#but just barely we were kinda talking about some stuff and like the subject of facing your own identity and accepting it came up

[surfinminho]

6:00 PM

wc: 1.3K

Warnings: age gap, reader is older, fem bodied, humiliation, panty stealing, perversion, masterbation (m), spit, sub!felix, overstimulation, unprotected sex, keep in mind reader is like 15 years older with a kid though it isn’t rlly mentioned

He could get you fired, you’re his professor and he’s just one of your many students.

You were the talk around campus for a while. He can see why though. I mean, you were pretty, has a nice figure, smart, Felix could go on for hours about you.

You on the other hand, seemed to pay him no mind. He kinda got upset about it multiple times. Not noticing his wandering eyes on you or staying after class just to spend a few more seconds with you, pathetic attempts he knows.

As time went by, finals week came closer. And Felix isn’t going to lie but, he was going to fail. Environmental science wasn’t his strongest subject. But you’re here! And you could help him.

He contemplated for a while if he should just get a tutor and suck it up, but apparently you had some concerns too. “Felix, can you come here please?” The bell had just rung, leaving a few laggers, and you sitting at your desk.

He packed his stuff up quickly before heading to your desk. “Hi miss” he gave you a small smile, sitting down on the nearest chair.

“Felix, your grades are much lower than last semester, it went down 12%.” You frowned, taking out a piece of paper and a pen, “See Felix, if you get less than a 90 on your final you’re going to fail the semester.”

He didn’t want to disappoint you with his terrible grades, he wanted to seem better than that.

“I can get a tutor?” you cut him off, writing something’s down on the piece of paper.

“I’m afraid with what little time we have left, getting a tutor isn’t enough. So, I’ll do it for you, personally.” you hand him the piece of paper nicely folded.

“Thank you, miss” as he gets ready to leave, you stop him once more.

“Since it’s also at my house, I’m not really allowed to do that so don’t tell anyone”

Felix nods his head and leaves, smiling to himself, thinking about all the possibilities of what could happen.

-

You let him in with a smile, telling him to go to your room and wait for you. As he was waiting, he looked around the room. It was white and chic with a hint of brown. Though, on your dresser, there was a picture of you and a younger girl, the girl was fairly young, probably 9 years old, give or take.

His train of thought is interrupted as you walk through the door,

“Let’s get started Felix.”

The next few hours were hell, it’s like the practice problems you handed him were impossible to do. It’s like any prior knowledge he had flew out the window. He could your sighs get louder every time he gets another question wrong, rubbing your temples.

“Felix, these are simple questions, you know what, I’ll be right back” you got up, leaving the door slightly ajar.

He looked around the room again, taking in everything once more. This time, a piece of fabric that he definitely didn’t notice caught his eye. It was sitting on the floor, by the bed frame. You could come back anytime, but what’s the harm in looking?

He got up, picking up the fabric, or lack there of. His face flushed, pink lace panties. He should put them down, it’s an invasion of your privacy, but he wasn’t thinking rationally. He pockets your underwear and sits back down, picking up his pencil and going back to work.

“How about we call it a night”

-

He doesn’t know what came over him, guilt was taking over his body as he looked at your underwear. He doesn’t know why he took it, he can barely look you in your face anymore. He wasn’t going to give it back though, it’s covered in his cum and spit. Your smell as worn off, surely he can sneak another pair?

As the days go by, he goes to your house at 6 pm, sharp. He’s never early or late. It’s routine at this point. He goes over to your place, does some practice questions, then he goes home and jerks off using your panties.

But today, when you answered the door, your were very giddy, smile reaching both ends of your face. The questions you given him were fairly easy, the answers were basically common sense.

“Miss, I finished this packet.” Felix said, slowly sliding the paper towards you.

You carefully look it over with a pen, tracing each answer with it, you slide it back to him with a smile. “Good, only 1 wrong!” You paused, getting up and walking to your dresser, “I think you deserve a reward, I mean those questions must’ve been so hard.

You sit down on your bed, calling him over.

“Miss, what’s this abo-“ he choked on his words as he watched you throw a pair of lace panties at him, almost identical to the ones he stole a week before.

“I know you took my underwear Felix, you’re not very slick” you frowned, pulling him closer by his thighs.

he stayed quiet, playing with his fingers in his lap.

“Felix, that was very disgusting of you, I offer you extra help and you take from me. Is that how you were going to make your move on me?” your tone was condescending, it made him want to die from embarrassment.

'No --- No, no, no, no, no --- I’m sorry, I don’t know wh-“ you pressed a finger to his lips, shoving two fingers into his mouth.

“Aw but baby, you do know. Tell me why you did it, I don’t like liars” you slowly removed your fingers from his mouth, wiping his spit on his cheek.

“I wanted to taste you..”

“Wanted to taste me?”

He hums, looking up at you, trying not to touch you.

“You’re a pathetic thing, could’ve just asked.” you mumbled, taking your index and middle finger, hooking it on the waistband of his pants, pulling it down along with his underwear.

“Show me what you do to them at home”

He didn’t reply, saving himself from any more embarrassment. He took his hand and spit in it before wrapping his hand around his cock. His body jolts at the feeling, back arching into the pleasure. He wraps your panties over his tip, rutting into his fist. The spit made the glide easier, making it so he could go faster. He closed his eyes, staccato moans leaving his plump lips, little ‘pleases’ coming out ever so often.

“Stop.”

His eyes shot open, stopping his movements while keeping his hand on his cock. He whined, blinking away tears, to look at you. When do you take off your pants?

“Ah, you’re so cute and well behaved, makes me wanna kiss you.”

“Can I? Uhm can I get a kiss?” He pouts

You shuffle over to him, knees on either side of his lap, slotting your lips against his. You titled your head to the side, grabbing his chin, trying to get more of him until you felt something wet seep in between your thighs so you look down and-

Oh.

“I’m sorry” he sputtered, still rutting against your thigh.

“Cumming just from me kissing you? Pathetic baby” you leaned down to press a kiss to his lips, shutting him up before lining his cock up and sinking down.

“I can’t- miss- mommy please, f-fuck!” Letting out a choked out sob, he could feel his cock drag against your soft, warm walls.

“Yes you can” You huffed, fucking yourself down onto his cock, his cum making the slide easy.

“Let- let me pull out, g’nna cum shit” he threw his head back, his moans reaching a crescendo as his thrusts became erratic, losing its rhythm.

“Just like that, good boy” you pulled him into another kiss, gripping his shirt to keep leverage. “Wanna breed me? Make me a mommy?” You said in between moans, meeting him halfway.

“Cumming!” You felt his release paint your walls, sure it’s not a lot but it triggered your own orgasm.

You climbed off him, using the discarded panties to clean him up.

“You better be prepared for the final.”

[sluttyten]

You In My Arms

Chapter 4: Promises

(gif credit to: huangrenjuns)

full masterlist || haechan masterlist || YIMA chapter index

summary: your time at university is coming to an end, but Haechan isn't going anywhere, and neither is your long-standing crush on him

length: 13,144

tags: voyeurism, exhibitionism, slowburn, friends to lovers, masturbation, general perversion, smut

previous chapter || next chapter  (Coming Soon)

As time passes, your graduation date growing closer and closer, you try to spend more time with your friends. Sure, you’re looking for a job and all that stuff too, hoping to jump right into a career after graduation, but also you’re not ready to let go of all of this just yet – your friends and this somewhat carefree life. 

You take every moment.

You cherish the lunch breaks with your friends, hanging out between classes or after work, going bowling together with some of them on a Saturday night. You take photos and videos, keepsake memories with all of them.

You want to remember it all. To remember way it feels to be surrounded with friends, to laugh with Jaemin and Shotaro in the sunny courtyard outside the sciences building, to eat a gourmet feast Xiaojun made for his culinary cornerstone class.

You enjoy the excitement when you run with Haechan to the cafe in the break during your three-hour lecture to grab a caffeine-punch in a cup — the way he laughs at you as you try not to spill your drink while you jog back to class, the silly way he smiles when you laugh at him for having smudged the pile of whipped cream on top of his drink onto his face. 

