the Ogden's," he suggested.
Y/N looked up at him with a gaze that made his insides turn to mush. "I would be thoroughly disappointed if you didn't," she hummed, glancing between him and his brother.
Fred laughed, running a hand through his sweaty hair. "Well, that settles it," he said.
Hermione watched Y/N throw yet another sweater on her bed, as if she hadn't already emptied her entire trunk onto her mattress, and she let out a sigh. She was already dressed, but Y/N seemed to be having a hard time picking out her own outfit. "Why don't you just wear that green sweater? Not very suiting for a Gryffindor win, but you know George loves you in anything," she stated, walking over to the girl's bed and lifting up a forest green, cable-knitted sweater.
Y/N shot her an incredulous look, still leaning halfway into her trunk, and her lips parted slightly. "What in Godric's name would George have to do with my outfit?" she asked, even though they both knew good and well that she wanted to look nice for the younger twin. It was too bad that she had a hard time admitting it to herself, let alone her friends. Maybe it was because she usually felt like a lost cause with him. She was so far up friendship's ass with George, she really didn't see any hope of climbing out.
"Fine," Hermione sighed, folding the sweater neatly and setting it back on the bed with the rest of Y/N's bunched up clothing. "You're probably going to get hot with the fire and that alcohol in your system, so," she paused, letting her eyes dart from one piece of clothing to another, until she picked out the perfect outfit, "how about you try this on? If you don't like it, we can default to the sweater," she suggested, holding up a pair of ripped, boyfriend jeans and a dark red tank top with lacy detailing. "You could wear it with your sneakers, too, so you're still comfortable," she added.
Y/N got up off of her knees and took in the outfit. She'd always been to self-conscious to throw it on without a shirt underneath or a cardigan, but what was better than wearing it in the comforts of her own common room, where everyone was about to get too plastered to care, anyways? She took the clothes from Hermione, running her fingers over the fabric and she glanced up at the girl. She knew she would probably regret the words that were about to come out of her mouth, but it wasn't like her feelings were ever that much a secret to anyone. "You reckon he'll like it?" she asked hesitantly.
A warm smile spread across Hermione's lips, feeling a bit honored that Y/N had trusted her with somewhat of a confession, and she nodded. "You'll look beautiful, Y/N/N. I'll wait for you on the stairs while you change, then, and we can walk in together, okay?" she asked and Y/N nodded.
Hermione turned to leave, but Y/N stopped her before she could, giving her wrist a gentle squeeze. "Thank you," she said. "I don't know what I'd do without you sometimes," she mumbled and the girl smiled.
"I know," she teased, walking out of the room with a wink and leaving Y/N to get dressed.
The second Hermione left her to her own devices, she cast a quick spell to tidy up her mess of clothes and drop them back in her trunk. After that was settled, she shimmied out of her game-day outfit and pulled on the one Hermione had chosen for her instead. She felt a lot more self-conscious than usual, after she'd been wearing a sweater all day, but she got over it quickly when she glanced in the mirror. She'd done her hair and makeup before she'd looked for an outfit, so she wouldn't have had to worry about it, and looking at herself, now, she knew she'd made a good choice.
A half-smile settled on her lips as she studied herself in the mirror, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear, and she turned, looking over her shoulder to check how her backside looked in her jeans. The jeans were snug in all the right places and she couldn't help but hope that her favorite twin might notice, as well. "Oh, yes," she hummed to herself with satisfaction, before she walked over to her nightstand. She slipped a couple of gold rings onto her fingers and popped in a pair of hoops.
Once she was all finished, she made her way out of the room, only to find Hermione waiting on the top step, just like she'd said she'd be. "Bloody hell," Hermione muttered when Y/N made herself known, her lips parting slightly as she took in her outfit.
Y/N's eyebrows lifted at Hermione's reaction and she felt the sudden urge to fold in on herself. She glanced down at herself and brushed her hands over her exposed stomach. "How do I look?" she asked, a sheepish smile spreading across her face.
"Stupid," Hermione hummed and Y/N's eyes widened, "because you ever even worried. You look gorgeous," she complimented and the girl felt her cheeks flush. "C'mon, let's go show you off," she said, grabbing her hand and starting down the stairs.
Y/N could feel her heart hammering in her chest, sudden nervousness prickling underneath her skin, and she almost wanted to turn and hightail it back up that staircase, but she didn't. She let Hermione lead her into the common room, where all the other Gryffindors were already dispersed throughout, talking with their friends or on their way to making new ones. She felt her nerves dissolve when her eyes met George's across the room. He looked like he'd showered since the game, as the dirt and the sweat were long gone, leaving his hair all shiny and fluffy. She had to fight the urge to go over and thread her fingers through it when he smiled at her. She was about to tell Hermione she'd catch up with her later, before the girl pulled her hand away.
She looked at Y/N with bright eyes, glancing at Ron, Harry, and Ginny, who were immersed in conversation by the designated snack table. "I know you probably want to talk to George, but I still wondered if you'd be mad if I went with Ron and Harry?" she asked and Y/N was almost relieved that she'd beat her to the chase.
She shook her head quickly and gestured over to them. "No, not at all, 'Mione," she said, urging her over there. "I'm sure we'll merge with you guys sooner or later, so I'm not worried. Go get him," she finished with a wink, not missing the way that Hermione's cheeks flared. Her mutual feelings with Ron were anything but subtle, so she liked to tease the girl about it with every chance she got, but she knew they'd never act on it until they admitted it to themselves.
Once Hermione mumbled a goodbye and walked away, Y/N's eyes snapped back to George, who'd started making his way over to her as soon as Hermione left. She felt herself smile and she moved to meet him halfway, taking in his outfit as she did. He was wearing a sweater that his mom made for him, a navy one with the letter 'G' stitched in gold on the front, and a pair of jeans. It was simple, but something about it made her heart skip a beat when the distance had been closed between them.
George's free hand, the other occupied by a drink, came to wrap around her waist, pulling her closer to him by the small of her back, and he let out a loud wolf whistle. "Well, don't you look absolutely stunning tonight, darling," he complimented, making a show of brushing her hair out of her face to see her earrings and holding one of her hands up to check out her rings. Usually, he'd be more embarrassed about being so forward, but with the familiar buzz of firewhisky already tingling in his fingers, he didn't really care.
Especially not as Y/N's cheeks turned about as red as her top, and she leaned forward. She wrapped her arms around his torso and buried her face in his sweater, laughing softly in slight embarrassment. "Thank you, Georgie," she said, looking up at him once she felt her cheeks lighten up, and he smiled down at her. "You don't look too shabby yourself," she complimented, plucking at his sweater as she pulled away, and she watched a crooked smile curve onto his lips.
"What d'you mean, Y/N/N?" George hummed teasingly, patting his own cheek. "I always look devilishly handsome," he added and she rolled her eyes up at him. He took it as a win when she didn't explicitly deny it. He set one hand on her bicep and let it trail down to her wrist softly, while he emptied the contents of his cup into his mouth with the other. "Anyways, I'm gonna go refill. Did you want me to grab you a drink?" he asked, and she nodded.
"Sure, I'll wait for you over there," she hummed, pointing to the wall on the other side of the room where George had come from before. Angelina and some of the other chasers were gathered in front of it, as beautiful as ever, and Y/N figured she might say hello.
George nodded at her request. "Be right back," he told her, giving her hand a squeeze, before he slipped away. She found herself missing their close proximity as soon as he left, taking the warmth of his body with him, and she half-wondered if she should just follow him to the drink table. She didn't want to give anyone any ideas about them, though, so she stuck with her original plan and made her way over to the fireplace, where Katie, Alicia, and Angelina were all huddled together.
Alicia was the first to notice her, a bright smile stretching across her pretty, pink mouth, and she tucked a tuft of her chocolate hair behind her ear. "Well, well, well," she hummed, her brown eyes scanning the length of Y/N's body, and she stepped towards her with her hand on her hip. "Somebody looks hot," she drew on with a grin, reaching out to welcome her with a side hug.
Y/N could feel her face get warm again at the comment, as she wasn't used to such attention, and she returned the side hug. "Says you," she retaliated, taking in the black tube top and red, leather skirt that Alicia sported herself. She took in the girl's dark eye makeup and glossy lips, and if she wasn't so into George, she might've had some questions for herself. "You're a total smoke show," she said and the brunette laughed. She pulled away from Alicia and her eyes landed on Katie, in her maroon jumpsuit, and Angelina, with her sparkly, gold, minidress. "Good Godric, you all are," she corrected herself, a beaming smile gracing her face when she took in how pretty her friends were.
"Thank you, Your Hotness," Alicia slurred, her cheeks a little pink from the Ogden's and it finally clicked why she seemed so forward. Y/N laughed and crossed her arms over her chest. "I was disappointed that I didn't get to see you after the game, but I heard ol' George whisked you away," she teased, waggling her eyebrows and eliciting yet another giggle from the girl.
Angelina threw her arm over Y/N's shoulder and leaned into her, while Katie did the same to Alicia. She braced herself against her shoulder, tipping her drink to her lips before speaking. "Yeah, speaking of your little boytoy," Angelina hummed, making Katie almost snort. "Honestly, I don't understand how he's more than three feet away from you, right now, you look so good," she said.
Y/N couldn't help from glancing over her shoulder at that, looking at the refreshment table for George, but she couldn't seem to find him, so she turned back. "Well, he was supposed to be getting me a drink, but I feel like he's taking a bit long," she said, her heart sinking slightly. Sometimes she liked or when they poked fun at her about her relationship with George, because if people noticed, maybe that meant he felt something for her, too. Times like now, though, where she felt like it was impossible for him to look at her as anything other than a sister, not so much. "Plus, it's not really like that between George and I, you know? We're good friends is all," she added, ignoring the way it almost hurt her to admit it.
None of the girls seemed to buy into that, though. Especially not Katie. "Not like that, my arse, Y/N/N," she said. "Friends don't look at each other the way you two do. I mean, the both of you are so clueless, it hurts," she continued, putting her hand over her heart and letting her head lull back as she let out an exaggerated groan.
Alicia nodded, seconding Katie's words. "Honestly. Plus, friends aren't all over each other the way you two are, either," she said. "I mean, I think it might kill him to go a day without holding your hand, or brushing your hair behind your ear, or touching you," she explained and Y/N felt queasy all of the sudden.
They were right. Normal friends didn't look at each other or touch each other in the ways that Y/N and George did, but they weren't just normal friends. They were best friends. George was her moon and stars at this point and she would never, ever hesitate to give him the world if he'd asked it of her, but what happened between them—every glance, every touch, every word—was strictly platonic.
Right?
Y/N didn't have time to respond before a familiar voice piped up from behind her. "Hey, ladies," Fred, she found when she looked over her shoulder, sing-songed as he made his way over to them. His eyes were focused mainly on Angelina, a soft smirk playing on his lips as he drank her in, before he let his eyes flicker between them all. "Mind if I steal our lovely little Y/N away for a bit? I've got matters to discuss with her," he said, winking at Angelina when they locked eyes again, and he watched the girl remove her arm from around Y/N.
"Just bring her back in one piece. We know you've got a habit for blowing things up," Angelina teased.
She nudged Y/N in Fred's direction and he donned a look of mock offense. "I'd never hurt a hair on her pretty head," he said, before letting a grin stretch out onto his lips. Y/N rolled her eyes at his theatrics and stepped closer to him, nodding at him in a silent way of saying she was ready. "Bye, Angie." He flicked his eyebrows at her in farewell, waiting for her to give him a flirty wave off, before he followed Y/N.
She stopped when they were out of the girls' earshots and she rested her back against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest as she looked over at Fred. "Am I in trouble, Freddie?" she asked in a teasing tone.
Fred looked down as her words pulled a quiet chuckle from his mouth. He placed his forearm on the wall above their heads as he settled in next her, leaning against it so he could just face her instead of leaning his back on the wall like she was. "Well, dear Y/N, that depends on how you look at it," he told her and she raised her eyebrows in question. He leaned forward as if to be more secretive. "I'm sure you'd be happy to know Georgie's not taken his eyes off of you since you walked in," he explained in a whisper, and she felt her cheeks turn pink.
Fred pulled away as she blushed, laughing to himself. She lifted one of her hands to her cheek, feeling how warm it was beneath her fingertips. "Shut up, you git. That was mean," she tried to hiss, but a laugh ultimately bubbled out of her lips.
He shrugged his shoulders and took a drink from his cup, his signature smirk still lingering on his face. "I wasn't teasing you that time, but whether you believe me or not is up to you. I wanted to talk to you about something else, anyways," he said, moving on from the topic of his brother. He took his hand off the wall and he shifted his weight, something near to nerves settling in his stomach. "Look, I'm sure you've picked up on how I feel about Angelina, yeah?" he asked.
"No." Y/N pretended to look surprised, letting her jaw drop as she let out a dramatic gasp. She got her bit of fun out of the way before Fred shot her a look and she cut it out. "I have," she admitted, on a more serious note, with a small shrug.
He nodded once. "Well, I wanted to make a move tonight and I think you should be the one to help me."
Y/N furrowed her eyebrows at that, tucking her hands into her back pockets. "And how do you want me to do that?" She asked and Fred's face lit up as he explained his plan. "Well, you'll have to get me a drink or two first."
"That, I can manage," he hummed, already holding the rest of his out for her.
George had just finished pouring himself and Y/N new cups of firewhisky when a group of other Gryffindors rushed to the table for the same reason. Feeling almost lucky that he'd finished when he did, he lifted their cups up off of the tabletop and maneuvered himself around them. His eyes trailed along the wall where she said she'd be at, making sure he could pick her out in the crowd, and his heart nearly fluttered out of his chest when he did.
Y/N was standing in front of the fireplace and she looked enchanting, even with Angelina Johnson hanging off of her shoulder. Her hair fell in pin straight sheets over her bare shoulders and the fire behind her created an outline of golden light behind her. If George had been any drunker, he might've mistaken her for an angel, honestly. He watched her mouth break out into a smile, a laugh that he couldn't hear from so far away bubbling from her lips, and he was about to make his way over to her, when Lee Jordan stepped in front of him.
"Georgie, my man," Lee said, beaming as he held up two shot glasses filled with a clear liquid. "Let's knock back a quick one," he suggested, holding one of them out to the redhead.
George was almost disappointed by his offer, letting out a sigh. He'd only talked to Y/N for a minute or two before he'd left her earlier, and right now, he was more focused on getting back to her than getting sloshed. "Lee, I'm sorry, but I was just about to—" he cut himself off when his eyes flickered back to Y/N and she wasn't there anymore. His eyebrows furrowed quickly, wondering where she'd gone so quickly, before his eyes wandered further down the wall and his stomach dropped. Her back was leaned against the wall while Fred, his own brother, stood next to her with his hand propped over their heads. He was whispering something in her ear, and George just knew he wouldn't like it when he saw how pink her cheeks got. Hot jealousy bubbled up inside of his chest and his eyes flickered back to Lee. "You know what, yeah. Let's do it," he hummed, repositioning the cups so he was holding them by the rims in one hand.
"That's what I'm talking about," Lee grinned and he held up one of the shot glasses, which George took more than eagerly, now. "On three?" he questioned and George nodded. "Right. One. Two," he counted, but in the place of 'three', he and George threw back their shots and swallowed them.
The liquid was bitter as it trailed down George's throat, but he knew the taste of vodka well enough to not ask Lee what it was. He'd had it so many times, he'd hardly flinched, either. "Here, Lee. Thanks," he hummed, passing the boy his glass back, and Lee nodded. George was about to excuse himself and walk over to Fred and Y/N. What he'd say, he wasn't really sure, but he didn't get the chance to think about it before his thoughts were interrupted.
"Alright, alright," a familiar, feminine voice shouted at the top of their lungs, quieting the entire common room in a matter of seconds. His eyes flickered to the center of the room where his very own Y/N stood on top of a table, with a drink he hadn't seen her with before and her hands held up in the air. He wanted to be angry at her, for talking with his brother over him, but she wasn't with him, now, so maybe he'd just chalk it up to bad timing on his end. She looked really beautiful, though, with her cheeks flushed because all the attention had shifted to her and her hair tied back in a low pony tail, something she'd probably done when he took his shot. "Who's up for some spin the bottle?" she yelled, before the common room erupted into roars.
George laughed to himself and he started towards her.
Things were about to get interesting.
-
At this point in the evening, the Gryffindor common room and everyone in it had been divided into two groups: those who were going to play spin the bottle, and those who wanted to keep partying on their own. Y/N, George, and all of their friends—with a couple of others sprinkled into the mix—had gathered on the half of the room intent on participating, all sat on the carpet in a tight circle. Everyone's knees were brushing against each other, all their cheeks flushed pink from the firewhisky, and excited smiles sat on all of their faces. "I'm going to assume that everyone knows how to play," Fred said as he placed an empty bottle of Ogden's Old in the center of the circle, having taken it upon himself to lead the pack after Y/N pretended the entire thing was her idea. Why he couldn't have just suggested it himself was beyond her.
George—who sat on the opposite side of the circle from Y/N, much to his dismay—chuckled and he leaned back onto the palms of his hands. "I'm sure if they don't, they'll pick it up quick," he hummed, and murmurs of agreement spread around the circle. The rules of the game were simple, really. Someone would the chain and spin the bottle, share a kiss with whoever it landed on, and then, the person they kissed would spin the bottle and the cycle would continue. As he waited for Fred to reclaim his spot in the circle, he knew exactly who he wanted his bottle to land on, but he wouldn't admit it for anything. "Who's first, then?" he asked, his eyes flitting around everyone, and his eyes locked with Y/N's for a moment. His heart melted when she flushed him that kind smile of hers and he managed one back.
Y/N couldn't help but be slightly disappointed that George had never returned with her drink earlier, as that meant her time with him had been cut short. She'd been hoping Fred's game might've changed that, but when she'd ended up sitting across from him, her hopes had dwindled. They still weren't too high, because the odds of her spin landing on him were about one in thirteen.
"I think Y/N/N should be the first to go, since this was her idea," Fred chimed from her left. He was lucky that Dean and Neville were positioned between the two of them or she probably would've punched him on the leg. Since she couldn't reach him from where she was sitting, she settled for a glare instead. He only smiled all-but-innocently in return. She had an inkling that this wasn't just about him and Angelina, after all.
Seamus, who was seated on her right, nodded. "It only seems fair, yeah?" he seconded. If only Y/N had known him better, because she wanted to punch him, too.
When the rest of the Gryffindors came to the same decision, Y/N sighed, deciding to give in. "Fine, if you all insist," she said and she reached up to tuck her framing strands of hair behind her ears. She leaned forward and reached into the middle of the circle, trying her hardest not to just stare straight up at George like she was dying to do, and she gave the bottle a good whirl. The second she did, her heart felt like it might jump out of her chest, but when she straightened up again, she tried to keep her cool. Part of her wanted for the bottle to land on George, so she could get the thought of kissing him out of her head, finally, but the other part of her prayed it didn't.
Who knew what a kiss could do to a friendship like theirs?
The group fell silent when the bottle started to slow down and Y/N knew that she wasn't the only one holding her breath. It wasn't until the neck passed George and land on Harry, who sat a few people down from him, did she feel like she could breathe again. Relief washed over her at the fact that whatever she had with George was preserved for a little bit longer, and also because she wouldn't have to kiss anyone too eager.
Harry was the happy medium: cute, respectful, and uncomplicated.
A couple of their friends oohed at the outcome and Y/N couldn't help but grin at the green-eyed boy. "Fancy a peck, Potter?" she asked, ignoring the feeling of George's eyes on her, and she watched as Harry nodded. The corners of his mouth were pulled up in an amused smile and he pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. Y/N stood up and made her way over to him, before leaning down. She placed her hands on either sides of the Chosen One's face. She quirked her eyebrows up as if to ask if he was ready and he nodded once in response. With that, she pressed a small kiss to his lips. It was short, sweet, and she laughed softly when it was over. "We good?" she questioned, pulling her hands away.
Harry laughed. "We're brilliant," he hummed, before Y/N returned to her spot. He was next to spin the bottle. George hardly even registered it when Harry kissed Alicia next, as he still felt nauseous from watching Y/N kiss someone else. He knew that it was just a silly game amongst friends and that he really had no say in who she kissed or didn't kiss, but it didn't change the fact that it bothered him a little. Y/N, on the other hand, couldn't help but smile when Alicia spun next and wound up kissing Neville. The look on his round face after she'd sat back down beside Ron was just adorable. She swore that girl had left him with stars in his eyes. It was even more precious when Neville's turn landed him a kiss with Hermione.
