#also is it flawed to put stock in having conversations with me? absolutely

[farkenshnoffingottom]

My university has also turned ai detection off, thankfully. Another reblog on this post said turnitin uses 'unusual grammar' as evidence of ai, which is such a big problem. It's not just ESL students, either, it also targets first gen students, people from poor school districts who've never gotten individual attention from a teacher because classes are too big, etc., and disproportionately POCs, even if English is their first language. I teach intro/gen ed courses, and so many of my students have never been taught how to write in an 'academic' way, and that's the kind of stuff that gets pinged by turnitin

I'm gonna echo op and say they're also just bad essays. No specific evidence is not a dead giveaway, because many of my students don't use evidence in the way I've asked them to, but it is already a mark against the essay. A major giveaway I've seen is suddenly switching topics to something that's not really connected, but I've also got a lot of students who just never learned how to use transitions, so I can't assume it's ai. So the official guidance from my department lines up with my own strategy of just grading it like it's a student-written paper, and that leaves us with all of the previously stated problems

Op's right about really bad papers making me grumpy when grading, and I try to step away and come back to an essay later when that happens to see if I was being unfair, but usually it's still not anywhere near meeting the assignment requirements. My own advice to students: showing us you're trying can really make a difference. Grading is subjective, and one of the things that makes me more generous in how I'm grading something is if you've emailed me or we've had a conversation beforehand. Partly it's just that I now recognize your name out of a class of too many to count, and that shows me you're engaged and trying. But also, it means that when I come across a point that isn't really clear in your writing, I have a sense of what you were trying to say, and it becomes a matter of your writing missing the mark rather than you not understanding the subject, and that has much more wiggle room (I don't like making this assumption, but when the only interaction I have from someone is an essay that doesn't make sense, I don't really have another reference point)

An important message to college students: Why you shouldn't use ChatGPT or other "AI" to write papers.

Here's the thing: Unlike plagiarism, where I can always find the exact source a student used, it's difficult to impossible to prove that a student used ChatGPT to write their paper. Which means I have to grade it as though the student wrote it.

So if your professor can't prove it, why shouldn't you use it?

Well, first off, it doesn't write good papers. Grading them as if the student did write it themself, so far I've given GPT-enhanced papers two Ds and an F.

If you're unlucky enough to get a professor like me, they've designed their assignments to be hard to plagiarize, which means they'll also be hard to get "AI" to write well. To get a good paper out of ChatGPT for my class, you'd have to write a prompt that's so long, with so many specifics, that you might as well just write the paper yourself.

ChatGPT absolutely loves to make broad, vague statements about, for example, what topics a book covers. Sadly for my students, I ask for specific examples from the book, and it's not so good at that. Nor is it good at explaining exactly why that example is connected to a concept from class. To get a good paper out of it, you'd have to have already identified the concepts you want to discuss and the relevant examples, and quite honestly if you can do that it'll be easier to write your own paper than to coax ChatGPT to write a decent paper.

The second reason you shouldn't do it?

IT WILL PUT YOUR PROFESSOR IN A REALLY FUCKING BAD MOOD. WHEN I'M IN A BAD MOOD I AM NOT GOING TO BE GENEROUS WITH MY GRADING.

I can't prove it's written by ChatGPT, but I can tell. It does not write like a college freshman. It writes like a professional copywriter churning out articles for a content farm. And much like a large language model, the more papers written by it I see, the better I get at identifying it, because it turns out there are certain phrases it really, really likes using.

Once I think you're using ChatGPT I will be extremely annoyed while I grade your paper. I will grade it as if you wrote it, but I will not grade it generously. I will not give you the benefit of the doubt if I'm not sure whether you understood a concept or not. I will not squint and try to understand how you thought two things are connected that I do not think are connected.

Moreover, I will continue to not feel generous when calculating your final grade for the class. Usually, if someone has been coming to class regularly all semester, turned things in on time, etc, then I might be willing to give them a tiny bit of help - round a 79.3% up to a B-, say. If you get a 79.3%, you will get your C+ and you'd better be thankful for it, because if you try to complain or claim you weren't using AI, I'll be letting the college's academic disciplinary committee decide what grade you should get.

Eventually my school will probably write actual guidelines for me to follow when I suspect use of AI, but for now, it's the wild west and it is in your best interest to avoid a showdown with me.

[margridarnauds]

You're so right about AI being bland and how everyone should use it instead of imagining what it is and isn't but I cannot touch ChatGPT with a ten foot pole after spending months next to the only man I Literally Cannot Stand at work use it for everything from Listing Pros And Cons Of Living In The City For A Conversation I'm Having In Person Right Now all the way to This Is Basically A Search Engine, Right? I've Never Heard of Cthulu Before, I'll Ask ChatGPT Who Came Up With It And What The Stories He Wrote Are.

Oh yeah, absolutely!

Like, my take on ChatGPT is just...it isn't glamorous, one way or another. But the people who borderline worship it are extremely annoying specifically *because* it isn't glamorous. I can at least get the fear-mongering more, especially since we DO have this phenomenon where something doesn't have to be *good*, it just needs to be *convincing* for people to use it over human beings. (See: Google translate.) I know that people are absolutely using it to, say, write books and stuff. (I think that a lot of the concerns re: fanfic don't...hold up as much as people think, like this so called wave of people plugging in hundreds of fanfics, just because anyone who's used ChatGPT knows there's a character limit. It could be they're using another one, but I think that a lot of people just enjoy stoking fandom's anxieties over this sort of thing.)

Basically my approach isn't "use ChatGPT religiously" or even "like ChatGPT"; it's more..."realistically understand what it is and isn't so you can frame your criticisms correctly instead of relying on a bunch of Tumblr posts by people who have ALSO never used it."

Tl;dr: You're valid. AI bros still annoying.

And now for my Hall of Fame (using things from the last...month or so instead of farther back because it HAS gotten slightly better):

Top female Celticists:

(1) Miranda Aldhouse-Green: Female Celticist, definitely doesn't deserve to be at the top given that she isn't...really...widely respected...in the field. Like, I'm not going to say more because we're talking about currently living scholars, but...there are others who deserve top prize.

(2) Dáithí Ó gÓgáin - Famously not a female Celticist.

(3) Barry Cunliffe, decidedly not a female Celticist.

(4) Anne Ross, see Aldhouse-Green. (Also...that book....is not highly regarded in the field.)

(5) Máire Herbert - FINALLY a female Celticist who's also widely respected and whose work holds up strongly. I sure hope that this isn't the only time this hap-oh, wait.

(6) Proinsias Mac Cana - Not a female Celticist.

RIP to Nerys Patterson, Robin Chapman-Stacey, Catherine McKenna, Charlene Eska, Rachel Bromwich, Cecile O'Rahilly, Elizabeth Gray, Maud Joynt, Natasha Sumner, Elizabeth Boyle, Ranke de Vries, Katherine Simms, etc. etc. etc. Barry Cunliffe is a more important female Celticist than them.

Philippe Égalité voting for the execution of Marie Antoinette...which is amazing when you consider that he was imprisoned at the time and awaiting his own execution, only a few weeks after Antoinette's. (He was a busy man.) Clearly ChatGPT liked the musical.

Ruairí Ó hUiginn is a wonderful scholar, but I think he's a little too busy working at DIAS to be the head of the Department of Old Irish...in Cork...where he has never lectured. And I feel like current head of the department of Old Irish, John Carey, might have a few things to say about that.

When I asked it to write a sequel to Romeo and Juliet and it gave me a baby who defies the laws of...basic...biology.

Basically the moral of the story from these shouldn't JUST be "ChatGPT is flawed" but more "It CAN actually be useful for coming up with ideas, the same as a random name generator, and it's very fun to torment with false information, but just like a random name generator, don't put more stock in it than it's worth."

[reidecorating]

the bau team and their star signs based on science

hotch: clearly an aries. this is not up for debate and i don't take criticism. natural born and excellent leader? maybe. but bossy boots because he is just a bossy boss man who probably sleeps in a suit or those pyjamas that have suit graphics on them? most definitely. when he speaks, his voice sounds like it’s coming out in all lower case, when he yells, it’s all caps. angery. down to throw hands at anything in his immediate line of vision probably. will exterminate you like a roach if you mess with someone he cares about. don't break the rules or my boss will kill me 😡 to you're breaking the rules under MY supervision, that way my boss will kill US 🥰. probably microwaves food a lot. type of dad to say no to getting a dog, then two months later get matching christmas costumes with said dog. never stops working because he is an absolute UNIT built like the circuit of one of those infinity pools in bali. could use another sabbatical.

rossi: i saw his birth certificate and the rumours are true, he’s a november sagittarius. two wives away from being a modern day king henry the eighth. it’s rossi’s world and we’re all just living in it. he is a prophet. his third eye has been opened and he ascended to the seventh dimension at the age of 24. when he takes leave, the only way to contact him is through a ouija board in latin or maybe greek depending on the position of the sun. he will only die when he chooses to die but will dissolve at the words ‘what are we?’. the major arteries in his body are just long pieces of macaroni. definitely has hooked up with one person from every state the jet has landed in. no filter between his brain and mouth, will destroy your self confidence intentionally. uses abbreviations when texting. liberal - because of the experimenting back in college. probably friends with your mum on facebook.

prentiss: imagine her being anything but an air sign. you can't because she's clearly an aquarius?? work comes first (first equal with her girlfriend). if you tell her to do something she simply won't do it, especially if it was something she was just about to do. she once came home from a run with her mother in the summer and her mother politely suggested that she should drink some water. emily, an anarchist, did not drink water and was hospitalised for heatstroke in due course of proving her point of nonconformity. has been to jail. sucks on candy canes and makes them pointy because christmas is one of her least favourite days. on probation. no, i really like him *deletes his number*. maybe moves to iceland to become a sheep herder to avoid having to ever see anyone she has romantically affiliated with ever again. actually quite the jester, joke levels exceed 4000, but can make you laugh and cry in the span of approximately the length of a short youtube ad. the antichrist.

morgan: has at some point caused someone to question their sexuality. am i really a straight man? do i really only like women? - direct quotes from anyone who has seen him. if that doesn't scream libra i don't know what does. i’m trying to refrain from using the words ‘hot’, ‘sex god’, ‘rail me’. the kinda guy who will hold open a door for you, but also have no problem kicking one down for you. has never ditched class before. momma’s boy. tries to make his pecs move in the mirror. he KNOWS he’s hot okay??? but THEN its not just that because people are like ‘oh he's attractive’ but then they find out he’s RESPECTFUL, and INTELLIGENT and COMPASSIONATE and then that awkward moment when you just DIE because he is not flawed??? it’s like he’s a lucid dream??? probably secretly is really good at baking some obscure european good. uses colognes that have really manly man sounding names for instance, ‘Man Musk’, ‘Mystical Muscles’, ‘Beards and Buttercream’.

garcia: the epitome of a female pisces. a baddie™. definitely owns a pair of those really skinny sunglasses that influencers wear and looks like god herself while in them. spirals from being the momma bear to the wine-aunt. she will care about you so hard but if that's not reciprocated, will hack into your my eyes only and fax those pictures to every machine she can connect to. accidentally has flirted her way into at least 19 relationships. really good at writing fan fiction??? like - seriously good. knows 4 different synonyms for the word “member” iykyk. researches things the people she loves most enjoy, so when she talks to them she can have more detailed conversations. catches feelings for people who are definitely not good for her. sometimes just takes off her glasses because she's tired of, well... seeing. hand makes cute lil earrings for her friends. a master at fireboy and watergirl and will never play with anyone else because ‘another player just slows you down, i can do it myself in half the time’. THAT FRIEND WHO WILL WAIT FOR YOU TO TIE YOUR LACES.

jj: virgo. she was definitely that girl who had notes with pretty titles and colour coded highlighters in school. also did extracurriculars in the weekends so she’d have to be picked up from sleepovers early to go to soccer games. when she takes the time to learn something she learns it well and perfects any craft handed to her because anything less than 100% is failure in her eyes. gets annoyed when other people cry for too long probably. will judge you. so much. silently. especially if you cry. don't make her mad because she has caused civil unrest in 13 continents. live, laugh, love signs in her kitchen. security footage surfaced in 2007 of her roundhouse kicking a middle aged man, in the junk food aisle of a trader joe’s, after he took the last re-stocked bag of cheetos. has a ‘mom first, agent second’ mug that garcia got her. likes family walks which will most likely be planned out meticulously, involving a detailed itinerary of the day i.e. Henry’s toilet break, 10AM

reid: he despises star signs and anyone who gives them any thought because “where is the SCIENCE?” this bitch is a scorpio. definitely only knows his sun sign. so intense! have you seen the way he looks at things?? the way he stares??? the way he analyses dead bodies??? the way he loves??? ridiculously put together to everyone around him but emotionally life is soup and he is fork. kinky. breaks off bananas little by little with his hands before eating each piece individually because eating them normally is too sensual and he’s paranoid morgan might see him doing it and take a picture. wants the kind of love he reads about. has a superiority complex about having a superiority complex. keeps a straight face while saying literally anything so you cannot tell if he’s being serious or not like one day he’ll just be like “yeah i killed a man with an axe once to enable myself to more easily empathise with future unsubs who potentially work as lumberjacks or have a history of logging. it’s called method axing,” and then leave the room to draw circles on maps or something. believes that parallel parking should work, in theory, but never seems to work for him in practice.

[drops-of-moonlights]

I LOST THE FUCKING ASK FOR THIS BECAUSE THIS IS A FUNCTIONAL WEBSITE, but to the anon that asked me which out of the 6 Winx I don’t like? The answer’s Flora.

Well, that’s not completely accurate. Sometimes I like her. But by and large she’s definitely my least favorite of the main girls, and is the one character that just frustrates me most of the time.

Being fair to my own biases, over the years I’ve grown bored and annoyed with the stock Kind And Shy character archetype, so of course I wouldn’t be as fond of Flora as I was as a kid (tho even as a kid I wasn’t really super into her either), but as the seasons moved on, I found myself getting even more annoyed with her.

Outside of her being the absolute flattest characterization-wise of the entire main cast a good 90% of the time, being reduced to “flower mom”, Flora also ends up as a hypocrite and on accident, constantly giving (often unwanted) relationship and communication advice for the girls when a) she’d rather ask the new girl in the group to stalk her crush, up to and making her commit breaking-and-entering to dig info on the dude instead of ATTEMPTING to initiate a normal human conversation, and b) instead of actually talking with her boyfriend about the jealousy she felt when seeing him with a childhood friend of his or actually talking with said girl to establish some sort of boundaries, she decided to just sit still, hope that everything is sorted out on its own, and when it wasn’t fixed by a miracle she was like “welp we’re over. nothing to do about it”. And this wouldn’t be an issue in other situations! It’s a good character flaw! But it’s not PRESENTED as a character flaw but a virtue of hers, and that’s what bothers me.

On top of that, as much as Flora and Helia are flauntered as the perfect couple, they never actually attempt to show that. For starters, we never see them ACTUALLY spend time as a couple until Season 5, when they started dating at the end of Season 2. Of course it helped that Helia simply Does Not Exist in S3, but even in S4 they didn’t have many moments that aren’t also shared with the other couples, and the few they did have on their own, they weren’t the best, mostly arguing about Musa and Riven’s break-up. And the reason I make this point, despite already hearing people be like “but Drops isn’t that true of all non-Skoom/MuRi couples?” the answer is no! It’s actually not! Brella and Tecmmy get completely separate scenes that are just about them throughout the series, however small. Florelia doesn’t get them as often.

I already pointed out the issues she had relationship-wise in S5, but HOO BOY WERE S6 AND S7 WORSE ON THAT. S6 had her be angry with Helia because he was almost murdered by a plant and thinking he was not reliable to do even the most basic tasks she asked him to do, while Helia was angry with Flora for not bothering to explain said tasks. S7 gave us the epitome of the terrible writing, as during that season Flora is 2 steps away from murdering Helia due to the simply act of existing. Throughout the season she’s constantly bothered by his presence, blames most of the minor mishaps on him even when he wasn’t present, and the less we talk about their clashes regarding how to raise the pure being that is Amarok, the better. THEY MADE SKOOM SEEM A PERFECTLY STABLE COUPLE. S K O O M

I admittedly don’t remember much about S8 (waiting for the Latin Spanish dub to drop to do a full rewatch), but they also made a point of marking them as the perfect couple in the same episode they almost break up because they were angry the other decided to support Musa/Riven instead of Riven/Musa, the other party obviously in the wrong.

Even with this, I do give her a small amount of slack because bad romance writing affects all non-Tecmmy couples, so it’s not something completely unique to her, but the show trying to give Flora/Helia the perfect couple status despite clear evidence to the contrary is why I don’t cut her too much slack.

I also don’t like how Flora’s referred to as the second-strongest Winx after God-Power-Infused Bloom despite how often she’s the first girl to get knocked the fuck out in a fight, and even when she doesn’t get out first, she never does anything meaningful for the fight either, not even act as healer or other forms of meaningful support. Flora tends to simply use one (1) spell, see it fail, and be like “well my job’s done y’all deal with it”. And that’s if she’s not fighting anything nature-related after S2, in that case she will willingly put herself between the thing they’re fighting and the rest of the Winx’s attacks, even when the enemy is actively trying to kill her. And sure, this isn’t unique to her and more of the stock Plant Lover Activist trait, but when it happens every single episode, as with S5 or S7, it gets grating really fast and ends up seeming as an excuse for her to not actually do anything at all.

And even with all this I WOULD be willing to enjoy and even like Flora if she had any significant subplots, but oh, what do we have here? She has absolutely nothing outside of her relationship with Helia and her power over plants. Nothing! Because Flora’s entire personality (what little she has, at least, even with the previous ranting) is entirely about plants, and nothing else. She doesn’t get anything else going on for her, no subplots about overcoming her supposed shyness, no subplots about her relationship with the girls outside of the generic friendship she has with everyone that isn’t Bloom or Aisha, not even any meaningful subplots about ANYTHING ELSE she might like! The girl doesn’t even have hobbies outside of her plants! And sure, Tecna and Musa suffer from the same but at least they get stuff outside of it. The closest thing Flora has to any kind of subplot is her strained relationship with Miele, and that’s only because SHE HERSELF strained it via her sudden distrust for her little sister’s agency.

I feel like I have to reiterate that I don’t hate her, but god, she’s one of the biggest wastes of potential in the franchise, and what bothers me more, with all this I’ve said already, is how everyone in-universe praises her, how she’s the canon’s Golden Child that does no wrong. Flora is the perfect fairy, the perfect friend, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect everything.

Whenever people talk about completely-perfect characters that never get confronted on anything and when they do the other party’s wrong, they shouldn’t herald Bloom as the main example.

The main example is Flora.

[thewritewolf]

After the End Chapter 25: Study

First | Previous | Next | Last

@marichatmay

Enjoy!

Read on Ao3

“So is this everything you’ve got from daddio?”

Adrien looked at the mountain of paperwork, spread across folders and binders and ledgers, stacked precariously in his father’s old office, then looked back at his best friend with disbelief.

“Did you want more to go through?”

“Chill, bro. Just tryin’ to get the lay of the land, ya know?”

Alya put a hand on both of their shoulders. “Don’t worry, this is more than enough to work with. Let’s just start going through all this with an eye for detail and see where it takes us.”

“I just don’t know what we’re hoping to find.” Adrien let out an exhausted sigh as he pulled up a seat and grabbed a stack at random. “I’ve been pouring over this stuff for months now. What else could there be to find?”

“Adrien, my chaton, I think the world of you, but you don’t have a deceitful bone in your body.” Marinette took up a spot near him and took a ledger. “Besides, you haven’t exactly been in the best mindset while you’ve been on your own.”

“Having a bunch of extra eyes lookin’ at this stuff is only gonna do us some good. I’d bet my hat on it, bro.”

“I’m hoping you’re right.” Adrien’s eyes went distant for a moment as he frowned at a paper in front of him. “Otherwise, I don’t know how we’re going to tackle the Gentlemen.”

The next hour was spent with each of them pouring over documents from the elder Agreste, from anywhere between fourteen years ago and a month before the battle that ended his life. Despite his fears that it would be another tedious slog like it had been the first time, the off and on conversation with his friends kept things lively. At least, as lively as they could be while they were digging through his dead dad’s stuff.

With Marinette sitting so close to him, he was the first one to realize that something was up. He noticed that she was flipped back and forth between two pages, her nose crinkling in the way that he’d long come to associate with intense focus while she was in the mask.

He craned his neck to look at what she was, but it just looked like some internal memo from a couple years ago. There were vague memories of him looking through it weeks ago but it was just another dreary Agreste communication.

“Something up, m’lady?”

She held up one finger without looking up. By this point the others had started paying attention to her. All three of them waited for her to finish whatever it was she was doing. After a few minutes her eyes widened and she gasped.

“That’s it!” Her eyes locked onto his. “There’s some kind of message hidden here!”

“Wait, are you sure?” Adrien leaned over her shoulder but didn’t see anything out the ordinary.

“Yes!” Marinette pointed out a couple words in the middle of the memo. “There are a couple letters that have been randomly capitalized here.”

“Well, Nathalie was usually pretty overworked so I’m not too-”

“But its not just that! There is a lot more paragraphs than what a tiny memo like this would really need. And if you pull out all the capital letters from each paragraph…”

She sketched some notes on the side. Spaced out like she said and with the letters in place, they almost looked like a small sentence. A sentence with completely jumbled up words, but still.

“Okay…” Adrien felt a spark of excitement. He hadn’t expected to find something so quickly. “What do we do now then? It doesn’t make any sense like it is right now.”

“That’s where we come in.” Alya took the paper from Marinette’s hand. “Nino, M - keep digging through those memos. Adrien, find as many of those as you can to pass to them.” Alya pulled out her phone and began typing furiously. “And can you give me any important words that your father might have used as a cipher?”

After another hour of frantic work, they’d compiled a few whole papers of transcribed secret messages. They’d even pinned down that the only ones with messages were memos on the Wednesdays of each week, for whatever reason. And eventually Alya cracked the code - naturally, the magic word had been ‘Emily.’

Working as a team, they managed to get an entire one sided conversation decoded.

“Any idea where the other half could be?” Adrien said as they finished up.

Alya shrugged. “No clue. But these were internal memos, right?”

“Yeah…”

“So the Gentlemen had to have at least one person on the inside of the company.” Alya frowned and tapped at her chin.

“I’d bet that he also had them respond from the inside then too.”

Nino gave him a confused look. “What makes you say that, bro?”

“He was a control freak. There was no way he’d let it go out into something he couldn’t control, like the newspaper.”

Alya frowned in thought. “You might be onto something there, but we don’t know for sure right. We’ll have to make do with what we have right now.” She looked over at Marinette, who was pouring over the notes that they had made. “So… what’s it all worth, M? Was it worth two hours of our time?”

Marinette nodded slowly and looked up at them with her lips pursed into a thin, pale line. “This was without a doubt worth the effort to get it.”

“Well don’t keep us in suspense, girl! Spill the beans!”

“They’ve been working on this for a while, but basically?” Marinette took a deep breath. “They’ve got pieces of the old Guardian monastery and are using that to turn off kwami powers.”

They exchanged looks with each other.

