#and if somebody has multiple people they dramatically fell out with they were probably the problem

[midwestdirtbag666]

i found my partner's ex's tumblr. alexa play it's my party i'll cry if i want to

[oitommothetease]

Invisible String (4/?)

Pairing:  Bucky Barnes x Female reader (Modern AU)

Description: James Buchanan Barnes, the owner of the most expensive-looking club in town and your new apartment. He was a dick and you hated him. What could possibly go wrong when you, the new girl in town, start bartending at his club to pursue your dreams?

Word Count: 2.6k words

Warning: 18+ (discussion of assault, nervous breakdown, anxiety attack, just don’t read this whole series if you are a kid)

You woke up to a night of dreamless sleep like you always did, but then the events of the previous night hit you. You wished it was a dream, but one look in the mirror and a bruise running along your cheek was enough to confirm. Not only that, but you remembered asking your boss to stay over, but you didn't expect him to. The blanket on your living room’s couch and the bowl of fruits and a glass of juice situated out for you on the kitchen counter proved that he did stay.

And then the reality sunk in, you have a decision to make. You can either go to the cops or let that guy get away. The latter sounded not so great, but you knew going to the cops isn't going to be great either. You've seen enough detective shows to know that. You've had enough, and you just wanted to forget it. 

What did Mr. Barnes mean when he said you were going to talk about this? Are you supposed to visit him before work? Is he going to come to your place?

You decided to work on your book but ended up not being able to concentrate, so you started watching a show and fell asleep while watching it. Maybe some Chinese take-out could make you feel better. It didn't. Nothing made you feel better. You wished you had some friends in this new town because you didn't want to burden your work friends. 

After a horrible day of trying to cope, when you finally made your way to the club, you noticed the security was increased. Usually, security guards weren't present inside the club, but today it was different. Everyone was so vigilant and you felt a little safer. If you didn't know any better, you'd think Mr. Barnes did it for you, but again he would have done the same thing for any other employee. 

"Boss wants to see you," Pietro told you. You were about to head for Clint's office when the blond twin spoke again and pointed his finger towards the stairs." The boss."

Okay, well maybe playing naïve couldn't avoid this meeting, so you slowly walked upstairs. How bad could this go, it's not like he saw you in your most vulnerable state? Oh, wait, he did. 

You knocked on his office door, wanting to rip the band-aid and get over with it. 

"Hey," you said, faking a smile. "Thanks for getting me home last night and for breakfast today. I didn't even know I had fruits and juice at home because let's be honest, I'm a toast and coffee kinda gal."

Mr. Barnes didn't say anything, he just looked at you as if you were a confusing puzzle that he couldn't solve. He raised a hand towards the seat in front of him and you took it, nervously fiddling with your fingers under the table.

“You do that a lot, you know?” he asked, it wasn't a question, it was merely an observation.

“What?”

“Deflecting a serious issue by using a joke.” Mr. Barnes observed as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“What are you? My therapist?”

He arched an eyebrow, indicating that you were literally doing the thing he pointed out. 

"Yeah, well, it's called having a healthy coping mechanism. You should try getting one, brooding is only gonna help you this far."

 "It's not healthy if you're not dealing with it," Mr. Barnes pointed out. 

You scoffed in incredulity and you felt very, very attacked. 

What is it? Attacking y/n day?, you thought. 

"Anyway, I think I want to press charges," You changed the subject to a more serious conversation to avoid him calling you out on your bullshit. 

"Okay, I understand.” 

“You do?” You asked, bewilderment clearly written all over your face. “I mean, letting an employee go to the cops is not gonna be great for your club's reputation and yours too. And, you know, considering the shady business, you do-” 

"What exactly do you think we do?" He asked.

And that's when it hit you, you didn't know what he did or mob bosses do in general. All your knowledge about it came from movies and Wattpad, both of them are not a great place to gain knowledge.

“What exactly do you do?” you pondered.

 He obviously wasn't expecting you to directly ask him, nobody has directly asked him or even made it known that they are aware of his work. It was kind of like a silent pact that everybody signed for, everybody except you, apparently. 

“Um, you know, I've been working for almost 2 weeks here now, and I haven't seen any drugs around here, so it's obviously not drugs. You don't look like the sex trafficking types-”

 "Jesus, woman!" He exclaimed, offended by your assumptions. 

"Then just tell me what you do."

You expected him to tell you something, but he just kept looking at you with a face void of emotions.

 "Fine, don't tell me," you mumbled, raising your hands dramatically in defeat. 

“So you don't mind me ruining your reputation by going to the cops?” 

“I told you I don't care. Your safety is my utmost priority,” your face might have given away the surprise you felt because he quickly backpedaled. ”I mean, the safety of my employees.”

“The safety of my employees is my utmost priority,” he told you, providing an extra emphasis on the word employees. “Anyway, one of my people would take you to the police station near-"

You cut him off immediately. 

"No, you can't tell anyone else. I don't want everyone hopping on the pity train. I'm already ashamed that you know about it," you pleaded but your voice was firm, telling him that this was not up for a discussion.

At this, his eyes and features softened. Bucky didn't want you to feel guilty or ashamed for somebody else's actions, but clearly, you did. 

"Okay, then I can take you. You just had to explain to the officer last night’s events, and they'll ask you to recognize Rumlow and then we can-"

Mr. Barnes’s voice faded into the background when it finally hit you.

"You know what, I changed my mind. It's too much. I don't want to press charges anymore. I didn't think this through," you backtracked. You did think this through, but now all the factors were adding up in your brain. You'd have to explain the details to a cop who is probably going to be another man and a stranger, and then they'd ask you to identify the guy. You didn't think you had it in you to face him. At least not now. 

He interpreted your thought process and promptly changed the topic. "Okay, we can work with whatever you want, and at least let Peter escort you home after work."

"What? No!” You quickly declined.

“It's for your own safety,” Bucky tried to reason. He wasn't letting you get off this easily.

 “I'm a strong, independent woman and I'm not scared of anything.” 

That was a lie. You were scared of many things like heights, dark, spiders, confrontation and the list goes on and on. 

You remembered all the lectures your mom gave you telling you that women should be scared because men are monsters, and you'd lose your honor if you are reckless and some other patriarchal crap that you didn't pay attention to. But you weren't scared, you were just always careful. You'd always put the keys between your knuckles when you went home alone. In your previous job, you used to laugh it off whenever your coworkers made a sexist joke. You'd ignore the subtle shoulder touch that your previous boss did. You told yourself that this is what it takes to make it. If you were to run away every time someone eyed you in a wrong way, then you'd spend your whole life running. 

Women usually shrug this behavior off as it is what is, but the truth is it shouldn't be like this.

“Please, I insist.” 

“I'm very capable of taking care of myself. Just because one bad incident happened doesn't mean I'll fucking break!” You stated, your voice louder than your regular voice to get across your point.

That was also a lie. You were walking on a thin line and you were ignoring your emotions. You were one outburst away from a breakdown, and you just couldn't bring yourself to feel anything. 

Mr. Barnes tried to call your name, but you were already bolting out of his office. 

You needed a drink. No, fuck that. You needed multiple drinks. It wasn't exactly wise to get drunk during work, but it couldn't get any shittier than this, right?, you thought.

Right?

 Wrong. It could get way shittier than this. Now it was almost midnight, you were kind of tipsy, and you could see two Mr. Stark, your regular customer, in front of you. 

Did he have a twin? Is he and his twin brother one of those identical twins that dress up the same? Because that's what it looked like.

 “Earth to y/n," Mr. Stark said, or was it his twin? It was getting hard to keep track anymore.

 And that's when you noticed. 

“Holy, Shit. You're triplets, Mr. Stark," you announced. 

"Okay, kid, close my tab.”

“Hey, y/n. Are you okay?” Peter asked, noticing the concerned look Mr. Stark gave him before leaving.

“Yes, I'm fine. Absolutely fine.”

***

Turns out you were not fine. You've been pretty much hammered for the past week, and you could barely get a sentence out without giggling or slurring. Your colleagues took notice of your state and whenever someone pointed it out, you'd just shrug it off as a bad day or a bad week. There was no concept of time in your drunk state.

You couldn't concentrate on your book, you could barely look at someone without squinting, and you've been eating takeout and leftovers for the past few days. 

James would have fired if someone working under him was this irresponsible, but he knew your reasons. He knew you clearly weren't coping with the trauma well. Your work ethics were shoved down the trash that even Clint asked why you weren't fired yet.

Bucky didn't want to talk to you, he thought that maybe giving you some space would do you good, but clearly it wasn't working. Usually, the mob boss didn't interfere in the affairs of his employees, it was Clint's job, but when you smashed a bottle on the head of a customer, he had to interject.

“I TOLD THIS FUCKER NO!” you yelled, Peter’s hand around your middle from behind. Another empty beer bottle was in your hand, ready to be smashed across the face of the drunk dude in front of you.

Pietro and Wanda were enjoying the show. Peter, being the peace lover he is, held you back when you smashed a bottle across a drunk customer's face. Even though Peter was younger than you, he was stronger, and he was not only holding you back but also himself. He didn't want to cause a scene and that is why he was mulling comforting words in your ear like, he's not worth it, you're gonna kill this guy.

Damn right I am, you thought.

It was ironic because everyone in that club had killed someone except you.

When Bucky walked into the room, the drunk guy turned towards him and pointed at you. ”You are hiring crazy bitches now? Just called her baby girl and she went psycho!!!”

Bucky didn't understand what was happening. He told the security guards to take that man outside his club and he walked towards you. He firmly yet gently took a hold of your left arm, signaling Peter to let go of you. Without a word, he started walking in the direction of his office, dragging you along with him.

Once near his office, he lightly yanked your hand and shoved you inside, making you stand in front of him.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he inquired, having had enough of your incompetence.

You were seething with rage. "Wrong with me? I told him no, but he didn't listen."

Bucky stepped forward, his anger dissipating into sympathy. " I know, he mumbled, "and I'm so-"

 "No, you don't know!" you yelled, body trembling and tears welling up in your eyes. "I told him no multiple times, I even tried to push him off me, but he just kept coming back."

Bucky's eyes furrowed in confusion. He didn't understand your words, the drunk customer didn't touch you. And that's when he realized, you weren't talking about the drunk customer. He cognized that the drunk guy purely triggered something that you've been suppressing for days now. Bucky was aware that you needed to get it out of your system to cope healthily.

“I told him no, you know? But he just wouldn't listen,” you stated, trying to convince yourself that you didn't lead him on. ”And he was so…. so strong and… and then he hit me and everything just went blur, I couldn't see but... but I could still feel him with me.”

Not realizing that you were not in that place anymore, you wrapped your hand around yourself to seek some sort of protection and comfort, bottom lip quivering, the welled up traitorous tears were streaming down your face and all you could think about was that night. 

“I… I can't get his touch out,” you stammered. ” I shower, multiple times a day, but I still can't get his touch out.”

With that, you broke down completely and shattered on the floor, sobbing ferociously. Your knees ached because of the position you were situated in, but the emotional pain was enough to overshadow the physical one.

For once in his lifetime, Bucky did not know what to do. Cautiously, he made his way towards you and knelt down in front of you. He did not know what to say or do to make you feel better.

You launched your body towards him, snaking your arms around his shoulder to settle on his neck as if he was the only thing grounding you. You lurched onto him like he was your anchor, and maybe he was. It took a minute for Bucky to register your actions, and when he did, he wrapped his arms around your middle and closed the minuscule distance separating you.

He surprised himself with the way one of his hands automatically reached for your hair and whispered words of comfort in your ear. He caught you as you crumpled physically and emotionally. 

”You're going to be okay, doll,” he whispered and kissed your temple with sincerity. ”I will make sure of that.”

The second part was barely audible, it wasn't meant for you, it was a promise he made to himself.

Bucky held you tightly yet gently while you sobbed on his shoulder.

 He didn't know how long he held you, it felt like an eternity to him with the way he could feel the guilt and rage inside him. When you passed out in his arms, he gently placed you on one of the comfortable couches in his office and draped a blanket around you that he had for when he would work late at night.

An office chair might not be the most ideal place to spend the night in, but it didn't matter to Bucky. All that mattered was you.

TAGS: @bananapipedreams​ @akkinda10​  @rivers-rambles21​  @emmabarnes​@goodcleanfunsis​ @valsworldofcreativity​

[lenmatcha]

Here’s an impression of all the Zhang Qiling’s from The Lost Tomb adaptations and some criticisms

because I have nothing better to do.

These are based on my personal viewing experience and reviews by novel fans

they may not match how you think about these versions and that’s fine. 

We all have our personal preferences.

The Lost Tomb (2015, drama)

played by Yang Yang

2010’s eboy vibes

Probably buys fingerless gloves from Hot Topic

Emo hair (I will not stop talking about that hair cuz that’s all I remember)

Tattoos looking like they’re drawn with a ballpoint pen

*Strikes pose to show off abs*

Most audience were unsatisfied with the hairstyle and how the actor played ZQL simply as the “cold, strong, expressionless” character without any depth.

Time Raiders (2016, movie)

played by Jing Boran

Sci-fi steampunk aesthetic (this was supposed to be a movie about tombs…)

Probably bench presses with his 200 pound sword

THICC 

Fur coat fashion

“Not bad.”

“I know.”

--- Actual lines from the movie, i swear im not making this up

“There is no movie in dmbj adaptation.” 

Yeah most fans don’t want to acknowledge the existence of this movie...

Tomb of the Sea (2018, drama)

played by Xiao Yuliang

he is baby

Exists only in flashbacks

Had less than 8 minutes of screen time but somehow nailed it

Him with the robe (藏袍) it’s just  *chef’s kiss*

Highly recommend behind the scenes video of the Xin Yue Restaurant scene cuz they edited so much of the stunts out.

Like how a tattoo artist on Bilibili analyzed, this version of ZQL didn’t really have the best tattoo design. Also in one of the flashback fight scenes (ep 35) , the editing was so awkward it made it look like the people he fought fell before he even kicked them.

The Lost Tomb 2 (2019, drama)

played by Cheng Yi

Defies gravity. 

Can fly

Learned martial arts from some sort of xianxia drama

*Does a split in the middle of fighting some wolves*

Sir, this is an adventure drama, not an idol romance drama

*holds Wu Xie gently* 

This version of ZQL was kinda out of character in a fanfiction kinda way. Also the fight scenes relied too much on wires, which some say it’s because the actor is used to playing xianxia dramas.

Reboot (2020, drama)

played by Huang Junjie

Get’s his own soundtrack for every dramatic entrance 

The hood still confuses me, like, what is that thing at the front?

Smirks 24/7

Like dude why are you still smiling

Lost so much blood, I’m starting to think he’s invincible 

Fans complained about how this version of ZQL smiles too much and is being treated like a background character. The Iron Triangle vibe isn’t really there, perhaps it’s because the actors didn’t communicate enough with each other.

Ultimate Note (2020, drama)

played by Xiao Yuliang

Yeah I know it’s the same actor as in Tomb of the Sea but I think he deserves a whole another section

Cat energy

Is finally loved.

Has an 8 pack but still skinny af (Like, somebody pls feed this child)

DEM LEGS THO THEY HELLA LONG

Did most of his own stunts, which is pretty impressive

Everyone say thank you Ultimate Note cast and crew

Unlike other adaptations, in Ultimate Note we get to see more of ZQL’ vulnerable moments, like the Akun flashback, getting amnesia, and getting injured multiple times. 

[ectonurites]

Whenever I see things in fic, or even in canon sometimes, about the Bats not eating well or forgetting to eat or not sleeping or only getting like 6, 5, 4 hours of sleep a night on average, I’m just like. They would not last long as vigilantes if that were the case. Same with if they all were going out on patrol every single night. Implausible. That’s why my personal headcanon is that at the most they all have carefully tailored meal plans, and at the least they all are highly aware of what goes in to a well-rounded healthy diet and eat accordingly, and 8 hours of sleep is the norm, because much else less than that and they’re a liability in the field

YEAH DEADASS like, I feel like this is another case of kinda what fandom does with basing their interpretation of Tim solely off Red Robin, where it’s using the dramatic low point of things as if it’s the norm. Because in the comics when it happens (outside of with Bruce sometimes) there’s usually a pretty direct cause you can justify it with, that it’s just a moment of drama during something big where a character is pushing themselves.

Because yes, in canon there are instances of Tim being like ‘i got 3 hours of sleep i feel horrible’ and characters forgetting to eat while getting sucked into casework... but that is when they are deep into specific situations, I don’t think I’ve ever read a moment like that and thought it should be considered their norm. If those things were happening every single day, there’s no way they’d be able to be efficient as vigilantes. Most of them are shown to like eat relatively normally and relatively healthily outside of the dramatic moments when we’re supposed to see that they are pushing themselves further than they normally would, or not taking care of themselves for a specific reason. Same with the sleeping thing, like yes the Bats are definitely night owls (multiple things across a ton of comics support them working late primarily and being up late a lot) but that just means they probably take naps earlier to make up for lost sleep or sleep in when they can. Also just occasionally having a super late night with little sleep every now and then (like working on a tough case) won’t kill ya and definitely makes sense, but like you’re saying it’s just not sustainable longterm.

I think you could argue while Tim was living with his dad he wasn’t able to make up sleep as much and that’s why he so frequently had his habit of passing out during the day (remember when Ari was trying to confess she went on a date with another guy to him and he literally just fell asleep. icon) but once he’s at a point where he’s got a more loose/under his own control schedule he could definitely make up for it more.

The patrolling every day thing is also like, I think a case of ‘yes in comics and stuff they go out nearly every night that we’re shown’ but thats because the comics only dedicate so much time to showing us the downtime in their lives? And usually when they do it’s like, at school or jobs or stuff, there’s only a few instances where they bother showing us the quiet nights in (but they do sometimes!)

And at this point where there’s quite a few Gotham vigilantes I imagine they have a schedule to make sure somebody’s out every night but no one person has to do it every single night except maybe Bruce who’s just. That man doesn’t get written with human expectations/limitations put on him even in the comics so I’d believe that he does at some points, or at least he’s the closest to every day. And like sure when there’s big shit going on (Gang wars, citywide bullshit, breakouts at Arkham, etc) they’ll have all hands on deck and probably be out every night while that is going on but again situations like that aren’t... every day. (they just feel every day to us because comics are gonna chose to focus on the wild shit more than the mundane days)

But like i’m totally with you there. I prefer looking at how situations like this might actually work with some human limitations, and people blatantly ignoring stuff like that can take me out of a work pretty quickly. (again usually when it happens in canon I can rationalize it better based on context of the story, but in fanworks it usually feels a lot more ‘thats just how it is dont question it’) I’m sure a lot of people don’t care, but it def is something I pick up on.

