#but i think with my final lines and shading it's unclear and looks like the foot is rotated so we're seeing the top

[asterwild]

sea otter (Enhydra lutris)

(pins!)

[jediofbooksandsnacks]

This is from something saved in my drafts under the title Only An Afternoon. It is, generally speaking, a hot fictional mess but! I decided to post a snippet to celebrate Kogami's birthday. It happens during when he goes to pick up Akane from the detention center and deliver her to the CID. I mean, what must have been going through his head? Delivering her to the place he had escaped from? Just: *chef's kiss*

Enjoy your fictional cake my fictional blorbo.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was 7 minutes to 11 am when Kogami arrived at the detention center.

The SUV was a loaner from SAD, a car that boasted all of the tech from a few years ago. The self-driving setting often didn’t work. The AC was perpetually on the fritz. Plus, the radio was stuck on one Sibyl-approved station that played the greatest hits of the past three decades, all padded by fill chatter from the DJ. At least the radio had distracted him as he drove over. When he parked, he clicked it off before he shut down the car. Silence surrounded him, both a blessing and a curse.

It was probably a curse. Consider this: a former Inspector turned Enforcer turned renegade turned SAD agent picking up his own former Inspector turned psycho-prisoner turned statutory Enforcer for delivery to the CID. Irony lived in there, somewhere.

A tug on the handle popped the car door open. Sunlight bathed him in midday gold as he got out, the discord both startling and astute. A breeze tugged at his hair, the same breeze carrying the falling flowers from the sakura trees down to their doom. Nature mocking her with its own beauty as the MWPSB doors inevitably swung shut behind her. Another irony. Soon he could start a collection.

The door closed with a thunk. The fingers of his right hand twitched for a cigarette.

Maybe just one. Hell, he’d smoked in the office, in his MWPSB room, even in her own car. Maybe it would calm the unsettled feeling in his stomach. No sense delaying it till later.

The one thing that held him off lighting up and sucking it down with determined gusto was this: Akane would know. It was dumb, but there it was. Gods, he was just like a kid back in school, not wanting to do anything to make his favorite teacher mad. Which said some fucked up stuff about how he thought of this relationship.

That door didn’t open until it was 11:06, and when it did—

Professionalism in an emergency was the whole point of his job. He’d helped crying children escape from a burning bus, taken action to aid troops advancing within a killing zone, hell, he’d even escaped his own CID captors in SEAUn. Yet, nothing had prepared him for seeing Akane come out of that hellhole and emerge into the shade of the detention center monolith.

He stood. His heart pounded in his chest. Goddammit it all to hell. He really would need a cigarette when this was done.

Brown eyes went wide when they saw him as surprise took over. There were no words he could think of at that moment. In fact, everything he wanted to say existed in the curve of the shadow on her face and was contained in her eyes. Finally, he said, “I’m here to get you.”

It was not the most gallant thing he could think to say, but this was not exactly the most gallant of situations.

Akane’s face relaxed into a smile, a smile thankfully not separated from him by a pane of bulletproof glass and under the dim lighting from the cells’ interior. Aware that he, too, was absorbing absolutely everything about her, he broke his eyes away. The pavement looked cracked beneath his shoes. “Sorry.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for.” A broad smile beamed across her face as she took the steps downwards, her hair blowing in the mild breeze. “I’m kind of hungry.”

“Is food all that’s on your mind right now?” The double entendre took a second to catch up, good god dammit. But it was a reasonable question, after all: the deal that had been struck, the machinations behind this, everything was so far unclear to him. Honestly, he’d give anything for a line into what was going on at the CID and save the sexual harassment call from HR for later.

Sunlight traced the lines of her face and was dimmed by her grin. Maybe it was jealous that he was there to pick up a more powerful force of nature. “Treat me to something.”

He had to stop himself from letting his mind wander into the gutter. As he cleared his throat, he reached for her duffel. “Yes, ma’am.”

[the-silentium]

The key to survival

Chapter 1: Always have tape; it might save your boat or silence chatty people

Masterlist

Pairing: Bad Batch x Reader, not sure yet but might turn into a Tech x Reader fic

Words: 5280 words

Warnings: None

A/N: I had this story in my drafts since 2021. I think it deserves to be out there. Please enjoy.

Taglist: @haloangel391             

____________________

Hunter looked through the glass canopy of the Marauder, searching intently along with Tech and Echo for their escort. The Marshall Commander had been clear about that step; wait for them and do not attempt to approach the surface of the planet without them. The reason why was unclear. 

According to Tech, this planet chose to remain relatively advanced-technology free, meaning that they did use comms and datapads, but turned down ships and any plasma-based weapon. It was odd but not unheard of. It also didn't explain why the clones were forbidden to approach without a native escort. 

Surely, without any high-technology, the ship could not be shot down, the planet was affiliated with the Republic so the locals would not attack them as soon as they stepped out, their presence was planned days ago and so they would not be surprised of the Batch's arrival. 

Even Tech's encyclopedic mind and seemingly endless databank couldn't make sense of it. He told them the planet was inhabited by a high variety of highly dangerous animals of all kinds; swimming, walking, flying, poisonous, stealthy, all more dangerous than the previous one. However, they could be as deadly as they wanted, the clones aboard the ship were trained elite commandos equipped with pretty decent artillery. Those animals had no chance whatsoever against them.  

They nonetheless followed their orders and remained into the stratosphere until their comm received a transmission. Still, Hunter couldn't spot any escort in the clear blue sky. 

"So you're the clone ship?" A cheery, female voice rang through the line as soon as Echo accepted the incoming call. 

"We are. We were told to wait for an escort, is that you?" The Sergeant inquired, eyes still looking for any sign of the woman's ship. Again, he remained clueless of your position. Even the radar remained clear. 

"The one and only!" Crosshair came over and rolled his eyes at your enthusiastic tone. 

Then you finally came into view from their side. Hunter was not the only one shocked to see you ride a living, flying creature instead of a ship. 

The thing was slim in girth although imposing by the size of its leaf-shaped wings. Its back went from an emerald green to a darker shade with black star-shaped markings while its underside was on the brown side. Hunter noticed the curious movements of the wings flapping to slow down. They were separated in three distinct flaps, like six humongous leaves that kept it in the air. More importantly, the vicious talons and sharp teeth that caught the sunlight were enough for Hunter to be grateful that you were on their side. 

Then his attention moved to you, firmly holding onto your ride by a saddle. Your helmet looked like the only piece of technology you possessed. Its emerald shade shone under the sun, a stark contrast with the dark Y-shaped visor. 

"Woah! I've never seen one of those!" Wrecker exclaimed in awe as he ran to the cockpit, his eyes growing wide at the sight of the flying reptilian. 

"Just follow me and I'll bring you to the landing zone closest to our city." The creature kept a stationary position a good distance away from them, its eyes looking right at the men. Hunter repressed a shiver at the feeling of being seized up. 

"I wanna ride one of those." Wrecker pointed at the beast. A scoff escaped Hunter's mouth. He looked at his brother and wondered if he realized that you were riding 45 klicks in the air. "Looks much more fun than the Marauder! And cuddlier!"

"Cuddlier?" Echo whispered in disbelief. Hunter had to agree with his brother, this beast was in the same "cuddly" department as Crosshair. 

"Using animals as transportation methods is quite antediluvian." Tech tutted. “Ships surpass by far any capabilities of a biological creature.”

"I beg your pardon?" The female's voice cut through the comms. Hunter straightened along with Echo. Both of them thought that the transmission was over. Tech must not have noticed the dryness of your tone because he continued like there wasn't any issue. 

"Oh, do not apologize, it's quite alright. Antediluvian refers to something old-fashioned. There are more useful and practical ways to fly nowadays than use animals that have limited stamina, lower speed, lower height endurance--"

"I know what the word means." You cut him off. Hunter noticed your head snapping in Tech's direction and he was more than certain that a glare hardened your face under your helmet. "If you guys are all so advanced and mighty, then I don't see why I, a mere idiot who's using obsolete ways, am needed here. Have fun making your way to the city." You snapped and cut the transmission right as Hunter was about to jump in to try and save the situation. 

They watched as your beast propelled itself upwards with the powerful beat of its wings and continued to rotate backwards until they lost sight of it. The radar of the ship scanned something big above them then it lost any signal as it dove for the ground. 

"Total success Tech, congratulations. We are now without any escort." Hunter grumbled in disapproval. His instinct told him that this was not a preferable outcome. 

"I can't help but wonder if we really needed one in the first place. We have the coordinates to the landing zone and it is not too far from here. I estimate our arrival time to be 13 minutes." Tech looked back at him with confidence and as calm as ever. 

Hunter took a second to think everything through. He had received Cody's debrief alone, none of his brother had heard the serious tone in which the Marshall Commander had relayed to not proceed with the mission without native help. When he had pushed for a reason why, his superior admitted that he was himself relaying info from a third party and the reason was lost to him too. All they knew was that the warning was to be taken seriously.

On the other side, Tech was more often than not a reliable source of information. If he said that this planet was not a threat, then it must be so. Whoever this third party was, they surely couldn't measure up to Tech. 

"Get us to the LZ." He walked away to the side console when the ship started advancing towards their destination. He wondered if you were someone important in that city and whether what happened would impact the mission. 

Cross the river when you get there, he pinched his nose in exasperation.  

The ship suddenly jerked to the side, sending Hunter crashing into Wrecker who hit the wall with force. With a yelp, Tech fought with the commands to take back control of the Marauder. 

"Something is keeping us on the side!" He yelled behind him. "Hold on!" 

In a flash, Hunter anchored himself to a seat. Not even a second later, the ship jerked slightly forward, the engines pushing as much as they could to dislodge the ship, but not budging. A worrying sound of metal being scrapped filled the Marauder until whatever stopped them in their course released them. 

"What was-" 

"We lost most of-"

"Wrecker, gun's nest!" Hunter barked in a hurry as soon as he noticed the new critter that flew before them. It was big. Bigger than your own creature. Almost as big as the Marauder. Black scales shone under the sun, looking as hard as rocks, imposing teeth were visible despite its maws being shut, it pushed an enraged screech and Hunter started to understand why they needed you. 

Even more when he noticed that its tail scaringly resembled a blade. 

"On it!" 

"Tech! Get us out of here!" Echo looked at his brother, his arm pushing against the console like he could keep the monster at bay. 

"I'm doing what I can, but as I was saying, we lost most of the power in our right engine." Tech groaned in concentration, his hands firmly grabbing the ship's commands. 

The ship jerked a few times, forcing Tech into reckless maneuvers in attempts to keep the ship from getting maimed 35 klicks away from the ground. Hunter could hear the turret going off in quick succession. The sound of artillery put him more at ease, knowing that they were not defenseless. 

"Guys! This thing won't go down!" Wrecker yelled with worry behind his shoulder. 

"Well shoot it!" Crosshair shot back with a hint of annoyance laced with nervosity. 

"That's what I'm doing! It doesn't do anything!" He shot at the beast that gained enough speed to outfly them and right in front of their eyes, the plasma hit the black scales without any indicator that the creature was hurt. To Hunter, it looked like a blaster bolt had hit a wall, leaving behind a charred circle and nothing else. 

"What?!" 

The beast suddenly lost speed and swung its powerful tail to hit them in mid air. Tech dodged to the side with a curse, avoiding the blade-like tail by less than a meter.

"Can we jump into hyperspace?" He asked his piloting brother, his own knuckles turning white under the pressure of his grip on the seat. 

"We'd need to redirect–" 

"Can it be done?" He asked again, eager to skip the long explanation. 

"Yes."

Jaws appeared on their left, quickly gaining ground. Soon it would reach the cockpit and the teeth clashed together in excitement of its upcoming bite on metal. 

Hunter was ready to call it a day and order Tech to jump into hyperspace to try again later. The words stuck in his throat as he barely noticed something above them dive for the enormous beast and clash so hard they both plummeted towards the ground. 

Screeches could be heard over the engines of their ship. With swift movements Tech quickly lowered the speed and rotated the ship to take in what happened. 

A green creature had the monster's neck between its teeth from its position on its back. The black one trashed in the air, angrily trying to dislodge its opponent to counter-attack. The green beast let go once the monster dove for the trees below, it took some altitude but remained between the ship and the furious dragon. You held on tight onto your mount, one hand on the saddle, the other onto a blade strapped to your back.

"We should go. She can't beat that." Crosshair mumbled next to him, his gaze searching for the aggressive one's return. 

"Oh I think she can." Hunter countered. 

He didn't know exactly why, maybe it was the confidence that radiated from you or the battle-stance you moved into whenever the wild monster came charging back, but his guts told him you had this under control. 

The monster charged the smaller one in a menacing growl. They clashed once again but this time you jumped off your saddle to land onto the attacker's back. There you found the base of its wings and plunged your blade between the scales where wings met its back. It screamed in pain and took off, abandoning the fight in a dive. 

"Kark-"

Hunter's heart stopped as he saw you free falling. Wrecker groaned, his stomach surely upset at the sight. You, however, seemed pretty calm. You weren't flailing around like anyone else would, you were patiently waiting, arms and legs parted. Your green mount sped off towards the ground to catch you onto its back. 

"She's nuts." Echo mumbled as you came back to their height, unfazed. 

You refused every attempt at communication Hunter sent you, instead deciding to point once towards the landing zone and take off in its direction. This trip was going to be hell. Not 30 seconds in it and Tech had ruined their relationship with their protector by insulting what he would bet was your entire culture. Hunter feared he would have to tape Tech's mouth closed if he wanted to preserve some civility in future conversations. 

The jungle became clearer as they continued their descent after you. Quite a few times, your green-colored beast became fully camouflaged with the top of the trees, forcing the clones to use Crosshair and the radar to follow you effectively. At the back of his mind, Hunter wondered if that was intentional or not. Maybe you hoped they would lose you and return home. 

He certainly wanted to. 

A clearing appeared before them and your creature dove under the leaves. They followed after you and quickly landed on the lush ground. 

"I don't think I need to say this but let's try and not insult anyone further." He looked at Tech. 

"I simply stated the truth." 

"Sometimes the truth hurts." He sighed. "And right now, she's the one with the flying dragon that can cover us."

"A wyvern." His brother corrected. "Dragons have four legs whereas wyverns have two." Tech pulled on his helmet and like that, the team was fully geared up and ready to leave the ship. 

"Whatever the name, it's still hers. And I have a feeling that there are more of those things around." 

He gave one last look at his squad before lowering the ramp. 

Hunter got a glimpse of yourself patting your beast's neck before sliding down its side and repeat the gesture with its forehead when it lowered its head. Yellow eyes then turned to him and he immediately noticed the intelligence within them. This was no porg. 

From up close, Hunter's gaze found the flesh of your thighs, visible through a slit at the side of your dark green pants that moved slightly with the breeze. A sort of armor made of deep blue scales covered your lower legs, arms and chest. He had never seen such a design before and found himself intrigued.

He knew Tech would have queries about everything since they knew so little about this place, the question was whether you would take it kindly or not. 

"Thank you for your help back there." He consciously slowed his approach when he got within biting range of the wyvern. Just as slowly, he reached a hand out. "We highly appreciate it." 

Your Y shaped visor moved from his hand to his face to the rest of his brothers. A long second stretched and he wasn't certain you would accept his gratitude and let him hang in the air. Then you surprised him with a firm shake. 

"You're welcome." 

"And I also would like to apologize for my brother's rude comment."

You hummed, the sound slightly distorted by the confines of your armor. You shrugged and removed your helmet, showing them a cautious smile. Hunter remembered your initial cheery self and thought that they were headed in the right direction. 

"Apology accepted. I get why the GAR would think that we're somewhat outdated, with your tanks and ships and our animals." You exaggerated the last word, referring to Tech's words and chuckled. "Guess y'all didn't think that they were plasma resistant though." 

"You could have warned us." Tech lifted his gaze from his datapad to peer accusingly at you. 

Where was the tape?! 

"Tech!" Hunter growled. 

"Well, if its warnings you want, here's one. Raek is carnivorous." You informed him with a grin and proceeded to enter the dense jungle, Raek following you dutifully. "And we're late for lunch." You smirked. 

Hunter pulled on Tech's backplate to keep him from following you too closely. 

_______________

The jungle was full of life. Hunter could hear a diversity of critters running, flying and digging around him. A few chirping birds silenced their voices at the group's passage, some smaller animal scurried off at the sight of Raek's imposing form and Wrecker was chatting your ears off with questions about your mount. If your growing smile and the enthusiasm that took over your voice whenever you talked about your beast was anything to go by, Hunter would say that you forgave them their initial mishap. And the one that followed. The Sergeant sent a silent thank you to his brother. 

"Oh, no no, Raek can't breathe fire, and you won't see any fire-breathing wyvern in these parts. You'd have to go to the West where there's more mountains." You explained before pointing at Reak's mouth. "Raek is a Starios. His saliva is actually a venom that affects the nervous system. He can paralyze or render another wyvern unconscious in a handful of minutes depending on its size." 

While Wrecker wowed, Hunter found himself staring at the venomous mouth. Raek was big enough that he would only need two bites to finish a clone, no venom needed. In order to affect another beast of his size, his venom must be extremely potent, making Hunter wish that his brother was not leaning closer to the maws so he could get a better view of the sharp rows of teeth so generously displayed by the Starios. 

"This is great! A venomous dragon!"

"Wyvern." You and Tech corrected at the same time. Hunter noticed your smile widening before you had to dodge Wrecker's arms moving to the sky. 

"Who cares?" 

You chuckled. "We do." Your hand softly stroke Raek's wing. 

"How long have you had him?" Tech wondered, his attention fully on you. 

"Eleven years now. And I don't really have him, he decided to stick with me when he found me. He's more like a friend than a pet." Hunter hummed. He could somewhat make sense of what you meant, what with the sharp intelligence he saw in Raek's eyes. At some point even he wondered if the green creature could understand the whole conversation. 

"A coexisting relationship then." Tech pushed his glasses up his nose, interest shining in his eyes. 

"Exactly." 

"You mentioned that he found you. If I may inquire, how did that happen?" 

Your steps faltered and that content smile of yours became stiff and forced. "That's a story between him and I, sorry." 

Tech's shoulder dropped and Hunter knew he was disappointed. It was obvious that the story was too personal to share and Hunter would even dare say not on the happy side. He made sure to catch Tech's eyes and with a shake of his head, to stop any push back for answers. 

You stumbled into Wrecker when a green head playfully pushed you to the side. Instead of pushing back, you reached your arm under its lower jaw in a side hug. 

"We're almost there." You announced and separated from Raek. "Ya know where to go. I'll be back soon." You patted his wing. He looked down at you with a rumble and took another route through the trees. 

"Do you fight other drag- er- wyv-ern?" Wrecker looked down at you and you nodded in confirmation. "Other wyvern often? You looked like you did that everyday!" 

"This season I do." You nodded your head along with your words. "Just before winter some species will migrate and others will calm down with the added space. Although when they get hungry, it can get real' ugly."

"I bet!" 

An enormous gate stood in the horizon, guarded by two beasts. In some of the giant trees hidden behind it Hunter could see platforms and buildings, flying creatures going and coming from them, some passing right overhead. You waved as they passed and did the same to the guards who waved back and let them all in without issue. 

You beelined to a staircase at the bottom of a tree, marching up the stairs two by two. "I hope you're all good with heights." You jokingly threw them. Wrecker grunted and you stopped. "Oh."

"I hate heights!" He swiveled back towards Hunter, afraid that he would be forced to go up. "And there's no rail Sarge! 

Indeed, he too had noticed that detail. Added to the height of the first platform which was a good klick above ground, it brought a tinge of discomfort even to him. 

"It's fine Wrecker. You can wait down here." He assured. "We'll brief you when we get back." 

Wrecker's whole body sagged in relief. "Ah, thanks Sarge." He looked back up at the stairs and with a shudder and stepped aside to let them pass. "I'll wait here. See you soon. Don't fall." 

"We won't." He assured his brother and followed after you. 

The first few stairs went fine, but half a klick in the air and even Echo was cursing through the comms. It didn't help that the stairs were individual planks shoved into the tree in a regular spacing in a branch-like fashion. It meant that they could see the ground far below between each stair and there was no rail.

"This design is irrefutably unsafe." Tech yelled from behind him and Hunter hoped the wind carried his words away.

"We ride wyverns for a living here. This is nothing for us." You shot back. 

"Again, irrefutably unsafe!" 

"You're soldiers! That's unsafe!" 

Hunter groaned. Five minutes without Wrecker and Tech was back at antagonizing their escort. 

You sped up the last few steps and arrived at the top. 

"Hi Chief!" You walked up to a man whose gray hair stood out like a sore thumb. He turned to you and looked over your shoulder at them with a warm smile. "Here are the clones! I'm off now!" You waved over your shoulder, already turning on your heels and walking away. It was clear that you were happy to finally be relieved of them and Hunter sighed in relief that your job with them was over. He did not dislike you, you simply had all the reasons to get them lost for days and they did not have days. 

That was until the Chief called your name and you froze.

"Not so fast. They are here for the crystals you found a few months ago and they'll need a Rider to guide and protect them." 

Hunter tensed. Oh no.

"Yeaaah… about that. I'm quite busy with my own stuff at the moment, but I'm sure Olaka or Taeme would love to fill out this role." 

"As it stands, they are out on an expedition. What is so important that you have to do?" He frowned suspiciously. 

"Find the kids who decided to dull all my blades again and terrorize them enough so they'll have nightmares for days." You said it so seriously that Hunter had to repeat the words in his head. He could already see you making them walk in circles for the upcoming week.  

The Chief pinched his nose with a sigh. "I'll take this matter into my own hands. You can go ahead and escort the clones to the Lemgona cave and show them the crystals." 

"Wouldn't it be easier if I went to get those crystals and gave them to the clones? Would be quicker if I could ride." You wondered. 

"If those crystals are what we think they are, then harvesting them the traditional way would inevitably destroy them." Tech jumped in. "They require a precise extraction technique in order to maintain their constitution and attributes." 

Your shoulder slumped as you accepted defeat with a nod and turned around, the pep in your step gone. 

"You'll be back to your ship with the crystals in about two days, Sergeant." He assured him. 

"Sir-" Hunter worriedly looked back at the Chief after he took in your body language. 

"I know what it looks like." He sighed. "She'll take good care of you all, do not worry about that. She's not usually like this, so I think something might have happened on the way here?" Hunter answered with a look towards Tech who was busy assessing their surroundings. "Know that whatever happened, she's not one to hold grudges." The Chief assured them. “Those kids are another matter. They honestly had it coming.” 

"Alright. Thank you, sir." 

"I hope those crystals are worth the trouble of getting to them. Now, off you go." He waved them off with a reassuring smile.

"Sir." He nodded one last time and they were all off after you. Hunter frowned. You stood at the edge of the platform, nowhere near the stairs. 

"You can either take the zipline or the stairs." You shot them a single glance over your shoulder, taking in how Tech's eyes widened. "Guess it's gonna be the stairs." You grabbed a hook off your belt and down you went. 

"Like hell we'll take the stairs." Crosshair moved at the front and followed after you with his own hook. 

"It really couldn't be an easy one." Echo sighed. 

_________________

After a quick stop to ensure that someone will take care of your charges during your absence, the clones followed you to your home, a small, two story house camouflaged in the foliage and a barn that seemed to have been through a lot. Some walls were charred, some parts have obviously been smashed in and fixed with planks, the windows were all broken and the door hung at an odd angle.

"I just have to feed some lil' guys and grab my stuff. Shouldn't take too long." You turned to him. "You can look around if you'd like. They are all used to humans around here." 

Hunter nodded. He couldn't see any "lil' guys" around them yet, but he knew they were there, looking at them from their hiding place in the high grass near the back of the barn. Wrecker did not lose a second and approached the pair when the grass slightly moved. 

An elbow to his arm caught Hunter's attention and he looked back at Crosshair who pointed in the trees. Hunter didn't see anything. 

"Camouflaged. 700 meters above ground." He told him. 

Then he could see it, the faint movement of the bark of a tree, like a mirage. It slowly moved down as if crawling down before stopping completely. Right before their eyes, a navy-blue creature formed right where the mirage once was, its milky eyes staring right at them. This one had four legs and no wings, but it jumped down the 500 meters nonetheless and somehow glided next to you. It landed in a crash when one of its front legs gave out. 

"Are you okay, Roo?" You tilted your head at the growling beast. "We'll have to work on strengthening your legs if you really want to keep jumping down trees."

It whined and snarled at the ground before scratching the earth with its claws. Curiosity got the best of him and Hunter approached the blue beast. It looked up at him, head tilted in a silent question. It chirped lightly and in turn approached him in earnest, its head pressing against the plastoid and wild sniffing filled the air. Its head reached his mid-chest, the scales on its body moved up and down frantically as it moved all around him causing the light to reflect over them, its tail finished in a grape of spikes as long as his forearm. 

It did a whole circle around him and finally pressed its head hard on his chest plate, nearly sending him stumbling backward. He planted his feet more firmly on the ground and waited. He received another push to his chest. 

"I think it wants pets." Echo joined him.

"Is that what you want fella?" Tentatively, Hunter flattened his hand and stroked a path down the neck of the beast, the upturned scales on its skin flattening with his hand before rising again. A vibration shook his armor and purrs reached his ears. Maybe not porgs, but closer to tookas. 

He continued the motion to the pleasure of the beast while you grabbed two buckets that made you lightly limp from the effort to carry their heavy weights. If only he wasn't scared of insulting you more, Hunter would have offered some help. He noticed Echo looking at him with a questioning gaze, he too wanted to help but was hesitating for the same reason. With a shake of his head, Hunter hoped today would get better. 

"Soooo by the way!" You drew the word how with a huff of effort. "I'm Y/N, but I think you got that one already."

He watched as you stopped outside the barn, removed the lid and dumbed a few dozens kilograms of ripe fruits on the ground. Immediately, the navy-blue creature detached itself from him to enjoy the food and you came back towards their group who looked in curiosity as more beasts made their way to the pile. 

"I'm Hunter. That's Wrecker, Crosshair, Echo and Tech." He pointed at each of them.  

You turned to them with a small smile and nods. Raek breached the line of trees and ignored them in order to drop a gray-furred carcass near the fruit pile before digging in with great appetite. He tore into the prey with ease, the flesh seemingly shredding with little to no resistance. Hunter suddenly wondered how easily Raek could tear into plastoid. 

A gasp caught everyone's attention including yours. Wrecker awed at the tiny, orange wyvern that clumsily walked right into the barn door and sent it falling to the ground. You sighed in defeat next to him. 

The damage went unnoticed by the youngling, its eyes staring at Wrecker. It was smaller than the several others gulping down the fruits. Way smaller. It barely reached his knees and those big yellow eyes definitely got to Wrecker's soft spot who quickly joined its side. 

"Can I pet him?" Wrecker's hands were almost shaking with excitement. 

"You can. And Silica's a she." You looked between his brother and Raek whose gaze was fixed on Wrecker's hand petting Silica's head. There was no malice in his gaze, only pure protectiveness. The resemblance between the two was obvious, not only in shape, but the tiny one, despite being primarily dark-orange, had Raek's green highlights.

