#Tell the old man to take his pills (oil)

[cosmicwhoreo]

tw: blood If you're not drawing your oc in pain for the fun of it, can you really call yourself an artist?

The cost of sophistication is being a little more "delicate" than one would care to acknowledge. Gold has all sorts of malfunctions and hiccups every now and then. at least one every 3 or 4 months. Usually minor tics that, at worst, he would need to hit his chest like a staticky box tv to get it up and working again. But there are other more... Violent outbursts that require a more involved hand... Either way, they can all be summed up as; unfun.

[mitigatedchaos]

You Won't "Beat Trump at His Own Game"

Post for July 8, 2024 5,500 words, 25 mins

[ @morlock-holmes ]

Like, can you guys imagine Donald Trump ever admitting that he lost a debate? Let alone imagine his party *withdrawing him as nominee* because of it? And we're going to beat him at his own game by, uh, doing literally the exact opposite of his game?

[ mitigatedchaos ]

Your plan is to beat Trump by being better at being Trump than Trump is? Damn, son. You got a Texas oil baron lined up or something?

-★-

I watched the first hour of the debate. At one point the moderator asked Trump about abortion. As the Republican candidate, this is a tricky question for him, since evangelical voters would like abortion banned in most cases (and thus presumably every state). Trump then argued that he was leaving it up to the states, and the states would decide. He says that he agrees that the abortion pill should be legal, and agrees with the court ruling in favor of it, and that he supports the exceptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. Further, he's against third trimester and 'post-birth abortion.'

While banning most first trimester abortion only has 38% support, banning most third trimester abortion has 80% supermajority support. The views of the median voter are in tension: they don't want to force women to have babies they don't want, but they also don't want to kill babies.

Biden stumbles in his delivery of his canned line in response, which appeared to be based on the idea that strict limits on abortion access would de facto nullify the exceptions.

Democrats have repeatedly lied about abortion. Republicans have repeatedly lied about abortion. The whole argument about 'after-birth' abortions appears to be based on political fencing with bills, which Democrats also do. (Something like the classic, "Oh, sure, it's illegal, but will you make it super double illegal? Oh, you won't? That means you support it, then.")

(I should note, at the time, I wrote, "I don't think Americans should trust a single word either of these guys is saying.")

But later, Biden trips over Roe v. Wade and the three trimesters to the point that it's unclear just what the hell he means.

The main CNN video doesn't support comments, but there's a clip that does. The top comment?

we're fucked as a nation

In my opinion, these comments overall agree with my post...

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

-★-

Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

-★-

There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

-★-

A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

-

[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.

[2] It's more complicated than this.

[cevansbrat0007]

Okay!! What if reader took this and sent it to Andy? It’s obvi Bebe and Koko! Andy would be so sad😂

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CmPrl-5JTKe/?igshid=NTdlMDg3MTY=

Baby Blush

Summary: You send Andy an adorable video of your girls and their playground crush, which sends his blood pressure through the roof.

Warnings: Fluff, Girl!Dad Andy Barber, Mentions of Pregnancy, Allusions to Smut, Cursing, Minors DNI

A/N: Part of my ongoing Growing Pains Series. Likes, comments, and reblogs are appreciated. All mistakes are my own. My sleeping pills have kicked in. I'll do more edits after I wake up.

___

"Hey, baby." You smile into the phone as you watch your little BiBi chase her younger sister around the playground. "How are -?"

"Who the fuck was that?" Andy interrupts as he shuffles what sounds like papers in his office.

"Who?" You ask, pretending to be confused about the source of your husband's displeasure.

"That delinquent - the one who was making eyes at both my daughters." KitCat blows you a kiss which you pretend to catch, all the while trying not to laugh. Because you knew exactly who your man was talking about.

Just like you knew that sending him that adorable video would more than likely cause a spike in his blood pressure.

"Oh! You mean the cutie pie?" You chirp into the receiver, taking a sip of your cinnamon spice tea. "Wasn't that just the sweetest thing? And their little blushes..."

"No." Comes his stubborn grunt. "My girls are too young to blush. Especially over some player fresh out of the sandbox."

Tossing your book aside, your hand goes to rest on the swell of your pregnant belly. You listen patiently to your husband as he continues to rant while you keep a mindful eye on your babies as they take turns going down the slide.

"- And like I keep telling you, baby girl, these boys are only after one motherfucking thing! They emerge from the womb with the urge to seek and destroy."

"I know that's what you keep saying. But I would like to point out that he's also only six-years-old, my love." At this point, you can practically hear your Andy Bear raking an agitated hand through his hair.

"So what? I don't care if the kid just got out of diapers, I'm not gonna let some sticky-fingered casanova corrupt my little princesses. Ain't gonna happen." He hisses as he rifles through his desk drawers for something. You secretly hope it's that tube of lavender essential oil you'd accidentally left behind in one of the compartments during his last office get-together.

Shit calmed him down. And it was seriously beginning to sound like he could use a good whiff.

"Well, Andrew, I just spoke with his parents about getting together for a playdate. Turns out, Romeo has a little brother right around Katrina's age so --"

You're interrupted once again with more inane blustering from the love of your life and father of your two, soon to be four, children.

"His name is Romeo? As in 'oh, where for art thou'? And what the hell's his brother's name? Othello? Just no, Y/N."

Blowing out a breath, you decide that there is no point in trying to explain the differences between the two Shakespearean tragedies. Over the years you'd learned that he would eventually tire himself out all on his own.

"Actually, it's Luca. But okay, Big Man."

"Hmph! You keep forgetting that as the head of this household, it's my job to protect my girls, all five of you, from outside threats." You hear what sounds like something being slammed on his desk. Perhaps a paper weight. "And anything with a - a dangling participle is a threat, prepubescent or not."

"Uh huh. You got your oils, honey?" You look down at your nails as you internally try to justify the need for a new manicure. "I'm just curious."

"If I snort any harder, it'll be lodged halfway up my left nostril." He grouses, followed by an exaggerated sniff.

If you looked up the definition of that word in the dictionary, all you would find was a picture of your handsome man's face.

"Very good." With a sigh, you pull the phone away from your ear to check the time. Another thirty minutes and you'd be ready to head home. "You know, since you're the, uh, man of the house, how would you feel about philly cheesesteak sandwiches and fries for dinner tonight?"

"Sounds delicious. But back to this Romeo character --"

"We're meeting Romeo and his family for a playground and coffee date this Sunday at 2:00pm. And before you ask, the answer is no. No weapons, no interrogations, and no threats of jail time or anything involving any other potentially serious legal ramifications."

Had you covered everything? Maybe. Maybe not. Andrew Barber could be a lot sometimes.

"Y/N, sweetheart, I am in charge here." Andy growls, not liking any of what you just said. "And that means -"

"It means would you like waffle or sweet potato fries?" A beat goes by, letting you know that you've got him thinking.

"Waffle." Comes the quiet, bordering on sullen, huff.

"Excellent choice, sir. And speaking of choices, we'll need to leave the house by 1:30 if we're going to be on time for coffee." Standing, you begin to collect your things before attempting to wrangle the girls. "I've gotta hop off and grab the ladies, Big Man. I'll see you at home, but I also feel the need to warn you..."

"Warn me about what?" He growls, not even bothering to hide the fact that he's pouting on the other end of the phone. All six-foot-something feet of him.

"That I've already prepared my closing arguments, just in case you want to go another round about this. And I'm gonna win, with or without a jury."

"Oh, is that so?" Andy snorts.

"It is. Especially if you want me to do that thing you like tonight, or any other night for that matter."

"You talkin' about the thing you do when you wear..?" His voice trails off as his thoughts begin to drift in a different, much naughtier direction.

"Yep. C'mon babies. We've gotta go make something yummy for Daddy for dinner!"

Another beat of silence.

"So...2:00pm on Sunday. Fine." He mutters with a resigned sigh. "But I'm not gonna smile for any of it." You can practically hear the wheels turning in that beautiful mind of his. "And you're wearing the outfit tonight, complete with the heels."

"You've got yourself a deal, Big Man."

END

[belovedindierock]

Bent out of Shape

Cranky, playful, and maybe just a bit cracked, THOM YORKE has channelled his anxieties into a new solo album. Join him as he ponders the future of Radiohead and the end of civilization.

by Brian Raftery / Photographs by Jack Chessum

THE FLIGHT LAST night was torturous. He didn't sleep—he never sleeps, in fact, no matter what he tries. The herbal pills shut down his body but not his brain, and melatonin gives him wide-awake nightmares that he dubs "the horrors." Sometimes he works on songs on his laptop, but usually, by the time he's halfway through the air, Thom Yorke is silently freaking out. But this morning he woke up, put on a Björk tune, and got a massage. Sitting in an abandoned, librarylike meeting room at Philadelphia's Loews Hotel, he walks over to a window framing the skyline. The sky outside is a wondrous blue, and the 80-year-old Ben Franklin Bridge looks as if it could reach into heaven. Yorke takes it all in, sweeping his arm across the display of buildings. "You know, you land in the U.S., and you look out the window here," he says. "And all this infrastructure, everything that's going on... it will not exist."

He launches into an explanation of how it will all go down: The world's oil supply will be depleted, American won't be prepared, and the City of Brotherly Love as we know it could be gone in the next 100 years.

This is what Thom Yorke is like on a good day.

His malaise is understandable. Yorke is a few months shy of 38, and like most people who pay attention to what's going on in the world, he's scared shitless. Much of this fear is channelled through The Eraser, a heavily electronic side project—he bristles at the term solo album—that Yorke recorded with Nigel Godrich, who has also produced albums for his band Radiohead. Its nine songs are jittery meltdowns about alienation and anxiety, and it's hard to listen to it without thinking, Man, does his voice sound good when it's so far up in the mix. Also, is the apocalypse going to arrive before track six is over?

And yet, because he has a partner, Rachel Owen, and two young kids, Agnes and Noah, and because it's no fun to be a gloomy Gus all the time, Yorke remains a 21st-century optimist, one who believes that things are bad but we're not entirely screwed. Yet, "I have to be positive," he says, "because when it comes down to it—how do I say this without sounding really revolting?—you have to get up every day with love in your heart."

He pauses, his face frozen in a wince.

"There you go. I sound like some sort of lunatic. I'll just say I haven't slept much."

There is absolutely nothing surprising about seeing Thom Yorke in person. With the exception of the mid '90s Pablo Honey era—during which he rocked a blond shag that made him resemble Garth Algar after partying in The Dark Crystal—he's appeared more or less the same for over a decade: spiky dark hair, a flatlined gaze (the result of a lazy left eye), and some tentative stubble. He dresses his age, in jeans and a white short-sleeved dress shirt, but looks five years younger—not surprising, perhaps, since 33 is the scientific proven median age of Radiohead's fan base.

What is surprising, though, is that while Yorke sounds as tense as ever, he's looking relatively relaxed these days. The perpetually tortured glare that greeted reporters and hangers-on during the OK Computer era has been replaced by an occasional nervous laugh and some self-deprecating digs. "It's difficult to tell how people have changed," says Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien. "But Thom's been in a better headspace for quite a few years."

Part of the reason for this reversal, Yorke admits, was The Eraser. After Radiohead's exhaustive tour in support of 2003's Hail to the Thief, the band needed a rest. Yorke retreated to his home base of Oxford, England, gathering blips and beats that had been lying around for years and assembling them with Godrich's help. "After the last tour everybody decided to take a break and have kids," says Godrich. "But Thom had actually had his kids first, so he was given this space to think about what he should do. And he thinks very hard about that." Everyone in the band knew about the project, but when Yorke describes the recording, it's as though he's talking about having an affair. "We were getting together a week here and a week there, and it really wasn't a big deal," he says. "And because it wasn't a big deal, it was fun. It felt like nobody was watching."

What happened on that last tour that made you so anxious to work on The Eraser?

The last show was Coachella, and by the end of that, we'd completely lost interest and lost confidence. Part of the nail in the coffin for me, personally, was going on after the fucking Pixies. It's like going on after the Beatles. It was a massive big deal, and I really, really, really didn't want to do it. It was an odd situation, as well, because I think the Pixies misread it. They thought it was because we didn't like them. I lost sleep for a month. It was time to stop for a bit.

What happened when you stopped?

The interesting thing was the lack of momentum, the lack of doing anything. You just sort of go into this loop where you're like, "Ahhhh, fucking hell," because nothing's done. Unless you finish a song, you can't move on. That's what was the good thing about The Eraser, going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and it was done. I want to get a bit of that bang, bang, bang, bang thing back again.

Making The Eraser may have been cathartic, but it's a very bleak record. There are songs about distrust, isolation, bombs in the Underground...

I have many bleak thoughts. Don't get me started, man, It's one f my specialties, apparently. I'm concerned for our future, generally speaking. I'm concerned for my children's future. The reason I called it The Eraser is because the whole thing was written just trying to forget all the things that scare me. For example, we've reached the point where the [oil] supply has peaked. So what's going to happen? It's this enormous fucking elephant in the room, and everybody in the Western world is ignoring it. It's insane. And me being me, I don't ignore it. I guess I have too much time on my hands. So yeah, big surprise that I happen to be writing about that.

How do you keep those things in mind and not have it weigh down your life?

I have periods like that, which probably means I should be [institutionalized]. But I'm not a pessimist. I've gotten involved with this Friends of the Earth [group]: in the U.K. they're a big thing, like Greenpeace. They have this campaign to get the government to reduce carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050 or something like that. And it's quite interesting to be sitting down with these people, and them actually saying, "These things are achievable."

We've got 50 years to reassess how we interact with the world around us. And it could be really exciting. It's not like this [points to window] is making us happy. Sitting in gridlock is not a blissful experience.

So what about stepping up your political involvement, like Bono or Bob Geldof?

I'm not capable of becoming a big spokesperson. I don't think it's a good idea for the sake of my sanity. You have to know what your limits or strengths are, otherwise you'll crack. And taking on the responsibility in that way is really tough. You have to retain your independence of mind because everybody has a different [opinion]. It's not good for you. It's purely self-preservation.

But you've spoken out against Bush and Blair in the past.

I have a problem when I make personal attacks. I always say, "Well, they don't make personal attacks on me." It's bad karma doing that shit. But at the same time, they're pretty good at racking up their own bad karma. I find it very difficult to worry about that level of karma when they're still preaching about democracy.

Do you ever wish you weren't aware of all this stuff? That you could shut it out?

I wish I could find the pill. Unfortunately, all the ones I've tried only make it worse. [Laughs] The stuff that makes it go away for me is listening to music. That's always going to be the best way.

Have you ever tried antidepressants?

Oh, no! GlaxoSmithKline's legacy to the world is these poor bastards who can't get off Prozac. That's a fucking evil organization. Oh, I can't say that, can I? [Pauses] That's a very astute organization. They obviously know exactly what they're doing.

IN NOVEMBER 2000 this magazine put the pouty faces of Yorke and his bandmates—O'Brien, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, bassist, Colin Greenwood, and drummer Phil Selway—on the cover, along with the question, "The world's greatest rock band?" At the time the answer was pretty easy: Sure, why not? They were only a few years removed from the laser-show vignettes of OK Computer, and they'd just released the successfully audience-segregating Kid A, the only chart-topping record to include a relevance to rampant lemon-sucking. Besides, the pickings were slim—other groups mentioned in that issue included Disturbed and the Insane Clown Posse—and so being the world's greatest rock band was about as admirable as being the world's most dazzling salt-rock formation.

Despite the good-but-not-great sales of 2001's Amnesiac and 2003's Hail to the Thief, the fact that they have released only one new song in the past two years, and the ascent of bands that sound more like old-school Radiohead than Radiohead do, the answer remains the same: Of course they're the world's greatest rock band.

Much of this has to do with Yorke being one of the last truly myth-shrouded frontmen left. Not to slag on the competition, but the Gallaghers no longer have the tunes, Bono isn't enough of a recluse, and Chris Martin still hasn't written a song as good as "Karma Police." Even musicians who aren't Radiohead fans speak glowingly of them. "What they're doing with musical ideas is really genuine and authentic," says Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. "They could really become super arena-rock, because they had that promise. But they take another turn with [their sound], because they want to do different things.

And like Moore, Yorke finds himself in the position of unlikely rude elder statesman.

Do you feel old?

I feel old. And wise. It's a fucking weird thing, because I've always wanted to do that thing of growing old disgracefully, one way or the other. It's a bad idea to say to yourself, "I wish I was 20 again." I hated it. I used to go through really bad periods.

What was going on?

I was—well, I am—sort of confrontational. If I don't agree with something, then I'll rant and rave about it. It was almost pathological. Early on I used to get into all these scrapes with people. I'm sort of proud of that, because it kicks up the dust. The Arctic Monkeys—they have a bit of that, which I think is good. I don't really understand the music myself, but they've been put in that position, and they're really young, and they don't give a fuck. There's all these people all over them like a rash, and I can remember exactly what that's like—all these people going [affects a sleazy coo], "Oooh, we'll have a piece of you." And I think biting the hand that feeds you is incredibly important.

Nowadays are you more comfortable with the inanities of fame?

They don't happen anymore. There seems to be this threshold, and during the OK Computer period, suddenly all this shit started happening, and you're this moving target, and weird people start attaching themselves to you.

With Kid A and Amnesiac, it was tough making those records, but at the same time, it was exciting to feel like you were basically jumping off: "Fuck the lot of you! We're off!" The most amazing thing about it was I remember sitting in Central Park, and Kid A was No. 1 for one week—like some sort of clerical error was going on. How the fuck did we do that? No videos, no bullshit—we minimized it as much as we could. Knowing that we'd never get away with it again was like our little proxy Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

So do you have a normal life in Oxford?

It's fine. Really. It's good for the soul to see the same people walking down the street and not get hassled. I only get hassled once every two or three days—someone might come up, but it's usually a nice thing, a positive thing. So I cannot complain.

Are your kids old enough to know what you do?

My [five-year-old] son came to our first show in Copenhagen. I can't get anything about it out of him: "So what do you think?" [Mimes a childlike shrug]

LIKE SO MANY other easily distracted creative types with too much free time and too little restraint, Yorke started blogging last year. The posts? Strung-together rants, plus the occasional in-the-studio update (Radiohead have been recording a follow-up to Hail to the Thief since last fall, though Yorke says they're nowhere near done). Yorke's prose style is choppy and scattered, and his entries make for an often disturbing read: Extremely personal, grammar-be-damned lines like "I was struggling, feels like we been trapped for a long time" are posted with no additional details, leaving readers to wonder if Yorke has gone completely crackers (and also to ask, "When did he start using smiley-face emoticons?").

I'm going to read you a few of these blog postings...

Oh, goody.

"Have come through another crisis, shaky but intact." What crisis?

[Pauses] Just wondering whether [Radiohead] should be carrying on. I always wonder whether we should be carrying on. We all do, really. In January and February we were still trying to work out what was what. It just seems to take a monumental effort to get everything back in gear. We stopped for so long. You need to be hanging out a lot and sharing ideas without realizing it. You can't disappear for six months and come back and expect it to be wonderful. And by rights now, we should have split up. Isn't that what we're fucking supposed to do at this point? We're not fucking 20.

Here's another one: "I'm fucking tearing my hair out. Too much at once." It sounds like you put a lot of pressure on yourself.

The pressure's from all of us. There was a long period of time when we didn't have a producer. We didn't have someone external giving us feedback. And by default, that meant that I, for whatever reason, was the one saying yes or no, and I was tearing my hair out because I couldn't wear both hats.

How about "There are giant waves of self-doubt crashing over me."

Ah. There I go again.

Is this an allusion to depression? You've talked about depression in the past.

Maybe. I mean, I can never work out if it's depression or just lack of energy.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER, outside Philadelphia's Tower Theatre, a determined-looking teen stands on the corner, index finger in the air. Like so many other 'Headheads milling about, he has an almost zero chance of getting in; the Tower holds only 3,000, and the seats for tonight's show—the band's first Stateside concert since they were forced to headline over the Pixies—sold out in seconds.

