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ginoeh · 4 months

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This is the second part of three for my entry for @the-centennial-husbands-bigbang 2024! The awesome banners were done by @lalaithquetzallicaresi who is also on Deviant Art !

The story is available on AO3, where I will post chapters serialized!

To the Edge of Night

Explicit || Hob Gadling/Dream of the Endless || Part 2 of 3 || 14k

Part 1

Part 2

*** *** ***

Chapter Three

The reconstruction of the New Inn was coming along swimmingly. The tap room was nearly all done which was great, really, because that meant Hob was perfectly in time for the day of the planned grand opening. He’d set it, nostalgic fool that he was, for the 7th of June.

But on the other hand, there was this:

“Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to work behind the bar, Bobbie?”

Hob sighed and resisted rolling his eyes at Martin. The man understandably thought he was ‘Bobbie’s’ elder by several decades. But Hob could really do without his repeated attempts at motherhenning him into a healthier lifestyle. Which, according to Martin, included more friends and more social interaction.

Usually, Hob would agree. It was just… well, it was just that so far, his attempts at interaction had been met with mixed results. It wasn’t even that he didn’t want more friends apart from Emily and Oswin. The actual reality of that was turning out to be somewhat more difficult to achieve, though.

It was hard to be entirely genuine when he knew the fears and nightmares of every person he came across. He simply didn’t know how to work with that, yet. Maybe in time he’d get used to it all. So far, all he’d managed to do was inadvertently alienate a lot of people; his inborn sociable nature didn’t fare well when coupled with this new kind of knowledge.

Martin sighed as well but he wasn’t half as good as Hob when it came to hide annoyance and concern.

“Kiddo, you need to get out more. I kept telling the same to your uncle. Ya need friends and people to talk to! Bartending is exactly what you want right now.”

It wasn’t but Hob had to concede the point. He did need to get used to people.

“I can do the late shifts, if you absolutely insist.”

Hob made sure to sound as longsuffering as possible. Wouldn’t do to seem like he was giving in too easily, after all. Otherwise, next he turned around, Martin would try to ply him the sunday roast left-overs from his wife. It was very much enough that Emily kept trying to get him to eat.

Hob was perfectly aware that he didn’t necessarily need to eat, to stay alive. That didn’t mean that he enjoyed starving but the thing was, he simply didn’t. He wasn’t hungry because he didn’t need the food. He was not starving. He knew intimately how that felt, after all. Looking back, Hob was pretty sure it had started at the same time when his lucid dreams began to outnumber his normal nights, at the same time that he started seeing the shape of people’s fear in their eyes.

He wasn’t sure he liked the conclusions that could be drawn from this.

“The late shifts? That is a stupid idea if I ever heard one, Bobbie.”

Hob shrugged. He appreciated Martin, he really did, but he had to put his foot down somewhere. He wasn’t going to let the man dictate the schedule of his waking hours, after all, no matter if he’d usually find the caring nature endearing.

“That’s all I can offer right now. You do know that I have my coursework to do, right? If you say it would be good for me to get out more, then the late shifts it is.”

Martin levelled him with a dark glower that Hob was sure not to find too amusing, and set his empty glass of coke onto the table between them. For a guy in his seventies he sure had a lot of life in him yet.

“Three nights a week, tops.”

“Are we really haggling over this now, Martin? I’m still your boss.”

Martin crossed his arms on the table and kept his large hand on the signed papers that declared him manager of the New Inn.

“You want me in charge of the staff as well, Bobbie. And I take care of my staff, believe me. Three nights a week. Four during semester breaks.”

Hob smothered a laugh at the stubborn look his future manager shot him. Exactly that was why ‘Bobbie’ had insisted to employ Martin, his ‘uncle’s’ closest living friend.

“Okay okay. You win.”

Hob ginned and gamely shook Martin’s hand in agreement. There wasn’t really any reason to tell the other man that Hob hadn’t actually felt any real need for sleep in weeks - months maybe even - and therefore the late shifts wouldn’t impact him at all.

*** *** ***

The rise on which the forest ends slopes down gently into the valley. There is fog hanging around bare tree tops and over the houses and a pale sun lurks behind a thin white cloud cover. Hob becomes aware of the dream, or maybe steps into it might be a better descriptor at this point, at the edge of the forest, half lying between the tall stalks of damp, yellow winter grass. He appears to be wearing something like a cloak this time, its unadorned black fading away into wisps of smokey grey towards the frayed hem. Underneath, there might be just a normal jumper and trouser combo but Hob finds he’s entirely unable to concentrate his sleeping mind to look beyond the shadows of the ominous cloak.

It feels a bit like a game the dreamworld is playing with him and Hob is amused despite himself. He’s had the usual nightmares of being butt naked in the middle of the city so he’s a bit glad it’s not that.

The Gargoyle that he has glimpsed the last time gamboles around the shingled roofs and over a crooked chimney, dips playfully behind a barn and clips one wing on the branches of a massive oak tree before it rights itself midair and continues its dizzying game of hide and seek. Hob makes his way down, the nightmare Otter - and he thinks he should maybe find a name for it - contently lingering on his shoulders. It’s an unexpectedly reassuring weight even if it offers no warmth like a mortal creature might.

It’s when he draws closer to the two storeyed houses that a rather stately figure with carefully coiffed hair steps through one doorway. He’s in a three piece suit but bears an iron rake in one hand that gleams like polished steel knives.

Hob slows down when he approaches an old bridge that leads on into the yard between both houses. The man stands on its other end, one arm at his hip and the other tightly wound around the rake that he holds in front of him like a weapon.

“Who goes here.”

His voice is a nice baritone but it carries his mistrust as easily as his drawn brows do and Hob is, for once, thrown. This is the first time since entering this world of dreams that someone - or some-thing - isn’t naturally inclined to be friendly towards him.

It’s also the first time since his very first awakening that an inhabitant of his dreams speaks to him in an audible voice. This might be the chance he’s been waiting for to gain a bit more information about this strange strange world he’s in.

“I’m just… passing through,” he says and holds up both hands placatingly. In answer, the man grips the rake harder.

“To where.” It’s less a question and very much a demand.

“Um…I don’t know? On, I suppose?” Hob gestures vaguely into the direction of the valley behind the two houses, where he now knows a large part of the landscape centres around something like a palace.

The man frowns, annoyed, and levels Hob with a look that speaks volumes as to the intellect he thinks Hob possesses.

“So you come here, to the gateway of the Nightmare marshes, and you don’t know where you’re going? Are you mocking me?”

This is turning out to be one very unique dreaming experience, Hob realises. It’s not an unpleasant realisation at all. Hob is living for new experiences after all, and while he certainly loves the land he has for some reason been chosen to traverse in his dreams so far, this is a welcome interruption.

On his shoulders, the Otter lifts its head to lay a proprietary claw against Hob’s neck. The man startles at that and Hob looks a bit closer. There’s apprehension in his eyes, something that looks like anger but veers closely towards fear.

And quite suddenly, Hob has another epiphany. The strange mind-reading powers that he has gained while awake, the same thing that lets him feel his little nightmares intentions, work just as well on this different dream-creature. Because no matter how human he looks, Hob is pretty sure that the man before him is both less and more than simply a human man.

“Are you,” he starts and lifts one careful hand to cover the smile that threatens to break out on his face, “perhaps afraid of intruders?” Of old enemies, he wants to say, or rogue nightmares, because that is what he sees when he concentrates. But he’s not really looking to make the man more uncomfortable than he already is.

“I’m Hob,” he offers instead, when there is no answer, “And I think I’m on my way to… the palace.”

The man gears up to say something cutting, Hob can see the way his shoulders draw up and how his glower deepens when they are interrupted by a cheery yell.

“H-hey b-broth-ther! Is this a g-g-guest you’re holding u-uu-up there? Ca-can w-we inv-vite him in fo-fo-for t-tea?”

The man that turns around the corner of the leftmost house looks nearly exactly like the one barring Hob entrance - they are brothers, without a doubt, even if the way he eyes his much more personable sibling promises murder.

“Shut your jabbering gob, Abel. He’s a dreamer. He’s not supposed to be here. So no, we can not invite him for tea.”

The so-called Abel hurries closer, an amicable smile on his face for Hob and a fearful glance for his brother. In it, Hob sees flashes of blood and pain, shallow graves and wooden crosses. He winces. This is… not what he’d expected, really.

“B-b-but h-h-he’s a r-real my-my-my-mystery, r-r-right? Don-don-don’t y-you want to k-know it? Really?”

Despite his fear of violence and death by the hand of his brother, Abel rolls neatly past him and manages to make him lose his grip on the rake. He comes to stand in front of Hob, a hopeful smile on his face, and holds out a meaty hand.

“I-I’m Abel. And h-h-he’s C-cain. Welcome t-to- the H-house o-o-of Secrets! W-we have t-t-tea. An-and c-c-cookies.”

The vision of blood and murder flashes across Hob’s new sense again and Hob knows, intrinsically, that these are ‘the’ Cain and ‘the’ Abel. It’s all a bit much to swallow and he’s sure that if this weren’t a dream with all the ingrained suspension of disbelief he’s desperately been clinging on to since his journey started, he'd be much more pole-axed by this revelation. Instead, Hob shakes the hand of the first murder victim.

“And I have Earl Grey and digestives,” the biblical Cain, first murderer, interjects. He looks miffed but the threatening rake has been abandoned for now and he as well holds out his hand. “I welcome you to my house of Mystery. I’d be honoured to have you as my guest, dreamer. You can tell me all about how you came to be here.”

“B-but he was my guest f-f-first! A-and I can tell him nice s-s-secrets. Ma-maybe the o-o-one about th-th-the Thing in the b-b-b-basement!”

Hob does end up going with Cain first. He has the vague hope that it might avoid or at least postpone the clearly inevitable bloodshed that’s sure to be in Able’s future. There are a lot of crooked crosses and mounds of overturned earth that peek from the strip of land that borders the half-hidden backyard of the houses.

His nightmare, though, has no inclination of going with him. As soon as they reach the door, it nimbly hops off Hob’s shoulder. Cain casts it a long glance.

“If you don’t wish to come, you can visit Gregory. My soft-hearted fool of a brother insists that he’s getting lonely. You wouldn't owe me either way.”

The Otter bares its teeth in something that Hob thinks might be equal parts amusement and threat. Cain just scoffs and turns to step through the door.

The nightmare glances at Hob and if there were words they’d be a flippant ‘so long’ before it summarily abandons Hob for the first time since he’d arrived on these shores.

“Oh very well then,” he says gamely, “no one forces you to have tea, after all.”

Cain’s house is dark and warm and narrow. Everything is wood panelled, from the carved ceiling squares to the soft grey planks of spruce that make up the walls, and down to the unnaturally long and gleaming floorboards.

There aren’t many right angles in the house. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t seem to be built sturdy, quite the contrary even. But the angles are all just slightly off and despite the bookshelves, knick knacks and homely fireplace, there is something eerie to the place.

Cain is backlit by the glow of the fireplace where he takes a steaming pot of water from the hanger with a glowing poker.

“Gregory is the Gargoyle, I’m guessing?”

“Gregory the gargoyle, yes. He lives here.”

Hob thinks this is a paltry amount of information to give about an actual Gargoyle but then again, this is the land of dreams and nightmares. So maybe having a mythical creature as pet isn’t all that strange, all things considered.

“How did you come to be here,” Cain asks abruptly after they sit over sturdy mugs of tea.

“What do you mean, how?” Hob swallows around his digestives. They taste of nothing. Neither does the tea.

“You are a dreamer, a human one at that. You should not be able to traverse the Dreaming like you do.”

The firelight reflects eerily in Cain’s thin glasses. In the background the iron poker heats up in the open fire. This, Hob realises, is still a nightmare, after all.

“This is what the place is called, then? The Dreaming?”

“Don’t you know? These lands are the sleeping marches, the nightmare lands, where all dreams and nightmares dwell.”

Queen Mab’s country after all, after a fashion Hob thinks with a mixture of amusement and apprehension. No wonder his Otter had been so thrown by naming the offering he’d made. Hob’s wild guess had been close to the truth, after all. Though he’s reasonably sure that’s not all there is to it.

“Huh. I knew I was sleeping. Dreaming, as it were but - I didn’t know that there is a name attached to the place. Are you telling me that this isn’t just… in my mind, then?”

Cain stares at Hob and Hob can’t read his expression at all.

“Are you asking me if you made all of this,” he gestures around and to himself, “up in your sleeping mind?”

Hob has the grace to look chagrined. He’d been lucid dreaming for months now. Years if he wants to count the many times he’d been dragged into the sea of dreams and nightmares by the nightmare he now has as a travelling companion. He has developed strange insights while awake and he has had more than just a suspicion that these dreams hold more truth to them than mere figments of his imagination.

“No. No, not really, I guess,” he finally mutters. “I s’ppose this is as real as anything I experience when I’m awake.”

Cain looks at least marginally mollified.

“So you don’t know how or why you arrived here, I gather? That… is disappointing. Rarely do things like these happen without reason or will of our Lord.”

There are many things Hob wants to unpack here; so this isn’t the first time someone has gained access to the Dreaming in a way that resembles his; and there is a Lord - and not a queen - who holds the power of this place. He’d known that one already, considering that he’d been greeted once, so very long ago, by this Lord’s librarian.

“Who is this Lord,” he decides to ask, “and isn’t he… missing?”

Cain straightens and spears Hob with his glare.

“And how have you come by this information? Has your… nightmare blabbered? Talked about abandoning the realm?”

“Nothing of the sort,” though now Hob wonders; had many nightmares left the Dreaming? What then about those that he encountered? “When I first woke up - at that dock over the endless sea? - there was this woman, Lucienne. She told me.”

Cain doesn’t look convinced at all. He stands with narrowed eyes and leaves Hob at the table in favour of stoking the fire with the red-hot poker. Hob debates telling him about the neglected air of the places he’d travelled, about the feeling of bruised and yearning emptiness he'd seen in every world he’d rushed by on his mad dive through the nightmare sea. He decides not to, in the end. It feels… personal, somehow.

“Why would Lucienne travel all the way to the Dreaming Sea, just to greet a… dreamer. Now this is a mystery…”

Hob snorts. “Well, her greeting wasn’t all that enthusiastic. Was surprised to see that I wasn’t her Lord after all.”

It is silent for a while apart from the crackling fire. Hob discards the tea and digestives; he doesn’t know why he thought dream food would do anything for him, really. When he’s about decided to leave the brooding Cain to his own devices and instead go and try his luck with Abel, the man finally turns.

“Yes… there is something about you, dreamer. Hob. I thought for a moment at first, that you might be… but that was foolish, of course. You are nothing like Lord Morpheus, after all.”

“So that’s your missing Lord’s name?” It does have a bit of a ring to it, admittedly, even if it’s only due to Hob’s much longer memory of Morpheus the roman god of dreams that he doesn’t immediately think of the new movie that has just hit the cinemas. He doesn’t suppose Lord Morpheus looks quite like Laurence Fishburn in The Matrix.

“The Dreaming is the Realm of Dream of the Endless. Morpheus is one of many names he holds. And why he’s missing or where he’s gone - that is the greatest mystery of all, isn’t it?”

Hob leaves Cain’s house feeling not one jot more knowledgeable than when he entered it.

“The Dreaming is governed by Dream. Go figure.” He makes sure to keep his voice down but this one is a bit of a let down. At least he’s rather sure that Lucienne the palace librarian is something of a known entity. Which in turn promises the palace he’d glimpsed in the Ruby’s facets to be an actual place as well.

But this Lord… there is his missing Stranger in the waking world, there is a missing Lord on this side of dreams and between them, a deeply magical Ruby has found its way into his hands. Hob isn’t sure how much he believes in coincidences like that.

He’s nearly bowled over by a diving Gargoyle when he clears the awning of Cain’s house. Shingles shatter on the crooked pavement in his wake and a wildly gesticulating Abel rounds the corner.

“Gr-gregory, s-s-stop that!”

Abel hurries over on the beast's heels but doesn’t manage to deter him at all. The Gargoyle dances around Hob a few times, inspecting him, it seems like, before it comes to a stand squarely in front of him.

“Hello there,” Hob croons, enchanted.

Intelligent eyes consider him, before he bobs into the likeness of a shallow bow. Then, he buts up gently against Hob’s side.

“G-gregoy don’t bo-bo-bother our g-g-guest!”

When Hob’s hand comes into contact with Gregory’s rough scales, something like knowledge suddenly sparks between them.

“So you’re a nightmare, too.” Hob strokes Gregory’s scales behind the spikes on his head. “Or were, at any rate. You like this better now, don’t you?”

Gregory puffs hot breath across his neck in silent bliss.

“Have you met my- the nightmare I arrived with, yet?”

Hob gets the impression of sleek black fur rolling between moss and stone and grins.

“G-g-gregory c-can you p-p-please s-stop destroying m-my house!” Abel looks forlornly at the shards of mossy green shingles he’s swept into a sad little pile. “It’s ge-ge-getting worse a-and worse e-e-either w-way. N-no need to ma-ma-make it g-go f-f-faster.”

Gregory looks repentant but Hob gets the sense that the Gargoyle, however much he might want to try, can't really stop destroying things in his wake. It’s in his nature to be disruptive and playful.

“I can help,” he offers instead.

“Th-that’s t-t-terribly n-nnice b-but the r-repairs ne-ne-never stick anyway.” He pokes the pile with the tip of his shoe. It’s so pitiful that Hob feels like it’s a kicked puppy and not a grown man.

“Why don’t they, though? Mine alway do.”

He kneels at Abel’s side and takes a few fitting pieces out of the shard pile. They slot together easily.

“I've repaired a lot of things on my way here. My repairs always go well.”

He swipes over the shingle in his hand and some of the moss comes off, leaving it a faded, dusty red. The breaks are thin lines still, but it all holds together. He’s really gotten better at this.

Abel watches him, something guarded in his jovial face.

“N-no repair ha-has stayed wh-wh-whole, since o-o-our L-Lord le-le-left.”

Hob thinks of the dock that regained its sturdiness, or the little bridges in the moor that repaired themselves with barely any effort from him. Then he glances back at the forest that rises over the valley’s far side and takes in the lush dark green it has become in his wake, teeming with lively nightmares.

“I don’t know,” he says and smiles, “maybe you need to have a bit more faith in this whole thing. It works fine for me.”

He holds up the shingle for Abel’s inspection. It’s unbroken again.

“I think most things here know what they’re meant to be. It’s a dreamworld, after all. Just help them get back to that. That’s all. Do you have a ladder?”

Abel does have a ladder, though it’s a rickety thing when Hob starts ascending it. He’s pretty sure that on his way down it will be much sturdier. It is not hard work to set the roof to rights again, Hob has had much more strenuous jobs over the centuries. Though admittedly he’d never been a roofer before.

“H-hob?”

Abel calls him over where he’s taken off his shirt - it does after all exists under that terrible cloak - because the sun has decided to peek out behind the thin white cloud cover. It fits his mood well; he has a goal now and something like a plan.

“I w-want to t-tell you so-something. I-it’s a se-se-secret.”

“What is it?”

“A d-dreamer who rem-m-members h-himself ca-ca-can ch-change th-their d-d-d-dreams.”

Hob thinks he knows all about lucid dreaming by now and this seems spot on, even if it’s not really a secret. Abel and Cain both aren’t really very inclined to part with useful information, it seems like. It does pose an interesting question though.

“And you and Cain, you aren’t dreamers, are you? But then, how does the upkeep of this world work? Only by the Dreamlord’s will?”

Abel shrugs. “The D-dreaming sh-shapes itself o-o-only for th-those that l-l-love it. B-but a-a-a few ca-can do th-things, w-w-with His b-b-blessing.”

It sounds as mystical as impractical - and this power imbalance surely has its drawbacks, considering the state the Dreaming is in with its Lord’s disappearance.

“Maybe he should consider sharing a bit of his power then,” Hob mutters and slips into his shirt again. It’s time to go on, he thinks. There’s the palace waiting for him and possibly, hopefully, answers to his questions.

“L-lord Mo-mo-morpheus d-doesn’t share. He i-is the D-d-d-dreaming.”

The strange emphasis Abel puts on the last sentence perlocates in Hob’s mind, sleeping and waking, long after.

***

He leaves the Houses of Mysteries and Secrets behind without mentioning the magical Ruby or the Stranger that used to wear it. Neither does he mention anything about his immortality or the growing suspicion that the Dreamlord’s absence and Hob’s presence in the Dreaming are intrinsically connected.

Instead, he finally starts to tell his nightmare companion a bit about his life. He starts, of course, with the greatest reget he holds. It’s a nightmare after all, and probably much more interested in the things Hob has had nightmares about than in the general comings and goings of a human life.

“He could just as well have simply left me hanging to prove a point, you know,” he tells the Otter when the Houses of Mystery and Secrets behind them are swallowed into the last wisps of fog. “I mean I was a bit of a berk, all things considered. Not that I wanted to be, but you know how it goes, don’t you? Wanting something so much that you just… overreach. And by doing so destroy what you try to build.”

The Otter doesn’t answer, of course. But it does clamber up Hob’s truly terribly threadbare cloak and settles again on his shoulders.

“Thanks, my friend. I really appreciate that. I hope one day I can apologise and make it up to him. I mean it’s been a hundred and fifteen years now since that cursed meeting. Who knows what happened to him in the meantime…”

Hob thinks of the invisible weight of the Ruby at his chest and wonders how or why the Stranger had lost it. Because there is no way he had gotten rid of it on purpose. Not with the way it had been the main and centre piece of each of his statement outfits. It was important.

The muddy path underneath his feet stretches into the far distance, where the cloud cover isn’t quite as heavy any more. There is the pink light of a friendly sunset that beckons him on in a perfect reflection of his own tentative hope.

Maybe he’ll meet his Stranger again. Maybe he’ll find answers at the palace. All he needs to do is make his way there. He needs to find Lucienne.

*** *** ***

His dreams were occupying Hob’s quiet hours more and more. Sometimes, after waking, he thought the reflection in his bathroom mirror mocked him - there was red and black in his eyes where there should be the browns he was born with, the shadows he cast looked like writhing masses of nightmares and the deepest waters, his face the same one he had seen when he’d thrown the flower crown into the cursed pond. And then, within the blink of an eye the illusions were gone again.

The Ruby was warm, as always these days, when he took it out of the box. He’d bought a new chain to match its delicate gold casing and wondered if it was normal for a magical jewel to seem proprietary and unwilling to leave its owners hands. All the same, it looked entirely unchanged in all other respects and he knew that if he looked closer, there’d be the same pictures, the same views in its facets as the last time he’d done so.

There hadn’t been any more incidents of surprise souvenirs from his dreams after that first time. Instead, the phantom sensation of wearing the Ruby as a pendant underneath his clothes didn’t stop with his dreams.

But there were two other things that reluctantly joined Hob’s mental list of changes that were most likely connected to the jewel:

Emily had kept up pestering him about eating - it was the thing that had started their friendship two years ago. But by now, Hob was starting to become suspicious of his lack of need for food. Usually, he loved eating. Physical pleasures were part of the experience, after all, and food was one of the many things that changed constantly, to Hob’s neverending delight.

And the newest and most concerning thing: Hob didn’t remember the last time that he had felt truly tired.

The Ruby, even though he was never wearing it, rested like an unseen weight on his chest.

*** *** ***

As if the Houses are a gateway that Hob has passed, beyond them the Dreaming feels like a different world. He finds himself in an endless landscape that looks like it's been well tended and designed but with harrowing signs of neglect everywhere. There are skeletons of trees where a lush forest once grew, dry earth and cracked stone in place of meadows and rivers.

Hob doesn’t see any paths or streets as such, at first glance but he discovers fast that wherever he steps, paths try to form or emerge from the debris.

The Otter on his shoulders grows quiet - Hob hadn’t noticed actively because of course the little nightmare has never made so much as a sound at him; but there had been, for lack of a better description, a sort of humming at the back of Hob’s mind, a susurration of unheard whispers that conveyed laughter and wit, disdain and hope and all things the nightmare wanted Hob to know.

