#but i know people that remember things from like age 1

[hurricanek8art]

I had to start trying to explain to my mom (strictly a movie/tv fan) why the Jedi are like this at this point in time, and it finally clicked in my head. The perfect way to explain how they're so rigid and strict and have such huge sticks up their butts at this point in time.

The Jedi of this generation are the result of generational trauma.

(Spoilers for episodes 1 and 2 of The Acolyte, Phase One of the High Republic books, and some barebones setting spoilers of Phase Three under the cut. Also a big wall of text because I never know when to shut up 🙃)

So I'm behind on Phase III of the High Republic books (got a few chapters into The Eye of Darkness when it came out, brain farted out on me on reading ability, haven't gotten back to it yet 🙃😖) but I know enough to know that things are really going bad. The Nihil are rampaging, the Nameless are turning people to stone, the Stormwall has cut off like a third of the galaxy from the rest of it. It's a lot! It's really bad! And we see how it's affecting our heroes. Avar and Elzar are reeling without Stellan. Vern's questioning about how the Jedi are responding to this threat throughout Phase I has led her to become a Wayseeker. Padawans like Bell, Burry and Reath have been elevated to Knighthood a lot sooner than any of them expected to be. All of them are incredibly traumatized.

But that's just the Jedi we've seen. The heroes, the big names. Imagine being a nobody at this time. An extra. A child.

Imagine being a youngling in this era. There are literal nightmares hunting you. People are dying right and left, they're being husked and turned to stone or just plain shot/stabbed/whatever. The outposts are being closed down and everyone's being recalled to Coruscant, and that's the ones who've survived so far. They knocked the Starlight Beacon out of the sky, something that was supposed to be impossible. And less than five years ago, this was a golden age of peace, of light and life and great works that were bringing the galaxy together, a united front. That's horrible, that is terrifying.

We as the readers know it's going to work out, because it has to, because this is a prequel. They don't know that. They're just kids, and the world has suddenly turned upside-down, and the galaxy is big and scary and dark.

So everything works out, the day is saved. But these kids, they have to live with this trauma for the rest of their lives.

And when they grow up, and they train Padawans, those Padawans are going to carry the lessons they learned onwards. There is no lesson a Master can teach in this era that isn't going to carry the grief of the Nihil or the Nameless. There is no lesson any Master will ever teach again, from the moment Loden Greatstorm was captured by Marchion Ro all the way to Luke's temple burning to the ground, that won't somehow, in some way, be touched by this. It haunts everyone, everything. Those lessons are passed on, and on, and on.

Yord Fandar is intense about protocal and following the rules and making sure he's the perfect Jedi, because a hundred years ago maverick Elzar Mann played fast and loose with the rules while he was stationed on Valo, and then the Nihil turned the Republic Fair into a bloodbath. Sol is worried about Osha's (so far) inability to put her grief to the side and remain objective in chasing Mae because Imri Cantaros lost control and nearly murdered the Nihil who caused the death of his master during the Great Disaster. Vernestra Rwoh is refusing to charge into this without talking it over with the Council because she remembers what happened when she kept information from them a hundred years ago.

These aren't isolated incidents because they happened to the heroes, every Jedi of that era has some story like this, where the lines blurred in the fog of war and they made or nearly made horrible mistakes out of fear. And now, every Jedi is going to want to rise above that. To not make those mistakes, because that past is past. It's peaceful again. They're better now. But that trauma's lurking under the surface, just like the Sith. The Nihil won't win, but the Order isn't going to, either. Because what the Nihil did changed them, permanently.

The plot of the High Republic books is supposedly unrelated to the show, because it's a hundred years later. But the plot of the High Republic books explains everything about the Jedi in this era of the galaxy. They're carrying the trauma and grief of an entire generation that was brutalized unlike anything the Order had ever seen before.

And the Sith have watched, and waited, as that trauma has become so internalized, so central to what the Jedi are. The Jedi might not even realize that's what's happened to them. But the Sith see it.

And now it's finally time to begin the grand plan.

[x-liv25-jamieswife]

my ranking of the tig villains/most hated characters

i'm bored so i'm doing this. 1 is the character i hate most meaning 8 is the one i hate the least. i apologize if this sucks. its quite late for me as i'm writing this.

drake. ik most people would put eve or smth at the top of this list, but this dude is an abuser and a pedophile (he used to call avery jailbait which means "a person who is younger than the legal age of consent for sexual activity and usually appears older, with the implication that a person above the age of consent might find them sexually attractive" according to wikipedia). not only was he horrible to libby, but he also tried to kill avery. characters like him just give me the ick and the creeps and i just can't stand them.

eve. i think this is self-explanatory. eve is one of the most annoying and petty characters i've ever read about. she tried to kill avery, kidnapped tobias (and ruined his chances of forming a better relationship with avery, and, as the biggest toby and avery father daugther stan, i cannot stand this), manipulated grayson, and hurt many people. if you don't hate her, i don't trust you. also, i hope she doesn't get a redemption arc bc she doesn't deserve it.

sheffield. i have one thing to thank this dude for and that's the love confession from jameson after he put avery in a coma. other than that, he bombed avery, kidnapped avery, cheated on his wife, was a horrible 'father' to grayson (and his daugthers bc of colin). he's honestly tied with eve (he's not first cause i can't stand guys like drake). i dont really think i have to explain myself

emily. i really don't think i have to explain. she's manipulative, petty, self-absorbed. the only thing she has going for her is that she didn't try to kill anyone. she treated the boys like crap, emotionally abused her sister, and (although she wasn't present to do it i still blame her for it) affected avery's self-esteem.

ricky. i know he's high on this list but he's just so creepy to me. anyone who hurts avery in any way si automatically a no for me. he was never there for avery and libby, refused to take custody of her after her mom died, didn't show up to hannah's funeral, tried to step up to get money after avery inherited, got together with skye (ew???). ik this doesn't seem horrible in comparison to what the others did, but seeing avery's feelings towards him in the books (especially thl) made me despise him so that's why he's so high up.

tobias. he emotionally abused his grandsons, put avery in a position that he knew might get her killed, treated his own kids horribly, hurt a lot of people in order to become who he became. the only reason he isn't higher up is bc he did sometimes do nice things (although not often).

vincent. him and tobias are sort of interchangeable??? but he partnered with eve to get toby kidnapped (sort of putting a stop to toby and avery's relationship which like said earlier pisses me off). from what i remember, he didn't really do anything else and i sort of understand where he was coming from (getting revenge on tobias) but what he did is still horrible and taking his anger towards tobias out on a teenage girl is just weird to me.

skye. i find her character sort of interesting but she is a horrible mother towards her sons. she's also a huge pick me bc who sleeps with their sister's boyfriend. she also tried to get avery killed which is just a no no. this is sort of off topic and i've made a post about this before but she didn't get punished enough for what she did to avery and that is grayson's fault. i talk about it in slightly more detail in this post.

although i knew that avery was hurt by a lot of people in this series, this really showed me exactly how bad it was. there are even more people. literally every person on this list hurt her (directly or indirectly (in emily and vincent's case)). these people either tried to get her killed, messed with her head or both. avery is a girl boss. she deserves better.

[homenecromancer]

comic by Tim Kreider; here’s the full text of his Artist’s Statement for this one:

I had already turned in my cartoon Friday afternoon when, Saturday morning, I read the news that Reagan’s health was failing. I began drawing immediately. I have had a rough draft of this cartoon ready for this occasion for years. As the day continued I kept getting e-mails and text messages from friends excitedly anticipating the Gipper’s impending death. Finally Steve, with whom I have planned for over a decade to hold a party on the day of Reagan’s funeral, called me from the track, where he was betting on the Belmont Stakes, to tell me that the old bastard was finally dead. He reported that there had been a perfunctory Moment of Silence, lasting approximately 1.6 seconds, before everyone went back to betting. It was beautiful. As the afternoon went on I got a flood of congratulatory calls from friends around the world—Ben in Boston, Megan and Mike in New York, Berkeley in Baltimore, even Allison in Bulgaria. I e-mailed this cartoon into the City Paper around seven P.M., begging them in the name of our sweet lord and savior Jesus Christ to stop the presses and please run this Wednesday, and then headed down to Baltimore to drink tiny beers and watch The Big Lebowski. The Reagan party will be held at my house this weekend.

Perhaps it may seem insensitive and unpatriotic to some for me to run such an ugly cartoon at this time of national mourning. To those of you who hold this view, I must respectfully say fuck you. Some of my younger readers may not even remember Ronald Regan’s presidency, and I would not want them to be misled by the onslaught of state propaganda they’ll be subjected to this week. Calling him the Great Communicator is like calling Hitler the Great Negotiator, and if we’re going to credit him with winning the Cold War we may as well credit him with the Challenger disaster and the return of Halley’s Comet. Let me tell you what it was really like:

Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. I secretly wept on the stairs the night he was elected President, because I understood that the kind of shitheads I had to listen to in the cafeteria grew up to become voters, and won. I spent the eight years he was in office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr. Strangelove. He put a genial face on chauvanism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokesmodels like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American. If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.

as of today, Ronald Reagan has been in Hell for twenty years

[twicethetrouble]

ANOTHER ROTTMNT AU that I probably won't write

Turtles are Lou Jitsu/Big Mama's kids before turtle mutation

- b/c why the hell not

 (Everything under the cut b/c apparently this is a long one)

start

- Basically Big Mama decides she'd rather have Lou join the battle nexus willingly than as a captive. (She likes the thing they have going on and would rather it not end anytime soon.)

- she introduced him to the Battle Nexus.

- After the shock wares off, he's fascinated by it. (The movies were great but he was getting bored.)

