#and how intimately I know how desolate that time of year can feel

[insignem]

I'm definitely not the first and I won't be the last to say this but something about spending every single one of your formative years in small-town New England makes Noah Kahan just really hit hard.

[hamsternella]

maybe headcanons of Bill Cipher being obsessed with us for being Ford's wife, but at first he feels jealous and gradually that changes as he finds we have equal things (e.g. we are blind, and that makes Bill start to want to get more intimate with us as he has with Ford because he finds that we have also been despised/put aside because of that difference), and maybe he wants to make a deal with us but we refuse out of loyalty to Ford and that makes Bill jealous- but now of Ford, not of us lmao sorry if that is confusing or too specific.

Are you going to write any Gravity Falls fanfic on the side? I've seen your poll and I'm very excited

HELLO, and no problem. Here it is, I hope you like it.

As for the fanfic, I do plan to write one. Actually, it's in drafts; I just need to correct what I have written. I don't know if I should make it long or cut it and put it in chapters.

Bill Cipher being obsessed with you [headcanon]

cw: fem!reader, non-con touching, possessed body, jealousy, maybe a bit of ooc(?

The reason Bill begins to feel his plan is threatened is because of you. As much as Ford has him on a pedestal, you are still the main reason for his early accomplishments. The special person who has been with him since his college discovery years.

You're not like McGucket; your judgment carries paramount weight in Ford's most decisive decisions. You're not a mentally dazzling woman, not like him, but your claws keep you firmly entrenched behind Sixer's back. Bill repudiates that—it makes no sense at all!

As if that weren't enough, the affair culminates with you being blind. Can there be anything much more repugnant than a romance fueled by misfortune? Ford is drawn to your sincere heart, and you support him unconditionally because beyond your husband's obsession, your love for him seems to break down the most terrifying walls. And how can you be afraid of something you can no longer see?

Bill feels he has the enemy breathing behind his back. For the first time he thinks he can't solve everything with a kick to the rock in the middle of the road.

The closest thing to a tantrum you get from him —unknowingly— are regular nightmares, a weak body and constant paranoia about unfamiliar sounds and sensations. Your home is suddenly a new world; frightening and strange. Because of this you become clumsy and unpredictable, and even your husband doesn't understand what it is that has you so off track.

Bill can't use his influence on your reality at all, but through Ford and other extensions, as well as fine print manipulations, he manages to reach you without arousing suspicion.

''I've told you many times, Bill,'' sighed Ford with his back turned, both hands placed on his journal. ''I don't think I can go through with this completely until I manage to find a way to help my wife.''

''Isn't this a sign that it's time to get her out of your way?''

"Excuse me?’’ The man turned his attention to the demon; his eyes laden with bitterness and desolation. ''What do you mean by that? I can't abandon my wife, Cipher—she would never do something like that to me.''

''Well,'' Bill chuckled, ''it's not like she's really done anything for you all this time. This project is our thing, Fordsy, and it shouldn't be interrupted by a little stumble that doesn't even belong to us. Or are you going to give up everything you've sacrificed for this?''

''You have understood me like no other, Bill; I admit that there is no person or creature existing on this planet who can do all that you have done for me,'' admitted Ford solemnly. ''But she's my wife—she's been around even before you, when I was nobody. When I had nothing. And even when I came to Gravity Falls and left everything behind she was always there. Bill, I... I can't, I'm sorry.''

Bill held back another complaint, beginning to notice that things were not working out the way he had wanted. Your clumsiness didn't kill Ford's patience or control, but what little sanity —if any— there was in him. It was humiliating; Bill Cipher losing to a human being, a random woman—blind, to make it worse.

The demon was beginning to withdraw in on himself, frustration rising to anger, when Ford's voice from the entrance to the room drew his gaze back. There was a different gleam in his companion's, and Cipher understood with annoyance where the conversation would end up now.

Your husband introduces you to the possible solution to all your problems: Mr. Cipher, a doctor and close friend of Stanford. A mysterious man with a booming voice that makes your hair stand on end, but at the end of the day a man of studies and degrees. Of course you were going to trust your husband's recommendation.

''What a coincidence that you happened to be passing by, sir! Thank you for offering to help me. That's very kind of you.''

Bill starts pretending to be your personal doctor in search of a miracle solution to your problems. It's not hard to avoid contact with you to hide the truth; Ford tries hard to keep the situation straight.

If the demon hated you before, now you better start praying.

Cipher understands that he needs to play along with Ford if he wants the project to stay on track, even if that means starting to help you heal while containing his desire to get rid of you.

Maybe if he possessed Stanford and took advantage of you during your naps.

Maybe.

But he knows better than that—Ford isn't stupid. Not stupid enough, at least.

It was humiliating to have to take care of what he himself had caused, but it's not as if Bill could afford any other way to get back on the project. Ford was all he had. Where was he going to get someone else capable enough? This had been fate; interrupted at the last minute by the appearance of a bad third. This was all your fault. Blind little rat—woman busybody with a sweet smile and giggly voice. Cipher understood why Sixer was where he was with you, on the one hand. On the other it was all the same: a whim that cost dearly. Who needed someone like you? What was the benefit? Sex, maybe? But Bill Cipher was a thousand times better than something so banal! Please…

Bill rolled his eye, snapping his fingers to undo the nightmare you were in. As soon as your dream was undone you let out an exclamation of surprise, jumping on the bed. You brought a hand to your face, feeling the sweat, and almost immediately moved your body to where he lay. Cipher held back surprise, finding himself genuinely intrigued.

''Doctor,'' you whispered hoarsely, ''good afternoon. I... Forgive me, I think I fell asleep—it was sudden, I don't know what came over me...''

''Did you know it was me here with you?''

The smile you gave him threw him off. A ''Well, yes, isn't it very obvious?'' kind of grimace.

''Does your husband know that you have these nightmares during our therapies?''

'Therapies' sounded fancy, but it was shorthand for the tortures Bill forced you to go through; a theater of supposed recovery to cover up his need to hurt you.

“He doesn't know, doctor. I haven't told him, if I'm honest,'' you replied. ''Please don't tell him anything.''

''It would be unethical!''

‘’Pretending to be a doctor is also unethical, sir,’’ you laughed. ''I am blind, not stupid.’’

Killing you was going to be the only solution to all of this—although from that day on nothing else ever happened.

Bill has to accept that you have a lot of tricks up your sleeve. You're not just any woman anymore; being Ford's wife had to have been warning enough for him.

You continue to not remind him of his charade and allow him to continue 'treating' you, while your husband resumes the plans for the portal.

Surprisingly, Bill seems to have found interest in something much more striking.

You.

The nightmares subside, your mood and judgment improve, and Cipher finds a strange pleasure in this new side of you: much more alert, more talkative and wittier. You have your charm.

But it's your husband who pulls the reins. Bill gets it right away.

Evenings with you aren't exactly revelatory like they are with Ford, who always has enough data and information to surprise everyone with. With you it's different; it's something much more intimate and almost forgotten by Bill. He knows so much that it would be impossible to be taken by surprise—but you manage to do it.

He is overcome with a nostalgic and unpleasant feeling, but which ironically keeps him alive as he decides to lie to Ford.

Bill doesn't want to let you go. It's strange. Maybe he got used to another glaring presence besides Sixer? Torturing you a little more in silence to keep you under his care should not be a stupid thing to do at all.

Cipher encounters another particular feeling: curiosity. He needs to know why you know what you know; and what it is, above all else, that keeps you here.

What keeps you with so much power over him, Bill Cipher.

''Are you saying that I have tricks up my sleeve? I don't get it, doctor...''

''Oh! Oh, please,'' Bill interrupted, thunderous laughter bouncing across the room. ''You know I'm no doctor; the title is ridiculous.''

''Should I call you 'Mr. Cipher' instead?''

Bill held back a sigh, rubbing his eye for a moment before orbiting around you. If you had noticed, you didn't say or do anything. Your eyes, white as opaque pearls, remained fixed on a corner of the room.

''Since when did you know I wasn't a doctor? No, better yet, since when did you know I wasn't human?''

''Well, it's not quite like that either,'' you replied under a soft laugh. ''You just revealed to me that you are not human. As for the doctor thing... Well, don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think that dream therapies and transverse snoring with citrus scent induction while dipping my feet in spoiled milk is something a professional would recommend.''

Bill pretended not to be offended.

''Besides that,'' you continued, ''I know my husband very well. I know that he hides dangerous things down there, where I cannot reach by myself, just as I know everything that has been happening is not the product of chance.''

''Did you know all this time that your nightmares and fears have been my doing?''

‘’No, not really. You just confessed it to me.''

‘’Oh, come on!’’ Bill shook his fists in the air, abruptly remembering that you couldn't see him. It was strange, you seemed to know the world you inhabited even though your eyes wouldn't let you. The thought made the demon orbit around you again, returning in front of you. Opaque pearls; gaze lost in the open. "I've had a majestic revelation at this very moment! Do you want to hear it, or will your big, bold woman brain let you know in advance what I have to say?”

"I have a slight feeling you don't like me.”

“Yes or no!”

“Of course, tell me.”

"I have to assume you weren't born blind; this must be the product of an accident," Cipher began to say. "That would explain why the hell you do everything you do, and why the fuck you know where I am.”

"That's right, Mr. Cipher," you nodded. "I've had an accident, though I suppose you know that because you've infiltrated me. Either that, or my husband told you.”

"So you did know that I'm a demon?”

“You just—”

“Oh, shut up! Don't fucking say it again.”

Your coexistence with Bill becomes pleasant, despite the early revelation of his nature and his having been the cause of your misfortunes.

Cipher comes to believe that he may have been wrong; maybe you were stupid after all.

But that would be crazy! Unlike with Ford, with you the feelings are extremely nostalgic and warm. There is no trace of some kind of farce or genuine morbid interest behind your words. You believe everything you say.

Bill, who despite not sleeping or dreaming, being haunted by the memory of screams and an old distorted and flat reality, finds in your company a comfort zone that makes him delirious.

Sadly, your heart and your judgment is still tied to Sixer—as if that brainiac cared at all!

Bill begins to drive Ford crazy; he feeds him extensive knowledge, possesses him more often to enjoy the benefits, and then alters his memories, making it difficult for him to know what is truth and what is a lie.

Where he can no longer meet your needs, Bill is always there to dazzle you.

You jumped in your seat, feeling your husband's warm hands wrap around your neck. Fingers, rough from machines and dust, caressed your skin awkwardly, drawing a chuckle from you. His breath came to you from above, as if he had just sighed in delight at your reaction. When you felt him rest his hands on your shoulders, you slowly brought one of yours to caress the back of his. You felt him tremble.

''I thought you were sleeping?'' you asked with genuine interest. ''Is everything all right? All these days you've been doing the same thing.''

''Do you mind, beautiful?''

You stifled a laugh.

''No, Ford, your company would never be a bother to me... Are you smelling my hair?''

‘’I just can’t get enough of you.’’

You felt him circle your body, delineating one of the chairs near you so he could relax his body in it. You didn't last long without his hands—as soon as he resumed his seat, you felt his fingers intertwining with yours. This time it was more consistent and comfortable; not like all those days where it seemed like your husband had forgotten how to use his own body.

''Oh, dear! Seeing you with these two orbs of nerves and membrane is amazing! You look even more dazzling.''

Although the comments without any context or sense were still there.

''I'm not that great,'' you said with a small laugh. A little shy. Ford didn't used to give you so many compliments. “How's your project going?’’

‘’That thing? Good, very good. Excellent, my dear! Maybe you could see for yourself—oh, well, you can't,'' he guffawed. ''Right. Whatever! Hey, uh, can I ask you a question?''

‘’Y-Yeah, sure, honey.’’ You cleared your throat. ‘’What’s the matter?’’

''Hypothetical scenario. You're married, but you're not quite fulfilled. Suppose someone comes along who is much better than your husband,'' he explained. ''He's smart, funny, multifunctional, powerful, extra-dimensional, or very soon will be, and also very stylish!'' Silence. Moments later an exclamation. ''Do you have a favorite color? His favorite color is yellow!''

‘’I… I mean, sorry, but I actually don’t understand at all where’s the question.’’

‘’Don’t be silly! Would you leave your husband for this entity—excuse me, for this person?''

‘’What?’’

‘’The heck.’’

Another booming laugh, and though you tried to accompany it with your own, the sound that came from you was choppy and awkward. This exchange was strange.

''I can't find a reason to leave my husband for this so-called mystery person,'' you replied. ''I am supposed to have married him for a reason which should be more than enough. Ford,'' you rushed on, ''is this regarding Mr. Cipher?''

''Why?'' he asked at once. ''Why do you think of him all of a sudden? Do you feel something forbidden about him in this marriage?''

''But of course not!''

''What do you mean ‘no’?!’’

His hands let go of yours. The chair in front of you seemed to be dragged, the wood against the floor squeaking with the sudden friction. The movement had taken you by surprise.

‘’Ford?’’

''Why are you so happy? Why, huh?'' he sighed, frustrated. ''Haven't I abandoned you every night in a freezing bed, while I prefer the company of machines? Cipher has been very kind to you and kept you company!''

''Ford, what are you—wait. Wait a moment... Bill, is this you?'' You covered your mouth, terrified at the discovery. Your companion didn't respond and you simply let out a shaky breath. ''Are you possessing my husband?’’

‘’Damn, that was fast.’’

‘’That’s awful!’’

"There was full consent!" added Bill with a chuckle. "This is a man-to-man thing, my pretty little fleshbag. Something between colleagues, plain and simple. You needn't fear—Bill Cipher is taking care of everything.”

"But it's horrendous anyway!" you exclaimed with your voice splitting. "It all makes sense now... The words, the touches, the way you acted—it was all a sham! You were using my husband!”

"Oh, please, little one. Wasn't it you who dreamed of being able to touch me?”

"You, not a substitute class using Stanford's body! Have you two been doing these kinds of exchanges all along?”

"It's just that there was a change of plans!”

“A change? What—”

“I mean, I tried to kill you; but it's not that easy now,” he laughed.

You tried to calm your breathing. Your heart was beating painfully against your chest, and your whole body was trembling. This wasn't right, obviously. It was like a vivid nightmare.

“Not that I want to do it, of course.”

“Why?” you asked after a long silence.

You felt the presence of your husband's body very close to you. A pair of hands rested on your cheeks, caressing them with his fingers very softly; the touches getting lost under the trembling of your figure when you heard again a sigh of delight. Something was up.

“You know,” he whispered, “I think we could make a deal. A little, pretty one, and just for you.”

“A deal? A deal with a demon, you mean. No, thank you.”

“Oh, come on! It will be fun!”

“And it makes no sense.”

Bill turned away from you, returning to his chair to take a seat across from your body.

"What exactly is it that Ford gives you that I can't manage to satisfy? Because very soon the little project will be complete, and I will have full disposal of many wonderful tricks to take care of you, my dear," he continued. "An eternity together! We'll be able to create and tell thousands of new stories; to travel across the world and let you experience hundreds of new sensations. We'll be unstoppable! Incomparable!”

"That's not the way things work, Bill…”

"Things work because of the strongest. I will soon be the only one with that title.”

"What will happen to Ford?" you asked haltingly. "What will you do to my husband?”

"He's my co-worker, dear.”

"You're hiding something from me.”

"So what if it is? He doesn't matter here! It's our time... You're mine.”

The way your husband's voice was beginning to distort sent a shiver through your body. You loved Ford—you missed him. The idea that you had been kissing the lips of a man possessed a couple of days ago was turning your stomach. Your silence seemed to feed something inside the demon; his voice thundered, totally changed, across the room.

"A few weeks ago you said you missed the stars," added Bill. "The last time you saw them was when you were a teenager. I miss the stars too—the ones I saw with a different eye. It's not the same anymore. Nothing is, since..." Silence. You didn't dare interrupt the creature who seemed to be drowning in bitter memory. It took him a while to pull himself together; a split laugh piercing your ears like an arrow. "Oh, the misery! I thought it repulsive the way you two looked so united over something so pathetic. Anyway, what does the past matter now, what does misery matter! There's no such thing being with Bill Cipher. You'll want for nothing.”

"I refuse, Bill.”

"And I refuse too," he laughed. "See? We can play the same game, silly. I don't recommend testing my patience, though.”

The touch of palms against the warm skin of your neck took you by surprise. The roughness of those fingers you loved so much were now forbidding you to breathe; the softness of moist lips pressing against yours, taking advantage of the way you parted yours to find a sliver of air. You soon struggled against your husband's body, desperate to deny the foreign tongue that flicked unseemly and inexperienced inside you. Bill was drowning in an unfamiliar feeling that felt too good. You were soft, fragile. Your flesh was tender and warm, quivering like an animal about to die—he was going to devour it to the bone. Was this what Ford had been doing with you? You liked it?

He could kill you. He could end your life when the portal was complete; he could take advantage of Ford, as he had been doing all this time, and keep the prize all to himself. Why was it so hard? What was it you had done to him? Was Ford a victim too? The thought burned like a fierce fury at the back of his mind—jealousy once again. The need to own even the crumbs. Ford wouldn't have the right to be your victim anymore. This feeling was too good for that brainiac to understand, surely he never did.

But Bill understood everything. He was incomparable. He could dominate your life and hold the reins as well as Ford had been doing. No. Cipher was going to do better! Did you miss your husband's domination? Bill would be your ruler; he would destroy obstacles and build better ones to keep you in check. Maybe a little training and you'd become a beautiful little bag of flesh and muscle—tight, warm and obedient. And who knows if you'd end up exceeding his expectations! Who knows if a little gift occupying your orbs would give you the chance to enjoy the same star-studded sky together.

"Don't think too much," whispered Bill pantingly. "There's plenty of other things to do than something as dull as that. Don't worry your pretty little head.”

You shook your head, surrendered to crying. Your husband's hands had left your neck, but now they wrapped around your wet cheeks, offering shy caresses.

"From now on you're going to use it when I say so. Everything will be that way, and you know why?”

A crooked laugh vibrated against his chest, reaching you through his hands.

"Because now you will be my new pet. A special one! The best of them all… You could say ‘muse’, even. Isn't that beautiful, dear?”