So he'll miss out on the mad rush when the band takes to the stage with "You and Whose Army?" He'll miss the nine new songs, many of which sound like a return to the rock-oriented Radiohead of The Bends (especially the soulful "House of Cards" and the Wire-in-a-haunted-house "Open Pick"). And he'll miss out on one of Yorke's most physically animated performances to date: the frontman staggers, flails, and waves, and at one point appears to approximate Axl Rose's shimmying snake dance (thought the homage is probably accidental). To the casual observer, it could even look as if he's having... fun.

When you were in the studio earlier this year, pondering the breakup of the band, how serious did it get?

What will probably irritate me about talking about that is that people make a big thing out of it. Well, what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's all wonderful and that we never thought about it? I think it's good to be honest about wanting to still have genuine reasons for doing this. But when you say that some days it doesn't feel like the right thing to do, it's made into this big thing. But surely, that's fundamental. That's a fundamental part of the whole process of being a musician—choosing whether to work this way or that way.

How bad did it get? I don't know. Lots of discussions. I think we're a lot closer now than we have been for a few years.

Do you still enjoy being in Radiohead?

Yeah, I do. Ultimately, it's important to me to be sharing ideas with the others. That's the way we do it. You don't notice it until you actually decide to not hang out with each other for a bit.

You've been cracking jokes and smiling a lot on this tour. Do you think your reputation for being humourless is fair?

No. I think it's widely unfair. But it's out of my control. I'm humourless when I think people are wankers. I'm not tolerant of idiots.

What's the biggest misconception people have about you?

Well, that's the same as the previous question!

Johnny Cash Movies, Pixies Who Sing

THESE ARE A FEW OF YORKE'S FAVOURITE THINGS

Walk the Line

"Fucking hell, what a great film! I liked the way they were able to take the [characters'] biographies and dramatize them in a way that wasn't naff."

Liars, Drum's Not Dead

"My favourite record of the moment. I don't know what it is about it—when you have it on, you just zone out. They moved to Berlin, and they sound like they're smoking loads of ganja."

The Bug vs. the Rootsman

They're on Rephlex, which is Aphex Twin's label. It's all sort of bit-crushed, and I guess it's drum'n'bass. I don't know. I'm too old to actually know the difference between this and grime. I'm supposed to know this shit."

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler

"It's an American book. [Album cover artist] Stanley Donwood lent it to me because we've been obsessing about suburbia. It's an analysis of the way America's developed since the first settlers. There was this period before and after the Second World War where America could have gone one way or another. And it chose to go [toward massive development]."

Björk, "Unravel"

"While you are away, my heart comes undone/Slowly unravels in a ball of yarn/The devil collects it with a grin." I'm trying to get Radiohead to do a cover, because I think it's one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard."

"Ain't No Fat on This Record"

YORKE COMES CLEAN ABOUT HIS ALBUMS

PABLO HONEY

1993

"Some of the songs we did justice to, and some we were in a bit of a hurry to do. But I think we did a good job on that record, considering we were kind of wet behind the ears."

THE BENDS

1995

"I like the fact that The Bends was so direct, but it [required] a lot of aborted sessions and starting over. For 'Street Spirit [Fade Out]', we were bashing our heads against the wall for days and not getting anywhere. We had countless versions that didn't make sense. I was being impatient."

OK COMPUTER

1997

"The house [in Bath, where it was recorded] was the most haunted house we ever encountered. Some people saw things, some people heard things. What tends to happen to me with haunted houses is I hear the thoughts of this other entity. You can't determine what they're saying; they're not that specific. Unless you're under the influence, and it gets really specific!"

KID A

2000

"I often think about the horn section on ‘The National Anthem'. Me and Jonny were standing in front of all these players; Jonny was writing out scores, and I was going, ‘Just play it like a bunch of cars in a traffic jam! They're really cross!' I really didn't give a shit what they started playing. I was listening to a lot of Charles Mingus. I wanted to take that to the extreme."

AMNESIAC

2001

"It never felt right to make Kid A and Amnesiac all one record; they both have [their own] weird flow. Amnesiac has some good songs on it—we play ‘Dollars & Cents' a lot. And I'm really proud of ‘You and Whose Army?': Jonny was listening to [30s vocal group] the Ink Spots, and he and Nigel had a bee in their bonnet about how it should be done. And I was like, ‘Are you sure about that?"

HAIL TO THE THIEF

2003

"Of all the records we did, I'd maybe change the playlist. I think we had a meltdown when we put it together. ‘There There' is amazing, and ‘2+2=5' is good, but as Nigel says, I wish I had another go at that one. We wanted to do things quickly, and I think the songs suffered. It was part of the experiment. Every record is part of the experiment."

THE ERASER

2006

"Ain't no fat on this record — it's a lean motherfucker. Short records are a good idea—40 minutes is the length of a school lesson, isn't it? Besides, we didn't have a lot left over. There's a B-side called ‘Drunk Machine,‘ which was cool, but The Eraser has a nice sheen to it, and if we put that in, it would have been like putting a massive stink bomb in the middle of the record."

Troubled Man

Confusion reigns on the Radiohead leader's solo debut [3 out of 5 stars]

by Jon Dolan / Photo-Illustration by Joe Magee

Rock music is based on a symbiotic relationship between artist and audience: They do whatever they want, we think it's genius. Get coked up and drive your car into a rehab clinic? Genius. Sober up and sit around a castle IM'ing with the Dalai Lama while a sexy robot maid rubs your temples? More genius. But some rock gods don't play that game, and Thom Yorke is one of them. The career of the Radiohead frontman has been an ongoing process of building a strange, maybe unprecedented empathy between a musical icon and his teeming minions.

Throw on any Radiohead album since 1997's OK Computer rewrote the book on stadium-rock alienation. Each is a little black pool of prog-rock drift where Yorke marinades his ego until it nearly dissolves, leaving him and the listener in a liberating state of disorientation. The woozier the vertigo, the deeper the bond. Now he's also got a blog (www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/) where he can share his most personal, tortured thoughts. Celebrities get rich commodifying their elusive inner beauty, but Yorke's freebie outpourings are kind of subversive.

The Eraser, a stopgap en route to the next Radiohead album (due in 2007), offers nine excursions into ambient neurosis that only heighten that shared sense of confusion. The skittery, out-of-focus beats and electronica brutalism are unsettling, and Yorke's dire musings are more obtuse than ever. But for him, that's just honesy, and this is his most personal, confessional work (Yorke created all the songs with producer Nigel Godrich). Call it a blog with beats--low on guitars and high on abstract expressive moodiness. "The more you try to erase me, the more that I appear/The more I try to erase you, the more that you appear," he yelps above the blurry piano on the title track, before the tension breaks with an almost humane house-music groove. It's one of the few moments when his body takes precedence over his troubled mind.

These are the weirdest tracks Yorke has ever been a part of; even devotees of Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's comparatively pleasant orchestral outing, Bodysong, may be a little freaked out at first. "Analyse" suggests Swan Lake performed on a hot plate, and "Skip Divided" is like an EKG machine humming old soul tunes. Echoing Radiohead, these songs dwell in the space where everyday communication fails, and we have to look deeper or look away. But Yorke's ability to make alienation seem reassuring--what he refers to here as his "elliptical caress"--always draws you in. Whether he's singing about his childhood or postmodern apathy or math or rain, his drippiest distress calls sound like gospel. Even if he's going nowhere in particular, you can't help but tag along.

[invisibleraven]

Here, let me carry you-- Sweet Tarts

Carrie tapped her foot impatiently, glancing at her watch and sighed in an annoyed fashion. This is why she hated relying on Uber for rides, she was never sure if she was gonna get a creep, or worse, ghosted like she was sure she was being right now.

This was why she desperately needed her licence back. Look it wasn't her fault that those lights all happened to turn red just as she went through them okay? It just seemed to be her luck to always run them, and the judge was less than understanding after it happened a few dozen times.

So for now she was standing outside her hotel, ready to just give in and call a taxi when an ancient looking truck pulled up in front of her. The window rolled down and an admittedly cute guy looked out, lowering his shades to peer at her. "You Carrie?'

"You're late," she answered in reply, opening the door and tossing her bags in the backseat.

"Can't be helped doll, traffic lets up for no man. Plus every toll in town is out to get me I swear. Sorry for the tardiness though. Now, where am I taking you?" he said as she secured her seatbelt.

Carrie spat out the address and then stared out the window stubbornly, arms crossed as the scenery flew by. Her driver (the app said his name was Reggie) hummed along to the country station playing on the radio, oblivious to her foul mood.

It wasn't his fault really. Sure, he had been late, and that hadn't helped, but Carrie was grumpy to begin with. The conference had been tedious and unnecessary to her, but her boss told her to go, even put her up in a nicer room, and promised her a promotion next quarter, so she went. Now all she wanted was to go home to her own bed and chill in front of her television for the rest of the day.

"So are you the chatty type or the sit in awkward silence for the duration of the ride type?" Reggie asked as they pulled onto the highway. "Personally I prefer to talk, but I draw the line at car games. Did one stint with a family and I swear I never wanna hear the words I Spy again after that."

"Silence please," Carrie begged. "My head is pounding and the heat isn't helping. Why do you even own a vehicle without AC here?"

"Sorry, Old Betsy's coolant is a little low. When we make a put stop I'll top her up," Reggie offered in explanation. "I usually have a sensible wagon for this, but she's in the shop getting detailed and this ride is helping pay for it."

He reached into the back then, pulling out a bottle of water and offered it to her. "There's Advil in the glove box if you want it. Boy Scout and all."

"Something tells me you were never a Scout," Carrie snarked as she cracked open the bottle, letting the tepid water soothe the parched nature of her throat before rooting around to find the pills, tossing them back as well.

"Guilty, but it still never hurts."

They drove a while longer in silence, save the low sounds of the radio, and Carrie finally felt some of the pressure surrounding her skull start to abate. "Thanks," she whispered. "For the water and the pills. They seem to be helping."

"All part of the Reggie package," he replied, lowering his sunglasses to send her a wink before directing his eyes back to the road. Only the truck seemed to be slowing, and he screwed up his face as his foot pressed down harder on the gas.

No dice, and the truck was going a mere crawl. "I have to pull over," Reggie said, easing her onto the shoulder, the engine giving a weak cough as he applied the brake. Carrie threw her head back and groaned as Reggie went to take a look.

"God what else can go wrong?" she said.

"Bad news I'm afraid," Reggie said as he rounded the cab again. "We're overheated and it dried up my oil."

"I had to ask didn't I?" Carrie muttered to herself.

"No worries, it's a small hike to the nearest pit stop, I can jaunt on over and get her filled. You can come with or stay here."

Carrie was about to reply she would just call for another car, but of course her phone was near dead with no reception. She didn't exactly relish either option, but maybe the walk would do her good. Or lead her to a working phone. She grabbed her bag and hopped out of the truck, then thought better of it, grabbing another bottle of water from the back before Reggie locked up the truck.

"Let's go."

It wasn't long before Carrie really regretted her decision. Her shoes were not the best choice for a trek and with the sun beating down, her sensible business attire felt sweltering. "How much farther is this rest stop?" she asked.

"Probably another fifteen minutes?" Reggie replied, wiping his brow with a handkerchief he had fetched from his back pocket. "But once I get what we need there you can stay while I hoof it back to Betsy."

Carrie almost levelled him with a glare when her foot caught on a rock, making a sharp pain echo from her ankle as it twisted. She hissed and dropped, swearing under her breath as it already started to bruise.

"Fuck my life," she said, glancing up at the sky.

"Come on, I'll help you," Reggie said, looping an arm under her to help her up. "You think you can hobble?"

Carrie tried putting weight on her foot and immediately shrieked in pain. "That's a no."

"Here," Reggie said, "Let me carry you."

"Wait?"

"I can carry you," he repeated. "You want piggy back or bridal style?"

"You just said it was another fifteen minutes!" Carrie protested. "You can't carry me that far!"

"I'm stronger than I look," Reggie replied. "Come on, I can't leave you here and I doubt we're anywhere my phone will get bars t call for an ambulance. So?'

"Piggy back," Carrie grumbled, hefting herself onto Reggie. He lifted her and her bag with ease, trotting down the road.

He was warm, and a tiny bit sweaty, but Carrie found that he could lift her, and didn't seem to be straining. He was making sure not to jostle her ankle more than needed and even offered her his shades if she wanted them.

"I'm good," she replied quietly. "Do you want some water?"

Reggie shook his head and kept going. "I'm fine doll, no worries. We're almost there." He nodded to where Carrie could see the sign for the rest stop shining ahead like a beacon.

Finally their oasis was in sight.

Thankfully they made it there, with Reggie setting her down on the bench outside, collapsing next to her and taking the offered water, downing half of it and pouring more over his face. Carrie sucked in a breath as the droplets caught in his hair, on his eyelashes, and his eyes opened to reveal a startling green colour, the redness of his face highlighting golden freckles.

"I'll be right back. You want me to help you in? Get you anything?"

"A Diet Coke?"

"Comin' right up."

Carrie slumped back on the bench, taking out her phone. Three bars. But then, instead of calling for another ride, she put it back, Lifted her foot onto the bench and grinned when Reggie came back out with her drink and an ice pack.

"Owner offered me this. He's going to have his employee drive me to the truck and I'll be back in a jiff. Unless you wanna call for someone else?' Reggie asked, his fingers playing with each other as he avoided her eyes. "I would totally understand if you did."

"I'll be here waiting," Carrie replied, sipping at her drink.

Reggie beamed, and took off, promising that he would be right back, and the owner was right there if she needed anything. Carrie waved him off, and sat back on the bench, humming.

It was only after he pulled out of sight did she pull out her phone again and opened the Uber app. Making sure to give Reggie's service five stars.

[eden-regained]

Dolores. A Fairytale. - Chapter 2 - "A dead fish..."

"... may stink to high hell, give you that lobotomized thousand-yard stare and make you shit yourself to death if you eat it, but it's harmless otherwise!" was something my mother had said to me in a drunken stupor one evening decades ago, yet it remains to be the wisest thing I've ever heard anyone say, laugh as you may suppose.

Mortals these days, especially the adults, are so intensely banal it can cause my kind quite intense pains from even just being around them, yet I need their presence, for as long as I don't engage with them too frequently I am safe. I cannot say the same for the Fae and those "Fae-touched"; where they tread dragons, imps and a range of other chimerical pests are bound to follow, vermin us knights are sworn to butcher lest we risk their horrific shapes taking root in the dreamscapes of those unfortunate enough to sleep in their paths.

And sure, many a mundane human may jump at the chance to join us in our ranks once the mists upon their eyes have been cleared by enchantment. Firstly, being oathbound to a lord is something not to be taken lightly, indeed, I have heard stories of oathbreakers being punished by having their tongues cut out, secondly, a Mien's wound still bleeds, and thirdly... once you've seen it you've truly seen it all.

I'd rather swim in a sea surrounded by slimy rotting fish and their sludgy dead blood than be face to face with one more goddamned chimerical-paratsite.

As fate would have it, though, my nextdoor neighbour is not the average Autumn person, no, Mr. Abdoul is an elderly man with the typical elderly kenning eyes only outmatched by those of the Kithain and thus the first sentence out of his mouth when he saw me returning form my trip to the park wearily dragging myself guitar in tow along the endless-seeming stairs of our apartment complex fishbowl towards him this evening was "My god, Dolores, you look like a ghost!" I had been so done for the day I was ready to just race my way past him if need be, but when he had offered me leftover cookies from today's meetup with his Yahtzee-group I simply couldn't bring myselft to say no.

"Inge made them" he'd explained before noting "you smell like a whole aisle of toothpaste, how'd that happen?" I couldn't help but giggle even though I'd felt a little more like crying from exhaustion. "New deodorant, that's all!" Mr. Abdoul had not laughed, rather he'd stared at me intently with an ever drooping frown, brows furrowed. "Say, are you a sleepwalker? Or perhaps you're prone to night terrors?" he'd asked me as I'd carefully began to eat the first cookie. "I'm... well, I think so, yes, how can you tell?" I had replied, getting more nervous by the second. Could he have caught on to my unfortunate nightly "visits" because of -

" - the screams coming from your apartment sometimes, they concern me. Nightmares like that can rob someone most their well-deserved rest, my daughter barely used to sleep for more than an hour at a time because of it when she was little. Guido recommends lavender oil, says it knocks him out like a rock" Mr. Abdoul rambles on, all I had mustered up for an answer is a half-hearted "I'll try it out" even though I'm sure as death lavender will attract more succubi rather than repell them.

Sitting here on my futon infront of my tiny, old as dirt TV meekly illuminating my last vestiges of wakefulness at midnight with a can of Spezi in one hand and a sleeping pill in the other I toast to my mother, the wisest woman I've ever known, praying to whatever god may be up above that tonight my watch will begin later, if only for an hour and that atleast this time around I won't have to stare into the pits of the human hell.

Looking down at the plate with the last two cookies I notice they're mermaid shaped. One dead, bitten in half. One more to go.

[keilemlucent]

pretty eyes & starshine: i

(NSFW)

hawks | takami keigo x reader

ao3

part i   ||   part ii   ||   part iii

beta’ed: @shadowworks & @keiqos​ (thank you!! 💞)

word count: ~9.4k

Keigo surrenders to losing himself in the blank-walled, temporary home he inhabits. He finds familiarity in the routine of aches, pains and pills. 

You’re his only solace. 

warnings: bodily trauma, medical trauma, PTSD, dissociation, suicidal ideation, alcohol as a coping mechanism and graphic description of sustained injury

a/n: oh wow so here it is, big sad fic :’^) part one!! it’s canon divergent from manga chapter 296 onwards.

this one has been a long time coming. please mind the warnings!! this fic deals a lot with trauma and mental illness in tandem. the warnings are going to change with the coming parts, so please be mindful. i don’t wanna get too sappy, but this piece has been my Baby for the past few months, and i’m excited to finally share. that being said, enjoy loves 💞

Everyone is fucked up after the War.

There is no kindness in an aftermath like this one, not so soon, and certainly not with dried blood of old comrades and mud still caking under its metaphorical fingernails. The world was in shambles, and every hero is along with it.

There is something horrifying about being at the center of it all, Hawks, no, Keigo thinks solemnly, all too often. 

He’s used to the attention he’s getting, touches and poking and prodding by near strangers. Except, he was used to exclamations of how great and powerful and remarkable he was. Now, all the attention he receives is followed by little sighs and sad, broken eyes.

He’s sure he looks equally as sad; Keigo had been nothing but an empty shell since the War had ended and he’d been carted off to his hospital room. Numb despite all of his burns. 

It’s the shock, he tells himself, he’ll snap out of it any day.

Any day.

...

And it is any day.

He wakes up to screaming from the next room over, agonized wails that pierce the air as his morning nurse enters. She’s over-worked and haggard while checking his vitals with a forced smile. They don’t make conversation with him much anymore, and Keigo doesn’t have the energy to try and force it. There isn’t enough in him to pretend that he’s okay enough to banter with folks. 

If he still had his wings, he would’ve wrapped himself up tight in the plumage and let himself rot away in some corner. He’d let the dissociated numbness fade, however long it took, and then succumb to whatever psychological wounds revealed themselves. 

Waste away, all alone.

But he doesn't have that luxury. He is in an overcrowded hospital with swarms of civilians and heroes, all stuffed in one place because the world doesn’t have the time to differentiate between the wounded, nor the space or resources to give different resources. Though, Keigo is a special case, hence why he’s had healers coming to him for the past three weeks since the War trying to coax his body into genesizing a new pair of wings. 

The Commission’s hospital has all the bells-and-whistles that a medical professional could need, but Keigo, and so many others, are facing problems that don’t have good and easy roads to healing. 

That’s assuming healing was even possible.

Keigo is convinced, has been convinced, that there is no way to come back from the War, nor the absence on his back, nor the shouts and cries of pain that echo around the hospital like a new genre of music that Keigo so desperately wants to scrub from his brain.

