#also worrying about having high blood pressure makes my blood pressure skyrocket its like a snake eating its own tail over here

[dogbunni]

being Unwell™ really fucking sucks bc what do you MEAN I can't get top surgery bc my blood pressure is that of dropping a mentos into a 2l bottle of coke and then screwing the lid on real tight??????? my titties though???

[2idiots]

Keep Yourself Alive

pt. 27 // pt. 28⚛ // pt. 29

NCT Frat Social Media AU // College Athlete & Fratboy Lucas x reader

Word count: 1872ish

Warning: a little angsty, mentions of chronic pain, insecurities, kinda cringey, also text pictures meshed in with writing just a heads up

It’s not that you weren’t interested in all the hell week practices that coach planned for the swim team, in fact you were fascinated by the sets your old coach was giving out.  In fact you didn’t want to be in this dark room away from everyone else out in the living room drinking, playing games, and eating all the food Johnny has painstakingly prepared. You wanted to be out there getting drunk on two cups of eggnog like Hyunjin, the friend you just barely met before leaving the swim team. But for the first time since deciding to fly across the world for college with your best friend you had to dip out of your Christmas tradition. Sure it wasn't intentional but that didn't stop the tearing feeling in the pit of your chest from blooming. You may have felt horrible physically but the mental strain of not being able to be out there performing your best attempt at normal for something that was so important was that much worse. 

Were those tears wetting your cheeks? No. Those were allergies, you couldn’t be crying. Who knew pollen was so bad in the winter?

The seconds had turned into minutes and 15 minutes later you were still laying on Johnny’s bed in the dark, feeling like someone sucker punched your heart, and other parts, curled into his sheets with only the harsh light emitting from your phone screen. You had taken one of the pain meds the doctor gave you but it had yet to kick in. You should've taken it sooner, if anyone knew your body it was you and you knew you should've take it earlier, then you could stand out there and attempt normal alongside your friends. But somewhere deep down you were hoping that maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t need some painkiller to go about mingling. Yu were wrong and now you were reaping the consequences of that decision. 

But above all else, you were worried that Lucas would show up at the party while you were holed away in the fetal position in your best friend’s bed. Stupid, right? Here you were, organs cementing themselves together, and yet all you could think about was some boy you had only known for a few months. But if he showed up you knew somehow you were going to have to explain yourself, something you had been dreading since night one.

Lucas had already texted you to tell you he was running a little bit late so you had a bit of time to figure something out or get out but that was nearly 30 minutes ago; he could only be so far behind. Any minute he was bound to be walking through Johnny and Mark's front door with one of his dopey grins, scanning the room for the person who invited him and coming up empty handed.

Wow you were the worst host of all time. At least Chan and Hyunjin had each other but Lucas was on his own. Here without a host. Sure he could visit with Jaehyun or Ten but they had obviously come without him for some reason considering they all lived together.

God hold it together! If you could take exams with your survival brain activated then you could handle one boy. Too much anxiety and your brain was jumping from conclusion to conclusion, problem to problem. Organs cementing together: check. Composure melting: check.

Three sharp knocks jolted you out of your downward spiral, followed by a soft voice, “Y/n can I come in?” The soft voice that had been at the root of your anxiety. 

Wow, who knew blood pressure could skyrocket that high? 

“Y/n?” The question was followed by a quick ping from your phone. Quietly, wiping the few stray tears off your cheek, you looked back to the harsh screen. 

It only took a few moments for the door to slowly creak open, the glow from all the Christmas lights in the living room casting a soft light across Johnny's bed. In that time you managed to suck in a few deep breaths and zip up your pants, wearing jeans with this bloat was not a good idea.

He was quiet, sinking into the other half of the bed while you laying on the other side facing away. Too quiet. The silence was making you nervous.

Then there was another ping at your phone. Sending a vibration through your hand: what was he doing?

You let out a bleat of laughter, what was he doing?

There was another moment of uncomfortable silence, you smiling into your phone screen as he tried to find more ways to make you laugh again, before he finally asked, out loud this time: "Is it your thingy?" His voice wasn't too far from yours and you could tell he was still sitting from the dip in the mattress.

"My thingy?"

"You know that thing you had surgery for? Does it hurt?"

You flipped over to look at him, even though you could barely see him with the dim lighting, the only glow coming from the cracks under the door and between the curtains. "You mean my appendix? Did you already forget everything I taught you?" You laughed with a soft smile that you hoped he could hear in your tone. 

In the darkness, his eyes search the room for yours landing only on your blurry dark outline. "Yeah your aerobics."

"Appendix." You corrected, another smile cracking through your self-wallowing.

There were two ways this could go over. You could lie, say it is the appendix that in all honesty hadn't hurt much since you got it out, the doctor said something about a high pain tolerance, or you could tell the truth and face the thing you have been dreading most since spending more time with him. He deserved the truth.

"Um not quite," your tone was hesitant and slow, though it wasn't him bolting you were afraid of it, it was you. "I uh, I am in pain right now. Actually, um, I’m in pain a lot of the time." You felt a hot tear slip down your cheek, dammit not again. "And it's uh, it's why I ran away from you on Halloween and, um, it's why I have to cancel a lot of our plans."

He was quiet across from you but you could feel his hand searching across the blankets for something, maybe yours?

"I'm so sorry. You came for a Christmas party and I'm crying to you in my best friend's bed." Wow what a catch. "If you wanna leave it's ok, I understand."

"Nah, I think I'll just chill in here with you," he laid down next to you, finally finding your hand and fitting it into his. "And anyway Mark is out there yelling about a journalist turned babysitter turned tutor turned princess teaching a prince about quote true christmas spirit, so I'd rather be in here." 

"That's an iconic Christmas movie, watch your words Yukhei." You chastised playfully, wiping away your tears with the back of your hand. The warmth from his hand was eating away at some of the anxiety, though you were still trembling.

"Ah yeah, did I say boring, I meant super interesting and exciting," he grinned, replacing your hand with his own to wipe your tears. What the hell? "Watching anything with you is exciting." When did he get this smooth?

"Yeah whatever. I know for a fact you fell asleep in Mathilda too." As cheesy as he was, this tall star basketball player was making your heart race so fast it felt like it was about to escape from your chest.

"Hey I came from practice, it's not my fault coach took all our energy!" 

You swatted playfully at him as the conversation lulled, because despite the laughter and his hand, all those negative thoughts were still swirling around in the back of your head eager to rear their face. Muttering, almost too soft for him to hear you choked out, "I'm sorry I can't be what you want."

"What? Who told you that?" He rolled over to face you, even though he couldn't see you all that clearly. "I've been trying to tell you for weeks now that I like you. If only you didn't change the subject right away. Y/n I like you. I like you a lot. Honestly I liked you that first night at Halloween when you were rambling about the night sky and all your dreams. I didn't expect to actually talk to someone at that party but then there you were on the couch, critiquing Doyoung’s music but also dancing to it and enjoying yourself?"

A blush spread through your cheeks and down your neck, leaving fire in its path. "Oh God, I was really high on halloween and a little drunk. I hope I wasn't too harsh on the critiques, though I should’ve known it was Doyoung. The music was pretty run of the mill. I mean Ariana Grande remixes? Seriously, what kind of party is that?" They're was a long pause that you felt the need to cover up with a quick justification "that wasn't a rhetorical--" 

"--can I kiss you?"

He was facing you, you could tell by his soft breath and how he seemed to fold into you. "Why?" Good god if your friends could hear you right now evading again, they would smack you.

"Because I like you!" When you tried to protest, he just tutted and repeated, "I like you, even if you are in pain."

Oh that's why you were so nervous, hearing that. Also you could feel the soft outline of his lips lightly brushing yours, combine that with the fact that the tether to your pain seemed to be loosening up as the painkillers kicked in. You would never feel perfect but this did give you enough of a confidence boost to close the gap, kissing him like your very life depended on it. This boy, those lips, these feelings; they would be the death of you. 

Pulling away to catch your breath, unable to form the words you wanted too, you knew you weren't done explaining yourself. There was more to your pain, more to apologize for how you let your fear dictate your time with him. "I need to tell you first, when I say I'm in pain I don't mean like some achy broad pain. I ran away on Halloween because a lot of the time sex hurts and my high was fading and I knew I couldn't stay. It was already a bad decision but I just wanted to feel like a regular kid and you were so nice, a little dopey with that fake blonde wig but still really hot. What I'm trying to say is: it's not just my head or my stomach,  it's those parts too. The parts that we started with. And those are important to people. And I like you, I like you so much but I'm not some normal girl. There are going to be days when I can't leave the bed or can't go out with you or be, um, intimate with you and there might be a lot of those days. I have some baggage that's a little more physical so if you wanna bolt I get it. You probably want someone who can do everything you want, so this is me showing you the door." You made a broad gesture to sweep to the door. These were your fears laying out for him to see if he looked close enough. Maybe you weren't enough for him or anyone for that matter. 

"Nah, I think I'll stay here. Maybe I can ask Johnny if he's got Mathilda around here so I can finally watch it all."

Keep Yourself Alive

pt. 27 // pt. 28⚛ // pt. 29

NCT Frat Social Media AU // College Athlete & Fratboy Lucas x reader

summary: College is hard enough, right? Coursework, two jobs, a social life, and the state of your mental health. As if that was enough now the school’s no.1 athlete won’t leave you alone after a one night stand. And maybe you like him back but you have a tendency to run when life gets too difficult especially now that undiagnosed chronic pain just seems to be getting worse with each passing month.

(I am not to happy with this chapter so I might come back and edit and revise. It just feels too gloom and doom for me. Let me know what you think. That’s for waiting for the update! And thanks for reading. There is only like one or two more actual chapters and then an epilogue.)

Taglist: @princeofshenzhenuwus @hannahdinse8 @wongassride ​ @cowward @sakura-uji

[arllenn]

METANOIA chapter 2

There’s only cannon typical violence in this chapter and it’s only described briefly so I think this should be ok for y’all. > AO3

Opening my eyes I was greeted by snow once again. Only this time there was much more than when I had last been awake. Hills of the fluffy white powder framed the landscape creating an eerily stunning image. I was facing downwards the snow taking up most of my vision with only a sliver of the sky making its way towards me and questioned just where I was. For a second I wondered why I was alone. Did the person from before go to get help? Did they get tired of watching me bleed out and leave, or was it all a hallucination?

It stopped snowing, the sun bleakly shining through the clouds, a ray of light burned into my eye sockets, having escaped through a small hole in the weather. I thought to raise my arm up for some type of relief before rembering that it most likely wasn’t possible. Both of my arms having been so damaged in the car accident. It was a wonder, I could no longer feel any pain only overwhelming numbness and the texture of the snow underneath my body. Again odd, how was I able to feel the snow so vividly through my clothes. I attempted to look down towards where my body should be but my eyes stuck firmly in place the effort only bringing rise to an uncomfortable grating feeling. I attempted to call out for help, my jaws feeling uncomfortable like I was grinding the top and lower together just to forcibly pull them apart seconds later, but the only noises that came out of my mouth were breathy huffs who lost their sound in the wind. Closing my mouth a resounding ‘clink’ came from it. It sounded a bit like glass and I assumed that it was just my teeth hitting one another, that wasn’t right it’s never sounded like that, however it also reminded me of the noises that the gems made when running in Houseki no Kuni. I loved that show back when I was younger, and still watched it for the nostalgia. It’s unfortunate that as it’s looking it be now I’ll never get to finish the manga or see season 2.

inwardly I sighed. Here I was who knows where with serious injuries that I could no longer feel with no idea how long it will be until my body gives out and I’m reminiscing about anime that I like. I’m ridiculous. I had to move, get out of here, do something! Clumsily I raised my arm towards where the window frame of the car should be. The feeling of my skin, or was it bone, grinding against itself was uncomfortable and a slight bit painful. I definitely should be worried that something as serious as my bones touching and grinding together is only a slightly painful but now wasn’t the time. I fumbled for where the window frame would be, it shouldn’t be this high up, it’s never been this high up, my arm felt like it was going to drop, until it felt lighter all of a sudden and something hard dropped down hitting my back before crushing something else.

I panicked. My arm just broke into two, it just broke, broken into halves like nothing! It didn’t even feel painful! I have to be dreaming, or having something like a full body hallucination right before death, because there’s no way in hell my arm just broke in half and I’m fine, hell I couldn’t even feel the blood gushing out that should’ve accompanied it! I tried to use my other hand to push me up so that I could find some way to help myself, rising on a single shaking arm that felt like it too could snap in any moment I noticed something. My arm, no not just my arm, the long hair that fell off my head too, was all a milky white with splotches of iridescent blue gemstone. I breathed out not believing what I was seeing when my other arm gave out leaving me lying completely on my side, face to face with a huge flat rock, or was it a mountain and the rest of what I presumed to be my body which also held the same bewitching shine as my arm and hair.

I don’t believe it, no I can’t believe it. My body had somehow turned into some type of wacky gemstone statue and there was no sign of the car that had killed me, nor the road that I had been flung off of. However just like before the teal shards were there. Only this time they took the remote shape of a person. Maybe it had been a statue? If so then was I still on the scene of the car crash, or did they get moved to where ever I had been moved as well? There were too many questions and not enough answers. So I decided to think my way through the situation I currently found myself in.

I had presumably died, or been severely injured. And transfered to somewhere unknown along with the statue from before. My body was made out of some type of stone, a gemstone most likely, and I am unable to speak or look around without risking snapping the remainder of my limbs off. Is this some kind of prank? Ridiculous I know but my only other theory was that this was my brains last parade before it shut down and I died. Or maybe I was in a coma, do people dream in their comas? It’s good to sort everything out even though I don’t have enough information to fully understand or even attempt to grasp the situation.

Pursing my lips, or just making the attempt to, I wasn’t sure of anything other than the feeling of my rough jaws pushing against each other, I looked at the statue infront of me. I studied the shape of what could possibly be a face, small and round with large eye sockets that were empty (did they get knocked out before I was here?) a nose that fit its face perfectly, small and button shaped. With hair that flew down in jagged layers looking a bit like leaves on trees at just the start of fall. It’s a bit funny I had just been thinking of Houseki no Kuni and now here I was staring at what could very well be a life sized Phosphophyllite, if only a bit younger than what they were shown to be in the begging of the story. Huh? A life sized Phos, a humongous rock that has bits of gemstones peaking out of its craggy surface, and a barren landscape with no signs of humanity. Not to mention the fact that I’ve literally become a gemstone as well! There’s no way it could be right?

‘Wait...’

’Don’t tell me...’

‘there’s no way in hell..’

Hah yeah right, the day I’m isekai’d is the day pigs fly and the moon explodes. Actually didn’t NASA find a crack in the moon? Off topic but the point still stands I’m jumping to conclusions way too far out of my league. There’s no way isekai is real, I’ll probably wake up in a hos-

THWACK

As if just taking off one of my legs wasn’t enough the arrow that was accompanied by an all too familiar sound track came and cracked through my denial, a second punishment for daring to doubt the universe I suppose.

Bad, bad, bad, this was bad, no more like horrible! I can’t move, my limbs being too splintery and uncontrollable to even attempt to run away, I lost half of an arm and my leg up to mid thigh, theres no way I’m moving myself. So unless by some miracle Phos lookalike, the real Phos, not just some lookalike, suddenly tripled in hardness and was able to move I’m done for. Isn’t this cheap? Dying before my life even begins! I’m not even a main character! There’s no plot armor to save me! Maybe Phos but not me! Is that why I don’t remeber a anyone that looks like this? Because they were so irrelevant that they were never mentioned or eluded to?

Desperatly trying to escape with only an arm on the brink of collapse and a leg that doesn’t want to even pretend to cooperate really makes your blood pressure skyrocket. Can I even say that anymore, it’s not like I have blood! My panic was accompanied by the sound of bows being drawn and the sound of arrows piercing through the air.

In a split second my torso was separated in two and my other arm shattered into bits along with the majority of my shoulder. Looking over to Phosphophyllite who had been shattered completely everywhere except for their head and legs carved a sense of desperation into me. There was nowhere for me to go and even if there was there was no way for me to get there. Resigning myself to a second death I stopped struggling and just laid there. Truly a blessing I was turned away from the lunarians so that I didn’t have to see the arrows and spears being flung at me. The strings were pulled back and...

Nothing but a spray of snow came. It threw me over forcing me to look at the lunarians and whatever had caused the snow to be so greatly disturbed. Slightly off to the left in my vision but at the center of my mind stood ANTARCTICITE? If the lunarians hadn’t convinced me of my situation then this certainly did. The arrows and spears all stuck into the snow having been slammed off course. They glanced back at Phos and I before readying themselves to go on offense. They took a running start and soared through the sky straight towards the lunarians. The anime could never compare to seeing it right infront of your eyes. The way they used their legs to make complicated twists and turns avoiding every attack while delivering one of their own was breath taking. They had cleared out the front of the float. There were only a few archers left on the float (ship? I forget the cannonical name for it) that was quickly disappearing the final blow haveing been delivered to the center just a few seconds ago. Fighting in what was essentially mid air they breezed through dodging arrows and pointed their sword at their final enemy. They twisted out of the way of the arrow being shot and plunged their blade straight through the lunarians neck. Of course knowing my luck, because I clearly being crushed by a car and almost being taken to the moon could never be enough, the arrow that Antarcticite had just dodged came flying at me. I felt it pierce through my nose and shatter my face. The last thing I saw was antarcticite running towards us as my world faded back into that inky black.

The next time I woke up was to a body that didn’t feel like hell when I moved it and eyes that roamed to where I told them to. The animation in Houseki no Kuni, I was IN Houseki no Kuni I’m a gemstone that lives and exists here, did the actual architecture of the school no justice what so ever. I remember hearing rumors on the internet that Ichikawa studied architecture before writing the manga and the fruits of her labor really showed through in person. The high ceiling met the archways perfectly and truly reminded me of the drawings and pictures one would see if an elegant civilization from back at humanities beginning. The wooden cot I was laying on didn’t seem worn out in the slightest despite the age of the gems and how often they had to be repaired.

i was yanked out of my thoughts by the voice I had heard during so many watch throughs, raising my eyes from the swirls in the wood that my fingers were tracing I looked up at Sensei.