“You’re… gonna have to explain that to us, girl.”

Marinette rubbed her temples. “Okay, so the Guardians are responsible for taking care of the miraculous, right?”

“Yeah…” Adrien glanced at the other two, who were just nodding along.

“Well, Hawkmoth wasn’t the first time a chosen has gone rogue. So they made their main base out of stuff that was pretty resistant to the powers of the miraculous. Or, well, they enchanted their stained glass and masonry to be that way.” She looked at Adrien. “If you tried to Cataclysm their building at the height of their power, it would have absolutely no effect.”

“But didn’t they get wiped out by an amok?”

“Yes - the powers of an amok, not the miraculous itself.”

“Seems like a pretty big flaw,” Alya said, crossing her arms.

“To be fair to them, those powers are both the hardest to account for, and have the miraculous holders easiest to take out in a one on one fight. After all, the butterfly and peacock miraculous don’t help much in a direct battle - they’re only good for attacks from a distance.”

“So - what?” Nino rubbed his temples. “They nicked some old rocks and that makes ‘em supes powerful?”

“Something like that.”

“Wait.” Adrien held up a hand. “Didn’t the old monastery get restored by the Ladybug cure years ago? Wouldn’t the monastery have resisted that?”

“Apparently the enchantments wore off a lot, and they had to spend years restoring them.” Marinette smiled. “But you’re right - the monastery is back. Which means they won’t be able to get more pieces of it, at least not without fighting a bunch of mystical warrior monks who know this stuff way better than they do.”

“But where does that leave us now?” Alya asked, elbows on her legs as she leaned forward.

“It means two things.” Marinette held up one finger. “First, it means that we know what these… let’s call them lodestones will look like. Old masonry, maybe something glass or jewel-like.”

Adrien’s eyes flew open. “Like that egg the Gentlemen dropped to get out of the alley!”

“Exactly! And two,” she held up a second finger. “Once their current stock is gone, they have no way of getting more. I’m also going to bet that they won’t be keeping all their lodestones in one place - between each one being a huge source of protection, from what I understand of Guardian magic, having them charged like this and too close together would break them. ”

“So… where do we start, then?”

“The lodestones need to be activated to work, and I doubt they’re going to keep them turned on all the time even though we know where they are.” Marinette started pacing. “And we know that since Chat’s transformation didn’t immediately drop that powers active before the lodestones are introduced are unaffected.”

Marinette stopped and grinned at them.

“I have a plan.”

[maymeteorite]

re ur tags to be fair on edelgard, ferdinand himself doesnt get main plot time to outline his views and he spends so much of his time in his supports with HER asking for a duel, while having no idea that SHE has no idea of his critiques. i feel like its more just flawed writing/wasted potential (rip ;-;) rather than. her evaluating his critiques and then basically just thinking hes not worth taking seriously.

yeah, i agree! in a way, anyways. i was trying to direct that criticism on the writers, mostly, bc especially when u do look at the other routes, u SEE how much they jipped him in comparison to the other challengers. admittedly, i don't personally like lorenz, so i did not do his supports when i played vw (as well as the fact that i've only played through vw once bc it messed me up real bad n i hated it <3 not ur fault claude i just wasn't prepared for dimitri's death being that graphically described) n that is why i'm going off a comparison to felix/dimitri moreso than lorenz n claude.

i just always found it interesting n also very. sad. how easily n readily dimitri accepted felix's criticisms n challenges, vs how edelgard n ferdinand aren't even really allowed to talk about theirs, n honestly though? okay this is. this is opening up a can of worms, actually, so bear with me.

ferdinand not being taken seriously really at ALL during cf was one of my biggest gripes with the route, actually. this extends to ss, too, but less so. especially considering that his idealogical challenge of edelgard's own views is really, really solid. a lot of people assume that the felix/dimitri clash is idealogically based moreso than anyone else, but. it isn't. dimitri dislikes faerghus' sacrificial knight culture (see: his entire support chain with ingrid) just as much as felix does. the tragedy behind those two is that they actually AGREE on a LOT of things, they just each cannot get past their own personal n emotional burdens (until their a support) to actually communicate properly about it. n again, anyone please feel free to add onto this post about claude n lorenz for a more. well rounded look on all this. but with ferdinand in regards to edelgard, he very directly opposes her ideals n her way of doing things.

where felix has a hard time having a proper conversation with dimitri about their similar views bc of past trauma n emotional walls, personal things, ferdinand puts his relationship as a challenger to edelgard above EVERYTHING; n believes that regardless of their status as friends, rivals, enemies, or anything else, he must fulfill that role regardless.

but, anyway. ferdinand is right, is what i'm trying to say, n he deserves to be taken seriously bc the things that he says are incredibly important. what really struck me about his a support with edelgard was that it was such an integral conversation/included such integral information, n yet it was relegated to a support that players could potentially miss/skip? edelgard having not even THOUGHT of commoner education n the ramifications of a meritocracy until ferdinand mentions it (which is doubly concerning when u remember a supports are locked until post timeskip, meaning she's been leading this charge without ANY detailed thought to support in the aftermath beyond vague mentions of it through "inspirational speeches" n shit) is like. something that definitely should have been addressed within the main story.

anyway, after uhh. going off on that, i think my original point was that yeah, ferdinand isn't taken seriously in the narrative. which he suffers for, unfortunately. especially considering he has a very strong case for his challenging of edelgard's ideals, n that was reduced to just. general competitiveness.

with that SAID, however. i also think i can go off of this point to elaborate on how that relates to edelgard n how specifically in her supports with ferdinand n linhardt, it really shines through how unprepared she seems? she started a war that would uproot fodlan, n she had no (concrete) plans for the political aftermath, even though she planned to assume absolute power?? did she just like, tell hubert to deal with that, or something? i do think that a lot of that could've been the writers reluctant to get too into politics, but.......still.

basically, ferdinand had the potential to really knock her off her feet in the sense of hitting her with hard truths about the things that she was neglecting to think about at all, n he didn't. n it's really unfortunate. bc it REALLY could've been so much more interesting. n it's a disservice to him to shoehorn him into this silly rival role even post timeskip, after he's matured past the young adult who put so much stock in that image.

re: my specific tags, too, i was trying to say something specific about edelgard n how i think she would've responded to ferdinand if they had been allowed to actually discuss, but my brain is off in genshin land rn n it's been a month or two since i was on the three houses train, so if anyone else sees this post n has these same thoughts/can word them better, please do.

n on a final note, i suppose i can understand how ferdinand was treated if u take cf as a villain route: from that pov, challenges don't mean anything, right? so why even include them. especially considering the uhh. other various things about cf that play into that. but regardless, i still think it's a disservice to ferdinand to discard him completely, even if u are trying to go full blown "propaganda route" lmao. especially bc it's in his nature to challenge edelgard no matter what. ESPECIALLY when he believes she's wrong.

[ambivalentmarvel]

so the story behind this is that @sreppub​ arrived in my dms saying “sitcom starring two uppity, former rich guys and a regular poor college kid who follow up an online ad and become roommates” and i said something along the lines of “your MIND” and here we are. she does the art, i do the fic, and we both yell a lot along the way. read it on here or ao3 and enjoy!!

The Sitcom Supreme

If Peter or Stephen were around to hear Tony tell the story of how they all ended up rooming together, they would have plenty of objections, to which he would call them both dirty liars, to which they would gang up on him because they’re terrible and like that, to which he would probably throw up his hands in exasperation and/or make the mistake of engaging them in a debate, to which they would grin like wolves because, once again, they’re terrible and like that, but Tony’s the asshole who put up the Craigslist ad, so he gets to start—because he’s terrible and like that.

It’s a common trait amongst the three of them, what can he say?

The beginning of the story does not involve either of the other two, however. It begins with Rhodey, who is only occasionally terrible and like that. Rhodey has been Tony’s best friend since the tender age of fifteen. Considering Tony at age fifteen was a greasy little douche bag with too much money and a whole bunch of daddy issues that were somehow more obvious then than they are in the present, this is an impressive feat. 

Where things start, Rhodey and Tony are roommates at MIT, which is Howard’s school of choice to shove his problem child onto. Tony is supposed to get a single dorm room, but there’s a cockroach problem in that building. Administration has to get creative, which is how Rhodey, fresh out of boot for the fall semester, gets saddled with approximately one hundred and fifty pounds of neglected teenage boy who has only kind of gone through puberty.

The first words out of Tony’s mouth are blunt: “Any chance you have plans to drop out?”

And Rhodey looks at him with a raised brow, efficiently unpacked and totally unimpressed with the enormous stack of Tony’s things wavering in the doorway. “You have any plans to quit being annoying?” he retorts, which set the tone for their entire relationship.

Tony loves him to pieces. 

He’s the older brother he never knew he needed, yanking him by his collar from frat parties on the weekends and to his house for holidays because getting swamped by Rhodey’s six younger siblings is infinitely better than having to wear a suit and tie for Christmas dinner with six CEOs and maybe some senators, depending on the year. In return, Tony sees him through every finals week of his collegiate career, during which Rhodey gets so nervous he usually pukes at least daily and pulls so many all-nighters Tony memorizes the exact shade of red his eyes are at the end.

So, it’s safe to say they get along well. They get along so well, as a matter of fact, that when they stare at each other after their graduation ceremony for their Masters—a two-year process for both of them, and Rhodey receives two degrees to Tony’s four—surrounded by Rhodey’s family and Jarvis, Tony’s lips curl in a smirk Rhodey knows spells the best kind of trouble. “What do you say we keep the roommate streak alive, yeah? Howard’s building an office in New York, and I’m thinking of doing a doctorate at NYU.”

Rhodey’s brows raise, but he’s grinning, so Tony already knows his answer. “Depends. Are you still gonna’ snore?”

“Are you still gonna’ have a stick up your a—”

Mama Rhodes shoots Tony a look from where she’s trying to corral the rest of her kids.

“—butt?” he finishes with a sheepish glance her way.

Rhodey does not even remotely have a stick up his ass, but of the two of them, he features in tabloids far, far less, which Tony somehow uses to his advantage.

“You know it,” Rhodey replies, and so they find a fancy penthouse that Tony mostly pays for, with the excuse of Rhodey satisfying his part of rent via generally covering Tony’s ass to the best of his ability. And he has a lot of ability, honed from years upon years of Tony self-destructing at the drop of a hat, but there’s only so much he can do, especially as his military career just keeps flying higher and Howard just keeps pushing Tony harder.

A few sex tapes, especially wild benders, and crashed cars later, when Howard cuts Tony off and tells him, quote, “I won’t speak to you until you learn to do something other than disappoint me”, Rhodey very gracefully still shacks up with him in their considerably less fancy apartment.

This is all important to know, contrary to what someone whose name may or may not rhyme with Tephen Trange might say about Tony’s “long-winded” and “overly-complicated” storytelling tendencies because it explains exactly why Rhodey is a traitor.

Is Carol a very cool lady who could kick Tony’s ass? Yes. Is she sickeningly cute with Rhodey and not just because a smile from her makes him melt into a pile of fucking goo on the floor? Also yes. Does it probably make more sense for Tony to find roommates who will actually be around to monitor his—allegedly—poor mental health and self-care habits? Okay, fine, yes, but the bottom line is, Rhodey is moving in with Carol and abandoning Tony, and nobody said he had to like it.

(This is not strictly true, what with the approximately ten conversations Rhodey and he have had about his happiness and how, if Tony needs him, all he has to do is say the word and he’ll be back, but Tony has always had a flair for the dramatic.)

The whole idea is that Tony will find someone gone less than Rhodey with all his military business to enjoy having around the apartment. It’s technically a three-bedroom, but he and Rhodey use the extra one for storage. Fortunately or unfortunately, that storage area has become a lot of junk they go through before Rhodey makes his grand exit, and Tony suddenly has the option of having two roommates.

The ad is a low point, he can admit that, but there is a flaw in what Tony loudly calls Rhodey’s master plan to leave him alone to wallow in misery: Tony doesn’t exactly have a lot of friends, nevermind people who he’d want to live with.

“Rhodey. Honeybear. Platypus.”

“The nicknames are old, and you need to stop using them around Carol. She called me Platypus last night during sex, and it ruined the whole mood.”

“You poor thing.”

“She thought it was hilarious.”

If Tony has to lose Rhodey to anybody, by God, Carol is his first choice by a long shot.

“Anyway, as I was saying, Sourpatch—”

“I hate you.”

“—how am I supposed to find someone else to live with?”

Tony is thirty-two and regularly speaks out with all of four people: Pepper, Rhodey, Carol, and Happy. Unfortunately, Happy works in Stark Industries’ California branch and has stated rather firmly that he’s not interested in transferring to the city, Pepper wouldn’t live with another person for love or money, and the other two are spoken for.

It’s a terrible situation to be in, honestly.

“Craigslist,” Rhodey deadpans, fighting with some packing tape.

Tony feels his heart stop beating in real time from his place folding some of Rhodey’s clothes into a plastic tub. His head snaps up, and his jaw drops, absolutely affronted. “You would suggest that I, even disowned and stripped of my former glory—” Tony has several million dollars in the stock market, but that’s neither here nor there and isn’t much compared to the fact that he was supposed to be a billionaire. “—would stoop to looking for live-in friends on Craigslist?”

Rhodey looks up to meet his eyes, unfazed. He’s used to Tony’s antics after nearly two decades of friendship. “Well, I’m not moving out until you have at least one person guaranteed to take my place, so unless you have any better ideas, yeah.” He shrugs—just shrugs, as if he isn’t advising Tony to scrape the bottom of the fucking barrel in terms of reliable people to regularly fall asleep around.

It’s insulting.

“I’m not putting out an ad for a roommate on Craigslist,” he protests, shoving the next horribly colored polo into the tub with disdain.

That night, he tears up thinking about stopping Rhodey from being happy with Carol, and the post is up by the time Rhodey gets up—stupidly early, like normal—for his morning run. Along with his contact information and a few blurry pictures of the place, it includes a blurb about the circumstances.

Best friend moving out. Need a roommate or I will die of Sadness. His girlfriend is cool but hewas mind first. Carol, I am watching you. Two rooms open for business. But not sketchy business. You can just lve there. Current resident (me) is cool and very charming. I am a man. No dumb fuck offers. Thanks.

It could use some work, but Tony’s never been great with words, even less so when he’s crying to rock ballads at two in the morning. He edits it when he wakes up, and by noon that day, it’s looking better.

At seven o’clock that evening, he receives one of two messages that actually work out.

Enter the first offender: Peter Parker.

Peter, Tony will learn, is nineteen, attending NYU—like Tony did, which is a sign, really—for a double major in biochemistry and physics, and has the worst luck of anyone Tony’s ever met.

Rhodey’s moving out in a week—he’s been putting off finding a roommate for a while, alright—and Peter has to legally be out of his dorm in three days. That is quite the predicament, and Tony, by nature, is a curious creature. He is not, however, one for beating around the bush. That results in a text that reads exactly this.

Tony: What the hell did you do?

He could hack through the university files, but explanations are always more fun with a personal touch that’s lacking in, say, an incident report. Tony watches a bubble with three blinking dots for a long, long time, and the reply is surprisingly sparse—sparse enough, in fact, for Tony to have more questions than answers when he receives it.

Unknown Sender: theres been a few things but the kicker was the fire

Tony: The fire?

Unknown Sender: i tried to make popcorn and the microwave blew up

Now that is some problematic behavior Tony can get behind. He amends the kid’s previously non-existent contact information.

Tony: How can they kick you out for that? That’s not your fault.

Roommate (?) Peter: it blacked out the power on the entire first floor

Tony: And?

Roommate (?) Peter: last month i got the blame for contaminating half the campus water supply

Roommate (?) Peter: so i was already on thin ice

Tony: Accidentally?

Roommate (?) Peter: idk sometimes things just happen to me

Tony doesn’t know how to respond to that. If Rhodey knew, he’d never let him live it down. He can hear his annoying laugh in his ears like a premonition—“Hah—Tony, speechless?”—but then there are the dots again and a simple message to follow the last, a touch pathetic.

Roommate (?) Peter: please let me move in

Tony likes him.

Peter shows up on the stairs of the complex thirty-six hours after Tony posted the ad with a backpack and a meager total of six beat-to-shit boxes. The backpack holds nearly all of his school supplies, which makes Tony, in retrospect, genuinely fearful for the integrity of his spine, and the contents of the boxes are sorted, as Tony will learn, into three categories that each have two boxes in them. The categories are fairly simple—clothing, necessities, and whatever other shit he could fit from his dorm—and leave Peter with thrilling possessions such as an entire collection of truly atrocious shirts with science puns on them, a gallon of hand soap, and any food he had in his cupboards.

Thankfully, Rhodey is out furniture shopping with Carol when Tony goes out to meet him, which solves the problem of Rhodey going into overbearing caretaker mode at the sight of a beanpole of a kid failing to manage their life successfully. As someone who has been made many a you-haven’t-eaten-a-meal-in-two-days-and-I’m-secretly-a-panicking-mother-hen casserole, Tony counts his blessings.

Tony waves. “Peter?” he asks, reluctantly changed out of his pajamas for the day.

The kid nods. “That’s me. And you’re Tony?”

“Guilty as charged. Want a hand with those boxes?” he asks, watching Peter lift three at a time.

“No, I got it,” he insists, and then the box on top slides out of his grip and onto the sidewalk.

Peter stares at it for a second before he lets out a long-suffering sigh.

“Maybe I could use some help,” he admits, and with much struggle, the two of them, each with three boxes, waddle inside. There is a moment and only one moment where Tony thinks that it might be nice to have some extra assistance, but with another thought of the things Rhodey would do at the sight of a woefully inept college kid, Tony decides it’s for the best.

Tony leads the operation, considering he has the key and also knows explicitly where they’re going, and he would have to say his biggest complaint about the ordeal is that Sam, who lives in the apartment below Tony and Rhodey with Steve and Bucky, happens to open his door as they walk by.

Being an asshole, he has something to say about it. “Need some help, shellhead?” he crows.

Tony wishes he had a free hand to flip him off.

“Watch your back, Wilson,” he growls in return, a continuation of the beef the five of them have maintained since they met approximately seven years ago, when they all moved in on the same day and kept knocking into each other’s shit in the halls.

When they reach the top of the next flight of stairs and Tony starts to fumble with the key, Peter asks about it. “So—uh—who was that?”

“That was Sam. Part of the deal with moving in is that you harass him and the other two idiots who live with him. He also responds to jackass, douchecanoe, or birdbrain.”

“Birdbrain?”

“It’s an old joke. He had a rather—” Tony grunts, forced to set down his load to unlock the door, “—spectacular run-in with some pigeons a few years ago.”

“Oh.”

“They shat on him. A lot.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a good nickname,” Tony assures him, throwing open the door with his arms flung wide for dramatic flair. “Welcome to Casa Stark. I mean, I guess it’s Casa Stark-Parker now, but if we’re hyphenating, my name goes first because I lived here first.” He holds up a finger as if to stall Peter, who has yet to speak from where his mouth is decidedly blocked by the aforementioned three boxes he is carrying. “And I know what you’re going to say—that Parker-Stark works better because it’s alphabetical—but that is where you are wrong because letters have no place in this house. Numbers are much preferred, and we play by seniority here, anyway.”

He gives Peter a meaningful look that he cannot see because, once again, boxes.

“More on that, by the way—”

“Hey, Tony?” 

He cuts him off which is, objectively, rude, but Tony rarely gets along with people who aren’t a little curt with him from time to time. This is a positive sign, really, so he allows it.

“Yeah?” 

“This can be Casa Stark-Parker, but can we get to somewhere I can set these down? My arms are, like, going to give out on me.”

Not even ten minutes in, and he’s already learned the art of bargaining. Tony’s proud, and he ushers him inside without any more monologues and a grin stretched across his face.

Peter, by virtue of moving in before Rhodey is out, ends up with the room that is no longer being used for storage. Tony has several questions for him, beginning with the fact that, despite the six packets of instant noodles he bothered to bring, he does not appear to have a mattress. Or a desk. Or a dresser. Or anything that’s supposed to go in a room.

His solutions for Tony’s concerns are as follows.

In place of a bed, he has two blankets, one to put on the floor and one to cover himself with. He was planning on sitting on the floor to do schoolwork instead of using a desk. And finally, he was going to leave his clothes in the boxes.

This is all relayed to Tony with an earnest gleam in his eyes and a smile.

Tony blinks in disbelief. Then, very eloquently, he says, “Kid, that is the saddest shit I have ever heard. Aren’t your parents helping you with the move to an apartment?”

The kid shifts from foot to foot, shoving his hands in his pockets and glancing to the side.

Tony’s eyes narrow. As someone who is extremely well-versed in avoidance tactics, he feels very confident in saying that is definitely a fucking avoidance tactic.

“About that,” he begins, “first of all, I’m an orphan.” Jesus Christ. “Second of all, my aunt doesn’t exactly—uh—know I got kicked out of the dorms.”

That is all interesting information, to say the least, but luckily, Tony thrives under pressure.

“Alright. I can respect that.”

It’s not like he never hid anything from his parents. Evading his aunt is Peter’s problem, not Tony’s. None of this is Tony’s problem, really, except then he looks around the room and wonders which of Peter’s boxes are holding his two blankets.

Tony was concerned about Rhodey, but he can’t stop himself.

“But I’m also gonna’ level with you—you’re not sleeping on the ground. You can take the couch.”

The until I get you a proper bed frame and mattress goes unsaid, but sometimes things like that are better as surprises. It’ll be a fun housewarming gift, Tony thinks, and by the time the shipment from IKEA arrives containing both of those things and the aforementioned missing dresser and desk, there will be a third roommate to help put it all together, not that either of them know it yet.

That night, Rhodey and Carol show up with enough ingredients for lasagna to serve four, and Tony delights in showing off Peter as they cook because now he has a “super cool roommate too! Take that, Platypus.”

Rhodey glances to Peter. “If you’re being held hostage, blink twice.”

“Hey!” Tony protests. He is a perfectly lovable roommate, thank you very much, and he’s so offended, he’s not even going to let Rhodey know about his mission to furnish Peter’s room.

God bless her, Carol just laughs.

The four of them get along with surprising ease, considering Peter’s only been around for a few hours. Peter even tries to help with the lasagna, but Tony has a near-photographic memory and has not remotely forgotten the popcorn incident, however vaguely it was described.

“You just sit there and be a nicer person than Rhodey,” he urges him, and Peter nods, hiding his grin behind his hand at the argument that starts.

Once everyone is done, he and Rhodey get suckered into dish duty while Carol spirits Peter off to the living room, claiming she has to warn him about what he’s getting into. Tony doesn’t care enough to complain, and when her back is turned, he splashes a plate of suds onto Rhodey’s front. 

Rather than rise to the bait, however, he raises his brows, slipping into what Tony affectionately calls his big-brother-giving-a-stern-talking-to mode. “You have to be a good example for him, Tones.”

Tony blinks. “I’m sorry, did you just say—”

“I’m serious!” They keep their voices mostly down, but Rhodey’s rises a bit with the declaration.

“He’s nineteen—an adult, in case you forgot. He signed the lease all on his own and everything,” he hisses back incredulously.