"We'll be able to leave once Raek has finished eating." You glanced at the wyvern once more and took in his focussed state. "Silica, com'ere." You called and she reacted immediately. She turned around with a joyous chirp to join your side, her flat tail whipping harshly at Wrecker's thigh plate. The resulting noise made the creature jump and face them with a growl. Hunter's heartbeat skyrocketed, his eyes shooting to the hovering male. To his relief Raek remained in place and looked somewhat amused. 

You quickly herded back your beast, all the while whispering her reassurances and giving her pats. She calmed down enough for you to send her back to the fruit pile with Raek who bumped her head with his nose and shared some shredded meat.

"Sorry Wrecker." You sheepishly scratched your neck. "She's still a hatchling and gets scared easily." 

"A hatchling?" 

"A baby." 

"Ooh! You sure have a lot of those!" 

"Yeah. Raek and I take care of the orphans of our Riders or the ones we find in the jungle." You reached the fallen door and lifted it enough so you could pull a bag with your foot from under it. You dropped it again. "The jungle doesn't have mercy. Not for anyone." 

You opened the bag to check the content and closed it before strapping it to Raek's saddle. 

"Do y'all need anything before we leave?" You asked and Hunter shook his head. 

"We're ready when you are." You pushed yourself off Raek and patted Silica's head. 

"Gabe will pass to care for you. Be a good girl will ya?" A thrill answered your question and you chuckled. 

"Let's go." You took the front and led them back to the gates where you led them deeper into the jungle, Raek following a few steps behind them.

[isekaimaiden]

I've always liked reading into things. Lately, I've been in a rut. Today, October 23, 2022, I will read into my profile in tumbler.

NICKNAME

I have just changed my nickname from minsushi to isekaimaiden. Minsushi was just something that sounded cute and tasty and so I made it my name a few years back. Now, my name is isekaimaiden, after the manhwa and manga genre I've liked the most.

Isekai - a Japanese genre of portal fantasy and science fiction. Why am I drawn to this? Perhaps it's because of my unsatisfied need for escaping reality and having certainty - knowing what will happen next. Security. Future security. Makes sense considering I like getting spoiled about movie/book endings etcetera. Is it because things in my life has always been uncertain? Has it always been uncertain? I feel like at some point, I knew where I was going - like I had a path to follow. Where has that path been? Since when have I strayed?

PROFILE

Has it always been a cube on a box? Is this photo a default? Was I able to choose from a multitude of choices and believed this four colored, resting cube describes me most?

According to umich.edu,

"The cube is a three-dimensional SQUARE; it is a symbol of stability and permanence, of geometric perfection. It represents the final stage of a cycle of immobility, it can be seen as the truth, because it looks the same from any perspective, it is commonly thought of as the counterpart of the sphere."

My interpretation of that is that I strive for such things - stability, permanence, perfection. This must be true considering I think of myself as a perfectionist. Some perfectionist I am, when I'm not even able to finish things. The me now is far from it. Additionally, my need for certainty somehow fits well here.

THEME

Purple shades, according to nixsensor.com,

"The color purple is often associated with royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. Purple also represents meanings of wealth, extravagance, creativity, wisdom, dignity, grandeur, devotion, peace, pride, mystery, independence, and magic."

Yeah, checks out the previous two. Not much on the first few descriptions but more on the mystery, pride, and magic. I find so much fascination among these things.

This part here is an open letter to my future self in hopes that I find this post again.

Things now aren't too good. You are affected too much by emotion yet it is also your source of hope. Right now, everything is falling apart. Well, not everything, but most things you care about.

Last year, you failed 5 subjects. Your main reason was that your trauma has resurfaced. This year, you are regretting not doing well.

At the start of October, your 5-year long-distance relationship showed signs of ending. Your partner refuses to tell you until you meet in person in December. Your heart aches each time the thought crosses your mind. You have cried for four days. I am assuming you will cry more towards December and even after that. Your partner seems to like going with the flow - like a cloud. You knew this, even from before. Now, things are unclear.

These two might seem like a small portion of everything else that's been happening in your life but as an emotional person, these has the most impact.

There are happy times too. You just started being a creator on a game app, here's to hoping you decide to push through. You also decide to make money online and start a self care routine. Not much luck but hey, we're still at the starting line.

Here goes the advice I'd like to give you. Keep going. Keep falling and standing back up. Never stop moving forward. Pause and rest, if need be, but DON'T ever stop. You'll be out of this hellhole soon. Please, even if everyone else gives up on you, don't give up on yourself.

I'll stop here for now. I'll be rooting for you.

With love,

2022 isekaimaiden

[seeminglyseph]

I may never do this because I am beginning to doubt I will find the physical strength and health in time with motivation to learn to draw an animatic because I fully have not been able to draw properly or consistently in years due to pain,

But due to the degree of my emotional attachment to Hector growing for not readily discernible reason, I do have a mental image of a “Just A Man” animatic that has like… heavy references to the Iliad in some way, if only in the form of Achilles and Hector as shades who haunt Odysseus in this choice or as Neo(ptolemus) takes Andromache since like.

“Neo avenge your father, kill the brothers of Hector”

Is mentioned, so that is enough to work with to bring up and demonstrate Neoptolemus (Achilles’ son) seizing Andromache( Hector’s widow) who he takes as a war trophy essentially, and fathers many children with, and I guess is how Alexander the Great is descended from Achilles. Sources unclear. I’m sleepy.

Anyway, to make a short story long the idea I have is to have the shades and memories of Hector and Achilles haunt Odysseus in the different ways things can escalate, until the very end where he does walk out to the sound of the chorus and in looking at Neoptolemus and the captive Andromache he sees behind them the shades of their dead patriarchs for a flash. Has his final line as he releases Astyanax, it is heart rending in its tragedy. The shade of Hector is shown in a way catching the infant, and weeping embraces his son. One of the meanings of Hector’s name is “to hold.”

While technically I don’t think Astyanax will have the proper funeral rights to pass on to his father’s afterlife, there there’s a possibility someone after the Greek fleets fled Troy were able to make appropriate arrangements. I don’t really want to think too deeply about whether or not Astyanax gets to be with Hector in the Afterlife. I’m giving myself this.

[from-the-clouds]

Kiss Me More (Part II) - Zemo/Reader

Masterlist || Part One

Summary: Part two, read part one if you haven’t already! Sam & Bucky put reader in charge of looking after Zemo....again. Series loosely inspired by this song.

Words: 2.5k

Warnings: Kissing, heavy petting, mentions of sex, minor TFATWS spoilers.

A/N: Wow! I was so shocked on the feedback I got on the first part of this story. It has nearly 800 notes. I’m not used to my writing getting that kind of attention so I really appreciate the love. I decided to make this into at least a 3-4 part series and there will be eventual smut, but I feel like there’s something sweet between these two that goes beyond an obvious physical attraction, so I do want to build that a bit before we get there. This weekend I rewatched TFATWS & Civil War because I’m officially obsessed with Zemo lol. Please let me know what you think, and let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist. :) 

-----

“Keep an eye on him.”

Y/N watched Bucky and Sam split off again. That was now at least the third time she’d heard that phrase since she arrived in Riga. Little did they know, she was probably the worst person to be put in charge of Zemo. Truthfully, it was starting to be a little insulting.

It was unclear why she’d been brought along on this mission, when half the time Sam and Bucky were talking in hushed tones just out of her earshot. There was always more to the story than they told her, but this time, it felt like she was more out of the loop than ever.

She adjusted the neckline of the sweater she wore out of an abundance of caution, checking subconsciously to make sure it hadn’t exposed the mark Zemo had left on her from the day before. It was a discovery she’d made that morning, and persisted despite her efforts to cover it up with makeup.

“According to those two, I must be the best at babysitting you,” she muttered under her breath. It was petty, so she wasn’t even sure if she wanted him to hear. But he did.

“Babysitting?” Zemo lifted an eyebrow. 

“You know, a nanny, a governess….whatever a Baron’s equivalent is,” she said, looking him in the eye for the first time that day, which was a mistake. He looked so handsome in that long, fur-lined coat, tall and refined, hair styled perfectly. There had to be warrants out for his arrest since escaping prison, and in his current getup, he was hard to miss. 

It wasn’t easy to ignore the stifling tension between them. The Baron hadn’t left her thoughts since she’d closed the door on him the evening before. Now they were alone again. She couldn’t decide if that was thrilling or terrifying, so she decided on both.

“It’s nice of them to give us some alone time,” Zemo stepped close to her, one gloved hand pressing between her shoulder blades. Despite the cool temperature outside, it was the first thing today that had her shivering. 

“Walk with me,” he commanded sternly. She saw no opportunity to refuse as they started in the direction opposite of where Bucky and Sam had disappeared. 

“Zemo-”

“Helmut,” he corrected her. “But go on…”

“We have to focus on figuring out where Donya’s funeral will be,” she said, feeling his hand slide down to settle on the small of her back, trying to inch away, but he just pulled her closer. “We can’t waste time.”

“I know Riga inside and out, that won’t be as difficult as you and your friends think,” he murmured. His proximity was already suffocating. Or maybe comforting. It was hard to tell. “Tell me, what is your business with them? You aren’t an Avenger. This was my first time hearing your name.”

She snorted, finally finding the strength to pull away, and he dropped his hand. That was one thing that had confounded her. He was confident, took liberties with what others would allow, but knew when to stop pushing. There was something alluring to his nature. 

“I’m not,” she responded, wondering how much she was willing to share. When she stole a glance out of the corner of her eyes, his head was lowered, leaning in, listening intently for her response. She wondered if he really cared, or if he was good at pretending. It was easy to believe that he did.

“Bucky and I aren’t that different,” she continued. “That’s why we’re friends. I’m not a super soldier, but I was taught how to fight, how to kill. I followed orders for too long without questioning whether or not I was doing the right thing. And at least now, I think I am.”

“You think,” he repeated, and corrected her again like he had the day before. As much as she wanted some kind of clever or quick quip back, she wore her heart on her sleeve for the moment and shrugged. There was nothing to defend when she still wasn’t sure what responsibilities she had in this world. 

Zemo halted, and she paused too, turning back to look at him. “So you were an assassin,” he murmured, reaching out. Nodding slightly, she lowered her eyes when his gloved thumb brushed across her face. The buttery, overpowering smell of leather took her over as he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I would’ve never guessed. Du bist so süß.”

Her knowledge of German was limited, but she could see a flash of what looked like affection in his eyes. He couldn’t be lying, could he? She wondered. She wanted to trust that he wasn’t, wanted to identify every good part of him she could, so she could justify the overwhelming attraction she felt towards him. Something in her just kept pulling forward against her will, like a magnet.

“You’d be surprised,” she answered, but didn’t pull away. The intensity of his gaze made her feel weak, but there was something strangely reassuring in his eyes. It was just the two of them, standing on a crowded sidewalk.

She rose her hand to clasp around his, frowning when she felt the hard loop of a ring on one of his gloved fingers. It had gone unnoticed by her, until now. He still wore a wedding band. 

It would have been easy to vocalize the observation, gauge his reaction, try to regain some upper hand and remind him who exactly he was dealing with. But, it would’ve been pointlessly cruel, as she knew what that felt like to answer that question. Those days were behind her, now. 

As if the universe was scolding her, a loud car horn broke through the perceived silence. His hand dropped from her face, and they began to walk again. 

“I had lots of time to think in prison,” he said after a heady pause in conversation. “About the things I’d done. Whatever intentions you have, to someone, you’re always the enemy. What I thought was important, trying to serve the greater good, it isn’t always worth the trouble. I was trying to protect what I had already lost, the places and people I’d taken for granted.”

Deciphering his words, she took a moment before responding. “That’s actually...very insightful,” she said, partly surprised by what he’d shared, appreciating that he felt her vulnerability, and matched it in his response.

“I know you’re stunned I’m not a brute,” he answered, increasing his pace to a determined strut rather than a lazy stroll. She was forced to keep up with him. “You’ve been told what to think about me by Sam and Bucky.”

She scoffed. “Not just them. The entire world. All the people you’ve hur-”

He halted and turned to face her so quickly, she collided with his chest and her breath caught in her throat. 

“I’m not that man anymore,” his voice was nearly a growl, disgust laced in his features as he looked down at her. 

But as soon as she recognized it, he became expressionless again, backing away. Falling back into step beside him, they continued to walk, a bit faster than they had been before. She followed him, at this point convinced that she might get lost without his guidance, but a little startled by his sudden change in behavior.

“What do you think of Riga?” he asked her as they cut through an alleyway. His voice held none of the venom that it had a few moments ago, so she wondered if she’d just hit a sore nerve.

“It’s beautiful,” she answered, admiring the old brick buildings and fine architecture. “But I think I haven’t had much of a chance to appreciate it.”

“Have you been thinking about me?”

They ducked under an alcove, and she realized he’d carefully led her off the crowded streets. It was much quieter here. She suddenly didn’t feel as protected as she had been with him in the open. The temperature in the shaded space was much lower than expected. And he was standing over her, waiting for some response she didn’t know if she could give. 

“I haven’t forgotten about last night, liebling,” he continued. 

Of course she had been thinking of him. Nearly nonstop. What they’d shared, what it meant. She hadn’t been able to sleep until she relieved herself, fingers rubbing her clit and delving into her warmth, whimpering his name when she finally came. Still, it had done little to quell the ache inside her. 

It was a horrible thing, she’d decided. Objectively horrible, and unprofessional. There was the consideration of accessibility. What did he see in her beyond a means to an end? Was she really going to throw everything she’d worked for away to a man who was going to use her to scratch an itch?

Too much was at stake, Sam and Bucky’s trust, her reputation, her job, and she couldn’t allow it to go on. 

But oh, how much she wanted it to. 

“Yesterday was nice,” she straightened up, holding her own. “I won’t lie to you.”

The corner of his mouth tugged up slightly in a self-satisfied smirk. 

“But I’m not foolish,” she continued. “Coming on to the first woman you see after you get out of jail? Seems pretty convenient.”

At first, the Baron tilted his head to the side, his brows pulled together at her words. But after a moment, the smile returned, and he chuckled. “Is that what you think this is about?”

“Don’t insult me, Helmut,” she said sternly, trying her best not to feel embarrassed. She was only being honest.

“Are you always so severe to yourself?” he asked, tutting lightly. 

It would have been better to say nothing. Why give him anything at all? 

She didn’t answer his question, just backed away from him and began walking in no particular direction, wanting only to increase the space between them and regain her common sense. That was impossible however, as she was jolted backwards before she even knew what was happening, a firm hand on her upper arm, and she was chest to chest with Zemo once more. 

“We were in Madripoor together. I could’ve had my way with many women there if I wanted. But I didn’t.”

“Please-” she rolled her eyes.

“If all I wanted to do was fuck someone, I could have done it by now,” he stalked forward, the air pressure around them dropping, weighed by the tension hanging thick between them. “But that’s not what I want. I want you.”

His words, spoken in a soft, low purr rattled away every bit of resolve she had left in her. Some last ditch effort found her stepping backwards, but her body met the brick wall behind them and she realized he had her cornered. 

In more ways than one, she thought.

Taking in a shaky breath, she looked up at his eyes, clouded with lust. “I know you want me,” he said, not a shred of doubt in his voice. But why should there have been? He was right. 

Her eyes darted around, like someone or something around them was going to jump out and save her from herself. It didn’t go unnoticed. “There’s no need to be scared, liebling. I feel it, too.”

With that, he closed the gap between their lips. He tasted sweet, like the candies he’d been eating back at his flat. Turkish delight. She was drowning in him again, his scent, his touch, everything about him enveloped and beguiled her. Her shirt had bunched up slightly somewhere along their walk and his gloved hands explored the exposed skin, leaving goosebumps in their wake. 

She surrendered, letting him tease open her mouth and claim her wholly. It was still bad, she knew. But there wasn’t any last bit of self-control left in her. 

The layers of clothing between them didn’t allow for the same proximity she’d had to him the evening before. Groaning in delight and frustration, she reached up to tangle and rake her fingers through his hair, as his fingers curled around the top of her sweater, revealing the sensitive skin of her neck. 

“Don’t hide this,” his lips left hers as his eyes focused on the stamp of affection he’d left behind the day before. “Let them see.”

“You know I can’t,” she responded, sheepishly pulling it back into place. Studying her with amiable consideration, his hand rose to brush tenderly across her cheekbone. 

“I thought you’d come to me last night,” she confessed, drawing away slightly, shocked by her own admission. But right now, she didn’t feel the need to put up as much of a facade. He looked positively virile; panting, his cheeks flushed and hair mussed, pupils blown out as he focused on her. To know she was the cause of his current state of disarray gave her an immense amount of satisfaction. A buried, salacious part of her wondered what else she could do to make him look even more unkempt.

“I considered it,” he said, sounding almost timid. “But I want to do this right.” He leaned in, pressed a kiss beneath her ear. “In private, so no one can disturb us,” he continued, lips moving down her neck. “We can take our time, you can be as loud as you’d like.”

The mental image he was currently painting for her was doing very little to strengthen her convictions, whatever those had been. The thought of her legs wrapped around his torso, naked bodies pressed together sent a bolt of electricity through the pit of her stomach, radiating outwards. She wanted his lips on every inch of her skin. Aching at the possibility, the present tease of his teeth nibbling on her collarbone wasn’t helping.

“You know we can’t,” she didn’t try to stop the thought as it came out of her mouth.

“What is there to lose?”

Everything, she thought, but didn’t answer. She couldn’t really, as his gloved hand was trailing slowly under her jacket and sweater, against her bare skin, and cupping her breast through her bra. Whimpering, she couldn’t control the way her body arched against his.

Hooking her knee on his hip, she let him press forward, feeling the warmth of his excitement through his trousers and her jeans. He ground against her once, teasingly, and she moaned softly into his mouth. 

He was the one to pull away, and she was thankful he did. “Think about it, liebling,” he said softly, pressing a tender kiss to her temple. “Du hast die Kontrolle.”

“We can’t,” she answered again, but even she didn’t believe herself. Raking her hands through her hair and adjusting her rumpled sweater, she straightened up. “We have a job to do.”

Brushing past him out of the alcove, each step she took away from him gave her the self control she desperately needed. She glanced over her shoulder to see him reluctantly trudging behind. At this point, she wasn’t foolish. There were only two ways this could end.

----

Part III

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Let me know if you’d like to be tagged, or if I forgot to tag you for some reason! :)

[stuckwith-harry]

A/N: Listen, babes, I was straight up not planning on putting out fic this year, but a series of well-timed little accidents and a very sweet groupchat resulted in this flirty little guy. While I’m sorting out my organisational crisis over on Ao3, I’ll put it here, and now I will go and agonise over the 23 other writing projects on my desk, cool? Cool. I’ve no real content warnings, it’s only banter, although the banter is not what the kids might call family-friendly.

look at what a heart can do / i’m starting to get to you

Silence has begun to come easily.

They’ve opened the window over Ginny’s bed, and cool late-summer air comes spilling in like handfuls of water, moving through the loose shirt she’s slipped into. She’s sitting cross-legged on her mattress, her back to the window, her knees bumping into Harry’s legs, her fingers drumming on his knee in a slow, tipsy rhythm, lilting and lazy like the pitter-patter on her windowpane. Afterwards, she can’t say whether a few minutes or an hour passed this way, only that it was time spent simply sitting and breathing and shifting beside each other, exchanging glances like secret handshakes, knowing grins.

Harry is flipping through the Quidditch magazine that usually resides on Ginny’s nightstand, his thumb absent-mindedly scratching at his bottom lip, his bare back leaning against her headboard. His face is softer without his glasses – like she’s catching him asleep – and still covered in a fine sheen of sweat. Every once in a while, he turns the journal over to point something out to her, like –

“Look at this one.”

So Ginny leans over the open page and peers at the model he’s indicating. “D’you think it’s weird that they’ve got it listed as a Chaser broom?”, she asks quietly, meeting his eye. “Sure, it’s speedy, but look at the inertia, that’s a better fit for a –”

“Beater”, they say in unison, grinning, and settle back into silence. Outside, the night is complete and starlit, the rain showers are warm and brief, and time is passing at a languid pace, not in any hurry to end.

Ginny finally gives up on her novel after she makes it to the bottom of the page for the third time in a row without any of it sticking, resigning herself to the fact that her thoughts are elsewhere. More precisely, they’re stretched out next to her in a pair of boxershorts, squinting at a line-up of the most anticipated broomstick releases of September 1998.

She rests her chin on her hand, her elbow on her knee, quietly looking over at him. His hair, she thinks. His hair is impossible.

He notices.

“What?”, he says softly, gazing back.

Ginny hums. “I have a question.”

Harry raises an eyebrow.

“Was tonight the first time you did … that?”, she asks.

He suddenly takes great interest in the pattern of Ginny’s quilt, picking at a piece of lint she’s pretty sure is imaginary. She thinks she can see a flush creeping up his neck, too.

“Which part?”, he asks, then, making a face: “Pretend I didn’t say that. The answer’s yes either way – yeah. Yes. I figured it was fairly obvious.”

“It wasn’t, actually”, Ginny says, “that’s why I was curious.”

This does nothing to lessen the way his face is heating up, but with the way he’s grinning to himself, she decides she needn’t feel too sorry for him. “I’m gonna … take that as a compliment, then.”

Ginny grins back. “Oh, you should. It is.”

He clears his throat, not quite meeting her eye. “Have … you?”

She shakes her head, shrugging.

“Huh.”

She squints, smile intact. “Surprised, are you?”

His face hovers in a place between trepidation and something that looks a little like bashfulness, but isn’t. It’s funny, she thinks, he should look bashful. Not very long ago, he would have, but now … she turns her head, searching his features. There’s newness in every slight movement of his mouth. In the intensity with which he looks at her.

“No – and it wouldn’t matter”, he starts, with that bout of sincerity he gets on occasion that makes Ginny weak in the knees. “You just, uhm …”

Ah, she thinks, there is it. Bashfulness in heaps.

“You were good at it”, he says, sounding breathless.,

“Well, thanks”, she says, feeling inexplicably warm. “So were you.”

He squints at her, then looks back at Broomsticks Monthly. “Alright, try not to sound too surprised.”

“I’m not surprised you’re good at it!”, she laughs. “I just wasn’t expecting to, ah – score a goal – the first time we did that.”

Harry peers up at her, the colour of his face roughly resembling their old Gryffindor Quidditch uniforms. Ginny wiggles an eyebrow.

“When would I ever have – who would I have done anything with?”

“You’re telling me you and Cho never reconnected in an abandoned broom closet after things went downhill?”

He seems simply stunned at the idea. “No. Definitely not.”

“It’s not a ridiculous assumption”, Ginny says, amused.

“Her and I only – come to think of it, I’m pretty sure we only kissed the one time. And she was – well, sad all the time, wasn’t she, and I was –”

“Seething all the time”, she says cheerfully. “Fair enough.”

He gazes back at her, visibly mulling something over.

“You and Dean never did anything?”

Ginny throws a pillow at him.

Harry catches.

“You needled me too!”

Which Ginny, unfortunately, cannot argue with.

“No, we really didn’t.” She watches his face for a reaction, for a hint of relief, or smugness maybe, but to his credit, there is none. “I think he wanted to, though.”

Harry makes a face.

“Alright, relax”, she grins. “I’d spare you the details, but there quite literally aren’t any.”

He slouches back, propped up on one elbow buried deep in her pillow, the deep orange glow from the lamp on her nightstand casting his face in soft shadows, in warm hues. Ginny continues to watch him. He’s squinting into Broomsticks Monthly again, but his eyes are not moving along the page, so she knows he noticed.

After a moment, he sighs.

“You’re not going to let it go, are you?”

Ginny merely hums in response, and it dissolves into ripples of soft laughter at his expression. There it is again. That newness in his face.

“You … made it pretty easy.”

“Hm?”

“Your face”, he says finally, with a quiet rasp in his voice that tugs pleasantly at Ginny’s insides, “is … extremely readable. It wasn’t that hard to figure out what was … working for you.”

Ginny stares at him, stunned, and he at least has the good sense to look a little abashed.

“Your face is extremely readable”, she mutters.

Harry grins. “It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.”

“No, I mean it”, she says, throwing her head back, peering down at him with a grin. “You were pretty readable too. Very transparent.”

“I’m just saying, it wasn’t all me.”

In the moment’s silence that follows, while they effortlessly reassemble their limbs, Ginny’s eyes come to linger on the long-abandoned camp bed on the floor beside her bed, whose only function now is to keep up the ruse for her parents’ sake. She grins: he’s been sleeping in her bed since he came to stay in her room instead of Ron’s.

They’ve been sleeping with each other for almost a week.

“You make that easy”, she tells him lightly. She makes a purposeless dog-ear in her book, shuffling around on her mattress, her body bumping into his with such ease she might as well have never known anything else.  “Maybe it’s not … entirely accidental. It’s easy with you.”

She hears his slow exhale, watches the way his grin softens into a smile. Even under the loose-fitting shirt, she feels herself growing warm, even though it falls off her shoulders like a circus tent, the shoulder seams comically misplaced on her upper arms.

It’s as good a moment as any to remember that the t-shirt is Harry’s, technically. It makes her feel naked in a wholly new way; only she realises she doesn’t mind. 

She lets out a fluttering breath. “Interesting. I’m usually the one making you blush.”

“Well”, he says softly, “it looks good on you.”

It’s unclear if he’s talking about his t-shirt or the colour of her face, and it doesn’t matter much, it makes warmth pool in Ginny’s belly all the same. For a moment there, she’s the girl with her elbow in the butter dish all over again – if nothing else, she can imagine their faces glowing in identical shades of pink, bright like the carnations growing in the flower boxes on the Burrow’s windowsills.

What never presents itself – what doesn’t come back – is the urge to hastily pull back into her shell, like a little snail prodded by an overzealous finger. So he continues to look, and she continues to let him, the fluttering in her belly light and pleasant like the first sip of a fizzy drink.

That much is new.

[jikookuntold]

I Can’t Believe We Are Still Talking About This!

Disclaimer: The post you are going to read here, is my personal opinions, plus some evidence. A part of the incidents I mention in this post, is my own observation and the rest came from some trustable sources but yet I don’t claim to be 100% true because first, the sources can be wrong, second, the human mind is tricky and a long time has passed so I can’t claim everything I remember is true. Some of the incidents could get fact-checked, but some couldn’t because the receipts are gone.

First, I had no intention to write about this controversial subject because many people don’t like to bring this up, and I was with them, but it seems people have many questions about it, and they don’t know the details of the incidents. So, I concluded that maybe it’s not bad if we open up a little bit and discuss this subject from different points of view with more details.

But again, I have to clarify this post is not factual, it’s just the things I remember about the subject in a ranting way. This incident had and still has so many unclear aspects, and everything we say or claim is just a theory. I’m not intended to shade or hate anyone, therefore I’m not going to mention any full names here.

TW: Rumor, Suicide, Scandal, Conspiracy Theory

 The Break

You all might know about the break the members had in summer 2019. When their Japan tour ended, and they did some shooting and interviews (like Summer Package), the LDF concert on August 11th was their last schedule and based on BH statement, they were free for 30 to 35 days.