It was less cute, though, when Hermione spin the bottle and it stopped right on George. The smile that Y/N had been sporting seemed to fall right off of her face, dropping to her feet, along with her stomach. Hermione glanced over at her and smiled awkwardly, knitting her eyebrows together in a way that showed her guilt, but Y/N waved it off. It was just a game. Even so, Y/N wouldn't deny the relief she felt when Hermione chose to kiss him on the cheek, instead.
When it was George's turn to step up, all eyes were on him, including Y/N's. Her mouth felt dry as she watched him from across the circle, his long fingers grabbing the empty bottle, and she swallowed thickly when his eyes flickered to hers. His lips quirked up in a half-smile and he winked at her as he twirled the bottle. She watched in anticipation as it circled around, choosing its next victim, and she was already preparing herself to watch George kiss someone like Alicia when the bottle stopped on the last person she expected.
Her.
Y/N's eyes widened, locked on that glass bottle, and the entire circle either laughed, cheered, or wolf-whistled. No fucking way, she thought to herself as her eyes snapped up to meet George's, which were blown just as wide. This was exactly the kind of opportunity that she'd been waiting for for years, now, but she felt sick to her stomach about it. She had it tangled in her thoughts that this singular moment would make or break them. She took a deep breath as George stood up, reminding herself that it was just a game, but either way, she knew she couldn't have her first kiss with him sitting down. She stood up, too, making her way to the center of the circle and meeting him halfway, her cheeks hot under the feeling of all eyes on her. She wished she'd had more to drink.
Something about George seemed off when she stepped in front of him. He wasn't passed around the school or anything, but she was aware enough to know he'd kissed girls before, but he seemed different, now. He didn't seem to know where to put his hands like he usually did and he swallowed thickly, his Adam's apple bobbing as he did. "We don't have to do this if it makes you uncomfortable," he said to her, his eyes searching her own for anything that could give him an out.
It wasn't like he didn't want to kiss Y/N, because Merlin, did he, but after mulling it over in his head for months on end, he didn't want to throw their first one away in a drunken state. He'd always pictured it special, maybe on a day when he finally got the courage to take her to Hogsmeade. He'd take her to a bookstore, because he knew how much she liked to read, and he'd tell her how beautiful she looked when she could take her eyes off the shelves, and when she got all flustered, he'd lean in and kiss her softly. He'd had it all planned out. He'd been mistaken earlier, he figured, when he'd thought that he wanted his turn to be with Y/N, because now that it was, he was regretting joining this game entirely.
Y/N looked up at him with those big eyes that made his insides bubble and she furrowed her eyebrows up at him. "It doesn't make me uncomfortable," she promised, and to prove it, she reached out and placed her hands on either side of his neck, letting her thumbs rest on his cheeks. He resisted the urge to lean into her touch. "So, you ready to kiss me, Weasley?" she questioned, her words betraying her thoughts, and she flashed him a grin.
All of her hopefulness that, maybe, the kiss wouldn't ruin everything, broke away when George hesitated, shaking his head softly. Her smile faltered and her chest clenched. "Not really," he confessed, pouring salt in the wound.
Ouch. She forced a small laugh, ignoring the way a feeling of hurt splintered through her body. and she tilted her head up at him. "It's just a game, right? It doesn't have to mean anything," she said, hoping to coax him into something quick, because it'd be much more embarrassing if he refused to kiss her in front of all of their friends, who were so adamant on the fact that they were in love with each other. It was pretty far-fetched and awfully one-sided, apparently.
Unbeknownst to her, George was screaming at himself inside his head. He knew it was just a game, he knew it didn't have to mean anything, but bloody hell, he wanted it to. He wanted it to mean something. Y/N wasn't the kind of girl you could just kiss and forget about it. If he kissed her he'd be thinking about it until his hair turned gray. "No, Y/N/N, it doesn't feel right," he whispered, hoping she would pick up on the emotion in his voice, but he knew he'd been asking too much when he saw the look that flashed across her face. He felt awful.
So did she, but for entirely different reasons. "Why?" she whispered, tears pricking in the back of her eyes, but she swallowed the knot in her throat, because how she knew how embarrassing it would be if she cried and he didn't kiss her. "Is it just me?" she asked, her mind suddenly racing. "Is there something wrong with me, I—"
She started in on a ramble and George didn't like where it was headed, because it wasn't her. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her, it was just him. It was all in his head. He shook his head at her quickly to cut her off. "No, no, I just—" He sighed. "I don't want it like this," he confessed, a bit louder than he intended to and Y/N's eyes widened.
"What?"
George would've given anything to just stop the game at that point. He was digging a hole for himself that was gonna be real hard to climb out of. "No, I just meant—" Fucking hell. "I—"
He couldn't even finish. Y/N's hands were starting to pull themselves off of his face slightly, her fingertips the only parts of her touching him, now. Honestly, she thought she might be sick. "George, what does that mean?" she asked, not sure if he'd confirmed what everyone had been saying about them all along or if it was just freakishly bad wording.
Too bad he didn't help much with figuring it out. Instead, George shook his head at her. "It doesn't mean anything," he said. "Let's just get on with it."
Before she had a chance to say anything else, George slipped his hand over her cheek, sliding his fingertips into her hair, and he crashed his lips onto hers. When she felt the warmth of his mouth, she almost felt the world stop turning on its axis, and her hands travelled down to his chest, balling up around the fabric of his sweater as she kissed him back. Y/N's heart was soaring as George tilted her head, finding it easier to kiss her at an angle so their noses weren't brushing together. George kissed her with all the passion he could muster up, his stomach flipping as he did, because if this was going to be the first and last time he kissed her, he needed it to be good. He needed to leave her mind reeling.
A couple more seconds passed, before he forced himself to pull away. It took everything in her to keep from pulling him back in for another; their kiss had lasted the longest, anyways. She managed a small smile up at him, which he struggled to return, before they both walked back to their spots on opposite sides of the circle.
Y/N could hardly breathe as she replayed the kiss over in her head again, choosing to pass her next turn to Ginny, because the girl hadn't gone yet and she didn't think she could stomach another kiss with anyone, especially not after the one she'd just had with George. Her heart was still hammering in her ears and she felt like she was floating, still feeling the ghost of his hands in her hair, and even though she'd denied it for so long, she couldn't anymore. She was absolutely in love with that boy.
But when his earlier words settled in, she snapped out of her trance.
It doesn't mean anything.
Had he meant the kiss?
George wasn't doing much better on his side of the circle. In fact, he almost faked an illness to get out of the next round, knowing he'd be absolutely crushed if he had to watch her kiss someone else after that. The relief he'd felt when she passed it off to Ginny was insane. He didn't know where his relationship with Y/N would go from there, though. It was clear to him now that he was head over heels for her—he always had been, really—but the fact that he still couldn't get her off of his mind after a kiss just set it all in stone. He glanced up at her from across the group, his heart stuttering in his chest when he found her already looking. She flashed him that pretty smile and he panicked, averting her gaze, and he almost wanted to smack himself.
Merlin, he didn't know how he was ever gonna face her again when all he could think about was her lips.
When Y/N woke up the next morning, she didn't know what she expected the day would bring, but it certainly wasn't Fred sitting in the seat beside hers in Transfiguration. She had walked into the room, ready to smile at George and start talking about their mornings like they usually did, but she felt a bit nervous when she saw that he'd switched places with his brother instead. George was on the other side of the classroom, partnered with Lee Jordan for the day. He watched her as she came in, but before she could even wave, he looked away.
She furrowed her eyebrows, ignoring the sinking feeling in her stomach, as she walked up to her desk, earning a close-mouthed smile from Fred as she sat her bags down. "Morning. How's the head?" he asked, tapping his index finger to the side of his head and she let out a huff of amusement.
Y/N took her seat next to him and she rested her elbow on the tabletop. "Fine, I didn't drink enough for a hangover," she told him and he nodded once, flicking his quill and watching it circle around his ink pot mindlessly. "Not that complaining, but how come you're not in your normal seat today?" she asked, glancing over at George. He was already looking at her from across the room, his lips set in a slight frown, and she tried to smile at him, but his eyes flickered to his paper before she got the chance. What was with him this morning?
Fred swallowed. "Not sure," he said, though she got the feeling that he was holding back on her. "He said he and Lee were talking last night and it felt like they haven't seen each other in a bit. Wanted to trade for the day," he elaborated and she nodded.
For her sake, she hoped that what he was saying was true, but as they progressed through the day and George had switched his seat in all of the classes they had together, her hopes were dwindling. It was weird not having him there to make her laugh when the lectures got too serious, but Fred was a close second for the time being. He was just as skilled in the art of comedic relief, but he was a lot less dedicated to his assignments than George was. He would nudge Y/N with his knee and ask her for the answer so often, she finally just angled her parchment towards him.
It wasn't to say that she hadn't enjoyed her time with the oldest twin, but by the end of the day, she was more than ready to be back with George the next morning.
It was just her luck, though, that she wound up with Fred the next day, too.
And the next.
And the entire next week, actually.
It wasn't until Y/N was sitting in the library with Hermione and Ginny that she decided that she'd had enough of it. "I just don't understand what his deal is. Like we kissed, I was there, but there's no need for him to keep tiptoeing around me, you know?" she ranted, tearing her eyes away from her open textbook and leaning back in her chair. "I mean, he barely looked at me after it happened and he's barely looked at me since, and I feel weird. It just doesn't feel right to not be next to him all the time," she continued, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear and letting out a sigh. "Anyways, what was the question again?" she asked, after taking in Hermione's amused smile and Ginny's look of disgust.
"It was just about the Summoning Charm, but I think we need to wait on it," Hermione answered through a small laugh. "I thought you said you didn't mind the time away from him," she hummed, dipping her quill back into her ink pot.
Y/N let out a sigh and she crossed her arms over her chest. "Well, I didn't, when I thought it was for a day," she explained, her mind trailing back to that first moment of truth in Transfiguration. "He wanted to spend time with Lee and I knew it would've been selfish to act like I was his only friend, so I was fine with it, but now, he's not treating me like I'm his friend at all," she continued, emotion churning in her stomach at the fact that she hadn't spoken to him in a week and a half. Every time she tried, he just walked away before she got to him or made up an excuse to leave. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't the least bit hurt by it.
"No offense, but what made you think you'd just go back to being friends after that night?" Ginny asked, sticking a ribbon in her textbook to mark the page and flipping it shut. The girl leaned forward, resting her chin in the palm of her hand.
Her eyes widened at the question. "I mean, it was a only a kiss."
Ginny shot her a look. "You're a right liar," she singsonged, a smirk playing on her lips, and she glanced at Hermione, who wore a similar smile. "I think you forget we were there, too. Witnessed the whole thing, actually," she said, scrunching her nose up a bit as she did, and Hermione let out a laugh. "I was a bit worried you'd rip his jumper off in front of us, if I'm being honest," she teased.
Y/N felt her face go hot and her jaw dropped. "I would not have ripped his—"
She was cut off when Ginny shot up in her seat. "Look at your face!" she whisper-yelled, in order to keep Madam Pince's attention off of them, and she pointed her finger. Her cheeks only darkened at that. "You're mad if you think your kiss was friendly. It was the most heated one in that whole game." Maybe there was a bit of truth to her words, because as she recalled, the kisses following were nothing but light-hearted pecks.
"She's got a point," Hermione joined in. "You've been in love with each other for years. I just know you poured months worth of feelings into that kiss," she said.
Y/N could feel her heart fluttering inside of her chest as they spoke and she replayed her kiss with George inside of her head. The way she'd grabbed onto his sweater and pulled him closer to her, the way his hands had been tangled in her hair, the way her toes had curled, and the way her stomach had done summersaults made so much more sense now. He'd kissed her with so much emotion, so much passion, and she'd kissed him back with equal need, just wanting him to know how much she loved him without saying the words, but maybe that's why it was bothering her so much to be apart from him now.
Because he hadn't picked up on it.
"Well, you've seen him," she said. "He's kissed girls before, so what makes me any different? Plus, he's a passionate person, maybe that's all it was," she protested, the feeling that she'd fucked everything up still swimming in her bloodstream.
The girls shot her a look. "You're different because he cares about you," Hermione said, her tone softer now. Y/N looked down at her words, her head spinning slightly as she wondered whether or not it was true, and the young witch placed a hand on top of hers. "You don't see the way he looks at you when you're not paying attention, or how he talks about you when you're not around. He's so taken with you," she explained.
Y/N wanted nothing more than to believe her, but she'd wanted this—wanted him—for so long that it seemed too good to be true. She looked up from her hand, ready to rebut her words, but Ginny stepped in before she could. "If only you could see him on holiday when you're at your parents'. Absolutely hopeless, that one," she explained, but she couldn't help the small smile tugging at her lips. "'Y/N loves this', 'Y/N would like that', and 'I wish Y/N was here'. Oh, and I can't forget my favorite: 'Where's the owl, I've got to write to Y/N', while he's barreling over Ron and Percy in the kitchen. It's quite funny," she explained.
Y/N's heart pattered quickly and she felt a little breathless as Ginny talked about how George was at home. "He does all that?" she asked quietly, chills spreading through her body.
Ginny nodded. "Mum can't wait until you two get together. She's dying to have another girl in the family," she explained, and Y/N couldn't help but smile. She was starting to think that even though George had always felt so far out of her reach...
Maybe he wasn't.
George and his possible feelings for her had stayed on Y/N's mind through the rest of her study session with the girls, and as she'd sat in the dining hall that night for dinner, she still hadn't been able to get him out of her head. She'd picked at her food with her golden fork absentmindedly, rolling a potato back and forth across her plate, and she'd barely eaten anything by the time everyone was heading back to their common rooms.
"I was thinking we'd get Snape again," Fred said as he walked with her back to the Gryffindor tower, talking to her about who he planned to slime next. She loved the guy, really, but she'd spent almost all of her time with him in the last week and a half. She'd sat with him in all of their classes, hung out with him during their free period, and he'd even taken to eating all three meals of the day with her. She knew that he was just trying to help, to take her mind off of his brother for the time being, but with the whole identical twin thing, it really just made her miss George even more.
Fred was great, but he wasn't the same. Fred wouldn't hug her so tight that all of her doubts would dissolve in thin air, or keep a protective arm around her at all times, or kiss her forehead. He wouldn't sneak into her dorm for a late night chat on her mattress, or talk about what his future would be like with her, or make her feel special like George did.
In fact, she was quite sure that Fred didn't even know her favorite color.
Y/N could still hear Fred talking, rambling on about his strategy to set up his bucket in a place where Snape walked through frequently, but she was hardly listening. She was too busy wrapped up in her thoughts, wondering why George had just completely shut her out. In the beginning, he would at least send her a longing glance or two, but now she got nothing.
It just didn't make sense, especially not after what Ginny had told her earlier.
"Does George love me?" she asked all of the sudden, the words leaving her lips before she truly had the chance to process them, and she cut Fred off mid sentence.
He nearly tripped over his own two feet, before he looked over at her and laughed softly. "Does George, my idiot brother, love you, the girl he spends all his bloody time with?" he asked, making pointing gestures with his hands and furrowing his eyebrows slightly. She nodded at him, pressing her lips into a thin line. "Are you blind? 'Course he loves you," he assured her like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and it could've been, honestly. He was a bit surprised that she'd even asked at all, but then again, he forgot how clueless she was on her own.
Y/N let out a sigh at Fred's answer, because it wasn't worded the way she'd wanted it to be, not that she knew what that was, but it just didn't satisfy her. "No," she groaned, running a frustrated hand through her hair as they walked. "I mean, is he in love with me?" she asked, looking over at him with pleading eyes.
Fred shot her a look, before he nodded once. "Yeah," he hummed with no hesitation and she felt her heart rate pick up. "I know what you meant," he elaborated, and she blinked at him, forcing her gaze to where they were walking again
"Really?" she asked quietly, almost breathlessly, and Fred nodded again. "Ginny wasn't lying?"
"Guess not," the redhead hummed, scratching the back of his neck. "I mean, everyone knows. We've known you two were mad for each other for a while now. I've got bets on when you're getting together," he confessed, a teasing tone laced in his voice, and her eyes widened. Had she really had him this whole time? She wanted to hang her head against the wall for being so oblivious. If she had known sooner, she might've done something about it.
It might've been too late, now, though.
She'd gone and muddied everything up.
Y/N swallowed thickly. "If that's true, why's he been ignoring me lately?" she asked.
Fred looked over at her with tender eyes and a small smile. He'd been expecting her to ask that for a while now, but it was about time. "Look," he started as they started up the stairs in the corridor. "George isn't so strong and courageous like me, you know," he started, not seriously, but it still made her roll her eyes. "He's nervous and soft-hearted, which I'm sure you've picked up on." She definitely had. He was definitely a gentler force than Fred, like a soft rain to his brother's thunderstorm. "He gets his feelings hurt easier, he overthinks things, and he's so very oblivious, love. Sometimes you just need to tell him what's on your mind straight up," he said as he led her up to the portrait of the Fat Lady. He muttered the password to her and she swung open for them. "This is one of those times."
She wasn't really sure what Fred had meant by all of that. All she'd done was kiss George in the midst of a stupid, teenage game, she didn't understand how she might've hurt his feelings or made him feel like she didn't want to be around him, because that was all she wanted. All the time, too. She nodded her head, regardless, and followed the boy through the portrait hole. "So, what am I supposed to do?" she asked as they walked further into the common room. She was about to get her answer from Fred when someone slammed a book shut. Her eyes flickered to the couch in front of the fireplace where George seemed to have been studying.
George had been there all night, waiting for her to come back from dinner. He'd decided that morning that he was sick of wallowing in his thoughts about what had happened all those days ago and he missed talking to her, missed being with her. It'd been painful for him to watch her spend all of her time with his brother instead of him, like it should've been, especially when they'd looked so cozy together at the party, but as he watched them walk in together, her cheeks just as pink as they had been that night, irrational anger spread through his body.
He'd closed his textbook loudly and stood up, no longer in the mood to speak to her, or Fred, for that matter.
Y/N's eyebrows furrowed and her lips parted as George stormed past in a fit of anger, her protests lost on her tongue, and she swiveled back towards Fred. She'd never seen George like that, and she wanted to call after him, but she couldn't find the words so quickly, and she didn't want to just abandon Fred, but—
He cut her thoughts short with a nod towards the portrait hole as George disappeared through it. "Go. Tell him how you feel," he encouraged her, sending a sudden wave of confidence through her body. It spread through her nerves and left goosebumps in its wake, and she nodded.
Y/N flashed Fred a small smile, before she took off after George.
Y/N wasn't quite sure how George had gotten so far in such little time—she'd chalk it up to his long legs, maybe—but when she found him, he was pacing back and forth in an empty corridor a few floors beneath the tower, carding his fingers through his red hair as he immersed himself in his thoughts. He hardly even noticed she was there until she stepped a bit closer to him. "What the hell is your problem, George Weasley?" she started, the confidence that had been building up when she'd come after him having turned into pent-up annoyance.
His eyes shot up from the floor and he rolled his eyes when he registered that it was her. "You know what?" he asked breathlessly, more to himself than her, and he let out a bitter laugh. "You're my bloody problem, Y/N," he snapped and it was like a lash from a whip.
She flinched at his words, feeling the sting despite the distance between them, and all of that fire she'd had a moment ago dissipated. In all of the time that she'd known him, he had never spoken to her like that, even when he was angry at her, he'd never called her the problem. He'd never jabbed at her like that. Her eyebrows furrowed and her chest clenched as she looked at him, his face contorted in exasperation. "I'm your problem?" she asked, her surprise masking the hurt. "I don't even know what I did to you," she continued, acutely aware of how hard her heart was racing and how knotted up her stomach felt.
George wasn't doing much better. He was quick to shove the sleeves of his uniform up to his elbows in frustration, bringing his hands to his tie and loosening it up, because he felt so warm all of the sudden. He knew he was being stupid and overreacting at something that probably wasn't even happening, but he'd planted this seed in his own head at the party and he couldn't get it out. He'd made a mistake switching seats with Fred that day, because seeing his twin make her laugh like he did stung. It was like he'd provided her with his own bloody replacement. He hated it.
It wasn't her fault that Fred inevitably became everyone's favorite after some measure of time, but he figured that for Y/N, maybe it'd been the couple of years she'd favored George. "I haven't stopped thinking about it, Y/N, okay?" he blurted, running his hands up his face and through his hair, and he could see the look of blatant confusion on her face. She was about to open her mouth and ask him what he meant, but he beat her to it. "The kiss," he explained, "because I felt something and I thought you did, too, but then, I'd see you with Fred and I wouldn't know what to tell myself," he confessed and it made her head spin.