Things change, it’s inevitable. Everyone falls eventually, and he was just used to flying.

It’s a harder descent. 

...

Keigo doesn’t meet you on any day, he meets you on a lonely night.

The evenings and early mornings were the most peaceful at the hospital. Most folks, three weeks after the end of it all, had serious enough injuries that they had to be somewhat sedated to sleep, either for physical or mental pain keeping them from sleep.

It’s morose, Keigo thinks, quietly and privately, but he craves those hours. All he hears then is the hum of air vents and beeps of his own medical machinery. None of the audible agony of the folks he was sworn to protect.

He’s slept most of the day, not lucid enough to do much else, and the nurses haven’t been giving him sedatives unless he asked (though he always did.) Without forced quiet, he’s antsy, fingers twitching and flaring the new (and growing) pains rooted in his (empty, isn’t that horrifying—) back.

He rouses himself, adjusting his scratching hospital garb (thin sweats and a cheap crew neck with the back almost entirely cut away). With his IV pole at his side, he resolves to take a few laps and quiet himself, hopefully.

(Keigo would need sedatives, he always did, but it was nice to play pretend that he didn’t. It made things easier for a precious hour or two.)

His laps are usually quick, despite how much his body aches when he walks. So much new, burnt tissue that needed to learn how to move, how to live again, kept him throbbing and gritting his teeth.

Masochism be damned, he keeps at it during his sleepless nights. Physical therapy wasn’t an option when the world was caving in with him at the epicenter.

There’s a common room at the end of the foyer of identical (filled) hospital rooms, just a collection of stuffy, uncomfortable couches that face an aged TV and a wide bay of windows. It’s rarely used, just a formality for when the space of the hospital had regularly hurt victims and heroes. When it wasn’t bearing so much weight. 

Sometimes, he would stop to idly regard the mostly barren world around the hospital. Far from the cities, a little hideaway for heroes and their loved ones to heal in privacy. Other than sheer distance, there is a thick, organic shield around the complex.  It’s a towering forest, man-planted with identical types of trees in perfect rows. 

It’s grim in its predictability. 

(When did he get so fucking pensive?)

(Oh yeah, too much time locked in his goddamn skull.)

He hadn’t been planning to have any inner musings that night.

But, that night, he notes that he is not alone. 

On one of the hard couches, you sit, with your own IV-pole companion and injuries, an arm carried in a monochromatic sling and set in a hard cast.

You turn to him, blinking wide eyes at him.

There’s a single lamp on, and the light dances in your eyes with its own unexpected rhythm.

Something compels Keigo to smile, cocky, like he used to, and greet you with a little wave, and a finger to his lips.

Your expressions melts, a hand going over your mouth to stifle a giggle.

It’s like you’re pulling him after that, he finds himself resting across from you.

You must look like a pair, he realizes. You’re greasy, he’s greasy. He’s got a fine layer of built-up stubble that shouldn’t be called anything other than impressive peach fuzz (not that Keigo’s seen it, he’s felt it. The idea of looking in a mirror makes him sick to his stomach. Though you don’t have any pseudo-beard, you’ve got your own unkempt look and feel that makes you two kindred without sharing a word.

It feels comfortable, warm.

“Hi,” you speak first, voice soft and gentle. “Can’t sleep?”

“Nah, who can?” Keigo replies, shaking his head. “But what about you? Midnight oil doesn’t burn without a cause, you know.” 

Your expression is also painful in the way it’s so open, yet worn (most everyone had locked up by now, the ones in the hospital and Keigo imagined the ones outside of it too.) 

“I like the sky— the stars are pretty.” You sigh, wistful. “I watch for shooting stars.”

The thought, the significance of that obvious wanting, makes something pang deep in his chest. Childlike hope in a place like this, foolish as well as frail.

“Trying to get a wish?” Keigo clicked his tongue. “Smart.”

“No, no— wishing doesn’t... suit me, right now.” You snorted, shaking your head, the light in your eyes dancing, “I just think they’re pretty.”

Keigo blinks, unable to stop the way his eyes widen.

Your posture reads nothing but earnestness and vulnerability, so freely given (so undeserved) without a hint of pullback.

“What do you want to be called?”

“... Excuse me?” Keigo is not used to his thoughts being interrupted in the blanket of dark that he feels most comfortable in. Your words shock him enough with their meaning, let alone the way you’re so brazen. 

“I, uh,” You stumble on your words. “I know who you are, but I also saw that whole broadcast, which I’m going to easily assume you don’t want to talk about. But, I don’t know how much you want to be called ‘Hawks’ at this point either.”

His mouth is dry.

“So, I ask instead,” You lean forward, your IV line pulling the slightest bit and you wince. His discomfort must be very fucking apparent, because you backtrack in moments. “... Or, neither. I can call you something else, too.”

“... A nickname, for someone you don’t even know?” Keigo, Hawks, whoever he is now struggles with words. There’s too many, and they’re all too fast, and he doesn’t have his wings to catch up to them or outrun them— 

“Yeah, why not?” You shrug with a lazy smile. “I’ll call you... pretty eyes. How about that?”

Keigo does have pretty eyes. They’re gold, light and glittering amber in the lowlight. Before he, ya’ know, lost them, and when things were good, but awful, but normal, he darkened the organic marks around his canthi with liquid eyeliner. He liked makeup, prettied himself up and accentuated all the good he had. Preening.

None of that is left, just what organically was on his skin, and he hasn’t seen it in its raw state in years, and like fuck if he was going to look in a mirror just to figure out if his natural eyeliner was half as good as that by his own hand. 

“Sure, that works,” He relaxes, mirroring your expression like the practiced... pro he is. “What do I call you, starshine?”

You roll your eyes, but nothing about you fades as you tell him your name, something that calms and fills him, “But, you can call me starshine if you want. Sounds nice.”

It’s sweet.

So, Keigo greets you.

“Nice to meet you, starshine.”

...

That’s the first time you kept each other’s company. Most of it is quiet, you truly do just want to watch the stars. Keigo did with you, tracing the shadows of clouds and moonlight with his eyes.

(Occasionally, his gaze shifts to you, regarding your figure with the same care for only a moment before returning to the sky you both miss.)

Eventually, the quiet heat of it puts him half to sleep, and he bids you goodnight.

You wave goodbye, rising as he away.

The light isn’t in your eyes anymore, and your warmth feels a little too far away.

...

The next days are long.

He slips into that shell-state again, where he’s a husk that stares emptily at the ceiling as the Commission tries to piece him together to a fraction of what he once was. 

They fail, each time, because no healer they’ve brought can regenerate quirk-formed appendages, but he commends their efforts all the same. It’s out of desperation, sure, but he’s heard whispers of the new generation. In recalling his own sidekicks, he isn’t as scared for the future. 

(Everyone else’s future. He’s so terrified of his own that he turns extra numb if he thinks about it.) 

Selfishly, he just wants his wings for himself. They’d keep him plenty company. If he ever did get them back, he’d fly somewhere, faraway and alone to live out his days under his feathers and feel as empty as he wanted. 

They fuss over him all day, not knowing those desires. They are private, and he only puts on his old, self-confident bravado so they don’t lock him up somewhere to have his brain picked and to fill the new holes with pill-shaped gauze. 

As established, Keigo was content to rot.

(He can’t fully parse all of his feelings and they consume him.)

The healers for the week all failed, doing nothing but making his back bow and burn. It’s painful. Obviously, trying to stitch a body back together, or rather making a body make when it was so tired of creating—

(Feather after feather after feather, for how long?)

He’s glad his sessions are in a different room, a spare, horrifyingly metallic exam room across the hospital. It reeks like iron and isopropyl alcohol, but Keigo doesn’t mind. The filmy paper that rolls from the exam table gets soaked with his sweat as opposed to his familiar bed dressings. 

Not to mention, it’s nice, not having to hear his neighbor’s screams and pleadings to God, any god, for reprieve. Calming. 

(He feels less guilty. Less like it was his own hand that scarred up their bodies. If he can’t hear them, he only thinks of his own agony under ‘helping’ hands.)

His body is exhausted at the end of each day, and even his restlessness fades with the necessities of his body.

He doesn’t see you, and practically forgets about you.

It’s a week or so later when he takes one of his strolls, and finds you tucked away into your nook, dimly lit and with a blanket over your lap.

Keigo feels it as he nears you, that comfort that your expression bleeds into his very soul. Even as he watches your healthy hand nervously toy with the thin knit in your lap, it doesn’t dim you.

The lamplight dances in your eyes as you nod to him, “Fancy seeing you here, pretty eyes.” 

“You’d never know it, but I live just down the hallway— me,” He touches his chest proudly, surprised by his own jest. 

You gave a fake gasp, mirroring him easily, “Never knew I had such a well-known soul in my neighborhood. Forgive my transgression.”

Bending at the waist, as much as you can with your right leg extended, straight, you choke on laughter.

Keigo follows you in it, giggling, genuinely giggling, high and light and girlish like he’d never heard from himself before.

He snapped his mouth shut, thickly swallowing and shaking his head.

“No need to be shy,” You assured him with an affectionate turn of the head. “You have a lovely laugh.”

“Now you’re just flirting with me, cute.”

Your head tilted farther, confused, “I’m simply being kind to you.”

Why didn’t he have the snark to reply to that? Probably because he was half-dead and on painkillers for nearly a month. He’d beat himself up about it later, maybe.

There wasn’t an ounce of malice in your tone, just earnestness that tugged at his own insecurities.

You backpedaled. “How was your day?”

Keigo takes a few moments to respond, shaking his head without mind to the way his too-long hair flops in his face. 

The banter isn’t forced, but it’s not welcomed yet.

As comfortable as you feel to him, Keigo isn’t comfortable.

“Same old, same old,” Living hell. “Boring, mostly. Painful, but dull. It’s crazy how much hell smells like cheap disinfectant, huh?” 

You agree, quietly, “I’m pretty sure there’s many hells in this place.”

Keigo doesn’t know how to respond, so he doesn’t. 

You both regard the stars again with growing reverence. Specks of light dance back in your eyes as you both settle into the hard cushions like they were made of goose down and Sherpa. 

...

Your conversations are... disjointed, to say the least. 

There’s an inability for words and phrases to flow between you. There’s starts and stops, stalls like an engine that putters on tarry oil without ever truly firing. There are good feelings, still, safety in silence before words as you stargaze together through the comfort of a window.

It should feel disarming, to be so far from the sky yet have no way to reach it. And it is, but Keigo can swallow the reality these days. It’s easier when there’s someone on the mend close by, sharing in the discomfort of a rawed mind and the comfort of a yellow-toned fluorescent bulb.

It’s unspoken kinship. Keigo never had time for it in the past, but now it was all he had. There had to be some cruel irony in it (as if there wasn’t enough in his life), but he couldn’t make himself mind. 

Everything he’d once excelled at, everything he had was gone. He was barren and stripped (don’t think about it—), exposed to the elements in all the worst ways. At least the hospital was clean and safe, relatively. 

It feels safest with you near.

Sure, your conversations were clearly that of two horribly broken people, but that wasn’t new or surprising. It simply was.

“Do you know constellations?” You ask one night, a colder one, where you’ve got two blankets over your lap. 

Keigo thought for a moment, “A handful, but I never took to stargazing, you know?”

You don’t relate, just chew your lip, the light of the dim lamp dancing across your irises.

“Can I show you some?” 

“...Constellations?”

“What else?” You crack a smile. “Come on, pretty eyes.”

Whatever you’d like, he’d do. 

He can’t refuse, he’s already getting weak for you. 

Shifting, Keigo joins you on your typical couch for the first time. Your IV poles, thrumming and humming their own rhymes harmonize, quietly and mostly imperceptible. 

You regard him even more warmly, so close, a little smile playing on your lips.

“What’s your sign?”

Keigo deadpans, “What?”

“Like... astrology. What’s your sign?”

You wiggle your eyebrows, knowing the double-meaning of your words. 

Flirting again.

Since when had he been so bad at it?

“Capricorn,” He huffs back. He keeps his back off the stone-like cushions of the couch— his scarring had been itchy the whole day prior— so itchy— 

You tap the plastic-y fabric gap between the two of you, grabbing his attention, “Hey, pretty eyes. Stick with me, let me show you where that one is.”

So, you do.

Your light-filled eyes trace the sky’s nighttime freckles, searching until you find what you’re looking for.

“There,” Your finger raises, tracing the patterns in the air. “That’s Capricorn, can you see?”

Not really, the stars are just a meaningless smatter. If there’s some sort of pattern he’s supposed to find, he comes up with none. 

“Not in the slightest,” Keigo rolls his eyes. “Show me again?”

You don’t reply, but rather scoot a bit closer, mirror his hunch and pose with precision and tiny adjustments. 

He doesn’t dare to breathe as you carefully grab his arm, extending it. You lay your cheek over his bicep, watching from the closest view to his own that you could. 

“Do you see now?” 

The only starlight he sees is right in front of him, soft cheek pressed against atrophying muscles. Sharing your heat so graciously as you would so easily come to, you chatter about the stories that are written in the stars, by all cultures, for so long.

Keigo hears, but he’s far more focused on how he wishes you were even closer.

...

After that night, you always share the same couch. 

You face forward, right leg always extended and stiff-looking. Keigo doesn’t mind, hardly notices. He faces you, fragile back bandaged and kept away from the unforgiving grit of the uncomfortable couch. It looks a bit uncomfortable, the posing of it all, but with the words flowing easier, neither of you mind.

You keep showing him stars, the constellations you can remember and see in the night sky. 

Keigo makes fun and crafts his own, connecting new dots and winding stories about them.

“See those three there?” He guides your hand, close enough to share your breath. “That’s the comb of the chicken. Star comb, if you will.”

You snort, rolling your eyes and pulling your hand from his grip, “There’s no cock in the stars, pretty eyes. Chickens can’t fly anyways.”

You both freeze.

Keigo’s mouth goes dry—

Chicken can’t fly.

As much as you’re both learning to be human again, there isn’t talk of your injuries. Maybe, there’s mutual curiosity (you’ve been here two months. just for a broken arm, why?), but like fuck Keigo wants to broach the subject.

“S-sorry,” you stumble over your words, physically retreating. “Shouldn’t have said that.”

It is a fact, chickens can’t fly, but Keigo isn’t a chicken. He’s a debauched, defamed hero whose home is the same set of a milky white, hospital ward walls. Once, a real hero, before the war, before selling his morals just for a chance at rest, before blue flame— burning— 

“Pretty eyes,” Your voice trembles, shaking and lonesome. “Come back here, now. Come on.”

You’re holding his cheeks, unkempt nails pressing (blessedly) a bit too hard into his cheeks. The heat of you is so close, almost scalding him, but he wants more of it, more of the heat that doesn’t burn—

“You’re okay, pretty eyes, s-see?” You hold yourself together, jerking your head to the wide window and glittering stars. “We’re just stargazing.” 

Keigo’s has tears leaking down his face, but neither of you acknowledge them. You release him, quietly spinning another tale about a hero hung in the cosmos. He thanks you for it silently by tugging you into his side. 

(It was the first night you really touched him.)

(The light in your eyes was so close, he wanted it all for himself.)

...

They’re running out of healers to try.

From the weakest to the strongest quirk, no one could revive his dead wings. There was no root to push from the scar tissue, nor resolve left in Keigo to try and make new pins and feathers sprout.

His back isn’t fertile. It’s just as poisoned as the rest of him.

...

He wonders where you disappear to during the day. He takes his strolls then, too. Waves to nurses these days, not charming, just friendly, trying to make a little brightness. 

There’s one day where he asks one of the nurses he knows best for a pair of scissors.

She looks at him, worried, “Don’t tell me we need to put you on psych watch.”

“What? No,” Keigo shakes his head, shaggy hair quivering around the frame of his face. “I just need a bit of a haircut.” 

“... We can ask the Commission to bring someone in—”

“I can do it myself.”

She doesn’t argue with the firmness of his voice, rather, she hands him a pair of safety scissors with bright purple handles. They’re for a child, but Keigo’s fine with that. They’d do. 

When he was younger, and in a pinch (and so poor he tried to eat grass and lick scraps from metallic packaging of discarded junk food wrappers) he’d cut his hair with his own feathers.

Safety scissors would be even easier.

It did mean that he had to confront his own visage, which he had gotten too good at avoiding.

The bathroom in his room is small, it would’ve been claustrophobic if he was still carrying a twenty-five-foot wingspan. 

But, he isn’t. It was just him and the scars on his back that he definitely wasn’t ready to see. 

He’s caught glimpses of himself over the past weeks, but nothing substantial. No view that would’ve given himself time to scrutinize over his imperfection. 

The dull hospital mirror reveals too much about him. It feels too vulnerable, makes his chest tighten, as he stares himself in his ‘pretty eyes’.

Purple stamps below his eyes, probably not from sleeplessness itself, just the sheer exhaustion of living. The one under his left is an odd maroon color, mixing with the scar that is burned into that half of his face.

The skin was once soft, plump cheeks always tended too and well taken care of by expensive skincare products. Now, it’s charred and gaunt. Healing, but still obviously scarred heavy and deep.  The weak beard he’s been growing (accidently) is patchy around the thickened tissue. 

It bothers him— 

It doesn’t look like him in the mirror. 

It helps to take care of himself for the first time in a long while. 

He shaves with the cheap foam and single blade razor they’d given him in the toiletries pack the first days he was there, while he was still numbed out and half-dead. The metal glides over his skin, stripping away the numbness just a little. The stubble and cream slide down the drain and away.

His hair is different. The waves had for so long been pushed back and held that way with the winds of his flights. The longer, feathery patches now hang around his face, dangling down and mingling with the too-long sections that curl over his ears and down his neck.

Wetting his hair, he cuts away what he can. 

It’s blunt, messy, and not elegant. 

All the same, the trim feels good. 

Though, his mood goes sour when the screaming starts for the day.

The far wall of the bathroom was shared by him and his shrieking neighbor, and he took great care to never shower when they were singing their awful chorus. It grates on his ears; he should’ve been a bit empathetic to their suffering, but he didn’t care that much. It was so regular, that the screaming that might’ve once sent each one of his feathers (don’t think about, don’t fucking think about it) sharp as the razor in his hand, didn’t bother him in the slightest.

Just a poke at his temple, a jab and a drop of water that irks him more than anything else.

It is a... somewhat pleasant distraction. He can focus more on his fellow patient than his own haggard appearance, the scar, the lack of red at his back— 

It’s all okay, ‘okay’, until the patient starts babbling.

“M-make it stop!” 

Keigo stills.

A scream tears through the drywall. Even without his wings, it makes him thrum, far-too sensitive.

“Help!” The voice yelps. “HELP!” 

There’s a thud and thump from the other room.

“Please, please!”

Keigo’s heart stutters in his chest, and the razor falls from his hand, clattering into the sink.

“MAKE IT STOP!”

It’s you.

It’s your screaming and shrieking that’s burrowed in his ears. It’s your voice that’s trembling in desperation that has him running out of his room, nearly pulling out his IVs as the pole teeters and follows behind him. 

Why are you screaming?

Why have you always been screaming?

A nurse is trying to stop him, urging him to settle but he can’t. There's an urgency in his chest he hasn’t felt since back before and he has to heed it. He needs to.

He pulls his forearm from the nurse’s grasp, hissing in his own pain, muscles pulling and aching with disuse but he doesn’t care.

The nurses drag him back from your door, and they almost have him, almost have him on the ground.

And then he smells burning—

Cloth.

Flesh.

And something in him snaps.

He clocks the nearest nurse with a tight fist, ignoring his atrophied muscles and kicking with everything he could muster.

They release him, probably out of shock. (He’d been such a model patient, so complacent and quiet until then.) 

Then, he stumbles into your room, and sees you, and wants to die.

...