“Hecatolite also that is your name. A hardness of six. You were born on the twentieth day of winter along side Phosphophyllite.”

I bit down on my bottom lip, while I was no expert of any kind on gemstones I had never even once heard of the name Hecatolite. Was it named after the goddess Hecate? In that case I don’t think the pale white and glimmering blue fit the name at all. Considering that Hecate was a goddess of the night.

As if he could read my thoughts Sensei, Adamant, whatever, told me something that I couldn’t help but laugh bitterly at.

“Hecatolite also had the common name of moon stone long ago.”

I a human soul who should have realisticly been reborn into this world as a lunarian was a gem named after the moon, the place where I belonged. Honestly this kind of ironic situation is something I’d expect from a novel, not real life. Sensei was still looking at me and I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts for now so I nodded as best I could with my awkwardly stiff yet also too loose neck. Apparently satisfied he turned to Phos and began working on them.

I’ve really never thought of the idea of being isekai’d before. Sure most stories about the premace were fun to read but there’s no way on earth I ever would’ve thought that I of all people could ever be isekai’d but here I am, sitting in the gemstones infirmary that I’ve seen in every way possible watching Sensei, or adamant which should I call him , carve Phosphophyllite’s face, having just been told that I’m Moonstone Hecatolite or whatever and have a hardness of 6. My life would in no way be hard like Phos’ or Cinnabar’s due to my hardness, the only thing I could ever even imagine that would cause trouble is my name, but then again I could just go by Hecatolite and keep the moonstone part to myself. It’s not like Antarcticite knows, or maybe they do and I’m just assuming, they were rather close to Sensei before they died, Sensei doesn’t seem like the type to blab information like that and I’m not sure that Phos is awake right now.

‘Really’ I thought as I brought my knees up to my chest slowly hugging them tightly so that the wouldn’t fall that any point. Today, could this even be counted as just a day had been too much all at once. I had essentially flung myself off of the road, died after being crushed with some random stranger holding my hand. Upon arrival into this messed up world I had encountered lunarians earlier today and been saved by Antarcticite after almost being taken to the moon. This is, unbelievable, ridiculous, I just can’t seem to comprehend what the hell is happening right now! Even in the lore of Houseki no Kuni it was outright stated that humans souls became the lunarians and that the gems were their bones, my very existence went against the firmly set laws of this world! It made no sense when I first realized and it makes no sense now, in all honesty I’m sure that it will never make sense. But, here I am sitting watching Sensei, Adament, whatever, whoever, carving Phos like it was nothing.

To be fair to him it was probably nothing considering the fact that Phos is the youngest in a long line of gems, but it’s still unbelievable. To me a person who had been living in modern society and didn’t believe that magic or reincarnation was a thing possible being here right now just wasn’t something I could wrap my mind around currently. I put my head down into my knees and thought of my family, my life up until the crash and everything that I had ever done. I tightened my hold on my knees in an attempt to focus on something else. Gems didn’t cry instead when they had extreme emotions they cracked. I didn’t want to break my newly formed body already. Despite my best efforts a crack still formed. Luckily I wasn’t a soft gemstone and it was something minor that could be chalked up to me falling. I moved my hand up over to my shoulder to cover the shallow but midsized crack. My regrets, my wants and the moments I was proud of all came to the forefront of my mind.

I’m not sure what the measures of time are here but to me it felt like quite a few hours, however it was hard to accurately perceive time as I currently was and I had no intention of finding out how long it actually had been, seeing as to the fact that I wasn’t even sure that I could talk, or that the languages that I had knowledge of would translate or be understood. And even if they were only Sensei would be able to understand and that would likely bring up questions as to why I knew a dead language. So I kept quiet as I was led by Sensei alongside Phos to where I guessed our rooms were. It did make me wonder if gems were born understanding the language and unable to speak it or if this was a cheat granted to me by the universe as compensation for ending my life.

We were placed in rooms next to each other. The designs were simple and minimalistic. A single window a bed that was shoved into a crook in the wall that had a wooden frame, it really just looked like a stone box with a pile of sheets on it but I digress. Young Phosphophyllite was rather cute, it was a shame they’d go feral and lose their mind one day. I plopped down onto the bed only keeping on the button on shirt that came with the winter uniforms on. I know usually from what Sensei said that gems sleep with either everything off or with a uniform that they requested from red beryl but considering that it was winter and they were sleeping I would have to make do with this until they woke up. The idea of sleeping without anything on at all was just a bit too much for me as I currently am.

i looked out the window towards the moon that was high in the sky and allowed myself to play with the strands of my hair, funnily enough the weight was comfortable and from the way my hair fell it seemed like it was styled the same way as it was in my past life. Of course mirrors weren’t a thing currently, so it was just an assumption. Pulling the sheets up I resolved to not think for the rest of the night. Reliving my life for who knows how long was definitely draining.

A few minutes after I had laid down I heard shuffling around the doorway. Looking up I realized that Phos, who looked two steps from falling over was standing in the door way looking at me. I sat up and beckoned them over by waving my hand towards myself. For a second I got scared that they wouldn’t understand, after all they don’t know how to speak and i have no idea if this means something different to them, but cute innocent Phos stumbled over to my bed on legs that would make a newborn fawn jealous. It looked they they were going to fall midway so I sprung up tangled in my sheets to steady them. Luckily the sheets formed a barrier in between us that stopped me from cracking them but it was still nerve wracking. That matter aside I wasn’t sure why Phos was here or what I could do for them currently.

With their behavior matching their angelic face Phos didn’t leave me to silently wonder for too long before they pointed at the bed. Though vague I think I understand? Did they need help getting into their bed because of their hardness? I nodded and picked them up ready to take them to their room, however once I reached the door frame they reached out and pointed towards the bed again...

’I’m an idiot...’

Sighing I went back into my room and placed Phos down on my bed and put on the shorts that came along with the winter uniform. I didn’t want to risk grinding them into dust like I was Achema so I took precautions. I left the room to go and grab Phos’ sheets. I wrapped them up in mine as if they were a cat getting medication or a shot and used their sheets to put over the both of us. There was no way I was going to break Phos on my first day alive, or ever considering the story. A small smile played on their face and they fell asleep soon after.

Sighing I decided that sense it was like this I should just sleep for now. There was no point in staying up and thinking when the situation was like this. Though I am nervous about crushing Phos in my sleep I really don’t want to wake them up right now.

The sky was empty and without stars, a stark contrast to the night sky I was used to. The moon was the only source of light and all I could think about was the earth that I was used to before all of this.

That night I gained a few more cracks over my shoulders.

[ichiruuu]

TITLE OF STORY: Do You Fear The Devil CHAPTER NUMBER/TITLE/ONE SHOT: Chapter One AUTHOR: https://ichiruuu.tumblr.com/post/190849488349/title-of-story-do-you-fear-the-devil-chapter WHICH TOM/CHARACTER: Loki GENRE: Romance FIC SUMMARY: He is forbidden. Her heritage was stolen.Its been two years since the earth was attacked by the Chitauri. Victoria Bishop lives in New York and works for Tony Stark also known to the rest of the world as the Invincible Iron Man When Loki returns for the Tesseract, she finds herself somehow drawn to him and his bad side. Loki is the type her dad warned her about. Loki is the type of man you want to hide and lock up your daughters from. As Tony Stark once said, "We create our own demons."But what about falling for one? RATING: Explicit WARNINGS/TRIGGERS/AUTHORS NOTES: mentions of rape and violence.  FEEDBACK/COMMENTS: Hello! This is my first Loki fic. Please give some feedback! Thank you :)

Something was off that Monday morning. 

I could not place my finger on it as I made my way through downtown Philadelphia. It was raining so it had been deemed pretty stupid to worry about the day being off. The mood however…

I had forgotten why the mood was sour today. I was on the first train out of my beloved city to an unknown place. The letter had instructed me to move out and was shoved down somewhere at the bottom of my suitcase. That was a week ago. It had been about three months prior to my departure when it arrived. I was sitting in my office with my mother who loves to chide me when it came to my personal endeavors. There hadn’t been too many clients that day so I could pace myself with my work. My father, a well known doctor in Philadelphia, had been contacted by Anthony Stark. Mr. Stark was a man of many secrets but everyone knew that he was technically a superhero. His company had been associated with SHIELD, which we only knew about through the television and newspapers. The organization itself had based their beliefs on catching intergalactic criminals and stopping the world from coming to end. But after some fights with SHIELD’s director, Mr. Stark had started his own program to stop aliens (the spacial kind) from invading the planet. Stark Industries had hired my father to study how other species survive and live on our planet. One of them happened to be Thor’s younger adopted brother.

The job description required a young and vibrant person to assist Tony Stark with physical and psychological studies involving said younger brother. I had never personally met Thor’s brother but based on Mr. Stark’s description of him, he was a dick. Someone that you wouldn’t want to mess with.

When I arrived at my apartment that same day, I was not surprised in the slightest at how big it was. Bigger than my room in my parent’s house. After all, my father had hounded Mr. Stark about me having the best accommodations money could offer. Being spoiled at age twenty- two made me feel like such a child. Once the movers arrived at my new home, they unloaded all of my furniture. There weren’t many things that I owned, but the comfort of having them with me had eased my apprehensiveness of moving to a completely different place. You’d think I’d be used to a big city but Philly had nothing on New York. 

My new place had two bedrooms, a single bathroom with a high powered shower and a kitchenette with a small dining room. Picking the biggest room was pretty easy. It was closer to the street with a huge window which I was thankful for. A daily dose of Vitamin D was good for everyone. 

A loud ring coming from under the couch cushions startled me. Realizing it was my phone, I laughed out loud for being scared of something so silly. The caller ID informed me it was Mr. Stark. Gulping audibly, I cleared my throat before answering. 

“Hello?” My voice cracked. 

“Ah, Ms. Bishop. I see you’re nice and settled into your new apartment. Is everything to your liking?” I wasn’t sure but I had the distinct feeling there was sarcasm behind that question. My teeth grit involuntarily. 

“Everything is perfect, Mr. Stark. Thank you by the way,” Mumbling, I said my goodbyes to him and we hung up. So much for trying to impress the new boss. Glaring at my clock, I shoved the phone under the couch cushions again. Like my mother said: Que sera sera. 

****************************************************************************

The sun was the only thing shielding myself from my own homicidal thoughts. 

I was drowning in my sweat and I wasn't even half down the block. I loved living in a big city but I missed Philly. Especially with all the pollution constantly clogging up my lungs and a car waiting at every corner to maim me. I was happy to go to work today. Today marked the anniversary of working one year with Mr. Stark. It was an honor and a privilege. It was also a degrading job that paid fairly well, the irony of it. I was a certified physician assistant to my father. But part of my job also entailed doing daily blood draws on the one and only god of chaos and destruction, Loki Odinson. Loki was Thor’s brother who also happened to be an Avenger. And in case you didn't know, Tony Stark was the Iron Man. I had started working with Mr. Stark because his most trusted physician had been too much of a chicken to go head to head with a god. A snort came out of my nose. Yeah, right. There was the small detail of Mr. Stark’s wife, Pepper Potts, having a pair of twin boys so Mr. Stark’s blood pressure was known to skyrocket.  

        Noise polluted the quiet vastness of my mind and distracted me away from my thoughts. I walked towards the upper part of Manhattan. A loud honking noise made me stop short and I turned sharply. A taxi had just stopped in front of me and kept honking. I kept walking and ignored the driver. It was usually what happened in these parts. That was one of the reasons I hated living here. It only made me miss my tiny bedroom in the outskirts of Philadelphia.

        I was out of breath by the time I was inside the Stark Tower. Missy, the secretary, met my eyes when I entered the grandiose building. She gave me a rather nasty look. I gave her a nasty look of my own. When I turned away, I could almost feel her piercing gaze on my back. I tried walking towards the elevator as gracefully possible, but for me, I felt like I was a gazelle with its legs broken. Holding my head up high, I stopped in front of the elevator. Just as I was about to press the last button, it pinged and opened. Mr. Stark stepped out in his mighty Avenger glory. I was taken aback at his sudden entrance. He was about the same height as my father (a whole five feet and nine inches on the dot) with dark brown hair that was neatly styled and a tidy beard. He had a rueful smile on his face and I stared at him more for several seconds. He wore a pair of dark wash denim jeans and a tight black t-shirt. I wasn’t the type to stare at one’s boss, but Mr. Stark had a good figure considering his age and all. He had gotten married recently, and still acted like the playboy that he solemnly had been for years. Around me, he acted like an older brother or protector. It was because he was twenty-five years my senior. It felt comforting having him there, since I rarely saw my father at the lab. He still stayed in Philadelphia and traveled for meetings once a week. 

        “Ah, Miss Bishop. So glad you made it. What, did you stop and get your hair done before work?” he teased. I laughed.

        “No, Mr. Stark. I had just set my alarm a little late. I knew that I didn’t have to start work until eight.” I glanced down at my Rolex, making sure I was right. Yup. Fifteen minutes until my shift. I shifted and let out a sigh of relief. Mr. Stark looked me up and down. He tsk tsked at me.

               “Geez, Miss Bishop. You’re what, twenty-four now? You dress like my grandmother!” He shook his head but kept smiling. My lips thinned into a tight line, I examined what I was wearing. I thought I looked decent enough. I was wearing dark washed jeans and a violet blouse paired with knee high boots. Perhaps wearing knee high boots in the middle of March wasn't such a good idea after all. Business casual. Or more casual than business as he had once put it. At least I hadn't walked into work with Hawaiian shorts and a Mickey Mouse shirt like he did one time. We don't talk about that Christmas party incident anymore. 

        “Okay, fine. I do admit I don’t typically dress my age. And I’m twenty-three!”

“Okay okay, kid. What’s on the agenda for today?” He stopped smiling and had a grim look on his face in a split second.

I gave him a blank stare. There was a strange look on his face. Crap. That was also part of my job. He glanced at me almost as if he was gonna say something but held his tongue. 

“Is it an Avenger thing?” I recovered quickly. “Or is it a code nine one one?” Code 911 usually stood for escaping superbeings. I could only pray that it wasn’t Loki this time. 

 He nodded and turned on his heels. A highly dangerous god was on the loose. Missy stepped out from behind her post and wordlessly gave Mr. Stark a silver briefcase. It was lightweight and inconspicuous, perfect for New York. Having a briefcase was the norm here. In reality, it was his Iron Man armor. He pressed a button to open the case. Stepping into it, the armor conformed to his body and he flew out of the balcony window in the lobby. Papers flew everywhere and Missy huffed. My laughter echoed inside the elevator. 

My job was fairly simple at Stark Industries. Do a routine blood draw, stay out of the way, and do not ask the guard to leave while doing physical tests. Sometimes I was a carrier pigeon for Mr. Stark. He’d send me over to the Shield headquarters (each time the location was different) and hand over vital information to Director Nicholas Fury. Sometimes it entailed me going on trips out of the country which was a nice perk of being here. 

There was only one person I could tolerate in the entire tower and that was Dr. Bruce Banner. We were both smart and we knew about the body so we felt comfortable talking about biological warfare and whatnot. On my first paid vacation we had spent a weekend in Calcutta where he tried to meditate and control the other guy. He had invited Natasha Romanoff. I usually stayed clear of her way. She was intimidating sometimes but her sharp wit often made me laugh. Her combat skills came in handy when my usual guard had to tend to some other assignments per Mr. Stark, so she filled in for him. The protocol was that I had to have someone with me at all times. The trust in Loki was so little. There was also Clint Barton. I rarely saw him since he had a private life outside of the Avengers job. He was married and had two kids so he tried to avoid the action as much as he could. There was a rumor going around that Clint had been possessed by some kind of unearthly power due to Loki’s influence on alien technology. Clint’s PTSD had sky-rocketed the minute he spied Loki again in the tower. 

And of course, there was Steve Rogers. He and I never saw eye to eye on anything. There had been a brief time where I had actually wondered if the man in red, white, and blue had developed a crush on me. It turned out it was just his fucked up views on female doctors. Shocker. 

The elevator was lagging today so I wondered if Mr. Stark had tweaked its hardware, again. I pushed the button for the very top again just to make sure I had pushed it in the first place. There was one person I forced myself not to think of. On my first day, I had fallen head over heels for Thor. Now that I thought about it, it seemed pretty stupid. Having a crush on him was inconvenient for sure but I was thankful that he had politely declined my advances. All in all, unrequited love hurt like a bitch. 

Now, I was better after the whole crush thing. I had a few friends, I worked for a bunch of superheroes and my salary was the bomb lest the degrading part of it. Sometimes I went on dates but it was rare since I was so busy. I barely had time for myself! When the elevator opened, I walked out with my satchel over my shoulder. The air was warm up here compared to the cool elevator ventilation. The sun was shining just as brightly as it had been outside and the birds were chirping. The windows in the corridor reflected a rainbow. I straightened my clothes before I walked into Mr. Stark’s office to pick up Loki’s medical chart. Excitement was bubbling inside of me as I thought about testing his lipids and cholesterol. Loki’s metabolism should have been the envy of every athlete in the world. It was quite impressive how much food he consumed and how fast he burned away all the calories. 

I shuffled forward while people passed by me in the hallway. Several of them waved or just nodded. Somehow I still felt out of place. Being the youngest worker here certainly didn’t make it easier on me. I was different from people my age. My degree stuck out like a sore thumb. There was always that feeling of not being good enough. Mr. Stark always soothed my worries about being useful. All the data I gathered for him on the daily had helped treat several people he knew that had suffered from a strange disease after the battle of New York four years ago. 