[awanderingdeal]

The one in which Logan finds Corbett - Chapter 3

This one is dedicated to the very sweet anon that suggested Corbett in the snow! Thank you for your love and encouragement. Join Finn, Leo, Logan and Corbett for a snow day! 

CW: one joking threat of murder, and a brief mention of a snowboarding injury.

Please message me if you feel that any content warnings need to be added. 

Rating: G (Not all chapters in this fic will be the same rating)

Credit to @lumosinlove for Finn, Leo, Logan and the sweater weather universe. Thank you for letting us use them! Corbett is mine :)

Please see my masterlist for future and previous chapters! "Fucking snow'," Finn growled, seeing the white blanketing the floor when he opened the blinds. 

He felt Leo perch his chin on his head, wrapping his long arms around his torso and squeezing - a small display of excitement. "Can we -" 

 "Absolutely not," Finn interrupted his boyfriend's question, wriggling out of his hold. "We have nothing to do today. There is no way I am going outside in that," he stabbed his finger towards the window, "if I do not have to."

Finn would have liked to have said he was surprised when forty-five minutes later he was wrestling on layers of clothing to protect himself against the ungodly wind chill. However, he would be the first to admit that Leo Knut had him well and truly wrapped around his little finger. There was only so long Finn could resist his boyfriend’s doe eyes. 

"This is a little excessive, non?" Logan laughed, watching Finn pull on another pair of socks. "Will your feet even fit into your boots?" 

Finn looked down at his feet, and considered that maybe Logan had a point. Perhaps four pairs were too many. He removed the last of them, chucking it at Logan’s head. "That's what you get for teasing me."

"It is not even cold," Logan said, crouching to scratch Corbett's belly, the dog giving a satisfied whine. "Wait! This is Corbs first time seeing snow," he gasped. "Are you excited? Are you?"

"I'm going to kill you,” Finn said, how dare Logan say it wasn’t cold. It was snowing!  I'm going to kill you, and bury you and no one is ever going to find you." The threat may have held more weight if he had been able to keep the smile from his face whilst he issued it. "You love me too much to murder me," Logan smirked. "I am loath to admit that is true," Finn sighed. "Leo!" Logan’s gaze looked past Finn towards the doorway "Save me!" "I'm just going to pretend my boyfriends aren't crazy if you don't mind," Leo replied, seemingly unfazed by the dramatics. He pressed a thermos into Finn's hands. "Coffee, can't have you freezing on us now, can we?”

“Thanks, Nutty. You're the best," Finn hummed against Leo's lips, pulling away with a grumble. "Right, come on. Let's get this over with." "Smile," Leo laughed, something soft and melodic. It always sounded like a song to Finn's ears. He poked Finn lightly in his cheeks until his mouth somewhat resembled a smile, "We're going to have fun." Logan slipped Corbett's leash into Leo's hand, before reaching for the beanie Finn was holding. Finn began to protest the theft, but then Logan was placing it on his head, with a softness that he rarely possessed outside of Finn and Leo. "We're going to have fun," Logan reiterated, adjusting the hat slightly and kissing Finn. Corbett thumped his tail against the hardwood as Logan took his leash back from Leo, excited to leave. Finn looked between his boyfriends, who seemed just as eager as Corbett, and decided even if his fingers fell off with the cold, he wouldn’t care much.

"You have to promise not to scream," Logan said, letting Corbett into the back seats of the car, Finn sliding in beside him. 

"Only if you promise to drive like a normal person," Finn argued. There had been a brief argument over who was going to drive, Finn refusing to do so in this weather. In the end, Finn had reluctantly handed over the keys to Logan, who had claimed he had the most experience in these conditions. It was true, but he also had a tendency towards road rage that slightly terrified Finn. “I promise,” Logan nodded, “I’ve got precious cargo on board.”

“Are you talking about us or Corbett?” Finn snorted a laugh as the door shut in his face. 

"How do you even know Corbett has never seen snow?" Leo interjected, changing the conversation as he buckled his belt.  "He's 8, it's possible that he has."

"He's from Texas," Logan shrugged, muttering something under his breath about tall people as he adjusted the seat. "I just figured it wasn't likely." 

"He could have gone on vacation," Leo reasoned. "Have you been on vacation, buddy?" he asked, craning his head around to look at Corbett.

 "Can you stop ruining the fun with your big logical brain, s'il vous plaît?" Logan scowled playfully. 

They were a few minutes away from the park when Corbett sat up, thudding his paws against the window. "Heyyy boy, you know where we are?" Finn laughed, trying to escape the wagging tail.

"He's smart, like his dad," Leo said, his expression smug. He too was starting to show signs of excitement. They were small, but Finn had spent enough time cataloguing Leo's mannerisms that he would never miss them. The slight flex of his fingers. The way he took a second , then third glance at the snowman somebody had built. The way he sat up straighter with every inch closer they got to the park. Finn would have thought one winter in Gryffindor was enough to dampen anybody's enthusiasm for the snow, but Leo had made it through his first year with his still in-tact. Whilst Finn teased him for it, he felt there was something poetic in the fact the snow, which was so unexceptional to him, held such magic for his boyfriend. 

Corbett's barks pulled him from his thoughts and alerted him to their arrival in the parking lot. Finn had to admit, from the comfort of the warm car, it was a beautiful scene. Snow was still falling in a kind of slow dance. At this early hour, it was still winning its war against the footsteps that tried to mar the quilt it was knitting on the ground. He pulled his jacket tighter around him and stepped out into the wintery battlefield. "Baby," Leo cooed, pulling a pouting Finn into arms. "Thank you for coming with me, it wouldn't be the same without you."

"Can I get in on this hug?" Logan asked, "Or is it a ticketed event?" "You're an idiot," Finn shook his head, but gestured for Logan to join in. They were only huddled together for a few seconds when Corbett barked his discontent. It was probably for the best anyway, considering they were in public. Sometimes, it was so easy to forget themselves. The fleeting melancholy of it all was forced away by the sound of his boyfriend's laughter. Finn looked up to see Corbett was perched on the very edge of the car seat, looking out rather warily to the snow. his eyes darted between the three of them and the ground, as if his brain couldn't reconcile the fact they were standing on it.

"Come on, Corbett!" Logan encouraged, breaking away from them. A stream of French left his mouth. It was lilted and bouncy, nothing like his usual tongue. Leo huffed out a laugh, saying something that Finn was pretty sure was just a mocking repetition of one of Logan's sentences. The theory was confirmed when Logan flashed Leo his middle finger, still talking to Corbett. Finn cocked his head, asking silently for a translation. 

"A summary," Leo said quietly. "Logan should definitely take over from Cap giving the team talks. He's very inspirational" 

"I can hear you, Knut," Logan whipped his head around quickly. "I was, in fact, just telling Corbett what a brave boy he was."

Corbett seemed to have taken the words to heart, and took the leap of faith onto the snow. Finn thought he heard Logan stop breathing in anticipation of his reaction, but Corbett just froze. Other than a tiny twitch of his nose, he stood stock still. "Is he broken?" Finn said quietly, feeling Leo shaking silently with laughter beside him. "I think he's broken." 

Corbett snapped out of whatever trance he was in just as quickly as it came and he galloped away, his legs splayed unusually wide. Finn saw Logan purse his lips to form a whistle, but Corbett started his return to them before he could get the sound out. "You can't run around the lot, but you can go free once we're in the park, okay," Logan clipped Corbett’s leash to his collar.

“Your coffee, sweetheart," Leo said, handing Finn the flask he'd shoved into the cupholder. Finn gave him a soft smile as a thank you, not even bothering to deny he had forgotten it. Leo helped him remember things, and he helped Leo with anything related to numbers. They were a team, both on and off the ice. Logan too. Finn loved his team, he loved his life. They trailed behind Logan and Corbett by a few steps, sneaking small glances at one another as they watched what was apparently a riveting conversation. "

You gonna run around in the snow too," Finn grinned, bumping his shoulder against Leo's.

"Maybe I -" Leo started, but then they reached the park. Logan let Corbett off his leash, and all their attention was pulled to the German Shepherd prancing through the snow, shaking his head with glee. 

"Hey, Corbett!" Logan called, packing snow into a ball and throwing it. The ball splintered as it hit the ground, Corbett's face turning into a picture of confusion. He looked between Logan and the ground multiple times, before turning his stare to Leo and Finn. Rather than trying to solve the mystery any longer, Corbett scooped a mouthful of snow and bounded back to Logan, dumping the offering at his feet. Finn was distracted by the dog’s antics, so he didn’t notice Leo creating the snowball that collided with the back of Logan’s neck.

"Leo!" Logan yelped, already crouching down to pack more snow into his gloves. "Oh, no, no, no, no!" Finn protested, seeing exactly where this was going. "Leave me out of this," he struggled to make his voice heard over Corbett's excited yips.

He quickly realised the words were a mistake. A challenge that Logan would never be able to resist. There was a gleam in those green eyes that Finn had long since learned only meant trouble. He took a few small tentative steps backwards, as if he were retreating from a wild animal. Thankfully, in the brief moment Logan took to contemplate who would be his first target, Finn's phone began to vibrate in his pocket. 

"My phone!" Finn said, relief evident in his voice as he pulled the device out of his pocket. Alex's timing was, for once, impeccable. Hopefully, Leo and Logan would get their bewildering need to pummel one another with the freezing substance out of their systems whilst Finn talked to his brother. "Alex, hey!" he greeted, turning his back on his boyfriends.

Some part of his brain told him it wasn't wise to let his guard down so easily. He took a glance over his shoulder as Alex began to ask him a question about their upcoming family reunion, just in time to see Logan jump on Leo's back, dragging him to the floor.

“Hello, are you listening to me?" Alex asked, his voice full of a fond exasperation. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Finn gasped, feeling his eyes begin to water, “Logan just…” he couldn’t finish the sentence, his words distorted by laughter. 

"Do you want me to call you back?" Alex said.

Finn managed to compose himself enough to answer the question, "No, no. I'm using you as my excuse not to get involved in this chaos."

 "Chaos? Where are you?"

"We got the first snow of the year," Finn explained. "So of course Leo got all excited -"

"He's so Southern!" Alex chuckled. 

"Don't interrupt me! Leo got all excited, so we're at the park and," Finn raised his voice so that Leo and Logan could hear him, "somebody decided it was a good idea to chuck snow at Logan, which has obviously descended into madness.”

"I miss snow," Alex sighed. "Nat and Kase were talking about hitting the slopes when we get a break though so that'll be nice." 

Finn snorted, "Al, last time you went snowboarding you managed to break your leg.

 "Anyway! As I was saying, Uncle-" Finn didn't hear the rest of what Alex had to say, the next thing he knew he was falling face-first into the snow.

"Finn, baby. Are you okay?" Logan asked, laughing slightly as he helped Finn to his feet. Once he was upright, Finn shook him off, crossing his arms across his chest.

"No, don't baby me. I am not happy with you." Finn said, looking around for Leo. He spotted him a short distance away, talking on the phone that had flown out of Finn's hand. 

"It wasn't me!" Logan argued, tugging at Finn's arm. When Finn refused to unfold them, Logan merely hugged him anyway. "It wasn't! It was Corbett!" Finn looked at the dog, who was now sitting on his haunches, tongue lolling out of his mouth as he tried to get his breath back.

"Sweetheart, are you okay? I think Corbs got a bit excited," Leo said, just as Finn was about to make a point that it wasn't fair to blame the one individual who couldn't defend himself. "Your brother said he'd call back later.”

“Thanks,” Finn nodded. “And no, I am not okay,” he pouted, “I am cold and wet and I think I scratched my nose.”

 Logan laughed, taking a surreptitious look around before pressing a small kiss to Finn’s nose. “There, that’ll make it better.” Finn’s lips curled into a smile, never able to stay angry at Logan for long. He could be infuriating in so many ways, but his heart was always kind and generous.

“Come on, let’s get you home and in front of the fire.” Leo chuckled, taking the leash from Logan and clipping it to Corbett’s collar. The German Shepard gave a small whine when he realised the fun was over. 

“You’re grounded,” Finn huffed. 

“Finn, you can’t go two minutes without giving him treats,” Logan said.

“I am the parent, I get to decide when he’s ungrounded,” Finn argued, pulling his wet hat off his head. His ears felt the cold immediately, but it was better than having the damp thing over them. 

“Here Fish, you can have mine,” Logan smiled softly, handing over his own beanie. Finn took it gratefully, and allowed Logan to adjust it in the same manner he had done earlier. 

"You want this?" Leo asked, holding out the thermos that he had retrieved along with Finn's phone. Finn's eyes widened, making grabby hands at the object until Leo surrendered it. He took long gulps of the drink, feeling the dark liquid glide down his throat, warming him from the inside out like some sort of lifeline. It was hot and bitter and just what he needed. "Okay, you can take me home now."

Corbett let out a single bark, which the three of them took as his agreement and headed back towards the car.

[andersoncharm]

Long Live All The Magic We Made- Saturday, March 26, 2022

Para: Long Live All The Magic We Made

Rating: PG.

Pairing: Seblaine. Hunter/Antoinette (OC)

Blaine: @andersoncharm

Sebastian: @smythesm

When: (Four month time skip.) Saturday, March 26, 2022  *Seb is now 27, and Blaine is 25. 

Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Notes: Hunter and Tony share some big news with Sebastian and Blaine before asking them something life changing.

Warnings:  This RP in general includes; Mentions of death/Parental Death (Blaine’s Mom), Mentions of toxic past relationships. Mentions of brief past Klaine. Depression. Anxiety.

Extra Warnings: (This RP is not Kurt Hummel friendly. You’ve all been warned.)

Para Title Taken From: Taylor Swift- Long Live

Extra Information: This took far too long to post, we apologize! There will be FOUR POV’s in this Para. We’ve done our best to make it as easy to read as possible. 

We will be doing a series of little mini’s to progress over the next few years of this RP. Things might get a little confusing but we promise to date them accordingly. 

Under cut for length. Work is mostly unedited as usual.

Blaine’s POV:

Blaine’s heart was full and thumped happily in his chest as he poured out four glasses of cabernet sauvignon and giggled with a smiling Tony. He listened to the sounds of his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s best friend Hunter carrying on out in the courtyard. Their new home felt awake and alive tonight after a dinner that Blaine had planned out perfectly, only the second one in their home. Sebastian had done his best to help, but mostly stuck to meticulously clearing and organizing which was saying something as they’d only lived here for a few months now. Neither Tony or Blaine knew what their boyfriends were doing in there, only that they kept hearing random slaps on skin and loud oofs followed by faux annoyance in both of their voices only to be soothed by tipsy laughter. 

The night had gone on perfectly- they’d had dinner out in the courtyard, the spring air was a bit chilly but they were warmed by the cute little firepit Blaine had put in. And since he was with company that knew what he was, Blaine had offered some magic and the whole area had been pleasantly buzzing with his heated energy all night long. Enjolras loved getting to run around wildly with Freya, who still insisted she didn’t run around. But, Blaine had caught her multiple times tonight and promised her he wouldn’t tease her too much. Besides, Ras loved it when she played with him, he’d hate for her to stop. The thought was almost laughable to him as soon as he thought it-Freya would let Blaine dress her up in cat clothing if she thought it would please the golden pup, she loved him that much. He could feel the two of them still running around out there in the glow of the firelight just outside the kitchen door.

He was happy, very much so, but this little ache like a bruise pressed over his heart. Don’t get him wrong, he loved having Hunter and Tony around- Hunter was Seb’s best friend and had done so much for both of them. And Tony, well she was pretty much Blaine’s little sister at this point. They shared a bond, a different kind of fate that few others could touch. Still, he wished he could invite David and Nick, and of course his father, but he knew he had to keep his friends at arms length to save face, and he had to keep his dad even further away. He tried to picture Sam in the room with all of them, and knew instantly that his best friend would probably fit right in, despite not being able to know the truth of it all. Tony would laugh at Sam’s jokes and Hunter would do the same and then quiz him about Japan. Too bad he was still over there, living his dream with his adorable girlfriend. 

And then there was his mom. All of these years and her absence still felt like a sucker punch to the chest when he thought about it. He pressed his hand over his heart just at the spot where her crystal used to rest and wondered how long she’d let  Seb wear it. He could tell it was getting antsy to come back every single time he touched his boyfriend. But, he still wasn’t ready. He’d give almost anything to have all of them here so he could show them how far he’d come and good things had turned out.  He wanted to show off his beautiful home and his gorgeous person, not to boast but to say hey, I made it even when I didn’t think I would… Missing those few people was the only thing keeping Blaine from feeling the happiest he’d ever felt. And even with them not being there, he was pretty damn happy. 

He sighed and dropped his hand before turning to Tony- her large grey eyes now studying him curiously and he knew she knew he was silently working through something. He gave her a big, genuine smile and shrugged.  

“Everything’s okay, Tony. I promise.” He pushed the try full of drinks towards her and scooped up the decadent round dark chocolate mousse cake he’d made from scratch yesterday. He noted that a few raspberries were missing from the top and wondered which one of them had stolen them, Hunter or Sebastian. He knew it was probably Sebastian- it was like his boyfriend felt compelled to steal food from desserts or salads that would taste just the same out of the package. He smiled to himself as he nodded towards the door, imagining Seb sneaking into the kitchen last night and opting to steal two raspberries from the cake instead of the fridge. He’d probably give Blaine some excuse about wanting the chocolate on it. Tony caught his smile and shook her head. 

“You’ve gone from happy to a little melancholy and now back to happy again in the span of three seconds, , you’re going through it tonight, aren’t you, babe? Something you want to talk about? We’ve got a little time before they get too stupid.” She laughed and nudged him before getting a sparkling water from the fridge for herself. “I don’t want to get too tipsy, you know, we are staying here as guests and someone’s gotta keep Hunter in line. I can see it now, he’ll end up dragging the two of us to your bed because his drunken mind thinks that’s a normal thing to do when you’re staying at your best friend's house.” She teased, but Blaine hadn’t witnessed her drink much of anything with alcohol tonight, let alone get any kind of tipsy. She’d been sipping on water most of the time. Her energy felt high and positive, she was happy. So he didn’t think too much of it. But, she was right, Hunter probably would find a way to implant himself into his and Sebastian’s bed and drag Tony with him. All six of them, Freya and Ras included,  just snuggled up. As if on cue, Hunter’s crackle of delight soared from outside and through the kitchen. 