You spend plenty of time with all of your friends over those final few weeks after midterms, but surprisingly, you spend quite a bit of time with Renjun too. Despite his awkward departure that night after you messed around during the movie, things were going perfectly smooth. 

It probably helped that neither of you mentioned it for quite a while after that. 

You’ve always been on good terms with Renjun, but over those final weeks of your final semester, you actually become quite close with him in a purely friendly way. You study together, hang out together, grab coffee and lunch and dinner. You talk about stuff, about the impending ominously dark cloud of your futures that looms ahead of you. You talk about many things, yet you both ignore the events of that movie night, not talking about it at all until weeks later. 

On a late Saturday morning, you meet Renjun to grab coffee before you go shopping together. It’s at a little place just a few blocks away from your apartment, and unfortunately, too close to the apartment of a guy you’d attempted to hook up with just a couple weeks ago. 

It’s truly unfortunate when the guy walks in while you’re standing there with Renjun. 

“Oh, shit!” You hiss, tucking yourself into Renjun’s shadow. 

Renjun freezes, barely even moving his mouth when he asks, “What? What’s wrong?”

Quickly you sum up the story for him, whispering it in his ear, and Renjun just smirks and shakes his head. He lets you keep hiding behind him until your drinks are ready, until you’ve snuck out of the shop without being noticed by the guy.

Once you’re outside, Renjun begins laughing. “I guess I should be glad you don’t treat me like that.” 

You take a sip of your drink and look sideways at him. “Honestly, I’m the one who was worried you were going to start avoiding me. After that night.”

Renjun clears his throat, and for about half a block, the two of you walk in silence tinged with awkwardness — the subject hovers right there between you, unable to be avoided now that it’s been mentioned. 

“Look,” Renjun sighs when you reach a crosswalk. Cars whip by, stirring up a breeze. “About that night….”

“Renjun, it’s fine! You don’t —“

“No, listen.” He takes your hand, and you turn to look at him. Renjun clears his throat. “What we did that night, I shouldn’t have done that. I’m kinda seeing someone, and it’s been a tentative thing for a while now.” He doesn’t meet your gaze as he says, “It’s this older guy at the place where I’m interning, so it’s not like we’ve been able to be upfront about it.”

Well, shit. There’s someone else? Did you pressure him into it that night? And, also, on top of that, you didn’t know Renjun was even interested in men. 

As if he can read the look of mild panic on your face, Renjun quickly says, “I’m bisexual, which I’ve never really said out loud before. So it’s not like I didn’t enjoy it. I did. It was a sexy situation, and you were very tempting.”

The light changes, and Renjun starts walking away, his hand still wrapped around yours. He starts talking again as you draw level with him, side by side. “The reason I just walked away that night after everything was finished is because I suddenly remembered him, and like, I’ve got this thing with him, and I really like him. So I thought I’d fucked up, and I panicked a little bit. He and I aren’t exclusive at the moment, but I still didn’t want to mess things up.”

You understand. That night is in the past, though now what little awkwardness about it remained has faded. 

You’re happy that Renjun feels comfortable enough with you to be open and honest with you, as he’d said, he’s never told anyone he’s bisexual before. And you’re just happy for him as he begins telling you about the guy he’s kinda seeing. 

Since you’re the only one of your friends that knows about this secret not-relationship going on, Renjun starts telling you, over the following days and weeks, all about the guy. He shows you pictures of him, tells you cute stories, and he even introduces you to him once when you have to swing by the guy’s apartment to pick Renjun up on your way to class. 

It’s a nice building. Nice enough that it has a doorman who gives you a strange look when you pull up to the curb and sit there waiting. You sit there, idling for a moment, and that’s when Renjun emerges. 

The guy walking beside him is wearing a cozy looking sweatshirt, a pair of basketball shorts, sandals, a backwards cap, and sunglasses. He doesn’t look like the supremely wealthy man you would typically imagine living here, nor does he totally match with the professional shots Renjun has shown you from their company’s website or his own social media. 

To your total surprise, as Renjun opens the door and slides into the passenger seat of your car, he rolls down the window and waves his not-boyfriend over. The man leans at the window with his arms folded on the edge of the car door, grinning in at Renjun before he looks over at you. 

“Hi,” he greets you. “I’m Jaehyun.”

He extends a hand, and you take it. He has a firm businessman grip, a strong handshake, a contrastingly cherubic smile. He’s tall and handsome, built like the type of man you’d see in a magazine. 

“Nice to meet you,” he tells you as he withdraws from the car a moment later. And to Renjun, he says, “I’ll see you later at the office.”

Renjun smiles and nods, his eyes softening when he looks at Jaehyun. “See you later, hyung.”

As soon as Renjun has rolled the window up, as soon as you’re pulling away, you exclaim, “I can see why you’ve been keeping him all to yourself. He’s even hotter in person, Renjun.”

To that, he just laughs. “I want to show him off. But we can’t go public since I’m an intern and he’s technically my boss right now. He’s, uh, a little bit like you. Doesn’t mind getting a little handsy in public.”

You blush as you drive. 

Renjun doesn’t even know half of it. You haven’t told him everything about the interests you’ve taken. All he knows is the way you’d not shied away from his wandering hands during the movie night, how you’d reciprocated without hesitation. 

He doesn’t know that lately you’ve been venturing out to explore your exhibitionist hungers somewhat regularly too. But you feel a little too wary about doing anything by yourself completely in public, fearing the negative consequences of getting caught, so you mostly just keep it in your car. Masturbating in your car in the parking lot on campus or while you’re driving. But there’s a missing thrill when you do that because there’s no one to really see you, which is a little contradictory to why you won’t do it properly out in public. 

Luckily, Renjun changes the subject, steering things away from your sex life or his. And for the most part, you don’t talk about it again until a few days later. 

The end of the semester is rapidly approaching, days filled with studying for finals, working on final projects, spending every waking moment working towards the finale of your time in school. That’s when the subject of Jaehyun finally comes up again. You’d just asked how things were going, Renjun had answered simply, and after a few moments of silence, he spoke up again. 

“I told Jae that I hooked up with you once,” Renjun admits.  

You’re sitting together on the floor of his bedroom, studying for different classes, but you decided to do it together. Haechan and Jaemin had been here earlier too, but Jaemin left for the gym with Jeno, and Haechan had finally left because he had to go to work at the restaurant. So now it’s just the two of you. 

You look over at him. 

“Jae said he thinks we must’ve looked good together, and I told him that no one was watching so I wouldn’t know how good we looked together. That we really just swapped a handjob and me fingering you beneath the blankets, so it wasn’t much to look at.” Renjun taps the end of his pen against his notebook, and he’s studying you, looking along the length of you stretched out on your belly on his floor. “He said he still would’ve loved to have seen.”

Yeah, well, you’d like to see him and Jaehyun together too. Renjun is so pretty and Jaehyun is so handsome. You’ve seen his hard muscles in some of the photos Renjun has shown you, plus the day that you picked Renjun up, Jaehyun was wearing a sleeveless shirt that showed off arms so beautiful they could have been marble sculpted by an old-world artist. Renjun has shared a few details about their sex life, enough that  you’re intrigued. You’re sure he and Jaehyun make a pretty picture too. 

Renjun looks away from you, staring down at his pen tapping on the page. His cheeks are a little pink when he says, “He’s given me permission to have sex with you again, if you’re down for it. But he wants to see. If it happens, he wants me to film it.”

A bolt of heat shoots down to your core, spreading fast through you as you sit up to properly look Renjun in the eye. “Are you serious?”

Renjun nods, nervously avoiding eye contact. “Yeah. It’s weird, I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything about it, but you were into the like exhibitionism of that night, so I thought maybe you could be into this too? But, I get it’s weird so if it’s too weird or if you just don’t want to do it at all, I understand and we can forget all about this.”

But you do want it. It’s exactly what you’ve kinda been wanting. To have someone watch without the risk of it becoming a problem. And you like Renjun; it’s not like the thought of doing anything more sexual with him hadn’t crossed your mind since that first time. 

“Ok. Can I make one request?” You ask, already closing your textbook and pushing your notes away. 

Renjun nods. 

“Can we do it in my car?”