It’s never been as clear to Hob as now when it is entirely absent, how the Otter has indeed talked to him in its own way.

“This is wrong, somehow, isn’t it?” Hob hushes his voice down to fit the horrifyingly despondent mood of his surroundings. He’s equally as horrified if he’s being truthful. This is not how it’s supposed to look, he knows that much without needing it explained.

“Where do I even start setting this to rights again?”

He can’t see what most of the landscape was supposed to look like so he doesn’t know how to start fitting things back into place. There are no structure for him to mend, only barren landscape.

“You don’t, “ says a high-pitched voice at his back.

Hob swivels around and feels his Otter’s needle sharp claws prick through his clothing to keep its place. Behind him are two androgynous figures, holding hands. They look like children at first glance, if children were monocolored including skin and hair.

“You can’t,” says the second one, voice nearly identical with the first.

They sound like children as well.

“And… why can’t I?” Hob gentles his voice even though he knows that these are, of course, not actual children.

They feel like nightmares as much as his Otter does and as Gregory did. Where their hands touch, their skin is the oppressing colour-leached grey of foreboding twilight; otherwise, one is entirely white and the other, entirely black.

The first one, black as a moonless night, shrugs.

“The power here,” they start.

“It’s gone back to the palace,” the other finishes.

“It’s needed there,” the white one whispers.

“Because if that place vanishes…”

They look at each other and Hob can sense their fear. But that means that he can probably help more at the palace or close to it, where there is something left to draw from and form. Here, he only feels the hollow phantom pain of a missing limb when he tries to look and see what the ephemeral path he’s on wants to become.

His own capability of repairing the Dreaming seems to be dependent on the power of the Dreaming itself, at least in parts.

“Then what about the other part of the Dreaming? The ones I came through?” Hob gestures to the far away reaches of the Dreaming, where he woke.

Again they shrug in tandem.

“Oh that’s a bit different…”

“...it’s nightmare country, after all.”

“They’re wild.”

“And know how to take…

“...and take…”

“...what they need…”

“...from the dreamers.”

The Otter shifts on Hob’s shoulder and Hob finally finds that its quiet stream of thoughts and feelings are back. What it projects feels to Hob a lot like dissociation - a loss of identity and directed thought, of watching from the outside, going under and only remembering in short glimpses when breaching through the surface of confusion. It’s helplessness and impotence and a strange kernel of hope when the little nightmare looks at Hob.

“And it takes from the nightmares, too,” Hob realises out loud and for the first time, dares to run a hand over his nightmare’s slippery fur, “you were once… something bigger, weren’t you. The Nightmare of Drowning. Until the sea swallowed you up.”

The Otter presses into Hob’s careful fingers and he understands more. The sadness and rage of being diminished, the knowledge of going back to what it was before its creation, the hope when it found, in Hob’s dreams, persisting memories of itself and then clinging to them.

The twin nightmares share a glance but don’t contradict.

“That’s why the two of you are here. Instead of there.”

“We didn’t want to…”, they begin.

“...disassemble. We like…”

“...how we were made.”

“So we came here,” they finish in tandem.

“We could have left,” white mutters, discomfited and black squeezes their hand. “No. We’re not Arcana. We’re not strong enough to last long.”

“I travel to the palace. Do you want to come with me?” Hob has offered the same to the nightmares of the nightmare country after all.

They share another long glance, a communication that Hob feels but doesn’t yet understand. He thinks he might, one day if he keeps trying. He rubs his chest and thinks of the Ruby in his bedroom.

“For a part of the way,” they finally decide.

“We can’t go everywhere here.”

“Lead the way, dreamer.”

Hob turns, leaving both of them in his shadow and walks for a few short steps before he suddenly stops. He can’t help the delighted laugh. He’s been thoroughly had there.

“I know who you are now,” his grin is so broad that it rings in his voice.” I used to know you well when I was still young.”

“Yes you did,” they giggle.

“C’mon then, you terrible two. Let’s get going.”

He doesn’t need to turn to know they are following. After all, behind him walk the Nightmare of Being Chased Through Empty Streets and the Nightmare of Being Too Slow. Hob grins quietly to himself for the better part of this dream.

***

Sometimes, Hob thinks he hears the churning waves of the sea of nightmares and dreams from the shadows of this scorched landscape. It takes him a while to realise that what he hears is an echo of a place within himself. He doesn’t know how it works but he knows that he’s hollowed out a part of himself to make space for that which is the foundation of the Dreaming.

He’s not sure if he can ever make that undone. And he doesn’t know if he even wants to. He loves the place, after all.

Sometimes, they come acrossother nightmares. All of those who cross their path are small. They might have been bigger once and found sanctuary in this powerless stretch of the Dreaming out of fear of being swallowed back into the sea. He talks to them, the many-eyed and tooth-limbed and creeping-fears, even if they can’t answer back like the twins do. The way he’s learned to listen to his Otter works on them as well. So he listens when they in turn tell of themselves.

They meet only two more of the bigger nightmares; where the rest is, Hob doesn’t want to know. There is the Nightmare of Empty Houses that Should Be Lived In and the Nightmare of Gone Loved Ones - both of them Hob recognizes at first glance - but other than them, it is empty here. He wonders where all the dreams have gone.

“Closer to the palace,” the Nightmare of Gone Loved Ones answers.

“It has been empty here for a long time now,” the Nightmare of Empty Houses adds.

They don’t walk with him far, not like the twins who still follow in his shadow, but they do offer their help if Hob needs them.

***

Hob doesn’t know how many nights and dreams he has spent traversing this part of the Dreaming. He’s never counted any of them and anyway, he can’t decide if he should count nights in the waking spent sleeping or rather the progress of time as it flows in the Dreaming. They are not at all the same, after all.

Rather, he measures his progress by how far he feels he still has to go to reach the palace. And that is, despite all of Hob’s attempts to measure the distance any other way, the only manner to do it: by some vague compass in his chest - if he had to put money on it, he’d probably say that it is the Ruby and its strange connection to the Dreaming that helps him out.

During one visit, he comes across the most wretched sight he’s ever seen. Or not seen as it were. Before him is a stretch of land that simply - isn’t. A place that has once been somewhere, but now exists only in broad strokes of bareness - like an artist colour blocking the barest shapes of a background; the reverse of an actualized idea.

“I can’t go through there.”

The words barely make it past his lips and after they leave them, they seem to vanish in the vague emptiness. His head hurts from looking at the stretch of - of bloodless heart-tissue. His own heart hurts as well.

“You must, if it’s the way,” says black, unimpressed.

“You are the one deciding on the path,” adds white.

“Can’t I go around?”

He knows before he speaks that that’s impossible. He knows the way and to detour from it is not a good idea. There are places here that he might get lost in and never leave again.

A suggestion of darkness and soft fur swims into his mind’s eye.

“Do you think that will work?” he asks the Otter, “Don’t you think that I should see where I’m going?”

The equivalent of a mocking ‘are you an idiot?’ tickles his ears without sound.

Hob sighs. “No, of course I don’t. This is a dream after all. Why would I need my eyes to see, really.”

The Otter stretches, satisfied in Hob’s answer. The twins, though, remain silent.

“We won’t go through here,” black finally says.

“It’s not a place any more.”

“It hurts to go in…”

“What is it then? Or, what was it before it became - this?”

“It was Fiddler’s Green…”

“...the Heart of the Dreaming.”

Hob shudders and averts his eyes from the stretch of horrifying bareness. The place left behind when a dream leaves, when a heart is gone…The Ruby he’s not wearing beats a warm and calming rhythm against Hob’s skin. What does one put in the place left empty by a missing heart, Hob wonders. It’s probably not so surprising that the Dreaming is so receptive to Hob's attempts to help - he’s grown to love the place after all and a thing without its heart… Hob wonders if he’s reading much into it. ‘Heart of the Dreaming’ might be an entirely metaphorical name after all.

The Otter, impatient as his little nightmare is, clearly decides that it has had enough of Hob’s woolgathering and puts its tail firmly across Hob’s eyes. It is unexpectedly soft but doesn’t budge one bit when Hob tries to push it down again. Bossy little bugger his nightmare is. He feels the tickle of laughter at the back of his mind

“Thank you for keeping me company, you two,” he says and gives up trying to dislodge the tail.

“You are welcome.”

“We will wait here and listen…”

“Incase you need us.”

Hob smiles in the nightmares’ direction, or he hopes at least that it’s the right direction, and concludes that he definitely won’t call for them if travelling closer to the palace is something they’re uncomfortable with.

“Take care.”

In his mind’s eye, the Ruby glows. Beneath his feet, a street starts forming in the dark of his imagination. He hopes the Otter can see it too and won’t lead him astray.

*** *** ***

Hob’s shift at the bar is long over, the New Inn empty and dark. He’s moved into the freshly finished upstairs flat only a week ago and already it feels more like a home than the apartment he’s had for nearly five years ever did.

He hasn’t switched on the light after coming in. It’s not really necessary, after all. While the streetlights are more than enough for navigating the space, he feels comfortable in the darkened shadows. He can feel them, like an extension of the Dreaming or doors connecting into it. They are the home of many nightmares. Hob wonders how many of them he’s gotten to know during his travels through the Dreaming.

He perches at the edge of his bed and stares listlessly into the London summer night beyond his window. He’s not tired at all, but strangely hollowed out even here in the world of the waking hours, where he’s nothing more than a human with a magical jewel. The ebb and flow of the sea of nightmares and dreams thrums underneath his breastbones at all times, by now. Something is missing but he doesn’t what it is.

The bed sheets are nicely cool underneath Hob’s bare thighs when he finally decides to settle. He doesn’t really feel like he needs the rest but all the same he’ll dream as soon as he’ll have closed his eyes. There have only been the lucid dreams for him, for weeks now.

Next to him the ruby sits on the bedside table, sparkling invitingly. He’s given up keeping it in the metal box. When Hob closes his hands around it, it beats in time with his pulse. In the mirror on his new wardrobe he thinks for a moment that he can see into the Dreaming, a bird’s view of a ravaged landscape yearning for its Lord.

The ruby screams in his mind and Hob flinches.

And then he realises that whatever it is he is missing - love, life, his heart maybe - it has come alive in the ruby, has fed it and given it power.

*** *** ***

On the other side of the missing Fiddler's Green, the palace suddenly looms closer than ever. There is a cobblestone road stretching from where he stands and into a quaint assemblage of houses and huts. To his right there are steep hills with the obvious ambition of becoming mountains at one point. To his left, there are swaths of burnt and grey meadows and dried out rivers but between them, the remnants of flowers and fields still shimmer like fading dreams.

The sound of a hammer being swung rhythmically onto wood drifts from the village. With the sound comes the smell of tobacco and the low scratch of off-key singing.

Chapter 4. → chapter 6?

There is a man with a pumpkinhead trying to fix a bullock cart. Or maybe it’s a pumpkin that play-pretends to be a man. He - it - he wears a simple white shirt underneath a worker’s overall. There is a cheroot cigar clenched in his gaping black mouth and puffs of its stinking smoke spiral slowly out from beneath the cut out lid of the pumpkin’s stalk. He hums a terrible rendition of ‘In the Army Now’ that has Hob’s toes curl in sympathy with his ears.

“Hi there”, Hob tries.

The Pumpkin man doesn’t react.

“Hello, good sir,” Hob begins again, several decibels louder and takes a step closer.

“Fer fuck’s sake what -” The pumpkin whirls around, angry words dying on his lips when he sees Hob. The hammer falls and narrowly misses the wooden sticks that serve as his legs and feet.

“Who’re you then?” He squints at Hob who holds up his hands placatingly. “And watcha doin here. Huh!?”

He rudely points a wooden finger straight into Hob’s face and leans closer.

“If ye’re an intruder then ye’re shit outta luck, my man. Cause I’m gonna flatten yer ass and feed ya remains to the birds. Ya hear me?”

Hob does hear and that’s the only thing he gets from the pumpkin man except for his general presence as part of the Dreaming; there are no flashes of fears, no general sense of what he wants or feels. This, Hob concludes tentatively, is probably a dream.

“Okay,” Hob says, “then it’s a good thing I’m not an intruder. I‘m here to see Lucienne the Librarian. Do you know her?”

It’s likely, after all, this close to the frankly enormous palace that looms behind the little hamlet.

“Sure do. What’ch want with ’er?”

“I need to ask her something that I’m sure she can help me with. See, I might have come across something that originally belonged to the Dreaming.”

“Something from here? But ye’re a dreamer. Dreamstuff doesn’t live long in the Waking ‘s far as I know.”

Hob shrugs. “So you see that I do need to talk to her, right? I’m Hob Gadling, by the way. Pleasure to meet you. Can you tell me where I can find her?”

The pumpkin-man spits his cigar onto the dry ground and stomps one of his wooden stick feet on it. Hob wonders if he’s ever managed to set himself smouldering on accident.

“I can do ya one better. I’ll bring ya to her. You’ll need a guide into the palace of the dreamlord. Not just anyone can come and go as they please.”

He puffs out his chest.

“Mervyn is the name and I'm the facility manager of this dump.”

He gestures around himself grandly and kicks the offendingly rickety ox cart. One wheel tilts sadly sideways on its frayed hub.

***

Mervyn prattles on and on as they make their way around the outer reaches of the palace. It’s forebodingly large this close to it. The onion domes, turrets and minarets he’d seen from afar tower so high above him that they might as well belong to the clouds. It probably was once a gleaming white jewel but now, there are signs of decay everywhere.

They detour around fallen remains of grand arches, climb over broken pieces of beautifully carved balustrades and take a shortcut through something that might have once been a rose garden.

“We gotta go all th’ way round to the front. Used to be doors here too but they’ve all vanished - poof - a while after Lord Murphy left. There’s only the Bridge now ‘n’ the main gate.”

The bridge is magnificent. Was magnificent and Hob sees only the sad echo of something fantastically great. There are hands holding it up over a ridiculously broad moat but they are crumbling, missing whole fingers that lay broken and shattered in the dried out basin like the remains of some grand beast.

The dereliction makes Hob’s heart ache. He wishes he could make it go back to how it was before but this… he eyes the broken balustrade and the deep drop where part of the bridge has fallen. Beneath his skin, he feels the Ruby like a physical weight.

Could he? If he tried - if he threw everything he has into it - could he repair this?

“There ya are,” Mervyn says and stops them before a pair of grand doors that hang askew on their hinges. “Used ta quibble with tha gate guardians. The pegasus is a right uppity li’l shit if ya ask me. They stopped movin’ though. It’s just Lucienne holdin’ down the fort now.”

There’s sadness behind Mervyn’s gruff words.

“Great woman, tha’ Lady. Must’a been an incredible raven to his Lordship back in the days.”

Hob is too close to his goal now to ask after either the fantastical gatekeepers or how Lucienne was once a raven. The only thing he wants to know is what the Ruby is, and how his stranger is connected to the Dreaming. The palace calls for him, or something in it does. He can feel it better, now that he’s closer but it is the same thing that helped him navigate the dead parts of the Dreaming after leaving Cain and Abel. Or maybe, it calls for the Ruby.

“So we just go in?”

“Nah.” Mervyn cups his hands around his mouth. “LOOSH! LUCIENNE! YA GOT A GUEST!”

He clears his throat while Hob’s ears still ring and adds, a bit awkwardly, “I don’t like entering the palace anymore. Haven’t been in there in forever.”

They wait in silence.

Once, Hob thinks the Pegasus - no matter how uppity it might have been - blinks but he’s not entirely sure. He is sure, though, that the Griffin on the other side of the door has turned his head towards them.

It doesn’t take long until a figure emerges in a brisk pace from the darkness beyond the gate.

Lucienne looks exactly as Hob remembers her from his very first foray into the Dreaming, sharp suit and sharper eyes.

“Mervyn. What are you shouting about?”

***

She notices him right away, of course, before she’s stepped far enough into the entrance hall to be seen. There is a dreamer at Mervyn’s side and he’s very clearly lucid. He is also familiar.

Much more familiar than he has any right to be, even considering that she once found him, aware of himself, on the dock to the dreaming sea. He’d been a strange case back then already. His arrival in the Dreaming proper had been felt by her in a swell of power that swept through her entirely unexpectedly. For a few painfully hopeful moments she had thought that the surge might herald Lord Morpheus’ return. She’d hurried to where it had come from, taking every shortcut the Dreaming could still provide for its last keeper. But even on the way there, she’d felt the quick decline. Still, she continued to hope.

Instead, she’d found a dreamer on the dock. Yes, he’d reeked of remnants of Lord Morpheus’ power but it was fading fast, becoming nothing more than a quiet little hum until it finally vanished from her innate raven sense for Dream of the Endless completely.

It is back now though, steady and strong, like a thread woven through the dreamer’s own soul.

“Ya know the guy, Loosh?”

“We’ve met before,” is all she says to Mervyn, “thank you for bringing him.”

Mervyn squints suspiciously at the dreamer who looks entirely nonplussed - there’s even an amused smile at his lips if she’s reading him right.

“She’s right. And thanks Mervyn.”

“If ya say so Loosh…” He grumbles and turns to the human, “if ya so much as put a toe out of place, I’ll find ya and mince ya.”

He leaves with the threat, throwing occasional glances back at her and the dreamer until he vanishes behind the broken southern hand of the bridge. The dreamer stays, eyes focussed neither on her nor on Mervyn but on the solid statues of the former gate guards. Lucienne remembers the grim loneliness that had settled once the both of them had grown back into stone.

“I think the Griffin turned his head,” the human says and tilts his own.

“That is unlikely. They have not moved for a long time now.” Still, when she turns around and follows his gaze, the Griffin indeed looks different.

His whole head is turned towards the dreamer, inclined as if the lifeless statue had tried for a bow.

Impossible.

She’s unable to keep the hope and fear contained completely and she knows it shows through her next words. They aren’t as unaffected as she wants them to be.

“Usually I wouldn’t have to ask but since these are the most unusual circumstances I am without a choice: What is your name, dreamer?”

He finally ends his appraisal of the Griffin and gives her a most charming grin. There are dimples at his cheeks and his eyes nearly sparkle. He looks … warm, all around.

“I’m Hob Gadling, my Lady. And you are Lucienne, the Palace Librarian.” He says the name like the title it is. “A pleasure to finally meet you properly. I’d apologise for taking so long, but it was a while until I realised that this is where I have to go.”

Not an unknown entity after all, she thinks, slightly validated in finding him familiar.

There has been talk about Hob Gadling the Immortal in the Dreaming, once long ago; the only connection close to something like friendship their Lord has ever had. The emotions his meetings with the human could evoke in Lord Morpheus had been rivalled only by those he expended for his lovers and family.

Hob Gadling, as far as she is aware, is neither.

That setup had lent itself to both positive and negative outcomes. There’d been bouts of furious creativity, begetting dreams of hope and nightmares for healing, there was April weather, capricious and bewildering, and of course the oppressive tension of 1789 where even decades later there had still been gossipy wondering whether that had been budding anger or another tension all together.

The dreary and awful weather that had persisted for a good while after his meeting in 1889 had prompted her to seek out Jessamy in a bid to find out what had gone wrong. Her Lord had been - furious and upset. More upset than furious if she was being honest but she hadn’t gotten a good enough look on him afterwards to ascertain if the tears in his eyes had been of hurt or of anger. With Dream of the Endless, it was often both at once if someone did manage to get close enough to truly hurt him - the kind of privilege rarely afforded to anyone.

When Hob Gadling bows, half in jest and half serious court manners that she knows are the genuine learned thing of a noble, she notices that what she’d thought was an odd patch of uneven sable fur on the strange clothes he wears, can move and nimbly clambers down from his shoulders.

The human doesn't look surprised in the least.

“So you don’t want to come with me?” he crouches down and Lucienne can’t see what it is he does but then he says, “I see. Take care and - thanks for … bringing me here.”

This is a nightmare, Lucienne realises and watches in disbelief as the human continues to hold a conversation with it.

“I’m glad I could help. You don’t owe – okay then. Anyway, you were a great guide.”

The nightmare in the form of an Otter gives her a mocking half-bow and a leer and then slinks into the shadows along the edges of the bridge until it vanishes through a gap between several broken columns. Hob Gadling seems absolutely unfazed and the smile with which he follows the curious form of the nightmare is fond.

“Sorry about that. That was the Nightmare of Drowning. It… found me, I guess you could say, and stuck around.” He grins quickly and Lucienne is sure that he has no idea about the unlikeliness of what he has just said. Nightmares do not ‘stick around’ dreamers like that. Neither do they converse with them or share their names. This one nightmare in particular, if the human has the right of it, she had thought lost or dissolved back into raw dreamstuff decades ago.

It is… heartening, to see that it is not so. There is one more dreamthing left in the Dreaming when she had feared that their number had nearly reached zero.

“I have a few questions for you, if you don’t mind? I think I … might have found something that came from here, originally. But I'm not sure. May I - come inside?” He gestures towards the shaded awning, and a bit of tension creeps into his shoulders. There might be something like a frown on his face as well.

“You are welcome,” she decides and hopes that this is not a mistake, “You may follow me.”

He crosses the threshold in front of her and then wavers. It’s a movement small enough that Lucienne nearly wouldn’t have noticed it if there hadn’t been at the same time a flash of red that ran across him and drawn her curiosity. Hob Gadling is half turned towards her and so she sees how he presses a hand against his chest where the light seems to gather for a short moment. The curious hum of Lord Morpheus’ power that seems to hang around him, grows stronger.

Before she can even blink the human straightens and keeps walking.

Lucienne hesitates too long then and before she can decide on a course of action - maybe it would have been better to bar Hob Gadling entrance after all - the man starts walking into the depth of the palace by himself, feet carrying him in a straight line towards the corridor that leads on the shortest route into its heart.

He could not have seen the corridor from where they stand, Lucienne is sure. Silently, she follows him. Maybe she should warn him about staying on the path - the palace isn’t any nicer about lost wanderers notwithstanding Lord Morpheus’ absence, after all.

She does not and stays behind him.

“You have come far since I last met you, Hob Gadling.”

“Just Hob is fine, Lady Lucienne. And yes, it was a long way. I suppose you took a shortcut to the palace?”

“Of course I did.”

She doesn’t offer him the same familiarity of using her given name and has no intention of using his but - Hob Gadling seems like the embodiment of friendliness, despite the strangeness of his presence.

He laughs. It’s a warm sound like the palace hasn’t heard in the longest time. Longer than the century Lord Morpheus was gone. She wants to believe that he is a sympathetic character. They walk in the dim light of the corridors, past junctions and up several stairs, around twisting bends - a spiralling, illogical maze that makes sense to exactly no one but Lord Morpheus and, at best, those that he allows to serve him in the palace.

It should be impossible for a dreamer to navigate it without following a clearly set path.

And yet… Hob Gadling does.

Lucienne takes care to stay just half a step behind him at all times, just to be entirely sure. He never hesitates, he never slows his steps or turns to Lucienne to take point. On the contrary, he seems entirely unaware that she is the one following, instead of him.

“Why did you seek out the heart of Lord Morpheus’ Realm?”

“I thought that title went to Fiddler’s Green?” The question sounds like idle small talk, not something Lucienne likes to indulge in normally, but it has been so long since things have been normal in the Dreaming.

“How do you know of Fiddler’s Green? Has the Drowning told you?”

“The Drow- oh yeah right,” he laughs sheepishly, “I suppose ‘The Nightmare of Drowning’ is a bit of a mouthful. And no, I met other nightmares on the way. A few of them fled to…”

He flounders for words for a moment and doesn’t seem to notice how the crumbling relief on the wall he musingly runs his fingers over while walking is glowing with a red sheen.

Everything about this human is ludicrously impossible.

“...hm that strip of scorched Dreaming that starts after you leave the Houses of Mysteries and Secrets in the direction of the palace? I don’t know what it’s called. It’s not the nightmares’ country any longer, though.”