I guess the only good thing about me was being able to stand my ground. I could easily stick up for myself in any situation. Fighting back a smile, I made my typical beeline for the fresh coffee and donuts Mr. Stark supplied for his workers. After grabbing a napkin to wipe the sugary goodness off of my fingers, I bit into my vanilla donut. I poured coffee with just a splash of cinnamon coffee creamer. A true queen’s breakfast. I walked down the hall while I munched on my goodies. It should be an easy day. I didn’t even have to start my labs until the afternoon after some interrogation and a meeting. Mr. Stark hadn’t been too specific about Loki, but I was sure it was a joke when he said Loki escaped. As far as anyone knew, Loki was locked in his room on the fiftieth floor like Rapunzel. Just as I was opening the door to Mr. Stark’s office I stopped right in my tracks. There was someone in his chair. My coffee hit the floor, sloshing the hot liquid all over my boots. It smelled like pine cleaner and...alcohol? My eyes widened when the chair turned. 

There he was in all of his Asgardian glory. 

I had seen Loki many times. I had seen him in regular human clothes. But I had never seen him in his armor. His cold piercing eyes stared right into mine. His eyes, oh his eyes, were a baby blue color that mesmerized me often. Right now they were dark like endless pools of black murky waters. His black hair was slicked back in his usual style with a few strands tucked behind his ear. The expression he had on his face was wild, animalistic. He didn’t smile. He never did. 

Fear shot through me like icy liquid causing me to shiver violently. My legs were numb while  pure adrenaline coursed through my veins. It was fight or flight at this point. I had no guard here. Basically, I was fucked. He stood up fluidly with such grace that it made me twinge with jealousy. Even like this, he was still somehow perfect. But something was not right. He staggered slowly. Then it hit me. Loki was drunk.  

Perhaps he would kill me in his drunken state. He’d be merciful and do it quickly. His temper was downright scary. I had discovered that on the first day of his blood draws. 

“What are you doing here, Loki?” I asked cautiously. He tilted his head and walked closer to me. I could smell the alcohol and it made me gag. I coughed at how strong and potent it was. It was most likely Asgardian ale. Earth alcohol had no effect on Loki or his brother.   

“How in the fuck did you escape your room?” There was silence. A look of confusion crossed his delicate features. He didn’t even understand my question. It took all of my willpower not to burst into laughter. Taking a deep breath, I tried to speak to him again and get his attention. 

“What am I doing here?” He slurred. He sounded coherent enough. Perhaps the alcohol was being sweated out of his system. It surprised me how strangely calm and collected he sounded at the moment. My thoughts began to wander as I studied Loki’s face. He was really attractive. There was something about his face that didn’t match Thor’s. Loki’s complexion was pale and his milky skin was flawless. Paired with pink thin lips and childlike expressions, overall he was angelic. He towered over every other resident in the Tower. During his first exam, I measured his height. He was an impressive six foot three and a half. 

“Where is the tesseract?” His slurring was even more pronounced as he swayed back and forth, eyeing me with a hungry stare. He was heaving instead of taking normal breaths. There was sweat on his forehead. A sickly look graced his perfect face. Even as he scrutinized me, I could feel the power radiating off of him. He truly was a god. A regal and powerful god. He could snap me in half if his heart desired. My bitchy persona was back on as I shook my head. So what if he was inebriated? I could still take him like that. 

“The what?” I asked stupidly, cocking my head to the side. I had a pretty vague idea of what he was asking about. “I said what are you-” Before I could finish my sentence, Loki did a very not Loki thing. In three quick strides, he stood in front of me, his frame completely engulfing me. He looked like he had fallen from above, like a malevolent god. The faint smell of pine and snow was coming off of him. His eyes were narrowed. I forgot how to breathe for a second and I swear my heart stopped for a few beats. Swallowing air burned my throat from how terrified I was. The odd feeling of having him so close to me was eerie. He had a thing about being touched without permission and personal space. 

“I want the tesseract!” The windows shook from his thunderous voice. “Tell me where I can acquire it!” Loki hissed at me. I was so scared at this point that I began to giggle. This was usually a side effect of pure fear. His swaying did nothing for him. My lips pursed when he leaned down closer to me. A finger lifted a curl from my face and he tucked it behind my ear. A whole second went by before Loki seized my forearm. I yelped in pain, his steely grip squeezing me tightly. My teeth gritted to prevent myself from crying. Several veins in his neck were popping out in anger. Yet, I did not care what he wanted. He was hurting me. Even my teeth began to chatter from the anger I felt at the treatment I was receiving from him. God or not, he shouldn’t treat a person with such disrespect. 

“I don’t where your stupid tesseract is, Loki,” I spat out. “And even if I did know, I would never tell someone like you. You are the scum of the universe, Loki Odinson.” And with that, I yanked my arm out of his grip, walked to the window and pulled out my phone to call Mr. Stark. A growl came behind me as Loki charged at me with an incredibly vile expression on his face. He bared his teeth, his eyes absolutely livid. It was the last thing I saw before he grabbed my arms and threw me against the glass windows. I greeted darkness peacefully.

[cottonblush]

promise me | lmh

❧ word count: 3,403 maybe?

❧ genre: fluff, one mention of a cut so like gore i guess

❧ notes: installment one of the skz powers au!! this one is kinda a drabble series?? also i’ve discovered i love the whole “i hate u” “u love me” thing a little too much but it’s not hurting anyone so yee to the haw my guys!

The first time Minho realizes he’s a gifted one, he’s on the rooftop of his apartment building, unclipping some extra laundry from the clothes line. The wind picks up all of a sudden and the large bed sheet he just unclipped comes flying at his face. He’s trapped, a tangled mass of fabric and limbs, the opaque sheets doing nothing to aid his vision.

The sheets seem to act as a pair of wings, lifting the young boy into the air. It’s just a couple of feet at first, but then he keeps going higher and higher, and Minho can’t get rid of the sinking feeling in his stomach.

When he finally manages to untangle himself and take in a deep breath, he makes the biggest mistake. He pries open his eyes and looks down. There’s no building below him now, just the apartment complex’s playground and park. It doesn’t help that he’s afraid of heights. In that moment, he feels like a cloud, yet he feels like the weight of the world is pressing down on his shoulders.

The fear overwhelms him, clouding his mind, and Minho starts to freefall out of the sky. He tries to scream but can’t seem to find his voice. All that’s left is the seemingly infinite supply of salty tears welling in his eyes and streaming down his cheeks.

In the few seconds it takes to fall, the world seems to slow down. Minho sees flashes of his past, though there’s not much since he’s only at the ripe age of eight years old. He sees his mom making him ramen with an egg on top for the first time; he sees himself in the mirror, small hands running over the scar on his stomach from a surgery he needed; he sees his friends gathering around him to show him the stray cat they found behind a dumpster; he sees you, his next door neighbor and best friend, on the first day that you two met, eyes wide and curious about all the world could offer.

He won’t get to say goodbye to you or anyone else, Minho realizes. He screws his eyes shut and hopes everyone will at least remember him in a good light.

And then everything goes dark.

“Minho,” comes your high pitched voice after what seems like an eternity, “what are you doing hanging from Mrs. Yang’s terrace? Hammocks are meant to be set up close to the ground, silly! And you can’t use a bedsheet. My daddy says you have to buy a special thingy for it.”

Thankfully, the universe has decided it just isn’t Minho’s time yet, and when he realizes this, the boy scrambles to try and get to the terrace.

“Y/n! Please, help! I don’t wanna be in here anymore.”

You run off, causing Minho’s heartbeat to skyrocket, but you return moments later with Mrs. Yang. The woman quickly sees how serious the situation is and cautions Minho not to move.

“I’ll come get you so stay put,” she says, moving quickly.

Once the boy is safely back on the ground, he can’t stop crying, snot and tears turning his once pristine face into a soppy mess. You take the boy into your arms and the two of you fall to the ground, remaining in a tight embrace. Even though Minho is a couple of months older than you, you know it’s no time to point it out and make fun of him.

Instead, you hold him tighter and hope that only good thoughts can reach him, tiny arms doing the best they can to support the taller and larger boy.

Mrs. Yang calls Minho’s mom and she rushes downstairs to get her son, worried expression softening when she sees him safe and sound. She starts to pry him away from you and pick him up in her arms.

Before he can get away from you, you stick out your pinky finger.

“Promise you’ll tell me what happened?”

“I promise,” comes the reply, a matching pinky finger hastily wrapping around your own to seal the deal.

When Minho comes to terms with the fact that he has powers, specifically the power of flight, the first thing you do is urge him to start training to become a super. It’s your latest obsession, the name ‘Megaman’ leaving your mouth at least a billion times a day.

You tell Minho that you want to marry the famous super one day, regardless of the fact that there’s more than a decade between you two. That’s when the boy starts to think that maybe if he becomes a super, you’ll want to talk only about him instead.

Although it doesn’t take much convincing, actually getting Minho up in the air is the difficult part. You have to take it slow, holding his hand even if he’s only a couple of inches off the ground.

After weeks of the same results, it doesn’t seem that Minho will be able to make any improvements, so you do the only thing your ten year old brain can think of.

You unclasp the silver chain that rests around your neck, pendant shaped the same as the first letter of your name, and put it around his. Your hands come to rest on his shoulders, face serious as you try to pretend you’re like a sergeant from your dad’s favorite war-time movie series.

Minho scrunches his brows and tilts his head as he asks, “What’s this for?”

You giggle, serious façade immediately breaking, “It’s a good luck charm! This way, I can be with you whenever you’re flying and you don’t have to be scared.”

“For real? I can actually keep this? You’re awesome, Y/n! I’ll never feel scared if I have this with me!”

You give the boy a tight hug, a giant smile contouring your lips. Minho mumbles something into the crook of your neck, but you don’t quite catch it, so you pull back, hands still grabbing his shoulders and keeping him at an arm’s width away.

He looks unsurely down at the ground for a moment, contemplating if he should voice what he’s thinking or not. However, when he sees your that your encouraging smile hasn’t faltered one bit, it’s just the boost of confidence he needs.

He places his hands atop your own and says, “The necklace sure is great and all, but do you know what’s even luckier?”

You get pouty for a second, thinking your best friend might dispose of your precious gift. With a frown on your face, you grumble out, “No. And I don’t really care either.”

“It’s you, dummy!”

“Hey! Don’t call me a dummy when you’re the dummy, dummy!”

Minho resists the urge to roll his eyes because of course you’d find it in you to argue in a moment like this.

“Ugh, fine, I’m the dummy,” he concedes. “Anyway, I was thinking you can be my lucky charm! As long as you promise to never leave me, of course. And then we can be best friends forever!”

“Really? That’d be perfect, Minho!”

“Promise? That you’ll be by my side forever?”

“I promise.”

Flash forward a couple years and the two of you are sixteen. You’ve become on of the top students in school, balancing grades and your responsibilities as student council secretary. Minho has made a name for himself as a super, dedicating most of his time to saving lives and counting on you to catch him up when he returns home late at night.

However, with people on the streets becoming more aware of him, it also means bad people are better equipped to deal with him.

It’s one fateful night, the wind is howling in his ears and lightning flashes every couple seconds. He’s managed to sneak his way into a gang meeting, trying his best to calm his heartbeat and memorize every detail about the scheme that’s supposed to occur in the coming weeks.

The lightning ends up being a dangerous adversary, its light illuminating Minho’s crouched figure from his place beneath one of the windows on the second floor. One of the grunts notices something is amiss and whispers a command for the building to go into lockdown. He also alerts a guy who appears to be an interim boss of Minho’s location.

The other grunts have him in no time, using their familiarity of the layout to their advantage and sneaking up on him. They grab his arms, forcefully pressing them against his back, and drag him downstairs to the boss.

Minho finds himself seated in a chair. It feels like an investigation scene from the popular crime show on TV, the nearest source of light being an old lamp shining directly in the teen’s face. He gulps, knowing if whatever he says doesn’t please the boss—and it likely won't—he could end up in big trouble.

However, there’s one more mistake Minho makes, and that is overestimating the amount of leniency he would receive. He doesn’t even get a chance to speak before the breath is knocked out of his lungs. Next comes a sharp punch to the face and he knows that’ll leave a mark that won’t be so easy to cover up.

The gang members are relentless, each taking their turn punching or kicking the poor guy, until it’s finally the leader’s turn.

The bulky old man whips out a switchblade and slowly stalks forward. He places the tip of the cold blade on Minho’s forehead, applying enough pressure to draw blood. Minho’s eyes widen in recognition when he realizes what’s about to happen: the man is going to cut off his mask.

He can’t allow that to happen so he wills his body with all his might to break out of the death grip that the grunts have him in. He flies up into the air, shooting through one of the windows and making his escape. Although he does manage to make it out without anyone seeing his true identity, he flies home with a large cut on his forehead, gash slightly tearing into the edge of his mask.

Minho knows that if he goes home and his parents happen to see him in his current state, they’ll find out he’s a super and even worse, they may forbid him from doing the job he’s come to love so much.

Instead, he lands haphazardly on your bedroom’s balcony. He gives the sliding glass door a weak tap, hoping you’ll hear him over the sound of the raging storm above.

Like an angel sent from above, you do hear his call for help and crack open the door.

“Minho,” you call out, voice laced with drowsiness as it’s almost the middle of the night, “what are you doing? Come inside.”

You slide the door open even more, allowing his drenched body to weasel its way inside. You tiptoe across the room and turn the lights to the lowest setting that the dimmer can possibly allow. When you turn around, you resist the urge to yelp, instead rushing forward as Minho’s body collapses.

“Oh my god, Minho! What happened to you? Look at your face. It's…”

You can’t even finish your sentence, your thumb tracing over the delicate skin on his forehead, not ignoring the way his temperature is rapidly falling.

“We need to get you warmed up first,” you urge.

First, you plug in your space heater and position it in front of your bed. You then grab some spare clothes of Minho’s from your closet and turn, ready to hand them off when you see that his form is too exhausted to move on its own. Carefully, you peel off his suit, embarrassment not even close to being present in your mind due to the severity of the situation. You dress him as quickly as possible, making sure to avoid his open wound when sliding on his shirt.

Lugging his body onto your bed, you cover him with your blanket as well as the winter comforter you usually keep tucked away beneath the bed.

Thankfully, the wound is not as deep as it first appeared, and you hope that you can get away with treating it with ointment and wrapping it in bandages, at least until you can get Minho to a doctor.

You lean over his weakened body as you dab the cut with the necessary ointments and creams. Minho doesn’t make it easy for you. His right hand refuses to let go of its grip on your left wrist, skin never losing contact with your own. However, you let it be, knowing that just like that fateful day years ago, the best thing to calm him down is a nurturing touch.

He falls asleep like that and you can only hope for the best, refusing to sleep until you hear his breath even out.

When the sun rises the next morning and Minho comes to, you practically pounce on him, arms winding tightly around his neck.

“Can’t breathe,” the young man chokes out.

You instantly jump back, worry plaguing your features and tears threatening to spill onto your skin.

“S-Sorry,” you say, voice warbling and hands self consciously coming to rest at your side.

Minho softens upon seeing you so concerned, hands reaching out to grab your own.

“I’m fine,” he tries to assure you.

He tells you that he feels much better; he can’t even feel the cut on his head anymore, and that causes you to laugh, telling him he’s being absurd.

“I was so worried, you know? I really thought you were gone for a second there.”

“Don’t you remember our promise? I’m never leaving you and you’re not getting away from me anytime soon.”

“Of course, I remember. But I want us to make a new promise. I want you to promise me to always be careful on missions and always, always, always make sure to come back home safe to me.”

“I promise. I love you, Y/n. I hope you know that.”

“I love you more. And I’ve always known, dummy!”

“Hey!”

“You can’t even argue this time. You literally have a giant cut on your head. You are officially the dummy.”

“Oh god… Do you think my mom will notice?”

“It’s impossible not to. But maybe we can tell her you tripped on the way to school? She must’ve already left for work by now so at least you won’t have to worry about that for now.”

“Ah, what would I do without you?”

“Don’t know. Probably something dumb, dummy.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me!”

“…I hate when you’re right.”

You’re seventeen, not quite a dancing queen, when you’re first asked out to a school event: the winter formal dance. You’re giddy with excitement, chatting with your girl friends about the insta-worthy proposal all day. A classmate who’d recently been in a group project with you, Younghoon, asked you by stopping you at your locker with a bouquet of roses and a box of chocolates.

Because you’re so caught up in the excitement, Minho has to learn of this event through social media, grip turning his knuckles white when he sees that a picture of you and Younghoon in a side hug is your most recent post. He thinks bitterly to himself that you would’ve liked lilies or snapdragons instead and would’ve much rather preferred Haribo sour gummy bears to a cheesy box of chocolates.

He doesn’t know why he’s so irked, to be honest. He thinks maybe it’s because you’ve always attended school functions together as a tradition and you could’ve at least given him a heads up.

However, on the day of the dance, when Minho sees you leaving your apartment through the tiny peephole on his front door, he swears his heart stops. Even through the distorted view of the glass, you look stunning. Your hair is styled and you’re wearing a beautiful floor length gown, but the only thing Minho can think is how you seem to glow. You’re not wearing any makeup but it looks like a fairy came and sprinkled you with glitter and fairy dust. Your million watt smile is just as bright as any other day, but it has Minho’s heart going a mile a minute like he’s seeing it for the first time.

While you spend the night dancing with your supposed prince charming, Minho spends his night at a table sulking. His close friend, Jisung, tries to get him to dance with one of the many girls who are head over heels for him, but he doesn’t have the heart to, telling his friend that he’s just not feeling well.

As Minho downs his sixth glass of punch and crushes the flimsy plastic cup between his fingers, he makes a promise to himself. He promises that from now on, he’ll try his best to make you see him as someone you can spend the rest of your life with. Because maybe all of the 'I love you’s that he’s said to you weren’t a way to express platonic appreciation, but actually are his way of showing how he wants to be able to call you his own and vice versa.