So the next day, you and Renjun are in your car. You’re parked in the back of a parking lot on campus, far away from anyone else, facing a border of trees. Renjun, while he’d agreed to the car thing, didn’t actually want anyone to be able to see, so you’d drawn up this happy medium. 

He props his phone up on your dashboard, and you climb into his lap. The day is warm enough that without the AC on in the car, you’re already sweating, especially when your bare thighs rest against Renjun’s. He’s shimmied his shorts down to his ankles, sitting in the passenger seat of your car in just his underwear. 

“We do look good,” Renjun comments as he looks over and readjusts the angle of the phone. 

You pull the sundress you’re wearing over your head, dropping it back into the driver’s seat. Now you sit nude on Renjun’s lap, sunlight pouring in through the windows over your skin. You put your fingertips just beneath Renjun’s chin, tipping his face up until his gaze meets yours. “Let’s show ourselves off to your man.”

He touches you, running his hands over your thighs, hips, your belly, your chest. You didn’t discuss it beforehand, but Renjun curls his hand against the back of your neck and brings you in for a kiss. His mouth is soft, his breath sweet. Renjun is gentle with you as you both get to know each other a little better, as he softens you up and as he slips his hand down to open you up with his fingers. You don’t hold yourself back, not in the sounds you make or the way you grind onto his fingers. You don’t care that the windows are cracked to allow in a breeze, that your moans might carry across the parking lot. 

After a few minutes, Renjun loses the stiffness brought on by uncertainty. He loses a bit of that softness when he grabs both of your hips and drags you a little higher in his lap. He lifts a hand to your throat, holding on as he brings his lips to your ear and tells you, “Want you to ride my cock like a good slut. Yeah?”

A swift smack to your ass with one hand gets you moving. 

You push at Renjun’s shoulders, pinning him back into the seat. “Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy, huh?”

Renjun does just that, relaxing back into the seat. He slides the hand down from your throat, to your shoulder, down your arm. His fingertips trace the rounded curve of your breast, down your side, over your hip and your thigh, down to your knee where it bends beside his hip. 

You squeal with surprise when suddenly the seat moves, falling nearly horizontal. 

Renjun laughs, lifting his hand from where it had fallen to the lever beside the seat, the one he’d used to make the sudden move. “Now,” Renjun says, “Now, ride me, beautiful.”

So you do exactly that. 

You fuck Renjun, riding him on that small seat in your car, both of you baking under the heat until sweat pools in all the small places, until your skin sticks to his disgustingly. Your car rocks as you ride him, and the phone filming all of this slips from its perch on the dashboard a few times until Renjun finally picks it up and holds it himself, focusing it where he disappears inside you, aiming it at your tits when he puts a hand on one, speaking to you, and capturing your moans and wordless replies. He films every part of you but your face, which had been another request of yours. 

Renjun pushes you off his cock just seconds before his orgasm mounts, and he releases across his belly, gasping and groaning. 

“Don’t move,” he groans as you begin to climb off him into the driver’s seat again. “You didn’t finish. Let me.”

It takes some careful rearrangement, but after a moment you’re the one reclining in the seat. Renjun has pushed the seat as far back from the dashboard as allowed, and he’s carefully squeezed himself down onto the floor, kneeling there with your legs draped over his shoulders as he dips in to lick you out. 

It’s great. It’s fun. 

You’re leaned far enough back that you can’t see the rest of the parking lot beyond the windows, only the sky above. But you can still hear, and you hear as a few people pass nearby the car, as Renjun does a certain thing that makes you let out a completely inappropriate sound. You hear the conversation of those outside pause, but you don’t even mind, in fact it perhaps excites you even more as Renjun carries you straight over the edge of your orgasm. 

That time is not the only time. Apparently Jaehyun likes seeing you and Renjun together. 

Jaehyun never wants to physically be present to witness it, just wants to see videos and pictures, and once he does call so he can listen and direct Renjun from a distance. 

It’s just sex. Great sex. Fun sex, sometimes in public but sometimes in Renjun’s room at the rental house. 

You keep it secret between you two. No one needs to know about the confusing nature of whatever is happening between you. They don’t have to know that while you’re all over hanging out at the rented house that you’re wondering about the likelihood of dragging Renjun into the laundry room for a quickie, or you’re wishing that you could just be riding him on the swing on the back porch with each of you wearing an AirPod with Jaehyun connected through a phone call like you’ve done before. None of them have to know at all, not that they’d notice. 

No, instead they’re all typically busy focusing on games or whatever movie or drama someone puts on. Or, such as on this particular night, a karaoke machine. 

Jaemin brought one home from the rec center on campus because it was outdated and they were going to trash it. So he’s brought it home for some fun tonight, and pretty much everyone has been having fun with it, and paying no attention to anything else, fully distracted. Even Renjun who keeps missing the way you’re trying to catch his eye. 

Your mind has been preoccupied with those thoughts about being bent over the washing machine in the laundry room, but it’s clear as you fail to catch Renjun’s eye for the fifth time tonight that it’s not going to happen. 

So you decide to give in to just having regular non-sexual fun tonight. To just enjoy the company of your friends, to pick up the mic and sing karaoke along with the rest. You’ll do anything for the prize of the cheap ass gold trophy one of the guys bought as a joke during your freshman year, the one that gets passed around any time there’s a contest. 

Haechan, tragically, is just getting over a cold and his voice is still a bit hoarse, so he’s had to sit out on the karaoke fun. He’d pouted for a while earlier when Jaemin brought the machine out, but once Mark had suggested that Haechan be the karaoke maestro for the evening, his mood improved. 

Therefore, Haechan is the one holding the control for the karaoke machine when you jump to your feet, ready for your chance. He grins at you, and you get this silly, starry-eyed feeling, bunnies jumping around in your belly. You pinch the inside of your elbow, trying to chase the thoughts away. You need to get over your crush on him. It’s been long enough. 

“What’ll it be? Anything in particular?” Haechan rasps, lifting his eyebrows as he scrolls through the selection. “Or dealer’s choice?”

“Don’t do it,” Chenle warns from where he’s sunken into a beanbag chair, arms folded and his eyebrows set in a deep frown. Just moments ago he failed disastrously after the song Haechan had chosen for him proved to be surprisingly too difficult. 

Haechan blinks up at you, fluttering his eyelashes with a sweet smile, the face of innocence.  

“Yeah, absolutely not,” you laugh. “I know what I want. ‘You In My Arms’ by Yoo Jae Ha, please, Haechan.”

It’s a slow ballad song, but it’s one you like. You’d heard it once and immediately fallen in love with the old song. It’s certainly the oldest choice of all the songs that have been sung so far tonight. 

“That one?” Haechan asks, a tone of surprise weaving through the scratch of his voice. 

“Yes.” You straighten up, turning to face the screen fully, trying to put Haechan out of your line of sight. 

You put your heart and soul into the performance. A few of the others sing along in the background, and even if you’re not the best singer in the room, you’re not the worst. You sink down into your spot on the floor, pretty pleased with yourself honestly, although Xiaojun ends the night in possession of the trophy, vowing that he’ll take good care of it. 

It’s only when someone points out that he might be the one to end up with possession of the trophy permanently with graduation coming up that the mood of the night sours. The end of the semester is quickly approaching, and many of you are graduating, and things will be different. There won’t be nights of congregating in the rented house just off campus, no more pointless competitions for the sake of the trophy. 

It’s coming to an end. 

Someone has the idea, on that bittersweet note, for all of you to take a group picture together because for the first time in forever, your entire close-knit group is all in attendance. And it would be nice to have a group photo to remember everyone by. 

“God damn, we’re not dying,” Haechan says. The words are rough, grating out of his throat and grating along sensitive nerves among the group. One of the girls starts crying, dragging everyone she can reach together into a half-hug, half-pose for the photo. 

Renjun sets his phone up, sets a timer, and everyone clusters together. Shoulders, knees, elbows knock as everyone scrambles to fit into the frame. Someone steps on someone else’s hand. There’s an elbow digging into someone’s thigh. A hand brushes your back, slipping over your shoulder as they lean on you a bit. 

