#and I’m on the less shitty part of the stick here because I’m white unfortunately

[weareoutofmaplesyrupdave]

THOSE IMPERIALISTIC NAZI FASCIST ASS DICTATOR ASS TYRANNICAL MICRO MANAGING CONTROL FREAK BITCHES WHO ARE OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE SEEN MY GREATx40 GRANDMOTHER BE BORN, WHO LICK THE FEET OF THE RICH AND SPIT IT BACK ON EVERYONE ELSE, ARE SITTING THERE PRUNE LOOKING ASSES ON SOME RICKETY ASS CHAIRS IN A BUILDING MADE OF SHITTY ASS MARBLE THEY BUILT ON THE STOLEN LAND THEY OCCUPIED WHILE THEY MURDERED AND ENSLAVED MILLIONS ARE STEALING EVERYONES HUMAN FUCKING RIGHTS AGAIN WITH THEIR SYSTEMIC OPPRESSION RELIGIOUS BRAINWASHING AND OVER BUDGETED MILITARY/ POLICE AND THEIR CENSORSHIP JUST SO THEY CAN KEEP THE SHITTY AND BROKEN SYSTEM THEY MADE AND FUCKED UP ON RUNNING SO THEY CAN CONTINUE TO HAVE THEIR WEALTH AND POWER AND HAVE A FULL SUMMERS RECESS AND GO GOLFING AND NEVER KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO TRULY SUFFER OR BE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK

[chinchilla-7]

A Show for One

I have Danny Johnson brainrot so I ended up writing something that ended up being a fair-length fic so... now I’m posting it here.

Summary: You’ve been in the entity’s realm for enough time now that you needed some alone time. However, you were quick to learn that you weren’t actually alone.

Pairing: Ghostface/Danny Johnson x Reader (GN pronouns - afab, though)

This is n/s/f/w, so no minors. Pussy and clit used to reference the reader’s genitalia. 

Words: 2.3k

You'd been in this place for long enough to understand it all. Well, more like understand as much as you were supposed to: there were survivors like yourself paired against killers over and over again. You were meant to get out of trials by completing generators and avoiding the killer. You had gotten pretty good at it, too. But that didn't make this place any better.

The campfire was your only time for peace. Thankfully, you weren't alone there - the other survivors provided great company, but that's where it ended for your relationship with them all. It felt like you were just close because you were all in the same shitty situation. You weren't sure if you would've been close with any of them if you met outside this place. Oh well, it's only something you could speculate.

Though, this kind of forced relationship you felt you had with the other survivors meant that you didn't really feel you clicked with any of them. Sure, they were pleasant to be around, and they helped make everything more bearable, but that's where it ended. And you, well, there were other aspects of yourself that you needed to attend to, and you weren't entirely keen on the idea of any of the others around you helping with that.

That's what led you here, leaned up against one of the many trees, a fair distance away from the warmth of the fire. Not far enough to upset the entity, but far enough where you knew none of the other survivors would find you.

Your hand teased the waistband of your pants. Despite being alone, you still felt nervous to do this. You weren't one to do this kind of thing outside - it was meant for the privacy of your own home. But you didn't have that luxury anymore, so you had to make due with what you had. Still, the dirt and twigs you sat on was less than arousing.

Finally, you slip your hand under your clothes, a sigh leaving your lips as the much wanted contact was made to your clit. A smile tugged at your lips as you teased yourself, your fingers moving slow and gentle as you relaxed into your own touch. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than nothing.

You eventually started moving your fingers faster, letting your eyes fall shut as you teased around your hole. You were in no rush; as long as the entity didn't call you to a trail, you could be as long as you wanted. You were sure that none of the other survivors would notice your absence - they'd probably assume you were in a trial.

As you continued, you started to get a little louder: nothing extreme, just a few whimpers and gasps as you played with yourself. You even started to forget where you were. It was pleasant: imagining you were in bed with someone teasing you as you were teasing yourself. It was almost like a little escape.

The fantasy was quickly broken, however, when you heard a stick or twig snap close in front of you. Your hand froze and legs closed as your eyes opened to see what the noise was. You found your answer immediately.

You had an audience.

A white mask stared at you a few feet away. The man behind it is quiet, save for the twig breaking. Had he done it on purpose? How long had he even been watching you? Why was he even here? There were a lot of things going through your mind. 

One thing you definitely felt was fear. Sure, this was outside a trial, so you were pretty certain that he couldn't actually do anything without displeasing the entity. So you were safe - at least, you hoped you were. But it still didn't explain what he was doing here.

The silence was finally broken by him, who let out a small chuckle. He must have been enjoying your little panic.

"Don't stop on my account."

You felt your face run red. You'd never really heard a killer speak and you definitely haven't heard Ghostface speak before. His voice was attractive, you had to admit. But you didn't really know what to do - he wanted you to keep going, that was for sure, but you weren't sure if you could do it.

"I, uh- I don't- this is, uh-" you tried, not even sure what you wanted to say. It didn't matter, because he cut you off with another low chuckle.

"Ah, a shy one, are we?" He teased, voice practically a purr as he moved a little closer. It somehow made you even redder.

Did you continue? Part of you wanted to. Not being able to see Ghostface's face made it easier to rationalize continuing for an audience. He didn't make any more moves; it seemed he was waiting for you.

So, taking your bottom lip between your teeth, you continued.

Your fingers went back to teasing your clit, starting a few steps back to work your way back up. This time, however, you were quieter, doing your best to suppress any noises you wanted to make.

This seemed to slightly annoy the other. He spoke again. "Awh, you were making such good noises before. What happened? No one's gonna hear. Well… except for me, but that's the point," he encouraged.

Despite the fact you were still biting your bottom lip, you caved to his request. Moving past whimpering to moan softly. That seemed to really get his attention. He perked up, being more attentive to you. The feeling of being observed made you stare down at the ground, unable to meet his eyes - or, rather, the black eyes of the mask he wore.

He let this go, as you kept making noise for him - or, you meant you just kept making noise. It wasn't for him, he just said it was okay.

After a bit more time of teasing, you finally slipped a finger inside yourself. It made you gasp, and that's when Ghostface's patience seemed to run a little short.

"Look at me," he said, the words a clear demand, "I want to see you fuck yourself."

If at some point, the redness of your checks died down, they were red again from those words. And as much as you wanted to keep avoiding any eye contact, you felt that you couldn't not listen to him. So, slowly, you brought your eyes back to the mask.

"What a good little thing you are," he praised, and you could hear the smile in his voice. This was getting you off more than you'd care to admit. You just simply nodded in response.

You continued to finger yourself, having moved up to three fingers by now. But, even with everything, you couldn't get off. Your moans developing into desperate whimpers. Ghostface seemed to notice.

Slowly, he moved closer to you. "Need a hand?" He asked, a gloved hand trailing up your leg starting at your ankle. He was moving slowly - giving you time to say no? You couldn't be sure, but it was either that, or just another layer to his teasing ways.

As a way to say yes, you took your hand out of your pants, giving Ghostface room for his hand. You weren't too sure what to do with your hand now that it was covered with your wetness. Though, it seemed you didn't have to make that decision.

"Lick it clean for me."

Another demand. This time it was clear that the action was for him and not just because you were masturbating. You were hesitant, but you brought your fingers to your mouth, the taste of yourself covering your tongue.

Ghostface let out a happy little hum. "You're such a sweet doll, aren't you?" You tutted, not looking for an answer as he slipped his hand into your pants.

The feeling of the leather on your pussy made you moan around your fingers. It was a new sensation; one you immediately fell in love with. You bucked your hips, trying to roll them with his fingers. The sudden desperation made him chuckle again, seemingly amused with you.

Even though he took over, it felt like he was doing less than you had been. The moans and whispers you let out were borderline frustrated at this point as you took your fingers out of your mouth to leverage yourself so you could move your hips to get better friction. But Ghostface was moving too slow. Then it clicked.

He was waiting for you.

You eyed the mask, now close enough that if it were brighter, you could probably see the man's eyes. Lucky for him, it was too dark for that. But you had a feeling that he knows you realized his game. You were shy, of course he wanted you to tell him what you wanted. You had to bite the bullet.

"Please Ghostface, I-"

You were cut off: "Danny."

The suddenness shocked you. It was a correction: he told you his name. Or, what you assumed to be his name. You nodded, trying again.

"Danny, please. I- I need more. Faster. Anything. Please."

It worked. You felt his fingers push into you, causing you to let out a surprised moan louder than you would've liked. The leather against your walls heightened the pleasure of it all so you couldn't help it. You just hoped that you were far enough away from the campfire that no one else heard.

Though, that's where Danny stopped. Sure, he was still moving his fingers, but it was still too slow for your tastes. "Danny, c'mon," you pleaded, rolling your hips again in hopes that it'd help.

"C'mon what?" He asked, curling his fingers in just a way that had you writhing already.

"M-more- I need it. Please." Unfortunately for you, your mind had gotten a little foggy so being articulate was not a current strength of yours.

So, Danny simply added another finger. Sure, it was 'more', so you got what you asked, but you didn't get what you wanted because he was still going too slow. It made you shake your head.

"No. Faster, please," you managed to say, and Danny hummed in realization, as if he didn't already know what you wanted.

"Ooh, why didn't you just say so?" He asked, his fingers now moving at a more bearable pace.

It made you relax against the tree, finally getting what you needed. Your breathing was laboured, and you stopped worrying about the chance of someone hearing as you moaned and cursed around his fingers.

Danny seemed to be done with the teasing. He added a third finger and picked up the pace once again. You felt yourself getting close, causing you to reach out for him. You wanted to hold onto something that wasn't the dirt under you.

It was so much. It felt so good, but it was so much. “Fuck- please, Danny,” you weren’t really sure whether you were asking him to continue or to stop. But, again, Danny made that decision for you.

“Danny, I’m- ah- fuck,” you tried, but it was hard to get a sentence out when there was someone as good as Danny finger fucking you. Though, Danny must have gotten the message because he leaned in close to your ear.

“That’s it, come for me, doll,” he growled, and it was more than enough to push you over the edge. With a cry, your hips stuttered as you came, but Danny kept his ruthless pace, causing tears to form in your eyes.

He pulled his hand out from your pants, the leather glove now coated. The sight made you turn red again, as if you weren’t already red as is. He used his clean hand to move his mask a tad, and at first, you thought he was going to show his face. But, instead, he brought his original hand up and it disappeared behind the mask.

Oh. That’s what he was doing.

After a moment, he let out a pleased hum. “I knew you’d taste sweet,” he said, and while you couldn’t see it, you knew he was smirking.

It made you pull away, embarrassed. So much so that you found yourself looking away again. This time he didn’t say anything, which you were happy for. You needed the moment to regain some composure. Once you were ready, you looked back, opening your mouth to say something but nothing came out when you saw that he was gone.

You felt a tad upset. But you supposed that you can’t expect the world from a killer in the entity realm. Still, you thought he would’ve stayed for a little longer after. You sighed, leaning back against the tree for a few minutes as you replayed the event that had just occurred in your head. It was pretty eventful, to say the least. And it left you with a lot of thoughts and emotions. But one stood out in particular.

How long had Danny been wanting to do that?

He mentioned that he knew you’d taste sweet, and while that can just be something he assumed during that run in, it felt like it had been a stronger yearning than just that. It itched at your brain, but you couldn’t exactly ask since he wasn’t here anymore. So, you had to just accept, like most things around here, that you don’t get an answer.

After a few more moments, you pushed yourself off the ground, your legs sore from both sitting on the ground and your orgasm. You groaned - something you’d have to deal with for a bit before the entity ‘heals’ you. You brushed yourself off, heading back to the faint glow of the campfire.

You hoped you’d get a trial with Danny soon.

[gukyi]

into the wilderness | pjm

summary: alright, so last summer’s camp was... disastrous. from the murky green showers to the wasps nests, it was all-around a bad time. but none of those things could be quite as catastrophic as the end-of-camp counselor campfire, when you told park jimin that you were in love with him. and if telling him was terrible, then seeing him again this summer, one year after your fruitless confession, just might be the death of you.

{camp counselor!au, unrequited love!au, friends to lovers!au}

pairing: park jimin x female reader genre: angst, fluff, comedy word count: 27k warnings: unrequited love, camp shenanigans, awkwardness, secondhand embarrassment/hurt, ot7 cameos a/n: hello and welcome to the one thing that guyi has wanted to write for literal years now but never go around to! finally i can cross camp counselor au off my list. anyway, it’s been over a year since i wrote for jimin so i hope that this monster 27k fic can make up for that !!! i swear the ending is happy. i swear. i promise.

Something about last summer sucked. 

Maybe it was the record six wasps’ nests you found around the cabin, leaving you with more bee stings than mosquito bites by the end of camp. Maybe it was that weird murky green color of the water in the showers and the sinks that didn’t go away until three weeks in, when you were already positive you had contracted some sort of pond disease from brushing your teeth. Maybe it was the lack of Namjoon, who had an internship and couldn’t come, therefore removing all sense of order and leaving you and the rest of the counselors in a state of chaos.

Or maybe it was the fact that, on the very last night, at the very last counselor campfire, you told Jimin that you loved him. 

Truth be told, you weren’t sure how badly it would go. But telling him was so much easier than keeping it hidden, than letting it drag on and on, this boulder sitting on your chest for the rest of time. You had spent the whole eight weeks of camp rationalizing it to yourself, so much so that by the time the last counselor campfire rolled around, you were convinced that it wouldn’t be that disastrous. 

There was no part of you that thought Jimin would reciprocate your feelings. No part of you that secretly hoped that maybe he felt the same, and that you could end the summer with more money in your bank account and a boyfriend on your arm. You knew he didn’t. Jimin was sweet, and thoughtful, and gentle, which is exactly why you fell in love with him, but he was like that to everyone. You didn’t think that telling him would suddenly make him fall in love with you.

You told him because people like Jimin deserve to know that somebody loves them. 

You told him because you thought that nothing would change. 

What you didn’t really expect to happen was this:

Your marshmallow is burnt beyond recognition, poking off of the edge of a stick like a sad piece of coal rather than a sweet treat. At this point, it’s even darker than the chocolate sitting on the graham cracker in your lap, waiting to be smushed together into the sugar-fest known as a s’more, so eloquently named because you will apparently always want some more. 

“Uh, hello? Earth to Y/N?”

Taehyung’s hand waves furiously in front of your face as he leans forward to make eye contact with you.

“Huh?” You ask, shaking yourself out of your thoughts. Your mind has been awfully cloudy these days, overcast like the weather around here. It’s a wonder you’re able to make your way through. 

“Are you alright?” He asks, an eyebrow raised. “Your marshmallow looks like what happens when I try to make scrambled eggs.”

“Your scrambled eggs look like that?” Seokjin interrupts, pointing accusingly at your charred marshmallow. You’ve seen Taehyung in the kitchen. It’s not that bad, is it? “Next year you should sign up for some of Yoongi’s cooking classes. The six-year-olds can cook better than you.”

“You’d have to pay me way more than the shit they’re giving us to get me to teach Taehyung how to cook,” grumbles Yoongi. 

“I’m fine,” you promise Taehyung as Yoongi and Seokjin launch into a tirade about raising minimum wage. “I just—” You glance at your marshmallow. You don’t even think the fish monster at the bottom of the pond would eat it. And he apparently eats people whose hearts have turned to stone. Like Seokjin, who swears that it had eaten the tip of his pinky finger. “—like my marshmallows really cooked.”

Taehyung looks skeptical but drops the subject nonetheless, turning back around so he can find a different conversation to barge his way into. You’re willing to put money on him finding some way to annoy Jungkook. 

Insecure about your apparent lack of marshmallow-roasting skills, you pull your stick away from the campfire, blowing on it until you decide that you’re willing to risk burning the tips of your fingers. You pluck the marshmallow from the skewer, hissing to yourself as you quickly plop it onto the graham cracker, squishing the whole thing together. 

The marshmallow is so burnt that it barely gives underneath the press of your fingers, bouncing back up like rubber. You frown at your s’more, which clearly should be renamed to something else because nothing about the thing in your hands makes you want some more. 

Next to you, Jimin laughs at your pitiful attempt at a classic campfire treat. 

“You want mine?” He asks with a smile, holding out a flawless s’more, the kind that they make in movies to perpetuate the illusion of perfection. You look up at him and in the light of the fire he glows, like a spark from the flames had created him right then and there, like he had been born with light in his eyes, a halo surrounding his body. 

You wonder if Jimin knows how beautiful he is. How beautiful he has always been, radiating kindness and joy and laughter. He must know, right? It must be impossible for him to notice how everyone falls in love with him. You certainly aren’t an exception. 

He holds out the s’more in his hands, laughing as he looks at you because there must be something endearing about being a shitty s’more maker, and you think, what’s the worst that can happen?

“I’m in love with you.”

The s’more drops to the ground, hitting the grass with a thud. 

Jimin’s eyes meet yours, and for once, they are unreadable. This tragic sort of confusion, like he can’t believe the words you’re saying to him. Like his mind refuses to accept them as true. 

He opens his mouth, but you answer for him. 

“It’s okay,” you assure quickly, reaching a hand out to rest on his own. The touch makes him look away, like your fingers are the flames of the campfire, burning him where they touch his skin. “I—I know you don’t feel the same.”

It’s not a secret. Not to him, and not to you. Jimin purses his lips because he feels guilty for not loving you back. Because he is so good, so kind, that he feels as though he has wronged you because he doesn’t love you the way you love him. Like it’s his fault. 

“Y/N—” He starts, but he does not finish. 

“You…” you interrupt, looking down at your feet. You can’t look at Jimin because looking at him hurts, and you can’t look anywhere else because Jimin is all you think about. All you ever think about. “You don’t have to say anything.”

He speaks, and it’s as if the words don’t belong to him. Don’t belong to anyone. 

“What are we supposed to do?” He asks. 

You shrug, resigning yourself to this. You knew that he wouldn’t feel the same. You didn’t know how terrible he would feel because of it. “Nothing,” you tell him. “I just thought you should know.

He nods, because he knows, and he nods, because he can’t do anything else. 

The fire crackles beside you, s’mores forgotten on the ground as your friends laugh and cheer, distant sounds that echo in your head like white noise. Jimin is all you can think of and right now you’re thinking about what happens next.

“I’m sorry.”

Maybe telling him wasn’t such a good idea after all. 

“Me too.”

Your busted-up sedan revs angrily as you rally up the mountain, shaking your head in an attempt to rid the memories of the campfire from your mind. Unfortunately, the nasty thing about memories is that the more you try to forget them, the more you seem to remember.

You sigh. Something about last summer sucked. 

Nothing about this summer makes you feel like it’ll suck any less.

The good thing about being thirty minutes late is that you’re still thirty minutes earlier than Taehyung, who does not have a single punctual bone in his body. You can count on one hand the amount of instances where he’s actually been on time, all of which are because you and the other counselors conspire to tell him that events are an hour earlier than they actually are just to make sure he doesn’t stroll in an hour late and improperly dressed. 

The bad thing about being thirty minutes late is that everyone besides Taehyung is already here, waiting for you. 

Your sedan crawls to the clearing at the top of the mountain, fighting against gravity and itself as it chugs up the last few feet, coming to a rough stop in the dirt, sunken in from countless tires tracking across it. 

Through your windshield, you can make out two figures with two clipboards, only one of which has something genuinely useful on it. 

“Y/N!” Hoseok cries out excitedly, splaying his arms out as if to hug the entire front of your car only to reveal the near-blank clipboard in his hand. All that’s on it is a neon green Post-it note with a caricature drawing of who you assume to be Yoongi, if the grouchy expression and chef’s hat are anything to go by. There’s no signature or name, but Hoseok’s art skills are on par with those of the campers you work with and Jungkook has a fun and quirky habit of vandalizing all drawable surfaces with pencil sketches of the counselors, so you take a wild guess as to who the artist is. 

You pop the door of your car open and step out into the sticky weather, warm and muggy despite the clouds above. It’s the same as when you step into your bathroom after your two roommates have showered, using up all the hot water and leaving a layer of fog on the mirrors for you to all play hangman on. Only, this steam never goes away. 

“Hoseok!” You cheer, letting the man wrap you up in a sweltering hug, your hands gently patting the top of his back so as not to come in contact with the dampness soaking through his thin cotton t-shirt. You haven’t seen each other for nearly a year, though, so you give in more than you usually would and relax into his hold. “You look good, I like the hair,” you compliment, two fingers coming up to twirl at his bright red locks, deep and vibrant like the cherries you pick. 

“Dyed it just so I could tell the kids I’m a superhero!” Hoseok grins. He’s already heading over to the back of your car to pop the trunk and pull out your duffel bags so that he can park your car in the garage at the other end of the campsite.

“Then who’s the villain?” You call, tossing him your keys.

“I guess that would be me.”

You whip around to find a platinum-blonde Namjoon standing happily before you, looking at least a little bit resigned as he grins at you. His hair is longer this year, like growing it out would somehow compensate for frying it with layer after layer of bleach. And with his silver-white hair and the fact that he is the only counselor any of the kids are genuinely afraid of disobeying, you suppose he would be the antagonist after all. 

“Namjoon, nice to see you again.” You go in for a hug even though Namjoon clearly had no plans on instigating one himself, because someone as hardworking and patient as Namjoon deserves a little platonic affection every one in a while. What, with everyone else constantly conspiring with the campers to oust him every summer. 

The truth is that all of you know that without Namjoon, this camp would be nothing but chaos in its purest form, with the counselors unable to wrangle the kids and the kids using that knowledge to their fullest advantage. Take last year, where everything seemed to go wrong because Namjoon had his stupid internship with a business firm and spent the entire summer drilling finances into his head instead of losing brain cells watching kids eat sand.  

If you had any dignity left you’d blame your rotten confession to Jimin on Namjoon’s absence as well. 

“Nice to see you, too, Y/N,” Namjoon says when you part, checking your name off of the list on his clipboard. “I feel like it’s been ages since I was here.” You can see red marks all over the page, blank only where the name Taehyung is written. 

Some things never change, you suppose. 

“Well, we definitely missed you last year,” You say with a chuckle, trying not to immediately associate your personal misjudgements with the lack of Namjoon, who you can hopefully keep from ever finding out what happened at last year’s end-of-camp counselor campfire. The problem is that Namjoon picks up on social cues and body language like a sociologist, so your only hope is pretending that the campfire never even happened. “Camp was pretty much a mess without you.” In more ways than one.

“Namjoon!” Someone calls. You and him both jerk around to the source of the sound when you see a figure barreling towards the both of you, face obscured in shadow. 

You almost don’t recognize him, with his pitch black hair and thick voice, like he has somehow become a new person in the nine months you’ve gone without seeing him. But the moment he comes into view, you know, and you can’t even pretend to not know, not with the way your heart freezes in place, mid-beat, like the sight of him has turned you to stone. Not with the way that Namjoon is right beside you, and how you don’t think you can bear explaining to him why you and Jimin aren’t as close as you used to be. Not with the way that Jimin looks as beautiful as he always has and always will be, no matter how many summers pass, this timeless portrait, this piece of art that’s come to life. 

There’s a part of you that’s shocked still at seeing him, like you had almost thought that after last summer at least one of you would bail on this shitty summer job, filled with mosquitoes and mud and wifi that only works in the room that doubles as the gymnasium and the mess hall. It’s the same part of you that wants to go back to pretending that nothing ever happened last summer. 

But Jimin is here, in front of you, eyes wide and out of breath and gorgeous, and pretending that last summer never happened is the same as pretending that you never fell in love with him at all.

“The water in the boys’ cabins sinks is green,” he says with a tense smile, making Namjoon nearly smack his clipboard into his forehead. 

“Ugh, seriously?” He asks, and you can’t tell if you’re thankful or hurt that Jimin’s failed to acknowledge you. “Fine,” he scribbles something down on the clipboard, this handwriting scrawl that only he can read, “I’ll figure out what to do with that later. In the meantime, just don’t drink it.”

“Seokjin’s already made lemonade with it, though—”

“Great,” Namjoon says, exasperated as he takes off towards the main cabin, where Seokjin is sitting on the balcony with his feet up on the railing with a glass of suspiciously murky lemonade in his hand, one that he’s offering up to Yoongi with a devilish grin on his face. 

His disappearance leaves only you and Jimin left standing at the entrance, rocking back and forth on the balls of your feet in the hopes that one of you will either leave or spare the other the torture of a conversation. 

“Hey,” Jimin says quietly, trying to meet your eyes. 

You look away, pretending to smack an imaginary mosquito on your arm while an actual one bites your leg. “Hey, yourself.”

“It’s been a while.” The last time we saw each other you told me you loved me. 

“Yeah, it has.” I know.

“How are you doing?” Do you still love me, or was the distance and time enough?

“I’m alright. Same old, same old.” I never stopped. “How are you?” What about you? Did you stop seeing us as just friends?

“Doing well, thanks.” No. You’ll always be just a friend to me. Jimin sighs, looking up at the overcast sky with his hands shoved into the pockets of his shorts, taking in the scenery before him. He exhales, long and heavy, before turning to you with a soft little smile, the kind of grin that almost makes you feel like forgetting might not be the best thing to do after all. “I just feel like this summer is a fresh start, you know? Like, I feel like there’s something different about being here this year.”

Maybe this summer, you can learn to move on from me, too. Because something’s gotta give. 

“I hope you’re right about that,” you tell him, because being around him hurts and being away from him makes you replay that night over and over, wondering what would have happened if you had just kept your stupid mouth shut. You open your mouth to say something, anything else, anything to break the ice that didn’t used to be there before, cut between the tension that has settled between the two of you, but your tongue is dry and your heart is sore just looking at him. 

Defeated, you walk over to where Hoseok’s left your duffel bags, hiking them onto your shoulders and heading towards the girls’ cabins, ready to end this conversation before it tears you in two. 

Jimin seems to flounder, standing awkwardly for a few moments as he watches you walk towards the cabins, skirting around him a few feet away because brushing by his side seemed too close for comfort. But then he says, “Hey, Y/N?” 

And it makes you stop dead in your tracks, unable to deny him an answer. 

You turn around to look at him, and he offers you a grin. 

“Are we good?”

Your love for me, will it affect our friendship?

You swallow.

It already has. It always has. From the very beginning, loving you was part of our friendship. I don’t know how to be friends with you without it. Even when you didn’t know it, I loved you. In a way, it was easier back then. Telling you was the one thing I shouldn’t have done. 

“Yeah, Jimin,” you tell him. “We’re good.”

The trek to your cabin from the main buildings of the camp is nothing if not familiar. Familiar in the way that the ground curves beneath your feet, leading you up to the top of a small hill where the building sits, looking out over the rest of the clearing. Familiar in how the scent of the woods that surround you fills up your senses, this fresh, airy feeling, like the very oxygen is smothering you. Familiar in how this place reeks of the memories of summers gone by, summers spent beneath the stars and by the campfire. 

Summer memories that make your heart burst with fondness and summer memories that… don’t. 

The fact is that it has always started and ended here. 

When you kick open the door to the cabin, there is only one other occupied bed. It belongs to Hazel, a counselor in her sophomore year in college who joined the crew last year and assumed that the Namjoon-less pandemonium that was camp last summer was just the norm. Hopefully she can take a much-needed break this year now that Namjoon’s back and she’s not the only one fruitlessly trying to cajole the campers into behaving. 

You beeline towards the bunk bed that has been your summer home for the past three years, the one shoved right up against the back right corner, giving you a perfect view of the entire cabin. The downside is that it’s the same corner that spiders seem to prefer as their location of choice for their webs, but better you, a stone-cold college student, than a terrified six-year-old. 

Plopping your duffel bags on top of the mattress, you let out another sigh. You wonder what it is about this summer that is so damn tiring, so exhausting that you can’t help but outwardly exhale every ten seconds, like merely being here is wearing you out, bit by bit. 

You’re looking forward to when the campers arrive tomorrow. Sleeping alone (well, nearly alone) in a cabin feels uncomfortably empty. Plus, you’re hoping that they’ll provide you with some sort of distraction so you don’t have any free time left to spend dwelling on the what-ifs and the should-have-dones. When there’s only a dozen of you, it’s much easier to run into him. 

The moment you collapse on your bed, a messy brown head of hair comes bounding out from the shared bathrooms in the center of the cabin. 

“Y/N!” Hazel cries out, launching herself across the room and into your arms for the tightest hug you’ve had in a long while. 

“Hey, Haze,” you greet in return, offering her a squeeze back. You didn’t often mix in your camp activities, with Hazel in charge of the nature walks and animal conservation activities while you hide in your air-conditioned arts and crafts room, but living together brought upon you a closeness you otherwise don’t share with anyone else. Plus, Hazel keeps a family-sized pack of Oreos and a gigantic jar of smooth peanut butter by her bunk at all times for emergencies. 

“I feel like it’s been so long!” She laments when she finally releases you, looking positively thrilled to be here right now. 

Not long enough, you think to yourself, though you don’t suppose any more time apart from Jimin would make seeing him again any easier. “Yeah, but the year goes by so quickly,” you agree half-heartedly. Too quickly. 

“I’m so excited for this year.” Hazel grins, clapping her hands together. “I have so much planned for all the nature walks and everything. I spent all of last week reading up on edible plants and berries found in this part of the country. I’m gonna teach all of the kids what they can eat in case they get stranded in the forest!”

“Fun,” you say with a hesitant nod. It’s not that you don’t trust Hazel to have done her research, it’s more that, knowing the campers and knowing the counselors, someone’s going to try and get lost in the woods around the camp, eating everything they can. Not to mention the fact that Hazel’s so innocent she’d probably reveal to someone like Seokjin or Jungkook which plants were poisonous without even realizing it. 

Camp last year was a mess, but at least nobody died. 

“Hey, aren’t you excited, too?” She asks, a hand on your shoulder as she notices your reluctance. “Apparently Namjoon’s a great leader so this year isn’t going to be as bad as last year.”

“Last year wasn’t bad just because Namjoon wasn’t here,” you comment vaguely. Hazel doesn’t need to know about all of the drama that goes down between the counselors. Hopefully she can get out of here without being dragged into something by one of you. 

“Well, this year is supposed to be better!” She cheers you on, determined to get you to feel as enthusiastic as she is. “No matter what did or did not happen last summer. Plus, you know that if anything bad happens I always have my secret stash, counselors only.” She winks. 

“Thanks, Haze,” you say, sighing again like it’s your job to be worn out by life. “I think I just need a bit of time to get back into the swing of things.”

“That’s the spirit!” She rallies. “I’m gonna head back to the main camp and see if there’s anything good to drink. I’m thirsty.”

“Stick to soda,” you advise, eyes wide at the thought of her downing anything that Seokjin’s had a sneaky hand in making. 

She doesn’t seem to notice your worry, already bounding towards the door, light on her feet. “I was feeling a Fanta anyway. See you at the camp counselor meeting if I don’t see you around beforehand!” She pulls open the heavy wooden door, half outside when she stops to turn back at you, wagging a finger in the air. “Remember, Y/N, leaves of three, let them be!” 

The door slams shut behind her, creating a cloud of dust in its wake. You watch helplessly as the particles dissipate into the air, as the silence that was once so comforting begins to terrorize you once more. 

You collapse back onto your bunk. If only last summer’s murky green water had poisoned you. Then maybe you’d finally have a good enough excuse for your utter lapse in judgement, and you wouldn’t be sighing so much.

There were no camp counselor meetings last year. There were only haphazard caucuses, irregular get-togethers where no one knew quite what was going on and there were no real announcements to be said, no real orders to be given. You had almost forgotten what it was like to have someone with genuine leadership skills working here. 

The problem last year was not getting everyone into the same room for thirty minutes. It was keeping everyone focused in that same room for thirty minutes, which was essentially impossible because, at your age, submitting to someone of authority is the very last thing you want to do. Especially when the consequences pretty much only amount to having to drink Seokjin’s murky green lemonade.

But like with everything else, Namjoon has, somehow, made the impossible possible. 

“Guys, guys, can we stop drawing on the board, please? I need that,” Namjoon begs as he walks into the room to find Jungkook and Taehyung with chalk in their hands and a chalkboard at their disposal. What they’ve accomplished so far is an expert drawing of Spongebob and Patrick with their faces missing, waiting to be filled in by one of the unlucky people in this room. 

“Okay, so who’s Patrick?” Taehyung asks the audience. 

“Hoseok!” shouts Seokjin.

“You!” shouts Hoseok. 

“Seokjin!” shouts Hazel, too, just because she likes being involved in things. 

Jungkook lets out a cackle at that. “Are you kidding?” He asks. “If anything…” He does a quick sketch on the board, hand flying across it so quickly you’re actually a little bit impressed, “Seokjin would be Plankton.” 

He steps away from the board to reveal a scarily-realistic drawing of Seokjin’s angry face on Plankton’s tiny, antennaed body, making everyone—even Namjoon, who usually tries to keep the roasting between counselors to a minimum—laugh. 

Seokjin scowls, and normally you would feel bad for him always being the butt of Jungkook’s endless jokes, but you can see a half-empty glass of green lemonade by Jungkook’s side, and you decide that he can hold his own just fine. 

“I think you guys would be Spongebob and Patrick,” Jimin pipes up from the back. You freeze, turning your head slightly just to see him sitting on the table pushed up against the wall. You hadn’t even noticed him. Or maybe you had, and your brain just decided to pretend that you hadn’t. 

Nevertheless, hearing his voice doesn’t make it hurt any less.

“Jimin’s right,” Jungkook agrees, already beginning to fill in the blank space where Spongebob’s face would normally go with a caricature of his own. “I’d be Spongebob because I have a wider face than you, Tae.”

Taehyung doesn’t object, instead moving his hand to an empty spot on the board. “Yeah. Oh, and Namjoon’s Mr. Krabs, obviously,” Taehyung says, adding his own drawing of Mr. Krabs with Namjoon’s camp get-up on—cargo shorts, a short-sleeved flannel shirt, a baseball cap, and high-tops.

“I would not be—hey, give me that!” Namjoon shouts, indignant, before ripping the chalk from Jungkook’s hands as he cackles wickedly, clearly pleased with himself. Namjoon shoos the both of them away from the board before wiping it with the eraser, which has very obviously not been cleaned since last year, leaving a trail of pale yellow dust in its wake wherever Namjoon drags it across the chalkboard. “Chalkboard for official matters only.” He glares at Jungkook and Taehyung, who high-five each other. 

The chatter soon subsides as Namjoon writes down the meeting to-do list on the board in his same old scratchy handwriting. Namjoon’s one of those people that writes exclusively in capital letters, simply enlarging any letters that actually need to be capitalized. You’re almost one-hundred percent positive it’s to establish written dominance over the rest of the counselors. 

“Okay, first order of business,” Namjoon begins after coughing to get everyone’s attention. “It’s come to my attention that the entire cabin water system is green.”

“Hasn’t it always been—?” Hazel asks, innocent eyes wide in confusion. 

“I called the utilities people and they’re coming tomorrow to fix it, so in the meantime, do not drink the water. Showering and using the bathroom is fine. I would use water bottles for brushing your teeth, though,” Namjoon says, crossing off something on his clipboard as the rest of the counselors murmur in approval. 

“See, this is what happens when Namjoon’s here,” deadpans Yoongi, motioning up to him where he stands at the front of the room. “Shit gets done.”

“Okay, secondly, no swearing in front of the kids,” Namjoon says, adding that onto the board as a final reminder. “The fact that I have to tell you guys this multiple times every year is ridiculous.”

“Fuck you, I can do what I want!” Taehyung shouts, earning a chorus of fuck yeah’s. 

“You guys do know that I have the power to fire you, right?” Namjoon says pointedly, making Taehyung shut his trap. “Okay, moving on. Everyone’s been assigned to the same things that they were assigned to do last year, and if you weren’t here last year, then the year before that.” Namjoon receives some cheers and some groans in response to this, the former mostly from people who work indoors, and the latter mostly from people who don’t. 