At this time, the members posted updates about being on vacation, but there was not much coming from JK and JM, except JK posting on weverse about staying awake and eating ramen and JM thanking him for eating ramen because of him (it was interesting that JM answered JK’s post about ramen at the same week we had the run episode moment where JK told JM “This is my heart” while putting ramen in his plate). After that, JM posted the videos of Run bottle cap challenge on August 26th.

Anyways, it was pretty clear that JM and JK were together on their days off for at least two weeks since JK mentioned in Bon Voyage 4 (their first schedule after the break) that he didn’t meet any of the members except JM and JH in his days off and since JH was the resident of the same complex, this kinda approved the theory of living with JM. JM also approved this theory, but we will go on that later.

The Rumors

In late August (27th or later) JM’s photos in Paris leaked, and JK was seen in Seoul eating churros, and a photo of his knuckle tattoos started to spread. Everyone was confused, and it was too soon to believe anything. After JM coming back from Paris for JK’s birthday, and leaving for Hawaii the next morning (as he explained in his 12th October Vlive, that year) things started to get weird. I know I didn’t bring up the Paris incidents, and I don’t want to, because it has nothing to do with the subject.

I still haven’t mentioned the subject directly, but I think most of you have guessed it right. In early September 2019, the rumors of JK going to a tattoo shop in Seoul started to spread. At first, the majority of the fandom didn’t take it seriously since the tattoo shop denied the rumors of JK being there, and even the photo of someone backhugging a short-haired girl claiming to be JK got mostly ignored because the photo was low quality and the man in it didn’t look like him that much. This was the time we heard the news about JK going to Geoje Island for vacation, alone, after visiting his family in Busan.

The real deal started when he appeared at the airport on September 16th (the day they were leaving for filming Bon Voyage4 in New Zealand) when we saw his knuckle tattoos, and the rumors turned out to be true. At first, we were excited about him getting tattoos without even knowing if they are permanent or not. But on the same day, the storm came. A photo of JK (this one was clearly him) sitting with that short-haired girl, (LM) eating lunch broke the internet.

The photo was taken from an angle to make it look like they were together alone, but at least two other people (later we found out they were more) were already there, and it was nothing like the date the person behind the camera was trying to make it look. The hugging photo which was taken from the CCTV of a karaoke room resurfaced along with the restaurant photo, and at this time, almost everyone in the fandom started to believe that they are dating.

The Statements

The mess on social media was getting bigger, and everyone was waiting for an official statement from both sides. BH released the statement a few hours later, denying the rumors and no further explanation. Almost one day passed, and there was nothing from LM, not even a single word. Finally, she posted a statement on her Instagram account (which gained a crazy amount of followers, and she didn’t even go on private the whole time).

The statement was extremely shady and been deleted a few hours later. LM claimed that she wasn’t ignoring the situation, and she was afraid to say anything because she knew we won’t believe her. “I am not dating JK” she used this sentence twice in her statement, and at the end, she said “his “J M” tattoos are not our initials!” and made the situation way worse. But the funny thing is, this wasn’t even the shadiest thing she did.

As I said, she got lots of followers (nearly 100k) and interactions on her account and started to delete the negative comments as she should, but she liked multiple comments congratulating her, saying she and JK look good together and things like that. I heard she even liked a fan-art post, but it didn’t end here. When the member came back from New Zealand she posted a selfie with the caption “I have missed you”. At this point, it was clear that she was enjoying the situation and acting shady to make it worse and fuel the rumors and stay on top of the news. But this wasn’t limited to herself because her colleagues at the tattoo shop weren’t any better.

In those days, one of the close friends of LM at the tattoo shop told an ARMY that LM has a boyfriend and there is nothing other than friendship between her and JK. And guess what? The Tattoo shop manager fired him the next day. What was the reason? Were those rumors a booster for their business, and they didn’t want them to die down? The number of followers and attention they gained at that time can approve my point. They were getting the best free promotion, any business could ever have.

Don’t Forget Me!

A few days later, when the public, started to forget the rumors, someone from the tattoo shop (I don’t remember if it was LM herself or her friend) talked to the media about the harassment they were getting from the ARMY to play the victim role. This again fueled everything and made us think over the situation. Was it all a frame for JK? The evidence suggests that it could.

Let’s go back a few days in the timeline of the events. Why JK chose that tattoo shop? Because his 97liner friends recommended him to go there (apparently this line of friends, have matching tattoos either) LM herself is a 97liner, and she is friends with plenty of idols, male and female, so they sounded pretty trustworthy. At the tattoo shop, they (LM and her tattoo shop colleagues) recommended JK to spend his days off at a guesthouse in Geoje Island, and based on LM’s Instagram posts, they were there days before JK, waiting for him, to make it look like they run into him accidentally? I don’t know, but this is a stalker's behavior

After having lunch with LM and her friends at the restaurant (where Sasaeng were there, ready to take photos), they went to a karaoke room and JK, who was pretty drunk (based on what the karaoke manager said later) backhugged LM. But the Sasaengs couldn’t be there to take photos, so they (allegedly) bribed the karaoke employee to show them the CCTV footage and took a low-quality picture of it.

The biggest question is, if the Sasaengs weren’t there, how did they know there is something worthy in the CCTV to check? The answer is they weren’t the main culprit, and karaoke or tattoo shop employees or both were cooperating with them. I mean karaoke employees definitely cooperated with Sasaengs, but the tattoo shop benefited the most. So why not? Anyways, that photo and that moment was the most “intimate” thing they could capture to use against JK.

JK went on that trip with his manager (The guesthouse manager gave out this information later, the part that was lacking in BH statement which could close the speculations way easier and earlier) and stayed at that guesthouse for two days to rest, but everything went wrong from there. This incident has three sides, LM and tattoo shop, the Sasaengs, who were following JK as their full-time job, and the media/industry which was trying to ruin JK’s image. I’m going to talk about all these three but let’s continue with the first one, LM and the tattoo shop.

Almost one month after the incident, LM’s friend interviewed with Korean media and claimed that ARMYs keep harassing her to the point that she wants to commit suicide. This was another attempt to bring everything back on top, but this time, it was disgusting because she did this interview right after one of the famous faces of Kpop committed suicide (October 14th, 2019). She used the situation and the public’s emotions to play the victim role on a higher level. Before this, many believed that she was a victim of some crazy Sasaengs, and she had nothing to do with the incident (I’m clearly talking about the people who didn’t think the rumors are true) but after that, it was clear that she is an attention seeker.

But I think she wasn’t just an attention seeker. She benefitted a lot from the situation. Her business blew up, she became one of the most famous non-celebrities in Korea (if not in the world), and she was literally shipping with one of the most popular men on the planet, who doesn’t like that? Anyways, LM had several friends, foreign older friends who were interacting with I-ARMYs for some unknown reasons, and one of them exposed something very interesting. She said she feels sorry for LM because she thought she had a chance with JK and that chance is long gone. Besides, people saw some conversations between LM and her friends on her Instagram comments about finding an idol boyfriend for her. These conversations happened before the incidents but it’s interesting since LM has several idol friends.

LM had another comeback to the media at the end of October and the next and the last update about the situation, happened in early December when BH stated that they (BH and LM!) are suing karaoke for leaking the photo. But after almost two years, we don’t know how this ended up. The last and probably the worst thing happened in the final episode of Bon Voyage when JK unnecessarily apologized for his behavior. I know JK himself, wanted to do this apology but he didn’t have done anything wrong and didn’t owe any apology to ARMY or anyone else, even if the rumors were true.

A New Ship on the Shore

After that, LM did nothing shady except posting photos of JK’s arm tattoos or someone with similar tattoos in December 2020 explaining their meanings, which was a weird action. After the rumors, JK didn’t visit that tattoo shop ever, and now, an artist who works with BH does his tattoos (the same artist who has done JM’s tattoos). LM announced on April 2021, that she has a boyfriend and some of JK/LM shippers, quitted their beloved ship after that. But not all of them.

We believed that the rumors weren’t true from the day JK and BH denied them, but many people didn’t. They were strongly believing that BH is hiding the truth because it’s Kpop and in this industry, idols are not allowed to date openly, so they had no choice but to deny any dating rumors. But this wasn’t their only reason for their denial. The main reason was the way JK was misunderstood and misrepresented by this fandom (I have a post about it, you can check it here).

At this point, there are people out there, shipping JK and LM. They bring several “proofs” for them being real such as:

1. Having similar tattoos: LM had designed and done JK’s tattoos, so it’s pretty normal for them to have the same style, especially the hand tattoos since he hasn’t changed or added anything on that part. But his arm tattoos have changed a lot, and you can’t see a similarity in them. Besides, knuckle tattoos are very common among tattoo lovers.

2. Having eyebrow piercing: This is another common trend. JK loves piercings and tattoos, and it means nothing, literally.

3. Similar drawings: This one is a little bit tricky and it needs a back story and a conspiracy theory. On 13th May 2020, BH released a Bangtan bomb from MAMA 2019 backstage, where JK drew a sketch of the moon and stars on a whiteboard. On the same day, people started to make a fuss, because LM had a design on her Instagram, very similar to JK’s improvised sketch. The date of her post was 11th December 2019, but the day JK drew that sketch, was December 4th (MAMA ceremony), and this means LM posted her design one week later. So who copied who? Does JK saw that design somewhere in that tattoo shop and had it in his mind, and drew it subconsciously? I don’t think so. Because JK improvised it in front of the camera, and it was originally his idea. Do I think BH has some insiders who took the photo of that sketch and showed it to LM, and she took the idea and made it hers? This is exactly what I think because I trust JK, not LM, nor BH. And the timing of the posts and Bangtan bomb is on my side. Preach!

That’s it. These are the only proofs people bring to say something is going on between them, and the funny thing is, this hasn’t ended even after April when LM announced that she is dating (apparently she had broken up with the last boyfriend right after the rumors started, definitely not sus, lol) The only reason people made a huge deal of those two photos, was one word: Heteronormativity. If LM were a man, none of this would have ever happened. But since this fandom is obsessed with the idea of het-JK, they bought these rumors eagerly. Back to the subject, as I said earlier, the other sides benefitted from this situation. I mean Sasaengs and the media/companies who had a part in the incidents.

Sasaengs always follow their targets and collect photos and videos of them, but they barely share anything publicly because they are criminals, and if they get busted they will be punished by the law. They have their isolated communities and share their information inside those communities. Of course, there are many accounts on social media that claim to be Sasaengs and gain lots of followers, but most of them are fake, and the real ones don’t share information for free, they sell them for high prices. So, there are two possibilities, in this case, someone bought JK’s photos from Sasaengs and published them, or Sasaengs did it themselves because someone asked/ordered them. I can’t see any other possibilities. Sasaengs wouldn’t gain anything from publishing these photos, but other people would, and they are the ones who made this happen.

Who were they? LM herself and tattoo shop? The fansite who wanted to destroy JK’s career? Or BH, who wanted to punish JK for his boldness about getting tattoos and make him more obedient? Or the media and rival companies, who wanted a scandal for their enemy? Or the people who wanted to revive the idea of het-JK? All of these are plausible and I can’t prove or disprove anything, but you can read more about this in the post I linked before.

Did This Affect Them?

Here comes the most interesting part; how did this affect Jikook? Did it affect them at all? Let’s review the timeline of the events again, from this point of view. As I mentioned earlier, we believe Jikook were together until 27th August and then JM went to Paris without any plans and came back for JK’s birthday. On the selfie, he posted that night he had written: “I’m glad to see you after not seeing you for a few days” which confirms that they were together before JM’s unplanned trip. At this point, JK had started getting tattoos and had most parts of his knuckle tattoos done.

When JM left Seoul for Hawaii the next day, JK went to Geoje, and the incidents happened, but nothing was public yet. Then he got arm tattoos and added some new parts to his hand tattoos including J which makes an obvious JM on his ring finger (The part LM claimed that is “not” their initials lol). JK’s completed hand tattoos were not exposed until September 16th when they were at the airport to leave for New Zealand. It was the day all the theories and rumors started. But in Jikook’s point of view, it happened on the second day of their trip.

Now we can start to analyze their moments on Bon Voyage 4. Of course, this series doesn’t show everything, but it gives us some clues about the dynamic of their relationship on those days. The first day of the trip when they were at the airport and Thailand (?) was pretty normal, but after that, at some moments I felt a strange atmosphere between them which I decided to not read too much on. But I found out I wasn’t wrong when in the last episode, JK talked about the awkwardness he felt about the issue with the members.

Jikook had many cute and domestic moments in the first two episodes but the grand gesture happened on the third one when JK climbed a hill without telling anyone, to bring a chunk of snow for JM as a gift, and we all know how much JM loves snow. This was an undeniable romantic act, but do I think this had anything to do with the situation? I believe Jikook was unbothered by those rumors because they completely trust each other, but the image you make for the others is different from the things you know and believe. Maybe this was a grand gesture not just for JM, but for us either.

After coming back to Seoul, there was no news from them for more than two weeks, and then they left Korea for Riyadh. The remarkable moment in the Riyadh concert was related to JM’s birthday. The members had planned a surprise for JM on the stage (The concert was on October 11th one day before his official birthday in Korea) and when it happened, JM said that he was happy because he saw JK happy and JK played a big role in that surprise. Honestly, you have to be deep in love to be happy just because your significant other is happy, even if it’s your own birthday. Let’s not forget the vlive JM did the next morning, and some pretty obvious moments happened that I can’t discuss here, but I bet you already know what I’m talking about. And also JM exposed the things he did for JK’s birthday that year.

A few hours later, on 18:22 (1+8+2+2=13) on local time and 00:22 on Korean time (only 22 minutes after JM’s official birthday in Korea started), JK tweeted one of the most amazing birthday tweets of all time which is comparable to a love letter. I’m sure you know everything about these tweets, so I’m not going too deep on this, I’m only saying that this tweet also was a grand gesture. And let me make another conspiracy theory here. After the rumors started, every time we had a big Jikook moment, something was coming from LM the next day. For example, when JK made this historic tweet, the next day LM's friend was interviewed about committing suicide. Or when SYS Seoul concerts happened (one of the biggest Jikook feasts of all time) and LM herself was at the VIP seats with her friends, the next day she did another comeback to the media. These can be just coincidences, but… never mind.

I Never Thought I Would Fall for a Man

Let’s not forget about the most obvious statements JK made on his first public appearance after the rumors. On JH’s vlive on 24th September, JK said: “I never thought I would fall for a man”. He said these words about JH dancing at CNS music video, and it clearly had nothing to do with Jikook, but it had a deep meaning. We know JK is not a shallow person, and lately, he stated that he thinks a lot before doing anything. So this didn't come out of nowhere, he didn't spit this out without thinking, in THAT situation. You never say such a thing when the internet is exploding with your dating rumors with a girl, do you?

His words can translate to “Do you ever consider the possibility of me not being straight?” This is what I read from his words and his facial expression. Maybe you think I say this because I’m a shipper, and I have this shipping goggle that makes me see everyone gay and debunk any girlfriend rumors. Some people even ask childish questions like “if they are dating why they didn’t travel together?” There are 100 explanations for that, and any couple who have been together for more than two years can answer you. When you date someone, you don’t stick together 24/7. Everyone in a healthy relationship has individuality, and sometimes they want to spend time with friends or alone, especially when they already had a world tour together lol.

Anyways, maybe I have a different point of view as a shipper, but this is not the problem. I never have a problem with my ship not being real (which they have shown enough to know they are). In fact, I will be delighted if any of them announce their relationship freely and publicly, but they haven’t done it yet. JK denied the rumors and gave us lots of hints about the truth, and I’m not delulu for believing him. But if you think he has to be het for backhugging a girl or having an eyebrow piercing, you are the one who is delusional because you are living in a heteronormative world where boys and girls can’t be friends and everyone is straight unless they come out in public.

I really can’t believe this post turning to be this long, and I thank you for reading it all. You might ask why I cared enough to write +4000 words about some stupid rumors that happened two years ago. This is the main question. This had to be ended in September 2019, but many people didn’t want it to end, because they loved it, they enjoyed it, they gained from it, so they protracted it as much as they could, and heteronormative people supported it blindly because of their homophobia or Y/N fantasies or whatever reason they had. I can’t believe we are still talking about this!

[mimik-u]

Flower Child, Chapter 19 (Blue IV)

AO3 Link

i.

Thursday, July 5th, 8:38AM:

Blue: Hello, Steven… how are you this morning?

Steven: tired.

Blue: I’m sorry.

Blue: Is there anything I can do?

Steven: no

Steven: I don’t think so

With one hand, Blue Diamond held her phone aloft and read Steven’s bare reply again and again. And with the other, she gently massaged her aching right hip, kneading her spiny knuckles gently over the bone beneath the thin layer of her nightgown. 

She’d slept on it the wrong way.

Had tossed and turned all night, nightmaring.

And she didn’t need a psychoanalyst to tell her what it meant that her dead daughter erupted from a wilting hibiscus flower before transforming into Steven Universe, who dissolved into petals as she tried to cling onto them both—her smile, his laugh, her freckles, his hair, all crumbling beneath her fingertips into pollen and pieces. Pearl’s words echoed in the dark chapel of her own head as she gathered the petals in her palms: “Start with a flower and a smile, perhaps.”

Help him, Blue.

Don’t look away.

(You’ve always been so good at looking away.)

In the end, she laid her phone facedown on the bed and rubbed her sore hip in the curtained darkness of her room for a few minutes longer. It was unclear to herself whether she was trying to soothe the pain or grate it in just a mica deeper, one sensitive knuckle movement at a time.

Either way, she was only giving herself what she deserved. 

Relief.

Injury.

And perhaps both at the exact same time.

A cocktail of them both—shaken, not stirred.

It was only when the alarm clock on the bedside table indicated that ten minutes had passed in silence and arthritic torture that she endeavored to apprehend her cane with both hands, violently wrenching herself into a standing position, briefly throwing her world into dizzying spirals. Blue closed her eyes against the initial nausea and told herself that she had to go on.

In so many more ways than just simply one.

She glanced fleetingly at the hibiscus that still remained on her nightstand, now withered around the edges, now graying, and thought to herself that perhaps she could save it if she acted fast, pressing it between the pages of a favorite book—an Austen, a Homer, a Kierkegaard.

Preserving it.

Start with a flower and a smile, perhaps.

Help him, Blue.

Don’t look away.

The sounds of her cane were muffled in the carpet as she made a detour to the bathroom to grab her robe, pulling on the worn garment like an old friend, the collar flush against her long neck. And then, her movements as stiff as they were laborious, she made her way from the bathroom back to the bedroom and then into the vast, empty hall—at the end of which the living room was framed in an arch of white, morning light. 

Clank, she barely glanced at the door leading into the study because she knew Yellow wouldn’t be in there.

The door was completely closed, which was a telltale sign in and of itself.

Clank.

Assorted images from the previous evening sifted through her head like grains of falling sand, salting her unsettled thoughts as she moved forward, her bare feet tracing the smooth wooden planks.

Clank.

They had sat in the backseat together on the car ride home from the hospital yesterday and dared to hold hands, fingers intertwining, palms touching.

Lifelines.

Yellow was as warm as Blue was cold, the gathering of their skin simply electric. 

Clank.

The sky outside the tinted glass windows had been the precise shade of a bruised peach—gold around the edges and a darker amber within. There were cream colored clouds that swirled and swirled through the ripening sky, becoming milky wisps in the places where they spread too thin.

Blue stared upwards into these vaulting heavens and thought fleetingly about beauty, how it could come from the most mundane of places.

In the continuous cycles of an ever-changing sky.

In children who gave flowers to random strangers at cemeteries.

In laughter.

In sadness.

Even in grief.

The fading light dusted the crown of her wife’s blonde head.

A slight frown pulled at her lips.

And there was great beauty and great sadness in this, too.

Paradoxes and contradictions.

“What are you thinking about?” Blue had asked, absently skimming her thumb along the side of Yellow’s hand, tracing every line, relearning every divot and groove.

“My luck,” Yellow returned in that familiar dry voice of hers. “That wreck could have been… disastrous.”

“Yes.” The word was hushed in her throat, cloistered, the possibilities that it engendered too much to bear: Yellow injured, Yellow dying, Yellow gone. The worst hypothetical had never felt more real to her than in the handful of hours that had elapsed between her doorbell ringing and rushing to the hospital in the dead of night.

With Pink, there had been no likewise chance.

No hospital to go to.

Only a morgue.

“Did… what’s her name… you know—the new valet—did she make it out alright? I forgot to ask.”

“She did,” Blue confirmed with a small nod. “Topaz—I mean. Only a few cuts on her face from what I understood. I gave her a temporary leave of absence.”

“Good,” Yellow sighed, relief palpable in her low voice. “Excellent.”

Her frown incrementally shifted, becoming the barest of smiles.

Subtle.

Almost easy to miss.

Clank.

They had ascended the elevator side by side, too, Yellow pulling her special keycard out from the pocket of her immaculately pressed shirt with fumbling fingers, and Blue could tell that she was tired by this uncharacteristic clumsiness alone.

“Let me,” she whispered before gently apprehending the card and slotting it into the reader that would grant them immediate access to their floor.

It was a tiny kindness.

Somehow, it was far more than that, too.

Yellow stared at her, eyes wide, and said, “Thank you.”

“It was nothing,” Blue murmured, a dull flush coloring her cheeks as she returned the card, slipping it back to where it belonged.

The doors opened slowly, welcoming the Diamonds home.

Clank.

Blue had insisted that Yellow sleep in the bed, that she needed a good night’s rest after all that she had been through, but Yellow was infuriatingly stubborn to the last—intransigent, inflexible, chivalrous—protesting that she didn’t want to aggravate Blue’s hip problem.

She’d be fine on the couch.

It only hit her later that night, as she laid in that bed that was much too big for her, that she could have invited her wife to come to bed with her.

But the thought scared her as much as it intrigued her.

She pushed it to the side, tabling it for a later date.

(Coward.)

Clank. 

The living room was dressed in a pale sunshine coat when Blue finally arrived at the very edge of it, her oceanic eyes washing over the scene until they lit upon Yellow Diamond, stretched beneath a thin blanket on the white couch, fast asleep, soft snores emitting from her half-open mouth.

In the hours that had elapsed, her wounds didn’t appear as angry as they had done yesterday, and there was already a little discoloration around the edges of her stitches that suggested that they were already beginning to do the complicated work of healing—as transitory wounds tended to do. 

Blue lifted the bottom of her cane now so it no longer thudded against the floor with each slow and deliberate footfall; she could retain her balance for that long, or, if she couldn’t, then she’d very well know it was likely time she had that hip replacement her physician kept threatening at each of her successive appointments.

But she didn’t waver.

Didn’t fall.

Miraculously refrained from breaking.

Long enough to reach the creamy ottoman in front of the couch, which Yellow had apparently used in lieu of a nightstand. Her reading glasses were folded neatly atop of yesterday’s copy of The Empire City Times, the crossword section right side up.

She’d almost finished it, lacking only two-across: ANTONYM OF CRUELTY.

And the answer, Blue Diamond could plainly see, was grace.

Fondness for her wife, exquisite and painful tenderness, unexpectedly erupted in the column of her throat—a rush of love, a flurrying sensation, spreading all over, both trickling water and raging fire, paradoxes and contradictions. And suddenly, all impulse, thought swept away by feeling, feeling unknotting her hesitant bones, Blue gingerly bent down and brushed the sharp line of Yellow’s jaw where sunlight had already scribbled itself in patches. She was a child running curious fingers along the edge of a forbidden shelf. She was a butterfly tentatively skimming a blade of grass. She was a broken mother trying to learn how to be unbroken again. She was a loving wife.

She hadn’t been intending to wake her—had only wanted to touch—but somewhere in the space of four awful years, Yellow had apparently learned to be a light sleeper. Her golden eyes flew open at the gesture, catching Blue in the act. 

“Blue,” she murmured, shocked, disbelieving, as though she wasn’t entirely convinced that she wasn’t dreaming. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Blue returned softly and at least had enough decency to look ashamed. (For what exactly? She wasn’t necessarily sure. Somehow, she just knew that it was a very shameful thing to touch her wife. To caress her gently after so many days and months and years of having not done it.) “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“No, no,” Yellow protested, sitting up abruptly to make room for Blue on the half-rumpled couch. The movement must have been too sudden for her sore body because she briefly winced, glancing downwards at her leg. “I should be getting up anyway. What time is it anyway? Seven? Seven-thirty?”

Blue remembered the timestamp that had accompanied Steven’s last message, and a frown bruised her lips as she slowly lowered herself by her wife’s side, balancing herself on the head of her cane.

“Closer to nine, I believe.”

Yellow blinked once, disbelief turning to cross bemusement in the slightest shift of her brow as she searched for the truth in her wife’s long face.

“Seriously?”

“More or less.” Blue’s lips slightly rippled, and Yellow shook her head with disgust, the emotion snarling across her weathered face.

“I haven’t slept in past eight since I was in college,” she muttered, pushing a hand through her sleep-straggled hair. “Goodness, that’s unusual.”

“You were exhausted,” Blue proffered immediately, as though this was explanation and excuse enough, but Yellow only shook her head again, refusing her own defense just as quickly as Blue had risen to it.

“Not anymore than usual,” came the stubborn reply. There wasn’t argument in her voice, so much as there was an edge, inwardly pointed.

Because that was the thing about Yellow Diamond.

She saved her sharpest words for herself, lancing her own criticisms deep into her skin in order to forcibly teach herself how to do better the next day. Blue knew better than to challenge her when she did this, for Yellow did enough challenging to herself.

So she looked away and allowed Yellow to punish herself and lapsed into contemplative silence, thinking about Steven again, threading her fingers together on top of her robed lap: his sunken face, his lachrymose messages, his careworn caretakers, and all of their collectively haunted eyes. Even glancing out onto the sun-warmed balcony was enough to conjure the image of him sitting beside her in the chair that usually belonged to Yellow and eating one of Holly Agatha’s famous chocolate cakes.

The one he would later throw up.

Because he was sick.

Terribly so.

“Blue?” Yellow’s voice was soft, prodding, hesitant, awkward—full of all the dichotomies and contradictions that their relationship seemed to have been built on these last four years. They both loved each other.

Surely. 

Deeply. 

Beyond a shadow of a doubt.

They were equally afraid to say it aloud.

“Is something troubling you?”

Blue’s turned away from the balcony and faced her wife again—the stitches on her sharply hewn jaw, the complicated emotions in her golden eyes, the sharp set of her frown—and wondered what would happen if she simply told her the truth, if she laid it nakedly between them and simply waited for a response.

It was terrifying to be vulnerable with another.

Somehow, in the midst of everything, she remembered that it was necessary.

“Steven Universe,” she finally whispered, the name less like a name and more like a confession, gently handed over between the sliding partition in a wooden booth. “I’m worried about him. I talked to one of his guardians yesterday, and he isn’t… doing well.”

Yellow’s face grappled with the news, appearing far more stricken than Blue could have ever expected of her.

When she frowned, the lines beneath her eyes darkened and creased, making her appear ancient.

Haunted.

“I know,” she said unexpectedly.

“You do?” Blue couldn’t help herself—she arched an incredulous brow, and her wife’s cheeks promptly colored in response, the pink feathering the sickly purple of her bruises. It wasn’t a particularly handsome effect.