He thought he dodged the bullet by not disclosing just how underprepared Peter is to live in an apartment, but Rhodey’s head dips. Tony braces himself for the part of his big-brother-giving-a-stern-talking-to mode where he tells Tony he’s making a bullshit excuse and needs to get it together. “Don’t give me that. He’s a baby adult at best, and you know it.”

Yep, there it is.

“That’s still an adult!”

It is! Tony was on his own way earlier than nineteen. This is not a big deal, no matter how outlandish Peter’s circumstances are for moving out of NYU’s dorms.

“Watch his back.”

Tony scoffs. “It’s not like I was going to feed him to the wolves. I’m barely thirty—I’m not his dad.”

“Tony.”

Ah, the final, crushing blow of this version of Rhodey: his name—but with emphasis.

Tony sighs. “Fine,” he acquiesces. “I solemnly swear I will not let him get up to no good.”

A beat. Rhodey squints at him, slowly lowering the plate he’s holding into the sink. “You told me you refused to read Harry Potter.”

Shit.

Back when the books were first coming out, Rhodey was insufferably obsessed with them, and Tony loves him, but emotionally, he couldn’t handle having Rhodey think he was willing to discuss anything having to do with the series for longer than thirty seconds. Thus, he read the books—everyone in the world was doing the same, okay, and he cannot stand being out of the loop—but lied to Rhodey about it.

And now, he’s been made.

Rhodey and he launch into a very spirited discussion that draws Carol and Peter back to the kitchen, and despite the vein throbbing dangerously in Rhodey’s forehead, the promise has been made.

The day after Rhodey moves out, he and Peter manage to flood the bathroom.

In Tony’s defense, he only promised to look out for Peter. He said nothing about curbing his own dumbass tendencies, and it’s not like Bucky’s bedroom is all that damaged by the leak that Tony fixes before it’s really even a problem.

He and Peter settle into a nice sense of camaraderie, and Tony, content with his situation, forgets to take down his Craiglist ad that, logically speaking, someone would have to dig to find at this point, over a week after initially posting it.

Then, he receives a text that is as simple as it is effective: Is there still an available room in the apartment?

Enter the second offender: Stephen Strange.

Ahem, Doctor Stephen Strange, technically, but Tony has six PhDs. Nobody sees him going around making people call him Doctor Stark, and that’s because it makes him sound pretentious and stuffy, both things Tony prides himself on not being. However, Tony likes to push buttons, and very little gets Stephen worked up as fast as someone ignoring his credentials.

It’s a fun set-up, really, but annoying the piss out of Stephen is something that comes a little later—Tony’s not there yet in the story.

He humors the text, and after getting a read on things, he bursts into the living room, startling Peter nearly off the couch. He’s been doing his homework there and on the coffee table in front of it because the Swedish have many things but fast shipping is, apparently, not one of them, not that Peter knows there’s anything to be waiting on, but he’s getting off-topic.

Peter lets out a short yelp and presses a hand over his heart, both things that Tony ignores.

“We have a situation,” he announces.

“I swear I didn’t do it,” Peter defends pleadingly.

Tony is trying to teach him that messing things up is expected and, especially in particularly magnificent cases, admired in Casa Stark-Parker, but it’s a work in progress.

“I know you didn’t—don’t be ridiculous,” he waves his concerns off. “We are talking bigger than setting things on fire by accident. I bring you, my young protege, the proposition of—” A pause for dramatic effect. “—another roommate.”

“Ooh,” Peter says appropriately, setting his textbook down to examine the texts Tony brandishes. He begins to scroll, but while he does, Tony figures he can go ahead and fill him in on the essentials. It’s a very juicy situation, after all, and he can’t help himself.

“His name is Stephen Strange. He’s a neurosurgeon, but he got into a pretty bad car wreck that messed up his hands. He’s trying to save money while he goes to physical therapy—he apparently has a chance of recovery, but it’s a ways off—and that includes downsizing on where he lives.”

“I mean, yikes, but that’s an oddly specific backstory.”

“I’m glad you think that too, but I am intrigued. I looked him up, and he’s a real person—has a basically flawless reputation, or at least he did before his accident. Thoughts?”

Please say yes, please say yes, Tony thinks. The chance of a competent human—not including Rhodey, who looks more put together than he really is next to the chaos Tony perpetually dwells in—choosing to live with him is too fascinating to pass up, and he needs Peter to see that too.

Peter shrugs. “I’m down if you are. How old is he?”

Victory!

Satisfaction floods Tony, but he tries to maintain his cool.

“Thirty.”

Peter blows out a long breath, tipping his head back to look at the ceiling. “I didn’t anticipate moving into a nursing home,” he remarks dryly.

What a little shit.

It’s worth noting half the reason Rhodey left so easily is because he said he trusted Peter to keep Tony on his toes. Then again, that Tony likes being snarked at is a large part of why they get along so well despite only knowing each other for a matter of days.

“You’re the worst, Parker. I’m going to feed you to the hooligans downstairs. Steve has a monster appetite, you know.”

Peter hums, picking his textbook back up. “Not if I feed you to them first. And, Tony?”

“What?”

“Only old people say hooligans.”

Tony thinks about that one book, Give a Mouse a Cookie or whatever. Except in his case, it’s Rent a Teenager an Apartment, and Tony doesn’t have to adhere to the literary equivalent of a G-rating.

His response to the dig is creative and colorful, and Peter laughs.

Four days and a brief conversation at a coffee shop later—a formality he and Peter did not do and probably something Tony should’ve thought of as the older adult before giving him the address—Stephen’s team of movers invade the apartment.

The man himself stands like a drill sergeant at the last flights of stairs it takes to get to the apartment, arms crossed, beard wild, conducting activity.

Peter and Tony share their evaluations, peeking their head out from the doorway when it’s unoccupied by movers and Stephen isn’t looking their way. This involves quite a bit of ducking, but they are very careful not to be caught.

(Someone’s whose name may or may not rhyme with Tephen Trange later informs that “they were not at all subtle” and “were, in fact, very embarrassing”, but that’s how things with the three of them generally are, so Tony figures it was a good crash course to how life together goes.)

“He’s kind of scraggly,” Peter whispers, his head under Tony’s because he’s the shorter of the two of them, something Tony delights in refuting Peter’s quips about his age with.

“Kind of? He looks like a hobo.”

It’s true, okay? Facially, at least, the guy is a wreck. He’s not quite to Einstein levels of bad hair day, but he’s getting there.

“Be nice,” Peter chastises him. He’s gentler than Rhodey when he does it, but considering neither of them ever shut the hell up and they have thus bonded very easily over the course of their short relationship, it’s gotten to feel as natural as most of their interactions.

“All I’m saying is that I am happy to retain my place as the most attractive person in the apartment, okay?”

They’re forced to retreat from the entryway as another load comes through, and Peter looks at him disbelievingly. “Dream on,” he replies bluntly.

Tony gasps in offense.

Peter shrugs. “Look, I’m just gonna’ say it—you knew Rhodey before me, and now that I’m here—” he trails off, looking at Tony in faux-sympathy that doesn’t match the mischievous glint in his eyes.

While it is true that Rhodey is a fine specimen of a man—yet another reason Tony can’t, in good conscience, be truly angry Carol mooched him away from the bachelor lifestyle—Tony can’t cede that easily for the sake of his pride, and he scowls. “I am going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

They’re still bickering as the movers finish up and Stephen enters the apartment, dressed in what Tony recognizes as the latest from Armani and Tom Ford.

He may not get invited to fashion week anymore, but he still has taste, alright, even if Rhodey limits him to one designer purchase a month.

(Rhodey isn’t around to see what packages he orders now, Tony thinks but shelves the thought for later.)

Tony and Stephen met over coffee, and all three of them said hi to one another before the moving business officially began. However, there is a little stiffness in the air, make no mistake. It’s not Stephen’s fault, exactly, because he’s just kind of a foreboding guy, but still.

It figures that Peter would break the ice. As Tony’s found and will continue to discover, Peter is just as talkative as him. Granted, that trait usually appears in the form of rambling about something from class, but it’s not surprising that his natural passion for life comes through with someone about to be very, very involved in it. 

“Hi!” he begins. “Are all of the movers gone now?”

Stephen raises an unimpressed brow. “Yes.”

His reply is seriously lacking enthusiasm, but Tony isn’t allowed the opportunity to jump on that as Peter keeps going. 

“Sweet! Okay, so welcome to Casa Stark-Parker.”

Woah, woah, woah—timeout.

Tony frowns, raising a hand in a motion for Peter to stop. “I thought that was my thing?” he interjects.

“Well, it has my name in it, so it gets to be both of our things,” Peter replies, then furrows his brow, looking to Stephen. “Actually, since you’re here now, I guess it’s Casa Stark-Parker-Strange. Order’s based on who got here first, sorry,” he explains with a smile that Tony, now familiar with the fact that Peter has more to him than meets the eye, notes is a touch impish.

Tony is pleased to see, despite his generally wholesome appearance, the kid has at least picked up on the power of staking a claim.

Stephen blinks. His hands, Tony has noticed, don’t stop shaking, not even when he folds his arm across his chest, like a physical barrier between him and Peter’s excitement. “Okay?” he drawls slowly, confusedly.

“Tony’s rules, not mine,” Peter assures him as if he doesn’t just want the satisfaction of having his name not be the last in the line-up.

Tony scoffs. “Oh okay, so now we’re throwing me under the bus?”

“You have to take responsibility for your actions, Tony.”

“Oh, sure thing,” he replies, tone betraying that he does not, in fact, think any responsibility is at all necessary. He looks to Stephen, rolling his eyes. “Can you believe what I have to put up with? And it’s barely been a week.”

Stephen blinks again. “I see it’s a lot,” he says measuredly.

Peter gasps, unaffected. “Oh my God, we should make a sign for it,” he enthuses. “We can put it up on the door, and we’d be so much cooler than Sam and them.”

To say that Peter rose to the challenge of bothering their downstairs neighbors with zeal is something of an understatement. 

Tony is, honestly, a fan of the sign idea, especially if it were to light up, but that is where Stephen cuts in, his hands still trembling as he gestures. “Can we slow down for a moment?” He looks carefully from Tony and Peter and back again, bearing the appearance of a man in the throes of realizing he has made a bad decision. 

Tony knows that look well. It usually shows up when Rhodey agrees to one of Tony’s ideas and doesn’t realize just how badly constructed it is until it’s too late.

“First of all, I am fairly certain my car is parked illegally, and before we get too far, I need to fix it before I get towed. And secondly,” Tony watches Stephen’s lips curl in a self-satisfied, I-totally-think-I’m-better-than-you-even-if-I’m-not-technically-saying-it smile, “I am not here to be part of any Casa. I am waiting for physical therapy to work for me, and then I will be out of your hair. I appreciate being able to live here, but—”

Yeah, Tony’s had enough of that. Personally, he would like to thank Rhodey, who, in a way, begins and ends the story, and truly is the greatest best friend a man could have for teaching him how to properly deal with pompous rich people.

“Nuh-uh, none of that. If you’re living here, you’re a part of Casa Stark-Parker-Strange whether you like it or not.”

Stephen looks downright appalled that someone would dare to interrupt him, which, Tony knows from experience, is exactly the kind of shock rich people need to go through. He splutters for a second before he manages to get out a reply, “That was not in the lease.”

Tony spreads his hands as if to say what can you do? “And you didn’t mention in your texts that you were going to try to be a bump on a log, but here we are.”

Perhaps sensing the mounting animosity in the room or maybe just as excited as Tony to have someone to bother, Peter takes advantage of Stephen’s overwhelmed and bewildered state.

“First day with all three of us!” he shouts. “Picture!”

And before anyone can protest—including Tony, who would prefer to be documented in something other than a Black Sabbath tee and his work pants—Peter leans in with the camera on his phone ready to capture the moment.

In the resulting photo, Tony looks vaguely alarmed, Stephen looks pissed as hell, and Peter wears a grin that stretches across his whole face. The whole thing is blurry, and they eventually get it framed.

It’s a beautiful and fitting start to their time as roommates, and in the humble eyes of the asshole who posted the Craigslist ad, that is how the story of how they came to live together went.

[babyybitchhh]

I thought the mineta thing was a joke but I'm hearing more about it? What did I miss???

Let’s just say it’s been enough of a shit show that I found out about it despite not being online all that much these past two weeks. 😂

Alright, so essentially the official Viz translation popped off with this particular line of dialogue

A bunch of people who care very deeply about that sort of thing were like omg, Mineta confessed before Ochako or Bakugo did! Wow! Can’t believe the grape bitch is LGBTQ and I am going to unapologetically shit on everything now

*queue hundreds of the exact same, unoriginally sarcastic ‘diversity win’ posts*

The main issue here are Mineta antis who base 70% of their online persona and 90% of their fandom enjoyment around hating him with every fiber of their being and ofc the increasing obsession with sexual orientation is only exacerbating the problem. For someone like me who sees every character as various degrees of bisexual by default and is pretty damn neutral about Mineta, I didn’t really give it a second thought. I literally thought he was just being dramatic. Y’know. A goof. : /

But those other people are upset that the “sexual harasser” is LGBTQ because it either

1: perpetuates harmful stereotypes about bi people being predatory or

2: invalidates queer sexualities because Mineta is a joke character

Take your pick between the two, I’m not really seeing an agreement on what the problem is exactly, just that there is definitely a problem regardless of what it is.

Now there’s been a consensus that the translator fucked up and they’re all mad at him for queer baiting them? With shitty translations? Which is slightly closer to the truth but still not quite it. For what it’s worth he basically gave us a literal translation of what was said in Japanese, which is mostly used romantically but can be platonic as well. Another way to read it seems to be something like “I was charmed by” or “I admire”, which obviously aren’t necessarily romantic so rather than being faithful to the source material he really should’ve localized the wording a little bit. But that’s the thing. People get mad when he does that and they get mad when he doesn’t. There’s no winning here.

Instead of looking inward and acknowledging that they put too much stock in a fictional characters sexuality (despite half of them being regular ol’ antis who say sexualizing fictional minors is a punishable offense so their extreme concern about what kind of genitals they get hot and bothered over doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me 😂) they want to blame everyone else for the fact they jumped the gun and rushed to conclusions because of an inherently flawed translation. Japanese is a language that is very, very contextual and a LOT gets lost when converting it to English both because we don’t use indirect language that could mean this or that, depending on the context it’s being used in, and also because there just isn’t a word for word translation that makes sense for most of it.

As an example of what I’m talking about, here’s a phrase one learns pretty early on when you start studying Japanese

Rather than expressing a concrete idea such as “I hope we get along” (which in and of itself sounds awkward but that’s exactly how it’s most often translated) the actual usage in Japanese is more along the lines of a vocalized feeling of positivity regarding your interactions with the other person. Which is particularly relevant to this conversation because that is exactly what Mineta’s dialogue was.

An emotion based statement that has less to do with “I fell in love with you” and more “you won me over”. Even reading it in English, as I first did, that scene clearly does not have the context of being romantically charged in any way but the kinds of people who build their entire identity around titles took one look at the wording and went into a frenzy about it. They’re mad that someone they despise and have shit on for years now is “one of them”, and I guess a lot of them were saying they’re homophobes because of it. Even as a joke it feels in poor taste and tbh the whole thing really just goes to show how performative much of the younger generations relationship with sexuality actually is. 🤷‍♀️

Canonically Mineta absolutely did not come out as bi but I genuinely wish he had just because they put SO much effort into hating him that it would’ve been the perfect karmic retribution for being this vitriolic over someone who doesn’t even exist. Basically it’s the Endeavor redemption situation all over again except this time it’s a lot more personal for them. 😆 Instead of “you can’t forgive an abuser, I would never!” It’s now “no, he can’t be LGBTQ like me!!” and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it hilarious.

(Also please know that Japan was absolutely laughing at us for the disproportionate reaction western fans had over this single line of dialogue, one of my favorite comments from 2ch being “is English a defective language?” 😂 The line made perfect sense to them and they didn’t bat an eye at it, whereas we had Mineta trending across multiple websites and please believe they’re judging us for that)

[dreaming-of-assclass]

AssClass OC

*SOBS* SHE’S FINALLY DONE!! 😭

Trying to replicate the Lerche style was...painful and took forever lmao

I’m just gonna info-dump a lot about her under the cut! Honestly less than half of this is relevant, but I figured I’d include as much as I can so you can get to know her.

I’m not making a fanfic for her or anything: but she will pop up a lot in mini drabbles, art pieces, etc.

Kamiya Mai (神谷舞) - Possessing charisma and a knack for navigating around any type of terrain; Class E’s Investigator

“Bravery doesn’t come from nowhere. You have to be scared first to have courage.”

Description

One of the class moodmakers, Mai is fun, witty, and cares deeply for her peers. She puts her all into everything she does and isn’t afraid to stand up for others.

She has an extremely strong photogenic memory and a natural knack for exploring new places, gathering information and memorizing routes with ease.

She’s a skilled athlete as well, very quick, agile and able to use it to her advantage in assassinations.

Codename: Honeybee (ミツバチ/Mitsubachi), Sugino’s Idea

He’s been struck with disbelief after having breakfast at her house once and finding out she puts honey on her pancakes instead of syrup. Also the name is fitting overall, as her short temper and cute looks remind him of a honeybee.

Birthday: April 2nd

Height: 155 cm

Weight: 51 kg

Bust Size: C

Blood Type: B

Favorite Subjects: Art, Biology, History

Worst Subjects: Classical and Modern Japanese, Math

Interests and Special Skills: Skateboarding and exploring new places

Former Club: Calligraphy Club

Treasured Items: Her hat collection and art journal

Favorite Food: Iced Coffee

Bento or Snacks: Snacks

___________________________

Stats

Physical Ability: 4

Mobility: 4.5

Close-Range Assassination: 4

Long-Range Assassination: 2

Academic Prowess: 3.5

Characteristic Skill (Spy-in-Training): 4

___________

Karasuma’s Assassination Aptitude

Strategy/Planning: 2

Commanding/Leadership: 3

Execution (ability to carry out plans): 4

Technique (traps, weapons, preparations, etc): 1

Scouting/Intelligence Gathering: 6

Politics/Negotiations: 5

____________

Bitch-sensei’s Fashion Check

Mai has a very tomboyish, soft grunge style. She seems to be equally fond of pants and skirts, although prefers the former for the sake of mobility. Overall her style is street-savvy, and she’s most fond of pink, white, black, red, and gray tones.

School Uniform

With summer being the exception, Mai wears thigh-high black stockings with her uniform. She wears the uniform with little change besides that. Mai changes her hair up very often, but some common styles are space buns, pigtails, or half-up. She’s quite fond of hair clips and wear them everyday.

Street Clothes

Mai wears hats very often, and it drives me crazy. Why cover up that cute face of hers all the time?? She’s very fond of Doc Martens, and usually pairs those with leggings. On her girlier side, skater skirts are a good look for her. And paired with whatever, she seems to really like hoodies.

______________

Relationships

(All of these have so much depth, I’m gonna have to make a separate post o_o)

- Sugino Tomohito (addressed as Tomohito)

He was the first friend she made once she joined Kunugigaoka. They’re best friends and stick to each other often. She greatly supported him during the baseball game against the main campus, to the point that she joined it herself to keep an eye on him.

- Okano Hinata (addressed as Hinata or Lesser Hina)

They hit it off instantly, but upon learning they shared the same birthday, Mai joyfully declared them sisters. They’re very close and bond over a lot, especially sports and thrill-seeking. They can clash at times with their similar temperaments.

- Kanzaki Yukiko (addressed as Yukiko)

Their relationship had a very rocky start. Neither of them liked each other and had very differing natures. It wasn’t until the Kyoto Trip that they began to understand each other. After that, their friendship steadily grew and they became very close. They balance each other as opposites.

- Asano Gakushuu (addressed as Asano or President-kun)

After the first semester mid-term exams, Mai’s family decided to request tutoring for her, so her grades could stay fine/rise. Who else was assigned to her but Asano Gakushuu? It’s a challenge keeping 3-E a secret, but Mai enjoys teasing him and having conversations about anything. And Gakushuu won’t admit it but he does enjoy her company. They grow to have a friendship over the course of the year.

- Kurahashi Hinano (addressed as Hinano or Superior Hina)

They started out as casual friends for a while, but still got along super well. Then summer break began and they found each other to be great bug-catching partners. They have a lot in common, being excitable and chatty. Their conversations never end. Mai is glad there’s a biology nerd besides herself.

- Akabane Karma (addressed as Karma or Satan)

They’re very good friends, and surprisingly clicked fast! They have a lot of similar interests and occasionally, Mai will volunteer to help him in pranks. Karma loves to ruffle/mess up her hair, half out of fondness and half genuine enjoyment at her ire. He calls her “May-chan” in an exaggerated American accent to make fun of her. They can disagree at times but when push comes to shove, they’re there for each other.

-Kayano Kaede (addressed as Kaede, later Akari)

They’re definitely close friends and it’s just so obvious to everyone how much Mai adores her. She’s constantly hugging her, getting her pudding, etc. But more than that, Kayano was someone she could confide in and felt comfortable around. The reveal hits Mai hard, and she needs a while away from her. Once her anger fades, she feels more empathy towards Kayano than anything else. Their friendship repairs and grows stronger afterwards.

__________________

Members of the Kamiya family:

Mother: Professional Choreographer

Mai gets along with her mom and they’re quite close, being each other’s only immediate family. But they don’t have much in common and her mother’s demanding job doesn’t allow them to spend much time together. Mai has grown relying on outside friends more for company.

________________

A hidden side of Mai Kamiya

She loves biology...but anatomy and anything human body-related makes her very squeamish. She especially can’t handle the sight of blood or needles before feeling dizzy.

_______________

Extra notes:

^^ Actually that ties into a lot about her. She has really awful test anxiety, which is how she dropped down to 3-E. She either did poorly in the exams for her worst subjects...or in the final exam of 2nd year, she skipped school to avoid the test all together. That’s how scared she was.

She gets very nauseous and feels sick under a lot of academic pressure, especially in exams.

She’ll never admit this though. No, in every other aspect of her life, she tries her hardest to keep a brave face, look independent and strong and everything she doesn’t feel she truly is.

Before I forget to mention this, she transferred to Kunugigaoka in her second year! She met Sugino since they were in the same class, and he was the first friend she made. 

She has a lot of pride in things she is good at (sports, art) and it can push to the point of arrogance sometimes.

Will take any chance to prove herself, even if it’s reckless or stupid or ruin things. For someone who’s a moodmaker and loves people, she’s not the best team player but that improves over time.

Generally is easygoing and goes with the flow of the mood...but she can have a short temper, and go from 0-100 fast. Only if someone is insulting her or her loved ones though.

She’s pretty confrontational, but don’t be fooled: she’s more bark than bite. She’s a sweetheart deep down, and all her classmates know it.

She’s bubbly, cute, and a total chatterbox once she gets comfortable around people, and can drop her “cool rebel” facade

Very creative and resourceful UwU. Super quick-witted too.

But she also can be incredibly ambitious and has big aspirations for the future. She’s fairly realistic though.

Her biggest flaws are that she can be self-centered, very stubborn, rash, short-tempered, overdramatic, and slightly arrogant. She has little confidence in herself.