Nothing seems to be catching your attention. You’re quite dense for an eighteen year old. Even his famed flirting and aegyo tactics breeze right by you. Minho swears if he could use one word to describe the whole situation, it would be the infamous r/woosh.

Everyone in your friend group knows about his not-so-little crush, but they’re waiting for him to make a big move. However, Minho’s used all the moves he knows. He’s about to give up hope when a friend suggests a last ditch idea: the silent treatment. That’ll have to get you to notice him.

He never predicted it would be so hard, though. Seeing you in the halls and living right next door to you but not saying a word isn’t as easy as it first sounded. You’re the first person he wants to speak to when he gets a good grade. His finger hovers over your number when he sees anything he thinks you would enjoy doing together (which is pretty often since he basically thinks about you 24/7). You’re the first thing on his mind when he wakes up and the last thing his mind remembers before he goes to sleep.

It’s taking a toll on you too because after a long week, you corner him at his favorite dinner.

Sliding into the booth across from him with a serious expression adorning your face, you inquire, “Did I do something wrong? I swear I haven’t and there was probably just a misunderstanding.”

“No,” Minho denies. “There was no misunderstanding. I just needed some time to clear my head, I guess. Something my friend said really got to me.”

It’s not a complete lie, but Minho would rather be swallowed by a black hole than admit he resorted to something as petty as the silent treatment, especially when it comes to wooing a girl.

“Next time, give me a heads up, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

You change the subject, offering to split a milkshake with him, eyes turning their focus from his face to the menu in front of him. You use your fingers to maneuver the menu around to face you, calling over a waitress. You order a vanilla milkshake with two straws and no maraschino cherry on top: the classic order for the two of you.

Minho hesitantly asks after taking a sip of the cold and sweet milkshake, “Hey, I know we’ve made a lot of promises, but I want you to make me one more.”

When you don’t reply but look at him with attentive eyes and an open heart, encouraging him to feel comfortable and speak his mind, he gets the extra boost of confidence he needs.

“Promise me you’ll give me a chance.”

“What? Wait, a chance at what?”

“I guess I should’ve said, 'give us a chance.’ Go out with me?”

The smile on your face is so bright and full of joy that Minho swears he’ll go blind if he sees it again, but the thought is dismissed when you jump up and reach across the table to pull him into a tight embrace.

Placing a light kiss on the tip of Minho’s nose, causing it to scrunch up in an adorable manner, you whisper, “I promise.”

[witchfall]

to melt the gilded seams: ch. 1

direct sequel to ‘the silver lining still remains’

In the aftermath of the Abel disaster and the revelations about her childhood, Emma Ibori has kept busy preparing to end the secrecy surrounding her life and the true origin of androids. Connor, meanwhile, continues to pester Markus about the feasibility of human-android marriage laws.

But Emma’s life no longer feels like her own…a vagary made from Connor’s increasingly busy schedule, the strange looks her best friend Ryker gives her when they think she isn’t looking, and an exhaustion born of a dread that sinks into her bones from simply leaving the house.

When she finally acts, the axis tilts – but not as she expects. To keep Emma and Connor safe from a growing terrorist threat (and a Cyberlife executive sniffing where he shouldn’t be), Jericho is going to make a spectacle of the one thing she wants to keep to herself: her singular relationships with the RK800 and WR600.

But as the world turns its glaring eyes their way, how long can their silent fault lines hold?

[Rating: T (except some swears)]

{Ryker is owned by @popsicletheduck, Sam is owned by @vaniccio, Chase is owned by @caitlynmellark and Messi is owned by @thenervousmedic. Thank you for letting me borrow your children!}

Read it on ao3 here.

---

April 2040

Even with Connor in D.C., it takes Emma, Chase, Messi and Ryker little more than an afternoon to pack up the entirety of Emma’s physical life into boxes. That’s how she finds herself alone in an empty bedroom -- once hers, but barely ever that -- riding the sharp waves of a sudden whim.

She pulls the memory box out of the dusty top shelf of her closet and settles it on the carpet with a thick clank. She feels a little high from the remnant dust as she digs into the sea of school photos, report cards, flimsy movie tickets and plastic vacation baubles for the sake of...what?

She searches until she finds the photo some part of her remembered. Her father and mother -- Ji-hun and Shara -- smiling together at the head of a long table. The lighting is poor; someone was taking photos with the flash on. But Mom has flowers woven into her curls. Her dress is a simple cream color with a boatline neck and her laughing grin is radiant. Dad is laughing, too, teeth perfect white, navy suit wrinkled but fitted, purple bowtie slightly askew. His arm is around her mother’s shoulders. Their cheeks nearly touch.

She can almost hear her mother’s voice, honeyed and happy for once. “Oh, we had no money. Both of us in post-grad. We just hurried and married. That’s what we wanted to do.”

She turns the photo around to read the writing on the back. “Shara and Ji-hun wedding, June 1, 2013.” She does the math in her head and realizes: she is older than they are in this photo. The dissonance makes her chest feel numb.

But their love could reignite the sun.

She covets a memory like this for herself so viciously that she has to close her eyes and go somewhere else in her head. Because that’s what she’s looking for, for reasons hard to fathom -- proof that even lives that end in tragedy could still see bright spots of joy.

---

June 2040

[REPLAY MEMORY?]

[ACCEPT]

“Hey darlin’.”

Emma sighs heavily, pulling her fingers through her thick auburn curls to throw them over her head. She looks down into the phone camera from an angle that suggests she is leaning up against her new headboard, pillows tucked in against her back.

“I’m glad I caught you before you fell asleep,” Connor hears himself say, and the relief settles like warm gauze both within the memory and without. He studies the video call closely. Her olive skin is pale. Her freckles stand out like dirt against glass and heavy, dark circles weigh down her cognac brown eyes. He watches her until he catches the orange flash of light behind her pupils.

A pulse of life. A flash of difference.

“You almost didn’t,” she says. “Feel like I’ve been fighting off a nap all day.”

“Your new medicine?”

“Maybe.” She closes her eyes.

“Have you been experiencing any strange side effects?”

“It’s hard to tell anymore.”

“I remember the doctor saying something about experiencing a strange electric feeling--”

She rolls her head back.

“Can we not? Can we talk about something else? Please?”

It normally goes like this. Her patience for talking about her health has only declined as his worry has skyrocketed. Anxiety is such a worthless emotion; it perpetuates itself in a cascade pattern and lingers in his biocomponents. But he has not been with her for the past three weeks, and that fact rankles him so much that he has to rejigger his breathing protocol to fire correctly, just as he did in the memory.

[END MEMORY PLAYBACK]

His programming demands action regarding the most important of his mission parameters (the constant [PROTECT EMMA] that buzzes in the corner of his eye), and yet to do that, he has to be away in Washington, D.C., doing his job. Talking to politicians and lobbyists in gold dining rooms with dark wood lining and crystal chandeliers to convince what feels like the entire world to sign Markus’ comprehensive Android Rights legislation into law.

To convince them that they really are people, willing to assimilate.

Connor glances down at his work phone -- something he obtained out of preference by his largely human team for “security reasons” -- and scrolls to his photo gallery with practiced precision. He lands on a photo of Emma leaning over his shoulder in a Detroit park, grinning down at the camera. The sky shines cobalt blue behind her wild hair, and her laughing smile reveals her bright white teeth.

He misses her so fiercely he routinely runs diagnostics to ensure a part of him isn’t actually, literally missing -- but then, a part of him is, in a way. He can hear Hank scoffing from here. But Hank, Connor thinks, would agree.

Only a two-hour flight remained of the fog of this three-week work trip. The constant typing in front of bright screens. The painful mediation of hope.

“Grip it any tighter and it might shatter.”

He flicks his gaze up toward his aide, in the seat across from him.

[NAME: HALE, SAMANTHA // LEGISLATIVE AIDE BORN: 10/13/2013 CRIMINAL RECORD: NONE]

“I thought you might actually relax for once.” Her words are clipped and efficient and teasing. She watches him over a thin, swiftly scrolling tablet, unreadable as amber.

He smiles slightly. “There is a saying about what happens when you assume.”

She smiles back. Like a mirror. “You’ve been looking at that picture for a while.”

Some switch jolts inside of him and he opts for silence.

Her smile inches closer to genuine. She glances down at his phone. “Sorry. You still hold it like a toddler learning how to play cards.”

He looks out the airplane window, over clouds and distant flatlands, where the people are small as mites. “I’m...glad to be going home.”

“She’s cute.”

Connor turns back immediately. Sam’s dark gaze pierces him through.

“An android?” she asks.

He stares at her until he realizes she is genuinely asking.

“No,” he says quietly.

Sam's eyebrows shoot up a single centimeter. She places the tablet on the thin table between them and leans back in her leather chair, watching him. He’s seen this look before. Part of him steels in preparation.

“This explains a lot,” she says.

“Not for most people.”

“You’ve been in a terrible mood for the past week.”

“Have I?”

She smirks, but it fades immediately. “You don't talk about her much.”

“I don't want--”

The words die in his vocoder.  I don't want her to get hurt. From attention. From my enemies.

Even thinking the words feels like setting the last slab of stone on an already creaking cart. Emma has considerable mechanical alteration (“a cyborg,” she explains plainly), but she's also a bright, mouthy, endlessly kind human being, and he wishes there was a way for everyone to see her as he saw her. She is determined to press on for the sake of truth -- tell the whole world how she became what she is so that no one suffers from the secrets anymore. So that humans have a new understanding of their connection to androids.

He had recently begun to understand the intoxicating calm of lies.

“You're worried about her,” Sam notes quietly.

“Always.”

Sam purses her lips against a number of unspoken things. “What does she do?”

“Carpentry,” he says.

She’s good at deduction and that’s why she is on this plane and not back in D.C. with the rest of his team. He knows what she is really asking, but he's not willing to give her this yet. She reaches for her cup of ginger ale, long drained, and taps her fingernails against the glass. “Are you worried it will become an issue?”

“In what way?” he asks.

“You tell me.”

“It’s been fine so far,” Markus says from across the cabin. Connor slides his gaze toward Markus, who watches them both with the reserved warmth of a curious patron. Simon, sitting across from him, pointedly keeps his eyes on his tablet -- but the PL600 is always listening.

Sam finally turns away, toward the airplane window, brows furrowed in thought. She slides a blonde hair back behind her ear and breathes out through her nose for five seconds straight.

“You can ask, Ms. Hale,” Connor says softly. “I don’t mind.”

He really doesn’t. It feels like a pressure release, speaking of Emma openly like this.

She doesn’t look at him, but her mouth relaxes slightly. “How long have you…?”

“Since November 2039.”

She sits up immediately. “Since--”

Her mouth snaps shut again. Her eyes search his face. How had he kept this hidden from her, his blood hound? What else could he hide from her?

What did he intend?

He leans back in his chair. Tension releases in a soft tick from his back that he catalogues away for future upkeep. “And hopefully for as long as we both are alive.”

Her mouth turns downwards. He thinks for a moment that she is going to say something angry. Accuse him of hiding key intel that prevents her from doing her job — she can’t protect his image if she doesn’t know everything. She can’t handle his affairs if he keeps half the workload to himself. But the tightness around her eyes loosens and he realizes she isn’t angry.

She’s thinking of the other side of the coin of “how long.” The collision of immovable object and unstoppable force; “how long” for an android has a different definition. He knows this because he is thinking of it, too, like he has been since he first saw Emma bleed. He knows because he can smell sadness and pity from a mile away after living in its stink in D.C. for so long.

But as soon as he notices this, she raises her hands as if giving up. A smirk erases all hint of emotionality.

“Well, now I’m definitely glad I am coming along,” she says.

He squints at her. He can feel Markus watching them.

“I’m really curious to meet the type of woman that puts up with you and isn’t even paid for it.”

---

It’s happening again.

Emma counts the flowers. Tastes their colors, pink like fizz and yellow like lemons and -- no. Not right. Start over.

Cement yourself to this moment, here in Ryker’s garden. Feel the too-hot summer sun on skin and the licking breeze out of the northwest, bringing a promise of cooler air from Canada. Settle your knees deep into the grass. Do not think of the snapdragons and how they smell like citrus.

One of the handlers in that hellhole house of her youth always smelled like tangy flowers and bleach.

Do not think of listening to that handler’s Monday afternoon soaps. Of the cold hallway floors sticking to the back of a smaller Emma’s legs. Of Noah leaning his head into her shoulder “to listen better” but really because being apart felt like staring down a big hole into nothing and--

Suddenly she’s a little girl again. She feels the world slip between her fingers, replaced by a sizzling anger that cleanses every thought. Something beeps in her head. Noah’s small face, innocent and pale, hovers superimposed on the face of Abel, the man who tried to kill her and Connor. The two repel like the same side of a magnet.

Her ears ring, high-pitched and trilling like mad bells. Her vision fuzzes out like an old TV. Her lungs seize. {PROCESSING --MEMORY!!ERROR. VARIABLES76857. ERROR UNKNOWN.}

“Ryker! She’s doing it again!”

Emma blinks a few times. Chase’s voice. Grass. Garden. Sun. Wind. Come out of it. Breathe.

For fuck’s sake! Breathe!

{ERROR. ERROR. ERROR------8978792*&^*^&^----ONLINE}

“I can’t look away for five minutes to get tools anymore,” she hears Ryker grumble, but in the way they do when things are truly going to shit. She hears the telltale pitter-stomp through the grass of Messi following not far behind. Emma rises to her feet, as if to make a point, and the world spins. She can’t catch her breath.

“Ibori. What happened?” Chase instantly reaches his arms out to stabilize her. “Look at my face.”

“Nothing,” she lies through her teeth. Chase merely stares at her as if she just announced that the sky is green. “Another fucking memory resurfaced.”

“Everything is alright, remember?” Ryker reminds her, though they grasp tightly to her wrist, turning it over to check her pulse. A gardener should not be so good at doing that, some distant part of her thinks. “The rate’s been slowing.”

She resists the primal urge to pull her wrist back, but not before Ryker notices her hand flex into a fist. They release her immediately.

“I’m going to call the editors,” Ryker says. “You can’t do this yet.”

She covers her guilt by smashing her palms into her eyes and dragging her hands down her face. “If we put it off, the journalists start doubting,” Emma says, as she has explained for what feels like the 500th time this week.

Ryker looms over her, standing with their crutches. For once, the full impact of their height difference -- their 6’2” to her 5’5” -- makes itself apparent. “You don’t think they’d believe you after sitting with you for interviews for hours at a time? That maybe you’re a little mentally unready for this?” “I’m not having this argument with you again.” She digs a toothpick out of her pocket, unable to look them in the eye. Normally, this is the point of the conversation where Ryker freezes as if to recollect themselves and Emma sorts through the weird signals coming from her cyborg brain, and then they both apologize and completely skip over whatever it is they were talking about. Peace is a balm best applied thickly. This time, Ryker fishes a set of familiar flash cards out of their shirt pocket and shoves them at Chase, who watches the exchange with a brittle expression. "Then I'm not having any part of this. I'm going inside." Her heart gives a lurch. "Come on." "No. I'm not talking about this anymore," they snap. "Don't stay out too long or you'll sunburn." The creaking of Ryker's crutches fades until she hears the backdoor to their house slam behind them. She jams the toothpick between her teeth and bites down until she is certain she can look at Chase or Messi and not burst into tears. "It okay, Miss Emma," Messi says softly, pulling on Emma's wrist. "Ryker just tired." "I know," she says, and she knows because it’s her fault. Emma sits down back in the grass. Messi presses her hands deeply into Emma’s thigh as a form of pressure therapy and hums a little child’s song, from somewhere deep in her calming medical programming. Emma absently untangles strands of Messi’s thick, long hair. Chase settles into a wicker chair set up close to Ryker's latest flower beds. He closely examines the flash cards. "Where were you born?" he reads off one. God. Maybe she isn't ready for this. “I’m tired of pop quizzes about myself," she says. "Can’t we just have some nice garden time? In quiet?” Chase holds the card primly in both hands, eyeing her suspiciously over its edge. She closes her eyes against another wave of vertigo. She can nearly hear Natalie, her therapist, speaking in her head. Think of things to be thankful for. Connor is finally coming home. She won’t have to pretend that she can get through the night by herself while curled up in painful knots on Ryker’s couch. She won’t lie awake, afraid of the dark and what she might remember of it. She won’t feel like a pathetic loser pining after someone who has only been gone three weeks. Three long-ass, terrible weeks. “It’s publishing tomorrow morning, Ibori," Chase says, as if explaining this to a child. "People are going to ask. They are going to try and find holes." "I'm gonna remember. My body won't let me do anything damn else." Both of them fall silent at that. For a moment, the only sound between them is Messi's soft humming. "Hmm," Chase says after a long moment, which is Chase for Yeah, I don't believe you.

---

Emma used to make a sport out of fading into crowds. I am among you, but not a part of you, she'd think, and she would disappear before anyone could ask her why she was drinking alone.

Hank pushes a black coffee across the small table. {IDENTIFIED: COFFEA ARABICA, 172 DEGREES F. } “Sorry. Decaf only for you.”

{ACCESSING LOGS…} “Goddamn meds,” she manages. She wraps both of her hands around the cup, like Connor would do if he was here. He could never drink it.

{STARBUCKS COPYRIGHTED BLEND. DO YOU LIKE COFFEE….*&*^*&????}

“Em?”

Her muscles twitch and lock up in strange places. She takes deep breaths. Cut it off at the stem. It doesn’t have to be like this.

{EMMIE I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS…}

Quit it.

“Emma!”

She blinks hard and watches as Hank yanks the coffee cup out of her tight grasp. Only now does she realize she has squeezed the cup until its boiling hot contents spilled over onto her skin.