The unexpected weight throws you off balance, and you almost fall forward until the hand on your shoulder drops to your waist, holding you steady, holding you up. 

“Smile everyone!” Someone says. 

The camera flashes bright. You hear the snap of the iPhone’s camera. 

The group disintegrates, people moving immediately. The hand on your waist falls away. 

You turn around to see who it was. 

Renjun smiles brightly right there. Mark is there too, laughing and swatting Renjun and Haechan on the shoulders. Haechan smiles too, silently laughing along with Mark. None of the three of them look at you. 

Renjun promises he’ll send the picture out to everyone, but then someone breaks out a couple bottles of wine. Glasses are poured, toasts are made, memories remembered. The night passes, tasting bittersweet on everyone’s tongues. 

“Let’s take a trip,” someone suggests before the night ends. “Let’s all go away somewhere after graduation. One last trip with all of us!”

Haechan is the one to suggest, “We could go overseas to somewhere warm with a beach and get drunk to celebrate.” He’d looked around at your friends, a light glimmering in his eyes, a touch of his insatiable voyeuristic hunger residing in that look. “How about Thailand?”

No official plans are set in stone that night. There’s been too much drinking already, people get sucked back into the lure of the karaoke machine, and others start to head home. You should go home too. Tomorrow you have an interview for a job that starts after graduation. You need to get some rest. 

But Haechan offers you another turn on the karaoke machine, any song, your choice. You can turn that down. As you slide down onto the sofa beside him, your shoulder brushes his, fingers sliding against the back of his hand while you use the controller to select the song you want. 

And maybe it’s your imagination, just wishful thinking brought on by your crush, but you think he leans into you, that he sighs a little when you touch his hand. 

Regardless of the truth of your experience, you cradle the warm feeling brought on by Haechan’s potential reaction, carrying it with you all the way home later that night.

It is a total relief, a weight lifted off of your shoulders, to be walking out into a beautiful, sunny, temperate day knowing that you have just received a job offer from the company you wanted to work at. 

The Moon Corporation is a business created by an alumni of your school, Moon Taeil. He’s hired many people who’ve also attended your school, so you felt like your odds at getting hired were pretty good. Especially since you’ve been there at the top of pretty much every class, top grades and performance. 

So today, after your interview, you walk out of the building with a nice job offer that you’re absolutely going to accept. 

“Well, how did it go?” A voice from behind you. A burst of cool air as the doors of the building are opened again. 

You turn around.

Haechan saunters forward, hands tucked in the pockets of his tailored black pants. His shirt is tucked in and crisp. His hair is styled instead of the fluffy mess it had been just last night during all the karaoke-ing. He’s wearing glasses again and an open smile. 

You forgot that he was here too. You’d seen him sitting there waiting when you were called in for your interview, but in all the excitement of how well the interview had gone and then receiving the offer, you’d miraculously forgotten about Haechan. That has rarely ever happened when he’s in your vicinity. 

“I got the job!” You lift your hands to your face, cool palms against your warm cheeks. You’re still surprised and elated, your face flushed with happiness. “What about you?”

The Moon Corporation was hiring multiple positions as the company was looking to finally expand a bit more. 

Haechan grins, and as he comes up beside you, he throws his arm over your shoulders. “I got it too, of course. You already know I could charm my way into anything.” He says it smugly and teasingly, offering you a wink that makes your heart beat a little faster. 

You push him away a little, half heartedly because you don’t actually want him to pull his arm away from your shoulders. Luckily he leaves it there as you start walking towards where you’ve parked your car. You ask, “So I’m stuck with you even after graduation?”

“Oh, dear,” Haechan laughs, “Yeah, I think we might be stuck with each other for a long time. It’s a good thing you enjoy my company.”

His arm slides away from your shoulders and he steps away, but you find yourself drifting closer to his side. “We’ve got to have each other’s backs, got it?” You tell him. “We’re in this together. Friends and coworkers, teammates.” 

Haechan nods seriously, holding his hand out to you, pinky finger extended. “I promise.”

You loop your pinky finger with his, holding his gaze as you make this pinky promise. An unbreakable vow. “I promise.”

The day of graduation comes too quickly. Final exams pass in a series of successes, final projects are submitted without a hitch. Your contract with the Moon Corporation is signed and submitted, and your orientation is scheduled to begin in two weeks.

But first, before all of that, before the entirety of the rest of your life stretches out before you, there’s the trip to Thailand planned with your friends. Before life, first there is the promise of fun and relaxation, adventure and alcohol as you all fly to Thailand, and cram a dozen of you into one house for a week. 

Everyone comes, which is kind of hectic to plan and organize, especially when some of your friends don’t even jump onto the trip until rather last minute. 

You don’t know if it’s the heat or something else, but something about those days spent in Thailand has everyone horny. 

In between the adventures — trips to historic and religious sites, a trip to a busy market in the city, a few hikes — and just simply relaxing on the beach, it seems that everyone is sneaking around and having sex. 

You hear sounds from the rooms the others are in. Echoing moans from the bathroom. You know the outdoor shower certainly gets more use than just for showering – you catch Jaemin walking in there once and moments later soft moans echoed out. You were pretty certain you spotted YangYang getting handsy on the beach with a European tourist he met at one of the bars in town. 

You are no exception. The heat just gets under your skin and drives you wild as you lounge on a float in the pool, watching Haechan swim laps, watching Renjun wrestling YangYang in the shallows. You watch both of them closely for the first day, unable to pull your gaze away from Haechan because he’s the object of your list and affection, but Renjun as well. Because you know that if you approach him, it’ll be so easy. 

It only takes a few hours for you to snap, to drag Renjun away from your friends and tell him that you need to get off. That leads to the pair of you sneaking around the house and on the beach, having sex at every opportunity over the next few days. You also use that outdoor shower for non-showering activities. 

You try to get it all out of your system, just wanting to not feel horny. All you want is to enjoy a day trip to a beautiful ancient temple, but your mind can only focus on Haechan standing beside you in a loose white tank top that doesn’t hide the way the muscles in his arms flex. And since when does he have toned arms? Has he been working out? You can only watch his hands as he gently brushes his fingers over objects in the market. You can only stare as his swim trunks rise up around his thighs when he sits down across from you under the pergola behind the house you’re all staying at, his hand fisted around a water bottle held between his thighs — your mind immediately turns to filthy thoughts of his hand around his cock, his golden thighs on display and his head thrown back with a moan instead of just laughter at a joke that Jeno is telling. 

That night you drag Renjun out to the beach when no one is paying attention, and you beg him to please let you do whatever you want with him to just get these urges out of your system. He lets you, and he doesn’t have to know that when your eyes are closed it’s because you’re thinking of Haechan. Although, to be fair, when you’re kneeling in the sand, sucking his cock with his fingers threaded through your hair, he could just as easily be imagining you as Jaehyun as you’re imagining he’s Haechan. 

That night is certainly not the only time that week. 

You know that you and Renjun aren’t alone in all of this horniness. Everyone is getting action either from among your friend group or from locals or other tourists in the area. 

Everyone except Haechan.

You try not to notice, but obviously you can’t help it. Everyone pairs off, even if they’re swapping pairs like YangYang keeps doing when he trades out the tourist for a local girl and that local girl for Giselle in your friend group, and then Giselle for another tourist. 

But Haechan is always alone, though he seems entertained by everything going on around him even if he’s not directly involved in any action.

On your final night in Thailand, several of the guys decide to cook for everyone. Xiaojun has just graduated with a culinary degree, Haechan just enjoys cooking, and after a recent trip abroad Chenle is now possibly considering switching his major to culinary arts. The three of them prepare dinner for everyone, serving it out by the pool with many drinks to be had by everyone. The drinking lasts a lot longer than the food, going until late in the night when drunken toasts are being shouted out left and right to celebrate everything from the big victories and accomplishments to the small and ridiculous things. 

“To those of us who’ve already got jobs lined up!” Renjun cheers, lifting his glass.

Several of the others glare, but you lift your glass to tap it against his. Haechan too, both of you with your office jobs lined up with the Moon Corporation. Haechan’s knuckles bump against the back of your hand as he joins you in the toast, and you glance his way. 