“I met him the other night,” she muttered, a little impish, a little stiff, glancing away. “I was curious. I wanted to know what he looked like.”

Blue didn’t know what was more astonishing—the fact that Yellow had visited Steven in the first place or the miraculousness of her actually admitting to it so plainly. Neither action seemed particularly characteristic to a woman who attempted to subjugate all of her emotions beneath the sleeves of her immaculately ironed shirt.

But she could see the truth of the words in the tense sobriety of her profile.

And she knew, from experience, that as astonishingly unlikely as it was for Yellow Diamond to visit a sickly child in the hospital, it was even less likely that she would lie about it in the first place.

And so Blue did what she could to collect her face, but she was fairly sure that trace remnants of her surprise still remained because her wife scoffed, the color of her cheekbones still a rosé red, sweet and mild.

“You don’t have to look so shocked.”

“I’m… I’m not shocked,” she protested immediately, her own features shading themselves in. “I’m just—”

But Blue Diamond, eloquent though she was, could not find another fitting word, and Yellow Diamond, seemingly despite her better judgment, laughed once, the sound harsh and warm in that airy, light-filled living room.

“Shocked,” she repeated emphatically, shaking her head.

“You’ve disarmed me before I’ve taken my morning tea,” Blue mumbled, a little petulance in her voice, a little play.

“Good,” Yellow sniffed, half-grimacing, half-smiling. “I’m glad to see I can still keep you on your toes.”

And then they both stared at each other—nakedly, unflinchingly—quite painfully aware that they were on the verge of making each other laugh for the first time in years, and the solemnity of the occasion brought them both back to themselves.

Blue frowned so easily that it was only muscle memory, primal reflex.

And Yellow followed suit, the sunlight raking itself across her wounded face.

“And what did you think of him?” Blue asked, both wanting the answer and dreading it. She slightly learned towards her wife; part of her wished to flee; and because she didn’t flee, because she stayed, the contradiction manifested as a twisting of her gut, a turning.

“A little impetuous…” Yellow said immediately, her voice low, distant with memory. “Annoyingly happy… but good, I think. Smart for his age. Kind. He almost reminded me of—”

But she caught herself just in time—stricken, terrified, revolted.

And Blue’s heart nearly failed with the simple proximity of her daughter’s ghost, of the closeness of her nearly evoked name.

But they danced through the horrible moment.

Silently. 

Together.

Yellow swallowed thickly, and Blue Diamond was merciful; she gently took her wife’s splinted hand.

“Pink,” she murmured softly, the word, the name, the ghost reverent on her tongue.

Holy.

“Those eyes,” Yellow croaked painfully, folding her fingers into the gaps between Blue’s own. “That wide smile.”

“I know,” Blue whispered. “I know.”

“I can see why you like him, Blue,” she said seriously. “He hooks you in.”

Blue’s mind worked far ahead of her. Even though she didn’t explicitly articulate it, even though she likely never would, it was clear that Yellow was amongst this number. 

She liked Steven Universe.

She cared.

“Before you even know it,” she agreed softly. “Before you’re even aware.”

“It’s all so very sudden,” Yellow muttered uncomfortably, frowning, a divot forming between her dark brow.

And Blue thought to herself, very quietly, that that was the nature of love, really. 

It was all so very sudden.

And beautiful and extraordinary and rare.

And sad and horrible and tragic.

And lasting.

Even when it happened suddenly.

(Even when it was suddenly taken away.)

“What isn’t in this world?” Blue murmured, and she gently skimmed the side of her wife’s hand with her thumb, watching as this simple revelation played out across her powerful features.

Smoothing them.

Sanding and softening all those rough edges.

“Frankly,” she finally said, smiling a little sadly, “I have no damn clue.”

ii.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a little elven girl, all tucked up in bed together, side by side by side. 

Blue ran her fingers through her daughter’s mass of curly hair as she snored lightly. Her tiny hand was curled into the front of Yellow’s pajama shirt, knobbly fingers twisted into the fabric, secure there. She’d fallen asleep protesting the need for sleep, trying to convince her mothers for one story more, and just as Blue had finally conceded—she rarely ever didn’t when it came to Pink—her hooded eyes drifted to a close beneath the gentle lamp-strewn haziness of the room, where she was warm.

Safe.

Loved.

For that was the crucial fact, the fundamental thing—Pink Diamond was loved most of all.

“We’re never going to have a sex life again, are we?” Yellow lamented, slanting a honey-eyed gaze at her wife over the top of Pink’s head.

Amusement in the expression.

Fondness.

Blue laughed lightly and could not help but play along, teasing her body upwards so that she was propped on her elbow, and she could look at her wife properly, drinking in the way she looked at ten o’clock at night, with her hair still a little wet from the shower. There was a certain gentleness in her hawklike face that she tended to eschew during the day around business colleagues, subordinates, and clients, but here, in the safety of their shared bedroom, it had always been implicitly understood that even birds of prey had to roost, too.

“It isn’t too late, you know,” Blue returned, her voice warm, low, suggestive . Yellow had started it after all; it was only fair that she finished. “We can simply move her to her own bed…”

“And chance waking her up again? Hell, no. It was an ordeal just getting her to sleep.”

“The couch is always an option.”

Yellow scoffed imperiously, poking her lips out in a magnificent imitation of her mother’s trademark pout.

“Every time we try that, one of us falls off the damn thing.”

“Hey,” Blue laughed again, causing a heavy strand of hair to fall from where it had been swept from behind her ear, “I wasn’t the one who vouched for hardwood floors.”

Yellow pulled on a faux-offended look like it was one of her favorite ties, dramatically starfishing one of her hands across her chest, exactly where her collared pajama shirt dipped into a vee.

“Well excuse me for thinking that carpet looks outdated.”

“You’re impossible,” Blue smiled gently, shaking her head.

“I believe the word you’re looking for is practical .”

And then, because it was late at night, and they were tired and being stupid, and there was a baby in the bed between them, the two of them caught each other’s eye and couldn’t help themselves, collapsing into laughter that was lovely and loud and ridiculous enough to make Pink briefly stir, her ears twitching irritably at the disturbance.

And then, because this was somehow incredibly funny even though it really, really wasn’t, they laughed some more—silently this time albeit—before eventually flicking off both of their lamps and wrapping their arms around their daughter in the cool darkness, fingers meeting precisely in the middle.

iii.

Friday, July 6th, 9:20AM:

Blue: Hello, Steven. Are you feeling better today?

Blue: If you are, I would love to come visit you again soon. 

Steven: not really

Steven: sorry, Blue

Saturday, July 7th, 9:51AM:

Blue: Just checking in, sweet boy. Respond only when you feel up to it.

Blue: And if that’s not at all… that is perfectly okay, too.

They took their tea and coffee out on the balcony, Blue assuming the right armchair and Yellow the left, and somehow, there was both a rightness and a wrongness to these simple actions.

Because this was new.

And yet, achingly familiar.

One week ago today, they danced this same vicious dance, drinking coffee, drinking tea, sitting in these chairs, appropriating a sense of normality that they did not feel. And the memory of their failed ruse swallowed a lot of the precious oxygen in the air, making it hard for either of them to speak. Blue spidered her hand across her sternum, the tips of her long fingers touching spiny collarbone, and tried to remind herself how to breathe.

Yellow was more finicky in her discomfort, her careworn face drawn as she bobbed her left leg up and down, the heel of her slipper flicking arrhythmically against the smooth floor. And the sun that she stared at was the precise color of a healing bruise, pale ochre against a silver sky. And the bruises on her angularly hewn face were mottled in the strange light, pulsing like miniature supernovas, burning, gradually dulling.

“I heard it was going to rain tomorrow,” the businesswoman eventually said, and it was clear from the way that her voice was clipped that she didn’t really want to talk about the weather.

“I saw that, too,” Blue Diamond replied in a low voice. “On the news, I believe.” She had seen no such thing, in fact, but they were talking again, she and Yellow, and that was something that would occasionally take baby steps.

Weather talk.

Mere pleasantries.

Scratching the deep, dark surfaces with fingernails.

But then, because the weather could only take them so far, they lapsed into a silence that was its own person, sitting indelicately in the space between them.

Pink hair.

Constellation freckles.

A black hoodie.

A mischievous smile.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a little elven girl, who hadn’t been so little anymore—not really. She’d been tall and willowy and full of passion for a life she had yet to live. She’d been twenty-one, but both of her mothers had treated her like she was twelve. 

And they loved her, but they suffocated her. 

And they loved her, but they ignored her. 

And they loved her, but the awful and unbearable truth of the matter was that love was not enough. 

Love was the foundation, but it had to be built upon with care and attentiveness—with perceptive eyes and willing ears and flexible hearts. It required sacrifice. It demanded compromise. Mutability. Vulnerability. Change.

And so Blue and Yellow loved Pink Diamond, down to their marrow, down to all the atoms in their four hundred and twelve collective bones, but they failed her in so many of those other important respects. 

And they paid the steep price.

Because once upon a time, the little elven girl who wasn’t so little anymore had had enough of her own fairytale and dreamed of carving out another.

She sought freedom and adventure.

She was daring; she wished to rebel.

But when she did for the first time (and the last), when she snuck out of her palace of a room, there were monsters out there, and nothing in the world had ever prepared her for monsters—not even her parents, who had slain their fair share of monsters: dragons and greedy businessmen and hardhearted mothers.

And so she died, and the princess and the knight were left alone in their high tower to lose their goddamn minds.

In separate rooms.

Away from each other.

They mourned and mourned and mourned.

And on that sun-paled balcony, before she knew it, before she could stop herself, Blue Diamond’s eyes were pooling with hot tears. She tried to swipe them away, so Yellow wouldn’t see, wouldn’t chide her, wouldn’t scold, but Yellow had already seen—of course she had already seen—and her golden eyes were wide.

Lined.

Horror-struck.

“I’m sorry,” Blue pleaded reflexively, covering her face with her tall hands. She was always so very sorry. “I was just... I was thinking of her and I couldn’t help it... and I’m—“

“Don’t apologize, Blue,” Yellow cut across her hoarsely, her voice a sharp knife on the edge of breaking. “Don’t ever feel like you have to apologize to me.”

But Blue didn’t think that this was a particularly healthy way of looking at things either. There were so many things she felt the need to apologize for.

(All of them had to do with looking away.)

“But—“

“Because I was thinking about her, too.” 

The sentence was an admission, rushed, expulsive, thrown to the floor like it was a bomb ready to ignite.

Yellow abruptly flinched, and Blue did, too, waiting for the aftermath of the blow that didn’t quite come. 

So now there was an invisible body in the space between them and a ticking time bomb on the floor. 

Company was always diverse in the Diamonds’ penthouse suite.

Perpetually attuned to their self-made demons.

“You were?” Blue’s voice verged on the edge of offensively wondrous. She dared to look at her wife in the gaps between her fingers, slicing her statuesque profile into vees. Her stern jaw. Her world-weary eyes. The lines crisscrossing her face. The defeated hunch of her Atlantean shoulders.

Blue pulled her fingers downwards until they were tightly clenching the lapels of her robe, fingers sinking into the thin fabric, knuckles turning white at the grip.

“How could I not be?” Each word was acerbic, gritted through the teeth, self-loathing. “Just last week, we did this, too, and I hurt you then… I’ve hurt you so many times over Pink. I should be the one who is saying sorry.”

Yellow looked over then, her face desperately open, as though she was trying to convey the force of her raw penance by expression alone.

How tortured she was.

How craven.

Feral.

Agonized.

Undone.

“And I am sorry, Blue,” she continued, the lines beneath her eyes contracting harshly. “I am so sorry—for every wrong I’ve ever done to you. For every time I’ve made you feel wrong for grieving Pink. I… I have no excuse, no semblance of a justification… I just…” But she violently interrupted herself, her ferociousness seemingly drained from her body as she jerked forward, elbows on her knees, dragging a hand across the whole of her face, uncaring of her stitches.

And she remained like that for what felt like an eternity, a statue ruined, palm covering her mouth

Staring wide-eyed into space.

Into an awfully bruised sky.

Blue Diamond’s entire nervous system was in total disrepair as she looked at her wife.

And tried to comprehend the words she had just said, the very ones she had resigned herself to never hearing. 

Because for all the four years that she had grieved and grieved, Yellow had been right there beside her, insisting that she should get a grip on herself, should get better, should move on.

And here was the apology for all those awful words.

Here was the proof that they had existed, and that they had injured, and that they had hurt.

The creased skin around Yellow’s eyes was damp.

Her robed shoulders trembled.

“Yellow Clytemnestra Diamond,” Blue finally whispered, the name less invocation than it was admonition, less admonition than it was cruelty, less cruelty than it was love, “you cannot honestly believe that it is that simple.”

That caught her attention.

Yellow jerked her head in Blue’s direction so quickly that it looked painful.

“What?”

“Can’t you see?” She asked, a pleading note in her voice as she leaned a little across the gap between their chairs, her silvery hair falling in loose gossamer curtains around her face. “It isn’t all just you, and it isn’t all just me either. It’s both of us. Together. My God and my goodness, it always has been.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Yellow snapped, her face leached of its color as she scrabbled for purchase, for a reasonable ledge upon which to mount her own cross. “You were grieving, and I kept pushing you. I couldn’t stand watching you fall apart.”

“But you were grieving, too, Yellow!” Blue all but shrieked, desperate to impress upon her wife how important it was to acknowledge the unplumbed depths of her pain.

To own it, by God.

To share it.

Because she didn’t want to be alone anymore.

She couldn’t bear to be.

“You were hurting, and you were sad,” she continued unrestrainedly, tears pricking the corners of her eyes again. She made no attempt to brush them away this time. “And I was so cruel, Yellow. I wanted you to acknowledge it for my own selfish reasons, and then, at the very same time, I was desperate to push you away. You hurt me, but fundamentally, I hurt you, too, and you can’t just… you can’t take away our history like that. You can’t shoulder all these four years on your own. It doesn’t work like that. Love doesn’t! Marriage doesn’t! We don’t!”

Blue Diamond’s chest heaved painfully at the end of all this, as though she had just run a marathon. She rubbed her sternum again, trying to excise the damage, but there was so much of it there—so many hundreds of days worth—and she was so tired.

Exhausted.

But still, there was more to be said; there were mountains between hers and Yellow Diamond’s chairs.

Insurmountable oceans.

And Yellow was frozen, a monument to her own colossal grief.

Stone.

Leaking stone.

She had fountains for eyes; they dripped and dripped.

“And we hurt Pink,” Blue whispered, closing her eyes against this final, horrible truth as the tears continued to lance down her long face, salting her cracked lips. “Oh, my God, how we hurt that poor child. She wanted so badly to grow up, and we wouldn’t let her. We looked away. And that’s what I think about every time I close my eyes, Yellow. Her last words to me echo perpetually in the dark of my head.”

You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

She couldn’t help herself then; she let out a bitter sob, wrenched to her very core.

Because their daughter was dead and never coming back, and the pain of that simple fact would haunt her until the day she died, the memories of her so many thousands of scattered ghosts.

Eternal.

Omnipresent.

Her own constructed gods to worship and to fear.

“I was grieving,” Yellow confessed hoarsely, and the naked baldness of it forced Blue to open her eyes again to take a look. Her wife was rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, fingers dug into the thighs of her pajama pants. Without her trademark three piece suit, without her makeup, without her man-killing heels, she seemed so much smaller than usual—less adamantine, more human. “And I hurt you.”

“Yes,” Blue said simply.

It was a mere syllable; it cost everything in her to utter it.

“And you were grieving… and you didn’t mean to… but you… you hurt me, too.”

“But sometimes,” Blue reminded her gently, the words awful on her lilting tongue, “I absolutely did mean to. I wanted to hurt you, Yellow… I wanted you to feel the barest inch of pain that I felt and suffer with me. Us. Together.”

Yellow looked like she didn’t know what to say to that, so she ignored it, striking the heel of one of her hands across her running face, sniffing harshly.

“And we hurt Pink,” she carried on, this unforgivable truth the salt in the exposed wound. Yellow’s voice broke at the end as the pain of it simply burned. “We hurt her so many times over.”

There was only one possible answer to this leveled charge, too.

“Yes.”

Yellow closed her eyes against this final condemnation, wincing harshly, as though skewered through with a sword. Her jaw was red in the place where she’d tried to wipe away the tears that still continued to flow down her angular face.

“So what do we do now?” She asked, and the question was almost childish in her stringent voice. The desperation in her golden eyes pleaded for an answer, a foundation upon which to stand. “Where the hell do we even go from here?”

It was a simple question at the same time that it was a loaded one.

It engendered the possibilities of more pain, dissolution, and grief.

The startling potentiality that neither Blue nor Yellow Diamond would ever recover from the loss of their only child.

Their shared tomb of a bleak and horrible future.

But there was hope there, too.

The startling possibility of it.

The barest potentiality.

Small.

Slight.

Goddamn miraculous even.

But there.

Taught first to Blue Diamond by a boy in a cemetery, so many days upon long, aching days ago.

Thinking clearly for the first time in four years or perhaps not thinking straight at all, the fifty-five year old woman tenderly reached her shaking hand across the gap between their chairs and held her palm upwards as though it had a flower in it, inviting her wife’s fingers to fill in the empty spaces, to imagine a conceivable future where they could one day hold hands and be content.

“I don’t know,” she murmured, her voice also quite childish, the words so very small. “But wherever it is, Yellow, let’s go together.”

To heaven.

To hell.

To the grave.

To their golden years.

Yellow stared at her open hand for the longest fraction of an infinity, and there was exquisite agony in her eyes, painful tenderness, too.

Paradoxes and contradictions.

“Okay,” she finally whispered, taking Blue Diamond’s hand, interlinking their long fingers.

“Okay.”

iv.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a night that seemed to swallow them both entirely whole.

Because White Diamond wasn’t doing well. 

Her live-in nurse had called Yellow just today and told her that some days were worse than others, and worse days were become less exception than the rule; she was often agitated, frustrated, terrified, confused; she thought that Yellow was still at boarding school; she saw shadows of strange men on the alabaster walls; she missed her own mother, who had been dead for some forty-odd years; she wanted to send her dearest Starlight a postcard from Paris.

As they laid in bed together in the darkness, Blue wrapped her arms around her wife’s tense body, pressing soft lips against her pillow-rumpled hair.

“Mother always said that she wanted a grand funeral when her time came,” Yellow said stiffly, each word yanked from behind gritted teeth. “If her casket cost less than a hundred grand, she’d haunt me from the aether for the rest of my life.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Blue sighed, a little sad, a little amused, a little fond. Her mother-in-law had always been quite the character, larger than life, always meticulously dressed in Gucci jumpsuits that were more expensive than most people’s home mortgages. 

“She wants to be buried in the same crypt as my grandparents naturally,” Yellow continued in that same halting voice, “and I told her that she was being ridiculous. Someone would have to knock out a damn wall to fit another casket in there.”

But Blue knew her wife too well, perhaps better than she knew herself sometimes with her obstinate avoidance of all things introspective in nature.

“My colleague’s husband is a contractor,” she said gently, skimming her fingers up and down Yellow’s sleeved arm. “I can get a quote for you on Monday...?”

“Mm,” came a noncommittal grunt, which Blue correctly interpreted as reluctant assent.

The silence laid thickly upon the two women then.

Seconds passed.

Electric minutes.

Blue could almost feel the tension agitating Yellow’s bones.

And then—

“We should talk about our own burial plans one day in the near future,” she said brusquely. “At the very least, we need to have the Zircons codify our basic intentions into a will.”

Blue stared at the back of her wife’s head incredulously, eyes wide, her dark brow contracting somewhere in the middle. With some effort, she extricated her arms from around her, so that she could prop herself up on one elbow more easily.

“Yellow Clytemnestra Diamond,” she whispered, unable to quite keep the emotion from her voice, the rising pitch, “what on Earth do you mean? We’re not even fifty yet.”

Goodness, they were barely forty. 

“Accidents happen all the time,” Yellow reasoned sagely, rolling around to face Blue properly, “and I want to leave Pink with a clear blueprint. Otherwise, you and I might end up in neon pink caskets as Weezer plays over our grave.”

“How serious of you,” Blue quipped, lowering herself down to the pillow again so that they were at eye level. In the barest light that seeped through the curtains, she saw that there were tired lines scoring Yellow’s face, straining shadows. 

“I’m being completely serious,” she protested shortly. “Not about Weezer, perhaps, but the fact that we should have solidified plans.”

Abstractly, Blue knew she was correct—it was only common sense for them to put their affairs in order, even if they were young, and perhaps especially while they were. And yet, she had a feeling that this particular topic of conversation wasn’t strictly about the common sense of it, the practicality, the realism.

It was more so about the haunted look in Yellow’s eyes.

And the stiffness of her body.

And her sick mother.

Assuredly, it was about grief.

“Yellow,” Blue only whispered, reaching across the barest gap between them and placing the palm of her hand on the woman’s warm cheek. Her thumb cradled that imperial jaw, tracing its harsh geometry, loving it softly.

And Yellow Diamond immediately jerked, as though stung by such a gentle, careful touch, but ultimately, she didn’t move away from it.

She leaned into it, in fact.

And closed her dark-stricken eyes.

Sighing.

“Sorry,” she muttered thickly. “I was being morbid... I just... it’s all becoming real to me, I think...”

Blue remained silent in this awful darkness, simply listening, simply holding her wife’s face. 

“The inevitability that one day, my mother isn’t going to call me on the phone to chew my ass out about the company again... she’s just always been so stubborn, so implacable, that to imagine her as anything else is...”

But she trailed off, opening her eyes again. They were strangely filmy, bright but simultaneously dull.

“Well, you know what it is,” she finished awkwardly.

The words sprung immediately to Blue’s clever and elocutionary mind: unbearable, unfathomable, cruel.

She decided quickly, though, against saying any of them aloud; thinking them was punishment enough.

“I know,” she whispered, continuing to study the planes of her wife’s jaw by touch alone. She chose not to say anything when there was sudden dampness on the side of her hand.

“What do I do, Blue? The question was hushed, strangled, barely articulated into the night. “What happens next?”

Blue Diamond didn’t particularly know grief yet, the harrowing nature of it, its iron-sharp teeth.

And so that was the only answer she could give her wife in the end, as intelligent as she was, as intuitive, and as sensitive to the natures of others.

“I don’t know,” she admitted gently, “but I promise you, Yellow Diamond, I’ll be by your side through all of it.”

In sickness and in health.

’Til death did them part.

’Til Weezer apparently one day played over their grave.

“How sentimental of you,” Yellow laughed humorlessly in a failure of an attempt to hide that she was touched.

Blue leaned over then and pressed her lips against Yellow’s cool forehead, fingers still cupping her face. And when the stalwart general of a businesswoman’s entire body shuddered, she was merciful again; she pretended not to notice.

“Yes.”

v.

Tuesday, July 10th, 7:22PM:

Steven: i’m sorry for just getting back to you, Blue. It’s been a rough couple of days.

Blue: I know how that feels.

Steven: it’s just kinda hard to get outta my own head right now.

Blue typed and sent her reply just as the door leading into the penthouse suite abruptly swung open: I know how that feels, too.

When she glanced up from her phone from where she was sitting on the couch, Yellow Diamond was limping through the threshold in such a way that it was painfully obvious that she was trying to hide that she was limping—holding her shoulders ridiculously straight and grimacing as though to subjugate any pain she was feeling in the firm press of her mouth.

Though she was dressed in a button down with black slacks and a suit vest to match, she wasn’t quite coming home from work; rather—as she’d told Poppy to tell Blue earlier that morning—she had been at the hospital all day.

Doing some more tests.

Placing her phone facedown on the nearby end table, Blue narrowed her eyes in what she hoped was sympathy but probably more so resembled fear.

“Yellow?” She asked softly, her voice small and tremulous and terrified of its own aggrandized shadow. She loathed herself; she didn’t know how to be anyone other than herself. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” came the immediate and stubborn reply as the woman shuffled over to the couch, her face unbending in unsubtle relief when she finally collapsed into a sitting position. Her palm immediately went to her right thigh, which Blue knew had been the one heavily bruised in the accident.

Blue’s brow bent pointedly over her arctic eyes.

Coldly.

“No,” Yellow amended herself, abashed, embarrassed, sniffing haughtily. “It’s only my leg, though. I was on it too much today.”

“I told you you could borrow my cane.”

“And I told you that that was the last thing I wanted to do,” she muttered, flushing, continuing to rub the inflicted area. “Besides, you need it more.”

Because it was always a competition between them—who was suffering the most. And for some odd and likely unhealthy reason, it was one competition that the ambitious CEO didn’t like to win.

Blue sighed heavily at this silent observation, disturbing the heavy braid that was slung across her shoulder, before slowly pulling herself upwards from the couch, drawing her wife’s incredulous, harried gaze.

“Wait! I didn’t mean for you to leave—”

But Blue only shook her head, quelling Yellow’s protests with the gesture, before slowly hobbling over to the kitchen and slowly hobbling back, this time bearing the ice pack that she sometimes took to bed with her and a gray towel to wrap around it. Using the head of her cane cane as leverage, knuckling it tightly, she nudged the white ottoman towards Yellow with her good knee until it was right in front of her.

“Prop your bad leg up,” she commanded quietly, her voice taking on that same authoritative note that she had once used with her pupils. “Elevating your leg will help drain some of the tension from it.”

And like the best of the headmistress’s former pupils, Yellow knew it was best to swiftly comply.

Laboriously, with obvious discomfort, she used her hands to drag her right leg onto the ottoman, wincing a little with each microscopic adjustment of her thigh. Blue, careful to give the limb wide berth, lowered herself down to the ottoman, too, where she encased the ice pack in the towel, neatly tucking the ends in together so that the cloth wouldn’t unloose itself.

Yellow watched all of this with offensively wide eyes, staring at Blue as though she was turning water into wine or doing somersaults in the middle of the living room. Self-conscious, hyperconscious, anxious, painfully aware, she tucked a stray strand of silvery hair behind her ear and tried not to pay attention to her as she gently pressed the ice pack against her leg, meticulous to cover the entirety of the affected area.

“Cold helps,” she only proffered in explanation. “I can instruct one of the maids to change it out for a new one in a few hours or so.”

“Thank you, Blue.” Yellow’s voice was constricted, tender, raw.

Blue didn’t think she deserved such an outpouring of emotion for such a simple task, this tiny, most minuscule of kindnesses; she glanced away, feathers of color dusting her hollowed cheeks.

“It’s nothing,” she returned gently. “You would do the same for me…”

A slight pause.

Loaded.

Unbearable.

She felt the need to extinguish it at once.

“You have done the same for me,” she added with quiet forcefulness, still not quite looking in Yellow’s direction, drawing both of her hands into her lap. They were cold now from handling the ice pack, rigid and stiff. 

“So many times over.”

After all, how many times had Yellow Diamond sat vigil by her bedside in these past four years? Bathed her? Accompanied her to doctor’s appointments? Taken care of her the best way she knew how?

The number was unfathomable to Blue, innumerable even—both from a lack of attention and from the stunning knowledge that indeed, there were probably too many times to count.