“I’m really okay, just thinking about things I can’t really change. I am happy though, you’ve got it right. And Gods, you’re probably right about Hunter. I mean, as comfortable as that sounds… he has a whole room here that he can roll all over to his heart's content.” He nodded towards the door. “What are they even doing out there? We should probably go feed them some more before someone gets hurt.”

 She laughed, knowing he was right and nodded, still looking a little skeptical over his answer, but she sat her water down on the drink try and walked with him out into the magically warm March air and Blaine followed. Both men looked up at them, the echo of a laugh still hanging in the air. Blaine made his way towards Seb, sat the cake down on the table and snuggled into his boyfriend's side.

“Do I even want to know what you’re doing out here? Also, did you steal my raspberries, Sebastian? You messed up my aesthetic.” He teased, pressing his lips into Seb’s jaw and nuzzling into his neck. He could hear Hunter’s childish, teasing ewwws and he looked over at his friend, who was just as snuggled up with his girlfriend, with wide eyes. 

“Keep it up, Clarington and I won’t give you any cake.” To which Hunter followed up with a scandalized and very dramatic face of woe even as Blaine moved forward to cut each one of them a slice.

Sebastian’s POV:

 Sebastian thought that he would hate having company over at the new house. After a successful holiday season with a visit to Ohio where he realized he missed his mother, Wick, and Luke more than he thought he did and a few small gatherings he decided he didn’t mind it. He was actually excited to have little parties here and there and he knew how happy it made Blaine to prepare artistic charcuterie boards and bake mini desserts. 

 When Tony and Hunter came over, things always felt natural. Ever since everything had calmed down after the trial, things with his best friend felt normal again. Sometimes when they were joking around over beers (and a cigarette for Sebastian) he’d forget that Hunter actually was a hunter of supernatural beings. He liked how easy and connected B and Tony seemed and that things just finally seemed settled into place as much as they could be when you were implanted into a magical world. 

The two of them had been roasting each other and laughing in the courtyard. Normally Seb wouldn’t choose to sit out in the chill but B had extended his magical warmth throughout the area. Sebastian had hit his tipsy best friend in the arm a little too hard and he fell out of his chair a little bit and spilled some of his drink and the ground. They burst into laughter because well, there was just no reason that Seb should have been able to get one over on somebody trained in combat. Hunter made a sly comment about how he had a soft spot for him and that was the only reason it had happened. 

Tony and Blaine had made their way into the courtyard with more drinks and cake and had snuggled up to their significant others.  

“Hunter was just flirting with me. You should like, zap him or something.” He waved his hand in the air like little volts were shooting from his fingertips. “I might have snuck a few, they taste better with the chocolate.”  He liked how Blaine’s lips felt on his jaw, a tingle slid its way up his spine. 

 Hunter’s POV:

Hunter’s skin felt electric with excitement. They were all gathered around the small fire pit, the air comfortably warm with Blaine’s magic. He felt giddy from the wine, Bas’ laugh, and  Tony’s glow. Her soft body pressed into his side, his arm wrapped around her. Everything felt right and he knew that tonight was the perfect night. 

 Hunter leaned forward and plucked a raspberry from Sebastian’s perfect slice of cake and popped it into his mouth.

 “You’re a tattletale. You know I could stop him, right?”

 Tony’s elbow gently poked his side, “You could try. I think I’d let him give you a good zap.” 

 Blaine smiled and Sebastian took a smug bite of cake and Tony giggled into her sparkling water. He couldn’t help but smile, couldn’t even joke about his feelings being hurt. Things may not be lining up how he had always pictured them but he felt satisfied and truly happy. He and his best friend were in love with two amazing people and their friendship had remained just as strong. Their lives were all changing for the better. 

Blaine gave in and slid him a small plate with a decadent slice on it. Tony stole his raspberry which he knew he deserved. “You’re lucky you’re cute.”  She kissed him and he could taste the slightest hint of berries on her lips. 

After everyone’s bellies were full and their drinks were refilled the night fell into a comfortable silence. Hunter could hear dove’s somewhere in the courtyard, Tony’s breathing, and the traffic on the streets. He gently nudged Tony and they held eye contact for a few minutes, she knew what he was thinking.

 Antoinette’s (Tony) POV:

Tony glanced around the courtyard, feeling full of happiness and hope she hadn’t felt in a very long time. For the first time since she’d been cursed with sickness as a child, she felt like things were actually going to be okay. She was a full-time, certified member of the Order now, she was able to freely train and got to work with the love of her life every single day. Hunter always had her back and she always had his. She got to spend time with Blaine, someone that understood her more than almost anyone else in the world, someone she had bonded with as soon as they met, by extension of both Hunter and Blaine she was able to spend time with Sebastian. A person who made both of her boys incredibly happy and therefore made her happy. She had secretly started calling the three of them her boys in her head and she wondered as he laid her hand on her stomach if she’d be adding another one into the mix soon.  

“Something does tell me that Blaine might have a leg up here though, it is his house after all. I mean, we’re actually sitting in a swarm of his magic right now.” She looked over at Blaine and grinned with a shrug while blatantly betraying her own boyfriend. She’d figure out a way to make it up to him later. She secretly sometimes wondered what hidden potential her friend had hidden away. She’d met both his mother and father and they’d both done incredible things and it made her wonder what secrets or untapped power Blaine Anderson might be carrying around. She also sort of hoped that maybe they never found out. 

Good Witches tended to only pull out the crazy magic when things were about to go incredibly bad. Imelda when saving her, and well, Will was on the Council, he got to do bigger magic every day. She knew Blaine was close to cashing in his good card and possibly doing something drastic during his trials, but they’d all pulled through and he didn’t have to. She supposed that was for the best, they were all here now and happy and well, she’d take that over getting an answer to her curiosities any day. 

 She couldn't help the little smile that played on her lips as they finished their food and drinks and when Hunter snuggled in a little closer and dipped down to get her to look at him, she knew it was time to let them in on the reason they’d wanted to come this weekend in the first place. Her heart gave a little flutter and she cleared her throat as she looked up at Blaine and Sebastian. They had three full things to tell them. The first one was the easy part, the other two were a little harder.

 “I’m sure you’ve all noticed that I’ve not exactly been indulging in the spirits with you.” She laughed a little and settled her hand over her mostly flat belly again. The very tiniest swell was there and you had to know she was carrying in order to tell at all. Hunter insisted he could tell when he laid his head on her stomach at night, but she could hardly tell herself. She was only thirteen weeks along as of three days ago.  She thought it was cute though so she let him coo at her. “That’s  because well, we’re having a baby.” She grinned, enjoying  the changes in the faces of the two men sitting across from her. From surprise, to happiness, to what might have been sadness- she felt that one... and back to happiness before crossing over into what could be described as elation. “We’re due at the end of September, early October.” She held her hand to keep them from advancing on her just yet. She had more to say and number two was the the second hardest-

“Before you get too ahead of me, we have a couple more things to ask…” She paused, she knew that Blaine and Sebastian had been through hell and that they had made many sacrifices to be together, including finding out that they’d never get to be parents together,  so she didn’t want to fuck this bit up. She reached over and took Hunter’s hand for comfort and then looked from Sebastian, who was holding sweetly onto his boyfriend and giving Hunter a sort of amazed look-  to Blaine and settled on his kind, eager, wide golden eyes. Eyes that reminded her so much of his mom, now that her memories of the wonderful woman had been restored.

 “We- both Hunter and I,  were wondering if, no matter what we have, if you, Blaine, would give us the honor of naming them Mel.”

She waited, watching Blaine carefully. How he took this question would help decide if the last big thing they wanted to ask them was plausible. If Blaine reacted negatively maybe they shouldn’t be asking such big things in the first place, but if he accepted then they had the biggest, possibly life changing question to ask the two of them. She was nervous as she watched him process with Sebastian’s help. 

 Blaine’s POV:

There were doves again. They cooing and twittering all over the courtyard. Little flits of pale pink and grey and white here and there, making for a lovely show…  Blaine didn’t always notice them right away, but when he did they always seemed to make a big show by spreading their pretty wings and flocking around Sebastian in particular. As if showing him off- Like hey, look over here, this one’s ours. As if Blaine didn’t know all about Aphrodite's advanced role in their Fate’s intertwining. They had an actual altar to her in their bedroom. It still left him beside himself whenever he woke up, or came home to find decadent dark chocolates or expensive flowers or deep red wine left as an offering to her. If it had always been him doing it, that would have been one thing, but these things came from Sebastian and that in and of itself was baffling. He figured his logical, lawyer boyfriend would drop a chocolate kiss or a petal here and there, but most of the time Blaine found incredibly nice things for the goddess of love and beauty. Sebastian seemed to take her presence as seriously as he did. Maybe the presence of the doves was a gift for them. A constant sweet soundtrack to everyday life inside (and outside) of the Smythe-Anderson home.

The doves seemed to coo even more sweetly as Tony revealed her and Hunter’s amazing news. So sweetly in fact that Blaine almost missed it for grinning up at the fluttering birds. His head snapped back down as he caught the words due at the end of September, early October… He wanted to do three things all at once. First he wanted to flock to Tony like the doves seemed to love doing to Seb, and wrap her up to congratulate her, but something her in demeanor said to sit back for a second, then he wanted to go to Hunter and do the same, but again, they both seemed to be telling them that wait, there’s more. The third bit was that he wanted to cry a little, a happy one, mind you. Because maybe there was hope for a child to be in their lives somewhat now. One that maybe they could become friends with and when Hunter and Tony visited  every few months they’d maybe prefer hanging out with him and Seb. Maybe they’d get cute nicknames one day. Maybe.

He was still processing the information and the excitement when Tony asked her next question. The name was pretty and gender-neutral. He liked it as soon as she said it. He had a familiarity with it that he couldn't place his finger on. Yet, he had no clue why they seemed to be asking for his permission to use it. How could he give them honor over a name?

 Seb was mumbling his name in question. He looked at him wondering why his boyfriend was holding onto him and rubbing his back so comfortingly, like he’d been told something sad. Or why Hunter and Tony were looking at him with wide, waiting eyes, looking and exuding the feeling of nervousness. Why was the focus on him? Shouldn’t it be on Tony and Hunter? He looked over at Seb a little confused. His boyfriend cocked his head to the side, not understanding his reaction, gave his hand a comforting squeeze and it wasn’t until Blaine tried saying the name out loud to Seb to question it that he understood.

 “Mel? Oh...”

 He swallowed hard and blinked once and then twice as everything seemed to fall into place for him. Imelda. Mel… They wanted to name their baby after his mom. The two of them knew that he and Seb wouldn't be able to, so they were asking to do it for them. His heart felt full and sad and he sniffled, blinking back tears as he spoke. His voice a little thick.

 “Oh, I would love that, guys. I truly would.” He bit his lip and leaned into Sebastian, feeling shy and overexposed all of the sudden. “She would love that…” He hid his face in Seb’s neck for a moment to collect himself, and smiled as Seb pressed a kiss to his forehead, gaining comfort from his soulmate and grounding himself. He pulled back to rejoin the group just in time for Hunter to clear his throat as if he had something more to say. Blaine could feel this was a big one...

 Hunter’s POV:

Hunter wrapped his arm around Tony’s shoulders and pulled her in even closer. He was delighted  by Sebastian’s surprised face, his mouth agape for about 3 solid seconds before he mouthed ‘you  motherfucker!’ It made him laugh with how simply Bas the reaction was and then there was Blaine, all wide eyed and shy. Hunter was thankful that Blaine had reacted positively to their request. If it weren’t for Imelda’s selflessness and power, none of this would have happened. 

 “Thank you, Blaine. It means a lot to us,” Tony nodded in agreement.

 “We do have one more question.” Hunter shifted in his seat a little bit. This part was big and his stomach felt acidic with nerves. Before all this, he had thought that he and Sebastian had seen it all together. Asking his best friend this next question felt heavy and scarier than any mission he’d ever go on. 

 “Would you two do us the honor of being the baby’s guardians? Like god parents, only way more. You know, like...on paper. Would you be willing to take care of them while we’re on missions and such? To bring them into your home? Take them in...if...a mission went south.” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words, ‘in case we die.’ when everything felt new and positive, even if they both knew their field was extremely dangerous. 

 “Well, don’t keep us waiting fellas.” 

Sebastian’s POV:

 Sebastian smiled and watched his boyfriend’s face closely. It would have been comical how long it took for the name’s significance to settle into his brain but the entire interaction was just, well, wholesome. He pressed a kiss to Blaine’s forehead and waited for him to peek out again. The gesture of choosing the name Mel was very sweet, even an old cynic like Seb could admit that. 

The change in Hunter’s tone made his ears prick up. He knew him like his favorite TV show, comforting and reliable for background noise that made his pre B world feel a little less empty. Whenever the other man got serious on him it made Sebastian feel a bit on edge. Not because he was afraid to see Hunter serious, just because he never really knew what to expect and that made his organized microcosm feel a little bit wobbly. 

The question that had been asked was not one he had been expecting. He didn’t even think that this was a topic that either one of them, Hunter or Sebastian, had ever talked about. Seb blinked a few times and felt his Blaine shift next to him. He had always thought  that he was bad with kids, that he didn’t like them all that much. But, getting to know his little cousin Luke had changed his mind and he really loved to see the light in B’s eyes when they played their games of make believe. There was a warmth that spread through his body, something protective. None of this was ever in the plans they had made over midnights and pizzas and the bellyache of laughter. This was big and special and the most important thing Hunter had ever asked him to do. Especially now that he and Blaine had had their opportunity ripped away...

“I...do we need to think about this or…?” He pulled away a bit to look down at his boyfriend. “ I know that I...would really love to do that.” 

 Sebastian knew that Blaine felt the same way as he did.

 Blaine’s POV:

Once again Blaine was a bit slow on the uptake, he was having a bit of a hard time processing what was being asked of them. Not because he didn’t want it, but because it was more than he thought they’d ever get. His heart thudded in his chest as he looked up at Sebastian, hardly allowing himself to believe what he was hearing. The moment passed and his face broke out into a smile as he pulled Seb closer, squeezing him to show him that no, they didn’t need to think about this. It was truly a no brainer. He turned his attention over to Hunter and Tony and gave them an even bigger smile. 

 “No, no we don’t need to think about it. I’m with Seb without a doubt… I’d love that more than anything.” He laughed a little, his eyes still bright with tears. Of course he knew accepting came at a price, it put the very real threat that one or both of them might die in the field. They were hunters that worked for the Order in very real dangerous situations. And chances of them dying together were much larger considering they worked right next to each other. It made him, and no doubt Sebastian,  look that ugly truth right in the face.  “I’m gonna have to double down on protection spells and maybe even make you a few charms because there is no way you’re not going to be around to see this baby grow up.” He made mental  notes of the charms and ingredients he’d need for their protection even as he spoke. His brain seemed to be in overdrive as a new person to care about was just on the horizon. He wanted to protect them with his magic and his own self and he didn’t even know them yet. “Tony, how do you feel about letting me make you a little something even more extra while you’re pregnant? And, before you ask, I planned on asking if I could do that before you asked us to assist in the life of your child.”

 The four of them sat and talked for a couple more hours, mostly about the baby and what steps they needed to take for their wishes to come to term, but they slipped a few other things in here and there. There were plenty of laughs, Hunter convinced Seb to take a few shots with him for old times sake and even convinced Blaine to take a couple- one for him and one for Tony since she couldn’t, and he obliged.

Blaine had a few moments of panic where he thought maybe he wasn’t cut out for this task that was  being asked of him, but he’d look over at Tony and see his mother, just a little bit, and how light Hunter seemed to be right now, and then at his boyfriend, his soulmate, his person and it would all slip away… Seb looked happy and hopeful and he held Blaine close the whole time they sat and talked and drank. It was hard to feel anything other than good when Sebastian looked like that. 

Eventually Seb started to yawn and even suggested that Blaine use magic to clean up their messes, which was wild to him considering Sebastian usually liked for him to keep magic more simple. Even after all these years, Seb still would stare in awe and wonder and a little bit of warrant fear over some of the magical tasks that Blaine could perform. And magically cleaning a whole house in one go would do that trick. Seb wasn’t afraid of Blaine, but magic was wild and even though Blaine was a very practiced Witch, he knew seeing something like that to a logical mind like Seb’s was a bit overwhelming. So he said goodnight to Hunter and Tony who were sleeping in the guest room and sent Seb to get ready for bed before doing his fancy bit of cleaning magic. Within minutes the courtyard and kitchen were both spotless and Blaine had rounded up Freya and Enjolras and locked the doors, and renewed his protective spells around the perimeters of the new house. His cat familiar and his not so little pup followed him up the stairs and they were both asleep at the foot of the huge bed before he could change into his pajamas. He was still buzzing with excitement as he snuggled in next to Sebastian whose energy was just as excited, if not drowsy with drink. He might just be making mild hangover cures for Sebastian and Hunter the next day.

 “It looks like we found a bit of a loophole, didn’t we?” He laughed gently and pulled his drowsy boyfriend into his arms. “I mean, they said neither one of us could father children or adopt.  They never said anything about being partial guardians. And they’ll be the child of two hunters, that just means they’ll get to know the truth about Witches and magic and what their parents do when they’re young, we won’t have anything to hide from them.” He paused, watching Seb’s face in the dim light. “I know it’s not what we may have eventually wanted, but I think it worked out for us. We get to be there for them. They have a safe space for their kid and we get to be important to someone. I’m really happy. Plus, you’re a lawyer, so if the Council tries to stop us from helping Hunter and Tony, you can help fight it.”

Seb snuggled into him and reassured him that he was just as happy, his words and little kisses tipsy against Blaine’s jaw. Blaine could have talked about the kid and their future forever, but he was much more sober since he was mostly made of magic and stardust, sort of, and he knew Seb would too under normal circumstances. But his boyfriend was overly happy and drunk and sleep would bring morning and morning would bring the excitement of Blaine getting to tell Sebastian of the ideas he had for the third bedroom. Hunter and Tony were gone a lot on missions, sometimes it added up to about five months out of a year. And then they only got a year and a half off after the baby was born and then it was back to the grind and of course they’d be bringing the baby over before that year was up so they could bond, so naturally the baby needed a bedroom!

He looked down at Sebastian and pressed a soft kiss to his lips, smiling when Seb mumbled his love. Blaine kissed him back and loved him just as much before settling down with the comforting weight of Seb on his chest. An array of ideas and elation for his friends and for them as he slipped into slumber.