“Seriously?” Seokjin whines. “I don’t think Yoongi has stepped foot out of the kitchens in literal years.”

“And I would like to keep it that way, thank you very much!” Yoongi counters. 

“Oh, shut up, at least you get to spend some time indoors teaching all of the kids how to play Hot Cross Buns on their guitars,” Taehyung counters. “I got more mosquito bites than freckles last summer.”

“My students have long advanced from Hot Cross Buns,” Seokjin says proudly and a little bit devilishly. “We’re working on something more technical now.”

“Like what?” Jungkook challenges.

“Okay, continuing…” Namjoon says loudly, eyeing Seokjin suspiciously. “If you’re new, you should have already received notification as to what activities you’re in charge of, but if you’re not sure, come and talk to me.”

“Oh, so Jimin’s still on first aid, then?” Taehyung asks, wiggling his eyebrows. “What do you think Y/N’s gonna do to get herself sent down to his tent? Glue her fingers together? Burn herself with a glue gun?”

“Shut up,” You mumble tensely, embarrassed that somehow you and Jimin’s relationship has turned into a counselor affair. 

Last summer, you had accidentally given yourself a palm full of splinters from the birdhouses that you had the campers paint to bring home with them, and the first aid tent is the only place that has bandages. Jimin was there, as he always is, and the two of you spent the evening plucking out all of the pieces of wood from your hand and patching it up with Band-aids that had Spiderman and Moana on them. Contrary to apparently popular belief, it was not on purpose, even though the hour of hand-holding was rather nice. 

“Or Jimin can just find some excuse to visit Y/N in the arts and crafts room,” Seokjin tacks on unhelpfully. “You know, last summer I don’t think I saw them eat lunch in the counselor room at all. They were always finding secret places in the woods.”

“Maybe we were just busy during lunch?” Jimin suggests, clearly equally uncomfortable. 

“Busy fucking, probably,” Taehyung mutters. 

“It’s none of your business,” you snap, because the last thing you want to be talking about right now is how wonderful your relationship with Jimin used to be, when all that’s left this summer are the burned remnants of it, the ashes of something that could have been. You don’t need a reminder of why you thought that you and Jimin would be alright, of why you thought that telling him wouldn’t be that bad. It was terrible, and now all you can do is pick up the pieces, patch together a friendship whose thread has come loose. 

“Alright, let’s keep going,” Namjoon says, picking up the weirdly tense atmosphere and doing his best to bring the attention back to him and the meeting at hand. “You guys should know that this year, Hoseok is thinking of adding in a counselor dance to the end-of-camp show…”

You look over at Jimin, who immediately turns away when he spots your gaze, making to pick at the rips in his jeans, doing anything and everything he can to avoid eye contact with you, and your shoulders sink. 

Jimin had asked you, “Are we good?”

And you had responded, “Yeah, Jimin, we are.”

And the two of you must have both known that was a lie. 

You turn back to face the front, focusing on how Hazel is rubbing your forearm and not asking questions, and you try to feel a little bit better. 

After the meeting, you and Hazel decide to spend the night holed up in your cabin eating from her Oreo stash instead of eating dinner with everyone else, half because it’s only the first day and already being around all of the other counselors is tiring, and half because you don’t think you can handle seeing Jimin any more today, but not before Namjoon stops you on the way out of the door. 

“Y/N,” he says, making you pause in your tracks. “Can we talk?”

“What about?” You ask, hoping to God that it’s not about everyone thinking you purposely injure yourself just so you can see Jimin at the first aid tent. 

“Just quickly, you and me,” Namjoon says casually, pulling you to the corner of the room, away from any windows so no one can see you two talking. “Did today’s meeting make you uncomfortable?”

“No,” you lie like a liar. “What are you talking about?”

Namjoon’s too observant for his own good, you decide, when he frowns at you, clearly not buying whatever it is you’re trying to sell him. “You don’t have to tell me everything,” he says quietly. “But I know that something happened between you and Jimin.”

You open your mouth to object and tell him that you and Jimin are fine, but Namjoon raises his eyebrows at you, like he’s challenging you to tell him another lie. 

“Well…” you begin, resigning yourself to the truth. “Yeah. Last summer.”

Namjoon purses his lips, nodding in understanding. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

“You’re not my mom, Namjoon,” you say with a smile, even though maybe telling someone about it might not be a half-bad idea after all. Plus, Namjoon’s your friend and the only one around here who’s any good at keeping secrets, so getting the words off of your chest could be good.

“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” he reminds you, because he’s wonderful like that. 

“No, it’s alright…” you sigh. “I guess someone else has to know.” You close your eyes, willing the words to come up from your throat, willing them to not hurt you as they leave your lips. “Last summer at the campfire I told Jimin that I loved him.”

Namjoon doesn’t say a word. 

“And he doesn’t love me back, which is not the problem because he shouldn’t change how he feels about me just to make me feel better. It’s not his fault, and I’m not angry at him or anything. I knew that he didn’t love me back when I told him,” the words come up like bile, slowly and carefully before spilling out in front of you. “But I was an idiot, and I thought telling him would make me feel better, or something. And it didn’t, because now Jimin and I don’t know how to act around each other anymore, and everything sucks.”

Namjoon offers you a careful, hesitant smile. 

“So yeah. That’s what happened.”

“Sounds like you and Jimin should talk about it,” Namjoon suggests, and maybe he’s smart, and a good leader, and attends a prestigious college along the coast, and studies business and sociology, but that is the worst idea he has ever had. 

“No,” you immediately say, shaking your head. “It’s no big deal. Jimin and I are still friends.”

“Are you, though?” Namjoon asks. 

You sigh, reaching up to rub at your forehead. “Yeah, we are,” you insist, perhaps more to yourself than to Namjoon. He looks skeptical, but doesn’t ask any questions. “It doesn’t even matter. I made a mistake and now I’m gonna deal with the consequences.”

“I can try to get the rest of the boys to stop teasing you and Jimin. I know it must be weird for you both right now,” Namjoon offers, always wanting to help. You scoff. Weird would be the biggest understatement of the century. 

“Jimin and I can handle it,” you say, not wanting to disrupt the rest of the counselor dynamic just because you and Jimin are dealing with things right now. Besides, the teasing has always been in good fun, and you know the boys well enough to know that they aren’t doing it out of malicious intent. “But I appreciate your concern.”

“Just doing my job,” Namjoon says proudly. You stand there in silence for a few more seconds until he coughs awkwardly to fill up the space. “You can go now, by the way, Y/N. I just wanted to make sure you were doing alright.”

“I’m fine,” you promise, silently hoping that one day, when you talk to Namjoon, you won’t have to lie to him anymore. “Thanks for checking in.”

“I’ll always be here for you,” he says in that comforting way, that warm way that wraps around you like a mug of hot cocoa on a cold winter night. 

You crack open the door to find Jimin, Taehyung, and Jungkook tossing around a frisbee on the open lawn as Seokjin and Yoongi watch from a picnic bench, soda cans sitting next to them. Someone must have mentioned the green lemonade. Jungkook purposely tosses the frisbee too high for Jimin to reach, making him jump wildly in a fruitless attempt to grab it. He falls backwards onto the soft grass, laughing alongside Taehyung and Jungkook as Taehyung pulls him back up to his feet. 

You smile to yourself, the longing and the pain and the love settling deep within your heart, finding a home amongst the wishes and the dreams. Seeing him there, the widest smile on his face as he tosses around a frisbee with some of his best friends, letting the rays from the setting sun fill him up with joy, it reminds you why you fell in love with him. It reminds you why you’re still in love with him.

Something seizes up at your heart, clenching it between its fingers. That used to be you, the thing whispers. You used to make him laugh like that. 

You did. From the moment you met him, you let his laughter fill your senses, burned the sound of it into your brain. You used to be so close. You used to think that maybe, just maybe, Jimin might love you back. 

You should have never told him, it murmurs, grip growing tighter. Look at where it got you.

If I could turn back time and redo that night, I would, you fight back. 

But you can’t.

The wicked thing releases your heart, lets it drop to the floor. You don’t pick it up. 

Every year, you and the other counselors keep a scorecard on the chalkboard in the meeting room to see how quickly someone gets sent to the first aid tent, whether it be from stumbling over a twig or contracting poison ivy or drinking the green water. Last year, it took two hours and thirteen minutes. 

This summer, it happens barely an hour after all of the campers have arrived. 

You make a mental note to write down the time on the scorecard as you run over to help the poor boy off of the ground after slamming into a spruce tree while playing an early game of tag with his friends. The side of his cheek is imprinted with the texture of the tree bark, and he has some scrapes on his hands and knees from the fall. 

“Whoa, hey, you alright?” You ask, leaning down to help him up. “You gotta watch where you’re looking, okay? Don’t want you to get hurt.” 

The beauty about young children is that very little actually causes them great pain. If it weren’t for all of the overprotective counselors, the kids would probably run themselves into the cabin walls and trees for the entire duration of camp.

“I’m not hurt,” the young boy says, standing up proudly. “I’m fine. My mom says I have thick skin.”

“What’s your name?”

“Eli,” the boy tells you matter-of-factly. “That’s my cabin.” He points to the one to the west of the camp that Taehyung and Jungkook are in charge of. Why Namjoon continuously assigns them to the same cabin year after year is beyond you. Once, they convinced everybody in their cabin that Seokjin and Yoongi’s cabin was haunted, and the only solution was to out-scare the ghosts by yelling and screaming right outside. 

“Is this your first year at camp?”

“Yup,” Eli says, rocking back and forth on his feet. He is not at all fazed by the blood and broken skin on his hands and knees, nor the pieces of wood and bark sticking out of the side of his face. 

“Alright, Eli, even though you have thick skin, I have to take you to the first aid tent. Really quickly, okay? Just to make sure you aren’t gonna get an infection. Then you can go and tell all of your friends how thick your skin,” you say, already beginning to usher Eli towards the first aid tent.  

“I think I have the thickest skin out of everyone here,” Eli says, as if goading you on. 

“You know what? I have to agree with you,” you say. “I get hurt really easily. My mom always says that I need to be extra careful here.”

“I’m sick of listening to my mom,” Eli pouts, stomping on the ground as you lead him towards the first-aid tent. 

“Me too,” you agree. No point in telling him that he needs to yield to his parents when he probably won’t even remember this conversation by the time he wakes up tomorrow. Besides, it’s never too early to begin teaching kids about rebelling against authority figures. “But you won’t have to listen to everything I say, okay? We’re just gonna be really good friends.”

“Like with my babysitter,” Eli says. 

“Exactly,” you say, stopping right outside of the first-aid tent. You’re not even positive that anyone’s inside, especially since it’s barely been an hour since camp officially started. Hopefully, Jimin’s somewhere else so you can just patch Eli up yourself. 

The first aid tent is not so much a tent as it is a shed with a fabric entrance, two curtains attached to a rod above the entryway to provide some semblance of privacy since nobody in the camp is handy enough to actually install a working door. But calling it the first aid tent is better than calling it the first aid shack, which, in the wise words of Yoongi, makes it sound like “a hospital where people go to die.”

When you push open the curtain, the first thing you notice is Jungkook and Seokjin in the far left corner, each with ice packs and suspiciously identical markings on them. They’re both making desperate attempts to patch each other up, fighting with the gauze and bandages that are laid out on the table beside them, as if in a competition to see who can better take care of the other. 

Besides that, Jimin is lounging along the wall, leaning back against it as he gazes into nothing, deeply lost in thought. His eyes trace the lines of the shed, foot tapping to an imaginary beat, brows furrowed. You wonder what the hell it is that Jimin could possibly be thinking about so intently, what it is that is making him not even pay attention to the two overgrown children in the corner of his tent, attacking each other with first-aid materials. 

Watching him, you almost don’t want to disturb him. Almost want to grab one of the kits on the shelf by the doorway and pull Eli outside, partly because you don’t think Jimin absolutely needs to be present for you to clean Eli’s wounds and give him some Spiderman Band-aids, and partly because you don’t think you can bear having to say hello to him. 

Eventually, and only because Eli would start thinking it was weird you weren’t talking to each other (and not because a part of you just wants to hear his voice again), you take another step forward, coughing. 

“Wha— oh, hi,” Jimin says, the sound of your arrival breaking him out of his trance. He rubs at the nape of his neck, clearly trying to brush off any awkwardness. “How can I help you guys?” His voice is unrecognizable. 

“Eli here crashed into a tree while playing tag,” you say tensely, doing your best to look around the room, anywhere else, literally anywhere else, just so you don’t have to look at him. “I just brought him here to make sure he’s alright.”

“I’m fine,” Eli insists. 

“Well, Eli, we just have to double check that,” Jimin says comfortingly, reaching down to bring Eli over to one of the benches. He sits him down and kneels so that he can be at eye-level with him, and says, “Sometimes our bodies say that they’re alright even when they really aren’t.” Out of the corner of his eye, Jimin meets your gaze, looking at you like there’s nothing left that you can do, looking at you like there is so much that he wants to say but no way to tell you. 

You open your mouth, willing for the words to come out, but your throat is dry and your heart is pounding in your ears, a painful thud with every breath that you take. He must have known that what you said was a lie. He must have known what you were going to say when he asked, but he asked anyway, not to get the truth but to see where your relationship stands. 

As it seems, your relationship doesn’t seem to be standing at all. 

It lies in front of you, shattered into a million pieces like a broken mirror, cursed but still doing its job, still showing you this fragmented reflection of yourself. Mixed together like this, you can’t see where your friendship ends and your love began. Mixed together like this, it is impossible to repair. 

“Y/N—” Jimin begins. 

“I should go,” you say at the same time, making the two of you stop in your tracks once again. “Thanks for, uh, patching Eli up. Just make sure he gets to the mess hall in time for dinner.”

“I will,” Jimin says with a nod. There is so much that he wants to say but you don’t think you can bear listening to another word come out of his mouth, to another apology for not loving you back when it wasn’t even his fault to begin with. 

You ruined your friendship but Jimin seems to think that he is the one to blame. 

“I’ll see you at dinner?” Jimin asks. 

You look back at him, wanting so desperately to say yes, to pretend that everything is back to normal, to act like this is the beginning of last summer instead of this one, where you loved him and he didn’t know and everything was alright. But you can’t, because it’s not last summer. It’s this one, and you still love him but he knows now. He fucking knows and just thinking about it makes your heart shake in its cage, holding itself together but unable to stop itself from cracking from within.

Jimin must have known you wouldn’t have agreed. Why did he ask?

“Wait, Y/N, hold up!” 

You’re already halfway out of the makeshift door when you turn around to see Jungkook barrelling after you, leaving Seokjin in the dust as he joins you outside, pulling you away from the entrance instinctively. No one has ever been particularly good at keeping secrets here. 

“Can I help you, Jungkook?” You ask, blinking at him, trying to act as normal as possible. 

“Are you alright?” He leans in close, looking into your eyes, concern washed over his features. 

“Everybody seems to be asking me this,” you say, acting like you don’t know why. “I’m fine.”

Jungkook, for all of his wide-eyed innocence, for the way that he views the world as perfectly imperfect, doesn’t buy it. “You don’t have to tell me anything,” he says. “I don’t know what went down between you and Jimin.”

“Nothing happened,” you say, forcing a laugh just so you don’t sound miserable. 

“Whatever it is, I just want you to know that it doesn’t always have to be like this,” he says, reaching out to take your hand in his own, his calloused thumb rubbing soothingly against your skin. “But you should be honest with your feelings, don’t you think?”

“You and Namjoon both think that I don’t have a handle on this, when I do.” You don’t. And being honest with your feelings is what got you into this mess in the first place. 

“Come on, Y/N, you don’t think we haven’t noticed, have you?” He asks, soft and sad and desperate to get through to you. 

“It’s no big deal,” you insist. “Jimin and I are alright. We’ve always been alright.”

“If you say so…” says Jungkook, no less skeptical than he was when he initiated this conversation. 

“Are we done here?” You ask, already pulling your hand from his grasp so you can go back to your cabin and pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. 

“Yeah,” Jungkook says, resigned as he lets you go. “But you know I’ll always be here for you, right?”

“I know, Jungkook,” you promise, because he always has and he always will be. “Thanks for looking out for me.” You begin to scurry away from the first aid tent, praying that Jimin didn’t hear you and Jungkook and wishing that everything was the way that it used to be.

“Be honest!” Jungkook shouts when you’re a hundred feet away, rushing back towards your cabin. 

Jungkook wants you to be honest?

Telling Jimin that you love him ruined your life. It ruined camp, it ruined your friendship, and it ruined your future. Seeing him now makes your heart ache and your brain dizzy. Every night you replay that conversation in your head, over and over, wondering if there was something that you could have done differently, something that you could have changed so you wouldn’t have ended up like this. Jimin wants to be friends again but you don’t know how to do that without him feeling guilty for not loving you back. 

You want to be honest?

Jimin makes you feel like there is a fire beneath your skin that you can’t extinguish, the flames creeping towards your heart. 

The only solution, it seems, is to smother them. 

The worst part about being in love with Jimin is that he’s impossible to avoid. 

You peer into the mess hall to see if lunch that day is any good and you see him laughing at a table surrounded by elementary schoolers munching on hot dogs and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You go hunting in the storage shed for some extra packs of popsicle sticks and find him cleaning out the old flower pots to use in the greenhouse. You lead your group of campers from the arts room to the lake and see him and Taehyung setting up the net for some friendly water polo, laughing as they try to tie each other up in the rope. 

It feels like you’re watching a movie unfold in real time, one where he is the star and you are nothing but a background character, the desperate loser who confessed to him in the beginning of the film just to develop his character arc, make him seem personable and relatable, then forgotten about until the end when you spot each other on the street and nod silently to each other, as if to say you’ve both inexplicably reached a peace between the two of you. 

Is that what the future holds for you? A wordless camp, an empty conversation? Will you simply go the rest of the summer without speaking, then nod to each other right before you leave? Will this be the last time you ever see each other?

The worst part about being in love with Jimin is knowing that just because you want things to be different doesn’t mean they will be. Just because you want Jimin to love you back doesn’t mean he will. Just because you want everything to go back to normal doesn’t mean they will. 

As it turns out, love confessions don’t always end in fireworks.

Park Jimin is impossible to avoid not only because he’s everywhere but also because he is everybody’s best friend, the campers’ favorite counselor and the counselors’ favorite companion. He is kind and thoughtful and electric. He is magnetic. He makes others laugh without even trying, he names the plants in the greenhouse after the people he loves, he stays behind after activities to clean up when no one else will. 

Falling in love with Jimin wasn’t you picking out your favorite traits of his, wasn’t you seeing him do one selfless thing and deciding that he could do no wrong. It was submerging yourself in the lake, little by little before you dive in headfirst. It was catching glimpses of his goodness until you were consumed by it. It was knowing that you prefer yourself when you’re around him.

Falling in love with Jimin was like the heat in summer—endless. 

If only falling out of love with him would be just as easy. 

The weather has been unusually nice today. There isn’t a cloud in the sky as the sun beats down on you, rays peeking through the tall branches and leaves of the spruce and oak trees that surround you, casting hazy shadows on the grass beneath your feet. It isn’t too muggy, isn’t too sticky and sweaty, this perfect medium between warm and hot, between dry and humid. It’s the sort of day that you romanticize every day of summer being, only to realize that summer actually consists of sweating through three different t-shirts and needing to eat your ice cream in ten seconds before it melts into a puddle on the concrete. 

Nonetheless, camp policy has always been that when it’s a beautiful day, the campers are going to spend every hour they’re awake outside, going on nature walks and playing capture the flag and eating watermelon on the splinter-y picnic benches. It’s nice, because it gives you a break from having to tell the kids not to touch the tips of the glue guns, but it also stinks, because it forces you to leave your sweet, air-conditioned paradise in favor of a mosquito-infested summer hell. 

Luckily, the kids have been washing off the summer heat in the cool water of the lake with the counselors that actually prefer being outside, playing volleyball in the shallows or canoeing out where it’s deeper. Sometimes, you wonder why Namjoon will let so few counselors supervise so many campers, and sometimes, you decide that it’s better them than you. 

You take a seat on the picnic bench by Yoongi, who is drinking notably clearer lemonade than in days past, so you assume that Namjoon got the water problem fixed like he promised. The two of you have never been outdoorsy people. Why you’ve been working at a summer camp for the last three years escapes you both. You and him lean back against the edge of the built-in table. From here, you have a perfect view of the lake, clear and blue and filled to the brim with rambunctious children, keeping at least somewhat of a watch over them so that Namjoon can’t shout at either of you for slacking off. 

“You know that Seokjin gave you murky water lemonade earlier, right?” You ask, just to make conversation. 

“I know,” Yoongi says, wholly unfazed. He takes another sip and sighs, feeling refreshed. Without batting an eyelash, he deadpans, “You know that you and Jimin aren’t going to get any better if you don’t talk to each other, right?”

“What are you talking about?” You scoff, playing dumb. 

“Just because all of those other idiots didn’t hear what went down between you and Jimin last summer doesn’t mean I didn’t,” Yoongi mutters monotonously. 

You jerk up, stick straight at his words, eyes wide as you glare at him. He heard you?

Yoongi laughs at your reaction, reclining back impossibly farther. “Relax, I haven’t told anyone. You know it’s none of my business.”

“Well,” you sputter out, “if it’s none of your business then why are you talking to me about it?”

Yoongi frowns. “Because you’re my friend, Y/N. And I hate seeing you like this,” he says, that soft lilt to his voice peeking through the rigid words spilling from his lips. “I feel like I don’t even know who you are anymore. A lot of the other counselors do.”

You purse your lips together, guilty. 

“Especially Jimin.”

“I just need time,” you say, trying to be honest for once in your life. Loving Jimin was never going to go away without a fight. 

“You need to talk to each other,” corrects Yoongi. 

“Talking is what got us into this mess,” you huff out, dejected. Yoongi heard it himself—your confession sent you and Jimin’s relationship down the garbage chute. 

“And talking is what’s going to get you out of it,” Yoongi tells you pointedly, truthfully, in that horrible way where you know that he’s right but refuse to accept it. “Promise me you’ll try?” He reaches out to place a hand atop yours, looking into your eyes with hopeful promise. “We want you back.”

“I’ll try,” you sigh out, because it’s never been worth fighting with Yoongi. Not when he cares so deeply. 

“Try what?”

You and Yoongi whip your heads around to find Jimin standing on the opposite side of the picnic bench, helping himself to a piece of sliced watermelon. 

“Try enjoying the outdoors more,” Yoongi covers for you instantly, making you breathe out a little sigh of relief. “We both hate when Namjoon makes it an outside day.”

“It’s not that bad,” Jimin says with a smile. The only reason Jimin doesn’t mind it is because he gets the best of both worlds—half the day spent inside the first-aid tent, the other spent inside the greenhouse by the woods. “There’s beauty in everything.”

Yoongi scrunches up his nose. “Like that?”

In the distance, you spot three things: Jungkook and Taehyung, laughing evilly as they run down along the rocky beach. The clothes clutched in their hands, crumpled up in their grasps while they hoot and holler. And Seokjin, hair sopping wet and half-naked, with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist and ugly lime green water shoes on, chasing after them. 

“I’m out,” Yoongi says without missing a beat, grabbing his lemonade and dashing off to safety. Yoongi’s exit leaves you and Jimin standing there, stranded, frozen in place, as Jungkook and Taehyung rush by you, each grabbing a piece of watermelon on their way. Something falls from Jungkook’s hold as they pass you, and Jimin reaches down to pick it up. It’s one of Seokjin’s socks. 

“Give that back, Park Jimin!” Seokjin’s banshee screech rings in your ears. 

“Run,” Jimin says, and you don’t get another say in the matter before Jimin is grabbing your wrist and pulling you along with him, Seokjin’s angry caws echoing throughout the clearing. 

Even though Jimin didn’t even actually steal his clothes from the locker room by the lake, Seokjin has determined that anyone who runs from him is automatically guilty, thus lumping both you and him into a wild goose chase alongside Jungkook and Taehyung, who are almost always the guilty parties when it comes to practical jokes like this. For a few moments, it’s the four of you running across the open field with Seokjin hot on all of your heels, desperate to catch up to at least one of you despite being severely out-matched, both in athletic ability and footwear, and then suddenly Jimin is pulling you behind the shed as Jungkook and Taehyung make a sharp right, headed in the opposite direction. 

Crouched behind the shed, you and Jimin stop for a minute to catch your breath, chests heaving after doing more exercise in the last thirty seconds than you have in the last week alone. You’re pressed up against the back siding, and only after your heart rates finally slow down do you become faintly aware of Jimin’s hand still gripping your wrist, like he’s simply forgotten to let go. 

“You think we lost them?” He asks with a wicked grin, and it’s impossible to avoid his gaze when he’s so close like this, when there’s barely a foot of space between your bodies, when his fingertips still press against your skin. 

“I think so,” you heave out in response. 

“Better stay here for a bit longer just in case,” Jimin says, and it’s the flirty sort of thing that he would say if it were last year, the flirty sort of thing that he would say if you two were friends like you used to be, but you aren’t anymore, and now it feels like Jimin is trying too hard and you aren’t trying hard enough. 

“I… I mean,” you say, pulling your wrist out of his grasp, rubbing at where your skin sizzles from his touch. “We’re probably fine.”

“Are we?” He asks, and this is exactly why you shouldn’t try to talk to him, exactly why talking won’t erase the tension that has settled between you two, repair the cracks in what you are. You’re not fine, because everything changed when you told Jimin that you loved him, and you’ve never been good at adjusting. You’re not fine, because for the first time in your years-long relationship, loving him is getting in the way. 

“I hope we are,” you admit, more to yourself than anyone else. Oh, how you so desperately wish that things were back to normal. Oh, how it would be so easy if only things were just a little bit different. 

“Me too,” Jimin says, and he smiles and, oh, how it makes you feel real and true and whole. He stands back up and reaches an arm out to help you do the same. For once, it doesn’t feel like a Band-aid on top of a stab wound. It feels like a lifeline. 

You let Jimin help you back to your feet, and for some reason your heart feels just a little bit lighter. 

“You think we’re alright?” Jimin asks. 

“Yeah,” You respond with a nod. “I think we will be.”

One thing that Namjoon is big on is interdisciplinary recreation. This is half due to the fact that he attends a private liberal arts school on the east coast and half due to the fact that he doesn’t always trust some of the counselors when it comes to chaperoning a whole group of kids on their own. You aren’t going to name names, but they’re the same people that steal clothes for fun. 

He’s got a list up on one of those massive sheets of lined paper filled with suggestions for all sorts of things that combine two or more of the basic activities the camp offers, ranging from making handmade bird seed treats in the kitchen to put out on nature walks to dodgeball in canoes. Some of Namjoon’s ideas are a lot more feasible than others. 

Namjoon’s never been a pushy person. He’s repeatedly said that he purposely avoids telling people what to do within their activity sectors because he doesn’t want the counselors to think that he’s stepping all over them or doesn’t trust them to come up with their own entertainment. The list in the counselor meeting room is titled: ACTIVITY SUGGESTIONS, bolded and circled, just so everyone knows that he isn’t forcing you to do anything (if you’re being honest, the emphasis on suggestions somewhat works against his whole niche). But sometimes, especially for someone whose greatest fear is stripping away others’ creative freedom, he can be rather insistent. 

Take, for example, the two stacks of plain flower pots left anonymously inside the arts and crafts room when you walk in to set up the activity for the day. You were originally going to have the younger kids color in their own guitars to hang up in the music room—an activity that was not on the activity suggestions list—and give the older ones some clay and let them go to town, but you suppose that decorating flower pots will be just as entertaining. At least you didn’t have to go hunting for the materials. 

The only problem with decorating flower pots is that, once the campers have painted streaks and polka dots and glued charms all over them, the flower pots have a rather specific place to go. A place that is part of a notable Park Jimin’s domain. 

A sneaky little feeling beneath your skin suspects that someone may have let it slip to Namjoon that you and Jimin could do with a bit of relationship repair. And Namjoon and Yoongi have been bunking in the same cabin for as long as you can remember. 

Sighing to yourself as you begin to set up the flowerpots on old newspapers spread out on the wooden tables, you decide that spending an hour with Jimin in the greenhouse (maybe even less if you can find an excuse to get yourself out of there!) couldn’t be any worse than being crouched down behind that cobwebbed old shed with his hand on your wrist and his eyes gazing into yours. At least you’ll have thirty campers to maintain the distance between the two of you. 

You suppose that you do have the easier of the two jobs. Arts and crafts is a rather simple activity to oversee, barring the occasional papercut or glue gun burn. Luckily, painting flower pots means that you will really only have to worry about the campers mod-podging their fingers together, and even then, the bathroom is just down the hall. Jimin, with his having to wrangle the kids to garden neatly and not hit each other with the trowels, is going to have it much harder. 

There’s a part of you that knows you’ll stick around. Not just to lessen the load of campers for him, but just so you can spend a little more time in the same room, breathing the same air, pretending that things are the way that they used to be. 

When you leave the arts and crafts room to hike the ten minutes to the greenhouse, followed by all of the campers dutifully carrying their brand new flowerpots in their hands, you feel like a young bird leaving the nest. Taught to fly little by little, but one day forced to face the real world and exist without the safety net you’ve called home for so long. The arts and crafts room hasn’t always been your favorite place in the camp, but this year it’s felt like you’ve been holding on particularly tight.

Jimin is already waiting happily in the greenhouse for your arrival, this stupid old gardening apron tied around his waist with a faded picture of a cartoon cactus on the front that says free hugs. He watches fondly as all of the kids shuffle into the greenhouse, the whole room just barely big enough to fit all of you, wide eyes peeking out from behind seed packets and green leaves. 

You stay in the back corner as Jimin gets to work, having all of the campers place their pots on the tables in front of them, bright plastic buckets of soil at the ends of their tables, flower seeds waiting to be planted. 

As much as Jimin is fantastic at patching kids up inside the first aid tent, the greenhouse is where he really belongs. The harsh rays of the sun are softened by the glass walls as they beam down on him, surrounding him with this warm yellow halo, painting him into the scenery behind him. Here, amongst the lush vegetables and flowers and ferns, Jimin doesn’t look like an underpaid camp counselor carrying the weight of thirty children on his back. He looks like this fairy in the woods, this forest sprite that has grown up amongst the trees and the moss and the wildflowers, who has learned to tend to the world’s greatest garden. He looks like someone whose mere presence makes the plants smile a little wider. 

Jimin’s like that with everyone. It should come as no surprise to you that the plants feel better when they’re around him, too. 

Jimin has always been so good with kids. More so than any of the other counselors, really, though they all try their best to be fun and friendly and gentle and stern all at once. But there’s something in Jimin’s nature that just makes him the best at it, something about the way he cares for them so deeply, something about the soft lines of his face that earns him their trust the fastest. He’s good with everything that camp throws at him, from frisbees to murky water to lake monsters, but nothing has ever seemed quite as right for him as his connection with the campers. 

The children don’t know how lucky they are to know someone like Jimin. Someone who believes wholeheartedly in the goodness of others, someone who will stop at nothing to fix what has been broken. 

You think about how lucky you are to love someone like Jimin every day of your life.

“Mr. Jimin?” A squeaky little voice pipes up. It’s a young girl named Zoe, whose flower pot is decorated with a painting of her entire family, a group of four stick figures with red shirts and purple dresses holding hands together, loopy smiles drawn onto their faces. 

“Just Jimin, alright?” Jimin corrects. 

“Are you sure these seeds are going to turn into flowers?” Zoe asks, looking skeptically at the packets in front of her. 

Jimin laughs, and it is as warm as the rays of the sun that stream through the glass walls. “I can’t promise that they will, Zoe.”

“Then why are we doing this?” She pouts. 

“Because,” Jimin says, pointing to the packets in front of the campers, “the only way that I can promise that these seeds will turn into flowers is if you guys can promise to love them. Because no matter how much sun they get, no matter how much you water them, they will only bloom if you really, really love them.”

“How do they know?” Another girl pipes up. 

“Flowers are just like us,” Jimin tells her gently. “They can feel when they’re loved, and they love us back by blooming for us.” He shuffles around the back of the greenhouse where he stands, fishing through the shelves lining the walls until he emerges with a rather large pot in his hands, placing it down on the table beside him with a thud. “Take this hydrangea, for example.”

Your breath catches in your throat, the blue flowers flashing before your eyes. 

You planted those together. Last summer. You and Jimin snuck out to the greenhouse while everyone else was eating potato salad for lunch and spent the hour listening to pop songs from the eighties and planting a baby hydrangea. 

They will bloom every year, Jimin said. 

So they’ll always remind us of us, you responded. 

It’s the first time that you and Jimin have looked at each other since you entered the greenhouse. He catches you off-guard, eyes wide as you stare back at him, suddenly feeling this gut-wrenching ache from deep within your belly. And Jimin—

God, Jimin looks like he’s tried everything under the sun and moon to keep that damn hydrangea from wilting. 

“They were planted early last summer. And they bloomed, right? But they look so sad,” Jimin explains, rallying himself and turning his gaze away from you. “And I gave them new soil and watered them regularly, but I’m still missing something.”

“Love!” Zoe shouts. 

“Right,” Jimin says with a tense nod, eyes flickering to yours once more. Your shoulders slump. “But I have a lot of love to give, so hopefully they’ll be alright soon. You guys just have to remember that love is the most important thing that you can give to your flowers. Just like you and me, the flowers need to know that there is someone who loves them.”

But you do know, you want to shout out to him. You’ve known this whole summer and you knew back at the campfire and you probably knew even before that. You’ve known for so long and still the flowers that we planted together are fucking wilting. Like they can’t even bear that this is what we’ve come to. What do you mean, they need to know that there is someone who loves them? You do. And I love you. You must know that, don’t you?

You feel the vines of a thorny rose wrap around your heart, clenching it tight. It’s been in bloom for a year now, thick red petals filling up the empty spaces between your bones, nectar swimming within your veins. And when you picked it, cut it off at its stem to place in Jimin’s hand, it grew only stronger, bloomed only harder.

Oh, if only that hydrangea knew how much you loved him. 

Afterwards, you stay back to help clean up. There’s soil all over the floor, buckets knocked over in the campers’ frenzy to go play games in the gym with Jungkook, discarded paper seed packets and trowels left littered across the tables. 

Jimin doesn’t put on any eighties music. Instead, you stand there in silence, brushing the leftover soil into dust pans and buckets, placing the gardening tools on the rack by the entrance. 

Even though you know flowers don’t wilt that fast, it feels like with every second that passes, the hydrangea is a moment closer to death. The color seems to fade every time you look at them, going from its vibrant pale blue to a sallow green, no longer able to tolerate being in the same room as the two of you. 

Your love doesn’t seem like it’s going to fix it this time. 

“I didn’t know that it was doing so badly,” you say, and the words don’t even feel like they belong to you when you hear them back, making Jimin stop dead where he stands. 

“What?” He asks. 

“The hydrangea.”

Jimin looks over at the pot on the table, and he sighs, helpless. “I’ve tried everything. It just doesn’t seem to be working with me this year.”

It’s no secret to the both of you why. 

“Hopefully you can figure something out,” you offer alongside a half smile. “I would hate to see them die after only a year in bloom.”

“Me too,” Jimin sighs. 

“How have you been?” You ask him, because you never really did get a real answer when you asked him that very first day. And because no matter what you do, you’ll always be curious about him. 

“Alright,” Jimin says, and it’s not a lie. “I’m looking forward to graduating next year.”

“Yeah, me too,” you say, even though you’re only looking forward to the not-being-in-college part of graduating. Not so much the being-chucked-into-the-real-world part. “How’s the major coming along?”

“Well, physics never gets any easier,” Jimin jokes, and even though it’s a little bit forced it makes the two of you both laugh, desperate to get back to the way that things used to be, step by step. “What about you? Still going for English?”

“With a side of business so that I don’t end up a broke poet,” you remind him. “But yeah.”

“Maybe you can write me into one of your stories,” Jimin suggests. 