There is no such thing as a direction in the Dreaming, least of all for dreamers.

The relief he has touched starts reassembling, stone chips and dust gently lifting from the floor he walks on and agglomerating in pristine shapes along the wall.

Absolutely, gallingly impossible.

She swallows a soft inhale and when her eyes start watering, she tries to tell herself that it is just the unexpected dust. This is a sort of power and care that she has last seen employed in the hands of Lord Morpheus.

“The Heart of the Dreaming - It is the title Lord Morpheus bestowed on one of his Arcana - Fiddler's Green, a long time ago,” she finally answers when she finds her voice again. “But this here, the palace, it is where Dream of the Endless resides. Without him, there is no Dreaming. It is all him.”

Hob Gadlings looks contemplative at that, as if the words remind him of something.

“…It empty though,” he finally says, some unnamable thing in his voice. “I know that Lord Morpheus is missing. You told me so already. But still it’s… empty.”

“So he does. I did not expect you to remember. Dreamers rarely do.”

They come to a stand in front of elegant double doors. And Lucienne realises that she hasn’t kept an eye on their path at all for a while now.

Despite this, Hob Gadling has unerringly brought them to the remains of the throne room.

***

There is power in every stone, every filament and tapestry. It suffuses what he breathes as air, and the hollow part in him that has been replaced with the Sea and the Ruby vibrates. It’s a high pitched humming at the back of his mind that nearly makes him want to scratch at the inside of his skull.

It’s hard to keep still, to not try and touch everything. It crackles under his fingertips, the power he associates with the Ruby, like the prelude to a storm. The palace is empty, yes, and it is yearning, screaming, pleading for its missing Lord. And Hob isn’t it; what it wants is not Hob and his power but it’s rightful ruler.

“What would happen if Lord Morpheus never returns?”

He’s curiously pushing at the double doors. They are finely wrought in carvings of illusive fairytale scenes and end in a pointed arch that makes him think of the gothic architecture of the Minster of York.

“The Dreaming would decay entirely. The waking world as you know it would descend into chaos.”

What is left in the absence of a dream; or Dream, in this case. Weren’t dreams and hopes two sides of the same coin?

“That sounds… awful, actually.”

“Very. Yes.” Lucienne steps up beside him. “So far, his absence has caused an ailment called Encephalitis Lethargica in the Waking. We still have dreamers here that have not left the realm in decades, and some who do not even reach us. I dare not imagine what would follow were the Realm to collapse entirely.”

Hob… can, actually. There were friends with him in the trenches that never woke up after falling asleep in 1916. He remembers the confusion and horror vividly. A new weapon of the Germans, they’d feared. More though, never found true rest again. They’d called it shellshock and yes, trauma was surely a large part of it but…The onset of the Sleepy Sickness was followed by the worst stretch of the First World War.

Nausea churns in his stomach. To imagine that the impact has already been felt in the Waking - it’s hard to swallow that a world of dreams might have such an influence on the Waking. What would the world look like if its access to respite and hope was - restricted; or gone entirely. He doesn’t want to remember the Second World War at all. If it got to be even worse…

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, right?” He hopes his grin isn’t as shaky as he feels.

Then, he finally pushed open the doors in front of him.

Lucienne slips past him, when he can’t manage to gather his wits fast enough in the face of what lies beyond. There’s something curious in the press of her lips, something between disapproval and naked hope.

“This is the throne room of Dream of the Endless, Hob Gadling. Will you not come in? You have led us here, after all.”

The room is grand.

Or rather, it was grand but the decay has not left even this innermost room of the palace untouched. The room stretches long before him, debris strewn in columns and shards up to the foot of winding stairs that rise unsupported towards three magnificent stained-glass windows.

The windows are unbroken, filtering colourful beams of ambient light into the cavernous room. It illuminates the remains of enormous arches that reach up high above him like the skeletal ribs of a slain beast. Beyond them, there is no ceiling. Glittering stars and nebulae make Hob feel as if he’s falling into space.

Hob doesn’t have a lot of time to take it all in.

The moment he has crossed into the room, a wave of power expands within him. It’s the nightmare sea’s full weight, it’s the ruby’s unfiltered heat and it drowns out every other sensation with him. He’s vaguely aware that he stumbles and manages to barely catch himself against the wall beside the entrance. His visions swims and he thinks he might lose consciousness if something like this was possible inside a dream

Under the hand he uses to support himself, marble carvings, once finely wrought like thinnest porcelain but now broken and chipped, regains their pristine edges and shapes. He hadn’t even meant to repair this.

He takes a deep breath and then another, trying in vain to pull the power back underneath his skin and into himself. It’s there to stay.

Lucienne, the only orderly thing inside the chaos of the throne room, observes him with sharp eyes.

When he finally manages to right himself and steps between the debris and shards of glass to join Lucienne, dust starts to swirl around his feet and the insistent pull of the ruby’s power has him stumbling like a newborn foal. He’s too small for it, not enough by far.

“Lady Lucienne? I think… I think we really need to talk about what I came here for, now.”

It’s hard to swallow around the words, his teeth and tongue are unwieldy.

“Indeed, we should.” Her voice is quiet and barely makes it above the insistent sound of crashing waves and static humming he hears. There is a careful hand on her shoulder and he finds himself led to the set of impossible stairs where he sits heavily.

“I found something in the Waking,” he forces out and does his best to calm the grip the ruby and the nightmare sea have on him. It’s… exhausting, and his stomach churns uneasily under the greedily pulling sensation.

“A jewel. I think. I think it might have come from here.”

“A jewel you say?”

“A… ruby. Or at least it looks like one. Since I found it, I have started this - this dreaming journey. It has… a strange power to it.”

Lucienne’s face is shuttered and her glasses make it hard for Hob to evaluate her ecpression. She’s taken a step back from him, tense and straight but her words are gentle.

“There are many magical stones and artefacts in the Waking, Hob Gadling. Some of them, in the right hands, might even allow you some measure of control over yourself in this realm. They must not necessarily have come from here, to let you dream lucidly as you do.”

That would explain the very beginning he guesses but nothing of the rest of it all.

“This here is not exactly the same as lucid dreaming, though, is it?” He makes sure that he’s as gentle as she is, that nothing of his fight to stay above the pull of the ruby gets out. “This is not really my dream at all, am I right? This is the place where dreams and nightmares dwell and I don’t think I should be able to perceive it like I do.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Before she unfolds her staunchly crossed arms.

“You are not wrong, Hob Gadling. There is a way to prove it, once and for all. If this jewel is truly of the Dreaming, then you should be able to take it with you when you come here. If it is of the Waking, it cannot cross into your dreams with you and retain its properties.”

“Just like that? I could have proven-”

Hob breaks off. There’s no need to make himself look even more foolish. If he’d just dared to wear the ruby after all…

“Yes. Just like that.” The small crinkle of her nose and eyes is silent laughter. There’s unexpected warmth to it.

Hob grins self-deprecatingly and braces himself for having to wait out his time in the Dreaming. He’ll have to leave the palace before long; he doesn’t think he can sustain himself against the power of the ruby very long any more. He feels as empty as the palace, hollowed out and scraped clean by the tides of the Dreaming Sea and the jewel. There’s not a lot left for him to give without getting something, anything really, in return. Otherwise there’ll be nothing left of him.

He shudders and makes to stand with trembling knees.

“I need to wait until I wake.” It goes without speaking, that in Dreaming time that could take a long long while, still.

There’s something considering in Lucienne’s gaze before she turns and walks towards the part of the wall he’d accidentally repaired when coming in. She runs a hand over the intricately carved wall cornice musingly and looks between him and the broken stairs to the throne.

“Try willing it,” she says quietly.

“What?”

“Try it. Tell yourself that this dream is over and will yourself awake.”

“I don’t think that’ll really work.”

It couldn’t be that easy, could it? He could just -

***

Hob opens his eyes in the dark of his bedroom and rears upright with his heart rabbiting against his ribcage. It did work; and it was truly that easy.

“Fuck.” He runs a hand over his face. He’s not sleepy but wide awake. Like always.

“What the actual -”

It worked. How has that worked? Granted, he’s never before tried to actively make himself wake up - why would he after all - but this was just… this was too easy and too real. The power he’d felt in the palace tingles in his fingertips like static. It’s not gone entirely but for now, in the Waking, it’s manageable.

He disentangles himself from his bedsheets and plants his feet squarely onto the cool floorboards. It doesn’t help much against the feeling of waves crashing against his insides.

The ruby glows where it sits innocuously on his bedside table, hypnotic as always. It resonates somewhere within Hob’s mind and makes his head ring faintly. It stays, no matter how hard Hob rubs his face.

“You’re the real thing then.”

Dread pulls at his stomach. This has terrible implications for his Stranger. If he even is a stranger any longer. Because if this ruby is of the Dreaming - what are the chances that his Stranger isn’t. There are many dreams and nightmares missing, as far as Hob has seen, but there is not a particularly large likelihood that someone who holds a power that belongs to the palace of Dream of the Endless is a mere dreamthing.

It’s… a staggering thought and Hob shies away from it. Waking up on purpose is not enough proof. He needs to bring the ruby back to Lucienne. It’s the only way to be absolutely certain about what he fears.

The gem is warm to the touch and slips around Hob's neck without second thought - as if it belongs there. It’s unexpectedly heavy and the fine gold chain he’d bought seems suddenly insufficient to carry its weight in the long run. The moment the stone settles on his skin the ringing in his head stops. So does the staticky feeling. Instead, it’s just the deeply thrumming growl of waves breaking against waves.

It fills him, every nook and cranny and pore of him until he feels he might burst with the sheer might that suddenly runs through his much too human body.

He’s too small, too tiny in the scope of things to hold this power without it changing him irrevocably.

He doesn’t know what is different this time; it's by far not the first time he touches the stone. But maybe it's not mere physical contact at all, he realises slowly, thoughts nearly sluggish under the weight of the Dreaming Sea and the ruby combined. He is now actively acknowledging its power, after all; for the first time he accepts it in a way he has never dared to before.

He’s always felt it reaching for him, surely. It’s only now that he is reaching back. He’s made space for the ruby and its power after all. It’s time to accept what it gives in return.

Hob only realises that he’s closed his eyes, when he finally deigns to open them again. He’s still sitting on the bed in his flat above the New Inn. It’s still the night hours of a new day. Around him, there is a spread of awareness that reaches out into the world. It starts small but he can feel it expanding with every heartbeat.

His neighbour is still sleeping, as is the old couple one floor up. Their visiting grandson teeters on the edge of waking. Across the street a man is in the last throes of a nightmare, its presence a brush of warm water to Hob’s cold black sea. Fears, old and new, linger in the wake of the shadows.

There is a shimmer to the world, a curtain behind which he glimpses the Waking in strands of truth and story and fears.

He becomes aware, mind reeled back into himself, at the window. London is sleeping and Hob can feel all those dreamers like little pebbles sinking through the Dreaming sea. And beyond the humans, beyond London and England - he snuffs the thought, suddenly nauseous, his unspooled awareness like the sting of a rubber band that has been stretched too far before snapping back.

Is this how his Stranger had felt when he’d worn the ruby? Because this is more than just a paltry bit of magical power. This is responsibility and duty. Hob could decide hold them all, those Dreamers, and guide them … or clench his hand mercilessly and -

This is inconceivable.

He falls heavily into his armchair. The ruby needs to go to Lucienne, as fast as possible. Natural sleep, though, feels a million miles out of his reach at the moment. On the other hand, he did will himself awake once already. Curiously, he prodds the veil that sits ephemeral somewhere at the back of his too small mind.

He might just as well try the reverse of waking up and will himself to sleep. Slowly he leans back and gets comfortable in the armchair.

“Sleep, Hobsie,” he mutters as he reaches into the power of the stone and pulls at the veil.

He doesn’t even have to close his eyes before he appears in the throne room between one heartbeat and the next, the ruby hanging heavily around his neck.

Beyond the palace, there's the raging sound of heavy rain and booming thunder.

***

Interlude

Dream cannot stop the shudder that runs through his crafted, cold body when it happens. He carefully unfolds his limbs until he is upright again and sitting in his temporary prison.

Where the warm flow of stories had settled underneath his skin, there is now the gentle hum of power. He cannot reach for it, not through the bindings of the circle but it is there nonetheless - the ebb and flow of his might and his realm as he hasn’t felt it in longer than a century.

It is the culmination of a development the true reason of which he can only speculate on. The warmth that had burrowed unbiddenly underneath Dream’s skin has persisted. No, not persisted. It has grown - steadily and unnoticeably at first until it flowed nearly like mortal blood though every part of him.

But it’s not only power and warmth he feels.

He has bent his whole focus on it, dissected its flow, its cause, its effect. What he has found is gentle care shown to the Dreaming that has grown into something more. So much more that it changes him even in his prison. He is the Dreaming, even here, even cut off from it.

There is endurance in his limbs where there was the strength of rage before. The colour of faith is a new blush on his cheeks and lips, a trickle of spring that contrasts the winter of his cell. He has - grown used to it, over the months. Cherished it. Awaited each increase.

This, now, is more than that. It is a surge, a rising wave that blazes through him without an inkling of remorse. He tilts his head up and smiles at the painted ceiling. A large part of his power has just been fully returned the Dreaming.

Someone has brought his ruby back and restored it to its primary purpose.

He wonders how long it will be until he finds an opportunity to leave. He wants to see for himself who serves him undaunted and bold like this.

***

It’s worse than wearing it in the Waking.

Much much worse.

The jewel is heavy, chain cutting deeply into his neck. It's bright, nearly too bright to look into and it hums with the voices of millions, billions of Dreamers all vying for Hob’s attention at once simply for being there. When Hob closes his eyes, he’s swimming in a dark, endless sea, lost in between all the beings that make up this realm.

Quickly he slams his eyes back open, panting as if he’d really been caught in the deep sea. For the longest moment he can’t differentiate between the thunder crashing around the palace and the booming waves of power pounding inside him.

There‘s too much in his head. His skin is wrong, his body is wrong.

In the many facets of the ruby, he can see his own face - thinner than he's used to, black-bleeding eyes staring back at him. There’s no trace of the brown he’s used to, only the same black he knows from the eyes of the nightmare of Drowning.

“I knew it,” he pants, out of breath simply from trying to hold on to his sense of self, “I knew it was from here.”

The grin he shoots at Lucienne is probably more a grimace.

She doesn’t return it anyway. She has a hand in front of her mouth and there are unmistakably tears running down her cheeks even if she’s quick in wiping away the evidence. She’s not looking at Hob at all, though. She’s entirely fixated on the ruby that lays heavily on his chest.

“Yes,” she breathes, voice thick, “this is a thing of the Dreaming. It is Lord Morpheus’ Dreamstone.”

She brushes new tears away before they fall. “He would never be parted from it of his own will. It is an extension of his power, a sign of his sovereignty.”

“Lord Morpheus’... Dreamstone.”

He’d known it, hadn’t he? At one point, he thinks, he must have realised the possibility that his Stranger and the missing Lord of the Dreaming were one and the same, right? He’d simply - decided to ignore it.

“Do you want to know why I kept it at all after I came across it? It wasn’t for any kind of power I felt from it. To be honest, I didn’t feel shit at first.”

Hob hears himself laugh but it’s an ugly, self-deprecating sound.

“I kept it because it reminded me of my Stranger. The one I met up with over the many centuries of life he gifted me with. One century, one meeting. I kept it because it reminded me of the stupidly large gemstone he would wear each century. Except he didn’t show up last time, did he? And I… missed him; miss him now even, more than a decade later.”

His eyes are hot and he doesnt think he could stop the tears if he tried. He doesn’t even know why he’s feeling so betrayed by this. He’d come here purely because he wanted to know about a magical stone. He was an idiot. An utter and complete fool.

“You’re telling me- What you’re telling me is, that the man - being - who I owe my immortality to, who is most likely missing in action, is your Lord Morpheus, Dream of the Endless.”

A foolish human meddling with forces beyond his imagination. Why is he so angry that this is the way he learns about his Stranger? It’s not as if it makes a lick of difference. Hob still misses him, still wishes he could have had a chance or a way to show him that he’s come to care for him.

“Yes, of course that is him.”

“What do you mean, of c- “ He breaks off at the curious expression she looks at him with. It’s nearly apprehension. It dawns on him at once “… You knew. You knew who I was the moment I said my name, am I right?”

“I did. There has been a lot of talk in the palace about you over the centuries, Hob Gadling.”

The storm outside howls against the stained glass windows and Lucienne frowns uneasily.

“Then why didn’t you say anything?” But why should she have? Hob himself had given no inkling of recognizing her Lord’s name or station after all. He’d given her no reason - he’d only asked for advice.

“I… apologise,” she says, “I should not have held back the information.”

Again she throws a tense glance at the windows. She says more but Hob can't hear her over the howling inside his dreaming body and the winds battering the palace noisily. He’s angry - at himself mostly or at fate maybe. Why hadn’t he wanted to wear the ruby? If he had, would he have found out earlier? He hurts, everything hurts and bends and stretches in ways that are impossible even in his worst nightmares.

His Stranger hasn’t come to their meeting, Dream of the Endless doesn’t freely part with his Dreamstone, has been missing since 1916 if Lucienne is to be believed - something horrible must have happened. And Hob has squandered precious years by dithering, pitying himself, by being to much of a coward to-

He grips his arms with nails that are much too long to belong to him. They shimmer, black and shiny and sharp. He feels thin and hollow and angry. Something in him hungers. He hasn’t felt hunger in so long.

“Sir! Hob Gadling! Hob!” Lucienne’s hand on his too pale arm rips him out of his spiral.

“L-Lucienne. What is-”

“I apologise,” she says again, more softly this time and despite the howling in Hob’s ears he hears her easily, her touch on his skin a steady grounding point. “I should have been frank with you from the moment I recognized who you are.”

“It’s- it’s fine. I’m mostly angry at myself,” he grits out and then closes his mouth again. There is something wrong with his teeth.

“What is happening to me?”

“I do not know, Sir,” Lucienne's voice startles him despite having expected it. She’s much too close now, nearly hovering. “But whatever it is that the Dreaming is doing to you, it is trying to help you fulfil the purpose you set for yourself. It… is partial to you. Very much so, I fear.”

“It’s the ruby, though. Not the - not the Dreaming.”

“There’s no difference. None that matters at least,” she says, “The Dreamstones are as much a part of the Dreaming as they are a part of Lord Morpheus. Here, in his Realm, it is the Dreaming’s tool. Just as it is Lord Morpheus’ when he wields it.”

Hob's smile is a shaky thing as a long overdue realisation slowly takes shape.

“The purpose I set myself, huh… What I wanted…”

What had he wanted, at first? He’d wanted to see his stranger again when he first found the ruby, wanted to find him and apologise. Then, when he began his journey in the Dreaming, he'd been curious, and enchanted.

But after that, he'd just wanted to help - help those sadly decaying things of beauty he’d come across - full of teeming possibilities but slowly falling prey to hopeless dereliction - help that fantastical landscape who’s scorched bones screamed for something that had been ripped away.

And he’d wished to help that depthless sea that had hummed and whispered underneath his skin and in the shadows of the world he had so easily come to love the longer he had walked in it…

“I wanted to help this place,” he whispers, “because I've… grown to love it.”

The Dreaming and Dream of the Endless are the same, he remembers. He doesn’t think it makes any difference at all to disentangle which one he’s fallen in love with.

It’s okay, though, he thinks as he considers his nails and feels his teeth. He’d given freely of himself and he doesn’t begrudge the Dreaming for trying to give something back. It’s only fair. He’s not going to eschew the gift it offers in reciprocity.

#hob gadling #dream of the endless #dreamling #centennialhusbandsbigbang #centennial husbands big bang #ginoeh writes #lucienne the librarian

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boywifesammy · 11 months

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s5e11 sam, interrupted is THE EPISODE. it’s a fucking cinematic pipe bomb. watching it is like chewing on glass and swallowing propane. it is wonderful, it is amazing, it is EXCRUCIATING and i love it. allow me to explain.

(under the cut because i ended up rambling lol)

like, yes… it is extremely ableist. it is extremely offensive. it is an overdone harmful caricature of psych wards and horrific to watch but that is EXACTLY what makes it so good. i’ve never seen spn as a horror show but man this episode?? the psychological distress of it, the unease, the dereality??? it has me frothing at the mouth.

as someone who has tics and PTSD i have first hand experience being labelled as Crazy so that’s the lens i’m coming at this from. this episode is most definitely not a reliable source for mental health info but the way they portrayed martin’s character kinda got me. him stuttering over certain words, his general paranoia, how they clearly address that he went through a deeply traumatic event but that he’s still useful as a hunter even though he can’t do the things he used to before. i don’t think the writers intended for this episode to be viewed the way i did but man i am shaking it around in my cranium like a snow globe.

just the first few minutes of it is insane. dean acknowledging that sam was high on demon blood and that the apocalypse wasn’t his fault. seeing the absolute absurdity of the show in perspective with real life. dean admitting to his psych doctor that he's an insomniac, alcoholic, and incapable of holding long-terms relationships with his usual blase nonchalance, then immediately clamming up when she hits him with the "let's talk about your father." ??!!! i know dean is The daddy issues character but i love when they call him out like that.

and how can i Not point out the blatant assault and objectification… wendy forcefully making out with both sam AND dean. them both getting probed by the fucking monster of the week not even 10 minutes into the episode. SAM BEING TIED DOWN. i cannot explain to you how much i love seeing him restrained. the moment i saw sam tied down and angry i literally vibrated out of my skin that boy must be helpless and restrained more often it is beautiful.

on a sort of related note: high sam. yes. just yes. the little nose boop. him telling dean I Love You. getting all emotional about how much he cares about his brother. the themes of his autonomy being stripped. him being drugged up against his will when he’s a recovering drug addict????? INSANE.

also one thing that really stood out to me was dean being diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with narcissistic personality disorder and religious delusions. which, yes, is inaccurate, but seems more like a misinterpretation of his PTSD symptoms. dean isn’t schizophrenic but he IS paranoid and he’s trained himself so thoroughly to weaponize his feelings that even to HIMSELF he seems narcissistic, when he’s really just scared and desperate. he externalizes his self-hatred as this overfed bravado but it’s because if he was honest about how he felt about himself the guy would simply fall apart.

expanding on that note… sam&dean meta on how they react to trauma & grief. dean immediately clams up and becomes anxious and terrified. he shrouds himself in so much false confidence but he genuinely hates himself so fucking much. so much that he just sits with his pain because he thinks he deserves it, while sam wants to externalize. he’s angry and that scares him because of what’s in his blood but the truth is that he has every right to be angry. he wants to be gentle but he has so much repressed rage that it bursts out of him and leaves him terrified in the aftermath. dean on the other hand wants to be angry but he’s so scared and critical of himself that he shuts down.

and the ending. my god the ending. dean telling sam to wrap it up and stuff it down. it’s excruciating to watch because dean’s advice is fucking shit but it’s also heart-breaking because it puts into perspective just how much these boys have on their conscience.

they PHYSICALLY cannot deal with their trauma. it is so awful and overwhelming that they could not function if they remembered it, so they forget about it. they push it down. they hide it away, and it’s so fucking refreshing to have an episode that acknowledges that they do that because THAT IS A TRAUMA RESPONSE. it is quite literally a SURVIVAL tactic. people who are severely traumatized will wipe their memory of traumatic events because they cannot function with it in the peripheral. this is a clear manifestation of sam and dean’s PTSD and how when they’re faced with these problems, their emotions take over and they completely lose themselves, whether that’s due to fear or rage.

the horror of this episode isn’t the wraith. it isn’t the silly little monster sucking out people’s brains. it’s the thing inside you. it is the imagery of these people hanging or with slit wrists being passed off as suicidal because they’re mentally ill. it is the ugly truth of trauma and the ways it twists your memory and self-worth. it is the inherent belief that someone is worthless if they are psychotic or paranoid. it’s the way the episode puts that perspective on sam and dean, shows them what it’s like to hallucinate and drags up their own repressed memories and puts them on full display. it is TRULY horrifying and it is GRIM and NASTY because it is about the human psyche and the horrible ways it can be twisted. it’s a fucking phenomenal episode if you can read the subtext and get past the whole “scary psych ward bad” wrapping.