 /fin.

[ratisnotcrying]

you’ll get him back

Summary:  Morse had done foolish things before, on several occasions, often running alone into whatever half formed theory he had, and Jakes or Thursday usually found him bleeding, but mostly okay. Jakes used to be annoyed whenever he did this, thinking it a waste of time, but now he feels much the way he imagines Mrs Thursday does every time her husband leaves each morning.

Pairing: peter jakes/endeavour morse, fred thursday/win thursday

Warning: graphic depictions of violence, canon typical violence, murder,  descriptions of murder

Word count: 2.5K

A/N: this is crossposted on AO3 under the same title - im working n a follow up piece but dont hold ur breath xoxo 

~~~

Morse had done foolish things before, on several occasions, often running alone into whatever half formed theory he had, and Jakes or Thursday usually found him bleeding, but mostly okay. Jakes used to be annoyed whenever he did this, thinking it a waste of time, but now he feels much the way he imagines Mrs Thursday does every time her husband leaves each morning.

The thing is, Morse was good at talking. He could explain obscure classical references in layman’s terms, in a way that meant Jakes didn't have to listen to any bloody opera to solve a case - which he was always thankful for. At first he had thought it was condescending, some young bloke lording his knowledge over the lowly Cowley coppers, but when he got to know Morse, really got to know him, he realised that Morse had a genuine interest in this, that all this music really meant something to him. In a way, it meant something to Jakes too now, seeing as most nights he fell asleep with Morse’s records on quietly in the background.

Morse was good at talking about nothing too. Peter couldn’t count the number of times he had found Morse after he had run off, hands up and definitely scared, though not in any real danger because he just kept talking, a steady stream of thoughts and theories about this and that, distracting the suspect long enough that Jakes could cuff them.

This killer though, the way he killed, seemingly without mercy and with no signs of stopping, he wasn’t the type to be talked down.

It was a rough case. The only good thing about it was that no children were involved. The list of bad things gave Jakes a headache; the long and the short of it was that young men were being viciously beaten and then strangled, and they were all found in some remote expanse of fields on the outskirts of Oxford. That would have been enough to put anyone on edge, but the only thing that seemed to connect the victims was their appearance - tall, slim, blonde academic types.

Dr DeBryn had always been something of a rock to the younger officers, always calm and collected, even in the face of danger, but it seemed that the good doctor was shaken by this one. After the first autopsy, Jakes and Morse had gone to see Max; and the latter pair had looked like they were about to pass out - their expressions grim, their already pale skin almost sickly, and both shaking so much that Peter reckoned he could feel it through the floor. He likely wasn’t doing much better - the body on DeBryn’s table looked a little too much like Morse.

“This young man went through… quite the ordeal. Knife wounds and blunt force trauma all over his body, both sustained over several hours, and if you look here,” Max pointed to the victims fingertips and ears, “you can see the beginnings of frostbite setting in.”

Jakes nodded, glancing at Morse to make sure he was still upright before asking, “What about these bruises, on his wrist?”

“Yes, he has them on his ankles too, which indicates he was tied to the arms and legs of a chair, and you can see from the angle of the bruising on his neck that the killer was taller than him whilst he was sat down. What doesn’t make sense, though, is that there are multiple ligature bruises. It could mean that he was brought to the brink of death multiple times, but I suspect that the killer simply wasn’t strong enough to do it in one.”

Thursday went alone to the second autopsy, which was for the best because the killer had escalated to cutting out his victims tongues, and Morse would definitely have collapsed had he seen that. The third and fourth were the same as the second, the cuts were deeper and bruises bloomed over more pale skin, but ultimately they were the same.

At ten o'clock the morning after the fourth body had been found, Morse was surrounded by Jakes, Thursday, Trewlove, Strange and Bright who were all trying to convince him to stay with another officer at all times.

“These are very clearly crimes of passion.” Morse snapped, slamming the newspaper onto his desk. Strange and Trewlove looked taken aback by his outburst, but Jakes just rolled his eyes, used to Morse’s dramatics.

Morse stood, planting both hands on the desk as he continued. “Likely someone has been wronged - or lied to, hence the tongues - and is going after men who look like the guilty party. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually been to Oxford, but ninety percent of the male population look like the victims; the chances of me personally being targeted are so microscopically small that it would be a waste of manpower to have somebody protecting me instead of searching for the killer.” Morse all but shouted before storming out, his coat billowing behind him.

Morse had become restless after the second murder - people had made the connection between the victims and started hovering around Morse. He didn’t like people fussing over him when he had been shot, so, what with the amount of attention he was getting now, it was really no surprise that Morse had done a runner, Jakes was only surprised it took this long.

That didn’t mean Jakes was happy about it.

He was, however, less happy to find out that Morse had been snatched off the street, in broad daylight, not fifteen minutes after leaving the station.

They’d had multiple calls from witnesses and it didn’t take long to put two and two together, which was all well and good, but they still couldn’t work out where the men were actually being killed. Trewlove had been coordinating searches of all buildings surrounding the fields, to no avail, so their only option was to split up and search buildings further afield until they found Morse.

It was freezing. In reality, Jakes knew that was because it was in the middle of winter, but he couldn’t help feeling as if the real reason he was shivering so violently as he sprinted across the field was the mind numbing fear that this time he would be too late. Or too slow, because despite the fact he was running fast enough to give him a stitch, the rundown barn he was trying to reach didn’t seem to be any closer than it was two minutes ago. He had always reached Morse before he came to any serious harm - he almost laughed when he realised that being shot or drugged no longer constituted ‘serious harm’, at least not when it came to Morse - this time though, this time his Morse could be killed and he’s not sure he’s ready to deal with that possibility.

His shirt was completely soaked with sweat when he eventually reached the building - if you could even call it that. The doors were crooked, barely hanging on; there were panels missing from all of the walls, and the one that were still holding on were more rot than anything else. There were tyre tracks leading from the doors away and cross the field - how the fuck did I miss them? - and in the cold glow of dusk he could see spots of dried blood painting a trail pointing towards what would no doubt reveal Peter’s worst nightmares come true.

There were footsteps behind him, likely uniforms who were only now catching up, but he didn’t turn to check - he just needed to find Morse, he just needed to move, but his joints had locked into place and he couldn’t find it in himself to push open the doors. At least not until he heard someone cry out over the sound of his laboured breathing.

He couldn’t stand there any longer and with a sudden surge of adrenaline, he yanked the door open and rushed inside.

For a moment it seemed that everything was moving all at once - Peter was still hurtling towards the centre of the barn, the unis behind him were cocking their guns, the killer was scrabbling for a weapon and there, bloody, but mostly okay, was Morse.

The next moment was deathly still. Jakes stopped a few feet from where Morse was tied to rickety wooden chair and inhaled sharply at how terrible he really looked: his hair was matted with sweat and blood, his eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, his skin as pale as the day he saw the first body and bruises almost as dark as the circles under his eyes after a long case.

“Do not come any closer or I will kill him.”

The unexpectedly feminine voice drew Jakes’ gaze upwards, where, standing behind Morse, holding a knife tightly against his neck, was a young woman.

“There are multiple ligature bruises. I suspect that the killer simply wasn’t strong enough to do it in one.”

“These are very clearly crimes of passion.”

Jakes could have smacked himself for not realising sooner that they were looking for a woman. Instead he raised his hands, signalling to the officers behind him to stand down.

“Alright, okay. No one else needs to get hurt, okay?” He hadn’t realised he was moving towards Morse until the girl waved the knife at him and he froze.

Looks really could be deceiving - Jakes reckons he should be used to that by now, what with Morse, but there was something about this girl that threw him off balance. Not necessarily because she was a woman, he thinks, more because there was something decidedly innocent about her. She was young, probably Morse’s age, though she looked much younger. Her hair was shoulder length and the dark curls bounced as she shook with rage; her pale yellow dress looked like a massacre in early spring, as did her coat which was discarded on some old equipment. Her eyes are what really threw Jakes off - a sort of unhinged sadness desperately looking for a way out that no one, especially not someone that young, should ever feel.

“None of the men you killed already are the one you really want, are they, miss?” Jakes said, hoping he sounded calmer than he felt, though his shaking hands gave him away.

She seemed momentarily distracted, as if she wasn’t about to kill a policeman, as if she was remembering a happier time.

“No, I suppose not.” She laughed humourlessly, a few tears falling to the ground. “No, no one can quite live up to my Jamie. He always knew just what to say to me. It’s a shame he had another girl on the go - we could’ve been awfully happy.”

There was a door on the opposite end of the barn, and over the girl’s shoulder Jakes could see Thursday creeping through it.

“I thought he was going to ask me to marry him - I was going to be Mrs Sarah Jones. I went to his house and I was trying to calm myself down - worked myself into a right flap, I had. But,” she took a deep breath, “as I was about to go and knock, the door opened and some… leggy tart came out, draping herself all over my Jamie.” The girl - Sarah - was getting agitated again and so was Jakes. Morse looked bloody terrified and he had the strangest notion to call out and tell Thursday to get a fucking move on.

“He didn’t even apologise. Merely told me to pack my things by the end of the week. I had a sudden urge to do the women of Oxford a favour and make sure they couldn't get hurt like I did.” Sarah was still smiling, but it was more sinister now and time seemed to slow giving Jakes plenty of time to watch as everything went spectacularly wrong.

Sarah pressed the knife against the side of Morse’s neck just as Thursday reached her and began to pull her back. Morse looked at Jakes, all doe eyed and teary, and all Jakes could do was look on in static horror as Sarah drew a line of blood that immediately cascaded crimson onto Morse’s already ruined shirt.

Jakes isn’t sure he’ll ever forget the sound Morse made - weak and broken, slicing right through his heart.

He moved on autopilot; if anyone asked he couldn't have said with any certainty how he got Morse untied, but he wasn’t really concerned about that. Peter used one hand to support the back of Morse’s neck and pressed the palm of the other firmly over the cut. Almost immediately, blood started seeping through his fingers, and Morse’s whimpering went up an octave, his eyes were glassy and unfocused, gazing vaguely at the other coppers who were standing around as if Morse wasn’t bleeding out.

“Are you just going to stand there or are you going to get a fucking ambulance!?” He shouted over his shoulder. Morse flinched and Jakes turned back to him, ignoring the sound of now-moving heavy boots behind him.

“Morse, you need to stay awake.” Jakes pressed harder against the wound, trying to ignore the blood that was rolling down his wrist and soaking into his cuffs in favour of adjusting his hold on Morse’s neck as his head lolled and he fell silent, causing Peter’s panic returned anew. It was careless, what with the number of people so close to them, but Jakes couldn't help stroking his thumb across the cold skin of Morse’s jaw.

“Morse? Morse, come on open your eyes.” Peter was only rewarded with a feeble fluttering of his lashes, just as they had on their last day off: the sun had peered over the horizon and Jakes had kissed Morse awake, running his hand through golden curls and in return Morse had blinked up at him, grinning sleepily.

“Come on, Dev. Open your eyes for me, please?” This time he didn’t get a response at all. “Please, love?” Peter isn’t quite sure if anyone heard his voice crack. He’s not sure he cares.

It seemed an age before the ambulance arrived and when it did, Thursday had to bodily drag Jakes away. He was vaguely aware that, at some point, everyone except himself, Thursday and Morse had left - which was probably for the best.

“He’ll be alright.” Thursday said quietly, as if Jakes was a frightened animal. “Always is - he’s a stubborn bastard. Won’t let something like this stop him.”

Jakes didn’t really listen, too preoccupied with trying to light his cigarette. The matches were taken out of his hand, and he didn’t look up until he was exhaling the first lungful of smoke. Thursday pressed the pack back into Peter’s hands, guiding him out to the car, and in an almost characteristic display of kindness and acceptance, he handed Jakes his hanky to clean up with.

“You’ll get him back, Peter.”

[notjonahclemence]

This post is long and I do not apologize.

Okay y’all quiz time! I’m curious, pay attention to me. Bored? Me? Never. IkeSen, IkeRev, IkeVamp or all three (max out the word limit, do it!). Feel free to answer all of these questions or whichever ones you like. 

I’ll go first and subject myself to the mortifying ordeal of being known so I hope you will do the same!

I’m gonna answer about IkeSen!

1. When did you start playing?

I have absolutely no concept of time and cannot remember dates but it was between Kenshin and Mitsunari’s routes. 

2. Who’s route did you play first/why?

Nobunaga’s route. I knew enough about the game to know his was one of the original routes and I wanted to start the game from ‘the beginning.’ 

He interested me and I could tell he was just enough of a 'bad boy’ for me to fall for. I am, unfortunately, cripplingly attracted to bastards. 

That’s why I play otome games instead of dating real men.

3. Before you started playing/towards the beginning who was your favourite guy and why? Do you have one ultimate guy or absolutely cannot choose between multiple. Kinda ties in with questions 2, 4 & 5 I guess.

Though I liked Sasuke, I’ve never been hugely romantically interested in him, I guess my favourite guy (romantically) has always been Nobunaga. And that’s terrible.

4. If their route had been out when you first started playing would you have picked somebody else? Who? Why?

*Naruto voice* SASUKE!!!! He seemed interesting, handsome, funny(ish), KIND, and was the only one who wanted to help me. 

He was also the only character in the prologue who wasn’t a jerk or Mitsunari (never been attracted to the ‘gentle angel’ type character) so he really seemed like the only option... but his route wasn’t out and thus I was forced to pick Nobunaga like I’d originally been planning anyway.

5. If that guy’s route is out now did it live up to your expectations? Why/why not?

Sasuke? Yes in both a good and bad way. The route was more interesting and entertaining than I’d expected it to be but I was not particularly into him before, I did not expect his route to change that and it didn’t. 

6. Your favourite guy NOW. Is it the same person as it was at the beginning? If not, who is it? Why? How many favourite guys have you had? Do you keep changing your mind or are you irrationally devoted to one guy? And I mean romantically, not guys you like for other reasons.

Still. Nobunaga. Send. Help.

7. Did a guy you expected to like disappoint you? Who? Why?

Masamune. I never thought he would be my all time favourite but I expected him to be one of my more liked guys both romantically and just as an interesting character. He isn’t. But it’s not like I hate the guy or anything he’s just not a fave.

8. Did a guy you never thought you’d fall for blow you away? Who? Why? Even if he didn’t ‘sweep you off your feet’ was there someone/a route you liked a lot that you didn’t expect to?

Route: Mitsunari. His route just kept me entertained, there weren’t bits where I lost interest or anything.

Person: Yukimura. I actually really liked him a lot in his route. Sweet, cute, romantic, interesting. Which is weird because I used to (and still do!!!) see him as one of the more boring characters.

Me, before *reading a different guy’s route, sees Yukimura*: Boring.

Me *reading Yukimura’s route: AAAAAAHHHHH! OMG! DJBQWHFIVIF!!!! *heart eyes*

Me, after *reading a  different guy’s route, sees Yukimura*: Boring.

9. Does one of your favourite guys not fit your ‘type?’ (Eg; your fave guys are Kenshin, Shakespeare and also Fenrir). Even if you’re only answering for one game, feel free to include guys from other games for this question.

Favourite IkeVamp guy: Shakespeare, fave IkeSen guy: Nobunaga, fave IkeRev guy: Lancelot... and Fenrir. Jerk, jerk, jerk... Fenrir.

10. Are you a romantic person or a dramatic person?

Dramatic. Even when I don’t want to be. 

11. If you’ve read both a romantic ending and a dramatic ending for the same character is there any where you noticed one being significantly better than the other?

Kenshin’s dramatic ending is so much better than his romantic one it’s not even funny.

12. Do you feel any character is significantly less loved than they deserve? Why do you think that?

Stop sleeping on Hideyoshi! Cowards!

13.  Do you feel any character is significantly MORE loved than they deserve? Why do you think that?

Kennyo. Mostly because I don’t much care for him at all so any love is Too Much.

Also Masamune, but again, it’s not like I HATE Masamune. I just don’t get the hype. Everyone’s different I guess.

14. What routes have you read? 

Nobunaga: Dramatic, romantic, eternal. Kenshin, Ieyasu, Mitsunari, Yukimura: Dramatic, romantic. Hideyoshi, Sasuke: Romantic. Shingen, Masamune: dramatic.

15. WHO’S ROUTE ARE YOU ON RIGHT NOW?! What do you think of it? Have you read it before? Etc.

Mitsuhide’s. Predictably I have not read it before. I’m enjoying it but not as much as I thought I would. Mitsuhide’s was the route I was looking forward to most so anything less than complete perfection would be a letdown. And while it’s good, it’s not complete perfection.

The main character is my real issue. She seems more childlike than I ever remember her being. Is it just me? 

Also tying into that, this is the only route I can remember her being consistently referred to as a ‘girl.’ Never a ‘woman’ always a girl. I know it happens SOMETIMES in other routes, Masamune calls you ‘lass,’ etc. But this time both the narrative and the characters seem allergic to the word ‘woman’ or something. That with her personality infantilize her a bit too much for me.

16. Fave route? Is it your favorite guy’s route or is there just a plot that you REALLY F*CKING LOVE even if the guy is not your favorite?

I actually really enjoyed Mitsunari’s route but I’m not romantically interested in him at all. Hideyoshi’s route was also a favourite.

17. Who’s route are you most looking forward to? Why? Again, you can answer for any game.

Shakespeare from IkeVamp. As for IkeSen... I’m not. Mitsuhide was the one I wanted. Don’t really like Kennyo, pretty neutral about the new guys.

18. Which guy are you most like? Why?

Jonah Clemence from IkeRev. But from IkeSen, Ieyasu. Because I’m salty. Though he’s really smart and I’m a complete dumbass.

19. Three guys/routes you love the most, why?

1. Nobunaga: bastard man, love of my life. The main character in his route does almost exactly what I’d do in her situation so it was a believable romance for me and he’s someone I could actually see myself falling for if I was magically transported into IkeSen rather than some of the others who I like but only because its a game and if I met them in real life we’d probably hate each other.

2. Shingen, another character I never expected to love, not big on flirts either, but he won me over. Still not sure why.

3. Hideyoshi. Just a damn good guy and a good route.

19. Three guys you like the most if they’re not the ones above, not necessarily the guys you fell in love with, just characters you like.

Number 1 guy is still Nobunaga both romantically and platonically.

2. Ieyasu. We’re too similar for a relationship between us to work but I adore him. That’s probably why

3. Kenshin. Funny 50% of the time, heartbreaking 50% of the time, interesting 100% of the time also just pretty to look at. An incredibly complex character with an interesting personality/relationships. But if you were to put a gun to my head and say “date Kenshin or die” I would say “pull the trigger.” Not romantically into him (or Mitsunari, or Kennyo) at all.

19. LEAST favourite three guys. Why?

1. Kennyo

2. Kennyo

3. also Kennyo

No, I don’t take constructive criticism. 

20. Any other romantic visual novels, books, games, songs, movies, tv shows or other media you would recommend?

The psy-changeling series by Nalini Singh. A paranormal romance series. There are like, 20 books and still going with it’s own worldbuilding so it’s not light reading but I thoroughly enjoyed the books and I hope others will too. It’s written in English but you can also get it in at least a handful of other languages, Spanish and German at least.

Also the song Fire meets Gasoline by Sia is Nobunaga x MC’s song.

21. MEEEE!!!!! Is there anything I’ve said that you totally agree with/blatantly disagree with? What/Why?

Well I can’t really answer this but please go ahead!

22. If you do read IkeSen, how do YOU feel about Nobunaga?