Her name “Mai” means “dance” and it was given by her mother, a professional dancer. She wanted to name her daughter after her greatest passion. Even though Mai grows to have absolutely no interest in dance lmfao. She complains about this but stops when she learns of poor Kimura’s plight.

She grew up speaking a lot of English within her family since her mother used to live in America so her language skills are great...but she is far from perfect at literature. She mostly just lacks the patience to analyze it and finds it boring.

And...that’s it UwU. Also just gonna drop this transparent version because I worked really hard on drawing her and I’m proud 💜

[captain-aralias]

8, 15, 17, 28 for the writer meme, if you didn’t already get any of those

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

i just answered this, but since it’s you, i’ll go for some blake ;) hm.... 

i must say, i think i have written some pretty great dialogue for blake’s 7 in my time. here’s one of my favourite bits - 

“It’s a quality operation,” Vila said. “They wouldn’t skimp on a thing like that. You want a boyfriend, Blake – and I want to go to Del Ten. Give me your promise that we can spend a week there once we find Docholli and I’m your man.”

“Vila, once we’ve found Docholli, we will have the key to finding Star One,” Blake pointed out.

“Are there any dancing girls on Star One?”

“I very much doubt it.”

“Then I’d still rather go to Del Ten,” Vila said.

“Couldn’t you wait?” Blake suggested. “Until after we blow up Star One?”

“After you blow up the Federation’s weather control systems, you mean?” Vila said. “And throw the civilised world into chaos? Right, I’m sure that would be a lovely time to take a holiday. Got any more suggestions like that, Blake? Perhaps I should invest in the stock market at the same time.”

“Two days,” Blake said. “I could give you two days on Del Ten.”

“A week!” Vila repeated.

Blake shut his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He willed himself to find the strength to complete this conversation and make the right choices.

“Oh, Blake,” Vila said kindly. “You really need this, don’t you?”

Blake felt a hand rest on his shoulder and looked up into Vila’s sympathetic eyes. “Yes,” he said with relief. “I’m sorry, Vila. I don’t want to put you in this position. But I really do need this.”

“You’re going to have to give in then,” Vila told him in the same kindly tone as before. “Unless,” he said, a twinkle in his eye, “that is, you want to ask Avon to be your boyfriend...”

i could have quoted this entire scene - even this is a lot. i love writing blake and avon, i love writing avon and vila, but i really really love writing blake and vila together because there are some lovely moments in canon to draw on. they’re two characters who have very little in common except that they’re both smart. this conversation is about how blake - who almost always gets his own way - now needs something he can’t just demand that vila does, and that gives vila the upper hand repeatedly throughout this conversation. blake, even though he knows this is an awkward conversation and really should be better prepared. 

i also like the different lengths of the dialogue - it has a good patter. 

it’s also funny, and funny because it’s cruel to someone (in this case blake, not usually), which is very blake’s 7. also also - it ends with vila insinuating what is essentially the plot - i.e. that avon will have to pretend to be blake’s boyfriend by the end of the story - and this is a trick that i always enjoy for a section end. the audience is like - oh ho, wouldn’t that be simply TERRIBLE? ;) ;) 

good times.

--

15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

hm - not sure. maybe right now ... ‘Hang the Moon’? it’s got a lot of good action that would translate well to film, and i have a very clear idea of how most of the scenes look.

it would be kind of weird, though, right to have a film of a ‘carry on’ fanfic before we have a ‘carry on’ film. so i’m finding it quite hard to visualise. 

i would have loved to have written some dialogue for blake’s 7 people to actually say (assuming they remembered how to do the voices properly, paul darrow). i would be so embarrassed to present paul darrow with my porn, though (although ‘An Apple Cleft in Two’ would be so great, though, as it’s practically a bodyswap - i love the idea of seeing the real stephen pacey pretending to be blake, and paul darrow just being so angry), so it would have to be some sort of gen. 

ok - i think i choose ‘Showdown’ because it basically is ‘Duel’, so I know the Beeb could have staged it. it’s got some mega emotion that gareth would have done beautifully, too - 

Blake extracted his hand slowly from Avon’s. He pressed his fingers against Avon’s wrist and waited, but there was no pulse. He let the hand drop and tried the artery in Avon’s neck, but he knew he was just prolonging the inevitable. Avon was dead.

He forced himself to look back at the man who had been his friend.

Avon looked peaceful. The blood spattered on his face was not his – it was Travis’s and had fallen from Blake’s cheeks like tears. Blake screwed his eyes shut again in an attempt to stop it, and in the darkness Sinofar’s voice said,

“So – the battle is over.”

--

17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?

i almost always write in order. when i think of a scene that is in the future, i will usually write some notes about it, but try not to write it because i very much build on (in my head? i dont know how much comes through in what gets written) what i wrote before in terms of how people think and feel/i do a lot of dialogue call-backs. 

there are a few occasions where i go ahead and write something that happens later, but then i feel like i really screw myself when i try and go back and write the missing piece. i have to re-write everything i wrote previously to make it make sense... ‘Greener Grass’ actually is an example where i didn’t write out of order on purpose, but i thought i’d start with simon’s section which introduces all the bodyswap stuff fine, but it was too heavy with the bodyswap plot AND the introduction of the agatha-isn’t-here/get simon’s magic back stuff. there was just too much going on.

so then i had to write an intro section for baz, which i thin is good - it frames the story as baz’s story, which i know is what rainbow would want, and gives us calm before the storm ... as well as giving me an opportunity to write the exposition i needed. 

but i had to go back an edit the next section a LOT to make room for it. which i hated. 

28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

i’ll do two batches. 

blake’s 7: 

x_los is my girlfriend, but i knew her first as an amazing writer. i wouldn’t have written half the things i did for b7 if she hadn’t started writing these epic, involved political stories, and she writes great porn. i really am not interested in david copperfield/uriah heep, but she thinks baz is a cat killer who does not deserve the time of day, so there you go. we’re in different fandoms now. 

elviaprose is not only a great writer (the foot fettish fic is incredible, given that neither she nor i have a foot fettish as far as i know), she’s also really engaged with other people’s writing and i love that. it’s really good fun. 

judith proctor  - i wanted to put in a second generation fan, and i was tempted to go for willa shakespeare (so good, so plotty, so porny) or nova (such pain!), but i have to go for judith. judith taught us all how incredible blake is. her love for this character, and the way that she always writes him as smart but flawed, and attractive to avon because he is smart and principled, rather than for any other reason, is fundamental to any of us reclaiming him for the future. (it’s probably not a surprise that the authors i like really influence me as a writer, but worth calling it out - i am very much saying that as well). Touching Life! so good.

carry on:

we have some amazing writers, thank you fandom <3 three of my very very predictable favourites (the same three, i think, who wrote my favourite fics of last year) are: 

@basic-banshee - what can i say? (insert long pause while i think of what to say.) i mean, we all know Ban is a great writer. it’s a pleasure when the most popular writer in the fandom is also a genius. i love all her secondary characters and that she spends so much time with them. she writes the way i want to - lots of good tropey stuff, great fun AUs, and plotty plotty good plot stuff. also - she always writes the most perfect endings that just make you feel GOOD. 

@sharkmartini - i think we share a lot of the same ideas about what we like in fics i.e. we like the same tropes, we like that baz is a vampire, we think the same things are hot and romantic. i love the way sharkmartini plots this and she always writes great dialogue. also, i do think we owe snowbaz smut to her - maybe it wasn’t the first-first, but ‘Monster Under the Bed’ (which is SO good, honestly still one of my absolute favourite things) seems to have influenced so much of what came after it. 

@krisrix - also an amazing artist, but for me an even better writer. the smut is amazing and sexy while also at the same time being really tender. kris also writes beautiful, long amazing kisses - and again, endings that are so beautiful and tender. also - let us talk about the plotty things! i love writers who mix plot and romance (or even dare i say - smut) because i love to have all the things in one fic. What Stays and What Fades Away is so smart and interesting. and, of course, kris has written my all time most favourite trope - fake relationship.

[mmguitarbar]

A bad guitar, 1961

In a recent interview with Reverb.com, Fender CEO Andy Mooney laid bare his true feelings about the Jazzmaster and Jaguar, and let me tell you, they were anything but glowing. In the exchange, he brands Leo Fender’s original designs as “not very good guitars” at the time of release, declaring the mistakes of the past fixed in Fender’s latest entries into the offset line. 

Mooney takes a hard stance here, but to be honest his perspective here is nothing new. These critiques have been around for years, and even with the informed views of dedicated users of the Offset Guitar forum, the main axe associations with high profile players like Chris Stapleton and Nels Cline, and my own work over the last decade advocating for the guitars in print and performance –– pardon the horn tooting –– opinions on these fascinating guitars among the general populace are still very much divided.  

I don’t blame folks for holding these opinions because even I, Dear Reader, once believed the very same things. Back in high school I had an Olympic white Japanese Jaguar, a parental purchase spurred on by my love of the band Bush. The kindest way I could describe the guitar is problematic; the strings skipped off of their saddles, the bridge shimmied down, and it would not stay in tune no matter what I did. 

Eventually I traded it in on something more reliable, unwilling to wrestle with the instrument. When I finally came back to the offset guitar 14 years later, I realized that insatiable tinkerer Leo Fender wouldn’t have released a guitar he didn’t think was ready, and so I pushed through my preconceived notions of its flaws to gain a better understanding of the thing. I came out on the other side with a deeper appreciation for the man’s work. 

It seems to me that when a player has a bad experience with these guitars, it’s often because they’ve been poorly maintained. In cases such as these, I view it as an opportunity to educate and reevaluate. After a conversation or a quick adjustment, the player might still decide the models aren’t for them, but more often than not they seem to “get it.” And that’s enough for me.

So here I am, returning from an extended hibernation like a grumpy, shaggy bear; like the aging ensemble cast of a ‘90s sitcom, lured into a reunion for the cameras by the dangling carrot of a handsome payday, each secretly knowing that the end product would not be nearly as good as the show’s initial run; like a cherished childhood movie that, upon re-viewing for the first time in 30 years, has way more adult themes than your young mind could then comprehend, causing feelings of retroactive discomfort because you watched it with your parents in the SAME ROOM???

Prodigal namesake that I am, I have returned with my proverbial pen pressed to the also proverbial page of the Guitar Bar website to feverishly scrawl this open[ish] response in an attempt to give some context and gentle rebuttal to his comments. 

“They were not particularly good guitars when they were first introduced.”

When the Jazzmaster and Jaguar were first released in 1958 and 1962 respectively, they were not only top of the line models, but top sellers as well. While neither model was exactly embraced by the Jazz community, they nonetheless found favor with a varied group of players and all but defined the sound of Surf music while still in its infancy. For a time, they seemed to be everywhere. Admittedly, perceived popularity does not a good guitar make, so let’s look at a handful of early adopters.

At first, session players and country pickers liked the models well enough to use them on stage and in the studio, including Wayne Moss, Hank Garland, Willie Nelson, and Luther Perkins, who has an engraving of the model on his tombstone. If more proof is needed, here are three separate performances of Roy Clark absolutely shredding “12th Street Rag” on a bone stock Jazzmaster and Jaguar. These videos remain favorites of mine because they show someone really digging in and playing fast melodic runs on guitars that people seem to think can’t handle that kind of vigorous right hand technique. 

But if they were so good to begin with, why did sales eventually taper off?

A refinished ’65 from a couple of years back. I actually put the stock bridge back on this one instead of the sloppily installed TOM. It was awesome.

Previously, I’ve explained that the most common complaints with the model aren’t the fault of the design, but rather, trying to make that design do things it was never intended to do: wearing a set of light gauge strings. In the Jazzmaster, Leo Fender’s intention was to appeal to Jazz guitarists by creating a solid body guitar with the string geometry of an archtop: a pitched-back neck, a floating bridge, and a tailpiece, and most importantly, all specifically designed to work with heavy gauge flat wound strings. We’re talking 12s, 13s, and 14s. 

Once lighter gauges (9s and 10s) became the norm in the early to mid 1960s, inadequate string tension reduced the downward force on the bridge, resulting in tuning problems and string skipping. It’s like going off-roading with bald tires: you can certainly do it, but expect to slide around a bit.

At this point in my career I’ve set up well over a thousand of these guitars over the course of my career, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, once you throw on a set of 11 gauge rounds and shim the neck as Leo intended, they just work. They were good guitars then, and they’re still good guitars today.

For more information on setting up these guitars, have a look at our Demystifying series and my May 2017 cover story for Premier Guitar. 

“We’ve made them functionally better”

It’s true that Fender has devoted a significant amount of time and resources into solving the perceived problems with these guitars, including modified vibrato positioning, redesigned bridges, strategically placed nylon bushings, and even neck pockets angled at the factory to eliminate the need for shims. These are all good ideas, a few even great; as is often the case when chasing mass appeal, some have not been as successful as Fender might have hoped.

Take the Classic Player, which features an angled neck pocket and an Adjust-O-Matic bridge yet can still fall prey to the same string path issues of more vintage-correct models. The AOM style bridge was not designed with a vibrato in mind, with sharp, shallow saddle slots that can cause tuning problems of their own. And that’s to say nothing of the mismatched 12” radius bridge on a 9.5” neck, which causes the E strings to be higher off of the fretboard than the D and G in the middle and makes for an inconsistent feel across the neck. 

My friend Brian’s wonderful later model MarrGuar. An amazing guitar that set up beautifully.

Mooney specifically mentions the Johnny Marr model –– indeed a killer guitar ––  yet it’s worth noting that many of the earliest of the bunch left the factory with 56mm bridge string spacing, which turned out to be only a hair slimmer than the width of the neck. Many players reported problems keeping the outer strings on the fretboard, which eventually led to Fender adopting slimmer 52mm spacing in later production runs (linked in case you need one). Here’s a shot of a lovely black one with the worst example of this I have yet to see. 

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Scroll to see the neck and bridge string spacing problems.

A too-wide bridge…

…causing the E strings to fall off the neck when fretted

Strangely, the earliest American Professionals which came a few years later had the same problems, sometimes necessitating the need for aftermarket parts and prompting another mid-run update. 

As for the new American Ultra guitars, they may not be for me but I can understand why many of the features might appeal to other players looking for a more modern take on the Jazzmaster. With an additional lead circuit control knob, a re-purposed rhythm circuit layout for out of phase operation, rollers for individual pickup volumes, and an S-1 switch for series options, it could be argued that functionally they’re more complex than ever. 

However, once agin Fender curiously employs a mismatched bridge radius, this time a 9.5” bridge mated to a compound 10-14” radius neck, which puts the D and G strings higher off of the fretboard than the Es. Generally, compound necks work best when the string path is treated as a cone, flattening as it expands. In this case, a 16” bridge radius would set up far better than that of the stock part. I suspect we’ll start seeing even these guitars sporting alternative bridges before too long. 

So yes, while it’s good that we’re seeing R&D dedicated to making adjustments, some of those adjustments haven’t actually solved the problems, but rather, changed the nature of them instead.

“Now you can actually play them.”

I’ve made this point abundantly not only in this piece but in nearly everything else I’ve done over the years, but the fact is that Jazzmasters and Jaguars were always playable –– stock bridge included. Take it from an ardent Mastery user: the original bridge is as viable as any other, and once it’s adjusted correctly it’s as fun as it is functional.

Not only is there a wealth of great music made with them over the years as proof, you can refer to articles on this blog, numerous posts on both my personal Instagram as well as Mike & Mike’s showing that the stock bridge is dependable and musical. Hell, every offset guitar the shop sells goes through the same setup process to show off what incredible instruments they can truly be with just a little extra effort.

Closing Arguments

Would you play this stripped ’61, original bridge and all? It was a total beast of a guitar.

Real talk: I get that Mooney’s comments may be a marketing tactic to steer customers toward the current lineup in the Fender catalog, and just in time for the holidays at that. You know the old song and dance: newer is better! Fender does make a great guitar and innovation can be a good thing, so to this I say, fair play. 

Still, I have to believe there’s a better way to say so without throwing heritage –– and our beloved vintage instruments –– under the bus. 

You see, over the last five or so years, it seems to have become fashionable in Fender’s corporate culture to downplay or outright disparage the legacy of Leo Fender, with reps at NAMM overheard saying things like “Leo didn’t get everything right” and “we fixed his mistakes,” phrases repeated at the onset of the latest feature set or spec tweak. 

At best, comments like those in the previous sentence (as well as those which are the basis of this response) make Fender seem out of touch, and at worst, could erode the trust of a very loyal legion of customers.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll be saying it for as long as it needs saying: the Jazzmaster and Jaguar are Leo Fender’s most brilliant and misunderstood designs. It may have taken us 50 years to catch up, but now a growing and dedicated group of fans have found a unique sound here unlike anything you can get from other more traditional guitars. 

Speaking personally, no matter what other instruments are available to me, I reach for an offset first. I have found my musical voice in the Jazzmaster and Jaguar, and I’m never more comfortable or more adventurous than when I have one in my hands.

One last quote: 

“I have Jazzmasters and Jaguars… I have four in a line on my wall from 1966.” 

Andy, if you’ve read this and have found any of it compelling, I’d love the chance to show you just how good those guitars on your wall can be. All I’ll need is a few sets of 11s or 12s, a screwdriver or two, and maybe a couple Cold Ones to share between us. Burritos are good, too.

Oh, and parking validation –– it’s a bit of a drive up from Long Beach and the last thing I want to deal with is finding a spot on those notoriously crowded Hollywood streets.

A bad guitar. A very bad guitar

  An Open[ish] Response to Fender CEO Andy Mooney’s Thoughts on Offset Guitars In a recent interview with Reverb.com, Fender CEO Andy Mooney laid bare his true feelings about the Jazzmaster and Jaguar, and let me tell you, they were anything but glowing.

[stlwindowsanddoors-blog]

10 Ways to Get the Wrong Window Replacements

There is no getting around it. Window replacement is a major renovation to your home. Besides including remarkable visual appeal, especially in an older house, window replacement has instant possible to conserve on electrical, gas and oil expenses. There is also the advantage of almost 100% recuperative worth of the expense must you choose to sell your house. 

So become informed of the ins and outs of window shopping, so you do not "break" your budget plan, and prevent these ten window wrongs. 1. Changing One Window At a Time Over the Next 10 Years. This renovation ought to not be done piecemeal. It's better to do all the windows that require replacement at the same time, and ideally all the windows in your house. Space by space window replacement is more affordable and it can be simpler if done slowly, a few at a time, but visually, your house will not convey an arranged, serene and cohesive design unless all the windows match well. What if materials are terminated or ended up being briefly unavailable, or expect there's not sufficient money to finish your home? If you can't afford them all now, don't begin up until the cash exists. But don't stress over purchasing replacements due to the fact that when finished, they should not require replacement once again. 2. Altering That Custom Window Space to Standard Window Space. There is no need to downgrade that unique customized window such as an arch, a small French door, or any uncommon configuration. Installing plain single glazed panes, because custom windows are too pricey, doesn't do justice to the unique functions of your house with its various lines, corners, and areas. Don't refrain from tailoring your windows to fit the character of the home merely to conserve money. One cost reliable way to get a custom-made appearance without the customized cost is to take several basic stock windows and combine them into a distinct style which enhances that unique space. The cost of personalizing a window versus combining standard stock windows is vast. Although the alternatives are more restricted, the client doesn't lose on their designer detailing. 3. Not Matching the Functions You Need With Available Options. You've been living in this home for 10 years so what's required is apparent, so put some brain power into the problems and document the features that are essential before checking out the websites or the display room. The choices readily available are truly endless with as lots of fashion statements on the market as any Parisian boulevard. Bare it down to the bones first. Those multi-paned, lever-operated, jalousie windows in the living room are not just an eye sore, but a thorn in your side. They do not belong in your stately Victorian on the very best street in New Orleans. Make a list of the functions you truly want and develop a principle of the perfect dream windows. Do this before browsing over the options so the focus remains on the requirements of your home first, before the glitter impresses you away. 4. The Easiest Thing Is To Buy All Vinyl Windows Within and Out and Be Made with It. Those TV commercials 25 years ago which showed how easy those replacement vinyl windows were to clean and open, did disappoint the vinyl after 20 or thirty years in a difficult sun. It holds true, vinyl replacements have enhanced, and are very energy efficient supplied the vinyl does not degrade. Nevertheless, I do not recommend all vinyl replacements at all and prefer instead a combined vinyl and wood replacement over an aluminum frame. It has the simple maintenance benefit of all vinyl, but does not depend upon the heat sensitivity of the vinyl for effective operation. Some individuals like wood at any expense. Although it needs a great deal of upkeep and regular repainting, absolutely nothing breathes and seems like wood in any home restoration. For our cash, we recommend an aluminum frame with wood on the interior side, and a vinyl covered aluminum frame outside for the maximum benefits of energy efficiency, visual appeals and maintenance ease. 5. There Are Some Good Deals On Dual Pane Windows. And if you fall for those lots you'll get a rude awakening. Something like two pieces of glass of questionable quality, without any unique coverings or surfactants, glazed together to form one window. Slightly longer than one year later on when that sub basic guarantee goes out, condensation develops between the panes and a black spotty poisonous mold begins growing all around the sides. "What a pity", says the brand-new glazier shaking his head. "This rot is anything however dry. You must have pertained to me previously." If only it truly was a bargain. The maker does not even return those calls and the specialist has left the state. Real double paned windows are pricey, and the choices are various. There is a brand-new cutting-edge version where the 2 panes are in fact blown together into a single system with a safe insulating gas sealed between them. This completely eliminates fogging, condensation, and drafts. Other types need proper sealing and ought to carry an excellent low u-factor. The U-factor is a toughness test which determines just how much interior heat gets away from the window. Conversely, a low Solar Heat Gain Co-efficient, or SHGC informs the consumer how much heat from the sun penetrates your windows. If you negotiate away your consumer protections, don't be shocked if that big restoration goes sour. 6. Customizing Into Complacency. Even the finest windows from the very best makers could position operational troubles and style flaws. Not that they were the top of the line to start with, but those advertisements for vinyl replacement windows revealing the easy tilt down cleansing system proved tough for lots of individuals to use. Don't buy any windows that you have not subjected to strenuous tests of your own. Even if a window is tailored, does not automatically make it user friendly. There isn't a maker in business that hasn't made windows with design flaws and particularly troublesome are those customized functions. Work them personally; don't simply observe the demonstration. Have the family work them. Ask concerns to the salesman. Any sticky wickets? Leave the windows at the store or at least those complex systems. Operation will only make them stickier. 7. Buying Windows Without NFRC Rating. NFRC or the National Fenestration Score Council screening has actually become an industry requirement in examination of energy efficiency and efficiency. It's a pity to acquire windows without the score considering it doesn't cost you anything however the manufacturers depend on it to sort out those less then perfect quality windows. Also makers who are less expensive however disavow their warranties after 1 year typically are those windows which don't perform well versus their better quality competitors. In fact, many states now require the NFRC scores in order to get a permit for window replacement of any kind. Contact the local council about constructing code requirements for your house. 8. All Window Hardware Is Basically The Exact same. The hardware set up with your windows figures out the ease, security, and toughness of operation. In fact, your windows are just as great as the hardware holding them together. Window hardware can conceal low-cost metal products in the locking system or sash. Attempt to get hardware that adheres to California's comprehensive anti theft and forced entry standards. They require that any closed window is a locked window and has the ability to remain locked under heavy lever type pressure. 9. Who Needs Two Warranties? You require two warranties to cover you in any eventuality and here is the information. Initially, there is the maker's guarantee. This covers the windows from manufacturing flaws, unforeseen wear, replacement parts or anything to do with the windows themselves. It is a prolonged service warranty that is released with premium windows for 10 to twenty years and often longer. It needs to not professional rate the advantages with time due to the age of the windows, and must be totally transferable should you choose to offer your house. Second, there is the assurance from the specialist who sets up the windows. This typically only extends over one year, although a professional who is sure of their work and has an excellent reputation may be encouraged to provide more protection, in some cases as much as 2 years. In any case, this service warranty is limited and covers just the work of the specialist relating to setup and nothing to do with producing flaws of the windows themselves. For example, if the surfactant is mottled on that western exposure image window in the bedroom, do not try to redress the problem with the professional. Call the maker. However, if mold is establishing on the inside of one brand-new window sill, get the contractor back over there as soon as possible before that guarantee expires. Try not to get included if there is a conflict over responsibility. Make them work it out. 10. It Will Save A Package If My Painter Installs The Windows and I Will Assist Fine, if you have the time and the painter has appropriate expertise however sadly, a lot of mistakes take place when attempting to streamline window installation. Since window replacement is a more costly and huge undertaking than it seems unless it's only one or 2 windows we're talking about, or you have actually done it previously, it's finest to leave this to a specialist. Setup is the least of the expense of window replacement so it does not pay to cut corners here. One essential tip, when you work with a professional to install those brand-new windows, besides doing all the basic evaluations of his work, such as seeing his jobs over the past three months, getting reliable referrals, not paying up front for the task, and so on, if there is a little additional money to spare, think about employing an engineer to evaluate the installation. It's a relatively affordable way to buy a lot of comfort. Even if you can't manage one, try asking the professional throughout the interview if he minds if you hire an engineer to evaluate precaution and setup. If he gets upset or declines, don't use this professional. The reason speaks for itself. If he states he doesn't mind or heartily welcomes the chance, then this contractor trusts his own work, and will no doubt work much better knowing that an expert will exist, even if he isn't. If an engineer is worked with, bring him when at the start, and once prior to the last couple of windows are finished to check for compliance before the last checks are written. Armed with these suggestions, you ought to get more for your money, and years of satisfaction looking out your brand-new "quite as a picture" replacement window.