Oh, but doesn’t he know already? He’s the main character in every single one. All of your poems are about him. He is your inspiration and your muse. He fills up each blank page all on his own. Doesn’t he know? 

“Maybe,” you agree, even though there has never been a ‘maybe’ when it comes to him.

You nearly drop the plastic bucket of soil on your toe when you hear his next question. 

“Have you, uh, been seeing anyone lately?” Jimin scratches at the nape of his neck, clearly nervous. Your heart sinks. Out of all of the possible questions he could ask you to keep this relatively casual conversation going, he chooses that one? 

You look up at him, wondering why on earth he’s asking you this when your love has already been laid out bare in front of him, every corner unfolded so he can read across the lines like a map, memorize the splotches of color. You look up at him and you are helpless, desperate for him to realize that even with thousands of miles and hundreds of days between you, for you, it has always been him.

You wonder if the only reason he’s asking is to see if you were starting to move on. 

“No,” you mutter lifelessly. “I haven’t.” And then, like a devilish whisper in your ear, “Have you?”

You almost expect him to say yes. You almost expect to hear him recount all of the fantastic dates he’s been on, all of the loving relationships he’s been in, but instead, he says, “Me neither.”

And that? That makes your heart stop dead in its tracks. 

“I tried to, you know,” Jimin says, and each word is a puncture wound inside of you. “But I just couldn’t. Nothing really stuck.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” you tell him, because you are. Because Jimin deserves to love someone who will love him back. Someone that isn’t you, someone who hasn’t been hopelessly pining after him for a year. 

“No, it’s alright.” Jimin shrugs. “I’m kind of glad that nothing stuck.”

And if hearing the words “me neither,” leave his lips made your heart freeze up, then hearing these words set it aflame. You don’t respond, instead choosing to let the words etch themselves into your memory, carve themselves into your heart, give you hope, if only a droplet of it. Any is enough to have your heart beating a little faster.

“I miss this,” Jimin breathes out, and if you closed your eyes and pretended that you were somewhere else it would almost sound like a confession. You glance up at him, and he is so empty, clinging hopelessly onto the remnants of things past just like you, and you realize that being honest is really the only option you have left. “I miss doing stuff like this.” 

The with you goes unspoken, but it rings loud and clear in your ears anyway. 

“I miss it too,” you say, because Jimin must know already, doesn’t he? How if you could choose to go on loving him without him ever knowing, then you would do it in an instant? How loving him silently was painful but loving him like this, unbearable. “I feel like it’s been a long time.”

A long time since you both really spoke to each other. A long time since you were friends the way you used to be. A long time since you first began to love him.

“Can’t we go back?” Jimin asks, a foolish question. He should know better than to ask for something he already knows he can’t get. 

“You know we can’t,” you tell him. You’ve already tried.

“Then can we begin again?” He proposes, the two of you meeting in the middle of the greenhouse, right in front of the hydrangea. You hadn’t even realized you were barely three feet away from him until you were already there. “Please? I miss us, Y/N. Don’t you miss us, too?”

Gazing at Jimin, you feel your heart tremble. One thing that hasn’t changed is how weak you are to his touch, to his eyes, to the way that they make every part of you feel like jelly, feel like you’ll collapse without him to hold you up. You’ve never been able to say no to him. It’s one of the things you don’t think you’ll ever outgrow. 

“We can try,” you say, because being honest may be hard, and talking even harder, but now you would rather try to piece yourselves back together than spend the rest of the summer wondering what to do with the shattered remains on the floor, stepping around them instead of cleaning them up, repairing what has been broken. 

It’s like the words are music to Jimin’s ears, the way he lights up, grinning wide and real and true. He inhales and it feels like a breath of fresh air, like a brand new season has come to rest upon the two of you. It feels like relief. It feels like hope. It feels like new.

You hadn’t realized it before, but you’ve been dying to make him smile. 

Next to you, the hydrangea seems just a little bit brighter. 

It’s getting easier. 

No longer are you turning in the opposite direction whenever you see him hanging around the center of camp, praying that he hasn’t spotted you from where you stand. Nor are you making excuses about having to go help Namjoon with something or run back to your cabin whenever he shows up to spend time with you and the other counselors. 

And even though it’s still a little tense when you accidentally look up at the same time and meet eyes, even though it still feels like you two aren’t quite the same, it’s getting easier. 

You’ve even begun to eat lunch together again. 

It’s not exactly like it was before, not like when you would scurry off to the greenhouse or the shed or some other hidden place, spread out a picnic blanket and bask in each other’s company, laughing about anything and everything, but it’s better. It’s better than how it used to be, when you would always bring your lunch back to your cabin to eat in silence, drown yourself in your comforter and your thoughts, letting them pile on top of you, one by one. It’s better than how you used to pretend that you didn’t even know each other. 

Slowly, step by step, things have almost started to feel normal again. 

“You guys seem happier lately,” Taehyung commends mindlessly as he sits down across from you and Jimin, three pieces of meat lover’s pizza on the paper plate he sets on the tabletop. 

You and Jimin smile at each other. You suppose that you have been.

“Three, Tae?” The moment gone too soon, Jimin’s focus is immediately redirected to the behemoth meal in front of Taehyung. “Seriously? Aren’t you lactose intolerant?”

“The meat balances it out,” Taehyung says matter-of-factly, even though it definitely doesn’t. He takes an enormous bite out of one of the slices, eating nearly half the pizza in a single chomp. “But seriously, I mean it. You guys look a lot happier. Yoongi!”

Yoongi freezes in his tracks from where he’s walking by your table, spilling his open soda can all over his plate of pizza at Taehyung’s shout of his name. 

“Don’t you think that Jimin and Y/N seem happier?” Taehyung asks, motioning to the both of you. 

“I don’t know,” Yoongi says with a shrug, aloof as always. You chuckle to yourself, knowing fully well that it was him who got Namjoon to leave two stacks of flower pots in the arts and crafts room to give you an extra push towards talking with Jimin. Taehyung huffs, disappointed but not surprised that Yoongi contributed so little to the conversation, but he doesn’t notice how Yoongi gives you a smile and a thumbs up as he heads over to where Namjoon and Hoseok are sitting. 

“Well, I think you guys do,” Taehyung says pointedly. 

“Did we seem… unhappy to you?” Jimin asks, an eyebrow raised. 

“No,” says Taehyung. “I don’t know, you guys just seemed different. You know, I was talking with Jin and he and I were convinced that the two of you were dating last year and then broke up sometime before this summer because you guys were acting so weird earlier.”

“Really?” You ask, cracking an awkward smile just to keep the mood light because god, Taehyung really is a lot more observant than you give him credit for. “That’s so funny, honestly.” It’s not. “You know that we’re just friends, Tae.”

Next to you, Jimin is staring down his lunch like it’s insulted his family. Out of the corner of your eye, you watch as he opens his mouth to say something, anything, goddamnit, anything that will make you feel like you’re not the only one who wants you two to be friends again. Anything that will remind you that being friends is all you have left because he will never love you back. 

“You could have fooled me,” Taehyung acknowledges. “Seokjin was pretty convinced, too. We even had a bet going to see which one of you would admit it first.”

“You guys bet on us?” Jimin asks, a little horrified and a lot of something else, something that you can’t quite place. 

“Not with money!” Taehyung defends. “Marshmallows for the end-of-camp counselor campfire. But neither of you ever said anything so we ended up just dropping it and ate as many marshmallows as we wanted.”

Oh, if only Taehyung knew. Oh, if only he had heard you that night, heard you pour your heart out in front of that fire. Oh, if only he had noticed, noticed the warm yellow glow that made Jimin look like he had been bathed in candlelight, noticed those roasted marshmallows over the heat, noticed the words that replay in your head like a broken record. 

There’s a part of you that wants to know who Taehyung was betting on. A part of you that is wondering why on earth would either of them ever assume that Jimin would be the one to confess first when he has only ever seen you as a friend and you have always seen him as something more. Seen him as this dream come to life, seen him as the answer to all of your prayers. 

Jimin never would have confessed first. That hasn’t changed. 

“Thinking back, it was kind of stupid of us to bet on you guys when you hadn’t even confirmed anything,” Taehyung says with a sigh, pursing his lips together tightly. “I don’t know. I guess that Seokjin and I both really, really wanted you guys to get together.” He chuckles, but it isn’t funny anymore.

Believe me, Tae, you think to yourself. You guys weren’t the only ones.

“Eh,” Taehyung hums, shrugging to himself. He clearly isn’t as caught up about it as you and Jimin, who wonder every day how different things would be if you had just kept your damn mouth shut that night, if you had never loved him in the first place. “I guess I’m just glad to see you both smiling again.”

“Thanks, Tae,” you say, because even if Taehyung doesn’t know the whole story he’s still hit the nail on the head, and even if he can’t pick up the way that Jimin’s body has tensed up beside you, even if he doesn’t notice how normal feels like the furthest thing to describe the two of you right now, he has always wanted the both of you to be content.

“Makes me kinda sad to know you guys are just friends, even though I’m obviously not going to force you into anything.” Taehyung takes another bite of his pizza, the words just conversational to him even if they clearly aren’t to either of you.

Slowly, Jimin looks back up from his lunch, like he’s finally made up his mind. You meet Jimin’s eyes when he does, and for once you don’t dare jump into the swirling sea of his irises, for once you can hardly tell if the waves are calm or rough. For once, it feels like Jimin is looking at you the way you look at him—helplessly.

Taehyung smiles, looking fondly at the both of you. “You guys would have been cute together,” he says it because he means it. “You make each other so happy.”

He means that part, too.

The end-of-camp show is a longstanding tradition where all of the kids, divided by age group, celebrate the best part about summer and going to a sleepaway camp: being away from their parents. There are dance performances choreographed by the counselors (namely Hoseok, who has the most free time because his other job mainly consists of making sure Namjoon doesn’t lose his head), a guitar performance organized by Seokjin (who has promised not to rickroll everyone this year), and an art show setup by you to display all of the treasures that the campers have created. But your favorite part of the show is how, no matter how much time time is spent practicing and rehearsing, the performance will always end in chaos. The only predictable thing about it is its unpredictability. 

This year, as suggested by Hoseok and immediately implemented by Namjoon, the counselors are being roped into a performance of their own, one that is bound to be even more disastrous because even though you can all listen to directions, you are all also just as capable of purposely disobeying them. 

Part of you suspects that the only reason Hoseok even recommended that you all do this is because he enjoys watching the camp counselor collective crash and burn. Like there’s something cathartic about watching you go up in flames.

Nevertheless, you do it, because if not for yourselves then for Hoseok, and if not for him then for Namjoon, both of whom tirelessly to make sure that camp is a place where you and the other counselors can do the dumbest things without repercussions. If it weren’t for the two of them, camp would be a lot less fun.

Hoseok also just absolutely relishes in being in charge of something, something that involves dancing and singing and performing, which are his favorite things to do, and it would be cruel of all of you to deny Hoseok this opportunity, if only for a silly little camp performance. 

Hoseok manages to wrangle a time and space for rehearsal thanks to one of those magic scientists that perform cool things with chemicals, one that Namjoon has arranged to visit camp to give you and the other counselors a much-needed break from the endless excitement of children. 

And so, you all trickle into the empty counselor meeting room at three in the afternoon exactly, waiting to see what the hell Hoseok has come up with now. 

All of the tables, chairs, and other miscellaneous furniture has been pushed up against the walls, leaving just enough room for all of you to fit relatively comfortably, with Hoseok standing smack in the middle of the room, looking proud. 

“I’m scared,” Hazel admits to you as you pass by Hoseok to stand where the rest of the counselors have gathered. You sneak a peek at the clipboard in Hoseok’s hand, which isn’t empty this time, and is instead filled with sheets of paper that look like they belong in the hands of a sports coach, X’s and O’s and arrows littering the pages. 

“Don’t be,” you say, though the tremble of your voice is probably doing very little to calm her nerves. You end up grouped together with Jimin and Yoongi, who are both standing in silence, waiting for something to pull them out of their thoughts. “Hey,” you say softly, giving Jimin a nudge. 

“Hey,” Jimin responds, face lifting a little when he sees you. From behind him, Yoongi is eyeing the both of you, but he doesn’t seem very worried. Jimin laughs tensely. “I’m nervous about what Hoseok has in mind for us.”

You glance over to Hoseok as he talks animatedly with Namjoon, who looks a little bit in over his head. Namjoon must have known that Hoseok would spare no expense when it came to a counselor performance. 

“I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” you assure him with a squeeze to his wrist, making him smile weakly at you. 

“First Namjoon makes us sit outside, and then he makes us do exercise?” Yoongi huffs. “When will it end?”

“High time he got you out of the damn kitchens,” Jungkook mutters to himself, making all of the other counselors within earshot laugh. Yoongi turns around to give Jungkook half of a noogie before Hoseok claps to get everyone’s attention. 

“Alright, hi everyone!” Hoseok cheers. “Glad you all could make it.”

“Did we have a choice?” Seokjin asks. 

“Nope!” Hoseok grins. “Anyway, as you know, this year Namjoon and I have been thinking of doing a counselor performance at the end-of-camp show to show unity and entertain the kids, since they’re the ones who have been doing all of the work thus far to make the camp show a reality. And I, as your assistant head counselor and dance choreographer, get to set it up!”

“Oh, God,” Taehyung says. 

“It’s not going to be a super serious thing because this is camp and we’re literally performing for prepubescent children, so don’t worry!” He says, doing nothing to ease people’s worries. He turns around to face the chalkboard, and begins to magnet the pieces of paper from his clipboard onto it, page by page, as the rest of you stare on in horror. “But I have come up with a bit of a dance for us to perform…”

“Oh, God,” Seokjin repeats dramatically. 

“Anyway,” Hoseok says, clapping his hands together once more to redirect everyone’s attention from the mess on the board back to him. “It’ll be a bit of a partner dance for the first half, and then everyone gets about five seconds worth of a solo in the middle where you can do whatever you want—” when Hoseok spots Jungkook, Taehyung, and Seokjin already beginning to scheme, wicked smiles widening, he quickly adds, “—within reason, and then a big old group thing to finish it up. Does that sound good?”

“Whoop,” Yoongi deadpans.

“Great!” Hoseok says, fumbling for another piece of paper in the stack that he still has left on his clipboard. 

“God, a partner dance?” You ask awkwardly, feeling noticeably more worried than before. It’s not that you’re dreading having to dance, or even having to perform in front of a bunch of kids, it’s the idea of having to dance with someone else, a specific someone else in particular, that has your stomach doing flips. “Why did Hobi think that was a good idea?”

“It might be fun, don’t you think?” Jimin says, trying to keep the mood light. It’s clear he has no worries about the potential for being paired up with you, which might have been able to fly last year but this summer, you’re not so sure. You and Jimin just managed to start eating lunch together again without wanting to curl into a ball and hide. What’s going to happen if you have to dance with each other?

“I’m not a very good dancer,” you admit, a weak excuse for your real fear. 

“Then I’ll teach you,” Jimin says, and the words are hopeful and filled with light as he works so desperately to remind you that not all has been lost. That you can begin again. 

“Okay, partners,” Hoseok says, looking at his list. “Namjoon and Yoongi, Jungkook and Seokjin, Taehyung and Hazel, Maria and Ruby, Jia-yi and Quinn, and Jimin and Y/N.”

Shit. 

Yoongi, noticing your alarm, immediately interrupts, “Uh, is it possible for us to switch partners?”

“Why?” Hoseok asks innocently. 

And in that split second, that moment of pause, you look from the wide-eyed Yoongi to Jimin, who is gazing back at you like he’s finally got it right, like he’s finally been given an opportunity to fix what you had broken, to repair your relationship, brick by brick, if only for a stupid counselor performance. Jimin, who is smiling and smiling and smiling because you are finally eating lunch together and you are finally watering that damn hydrangea and you finally get to dance together, and everything in the world is slowly beginning to feel right, the dust is beginning to settle after a month’s worth of storms. 

You inhale, then you exhale, and you say, “I’m fine with my partner. I don’t think we need to switch, do we?”

And you swear, your heart feels lighter already. 

Jimin pops into the arts and crafts room more often these days. Sometimes he actually does it because he needs to drop something off, because a camper left something in the greenhouse or because Namjoon is making him, but most times, he does it just to say hi, just to charm all of the campers as they make collages out of old magazines or glue together fabric for no-sew pillows. 

And every time he does it, every time there is that familiar knock on the door, you nearly tumble over yourself from excitement. The best part about it is how normal it’s all beginning to feel, how familiar it is. You are almost back to where you used to be. 

Almost back to when you loved him, and he didn’t know, and everything was alright. 

Today, the kids are making cards for you to mail back home before the summer is done, before camp comes to a close and they return to their lives and you return to yours. Normally, you’d automatically send the letters back to the parents, but this time, you offer up an alternative. 

“These cards are going to be mailed back home to the people that you love,” you say, holding up your own as an example. It’s a basic one, yellow cardstock with daisies made out of construction paper glued onto it, but it serves as a good guideline for whatever the campers want to do with their own. “You just need to provide their address so that we can make sure it gets to the right person.”

“It doesn’t have to be our parents?” One boy asks.

“Nope,” you say with a smile, shaking your head. “You can send it to anyone you love. It’s just to let them know how you are, and that you miss them.”

“Who are you sending yours to?” A different girl, Rose, asks. 

“I’m not sure yet,” you say, because you don’t really need to let your parents know how you are when you text each other constantly, and all of your friends from back home can see all of the shenanigans you get up to on your social media, but a letter is no fun if only one person ever gets to read it. 

“You should send it to Jimin,” Rose suggests matter-of-factly, making you sputter out the water you were taking a sip of all over the table in front of you. 

“Jimin?” You repeat, forcing a smile. “I see Jimin all the time.”

“But you really like him, don’t you?” She asks, even though she obviously already knows the answer. Goddamn, kids pick up on everything. “I can tell.”

“Is that so?” You return, eyebrows raised. 

“Yeah, me too!” The boy chirps up. “You always look so nervous whenever he comes to say hello. Like you don’t know what to say. That’s what my mom looks like whenever she comes home from a new date with a boy she really likes.”

You do? That is news to you. 

“It’s okay, though,” Rose interrupts. “I think that he really likes you too. Otherwise he wouldn’t just be popping in every other day to say hello!”

“Maybe he really likes seeing you guys, instead!” You offer, feeling your cheeks heating up at the thought that you and Jimin have laid yourselves out bare like a board book for everyone to read. 

“I don’t think so. He looks too happy when he sees you.” The girl shakes her head. “You should send your card to him, so he knows that you love him.”

Oh, he knows, that’s for sure, you think to yourself. There’s no way that Jimin hasn’t already realized that you still love him. That you have always loved him. Even the campers have it figured out, and they’re still in elementary school. But you think that the worst part of this, the worst part of all of these freakishly observant children verbally beating you up with reminders of your relationship with Jimin, is how they seem to think that Jimin likes you back. That Jimin sees you as something more. 

Because he didn’t, last year. And he didn’t, earlier this summer. And there is no way things have changed that much. 

“You guys should keep working on your cards,” you say, desperate for the subject to drop, desperate to talk about anything, literally anything, besides Jimin. “We want to send them by the end of the week so that the people you love will get them before camp’s over.”

“So you do like him!” The boy exclaims. 

“Cards, Oliver!” You reprimand him, earning a chorus of giggles, though there is no mistaking the way your body has tensed, the way your words are shaking. No mistaking how your heart trembles at the thought of Jimin, sweet, wonderful, beautiful Jimin, actually liking you back. 

It can’t be. 

You and Jimin have always just been friends. That’s all you’ll ever be. You swear. 

You swear.

“The hydrangea looks better,” you comment as you enter the greenhouse, eyes immediately darting towards the pot on the table at the front. In it, the hydrangea has blossomed fully, its petals a vibrant sky blue, basking in the faint glow of the sun as it streams into the greenhouse, peeking between the misty gray clouds, painting everything with a hazy yellow warmth. 

“It does, doesn’t it?” Jimin asks from where he’s wrestling with an enormous packet of soil, pausing his battle to turn and look at the blossom, smiling to himself. “I think we must have worked some sort of magic.”

“Or maybe it’s just your expert gardening skills,” you tease, hauling in some plants by the door that Jimin has been meaning to bring inside the greenhouse for days now. “I’m not in here enough to make any sort of noticeable difference.”

Jimin scoffs disbelievingly. “You’re in here almost as much as I am nowadays.”

“Just to help out,” you defend weakly, pouting to yourself. It’s not like you’ve completely abandoned your air-conditioned arts and crafts room to fool around in the balmy greenhouse, soil underneath your fingernails and seeds stuck to your clothes. You just prefer to spend your free time here. Nothing criminal about that.

Plus, Jimin sure doesn’t seem to mind. 

“And for that, I thank you,” says Jimin with a grin, the bag of soil finally beginning to cooperate with him. He hauls it over his shoulder to bring into the back room, where he keeps all of the bigger tools and plants that are too advanced for the campers, and you pretend not to ogle the way his biceps bulge as he carries the soil away, the bag easily fifty pounds or more. 

What? You didn’t fall in love with Jimin just because of his electric personality. 

“Besides, you come into the arts room so often that all the kids are starting to think you work there instead of here,” you remind him pointedly. He laughs, and the sound bounces off of the glass walls, filling up the room. 

Jimin comes out of the back room, a little bit of soil smudged onto his cheek from his gloves, and he’s smiling. “Maybe I just like seeing you.”

“Next time we do a craft I’ll make sure to prepare an extra one so you can do it with us,” you joke, ignoring the way his words warm you from the inside out, convincing yourself that this is what it was like last year, too, so Jimin doesn’t mean anything by it. 

Convincing yourself that Jimin has never loved you the way that you love him. 

“Am I going to be allowed to sit next to you?” He asks as he walks up to where you’re working, that same flirty lilt to his voice, that teasing tone that he always used to use on you, especially whenever it came down to spending time together. 

“Only if you’re good,” you chide in response, leaning over to pick up a flower pot just so you don’t have to see his damn face, so you don’t have to see the way his eyes glint in the sun as he toys with you, as he presses all of your buttons with ease.

Obviously, you had seriously miscalculated how far away he was, because by the time you’re standing up straight he’s right behind you, playfully pinching at your waist, the sensation sending an electric jolt through your veins. You jump and gasp at the feeling, nearly dropping the goddamn flower pot, body suddenly turning to jelly. Behind you, Jimin is in stitches. 

“I could have dropped this!” You scold him as he doubles over in laughter, giggling and giggling and giggling, so much so that you can’t even pretend to be angry at him, too endeared by his happiness, by his pure joy, to shout at him any more. 

“You’ve always been so ticklish, Y/N,” Jimin says between puffs of air, trying to catch his breath.

“I am not! You just surprised me!” You defend, even though Jimin’s right and he knows it. Your outrage leaves him in hysterics still, amused by the way you so easily fall right into his trap.

“Whatever you say,” he singsongs, helping you haul in the last of the flowerpots. “I think that’s the last of them.”

“Next time I show up, a whole different part of the greenhouse will need work,” you say with a sigh, because no matter how much you do, no matter how much you clean and reorganize, there will always be something left. 

“The work is never done,” Jimin says with a smile, having already resigned himself to this fate. “But I think it looks pretty good.”

And looking at the greenhouse, looking at the vibrant hues that fill the room, from the rich golden marigolds to the bright pink lilies, from the rich green leaves to the soft blue hydrangea, you have to agree. It’s no wonder why Jimin loves this place so much, spends so much time in it despite its severe lack of circulation and the absence of reliable shade. It’s because everything in here he has had a hand in making. Everything in here is here because of him. 

This place will never not remind you of him. 

“It’s getting late,” Jimin says, checking his watch. “You think they have dinner ready for us?”

“God, I hope so,” you say with a sigh. “I’m starving.”

“Then shall we feast?” He asks, holding his arm out for you to take. 

You wrap your arm around his own, and you grin. “We shall.”

Then the thunder cracks, and the sky begins to sob. 

You’re barely three feet out the door before you feel the wet splotches on your shoulders, cold drops on your skin, made thicker by the leaves above your head, forcing you to retreat back into the greenhouse. Thanks to the glass, the raindrops that hit the rooftop ring like mallets on a drum, booming and loud, echoing throughout the room. 

“Damn,” Jimin says, staring out at the once sunny clearing, now shrouded in a grey haze. “It was sunny two minutes ago.”

“It’s just a summer storm,” you assure, arm still wrapped up tight in his own. “They never last long.”

“Think we should wait it out?” He asks. 

“Whatever you want to do.”

Jimin grins, squeezing you tight. “How about this? Five minutes, and if it doesn’t stop, we make a run for it?”

You nod. “Five minutes.”

Five minutes pass and the rain has no intention of letting up, seemingly getting heavier as you count down the seconds, the light grey fog that has blanketed the clearing turning to an angry deep blue, thick and endless. The alarm on Jimin’s watch goes off, signifying your wait’s end, and you open your mouth to suggest that maybe you should wait here a little longer, but barely get the first letter out before Jimin is flinging open the door to the greenhouse and pulling you out into the rain. 

You shriek as the drops hit you, little pellets of water striking you like beads, soaking your clothes and your skin everything in between. Jimin looks back from where he’s running in front of you, one hand still wrapped around your wrist, and his hair is in strands and his shirt is sticking to his torso, and you don’t think that, in your three years of knowing him, you’ve ever seen him happier. He pulls you out into the rain and he looks like a shot from a movie scene, looks like the hero in a coming-of-age film, letting the rain wash away his worries and his insecurities, letting himself be reborn beneath the crying sky. 

And he stops, and you stop, and you stand there in the pouring rain just looking at each other, picturesque frames, moments in time, letting the water soak into your skin, letting it trickle down your cheeks, decorating your eyelashes. You feel his hand sink down to your own, feel your fingers intertwine. And he is smiling, God, he is smiling so fucking wide, smiling at you like there is no place he would rather be, smiling at you like you smile at him when you think he isn’t looking, like you are the reason he is filled with light. Jimin stands there in the rain with his hand on your wrist and droplets of rain dotting his skin, and he is brand new. And you watch him, watch the way it rains down upon him, and you wonder what the hell he is thinking. 

You wonder what on earth he sees when he looks at you. 

(Is it the same as what you see when you look at him?)

“Aren’t you cold?” You ask him, feeling like your voice is a distant melody, feeling like it’s coming from somewhere else. 

He shakes his head, and you can see the rain spraying from the ends of his hair, soaked strands framing his face. “Isn’t this wonderful?” He asks up to the sky, tilting his head up to let it rain down upon him, let the droplets drizzle down his cheeks. “Don’t you love it?”

“It’s nice,” you admit, because there’s something refreshing about being here, about being caught in the midst of a summer storm, washing away the dirt and sweat and worries. 

“It’s perfect,” Jimin corrects, voice trampled by the rain, thick and heavy. “I feel like this is just what I needed.”

“Needed for what?”

He looks back at you, looks at the way your bodies are still connected, at the way you’re standing barely a foot apart in the pouring rain, and he grins and says, “Just what I needed to know.”

You don’t have time to ask him what he needs to know, what he has been so desperate to learn, before he’s pulling you back into him and up onto the deck, wet footsteps on the wooden porch as you heave yourselves out of the rain and into the counselor meeting room, drenched from head to toe. 

“Oh my God, what the hell happened to you guys?” Seokjin asks, shocked when he spots the two of you, still holding hands. 

“Got caught in the rain,” you say sheepishly, still feeling out of breath. 

“In the rain?” Taehyung asks. “For how long?”

“Long enough,” Jimin answers this time, finally letting you go to run towards the back of the room. You watch helplessly as he does, your hand clenching around nothing, missing his touch. When he returns, he’s got a dry windbreaker in his hand, crumpled up from being in his backpack for so long. “Here, use this,” he says, placing it over your shoulders, pulling the collar tight at your front. 

“Thanks,” you say breathlessly, wondering what the hell Jimin is going to use to dry himself off, clothing so soaked not even a day in the sun could dry it. 

“That was fun,” Jimin says, fixing the windbreaker over your shoulders to make sure it’s covering as much of you as possible. “Who knew, right?”

“Right,” your voice trails off, too focused on the way his brows are furrowed as he tries to dry you off with a jacket made of fabric meant to repel water rather than absorb it, mouth pressed into a pout as he shuffles it around, drying off whatever he can. 

“Maybe we can do it again sometime,” he says when he’s satisfied, gazing into your eyes, trying to get you to gaze back into his own. When you falter, he chuckles, this little huff of air dispelled from his lungs. “I’m gonna go bother Hoseok for something dry. Don’t stay in those clothes too long, or you’ll catch something.”

With that, he disappears into the other room, soggy footsteps leaving prints in his wake. You’re so busy watching his back disappear from view that you don’t even notice Namjoon coming up to you, a sage expression written all over his face. 

“What?” You challenge, not liking the way he looks so suspicious. 

“Nothing,” he says with a laugh and a shake of his head. “I just… don’t know if you really do have anything to worry about when it comes to him.” He nods his head in the direction of Jimin before vanishing, called over by Seokjin and Jungkook to complain to him about something, leaving you floundering in the doorway to the counselor’s room. 

Does Namjoon know something you don’t?

Are you missing something here?

Because as far as you’re concerned, you and Jimin are finally getting back to where you used to be. As far as you’re concerned, you and Jimin did these same things last year, worked in the greenhouse together, planted flowers together, ate lunch together (okay, maybe you didn’t stand in the pouring rain together), and you are positive Jimin didn’t love you back then. As far as you’re concerned, this isn’t different. This is normal. 

Outside, the rain has stopped, a rainbow hidden behind the trees the only reminder that it was ever there in the first place. 

Despite the fact that you will literally only be performing for a bunch of children, Jimin is insistent on teaching you how to dance. 

At least, that’s it looks like, when he asks you to meet him in the counselor’s room one day half an hour before the mandated practice that Hoseok’s arranged for the whole group of you while the all the campers are off on a nature hike with some of the local rangers from the reserve nearby. You don’t know why this couldn’t wait until during practice, when Hoseok puts on some upbeat dance music and lets everybody do what they want, which usually ends up in someone getting twirled (usually Seokjin), but you don’t really mind. Your other option was to lie around in your cabin waiting for the next social event. 

Jimin’s already inside by the time you arrive, this smooth, soft jazz playing from the little speaker that he brought with him, set up on a table at the front of the room. The furniture hasn’t been moved back to their original spots since the first practice, so anytime Namjoon calls a meeting everyone ends up sitting on the floor like a kindergarten class, but at least it makes dance practice easier. 

Even though he’s not really dancing, his body is still moving, absorbed in the music as it echoes around the room, hips swaying and head bobbing. He loses himself in the melody so easily, letting each and every note pluck along to the strings of his heart, this deep, mellow sound that fills him up like a wine glass, dulcet and sweet. 

“Hey,” you say softly from where you stand, watching him from the doorframe. 

Jimin jumps a little bit at the sound of your voice, almost embarrassed that he hadn’t spotted you sooner. “Hey,” he says in return, coming to a halt. “I didn’t, uh, see you there.”

“That was kind of the point,” you joke, walking into the room and joining him where he stands in the center. “Why did you want me down here?”

“You mean I need a reason to see you now?” Jimin teases in return, a little smirk playing along his lips. You frown, narrowing your eyes at him, unimpressed. He gives. “Alright, you got me. I promised you a dance lesson, didn’t I?”

“This isn’t the kind of music that Hoseok puts on, though,” you point out, even as Jimin intertwines his hand in your own and pulls you in close to him, the two of you stepping in time to the beat, not too slow but not too fast, either, this even, steady swing, the sort of thing an old bar would play during the evening rush. Jimin doesn’t pay your comment any attention, instead focusing on his hand on your side, your fingers laced together between your bodies. 

You have, admittedly, never been much of a musical person. You never go out to clubs because sweaty, drunk people just aren’t your style, you don’t ever dance, and you can barely keep a beat when you sing in the shower. Your body has always been stiff as stone despite your (and your friends’) best attempts to achieve otherwise, and as such, you had long resigned yourself to the fact that you do better with your mouth than with your feet. 

But still, Jimin rallies on, because you’re here, goddamnit, and even if you never dance again after this, at least you can say that you have. He moves you around the room in time with the honeyed melody, even daring to pull some advanced tactics like spinning you beneath his touch, hand held above your head as you twirl in place. And you try to let loose, try to lose yourself in the music like he does, but it’s hard when you have always been more of a wordsmith than a dancer.

What’s also not helping is how every bone in your body always seems to freeze up at his touch. 

“Relax, alright?” He says, guiding you across the old wooden floor, boards creaking beneath your feet. “It’s just me.”

That’s the problem, your brain supplies unhelpfully. 

“I told you that I wasn’t a very good dancer,” you say bashfully, unable to look Jimin in the eye when he is so close, when his body is practically pressed up against yours, when his fingertips leave burn marks where they press against his skin, sparks flying. 

It’s different than when it was raining, because when it was raining, even though you were close, there were other things for Jimin to look at besides you. He gazed up at the sky and thanked it for its tears, gazed around the clearing and surrounded himself in the navy blue haze, closed his eyes and felt the drops on his skin, felt them wash away his nightmares and replace them with dreams. 

It’s different now, because there is nothing impressive about the counselor room. Because the janky old tables and dirty windows aren’t something to be gazed at. Because Jimin’s focus is on you and only you, and it makes you feel like he’s staring right through you, like he’s gawking at your heart where it sits in its cage, trembling beneath his eyes. Jimin makes you want to board yourself up, wall yourself in, and reveal yourself bare all at once, like there is so much that he already knows but so much more that he could, if only things were just a little bit different. 

“You’re doing just fine,” Jimin promises, voice as soft as his steps, padding on the hardwood. You’ve lost track of the number of times you’ve circled the room, Jimin guiding you without reason or rhyme, just rhythm. He makes sure you’re always looking at him, reaches a hand out to tilt your chin back up if you dare glance away, keeping his steely gaze trained on you, determined to have you do the same. “Isn’t this nice?” He murmurs. 

“It is,” you agree. You don’t even have to think about your response, letting the words fall off your tongue, because even if you do feel tense, even if your bones are stiff, there is something about this that sets you at ease. 

And you stay like that, wrapped up in each other, swaying to the beat of this song, a beat that is strikingly similar to the drums of your hearts, and the moment feels as though it’s freezing. Feels as though the rest of the world is fading away, leaving only the two of you and the warm, rich tune that floats through the air, slowing down as time seems to come to a halt. 

“Do you still miss us?” You breathe, and you can see the words as they leave your lips, see them written out in puffs of smoke between you before they fade into nothingness. 

“No,” Jimin responds, equally as speechless. The word disappears quickly in front of you, replaced by his next ones, “because this is what I had been waiting for.”

The words stare down at you angrily, your eyes raking over them, line by line, letter by letter, hoping to imprint them into your skin and your brain and your heart, hoping to keep them locked up besides your love for you to replay, over and over, one of many memories that keep you up at night, that you flicker back to watch like an old film, reminiscing of who you used to be, what you used to do. 

They disappear far too quickly, and suddenly time begins again, and you get dizzy just from how much the rest of the world needs to catch up, whizzing by you in fast forward. Or maybe you’re just dizzy because Jimin has always made you feel this way, always left you gasping for air, weak in the knees, heart pounding. 

God, he makes your heart pound. He makes it drum in your ears like the Nutcracker, like thunder during a summer storm. 

“Don’t you want…” he asks, trailing off, eyes hazy and deep, absolutely unreadable. 

“Want what?” You respond, and you swear you aren’t doing it on purpose but you feel yourself leaning forward, closing the gap between you, inch by inch—

“Want to see me lift Seokjin up in the air?” Jungkook’s voice rings out into the room. “I can, you know, he weighs like two pou—whoa, alright.”

A hoard of people stop behind Jungkook as he stands in the doorway like a floundering fish, blinking at you and Jimin. His arrival does not give you enough time to part without things looking suspicious, without all of the damn counselors already making their assumptions, leaving the two of you separating awkwardly, smiling tensely. 