I’ve made my opinion pretty clear. If you actually answer any of these questions please feel free to put in your answer what guy/route YOU would like other people’s opinion on, that way we can get a bunch of different opinions on different guys.

Okay! That’s everything guys! If you’ve got any other questions you want to ask people add them to your answers. Other than that, I hope to see your replies *HINT HINT*

[iya5rt]

Kalopsia Project [Bakugo Katsuki x Reader – Tokyo Ghoul AU]

Epilogue – re:Kalopsia Project

Chapter Summary: Despite its ever-changing nature, life waits for nobody. It continues on, and so do you.

Quick Note!! This drawing you see here was done by the wonderful @CxldRain over on Wattpad!! Please, please, please check them out!! I am seriously so honored and thank you so much♥

Kalopsia Project Masterpost

“And now – exclusive information coming straight from the police about a discovery from a few days ago. Following an anonymous call reporting a sighting of multiple ghouls, police and Investigators from the CCG were led to the site of the raid from 4 years ago in which All Might – a renowned investigator, lost his life in a brutal fight against a skilled and feared ghoul nicknamed Endeavor by the CCG. The building, a former research facility of the CCG, which was thought to have been abandoned following the raid, was discovered to still have been in use.

“Inside, the police found traces of a fight and continuous use of the facility for the last couple of years. It resurfaced that this had been the main operating headquarters of a horrific human experimentation project. Unfortunately, no further data could be recovered and the organization responsible for this project has yet to be unveiled. The police are working together with the CCG to get to the bottom of this baffling case.

“The man thought to be the mastermind behind this inhumane act was caught at the scene. So far, his claims have been insufficient and, according to the CCG’s research department, false and contradictory. Multiple of his supposed “subjects” were discovered at the scene. Two of them appeared to have been killed by a ghoul, while the rest were temporarily incapacitated. Multiple organizations are currently looking into the matter, so stay tuned and we will keep you updated.

“Now, to have a look at the situation in the second ward. Sightings of the binge-eater ghoul which had been terrorizing the ward for a couple of months now have gone silent. No new victims have been discovered since the suspicious scene with no remains from last week. Has the threat been eliminated? Will the second ward finally be able to-“

The woman’s monotone voice coming from the small TV sharply cut off. Or rather, it was the sound of the TV instead that disappeared, as Monoma let out a frustrated sigh and set down the remote. He sure was getting quite the attention, though perhaps a news reporter wondering if he was finally dead for good wasn’t the attention he had been hoping for.

It was yet another bright and early morning at the small café which held a tiny secret most knew nothing of. The late-night venture of its staff from a couple nights ago hadn’t made it to all of the news stations quite yet (seems like the CCG still wanted to keep it under wraps as long as possible) and the concern and rumors hadn’t spread among the public for now. Of course, everything had been so carefully planned out, so as to not allow a single unsuspecting person to discover what exactly had transpired there.

One by one, the rest of Yuuei’s staff finished up their morning chores and gathered in the main area, sitting beside the counter, at the tables, or already working on preparing for the day (poor Midoriya and Todoroki had it tough).

Monoma’s eyes swept across the bunch of people and he raised a brow.

“Well, would you look at that. We’re starting any moment now, yet [L/N]-chan is nowhere to be seen.”

“She should be arriving very soon,” Ida chimed in. “Apparently she’s squeezing in some more kagune training with Bakugo-kun whenever she can.” Monoma followed up with a small hum.

“Huh, is that so…? Won’t the customers get worried she’s all bruised and beaten when they see her then?” his raised brow fell and he leaned back against the counter. Uraraka tried to stifle a giggle but failed.

“No way. Bakugo-kun’s still probably going easy on her. At least until her regeneration’s good enough, that is. And who knows,” she muttered to herself. “Maybe even after that.” Another giggle slipped out through her knowing grin. Meanwhile, Monoma’s curiosity turned into a devilish smirk.

“Betcha they’re just making out the whole time-“

Smack!

The towel easily knocked his head forward, leaving him to rub at his reddening neck, as a couple people laughed a little.

“I heard that, you know?” you reached out to retrieve your towel. Hey, he deserved much worse. You were being nice. Not minding Monoma’s pouting face, you dug around for your apron. “Once I get the hang of it, I plan to challenge you to a fight. Get back at you for that oh so pleasant “date” we had.”

“You’re welcome to do so. Any time you like, in fact.” Monoma closed his eyes and put a hand to his chest in a dramatic gesture. “I don’t plan on losing to a newbie.” His eyes looked back at you, a challenge just as clear evident in them.

Though, like you had said, that challenge would have had to wait. They weren’t wrong – you still had a long way to go before you could proclaim to have all the meticulous control over your kagune you’d need to take down somebody as experienced as him. Landing a single blow on Katsuki was already next to impossible throughout your training sessions.

But when that day was to finally come, you were determined to turn the tables on him. On both of them.

Another thought resurfaced in your mind.

“Oh, that’s right! Seems like only Kirishima-kun will make to today’s interview. I hope that won’t be a problem. The rest should manage to find a free slot by the end of the week though!”

“Interview?” Uraraka paused, just as she was putting a big mop away. Ida also looked at you with a slight tilt to his head.

“Ah, you guys were dealing with the clean-up, huh. Forgot you ran a little late. Well, you see-“ you walked towards the door, then turned to face them once again. “Once everything was done and over, Kirishima-kun and the other three somehow managed to convince Aizawa-san to let them work here! They said they’d all been looking for some part-time jobs anyway! Not sure why he insists on interviewing them but hey, I wouldn’t really mind graduating from taking out the trash!!”

With a small hop to your step, you turned the sign on the door, the word “Open!” now inviting all passer-by inside

***

“Katsuki-kun!” you called out from beside him.

His steps momentarily came to a halt, his eyes widening just enough for you to notice, only for him to shake away the surprised expression as quickly as it had crossed his features. You let out a laugh.

“I love the funny face you make when I call you that!” This time, he made a small growl.

“Well, excuse me, but it’s not my fault, now is it?” Not that his complaints were going to put an end to your constant giggles though. After a few seconds of silence on his part, just enough for the funny scene to pass, you hummed quietly.

“I still think we should’ve saved this for when I finally manage to land a hit on you during training.” Katsuki, however, only scoffed.

“Yeah, so never?”

Your small fist hit his shoulder, though he gave no sign of having even felt it. You looked around the mostly empty street, yet your eyes wandered back to him. Hands intertwining behind your back, you tilted your head in pretend curiosity, failing to hide the smile from the joke you hadn’t even made yet.

“Say, you’re not gonna try and eat me too, are you?”

With a single roll of his eyes, Katsuki replied simply.

“I’m not a cannibal.”

You paused mid-step. He noticed your hesitation and stopped too, raising a brow when he looked back. He didn’t necessarily say anything, but you had come to appreciate just how many words his face was able to convey. You didn’t need him to ask you to know he had a question.

“I guess I’m not really human anymore, huh. It’s been a few days, but the thought still feels as foreign as ever.” At the sound of Katsuki’s approaching footsteps, your eyes flicked to him.

“The hell are ya talking about?” He stopped before you, leaning his head towards yours. “With all you went through, you might just be more human than anyone else.”

The blood rose to your cheeks and you let out a laugh to hide your embarrassment.

“Wow, never knew you could be so cheesy, Katsuki-kun,” you smirked. If he was getting to embarrass you, you could easily do the same. Nonetheless, you smiled at him, putting your hands on his shoulders, and leaning in closer. “But thank you – it means a lot to me, you know?”

You pecked him on the cheek and pulled away, skipping ahead with a big smile. He didn’t like it when you saw him blushing or making a weird face, so you could at least give him the space he needs to shake it off. In no time, he was walking by your side again.

Suddenly, his eyebrows scrunched in concern and his eyes focused somewhere up ahead, as he took hold of your hand to stop you from going on by yourself.

“Act natural,” he leaned in and whispered. You followed his gaze and your heartbeat quickened at the sight of the two men clad all in white and carrying those trusty briefcases of theirs.

Passing them by took only a couple of seconds, yet it felt like you hadn’t breathed in a single time all throughout. The two of you rounded a corner, Katsuki looking back to make sure the investigators were well on their way, while you finally took a deep breath to recover.

“Gosh, my heart’s thumping,” you laughed, though the relief written across your face was clear to Katsuki.

“Well, better get used to it – this is going to be your life from now on.” He patted your back a few times.

He was right, huh?

Your path had seemingly been decided so long ago, from the moment that experiment had succeeded. A path of misery, of suffering, of tears shed alone, and of a life doomed from the start.

Yet, with the help of those you’d always thought to be your enemies, you had created a new path. One that was still rocky, rough, filled with thorns. But it was a path you had chosen by yourself. It was a path you weren’t meant to walk alone.

You turned to face Katsuki, two pairs of eyes looking straight at each other. The smile on your lips grew even larger, as you reached out for his hands with your own.

“Get used to it, you say? Hm!” By this point, you were practically grinning already. “I think I’ll manage. But you have to promise me! That you’ll stay by my side, just like I’m going to stay by yours.” Once again, you leaned in closer. “That we’ll help each through it, right?”

Katsuki shook his head, a small smile playing on his lips when he opened his eyes again.

“Sure, sure,” he breathed out.

That was more than enough.

The distance between you became smaller and smaller, until your lips finally met in the middle.

And in that moment, you realized. Both of you realized.

What an ironic situation you had been put in from the start of it all.

Yet in the end, it was an irony you both had learned to love.

~Fin~

***

Author’s Note: And so, it is… done? That’s kinda crazy.

A few quick notes before I start with all the sappy stuff. I know that this was an extremely short chapter, especially compared to last week’s beast, but I really wanted to show those two particular scenes and make it short and sweet, so I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless! Also, the chapter title! I intended for it to come off as a reference to Tokyo Ghoul:re but if you noticed, the :re is actually placed at the start. That’s because, while Kalopsia Project:re feels like a new start, re:Kalopsia Project gives me more “in response to Kalopsia Project” vibes. Not sure if that made any sense or came across nicely though.

And lastly, at first this was going to be it for sure. Done and Over. But after hearing what you guys have been saying, I’ve been considering writing a sequel to this story one day. It won’t be for a while and I’ll get into the reasons for that later, but the fact is, it will probably happen. I hope you’ll enjoy it too!

And now – thank you all so, so much. You might have noticed already that I don’t shy away from getting wordy in my notes, so please forgive me for that. I’m just infinitely grateful for all the support this story has received – this was my first proper attempt at something with a plot, and also at an AU. It was a fun experience for me and I hope you all enjoyed it too! Every single interaction makes me have this big stupid smile on my face and, while I was a little anxious about posting this story initially, you’ve made it all worth it. So thank you so much to everyone who read this story, who liked or reblogged it, and especially to anyone who stuck with it all this time. It truly means the world to me since I wouldn’t be doing this without you all♥ I hope you’re all staying safe during quarantine! 

And finally, I feel a bit odd self-promoting like that but hey, if you enjoyed this story, and especially the character writing, and are looking for something else to binge during long days at home, I do have one more story! Granted, it’s Bakugo x OC, though I always say that you can easily pretend the OC is either you or your own character, and it is canon-compliant. However, it’s also a good 4 times longer than this story! It’s also my first ever story, so the writing in some of the beginning chapters won’t be up to par with what you’ve been seeing here! But if you feel like it, I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a chance! In fact, now that “Kalopsia Project” is over, I will be returning to plotting the fourth book of that story and hopefully go back to writing it soon enough! Here’s a link to it on Wattpad/Quotev/AO3– I hope you’ll enjoy it^^ Alright, enough blabbering on my part.

Once again, thank you all so much, I love you and I stay safe and have fun~ Hopefully I’ll see you again some time! 

Bye~

(Also, I haven’t quite decided what I’m doing with this blog yet but I plan to type a probably somewhat long post once I figure it out! In the meantime, thank you all so much for the support!  And hey, @afuckingunicornn  @creativedogs  @chims-kookies  - it’s finally over huh?)

[jawnjendes]

don’t want your hand this time | shawn mendes

chapter 1/?, university au, shawn x goth oc

AN: i know i know i posted a thing yesterday but UUUHHHHH im just tryna get to the saucy parts of this bc SOMEBODY decided to be all hot n sexy in a certain music video ANYWAY this is just an intro chapter of sorts and we are introducing some new characters!! lmk your thoughts thots!

***let me know if u wanna be added/removed from the taglist

masterlist | playlist coming soon

When Annalise Flores has shit to do within a time limit, she forgets about everything else. Her phone goes on silent, she ignores her other obligations, and she makes sure to get whatever is in her focus done. This has proven to be disastrous in the past, like when Annalise just needed to clean the entire dorm before starting any homework assignment was due the next day. Or when she reorganized the filing closet at the dealership before adding up the gas receipts she was ordered to do. You get the idea.

Annalise was very determined to get all of her unopened boxes, and her clothes to fit in her tiny, beat up car so she didn't have to make multiple trips, given how far campus is from Shawn's apartment. He promised he would help her move when he got home, he had that huge Jeep after all, but Annalise was way too antsy. Besides, they already fought about this, and she didn't want to start anything all over again. She didn't want him to feel obligated to help if only one of them was into the idea of her moving out.

After pushing on the car door three times, it finally clicked shut. Annalise successfully managed to stuff all of her clothes and half her boxes into the backseat. The rest of the boxes were in the trunk. The windows were all covered, so maybe she wouldn't be able to see her blind spots, but at least Annalise wouldn't have to make a second trip. She silently thanked the Tetris gods for blessing her with the appropriate skills as she went back up to the apartment.

Shawn's living space didn't look that different with all of Annalise's belongings out. Most of it was all stashed into the "recording" room over the summer, and neither of them spent any time in there. There was more space in the closet now, too. It was no longer just a black abyss, and all of Shawn's belongings were now undisturbed. Annalise debated smuggling out his black Nike hoodie, but given the circumstances it was best to leave everything as it was. The apartment didn't look any different really, but Annalise still felt an ache from her throat down to the bottom of her feet as she removed the spare key from her chain and left it on the glass dining table. This was easier than saying goodbye to him in person.

~

Campus was nowhere near as quiet and lonely as the apartment. Students were running around like headless chickens, trying to locate buildings, schedules, and friends. She already had a key to her dorm, so she parked near her building and carried her backpack and two boxes up the walkway. Annalise's resting bitch face and the clunk of her boots on the ground gave her less of a struggle to push past other students. Weak and fragile as she was these last couple of months, she's still got it.

The dorm building wasn't too far from the last one she lived in, but it was going to be a bitch getting to her classes. Maybe she should invest in a bike… or she should get her shit together and take the bus.

Annalise's new dorm was on the third floor, and it was furnished. Weird, yes, but she was not going to complain. It was a bit smaller, but not cramped. There was a tiny hallway between the two bedrooms, and one cramped bathroom. She noticed one room already had boxes sitting on the floor, and she couldn't help but get just a little excited. Stella hadn't completely abandoned her. Annalise wasn't even mad about their three month long silence, she was just happy that she would be seeing a familiar face.

She didn't run into Stella at all during the multiple trips she took bringing all her stuff in. Annalise knew she was here, though. Her perfume scent was always left behind in any room she had been in, and Annalise definitely caught the scent in the dorm. The same amount of boxes were still in her room by the time Annalise finished bringing all of her's in. She figured she could have texted Stella, but she kind of wanted to surprise her… even though they both knew about the other.

She checked her phone anyway. The only text she had was from Shawn.

"How come you didn't wait for me?"

Pursing her lips and smudging the signature black lipstick, Annalise cleared the notification and went to sit in the armchair in the living room. She was way too tired to try to reason with him. She certainly couldn’t jump into the "I miss you" crap so quickly either. She didn't want to, but Shawn obviously did when he sent another text. Out of sheer habit, Annalise opened the notification instead of clearing it, and she cursed under her breath.

"You've been gone only a few hours and this place already feels so sad and empty. Why did you leave your key?"

Yeah, she left him on read. She didn't know what else to say to him.

Thankfully, the lock on the door jiggled and in came Stella carrying a large cardboard box. She gasped and her hazel eyes lit up when she saw her dark natured roommate. She quickly squatted down and set the box on the floor before coming at Annalise with open arms.

"Mi esposa hermosa!"

Annalise will never say this out loud, but Stella gives wonderful hugs. They two girls haven't seen each other in over three months, so getting a nice tight hug was something that was really needed. They rocked from side to side, giggling at the motions. It was like nothing had really changed.

"When did I become your wife?" Annalise asked, amused as she leaned back to look at her.

"When we decided to live together for the third year in a row!" Stella replied. “Oh you got a little…” Her thumb rubbed under Annalise’s lip, showing her the black.

“The struggles of being goth,” she joked.

Stella giggled, and then the rambling began. "How are you? I'm so sorry we didn't talk much over the summer. Did you stay with Shawn the whole summer? Oh, is he here?" She bounced on her feet, looking around the dorm.

"Uh yeah, I did stay with him the entire time," she told her. "And no, he's not here. He's working."

Annalise knew he wasn't. He had found her abandoned key, which meant he was home. And he was probably sulking. And he was going to sleep alone...

"But he'll be here later, right?" Stella asked, nudging her arm. "Y'all are gonna christen your room, eh?"

She really had to ask, didn't she? She really had to jokingly ask a question that would change the expression on Annalise's face, thus warning her of the things that had happened. She wasn't sure why she kept an obviously fake smile on her face as she silently stared at her roommate. The silence alone wasn't enough, apparently.

Normally, Stella would dramatically gasp, sit her down, and ask Annalise to spill every detail. Instead, she sighed.

"Fill me in while you help me bring my stuff up."

~

Classes and club meetings resumed within the next couple of days, so it gave Annalise plenty of excuses to keep her texts to Shawn dismissive and short. She knew he was coming and going from campus for class too, but due to their different majors, he was going to be very far away from her. Not to mention, he didn't know where her new dorm was located, so it wasn't like he could track her down.

Except… Annalise had to retake biology. She knew Shawn was at the science building quite often, and she had hoped her bio lab fell on a day that he was at the fine arts building. But you know, life just happens, and sometimes you see your mans between classes. Sometimes you just see him leaving classroom, towering over the other students because he’s a giant. Maybe you’ll see him with a very short girl at his side, and they’re both laughing at something. Maybe he won’t see you either because he’s balls deep in banter with this random girl.

There was a lump in Annalise’s stomach following that minor event, and it made her anxious and uneasy for the first day of that class. Still, she was determined to stay on board with the separation they both agreed on. It was better that way for now. She didn't know about Shawn, but Annalise fully intended on keeping the distance, suspicious-looking friends be damned.