[dank-hp--memes]

Pulling at Heartstrings: Chapter 5

Tags: @shit-in-silk-stocking

---

Valery Apartment, Moscow

Sometime between the meeting in December and the trial.

-

Ulana approaches Valery's apartment building, carrying a file box. She is unable to conceal her pregnancy now, her bump clearly visible. She is wearing a deep navy dress that is cinched just under her breasts. She sighs and enters the building, climbing the many stairs to Valery's apartment. Ulana sets down the file box as she reaches Valery's door, her back and feet aching as she stops to catch her breath. She sighs before knocking on the door. As she bends down to pick up the file box, the door slowly opens. Valery is standing in the doorway, his eyes widening as he sees her. He slowly looked her over, not knowing what to say, his jaw clamped shut.

"May I come in?" Ulana mutters, quite exhausted from the walk there.

Valery simply steps aside. Ulana steps inside and places the file box onto his kitchen table. She sighs and collapses into a chair, stretching out her legs and crossing them at her ankles. Upon further inspection, Valery sees that her ankles are swollen. He cannot help but feel sorry for her as he sits down across from her. A few moments pass and they sit in silence. Ulana sits quietly one of her hands resting on the side of her stomach, gently rubbing it with her thumb. Valery cannot help but look at her belly, his heart beginning to ache. He can see the slight movements of the life growing within her. The life that he put there. Suddenly, Valery reaches out and places his hand on the crest of her stomach. Ulana looks up at him for a moment and their eyes meet.

"I am sorry, I should have asked," Valery says, beginning to pull his hand away.

"No, it's alright..." Ulana says softly, pulling his hand back.

Valery looks at her quietly as he gently runs his hand down her stomach.

"Valery, we need to talk…" Ulana says softly.

Valery looks up at her, his heart beginning to sink. He pulls his hand away, his heart aching as he looked into her eyes.

"I came here to talk about Vienna," Ulana says, her tone becoming serious.

Valery sighs and sits back in his chair. He knew deep down that was why she came.

I haven't come to scold you. I know how the world works. I'm a realist, no matter what Shcherbina thinks" Ulana says, with a slight huff of frustration as she sees the look on his face.

"Then why are you here?" Valery mumbles, quickly losing interest in the conversation.

The conversation that follows is fairly frustrating, for Ulana is extremely stubborn and will not give up without a fight. She is more passionate than ever about exposing the truth.

"Why?" Legasov says, looking at her, his heart sinking, he anticipates what she will say.

" Because you're Legasov. And you mean something…” Ulana begins in a frustrated tone, “I'd like to think if I spoke out, it would be enough" Ulana continues, a bitter look crossing her face, "But as I said, I know how the world works"

There is a pause, tension in the air. It is obvious that Valery does not share her passion for the truth, despite the fact that the radiation from Chernobyl could decide the fate of his unborn child.

"They will shoot me Khomyuk," Valery says selfishly.

Ulana sighs, the use of her last name stinging like salt on an open wound. It hurt more to hear her last name roll off of her lovers’ tongue than she had imagined. She has one last shot at convincing him. She has little hope, for not even the potential loss of their child could convince him. She begins pulling the notebooks out of her file box.

"You told me to find out what happened. I talked to dozens of people. Every word they said, I wrote it down" Ulana says with frustration as she separates the books into two piles.

She gestures to the pile with two books. "These are the people who are still alive"

She pauses before gesturing to the pile with twelve books. "These are the ones who are dead. They died rescuing each other. Putting out fires. Tending to the wounded. They didn't hesitate. They didn't waver. They simply did what had to be done" Ulana says, feeling her eyes start to water at the memory of the men and the state they were in when they died.

"So have I. I went willingly to an open reactor. I've also given my life. Is that not enough?" Valery says, seeing the disappointment on her face as he speaks, causing his heart to ache.

"I'm sorry, but it is not enough," Ulana says coldly as she begins gathering her books.

Ulana looks over at Valery as she hears sniffling. He has his head in his hands and is sobbing softly.

"Valery…" Ulana says softly, gently putting her hand on his wrist.

"I never wanted to disappoint you, Lana, I never meant to hurt you…" Valery whispers, his voice shaking.

Ulana leans in and places her hand on his cheek, wiping away his tears. She looks up at him with a somber look. Her skin looks absolutely radiant in the golden afternoon light that is filtering in through the windows.

"Valery, why didn't you tell me… why didn't you tell me about the Volkov paper and the flaw with AZ-5?" Ulana asks softly.

Valery meets her eyes, tears welling in his eyes, "I wanted to keep you safe. I needed you to stay away from Chernobyl, away from the radiation" Valery whispers, his voice cracking.

Ulana shakes her head and wraps her arms around him, "I could never say mad at you for long. No matter what you do, or what you say. I will always love you Valery Alekseyevich Legasov" she whispers, holding onto him tightly.

"And I will always love you Ulana Yuriyvna Khomyuk" Valery mumbled as he wrapped his arms around her lower back and pulled her into his lap.

They sit like that for a few moments before Valery lifts her up and carries her over to his sofa. Ulana wraps her arms around his neck, holding him tightly.

She props her feet up on the coffee table as Valery places her on the sofa. He sits down beside her and Ulana snuggles up against him. She mindlessly rests her hand on her stomach as Valery wraps his arm around her back, his hand resting on her soft hip. He reaches his other hand over and places it on her lower belly. They sit in silence for a moment as Valery feels some slight movements, causing his lips to curl in a radiant smile. He never thought he could feel so much happiness in his life. Ulana looks up at him, her heart melted by the wide smile on Valery's face.

"This is the most movement I think I have ever felt,"  she says with a soft chuckle.

"She knows her daddy is here," Valery says, leaning down and planting a kiss on the top of her belly.

Ulana smiles and gently runs her fingers through Valery's hair. They spend hours sitting there together, chatting quietly, watching as the sun slowly sets.

Ulana quietly crawls into Valery's lap, sitting in his lap and laying her head against his shoulder as she wraps her arms around him. She is extremely warm and cuddly, her body soft and comfortable. Valery props his feet up on the coffee table and holds Ulana in his arms, leaning his cheek against her forehead. They sat in silence for a while, each content merely with the other's company. As the sun begins to set and the sky turns a deep shade of purple, Valery gently prods Ulana.

"I think you would be more comfortable in my bed" he mutters as she looks up at him, her eyes half opened.

“You’ll have to carry me” Ulana mumbles, chuckling tiredly.

Valery smiles a little and kisses her forehead.

“As you wish” He whispers.

He takes his feet down off the coffee table. Taking a moment to gather his strength as he adjusts her slightly in his lap. He groans softly as he stands up, holding her in his arms in a bridal style. Valery manages to carry her into his bedroom, laying her gently on the small bed. He smiled a little as he watched her curl up.

“I may have some pajamas you can wear, if you would like them,” Valery says softly as he sits on the bed, running his fingers through his hair.

“hmmm, that would be nice” Ulana mumbles, smiling at him drowsily.

After searching through his dresser for a few moments, Valery manages to find an old, black, silk button down and some of his pajama pants. He places them on the bed in front of her, holding his own pajamas under his arm. Without saying a word, Valery wanders down the hall to the bathroom to wash up and get ready for bed. Upon his return, he finds that Ulana has already dressed in the clothes he gave her and is dozing peacefully in his bed. Her clothes lay on the floor beside the bed in a heap. The very sight of her brought a smile to his face and made his heart feel as though it would burst. Silently, Valery climbed into bed beside her and turned out the light. He lay on his back for a moment, though he was an atheist, he stared up at the ceiling with tears in his eyes and a smile on his face as he thanked God for Ulana and the small life that she carried within her. As the moment passed, Valery looked over at her and rolled onto his side, wrapping his arm around her middle as he cuddled up to her, becoming her big spoon. Ulana smiled and laid back against him as she slept. Every inch of her was soft and cuddly, and she seemed to radiate a cozy warmth. Valery smiled as he ran his hand over her belly and pressed his nose against the crook of her neck. He could have spent a lifetime laying there with her.

[stonyverse]

Favourite avengers movies scenes? Favourite iron man movies scenes? Favourite captain America movies scenes?

Omg, you have no idea how hyped I am because you're the first person who asked me so thank you for that. Anyways, you are in for a long ride because I won't be able to shut up about this.

1. Iron Man movies

Fave scene in IM1, I am Iron Man. That was the line that made MCU a different universe. I think they were gonna follow 616 (based on Tony's prepped statement courtesy of Phil) until RDJ disregarded the script and just opted to say that.

You see Nat going from playful to serious master assasin mode because her best friend is in danger. That scene basically shows that they will do everything for each other (FACT PROVEN IN ENDGAME). Basically, I loved all of Clint and Nat's scenes (kinda a low-key Clintasha shipper) in the first movie. I absolutely love their friendship and how it's portrayed in the MCU in its entirety. I mean I would've preferred that they be a couple but their platonic love for each other is what really got me to burst into tears in Endgame.

Whenever I watch that scene in IM1, I always find myself shaking my head and smiling because of how unbelievable Tony is. A part of me thinks he said that just so he could fuck with Christine Everhart and the other part of me thinks that he said it because he wants to tell people that you can be a superhero, no matter who you are and what your past is. It makes me think that way because before declaring that he's ironman he says that he's not a superhero because of his list of character defects.

In IM2, fave scene is Nick and Tony's talk in the latter's Malibu mansion. The whole conversation about Howard Stark. It highlights the fact that Tony never really got to know Howard. We all know he was a bad father to him but I kinda have mixed feelings about it. I mean, we see our parents as parents until we get to know who they are outside of being that. Personally, I'm just knowing who my mom is, now (I'm 20). Tony never really got that (part of the reason why that scene where Tony meets Howard in Endgame was important, for me).

And IM3, I don't have a specific favorite scene but I love its concept. I loved the fact that they showed Tony having anxiety attacks and PTSD and how he got through that. It's one of the things that made him human and so relatable.

I have to confess that I didn't see any CA movies until 2016. I only watched it because Tony was in CA:CW then I watched CA:TWS before watching CA:TFA. Basically, I watched it in reverse. 😂😂

I also loved the fact that the person who got him through it was Harley, a kid who became Tony's sidekick during that time. God, I don't really know how to explain how important it is to me, it's something that I can't put into words but I REALLY FELT THAT.

2. Captain America movies

CA:TFA, hands down to Steve and Peggy's last conversation. My god, that was heartbreaking. I've always been a sucker for what-could've-beens and almost love stories and they really reflect that. I sympathize with the both of them so much because they have to live with that heartbreak for the rest of their lives. It will always be the one bittersweet thing that they will carry. But the one my heart really aches for is Peggy.

I have a lot of favorite scenes from the avengers movies. I really loved the scene in A1 where Phil pulls Nat from a mission because Barton's been compromised.

I mean just. look. at. that! Holy shit, that grimace and half smile that she does. That's the face of a woman who can't get mad at the man she loves for leaving because the reason of said man for leaving her is the same reason that made her fall in love with him. It's kinda of like the look Pepper gives Tony in Endgame when the latter talks to the former about the time gps.

I'll put it on the list is easily my fave part in CA:TWS. It shows Steve doing everything he can in order to adjust to this world. It shows him moving forward.

And for CA:CW, it's Tony's presentation at MIT. Yep, loved that. It echoes with his character development.

For A:AOU, I'd say Fury having dinner with the Avengers. I think that's when he says I have you, guys, I have nothing to worry about. We know that AOU takes place after the falling of SHIELD and Nick doesn't really have all the resources that he had before but he still believes. He knows that these are the people who will save the world because they see it as something that they have to do. These are the people he watched closely and saw grow. We all know how the Avengers Initiative came to be after Captain Marvel and saw how soft Fury is back in the 90s and during the dinner in AOU, I see it as a parallel. I've always loved Fury and have always wanted to see how he came to be and who he was before SHIELD fucked him up, you know? And that scene in AOU really gave me a glimpse. I see him as the tough loving dad of the avengers.

(I got the gif from google and it says it's from bitony's tumblr so credits!)

It shows how much he wanted to help people with mental health issues because he's been there and he knows how hard it is so he wants to do everything he can to make it easier. It's for the people who finds it hard to talk to a psychiatrist so in order to contribute, he created a noninvasive tech that helps deal with that (that's why I stan one man, why I can't understand people who calls him selfish).

(P.S. CA:CW could easily be IM4, let's be real)

3. Avengers movies

A:IW honestly fucked me up (they dusted some of our faves!!!). Buuuuuuuut, I'm gonna say the Okoye-Nat team up. THAT SCENE GOT ME LIKE:

BC I LOVE OKOYE AND NAT SO MUCH!!! And to see them - these two powerful women of MCU who deserves more recognition - team up against the enemy, I swear, the BDE radiating from them.

(Additional stuff: what made me love Okoye way more is during that scene BP where W'Kabi was like would you kill me, my love? And my girl's like for Wakanda? Without question. I literally sobbed during that scene bc it hit me so much, I'm like I feel you, it just shows how much Okoye loves her country and that spoke to me)

SPOILERS AHEAD.

AS FOR ENDGAME, GOD DAMN, I LOVED EVERY MOMENT. It's easily my favorite Marvel movie. Stevetonies won in that movie, Clintasha shippers won, Thorbruce shippers won. It's basically a service to the people. I know some have been hating on it (especially on Steve's ending) but I think tied everything up.

Endgame's opening scene was Clint teaching his daughter archery. That was so soft for me. The last we saw him was CA:CW (and tbh, I didn't like him in that movie bc he's such an asshole to Tony, like the things he said cut deep) and then now we know he's on house arrest just like Scott and being happy with his family. I loved how normal it was bc that normalness made it so painful when they disappeared. Then we saw Clint become Ronin. It's a parallel, to me, because it shows that the good can be bad. It showed us flaws and that losing someone really brings out the worse in us. But he's storyline also showed how much a bad person can change with the help of other people.

Now, let's talk about Nat and Tony, let's be real, those two heroes started it. I mean, sure, Downey really started the MCU but Scarlett immediately followed him (IM2). To see their characters' journey end meaningfully by saving their families and creating a better future for the world, I gotta say, it may not be the ending we wanted (bc we want everyone to live) but they died doing what they love most, you know? They died knowing that they made a better future for everyone. And if they're gonna go, they have to go like the hero they truly are.

For Steve's arc, I'm not mad at it. I actually smiled when I saw how happy he was with Peggy. I would have wanted for him to stay in the present but I kinda get why he did it. I know it doesn't really reflect the comics (since Steve grew to love the 'future' in there) but MCU is a different universe. Steve's always been selfless, always puts the world's interest before his so to see him finally putting himself first by following Tony's advice (back in AOU) makes me understand. Like, okay, finally, this guy does something for himself.

I LOVED THOR. I know a friend of mine thought that Thor was a laughing stock during Endgame but I deemed him gaining weight as an important arc his character. Thor lost everything: Friga, Odin, Loki, Asgard, Heimdall, the people he's supposed to lead... Then he failed to stop Thanos because he didn't go for the head. He thinks he failed, he thought it was fault. He became an alcoholic, he was depressed but hides it behind jokes. I feel like somewhere in there he thought he wasn't worthy anymore. That's why he doesn't use stormbreaker, anymore. That's why for the last 5 years, he's 'not' the god of thunder. Also the reason during time heist, when he was able to call for mjolnir, it made me smile from ear to ear. Thor's endgame arc proved that no matter how depressed you are or how much of a failure you think you are, you're still worthy.

Bruce, Brucie-bear, Bruce... finally, he learned to accept Hulk. At first, I thought it was funny that he's Bruce and Hulk at the same time but the more I think about it, the more I saw how much Bruce grew. I mean, flashback in A1 when Tony told him to accept the guy and think of them as one instead of two different people, I remember how much he hated that idea because he sees himself as a monster and then in Endgame, we see him finally accepting his demons and actually became a better person because of it. Like, it really reflects how things would become better if we just embrace and love ourselves for who we are, you know?

THAT'S ABOUT EVERYTHING.

(credits to the owners of the gifs and photos!!!)

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Anti-Villainy & Well-Intentioned Extremism

Every villain is a hero in his or her own mind… but there are some villains who take it to a whole new level. Some villains actions would be, if done by just about anyone else, a truly heroic deed… but the villain, being a villain, goes about achieving their heroic goal in a less-than-savory manner. This is the mark of a Well-Intentioned Extremist, a villain who believes the ends justify the means and that a wicked action that achieves a good goal is worth it. A lot of anti-villains tend to be like this, and one in particular sparked the idea for this essay: Thanos.

Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been criticized by many as having an utterly nonsensical plan, one that is nowhere near as compelling as his dudebro-esque obsession with Death that he has in the comics. They say his goal to wipe out half the universe so there are more resources would fail horribly due to basic math, and that his plan is doomed by his shortsighted idiocy and he could have just solved the problem by doubling all resources. This last part is actually entirely correct. The issue is they are using it as a criticism, when it is in fact the whole point.

The thing with Well-Intentioned Extremist characters is that, while their end goal could be considered a good thing, if you want the audience to still view the character as a villain you need to be sure to show that, above all else, they could have entirely avoided the entire plan if not for their own hubris, their desire for vindication. Let’s go through a few particularly famous examples to clarify what I mean:

First, and most famously, is Adrian Veidt, AKA Ozymandias.

Veidt is the antagonist of Watchmen, and he sets into motion a convoluted scheme to save the world from nuclear annihilation at the height of a Cold War where Nixon is still running the country. There is absolutely no denying that Adrian Veidt’s attempt to unify Russia and the United States as comrades-in-arms to prevent the end of all life as we know it is a noble goal… but how does he go about it?

He sends a gigantic genetically-engineered alien squid creature with a cloned psychic brain that acts as a psychic nuke to wipe out half the population of New York. He does all this to trick the world into thinking that aliens are invading, and that they need to band together to fight them off if they ever come back.

Now, the end goal is obviously good, but the means he used to achieve it are incredibly awful, and even he knows it. All of this is what makes him a compelling character… but he is tragic, and it’s all the more tragic to think that this all could have been easily avoided if he was not so desperate to keep himself from being “the smartest man on the cinder,” as the Comedian put it so eloquently years prior to the events of the story. Look at what he accomplished, all in the name of his plot: he managed to engineer a monstrous squid creature, utilize the brains of human psychics as well as nightmarish images created by artists, all to create a massive psychic nuke to trick the world. All this and he also managed to cause a being with godlike powers to give up on the world so he could pull this all off unhindered, and he managed to kill everyone involved neatly and without error, with only one loose end that may or may not even matter in the long run. With all that said… considering all he did, is there truly no other way he could have gone about this? One with minimum loss of life? The man was an absolute genius who accomplished some of the most stunning leaps of genetics imaginable… and his grand plan to save the world was mass murder? This is part of the tragedy of Veidt, obviously; his hubris blinded him, the complexity of his plan and his own ego blinding him to the fact that there could possibly have been a myriad other ways to resolve the issue. He could not be wrong, so he had to prove himself gruesomely, painfully right, no matter the cost.

And as any good Well-Intentioned Extremist, in the end he ruminates on whether or not it was all worth it… much like Thanos does at the end of Infinity War, interestingly enough. One can easily draw comparisons between Thanos being confronted by the child Gamora and Veidt’s final conversation with Doctor Manhattan, wherein both men come to grips with the fact that all they’ve done has cost them everything, and that it may not have been worth it.

Let’s look at another example: Senator Armstrong of Metal Gear Rising.

Armstrong is a bit different, in that he absolutely, unabashedly views his “might makes right” philosophy as a good thing, and never really has a moment where he realizes the wrongness of what he’s doing; as he puts it, “Making the mother of all omelettes here, Jack - can’t fret over every egg.” And when you really think about it, his goal isn’t truly an evil one: he wants to end war as a business and stop men fighting and dying for causes they don’t necessarily believe in, instead wishing to create a world where each man fights his own battles, fights for what he personally believes. It’s obviously extreme, but it’s almost refreshing to see a politician who actually wants to put an end to war like that.

The issue, of course, is his use of child soldiers, his numerous terrorist actions, and his creation of a new Metal Gear, the eponymous mech of the series and that is without fail always a bad omen when it pops up. Armstrong’s actions are truly evil, and go towards a good end goal, and while he never has an epiphany - he actually dies feeling his beliefs are vindicated - his heinous actions are pretty obvious for the audience to pick up on. And of course, much like with Veidt, you have to stop and think: there HAD to be a better way.

This is a man running for public office who has the time to command a group of mercenary cyborgs, get a gigantic mech the size of a city block made, and is powered by NANOMACHINES, SON! There seriously had to be a better use of his considerable power and influence than false flag operations, assassinations, and beating up twinks on top of robots. With his considerable power and influence, and especially with the fact that a guy like him would have easily won the elections, he could have simply done things diplomatically, or at the very least have enforced his ideas through the Winds of Destruction. True, this is a lot more obviously evil and shady and would make him into even more of a corrupt politician… but is it truly that much of a price to pay when it means ending war as a business?