#oc #supernatural #spn meta #episode analysis #spn 5x11 sam interrupted #sam and autonomy #dean winchester #sam winchester #tw ptsd #tw sui talk #tw sa #tw drugs #hello :)#tagging triggers because this one is a bit of a doozy #i went a little bit crazy watching this episode could you tell #i am very sorry to dump my ramblings on your dash but HEAR ME OUT HERE—#anyways. ANYWAYS.

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feeder86 · 2 years

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Lust and Loyalties

It had been fate, Jed was sure of it: being offered a promotion in the very city where his online girlfriend, Shelly, lived; it was the universe telling him that they were meant to be together. He needed to put away his reservations and jump in head first. Shelly was so smart, with an incredible wit and interest in the world. She was beautiful as well; three hundred and fifty pounds, with a big, gorgeously soft belly, enormous breasts and one of the most jiggly asses he had ever seen. Jed’s dick felt like it was pumping out heat as his plane drew closer and closer to the destination. At long last, he was going to be living the life he’d dreamed about for so long. He’d struggled to accept his fascination with fat. Somehow, because he had been so sporty and popular in high school, he’d drifted from one fit girlfriend to another; spurred on by the friends he’d surrounded himself with; none of those women never ever really igniting any spark of attraction in him. He wanted to caress Shelly’s belly every night, rub her stomach as she ate and watch her fat ass bounce up and down as she walked. It was exactly the sort of pampering Shelly desired too. Despite her size, she wanted to be fed more, enjoying every single lardy pound on her body. Getting away from his hometown and everyone he knew would help Jed to shake off those expectations they had all seemed to have for him. He was now finally free to be himself and to love whoever he wanted.

Jed saw Shelly’s large form waiting for him as he came out of arrivals. He ran towards her, dropped his bag and kissed her so deeply, she would never forget it. People stared, of course. In this sad world, it wasn’t often that athletic, muscular guys like him went out with short, spherical girls like Shelly. But Jed was in love; and from now on, everyone was going to know about it!

Shelly lived in a house share with four other people. However, it didn’t seem to be anything like the rowdy, party experience that Jed remembered from his similar set up in college.

“So, it’s Sarah, Martin, Mabel and Danny?” Jed asked, trying to get the housemates’ names in his head, given that he would be staying with Shelly for a couple of weeks whilst he looked for his own place in the city.

“Yeah,” Shelly nodded apathetically. “You saw Sarah and Martin on the way in. They’re the couple. Mabel spends most of her time at her girlfriend’s place and Danny is just a jerk.” She was lying in bed, having been treated to five rounds of the best sex Jed had ever had in his life.

“I want to get to know them all though,” Jed replied. “If they’re part of your life, I want to show them how serious I am about being with you.” He looked on at Shelly’s blubbery, fat body, feeling like the luckiest man alive. Was it possible to fall in love this fast? Before today, he’d never even met her in the flesh before. Now he was wondering how long he would have to wait until he could ask her to marry him! “That reminds me,” he whispered seductively into her ear. “I bought you some super-fattening cookies I found at a special store at home. Over two thousand calories in the box!” His eyes lit up with arousal. “Maybe I could feed them to you…”

Shelly stiffened. “I’m not really hungry,” she stated plainly.

Jed backed off, feeling that he had misread the situation somehow. They’d spent hours online talking about feedings and how much food Shelly was going to eat for him. “”Okay, that’s fine,” he backtracked, feeling awful for suggesting it. “Shall we watch a movie instead?” he asked, settling in for his first quiet evening with the love of his life.

“My, my, my!” came a curious voice as Jed stood, dressed only in his boxer shorts in the small, shared kitchen. “So you’re Shelly's new boyfriend?”

Jed looked over at the guy and knew at once that he was Shelly’s other housemate, Danny. He didn’t need to be told that Danny was gay; he could simply tell by the way he was blatantly checking him out. “I’m Jed,” he offered politely, pausing his preparation of Shelly’s breakfast to go and shake the guy’s hand.

“So you’re the one who is into fat chicks then?” Danny asked bluntly as he returned Jed’s firm handshake with an equally strong grip.

Jed retracted his hand and scratched the back of his head awkwardly, chuckling a little nervously. He could already tell that Danny wasn’t the type of guy to sugarcoat things. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he replied, deciding that honesty was the best policy in his new life.

“She won’t eat all that,” Danny stated, seeing the tray full of food Jed had lovingly crafted for his girl. “Shelly is fat because she’s lazy and she’s always been big. Nothing more.”

Jed wondered why Danny was trying to make a point about the breakfast. During their six month online love affair, Shelly had never failed to express to him how much she longed to devour one of his ultimately fattening breakfasts.

“I’m just trying to limit your expectations,” Danny continued, getting his protein shake out of the refrigerator and walking out, clearly on his way to the gym.

Jed could see why Shelly didn’t like the guy. He had a rather obnoxious tone that was going to quickly get on Jed’s nerves. He finished frying up the bacon and headed back upstairs to surprise his sleeping beauty with his many delicious treats.

“I need coffee,” grumbled a sleepy Shelly; audibly groaning as she spied the tray of food. “And… I never eat breakfast,” she announced flatly, as if she was offended by Jed’s lack of knowledge about her.

“Oh, but I thought…” Jed began, thinking to explain himself and deciding better of it. This was all new to him after all. So what if he wasted a bit of food? He was here with Shelly for their first morning together. He wanted to lie in bed all day with her and get to know even more about her. He wanted to be a walking, talking encyclopaedia of her. So, he took a took a couple of slices of bacon for himself, climbed back into bed and waited patiently for Shelly’s morning coffee to pull her out of her grumpy mood.

Jed’s new job was a marathon of stress. Since he’d found a small room in his own house share, he’d hardly had time to even see Shelly. He’d chosen a cheap, dirty room in a rough neighbourhood so that he could better save up enough money to buy somewhere nice for himself and Shelly. He felt bad about not seeing his girl so much, and yet, somehow, he was confused with how relaxed Shelly was about only being together on weekends.

Moving out of Shelly’s place had been a surprisingly welcome relief. As much as he loved his new super-sized girl, it had been hard to deal with the drastic differences in their libidos. Jed could have worked her body twenty-four hours a day, yet Shelly hadn’t wanted to have sex at all last weekend. He’d had to masturbate in the bathroom to calm himself down; not wanting for Shelly to ever see him as some sort of sex pest; or for her to get the impression that he was only with her for her body. Still, he did begin to think that maybe his own imagined future with her had been a little naive. Despite the things that Shelly had said when they were long-distance, her fat body and the prospects of eating for Jed really didn’t do it for her. It was okay though. Jed didn’t need that to feel satisfied. He remembered how funny and clever she’d been in her responses to his messages when they first found each other online; such insight and humour. It was impossible not to love her. Shelly didn’t like coming over to Jed’s new place. It was a couple of bus rides and a small walk up a moderate hill to get there. And so, after that first visit, Jed was the one to compromise; realising that they would have to spend their weekends together at Shelly’s place.

It was their four month anniversary and Jed wanted to do something nice together, but felt conscious about suggesting food places out; not wanting Shelly to think that he was trying to inflict his fat kinks on her. In the end, they stayed in, watching a reality TV show that he hadn’t expected to be Shelly sort of thing. They’d talked for hours about their favourite TV shows online, yet Jed’s humorous references to the shows they had both loved seemed to fall flat with her; like she hadn’t even watched them at all. It was the same with her music taste and, upon inspection of the paperback books Jed had sent over to her in those early days, not a single one had even been thumbed through, despite the detailed conversations they had both had about them.

“Back again?” smirked Danny as he opened the door for Jed after he finished work that Friday night and headed straight over.

“Hi, Danny,” Jed mumbled as he breezed by him, on his way up to Shelly’s room.

“Those work pants are looking a little fitted, aren’t they?” Danny remarked, stopping Jed in his tracks.

“What do you mean?” Jed asked, caught off-guard as usual by Danny’s random comments.

“Just what I said,” Danny went on. “Your pants. They’re a little snug. Mind you, I suppose it was always going to happen: new job, new city, dating a fat, lazy girlfriend. You were always bound to get a little junk in the trunk.”

Jed walked on, not knowing how to reply. Shelly was engrossed in another dreadful reality show and hardly turned to him as he came in and lay next to her on the bed. “I’m just going to the bathroom,” he whispered quietly; escaping during the most irritating elimination part of the episode.

Locking the door behind him, Jed went to the bathroom mirror, his brain replaying the words Danny had said to him at the door. There he twisted, trying his best to get a look at his butt in the reflection. Did it really look bigger? It was just the cut of the pants, surely? He undid his belt and lowered the pants to the floor. He pulled the waistband of his underwear down too, but just enough to cup the glutes. There, he tapped and jiggled his butt cheeks as best he could. Did they move like that before, with that odd squishiness? Having never struggled with weight gain before, Jed found his heart was racing, even as he pulled his pants back up and buckled his belt again. He had to agree completely with Shelly: Danny really was just a jerk, making him feel self-conscious like this.

Jed noticed the fit of his clothes a lot more over the coming weeks. It made him irritable at work to feel his pants pinching him around his hips. He looked around their small office, noticing for the first time that no one here was slim. Every person had at least a small belly on them; no doubt brought on by the endless amounts of cakes and cookies that were frequently brought in by everyone throughout the week. Jed began to think about how much different his life was here as well. Back home, he would have gone to play basketball with a few buddies a couple of times a week. Here, there was no one and no time for such luxuries. He rode the bus into work, sat all day at his desk and then retreated back to his dingy bedroom, usually picking up some take out to avoid having to spend any time with his questionable housemates downstairs.

“Do you think…” Jed began, deciding to broach the subject with Shelly after a few weeks of keeping it to himself. “Do you think I’ve gained a few pounds since we’ve been together?” He rubbed his middle, where he’d noticed earlier that week that one of the buttons in particular had been looking a little stretched.

“Have you been talking to Danny?” Shelly asked suspiciously.

“Not recently,” he replied “Why would you ask that? Has Danny said something?”

Shelly shrugged. “He just likes to… You know what he’s like!”

“What’s he been saying?” Jed demanded, flushing a little red with annoyance.

“He just… said a couple of times that you’re getting a little chubby,” Shelly finally admitted. “It’s fine though! You’re still handsome. You’ve been stressed at work. And I’m sure you’ll lose it when the summer comes.”

“Chubby?” Jed repeated back to himself. Where the hell did Danny get off talking about him like that behind his back? “You don’t think I’m chubby, do you?”

Shelly paused for a second, as if she didn’t know how to break it to him. That was when Jed felt it: a sudden kick in his dick, like it had just bolted upright. Shelly thought he was getting chubby too? “You think I’m getting fat?” he asked, wondering why his heart was beating so fast and why his voice had suddenly become so breathy?

“Maybe. Just a little,” Shelly finally nodded, turning back to the TV screen and leaving Jed to wonder why he had suddenly become so aroused.

Despite being off all day, Shelly had fallen asleep early that night, leaving Jed to listen to music with his headphones, lying next to her in bed. He felt like he needed to masturbate, but he knew that if Shelly woke up and saw him, she would not approve. His dick felt so hard and a sneaky trip to the bathroom was the only hope he had of getting any sleep that night. So, pulling on his t-shirt, he crept out of the room, sighing as he heard someone moving about inside the shared bathroom. Suddenly, the door unlocked and flew open, with a large-bellied young guy standing at the door shyly. He smiled, then trotted back down the stairs and disappeared into Danny’s room on the first floor.

Jed looked on in confusion. Shelly had told him that they were to stay upstairs that night because Danny had a date coming over. But, that guy… he surely wasn’t Danny’s date? He was too large and doughy; holding just as much blubber on his unconditioned rear as he did on that oversized gut of his.

Shamelessly, Jed grabbed his empty glass and crept down the stairs, pretending to need a drink. He glanced through into the kitchen, amazed at the mess in there: empty plates and bowls, packaging and pizza boxes. None of it looked like the sort of stuff Danny regularly ate.

His interest piqued, Jed crept over to Danny’s door, placing his ear as close as he could to the wood.

“Ready for the next slice?” asked Danny’s deep voice from inside the room.

Jed heard a mumble of agreement. “Yes, Sir,” came the response from the large guy who had just disappeared inside.

“Good!” Danny shot back. “Piggy is going to get nice and fat for me tonight!”

Jed couldn’t make out what the guy said in reply. His voice unintelligible, moaning softly, making Jed wonder what pleasurable things Danny was doing to him inside. Stood stealthily outside Danny’s room, Jed looked down to see his hand firmly clamped around his own dick, listening to the sounds of the two kinky men inside.

“Ooo! That’s it!” Danny swooned. “A nice BIG bite! There’s a good piggy. We’re going to make those buttons pop later!”

Jed removed his hand the moment he felt he’d gone too far. His dick was bubbling and writhing as if unable to be controlled. He tried to stuff it back into his underwear, but as he heard Danny’s date oink like pig, he felt his dick erupt and a lake of sticky warmth spreading in his crotch. Somehow, perhaps it was the fact that he didn’t want to come, Jed’s situation was playing to a naughty streak within him, stood outside, listening in like this; only making the orgasm more intense. Even as he tried to coordinate his legs to get himself back upstairs as fast as possible, he could still feel himself coming; only finally starting to calm down as he made it back behind the locked door of the bathroom; amazed at the sudden mess he’d made in his underwear.

Jed felt his cheeks flush a little red as Danny came through to the kitchen the next morning. Never before had he done something so voyeuristic as to masturbate like that outside someone’s door. With his girlfriend asleep upstairs, it had been completely shameful of him.

“Morning,” smiled an oblivious Danny.

“Shelly told me you had a date last night?” Jed asked innocently, hoping some small talk would ease him through the interaction. “How did it go?”

Danny smirked to himself. “It was… very productive,” he chuckled to himself.

“You think you’ll see him again?” Jed went on, stirring a cup of coffee for himself.

“Probably not. He doesn’t live around here,” Danny sighed with obvious disappointment. He suddenly looked around the kitchen, startled. “Did you clean up in here?” he asked.

Jed nodded. The guilt had been like a knot in his stomach from 5am that morning. Cleaning the kitchen after Danny’s date had seemed like the least he could do. “It’s no big deal,” he shrugged.

“Yes, it is!” Danny smiled. “I set my alarm early to get this place sorted before everyone woke up. We made one hell of a mess last night!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jed insisted, trying to walk away. “It really didn’t take me that long,” he lied.

“Let me pay you back!” Danny blasted, trying to keep Jed there. He checked his watch. “Lazy Shelly won’t be awake for at least another two hours. Let me make you breakfast!”

“There’s no need!” Jed tried, feeling his heart suddenly racing at the idea of being cooked for by Danny; especially after seeing the remains of all the wickedly fattening things he’d cleaned up from the date last night.

“I insist!” Danny stated with an uncompromising certainty. “Sit your butt down. You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted my cooking!”

Jed wished that he could have controlled his boner. He tried to breathe deeply as he felt it throb once the sound of sizzling from the frying bacon reached his ears. The smells too were a sensory overload. Somehow, the fact that he couldn’t see what Danny was doing in there made the experience all the more surreal. Somehow, in a series of strange and unforeseen circumstances, he had learned in the last twelve hours that Danny was an actual, real-life feeder. And there he was, right now, cooking up a delicious breakfast for him. What had been the chances of finding another fat lover in this small house? It was so bizarre, considering how he and Shelly had actually met on a dating website devoted to feederism kinks.

“How does it taste?” Danny asked, simply watching as Jed sat, with a large tray of food on his lap. “Good?”

Jed nodded in approval. “There’s just so much of it!”

Danny simply chuckled. “Well, I wanted you to know how grateful I am,”

“I don’t think I can eat it all though,” Jed admitted, inhaling for a second and holding the top of his stomach.

“Sure you can,” Danny coaxed him. “Just one bite at a time. That’s all it takes.”

By the time Shelly finally woke up over an hour later, Jed somehow felt even guiltier than he had before. He had eaten Danny’s entire breakfast and the thrill it had given him to do so was gnawing away at his conscience even now.

“Let’s go out today!” he insisted. “Anywhere you want!”

Shelly sighed grumpily. She really wasn’t a morning person.

Jed had never thought of himself as someone who buried his head in the sand, but his current strategy for dealing with his situation sought to prove him wrong. He didn’t have to accept that he was gaining weight if he didn’t acknowledge it in any way. He wasn’t about to rush out for a gym subscription, or somehow find the time to start jogging around the daunting streets of his neighbourhood. His relationship with Shelly wasn’t quite how he had pictured it in his head. She was beautiful, yes, but she didn’t have any of the qualities or interests that Jed had moved over one thousand miles across the country to be with. Then there was Danny; the biggest conundrum of them all. What was it about that guy that intrigued Jed so much? Why did he feel the compulsion to get up earlier on a Saturday and Sunday morning to have breakfast with him while Shelly slept in?

Hamster cheeks; that was what Jed could see he had now. He studied his face in the mirror, wondering why he hadn’t noticed until that day. Most of the little changes to his form he could hide by wearing something baggy, and sweatpants had become his new best friend after work. But those cheeks were not going to be so easy to conceal. His dad had not been especially complimentary the last time he headed home and struggled to keep up with him during an impromptu jog around the block. The city had made him lazy, his dad had claimed; so much fast food and convenience right there on the doorstep. But , somehow, Jed got the strange feeling that people weren’t as surprised as they might have been to see him carrying a few extra pounds. They had all seen the pictures of him with Shelly and had witnessed for themselves what Jed really appreciated in a girl: the curves, the blubber, the fat. It was like Danny had said, dating someone so big was bound to have an effect on his waistline. It was as if he had been playing with fire all along. So, why did the thought of sliding into weight gain feel so arousing to him?

For the first time, Jed found that he was grateful he hadn’t saved up enough cash to get a nicer place for himself and Shelly yet. He stood in his bedroom mirror, sighing with relief as he undid his pants and then took a few minutes to study the marks his clothes had made on his body. The creeping softness as it spread across his physique never failed to arouse him and he grabbed his dick as he surveyed the changes. He’d started to develop such a little pot belly in recent weeks. He sucked it in and pushed it out with a feverish lust for his own reflection. He could feel the build up of mass on his love handles and sensed the tightness of his underwear as his glutes swelled with each passing day. It was one thing to admire Shelly’s curves and blubber; yet it was something entirely new to feel it beginning to happen to himself. His own choices had done this to him: the career path, the takeouts, the lazy weekends with Shelly, the breakfasts with Danny. Was this his life now? Had he really lost the battle of the bulge? Was this the start of him turning into nothing more than a fat guy?

“Why don’t you start thinking about getting a gym subscription or something?” Shelly asked, clearly trying to be diplomatic, despite her tone of irritation.

“Because we’re trying to budget,” Jed explained. “You know what apartments go for in this city. We want to live together, don’t we?” he asked, squeezing the fat girl tightly.

“Yeah, but, I’ll be the one who is stuck having to look at your belly every day,” Shelly grumbled. “Why can’t you just tone up, like you used to be when we met?”

“I didn’t know that it bothered you so much,” Jed lied, feeling like his bubble had been burst. He’d pretended not to pick up on Shelly’s subtle hints about his weight for a good couple of months, thinking that he could ignore them entirely. Shelly’s failure to confront him about how chubby he was getting had allowed him to start to imagine a future where he didn’t have to worry about being slim anymore. How hot would it be to live with a fat girl and actually be fat himself too? As he masturbated, alone in his bedroom across town each weeknight, he’d began to fantasise about it, rubbing his newly rounded pot gut.

What would she say now if he told her he wanted to keep it? That he found it arousing to express his fat kinks on his own body, given that Shelly had decided against letting him feed her? That his love of fat was not something he could quash and dismiss like he had hoped.

“I’ll try my best to get back to my old weight,” he promised instead, deciding to be a good boyfriend after all.

Gone were the takeouts and oversized weekend breakfasts. Shelly’s impatience with Jed’s weight had forced him to take a very hard look at himself. The evidence of all that bad food was now written all over his thicker stomach and bubble butt. He could see it in his thighs and love handles, arms and chin. It had crept onto every part of him, softening his athletic physique and expanding below his skin, altering his looks with fifty pounds of pure fat. It was arousing to think of how effortless it had been to get chubby, and yet, incredibly frustrating to see how hard it was to lose.

“Which gym is it you use?” Jed asked Danny, finally deciding that dieting alone was never going to give him the results he needed to please Shelly like he desperately wanted to.

“Is Shelly still giving you a hard time?” Danny responded with a sigh. He’d resented the fact that they couldn’t have breakfast together at the weekend and had told Jed there and then that he thought he was a fool to let Shelly boss him around. “Tell her to stick it. She doesn’t exactly have a leg to stand on, complaining about someone else’s weight!” he grumbled, repeating what had become his own personal mantra of late.

Jed sighed, but he knew he couldn’t allow himself to think that way. Just because Shelly was a big girl, it didn’t disqualify her from having a right to a preference about Jed’s body.

“You can come with me to my gym later,” Danny finally relented, as if finally able to see Jed’s predicament. “I have a free pass that I’ve never used. If you really want to lose a few pounds… I guess I could try and help you with that. Not that Shelly deserves all this effort you’re putting in,” he added sharply. There really was nothing Danny seemed to like about the girl who had captured Jed’s heart all those long months ago.

The sweat was pouring down Jed’s face as he slouched on the changing room bench. He felt disgusting, with his t-shirt clinging to his enlarged form and he began taking down at least a pint of water as fast as he could. “That was awful!” he complained.

“You’re the one who said you wanted me to push you hard,” Danny chuckled wickedly.

“I’m not going to be able to move tomorrow,” Jed grumbled, already feeling his muscles aching. He’d been surprised at how fit Danny actually was. Even in the time Jed had known him, the guy had packed on a lot of muscle, making Jed feel a little strange as they walked into the gym together, looking so contrasting. “I bet this is a great place for you to pick up guys,”Jed commented as he saw Danny taking off his shirt, ready to take a quick shower. He’d noticed all the looks Danny was getting, and rightly so; the guy was sculpting his body to perfection.

Danny laughed and shook his head. “No. The gym is not really the place to find the types of guys I’m into.” He looked at Jed with a wicked pleasure. “Let’s just say, you and I aren’t as different as you think…” he teased.

Perhaps Danny thought he was being coy, but Jed knew exactly what he meant. How he wished in that moment that he could confess his desires to Danny to grow fatter, just like those guys Danny loved to date. To enjoy the blubber and to think of none of the other expectations upon him. The freedom from the endless pressures to be a certain way in life. It was the reason he had moved here in the first place and what he thought he could have achieved with Shelly. The frustration of his circumstances built like a pressure in his head and in the whole time Danny was showering, he simply sat to the side, trying not to watch and give into the attraction he felt for his friend. He needed to tell someone how he was feeling: about Shelly, about his body, about his hatred of being asked to lose weight like this. He pictured saying those words to Danny: ‘I want to get fat.’ He imagined the guy’s surprise and hopefully, his eventual understanding. After all, like Danny had said, they really weren’t that different from each other.

“Same time tomorrow?” Danny asked as they both left the building that evening.

“Sure thing,” Jed replied with a sigh.

People thought they were being kind, lavishly throwing their compliments at Jed as the first couple of pounds began to melt away. It made Jed feel flat; like his final opportunity to explore his love of weight gain had been taken from him forever. Despite everything Shelly had said and promised him before he moved over here, she had never had any intention of exploring Jed’s infatuation with her fat body. She didn’t like the belly rubs he wanted to give her and despised how horny he became whenever she looked her most blubbery.