“What were you guys doing?” Taehyung asks, breaking the silence that has blanketed the room. 

“Practicing,” you say quickly, looking as far away from Jimin as possible. Not even you are buying into your excuse. 

“Sure thing,” Taehyung responds, eyebrows raised in understanding, already having formulated his own, likely more realistic answer. 

“Alright,” Hoseok says, appearing from behind the crowd with a clap of his hands. “I guess that means that Y/N and Jimin don’t need to be joining us today, off you guys go.” He gestures for the two of you to leave, but the only exit doubles as the entrance, which means the two of you are left to shuffle past a crowd of counselors, all of whom are staring at you as you pass them by. Jimin doesn’t reach out his hand, and you don’t make any attempts at changing that. 

You nearly suffocate on the way out, overwhelmed by the tension that has filled the atmosphere, leaving everyone helpless to it. 

Jimin goes in one direction and you go in the other, the both of you clearly too stupefied to say anything meaningful to each other, determined to spend the rest of the night apart in an effort to dispel the dozen rumors that you know have already begun to circle the camp. 

On your way back to your cabin, alone and lost in thought, you finish your conversation. 

“Do you want…” Jimin asks, voice trailing off. 

“Yes,” you say. “I want it all. I want you.”

You wonder if Jimin feels the same. 

There is something eerie about the camp late at night, when the only lights that shine are the dim yellow wall sconces outside of the cabin doors, when everyone is sound asleep in their bunks, when there is only the moon and its stars to keep you company, watch over you from their place in the universe. There’s something eerie about the quiet, not because you have a reason to feel unsettled but because you’re so used to camp being this lively, bustling place, filled with things to do and people to see. 

When you see it like this, empty and silent, it almost makes you think you aren’t even in the same place anymore. 

The one and only place that you go when you cannot sleep is the pier, extending out over the lake, the cool, clear lake, looking out into the midnight horizon, a perfect view of the stars and their reflections, cast over the water, twinkling endlessly. You take a seat on the edge, legs dangling over the water, and you stare out into the world, a cool breeze tickling your skin. 

You wonder what it is that’s keeping you awake tonight. What it is that is holding sleep just out of your grasp, your dreams suspended above your head. Camp ends in three days and for once you finally feel satisfied, feel as though you have done what you wanted and accomplished what you had hoped. The last few days of this summer are a far cry from those of last summer, where you were wearing yourself thin thinking about your confession, thinking about what you would say and when you would say it, and what you would do based on the fifteen thousand different things that Jimin could say in response, so hung up on telling him that you barely focused on anything else. 

But this summer, you and Jimin are finally starting to be alright again. And even though you don’t think you will ever move on from loving him, you have moved on from the fact that he will probably never love you back, moved on from your failed confession, and you are learning to be okay with what you have, even if it’s not what you want. 

The truth is that you and Jimin have never felt closer. Driven by your mutual desperation to be friends again, to return to the way that things were when you were together, when you were inseparable, you have been pulled together like moths to each other’s flames, like the thunder and the lightning. You can’t think of anything from this summer that you have wanted more than to be by his side again. But things are different from last summer, different because you and Jimin are not only friends but friends who have had to reckon with love, with its disastrous effects. 

So maybe that’s why you’re awake tonight. Because this summer feels inexplicably stranger than last summer, and you feel like you’re missing something. 

“I thought I’d be the only one still awake.”

You whip your head around at the voice to find Jimin standing at the other end of the pier, ink black hair hanging over his eyes, stars swimming in his irises. You can barely make out his face this late at night, when there is nothing to cast upon him a glow besides the moon and its lonely companions, but you will never mistake his soft, honeyed voice, never mistake the way his eyes sparkle and shine. He is grinning at you, warm and kind, as he slowly makes his way towards you, footsteps tapping along the worn wooden planks, until he sits down next to you, feet hovering above the water. 

“You and me both, I guess,” you feel yourself whisper, not daring to speak a decibel louder. 

“Lots on your mind?” He asks, looking out into the horizon. You sigh, too tired to respond. He understands anyway, just like he always does. “Mine too.”

You let the silence wash over you like a wave that bathes the shoreline, gazing out into a world that carries on no matter the time of day, no matter who watches over it. Like this, you and Jimin don’t need to explain yourselves to each other. Don’t need to force a conversation just for the sake of filling up the quiet night. Like this, your presence is enough, the knowledge that he is here beside you, staring out into the same sky, into the same moon and stars, is all that you need. 

Something has long gone unspoken between the two of you. Something that you can’t quite place. Jimin has had something to say for a long time but he lets his body do the talking, lets you fill in the gaps. But this time, it feels like the more you try to read between the lines the less you understand, and goddamnit you wish that he would just tell you, would just say it so you don’t have to keep wondering and wondering and wondering—

“I never did tell you,” Jimin says, breaking you out of your reverie.

“Tell me what?”

“Tell you what I was thinking, that night.”

He doesn’t need to elaborate any further for you to know what night he’s talking about. You stare down at the lake, at the way it seems to move into itself even though there is nothing to disturb it. 

“I guess I was just so shocked that you, you know, liked me like that, that I didn’t really focus on anything else. Didn’t think about why, or how, or when, or what to do. It existed separately from all of that,” he admits, breaths heavy. 

“You didn’t need to focus on that stuff,” you assure him softly. “It was my burden to hold. I was the one who chose to tell you. It wasn’t your fault.”

Does he know? Does he know that you never hated him for not loving you back? That you didn’t expect him to do anything about it? 

“I just felt so bad,” he says, and you hear the way the words prick at his tongue, leave burn marks along his lips. “Because I didn’t know what to do after that. I wanted to love you back so badly but I just couldn’t.”

And even though you already knew this, even though you were already well aware that Jimin has always only seen you as a friend, for some reason hearing him say it aloud still hurts, still pierces your heart, wounds that your love for him alone cannot fix. 

“It’s not your fault,” you promise him, because throughout all of this, no matter what, you have never, ever blamed him for not loving you back. “I didn’t expect anything. At all. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“Don’t I, though?” Jimin asks, and God, he sounds so helpless, sounds like he’s tried everything under the sun to figure things out and still, nothing has felt right. “We had always been so close. I wondered why I couldn’t fall in love with you and the things that we did together when you could. I thought that I was doing something wrong. You deserved someone who would love you back, and I so desperately wanted to be that person.”

“You owed me nothing,” you declare. “You still don’t owe me a damn thing. All I wanted was for you to know.” And look where that got you.

“Knowing didn’t feel like enough,” Jimin divulges. “I wanted to do more for you than just acknowledge it. I replayed that night in my head, over and over, wondering what more I could have said to you.” He sighs, deep and slow and filled with weight, filled with a year’s worth of thoughts he never told anyone else. “You told me you loved me and it was all I could think about. Then and now.”

“You still think about it?” You wonder aloud, sad because Jimin doesn’t deserve to have this weight on his conscience when you are the one at fault, and hopeful because maybe, just maybe, your confession meant just as much to him as it did to you. 

“I can’t stop,” he confesses. And then he turns to you, turns to you in the glow of the moon, his eyes drowning in starlight, and he says, “Every time I look at you I think about how you love me.”

You don’t know what to say. You are too absorbed in the swirling sea of his irises, letting the warmth wash over you in waves, filling you up before emptying out again, shocks of cold before the heat races through you. Jimin is right there, right here, and he is gazing at you and you wonder. 

You wonder, what if. 

You wonder, what if he loved me back?

“Even when I was away from you I thought about it,” he chuckles to himself, amused at his own obsession. “I thought about you, that night, at the campfire. You were wearing this neon pink camp t-shirt and your marshmallow looked like coal and you had this warm orange glow on you, and I swear to God, that image is imprinted in my brain. I see it every time I close my eyes.”

You didn’t know that. 

“When I went on dates, I saw you instead. I would be sitting in a booth with some girl and she would be trying to talk to me about the menu and all I would see is you.” Jimin exhales, filling the pauses that he leaves between his sentences, eyes raking you up and down as if he’s trying to commit this scene to memory, as if this night on the pier is something worth remembering. “They knew, too. All of them told me that I should get over my ex before going on a brand new date.” 

Get over you? What about you was there to get over? Your love has always been one-sided. You have never known a world where it hasn’t.

“And I wouldn’t even try to explain to them that I didn’t have an ex to get over, and that you were the one who confessed to me, and that I didn’t love you like that,” he forces another laugh, like he doesn’t even believe the words he’s saying himself. “Then this summer rolled around, and I saw you arrive and I just can’t tell you in words how happy I was to see you. How looking at you just lifted my spirits.”

“I hardly recognized you at first,” you admit shyly. 

“I dyed my hair,” Jimin reminds you. That’s right. He had brown hair last summer. “And I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t know how to without bringing up all the shit that happened last year, and things were awkward between us, and I guess…” he trails off, thinking for a moment. “I guess I just really, really wanted us to get back to the way things were, but I didn’t know how to. And I didn’t know what had changed.”

“Nothing changed,” you say, even though everything did. But loving Jimin has always been a constant in your life, a truth, and this summer was no different. “I wanted to go back to being friends with you, too.”

“I thought I wanted that, too.”

This time, you are the one who turns to look at him. What could he possibly mean by that? 

(Can it be?)

“At first, that’s all I wanted,” Jimin begins. “I wanted us to go back to being friends, I wanted us to eat lunch together and have it not be weird, I wanted us to spend time in the greenhouse and the arts and crafts room together, I wanted us to hang around the rest of the counselors without them noticing how different we were. But then I noticed that the hydrangea was wilting no matter what the fuck I did to keep it alive, and I realized that wanting our friendship back wasn’t enough for me anymore.”

You are frozen in place. You are locked into his gaze, body turning to stone, unable to even utter a single word. To breathe a single breath. And you look into his eyes, Jimin’s beautiful, ocean eyes, Jimin’s sparkling, ink eyes, and you pray. 

“And then Hobi partnered us up for the stupid camp counselor performance, and we got caught in the rain, and then we danced in the counselor meeting room and I just—” His chest heaves, words flounder. As if he has so much to say, as if the words are practically spilling off of his tongue, and yet they are still not enough. He closes his eyes. Pauses. Catches his breath. And then he asks, “If I asked you if you still loved me, would you say yes?”

“Yes,” you breathe out. 

“If I asked you if you wanted me to love you back, would you say yes?”

“Yes,” you whisper again. 

Jimin blinks.

“If I asked you if you wanted me to kiss you, would you say yes?”

You barely get out the first letter before Jimin is pulling you into him and pressing his fiery lips upon yours. His hand cradles your cheek, the other one splayed out on the wooden pier to keep his balance, dragging you into a messy, desperate kiss, one that sends sparks ricocheting throughout your body, turning your blood into liquid flames, that fills you up from the inside out. The feeling of his lips pressed upon yours makes your heart shake so wildly in its cage that it frees itself, growing a thousand times wider. The rose inside of you vanishes, finds itself replaced by a blooming, bright blue hydrangea, one that settles deeply within your soul. 

Your legs dangle off the pier as your arms wrap around Jimin’s body, curling around his torso in a futile effort to bring him closer than he already is, to feel the warmth of him press against you, sending jolts down your spine, into your bones. You feel yourself getting dizzy just at the feeling alone, kiss drunk, the rest of the world spinning like a goddamn teacup ride, but you cling onto him and you know that he will always be there to catch you if you fall. You know that he will always be there to steady you when you feel the world slipping out from beneath your feet. 

You have him, you have him, you have him. You have him, and he is right here, and he loves you like the sun loves the moon, and you love him like the waves love the shore.

When you part, you almost lose your balance and fall right off the damn pier. Jimin reaches out to grab you just in time, saving you from a watery grave (or just major embarrassment), and the two of you laugh, letting your voices fill the moonlit air, heads light, bodies blissed out. 

“Honestly, I was a little nervous you were going to say no,” he admits with a laugh. 

“Impossible,” you chide. “You know I’ve always loved you.”

No matter what, that will never change. 

“And now,” he says, pressing another kiss to your forehead, this one gentle and plush, “you know that I will always love you, too.”

It doesn’t feel like something long overdue. It doesn’t feel like something that you have been waiting and waiting and waiting for, something you have expected from the moment you told him. 

No. This feels like something new. 

This feels like your heart is in bloom. 

The end-of-camp show, no matter how much time and effort Namjoon puts into making it go smoothly, is a train wreck. But it is a train wreck in that wonderful way, in that way where you would be suspicious if things actually went according to plan, in that way where chaos and disarray reign supreme. Quite frankly, when it comes to the end-of-camp show, you never expect anything less. 

The truth is that the majority of the end-of-camp show performances are just for the counselor’s entertainment, an afternoon of fun to wrap up the end of camp, topped off by a fun meal (usually pizza) and a night around a bonfire, letting the heat warm your bodies from the inside out. Unless Jungkook and Taehyung pull some extremely ridiculous prank, the last official day of camp is usually everyone’s favorite, filled with snacks and music and laughter.

The performances by the campers go about as well as any performance by a bunch of elementary schoolers can go—that is to say, the kids remember the first five seconds of the choreography before they devolve into pandemonium, dancing as many weird, trendy dances as they can, and some you don’t even think have been invented yet. Nonetheless, Hoseok is proud, and beams at all of the campers as they scurry away from the center of the gymnasium once their dance is done, grabbing little snacks on the tables by the windows before settling in to watch the next stage. Hoseok does a good job of keeping the music current and upbeat so that nobody falls asleep, and gives the campers enough creative liberty so that it doesn’t feel too practiced. 

Lightly rehearsed, Hoseok likes to say. 

Absolute madness, Yoongi usually corrects.

After the dances, Seokjin and his hoard of campers with guitars the size of an overgrown ukelele make their way to center stage, and you and the other counselors bet on what stupid song he’s taught them all. He starts it off with everyone’s favorite and the most timeless of all tunes—Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star—before the musical highlight. 

(“It’s gonna be Fireflies,” Taehyung insists, so confident in his choice that he even wagers two of the homemade Rice Krispie Treats that Yoongi got all of the campers to make for today’s celebration. 

“It’s been too long since he rickrolled us,” Jungkook says, eyes narrowing suspiciously to Seokjin at the front of the room. “I’m just waiting for it.”

“Wonderwall, obviously,” Hoseok contributes, even though Seokjin got all of the campers from last year to play that. 

You and Jimin are both almost positive Seokjin has chosen to perform Let it Go, a song that will never truly escape you, but you keep your comments to yourselves. 

“I’m thinking Photograph,” Namjoon comments mindlessly, late to the conversation.

“The Nickelback song?” Yoongi says with a scoff. “Dude, we’re the only ones old enough to even know that song. No no, I think it’ll be Despacito.”

“If I have to hear Despacito one more time, I’m going to jump out of the f—” Taehyung stumbles on the syllable as Namjoon turns to glare at him, making Taehyung sputter for a replacement. “F… -reaking window. Watch me.”)

In the end, none of you guess correctly, because Seokjin has chosen to teach all of the campers how to play Country Road, Take Me Home, and honestly, none of you can even be mad about it because by the thirty second mark, you’re all singing along. There’s just something about that song that forces you to belt out the lyrics, something magical and irresistible. 

Afterwards, it is finally time for the counselor’s performance, which, if the camper’s excited screams are anything to go by, is apparently the peak of the afternoon. Hoseok puts on the same upbeat dance music and all of you go to town, following his choreography without any hitches before jumping into the solo section. Namjoon and Yoongi both attempt a trendy Internet dance and fail miserably, Taehyung and Hazel do a little tango that involves no accidents, and then it’s you and Jimin’s turn. 

The music isn’t really appropriate for the slow dance that Jimin taught you in the counselor meeting room, but he makes it work and you follow along, tracing his footsteps and laughing at the prickly sensation his hand on your waist sends shooting through you. You really have always been ticklish there. Hoseok only gives everyone thirty seconds before they’re booted off to the sideline, but thirty seconds is just enough time for Jimin to spin you once before pulling you into a kiss in front of dozens of campers and all of the counselors, whose hollers and hoots fill the gymnasium, bouncing off of the walls and ricocheting into your ears, when they watch you. It has your cheeks heating up something fierce, all embarrassed by Jimin’s big reveal, but the great big smile on his face makes it all worth it. He looks so happy to be here with you. He looks so goddamn happy to have you. 

It makes you feel like you can do anything. 

Ultimately, Jungkook and Seokjin get the greatest applause, because Jungkook lifts Seokjin into the air figure-skating style before Seokjin comes crashing down on him, and they land in a puddle on the gymnasium floor to the screams of all of the campers and counselors, who have never seen anything quite as artistically dramatic in their lives. 

Afterwards, you and Jimin retire to the snack tables alongside the rest of the counselors as the campers are free to roam the building, check out the art on display and eat as many ants on a log and homemade Rice Krispie Treats as they can get their grubby hands on. 

“Congrats, you guys,” Namjoon says, raising his dixie cup filled with lemonade. “It worked out after all.”

“I’m proud of you,” Yoongi murmurs to you, a soft smile gracing his features. 

“Love always prevails,” Jungkook declares, sighing happily, always a hopeless romantic at heart. You sure hope that one day, Jungkook will fall in love with someone who loves him back unconditionally, because he deserves it. 

“Which one of you confessed first?” Seokjin says, Taehyung nodding furiously behind you. You see that the bet is still on. 

“Me,” you say. 

“Me,” Jimin says. 

You both look at each other, eyebrows furrowed, clearly on separate wavelengths. 

Seokjin narrows his eyes. “Alright… which one of you said ‘I love you’ first?”

“That would be me,” you admit sheepishly, having a year’s headstart on Jimin when it comes to love confession. 

“I fucking knew it,” Seokjin says, palm out. Taehyung begrudgingly smacks five dollars into Seokjin’s hand, muttering to himself about how he was convinced that Jimin would tell you first. It makes you wonder, just a little bit, how long Jimin had known.

You open your mouth to defend yourself and your weak, weak heart, when you feel a tap on your side. Behind you is the same girl from the day that you were making cards to send back home to people you love, the one who absolutely grilled you about your feelings for Jimin. 

“Yes, Rose?” You ask happily. 

“So did you send it to him?” She questions. 

“Send what?”

“Your card. Did you send it to Mr. Jimin?” She elaborates, eyes wide in curiosity. You make a mental note to remind her to never stop being inquisitive. It will take her far. 

“No, I didn’t,” you say with a laugh, shaking your head. You look back at Jimin, where he’s laughing with Seokjin and Taehyung about their stupid bet on you, and you grin. He is so beautiful. It’s still hard to believe he’s yours. “Jimin doesn’t need a card to know that I love him.”

Not when he’s right here, and not when you know he loves you back. 

The counselor campfire is held on the day very last night that you spend together, after all of the campers have left the mountain, returning home, and you finally have the place to yourselves. Namjoon and Yoongi light it because everyone else has been banned from doing so after the Great Flame Incident two years ago, and then you all sit on the logs around the fire pit, reminiscing of the summer gone by, musing aloud about what the future holds. 

You and Jimin snuggle up together, and this night faintly reminds you of the one from last year in the way that Jimin still glows, warm and yellow, in the light of the fire, in the way he seems to make perfect s’mores no matter what, in the way that he laughs at everything that you say. But even with all of the similarities, nothing, literally nothing, could top how you feel right now, dancing on cloud nine with Jimin by your side. 

Never in your wildest dreams did you imagine you’d have him. Never in your wildest dreams did you think your confession would amount to anything more.

“You’re burning your marshmallow again,” Taehyung points out crudely, the side of your marshmallow already turning an ashy coal color. 

“Ah, fuck,” you mutter to yourself, yanking it away from the fire as you blow on it. 

“You’re never gonna learn, are you?” Jimin teases. He plucks his off of his stick, perfectly toasted, and holds it out for you. “Here, have mine.” You open wide and he pops it onto your tongue, the crisp, sweet flavor melting in your mouth as all of the other counselors groan, clearly wishing that they were somewhere other than here. Jimin’s fingers reach up to your chin, tilting your face towards him, before a thumb comes out to wipe away at the smudge on the side of your lip, a sticky white crumb that he pops into his mouth, earning another round of whines.

“Gross,” Seokjin says, nose scrunched up. “Just because you guys are in love now doesn’t mean you have to keep showing us. We get it.”

“Oh, just leave them alone,” Yoongi chides. “They’ve been pining after each other for so long, let them have this.”

“Thanks,” you murmur to Yoongi. You have a lot to thank him for. He has always been on your side, even when you weren’t. 

“Anytime,” he promises. 

“If they’re gonna be like this next year, then I don’t know how long I’m going to last,” Taehyung admits with a fond sigh, because no matter how much he pretends to be annoyed, you know that he’s happy for you. 

Namjoon sucks in a breath. “Uh, yeah, about next year…” he says, wringing his hands together. “I’m not going to be coming back.” You fall into silence, the only sounds the crackle of the fire, the rustle of the wildlife in the woods. “I have another internship at a firm, and then I’m going to be going into the job market, so I don’t, uh, I don’t really see myself coming back here.”

“Me too,” Yoongi chirps up, earning a surprised look from everyone else. “I’ve just been given an offer to produce music for this small record company, but they’re located across the country, so I’ll be moving soon. I guess—well, I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell you all.”

“Congrats,” you tell him, sad to hear he won’t be back but thrilled to know he’ll be doing something he truly loves instead. “Seriously, Yoongi. That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, man, that’s sick,” Jungkook pipes up. “When you’ve won your Grammy you have to remember to mention us.”

Yoongi chuckles to himself, small and quiet, but even in this orange light you can see the way his cheeks are turning cherry red, relishing in the praise. “I’ll miss you all,” he says. 

And slowly, one by one, you all begin to admit that even though you love it here, being a camp counselor had always been temporary, and it just wouldn’t be the same without everyone else here with you too. You and Jimin will be graduating this coming school year. So will Taehyung. Seokjin has a Master’s degree in acting that he wants to pursue. Even Jungkook, who is younger than all of you besides Hazel, has said that he plans to travel with his college lacrosse team next summer. 

“Damn,” Taehyung says when everyone is finished, as you all begin to count how many of you there will be left for next summer. “Who’s gonna do Namjoon’s job?”

“I already asked,” Namjoon says with a proud grin, “and Hazel said she is happy to take on the responsibility.”

“Oh, fuck yeah!” Seokjin shouts, giving Hazel a massive hug, nearly crushing her in two. “Hell yeah, Haze! You are going to be kick ass at that. I’m proud of you!”

The rest of the counselors soon follow suit, congratulating Hazel and cheering for her future. It almost makes you want to come back, but you know that Hazel will be fine without you. As long as she still has her secret stash. 

“Nice work, Haze,” you tell her, earning a shy smile from her in response. “You’ve always been a leader.”

“I’m just nervous I won’t be as good as Namjoon,” she admits timidly, clearly a little overwhelmed at such an enthusiastic response. 

“You have nothing to worry about,” Namjoon assures her. “I know you’ll be fine. Plus, you won’t have all of these losers to worry about, so your workload will be much lighter.”

“Hey!” Seokjin, Taehyung, and Jungkook all shout at once. 

“Don’t get me started on the two of you,” Namjoon chides, eyes narrowed. “You’ve caused me more stress than my senior thesis.”

“Out of love,” Seokjin swears, Jungkook and Taehyung nodding enthusiastically next to him. Namjoon rolls his eyes, even though you know that he secretly loves the extra work that they give him. It keeps him young, in that old-timey kind of way. 

“Then I guess this is it, isn’t it?” Hazel asks, standing up and holding out a finished s’more, already taking on her newly-bestowed head counselor duties. “I suppose I’ll do the honors. Congrats to Y/N and Jimin for finally figuring their relationship out, congrats to Yoongi for getting into that record company, congrats to Namjoon for getting his internship, and congrats to everyone else for doing what they love, and for not letting their dreams be dreams. This summer feels sort of like the end of an era, in a way, don’t you think? I mean, lots of us are moving on to bigger and better things, celebrating the past and aspiring to become people that we hope will be admired in the future. And I guess that I just want you all to know that no matter who you become, no matter what you do, I’ll always be someone who admires you.”

If you were a little drunk or just a little more sentimental, Hazel’s words would almost bring tears to your eyes, but instead you just join everyone in cheers, standing up and clinking your s’mores together.

And in a way, it really does feel like the end of an era. No more summers on the mountain, no more late-night camp pranks, no more hydrangeas in the greenhouse. You’re moving on, not only from this part of your life but from your almost-fruitless quest for love, from the place that led you to fall so deeply for Jimin, the place that has housed every memory you have ever saved of him. You’re moving on to a world where Jimin is with you every step of the way, where you know that he will always be there for you, where you no longer have to fight yourself to keep from loving him, where you have to do everything you can to preserve an already-fragile friendship. 

No. Now, you can take your first step forward with Jimin by your side. 

“Cheers!” Everyone shouts. 

“Cheers,” Jimin says to you, pulling you in for a quick little kiss, and no matter how hot the campfire burns Jimin’s lips upon yours will always be what warms you from within. “Cheers to us.”

You grin against his lips, pressing back because you can never get enough, and you murmur, “Cheers to us.”

“Hey! Jungkook!” Seokjin shouts right as Jungkook hops into his car. “When we text you in the group chat you better fucking respond!”

“I will, I will!” Jungkook screams back, voice so loud you can hear it despite the fact that all of his windows are rolled up. 

“No, he won’t,” Yoongi deadpans as he passes you by, duffel bags hanging from his shoulders. “You know he won’t.”

“He never does,” you agree. Getting a text from him is almost as impossible as winning the lottery. “I’ll call you, alright? I know you don’t really like texting, either.”

“Talking is just easier,” he says with a nod. “I’m looking forward to it. Call me whenever you need me.”

“I will,” you promise, watching as Yoongi bids you one final goodbye before heading to his own ride. He plops his bags into the trunk of Namjoon’s car before getting into the passenger seat. Namjoon pushes his head out of the window to wave, smiling wildly at you as he starts the car. You grin, waving back, and watch him, Yoongi, and Jungkook, disappear down the mountain. 

“You’re next, right?” 

You whip around to find Jimin standing behind you, a frisbee in one hand and a suitcase in the other. He won’t be leaving for another couple of hours, when Taehyung’s finally ready to go. They live close to each other so they figured they’d save money by splitting an Uber, which will be waiting for them at the bottom of the mountain.

“Yeah, gotta get back before college starts,” you say, dropping your bags at your feet. “But we’ll see each other before then, right?”

Jimin and you attend universities on opposite sides of the country. Loving each other is the easy part. Staying in love is what will challenge you. 

“Of course,” he promises. “I’ll visit whenever I can. And I’ll come see you on all my breaks during the semester, too. You and Jungkook.”

“Good, you better,” you say, and you pull him in for a bruising hug because you know that this will be the last time for a while. Not a long while, but a while, and even if you have committed every slope of his figure, every inch of his face to memory, you still have to remember how warm he is when you hold him, how soft his lips are when they touch yours. Those things… those are new. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll see you soon,” he assures you. “But I’ll miss you too.”

Several feet away, Hoseok honks the horn of your car to let you know that you’re all ready to go.

“I’ll call you when I’m home, okay?” You promise, pulling him in for another hug, one last time, feeling this strange desperation rush through you, like you won’t see him for weeks and this is all you’ll have left. “Isn’t it weird? You’re right here and I miss you already.”

“We’ll see each other again before you know it,” he says, pressing his lips to yours in a sweet, quick kiss. No matter how many times he does it still sends sparks shooting through your veins, but you suppose that that’s just another thing you’ll have to remember. When you part, he notices your worry, eyes softening at the sight. “Hey,” he says, lifting your chin up so you look at him. “I love you.”

You crack a smile. “I love you, too.” 

It’s not a goodbye. 

It’s an until I see you again.

You grab your duffel bags and hike them over your shoulder, footsteps heavy and weighted as you slowly make your way towards your car. Every four steps or so, you turn back just to make sure that Jimin’s still there, and sure enough, he’s watching you, this lopsided, love-drunk smile lacing his features. 

You place your bags in the backseat of your car before heading to the driver’s side, hand on the handle as you look up one final time. 

There Jimin stands in the middle of the clearing, the warm afternoon sun bathing him in a halo. There he stands, beautiful, and kind, and lovely, and in love. And you are so in love. You wave. He waves back.

And you know that you two will be alright. 

You jump into your car and tug the door shut behind you, keys in the ignition, engine revving, and you sigh, content and feeling confident in life. You peer into the rearview mirror to see Taehyung running up to Jimin, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and waving goodbye to you. You lift your hand up in response, watch as they bid you farewell as you creep towards the slope down the mountain. 

As you drive down the mountain, you take a deep breath, inhaling the fresh summer air, and you smile. 

↳ links are broken, but don’t forget to message me with any thoughts or feedback!

[wizkiddx]

work with me

this is for @worldoftom 'lolbrosgetsicktoo' challenge event thing - go check it out bcos lots of much better writers have got involved too✨! I'm v new to these things but I tried :) the prompt was: 'would you quit whining and just get in the bath' . (also look at me acc posting sort of regularly, who'd of thought?!?!)

warnings: sickness / fever (more dramatic than it needs to be) / LOTS of medical inaccuracies

summary: when tom doesn't take advice and ends up very ill, very far from home, there's one person whose stuck dealing with it

“Please Tom… I need you to work with me!”

It wasn’t his fault he was being a complete nightmare, though your patience was wearing off somewhat.

For context, you were in Morocco, where he had been filming part of his next film, which only made trying to take care of him that bit harder.

Everyone got ill sometimes. It wasn’t his fault.

That was the mantra ringing through your head, even if you had a more challenging time believing it. Tom wasn’t stupid, as much as he liked to joke about it. HOWEVER, what he was less good at was heeding warnings. He was a white boy in Morrocco; the health and safety briefing had literally been aimed at him. Had he taken the advice not to eat any dodgy looking meats at the market?

Of course not; that’d be boring.

Everyone else was fine. You’d all sampled Morroccos culture without giving yourselves the worst case of food poisoning you’d ever witnessed. But not Tom - possibly one of the only ‘indispensable’ people on the set. If you, or one of the minor characters, or even the director, had got ill - the show could continue.

When you’d been rudely awoken by your phone going off, you’d known instantly. It was as if you’d told him not to take a bite out of the weird burger once you were away from the eager view of the street vendor. Sure enough, with bleary eyes, you hissed at the brightness of the phone screen before seeing ‘Tom H’ on the screen.

“Y/n?” His voice was croaky, but just from the single call of your name, it was clear he was feeling sorry for himself.

“Are you okay? It’s late T.”

“Um I… can you come over? You…you might need the key I’m - um- in the bathroom.”

As his stylist, it technically wasn’t part of your job description to also be mother when he was sick, but (unfortunately for you) after the 3 years working side by side with him - you were also friends.

Which you were almost regretting by the second time rinsing the toilet bowl clean after he’d evacuated what seemed to be the majority of his vital organs into it. Honestly, it was impressive how he managed to keep going.

That had been at around 4 in the morning- the doctor had been called at 8, coinciding beautifully with his 5th toilet extravaganza. Once the doctor had confirmed your original, if completely unqualified, diagnosis of food poisoning - you hadn’t been able to bite your tongue. Perhaps an ‘i told you so’ might’ve slipped past your lips, but Tom was a bit too out of it to argue back.

You’d been given firm advice from the doctor - he said little sips of water, rest and control his temperature. It all had seen pretty simple - though the action? Not so much.

It wasn’t his fault, yet Tom was not super compliant. You and Harry had both been taking turns in practically forcing him to take sips of water, having to turn off ‘modern family’ till he did. The blackmail had put you both in his bad book.

Honestly, thank the lord Harry was here too. You’d woken him up at seven, begging for help and since then, you’d tagged teamed. While one was looking after Tom, the other was phoning the director, the doctor, and the crew to inform them of the current situation.

Again, of all people. Why’d it have to be Tom?

Mainly because you knew how mortifying he found this. He didn’t like people fussing over him, never had. He liked to work hard, liked to make people happy - definitely didn’t like to feel a burden. Perhaps what made him feel ten times worse was that he knew he was inconveniencing the whole production team massively.

And yes, as you’d unhelpfully reminded him, it was ‘his fault’.

The lavish hotel room, big bathroom and pretty efficient AC still didn’t manage to mask the pungent in-the-back-of-your-throat smell from the bathroom. At the doctor’s advice, who had been a little concerned at Toms fever, Harry had cranked the AC on high. It had forced you to steal one of Tom’s big hoodies and a pair of joggers- you hadn’t left his room since he first called you, still wearing your tiny pyjama shorts and an old tee.

“Please turn the air con off.” His little voice whined from where he was lying, huddled up under the covers. Perched on the other side of the double bed, but over the covers with your laptop on his lap, you could actually feel him shivering with the chills. It felt like you were torturing the poor boy.

“T you know I can’t. It’ll make your fever worse.” The way he looked up at you, like a little Labrador that you were refusing to pet, actually pained your heart.

Okay, so yes it was his fault, but you weren’t mad, you just felt so awful for him.

“Please I’ll- I’ll pay you more.” His voice was hoarse; though he denied a sore throat, it sounded like the constant sickness was burning his windpipe.

“Tommm” you pouted, sticking your bottom lip out “I don’t want your money, want you to get better.”

Apparently giving up, brown eyes shot you the filthiest look in disappointment, rolling to face away from you. You thought he was giving you the silent treatment in a huff, but instead, he was praying on the weaker one.

“Harry, I’ll buy you that set of golf clubs-“

“NO!” You had to interrupt before Harry would say yes - because from the way his younger brother shot up from the arm chair, he was about to. Scowling eyes slowly focused back on you in annoyance, making you huff - shutting the laptop and kneeling on the bed to face him. After pressing the back of your palm to his forehead, which was scorching hot, you sighed. “I know you feel shitty and I’m so so sorry but I’m trying to make you better. So shut up, drink this and go to sleep!”

Like a child scorned, you received another death glare however, then he complied, taking a sip of the water you offered before lying back - huddling even tighter.

And it had been relatively peaceful for a few hours; Tom seemed to be getting some sleep - even if he was tossing and turning. Eventually, a prescription that the doctor had requested worked its way through the system, Harry getting a text to say he could go pick it up. The nearest pharmacy was probably a 30 minute drive from the hotel, so he left as soon as.

This left you alone with Tom, where the situation only descended into more chaos.

Almost as soon as Harry had left, Tom had stirred with a grunt. All it took was one look at his face for you to know. Both of you leapt up and flew into the toilet, Tom once again getting very familiar with the Moroccan toilet bowl.

This time though, when he had leant backwards, he’d sort of lost control and flopped most the way - you catching him before he could hit his head on the tiled floor.

“Woah, easy there!” It wasn’t like he’d passed out, but the look in his eye as he slumped into your lap… he wasn’t all there either. “Hey Tom… you with me? Tom?”

Lazily he blinked up at you, not really replying except for groans of half-formed words.

Deciding this had all got a bit direr, you almost sprinted back into the room, grabbing your phone and returning. He was still on the floor, his thumb and first finger pressing into each eye - groaning again.

“Hey Tom? I’m gonna call the doctor you need anything?” He whined in response, stopping only when you stroked his sweaty hair back, most of your attention on dialling the correct number.

The solution he’d given wasn’t pretty: Tom’s fever was too high hence why he was all woozy and groany. Until the doctor could get over with the stronger medications, you needed to lower his temperature in other ways or take him to hospital. He’d absolutely hate hospital, but the other choice? Boy, was he not going to like it either.

Ignoring Tom’s croaked question of what you were doing, you busied yourself switching on the bath taps. You let the water run until it was the right (very mild) temperate, then turned back to Tom, who’d managed to work himself up to sit against the sink unit.

“The doctor says you need it.” His brain was foggy, his mind was slow but your tone told him enough to know something was wrong with the bath. “Just take your clothes off and then I’ll help you-“

“Absolutely fucking not.” Good. He was still with it enough to argue.

“I am just as uncomfortable as you are Tom, but we both know you can’t stand up without fainting, so you are going to need my help.”