Of course, the reason he doesn’t consider other alternatives is obvious: his own personal beliefs and philosophies blind him to any other possible way. And again, this can easily draw comparisons to Thanos. Thanos as a character is driven to be vindicated in his beliefs; he watched his homeworld die, and though he offered what he thought was a reasonable solution, he was ignored, and left the last of his kind. This was long, long ago; at the point of his life in which he see him, he’s so completely and utterly consumed by his desire to be vindicated, his desire to see his idea put in motion, he no longer cares to consider all the issues, to stop and really consider what he’s doing, much as Senator Armstrong doesn’t care about the eggs he has to crack to achieve his goals.

And that brings us right to Thanos.

He is criticized for his shortsightedness, but there is reason to it, reason blatantly laid out in the film. He is criticized for ignoring the flaws in his plan, but being blinded by his own hubris is the exact point. And he is criticized because his end goal was changed to faulty logic rather than him being a bitter angry cuckold who can’t bang the girl he wants, which is… really, really bizarre. I’ve never really put any stock into any argument the MCU Thanos is a bad villain, but it really has dawned on me just how completely and utterly people are missing the point with his character. Do people just not understand anti-villains or well-intentioned extremists anymore? We’re not supposed to think he’s right - he doesn’t even seem to think so in the end - and we’re not supposed to agree his logic is flawless, either; he’s called “The Mad Titan” for a reason. We’re supposed to be compelled that his own hubris, his own desire to feel vindicated, is blinding him and driving him to these shortsighted actions, actions that have completely set him up to fall. He is doomed to failure because his actions, no matter how well-intentioned, were so heinous and ill-conceived that he managed to royally piss off the kind of people who were doing what he did better. 

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, after all. 

[gatesofember]

Summer Grass

PJO Arranged Marriage/Royalty AU Part 8

Rating: M | Pairing: Solangelo

Prev | Next | AU directory | Read it on AO3 (Recommended) | Arranged Marriage AU Masterpage 

Summary: Reyna has business in the City of Enlightenment and Prince Nico tags along to visit Will. Since confessing their feelings, Nico and his fiancé have grown even closer...and Nico has even more trouble keeping it in his pants.

They had stopped at the Sun Palace once more along the journey from Neptune to Pluto, but only for a day.  Some nights they stayed at inns along the road and other nights they stayed as guests in noble estates, but sometimes, they only stopped to exchange horses before continuing to travel throughout the night.  Nico and Will had fallen asleep against each other in the carriage on more than one occasion, and although Reyna’s expression made it clear that she did not approve, she did not stop them.  They separated after reaching Divitia, when Will went to continue his studies in Venadica and Nico remained at the Palatium de Divitae.  Nico bid him farewell with a few kisses and the promise to write, reminding him that it wouldn’t be long before he accompanied Reyna to the City of Enlightenment when she renewed her Sororal vows.

Will had started to be a bit more bold.  He was always well within the boundaries of appropriate behavior, of course, but Nico’s confession in Neptune had given Will confidence.  Nico appeared to like Will’s boldness, too.  Whenever Will initiated some form of touch—even just to rest his hand on top of Nico’s—Nico rewarded him with at least a smile, but sometimes a kiss if he was especially pleased.  Will was slowly starting to feel more comfortable with being affectionate towards Nico.  Although he’d never attempted to hide his admiration, he’d always been careful to keep his behavior polite and gentlemanly; he hadn’t wanted to upset Nico’s chaperones or to make Nico uncomfortable by being too open with his feelings.  After spending so much time alone with Nico while traveling, it became more natural for Will to casually touch him.  He stopped questioning whether his feelings were welcome and started to trust Nico’s love for him instead.

When Nico arrived in Venadica that summer, the sky was still bright but the sun was descending.  Will greeted him at the carriage door and was nearly knocked off his feet when the Prince’s huge bloodhound jumped out first.  He sniffed Will’s stockings happily while waiting for his master.

“Will!” Nico said, nearly pushing Reyna out of the way to see him.

“I’m happy to see you, Your Highness,” Will said.  He offered his hand to help Nico step down from the carriage and wasn’t surprised when Nico didn’t release it.  However, he was surprised when Nico immediately kissed him there in the middle of the city without regard for the Sororal officials who had come to greet him.  Reyna sighed in resignation as she stepped from the carriage, but Hedge looked like he might have a seizure.  When Will turned back towards his aunt and the others waiting for Nico and Reyna, he noticed that Thalia seemed amused and Hestia had raised an eyebrow.  He could already imagine Artemis teasing him about it later: “It seems there were a few developments in your engagement you neglected to mention to me,” she would say.  “I must have done well to arrange your marriage.”

When they entered the palace, Nico and Will trailed a few steps behind Reyna and Artemis and her attendants.  Normally, it would have been expected for Nico to walk beside Artemis, but because he was merely accompanying Reyna rather than acting as an official guest, it wasn’t very rude for Nico to ignore the Matestra in favor of his fiancé.

“I really am happy to see you,” Nico said.  “I’ve missed you.”

“And I have missed you,” Will answered.  “I’m glad you decided to visit.  This time, I have a clear schedule.  I’m staying at the palace, as well.”

“Not in your own rooms?” Nico asked.

Will shook his head happily.  “My aunt offered me a place to stay for the week,” he explained.  Like his first visit to Venadica, Nico would stay at the Sororal Palace for the duration of his stay.  The palace had been full of guests during the Expo, but now had plenty of vacant rooms available for Will, too.  He was grateful; the time it would have taken to travel from the consor dormitories to the palace every day would have left less time for Will to spend with his fiancé.  “There are so many places I want to take you,” he said.  “Last time, the city was so crowded that I couldn’t show you what it’s like normally.  My friends and I used to have secret meeting spots when we were children—there’s a little nook at the bottom of the Cronius Turris in the square, then there’s the tunnel system in the palace.  And we found plenty of places to hide in the children’s ward.”

“I’d love that,” Nico said.  “Will you show me where you live?”

“No, I hadn’t planned to,” Will said.  “It’s only a small room with a bed and a trunk.”

“I would still like to see.”

Will cleared his throat uncomfortably.  “Your Highness, the way I live as a consor in Venadica is very different from the way I live as the son of a duke in Diana.”

“I know,” Nico said shortly.  “This isn’t the first time that you have refused to show me this sort of thing.  Last time I was here, you were hesitant to show me your lab and you didn’t want me to attend your lecture—”

“You know that’s not true at all,” Will interrupted.  They’d had the same argument on more than one occasion.  As patient as he tried to be, he was growing wearing of discussing that incident.  Either Will and Nico had very different memories of what had happened, or Nico only kept arguing because he liked to argue—which seemed plausible, knowing Nico.  “Of course I wanted you to attend the lecture,” Will said.  “The problem was that I didn’t know you were interested.”

“Well, I am interested in seeing where you live.  So why won’t you show me?  Surely you’re not ashamed.”

“No, of course I’m not ashamed, I just...Your Highness, my living quarters are very small and uninteresting and I admit that I don’t take much pride in it—”

“I’m not expecting dormitories to be glamorous—”

“—but it’s not the size or plainness that is the issue.  You must understand, I live quite independently here in Venadica.  I dress myself, I sometimes cook for myself, and I clean after myself.  But my living quarters are not a high priority and I often neglect them—”

“Ah.  So it’s a mess,” Nico surmised.

Will sighed.  “I may be unintentionally fostering a few colonies of bacteria, in fact.  Out of respect for your safety, I cannot take you there.”

Nico snorted and laughed, loudly and unattractively.  Will knew that Nico hated his own laugh, but Will loved it.  It served as a reminder of just how human Nico was—imperfect and flawed, just like Will.

It wasn’t long after Nico’s arrival their meal was held.  The dining hall was crowded, noisy, and full of life, just as it was every time Will went to the Sororal Palace for supper.  While Artemis was also fond of small, private meals, she usually took her suppers in large gatherings.  Will liked the variety, as well; sometimes, he preferred to have his aunt to himself when he visited, but Will always enjoyed himself at full sororal suppers.  That evening, however, Will wished he could have eaten alone with Nico.  He couldn’t have paid attention to the conversation around him even if he had wanted to.

“I love you,” Will said, quietly enough so that no one would overhear.

“I love you, too,” Nico answered.

Will didn’t even realize he and Nico had been leaning closer to each other until Reyna made a subtle gesture to get their attention and silently shook her head to indicate her disapproval.  She didn’t stop glaring until they reluctantly scooted their chairs a bit farther apart.  For the rest of the meal, Reyna kept a close watch on them, but Nico and Will kept their ankles secretly locked together beneath the table until supper was over.

“I have a meeting to attend until late in the evening,” Reyna told them after they left the table.  “You may either—”

“I’m staying with Will,” Nico announced, his fingers clutching Will’s arm as if to demonstrate that he would not tolerate being separated.  “He is going to take me through the city for the rest of the afternoon.”

Will had no memory of discussing that, but he wasn’t opposed.

“I am not able to follow you around the city,” Reyna said.  “Unless you would rather have Hedge chaperone, I suggest you both stay with me.”

Nico scowled and Will flinched.  To his credit, Hedge wasn’t nearly as overprotective as he had once been, but he still had a short temper and was quick to snap at Will.  He was far from the ideal chaperone.  In fact, Reyna had banned Hedge from chaperoning duties unless absolutely unavoidable.  But as bad as having Hedge as a chaperone sounded, attending Reyna’s meeting did not sound much more pleasant.

To Will’s surprise, Hestia stepped forward.  “I will chaperone them, if you and Her Divinity allow it.”

“I can handle the rest of the day without my aide,” Artemis said.

Reyna looked Hestia over thoughtfully before nodding.  “But I must warn you that His Highness will take any opportunity to cause trouble.  Do not allow them to leave your sight.  Physical contact is to be kept to a minimum.  If kisses are unavoidable, they must be chaste.”

Nico looked pleased with the arrangement, but Hestia looked concerned, like she was wondering exactly what she’s just volunteered for.

Will took Nico to the children’s ward first and they spoke to Emmie and Jo, but as it was already getting late in the day, they didn’t stay long.  As they left, Will found Cal and Leo putting the youngest to bed and stopped to give them a quick greeting before letting them get back to the children.  Before Will became engaged to Nico and before Cal and Leo started courting, Will and his friends had planned to run the children’s ward together when Emmie and Jo grew old.  Will wondered if the two of them still shared that dream.  He could imagine them chasing after the children together—Cal would teach the children to sing and Leo would entertain them with his inventions.  Would they marry and have children of their own?  Would they grow old together in Venadica?

Not for the first time, Will realized just how much he was giving up to marry Nico.  He would leave his friends and family and would never live in Venadica or Diana again.  He might visit, but the rest of his life he would live in Divitia.  He would suffer through Plutonian winters every year.  He wouldn’t be there to watch his sister Kayla grow into a brilliant and beautiful young lady.

But he would have Nico.  He would find a second family and more people to call his friends.  In time, he would learn to call Divitia home.

Before he finally managed to escort Nico back outside, Will was stopped several more times by children coming to see him.  “I’m sorry for the delays,” Will apologized as they left the ward with Asterion and Hestia following behind them.

“It seems that children are fond of you,” Nico observed casually.  “You will make a good father.”

Will blinked a few times as he stared at Nico, unsure how to react.  Nico didn’t seem to think he’d said anything odd, but there was no doubt that Will had heard correctly.  Even though Nico wasn’t a student of medicine, surely he must have understood how procreation occurred?

“But...Your Highness, we won’t have any children,” he said.

“Why, that’s absurd,” Nico said humorlessly.  “Then who will help me raise Asterion?”

Will looked from Nico to his aging dog, then back to Nico, who was still wearing a serious, earnest expression.  Finally, the corner of Nico’s mouth quirked up and Will tilted his head back and laughed.

“He is a good son, as you’ll soon discover,” Nico went on, patting Asterion’s head.

“Gods above, I love you,” Will said.

Nico frowned.  “That’s not fair,” he said.

“And why not?” Will asked.

“You can’t say that and expect me to not kiss you.”

Will laughed again.  “A kiss would be quite welcome, Your Highness,” he said.

So he gave one.  But a single kiss was not enough for Nico.

By the time Hestia forced them to separate, it was starting to get dark, so Will took Nico to the Venadican Library to enjoy the rest of their evening in the quiet, peaceful atmosphere.  Nico, however, seemed to be after a bit more than peace and quiet.

While he was reading, Will saw Nico moving out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t think much of it until he felt Nico’s fingers trace over his knuckles.  “Yes, Your Highness?” Will asked, glancing up from his book.

“You look beautiful,” Nico said.

Will hadn’t been expecting that.  “Oh,” he said when he finally managed to find his voice.  “Thank you, Your Highness.”

“I want to ask my sister to paint you,” Nico added.

Will was flattered but confused by the sudden attention, and he couldn’t help wrinkling his nose in distaste at the idea of being painted.

“No?” Nico asked.  Will thought he might have looked a bit disappointed.  He could still have trouble reading Nico; his expressions were sometimes too subtle to make sense of.

“I don’t like sitting for portraits,” Will explained.  He couldn’t stay still without anything to do long enough to pose and people always shouted at him for it.

“I’d like a portrait of you reading,” Nico said.  “You may sit and keep yourself entertained with a book.  You look pretty when you read.”

Will’s mouth felt dry.  He tried to think of something to say, but all that came to mind was, “Thank you.”

“I always think you’re pretty,” Nico said.  He put his knee on the seat beside Will and his forearm by Will’s shoulder on the back of his armchair.  “Everytime I look at you, I want to kiss you.”

Will swallowed and his book fell forgotten on his lap.  When Nico’s fingers grazed his jaw, Will closed his eyes and tilted his chin up.  He felt Nico’s hot breath against his lips, then—

Across the room, Hestia cleared her throat.  “Your Highness?” she said.

Will quickly pulled away while Nico turned to glare at their chaperone, but obediently moved to sit in the chair beside Will’s.  He made it very clear that he wasn’t pleased, however; he slumped into his seat, crossed his arms, and grumbled to himself incoherently.  Will bit his lip to suppress a grin.  Nico could sometimes act like a spoiled child, but Will didn’t mind.  He even found it endearing.  Nico was rebellious but good-hearted, which made his defiance entertaining rather than annoying.  When Will gently put his hand on Nico’s elbow to soothe him, Nico relaxed so immediately that Will felt warm with joy.  Although his moods were sometimes amusing, it made Will happy to know that he was able to calm his fiancé.

Hestia must have also found it entertaining, because she politely stifled a giggle behind her hand.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Nico demanded.

“I am trying my very hardest not to,” Hestia assured.

Hestia and Nico exchanged a glance that gave off an air of familiarity, and Will tilted his head curiously.  How could Hestia address Nico so casually?  Even Will, Nico’s fiancé, used formal language when speaking to him.  Although Nico had once mentioned that he and Hestia would occasionally chat, Will suspected there was far more to their relationship than Nico had let on.  “If you don’t mind me prying, how long have you known each other?” Will dared to ask.  “How did you meet?”

Nico and Hestia glanced at each other again before Nico said, “Almost ten years, I think.  She was a kitchen maid in the estate where I lived during the outbreak of the Scarlet Delirium.”

“I see,” Will said, but the answer only gave him more questions.  How did a kitchen maid become an aide to the Matestra and a friend of a prince?  Nico was always vague when the topic of his stay on the countryside was brought up, so Will was careful not to ask more questions than Nico was willing to answer.  He did wonder, however.

“One day, I will tell you the story,” Nico said, then he gestured to Will’s book.  “What are you reading?”

Will decided not to comment on Nico’s quick change of topic, but he noted to himself that he would have to ask Nico about his relationship with Hestia again later if he was willing to discuss it.  “It’s a collection of essays on theories of poverty,” Will answered.  “At the moment I’m reading ‘Concerning the Origins of Human Inequality’ by Penia.”

“I’ve read it,” Nico said with a nod.  “It contains some good points, but wasn’t very well-written.”

“Better than Euthenia, in my opinion,” Will said.  “At least Penia’s direct.  Euthenia somehow manages to fill entire pages without saying anything.”

“Oh, I hate reading Euthenia,” Nico agreed.  “You mustn’t tell Reyna, but I never finished ‘A Treatise on Economic Disparity.’”

Will laughed humorlessly.  “Truthfully, I think very few people other than Lady Reyna have finished it.  I did, but it took a month to get through it.  Personally, I prefer the works of Ma’at to either Penia or Euthenia.”

“Ma’at?” Nico asked, the syllables sounding awkward on his tongue.  “I’m not familiar with name.”

“She is an Aegyptian theorist,” Will explained.  “I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture she gave at the Expo last summer.”

“Ah,” said Nico.  “I forgot that you spoke Aegyptian.”

“Yes, Your Highness.  Many of the most brilliant scholars in the world come from Aegyptia.  I have access to translated works, but sometimes ideas are lost in translation.  Master Asclepius is fluent in Aegyptian and encouraged me to learn the language.  Which reminds me: the Venadican choir and orchestra are preparing to perform an Aegyptian opera.  Opera is only just starting to become popular in Aegyptia and the blend of traditional Aegyptian music with Romanus opera style is fascinating.  Many musicians in the orchestra have even learned Aegyptian instruments just to perform it.  The parts I have heard are brilliant.”

“Then you haven’t seen the opera in its entirety?” Nico asked.

“No; the show doesn’t begin until after you leave,” Will said.  “But if you’d like, I can arrange for us to watch a rehearsal.  It won’t be a polished performance, but it would still be nice.  We would have the theater to ourselves.”

“I would love to,” Nico said.  “What is the story about?”

“It is the story of the king of their gods, Ra.  I can find a collection of Aegyptian stories for you, if you would like.  There’s an excellent translation of poems you might enjoy.”

When Nico answered that yes, he would like that, Will offered Nico his arm and led him through the aisles, Hestia walking quietly behind them as she read her own book.  Asterion remained behind dozing until they got far enough away for him to feel obligated to get up and follow his master.  Nico occupied himself by examining the titles on the spines while Will searched.

“I thought the Palatium de Divitae had a good library, but I was mistaken,” Nico mused.  “You must love this place.”

“I can spend entire days here,” Will answered.  “I may have even fallen asleep here once or twice.”

Nico laughed softly.  “Some of these books look like they’ve been here for centuries,” he went on.  “They must have been here even before the Scatinavian invasions.” Will heard the slide of Nico taking a book from the shelves looked over in time to see him blush and frantically shove it away again.

“Is that Sappho?” Will asked, glancing at the print on the cover.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I like Sappho.  Her work is so interesting, don’t you think?”

Nico stopped trying to shove the book away and looked at Will curiously.  “Interesting?” he asked.

“Of course,” Will said.  “She was banished from the sorority for writing love poetry and breaking her vows.  Don’t you think that’s at least somewhat interesting?  Even today, her life and her poetry are surrounded by debate.”

“Oh,” Nico said slowly.  “So you don’t think it’s...well, scandalous?”

“Certainly it’s scandalous, but her poetry is still rich in artistic and literary value.  She’s frank and her depictions are so vivid that her work is still banned in some areas, but it was her poetry that brought to public attention that sometimes, sorors fall in love, and when they do, it’s passionate and painful.”  For a long time, Will had suspected that there was more to Emmie and Jo’s relationship than solely friendship.  There was a subtle dynamic between them that he, Cal, and Leo had picked up on over time, but the three of them had agreed to protect Emmie and Jo’s secret.  Will suspected that his aunt was deliberately turning a blind eye to it, but she wouldn’t be able to continue to do so if someone reported it to her directly.  The Soror’s Oath was sacred; breaking it was a serious offence.  Will wasn’t certain exactly what would happen to Emmie and Jo if there relationship was discovered.  They would be expelled from the Sorority, but he wasn’t naive enough to hope that would be the end of it.  Although the Sorority rarely condoned the death penalty—there had only been one formal death sentence in the Romanus Terris during Will’s lifetime—that was little comfort to Will.  The kind of public ridicule and ostracism that would come from being excommunicated did not seem to be much kinder than a death sentence.  Will didn’t want to see what happened to Sappho happen to Emmie and Jo.

“I’m surprised you have read Sappho,” Will said, trying to forget about how much danger Emmie and Jo could be in.  “I was under the impression that her work is still banned in many places in Pluto.”

“The only time Sappho was ever mentioned in my lessons was when my tutor expressly forbade me to read her work,” Nico said as he leafed through the pages.  “Naturally, when I stumbled upon a collection of Sappho’s poetry a few years later, I read it anyway.  And I was horrified by it.”

Will laughed quietly.  It was very like Nico to be both intrigued and scandalized by the work of Sappho.  Nico’s opinion could be difficult to predict and often depended on how rebellious he was feeling that day.

“And are you still horrified?” Will asked.

“Maybe.  But look at this.” Nico stepped closer so that Will could see the page he was looking at before he started to recite it outloud.

“Your lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by, sets the heart in my rib cage fluttering; if I glance at you even a moment, I can’t say a thing,

and my tongue stiffens into silence, thin flames underneath my skin prickle and spark, a rush of blood booms in my ears, and then my eyes go dark,

and sweat pours coldly over me, and all my body trembles, suddenly paler than summer grass am I, and I appear to have nearly died.

“How can I hate poetry that is so beautiful?” Nico asked.  “Yes, it’s horrifying, but exhilarating.  And it’s less shocking to me now that I’m in love.”

Will had expected the sentence to end with “now that I’m older,” so it took him a moment to process what Nico had actually said.  He felt his face burn in embarrassment when he figured it out and he couldn’t help but wonder if Nico had said it just to see his reaction.  Will thought he would laugh at his embarrassment, but Nico took a step closer instead.  “You make my heart race so fast that it hurts,” he said.  “I sometimes become so nervous around you that I can’t speak.  My mouth gets dry.  I can barely think.  I feel like I’ve lost my mind.  Do you ever feel that way?  Do you ever feel like your skin is on fire?  Does your heart ever beat so hard that you fear it might burst?”

“I do not think I have to fear that my organs will spontaneously rupture,” Will blurted out.

Nico opened his mouth to say something, but then stopped.  For a second, he looked confused, then few indecipherable expressions flickered across his face before he settled on a grin.  “Will, I swear to the gods,” he laughed.

While Will hadn’t actually been trying to make Nico laugh, he decided to pretend that he had indeed made a witty remark rather than the first comment his garbled mind could think of.  “It’s the part you read first that I liked the most,” Will said, tapping the book in Nico’s hands. “‘Your lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by, sets the heart in my rib cage fluttering.’  I am sure that my heart is perfectly healthy, but it’s true that it beats harder for the sound of your laughter.  I want to make you laugh every day.”

Nico looked at Will quietly for a moment before carefully closing the book.  “And I like your voice,” he said, running his thumb over Will’s lower lip.  “It’s warm.  Soothing.  I want to hear to your voice every day.”

Will reached up to hold Nico’s hand steady and kissed the back of his fingers.  “I want to kiss you every day,” he whispered.