There’s plenty of times in his life where Keigo felt like an animal. When the Commission first got their hands on him, they took to studying and picking his quirk about to figure out the most efficient way to rebuild it to their needs and uses. Now then, he felt very much like an experiment, only half-human. He was too young to really ‘get’ it, but the feeling persisted.

Sometimes, he felt similarly when he played celebrity. The talk shows, the modeling and media felt hoops he had to jump through just to get a decent night’s sleep. It was an additional job aside from heroics, one he excelled at and entertained him. But that didn’t mean each flash of a camera didn’t suck him dry of a bit of his dignity. 

He was sure you had to be feeling similarly.

You’re writhing and arching in your bed, curls of smoke rising from your papery hospital gown. Every machine in your room is screaming with you, bloody and loud and angry—

And scared. Keigo recognized well, and it drove pins into his heart to realize it was you.

It’s even worse when he realizes some part of you is burning. 

At your bedside, he freezes.

Nylon straps wrap around your wrist, around your cast, and keep you held tight to the bed. You’re tied down, held to the plastic bed frame as you wretch and scream.

You don’t even notice him.

The smoke rises from your burning hospital gown. He rips it away, tears the burning section away with his shaking hand. It’s crass, and Keigo sees a bit too much.  The gauze wrapping your leg below is burning as well, in little veins of char that burns black and smoldering. 

Keigo tears it all away, he tears and tears—

And then he sees the wound.

He was trained, once, to see this type of horror and not bat an eye. That training was gone, and all that remained was his starshine with a writhing, molten wound.

Keigo is numb as the nurses drag him back to his room, trying to decide if he prefers the apathy and numbness to injury that his old heroism gave him, or the blinding pain of empathy when someone you... care about is hurt.

He can’t decide which he’d rather suffer with. 

...

You appear in the common room a few nights later.

Keigo still takes his walks in the late evening, even if you aren’t there. If anything, he needs them more. He’s restless, always listening for the screams or howls from the next room over. His annoyance towards them was gone, and all that remained was a concern that knotted in the pit of his stomach. 

There’s a sigh of relief on his lips when he finds you, nestled into a pile of blankets with your IV pole, watching the stars with sad eyes.

He joins you on your couch, cracking a decent joke that you don’t respond to.

Then, there’s silence.

It’s as loud as the stars are bright. The expanse of sound is filled by the hum of the cold air and distant beeping.

“I’m sorry,” Your voice shakes. “You shouldn’t have seen me like that. It’s not... Easy to look at. Or, I imagine it’s not.”

Keigo wants to rip the apology from your tongue and burn it.

“No, please, it’s alright,” He’s begging too much. “I get it.”

As much as he can, anyways.

You’re quiet again, biting your lip so hard it must be close to breaking skin.

“Can we... talk about things?” You ask, softer. “I can’t keep pretending.”

“...’Pretending’?” Keigo knows, but he selfishly wants to hear you say it.

“Well, you didn’t think I’ve been here for two months for my bum arm, right?” You laugh weakly. “And I’m well-aware that you don’t have wings.”

We just don’t talk about it. 

“It’s nicer to look at the stars and pretend everything’s fine,” Keigo lays the statement down and regrets it.

Your fist tightens, jaw clenching.

And there’s more silence.

It’s deafening to Keigo, he wants to speak, scream, but you’re quiet next to him. He can fill voids with his voice so, so easily, yet he turns in on himself.

“I know, it’s all hard,” Tears drip down from your words, though your cheeks remain dry. “I know, but there was a War two months ago, and we’re still holed up in a place like this, and we never talk about why.”

You turn to him, light dancing slowly in your eyes. Your lips part to speak, but no sound comes out.

“... I didn’t want to ask.” Keigo speaks, gaze shifting down to your leg. He questioned why a broken arm would keep you here, but you can’t just ask that. “It’s bad form to ask a stranger about their injuries unnecessarily when they’re traumatized.”

“But we’re not strangers, not anymore.”

Keigo can’t disagree. 

...

You had been in a conbini when Gigantomakia tore through your little suburb. It was a few miles away, but the ground shook as if the goliath was just outside the automatic doors.

Your demon was near, though.

It was a man from the PLF who tore into you so badly. Just some random, emboldened civilian who ascribed to Destro’s ideology hard enough to think about taking out his frustrations on ‘weaker-quirked’ individuals.

That meant the young couple getting slushies in the corner, the old man behind the cash register, and you.

(You’d told your roommate you’d be home quick to help her study—)

(Your roommate is dead, under several tons of rubble.)

“The old man died before the heroes even started trying to rescue anyone. The couple was begging each other to hold on, but only one of them lasted. He died within a few weeks of being taken here.”

There was just you.

You’d hardly been touched by the man, the fucking villain, who’d set his mark on you. But it was more than enough to leave a writhing scar.

Keigo asks to see it, and quietly, you oblige him.

You’re in a gown, you always have been. The hem of it is pulled up by your visibility shaking fingers, and slowly reveals the scar in the lowlight of the ever-present lamp. He’d seen it once, but that didn’t change how startling it was. 

It’s molten.

The skin is gnarled, twisting and scarred worse than anything Keigo’s ever seen. It was like the gore of a torn flesh was frozen over your right side, from your calf, to your thighs to your pretty hips—

“It goes higher, but that’s not exactly couth to show you,” you joke, but neither of you laugh. 

“... It’s not moving anymore?”

“Oh, yeah. It calms down, when it’s dark. Nighttime and all. It stops being so ornery.” 

Keigo has a laundry list of questions, but with the expression on your face that just bleeds exhaustion into the air, and the fresh burns from the restraints on your wrists, he keeps quiet. 

Maybe, three months ago, he’d jabber on about the injury, try to gode some information out on the villain, profile him, track him and beat the tar out of him for touching you—

But this is the present, and Keigo is a wingless soul. All he has is a prescription for painkillers on a rigid schedule, and the awareness that you both appreciate each other.

Keigo scoots to your uninjured side, lifting his arm up and around your shoulder. It hurts, it fucking hurts, but he doesn’t mind.

You tense for a moment, turning to him with wide eyes, scared like he’s never seen.

Then, you melt into him.

...

Keigo’s busy with healers the week, though none speak his language, literally. They’re international, foreign aid that’s been flown in to try to pick up the disaster of a society that’s been left in the wake of the War and the dissolution of Tartarus.

None of them make progress. 

As much as it burns (haha) him to his core, he’s accepting the reality, slowly but surely. 

...

Endeavor visits him.

It’s the morning after a particularly sweet night with you. You still sit together in the starlight, though you’ve run out of constellations to show him. It’s less quiet than it used to be, just little banter that flows between the two of you. It feels more genuine than his old bluntness, welcome after so much odd tension when you first started enjoying the heat of each other’s presence and the far-off stars.

You’d taken to spending time together during the day as well... As much as you could. Strapping you to your bed was for your own safety. Your broken arm had snapped the first few days at the hospital because of the severity of your spasms and flares. The nurses keep you wrapped up, but Keigo drags a chair close to your bed and talks to you as much as he can.

It helps you relax.

Though the days fill with tension as you try to negate the inevitability of your molten scar coming to life, nights remain calm.

And so, so sweet.

You’ve taken to tucking into his side, telling him little treasured facts about the cosmos. It’s easier to guide his eyes like that, as your cheek rests over his collarbone. 

It lingers with him, the feeling of your casual touch, so tentatively offered and so graciously received.

He traces his own constellations over your gown, mindful of the flesh beneath that heats beneath his palm when he gets too close.

After one of those wonderful, early nights, Enji Todoroki enters his room with all of the gusto one would expect. Which is not very much, but the sheer presence of him is enough to make Keigo quake.

 Just like the little boy from Kyushu, Keigo regards him with stars in his eyes. 

The hero, not a speck of flame on him (thank god) pulls up a chair near his bed. Keigo sits cross-legged and cocks his head to the side.

“What brings you to my neck of the woods, number one?” Keigo smiles.

“Number fifteen.”

“... What?”

“Since my injuries, I’m mostly on bedrest,” Enji replied, folding his hands on his chin. “I’m number fifteen now, and that number will more than likely just drop. I’m not much of a hero with only one lung. I’m planning to officially retire at the end of the month.”

Keigo’s chest goes tight and it feels like he’s joking. He tosses on a tight smile. 

“This is hardly time for a pillar—“

“I’m no pillar. I never was,” Enji sighs, running a hand over his scarred cheek. “The kids can handle this.”

Keigo breaks so easily these days.

“That’s not fair—” He had been tossed into this all too early and god it fucked him up— 

“Hawks,” Enji sighed. “There’s hardly anyone left to fight. They’re either dead, missing part of themselves, or gone.”

“So, you’re giving up?”

“If I didn’t, I’d die.”

Coward.

No, just honest and smart. 

“Since when are you this selfish?” Keigo’s own words surprise him, but he doesn’t back down. “And this wordy, number one? You’ve changed.”

He spits the last phrase like an insult. He hates himself for it and would hate himself even more for it later. 

Enji’s face remains solid and unwavering. The twitch in his brow is the only indication that Keigo’s words were even heard. 

“Since we lost, Keigo. Things have changed.”

Keigo knew, of course, but it didn’t stop the anger from rolling his belly.

“Oh, like I don’t fucking know,” If Keigo still had his wings, they would’ve been extended and fluffed, angry as the pinched skin of his forehead. 

This was his hero, he couldn’t be giving up too— 

“Rest, Hawks,” Enji stand up, “You deserve it.”

Seems Endeavor really died. Enji’s face is worn, his expression neutral and jaw slack. He looks hollowed out and empty, not an ounce or morsel of fight left in him, even for a flightless bird in need of some encouragement. 

There’s more to be said, but Keigo’s too angry to listen and Enji doesn’t have the energy to try. 

Whatever news the old hero had come to bring was left undelivered. 

...

You settle together the next few nights, both so damn tired, even though you’ve done nothing other than lay around a hospital for so-many weeks. 

The air always vibrates between the two of you, that comfortable warmth shared between mingling breath and senses. Light dances in your eyes, twisting and bouncing like something otherworldly.

(Maybe it is.)

Your fingers lace together, held in Keigo’s lap. You trace the others hand in relaxing little lines and shapes, trying to soothe each other’s wounds, always.

“One of the doctors said the scar might start shrinking,” You break the tender silence, nosing into his jaw in the same way an affectionate cat would. “They’re not entirely sure, but it’s been stable for a few days.”

Keigo’s feathery (don’t think about it) eyebrows shot up, “That’s amazing, and there’s only a few spasms this week, too.”

(He kept good tabs on you, he had to.)

You hummed in agreement, a sad smile playing on your lips as it so often did.

With a quick blink, the light bouncing in your eyes faded, and the world felt a bit colder.

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do when I get out of here,” You pressed closer to him. “There’s shelters, and some cities are taking refugees, but I don’t—”

Your jaw clicks shut, brow furrowed and mood soured.

(Keigo, mind you, is still focusing on the lack of light in your eyes and the chill of the air in the room.) 

Something stirs, deep in his gut, but he doesn’t say anything. How Keigo used to have such a mouth, he didn’t know. These days, all he can is act, like somehow the loss of his wings came with the loss of his tongue.

Tugging you by the waist, mindful of the tender scar, he pulls you close, internally resolving.

...

She, the main Suit, visits him.

(It’s his last visitor at the hospital.)

There are no trumpeters, guards, or the like. It’s just the haggard president, matching Keigo with his dark circles and creased with new wrinkles and far-more grey sections in her slicked back hair.

The air stands still as she pulls up a chair, burying her head in her hands.

She, the Main Suit, has never been one to inquire as to how he is. Many of the others at the Commission were sweet, kind to him in youth, but she was all business. 

Some things never change.

She breaks the silence of the room, “... do you want to be done, Hawks?”

The cords in his chest tighten, gaze going sharper.

He doesn’t answer.

They meet each other’s gazes; twenty years of fucked-up emotion being shared between the pair of them.

“We’ve done everything. Every healer, every quirk, every treatment, conventional or otherwise,” she’s too soft. “There’s nothing left to try.”

He knew that, he had to know that, right?

His throat feels sticky as he swallows down bile, the scars on his back burning anew. It’s somatic, it has to be, but his flesh crawls and writhes just like yours. His starshine. He hates the way his mind is racing, just as fast as it always has, but his body lacks the ability to keep up.

He grounds himself in the thought of you, his starshine. Your body. Your heat. 

His narrow pupils refocus on the light tremble in her shoulders. 

“I’m being honest, so I’ll ask again,” She meets his gaze, grey eyes as soulless and full as ever. “Do you want to be done?”

“Well, obviously I can't fight—” 

“I mean it. All of it, Hawks. Maybe a few media appearances, but all this... shit. You’ve done enough.”

You’ve done enough. 

The words bounce around in his skull.

“Do you want to be done?”

Done with being a hero.

That’s all he’d ever been, right? That is him, he is Hawks, for fuck’s sake, no one other than Dabi (may he rot and die and immolate in hell) even called him his actual name in years.

Keigo is Hawks.

His mouth is dry, and he tries to ignore the tears pricking his eyes. He’s not sure why he’s beginning to cry, and definitely not sure why tension is draining from his shoulders as he sighs out an answer.

“I’ll be done.”

You’ve done enough.

...

Hospital beds are a hot commodity, and now that Keigo had thrown in the towel (along with everyone else) to stop trying with his wings, he was to be discharged within a few days.

(“Just a few more days to adjust your body to your new medications—”)

He’d stopped listening after that.

...

Your last night together is so bittersweet, you taste it on each other’s tongues.

You have an episode early in the day. Your screaming wakes the floor, the burning smell of flesh cementing that it was you.

Keigo’s only half-lucid when he shoves into your room, holding your hands while nurses desperately try to administer pain medication.

It’s too much for you, the crawling edges of the scar once again consuming you in the molten, glowing amber veins of heat that tore through you so terribly.

You sleep the day away. Keigo stays with you for much of it, stroking the bones in the back of your hands. 

...

He fucks you for the first time, that night. 

His own IVs have been removed, he’s to be discharged first thing in the morning—

And he wants one more night of stargazing, please, please—

(Why’s he clutching at you so dearly?) 

But you’re not in the common room. 

Rather, you’re under a few thin blankets, eyes tired and lightless. Your arm is out of its cast, laying over the bed clothes. It scares him shitless at first as he tentatively enters. It’s you though, and the moment you see him, it’s like a flame, a good one, heats the room full and wide. A few specks of light dance in between your irises as your skin crinkles in a gentle smile.

You both know he’s leaving tomorrow.

The knowledge settles in the room like a weight that neither of you can move. So, Keigo takes to it and does what he can.

As opposed to his normal perch next to his bed, he sits beside you, removing the restraints on your wrists and helping you to sit up.

Keigo fishes around in his pocket, pulling out a folded square of paper and placing it at your bedside. It’s his phone number, an odd detail. Relationships usually shared far-earlier.

But there is nothing linear or normal about the two of you, or the situation you both sit and stewed in.

You both are making peace with it at your own pace.

The bed creaks as you move to sit beside him, legs dangling from the bed. There’s gooseflesh beneath your gown, the boring pattern obscured by the darkness of the room, but the molten lines of the scar ever-visible.

“I’m glad you’re getting out of here.”

But I wish that you weren’t leaving.

His hand finds your waist, careful like he always is, but so giving in the same breath. 

“I am too. It’ll be nice to be.”

But I’m going to miss you.

It’s inherent, and has been forever. Since the moment you both stargazed in the common room and watched the worlds high above twist and shine without regard to your own hells, you’ve been ensnared in the other and neither of you have a want or need to let go.

Even with the inevitably of progress.

Keigo drowns in these thoughts, and has been since Endeavor visited and he was reminded of the harsh reality just outside of their tree-ringed prison. The reality he has to return to—

He presses his lips to yours, more desperate and needy than he had before.

Keigo had taken his share of you before, little pecks and the rub of the bridge of his nose over your jaw and cheeks. He had been a bit greedier with his hands, uncaring of the eyes of the night nurses when he’d touched you in the common room.

But he’s insatiable that last night.

The sheets of the plastic bed are too scratchy, they’re too harsh for you, and it burns Keigo to his core as he lowers you down. He cradles what he can, as your fingers latch onto his clothes (real clothes) and tug him as close as you can get.

The machines in your room cry, but they’re forgotten. 

You nip at his bottom lip, dragging yours across his clean-shaven jaw before laying into his neck with kiss after kiss. His muscles shake, holding him over you, both of you atrophied but uncaring.

You suck a deep, throbbing bruise on the fragile skin of his neck. It’s something dark that won’t fade for a week. The thought stirs something in his chest, a white-hot feeling that wants to crack his ribs and consume him. He doesn’t give in, he can’t—

“Stay with me, pretty eyes,” you whisper, so sweet and gentle as you push floppy strands of hair from his face. “Stay here, just for a little while longer.”

The reminder jolts him back, back to you, and the way your body (so tired, but unwavering) jumps and rolls under his touch. He’s a glutton for attention, always has been, but your particular brand and sounds keep pulse hot and hard. 

Shaky fingers pull his shirt over his head, sweaty palms push the gown over your hips. By the starlight, you’re both seeing too much of each other, but this is a goodbye, there’s no time to dwell on the discomfort.

Keigo tries to be careful as he adjusts your legs, tries to be mindful of the raw skin and flesh that makes you whine and half-writhe. You clutch at him, still trying to pull him closer despite the proximity and heat, like you need him as opposed to just wanting him. 

There’s no fanfare in it, just more rushed kisses and the swirling of fingertips over covered clit. You catch each other’s gasps in the mingling of breaths you share. It’s choking, suffocating, yet entirely not enough. You beg, quietly, for more. Your fingers latch onto his wrist and urge him to help pull your panties off and away.

More, more, more. 

By the time he slides into you, you're still tense, but so is he, and in a pile of tension and fear and wishful-thinking, you both come undone, and undone, and undone— 

...

Keigo leaves the next morning. 

The press is there, flash bulbs blinding him after so long with just fluorescents and starlight. He manages an easy wave or two, no autographs or gleaming smiles, just business and numbness that he needed to hold onto, so he didn’t fucking break.

He slips into the Commission’s car and leaves behind the hospital, you, and its wall of man-laid greenery and prays to forget it all quickly. He has enough to mourn. 

...

Keigo wants to off himself when he arrives back at his penthouse. 

How can he not?

His ‘home’ (if he couldn’t even call it that) is a dusty, time capsule of everything before. Before he got fucked up with the League, before the PLF, before the war, before Jin—

Every untouched bit of his life from when it was a few, precious fractions better stands unturned. A discarded jacket, wing slits visible and frayed. Scattered dead feathers that make his skin crawl. Memorabilia too, old merchandise that he never cared much about, but he definitely didn’t need to be seeing it now that ‘Hawks’ had burned up and died. 

All disgusting reminders. 

Something burning fills the base of his skull when his gaze fixates on one of the old plumes. He reaches out to touch the spine of it, instinctually expecting a little jolt of feeling from it, like he always had. 

But there’s nothing. It’s dead, decaying, and so is he. 

The reality of it breaks him, quick, hard and hot. He burns alive a second time. 

He clears the liquor cabinet while blaring music from his over-priced stereo system loud enough to make his ears ache and throb. The music isn’t drowning anything out, but it’s better to pretend.

He finds a bottle of old pills and downs them with a few swigs of expensive whiskey and lets go.

...

When he comes to, he’s staring into a smashed mirror, with his own nails crusted in blood from thin welts in the skin of the scar on his face.

Much to his chagrin, he hasn’t forgotten anything. The memories of blue flames, red feathers, and the smell of your skin mixed with isopropyl alcohol feel brighter than ever. He grounds on them as he sobers up, latching onto the pain of his scar tissue and the solace you gave. 

And won’t ever give him again.

Something in him wilts as he defeatedly goes to his phone, arranging any number of things to get him the fuck out.

...

The penthouse is sold, his more important belongings gathered in bland boxes. 

And he leaves. There’s no sentiment holding him there, not anymore.  