Anyway, she could find friends of her own too. Gaming club meetings started up again that Friday, and it was something to look forward to. After god knows how long, Annalise attended said meeting after receiving an email from the head of the club, Josh. He and his friend, Paul, ran the club most of the time. They managed to get plenty of people to sign up during the rush earlier in the week but only seven of them actually attended the first meeting. Just like every year.

Both Josh and Paul were scrawny blond boys with "nice guy" complexes. They were polite for the most part, given that they inducted Annalise into the club the moment she signed up. But they also quizzed her on just about every popular, mainstream video game there was once they realized she would actually be showing up to the meetings. It took time, and a bit of Annalise telling them off, but they were civil towards each other now.

"Annalise!" called Chad as the lady herself entered the classroom in the communications building. He was another member, and he had his two frat bros with him, Kyle and Jared, and they both chanted her name in their deep, manly voices.

All different heights, but same amount of insane muscle. For lack of better words, these guys were meatheads with good intentions. Chad was a student with one of the highest GPA on campus, practically competing with Josh. Kyle was the star student in his major, sports medicine. Jared was that guy who beat up bigots as a hobby. All three of them were fully dedicated to their fraternity, Sigma Chi.

Then there was Patrick, who nodded to Annalise as a greeting. She nodded back and took the empty seat next to him in the circle.

The people who think Annalise Flores is a complete hardcore goth have not met Patrick Markowski. This was a guy who was always decked out in leather, ripped jeans, and black eyeliner. He had a proper faux hawk, which is what made people notice him the most. He typically surrounded himself with other goths, unlike Annalise. He was truly dedicated to the lifestyle, while she deviated from even that sometimes. This was the only guy in the club Annalise was actually friends with.

Anyway, all seven of these nerds shared the same appreciation for video games, which brought them all together in a circle, in an empty classroom, in the communications building this evening. However, Annalise's entrance caused the guys to deviate from the main topic.

Josh and Paul had been staring at her with their mouths open the second she entered the room. The Frats were visibly excited and each gave her a high five. Patrick merely stayed quiet and smiled.

"Heard you almost fucking died!" Chad told her. "And you didn't tell a single one of us!"

"I thought you had actually died," Josh spoke up. "Since you never miss a meeting and all."

So that got around. Cool.

“I wasn’t dying,” Annalise said, rolling her eyes. “I just had part of my colon surgically removed.”

“No way…” Jared said in wonder.

“Oh, that’s disgusting,” said Paul with a gag. He brought the collar of his red Pizza Planet shirt over his mouth.

The Frats stared at Annalise in awe, almost impressed by her vague explanation. She really didn’t understand the fascination, given everything that happened during and after the hospital. Of course, they knew nothing about any of that. At the same time, Annalise was annoyed at Paul’s dramatic reaction, so she kept talking.

“It might happen to you too if you don’t take care of yourself and listen to your body,” she told him. “Or worse, you could end up with a bag of your poop attached to your belly.”

Paul gagged again, much louder this time. Then Annalise decided that that was enough and directed the conversation to the club’s main topic: video games.

“So who’s played Team Sonic Racing?”

It was only the first meeting, so the group made a plan to bring their Switches and play next time. The Nice Guys prompted to play a round of Fortnite online later, but Annalise was not up for that game in the slightest. Too mainstream. Too chaotic. She never could get into it.

“Well, we can play without you,” Paul suggested, “not everyone has to join in.”

“Isn’t that a rule, though?” Patrick asked pointedly. “If we’re gonna play something together, we all have to agree on one game. Besides, I don’t play Fortnite either.”

Paul's eyes darted around, trying to look for a counterargument, but he sighed. “Fine. Anyone else got any suggestions?”

“What about a D&D campaign?” Annalise said. “Or some type of board game?”

Josh scoffed. “It’s video game club. Besides, me and Paul already have a campaign with our other friends.”

“‘Course you do,” she mumbled, folding her arms.

“Ooo! I got an idea!” Kyle spoke up, raising his massive hand. “We should hit up Bart. That bar with the art and retro games?”

Annalise perked up. Finally, someone with a brain cell. “I participated in a Smash Bros tournament there. It’s really fun, we should all go one weekend.”

“A bar?” Josh said in distaste.

“Yeah! It’ll be a class field trip or something!” Chad agreed. “It’s awesome, bro! They got a Gamecube and an N64! Sometimes they do karaoke night, but only with songs from different games!”

Then, Kyle looked at Annalise with a smirk. “Bet your boyfriend would perform there, eh?”

Even when she was far away from him, Shawn still had a presence wherever she went. “Heh, maybe…”

Luckily, none of these guys were the type to hover. The subject went back to going to Bart one weekend, and then the group chat was revived to discuss further adventures. Once the meeting was adjourned, Patrick followed me out the door.

“So, Annie. No offense or anything,” he said, walking in step beside her as they walked down the corridor, “but what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“My summer was great, thanks,” Annalise said, too busy glancing at her phone to cringe at that awful nickname. No new messages for once.

“Nah, seriously. You were in the fucking hospital, and I find out through Snapchat?” he asked seriously. “Did you even tell anybody? What the hell happened?”

She didn’t remember posting anything about her hospital stay anywhere on social media. However, the only two people who were there with her were social media freaks. Stella was the type to tweet every single one of her brain farts, and frequently Snap where she was every second. Shawn was less active on his platforms, but he was still quite popular in the Toronto area, so he had a sizeable following. Annalise knew he took a picture of his hand holding hers while she was in the hospital at least once. Maybe it made it to his Instagram story a couple of times.

Sighing, Annalise gave Patrick the gist of her exciting adventure with her large intestine. Some underlying guilt wanted to be felt as she recalled staying and Shawn’s for so long, but she decided to spare those details.

“Looked death in the face, eh?” he said, nodding in what looked like approval. “Badass.”

She chuckled. “Guess I wasn’t ready to be yeeted off this mortal coil.”

“Ugh, you use the word yeet? How much has that guy changed you?” Patrick stuck his tongue out at her, flashing the piercing he had on the muscle.

“Hey, I’m more down with the kids than he is.”

The pair were quiet as they made it out to the courtyard. The night was chilly and cloudy, the only light coming from the lampposts on either side of the walkway. It felt different knowing Annalise was with only a friend rather than her mans, and she tried to ignore the ache in her chest and the urge to talk about him.

“Do you remember what it was like?” Patrick asked after a minute. “Being so close to death?”

“Nope,” she replied simply. “Although, when I was under, I had a really vivid dream that my… uh, Shawn cheated on me.” Way to not talk about him.

“You sure it was a dream?”

They were passing by one of the picnic tables, where Patrick pointed to. There was a group of people standing around the table, and two people sitting on top of it. One of those people was Shawn with his acoustic guitar. He was singing with the girl who was sitting next to him, the same one he was walking with at the science building. It wouldn’t have seemed weird if Patrick hadn’t said what he said. It would have been left alone if Annalise hadn’t thought about that stupid fever dream.

“Come on,” she said to Patrick as she stalked off towards the group.

“I was joking!” he said with a laugh.

Still, Annalise walked with a purpose and he followed her. She clutched the strap of her shoulder bag and kept her chin up as she made herself apart of the tiny audience. It was quite the sight, two nerds decked out in all black and heavy eyeliner amongst a group of normals watching two other normals sing a pop song. No lie, Annalise just wanted to get a look at this girl she had never seen before.

Olive skin. Black, curly hair. Very short next to her guy. Very pretty voice coming out of very pretty lips. She looked at Shawn and he looked back at her as they sang an eerily familiar song. Musically speaking, they seemed good together.

“I’ll leave you with the memory, and the aftertaste…”

The tiny audience clapped. Patrick was nodding in pleasant surprise, probably having never heard Shawn’s songs before. Annalise applauded as well, but she couldn’t help the narrowing of her eyes as she watched Shawn and this girl high five each other.

They were both comfortable with all the attention, it was easy to see. Shawn was beaming in a way that hadn’t been seen in a long time, and then he laid eyes on Annalise. He still had that smile on his face, even though it faltered a little bit. She kept her face neutral and quirked her eyebrows at him as a silent greeting.

“Should I leave you guys alone?” asked Patrick as he and Annalise watched Shawn get down from the table top.

“No,” she replied simply.

She almost regretted having him stay. He had to witness Shawn and Annalise attempt to figure out how to greet each other. A side hug would have been awkward for reasons not only having to do with the guitar strapped to his shoulder. She definitely couldn’t kiss him, because that would have started something she had been trying to distance herself from. They finally settled for a mildly uncomfortable handshake, and Shawn kept holding her hand as he spoke.

It had been almost a week since Ann moved out, and she only sent him one text in that time span. It was the black heart emoji. Better than nothing, but not better than seeing her in person.

“You haven’t answered my texts,” Shawn told her. If she was going to decide when she'll give him attention, then he wasn't going to beat around the bush when he saw her.

“I’ve been busy,” Ann replied, feebly attempting to shake her hand away.

Shawn nodded, but he wasn't thoroughly convinced. Between work and school, Ann was a hermit. Or so he thought, given that she now had this new goth dude at her side. “So, who’s your friend?”

“Who’s yours?” she quickly said back.

“I’m Patrick!” said Patrick, holding out his hand. “Annie and I go way back!”

Shawn let go of her hand to shake his. “Nice to meet you, brother. Wait… Annie?” He chuckled.

Her cheeks heated up, and she decided to move her eyes somewhere else, specifically on Shawn’s unnamed singing partner. She was chatting with some of the other people still around the table. Annalise noticed she talked with her hands a lot.

“She lets me call her that even though she hates it,” Patrick said, snapping her back into the moment. “Right, Annie?”

“Do not,” she warned. Then she looked at Shawn. “So who’s the chick you’re singing with?”

Shawn took in an almost reluctant deep breath as he turned and called the girl over. If there was anything he had yet to discover, it had to be if his girl was the jealous type.

Annalise's dark brown eyes narrowed once again while he wasn’t looking. Call it anxiety or paranoia, but she was oddly suspicious. Patrick caught the glare though, and he nudged her arm to snap her out of it.

“Ann, Patrick, this is Alessia,” Shawn said when the very short girl joined them. “She’s a first year. Alessia, this is my…” He elongated the vowel. “Annalise. And her friend Patrick.”

Okay, so… a sinking feeling in the tummy. That’s what that felt like. Couldn’t be mad, though. Annalise wasn’t so quick to use the boyfriend word these days.

“You’re Annalise!” Alessia said in pleasant surprise. She did not hesitate to hug her, arms going around her shoulders and practically pulling her down to her level. “It’s so nice to meet you! I’ve heard so much about you!”

Honestly, Annalise was just glad she didn’t call her the goth girlfriend. Or the goth anything, for that matter. She didn’t hug Patrick, though, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“So, how did you two meet?” Annalise prompted. So maybe she was a little more than curious to know how and when Shawn found the time to get another girl at his side.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Shawn replied a little too quickly.

His eyes bored into hers, throwing them into a staredown. He broke through the fake, polite smile Ann had on. Of course he broke it. He was the only one who could. However, Shawn couldn't read the expression she had on. He couldn't tell if she was upset or not, happy or not… He couldn't tell if she wanted to change her mind about this separation or not… Ten months together and Ann was still a mystery.

“Uh, Shawn and I have like, every class together,” Alessia said slowly, looking between the couple, noticing the sudden change in atmosphere. She scratched the back of her head.

“Annie and I have been in the same club for two years,” Patrick added in the same tone. He too noticed the tension.

“Oh, which club? There’s some I’ve been checking out…”

Those two kept up the conversation. Shawn’s gaze on Annalise made her throat close up. He wasn’t smiling or feigning politeness anymore. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were hard and glossed over. Inexplicable guilt began to form in her chest yet again. She knew he didn’t understand.

_______

taglist: @normalcyisoverrated-beyou @ilsolee @mendesromano @1-800-khalid-mendussy @kitykatnumber @strangerliaa @iloveshawnieboi @poppyshawn @shawnsunflower @shawnvvmendes @yourdelightfullyleft @shawmndes @havethetimeeofyourlifee @calyumthomas

[marvelmando]

Dialogue Prompts

please send me a number (or multiple numbers) in my ask!

kind of a compilation of a bunch of different lists ive seen but only the ones i liked

“Can you please stop coming in through the windows? You keep scaring the hell out of me.”

“I’m not really sure what you’re doing is legal, so how about don’t do that.”

“Hey, I kind of just moved in? The walls are pretty thin, and I heard muffled screams coming from your place, are you good?”

“Wow, so this is what you’ve been hiding? Honestly... I’m not that surprised.”

“You know, for a genius, you’re kind of a dumbass.”

“You just got stabbed and you want to know if I’m okay?!”

“Did... Did you just get yourself stuck to the ceiling?”

“Holy shit, you’re freezing! C’mon, let’s go get you warmed up.”

“I thought you... of all people, would understand why I do this.”

“You are so good. How could it be anyone else?”

“You’re still my favorite person. Even if you are part spider and wear spandex.”

“Then I’ll wait until you’re ready. For you, I’d wait forever and then some.”

“You deserve all things that are good, and I won’t stop reminding you of that.”

“Your hands are always so cold.”

“I really like the way the light hits you and makes all of the gold in your eyes explode. It’s like looking at the sun.”

“Don’t move! Wow, you look so pretty in this light, I can’t miss the opportunity.”

“I know you’re a boy and boys aren’t supposed to be pretty, but damn, are you a pretty boy.”

“Every time I see you, you have a new bruise on your body. You’re either the world’s clumsiest person, or you’re in some kind of trouble.”

“Asking for help doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you’re strong enough to realize when you can’t do it alone.”

“Please, I don’t want to lose you.”

“You mean everything to me.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be doing it.”

“No! You can’t just web it the fuck up and expect it to stop!”

“I’m really sorry, but I just killed a spider.”

“You know, that color really brings out the happiness in your eyes. You should wear it more often.”

“Am I not good enough for you?”

“Do you believe in true love?”

“I’m only good at three things: making ridiculous science puns, laughing at inappropriate times, and making some bomb ass snickerdoodles. None of them will help with this.”

“At least I’ll have a pretty wicked scar if I survive.”

“Oh, absolutely not. I can’t do this without you.”

“I need a place to stay, and your arms were the first thing I thought of.”

“I immediately regret my decision.”

“I am not being dramatic. I’m being practical.”

“Please don’t go. I don’t want to be alone right now.”

“I need your help. I had nowhere else to go.”

“No. No, you don’t get to apologize. Never, ever apologize for something like that, you got it? Now come here.”

“You could have died! I could have lost you!”

“I’m not angry at you. I never could be. I’m angry that your life has been on the line so many times and you’ve been hurt so much and I’m angry that you had to go through it alone.”

“Stop hiding from me. I just want to help you, can’t you see that?”

“Would you just shut up and listen to me for two goddamn seconds?!”

“You should probably close the door.”

“Don’t you fucking dare.”

“I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

“I told you to take care of it - not stick it to the fucking ceiling!”

“Okay... It’s not - no, it’s exactly what it looks like. Shit.”

“You can fall apart if you want to.”

“You’re such a fucking dork. It’s adorable.”

“Holy muscles.”

“Think you have enough there, Sticky?”

“I don’t think forever will be long enough. Our time together will always be too short.”

“I love your freckles.”

“Do you ever wish you weren’t who you are?”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

“Pinky swear?”

“Hey! Swinging with another person isn’t as easy as it seems, okay?!”

“God, stop doing that.”

“You know my house has a door, right? You don’t always have to come in through the window.”

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

“I’m not sure when it happened, but I fell in love with you, and it was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“I’m in love with you!”

“What in the world did I do to deserve someone as amazing as you?”

“Say that again.”

“I’ll pay you to hit me with a car.”

“You knocked on my window at three in the morning to cuddle?”

“I think I forgot how to breathe.”

“Is this okay?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.”

“You’ve got to stop doing that.”

“I can’t stop thinking about you.”

“I trust you. Wholeheartedly.”

“Just shut up and kiss me already!”

“You did all of this... for me?”

“Please.”

“Trust me.”

“Do that again.”

“Um... Somebody broke that.”

“Ow-Hey! Stop hitting me!”

“I’m just going to walk away and pretend I didn’t just see that.”

“Make me.”

“Are you jealous?”

“What am I going to do with you?”

“Will you be quiet?!”

“Can I kiss you?”

[frankkjonestx]

What will happen when COVID-19 and the flu collide this fall?

The specter of a “twindemic” — two epidemics at the same time — looms as cold and flu season is set to start in October in the Northern Hemisphere. No one can predict what will happen when flu meets COVID-19, but public health officials are urging people to prepare for the worst.

In this case, the worst would be a bad year for influenza, which in the United States has killed 12,000 to 61,000 people annually and hospitalized between 140,000 and 810,000 each year since 2010, combined with a resurgence of coronavirus infections. Together, the two could stress health care and public health systems beyond their limits.

“We could see a perfect storm of accelerated COVID-19 activity as people gather more inside in particular, as they become increasingly fatigued with the mask wearing, social distancing and the hand hygiene, and as they are exposed to seasonal influenza,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the infectious diseases division of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, during a news briefing from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, or IDSA, on September 10.

Some states are getting coronavirus spread under control, but hospitalization levels haven’t gone down much, she said. “Overall, we still are on … a razor’s edge when it comes to COVID,” and influenza remains unpredictable. “We really can’t be complacent about this.”

Sign up for e-mail updates on the latest coronavirus news and research

Infectious diseases experts worry about a conjunction of influenza and coronavirus for multiple reasons, beyond overburdened health systems. Teasing out whether a person has flu or coronavirus — which have very similar symptoms — will require testing for both viruses, at a time when turnaround for COVID-19 tests is often slow. And some people may get infected with multiple viruses simultaneously, which could make symptoms more severe.

But hints from the Southern Hemisphere give hope that the worst may not happen. Scientists usually forecast flu seasons’ severity in the north by watching what happens south of the equator, where flu season falls in the middle of the year. This year, the preview held good news: a mild season for flu and some other respiratory viruses.

Southern exposure

Countries in the Southern Hemisphere normally start seeing flu cases in May, and the flu season typically peaks in July and peters out around October. For the past five to six years, flu seasons in Australia have been bad. For instance, in 2019, Australia got an early flu season that started in March and “went on for a very long time,” says Kanta Subbarao, a virologist who directs the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia.

It wasn’t looking good for 2020 either. This year, flu season started even earlier, she says. “We started seeing some flu activity in January and February,” summer in the Southern Hemisphere. “Then it just completely stopped. It just fell off a cliff at the end of March, essentially when COVID-19 started appearing.”

From April through July, only 33 people had positive flu results in Australia out of 60,031 people tested, an international group of influenza researchers report September 18 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The flu was also nearly nonexistent in South Africa and Chile in the late spring and early summer months. Together, the three countries recorded just 51 flu cases among 83,307 people tested, for a positivity rate of 0.06 percent. By contrast, over the April through July periods in 2017, 2018 and 2019, a total of 24,512 out of 178,690 people had positive flu tests, a positivity rate of 13.7 percent. 

Flu review