“Burning yourself won’t do the trick,” Hank gruffs. He tugs at the napkin dispenser and dabs at her knuckles lightly.

“Sorry,” she says automatically. She grounds her feet to the floor. The hand still tingles. She gets the feeling it should hurt more than it does, but the busy airport atrium has flooded her with so much stimuli that she is shocked when she sees that the spill has left a red welt on her skin.

(Noah -- Abel -- he said he didn’t feel pain anymore, didn’t feel anything--)

“Connor won’t like that,” she mutters.

Hank scoffs. He finishes cleaning the table and tosses the napkins into the nearby trash-can. “Yeah, he’s gonna be out of his mind now, thanks for that. Lucky I’ve dealt with worse attitude problems than you...”

Hank refers to it as an attitude problem because he knows she laughs when he does. An attitude problem would be laughably, wonderfully normal. “Great,” she mutters.

His eyes soften. “North'll be back with our clearance soon.”

She huffs and lays her forehead (and burned hand) on the cool metal table.

Current security policy is that no one may be in the private plane receiving area who is not a passenger until within 20 minutes of the landing time. In a fit of anxious energy, Hank and Emma arrived at least an hour early, but they’d been waiting for close to 40 minutes already.

Meaning…

“There she is.” Hank sips his coffee. “Just like I promised. Our boys almost here?” he says to North.

“We’re in luck. They’re ahead of schedule. They’re already taxi-ing in.”

Emma looks up to see North with a rare, true smile on her beautifully carved face. Her hair is in its usual side plait, though she is experimenting with blonder highlights that stand out like ice against her dark clothes. She brandishes the thin pass tablets like three playing cards.

Emma is up and moving out of the chair before North can say another word.

She raps her knuckles against her thigh as she speed walks to the private jet gates, past a dancing water fountain and quiet museum displays of old world cars that feel like pockets of a different time and place. She half-runs down a windowless, wide hallway lit with shades of purple and green like some petrified nightmare vision of the future, all cornerless architecture and the constant feeling that you have to be going somewhere.

Her phone is vibrating, but her hands are shaking too much to pull it out of her pocket. She shoves her credentials at the TSA agents who give her strange looks, but they let her pass once North catches up to wave them off.

“I swear it was decaf,” she hears Hank mutter to North.

Emma reaches the gate, eyes fixated on the gleaming jet rolling down the tarmac. The creamy, nondescript white of an undecorated fuselage, dark windows and an extended walkway remain her only obstacles. All that is left is waiting, which is nearly impossible for her to do. She turns around to speak to Hank and North only to find they are still somewhat far behind.

She runs through a mental checklist. Connor is on that airplane. Ryker is at home watching one of their favorite late afternoon nature programs and keeping an eye on Messi, who is likely experimenting on the dirt in their garden. Chase is on the late shift at the department store. Hank is coming up behind her. Her aunt and uncle are...doing whatever it is they do.

{eeeEEEmmmmiEEEEEE}

You do not own me, you are not real. You are just one aspect of my thoughts.

But then, Natalie was not programmed to deal with the fussy, indeterminable nature of a wetware-enhanced human brain. So. There’s that. Emma falls into one of those black beam seats one always finds in airports and bounces her knee until the pressure against her heel thrums through her whole body.

“Emma.”

For a moment, she is so absorbed in sorting out her thoughts that she looks up and expects Hank.

But she knows that voice.

She rises to her feet at once. “Hey,” she says. It comes out a breathless whisper, weighed down by everything beneath it. Connor strides down the walkway at unnatural android speed. His polished dress shoes click against the hard floor.

His face is stolen from an angel in Venice. Dark eyes, warm as homemade cake, a smile, a--

She hears the luggage -- his little chrome luggage, the pieces she helped him pick out at the mall -- click to a stop just as an arm crushes around her middle. A hand snakes behind her neck. She’s pulled into an embrace so tight that feeling finally fully returns to her senses, rushing in like water through a cavern. Her eyes burn.

“I missed you so much,” he says, straightforward and breaking and quiet. “I was certain something was wrong with me.”

He pulls back to look at her, and his smile flickers. His hand around her neck moves to touch just beneath her eyes.

“Sorry.” She sniffles and apologizes, like she does too often anymore. “I know it was only three weeks.”

“It was terrible. I was very bored,” Connor says, in that deadpan way of his, and it makes her laugh. She throws her arms around his neck and plants the kiss she’d been dreaming of for three weeks right on his mouth, all stupid bravery. He takes a deep, sudden breath through his nose and pulls her tighter against him, sighing softly, like he finally could accept that she was really here, really wanted him back, more than anything. He only breaks away to speak so quietly against her mouth that she wonders if she imagined it. “...my love...”

“God, you’d think you hadn't seen each other in 5 years.”

Emma doesn’t even turn around to flip Hank off. He laughs. She laughs. She looks back, carefully ensconced in Connor’s arms, and puts her hands up as if to say, ‘Guilty.’

Hank walks toward them. “What am I, chopped liver?”

A cool hand touches her burned one almost in an instant.

“...Emma.” Connor’s voice tightens. “What happened?”

“Oh, here we go,” she mutters. And Hank, that asshole, laughs more.

---

As soon as Connor settles into the back seat of Hank's old Ford, a strange weight lifts from his thirium pump. He takes a long, unnecessary drag of the scent of old leather, dusty blankets and the sickly sweet tinge of alcohol from a bottle that once broke open on the carpets years ago. A human wouldn't notice it, he thinks, or they would comment. But then, he doesn’t want to think about the differences between himself and humanity.  

He wants to watch Emma curl herself into the backseat -- all human sighing and complaint, beautiful and alive.

Emma clicks her seat belt and contours herself to his shoulder, leaning so that her forehead lays against his neck. He wraps an arm around her, pulling her against him so tightly that he has to triple-check to ensure he isn’t crushing her. She doesn't complain.

"Comfy," she mutters, as if angry about it. He presses his nose into her wild red hair.

Lavender. Chipped plywood. The summer wind. Coming home.

(How long would this go? How long could he do the stretches without her? He's adaptable. He is built to be the perfect teammate. Adapting to human ingenuity, fine, he is quite capable. They did not prepare him for human desires. Of any kind. The very notion of wanting something is supposed to be foreign to him and he has never wanted anything more in his life than this feeling, like he’s finally climbed through the earth to see the sun.)

He’s startled out of his reverie because she starts snoring softly. Hank's eyes flick to the rearview, as if finally granted permission to speak.

"You really doin' alright out there?" Hank asks. His voice is quieter than usual. He clears his throat and looks pointedly to Emma for a moment. "Pretty long work trip for you."

Connor casts his gaze out the car window to the rolling cityscape of Detroit. He catalogs the  strange pinging in his heart as another type of homecoming -- a realization of what was missed. "It's what it is," he says flatly, because he is not sure what else to say. "People act like they want to hear what we have to say. But...I see the way they look at us."

"Oh?"

He meets Hank's eyes in the mirror. "Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's pity. Sometimes it's...an anger I don't understand."

Hank makes a sound of disgust. "Fuckin' politicians..."

"They don't know how to talk to us, I think."

"But you're okay?" Hank asks, more intently than before. "You feel safe?"

"We're safe, Hank," Connor says softly. He holds Hank's watery gaze until Hank is the first to turn away, eyes back on the road. "It would take a very determined terrorist to strike the Congressional halls in D.C."

"Who's the blonde? The aide you were tellin' me about? She looks very...serious."

"Sam. Yes. She's helping me gather intel before our next big excursion. She is...as you say."

"Heh. Coming from you..."

"I know," Connor says. “She has her work cut out for her.”

Hank finally smiles into the mirror.

"Man, lemme tell you, when I last visited D.C...."

Connor lets Hank tell some anecdote about a previous trip, in which people "weren't even allowed on the damn sidewalk on Pennsylvania Ave. to take pictures of the damn White House," because it seems to help Hank steady his vitals. But once Hank runs out of asides, Connor decides to finally address the flashing warning in his vision. [PROTECT EMMA.]

“Was she okay?”

Hank sighs. Connor squints, considering all the reasons why Hank may lie to him about this.

“She'll give you some bullshit," Hank says after a long moment. "It's a mixed fucking bag. But she's...holding on better than I would. I'd say.”

The turn signal blinks. Connor syncs his breathing with it as he re-orders his sudden splatter of thoughts. "She's...the article..." "Tomorrow morning." He freezes. He hadn't forgotten -- he rarely forgets anything -- but this particular insight had been shoved far back enough in his processes that he hadn't realized the date of publication on the story about her horrific youth was so soon. He's nearly seized by a protocol that would have prompted him to yank her entirely into his lap.

"I should have been here," he whispers, horrified. "No," Hank says, firmly. "You know that isn't how this works. Not anymore."

Connor closes his mouth. He knows. How this works is that he lives and works separately from the love of his life even as she’s withering half a country away. He knows that’s how it is supposed to work.

But he’s running out of context. All the pains are new and strong and he is running out of assurance that all of them are survivable.

---

As soon as they reach Hank's, the trio decides to keep a quiet night in. Hank insists on cooking because Connor just got back from a long trip, which prompts Connor to protest he isn't tired like that, which prompts Hank to tell him to shut up and sit down like the thankful asshole he should be, which makes Connor remind everyone he doesn’t actually eat any food...and so it goes. Emma loves every second of it.

She drinks chamomile tea with honey (Connor's version is a close second only to Ryker's) and sits on the couch between Connor and Hank in a warm haze watching baseball. Eventually, Hank excuses himself to bed. Emma and Connor quickly leave to Connor's room. Everyone's tired of pretending to be anything but exhausted.

That doesn't stop Connor from kissing her as soon as the door is closed. Soft and gentle, he presses in on her jaw, the corner of her lips, her mouth. He holds her tightly against his chest as if he could keep all the world away, and she leans into him, believing it. But it's all a trick, she realizes too late, to pick her up and deposit her in the soft down comforter he bought just for her.

He sits on the mattress and unbuttons his shirt sleeve.“You have a lot of sleep to catch up on, my love.”

“Hrmph,” she says from within a down cocoon. She sits up, blanket still wrapped around her body and head, and leans forward as if to issue a challenge. “Maybe I want to kiss you all night. What about that?”

“Have you taken your medicine?”

“Yes…”

“Then you'll be falling asleep in about an hour.”

“Try me.”

He scans her face for a long moment before he leans over to kiss her on the nose. “Somehow I missed you acting like this, too.”

She smiles. He rises to begin unpacking his luggage, placing perfectly folded clothes into his drawers.

His room is no longer a place of spartan order, at least. She framed a few of his pencil drawings to hang on the wall; at least one of them is of her alone, looking over the Detroit River (he insisted on that one). Some drawings are of Hank and Sumo, of Markus laughing in a garden next to North and Simon, of Josh reading quietly against a window. He also hung a drawing from Messi that is mostly abstract color splotches. She glances to the dresser and the collection of objects there: his DPD badge and official portrait, a snow globe with a beach santa inside it (“I like the dissonance,” he said as explanation once), an old quarter collection, and a rubik’s cube.

But all his work clothes are still the same uniform he prefers, she notes with some humor. It's like out of a TV show where the main character has a closet full of exactly one outfit. He folds pants and hangs shirts and she relishes the quiet domesticity of it all like inoculation against the loneliness of other nights.

“How is Ryker?” Connor asks, breaking the comfortable silence.

She pulls in the comforter tighter around her. “Fine.”

He looks at her back over his shoulder, expectant.

She sighs. “I made them mad.”

“But you're always so agreeable.”

She snorts an involuntary laugh. “Yeah, real picture of function over here.”

He hangs the last shirt and turns back fully to her. She takes in a sudden breath at the weight in his expression -- at the way his frown could break glass.

“They don't think I should publish tomorrow, but it's too late,” she blurts as if being interrogated. Anything to stop his face from looking like that. “It’s gonna happen sooner or later and I’m so damn tired of sitting on it like it’s a bomb ready to go. I’m good, you know? I just want it done.”

He sits on the mattress close enough that her knee slips over his lap and she sinks in toward him. He wraps one of her many loose, coily hairs around his finger quietly. “Something is bothering you, though.”

Her eyes feel misty. “I’m just tired.” And then, against her better judgement, she adds: “I had another memory relapse today.”

He freezes, like he tends to do when she talks about this, and it makes her feel worse but she can’t tell him that.

“It was fine,” she says quickly. “They aren’t happening as often.”

“This isn’t the one that prompted you to burn you hand.”

“No, that wasn’t---that was just me...zoning out…”

She thinks of Noah’s voice, booming in her thoughts, because hiding from it gives him -- it -- power, and thoughts are not reality. She thinks his name so intently she nearly says it. Luckily, she bites her tongue.

Because already she has said too much.

Connor leans in toward her until their foreheads touch. She expects him to kiss her, but he places his hands firmly around the small of her back as he pulls her into his lap, lips not quite touching. Her legs straddle him and her arms circle his neck, prompting the comforter to fall to the floor. She feels a strange heat from the vulnerability. But he holds her tightly against him and she welcomes the pressure.

His mouth is beside her ear. "I can't keep spending time away from you like this.”

“You have to.”

“You're more important.”

She pulls back to look at him. “More important than all of android life?”

His shoulders loosen. He buries his face in her neck and she cradles his head with one hand. He can't keep talking like this because she is tempted to agree. But he has to build a life outside her own. That is what she swore she would never let him give up.

There is so much he hasn't seen…

“It's okay, darling,” she says softly. “I'm not dying yet. I still got shit to do.”

“Like drive me insane,” he mutters.

She laughs. His grip tightens and her stomach flutters. “In a good way?”

He leans back just enough so that their foreheads meet again. She settles her gaze on his cheekbones as his eyes seek hers. “On occasion.”

Finally, finally, he sighs, like giving in to her orbit, and he kisses her until she can’t think about anything but him.

---

21:37 Lil.lion.lady74: we'll be over by 7

21:37 Lil.lion.lady74: love u

21:38 Lil.lion.lady74: im sorry. i hope one day you can forgive me.

It is 5:47 a.m. Ryker sits on the edge of the couch. They reread Emma's last texts. They reread and reread and reread, like they’re looking for some hidden meaning they keep missing. Maybe the words will summon her here to answer all the questions they can't seem to ask. Or maybe the words will fall inert to the ground.

They eye the small laptop on the coffee table for a long moment, afraid to open it. But then, they need to take their own advice: there is no use hiding from something that is true. Her story is out there. Everyone's eyes will turn her way. The gaze of the world will eat her up like a pest, leaving the plant dying and brown in its wake, and she thinks she'll be able to come out of this whole. But Ryker knows better than anyone what it means to believe that right up until it’s not true anymore.

So they grab the laptop and go out into their garden to sit in quiet as the first hints of a coming dawn paint the world in soft hues. It's a carefully planned operation, with the crutches and the laptop and managing both, but Ryker is a master of the front-pack, as Emma christened it. Moving from living room to kitchen only takes five more steps of organization than the usual android, rather than the....more....that it used to be. Before they learned how to maneuver on one leg.

They settle on their patio chair, the favored one with the daisy-patterned pillows that have somehow survived the Detroit elements. Emma got it for them, and they will take it with them wherever it is they end up going. Ryker. Alone.

No time to think about that now. They take a deep breath and smell the roses and the snapdragons, soon to wilt in the summer sun. They open the computer to see what damage has been done. Emma got them this laptop so they could watch their shows while sitting in the garden. She moved the WiFi router so they could stream things without issue.

She…

You're just a project to her. Something she can fix in a falling-down house. Except Ryker won't let any human fix them, not even Emma. Maybe life would be easier if they let her. They should do the correct android thing and repair their leg, but something still stops them, a fear like ice against their spine. But also an indignation; they shouldn't have to be anything except what they are. Isn’t that what freedom is about?

Do humans know what it is like, to have freedom dropped in your lap? Some must. Some must still wonder, somewhere, but they’re probably all here already, helping the Volunteer Corps. And one of them, Emma, their Emma, no longer their Emma, uses her freedom to throw herself on the pyre.

They open the Detroit Free Press site to the doe eyes of a three-year-old Emma -- curly auburn hair cropped to her ears, skin yellowy and wan, freckles constant. She stares at the camera utterly flabbergasted, like it had caught her doing something she shouldn't be. Her eyes almost glow.

A LIFE HAYWIRE:

Cyberlife inspired a decade of innovation. But that innovation was built on the back of a survivor of dangerous cybernetic experiments. Her name is Emma Ibori. She was age 3.

Their biocomponents click and squeeze. They've seen this picture before now, but only in momentary snippets. That was all that they could afford, unless they wanted to spend an afternoon in inexplicable tears. But now, as they confront the picture in its final print, the tears become extraordinarily explicable. Ryker will never know what it is like to be that small. Ryker will only understand what it is like to be that tiny and helpless from reading this story about it happening to this person that they love -- this person who somehow grew from that, like an oak from an acorn. They reach out to touch the screen and the picture zooms in slightly, making Ryker's vision blur.

They're too different. It's too much. How could they ever have thought that it could work, them being best of friends for as long as they both would live? Emma grows on and on and on and Ryker is just here, waiting in the garden for dawn.

Ryker loses track of time reading the story. Suddenly they hear the telltale creaking of their backdoor opening. 7:00 a.m. on the dot. Emma, harried and true, and Connor, frustratingly impeccable. They are followed by Chase in his duck pajamas and Messi in her long nightgown, both of them coming from Ryker's bedroom. The sight is jarring and lovely; a splash of unexpected color in a flower bed. And everyone is on time. Connor is good for something.

Emma stares at Ryker, with a fear not dissimilar from the picture on the tablet. "What's the damage?"

"It's..."

The words die on their tongue. Her face is pale except where it’s flushed red, her fingers subconsciously twining in anxious knots.

How are they going to do this right? Where do you go, once you leave an anchor behind in a world that won't stop changing?

"There’s no damage,” they lie. “Not yet.”