Haechan isn’t truly paying any attention to you, but rather he’s looking at Renjun.

Haechan’s eyes flash as he says, “I still don’t get how you got a full-time position with full benefits, Renjun. Getting promoted from an unpaid intern to having full benefits and everything at your company. You skipped right over being a part-timer. Sheesh,” Haechan whistles, knocks his drink back like it’s a shot, and then asks, “Whose cock did you have to suck for that?”

It’s just a phrase, but still, it holds a little ring of truth to Renjun’s situation. 

Renjun sits his glass down heavily onto the table. 

Not that Haechan could possibly know it, but that’s something Renjun has expressed concern to you about. That it’s Jaehyun that got Renjun his position. You know it can’t be true; Renjun deserves the job he’s got, and maybe Jaehyun helped fast-track the promotion, but Renjun certainly would have gotten himself there all on his own. 

You know that there’s no way that Haechan could know about that. None of your friends probably do. Most of them don’t even know that Renjun is bisexual. 

Renjun doesn’t take another drink from his glass or say another word. He simply leaves the table.

“Damn,” Haechan whistles, “I think I touched a nerve.” And then he looks at you, a smile beginning to form, and then he opens his mouth, ready to say something to you, too.

“Don’t even dare to suggest that I did something like sleeping my way into our company, Lee Donghyuck,” you warn him off before he can say anything like that.

He just smirks. “The full government name? What did I do wrong?” He steals Renjun’s abandoned drink and tosses it back without flinching. “And besides, angel, you know I don’t think you could do anything as naughty as fucking your way into a job. You’re too much of a good girl for that.”

Heat flares beneath your skin due both to anger – why is he so determined to think that you are the perfect picture of innocence? – and arousal in hearing him call you a good girl. The way that his voice curls around the words, softening them, turning them into a praise rather than just a tease. You cross your legs beneath the table. 

“I wouldn’t accuse you of something like that. I’m not dumb enough to piss you off when we’re about to be working together. And I know you’ve worked hard. You’re brilliant.” Haechan drapes his arm over the back of your seat, and it takes a lot of your willpower to not lean into his gravity. He smells like summer with a little hint of the spices he’d used to prepare dinner. It’s so tempting to lean in, to breathe the smell of him in, to have your nose tracing the path of moles on his throat, to let your tongue take over and taste his sweat….

Just like Renjun, you leave the table without another word. But yours is less to do with being upset, and everything to do with the way that you’re about to throw yourself at him. 

Haechan just laughs, and when you take a last glance over your shoulder at him, he’s already turned to a conversation with Shotaro.

You find Renjun upstairs in the group bedroom, or the overflow room where a variety of people who there weren’t enough bedrooms for had been sleeping all week. He’s sitting at the far end of the room on the pallet of blankets that you and he had claimed the first night. He’s on the phone, talking quietly with someone you can only assume is Jaehyun. 

Renjun only glances at you as you walk around to sit down on your blankets. You can make out the low timbre of Jaehyun’s voice on the other end of the line, and you quickly determine that Haechan’s little jab at Renjun had certainly touched a nerve as he’s now seeking reassurance from Jaehyun that he didn’t earn his job just because of the relationship that they have.

You find the answer when Renjun spits out, “What the fuck, Jaehyun?” 

He promptly ends the call, tossing his phone over into his suitcase. He cries, frustrated, angry, sad. And you sit up there with him and comfort him for a good long while until his irritation with Jaehyun — who had in fact fast-tracked Renjun’s promotion from intern to full-time employee — shifts back to being his irritation with Haechan. 

“Haechan can be such an asshole sometimes!” Renjun complains. “You know the other day when I left my phone down by the pool? I saw him looking through it before he returned it to me, like what a nosy asshole.”

“And what do you think he was looking at in your phone?” You rest your cheek on your hand, tilting your head to look at Renjun. 

Renjun shrugs. “My photos app is full of nudes and videos, so he probably saw some of that. That’s probably why he thinks I fucked my way out of being an intern.” He shakes his head. 

“I’m pretty sure he was about to make some comment about me too,” you say, “But I stopped him before he could.”

Renjun sits up quickly, staring down at you. “Are you fucking kidding? What the hell is his problem tonight? Accusing both you and I of sleeping our way into our jobs?” He scoffs and looks like he’s about to get up, to go hunt Haechan down. 

You take his hand, tugging to get him to stay down there on the floor with you. “He never actually said anything implying that I’m a slut. Actually, on the contrary, he told me again that he thinks I’m too innocent to do anything like that.” You roll your eyes a little bit. “I’m halfway convinced Haechan still thinks I’m a blushing virgin.”

“If he only knew.” Renjun slumps back down beside you. “I’ve never met anyone else who wanted to have sex in public as much as you.  No one else who would eagerly agree to fuck on video just so I can send it to my… my boyfriend?” His eyebrows furrow. “I don’t know if that’s what Jaehyun is or not. We haven’t called it anything officially. But if that’s not what we are, why would he give me such a good position at work? Like, he obviously wants me around, right? Fuck, Haechan has me questioning everything now. And I had to put a passcode on my phone because of him.”

You smile at him softly. “You probably should’ve done that a while ago if you have so much sensitive stuff in your phone.”

Renjun makes a face, but you know that he knows that you’re right. He sighs, “I’m just ready to go home. I’m tired of being crammed in this house with so many people, most of all him. He’s just right there beneath my skin, you know?”

You do and you don’t. As much as Haechan irritates you sometimes, you also can absolutely not deny that you still like Haechan. Quite a lot. And Renjun mentioning Haechan potentially looking through the camera roll doesn’t help the problem you were trying to escape from by coming up here. A low heat simmers in your belly as you think about gross voyeur Haechan scrolling through Renjun’s phone. 

“I’m getting my own place when we get home. With my salary, I’ll be able to afford a decent place.” Renjun stares up at the ceiling, his gaze distant, his thoughts probably miles away from where yours are. “Our lease on the house is up at the end of the month, and most of the rest of them already have their next place lined up. I was hesitating, hoping Jae would ask me to move in with him. Maybe I’ll see if Xiaojun still wants a roommate. But he lives next door to YangYang and Haechan. Do I really want to deal with them?”

As if YangYang isn’t Renjun’s best friend other than you? You know he would love to have him as a next door neighbor. Haechan too. Even though he’s on Renjun’s nerves right now, they generally do get along quite well. 

It’s already late, and when someone stumbles into the room a few minutes later, crashing and stumbling down onto the blankets at the other end of the room, your conversation with Renjun tapers off. It’s late, your flight back home is in the morning, and even if the others want to drink until you all leave for the airport, you’re going to sleep. 

Renjun follows your lead, getting undressed to fall asleep in the humidity of the room. 

You doze off, sleeping lightly. 

You hear every creak and groan of the house, each footstep climbing the stairs. Every flush of the toilet. The quiet conversations as people say goodnight and close themselves into their rooms. You hear a distant moaning and thumping of a headboard against a wall. You hear the room fill around you, snores and breathing and the ever-increasing heat as more of your friends pack into the room. 

The ceiling fan overhead doesn’t seem to do much at all, and even when you get up to crack the window in the hope of tempting in a breeze, it only helps slightly. But when you lie back down, you do manage to drop right back into sleep. You fall all the way down to a place where you can dream. 

And you do dream.

A sweet summer fantasy of relaxing on the sand of the beach just outside this house, entirely nude beneath the sun. There’s a soft pair of lips and a set of rough hands, a clever tongue flicking against your clit, quick fingers pressing inside you. Even in your dream you know it’s wrong to be doing this out in the open, but you love it so much, knowing that anyone could see how your partner is making you feel. 

You lift your head and look down your bare body to the head of the person settled between your legs. All you can see is his hair — dark and fluffy, curling in the humidity. And then he moves, tilting his head in just a way that you can at last see his eyes. 

“Haechan,” you sigh.

Your eyes open, heart pounding in the quiet of that room. The humid air clings to your skin even though all you’re wearing is your panties and a tshirt. You’ve already kicked your blanket off in your sleep, so what little air is circulating in the room moves over your bare skin, but it does very little to help anything, especially with the heat of a different sort simmering beneath your surface. 