Despite his resolve to lose weight, Jed had become obsessed with the pictures he had collected of himself at his biggest. The evidence of his gain was so obvious in his face as he posed with Shelly on their days out, and he stared in awe at how wide and thick his butt seemed in some of the shots Shelly had taken of him. He got hard, thinking about what people must be saying about him back home as they perused these very pictures on his social media. ‘Have you seen how fat Jed’s got since he moved away?’ he imagined them asking each other; then gasping with shock as the photos were shown to them. The truth was that Jed had loved how nicely the fat had packed onto his once athletic physique. He adored how the fat had swollen up his butt cheeks, making them squishy and plump; how his love handles had bulged outwards and destroyed the strong V-shape of his broad back. His belly too had been completely perfect: solid and round looking beneath his chest, even as the fat had started to take away the muscular look of his arms and legs. He’d become the sort of man ten years older than himself, with three demanding teenage kids and no time for exercise: the dad-bod shape that had slowly started to fascinate him.

There were so many sites online dedicated to the appreciation of a swelling man’s form. Jed had begun to study them all, finding guys who had taken the plunge for real; letting their bodies grow as they really wanted them to. Jed could see those guys who had once had similar builds to himself and he looked on with fascination, scrolling through their pictures and seeing exactly how they had grown. He could picture himself in those shots; gain an understanding of exactly how he would grow if he just kept on eating: how many more pounds until his chest started to swell and the rolls of fat began to form on his back. His resolve faded, despite his promises. He convinced himself that a couple of weekend workouts with Danny would be enough for him to continue dropping the pounds.That he could maintain his workplace snacks and late night take outs and not suffer the consequences. But, with an absolute inevitability and erotic thrill, Jed soon felt the familiar tightening of his clothes once more.

Jed remembered it clearly, a boring Wednesday evening in the middle of winter, when he had been exploring his interests in weight gain online: another new site, full of fat men and their admirers; packed with sexually charged exchanges and erotic recounts of their exploits. How many of these guys lived in this city? Jed thought to himself, searching through the profiles. His eyes bulged, seeing the familiar face and muscular body of a man he knew very well. So this was where Danny met all his lovers, Jed realised; his heart beating furiously as he clicked onto the profile.

Danny’s eye watering number of followers was testament to how well he kept his profile. As Jed scrolled through the pictures, he could see just how much Danny had sculpted his body into the sexy muscular physique he had today; so contrasting to the enormously overweight guys he occasionally pictured himself shirtless with. Jed was already hard as he continued through the profile, checking out Danny’s status updates over time. Then his jaw dropped as he found himself so obviously the subject of one of the updates:

‘I was so hard walking into the gym with my housemate’s boyfriend tonight. Three words, guys: FATTER THAN EVER!”

Jed could hardly believe it as he read more and more posts. It was as if Danny had been documenting the entire process of Jed’s gains for his many eager followers. There were pictures too; never identifiable ones; usually taken from behind as Jed had no idea.

“Look at this fat ass! I don’t think he even realises how insanely tight his clothes are getting. I can’t even begin to describe just how much I want to fatten this guy up,” Danny had posted longingly.

Jed couldn’t look anymore. He felt himself coming even as he tried to calm himself down and click off the page. His penis boiled over like a volcano, the orgasm strained and full of guilt. Jed clicked off the site, deleting his profile and vowing that he would never again return.

“Only 3 sets?” Jed laughed, seeing that Danny was already packing up his stuff at the gym and finishing at least twenty minutes earlier than Jed had anticipated; leaving tonight with barely a sweat on him.

“I’ve got a date this evening. He’s coming over to the house at eight” Danny explained, checking his cell phone once more. “I want to head to the supermarket first and get supplies in.”

Jed’s imagination sparked into life. Danny was having another date and he needed to pick up food supplies? Surely that could only have one incredibly kinky outcome. “I’ll come with you; help you carry the stuff home,” he offered kindly. “Shelly started streaming another dreadful reality show this week, so it’s better than having to go back and put up with that.

Danny nodded, accepting the company. “Just… don’t judge me, okay?” he cautioned without explaining what he was even referring to.

The shopping cart was loaded within a surprisingly short amount of time. Danny seemed pumped and enthused in a way that Jed had never seen him before; enjoying the dopamine of a spending spree. “Another cheesecake?” Jed laughed. “Do you really need that?”

Danny grinned. “I might… You don’t know the types of guys I like to arrange dates with. They’ve got to have a good appetite or I’m not interested.”

“So, you expect him to eat all of this?” Jed laughed, trying to hide his arousal at Danny’s wild expectations.

“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t get a kick out of seeing Shelly taking all this down!” Danny laughed. “I told you, you and I are one in the same.”

Jed had the sudden realisation that the prospect of feeding Shelly hadn’t crossed his mind in a long time and, now he really thought about it, the idea didn’t arouse him as much as it would have done, once upon a time. He followed Danny around the supermarket like an eager student, desperate to learn; then helped carry it all back to the house.

“What’s the blender for?” Jed asked, captivated by watching Danny prepare as soon as they got home.

“My special recipe!” Danny enthused, beginning to throw in a whole carton of whipping cream. “It’s basically pure fat and sugar. I try and make it taste good for them…” he explained, throwing in some chocolate sauce and vanilla powder, “...but, really, I’m not so bothered about that. It’s the calories I want; a massive overdose of them in one incredibly sexy shot!”

Jed’s dick was hardening as the blender roared on, mixing those carefully chosen, and highly fattening ingredients, into an innocently disguised chocolate shake. It was thick and oozy, pouring perfectly to the brim of a large flask without wasting any of it. “So, your date is going to drink that tonight?” Jed asked, his heart beating with excitement at the idea.

“I hope so,” Danny nodded. “He’s three hundred and ten pounds, but quite short, so his belly is pretty big! He claims he wants to be fattened up to four hundred. But, you know, sometimes they just tell you what you want to hear,” Danny shrugged, looking at Jed as if he understood exactly how his and Shelly’s brief foray into feederism had gone down.

Jed couldn’t settle upstairs, knowing that Danny was having his date just below him. Shelly had chosen a movie with the simplest, dumbest plotline, and yet, even that he was finding hard to follow. “Don’t go downstairs,” Shelly warned as Jed grabbed his empty glass. “Danny’s on a date, remember. Trust me, you don’t want to disturb them! Who knows what you could walk in on.”

Jed protested how thirsty he was, refusing to get water from the bathroom and insisting that he wanted one of his beers, given that it was Saturday night. He crept down, pushing his hardness up so that it was held down by the tight waistband of his pants. He hadn’t known what to expect; how kinky it would be once Danny got his hands on another fat boy. However, the sight that greeted him was fairly tame. Danny sat himself into the corner of the couch, with his date resting slightly against his strapping chest. His arm was draped over the fat guy’s shoulder, while his other hand gently rubbed the man’s admittedly very nicely developed gut.

“Sorry to disturb you…” Jed whispered as he crept into the kitchen and pulled out his pack of beers.

“It’s fine,” Danny replied, sounding bored as a movie played on the TV in front of them.

“Do you guys want anything while I’m in here?” he asked, trying to be helpful. “Some snacks, cheesecake, beers?” he listed, realising how much he wanted to see the feeding in action.

“I think you’re okay,” Danny replied. “We’re taking it slow…” he added, with a slight hint of irritation in his voice.

Running out of excuses to hover around, Jed took himself back upstairs. Shelly fell asleep straight after the movie, leaving Jed still wide awake, sat up reading his book and listening out for the sounds from downstairs. It wasn’t late when Jed heard Danny saying goodnight to his date and closing the door behind him.

Midnight ticked by and the curiosity in Jed’s mind was becoming unbearable. How much had Danny stuffed into his date? Had the guy left with an even larger, aching gut, barely able to waddle back to his car? How sexy that must be! He crept downstairs once more, into the silent darkness and noted with surprise how clean and tidy the kitchen was. Danny had plated everything up, taking over the refrigerator with the copious amounts that remained. How disappointing! Danny thought to himself, looking at it all. Shelly was going to hit the roof when she saw it; all that food, and no space for anyone else’s things. It was exactly the sort of thoughtlessness she loved to complain about in Danny. Jed wondered if he could rearrange it a little to make it all fit better, and avoid the drama of Shelly’s inevitable outburst. Some plates of things he could combine. The cheesecake looked great and would fit on the plate with the pastries if he cut a little off for himself.

Jed moaned as the creamy goodness melted onto his tongue. Somehow, it tasted so much better, knowing the Danny had picked it. That little slice had probably added more calories that he’d burnt going to the gym that afternoon, he realised with a chuckle. That’s why Danny had spent time studying the nutritional information on the back of the box, looking to find the most fattening one in the store. He felt his hardness throb at the memory of that; realising that he could probably fit a little more on that plate if he took another slice.

Maybe it was the six beers he’d quickly consumed up in Shelly’s bedroom that had knocked his self control, but as soon as that second slice of cheesecake hit his tongue, Jed felt a surge of sexual energy rip through his body. He picked up the pastries, one in each hand and bit into them with a feverish lust for consuming. The other plates came out and, overwhelmed by his own seemingly bottomless capacity, Jed began clearing them one by one. Everything he had told himself about needing to lose weight for Shelly was being slowly eroded. He never imagined that he could eat like this; his dick aching for those little strokes he gave it between each new item.

Jed could feel the sticky cream and grease smeared around his face. His stomach had bloated up, even larger than he had ever seen it before. Yet there, in the side of the refrigerator, completely untouched was the massive calorie shake he had seen Danny mix up earlier. He couldn’t, could he? It hadn’t been made for him. But his hand was already reaching for it, unscrewing the lid and turning it up to meet his lips. It felt thick as it hit his tongue and took a surprising amount of effort to swallow. But that was where the true eroticism seemed to emanate from: he had to want to swallow it down; to let the calories flood his body and fatten him. It was a choice he was making, to grow fatter and allow his love of blubber overwhelm him. He moaned quietly into the empty, upturned flask as he came inside his underwear one again.

Jed hadn’t worn his sweatpants in a little while. But he’d woken at 6am that Sunday morning, still feeling incredibly bloated and full from his stuffing only a few short hours before. Although a little less stretched, his tummy was round and hard. He threw on his largest t-shirt to try and conceal it. What had he done last night? It was by far the dumbest stunt of his life so far. How was he going to explain the sudden disappearance of all that food?

Jed got himself up and tiptoed downstairs, wondering how much of a mess he had made in the kitchen. He remembered trying to clean up, but all the beer, sugar and calories dominating his system had more than likely hindered the job. He was right. Crumbs and blobs of cheesecake covered the kitchen floor and counter. Chocolatey fingerprints smeared the front of the refrigerator, like some horrific crime scene. Plates were discarded in the sink and it was those Jed set about clearing up first. As the water ran, he didn’t hear the footsteps of Danny creeping up on him.

“I thought I cleaned this place last night?” Danny asked, dressed in only his underwear and rubbing his eyes sleepily. He opened the refrigerator, upon seeing the finger marks and raised his eyebrows in surprise. He looked over at Jed, seeing the empty flask that had once contained his fattening shake, almost washed clean and half immersed in the water. Jed had been caught red handed. “Well, well, well…” he smirked. “So that was you I heard rummaging around in here last night?”

A spark of panic ignited in Jed’s eyes. “Please don’t tell Shelly!” he blasted. It didn’t even occur to him to play it cool or blame someone else. “I’m supposed to be losing weight and… I don’t know… I don’t know why I did it!”

“There’s absolutely nothing left!” Jed laughed, taking another look in the fridge. “You’ve eaten every last bit!”

Jed blushed and turned, scrubbing the plates as if he could erase his mistakes just as easily as those grease marks and smears.

“Don’t panic. I won’t tell Shelly,” Danny’s calm voice stated behind him, seeming to sense his anxiety. He strutted over to lean on the counter beside Jed and tried to look him in his eyes. “But just tell me one thing,” he insisted. “Did you enjoy it? Eating like that?”

Jed didn’t look back at him. He always tried to avoid making eye-contact with Danny when he was half naked like this, but this time he tried for the briefest of seconds. “Yes,” he admitted guiltily.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jed saw the broadest smile fill Danny’s face. “Good man!” the guy nodded, giving Jed’s a little, friendly pat on his rear as he strolled back to his bedroom, leaving Jed to finish cleaning up his mess.

“I might go on the treadmill while you do your pull ups,” Jed mumbled, looking around the gym the next weekend. Despite his concerns, Danny had been remarkably unchanged with him; not once bringing up the embarrassing incident from the previous weekend on their way down there.

“No, just watch while I do this,” Danny replied, handing Jed his towel and beginning his routine. Even when he was pushing himself to his limit, Danny seemed able to hold a conversation; chatting away to Jed like this was all nothing to him.

Jed looked at his watch. They had been at the gym for forty minutes already and he had done absolutely nothing but chat to Danny that whole time. “I’d best get started on my treadmill cardio,” he chuckled, holding out Jed’s sweaty towel and rucksack for him to take back.

Danny looked down at the offering, not moving to take them. “You’re not going on the treadmill,” he stated with absolute certainty. “I’m just getting you out of the house so that Shelly doesn’t think you’re skipping the gym. You’re just going to hold my rucksack and towel and keep me company today.”

“Danny!” Jed whispered, almost in a panic as his friend wouldn’t take his stuff back, but went striding over to the next station. “I can’t do nothing the whole time we’re out!”

“You’re not doing ‘nothing’. Look! You’re doing a little bit of walking!” Danny teased as Jed followed him across the weights area. “Don’t argue with me,” he finally stated, turning to face Jed properly. “I’m your friend and I’m trying to help you. Just trust me!”

“But, Shelly…” Jed began.

“Fuck shelly!” Danny spat in frustration. “We’re doing this for you, not for her. Just be selfish for once in your life! You’ve made enough sacrifices for her. I’m not letting you make another one.” He took his stuff from Jed and threw the towel on the floor as he reached inside his bag, eventually pulling out a flask of protein shake and handing it to Jed.

“Is this what I think it is?” Jed asked, holding another huge helping of Danny’s special calorie shake.

“There’s another six of these back home too,” Danny nodded. “If you can get them down, they’ll give you exactly what you’re after.”

“And what’s that exactly?” Jed demanded.

Danny sighed and looked with the utmost sincerity at his friend. “Shelly is never going to let you enjoy this kink. I know she told you she was into it all when you were dating online, but she was just playing you. All she wanted was a handsome boyfriend with a good career. She simply told you what you wanted to hear! And now she’s got you living out a boring little existence; one that you never wanted.”

Jed frowned, wondering how Danny would even know all of this.

“But, this…” Danny implored, pushing the calorie shake even closer to Jed, “...is something you can do. It’s a pleasure that nobody can take it away from you. You just have to have the confidence to take it.”

Jed stared into the eyes of his friend offering him exactly what he had secretly desired for so long. That was when the realisation hit him and he knew with absolute certainty that everything he had ever known, was a complete lie.

Later that evening, Jed carried his heavy bag down the stairs, loaded with absolutely everything he had ever left in Shelly’s bedroom. Danny came out of his room, having already sensed what was going on from the raised voices as Jed and Shelly had argued upstairs.

“I ended things,” Jed said with a sigh.

“Look, I was being stupid before. I didn’t mean to make you doubt things and…”

“No, you were right,” Jed cut in. He gazed over Danny’s shoulder and laughed at how obvious it had been all along: the rows of books and LPs scattered on the bedside table, matching Jed’s tastes exactly. “You and Shelly never used to hate each other, did you?” he asked. “My guess is you were pretty good friends at one point. Good enough to help her find a guy who wouldn’t see her size as a problem?”

Danny looked on guiltily. “I swear, I thought you were just some catfish, or one of the usual flakes on those sites. I didn’t realise that guys like you even existed: genuine, honest, loyal men who were seeking a real connection. You’d message Shelly and she’d come to me, asking me to reply for her; making her sound more intelligent and into the same things that you were. She started boasting about you to her friends, and it was only when you told her you were falling in love with her that I realised we had gone too far. I’d made you believe that Shelly was an entirely different person. I stopped having anything to do with it. But then, there you were, moving your whole life to be with Shelly, just like that! I told her that she needed to tell you the truth and we… Well, we haven’t even spoken to each other since.”

Jed nodded. He appreciated Danny’s honesty, but he hadn’t needed any explanation. It had all clicked into place for him back at the gym. He’d spent a long time mourning the pen pal he had loved back before he moved here to be with Shelly. He so wished that she would become the fun, kinky, playful and funny person he had flirted with online. He’d hung on to their tired relationship for months because of it. Now that was over.

“Do you hate me?” Danny asked.

“No,” Jed replied straight away. “I could never… I just wish I had known, that’s all.” He started walking towards the front door but turned to look at Danny once more. “Was it special for you too? It wasn’t just in my head, was it? Those messages; there really was a genuine connection?”

Danny placed his hand over his heart as if to swear to his honesty. “I’ve never felt anything like it!” he nodded. “You were… you ARE the most incredible man I’ve ever met.”

Jed felt a wave of relief and gratitude wash over him. He dropped his bag and stepped closer to Danny; so close that he could feel Danny’s breath on his face. “Prove it,” he demanded.

Danny brought his fingers towards Jed’s, and the pair gazed into each other’s eyes. Then, both together, their eyes closed and they leaned in for that first, perfect kiss.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that!” Danny sighed as their lips parted once more. He went in for another kiss, but Jed stopped him.

“Not here,” Jed whispered, gazing up at the ceiling towards Shelly’s bedroom. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

“No, you’re right,” Danny agreed, stepping back. “But, what now?”

“Now we… take a little time, explore things; see where this is going,” Jed considered, picking up his bag once more and flashing one of the open pockets to reveal Danny’s six flasks of calorie shakes, already packed and ready to go. “You’ll have to swing by my place and collect these at some point soon,” he smiled cheekily.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Danny nodded back keenly, finally watching Jed leave the house for the last time.

Jed had taken a little longer than he anticipated before he was ready to get in touch with Danny. Now that he wasn’t saving for a dream apartment with Shelly, he’d decided that his current living arrangements could be improved, finding a tiny one bedroom place that he could easily afford to take on. It had been hard to get into the right headspace, leaving that whole imagined future he had mapped out with Shelly and swapping it for something new. Danny seemed to understand that, but when he finally came over to see the new place, he seemed awkward and shy, like their kiss hadn’t ever happened.

“I really thought you might quit your job and head back home now you’re single,” Danny rambled, taking in how nice and settled Jed seemed in his new apartment.

“No way,” Jed chuckled. “I have too much to lose by leaving, and a lot to gain,” he grinned, slapping his little gut upon the pun.

“I certainly noticed that your tummy’s looking a little thicker,” Danny threw back, seemingly relieved that the conversation could move forward onto a subject they were both equally passionate about.

“Thanks,” Jed smiled, still rubbing the curve of his belly. “I think I have a bit of a skill for gaining weight. It’s such a satisfying feeling when your clothes are getting tighter. A couple of the girls in work have been rather flirty since they found out I’m single again. It’s the last thing I need right now, so kick-starting a properly fat gut was a priority for me. Plus, I really wanted to impress you when you came over.”

“Well, consider me impressed!” Danny marvelled, stepping closer. “May I?” he asked, with his hand out ready to feel the shape of Jed’s protrusive belly.

“Be my guest,” Jed nodded keenly, raising his arms a little to give the handsome man easier access.

It was hard to describe how pleasurable it felt to have Danny’s large, warm, appreciative hand sliding over the curve of Jed’s larger belly. His fingers were experts at finding the softness and detecting where the freshest fat had placed itself. It was as if they had known Jed’s body their whole life and were marvelling in even the finer details of his transformation.

Jed lifted his shirt up to allow Danny’s fingers to touch his bare skin underneath the shirt and, from the deep moan of delight the guy let out, Jed could tell that Danny was getting just as aroused as he was. When Jed took off his shirt completely, their open, horny mouths fell into each other and, for the first time, Jed’s own hands began to explore Danny’s muscular physique that was now so much different to his own.

“You’re getting so fat!” Danny whispered between kisses. “You’re even getting proper tits!” he exclaimed, sliding his fingertips over the increasingly pointed nipples.

Jed wondered how every single word that came out of Danny’s mouth was so supercharged with eroticism. The way his hands felt up his body, it was like he was being touched for the first time. He’d never imagined his bizarre sexual fantasies, that he had tried to suppress for so long, being catered for with such perfection. It was no surprise that when Danny’s roaming hand found its way to his crotch, his hardness was like concrete.

The pair pulled away, breathless with lust, but knowing that they couldn’t rush straight into the bedroom. They had only just been reacquainted and this was, after all, still very new to them both. Danny tried to shake it off, walking over to the kitchen and opening the refrigerator door out of curiosity and a need to keep himself busy. However, the sight that greeted him made him laugh out loud. “Shit! No wonder you’re getting so fat!” he shouted, picking up a box of cream cakes and suspiciously thick homemade milkshakes in the same flasks he had taken from Danny the last time he had seen him..

“If you want to be a fat guy, you have to eat like one,” Jed stated with absolute certainty. The more fat he had gained and the higher he had witnessed the scales climbing up and up, the more confident he was that he needed to be very large indeed.

“Let’s drink to that!” Danny smiled, swinging the refrigerator door closed whilst holding two large flasks of gainer shake, ready to pour them both down Jed’s throat for the first time.

“I think my mom likes you more than she does me,” Jed joked as the pair of them drove back to the hotel, midway through their weekend in Jed’s hometown. Two years had gone by since they’d got together and Jed couldn’t even imagine being happier. “If it weren’t for how fat you’re making me, I think she would be signing the adoption papers right now!”

Danny grinned and took one hand off the steering wheel to pat the enormous, proud gut that protruded from Jed’s torso. Maybe it was the extreme stuffings or how consistently Jed had been overdosed on calories every single day since they made it official, but the man had fattened up like a dream. At well over four hundred pounds, there wasn’t a single part of his body that had been spared from the transformation; even with his great height. It drove them both wild how much the lard had taken over now; how it sat on his body and jiggled when he walked. “I don’t think your family realise that I’m going to have you over five hundred by the time we get married.”

“Five hundred, huh?” Jed grinned. “I thought we both said we’d try and set four-fifty as the limit?” he asked with a wry smile.

“I think we were both a little naive if we thought we’d be able to stop there, don’t you?” Danny stated with complete seriousness.

Jed’s hardness pulsed, just like it always did with the way Danny described the inevitability of his situation. His feeder had been there every step of the way: letting out his pants, training up his capacity and indulging him in the most erotic ways imaginable. Tomorrow they were going to be meeting up with a few of Jed’s old high school buddies and even the thought of that would be enough to make him power his way through the mountains of food back in their room later tonight. It was the way Danny was so unafraid to enjoy his body, no matter who was around them: the rubs across his belly, the hand sliding across his big, broad butt. There wasn’t a soul alive who couldn’t recognise that Jed had asked a feeder to marry him; with all the blubbery consequences that delivered for his once athletic body. It was strange, yes; but everyone could see how well they bounced off each other; how Jed’s sense of humour was matched so wickedly with Danny’s, as well as their passions and values.

As Jed had wandered into his old bedroom back at his mom’s place that afternoon, he tried to imagine the man he had once been, first dipping his hand into his interests by messaging Shelly and falling so erroneously in love with her. He remembered how hard he had come, looking at all that blubber on her body; blubber that now draped across his own overfed and overindulged physique. What would his old self say if he saw him now? That guy who had not yet unlocked the key to where his love of fat truly lay. They’d found a drawer full of Jed’s old clothes, amusing and arousing them both in equal measure with how ridiculous it was now to imagine such an obese man wearing them. No doubt Danny would squeeze him into that tiny shirt later and use how horny it made him to pump Jed full to the brim with calories that would make yet another pair of work pants too tight. However hard the guy had been at making him work out in the gym was nothing compared to how uncompromisingly he pushed those calories onto him.