[borderline-worthless-blog]

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[green-eyeddragonfanfiction]

Valentine’s Day Countdown: Day 12

Valentine’s Day Countdown Collection

Day 12 of my Valentine’s Day Fanfic Countdown.

Without any further ado, here’s the request that made today’s cut:

1) Bucky x Reader (Winter’s War)

creideamhgradochas said to green-eyeddragonfanfiction: Hi lovely! For the Valentine's Day thing...I was gonna ask for 40's Bucky. But then I realized maybe you could do like a deleted scene from Winter's War? Where Bucky and the reader (me) are just being domestic? Fluffy and/or smutty. I basically just want my little 40's baby to be happy while he still can, and I love your writing so much! 💕

Pairing: Bucky x Reader (Winter’s War) Warnings: Swearing Word Count: ~1,996 A/N: This is 100% canon to WW’s storyline. Also, colors suck. It’s dark red-purple. Plum. Wine. Boisonberry. W/e.

February 14th, 1944 - France

You wished there wasn’t a war going on. You were in France, just a few miles away from Paris- the city of love- on Valentine’s Day, and yet you were stuck drafting battle plans and forging weapons. You couldn’t even spend the day with Bucky. He was off with Steve and the guys doing reconnaissance.

As soon as you were done kicking Hydra’s ass back into hell, you were going to celebrate by going to a fancy restaurant with Bucky and eating the best food money could buy. You were rich, after all. Maybe not as rich as Howard, but rich enough to spoil yourself on just about anything. You hadn’t told Bucky, worried that he’d treat you differently after. It was silly, but you’d only been going steady for a few months. There were things about him you still didn’t know, and that dark voice in the back of your mind told you not to trust him with that information yet.

A knock on the door to your tiny workshop in the basement startled you so badly you swore and dropped the gun you’d been working on, wincing as you expected it to go off and blow a hole through you. But it didn’t, and you relaxed after a moment and glared at it. “Stupid piece of crap,” you muttered bitterly. “Who is it?” you asked, hand traveling to the pistol on your thigh just in case the person at your door wasn’t a friendly.

“It’s me, (Y/N),” came Steve’s voice from the other side of the door. You leapt up from your seat and hobbled to the door (your right leg had fallen asleep you’d been sitting so long). If Steve was back, that meant Bucky was, too. You opened the door, huge smile on your face faltering when it was only Steve standing there. Immediately, your blood pressure skyrocketed as you jumped (feet-first) to the worst conclusion. “Bucky-”

“Is fine,” Steve said placatingly. Your heartbeat immediately slowed a bit, but now you were confused.

“What’s goin’ on, Steve?” you asked, eyebrow cocked in confusion.

Dum Dum appeared beside Steve, long garment bag in-hand. “Get cleaned up and put this on,” Dum Dum said mysteriously as he held the bag out to you. You took it, confusion growing by the second.

“Wha-”

James poked his head in the doorway. “You have twenty minutes. I suggest you hurry.”

When you didn’t move, James walked into the room and physically shoved you towards the stairs. “Okay, okay. Alright! I get it!” you said. James stopped pushing and you gave them all withering looks before climbing up the steps.

You arrived in your room a moment later and threw the garment bag down onto the bed unceremoniously. You didn’t have time to shower, but you weren’t very dirty. It was mostly your hands. A quick scrub in the sink and you were passably clean. You walked back to your room and unzipped the bag slowly, eyes widening in surprise at its contents. A beautiful plum colored dress stared up at you, and you carefully pulled it out of the bag, its soft fabric flowing smoothly between your fingers as they danced over the pleats and the huge bow around the waist. Its medium length sleeves would be nice against the February chill, and the fabric was thick enough to afford you some barrier from the ghastly wind.

A gentle knock on your door startled you out of your thoughts. “Ten minutes,” you heard James say from the other side of the door.

You swore under your breath and quickly stripped out of your disgusting work clothes and shrugged the dress on with only a little difficulty. You ran from your room to the bathroom barefoot, tiny makeup purse clutched tightly in your hand. It had been a gift from Peggy and you hadn’t had an occasion to use it... until now.

You hastily painted on some eyeliner, followed by mascara and light eye shadow. You wanted to do your eyebrows, but simply didn’t have the time. You pulled out the tube of red matte lipstick and carefully rolled it on your lips, smiling with satisfaction at the final product. Peggy had chosen the perfect shade, of course, and you were- for once- thankful for her expertise in feminine areas.

You returned to your room to grab your purse and it was only once you started to make your way to the front door that you realized you’d forgotten something very important.

You were barefoot.

And you didn’t have any shoes that would match that dress. In fact, you were pretty sure your only options were slippers, ratty old heels that you hated, or combat boots.

“Ah, shit,” you whispered.

A knock at the door pulled you from your self-pitying thoughts. “Chaussures, mademoiselle?” came a voice from the other side of the door. Shoes, miss? You smiled and trotted over to the entryway, opening it to reveal Jacques standing there, a pair of plum flats in his hands. He held them out to you and you took them with a smile, admiring the adorable studded frills on the toes.

“Merci, mon ami,” you said with a smile. Thanks, my friend.

“De rien. Es-tu presque fini?“ he asked curiously. You’re welcome. Are you almost finished?

“Oui,” you said as you sat down on the edge of your bed and slipped the flats on. “Vas-tu me dire de quoi il s'agit?” you asked, giving him a side-eye. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?

Jacques pantomimed zipping his mouth closed and throwing away the key and you rolled your eyes. “Fine, be that way,” you muttered, making him chuckle. He might not have known exactly what you’d just said, but between your tone and the words he did know, he caught your meaning clearly.

“Gabe et Jim sont en bas t'attend,” he said with a mischievous smile before turning away and leaving you alone in your room. Gabe and Jim are waiting for you downstairs.

With a resigned sigh, you hefted yourself off of your bed and meandered downstairs, mind swirling as you tried to figure out what was going on. You sensed Bucky’s hand in everything, but you couldn’t place his endgame.

Sure enough, Jim and Gabe were waiting in the entryway, looking bored and bundled up against the cold outside. When they spotted you, though, their expressions brightened considerably.

“Ready?” Gabe asked with a smile.

“Don’t suppose you’ll tell me what I should be ready for?” you asked, already knowing the answer.

“No can do,” Jim said with a smirk.

You sighed and nodded. “Yeah, alright. I’m ready.”

Gabe opened the door, revealing the most beautiful, sleek 1930 black and red roadster convertible you’d ever seen. The top was up, thankfully, but even in the quickly retreating daylight, it shone like diamonds. This car was obviously loved.

“Wh-What on earth...” you murmured, walking up to it in a daze, freezing just before you touched it.

You heard Gabe open the door next to you and you stared between it and him uncomprehendingly. Gabe rolled his eyes. “C’mon, just get in,” he said with a smile as Jim hopped in the driver’s seat. You nodded dumbly and clambered in the passenger seat. Gabe shut the door securely and gave Jim a wave.

And just like that, you were off to who-knew-where.

As it turned out, who-knew-where was into town. Faces followed your car as you passed through the narrow streets, onlookers curious as to who owned such a nice car in the middle of a war. You wondered that, too, but your curiosity was focused on your mystery destination.

Jim eventually stopped the car in front of a nondescript line of stores. You raised your eyebrow as you studied the store fronts, trying to discern the grand scheme.

“Over here,” Jim said, pointing to an alley. You looked from it to him, eyebrow raised skeptically. He rolled his eyes. “Just go,” he said, gesturing down the alley.

With a shrug you did as he said. You turned the corner and froze, shocked at the sight before you.

It was beautiful. Many strings of lights hung in a canopy between the buildings. Rose petals littered the street, leading towards a single table nestled under the lights. Your eyes fell to Bucky, who was dressed to the nines. He had a black suit on, a navy polka dot tie accentuating the blue of his eyes well. He looked devastatingly handsome with his hair slicked back and his facial hair trimmed down to nothing. The moment he saw you his eyes lit up, huge smile creeping onto his face.

“Right on time, Doll,” he murmured, snapping you out of your daze. He walked over to you and extended his hand and you took it, wide-eyed. “You look absolutely stunning.”

“Bucky, what is all this?” you asked, gaze flicking around the romantic hideaway.

“I wanted to surprise you for Valentine’s Day,” he said as he pulled out one of the chairs at the table and gestured for you to sit.

You gaped in shock for a moment before snapping your mouth shut. “You did all this... for me?” you asked, bewildered as you sat. He scooted your chair in and went to sit in his own seat across from you, nodding as he went.

“For you. For us. I wanted today to be special. It’s out first Valentine’s Day together, after all,” he said with a smile as he sat.

“Settin’ the bar pretty high,” you said with a small smile.

He smirked and your heart fluttered in your chest. “I’m confident in my abilities to make every year memorable.”

You laughed at that. “Oh, I don’t doubt that. You could do anything you set your mind to.”

You were interrupted by a man you didn’t recognize, though he was clearly a waiter judging by his attire and the menus clutched in his hand.

“Bonsoir, voulez-vous regarder le menu des vins, monsieur?” the man said as he handed you your menus. Good evening, would you like to look at the wine menu, sir?

“Oui, monsieur,” Bucky said easily. Yes sir. It appeared living with Jacques and staying in France had rubbed off on him. 

The man handed Bucky a second smaller menu and Bucky perused it, slight frown in his brow the only indication you had of how out of his depth he was.

“If I may? I’m quite particular about my wine,” you said with a smile, trying to come to Bucky’s rescue without making him uncomfortable.

“You like Bordeaux, right?” he asked, eyeing you over the menu. Even though you couldn’t see his mouth, you could tell he was smirking at your expression. Just how did he know that?

“Cet un, s’il vous plait,” Bucky said, pointing to a wine on the menu that you couldn’t see. This one, please.

“Oui, monsieur,” the waiter said with a secret smile as he took the menu back.

Once the waiter departed you looked to Bucky, lopsided smile on your face. “You know my favorite wine?”

Bucky smiled and ducked his head almost sheepishly before nodding. “You and Jacques talked about it. I overheard,” he explained.

You frowned. You hadn’t talked to Jacques about wine in... at least a month. In fact, you were pretty sure the last time you were talking to him about it was on the march out of Austria. “That was months ago, Buck.”

Bucky shrugged and sent a heart-breakingly sweet smile your way. “S’pose I just like listening to you, I guess,” he mused.

A shy, pleased smile settled on your face. “This-” you gestured to the area around you, “-is perfect. Thank you,” you whispered, trying to blink back the tears. No one had done so much for you before.

Bucky’s smile was blinding. “Happy Valentine’s Day, (Y/N).”

You smiled back, eyes dancing with happiness. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Buck.”

[your-dietician]

Giving Birth During the Pandemic, Calif. Wildfire Evacuation

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/giving-birth-during-the-pandemic-calif-wildfire-evacuation/

Giving Birth During the Pandemic, Calif. Wildfire Evacuation

Illustration: by Lucy Jones

Smoke plumes over the parched hillside as we load up our two cars for our first wildfire evacuation: passports and a few bags, one neurotic pit bull and six very disgruntled barn cats. At the last minute, we toss in some baby essentials (car seat, co-sleeper) — but surely, surely we’ll be back home before we need them. Nearby, two wild turkeys peck at the new fire break, unperturbed by the human frenzy, the gathering of domestic animals, the churning of fields.

It’s August 2020. And I am 36 weeks pregnant.

A week earlier, we’d been counting our blessings — the sort of feel-good California nonsense that ran contrary to every fiber of my jaded New Yorker soul. But on that deceptively bright afternoon, I’d indulged. First on the list was our home: my husband’s family ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains where we’d moved from Brooklyn three years before.

Like so many “classic” journeys West, ours had begun in a quixotic vein. On paper, it was a job offer for my then-boyfriend, now-husband, but the impulse ran deeper than that. We were both fed up with New York for the reasons 30-something artists often are: a growing disillusionment with our respective industries; the churn of yuppification driving our friends from the neighborhoods they themselves had gentrified not long ago; the pervasive sense that there’s always someone younger than you dying to do the same thing for less. And so, we wanted to embark on a new adventure together, something utterly different — and what could be more different than trading cramped city living for bucolic rolling hills? The ranch itself held an almost mythic status for my husband. It was the childhood kingdom where he once visited his uncle and grandmother and played out his Tolkien fantasies; the steady rock of home after his parents got divorced.

But, it turns out, we’d come to California in the end times. The apocalypse grew starker the farther west we drove. When we passed through Montana, the big sky clogged with smoke as fields burned alongside the highway. As we wound down the Oregon coast, the heat sizzled. We reached the ranch on the hottest day in San Francisco history. We drove down to the beach to escape the heat—only to find a small brush fire blocking our path. The Bay Area of my husband’s childhood was in its death throes. Destroyed by tech bros and venture capitalists and, most irrevocably, by climate change. Since our arrival, the Golden State has seen its population decline for the first time on record.

Living out in all that damn nature — a 25-minute drive from just about anything — felt claustrophobic. I missed home. I yearned to hop on the subway. Trade gossip with the self-proclaimed mayor of my block. Stumble home and stop, shame-faced, at the corner bodega for a bag of expired Goldfish crackers. Engage with that pulsing, beating, bleating hum of humanity that is New York City.

But there’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you see the value of wide-open spaces. To find the beauty in sunburnt grasses. To see the hills dotted with live oaks not as yellow but as gold. To watch the fog unfurl like dragon smoke and think — this, perhaps this can be enough.

The second blessing we’d been fool enough to name was my “easy” pregnancy. I’d been 15 weeks pregnant when COVID-19 shut down the state. My in-person appointments migrated to video. I purchased a scale and a blood-pressure cuff; I dutifully reported the results every month. By and large, I felt pretty good. Healthy. But this fiction, too, was about to go up in flames. The temperatures soared, the barn cats’ fur crackled, my feet ballooned.

The morning of our evacuation, I have my first in-person OB/GYN appointment in months. By this point, I’m accustomed to the realities of a pandemic pregnancy. The strange disconnect when I talk to anyone who gave birth before COVID-19, who never worried if their partner would be allowed into the delivery room, or Googled “will the hospital separate me from my newborn if I test positive for COVID?” In the empty waiting room, the “don’t sit here” printouts have vanished along with the chairs that accompanied them. The pandemic has dragged on for five months, and the furniture has adjusted itself accordingly.

The doctor gives me bad news — the baby is in breech. The hard, round protrusion jutting beneath my rib cage is, indeed, the baby’s head, not his rump as I’ve been trying to convince myself for weeks. We schedule a version— a procedure where a doctor tries to turn the baby right-side down — for the following Friday.

Who was I to think that my body wouldn’t betray me?

There’s something else, too. My blood pressure clocks in at 151 over 97. The chatty nurse grows quiet. She looks at me, then back at the reading. She asks if I was rushing to get here. If I suffer from white-coat syndrome. With the cocky self-assurance of a person young enough and lucky enough to believe that their body won’t betray them, I tell the nurse I’m stressed. We’re under evacuation warning. By the time she straps the cuff back on after the appointment, my blood pressure has returned to normal.

Preeclampsia, the dangerous and maddeningly enigmatic condition that my high blood pressure augurs, has plagued (wo)mankind since the dawn of history. Back in the fifth century B.C.E., Hippocrates blamed it, along with so many other lady ailments, on the wandering womb. In the intervening two and a half millennia, doctors haven’t figured out the cause. The prevailing theory is that the problem starts in the placenta, the organ that nurtures the fetus in the womb: In women with preeclampsia, the blood vessels that form to deliver oxygen to the placenta are too narrow. In its efforts to feed the growing baby, the body kicks into overdrive. Your blood pressure skyrockets; your kidneys falter; your liver might fail. In the worst cases, the “pre” vanishes and you “progress” to eclampsia — seizures which can be deadly to both mom and baby.

Preeclampsia is characterized by a list of associations that often border on patient-shaming: risk factors include poor diet, obesity, diabetes, and chronic hypertension. For complex reasons that likely involve structural racism, unconscious bias, and biological weathering, Black women in America develop and die from preeclampsia at significantly higher rates than white women do.

Returning, then, to my certainty that I am perfectly well, high blood pressure or no, thankyouverymuch. We could call it denial. We could also call it a particular cocktail of white, able-bodied, and socioeconomic privilege. After all, none of those risk factors applied to me.

Days later, as another nurse lines my hospital bed with bumper pads to protect me in case of seizure, I’ll wonder at my arrogance. Just two years earlier, my older sister dropped dead at 35. Who was I to think that my body wouldn’t betray me?

Almost exactly nine months after we first arrived in California, my sister Julia died, both suddenly and predictably. She was 35 and, by most outward metrics, in good health. But, as hard as she fought, she’d been gripped by both depression and alcoholism for over a decade.

In the months after Julia dies, wildfires flame up and down the state. Eight-five people perish as Paradise is razed to the ground. I try to work on my new novel, a cli-fi dystopia that offers little escape. I spend a lot of time sitting in a large wooden crate, socializing a litter of barn kittens. Sometimes, I meet Julia’s college roommate, Casey, in San Francisco. We go to coffee shops that are both like and unlike the ones I missed in Brooklyn. Places where using the bathroom requires an app and a QR code. The world is literally on fire, and this is what Silicon Valley innovation has to offer: the monetization of what should be public goods. Over burritos and tears, Casey tells me stories about her toddler son. Funny words that he’d string together, and how when she says they can’t go outside, he knows to respond: “Too smoky?”

The decision to have children has always struck me as an essentially selfish one: You choose, out of a desire for fulfillment or self-betterment or curiosity or boredom or baby-mania or peer pressure, to bring a new human into this world. And it has never seemed more selfish than today. From a global perspective, having a child in a developed nation is among the most environmentally unsound decisions you can make — a baby born in the United States adds another 58.6 tons of carbon to the atmosphere per year. (That wipes out the net positives of my 25 years of vegetarianism in roughly three months). On the individual level, as fires rage and hurricanes form, as water grows scarce and fields lie fallow, it’s hard not to wonder: What kind of future can we offer a child?