And of course, nothing is helped by what you see as soon as you’ve opened your eyes. 

The man in your dreams is right in front of you. 

Haechan is stretched out on his back right beside you. And he’s awake, his gaze fixed first on your ass only to slowly trail back up to your face. 

And that’s when you realize that you’d spoken his name aloud. 

“Sorry,” he apologizes quickly, making some excuse about how YangYang had locked him out. 

You don’t care about what he’s saying. All you can think about is how you’d just been having a very nice dream about him, and now here he is. What are the odds? 

Haechan moves a little, and you realize that you can smell him — all sunscreen and spice, and much like earlier in the night, you have to fight that urge to smell him. It would be so easy right now to just roll closer to him, to snuggle into that spot between his shoulder and his neck, to excuse it in the morning as not having been fully awake. Maybe you’d been able to smell him in your sleep, and that’s why he’d taken up that role in your fantasy. 

Haechan finishes his excuse, and you just close your eyes again, and tell him, “Don't care. Just stop staring at my ass. I’m trying to sleep.” You hide your face in your pillow, hoping that he couldn’t tell that you were flushed in the face, hoping he won’t notice that you don’t fall back asleep because your heart is pounding and your body is craving to be touched. 

He doesn’t say another word, but after a moment of silence, he does suddenly fling his blanket off only for it to land over your feet. Even that much is too warm, plus it stirs up the scent of him that just riles you up even more. You feel like an animal, getting so turned on just by a smell, so you back away, scooting back towards Renjun to try to get a little distance from Haechan. You turn onto your side instead of the less comfortable position of lying on your belly, and as you do so, you accidentally bump into Renjun. 

He jolts, startled awake by the contact. You can tell he’s awake because he wraps an arm around your waist, he presses up against your back. He drops a kiss to the sensitive spot right behind your ear that’s exposed at this angle. 

You shiver against him, and without either of you acknowledging it, Renjun starts moving. 

You’ve mentioned this before, this idea of being touched in the room with all of your friends. A scenario similar to the first sexual encounter between you and Renjun. Even earlier this week, you’d mentioned something quite similar to this about messing around with each other in this room while your friends slept around you. 

You think that’s what Renjun is playing off of right now as he slides the hand resting on your waist down along the band of your panties. 

In front of you, Haechan’s face has relaxed, and you think maybe he’s fallen asleep that quickly. Maybe the heat, instead of suffocating him, has lulled him into a comforting sleep. Part of you wishes it had worked that easily for you. 

You slowly slide down to lie on your back as Renjun moves too, lifting himself up on his side to look down at you. His fingers graze your clit, dipping a little lower and finding you already soaking wet with arousal, and an involuntary noise leaves your lips. Renjun grins, lifting his free hand up to his lips, signaling that you need to keep quiet, but with the other hand, he keeps touching you. Slowly he circles his fingers on your clit. You want more, need more, crave to be touched everywhere. 

And somewhere at the other end of the room, someone coughs in their sleep. 

Renjun freezes. 

He’d better not stop. He can’t stop. You’re too worked up at this point to not be allowed to cum, even if that means that you wake every single person in this room. 

But the room settles into quiet again, and Renjun’s fingers move on your clit again. A sigh spills from your lips. 

You bring your own hands up to your chest, slowly moving your hands up over your shirt which is already ridden up over your ribs, and you try to keep it covering your tits just a little to preserve a tiny bit of your modesty. Your nipples are hard, and you pinch them between your fingers, massaging your tits just the way you like as Renjun keeps touching you. And you know there are involuntary little sounds that keep escaping you, but they’re so quiet there’s no way that they’re loud enough for anyone else other than you and Renjun to really hear. 

Until Renjun decides to touch you deeper. His fingers dip down to your entrance, sliding inside you in a way that makes your breath catch, makes your legs fall apart to allow him better access. 

This time, Renjun clears his throat, just a small coughing sound, but it’s enough to draw your attention up to his face. He flicks his gaze over toward your other side. 

Your knee is touching Haechan’s leg. Renjun looks at it, looks back at you. But you don’t care, you just want Renjun to keep touching you. You shrug a little, and that’s enough for Renjun. 

As his fingers stroke your inner walls, your control really starts to slip. Whimpers, sighs, all these little noises that are going to get you caught. Which, really, is that the worst thing that could happen?

For Renjun, the answer might be yes. 

He covers your mouth with the hand that’s not busy at work between your thighs. You can’t help making sounds, you feel so good, and you’re really enjoying this situation and the possibilities. It’s your ideal exhibitionist scenario playing out in real time. 

Renjun holds your gaze, a silent command in his eyes for you to be a little more quiet. 

But then his fingers press right against that certain spot inside you, and this time you whimper his name, the sound muffled against the palm of his hand. 

A moment passes in which Renjun stops touching you, and then his hand moves as if he’s going to pull his hand away. Immediately you reach down, closing your hand around his wrist, keeping his fingers inside your panties. His threat is clear in that alone, but still Renjun whispers, “Quiet, beautiful.”

“Renjun, please,” you beg, trying your best to keep your voice quiet too. You move, rolling your hips up, trying to get Renjun to resume touching you. He looks into your eyes and you tell him, “Someone is going to hear.” And by that you mean: someone is going to hear, it’s inevitable, but you don’t care. He knows you get off on stuff like this, so why is he suddenly wanting you to be quiet and sneaky about it?

“Then be quiet. You said you wanted this,” his fingers stroke slowly over your clit. “Do you still? Or should I actually stop?”

His threat is clear. His rules are plain. 

Either you keep quiet while he fingers you in this room full of your friends, or he’s going to stop and leave you horny. He won’t finish giving you what you want. He doesn’t mind the threat of being discovered, but he doesn’t actually want to be discovered. The noisier you get, the higher the likelihood of you actually being caught. 

He slides a finger back down to your entrance, pressing it deep into your tight heat. It’s a test to see if you’ll keep quiet. 

Your thighs close, and you roll towards Renjun, rolling your hips to get him to move, hoping he’ll fuck you on his fingers until you’ve made a mess of your panties. He gives you a little, but he’s still holding back, so you clutch at his shirt, press your forehead to his chest, and you plead, “Keep going.”

Fuck.

You wish you were alone with him right now, and that alone is a rare enough feeling to be fucking around with Renjun and wishing that you were entirely alone and in private. You wish that he could properly fuck you right now and that you didn’t have to be quiet. You’re just desperate for it, and you can’t get what you really want here in this room of all of your friends. But this is something that you want too. It’s hot to be getting touched like this right now. 

Renjun just smiles and caresses your jaw, your throat, and he touches his fingers lightly just beneath your chin until your tip your head back just enough that it only takes a slight tilt of his face downward to kiss you. You moan softly from the smooth way he kisses you and the way that he finally really starts moving his fingers, fucking you with them.

You slide your legs apart, wanting him to get deeper, to touch you everywhere. You roll your body forward, riding his fingers as well as you can, and you can’t help the sounds you’re making. You know you’re being louder than you probably should, even though you’re actually being quite quiet as compared to normal. You can hear the rasp of the blankets beneath you as you’re moving your hips to meet each thrust of Renjun’s fingers. You can hear your wetness lubricating the way for Renjun, and it only serves to turn you on even more. Knowing that these noises are happening regardless of your attempts to muffle your moans and whimpers (unsuccessfully).

Renjun has three fingers inside you, his thumb rubbing circles at your clit. Your heart is beating everywhere all at once – in your throat, pounding in your chest, pulsing in your pussy, fluttering in your belly. You can feel it in your toes as they curl in the building heat tickling through your veins. Your hands clutch at Renjun’s shirt, and he smiles when he bends his fingers just-so, his thumb working tight circles against that sensitive bundle of nerves at the apex of your thighs.

You gasp and whimper as you cum. You bite at Renjun’s shoulder, pulling him closer even as you try to push him away to get his hand away from where you’re quickly growing sensitive as you soak your panties. You ride it out, still feeling your heart beating in every part of you as you do pull yourself away from Renjun, flopping onto your back to stare up at that ceiling fan revolving slowly overhead. 