“Are you ready?” Danny asked as they pulled up in the car park, spinning to unclip his seat belt and then Jed’s too; lifting it up and over the man’s large stomach. “We want you looking nice and big for everyone tomorrow. You know how horny it makes me showing you off to everyone in your hometown.”

As if on cue, Jed’s stomach gave a rumble. Neither of them chuckled at the perfect timing of it. They only smiled and leaned in for yet another loving kiss.

“Let’s grow this belly!” Jed smiled, ready to impress the person he knew he had always truly been meant to be with.

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cosmicpearlz · 1 year

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i heart you

summary: you’re boyfriend surprising you with a valentines day date.

pairing: ajax petropolus x reader

……………………………………………………………………………

valentine’s day was one of your favorite holidays. your friends, boyfriend and hell even the other students at nevermore knew about your love for love. which made ajax’s situation more nerve racking. he wanted to surprise you with the best date because you told him you’ve never had a valentine.

“so y/n, what are you and ajax doing for valentine’s day?” enid breaks her concentration on painting your nails to look up at you. you shrugged giving her a slight frown.

“i dunno. he- uh didn’t ask me to be his valentine. so, i’m assuming we’re not doing anything.”

“what? what’d you mean not doing anything? you love valentine’s day!”

“yeah, i know! which is why i thought this year was going to be different since i finally have a boyfriend. seems like it might be the same as it was every year.”

“i’m sure he’ll come around.”

“i hope so.”

ajax did not come around to asking you. at all. you had sat and watched everyone get asked out for dates the whole week but nothing from your boyfriend. you felt even worse because he acted like nothing was wrong.

“hey baby, i’m going to hangout with xavier. i’ll be back a little later.”

“sure whatever,” you rolled your eyes at the boy.

“are you okay?” with a deep sigh, you nodded gazing into his eyes.

“i’m fine. go ahead and have fun jax,” he places a kiss to your head and rushes off to god knows where.

ajax had xavier help him plan for the date. he needed it to be perfect because you deserved nothing less than that. they had exactly two days before valentine’s day to have everything in order.

“are you sure y/n will like this? what if i should get something different because you know-“ xavier places his hands on ajax’s shoulders to stop him from ranting.

“dude! stop it. y/n will like the necklace and will definitely like what we have planned for your date.”

“but are we one hundred percent sure?”

“chill out, everything is gonna be okay. it’s just your nerves. we’ll set the stuff up on tuesday.” ajax weakly nods at his friend, still feeling nervous about the surprise.

“xavier. do you think that maybe-“

“goodbye ajax!”

valentine’s day was finally here and still no word about the special not so special in your case day from your boyfriend. you even got him a gift that you weren’t so sure you wanted to give to him anymore. but that didn’t stop you from wearing your favorite dangling heart earrings that your mom gifted you awhile ago. today was going to be a good day either way.

“happy valentine’s day to you, you lovely human being,” enid runs from her spot and hugs you. you laughed hugging your friend back equally as hard.

“happy valentine’s day to you too enid! at least someone is enjoying their day.”

“he still didn’t ask you to be his valentine?” enid was totally in on the plan because ajax had texted her about everything the night before. it was hard to keep in the excitement she had for you but she didn’t want to ruin it.

“no! so much for a boyfriend.”

“don’t worry, we can have our own little thing. i’ll text you about it later,” she squeezed your arm before leaving, going her separate way.

for the rest of the day, you were sad seeing everyone else enjoy being in love. your classes felt slow and the day just felt like all the previous years of being a watcher and not a participator. but at least you’ll get to do something with friends then do nothing at all.

enid <3

hiya, get dressed and meet me in that wooded area with all the flowers!

you

okay, i’ll see you in a minute :)

you decided on a simple outfit which consisted of dark washed ripped jeans, a black shirt and a white and pink cardigan. you kept on your red heart earrings and switched your shoes to your black doc martins. you weren’t sure why enid wanted to meet in the woods but you learned early on to never question her anymore.

the walk was comfortable with a nice windy breeze. you stopped in your tracks, looking down at the flower petals that started leading the path. continuing to follow the pretty flowers, you found your boyfriend at the end of it.

“ajax?”

“hi baby, i- uh wanted to surprise you. first things first, will you be my valentine?” he pulls out a bouquet of flowers and a small teddy bear. you smiled at your boyfriend feeling better than you did earlier.

“took you long enough. of course i’ll be your valentine!” you throw your arms around him, bringing him into a hug. he chuckles and kisses your head.

“c’mon i have something for you.”

ajax takes your free hand and leads you further into the woods. you guys stopped at a picnic blanket decorated with pillows, food basket and more flower petals.

“baby! is all of this for me?”

“you deserve this and i wanted to make your first valentine’s day with an actual valentine special.” he sits down next to you and pulls out all the snacks.

“how did you have time to do all of this?”

“i got xavier to help set up and then i got enid to tell you to meet her here even though it was a lie.” you nodded and grabbed a chocolate covered strawberry, taking a bite of the delicious treat.

“aw, i didn’t know you planned this the whole time! i thought we weren’t gonna do anything at all.”

“what? babe, i knew you were excited about today. i just wanted to make sure everything was perfect.”

“what i know is that you’re perfect and this is amazing,” you grinned leaning over to kiss him.

“i wanted to give you something because you know, it’s valentine’s day! and you’re my valentine.” ajax shuffles around in the basket and pulls out a black box.

“what’s this? and i have something for you too but it’s in my room.”

“i can just get it later but open it and see for yourself.” you opened the box seeing a pretty heart locket with a snake on the front of it. both of your guys initials were engraved on the back of it.

“do you like it?”

“like it? jax, this is the best gift i’ve gotten. i love it!” you tackled him into a hug making the boy laugh while wrapping his arms around your waist.

“i wanted to give this to you because we’ve been together for a few months now and i wanted to show you how much i love you.”

“what’d you say?” you slowly pulled back to stare at him. ajax brings a hand up to caress your cheek with a smile.

“i said i love you. i love you so much.”

“i love you too baby.” this was the first time you guys had said those three words to each other. you knew that you were in love with him but was too scared to say it first. it was nice to know that the feeling was one hundred percent reciprocated.

“i love you, i love you, i love you,” his whisper fell on your lips before he kissed you gently.

“i’ve wait so long to hear those words come from you’re mouth. jax, this is truly the Valentine’s Day date ever! i love you so much.”

“this calls for a toast,” ajax places another kiss to lips and grabs two glass cups filled with sparkling cider. you smiled and took one of the cups from him.

“to us and our journey together.”

“to us and our journey together.” you both clinked your glasses together with wide grins.

#ajax petropolus x reader #georgie farmer #ajax petropolus fluff #ajax petropolus

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specialagentlokitty · 7 months

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Mr Evershed x daughter!reader - Christmas as a family

Hej, can you please write a Evershed x Daughter story? Mister Evershed learns that he has a daughter. She is also a student at Ackley Bridge. However, she refuses contact with Mr. Evershed because she doesn't want to destroy his happy family life. Christmas is coming soon and Mr. Evershed invited her over a few times. Without success. Maybe you can include the Winter Prompt Number 19. So he visits her to celebrate christmas. Thanks 😊 - Anon💜

19: “Shouldn’t you be with your family?” “They see me every year, I think it’s your turn to have somebody be with you on Christmas.”

When Mr Evershed opened the letter he received in the post it wasn’t what he was expecting at all, and he sat on his sofa in pure shock as he stared at it.

“What is it?” His wife asked.

He looked at her and back to the letter.

“Gaynor I have a teenage daughter..”

“What?!”

She sat next to him and he handed the letter over to her to read.

It was a legit letter, sent from a lawyer to him, and he didn’t know what to do.

Neither of them did, how would they? What where you supposed to do when you found something out like this?

Did he get in contact with the lawyer? Did he leave it and pretend he never got it?

He didn’t know, but the letter didn’t say much, just that they wanted to talk about the situation so after nearly a week he finally agreed.

And he went to the building where the meeting had been set up.

“If I’m being honest I wasn’t sure you were going to show up…” a woman said quietly.

He turned around and looked at her.

“Laura?” He asked shocked.

“Hey Martin…”

They sat down and the woman sighed.

“I’m sorry, I just saw you were in town and I thought you had a right to know about your daughter. When I found out it was too late, we’d graduated and you moved away..”

“I.. yeah.. to further my studies..”

Laura nodded.

“You want to know more, don’t you?”

“Please.”

“Her name is (Y/N), she’s a lovely girl, happy and friendly. I’ve told her as well, she knows. She’s a student at your school, it’s how I found out I saw your name at the bottom of a letter.”

He slowly nodded his head and they talked more about you.

After nearly an hour, he sighed.

“I’m sorry, I’m not saying you would lie but do you have any proof?” He asked.

“We can do a DNA test to confirm it, (Y/N) already asked for one to be done.”

He agreed and then it was the agonising wait for the test to come back.

When it did it confirmed it all, and he didn’t know what to do. Though he spoke to your mum about it, he hadn’t spoken to you.

So, he called you to his office so the pair of you could talk about it and you walked in.

“Yes sir?” You asked.

“I thought maybe we should talk..”

You looked at him, shaking your head.

“I don’t think we’ve got anything to talk about, if it’s not about school I’m not interested in talking about it.” You said.

“Oh.. I see..”

“I don’t want any contact with you, I don’t want to meet your family, I have my mum and that’s all I need.”

With that, you left.

And if he was being honest he felt a little defeated.

He had found out you were his daughter, and he was looking forward to getting to know you more, but you weren’t interested in that.

Every time he asked your mum to try arrange a day that the pair of you could meet up and do something, you declined.

And after weeks of trying he didn’t know what to do anymore.

“I don’t know what else to do Laura, I’ve tried, but (Y/N) wants nothing to do with me. I actually think she hates me.” He said.

“I’m sure she doesn’t, it may be hard for her.” Gaynor said.

Laura nodded her head.

“Exactly, I know (Y/N) doesn’t hate you. In fact you were her favourite teacher when you were teacher her English. It’s just hard for her, all her life it’s been us two.”

“Then what do I do? Because right now it feels like I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Laura sighed.

“Listen, you never heard this from me, but the truth is (Y/N) is worried about your family.”

“Us?” Gaynor asked.

Your mum nodded.

“She doesn’t want to break your family apart, so to her it’s easier to stay away from all of you.”

Your mum looked at her watch before getting up.

“I’m going to be late to work, but just keep trying.”

With that she left and Mr Evershed turned to his wife.

“Ask her over for Christmas, or Christmas Eve.” Gaynor said.

“You’d be okay with it?”

“She’s your daughter Martin, there’s only so long we can put this off. It’ll be nice to introduce the girls to her.”

Mr Evershed nodded his head.

So, the following Monday while he was wondering the hallways he spotted you at your locker and made his way over.

“Can I ask you something?”

You glanced at him but nodded.

“How would you feel about spending Christmas Eve with us at my house?”

“No.”

“Please I’m trying here (Y/N).”

You closed your locker and walked away from him.

He tried again a few days later, and again you turned his offer down.

He had gotten you presents, he knew some things you liked, and got you a few of them, and now he wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to give them to you.

The Christmas holidays had started, and he still hadn’t been able to reach you or talk to you.

But a conversation with your mum made an idea come into his head, and after running it by with his wife she agreed to was a good idea.

On Christmas Day, you woke up around lunch time, and wondered into the kitchen to find something to eat.

You knew your mum was at work, so you decided to make something to eat, and sit down watching some crappy Christmas films.

You glanced at the tree, two presents were under it, one from you to your mum and one from your mum to you.

It wasn’t much, but it was always enough for you.

There was a knock on your door, and you got up to answer it, seeing Mr Evershed in the other side and he smiled, holding up a few bags.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas I guess.”

You stepped aside to let him in.

“Mum isn’t in, she’ll be back tonight I think. She’s working.”

“I know, she told me.

“Shouldn’t you be with your family?” You asked.

Walking over to the coffee table, Mr Evershed set the bags down.

Then he turned around to look at you.

“They see me every year, I think it’s your turn to have somebody be with you on Christmas.”

You looked at him with a blank look and he sighed.

“Your mum told me she was going to be working, and she didn’t want to leave you alone on Christmas. I know for the past few years she hasn’t been able to be here, so I wanted to be here.”

“You got family you should be with.”

“And you are family, it’s why I hunted all around town for a pizza place still open, and I got you some presents.”

“What?”

He smiled, pulling a couple of wrapped presents out of a plastic bag.

“Yeah, I haven’t been part of your life I underhand, but I want to be. And Gaynor is alright with it, and the girls don’t know yet but when you’re ready we’ll tell them.”

You sat down on the sofa and he sighed.

“You don’t have to be scared about ruining my family (Y/N), they know that you’re my daughter, and that makes you family as well.”

He smiled at you.

“I don’t want you to be alone on Christmas, and neither does your mum, so whether you like it or not unfortunately you’re stuck with me for the rest of the night.”

He sat next to you, gesturing to the presents and you looked at them.

“Go on, they’re for you.”

You reached over and opened them, admiring the new books and games he had gotten you.

“These must have cost a bomb…”

“Not really, your mum helped me pick them out.”

You nodded.

“Well uh.. thanks..”

He smiled and you sat back to carry on watching your film, happily eating away at the pizza he brought.

It was quiet for a while until you spoke up.

“Mr Evershed?”

“Yeah?”

“I guess I wouldn’t mind getting to know you and your family.”

“We’ll sort it all at a later date, but I’m glad to hear it.”

And that was a start, it was what he wanted. Just a chance to get to know you, and be able to spend Christmas with you

#ackley bridge #ackley bridge imagine #ackley bridge x reader #ackley bridge x you #mr evershed #mr evershed x reader #mr evershed imagine #mr evershed x you

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landinrris · 13 hours

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You got me interested on the "Lando/Martin/Carlos fic" cause iits sound really intriguing

lol this is the one that is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures that will probably appeal to like three (3) people. But they do say write for yourself so... 🤷‍♀️

The idea behind this one involves Lando being glued to Carlos' side on race weekends and Martin's during off-weeks. Lando’s in a casual and open thing with Carlos (in which Carlos also has his girlfriends still), and in comes an escalated relationship with Martin. The best part of the arrangement is that it genuinely works because Lando doesn't want to choose and no one makes him. And then it escalates, naturally. The idea is to have deep feelings, a bit of Carlos assessing his own thoughts and feelings about himself, etc. Jury is still out on whether or not it actually ends in a throuple. I'd have to develop a more detailed outline first 😅

A little snippet from when Lando wins Miami (because it's the first scene I have that has all three of them more or less in it):

Ask me about my wips!

----

Lando loses it when he and Carlos finally get back to his hotel room later. After the celebratory dinner and parties with his team, after he’s thoroughly tired himself out.

They stumble back into their hotel room, the sky outside long darkened and on the way to getting lighter. He has too many different smells in his nose— champagne, perfume, cologne, sweat— yet the smell of everything mixed together when it’s rolling off Carlos as Lando’s pulled into a tight hug is infinitely more bearable and desirable.

Lando tucks his head into Carlos’ shoulder and wraps his arms around his back to hold on as tightly as he can. The hours separating them from the last time they were able to do this are too many. They should have been able to do this the entire time they were out.

“God, I am so proud of you,” Carlos whispers into the side of his head. The words are all it takes for Lando to lose it.

He’d managed to keep himself together in the immediate aftermath in front of the cameras— had become a bit choked up talking to his parents and grandmother— but that was it. The weight is off his shoulders, sure, but until this moment, Lando’s just felt a bit empty.

But Carlos is here, holding him close and whispering praise, and Lando feels relief. Relief that it’s all been worth it to this point. His belief and trust haven’t been misplaced. The moment the team gives him a car capable of more, he gets what it’s capable of out of it.

The sob that hiccups from his chest only makes Carlos hold him tighter.

“Hey, I’ve got you, you’re okay.” So naturally, Lando only cries harder. One of Carlos’ hands rubs reassuringly up and down Lando’s back. It’s silly to cry so long after the fact— he should’ve done this in parc fermé or something, not after all the celebrations. But Carlos doesn’t tease him for it. Instead, he shuffles them over in front of the bed and sinks down to the floor.

It’s exactly what Lando needs, a firm and solid surface beneath him to contrast the way Carlos pulls him back in and arranges them so Lando’s legs are settled sideways over Carlos’ lap. He pulls Lando closer, lets him lay his head against his shoulder, and release as much emotion as possible.

“It didn’t hit me in Silverstone until the next day,” Carlos admits. “After I talked to my dad for the second time, and I realized I am a race winner. I think everyone has a bit of a delayed reaction.”

Lando chokes out a weak laugh. “Would’ve preferred it to wait until tomorrow, that way I can enjoy the night in peace.”

Carlos just tsks. “No, because this is how you know it’s real, that it’s setting in, and the next race you start, you are going to be starting it as a race winner.” He says it with so much conviction Lando feels silly for ever thinking anything different. “I called it from the car, you know.”

The statement catches Lando off guard enough that he lifts his head from Carlos’ shoulder to look at him properly. “What?”

“When the safety car came out and Ricky confirmed you would be coming back out in front. I knew you were going to him it. You were flying.”

The earnestness in Carlos’ voice and in his eyes makes Lando want to cry again. Sure, he knew he and his team thought it was well within grasp as soon as the safety car came out— even more so when it caught Max instead of him— but to hear that Carlos also thought so? It doesn’t do anything good to his mind.

His mind reels with how to respond. Thank you is too inadequate. He’s also much too weepy to think about kissing him. Not right now. Before he can figure out what to say though, his phone rings. He doesn’t remember when he pulled his phone off silent, but the noise, a shrill default iPhone tone, knocks Lando sufficiently out of his head enough to pull it out of his back pocket to see who’s calling.

Somewhat surprisingly, it’s Martin. God, Lando doesn’t even know what time it is here let alone what time it is in Amsterdam. He talked to Martin earlier for a few minutes— promised they’d talk more a little later. This must be a little later.

Lando thinks about silencing it though because he’s with Carlos, after all. They were having a moment. But Carlos cranes his head to look down at Lando’s screen, sees the candid photo Lando took on Martin’s boat in Amsterdam as his contact photo, and tells him to answer it.

“But I’m with you right now.”

“Answer it, Lando.”

So, Lando answers the phone just before it transfers over to his voicemail and gives a less than stellar, “Hello?” in greeting.

Martin gives a quieter version of the drawn-out “Landoooo,” than he did earlier. It’s very possible this is the first thing Martin’s doing after waking up. He might still be in bed. The thought warms Lando’s chest even more.

Lando must make some kind of distressing noise back because Martin pivots almost immediately. “Lando, what’s wrong?”

Martin has always been able to clock the slightest mood shift in him— he and Carlos both— but today is not one of those days where he can brush it off. Lando breathes in shakily and sniffles. “Nothing—”

“Lando—”

“Nothing, honestly. All the emotions are just catching up with me a bit. Carlos said it’s normal. God knows I need to sleep.”

“Lando,” it’s softer this time, like he’s aching that he’s not there with Lando to make sure he’s okay. Maybe Lando is as well, as much as he loves that Carlos was by his side all evening. To have them both with him all night on top of the win? Lando’s sure there would’ve been some news the following day. “Is Carlos there with you right now?”

“Mmm yeah. We just got back to the room a little while ago. Probably sleep for a few hours before we have to get to the airport.” Carlos tightens his grip on Lando in response, Lando letting him take more of his weight in turn.

“Put the phone on speaker for a sec.”

Lando can’t imagine what Martin has to say to Carlos right now of all times. Surely anything regarding Lando’s well-being wouldn’t be taken well even if Carlos is slowly coming around to enjoy the idea of Martin being physically around more and more. Lando knows how much of a mess Carlos’ head still is. But Lando puts him on speaker anyway. “Okay, you’re on.”

“Tough break today, mate,” Martin says. “You probably could have been up there on the podium otherwise.”

Carlos sighs. “Yeah, it was unfortunate, no? Lando’s little teammate getting in the way.” He nudges Lando in jest, and Lando can’t help but snort in response.

“Naturally. Listen, I’m glad you’re there. I used to see Max after his first several wins. Takes a bit before you learn to manage things as I’m sure you know.”

“Mmm, that it does. I appreciate your thoughts. I could have had a much worse race though and would still be here. You never forget your first.”

“I’m sure. I’ll leave you two alone for now. I’ll talk to you soon, Lan, and we’ll talk plans?” Right, plans for Martin’s birthday and then the week off they both have following it. Martin had briefly suggested a house with a view off a cliff in California since he’ll already be in Las Vegas, but they’ve not talked specifics.

“Yeah, talk soon.” The beeps of a disconnected call ring through the room, and Carlos sighs.

#let's just say... those Replay tennis pics of Carlos and Martin chatting only acted as fodder #but mainly i blame the image of Lando wearing Martin's Vegas shirt in Australia to help celebrate Carlos' win as the catalyst for all of it #ask #husbands™#norrix #writing tag

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yellowkitkieran · 1 year

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To Have and To Heal (Part 5)

Masterlist

Read part 1 here

Word Count: 3.7k

Summary: Single working dad Martin Odegaard is navigating the ups and downs of parenthood all on his own, and he’s struggling. That’s not to mention football, life and... love?

Martin loves his teammates, he really does. They're his brothers in every way but blood. They'll lift him up if he hits a rough patch and keep his feet firmly on the ground when praise from the press threatens to inflate his ego. There's a few of them that are acutely tuned into his moods too, which generally he doesn't think twice about.

Today however, he'd rather be left alone than have Kieran hovering over his shoulder. The Scotsman has been in Martin's shadow all day, a constant presence that he cannot shake. Today is an individually minded training day, each boy following their own tailored regime in the weights room for the first few hours, meaning Martin expected to be able to work off his mixed emotions. But having Kieran so close is grating on his nerves, until finally he can't stand it.

"Mate, can I help you?"

Kieran pauses on his machine, brown eyes wide. "Erm, no? I mean I don't need a spot for leg presses so…" Kieran maintains his mask of innocence despite Martin's hard stare, which only further aggravates him. When Kieran flashes Martin a smile that's all teeth, Martin swears under his breath and resets his machine so he can turn to face his friend.

"Why have you been shadowing me all day? You're like a- a…" Martin searches for the English word, his brain short circuiting. "A flea on a dog's back! I'm trying to work through something here-"

Kieran snaps his fingers and leans forward, "there! That's exactly what I've been waiting for- an admission! All week you've been off mate, everyone can tell. I'm just the unlucky one that got nominated to figure out why!"

Martin rolls his eyes. His lads are busy bodies. If they could mind their own business, Martin wouldn't feel so shitty because he might actually be able to process his things properly. Instead he's ended up more frustrated, because Kieran won't give him an inch to breathe.

Yes, it's true. Martin has been quiet lately, keeping to himself more than usual. He isn't surprised that the team has picked up on it. He hasn't done anything to hide it. He's allowed Kieran to take over team talks instead of himself; anyone with half a brain would recognize his out of character behavior. That doesn't mean he's about to pour out the contents of his wilted heart to Kieran in the middle of a training session though.

"I'm fine Kieran." Martin's response is a touch too firm, causing Kieran's eyebrows to shoot up. Martin draws a deep breath and dials it back, forcing a smile, "really, I'm fine mate. It's nothing I need to discuss, I'm working through it on my own."

Of course, being Martin's best friend means Kieran can see straight through his cheesecloth lie. It also means Kieran can read Martin like a book, thus knowing when it's best to leave an issue alone. So Kieran simply nods, murmurs a soft, 'I'm here if you need me' and continues on with his day.

Once Kieran moves to another machine, the rubber band around Martin's chest eases enough for him to breathe properly. It allows him room to think and reflect. He needs to clear his head… which is part of the issue.

Martin's head is a mess because you muddle his thoughts. It's gotten to the point that he can't walk outside and see the sun without thinking about you, and that terrifies Martin.

He hasn't felt this way about anyone since the day he met Maria. She became the center of Martin's world from the moment he laid eyes on her, only shifting to make room for Atla when she was born. For three years his girls shared equal space in his heart, until fate stepped in and ripped one of them out of the picture.