“Then I think you ought to make up for all the days you missed these past few months,” Nico said.  He carelessly tucked the book in the shelves and grabbed the front of Will’s coat to pull him closer, then—

“Good evening, Your Highness; Lord William,” said a devastatingly familiar voice.  Will and Nico slowly turned to find Reyna standing at the end of the aisle beside Hestia and Asterion, her arms folded and her expression like stone.  Hestia was wise enough to take Reyna’s appearance as her cue to leave, but Nico and Will weren’t so fortunate.

“I think it’s time for you to escort His Highness to his chambers for the night, Lord William.”  Her voice was clipped and cold, like the soft but ominous rumble of faraway thunder before a storm.  Will would have preferred it if she’d shouted.  Instead, she stepped aside and motioned for them to go ahead of her.  Will quickly scrambled to put the book of poems away properly, hoping that Reyna hadn’t noticed what they were looking at.  The entire way to Nico’s chambers, he felt like her eyes were stabbing into their backs.  Apparently she liked to keep them on edge, because Reyna waited until they were outside Nico’s door to lecture them.

“Lady Hestia has informed me that she refuses to chaperone for you again,” she said.

Nico gasped.  “But—”

“Perhaps if you had behaved yourself, she would have felt more comfortable being around the two you,” Reyna snapped.  “Instead, I heard that you attempted to climb on your fiancé, then proceeded to read him Sappho, of all things.”

“‘Climb on’ is a highly exaggerated phrase—”

“So for the rest of our stay in Venadica, you will remain with me at all times.  If I must attend meetings for an entire day, then you must attend them with me.  The two of you may sit in the corner of the room and whisper about Sapphic love poems as much as your hearts desire, but under no circumstances are the both you to leave my sight at the same time.”

“Reyna—”

“No arguments,” Reyna interrupted.  “Say goodnight, Your Highness.”

Nico sighed and turned back to Will and despite her anger, Reyna stepped back to give them some privacy.  “I wish we could marry sooner,” Nico said.  “I hate being separated.  I miss you too much and I’m tired of being forced to listen to chaperones.”

“It won’t be long before I join you in Divitia,” Will said.  “Then we’ll be together so much that I worry you’ll tire of me.”

“Impossible,” said Nico.  “I will have the best husband in history.”

Will laughed shyly.  “I love you,” he said as he traced Nico’s cheekbones with the back of his fingers.  Nico’s cheeks darkened, but he held Will’s eyes.  Will stepped closer.  “May I...?”

“Yes,” Nico interrupted eagerly.  He blushed harder and averted his eyes when Will chuckled.

“I didn’t finish my question,” Will said.

“I know what you were going to ask.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I....”  Nico frowned.  “Surely I wasn’t wrong?”

Will smiled.  “You weren’t wrong,” he assured.  “But you really ought to listen to the whole question before answering.  What if I’d asked for permission to keep Asterion or throw you in a lake?  I once ruined an entire day’s work because I didn’t listen to Master Asclepius properly and assumed he wanted the particles absorbed in water rather than adsorbed from water, so I didn’t prepare the charcoal samples and—”

“Will, please.”

“My apologies.  I...what were we talking about?”

“You were going to kiss me.”

“That’s right,” Will said with a grin.  “Except I didn’t actually say—”

“Will.  I have been waiting very patiently for you to kiss me.  Are you laughing at me?  Don’t laugh at me!  Gods, Will, I swear....”  Nico grabbed the front of Will’s coat to pull him into a kiss.  Will laughed against Nico’s lips, but then Nico kissed him again, and then again, and Will suddenly wondered why he’d wasted valuable time teasing Nico when he could have been kissing him instead.

Will wasn’t sure if they ever would have stopped had Reyna not interrupted.  “Your Highness, that’s enough,” she said.  “Bid Lord William goodnight.  Now.”

Nico pulled back far enough for Will to see his displeased expression.  “I think you may have earned another lecture,” Will whispered.

Nico smirked.  “I can handle a lecture if it means I can kiss you,” he said.  To illustrate his point, he leaned closer to kiss Will’s cheek.

But the kiss didn’t come.

“Meet me later tonight,” Nico whispered against his skin.

Will shivered as Nico’s breath tickled his neck.  His knees felt like they’d crumble beneath him and he wanted to go limp against Nico’s shoulder.  “Where?” he asked.

“By the fountain in Aether’s square,” Nico answered.  “That’s where we first met, isn’t it?”

Will swallowed and nodded.  He didn’t trust his voice to remain steady.

“I’ll be there as soon as I’m able to get away.  Don’t make me wait.” As Nico pulled back, he brushed his lips against Will’s cheek.  Will wanted to reach out and keep him from leaving—and perhaps steal a dozen more kisses—but he felt frozen.  He could only blush when Nico offered him a secretive smile and turned away before disappearing into his room.

*   *   *

Nico hadn’t expected Reyna to be so strict.  Despite her declaration to not be lenient after the maze incident in Delphi, Reyna seemed to be getting lighter on Nico’s courting restrictions.  Nico had discovered that Reyna could rarely refuse him when he looked at her as innocently as possible and said, “but it would make me so happy, Reyna.”  In fact, it was so effective that during the journey from Neptune to Pluto, Nico had once even managed to get Reyna to agree to join Hedge on the bench at the back of the carriage for a while, leaving Nico and Will alone inside.  He and Will had sat opposite each other at first, shyly talking about unimportant things.  After a few awkward pauses, Nico had gotten up to sit beside Will and then kissed him.  They’d proceeded to spend most of their allotted alone time kissing.

Even Hedge appeared to be warming up to Nico’s fiancé.  One day during the journey to Pluto, Hedge aggressively informed Will that if he even thought about unbuttoning Nico’s breeches, he’d find himself chained up to a tree naked for a night—an image that Nico might have liked a bit too much.  Will, eternally polite and pleasant, had quite sincerely told Hedge that he had only the highest respect for Nico and would never dream of doing anything that Hedge would disapprove of.  Then Will had looked at Nico with the softest, purest smile and Hedge had nearly burst into tears.  He’d reached up and patted Will’s shoulder, saying, “good man, Lord Solace, you’re a good man,” and then he’d walked away, sniffling and dabbing at his eyes.  Nico would forever deny having been a bit disappointed when Will assured Hedge that his intentions were entirely pure.  The thought had occurred to him that if any breeches were unbuttoned, it was much more likely to be Nico who was unbuttoning them.  He’d quickly buried the thought in embarrassment, but he’d be lying if he said he’d never thought about it again.

Truthfully, Nico thought about that sort of thing fairly often.  Nearly every night during that journey, Nico had lain awake in bed for hours, staring at unfamiliar ceilings and thinking about Will.  On several occasions, he’d seriously considered sneaking out to visit his fiancé, maybe even to spend the night in his room.  He’d tried to convince himself that he would be content with merely lying beside Will, but then his imagination would get the better of him and he’d end up lying on his belly and whimpering into his pillow as he wished away his arousal.  He sometimes even dreamed about Will—strange, heated, impure dreams that he would never admit to outloud.  And as shameful as those dreams were, Nico could not deny enjoying them.  He enjoyed them quite a bit, in fact.

Although Nico knew restrictions were necessary, he’d come to the conclusion that it was alright to push the boundaries a little bit.  Nico had once again decided that he would kiss his fiancé as much as he liked.  If that meant he had to sneak out of the palace late at night, then so be it.

Escaping wasn’t difficult, but Nico ran into a few problems along the way.  There was a guard posted outside his door at all times, so Nico was forced to exit through the window.  Asterion wouldn’t stop whining every time Nico tried to leave.  Worrying that the dog would alert someone to his absence, Nico was forced to bring Asterion along with him.  Although Nico was on the ground floor, there was still a raised balcony outside his room.  It wouldn’t have been difficult to climb if it hadn’t been for Asterion, who was starting to have hip trouble in his old age.  It was a bit of a challenge to carry the dog when he kept wiggling.  Then, after taking a few wrong turns in the garden, Nico managed to navigate his way to the fountain in Aether’s square, where he found Will waiting for him as planned.  He looked happy and beautiful with the yellow light of gas lamps dancing in his eyes.  It made Nico want to kiss him, so he did.

“I wasn’t expecting you to bring a friend,” Will commented, gesturing to Asterion.

“I hadn’t planned to, but he insisted,” Nico explained.  “Have you been waiting long?”

Will laughed.  “Only fifteen years or so,” he said, looking at the stone faces of the goddesses adorning the fountain.  “When I first came to Venadica, I used to sit in this spot for hours every week and I’d imagine you coming to join me.  I had a plan to introduce you to all my friends and impress you by having so many.”

“I can’t believe that the memory of meeting me once as a child was so important to you,” Nico said.  “Are you sure you’re not lying just to flatter me?”

“Meeting royalty is always a memorable experience, Your Highness,” Will said.  “But what’s more memorable is when you fall instantly in love.  I thought you were amazing.”

“I must have thought very highly of you, as well,” Nico assured.

Will laughed.  “No, you pitied me,” he said.  “You were concerned that I didn’t have any friends and you thought that I didn’t have a tongue, then you lectured me for being a clumsy dancer.  But I was so smitten that for years, I’d come here and imagine meeting you again.  I was always a bit disappointed that you didn’t show.”

“I’m here now,” Nico said.

“Yes, you are,” Will agreed.  “In fact, you arranged to meet me here alone, scandalously late at night.  I can’t help thinking this is a very bad idea.”

“I know it is,” Nico admitted.  “But I don’t particularly care.  Do you?”

Will grinned.  “No.”

“Good,” Nico said, stepping closer and reaching for Will’s hand.  “Because right now, I would very much like to be alone with my fiancé.  I haven’t seen you in months.”

Will cocked his head to the side curiously.  “But we’ve been apart longer before,” he pointed out.

Nico pursed his lips in frustration.  As much as he adored Will, he couldn’t help feeling impatient when Will didn’t understand his intentions.  Nico had always had trouble finding the right words to express how he felt and what he wanted, but he’d been working to improve that for Will.  He was doing his very best to be honest and express himself clearly, so it seemed that the very least Will could do was work a bit harder to understand.  Sometimes, Will could be a bit too innocent—too chaste, too pure....

I can change that, Nico immediately thought, then he flushed as he vividly imagined himself sullying Will’s virtue.

“We were together for a long time this spring,” Nico stammered.  “It felt strange to suddenly not be together and—”

Will squeezed Nico’s hand.  Nico fell silent almost instantaneously when he looked up and found Will smiling at him.  “I know, Your Highness,” Will said.  “I was teasing.”

“Oh,” Nico breathed.  So maybe Will was working harder to understand.

He noticed that the corners of Will’s eyes wrinkled when he smiled.  It was distracting.  Nico wanted to reach out and gently run his thumb over Will’s golden eyelashes.  He wanted to trace the lines of Will’s face.  He wanted to touch Will.  Anywhere.  Everywhere .

“Would you like to go to the laboratories?” Will said, breaking their eye contact and pointing the opposite direction.  “I’d love to show you around my workspace again.”

Nico sighed.  Then again, maybe Will couldn’t read Nico’s intentions at all.  He’d wanted to kiss Will, not tour his lab.  He pretended to happily agree anyway.

“I actually haven’t spent as much time as I usually do in the labs lately,” Will admitted as he offered Nico his arm.

“Why not?” Nico asked.  “Has there been trouble?”  Will had explained that research could often be stalled if there was not enough financial support.  He’d mentioned several projects that he and Asclepius had wanted to take on, but were unable to pursue due to a lack of funding.  Sometimes funders were uninterested in his research or prefered to invest in different projects.  Will had even once mentioned that he worried Asclepius was being funded less frequently now that he was in his older years and had started to acquire a reputation for being forgetful and scatterbrained.

But Will shook his head.  “No; no trouble,” he answered.  “I’m still assisting Asclepius and Hygeia in the infirmary, but lately I haven’t had much time to spend on other medical studies.  I’ve been devoting more time than usual to my other studies—trade, history, political theory, and such.”

“Why?” Nico asked.  Although Will was enthusiastic about all his studies, he prefered to focus on healing and medicine.

Will bowed his head and blushed, then looked at Nico out of the corner of his eye and smiled shyly.  “Because in less than one year, I’ll marry a prince,” he answered quietly.  “I want to be a good consort for you.”

Nico wanted to tell Will that he already thought he was perfect, but his mouth felt dry.  It was impossible for Nico to say something so embarrassing.

No, Nico reminded himself.  It was very much possible; he was just afraid.

“You’re already perfect,” Nico forced himself to say.  It came out sounding stiff and uncomfortable, but he meant it.  “But thank you,” he added, so that he sounded a bit more grateful.  He was so flattered that he wanted nothing more than to pull Will close and kiss him.

Admittedly, he always wanted to kiss Will, but he was still flattered.

The summer night air was pleasant; cooler than it was in the heat of the day, but still warm.  Nico couldn’t decide if Will’s body heat was soothing or thrilling.  He teetered between feeling calm and feeling like he was on fire, but the longer they walked, the more he leaned towards fire.  That made him quite irritated when Will started babbling about medicine instead of kissing him after they got to the lab.

It was nice to see the way Will lit up, however, so Nico allowed Will to ramble on for a while.  He smiled, nodded along, and tried to pay attention, but his thoughts kept drifting to other things Will could do with his very nice lips.

Finally, Nico put his hand on Will’s arm to stop him.  “I think you should kiss me,” he said.

Will, who was holding a bundle of plants in each hand, tilted his head to the side and looked confused.  “This doesn’t interest you?” he asked in a hurt voice.

Nico cursed Will for being so adorable.  “Of course I’m interested,” he said gently.  “But you can tell me about this another time.  Right now I’d rather take advantage of the fact that we don’t have any chaperones and—”  Nico broke off when he noticed Will smirking.  “You’re teasing me again,” he realized.  “Gods, Will, why do you do these things to me?”

“I admit that I can be a bit slow to pick up on your intentions, but I’m not completely hopeless,” Will said, putting the plants back down on the work table behind Nico.

“You should focus less on teasing me and more on kissing me,” Nico said, running his fingers down the lapel of Will’s coat.  “Have I made myself clear enough for you?”

“What I don’t understand is why you haven’t just kissed me yet,” Will said.

“Gods, Will, you weren’t always this difficult,” Nico growled, but he tugged Will close and kissed him anyway.  Will’s laugh felt nice when it tickled his lips.  His laughter was always contagious, even when it made it difficult to coordinate a proper kiss.

Nico heard Asterion whimper in the doorway, so he cracked his eyes open to check on him.  The dog was watching with pathetic, droopy eyes, and his tail started to wag when he noticed Nico paying attention to him.  Will broke away from the kiss and followed Nico’s eyes to Asterion.  “Is—” he started, but Nico forced him to turn back and kissed him again.

“Ignore him,” Nico said against Will’s lips.  “He’ll be fine.” Asterion whimpered again, but Nico just waved in his direction to silence him before focusing on Will’s kisses again.

That time, they didn’t laugh.  Nico felt unbelievably good, like a part of him that had long been empty was suddenly whole now that he had Will.  But he needed more.  Nico wrapped his arms around Will’s neck and pulled him closer.  He pushed his chest against Will’s, hoping that Will would touch him back, but Will’s hands remained lightly on Nico’s upper arms.  “Hold me,” Nico mumbled between kisses.

“How?” Will asked.

Nico was so frustrated that he almost bit Will.  “I don’t know,” he growled.  “Just hold me.”

Will’s hands hesitantly reached for Nico’s waist before he slid his arms around Nico’s back.  Then Nico hungrily pushed against Will’s lips and Will pushed back, tightening Nico inside his embrace.  The pressure of Will’s arms around his waist, the feeling of Will’s lips on his, the heat of Will’s breath...it was too good, too intoxicating.  Nico tugged Will closer and Will stumbled forward, pressing Nico against the table behind him.

“Too tight,” Will gasped, tugging at one of Nico’s arms around his neck.  Nico mumbled an apology when he realized he’d been choking Will, but didn’t stop kissing him.  Will didn’t stop, either.

He felt hot, so hot, like he was burning alive and he needed Will to live.  A voice in his head growled for more like a mad, predatory beast.  His thoughts were filthy and scandalous, yet Nico wasn’t bothered by that.  He wanted to be filthy.  He wanted to make Will filthy.  He wanted to shred Will’s clothes off his body and touch his skin, then put his mouth on Will and taste him.  And Will’s legs, his legs— Nico wanted to look at those legs.  He would get his hands on Will’s thighs and feel the strong muscles working beneath his skin, then he would bite them and listen to Will’s responding cries of pleasure.

Nico imagined Will underneath him, legs wrapped around Nico’s waist while Nico pounded into him.  Or perhaps Will could be astride him, his thighs on either side of Nico’s hips.  And what would it be like to feel the force in those powerful legs when Will took him?  How would it feel when Will slammed inside?  Would Will drive into him hard and fast?  Would he make Nico scream?

Nico gasped against Will’s lips at the thought.  More, growled the hungry beast inside him.  Nico pulled Will closer, pressed their bodies against each other—

It took far too long for Nico to realize his mistake.  So occupied with his obscene desires, Nico had neglected to consider how his body might react to his fantasies.  He was unable to suppress a pathetic whimper when Will’s thigh pressed against his groin, sending a wave of heat scorching through his entire body.  Delirious with pleasure, Nico rutted against Will’s leg once before the belated horor finally set in.

The fantasies he entertained about his fiancé were crude and shameful enough, but at least Nico’s thoughts were private.  He could imagine the most debauched scenarios without revealing them to anyone, keeping his name clean even if his mind was corrupted by wanton desires.  Nico had assuaged the feelings of guilt and shame with assurances that it was all in his head and that he would never act on them.  And yet, at his first opportunity to be alone with his fiancé without chaperones to control his behavior, Nico’s filthy desires had taken over his body.  He was unmarried—an unmarried prince, at that.  His behavior was unacceptable, disgusting, vile...and it felt good, so very good.

Nico quickly pushed Will away before the cloud of lust settled back over him.  He prayed to the gods that Will hadn’t noticed his body’s predicament, but it was clear that Will had.  His eyes were wide, his face was red, and his gaze briefly flickered to Nico’s breeches.  Thankfully, Nico’s waistcoat was long enough to hide his problem, but that offered Nico little comfort.

“It’s not...I’m not...I didn’t mean....” Nico stuttered.  “Please forgive me.  I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

Will stared wordlessly and Nico had to bite his tongue to keep himself from rambling apologies for being so rude, knowing that he’d only make it worse.  After a second of silence that felt like a century, Will cleared his throat.  “It’s quite alright, Your Highness. It’s a typical, automatic reaction of the male body in...um...in that sort of situation.”

Male body.  Will had a male body.  A very nice male body.  A male body that must have those same ‘typical reactions.’  Nico wanted to see Will react that way.  He wanted to make Will react that way.  He wanted to touch Will, to tear off Will’s clothes, to run his hands over Will’s bare skin, and to bite....

Nico blinked away the vivid, enticing scenes infiltrating his mind and realized that Will was still talking.  “—so no apologies are necessary,” Will was saying.  “It was unintentional, I understand.”

It had not been completely unintentional.  The reaction of his body had been automatic, and rutting against Will’s thigh had been an almost reflexive response to the pleasure of being touched, but the thoughts that had led Nico to his predicament in the first place?  Those had been very much intentional.

Nico decided that there was no reason to correct him.

“I...” Nico started, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.  Will didn’t ask him to continue.  In fact, Will didn’t say anything at all.  Nico wanted to run back to the Sororal Palace and hide under the blankets on his bed forever.

And then a voice called, “Will, is that you?”

Will and Nico’s heads both snapped to the door.  The awkward tension fizzled away, but was quickly replaced with terror as Nico realized they were about to be caught.  Will glanced at Nico and looked like he was about to say something, but then he hurried to the door and left Nico alone in the room.

“Aw, look at you dressed in your fancy clothes,” cooed the voice.  “I saw the light on from the woodshop and I thought it might be you.  Have you got a minute to help me with—why is there a dog in here?”

“I...I don’t know,” Nico heard Will say.  “I’ll come if you’ll give me a moment to clean the lab.”

“I can help.”

“I can do it on my own.  Just go back to the shop and I’ll—”

“Why are you standing like that?  Are you hiding something in there?”

“Leo—”

“Let me—”

“Leo, no—”

Nico didn’t realize that he ought to hide until it was too late and Will’s friend had already poked his head inside the room.

“Oh,” said Will’s friend.  “That’s interesting.”

“Leo,” Will said, pulling him from the doorway.  “Please give me a moment and then I’ll come help you in the shop.”

“Right, yeah, of course,” said Leo blankly.  “Take your time.  You have to...make sure the lab is clean....”

“Leave,” Will ordered.

Nico hated his body and he hated that he couldn’t help shivering at Will’s tone.  He’d never heard Will use such a commanding voice before.  It opened up all sorts of new scenarios for Nico to imagine later on.

With Leo’s footsteps fading away, the room fell silent again.  Nico pretended to be looking at the floor and prayed that Will would follow after his friend quickly so that Nico could wallow in misery alone.

But instead, Will cleared his throat and stepped back inside the room to approach Nico again.  “I’ll escort you back,” Will said.  When Nico glanced up, Will’s cheeks were pink and his gaze fixed on his shoes.

He doesn’t want to be around me anymore, Nico realized.  He’d made Will uncomfortable.  He’d disgusted Will.

“I can do it on my own,” Nico said.  “Your friend is waiting for you.”

Will shook his head, but still didn’t meet Nico’s eyes.  “I can’t leave you to walk through the city alone at night.”

“I have Asterion,” Nico pointed out.

“At least allow me to escort you to the entrance of the palace,” said Will.  “I’d like to see you there safely, if only for my own peace of mind.” Will’s eyes finally flickered up and he held Nico’s gaze for a second before blushing and looking away again.

Nico sighed.  “To the palace,” he agreed.

Will offered Nico his arm, but Nico knew it was only to be polite.  The entire left side of his body felt like it was burning with Will next to him, like Will was sending over waves of fire to sear off whatever Nico’s touch was contaminating him with.

They didn’t talk.  The only sounds were their footsteps and Asterion panting beside them.  Nico’s throat itched and he wanted to cough, but he didn’t dare make a noise.  He only wanted the walk to be over as quickly as possible.  It seemed that the gods had cursed him by making it stretch on for an eternity.

“I’ll meet you again in the morning,” Will said when they finally reached the palace.  “Sleep well, Your Highness.”

“Sleep well,” Nico answered.

He made to turn away and leave, but Will touched his shoulder and held him back.  Before Nico could even react, Will brushed his lips against Nico’s cheek.  Nico felt a spark of hope, realizing that perhaps he hadn’t disgusted Will—but hope was quickly replaced by dread, because Will’s kiss was so chaste that it felt like a rejection.

Will turned away first, but Nico didn’t wait for him to leave before he escaped with Asterion back to the side of the palace to climb back into his room through the window.  He quickly picked Asterion up and climbed onto the balcony before helping him back inside, then he ducked into the room to hide in his blankets and pity himself for the rest of his life.

But then a voice said, “Perhaps it would have been easier to use the door.”

Nico whirled around to find Reyna standing in the dark, the moonlight illuminating the hard, disapproving lines of her face.  Her arms were crossed and her lips were pursed, her dark eyes burning with anger.