A cold kiss. The last one.

“Aren't you, above all, beautiful too?”

[mercuriians]

my paradise

jjk,, k. nanami x fem! reader

content info — short drabble, angst horribly and lazily disguised as fluff. <3 this fic was borne out of my own anguish upon witnessing certain spoilers. (gege hates us all)

author’s note — sorry for being mia. you guys all know how life can be. luckily i’m on break so i’ll do my best to send out at least one finished request 🙂‍↕️ i’ll fix this post’s format later, for now i hope you guys enjoy my first attempt at writing jjk.

"do you think heaven exists?"

you utter your question so softly, so innocently, in a timid whisper that seems like it barely even leaves your lips in the first place. the moonlight seeping from the window is dim, just enough to surround the room in a bleak, lazy kind of aura. nanami's just about ready to drift away into slumber—where it's dreamless and monotonous, and he simply just exists—but somehow there's a feeling that tugs at him. telling him that he should turn his body to face you, to see whether there's childlike curiosity within your eyes or quiet desolation.

so that's what he does. twisting around in the ivory bedsheets, he examines your expression with an air of diligence that probably shouldn't even be possible in the near-midnight hour. nanami ends up being a bit surprised. somehow you look calm. tranquil. like there's nothing else in the world worth focusing on but him.

but he still treads carefully, cautiously. "why do you ask, love?" nanami's voice is a bit hoarse, a little rusty from the lengthy time he's been silent.

perceptively, he sees the column of your throat move slightly as you swallow. "while i was on break earlier today, yuji asked me something," you admit. "he wanted to know how he could, in his words, 'give people a proper death' when the time came. and i guess that made me think about where we even go when we finally depart from this world. where our souls go to rest."

there's a small, intimate pause as nanami waits for you to continue.

"when we were kids, we were always told that there's a place for the good people and for the bad. obviously it's comforting to let yourself believe that it's all really that black-and-white, but i don't know." your voice trails off again. nanami doesn't know how much time passes when he sees your eyes become clouded over, like you're focused on something faraway. something distant, maybe something that wasn’t even there to begin with. "would there be some sort of paradise waiting for us when we die? would we even deserve that, kento?” you whisper.

he holds his breath.

it was exceedingly rare for you to succumb to such sentimentality. you were almost always driven with diligence, fueled by the need to stick to your schedule of early mornings, midday coffee breaks, and late shifts. in a world where curses ruthlessly threatened to enforce a strict hierarchy of chaos, he recognized the all-too-significant desire to at least maintain a reliable form of organization. especially considering the fact that you were both first-grade sorcerers. some of the very best.

but now, nanami's realizing that maybe, maybe the reason why you were always so vigilant is because there was no other option. there was no time to wallow in self-pity, to question why you both had to live in such a merciless society, to scream out in frustration and curse out every single damn thing in existence and wish that things had been at least a little bit easier.

either you accepted the cards you were dealt with, or you opted out of the game permanently.

nanami quickly wonders what that means for himself. but he shakes off the thought, shakes off the negativity that crept up on him for a split-second with the expertise that he's collected and honed over the years.

right now, his only objective revolved around you.

gently, he reaches out, touching your face with the calloused tips of his fingers. for a moment, he traces the smoothness of your skin, like a paintbrush to a canvas, before moving a loose strand of hair behind your ear. the way you look up at him with eyes just short of being teary makes his chest tighten, but he perseveres for you.

it's all for you. whether he likes it or not.

"i don't know the answer to that, and any sane person living on this planet wouldn't know either," nanami finally utters. as his words hit the empty air, he sees your pink lips curve upwards by the slightest bit. it’s like you can’t help but be amused by his trademark bluntness. even in the middle of such a bleak conversation, nanami’s glad that he can at least bring you some resemblance of joy.

“but the way i see it,” he continues, hand dipping down to find yours almost instinctively, “none of that matters.”

your brows furrow. you curl into his comforting figure. “what do you mean?”

nanami’s eyes meet yours. “i couldn’t give less of a damn about what happens after death. not when i’m here with you in this moment,” he whispers, unable to restrain himself from inching closer, closer towards your face, “and hopefully the millions after.”

his lips brush against your own. it’s tentative, even almost shy—his way of asking you if this is alright.

you seal the gap without a second thought.

nanami pulls you closer. his arms wrap around your waist, as if he was unwilling to ever let go.

the intimacy of it all is enough to make him forget that for a moment, he was lost in thought, lost in the realization that people truly were helpless to whatever happened in the afterlife. but really, above all else, he was a soldier—had been since the day he enrolled at jujutsu high. and as long as you were safe, nothing else would matter. including his own—insignificant, small, dispensable—life.

at that moment, nanami’s armor became yours instead.

[heliianth]

actually bc im never gonna shut up abt it while im still on this im gonna ramble abt botw and totk and maybe how i wouldve written a sequel . & i will pay u money to listen i promise

my favoritest of totks ideas are what it expands from botw. botws whole atmosphere is drowned in quiet mourning. something bad has happened but it was a long time ago. it still hurts but theres nothing to be done now but move forward. something is still missing but all you can do is find something else. nobody has resources to rebuild and you can hear deafening echoes of better times but the alternative is giving up. you are in this frozen state of not quite moving on and not quite in despair. like the numbness stage of grief. and the pivotal element of all of that is that link is alone. like, oppressively alone. its the primary vehicle of conveying this mood. and its interesting because this can be read not only as what link is experiencing through the player but what zelda is feeling as she holds back ganon. its an interesting contrast to have zelda mature faster than link in the flashbacks, only for link to pull her the rest of the way by growing himself

and the reason why i so strongly adore the light dragon aspect of the plot is because it shows how attached to everything zelda has gotten. arguably, zelda held back ganon in botw because she loved link. in totk, she becomes the light dragon because she loves hyrule, which had previously been so unimaginably cruel to her. the crux of her character is learning that attachment is good. loving is good. you deserve to leave an imprint on the world in a shape of Your choosing instead of being another factory print on a paper. on a surface level, shes making the same choice, but the motivation and growth behind it is really powerful

i could waffle for literally ever about all that and the point is that totk takes these ideas and implements them really well through in-game worldbuilding and specifically zelda turning into the light dragon. i would occasionally get extremely emotional just seeing how things have expanded because it feels like the world is finally moving on. theres a catharsis in seeing hyrule finally heal after knowing its desolation so intimately, especially because the state of the land itself is such a strong parallel to the arcs of the two main characters, so you get the sense that not only can people move on, link and zelda specifically have started to as well. thats my favorite part

thats why i think its an odd choice that they decided on a time travel plot. if zelda HAS to be the one getting saved, if she cant be a companion in some way either via sheikah facetime or spirit tracks shenanigans or whatever, there are lots of ways to do this without her being magic fruit snacked ten bajillion years into the past. why spend all this effort intertwining her and link with the land, only to remove her from the equation and have no further growth? in botw its understandable that hyrule is stagnant and only changes when link does because zelda is stagnant and link is doing the one changing during the game. in totk its the opposite. there are lots of ways to do this with out Having to play as zelda (though honestly that would be the way id go about it)

also a lot of my own ideas have to do with the wasted potential of a place like the depths???? what the hell do you mean theres this mind bogglingly big cavern underneath the entirety of hyrule which mysterious people used to live in and it has almost no story relevance beside being a cool setpiece???????? I FEEL INSANE?!?!??!?!? there are so many good ideas in totk that never get expanded dude FUCK

i think no matter how much i speculate and draft my own preferences of how i wouldve liked totk to elaborate on the things it introduces i cant ever bring myself to present them like they couldve realistically happened and gotten thru the nintendo writing room simply bc of the games format. if it were up to me doing certain story missions would radically change the open world as events happened in real time and thats not the MO of the game's design philosophy. honestly totk's biggest enemy is the memory system and i need to kill it with fire

[starz-saintz]

Baaabe and Sweetheart

I've mentioned before that both my Babe (Bonnie) and Sweetheart (Melanoia) were trained for a decade or so years in the BHR (bounty hunter regiment) in military school-type environments. I'd like to highlight the differences in their training grounds, mentors, fighting styles, and what they got out of it. This post is dedicated to my Sweetheart, I will be posting Babe's at a later date.

Melanoia started when she was 13. She had spent the two years before that in a mental institute in a different country because she had carved out her left eye. She was paranoid and manic. The BHR looks for unstable youth to mold into obedient soldiers, so Melanoia was a perfect candidate and was discharged from the institute and brought to another country. This would be her third and last country of residence.

Her training grounds were a large, high-tech dome called the Sanguine Desolation Institution (SDI). It is held in high regard (despite the terrible name) by the department for its teachings. The SDI would teach its children from 10 - 20 advanced academics and the ability to defend, attack, and heal. There is a ranked system with each age group based on those two subjects.

Melanoia, during all of her time there, stayed in the top 5 when it came to training and academics. Truly blowing everyone out of the water. But, that caused her to be left out socially and looked down on. She was never cocky or mean, she stayed to herself because she didn't know how to integrate into these cliches or how to communicate with the people her age.

When she was 15, she got a mentor. The SDI gives its students mentors to teach them formally how to use their magyk to their advantage. Her mentor was called DEATH, he was an older vampire and a feared bounty hunter. He taught her how to dissociate and use it to her advantage on the battlefield.

DEATH taught her to learn about her opponent and to use it to her advantage. What they are willing to do or where they frequent. To set up traps even if it means baiting or sacrificing a few pawns to do so. He also taught her to destroy her targets. To hurt them in a way that will either kill them or make it so they would never want to cross her path again. Do what it takes to win even if it means you will get hurt.

As mentioned before, DEATH is a vampire. He moves with a swiftness and that is what got him so many wins. He was quick. Strength doesn't mean anything if you can hit the target. He trained Melanoia like she was an acrobat or a gymnast. She was short, damn near emaciated, and had loose joints. She was perfect for this!

Melanoia spent all of this time away from the outside world, surrounded by instability, pain, and violence. She was taught to hone her sense of mortality and personhood in when placed in sensitive situations. She never had a lending ear, so all of her thoughts stayed inside of her. She was a walking aura of despair even if her face didn't show it.

So, when she met people in the department who would give her a lending ear or would ask to assist her, she pushed them away. She viewed worse here than in holding. She was seen as sadistic and she was thought to have taken pleasure in the hunting of criminals by how brutal and vaguely intimate she would get. This rumor wasn't made any better when she would be put on interrogator duty for the live bounties and she would cause the criminals such emotional and psychological turmoil that they would beg for relief.

She didn't take pleasure in it, but she didn't feel bad for what she did either. She was efficient and did her job. She didn't want to ease up, she needed to be faster. But, she wasn't totally unfeeling. She took a liking to some of her colleagues and would show it in her unique and quirky little ways.

[pom0dorini]

spamano fic recs

some time ago i posted about wanting to make a list of spamano fic recommendations and quite a few people seemed interested, so here it is! these are some fics that i personally really liked, i also added a brief comment for every fic as well as eventual warnings. enjoy and support the authors!

Morning Glory by AroAceMess

Ludwig has something very important to ask Romano, if only he remembered that not everyone woke at the ass crack of dawn like him

He batts around blindly at the bedside table while Antonio continues to grumble into his ear, when he finds the screaming device he squints at the screen in disgust before answering it and bringing it too his ear. The too bright display had read 5:30 am and assured him that it definitely wasn’t someone he liked enough to warrant this disturbance of the peace.

chapters: 1/1 

if you’re in the mood for something fluffy and domestic this is the fic for you. it manages to be sweet and funny while still dealing with more angsty themes, and the feeling of domestic warmth is portrayed perfectly

Captain’s Log by LadyLisa

After months at sea, Antonio finally returns home to Romano.

chapters: 1/1

the writing and descriptions are simply wonderful. i feel like rather than the plot, the most enjoyable part of this fic is the way it perfectly captures romano’s feelings and the sense of yearning. definitely worth checking out (just like every single one of this author’s works)

Humors

chapters: 3/3 (bloodplay, underage, dubcon)

one of my all time favorites. the spain in this fic is absolutely unhinged, which is something i’m a huge fan of, and this side of his character is handled extremely well, although it may not be everyone’s cup of tea 

and maybe next time we can hold hands by lillialyce

“Their mouths move with desperation, but they are somehow elegant, a tragic dance before an impending, horrible end." Nations are forbidden from having relationships.

chapters: 1/1 (sexual content)

this is an angsty one but i really love the concept of nations’ actions directly affecting their country and how that translates to not being able to love each other 

Twisted With You 

chapters: 4/4 (smut)

i usually don’t love fics written in 2nd person pov, but this one stuck with me. there’s just something so sweet and intimate about it and i love the trope used here

Age Quod Agis 

Teacher!Romano x Student!Spain

chapters: 3/3 (smut)

spamano with bottom!spain is one of my guilty pleasures and i just love how cocky spain is in this one 

Door to Door by Canadino

Do not open the door. It could be a zombie, an unwanted boyfriend of your brother's, or a persistant salesman by the name Antonio Carriedo.

chapters: 1/1 

short but very funny, i often come back to this one

The only light in this darkness by SheenaWilde

Lovino, unwilling heir of a rich noble family, is forced to attend his grandfather’s every ball. But this night, a mysterious stranger captures his interest.

chapters: 1/1

i’m extremely weak for vampire!spain. this fic may be a bit on the “twilight” side but it’s worth a read if you enjoy stereotypical vampire romances (and i sure do)

Scars by The Cilantro Family

One year ago Lovino Vargas killed himself. Now, by some strange turn of events, he's returned

chapters: 1/1 (self harm) 

i don’t know what it is with this fic, but everytime i read it it leaves me with a lingering sense of desolation. it’s still really good and i personally think its themes are portrayed well 

Fever by Romanoma 

Romano discovers the electricity and excitement of World Cup 2010 causes all kinds of interesting reactions…

chapters: 1/1 (smut)

don’t have much to say aside from “great smut and writing” and “sweaty football player spain is a blessing” (every work by this author is worth checking out)

Spirito Di Punto by starshards

After Romano's driving skills send another car to super-car heaven, his boss decides that it's time for him to have something much more modest. Luckily for Romano, Spain's there to help him learn how to appreciate it.

chapters: 1/1 (smut)

i just really love everything about this one. hilarious, great smut and bottom!spain, what more could you ask for?

Liar by starshards

Spain cannot resist Romano, even though he hates himself for it.

chapters: 1/1 (smut)

i'm putting another work from this author simply because this one is up in my top spamano fics. this isn’t something i would recommend to anyone, but if you enjoy a darker take on spamano’s relationship it's a must

How to Care for Your Spain by AlexOfCoffee

A guide written and published by Romano Italia.

chapters: 1/1

highly recommended if you want something short and extremely fluffy/domestic

Esp by Soe_Mame

Il momento arriverà.

Continua ad aspettare, continua ad aspettare che arrivi.

Continua a sperare, continua a sperare che arrivi.

[1649-1738: È bastato meno di un secolo per cambiare tante cose tra il Sud Italia e la Spagna.]

chapters: 9/9 

i left the best for last. i can’t even begin to describe how much i love this fic. it’s in italian but if you have a way to translate it do yourself a favor and read it. the historical details, the characterisations, the tension, every single thing about it is amazing and it’s surely not my favorite spamano fic for nothing. 

[justforbooks]

Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or 17th or 43rd floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others.

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability to find as much intimacy as is desired.

I know what that feels like. I’ve been a citizen of loneliness. I’ve done my time in empty rooms. A few years back I moved to New York, drifting through a succession of sublet apartments. A new relationship had abruptly turned to dust and though I had friends in the city I was paralysed by loneliness. The feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether until the intensity diminished.

The revelation of loneliness, the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn’t have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all this had quickened lately, the unwelcome consequence of being so summarily dismissed.

I don’t suppose it was unrelated, either, to the fact that I was keeling towards the midpoint of my 30s, an age at which female aloneness is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.

The experience was acutely painful, and yet as the months wore by I became weirdly fascinated by it. Loneliness, Dennis Wilson once sang, is a very special place, and I started to wonder if he might be right, if there wasn’t more to it than meets the eye – if, in fact, loneliness didn’t drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive.

There were things that burned away at me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixellated age. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?

I was by no means the only person who’d puzzled over these questions. All kinds of writers, artists, film-makers and songwriters have explored the subject of loneliness, attempting to gain purchase on it, to tackle the issues that it provokes. But I was at the time beginning to fall in love with images, to find a solace in them I didn’t find elsewhere, and so I conducted the majority of my investigations within the visual realm. I sought out artists who seemed to articulate or be troubled by loneliness, particularly as it manifests in cities.

The obvious place to start was with Edward Hopper, that rangy, taciturn man. Born at the tail end of the 19th century, he spent his working life documenting life in the electrically uneasy metropolis. Though he was often resistant to the notion that loneliness was his metier, his central theme, his scenes of men and women in deserted cafes, offices and hotel lobbies remain signature images of urban isolation.

Hopper’s people are often alone, or in fraught, uncommunicative groupings of twos and threes, fastened into poses that seem indicative of distress. But this isn’t the only reason his work is so deeply associated with loneliness. He also succeeds in capturing something of how it feels, by way of the strange construction of his city layouts.

Take Nighthawks, which the novelist Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”. It shows a diner at night: an urban aquarium, a glass cell. Inside, in their livid yellow prison, are four figures. A spivvy couple, a counter-boy in a white uniform, and a man sitting with his back to the window, the open crescent of his jacket pocket the darkest point on the canvas. No one is talking. No one is looking at anyone else. Is the diner a refuge for the isolated, a place of succour, or does it serve to illustrate the disconnection that proliferates in cities? The painting’s brilliance derives from its instability, its refusal to commit.

I’d been looking at it on laptop screens for years before I finally saw it in person, at the Whitney one sweltering October afternoon. The colour hit me first. Green walls, green shadows falling in spikes and diamonds on the green sidewalk. There is no shade in existence that more powerfully communicates urban alienation than this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city of glass towers, empty illuminated offices and neon signs.