“Y/n!”

“Keep your boxers on and it’s just like a fitting! I’ve seen you have those before!”

It was clear as day just how emasculated he felt, especially because he knew you were right. Sitting up at this current moment was a push; there was no way he was getting in the bath without some help. Defeatedly he nodded, but gave you a piercing look to turn around before he started wiggling himself out of the flannel pyjama trousers and light cotton t-shirt. Most confusingly, he still felt freezing cold, yet he had long since learned not to argue with you - especially when your justification came from the advice of a doctor.

Your cue to turn around came in the form of an extra angry-sounding grunt- the look you got when you did wasn’t much better either. It was a weird contrast, though, having someone who physically appeared so indestructible (a superhero for crying out loud); to have been absolutely beaten to a pulp by a few mouth fulls of weird meat. You had seen his bare torso before, although it still wasn’t something easy to get used to - making you clench your teeth together just slightly. A very welcome view.

Perhaps you looked just a little too long at the man who was technically your boss, hunched angrily on the floor in nothing but his calvins - another grunt shaking you out of it. By now, the bath was almost full and you hurried to shut off the water, feeling your cheeks heat up as you cursed silently to yourself.

“Okay come on, gimme your arm.” Begrudgingly Tom followed your request, slinging his arm heavily over your shoulder as you crouched beside him. As strong as he looked, you knew right now he felt powerlessly weak - all that muscle was just going to be almost dead weight.

Now it was your turn to grunt and groan as you pulled Tom up to stand, him focusing on blinking away the headrush he got.

“Come on T work with me here.” Getting him to the side of the bath wasn’t too difficult, the issue came when he stepped with one foot into the bath and yelped, instantly withdrawing as if it was a literal ice bath.

The sudden movement had you both losing balance, ending with Tom sitting on the edge of the bath and you leaning over him, in between his legs, and slapping your hand on the wall opposite purely so you both didn’t end up in the bath.

“Tom!”

“It’s like ice water!”

“Its lukewarm like the doctor said!”

“It is not its from the fucking arctic!”

“Oh for god sake!” Exasperated, you paced up and down the bathroom shaking your head at his ridiculousness. This was ALL. HIS. FAULT.

You came back to him with an ultimatum.

“It’s this or the doctor said I had to drag your ass to hospital.”

“Nooooooo.” The 25 year old seemed to convert into a whiny three year old again.

“Those are the two options. So will you PLEASE quit complaining and get in the bath.”

Keeping up the toddler persona, Tom huffed but reluctantly nodded in agreement - you had come up trumps. It didn’t stop him yelping when you helped to lower him in. His breath was shaky, as a response to the ‘cold’, but he was firming it. At least when you felt his forehead after a couple of minutes, it certainly seemed as though the fever was starting to ease off .

“You can go if you want.” His voice was murmured and as you looked up at him, he did his very best to avoid your gaze.

“Not a chance, if you drown on my watch, Nikki will never forgive me.” At the very least he seemed to appreciate your joke, scoffing a little with a small nod. “If you don’t want me here I get it. As soon as Harry’s back, I’ll swap with him.”

“No! It’s not that its… I’m just an ass when I’m ill.”

“A self aware ass, though.” Again he chuckled a little, as you folded your arms on the edge of the porcelain tub, resting your head lying to one side. “You had me pretty scared there for a moment, you know?”

He nodded a little, creating a wave of ripples in the water which you watched to avoid his gaze - which you knew was tracing all your features inquisitively.

“Hey it’s in the job description, always a bit dramatic... I’m sorry though I should never of called you- don’t know why I didn’t just get Harry.” In response you tutted, taking a moment to lean up and push his sweaty curls back a bit.

Just because you could, it was allowed in this moment.

“’m glad you did.”

“Yeh me too” He sighed, eyes fluttering shut in the easy silence of the bathroom. You kept a vigilant eye on him for the next 20 minutes, checking the temperature of his forehead using the back of your hand, whilst he seemed to finally get a bit of proper restbite, appearing like the worst had passed. You had no idea what was taking Harry so long; in fact it was the doctor that arrived first- who you ran to let in (not wanting to leave Tom asleep in the bath one bit).

Whilst the doctor did all his checks, taking his temperature properly this time, satisfied that it was much more manageable. He still wanted to set him up with some oral rehydration rescue packs to get his hydration status a bit better and give some anti-sickness tablets and antipyretics.

Having actually been getting some rest before all the prodding and poking, Tom was back to being a grumbling dick - now not wanting to leave the bath (the irony was real - making you roll your eyes). Once again, he appeared embarrassed to have you see him like this, so you left the doctor to help him get out and changed- instead going down to reception to get a fresh set of sheets, as he’d done a pretty impressive job of sweating through the old ones.

Even if tired and grumpy, when Tom exited the bathroom, he looked much better - he was walking himself without the doctor’s help. Which honestly was such a relief because when he had passed out on you, you genuinely were terrified. Thankfully the doctor stayed for the next 20 or so minutes, which was just when Harry returned with a bag of medications - which were now wholly redundant, given the doctor had already supplied everything.

“What happened?” Harry asked you in a hushed voice, whilst Tom was distracted with getting his medications. Recounting the story of Tom pretty much passing out, Harry grimaced for you, then launching over to give you a tight hug.

“Are you okay?” That was a novel idea, you hadn’t really thought about yourself at all - but honestly, you were a bit shaken, having been running on adrenalin for most of the night.

“I-uhm… yeh I think so… just-just was a bit scared, I guess? Felt bad too because he didn’t want me there but-“

“I can promise you Y/n, he did want you there. Just probably embarrassed he wasn’t all manly and that…” With a nod, you smiled softly at the frizzy-haired boy.

Whilst working with Tom, it also meant getting pretty close to his younger brother. The two Hollands were almost attached at the hip, which you were very much okay with.

It was weird though... your relationships were completely different. Harry was just your brother, through and through. He wound you up like a sibling but also knew you as if he had your whole life. With Tom… it wasn’t that. Arguably, you were closer to Tom, but on a different level. It was more exciting, more nerve-wracking and heartwarming all at the same time. Honestly, you couldn’t get your head around it properly.

“Hey, you’re probably shattered. Why don’t you go back to your room and get some sleep? I got it in here.” You knew Hary was trying to offer something nice, and now all the excitement had worn off, you were unbelievably shattered. But you didn’t like the idea of not being there, as a just in case.

“Uhm, I think I might just stay, you know?” And he did, with a deliberate, knowing smile, he nodded.

He knew you were worried. He knew Tom had really really scared you. He also knew how much you cared about his brother.

Just like how Harry knew Tom wanted you there, even if he felt embarrassed. Well, anyone would- when you are passing out half-naked in front of the one person that really matters.

It was just at this point that the doctor was done, giving Harry instructions about the rest of the day, when you made a beeline for the bed. Tom was propped up against the headboard, still with a pale sullen look and tired eyes, but a bit less clammy and more human. He cracked a smile as you crawled up onto the other side of the bed, kneeling next to him.

“How’re you doin’?”

“All drugged up, just feel fucking exhausted.” Instinctively you reached up to feel his forehead, really appreciating the fact it felt almost normal.

“Join the club mate, I had a 5am wake up call too.” You almost whispered, intending to make Tom laugh, but instead only getting a pout.

“I am sorry, a-are you going to go back to your room?”

“Nah” Tom’s eyes didn’t light up, except the fact that they very much did. “Can’t trust you not to get into trouble while I’m gone Holland.”

“Thanks.” He laughed weakly before shimmying down on the bed, so he was much more comfortable. “And thankyou, I-I’m sorry I’m a dickhead and made your life-“

“Shut up Tom!” Laughing, you lightly slapped his arm, also leaning down on the bed, so you were lying facing him. “You’re all feverish; go to sleep before you say something stupid.”

There was a long pause, Tom just gazing deep into your eyes, because he was pretty sure what he was thinking was nothing to do with the dodgy unidentified meat he’d had the evening before.

“What... like asking you out?”

…..