You’re sweating. 

You feel sticky and gross, and you’ve only got a moment to rejoice in the slight respite of the air stirred up by the fan. Then Renjun is there stretching over top of you.

“Good girl,” he whispers, kissing your cheek. 

And Renjun is the one all over you right now, but you’re only thinking of Haechan. Thinking of his “good girl” from earlier tonight, wishing it was his voice that was whispering that in your ear, that it was his fingers inside your panties, his body too hot against yours in this already too stuffy room. Which, you do still have that one burning hot point of contact with Haechan where your knee rests against his. 

It’s not enough. 

Your body craves more of that. 

But instead you have Renjun. He’s a cuddler, that’s one thing you’ve learned since this started, and you usually don’t mind. But tonight is too hot.

“Fuck off,” you whine, squirming in a half-assed effort to dislodge him. It’s too hot, but you’ve also completely run out of the energy to actually get him to move. Renjun just lies there halfway on top of you, his arm stretched out on your other side. You wonder if he’s going to tell Jaehyun all about what you and he have done on this trip. You haven’t filmed any of your encounters on this trip, and after his argument over the phone with Jaehyun earlier, you wonder if it even matters. 

Haechan suddenly switches sleeping positions, breaking that singular point of contact, and he rolls over in his sleep so his back is to you. He twitches and shivers a little, which seems like it should be impossible given the heat, but after a moment, he relaxes again. He’s shirtless, and in the faint light coming in through the cracked open window, you can see that he’s sweating too. Beads of sweat glisten along his arm and the length of his spine. 

You smile a little to yourself as you look at his sleeping figure.

He’s so blissfully unaware that you and Renjun just did this right beside him. You could almost laugh. Would he have watched you two if he’d known? Would he have sat there like he’d done with Shotaro and his girlfriend, watching and getting off?

You fall asleep thinking about that, and in the morning you find yourself looking over at him as you wake. He’s still asleep, now flat on his back again. He looks so peaceful in sleep, his hand resting low on his belly right above the band of his black boxer-briefs. Perhaps you stare a moment too long, but as soon as you feel Renjun stirring behind you, you look away. You get up and leave the room, deciding you definitely need a cool shower before you finish packing up to head to the airport for home. 

Life settles into a boring routine once you return from Thailand. Half of your friends move away, the other half is almost always so busy working now that you hardly see each any of your friends.

Except Haechan.

With both of you working at the Moon Corporation, you see him every single day. Plus, YangYang is the only one of your friends still in the city who isn’t pursuing a proper professional lifestyle, so he made an open invitation for any of your friends to come over pretty much at any time. You take him up on that offer pretty often, honestly, but considering that he’s Haechan’s roommate, you still see a significant amount of Haechan.

Not that you’re complaining. 

You still have a dumb fucking crush on him even though you know that it’s probably just time for you to completely let it go and move on. It’s been almost five years that you’ve known Haechan, and the relationship between you has never developed beyond friendship, so maybe it’s just time that you give up.

But that history is part of the reason it’s so difficult to just move on. 

It also doesn’t help that you’re quite horny like all the time, so seeing the object of many of your fantasies all the time has put you in a rough spot. 

After your return from Thailand, Renjun and Jaehyun made up for their little fight, and they created new rules and boundaries, which meant cutting you out of the relationship altogether. You understand, of course. It was really just sex after all. You didn’t have feelings for Renjun, and you don’t want to ruin his happiness with Jaehyun. Renjun gets his own place, though Jaehyun’s over there so often that it might as well be their place. Renjun is swept up in his official relationship and his professional job, so you see less of him than you would like.

Xiaojun gets an apartment right next door to Haechan and YangYang, meaning that it should have been more convenient to get to see him too, and when you receive the invitation to his housewarming party you consider the possibility of rekindling your friends with benefits relationship with him. But at the party you learn that he’s got a new girl he’s seeing, and that it’s only been a few dates but he really likes her. 

So, instead of spending that time with your friends (except Haechan), you start spending time with your seniors at the Moon Corporation. Many of your coworkers there are men, though there are a few women too, but for the most part it’s a male-dominated company, though Mr. Moon Taeil had reassured you that as his company grows and he has a larger applicant pool to pull from, he is hoping to bridge that gender gap. For the moment, you don’t mind too much. With less women in the company, it means when you search for private company among your coworkers, there’s less competition.

You select Jungwoo, a nice guy. Funny and carefree. He’s fun for a little while, a couple hook ups in those first few weeks, but soon you both agree that you’re not truly compatible in the long run. Plus he claims that you seem distracted, like you want something else or someone else. Which is bullshit because you’re using Jungwoo to try to forget about Haechan. 

Next, you hook up with Yuta – he’s one of the biggest gossips in the company – after a night out having celebratory drinks. It’s just a one-time thing because you realize that the two of you are better off as coworkers or friends. 

No one else really catches your eye. You sometimes hang out with Yuta, WinWin, and Ten on your lunch breaks, which is when you learn all the gossip. Particularly everyone’s favorite rumor (or favorite bet) about if Taeil is in fact secretly hooking up with his secretary.

She’s gorgeous, of course, so you can understand why all the guys who have been rejected by her wonder if she’s sleeping with their boss. It’s surely some way of them coping with the rejection. But she is also really close with Taeil, so you can sort of see why they might assume she’s sleeping with him. You consider yourself a pretty decent judge of character and reader of body language, so you can tell by the way Taeil’s secretary and him interact that there’s not anything going on between them.

Romance is surprisingly a hot topic of gossip among your coworkers. But you try not to pay too much attention to it all. 

Not until the company retreat in October, a little over five months after you started at the Moon Corporation. 

On the way there, you’d been squeezed into the back of one of the transit vans that Mr. Moon had rented. One of the women was sitting beside you, and on the drive she’d chattered to you about everything that she could think of. That included, at one point, her discussing with you her ranking of your male coworkers, which was all fun and games until she reached Haechan.

“A ten. For sure. He just seems like he’d be a fun time, you know?” She says, twirling her hair around her finger as she stares at the back of Haechan’s head a couple rows up from you. “I can’t even lie that it’s kinda my goal to get him during this weekend. I want the full, fun experience of a retreat.” 

The woman on your other side giggles at that, but you just sink into a funk. 

You haven’t known anyone Haechan’s hooked up with since probably Halloween, which has been nearly a year ago. You don’t want to know that he’s having sex with anyone honestly. And as the two women continue laughing together about it for the next several miles of the trip, whispering about it while you sit there stuck between them, you just want to melt into your seat.

Instead, you decide to drink yourself numb as soon as you arrive at the retreat. Just in case you somehow play witness to your coworker’s seduction of Haechan, maybe you won’t remember it in the morning. Luckily, your first night of the retreat consists of everyone getting drunk together, so it’s not like your actions totally stand out. It’s actually just meant to be everyone drinking together, not necessarily getting drunk. 

You, Taeil, and the secretary are probably the three worst drinkers in attendance.

You only have vague recollections of that night. You remember blurrily Haechan coming over to you, stopping you from drinking any more. You remember seeing the other woman watching you with jealousy in her eyes while Haechan talked to you, as he pushed a bottle of water into your hands.

You remember sitting there, looking into his eyes and wondering if maybe you should just confess everything to him. But even with as much alcohol as you’d consumed, it wasn’t enough to loosen your lips and let everything flow out. 

You remember him asking to walk you back to your tent, and how your mind had immediately shot to the only possibility that your forever-attracted-to-him brain could think of in delight, while the rational part of your brain was shouting that you couldn’t have sex with Haechan when you were drunk. Of course, that’s not what he was trying to say. He was just trying to be a gentleman and walk you back to your tent since you were staggeringly drunk.

You vaguely recall him calling you angel, him putting his arms around you to help you walk. You barely remember the walk there, only the cool material of your sleeping bag against your bare legs as you crawl in, as you flop down and twist around to look at Haechan. You remember wanting him to stay, but also wanting him to leave because you don’t want him seeing you like this. And then everything fades away completely.

But then you’re awake and it’s not yet morning.