But it was the window that really stopped me in my tracks: a bubble of glass that separated the diner from the street, curving sinuously back against itself. It was impossible to gaze through into the luminous interior without experiencing a swift apprehension of loneliness, of how it might feel to be shut out, standing alone in the cooling air.

Glass is a persistent symbol of loneliness, and for good reason. Almost as soon as I arrived in the city, I had the sense that I was trapped behind glass. I couldn’t reach out or make contact, and at the same time I felt dangerously exposed, vulnerable to judgment, particularly in situations where being alone felt awkward or wrong, where I was surrounded by couples or groups.

This is what Hopper replicates with his strange architectural configurations: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with near-unbearable exposure. “I probably am a lonely one,” he once told an interviewer, and his paintings radiate an empathic understanding of what that’s like. You might think this would make his work distressing, but on the contrary I found it eased the burden of my own feelings. Someone else had grappled with loneliness, and had found beauty, even value in it.

Loneliness doesn’t only affect the solitary. It can also prey on people who have what seem like highly populated lives. This is the case with Andy Warhol, who was almost never without a glittering entourage and yet whose work is surprisingly eloquent on isolation and problems of attachment, issues he struggled with lifelong.

Warhol’s art patrols the space between people, conducting a grand philosophical investigation into closeness and distance, intimacy and estrangement. Like many lonely people, he was an inveterate hoarder, making and surrounding himself with objects, barriers against the demands of human intimacy. Terrified of physical contact, he rarely left the house without an armoury of cameras and tape recorders, using them to broker and buffer interactions: behaviour that has light to shed on how we deploy technology in our own century of so-called connectivity.

Even as a little boy, Warhol was notable for his skill at drawing and his painful shyness: a pale, slightly otherworldly child, who fantasised about renaming himself Andy Morningstar. His parents were Ruthenian immigrants, and he was passionately close to his mother, particularly when at the age of seven he contracted rheumatic fever, followed by St Vitus’s Dance, an alarming disorder characterised by involuntary movements of the limbs.

This spell of social withdrawal left its mark, as did the experience of being betrayed by his own body. As an adult, Warhol was hampered by an absolute belief in his own physical abhorrence: his bulbous nose and receding hair; his strikingly white skin, covered in liver-coloured blotches. What he most wanted was to be desired by one of the beautiful boys on whom he developed serial crushes, a breed exemplified by the poised and wickedly glamorous Truman Capote – who described his suitor cruelly as “a hopeless born loser, the loneliest, most friendless person I’d ever met in my life”.

In the 1960s, just as he was making a name for himself as a Pop artist, Warhol found a novel way of handling his problems with intimacy. He bought a television at Macy’s: an RCA 19-inch black-and-white set. Able to conjure or dismiss company at the touch of a button, he found he cared much less about getting close to other people, a process he’d found so hurtful in the past.

It was the beginning of a passionate affair with machines. Over the years, he fell for a range of devices, from the stationary 16mm Bolex on which he recorded the Screen Tests of the 1960s to the Polaroid camera that was his permanent companion at parties in the 1980s. Part of the appeal was undoubtedly having something to hide behind in public. Acting as servant or companion to the machine was another route to invisibility, a mask-cum-prop like his wig and glasses.

But Warhol also used machines to buffer his interactions with other people. Filming, taping and photographing meant he could possess people without risk: a strategy of enormous appeal to the lonely, who fear rejection almost as intensely as they desire intimacy.

In this, as in so many things, he was the herald of our own era. His attachment prefigures our rapturous, narcissistic fixation with phones and computers; the enormous devolution of our emotional and practical lives to technological apparatuses of one kind or another. I understood exactly why he called his tape recorder his wife. I would have been lost without my MacBook, which promised to bring connection and in the meantime filled the vacuum left by love.

Loneliness can wed people to machines, and it can also drive them away from the world. The lonely disappear in plain sight, retreating into their apartments because of sickness or bereavement, mental illness or the persistent, unbearable burden of shyness, of not knowing how to impress themselves into society.

If anyone can be said to have worked from this place, it’s the outsider artist and hospital janitor Henry Darger, who was born in Chicago in 1892. Darger’s life illuminates the social forces that produce isolation – and the way the imagination can work to resist it.

For decades Darger lived alone in a boarding house room crammed with hoarded rubbish. In 1972 he became ill and was moved unwillingly to a Catholic mission. When his room was cleared, it was discovered to contain hundreds of paintings, of almost supernatural radiance.

These baffling, beautiful collages were populated by soldiers and naked little girls with penises. Some had charming, fairytale elements: clouds with faces and winged creatures sporting in the sky. Others showed exquisitely staged and coloured scenes of mass torture, complete with delicately painted pools of scarlet blood. Together, they described a coherent otherworld: the Realms of the Unreal, site of a devastating civil war between forces of good and evil.

Since his death, theories about Darger have proliferated, put forward by an impassioned chorus of art historians, academics and psychologists. These voices are by no means convergent, but speaking they have established Darger as an outsider artist nonpareil: untutored, compulsive and almost certainly mentally ill. Over the years, he’s been posthumously diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia and declared a paedophile or serial killer, an accusation that has proved enduring despite an absolute lack of evidence.

It seemed to me that this second act of Darger’s life compounded the isolation of the first. The things he made have served as lightning rods for other people’s fears and fantasies about isolation. But what this pathologising elides is the damage wreaked on individuals like Darger by society: the role that structures such as families, schools and jobs play in any person’s experience of isolation.

Like many lonely people, Darger’s childhood was full of shattered attachments and broken ties. His mother died when he was four. His father was too ill to care for him, and so he was sent to the Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, where extreme violence was common. After escaping, he worked in the city’s hospitals, where he spent nearly six decades rolling bandages and sweeping floors. Intelligent and talented, he was deprived of both love and an education, and in his entire life had only one friend.

He built the world of the Realms out of almost nothing, against extraordinary odds. I realised this most forcibly when I visited the recreation of his room in a Chicago museum. It was packed with art materials: pencil stubs made usable by being jammed into syringes; piles of children’s paints and crayons; broken elastic bands mended with tape. In all his life, Darger’s income never exceeded $3,000 a year, and yet he had accumulated these resources, painstakingly gathered from among the discards, the leavings of the city.

Why did he spend his life creating a universe of such violence and beauty? There is a theory that loneliness stems from a profound sense of disintegration, caused by just the kind of broken childhood Darger suffered. It’s a longing not just for love, but for integration, for wholeness. Now look again at Darger’s pictures: the unleashed forces of good and evil brought painstakingly together, into a single field, a single frame. Insane? I don’t think so. It’s the work of someone absolutely alone, struggling with all their might to make sense of suffering and disorder.

You can show what loneliness looks like, and you can also take up arms against it, making things that serve explicitly as communication devices against censorship and alienation. This was the driving motivation of David Wojnarowicz, a still under-known American artist and writer, whose courageous, extraordinary body of work did more than anything to release me from the feeling that in my solitude I was shamefully alone.

Like Darger, Wojnarowicz had a brutal childhood. As a small boy in the 1950s, he and his two siblings were kidnapped by their father, an abusive alcoholic who took them to live in the suburbs of New Jersey. The Universe of the Neatly Clipped Lawn, David called it – a place where physical and psychic violence against women and children could be carried out without repercussions.

By 15, he was turning $10 tricks in Times Square, and by 17 had left home entirely. He almost starved during his homeless years. Sometimes he was raped or drugged by the men who offered him money; sometimes he stayed in welfare hotels and derelict buildings, or with a group of transvestites by the Hudson River.

In 1973, he prised himself off the streets, though the legacy of shame and isolation never fully dispersed. He came out as gay, and felt immediately lighter, albeit acutely aware of the weight of antagonism stacked against him, the hatred lurking everywhere for a man who loved men and was not ashamed of the fact.

It was in this period that he began to make art. Photographs of a man in a paper mask of Arthur Rimbaud, wandering the meat markets and bus stations of New York. Lurid, intricate paintings that look like maps of some mythic realm. A film of a drag queen walking slowly into a lake; graffiti of burning houses and choking cows. Within a handful of years he became one of the stars of the 1980s East Village art scene, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Nan Goldin.

What happened to him? Aids happened. In 1988 he was diagnosed with Aids, then a death sentence. His first reaction was intense loneliness, combined with absolute rage against the bigoted politicians who blocked funding and education, the public figures who called for people with Aids to be tattooed with their infection status or quarantined on islands. Stigmatisation: the cruel process by which society works to exclude people considered undesirable, whether because of race or poverty or illness or a thousand other factors.

Stigmatisation is yet another driver of loneliness, reducing a person from a human being to the bearer of something polluting or repulsive. Wojnarowicz’s response was to fight back, to resist the silencing and shaming he’d suffered from lifelong; and to do it not alone but in the company of others. In the plague years, he became involved with Act Up, a direct action group that fused art and resistance into an astonishingly potent force. There isn’t much to find inspiring about the Aids crisis, except the way that it was combated not by people contracting into couples or family groupings, but by communal direct action.

Wojnarowicz’s work had always been political. Even before Aids, he’d dealt with sexuality and difference: with what it’s like to live in a world that despises you, to be subject every single day to hatred and contempt, enacted not just by individuals but by the supposedly protective structures of society itself. Aids confirmed his suspicions. As he put it in his searing memoir, Close to the Knives: “My rage is really about the fact that when I was told that I’d contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realise that I’d contracted a diseased society as well.”

Act Up’s work undoubtedly drove improved treatment for people with Aids, but combination therapy came too late for Wojnarowicz. He died in 1992, at the age of 37, leaving behind a body of work of radical honesty. “I want to make somebody feel less alienated – that’s the most meaningful thing to me,” he once said. “We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated.”

That statement summed up precisely what his art meant to me. Nothing in my years of loneliness touched me as deeply as Wojnarowicz’s openness: his willingness to admit to failure or grief; to acknowledge desire, anger, pain; to be emotionally alive. His honesty was in itself a cure for loneliness, dissolving the sense of difference that comes when one believes one’s feelings or desires to be uniquely shameful. How had he responded to the sources of isolation in his own life? By speaking the truth, by making art, by building community, by engaging in political action, by refusing to be invisible.

The artists I encountered in the lonely city helped me not just to understand loneliness, but also to see the potential beauty in it, the way it drives creativity of all kinds. These days, I don’t think the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.

There is a gentrification that’s happening to cities, and there’s a gentrification that’s happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amid the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with being compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up wounds as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need constantly to inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?

I have been lonely, and no doubt I will be lonely again. There isn’t any shame in that. Loneliness is a special place, I’m certain of it: adrift from the larger continent of human experience, but intrinsic to the very act of being alive.

© Olivia Laing. This is an edited extract from The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[hunkydorkling]

Spotify's open and is playing some 70s-80s sap, overlaying my current bittersweet symphony of feelings that I thought would be kinder to me when I went to the co-working space for: a) at least one onsite bonding with the colleagues, b) to sell some stickers lol, and c) to send David off since it's his last official day with my company. I was already crying at 4PM while I was sketching some logo studies for our upcoming event's area design, and I was crying, right, then my boss comes up and talks to me about her 2019 Japan photos she happened to repost on Instagram, how a number of them were homages to The Garden of Words' beautiful framing and cinematography, how it was snowing in Spring sometime in April when it should've been cherry blossom season. Anyway, she leaves as soon as I stood up to throw out the sauce for my food.

I continued to cry-bawl-sniffle when I talked to David intimately about why he's leaving, actually, why so abrupt, how was I supposed to know he'd been feeling so desolate about being in esports for 11 years when I've only known him for about a year and some change and I feel like I've known him my whole life in such a short amount of time. He's a big guy but he wanted to cry as he tells me the lowest point wasn't because of the good people in our company, despite the setbacks and challenges, but because he needs to know all of this is worth it. And so the job offer comes to go multinational, and he's immediately validated and needed, and this goal of his, talking about it, came from the heart... but tears were still streaming down my cheeks as I dab a ball of tissue on either side.

Anyway, there's a whole segment of parting words in the smallest room we could be in out of the entire co-working space, I managed to be spoken to last, I got to hold his hand for what feels like solidarity, but I wanted him to feel? like I'm with him. Excited for him.

And then we wrapped up the workday with some soju and lemon soda, which I only managed to get about two small cups of before I started to float in tipsiness. I only got 3 hours of sleep, see. I was also beaten with so much emotion for David that I had to talk in seesaws. Now it's time for me to leave. I give everybody a hug and ended with giving him a really tight one, arms around this big bear, as he reassures me we can still talk. The way I raised my head up at him and away quickly was the only way I can say, yeah, sure. Live your life first then maybe I can consider if I should even come out to you and tell you I've had a crush on you ever since we stepped into the same bookstore after we've carried out an ocular with the team. Ever since you told me some stuff from the rule book during FG tournaments, at our actual event last September. Ever since you told me how much fun you had roleplaying as a way to amass virtual coin sometime ago, which made me laugh as we shared a drink at the tiki bar last Christmas party.

I just feel like I didn't get to properly get to know him, and how it's, I don't know, a little too late to be telling him that now that he wants to pursue his dream of changing the esports scene outside of this place. And he'll never know. He will never know I've liked a David this much the way I did/do with him.

[cavalierious-whim]

Rains of Solace (NeuWrioLette)

Neuvillette shows up at Wriothesley's door, drenched in rainwater, seething in silent fury, and requests to have his hair brushed as a way to calm down. Part of 'by the strange pull'.

Read here on AO3. You can also, follow me on Twitter, and here on Patreon!

--

Wriothelsey opens his door to find Neuvillette standing on the other side, drenched. He lacks his usual scent of ocean salt, doused in freshwater instead that drips to the concrete. Rain; it must be raining outside. Neuvillette isn’t the type to get caught up in it. 

Hydro dragon, hydro dragon, don’t cry. Wriothesley thinks about this stupid nursery rhyme more than he’d like, but never before has it been standing at his door. 

“Come here,” he says without a second thought, pulling at Neuvillette’s wrist and tugging him through the door. Wriothesley doesn’t ask questions, he just guides Neuvillette’s face into the crook of his neck. He kicks the door shut and drags his hand down Neuvillette’s back. No questions, no demands. “Beloved,” he says, stealing Neuvillette’s preferred endearment, dropping his usual tease. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

It isn’t; Wriothesley’s alpha is displeased at Neuvillette’s sour scent. It curdles his blood and stings his nose. It’s his job to soothe him, to protect him, to—

No, no. Neuvillette isn’t some weeping omega. It almost makes it worse, to see such a strong man so woefully desolate. Wriothesley itches to fix whatever it is. 

Wriothesley pulls back and tilts Neuvillette’s face up. His hair is tangled. Everything about him is a mess. Looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Wriothesley thinks he hasn’t seen such exhaustion on this man in years, maybe even a decade—not even in the aftermath of his accidental rut. 

“Let's get you cleaned up, hm?” Distress wafts off of Neuvillette in waves but he nods against him. Wriothesley sighs, entirely at a loss, and leans forward to plant a kiss against Neuvillette’s forehead.

It is clinical; Neuvillette goes through the motions as Wriothesley strips him and throws a towel over his shoulders. He steals a shirt from Wriothesley’s closet and it hangs off his frame. Neuvillette pulls the collar to his nose and inhales, breathing in and out. 

Any other time it’d make heat curl in Wriothesley’s gut, instincts wild at seeing him buried in his clothing. But now, all he feels now is the acrid sting of inadequacy. Wriothesley cares a great deal for others, but this, he is unaccustomed to. Neuvillette isn’t just one of his people, he is his partner, and Wriothesley’s alpha craves to settle his nerves. He hears how Neuvillette’s blood pulses, too quickly, rampaging through his veins.

But Wriothesley doesn’t push, doesn’t try to tip the scales. Neuvillette is deathly calm—the sort that can easily snap back. And even though he chose to come here, even though he breathes in Wriothesley’s scent to calm his nerves, there is no knowing how his alpha would react. 

Wriothesley has been there and dealt with those silent, raging instincts. His method of madness is duking it out in the ring. Neuvillette is quieter. Sterner. He’d never bloody his fists, not unless it was something truly unthinkable, or the intent was to roughhouse for pleasure. 

He’s about to peel away when Neuvillette’s fingers wrap around his wrist. “A brush,” he says. His voice is soft. Uneven. “Do you have one?”

“It isn’t fancy like the one you have, I’m sure—”

“I would like for you to brush my hair.” 

Wriothesley stills at the request. Seems intimate. And not that they aren’t—Celestia knows they’ve both transcended the ruse of two alphas having fun. It never was that but they held that initial boundary, hesitant in the beginning despite their interest. But Wriothesley knows what he wants. He looks at Neuvillette and thinks mate instead, and even his alpha agrees. 

Still. There is a sort of hesitance cradling Neuvillette’s tone that gives him pause. 

And, as always, Neuvillette reads his concern as easily as he does any book. “It will calm me,” he continues. “My instincts, while similar, have their differences.”

“Because you’re a dragon.” Wriothesley has always known, and he knows he isn’t just a dragon, but the dragon. But there’s no point in hashing out those details at such a vulnerable time. 

Neuvillette’s mouth parts in surprise. Then he licks his lips nervously. “I…well, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. But yes. It is… we are often solitary creatures until it comes to our—partner.” Wriothesley doesn’t miss the way his words jerk, as if he’d rather call him something else. 

Later. A thought for later. 

“So… brushing your hair,” says Wriothesley instead.

“I am angry,” admits Neuvillette. And Wriothesley knows. He can smell the acrid tang of it, thick as it drips from him. “But I am also full of sorrow. And to feel your hands in my hair… it will soothe the hatred that pools in my veins.”

Warmth spreads through his chest. His alpha purrs, delighted. And Wriothesley—well, he didn’t think he could fall in love more with this man, but he’s been proven wrong time and time again. It cuts deeper; this love. Every fucking time it leaves a wound that he doesn’t want to heal. And so he won’t. 

“Yeah,” says Wriothesley, forcing his tone to be steady. “Yeah, okay, let’s—the bed?”

He needs the closeness. Wriothesley. He needs to be close, to brush Neuvillette’s hair out of the way and bury his face into his neck. Later, when Neuvillette is calmer, sleepier, bundled in his sheets. When he’s drowned in his scent so thoroughly that he smells like Wriothesley, that everyone will know that Neuvillette is his.