- Lou joins the Battle Nexus willingly and the two stay in a relationship (not married, just together.) (Some talk about how he's her pet champion but those that talk too loud end up disappearing.)

- As a result of their continued relationship, they end up having kids. 4 boys (the middle 2 being twins, of course)

(I can't decide if they have the same names or not so we'll skip that for now.)

- Now, a quick note for this AU. Part of the reason Yokai stopped interacting with humans was b/c whenever a hybrid was produced, they tended to be more human than Yokai. (Even more if a cloaking broach is involved. It throws in extra genetic variables so the offspring can end up inheriting traits from that as well.)

- The boys are no exception. They look human except for a few... oddities.

- Raph has the fluffy mint colored hair and red eyes of Big Mama's spider form. (Not fully red eyes.) He's also exceptionally strong, having once thrown a temper tantrum that resulted in throwing his entire crib across the room. He also likes to pick up his brothers and bodily carry them for no reason. Much to his parents panic upon finding the baby just missing.

- Leo is the oldest twin (by 2 minutes). He and Donny look the most human (with Lou's black hair and dark eyes) the only odditys being from the lavender purple spots on their skin they got from Big Mama's human form (think Leo's marks except more organic looking). (Tho they seemed to both start developing extra, spider like limbs by the time they're 1). Leo likes to follow around Big Mama whenever he can, often sitting on her lap during meeting and trying to mimic her facial expressions.

- Donny is the youngest twin. Again, mostly human looking. His purple spots are different then Leo (again his turtle markings but different, tho he does also have one over his right eye as well.) He is very frustrated about not having extra limbs like Big Mama. He is constantly wearing a spider themed backpack with little bouncy spider limbs as a result and will scream whenever it's removed.

- Mikey is the baby (obviously). He has Big Mama's human form hair and eyes, tho if u lift up his hair and there's 4 spider eyes on his forehead that he hasn't figured out how to open yet.

mutation day

- On mutation day, Raph is 2, the twins are a little over 1, and Mikey is 3 months.

- Draxum sends his gargoyles to grab Lou like originally planned.

- Huggins and Muggins arrive at the room, finding only the 4 boys asleep in their beds (Lou is currently arguing with Big Mama in another room about wanting to stop fighting for the boy’s sake.)

- Huggins and Muggins thinks one of the boys is Lou so, not knowing which it would be, grab all four.

- Draxum sees the four and realizes they’re Lou’s kids (but he’s not paying attention to gossip so he doesn’t realize they’re half yokai) and decides starting with a young human base might be more beneficial than an animal base.

- He has them each interact with the turtles he was going to mutate before mutating the children instead.

- Lou shows up just in time to see his boys mutated into turtles.

- Draxum is woefully unprepared for the fury Lou fights him with. He destroys the lab and steals his sons back, getting covered in mutagen as he does.

- He’s back in the NYC before he realizes that his boys are alright, just turtles, and that he’s now mutated into a rat-man.

- (Also that the mutation has overrode their yokai dna so they no longer have those traits)

- He can’t go back to Big Mama like this. He certainly can’t fight in the Nexus like this and she made it exceptionally clear that’s the only reason why she keeps him around (a lie but he doesn’t realize that)

- so he stays in the human world, eventually finding a decent place to hide in the sewers and raises his sons alone.

- he doesn’t talk about before they were mutated, keeping the only human(ish) picture he has of them hidden deep in the do-not-touch cabinet.

- If they assume they’ve always been turtles then, well, he doesn’t correct them. It was probably for the best anyways.

post mutation

-The boys were so young, they don’t really remember a before.

-Mikey definitely doesn’t.

- Leo doesn’t really either. His only memory being sitting on someone’s lap as they sat behind a big desk and made faces at weird men, but he assumes it’s just an old dream he can’t quite shake.

- Donny knows there was..something. He knows they used to look different (but not exactly how) and has a foggy memory of being caught pulling apart a new toy and a women praising him for being so smart. (he still is very much frustrated by lack of extra limbs, hence his spider limb battle shell, which was probably the first non-standard battle shell he designed.)

- Raph, without a doubt, remembers the most. He remembers they had a mom and how pops looked different back then. He remembers being chased by an owl man after escaping his  watch. But he also remembers how mutation day felt, and is forever grateful his brothers do not.

Series

- series doesn’t really change much

- Big Mama never knew her boys got mutated (instead thinking Lou had taken them and left after their fight) so 13 years later, when 4 turtle mutants start causing trouble for her, she is exceptionally confused as to why she immediately thinks of her lost boys.

A strong one in red, carrying his brothers without thought

A clever one in blue, who seems to see right through her tricks like his mind works just like hers.

A smart purple one with fake spider limbs.

And an smiling orange one who trust his brothers without fault.

- She tries to keep them at the hotel to figure out why, but Blue is too clever for that.

- It’s not until she meets Lou/Splinter again does she put the puzzle pieces together.

- She doesn’t quite believe it until Blue cons her in her own game.

-after that, i’m not sure what would happen. maybe she would sit back and watch them from afar? Maybe she would continue her plans for a weird “they’re my kids, i know they can handle the challenge” sort of way? Either way she knows now. And she’s not going to be able to pretend that she doesn’t.

[lionblaze03-2]

sometimes I think about writing and singing music not because I’m an incredible singer but because no one has my fucking voice, especially in popular music, and its disheartening to be born a girl, told you’ll only get girl roles or try to voice match other girls, or ‘sing with the girls’ and then only be able to match male voices because you’re a fuckin tenor and not anything higher. I can’t think of any girl Broadway roles I can hit all the notes on. Most songs I love I have to pitch down for myself or use falsetto for singing along to. It bothers me a lot less now because I’m an adult who’s more secure in myself but as a teen in kids musical theatre it FUCKED with me, BAD style. And I know for a fact that even now when I hear people with a voice like mine singing I get excited and immediately invested in their work because they’re like ME, finally, for once. A brother in this world of being afab and having the voice of a recently pubescent boy forever. Maybe I should be that brother too.

[fingertipsmp3]

The overall concept of kids bringing their phones to school BAFFLES me tbh. Like what do you mean 10 year olds have phones? What do you mean they’re allowed to bring them to school???

[pierregazly]

but mama, i love him ꨄ oscar piastri smau

oscar piastri x leclerc!reader

the one where oscar's girlfriend has been soft launching their relationship for ages. and he's okay with it, especially if it means he can keep hiding in plain sight from her three overprotective brothers.

ynleclerc

tagged charles_leclerc

liked by charles_leclerc, arthur_leclerc, oscarpiastri, and others

ynleclerc omg omg omg... charles leclerc signed my hat? should i add it to the shrine? give them something to sacrifice?

view all comments

username any non-f1 fan would automatically assume ynleclerc is a crazy fan page for charles

username or a charles leclerc hate page... all she does it make fun of her brothers here

username she's offering her signed hat for the tifosi to sacrifice for a CL16 win??? that seems like pure love all around

arthur_leclerc i also signed your hat?

ynleclerc i also do not care? will a hat signed by you get me millions if i sell it for sacrificial purposes?

charles_leclerc what's next? my personal belongings?

ynleclerc is that an offer? if so, oui. i will take what i think will make me the most money next time i'm there, merci <3

scuderiaferrari if it gets us a 1-2 finish, sacrifice everything ynleclerc... please 🙏

username being a Ferrari fan is so satisfying when you remember ynleclerc is an automatic inclusion in everything and anything charles does

username the things i would do to have her as a McLaren fan... she's too beautiful for Ferrari 😭

oscarpiastri a piastri hat will get you good money in straya btw

username oscar??

oscarpiastri

liked by logansargeant, landonorris, mclaren, and others

oscarpiastri 'stop hitting me with the ball on purpose you jerk' was said more times than it should've been, by someone who really just sucks at tennis. had an awesome week back home, time to get back to it 💪

view all comments

logansargeant no wonder you're so worried about getting run over

username the coordinating outfits?? i'm gonna scream, who is she!!!

username what does logan know, tell us your secrets girl logansargeant

username oscar is gonna soft launch this relationship until the end of time. show us her face, you coward!!

ynleclerc did you pay her for all the bruises that tennis ball left?? poor girl

oscarpiastri it's not my fault she's a terrible tennis player, we all know i've offered to pay for a trainer

landonorris so this is why you couldn't come to bali with me 🤨

username lando really said i'm the third wheel??

username to be fair i'd probably pick oscar's girlfriend over lando for a week away too

username girly you don't even know who she is!!! she could be the devil

username i wanna be included in oscar's post week home photo dump :(

ynleclerc has posted a story

liked by oscarpiastri, logansargeant, pascale.leclerc.355, and others

replies

oscarpiastri you can call me pookie whenever you want if you're gonna post things like this

ynleclerc i'd call you pookie with or without your permission, mon amour

charles_leclerc who is this

charles_leclerc why won't you tell us who you're dating

charles_leclerc we won't hurt him

charles_leclerc answer my texts

ynleclerc

liked by oscarpiastri, pascale.leclerc.355, arthur_leclerc, and others

ynleclerc get you a man who can do both, luckiest woman in the world whenever you're around. mon amour 🤍

view all comments

username people involved in formula 1 and their obsession with soft launching everything NEEDS to be studied

username at least she posts her boyfriend and he isn't just a small figure in the background of every post (charles this is a direct hate comment)

arthur_leclerc this would have been very lovely if it weren't for the last photo

liked by charles_leclerc and lorenzotl

ynleclerc suppose it's a good thing you could easily ignore it. cheers :)

pascale.leclerc.355 trés belle, ma fille 💗

charles_leclerc maman?