The 2019–2020 flu season may have been cut short by public health measures to limit the spread of COVID-19. Compared with three previous flu seasons, the percent of flu tests that detected the virus dropped precipitously in March after the United States declared COVID-19 a national emergency. Some states had already instituted stay-at-home orders prior to the declaration. Surveillance for influenza typically starts at the end of September (around surveillance week 40) and continues until the beginning of April, though cases may occur year-round. These data go to early August (week 32).

Percent positive flu tests in the United States, 2016–2020

T. Tibbitts

T. Tibbitts

Source: S.J. Olsen et al/MMWR 2020

Travel restrictions that closed Australia’s borders may have prevented influenza from being imported from elsewhere. Lockdowns, school closures, mask wearing, social distancing and hand washing — all measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — may have also quashed any influenza outbreaks that remained. Other Southern Hemisphere countries have also reported unexpectedly low levels of influenza and another common respiratory virus called respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, she says.

Public health officials anticipated a resurgence of influenza and RSV once Australia reopened schools, but that hasn’t happened, Subbarao says. “We have looked very long and hard,” but have found very little of either disease, Subbarao says. Instead, “what we’re finding is rhinovirus,” which cause colds, Subbarao says, suggesting that rhinovirus hasn’t been phased by all the public health measures.

Northern predictions

Flu season may also be lighter than usual in the Northern Hemisphere as a result of reduced travel, former CDC director Tom Frieden said in an IDSA news briefing on September 15. Flu “gets around the world when people travel, and there’s not much traveling going on.” But COVID-19 remains a threat, he warned “If you doubted that COVID was more infectious than flu, look at South Africa or Chile, where COVID is spreading like wildfire and flu isn’t spreading at all.”

In the United States during the 2019–2020 flu season, flu cases also took a nose dive after public health measures were put in place to limit coronavirus spread. Flu cases started increasing in November 2019, and between December 15 and March 7, more than 20 percent of flu tests were coming back positive each week, according to the MMWR report. By the week of March 22, plenty of people were still getting flu tests, but only 2.3 percent of the results came back positive. Many of those influenza-like illnesses that weren’t due to flu may have been COVID-19 (SN: 6/25/20).

Since the week of April 5, fewer than 1 percent of flu tests have detected the virus, and off-season flu counts are at historical lows. From May 17 to August 8, only 0.2 percent of flu tests gave positive results, compared with 2.35 percent last year, 1.04 percent in 2018 and 2.36 percent in 2017. The sharp drop-off of flu cases might just have been the natural end of the flu season. However, the decrease in percent positivity after March 1 “was dramatic, suggesting other factors were at play,” the researchers wrote.

If social distancing and other measures to contain COVID-19 remain in place, the flu season in the United States might be blunted or delayed, the researchers wrote. But don’t bank on it, other experts say. If there’s anything experts who try to predict influenza activity have learned is that flu is unpredictable.

Battle for dominance

Predicting how flu will play with COVID-19 is trickier still.

Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., is involved in efforts to predict which flu strains will dominate so that vaccines can be designed accordingly. One pattern Webby and other flu researchers have seen over and over again is that when a new pandemic influenza strain arises, it pushes out another strain. For instance, when the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic strain emerged, another H1N1 flu strain that had been circulating since 1977 disappeared.

SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — and influenza will be competing for hosts to infect, which may result in one virus squeezing out the other, Webby says.

 “I find it difficult to believe that there’s going to be widespread flu and widespread COVID activity at the same time. I think one of them will dominate. I couldn’t tell you which one it will be,” he says. Admittedly on the fence, he says that if asked to bet which disease will predominate, “I’d put a little bit of money each way.” He says the two diseases probably won’t both go gangbusters, “but I could easily be horribly wrong.”

Getting a double dose

In the battle for hosts, sometimes both viruses win, infecting a person at the same time.

As New York and New Jersey became hot spots of coronavirus spread in the spring, COVID-19 “patients were coming around the clock” to St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., where Balraj Singh works. Singh, a hematologist and oncologist, was called in to treat the patients’ blood clots and plummeting blood cell counts. As he did so, he decided to also test his patients for infections with other viruses that produce similar symptoms. He and colleagues discovered that three of their patients were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza at the same time. They reported the cases August 18 in Cureus.

Two of the patients had to be intubated, but Singh and colleagues can’t say whether the dual infections made their illnesses worse. All were eventually discharged. It was important to publish the case reports “so somebody else can have a little bit of a head start” in recognizing that some people may have double trouble from viruses, he says.

There’s still no vaccine against COVID-19, but health officials are asking people to get vaccinated against influenza to help remove one deadly virus from circulation.E. Otwell

Coinfections with SARS-CoV-2 and influenza will probably be uncommon, says David Morens, a virologist and infectious diseases doctor who is the senior scientific advisor to the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.

One analysis suggests only about 3 percent of COVID-19 patients were simultaneously infected with another virus, researchers reported online May 27 in the Journal of Infection. Those researchers examined 30 studies, mostly from China, that reported on dual infections with bacteria or viruses in people sick with COVID-19. The most common viruses to double up with SARS-CoV-2 were RSV and influenza A.

Broad defenses

It’s not impossible to catch viral infections at the same time or in quick succession, but getting one viral infection generally makes it harder to get another one, Morens says. That’s because viral infections tend to rev up the immune system’s generalized antiviral defense system, known as the innate immune system. Catching one virus sets off alarm bells in the form of virus-fighting immune chemicals known as interferons (SN: 8/6/20). For a short period after an infection, maybe weeks to months, the immune system stays on high alert with defenses at least partially raised to ward off any subsequent intruders.

That battening of the hatches against other viral invaders is different from the specific kind of immunity that comes from making antibodies against a particular virus. But it still might be useful. For instance, immunologist Ellen Foxman has long suspected that catching colds caused by rhinovirus may have delayed the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic in Europe.

“For years I’ve been looking for a way to test” that idea, says Foxman, of Yale School of Medicine. She and colleagues confirmed that flu and rhinovirus don’t seem to mix by examining data from three later flu seasons, spanning November 2016 to March 2019. They found that people were less likely than expected to have dual infections with rhinovirus and influenza, the team reported September 4 in Lancet Microbe.

See all our coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Infecting human lung cells growing in laboratory dishes provided some clues to why. First, the researchers infected the cells with rhinovirus. Then they tried a few days later to infect the same cells with flu virus. Rhinovirus infections turned up activity of genes involved in the interferon response, preventing flu viruses from replicating in rhinovirus-infected cells, the researchers found. Blocking interferon allowed the flu viruses to reproduce in cells already infected with the cold virus. But interferon response doesn’t last long, “maybe a week or two,” Foxman says.

And that type of protection isn’t perfect, Subbarao says. About 10 percent of the respiratory illnesses are coinfections with two or more viruses.

Some scientists theorize that vaccines against tuberculosis, measles or polio — which contain live, weakened virus or bacteria — might give some measure of protection against COVID-19 by generally toughening the immune system, Subbarao says. FluMist, a nasal spray flu vaccine mainly used for children, might also provide a little nonspecific armor against other viruses, though she cautions that the protection is short-lived and intended only as a stop-gap until there’s a safe, reliable and widely available coronavirus vaccine.

Injected flu vaccines are usually made with killed viruses and don’t offer the same generalized virus protection as live vaccines. But public health officials are urging people to get flu vaccines, to reduce the chances of getting infected with both viruses and hopefully ward off a nasty flu season.  

“If there’s ever a year you need to get your flu shot, get your kids vaccinated, this is the year,” Marrazzo said.

.image-mobile { display: none; } @media (max-width: 400px) { .image-mobile { display: block; } .image-desktop { display: none; } } from Tips By Frank https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid19-coronavirus-flu-season-fall

[kristablogs]

Yes, the new coronavirus is mutating—but that’s not a bad thing

The bulk of the mutations that appear as a virus spreads are either harmful to the virus itself (meaning it is less likely to survive or replicate) or don’t change how it functions. (CDC/)

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is changing over time.

While scientists are still unsure whether viruses are actually alive (they can’t survive or replicate without the help of another lifeform, but inside one they clearly thrive), they do have DNA or RNA and copy it to make more versions of themselves. And like plants, animals, and bacteria, the new coronavirus will inevitably make mistakes during this process. These errors lead to mutations—changes in genetic material between the new virus and its parent.

All of this might sound unsettling. After all, we’re in the midst of a global crisis as the virus spreads around the world. Having it change on us unpredictably can seem scary. But just because the virus is mutating doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly going to become more dangerous. In fact, experts say, it’s very unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 (as the virus is officially known) will mutate in ways that change how the pandemic plays out.

“The rate at which this virus is mutating or evolving is not unexpected; it’s exactly what we would expect for a virus like this,” says Nathan Grubaugh, a virologist at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut. “All viruses continuously evolve and there shouldn’t be anything alarming about the process in general.”

But there’s something about the idea of mutation that gets under people’s skin, Grubaugh acknowledged in a recent article in the journal Nature Microbiology. Fiction is filled with superheroes and deadly germs that owe their powers to mutations.

“As soon as the word ‘mutation’ comes into the story it means that something grand has happened, either for the better or worse,” he says. “And that’s just not the way that evolution works. We all have mutations. We all are genetically different from our ancestors.”

Viruses do mutate at a particularly high rate, especially ones like SARS-CoV-2 that use RNA for their genetic material. Unlike organisms that use DNA, these viruses don’t have the ability to fix mistakes that happen when they copy their genetic code. This means that RNA viruses tend to evolve more quickly than other organisms, says Richard Kuhn, a virologist and director of the Purdue Institute of Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease in West Lafayette, Indiana.

However, the bulk of the mutations that appear as a virus spreads are either harmful to the virus itself (meaning it is less likely to survive or replicate) or don’t change how it functions. Additionally, the two characteristics that are of most concern right now—how contagious the virus is and how harmful it is to its hosts—are controlled by multiple genes, Grubaugh says. Changing these characteristics is a complicated process, and not often the work of a single mutation. So the odds of the virus mutating in such a way that it actually becomes more lethal or contagious over the timescale of weeks, months, or even a couple years aren’t very high.

In past outbreaks of other diseases such as SARS or Ebola, scientists haven’t seen evidence that a particular virus was mutating to become more deadly. “While there may be some mutations from time to time that arise that do have an epidemiological impact, it’s not very often that we actually find them,” Grubaugh says.

Coronaviruses can undergo major changes that make them more of a threat to people. After all, the ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 were only able to infect non-human animals. The virus did eventually mutate so it could transmit from animals to humans. But it probably didn’t gain this ability in one fell swoop. “These events happen over the course of many, many years,” Grubaugh says.

The new coronavirus has changed in subtle ways since the outbreak began in the city of Wuhan in China. On March 3, scientists in China reported that they’d identified two separate strains of SARS-CoV-2. However, these two versions of the virus are nearly identical overall, Grubaugh says. One does not seem more deadly than the other, and a vaccine for one would also protect against the other.

Regardless, confusion and misinformation about coronavirus mutations have proliferated on social media, says Kathleen Carley, the director of the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

“People are afraid, they are shocked how fast it has spread compared to Ebola and SARS, and they don't understand why it seems to have much higher rates in some countries than others,” she said in an email to Popular Science. “Mutation is an easy explanation for this. We prefer easy answers. But the truth is much more complicated.”

There are two situations where mutations can have a significant impact during an outbreak, Grubaugh says. It’s possible that a mutation could appear that doesn’t make the virus more dangerous to people but does slightly alter the region of the virus that diagnostic tests zero in on. This means our ability to test for the virus would be blunted. It’s important for scientists to track new mutations in SARS-CoV-2 so they can find out whether test kits ever need to be updated to spot new forms of the virus.

It’s also possible that SARS-CoV-2 could become resistant to antiviral drugs over time, similarly to how bacteria become impervious to antibiotics. If a drug wipes out all copies of the virus in a sick person’s body, the virus won’t have the chance to adapt. But if someone is infected with COVID-19 and a few copies of the viruses happen to have a mutation that helps them withstand the drug, and the sick person spreads them to somebody else, then those viruses would have an advantage over their peers and could become more common on a population level.

That’s why we’ll probably need more than one drug to combat COVID-19. Eventually, people will probably be given a cocktail of several drugs to clear out the virus. This strategy is why today’s treatments for HIV are so effective, Kuhn says. He expects that scientists will ultimately develop a variety of antiviral drugs that act on different parts of the virus.

“The whole idea behind the antiviral strategy and the vaccine strategy is that it’s not a single site we go after,” he says. “It’s much more difficult for the virus to mutate and become resistant if there are multiple sites that are being targeted.”

The good news is the novel coronavirus is not likely to mutate dramatically by the time we come out with a vaccine. It’s difficult for viruses to develop resistance to vaccines, except in rare cases such as influenza, Grubaugh says. Many viruses—including the ones that cause measles and yellow fever—have changed so slowly that vaccines developed many decades ago have remained effective against them.

It’s hard to know for sure, but right now the virus may not be facing too much pressure to adapt to its human hosts. “Obviously it’s moving quickly through the population, so it has the ability to replicate in humans very efficiently and it has the ability to move from one human to another,” Kuhn says. “I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of variation from what we’re seeing now in terms of the genetic makeup of the virus.”

And mutating to become more lethal to humans wouldn’t necessarily be in the virus’s best interests. “If a virus goes in and immediately kills its host, that’s usually not very good because that limits its ability to expand and infect new hosts,” Kuhn says.

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread, it will continue to develop mutations, and some of these mutations will stick around. Scientists can use these genetic-level changes to track when and where different strains of the virus have infected people, Grubaugh says. This can give us a sense of how outside variables like air travel, climate, or containment strategies affect the spread of the virus. Grubaugh and his colleagues are studying the genomes of viruses sampled from people in the New Haven area to investigate when SARS-CoV-2 could have been introduced and whether healthcare workers who catch COVID-19 are getting infected at the hospitals where they work or while they’re out in the community.

[scootoaster]

Yes, the new coronavirus is mutating—but that’s not a bad thing

The bulk of the mutations that appear as a virus spreads are either harmful to the virus itself (meaning it is less likely to survive or replicate) or don’t change how it functions. (CDC/)

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is changing over time.

While scientists are still unsure whether viruses are actually alive (they can’t survive or replicate without the help of another lifeform, but inside one they clearly thrive), they do have DNA or RNA and copy it to make more versions of themselves. And like plants, animals, and bacteria, the new coronavirus will inevitably make mistakes during this process. These errors lead to mutations—changes in genetic material between the new virus and its parent.

All of this might sound unsettling. After all, we’re in the midst of a global crisis as the virus spreads around the world. Having it change on us unpredictably can seem scary. But just because the virus is mutating doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly going to become more dangerous. In fact, experts say, it’s very unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 (as the virus is officially known) will mutate in ways that change how the pandemic plays out.

“The rate at which this virus is mutating or evolving is not unexpected; it’s exactly what we would expect for a virus like this,” says Nathan Grubaugh, a virologist at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut. “All viruses continuously evolve and there shouldn’t be anything alarming about the process in general.”

But there’s something about the idea of mutation that gets under people’s skin, Grubaugh acknowledged in a recent article in the journal Nature Microbiology. Fiction is filled with superheroes and deadly germs that owe their powers to mutations.

“As soon as the word ‘mutation’ comes into the story it means that something grand has happened, either for the better or worse,” he says. “And that’s just not the way that evolution works. We all have mutations. We all are genetically different from our ancestors.”

Viruses do mutate at a particularly high rate, especially ones like SARS-CoV-2 that use RNA for their genetic material. Unlike organisms that use DNA, these viruses don’t have the ability to fix mistakes that happen when they copy their genetic code. This means that RNA viruses tend to evolve more quickly than other organisms, says Richard Kuhn, a virologist and director of the Purdue Institute of Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease in West Lafayette, Indiana.

However, the bulk of the mutations that appear as a virus spreads are either harmful to the virus itself (meaning it is less likely to survive or replicate) or don’t change how it functions. Additionally, the two characteristics that are of most concern right now—how contagious the virus is and how harmful it is to its hosts—are controlled by multiple genes, Grubaugh says. Changing these characteristics is a complicated process, and not often the work of a single mutation. So the odds of the virus mutating in such a way that it actually becomes more lethal or contagious over the timescale of weeks, months, or even a couple years aren’t very high.

In past outbreaks of other diseases such as SARS or Ebola, scientists haven’t seen evidence that a particular virus was mutating to become more deadly. “While there may be some mutations from time to time that arise that do have an epidemiological impact, it’s not very often that we actually find them,” Grubaugh says.

Coronaviruses can undergo major changes that make them more of a threat to people. After all, the ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 were only able to infect non-human animals. The virus did eventually mutate so it could transmit from animals to humans. But it probably didn’t gain this ability in one fell swoop. “These events happen over the course of many, many years,” Grubaugh says.

The new coronavirus has changed in subtle ways since the outbreak began in the city of Wuhan in China. On March 3, scientists in China reported that they’d identified two separate strains of SARS-CoV-2. However, these two versions of the virus are nearly identical overall, Grubaugh says. One does not seem more deadly than the other, and a vaccine for one would also protect against the other.

Regardless, confusion and misinformation about coronavirus mutations have proliferated on social media, says Kathleen Carley, the director of the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

“People are afraid, they are shocked how fast it has spread compared to Ebola and SARS, and they don't understand why it seems to have much higher rates in some countries than others,” she said in an email to Popular Science. “Mutation is an easy explanation for this. We prefer easy answers. But the truth is much more complicated.”