The small things. It’s always the small things. Any other alpha would run at the thought of being scented by another. Neuvillette craves it, seeks it out. He’ll burrow into Wriothesley’s clothes, his sheets, even his skin without a second thought. He demands it on some nights, spooning Wriothesley from behind, sleeping with his nose firmly locked in his nape. 

“Wriothesley.”

“Right,” mutters Wriothesley. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”

Neuvillette shouldn’t be the one comforting him but he tugs Wriothesley’s hand to his face and kisses his eternally busted knuckles before they retire. 

Wriothesley’s brush isn’t fancy. It’s old, the handle is cracked, and it’s one of the few things he kept when he came to Meropide all those years ago. A gift from an old sibling he tries not to think about. He’s fond of it, though, despite the missing and crooked bristles.

“This’ll just make your hair a mess,” he muses. Neuvillette says nothing as the brush snags halfway down, and so Wriothesley keeps at it, brushing out his hair in measured increments. He detangles clumps with his fingers, tips brushing against Neuvillette’s back.

It feels as though a century has passed when Neuvillette breaks the silence. “It was a case so similar to yours.”

Everything reels to a stop. They have shared many things except for this. Never this. Neuvillette knows that Wriothesley hung up his old name and started a new life the moment he stepped foot into this place, and so it remains in the past.

But. But.

Clearly, it weighs heavier on Neuvillette’s mind than Wriothesley thought. “I…”

“I uphold the law. That is my job. So rarely do I question the decisions of the Oratrice but your case—” He pauses and sucks in a breath. “That was the first time,” he whispers, “that I questioned the justice of Fontaine.”

Wriothesley swallows around the lump in his throat. He presses his palm against Neuvillette’s back. “It was premeditated.” Wriothesley remembers the blood that dripped from his fingers and how his alpha roared in satisfaction. He meant what he did. He sought out death and committed murder in cold blood. He has thought long and hard about his crime and has come to terms with it.

“But was it wrong?” asks Neuvillette. He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It matters not. That is done and in the past, but this—a child, Wriothesley. And the worst part of me wishes I could have been the one to rip his parents to shreds. But, I cannot. And the boy has been sentenced. There is nothing that I can do, my hands tied as I force myself to watch on in silence.”

Wriothesley doesn’t ask for the details but he can glean an idea. “And so, the rain,” he says quietly. He dips forward to lean over Neuvillette’s shoulder, nose pressed against the juncture of his neck. Neuvillette smells sharp and angry; like gunmetal and the air before a brewing storm.  

Neuvillette tenses under his hold. “Ah. So you know.” He sounds rueful, vexed even. 

“I’ve known since the beginning.”

Neuvillette looses a bitter laugh. “How can I be so powerful and yet so useless?”

Wriothesley kisses his scent gland sweetly and Neuvillette crumples. “It’s okay,” he says, stroking his hair, chest against his back, holding him close. 

It is not okay. It will never be okay. Justice isn’t fair and never will be, a hard lesson that Wriothesley learned a long time ago. Neuvillette is childlike in so many ways and he wears his grief like a cloak over his shoulders. 

Neuvillette doesn’t cry. He rages instead, his pulse hot and hard underneath Wriothesley’s mouth as he kisses a tender spot on his neck. He smells like a tempest, all salt-brine and fury. His alpha ripples underneath his skin, and Wriothesley thinks not for the first time just how beautiful this dangerous man is.

But, it rains outside, a grand deluge because even for all his anger, Neuvillette will never raise a hand. The law is absolute. He’ll stew and seethe in self-pity and misery, but he is tied to his duty. It is another type of strength. Quieter. Soft-handed. Wriothesley loves this part of Neuvillette too, the old, beleaguered alpha who’s had centuries to train himself to rear back.

Wriothesley pulls away with a hum. He curls his fingers into Neuvillette’s hair, parting the strands, carefully easing out the knots. The tension eases from Neuvillette’s shoulders. When the tangles are gone he braids Neuvillette’s hair, tugging at the strands gently. It’s messy. He’s out of practice. “I had sisters,” he explains so quietly that he barely hears himself.

Neuvillette pets the braid when Wriothesley slides it over his shoulder. He shudders as Wriothesley’s fingers ghost the topmost knob of his spine, dipping against skin that peeks out from Neuvillette’s borrowed shirt. Then Wriothesley dips forward and presses his nose there, inhaling deeply. His arms wrap around Neuvillette’s waist, a perfect fit as his elbows rest against his hips. Nothing else, nothing untoward. Just a moment to ground himself. 

“The boy,” he murmurs, “I’ll watch him.” 

“I know.” Because Neuvillette will too.

“I can’t fix it, but I’m here.”

A pause. Neuvillette’s fingers wring out the end of his braid. “I know.”

“Do you want to stay here tonight?” Wriothesley already knows the answer—and even if he didn’t, he’d coaxed Neuvillette beneath the covers anyhow. And Neuvillette would give in.

Neuvillette finally tilts toward him and breathes a sigh of relief. And then, in a rare show of humor, meant to mask the pain, he says, “I’m dry now. I wouldn’t want to get wet again and ruin your hard work.”

It is a slow and sluggish process of dressing down. Neuvillette watches Wriothesley as he strips and pulls on his sleep clothes, mind somewhere else entirely. The bed is too small. For the thousandth time, Wriothesley reminds himself to fix it. The sheets are too thin and scratchy. He reminds himself to fix those too, arbitrary problems that he’ll forget the moment he has more paperwork.

The smell of another alpha in his bed doesn’t induce rage. Wriothesley relishes it, the way Neuvillette’s scent lingers, permeating the space. That’s what calms him on nights like this—but maybe in the future he should sneak above ground and use that spare key hidden in his desk drawer instead. 

He expects Neuvillette to curl into him, pressing his cheek into his chest, and cling to him like the sea creature he is. Wriothesley pulled close instead. Neuvillette guides his face to rest against his heart and Wriothesley doesn’t realize until that moment just how on edge he is. How his pulse races too, or how the sharp scent of his restlessness cuts through the air.

“I should be comforting you.”

“You are.” Neuvillette’s claws comb through his hair. The moment stretches and then he says, very softly, “I am sorry that I brought it up.”

“No, that’s—” Wriothesley listens to his heart and counts every beat. “You can. You can, no one else.”

Neuvillette’s claws rake across his scalp, gentle enough to make Wriothesley’s spine tingle. “I wonder at times,” he muses, “why is it that we work so well? Shouldn’t we be at each other’s throats? Even in my deepest anger, I only thought of you.”

The worst thing Wriothesley’s alpha has ever wanted was Neuvillette’s submission. And not for a gain of power. No, just to bask in Wriothesley’s scent, to drown in it. To care for him in return because it is two-fold; Wriothesely would do the same. Has done so, and will for however long he can. There is no need to sleep with one eye open in his presence; his trust in this man is absolute.

 “Why question it,” he asks. “Why worry about something so clearly meant to be?” 

Neuvillette’s fingers stutter before resuming their petting. Wriothesley’s eyelids flutter and he lulls into a doze, counting those heartbeats. Steady and strong. Neuvillette has calmed enough to smell like home, and Wriothesley folds himself into it. 

“Do you think it’s still raining?” asks Wriothesley hazy as he begins to slip under.

“No,” replies Neuvillette. “Not anymore.”

[sinfultray1408]

Scene Comparisons: -6-

My Life With Chaplin: An Intimate Memoir by Lita Grey Chaplin with Morton Cooper (pg. 61-68)

Wife of the Life of the Party: A Memoir by Lita Grey Chaplin and Jeffrey Vance (pg. 37-38)

The plan had been for all of us to stay in Truckee for no longer than a week. Then Charlie caught the flu and was ordered to bed, and the production was halted for four days.

No one was pleased by this respite, least of all Charlie, who viewed bed rest at such a crucial time as idiotic. Spirits in general were low, especially among those of the company who were well enough to move about and who wanted some fun during the standstill. There was nowhere to find it; Truckee was a pretty desolate and depressing town, and it simply provided no outlets for anyone who wanted to let off steam.

Charlie knew this. He knew, too, that low morale in a picture company can become contagious and can damage the end product. So, though it wasn't his style to be overly chummy with workers during a production, he sent word that he wanted to have the company visit him from time to time - not to talk shop but just to socialize. Knowing him as I was soon to know him, I'm sure that Charlie flinched inwardly when he made this offer, for he wasn't a man to engage in chitchat. But the invitation did have a wonderful effect on the cast and crew. Each of them made a short, individual pilgrimage to his room and came out with spirits buoyed.

The afternoon came when Henry Bergman walked over to me in the lobby and said, "Charlie wonders why you haven't dropped by to say hello."

“Maybe I will,” I said, glad that we were in the lobby and Mama was upstairs - and immediately nervous about actually, at long last, being alone with Charlie. In fantasy I'd been audaciously bold and grown up. But that was fantasy.

I took a pot of tea to Mama, who sneezed, thanked me and complained that she just couldn't seem to rouse any energy, that all she wanted to do was doze. I sat with her while she sipped half a cup of tea, and I tiptoed out the minute I was sure she was asleep.

Heart thumping, I guiltily made my way down the dimly lighted corridor to Room One at the end of the hall. I told myself I was being melodramatic, that he wished merely to see me and chat with me, not rip my clothes off. He had given me that unmistakable look, of course; but he was Charlie Chaplin, with a million things crowding his active brain, not some one-track-minded simpleton. He had Pola Negri, a mature woman of the world, for a fiancée, didn't he? What could a passably pretty kid of fifteen, who made fifteen-year-old conversation, possibly have that would interest him?

I hesitated at the door. Then, closing my eyes, I knocked. “Come in.”

He was sitting up in bed, two large pillows behind him, reading a book. A broad smile broke over his face and he lowered the book to greet me. "Well, finally!" he said jokingly. "I was beginning to feel that being a leading lady had gone to your head and I wasn't important enough for you to waste your time on."

Moving with careful steps into the large, comparatively luxurious room - it had chairs instead of stools - I said, "That shows how much you know, Mr. Chaplin. I was scared to death to come till now. I was sure you'd think I was an awful upstart."

"You're joking! What a preposterous thing to think!" he objected. Then, patting the edge of his bed, he said, "Come sit down by me, Lillita - no, forgive me, it's Lita now, isn't it?"

I sat where he directed, stiffly and impersonally so I wouldn't give the impression that I considered the visit even remotely improper. I tried to make my smile impersonal, too, the smile of an utterly naive and unconcerned teenager. It was a pose, of course, and an outrageously dishonest one at that. I was there to impress him, to make him approve of me. I was intrigued by what would happen if he touched me - the romantically receptive young woman, not the dumb, dopey kid. Tension was mounting inside me. I wanted to be his little girl and yet I wanted him to put his tongue in my mouth. I knew I was playing with fire by not getting up and sitting safely in one of the chairs, but I wasn’t honest enough to admit just how little fire I was prepared to play with.

“Are you feeling any better?” I asked. “You don't look sick at all.” His eyes were rimmed with red and his nose was pink and a little puffy, but otherwise he looked marvelously alive. I'd never been so struck till now by the beauty of his eyes, by how long his lashes were. By no stretch of the imagination could he be called handsome in the Fairbanks-Valentino-John Gilbert sense, but it was no accident that so many discerning women found him desirable; the magnetism of the man was immediate and overwhelming.

He gave me that shy, bucktoothed grin. "I'm not the match for wintry blasts I expected I would be, but I'm much better, much better - for an antique."

I frowned. "Why do you talk like that? 'Fossil,' 'antique!' Do you really think you're old?"

"No. Truthfully, I like to believe I'm not even approaching the prime of life yet. But I'm thirty five, and most people your age see thirty-five as far over the hill."

"Well, I'm not most people my age," I said. "I think - well, I think of you as just about the youngest man in the world."

That reached him, for the grin widened and he took one of my hands from my lap and pressed it. "You're very kind, Lita. Turnabout is fair play. I think of you as just about the most adult young lady in the world." If I was going to escape the time was now. I could have done it with a show of casualness, too, for his hand wasn’t presing mine with any force. I could easily have slipped away and drifted to a chair without appearing to be ill at ease.

I stayed.

“You’re hard for me to understand,” I said. “How do you mean, I'm adult? We haven’t talked together very much before today, and when we have I've always sounded like a nitwit. I mean, I get embarrassed when you ask me something or want me to talk. I - well, I always feel like I'm anything but adult…”

Slowly, he leaned a bit closer toward me. "Are you embarrassed now?"

I nodded and withdrew my hand from his, but I continued to sit where I was. I was both glad and distressed that I'd closed the door when I'd come in. And both thrilled and frightened by those eyes that had now left mine to scan the contours of my body.

It was his turn to speak, but he was silent, leaving me more rattled than ever. Desperate to see this meeting through, yet just as desperate to change the fearsome mood, I indicated the book he'd put aside and asked, "What's that book about?" as if it were urgent that I know.

Apparently sensing my discomfort, he leaned back again and picked it up. "This is a biography of Napoleon and Josephine - an excellent one, by the way. You know who Napoleon was, don't you? Of course you do. Do you know who Josephine was?"

"She was his wife, wasn't she?"

"Not exactly. Not in the beginning. She was his mistress."

He pronounced the word with relish and looked at me once more as he said it. It was now obvious that he was embarking on a serious game of cat and mouse, to judge how far he might go.

Not blinking at the word, I asked, "Was she beautiful?"

"Only the most beautiful woman in all France," he said. "She wasn't French, you know. She was Creole, a mixture of two pure Latin strains. She looked like you, Lita."

"Is there - ah, could I see a picture of her?" I asked, fixing my eyes on the book, trying to make the question sound light, knowing that the thing I was ardently hoping for and ardently dreading was about to happen.

His hand circled my wrist, his face suddenly dark and intense. I began to babble senseles words about anything and everything I could think of, and I kept on as he pulled me to him. Then I stopped abruptly, for there was no breath left in me.

For an instant I felt he would be gentle. If he'd only go slowly, if he'd only be nice, I thought, then somehow all my panic would magically evaporate and I could accept anything.

But instead he pushed me back roughly on the bed. He kissed my mouth and neck and his fingers darted over my alarmed body. I found my voice and implored in a ragged whisper, “Please…stop…” but he rolled on top of me and covered my mouth with a deep-drawn kiss.

One of his hands snaked under me; his other hand squeezed my breast with almost brutal force. His body writhed furiously against mine, and suddenly some of my fright gave way to revulsion. His animal movements might have made some semblance of sense if we were naked, but we weren't; he was wearing red silk pajamas and I was wearing a blouse and skirt. He was heavy on me, and the thing he was doing was hateful because it had no tenderness, no recognition of me as a person.

His mouth drew away and once more I pleaded with him to stop. I pushed him and started to roll toward safety, but he caught me and pulled me back.

Then, abruptly, he sat up, looked at the door and whispered, “What's that?”

I leaped to my feet and hurried as far from him and the bed as I could get. I heard something, too, the sounds of the muffled voices and the shuffling of feet on the other side of the door. Upset and obviously angry, he rose and moved conspiratorially over to the door, where he stood and listened. He peered at me and put his finger against his lips. I stood at the window, terribly shaken, terribly disappointed, terribly confused. If this was what sex was all about, I wanted none of it - ever. It was vile and it was savage, and the fact that it was made so by this man I adored - or thought I did - revolted me all the more. The world saw him as a man of taste and sensitivity and compassion, which struck me now as bitterly laughable. Did he do these grotesque, dismally unromantic things with sophisticated women like Claire Windsor and Pola Negri?

No, probably not. Only with a ninny like me, who had almost no conception of what being a woman was.

I tried to smooth my wrinkled skirt, and then I began to comb my hair. The sounds of feet and voices moved on down the hall, and he came back, muttering, "Bloody bastards." I was afraid he was going to come near me again, but he didn't; he sat in a chair, crossed his legs and watched me comb my hair.

“You look unhappy, Lita."

I nodded.

“I'm going to make love to you,” he said, as casually as if he had said, “I'm going to tie my shoelaces.” Then he said, "When the time and the place are right, we're going to make love."

I found the courage to say, quietly but resolutely, "No. We're not."

He was calmly curious. "Why? Because of middleclass scruples, or because I didn't touch you sweetly?"

"Both, I guess. Please. I don't want to talk about it."

"But we must," he said, still without a hint of urgency.

"I'm not a caveman, Lita, even if I behaved like one for a minute. I'm really quite human, and you're very beautiful. But you don't know what it is to be a woman yet. You want to grow up, don't you, and live life to its fullest? I'll be your teacher, Lita."

I was no longer scared or revolted, just drained. "I'm going to my room," I said, walking past him, not looking at him.

He didn't get up, but his soft voice held me. "I assume you won't mention a word of this visit to your mother." It was not a question.

"Of course not."

He nodded. "That's very wise. If you must go now, will you kiss me goodby? My flu has just about flown. You needn't worry about catching it."

I walked to the door. "Goodby," I said and left, too troubled to say or hear another word.

Mama was still asleep when I returned to our room. I stared at the waisthigh snow drifts through the window, sure that the bath I was going to take would never cleanse me.

I quickly began to dislike the snow. It must be very cold, I discovered, to have lots of snow, and working with Charlie on the exterior scenes required the company to be in the freezing conditions for extended periods. We were not long in Truckee before Della Steele and Eddie Manson came down with bad colds, and Charlie was complaining about feeling feverish. A local doctor was called who took Charlie's temperature. It was 102 degrees. Bed rest was ordered, as Charlie had a bad case of the flu.

Charlie's illness lasted not quite two days before his temperature returned to normal. Still in bed, but accepting visitors, Charlie permitted members of the company to pay him a call, including me. It was good for company morale for the cast and crew to have an audience with him, as it was desolate in Truckee, and many of us were losing our enthusiasm.

Charlie greeted me warmly. "Please sit down here," he directed, patting the side of his bed. "There's no chair in this room." I sat down on the bed near his feet. Before I could say anything, he bent forward and clasped my hand. I pulled away from him when I noticed a look of unmistakable passion registering in his expressive blue eyes.