username could you IMAGINE if ynleclerc told pascale but obviously hasn't told her brothers? i can FEEL the outrage

username starting to think this may be a driver, ynleclerc is at every race weekend and ALWAYS makes a post with her mystery man at some point during the week after...

username okay ms sleuth (i think it's lando)

username i'm like 65% sure it's oscar, and 35% positive it's someone that looks a lot like oscar

ynleclerc

tagged oscarpiastri

liked by oscarpiastri, logansargeant, landonorris, and others

ynleclerc someone exposed us on twitter, so i had to expose us on instagram 😮‍💨

comments on this post have been limited

oscarpiastri love you <3

oscarpiastri i will love you even when a ferrari has run me over, of course.

arthur_leclerc is this your way of telling me i was right, without texting me back?

charles_leclerc this must be a joke, non?

pascale.leclerc.355 so very excited to finally be able to invite the both of you for dinner. trés belle 🤍

charles_leclerc maman, you knew?

ynleclerc oscar and i will see you for sunday dinner, maman! <3

tresbelleleclercspam

liked by logansargeant, charles_leclerc, alexandrasaintmleux, and others

ynleclerc live feed of oscar running away from charles in the paddock when he said he 'just wanted to talk, mate'

view all comments

charles_leclerc i truly just wanted to talk about the race

charles_leclerc i did not have a speech planned, non

arthur_leclerc i did have a speech planned

lorenzotl i just wanted to welcome him to the family, as a good big brother should

oscarpiastri my apple watch warned me of an overactive heart rate 5 times today. why did you do this to me. why couldn't you have three sisters???

ynleclerc so very sorry, in our next life i'll try to make sure you only have to worry about sisters and not three overprotective brothers

oscarpiastri as long as i get to spend every lifetime with you <3

i actually got a request for something like this ages ago, and finally got around to finishing it. i so hope you all loved it as much as i loved writing it. thank you for all the support!!

i'm not currently taking requests, but if anyone has lil suggestions or prompts please feel free to send them.

[seven-stars-in-his-palm]

analyzing some images (for fun)

so i found this pair of promotion images for good omens season 1 on the good omens reference library server and it’s hooked me so so bad im having feelings about it. we’re analyzing them now. not really for meta purposes just fun to see the parallels and differences :)

everything under the cut !

unique traits

aziraphale:

1) his plank background. its older, its crisp, it smells like wood from the screen. mmmm

2) the pencil shavings at the bottom. he does a lot of writing honestly, so i like this. also adds a messy and cozy vibe he always seems to have in that shop…. i like that blessed shop fr

3) his SUSHI. little soy sauce drops near it too—just the right amount of deliberate mess. our first formal introduction to aziraphale in the present day and beginning the Tomfoolery just happens to have sushi... i watch that scene and i go “yeah, that sums up aziraphale i suppose” very nicely. (they dont have sushi Up There) (im literally never gonna forget that)

4) the ray of light shining on the scene. tiny thing, but a bit of the heaven is peeking through..it also sort of blurs the whole image but i think thats just me.

5) and we’ve saved the best for last: the big whopper. the nice and accurate prophecies of agnes nutter, witch. I LOVE THAT BOOK!!!!!!! i cant remember if that ring stain was there but if it isnt in the show on the actual book i’d assume thats to add that ‘thy cocoa doth grow cold’ thing. ALSO. you know what’s being used as a bookmark in the pages?? a check for the ritz. he bookmarked their one chance for living . with a ritz check . MMMMMM. my GOD. that means so much to me even if i cant convey it in words. he KEEPS THE CHECKS 😭😭😭😭😭😭

crowley:

1) let me get my favorite out of the way. crowley’s glasses have fire in their reflection. we’ll talk about the glasses themselves later but the REFLECTION IN THEM. fucking FIRE, BOOKSHOP fire, PAIN, SRIVING THROUGH THE M-25, HELL, I DONT KNOWIM HAVING FEELINGS!!! i do believe this is a bookshop fire reference though, the flames feel too Familiar. the lengths people will go to to attack others 🤧

2) the leather seat background!!!!!!! probably meant to look similar to the bentley’s seats but i cant recall their texture, exactly. maybe just meant to convey modernness—unsure. still, its there <3

3) the tiny little crisp plant </3 its trying his damned best to stay perfect. it might a specific plant that means something, but i cant tell at thsi angle, so i’ll assume its a mini version of the ficus he keeps in the flat. its so SMALL and sitting in ANOTHER POT i CANT

4) the snake slithering!! black and red (in this image it looks orange lol) bellied scales!!!! slithering there, chilling, being crowley, showing hints. love it

5) QUEEN RECORD!!!!! TRYING TO OVERRIDE IT WITH TCHAIKOVSKY!!!!!! the tape over it does a reminisence to crowley’s handwriting, but in a clean ‘this made made to be a font’ way. not exactly just yet. ive become a fan of tchaikovsky recently. amazing darling wonderful crowley, trying to push the rock up the hill for eternity 😞

6) HIS LITTLE DEMON KEY THING. HOLDING A TINY LITTLE BENTLEY CAR KEY OHHH. thats how he doesnt lose the tiny key despite probably not needing one of those. and he CHOSE that intentionally probably. little wings and red circle….URGHHHHHHH

similarities

mmmmm now here’s the good shit. similarities! i’ll bullet point most of them but ohhhhh. ohhhh these. i’ll go from top to bottom as best i can….

1) one of their shoes, obviously. crowley has them iconic snakeskin shoes while aziraphale has his old loafers like the old loafer he is /pos

2) chateauneuf de pape wine bottle labels! (crowley’s is under his glasses, aziraphale’s is next to his shoe). oh my fucking god theyre MATCHING. the labels are old, battered, of course labeling the drink’s age, but mmmmm its these tiny details that get me going….

3) their respective drinks in their mugs—crowley’s a black mug coffee (or what looks to be coffee) and aziraphale’s angel mug tea (or what looks to be tea). i think about that mug sometimes. where did he get that from?? mystery for the ages….

4) their glasses, of course. crowley’s iconic sunglasses and aziraphale’s reading spectacles. i cant really tell the reflections in this pair, but if its supposed to be fucking fire, im done with this. im giving up forever

5) their own watches! aziraphale’s is visibily older while crowley’s is visibly modern, but they function just the same. also, crowley’s is set to 2:56:59 (presumably PM), which is around the time we see when crowley starts checking his watch at warlock’s birthday party. its almost time for disaster to strike!! 😃

6) and finally….their ties!! they have their own ties!!! or more accurately, neck accessories, but i digress. i mesn i assume its crowley’s neck tie, because the fabric looks… different. either way, crowley’s neck thingie is very whispy and aziraphale has his funky little bowtie i love so much,,,

okay thats it. there’s no canonical implications, any fantheories, none of the sort. just saw a pair of images and my mind went GOD DAMN!!!!!! theyre very important to me. i need to look at more promo material 😔

[lovelybrooke]

Platonic Yandere Hazbin Hotel Concept (pt.1)

Hello, this is based on this post here. Hope you enjoy, also feel free to request for Hazbin Hotel if you want.

Also, fair warning for hints of bad parenting and descriptions of death.

edit: no one mention I spelt the name wrong, got it?

masterlist

---

You weren't normal, you knew that from a young age. From when you fell out of a tree that you knew you shouldn't have been in, feeling the bones snap in your legs and your heart race. Even as a child, you knew you were doomed, watching as the sun slowly set, the stars grace the sky, and you alone as your breathing slowly stops.

You wake up in the hospital, days later, with your mom asleep beside you. Apparently your legs were fine and you passed out from shock. Your mom found you in your backyard hours later, cold and barely breathing. When you didn't wake up when the sun rose, your mom took you to the hospital, and now you're here.

You could barely hear you mothers lecture on the drive home as you sat in the back seat, thinking about the pain you swear you felt when you feel from that tree. Thinking about the snap you heard when your legs hit the ground. Thinking about the fear you felt when you remembered your mom wasn't home, and that no one was coming for you.

Things like that day would happen again and again. You'd cut your hand, bandage it, and the next morning you'd wake up with it completely gone. You'd eat something that your stomach and throat didn't agree with at all, only to be gifted with a beautiful breath of fresh air at the very last second. You'd once even got into your mom's wine when she was sleeping, feeling completely sick but too scared to tell her, only to wake up the next morning completely fine.

You weren't normal, you knew that from a young age. And when you were in your junior year of high school, you knew that the best. When you were walking home from school, it dark and cold in the winter night. You traveled along the road looking for any sign of your mom's car, but in the dark you couldn't see anything, not even the car swerving right towards you. The headlights were so bright that in those last few seconds, you felt warm. But then you were cold again, as you lay on the icy road, the blood left your body and you breathed your final breath.

You awoke in a strange and unfamiliar place, the lights bright but radiating no warmth. It was like the cities you see in movies, strange people and sounds everywhere. You were still recovering from the shock, your breathing quick and erratic. You tried to ignore the stares on you as you raced to find a place to hide. You could hear people scream at you, try to grab on to you, but you just keep moving.

Eventually you find a door, and despite your better judgement you went through it. As you slammed the door close behind you, you couldn't help realize that this place was much calmer. It was so strange, how instantly you felt like this place was so different. For a moment, all you did was stand and look around the room, noticing a bar, a fireplace, and a front desk. You've never been to a hotel before, but this is what you imagined it would look like, minus all the macabre imagery. You would've just remained there in the entrance if wasn't for some strange looking creature, pink with four arms, entering the room and giving you a strange look.