There was a shifting noise then—Yellow adjusting herself on the couch, perhaps—and when Blue finally forced herself to glance up, she could see that there was a rumpled look in her wife’s eyes—the same messiness of an unironed collar, the stain of tea spilt on a tiled floor. She had jerked forward as though to reach out and touch Blue, but the position of her extended leg had made it difficult.

“But I could have done so much more, Blue,” she said softly, with quiet pain, the barren and fervent truth of it shining in those liquid gold eyes. “I watched you suffer more than I ever helped you… I’m so sorry.”

And when Blue immediately opened her mouth to protest, to rearticulate that it wasn’t as straightforward as that, that they had both done inconceivable wrongs to each other, that Yellow had done the best that she could, Yellow shook her head ferociously, her aspect taking on that same indefinable sense of authority which had so permeated her reign as the CEO of Diamond Electric.

And like the wisest of Yellow’s colleagues, Blue knew when it was best to simply stand down.

“No! I’ve been thinking about this,” she continued doggedly, “and I’ve come to the conclusion that just because we’ve both hurt each other doesn’t very well cancel out the fact that we did. That’s asinine, Blue—fallacious logic. I hurt you. I pushed you away. I didn’t want to acknowledge your grief for the inglorious reason that if I did, I would have to acknowledge my goddamn own.”

She raised her voice only at the end, flinching when she did, looking away.

The pale light flooding down from the strips in the ceiling cast strange shadows across her beaten face, and Blue Diamond’s heart bruised with the utter surreality of it all.

The confession.

The accountability.

The simple agony in Yellow’s voice, laid bare.

There were no barriers between them now, no walls, no facades, no meticulously constructed pretenses—only words.

Words and words and words.

Yellow Diamond had been there for Blue in so many different ways in four years… but she had hurt Blue so many times in so many different ways, too, and that was apparently something that neither of them were allowed to forget.

How many times had Blue laid in the horrible dark by herself, silent tears streaming down her face weathered? And how many times had Yellow insisted to her physician do up her meds, as though the underlying problem of grief could be treated first and foremost with a pill? How many times had her wife raised her voice at her—so devastatingly harsh, aloof, and cruel?

The number was unfathomable, innumerable.

Blue could not immediately swallow the lump in her throat.

“I… I remember thinking that if I could just keep myself together on the outside,” Yellow half-whispered, “I could be strong enough for both of us. I couldn’t bear being weak.”

And she flexed her fists on top of her powerful thighs, scraped knuckles trembling.

And she somehow found enough courage to look Blue in the eye.

And Blue stared at her right back, her eyes melting with awful tears.

“Grief isn’t weakness, Yellow,” she said ardently, with all the conviction she could muster, with all the atoms in her broken body.

Because she knew grief; she understood it; it was her closest companion, her very best and most horrible friend.

Yellow sniffed and swiped a hand across her face as though it would do anything, as though it would annihilate the over-brightness of her eyes.

“What is it then?” She asked, and from the quiet tone of her voice, Blue thought that she’d already guessed the answer.

But she said it aloud anyway, for both of them to hear and to know and to never forget again.

She reached over and gently took her lover’s hand and whispered, “Love.”

Tuesday, July 10, 9:02PM:

Blue: It’s such a hard feeling to contend with, sweet boy—the feeling of everything, the feeling of nothing, the feeling of drowning in the empty space of your own head.

Blue: I was there.

Blue: Some days, I still am.

Blue: But please know, Steven Universe, that I am here for you.

Blue: So many people are here for you.

Wednesday, July 11, 6:58AM:

Steven: thank you, Blue

vi.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a dead queen to mourn and to bury in a one-hundred thousand dollar casket.

On the day that White Diamond died, Blue washed her wife’s hair when they showered together that night, rubbing her fingers gingerly across her scalp as the steaming water broke across the crowns of both of their heads.

Yellow braced her shaking hands against the marbled walls and tried not to make so much as a sound.

Her shoulder blades were knife-sharp with the excruciating tension of holding herself together.

(Of not falling apart.)

Blue kissed the skin right between the middle of those tremulous mountains and scrubbed those places tenderly, too.

And when they dressed in their pajamas and went to bed together later on, loosely intertwining hands and painfully letting go, Pink Diamond came in, wearing one of Yellow’s old t-shirts as a gown, and wrapped her arms around Blue’s neck first, pressing a gentle kiss against her head. Her dark eyes were red from where she had been crying, for she had loved her Gran dearly, even if the eighty-five year old woman had taken habitual offense to the teenager’s choices of music. 

“Goodnight, Mom.”

Blue closed her eyes in her daughter’s warm embrace and inhaled the scent of her floral shampoo.

“Goodnight, Pink.”

“I love you so much.”

“I love you, too.

She used to say it so easily then, and she said it so often, too.

It was commonplace.

It was habit.

(What had ever happened in the intervening years? Blue Diamond, to her eternal condemnation, could not know.)

And then the sixteen-year old dutifully shuffled over to the other side of the bed, where Yellow was sitting on the edge, staring blankly into space, the lines beneath her eyes stark, as though dictated in black ink. And Pink wrapped her arms around her other mother, too, burying her nose against that tall column of a neck.

Tears flowing down her freckled face, she whispered, loud enough for Blue to hear, “I’m so sorry, Momma.”

Yellow Diamond didn’t seem capable of moving a muscle at that very moment, more statue than human, obelisk-like, calcified.

But Blue watched as their beautiful daughter squeezed all the tighter, uncaring that she was meeting stone, her slender shoulders wrenching with a sob.

“I’m going to miss her, too.”

Yellow hadn’t cried since she had first gotten the call earlier that morning, and she didn’t start then either; Blue knew her too well; she was desperately afraid to be vulnerable for anyone to see. 

And yet, with slow rigidity, with a tenderness that almost did not befit her, labored though it was, the businesswoman reached upwards and encircled her arms around her daughter, drawing the sixteen-year old girl into her lap as though she was that same child who had perpetually come into her mothers’ room after a bad nightmare.

“Shh,” she croaked, and there was pain in her fractured voice.

Pronounced agony.

Love.

Blue’s heart stuttered at the sight and at the sound.

“Shh, Pink,” she repeated, cradling her child, tangling her fingers in that wild, pink hair. “I’m here.”

vii.

Thursday, July 12, 7:12PM:

Steven: hey Blue?

Blue: Yes, Steven?

Steven: You can come visit me tomorrow if you want.

Steven: Would morning be okay? 9:00 maybe? I think they have some more tests to do on me in the afternoon

Blue: I’ll be there.

The summer evening was flush with soft colors—pink and indigo and aegean blue, all bleeding into each other, all melting, until the sky was falling with hazy radiance, white stars dotting the sky like angels in the night. Blue was on the balcony when Yellow arrived home, listening to a familiar piano arrangement that was playing on the classical radio station; the portable stereo was sitting on the table between the chairs.

“You’ve always liked this one,” Yellow said fondly, and when Blue turned around, she saw that her wife was leaning against the sliding glass doorway, dressed as impeccably as usual in a black button down and well-tailored khakis. The collar of her shirt was popped up around her sinewy neck, and there was a manila folder tucked neatly beneath her unhurt arm. She’d spent yet another day at the hospital, doing heavens only knew what. 

At least she wasn’t coming home with any new injuries, though. 

“Debussy?”

“Chopin,” Blue smiled faintly, and the gesture stretched a little stiffly across her unpracticed lips. “Nocturne in E Flat Major… I used to play it at my parents’ estate for our guests…”

“You used to get so frustrated when you pressed the wrong key,” Yellow teased as she pushed herself off of the door and ambled over. She didn’t quite sit down in her chair, but rather placed the manila folder down in front of the stereo before straightening up again, her silhouette tall in the burgeoning night. “Your brow would furrow just in the middle before you’d start all over again, intent on getting it right this time…”

Blue Diamond’s heart gently pulsed in her throat as she stared upwards at this figure she knew so well—so stern and so simultaneously magnanimous, so magnificent and so undeniably… broken, the lines beneath her eyes fixed scars, her face an angular canvas for cuts and oddly healing bruises.

“I’ve always been a perfectionist, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

Yellow drew a purposeful step closer, and Blue instinctively leaned back, her stomach clenching against wild and irrational and warranted fright.

“Yellow…”

Because then, with a little awkwardness in her eyes, with a hell of a lot of fear, Yellow Diamond slowly proffered her hand, the metal band of her watch catching in the golden light that illumined the balcony.

There was no mistaking the gesture.

It was an invitation.

“The song’s almost over,” Blue whispered, her throat savanna-dry.

“So?” Yellow meant it to be casual, Blue inferred, but the sound came out too agitated. Color leaked from the sky and seemed to scribble the hollows of her cheeks in. “That’s never stopped us before.”

She was embarrassed.

It was adorable.

And strange.

And oddly sad.

And so, Blue Diamond swallowed her fears.

She took her wife’s hand in the star-strewn darkness.

They could be embarrassed and strange and oddly sad together.

Relief shattering her face, Yellow leaned forward then and wrapped her arms around Blue to help her stand, going slowly, with all consummate gentleness. Their bodies were so close that they could hear the hummingbird beating of each other’s hearts—loud, quick, and desperately afraid.

Blue placed her chin on Yellow’s shoulder and allowed herself to be held by her wife for the first time in four years.

The thought and the sensation nearly made her want to cry.

Yellow Diamond led them slowly and carefully as the arrangement lolled through its sweeping notes. With Blue’s bad hip and Yellow’s sore leg, they couldn’t do much more than turn around in careful circles.

Once upon a time, they would have both sworn that they could out-waltz a king.

“I had an interesting day today,” Yellow said suddenly, as though this was explanation enough for why she was dancing with her wife. Her breath was warm against the tip of Blue’s right ear.

“Oh?”

“Indeed,” she nodded, her chin briefly pressing against Blue’s shoulder, “but I’ll have to tell you about it later, I’m afraid.”

“You’re such a tease,” Blue murmured, but the accusation didn’t come out quite as light as she wanted it to. Her voice shook, and her hands trembled where they were resting on the woman’s back.

Tears danced in her sea-dark eyes.

“Something of the sort, yes.”

The song continued on, but it was nearing its beautiful end—a series of high-lilting lifts and then a final, graceful fall.

Blue greeted every note like it was an old friend, long lost at sea, now come home.

“I’m going to see Steven tomorrow,” she whispered as they continued to draw their slow circle upon the floor. “Early. He asked me to come visit.”

A slight pause.

The piano tinkled a spray of final notes.

And then, there was silence.

“I don’t think his head is in a good place.”

The silence made the proclamation all the more wretched.

Yellow stopped them in their place but didn’t quite let go of Blue, her fingers curling into the thin fabric of her dress.

“I don’t find that hard to believe,” she murmured. “We wouldn’t be in a good place either if…”

But rightfully so, she let the end of that particular hypothetical trail off into the night, for Yellow and Blue Diamond both weren’t in a good place either yet. They were dancing, and they were tentatively smiling, and they were learning how to love each other all over again.

But that was only the beginning.

The start of another piano arrangement began to rise softly from the stereo.

“Bach,” Blue said automatically to smooth the rough moment over. “One of the Goldberg Variations, I believe.”

And so they began their gentle revolutions again, swaying, barely moving their feet to the solemn melody. The wind ran its fingers across them, stirring Blue’s heavy braid, ruffling the collar of Yellow’s shirt.

“Do you know what you're going to say to him?”

It was a remarkably intrusive question, or perhaps it very well wasn’t. Perhaps Blue was judging off the standard that four years of standoffishness from her wife had taught her so emphatically. The questions she most associated with Yellow now largely had to do with whether or not she’d taken all her pills.

She shivered a little, even though the air was mild.

“No,” she replied, closing her sunken eyes. “I haven’t the faintest idea…”

She hadn’t been able to rouse herself out of four years of grief; despite whatever Pearl seemed to believe, she wasn’t entirely sure that she possessed the words that would be enough to help Steven Universe. For even he hadn’t given her words that fateful day in the cemetery.

He’d given her kindness.

He’d given her a flower.

“You’ll figure it out,” Yellow said with an assuredness that made Blue’s heart flutter again. It was a wonder that she could even breathe.

“You say that with such confidence on my behalf.”

And as Bach’s mournful contemplation scored that profound night, Yellow Diamond drew back, so that Blue could see her face, every sharply drawn facet of it, illuminated in that softly scattered lamplight—fifty-six years of life, pressed into the layers of her skin, lines and shadows and lines. These were the lines that had formed beneath her eyes when their daughter first died. And there was the cut that raced across the bridge of her nose from the car accident. And here were the stitches that currently served as a memento of that scary night, too. And there were the slight parentheses formed around her mouth whenever she frowned, relics of time and age and grief.

Her golden eyes were bright with emotion and ancient with the weight of so many passed years.

“Because I know you,” she returned simply, “and I love you.”

They were merely three words, but Blue’s heart nearly failed to hear them.

Spoken to her.

Meant for her.

By the person whom she loved.

Oh, dear God, when was the last time anyone had ever told her that they loved her?

She could not say; she strained to remember.

“I love you, too,” she whispered it back, even though it was only four words, and they were all so very semantically simple. 

But the expression on Yellow Diamond’s face was anything but as she, too, registered what it was to be loved by another, her mouth agape, pleasure and pain and ecstasy and terror warring across her face in dizzying swirls.

Oh, dear God, when was the last time she had told Yellow that she loved her?

She could not say; she strained to remember.

And there was hesitancy then.

And vast, godawful fear.

And there was longing then.

And tender, unquestioning desire.

And they both leaned forward then…

And tilted their heads in just the right way…

And they…

viii.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a master bedroom that smelled like a fresh coat of paint. 

It was empty as of yet, hollow and silver-walled and woefully unadorned—the movers had just placed the bed and mattress down. They’d be coming back later on that day with the nightstands, armoires, and dressers—all custom-made for the Diamonds’ penthouse suite. 

For their first home.

“Wait,” Yellow said, and there was mischief in her twenty-eight year old voice that took Blue by pleasant and tender surprise. “Let’s finalize this bridal style.”

“Yellow,” she laughed, her face coloring pink, “don’t be ridiculous.”

But the heiress only shook her head, grinning with all the self-assuredness of her love and general air of arrogance, as she bent down and scooped her wife into her well-toned arms. Instinctively, Blue wrapped her own arms around that corded neck to help support her weight and found herself so close to Yellow’s face that she could not help but be enchanted.

By her.

Because of her.

This golden-eyed knight.

“I’m not being ridiculous,” Yellow scoffed, pressing a quick kiss against her head. “I’m being romantic. Haven’t you heard of the concept before?”

“Abstractly,” she teased. “In novels and fairytales and the like.”

“You read too many books.” “And you read too little.”

“Nerd.”

“Neolith.”

And they grinned at each other with unbearable affection as Yellow Diamond walked them over the threshold of the room, careful to maneuver her body in such a way that Blue’s feet didn’t hit the doorframe. 

When they were on the other side, though, she gently placed her down, so that they were directly in front of the bed that would soon be their own. Blue would assume the right side and Yellow the left, and on some nights, they would meet directly in the middle.

“Soon,” Blue murmured, softly interlinking her fingers with Yellow’s. The bands of their wedding rings clinked delicately at the touch.

“No more bumming out in my mother’s mansion,” Yellow smiled, playing a little with Blue’s hand, swinging it.

“And hearing her daily tirades about being late to breakfast…”

“Oh, yes,” came that harsh, lovely laugh that Blue so loved. “I certainly won’t miss those.”

And they turned to face each other then, light playing in their youthful eyes. 

And Yellow reached up and tentatively brushed back a strand of loose hair behind Blue’s ear.

And Blue leaned into the touch because she could not imagine ever doing anything else in this world.

And their futures stretched before them, ribbon-like, graceful, spiraling into each other’s lifelines with an inextricability that they simultaneously believed in and found hard to fathom. They were each other’s beginnings and their ends. They were partners, soulmates, wives. They dreamed, in that very moment, tiny though it was, of all the things that they would do together over the course of an interconnected lifetime. They would chase their ambitions with wild abandon and climb to the very height of them side by side. They would take long walks in the park near their high rise. They would go see musicals on the date nights that Blue chose and drink the most expensive bottles of champagne over steak and lobster on the ones that Yellow preferred. They would fall into the same bed every night, the very bed in front of them now. They would fall asleep in each other’s arms—warm, loved, secure. Maybe they would get a cat at some point, even though Yellow swore up and down that she was allergic to them. And maybe they would travel the world, seeing all the sights and wonders and ultimately concluding that somehow, even the Eiffel Tower paled in comparison to the view that they had of each other.

And maybe, one day, they would even adopt a child to love, to raise, and to cherish.

For Blue had always wanted a little girl.

The possibilities were endless.

And so, they leaned forward then…

There was nothing else left to do.

And they tilted their heads in just the right way…

And they…

ix.

Thursday, July 12, 7:45PM:

Steven: I’m scared, Blue.

They danced in the incomplete darkness for as long as they could both bear it, but eventually, their bodies caught up to them—Blue’s aching hip and Yellow’s sore leg and the overwhelming awkwardness of it all that arrested their limbs, too, as they slowly remembered what it was to touch each other.

They hadn’t touched each other in so many years.

Holding on to the head of her cane for support, Blue leaned down and turned off the stereo, while Yellow collected that curious manila envelope from the table and tucked it beneath her arm again.

When they both straightened up again, their noses were inches away from each other.

Blue could see every microfilament in her wife’s expression, softly realized by the amber light above. She was a beautiful creature, down to every last line that had struck itself across her face. Those dark lashes and golden eyes. The way her teeth gently pressed into her lower lip in tender and shy hesitancy.

With this sort of notable self-consciousness, though, she stepped backwards and away, giving them both space to breathe.

Blue’s heart felt as though it was going to beat right out of her chest.

“You can shower first,” Yellow said, rubbing the back of her neck. “I have some paperwork to attend to anyway.”

Oh.

She’d forgotten, for however long that they had been on the balcony together, that it was commonplace for them to part at night.

That they weren’t together.

How awful and how unbearable.

How completely and utterly cruel.

Yellow’s gaze flicked down to the manila envelope, but Blue’s remained centered on her wife’s face as she struggled to articulate the words she desperately wanted to say and ardently dreaded to, her lips partially cracked open, her entire body electric with nerves.

“Blue?” Concern bent Yellow’s brow. She shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot.” Are you—”

“Come with me, Yellow.”

Oh, the awful and beautiful and terrible words—how they fell so clumsily and stupidly off her laden tongue.

“What?” The businesswoman’s eyes flew wide open, stretching the lines beneath them into almost comedic proportions.

Blue tried again, slowly extending her hand, palm up, her oversized sleeve dangling from her wrist.

Her skeletal fingers were trembling, but there was no mistaking the gesture.

It was an invitation.

“Come to bed with me, Yellow,” she whispered as tears reflexively blurred her eyes. It was no small wonder that she still had the capacity to cry after so many days and nights of weeping herself undone.

“Please.”

What complicated emotions were going through Yellow Diamond’s mind then, Blue could not entirely say. Sundry emotions seized across her eyes; her mouth wrenched itself open; and for what felt like an eternity, an infinity wrapped into excruciating seconds, she was simply and utterly speechless, staring at that outstretched hand as though she was seeing God for the first time.

How many nights had this woman dreamed of this moment? Blue wondered to herself, pain and love and fear commingling in the column of her throat.

And how many nights have I half-wanted it?

Half-dreaded it?

Craved it.

Pushed it away.

She did not have time to answer these profound questions, though, for with astonishing tenderness, with paramount and equivalent fear, Yellow took her hand, palms against palms, the striations of their fingers aligning themselves perfectly.

“Are you sure?” She asked quietly.

She was thorough as ever; she was giving Blue a readymade out.

Blue Diamond had never been more unsure about anything in her life.

“Yes,” she whispered anyway.

And so they…

Thursday, July 12, 8:15PM:

Blue: It’s okay to be scared, Steven.

x.

Once upon a time, there was a princess, a knight, and a king-sized bed that had always been meant for two.

Theirs was a sad tale.

A tragedy.

Their daughter died, and that was something that neither of them would ever entirely recover from.

But, and all the same, they could love each other nonetheless.

They could be there for each other for the rest of their dwindling days.

Holding hands.

Learning the shapes of each other’s collected and accumulated scars.

Braving the night together, one second, one minute, one fraction of a vast and incomprehensible infinity at a time.

In that dark bedroom, silent tears streamed down Blue Diamond’s face as her wife tentatively held her, her face against her shoulder, her arms encircling the softness of her gowned belly. She rested her slender hands on top of those of tall, leathery ones and didn’t know whether to be devastated that this was the first time they had shared a bed together in four years or so utterly relieved.

Yellow kissed her head.

And the back of her neck.

And her cheek.

And kept asking if she was okay? Was her hip doing fine? Did she need more space?

And Blue replied, every time, in the strongest voice she could muster, “No.”

No, she was not okay.

No, her hip was not fine.

No, she didn’t need more space.

It was all paradoxes and contradictions: grief and love and so many wasted years. The potential for a better future. The awful fear that things could eventually become worse. Blue’s softness and Yellow’s sternness. Blue’s selfishness and Yellow’s tender care.

But they went to bed together, and that was what mattered.

And when Blue Diamond finally fell asleep, for the first time in a very long time, she did not nightmare.

She did not dream.

xi.

Friday, July 13, 7:22AM:

Steven: you think so?

Blue: I know so.

Blue: Being scared is how we know that we are alive.

By the time Blue had woken up and gotten dressed and made it to the kitchen the next morning, Yellow was already gone to work according to Livia, who was fixing Blue’s choice of tea. The slightly bitter aroma sharpened the air.

“She left something for you, though, Mrs. Diamond.” The slight maid used a spoon to point towards the counter. “She asked me to tell you…”

“Thank you, Livia,” she returned gently as she proceeded to the directed area, one doleful cane clink at a time.

Laying on top of the cool marble was the manila envelope Yellow had brought out onto the balcony last night. It was clasp-side down, and the businesswoman’s squared, utilitarian penmanship had dictated a short note to Blue in black ink.

Before she had the chance to read it, though, Livia was sliding the steaming cup of earl gray across the counter, the dark liquid gently sloshing against the rim.

“Do you need anything else, ma’am?”

Blue glanced up and studied the maid’s face, which was tentative with kindness and shy with awe. It suddenly struck her then, with all the precision of a lanced sword, how hard these past four years must have been for her, too.

“No,” she murmured softly. “Thank you, Livia… I think I’m…”

But then, she remembered.

Yes, there was in fact something she required before she went to the hospital today.

“My checkbook if you would, please, Livia… I haven’t the slightest clue where I’ve last placed it.”

If Livia seemed surprised by this odd request, she didn’t betray it in her features, simply nodding with all the delicacy that her natural constitution seemed to entail.

“Yes, Mrs. Diamond.”

“Thank you again.”

And the girl fluttered off, wisp-like in her movements, towards the dark corridor, leaving Blue alone with her thoughts and her tea and the manila envelope beneath her. She looked down again, running her fingers across that familiar scrawl.

Test results. The doctors rushed to get them done. I love you. - Yellow

Blue’s harrowed heart lurched against her ribcage as she comprehended these words, as they seemingly fell to the pit of her stomach.

Sickening her.

Immediately goring her.

She flipped the envelope over and unclasped it with almost indecent haste.

There were about twenty papers in all, neatly stacked; the first sheet was the same shade of light pink that had once been their daughter’s favorite color, and the reminder nearly ruined her where she stood.

But eventually, with trembling fingers, she negotiated the papers out of their sheath, her dark eyes scanning the neatly printed words.

And when she comprehended them, when realization swept down across her body with glorious, sweeping force, Blue Diamond did something she had not an occasion to do for years upon years now.

Strangely enough, though, in these past few weeks alone, it was becoming something of a commonality.

Her lips tilted upward in the barest, most gentle of curves.

And she...

[luminecho]

Vios wurmple/cascoon/dustox is such a funny concept to me because in your essay you made him sound like a "no thoughts brain empty only love" kinda bug but now, after hating Shadow and getting dunked on by the colors i started to imagine him as a Angery Boyo who hates everyone but Vio

No thoughts head empty no room for love only rage and spite /j

Ok but in all seriousness I never reeeeally figured out a personality for him, but I know for certain that I want all of Vio’s pokemon to either compliment or contrast him in some way.

Allow me to use this opportunity to use the shitposts to turn this into character analysis <3 dropping another essay on yall

So Wurmple starts off as very much the former. “No thoughts head empty only love” because… well, he hasn’t seen much else. Once he’s with Vio for a bit longer though, a bit of resentment starts to settle in towards Blue and Green specifically. Red is the odd one out. I think it would be hard for a pokemon to not like him. But I digress.

Being Vio’s only confidant from pretty much the very beginning, Wurmple probably grows pretty protective of Vio pretty quickly. Vio confides in him because talking to a pokemon is infinitely easier than talking to a person, especially when admitting your own flaws and vulnerabilities.

Now, Wurmple may not be capable of very complex thought right now but even it can acknowledge that Vio closes himself off around pretty much everyone. That makes him a little sad, because he likes it when Vio is super excited and geeking out but recently it seems the only thing Vio’s been has been aloof and calculating. So maybe it’s a bit of the world’s fault.

All things considered, he doesn’t… hate Green and Blue. Aside from the relentless teasing and the playing-Basketball thing and Blue’s tendency to be rude and push the others around, they’re not the worst people ever. Besides, Vio seems to care about them, for some inexplicable reason. Cascoon has always loved people and tried to have a positive outlook on humanity. But Cascoon are naturally spiteful creatures by instinct and he can’t help but feel that revenge would be so, so sweet.

Red, on the other hand, may have contributed to the teasing at first, but he very quickly starting doting on Wurmple/Cascoon and he treats his own pokemon well and, just like Vio does, it finds it hard to stay mad at him for long.

Time passes, and Wurmple’s evolutionary line doesn’t take long to evolve, so it’s not long at all before Dustox is free from its cocoon.

First order of business: beat the shit out of Blue & Green. They learn their lesson pretty fast. All is fine again.

The adventure continues, Dustox can finally follow through with its protective instincts toward Vio because it’s no longer quite so helpless as it was before.

Then Vio is met by Shadow in the Lost Woods, and Dustox’s reality starts to shift.

Vio’s pokemon are the only ones who know that he’s planning something, know that he doesn’t intend on remaining on the side of the dark. However, knowing that they have a cover a keep, Dustox can’t help but despise everything about Shadow. By this point the shade has shown himself to be nothing but a nuisance who keeps hurting Vio and the others, and Dustox doesn’t trust him in the slightest. He distrusts him and doesn’t really want to be on the side of the dark at all, and he has no reservations with making that clear, despite Shadow’s strange and inexplicable fondness for him.

However, Dustox is one of the few that witness Vio and Shadow together and realize that the two are beginning to grow closer— far closer than Vio ever intended. Vio even admits to such one night when he’s sure the two are along and won’t be overheard.

Dustox isn’t sure where Vio’s loyalties lie anymore, but it knows its loyalties lie with Vio, regardless of what his choice will be.

He still doesn’t like Shadow, but it’s far less of a hatred than it was before.