Suddenly, he surprised me. He leapt out of bed, shoved me to the wall, and pushed his body against mine. I slid along the wall and managed to get away from him.

"I have to go now," I said. "Mama will be wondering where I am."

“Please, Lita. I can't help myself,” he said. “You're so desirable.”

Reaching the door, I grasped the doorknob. Turning it, I opened the door and let myself out. What would I do now? I wondered. He is my boss and I respect him. With all the beautiful women, in Hollywood and elsewhere, who would give anything to be pursued by the famous Charles Chaplin, why me? What have I done or said that would make him act this way toward me, and now, how can I be comfortable in his presence? I felt guilty and frightened but somehow flattered that he would want to make love to me.

I did not tell Mama, who was in bed fighting off a cold, what had happened in Charlie's room. I was afraid she would confront him and create an embarrassing scene. I was happy being a part of his film. I did not want to spoil it in any way.

This gif from Monsieur Verdoux (below) reminds me of Charlie’s confrontation with Lita at the cabin in her second book.

[atlas-of-a-human-soul]

Broken Trust, pt.4

Part one // Part two // Part three  

Summary: Time passes, but certain things don’t change. In light of their emotions, both make a choice that will inevitably lead them to one another - for better or worse.

Warnings: angst (my apologies), fluff sprinkled on top

a/n - It’s likely the last one before the finale, so settle in and get some tissues.

========================

Y/N swore she’ll never be so stupid, so naïve, so helpless ever again when she  left the orphanage. She swore she’d be stronger, for herself and Mal, yet she found herself in the very same position.

Mal returned to her side, alive unlike what she believed. In a way, Aleksander couldn’t take away the one person she had left and a small part of her loved him more because of it. Mal wrapped his arms around her, aware nothing he says would do them any good as she began to cry. She didn’t want to, she didn’t want anyone to see her weakness for the man she’s supposed to hate. She couldn’t help it, though. She felt utterly alone and helpless. She felt like her mind and heart are breaking into two – one meant to love Aleksander and the other meant for hate.

Her screams echoed long into the night, filled with raging despair and the sorrowful betrayal she had been a victim of. After all, it’s those we love who hurt us most and she didn’t break quietly. It felt like every atom of her being screamed in unison, traumatized by all the things she kept inside since she was a child. She thought she was safe with Aleksander, that she could entrust her heart and soul to him. And she could, but she’d have to sacrifice who she is in return and she caught herself wishing she could. Y/N wished she could shed that part of herself that saw the world as black and white, to see it in the same shade of grey Aleksander did, but she couldn’t.

When the wracking sobs passed, she cried in such a desolate way that Mal couldn’t bear to listen for long.

“We need to go”, Mal whispered, looking around anxiously. They’ve stayed for too long, her cries have been too loud. He could feel it in his bones, if they didn’t leave, something sinister would happen. “Please, Y/N.”

Mal attempts to help her up, but she sinks to her knees. Her entire body is trembling, inconsolable. Y/N found herself robbed of her ability to love and trust, not only others but herself for her heart had lied to her mind who trusted the muscle blindly. It’s much more painful than a simple betrayal – she would have taken a dagger to the heart much kinder than what he had done to her.

And she hated him with burning passion for leaving now. If he persisted, she wasn’t certain if she’d be capable of resisting him much longer. But he left. He told her he loves her, her told her he would be kind to her and then he left her for trying to save his soul.

“If we do not leave now, we will be killed!” Mal raises his voice and she flinches, snapping out of her thoughts. She stands, her tears glistening in the faint light of the moonlight above them. Nodding, she walks with Mal, refusing to wipe the tears away.

She might not be like Aleksander, she might not share his darkness, but she is too proud to surrender, too proud to bend, too proud to lose. If he wants to make war instead of love, she’ll give it to him.

“How do I look?” Y/N raised her eyebrows, hands on her hips as she twirled.

Her cheeky smile acted like a wrecking ball for the wall the Darkling erected long ago, meant to keep the light out. He cultivated his darkness, convinced it would give him all his heart desires, yet the sight of Y/N struggling to stand with his kefta engulfing her the same his arms would if they embraced, it had rendered him speechless.

Y/N’s smile falters in the silence, her eyebrows furrowing as a frown crinkles her forehead. “Should I not have done this?”

The disappointment in her voice forced Aleksander to act, shaking his head while sending her a disarming smile.

"No, it's fine. I just didn't expect you to wear my clothes."

On any given day, she’d be blushing at the sight of his smile. His smile had healing properties as far she was concerned, but today wasn’t an ordinary day and her nerves made her particularly sensitive. Pursing her lips, she attempts to fold her arms with the extra fabric making it much harder, while casting her gaze to the ground. “You don’t like it.”

Raising his eyebrows, his smile grows. He comes closer, placing his index finger under her chin to tilt her head, properly meeting her gaze. "On the contrary", he speaks slowly and clearly, "I find you irresistible."

If she didn’t know any better, Y/N would have guessed he was the Sun Summoner with the way his glowing smile set her alight.

Licking her lips drew his attention, his eyes flickering down momentarily. It seemed like such an innocent moment, but it was enough to make her hands shake in anticipation.

Sighing, Y/N forces her eyes open. While she kept Aleksander out of her mind during the day, the nights favored his memory. It had been an almost that came to her dream, their almost first kiss when she had been in Little palace for a full month – she remembers because he made the dinner all about her presence.

No matter how hard she tried to let it go – to let him go, she always found herself clutching her chest in the morning. She wondered if she ever crossed his mind, almost a year since they’ve parted. Does his heart ache the same? Is that why she had hardly heard anything of him?

Her mind conjured up the worst, most painful explanations in the lonely nights. She wondered if he ever truly loved her and if he had, where had the love gone?

Can a person just stop loving someone? Did Aleksander Morozova finally stop loving her?

She wanted to stop loving him, but she couldn’t. She found herself making up excuses in his place to cover up the mistakes he’s made. In this distance that was freezing her soul and collapsing her heart, Y/N’s sole wish was to meet with her darling Darkling again. But she couldn’t travel to Little palace with the knowledge that he likely didn’t want her there or that he’d still further his plans despite her wishes. She’d have been by his side if he truly wanted her with him.

If he loved her enough, he wouldn’t have deceived her.

If he loved her enough, he would have helped her destroy the fold.

If he loved her enough, he would be here to reassure her instead of letting her question everything.

“I can do this”, she whispered under her breath, reassuring herself. She spent so many months trying to conjure up enough light and maintain enough control for it to seem Aleksander wasn’t wrong about her.

She wanted to make him proud, to draw him in with her light ever since he named her Sunshine. It’s silly, but the endearing name passing his lips made her insides quiver and she was prepared to do anything to hear it again. After all, if she does spectacularly well during an evening where she’s the main attraction, she was certain he’d see her as the only woman in the world.

Yet, as she makes her first few steps into the room, Y/N realizes she was wrong. She hasn’t done anything yet, but his eyes are chained to her regardless. The way he’s looking at her now makes her feel as if she is the only woman in the world that matters.

She saw his chest rise as he drew breath, then he was coming toward her, moving with his usual predatory grace and the intimidating flare. She wasn’t sure which she found more unnerving the intimidating Darkling or the graceful General.

"We are matching", she presses her lips to suppress an excited smile creeping up on her. She didn't expect his kefta to match hers despite his request to wear it. For Y/N, it felt strangely intimate, but she welcomed intimacy as long as it was with him.

“You look stunning”, he breathes out, a handsome smile appearing on his lips as he holds out his hand for her to take.

She doesn’t hesitate, awestruck by the twinkle in his dark eyes.

“They tell me you refused the gloves”, he raises his eyebrows.

Lifting her shin up, she smirks, “Have faith in me.”

Leaning in, Aleksander’s nose brushes her earlobe, “I never said I don’t.”

Helping her up on the stage, Aleksander stepped before her. She could hardly focus on his words, staring at his broad shoulders as they entirely shielded her from curious glances. He eclipsed her long enough for nerves to subside and she was grateful.

“You still think you’re ready?” Mal settles beside her, lips pressed as he looks at her disheveled state.

Clearing her throat, she nods, “I’ve never been stronger.”

“I know, but if you need more time –“, Mal begins, but Y/N’s irritated glare shut him up.

“We head to the fold today.” Taking a sip of her water, Y/N stands, intent on going into the woods.

“You love him”, Mal’s words stop Y/N in her tracks. “I know you do. It’s why you suffer so much in his absence.“

Swallowing thickly, she exhales through her nose to stop herself from saying anything she might regret. There’s a reason she refused to speak about Aleksander with Mal, with anyone if she could help it. Other than occasionally asking around if he’s been seen, Y/N had kept him out of her mouth. Mal couldn’t understand her feelings, he never would. She knew it to be true.

Aleksander is still an active heartache she couldn’t heal with time nor practice. Truth be told, she wanted him with her all the time. She wanted him there to cuddle when she’s on the brink of breaking, for him to whisper sweet nothings in her ear and remind her she’s loved. She wanted him there when she bathes to splash water in each other’s faces like children, to hear him gasping for air when he laughs so freely like nothing had ever gone wrong between them.

She is his. Despite the way things started, she was truly his and no amount of denial will ever change that. Unable to form words, Y/N closed her eyes as her face contorted. Her lips pressed together to hold in a sob and her head hurt from all the pressure building up in her attempt to stop herself from falling apart. But she couldn’t. There were no walls left inside her to hold the hurt encased from her mind any longer. She was shattering after nearly a year and a half of being strong – silent as she missed him, as she loved him, as she defended him from herself.

Meanwhile, in Little palace, Aleksander sat in her old room with her blue kefta in hand. He brings it up to his face, inhaling the faded scent in hope of remembering the warmth mere traces of her scent could evoke. He missed the smell of her hair when he buried his face in her neck, the gentle touch of her skin, the sweetness of her lips.

"May I ask for a dance?” He asked her with a half-smile, surprised she seemed reluctant to take his hand after her demonstration. “I won't bite”, he winks, making her roll her eyes and giggle simultaneously.

“I can hardly dance”, she admits, nibbling on her lower lip mercilessly.

Taking her hand with his right hand, he brought her closer with his left hand on her hip. She gasps, caught off guard as she looks at him with amusement.

He raises an eyebrow, suppressing a chuckle as he begins to sway her from side to side.

"When I first saw you, I couldn't get over how breathtakingly beautiful you are.” Aleksander tells her, the softest smile adorning his lips and she wished she could just reach out and touch them to see if they feel just as soft as they look. “I tried to stop you from leaving because I was bewitched by you, but then your light came out and I couldn't believe how lucky I was."

Inhaling sharply, she stared at him with lips parted in uncertainty. “So you’d say you care for me?”

Sighing heavily, Aleksander leaned his forehead on his palms, realizing not much work would be done as her face is all he thinks of, all he sees. The night he walked away, he finally saw what his love had brought her – pain and suffering. He took all she was and picked her soul apart until she was left void of love, of hate, of all emotion. After so many lifetimes, the Saints answered his prayers and sent him a dream encased in a good woman, to love and to care for and he had ruined her.

Loneliness was a punishment too kind for his awful actions.

He thought what would have happened if he had given her the truth before – had he told her what he knew, but also what he kept from her. Maybe she’d understand, maybe she would have stayed. Would their bond grow stronger? 

It couldn’t be worse than it is now.

That’s his fault as well.

Pressing his lips together, Aleksander closed his eyes for a moment. “I’d say you’re the light of my life and I never want to see it dim.”

Dipping her, his lips pause at her throat and he could feel the exact moment her breath halted, caught right below his lips. He could feel her quiver, gripping his arm strongly but not out of fear of being dropped, but from a need to be closer.

Bringing her upright, he had no more desire to remain among the people where every action is judged, controversial. He wanted to take her somewhere where he could just be Aleksander, more than the Darkling they branded him as.

“Want to go somewhere more private?” She tilts her head ever so slightly to glance at the grand entry door, waiting for his response. He couldn’t believe how easily she read his mind.

Instead of speaking, he simply pulls her toward the door, feeling as if he had been given a chance to do what he never thought was possible – live. To live and possibly love.

Once they entered his room, closest to them from the reception, Aleksander stopped. He turns to her with a smirk, his hand still holding onto hers. His fingers curl around it gently, encasing it. Slowly, he brings the hand up to his lips, leaving a feather light kiss on her wrist while her cheeks darkened.

Y/N couldn’t ignore the smile upon his lips. Smiles are supposed to be soft and inviting, but his is charming and deadly. She knew he had captured her heart and no matter what she does, he’s rooted deep inside her. He’ll always run through her veins, even if they part.

Problem is, she didn’t mind it. Not at all.

She could feel her lips tingle, parting in need. All she wants is to press her lips against his, close her eyes and take him in. She didn’t care about her previously established beliefs, she’d burn them all down for a single kiss. Barely holding onto who she was before she met her sweet Darkling, Y/N cups his cheek.

His eyes are alight with desire and craving he’s been suppressing for a long time, intoxicating her, captivating her.

Her hand moves to the back of his neck, pulling him down and he complies. His forehead rests on Y/N’s, the tip of his nose brushing hers while her fingertips grasp at the short hair at the back of his head. He’s breathing heavily, his eyes closing, so she allows herself the comfort of closing her own while bridging the distance between them. 

She presses her lips firmly onto his and the world melts away. His hand clasps gently into the back of her hair, pressing in softly. His lips are softness, passion, the promise of the sweetness to come.

Pulling back for a air, she hears the breathless chuckle accompanying his dashing smile.

“That was a perfect kiss”, she pecks his lips once more and he feels his heart stop. At a loss for words, he blinks a couple of times, seeing her lips curve into a small smile.

“Don’t go shy on me now, Sunshine.”

Aleksander remembered how they made love that night, leisurely, savoring each other’s bodies until their passion mounted. He thought about all the times she had given herself to him willingly and yet it felt like he was the one who gave her small pieces of himself each time. He loved not knowing what to expect with her for she was never the same twice. One time she would be quiet and sensual, the next aggressive and demanding. At other times she would be laughing and teasing. But no matter how she was, he loved loving her. Even the thought of touching her excited him.

She drove him mad, but she also showed him what it means to love someone. She could have killed him at any given moment had it been her true desire, just as he could have done the same to her and yet he couldn’t. Even thinking about someone hurting her upsets him.

Y/N could have stayed or killed him, he’d be fine with either way. At least then he wouldn’t suffer alone. She let him go so easily that he couldn’t help but think her love was never his. He wished he didn’t resent her for it, because a part of him wished she’d let him go long before, he wished for her to go far away from him where she’d be happier.

In his eyes swam ghosts of regrets and self-loathing, for he could have done a lot of things much better, made her life much easier. He could have been a better choice for her, a happy ending she’s deserving of. But he had already messed everything up and it is easier to have her see him as the bad guy. 

She’d let him go easier.

“General?” Ivan paused in the doorway, aware no one’s allowed in Y/N’s room and he valued his life greatly, far too much to dare take another step.

Swallowing thickly, Aleksander remained on the bed while the Darkling rose to his feet. He had been planning for too long, hiding away from what needs to be done. It was time to act and the Darkling’s mind is made up.

“We’re heading to the fold today.”

PART 5

[slasherholic]

synopsis: you work at smith’s grove, and by god, you are determined to snuggle michael myers even if it kills you.

contains: gender neutral reader, drugging, nonconsensual cuddles, lots of hair petting, somnophilia(?) intimate touching but no nsfw

Michael Myers x Reader | Stolen Affection

“You really don’t have to fight it.” You say, tenderly. It is the first you’ve spoken to him since the needle went in.

“If you let it take you, I promise it will be very pleasant.”

Michael’s eyes are cold, like a bitter autumn wind sweeping down a desolate street. He glares up at you past long, dark lashes, and you refuse to look him in the face. It’s no small wonder the man doesn’t speak—those violent eyes declare greater threats than spoken word ever could.

But the violence has begun to soften. 

As you caress his hair, twisting and weaving through his dark curls, his eyelids, teeming with heaviness, linger shut between deliberate, calculated blinks. You have not turned a blind eye to the way his body has begun to loosen all over, how his clenched fists have slackened into open palms, how his head has sunken deeper into his pillow, how the rigid tension in his jaw has all but dissipated. Michael is still fighting, still refusing to let you have your way with his body—but slowly, surely, your drug is dragging him under.

And the further under Michael goes, the more accepting he seems to become of your touch.

Your fingers begin through his hair again. His long lashes flicker, struggling to stay open; his eyes close, only for a beat. When they open again the pale blue irises peering up at you are just a bit duller. The sedative has begun to take its toll. 

You cannot place exactly when your fascination with Illinois’ worst murderer began—you can only say that it was sometime long before you had ever been working at the sanitarium, a year before his recapture, when you were still reading about the brutal killings in the local newspaper, perhaps even longer—but you do know why it began. The thought of being intimate with something so dangerous made sparks fly in your belly.

The fact that Michael is drop-dead gorgeous by anyone’s standards certainly didn’t help to alleviate your obsession.

Michael’s subtle, stubborn frustration at his predicament has loitered on his handsome features since you first slipped the needle into his arm. A much longer time than you figure should be possible, considering the generous dosage. The drug has begun to take him, yes, but his opinion of you remains starkly written in the slight furrow of his brow—if you were to unfasten the thick leather straps across his wrists and chest now, his hands would find their way around your neck before you could let loose a single bloody scream.

But you don’t let up. You don’t let up because you can see his icy resolve slipping every time your fingers dance along his scalp.

At the apex of another gentle repetition through his curls, Michael’s eyes blink tiredly. His lashes flutter and flutter, struggling, struggling…

Finally, they close. His head lolls into your hands. He doesn’t move again.

You continue to pet him, biding your time, just to be safe. You are well aware of Michael’s tricks—he could very well be faking it, could very well be misleading you into lowering your guard, and if you grow too comfortable, if you play into his hands now, it will be the end of this risky little game, and most probably the end of your life.

You wait and wait. Your fingers do not leave his hair. The moon shifts higher in the sky and seeps into his cell past barred windows, casting a gentle silver light across his face. His previous contempt for you is gone from his features; what has taken its place is slack, vacant, restful.