“Maybe that wouldn’t be so stupid.”

~~~~im really not sure how I feel about this one, let me know what you thought ;) ~~~~

tagging: @lovehollandy12 @hallecarey1 @crossyourpeter@hollandfanficlove

[stina-is-a-punk-rocker]

stephanie perkins: ‘anna and the french kiss’

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Then again, if you’ve read any YA book, ever, it’s fairly obvious what’s going to happen.

I was going to go easy on this book; I really was. It’s really unfair how media aimed at a female demographic is seen as frivolous and vapid, and more often than not bashed and bullied when it comes to reviews. “People actually enjoy this crap?” ask the powers that be. “It’s worthless! Pulp! Dreamy-eyed nonsense only complete nimrods could ever like!”

And I take offense to that. There’s nothing wrong with liking romance or happy endings or stories about cute European boys. I was ecstatic when I stumbled across Anna and the French Kiss upon a chance trip to the bookstore. The cover was… meh (Century Gothic? Really? There were no other fonts?). But I’d heard nothing but praise about the book, and I was prepared to stay up all night and into the wee hours of the morning to finish it.

Admittedly, I was far from impressed upon the first reading. The characters were unlikable, the plot would’ve worked better for less shitty characters, honestly fuck these characters am I supposed to like them, fuck Anna, fuck Étienne, fuck Bridgette, fuck Toph, fuck Dave and Meredith and Amanda and Seany and every other stupid character in this stupid book.

The second time around, I expected to not hate it as much as I did when I first read it. It’s happened- I hated Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda when I first read it, and when I read it again, all that red-hot anger simmered down into an overall dislike. I thought To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was trash at first, and then I read it again, and it got promoted to recyclable waste matter.

I found Anna and the French Kiss horrendous the first time I read it, and then I read it again, and… yeah, it’s still pretty awful.

Le Sommaire:

Anna Oliphant is a seventeen-year-old wannabe film critic who is #NotLikeOtherGirls – so she’s exactly like every other female YA lead. To her credit, she never explicitly says she’s special… everyone around her does.

She has a pretty meh life in Atlanta, Georgia with her mum and little bruv Sean- and then her dad decides to ship her off to France for her final year of high school. I’m not judging Anna for bawling her eyes out on her first day; I’m a huge mummy’s girl myself and I’d probably (definitely) do the same.

Meredith is Anna’s next-door neighbor, who does that thing which only happens in YA where she’s like “Oh, newbie? Let’s be friends!” (Or maybe it does happen irl and I tend to make a bad first impression which is why no one has ever approached me.)

Meredith’s friends are: Rashmi and Josh (who are a couple), and Étienne St. Clair. Guess which one is the love interest.

Étienne is cultured in that white person way where he’s half American, one quarter French and one quarter British. A true international.

But- *gasp*- American-British-French boy has a girlfriend, Ellie.

Anna has an absolutely gorgeous punk rocker (yum) boy with sideburns (yikes) back home named Christopher. Also, Christopher’s nickname is ‘Toph’ instead of ‘Chris’ because he too is #NotLikeOtherGirls. Anna tells us that nothing will happen between her and Étienne.

Anna is wrong.

Meredith has a crush on Étienne. So does the Regina George of the school, Amanda.

Étienne and Anna have some moments ™.

♫ Everyone else in the room can see it, everyone else but Anna ♫

I tear my hair out in frustration.

Several other white boys vie for Anna’s heart. Anna remains blissfully unaware (♫ that’s what makes you beautiful ♫). Étienne (who is still dating Ellie, mind you) is unreasonably agitated by this.

Étienne’s mum has cancer btw, which excuses all the shitty things he does, because he’s just a poor, misunderstood boy.

Ellie dresses up as a, quote unquote, ‘slutty nurse’ for Hallowe’en, though- so it’s perfectly okay to dislike her (even though, in the first interaction she had with Anna, where Ellie meets Anna and Étienne, after Étienne takes Anna to the movies, Ellie is perfectly sweet).

Anna, however, is NOT a slut. Amanda is, though. And Rashmi’s cold. And Meredith’s desperate. And Emily’s a slut, too. And her friend Bridgette from Atlanta is a traitor. Anna has an intense case of internalized misogyny.

Anna’s friend Bridgette from Atlanta is screwing Toph, and Anna throws a fit.

Étienne and Anna have some more moments ™.

A truly chaotic series of events befall Anna. She somehow winds up dating Dave (one from the harem of white boys who likes her) to spite Étienne, she gets into a fight with Amanda, more drama ensues, there’s a hint for a spinoff, Étienne and her kiss, Meredith sees and feels betrayed… several misunderstandings and more bullshit later, Étienne and Anna wind up together, because true love conquers all.

Mes Réflexions:

(If the French is off, blame Google Translate.)

Usually, it takes me half a page of my notebook to scribble down my thoughts about the book I’m reading. This motherfucker took me almost an entire page.

Granted, a solid 30% of those notes are me throwing insults at Étienne, but still. ‘STOP STOP STOP YOU HAVE A GIRLFRIEND YOU DICK’ counts, right?

(That was #17 in my notes, by the way.)

For the record, I like Stephanie Perkins’s writing. It’s not as over-the-top and unnecessarily introspective as Jenny Han’s in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and the interactions between Anna and her classmates were natural and not the “How do you do, fellow kids?” style of Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. The pacing is decent- I didn’t feel like it was too rushed; not the insta-love trope most YA romances unfortunately fall prey to.

And yet. AND YET.

Anna: “What’s your problem?” Amanda: “You.”

Same, Amanda, same.

Anna Oliphant is one of my least favorite leads in a book, ever. Étienne’s even shittier. And it’s not like Nick or Amy Dunne from Gone Girl, or any of the main characters from The Secret History, where readers pretty much unanimously hate them. You’re meant to relate to Anna, you’re meant to find Étienne charming and dreamy. I literally had to put the book away and calm myself down several times- especially in the last quarter of the book.

One of my main gripes with Anna is how… dumb she is. I guess Anna’s “Oopsies, silly me, I don’t know French!” is meant to be relatable to the readers. And some parts (like her not knowing how to order food because she can’t speak French) are plausible, but- sis, you didn’t know how to spell oui? And my idea of a cinematic masterpiece is Kung-Fu Panda, but even a dumbass like me knows that France is the film appreciation capital of the world. And yet Anna, a self-professed film freak, doesn’t?

Of course, Anna’s gorgeous, but she has no clue, because of course she doesn’t- even though she has multiple guys falling head over heels for her.

I’m in a short skirt. It’s the first time I’ve worn one here, but my birthday seems like the appropriate occasion. “Woo, Anna!” Rashmi fake-adjusts her glasses. “Why do you hide those things?”

Étienne is staring at my legs. The scales covering them throb under his intense gaze, and the pincers sticking out of my thighs start clicking rapidly in arousal. My hooves shiver in ecstasy.

… sorry, that’s not funny.

Her friends think Anna’s weird for wanting to write film reviews (which is the most contrived thing I’ve ever heard) instead of being the next Margot Robbie or whatever, but of course Étienne doesn’t and he thinks it’s not weird and cool and that Anna is such a special snowflake.

(Man, I sound like Amanda.)

And then we have this spiel by Anna about how she got into film critiquing (?), because we the readers need to know how special and #NotLikeOtherGirls Anna is.

To this, I say, “Piss off, you pretentious fuck.”

Of course, Anna’s a virgin and she’s never gotten drunk before or worn short skirts- she’s not a slut, she shaves below the knees only.

And would YA really be YA without several hearty helpings of internalized misogyny?

First up, we have the bimbo; the Barbie doll archetype whose only goal in life is acquiring the main guy (who is quite obviously uninterested in her), and making life hell for our protagonist. Amanda Whatsername (is she ever given a surname?) has this coveted role in Anna and the French Kiss. She’s blond (because of course she is); the first time we meet her, she’s in a, quote unquote, ‘teeny tank top’, and she also ‘positions herself for maximum cleavage exposure’. She’s always flipping her hair, getting her grubby paws on Étienne, giving Anna the stink-eye, being homophobic and a grade-A bitch.

Meredith goes batshit when Anna and Étienne kiss, and is very pouty and unhappy during prior Anna x Shittiene moments. Honey… he’s just not that into you. Rashmi’s the Ice Queen reincarnate and halfway to bitchdom. Anna doesn’t go as hard on them as she does on literally every other female her age in the book, though.

Rashmi looks at me for the first time, calculating whether or not I might fall in love with her own boyfriend.

Anna, hate to break it to you, but not everyone’s a possessive fucking weirdo.

About Cherrie, her ex-boyfriend Matt’s new girlfriend:

And maybe Cherrie isn’t as bad as I remember. Except she is. She totally is. After only five minutes in her company, I cannot fathom how Bridge stands sitting with her at lunch every day.

Her lifeless laugh is one of her lesser attributes. What does Matt see in her?

Even Bridgette, Anna’s best friend from Atlanta, isn’t immune to Anna’s anti-female propaganda. She’s screwing the guy Anna used to like, and Anna, the hypocrite, throws a huge fit.

For context: Bridgette and Toph are in a band called the Penny Dreadfuls (why is it with YA books and horrible band names? ‘Emoji’ from Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda was bad enough), and Anna + Matt + Cherrie go to a bowling alley to see them perform. After the performance, Toph announces that he’s sleeping with Bridge, and Anna confronts Bridge… onstage.

“… You’re welcome to move in when I leave again, because that’s what you want, right? My life?”

She shakes with fury. “Go to hell.”

“Take my life. You can have it. Just watch out for the part where my BEST FRIEND SCREWS ME OVER!” I knock over a cymbal stand, and the brass hits the stage with an earsplitting crash that reverberates through the bowling alley. Matt calls my name. Has he been calling it this entire time? He grabs my arm and leads me around the electrical cords and plugs and onto the floor and away, away, away.

Everyone in the bowling alley is staring at me.

I duck my head so my hair covers my face. I’m crying. This would have never happened if I hadn’t given Toph her number. All of those late-night practices and… he said they’ve had sex! What if they’ve had it at my house? Does he come over when she’s watching Seany? Do they go in the bedroom?

I’m going to be sick.

Give me a goddamn break.

Anna, about Ellie:

To my amazement, Ellie breaks into an ear-to-ear smile. Oddly enough, it’s this moment I realize that despite her husky voice and Parisian attire, she’s sort of… plain. But friendly-looking.

That still doesn’t mean I like her.

“Anna! From Atlanta, right? Where’d you guys go?”

She knows who I am? St. Clair describes our evening while I contemplate this strange development. Did he tell her about me? Or was it Meredith? I hope it was him, but even if it was, it’s not like he said anything she found threatening. She doesn’t seem alarmed that I’ve spent the last three hours in the company of her very attractive boyfriend. Alone.

[about Ellie’s Hallowe’en costume] Slutty nurse. I don’t believe it. Tiny white button-up dress, red crosses across the nipples. Cleavage city.

If I didn’t like Ellie before, it’s nothing compared to how I feel now. It doesn’t matter that I can count how many times we’ve met on one hand.

I fantasize about their break-up. How he could hurt her, and she could hurt him, and all of the ways I could hurt her back. I want to grab her Parisian-styled hair and yank it so hard it rips from her skull. I want to sink my claws into her eyeballs and scrape.

It turns out I am not a nice person.

YOU DON’T FUCKING SAY.

Emily Middlestone bends over to pick up a dropped eraser, and Mike Reynard leers at her breasts. Gross. Too bad for him she’s interested in his best friend, Dave. The eraser drop was deliberate, but Dave is oblivious.

One of the juniors, a girl with dark hair and tight jeans, stretches in a move designed to show off her belly button ring to Paul/Pete. Oh, please.

And I’m meant to like this character? I’m supposed to root for her?

I’m not saying every girl in the book should be perfectly sweet and friendly- that’s just not realistic. But when Anna has something judgmental to say about every other young female character… maybe she’s the problem.

In fact, the only girl I recall getting a pass is Isla Whatsername. And why do you think?

Brilliant.

And now we have the amalgamation of almost every fanfic boyfriend trope from 2014, Étienne St. Clair. Brown-eyed Harry Styles. I can’t fucking wait.

Étienne could’ve discovered the cure for cancer, or abolished poverty, or volunteered at animal shelters in his spare time. He could’ve been the most virtuous guy around (fret not; he decidedly isn’t). And I still wouldn’t’ve thought of him as the man of my dreams because HE HAS A BLOODY GIRLFRIEND.

I mean, which girl doesn’t want her boyfriend to say:

“I cheated on her every day. In my mind, I thought of you in ways I shouldn’t have, again and again.”

Fuckin’ smooth, bro.

“No matter what a terrible boyfriend I was, I wouldn’t actually cheat on her. But I thought you’d know.”

Such a gentleman!

“So you can keep dating Ellie, but I can’t even talk to Dave?”

Étienne looks shamed. He stares at his boots. “I’m sorry.”

I don’t even know what to do with his apology.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. And this time, he’s looking at me. Begging me. “And I know it’s not fair to ask you, but I need more time. To sort things out.”

And this gem:

“If you liked me so much, why didn’t you break up with her?”

“I’ve been confused. I’ve been so stupid.”

*me, banging pots and pans together* F U C K Y O U

“Ellie’s not like you, Anna; she’s a slut and a whore even though I’m the one who’s been thinking about another girl inappropriately and I’m the one who gets my knickers in a twist when another man glances in your direction because my masculinity is extremely fragile and I’m a total hypocrite and a dickhead.”

I mean, he didn’t actually say that, but that’s the gist.

WHILE DATING ELLIE: he gets Anna a book of sexual love poems, he calls her attractive (“Any bloke with a working prick would be insane not to like you.”) multiple times, he gets jealous whenever another guy so much as breathes in Anna’s direction and constantly interrupts such interactions, he’s been ditching his friends for his girlfriend but suddenly decides he prefers a new girl over said girlfriend, he thinks bread pudding tastes good- in conclusion, he is a Massive Fucking Prick. Though in hindsight, him and Anna deserve each other. They’re awful.

I had loads more notes taken down (Anna using Dave; “The important thing is this: Dave is available. St. Clair is not.”); the implication that cheating is okay because Ellie is bad or whatever, even though the sudden change in her character seems contrived because she was perfectly okay with Étienne and Anna hanging out before; how my blood boils whenever I read an American book and American girls are like “oOoOh AcCenT!!!1!!1!!”; me reading “DAVE SAYS YER A SLUTBAG” in Hagrid’s voice; the sheer atrocity of the name ‘Étienne St. Clair’ (sounds like a caricature of a French person)… but this ‘review’ is already pushing 3k and I can’t be fucked to expand on any of those points.

Verdict (which is apparently the same in French):

Who needs Christopher when Étienne St. Clair is in the world?

Speak for yourself.

[mst3kproject]

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein

Have I somehow not already reviewed this? Shit, I better get on that.  If the title alone weren’t enough, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein has Gary Conway from The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Phyllis Coates from Invasion USA, and sure enough, Whit Bissell from I Was a Teenage Werewolf playing more or less the same mad scientist character. Though sadly, there was no part for Pepe the Latino-Transylvanian janitor.

Professor Frankenstein, yet another modern descendant of the fabled Baron, is looking for medical applications of his ancestor’s work.  He thinks he can bring dead tissue back to life, and allow it to be used in organ transplants.  Naturally Those Fools at the Academy tell him it’s impossible, so he’s determined to Show Them All.  Conveniently, shortly after this declaration a car full of drunk teenagers crashes just outside Frankenstein’s home.  He and his buddy Dr. Carlton sneak off with one of the corpses, and over the next few weeks they assemble bits and pieces into a boy.  Problems arise when Frankenstein, true to form, refuses to acknowledge the humanity of his creation.  The boy wants to see the world outside the lab, the Professor’s fiancée Margaret is getting curious about what goes on down there, and Carlton is having more and more qualms… there are many ways this can end, but none of them are happy.

We’ve got some awesome mad science going on here, with a lab full of blinky light machines and a secret stock-footage alligator pit that, yes, the mad doctor does get chucked into at the end.  Lots of severed body parts are thrown around, all of them enormously fake but pretty gruesome nevertheless.  The horrible, horrible monster mask falls into this same category.  My favourite moment in the film is when Frankenstein takes his creature out to pick out a new face, and comes back with a severed head in a birdcage! My second-favourite is the traumatized witness to the car accident wailing “what a crash!”  I’d be hard-put to choose between the two for a stinger. And at the end, the movie does the same thing as War of the Colossal Beast, suddenly switching from crisp black and white to shitty desaturated colour, and it has the same effect.

But none of that is what the movie is actually about.  If there’s one thing I want to say about this film, it is the truly astonishing fact that I Was a Teenage Frankenstein appears to have been written by somebody who actually read Mary Shelley’s book.  This is not a claim that can be made of many Frankenstein movies, and certainly not of any that previously appeared on this blog.  I’m not sure the writer of Frankenstein Island had even seen any of the movies.  Although I Was a Teenage Frankenstein borrows only the barest of bones from the book’s plot, the emotional center of both is the doctor’s relationship with his creation.

The reason it’s a teenage Frankenstein, by the way, is because the professor believes one of the reasons his ancestor failed at creature-creation is because he used old, worn-out parts.  By choosing bits from young men cut down in their prime, he feels the result will be healthier and more resilient both physically and mentally.  He seems to be right, too.  His creature is not a shuffling abomination, but an intelligent and articulate young man who longs to ‘go out among people’ and is absolutely crushed to find that the ones he meets are terrified of him.

The Professor is proud of the progress he makes in teaching his creation to do things like walk and speak, but he seems entirely uninterested in the boy’s happiness or personality.  When he sees his creature crying, he is pleased that the tear ducts work.  When Margaret expresses fear of the ‘monster’, Professor Frankenstein tells her to think of him as something ‘like a machine’, a creation of science.  Finding he needs to get his creature out of the country in a hurry, he has no qualms about taking the boy apart to ship and reanimate later.  He never even bothers to give his creation a name, addressing him simply as ‘my boy’ – never just ‘boy’, but always ‘my boy’.  The possessive is important here.

Indeed, as his creature gains humanity, Professor Frankenstein seems to lose his.  At the beginning of the movie, the Professor (who never has a first name, either – he is a scientist, not a human being) seems very much in love with Margaret. As events progress, he becomes colder and colder towards her, and eventually manipulates his creation into murdering her.  Shortly thereafter is a tense moment in which we worry that the same thing will happen to Dr. Carlton.

Don’t think Frankenstein started off as a good person, though.  Though he claims to love her, he slaps Margaret when she asks what he’s working on in the basement.  When he first describes the experiment he’s about to perform to Dr. Carlton, he says he’s using the ‘principle of selective breeding’, choosing the best parts to put together into a human body.  This will be a step towards ‘perfection in the human race’. That’s the sort of language that should worry just about anybody, especially when it’s coming from somebody with a German name.  Unfortunately, the movie shies away from actually exploring the issues of eugenics or racial purity that it seems to bring up here.  You can see why they might not want to go into that, but it’s a shame they left it hanging there.

With this for his upbringing, the creature is not a model of morality either.  He eventually escapes from the lab and goes outside to interact with human beings. The first person he sees is a girl sitting and brushing her hair – when she notices him, she screams, and he accidentally kills her as he tries to make her stop.  The incident clearly has a terrible effect on him, but this has far more to do with the way people reacted to his face than with the fate of the dead woman… the creature never seems to feel a moment’s guilt about the latter.  Perhaps this is because of the way Frankenstein raised him, or maybe it’s because, being a reanimated corpse himself, the boy does not think of death as a permanent fate.  Again, the question is not explored.

That’s the main problem with I Was a Teenage Frankenstein – it keeps suggesting things it doesn’t want to follow up on.  This becomes a particular problem at the ending, which is very unsatisfying.  Frankenstein sets about taking his creation apart for transport, the boy objects and kills him, and then commits suicide by electrocuting himself.  Throughout the movie, the only thing the creature has expressed a desire for is to interact with people who aren’t afraid of him.  Having just removed that stupid monster mask had his plastic surgery, he is on the cusp of being able to do so… but he never gets the chance.

Not only is this disappointing in itself, it also leaves another plot point unsettled.  In order to get a normal-looking face, Frankenstein and the creature killed and beheaded a young man named Bob, traumatizing Bob’s girlfriend Arlene in the process.  We see Arlene’s mother describe the incident to police officers, and offer them a photograph of Bob so they can identify him if they find him.  All these characters then simply vanish.  The next scene is Frankenstein telling Carlton that they’re going to take the creature apart for shipping, and then the movie ends.

What I wanted to see at this point was the creature going out and talking to people like he always wanted.  It would seem to be going awkwardly but not bad, but then he would run into Arlene, who identifies him as Bob and tries to spread the word that he’s still alive. This would make the creature feel that he has to kill her to keep her quiet, and ultimately bring the police to Frankenstein’s door.  Instead, the movie goes with an ending that feels like kind of a cop-out, like they ran out of time and just had to finish the story as quickly as possible.  We don’t even get a decent explanation of how he knew the two scientists were going to take him apart.

This is doubly disappointing because they could have had time.  There are early, talky scenes that could have been cut down a little in order to show us things we’d rather have seen.  The movie doesn’t drag much, but there are bits where it lingers on stuff we don’t need to see, like Margaret getting the key to the lab copied, or establishing that Frankenstein knows where the Lover’s Lane is.  Alternatively, since it wasn’t going to make a plot point out of Arlene, they could have cut that scene with her mother talking to the cops entirely… that would have made the ending feel less irrelevant.

In the end, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein reminds me a lot of another favourite bad Frankenstein movie of mine, Lady Frankenstein.  The two films share a lack of ambition.  Both have everything they need to be a much more interesting and thought-provoking take on the original material, but Lady Frankenstein chose to be about Rosalba Neri’s tits and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein tosses ideas around willy-nilly without ever giving any of them a chance to stick.

The weirdest thing about the movie is that it doesn’t even make any effort to appeal to teenagers!  You’d think a movie called I Was a Teenage Frankenstein would feature the title character interacting with teenagers, or trying to do ‘teenager’ things from the 50’s, like go to sock hops or race cars.  But no, besides the creature, all the major characters are adults.  The closest they come is by encouraging teenagers to identify with the boy as he chafes against parental restrictions.  I Was a Teenage Werewolf was about actual teenagers.  Why didn’t this film, obviously a partner to it, do the same?

[thespiralgrimoire]

So just realized that all of the female cast members (and probably some of the male ones) are based on fairytales Grey is Cinderella, Noelle is Snow White, Vanessa is rapunzal, Yuno might be Peter Pan or at least Sylph is tinkerbell

I got an ask similar to this quite a while ago, but it was a little more cumbersome and I wasn't sure how to respond to it....

I think this is an interesting take but personally I think it's a little reductive. There are definitely some similarities between the BC ladies and the Disney princesses, but I think to say that any of them are based on Disney princesses is a disservice to them as characters. While the BC universe is definitely loosely based in a European fantasy setting, I would think that the fact that it's written from a Japanese perspective would mean that the similarities to our classic Western fairytails can't be taken for granted.

HOWEVER, there is also the point to be made that the Disney Princess stories are based in tropes that show up in a LOT of traditions and stories, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that these characters' stories contain a lot of the same elements that appear in folklore all around the world?

That being said, I think it's fun to play with what we know, and I don't know a lot of Japanese fairytales. So let's take a look at some of the ones you listed, because I spent $75,000 on a Bachelor's degree in English literature and I don't get to use it much.

☘️ Of all of these, Grey is DEFINITELY the most obvious one. Like, it’s every element of Cinderella... The step sisters, the mistreatment, the false identity. But I think that’s is very important how it differs from the classic tale to play on Grey’s sense of self.

The classic Cinderella story doesn’t paint Cinderella as a self pitying damsel who needs to be rescued. She is upset with her situation, she knows it’s not fair, and she knows she’s entitled to a nice night out, especially after she puts in the work in to make an outfit appropriate for the occasion. Her step sisters’ vindictive nature ruins this for her, not any fault of her own, which is why her fairy godmother steps in to right the wrongs of her situation.

Grey doesn’t have the sense of self that Cinderella has. Be it through abuse or quirks of her own personality, she’s a rather passive victim to her step sisters’ bullying, and instead of doing what she does despite of them like Cinderella, she does everything she can to please them. The ending result is more or less the same: they can’t be pleased. In both cases the step sisters retaliate violently: in Cinderella’s case, they destroy the dress she’s made for herself, and in Grey’s case, they drive Grey into the woods, taking her attempt to please them as a personal insult.

Grey gets no fairy godmother, and no ball. And unlike Cinderella, she gets rescued by a “prince” character (as much as I loathe to call Gauche that, but an analogy does exist there, so let’s acknowledge it.) Gauche saves Grey in the literal sense, and he also gives her the courage to better her situation, which eventually leads her to develop a sense of self that is not “her step family’s doormat.” She varies from Cinderella in this way because Cinderella never had to make this personal jump in her narrative; she started her narrative already there. Whereas Grey was desperately trying to become something that someone would respect, Cinderella knew from the start that she was worthy of more than the world had given her.

But the nice thing about Grey’s narrative is that she IS working to be this person! She’s got to put in the work to get to where Cinderella is, but who knows? Maybe by the time she isn’t afraid to be her authentic self, she’ll get some help from an exterior source (a metaphorical fairy godmother character) or maybe that power will come from within (with this new magic she’s using to save Gauche?). If we stick with the fairytale princess narrative, her reward would be Gauche. Just like Cinderella was rewarded for her strength during an adverse time in her life, Grey will be rewarded for overcoming her insecurities.

☘️ I... gotta come clean here, I read “Snow White” but my brain went “Sleeping Beauty”, and I was all ready to talk about THAT fascinating analogy. So apologies if this one is a little lackluster while I get my fairytales straight.

I think this one is a little flimsy, but again, I prepared to talk about the wrong fairytale. Would we paint Magicula as the evil queen, wanting Noelle dead because she’s “fairer”? Or would her siblings be an abstract reading of the “evil queen” because Noelle looks too much like their mother, and therefore is the bane of their existance, like Snow White was for the evil queen? The Black Bulls as the seven dwarves is the one part of this I’m really digging, because it’s hilarious. But I think this one is a hard sell. Noelle has failed to be a victim to any serious threat for more than a few minutes because she’s always surrounded by people who fight tooth and nail for her, and she’s fighting every second to be stronger. Of course, that furthers the “Black bulls = seven dwarves” thing, which is just. So great. Snow White never had to do anything but housework. She doesn’t get stronger because strength was never a part of her equation.

☘️ Vanessa as Rapuzal is eh. She’s a classic princess trapped in a castle, but she’s the second one of those in the series (Charlotte being the other). In both cases, Yami saves them with a strange mix accidental concern and casual heroism. I think this says more about Yami as an accidental prince charming than it does about either of them as Disney princesses.

I haven’t seen Tangled, but from what I’ve gathered, there’s an analogy to be made here between Vanessa and Tangled Rapunzal being trapped by their mothers under the guise of caring for them. Hell yeah, can’t deny that connection! But it’s far from a sign of a fairytale princess. It’s just shitty parenting. Unfortunately, it’s rampant across all cultures, and therefore appears in all forms of media.

Charlotte’s case is, I believe, supposed to be a parody of a “strong independent woman” (which is a big problem I have with how she’s written but that’s a different conversation). There very well could be a specific fairytale that fits Charlotte’s case (Sh. Shrek?) but I think it’s meant to be more of a parody of the false persona she puts out than anything else.

Yami is really the one to look at here, since it’s not a coincidence that he’s rescued TWO of these fairytale-princess-knockoffs over the course of the story, and they both have unrequited crushes on him (although Vanessa’s is mostly for show). While Charlotte is a parody of a strong independent princess, Yami is a parody of Prince Charming. He doesn’t want the role, he didn’t ask for the role, he’s not looking for the role... He’s just doing what he’s doing and if he happens to rescue some ladies in peril, it’s just part of his day of wandering around busting through walls like the Koolaid man. That’s not a jab at Yami’s character. It doesn’t mean that he’s not a hero. Yami’s whole shtick is that you don’t have to be a conventionally handsome dude in a cape with a winning smile to be a hero. That’s the mantra he’s built the Black Bulls around. His whole character is a counterpoint to the traditional hero stereotype with Fuegoleon (and to a lesser degree, Nozel) as the point he’s countering.

Yami and the Black Bulls exist to make the point that there is more than one way to be right, to be strong, to be brave, to be heroic. You don’t have to look, act, think, or feel a certain way to be on the right side of things.

☘️ Okay so Yuno as Peter Pan is the one I’ve really been chomping at the bit to talk about because while I don’t think you’re right, I can’t decide if you’re wrong???

I don’t know what other stories and traditions could influence Bell’s design, so based on what I know, she’s a dead ringer for Tinkerbell. Moving past that.

Yuno as Peter Pan has me WILDING because he’s literally the host for an unborn baby. I don’t know how much harder you can drill in the “Never grow up” theme.

Does it really hold up past that though? I kind of want it to, just because the very premise of Yuno as Licht’s baby screams it so hard. But I don’t think it does.Which is a shame, because it could.

Yuno was a crybaby as a kid, which is a very infantile trait, but when he and Asta made their pact to be the wizard king, he went the opposite direction of “never grow up” and rapidly matured in order to accomplish this dream. We don’t really know how else Yuno may have changed besides “he doesn’t cry anymore”, but from the way he acts and the way he’s treated at the orphanage, it seems to me that a lot was placed on him. And that carries into his magic knight career. Because of his talent and his resolve, he was made to face some very adult problems at a very young age.

Major manga spoilers ahead!

This carries into the current events we’re seeing, too. There is no semblance of “never grow up” in the way that Yuno acts or is being treated as a member of the Golden Dawn. He’s the vice captain at... what, 16? 17? and he’s just found out that he’s also the next heir of a kingdom that he does not call his home-- that’s he’s considered the enemy for his entire career. Then he’s forced to handle the violent deaths of half his squad, the severe injury of the other half, and the kidnapping of his captain, which leaves him in charge. We see him give a big old holler about all this, but I what’s really interesting to me is that he doesn’t cry. The most infantile part of his identity, which he abandoned to get where he is now, does not come back to him in a moment of weakness, at a time where he very much has every write to feel like a helpless child. Whether he wants to or not, Yuno is no longer allowed to be a child, and he will never get the opportunity to be one again.

I guess you could say that this may mean that we’ll see him want to be Peter Pan, that he’ll grow nostalgic for the days where everything was simpler and he had the time to cry, the freedom to be scared and confused and feel sorry for himself. I would love to see that explored in his character, but I really don’t think that we’ll see it happen. In both the meta and the story universe, there’s no time for Yuno to have that breakdown and regression. It wouldn’t fit the pacing and Yuno’s got shit to do. Yuno isn’t Peter Pan. He’s lost the chance to be.

So in conclusion, I can see why a lot of people want to assign fairytale roles to characters in Black Clover, and I do think that the creators play with the concept themselves, but I think to boil any of the Black Clover characters down to a single character or fit them into a single fairytale is a disservice to the characters themselves, and overlooks everything else going on with them. None of the black clover characters are “based” on a fairytale character. Their stories may take inspiration from them, but there is far more going on with each and every one of them to ever take such similarities at face value.

[writerseven]

i would love commentary on the ending conversation between jason and bruce from present if you're willing (sorry i tried sending the actual passage but tumblr kept rejecting my ask for some reason when i actually pasted it) love your fics!!!

Thank you!! yeah tumblr is a nightmare, but no worries about not pasting the section; this works too! I'll include it here myself

When he returns to his bedroom, Jason is finally sitting up, hair still rumbled and face imprinted with the pillow's creases. He looks around the room before squinting up at Bruce.

(gonna be real I just love the contrast of Big Scary Jason having pillow imprints on his face. also I just found another typo from doing this booo)

“Where's the kid?” he asks.

Bruce raises his eyebrows in judgment. “It's Monday. He's at school.”

Jason, as always, falters and then steels back up at the implied insult to his intelligence. “Yeah. Right.”

Before he can wake up enough to become irritable, Bruce glides over to him for a deep and forceful kiss. Jason catches up after a moment, grasping handfuls of Bruce's shirt to hold him close, and then shoving him away.

In terms of word choice/little micro writing decisions, describing that judgmental 'he's at school' took me a minute. Even though this fic is 100% Bruce's PoV I originally imagined that moment more from Jason's, where it's easier to just describe Bruce as judgmental and Jason as upset. Writing it in Bruce's PoV unlocks all the underlying motivation—Bruce knows he's being a condescending dick, doesn't even think Jason is stupid, and just figures the insecurity will put Jason on the defensive—and I wildly over-explained all of that when I first wrote it

(A consistent problem for me: I am always trying to talk myself down from explaining too much, and reminding myself I can trust readers to put things together themselves. That's also just a good writing tip in general! Trust your readers to pay attention!)

“Alfred kept breakfast warm for you,” Bruce says, belaying whatever Jason meant to say and redirecting to safer topics. “I think he mentioned showing you the remodels to the library when he returns, if you're up for it.”

Jason grunts, shifting off the bed. “I'm taking a shower.”

It's not a no. Practically the same as agreement.

OKAY so writing any given scene is a lot easier when I know what I'm trying to accomplish with it, and this scene was for two things. The first was just to sort of establish time moving forward and give a baseline for what everybody will be doing.

Lure to present all take place over the weekend with very few pauses left to the imagination between events, but I knew I was going to jump ahead a little bit going forward (and switch temporarily away from the Bruce/Jason/Tim trio with Dick's PoV), so I wanted to briefly establish that Jason is still at the manor even with Tim gone, and Bruce is probably using various little activities and excuses (and Alfred) to keep him around. It may just be me, and I definitely get far more intense about time lines than most people, but I knew it would bug me if I didn't give some indication of where Jason would be and why. He probably wouldn't stick around without the Tim-excuse on his own, thus Bruce guiding to safe topics like “Alfred wants to show you stuff!”

(also: “It's not a no. Practically the same as agreement.“ he’s just the WORST)

“Jason,” Bruce says, stopping him as he reaches the bathroom doorway. He's had a month to adjust to it, but the mere ability to speak his son's name again still fills some part of his heart long left empty. “Last night was...” Revelatory. A perfect gift.

“Thank you," he finishes. "I don't know what I'd do without you.”

(two typos ughhhhhhhhhhhh)

The second goal was making that extremely unsubtle parallel between Bruce's manipulations of Jason and of Tim with I don't know what I'd do without you. There have definitely been some parallels already, but I really liked making it super blatant. (Hey remember three seconds ago when I said I tend to over-explain? Whoops. Hopefully this one was merited and enjoyable.) It's a comment on how awful Bruce is, but also a little bit how lazy he's gotten—he doesn't even need to come up with anything else, because he just uses the exact same line on both.

...the embarrassing addition here is that the first version I posted left it unclear who said that last line, which I didn't realize until a commenter referred to it as Jason speaking. 😬  Tbh the idea of Jason already knowing exactly what Bruce was going to say was super cool and interesting and I straight up wondered if that be better and I should canon-ize it—but ultimately it just doesn't work with where I'm pushing the characters. Unfortunately for Jason, as aware as he is of Bruce's manipulative tendencies in general, he completely fails—or perhaps subconsciously refuses—to notice Bruce is using them on him too.

Subtler parallel: Jason's initial confusion at Tim being gone, having completely forgotten about the concept of school, lightly mirrors Tim in the previous fic thinking about how strange and distant “real life” felt. (Though Jason has the excuse of, you know, not having school and a “normal” life since he died)

That sort of calls back to one of my favorite parallels (though probably not as noticeable since it's between fics)—Jason noting in surrogate that everybody brushing their teeth together is the weirdest thing he's done, and then Tim noting in prevaricator that seeing Jason eat breakfast like a normal person is the weirdest thing he's seen. They're both SO USED to this ridiculously fucked up situation that mundane and calm events are what register as wrong.

And jumping back for one last thing:

He's had a month to adjust to it, but the mere ability to speak his son's name again still fills some part of his heart long left empty.

I wanted to remind everyone that Jason's return was very recent (because I know typical batfic picks up awhile after it) but more importantly, I wanted to make it clear that Bruce really does...care about Jason.

It's a shitty, manipulative, controlling kind of care, but he loves his son. I've read various sorta similar fics where it turns out Bruce never liked Jason (or even arranged his death!!!) and I wanted to take very much the opposite path here. imo it's more twisted and more compelling the less black and white things are. Bruce isn't a heartless monster who only wants to abuse his kids and doesn't care for them; Bruce is a horrible person who abuses his kids but still fully believes he loves them in his own way, and would absolutely protect them from any danger (except, yknow, the danger Bruce poses himself).

This commentary is way longer than the actual passage, but hopefully y'all liked reading it as much as I liked rambling. Thanks for the ask, anon!!!

[berenshand]

pLease talk about why benedick and claudio are foils!! i’ve only just gotten into much ado and i’m thirsty for analysis 👀👀

hoooo eee you opened a can of worms here my friend. there is literally nothing i would rather talk about than this. im so sorry i am not kidding when i say i wrote an essay in response to this

Ok so, a big theme in Much Ado is realistic vs idealized love, and there’s also a lot of generalizations about love, but Claudio and Benedick generalize about love in totally opposite ways. At the beginning of the play, Claudio sees Hero and immediately thinks ‘she is beautiful and I would like to marry her’. Sure, he’s seen her before, but he was distracted because he was, you know, about to go to war, but in the first scene, he tells Don Pedro that he “liked her ere I went to wars.” Like, he didn’t realize he was in love with her til after, but it was love at first sight.

Claudio, through the whole play, is idealistic – he wants everything to be perfect, to be black and white. There is no room for ‘maybe’ in his character (which, unfortunately means he does not use his brain cells). When he talks about Hero, he almost always talks about her beauty or her chastity. He’s focused on the superficial, and he’s hyperbolic (almost like Romeo). He’s trying really hard to be the perfect courtly lover stereotype – he can’t just say ‘Hero is beautiful’, oh no, he has to say “she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on”. Benedick even says Claudio used to speak “plain and to the purpose” but now his words are “fantastical”. So Claudio is way over the top.

Claudio expects everything to be perfect. Another big theme in the play is appearance vs reality. Claudio thinks that because Hero looks perfect, she must be perfect, and Claudio seems to be incapable of interpreting things beyond the surface-level, which is foreshadowed when he sees Don Pedro with Hero. He literally planned this with Don Pedro, but as soon as Don John and Borachio show up and say ‘oh by the way, DP’s in love with Hero’, Claudio’s like ‘damn, Don Pedro must be in love with Hero’. Y’all know Shakespeare loves a soliloquy, and Claudio does get one here, but it isn’t a ‘hm should I listen to Don John who is notoriously untrustworthy’ soliloquy, it’s a ‘well I guess Don Pedro screwed me over’ soliloquy. Claudio sees/hears something, has no evidence to contradict it and says ‘well, that must be true’. He doesn’t look for counter evidence or take Don John’s character into account. He’s gullible, black-and-white, and idealistic. If someone says something he can’t, for a fact, disprove, it must be true.

Later, when he accuses Hero, he says, “O Hero, what a Hero hadst thou been, / If half thy outward graces had been placed / About thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart!” He’s finally learned that people aren’t always what they seem, but HE LEARNED IT FROM THE WRONG PERSON because he always sticks with his first impression, instead of like, trusting the person he loves and wants to marry. His first instinct was to believe Don John at the party that Don Pedro isn’t a loyal friend, and a few scenes later, to believe Hero isn’t a loyal fiancée. His trust is completely based on perfection: he wants people to be perfect, and when they aren’t, he doesn’t just like. move on. He completely goes off the rails. In the party scene, he’s furious with Don Pedro, which makes him snap at Benedick and storm off in a huff (meanwhile Benedick is stood there like ????????????), and when he accuses Hero, he can’t just do it quietly. Like Beatrice complains, he waits til they are in church in front of God and everybody and completely destroys her life. He learns one negative thing about her and her perfection is destroyed and he will never love again.

Benedick, on the other hand, does not believe in love at first sight. He doesn’t believe in love at all. Nearly every single one of his lines in the first scene is him complaining about love. He says every man who marries will eventually “wear his cap with suspicion”. (This means married men have to wear caps to cover up their cuckold horns – Elizabethans had a sort of… urban legend that if your wife cheated on you, you would grow horns). So Benedick is basically saying ‘women will never be faithful’ (the irony of this is apparent later when Balthasar sings “men were deceivers ever”). However, Benedick also says a lot of stuff about being a ladies man??? He’s very inconsistent – the whole ‘appearance vs reality’ thing comes up with him too bc its like he really doesn’t want people to think he’s interested in romantic love but he also really wants them to think he can Get It. Who is the real Benedick????? We don't really know bc he keeps swapping personalities. Personally I think it’s interesting how Shakespeare seems to like flipping the connotations we expect… in Romeo and Juliet, he gives day a negative connotation and night a positive one, which is almost unheard of in western literature, and in Much Ado, the consistent character (Claudio, who is consistently gullible and idealistic) is a much less positive character then the inconsistent one (Benedick, who has no clue what he is doing ever).

A few scenes later, Benedick is in the garden complaining about how men make fun of other men who fall in love, then become the exact thing they’re complaining about by falling in love “and such a man is Claudio”. He goes on to say he will never fall in love (methinks he doth protest too much), but if he does the woman he loves will be perfect in every way. On the surface, it sounds like he has high standards, but what he’s really saying is ‘I will never marry because no such woman exists’ (not unlike Beatrice saying a man with no beard is too young for her but a man with a beard is too old – she’s saying she won’t marry because there is no such man in between – you either have a beard or you don’t). Benedick is an idiot, but not that kind of idiot. He knows the perfect woman doesn’t exist. Where Claudio is idealistic, Benedick is realistic.

……and then like one page later, he hears his friends say Beatrice loves him and he goes ‘oh hell yeah I will be horribly in love with her’. His soliloquy from earlier that said ‘men are idiots because they mock love then fall in love’? He’s proving himself right. But the difference between him and Claudio is that he can always acknowledge Beatrice’s faults. Even in the very beginning, he says Beatrice is prettier than Hero, though she is unfortunately “possessed with a fury”. Even now, when he’s deluded into thinking she loves him, and he’s listing off her virtues, he can still say she is “wise, but for loving me; by my troth, it is no addition to her wit”, and not only is he acknowledging her faults, he’s also acknowledging his. He even decides to be kind to her because he hears his friends roasting him and thinks ‘wow am I like that? I need to fix that’. While Claudio refuses to even consider that he might be wrong about distrusting Hero, Benedick is making a list of his own flaws and calling it Things I Need To Work On. Claudio’s list is more like Things I Am Right About Without Doing Any Critical Thinking.

What this all boils down to, for me, anyway, is again, that idea of realistic vs idealistic. Claudio is idealistic about himself too. He always thinks he’s right. Benedick knows he has flaws and actively tries to fix them. Claudio has unrealistic expectations of perfection. That whole ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’ thing does NOT apply to him. If he finds an alteration he will not only stop loving you, he will give up on love forever, and ruin your entire life in front of every single person you know. He thinks love is nice. That it’s a warm fuzzy feeling that makes you feel like chirping birds helped you get dressed in the morning. But Benedick knows that love is a choice. His love for Beatrice isn’t love at first sight. In fact, they had a past relationship that ended badly. His feelings for Beatrice change on a dime because he decides he is going to love her, which is a crucial part of any real relationship, romantic or otherwise. We have to choose to love people in spite of their failings because everyone has failings. If we give up on everyone who fails us, we will be alone – just like Claudio and Don Pedro end up isolated from everyone in Act 4 and 5.

When Hero and Claudio reconcile, they slip right back into their dramatic overwrought nonsense – Hero’s all ‘I truly was dead, because you killed me, but I have returned to life’. Beatrice and Benedick are like “I take you for pity” and ‘here’s a shitty sonnet you wrote about me lmao’. Claudio and Hero feel like Romeo and Juliet 2.0, but Beatrice and Benedick sound like your favourite real-life married couple because they can make fun of each other. So again, Shakespeare is playing with expected connotations: the person who’s more serious should probably be a more positive character than the one who can’t take anything seriously, but it’s Benedick, who literally never stops joking around, who is the positive character, and Claudio, who takes everything Very Seriously, who ends up looking like an idiot.

This is a really long answer but basically, they’re foils because Benedick is unserious, realistic, and introspective, while Claudio is serious, idealistic, and self-righteous.

[monicalorandavis]

I saw ‘Knives Out’ a week ago and I’m still reeling

I saw ‘Knives Out’ a week ago and I’m still reeling. This movie is fun and I simply won’t talk to anyone who disagrees! I don’t want to argue about its merits. It’s good.

Your issue is, I presume, an issue with what the film says about the upper class. Go on, sympathize for the horrible, rich family that represents all that is ugly with America. Feel bad for the racist gargoyles who are equal parts human and checking account. These people are snobs. They are snob dumpster fires and if you didn’t have fun roasting them then you and I are on different sides of the war.

What war you ask? I guess I’ll call it the culture war (though that’s not really it). I’m talking about the current (unannounced) civil war between those who think Trump is getting unfairly maligned and us, the ones who are looking back on this shameful era ten years down the line, explaining to our kids what the fuck happened in 2019. This is bad. Art should make fun of us. Our obsession with fame and fortune has gotten us into global laughing stock territory. So let’s allow for art to poke fun as the bullshit of America. Art should be a reflection of our ugly parts. We all must look in the mirror when we try on a bathing suit. This is that. I choose not to place blame on the world for my muffin top. It’s funny. I’m gonna still have fun with this muffin, and this film, even if it doesn’t make me feel amazing. Laughing at yourself exorcises the demons. We still need art to encourage our spiritual progress. Don’t be such a stick in the mud.

So, now that I’ve sorted that out, the film...