It took Atla a long time to understand what happened. Martin honestly isn't positive she understands now, actually. The weeks immediately following Maria's passing were the hardest. Each night Atla would ask for her mummy to tuck her in and listen to a story that Martin would read, and each night Martin had to gently remind her that mummy wasn't there. Martin lost count of how many times he'd told her 'Mum's in the sunset now søta, she's watching over you even if you can't see her'. Through it all, Atla rarely cried, thank god- a three year old doesn't truly know how to process grief after all. If Atla had shed tears, Martin isn't sure he would have survived.

For two years, Martin has thrown all his energy into being a father. Anything he has to spare goes into being Arsenal's captain, and he thinks he's doing a pretty damn good job of balancing both. The learning curve was steep, and he still discovers new nuances about being a better parent nearly every day. The fathers on his team have been his backbone, though none of them understand the full weight he bears on his own shoulders. At the end of the day, they have partners to lean on. Martin only has himself.

The scary part is, he's beginning to wonder if he's meant to be a single parent forever. He's found himself caught between a rock and a hard place: continuing to remain a loving, loyal widow, or chasing his own potential happiness. It feels like a betrayal to even consider letting someone new occupy his heart the way Maria had, but at the same time he wonders if it's fair to Atla to allow her to grow up without a maternal figure to guide her. He's not stupid; one day Atla will have questions he can't answer himself, ones that only a woman can answer properly. No matter how much research he conducts or how much he prepares himself, he will never experience the world the same way a woman might.

Is he robbing Atla of a fundamental right, the right to grow up with a mum at her side? Everything he does is for Atla, for his daughter- is he being selfish by cutting himself off from the chance to find love?

"Oi Martin! Come on, we're headed to the pitch!"

For now, his questions will remain unanswered. He has a job to do, and he takes that job seriously. Martin quickly cleans up his mess and wipes down his machine before following the rest of his team outside for some small group drills, which is one of his favorite activities.

Martin leads a round of keep away, passing back and forth in a small circle whilst Saka tries to intercept. It takes his mind off of anything you related, which comes as a welcome realization. Martin laughs with his friends, doubling over to clutch his stomach when Saka falls flat on his back after tripping over the ball. It feels good to be his normal self again, not having to worry about anything except the task at hand.

The end of their session comes sooner than Martin expects. He showers and organizes his cubby, preferring things to be neat when tours come through. Then he makes his rounds to chat with the staff to ensure everyone knows they're an important part of the team in his eyes. Eventually he can't stall any longer and he is forced to head out to pick up Atla from school.

There is a pit in his stomach as he pulls up to the limestone building. Pick up is simultaneously the part of his day that he dreads and that he looks forward to most. On one hand, pick up means he gets the rest of the night with his family. On the other hand, he has to see you, which is both a blessing and a curse.

The gymnasium is on the opposite side of the school but he always parks out front, preferring to walk the halls and chat a bit when he can. Today he chats less, intent on seeing his daughter as soon as he can. He whistles quietly as he walks, smiling when he hears Atla clock his tune.

"Papa's here!"

Martin is already crouched when she comes barreling over to wrap her little arms around his neck to squeeze him in a bear hug. At last Martin feels the remaining bits of his troubles melt away thanks to his daughter. She is the center of his world, and being with her makes him feel at home.

"Hallo søta, did you learn lots today?" It takes everything in him to not immediately look up and meet your eyes. Martin still isn't sure how to act around you; he'd extended an olive branch in the form of chocolates and tulips and he is patiently waiting for you to reciprocate his energy. Until then, he is determined to leave you be.

"So much! I had a fun day- David tried chasing me on the playground but don't worry papa, I made sure he knew I wouldn't let him!"

"She was very adamant," you say, your sweet voice drawing Martin's attention. Your smile is the first thing he truly notices. The next is the way you fiddle with the badge hanging around your neck, and the third is the way you shift your weight from one foot to the other.

Martin tips his head and speaks before he can filter himself. "Those boots are new, they look nice. I feel like I've seen those in the window at Harrods, no?"

"Oh, um- yes actually, they were an early birthday treat to myself actually. I saw them and couldn't resist!"

Martin would love to unpack that, so he smiles at Atla. "Go clean up your coloring things, lille venn, okay? Go on, don't make Miss. Sunshine clean up your mess!"

Once Atla is out of earshot, Martin stands to his full height and smiles. "Happy early birthday. I suppose I'll have to get you something, seeing as you do so much for Atla."

"Oh, you really don't need to Martin! I appreciate you just wishing me a happy birthday. That's really more than enough."

Martin's heart sings when you address him by name. It amazes him how something as simple as hearing you speak his name can set a flurry of butterflies loose in his stomach.

"I'd like to get you something, if you're alright with that? I wouldn't want to make you uncomfortable. From one friend to another?"

There it is, another try with the olive branch. Martin silently prays you'll accept it, because in honesty he still isn't sure how he feels about this whole thing and he wants some sort of confirmation that he isn't committing a match-ending foul.

It takes you a minute, but Martin exhales when you nod. "I think that's fine, friends give each other presents all the time… friends also come to birthday parties, yeah?"

Your voice is soft as clouds and your eyes are tentative as they search his face. Martin is certain you pick up on his amazement. You must, because you've stunned him into silence. Martin isn't a man who is silent often.

"Mar?"

Oh, faen. Not that name.

It's as if you reached into his consciousness and plucked out the one surefire way to sink yourself into his heart. He hasn't allowed anyone to call him Mar since his wife had passed because it never felt right. But now? Martin finds himself smiling despite the twinge of bittersweet memories.

"Yes. I'll come if you let me know the details. Friends… friends attend birthday parties, that's a friendly thing."

Martin is falling hard. Guilt gnaws at him despite the excitement that washes over him when you grin, clearly feeling much the same as he is. Your smile quiets the war in his head temporarily, reducing the cacophony of noise to a whisper in the background.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing that you have such an effect on him. He's lived with that noise for years and in seconds, you've dulled it to nothing.

"I'll see you there." You bite your lip and tuck your hands behind your back, which is somehow the most endearing thing. "It's at that same bar you saw me at last month, this Friday. You don't have to drink or anything I promise, I know you have a match on Sunday!"

"I'll be there, I promise." It's as if Martin is seeing you for the first time. The way the sun filters through the skylight and illuminates the gentle planes of your face mesmerizes him. He notes the little curve of your lips that grows the longer he stares. Beautiful with a selfless soul- that's how he'd describe you.

"Papa, I'm all done!"

Atla shatters the moment when she tugs on Martin's sleeve. She's too adorable to be upset with, so Martin gives her a pass and offers you an apologetic smile which you accept with a wave of your hand. Martin scoops up Attie with little effort, propping her on his hip and kissing her rosy cheek.

"Say goodbye to Miss. Sunshine," Martin prompts, smiling when Atla does just that. "I'll see you tomorrow," he adds, that same smile playing on his lips.

"Tomorrow for sure, and then Friday evening."

"Wouldn't miss it, søta."

**********

"Kieran, I need you to watch Attie on Friday."

"Uhh sure mate, what for? It's pretty short notice, but you're lucky I don't have anything planned."

"Shut up mate- if you had plans you wouldn't let any of us hear the end of it."

Kieran drops his weights to the padded floor. The resulting thud rumbles through Martin's bones, "Okay, for one, that's harsh even if it is true. And second, why am I watching Attie? I mean I love her and I have no problem doing it, but what's so important that you'd leave her with me?"

Martin knows he can be honest with Kieran. He's probably the one person who won't ever judge him. Regardless, Martin wants to keep this secret for a little longer, at least until he sees how Friday goes.

"I'm just going out with some friends. You're sure you can watch Atla? I can make you up a list of what to do."

Kieran chuckles, "Mate, it's not my first time watching my goddaughter. I got this! Bedtime is eight on the weekends, no television an hour before bed, and… Friday isn't a bath night so that makes my job easy! I'll plunk her down with a set of coloring books and some blank pages and we can go wild, it'll be fun!"

"Alright yeah, that seems fair. Just don't let her have too much-"

"Sugar, yes Martin I am aware!" Kieran waves a hand flippantly, "I know what I'm doing like I've said! Just have some fun doing whatever secret mission you've got, you need to loosen up a little."

"I do not-" Martin begins to snap, but then notes Kieran's amused smile and stops himself. Martin forces himself to breathe and unwind before finishing, "I do not need to loosen up, I'm doing just fine thank you."

"Sure mate if you say so- you're just going out with 'friends' that aren't at Arsenal, nothing odd about that!"

Again with Kieran being annoyingly perceptive. Martin is beginning to think having a best mate is more trouble than it's worth. Kieran is lucky Martin loves him because in the end, having Kieran around is more beneficial than it is a nuisance.

Once a time for drop off is agreed upon, the two part ways. Martin only has two days to come up with an outfit that's acceptable for a night out but also doesn't scream 'I'm trying to show off in front of all your friends', which is a struggle. Considering his closet is filled with basic t-shirts and designer jackets with no real in-between, he'll have to head out after training and buy something.

The only issue is Martin has no clue what's what when it comes to fashion. Kieran at least has some sort of idea of what's trendy and looks good…

Martin sighs and heads back over to Kieran, "Mate, are you free tonight to help me shop?"

"Shop for what?" Kieran feigns innocence as he finishes up his set of curls. "Food? Because I'd think you pay someone to do that for you. At least that's what most of us lads do!"

"Don't make this hard for me, you know what I mean Kieran." Forcing Martin to voice things he isn't ready to is like pulling teeth. Not only is he reluctant to do so, but it's also incredibly painful and Martin would prefer to keep it to himself. And for some reason, Martin feels oddly protective over you, as if letting Kieran know it's you he's going on a pseudo-date with will allow Kieran to sweep you out from under him. For now, Martin feels safer with a cloak of mystery to protect him.

Kieran clears his throat and drags Martin into the present. "Right, sorry mate. I'm free and I'd be happy to help you shop for something to wear- you'll have to give me some details though? What sort of place you're going to, as a bare minimum. I can't have you showing up to a steakhouse in Dunks, you know?"

Martin nods. That much he is comfortable sharing. "It's just a club, so nothing fancy. I just don't normally do casual? So I only have really casual, and I don't think that's appropriate. I'd like to impress the people that are gonna be there."

Kieran nods, thinking for a minute. The grin that lights up Kieran's face has Martin's head racing with thoughts of what the Scotsman might be up to.

"I know just the place, mate. Bring your credit cards cause it's gonna be expensive!"

**********

"Babe! What did I tell you?! Don't get involved with him- and you just straight up went against everything I said!"

"I know I did Jen!" Your pacing is nearly wearing holes in the circular orange carpet in the center of her room. You've walked the perimeter of your self-imposed prison cell at least a dozen times in the past ten minutes whilst enduring a well-deserved lecture from your friend. "Look, why can't I be friends with him? There's no rule against that in the ethics handbook is there? I'm just fostering positive relationships between myself and the parents of my students!"

"Oh, that reads like a textbook. Babes, you know why you can't do that. You'll catch feelings! Hell, you caught feelings for that writer at the Starbucks down the street for your flat and you never spoke a single word to him. You think you can be friends with Martin 'I'm the best looking single dad ever' Ødegaard and not feel a thing?"

Was it a foolish decision to invite Martin to your birthday gathering? Obviously. It isn't your fault that he's too damn charming and irresistible. You hadn't expected Jen to be over the moon with your idea, but you had crossed your fingers in hopes of her supporting you.

"Okay, maybe I made a mistake-"

"You think?!"

"-but realistically what's the worst that could happen? Technically Attie isn't my student, so there's nothing that says Mar and I can't be involved."

Jen rakes a hand through her hair, her blue highlighter leaving a streak behind. "I mean technically you'd be fine, but if the other parents found out, who knows what they'd do? The entire school is filled with Mum's constantly lusting over that man- all it takes is one of them getting a touch too jealous and spreading some terrible rumor for things to go ass over tits."

You hate it when Jen is right. The fantasy you cooked up in your head is much more favorable than the reality she's just whacked you upside the head with. You deflate, finally ceasing your feet long enough to sit cross legged on the carpet.

"Look Jen, I don't even think he's interested in me like that anyway. He's got this trauma, I can see it in his eyes- he just feels… broken hearted. I think he needs a friend to lean on, someone outside of Arsenal. Like a new perspective, you know? Maybe I can be that for him."

At this point, you're grasping at straws to invent a reason why this is a semi-acceptable idea. In truth you're being selfish, wanting to see if you can sus out how Martin feels beneath that steely armor he wears. You can chalk it up to your teachers instincts; seeing people struggling silently isn't something you can sit by and tolerate without trying to help. You don't have it in you to watch Martin continue to come in and paint on a happy face for his daughter when you've noticed flashes of something much more troubled beneath the surface.

"For the record, I hate this idea."

"I know you do, Jen. But you going along with it is exactly why I love you." You hold up one finger, pleading with your eyes for her to hear you out. "One outing, that's all I ask. You'll be there the entire time to keep me in check, totally supervised and everything."

Jen shakes her head, taking her time in answering to ensure her discontent is well noted. "I'm only doing this because I love you. One outing- and I'm not letting you drink until he's gone. You get all touchy when you have tequila and I know that's what you'll wind up having."

You break into a cheek-splitting grin that is impossible to hide even if you wanted to, "that's a deal. Have I told you I love you?"

"Not nearly as often as you should, considering how much I risk for you on a daily basis. Now go home and pick out an outfit, let me grade in peace."

"Trust me, I've got just the thing in mind."

#martin odegaard #martin odegaard fic #martin odegaard fanfic #martin odegaard imagine #martin odegaard fantasy #arsenal fc #footballer fic #footballer fanfiction #footballer fluff #footballer imagine #jac writes #alt timeline lover

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annabelle--cane · 1 year

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half of me is like "somewhere else jmart would never break up even with all their Stuff because if they ever had a conflict so bad that that felt imminent there would be a horrible moment of dread filled eye contact as they realized before simultaneously starting to babble about going to go live in therapy for the next two weeks and reading every book ever published about working through relationship trauma" and the other half of me loves the image of them going on break for a bit and jon sitting by the phone not calling for three weeks thinking "oouughouu god he hates me he never wants to see me again I bet he already has four new partners who are all better than me..." meanwhile martin is doing. exactly the same thing.

#tma #marina marvels at life

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littlebatpup · 3 months

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(GIF isn't mine) Martin Whitly x Reader Summary: AU where you and Martin met during med school (reader being a few semesters behind because they started later), set before he's put in prison. Word count: 995

You were sitting at your desk, studying for exams like you had been for the past weeks. But as of recently, it felt like a drag. You were wondering why you were doing what you were doing. If it was worth it. If you could keep up with the speed of things, with the competition. If you deserved to be studying at University. It was a spiral you fell into more and more often lately. You didn't notice the door of your apartment open nor that your Boyfriend Martin stepped into it. He knew that you had upcoming exams and suspected you'd be sitting at your desk studying. That's exactly where he found you after he had taken off his jacket and shoes. However, he didn't expect you to mindlessly stare out the window. You also didn't seem to have heard him enter your room, which made him worry cause you usually heard every little sound. He carefully walked closer to your desk to not scare you. "Love?" he asked quietly, making you whip your head around in your chair. Staring at him for a second as if he were an alien. Once you realized it was him your gaze softened though it still held some sadness and fear caused by the endless spiral of what-ifs that almost constantly occupied your brain. "Oh uhh hi Martin. What are you doing here?" you asked. He told you that he thought you two could maybe spend a nice evening together, cook something, watch a movie, or something. Something about the way you looked irked him though. This wasn't how you usually looked, not the happy eyes that usually looked up at him. Something was up he knew that. "Darling, you look like you're almost about to burst into tears. What's wrong?" Martin asked, concern laced in his voice. "And don't tell me it's nothing, I know something's up." he added in a serious tone. You let out a big sigh, he wasn't wrong but you also didn't wanna unpack everything. It all felt too small to be a 'real' problem like it wasn't something you should feel so worried and upset about. Martin stepped even closer to you, turning your chair so that you were directly opposite him. He lifted a hand to your cheek and let his thumb softly glide over your skin. You leaned into his touch, feeling the warmth of him seep into your skin. Knowing you couldn't stop him from asking until he had an answer you told him. Told him about how you were stressed about exams and the competition, and how you were questioning why you even studied. However, you left out the aspect of whether you deserved to study or not. Martin knew you in and out so he knew you were keeping something from him. He looked at you with a stern but concerned face, prompting you to tell him the rest as well. You closed your eyes before you told him the last bit. "I feel like I don't deserve this, don't deserve studying." You teared up after this statement. Martin just lifted you up from your chair and pulled you into a tight hug, which in turn made you cry out everything. Martin stroked your back in comfort and whispered words and phrases of reassurance. Once your crying had calmed down to sniffles he pulled you from his chest so that he could look at you and hold your face with both of his hands. "You deserve studying, darling. You deserve to be a student. You deserve everything that you have." he told you. The earnest in his voice was clear as day and he hoped that it seeped into your mind. Pulling you into him again, you two stood there, in your room, wrapped around each other, for a little while longer.

"Now I don't think I can really take away the stress about competition or the thoughts about you deserving to study or not. However, I think we can do something about feeling stressed out in general." You looked at him with curious eyes while he smiled slightly.

"What do you say about comfort dinner and then a movie after. I can cook or we can cook together. We can cuddle up for the movie and you can just turn that smart brain of yours off." "Mhmm cooking together and movie night sounds good." So off you went into the kitchen to collect the ingredients you needed and started cooking. Whenever Martin wasn't occupied by preparing something for dinner he walked over to give you the occasional kiss or hug, knowing that the physical contact would help you feel better.

After dinner, which you and Martin thoroughly enjoyed, you got settled on the couch. You were sitting next to him, head somewhere between his chest and shoulder. Martin had given you the choice of movie, which meant your favorite movie was just about to start. You snuggled deeper into him and he put his arm around you, holding you as tight as possible.

You enjoyed the movie – with the occasional comment from either of you here and there – up to about the halfway mark, at which you felt the sleepiness creep in. You changed position so that now your head laid in his lap. Not long after his hand found its way into your hair, playing with different strands of hair and occasionally scratching your scalp too.

“You comfy down there love?” Martin asked in a soft voice, one that was reserved for the quiet times you two spent together. You only hummed a confirmation; you were too comfortable and sleepy to answer properly right now.

At this very moment, in this place, being so close to Martin, you felt safe, loved and so content with everything. Your head being quiet for once. You fell asleep not long after, the last words you heard were Martin’s soft whispers, “Goodnight my dear, have a restful sleep.”

#martin whitly imagine #martin whitly x reader #prodigal son #so self indulgent #based on authors feelings #sfw

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 5 months

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By: Francesca Block

Published: Jan 15, 2024

In the 1960s, when Clarence Jones was writing speeches for Martin Luther King Jr., he used to joke with the civil rights leader: “You don’t deserve me, man.”

“Why?” King would ask.

“I hear your voice in my head. I hear your voice in perfect pitch,” Jones would respond. “So when I write, I can write words that accurately reflect the way you actually speak.”

King would agree. “Man, you are scary. It’s like you’re right in my head.”

And Jones is still, in his mind, having conversations with his friend, who was assassinated at the age of 39 on a Memphis hotel balcony in 1968. Especially now, as America’s racial climate seems to have worsened, despite the fact that King successfully fought to ensure all Americans are given equal protection under the law, regardless of their skin color. A poll from 2021 shows that 57 percent of U.S. adults view the relations between black and white Americans to be “somewhat” or “very” bad—compared to just 35 percent who felt that way a decade ago.

Jones knows exactly what King would have felt about that. He says it out loud, and directs it to his late mentor: “Martin, I’m pissed off at you. I’m angry at you. We should have been more protective of you. We need you. You wouldn’t permit what’s going on if you were here.

“We are trying to save the soul of America.”

[ Jones, behind Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, wrote: “I saw history unfold in a way no one else could have. Behind the scenes.” ]

I spoke to Jones, 93, two weeks ago as he sat on a beige couch in the humble second-floor apartment in Palo Alto, California, that he shares with his wife. A black-and-white close-up of King sits directly above his head, almost like a north star.

“Regrettably, some very important parts of his message are not being remembered,” Jones said, referring to King’s belief in “radical nonviolence” and his eagerness to build allies across ethnic lines.

“Put in a more negative way,” he added, King’s messages “have been forgotten.”

Jones was a young, up-and-coming entertainment lawyer when he first met King in February 1960. The preacher had turned up on the doorstep of his California home and tried to convince him to move to Alabama to defend him from a tax evasion case. But Jones wasn’t interested.

“Just because some preacher got his hand caught in the cookie jar stealing, that ain’t my problem,” he said in a talk, years later.

But King wasn’t one to give up easily. He invited Jones to attend his sermon at a nearby Baptist church in a well-to-do black neighborhood of Los Angeles. Standing at the pulpit, King spoke to a congregation of over a thousand people, delivering a message that seemed almost tailor-made for Jones.

Jones remembers King talking about how black professionals needed to help their less fortunate “brothers and sisters” in the struggle for equality. He realized, then and there, what an incredible speaker King was, and felt compelled to join his cause.

“Martin Luther King Jr. was the baddest dude I knew in my lifetime,” Jones says.

Jones moved down to Alabama to join King’s legal team. He helped free King of any charges in Alabama, and quickly became one of the leader’s closest confidants, and ultimately, his key speechwriter.

Jones refers to himself and King as “the odd couple,” because, he says, “we were so different.” King was the son of a preacher from a middle-class family in the South. Jones grew up the son of servants, raised by Catholic nuns in foster care in Philadelphia, who he credits with instilling in him “a foundation of self-confidence that was like a piece of steel in my spine.”

He said this confidence propelled him to graduate as the valedictorian from his mixed-race high school just across the border in New Jersey, and then on to Columbia University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953. After a brief stint in the army, where he was discharged for refusing to sign a pledge stating that he was not a member of the Communist Party, Jones enrolled at the Boston University School of Law, graduating in 1959.

Though Jones was mainly a background figure in the 1960s civil rights movement, it might not have been possible without him. He fundraised for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference so successfully that Vanity Fair later called him “the moneyman of the movement.” In 1963, when King was in prison, Jones helped smuggle out his notes, stuffing the words King scrawled on old newspapers and toilet paper into his pants and walking out.

Later, he helped string those notes together into King’s famous address, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which argued the case for civil disobedience, and was eventually published in every major newspaper in the country.

Jones then wooed enough deep-pocketed donors, including New York’s then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, to raise the bail needed to release King and many other young protesters from jail.

Jones also helped write many of King’s most iconic speeches—“not because Dr. King wasn’t capable of doing it,” Jones emphasized—“but he didn’t have the time.” Jones crafted the opening lines of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from his D.C. hotel room on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington. In his book, Behind the Dream, he recounts how he penned their shared vision for a better nation onto sheets of yellow, lined, legal notepaper, many of which ended up crumpled on the floor.

But he didn’t write the most famous words: “I Have a Dream”—that was all King, his book notes. “I would deliver four strong walls and he would use his God-given abilities to furnish the place so it felt like home,” Jones writes about their speech-writing dynamic.

The day after he wrote that speech, Jones stood just fifty feet behind King as he delivered it to the hundreds of thousands gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “I saw history unfold in a way no one else could have,” Jones writes. “Behind the scenes.”

The movement King led with Jones by his side helped achieve school integration, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So, when asked if America has made any progress on race, Jones is dumbstruck. “Are you kidding?” he said, with shock in his voice. “Any person who says that to the contrary, any black person who alleges themselves to be a scholar, or any white person who says otherwise, they’re just not telling you the truth.

“Bring back some black person who was alive in 1863, and bring them back today,” he adds. “Have them be a witness.”