When the better part of half an hour passes without so much as a twitch of his eyes beneath their lids, you know that Michael’s fight is over. Sleep has taken him, and no time soon will it give him up.

Your fingers fly to the steel buckles of his restraints. You undo them one by one. Your heart patters faster in your chest when the last strap comes loose; just like that, Michael is free. You are alone with him in a locked cell, and the next guard check won’t be until midnight, and those dangerous hands of his which have ripped away so many lives are free.

Your mind flashes in a slideshow past article after article; victims found strangled, choked, so starved of oxygen that all the blood vessels in their eyes and face had burst and caused a terrible hemorrhaging, a bruising of the face that had left the corpse’s irises stained blood-red and the skin a deep suffocated purple for hours after the moment of death.

Despite all your worst fears, Michael’s motionless form does not lunge up from his pillow and seize you by the throat. The outline of his chest continues to rise and fall with steady, unconscious breath.

You clamber onto his bed.

It’s cramped—his body takes up too much space. You’re forced to huddle up against his chest to keep from falling off.

Immediately, you are stricken with the thought that Smith’s Grove is cold, and Michael is very, very warm.

You had already felt his warmth in passing whenever your fingers brushed against his skin; but to cradle the heat of his core so closely is a different thing altogether. Michael radiates warmth in a way that sends goosebumps cascading up your arms and makes the chill of his unheated cement cell seem small, small, small.

You shuffle closer and rest your cheek on his pectoral. His ribs expand beneath you, then contract. You reach a hand up to play with his hair some more. Burying your face in his hot neck, you inhale deeply. Michael’s smell is subtle but pleasant—fresh clothes and fragrance-free shampoo. The staff must have hauled him into the showers this morning. You would have liked to have seen that very much.

Soon, you are touching Michael in ways few before you have gotten away with. Your hands gently explore the curve of his muscles, groping his biceps, dipping beneath his shirt to trace the multitude of scars that litter his torso. The forbiddenness of your stolen affection only makes your efforts bolder—your fingers wander up to brush lightly along his smooth jaw, a touch that sends melty shivers all down your back.

Cupping his face in your hand, you plant a delicate kiss on Michael’s cheek. You tug at his shirt collar, pulling back the fabric to expose his sharp clavicle. Your lips meet his hot skin there, too.

Michael’s mouth seems too prohibited a place to explore, and when you catch your eyes flitting to his softly parted lips, you immediately cast your gaze downwards again. No, that simply wouldn’t feel right. Surely not. Such an act would be too intimate, too disrespectful, far too removed from the reality of what Michael is.

The very next second you are stealing the kiss anyway.

You suck on his rosy lips and they are remarkably soft, remarkably warm. Excitement explodes in your stomach and you gasp between the kiss, growing bolder in the heat of it, rising to sit atop his chest while you throw your entire weight into the stolen act, and when it is over, you take his face in your hands and smush your forehead against his as you pant and pant and pant.

Heaviness pulls at your eyelids. You collapse in exhaustion against Michael, burying your face into the nook of his shoulder. Your arm comes to dangle across his broad chest. You are fully aware of what a dangerous game you are playing in letting sleep take you, and you cannot find it within yourself to care.

Cheek to cheek with a man who would gladly snap your neck, if only he were awake and aware enough to do so, you grip Michael’s body desperately closer, and fall against his shoulder in a gentle sleep.

[ukcyo]

eyes locked forward.

❦ summary ; you love eren, but it isn’t enough to save him.

➳ pairing ; eren jaeger x reader

➳ genre ; angst

➳ warnings ; spoilers for chapter 119 and beyond, nsfw mentions, death, canon-typical violence

➳ a/n: happy late valentines day lovs <3 i was supposed to post this yesterday but i kept scrapping it and it went downhill from there sijfosidj

"I did love you once. But that was when I thought you weren't like the rest of them: a slave."

If Hell was real, the fire that scorched it realms could never compare to the way your heart burned when he had told you those words yesterday, only mere hours before he begun the destruction of all lands beyond Paradis. You waited for a sign, a quiver, a betrayal in his expression--anything to tell you that he didn’t mean what he just said to you, that he was just too caught up in the moment. But those blue-green eyes, absent all of life, continued to stare coldly at you, as if you truly were nothing to him but a pebble on the side of the street.

And that was when you realized that your Eren wasn’t here anymore.

You remember the first time you’ve met him. Blue-green eyes with a certain intensity that reminded you of the fiery blazes of the sun, he swept you off of your feet when his zealous words and promises of revenge and freedom made you realize that there was hope within these walls, that humanity’s savior trained right beside you. The way he was eager and happy beyond words when you agreed to his sentiments and provided opinions of your own further intensified those emotions of yours, feeling yourself get attached to everything he offered. Your feelings were confirmed when he was revealed to be one who can become a titan, telling you that it was only Eren who can guarantee a future for all of humanity. 

Yet, as both of you spent countless conversations under swirls of red-orange and the occasional star-ridden darkness of the night sky, you no longer bonded over only shared goals of freedom. First it was your smiles, then it was jokes, then it was the sudden appreciations over being there for each other, tinges of red appearing both on your faces. And on a Thursday night, when both of you had gingerly kissed for the very first time, Eren and you realized that you had given a half of yourselves to each other.

That was why it was worth and continued to be worth it for the longest time, because Eren was there, as you were for him. Countless sorrows, imminent grief, frequent loss, the guilt of surviving while hundreds of the soldiers you all fought with were left either mangled or eaten--they all became bearable because both of you leaned on each other, melding beautifully into one whole that only fueled the strength you had.

What foolish thinking.

You remember the first time he touched you. It was a week before your first ever visit to Marley, just a little over a year ago. Eren had drastically changed, much more quieter and solemn, he had a habit of staring into space with a deeply blank look in his eyes. It hurt you to see him like this, the pains of the world consuming his soul, but it was enough for you to be by his side and easing his woes even just little, something you knew you were able to do when an adoring, sincere grin appeared on his face. Yet, besides that, both of you barely spoke as much as you did in your past, usually resolving to sitting in comfortable silence as you stared at the vast green scenery of the island. That was why it greatly surprised you when he had appeared in your bedroom that evening, hand caressing your cheek and lingering there, his eyes intently looking at your features, as if he was trying his best to memorize it. And when he asked if he could lay in bed with you that night, hands moving down to the collar of your nightgown and gently clutching it, you smiled and whole-heartedly agreed.

You can still vividly recall every feeling Eren had managed to procure from you that evening. His hands were like the paintbrush of a talented painter, brushing even the slightest upon your skin and producing a magnificent shade of color that you’ve never experienced and seen in your life. Both of you were inexperienced, two people lost in a world that they thought they understood so well, but realized that they actually knew nothing all. But if you were to say that the experience wasn’t heavenly, that the way he had moved against you wasn’t divine and almost brought you to tears, you would be lying. Because it was absolutely beautiful, ethereal even. In the first time in years, both of you tasted the feeling of happiness, what it meant to be alive. Both of you understood that maybe you were born to live in this exact moment, intimately connected as if tomorrow was such a distant concept.

The memory of it was a treasure in your heart that you swore to never reveal and offer to someone else, identifying it as sacred and a light in this dark tunnel you have been facing. 

(Now your heart only twists in ache, for the treasure had altered into poison.)

As you reminisce, you suddenly come to a painful realization that that evening was the last time Eren had stayed alive. Both of you laid in bed afterwards, entangled in each other’s arms as you attempted to fall asleep. You remember thinking that this was the essence of being alive, until Eren had suddenly tightened his grip around your body, his arms shaking in the process. He acted as if he was in fear, fear that you were going to slip away and leave forever if he even loosened it just a bit.

“Eren,” you said his name in a concerned tone, “What’s wrong?”

He was whimpering. You realized that it wasn’t only his arms that shook, but his whole body did, his heart hammering rapidly within his chest.

“In the future, I want you to find happiness no matter what happens, even if it isn’t with me. I want you to be free, like we’ve always longed for.”

You stayed silent for a second, stunned from his words, before smiling and hugging him tighter in return.

“Eren, wherever you end up running to and wherever you go, look to the distance and know that I am there too. Freedom is still what I consider happiness, but now I realize having you in my life is too.”

That conversation, the desolation in his words, the venom in his tone when he had told you were no longer important to him--it all made sense to you now. His attack on Marley, his subsequent escape from his prison here, activating the rumbling and releasing all those colossal titans to wreck havoc to all the lands beyond Paradis--Eren knew that this was going to happen. Long before the Marley trip, long before you made love, he knew that he was meant to destroy the world the moment everyone decided you were all devils. He knew that the blood of all the innocent people that made up numerous nations was going to be on his hands. He knew that he was going to have to kill who he was, and that was why he said those words to you that evening. Because despite that all, despite how much you mattered to him, it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to save Paradis, it isn’t enough to vanquish the fear people had on the island you called home, it isn’t enough to change the future.

You love Eren, but it isn’t enough to save him. It isn’t enough to save you all.

Sacrificing himself and everything he held dear to his heart for the sake of freedom, there was no going back to who he was, and there was no going back to you.

That’s why he said it, you tell yourself, because he knew how painful it would be when I will have to face him.

As you currently lay huddled against the campfire, the woods deathly quiet for almost everyone around you slept, silent tears cascaded down your cheeks. Not because you understand that what he told you was a lie, but how much he had to slice himself up for the sake of protecting all of you. This wasn’t fair. None of this was. Why wasn’t he given another choice? Why?

A new resolve develops in your heart as you quiver from the tears that refused to stop spilling from your eyes. It didn’t matter what will happen, what will happen to you, you will get Eren back. You will save him, away from the crimes he was forced to commit, away from the cruelty of the world that refuses to leave him alone.

Because wherever Eren runs to, wherever he ends up being in, you will always be there in the distance, ready to lift him up when he ends up crashing to the ground.

[svnflowervol666]

Crisp Trepidation (Harry Styles x fem!Reader)

Word Count: 5.2k

Warnings: angst, mentions of smut, pregnancy

Author’s Note: Here she is! The promised “Y/N is pregnant again before she’s ready” fic. I ended up liking this a lot more than I thought I would, so I hope you all do as well! Take care and TPWK. 

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t my favorite tiny human,” the pediatrician chimed as she kicked the door to the small examination room shut with her sneaker.

“You must say that to all of the parents that you see,” Y/N blushed, unable to hide the smile that tugged on the corners of her lips.

“I don’t, actually. I’m being honest when I tell you she is the cutest baby I have ever seen in my life. Those curls! Are you kidding me?”

She padded over to the miniature exam table to get a better look at the infant that was lying contently on her back and chewing on her pudgy albeit still tiny fingers. 

“Let’s take a look at how you’re doing, sweet pea.”

The doctor, Lisa, lifted the stethoscope that was looped around her neck and placed it correctly into her ears. Listening to the baby’s heartbeat to check for any abnormalities, she couldn’t help but give a sympathetic frown when the tiny girl under her tensed up from the cool touch of the metal.

“Nurse’s notes say she’s put on quite a bit. She’s finally caught up to her age group in weight. I’m assuming breastfeeding is going better for you both now?”

She lovingly squeezed the extra chub around her thighs.

“Yeah. We don’t really use bottles anymore. Finally got her to latch on and now it seems like all she wants to do it eat,” Y/N chuckled.

“Good! That’s good. There’s nothing wrong with formula like we talked about, but it’s even better to breastfeed when you can. Is she hitting the milestones? Rolling over? Propping her head up? Babbling a bit?”

“Babbling, definitely. She keeps us up sometimes because we can hear her talking to herself through the monitor at night,” Y/N poked her tongue out at her daughter in an attempt to get her to smile.

“Having a bit of trouble propping herself up though. She can only do it for a little bit and then she’ll give up. She’s got Harry’s giant head, though, so I’m sure it’s a bit of a struggle.”

Lisa laughed loudly at the mention of her patient’s father, knowing good and well what Y/N meant. She scribbled notes onto the file attached to her clipboard, checking off the baby’s progress and coinciding what the nurse that came in before her documented about her length and weight.

“She’ll get to it eventually. All babies are different. She seems to be coming along quite nicely, though. Nothing abnormal or anything to fuss about. A perfectly healthy six-month-old in my book.”

Y/N sighed in relief, though she knew there was nothing to worry over to begin with.

“How’s mum doing? You taking care of yourself, too? You’re just as important as baby.”

“When I can. Harry’s really good with her. He’ll take over when he sees me struggling, but it seems like she only wants me these days. Think I might be coming down with something, though. I’ve been feeling awful for a few weeks. Like I got hit by a train. I keep reminding myself to go get checked out, but I always get distracted taking care of her,” Y/N gestured to her daughter that was now drooling onto the parchment liner and staring up at the ceiling as if there was something ornately interesting about the popcorn texture that had been stippled onto it.

“When you say, ‘hit by a train,’ what do you mean? I can examine you here if you’d like. As long as it’s nothing serious, I can send you something off to the pharmacy.”

Lisa re-fastened the snaps on the infant’s onesie, making sure not to pinch her chunky legs and placed her back into her mother’s lap.

“Ummm,” Y/N began, “Just extra drained, I guess? Kinda nauseous. I’ve been getting migraines a lot and even when I do get a good night’s rest, I still feel like I could go back to bed for the rest of the day. Maybe I’m just exhausted, I don’t really know. But it just feels a bit different than being worn out like I have been before.”

She could see the wheels in Lisa’s head turning, noting each of her symptoms and trying to align them in a path that would lead her to the root of the problem.

“Can I ask you something that might be a bit personal?”

Y/N nodded, rubbing her fingers absentmindedly along the bridge of her daughter’s socked foot.

“Have you and Harry been intimate since she was born?”

She was taken aback by the question, not understanding where Lisa was going with this or why it was relevant.

“Umm,” Y/N stuttered, feeling a static-y surge of embarrassment travel up her neck and onto the sides of her face, “Yeah. We have.”

A whole fucking lot ever since I’ve been cleared for it, she thought, but kept to herself.

“And can you tell me when your last menstrual cycle ended?”

Then it clicked. She genuinely couldn’t recall her most recent period and even the thought of what Lisa was alluding to made her stomach twist into thousands of tiny knots.

“I- I don’t know. I’ve been so busy with her I don’t even really think about what’s going on with me half of the time.”

Y/N tried to make excuses, anything to avoid the obvious, but judging from the quizzical look on her daughter’s pediatrician’s face, she knew exactly where this was going.

“There’s no way,” she whispered, “I can’t be.”

Lisa’s face dropped, now tender and apologetic when she realized that this was news Y/N was not ecstatic to hear.

“I know I’m a pediatrician, so that’s obviously the first thing my mind goes to, but can we at least get you to take a test? That way we’ll know for sure?”

//

Harry came home to a quiet house. It wasn’t unusual, but seeing as it was well after six o’clock in the evening and his wife wasn’t in the kitchen making the curry that she’d been oh-so so excited about earlier in the week and swaying along to the playlist they’d curated together as she stirred a pot filled with vegetables was. Their grocery store had been out of coconut milk for several weeks and she’d nearly tackled him to the ground out of excitement when he’d come home from the grocery store with it the night before, so he found it awfully strange that she’d yet to start cooking it. Had he not seen her car in the driveway, he probably wouldn’t have even suspected her to be home.

He checked the living room first, and it was desolate apart from the playmat on the floor that was littered with a few of his daughter’s favorite rattles and teethers. Her coat and purse were abandoned haphazardly on the couch, almost as if she tossed it aside in a hurry to get somewhere.

“Baby?”

Nothing.

His head peaked into the nursery, stealthily and quietly in preparation to walk in on his daughter taking her scheduled nap before her actual bedtime. He’d gotten good at hushing his footfalls to almost complete silence as to not wake her, having made that mistake more than a handful of times. 

And he was right. There she was, sprawled out in her crib with her arms outstretched over her head like a tiny starfish. Her chubby cheeks were smushed against her bicep, drawing her lips open the tiniest bit so that Harry could see the tops of her fleshy, pink gums and the barely-there nub of her first tooth peeking through. More than anything, he wanted to wake her up - lift her from the plush mattress and cuddle her close, shower her with kisses and tickle her with his scruff that was teetering on the line of becoming a full blown beard to hear those baby squeals he adored so much, but he needed to find Y/N first.

She had to be in their bedroom, he thought to himself. Maybe she was taking advantage of their baby girl napping to also get some rest. She had been rather exhausted lately. Maybe she’d had a rough day and was relaxing in the clawfoot, porcelain bathtub that had been the selling point of the home they now lived in. Or maybe she was keeping to herself peacefully somewhere else in the house and she was being so quiet that he just couldn’t hear her.

Turns out he was right again. Like he had done with the nursery, he held the wooden door tightly in his grip to keep the hinges from creeking and pressed it open gently. The room was completely dark, but he could make out the lump underneath the duvet on their king-sized bed as his wife. 

Good. She was sleeping. 

He padded across the hardwood floor, still being as quiet as he could until he crossed the threshold of the bathroom. There, he rid himself of the uncomfortable clothes he’d been wearing all day. Curse these professional business meetings about his tour schedule that forced him to dress nicely. 

All throughout the meetings, he wanted nothing more than to be home with his wife and baby, cuddling the afternoon away and watching shitty reality television while his daughter cooed and grunted and gurgled in her baby voice that he loved so much and could listen to all day. Maybe it was the fact that he’d been having to partake in these boring work meetings a lot more lately, which caused him to miss even the smallest aspects about his everyday life with his family like changing diapers or checking the baby monitor eight hundred times throughout the day to make sure his daughter was still breathing. Or maybe it was the understanding that by this time next year, he’d be halfway across the globe and physically unable to hold her in his arms. Perhaps he’d just been getting sentimental, but it was an unpleasant feeling nonetheless.

His thoughts were interrupted when he deposited his rings into the dish he kept on the counter and he heard a quite yet still prominent sniffle among the clattering of metal against the glass dish.

“Honey? ‘S that you?” Harry peaked his head out from beyond the bathroom door. 

He saw her body shift under the covers, but she gave no response. So he called out again.

“Ye’ sick? Can hear ye’ snifflin’.”