"Charlie? What the fuck is a human doing here" he yelled, and for a second you wanted to crawl into your skin. He was so tall, nearly blocking your view of the much more normal looking woman crashing in, looking just as confused as the man in front of you. Followed by her was yet another woman, who looked more angry than confused. The original woman, the one you assumed to be Charlie, carefully stepped up next to the strange, four armed creature.

"Uh--I don't know..." She mumbled, staring you up and down. You don't know what to do in the situation, what to say or even what to do.

"Where am I?" You whisper out. It felt like the first time you talked in hours, your throat sore a rough. "Why am I here?" you whisper again only slightly louder. You could feel their judging gazes on you.

"Sorry buddy, you're in hell." The pink one said, getting a side eye from Charlie. "Angel!" She yelled, clearly wanting him to shut up. He, Angel, shrugged, clearly loosing interest and walking away. Charlie could judge by the look on your face that you were clearly distressed, sweat deeding down your face while you stare into space.

"Hey, don't worry, we all have to die sometime." She attempts to comfort you, rubbing you back gently. You don't feel comforted though, you feel confused. You don't feel dead, more like your mind is in a different place, separate from your body. "You don't...look dead though." She wondered aloud.

"Charlie, what are we gonna do with them." The other woman said. She looked more intimidating than the others, her voice alone making you shiver slightly. "We can't just--keep a human here." She tried to whisper the last part, but you heard it clearly.

"Vaggie! We can't just abandon them!" Charlie exclaimed, grasping the other's shoulders tight. At this point you felt like more of a side thought. "Plus, if a humans down here, they're probably dead so..." Neither of them were good at being subtle were they. After whispering a bit to each other, Charlie took a deep breath and faced you. "Hi! My Names Charlie Morningstar! Welcome to the Hazbin Hotel!"

You introduced yourself, explained you situation, keeping out your suspicious history of not really being able to die. Maybe you were just really lucky, you thought, and that your luck just ran out. The Hotel wasn't that bad, and out of all the places you could spend you time, it was probably the best. You still couldn't get over the fact that you really didn't feel dead, almost like you were lost but couldn't remember where you trying to go in the first place. Everyone in hell looked so--unique was probably the best word, but you looked the same as the day you died. Charlie told you that it wasn't anything you should worry about, but it still made you stick out like a sore thumb.

Speaking of Charlie, she became a really great friend. She was very concerned with you fitting in with the others at the Hotel, even if it was a struggle. You mainly just sticked to yourself, since you didn't feel comfortable leaving the hotel. Every once in a while, you'd hang out at the bar, where you met the bartender Husk. He was nice, at least nice enough to make you alcohol free drinks, almost being able to sense your aversion to alcohol. Sometime you'd see Angel there, mainly after work. He never told you what he did for work, but you could assume, not like it was your place to judge him. You grew closer to Vaggie as you grew closer to Charlie. They cared about each other, it was very nice to see. It made the Hotel feel just a little bit warmer. You even got to meet the little housekeeper named Niffty, who was definitely a character.

Though you often have the feeling that you're missing someone. It wasn't until a few weeks into your stay at the Hotel that you actually got to meet Alastor. He was--creepy, and you couldn't get over the feeling that he knows too much about you. You don't miss the scared looks the others have then he's around, or the predatory gaze he gives you often. But you choose not to think about it, since other than his more than strange behavior, he's pretty kind.

Your stay at the Hazbin Hotel is overall, a nice one, though pretty reliant on you ignoring the whispering in the walls and the strange feeling that you're always being watched. Every day you're here, you feel your mind become more hazy, barely being able to pay attention, and if it wasn't for the others, you feel as though you'd loose yourself completely.

---

A/n: sorry for the abrupt ending, Tumblr couldn't handle my ramblings. I'll try to get part 2 out soon, which will focus more on the characters rather than lore. Sorry if this wasn't what you expected.

[rowenablade]

Okay. I’m going to wait to do a second watch before I articulate most of my other feelings here, but I want to address one thing.

I’m seeing a lot of posts like, “I related to Izzy because I am also queer and older/disabled/depressed. By killing him off, the writers are saying that I deserve to die.”

Guys.

I’m not saying your feelings aren’t valid. I totally understand grieving a character that you relate to. But speaking as a writer, I just want to point out that trying to write with the shadow of “what is the absolute worst and most harmful way a reader can interpret this” will smother your ability to create. Twisting yourself in knots, trying to think up the worst-faith takes possible and scotch-guarding all your writing decisions against them is exhausting to the point of making you just not want to write anymore.

And we’ve seen the writers deliberately choose not to do this in Season 1. Remember all those terrible “Izzy is racist” takes that the writers and cast seemed completely blindsided by? That happened because the writers and directors and actors weren’t going over every scene with a fine tooth comb, ferreting out every shot or line of dialogue or micro expression that could possibly be interpreted as racist, and scrubbing it off. Because there comes a point where your story is what it needs to be, and you have to accept that some people will interpret it in ways you didn’t intend them to. And if you can’t accept that, you’ll never find the courage to put your work out there.

The point of diverse casts and writing teams isn’t to achieve a state of, “Nothing bad ever happens to a character from a marginalized demographic ever again.” It’s to achieve a status quo of these types of characters just being people in the world of the story. Not symbols, not representation boxes to tick, not tokens that you can point to so that you can say, “Here, we acknowledged this type of person exists, now where’s our woke points?”

OFMD is full of characters of color, queer characters, older characters, characters of differing body types. And in stories, things happen to characters. Some fall in love. Some make the same mistakes over and over. Some turn into birds. Some die.

Izzy’s character represents a lot of things, but he does not represent every older, disabled fan or fan who has struggled with suicide, any more than Jim represents all genderqueer fans, or Olu represents all black fans. That’s not how the writers were handling him. They were handling him like a character, because that’s what you have to do.

Again, I understand being sad. I am so, so fucking sad. But this idea of, “Any time something bad happens to a character I relate to means that the writer thinks I deserve these bad things to happen to me,” will poison everything you engage with eventually. Because stories are full of things happening to characters, and they won’t all be good things. And the more representation we get, the more often bad things will happen to characters we relate to.

But good things will happen too.

Queer couples get married. Disabled women run off with their favorite husbands. Middle-aged characters change careers. A multiracial polycule finds a home at sea. A fat man covered in tattoos stars in a drag show and all his friends cheer. All these things happened in the same show as Izzy’s death. This is what this world is.

Anyway. I know emotions are running high and I’ll probably get blocked or unfollowed by a few people for this. But I’m just trying to find my peace where I can, and if anyone else finds this useful, cheers.

[caffeinewitchcraft]

The Hero and Hope (part 3/5)

(part 1) (part 2)

Summary: You've been adopted before. That's why you know better than to hope for another chance, especially a second chance with the Bahrs

-----

It’s not that you don’t want to be adopted. You just know that you’re not going to be. You’re the oldest in the orphanage, barely three years away from aging out. People don’t adopt kids your age, especially not obstinate, mean ones like you.

Besides, you’re a Hero. As soon as you master your power, you’ll be compelled to leave and fight evil anyway. That’s why it doesn’t matter if the Bahrs want you or not. You’re not somebody that’s supposed to have a family.

You barely remember the first time you were adopted. That was back when the Director of the orphanage was mean and biting. You have a vague memory of gold exchanging hands and leaving in the middle of the night. Your new parents barely looked at you and didn’t call you by your name at all.

You don’t remember a lot of that time. You were five and it was a struggle to go from living with a dozen kids to no one at all. Your new family gave you your own room in their small house and told you not to get underfoot.

The first time you ran away from their house, you didn’t get far. The baker in town brought you back to them and warned them about how kids your age are always slipping out when not paid enough attention.

“If you do it again,” the person who paid for you said, “you’re going straight back to the orphanage.”

And you do.

--------.

The day of the picnic, every kid wakes up early without being told.

You watch as Hera fusses over all the younger ones, straightening new shirts and brushing dust off knees. Josiah is reading one of the newest books Mrs. Bahr – Marie – brought, biting the skin on the side of his thumb. You snag Hera as she races to find Annie some ribbon for her hair.

“Hold up, let me brush your hair first,” you say.

Hera frantically pats the braids she slept in. “I forgot about my hair!” She turns large, watery eyes on you. “Islaaaa!��

You snort and help her unwind each braid. She decides to leave it down, charmed by the waves the braids left in her hair. Your hands don’t shake as you work even though your heart is racing. Today is the day of the picnic.

Today might be the day the Bahrs pick one of you to adopt. The younger kids don’t know that, the information carefully hidden from them, but Hera knows. Director Sarah knows. You know.

It’s been a long time since you felt this sort of anxiety. The second time you were adopted was just before the Winter and it wasn’t bad at first. The couple who adopted you ran an inn in town. It was exciting to have your own room and your new mother wanted you to call her Mom right away. Six-years-old and you were so excited just to be able to call someone your parent. This time you were going to listen. You weren’t going to run away or complain if their house felt too big and too lonely. This time you were going to get it right.

You didn’t think about what they wanted from you in exchange.

It wasn’t until the second week when they found out you weren’t really much use for anything that things started getting bad.

You breathe in through your nose and proclaim Hera’s hair finished. She thanks you and races off to find Annie, determined to put the ribbon she picked in the younger girl’s hair.

The Bahrs aren’t like the innkeepers. Whoever they adopt won’t be expected to know how to read or do math or how to take care of horses. If they are required to then Marie and Ivan will teach them first. Both have spent enough time at the orphanage for you to believe that. Isn’t it Marie who’s teaching all of you your letters? Wasn’t it Ivan who taught you how to better put up a fence?

Whoever they choose will be fine, you think. It’s both a relief and a sting. Whoever they choose will be fine. It’s just probably not going to be you. Not when Annie is so sweet and social and Hera is so strong and kind. Not when Josiah works so hard to soak up everything they have to teach him.