But after the death of George Floyd in 2020, 44 percent of black Americans polled said “equality for black people in the U.S. is a little or not at all likely.” And “color blindness”—the once aspirational idea of judging people by their character rather than their skin color, which King famously espoused—has fallen out of fashion. The dominant voices of today’s black rights movement argue that people should be treated differently because of their skin color, to make up for the harms of the past. One of America’s most prominent black thinkers, Ibram X. Kendi, argues that past discrimination can only be remedied by present discrimination.

Jones makes it clear he doesn’t want to live in a society that doesn’t see race. “You don’t want to be blind to color. You want to see color. I want to be very aware of color.”

But, he emphasizes: “I just don’t want to attach any conditions to equality to color.”

He adds that it’s possible to read Kendi’s prize-winning book, Stamped from the Beginning, and “come away believing that America is irredeemably racist, beyond redemption.”

It’s a theory he vehemently disagrees with. “That would violate everything that Martin King and I worked for,” he said. It would mean “it’s not possible for white racist people to change.”

“Well, I am telling you something,” Jones adds. “We have empirical evidence that we changed the country.”

Jones is the first to admit King and his circle didn’t change the country on their own.

“As powerful as he was at moving the country, I tell everybody, there’s no way in hell that he or we would have achieved what we achieved without the coalition support of the American Jewish community.”

Jones especially gives credit to Stanley Levinson, who also advised King and helped write his speeches, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched alongside King in Selma, Alabama. He remembers being on the picket lines and talking to Jewish protesters who told him about their own families’ experiences in the Holocaust.

“There would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964, no Voting Rights Act of 1965, had it not been for the coalition of blacks and Jews that made it happen,” Jones says.

Now, in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, Jones said he fears that relations between the Jewish and the black communities in America are beginning to unravel.

He said he has seen how, days after the attack, college students—many of them black—marched on campus, chanting for the death of Israel.

“It pains me today when I hear so-called radical blacks criticizing Israel for getting rid of Hamas. So I say to them, what do you expect them to do?”

He continues: “A black person being antisemitic is literally shooting themselves in the foot.”

Long before October 7, Jones has proudly shown his allegiance to the Jewish people: a gold mezuzah—the small decorative case, which Jews fix to their door frames to bless their homes—is nailed outside his Palo Alto apartment.

“I’m like an old dog who’s just not amenable to new tricks right now,” Jones says. “I have to go on the tricks that I’ve been taught, that got me where I am at 93 years of age. And those old tricks are: you stay with an alliance with the American Jewish community because it’s that alliance that got us this far.

“I am damn sure, at this time in my life, I’m not going to turn my back. This time is more urgent than ever.”

Meanwhile, Jones worries that some of today’s social justice measures have strayed too far from King’s original message. He points to an ethnic studies curriculum for public schools in California, proposed in 2020, which sought to teach K–12 students about the marginalization of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American peoples.

Jones fiercely opposed the new curriculum recommendations, calling them, in a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, a “perversion of history” that “will inflict great harm on millions of students in our state.” He wrote that the proposed curriculum excluded “the intellectual and moral basis for radical nonviolence advocated by Dr. King” and his colleagues.

“They were promoting black nationalism,” he told me. “They were promoting blackness over excellence.”

California later passed a watered-down version of the curriculum.

At the same time, Jones feels more conflicted about affirmative action, a policy he believes was grounded in “the most genuine, the most beautiful, the most thoughtful” intentions, and that it helped to “accelerate the timetable. . . to truly give black people equal access.”

Even so, he is pragmatic about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike it down last year. “You had to stop the escalator somewhere.”

[ Jones is still working. He released his autobiography, The Last of the Lions, in August, and is now recording the audiobook. ]

In the immediate years after King’s death in 1968, Jones struggled to find a path forward. He was angry and even considered “taking up arms against the government,” which he blamed for allowing King’s death to happen.

For a while, Jones dabbled in politics—serving as a New York State delegate at the 1968 Democratic Convention—and then in media, purchasing a part of the influential black paper New York Amsterdam News. In 1971, he acted as a negotiator on behalf of some of the inmates behind the Attica prison uprising, unsuccessfully trying to seek a peaceful resolution.

But King’s voice—always in his head—eventually steered him back toward his original purpose.

A father of five, Jones lives with his wife, Lin, just a five-minute walk from the Stanford campus where he maintains an affiliation with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. In 2018, Jones co-founded the University of San Francisco’s Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice to teach the lessons of King and Mahatma Gandhi “in response to the moral emergencies of the twenty-first century.”

He is also the chairman of Spill the Honey, a nonprofit founded in 2012 to honor the legacies of King and Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. And in August 2023, he released his autobiography, The Last of the Lions, so named because he is possibly the only member of King’s civil rights circle still alive. “There’s an African saying that I often reflect upon when I think about his legacy and my own part in his movement,” Jones writes in his book. “If the surviving lions don’t tell their stories, the hunters will take all the credit.”

Although the eight years he spent with King happened more than half a century ago, Jones told me he now sees his mission as clearly as ever. Asked if he has a message for young black Americans on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he doesn’t hesitate.

“Commit yourself irredeemably to the pursuit of personal excellence,” he says emphatically. “Be the very best that you can be. If you do that. . . our color becomes more relevant, because we demonstrate ‘black is beautiful’ not as some slogan, but black is beautiful because of its commitment to personal excellence, which has no color.”

What's going on now is what happens when activists and fanatics, such as frauds like Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones, construct history curriculum, not actual historians. If they teach the Jewish allyship with the Civil Rights Movements at all, it will be wrapped in conspiracy theory such as "interest convergence."

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-conspiracy-theory/

This doctrine insists that white people (as the racially privileged group) only take action to expand opportunities for people of color, especially blacks (see also, BIPOC), when it is in their own self-interest to do so, and in which case the result is usually the further entrenchment of racism that is harder to detect and fight. Under interest convergence, every action taken that might ameliorate or lessen racism (see also, antiracism) not only maintains racism, but does so because it was organized in the interests of white people who sought to maintain their power, privilege, and advantage through the intervention.

One of the truly gross and despicable things about frauds like Kendi is that while he pulls every bogus fallacy to assert that nothing has changed - it's a tenet of Critical Race Theory that nothing has changed, racism has only gotten better at hiding itself and becoming more entrenched - his own success blows this conspiracy theory completely out of the water, given how fawning his acolytes are about his wildly overstated wisdom, and the number of white fans he's accumulated who masochistically want to be told how racist they are and how much they hurt black folk every single day.

That's not possible unless racism is both aberrant and socially and culturally unacceptable.

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elisysd · 6 months

Text

46. I'll be late, but I could make it all up to you

Masterlist - Previously - Next

Chapter soundtrack: Haven - Novo Amor

When Julia had imagined Martin’s holiday rental, she had thought of a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Something cozy, something small. Not a gigantic villa with a pool and large windows that left very little intimacy. The ride from Maranello to the Como lake area had been peaceful, without much talking as she didn’t feel like entertaining a conversation and Martin didn’t seem to want it either. Entering in the Ferrari felt weird. She didn’t know if it was because she was in a Ferrari with someone else than her dad or because she was so used to ride with Ethan than being in a car with Martin felt like betraying him, but still, she wasn’t very comfortable, hence why she preferred to stay silent and enjoy the calm and folk music that was coming from the speakers.

When Martin parked in the huge driveway, Julia sighed. She didn’t know if it had been such a good idea. Isolating herself with Martin, out of all people, didn’t sit right with her. Sure, he had been clear to her that he was only offering her his friendship but, what if people were learning she was with him? What would they all say? She thought of Ethan and his reaction. How it would hurt him. How she was doing exactly what he feared her to do. And it was stupid. He was seeing other girls, he was back to his hook up era. Why couldn’t she be with other people too? He had no right to be mad. But even if she was trying to persuade herself, the vicious voice inside of her mind kept on repeating the word “traitor”. She contemplated the view in front of her, and the green of the trees that were protecting the villa. It was still a gated area and it reassured her a little about the privacy she still would get here. And it was only for a few days. She could do it. It would be fine.

“Julia? Are you alright?” asked Martin, opening her door and handing her the pair of crutches, her bag in his other hand.

“Yeah… I was just admiring the view.” she smiled, a little tight.

“It’s pretty, right? Wait until you see the view from the back of the house. You can see the lake and all, it’s gorgeous.”

She absent-mindedly nodded before taking her crutches and followed him inside the house. She had had a brief idea of how the inside looked based on the last facetime they had, a few weeks ago, but she never expected it to be this impressive. The ceilings were high with exposed beams on them. It had a Scandinavian vibe that she liked and that felt homely and reassuring. Martin guided her to her room as she was still looking around. Her bedroom had an amazing view on the pool and she could see the valley underneath. A big king sized bed with white and fresh sheets was taking center stage against a wall in light in beige wood.

“You have your own bathroom with a bathtub and shower. Also the room has direct access to the patio. Lucky you.”

“Thank you.” she whispered, her hand slowly caressing the sheet.

“I'll let you settle down. If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen. Chicken breasts and vegetable mix for tonight if that’s okay with you?”

“It’s perfect.”

She rapidly emptied her bag before going to the bathroom for a quick shower. It had become a trial for her, to not soak too much of her casts and she couldn’t wait to finally get rid of them in a few days. She wanted to get back her mobility. It would be a long road to get it back fully but she would be working with Martin’s physiotherapist. She let the water cascading on her body as she was trying to support herself the best she could as she was doing her hair routine. Once she was finally done, she wrapped herself in the navy blue fleece-lined towel.

She was about to untangle her hair, when she felt herself slip on the tiled floor, regaining her balance just in time but still managing to drop a few things on the floor. She swore under her breath but the sound must have been loud enough to alert Martin that knocked on the door.

“Julia? Are you okay?” he asked, worried and faced with her silence, he added: “Can I come in?”

She unlocked the door and tightened the towel around her frame as she sat on the edge of the bathtub.

“I’m stupid. I can’t even do things by myself without causing a disaster.” she mumbled.

“You’re not stupid, you’re injured.” he scolded her, kneeling in front of her and forcing her to look at him.

“I feel useless. I can’t wait to get rid of those stupid casts! I want things to go back to normal.” she whispered, a lump in her throat.

“What things?”

“My wrist and my leg… Ethan and I… I feel stupid to miss him this much. I broke up with him! I shouldn’t feel this bad!”

“You didn’t break up with him because you were not in love anymore. You broke up with him precisely because you love him and you want this relationship to work and because you knew that it was not the right time. It’s brave.”

“I don’t feel brave.”

Martin sighed, understanding that it was no use to try to argue with her and helped her standing up to guide her to her bed. He came back to the bathroom to take her things and sit beside her, determined to untangle her hair. Slowly and delicately and brush each strand until he felt her relaxing and leaning against his chest.

“Do you feel better?” he broke the silence, his lips against the back of her head.

“A little. I’m sorry if I’m being a burden.”

“Julia, stop. I knew what I was getting into when I asked if you wanted to spend a few days here. It’s fine. And what are friends for if we can't be vulnerable to one another?”

He rubbed her shoulders before getting up and leaving the room to give her the space to change. Once in comfier clothes she went to the open kitchen to find him putting the plates on the table. Two glasses of red wine were next to the food that smelled amazing. Julia took place on a chair as he quickly followed her. Diving into the food, she couldn’t help but let out a moan.

“You didn’t tell me you were that good of a cook! That’s amazing.”

“I have many hidden talents. And I like to cook. It helps me relax.” he explained. “What about you?”

“I bake with my mom. It’s our thing. But beside that, I don’t really cook. I don’t really have the opportunity…”

“You know what we could do? I will prepare dinner and you will take care of the desert.”

“With my broken wrist and equally broken leg?” she arched an eyebrow.

“Why not?”

“That’s not very easy to do.” she mumbled.

“Okay, Julia, now you listen to me. I want you to stop finding excuses to flee situations. I want you to face them. You have difficulties standing and doing stuff? I’ll help you. You can lean on me. You can lean on anyone, we are all here for you. And I’m not talking about baking…” he looked at her dead in the eye.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I didn’t want to?”

“So you prefer wallowing in self-pity? Didn’t take you for a coward.”

“I’m not.”

“Prove it.” He challenged her.

She clenched her jaw, abruptly putting down her knife and her fork before slowly standing up, trying to find her balance without her crutches. She took her plate in one hand and limped to the sink, trying to hide the pain. She was about to put down the dishes when a sharp pain went through her leg forcing her to let everything fall to hold against the counter. Martin rushed to her side forcing her to sit down on the stool as she felt tears running down her cheeks.

“I… painkillers… in my toiletries…” she said, gritting through her teeth.

He left her quickly to come back almost as fast and poured her a glass of water before handing her the tablet and the drink. She took them and emptied her glass in one gulp.

“That’s exactly what I was trying to tell you, Julia. You don’t have to go through things alone.”

She looked at him in the eyes and saw in the green orbs a calmness and a serenity that appeased her almost immediately. She slightly nodded as he helped her getting back on her feet and supported her when he saw her wince. That night, alone in her bed, her mind din’t go straight to Ethan for the first time in two weeks.

She woke up the next day, feeling rested. She quickly dressed before heading to the kitchen to find pancakes and freshly pressed orange juice as well as a note explaining to her how the coffee machine was working. Martin was nowhere to be found which gave her the time to explore the house a little bit more. He had a home cinema and even an arcade room. Julia wondered why he would need all of this for him to be all alone and no even planning to invite friends here. Once her exploration over, she went back to her room to pick up her drawing book and a bunch of pencils and used her private access to the backyard. The pool seemed really nice, it was shame she couldn’t go in there. She sat on one of the lounge chairs and started to draw what was in front of her eyes until a silhouette appeared in her field of vision. She gulped when she noticed Martin’s sweaty and bare chest. He really was a nice specimen she had to admit and almost immediately she felt guilty to even have the thought. When he saw her, he jogged until reaching her side and sat down, out of breath.

“Glad to see you up and outside. You definitely needed some vitamin D.”

“Say that I look pale while you’re at it.” she said, throwing her pencil at him, which he caught easily.

“I mean, you do look like someone who has not seen the light of the day for weeks.”

“Hey! It’s not my fault. Even if I would spend all my days outside I would still be pale. My skin becomes sunburned easily but the sunburn doesn’t turn into a nice tan. That’s genetics. Look at my dad.”

“Have you ever considered self tan?”

“No! Have you seen the amount of chemicals they use in them? Thanks but no thanks.”

It made Martin laugh and Julia looked at him, puzzled.

“I’m glad to hear you talk like that. I missed fiery Julia.” he confessed.

“I missed her too. But you know, I think she starts to come back. A little.” she said, looking at the ground.

“I’m going to get myself something to drink, do you want something?”

“I’l take the same as you.” she said, going back to her drawing.

He quickly came back with two glasses of sparkling water, before taking his place next to her. She felt his eyes wander on the drawing but he didn’t say anything, letting her lose herself in the curves and lines that she was creating.

“I didn’t know you were drawing.” he ended up saying when she put her pencil down.

“It’s an escape. Whenever I don’t feel good or I feel like my brain is going to explode, I draw. It had been a while since my pen touched a sheet, I have to admit.”

“Will you let me have a look at them or are they too personal?”

“They are not. It’s mostly landscapes and by the way, you were right, I love this place. It’s exactly what I needed.” she said while handing him the notebooks.He flipped some pages until he stopped right in the middle.

“Are these Ethan’s eyes?” he asked showing her the page where multiple eyes were displaying in every corner of the page.

“I mean… yeah. I think I started to draw them around Singapore… I think it was my mind telling me that I was really falling deep for him.”

“Weren’t you already?”

That’s when Julia realised that he was not aware of the PR stunt. She didn’t know if she could say something or if she should still keep it to herself. But after all, why bother keeping it a secret? It was over, anyway.

“Can I tell you a secret? That you must not repeat to anyone.”

“You scare me, Juls… but yeah, of course.”

“Well… at the very beginning, Ethan and I we were not really a couple. I agreed to fake date him to save his ass. But along the way, towards Singapore I think, something changed. I don’t know what exactly, we just grew closer I guess. Anyway… those eyes were my brain telling me to realise that I was falling. I stupidly ignored it and we are in this mess now.”

“So when I was saying at the beginning that you guys didn’t look in love or were not acting like a couple….”

“You were right.”

“Okay… And I think you’re right when you said that something changed towards Singapore. I noticed the way you were acting with him, how you looked at him, there was a twinkle in your eyes that were not there before.”

“A twinkle in my eye? Really?” she laughed.

“I’m serious. It’s when you talk about things you are passionate about. Most of the time, it’s Ferrari and engineering, but it was also there when Ethan was around.”

“Yeah, was…” she repeated, sadly.

“I don’t want to see you sad.”

“I’m not. that’s the thing… I’m not sad. Or I am, but it’s not what comes first to me when I think about Ethan. I feel frustration, anger, guilt, disappointment but not really sadness. And the sadness I feel is more because I’m sad that I’ll never know what we could have been, not sad about what we had. I’m grateful for that actually because despite everything he helped me knowing who I wanted to be. Now it’s up to me to become what I want to be. Do I make sense?”

“That’s very mature. It took me almost a year to not totally feel the sadness.”

“That’s different. You were grieving.”

“I still do. There is not a day that passes when I don’t look at that ring or when I don’t think about her. You know, I didn’t even celebrate my win in Buenos Aires. I went straight to my hotel room and called her parents. They were so proud. And we cried.”

“I don’t want to sound insensitive or anything but, don’t you think that keeping the ring you were going to propose to her with is unhealthy?”

“I know it is. But I’m not ready to say goodbye, yet. I know I should, that’s what her parents tell me. I should find another girl, I should be happy. I should allow myself to be happy. But I still feel like it’s betraying her.” he explained.

“And me? When you were flirting with me? What was the goal?” she asked, a bit confused.

“I…. I was so drawn to you and you were the first girl with who I thought that maybe I could fall in love again and be happy. I don’t know why it was you. There is something that I can’t pinpoint exactly that reminded me of her. Your laugh for example, she had the same one. And… and you kind of look alike. I swear when I saw you in the paddock for the first time this year, I thought I was seeing a ghost. And then I understood that Ethan was your everything and that I would never stand a chance and I decided it was for the best to let you be happy with him.”

“Is that why you asked me to stop using you to make him jealous?”

“Yeah. It hurt. You remind me so much of her that seeing you happy with someone else seemed like loosing Cecile twice and it’s something that was hard for me to come to terms with.”

“I’m sorry… I didn’t think I was hurting you that much.”

“You didn’t know.”

“But now that Ethan is not here anymore, would you try something?” She didn’t want a relationship with Martin but she needed to know if she could trust his friendship.

“Listen, Julia. You just got out of a relationship with a guy that you genuinely loved and still do. You are injured and emotionally unstable. You’re not ready for a relationship. With anyone. You need time to heal, physically and mentally. And I told you that I wanted to help you. As a friend, nothing more. But, I would also be lying if I was saying that the feelings I have for you are gone. I won’t act on them. But, if one day, you discover that you reciprocate them….I don’t know, I think we could give us a chance. Because I think we could work out. I could make you feel safe. But that’s just hypothetical. We’re not there yet, if we ever get there. For now, we’re friends and I intend to be a good friend to you so, get your ass out of that chair and let’s go grab a bite.”

“I appreciate you being honest with me.”

The next day was spent bathing under the sun, in peace while Martin was working out near her in the morning and board games and movies the afternoon. She learned that he was a sore looser, just like Ethan and it made her laugh. Drivers were all the same, she thought to herself. She also picked up that he was a fan of thrillers whether it was books or movies. He would have studied psychology if racing hadn’t work out. He could also spent hours talking about his sister, Georgia. She was the same age as Louis and was into photography and poetry. Julia believed she might have seen a brief veil of sadness passing through his eyes and when she asked him, he simply answered, a little defensive, that he missed her dearly. She knew the feeling all too well and her mind drifted to her own brother. She had barely seen him these past few weeks, too caught up in her pain and regrets. And seeing Martin talking about Georgia with so much loved made her realise that it was time for her to stop wallowing in self-pity and get back to her old life. She apologised, telling him she would meet him later for dinner and isolated herself in her room. She laid down on her bed before calling Louis.

“Hey, munchkin…” she said when he picked up the call.

“Julia! Mom, Julia is calling me!”

“I missed you, I wanted to hear your voice.”

“When are you coming back home? I wanted to hang out with you and Ethan. He wants to bring me to the aquarium and on his boat! He showed me pictures, it looks so awesome! And I started to study what kind of fish we had in the Mediterranean! I’m so excited. He wanted to go today but I said I wanted you to come with us.”

“Louis… you know that Ethan and I, we are not together anymore…”

“But… he said you were still friends! And friends hang out together. Please, Julia!”

“I have a doctor appointment to remove the casts and soon after I’ll start the physiotherapy… I’m not sure I can make it.”

She heard the deafening silence on the other end of the line. She knew she had hurt him, she didn’t need to hear his voice to feel it.

“But… if it is so important for you, maybe I can come with you on the boat.”

“Okay… I’ll tell Ethan, then. He misses you, you know.”

“I miss him too but, it’s better this way.”

“So… I can tell him you are fine with the boat, right?”

“Yeah, you can… do you talk a lot to Ethan?” she asked him.

“Every day. Almost. It’s him who called me first, though. He wanted to know if i hated him because of what he had done in Canada to Martin. And I said that I didn’t because even if he did it on purpose, and it’s bad, Martin is alive, he walked out of the car so it meant that he was okay. And then he asked if I still wanted to be his friend and I said yes, because he is nice and he doesn’t treat my differently because I’m autistic. I don’t have a lot of friend, I want to keep Ethan… are you mad at me?”

“Of course not! I’m glad you have someone you can talk to even if it’s Ethan. I know he likes you a lot too.”

“He told me he was sad, you know. And I said you were too, because you didn’t get out of your room and you ignored me a little. And I know it means you’re sad because you are always the first one to talk to me when you’re at home and then you didn’t after you came back from the hospital.”

“I am still sad, you know. But I’m getting better. A little.”

“Dad said you were with Martin, is it because of him you are getting better?”

“He helps me getting out of my own head.”

“Okay… Does it mean that now you will be with Martin instead of Ethan?”

“What? Why would I?”

“I don’t know… You said he was helping you and because of him you get better…”

“It doesn’t mean that he will replace Ethan. Martin is my friend.”

“But he is a guy.”

“Girls and boys can be friends, you know.” she explained slowly. “So… when will be the boat ride?”

“I have to give Ethan a phone call, first but I’ll tell you when you’ll come back! When is it?”

“The day after tomorrow. I have my appointment in the afternoon and then I’ll be all yours, I promise.”

“Great! Does it mean we can go to a restaurant with mom and dad when you’ll be back?”

“If you want.”

“Can I invite Ethan?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea… I doubt he will say yes and I doubt mom and dad want him around.” she slowly said.

“You’re all mean to him. You always say that we have to be nice to people that have a good heart but then you are all mean to him. I don’t understand.”

Julia didn’t have the time to reply that he had already hung up. She sighed and closed her eyes. That was something she was dreading. The moment when Ethan and her would part ways. Louis was so attached to Ethan and even if Julia was grateful to know that not being together anymore didn’t mean for Ethan to abandon Louis, a part of her ached to know that it would inevitably lead to awkward situation, at least until they both had grieved their relationship. She didn’t doubt that at some point she would be able to be friends with Ethan but for now, it was tough and something she wasn’t strong enough to do.

Author's note: Merry Christmas everyone. Here's a new chapter to celebrate. What do you think will happen next? Let me know your theories, I love to read them.

Don't hesitate to leave a comment or an ask, as well as reblogging and leaving a like. Besides the fact that I absolutely love to read you, it helps a lot for the story to find its audience. I also have a taglist for this story, so if you want to be added so you never miss a chapter, let me know.

Taglist:

@herondalism @aundercover @musingsbyshreya @karmabyfernando @reengard @mycenterfold @smoooothoperator

#writing #fiction #charles leclerc #f1 fanfic #f1 fic #f1 x oc #charles leclerc fanfic #max verstappen fanfic #max verstappen

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