It’s good.

Now let’s focus on the acting which is, arguably, always my favorite part of any movie.

Didn’t we all revel in the Yosemite Sam impression Daniel Craig was doing with New Orleans private investigator, Benoit Blanc? Wasn’t Lakeith Stanfield playing the slightly oblivious police detective while his partner fangirled over Christopher Plummer a treat?

It was.

In a society so obsessed with celebrity, it was especially delightful to watch the investigators reckon with people who simply did not believe they had to play by the rules. They don’t have to partake in police questioning. They have people for that!

Only, they do have to partake in police questioning and their lack of experience in dealing with authority figures, like the police, made them particularly horrible witnesses. They quite enjoyed a wonderfully anonymous type of wealth, free from press and the quotidian boredom of bosses, day jobs, rules...you get it. The Thrombey’s do not handle inconvenience very well.

As a result, we delight in their misfortune. This move dripped with Agatha Christie meets Succession realness. Plus subtle notes of Rupaul’s Drag Race camp.

Yes, I admit, Benoit Blanc is no Hercule Poirot. All these mystery purists coming for ‘Knives Out’ best fall back with those comparisons because it’s simply unfair. Christie’s number one Belgian is too good for mere mortals to emulate. And Daniel Craig tried very, very hard to give you an iconic detective character. Was it goofy and weird? Yes. Let’s all agree to move on.

And the moving on is a larger lesson here. Because only when you surrender to this film does it reveal all its gifts to you. Once you stop comparing it to all the other stories you hold so dear does it grow into its own animal. It’s a mystery for the age in which we find ourselves. I will not slander the p.c. police because, hell, I’m sort of one of them. Social justice warrior is not an insult that rustles my feathers. Interestingly, this film joins the SJW’s alongside the Stephen Miller’s of the world. White privilege is white privilege. And, unfortunately, the Thrombey’s, both young and old, liberal and conservative, are victims of their privilege. So blind to the plight of others, they can not help but make themselves the heroes of their own story. And people don’t like the thought that they, like the film’s youngest SJW of the family, Katherine Langford, could be part of the problem. And yet, she is. She so is.

Langford delivers a knockout performance of Taylor Swift-level white feminism that is so 2019 and clueless that I imagine many people even missed the joke.

Along those same lines, Chris Evans is the playboy, black sheep of the family who seems misunderstood and sexy but, spoiler alert, is just conniving and sexy.

Both performances were stellar and so deeply entrenched in modern white identity politics that if you’re not paying attention you might assume that their characters are just your standard rich villains. Nay. These are the “good white people” who are behaving badly. These are the white people who donate to charities and hire undocumented workers like Ana de Armas’ character, Marta. They are people who listen to rap music and love ‘Insecure’ and took an African-American studies class in college. And yet, they demand attention and emotional labor from the (employed) people around them. They distort proximity with closeness and try to lure Marta into their world. But she always knows better. For whatever reason, she can not trust these people, even before Harlan’s death.

Rian Johnson directs with a certain je ne sais quoi. Call it a ‘BDE’ that I would not expect from such a dweeby looking dweeb. Yes, ‘Knives Out’ has a fun enough story. But it really shows the fuck out is with its performances. Holy moly. No small roles, only small actors, as the saying goes. Yet in the case of ‘Knives Out’ you will find neither. Everybody is a god damn star. You should know that I stan Chris Evans but, as it turns out, this film begs you to worship its entire cast. So I did.

‘Knives Out’ is a star-making performance for Ana de Armas. If you hadn’t heard, de Armas garnered a Golden Globe nod and it is well-deserved. Armas’ Marta is a nuanced, funny, sensitive, conspirator in a plot that could’ve isolated the audience but instead put us smack dab in the middle of a moral quagmire.

Only the best actors can pull this off. Lesser actors have us turn against them while they flounder. Marta’s role in the family drama is as an outsider. In spite of their insistence that she is one of them, she keeps her distance, only clinging to Harlan. She fell for Chris Evans’ charms briefly, and I applaud Rian Johnson for avoiding a romance between the two (we didn’t need it) and focusing instead on the emotional betrayal. Marta was a woman with her head screwed on straight. In spite of her, possible, nursing fumbles she was the only kind person Harlan had in his life. She would never risk her loyalty to him by engaging in some foolishness with Chris Evans’ hunky ass.

And I repeat, I don’t care about your thoughts regarding inheritance. It is silly to contest that Marta deserved nothing less than the full sum of the fortune (*spoiler*). She deserved everything. She deserved an existence in this country free from citizenship anxiety. She deserved a partner who loved her. She deserved a friend who didn’t kill himself to save her ass. Least of all, she deserved Chris Evans’ character to be better. But, he was a product of his shitty family. How could he be better?

Three names: Jamie. Lee. Curtis. I need her in at least seven to twelve projects in the coming year. She is a stand out among stand outs. She serves up the quintessential performance of a cold-hearted bitch that is so likeable that I will patiently await the spin-off. I need to know where her Linda Drysdale is now. If anyone in the family was able to land on their feet it was Linda. We all know it.

Linda was the only Thrombey child who had the guts to make it without a handout. Her loser husband, played by the ever-handsomer Don Johnson, was practically useless. Her loser brother, played by the unusually diminutive Michael Shannon, was the same. Her sister in law, played by the illustrious Toni Collette, had her head so far up her own ass that even Gwyneth Paltrow would blush.

Poor Linda. She was surrounded by idiots. I hope she’s doing ok.

And now, we’re at the end. I’ve tried my best to avoid any horrible spoilers. But I’ve also taken a deep dive into SJW’s so I might’ve gotten off track along the way...

In any event, this movie is good. And I can’t wait to see it again.

[rwby-party]

I had to run some errands but I really wanted to follow up on what I meant earlier. 

 (side note, I always write negatively under the cut/under “keep reading” so people don’t have to see it. So if you don’t wanna look at me angry about the show don't continue on from here. I mean that genuinely as I understand not wanting to see negative about a show you like and not as a ‘’DON”T LIKE DON’T READ U PANZY” sort of way)

So to get down to brass tacks and spoilers Imma be talking about Qrow’s actions and Clover dying.

Starting with Qrow, I just didn’t feel like his actions were... I guess in character. i’ve always hated saying that because he’s Crwby’s character, therefore I can’t say he’s out of character, but he really did feel out of character.

Even if Qrow was in a blind rage against Clover, I just can’t see him SIDING with Tyrian, even though it does feel unintentional.

He was attacking him at first, but just... stopped out of nowhere to keep attacking Clover. Granted, Clover wasn’t wasn’t stopping either, but I also felt like that was... bad writing.

Both Qrow and Clover pissed me off in this scene because Tyrian is a fucking murderer and one of the biggest threats in the entire show. Qrow should’ve been the least of Clover’s worries, and Qrow clearly hates Tyrian more than he’d be angry at/hate Clover. He was way more of a threat than Clover or Qrow were

It’d make way more sense for them to at least get Tyrian into custody before they did this. It feels like character stupidity for the sake of the plot.

Seeing him fight Clover with Tyrian was just.. Surreal. Not in the good way. It felt terrible. I just don’t understand in what world he would do that, or why Crwby would even think that.

Qrow is 100 percent responsible for his death as well because of it. He was too stupid to either try and stop Tyrian first or realize he’s the bigger threat. He punched Clover’s aura down. Took advantage of Tyrian being there and attacking Clover.

Even though he didn’t deliver the final blow, everything he did let Tyrian do it. He is responsible for it.

Speaking of Clover dying though.

I just feel like it’s just incredibly, INCREDIBLY unnecessary for Clover to die.  

Even though I wanted to see him side with Qrow and believed he would, I can completely understand him following Ironwood’s orders. Like he said in the show, he trusts him with his life. Seeing him trying to rationalize Ironwood’s actions was understandable and felt genuine. It was also obvious he didn’t want to arrest Qrow either, so I could understand it even though I really felt like it was going to end up differently.

It made sense for Tyrian to take advantage of the situation and cause chaos. It made sense for Robyn and Qrow to react like they did. It made sense for Cinder and Neo to show up when she did. It made sense for Marrow to side with the other Ace ops even though I didn’t want him to. It made sense for Ironwood to snap like he did the previous ep. So much in the show has made sense.

But, in my opinion, killing Clover makes no sense. Both in the narrative and just in general. The only thing it does is make Qrow suffer. Something he’s done for frankly the entirety of RWBY. It just was done for shock value. If I could find 1 reason that Clover died, just one reason, I’d feel differently. I’d still be mad and upset about it, but it’d hurt a little less if it narratively made sense.

As much as I hated Cinder coming back, her character arc wasn’t finished and I could see it. Pyrrha’s death made sense and furthered the plot. His death doesn’t.

And all this anger is leaving out the shipping aspect of it. The part I’m dreading the most to be honest.

I don’t want to call it Bury Your Gays or Queerbaiting. Clover was technically never confirmed to be gay, and while I, and MANY people felt like their interactions were flirting/romantic, I can at least try to see how it can all be interpreted as friendly.

but to be honest, I still saw it as romantic. I’m trying to be understanding of those who felt it wasn’t romantic and say it shouldn’t be considered Bury Your Gays or Queerbaiting, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel good either way.

The scene of Clover smiling at Qrow while the sun rose felt romantic. Like I’ve said before, if Clover or Qrow was a woman, many of the scenes would be way less arguable as flirting/romantic, that one included. If Ruby and Oscar can share a scene where the awkwardly talk to each other can be called romantic, so can’t a lot of the scenes with Qrow and Clover.

Even with them as just friends, building up their friendship this entire volume only to kill him is just...

Its just... real shitty. Maybe in the future I’ll see a reason to why Clover died but it just doesn’t make sense right now. I don’t even know if I want to stick along to see if it ever will.

It doesn’t do anything but bad to Qrow. Not only does it unnecessarily hurt him, but it throws a bunch of his character development throughout the whole volume out the window and makes me actively dislike him for the shit he pulled during their fight. And as much as I think Tyrian is a genius for killing Clover with Harbinger, it very much is setting up for Qrow to be framed for his murder (even though I feel like he is responsible for it, just didn’t deliver the killing blow) and additional tension between him and Ironwood, him and Robyn, and possibly even him and the rest of team RWBY and co. Once again, unnecessary tension (or tension that could’ve been added in a different way)

Clover wasn’t important enough to the plot to affect it by dying, especially with the fact that he sided with Ironwood.

Plus, with the unfortunate fact that many MLM (and other people like me, I’m more focused on them though.) shipped Fair Game and felt like he was very much Gay/Queer coded, it’s just a huge slap in the face at best, and incredibly homophobic at worst.

It’s infuriating, especially with how much I liked in this ep and how much I’ve been enjoying bumbleby’s interactions as a WLW. I was happy to have MLM rep since it’s something the show doesn’t have, but I guess they didn’t see it as such. Or just didn’t care.

I’ve never wanted to stop watching Rwby. Even after I was angry about how they handled the white fang and Discrimination the entire series. But now, I just can’t see myself watching the next ep or any afterwards.

[silverleafnightshade-blog]

The Shining, Part 2: Hope I’m Not Overlook-ing Anything

(Scroll down to read part one if’in ya haven’t yet)

Besides the Colorado Lounge, we are introduced to the Gold Room fairly early on, during a tour led by the Overlook’s manager, Stuart Ullman (a very merry Barry Nelson). “Pink and gold are my favorite colors,” Wendy (Shelley Duvall) states happily to Stu, but didn’t appear to catch that same vibe off the caretaker’s apartment. This careless little corner is decorated in hepatitis yellow and whytepeeple-flesh pink, and you can almost feel your skin drying up in that attic air. It’s somehow even more depressing and claustrophobic than the apartment the Torrances just left behind.

Put a good face on it and smile, kids!

The Gold Room is pretty ballin’ though, and even more so once the ghosts arrive to zhuzh up the place a bit. The female guests seem to be wearing a lot of gold or champagne gowns, and that color coordination continues down to the yolky Advocaat drink that Grady (Philip Stone) spills on Jack. That drink is basically a Dutch cross between eggnog and custard, and “tends to stain,” says Grady as he whisks Jack off to that terrific red men’s room.

I was musing earlier about how the Overlook’s layout helps to build up a feeling of unease. But what unfortunately fails to build up to anything is Jack Nicholson’s performance. Stephen King was apparently unhappy with Kubrick’s casting choice; King argued for Jon Voight or a likewise dad-ish actor who could emit a more benign vibe. Ultimately, King wanted someone who read a little less “Cuckoo” than Nicholson, and upon this latest re-viewing, I think I rather agree with King. There is no descent into madness with this Jack, but rather a tiny trip over a curb and boom! Straight to crazy town. Nicholson’s Jack Torrance goes from white knuckles to wholly terrible so fast, it doesn’t give you much sympathy for his character. I remember at my first viewing, I thought that Danny (Danny Lloyd) was supposed to be Jack’s stepson, because Jack’s character seemed so completely disconnected from his son from the very start. You infer early on from Wendy that the family appears to be running from a pattern of alcoholism and child abuse. While I think this backstory informs her character’s initial passivity (which later develops into incredible strength), I’d still rather that the hotel is the bad guy in this flick, an entity preying on the weaknesses of an ordinary family man. Oh damn... I think this is turning into an argument that The Shining serves as the bridge between 1970s and 1980s horror themes! Supernatural psychosis attacking the safe space, the suburban family displaced into the sinister setting... yup, I think this argument holds water.

But Jack is in fact the bad guy in this flick: while Danny is sensitive to thresholds of the hotel’s dark past, Jack is key in unleashing the horrors, bringing those colors from sepia to Kodachrome. Danny can’t help that he notices the Shine given off by the Overlook, but Jack is an eager participant in his own corruption. I only noticed upon this viewing how much Jack stares at himself in mirrors. There he is in pivotal scenes, sticking out his tongue in the caretaker apartment’s vanity, or mugging in the mirrored backsplash of the Gold Room’s bar, and even making a quick adjustment while chatting with Grady in the red restroom. He only notices that he is making out with a corpse in Room 237 because he catches sight in the bathroom mirror.

But while Jack is gazing at his reflection, unreflected on his increasing insanity, it’s a mirror that pulls the blinders off Wendy. When Danny writes “Redrum” on the bathroom door, and Wendy finally reads it backwards in the mirror, it is just in time. Jackie boy has an axe to grind and is about to do a bit of demo work on the apartment.

But let’s backtrack and talk about Room 237, shall we? I fucking love this room. Everything about it is so pronounced and announced, from the (Hicks-inspired) peacocking carpet to those carnally magenta sofa and chairs, straight to the matching chevron-patterned drapes and bedspread. I also adore the brass-accented furniture and strange stripey cream walls.

Maximalistas, unite! And then of course there’s the bathroom, that amazing combination of cream, gold, and mint walls with sea foam green porcelain fixtures. I mean, it’s best appreciated sans corpse, of course. Oof, I am so ready to shrug off this last decade’s last gasp of minimalism, this tired trend of white white white everything with demure accents of fir or beech wood. Viva la sea foam toilets! Bring on the rose pink sinks! I’m very glad someone out there had the foresight to hold onto that stuff.

The Overlook’s head chef Dick Hallorann (Scatman goddamn Crothers) has some decidedly 70s decorating ideas, which I don’t hate at all. Here’s his awesome bedroom in Miami:

This may seem like a minor detail in the plot, but I think there’s no casual connection between domestic violence and racism in the movie. Grady (who murdered his wife and two daughters) uses a racial slur to refer to Dick, and Jack is pretty fucking unwoke with his “white man’s burden” comment and general shittiness towards Wendy and Danny. And I imagine that this was more Crother’s own cue rather than Kubrick directing, but did you notice that Dick’s character seemed to make himself smaller whenever he had to address a white person? He always assumed a subservient position, slightly bent over, even when dealing with white people beneath his rank at the hotel. There’s a tiny scene where Dick has to call his friend Larry in northern Colorado to rent a Snowcat to get to the Overlook. Larry is also black, and the scene shows Dick easy and relaxed while chatting with Larry, speaking forcefully into the receiver and cursing freely. It’s like Dick’s Miami pad is the true version of the character. Dick has had a lot of practice hiding his Shine from others, because he must constantly surveil and suppress his own feelings. He is really such an important character, and I am still pretty pissed that the movie kills off Dick (yeah, he survives in the book). Still, I think Kubrick did right by the character, or I guess as well as could be hoped for given the time and circumstances.

RIP, Dick. We’ll never forget your wood-paneled Miami man-cave.

So I bent the rules on this one, but I think it can be argued that The Shining belongs in the archives of iconic 1970s horror film architecture. Next time, though, I’ll be standing on safely 70s giallo ground.

[mininky]

The Water Cooler

Summary: Life works in mysterious ways. Really shitty ways too, might you add. After a series of unexpected incidents you find yourself living with your office enemy.

Pairing: Office Worker!Kihyun x Reader

Genre: Fluff, crack/comedy, romance

Warnings: Cussing, some sexual mentions but no graphic scenes, drunk Minhyuk loves to pole dance, Changkyun hates hikers, cheating

Word Count: 9.9K

     There are a lot of ways that you could describe Yoo Kihyun. Obnoxious. Nagging. Uptight. Know it all. Arrogant. Self-serving. Pretentious. Annoying. Loathsome. Short with an even shorter temper. Smug. Cocky. An insufferable pain in the neck. God how you wanted to just break his fucking neck. You aren’t sure how exactly your disdain for the tiny man started, but you did know that he’s currently testing the one last nerve you have before you snap and murder him and have Minhyuk help you hide the body. Hyungwon would probably help too as long as he didn’t have to expel any energy on that matter, at the very least he would root the two of you on.

 You can feel the vein in your forehead pop and throb as he continues to talk about his oh-so-perfect reports that will probably land him a promotion. You’d bet your measly savings that Yoo Kihyun was also a former teacher’s pet. “You know what Kihyun, I hope you do get a promotion.” Everyone in the breakroom turns to look at you with confusion. Wonho almost chokes on his coffee before shouting about it burning. Hyungwon actually stops chewing his bagel to give a look of pure horror at you.

 “Really, thanks (y/n). You know I always knew-” Kihyun is giving a pompous smile at you as he speaks and you feel that last nerve snap like a twig.

 “And I just really hope that it involves a transfer to the middle of nowhere so I never have to deal with your Napoleon complex ever again.” Minhyuk is giving a high pitched wheezing laugh, he’s doubled over in the back shaking as he tries to squeeze out an unintelligible sentence in reply to you.

 “Na-napoleon complex?! I’m not even that short! I’m average height!” Kihyun is crushing the water bottle in his hands and you feel your headache abate at the rage you’ve inflicted on him. Serves his smug ass right.

 “And so was Napoleon for his time. For someone who deems himself all knowing you would think that you would have already known that. Well anyways, as pleasant as it was listening to you kiss your own ass for thirty minutes I have some papers to work on. Oh and Kihyun, don’t let the door smack you on the way out to that promotion.” You pick up your fresh cup of coffee and blow a kiss at him as you walk back to your cubicle and laugh under your breath as you begin sifting through the spreadsheet from hell you’re currently working on.

 Working in a painfully boring office was not how you imagined your life, it’s certainly not how you intended to use your degree in psychology but considering that you only have a bachelors the best use that you have for it is as an overpriced decoration in your cubicle that collects a copious amount of dust for the sake of making Kihyun shudder each time he sees it. Thank god for that minor in accounting or it really would be completely worthless. Life is just that way, sometimes things just don’t work out as you planned. Still, it could be worse. At the very least you have a decent paying job and for the most part, you enjoy the people you work with (the main exception being Kihyun although when Minhyuk goes full dolphin mode he too is in the doghouse with you) and your boss Shownu was one of the sweetest people you’ve ever met.

 All in all, things weren’t that bad. Boring, monotonous, a bit like groundhogs day sure. But at the same time, you had bills to pay and adult things to do like pay said bills. Oh, how the capitalist system sucks for everyone but the filthy rich. But once again, on days like today when your temper has flown out the window, you can’t help but wonder how you got here. In a long-term relationship with a guy who you live with who still looks at you like a deer in headlights the moment anyone brings up the word marriage, committed to a job where you deal with numbers and papers and other tedious tasks every day. This certainly isn’t the fabulous life of jet-setting and hanging out with hot cabana boys that feed you grapes that you’ve envisioned for your life.

 The rest of the day goes by painfully slow and unfortunately, it’s just as dull as you figured it would be. The most interesting part of the day had been your earlier tussle with Kihyun and watching Hyungwon almost unhinge his jaw as he tried to fit the largest burger you’ve ever seen into his mouth because Jooheon dared him to do it. But it’s Friday, and that means that you can be out of this humdrum hell for two days so when the clock hits five you’re quick to save your work and get the hell out of dodge.

 Changkyun is already standing in the elevator when you fly into it. “'Sup (y/n). Got any plans for the weekend?”

 “Nah, not unless binge-watching Netflix in my underwear counts. You?”

 “Sexy. Eh, I’ve got a date with this chick from tinder but I dunno man. She’s into nature and shit and those hiking people usually give me hives you know. Its like, calm down man you can see all that shit on Instagram why be so active? Plus they get all holy about it, they act like your couch is a den of evil. But she’s pretty hot so I’m willing to risk it.”

 “Well, I hope the risk is rewarding for you. Best of luck kid.” You spring out of the elevator and out of the building with more energy then you’ve displayed all week. It’s true, you don’t really have any plans for this weekend except for meeting up your boyfriend for dinner right now but my god, you get to sleep in and isn’t that all that really matters?

——————————————————

 You’re contemplating picking up the glass of wine you’re clutching to and hurling it into Matt’s face. Or maybe you’ll take the steak knife and drive it through his heart. Or take the candle sitting on the table and light him on a tiny fire before cramming it up his ass. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you right. Did you just say you want to break up with me?”

 “Listen (y/n), it’s not me it’s you.”

 “I’m pretty sure that it’s supposed to be the other way around.” You grit out the words with venom. God, what did you ever see in this loser?

 “Oh, yeah right. I always forget how that goes. My bad. Listen, it’s just you know I need something else in my life and well things have just gotten kind of boring. Like, I’m glad you finally let me try anal and all but you know I just think it’s time we go our separate ways. We’ve had a good six years and all, but you know I mean…I think we’ve pretty much done everything now. You’re a great girl, I’m sure you’ll find someone decent. And we’re still young I mean we’re not thirty yet! Anyways, listen I’ve already packed up most of your things for you so-”

 “You’ve packed up my shit? Let me get this right you’re breaking up with me and you want the apartment?” You can feel the entire restaurant turn to watch as you raise your voice but you couldn’t care less. Your life is already crumbling before you so why not give a few spectators a free show to it?

 “Yeah, well you know I mean it’s just so close to my work and it’s really hard to find a place with so much natural lighting for my garden.” Seriously, you slept with this guy for six years? This guy? This was the guy you were actually thinking about settling down with? Good god, you needed to see a shrink because clearly, your measly bachelor’s degree in psychology didn’t cover your own neurosis.

 “You have a succulent garden, they actually don’t do well under direct-no you know what. Fucking fine, I’ll figure something out.”

 “Great, great. Well, now that that’s settled I’m just going to see myself out. You know (y/n) I just want to say-”

 “Save whatever you’re going to say and shove it up your fucking ass Matt.” You glare at him as he gulps uncomfortably, his hand sticking out awkwardly as if to give you a consolation handshake before he finally runs his hand through his hair and walks out of the restaurant. Indignation and bitterness consume your thoughts as you chug down your wine and grab the glass he didn’t even touch before chugging that one down too. The food hasn’t even arrived yet and you know that soon you’ll be feeling the effects of the alcohol but really, right now you need to be a bit drunk to get through all of this.

 An exasperated sigh leaves you as you see someone slide into the seat where Matt just was. You slowly look up to see Yoo fucking Kihyun in all his glory having the audacity to look concerned. “The fuck do you want?”

 “Hey, woah, calm down. I just…well I saw how that whole thing played out and I was wondering if you’re okay.” You take a moment to glare at him. His hair is slightly disheveled after the long day at work, white button-up sleeves rolled up but still buttoned all the way to the top, his eyes scream ‘I pity you, you sad sack of shit.’ Of course one of those people who had to watch everything burn just had to be him. Why not also have Matt come back to tell you that your dog died too? (You didn’t actually have a dog, but somehow it would be fitting.) What more could possibly be added to this? God, when will this day end? “Ouch, listen I mean I get that you don’t want anyone to see that. I know I wouldn’t but I mean, you look like you need someone to talk to and I’m here for you. I mean it, I’m just trying to help.”

 “How much of that did I say out loud?”

 “'Of course one of those people who had to watch everything burn down just had to be me.’ That part. You know, I’m just going to take this, I think you’ve had enough.” Kihyun reaches for your glass but you guzzle back the remnants before giving him a childish smirk. “Or not…” You watch him chew on his bottom lip for a moment before he speaks again slowly as if afraid he’s speaking to a wounded territorial animal. “Do you…do you have anywhere to go? Any friends or family in town?”

 “Nope, I moved here to the city last year for Matt’s transfer.” God seriously, what were you going to do for a place. If you walked back into your apartment you’ll be wearing an orange jumpsuit for the rest of your life and buying protection from a woman named Bertha so clearly that isn’t an option right now.

 “Yeah I don’t know about that Bertha part, but I mean I don’t think murder is the solution.”

 Great you spoke out loud again unless… “Are you a mind reader? Nah…nah if you could read my mind then you would know that Hyungwon and I have entertained the notion of giving you those awful diet aka laxative teas before.”

 “I…I’m never going to drink anything you ever give me. Or Hyungwon for that matter.” You relish in the sheer horror that runs through his face. Yes, you’re petty and yes for whatever reason the office hamster is trying to be kind but really you just want to bludgeon your head on this table in peace and away from prying eyes that might report your mental instability to HR.

 “Wise choice little man. But we still have our ways.”

 “Back onto more pressing matters…so you don’t have anywhere that you can go?”

 “Does sleeping under my desk count?”

 “Of course not!”

 “Then no.”

 Kihyun looks like he’s in physical pain as he wrestles with some internal monologue that he’s unfortunately too sober to say out loud unlike you. With a weary sigh, he looks up at you. “My roommate just moved out yesterday, and I don’t have anyone else lined up. You can stay at my place until you figure something out.”

 “Why on god’s green earth would I do that? Are you trying to get me to kill myself? Is it not bad enough that I was just broken up with publicly but now you want me to live with you?”

 You watch his eye twitch before he gives a deep breath to calm down. “Do you want to be homeless?”

 “Good point. Fine, I’ll do it. Save me Kihyun! Oh, my knight in shining armor! Oh, my tiny tiny savior!”

 “Great-WAITER!”

 “What are you doing?”

 “Getting your food to go and hoping that I don’t regret my life choices more than I already do.” You tamp down on any snarky remarks and just look at him instead, the wine allowing you to do so with no shame. You hate to admit it, but Kihyun is attractive. From the small nose, tiny pout to his lips, flawless skin, meticulously groomed eyebrows. It’s a shame really, that he has to be such a complete and total stickler because otherwise maybe you’d-nope, gross that’s totally never going to happen. Ever. EVER. You watch the waiter scurry over and nod as Kihyun speaks before pulling out a check and handing it over before running back away.

 “Here.” You fish out a handful of cash and wave it when he just gives you a pointed look.

 “Listen, you’ve dealt with enough crap tonight. Just let me get the food. Besides, I’m eating whatever that asshat ordered.” Kihyun pulls out his card and places it back just as the waiter runs back over with a bag of your food. It only takes another two minutes before you’re stumbling out the door with Kihyun gripping at your elbow. Drinking two large glasses of red wine on an empty stomach was clearly not the smartest of decisions, and by the slight acidic churn you’re feeling you’re sure that you’ll regret it more than you already do soon enough. You’re grateful that Kihyun allows you to make the trip back to his apartment in silence, leading you slowly on the short trip with a steady arm. The only thing he says is that he doesn’t live very far and it’s just a short walking distance away.

 By the time you reach his apartment you’re already feeling a wee bit more sober, and now you’re not sure if that’s a good thing because it just makes the weight of everything come crashing down. You feel like a complete and total fool, and you feel like a major bitch for how you treated Kihyun for trying to be decent, but most of all you just feel like a failure. Nothing in life can ever seem to go the way that you planned. Your eyes are glued to Kihyuns feet as he pads through his apartment and starts setting down the food at his coffee table.

 Not surprisingly his apartment is immaculate. Everything seems to have its own place and you’re pretty sure that you could safely eat off the floor. Various photographs, ones that look professional more than personal, line the walls. His furniture is leather and looks lived in but still in great shape. Clearly, he has a knack for decorating by the way everything is perfectly color coordinated in the room. There are pops of navy blue floating around the living room found in pillows, throw blankets, rugs, and candles. HGTV worthy in a way that you could only dream of but never be able to fully recreate. Seem’s like the office maid is also a mini Martha Stewart.

 “Are you gonna come eat or not?” Kihyun is gesturing over to your food before he starts cutting into his steak.

 Slowly and cautiously you make your way through the room and stare down at your fettucini alfredo for a minute before twirling it around your plastic fork. “Thank you…Kihyun…” Your words come out small, wobbly, uneasy before you shove a too large forkful of noddle into your mouth and try to blink away the tears threatening to form.

 Kihyun stops chewing for a moment, and you hate that he gives you a heartwarming smile. Its a smile that says, ‘of course I’ll help you, you big pathetic buffoon, someone has to do it.’ He chews slowly, head tilted slightly as he gazes at you and while normally you would shrink away from someone staring at you so intently and obviously analyzing from you instead you just let him. You’ve been through enough tonight and exhaustion has stripped you of your defenses. “What did you ever see in that guy?”

 “I’d like to know that too. You know, I really thought that maybe he and I would get married someday? We met in college and I knew he wasn’t everything I wanted but I think I just settled anyways. And the older we got the less of a chance to find anything better than each other. It was stupid, we should have broken up a long time ago, but I was too afraid.  I don’t think I’ve been in love with him for a long time if I’m honest.” You don’t even look up at Kihyun as you speak, shoving another pile of pasta into your mouth and chewing quickly before you continue. “I’d like to lie to you and say he wasn’t always this bad, but he pretty much always has been. He never grew out of his douchey frat boy phase like I hoped he would. And then I just started getting scared you know? Who would want me? I didn’t feel good enough for more than him so I figured, fuck it I’ll make it work. But neither of us were really happy. I’m actually not even mad about the breakup, relieved really. I’m just mad about the way how he did everything.”

 “Yeah, telling you he’s taking the apartment is a supreme dick move.” You shoot a smile at Kihyun before breaking into a fit of giggles.

 “You know, you know he seriously thanked me for letting him try anal? Like that was his consolation to me. ‘Sorry I’m breaking up with you but thanks for letting me do your butt but now there’s really nothing else for us.’ Like what even?” Kihyun is roaring with laughter after he chokes down his steak.

 “Oh my god, who the fuck does that? Seriously?? Wow. You know, a woman like you can get a hundred guys better than him! No-don’t give me that look, I’m serious (y/n)! That guy will just be something you laugh at in the future. One of those ‘why did I ever think I needed to settle on that idiot’ moments. You’ll find someone else, someone better. And if you ever try to settle for a dick like him again I’ll tell you that he’s not worth your time. I can go all angry dad mode on him for you and be like ‘excuse me sir but I’m not afraid to go back to prison for my little girl.’” You know he’s trying to make you laugh again, but instead, you feel tears starting to spring to your eyes. Kihyun, the man you torment on a daily basis, is being genuinely kind and is just trying to help you get through this. He’s a better person than you, that’s for sure. Surprisingly Kihyun just lets you cry, he doesn’t try to stop you. He does occasionally pat your head and rub soothing circles on your back, but other than that he makes no mention of your clearly crumbling pride.

 He flicks on his TV and settles on pulling up Friends and after a couple of episodes and consuming nearly your weight in carbs you’re starting to feel a bit better. You’d make sure to pay Kihyun back for all of this. Quietly, of course. In a way that wouldn’t be grandiose or hurt your rapidly shrinking pride. After the third episode, Kihyun is suddenly up on his feet and silently walking around the apartment. You can hear doors opening and shutting, rustling echoing through the otherwise silent apartment before he comes back with a few things in his hand.

 “Here, you’ll need something to sleep in.” He almost looks timid, bashful you might say, as he places the clothing next to you on the couch.

 “Thank you.” The words come out just a whisper as you pick up the t-shirt and sweatpants and hold the soft material in your hands tightly. Where would you be right now had it not been for Kihyun? Some shitty motel with a cheap bottle of wine for your sole company? Maybe crying loudly at the table at the restaurant still? “Thank you.”

 Kihyun just gives a soft smile at you, scratching his head for a moment before nodding his acknowledgment. “No problem. So the bathroom is the first door on the left and your bedroom is right next to it. I’m going to go ahead and get to bed, but if you need anything just let me know. Feel free to watch whatever you want on Netflix.”

 You listen to his footsteps walk away, misty eyes still glued to the white t-shirt your clutching. “Good night Kihyun.” You’re almost certain you spoke too softly to be heard, but you hear Kihyun stop for a moment.

 “Good night (y/n). Get some rest.”

———————————-

 You wake up with the feeling of your skull trying to split itself away from your brain, the headache dulling your senses. You stared up at the white ceiling as the panic sets in until the crashing realization of why you weren’t home settled in. You’d really have to thank Kihyun, especially for the extra toothbrush and toothpaste he’d set out for you along with an entire arsenal of luxury skincare. With a groan, you rolled yourself out of bed and looked over at your phone. At least you always carried a charger in your purse, but you’d have to go back to your apartment today to start picking up everything that the idiot (you refuse to even think of his name) had packed for you. Slowly you made your way through the apartment, following the dulcet noise of what had to be Kihyun singing.

 You found him singing into the spatula like a microphone over the omelets he just placed on two separate plates. Clearly, by the sheer enthusiasm and volume, he hadn’t yet noticed you. His face was scrunched up in concentration, little dimples under his eyes showing as he finished off the song. “You have a great voice.” You watched the spatula fly out of his hand and clatter into the sink as he jumped a few feet in the air.

 “You scared the shit out of me!”

 “Okay, Jooheon.” He glared at you, mumbling something about how he wasn’t ‘that bad’ before opening the fridge and grabbing a bottle of Gatorade for you.

 “Drink this, I’m sure you’ll need it.” You stare dubiously at the drink before slowly opening it and taking a swig.

 “Why are you being so nice to me?” You slowly make your way over to the stool at the kitchen bar, hungrily looking at the cheese covered eggs before sinking into it.

 “Because I’m actually a nice person?”

 “Unlikely. Based off of all the calculations I’ve done on you in the last year that doesn’t match up.” Kihyun shoots a pointed look at you as he sits down next to you.

 “Well, your calculations were wrong. Besides, even if you don’t think I’m nice, which I am, by the way, I’m not some heartless monster who would watch a friend…albeit a bitchy one…get her heart stomped on and just leave her there to fend for herself. And don’t even pull that tiny savior shit again, it’s too early for that crap.”

 You snort but hold your tongue for a minute. “Friend huh?”

 “Yeah. I mean, sure we don’t hang out outside of work and we’re usually at each other’s throats but I mean, we’re friends, right? I mean, you never did actually give me that laxative tea so that’s gotta count for something.”

 “I can’t tell if you’re just really sweet or really naive.”

 “Probably both.” There’s a bitter note to the words, and it makes you want to force him to elaborate but you sense that it’s something he’s trying to keep covered up.

 “Yeah, but that’s not so bad. It’s better than being a bitch who was stuck in a shit relationship for six years to a complete moron out of fear. You might be sweet and naive, but I’m just bitter and tired and afraid.”

 “You know if you combine us we might make a decent dark chocolate recipe.” You can’t help but laugh, guzzling down the rest of your food in comfortable silence before picking up your plate and washing it.

 “Well, I suppose I should head out to my apartment in a bit. Do you have a copy of the key by any chance so I can just let myself in?”

 “Oh, yeah.” Kihyun grabs a key off a hook on the wall and tosses is it over to you. Unfortunately, he misses and it falls somewhere in between the fridge and the cabinet. “Fuck, I am so sorry. I need to get better aim.”

 “It’s okay, I suck at catching anyways.” You start rooting around on the floor, blindly searching for the keys before finally fishing them up. God, even the crack in between his fridge was spotless. What does he do, move the fridge to clean it once a week? Probably. Oh lord, how you pray he doesn’t make you clean that much.

 “Hey, if you want I can go with. I have a car anyway, so it’ll help make the move easier.”

 “You have a car?”

 “Yeah?”

 “You live right by the station though! Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just take the subway to work every day?”

 “Probably, but I enjoy having a car. It’s nice to be able to just go when I want to go without relying on some form of public transportation. So, what do you say? Want me to come with?”

 You fiddle with the key in your hand for a moment. “I don’t want to interrupt any plans you have.”

 “Nah, I was just planning on cleaning and shopping today so no worries about that.” You blink up at Kihyun, twirling the key around before finally nodding.

 “'Kay. Well, let me just take a shower first and then we can head out.”

——————-

 The drive to your apartment…former apartment…has your stomach in knots. Anxiety has consumed you and twisted you into a nervous mess. You probably should have texted the idiot but fuck it, who cares if you’re ruining his plans? He can deal with your intrusion and kiss your ass if he doesn’t like it. Oh god, oh god what are you going to do?

 “Hey, calm down. It’s going to be okay.” Kihyun gives a small pat to your head and you fight off tears at the soothing touch. To think Yoo Kihyun would be of comfort to you. The world is a cruel, sad, obscure shit show of a place.

 Your hands tremble for just a second as he pulls into a parking spot in front of your apartment before your willing yourself to move. It’ll be fine, it’ll be totally fine. After all, what more could possibly go wrong? You take a deep breath as you stand in front of the door of the apartment and knock rather timidly before Kihyun just gives one sharp wrap after you. The two of you wait in silence for a minute before Kihyun’s impatience gets the better of him and he tries the door handle. “You brought your keys right?”

 “Yeah, give me a second.” You fish around the bottom of your purse through a sea of papers, loose lipglosses that fell out of your makeup bag ages ago, and a handful of pens you’ve swiped from the office before you finally find your keys. You look up to see Kihyun staring at your purse dubiously before you shrug and open up your apartment. The first thing you notice is the two sets of shoes sitting at the entrance. One of the shoes you recognize as the idiots. The second set is clearly a female’s with ridiculously small feet and a penchant for pain judging by the wafer-thin stilleto. You’re not sure what hits you first whether it’s nausea or rage but it’s clear that animosity takes a hold of you the most once you start moving again.

 You step through the apartment swiftly, the sound of the idiot and the unknown woman are drowned out by the blood rushing through your ears as you kick open the bedroom door. She’s pretty and young and she’s also the intern you’ve met at his company Christmas party last year. “Really? Really? This bitch?” Your voice comes lashing out in thick dark waves growing in decibel.

 “What the fuck? What are you doing here?” The idiot is scrambling under the bed sheets, the girl is staring at you with terrified doe eyes.

 “Picking up my shit you nit-wit!” Kihyun rounds the corner at this exact moment, a low whistle coming out as he takes in the sight.

 “You were fucking someone else?” Matt, no wait the cheating idiot (he no longer deserves a name), has the audacity to bawk at the sight of Kihyun and it’s around that time that you almost black out in rage.

 “You think you have the right to say that to me? I never fucking cheated unlike you, he’s my friend you lying sack of shit!” You throw the painfully expensive flat screen onto the floor before going through his closet and grabbing a fist full of ties that you toss into the toilet. In the midst of all your chaos, everyone is standing (well Kihyun is standing the two idiots are still laying in bed) stock still when you stand back in the center of the room panting. “Fucking help me Kihyun!”

 “Right!” Kihyun looks around the room before dashing out to the living room where you hear multiple loud crashes that sound suspiciously like the breaking of electronics and glass followed by a few manic cackles.

 “Kihyun, I meant grabbing my boxes!”

 “WHAT?” You hear his footsteps before he turns back into the room, she who will not be named and the cheating idiot are still unmoving in a state of shock as you hand Kihyun two of the boxes you found in the closet.

 “What did you do with all of my makeup?” The idiot points to a box sitting by the bathroom door that you swiftly grab before adding that he hasn’t had time to pack up any of your books. He watches nervously as the two of you make trips back and forth to the front door with more boxes until you’ve gathered just about everything. She who will not be named tries to slink into the bathroom as you grab the last box.

 “And you! You can do so much better than this cheating sack of shit! Don’t waste your time on him. And you, you complete fucking moron,” You turn on your heal to see the idiot shrinking under the blankets like a small child trying to hide from the monster in the closet “it’s not fucking normal to cum that fucking fast all the time! That’s right, for six years I fucking lied because I’m a nice fucking person but let me tell you cumming after entering is only normal for fucking virgins!” With that, you stomp out of the apartment with Kihyun chasing after you.

 The two of you organize everything in the trunk before making a drive back that’s nearly silent with the exception being Kihyun humming. Normally his humming at the office makes you want to strangle him, but for once it’s nice. There’s no pressure to discuss any of whatever it was that just transpired back there, and it’s almost soothing to listen to his voice melt with the road noise. It takes a minute to register that you’ve finally parked, both of you still sitting in the car without a word.

 “Um, Kihyun, thanks…you know for helping. Also, good work on destroying the x-box and coffee table.”

 “The coffee table was an accident. I told you, I have bad aim. You don’t think he’s going to call the cops on us, do you?”

 “Nah. He’s a lot of things, but not a narc.”

 “Oh thank god. I got all caught up in the moment, it was just so addictive!”

 “You wanted to clean everything up right after didn’t you?”

 “…yes…”

 “You need help.” You shoot a smile at Kihyun, ruffling his hair before stepping out of the car to grab your boxes. Had you stayed a moment longer you might have seen his lips twitch into a grin as his hands touched his hair.

————-

 The weekend was spent with you unpacking the necessities and watching Netflix with Kihyun. There’s a lot that you’ve learned about him over the two days. For one, he sings constantly. And you wouldn’t complain about it if it weren’t for the fact that it gets stuck in your head every damn time. Another thing that you’ve learned is that he cleans constantly while grumbling the entire time. He’s also a damn good cook. And you’re happy to say that unlike at work, he’s pretty chill at home. He’s not constantly bragging or boasting, and he’s a bit of a couch potato like you. He’s also kind enough to not bring up the breakup for the rest of the weekend, and when you break down randomly he just hands you random sweets and a blanket. You’re pretty sure you’ve wiped out his entire candy stash at this point.

 By the time Monday rolls back around you’re actually excited to get to work, something mundane and normal. As you settle into your cubicle with a fresh cup of coffee Minhyuk is swiftly spinning his chair over to you. “How was your weekend?”

 My entire life is falling apart. The man I thought I was going to marry not only broke up with me but he was also cheating on me. Oh and I now have to live with Yoo fucking Kihyun and I’m actually starting to think he’s not that bad of a roommate. What little bit of sanity I have is being glued together by coffee. “Boring.” There you go, a lie is so much easier to spit out. Also, you won’t be chucked in a looney bin.

“Same. Oh, but man listen to this. So Wonho and I went out to that new gay bar and we scored like 10 free drinks from this totally cool bear because Wonho took off his shirt. You should come with us the next time we go out! Oh and get this-” You glaze over, nodding randomly as Minhyuk continues to speak a million words a minute before Shownu finally comes out of his office to politely remind Minhyuk that he has three different projects he’s behind on.

—————————————-

The rest of the week tends to amble on much the same way as Monday, monotonous and tedious. And you’re starting to itch with each repetitive conversation. You need something different, you need something to change. Granted, you’ve had a lot of change in the last week. But it’s opened up your eyes to something, the realization that you were just living for the sake of living. Wake up, shower, eat, brush your teeth, go to work, commute home, watch TV, go to sleep. Really what was even the point anymore? You’re beyond apathetic. Too old for this emo shit, too cynical to fall for the hippie-dippie idea of just ‘do what you love.’ Now you’re stuck somewhere in between. Rather lost and craving something, anything, to make you feel alive again. As long as that anything won’t be too expensive. Or too dangerous. Or too annoying. Or too physically exhausting. Which is exactly why when the entire team went out for drinks on Friday you decided to join for once.

You should have known that it was a terrible idea from previous horror stories Hyungwon has told you. He comes solely to watch the world burn as his coworkers all turn into drunk mutants. Everything had seemed fine until you reached the second bar of the night. At this point, Jooheon is speaking only in English and is constantly trying to find ways to rhyme orange. Wonho has lost his shirt or tore it on the dance floor, you aren’t really sure what exactly happened. Minhyuk has been dancing on a column as if it’s a pole and Hyungwon has been discretely pocketing the money that keeps being randomly thrown in Minhyuk’s general direction. Shownu has been in various competitions with strangers, all of them varying in degrees of physical difficulty including the longest headstands that promptly got you kicked out and sent to the third bar.

You’ve lost Changkyun somewhere in the madness, and you’ve been screaming for him as if he’s your lost child until you finally find him hitting on a poster (you’d like to add that the poster was of some foreign film with no people in it) with only one shoe on. Wonho is now clinging onto Kihyun as he sobs about ramen with so much strength you’re afraid Kihyun might not be getting any air. Jooheon has been playing Gucci Gang on repeat while Minhyuk has been trying to blast The Internet over it until the noises have morphed together into some unintelligible and painful to listen to concoction. Hyungwon has somehow found his way behind the bar and is now making drinks for people, none of the other bartenders have noticed that he’s infiltrated yet.

You have a raging headache and your feet are in blisters from all the running around you did to find Changkyun. You feel vaguely out of body as you begin to start screaming for everyone to stop at around the time that Minhyuk starts trying to give lap dances. (You have to admit, he was in the wrong career field. Boy could make a killing off of being a stripper.) Unfortunately, all of them are too far gone to pay attention with the exception of the also painfully sober Kihyun who looks like he’s going to stab Wonho if he doesn’t let go of him.