“I was...I...” Nico started, but he faltered when Reyna crossed the room to stand in front of him.  Her glare felt even more crippling up close.

“Hedge had the sense to check your chambers at the start of his watch,” Reyna said.  “Imagine how worried he was to find you missing.  For all we knew, you could have been kidnapped.”

“I wasn’t—”

“I know you weren’t.  Fortunately for your reputation, I assumed that you’d run off with your fiancé and I kept your disappearance quiet.  When your guards searched the palace without finding you, I nearly sent out the city’s night watch.  Imagine the scandal it would have caused if you’d been discovered alone with a suitor at night.”

“Reyna—”

“I won’t cover for you again,” Reyna interrupted.  “I shouldn’t have covered for you at all!  What if I’d been wrong?  What if something had happened to you and I didn’t do anything about it?  Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to be out after dark in such a large city?  Even Venadica has its crime, Your Highness.  I need to be able to trust that you take your own safety seriously.”

“I know,” Nico said before Reyna could lecture him further.  “I won’t do it again.”

Reyna looked both skeptical and perplexed by Nico’s lack of resistance.

“I learned my lesson,” Nico added.  “From now until the wedding, I’ll be sure to stay with a chaperone every time I meet Will.  I won’t sneak away again.”

Reyna drummed her fingers against her elbow.  She looked him over silently for a moment, then pointed to a chair by the window and said, “Sit.”

Nico wanted nothing more than to fall into his bed and wallow in self-pity until the morning, but he obeyed.  Reyna lit a standing gas lamp in the corner of the room before joining him.  She did not sit; instead, she stood over him, her expression still so harsh and disappointed that Nico slumped into his chair in defeat.

“Your posture,” Reyna reminded, and Nico forced himself to sit up straight.  “Tell me exactly what happened,” she said.

Nico shook his head.  It had been so mortifying, so unspeakable, and he had no desire to relive it.  He’d never tell anyone what had happened.

“You won’t tell my father about this, will you?” he asked.

“I am obligated to report to His Majesty,” Reyna said.

“But—”

“I have already kept enough secrets for you,” she reminded.

“Please, Reyna,” Nico said.  “I won’t ask you to do this again.  Telling my father won’t accomplish anything other than making me more miserable.  I’ve learned my lesson and I won’t cause any more trouble—I swear it.”

Reyna was quiet as she carefully looked him over.  “Alright.  I’ll trust that you are being sincere.”

Nico let out a breath in relief.

“But,” Reyna went on, and Nico tensed again.  “If something went wrong while you were off frolicking with your fiancé—” Nico tried to object to the word ‘frolicking,’ but Reyna ignored him, “—then I need to know what happened.”

Nico felt the blood drain from his face.  “No.  I can’t say.”

Reyna sighed and when she spoke again, her voice was softer.  “You won’t be in any trouble, Your Highness.  I only need you to tell me if Lord William did anything that I, as a chaperone, should be aware of.”

Nico frowned.  “What? Will?  No!  Do you think Will is the most problematic of the two of us?”

“No, but I assumed you would be boasting about it if it had been your fault.  Was I wrong?”

“It wasn’t exactly my fault, either,” Nico said defensively.  “I didn’t mean for it to happen, I just...just...Will said it was normal!  An automatic response!”

Reyna’s eyes widened before Nico realized he’d said too much.  “Do you mean...” she trailed off and vaguely gestured to Nico’s lower body.  “And it was unplanned?”

Nico’s face burned, but he couldn’t deny it.  “I do have some shame,” he snapped.  “I didn’t sneak out with the intention of bedding him.  I just...got excited.”

“And Lord William noticed?”

Nico whimpered.

It was rare to hear Reyna laugh.  While she smiled at Nico and sometimes softly chuckled, full laughs did not happen often.  But when Nico was unable to do more than whine pathetically, Reyna laughed so hard that she clutched her sides and doubled over.

“Stop laughing at me!” Nico demanded, but Reyna did not obey.

“Impossibile,” she said.  “You see: laughing, much like the engorgement a certain part of your anatomy, is an automatic response to certain stimuli.  You cannot order me to stop laughing any more than you can order your physiology to stop functioning.”

“I don’t appear to have very good control over my anatomy,” Nico grumbled.

“I would say that you got what you deserved, but I must admit...that is too severe a punishment,” she said, dabbing at her eyes.

Nico was outraged—was she crying from laughing so hard?  “And that is why I’m promising to behave!” he snapped.  “I have suffered enough already, so stop laughing!”

“I shouldn’t taunt, I know,” Reyna said.  She took a deep breath and used her sleeve to wipe tears from her eyes.  Sighing, Nico pulled a handkerchief from the pocket in his coat and offered it to her.  She thanked him and tried to compose herself.

“It’s nice to know that the most embarrassing moment of my life offers you some amusement,” Nico said sarcastically when she offered the handkerchief back.  “At least some good came out of it; that makes it entirely worthwhile.  Now do you believe that I will behave?”

“I believe you for now,” Reyna said.  “Once the embarrassment wears off, I’m sure you’ll go back to causing trouble.”

“I wouldn’t—actually, that’s true.  But for now, I am mortified and you ought to console me.”

“I’m sure your fiancé understands your automatic anatomical troubles.  After all, he has the same equipment and he is a student of medicine.”

“Thank you, Reyna,” Nico grumbled, not feeling any better.  “But you won’t tell my father, will you?”

“No, I won’t tell your father,” Reyna promised.  “That would be uncomfortable for everyone.  But that being said, there is no need to be ashamed of your feelings, Your Highness.  Of course I have to make sure you behave a certain way, but that does not mean that your love for him is shameful.  Now, I may be from Mars, but I understand that Pluto is more strict about this sort of thing than Jupiter is.  I respect Pluto’s modesty and I have chaperoned you with Plutonian standards, but I do worry about what sort of pressure that has put on you.  I was not in charge of your sexual education—”

Nico flushed.  “Reyna, must we talk about—”

“Yes, Your Highness.  I think it is very important that we discuss this, no matter how uncomfortable it is.  As I was saying, I was not in charge of your sexual education and I do not know how you were taught, but I suspect you were led to believe that desires were shameful.  Is that correct?”

Still embarrassingly red in the face, Nico nodded.

“Then allow me to assure you that there is absolutely nothing shameful about your body or your physical desires.  No, I can’t allow you to act on them until you are married, but you ought to know that there is nothing wrong with your feelings.  They are perfectly normal.”

Nico sank into his chair.  “I shouldn’t think about Will that way.  It’s disrespectful.”

“I do not believe you would would ever want to hurt or disrespect him.  It seems much more plausible to say that he was surprised, not offended.”

“I suppose so.  But...it’s disgusting.”

“It’s not,” Reyna said.  “And I cannot speak for Lord William, but I think I can promise that he does not find you or your attraction to him disgusting.”

“Reyna, I just can’t stop thinking about him and it scares me.  Then I started feeling like this and I was so afraid that he’d find out, but now he has found out and I don’t know what to do.  What am I going to do next time I see him?  What if it happens again?”

“It won’t happen again because from now on, I won’t let you out of my sight,” Reyna assured, with surprisingly little anger.  “Not only will you have to stay by my side for the remainder of this trip, I am also going to request that you are moved to a room on a higher floor to keep you from sneaking out the window.”

Nico sighed.  “I knew that was coming.”

“Then you know that you won’t get another chance to be alone with him until your wedding.  After that, I won’t stop you.”

He blushed and avoided Reyna’s eyes.

“As for tomorrow: you will smile and wish him a good morning,” Reyna continued.  “I will take you to a private balcony for breakfast.  I’ll give you enough space for you to talk with him openly.  It may be uncomfortable, but I want you to at least try.”

“I’d rather just stay in bed all day,” Nico muttered.

“When have I ever allowed you to do that?”

“I keep hoping.”

Reyna smiled at him fondly.  “We’ll worry about it tomorrow,” she said.  “For now, it’s best if you get some sleep.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Nico mumbled.

“Then at least rest,” Reyna said.  “And if my opinion is worth anything, I don’t believe that it will take long to work this out.”

*   *   *

Will wasn’t sure how Leo had gotten him to agree to help, but it was already in the early hours of the next day and Will was still locked up in one of the wood shops, working with Leo on a section of the spinning machine he and Calypso were inventing together.  Jo was helping them build it, but she had to take care of the children and Calypso had evening rehearsal for a show with the Venadican choir.  To Leo’s credit, he hadn’t mentioned the awkward scene he’d walked in on earlier in the evening—in fact, Leo had such a short attention span that Will wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d forgotten about it.  Still, Will was tired and his mind was still spinning from the incident with Nico.  He wanted nothing more than to go to bed.

“At least let me finish the roller,” Leo said when Will suggested they turn in for the night.

Will sighed but resigned himself to staying awake a while longer.  His arm was sore from spinning the lathe so Leo could carve one of the machine’s rollers.  The carpentry shop Leo liked to use had plenty of treadle lathes, but Leo claimed to prefer using the two-person one because his foot got tired from spinning it himself.  Will thought that was only an excuse so that he didn’t have to be in the shop on his own; despite his enthusiasm about eliminating the need for manual labor in favor of automatic machinery, Leo liked the company.  So Will was stuck with his friend in the carpentry shop late at night, nodding along sleepily while Leo shouted to be heard over the sound of the knife scraping against the wood.

“Hydraulic power is easier to harness, but soon the steam engine...Will?  Are you even listening?”

“I’m trying to,” Will answered.  “Leo, I’m meeting the Prince tomorrow and I’d like to at least get a bit of sleep.”

“Oh, fine,” Leo sighed, putting aside his knife.  “Jo is better at carpentry than I am, anyway.  I’ll ask for her help tomorrow.”

Will let his arm fall to his side, relieved to finally get a rest.  While Leo put away his tools, Will sat by Leo’s bench and let his eyes shut in exhaustion.  He could feel himself starting to drift to sleep.

Suddenly, against the back of his eyelids, Will saw Nico—Nico standing so close that their chests touched, Nico gazing at him with that odd, predatory look in his eyes, Nico kissing him, Nico’s face painted red in embarrassment after Will accidentally felt between his legs.

Will blushed and snapped his eyes back open.  As a student of medicine, he was rarely uncomfortable with any aspect of anatomy.  Will had also learned about breeding and seen the way animals behaved during their mating seasons while growing up near his family’s ranch.  Although many people around his age were embarrassed or aroused by the topic of physical excitement, Will rarely felt particularly bothered because he simply viewed it as a natural phenomenon.  Erections were the male body’s involuntary response to direct stimulation.  Nico’s reaction had been typical for someone of his sex, even indicative of good health.

Will couldn’t remember ever feeling so flustered over something as trivial as anatomy.  Although he had assured Nico that it was a physically normal reaction, he couldn’t help but think that it had been a bit more complex than an involuntary anatomical response.  There had been no “direct stimulation” prior to Will accidentally pressing against Nico; all they had done was kiss.  If Nico had felt aroused while kissing Will, the only explanation was that Nico was attracted to Will.

Of course Will had considered the fact that he and Nico would eventually enter into a sexual relationship, but he hadn’t put much thought into it.  It had been something in the back of his mind, something that seemed far off and not immediately important.  The only time Will had actually worried about it was when Octavian had mentioned offering Nico his “services”—which was, quite possibly, the most repulsive thought that had ever been forced into Will’s head.

But if Nico was attracted to Will, did that mean that Nico wanted to sleep with Will?  Nico had told Will that he loved him, but that didn’t necessarily imply he wanted to be with Will that way.  Or did it?  After all, Will had a tendency to misunderstand or even underestimate Nico’s feelings for him.

The idea had entered Will’s mind several times—mostly when his older siblings were teasing him about it—but Will couldn’t remember actively desiring Nico that way.  When Will touched himself, he sometimes considered the fact that he’d eventually touch Nico the same way, and the idea certainly hadn’t been unappealing.  Intimacy with Nico sounded nice.  Will would be happy to share that with Nico, if it would bring Nico pleasure.  The wedding was still months away, however, so there was no need to worry about it yet.  Will wouldn’t touch Nico that way before they married.

Of course, he knew that marriage was not a requirement for intimacy.  If Apollo’s complex web of lovers wasn’t enough evidence of that, Will was also an accidental witness of the fact that Cal and Leo were in a very active sexual relationship.  But Nico was a prince.  Cal and Leo didn’t have the same pressures that royalty would.

“Are you ready?” Leo asked, suddenly pulling Will from his thoughts.

“Right, of course,” Will said, getting to his feet and brushing off his breeches.  He sighed when he realized that he may very well have ruined his suit with the dust in the woodshop.

“So,” Leo started casually as they walked outside.  “Is there anything you’d like to share?”

“Not particularly,” Will said.  “Leo, do you remember the time that I went to your room without knocking and accidentally walked in on—”

“I try to forget,” Leo answered.

“What is...why...how do you...?”

Leo looked unimpressed.  ���I think you know how it’s done, Will.”

“I don’t mean physically.  I mean...how did you know she wanted to?”

Leo laughed.  “I admit that I have trouble understanding other people, but Cal wasn’t shy.”

“How did you know you wanted to?”

“I don’t know; I just did.  I’ve been attracted to her for a long time, same as you and your prince.”

Will had been in love with Nico for a long time, not attracted to him, but he decided not to correct Leo.  “Sometimes he looks at me in an odd way, like you and Cal look at each other before you drag each other off somewhere alone,” Will said.  “And he kisses me a lot.  I’m just a bit confused—”

“What is there to be confused about?” Leo asked.  “I’m fairly certain that I witnessed something I wasn’t supposed to this evening.  He obviously wants you.”

Will frowned.

“Your body,” Leo explained.  “More specifically, your genitalia.”

“I understand that, Leo,” Will sighed.  “Today, he kissed me and I accidentally rubbed against his—”

“Gods, Will, I don’t need that much detail,” Leo interrupted.

“Right,” Will said, deciding to give up.  He wasn’t quite sure how to express what he was thinking and feeling, and Leo didn’t appear to understand.  He bid Leo goodnight and set off for the Palace on his own, still feeling confused.

Will had enjoyed kissing Nico earlier.  He had started to feel less concerned about the rules of courting a prince and instead had felt excited when they escaped from their chaperones.

Will reached up to touch his lips, remembering the Nico’s passionate enthusiasm—the way he’d kissed Will, held Will, pulled Will closer.  And when Will wrapped his arms around Nico....

As much as Will loved to kiss Nico, nothing felt better than holding Nico in his arms.  Nico’s build was firm and strong.  When Will held him, it was like he’d found something safe and solid to keep himself steady in a storm.  Will had wanted to cling to Nico and to squeeze him tightly against his chest.  He’d wanted to press his nose into the top of Nico’s head and hide his face in Nico’s black hair so that he could pretend that nothing else in the world mattered.

Will sighed when he got back to his bedchamber and barely managed to undress himself before falling onto the bed in exhaustion.

The idea of sharing a bed with someone felt foreign to him.  It seemed foolish not to have considered it more; after all, their wedding was only months away.  How had Will neglected to consider intimacy for so long?

Perhaps Will still hadn’t completely grasped how real Nico was.  Although Will had grown so much closer to him over the past year, he’d admired Nico as more of an idol than a person for much of his childhood.  The idea of a physical relationship with someone who existed only on a pedestal was so absurd that Nico may as well have been an object rather than a person.

But Nico was a real person, no different from Will.  Yes, he was a prince, but Nico and Will were equal in dignity and value.  Will had slowly been realizing that since the beginning of their engagement, but he had failed to consider other ways in which they were equal.  As Will had been recently reminded, he and Nico were also the same physically.  Nico had an ordinary male body and experienced ordinary desires.  It shouldn’t have been surprising that Nico had reacted to Will the way he did.  The surprising thing was that Will remained so far behind.  Why hadn’t he noticed Nico’s attraction?  Why hadn’t he reacted the same way?

Perhaps the real root of Will’s problem was that he had never completely understood ‘desire’ to begin with.  Did he even want intimacy?

I wouldn’t mind, said a voice in Will’s head.

He wanted to be close to Nico, that much was certain.  He would feel comfortable lying beside Nico, kissing Nico, and opening his heart to Nico.  But as for touching Nico that way?

Will closed his eyes and imagined that Nico was with him.  They were in the Palatium de Divitae, sharing a large, soft bed.  Sheer curtains covered the windows for privacy, but they could see the night sky outside.  They had been watching the stars together, then Will had turned to look at Nico instead.

“I love you,” he whispered.  His fingers curled in the bedsheets, imagining that he was holding Nico’s hand.  In his mind, he saw Nico smile and heard him whisper the words back.  Nico leaned closer, touched Will’s shoulder, and kissed him.  The kiss lasted so long that Will forgot how to tell time and turned to liquid under Nico’s hands when they started to roam over his body.  Will imagined himself responding and answering Nico’s touches with his own.  Every time Will’s hands felt him, Nico’s skin would flush, his body would arch, and he would make the most amazing, mesmerizing sounds.  They would whisper words of love over and over again, even when it was over, and then they would hold each other until morning.

Yes, Will decided; intimacy with Nico sounded quite nice.

*   *   *

Nico did manage to fall asleep at some point, but he woke up feeling groggy and confused.  When he remembered what had happened the night before, he groaned and hid back under his blankets.

“Get up,” Reyna demanded, pulling the blankets back down.  “There’s no point in lying around feeling miserable.  Today, you’re going to put on a nice suit and walk to breakfast with your head held high.”

“Impossible,” Nico scowled, trying to dive under the blankets again.

“I will raise the kissing quota if you stop acting so pathetic.”

Nico pulled down the blankets a little bit to peer out at her.  It was rare for Reyna to resort to bribing.  “You’re lying, aren’t you?” he said skeptically.

“I’m not,” Reyna assured.  “I will allow more kisses per day if you get out of bed right now and wear a smile.”

Nico considered.  “It’s not worth it,” he decided, then covered himself in blankets again.

“I swear to the gods!” Reyna shouted.

After a bit more bickering, Reyna did manage to get Nico out of bed.  Unfortunately, he’d missed the opportunity to raise the kissing quota, but he wasn’t sure if Will wanted to kiss him anyway.

But when they got to the balcony, there was Will waiting for him wearing a sunny smile like nothing was wrong at all.  If anything, he looked happier than usual.

“Good morning,” Will said.  “I hope you slept well?”

“Yes, thank you,” Nico croaked, even though he hadn’t.  “And you?”

“Very well, yes,” Will answered.  He sounded surprisingly genuine.

“Good,” Nico said.  “Well, shall we—”

“Wait,” Will said, grabbing Nico’s arm before he could sit down.  “I wanted to tell you that...I mean...I wanted you to know...uh...I love you.”

Even after what I did last night? Nico wanted to ask, but Will didn’t give Nico the chance to question him.  He kissed Nico for so long that he started to feel dizzy from holding his breath.  With Will’s warm lips moving slowly against his, Nico was melting, falling into Will.  Yet he was weightless—his feet were lifting up from the ground and all that kept him from floating away was the need to touch Will.

Nico’s fingers grasped Will’s sleeve firmly to keep himself grounded.  For the first time, it was like Will understood the way he made Nico’s heart race, his mind spin, and his body ache.  Will knew exactly what he did to Nico.  And Will wasn’t disgusted or afraid; he chose to touch Nico even though he was aware of the way Nico reacted to him.  And yes, Nico was afraid that he’d become aroused and ruin everything, but he knew that if he hadn’t scared Will away before, he certainly wouldn’t that time.  Nico loved Will, he wanted Will, and maybe it wasn’t completely shameful that he felt the way he did.

When Will pulled back and waved for Nico to take a seat at their table, Nico glanced over his shoulder at Reyna to confirm that he hadn’t imagined that Will had, in fact, kissed him.  Reyna just smiled at him and took a few steps back.

Nico turned back to Will and cleared his throat as they sat down.  “We should talk about....” Nico gestured vaguely between them.

Will nodded in agreement as a maid in silver came to pour their tea.  Nico waited until she left for Will to speak, but even after they were alone, Will just watched him patiently like he was waiting for Nico to start.  Nico cleared his throat again and tried to think of how to start.  Finally, he said, “I was afraid that you’d be disgusted.”

“By something like that?” Will said with a disbelieving shake of his head.  “No, of course not.  It was normal physiology.”

Nico took a deep breath.  “But it means...you know what it means, don’t you?  About how I feel about you?”

Will was silent for half a second before answering.  “Yes.  I know.”

Nico waited.  Will didn’t continue.  He took a deep breath and asked, “What about you?”

Will’s smile wavered and he glanced down, away from Nico’s eyes.  “I intend to follow the rules of courting, Your Highness.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

Will nodded.  “I know.”

Nico waited, but Will didn’t add anything else.  “Never mind,” Nico said, trying not to sound disappointed.  “It doesn’t matter right now anyway—”

“Wait,” Will interrupted.  He started to say something else, but stopped.  After trying a few more times, he smiled sheepishly.  “Last night, I stayed awake for hours planning what to say, and now I’m suddenly too nervous to talk,” he said with a shy laugh.  “At least give me the chance to explain?”

“What do you mean?” Nico asked.

“I mean that we went too far yesterday, but I didn’t dislike it,” Will said.  “When we kissed like that...I felt good.”

“Oh,” Nico whispered.  “I...I did, too.”

“Yes, I noticed,” Will said, his cheeks reddening.  “And I think that I would also like...uh...with you.”

Nico was so distracted by how pretty Will looked wearing that embarrassed expression that it took a moment for him to understand what Will had said.  “That’s...you would?”

Will nodded and he put his hand on the table between them, palm up.  Without even thinking, Nico took it.  “I love you,” Will said simply and easily, like he wasn’t at all embarrassed or uncomfortable about his feelings.  He put his other hand over Nico’s on the table and squeezed it.  “Yesterday, you asked me if I’d ever felt the things Sappho wrote about, and I have—with you.  I know what it’s like when your heart beats so hard that it hurts.  I get cold chills when you whisper in my ear.  My limbs feel numb every time you kiss me.  And this is all new to me, but I think when it’s with you...that would be very nice.”  He cleared his throat.  “We can’t, of course.  I think it would be wise for us to have someone chaperoning at all times to ensure that what happened yesterday doesn’t happen again.”

“I understand,” Nico said.

“That being said,” Will continued, “I know that you have a tendency to break the rules.  So perhaps it would be alright to push the boundaries a little bit.”

“Oh,” said Nico.  The taste of Will’s mouth was still lingering on his lips, but it was fading.  Suddenly, his desire to kiss Will came roaring back and he had to bite his cheek to distract himself from his desire to pounce on his fiancé.  “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

“Well, I did enjoy what we did yesterday,” Will said, running his thumbs over Nico’s fingers.  “And as long as we don’t let it get out of hand...I said having a chaperone would be ‘wise,’ but I think we can be wise enough on our own.”

“Reyna caught me coming back in last night,” Nico said with a shake of his head.  “She’s moving my room to the upper floors so that I can’t sneak out the window at night again.”

“Pity,” Will said.  “Well, we’ll have to think of something else.  I’m sure there will be another opportunity to sneak away at some point this week.”  He raised Nico’s hand to his lips, kissed it, and gave Nico a reassuring smile, and they spent the rest of the meal plotting their escape when they weren’t too busy kissing.

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