There are two situations where mutations can have a significant impact during an outbreak, Grubaugh says. It’s possible that a mutation could appear that doesn’t make the virus more dangerous to people but does slightly alter the region of the virus that diagnostic tests zero in on. This means our ability to test for the virus would be blunted. It’s important for scientists to track new mutations in SARS-CoV-2 so they can find out whether test kits ever need to be updated to spot new forms of the virus.

It’s also possible that SARS-CoV-2 could become resistant to antiviral drugs over time, similarly to how bacteria become impervious to antibiotics. If a drug wipes out all copies of the virus in a sick person’s body, the virus won’t have the chance to adapt. But if someone is infected with COVID-19 and a few copies of the viruses happen to have a mutation that helps them withstand the drug, and the sick person spreads them to somebody else, then those viruses would have an advantage over their peers and could become more common on a population level.

That’s why we’ll probably need more than one drug to combat COVID-19. Eventually, people will probably be given a cocktail of several drugs to clear out the virus. This strategy is why today’s treatments for HIV are so effective, Kuhn says. He expects that scientists will ultimately develop a variety of antiviral drugs that act on different parts of the virus.

“The whole idea behind the antiviral strategy and the vaccine strategy is that it’s not a single site we go after,” he says. “It’s much more difficult for the virus to mutate and become resistant if there are multiple sites that are being targeted.”

The good news is the novel coronavirus is not likely to mutate dramatically by the time we come out with a vaccine. It’s difficult for viruses to develop resistance to vaccines, except in rare cases such as influenza, Grubaugh says. Many viruses—including the ones that cause measles and yellow fever—have changed so slowly that vaccines developed many decades ago have remained effective against them.

It’s hard to know for sure, but right now the virus may not be facing too much pressure to adapt to its human hosts. “Obviously it’s moving quickly through the population, so it has the ability to replicate in humans very efficiently and it has the ability to move from one human to another,” Kuhn says. “I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of variation from what we’re seeing now in terms of the genetic makeup of the virus.”

And mutating to become more lethal to humans wouldn’t necessarily be in the virus’s best interests. “If a virus goes in and immediately kills its host, that’s usually not very good because that limits its ability to expand and infect new hosts,” Kuhn says.

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread, it will continue to develop mutations, and some of these mutations will stick around. Scientists can use these genetic-level changes to track when and where different strains of the virus have infected people, Grubaugh says. This can give us a sense of how outside variables like air travel, climate, or containment strategies affect the spread of the virus. Grubaugh and his colleagues are studying the genomes of viruses sampled from people in the New Haven area to investigate when SARS-CoV-2 could have been introduced and whether healthcare workers who catch COVID-19 are getting infected at the hospitals where they work or while they’re out in the community.

[i-am-very-very-tired]

I feel like if you're a weirdly shy kid, you end up taking to very divergent paths during the pubescent years: Either you commit to your true introvert nature, or you light up like a mega-annoying supernova and start yammering off all the weird shiz you've been keeping locked inside yourself for your whole life all at once. I fell firmly into the second camp. Over the course of several years, I went from the mousy kid in overalls to an awkwardly outspoken baby horse who didn't quite yet know how to be funny but was going to try, dammit. And apparently "trying to not be so shy anymore" actually just meant being very, very loud.

Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but for me, once the words started spilling out, everyone was a little shocked by not only how much of an over-sharer I was, but how ridiculously loud I was when I did it. TURNS OUT TALKING IS SUPER FUN, GUYS. I have fully accepted the fact that I am the sidekick in everyone else's rom-com by virtue of the fact that I feel the need to loudly and sassily narrate not just my life, but everyone else's. You know when someone says something really awkwardly and loudly and shuts down a whole room in less than a second? Yeah, that's me. It would be great if I could be either awkward OR loud, but that's not how life works. For the most part, you end up being both if you're either.

I feel like loud talkers never choose to be that way — It just kind of happened to us. I am aware that I do it, but not necessarily aware when it is happening, or I would probably, you know, shut myself up. Fortunately, I am not as blind to social cues as I am deaf, so it's not like I am projecting my CRAZY IDINA MENZEL LOUD BELTING speaking voice everywhere I go. But if I'm in a comfortable, normal social situation — especially if I'm excited about something — you can be sure that the volume is going to go increasingly higher until someone has the good sense and kind mercy to stop me. Until that happens, here are some of the struggles that natural loud-talkers face:

Strangers always think there is an emergency

You know how the sarcastic people of the world are always saying annoying stuff like, "Where's the fire?" Well, when people as loud as I am walk into a room, they are genuinely asking (and probably already preparing to make a run for it).

Everybody always knows you’re a tourist

Specifically, everyone knows you're American. The times I've traveled abroad, I've gotten someone chuckling at how loud I was at least once a day. I'm pretty sure I breathe too loudly by European standards. Jeez, SORRY FOR LIVING.

You’re the most self-conscious laughing in movie theaters

There's always That Person who awkwardly laughs really loudly at something that was only mildly funny and makes everyone in the room instantly uncomfortable. I am That Person. The fact that my laugh is about as loud and strident as a guard dog's bark doesn't help, either.

You get told to “calm down” 90% more than other humans

People assume that volume = PANIC. I could be having a regular conversation about which cereal I'm eating and people would be like, "Learn some chill, please." And when we actually are upset about something, people think we're drastically and over-dramatically upset, even though we are just mildly upset at a high volume.

People just assume you are an extrovert

This is true of most loud-talkers, but some of us only loud-talk with people we know and love. Just because our voices are turned up with our friends doesn't mean we're, like, ready to address to UN tomorrow morning.

Sometimes you notice that you’re doing it, but you CANNOT STOP

Welcome to the train wreck of my life. Sometimes I'm even loud in my own ears, and trying to bring it down subtly without calling attention to the fact that your voice just dropped 1.6 million decibels is a struggle bus.

Somebody shooshing you is the worst moment of your life

The memory of every time I have been shooshed by a stranger is burned into my memory forever. I almost can't even continue typing because the retroactive embarrassment is that paralyzing.

Hearing a recording of your voice is profoundly upsetting

Especially if there are other people's voices in the background, the contrasting volume of which will give you an idea of just how freaking loud you really are.

Teachers always caught you talking in class

Loud-talkers can't get away with anything. One time, I muttered an answer to a question I hadn't been called on for in middle school — or thought I muttered it, at least. The teacher was all #ragesauce at me for the rest of the day. Similar shenanigans went down on a bi-weekly basis until I graduated from college.

Even when you WEREN’T talking in class, they blamed you

LITERALLY THE WORST. I was so careful to clam up in class, and multiple times teachers would be all, "Don't think I can't hear you all talking!" and then zero their angry teacher eyes right at me. INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GABBING!

If you ever talk quietly, people assume something is wrong

Nope, just thought I'd give you guys a five second break from being deafened against your will. Everything's chill.

It’s way more obvious whenever you mispronounce something

The virtues of being a mumbler is that nobody's like "it's HOW-stun street, incomparable disgustingly useless moron". (Nobody has actually said those words out loud at me, but they did with their eyes.)

Losing your voice is like getting cut off from the planet

When I lose my voice, I'm basically Sandra Bullock in Gravity, untethered from the space ship that is humanity. And the worst part is, you just keep trying to talk at your normal level, so loud-talkers basically turn into aggressive donkeys whenever they're sick.

You live in constant fear of interrupting someone

Sorry, were you trying to say something? I couldn’t hear you over my BULLDOZER VOICE.

YOU ARE A FREQUENT ABUSER OF CAPS LOCK

HOW ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO APPROPRIATELY GET YOUR POINT ACROSS IF THEY CAN'T HEAR YOU?!?!

Meeting with fellow loud-talkers is a beautiful nightmare

Beautiful for you. A nightmare for everybody else.

You’ll probably never be a spy

Or anything requiring subtlety, really. I should tell my future children the truth about Santa while they’re still in the womb. It's not that I can't keep a secret — secrets can't keep me.

[randomconnections]

Henry Mill Village Excursion

It has been tradition for Alan Russell and me to take a photo excursion on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This time we decided to make the trek up to North Carolina and visit the Henry River Mill Village. This choice ticked lots of boxes – it’s a ghost town, and it served as the shooting location for “District 12” in the movie The Hunger Games. It turned out to be a day that went beyond expectations.

I’d seen plenty of photos of Henry Mill Village. With its recent popularity it has become a Mecca for fans of the film. As such, it’s also become the target of vandalism. I’d heard that most of the village was off-limits, except for what could be seen from the road. I honestly didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t get my hopes too high. I put together a Google Map with other possible targets. I am completely unfamiliar with this part of North Carolina, so I wanted a few clear options, rather than driving around without a clue should the mill village prove to be a bust.

We had actually planned this trip for election day, when it seemed appropriate to visit the location of a dystopian movie. That trip fell through, so we rescheduled for this week. Again, dystopia seemed appropriate for the week of the inauguration.

And it felt dystopic. Politics aside, it was overcast and misty when Alan and I set out. The two-hour drive up was not inspiring – rather dull Interstates and four-lanes most of the way. As we drove further north the mist increased, but it didn’t rain outright. We took I-85 from Greenville to US 321 in Gastonia, then I-40 back west to Hildebrande. The village itself was just a couple of miles off the Interstate.

Before we get there, though, a bit of history is in order…

Three Rudisills (Michael Erastus, Albert Pinckney, and Miles R. ) and two Aderholdt brothers (David William and Marcus Lafayette) got together and formed the Henry River Manufacturing Company in 1904. By 1905 they had constructed a 4000 spindle yarn mill and a 30 feet dam to provide power to the mill. In addition they built a planned community to house the workers, which included the company store and 35 cottages. The images of the mill are from the “Images of America: Henry River Mill Village” book.

By the time it shut down in the late 1960s, the mill had 12,000 spindles and produced fine combed yarn for lace. The mill closed in 1973, and in 1977 the mill burned, leaving only the cottages and company store. Of the original 35 mill houses, 20 have survived.

The property was purchased in 1976 by Wade Shepherd, who hoped to redevelop the site. In 2010-11 Shepherd allowed Lionsgate Films to use the village as the location of District 12 for The Hunger Games. Shortly thereafter, Shepherd put the property up for sale for $1.4 million, hoping to capitalize on the sites new-found fame. Shepherd had tried to keep trespassers out of the village because of repeated incidents of vandalism, and at the age of 83 he was getting tired of it. In 2015, Wade Shepherd died, and the future of the village is now up in the air.

Back to the trip…

Driving down Henry River Road I was surprised at how many structures were visible from the road. When we reached the company store that marks the heart of the village there were several parked cars. Not know what was really going on, we drove on past first. We crossed the Henry River on a high bridge, turned around, then came back to the store. I decided to pull on in next to one of the parked cars.

Last time I pulled up to a mill store like this the cars were parked outside for a meeting. I didn’t know if this was the case here, or not. A couple approached, and I asked if they were associated with the site. They said they were just there looking around. We figured that’s what everyone else was doing, too, so we decided to explore.

We didn’t see any No Trespassing signs, and since there was a Burke County Museum sign about The Hunger Games, that seemed like an invitation. We started with the house directly across from the store. It seemed to be in the best shape. The door was open, so we went on in.

The upstairs had been heavily vandalized.

Back downstairs it was apparent that this house was supposed to be off-limits. There were multiple padlocks on the door, and it looked like the door had been kicked in – there was another padlock on the floor.

It wasn’t until I got home and re-watched The Hunger Games that I realized this must be the house used for many of the interior shots. Here’s a picture of Jennifer Lawrence, aka Katniss Everdeen standing in front of a set of stairs:

Here’s that same set of stairs in the house we were in:

I read in one account that the houses were already in pretty bad shape, and that the movie studio had to do some rebuilding to make them believable as houses.

This 1966 image identifies the house as belonging to one of the Rudisills, and it looks like it wasn’t in great shape even back then.

We turned our attention to the store across the street. It still had painted signs from the movie advertising Pastries and Cakes.

In the movie there was a wooden porch. I don’t know if that was original to the structure, or an add-on. It’s now missing, regardless. The movie only showed the lower floor. Here’s that shot…

…and my shot from a similar angle.

This was the only image I could find in the Images of America book, and it doesn’t show the wooden porch, so I’m guessing it was added for the movie.

Below the Rudisill/Hunger Games House was a garage. There were two ramps over a steep decline so that mechanics could get under the car.

There was a pool or pond of some type, with various valves and hydrants below.

There were several other cottages, some in pretty bad shape. There were also interesting views back along the row of mill houses.

The street wound down close to the river. We could see the dam and an old warehouse building. There was a sign stating that the building was posted, and not part of the tour. We wondered, what tour?

There was a pickup truck near the warehouse, and we spotted a man coming across the dam, then up to the truck. It could have been another visitor violating the posted signs, for all we know. When he got close, we ask if he knew anything about the old mill. That was our first interaction with Joe Cline, who would be our tour guide for the bit.

I immediately pulled out my audio recorder, mainly because Mr. Cline was giving us information so fast and furiously that I was afraid I’d miss some of it. Here’s a sample of his introduction to us:

My parents worked in the cotton mill. I was raised here…I was six years old…back up the hill, the last house up there on the right. We moved when I was six years old… was in first grade.

My parents continued to work down here for a number of years. People started moving off. Business, I think, got bad, and, Miles [Aderholdt?], that owned it, he’s getting up, probably in his 70s…I don’t know if he got tired of fooling with it, or what…but they closed in early 70s.

People continued to live here – a few couples did – until the early 80s. I think the county condemned the houses they had to move.

Somebody burned the mill down in ’77.

Cline pointed out the original outline of the mill.

He also pointed out the location of the old bridge. Built in 1916, this was a single-lane bridge high above the Henry River. It must have been terrifying.

The new bridge was build in 1960, and this one was torn down. Now there was nothing be a dirt ramp into space, over a deep ravine where people had dumped stuff.

Cline led us down toward the dam, describing features of the mill along the way. He also described how he has been working to take care of the property, and his concern about its future. The areas he led us into were also marked as No Trespassing, but we figured that as long as we were with Joe it would be OK.

We reached the base of the dam and Cline talked about power generation. He said that another company still owns the dam and hope to start generating power again. I confirmed ownership on the Burke County GIS site. The website also shows Wade Shepherd as the owner. I’m sure that means the estate.

But, back to the dam…it was very slippery, and I can understand why they want to keep people out of this area.

Once again I was able to find a shot from the movie that lined up with our current view. Here’s a photo I took…

…and here’s Jennifer Lawrence running across the top of the dam.

We made our way back up to another building near the top of the dam. It had dramatic arched windows, and was used to store cotton bales. Joe showed us where the bales came through a sliding door down a chute.

We noticed that the bale building had large hydrant valves similar to the pond up the hill. Joe said that the pond was used for fire suppression. Rather than a water tower, they had the pond at a higher elevation.

I asked about churches and schools. Joe said that one of the cottages was used as a one-room school. Apparently that didn’t last long. According to a 1919 article in the Charlotte Observer, after the number of students outgrew the one-room school classes were held on the second floor of the company store. Not long after that students were sent to a new school in Hildebrande, just a couple of miles away.

Joe talked about the current state of the village and the amount of vandalism taking place. In addition to spray painting, there had been theft of artifacts from the store and a couple of houses. There had been a large two-story house next to the store that had served as a boarding house. That was burned down either by carelessness or arson a few years back. Joe said that they had to spray water on the store to keep it from combustion. Since Wade Shepherd’s death the site’s status was even more dubious. Even as we were speaking more tourists were arriving and wandering freely around the site, including one family with metal detectors.

We expressed our thanks to Joe for his graciousness and information. I think he would have been happy talking to us about the mill all day. Alan and I continued on our trek, following the loop road that runs behind the houses.

From this angle the number of out houses really stuck out. These houses had no indoor plumbing. Now that I think about it, I didn’t see a sink or bathroom in any of them. According to the Images of America book there was a common well. The book also said that one poor soul’s job was to clean out the outhouses on a regular basis. When one was completely full, they would just dig another hole and move it.

What really bothers me about this is that these houses were occupied well into the 1970s with no modern conveniences. It’s as if the company really didn’t want to be bothered with providing their workers with sanitary living conditions. I think back to the mill villages in South Carolina and I can’t think of any that didn’t provide these services for the mill houses. The last occupant left in 1987, long after the mill had burned.

On the east side of the village there were smaller cottages. These just had a couple of rooms and an upstairs. Most of these were in very said shape. In some cases chimneys and fireplaces had collapsed. Most of the stairs were gone, too, and we didn’t attempt to go upstairs in those that remained.

We continued on up the hill. At the top of the hill on the other side of the main road were two much larger houses. The lower one had what looked like either a storm cellar or root cellar.

We made our way back down the hill toward the company store. Traffic was fairly heavy on the main road. All along the way we took more photos of the village and the houses.

When we got back to the car the parking area next to the store was full. Between the vandalism and being loved to death because of the movie, I had to wonder how much longer this place could survive.

When we set out I thought we would only be here 20-30 minutes, then move on to one of the other places I had marked on the map. We were here for much, much longer. There was more to see and explore than I had imagined, and meeting Joe Cline was like discovering gold. He even gave us his phone number, should we ever want to return. It turned out to be an excellent trip.

Alan and I left the mill village and headed west on US 70, paralleling I-40. Our plan was to have lunch in Morganton, then visit the Burke County Museum and see if we could find out more about the village. Alas, over lunch we discovered that the museum was closed for MLK Day. We headed home down US 64, which took us past the South Mountains. All along the way we saw some very intriguing spots, and were tempted to stop and explore. However, it was couldy and misty outside, and not the best for photography and exploration. Plus, I had to get back for a rehearsal that evening. Those places would have to wait for another day’s exploration.

My album of photos from the trip can be seen here:

Alan’s photos are on his Flickr page here:

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