Y/N's eyes widened at his words and she practically gaped at him. "Wait, Fred?" she asked, almost wondering if she'd heard him right, because she hadn't even realized that Fred was a factor in this. George nodded once and she sputtered out a laugh in disbelief. "Hold on, what makes you think Fred—"
"You've been ignoring me for him for days!"
Oh, he did not.
She reeled back in disbelief, steadying herself against the side of the corridor. "Me?" she repeated, pointing to her chest. "Don't you dare try to put this on me when it was your idea to swap places with him in the first place! You've been avoiding me, you idiot," she yelled, her voice echoing through the hallway, and she would've been surprised that Filch hadn't dragged them away if she wasn't so worked up.
"How is it all my fault when you've barely reached out?" George retaliated, taking a few steps closer to her, and she wanted to pull her hair out.
"I'm not going to waste my time chasing after someone who can't stand to be near me," she explained, "And I didn't know how you expected me to fix this between us, okay?" she said, her voice cracking over the question and she sighed. She tilted her chin up so she could blink back tears, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. "I'm sorry, George," she added, all the anger in her voice having fallen away. She didn't want to fight with him anymore, she just wanted things to go back to normal, and if that meant taking the blame for the entire situation, then so be it.
George felt his heart sink at that, his eyebrows knitting together. "Wait, so you do want to be with Fred?" he asked, the volume having lowered in his voice. She shot him a look of disgust, quickly shutting down his theory about his brother. "For what, then? Kissing me? I don't understand," he continued, his stomach twisting as he spoke, because he hoped it wasn't that, either.
Y/N pushed herself off of the wall slightly, reaching out to take one of his hands in hers. Her heart took flight inside of her chest at the feeling, as it was the first time she'd touched him in what felt like forever. "What? No, I'll never be sorry for kissing you, it's just," she paused, glancing down at the space between his shoes and hers, "Ginny told me you loved me and I just— I was going to try George, I swear, but then you freaked and ran out and—" she cut herself off, pulling her hand back from his and shoving it into her hair. "I should've tried harder, I guess, and maybe—"
George hardly heard anything after he'd heard that Ginny ratted him out. With wide eyes, he couldn't help but ask, "She told you?" His throat moved as he swallowed thickly. "Godric, I'm gonna—"
"No, it's a good thing," she said quickly, pulling her hand out of her hair and holding it out in front of her almost defensively. "I'm just sorry for being so bloody clueless and too worried that you wouldn't feel the same way I did to not tell you," she confessed, and George pinched his arm behind his back to make sure he wasn't dreaming (he wasn't). "And if you're still worried about Fred, I don't care about him, okay?" she blurted, before she realized how it sounded, and her eyes widened. She covered her mouth briefly. "Okay, I do, but not like I care about you, I mean, Fred isn't even an option. Merlin, nobody else is even an option, because it's you, George. I..." she trailed off, staring up at him in search of any sign that she shouldn't say it, that she shouldn't tell him, but all she found was a look of anticipation, and she couldn't help but smile. "I love you," she whispered, tears prickling in the spaces behind her eyes, and she reached out to grab the hem of his sweater.
George didn't say anything immediately, or even for the next minute. He just took a step forward and looked at her, his mouth opening and closing like a fish until he figured out what he wanted to say. "So, that's it, then?" he hummed after a while and she nodded. "You love me?" She nodded again and he smiled slightly, his heart feeling like it might explode. "I reckon I still need you to prove it," he whispered, taking another step closer to her and forcing her to take one backwards, her shoulders pressing against the wall.
She couldn't help but shake her head up at him as he slid one of his arms around her waist, her hands reaching up to cup his cheeks. His skin was warm in her palms and he leaned into her touch, his eyelids fluttering shut, and she brushed her thumbs over a spray of freckles. "I really do love you, Georgie," she whispered and his breath hitched in his throat. With that, Y/N pulled him down to press a kiss against his mouth and this kiss was less eager than the last. There was no question that this wouldn't be their final kiss together, so there was no rush.
George's lips were soft and his kiss was slow, and sweet, drawing her in with every peck. He leaned her back against the wall softly, tilting his head as his mouth slanted over her own, and he braced his arm on the wall above her. After he let her slide her fingers into his hair and thread them through it for a bit, he pulled away gently, his brown eyes staring into her own, and he smiled.
"I love you, too, darling."
author's note / this was a long one, but i think it was worth it. tag list in the comments! :)
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Text
He Was a Sk8r Boi
Happiest of Birthdays and best wishes to one of my most beloved and darling friends on this earth, the fantastical @hailhailsatan ! May your sass never cease.
modern au - college student Jaskier - the Kaer Morons are all skater punks
tw: mild injury (scraped arm)
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Jaskier took a seat on what remained of a crumbling stone bench and pulled his black-and-white composition notebook onto his lap, opening it to the closest blank page. He tugged his favorite pen out from its place of honor behind his ear and waited for inspiration to strike.
And waited.
And waited.
After half an hour of staring into space and getting absolutely nothing written, the frustrated college student stood from his seat and jammed his headphones into his ears. If nature wasn’t going to help finish this stupid poetry assignment then maybe he could find a person or two to observe for inspiration instead. Glancing around the otherwise empty benches and pathways of the public park, Jaskier sighed and shook his head. “Fuck this, I’ll try the other side.”
He pulled his MP3 player out from the pocket of his light autumn jacket and painstakingly scrolled through every song available until finally giving up and pressing the “Shuffle” button. As a heavy, angry guitar riff began to filter through his headphones and lighten the load of the world from his shoulders, Jaskier found himself approaching a half-hearted attempt at a skatepark.
There was one cement half-pipe to his left and a few rails and quarter-pipes scattered around the vicinity, bolted into the ground in a seemingly random pattern. Several oddly shaped cement bowls were sunk into the earth, obviously made to work like ramps but with a larger and less predictable surface area.
There were only three skaters enjoying the park on this particularly grey afternoon, zipping back and forth from one piece of equipment to the next like emo hummingbirds. Jaskier took out his headphones again as he made his way to a nearby bench - wood this time - and casually sat himself down. The skater dudes were yelling back and forth to each other as they swanned over and around the equipment on their boards, mostly insults from what the student could hear.
The loudest of the three had springy orange hair that he wore pulled back into a small, messy half-bun at the top of his head. The rest fell down against the back of his neck in an equally messy sheet, reaching nearly all the way to his shoulders but not quite touching them. He was wearing a bright red t-shirt with a catchphrase that Jaskier couldn’t read and plain denim jeans.
“What the fuck are you doing, Eskel?” he laughed, pointing to the tallest of the group and pulling a face.
“Shut up, Bert,” the brunette shouted back at the redhead, doing a quick kick-flip over the far end of a metal railing. “You can’t skate for shit.”
“I’m better than you!”
The third member of their little gang was the quietest so far and, in Jaskier’s personal opinion, also the prettiest. He had a mass of long white hair that fell all the way to the bottom of his shoulder blades, pointed and stiff in a way that meant it had been straightened and sprayed into submission. The silvery strands were being held out of the stranger’s eyes by a baggy black beanie and Jaskier desperately wanted to know whether or not that hair color was natural (though he heavily suspected that it was not).
The white-haired guy was also the most talented of the three gathered skaters, flying from one end of the half-pipe to the other and landing a few flips in between as if risking his life was as simple as breathing. He wore no knee pads over his ripped black skinny jeans and no elbow pads either; Jaskier noted with a little zing through his nervous system that the skater’s arms were muscled like a Greek statue’s and equally pale.
He was fucking hot.
“Geralt, do a three-sixty!” the redhead jeered, chucking something at the pretty one.
“I can’t land one yet and you know it,” the white-haired guy, Geralt apparently, replied. His voice was low and sonorous and Jaskier nearly fell off his bench in surprise. The student hadn’t realized how far forward he had been leaning in order to listen to their conversation and he scooted back again with a self-conscious little blush. In the distance, Geralt continued. “Why don’t you get up here and try it yourself, asshole?”
“I just fucking might, White Wolf,” Lambert huffed, turning his board back toward the half-pipe and picking up speed. The dark-haired one, Eskel, caught Jaskier’s eye from across the park; the student blushed an even darker shade of red and looked down at his lap to avoid any sort of confrontation. If any of these guys wanted to start a fight with him, Jaskier would surely lose.
By the time the anxious student worked up the nerve to look at them again, Lambert had already climbed to the top of the half-pipe and taken a defensive stance. His eyebrows were furrowed and his arms were crossed over his chest in a projection of almost childish anger. As Geralt came up the cement incline, Lambert lashed out with his foot and kicked the other man’s board out from beneath his feet.
Eskel gave a wordless cry of alarm.
Geralt wavered in the air for a moment - cartoonishly, Jaskier thought, almost like Wile E. Coyote - before plunging to the pavement and rolling limply down the inside of the half-pipe. Eskel chucked a rock at the redhead and started screaming, “Fuck off, dude! You could have cracked his fucking skull! You could have killed Geralt, you absolute cock-toboggan!”
“Fuck! Shit, I didn't-,” Lambert fell on his butt and slid down the ramp to Geralt’s side, kneeling over him with concern written all over his face. “Are you alright, man!?”
Jaskier couldn’t hear if Geralt replied or not, but he suddenly remembered the first-aid kit sitting right there in his bag. Jaskier was a total klutz and tried to keep a handful of bandages and a tube of disinfectant on him at all times just in case he ever needed them. Thank goodness they would be able to come in handy, and for a far nobler purpose than patching up yet another one of his table-smacked knees.
Without thinking any further ahead, Jaskier grabbed the strap of his bag and took off running towards the site of the accident.
“Hey!” he shouted, coming to a stop a few feet away. “I have - uh, I have a first-aid kit if you want to use it.”
“Cool, thanks,” Eskel said, glancing over his shoulder with a curt nod. “Come on over, we don’t bite. Well, I don’t.”
“Dude, I’m so sorry,” Lambert apologized to Geralt once again. When Jaskier glanced over at him, the redhead looked legitimately upset and guilty. Geralt looked up at the newcomer from the pavement, his silver hair spread out around him in mimicry of a halo - the black beanie was lying a few feet away, forgotten or ignored.
Up close like this, the stranger stole the breath out of Jaskier’s very lungs. The man's eyes… His fucking eyes were a gorgeous molten gold in the late afternoon sun, sparking and shining like gemstones. Holding Geralt’s gaze made Jaskier feel as if his very soul was catching fire.
“Do you need a band-aid?” Jaskier asked rather stupidly, holding out the little cardboard box. Geralt nodded stoically.
“I think I scraped my arm.”
“Let me help,” Jaskier said. The student knelt beside Geralt and set the box of band-aids down. He flung open the kit and retrieved some ‘pain-free’ disinfectant, then returned to the box of bandages in search of one without a Disney princess on it. “Do you guys always do this without wearing any protective gear?”
“I’ve got a helmet,” Geralt said. He pointed towards three mismatched backpacks piled near the edge of the pavement; a bright red helmet with several semi-familiar logos stuck to it sat atop one of them.
“It’s very useful over there, keeping your backpack from cracking its skull open,” Jaskier chastised lightly, trying to keep his nerves in check. He was feeling oddly protective of a guy he’d never even met before and it was very fucking weird.
“Sorry,” Geralt shrugged. He was still laying on his back, his topaz eyes flickering between Jaskier’s hands and face. The student applied a thin layer of medical cream to the shallow scrape with shaking fingers and then wiped the remaining goo on his shirt, uncaring of the damage it may have done. He bandaged the minor wound quickly and leaned back, glancing between Lambert and Eskel as if just noticing their presence on either side of Geralt's head.
“Thanks,” Eskel grinned, holding out his hand. “I’m Eskel.”
“Jaskier,” Jaskier replied shyly. “And the loud one is Lambert, right?”
Geralt chuckled from his place on the ground and Jaskier’s heart seized painfully in his chest. What a laugh, ye gods. “Yeah, that’s Lambert. I’m Geralt.”
“Nice to meet you, Geralt,” Jaskier could practically taste the name as it melted across his tongue. “Well, not the nicest way to meet you, but I’m glad I met you all the same. Anyway.”
He stood up with a little grimace and took a step back.
“Where are you going?” Eskel asked. “You came to Geralt’s rescue so I think that means he owes you like, at least an ice cream, or something.”
“Yeah,” Lambert piped up. He smirked at the man on the ground and then turned back to Jaskier, mischief clear in his expression, “Let him take you to get an ice cream.”
“I’m lactose intolerant,” Jaskier squeaked. Then he realized he’d sounded rude and held up his hands as if offering surrender (surrender for what, he wasn't exactly sure), “Not that I wouldn’t like to hang out with you more but I’ve got an assignment due and I’m sure you’re very busy doing skater things and I-”
“Am I not good enough for you?” Geralt asked, finally sitting up. He straightened his arms out behind him and rested there, reclined comfortable, a god in his temple.
Jaskier shot the older man a half-annoyed look, beating back his anxiety with a stick. “I listen to Avril Lavigne. I know not to underestimate pretty skater punks.”
“Pretty?” Geralt raised his eyebrows. Jaskier hid his face behind his hands and turned on his heel.
“Anyway, nice meeting you!” Jaskier shouted, hoping they could hear even if he was facing the opposite direction. He took off toward the edge of the park at a brisk walk, verging on a jog. He needed to go hide behind a tree and cry. What the fuck!? He was terrible at flirting and now he’d gone and ruined his chances with the guy he’d… literally just met. Chill out, he told himself - just before a strong hand clamped down over his shoulder and stopped him in his tracks.
“So not ice cream,” Geralt said. Jaskier slowly turned back to face the mostly-stranger. His lip was caught fast between his teeth and Geralt lifted one large hand to gently thumb it free again. “Maybe a boarding lesson, instead? It would give me an excuse to put my hands around your waist and you could put yours on my shoulders.”
“Are you asking me on a date?” Jaskier asked. He fluttered his eyelashes and took half a step into Geralt's space.
The broad-shouldered punk smiled down at the Little Mermaid band-aid on his arm and then turned that smile to Jaskier. “Yeah.”
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hotshotsxyz · 5 years ago
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15x19 Coda
[read it on AO3]
It's… over. They won. And Dean is happy, he really is. It was a near perfect ending. The sun is shining and the Earth's still turning, it's inhabitants entirely unaware of the days they'd lost. He wonders if some scientist won't figure it out, notice that the stars have moved too far for a single day. A puzzle for the decade. And Sam, Sam's practically vibrating with excitement as they draw closer to Eileen with every mile of asphalt beneath their tires.
So yeah, Dean's happy. But it's a hollow sort of happiness.
They'd won, but the cost to play had been too damn high. Dean hadn't asked Jack to bring Cas back because he didn't have to. He'd seen the flash of sadness in his eyes after bringing everyone else back; seen the near-imperceptible shake of his head when Dean took an aborted step after him as he backed away. Jack couldn’t do it.
The kid had been through enough, and Dean wasn't going to make him explain why restoring the entire world was in his power but bringing Cas back wasn't.
Instead, he'd pasted on as much of a smile as he could manage and teased Sam about seeing Eileen again so he wouldn't have to think about who they wouldn't be seeing.
Waking at all is a surprise. Cas had seen the Empty reaching out to him, had felt its icy tendrils envelop him. And he'd felt peace. Dean was safe, and he'd finally said what he'd wanted to all these years. Finally let himself feel love in its entirety. It had been glorious.
Now, he's mostly confused. The Empty is different from what Cas remembers. There's a high pitched whine that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. In the back of Cas's head, he feels presences other than his own, tugging his consciousness in several directions. With nothing else to do, he picks one at random and begins to walk.
It's well after midnight, and they're still on the road. Sam is asleep on the passenger side, but Dean isn't tired. The last song on the cassette in the tape deck had ended an hour ago, and Dean hadn't bothered to put in a new one. They're miles from any sort of civilization, and Dean has to remind himself more than once that the lack of cars around them doesn't mean everyone is gone again. Still, between that and the muted landscape surrounding them, there's little to do but think.
Before, just after Chuck had wiped the Earth clean of everyone but them, Dean had had to push it all down. Sam was spiraling, and Dean couldn't afford to sink into the stupor he usually found himself in after losing Cas.
And wasn't that a thought? He's lost Cas so many damn times, he has a 'usual' response. This time feels different, though. He feels different. Dean still aches, feels the loss like a gaping hole in his chest. He greets his grief as an old friend, wraps himself in it like a warm blanket. He knows how to survive this loss, though, because he's done it before. And for once, he wants to. Because he wants to live up to what Cas saw in him.
"Michael," Cas says, surprised. His voice sounds strange to his ears, echoless and muted by the void around them.
Perhaps the direction he'd chosen hadn't been quite as random as he'd thought.
"Castiel," Michael replies, "I – I'm sorry," he says. Had Cas not known any better, he would've thought it was Adam speaking, not Michael. The words are pained and soft, brimming with the sort of regret and sorrow that angels are rarely capable of.
"What happened?" Cas asks.
Michael shakes his head mutely and turns away. Cas blinks and he's gone. The high pitched whine remains. Cas continues on.
Dean shakes Sam awake around four in the morning, just as he pulls into a roadside motel. It's the sort they've slept in a thousand times before, stained carpet and questionable mass produced art and all. It feels almost like a homecoming.
"Time is it?" Sam asks, yawning.
"Late," Dean replies. "C'mon, I need a couple hours of shut eye before we keep going."
Sam rubs his eyes and stretches. "How far out are we?" He asks as he climbs out of the car.
Dean shrugs. "Three or four hours?" he guesses.
"That close?" Sam asks.
"C'mon." Dean gestures towards the front of the motel. "A little sleep and we'll be there by lunchtime."
Next, Cas finds Ruby. Or rather, she finds him.
'Well, whatever the hell you did it woke us all up," she says from behind him. Cas spins around to face her.
He doesn't know what to say.
"I guess I should thank you," Ruby continues. "I mean, I could do without the eternal shriek, but it's better than everything that was going on up here." She taps her forehead meaningfully.
"I don't know why we’re awake," Cas says finally.
"Ah," Ruby says. "Then I guess you still owe me." She winks, and then she too is gone. The whine continues. Although, now that he thinks about it, perhaps shriek is a more accurate description.
Dean is exhausted, but even with his eyes shut tight against the soft moonlight that filtered through the motel room's thin curtains he can't sleep. He misses the odd sounds the bunker made at night. He misses his memory foam mattress. He misses his damn nightgown and he misses- well. Best not to go there while he's trying to sleep.
After several more minutes of unsuccessful slumber, Dean sighs and swings himself out of bed. He toes on his boots as quietly as he can manage and slips out into the night. He walks around behind the motel and sits on concrete slab, back against the wall and arms resting on his knees. The night is cold and clear, the stars as bright as he's ever seen them.
For a while he just stares, tracing out the constellations he knows and making new ones in place of the ones he doesn't. Above the big dipper is a group of stars he decides to call Jack. The brightest of them make a sort of circle. Harmony, Dean thinks. Beyond that are several stars in the shape of a child's drawing of of a house. He calls that one Sam. And above it… well, Dean knows that one. Cassiopeia. He doesn't know where it got it's name, but he knows what it means to him. Cas.
His next encounter is less welcome than the first two were.
"Cassie!" Lucifer calls out gleefully. "What a lovely family reunion."
"I have nothing to say to you," Cas rumbles.
"Oh," Lucifer says, "but you'll want to hear what I have to say." He grins, but none of the mirth reaches his eyes.
"Your precious little humans are going to lose," he sing-songs. "I've made sure of it."
"You've been here longer than I have," Cas retorts.
"Dad sprung me," Lucifer replies, "and I-"
Cas pushes past him. "I have no interest in your games," he says. To his surprise, Lucifer says nothing in response.
When he turns around, the Archangel is gone.
Dean tilts his head back against the wall, and for the first time since purgatory, he prays.
"Cas," he says softly. "I don't know if you can hear me. Hell, you probably can't. I know this one was probably it. The big goodbye." Tears begin to form in Dean's eyes, and he does nothing to stop them from falling. "I wanted to say thank you," he whispers. "What you did… we saved the world because of it. Because of you. There're seven billion people out there who owe you their lives. Some of us owe it a few times over." Dean chuckles a little at that, a wet, painful sound. "I need you to know that you changed me too. Of course you did, how could you not? Whatever it is you saw in me… it's there because of you. I never thought… well, I guess we're both stupid. You said the one thing you wanted you couldn't have. Cas," Dean says, his voice breaking, "I wanted it, too." His prayer devolves into choking sobs, the kind that tear themselves from you and won't let you draw breath to replace them.
Cas feels a sharp, painful tug in his grace.