I haven’t quite decided how much of an importance the pokemon will have over the overall story in either of my AUs yet, as far as fighting goes. So it’s unclear if the duel between Green & Vio will remain a sword duel or if it’ll be a pokemon battle. If it’s a pokemon battle, though, there’s a few key factors that would play into this:

Green very much has a Shogun Protagonist style of battling. Not quite to the level of “I’ll win with the power of friendship” that Red is, but it’s close to it. Vio, however, relies heavily on logic. He’s extremely thoughtful with every move he orders and he can be a deadly force in the arena for this reason because it’s near impossible to figure out his plans. So Vio would end up wiping the floor with Green’s team pretty easily.

Pokemon battle or not, the two would probably still end with a sword duel on Shadow’s order to kill him— which would be a lot more spontaneous this time around than it probably was in canon. Still, things play out the same, with Vio making it look like he killed Green.

This is a point where several of Vio’s pokemon stop listening to him out of protest of his actions. Some are more aware of the plan to betray than others, but Vio hasn’t exactly made his loyalties clear recently what with how close he and Shadow are, and now that it looks like he just murdered Green… there’s a lot of rebellion. Vio’s team is mostly full of incredibly smart pokemon, so it’s not a surprise they have minds of their own. Dustox is not one of these pokemon. It’s never been super intelligent and it’s never understood human morals. All it knows is that it’s loyal to Vio as long as he’s happy.

Vio figures telling them his pokemon truth would be too great of a risk right now, and all things considered he doesn’t seem happy anymore. If anything he seems stressed out. So Dustox isn’t sure how to feel.

Then the rest of the manga events play out. Vio gets caught trying to break the mirror, nearly gets sentenced to death by Shadow (which his pokemon break out of their pokeballs and try to protect him from, most of all Dustox, which doesn’t work out in their favor and they all end up injured for it), and is rescued by the other colors. They have their reunion, apologies are exchanged, pokemon are healed up, and they head up to the Tower of Winds.

The winds are too strong for any pokemon to be out of their pokeballs for long, and this has always been the heroes’ battles, not theirs.

Shadow smashes the mirror. Dustox breaks out of its pokeball in time for Shadow to reach out and pet it before disintegrating into light.

Dustox isn’t used to feeling very complex emotions. He’s not a fan of them.

TL;DR Dustox started off as “no thoughts head empty only love” and slowly became “hates everyone except Vio (and maybe Red) because the world is against them, so it seems.”

[colorfulandblack]

So did you notice how every single song in JATP is dedicated to different character? I'm going to skip all the Dirty Candy cos obviously, and same goes to Caleb's HGC numbers. Bit for the rest:

Now or Never - this is the ultimate and only Sunset Curve song. It's THEM. But also have you read the lyrics?

"Clocks move forward but we don't get older, no" and "When all the days felt black and white those were the best shades of my life" it can be read two way. It's both about 1995 and 2020 and their life and afterlife. It's almost prophetic but you don't know it unless you keep watching the show. Also "we're the revolution that's been singing in the rain" watch out for the rain but cos it's echoed in another song.

Wake Up - so at first this seems to be Julie's song but hear me out. It's not. It was written by Rose, Julie's mom. The lyrics: "And you use your pain, cause it makes you you though I wish I could hold you through it. I know it's not the same you got living to do and I just want you to do it". Rose knew she was going to die and she wanted Julie to keep living. To keep playing music. It's her guidance from beyond the grave. It's precisely why this is the first song Julie sings in a YEAR. Because it's the LAST message her mom left for her. It's Rose's song for Julie.

Bright - this is Alex's song and you can fight me on it. Mind it was written back in the 90s - Luke gives it to Julie because it was one of the songs that Bobby hasn't stolen which means that they either played it before, live when they were alive (which seems sort of unlikely because it has more of a pop sound to it than say Now or Never) or because it was never played to the public before. Because it was private. Now again it wasn't something that was kept a secret either because the band joined Julie on stage and executed the song perfectly and they haven't reversed it before, couldn't have because at this point the boys didn't know they could be seen when playing. They sort of joined last minute. They were standing by and watching Julie to the almost last second. And now the lyrics:

"Sometimes I think I'm falling down I wanna cry, I'm crying out for one more try to feel alive. And when I'm lost and alone I know that I can make it home fight through the dark and find the spark" and "In times like that I doubted myself I felt like I needed some help stuck in my head with nothing left. I feel something around me now so unclear, lifting me out I found the ground I'm marching on" this is Alex, anxious, worrisome Alex who came out to his parents who weren't accepting. And his band was there for him. "I can make it home", home being the garage, his band, his friends. They helped him find his 'ground that he's marching on'. Also, I ain't saying that Alex and Luke dated back in the 90s but they definately dated. Just look at this:

"Life is a risk, but we can take it close my eyes and jump. Together, I think that we can make it, c'mon let's run" and "And rise through the night, you and I, we will fight to shine together, bright forever" WE WILL FIGHT TO SHINE TOGETHER, BRIGHT FOREVER. Shine as in unapologetly being themselves. As being happy and accepted and themselves.

Sure when Julie sings it it's about her incredible talent and trying to get back into the music program but again this song was written back in the 90s. It's Alex's song.

The Band is Back - Reggie's Jam. This is pretty self explanatory and the song might be simplistic and upbeat and very beach, summer like but is not without dept. The boys don't know where they stand with the band. They know they are dead and can be heard when singing and seen when playing with Julie but they are still dead. Now remember this song plays right after the boys leave the studio when Ray talks about his happy times with a wife that died. This hits close to home because well they are also dead. But also the way Ray talks about Rose. So much love and admiration. And now Reggie's parents who were "one fight away from divorce". And on top of that his house is gone so there is no way of him (at this point at least and without Julie's help) to find his family or even to learn if they are alive. This song, Luke says that he knows how to cheer Reggie up. But notice this. It's not something that Luke or Alex sing. No. Reggie is. I'm not going to mention that it is kind of weird that they had a song in the ready that's called "the band is back" as if they had a fallout before or something like that. But this aside, this is a song to remind Reggie that they are still friends and that they are family. The only family they are going to need. And they are going to stick together, life or afterlife.

"Can you, can you hear me?" "Loud and clear!" Is such a simple thing that is used on so many concerts to get the audience's attention. But here is different. Becaus eits reaffirming that Reggie is valid. That his voice is being heard and that he's safe. And by having Reggie sing the song - it's like saying "hey Reg we know this is terrible and it sucks but if you'd like we'll be your family and will me always stick around". By making REGGIE sing it, by making him announce that the back is back together is like giving him a choice. A choice to have Luke and Alex as his family. If Luke sang it it was as if he said: "we're your family" but the way it is it's more like a question: "we will be your family if you'll have us" and of course Reggie would that's why the band is back.

Flying Solo - Flynn's song. One of my personal favourites actually. Nothing much to add really. The lyrics are from Julie's dream box because the boys were looking for the kitchen again and are very personal. Flynn is a constant in Julie's life and by having her sing a song about her best friend, SING (a big change that has happened recently in Julie's life) is letting her in once again, having her in her life when the change happens. Letting her on the secret about the ghost band. And it's also an apology and giving her thanks. Because Julie is so thankful to have Flynn there. "My life would be real zero, flying solo without you"

And one more thing, notice how the boys sing nothing but chorus. On every other song the boys get a line or two to sing on their own, except Luke who is not ready to give up his front man position (which is quite fair since he writes the songs too). This song is entirely BY Julie and sang by Julie but is still a Flynn's song.

Finally Free - this is JULIE'S song. This is her first song playing PUBLIC (yes I know it was Bright but it was different. There was no band then yet.) It's her metamorphosis. The song reflects the change in Julie every time she sings:

"I'm awakened, no more faking so we push all our fears away. Don't know if I'll make it cause I'm failing under, close my eyes, and feel my chest beating like thunder. I wanna fly. Come alive. Watch me shine. " it starts off with noting Julie's life without music and then its restoration of it back in her life. Here is this word again, SHINE. It refers to the same thing just different situation. Sine as being themselves. Being true to themselves and singing their heart out.

"Hands up if you believe, been so long, and now I'm finally free. We're all bright now. What a sight now. Coming out like we're fireworks. Marching on proud. Turn it up loud cause now we know what we're worth" Now this can be applied to the entire band. They are visible again, they can be heard and seen. They are feeling as if they are alive again. But more importantly- remember how Julie couldn't sing in her class? How she choked back tears as she run away and Carrie's bitchy comment (it's not that I hate her but y'know if they used to be friends she must have known that Rose died so low blow). "COS NOW WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE WORHT" She proved to everyone that she can sing. She proved to her friends and family that she is getting better with her mother passing. And most of all that she feels closer to her when she sings. She is free. Free of pretending to be fine so her dad wouldn't worry. Free of bottling up all the fear of singing before Flynn and the inevitable disappointment because her friend knew Julie can sing but didn't to say with her in the music program. She is done proving things to people. She is shining bright and she is free.

Edge of Great - ultimate Juke song or a BAND song. Now let me explain, I love the ship I really do but-there is a but,however, I'm not going to go in about my slight concerns regarding Juke as it is canon so let me just jump into the analysis.

Of course it can be read as a Juke song but also as an Julie and Luke's song separately. "Running from the past. Tripping on the now. What is lost can be found, its obvious. And like a rubber ball we come bouncing back. We've all got a second act inside of us" essentially it's about how they all had their past, their demons to battle but they come together united in music. "This is an interesting little relationship you and I have" Luke said. And he was right. Because their relationship is not physical. Its a bond forged by similar life experience and the pain they draw from joined in music.

Now this bit, this 100% Juke right there: "I believe that were just one dream away from who we're meant to be. That were standing on the edge of- something big, something crazy our best days are yet unknown. That this moment is ours to own cause were standing on the edge of great" this gives me some serious throwback vibes to HSM. Also note how this is possibly the only song where Reggie and Luke don't share the mike. They stand next to each other but just watch Julie instead. Also, I think mentioned in other lengthy post about how Reggie and Alex intentionally poofed out giving Luke and Julie that last harmony moment by the piano.

Now this bit: "We all make mistakes but they're just stepping stones. To take us where we wanna go it's never straight, no. Sometimes we gotta lean. Lean on someone else to get a little help until we find our way." Now listen I mentioned the band. See I know this is the almost acoustic chilling chemistry packed moment when Luke and Julie sing. It's obvious they mean so much to each other. By the lyrics itself. It applies to the entire band. They were there to pick each other up and to provide a shoulder to rest their head on.

But as I said untimalte Juke song.

Unsaid Emily - now this, this is LUKE'S song. Obviously. But it's not only because it's dedicated to his mother. It's like Wake Up. It's the second song that is sang acoustically but just one person throughout. And it gives up such a great insight into Luke as a character.

"First things first, we start the scene from reverse, all of the lines rehearsed" THIS is how much his family means to him. He was going over this moment over and over and over in his head. Thinking what he would say. We saw in the show that he approached his house few times checking on his parents. Possibly hoping to come back but never doing it.

"I should have turned around but I had too much pride" he KNEW his parents were only looking out for him. But he was Luke. His music was EVERYTHING to him. Luke has a very single way of thinking of things. He didn't care, doesn't mean he didn't know, how hard it would be to make it. All that mattered it was his music. And it must have hurt. Because he says that his parents regretted buying him his first guitar. It's obvious that he was close with his parents with his mom so they must have not completely condone him being in the band. They just wanted him to have an option if the band won't work out. But Luke didn't see it like that. Because every time his parents tried to convince him to think about it for a moment to think about his future they were looking out for him but to him it felt like betrayal. Because to Luke it sounded like they had no faith in him, on his talent in his band and their chance or making it big. And it hurts SO FUCKING MUCH BECAUSE HE KNOWS IT. He knows it but as he sings he was too prideful to admit it. To come back.

"No times for goodbyes. Didn't get to applogise" and " conversations in my head and that's just where they're gonna stay forever" it's goddamn HEARTBREAKING because this song was written when he was still alive. He still stalked his house and his parents but THIS indicate that he thought things were beyond repair. Like he wanted to come back and apologise but thought it was too late. Like he would never get a chance to say he was sorry and ultimately he never did. Not until Julie.

"If I could take us back, if I could just do that. And write in every empty space the words I love you in replace and everytime would not erase me if you could only know I never let you go and the words I most regret and the ones I never meant to leave" everything he said was in the heat of the moment. He was hurt. But god, at this point I'm crying don't mind me, he thinks that he apologise would mean nothing. He says that if he could replace EVERY SINGLE WORD with I Love You he would but he think it would be erased. It would never be received. Thay it would dissapear. And ultimately it was. Because he died. He died and never got to say how sorry he was.

This song shows us the other side of Luke. Not only the side that only the band has seen before because I think that noone really saw Luke break down like thay when he was singing Unsaid Emily. He was bottling all of it inside and wouldn't let his friends to help him out. Because I refuse to believe that the boys wouldn't try to comfort him knowing that he was hunting around his parents both when he was alive and after.

And this song makes me ugly sob in every form, written, sang, seen in the show so thanks Kenny for it.

Stand Tall - this is the JULIE AND THE PHANTOMS song. The first one of many. And it's almost as heartbreaking as Unsaid Emily. First of all let's lay out the situation. Julie decides to sing ALONE and UNCERTAIN whether the boys would show up or not. Even if she still believes thay they are still there lingering, fighting to play the Orpheum with her and complete their unfinished business she would still lose them. When they cross over they are gone. And if they don't they will cease the exist in the afterlife. So no matter what Julie does she says goodbye to her family. And she STILL DECIDES TO SING.

"Whatever happens even if I'm the last standing I'ma stand tall." THIS FUCKING MOMENT. This is when the boys are supposed to come in. BUT THEY DON'T. They are still trapped in the HGC so JULIE LITERALLY IS THE LAST ONE STANDING. Because she thinks it's too late. She thinks they boys are dead.

I shit you not I scream everytime the boys appear and Luke flickering gives me a heart attach every single time but it's so powerful in terms of showing how much they mean for each other. When Alex and Reggie break free they are so happy to see Julie but when Luke can't get there quite yet the tension is palpable and I will never forgive Charlie for being the little shit when Luke finally appears exactly on his cue with a shit eating grin like he didn't almost die.

"Right now, I'm loving every minute. Hands down, can't let myself forget it, no cause everything is rushing in fast. Keep holding on never look back. And it's one, two, three, four times that I'll try for one more night. Light a fire in my eyes." This is so bittersweet because she is playing with the band. THEY MADE IT! But also she knows it's the last performance. And it's so powerful because she knows it and she will still keep trying. Keep playing music. Keep creating.

This is the ULTIMATE JULIE AND THE PHANTOMS, BAND UNITED AND TOGETHER SONG

But I want to note the literal chills I get everytime Alex and Reggie get their separate "whatever happens even if I'm the last standing I'ma stand tall" because it speaks VOLUMES. For Alex standing tall is being who he is. Unashamed and happy and loved. For Reggie is being with his family. Doing everything for his found family.

This is incredible performance and on top of that the boys disappear barely finishing their bow. If you listen closely. The second Julie stops singing all the music dies down except for the last line guitar strum, Luke's guitar strum and everything is quiet. You can hear Julie's voice, alone, still echo but that's it. The boys are gone.

+1

House is Where my Horse Is - ok, I know it was a joke cos they are in the rock back and this is country song. But you ever listened to a country music? And I'm not talking about modern stuff but a good old fashioned country ballad. I had a moment of little musical crisis in my life and listened to some songs and honestly they are so bittersweet and full of longing and melancholy. 90% of them are about loss, whether that be of a parent (almost always father and almost always cancer) or love and hardships of life and struggle. And I think it's really interesting to give Reggie, a person who is nothing but optimistic and cheerful this characteristic. Because if anything it only underlines what we have seen before that he is not the sharpest tool in the shed but he's smart. He sees things, and he might get lost in the conversation but he sees everything else. And it's not the fist country song he has written either. Luke says "stop putting your country songs in my journal". It's an occurring thing. I just think it sheds a light a bit on Reggie's character as someone else than the goofball.

[hauerr77-and-a-dream]

hello, i am back and requesting more stitch x naga content for this world :)

Sorry this took me so long to get to, but I turned it into a nice lil oneshot! Also written for @last-operator-standing who requested it as well!

AO3 link will be in the reblogs! 

тупой идиот

Characters: Stitch x Naga

Warnings: Violence, blood, language 

Word Count: ~2100

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Arrogant. 

That was the first thing Stitch thought when he met Kapano “Naga” Vang. He was arrogant. Naga was someone who was so full of himself that he would go out of his way to let everyone know who he was and exactly what he thought about them. All. The. Time. 

God, he was annoying.

Had Perseus not expressed the importance of the warlord’s supply chains, Stitch would have killed him ten times over already, something he had already done countless times in his imagination. Thinking about the ways Stitch could go about killing Naga, to make him finally shut up, was the only thing that got him through days like today, where he was put on a mission with the other. Currently, Stitch was wondering how quickly it would take to suffocate the man with his Nova-6 gas, what Naga would look like as he withered away from the toxic chemicals. 

It almost brought a smile to his face. At least, it would have if he hadn’t just watched Naga breached into the building they were supposed to infiltrate silently with a grenade launcher.

“тупой идиот!” Stitch yelled, cursing the man in Russian as an alarm began to sound throughout the base. Whether the other had even heard Stitch was unclear as Naga had already run into the building, swinging around a fancy assault rifle from his back with a mad laugh. With an exasperated sigh, Stitch pulled out his own weapon, trudging into the base behind Naga, where inside, bodies were already beginning to pile up.

“‘Bout time you showed up!” Naga laughed, turning his head to greet Stitch. Although he had his mask up and had those stupid sunglasses on, Stitch could see the fire in Naga’s eyes, the wicked grin he had on his face as he reloaded his weapon. The man was passionate about his job; Stitch could give him that. “So, are you going to help or what?” Naga asked, a sense of mockery in his voice. 

“We were supposed to move in silently,” Stitch hissed back, moving to take cover beside Naga as a horde of enemies emerged on the other side of the hallway. 

“What difference does it make?” Naga laughed, wanting to get a reaction out of Stitch. 

The man was too serious all of the time, always looking at Naga with that look of disapproval. Like Stitch thought he was better than him with his cold, brooding exterior. Kapano had been quick to pick up on the fact that Stitch didn’t like him and even quicker to realize just how easy it was to get under his skin. And, with how easy and fun Stitch made it, how could Naga not want to try and press all his buttons? Surely at some point, he was going to snap and Naga couldn’t wait to see what kind of person was lurking under Stitch’s silent demeanour, especially after all of the stories he had heard about him. 

“What difference does it make?!” Stitch retorted, his voice filled with a wave of certain anger that brought a grin to Naga’s face. “If we are unable to complete this mission successfully, it will be your head that Perseus puts on a spike,” Stitch spat. 

“Then I guess we should complete the mission,” Naga smirked. “Unless, of course, you don’t think you have what it takes. Because I can do this without you if you need.” 

Stitch growled in response, physically pushing past Naga with his shoulder, knocking the smaller man out of the way; if Naga wanted to play this game, there was no way in Hell Stitch would let him win. Stitch opened fire on the wave of enemies approaching them, his LMG tearing through a dozen of them within seconds. 

“So you do remember how to shoot!” Naga exclaimed from behind Stitch. Instantly Stitch turned his head to shoot him a death glare but only saw the man pointing his handgun at him. Before either had the chance to say anything, Naga had fired a shot, the bullet flying just past Stitch’s shoulder and into the head of someone else approaching. “You missed one,” Naga pointed out, another smirk under his mask. This time, he was the one pushing Stitch aside to advance. 

The alarms were blaring as the two of them made their way through the compound, each room seeming to have more armed guards waiting for them. The flashing red lights illuminating the base were soon the only source of light after Naga had made the bright decision to pull out his grenade launcher again when the duo made their way into the control room. 

“You know you could have just flipped the switches, right?” Stitch asked, clear annoyance in his tone.

“Well, yeah, but, c’mon!” he proudly held up the weapon in his hands. “You wanna give it a go?” he asked, holding the launcher out to Stitch, who crunched his nose in disgust.

“A weapon like that demonstrates no skill of the man wielding it,” he stated, turning away. Naga jogged to catch up with him,

“I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” he said, jabbing a finger at Stitch. “The way I see it, I’ve done a lot more work here today than you have.” 

“The only work you’ve done today is fuck everything up!” Stitch’s voice was getting louder with each word he yelled. 

“Then why am I the one with the intel we need?” Naga smirked, holding up a floppy disk in between his fingers. Stitch’s eyes went wide,

“How long have you-” 

“It was in like, the first room we went into.” 

“And you-!” Stitch huffed in frustration, curling his hands into tight fists. “I am going to tear you limb by limb and watch as the maggots-” 

“Over here!” a voice interrupted Stitch’s threats. The shout was followed by the sounds of even more guards on their way up to where Stitch and Naga were standing. 

“I am going to slaughter you once we make it out of here,” Stitch growled at Naga, moving to position himself behind cover. They were currently in the middle of the building. The room was wide open and already littered with bodies from when they first arrived.

“Please,” Naga started, reloading his rifle. “How many more of them can there even be at this point?” However, as he said this, both entrances to the room they were standing in were suddenly filled with a dozen more people, at least, on each end. Stitch shot Naga another death glare, who just grinned in response.

Stitch shook his head, holding his tongue as the enemy began to push their way into the room. At the front of the line advancing, the guards were equipped with much heavier gear, meaning it was taking a lot more bullets to get them down. By the time the armoured ones were out of the way, the remaining enemies were within close range, giving neither of the two men time to reload their weapons. 

Naga was quick to pull a knife from his pocket, lunging towards the person closest to him and driving the blade through their neck. 

“Messy,” Stitch mumbled, watching as Naga quickly moved to the next person, using his knife to paint the floor a new shade red.

 Instead of using a knife, Stitch simply grabbed the barrel of the gun from the person closest to him, twisting it out of the way as the person holding it held down the trigger, splattering the wall behind Stitch with bullet holes. Stitch then brought his knee up into the person’s chest, and as they stumbled backwards, he snatched the gun from their hands and shooting them point-blank in the skull. There were just enough bullets left in the magazine that Stitch was able to easily pick off the rest of the people on his side just as Naga finished filleting those on his. 

“See?” Naga asked, wiping blood off of his blade. “That wasn’t so bad.” Stitch shook his head, 

“Do you ever shut-” he cut himself off as he noticed one of the men on the ground still moving behind Naga, reaching for a gun inches away on the floor. “Get down!” Stitch yelled, not even hesitating to run towards Naga, pushing him out of the way just as the gun was fired. 

“Damn!” Naga exclaimed, quickly scrambling back to his feet. “Did you just save my life?” he laughed, scooping up the gun that had just been fired. “I didn’t think you had it in you, Stitch,” he chuckled again as he put a bullet into the skull of the person who had just tried to take his life. However, as Naga put the gun away, he realized that he had received no reply for his snarky comment.

“Stitch?” Naga turned around, his eyes scanning the room for the other. “Oh, fuck, Stitch!” Naga exclaimed, rushing over to where Stitch was on the ground. He was currently clutching his side, blood oozing through his fingertips. “Oh, no, no, no,” Kapano muttered, quickly looking around the room for something he could use to help. There was a first aid kit on one of the walls that he scrambled towards, simultaneously pulling out his radio to call for evac as he rushed back over to Stitch. 

“So,” Stitch started, a small laugh escaping his lips. “You can care about someone other than yourself.” 

“Please,” Naga remarked, pulling out bandages. “We already discussed whose head it would be on a spike if I fucked up this mission.” 

“Well, we did get the intel,” Stitch said, his breathing getting raspier. Naga shook his head, 

“This is my fault,” his words were so quiet that Stitch could barely hear them. “Can you even breathe with that thing on?” he asked a second later, looking towards the gas mask over Stitch’s face. Without waiting for an answer, Naga moved to undo the straps holding the mask in place. 

“H-hey,” Stitch tried to protest, watching as the other tossed his mask to the side before applying more pressure to the gunshot wound on his stomach. “That’s not fair,” Stitch coughed. 

“Why-” Naga started to ask,

“You can see my face, but I can’t see yours?” Stitch laughed a little again, a laugh that turned into a groan from the pain in his stomach. Naga rolled his eyes, but he did decide to humour the old man and pulled the mask off his nose to under his chin. 

“Happy?” 

Stitch shook his head, his mind suddenly seeming detached from his body as he reached his hand up to Naga’s face, gently grabbing the side of his sunglasses, slowly pulling them off his eyes. Naga wanted to smack his hand away, but for some reason, he found himself unable to move, his breath caught in the back of his throat as Stitch gazed into his eyes.

“Now I’m happy,” Stitch muttered, a slight grin on his face as he lowered his hand, placing the sunglasses on the ground beside him, his eyes also locked on the other. “Hm,” Stitch started, interrupted by a cough that left a trail of blood under his chin. “I didn’t think your eyes were brown. They’re beautiful...” 

Naga opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly he found himself at a loss for words, though he could feel the redness in his cheeks grow the longer Stitch stared at him, and he quickly averted his gaze, praying to god the evac would get here soon. 

“Ah,” Stitch chuckled, having noticed the other’s reaction. “There is a way to shut you up,” he laughed again, leaning his head back to rest it on the wall behind him. Stitch closed his eyes, “That’s good to know,” he said quietly. 

Before Naga had the chance to say anything as if he would have had something to say anyone, the evac team burst into the room, the medics shoving Naga off of Stitch to take over on applying pressure. They moved fast, lifting Stitch up onto a stretcher, leaving Naga standing there, suddenly feeling helpless. 

“Do not let him die!” Naga heard himself yelling as Stitch was ushered away from him. “If he dies, I will personally see you all to your graves!” He could tell that he meant every word he was shouting. 

He needed to see Stitch try to shut him up again… 

[shapa-likes-art]

Chapter one: Now or never

Warnings: death of major characters, food/battery poisoning (it's unclear). Tell me to put more warnings if needed.

Pairings: Eventual Prinxiety and Intrulogical

Summary: upcoming band, sunset curve, are about to make their debut at the orpheum when a serious tragedy occurs on the night of their performance. (Set in 1995)

A/n: here is my crappy writing bringing to you my Julie and the Phantoms au- er, Roman and Phantoms in this case? Haha, sorry! Besides that, there is are going to be links right before a performance/singing scene and it's highly recommended that you give it a listen before continuing on!

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Taglist: @that-peach-anon @thunderholtz @anxious-chaos-art @arcticfrostdoesthings @cirishere

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It was a loud and busy night in sunset boulevard, there were crowds of people lined up right outside the orpheum, a line that was so long that it almost surpassed the width of the building. There was excited chatter amongst people- fans of the band that had yet to play in the building.

Up on the Marquee read: Sunset Curve - Sold out.

The sound of a distant guitar riff from inside the building seemed to rile up the excitement in the crowd.

(Listen to the song before proceeding)

There were three clacks of drumsticks hitting, "One! Two! Three!"

"Take off, Last stop! Countdown till' we blast open the top!"

A man in his late teens with purple-dyed tips and ripped jeans sung with a playful smirk. he seemed to be the lead singer of the band Sunset curve.

"Face first! full charge! Electric hammer to the heart-"

He looked in his element, effortlessly playing the guitar while singing. Three other voices joined the lead in harmony.