It just takes Kihyun mouthing ‘help me’ for you to finally make your break. “This rounds on me guys!” You slam down a couple of twenties and use the diversion to grab Kihyun and run out of the bar. Sweet, sweet freedom is obtained at last.

“Thank you! Oh my god, I thought that Wonho was going to smother me!”

“You know, a lot of gals and guys would die happily that way. So, where to now? Do you just want to go home?” You start looking around for some cabs as you speak, wandering down the street slowly now that you’re far enough away from the bar to not be caught.

“Eh, I mean, the night is still young. Besides, I was too afraid to join their league of mutiny to even drink. I know this bar right across from my place. We’re just a couple of blocks away from it right now. What do you say?”

The blisters on your feet say no. The thought of possibly convincing Kihyun to do a couple of shots has you saying, “Sure, why not?” Perhaps you could get him drunk enough to give you an arsenal of secrets to use at your disposal. Then again, you’ve both survived war this evening so by the time you’re finally sitting at the bar with a strong cranberry vodka in your hand you decide to give him a break. (You will never, ever tell Minhyuk and Hyungwon know of this momentary lapse of kindness though.)

“I’d like to lie to you and say that the guys aren’t always this way when we all go out, but…honestly, I’ve seen things get even crazier. It was really nice though to not be the only sober-”

“Kihyun?” Both of you switch your attention over to the woman staring at Kihyun. You see a flash of shock morph into a bitter rage as his jaw clenches. You’d bet your measly savings that the girl was an ex. And a bitch. But the last part is personal conjecture. You want to blame the alcohol for what you do next, but you don’t have enough liqueur in you for it to be the real cause.

“Kihyun, baby, who’s this?” You wrap your arm around Kihyun’s shoulder and give a pointed glare at the other woman.

“Baby? You’ve already moved on? It’s only been, like, three fucking weeks.”

“Well, at least I didn’t move on by cheating on you with my roommate.” Kihyun’s words are angry, and suddenly things start falling into place. That’s why he needed a roommate. That’s why he had been so good at comforting you. That’s why a few weeks ago for the first time he had been late. (Not that you pay that close of attention to him. Nope. You just so happened to notice, and you just so happened to remember.)

“Wow. Wow. You’re such a-”

“I’d step off bitch before I break this glass over your head. Come on baby, let’s go home.” You tug on Kihyun’s hand and leave the bar with her still shouting insults at the two of you. You make the trek back to the apartment in silence, and it isn’t until you actually step through the doors that you realize you’re still holding hands. “Um, sorry about that. I know I just kind of inserted myself in there, but I mean…I get how it feels. We’ve…been through basically the same thing at around the same time. And I just-”

“Thank you.” Kihyun ruffles your hair before suddenly stopping and stepping in closer to you. “I…” His words die out, choked up in his throat with emotions you can’t quite pinpoint swirling just beneath the surface.

“No worries, that’s what friends do right?” You’re not sure if you’re saying that to him or more as a reminder to yourself. He’s just a friend. Right? Right?? His face almost seems to fall for a moment, but it must have been your imagination because suddenly he’s smiling and nodding back at you. Awkward silence ensues and you’re not sure why but you feel a need to break the moment by pulling him into a tight hug and then stepping back. “You know, if you ever want to talk to me about anything, I’m here for you.”

Kihyun nods silently again and gives another small pat to the top of your head before he takes off for his room. Well, that was odd. Then again, that was probably the most normal thing you’ve witnessed all night. Note to self, never go out with the guys ever again.

——————————

Months go by and you’ve fallen into a comfortable routine at Kihyun’s. At first, you tried looking for other places, but rent in the city is painfully expensive and well if you’re honest…living with Kihyun isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s wonderful. And much to Minhyuk and Hyungwon’s dissatisfaction, your new friendship with Kihyun has stopped you from pulling as many pranks on the office hamster. It’s not that you don’t still, it’s just that you’re not out for blood anymore.

You’ve learned a lot about Kihyun. About the type of music he listens to. About how he’s a perfectionist even when he plays games. And how his skin care routine is at an almost religious level. And how when he cleans he mutters the entire time to himself until you join in. And how he’s a dog enthusiast who melts any time there’s one nearby. But there’s still one thing you don’t know much about and for some reason, it constantly plays in the back of your head. Why did that girl cheat on him? How could she not see how good of a guy Kihyun is? And why isn’t he trying to get back out there? A catch like him doesn’t come around every dynasty.

You’ve come to understand why your relationship with the idiot failed. You know that he was horribly wrong for cheating and that he should have left and just said he wasn’t happy a long time ago. But you’ve also come to the conclusion that you hadn’t been working on your own happiness in the relationship enough. You had just at some point stopped trying at almost everything. But Kihyun? Well, he’s certainly not that type. Sure he goes between being either really hard on himself or thinking too highly of himself, but he’s got a heart of gold. He knows his worth, and he treats women like queens. (At least if his interactions with his mother over the phone are anything to go by.)

You’re pulled back out of your thoughts by Kihyun walking back into the apartment and the smell of food wafting over. “Ooh, takeout! Did you get me anything?”

“At first I was going to torture you and get something for just myself, but then I realized that my meal would be ruined by you complaining loudly the entire time. I got you some curry.”

“Awesome, thanks babe!” Both you and Kihyun freeze at the nickname. Perhaps you’ve gotten too comfortable once again. Yep, that’s all this is. An innocent mistake caused by being comfortable. Yup. Nothing to see here folks. Nothing at all. “Uhh, I’m not sure why I said that…I’m uh…”

“Nah it’s uh, it’s all good. Babe.” Kihyun cackles loudly before you see him disappear below the kitchen counter. You’ve noticed that when he’s embarrassed he just kind of…runs out of eyesight. It’s endearing, but right now you’re too mortified by your slip of the tongue to even laugh with him. Babe? Really, babe? God, you needed to get out there before you start seeing Kihyun as a possible interest. Nope, never ever going to happen. Absolutely not. It was just a mistake. It meant absolutely nothing.

Dinner goes by quietly after that, the two of you making awkward small talk while pretending to pay attention to some show in the background. By the time dinner is over you’re taking a deep breath and finally setting up a tinder account. Clearly, you need to start moving on, doing something more with your life. You deserve better than that shit show of an ex, and you also deserve some fun. Life has become too routine, and you refuse to turn into a spinster cat lady with a hamster as a roommate.

——————————

A week later and you’re meeting up with a guy you met on tinder, praying you aren’t going to get murdered by some psycho. You’ve never used dating apps, and while you were kind of leery about the situation the conversations you’ve had with him have seemed pretty normal. Albeit boring, but you were never the best at making small talk so you’ll take some of the blame for that. He’s good-looking, you’ll give him that. But as the night wears on it becomes painfully apparent that that’s all he is. He’s good looking and he’s got a stable job, but the best way to describe his personality is monotone.

“Yes, so anyway, enough about the bank. What is it that you do again?” You take a large gulp of your wine before speaking, and you don’t miss the way he cocks his eyebrow as if to say ‘are you really going to drink like that?’

“Oh, nothing special. I’m an accountant for a salon and spa software company.”

“Does that make good money? If you’re an accountant we could actually use someone like you on our team and I’m sure it would be better pay…” Blah blah blah, your eyes glaze over as he keeps talking. What’s this guys name again? God, you can’t even remember. You forgot after six years of being with the same guy how boring dates could be. Well, to call all dates boring isn’t exactly fair. You’re sure that not every guy would be this boring, or hell, turn into some sort of weird job offer. Kihyun would be a lot more interesting. You’d probably be out doing shots and karaoke by now. Or maybe you’d go to a cooking class with him. Or you might be out at that fried chicken place he swears is heavenly. Or maybe he’d be animatedly discussing the best cleaning products with you. Okay, so that would suck, but you’re pretty sure he would never discuss that on a date. Unless it was with a maid or cleaning lady. Wait, why are you thinking about Kihyun right now? Oh…oh fuck. Fuck almighty, you like Kihyun.

You try to pay attention to the one-sided conversation, but really he’s so busy talking about himself he doesn’t even notice you zoning out. How long have you liked Kihyun? Probably longer than you care to admit. Maybe the first time you met him. Maybe that’s why you always found a way to poke fun at him. You always were shit at being honest with yourself. How pathetic though. You keep saying you’ve grown after a terrible six-year relationship, but you’re still just as pathetic at being honest with your own emotions. Blunt sure, but honest? Well…honesty requires vulnerability and courage. A potent mixture that you can barely handle. And that’s why you stayed around some dude you weren’t that interested in. But what about now? Will you be honest? Will you go for it?

You grab your phone as it buzzes, just some app unfortunately and not a getaway ticket. But your date doesn’t know that. “I’m so sorry, but it looks like my cat just went into labor and I think she really needs my support.” You pull out some cash and slap it on the table before he can respond and try your best to run out of there. You’re pretty sure he’s saying something to you as you leave, but you’re moving too quickly to hear him for long. Cat going into labor? And she needs your support? Jesus, you need to get better at lying.

By the time you’ve finally reached your apartment, you’re in near hysterical giggles. Of all the things you could have said to get away from the date, I mean that’ll go down in history as the strangest lie you’ve said. It’s at least entertaining enough to keep the sinking realization that you like Kihyun at bay. Until you finally step foot in the apartment and come face to face with him that is. He’s lounging on the couch, reading a book. His hair is still slightly damp from a shower and the scent of his body wash lingers in the air.

“Oh hey, I was going to…” Kihyun looks up and stops speaking as he analyzes you. His jaw tightens slightly before he gulps and continues speaking, “I was going to ask you to pick up some food but I wasn’t sure what you were doing.”

“Trying to flee a really awful date actually.” You fling yourself onto the chair next to him and kick up your feet on the coffee table, ignoring the look of disdain he gives you at your action.

“That bad?” You don’t miss the way his words sound a little clipped, slightly agitated.

“Bad enough that I told him my cat went into labor and then ran away.” You can’t help but join him as he starts to laugh, his annoyance melting away. It feels so nice to be home with him. It feels so normal and so right. But it kind of hurts, your heartaches and stomach drops as you gaze fondly at him. Kihyun has been such a good guy to you, and you’re pining after him. And you didn’t even notice it until you went out with some schmuck from tinder. How lame could you get?

“How bad could the date possibly have been that you went with that half-baked lie?” He wasn’t you. It’s just that simple, that’s why I gave him that half-baked lie.

“Well, …he was a banker. I think that’s enough said, right? At least he wasn’t a lawyer though. You know the weirdest part about the date though was that all he did was talk about work, and when I explained that I work in accounting he tried to offer me a job. It felt more like I was at an interview than a date. And here I thought tinder was for random flings.” You hate the way your heart flutters at the smile he sends your way as he ruffles your hair in consolation for your bad date. You hate the way that his touch feels so right, so natural. But you mostly hate the way that you can’t stop dwelling on it and how you know that you’re being a coward by not coming clean. But what exactly were you supposed to say? Hey Kihyun, being roommates isn’t enough anymore I’d like to hold your hand and tell you that you’re super cute and maybe screw your brains out? Yeah, probably not going to go down well. Both of you just got out of relationships. You work together. You live together. The last thing you need is to make things awkward.

At the same time though, you know you like him. You’re both grown adults. If things don’t work out then you’ll move on. But if you just allow these feelings to keep festering it’ll become unbearable. So you take in a deep breath and you finally say it before you can chicken out. “You know, Kihyun that isn’t actually the real reason why I left the date though. I mean, I’ve been on worse ones I could’ve stuck it out till the end but I didn’t exactly give him a fair chance. You see, I kind of already like someone.” You can’t make eye contact with him as you speak, but you can hear him shift on the couch presumably to move closer to you. It’s now or never. “Maybe I’m a complete idiot to not realize it sooner, but the entire time I was on that date I kept comparing him to you. And I kept thinking about what we would’ve done on a date, and how you wouldn’t have taken me to some pretentious French place only to talk my ear off about something as lame as work. And how you definitely would’ve called me out for saying some lame excuse. And I…”

“You like me?” You’re staring pointedly at the ground, still too afraid to look up. Your bravery can only go so far, and actually seeing his reaction might just kill what little of your fragile ego you have left in you. “You…like…me?”  There’s a pregnant pause before you suddenly see him in your line of vision, crouched down in front of you and his hands cup your cheeks gently. “You don’t know how happy that makes me. I really really like you (y/n). I mean I think I have from the moment you first sassed off to me. I actually got into a fight with my ex once because when I first started working with you I kept talking about you.”

“What? You didn’t hate me? I was a total bitch to you!” God, what kind of masochistic shit is this? You always knew he had a few screws loose, but I mean, is this his version of some kind of a sick joke? You’re pretty sure it’s not based on his expression. He’s looking at you so fondly, so happily. It’s the same face he makes when he sees dogs, pure joy.

“Well, sure. But it was funny the way how everything I did set you off. And it was awesome how you didn’t back down. I mean you never took my shit, you always threw it back at me. But it was never malicious. It was always very honest. Blunt and to the point. I think the thing I appreciate most about you is that you always say what’s on your mind. I don’t have to guess with you, you just come right out and say it. And it’s refreshing. And then when we moved in and I started to see the softer sides of you I knew I was a goner. I knew you had me wrapped around your little finger. I’ve just been hoping that maybe, somehow, you’d like me as much as I like you.” Silence fills the room, but it’s not uncomfortable. The two of you are just gazing at each other, basking in warm serenity.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Kiss me already you fool.” You love the way he laughs, it sets off butterflies in a frenzy before he finally pulls you into a soft kiss. His beauty routine clearly extends to exfoliating his lips because wow, they’re so soft. So perfect, so warm. At first, it’s feather light, but when your hands cup his face it moves into something deeper. His tongue swipes your lower lip and you taste a hint of peach as they tangle together.  His hands weave into your hair and push the two of you closer until finally, you fall in a pile of tangled limbs on the floor, both of you refuse to break the kiss as hands roam each other in a greedy frenzy before he finally pulls back slightly sheepish.

“Sorry, I got a little carried away there. I guess before I do anything else I should probably officially ask you to be my girlfriend shouldn’t I?”

“God, you’re such a dork. But I guess you’re my dork now aren’t you?” Your breath hitches slightly at the grin he gives you as he moves your hair out of your face gently. He’s so beautiful. His cute little mole, flawless skin, sharp jawline. You trace over his features silently as your brain tries to wrap around everything. He’s yours. You're his. And it just feels right. If a few months ago someone would’ve told you that you’d be hopelessly in love with the office hamster you would’ve laughed in their face. But the world works in mysterious ways, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s a lot of ways that you’d describe Yoo Kihyun. An insufferable nag. Confident. Handsome. Great singer. Pretty good cook. A bit of a Napoleon complex. Ridiculously kind. A total softy. A fantastic kisser. The love of your life. Yeah, that’s Yoo Kihyun for you.

——————

A/N: I know the ending is kind of rushed, sorry about that. I’ve actually had this in my WIPs for a couple of months now and I just really wanted to share it. I hope that you enjoyed it! This was a lot of fun to write.

[hailsuzalulu]

The Cute Quirk Analyst

I took way too long to get anything at all out and I want to apologize to my Giftee @rvkiakuchiki, for having to deal with the fact that I am a horrible Santa. I’m hoping to make this a several parter because everything in life just seems to hate me. But so far this is what I have and I’m planning to update every chance I get the time

I am so so so so sorry for posting so late, but I hope you enjoy what I have.

“ I swear to god round-face, if you ask again about that damn secret santa i’m going to blast you sky high and not wait for you to float your ass down.” Bakugo growled, sending a signature glare to the shorter girl walking by his side.

“Don’t be such a stick in the mud Blasty, it’s a holiday tradition! There’s just something thrilling about not knowing who’s going to give you a present, it’s fun to see what people think about you.” Uraraka teased, jabbing her partner in the side with her elbow. Her grin could only be described as shit eating, to think she used to be the sweetest person that he knew. Being partners since UA really had changed her, maturing her from someone who was polite to everyone and overly bubbly, to someone who wasn’t afraid to throw sass and get tough when she needed to.

Bakugo huffed at the jab, focusing his attention on the scenery below him. People hustled around the streets, buying gifts for the holidays and going on window shopping dates. Snow slowly fell, a flake showing itself here or there. Ground Zero eyed the alley ways that were sure to be littered with villains just waiting for something sparkly to cross their paths. And today was their lucky day. A scream emanated from across the street where a jewelry store was getting robbed. The villain dashed out of the door, knocking people over as he ran down the street. A wicked grin spread across Bakugo’s face, the two heros shared a glance before taking of into action, jumping from roof to roof of the buildings, watching the movements of the villain. He was clearly an amature, his movements through the streets and alleyways were erratic, like he was making up where he ran on the fly. Ground Zero and Uravity followed him closely, hoping to trap him before he hurt anyone. They had practiced this maneuver several times, chasing low time villains throughout the abandoned alleyways until they reached a dead end. It minimized fighting, damage, and the possibility of civilians getting caught in the fray. He fell for it easily, skidding to a stop when Bakugo chased him to a wall, effectively trapping the villain.

“Geez, and I was really hoping for a real fight today.” Ground Zero spoke as he approached the villain, cracking his knuckles as he prepared to take the guy in. Uravity floated down beside him from the rooftop.

“Don’t be mean Zero.” Uravity sighed. If she was being honest she hoped for a fight too, but if that wasn’t the case then it meant far less paperwork, and that she was fine with.  The villain took steps back as the heroes approached, the bag on his side jingling with the stolen jewelry. He was sweating buckets as the heroes came closer, distressed and cornered, he backed himself into the wall and then he froze. Now he had only one option, the one any cornered animal would use.

“Look out, he’s about to use his quirk.” A voice came over their coms, one that neither hero had heard before.

“Who the fuck-” Ground Zero began to ask, before he was cut off by being pulled violently toward the villain by his gauntlets. Instantly Bakugo set off explosions, splitting from the guy’s hold.

“His quirk is Magnetism. He can attract the metal in your gear.” The voice spoke again through the coms.

“Zero!” Uravity yelled as the guy pulled her towards him, her belt buckle the source of the magnetism, Bakugo leaped into action before she could fall into his hold, shooting forward with an explosion. He reared back to aim a punch at the villain, before getting stopped by the villain’s quirk. The metal of his gear was held in place by the magnet, stopping Bakugo from moving away to toward the villain.

“Ground Zero, distract him somehow. It’ll stop his quirk.” The voice said in his ear again. Bakugo let out a growl.

“I dunno who the fuck you are but you damn well better not be wrong about this.” He was out of options, not being able to move his body to attack left him with few options, the person on the other end of the communicator voicing the best option that came to mind. Ground Zero let off a loud explosion, catching the villain’s attention enough to break his concentration and let his quirk’s grip loose. Uravity used the chance to punch the villain and put him in cuffs. She stood up, the villain lying on the ground below her, and let out a relieved sigh. The heroes pulled the man to his feet, leading him down the alley towards the police sirens going off in the distance. After dealing with turning the villain into the police, the hero’s checked the time to realize their patrol shift was up. They both headed back to the agency, and unfortunately, had paperwork waiting for them both.

“Hey Bakubro, are you ready for the secret santa?” Kirishima asked, leaning his body weight against the hero sitting at his desk. Bakugo straightened his posture under the weight of who he could only call his best friend.

“I’m not doing it.” He grumbled, reading over his progress on the report before sighing and turning in his chair to face Kirishima, he needed a break anyways.

“How come? You gotta do it, it’s part of the holiday fun!” Kirishima exclaimed, his smile blinding.

“Because I don’t want to.” Bakugo responded nonchalantly. He reached back to pick up the coffee cup from his desk, a plain white mug with the words ‘Fuck off’ on the bottom, displaying his mood to any bitch that watched him take a sip. Bakugo downed the rest of the caffeinated liquid, scowling at the taste of cold coffee.

“Strange, I thought Uraraka told me that you were doing the secret santa this year.” Kirishima muttered, scratching the back of his head.

Bakugo’s back cracked as he stood and stretched, moving his head side to side to pop his stiff neck as well. “I need more coffee.” He groaned, heading for the employee lounge to make another cup. Hopefully one more would be enough to get him through the day.

“You should probably get something else man, that much caffeine will keep you up all night.” Kirishima insisted, following Bakugo through the office. It was late already, maybe an hour and a half before everyone started to go home. The sun outside the large office windows was close to beginning to set, the sky a nice yellow color.

Bakugo responded with a grunt, knowing that Kirishima was right, but he was too tired to care. Who would have thought that paperwork could make someone so tired, way more tired than the several small time villains he took down over the day. There weren’t even any damages or casualties for any of them! If that was the case the paperwork and reports would have doubled, maybe tripled in size. No one ever told him in UA that being a hero required so much awful desk work.

Tiredly Bakugo took the kettle off the stove and filled it with water, setting it back on the burner, he turned of the flames and leaned against the counter to wait for the shitting thing to go off. Damn office didn’t even have the good kind of coffee, not even a coffee maker, just that instant crap along with shitty powdered creamer. It was annoying, such a high time hero agency didn’t even spend the little bit of extra money on a fucking coffee maker? Fucking cheapskates. To the side he could hear Kirishima digging in the fridge for something, probably a snack that he brought that someone had taken or moved without his permission.

“Oh, Bakugo there you are!” A bubbly voice broke the mild silence in the room.

“What do you want 3D printer?” Bakugo asked, greeting Yaoyorozu as she walked into the room. She didn’t even react to the nickname, used to what Bakugo called everyone at this point.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere! You need to pick your person for the secret santa.” She explained, a basket with folded pieces of paper in it.

“I’m not doing it.” Was his simple answer. The kettle began to scream, signaling the boiling of the water. Bakugo turned off the burner and poured the hot water into his mug, reaching for the coffee powder on the shelf above.

“Your name is in the drawing.” Yaoyorozu pointed out, holding the basket out to Bakugo.

“I didn’t put it in.” He growled, beginning to get pissed at how much people were asking him about this fucking event. Then it clicked, “Fucking round face.” Bakugo sighed and turned back to Momo. “I’m dropping out then.”

“You can’t, then that leaves someone without a gift.” Momo pushed the basket closer to Bakugo’s chest. “ Just do it Bakugo?” She pleaded, giving a small smile in hopes that it would get the temperamental hero in front of her to give in.

“Do it man! It’s fun!” Kirishima encouraged, holding up his own slip of paper between two fingers.

“Fine! I’ll fucking do it. A gift card should work just fine for anyone right.” Bakugo grumbled, shoving his hand into the basket and pulling out the first slip of paper he grabbed. Unfolding the slip revealed the name “Who the hell is Izuku Midoriya?”

“T-That would be me.” A small voice stuttered from the doorway, a mass of green hair and star like freckles making its mark on everyone in the room. Mostly Bakugo, because damn was he cute. Fuck! No! Stop thinking like that! You don’t even know him!

Uraraka peeked from behind the other, her face like the cat who caught the mouse. And Bakugo was the mouse, because he fell right into her clutches, and that pissed him off.

“When I get my hands on you, you’re gonna regret it.” He growled, but the threat was met by snickering from the bubble faced girl who knew she was won the fight for now.

“Oh c’mon Blasty. Put the aggression in your pocket and meet our new team member!” She exclaimed, patting the nervous looking man on the back.

“H-Hi.” Midoriya stuttered, smiling nervously and giving a little wave.

“He’s a quirk analyst! He’s the one that warned us during that one fight.” Uraraka smiled, pulling Midoriya closer to her in a friendly side hug. Midoriya flushed at the contact, fiddling with the name tag that hung around his neck. Several pens and pencils were clipped to the lanyard, along with a few hero buttons, among them being All Might, Ingenium, Froppy, and Ground Zero. This guy was a nerd wasn’t he. Bakugo turned to finish making his coffee, scowling at the water in his mug that had cooled significantly by this point. He glanced at the jar of coffee powder in his hand and finally decided against it, putting the jar back and instead grabbing some green tea. Cooling tea at least tasted better than cooling coffee, that shit just tasted nasty.

“What’s a quirk analyst?” Kirishima asked, confusion written all over his face.

“It’s someone who analyzes quirks and figures out how they work. Most of the time people in the profession have analyzing quirks that can help them better understand what’s going on in a person’s body when they use their quirks. I’ve actually been very eager to learn more about all of your quirks, more than I already have that is.” Midoriya explained, still playing with his name tag. He seemed a bit less nervous now, good, people who were constantly nervous got annoying real fast.

Bakugo took a sip of his tea, throwing out the used tea bag. Thank god the water was still warm, anything as disappointing as cold tea would throw off his already teetering mood even more.

“More than you already have?” Momo asked, setting the basket of names on the table and taking a seat in one of the uncomfortable chairs.

“Um, I’ve kinda already studied them quite a lot. I watch several news feeds and just about any footage of uses of your quirks that I can find and then I figure out whatever I can from those bits of information. I know the basics at least of how your quirks work.” Midoriya muttered in response.

“Oh! Oh! Do me! What do you know about me?” Kirishima jumped at the chance to see what Midoriya knew about him. Damn eager idiot.

“Let me see…” Midoriya trailed off, reaching behind him and pulling a worn notebook from his back pocket. He quickly flipped through the pages until he found the one titled “Red Riot, Quirk: Hardening. You can harden your body to withstand almost any attack, and very few singular attacks have knocked you off your feet in that state let alone got the chance to harm you. Prolonged use of your quirk weakens your ability to use it, and over time of taking multiple hard hits it will begin to fail. Your body becomes very sharp when you use your quirk and that itself can be used a weapon. Hand to hand combat has been growing better and better since UA and by now you’re a very hard hitter that can be useful in both defense, rescue, and attack positions as a hero.” Midoriya read off, drifting into a bit of a muttering state.

“Wow, you really do know your stuff!” Kirishima said, amazed at just how much this guy knew about his quirk.

“It’s not really much, I just observe what I can and write down what I see.” He flushed, closing the notebook and shoving it back into his back pocket. “ I hope that I can help all of you, especially when it comes to villains. Thank you for allowing me to work with you all.” Midoriya bowed, smiling before taking his leave.

“He seems cool.” Kirishima commented enthusiastically

“Seems like a nerd to me.” Bakugo retorted, taking another sip of his tea, using his other hand to rub his aching head.

“Well, you’re not wrong.” Uraraka interjected. “He’s so nice though, and super nice. You could learn a thing or two from him hot head.” She smirked. Her shitty bubbly face pissed him off, but he didn’t feel like doing anything about it now, he was way too tired.

“Shut up rosy cheeks.” Bakugo retorted, wanting nothing more than to be home right now. “I need to finish that last report, but mark my words, tomorrow I’m gonna kick your ass in sparring.” He passed a light glare at Uraraka as he passed her.

“Just try it Fireworks!” She called out the door toward Bakugo’s retreating form.

[rpbetter]

Hi Vespertine. Can you offer some advice on how to RP a character that a lot of people think I shouldn't be RPing? I've wanted to RP Hans Landa for years, I like how cunning he is and how he could react to other ideals, how he could grow, especially in modern settings where he would stick out a lot. But I'm afraid because of how people react to muses like him. How do I build up confidence? How do I keep RPing if people bother or threaten to report me? Would people even RP with me? Thank you.

Alright, first thing, I've apologized on the blog already, apologized to people before you, but like I keep saying: it's really important to specifically apologize to individuals when we do something lame like I have. I did not intend to leave the blog unattended for months, but I did. This is an important question, it's right up the alley of why I created this blog, and I left you hanging. I'm deeply sorry, and I hope that my serious delay did not cause you any further worries or to give up on your character/RP!

Okay, we can proceed now!

I'll confess, I seriously spaced on who Hans Landa was for a moment there, but quickly remembered upon Googling! He was an interesting character, and I love that movie! However, I definitely see why you're worried, Anon.

Up until the last decade, taking up a character who was villainous, yes, even a Nazi, was a mark of creative gumption. Almost everyone had a verse for their muse that today would get them anon hate, callouts, reported, and so on. You know what? We had far less drama then. So, I'm not at all in the camp of demonizing your choices, or anyone else's. I saw what worked for a more peaceful RPC for decades and I've seen what is a total nightmare on tumblr.

Unfortunately, it is a total nightmare. So, let's see what you might be looking at, what your options are.

Firstly, you have the right idea; this is a character that appeals to you creatively, and that's really all that should matter. You've got ideas, you want to see your muse grow and change through interactions, and that's very much what the whole RPC needs to be a little more interested in.

I think, based on that alone, you would find people who wanted to write with you. There are quite a few muns out there dying for more interesting interactions with muses who have been taken up because the other mun really wants to write and develop them. Especially in the multi-para and novella communities. It's a bit of bane over there, the way the majority of muses are picked purely to satisfy a fleeting interest in a fandom. They don't come across as the characters they are in canon, are never given the opportunity to develop uniquely, they just exist to fulfill the mun's intense interest that will be gone soon. That works wonderfully and happily for some, but there really are a lot of muns out there who are interested in different approaches.

I will also say that most longer multi-para and novella RPers are less supportive of callout culture and content policing. When the very way that you enjoy RP is easily considered problematic on the grounds that you take it too seriously because you're invested in it, you tend to be against labeling others and giving them a hard time. That portion of the RPC, additionally, tends to be made up of older adults. The RPC kind of despises anyone over 25 who is still RPing, and I think a decent part of that is...this. We don't usually go in on equating fiction to reality, thinking that muse=mun, or that "problematic" material needs to be driven into the darkest void for communal safety. A great deal of that is because we lived through multiple fandom experiences being obliterated by these sorts of ideas, we know this is all detrimental to the community, and are more interested in a live and let live mentality even if we are disturbed by someone's muse or writing topics.

You may wish to specifically seek out RPers who are serious veterans (around for 10+ years), multi-para to novella writers, and/or have things in their rules that imply toleration and support for dark topics, villain muses, etc. (I know I have it in my rules that minors shouldn't interact with this blog due both its content and my age, but I can't exactly verify that with an anonymous message! So, Anon, please be aware I am giving this advice as though you are legally an adult.) Seek out muns who have muses that could also be considered "problematic" or who interact with muses who could be.

Remain away from anyone participating in or supportive of callout culture and purity policing. I know that can be difficult and limiting, and it is also not a 100% safe bet that you will be avoiding problems, but at least you'll know right off that these are not your people. That includes the ever-present callouts that claim the poster "never does this," that the mun being called out is just that much of a danger, and/or those dealing in the major callout-laden muns in your corner of the community. You might agree that one or two of those muns is a legitimate problem, but it's too likely that these people are going to feel like you are too.

Know that you will, inevitably, be called worse than just a "villain apologist." I write a muse that I wanted to write for years as well, and refrained from writing for so long because of the fandom's ideas about them. However, I have never been so happy with any muse choice, it's worth it to me to have some random hatefulness sometimes. I know I'm not a horrible person, the people who matter to me on and offline know that I am not, it doesn't actually matter what someone on tumblr thinks. It doesn't matter what they think about you either, they don't know you and won't give you the opportunity to be known, so pfft to them!

It can still be a little disheartening to hear some of the especially hateful things. While my muse isn't like Hans, the comparison to that is often made. There are a lot of assumptions about my personal character, race, gender, political affiliation, and so on. I'm just going to say it: if you don't think you can handle someone randomly attacking you and labeling you as "actually a Nazi," a genocide supporter, school shooter, "white cishet republican," and so on, do not subject yourself to this. Just write with friends you know are on your side or write some fic where there is some distance and control.

I do not believe, after reviewing them again, that you would be violating tumblr's TOS by writing this muse. You would not be promoting racism, harm to others, or misleading information. Nor would you be harassing anyone. Does that mean no one will try to report you? No, unfortunately. I've gotten reported for politely disagreeing on a post and asking a question! The important thing is that nothing will happen.

I would still make it very clear that this character might be offensive to some. Seriously, I would say, "In the interest of sensitivity, please note that this muse might be offensive to some - do not interact if imagery or topics associated with historical Nazis will be triggering for you. Hans Landa is from the film 2009 Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds." Pop that into the top of a pinned post, your rules, and your blog's header statement.

Because even if tumblr wasn't a mess, it's still the most responsible thing to do to treat this sensitively. It is a sensitive matter! People should have every opportunity to be aware and make the best choice for them to interact or not.

People almost certainly will threaten to report and block. Particularly when you are still looking for writing partners and having to expose yourself to more of the community in order to do so. It'll get so much better when you start finding them, though, I promise! Once you find a good mun or two, you've kind of unlocked a pocket of potential. Those people who are more accepting, reasonable, and interested in writing and characters are naturally going to be interacting with other like-minded muns.

Finding a good base of partners might take you some time, but the good news is, the whole process will help you build up the confidence to keep writing. It helps you get in touch with both writing and the muse, what is really important to you as an RPer, and is what isn't. It feels shitty at the time, but in the end, it builds a lot of confidence in yourself, and when you pull confidence from within you, you're never totally without it again!

When you're looking for those people (I'd additionally suggest historical RPers, if there is any existent community for the movie still, and branching out to fandoms that have "problematic" characters in them that you could do crossovers with in modern settings etc.), you can still be writing and developing your muse. Write up headcanons, fleshout the character's backstory, make multiple verses so that you have many options ready to go, do some one-shots.

A great way to do that is to find memes or traditional writing questions specifically for character development, but don't wait for someone to ask you! Go down the meme/list, pick some questions that spark your interest, and base your HC posts on them. Answer questions you immediately have answers to, answer the really hard ones you have no clue about. You don't know until you develop it, after all!

It helps with confidence so much to feel confident about your writing and comfortable with the character. It'll also help non-judgemental RPers who come across your blog or want to follow you back to see your writing and interest in the muse. I know that there are muses I was not interested in from their canon, but seeing the mun's love for them and how they had uniquely developed them, I had to interact!

When you do receive the almost inevitable anon hate, I'm going to suggest something a bit radical here; the idea of not feeding the trolls doesn't always work. That's predicated upon people not already receiving a reward for sending that hate to you. You can't starve what has already eaten lunch! I've found that demonstrating that they're not getting to you is more effective, in all, incredibly controversial honesty.

Put in your rules that anon hate will be addressed only with something like...a gif of a rabbit, a random fact, or a link to a song you recommend. Then, you do exactly that. You get a message calling you derogatory things, but instead of deleting it or going off about it in a way they can just use, you respond with a picture of a bunny cleaning its ears. Block the anon after.

This, again, in all honesty, is a confidence booster. Sometimes, building confidence is about projecting it first. You are projecting an aura of non-hostile confidence that you're not any of those negative things in reality, nor is your life ruined by people who haven't anything better to do with their own lives than bother you as performative "activism" online. It's alright if it really does bother you at first! Eventually, it won't. Eventually, you'll be left in peace with the reasonable muns you've found.

You will find them! There are still muns out there who feel like the most important factors in RP are engaging muses and writing, and how the mun is truly conducting themselves. If that mun is a genuinely decent person who isn't starting problems, harassing people, forcing anything on anyone, that's what matters! Just put your muse out there in a thoughtful way around people who are interested in writing. Be respectful of the sensitive nature of the subject, tag liberally and correctly.

No matter what tumblr's RPC says, you do have the right to write any muse or topic you so desire. People also have the right to not interact, of course, but since you're concerned about it (and truly, the person who is most likely to be made uncomfortable on here), I highly doubt you'll be trying to force interactions or anything.

Unfortunately, when you write any, even vaguely, problematic muse here, you are held to higher standards. You are obliged to be ten times nicer in the face of hatefulness, to be more aware of tagging and other warnings, and so on. It's kind of a practice in acceptance, and it can be frustrating. Again, if the muse is worth it to you, it'll be fine. Just know that you'll need to not be reactive to nastiness, very responsible in how you present yourself in all ways, and that it still won't be enough for some people. And know that's alright as well! They're making a choice to be hostile without knowing you or employing the adult maturity to just not interact with you, not you.

I know it's very easy to say "don't let people get to you." Perhaps especially from someone who will openly say in the tumblr RPC in 2021 that it's 100% fine to write a Nazi muse lol but please know that my confidence was not naturally occurring. It was developed across years of nonsense, and much of it offline, in person. So, I'm not flippantly advising you to have a level of fortitude out of nowhere! I'm honestly telling you that it is a process, but I think that if you want something bad enough to stick to it through the hardest part of it, you kind of expedite that process. It makes it a bit easier if you're still enjoying yourself!

So, on that note, my additional advice is to have another muse or other hobby you can enjoy during the difficult patches, or even slow times before you establish a good group of writing partners. Do things that will keep you feeling positive and motivated to write. That looks different for everyone, but I'm certain you have something. If that does happen to be another muse, or muses, I would strongly suggest you keep it to yourself that you are the mun of this one until you get rolling. While you have exactly nothing to be ashamed of, don't tempt ruining your fun on the other blog(s) until you are established on the new one and confident about it.

If you ever need to vent or further advice, I'm not going to vanish or anything again! Drop by any time you need to, Anon. Sometimes it goes a long way knowing that even a single person out there supports you!

I hope this helped a little, and I do support you! I think you've got this!

[chelseyroseblog]

WHAT CAUSES INFLAMMATION IN THE BODY

Hi Hi Hi!

Okay so hear me out. I just got back from vaca and we all wondered about why we get bloated, why we get acne, why we can't lose weight as quickly as our friends, and why our knees hurt so damn bad right?

There's obviously different reasons for all this ish and a million different ways to go about fixing it but I feel like one thing that a lot of people are overlooking is INFLAMMATION. 

I mean, if you think about it...we talk about it almost on a daily basis on so many different levels. We've started using cryotherapy to reduce inflammation in our muscles, we use turmeric to reduce inflammation in the body, facial massage to reduce inflammation in the face, anti-inflammatory foods to reduce inflammation in our gut, yoga to reduce it..everywhere? And omega-3's to help with our heart health, brain function, and arthritis aka... inflammation. 

HOLY HELL RIGHT? It's EVERYWHERE. 

This is why I want to talk about it. OKAY SO. 

WHAT IIIIS INFLAMMATION??

Well, there's different levels of inflammation but in any case, inflammation is point blank... a defense mechanism within the body. So when anything is harming or irritating a part of our body, the body tries...key word "tries"... to remove it.

The cool thing about inflammation is that it is a healing process soo we wouldn't heal without it. The shitty thing is that it sometimes (okay, a lot of the time) it can stick around longer than we need it to, at which point it can turn into an annoying issue orrrrr chronic pain. AWESOME......

But we're ALL dealing with inflammation in some way, shape or form so let's talk about

WHAT CAUSES INFLAMMATION?

Ugh, I feel like everything under the effing sun is a cause of inflammation. Here's a few:

+ Certain Foods

+ Synthetic Chemicals

+ Food Additives

+ Viruses

+ Bacteria

+ Parasites

+ Stress

+ Lack of Sleep (my fav.....eye roll)

Things like a sore throat, a cut or a burn (I just got one in Montana when the oven door was about to slam shut and I decided to catch it with my forearm...cool cool cool) anyway... those kinds of things can cause ACUTE inflammation. 

Then there's other news called CHRONIC inflammation which means that inflammation occurs for months and even YEARS and it's caused by things like asthma, Crohn's Disease, arthritis, and ulcers...to name a few. 

BUT inflammation can go from acute to chronic if we don't take care of it so just a reminder to be on your game when it comes to little injuries or health issues ya know?

PS I don't want to skim over the foods that can cause inflammation so let's talk about it. 

Things such as:

- Sugar

- High Fructose Corn Syrup

- Artificial Trans Fats

- Vegetable and Seed Oils

- Refined Carbs

- Excessive amount of Alch

+ Processed Meats

etc.

This is why you may have heard of the ANTI-INFLAMMATORY DIET. Honestly, it's just a clean, normal diet. Get rid of eating an abundance of fast food and start eating healthy, clean, nutrient dense foods and obviously, you're going to feel better. 

We all know that food allergies and toxins and bacteria from foods can make us feel some type of way but WHAT is actually going on?

Well...because of these things...foods are actually able to create inflammation through our intestinal wall. If your body is sensible to certain foods then your body sees it like a foreign invader and starts attacking it which, causes that inflammation. 

So simply by reducing the intake of certain foods that our specific bodies don't agree with, we are able to start reducing inflammation. 

How STRESS causes inflammation:

Ugh, the more I learned about this, the more I hated it. I've always known stress is horrible for us which is why I try to avoid it AT ALL COSTS but this was a healthy reminder for me and hopefully you as to why everything stressful from an argument with our parents to psychological stress is capable of producing inflammation in the body. 

Stress actually produces a type of inflammation that has been shown to increase the risk of arthritis, cardiovascular disease and diabetes :( This is something that I talk to my clients about ALL THE TIME. 

Stress is a HUGE issue for our health and directly impacts our ability to lose weight. When were under psychological stress, our bodies releases stress hormones as part of the fight or flight response. So it's SUPPOSED to be helpful in certain situations and definitely can be BUT because so many of us are stressed all day, this fight or flight response never turns off. 

This equals CHRONIC STRESS which equals CHRONIC INFLAMMATION which is a MAJOR RISK FACTOR FOR CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE.

And then to top it off, too much stress releases cortisol levels which, according to a study in 2012 by Carnegie Mellon University, too much stress dampens cortisol's ability to REGULATE inflammation. So now we're creating inflammation and making it harder on ourselves to control it. 

How Health Problems Cause Inflammation:

Well for one, Obesity is not great for inflammation. And on top of that there's unhealthy eating which we touched on a little bit already. So just as a re cap... inflammation can be triggered by fat and blood sugar or by bacteria, allergies and other toxins. 

WHY IS INFLAMMATION BAD FOR OUR BODIES?

I mean, I feel we should know right? No more ignoring the signs and letting little things get worse or pushing things off like everything is okay. I don't want to scare you guys haha but I feel like this info will be useful to you now and in the long term.

1. Immune cells can attack the digestive tract and create Crohn's disease with symptoms such as well...diarrhea, cramps and ulcers. 

2. It can harm your joints such as the condition known as Rheumatoid Arthritis.

3. It's linked to heart disease aka HEART ATTACKS (You know how when you get a cut on your skin and then all those white blood cells rush over and it starts to become swollen? That's the same thing that starts to happen when there's a build up of fatty plaque in the arteries. It triggers chronic inflammation which can cause blood clots).

4. Whether you have inflammatory conditions due to obesity or a chronic condition, you're unfortunately at a higher risk for cancer. This includes lung, esophagus, cervix, digestive tract and others. 

5. It's no bueno for your lungs. Inflammation in the lungs = a narrowing of the airways which makes it difficult to breathe. This could be due to asthma, smoking and being overweight. 

6. It makes weight loss more difficult. Chronic inflammation can trigger hunger hormones AND SLOW METABOLISM. (WTF!)

Now we're eating more and burning less. Fantastic. This inflammatory response can also increase insulin resistance which raises your risk for diabetes and is linked with future weight gain. 

ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM INFLAMMATION??

Most of the time if we scan our bodies from head to toe, we can find signs or symptoms that are signals that something we are being exposed to must be removed. 

This could be:

+ Skin issues like acne, rashes, psoriasis.

+ Brain fog/Fatigue

+ Sinus Issues

+ Weight Gain

+ Allergies/Infections

+ Autoimmune Disease

The only thing I want to mention about this really quickly is....remember that inflammation is typically a RESPONSE to something else that is happening. So the best thing to do is to figure out WHY you have inflammation, and then focus on fixing THAT so that you can start reducing inflammation. Here's the basics:

- Are you eating a clean diet filled with nutritious foods?

- Are you getting enough sleep?

- Are you drinking enough water?

- Are you taking time to meditate and relax?

These last 4 months for me were SO insane as a lot of you know from following my long days and even longer nights on Instagram. I tried my best for the first two and a half months of my hectic schedule to make sure that my short nights of sleep were at least GOOD sleep. I tried to meditate for at least 10 minutes a day, drink more than enough water, and eat clean.

Before I knew it, I suffered from my first panic attack and realized that I'm not some magical human. I need sleep. I need time for myself. I need to de stress. 

WE ALL DO. 

So if you're feeling overwhelmed, stop. Clear your schedule. Stay home. Take yourself to the movies. Book a breathing class or a meditation yoga or something. WHATEVER. 

Comment below if you have any questions or helpful tips for reducing inflammation!

X