Cas, he hears in his mind. He knows that voice. Cas falls to his knees.
It isn't until the suns rays stain the horizon gold that Dean stands again. He dusts himself off and wipes at the dried tear tracks on his face. He aches, but he also feels some relief. He hadn't said it all but… he'd said enough. The rest he can keep for himself, at least for now. He slips back into the motel room where, predictably, Sam is still asleep. He steps out of his shoes and slides beneath the scratchy motel sheets. Finally, finally, he sleeps.
"Dean," Cas chokes out. The prayer bounces around his head like a trapped echo. I wanted it, too. Cas feels the wetness on his face even as his determination surges. He's awake, and he's going to find a way home. He has to.
Cas continues walking with renewed purpose, although just as directionless as before. He wanders for what felt like hours or perhaps mere minutes. There's no concept of time in the Empty; only what was and what is. Eventually, he notices that the shriek is getting louder. It suddenly seems to be coming from a specific direction. Cas turns toward it and begins to run.
The little sleep Dean gets leaves him feeling surprisingly refreshed, and they make good time the rest of the way to Eileen. Ten minutes out, and Sam is all smiles, sending her update texts for every street they pass. His happiness is contagious, and Dean finds himself smiling too. He might not have gotten everything he wanted, but dammit Sam deserves this. So does Eileen. They've both been through so much. They're good for each other.
She's waiting on the sidewalk as they pull up to the curb, and Sam's out of the car before they even stop. He runs straight to Eileen, wraps his arms around her and swings her in a circle. She lets out a high pitched squeal and, when Sam puts her down, drags him into a long kiss.
"It's over," she says softly.
"It’s over," Sam agrees.
Eileen wraps her arms back around Sam and presses her face into his shoulder.
Dean looks away. He's happy for them, he is, but it's hard to watch, knowing that he'll never – well. All that matters is that they have each other. Dean is grateful for that.
The Empty is screaming. The closer Cas gets, the more it hurts to listen to. The unending screech rattles his teeth and threatens to tear his eardrums. He keeps walking.
As he draws close, it seems to sense his presence. "You!" it shrieks, turning it's face towards him. It still wears Meg's face, but it bares an expression he's never seen on her before. "You did this!" It lunges at him, but even as he flinches back it falls short, back on it's hands and knees.
"Make it STOP," the Empty pleads. "It's so loud."
It sounds so desperate that Cas almost feels sorry for it.
"Maybe I can help you," he says, though he has no idea how.
"Please," it begs, driven far past the point of reason.
"But if I do," Cas says, "you have to help me too."
"ANYTHING," it screeches.
"Send me home."
The Empty stares up at him. Its lips curl into a snarl. "I. Can't," it says.
"Why?" Cas demands. "You've done it before."
"We made a deal," it replies. "Deals cannot be broken."
"Then I can't help you." Cas turns and begins to walk away. The determination he felt before begins to drain quickly away.
"Wait!" it screeches.
Cas turns. "I can't help you from here," he says.
"If you get back… what will you do?"
"Jack did this to you, right?" Cas verifies. The Empty screeches in anger. It's all the confirmation Cas needs. "Then I'll get him to undo it. It's the only way to put them back to sleep. For you to go back to sleep."
The Empty stares at him for a moment in silence. It nods. "It's a deal," it says. It lunges at him, and this time Cas is too slow to avoid it. It wraps itself around him and tears him open. It's like dying all over again, but a thousand times more painful. It's as if his very essence is being torn from him. As if – oh. That's exactly what it is. It's unmaking him. The Empty is for angels and demons and other celestial beings, and if he isn't one… before he has time to finish the thought, he's gone.
The Empty curls in on itself to wait. It screams.
Dean makes some bullshit excuse about finding parking and drives off, leaving Sam and Eileen to catch up. It serves the dual purpose of giving them some alone time and him some space. He drives without thinking, makes random turns onto streets he doesn't know until he finds himself at the edge of town. He parks the car and gets out.
He begins to wander on foot, walking along a dirt road that runs between two corn fields. It almost certainly leads nowhere, but he feels an irrational need to follow it, as if there's something important at the end.
And then he sees it. He swears.
He'd known they were somewhere in Illinois, but he hadn't realized they were here.
The barn is more rundown than the last time he saw it, but Dean knows it's the same one. He can feel it in his bones. He wants to let go, to fall to his knees and sob, but something in him pushes him forward. He walks until he reaches its ramshackle doors. He places his hand lightly on one.
This is stupid, he knows. There's nothing for him beyond those doors except heartbreak and longing. Still though, there's something fitting about saying goodbye where it all began. He takes in a deep breath and pushes the door open. Its hinges squeal, but he pays them no mind because the barn isn't empty.
In it's center lays a dark haired man, naked and shivering. Cas. Cas.
Dean sprints forward. He doesn't care if this is a trick, doesn't care if he's gone mad. It's Cas.
Everything hurts. Cas is cold, and disoriented and lost and the only emotion he can process is relief. Because these aren't the sort of things that an angel feels. They're what humans feel. And humans don't belong in the Empty. He hears a noise behind him, hears a sharp intake of breath, and he knows.
He's home.
Dean falls to his knees as Cas sits up and turns to face him. "Cas," he breathes. All of his energy seems to leave him at once. He reaches out with a shaking hand and stops just shy of touching Cas's cheek.
"Hello, Dean," Cas replies warmly. He presses his face into the proffered hand.
Dean chokes out a sob, and then he's pulling Cas toward him, wrapping his arms around his shoulders and pressing his face into his hair. Cas returns the gesture, snaking his hands around Dean's waist. Dean feels dampness against his shoulder and knows that Cas is crying too.
"How?" Dean asks, not loosening his grip at all.
"I made a deal," Cas replies simply.
Dean feels himself tense. "Not that kind of deal," Cas reassures him. "I'll tell you more, but… not right now."
Dean pulls back a little, just far enough to look Cas in the eye. "Cas," he says, "I gotta tell you something."
Cas shakes his head softly. "I heard your prayer," Cas says. "I know."
"I didn't say it all," Dean replies.
"What's left?" Cas tilts his head in that oh-so-familiar way that Dean thought he'd never see again. He lets out another small sob.
"I love you, too," Dean says. "I'm sorry I didn't say it before, I should've said it before. But I love you, I've loved you, I will always love you. You changed me too, Cas."
"You…" Cas says, wonder in his expression.
"You can have it, Cas, of course you can have it. I'm yours."
Cas surges forward, and for the first time he takes, pressing his lips against Dean's. Dean is quick to respond though, giving as good as he gets. They spend who knows how long wrapped up in each other, until finally the need for air forces them to break the kiss. At some point, Dean's hands had wound their way into Cas's hair and he leaves them there as they breathe together.
"Dean," Cas says, and there something desperate in his voice.
"I'm with you," Dean replies.
"There's something you should know," Cas continues. "There was a cost to leaving the Empty," he says.
Cold fear washes over Dean. "What?" he asks softly.
"My grace," Cas answers. "I'm human."
Dean stares at him, open mouthed. "You're..." he starts, but doesn't know how to finish.
Cas nods. "I understand if that changes things," he says softly.
"Of course not Cas, god, of course not. I love you," Dean says. "All of you, in any form, whatever the consequences." Dean pauses for a moment, out of breath. "Are you okay, though?" he asks softly.
Cas breaks out into a wide grin. "Yes, Dean Winchester. Yes, I am."
And Dean's smiling too, so hard it hurts. "C'mon," he says, "You must be freezing." He pulls off his jacket and wraps it around Cas's shoulders. "Let's go home," he says.
"Home," Cas repeats, smiling.
And so, they do.
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friendly-peep · 5 years ago
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Which Homestuck characters would read Homestuck and their opinion
idk i’m bored. What’s Homestuck^2? What’s epilogues? We’re strictly Homestuck in this house. Also only doing main characters, I’m not going to dive into the Felt or caparacians, I want this to be done today.
Beta kids:
June: Avid reader. Got in early and read the whole thing. Got shirts, unironically liked it.
Rose: Got in late, but got into it. Loved the tarot deck, uses it to pretend she’s reading while she just tells people their truths. Noticed some narrative issues but overall liked it.
Dave: Got in shortly after June did, read for a while, but his irony poisoning led to him sassing the HECK out of it. Made a diss blog. Kept reading it “ironically” and cannot tell if he actually likes it or not. Got a god tier hoodie he wears at home. Sampled some of the soundtracks for his raps.
Jade: Loved it. LOVED IT. Got the full soundtrack. Made remixes. Got all the shirts. One of the blogs that posted “UPD8!” whenever an update happened. Big fanartist during the Gigapauses.
Beta Guardians:
June’s Dad: Tried to get into it to connect to his daughter’s interest, but the memes were too much, so he became the “Are ya winning, daughter?” dad. Very supportive but would need fifty slow paced “Homestuck explained” videos.
Mom Lalonde: Read it, but was too intoxicated to remember most. She holds obscure knowledge and will remember minute trivia, but don’t ask her about any of the large plot points.
Bro Strider: Too busy being A Mess Of A Human Being to sit down and read.
Poppop Harley: Too busy being A Dang Explorer to sit down and read.
Alpha kids:
Jane: Takes time to read it slowly. Has a blog of theories she constantly updates. Was upset about how some plot points got dropped and underdeveloped.
Roxy: Much like Jade, loved it. While Jade made remixes, Roxy cosplays. She has killer cosplays of most characters. Screamed about updates on twitter. No filter, accidentally drops spoilers left right and center.
Dirk: Deep, DEEP character examinations. Draws diagrams, writes essays. Unironically liked the potential of Paradox Space, may have even submit his own stories to be a guest artist.
Jake: Read the whole thing, liked it, missed many connections and plot points, was satisfied with the ending. Got some merch, can say “I read Homestuck” in public and be blissfully unaware of any positive and negative baggage that comes with saying so.
Alpha Guardians:
Jane’s Dad: Much like June’s Dad, tried to get into it. Unlike June’s Dad, watched and read his daughter’s theories (and Dirk’s explanations when Jane linked them to him) and became A Walking Homestuck Encyclopedia. Jane is unsure how to feel about this. He, however, does not reference it.
Roxy’s Rosemom: Too busy fighting the good fight to read. It’s in her radar but didn’t get the time to read it.
Dirk’s Davedad: Read it as a novelty. Sent Hussie a gold-plated Bad Dragon dildo. Put offhand references to it on his movies, but they were so oblique that even readers didn’t get it.
Jade English: Too busy running her own baking good company to read Homestuck. Not even in her radar.
Alternia Trolls:
Aradia: Much like Dirk, got REAL DEEP into it. Makes youtube vids explaining classpects and narrative points. Actually wrote a dissertation on Homestuck.
Tavros: Tried to get into it, but the first few acts were not to his taste so he never got to the trolls ironically enough. Likes the character designs though.
Sollux: Next level Dave. Critiques the FUQUE out of it on every platform he can. If Hatedom is a thing, he made it. He’s the founder. It’s him. But he read it to the end.
Karkat: Read it, loves it, does some interesting character relationship examinations. Predicted who would end up with who with 100% accuracy. Wasn’t a vocal fan, didn’t get merch, but still liked it.
Nepeta: The shipper who launched a thousand ships. She writes crackfic but with deep care, making sure it makes sense that characters would end up together. Got one of every homestuck shirt. Very into it.
Kanaya: Got into it only because her friends got into it. If Karkat hadn’t talked about it she would not have gotten into it but she did because she wants to be able to carry a conversation with her friends. Not a huge fan.
Terezi: She can and WILL correct you if you get trivia wrong. She did not sit through hours of text-to-speech pesterlogs for some scrub to get it wrong. Defiant Homestuck defender. She’ll cut you if you say you don’t like Homestuck (she won’t, but she’s judging you from the other side of the room)
Vriska: Skipped the first acts and jumped right into Alternia. Little context, little care. Pretends she didn’t, gets facts hilariously wrong which Terezi takes as an invitation to tease her. Fanartist.
Equius: Another fanartist. He made physical media as opposed to drawings. Slow reader, got into it late and didn’t finish until way after the comic had ended. Did not get to experience the comic without Random Paradox Arms all over the place. Loved by the community for his short reaction posts about what happened at the point he’s at.
Gamzee: Either first person to post “Update” when comic updated, or doesn’t read for months and then catches up in two days. Skips many chat logs, but still gets most of the plot no problem. Remembers exact phrasing of the posts he does read though.
Eridan: Another Character Analysis blogger. He dives into (pun unintended) why some characters are The Absolute Worst and writes fanfic of how they would be if they had a chance to be in a different circumstances. The Problematique fan, but only because people assume the worst of him. He’s actually pretty chill.
Feferi: Superfan, and Super Content Creator. Started making plushies and charms and eventually started selling them. Her stuff became a badge of honor and people posted themselves hugging their plushies during the gigapause.
Ancestors:
Too busy caught up in their personal turmoils to read any of it. Except the Condesce. She sent Hussie a diamond-studded Bad Dragon dildo.
Beforus trolls:
Damara: Big fan, but doesn’t express it because of the crowd she’s with. But she has a blog where she tries to get in touch with new readers and is always open to answer questions others might have. Not a Big Name fan, but she’s much more vocal online than in person, and even then it’s through an alt account.
Rufioh: Got people into it, but he himself didn’t finish reading after the Scratch. Said he would but he just never got to doing so.
Mituna: Prone to ranting when updates happened. Very emotionally invested, nearly died when Game Over happened.
Kankri: The nitpicker to end all nitpicks. He critiqued everything, and hated that there were hero mode, simplified and silly drawings. Genuinely disliked all characters for faults that he himself has, yet never self-examined. Got a following that  consisted three-quarters of people who made fun of his rants and one-quarter of people who were as intense as he is.
Meulin: Big, BIG fan. Prolific fanfic writer, if a character pairing exists, rarepair or not, she wrote a fic about them. Likes all characters and as such thinks she must devote roughly the same wordcount for everyone she can. Disappears for months then reemerges with twenty new fics.
Porrim: Moderate fan, great cosplayer. The more complex the outfit, the more she wanted to make it. Routinely goes out in Jade’s Dead Shuffle and Three in the Morning dresses because she is incredibly proud of them.
Latula: Not a big fan. Knows most of what she knows through cultural osmosis because her friends got into it, but she’s not likely to ever read it herself. Likes how into it her friends are though.
Aranea: Much like Jane’s Dad, she’s the walking encyclopedia, except she memorized the content of almost every page, and if she doubts her knowledge, will immediately go to her computer and look up what she is unsure of. Tries not to talk people’s ears off and will only talk about Homestuck when asked about it.
Horuss: Super into it. To a maybe creepy degree. Doesn’t show in public but if you get access to his secret blogs it’s more like character shrines. Don’t dig too deep into it.
Kurloz: Read it, kinda into it, but not that big of a fan. He will talk about it but he’s pretty lukewarm about the whole thing.
Cronus: Read it to impress a crush, got genuinely into it, but isn’t a vocal fan.
Meenah: Didn’t read it, much like Latula learned about it because everyone around her talked about it. Unlike Latula, she mocks everyone for liking something she says is “for nerds”. Still kinda wants to read it to be part of the conversation but her pride of Not Knowing About Homestuck is too great to overcome that hurdle.
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maluminspace · 5 years ago
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Genre: Smut
Pairings: Ashton Irwin/Calum Hood/Michael Clifford
Word Count: 5.7k
Requested: by @pxrxmoore
Laura pls ruin me with some Mashlum 😫😍 please can I request (students) Gryffindor Cashton and Hufflepuff Michael Mike pining from afar (that maybe leads to some smut) on a Hogsmeade trip? Thank you!! Love you 💛 
Includes: strong language, explicit sexual content
A/N:  Sorry this took a while! It required a lot of set up but I enjoyed it so much! I hope you enjoy this Beth, I love you too!
***
Their Gryffindor robes billowed in the autumn wind as they walked hand in hand along the path that led from the Hogwarts castle into Hogsmead. Michael couldn’t quite hear what they were saying from the distance he was at, but just the way that they were looking at each other made him want to cry. 
It felt like only yesterday that Calum had held his hand the way he was holding Ashton’s right now. They’d been excitable and reckless, acting on their attraction towards each other even though they were never really meant to be. Calum was popular Gryffindor with a promising quidditch career ahead of him. Michael was a Hufflepuff nerd that spent his weekends in the library or the greenhouses rather than at the quidditch pitch. The scathing glares from fellow students and their disapproving whispers had ultimately driven the boys apart. Michael had felt like he was holding Calum back and harming his reputation just being seen with him. 
Predictably, the Gryffindor beater had sought comfort from his team captain, the strong, beautiful seventh year chaser. It hadn’t taken long for Ashton to step quite comfortably into his role as Calum’s boyfriend all too soon after Michael had proudly held that title.
Ashton’s beautiful hazel eyes sparkled with the purest love imaginable as he giggled at whatever his boyfriend, had just said to him. The slightly younger boy was evidently just as besotted, it was obvious by the softness of his expression and the tender way he reached over to tuck a lock of Ashton’s brown hair behind his ear.
It was only when Calum caught sight of Michael watching, that the Hufflepuff realised he was staring at the couple. His cheeks blushed a deep pink as he hastily averted his gaze and quickened his pace. He hoped that he could lose himself in the crowd, knowing that the Gryffindors would attempt to strike up a conversation with him if they caught up with him.
Despite their history, Calum seemed to be making a huge effort to reconnect with Michael recently. The blonde boy couldn’t handle it, though. His heart ached too much to be near the boy that still held his heart, even though someone much more worthy than himself now held Calum’s.
It was for this reason that Michael felt it was easier to avoid Ashton and Calum entirely, than attempt to control his emotions when they’re close to him. Luckily, the crowd of excitable students making their way to Hogsmead, made the task of staying alone simple. Michael tried not to let the look of disappointment on the Gryffindors’ faces when they lost sight of him, make him feel too guilty. After all, they had each other, it was Michael who was alone and hurting.
It didn’t take too much longer to reach Hogsmead, which meant that Michael had to think fast about where he wanted to head. Once his fellow students started to filter off in different directions, it’d be harder for him to stay hidden. 
In an attempt to cheer himself up a little, Michael decided to head straight for Honeydukes. Most of his fellow students headed there last, not wanting to lug their giant bags of magical candy around for the rest of the day. The Hufflepuff wouldn’t have that problem. He fully intended to buy a bag of each of his favorite treats and devour most of them in his little hideaway in the  woods near the Shrieking Shack.
Michael weaved his way through the busy Saturday morning crowd on the main street with all the purpose of a boy on a mission, determined to quickly buy his sweets before hiding away for the rest of the day. It was a big relief when the front of Honeydukes came into view, the colourful window display instantly lifting the Hufflepuff’s mood. The faint smile on his face widened when he finally stumbled through the old wooden door of the sweetshop. The pleasant tinkling of the little bell signalling his arrival helped to melt away his bad mood a bit more as Michael breathed in the sugary smell he loved so much.
Just as the blonde boy had suspected, there were very few Hogwarts students here. Besides a group of excited third years (clearly on their first ever trip to Hogsmead), the shop was completely devoid of his fellow students. This put Michael’s mind at rest as he started to browse the shelves for his favourite treats. First of all, he picked up a bag of Pink Coconut Ice, before adding a Chocolate Cauldron, a bottle of Pumpkin Fizz and some Crystallised Pineapple to the growing stash of goodies. He got so lost in his mission to locate at least one packet of everything he loved, that he barely noticed the shop filling with more Hogwarts Students. Apparently, a light drizzle had started outside, driving more people into the shops when they’d otherwise still beadmiring the magical window displays of all the shops on the street.
 By the time Michael had worked his way around to the Chocoballs, his arms were so full of sweets that he was struggling to hold everything. Part of him wanted to take one of the delicious strawberry mousse and clotted cream filled treats, but they reminded him too much of Calum. How could he ever forget splitting one with the cheeky Gryffindor the night they got back to Hogwarts after their first date? It’d been well after curfew when they’d met in a quiet corner of the castle where none of their housemates or any of the nosy portraits could disturb them. Calum had licked a spot of strawberry moose from the end of Michael’s nose before kissing him hungrily. The rest of the chocoball was left forgotten on the little blanket Calum had laid out for them as they fooled around.
Michael’s cheeks heated as he remembered the feeling of Calum’s hands on his bare skin and the sounds the younger man had pulled form him as the two of them clumsily worked their bodies against each other until they ended up in a sticky, breathless mess on the cool tiled floor of the neglected corridor. 