Nothing.

Pivoting back around to the inside of the bathroom, he quickly shut off the light and carried himself over to her side of the bed where he could see her properly. Her face was tucked into her chin and all that was visible to him was the top of her head.

“Hey,” Harry cooed, petting what he could reach of her hair and speaking even gentler than he had been, “What’s wrong?”

And that’s when he heard it - an almost inaudible choking sound of Y/N trying to catch her breath that immediately let him know she wasn’t sick. She had been crying.

“Whoa, baby,” he was already pulling the covers back with force, honestly not caring whether or not she minded the intrusion.

“Tell me what’s going on.”

She was emotionless when he saw her face, her puffy, bloodshot eyes and swollen lips the only indicator that she was upset. She didn’t even react to Harry tugging her head out from where it had been buried in the covers, simply rolling onto her back to stare idly at the ceiling.

“Y/N,” he called for her again, this time much more stern, “You’ve got to talk t’ me.”

She took several deep breaths through her nose, allowing her lungs to fill to their maximum capacity before exhaling with a sigh. Harry could have sworn she was sucking all of the oxygen out of the room along with his patience each time she did so. 

After what felt like ages, she parted her lips to speak.

“I went to the doctor today.” 

“Yeah? For the six-month check up, right?” Harry asked, not seeing why that was important but his mind quickly went to the worst scenario possible despite having just seen his daughter sleeping peacefully in her crib.

“‘S she alright?” his voice now demanding urgency in the delivery of her response.

“She’s fine,” she quickly dismissed him, internally kicking herself for making Harry worry.

“I was telling Lisa about how sick I’ve been lately and she -,” Y/N gulped and rubbed her knuckles against her tired eyes, bracing herself for whatever events unfolded after she said what she was about to say.

“She, umm. She made me take a pregnancy test.”

Now it was Harry’s turn to be speechless. He stared at her with furrowed brows and his mouth slightly agape. His palms suddenly felt clammy against the white sheets that they rested on and his stomach felt like it had turned in on itself from how badly it was churning. Of all of the things he had expected to be wrong with her, this was certainly the last on the list. 

“And?” he asked after a solid sixty seconds of staring at her and saying absolutely nothing, though he already knew the answer.

“Ten weeks.”

Silent tears now spilled over her eyes and down past her temples. She couldn’t even be bothered to wipe them, instead letting them dampen a small patch of hair on either side of her head. Pregnancies weren’t supposed to be sad, but somehow, she had barely been able to stop crying since she left the pediatrician’s office.

“How,” Harry whispered, moreso to himself than to her.

“I think you know how babies are made, H,” Y/N quipped.

“‘S not what I meant,” Harry fired back just as quickly, “It’s just...She’s still so little.”

He thought of his daughter asleep in the next room. She was the most perfect thing he’s ever seen and on the day that she was born, he knew he wanted nothing more than to fill his and Y/N’s house with as many curly-headed babies as he could fit beds in each room. He just hadn’t expected that his only child’s first birthday present was going to be the gift of being a big sister. 

It was all too sudden.

“I just don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner. I mean,” Y/N raised her arms above her head before huffing and letting them fall to her sides, “I guess I was just so caught up with the baby that I hadn’t even had a second to think about what’s going on with me. It’s like I don’t even matter anymore and I-”

“Hey, hey now. None of tha’,” Harry shushed her and curled up next to her frame as she began to sob.

He tucked her head into his neck, hugging her shoulders tightly as if he was trying to hold the pieces of her together before she shattered. His mind was running a mile per minute. It killed him to see her like this, killed him to be in this situation. The last time they had found out this news, there were happy tears - tears of joy and celebration and relief after having tried for what felt like years. Never had he imagined that the next time they were presented with the very same news, that there would be tears of sadness.

Her voice was muffled against his now wrinkled blouse, but he could still make out what she was saying beneath her blubbers.

“I can’t do this.”

“Wha’ do yeh mean, pretty? Of course yeh can. I’ll move some things around and we’ll make it work. We’ll be alright,” he ran his hand up and down her back in attempt to soothe her.

“That’s the problem, Harry.”

He lifted his chin from here it was resting on the top of her head to look down at her.

“What?”

“You have to move everything around. You’ve already been gone for almost two years. This sets you back at least another. You can’t keep pushing shit back.”

“Erm,” Harry paused to break away from her and sit up straight against the headboard, “Yes I can? I couldn’t care less about tour...Did yeh think I was gonna leave yeh here on your own with a fuckin’ newborn?”

“No. I didn’t think you were just going to leave,” she almost sounded annoyed, which didn’t sit quite right with Harry.

“But do you see what’s happening? Everything is fucked.”

His voice wasn’t so calm anymore.

“No, Y/N. I honestly don’t. I mean I know this is all happening much earlier than we expected, but what else is there t’ do? Tour can wait.”

“People are counting on you, Harry. Millions of them. We’re not the only ones that matter in this situation.”

“Will you please tell me what yeh gettin’ at, because I’m starting t’ get upset.” 

Harry’s lips were pressed in a thin, straight line and his nostrils flared with every breath. Why was she being like this? 

“I don’t know what I’m fucking getting at. I’m just overwhelmed."

“And yeh think I’m not? ‘M tryin’ my best to keep it together for your sake if yeh haven’t noticed,” it almost condescending how the words rolled off his tongue.

“Oh, excuse me,” Y/N laughed sarcastically.

“Didn’t realize you were the one carrying our fucking child. Didn’t realize you’re the one that has to grow all big and gross and swollen and be in pain every fucking day to the point where walking to the bathroom feels like a fucking marathon. Didn’t realize you’re the one that has to push a football-sized human out of your vagina and just lay there while a doctor you’ve never seen before stitches you up because it literally tore your insides. Didn’t realize you-”

“For fuck’s sake, I get it!” Harry was yelling now.

“It’s not the same and I’m sorry for suggesting tha’ it was. ‘M not sure what it is that yeh want me t’ say though. I’m sorry? ‘S that it? Sorry for gettin’ yeh pregnant? Sorry for havin’ a job that were well fuckin’ aware of when yeh met me? Sorry that I do everything I possibly can to keep you and the baby and everyone else on the fuckin’ planet happy?”

“You’re being an asshole, Harry,” she was just as angry as he was, scowl evident on her face even in their dimly lit bedroom.

“And you’re not makin’ any fuckin’ sense! Are yeh tellin’ me yeh don’t want t’ keep it? ‘Cos I never fuckin’ said that yeh have to.”

The thought had crossed her mind on the drive home from the doctor’s office, but the feeling left as quickly as it approached. She’d taken one look at her daughter in her car seat through the rear view mirror happily sucking on her teether and knew without a doubt that she couldn’t.

She felt a tidal wave of fresh, salty tears peaking and about to crash over her.

“I don’t want - fuck,” she put her head in her hands. 

“I just-,” and then she broke.

Sobs wracked her body, making her shoulders shake up and down. She wasn’t even sure how she had any more left to get out, but it just kept coming. Over and over and over again until it felt like she was being suffocated and that no one was going to save her. She felt Harry’s hands move to rest on her shoulder blades and heard gentle, cooing-like sounds coming out of his mouth, but she couldn’t make out what he had said over the sounds of her own wailing.

“Baby, it’s okay. Just breathe f’ me. It’s alri-”

His attempt at subduing her was cut short by shrill cries coming from the digital monitor that sat on their nightstand. Harry peeked over his shoulder at the screen, seeing that their daughter had woken from her nap and was now demanding the attention of her parents. He couldn’t help but wince as he watched her socked feet flail around in the crib; it was without a doubt that the screaming match they’d just encountered had stirred her from her sleep, and that hurt him just as much as it did to see his wife crying right in front of him.

Y/N heard it too, somehow. Perhaps it was because she’d been trained to react to every minute sound that she made and could recognize her cries from a mile away in the paralyzing fear that something was wrong with her or maybe it was because she looking for any and every excuse to get Harry’s hands off of her so she could get away from him and escape the argument they’d just had without making the situation any worse than it already was. Regardless, she turned her own neck to peer at the monitor and sighed heavily.

“I’ll go, Y/N. Just stay here.”

“No. I got it. It’s after seven. She’s probably hungry.”

She shrugged Harry’s hands away from her shoulders like his touch physically pained her and climbed over his body and off the bed without another word, not even giving Harry the chance to take her hand and help her over the edge of the mattress. He knew she wasn’t going anywhere but down the hall and into the nursery, but he couldn’t help but feel like she was walking away from everything.

//

Y/N stared her daughter while she nursed. She started from the top of her head that was riddled with chocolate brown curls and worked her way down to the tips of her toes that would occasionally flex themselves out of habit. Her hair? Undoubtedly Harry’s. Her nose? A perfect, narrow line down her face that led to a button-shaped tip akin to Harry’s. Her lips? The same almost inhuman shade of bubblegum pink as Harry’s. Surprisingly, the only physical trait she’d inherited from her mother were the color of her eyes, which was funny considering that was the one thing she’d wanted Harry to pass down to their daughter; Y/N had always hated hers.

She was content, suckling away at Y/N’s breast - her cries of hunger long forgotten. The infant hadn’t even flinched when a few more of Y/N’s silent, cold tears spilled over and left small wet spots where her onesie rested over her belly. She had no idea that her parents were upset with each other and she had no idea that in a little more than six months time, she’d be a big sister and there would be two babies fighting for their attention. Y/N was also clueless, but only as to how she was going to take care of a newborn and a one-year-old simultaneously. She’d always thought she’d have more time than this - more time to spend with just her daughter and Harry before they decided to have another, but just like her eyes, things always had a funny way of never working out in her favor.

Three soft knocks on the wall withdrew her from her thoughts and she was greeted by her husband idling in the doorway like he needed permission before entering a room in his own house. He had changed out of his dress clothes and was now clad in his favorite pair of joggers that were permanently stained with spit-up. Y/N had tried everything under the sun to get the spots out, but he’d been persistant on not throwing them out.

“Can I come in?”

His voice was barely above a whisper and much calmer than when he’d been yelling at her about twenty minutes ago. He still hesitated crossing the threshold even after Y/N had given him a skeptical nod, but allowed his bare feet to pad over the plush carpet as he joined her on the loveseat in the far corner of the nursery.

He watched their daughter just as Y/N had, taking in her tranquil state as her fingers brushed reflexively against the underside of Y/N’s breast. He’d never been able to pry his eyes away every time he watched her nurse. There were no ulterior motives behind it, nothing sexual or erotic whatsoever. It amazed him each and every time, how Y/N was able to provide their child with everything that they needed to grow with only her body. At first, Y/N hated that Harry loved sitting in on her feedings, feeling exposed and unattractive despite Harry’s continuous affirmations that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever had the privilege of witnessing, but over time she’d grown fond of it.

“‘M sorry for yelling at yeh,” Harry started.

“It was uncalled for.”

Y/N sniffled, rubbing her swollen eyes with the back of her free hand that wasn’t supporting her daughter’s back as she held her.

“It’s okay. It was a lot to take in. I’m sorry for yelling at you too.”

She couldn’t quite look him in the eye just yet, but she was slowy but surely getting there.

“’S not okay, actually. You’re right. I’m not the one havin’ the baby. It’s you that’s got t’ do all the hard stuff. Should’ve listened to you more.”

He shifted towards her on the cushions, afraid to touch her just yet but still yearning to be closer to her.

The best Y/N could muster was a quiet, “Thank you,” before she busied herself by attempting to run her fingers through her baby’s hair and untangle the mess she’d created while she was sleeping.

“Can I hold you? Please?”

Now was when she turned to face him and she was met with eyes that were just as red-rimmed as hers. She had heard the bathroom sink running for an abnormally long amount of time and a hard, frustrated pounding against the wall shortly after she’d gone off in the nursery to feed the baby, which meant he must have been trying to muffle the sounds of his own crying when she left their bedroom.

Y/N didn’t say anything, only shifting her weight onto one side so Harry could easily lift her onto his lap in one swift movement without disturbing their daughter. He tucked her shoulder into his neck and softly kissed her skin and his hands moved to mimic hers so they were both holding the baby that was nodding off again in their arms. She found herself relaxing into his loose grip, her head tilting to the side to rest against his. 

“I love you so much. Yeh know that? I know it’s difficult always having t’ think about everyone else, but you’re what’s important t’ me. I’d drop everything for you if I had to. End it all today.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” she refuted, but there was no malice in her tone.

“I wouldn’t let you.”

“Well, just know that I would if yeh wanted me to. I’ve thought about it a thousand times. I want t’ be here f’ you. For her. Don’t want t’ miss anything. I finally got my shot at bein’ normal when I met you and I hate myself for even thinkin’ about going back on the road and leavin’ yeh.”

“Don’t,” Y/N paused to press a chaste kiss to Harry’s cheek.

“You’re a good person, Harry. A good dad. A good husband. Please don’t ever think that you’re not.”

She felt moisture pool in the dips of her collarbones where Harry’s chin lied, but she didn’t acknowledge it.

“I’ll be okay. Sorry if I freaked you out earlier. Think I just need some time to get used to it all. Just wasn’t expecting Lisa to drop the ball that I was pregnant when all I was expecting was for her to tell me that our kid is in the 99th percentile for weight and then send me on my way.”

This got a chuckle out of him, almost causing him to choke on his tears. He quickly rubbed the sleeves of his jumper against his eyes to dry up any remaining wet spots on his face. 

“She is pretty chunky, isn’t she?” Harry jested while thumbing over his daughter’s rounded tummy.

After a moment of admiring their little chunk of a baby, with her milk-drunk eyes and puckered lips, Harry spoke again.

“Two babies,” he huffed.

“Two babies,” she repeated.

His hands moved to caress Y/N’s stomach. She clearly wasn’t showing yet considering that neither of them had even known she was pregnant up until today, but he still held her like her belly was the size of a watermelon and he was waiting anxiously to feel a hand or a foot press up against his palm.

“Might be kinda nice. They can share everything and we’ll only have t’ have one birthday party ‘cos they’ll be born around the same time. They’ll go t’ the same school and probably have the same friends. Kinda like twins.”

“Based on the fact that you’ve already picked out the outfit this one is wearing on her first birthday that’s still six months away, I highly doubt you’ll stay keen on them sharing a party.”

Harry pursed his lips and blushed, recalling the garment he’d spotted during one his fittings with Gucci that he vowed to have for his daughter.

“Guess you’re right about tha’.”

Their banter was interrupted by a grueling rumbling sound coming from Y/N’s stomach that Harry could feel throughout his entire body.

“Jesus, Y/N. You hungry too? When’s the last time you ate?”

“Uhh...this morning I think?” Y/N sighed.

“Couldn’t stomach anything when I got home.”

Harry’s heart dropped when he thought of how distraught she’d been all day while he was gone and with everything in him, he’d wished he would have postponed his meetings to go to check up with her and they could have found out together, but it’s possible that the topic might not have even come up if he had been in the room with her and the pediatrician.

“Found coconut milk at the store the other day, remember? Want me t’ make that curry for yeh?”

“Ohh, yes please,” she immediately purked up at the thought of warm spices and rice.

“Starting to wonder if curry was a craving now that I think about it. Didn’t we have it, what? Three nights in a row a while back?”

Harry giggled as he reluctantly removed Y/N from his lap and stood up from the sofa.

“Thought tha’ was a bit weird that yeh wanted it so badly, but I didn’t dwell on it too much.”

“She’s going back down. If you give me a minute, I’ll come downstairs and help you,” Y/N said, pulling up the straps of her tank top after realizing her daughter had long since forgotten about her breast and was conked out in her arms.

“‘Ve got it, mama” Harry quickly refuted.

“Take a bath or somethin’ and I’ll bring it up t’ yeh when it’s done.”

“Okay.”

Y/N couldn’t fight the grin growing on her face at the nickname Harry used that she still hadn’t gotten used to.

When she placed their daughter soundly in her crib, Y/N’s fingers stayed put from where they sat on the railing as she caught herself staring at the sleeping infant once more. Though she’d felt like her world was caving in on her just a handful of hours ago, the pieces were all coming back together now. 

Of course, she wanted more children with Harry. And now she was getting what she wanted. Just like he’d told her back in the bedroom, it wasn’t ideal, but they’d make it work. They always did. 

With two babies.

[againstauthority]

Recovery without a support system:

To give more context, I reccomend you read my last one about how therapy is a scam.

This time, I'm talking about recovery and support systems. If you read any psychology article about trauma or mental illness, the "genius" advice they give every time is "get therapy" and "tell your family/friends." If you're someone who has these options, you're probably not looking for these articles.

If you are young or broken-hearted, you probably dream about being saved. You're tired of fighting alone, you crave the understanding and intimacy of another person, you see others who have somebody and feel jealous of them, you grieve the relationships that could've been better; these things are ok. You have the right to feel sad, lonely, envious, angry, and fearful about your future. Although you are alone, a sense of dependancy lives in you; you think to yourself, if I had someone who showed me love, I could feel good enough about myself to recover. Let me tell you something, as someone who's been there, too: you are enough on your own.

This might first come off as ignorant or condescending; if I told this to myself years ago, I would die on this hill that I need someone to save me. It's because I had been lonely for so long, the idea of being saved was so romanticized, I put all my hope in my wishes to take away my pain from being hurt and abandoned again and again. I held on to this wish because I believed someone had to be out there, it felt like the only thing that could possibly vanquish this state, I was told so many times I was not good enough and I needed someone else to prove it wasn't true. I would never believe that I could be strong enough on my own, but I was fucking wrong. When you're in this state, you are convinced that only a savior is powerful enough to enlighten you out of your self hatred, and the weak and hopeless relationship with yourself is not feasibly strong enough to change. This state is a box that seems like it will always be closed, but it won't, and you'll find it open even though you swear it won't.

It's not bad to crave intimacy and understanding, that's human. I wish we lived in a world where people were more accepting, but you know by now how harsh people can be. You know that good relationships (including friendship) are hard to come by, are hard to mantain, and may only last a short time. You know that people don't always care about you, can be toxic, can betray your trust and leave you - and that fucking hurts. Let me tell you, you don't have to prove you are enough to people, this isn't about them - it's about you. This is your life, you're an individual with your own personality, circumstances, experiences, lifestyle, and desires. No one knows you better than you, and all the loving things you've wanted to hear about yourself, you already know in a much more intimate way.