“Is everyone ready?” Director Sarah asks. She’s standing by the door. Her clothes are nicer than usual too, a dress made of a light blue fabric you’ve never seen before. Her hair is carefully combed back into an updo and fastened with a tie Hera made for her last winter. She runs a critical eye over all of you. “You all look very nice. Josiah, tie your shoes, please. Annie, leave the slate in your room, what you do if you lost it? Honestly…”

You let Director Sarah fuss over the kids, slipping out the door ahead of everyone. You don’t own a dress, but the button-down shirt is new and starched. Director Sarah helped you embroider bluebells on the collar and sleeves, and you think it turned out well.

You may not be getting adopted today, but you’re excited to see the Bahr family’s estate. The sun is warm overhead, the sky an endless blue. The summer is mild this year, perfect for a party. Isn’t that what Mr. Bahr – Ivan – told you to think of it as? A party. No strings attached.

A wagon comes up the lane. The Bahr family’s home is too far for the younger kids to walk to, past the town and closer to the Lord’s manor. They said they’d send a wagon for all of you, but something still clenches in your chest when you actually see it. Wagons are an expense the orphanage can’t justify, but, apparently, the Bahrs can.

The driver smiles kindly when he pulls up next to you. “Everyone ready to go?”

Before you can answer, the kids are pouring out the front door, chattering excitedly. You help Director Sarah lift the smaller ones into the seats near the front. The wagon is open topped, so Director Sarah can look over everyone sternly, twisting around in her spot next to the driver.

“No playing during the ride,” she instructs. “Mr. Dallen is very kindly driving us so you must listen to him, alright?”

Mr. Dallen also turns around. “I don’t have too many rules,” he says. He pretends to think, scratching his thick beard.  He grins “Don’t fall out!”

He’s joking, but that’s why you’re stationed at the back of the wagon. From your seat, you’ll be able to stop any roughhousing before “falling out” becomes a real danger. Already you’re eyeing the way Josiah is fidgeting. He’s incredibly calm when he’s reading, but otherwise he’s like a tornado. There’s a reason he’s the one that fell into the well in the first place. Hera sits primly next to him, her hands folded in her lap. You can tell she’s watching him from the corner of her eye. There’s a reason she’s the one who pulled Josiah out of the well.

Mr. Dallen directs the horses away from the orphanage, through the orchard, and along the road cutting through the fields. When you’re going to the forest to hunt, you take the narrower path that winds through the orchard and more directly into the tree line. The wagon is forced to stay on the wider road where the horses won’t sink into any mud and the wagon wheels won’t catch on rocks or dense foliage.

After the fields is the town. The kids wave to every Villager and Blacksmith they see. “Good day!” “Morning!” “We’re going to a picnic!” Hera pulls Annie back from the edge of the wagon before she tips over onto the street.

You slouch in your seat, wishing you were wearing a hat. While the first family who adopted you left town ages ago to live in the Capital, the innkeepers are still around. You don’t look as you pass their business and try not to listen to Josiah carefully sounding out the name of their inn.

When you open your eyes, Director Sarah is looking at you. You okay? She mouths. She wasn’t at the orphanage for your first adoption, but she was there for the innkeepers. You feign going to sleep. Just tired. She pretends to believe you and turns back to continue chatting with Mr. Dallen.

The kids are excited to go through the forest. Many of them are too young to even go into town with Director Sarah, a privilege you earn at ten years old, and they point to every bird, deer and mushroom they see amongst the trees. You let the sound of nature and the kids’ chatter lull you into a sort of meditation. The estate is only thirty minutes away now that you’re out of town.

You’re nearly dropping off to sleep when Director Sarah’s voice changes in pitch. Your sensitive hearing can pick up a thread of concern in her voice. What makes Director Sarah concerned, makes you concerned.

“—demons in the woods,” Sarah is saying very quietly. She glances out of her peripherals towards the back to make sure no kids are listening. If she notices how you’re only pretending to sleep, she doesn’t show any sign of it. “Shouldn’t we ask the kids to be quiet?”

“The Lord’s Knights have been patrolling,” Mr. Dallen says equally quietly. You can see him scan the trees for a moment before he smiles reassuringly at Director Sarah. “We’ll be okay so long as we stick to the road.”

“Alright.”

You keep a closer eye on the surrounding forest.

“There! There it is!”

Annie’s shout drags you attention from a (suspiciously) shadowed gully. The woods have thinned enough that hedges of the Bahrs’ estate can be seen. You’ve only been out this far once, a long, long time ago. You’ve never been past this point.

You’re just as surprised as the rest of the kids when the hedges give way to a castle.

That’s not a manor. You’ve never seen either, but you’re sure of this. Manors are supposed to look like the orphanage or any of the buildings in town, just larger. The Bahrs’ home has towers. The front doors are three times the height of a regular one and you can see that the handles and knockers are made of copper. The stone isn’t white like the castles in picture books, but it’s clean and neatly cut.

“Wow,” Hera breathes.

You agree.

Mr. Dallen directs the horses right up the main driveway, cheerfully explaining that the roses are the flower of the estate, aren’t they beautiful? Even Hera can only manage a faint noise of agreement, eyes wide on the house.

“The party’s around back,” Mr. Dallen says cheerfully. He clicks his tongue and the horses stop just short of the front doors. “I’ll take you there.”

Around back. You expect him to lead you around the side of the castle, past rows of rose bushes and the fountains that are tucked between the hedges. Instead, Mr. Dallen opens the front doors without knocking and directs everyone to follow him.

You’ve never seen anywhere so grand. The kids follow Mr. Dallen in hushed awe, gaping at the marble staircase that bisects the foyer. There are two chandeliers to either side of the grand staircase that each send a spray of rainbow light across the walls. Is the manor a little bare? The walls empty of portraits and artwork? You eye a pair of crossed axes hanging just beyond the shadow of the staircase.

“They’re ordering portraits from the Capital,” Mr. Dallen says, gesturing carelessly to the space where a portrait of the homeowners might hang. Then under his breath, “Unless they hang more swords there instead.”

“Excuse me?” Hera asks.

“Nothing,” Mr. Dallen says cheerfully. He guides them past the staircase and a row of doors to the back of the house. The large doors at the back of the house are already open. Mr. Dallen cups a hand over his mouth and calls, “Ho ho, look here! Look who’s arrived!”

“Surprise!” Ivan shouts, throwing his hands up in the air. He’s standing on the stone patio just outside the house, but he’s not the only one. Mrs. Bahr is next to him, her hands clasped in front of her, beaming. Behind her is a dozen other adults. “It’s a party!”

“Welcome,” Mrs. Bahr says warmly. She’s dressed elegantly in a long, red tunic that’s embroidered with the Lord’s crest. The Lord is here as well, his golden hair and eyes unmistakable even amongst the crowd. “Welcome to our home.”

You’re already at the back of the group, but you hang back further as the younger kids cautiously step out into the sun. Your eyes flick from face to face. You recognize a few of the people. There’s the Baker from town and her wife, there’s the Merchant that comes through every third week, there’s the Villager that donates zucchini—

And there are the innkeepers who, once upon a time, told you to call them your parents. They’re older than you remember, light hair gone silver in the sun, but it’s them. They’re right by the Lord, eagerly waiting near him for the opportunity to talk.

It’s very clear what this is. You watch the kids stream out onto the patio to greet Ivan and Marie. The other adults study the kids like zoo animals, eyes flicking to their clean party outfits to their happy faces. This isn’t a party for the kids. It’s a party for them. They’re showing off to each other. Look at how great they are! They’re helping out the poor orphan kids! You’re very familiar with these sort of events from back when the other Director was in charge. You just didn’t think you’d ever have to be near one again.

You take a step back and are stopped by Director Sarah.

“It’s okay, Isla,” Director Sarah murmurs. You didn’t even notice her falling back to your side. Her hand is gentle on your elbow. “It’s not what you think.”

Not what you think? You watch the Villager who runs the general store ask Josiah about the book he’s reading. The Bahrs are proudly introducing Annie and Hera to the Lord. There is something different about it, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. All you can see is the way the adults are watching the kids. You breathe in through your nose like Ivan taught you. In. Out. “What is it?”

“Fixing my mistake,” Director Sarah says.

That gets your attention. Your eyes dart from the happy scene in front of you to Sarah and back again. With the white umbrellas over the food tables, the streamers strung between garden trellises, and the kids dressed in their best, it looks like a painting. In contract, Sarah’s lips are pursed and the shadows of the house make her appear more tired than she is.

“There’s a parlor,” Mr. Dallen says. You jump when he speaks and he grimaces apologetically. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “If you need to talk.”

Marie is looking over the heads of the kids to where you’re standing, a frown on her face. She mouths your name, concern in her eyes. Your jaw clenches when the Merchant steps in front of her, hiding you from view.

“Yeah,” you say. “Let’s talk.” You spin on your heel.

Sarah follows you silently. You feel wrong-footed and caged by the entire situation. This was supposed to be a picnic, wasn’t it? No strings attached? Your dress shirt is tight around your neck and you flick open the top button.

“I should have told you,” Sarah says as soon as the door closes. There are two couches in the room adjacent to a large window that overlooks the party. Neither of you sits down. Sarah folds her hands in front of her skirts. “I apologize.”

“What are they doing here?” you ask. You gesture to the window. “The Lord, I understand. He’s the Lord. But the Baker? The Merchant?” You bark a laugh. “They’re not here to adopt anyone.”

“Maybe not,” Sarah says evenly, “but they’re good connections to have.”