The Hufflepuff shook his head as though that alone would clear the image of Calum staring at him lovingly, his handsome face bathed in soft moonlight as he held Michael close. Unsurprisingly, the memory stayed firmly in place and Michael’s heart started to break all over again, grieving the loss of his first real love for what felt like the millionth time.
“Can I help you dear?” The friendly cashier asked, pulling Michael back to reality.
“Just these, please.” He replied, sniffling slightly as he laid his purchases on the polished countertop.
The elderly lady at the till looked slightly taken aback at the sheer number of sweets Michael had gathered but she was nice enough not to call him out on it.
“I’m just getting an early start on my Christmas shopping.” He lied, hoping that he was convincing enough.
The cashier nodded, her smile brightening like she fully believed him. “Smart boy.” 
Once his transaction was complete, Michael headed back out onto the busy high street. He lingered briefly in the doorway of Honeydukes, taking a moment to wrap his Hufflepuff scarf tighter around his neck in a feeble attempt to protect him from the chilly wind and light rain.
He was unable to shake his glum mood that had descended on him again, as he began to make his way along the crowded street. It was hard not to feel bitter when he was surrounded by his giggling classmates, all of them seemingly care-free as they huddled around shop windows to appreciate the magical displays or darting off to take cover in Madame Poodifoot’s Tea Shop. It felt as though no one else could understand how he was feeling, which only strengthened Michael’s resolve to take refuge on the outskirts of the Town, away from the smiling faces and cheerful chatter.
It didn’t take him long to reach the little woods on the outskirts of the village. The Hufflepuff tried to let the pretty scenery around him cheer him up. The bright autumnal colours of the leaves filling the trees and lining the ground would usually make him smile. Today, though, the rich reds and golds filling the woods just made him think of Gryffindor and in turn brought Calum and Ashton to the forefront of his mind yet again.
Picking his way miserably through the woods, Michael finally decided to rest against a large oak tree that had a clear view of the Shrieking Shack. Even though it’d been revealed a long time ago that the building was used for Remus Lupin’s werewolf transformations once a month during his time at Hogwarts so long ago, the area surrounding it still had an eerie feeling to it. Maybe that was partly down to how quiet the area was and how unkempt the land around it had become since it hadn’t been used for decades.
As Michael opened his packet of Pink Coconut Ice, he found himself wondering if any ghosts had thought about taking up residence there now to enjoy their afterlife in peace. It may have seemed like a random and throwaway thought but at least it kept his mind off of his ex-boyfriend for a while.
Luckily, the shower of drizzle started to ease as Michael pulled his bottle of pumpkin fizz from the paper Honeydukes bag. The chilly wind persisted, though, tugging at Michael’s robes as he hugged his knees close to his chest, wishing more than anything that he had someone to cuddle with.
Before the Hufflepuff had finished his drink, Michael thought he heard voices somewhere behind him. He quickly told himself that it was likely to be some frisky couple hoping to find a solitary place away from the crowds to make out. The thought made him sad as he remembered doing just that with Calum. On their last Hogsmeade trip of their fifth year, just before the summer break. 
He didn’t really have time to get lost in his memories again as the voices got closer to him. Not wanting to unwittingly witness something he’d rather not, Michael downed the rest of his drink and packed everything into his paper bag, ready to head back to Hogsmeade’s High Street.
Just as the blonde boy scrabbled to his feet, he stopped, frozen in place by the sudden appearance of the last two people on earth that he wanted to see in this clearing, of all places.
“I thought we’d find you out here.” Calum smiled, his gaze soft as he stepped fully out of the trees. “We brought some of your favourite snacks, but I guess you already have that covered.” A tiny giggle escaped him as he gestured to the bag in Michaels arms.
“Why were you looking for me?” Michael asked, unable to keep a note of anger out of his voice. “I came up here to be alone.”
There was a moment of tense silence, during which Ashton wrapped an arm around Calum’s shoulders in a supportive gesture.
“We just need to talk with you, Mike.” The younger Gryffindor explained. “We’ve been trying to grab a moment with you ever since the start of term, but you’ve been avoiding us.”
Michael’s niggling spark of anger grew in his chest. “Can you blame me?” He demanded, his green eyes flashing as he stepped a little closer to the Gryffindors. “I spent all summer trying and failing to get over you whilst you were just working on getting under your quidditch captain!” The destain and hurt in Michael’s voice were undeniable as he dropped his gaze, unable to contain his tears for much longer.
“It wasn’t like that.” Calum replied, placing his own Honeydukes bag down on the ground next to a tree trunk. “I still love you, Mike.” He whispered, “I always will.”
The words were like daggers through Michael’s heart. How could Calum come and confess this to him, knowing that they couldn’t be together anymore? He glanced up, meeting Calum’s gaze again. “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? You have a new boyfriend now. Someone you’re not ashamed to be seen in public with, someone you can kiss on the quidditch pitch after your matches instead of in some dusty old deserted corridor in the dead of night.”
The youngest Gryffindor sighed sadly, his beautiful brown eyes shimmering with emotion as he reached out to take Michael’s hand. “I can’t explain everything to you if you won’t let me, angel.” He sniffed, a pleading note creeping into his melancholy tone.
“I don’t want you to explain!” Michael snapped. “I want you to leave me alone…” He wrenched his hand free of Calum’s before attempting to barge past them.
It was Ashton that stopped the Hufflepuff from storming off, letting go of Calum in order to block Michael’s path. “Please listen to what we have to say, you deserve to know the truth and once you do, well… you can do what you like with it.”
Feeling as though he could completely lose his temper at any moment, Michael dropped his Honeydukes bag to the ground and reached for his wand, gripping the smooth cherry wood tightly in the pocket of his robes. “I already know the truth! Calum left me so that he could have you instead! What else is there possibly to explain?”
Before the blonde boy could pull out his wand and do something he might regret, Calum stepped between him and Ashton, gently holding Michael’s gaze as he gripped his shoulders softly. “I never wanted to break up with you, Michael. We had a stupid fight and we were both too stubbourn to apologise and work through it. On the last day of term, you left the Gobstones set I bought for you outside of the Gryffindor common room and before I could try and make things better with you, you’d already left.”
”Well it worked out well for you.” Michael huffed, trying desperately not to cry. “Because now you have a successful new boyfriend.”
“Will you just listen to him, before I cast a silencing spell on you?” Ashton interjected, his tone undoubtedly irritated. “We both have something that we need to tell you and you’re making it a lot harder than it needs to be!”
Michael’s temper flared yet again, unable to see how he was the unreasonable one in this situation. “Harder? You know nothing about hard, Irwin!” He yelled, “You have no idea what it’s like to watch someone you love with another person that embodies everything you could ever wish to be yourself.”
Surprisingly, Ashton’s shoulders slumped as leaned against the nearest tree and dropped his gaze. “Actually, I do…” He confessed, “I had to watch you and Calum share meaningful glances across the Great Hall every night last year. Each time I saw Calum sneak out of the Gryffindor common room at night to come and meet with you, I’d go to bed wishing more than anything that I could be either one of you.”
Despite his anger, Michael felt confused. He was sure that he must have misheard the older boy. It was only Calum he’d wanted.
“That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you, angel.” Calum said softly. The familiar pet name almost melting Michael’s heart just as it used to when they were together. “Both Ashton and I love you. Part of how we bonded over the summer was talking about you. I never made a secret of how I still wanted to be with you and Ashton repaid my honesty by confessing that he loved us both equally.” 
“So what?” Michael sobbed, unable to hold back his tears anymore. “You think it’ll be easier for me to see you together, knowing that it could be me with either one of you? It feels more like you’re rubbing it in my face that you want each other more than me.”
Calum lifted one of his hands to wipe the tears from Michael’s cheeks. “You really don’t understand what we’re trying to say, do you?” He asked quietly, his brown eyes glistening softly. 
Shaking his head hopelessly, Michael allowed more tears to fall from his eyes, savouring the way the Calum’s soft fingers felt as he brushed each one away. He was slightly shocked when Ashton stepped behind Calum, wrapping his arms around the younger boy so that he reach past him to brush a lock of Michael’s blonde hair out of his face. “We want to ask you out, Michael.” The Gryffindor quidditch captain smiled gently. “We’ve been trying to ask you since the very first day of term, Calum and I never had any intention of dating each other without you. Unfortunately, you didn’t give us much of a choice and we got a bit caught up in our celebrations after winning the first game of the term against Ravenclaw. That was the first time we’d properly kissed.”
It took a moment for Ashton’s words to sink in. Michael couldn’t really believe that both of these amazing boys wanted him. “This must be some kind of joke?” He whispered, the rustling leaves overhead almost drowning out his voice.
“We’ve never been more serious about anything in our entire lives.” Ashton replied simply. It was easy to see why Calum had fallen so hard for the older boy. Ashton’s deep hazel eyes, handsome features and charming personality were so captivating that Michael felt as though he could easily fall in love with him.
Calum pressed his cool palm to Michael’s cheek, cradling his face softly. “I know it’s a lot to take in, you can take your time to answer.” He explained. “We just really wanted you to know that you have a place in this relationship.”
Michael’s head was spinning and he had more questions than he cared to admit. Part of him wanted to do the sensible thing and talk through every last detail, the reasons why it could be amazing, the reasons why it might not be such a good idea… As much as he wanted all of that, he craved something else more. Calum’s face was already so close and it was all too easy for Michael to close the gap between their lips.
It felt familiar and even more intoxicating than Michael remembered when Calum deepened the kiss, smoothly taking control because he knows that’s what they both want. The only difference between this kiss and the countless others that they’d shared, was that Michael found himself thinking of Ashton too. As Calum worked his tongue gently against Michael’s, the Hufflepuff found himself imagining how Ashton’s lips would feel on his neck. The thought pulled a gasp from him and he broke the kiss, stepping back to create some physical space between him and the other two boys.
The Gryffindors exchanged a glance, they looked nervous and a little surprised. Michael still wasn’t sure what he was feeling. It was almost as though he could feel every emotion imaginable all at once. He muttered an apology as he turned away, intending to pick up his Honeydukes bag and leave. 
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” Calum insisted.
Michael stepped closer to his paper bag full of treats but a strong hand gripped his shoulder to stop him in his tracks. “Please don’t go yet, Mikey.” Ashton pleaded, gently turning Michael around to face him. “This is a lot to take in and you must be pretty confused. I just wanted to say that I don’t have any unrealistic expectations, okay? I know that you and Calum have a history and you’re already in love with him. It’ll probably take a while before you even start to feel that strongly about me, so if you decide to give this a go, I’ll take it all at your pace, yeah?”
The Hufflepuff’s gut reaction was to grab Ashton’s face and kiss him the way he’d just kissed Calum. He somehow refrained, only allowing himself to get lost in Ashton’s pretty eyes for a second before voicing one of his biggest concerns. “How can someone like you want me as much as Calum?” He asked cautiously. “I mean you’re one of the hottest guys in school, a popular quidditch captain that most people would kill to be with.”
A soft smile curved Ashton’s lips as he raised a hand to stroke Michael’s blonde fringe out of his eyes again. The Hufflepuff shivered a little as the older boy’s fingertips grazed over the skin of his forehead. “And you’re one of the cutest and funniest people I’ve ever met. I know we’ve barely spoken before today, but I feel like I know you through Calum.”
Michael felt himself melt into Ashton’s hold. The older boy already felt safe and familiar, making it all too easy for Michael let his guard down. “I want to get to know you.” He confessed, his voice coming out breathy as Ashton tentatively moved his face a little closer. 
“We can all get to know each other better, sweetheart.” Ashton whispered, his gaze drifting down to Michael’s lips for a moment. “We can hang out together every night if you want to.” He stroked his thumb over Michael’s cheekbone. The gentle and comforting gesture along with the fond pet name, had Michael melting into a puddle. “We’ll do nothing but talk until you feel comfortable enough to do more.”
After being utterly alone for so long, Michael just craved the feeling of being loved and wanted. All of the formalities of a relationship would come in time, but right now there was only one thing that would prove to him that Ashton actually wanted him as much as he wanted Calum. “I don’t want words…” He admitted, nervously tangling his fingers in the front of Ashton’s robes. “Kiss me.”
The older boy glanced over at Calum as though asking permission to take this step so soon.
“Are you sure, angel?” Calum asked, stepping behind the Hufflepuff and placing his hands on Michael’s shoulders, like a silent display of support.
Michael nodded, allowing his eyes to drift closed as he leant back against Calum’s strong frame as Ashton wrapped his arms around both boys, keeping all of them close together.
A second later, Ashton’s soft lips grazed Michael’s. Despite his obvious physical strength, the Gryffindor chaser was so gentle, holding both of the sixth years tenderly as his lips moved slowly but firmly against Michael’s.
When they pulled apart for air, Michael opened his eyes to find Ashton staring at him almost hungrily. “You’re really beautiful, sweetheart.” The Gryffindor whispered before glancing up at Calum. “You too, baby.” He added, placing a soft kiss to the youngest boy’s lips over Michael’s shoulder.
There was something about the sweetness and sincerity of Ashton’s words and the intimacy of the kiss he found himself in the middle of that made Michael yearn for more. The three of them together just felt deeply right, like this is how it was always meant to be. He wrapped his arms around Ashton’s torso, resting his head against the older boy’s chest as the Gryffindors continued to kiss.
Presumably to make him feel more included, Calum placed his hands on Michael’s hips. His familiar grip coupled with the new intensity that Ashton brought to their dynamic, pulled a needy whimper from the Hufflepuff.
“You okay, angel?” Calum whispered. “Do you need us to back up a bit?”
“No!” Michael gasped, abandoning all hope of obeying his sensible side and stopping it all until they’ve talked more. “I want more, please don’t stop…”
As the one that knew both of the others best, Calum took it upon himself to be the one in control. He met Ashton’s gaze once again, silently checking that he was happy to hand over the dominant roll for now. When the oldest boy gave a shallow nod, Calum smiled, touching Ashton’s cheek gently. “Will you cast a silencing and invisibility charm around us, babe? Just in case anyone else ventures up here.”
Michael whined at the loss of contact as Ashton pulled away before pulling his long cedarwood wand from the pocket of his robes and setting about casting the charms that calum had asked him to on the immediate area surrounding them. “Don’t worry, angel.” Calum whispered soothingly. “He’ll be right back and we’ll take care of you then, okay?”
The Hufflepuff pressed back against Calum, craving the closeness he’d missed so much in the last few months. “I hated being without you, Cal.” He confessed, not caring how pathetic he might sound. 
“I missed you more than you’ll ever know, angel.” Calum replied, “but now you have two of us to look after you. Ash and I won’t ever let you go again, as long as that’s what you want.”
“Promise?” Michael asked, resting his head back on Calum’s shoulder. 
“I promise, gorgeous.” Calum confirmed, automatically loosening Michael’s scarf so that he could trail kisses down the blonde’s neck.
For a long moment, Michael allowed himself to get lost in the bliss of Calum’s soft kisses and firm hold, his eyes sliding shut once again.
“You two look so good.” Ashton growled as rejoined the sixth years near one of the large trees at the edge of the clearing. “I could devour both of you right here…”
Calum smirked into Michael’s neck as he gripped the blonde’s hips tightly to keep their bodies close. “I don’t think we have time for that right now, Ashy.” He said, “I think our angel needs a quick release, don’t you, Mikey?”
“Is that what you want, sweetheart?” Ashton enquired, quirking an eyebrow as he stepped back in front of the younger boys. 
Michael nodded frantically as he reached out blindly for the older boy. “Please, I want you both…”
Hushing the Hufflepuff gently, Ashton pressed himself close. The moment he felt Michael’s hardening cock against his thigh he groaned approvingly. “Already so needy for us, huh, beautiful?” 
“Wait until you really get him going.” Calum whispered, between kissing and nipping at Michael’s neck. “You won’t believe how hot he sounds.”
“I bet he’s the only one that sounds as good as you, baby” The oldest boy grinned before pressing a kiss to Michael’s lips. 
The Hufflepuff was so overwhelmed with pleasure, being sandwiched tightly between the two hottest guys at Hogwarts, that it took a moment for his brain to catch up with Ashton’s words. “How far have you gone together?” Michael asked, his voice breathy but soft. Surprisingly, the thought of Ashton and Calum together didn’t make him jealous at all anymore.
“Only about the same as what we did together, angel.” Calum answered. “Kissing, touching, grinding, I sucked him off once…”
“Fuck…” Michael moaned, loving the way that Ashton moved against him, which in turn pushed him harder against Calum. “I wanna see!”
Calum giggled in the Hufflepuff’s ear. “Can we focus on you for now?” He asked, moving one of his hands to Ashton’s hips whilst keeping the ther firmly on Michael’s as he started to establish a coherent rhythm.
Five minutes ago, Michael would have sworn that he’d never feel as good with anyone else as he did with Calum. Ashton was quickly proving him wrong now. The oldest boy was already proving that he was a master of perception. Every time Michael let out a gasp or moan, Ashton would instantly repeat what he’d done to cause it.
“Answer my question, beautiful…” Calum prompted, his breath ghosting over the sensitive skin of Michale’s neck. “We want to make you feel good, but you have to use your words for us, yeah?”
“I just want you both.” Michael repeated, his brain felt to cloudy with lust to think of anything else to say. 
Seemingly recognising that Michael was having trouble voicing his needs. Ashton slipped one of his hands inside the younger boy’s robes, sliding his palm over the warm skin of Michael’s waist. The skin-to-skin contact made Michael gasp, his hips jerking instinctively towards Ashton, temporarily messing up the rhythm that Calum was trying to maintain. 
“Just tell us what feels good and tell us to stop if you don’t like something or it gets too much for you, okay?” Ashton asked gently. “Today is all about you… We owe you a lot of love and attention but we only want to give it to you in ways that you’ll enjoy.”
Michael understood but he didn’t want to talk, He just wanted to feel as close to both of the Gryffindors as possible. It didn’t really matter that the three of them weren’t even properly official yet. The main thing was that Ashton and Calum wanted Michael and apparently had done for a long time. He was just determined to enjoy that. “Okay…” The blonde whispered, “I’ll tell you if I need to stop.”
“That’s our good boy…” Calum grinned, deliberately thrusting harder against Michael so that the Hufflepuff could feel the effect he was having. “Do you want to show Ash how beautiful you look when you come apart for me?”
Michael nodded, grinding back against the slightly younger boy. “I want you both to cum with me, though, please…”
“Then keep making those little noises, sweetheart.” Ashton urged, gripping the younger boy’s waist a little more firmly beneath his robes. “Do you want to feel what you’re doing to me?”
“Yes.” Michael replied, his voice breaking on a whine as Calum once again rubbed his hard cock against the hufflepuff’s ass.
Ashton carefully led one of Michael’s hands to his own clothed erection, groaning as the blonde palmed him lightly through his trousers. “You feel big, Ash..” Michael gasped. 
“He is.” Calum confirmed, his growing need for a release causing him to speed up the rhythm he’d been keeping between the three of them. “Wait ‘til you see it, angel”
Whining needily, Michael gripped Ashton tighter. “When will you show me?” He asked, hoping that the question would lead into a bit of dirty talk. 
The Gryffindors seemed to pick up Michael’s expectations instantly. “When we’re all alone in the comfort of the castle.” Ashton replied, panting a little against Michael’s lips now. “Calum told me about the disused corridor you used to use. We can take some blankets and cushions up there and I know a few spells to make it more private and cozy.”
“Then you can see as much of us as you like.” Calum promised. “We can try everything you’ve ever thought about… the possibilities are infinite, especially now that there’s three of us.”
“Will you touch me, Cal?” Mihcael whined, his breath catching in his throat as Ashton twitched in his hand. 
“Of course, angel, I’ll do whatever you want me to do to you…”
Michael shook his head, “I mean now… please Calum!” He begged, needing that extra bit of attention on his painfully hard dick.
Fumbling to work his hand between Michael’s and Ashton’s bodies, Calum wriggled his hand through the tight space until he could wrap his fingers around the Hufflepuff, pulling a desperate whimper from him. 
“Why don’t you touch him too, Mike?” Ashton asked, grinding into Michael’s hand harder and faster with every passing second. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, baby?” He questioned the youngest boy.
“Yes!” Calum exclaimed, guiding Michael’s clumsy hand to where he needed it most.
With a hand on each of the other boys’ waists, Ashton took over guiding their bodies, simultaneously providing the skin-to-skin contact that helped move all three of that much closer to their orgasms.
Calum was every bit of skilful as Michael remembered, working his palm over the younger boy in a firm but gentle manner, just like he used to. The main difference between then and now, was obviously the addition of Ashton and he was a more than welcome one. It was already  obvious to Michael that the three of them worked well together and he couldn’t quite believe just how amazing it felt to have two people against him as opposed to just one.