Fukuoka is gone and some distant memory as he drives (yes, he forgot that he had that skill) him and his things to his new home.

His penthouse had been immaculate. Crisp interior design, new shapes and colors that were on trend. He was hardly home to appreciate the modern beauty of it, but he’d received enough compliments from random hookups to know that it landed aesthetically.

But honestly?

Who the fuck cared?

His penthouse had been sold to the highest bidder and far behind as he arrives at his new, high home in the sleekness of his far-too fancy, disused car.

...

...

He gets a call from an unknown number, another one, on some snowy day, deep in winter. 

Keigo debates answering it. He almost lets it slip to voicemail. The only calls worth answering are the handful from the Commission that he has to heed, or the odd one from Rumi, Fuyumi, and on occasion, Endeavor.

Not random numbers, he has no patience for it. 

Yet, he answers it lazily.

“Washed up hero, how can I help you?”

“P-Pretty eyes?”

His heart stutters in his chest, he swears— 

“Starshine?” He sounds breathless, the air leached from his chest as he white-knuckles his thighs.

He’d given up on you contacting him, yet there you were, or at least your voice, mechanical and high bouncing around preciously in the walls of the cabin

There’s a moment of silence, nearly, just your light breathing that receiver picks up.

Your voice trembles when you break it, “Y-yeah, it’s me, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call—”

You don’t need to be sorry; he would wait for you forever, and then some. 

“I d-don’t actually have a phone? Mine got trashed, uh, back then. I’m on the hospital’s line.”

Keigo hadn’t really considered that, he’s slipped the paper with his number on your bedside without a thought. 

How much had you lost?

“No worries, chickadee,” Keigo is sure his smile is audible. “Why call now? Miss me too much?”

He had no idea.

You laugh, though it soured as you spoke, “I get discharged tomorrow.”

Keigo’s heart seizes again and he’s sure he’s going to go into cardiac arrest.

“The guy who gave me the scar and all? He fucked up a few other people, word eventually got here. Once the scar stops... glowing, it rests. If you make it until then, you’re good.”

And alive.

“The whole injury is stable, has been for a week now,” Surprisingly, there’s no relief in your voice. “They need my bed, so they’re releasing me.”

No, no, no.

Where will you go?

Keigo doesn’t say it, but the question hangs in the air and is quickly answered.

“They got me a spot in one of the shelters close by... It’s only a couple hours by train!” You try to sound happy, but it’s so hollow and unnatural; it makes Keigo physically sit up.

No, no, no.

That won’t do.

“... What won’t do?” 

Keigo hadn’t realized he’d said it out loud.

Something is buried in his chest, something warm and molten, like the old veins of your scar, just kinder and better. It’s full of urges, so seldom used, selectively as needed throughout his career as a hero.

The need to keep something precious safe. 

The thing hasn’t thrashed in months.

Yet now? It’s practically screaming.

“Pretty eyes?” You sound scared through the phone. “A-Are you alright? I can call back—”

“No, don’t, do not.” Keigo lets the flame fill his chest, welcoming it. “You’re not going to that shelter.”

He has something to protect.

“I don’t have another choice—”

Someone.

“You do.” Keigo keeps his voice even, the muscles in his back writhing. If he still had his wings, they’d be puffed out and large. Impassioned with feeling he finally let breath between his ribs. “I’ll come get you, tomorrow.”

“... P-Pardon?”

He doesn’t hesitate, and for a moment, he starts to feel like his old self. 

“Come home with me, starshine.”

++++++

thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed!! 💗

look out for parts 2 and 3!!!💞

ko-fi

[chiwhorei]

boyfriend headcannons- k. kyoutani

synopsis: boyfriend headcannon with a sweet, soft g!n s/o.

rating: sfw- just some fluffy boyfriend kyotani vibes.

word count: ~1.1k

warnings: swearing

a/n: just some self-indulgent boyfriend mad dog content, i am unreasonably soft for this man. this has been going bing bong around in my head so i just had to let it out.

This boy is rough around the edges and it drives my FUCKING crazy😍. But let’s all imagine him with a really sweet, soft, s/o.

So everyone from VBC knows Mad Dog as a punked out demon, so they surely don’t expect a sweet, smol babie like you walking hand in hand with him

He always walks a little in front of you and holds your hand very protectively ugh😖

Your style is super soft . Pastel colors and baggie sweaters. Precious really. And Kyotani is always stunned by your sweet, pure beauty.

Whenever you say a curse word my man is literally so shocked, like “Did they srsly just say fuck instead of frick frack?”

Always grumbles when you drag him to go clothes shopping. Mf only has like 5 shirts he cycles through and 182732772 different cut offs made from like old high school t shirts to work out in

“What color do you like better?” You ask while holding up two shirts he SWEARS are the same fucking shirt.

“Is this bitch trying to prank me?”

“I like that one.” He points to the one in your right hand (even though he cannot tell the difference) and you smile happily and kiss his cheek.

Cue the blushing mess of a man who tried to act all hard awwwww

You steal one of his old ripped up band t-shirts and pair it with a soft baggie cardigan and someone is going to have to check my dude’s pulse.

hOW ARE YOU SO CUTE

You also help him dye his hair and honestly bless your soul. You two have very different aesthetics but you will still meticulously dye his hair with those two lines of brunette because you support your man’s emo dreams.

Okay. Listen. Mad Dog drives a stick and really likes classic cars. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

If he’s not playing volleyball he’s working on a beat up old Mustang. He’s like... changing the... transmission or the bumper... or something...

Whatever, he’s all hot and sweaty in a tank top that’s what we all care about anyway.

And there you are, leaning against the drivers side door and chattering about something that happened in one of your classes and he’s just nodding along, offering some grunts of acknowledgement while wiping some oil off of his hands.

And CAN WE JUST IMAGINE SITTING IN THE PASSENGERS SEAT while he’s driving. Watching his hands as he switches gears and his fingers thumping to the beat of whatever song is playing on the steering wheel oomph

One of his favorite things to do is to just drive around and listen to music.

Here he comes, banged up old car he completely rebuilt, with the hardest music blasting through the open windows, and there you are in the passengers seat going 🥰☺️💖

Everyone around: “Is that person being kidnapped?”

Takes you to car shows. This is one of the very few times Kyotani is super talkative, walking you around and explaining all the different ~car~ things

You don’t really know what he’s talking about but you love it when he geeks out a little.

You show up to his practice one day to bring him some snacks.

Everyone’s eyes snap over to the random person hugging the door frame of the gym entrance, with a gigantic smile and pure, curious eyes.

Literally everyone on the team is disintegrating when Kyotani walks up to you and starts talking to you? Like? A? Normal? Conversation?

And then he starts tugging on the end of you sweater, playing with the hem bc it comforts him 😢

You lean in and rub your hand over his bleached hair, scratching your nails on the back of his neck

“Mad Dog-Chan, you look like a little puppy!”

Ope Oikawa you have a death wish

“Aww, Taro you are MY little puppy!” You say and hug his arm to your chest, rubbing your cheek on his fucking BEEFY bicep.

Everyone in the gym is waiting for him to BLOW

But he just- blushes and buries his head into your neck, mumbling something about how embarrassing you are but giving no indication that he’s actually upset

Now the whole team uses you as a lithium pill

“That’s not very nice puppy-Chan, what would y/n think?”

Absolutely hates it when Oikawa talks about you like he knows ANYTHING, he gets a little frustrated when people assume things about your relationship.

Don’t worry, Iwa spikes a ball right into Oikawa’s head so your boyfriend just glares and moves on.

His scowl never really leaves his features, but you bring out the tiniest soft look in his eyes.

You’re at every game. Sporting his jersey and cheering like a maniac

After a win, you rush down and jump onto his back. He knows you’re going to and he catches you every time like it’s nothing.

He’s just standing around with everyone and feels you approaching and hooks his hands under your knees and continues whatever he was doing as your kissing his cheeks and praising him.

Will have a whole conversation with Iwa or something with you hanging on him like a koala

After a loss, you know he doesn’t want to talk so you wait for him to change and clean up and he drives out to a quiet parking lot or the overlook on top of a hill (that sounds like a kidnapping I’m sorry)

But you just sit on the hood of the car and hold his hand, rubbing small circles with your thumb. You stay quiet and give him time to decompress.

You’re both staring up at the night sky, when a shooting star passes and you squeal and point up to make sure he saw.

Even in the dark he can see your huge, sweet smile and sparkling eyes. 

He loves how the smallest things excite you, he loves how you always look on the bright side, he loves how you make him want to be a better person.

He loves you.

You snap your head to face him with complete adoration in your eyes.

He didn’t mean to passively whisper it into the night air after a frustrating loss, it honestly just slipped out.

His worries that he didn’t make his declaration special enough were quickly quelled when you scoot over and put your head perfectly into the juncture of his collar bone.

“Taro, I love you too. So much.” You lean up and speak softly right over his lips.

You’ve kissed him a million times before.

But every time, just before your lips meet and you take the cutest little anticipatory inhale and glance down at his mouth and back up to his eyes, he feels just as nervous as the first time.

[shorkbrian]

Villain! Bakugo out here with a Mommy kink hoping for milk? Sign me up

I did a bunch of research on this, and am armed with practical knowledge of how Bakugou might treat you if he had a lactation kink.

(What to expect - HEAVY lactation kink, not super NSFW but it’s there, dubcon. I get a bit more explanatory and less smutty lol sorry)

At the beginning of his kink development, Bakugou wouldn’t necessarily be looking to actually make his partner lactate. He just finds the sensations comforting, lying on a pillowy chest, wrapping his lips around a nipple and sucking until he falls asleep. Does he have an oral fixation? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily why he’d do it.

Something about the closeness, the skin-to-skin contact, the trust and safety that’s felt just really gets him going. He gets all soft and relaxed, sucking on his babe’s nipples. As such a rough, irritated guy, the oxytocin he gets from committing such a deeply intimate act is literally like a drug to him. He wants more and more of that feeling, of the close connection with his darling, whether or not they’d be willing.

It’s a huge, huge act of love and generosity, especially taking the time to commit and induce lactation.

Bakugou would go all out, he’d have pumps, creams, make his darling eat a special diet, I think he’d even go to lengths to get lactation-inducing drugs. Lactation can happen outside of pregnancy, it just takes a lot of time, patience, and research.

Those drugs (like Domperidone) have to be taken 3-4 times a day, pumping has to happen pretty regularly, and the woman has to be relatively relaxed and in a good headspace. Stress, poor sleep, and a lack of water or food can result in a woman’s production lessening and drying up, so Bakugou’s darling really isn’t going to ever get a break.

Like, she’s stressed because she’s with him, because he’s so controlling and possessive and won’t let any other man even look at her. Stressed because Bakugou insists on her lactating, even if she’s not that into it or if it makes her uncomfortable. Stressed how needy and demanding the man is, how it’s his way or the highway, how if she doesn’t go along with whatever he wants, Bakugou accuses her of not loving him.

So already, it’ll be hard for lactation to happen.

But every night, just like clockwork, Bakugou’s there.

He’ll knead your breasts for a while, warming them up, enjoying the feel of them in his hands. Sometimes he’ll do this when you’re watching TV, or trying to cook dinner, or on your phone. Just sidles up behind you and grabs your chest, squeezing and groping and massaging the mounds with care.

While he’s rough and aggressive during sex, he’s more controlled during times like these, softer and less prone to acting like he’s got a toilet bristle brush shoved up his ass.

After he’s sufficiently “warmed you up” you get sat down somewhere comfy - sometimes the couch, but preferably the bed, just in case Bakugou feels a little more pent up than usual and wants to relieve some stress using your body in another way.

If he hasn’t stripped you of your shirt already, that’s next, along with your bra. Bakugou prefers you to be completely nude, but you find that extraordinarily uncomfortable, so after a couple of heated arguments, Bakugou’s decided to relent on that rule.

The man’s shirt comes off too, so he gets to lie flush against your and feel your soft flesh against his own.

The first couple of times, he had always started out far too eager, pulling and tugging at your nipple painfully, creating such a tight suction with his lips that it made you cry, and you’d begged him to stop. He hadn’t, not until you’d made milk for him. Something that you had thought to be impossible, considering you weren’t pregnant.

But not he starts of gentler, with soft kisses over your breasts, little kitten licks across your nipples, hands holding your sides, your shoulders, anywhere he could grab with uncharacteristic tenderness.

When he finally does dip down and begin sucking, it always feels weird. NO matter how many times he does this, you can’t feel comfortable with it. It’s such a strange, pulling sensation, relieving, emptying.

Bakugou’s figured out how to suckle and breath at the same time, just like a baby. He’ll purse his lips and nurse, stop for moment to breathe through his nose, then continue. This results in his warm breath intermittently puffing over your skin, making desperate little noises as he continues to drink you up.

You’d never have thought that Bakugou Katsuki could be defined as desperate, or soft.

Whichever breast he’s not sucking at gets massaged with one of his hands, tweaking the nipple, groping your flesh. You don’t know how or when he got so good with his mouth and hands, when he was able to practice coordination like that, but the movements are seamless for him. 

He spends a significant amount of time lathering one breast with attention. If his jaw gets sore, or his mouth feels tired, he’ll pull of for a few moments to nuzzle at your plushy tits before latching on again.

And when he’s ready, he’ll switch to the other breast, hand immediately coming to spread his saliva around your nipple, to try and combat the chill that always makes you shiver whenever your spit-slick nipple gets exposed to the air.

All you can do is lay there and let him drink his fill.

Trying to catch his attention or try to divert him back to different activities is like trying to water a fake plant - absolutely nothing happens.

You get ignored, or Katsuki slaps at your hands if you try to pull him off, squinting up at you like a petulant child.

He usually falls asleep like that, it’s been months of the same routine, every single night. Bakugou suckling at you like you’re the first drink he’s had in years, obviously desperate and wanting, but trying his absolute best to hold himself back from devouring you.

Sometimes, if he’s excited, he’ll fuck you like that, hips slapping against your while he’s hunched over your tits, panting against your flesh.

Cumming always feels better when that happens, but it’s not like you’ll tell him that. He already pushes for you to let him nurse at your tits any chance he can get, and especially when it comes to sex. 

Even after an intense, tiring fuck, Katsuki can’t fall asleep unless his mouth is on you, tongue sucking at your nipple. 

Bakugou highly enjoys suckling at you at any time of day - right when he wakes up, before you’re even conscious, when you’re watching TV or reading a book, at lunch time... really any chance he gets, his face is buried in your chest. He always gets sleepy afterwards though, so he’s prone to even more irritability if he can’t take a nap, of which he completely denies. Says you try to use that as an excuse to not let him touch you, and then it’s back to the old argument of Katsuki claiming you don’t love him.

He’s manipulative, but you don’t know what else to do except give in.

During the day, he has timers set for when you’re supposed to take your lactation pills. The man had hand-fed you them at first, not trusting you to do it right yourself, considering how you were against the idea. 

When he has work, Katsuki video-calls you, makes you take the pill and show him your mouth afterwords.

Pumping happens semi-regularly, only if Katsuki hasn’t been able to nurse for as long or as often as he usually does. You’ve learned not to do it while he’s around, even if he’s in the house working on paperwork. Katsuki hears the sound of the pump and suddenly appears, bulge in his trousers, a gleam in his eye. 

So you do it when he’s away, per his rigid instructions. He makes you text him when you do, as a video call would make him too excited.

He’s very good at keeping you taken care of. When you’re starting to chafe and get sucked raw, he makes sure to slather your chest with cold creams and oils to speed up healing time, to heal the angry, swollen skin. It’s like your body dislikes his nursing as much as you do, with how often it seems to ache from his treatment. 

Bakugou makes sure you get eat foods that help increase prolactin, the lactation hormone. Dates and Apricots are staples in your diet, and you’re sick of them. Bakugou insists you eat them anyway. You’re going to produce milk, no matter how much he has to force it.

You provide him with safety, security, a warm place to lay his head at night (your chest) and the one thing that seems to help him calm down in any situation.

When he comes home angry, you only have to wince through his rough fondling before he begins to pacify, and by the time his mouth reaches your breast, he’s quiet and relaxed.

Something’s agitating him beyond belief? he comes to you, salivating, expectant and sure of relief.

Whatever you want, however you feel - that’s all an afterthought, always has been, and always will be.

[a-froger-epic]

Interview with a Queen “groupie”

Cross-posted to AO3. I encourage you to leave any comments you have there.

---

I compiled this interview following a long email exchange with J, a very sweet lady who went to Ealing Art School between 1972 and 1974. She knew all four members of Queen personally and was part of their larger circle of friends.

First off, you may find this hard to believe. I don’t blame you. But I assure you I’m not pulling your leg. As well as the pictures I share in this post, I have seen current pictures of J (which I will not share to protect her privacy). There is no indication as far as I am aware that she isn’t who she says she is.

Nastally, hold up. How exactly did you find this lady?

She found me. It turns out that she has been following my story Dawn of Aquarius for quite some time. The story is set in 1969. A lot of research about the era went into it, because I wanted to portray that time period - and Freddie’s and Roger’s surroundings - as accurately and realistically as I possibly could. That was what drew J in. She tells me it brought back a lot of memories for her. One of the reasons I love DoA so much is the nostalgia, she says, which genuinely means the world to me. Eventually, she talked to me in the comment section. Of course, I freaked out!

And then, I asked her for an interview, to which she replied: I will give it a go, but you must remember that I am 65 and there were great drugs in the 70s, and at 16, away from home, I had a lot!

And so...

Here’s what is IMPORTANT TO KEEP IN MIND when you read this interview.

These are one woman’s 50-year-old memories and subjective impressions. J has been incredibly kind to let me pick her brain, trying to recall everything as best as she can. In her own words:

Just remember that when I answer the questions, it is from a 16-year-old who is 9 years younger than Freddie and a little girl with no family and friends in a strange country trying to fit in. The only reason I was there, was because some hippie thought I had a unique art style.

---

J as a teenager.

[I have edited the interview together from our long, and somewhat messy at times, email exchange. Typos have been fixed and some punctuation added for clarity, but I have not changed anything J has written to me. Again, bear in mind these are personal opinions and impressions.]

So, J, how did you end up at Ealing Art School in 1972 and what was it like?

This was the painting done for the Australian school-leaving certificate.

It placed first and gave me a scholarship. I could pick France, the USA or England. As a dual citizen of the UK, the choice was easy. The scholarship paid for board and fees, so had to be and sell whatever for spending money.

This picture is from the dorm. We all had a 10pm curfew and a very thick rule book that, I am proud to say, I broke every one of them, one by one. The rooms were on the 1st and 2nd floor. We were on the first floor, rooms one side and admin staff the other end. We had two bathrooms for 18 girls. One of them had two baths. The walls were your standard half wall, so it was a given that if you had a bath you run the risk of having a bucket of cold water dropped on you. Downstairs was the kitchen and lounge room.

I want to ask you a few things about life in London in the early 70s, to get a picture of what it was really like. For example, was there alcohol at the music gigs you went to?

If it was a school, church or community hall, no. If it was a pub, yes.

Did you and your friends drink as much then as young people tend to drink now when you all went out?

No, we didn't. I think it had a lot to do with money. We didn't have the disposable income, and it was unheard of to still be living at home with the parents after the age of 20.

Was weed and LSD as big and easily accessible as depictions of the 60s and 70s would have us believe?

The drugs! Got to have drugs. Pot (weed) was easy to grow, very cheap. Used to smoke it in bongs rather than joints, more bang for your buck. Trips [LSD] were cheap, I think. About 2 pounds and you were on the high for over 24 hours with no sleep. My drug of choice was hash. Either the oil or the block. It was a nice high, but you could not function well. But if you listen to the music of the time it really does reflect what it was like, to have a group of friends over for a session. Having said all that the most outlandish and shocking drug I ever saw anyone use was the birth control pill. Didn't you have to hide that stuff away?!