“Connections?” You scoff. You remember watching the empty road through that winter nearly seven years ago. “What good are their connections?”

“Annie loves baking,” Sarah says. She doesn’t flinch in the face of your anger. She watches you calmly and doesn’t so much as shift her weight when you start to pace. “The Baker is a good connection for her to have, even if she doesn’t want to adopt. Many of the shopkeepers in town are open to taking on apprentices.”

You falter. You didn’t think about that. Your eyes drift towards the window. You can hear Hera laughing and Josiah complaining good naturedly. You’re nearly 15, just a few years away from aging out. You can’t say you’ve never thought about the future before. “They said they’d be willing to do that?”

“Who knows what the future holds?” Sarah sighs and goes to take a seat on the sofa. She makes a sound low in her throat when she sits. “That wagon ride was not good for my back.”

“I don’t trust them,” you say. You stop pacing to sit opposite her. From this point in the room, you can see the party on the patio. They can also see you. Ivan doesn’t turn away from the dessert table, but you can sense his attention on you. You swallow. “We don’t need anything from them.”

“I agree,” Sarah says.

You blink. “What?”

Sarah laughs. It’s not her usual laugh that she shows the kids, gentle and fond and warm. It’s cold and a little sharp. You’ve only heard it once before when the snow finally melted, chasing the snow spirits away, and the town came to see what had become of the orphanage.

“You and I are a lot alike,” Sarah says. Her eyes drift somewhere distant. “Like you, I remember that Winter. I remember waiting for any sort of response to our pleas. I remember hearing nothing back. The helplessness I felt as our stores dwindled…” Her voice cracks. She shakes herself, swallowing hard. “Well. I don’t need to tell you what their lack of aid cost us.”

It takes you two tries to speak. Director Sarah feels the same way as you. “So why?”

“Why did I agree to the party?”

“Yes.”

“Because I need to forgive, not forget, if I want to fix my mistake,” Sarah says. Her lips thin. “I’m not perfect. Since I’ve been Director of the orphanage, there hasn’t been a single new hire. There have been no volunteers or extracurricular programs for the kids. I’ve kept us hidden.”

“You’ve kept us protected,” you say. Things under Director Sarah have always been better than what they were before. The kids are happier and brighter, and the pantry is always full. No one disappears in the middle of the night or dies under her watch. “We know you have.”

“I’ve tried,” Sarah says. She opens her hands, palms facing the ceiling. “I rebuilt the orphanage to be independent. I thought that if we were completely self-sustaining, we’d be alright. But in doing so I’ve hurt the children. The orphanage is not supposed to be forever. They need connections with people, with the town, for when they grow up.”

“That—” You don’t know what you’re going to say. You fall silent, your anger fizzling out in your chest. She’s right. As much as you want everyone to stay together, you know that can’t happen. What Sarah is saying isn’t wrong, but… “Today is supposed to be for the kids. Not for them to feel better about themselves helping the orphans.”

“The kids are having fun,” Sarah says. There’s a peal of laughter from outside as if to underscore her words. She smiles as she stands. “Kids includes you too, you know. Let me worry about the adults.”

You stand too. You know the conversation is coming to a close and that, soon, you’ll be expected to go out there with Sarah. “Um…”

“Yes?”

You nearly don’t say it. But the way Sarah is waiting for you to speak is so patient that you muster up the courage. “The innkeepers are here. They aren’t…?”

Again, you’re not sure what you’re about to say. There’s a sick fear in your stomach that they’re here to tell the Bahrs all about how awful you were when you with them. Maybe they’re looking for another kid to demand too much of. Maybe they’re here because, in the end, you didn’t mean anything to them and what happened between you and them doesn’t make a difference--

Even if you don’t know what you’re going to say, Sarah must. Her smile darkens. “I’ll take care of the adults,” she repeats. She smooths her hand over your hair when you follow her to the door. “Why don’t you stay in here for a moment? I’ll just have a word with the innkeepers.”

You wait in the parlor while Sarah joins the party. You twist your hands together to keep from picking at the embroidery on your sleeves. You almost want to stop Sarah from talking to the innkeepers. It was so long ago, before the Winter, it shouldn’t matter anymore. You’re being ridiculous to be so worried about them when there are bigger things going on. You—

Hera throws open the door to the parlor. Her braids are a little frizzy already and there’s a flush high on her cheeks. “Isla! We’re playing team tag and you’re the only one fast enough to catch Marie. Come on!”

You don’t have the option to say no. Hera yanks you by the sleeve out onto the patio. The guests are much more dispersed now, pockets of adults around this table or that. They’re not studying the kids now. They’re just watching them as they run to and fro across the lawn, bemused smiles on their faces.

Ivan cheers when he sees you. Like Hera, his face is bright red. “Isla!” he pants. “You’re on my team!”

Marie sprints past, her skirts hiked up to her knee. She runs as if she’s in full armor, strides long and shoulders square. You wonder if she notices no one is chasing her anymore. “It won’t be enough!” she cries.

Josiah is laying on the grass. He chucks his fist in the air. “Go, Marie! Go!” He gasps for breath. “We’re unstoppable.”

“You’re out,” Annie tells him crossly. She’s also laying flat on her back, but seems to be faring better in the breathing department. “You’ve stopped.”

“Shut it—”

You scan the crowd. You don’t see the innkeepers anywhere, not even near where the Lord is sitting. You look over your shoulder back towards the house just in time to see Director Sarah disappearing around the corner. She’s talking to someone just ahead of her. Is she escorting the innkeepers out?

“Isla?” Hera slips her hand in yours. Her eyes are knowing. “You okay?”

You clear your throat, aware of all the eyes on you. You tuck  some hair that’s escaped her braid behind her ear. “Just trying to decide which team I should join.”

Ivan cries out in dismay. “Isla, please!”

Grinning, you join the game.

-----

(part 1) (part 2)

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to read the conclusion of Isla's tale before next week, please consider supporting me on Patreon (X)!

Up this week is a continuation of my Cinderella Retelling, Cinderella Doesn't Believe in Fairytales

[redwineandtarot]

your future spouse's first impression of you

hi! after a long time i am back with another reading❣️ i asked spirit using the term fs but you can use this for soulmates as well. please remember we have free will, i am just reading energies so take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. i would love to hear your feedbacks <3

🥀paid readings🥀

Disclaimer: My readings do NOT replace any professional advice. Use your own judgment while making decisions. You have your own free will. Take everything I say light-heartedly. All of my readings are for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES.

pick a pile

piles 1-2-3

all pictures are from pinterest.

pile 1

They will think that you are a selfless person. And that you are always ready to help others. Or fight for your values. But in a subtle way. To them you have a calming aura. They will also see you as someone reserved, someone who prefers to keep to themselves and speak less. From the first impression, you are someone who is a bit passive. 

They will think that you have a rich inner self. However you seem to be avoiding it. I don't really know what exactly this is but your fs will be confused as to why you are avoiding this amazing part of you.

You have a mystic and wise energy to you. And to them you look like someone that trusts the universe (or whatever you believe in). You also seem mysterious to them. They will be intrigued by you and will want to know more about you. Maybe it's because you are somewhat different from them. Like they may be an atheist and you may be a pagan or you two may come from different cultures etc. This difference will spark their interest in you. Because to them, you bring a different outlook on life.

They will think that you know how to balance things and can see the different parts of a situation. They will think that you try to be fair.

I don't know how your person will see this but they will think that you accept change as it is and with peace. Maybe it's your calm demeanor that made them think this way.

They will see you as someone who takes a lot on their plate. Maybe you struggle with saying no and end up helping everyone even if it burdens you. Or it's just the way they see you.

Around the time you first meet them you may be very busy. Also you or them (or both) maybe in your 30s. And you may have a 2 year age gap for some of you.

your song: intro: singularity-bts

significant placements: libra, pluto, 3rd house aquarius, uranus, 12th house leo, south node, 4th house

thank you for reading ❤️

pile 2

They will see you as someone reliable and nurturing. You have an earthy vibe to you (also fiery), to them. You look like that friend who never leaves their friends alone in their hard times. 

They will think that you have a lot of potential in you. And already doing quite good in life. You move slowly while making decisions. You think before you act. However when you decide something you move swiftly and get what you want. You seem passionate to them. The line “I want it, I got it” from 7 rings-ariana grande is your line!

They will think that you are quite attracted to them, lmao. But they may think that you already have someone in your life. Again they make a lot of assumptions so you may have not said anything about this topic but still they just can't sit still lol. They think that you shine a lot so maybe that's why they assume you are not alone or at least people are chasing you. 

They will think that you have a lot to offer. Emotion and passion wise.

To them you are quite firm on your beliefs. For some of you they may see you have a debate with someone or you may have a debate with them in your first meeting. Or it's just something that will allow them to see your argumentative side. 🔞They will think that you are s3xy when you get all bossy(?) like that lol.

You seem like someone who is quite comfortable in their own skin. However they will see the hard work behind this confidence. Idk they will try to analyze a lot probably. Like try to see through you. You may have had to work hard to gain your confidence and maybe you were self conscious/had a low self esteem but worked hard and became who you are today. Again this is in their eyes.

Some of you here could have brownish-reddish hair here. Or will have that color when you meet your fs.

you got two songs: better by myself- hey violet, to me-alina baraz

significant placements: saturn, 2nd house, cancer south node, 7th house, leo south node, 11th house, libra

thank you for reading ❤️

pile 3

First of all, you may have a purple aura. I know this is a bit off topic but it came through.

You may have a darker aesthetic or may prefer darker colors on your clothes around the time you meet your fs. And they notice this. They may notice your legs and think that they are beautiful. Also I heard, boobs/chest area for some of you.