Judging by the sounds escaping the Gryffindors, Michael wasn’t the only one finding this new dynamic intoxicating. Both Ashton and Calum were gasping and their movements became clumsier and more erratic, a clear sign that they were as close as he was.
“Fuck, you’re both so hot.” Ashton exclaimed, grinding into Michael’s hand with a new desperation. “I can’t hold on much longer.”
“Then don’t.” Calum gasped, “We should all let go together, if you’re ready too, angel?”
Michael nodded frantically. “I am...” The words had barely left his mouth before he came apart in Calum’s hand. The Gryffindors were less than a second behind him and their moans of his name and each other’s sounded like the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard.
Ashton held the two younger boys softly as all three of them slowly came down from their highs. The sound of their gasping breaths filled the clearing, drowning out the rustling of the leaves in overhead and on the ground at their feet.
“You were right Calum…” Ashton chuckled after a moment. “He does look beautiful when he cums.” His hazel eyes were softer than ever as he looked between the two boys. “You both are. There’s nothing cuter than the two of you, leaning against each other with flushed cheeks and jizzy trousers.”
A shocked laugh burst from Calum as Michael felt his cheeks heat up more with embarrassment. “Ignore him, angel.” The beater grinned as he pulled out his wand from the pocket of his robes. “There’s one thing you’ll learn very quickly about Ashton; he’s a sap with a dumb sense of humour.”
Ashton nodded in agreement, stepping back to allow Calum to clean his trousers. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, sweetheart. I meant what I said about you being beautiful. I guess I’m still a little nervous to say it to your face.”
“Nervous?” Michael giggled, “You just came in my hand… I don’t think you need to get jittery about calling me beautiful...” 
Tag list: @clffrd​ @byxthexway​ @afuckingunicornn​ @painkillerash​ @thrillchaser @moonchildsblack​ @calumbbyyy​ @h0tsos​ @valentinelrh​ @sexgodashton​ @megz1985​ @myfalsedevotion​ @aulxna​ @honeyedlashton​ @tea4sykes​ @ghostofmashton​ @fairyintheglass​ @cashworthy​ @cashtonasfuck​ @opheliaaurora23​ @5sosnsfw​ @theagenderwhocriedwolf​ @myloverboyash​ @easiercake​ @irwinkitten​ @cxddlyash​
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hey-hamlet · 6 years ago
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BNHA AU Ideas: Child of Fate (Parts 1 and 2)
Also on AO3!
TL;DR:
Chosen by the Fates for his many monumental futures, Izuku is gifted a 'quirk' at the age of 5. The ability to see and influence the strings of fate.
He will become a Hero.
But fate does not smile upon a hero any more than it smiles upon a worm.
basically, the 3 fates from norse myths are still kicking
w all the crazy shit that's gone on since the rise of quirks, fates are constantly getting harder and harder to predict or manipulate so they are kinda out of a job
so they say "fuck it, lets throw our hat in the ring" and decide to pick a "champion" of sorts
out of everyone, there is one child that sticks out a lot. he's plain-looking, but every future he's in is incredible. he's not always a good person, but he always brings about change of some sort, for reasons he believes are good ones
and they look at this child with his shining fate and think "this one"
bc the fates know what it's like to be jerked around by the universe, they ask him
"this is a deal we've done before, but we'll give more to you. trade us an eye and our powers will be yours to wield as your quirk, all we ask is that you live up to your fate"
they do the deal, the 4-year-old izuku gives up the sight of one of his eyes for the power of the fates
the quirk is registered as "all the odds" aka: he can see the odds of a certain thing happening
but that's not his quirk. he can see the strings of fate, follow them to see the different future outcomes, or pull at them, making some options more likely than others
the only person he tells the full details of his quirk to is Katsuki, bc the fates tell him he literally always tells Katsuki in the end, and it'll "save a lot of trouble", not that he knows that 
Katsuki is very excited to know he becomes a top hero, but he makes Izuku promise that he won't change his future bc he wants to make it there alone
also, the major downside of izukus quirk? he can't see his own fate
and the futures he sees are only as complete as the information he has
ie, he could witness kamino ward, but the future wouldn't show afo or mini might beyond a vague blob
anyway izuku gets teased for his lame quirk for a bit, then stops bc everyone who teases him gets weirdly bad luck
its the fates, they love their baby champion and he said no killing people
but people who are good to him get good luck, so he's got the nickname cat, for black cat and lucky cat!
anyway, episode one kinda happens normalishhh, but he doesn't ask if he can be a hero, because he's going to be a hero, he doesn't care what anyone says, he will be
but when he sees all mights strings of fact he gets a really weird look at them, because something unnatural is holding one of them above the others. so he asks "who tried to seal your fate?" bc he has no brain to mouth filter
and all might, understandably, is confused by this tiny boy asking him a very very weird question
he doesn't even get a chance to go tiny before izuku does dead pale, and whispers "shit" allmight poofs tiny, izuku looks at him, yells "I WONT SAY ANYTHING" and running jumps off the roof. all might coughs up a lung but the kid was 'lucky' and stuck the landing
basically, w the appearance of the sludge villain, the weird fate he saw for katsuki that morning suddenly made a whole lot more sense
the fates guide him to katsuki as fast as they can, he arrives there just before allmight
anyway izuku is calling out for katsuki and lays eyes on someone in the sludge, he doesnt see who it is, he doesnt see their fate. he sees that flash of a hand reaching out for help and he's already leapt over the barrier
he grabs a bit of rubble from the ground and throws it at the villain's eyes, nails him right in the fucking eye, gets katsuki half out. but the villain is baring down again and its all izuku can do to try to keep katsuki's mouth free
allmight saves them
anyway, when izuku is walking home all might pops out of fucking nowhere and gives izuku a heart attack
"I SAID I WONT TELL ANYONE PLEASE DONT HURT ME MR ALL MIGHT SIR"
"KID NO WAIT"
does the: you are so stupidly heroic, do you want to be a hero?, izuku says: i sure fucking do
“whats ur quirk”
"oh funny that its,,, its a little weird."
"oh?"
"i can,,,, see and influence the strings of fate"
"oH THATS WHY YOU SAID THAT WEIRD THING"
"wait yoU JUST THoUghT I wAs CRAZY?"
",,,,, people say weird things around me ok"
anyway all might basically says "ur crazy, your quirk is cool, take one for all."
and izuku says "OK YEAH"
all might asks a little how izuku was going to get into the hero course and he just pauses
"you know i was wondering about that but the fates told me id be fine." they both pause, staring at each other "wait,,, did they,,," "the fates totally knew huh"
anyway he eye glow when he use the fates quirk
all might sees izuku and he's like,,,, its baby nighteye
he honestly, for a hot minute, thinks nighteye might be izukus dad
bc like; green hair, gold eyes (well, eye), smart, analytic? thats nighteye baby
all might asks lowkey like "oh you don't talk much ab ur dad huh?" and izuku explains he doesn't know the guy. all might mentally tells off nighteye for having a child and ditching the mother
todoroki’s question literally is "are you all might and nighteye's illegitimate love child"
and izuku, who has no filter, blinks and responds with
"who said i was illegitimate"
anyway, back to the training
izuku who has been training to be a hero forever is pretty damn fit for a kid, but hes not one for all fit
anyway katsuki is like "izuku why are u following an old man around is he a pedo, and izuku wheezes like "NO OH MY GOD KASTUKI NO" and he explains like,,, a little of it
"like so i might have a strength quirk now too"
"izuku what the fuck why are you so op"
"im sorry katsuki im just better than you l m a o"
"COME HERE U LITTLE S H I T E"
so a brief overview of his quirk:
he gave an eye to use it so one of his eyes is just like,,, white. the whole thing is white. bc,,, its not really a quirk lmao,,,
anyway: he can view the future as much as he wants, it just takes some time, if he wants to take a quick look he doesn't need to stop paying attention, but its two slow and branching to be used like nighteye's in a fight (think like doctor strange in infinity war)
unlike nighteye, he has a third-person view of the events in question, and has,, some sounds? not many. mostly like breaking shit or oneliners he's heard before
changing the future, however, is more difficult by a long way
viewing the future has no real cost other than the fact he's not paying total attention at the time
changing the future, however, causes pain
nerve pain proportional to the change. little things, like flipping a coin heads? to make it more likely, its like a prick of the finger. to make it a 100% chance its like badly stubbing your toe. to change something big, like to move where a blow hits, feels like your arms have been plunged into burning oil. to change something massive, like, to stop something that was almost certain to happen, can cause enough pain to not only render him unconscious but can cause nerve damage leaving him with chronic pain/numbness/lack of function
the pain is normally in his arms bc its izuku and he break he arm
anyway! bc he was fitter and caught a glimpse of gran yelling at him about something called full cowl in the future + he cleaned the beach faster, he has like 2% full cowl for the entrance exam and had the quirk 2 months beforehand
katsuki avoids izuku for the day literally bc he doesn't want izuku to know if he passed before he did. which,,, is fair. he does explain this too so there isn't any random angst, izuku is just nervous
(oh also he can see the fate of someone he's looking at, he can change the fate of an event he's already seen to a different option he's already seen)
so we get the ochako bit, plus a bit of comedy bc katsuki is in a fucking beanie and sunglasses so izuku doesnt recognise him
he totally does but he doesn't say anything bc he's trying real hard
so izuku is kicking some ass in the exam and the bAMN 0 pointer like a fucking b a s t a r d hes like "what's the chances of this thing just like,,, breaking" and unfortunately they are v e r y low
so he is like "well i guess it's punchy time"
but before he gets there he sees a piece of rubble about to hit ochako. and he sees there isn't a small chance of it crushing her leg, so he changes the odds of that and gets a lovely few seconds of burning pain for his trouble
(he’s,,, pretty used to it by now so the boy has a scary pain tolerance)
bc he doesn't want to break his poor arms he jumps up the sides of the robot and tears out some wiring in the back and they start to fall
and he's like "oh shit the chance of my getting hurt is pretty high huh i should change that too" and ochako saves him with her quirk
and then he has a bit of a horrifying realisation while he's trying not to cry from pain
because
his quirk never changed the actions of other people before. ofa made it stronger
but, as he is now understanding, that hurts like a motherfucker, and his not-eye burns too and boy that's really unpleasant
this is another au where shinsou gets in on rescue points from saving katsukis ass + using him to save someone else
katsuki is a little salty but hes like "yeah tbh i really wouldn't have saved them alone, its fine" and then forces him to meet izuku bc hes still a total quirk nerd
izuku drags them + ochako out for ramen bc hes celebrating. shinsou is like "its a little early to celebrate getting in" and izuku just turns looking a lil confused "no im celebrating surviving the exam"
ok so, first day its wild
izuku's quirk is listed as "lucky punch" aka he can see odds and he's strong and no he doesn't know why stop looking at him like that
izuku and katsuki walked to school together bc they are baby and secretly nervous
izuku doesnt really look at katsuki's future all that often bc he doesn't like it, no real deal w izukus quirk he just wants to be successful by himself. so izuku, who can't look into his own future, has no idea how this day is going to go
they rock up to class, get inside and aizawa shows up, izuku has a brief heart attack, the quirk assessment starts. this time aizawa doesnt even have like a problem w izuku he's just trying to prove a point ab them being little baby heroes and sucking ass and izuku looked nice enough not to be mad about it for the rest of the year
so aizawa erases his quirk which, fair and izuku is confused and trying to use it
both of them
but
erasure didn't touch the fate quirk
so when he turns to look at aizawa he gets a face full of the USJ incident and he goes dead pale. aizawa is a touch confused but continues his whole thing, gives izuku his quirk back. he's still shaking. he throws the ball, it goes,,, less than it could have but far enough to be impressive
izuku stands next to katsuki shaking while they wait for the test to end. shinsou and uraraka are kinda distressed and all 3 of them are angry at aizawa even if they have no idea why. izuku bolts from the field right after and throws up in the bathrooms, followed by a quick panic attack. he was so freaked he was using ofa to get there so now uraraka, katsuki and shinsou are trying to find the boy
and aizawa is faintly confused
shinsou finds him first, shaking and sick in the bathroom. he grabs shinsou by the arm and says "staffroom, now." shinsou, who really doesn't know what's going on but is 100% shook, takes him there. he basically has to half carry izuku there bc he can't support himself
they get there and izuku knocks saying "i need to speak to yagi-san, now." and he sounds so scared and the whole office jumps bc why does a kid know allmights name, and all might jumps bc what happened to his boy
so he rushes out, grabs izuku and hurries him into a private office aizawa gives shinsou a look and shinsou just glares at him lmao bc its his fault izuku is like this. even though,, he's not really sure how
anyway, through sobs, izuku explains what he saw
and all might feels sick bc his boy didn't need to see all of that horrific violence, see his teachers torn to shreds and crushed to bits while the other students watch on helplessly
nezu doesn't know the extent of izukus quirk, mostly just because they didn't think ab telling him. they tell him now
aizawa is brought in to see smallmight trying to comfort his poor shaking student, who looks up and him and flinches and aizawa is like "ok guys the fuck did i do" nezu explains and then aizawa feels like a right dick to be honest, not that it was really anyone's fault
then the horrifying implications of "villains inside UA" sinks in and he's suddenly very on edge. now, izukus quirk isn't 100%. he had such a brief look at the vision he doesn't even know how likely it is. and while he offers to take a better look, its clear he really, really doesn't want to, so they all basically say
"right. so. we should probably be pretty careful tomorrow, huh?"
so when the usj attack starts, they have all might with his full 3 hours, mic, aizawa, and 13, w other heroes on standby, they hope, hope, that this wasn't very likely
but
they were wrong.
they were basically praying that the villains wouldn't make it into the usj
they've already altered the fate izuku saw by bringing allmight from the start, and present mic
but its not enough
the villains arrive and shigiraki is angry from the beginning, two unlisted teachers are waiting for them. shigiraki is childish but he's not stupid. he looks at the only child truly rattled, already protecting his friends, and he thinks he's found the cheater
they may not know the children's quirks, but present mic? 13? they know those quirks very well. mic is warped to the ruin zone, too unstable to freely use his quirk. kurogiri sends bakugo, kirishima and jirou after him
All Might is warped right to the nomu, kurogiri and shigiraki on standby for support. 13 has been taken out, aizawa is fighting through the villains to get to the nomu, to maybe offer some support to all might. he doesn't go after mic. he has to believe mic can handle himself or he'll break down where he stands.
izuku is warped to the shipwreck zone. alone. from a quick look at the future, the fates for anyone warped with him were grizly. he is confident in his choice to stop anyone from warping with him. he's ignoring the steadily climbing number of futures where he alone meets a terrible end
he's missing so much information on the villains every future he sees is hazy at best. all he knows is that if he doesn't get off this boat, aizawa gets hurt and that's not something he can abide
he busts the fuel tanks, letting the flammable liquid float across the water. he drops a match. in the chaos, he uses as much of ofa as he dares to jump to the shore. he steadfastly ignores the smell of burning meat.
he is one the opposite shoreline to canon, approaching the fight from the side, rather than the front. aizawa is hurt, battered from various villains, bleeding sluggishly from a headwound. he looks dazed
4 of shigiraki's fingers are wrapped around his neck
all might is at a standstill. if he strikes against the nomu, shigiraki will put his thumb down. he stands there and takes blow after blow, smile long gone from his face
izuku looks at the strings of Aizawa's fate. so many end here in so many ways.
he pushes his quirk into getting shigiraki away from his teacher. without direction, he's just baring against his quirk, begging it to give him a chance.
it does.
the bright flash of an explosive blonde draws the eyes of kurogiri and shigiraki. he uses the moment of distraction to launch towards his teacher, yanking him from shigiraki's hand. he loses a large chunk of skin for his trouble
all might defeats the nomu, but hes not looking good
bakugo, a limping mic, dazed aizawa, battered all might and bleeding izuku are the last stand, all praying the other students are ok.
iida did not escape
they have no backup coming.
shigiraki is fuming, but kurogiri can see the heroes are flagging. izuku is putting his all into his quirk, trying to give them all a lucky break
for the second time, it comes through
the rest of the students run towards them, joining them shoulder to shoulder. all of them are scared, some are hurt, but none of them are going to lay down and let shigiraki win. the villains escape
izuku falls
damages:
aizawa has a concussion + post-concussion syndrome. he has chronic migraines for the next year, and trouble with his long term memory for a few months
izuku is suffering from massive quirk overuse, his hands don't feel 'right' again for weeks
all might has lost only 20 minutes, but it's time he'd rather have
mic broke an ankle, but it's quickly fixed. Still, it aches from time to time
the other students had mild cuts/bruises and were left shaken
aizawa cries that night. a mix of the head injury, his hurt students, the look of fear he saw in their eyes. he holds mic and he sobs
izuku and his mother had a real relationship breakdown when she tore down his dream, even when izuku got a 'quirk' it never recovered. they don't talk. he doesn't tell her what happened. she doesn't find out.
izuku wanders the city the next day, unwilling to explain why he had no school today. he runs into mic who takes one look at this shaken student, outside and unprotected, and basically kidnaps the guy
izuku is forcibly dragged to the place mic/shinsou/aizawa share
when shinsou and aizawa find out izuku's mother basically just sent him off to school, not taking a day off work? they go full protective mode. shinsou wraps him up in the biggest blanket they own, grabs his own and forces izuku to play videogames with him on the couch. aizawa fumes in the kitchen over a cup of hot chocolate, mic fumes with him honestly
so, izukus kinda a mess, never tells his mother anything, etc, aizawa kidnapped him and he and shinsou played video games. izuku didn't go home that night, he just hopped on a train and rode it until it was time to go to UA
so when they get back everyone is just glad so see izuku alive tbh
so, sports festival! its a lot like canon
izuku doesn't use his fate quirk to change the future, but he does look at the possible futures and he sees that iida never makes it to the podium. he thinks for a second and makes a horrible realisation
the hero killer is in hosu
iida's brother is in hosu
iida’s brother is a hero
just before the event starts he finds aizawa and he's pale already
he gets out 'i need to see allmight' and aizawa gets a horrible feeling because last time this kid was worried they all almost died, so they run to find all might. seeing aizawa run around with a concerned look on his face? the stuff of nightmares at UA. everyone practically dives out of their way
izuku tells all might who swears a blue streak and pulls some strings to get extra heroes in hosu. izuku doesn't breathe a word to iida, because he just can't. not only does iida not know about the fate quirk, he can't scare him like that
bakugo knows something is wrong, but izuku won't breathe a word so he lets it lie
anyway, todoroki does his lil speech and izuku is honestly too burnt out to be intimidated, he sees his own death daily during just casual use of his quirk. boi ain't scared of much. bakugo gets pissy bc "FUCK YOU HALF AND HALF THAT'S MY RIVAL" and basically all of 1A is trying to claim izuku as their rival, either out of admiration or the desire to annoy bakugo
so izuku has to give the speech. which he's not happy ab because p e o p l e
and also because well,,, he's got no one at home to watch him
his speech basically goes along the lines of "we are here to fight fate. the odds are against us but we will win no matter what. not because it's easy, but because we have to. no matter what course we are in, we are all at this school fighting for a better future, for ourselves, our loved ones and the world. it doesn't matter if the odds aren't in your favour - the chance of any of us being here to see this moment is so small it may as well be impossible. its nothing to beat those odds again."
and everyone is like "owo how inspirational" but like anyone who knows him sees,,, layers
aizawa sees the bitterness about the USJ
all might sees izuku reducing his fight to be a hero as a quirk of fate, reducing his own involvement to 'it could have happened to anyone' when thats not true, because he is special
katsuki sees the bitterness that even though he had a good quirk, people tried to grind him into dust because he couldn't talk about it.
if inko was watching, she'd see how badly she betrayed her son
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tera-91 · 5 years ago
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Into the Woods
Prequel to Strangers 
Summary: Patton is attacked and loses his memory
Pairing: Moxiety if you turn it sideways
Warnings: Woods, Night, Fear, Animal Attack
Word Count: 1294
Patton’s side burned.
His lungs stung.
His legs were screaming at him.
He wasn’t going to stop.
No, he couldn’t stop running. 
He knew that if he stopped, he would probably die. If he had the extra breath, he would curse under it. He jumped over a fallen tree but didn’t realize that the ground on the other side was downhill. It took him far too long to touch the ground, he wasn’t expecting it and his ankle rolled upon contact.
He held hack a scream as he fell and tumbled a few feet. He didn’t want it to find him. Pain radiated up his leg as he scrambled across the leaf littered ground. He pressed himself up against the closest tree. He could feel the bark biting into his back through his hoody. He covered his mouth with the mud-covered sleeves to ensure it wouldn’t be able to hear him. He couldn’t bring himself to care, to even notice as he tried to hold back the tears from forming in his eyes. He almost couldn’t hear anything over his pounding heart.