Can you tell us some 70s slang that isn’t really in use anymore? What in the world does “ultra-blagging” mean? (As written in a letter penned by Freddie to his friend Celine in 1969.)

Abso-bloody-lootely!

Man, I thought I was the bees knees to be on a scholarship in London. But that didn't stop me from jigging or having a skive day. They were the days that I blagged my way into a pub, had too many lagers and ended up chundering in the gutter. That was how you knew your night was ace. I would get a right bollocking if anyone found out. It would be a bugger when all that you could find at a car boot sale was chavtastic, but sometimes you could be Jammy Dodger and tickety-boo you find something brilliant. Bob's your uncle. Anyways, I need to see a man about a dog.

[It seems to me that J uses a bit of Australian slang here, like chundering, which makes sense because she is, after all, Australian. She also provided the translation:]

Cheers

J

It would be my honour.

I felt very privileged to be given a scholarship that let me study in England. But being so young and having no family to guide me, it was often tempting to not turn up or give a false excuse for being sick. (I had a lot of food poisoning). These would often happen if the night before I had been drinking beer and ended up vomiting outside the pub. But in my young mind that was a good night. If any of the teachers found me drinking I would be in a lot of trouble. Often I would have to say I was holding it for someone else. Not having much clothes with me, I would buy them second hand from church jumble sales or other students and, yes, Kensington market (the market). Some of the stuff would not be very tasteful or in good condition. But sometimes you would find something that was cheap and in good condition. I will stop this text now as I must go to the toilet.

PS: Ultrablagging sounds very Freddie. Blagging was used, but not ultra, meaning to persuade someone to do something or act better than you are. They were always rock stars.

Sincerely

J

[It was at this point that I realised I was talking to an absolute legend. She also told me then that the majority of her old photographs had sadly been lost when her house was flooded in 1988, including most of the photographs from her stay in London. Noooo! :(]

When you went out to dance, did you have only live music? Were there DJs yet?

You know, that is hard. We did not have a DJ. Sometimes there would be a band. Often we looked for places with a band or the jukebox. I think pubs closed at 10pm and some stayed open to 12 or 1, but public transport stopped at 9. So if you had not arranged a lift then you had to make the last bus. Most of the time we would be heading back to someone's place to get stoned and then crash there. In the morning you would have to work out where you were. When I got back to Australia, the discos were all the rage. They could have been in London too but it was not cool to like disco.

How many people would show up to Queen’s gigs when they played in pubs or at, for example, the Imperial College?

Depending on the location and the night: 10 to 1000!

So how did you first meet the Queen boys?

I was at the pub talking about a band we saw last week when Brian stuck his head into our booth telling us he knew a better one. Thinking about seeing them at the stall... Roger not often, Freddie quite a lot. Often on different stalls, I think that is why I can't remember the name. [The name of the stall. Other sources confirm that Freddie also worked at Alan Muir’s stall, for example, selling shoes.]

How well did you know them?

Just looking at your tumblr account. [she has had a look at my blog, where somebody asked if ‘groupie’ meant she had slept with the band] No, I never slept with the boys. I would not say I was a close friend, but I started at Ealing Art College in ‘72 and moved in the same circles. I loved the music and could be called one of the first groupies. I had to sneak into the pubs because I was 16. Roger always teased me for being so young. They all did seem to be one very large family, not just the band. It was a group of about twenty regulars, both male and female. Everyone knew that Fred was too gay to function. We were all at the gay rights march in London in 1972, had to run after the march. Lots of sharpies [Australian slang: youth gang, thugs] wanting to bash us. Back then I was in every protest that was going, student union rights, even the secretary protest. Just part of the times, stick it to Man or Woman. I left London in ‘74 for Australia, been here ever since and lost track of the boys but have never stopped being a fan.

What do you remember about them? How would you describe their personalities?

Don’t let the trolls hate me, but I did not like Brian. I found him to be rather full of himself. Space was a subject you never brought up around Brian or you would die of old age before he stopped talking. He was always the first to speak and start a conversation and then quickly passed you off to John, who was always tired and shy. Roger was also quite shy at times. He was very self-conscious of his looks, as he felt being pretty, nobody would take him seriously. Fred, well, he was not yet the big star, so I think he was working on his stage persona. When talking to groups at parties, he had the best stories of things that had happened to him or close friends. They were very funny and very descriptive. He was the life of the party. When he had a few to drink or was the centre of attention, he would take a cigarette out of the closest person’s hand and start smoking. Now remember this is the point of view of a 16-year-old girl that was a fish out of water, trying to fit in and not having much worldly experience.

It is said that Freddie and Roger were very stylish. How did they dress in everyday life?

Fred would do his hair and makeup to check the mail. Yes, he was always turned out, but so were a lot of people. Freddie did go over the top with hats, scarfs and jewellery. With Roger, it is a surprise he was able to have kids his jeans were that tight. And his shirts were always open unless he was in a jumper. I think it could have been so that you knew he was male, as it was the start of the unisex clothing. When I travelled out of London I realised it was a London thing. When I got back to Australia everyone thought I was a show-off.

There are some disagreements about how tall especially Freddie was. I know this is a difficult thing to try and remember accurately. But do you remember?

Freddie was taller than me but everyone was. Roger was shorter than Fred, but I never saw Roger in platform shoes. I did meet up with the band by chance at Sydney airport in 1984, said ‘hello’ but they did not remember me, or if they did then they did not say anything and I did not want to be a dork. At that time Fred was the same height as me (5ft 8in/1.72m), Roger was taller than me. It made me think at the time that he had a growth spurt! John was shorter than me and Brian has always been tall. [I have a feeling the platform shoes - or lack thereof - played a vital role here! Although 172cm for Freddie seems likely.]

You said everyone knew Freddie was “too gay to function”. Attitudes towards homosexuality have changed so much that it can be hard for us, now, to fathom what exactly people must have thought of him. Was it more of a joke that he was so camp? Was it something he would have been teased for? Also, he had a girlfriend. Did you ever meet Mary or the other girlfriends?

In 1972 a whole group of us - and I am pretty sure that Fred, Roger, Brian and Tim were there - were in a gay pride march. [Since then, J has found and showed me a picture of a boy she thought was Tim Staffel, and it wasn't, so Tim was most definitely not there. Whether Freddie, Roger and Brian really were there or if J is misremembering, who knows?] Us youth believed you could not choose who you fell in love with and if it was same sex, so what? However, if it was two girls then it was every guy’s duty to change her!

It was also a time that the gayer the guy was, the more the girls were interested. Also, if a guy was gay then you did not have to worry about him and he was a good person to take with you if you were going out drinking. However, the police, parents, teachers and anyone of authority were horrified and treated them badly. I did meet Mary a couple of times at pubs and once after a gig. This is just my opinion, but I found her a bitch. It could be that I was so young. It could be that I was very Australian. It could be that she felt threatened as my accent was a magnet to people around. And the boys (Queen) were no exception. Brian had a cousin in OZ and was always asking questions. I remember that my close group of friends thought that Mary made the perfect girlfriend for Fred as they were as fake as each other. Having said that about them, I often wonder if I would think the same now and if my perceptions were just because she would not give me the time of Day. Chrissy and Jo were a lot of fun.

This was before your time, but I read that Freddie's nickname at Ealing Art School was ‘Freddie Baby’. Any ideas how this came about? His showmanship or maybe personality traits?

I don't think so. There were an older crowd that would talk like that. I think the slang ‘baby’ was a 60’s thing, like groovy baby.

How long, roughly, did Roger and Freddie have their stall? I can't find anywhere when it closed down. What did it actually look like? Was it a sort of wooden stall type of thing? Or an actual room? What were some of the other things people sold at Kensington Market? Mostly clothes or all sorts?

The markets were little divided shops. The back was brick and the walls wood. I have been trying all day to remember the name. [Of the stall.] I think it was something hard to say. More often than not it would be Freddie's dad in the store. It was still open when I left. Roger and Freddie were both in the store on Saturdays and some Sundays. There was a girl, I think Jill, who was in the store more. And during the week it could be anyone. You name it and you could get it at the markets. Second hand or designer clothes, shoes, jewellery, pot and assortments. Hair cuts, food, bric-a-brac.

Wait, wait. What? Freddie’s dad? Really now?

Yeah, it was an older Indian man. so we just assumed it was his father. It was my understanding that he started the stall then the boys would work it as the whole markets were set up for younger people, but if needed he would work there. I don't think the boys would be able to pay the rent on their own. [I have since found out that the stall closed in late 1971, and Freddie continued to work at the Market until '74, for Alan Mair and possibly others. So the stall J witnessed wasn't their original stall - explaining all the different people she saw there - but she had no way of knowing that it wasn't.] They always had incense burning that was very big in the 70s. I still occasionally bring out the sticks, but it does not last like the candles and diffusers of today. If you could get in touch with Robert Daniels, he ran ChaChaDumDum it was the stall across from Freddie. He would know the dates.

[J says it’s this look, in a picture she happened across while looking at my tumblr] Yep, that is the one. It usually means that he does not believe or agree with something that was said and is working out how to respond, or he has lost the plot.

You mentioned Roger seemed shy to you at times. Was he also quite charming? We read a lot about what a chick magnet he was. Was this the impression you had?

My favorite subject! I had a thing for Roger. Everyone has a type and mine is the blue-eyed blond. Now, before you ask, was he brunet? No, he was a mouse/dirty blond. If it was summer he would have blond streaks mostly at the ends. He knew he was pretty and was always dressed in the latest fashion and had the current hairstyle. So, being my type I was constantly watching him. Everyone slept around during that time. I did not notice Roger doing it more or less. 80% of the time he was with Jo. Yes, he was a chick magnet, but he did not do the chasing. He was always very polite to everyone. If it ever looked like there would be any conflict he would be the first to leave it. It was not that he was a coward, just not into conflict. If he saw anyone that needed help he was right there, and often had to have Freddie's back. I never saw him in a fight. He could always talk his way out of things. He was also very patient and would listen for hours to other people talk. However, he would get this vacant look in his eyes at times.

And Freddie would either click his fingers, change the subject or just give up. I don’t think that Brian noticed, and it would be fair game for John, he would see how far he could push it. Roger liked to drink a fair bit and when drunk he would be hanging all over Jo. If she was not there then he missed Jo. If, however, he thought that he or his friends were not being respected, then look out! It was a verbal volcano heading your way. That is what happened to me one time. I was trying to talk with my friends close to where a drunken Roger was and I yelled at him to shut the hell up, you wannabe blond. We/I coped a mouthful back, all in the same sentence, that finished with: Sorry, I didn't realise you were on your rags (period)! I have to have the last word, so I told him the truth: I don’t get them yet! (I was a late starter.) He went so red in the face and called me JB [jail bait] from then.

You also mentioned Roger’s cat Ziggy having kittens. I read about this but never when exactly it was. Do you remember?

I think it was winter ‘73. I remember being cold when he was asking around the pub. [To find homes for the kittens, I gather.]

Is it quite strange reading fictional interpretations of real people you knew? When did you first find out there was Queen fanfic?

No, we used to make up stories about people all the time, a verbal fanfic. Was looking up Adam Lambert and came across the fanfics. Some had me in stitches! Others, like DoA, had me hooked.

Please, allow me to be a little self-indulgent at the end. What's one thing I got totally RIGHT in DoA?

All the Ibex stuff.

What's one thing I got totally WRONG in DoA?

Roger did not have a temper, and I don’t know what the go with his father was, but he would talk about him quite a bit and was always visiting his mum. [Absolutely fair, not only did I change the timeline of Roger’s parents divorce in DoA - for lack of information at the time - but also created a completely fictional narrative around it for the sake of storytelling.]

J, thank you so much for all this, sincerely. Can you tell me a little more about yourself? Are you still an artist?

I don't paint or draw any more. At the age of a 50 the doctors operated on an aneurysm or three, and now my eyesight is very bad, I have no fine motor skills and a tremor. I was married in January 1984 and have just celebrated our 37 year anniversary. I have one daughter who is 30 and two great, although tiring grandkids. A girl, 11, and one boy, 5. I have lived my life as the average middle class Australian with great memories. Talking with you has helped me a lot to remember a time when the world was mine for the taking. When I returned to OZ I started nursing, met my best friend, and we planned that once we graduated we would go back to London to study midwifery. But I fell in love instead.

J's wedding in 1984. As you can see, she found her own blue-eyed blond.

---

Upon request, J has shared some of her past and present artwork with me.

These are from her time at Ealing Art School:

These were done later, back in Australia:

J: Did this just before Christmas as you had inspired me. It did not require fine motor skills!

So there you have it! I hope you found this little glimpse through a 16-year-old girl’s eyes as much of a fascinating read as I did. I urge everybody one more time to remember that J did not have to share any of this, and I think we all owe her a big thank you for delving into her memories. She is likely to see the responses on AO3, so I have comment moderation enabled there as I will not let anybody harass this lovely lady. The tumblr she created is @since72, but she isn’t really an active user and also very new to it all. Again, I can only urge everybody to be respectful.

If you have other burning question for J, feel free to leave them in the comments on AO3. I will either pass them on, or she may want to reply to them herself directly.

[necros-writing-stuff]

im a sucker for assholes, so can i please have m!bailey absolutely wrecking f!pc infront of m!robin, thinking they've been fucking each other but then surprised when he finds out pc's been untouched this whole time. the pure jealousy from bailey turning into extreme embarassment after realizing what he did? Ughhhh.

Bailey? Embarrassed? You mean Bailay gloating and rubbing it in Robin's face that he's taken something from you he'll never have?

NSFW below (tw for dubcon, virgin PC)

Bailey has a man around the neck, marching him out of the room of the brat he was trying to molest. Despite the struggling, yelling and general pathetic begging, Bailey keeps his grip.

Several kids pop their heads out of their rooms to watch the scene, including you. Only its not your room, it's Robin's.

Bailey tries to ignore the jealousy stabbing at his heart seeing you two so close together, instead focusing on throwing out the trash.

It doesn't work, even when he leans against the kitchen counter and makes himself a coffee in an attempt to distract his mind.

He shouldn't give a shit about you. You're just another brat, one that pays him regularly, sure, but what would make you special?

You're far prettier than the others. You look up into his eyes sometimes and he can't help himself when images of you on your knees, forcing his cock as far down your throat as it can go flash though his mind.

Only this time, he pictures you sucking off that other drain on his finances.

Robin. Plain, boring Robin. What, does playing that many games make him good with his fingers or something? Can he make you squirm and writhe with his hands alone?

Bailey's face starts getting hot with anger, grimace morphing into a sick smirk when an idea crosses his mind.

He grabs one of the smaller brats, a timid, shy one, telling them to let Robin know he's due in Bailey's office at midnight.

Bailey only gets happier when he sees you leaving in the clothes you wear to work. You'd be gone most of the afternoon, Robin wouldn't be able to tell you about his appointment.

It takes more patience than he'd ever admit, but Bailey waits for you to come back home, hands covered in the scented oils you use at that spa, exhaustion all over your face.

He steps from the shadows, immediately gaining your attention. "Come here, girl, I need a word."

You follow wordlessly, looking confused and worried as you enter his office, letting him close the door behind you. Not noticing that he leaves it open a crack.

He grasps your arm, pulling you with him as he rounds the desk and sits in his chair. Then he pats the desk, asking you to sit.

You do as you're told, sitting with your thighs pressed together so he can't see up your skirt. That won't do.

Bailey rests his hand on your thigh, leaning in when you blush, hands coming up clenched as you cover your face.

"W-what did you need?" you cough, embarrassed at how high your voice was when you asked that. You couldn't deny the heat pooling between your legs at the attention, Bailey (despite all of his shortcomings) is very handsome. His hand so warm and heavy on your skin.

Bailey starts stroking the skin, dipping his fingers under your skirt to tease along the line of your panties. His other hand comes to pry your thighs open a little.

"I've decided money's not enough. I need something else from you," he explains, fingers dancing across the crotch of your panties and ever-so-slightly putting pressure on your clit making you gasp and clench your thighs shut on his hand.

"Bailey I don't know, I-"

"Oh you're not getting a choice. You need a reminder of who owns you," he growls, standing up and pushing you onto his desk, flat on your back.

You squeak out, not expecting it, quickly covering your crotch with your hands only to have them swatted away.

One hand grasps your ankle, putting it over his shoulder as he pushes your skirt up, grinning at the wet patch on your panties.

"Bailey, please, I-" this time you're interrupted by his lips on your own, tongue immediately invading your mouth. Your eyes are wide, staring up at the ceiling. This kiss was your first.

Bailey's free hand returns to teasing your pussy through the thin fabric, making you whimper into his mouth. He ignores your oiled hands clutching at his shirt, staining the white material.

Then he pushed the fabric to the side and starts roughly rubbing at your clit. You'd barely touched it yourself, the sensation foreign and good. So, so good.

You close your eyes and try to kiss back, quickly getting lost in the pleasure of it all. Your tongue is clumsy compared to his, but he doesn't seem to mind.

Bailey can hear his heart hammering in his ears from his excitement. You're being much more compliant than he had thought, sweet little noises coming from you everytime he flicks that sensitive button between your legs.

You're so wet for him, despite how little he's touched you. Does Robin get you this wet?

His good mood drags down a little at the thought of the boy, and Bailey decides that you're wet enough. Breaking the kiss, you barely get a breath in before his fingers are in your mouth.

"Suck," he orders as he undoes his fly, not taking his eyes from your greedy little mouth as he pulls his cock out and rubs it against your folds.

Your panties keep getting in the way, so he pulls them off before going back to teasing you.

A tiny creaking sound gets Bailey's attention, and his eyes meet with another's peaking through the crack in the door. Oh, is it midnight already?

"Does Robin ever make you feel this good?" Bailey asks, licking his lips as the eyes at his door grow wide.

Keeping eye contact, Bailey smiles, a triumphant, almost insidious smile. He misses your look of confusion at his question, too excited to claim his prize. Robin watches as your carer sinks his cock into your wet heat.

Bailey's smile falters at what he feels. At what he hears as you cry out around his fingers, which he pulls out of your mouth. He stares down at you, length still buried inside.

"You're a fucking virgin?" his smile returns, grabbing your thighs so he can bend you in half and grind into your pussy even deeper than he already is.

"I tried to-to tell you- ahhh," you can barely speak as he starts pounding, hands resting on your chest as you take him. It really didn't hurt as much as you thought it would, just a slight sting before you got used to the stretch.

Bailey's eyes return to the pair at the door, seeing white-knuckled fingers clinging to the wood. Robin hadn't left, in fact he looked furious.

The slick sounds of your cunt swallowing his cock lewdly fills the room, your hands grasping at his back while he thrusts into your heat.

Robin watches on in shock. Why? Of all people, why let Bailey touch you like this? Had he hurt you? It wasn't a coincidence that he's been asked to the office at the same time you're getting ruined by that old bastard, he knew that much. Especially after hearing Bailey's question to you.

You begin to scream as Bailey picks up the pace, desk moaning in protest from the pressure being put onto it.

"Bailey, I'm so close, Bailey, Bailey!" you begin to chant his name like a prayer, voice increasing in a crescendo as you do.

The tattooed man above you stares down at you, face looking the softest you've ever seen it as you cream on his length, shaking and gasping from the pleasure.

He follows soon after, filling up your womb, not bothering to pull out despite not knowing if you were on birth control. He'd get you the morning after pill, but this time he really wanted to see his seed dripping from your folds.

You both pant as you come down from the high, you wiggling on the desk to unstick yourself from the surface due to your sweat gathering on the wood.

"Why did you bring up Robin?" you ask, running a hand through your hair.

Bailey pretends not to notice the fingers on his door readjust themselves at your question.

"Thought you two were closer. You're always stuck with each other, you know," he explains, not bothering to leave your body yet.

You giggle and sit up, resting your weight on your hands. "No, Robin's my best friend, we've never even held hands!"

Bailey presses a kiss to your forehead as he withdraws. "Good to know."

The crack in his doorway is empty when he looks back.