They will think that you know how to enjoy life and enjoy yourself. You have this nonchalant energy to them. And they see you as someone who is not afraid to express themselves and live authentically. You are at peace in life. You love your life and seem to enjoy it. To them, you are like a “no bs” person. 

Like your clothing, you may like/like to search about what society deems as “dark”, like occult etc.

They will think that you are a disciplined person. However at first they may understand you wrong, this discipline can seem like the will to win no matter what, to them. They may see you as someone who is defensive and does not accept their faults. Someone who is willing to do almost everything to win. However I am not seeing that this is the case with you. Because of this later they may be ashamed of themselves. 

You also seem somewhat unattainable and unpredictable to them. But it's not like you do stupid things. It's more like when they think they know you, you say something totally unexpected about yourself. 

You have this great personality inside you. For them to see this side of you may take a while. I am not saying they will hate you but they will be a bit judgemental of you. You seem like the life of the party and like you are an authentic person but you are also such a deep person. However nonchalant you seem, you also have worries. And you have such a strong and a soft person inside you. They will see this eventually and embrace every part of you.

(For some of you this judgment may be because they are a bit more of a reserved person)

your song: take me-miso

significant placements: taurus, 3rd house, uranus leo, 11th house, neptune capricorn, 12th house, mercury

thank you for reading ❤️

[fatesundress]

⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

[itshype]

Like and Survive! (DC x DP)

Everyone knows who Phantom is. He was one of the very first heroes though he inexplicably chose to dedicate his life (metaphorically) to micromanaging the hell out of some random town no one has ever heard of. He's a specialist hero, only really useful for ghost stuff. He comes every time someone contacts him for help but it's only happened a few times in all of his years of operation.

Then, kid heroes become a thing. Robin, once perpetually hidden beneath the shadow of the bat emerges into the metropolis sun just in time to make the front page.

When Batman's child-raising skills are called into question, Kid Flash is brought out at a press release by Flash to show that these exceptional children are around. They just aren't common knowledge for their own health (aside from the villains - being a child star wrecks your brain).

A few villains do come forward and say "no, the sidekicks will go out on their own if their hero doesn't let them. And they have all the powers and none of the restraint. Please don't separate them."

(Batman and Robin are both very flattered that all their rogues think they have powers. Robin is ✨glowing✨ with pride.)

Cyborg calls Robin at 3am. He asks if he's seen the new 'BooTube' page.

Phantom has set up his own website. It's a dark and moody ripoff of YouTube with 1 channel. His.

Introduction Video: Transcript Hi guys, I can't lie to you, I was as up-in-arms as anyone when I saw what people are now calling "The Robin Reveal". But then I remembered that I started my hero work when I was mentally and physically fourteen years old...

Danny doesn't mention he was also chronologically 14 at the time. Secret identities and all.

...and I had no mentor, no training and no backup. It was just me and two humans, neither of whom even had powers at that time. I understand the call, in a way that none of the non-hero people criticising you could ever hope to comprehend. I'm glad to see most of you fellow child-heroes have an experienced adult watching your back. But if you don't. If there's even one of you out there who need a mentor, consider Amity Park open for business, and consider adding my number to your speedial. I'm not like those people in interviews saying "Oh, someone needs to help the children!" I am helping you, I am helping you whenever you need with whatever you want.

The ghost swallows and seemingly forces down his brimming sincerity.

And for those of you who do already have backup? Consider checking back here. I'm going over my old reports from my first few years on the streets to see what I most needed to hear, and what I wished I knew sooner. Hopefully no one else will have to learn what I know the hard way.

You know how to fight, this channel won't be for that. This is about coping with secret identities, and the messed up situations that can only happen to a vigilante or hero.

Anyways, the first video is already ready to be edited so in a few days I'll be back here to discuss what you do when you've been cloned. How to deal with that emotionally and physically. My clone isn't very well known outside of my town but I think she'll add a great perspective!

Within weeks, without his knowledge, Danny is somehow remote-mentoring heroes of all ages.

[alllgator-blood]

I s2g if you add the layers of these comic pages together, it's over 350 layers. THIS is why I don't do full color for my comics lmaooo- ANYWAY EVERYONE HERE HAS AN AU APPARENTLY, SO THIS IS A BRIEF GLIMPSE INTO MINE. I don't know what to call it yet but I'm thinking of calling it "famous prophets" because 1. I like that car seat headrest song, 2. it's about shamura who is prophetic, 3. it's about trying to outrun fate with the Power of Love (and failing. Like the song!!!). It takes place when all the bishops were teens/kids during the age of hundreds of gods at war, and were trying to survive as a family.

I'm really excited to work on stuff for it but it's all gonna be drawn out of order. Maybe I'll write a full explanation of what it's gonna be about when I have a better idea...I want to channel my eldest sibling angst in a productive way, and maybe establish a QPP between shamura and a completely random npc everyone forgets about <3 also kallamar is trans too cause I said so. I'll do a comic about it eventually. Instead of an absence of gender he has TOO much gender. It simply cannot be contained.

I like that nonbinary genders are normalized in cult of the lamb to the point where nobody singles anyone out for being a they/them, it's not like "THIS IS MY SIBLING SHAMURA. THEY ARE NONBINARY AND USE THEY/THEM. ALRIGHT BACK TO KILLING YOU", it's just like "don't you fucking dare make my poor sibling wake up from their nap to kick your ass. Cause they deserve better than this."

But at the same time I like having the freedom to be more specific, and say "shamura is voidpunk and their gender is best described as the feeling that overtakes you during the first snow of the year, when everything outside is deathly quiet". This comic is actually derived from the time I was walking through a forest that's been torn down for a few years, and came out to my little sister as trans. I must've been like 13 or 14 and she didn't really get it as a 10 year old, but it was better than my mom FREAKING OUT about me coming out. So it was a nice little bonding moment between just the two of us. I don't have a good memory so I don't recall how it went unfortunately...

Now, the climate is a little different. My sis tried out transmasculinity for maybe 5-6 years before feeling happier as a woman, my mom is trying to be Based and flaunt her Woke trans children, and my dad remembered "oh yeah trans natives have existed before colonization. Maybe me being transphobic is a product of my culture being erased" and has gotten better about calling me the right thing. I have a mustache (thanks pcos!!) and wear skirts and am not a repressed "tomboy" teenager anymore. But I can't help but wonder what would've happened if I could've been like shamura and just...been nonbinary without people being fucking weird about it. Or been born as a badass war god who will tear you to shreds before you can perceive my birth sex. I know they're fictional but they are my ultimate gender envy GRRRRR BARK BARK BARK

Here is the secret image for this post- I listen to mostly EDM when I draw cause it keeps the energy up, but as I was finishing up shamura's poetry part, I was like THESE ARE JUST KMFDM LYRICS so I made this

[kithtaehyung]

would u? (3tan717) | myg

3tan717 drabble #1: would u? pairing: 3tan!yoongi x reader(f) series: masterlist | three tangerines | 3tan717 rating/genre: pg (18+) ; fluff ; brother’s best friend au, implied age gap au summary: you see a certain fruit-centered trend online.. and decide to test it on yoongi note: i am so so so sorry this is out on the very last day of feb but things have been absolute bananas lately! tbh i’m surprised this is even getting posted on time and i have even more to do after this is shared but eff it shibal!!! note 2: as promised, this is dedicated to the people that submitted the answers i’m using for this drabble: anon, grapes / @yoongrace, and apryl @aprylynn for this idea hehehe! also i literally just finished this so it's legit unedited so i'm sry for any mistakes! off to go prep for events now! warnings: 3tan yoongi as always, working yoongi??, kitchen, period cramps suck but yoongi to the mf rescue drop date: feb 29th, 2024, 10:03pm est word count: 2.3k

-

-

Ugh. 

Why does this have to happen every fucking month. Why can’t it happen every three? Or six? Or never ever ever? 

Groaning, you roll over, burying your face into the pillow on Yoongi’s side. 

To some degree, you feel placated, probably due to his scent still lingering next to your dismay. He had to get up early to finish a track, but he assured you can be in the room. 

You can hear a little bit of what he’s working on as it bleeds through his headphones, and even just this sliver of sound gives you chills. Not just because of what it sounds like, but the sole fact that Yoongi’s letting you even listen in the first place. 

Huffing out a bit of amusement, you remember the last time Yoongi let you stay while he worked—albeit at his place while he went to the studio. 

Damn, how much you’ve grown since then. All those memories, those quiet times and tumultuous times, everything leading up to now. How time has molded you with knowing hands. 

However, no matter how much has changed all these months, some things have not wavered, like the fact that you needed to be sure he was okay with it—and his answer making you absurdly shy. 

Did he really have to say that you’re either staying or he’s gonna leave? That scheming motherfucker! 

Some drum beats hit your cheek before you realize the menace himself is playing multiple different ones. It’s only a couple hits before he moves onto the next, and you’re about to lift your hea—

“Fuck, where the hell is that kick?” 

Your laugh is stifled by cotton. As tickled as you are to hear Yoongi like this, you don’t wanna do anything to distract him. 

But by doing so, that causes your body to tighten and fuck, it hurts. It hurts to move, it hurts to laugh, it hurts to just exist. God, you want him to come back and join you so bad, but you don’t wanna be that person. 

…Yet. Maybe if it gets so bad you can’t even sleep? 

“Found you! Fucking finally. Thought you could hide from me, huh?” 

Oh, fucking hell, he’s adorable. 

Yeah, there’s no way you’re making him drop everything right now. This is too precious of an afternoon to stop. 

Exhaling a mile long breath, you fight through your pain and feel for your phone, groaning as you shift yourself. When in position under sheets and warm sunlight, you cycle through apps as a distraction. 