Then he heard it. The sound of something moving through the undergrowth and dead leaves. He didn’t think it was that close behind him. He should have never listened to Russell or his brother. He just wanted to belong and now he was about to be eaten. He could hear its heavy breathing coming closer. He glanced around to see if there was anywhere that he could possibly hide. Anything that he could use as a weapon. Not that much could stop those razor-sharp claws he thought as he free hand carefully reached down to his side to feel the sliced fabric. Luckily, he wore one of Virgil’s hoodies, even though it was a couple of sizes too big to fight off the chilly night air, and the claws hadn’t caught his side but instead snagged the worn fabric.
He held his breath as he heard something big approach where he was. Every nerve in his body screamed for him to move, to run, to hide, something. He was frozen. He knew that if he moved, if he breathed. It would know where he was.
Patton practically felt his own heart stop when the face of the creature that had been chasing him came into view. The giant cat’s eyes glowed in the dark, the large teeth drew his attention. It had seen him he just knew it. It looked ready to lunge at him when something even bigger attacked it.
He watched in slight relief, also in paralyzing horror, as two fought. The sounds shook him to the core. For a few moments all he could do was watch. In the low light something caught his eye. The wolf? At least Patton thought it was a large, some kind of canine. On its side was side was a rather large patch of white fur. Patton turned his head trying to get a better look at it. He must be seeing things because the white fur looked identical in shape to Virgil’s scar.
Patton was pulled out of his trance by a menacing sounding yowl from the cat. The wolf had grabbed it by the nape of its neck and swung it around into a tree. Patton must have been hearing things because he would have sworn he could hear the word run as the wolf released a growl as the cat made its way back onto its feet.
Patton scrambled to his feet as the two continued to fight and ran as fast as he could. The darkness made it difficult to see the roots. He stumbled a few time but he kept running, fear crept up his spine. What if the wolf only attacked the cat because it was in his territory and the cat ran off and was now chasing him? Or what if the cat ran off and the wolf would decide it wanted to kill him and eat him?
Patton’s heart pounded in his chest as he jumped over a, hopefully shallow, ravine down to a river. He could just barely hear the running water over the blood rushing through his ears. As he landed he rolled. He laid there as he tried to catch his breath. Where was he? He didn’t even know how to get back to the city, back to the safety of his and Virgil’s apartment. Tears welled up in his eyes. Was he ever going to see Virgil again?
A branch snapped. He froze. Something was there. He was afraid to look. He slowly lifted his head. The glowing mismatched amber and gold eyes of the cat stared back at him. Patton could’ve sworn his heart stopped in that moment.
Another branch snapped. Patton hesitated but looked slightly to the left. The wolf. While the wolf stared at the cat Patton could see its eyes. It’s glowing eyes also mismatched and glowing. Purple and green? Patton shook his head, he must’ve hit it at some point and he was hallucinating. His eyes shot back to the cat. Its exposed fangs stark white against its mottled black fur even in the dark. He almost didn’t notice the cat edge closer to him.
Patton glanced between the two. Each time he looked back at the cat he noticed it had moved closer to him, not much but enough for him to notice. The wolf too, each time closer to the cat. The wolf wouldn’t make it to the cat if the cat tried to pounce on him. He wouldn’t be fast enough. His muscles tightened he had to do something or he would get caught by those razor sharp claws.
There was only one way he would survive. To get a chance to see Virgil again. Even then he might not make it. Patton’s hand slowly closed, grabbing as much gravel in his grip as he could. There was no going back now.
Patton pushed off the ground and leaped towards the ravine, and thus the cat. The cat, as Patton thought, jumped towards him too. Claws unsheathed, ready for a second attempt to grab him. Patton threw the gravel in the direction of the cat’s face. It was enough of a distraction that Patton was able to slip under the cat’s lithe body as the creature let out a blood chilling yowl.
The ground disappeared from underneath him as he began to fall into the ravine. The fall was further than he than he predicted. He was not prepared for the tumble he took. Pain shot through him. First his shoulder then the side of his head. On the way down Patton could almost have sworn he heard his name. Was that Virgil’s voice? No it couldn’t be.
The lukewarm water of the spring surrounded him. His clothes tried to weigh him down, his shoulder screamed at him as he fought against the water to get air. He blacked out.
Light filtered through the trees. Patton opened his baby blue eyes. Where was he? He could hear voices, laughing. Children? He stood up and walked to the sound. Just on the other side of the bushes was a park. He watched as a group of children played ball. That looked fun. He watched as a kid missed the ball and it rolled towards him. He gently picked up the blue ball. He stared at it for just a moment before the kid that ran after it reached him.
“Hi I’m Sammy! Wanna play with us?” The child asked Patton gently shook his head as he handed it to the kid. “Are you sure um?” The kid was asking for his name. He shook his head again and walked away.
What is my name?
@tinkslittlebelle  @teacupfulofstarshine @random-name-here @kindly-falling @xx-fandom-potato-xx @sylveon-lover-crazyfangirl1415 @sandersfander1820 @downrightdanny @i-do-not-dislike-fudge @not-so-innocent-bi-sander @princeanxious @sammys-ghostz @nope-not-more @moltengoldenstardust
@coolerthan-a-vintagecassette @j-d-lightful @could-always-be-gayer-2 @altruistic-skittles @c4t1l1n4 @dutifullystrangequeerdom @i-read-by-lamp @thatcacidork @bigfirecreator @badluckkaren @eternal-optimists-world
@ironwoman359
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jypsyvloggin · 3 months ago
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How to get the Future Billionaire Filter on TikTok?
Future Billionaire Filter on TikTok The Future Billionaire V2 filter by @panda.games_effects is one of those low-key gems gaining traction with over 874 videos and counting. This filter taps into everyone’s favorite “what if” question: When will I become a billionaire? How It Works This filter isn’t your basic prediction spinner. The challenge? You have to slide a virtual gold coin through a…
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cocomere · 3 years ago
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NO BUT GENUINELY, THIS IS WHY SOME ITERATIONS OF CANON CHARACTERS I WRITE SHOW UP SO OFTEN.
This got long, as is usual for me lmao
If you don't care about my writing, specifically, then you can just ignore this.
Okay, to backtrack a second-- I come from a background of rp. I did that shit for fifteen years, technically. (I'm choosing to gloss over the gaps where I didn't have a buddy for various reasons-- I started fifteen years ago is probably a better way to phrase it.)
I wrote exclusively OCs for that entire time. I wrote OCs in an original setting, played against other OCs. Most of those characters, for both me and the person I wrote with for eight years (again, counting times where we couldn't write), were vampires, gods, or something along similar lines.
Old as fuck, to put it bluntly.
And my weird brain, in the way it sometimes latches onto things, made me decide at some point that the very old vampires (and/or gods) weren't being written Good Enough if they used contractions.
It's too informal. It doesn't fit their vibe.
So I got used to filtering my thoughts into not just character thoughts, but making those thoughts fit the speech patterns of whoever I was writing.
I specifically wrote mostly in rapid fire back and forth. That would be where where I and my buddy would be sitting in as the other wrote responses (anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and half or so) for multiple passes back and forth. In real time.
Like, we did other stuff, ofc. We weren't sitting twiddling our thumbs. But the real time element made me really good at being able to snap into a character's "voice" quickly. It also made me good at writing fast.
But, one very long tangent I got rid of later, that brings me back to character voices.
cc!Tommy has very distinctive speech patterns/quirks. c!Tommy, because he's, y'know, played by cc!Tommy who doesn't do much alteration of the way he speaks, shares most of those.
It took me some time to get used to writing the quirks of it (and also writing solo stuff but that's tangential to the subject at hand), but if I gave a random snippet of dialogue from Theo or Aver you would most likely be able to tell that they're based on c!Tommy.
In part, this is because the lore playlist I binged had a moderate amount of Ranboo VODs, a handful of clips from various streams, and an unholy amount of Tommy VODs. Full ones. Uncut. Literally, at least 80% of the playlist was JUST Tommy VODs.
I binged from before the revolution to the burger van in like, two months tops. cc!Tommy grew on me, not unlike a fungus. And c!Tommy sort of cemented himself in my brain.
The reason why Daz/Blood & Gold's Tommy and Aster are notable for their speech patterns is because I deliberately break away from how cc!Tommy speaks.
I don't know how well I could portray similar characters but with a different starting character.
Other characters are a LOT harder to mentally zero in on. I still don't know if my c!Dream (and derivatives) voice is quite right. This is despite him being my favorite.
Sure part of that is that DayDream speaks with a bit of a Tommy...inflection? I guess?
He curses a lot more readily than c!Dream would, basically.
And other characters can be a mystery to me. c!Tubbo? I can occasionally sorta hear it if I try really hard, but mostly I'm floundering and hoping at least SOME of it lands where I want it to. c!Ranboo can be hit or miss, but some things I can hear crystal clear.
Vio? Vio doesn't fucking count, he's basically a c!Purpled-themed OC. I saw the Las Nevadas episode where the UFO was blown up and NOTHING ELSE for c!Purpled.
But I think I get credit for going "oh that's a spiteful bastard right there. Good luck c!Quackity lmao" WELL BEFORE c!Slime died. I also accidentally predicted c!Dream and c!Purpled teamup before said stream, but that's beside the point.
The point is that actively altering my mental voice to suit my OCs made me aware that characters can have very, VERY different ways of speaking. Some of those ways are more obvious than others.
Ask me to write a c!Tommy variant and I can probably do it fairly well. Ask me to write a c!Boomer variant and I will curl into a ball and weep bitter tears.
Character-voice is I think one of the hardest parts of writing and here's two charts to explain my thoughts on why.
The intention:
Tumblr media
The thing I think is maybe happening which I have no idea how to check or prevent:
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sugar-intraining · 7 years ago
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Sugar “Master Post” (updated Nov. 2018)
Every time I come back to this list, it seems more links are broken, so I decided to comb through them and only keep the ones that work as of Nov. 23, 2018. Best of luck, sisters!
Safety
Sending pictures via google voice texting
Square cash warning
Amazon gifts safety
COP or POT?
Tips to remaining safe as a sugar baby
All about screening
The Miranda warning
Receiving packages
Staying safe as a sugar baby
Sugar baby safety
Sugar baby safety tip
Sugar baby safety & cat-fishing
Free background check website
Keeping your privacy
Very important hoe safety tip
Free-Styling
Free-styling guide
Eye-contact
How to approach men while free styling
Free-styling and where to meet sugar daddies
Where to freestyle
Top three places to freestyle
Free-styling & staff
Meeting SD’s Online
Craigslist title tip
Sugaring using tinder
How to tinder
How to message men on sugar sites
Sugaring: Tinder and OkCupid
Perfecting your message
More messaging advice
Allowance, Financials, and Budgeting
How to get the allowance you want
How to ask your sugar daddy for an allowance
Allowance or pay per meet?
All about money
Cash/gifts on a POT date
Sugar baby banking tips
Financial advice
Drain his bank account
When he says he doesn’t feel comfortable with allowance…
How much can he really pay you?
Budgeting tips for sugar babes
Tips on spending your sugar money
Allowance and AmEx cards
Let’s talk budgeting
5 questions to ask before agreeing to allowance offer
What to say to get the allowance you want
Sugar banking
Allowance and bank laws
Random cash tips
He pays for what he wants
Allowance negotiation tactics
The Art of Sugar Dating
How to handle a first date with a POT
Organizing your POTs
How to: manipulate the conversation
How to create a positive impression
6 ways to make your sugar date the best date he’s ever had
What the hell am I going to talk to him about?!
Checklist the night before your date
What you need to do before your POT date
Dining etiquette
First date conversations with your SD
What to bring in your purse on a sugar date
Things to know about wine
First date advice
How to handle a first date
100 “non allowance” questions to ask a POT on a date
How cheat your way through small talk
Conversation topics
Developing your personality
The psychology of persuasion
Seduction, Manipulation & Negotiation
Remember: You are an actress/actor
The art of seduction
Strategies to try on your SD
Sugar negotiation
Bullshitting 101
How to make him want to say yes
Body language
Manipulation tips
Manipulation success
Keeping Your SD
Treat your SD right… Or someone else will
Keeping him hooked
Don’t become familiar or ordinary
Become his fantasy
Don’t forget the details
Bedroom tips
Showcase yourself to yourself to your SD
Appearance
How to make yourself more attractive
Hoe products
How to be a kept woman
Looking elegant
Lingerie masterpost
Vaginal hygiene
Invest in yourself
Contouring cheat sheet
A hoes guide to body care
Sugar baby check list
Platonic Sugar
A tip for aspiring sugar babes
Being a platonic SB
Sugar Travel
Traveling with your SD
Travel etiquette for sugar babies
Traveling sugar
General tips/info on sugaring
The rules of sugaring
Sugar baby manifesto
Sugar baby academy
How to find a sugar daddy in 6 simple steps
This lifestyle isn’t for everyone
The secrets to being a successful sugar baby
Random sugar baby tip
Being a successful sugar baby
10 golden rules of sugar dating
General sugar baby tips
Sugar baby mentality
Sugar baby wisdom
Sugar baby resources
What being a SB is all about
6 common sugar baby mistakes
What SB’s often forget
Beginning advice for newbies
Tips for new sugar babies
Always have a plan B
Tip to new sugars
What would you tell your newbie SB self if you could go back?
5 newbie mistakes and how to avoid them
Remember this when you become a sugar baby
“How do I become a sugar baby?”
How to stand out as a sugar baby
“When is right to start sugaring?”
Tips from a successful sugar baby
How to know if he’s the right sponsor
POTs
Filtering the POTs
How to spot a fake POT
Things POT’s say when they’re trying not to pay
Distinguishing sugar from salt
10 questions to ask a POT before a relationship
“What Should I Say?” and Personality
Don’t be mundane and predictable
When he asks if you’ve had an arrangement before
How to say “no” to your SD
What to say when he asks “What are you looking for?”
Your sugar profile
Writing tips
Make your profile work for you
Face shot or no face shot?
Random tips/things/misc.
P.O. boxes and why you should have one
“Advice I received from a whale SD”
Long distance sugar
How to be a boss ass bitch
Why love is poison for a heartless gold-digger and a guide to the antidote
“Sex is sex, but money is money”
No luck finding a sugar daddy?
The official sex worker reading list
Getting your sugar daddy back
Sugar baby texting
Suggested sugar reading list
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collapsedsquid · 7 years ago
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It feels like election season never ends. But I want to submit that the problem is that it does end, with a very high-stakes election. The integrity of our elections has, thank goodness, become a subject of active public concern. The ways we draw district lines, the ways we form voting rolls, the susceptibility of our voting machines to malfunction or subversion, all demand scrutiny and reform. But there is another vulnerability, hiding in plain sight: the fact that our elections all take place basically on a single well-known day.[1] A short, sharp manipulation of the news cycle, if well-timed, can tilt electoral outcomes. Many people plausibly blame Hillary Clinton’s loss on a letter by James Comey released a week prior to the 2016 election. Perhaps that was not intentional manipulation, but similar events past or future might be.
It seems obvious to me that political actors of every party and creed do their best to exploit this open vulnerability in our electoral system, working to manufacture coverage or even newsworthy events likely to motivate their own electoral base in the immediate run-up to an election. To the degree electoral results turn on this contest, they seem likely to reflect the cleverness (or deviousness) of campaign operatives much more than any colorable expression of the “will of the people”. It’s hard to come up with a justification, even under very naturalistic theories, why this would be a desirable form of democratic deliberation.
Less apocalyptically, the quality of representation is undermined by a predictable election cycle. In the run-up to an election, often inaccessible public figures become suddenly more available and accessible. It is a commonplace that Senators’ willingness to take unpopular votes depends upon whether they are near the beginning or the end of their six-year terms. That might be intended in Constitutional theory, but in practice, in my view, unpopular votes are less likely to reflect dispassionate deliberation on behalf of the polity and more likely to entail privileging the interests of the elites that dominate either political party. Even in theory, however “insulated” we decide Senators should be from vicissitudes of the mob, this cyclicality in time of popular responsiveness seems undesirable. Ideally, our representative would not be “there for us” only during the short season when they are soliciting our votes. They would be there for us all the time.
For a variety of reasons, I think it a good idea that we introduce into our voting system a greater element of stochasticism, of structured, intentional randomness. This may be counterintuitive — sure, a manipulated news cycle may not express the will of the people, but how could a random number? The deep fact of randomness is that while an individual “draw” may be noise, random selection has characteristics that are well defined, widely understood, and intuitively accessible. When statisticians want to examine a population, they take a random sample and characterize that. With good randomness and a reasonably large sample size, it becomes extremely unlikely that the characteristics of the sample will fail to represent the broader population. This fact is already a part of our political process. Pollsters, who affect electoral possibilities as well as characterizing them, seek (very imperfectly) random samples of likely voters. We select juries largely by lottery, on the theory that this is a good way to get a representative sample of ones “peers”. There have been a variety of democratic experiments with sortition, simply choosing by lot, picking random names from the phone book. Perhaps overcynically, many of us might consider that an improvement over our present, professional political representation.
I do not favor sortition for the constitution of our legislatures. There is a lot to be said for choosing among representatives who express an interest in and commit to doing the work, and to some kind of voting process that ideally filters for quality. What I do favor is an idea called “lottery voting” or “random ballot“. I really encourage you to read the first link, a very readable academic note by Akhil Reed Amar which introduced the idea. You should also read this essay by David MacIver (ht Bill Mill). In a nutshell, everybody votes in the way they currently do for their preferred candidate. Then we throw the ballots in a big hat, and draw the winner like a bingo hall door prize.[2] You’d never want to use lottery voting to elect a President. Who knows who you might pick? It’d be totally random. But for a large legislature, lottery voting will predictably yield proportional representation along whatever axes or characteristics are salient to voters, not just formal political parties. Further, lottery voting is immune to gerrymandering, and every vote always has equal influence. (This is decidedly untrue of conventional “first-past-the-vote” voting, where the statistical effect of a vote — the difference in the probability of a candidate winning with and without an additional vote — depends very much on the closeness of the election.) There are lots of reasons to love lottery voting, including the conventional case for proportional representation, which I very desperately endorse. (See Matt Yglesias and Lee Drutman.) Not to let the best be the enemy of the good, I’d favor American experiments in more common forms of proportional representation (multimember districts, party lists), but lottery voting really is the gold standard. It is simple, effective, resistant to entrenchment of incumbents or capture by political parties. The US House of Representatives should be selected by lottery voting today. At the very least, we should start experimenting in some state houses.
One interesting characteristic of lottery voting is there is no need that elections be simultaneous, or even take place at known predictable times. Suppose we had an electoral system that looked like this: Every month, 5% of the voting roll is randomly selected to cast a ballot for a representative. There’s no big election day: Any time during their month selected voters can come in and cast their vote. After the balloting period has passed, one ballot is randomly selected, and then a virtual coin is flipped that comes up heads only one time in 24. If the coin comes up heads, the current representative is replaced with the randomly selected ballot. If not, that month’s ballots are thrown away, and the representative’s term continues. Under this system, on average, a representative’s terms would be 24 months, but there would never be a period when a representative is more or less near an election. Whatever persuasion incumbents (or their political parties or PACs or dirty tricksters) want to engage in to see to their reelection, they’d have to do basically all the time. Challengers also could arise at any time, but would want to make their case continually. That would become a very different enterprise than existing elections, which engender an avalanche of marketing in sprints. People who wish to become representatives would want to become prominent and popular within their communities, or become endorsed by popular civic organizations (including but not just political parties), in ways that are sustainable over time.[3] Is this a good idea? One might argue that it would just make elections more expensive to contest, and so increase the influence of money. But lottery voting by its nature is much less susceptible to vote buying. Your ads can win 60% of the vote and you still have a 40% chance of losing. 
Not only a random ballot, but a random election timing as well.
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pattern2022 · 3 years ago
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What Is a Technical Indicator?
A technical indicator is a series of data points that are derived by applying a formula to the price data of a security. Price data includes any combination of the open, high, low or close over a period of time. Some indicators may use only the closing prices, while others incorporate volume and open interest into their formulas. The price data is entered into the formula and a data point is produced. For example, the average of 3 closing prices is one data point [ (41+43+43) / 3 = 42.33 ].