"Clocks move faster 'cause it's all we're after now, oh"

The lead looked over to a guy with a baby blue leather jacket a bass and he cocked his head to the side as if to say 'come over'. The bassist jumped over and sung in the same mic.

"Won't stop climbing, 'cause this is our time! yeah!"

The singer pushed him away playfully and the bassist went back to his own mic. They quickly moved to the prechorus

"When all the days felt black and white, Those were the best shades of my life!"

The singer belted with a grin, swiftly moving to the chorus, the other band members joining in every shout

"Don't look down!"

" 'Cause we're still rising-"

" Up right now!"

"And even if we-"

"Hit the ground!"

"We'll still fly- Keep dreaming like we'll live forever But live it like it's now or never!"

The singer turned away from the mic and to the drummer as if passing it off to him with a shine in his eyes and an almost never-gone grin.

"We ain't searching for tomorrow," The drummer sung, "Tomorrow" The bassist repeated

" 'Cause we got all we need today," "Today!"

The lead took over momentarily

"Living on a feeling that's been running through our veins,"

The bassist smirked as he took in a deep breath, running his and through his hair,

"We're the revolution that's been singing in the rain"

Each band members stopped playing their instruments, clapping and clacking their sticks together to a beat as they repeated the start of the chorus

"Don't look down! 'cause we're still rising up right- now!"

They picked their instruments back up, a fire and smoke effect errupted around them as they played their instruments once again and delved into the final chorus

"And even if we hit the ground we'll still fly- Keep dreaming like we'll live forever but live it like it's now or never!"

There were more effects blowing around and lights shining on them as they harmonized at final part of the song

"It's now or never!" "Now or never"

Both guitarists and the bassist turned to the drummer as they strummed their last chords. They panted, catching their breaths as sweat fell down their faces and yet they had wide grins. They soon turned around and did their bows.

There was applause and cheers from the orpheum employees as the band members stood straight, "Whoo! Excellent!" A Girl cheered from the table she was wiping down, clapping alongside the employees,

The bassist chuckled, it sounded bubbly and sweet, and grabbed the mic, "Thank you, we're sunset curve," he said with a small wave before turning to the other bands members, who were immediately going on about that performance as the put away their instruments.

The lead and the second guitarist bumped their fists together with a smile, "Too bad we wasted that om a sound check," the second guitarist said, "that was the tightest we've ever played!"

The lead singer just smiled as he turned to the empty spot where the crowd would have been, "Just wait until tonight, when this place is packed with record execs," he said, his eyes lighting up at the mere thought. It was almost hard to believe and yet there they stood on the stage.

"Logan, you were smoking!" The bassist said to the drummer- Logan- who just huffed, pulling out his glasses from his shirt and sliding them back onto his face

"I oppose that, Pat, I was just warming up... In fact, you guys were the ones on fire," he said with a small smile and a faint blush on his light brown skin.

The bassist- Pat- pouted, "Aw, c'mon, lo! Can you, just this once, own up to your awesomeness? Hm?" He huffed, grabbing a few of their t-shirts and CD cases. The lead, who had been listening in, looked at Logan with a knowing smirk and an eyebrow raised.

Logan relented, biting his lip as he looked to his band members, "Fine, I was... 'Killing' it," he said, offering a small smile.

The lead smiled and went to lightly tap Logan's Shoulder, "ok, well, I'm thinking that we fuel up before the show," he took in a deep breath, "I'm thinking street dogs?" He suggested

Logan and Pat made sounds of affirmation. It had been a pretty high-energy performance, so having some hotdogs wasn't such a bad idea. At the time.

A female employee watched with a fond smile as she wiped down a table, and it seemed that she had captured the second guitarist's attention and interest

He went to walk off the stage and approach her.

"Hey Toby-" the lead saw him jump off the ledge of the stage and followed after, "Where you going?" He asked, the other two members right behind.

Toby turned to them, "I'm good," he said waving his hand dismissively and turned to the girl, smiling as he leaned against the table she was wiping.

"Vegetarian. Could never hurt an animal," he said, as if explaining. The others stood next to him, the three of them holding unimpressed and fond looks, seeming that they knew it was a lie.

"You guys are really good," she said with an impressed look on her face, a small spanish accent to her as she spoke. She had tan skin, shoulder-length voluminous curly hair, and a sleeveless sequin shirt.

"Thank you," pat chirped, resting his arm on Logan's Shoulder, to which said man didn't mind.

"I see a lot of bands," she continued, "Been in a few, myself," she smiled, "I was really feeling it,"

The lead smiled, "Well, uh, that's what we do this for," he said with a small awkward laugh before realizing something: "I- uh, I'm Virgil, by the way," he introduced then gesturing to Pat.

"Hi, I'm Patton,"

"Logan,"

"Toby,"

"Nice meeting you guys," she said with a curt nod, "I'm Rose,"

Patton seemed to perk up, "Oh! Uh-" he held out a CD, "Here's our demo," he said, sliding it over to her, then grabbing a T-shirt, "and a T-shirt, size: beautiful," he said with a grin. Logan groaned at that. Patton had the tendency to flirt as a joke and not meaning any of it.

Rose just smiled, talking the T-shirt, unfolding it and holding it up to he body, looking down at the design, before looking to the band, "Thanks," she said with a smile. She went to fold it in half and put it on her shoulder, looking to the table, "I'll make sure not to wipe tables down with this one," she said a little awkwardly.

"Oh, good decision," Logan said with a nod, "whenever they get wet, they tend to- uh, fall apart in your hands," he provided with a small smile.

Toby huffed, "Don't you guys have to get hot dogs?" He asked.

Virgil just smirked, "Yeah," he said then leaning close to Rose, "He had a hamburger for lunch," he said, cocking his head to Toby's direction before going to push himself away from the table and walk towards the exit, leaving an exasperated and disappointed Toby alone with Rose.

Virgil, Logan, and Patton grabbed their jackets before they went, shrugging them on as they went out the backstage exit.

Virgil hummed looking around, rolling on the balls of his feet "That's what I'm talking about," He said with an almost giddy shine to his eyes

"The smell of sunset boulevard?" Logan asked with a raised eyebrow, readjusting his ripped denim jacket.

Virgil rolled his eyes and lightly punched Logan's arm, "No, smartass," he said with a small laugh, "It's what that girl said back there-" he said, walking in front of the others and kicking a puddle in his adrenaline-induced happiness.

"-about out music Alright?" He turned to look to the others, making a vague gesture with his hands, "It- It's like an energy," he said, slowing down a bit and walking beside them with a hum.

"It connects us with people- they can feel us when we play," Virgil hummed, walking behind them then hooking his arms around their shoulders, "I want that with everybody tonight,"

"Well then, we'll need a lot more shirts," Patton said, looking to the two ones in his hands. Virgil could help but let out a small laugh at that, "C'mon, let's go," he said.

They walked by a line of people- the people lined up for their show. Patton noticed two girls who were excitedly talking to each other and he went to diverge from the other two.

"Ladies," he smiled, giving them the last two shirts he had on hands before going back to the other two.

The two girls seemed confused, unfurling the shirt. Their eyes lit up as they realized who gave them the shirts

"Patton, wait!" One of them shouted, "oh my God, Patton!" The other one shouted. They both jumped in excitement, "oh my God, hi! It's me!"

As they walked away, they felt a little bit of pride bloom inside. They saw just how long the line was and it blew their minds. So many people lined up to see them and hear them play. This truly was a night none of them would ever forget.

They soon found a hotdog spot in an alleyway about a street down from the orpheum. They quickly got their hotdogs and went to putting on their toppings and condiments

Logan grimaced as he looked to where the condiments were stored- the trunk of a car along with a car battery.

"Virgil, there should be better places in Hollywood than this," he huffed, going to reach for the tongs to grab his topping of choice

Virgil didn't exactly look that crazed about it Either but he shrugged, "It's the closest spot to the orpheum and we cannot- for the life of us and our future- miss this gig,"

Logan just took on a deep breath, going to take a pickle to put on his hotdog, a slice slipped through the tongs and fell on the battery's cables. Great, just great, "I can't wait to eat someplace where the condiments aren't served in the back of an Oldsmobile," he grumbled.

Virgil just huffed and leaned against the trunk, waiting for Logan. This was going to be the one and only time they're eating at this spot. After tonight, they'll eat anywhere they want.

Logan finished with assembling his hotdog and turned to the vendor who was grilling hotdogs and patties, "Excuse me, uh... I got some pickle juice on your battery cables. Sorry," he said.

"No problem, it'll help with the rust," the vendor responded, giving Logan a pat on the back and a laugh

Logan looked dumbfounded, "That can't-" the vendor only chuckled and turned back to grilling. Logan looked to Virgil, who cocked his head over to a couch.

"Ok.." Logan sighed as he shook his head, defeated.

Patton let out a small sigh and he plopped on to the couch, followed by Virgil then Logan, they all leaned against the ratty and patched-up couch that was in the "dining area" of this pop-up shop.

Virgil hummed as he looked up to the sky, a small smile appearing on his face. Tonight was the biggest night ever and he could barely believe it, "This is awesome, you guys," he said, looking to his friends. "We are playing the freaking orpheum- I can't even count how many bands have played here and then ended up being huge!" He exclaimed

Patton chuckled lightly and smiled wide while Logan tried to suppress one. Virgil let out a small laugh of disbelief, "We are going to be legends," he smiled. He looked to the hotdog in his hands and lifted it up.

"Eat up, Boys," he said, the other two lifting their dogs as well, " 'Cause after Tonight... Everything changes,"

They all brought their dogs together as if a toast and bit in. As soon as Logan bit down, he tasted something metallic and ashy, "That's an odd flavor," he mumbled. Something felt very wrong.

"I'm sure It'll be fine," Patton mumbled. There was sudden sense of dread, "street dogs haven't killed us yet," he tried to joke.

They looked to the sandwich in their hands and reluctantly took another bite.

Only a few moments later, the siren of an ambulance wailed, driving towards sunset boulevard.

[bunnys-beetlejuice-blog]

bangs pots and pans together loudly FIC UPDATE COME GET YALL SOME JUICE

Apparently the vital, missing component to enjoying school was having a friend there. Go figure.

He and Kevin only have that first period class together, but they make the most of it, passing notes back and forth between the two of them, the teacher too tired that early in the morning to notice, or care. Lunch isn’t depressing anymore. They sit together under the shade tree, and Kevin does seem to also appreciate the view. “Can you even imagine working up a sweat, on purpose?” Betelgeuse pats his gut. “You know I can’t.”

“I can’t believe how little the track shorts are. That’s obscene. You think I’d look good in them?” “You join track and I’ll come to every meet, an’ it won’t be for th’ love of th’ sport.” He doesn’t think normal friends talk to each other like this, but he doesn’t actually know. Does everyone flirt with their friends? Are friends just cool people you wanna fuck but haven’t yet? Is it demon hormone bullshit, making him read into everything? Unclear.

It’s all going so good, until it isn’t, suddenly.

One lunch, two months into being there, Kevin pulls a huge and impressive old book from his backpack. “Look what I goooot,” he sing songs, waving it in Betelgeuse’s face, and he sneezes in response. “Smells old.” Emily and Lydia would love it. “It is. It’s very old,” Kevin confirms, and he moves so he’s sitting next to Betelgeuse, shoulder to shoulder, both their backs to the shade tree. “It’s about demons.”

Betelgeuse loses interest immediately, and focuses on not going pink at their shoulders touching, instead. “Z’at so?” he grunts. Kevin doesn’t seem to pick up on his moodiness, though. “It talks about all these ancient beings,” he explains, flipping pages. “Their summoning circles, their aspects,” he gives Betelgeuse a nudge at that, “all the things they can do for you, and the boons they grant.” He feels uncomfortable. “What’s with this? You obsessed with me, or somethin’?” He tries to play it as a joke, but that glint in Kevin’s eyes is back, and he doesn’t like it. “Of course, who wouldn’t be obsessed if they learned all this shit is actually true? It’s like there’s a whole secret world behind a locked door, and I’ve got the key.” Kevin looks back up at him.

He gets the feeling he’s the key. It’s not a good feeling.

“Where’d you even get this fuckin’ thing?” he lifts a finger, and the book slams closed in Kevin’s lap. His friend huffs. “Internet, of course.” “No, I mean… why were you lookin’ for somethin’ like this?” “I want to learn more. Don’t you?” Kev presses, and reopens the book. “I mean, what if there’s something amazing you can do, and you just don’t know, cause you’re not bothering to try?”

“So I’ll never know, so what?” Betelgeuse feels like this is a losing argument, but he tries anyways. “What’s so great about bein’ weird? You’re lucky you’re human.” “Dude, don’t even start with that. You can fly.” “So can humans,” he points out. “Wh- A plane and fucking levitating for fun are not the same, and you know it, BeetleJerk.” Kevin honestly can’t understand why he’s not excited over this. “I just mean… I’d rather be human, than this.” He blinks at his own words, because he’s never expressed that out loud before, ever. But it doesn’t feel untrue. “You’re out of your mind, more so than usual. Every human alive wants to feel special, and do the stuff you can do. Why are you acting like it’s so miserable all of a sudden? You use your powers all the time, I’ve seen you literally teleport five feet because you’re too lazy to walk.”

“You don’t get it.” He’s feeling sullen now, and he wiggles a little away from Kevin, and crosses his arms. “BJ, come on-” Betelgeuse teleports away to under the bleachers, and he eats his lunch there, until the bell rings.

He’s waiting for Emily after school, not feeling particularly friendly, when Kevin approaches. They stand there awkwardly. It feels tense, and weird, and he waits to see what the breather does. “Don’t be mad,” Kevin says, finally. “M’not mad.” “You sound mad.” “You know what mad on me looks like,” he finally turns to look at his friend, amber eyes burning with irritation. “First hand.”

Kevin looks down, and kicks at a rock that might not actually be there. “I thought you’d be excited. BJ, come on, I don’t wanna.. Not be friends over this.”

Betelgeuse signs, and scratches at the scruff on his chin. “It’s not like that,” he relents after a moment. “I just, I don’t care about that stuff. An’ I don’t wanna sit around, focusin’ on it. I don’t exactly like feelin’ different. Yeah, I do tricks an’ use my magic an’ stuff, but it’s hard to control. I lose my temper once an’ I could seriously destroy somethin’, or hurt my family. It doesn’t exactly feel good, knowin’ that. No one else my age can stand me, cause they can tell I’m weird. Before you, it was fuckin’ lonely, Kev.”

He feels a familiar pressure, because Kevin has taken his hand, and the human gives it a squeeze. He accepts it, melting a little against the other boy. “Still friends?” Kevin asks, and Betelgeuse purrs in response, resting his head on Kevin’s shoulder.

It’s not till later, at home, that he realizes Kevin never actually apologized.

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It’s like that, for a while. He knows Kevin still has the book. He knows he’s reading it, and sometimes Kevin will bring up demon stuff, but Betelgeuse has almost exactly a minute and a half of patience for answering questions or hearing about it. Still, Kev doesn’t stop. He might feel angrier if the breather wasn’t so god damn cute.

The air is starting to go cold, and leaves are beginning to fall. October is settling in, getting comfortable, and mom’s starting to break out the Halloween décor. It’s the middle of a kind of gloomy, Autumn day, when things get weird.

Kevin has the book open, much to Betelgeuse’s annoyance, and he’s blabbing away about a demon that supposedly grants wealth- “Do you think you could do that?” -when Betelgeuse looks down at the book, and sees Juno looking back at him. It’s not really her, it’s an illustration, but he’d recognize the bitch anywhere. She’s ink, glaring up from the page, those same age lines etched into her face, confirming his private theory that she’d been an old hag even when she was young. The slit neck is prominent, and as he stares, he sees smoke billow out of it. Oh, fuck no.

He grabs the book and slams it shut, startling Kevin, and then he teleports it directly under them, a mile down in the rock of the earth. Kev blinks for a moment, confused, before looking at his friend. “Wh.. Dude, WHAT?”

“Possessed book,” he croaks out, feeling tense, because he can smell cigarette smoke. “And you’re afraid of it? Why? You are also a literal fucking demon!” “That’s why I’m not messin’ with it!” Betelgeuse stands up, uneasy. The ground around the tree feels weird, now. He doesn’t like it here anymore. “Cause I actually understand why it’s a bad fuckin’ idea! God, you should have instincts that tell you not to mess with this stuff! You’re deficient, Kev, seriously.”

“Me deficient? Seriously?” Kev snaps, which hurts in a new, unexpected way. “Whatever, asshole. Give me my book back.” Kevin stands up, too, but he’s not uneasy, he’s angry.

“It’s better off where it is.”

“Which is where?”

Betelgeuse glances down. The grass around the tree is starting to wither. Kevin follows his gaze, but doesn’t seem to notice the dying vegetation. “You buried it? Come on!”

“Leave it, Kev.”

“This isn’t just your cool secret, anymore, it’s mine too!” Kevin glares at him. “You can’t keep me out of it, BJ. That’s not fair. God, at this point, I know more than you! You should be listening to me!”

He feels his volatile temper flare.

“Ex-fuckin’-scuze me?”

He waits for Kevin to take it back. Instead, his friend doubles down. “Demons have to listen to humans,” Kevin crosses his arms. “If they’re summoned. It’s in the book.” “Nobody summoned me,” Betelgeuse snarls, letting his real snake eyes show, an intimidation tactic that works for about half a second. Kevin’s too used to him, at this point. “I’m up here on a deal.” “Bet I could do it. I bet I could summon you. Then you’d have to listen to me.” “Yeah? Well, good luck without your stupid book!” He storms off, leaving Kevin standing there.

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The rest of the day sucks. He’s moody all day, annoyed in the car, grumpy in his room. He cranks metal and wishes he’d learned to play a guitar instead of his rinky, happy sounding ukulele. The instrument isn’t going to produce the noise he wants to express himself, right now. He throws it across the room, into a wall, where it smashes, and reforms a minute later, because… it’s still his favorite, after all. Even if it’s no good for expressing his teenage angst.

He can hear shuffling, and talking, outside his room, though he can’t make out what’s being said over the music. After a moment, though, there’s a knock at his door. “Hey, Bug?” Emily calls. “Can you come give me a hand with something?” He wants to tell her to piss off, go away, to leave him the hell alone, but.. It’s Emily. The CD player lets out a strangled choke and suddenly stops, and the door swings open, all without him moving from his flopped position on the bed. “Sup, ma?” he grunts. Emily peaks her head into the room, and smiles when she sees him, the expression radiating warmth and adoration and.. Oh, God/Satan, bless his sunbeam of a mother. “Just wondering if you’re free to do a little decorating?” She reaches behind her and grabs a fake severed bloody limb from the box he assumes she’s dragged into the hallway from the attic. “Don’t you worry it takes away from the “wow factor” to do Halloween twice a year?” He asks, standing and stretching, before apparating in the hallway behind her, and giving the decor box a nudge with his boot. “What? No way, there’s never enough Halloween!” Emily grins. “Get that, please.” The box floats along behind him as they head downstairs. They pause in the entryway, as Emily thinks out loud. “So, maybe the kitchen should be-” “Functional as a kitchen, please,” Charles calls from the living room. Emily rolls her eyes. “Okay, fine! Spoilsport! We’ll focus on the entryway for now,” she decides. “You wanna put up cobwebs in the rafters?” She gets on tiptoes to reach into the floating box, and he lowers it a bit for her, as she grabs the fake webbing. “I could just instantly decorate the whole room,” He takes to floating next to the box. “Could make sure it’s all normal human stuff, too,” He adds, before she can respond. “I know you can… But I like decorating,” Emily says brightly. “It’s not about getting it done quickly. It’s about, you know, doing it together.” “So why are dad and Lydia slacking?” Her smile doesn’t falter, but becomes softer. “It kinda felt like you needed some mom time, today,” She says simply. God, she can read him easier than Kev can read his stupid book. “We got in a fight,” he admits. She hums at that, because he only has one friend. It’s not hard to guess who he could possibly mean. “I’m sorry, Bug. What over?” He hesitates. So far he’s not let any of his family in on this book business. He’s been sort of hoping it could just go away on it’s own, and not be a thing. Kevin’s made it into a thing, though, and not telling even his mom feels… bad.

“He’s really into demons. Like, really, really into em,” He rasps, floating up and beginning to put up the spiderwebs, as his mother takes down the usual, sort of spooky wall hangings and trades them for her very intentionally spooky Halloween ones. “He’s got this book, an’ it’s all about demons an’ like, how to summon them, an’ their powers, an’ stuff… Sometimes th’ way he talks, it’s like.. Are we friends cause we’re friends, or friends cause you think I’m gonna be... useful?”

Maybe that doesn't make any sense, but that’s how it’s been feeling, like there’s an invisible shoe hanging midair, and it’s about to drop. His mother waits until he’s finished before looking up at him. “And you fought over that?” She prods. “Not exactly.” How the fuck can she even tell that, though? Damn her mom powers. He really, really didn’t want to talk about this, not to her, but… “I saw Juno. In th’ book,'' He lowers back down to the floor, and digs through the box, pulling out fake body parts. Back up he goes, to stick these in the fake webbing. “It was just a drawing of her, but it started like.. Billowing smoke-”

“From the neck,” His mother remembers, suppressing a shudder.

“Yeah. I could smell the smoke. So I got rid of the book, buried it in th’ school yard, but Kev got all pissy about it. He thinks he’s an expert on this shit, an’ he’s gonna mess with somethin’ big if he keeps this up.” “I’m sure you’ve told him that.” “He doesn’t listen. He gets this look in his eye, like it’s a game, or like… I dunno. Feels sometimes like he thinks he’s…” He searches for the words. “Like he thinks he oughta be the boss a’me, or somethin’.”

He rubs absentmindedly at the moss on his nose. It clings, stubborn as ever, same with the patches by his hairline, and he’s found it’s easier to just add another little layer to his glamour than try to do anything about it.

Maybe that’s indicative of a bigger problem. It’s easier to do a bit of magic and make everything look better than to actually fix the underlying problem. Ugh, introspection, how absolutely miserable. He wants to keep thoughts like that locked away tight, but they have a habit of slipping past his mental defenses and making him feel worse. Absolutely no one can make him feel shittier than he himself can. He sinks to the ground, going purple, and he’s instantly wrapped in his mother’s arms. “It’s okay, Beetlejuice,” Emily has both her hands on the back of his head, and he pushes his face into the crook of her neck. “I just.. I’ve only got the one friend,” he groans. “I don’t wanna stop bein’ his friend, but.. Fuck, ma.”

“I know.” Her voice is a soothing balm. She works her hands through the mess of purple hair at the back of his head. “I know, sweetheart. I know it’s lonely at school, but school isn’t forever,” she tries to assure him. “If your friend is treating you this way, well.. He’s not a very good friend. Do you want to be around someone who makes you feel this bad? Does it feel worth it, to you?”

He knows the correct answer is, “No,” but he’s not sure if his self esteem is high enough for that.

“I like him a lot,” He grumbles, and she hums again. “He’s handsome,” She says, and then pulls back far enough to pinch his nose. “But not as handsome as my son, of course,” and it’s silly enough to help knock away his mood, so that’s something, at least. “What should I do?” He doesn’t pull away from her, just soaks up the mom energy for as long as he can. “I think you need to have a talk,” Emily tells him. “Lay out how you’re feeling. Try to get his side of things, and make sure he hears your side, too. Then, at least you both tried, you know?”

It’s such a mom type answer. He groans again.

“I was worried you’d say some shit like that.” She fuzzes his hair, and he feels the tingle in his scalp that means it’s changed colors. Back to green, he assumes. “You know your moss changes color along with your hair? And your creepo-stache?” “Leave the stache alone, it’s tryin’ it’s best,” He pretends to be defensive.

“It makes you look like the founder of a forum for people who marry their cars,” Lydia offers, from the bottom step of the staircase, where she has apparently been just chilling and listening.

“Wh-! Mom, it’s not that bad, right?” Emily tilts her head to the side and gives what can only be described as a condescending smile. “Oh, you’re both in for it now.” He brings the various decor items to life to terrorize them, and then Charles joins his side, sympathizing with his son vis-à-vis bad teenage facial hair, and by the time the whole squabble is over, hardly any decorating has gotten done… But he does feel better. His family’s good like that.

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Monday rolls around, same as it always does, but there’s a weird feeling in the air. Halloween is a week away, barely missing getting a weekend date, but there’s some big Halloween bash the school is apparently throwing. There’s fliers for it everywhere, plastered all over lockers and bulletin boards. He’s not much of a participator, though, and his reaction to his locker being plastered over with invites to a party he doesn't care about is to snap his fingers. All the fliers on all the lockers up and down the hall, all instantly fall loose at once, littering the floor. A few students jump back, but no one looks his way, because why would they?

He’s grabbing his history textbook when he feels a tap on the shoulder, and when he turns, it’s a girl he recognizes, but her name is absolutely lost on him.

“You’re BJ, right?” Miffy askes, and he nods. “Yeah, s’right,” and Margo seems to wince at how gruff his voice is, before continuing. “Um, you and that guy Kevin, you’re like…” Milicent trails off, waiting for him to finish her thought, but sorry, baby, he can barely finish his own. “Like…?” He says, with his gravel voice copying her tone and inflection, and she huffs. “Together?” Marge asks, “Like, all of the time?”

He cocks his head, and squints at her, hands t-rexing at his sides, as Lydia likes to say.\

“Usually,” He concedes, and he gets the feeling he’s dragging this out much, much more than Mango clearly wants, because he spies a group of girls a little ways off, waiting for her. One of them is staring intently, more focused on him, but he pushes that thought aside.

“Look, okay, he’s gonna be out for a few days, and I’m just trying to see if you can take him his homework,” McGrubber has grown tired of having to stand here, talking to the chubby goth loser, apparently. “I’m a student aid in the office and they’re trying to make me do it, but I have track practice!” Thaaaat’s where he knows her from. She looks different, not bouncing and sweating and also not half a football field away. “Sure, fine, I’ll make sure Kev gets his work. Wouldn’t want you to miss out on running in a fuckin’ circle, Maria.” Her face sours. “It’s Blair.” So close. “Who fuckin’ cares,” He replies, and turns back to his locker. He can hear her rejoin her friend group, all of them fawning over her harrowing experience of having to speak to him in public. The last thing he hears from Blair is, “He’s just so goddamn weird,” and then the group rounds the corner.

He closes his locker harder than he maybe needs to.

Kevin isn’t in class that day, or the next, or even the one after. The shade tree has withered and died completely, it’s color sapped and gone, and even walking near it makes him feel uneasy. His new lonely lunch spot is under the bleachers, which feels even more voyeuristic of a spot to watch the track team, but even that activity feels tainted, somehow. He’s back to being lonely.

He can’t stand being lonely.

It gets so bad he contemplates sitting, wait for it, on the bleachers, and maybe even trying to strike up a conversation, but he’s too chicken shit. He’s been going to school with these kids for the past three years, and no one’s wanted to talk to him or chat with him in all that time. He can’t imagine that’s about to change.

Still, on Thursday, miserable and lonely, he gives it a try.

Sitting up here sucks. It’s just a hard metal seat on a gloomy day, and when he’d ventured up and sat down, other people had slowly moved away from him, until he was sitting by himself, all the breathers huddled in a different area, away from him. He'd tried talking, but hardly had a "Hey, how ya doin'?" grated out before the migration began.