[silverhandsimp]

Have there been many posts about the Tarot and their relationship to where they find them and the characters? Because Cyberpunk is def not the first to do this, but i still love it everytime.

The first card where i realized that the tarot location was a givaway for who the card was related to was finding The High Priestess so close to Hanako. Takemura is associated with the Chariot and is found outside the dinner when you talk for the first time, Evelyn (or possibly Judy but the card def suits Evelyn more) is the Magician found outside Lizzy’s bar, and Rogue is the Empress (god damn i love that card for her so much) which is found outside the Afterlife.

Then there’s the two i really want to focus on in debt right now and i might come back to the others later; V and Johnny’s cards and how they break my heart with the ending. V’s was the first i noticed, and assumed was associated with the but wasn’t sure just yet. Similar to how the death card is often missunderstood, so too is the fool. Based on the name it might be assumed to be negative, but this is not the case. The fool is the card associated with youth, naïveté, a beggining, dreams, and asperations. It’s the first step on a journey and fate yet undecided and infinite possibilities. Most protagonists start off represented by the fool as it is also a transitionary card, and is most known for meaning that the individual in question with go on a journey or will be faced with a challange that will make them grow and change them. It thustly comes as no surprise that V is The Fool.

Johnny’s card and it’s location also both do and do not surprise me. He is the Hanged Man. This card is found on the water tower in the oil fields. With all the moments you speak to Johnny, it might come off strange to find his card all the way out there at first. It might make more sense to have it near the Sunset motel in the badlands where you have two important cutscenes with Johnny and V having a heart to hear, or at the Pistis Sophia where you two have another heart to heart where he tells you he would take a bullet for V and will die if it means V will live and gives V his dog tags. Instead The Hanged Man is found closest to Johnny’s resting place in the Oil Fields. The hanged man is a card of sacrifice and martyrdom. The hanged man does not struggle, for it is his choice to endure pain and suffering as the toll for enlightenment. There is no halo in the Cyberpunk interpretation of the card, but it is an important feature of the card as it reinforces that the hanged man finds his peice in his surrender and sacrifice for the greater good. He has accepted that his pain and his death means new begginings and rebirth for others. The Hanged Man also represents being frozen in time, and Johnny really IS literally rozen.

Stuck perpetually stuck at 32 years old in his scraped, brused, and dirty body. He accepted death long ago if it ment taking down Arasaka, and freeing not only Alt but the rest of Night City from the corperation’s grasp. He even outright says this. That death ment nothing to him. If you had any doubt that Johnny was telling the truth when he said he would give his life for V then his association with this card should put that to bed. He’s been a martyr before, and he’ll sacrifice himself again if it means even saving just one person.

From the tarot’s pov it makes sense that Johnny would come back. He dies not having learned to trust others, addicted to nicotine, pills, booze, and anger still living his life as fast and hard as he can without introspection. His first death is not one of acceptance, but of fire, anger, denial, and an attempt at atretribution. He had not reached enlightenment. It’s through meeting V and being forced into staying still that he learns his lesson, grows, reconciles, and truely comes to peacewith not only death, but his life. Johnny could not be more representative of The Hanged Man.

[ketchs-mistress]

Bath, Pizza, and Cuddles

Summary: You are on your period when all you were trying to do was surprise Henry.

Pairing: Henry x Reader

Word Count: 1,907 

Warnings: Mentions of period, PCOS. It’s fluffy!

A/N: I’m posting this again...Hopefully people will like it. This was originally written with Negan, but I changed it! Not beta and all mistakes are my own. It’s also my first time writing for real person, so please be nice. I hope you like it. Please leave your thoughts! Likes and reblogs make my heart sing. 

You had been cleaning all day and trying to prep dinner to surprise Henry. He worked so hard and provided everything for you. Unfortunately, you hadn't been feeling well all day, but you fought through the pain and nausea that crept up your throat. You wanted everything to be perfect for when he got home. You hated it when your period came. The PCOS always made your periods ten times worse than a normal one. You were hurting all over and your stomach would clench tight. You finally decided to take a break and rest on the couch. 

When you laid down, you realized how bad the pain was and tried to ignore it. When the pain got unbearable you got up slowly, making your way upstairs to the bathroom to grab some Midol. You grabbed the pill bottle and struggled to focus, struggled to open the lid, when it all became too much you slumped on the floor, everything had become blurred, even sound was muffled. Your eyes fluttered shut. 

You were curled up in a ball, sweat running down your face. You could barely hear his velvet-smooth voice, before you could feel warmth wrap around your body. "Kitten? What's wrong?" You could hear the worry in his voice as he brushed a hair strand out your face. He needed to see your face. His eyes looking over you frantically. All you could do was whimper and nuzzle into his chest. "(Y/N), what is the matter?" He was scared, he had never seen you like this before. 

He scooped you up carefully, holding you close. You looked weakly into his ocean blue eyes and pointed at your pelvis. "Oh, kitten. Why didn't you say something this morning? I would have stayed home." He sighed softly. He hated it when you kept things from him. He made sure you had everything you needed and wanted and you didn't want to burden him for being a wuss. You glared at him, "I'm a big girl. Can handle myself just fine." You winced in pain as you tried to get comfortable in his arms. 

He knew you could handle yourself. You always did. You were just a stubborn girl, never wanting him to worry or fuss over you. It was a trait he admired, he just wished that you would relax more. He chuckled softly, nuzzling his nose on your cheek, "yeah? Ok, then why the hell did I find you on the floor?" Henry fussed with a teasing tone. He kissed the top of your head and begin rubbing your stomach, humming softly. You loved the feel of his warm large body around you. He smelled so good, amber woods and pine. You inhaled deeply and whimpered again. 

"How about you let me take care of you for the night? Just for once without argument?" He asked still rubbing you and gently rocking your body. You nod reluctantly, biting your lip. It took a lot for you to let him take care of you. Usually, you could handle the pain and fatigue, but you were struggling this time. This time you passed out from the pain. You really didn’t have the energy. Not even to argue with Henry. You would just have to let him take care of you. 

You were grateful for the sweet, loving boyfriend Henry was.  Sweet, loving, caring. It was hard to put into words just how amazing of a man he was. He was just perfect.  "But I was supposed to surprise you with dinner." She tried to protest but whined loudly. "Ah. Ah. Nope. You are hurting and that doesn't work for me. You are always working too hard. You need to learn to relax and even let me take care of you." He stood up holding you bridal style before laying you on the bed. 

You curled up inhaling his scent, one of his shirts was still on the bed. You held it close, smiling softly. Henry walked to the bathroom, then a few minutes later came back with water and two Midols. "Take this and drink all the water. Don't need you passing out again." He smiled down at you as you did what he asked. He loved you having to rely on him, he was old fashioned that way. He knew you were strong and independent, but sometimes he felt you push yourself too far. 

"Stay there and try to relax. I'll be right back." He kissed your forehead and walked back to the bathroom. You laid there, holding his shirt close to your chest. You bit your bottom lip and whimpered as a cramp ripped through you. You hadn't had a painful period in a long time and forgot what it felt like. 

Henry came back and scooped you up, carrying you to the bathroom. There the tub was filled with water and bubbles. It smelt heavenly, he had lit some of your favorites candles and added your favorite scented oil. He set you on the bathroom counter. Henry pulled on the hem of your shirt and started to undress you, placing kisses along your neck and chest. 

"I want you to take a hot bath and think very happy thoughts." He said discarding your dirty clothes into the clothes bin. You nodded, giving him a small smile. "Thank you, Henry Bear," you leaned up and kissed him. "You are most certainly welcome, Kitten. But I ain't done, pet." He helped you into the tub, chuckling softly when you gave him a puzzled looked. “What do you mean, you’re not done yet?” The tone was one of slight annoyance, but also curiosity as Henry left you to relax. 

While you relaxed in the hot water, he went and grabbed a towel, your favorite blanket, your favorite shirt of his that you had stolen and threw them in the dryer. He rummaged the pantry and the freezer. He found your favorite ice cream and a chocolate bar. He smiled at himself when he saw how clean the house was. You really did surprise him. And he loved it. He loved you. 

He grabbed the snacks and the warm materials from the dryer and headed towards you. He sat the items down on the nightstand and brought the towel and shirt to you. "How are you feeling?" He asked kneeling down to you, rubbing his thumb and forefinger across your chin. "A little better." You leaned into his touch, closing your eyes. 

"Good, stand up and let me dry you off." He opened up the warm towel and wrapped it around you hugging you tight. You hummed happily at the touch and warmth. His hands and arms always being gentle when it was needed. He dried you off carefully before pulling the shirt over your head.

He finished getting you in comfy clothes before picking you up again. It was hard for you to walk right now and he wasn't going to let you suffer anymore. He laid you down and wrapped the warm blanket around you and handed you your snacks. You squealed in delight, "thank you so much, Hen!" You giggled taking a bite of the ice cream. "You are welcome and thank you for being the best ever." He kissed your cheek when you winched in slight pain. 

He climbed into bed with you. He propped himself up against the headboard before pulling you close to him. "You are too good to me." You snuggle into his chest, balling up your legs to put pressure on your abdomen. "Still cramping, Kitten?" He asked as he rubbed your side soothingly. "Yeah.." You sat down the ice cream and licked your lips, hating being such a burden. 

He propped you up so he could rub your stomach and push down where it hurt. "That's better." You smiled up at him, feeling like walking on cloud nine. He always knew what you needed. He was always attentive to you and your needs. That's why you pushed yourself. You always doubted your relationship with him. Not because of anything in particular, but the fact that he was flawless in everything he did. 

You wanted to be strong and be the perfect girlfriend. Even though he would argue that you already were. How did you get so lucky with this big strong, handsome man? "How about a movie?" He asked pulling you completely into his lap now, hugging you from behind. "Oooo, yes please." You wiggled happily, only saying a small ouch from the uncomfortable feeling. 

Henry chuckled as he searched the tv for the movie and pressed play. The narrator began to tell the story of a selfish young man that was turned into a beast. "My favorite! You remembered." You leaned back and kissed his cheek nuzzling into him. The cramps being a dull ache at this point. Henry had worked his magic once again.

"Of course, I remembered." He smiled against her neck, rubbing her stomach and then rubbing her neck. "Nothing, but the best for you, pet." He whispered. You hummed along to 'Bonjour', fiddling around until you found Henry's hands and held them tight. Your stomach growled. You can't remember if you had eaten lunch, usually, you didn't eat when you were on your period. But you found yourself starving. 

"Hungry, my love?" He asked reaching for his phone and dialed for a pizza. "You are too much." You giggle poking his side. He flinched "hey, no tickling." You loved that he was ticklish and you laughed softly. "But it makes me happy." You stuck your tongue out at him, your bratty attitude making a small appearance. 

You were feeling so much better now. Henry really did know how to take care of you. Even when it was just him being himself and taking care of you when you didn't feel good. He gave you a home, love, and care. You stared at him getting lost in his eyes when the doorbell rang. 

You pouted and whine, but you moved for him to go get the pizza and happily waited for him to come back. He had the box in his hand and some paper towels. "Bon appetite, (Y/N)." He sat next to you and smiled. He was glad to see you feeling better. You both ate in content silence and watched the movie. After you had finished eating and the movie was over, you laid down, yawning. 

Henry took off his clothes and was only in his boxers before he climbed back in next to you. He pulled your back flushed to him and kissed your neck, then your shoulder. "Mmm, I feel much better. Thank you, Henry." You sighed in content and wiggled happily against him. There was no other place you would rather be. 

You wondered if you would be able to relax more often and actually let him pamper you from time to time. You knew that you let him pamper you tonight, he would keep doing it, but now you didn't mind it as much. Your eyes got heavy as so did your body. You felt an arm wrap around your waist. 

"Tomorrow, I'm taking the day off and you will have all the pampering in the world." He whispered and nuzzled into your neck, his breathing becoming even. You knew you would protest it, but secretly love every second of it. You smiled and closed your eyes dreaming of the pampering tomorrow held.

[albino-whumpee]

Teach me how to cook

My thought process for this at 3 am today was: Everyone’s asleep! Quick!! Write that fluff!!!

Taglist:  @castielamigos-whump-side-blog @giggly-evil-puppy @cowboysrappin @haro-whumps @burtlederp @neuro-whump @comfortforthepain @whumps-the-word @whole-and-apart-and-between @broken-horn @ashintheairlikesnow @rosesareviolentlyread @starnight-whump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi​ @as-a-matter-of-whump  @whumpasaurus101 @grizzlie70 @twistedcaretaker

CW// accidental cuts, mentions of past abuse, implied head injury but really. This is just tooth rotting fluff.

[ illustration at the end because yolo ;) ]

If he had a wish, it was that those saturday mornings never ended.

Where Albus clung to him in his sleep on the same position they had cuddled the night before. Those moments of early morning when the rythm of his breathing tried to make him join him back on dreamland. When the other snuggled up to his chest in an attempt to stay asleep, before letting out his breath and opened his eyes.

“Hey…” he said in a drozzy whisper. Sann smiled as reply before the other turned slightly and stretched his legs. “Hmnnngh” he let out followed by a sigh and then curling back to the other’s chest. “Five more minutes” he said with a smile on his face that made him giggle. Neither of them tried to stand up. Secretely not wanting to.

Sann pulled his arm and pressed him into a hug. The tip of his nose tickled by the white hair. Sann unconsciously passed his hand behind the other’s head. Brushing his hair making him exhale a little, content purr. Sann opened his eyes in surprise when he found a weird bump on the back of his skull. Passed his fingers around it without being able to tell if it was an old scar or a new injury. He pulled himself up with his elbows to Albus little protest sound.

“Shhh” he said. Rasping his throat as he inspected the back of his head with what little light came from the windows. The other held his head down. It was easier if he just let him see it.

Sann found the stitches scar below the hair, curled around a thicker, straight line.

“It’s been there forever.” the young man explained as he felt Sann’s fingers pass over the line gently. “Maybe something before training. Maybe because of training. Not important. Doesn´t hurt” he said pulling away. The other knew that, but he was just surprised he hadn’t seen it before. By the way the boy stiffened he let the case rest.

Still, he pulled himself up and gave him a little peck on the back of his head. Pleased to hear a little hum from him.

“Thanks” Albus looked at the boy after a second of silence “Breakfast?” The growl on his stomach gave him away to the young man’s smile. “Ok, ok” he chuckled taking his glasses from the night table. Sann finally swung his legs off the bed and walked together to the kitchen.

Once there Albus began taking out the eggs, tortillas, tomatoes and onions. All while Sann awkwardly stood there.

“Ma’am said she wanted something called “migas” the other day” Sann perked up at the word. A sense of familiarity drilling his head with both longing and the starts of a headache. “Didn’t know what that was so I had to ask Diana. It’s a fairly easy mexican dish. Just some fried tortillas and eggs with…” A wince made Albus turn back to see him. “Sann?” 

He put the food down and stared back at Sann holding his head with knit eyebrows. He knew that headache himself. Something trying to resurface from the fog the company had worked so hard to make. He took his hand and soothed it with his thumbs for a moment before darting his eyes around the kitchen’s drawers. Locking his eyes to the improvised medical kit drawer next to the cereals. He was about to walk and take out a pill for it when Sann squeezed his hand.

“Im ok. Just a little headache” he signed with a sincere smile.

“You sure?” He nodded slowly. Careful.

“Albus?” Sann signed with “white”. Just a little joke between them and because it was easier than the five motions. “Would you teach me how to cook that?” He asked.

He wasn’t 100% sure but he had the sensation, he did know how to cook before. That they made him forget so he wouldn’t think of running. So he would be so very grateful anyone feeded him because he couldn’t do it himself.

He wanted to be able to do so. He wanted to prepare Albus, Zarai, Cloude and Sasha and Tony a nice meal. As thanks. But… He wanted to proof himself that he could be good at something else too. That there was more things he could do to please others than use his body.

Albus gave him a smile before he took out a bowl and four eggs. “Then, help me with this would you?” Sann picked them up happily and shattered the first one when he used too much force.

He looked at the mess in the table and his mind tunneled to bring back Robert’s chef face. He had put his wrist against the hot pot for turning the stove off. Making a mess with precious ingredients? He shrinked on himself, bracing for anything flying his way.

But he heard a little snort. And opened his eyes to a hand cleaning up the mess with a piece of paper. “Ok, but not so hard. Here” he discarded the paper and put another egg on his hand. Taking another himself and showing him how to do it.

He taught him how to hold the knife and cut the tortillas. Trusting him half way through to do it alone. He was very slow. Still a bit afraid of Albus snapping and yelling at him for doing a bad job at any second.

But that never happened.

Even when he accidentally cut his finger, Albus didn´t yell. Didn´t tell him to stop or made him regret even asking. He put a band aid and asked him if he was alright, if he wanted to continue.

Right, he thought to himself with a smile, Im Here.

His safe place.

Albus minced up the tomatoes and the onions so quickly and even he put the food processor to shame. Looked above his shoulder every so often to check on Sann. Gently walking him through every step. Careful with the jumpy onions with oil and enjoying Sann’s focus while mixing it all up. Like a child… He felt a headache wanting to make its way through, but Albus shoved it aside. He wasn’t ready to remember who that child was yet.

“So? How is it?” Albus asked after a few minutes, flatly ignoring the pain behind his eyes. Sann lifted the fork up. To which he opened his mouth and let him put it inside. Sann watched him taste it and then put a surprised face. “Oh! Its good! Take a bite, chef” he said taking the fork and lifting him up to Sann. He ate it and was hit with a wave of familiarity that prickled tears behind his eyes. He wanted to know why he wanted to cry so much, why the smell alone made him remember voices that weren’t quite the ones he knew.

He wondered, if he cooked more, would he remember who they were?

Albus took Sanns’s hand into his and gave it a little kiss on the knuckles. Grounding him back to reality, but letting the question float on his mind.

“If you cook this good then ma’am wont have a problem if you do it more often” he said “would you like that?” Sann’s eyes lit up and nodded enthusiastically.

“Will you teach me how?” Sann signed to the boy´s smile

“If you want me to” he said a blush crossing his cheeks rather quickly “Well, turn the stove off before it overcooks” he said cocking his head in a “go, on” gesture.

This time, turning the stove off earnt him a plate of food he had made himself. One he could eat with people on a table, even if he still sat on the floor instinctively before Albus pulled him up on a chair.

There with a surprised Zarai and the gentle praises from the doctor as he heard their conversations and sometimes was even invited with still unpolished sign language.

He really wished those warm mornings never ended.

[bluegarners]

Dick comforts a dying civilian. He wishes he didn’t have to lie to do so. 

~oOo~

“You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

That’s what he says. What he swears. The dying man, hardly a man, couldn’t be a man, he’s barely an adult, he’s so young, so young, only nods his head at the lie. It’s a sure movement, confident and trusting, and Dick has to force his mouth shut in order not to take it all back.

The asphalt is cold, it’s barely eleven thirty, but there are no stars or street lamps to help soothe the roughness of it all. The ink that oozes out and stains the black is staining his suit as well. It coats his hands and fingers, breaks through his knees, slides under his feet. Despite the pebbles that press into his shins, Dick can only focus on how soft and slick blood is.

Blood is soft.

“My name’s John,” the young man offers. Red stains his teeth in a grin that reminds Dick of his own. “Nice to meet you, sir, uh, Nightwing.”

He knows he’s not really supposed to listen to the scanners. Old habits die hard, and even though Batman’s disapproval is almost enough to keep him away, Dick’s fingers still twitches to his retired radio. It’s how he got here. It’s why he’s here now.

“Hi, John,” is all he can really offer, too focused on keeping his hands in position. Too focused on trying to slow the stream, the bubble of life that keeps pouring out. Upper left side of the sternum. Exit wound out from the third left rib. Estimated time of sixty, maybe ninety seconds, since the shot. Too late. Too late.

“My sister’s name is Rita,” John says, and his eyes are wandering across Dick’s masked face. “She’s thirteen.”