However, one data point does not offer much information and does not make for a useful indicator. A series of data points over a period of time is required to create valid reference points to enable analysis. By creating a time series of data points, a comparison can be made between present and past levels. For analysis purposes, technical indicators are usually shown in a graphical form above or below a security's price chart. Once shown in graphical form, an indicator can then be compared with the corresponding price chart of the security. Sometimes indicators are plotted on top of the price plot for a more direct comparison.
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What Does a Technical Indicator Offer?
A technical indicator offers a different perspective from which to analyze the price action. Some, such as moving averages, are derived from simple formulas and the mechanics are relatively easy to understand. Others, such as Stochastics, have complex formulas and require more study to fully understand and appreciate. Regardless of the complexity of the formula, technical indicators can provide a unique perspective on the strength and direction of the underlying price action.
A simple moving average is an indicator that calculates the average price of a security over a specified number of periods. If a security is exceptionally volatile, then a moving average will help to smooth the data. A moving average filters out random noise and offers a smoother perspective of the price action. Veritas (VRTSE) displays a lot of volatility and an analyst may have difficulty discerning a trend. By applying a 10-day simple moving average to the price action, random fluctuations are smoothed to make it easier to identify a trend.
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Why Use Indicators?
Indicators serve three broad functions: to alert, to confirm and to predict.
An indicator can act as an alert to study price action a little more closely. If momentum is waning, it may be a signal to watch for a break of support. Alternatively, if there is a large positive divergence building, it may serve as an alert to watch for a resistance breakout.
Indicators can be used to confirm other technical analysis tools. If there is a breakout on the price chart, a corresponding moving average crossover could serve to confirm the breakout. If a stock breaks support, a corresponding low in the On-Balance-Volume (OBV) could serve to confirm the weakness.
According to some investors and traders, indicators can be used to predict the direction of future prices.
Tips for Using Indicators
Indicators indicate. This may sound straightforward, but sometimes traders ignore the price action of a security and focus solely on an indicator. Indicators filter price action with formulas. As such, they are derivatives and not direct reflections of the price action. This should be taken into consideration when applying analysis. Any analysis of an indicator should be taken with the price action in mind. What is the indicator saying about the price action of a security? Is the price action getting stronger? Weaker?
Even though it may be obvious when indicators generate buy and sell signals, the signals should be taken in context with other technical analysis tools. An indicator may flash a buy signal, but if the chart pattern shows a descending triangle with a series of declining peaks, it may be a false signal.
On the Rambus (RMBS) chart, MACD improved from November to March, forming a positive divergence. All the earmarks of a MACD buying opportunity were present, but the stock failed to break above the resistance and exceed its previous reaction high. This non-confirmation from the stock should have served as a warning sign against a long position. For the record, a sell signal occurred when the stock broke support from the descending triangle in March-01.
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As always in technical analysis, learning how to read indicators is more of an art than a science. The same indicator may exhibit different behavioral patterns when applied to different stocks. Indicators that work well for IBM might not work the same for Delta Airlines. Through careful study and analysis, expertise with the various indicators will develop over time. As this expertise develops, certain nuances, as well as favorite setups, will become clear.
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blogtrax905 · 4 years ago
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Unturned - Permanent Gold Upgrade Crack
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Unturned Permanent Gold Account Upgrade Steam Gift GLOBAL Can activate in: United States Check country restrictions. Unturned is a sandbox game in the emerging multiplayer apocalypse survival genre. Rather than focusing on being an MMO it provides players with easy systems to sit down and survive the zombie infestation with their frien. Unturned Permanent Gold Upgrade is an action-adventure video game developed and published by Smartly Dressed Games.
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Unturned game will launch and you will be put in his server. There are survival, roleplay, creative, battle royale and other types of gameplay for you to chose. Just start playing Unturned game on Vortex where we take care of updates and connection.
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$4.99 Focusing on the zombie survival game genre, this one comes with various action-packed sequences and tasks.While the blocky style makes the game look similar to other sandbox adventures, it features several new items, tasks, and skills. Unturned online is a free-to-play survival game that offers you several different game modes.
Configure your options. The zombie apocalypse has finally come and you are one of the survivals. Play Unturned online now! When enabled, off-topic review activity will be filtered out. If you have just a modest PC, it is recomm… In Unturned everyone will find great entertainment and will not be bored, as the game has many difficulty settings.If you choose the survival game mode you will be spawned on the map with clothes and equipment that will depend on your experience and skills. $0.99. Find weapons, supplies and don’t let the zombies eat you! Sounds like fun?If you want to increase your chances to win find a team and play together. Then you have to right click his name and the button that says “ join the game”.
You will have to find weapons and supplies in order to survive. Unturned is a popular retro-style game in the sandbox category.Considering the graphics and features, it has the perfect blend of Minecraft and Day-Z. You can also buy selected skin, but that will cost you more.There is a story in Unturned online and it is spread across all the maps in the game.
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Unturned - Permanent Gold Upgrade Cracked
Unturned is a free to play survival game for PCs that has steadily become popular. This defaults to your Review Score Setting. - 91% of the 399,162 user reviews for this game are positive. $0.99.
Especially the health items are very important because the game has intense bleeding out mechanics.
If you don’t want to wait you can buy cases in Steam market and get a random skin. You will be able to buy upgrades and become better zombie killer!The survival mode is available as a multiplayer, so if you would like to kill zombies with your friends there is nothing stopping you!
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Unturned was designed by Nelson Sexton, and …
You're a survivor in the zombie infested ruins of society, and must work with your friends and forge alliances to remain among the living. You will be spawned in the middle of the map and will have to find the supplies and survive.Remember that not only zombies but also other players may be a threat! Remain among the living in Unturned. $0.99. $0.99.
It also supports multiplayer, and there are cooperative, player versus player, and team versus team servers available. Content For This Game Browse all .
Be prepared and don’t forget to have the best gun you can find!The longer you manage to stay alive and progress through the game the more experience points you will earn. Be the last person or the last team standing on this battle royale against zombies and other players!To be a successful player you need to remember about collecting loot. Shop available items . The parts of the whole story and all the locations that will give you the information about where the zombies came from are all over the maps. The higher the graphics are, the slower your computer will run the game. Be sure to play them all and explore!
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Total war: attila - blood & burning crack. You can also play with your team. Hosted on premium servers Our servers are hosted on only the best hardware with our server machines rockin' Intel Xeon CPU's, 32GB RAM & High-speed SSD's.
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For example, you can select your preferred hand, hit marker colors and graphical options. But if you want to fight other players go for it!. All rights reserved. We focus on the survival roleplay aspect of Unturned. You just have to have Internet and a mobile device, Pc or smart TV.
Quests Play through the NPC quest storyline! Items available for this game. $0.99. Read more about it in the There are no more reviews that match the filters set above© 2020 Valve Corporation.
3,195 Curators have reviewed this product. To view reviews within a date range, please click and drag a selection on a graph above or click on a specific bar. Unturned has no separate solo/ squad mode so if you play alone you will have to fight with teams of players. Be sure to play them all and explore! $4.99 Unturned - Permanent Gold Upgrade $4.99 Add all DLC to Cart.
Click Filter reviews by the user's playtime when the review was written: Sign in to see reasons why you may or may not like this based on your games, friends, and curators you follow. Remember that arena is for multiplayer only! - 92% of the 4,769 user reviews in the last 30 days are positive. Survive the zombies and win!It doesn't matter if you are an experienced player or a beginner. After the game, you will have a chance to get a cosmetic item. Unturned can be played in an isolated, single-player environment. You may also ask: All of them will bring you to a word after zombies apocalypse.
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The Player is the character the user controls in Unturned 3.
Coloring Pixels - Spring Pack This content requires the base game Coloring Pixels on Steam in order to play. Coloring pixels - spring pack for mac.
Appearance
The Player has a randomized starting look, which can be customized. Purchasing the Permanent Gold Upgrade DLC will allow for more customization options.
Actions
There is a multitude of actions The Player may perform, usable depending on your set Controls. They include several Stances, Leaning, Interacting, and more.
Statuses
The Player is affected by multiple Statuses. These generally include Health, Food, Water, Immunity (Status), Stamina, and Oxygen; meanwhile, they can sometimes also be affected by Temperature, Broken Leg, and Bleeding.
User Interface
The Player has multiple user interfaces available to them. This includes the Inventory, Crafting, Skills, and Map menus.
Aesthetics
Cosmetics and Skins may be equipped on The Player, and only have aesthetic values.
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Cosmetics appear over any ClothingThe Player has equipped unless toggled off. Skins will replace the default texture of an item, if it is in your Inventory, or you place it on any Storage Containers that display the contents of what is inside.
Trivia
In Antique, The Player had no face, no punching ability and spawns with a Torch.
One of the Player character's arms seems bigger than the other, depending on the user's chosen dominant hand. Oddly enough, the larger arm is not the one that the Player chooses.
Retrieved from 'https://unturned.gamepedia.com/The_Player?oldid=3585'
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garywonghc · 7 years ago
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How Meditation Changes Your Brain — and Your Life
by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson
One cool September morning in 2002 a Tibetan monk arrived at the Madison, Wisconsin airport. His journey had started 7,000 miles away at a monastery atop a hill on the fringe of Kathmandu, Nepal. The trip took 18 hours in the air over three days, and crossed ten time zones.
Richie Davidson had met the monk briefly at the 1995 Mind and Life meeting on destructive emotions in Dharamsala, but had forgotten what he looked like. Still, it was easy to pick him out from the crowd. He was the only shaven-headed man wearing gold-and-crimson robes in the Dane County Regional Airport. His name was Mingyur Rinpoche and he had travelled all this way to have his brain assayed while he meditated.
After a night’s rest, Richie brought Mingyur to the EEG room at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, where brain waves are measured with what looks like a surrealist art piece: a shower cap extruding a spaghetti of wires. This specially designed cap holds 256 thin wires in place, each leading to a sensor pasted to a precise location on the scalp. A tight connection between the sensor and the scalp makes all the difference between recording usable data about the brain’s electrical activity and having the electrode simply be an antenna for noise.
As Mingyur was told when a lab technician began pasting sensors to his scalp, ensuring a tight connection for each and placing them in their exact spot takes no more than fifteen minutes. But Mingyur, a shaven-headed monk, offered up a bald head, and it turns out such continually exposed skin is more thickened and calloused than one protected by hair. To make the crucial electrode-to-scalp connection tight enough to yield viable readings through thicker skin ended up taking much longer than usual.
Most people who come into the lab get impatient, if not irritated, by such delays. But Mingyur was not in the least perturbed, which calmed the nervous lab technician — and all those looking on — with the feeling anything that happened would be okay with him. That was the first inkling of Mingyur’s ease of being, a palpable sense of relaxed readiness for whatever life might bring. The lasting impression Mingyur conveyed was of endless patience, and a gentle quality of kindness.
After spending what seemed like an eternity ensuring that the sensors had good contact with the scalp, the experiment was finally ready to begin. A precise analysis of something as squishy as, say, compassion demands an exacting protocol, one that can detect that mental state’s specific pattern of brain activity amidst the cacophony of the electrical storm from everything else going on. The protocol had Mingyur alternate between one minute of meditation on compassion and thirty seconds of a neutral resting period. To ensure confidence that any effect detected was reliable rather than a random finding, he would have to do this four times in rapid succession.
From the start Richie had grave doubts about whether this could work. Those on the lab team who meditated, Richie among them, all knew it takes time just to settle the mind, often considerably longer than a few minutes. It was inconceivable, they thought, that even someone like Mingyur would be able to enter these states instantaneously, and not need much time to reach inner quiet.
Richie was fortunate that Buddhist scholar John Dunne — a rare combination of scientific interests, humanities expertise, and fluency in Tibetan — volunteered to translate. John delivered precisely timed instructions to Mingyur signalling him to start a compassion meditation, and then after sixty seconds another cue for thirty seconds of his mental resting state, and so on for three more cycles.
Just as Mingyur began the meditation, there was a sudden, huge burst of electrical activity on the computer monitors displaying the signals from his brain. Everyone assumed this meant he had moved; such movement artifacts are a common problem in research with EEG, which registers as wave patterns readings of electrical activity at the top of the brain. Any motion that tugs the sensor — a leg shifting, a tilt of the head — gets amplified in those readings into a huge spike that looks like a brain wave but has to be filtered out for a clean analysis.
Oddly, this burst seemed to last the entire period of the compassion meditation and so far as anyone could see Mingyur had not moved an iota. What’s more, the giant spikes diminished but did not disappear as he went into the mental rest period, again with no visible shift in his body.
The four experimenters in the control room team watched, transfixed, while the next meditation period was announced. As John Dunne translated the next instruction to meditate into Tibetan, the team studied the monitors in silence, glancing back and forth from the brain wave monitor to the video trained on Mingyur.
Instantly the same dramatic burst of electrical signal occurred. Again Mingyur was perfectly still, with no visible change in his body’s position from the rest to the meditation period. Yet the monitor still displayed that same brain wave surge. As this pattern repeated each time he was instructed to generate compassion, the team looked at one another in astonished silence, nearly jumping off their seats in excitement.
The lab team knew at that moment they were witnessing something profound, something that had never before been observed in the laboratory. None could predict what this would lead to, but everyone sensed this was a critical inflection point in neuroscience history.
The news of that session created a scientific stir. As of this writing, the journal article reporting these findings has been cited more than 1,100 times in the world’s scientific literature. Science has paid attention.
The next stunner came when Mingyur went through another batch of tests, this with fMRI, which renders what amounts to a 3D video of brain activity. The fMRI gives science a lens that complements the EEG, which tracks the brain’s electrical activity. The EEG readings are more precise in time, the fMRI more accurate in neural locations.
An EEG does not reveal what’s happening deeper in the brain, let alone show where in the brain the changes occur — that spatial precision comes from the fMRI, which maps the regions where brain activity occurs in minute detail. On the other hand, fMRI, though spatially exacting, tracks the timing of changes over one or two seconds, far slower than EEG.
While his brain was probed by the fMRI, Mingyur followed the cue to engage compassion. Once again the minds of Richie and the others watching in the control room felt as though they had stopped. The reason: Mingyur’s brain’s circuitry for empathy (which typically fires a bit during this mental exercise) rose to an activity level 700 to 800 times greater than it had been during the rest period just before.
Such an extreme increase befuddles science; the intensity with which those states were activated in Mingyur’s brain exceeds any we have seen in studies of “normal” people. The closest resemblance is for epileptic seizures, but those episodes last brief seconds, not a full minute. And besides, brains are seized by seizures, in contrast to Mingyur’s display of intentional control of his brain activity.
While Mingyur’s visit to Madison had yielded jaw-dropping results, he was not alone. His remarkable neural performance was part of a larger story, a one-of-a-kind brain research program that has harvested data from these world-class meditation experts.
Over the years in Richie’s lab, 21 Buddhist yogis have come to be formally tested. They were at the height of this inner art, having racked up lifetime meditation hours ranging from 12,000 to Mingyur’s 62,000.
Each of these yogis completed at least one three-year retreat, during which they meditated in formal practice a minimum of eight hours per day for three continuous years — actually, for three years, three months, and three days. That equates, in a conservative estimate, to about 9,500 hours per retreat.
All have undergone the same scientific protocol, those four one-minute cycles of three kinds of meditation — which has yielded a mountain of metrics. The lab’s team spent months and months analysing the dramatic changes they saw during those short minutes in these highly seasoned practitioners.
Like Mingyur, they entered the specified meditative states at will, each one marked by a distinctive neural signature. As with Mingyur these adepts have shown remarkable mental dexterity, with striking ease instantly mobilising these states: generating feelings of compassion; the spacious equanimity of complete openness to whatever occurs; or a laser-tight, unbreakable focus.
They entered and left these difficult-to-achieve levels of awareness within split seconds. These shifts in awareness were accompanied by equally pronounced shifts in measurable brain activity. Such a feat of collective mental gymnastics has never been seen by science before.
Preparing the raw data on the yogis for sifting by sophisticated statistical programs has demanded painstaking work. Just teasing out the differences between the yogis’ resting state and their brain activity during meditation was a gargantuan computing task. So it took Richie and his colleague Antoine Lutz of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center quite a while to stumble upon a pattern hiding in that data flood, empirical evidence that got lost amid the excitement about the yogis’ prowess in altering their brain activity during meditative states. In fact, the missed pattern surfaced only as an afterthought during a less hectic moment, months later when the analytic team sifted through the data again.
All along the statistical team had focused on temporary state effects by computing the difference between a yogi’s baseline brain activity and that produced during the one-minute meditation periods. Richie was reviewing the numbers with Antoine and wanted a routine check to ensure that the initial baseline EEG readings — those taken at rest, before the experiment began — were the same in a group of control volunteers who tried the identical meditations the yogis were doing. He asked to see just this baseline data by itself.
When Richie and Antoine sat down to review what the computers had just crunched, they looked at the numbers and then looked at one another. They knew exactly what they were seeing and exchanged just one word: “Amazing!”
All the yogis had elevated gamma oscillations, not just during the meditation practice periods for open presence and compassion but also during the very first measurement, before any meditation was performed. This electrifying data was in the EEG frequency known as “high-amplitude” gamma, the strongest, most intense form. These waves lasted the full minute of the baseline measurement, before they started the meditation.
This was the very EEG wave that Mingyur had displayed in that surprising surge during both open presence and compassion. And now Richie’s team saw that same unusual brain pattern in all the yogis as a standard feature of their everyday neural activity. In other words, Richie and Antoine had stumbled upon the holy grail: a neural signature showing an enduring transformation.
There are four main types of EEG waves, classed by their frequency (technically, measured in Hertz). Delta, the slowest wave, oscillates between one and four cycles per second, and occurs mainly during deep sleep; theta, the next slowest, can signify drowsiness; alpha occurs when we are doing little thinking and indicates relaxation; and beta, the fastest, accompanies thinking, alertness, or concentration.
Gamma, the very fastest brain wave, occurs during moments when differing brain regions fire in harmony, like moments of insight when different elements of a mental puzzle “click” together. To get a sense of this “click,” try this: What single word can turn each of these into a compound word: sauce, pine, crab?
The instant your mind comes up with the answer, your brain signal momentarily produces that distinctive gamma flare. You also elicit a short-lived gamma wave when, for instance, you imagine biting into a ripe, juicy peach and your brain draws together memories stored in different regions of the occipital, temporal, somatosensory, insular, and olfactory cortices to suddenly mesh the sight, smells, taste, feel, and sound of that bite into a single experience. For that quick moment the gamma waves from each of these cortical regions oscillate in perfect synchrony. Ordinarily gamma waves from, say, a creative insight, last no longer than a fifth of a second — not the full minute seen in the yogis.
Anyone’s EEG will show distinctive gamma waves for short moments from time to time. Ordinarily, during a waking state we exhibit a mixture of different brain waves that wax and wane at different frequencies. These brain oscillations reflect complex mental activity, like information processing, and their various frequencies correspond to broadly different functions. The location of these oscillations varies among brain regions; we can display alpha in one cortical location and gamma in another.
In the yogis, gamma oscillations are a far more prominent feature of their brain activity than in other people. Our usual gamma waves are not nearly as strong as that seen by Richie’s team in yogis like Mingyur. The contrast between the yogis and controls in the intensity of gamma was immense: on average the yogis had 25 times greater amplitude gamma oscillations during baseline compared with the control group.
We can only conjecture about what state of consciousness this reflects: yogis like Mingyur seem to experience an ongoing state of open, rich awareness during their daily lives, not just when they meditate. The yogis themselves have described it as a spaciousness and vastness in their experience, as if all their senses were wide open to the full, rich panorama of experience.
Or, as a fourteenth century Tibetan text describes it,
“…a state of bare, transparent awareness; Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom; Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point; Spacious empty clarity, a state wide open and unconfined; the senses unfettered…”
The gamma brain state Richie and Antoine discovered was more than unusual, it was unprecedented — a wow! No brain lab had ever before seen gamma oscillations that persist for minutes rather than split seconds, are so strong, and are in synchrony across widespread regions of the brain.
Astonishingly, this sustained, brain-entraining gamma pattern goes on even while seasoned meditators are asleep — as was found by Richie’s team in other research with long-term vipassana meditators who have an average lifetime practice of about 10,000 hours. These gamma oscillations continuing during deep sleep are, again, something never seen before and seem to reflect a residual quality of awareness that persists day and night.
The yogis’ pattern of gamma oscillation contrasts with how, ordinarily, these waves occur only briefly, and in an isolated neural location. The adepts had a sharply heightened level of gamma waves oscillating in synchrony across their brain, independent of any particular mental act. Unheard of.
Richie and Antoine were seeing for the first time a neural echo of the enduring transformations that years of meditation practice etch on the brain. Here was the treasure, hidden in the data all along: a genuine altered trait.
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