Figures.

He finishes eating and lies on his back, resting his hands on his chest, eyes closed, and after a while he feels someone standing over him, and something laid over his hands. He opens his eyes. There’s the most beautiful girl staring down at him. She’s got long, bleach blonde hair, darker at the roots, which is hanging down in a halo around her face, and the biggest, clearest blue eyes he’s ever seen. He glances down, to see she’s placed a daisy over his hand. He looks back up at her, amber eyes questioning.

“You looked so still,” She smiles. Her voice is like music. He thinks he can hear harps. “With your hands folded like that. Kind of like an open casket.” He’d been forgetting to breathe, apparently, which happens sometimes. She thought he looked like a corpse, and she placed a flower over him.

“Sorry, if that’s weird. You’re.. BJ?” She asks, and he picks up the daisy, sits up, and nods. “Yeah, you’re…” “Barbara,” she fills him in. “You’re not so good with names.” “Mmm. Buffy tell you that?” He recognizes her now, from that group of girls. Barbara sits next to him, which makes zero sense. “It’s Blair,” she corrects him gently, but not without a giggle in her voice. “Oh, right.” Her name could be fuckin’ Moonpie and it’d make the same amount of difference to him, but he’d agree with anything Barbara said, if it meant she kept sitting there, talking to him. “Are you going to the Halloween party?” She asks. “Supposed to be pretty killer. It kind of seems like your scene.” “I’m not exactly a social butterfly,” which is the understatement of the god damn century, honestly, but she laughs and nudges her shoulder with his. “Well, I think you should come. I bet you’d have the coolest costume. Maybe think about it?”

“I guess, maybe..” He says lamely, because his brain is short circuiting from that small touch.

“Barb, come on!” someone calls to her from a ways away, on the track. Lunch is nearly over. She stands, and smooths down the long skirt she’s wearing, which is modest but flattering. “Later, BJ,” she smiles, and just like that, she’s gone, like an angel going back up to heaven in a beam of light, off to rejoin her friends. He can hear what she says to them, though. “You guys are mean, he’s not so bad. Just shy.”

He keeps the daisy in a little glass of water on his dresser, and strums love songs on his ukulele.

```````````````````````````````````````````````````````

Thinking about Barbara and her smile and the way she nudged him is a fun distraction, at least for a little while, but when it’s Saturday, and he still hasn’t heard from Kevin, he decides it’s time to demon up and see what the fuck is happening with him. He’s been just teleporting Kev’s homework inside his room, and he’s sure it’s falling into a pile on the floor each time and startling him, but no one ever said how he had to deliver it. Today though, emboldened by the pretty girl on the bleachers, he appears at Kevin’s front door instead, holding Friday’s work, and he knocks. It takes a moment, but Mr. Loh answers.

Betelgeuse hasn’t had much chance to interact with Kev’s dad. He looks like a normal, tired dad, wholly unimpressive, and kinda short. Chuck could wrestle this guy to the mat, no problem.

“Oh, BJ,” Mr. Loh says, and then glances at what’s in his hands. “Kevin’s homework? Thank you. He’s holed up in his room… won’t come out.. Maybe,” and he suddenly looks hopeful. “You two are friends. Maybe you can try talking to him?”

Well, that’s what he was there to do anyways, so sure. “I gotcha, Mr. L,” he nods, stepping inside, and heading up the stairs and down the hall to Kevin’s room. The closer he gets to the door, though, the weirder he feels. Something stinks, figuratively and literally. It smells like… It smells like the waiting room. It’s that same, veil is thin type air that he can smell on Halloween night, but how the fuck is he smelling it here? He bangs on Kevin’s door. “Hey, Kev, it’s the B-Man,” he calls, trying to keep his tone playful, but he feels like he’s doing a poor job. What the hell is going on? “Come on, man, open up!” He tries again, when he receives no response. He thinks he can hear a shuffle behind the door. “Dude, I will bust this fuckin’ door down,” He growls, all the play gone from his tone. “You know I will. Better yet-”

He appears inside the bedroom, just in time for Kevin to slam shut the closet door. Kevin turns to look at him, back pressed to the wood. There’s a beat, both teens staring at each other, wide eyed, Betelgeuse in that weird way he does, and Kevin looking frazzled. “What,” the demon grates out, “the fuck, are you getting up to in here? It smells like the netherworld, Kev.” Unfortunately, that makes Kevin’s face light up. “It does? Oh my god, that’s perfect! It must be starting to work!” He crosses the bedroom, going to his desk, where an old book is sitting open. It’s not the same one he took from his friend, it can’t be, that book is still a mile down in presumably solid rock. “Another musty ass tome, great,” he growls, but Kevin ignores him, flipping through the book.

He hates feeling ignored.

A black and white striped arm sprouts from Kevin’s desk, and slams the book shut, which makes the breather turn and glare at him. “Get out of my room, BJ,” is all Kevin says, and Betelgeuse ignores that, instead crossing the floor to get a look at that book. “Where th’ hell do you keep finding these fuckin’ things?”

“This one I bought from a one armed man living out of a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale,” Kevin recites. Betelgeuse squints at him, top teeth over bottom lip. “You’re too gay to know what that means,” he says, plainly, and Kevin shrugs. “He wouldn’t stop talking about his stupid car. I now know more about that antique than I know about geography.” It feels fun, for a second, like this drama isn’t happening, and they’re just having a conversation. It doesn’t last, though. He can’t let Kev off the hook.

“So you bought a second cursed book, this time from some amputee homeless guy, and you’re just, doing the rituals inside of it? And this seems like a super good idea to you?”

“I’m practicing,” Kevin replies.

“So what’s in the closet, Kevin?”

“Get out of my room, Betelgeuse.”

The way Kevin says his name is weird. It doesn’t feel like how it normally feels when a breather says the full thing. He shakes it off, and gives his friend a defiant look, before waving a hand and throwing open the closet door. There’s a cleared spot, in the middle of the closet floor, and a fucking summoning circle in what smells like, “Pig’s blood? Couldn’t get human?” He turns to look at Kevin, who is glaring at him intently. He matches the look.

“Betelgeuse Shoggoth, get out of my room.”

That gets his attention. It feels like an invisible hand is pushing him, and he stumbles back out of the room, confused. “W-what?” Kevin is just standing there, staring at him, and Betelgeuse stares back, eyes wild. “You motherfucker,” he hisses, eyes in snake slits, teeth sharp, claws extended. “You wanna do that “real name” bullshit with me? That the choice you’re makin’ here, Kev?”

Kevin doesn’t even look phased. “I’m working on gaining a bit more control, but looks like that works, for now.”

“You’re cracked!” Betelgeuse growls, absolutely furious. “You’re really tryin’ to summon me? Are you out of your head!?”

“You’re wasting your powers,” Kevin storms forward. “You’re a supernatural being, and you go to school and play your stupid ukulele, and don’t even try to do anything bigger. You could be stepping on everyone under you,” his former friend is going red in the face. “You could be leading, you could be ruling, but you just jerk off in your room and play pretend at being human. But someone might as well profit, here. Why not me?”

“I thought.. I thought we were friends,” is all the demon can say, lamely, and Kevin’s smile is the meanest thing he’s ever seen on a breather. “Once you’re fully listening to me, we can be friends again. Betelgeuse Shoggoth, get out of my house.”

He feels that same invisible pull, and he thinks maybe if he was stronger he could resist it, but a demon’s true name is like a lead on a dog, meant to control them, and unfortunately, Kevin has a tight hand on his leash. He makes it to the front door, and stumbles out, covering his face until he can calm himself enough to reapply his glamour.

Shit, he thinks, straightening up, and staring up at Kevin’s bedroom window. He is so fucked. ``````````````````````````````````````````````` Posted this chapter and another over at Ao3. You can read it right here

[if-you-built-yourself-a-myth]

Check Ignition: Part VIII

The Sobbe fake-dating Hogwarts AU that one person requested and I dove into headfirst

First part // Previous part // Next part

Send me requests for other fics, ideas for this one, opinions, whatever! My apologies if the quality seems to have one downhill; I'll be doing minor edits for the sake of readability when I have a good chunk of free time.

“Shhh, guys, leave it,” Jens said. Everyone’s comments died on their tongues. Zoë and Moyo herded the superfluous students from the room and left as well, shutting the door behind. Moyo almost clapped a hand on Robbe’s shoulder, but seemed to think better of it in favor of a saddened smile. It didn’t really help. Robbe wasn’t sure if they ended tonight on good terms.

“We’re going to bed early,” Aaron suggested. “We have to get a jump on those damn exams.”

“Leave it,” hissed Jens.

“I was just saying, we’re—”

“Leave it.”

“It’s a good idea,” said Robbe. “We’re going to bed early.” He hadn’t realized how angry he was all week until faced with its culmination. And now—now he was tired. Stupid and single and tired.

There were still no sheets on his bed; he hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with them. He could perform a cleaning spell on the mattress if it got too bad in their absence. Whatever. Robbe couldn’t be bothered to rifle through his trunk for a cleaner blanket, so he crossed the room and grabbed the one off the fourth bed.

Motherfucker. It smelled like Sander. He really couldn’t win, could he? Robbe threw the blanket to the decimated floor and curled up without any covering at all.

“He wasn’t that attractive,” said Jens, breaking his own rule. “Had to get those roots done again.”

Robbe clamped his pillow over his ears. “Shut up.”

“We haven’t been to Hogsmede in a while. Might be nice to go tomorrow. The four of us.”

Hogsmede. Robbe’s eyes burned.

“I need to stop at Honeyduke’s,” Aaron agreed. “It’s Live It Up week.”

“I’d fancy a pint at the Three Broomsticks.”

The Three Broomsticks. Robbe was not going to cry over this. It brought him back to Sander explaining their fake love story to Zoë, all the little accurate details, all the possibility… that’s all it was. A story. You don’t like me. He cast the Muffliato charm across his four-poster before the tears started flowing. Once they started, they didn’t stop until morning.

“You don’t have to tell us a thing,” Jens said. “We understand.”

I want to, Robbe thought. He rolled over and faced the wall for the remainder of the night.

***

As much as he would love to hardcore sulk, Robbe had never been that kind of person. Sander was gone. They weren’t even together for that long, so there wasn’t much sulking warranted. He took Saturday and Sunday as unofficial off-days before exams, in that he spent them with Jens, Moyo, and Aaron, pointedly not talking about Sander. They did not go to the Three Broomsticks. Jens passed a whole afternoon in Honeyduke’s, attempting to sample every flavor of Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavor beans.

Okay, Robbe sulked. But not hardcore.

Robbe resolved that one Monday he would snap out of it in time to guard his outstandingin his five classes. What should he do? What had he learned? He could start there. Starting there was something.

1. He should never drop a class for someone he wasn’t really dating.

Robbe’s Potions exam was the first on Monday, and he went into it grossly unprepared, despite hours of common room studying. There was a large difference between reading theory and enacting what it said. Plus, a lot of his library time focused more on Sander’s eyes than on the written material.

Everyone else chopped up their beans and sprinkled them into their brews without difficulty. Robbe couldn’t remember how many he should use. In the end, he dumped a whole handful in completely whole and stirred counter-clockwise. How much could it hurt, anyway? He left fifteen minutes before the exam period was up, and the Potions master did not bother to stop him. The Drought of Living Death he prepared could probably kill the whole class, Britt and all, even if not in the way it was meant to.

Why had he stopped attending in person? What could Britt have done to him? It hit him—she probably knew the dating thing was fake from the beginning. Sander might have planned it all out to make Robbe look like an idiot.

That wouldn’t account for that night in the workshop.

Fuck that night in the workshop.

Sander waited outside the Potions classroom, his back on the wooden doorframe. Britt would be done soon. It didn’t give Robbe any satisfaction to brush by Sander without speaking—or at least, not until he saw Sander rubbing his arm in the aftermath. Robbe must have hit him with the door.

“Sorry,” he called over his shoulder, hoping it sounded blasé.

It could have been anyone there, he thought. Sander wasn’t special anymore. Then he went to his bedroom and stared at the wall over it.

2. He was not straight.

The specifics were, as of yet, unclear. He was in love with Sander, which meant he liked boys, but he’d kind of liked Noor too. Not romantically. Or even sexually. But like, he enjoyed her company.

Sometimes.

He wasn’t in love with Sander anymore, though, definitely not. Robbe figured if he told himself that at least four to five times a day, it might become a little more accurate. Two weeks was too short a time to fall for someone.

After all this, he needed to get Jens alone and lay it all on at once. Bad phrasing be damned. The boys began packing their belongings on Wednesday, after a mostly uneventful Transfiguration exam (Moyo turned his cockroach into a pair of earrings that still moved their spindly antennae—he seemed satisfied). They would leave on Saturday afternoon. Aaron tried a simple cleaning spell, Scourgify, and ended up scattering his belongings to the four corners of the castle. He scurried away to pack the rest manually, Moyo at his heels to help.

Jens and Robbe were alone. Robbe was ready to talk about it.

“Why is Moyo always here?” asked Jens, in a way that made it sound like he was breaking the tension.

His plan failed, of course, because Robbe was already speaking. “We have to talk about something.”

They stared at each other. Jens blinked.

“There’s a lot I haven’t told you,” Robbe began. “I wanted to, but it was always so complicated.”

“Uh, sure, okay.” Jens shoved a crumpled shirt into his trunk, followed by a pair of ripped slacks he could never wear to class again.

“This thing I had with Sander… it was fake to him. But, well, uh, to me—”

Jens nodded. “I know.”

Damnit, no.

“Jens,” Robbe tried a second time, “I’ve realized some things about myself recently. They kind of explain other things, from earlier, so…” He switched tactics. Who knew how long until Moyo and Aaron returned? “Do you remember when you and Jana broke up? How you found out about what’s-his-name and—”

Another shirt in the trunk. Some more destroyed pants. “Yeah.”

“Cool. So um, you should understand that it was—” It was never this awkward to talk to Jens before. Jens was supposed to be easy. Robbe folded his shirts by hand, like his mother did, and placed them carefully in his own luggage as he thought of how best to phrase this. “I did it on purpose. She was gonna tell you and I—well I said—”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I know things about myself now. Learned them. From that. and this.” Here it came, the big jump. Even though Robbe knew Jens, Aaron, and Moyo outlined a whole plan to get him and Sander together, he still worried about what they’d say when confronted with the reality of it. “Jens, I’m—"

“I know.”

No, that wouldn’t work. Again, “Jens, please, I’m—”

“It’s okay, Robbe, I know—”

“I don’t want you to know!” Robbe flopped a shirt down harder than he intended. “I want you to let me say it.” He took a deep breath. “I’m gay. That’s who I am. With or without Sander. Okay? I need you to understand that it’s like that with or without him.”

“I—”

“Don’t say you know. You’re my best friend.”

“Okay,” said Jens. “I understand.”

“Good.”

Jens closed his trunk on top of some clothing that spilled out the sides. He sat down on it to close the latch. Then he reached out and gathered Robbe into the tightest hug ever. It wasn’t nearly everything that Robbe wanted to say, but it was some, and Jens didn’t run away from him. Sexuality crisis, somewhat had. Robbe was sure there would be more later.

3. You don’t like me.

Robbe’s final exam was History of Magic. Luckily, his cramming paid off. He breezed through the questions on the first and second wars faster than any of his peers and was out the door within thirty minutes.

Most students were trapped in their classrooms for another half-hour or more. Empty corridor stretched in all directions, and Robbe didn’t have anything to do for the rest of the day. He knew where he wanted to go.

Sure enough, his astronomy tower perch was vacant. Bright sunlight dyed the campus in shades of yellow and gold, made the upper turrets appear as drawings from a children’s book. Robbe noted in passing that someone had collected Sander’s picnic blanket from its forlorn position on the roof. That made sense. Filch himself must have cleaned.

From overhead, soft music played. Robbe was sure he was hallucinating. He sat down on the sill.

Oh fuck, maybe not hallucinating. Noon cast a shadow of someone above onto the roof below.

Sander’s blanket wasn’t where he’d dropped it on night one because Sander sat on the overhang above the window. He had it splayed across the shingles, a compact player oozing the final lines of that same damn song on a loop, his wand gripped in his hands.

Robbe couldn’t escape him. Couldn’t escape how he felt about him. He could bring it under his control if he made it look purposeful.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t you have class?”

Sander startled.

This was a mistake. Never mind. Robbe should go.

He leaned even further out the window for a better view of Sander’s setup. A stack of textbooks balanced precariously, end on end, held aloft by a complicated charm of some sort. A quill rolled down the roof and stopped as if by an invisible wall. Sander had created a bubble for his things.

“Cheers to exams,” Robbe said, a bit louder. Sander did not look at him. The music cranked itself up to mask Robbe’s voice—perhaps it was spelled to muffle all noise Sander did not want to hear. That wasn’t fair. “This is my spot.”

“You said you didn’t want to be friends,” said Sander. He didn’t sound upset. Why did Robbe expect him to be upset?

“Can you turn down the music?”

“Britt’s going to join me.”

“That isn’t really what I asked.” Robbe wondered if interactions like this would ever stop hurting. But he didn’t feel as bad as he felt last week. Or on Friday night. Maybe the finality of a no was all he needed to move on. He recalled Sander’s speech word-for-word, mostly the end. You don’t like me.

It hit Robbe in a moment of irrational bravery, when Sander’s music dialed up in volume. Their first night in the astronomy tower, together, illuminated by Britt’s wand. The CD playing in the background. Sander knew what he was wearing on a specific double-date on a specific day—there was no denying something existed between them.

And to have Sander talk like that, say it was nothing… it wasn’t nothing, not to Robbe, and Sander needed to hear it.

So he said it. No introduction, no nothing. “I liked you.”

The Major-Tom-planet song quieted. Definitely some kind of magic there.

“I liked you so much,” he said again. Now that it existed, now that it was said, there was nothing to stop him from continuing. “You can’t tell me I didn’t.”

One of Sander’s quills rolled to the edge of the bubble, only this time, it dropped out and fell the length of the tower.

“We made it up, we agreed,” Sander whispered. “I’m sorry.” He slid down from the roof, landing beside Robbe on the sill, then jumped to the floor. His belongings trailed behind him in a floating line.

Robbe stood his ground and blocked the staircase. “It’s not your thing to decide.” His voice softened. “I liked you. So that’s that. And it’s done.”

Sander scuffed the floor with his shoe.

“Good. You never have to see me again.” Robbe pointed down the stairs for dramatic effect. “I have class. Bye.”

He felt lighter than he had all week when he descended the staircase. Any lighter, and he would have missed it when Sander said, “I liked you, too.”

4. He was a jerk to Noor.

Robbe sought her out on the train home, abandoning his friends in their own little compartment. They had plenty to discuss without his involvement. Pranks and whatnot. The usual. Noor was alone in a compartment near the back of the train, a dozen or so scrolls of parchment dispersed around her. She wrote on one with a broken quill.

She wasn’t a bad person. Robbe should have just told her. The least he could do was tell her when everything was over.

“Hey,” he said, taking the seat across from her.

She looked up, surprised. “Hello.”

“You seemed like you could use some company.”

Noor blushed. “No, I—Britt’s sitting elsewhere, and I have a lot to do.”

“With Sander,” Robbe supplied.

“What?”

“Britt’s with Sander.”

“Oh, um, actually—”

Robbe wasn’t in the mood for the nitty-gritty details of whatever Britt and Sander had going on. Obviously it was toxic. Not his problem. Besides, this conversation was for Noor’s sake, not his own.

“Listen, about me and him,” he said. “I need to apologize. It wasn’t fair of me to lead you on.” He hoped it wouldn’t get awkward. The extent of his recent planning was pretty much just say it without warning and hope it works out.

“I don’t read smoke signals,” said Noor curtly. She set her quill down on the seat next to her, ink stains bleeding into the cushioning. “But I get it.”

“No, it was fucked up. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.”

Awkward silence. Robbe wasn’t built for prolonged chatter with anyone besides Jens, Moyo, and Aaron. The girls’ group was the exception, and only when Jana and Zoë were present. He fiddled with the beginning of a hole in his yellow sweater.

“I suppose I should apologize too,” said Noor, after a while. “That was fucked up, to say he’d get bored of you. I was a little—well, you know.”

“If it helps,” Robbe said, “you were right.”

Noor frowned. She sat up in her seat, and her parchment fell to the carriage floor. The sweets trolley passed by their sliding doorway without stopping—its driver could likely sense the tension. Robbe explained, “He’s back with Britt.”

“No, he isn’t,” said Noor. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Jana said—”

“Who would know better: Jana, or me?”

Robbe fumbled for something to say in response. Actually, now was a pretty good time to get out, before the topic became any more serious. He said, “He broke up with me.”

“It wasn’t for Britt. She helped him through some stuff, sure, but everyone knows that train’s come and gone.”

“I guess I’m just boring,” Robbe said.

“Bullshit.” Noor picked up her parchment again. She dipped her quill into her ink and began her writing anew, on whatever mess this was. Robbe couldn’t read fucking cursive. “I don’t believe it. Britt says he adored you.”

Robbe didn’t know what to make of that. There was no way he could segue into his next point, which was, of course, that their dating arrangement wasn’t real in the first place, especially after something so honest from Noor. He gave a bullshit excuse, something about chasing the sweets trolley, and got the hell out of there.

***

Robbe said goodbye to Moyo on the train platform. Jens and Aaron lived close enough that their parents parked in the same general vicinity, meaning that they could walk over as a trio. Robbe considered awaiting Sander on the platform as well. Every time he learned something new about Sander’s behavior when he wasn’t there, he got more and more confused. What fake relationship could be convincing enough to have Sander’s ex lamenting its reality?

The boys shared idle gossip on their way to the parking lot. Nothing substantial. Robbe’s head was too full of thoughts, most of them Sander-related. He wasn’t angry, or upset, or tired right now. How did knowing one little thing from Noor make a difference in his overall mood? They split off to their respective parents with casual goodbyes and a promise to write at least once during the holidays.

“Hey,” called Jens, just as Robbe opened the shotgun side.

Robbe turned back, his rucksack swinging off his shoulder. He swiped a hand across his eyes.

“Were you in love with him? Actually?”

They spent two weeks together. Two weeks, plus months and months of pining from afar that couldn’t count for much. It was supposed to last longer. What had Sander said, that day after their date? He wanted it to continue through the holiday break. And now, nothing. Robbe summarized this feeling the only way he knew how: “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

He climbed into his mother’s waiting car, and with that, it was Christmastime at the Ijzermans house.

[besanii]

“don’t give me space. that’s the last thing i want with you.” or “am i too late?” for shattered mirrors? :DDDDD

The sound of footsteps thundering along the corridor alerts Lan Wangji to the imminent arrival moments before the doors to the Library Pavilion are flung open. He looks up from his book as Wei Wuxian marches into the room, wild-eyed and out of breath, his hair falling out of its high ponytail as if he’d walked through a gale. He’s still in his training clothes, and trails dirt and dust along the polished wooden floors as he crosses it to where Lan Wangji sits at the desk in the centre.

“Running is not permitted in the Cloud Recesses,” Lan Wangji tells him, raising an eyebrow at his unkempt appearance. “You’re filthy.”

“You—” Wei Wuxian gapes at him. “Is that all you have to say?”

Lan Wangji turns back to the book in his hand and picks up his writing brush. Wei Wuxian stamps his feet and points an accusing finger at him.

“Lan Wangji! Are you ignoring me?” He slams both his hands on the desk in front of Lan Wangji and glares. Lan Wangji continues to take notes, unruffled. “You are! Unbelievable! I thought Lan-er-dianxia would have more manners!”

Lan Wangji turns another page in his book and ignores the way Wei Wuxian splutters, opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water. Finally, he slumps onto the floor with a groan, half splayed over the desk with his chin propped up on one hand.

“Lan Zhan,” he whines. “Lan-er-dianxia. Lan Wangji. Lan-er-gege…”

He perks up when Lan Wangji clenches the page between his fingers a little too hard, crumpling the paper at the corner, and his ears turn a faint shade of pink. A sly smile spreads across Wei Wuxian’s face and he leans in closer, ducking his head to peer at Lan Wangji’s face.

“Lan-er-gege,” he calls again, teasing. “Why are you ignoring me? Come on, Er-gege, look at me?”

He skips his fingers along the edge of the book in Lan Wangji’s hand and tugs on it playfully. When that doesn’t work, his fingers venture lower, over the tips of Lan Wangji’s fingers, along his thumb, across his wrist. He grins as the skin beneath his fingers tense and start to tremble. He’s about to open his mouth to speak when the book falls to the table and his hand is caught in a crushing grip.

“L-Lan Zhan?” he stammers, heat flooding his cheeks. Lan Wangji fixes him with a long, penetrating stare.

“Wei Ying, behave,” he says sternly.

“It’s your fault,” Wei Wuxian says with a pout. “You’re the one who came all the way to the Cloud Recesses to avoid me.”

“I’m not avoiding you,” Lan Wangji sighs.

Wei Wuxian huffs disbelievingly. “So you traveled all the way from Caiyi City to your family’s ancestral home, the day after essentially proposing to me, because you’re not avoiding me?”

The flush on Lan Wangji’s ears grow darker.

“You made your intentions clear,” he says. “I did not want to impose my feelings upon you where they were unwelcome.”

“Unwelcome?” Wei Wuxian repeats incredulously. “When did I say they were unwelcome?”

“You said you did not want to think about it,” Lan Wangji replies. He stares down at their joined hands. “I thought it would be best to give you some space.”

“Give me some…” Wei Wuxian stares at him. “Lan Wangji. Are you being serious right now? I said I didn’t want to think about it right now. Not when the war with Qishan Wen is at its most crucial point. I never said I didn’t want to marry you!”

Lan Wangji’s breath hitches, his mouth falling open in a soft gasp as he stares back at Wei Wuxian with wide-eyed wonder. His hold on Wei Wuxian’s hand tightens; Wei Wuxian returns the favour, clutching at his hand just as tightly, the heat in his cheeks spreading down to his neck under Lan Wangji’s intent gaze. He ducks his head, embarrassed, but doesn’t withdraw his hand.

“You’re riding off to the front lines tomorrow,” he says softly. “And who can say how long the war will last? I don’t want for us to part with our feelings unclear. So please, don’t give me space. That’s the last thing I want with you.”

He’s startled when Lan Wangji gets to his feet abruptly and rounds the edge of the desk to kneel before him.

“Lan Zhan, you—” he starts. “Get up! Er-dianxia you can’t kneel in front of me, what are you do—”

He gasps as Lan Wangji gives him a firm tug and topples forward into his waiting arms. They come around him immediately, pulling him against Lan Wangji’s chest, threading into his hair and wrapping around his waist. He melts into the embrace, his own hands coming up to clutch at Lan Wangji’s robes as he buries his face in his broad shoulder.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji murmurs. “Promise you’ll wait for me.”

Wei Wuxian nods, his throat tight and eyes burning.

“Yes, Lan Zhan,” he says, turning his head to press his ear over Lan Wangji’s heart. He closes his eyes. “I’ll be right here when you come home.”

// buy me a ko-fi //