And yet. On some level we still believe that a baby, our baby, will bring the world, our world, so much more than his carbon footprint. On another, we believe, like so many before us, that a baby can be the only balm after a loss. That it will transform me from a bereaved sister to something new and alien: a mother.

The day we evacuate, in that now-annual tradition among Western states, Gavin Newsom declares a state of emergency. The fire that we’re fleeing is the smaller of two mammoth blazes threatening the state. A CalFire spokeswoman on TV advises that all citizens should be “ready to go” in case of wildfires. “Residents have to have their bags packed up with your nose facing out your driveway so you can leave quickly.”

We joke about how absurd it is that every single Californian should be living in a perpetual state of emergency preparedness. It isn’t funny.

The truth is that we’re the lucky ones. We won’t be sleeping in our cars outside Half Moon Bay High School, hoping that the Red Cross can find us a hotel room. We have a safe place to go that will accept us and our veritable menagerie in the middle of a pandemic. My in-laws live an hour’s drive away. And for once we’re grateful they’re on the far side of Santa Cruz.

On the individual level, as fires rage and hurricanes form, as water grows scarce and fields lie fallow, it’s hard not to wonder: What kind of future can we offer a child?

So we settle into our cushy evacuation digs. I check Twitter for updates on the fire lines. I lie upside down on a propped-up ironing board to encourage the baby to flip. I dutifully record my blood pressure twice a day. When I go into a local lab on Monday, I pass a woman around my age. Her hair mussed; her clothes rumpled. I overhear her tell the security guard that she is evacuated from Boulder Creek. Her house has already burned down.

The call comes late that afternoon. We’ve gone for a walk on the beach to distract ourselves. A brisk ocean breeze keeps the smoke at bay.

The OB tells me that I need to go to the hospital in two days and that I should be prepared to deliver. Depending on whether they can flip the baby, they will either induce labor or perform a C-section.

I press my hand against my stomach, cupping what I now know is my son’s head. I dig my heels into the sand. I know with every fiber of my being that this child is not ready to be born. He has literally put his foot down. Wildfire evacuations? Smoke-clogged skies over the Bay? A global pandemic? Nah, thanks, Ma. I’ll stay inside.

Something primal stirs. A desperate need to protect this child — from the world, from the climate, from the overreach of litigation-fearing American doctors. This baby, I am convinced, does not want to come out. He needs a few more weeks inside. My lab work hasn’t even come back yet. Two high blood pressure readings? From a person evacuated from wildfires during a pandemic? And I feel fine.

So, for the first time in my life, I argue with a doctor, first patiently, then furiously. I tell her that I cannot possibly give birth in two days. That we’re evacuated. That we might not have a home to return to. That, as freelancers, we both lost a lot of work during the pandemic. That my husband, whose industry has been completely upended, has an enormous gig with a new client. That I can’t imagine waiting until Friday can make any difference. The doctor takes out the cudgel: “You need to stop worrying about money and start worrying about your baby.”

It is the first time anyone has pulled the “bad mother” card on me, though I’m sure it won’t be the last. I sputter. I am livid. I tell her we’ll be there.

Things at the hospital go well until they don’t. The baby flips; the cheerful dry-erase board is decorated with a beaming sun, the names of the on-duty nurse and physician, and the words “Preeclampsia: Mild.” The next morning, my blood pressure soars, and “mild” is replaced with “severe.” The blood-pressure cuff is now accompanied by a catheter and an IV that pumps me up with magnesium to reduce the risk of seizure. The bumper pads are up now, too.

The hospital, the beeping machines monitoring my vital signs, the proliferating IVs, it all reminds me too much of Julia. The three days I sat at her hospital bed — holding her hand, reading Redwall to her, so sure that she could hear me, that the stories we shared in childhood might somehow draw her back. So sure that she would pull out of her coma, that one day we would make macabre jokes about her hospital stay. That she wouldn’t die. That our story couldn’t end that way.

But here, in this hospital, the wool has lifted from my eyes. I now know how these stories end. And I am sure that one of us isn’t going to survive. It takes the last bit of my resolve not to tell my husband, in a fit of melodrama, to save the baby if the doctors have to choose. (In later, clearer moments, I realize that medicine doesn’t work that way. But in the throes of magnesium-laced labor, the brain latches to the cinematic.)

So much of what could go wrong does: The baby crowns but every time I push his heart rate drops. We try three more times with a suction cup fused to his head, the pediatrician’s eyes glued to the heart monitor, periodically shouting for me to stop pushing so a nurse can press the baby back inside and massage his heart rate up again. At some point, a switch is flipped, alarms blare: an emergency C-section. I’m rushed down the corridors amid flashing lights to the operating table. My husband abandoned in a delivery room awash in blood. Someone shouts back, “We’ll come back for you if we can.”

My son is wrenched from my seizing uterus — weak from the magnesium and letting out only the smallest cry. He is rushed to the NICU for oxygen and observation. But he lives. We live. And, in the end, we get to go home.

The night that Jude is born, our evacuation order is lifted. The fires that burn parts of Bonny Doon and Boulder Creek never reach the ranch. We are so very lucky. Even though I doubt that luck can last.

Although that future still terrifies me and part of me wants to disengage, to say “Let it burn” and “Fuck you” to all that, I can’t. I don’t have that luxury.

After the dust has settled, my father — my somehow still optimistic, boomer father — keeps talking about how crazy it will be for Jude to learn about the day he was born, in a pandemic while evacuated for wildfires. And all I can think is how much I wish Jude might grow up in a world where the summer of 2020 sounds aberrational. I suspect he won’t. As I write this, fires descend on Lake Tahoe, defying all efforts of containment, and Hurricane Ida has devastated the Gulf Coast. Headlines blare about “extreme” weather, and I wonder when the newspapers will lose the word “extreme.”

I know that the world in which Jude grows up will be plagued by more and more environmental disasters. That cataclysmic changes to the climate will exacerbate the other inequities we face as a nation and a planet. That we are living in a real way on borrowed time, under the shadow of carbon that’s already been released as more fossil fuel continues to burn and burn and burn.

Although that future still terrifies me and part of me wants to disengage, to say “Let it burn” and “Fuck you” to all that, I can’t. I don’t have that luxury. I have no choice but to believe that the future — troubled as it will be, stripped as it will be of my biting, brilliant sister — is still worth living in and fighting for. To believe not just in destruction, not just in accruing loss after loss after loss, but in counting blessings. Finding those small moments of joy. The smile on Jude’s face as he bashes his mouth into my cheek. “Boop,” I say as I tap his nose. The same sound Julia used to make when I tapped hers.

This isn’t the ending that I’m looking for. And it isn’t just an ending either. It’s a beginning, too. An often frightening one. And, for now, that has to be good enough.

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[allenmendezsr]

101 Toxic Food Ingredients - New Conversion Breakthrough

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101 Toxic Food Ingredients - New Conversion Breakthrough

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    3 Newly Discovered TOXIC Food Ingredients You Must AVOID to Fight Cancer, STOP Heart Disease & Burn Off More Stubborn Fat

Written By: Anthony Alayon C.F.T., C.S.N., & Best Selling Author

Did you know that DANGEROUS ingredients can be found in a majority of the food items you purchase from a grocery store or any of your favorite restaurants? These ingredients can be harmful and even LIFE THREATENING.

FACT: A recent study conducted by the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association states that OVER 80% of packaged foods eaten in the U.S. every day are contaminated with at LEAST ONE TOXIC ingredient. These ingredients are responsible for putting your health at risk.

Did you know that as your weight increases, so does the risk of getting cancer?

FACT: The American Cancer Society discloses that excess body weight contributes to as many as 1 out of 5 of all cancer related deaths.  Not only that, but 1 out of 3 deaths are also linked to poor nutrition and physical inactivity. Don’t you – as a consumer – want to know exactly what you are putting into your body?

FACT: Food labels are NOT required to fully disclose the amounts of certain ingredients contained within foods you consume.

I am here to open your eyes and help you learn the Truth About Food Ingredients!

But first, let me introduce myself… My name is Anthony Alayon and all my colleagues call me the “Toxic Ingredient Food Decoder”. I know it may sound a bit like a tongue twister, but with over 14 years of experience in the health and fitness industry, I have spent THOUSANDS of hours relentlessly researching food ingredients and the effects they have on our bodies.

Fortunately, while being surrounded by top health experts, I was able to compile the BEST strategies on how to FIGHT aging to live a long and healthy life. During my research, I discovered literally over 101 ingredients have a negative effect on our bodies… but I also uncovered which ingredients have positive health benefits as well.

And today, I’m here to “spill the beans” and tell you the REAL truth.  You see, there are 3 HIGHLY-TOXIC ingredients you are consuming every day that can cause cancer, while increasing your risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, brain tumors, Epilepsy, and Depression… just to name a few.  By simply REMOVING these toxic food ingredients you can instantly increase your cognitive function, normalize your blood pressure, and decrease your chances of acquiring LIFE THREATENING diseases.

Brace Yourself: What I am about to share with you goes AGAINST what all the popular nutritionists, diet experts, and doctors will tell you to do. So, be prepared. I’m not here to use scare tactics.

I wrote this article for ONE reason, and one reason only: To tell you the REAL truth about the “healthy foods” you spend your hard earned money on.

These 3 Diet Mistakes Below Reveal The “Hidden” TOXIC Food Ingredients You Must Avoid The Next Time You Shop…

And In LESS THAN ONE DAY From Now Your Body Will Begin To “Burn Off” MORE Stomach Fat and ELIMINATE Your Risk Of Deadly Diseases

Simply follow the 3 steps mentioned below and you will finally discover the major barriers that are holding you back from living the healthy and vibrant lifestyle you deserve. I assure you these 3 steps are “little known” and fly “under the radar” as the Giant Food Companies want to keep this information from you so you keep buying their products. You’ll want to pay close attention…

STOP Eating These 6 “Specific” Cancer Causing Foods

Society has conditioned us to think that by eating fruits and vegetables, we will have more energy and be healthier. This could NOT be any further from the TRUTH. Just take a look at the world we all live in today.

According to a study conducted by the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s accounts for over 1.3 million deaths in the United States alone.

This is the fattest and sickest we have ever been in the history of the world.

The REAL problem lies in the fact that most of the foods we eat today have been Genetically Modified. A better definition of a G.M.O. food is “A food in which the gene from one species has been forced into the DNA of another species and the process itself creates all sorts of unpredicted side effects.”

What this means in plain English is that the fruits and vegetables are taken out of their natural state, which is NOT what Mother Nature intended for us to do.  The big food corporations created this process in order to produce mass quantities so that we buy more from them.

Negative Side Effects of Eating GMO’s You’ll Probably Eat Today

There have been attempts by scientists worldwide WARNING about the negative side effects G.M.O. foods cause such as cancer, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, joint pain, newborn diseases and nutritional problems, they were IGNORED.

When lab rats were given G.M.O. foods for long periods of time, some of the DANGEROUS and HARMFUL side effects included infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. Other side effects include food allergy symptoms, increased toxicity, negative reproductive effects, negative effects to digestive systems, unknown genetic effects on humans and EVEN DEATH (rats and mice).

Here are some common foods that you are probably eating that have been Genetically Modified:

There are over 39 other common foods you eat every day just like this found on the very next page.

And you’ll NEVER believe this one:

Food companies do NOT even have to put a label on foods containing these DANGEROUS G.M.O.’s.

They do this because the companies NEED you to spend more and more money on their foods so they can stay in business. These big food companies could care less about you OR your family’s health because they only have ONE goal: Make MORE money. 

By producing G.M.O.’s they are able to produce MASS QUANTITIES of unhealthy foods and lightening speed to meet the demand of the uneducated consumer.

But there is a SUPER simple way to avoid all of the harmful effects of eating G.M.O. foods on the very next page.

NEVER Consume The ONE “Hidden” Food Ingredient That Instantly Skyrockets Your Blood Pressure

Drinking your favorite soft drink or health beverage may taste great and make you feel energetic, but in reality, it may VERY well be the REASON you are at risk of a heart attack. Unfortunately, when a food label claims that it is “sugar free,” it does not mean you are out of the woods. There is still something in the food or beverage making it taste like there is sugar in it and the #1 CULPRIT for that is NEOTAME.

Neotame is a fake sugar substitute that was created years ago (back when they thought tobacco was good for you). This was done without testing the long term side effects it would have on our health. After decades of research, here is what we have found about this HARMFUL and NASTY ingredient.

According to the FDA’s website, nearly 100 adverse side effects come from consuming Artificial Ingredients (like NEOTAME), which including the following:

This is just 12 of the nasty side effects caused by consuming artificial food ingredients.

And these “hidden” killers can be found in foods you and your family are probably consuming every week: Juices & Vegetable Drinks, Chewing Gum, Diet Soda, Ketchup, Non Fat Yogurt, Sugar Free Desserts, Low Fat Milk, Condiments, Sweetened Ice Tea, plus over 100 other foods you’re probably eating every single day.

These artificial health food ingredients can be FATAL to your health.  But don’t worry, you can learn how to find healthy alternatives to this ingredient on the next page.

AVOID Drinking Fluoridated Tap Water (It’s Harming Your Brain & Your Body)

If the first 2 ingredients to avoid were not enough, this next one is going to be EYE OPENING.

Around 60% of the U.S. population has access to fluoride in its public water system. You may think that drinking water is good for you but NOT when it comes from your tap & it contains fluoride. Let me explain…

Fluoride from your tap water and faucets has been PROVEN to cause the following adverse side effects:

Researchers from both Harvard University’s School of Public Health and China Medical University in Shenyang, in a joint meta-analysis of 27 studies, found there were “strong indications” that fluoride exposure, particularly among developing children, is highly problematic for proper cognitive development and brain formation.

It also alters your thyroid which means you will not be able to burn fat as efficiently as you need to. Not only that, but it’s known to be a neurtoxin, which INCREASES the risk of cancer. This is especially true for your children as they are still developing their brains, bodies, and endocrine systems. You can go ahead and try to find a bottled water company you trust, but plastics can be just as problematic as fluoride. OR you can find a permanent solution to this problem in just a few short minutes on the next page.

WAIT!

“Find Out Why You May NOT Qualify To Use These Secrets That Fight Cancer and DEADLY Diseases…

On the next page, I am about to reveal the “101 Toxic Food Ingredients They NEVER Told You About” system and some easy food substitutions you can start making today to AVOID these ingredients and nasty side effects.

But I do have to warn you. If you are heavily influenced by TV commercials and don’t care about what you’re putting in your body, then this ingredient reference guide is NOT for you.

It’s taken me nearly 14 years of research to compile this solution. I had to consult with some of the world’s TOP nutritionists, doctors, and scientists to uncover these Silent Killers… and today I will be sharing the truth about the toxic “hidden” ingredients found in your food on the next page.

This new information can NOT be found anywhere else and it can be implemented RIGHT NOW. So the next time you go grocery shopping you can easily “eliminate” these TOXIC ingredients that are making us all sicker and destroying our health. And the BEST part??? You can still continue to eat the same delicious foods and NOT have to follow some unrealistic or bland diet.

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[theloveablesociopath]

Silver Silence Part 5

Pairing: Bucky x shy enhanced reader

Summary: Bucky finally finds himself able to live at the compound with the team, but finds it difficult to repress his feelings for his new very shy and gentle teammate.

Word count: 1,520 (sorry its short)

Warnings: swearing, mentions of pain and surgery.

By the time tony finally called you into the lab for a pre treatment examination you where not only over the hills with happiness but also burrowed 10 feet beneath your extreme nervousness.

Your hands pressed softly against the cold surface of the examination table as you sat at the edge of it. You where absent mindlessly swinging your feet over the edge and looking down with jaded breath, along with the silent remains of fatigue that promptly washed over your eyes, in thick, purple rings.

“You sure you’re ready?” from behind you, Bucky came into view laying a soft hand on your shoulder and gently applying pressure.  His face was overcast with concern, yet gently covered by a sheen layer of eagerness.

“More ready than I’ve ever been for anything.” You replied. “Do you know what this means?”

Bucky stood there looking at you with a soft smile, as if to urge you to tell him even if he knew the answer.

“I’ll be able to run…” you smiled, “I’ll be able to fight, and have sex and play football.” You felt tears prick at your eyes. “I can have kids now buck…” tears where flowing down your cheeks as you laughed through them. “k-kids...” you whispered.

Bucky’s smile grew, and with it, a soft expression formed in his eyes.

“I never thought I’d see the day where my body would be able to function like a normal person, and now that day is just beyond the horizon.”

You knew at this point you where rambling, but in this bubble of hope that had floated into your grasp you couldn’t bring yourself to care.

To think in only a few moments Tony would come in and tell you all about the procedure, to think you where mere hours away from turning glass into titanium.

When your series of hope filled sentences had died off into silent beams of smiles, the doors to the lab opened and in strolled tony, an uncertain smile on his face.

“How’s it going kid?” he asked, taking a seat on a stool in front of you.

“Better than I’ve ever been, knowing what’s coming.” You answered.

He gave a breathy chuckle as he reached for a remote beside him and pointed adjacent to him, willing a screen to fold down at the click of a button.

“I know you’re eager (y/n) but there’s a few things I need to run by you first.” He let his eyes narrow in sincerity. To which you uttered a simple “of course” in acknowledgement.

He clicked a button on the remote twice, and the screen clicked on and moved to a slide with a female autonomy body model on it. “The problem with your body, the reason it’s so frail is because all your energy, bone marrow, enamel, is stored in your chest, in this strange sort of pocket that your powers had formed”

You knew some of this already, but to understand that your body had a physical pocket of stored energy rather than a metaphorical one was a bit shocking.

He clicked the slide again and it zoomed in on the chest, showing a soft glow over  the heart.