If your family is not there or is a negative presence, if you don't have friends or your friends are not there for you, I'm sorry. If you have been hurt in a way that wants to be healed by someone, if you are misunderstood, if you want to feel safe around others and have someone to talk to, if there is someone you wish loved you, you are validated in wanting compassion and understanding. You deserve the support and security of having people there for you; however, not everyone gets it. That is ok, because you are enough without it - you've come it this far alone. That takes a lot. You are exhausted, and you're probably insisting that you need to rest in the company of someone. You already know what I'm going to say - it's better to be alone than in the company of people who make you feel unloved. I almost lost my life many times to loneliness, but it was not being alone that got me - it was feeling unwanted. Loneliness is a bitch, it's a horrifying and gruelling thing to cut the toxic people out of your life and accept being alone. I promise, it's going to suck for a long time, but it pays off for the rest of your life. You'll be tormented by feeling unlovable and desolate, but with time, these feelings really fade away. You will survive loneliness and find a lifestyle that feels free.

The key to recovery is understanding yourself + learning the psychology of what you've been through/are dealing with, and applying this knowledge in a way that works for you. Gather knowledge and use it to give yourself understanding and compassion. The more time you spend with yourself, away from shame and self hatred, the more you'll understand and come to appreciate yourself.

Of course it takes time to figure out how to apply this knowledge in a way that's relevant to you and adopt this practice, but it's much more effective this way. People are unreliable; it's not guaranteed someone will be there to save you, they will stay and not hurt you further. If you choose self help, you are gaining knowledge you can use forever in so many ways, and practices you can depend on. You are not weak for being lonely, but you deserve yourself. This is here to empower you, not patronize or intimidate you. I've been there, but let me tell you: even though it takes time getting used to being alone, it pays off. You can heal yourself.

[lesyah]

moshang childhood friends to lovers au - final

Hello! here is a fic that was posted to my twitter. it has songs to go along with it from my twitter. If you’d like to look at the songs for each part, or just check out my twitter (where I have threadfics and other twitter fics not posted here), feel free to do so!

final [age 22]

Out of all the things Shang Qinghua had gone through over the past three and a half years, this was somehow the worst. He wasn’t sure why this was the one thing that had him on the verge of a breakdown. It seemed somewhat inconsequential compared to the other moments throughout his college career. Other moments like when he was truly on the verge of dropping out, or when he felt so lonely he thought he’d snap in half. He was able to cope with those things. But for some reason, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

He stared at the program in front of him, gaze faraway and his mind even farther away. All the sounds around him seemed to muffle. He had only picked up the itinerary to double check the time to tell his mom. He realized, in a split second, that Mobei Jun was also graduating. He knew this, in theory, but he never really thought about it.

A painful feeling bloomed in his chest. Mobei Jun was graduating. He was graduating university. He was graduating and Shang Qinghua wouldn’t be there. Shang Qinghua was graduating and Mobei Jun wasn’t going to be there. He blinked a few times, the realization settling in, grabbing his heart like a vice, and squeezing until his eyes pooled with tears.

This was the first milestone they wouldn’t be a part of for one another. They’d done all of the rest together. Mobei Jun had been there for all of it, and Shang Qinghua had been there for him in turn. He had expected this to go on for the rest of their lives. He didn’t necessarily think they’d share the same milestones (though he wished), but he at least thought he’d be there for them. 

He had always imagined Mobei Jun being on the other side of the room, a silent support, when he inevitably felt anxious about this huge change in his life. Now, he was going to have to walk across a stage, receive congratulations, hug his mom, hug Shen Yuan, smile in photos with his friends, and Mobei Jun wouldn’t be there. Even worse, Mobei Jun would walk across a stage, receive congratulations, stand with his father and uncle who wouldn’t hug him, and he’d hover with his friends, and Shang Qinghua wouldn’t be there for it. He wouldn’t get to hug him in lieu of his family. He wouldn’t be able to support him when he inevitably looked at the door, hoping his mother would walk in.

Shang Qinghua set his program down, pressed his face into his hands and wept. 

[“The person you are trying to reach is not available. Please leave a message.”

“Hi Mobei, it’s Qinghua. Um… You’re probably busy getting ready, so don’t mind this. It’s nothing important. It sucks we graduate on the same day, so I can’t go to yours. I wish that I could. Even though I can’t come, I just wanted to at least call you and let you know that I’m really proud of you. Don’t let your dad or your uncle bully you today, okay? I hope you have a good day. I, um…I miss you. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Hi! It’s Shang Qinghua. I can’t take your call right now, but please leave a message and I’d love to call you back!”]

“Have you thought any more about that job?” Shen Yuan asked, lightly pushing Luo Binghe’s hand away, where he was trying to dump more food into his bowl. “Binghe, stop. That’s yours.”

Shang Qinghua leaned back against the seat, letting his own food cool down as he thought of how to answer. It was just the three of them, thankfully, otherwise it would have been impossible to be honest. In fact, he was a little thankful that Luo Binghe was there. Luo Binghe would be kinder about it than Shen Yuan. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

Shen Yuan looked up at him. “What do you mean you don’t know? It’s an amazing opportunity.”

“Yeah, and it’s also really far from home.”

Shen Yuan looked at him. Luo Binghe was also looking at him, but more in interest than criticism. 

“Isn’t it exactly what you want to do?” Luo Binghe asked, taking a small bite of his food. “It’d be worth it to move far away, right?”

Shen Yuan looked back at his food, eating a huge bite of noodles in frustration. “He doesn’t want to move because of Mobei Jun,” he said, annoyed.

Shang Qinghua didn’t meet either of their gazes.

Luo Binghe was the one to speak next. “But…Do you know if he’s coming back?”

Shang Qinghua’s chest twinged. “No, I don’t know. That’s why I don’t know if I’m taking the job yet.”

“You’re really gonna determine whether or not you take your dream job based on whether or not Mobei Jun moves back?” Shen Yuan snapped. “Can you honestly tell me that you’re not setting yourself up for failure? Why did you switch schools? Because you made the mistake of following him to his school in the first place.”

Shang Qinghua couldn’t help but wince. He looked down at his food and picked at it. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to prioritize yourself for once!”

Shang Qinghua didn’t respond. He took a bite.

Luo Binghe was quiet. “I don’t know, gege, I kind of understand what he means.”

Shen Yuan looked over at him. “What? You’re saying you would give up your future for me?”

“No,” he defended, also not meeting Shen Yuan’s gaze. “It’s not like that. It’s not that simple.”

“How do you think that makes me feel, Binghe? That I’d be stopping you from doing what you want?”

Luo Binghe sighed and put his chin in his hand. He swirled his chopsticks in the broth in front of him. “But you’re what I want. What’s the point in having a job that I like just to be miserable in every other way?”

Shen Yuan looked at him for a moment, a complicated expression on his face. He looked like he was not about to let that conversation go, but was going to save it for just their own ears. He looked back at Shang Qinghua. “Are you really miserable?”

Shang Qinghua took a bite of some rice. “What gave me away?”

Shen Yuan said nothing. He looked down at his own food and began to eat. The rest of their celebratory meal was eaten in silence.

His mother was being a little overbearing. She was trying to hold onto him now that he was finally slipping away. She hadn’t tried to hold onto him his entire life, but now that he was finally going, she was ready to try. A part of Shang Qinghua thought it was a pretense. That in order to make herself feel better, she should cry and hug and reminisce about how much she loved him and how much of a good child he’d been. It only felt suffocating. 

When she finally went to bed, Shang Qinghua went to his old room and looked at the boxes on his floor. He packed away a few more things he’d be taking with him when he fully moved out. He didn’t have a place yet, and he still didn’t even know where he was going, but it would be easier for both him and his mom to have his things packed up. That way it wouldn’t be a surprise when the time finally came.

Shang Qinghua sat on the floor in front of one of those boxes. It was full of haphazardly thrown in memorabilia, all without a category that could go into its rightful box. It was full of random things he’d kept through the years, random photos, random toys he didn’t want to part with. 

He pushed himself away from the box. It was a box full of Mobei Jun, and Shang Qinghua was more and more averse to thinking of him at all.

He left his home, only bringing a light jacket. The summer air was just warm enough to not need anything heavier. The street he walked down was quiet, but he could hear the sound of the electrical wires crackling overhead. It was soft enough to not be distracting, and loud enough to help drown out some of the loudness in his heart.

He arrived at the park in what felt like a few moments, for this was a worn path, and a known journey. At the end was a familiar sight, with an intimate familiarity with the way the shadows from the moon would bend around each park bench, around each dark lamppost. Even more familiar, even more known, was the figure lying in the small patch of grass at the end.

Shang Qinghua’s heart lurched as he neared. Mobei Jun did not move when he approached. His eyes were somewhat blank as they stared up at the sky. Shang Qinghua laid down beside him and pillowed his head on his arms. The moon was right overhead, and cascaded them in white light.

“You’re here,” Shang Qinghua murmured, voice warm and desolate all at the same time.

“I thought maybe you’d come,” Mobei Jun said back, a similar cadence. 

“How’d you know?”

“Because I wanted to come, too.”

Shang Qinghua smiled a little. He removed one arm from beneath his head and set his elbow on the grass between them. He kept his hand raised in the air and waited. Mobei Jun reached out and grabbed it. He lowered their hands to the cool grass, and the blades tickled along Shang Qinghua’s hand.

“What’s next for you?” Shang Qinghua asked. His eyes tracked the movements of the clouds—a practiced habit. Much of his life was habitual, and he was discovering that anything beyond those learned habits was immensely painful.

“Not sure,” he said honestly. “I’m open to anything, to going anywhere. I just…want to want it. Whatever it is.”

Shang Qinghua nodded. He understood that. “Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing next?” He asked. He turned his head to look at him.

With his gaze, Shang Qinghua felt like another moon entirely stared down at him, lighting him up from the inside out and revealing all of his secrets. An unnamed desperate feeling welled up with the question. He felt afraid. He was afraid of knowing what his options were and not knowing at all what to do with them. “No,” he whispered, voice weak. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

Mobei Jun squeezed his hand. “It’s ok. You will.”

“I don’t feel like I will.” He could already feel the hysterics welling up. “I…don’t know what to do. About anything.”

Mobei Jun’s thumb brushed along his soothingly. “Qinghua,” he said. “Qinghua, it’s ok. You don’t have to know right now.”

Shang Qinghua squeezed his hand back, like he was trying to keep him from running away. It was all very loud, and he was very out of practice. He hadn’t had Mobei Jun to help him come down when he got like this for a very long time. It even felt like he had forgotten how to listen to Mobei Jun’s soothing voice and his calm demeanor. That scared him even more. He felt untethered, like a balloon full of helium, with nothing to keep him down. 

Mobei Jun released his hand and rolled onto his side to prop himself up on his elbow and look down at Shang Qinghua. The loss of his hand made him feel like he was about to float away forever. But Mobei Jun reached down with his other hand and grabbed onto Shang Qinghua’s again. He brought Shang Qinghua’s hand to his own chest. “Qinghua, breathe. It’s ok.”

Shang Qinghua looked over at him. “Is it? It doesn’t feel like it.”

Mobei Jun looked down at him, face even, heartbeat slow. His hand tightened on Shang Qinghua’s, and pushed it more firmly to his chest. He said nothing. 

Looking at his face, Shang Qinghua counted the heartbeats, and tried to think of nothing else. Instead of calming down, however, the desperation in his chest only morphed into another kind of panic. “Mobei,” he said, gripping onto the fabric of his shirt. “Mobei, I missed you.”

His hand flexed around Shang Qinghua’s. “I missed you, too.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” he whispered, almost frantic. “I never knew what to do.”

Mobei Jun began to look sad. “Me neither.”

Shang Qinghua began to cry. He rolled onto his side the same time Mobei Jun shifted, and they pulled each other into their arms. Shang Qinghua pushed his face into his chest and clutched into the fabric of his jacket. It was such a relieving feeling, almost painful in the way it pulsed through him. 

He only felt more afraid. Letting go would be so much harder, so much worse, now that there was no guarantee there would be another time for this. In that moment, he realized one thing: whatever happened, it would have to be final. Either he held onto Mobei Jun forever, or he let him go and never held him ever again.

Shang Qinghua felt a cold dread fill his gut. “Mobei, I need to tell you something.”

Mobei Jun’s arms tightened. When he spoke, he sounded afraid, like he was thinking of the last time Shang Qinghua had said those words. “What is it?”

Shang Qinghua shifted slightly, holding onto him tighter. He allowed himself one moment to savor it, just in case. He felt the way Mobei Jun’s breath expanded in his chest, the way his heartbeat could be felt from how close they were, the way his hair was long enough to fall down his back and tangle in Shang Qinghua’s fingers. He savored the way Mobei Jun held onto him like he would protect him from the world, and the way every embrace had only brought respite. 

“Qinghua,” he said, somewhat fraught. “What is it?”

Shang Qinghua shut his eyes, drifted a hand up to brush through the knots in his hair. “I love you.” He let the sound of it settle into the air around them for a moment, and though he hadn’t noticed before, he suddenly became aware of the sound of grasshoppers chirping, and the sound of the wind rustling the leaves in the trees. “I love you in every way I possibly could.”

Mobei Jun was silent and still for several moments. 

“I love you in the way that I want to be with you forever, never too far away and always close.” 

Mobei Jun pushed forward slightly and rolled Shang Qinghua onto his back. He lifted, propped up over him on one elbow, his other hand pillowing Shang Qinghua’s head. Shang Qinghua looked at his face once, but couldn’t take it. He looked away. “Qinghua,” he breathed. 

He blinked a few times, face flushed. “I mean it. Don’t ask me if I’m being serious.”

His hand shifted to caress the side of his face. He brushed his thumb along his cheek. “Qinghua,” he said again. “Look at me.”

Shang Qinghua really didn’t want to. He met his gaze and it was almost painful with how embarrassed he felt. He only felt more embarrassed when Mobei Jun did nothing but stare down at him. “What do you want me to look at you for? I’m so embarrassed.”

Mobei Jun dipped and pressed his lips to his cheek, soft and cool from the night air. “Why embarrassed?” He asked quietly, lips brushing against his skin. He pressed another kiss further down his cheek. Shang Qinghua’s face was on fire, and the grip he still had on Mobei Jun’s jacket only tightened. “What’s embarrassing?” He kissed further down, inward, towards Shang Qinghua’s mouth.

“Because you’re my best friend,” he whispered. “And you’ve been my best friend since I was a child. And—And I’m in love with you.”

Mobei Jun lifted slightly and hovered over him, only an inch away. “Still don’t understand what’s embarrassing.” He lowered, so their lips brushed when he spoke next. “You’re in good company, Qinghua. I love you, too.” 

He kissed him, gentle and calming, the same way he was about everything else. Shang Qinghua’s eyes stayed open for a moment as his brain tried to catch up. But then he found himself clutching onto him tighter, eyes slipping shut, as his hand caught in Mobei Jun’s hair with the grip. Mobei Jun winced slightly, then let out a soft laugh against his lips. 

Shang Qinghua loosened his grip to not pull on his hair, but only moved to cradle his face closer to his own. Mobei Jun tilted his head to the side, pushing further in to kiss him open. Shang Qinghua pulled back to breathe when he realized he had forgotten to do so ever since Mobei Jun kissed his cheek the first time. He kept his eyes shut, not wanting to wake up if this was a dream. He was breathing heavily, hands still on Mobei Jun’s face.

Mobei Jun was undeterred and pressed a light kiss to his open mouth, then to his bottom lip, then his chin, and down his jaw. “I’ve loved you for so long,” he whispered, breath washing down his neck. He kissed beneath his ear. “For so long that it seems odd that I’ve never told you. Why haven’t I?”

Shang Qinghua opened his eyes and the moon stared back at him, like it had seen everything. “I don’t know. I wish you would have. But it’s not like I told you either.” He swallowed, eyes scrunching shut when Mobei Jun kissed back up his jaw. “You meant too much to me to lose. That was why I didn’t tell you.”

Mobei Jun pulled back to look down at him. “You wouldn’t have. Even if I didn’t feel the same way. You mean too much to me to lose, too. There’s nothing you could do or say to change that.”

Shang Qinghua’s eyes filled with tears and he tugged him back down. Mobei Jun went pliantly, pressing their lips together again. He shifted over him, so his knees were on either side of his waist. He held Shang Qinghua’s face, kissing him so gently that it felt like kissing a cloud. Despite the gentleness, he still managed to coax Shang Qinghua open with it, and as soon as he opened up, Mobei Jun swept inside, head tilting to the side for a better angle.

Making an embarrassingly small sound in the back of his throat, Shang Qinghua wrapped his arms around his neck and pulled him down. Mobei Jun went, shifting onto his elbows to hover over him. He pulled back for a moment, a quiet, wet sound hanging between them. Shang Qinghua looked up at him, felt his heart lurch, and pushed himself up to kiss him again. Mobei Jun’s lips turned up as he indulged for a few moments longer.

He pulled back and held his face again. His thumb came up to softly brush against Shang Qinghua’s bottom lip. He pulled down on it slightly, looking a little entranced at his red, kiss-bruised mouth. “I love you.”

Shang Qinghua let out a breath, like it was forced out of him. He reached up to grab onto his shoulders. “I love you,” he whispered, as if he was trying to convince him. 

Mobei Jun smiled.

“You asked me what my plans were,” Shang Qinghua said, swallowing as he stared at the hollow of Mobei Jun’s throat. “And I really don’t know. I don’t know what I want or what I’ll do, but I do know that I’ll only be happy if you’re there with me.”

Mobei Jun bent to press their foreheads together. His voice was quiet, so quiet it felt like a feat that Shang Qinghua could hear him at all. “I’ve never really known what I wanted to do. The only plan I’ve ever had has been you.”

Shang Qinghua felt his insides collapse a little. He tugged him down and pressed his face into his neck. Mobei Jun hugged him back just as tightly. They stayed that way for a long time.