Dick nods. Digs his fingers into the small hole further. The ambulance is maybe two minutes out. Maybe more. The call only just came in.

“What’re you doing?”

Finally, Dick shifts. John has brown, unremarkable eyes. “I’m stemming the blood flow. You were shot.”

“Really?” John is genuinely surprised. “When?”

Dick presses his hands down a little harder. “A few minutes ago. Tell me more about your sister, John.”

“Why was I shot? Who did it?”

“I don’t know,” Dick responds. “You said Rita was thirteen?”

John smiles, eyes scrunching up. “Yeah,” he sighs. “She’s going to turn fourteen next month. An actual teenager.” He adds, softer, “She’s growing up too fast.”

“I know the feeling,” Dick agrees, thinking of his own teenager. Damian, indeed, was growing up too fast. He was almost up to his shoulder now. “Any plans for a birthday party?”

The blood isn’t stopping despite the pressure. It keeps seeping through his fingers, a warm envelope compared to the dry cold.

“She wants-” John coughs, chest caving. “She wants to go to Disney World. Go see Mickey Mouse.”

“That sounds like fun,” Dick cheers, trying to calculate how much time is left. John’s green coat is soaked, drenched, and Dick knows if he were to squeeze the front, it would dribble. 

John jerks his head and his eyes are roaming. There is little color in his face, lips parted in desperate gasps. The shock from before is steadily going away. The adrenaline is leaving, but everything else is fixed in place.

“Am I,” his voice cracks, “Am I dying?”

“No,” Dick reassures. “You’re going to be fine.” He presses down harder.

John whimpers. “Stop, stop. That hurts.”

“I know,” Dick soothes. “Everything is going to be okay, John. Look at me. You’re going to be okay.”

A lie.

The younger man doesn’t look at him though and he bites his lip, squeezing his eyes shut. “I can’t feel my hands,” he admits. “I-I don’t feel very good.”

“Help is almost here, John.”

Another lie. He can hear the orders going back and forth in his ear. There’s traffic. It’ll be another three minutes until an ambulance is free.

 “Just stay calm. Deep breaths. Breathe with me, okay? In and out.”

John is trying his best to copy the exaggerated movements, lungs stuttering and shaking. The panic is setting in though. The panic and the desperation.

“What am I gonna tell Rita?” he asks like he’s expecting an answer. “What am I gonna tell mom?”

Dick doesn’t know. 

“We were-- We were all gonna go together, you know? She’s turning fourteen but she still wants me around and I don’t understand why but-”

John coughs again. It’s weak. 

“I’m scared,” he whispers. “What’s going to happen to me?”

Dick opens his mouth again to spew some half-hearted reassurance or answer that’s just lies with a pretty bow atop. He stops though. John is staring at him with dirty brown eyes. There’s nothing special about them. Nothing notable. There are no flecks of gold or amber in them that catch the light. There’s no stony wall of indifference built behind them. The whites of his eyes are splattered with burst vessels and strain, and they hide nothing.

But John has brown eyes that stare at him, stare into his soul, and beg for honesty. Truth.

Dick can’t bring himself to use harsh words though. Can’t bring himself to form the sentence ‘You’re going to die,’ because that’s cruel and too blunt and death is so personal. Dying is too intricate to be put like that. You can’t explain death.

Dick’s died before. Only a minute or two of complete nothingness, but death nonetheless. He remembers the moments leading up to it more vividly than he does the moments after. His body hurt, ached in a way that he was sure he’d never feel the same again. His throat was sore, deep gouges and scratches still oozing blood. He could barely see out of his left eye, nearly swollen shut, and his wrist were throbbing. 

Most of all, though, Dick remembered suffocating. Remembered Luthor’s clean, clean face. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or blemish on that man. His teeth were a perfect white and his eyes were filled with apathy. Luthor’s metal gauntlet smelled like oil, and he could sometimes taste it on his tongue during the worst nights. The pill was small, shoved down his throat so efficiently, but the very idea of medicating like that again leaves him shivering.

He struggled. He did. Dick struggled as much as he could, muscles screaming and heart crying out. At some point, he recalls looking for Bruce. Looking for a small comfort in his despair. A familiar face to ease the panic.

There was only Luthor though. Luthor and his pearly white teeth and apathetic eyes. 

His lungs had burned and it had spread to the rest of his body like he was on fire. Dick’s last moments, his death, his murder, was filled with nothing but horror and pain.

Dick hadn’t wanted to die. Dick hadn’t wanted to know he was going to die. There was no hope with that. No sense of faith for another outcome. Fruitless as it may have been, Dick had wanted to dare for a savior.

No, Dick would not be cruel. He could not be.

“Nightwing?”

His name is hardly a breath out in the open air. The wheezes have stopped. Blood still pours and pours and pours. His suit is stained. The ground is soaked.

“It’s not scary,” Dick says, leaning closer. It’s truthful, this time. Dying wasn’t scary. Everything up until death was. “It’s like falling asleep.”

“I’m not ready,” John rushes to say. “I--I don’t wanna be alone.”

His eyes keep flickering closed, slowly fluttering open every few seconds. Carefully, cautiously, Dick removes his hands. Alleviates the pressure. There is an awful suctioning noise as he releases his fingers from the wound. John doesn’t notice.

“You won’t be,” Dick whispers, taking the other man’s trembling hand into his. “I’m here. You won’t be alone.”

“You said it’s like falling asleep?” His voice is hardly a rasp. “I go to sleep and it’ll all be just a dream?”

Death was a dream for Dick. A nap in oblivion. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and then opened them and gasped. That was it.

“Yeah, just a dream. That’s all it is.”

“And after...” John trails off, pausing for such a long time that Dick doesn’t know what to do except to continue to hold his hand. He speaks up again though, eyes flickering to find opaque lens staring back at him. “What happens after?”

There’s a wailing in the distance, close enough where the high pitched whines sound like hope and the flashing blue and red lights look like safety. There’s too much life around him though. Too much of it leaking into the asphalt and draining out of that green winter coat. John stopped shaking awhile ago. His grip lessened, and even though his eyes were meeting Dick’s own, Dick knows that he was no longer seeing.

On some level, Dick knows it’s too late. It was already too late when he arrived. John, this man that barely looked over twenty one, with a chipped tooth and boring brown eyes and a thirteen year old sister named Rita, had the misfortune of Nightwing arriving too late.

“After?” Dick repeats, squeezing the man’s hand. “Well, that’s the easy part. After, you wake up.”

He doesn’t see the exact moment brown eyes become dull, doesn’t look at his watch to confirm the precise second of when John takes his last breath, but he does know that sirens flood the dim street thirty seconds later and that it is much too late to do a thing about it.

He lets go of John’s limp hand, briefly considers wiping his gloves onto his already smeared suit, and allows two paramedics to swarm the quickly cooling body. He waits for police to arrive, watches as they drape a black tarp over Rita’s older brother’s body, and declare it a homicide. Even throughout the questioning, of which they let him off relatively easy considering the sheer volume of-- of life splattered all over him, Dick lets them do their jobs.

He leaves with little fanfare, grappling away from the scene and flipping through rooftops.

The radio in his belt feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. The static in his comm is loud and screeching, and for a moment, Dick entertains the notion of flinging it out into the night. Throwing the cheap device into darkness, watch it plummet and shatter. 

The sirens are soft, muffled with distance, but the taste in his mouth takes him back as if he never left. Copper. Oil. Dirt. His own sweat. A dry pill.

See, the thing is, Dick isn’t very good about being honest. He’s tongue and cheek most of the time, quipping and tossing around puns as distractions and ice-breakers. When people go to him for guidance, they aren’t looking for his honest thoughts. They’re looking for leadership. They’re looking for advice that’ll help them through their trials. Most of the time, they just want hope.

John was looking for hope.

Call him an optimist. Call him a pessimist. At the end of the day, there’s still water in the cup, and that’s all that matters, right?

Dying was not like falling asleep. It wasn’t taking a little nap and floating in forever. You don’t wake up from death. It wasn’t a dream that you don’t remember after opening your eyes. It wasn’t a nightmare that leaves your heart beating out of your still chest.

Death was nothing. Nothing.You aren’t supposed to come back from nothing.

You aren’t supposed to wake up either, and yet here he was. 

Dick isn’t very good about telling the truth. He’s a very good liar. A good actor. Manipulative, some would say. He prefers to see the other half of the coin. He doesn’t like the darkness or the grim. He tolerates it all, yes, but he’s a good liar. Good enough to fool himself.

Sometimes, Dick wonders if he ever actually woke up.

Thoughts like these are dangerous. They lead down a rabbit hole that’s difficult to claw out of. He’ll do it again, shovel through his own thoughts until his nails are broken off and the tips of his fingers are raw, but he can’t let himself ever succumb to it all again. 

Death wasn’t like a dream, but it took all the same. It took memories from him. Those short, precious, important minutes he spent dead took away a lot of things. And he gets so angry when he can’t remember the good things.

He gets so furious when he has trouble recalling his first birthday at the Manor. He feels an unbridled rage when he doesn’t know off the top of his head when Jason got adopted. These dangerous and purging flickers of loathing for himself shove everything else aside when Tim talks to him about certain missions that he knows he should know like they happened yesterday, and yet even the thoughts of it are fuzzy and woven with cob webs.

He’ll never forgive himself for forgetting what it was like to hug Damian for the first time.

Death, trauma, it all stole from him, but he was also lucky enough to wake up. 

Blink. Gasp. Breathe. Taste ash and inhale smoke.

John had brown eyes. Rita is turning fourteen next month. 

The radio call requested emergency services for a neighborhood disturbance at eleven twenty five. Nightwing arrived on scene at eleven twenty eight.

The blood under his fingernails will take three showers to get out.

John bled out and his life now stained every part of Dick Grayson.

These are things Dick will remember. 

Death is not a dream, so this is the price for making it one.

[novelty--night]

Sick Fic

@daringyounggrayson I finally finished your request! (running fingers through sweaty hair x being led back to bed with patient whispers)

Characters: Bruce, Dick, and Alfred

"How is he?" 

Bruce asks as Alfred steps into the hallway and out of the bedroom. 

Alfred sighs as he readjusts the tray in his hand. The soup was half-eaten and cold. 

"His fever is still high, but it seems he has more of an appetite." Alfred sends him a pointed look. "Although, I am positive you can Master Dick himself on how he is doing." 

"I…" Bruce touches his broken ribs, still slightly sore. His mind flashes back to that night.

.

.

Poison Ivy had made another escape from Arkham. She went and destroyed another oil factory, destroying many Iives with it. 

Robin and Batman fought together as they avoid being plummeted by thick, green vines. One lucky vine manages to hit Bruce on the stomach. He winces when he hears a crack. He stumbles weakly on his feet when he hears a shout. 

"Batman, behind you!" 

Bruce spins around to see a giant pink flower bursting out of the ground. 

Everything else happens too quickly. 

Robin pushes Bruce away, grunting with the heavy weight. The flower burps out a yellow powder, clouding Dick in an opaque cloud. 

"Robin!" A scream stretches out of his throat. Poison Ivy flinches in surprise and has a glimpse of guilt before her expression cools away. She lifts a hand and the pollinated dust filters away. She takes a hesitant step back before she rides off on a vine. 

Bruce pays her no attention as he skids over to Robin. His Robin, who was choking on a scream, whose face already glistening with sweat. 

He comms Alfred and orders in a brittle voice to prepare a med eval.  

-

"I will send your dinner back to Master Dick's room where I expect for you to finish your plate."

Bruce fidgets. "But I-"

Bruce shuts his mouth when Alfred sends him a look that says there is no room for argument. 

He huffs out a breath and wraps his fingers around the doorknob. He closes his eyes and counts silently in his head and opens the door. 

Dick lays silently in his bed and his chest slowly moving up and down is the only thing that brings Bruce comfort. He sits on the spare chair next to the bed. 

He gently rakes through Dick's sweaty and matted hair. Dick grumbles and blinks his eyes open. 

"Hey, kiddo," Bruce smiles in greeting. 

"Bruce," Dick coughs out weakly. "Took you long enough." 

The man holds back a wince as he brushes back a lock of hair. 

"I was taking care of other priorities." 

Dick shifts his head so Bruce's hand falls flat in the air. Bruce clears his throat and drops it back onto his lap. 

"Right," Dick says after a moment of silence. "How's Ivy?" 

Bruce fingers the bruises on his knuckles. "Back in Arkham." 

Dick looks at Bruce in the eyes and his blues are foggy with fever. "That's not what I asked." 

Bruce glances away and he scratches at a scab on a knuckle. "A bloody nose and bruised eye. That's it."

Bruce quickly eases Dick up when he starts to cough heavily. 

"She didn't mean to." 

"I know." 

Bruce still remembers the guilt shining through her eyes as Bruce throws in a final punch. 

Bruce sighs and repeats. "I know she didn't."

There's a knock at the door and Alfred enters with a plate of food and medicine. 

"Here is your dinner, Master Bruce, and I do expect an empty plate when I return." Alfred turns to Dick. "And your medicine, Master Dick." 

Both Dick and Bruce move to argue, but Alfred clears his throat loudly. "I do not want to hear any arguments." 

With a pout, Dick swallows the medicine down. Bruce starts to eat, but at least he doesn't pull at the bottom of his lip.

"Master Bruce, I will be at the farmer's market early in the day tomorrow, so I expect you will be fine taking care of Master Dick for a couple of hours."

Dick sniffles loudly and grins lopsidedly. "I'll make sure he won't burn down the house, Alf," he says through half-lidded eyes. 

Alfred smiles gently. "Yes, I will put my trust in you." He moves to pull the blanket closer to Dick's chin. "Now rest, Master Dick, sleep is the best cure."

.

.

.

"Now, Master Bruce, there's soup on the stove with instructions on how to reheat it on the fridge. Please, make sure he takes the medicine 30 minutes after he eats."

"Yes, yes Alfred," Bruce rolls his eyes and smiles. "Now, go or you'll get stuck in the morning traffic." 

"I should be back within a couple of hours." He puts on his jacket and leaves. 

Bruce sets to the kitchen and reads Alfred's instructions. He still manages to slightly burn the soup, but it's better than he could've hoped. He puts the soup on a tray and carefully walks upstairs to Dick's room. 

Dick is still snoring gently. Bruce hates to wake him up, especially when he looks so peaceful, but Alfred did give him a rather strict schedule. Bruce places the tray on Dick's nightstand. 

"Hey, Dick," Bruce shakes Dick's shoulder. "It's time for breakfast." The young boy groans but blinks awake. 

"Here let me check your temperature." 

Dick turns his head already used to the procedure. 

Bruce puts the thermometer in his ear and takes it out when it beeps. Bruce lets out a sigh of relief. "It looks like your fever is finally going down." 

Bruce goes to grab the soup when Dick says, "Bruuuuce, can I please eat it in the study?" 

Bruce lets out a grimace and already feels his resolve breaking away. "Dick, I-"

"C'mon, Bruce, you gotta do some work anyway, right? The work which is in the study, rigggght?" Dick furrows his brows and juts out his lower lip. "Pleaaase, Bruce, I've been stuck in my room all week! I'm dying here!" 

Dick grins when he hears Bruce sigh. "Alright, fine, but you'll have to finish all of your food then." 

"You got it, captain!" 

Dick grabs a folder on his other nightstand and a pencil. Bruce grabs the tray and lets Dick go ahead. Bruce carefully watches Dick climb down the stairs and into the study. 

Dick plops onto the couch and Bruce sets the tray on his lap. 

"Remember to finish all of it." 

Both fall into silence as Dick starts to eat and Bruce goes over files for WE. 

Dick shows off his clean plate once he finishes. He sets it down on the small coffee table and opens the folder and takes a paper and pencil from the flaps. 

"What are you working on?" Bruce asks as he replaces one file with another. 

"A calcudoku," Dick answers as he scribbles on his paper. 

"A what?"

"It's similar to sudoku, but I have calculations to solve while thinking about what can go in the boxes." 

Dick sighs and erases something on the paper and writes something again. He looks over the paper with a furrowed brow. "I think I'm done. Can you check it over?"

Dick folds the paper into an airplane and flings it over to Bruce's desk before the man can answer. Bruce unfolds the paper and starts to check Dick's work. 

Bruce tries to hide his smile. He glances back up at Dick. The younger boy had already started on a new sheet. His hair is slightly damp with sweat and his tongue sticks out in concentration. "You have everything right," Bruce says with pride.

Dick grins at the response. Bruce lets out a breath of a laugh. 

Dick groans when he hears Bruce's phone alarm ring. 

"Please tell me that isn't what I think it means."

Bruce shakes the med bottle with a grim smile. 

"Aw, c'mon, B, do I have to take it? I won't tell Alfred if you don't." 

"Sorry, chum." Bruce rolls his eyes as he shakes two pills out. "Alfred's rules are law."

Dick's eyes start to shine and his bottom lip quivers. 

"Ah, put those eyes away. Those won't work on stuff as important as this."

Dick's expression immediately darkens. "They make me so drowsy," he says with a high whine. 

"Dick," Bruce replies with force. 

Dick sighs as takes the pills and swallows them down with a gulp of water. 

"Thank you. I know it sucks, but you just have to take it for a couple more days."

"I know," Dick softly replies with a tight smile. 

The next time Bruce looks back up from his files, Dick is fast asleep. The man smiles as he gets back up once more. Bruce brushes Dick's bangs gently away from his eyes. He cleans the papers back into their folder and makes sure to note to check the rest of the completed sheets. 

He groans only slightly when he picks the eleven-year-old. Small arms wrapped around his neck instinctively. Bruce shifts Dick gently making sure his head is cradled safely on his broad shoulders. Bruce winces when Dick moans quietly. 

"Go back to sleep, chum," Bruce whispers over his shoulder. "I'm just taking you to your room."

"I can walk on my own." But Dick makes no move to slide off Bruce's back. 

Bruce huffs out a laugh. "Sure, kiddo."

"You're lucky you're comfortable." 

Bruce laughs again while shaking his head. 

Bruce quietly climbs up to Dick's room. He tucks the blanket around his shoulders. 

Bruce goes to leave but a small hand quickly wraps around his wrist. 

"It's not your fault, B," a small voice croaks out. 

Bruce freezes and doesn't turn around. The hand around his wrist feels so small. Bruce still remembers clasping it tightly while Dick lay unconscious in bed. "You were unconscious for two days," Bruce chokes out between gritted teeth. He still feels the fevered hands and hears the labored breathing. 

Dick takes a breath as if he’s the one who’s looking for patience. "I'm getting better now. I have my appetite and everything." 

Bruce finally turns around and says exasperatedly, "Dick!" 

"Bruce," Dick replies in the same tone. His eyes, still foggy from sickness, somehow shine clear. "I'm fine." The young boy glances down at the wooden floor, all of a sudden shy, and glances back up at Bruce. "Just stay with me, okay?"

"Okay." 

Bruce sits at the cushioned seat near Dick's bed. 

"I still don't think it's your fault."

Bruce doesn't reply this time because how is going to explain to this young boy that it's on Bruce's shoulders to make sure nothing ever harms Dick? That if something does, Bruce isn't sure if he can handle it. 

A book lands on Bruce's lap, breaking him out of his turmoiling thoughts. 

Bruce picks it up and smooths the cover. 

"Is this the French version of Robin Hood?"

Dick nods and answers with a shrug, "I wanted to learn a new language. Read it out loud to me. It'll be good oral practice." 

Bruce opens to where a page is dog-eared. He is pretty sure that he is completely butchering the language and stumbles on one too many words, and Bruce is positive that once Dick gets better he's totally going to make fun of him, but Bruce doesn't really mind. Bruce continues to read softly even after he hears quiet snoring because he knows if he stops Dick is going to wake up and demand Bruce to continue. 

.

.

Alfred comes home and the first thing he does is to check on his two charges. He opens the door in a way he knows it isn't going to squeak. The old man smiles when he finds both of them fast asleep.