“This is where it gets tricky” he sighed, and stood up, walking over to the screen and enlarging the heart and bringing it out of the model onto a bigger screen. “This sort of, energy pocket is actually attached to your heart.” He spun it around to show the back where a strange dark mass now stood prominently on the side. “it’s like a growth, like a tumor, and we have to cut it out… which means…”

“Open heart surgery” Bucky interrupted, his eyes softly bitten in sorrow and you felt a wave of fear run through you.

“That’s right tin man, open heart surgery. And when removing this pocket where energy is stored, is also removing your powers.” tony replied softly. “But that’s not the worst part…”

Your chest constricted in fear as he went back to sit down and turned off the screen, his eyes fixed on yours in gentleness. “If everything goes as planned, your body will start to develop strength, your bones will become stronger, your teeth, your energy they will all skyrocket in strength, but slowly... And unfortunately painfully.”

You looked at him lightly confused and not being able to bring yourself to ask questions proved easier when Bucky spoke up before you. “Painful?” he asked.

Tony looked up at him with a sigh and then back at you.

“yes… very, very painful” he ran his slender fingers through his chocolate hair, “your body will slowly begin to take in energy, but it’s incredibly slow, and by my calculations the years of being so fragile makes your bones and body so unused to this energy that you will likely be in pain for months..”

You sat there in the hauntingly thick fog of silence that had pressed upon your shoulders. Pain, pain was nothing; pain was something you felt so often it was like a second personality to you. It was the fear of everything going wrong, but you knew one thing for sure, you would rather live normally then live everyday in a glass coffin.

“Let’s get started” you replied. Causing tony to give you a soft sincere smile and put a hand on your knee.

“Im going to take care of you, kid.” He said softly. You gave a nod in response.  “I promise”

As tony got up to go get Helen and Bruce to set up the surgery room, and hopefully round up his surgeon friends, Bucky took a step in front of you.

He put two gentle figures under your chin and moved your head to look up at him. “Are you SURE you’re ready?” he asked again, worry obvious on his chiseled features.

“100%” you smiled up at him. He gave a short soft smile before unexpectedly, leaning down to place a softly crafted kiss to your lips.

When he released your eyes opened, even without knowing they had closed and you felt warmth spread through you. Up until this point you dismissed your small fascination with him as a result of his kindness. However feeling the warmth of his lips on yours, that small gesture of intimacy told you that both you and him had found a comfort in each others demons.

-------------------------------------

The procedure went by smoothly, naturally their where bumps in the road, a surgery that often took 3-4 hours ended up taken 7, and by the time it had concluded and a series of exhausted nurses and surgeons poured out of the room,  it became night fall.

You now laid in a hospital bed, out cold with an IV slowly dripping beside you and the bulky bandage that covered the giant line of stitches on your chest poking out of the gown that clung to your sweating body.

From beside you, Bucky sat with his fingers intertwined with your own, he watched your chest rise and fall in slow breaths and listened to the gentle beeping of the machine beside him, that imitated your heartbeat.

He lost count of time as he stared at you, feeling a warmth radiate off him in waves, because he knew one day you would have the life you always wanted, and he could only hope you would want to spend it with him.

Your hand gripped his tighter as the beeping sped up, and with panic starting to settle in him, he reached over to push the panic button.

Your breaths became sporadic and heavy, as your head began to tic in a slight manner.

When tony, Helen and Bruce rushed in, Bucky was casted aside to watch as your body began to thrash violently, and the constant beeping of the heart monitor turned into a series of quick almost blended tones.

“What’s happening?!” Bucky yelled in a panic over the series of voices and mechanical screeches.

“It’s happening..” tony replied in a pant, grabbing padded cuffs and strapping your arms down, and that’s when the screaming begun.

Your voice broke the chain effect of the chatter of technology and people with a burst of a blood curdling scream.

All Bucky could do was sit and watch as eventually everyone backed out of the room, with sorrow forming in their eyes, at the sight of your body thrashing against the bonds.

He didn’t sleep that night, only left your side when Steve dragged him away, and even his own protests to stay with you didn’t convince him that it was good for him. Your screams would be only thing that would occupy his ears if he stayed. Yet as much as he wanted to hold your hand and sooth you as you cried out, his being would not have handled it, and Steve knew that.  But your screams never stopped, and through the entire compound they echoed.

It was a silent dinner that night, all except the distant high pitched voice of you that kept everyone’s stomach churned so much that it made it impossible to eat.

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[wendyimmiller]

What does “Rural Metro DC Area” even mean?

The latest in the on-going correspondence between Marianne Willburn and Scott Beuerlein.

6 March 2020

Lovettsville, VA

Dear Scott,

I am grateful to digital correspondence in that I cannot catch one of the diseases currently incubating in the Petri dish that is your part of Ohio by opening a slightly smudged and suspect envelope.  I wish you both healing – and broth. And my very best to your mother as she recuperates too.

My former Marine chuckled grimly when I read to him your description of us living rurally within the benevolent outer rings of D.C. How right you are – how beautifully you put it, and how sad for the country that the wealthiest counties in the U.S. cluster around the warm teat that is Washington D.C.

A bonus of living within that benevolent outer ring – the National Cherry Blossom Festival in a few short weeks. This year March 20th – April 12th.

For our part I will plead only that we live in the far northwest and often forgotten corner of one of those counties, where side roads are graveled and children ride on bicycles without helmets in the evening.  There are generational farms and farmers here, and though it is true that many are turning their hands to the lucrative temptations of artisanal goat cheese and picnic baskets for wine tasting 30-somethings, it is a rural community for now. Our internet data is delivered by horse and wagon.

Every Thursday.

Our washed-out road in the spring.

Still, change is coming. Two of our neighbors are only here on the weekends, and when I met one of the newly ensconced last autumn, she needed a moment to process the fact that we lived here full-time.

Later at a gathering in their tastefully renovated farmhouse (redundant), Michael and I brought down the tone somewhat by joking over the dangers of felling trees on our own – much like you did last month – and about how a death and dismemberment policy on Michael had opened up new opportunities for risk and reward.

There was a Bethesda psychologist in the company. We haven’t been invited back.

We were kids in Northern California in the eighties, and watch this slow urban creep with not a little worry. No matter how large our compost pile, and how ancient and dirty our automobiles, we know that we are part of the very thing we fear.

My grandfather lost his soon-to-be-Silicon-Valley San Jose farm to skyrocketing taxes; and I remember as a child (during a roadtrip into the city) having my mother point at two incongruously planted palm trees in the middle of three levels of freeway flyovers. “Those were right outside our front door.” she said, and then muttered something her children were not used to hearing her mutter.

Though you make such a brilliant case in your letter for selling everything and moving with great haste to the English-grey, Corona-virus-saturated suburban wasteland that is apparently the greater Cincinnati area, twenty years in the Mid-Atlantic has convinced me of two things: I don’t wish to live anywhere colder, or more humid.

Once upon a time, I didn’t know what an ice storm was.

When the tax assessor finally decides that we have rented this lovely piece of land long enough and must vacate it for the second home ambitions of Capitol Hill consultants and their beautifully groomed labradoodles, I fantasize of once again flexing my gardening fingers in a Mediterranean climate – this time in the Mediterranean. The recent Philadelphia Flower Show with its Riviera Holiday theme has only strengthened those fantasies (of the gardening climate, not the Monaco glitz).

They had me at Vespa.

However, I do share your love of moss walks – mossy anything really – and such lushness will not be feasible further south in San Marco, no matter how many young, powerfully-built Italian gardeners I put on the job or how many glasses of Prosecco I sip whilst watching them try.

I too have been underwater with Powerpoints, articles and book deadlines, but there is nothing like unrelenting pressure to make the cold months fly by.  At a recent symposium I was introduced by a cheerful, funny woman who started the proceedings by announcing there were only a few days left of winter. The crowd cheered. I started to sweat blood. There is simply too much work out there and too few hours left in which to do it.

The beginning of a woodland garden.  In that I have decided it will be a woodland garden. Someday.

As you and I are rapidly hurtling toward that part of our lives where we attempt to outdo each other with health issues, I will say that a recent high-speed car accident in Miami (not as exciting as it might sound), has made those tasks Herculean.

I have no chance of finishing all the clearing in the woodland garden before there are bluebells to be trampled in the doing of it. In all truthfulness, and with apologies to Michele, the sight of your mighty brush pile filled me with longing.

I have given up the clearing for now and am instead, observing. What a glorious thing to realize that I could finally see a small patch of snowdrops and eranthis from a hundred yards away this February! Perhaps all the digging and dividing with hands numb from the cold has, and will be, worth it in the end.

A slow, but hopeful start. Snowdrops and eranthis.

The witchhazels have been blooming well, and though small, I can see them in my mind’s eye at three times their size. I am also thrilled to find that the violent butchery I performed upon my hellebores at the end of last March (both the posh niger hybrids and the not-so-posh-but-adored orientalis downfacers), has resulted in healthy, blooming, divisions. I expected they would sulk for longer.

H. orientalis looking remarkably happy after the night of the long [serrated] knifes last March.  Please note sticks and dead leaves signifying journalistic integrity.

I have interplanted one patch with ‘Rapture’ daffodils on the always sage advice of Brent Heath – as it is a partially shaded site, and evidently the cyclamen types can cope best with such things.  A few seasons observing their vigor will tell.

Speaking of cyclamen – I have launched into a profligate romance with C. coum and C. hederifolium after too long seeing them in other people’s gardens and a recent first visit to Gettysburg Gardens in Pennsylvania. All those years of trucking visiting relatives up to the battlefield and eating KFC on a blanket and I could have left them to their mashed potatoes and monuments and shopped for plants!

Cyclamen coum at Gettysburg Gardens in February.

Perhaps it’s for the best, seeing as I also picked up some budding Scilla peruviana with the delusional intention of clearing my entire sunny hillside around it. The bulbs are blooming now on the windowsill, oblivious to the 6b/7 stream valley fate in store for them.

Bloom now little one.  Bloom while you can.

I am reminded of Beth Chatto’s line – “We lost many plants in our impatience to possess them because we had not achieved the proper growing conditions.”

Guilty.

So. Damned. Guilty.

I trust you remember St. Beth, and have reconsidered your harsh words of last July.

Thanks for the visual reminder that I need to cut back the epimedium foliage before I have to use floral snips instead of a weed whacker.  I will put E. stellatum on my list if the foliage looks that good in your Midwestern February. Have you tried the gorgeous hybrid ‘Amber Queen,’ or are you species purists out there?  Walters Gardens & Saunders Bros. have it for those wielding the buying power of the Cincinnati Zoo.  For the rest of us there is always Plant Delights and a home equity loan.

So worth it. Flowers you could pull up a chair and a drink for.

Heal quickly – for Michele’s sake. Men are such babies about the flu.

Yours in journalistic integrity,

Marianne

P.S. Rethink the chamaecyparis.  It looks in need of something you won’t give it – an easy death.  The skinny exclamation point of Juniperus virginiana ‘Taylor’ perhaps? I am saving my pennies for one of my own – or three.

What does “Rural Metro DC Area” even mean? originally appeared on GardenRant on March 5, 2020.

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What does “Rural Metro DC Area” even mean?

The latest in the on-going correspondence between Marianne Willburn and Scott Beuerlein.

6 March 2020

Lovettsville, VA

Dear Scott,

I am grateful to digital correspondence in that I cannot catch one of the diseases currently incubating in the Petri dish that is your part of Ohio by opening a slightly smudged and suspect envelope.  I wish you both healing – and broth. And my very best to your mother as she recuperates too.

My former Marine chuckled grimly when I read to him your description of us living rurally within the benevolent outer rings of D.C. How right you are – how beautifully you put it, and how sad for the country that the wealthiest counties in the U.S. cluster around the warm teat that is Washington D.C.

A bonus of living within that benevolent outer ring – the National Cherry Blossom Festival in a few short weeks. This year March 20th – April 12th.

For our part I will plead only that we live in the far northwest and often forgotten corner of one of those counties, where side roads are graveled and children ride on bicycles without helmets in the evening.  There are generational farms and farmers here, and though it is true that many are turning their hands to the lucrative temptations of artisanal goat cheese and picnic baskets for wine tasting 30-somethings, it is a rural community for now. Our internet data is delivered by horse and wagon.

Every Thursday.

Our washed-out road in the spring.

Still, change is coming. Two of our neighbors are only here on the weekends, and when I met one of the newly ensconced last autumn, she needed a moment to process the fact that we lived here full-time.

Later at a gathering in their tastefully renovated farmhouse (redundant), Michael and I brought down the tone somewhat by joking over the dangers of felling trees on our own – much like you did last month – and about how a death and dismemberment policy on Michael had opened up new opportunities for risk and reward.

There was a Bethesda psychologist in the company. We haven’t been invited back.

We were kids in Northern California in the eighties, and watch this slow urban creep with not a little worry. No matter how large our compost pile, and how ancient and dirty our automobiles, we know that we are part of the very thing we fear.

My grandfather lost his soon-to-be-Silicon-Valley San Jose farm to skyrocketing taxes; and I remember as a child (during a roadtrip into the city) having my mother point at two incongruously planted palm trees in the middle of three levels of freeway flyovers. “Those were right outside our front door.” she said, and then muttered something her children were not used to hearing her mutter.

Though you make such a brilliant case in your letter for selling everything and moving with great haste to the English-grey, Corona-virus-saturated suburban wasteland that is apparently the greater Cincinnati area, twenty years in the Mid-Atlantic has convinced me of two things: I don’t wish to live anywhere colder, or more humid.

Once upon a time, I didn’t know what an ice storm was.

When the tax assessor finally decides that we have rented this lovely piece of land long enough and must vacate it for the second home ambitions of Capitol Hill consultants and their beautifully groomed labradoodles, I fantasize of once again flexing my gardening fingers in a Mediterranean climate – this time in the Mediterranean. The recent Philadelphia Flower Show with its Riviera Holiday theme has only strengthened those fantasies (of the gardening climate, not the Monaco glitz).

They had me at Vespa.

However, I do share your love of moss walks – mossy anything really – and such lushness will not be feasible further south in San Marco, no matter how many young, powerfully-built Italian gardeners I put on the job or how many glasses of Prosecco I sip whilst watching them try.

I too have been underwater with Powerpoints, articles and book deadlines, but there is nothing like unrelenting pressure to make the cold months fly by.  At a recent symposium I was introduced by a cheerful, funny woman who started the proceedings by announcing there were only a few days left of winter. The crowd cheered. I started to sweat blood. There is simply too much work out there and too few hours left in which to do it.

The beginning of a woodland garden.  In that I have decided it will be a woodland garden. Someday.

As you and I are rapidly hurtling toward that part of our lives where we attempt to outdo each other with health issues, I will say that a recent high-speed car accident in Miami (not as exciting as it might sound), has made those tasks Herculean.

I have no chance of finishing all the clearing in the woodland garden before there are bluebells to be trampled in the doing of it. In all truthfulness, and with apologies to Michele, the sight of your mighty brush pile filled me with longing.

I have given up the clearing for now and am instead, observing. What a glorious thing to realize that I could finally see a small patch of snowdrops and eranthis from a hundred yards away this February! Perhaps all the digging and dividing with hands numb from the cold has, and will be, worth it in the end.

A slow, but hopeful start. Snowdrops and eranthis.

The witchhazels have been blooming well, and though small, I can see them in my mind’s eye at three times their size. I am also thrilled to find that the violent butchery I performed upon my hellebores at the end of last March (both the posh niger hybrids and the not-so-posh-but-adored orientalis downfacers), has resulted in healthy, blooming, divisions. I expected they would sulk for longer.

H. orientalis looking remarkably happy after the night of the long [serrated] knifes last March.  Please note sticks and dead leaves signifying journalistic integrity.

I have interplanted one patch with ‘Rapture’ daffodils on the always sage advice of Brent Heath – as it is a partially shaded site, and evidently the cyclamen types can cope best with such things.  A few seasons observing their vigor will tell.

Speaking of cyclamen – I have launched into a profligate romance with C. coum and C. hederifolium after too long seeing them in other people’s gardens and a recent first visit to Gettysburg Gardens in Pennsylvania. All those years of trucking visiting relatives up to the battlefield and eating KFC on a blanket and I could have left them to their mashed potatoes and monuments and shopped for plants!

Cyclamen coum at Gettysburg Gardens in February.

Perhaps it’s for the best, seeing as I also picked up some budding Scilla peruviana with the delusional intention of clearing my entire sunny hillside around it. The bulbs are blooming now on the windowsill, oblivious to the 6b/7 stream valley fate in store for them.

Bloom now little one.  Bloom while you can.

I am reminded of Beth Chatto’s line – “We lost many plants in our impatience to possess them because we had not achieved the proper growing conditions.”

Guilty.

So. Damned. Guilty.

I trust you remember St. Beth, and have reconsidered your harsh words of last July.

Thanks for the visual reminder that I need to cut back the epimedium foliage before I have to use floral snips instead of a weed whacker.  I will put E. stellatum on my list if the foliage looks that good in your Midwestern February. Have you tried the gorgeous hybrid ‘Amber Queen,’ or are you species purists out there?  Walters Gardens & Saunders Bros. have it for those wielding the buying power of the Cincinnati Zoo.  For the rest of us there is always Plant Delights and a home equity loan.

So worth it. Flowers you could pull up a chair and a drink for.

Heal quickly – for Michele’s sake. Men are such babies about the flu.

Yours in journalistic integrity,

Marianne

P.S. Rethink the chamaecyparis.  It looks in need of something you won’t give it – an easy death.  The skinny exclamation point of Juniperus virginiana ‘Taylor’ perhaps? I am saving my pennies for one of my own – or three.

What does “Rural Metro DC Area” even mean? originally appeared on GardenRant on March 5, 2020.

The post What does “Rural Metro DC Area” even mean? appeared first on GardenRant.

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