Scrolling. Scrolling. Smiling at some animal videos a bit before scrolling again. 

After all of five minutes, you start to see a trend on your feed, and suddenly get the idea to try it on Yoongi. It’s simple and harmless, right? 

You [3:30pm]: would u peel an orange for me 

Yoongi doesn’t say anything, and you lift your head slightly to see if he looks at his phone. 

When he does, he checks it really quick before setting it back down on his desk, back to clicking on his screen. 

Ah. Damn. He must really be in the zone because… 

Uhh. 

Blinking, you watch as Yoongi rolls his chair out to get up, setting his glasses down and heading out of the room with a light swing of his chains. 

Uh. What just happened? Did you upset him? You’re so stunned that his swift exit has you wanting to get up and follow him.  

But ow. Ouch. It’s maddening how much your cramps are getting to you. 

Bearing the punches to your gut, you start sliding out of the bed, straining and sucking in sharp breaths just to stand and pull Yoongi’s comforter over your tension. 

Padding out the bedroom, your worries make your steps tiny and heavy, and you regret sending that text because you literally just said you weren’t… gonna…

On the dining table—quiet—lie three tangerines, peeled and placed next to vibrant scraps while your lover peels a fourth with diligent, devoted hands. 

And you can’t even form words that match how you feel. 

Your vision swims right as Yoongi looks your way, his body stilling before he puts the fruit down. 

When he approaches with concern, you answer his silent questions through hiccups, “I—I thought you left cus—you were mad.” 

“Huh?” 

“I don’t even know,” you swallow, gesturing to all of your lower half and feeling him hold the slipping blanket. “It’s just… this, I guess.”

“Does it hurt?” 

“Like a motherfucker.” 

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, doll. Hold up.” Handing you the comforter, Yoongi goes to his cabinets in the kitchen, grabbing a bottle of medicine before walking it over. “You gotta take something as soon as you feel it. Don’t let it get this bad.”

“I know,” you groan, resting your head on his shirt and inhaling his healing presence. “I didn’t wanna bother you.” 

Your forehead is kissed. “You’re not bothering me. Especially with something like this.” 

“Okay.” 

He walks away again to grab some water, and you watch as he pours some into an electric kettle before starting it up. 

Glancing back at the fruit, you sigh, clutching the bottle of pills while feeling the weight of his comforter. He’s probably not pleased with the way it might drag on the ground, so you gather it and pick the end chair to sit on. 

And then you sigh, “Sorry for making you peel those. I didn’t even plan on eating anything.”  

“Too bad. You’re gonna eat what I make you anyway.” 

Wait, he’s cooking? He has work to do! “You’re working, though. Don’t worry about me right now.” 

“It’ll be quick.” 

“What are you making?” 

A glass bowl and pan are procured from random places before Yoongi blinks in place. “Uhh.. You’ll see.” 

As he clunks them onto his counter and stove, you watch with hearts for eyes as he bustles around the kitchen space. Even doing things as simple as washing his hands, opening his fridge, and simply grabbing a knife gives you pause. 

And this is when you realize that you can watch Yoongi do absolutely anything and be amazed. 

Even when he stands, watching you with a look that’s wait why doesn’t he look—

“Take the medicine, baby girl.” 

Oh. 

Snapping out of your trance, you nod. “Sorry.” 

Yoongi continues to give you glances until you swallow down the painkillers, satisfied enough to continue his cooking venture when you take the second one. 

As the sun paints the apartment in marigold and light, you keep watching with a smile as he brings the kitchen to life. Butter sizzles in a pan, tangerines are getting halved on a board, and something is getting mixed with a whisk. 

Who knew that the neighborhood fuckboy would have a whisk on hand? Not the younger you, that’s for damn sure. 

But here Yoongi is, in the flesh, whisking away with veiny forearms that have you thinking the most absurd thoughts during this time of the month. The only thing that would cut through the raging horniness would be getting up to see what the hell he’s making. 

It’s starting to smell familiar though. But he put the tangerines in the pan so you don’t even know what to expect right now. 

Walking up—blanket left behind—you observe the kitchen before peering over his broad shoulder. “Mm.. Smells like pancakes.” 

Yoongi doesn’t answer, but when you see the consistency of the batter, you realize you’re correct. “Oh, it is! I’m smart.” 

“You are,” he laughs. “But you didn’t get it all the way right.” 

“No?” 

“Nope.” Yoongi then gently gets you to move before he pours the batter over the slices, and you crane your neck to watch as he evens it all out. “Just one tangerine pancake.”

“Oh, okay,” you scoff, earning a laugh at your side. “Whatever, chef.” 

“We’ll see what you say in a bit.” 

Is he gonna leave it or flip it? Probably the latter. 

“K. Gonna flip that once it’s done.” 

Nice. You smile to yourself, loving how you’re starting to really be on the same page. Nudging him, you keep watching as he lowers the heat and sets the lid on the pan. “What now?” 

“We wait,” he responds, dusting his hands together before cleaning up his mixing bowl. “And I’m gonna see if we have any sugar.”

Damn it, Yoongi cannot keep saying that two-letter word. It’s starting to be detrimental to your health. “I can help.” 

“S’ok,” he assures, nose upturned. “Just watch me work.” 

“Oh, I’m very good at doing that.” 

At this, Yoongi turns and gives you a smile that immediately reminds you of summer, and you almost feel like crying again. 

“I’ve actually never tried this, but. We’ll see if this works.” 

With nothing snarky, or teasing, or fake to say, you reply with a smile and a genuine, “I’m sure it will.” 

When he keeps staring, his eyes lower to your lips, and you don’t care that you probably look like a wreck, or feel like one. Because the way he’s looking at you now makes you glow. 

If only the kettle didn’t decide this was the moment to stop boiling. 

You were probably about to get the kiss of your life. 

But Yoongi halts in his tracks before shifting to get a mug, setting it down with a thud before checking on the pancakes. Pancake. Whatever that delicious-smelling thing is gonna be. 

“There’s some tea packets in that right drawer. Help yourself cus I’d rather you pick.” 

Chuckling, you oblige before scooting over. After seeing a small jar of granules on the counter, you start rummaging through the drawer, exploring the various options while hearing the sound of a plate behind you. 

Ah, Yoongi’s flipping it. 

As you turn, you’re just in time to watch the muscles in his back protrude through his shirt as he flips the pan, impressed as he sets the plate down because holy hell that looks great. 

“Sugar, sugar, sugar… Suga, suga, suga.” 

Laughing, you interrupt his silly search as you grab the jar you just saw. “Suga suga, how you get so fly?”

Yoongi stops to see what’s in your hand, and he huffs through a grin before grabbing it. “Thanks, doll.” 

You keep humming the song that’s now wedged into your head as you watch him sprinkle bits on the pancake. 

“I don’t have a blowtorch,” he admits, “But I do have this.” 

Rolling out a drawer, Yoongi takes out a long lighter before holding it to the sugary top, humming the same song you were just singing without even knowing it. As the sugar slowly but surely heats, you both keep humming and basking in a calm afternoon. 

And you don’t even feel the pain anymore. 

“Go ahead and sit, babe.” 

“You sure?” 

“Uh huh.” 

Following instructions, you make your way to the table, cocooning yourself in his comforter again as you await the cutest meal you’ve had in weeks. Months. Lifetimes. 

Speaking of lifetimes… You hope every version of you meets every version of him. No matter when. No matter where. Because you want every version of yourself to find happiness, and Yoongi has been the one to help you finally find it. 

And he certainly passed whatever the hell this orange theory thing was supposed to be. 

Plates are set down to break you out of introspection, and you glance up with eyes sparkling. 

When Yoongi raises a brow, you just smile. When he asks what’s gotten into you, a chuckle escapes before you shake your head, 

“Nothing, baby. Just didn’t expect all this from that text.” 

As he plops into the next chair, you love the way the sun settles on his skin. Highlights his hair. Shimmers in his eyes. 

“Don’t even need to ask, babe.” He captures your attention with a calm look. “I was waiting for any distractions anyways.” 

So this was for him, too? Good. 

Grabbing your fork, you giggle. “Sounded like you were having a little trouble over there.” 

“I was! This is what I get for not saving my shit.” 

Both of you sit back in laugher as you throw your hands out. “Do that!” 

“I’m lazy!” 

“Tough shit!” 

“I know!” 

Grinning, you loll your head before waving your fork out. “You’re gonna save those sounds, and you’re gonna remember this day and thank me.” 

Yoongi just tightens his lips in a smile, eyes creased and glimmering. “Maybe.” 

“Yes. I’ll stand there and watch you until you do it.” 

"Really.."

For the rest of the afternoon—with full bellies and clear minds—you rest on the edge of Yoongi’s bed, forcing him to find the files he needs and watching him groan his way through saving everything. 

Constantly laughing at the ridiculously random names he’s assigning them.

When he’s done, you watch as he spins around in his chair, heart thumping with anticipation as you’re met with a waiting pair of eyes.

Breathtaking. 

When he leans in, you feel incredibly shy. Always, always, always. This will forever remain the same.

And—just as well—Yoongi's kisses will forever taste like tangerines. 

Three of them, to be exact. 

-

-

fin. :)

-

how did the first 717 drabble go! | join the discord hehe

a/n: nothing much to say other than i love y'all so much! i will try responding to anything when i can (there's literally still all the 3tan12 feedback to get to) but i do read all the commentary sent in and it keeps me going strong :'))) so thank you again for being here and being amazingly patient with me. off to work on more things but i shall be back once the wild weeks are over!

a/n 2: suga suga how you get so flyyyy hahaha