The tent is dark with only the shadows of branches stretching across the canvas ceiling. Bugs chirp and buzz outside the tent flap. Something woke you, though you’re not sure what exactly. You consider rolling back over and falling asleep, but that’s when you realize that the spot beside you in the tent is empty. The spot where Mr. Moon’s secretary was meant to be sleeping tonight. 

There’s no way that you’re sober enough to be getting up and wandering around the retreat site in the dark, but you’re also not sober enough to realize how that might be a bad option. So you get up, you pull on a hoodie and slip on your shoes, and you step out into the dark morning. 

The grass is damp with dew. The stars are visible overhead. All of your coworkers are asleep in their tents, but the lights are on back up at the guesthouse where the bathrooms and the kitchenette are, and you realize maybe she’s just gone to pee. You can’t blame her for that; as a matter of fact, you could probably use the toilet too. So you make your way in that direction, but before you can quite reach it you notice something odd.

Through the uncovered window, you can see Miss Secretary straddling Mr. Moon's lap while they make out.

Damn, Yuta was right about them, is all you can think as you watch her running her fingers through Mr. Moon’s hair, rubbing herself in his lap.

Then something else shifts in the darkness.

A shadowy figure shifts in front of the scene, standing outside one of the windows in the bushes. 

And in the next instant you realize that the shadowy figure is none other than Haechan. And he’s definitely jerking off. You can see his arm moving.

You’re sure he thinks no one could possibly be watching him. But you are. The watcher is being watched, and you can feel yourself growing a little warm and wet from the sight of Haechan highlighted by the glow from the window. 

You can’t properly see him from this angle, can’t see the way that his fingers wrap around his cock, but you can definitely tell what he’s doing. The way he strokes himself to the sight of them in front of him. God, he’s gross, but you love it. Heat pools between your legs, watching him like this.

You don’t even notice that Taeil and the secretary have left the scene until you notice Haechan shuddering, a quiet moan breaking the otherwise silent night. You can just barely see in the light that comes through the window, the way that there is a splatter of cum on the window. 

Damn. You feel warm, craving to be touched. 

You don’t hang around and wait for Haechan to find you, you flee back to your tent. The other woman you’re sharing your tent with is passed out completely. She hadn’t been drinking tonight, but she had taken a sleeping pill, so she is well and truly out when you slide back into your sleeping bag, when you wiggle around to get your hand inside your panties, when you plunge your fingers inside yourself, thumb swirling against your clit as you imagine a scenario where you were there in those bushes with Haechan, him fucking you while you watched the beautiful secretary ride Taeil at the table. 

You cum quietly without the other woman in the tent even stirring. And a few minutes later, as your racing heart settles, the secretary quietly returns to the tent, smelling like a masculine body wash as she tucks herself back into the sleeping bag beside yours. 

You level your breath, hold still, and soon you fall back asleep again, and in the morning you’ve pretty much forgotten everything from the night before, including the encounter between the boss and the secretary, as well as you witnessing Haechan succumbing to his perversion.

You essentially forget all about it until a few weeks later when Ten excitedly tells you and Haechan that he swears he almost walked in on Taeil and the secretary in the break room. But it just sounds like they were both standing in there when he walked in, though that little tidbit is enough to jumpstart your memory and that early morning comes back to you.

It’s a few days later when the topic returns while you’re out for dinner and drinks with several of your coworkers.

Ten is once again excitedly talking about Taeil and his secretary, insistently asking everyone else, “Don’t you think something is going on?” and “I know we don’t have proof, but I really think….” He doesn’t have to finish the sentence for everyone at your table to know he means that he’s pretty sure they’re fucking.

You look over at Haechan. 

He has proof. So do you. You’ve both witnessed it with your own eyes, although you’ve not mentioned it to him since you remembered it a few days ago. That’s in part because you don’t know how to bring it up to him without admitting that you also saw him jerking off while watching them. 

Haechan looks at you. A knowing look as if he could possibly know what you’re thinking about right now.

He doesn’t admit to anything then, not in front of your coworkers, and it makes you wonder why he’s keeping the secret to himself. He didn’t hide the secret of Shotaro and his girlfriend hooking up before outing them at that camping trip your friends had taken about a year ago. You’re curious about why he’s hiding it, and you’re curious about what his knowing look had meant.

There’s no way that he knows that you also know.

Later that night as you all start to head home from the pub, you head in the opposite direction from where everyone else seems to have parked. You’re headed for the bus stop since your roommate has borrowed your car for the night. 

You don't make it far from the door before someone calls out behind you.

“Can I walk with you?” He asks, jogging a little to catch up with you. “Don’t look at me like that. I just want to make sure you get there safely.”

You immediately wipe away your expression of surprise at his offer. “Yeah, you can walk with me. Thank you, Haechan.”

He just nods, and for a minute the two of you walk in companionable silence. But then you ask, “Well, what do you think? Think they’re fucking?”

That seems to catch him off-guard. A startled laugh tears out of him. “Yeah, they absolutely are.”

Is he going to elaborate on that?

You bump your shoulder against his, hoping if you just make all of this seem like friendly inquiry based off of that earlier conversation that he’ll be more likely to open up. For some reason you really want to hear him say it. You want to finally hear Haechan admit to you that he’s a perverted voyeur who has watched your friends and now your boss while they have sex. “You sound so certain, Haechan. Why?”

“I have my reasons.” He shrugs a little, his lips tilting up on the one side in a smirk. 

God. You want to kiss him.

You want him, and the combination of the cool air and the alcohol warm in your veins leads you to pull yourself closer to him. You wrap your hands around his arm, snuggling up against him, and you catch a whiff of that warm summery scent of him like spice, citrus, and something else distinctly Haechan. He doesn’t flinch or say a single thing as you basically hug his arm. As a matter of fact, his fingers flex a little, stretching out minimally to brush against your hip before he closes his fingers in a fist.

You wish he wouldn’t keep this a secret. Maybe if he would just admit to you how he knows, if he confessed to you the truth of his reasons, maybe you would tell him too that he might be a voyeur but you’re an exhibitionist, and something about those two truths could work out between you.

But he doesn’t say that. He actually falls silent as you come to stand beside the bus stop. There are others waiting there too, but your eyes are only on Haechan. 

You pretend not to notice when he finally looks over at you. You pretend not to see the way that he’s studying you. You pretend that you don’t notice when Haechan inhales a little sharply, turning his face away to look across the street. He just keeps silent, keeps still as he seems to stare at nothing, deep in thought.

You decide to speak since he won’t.

“I feel like you see a lot of things that other people don’t, Haechan. I think you keep a lot of secrets.” Again, you feel his hand flex, and this time when his fingers stretch out, they rest against your hip and don’t pull away. You’re not even sure he’s aware of it. You continue, “You can share secrets sometimes. I have secrets too. We could trade.”

You want him to know that even though he’s a pervert, you’re a bit of a pervert too. 

You lean your head to rest it on his shoulder, and he looks at you again. Your eyes meet. 

“Can’t you just share the secret of how you know with absolute certainty that Taeil and his secretary are fucking?” Your fingernails dig into his jacket sleeve, a whine in your voice as you gaze at Haechan’s face. You notice the way his throat bobs as he stares down at you. 

“I don’t think you want to know my secrets,” he says, looking away from you. His voice shakes a little bit, and you wonder if he’s truly that nervous about you learning about his creepy habit. You swear you can hear his heart pounding beneath the ear that you have against his shoulder. “You wouldn’t look at me the same.”

The sound that comes out of you then is not a nice one. A snort of laughter. But you’re amused. He must think you’d think of him as some gross weirdo, but it’s really quite the opposite. Ever since that first night you caught him watching Shotaro and his girlfriend in the hot tub, you’ve actually found it surprisingly hot to think of him being a voyeur. 

“I don’t know about that, Haechan. Maybe I have secrets that would make you look at me differently.” You tilt your face so you can better see his. He looks down at you with such a look of doubt, that it almost pulls another laugh from you. He really doesn’t believe that you could ever do anything naughty. “Maybe I could tell you a thing or two that would make you finally see me as less than a perfect angel,” you say, and you put a tiny bit of challenge into your voice.

Haechan straightens up. His fingers withdraw from where he’s been absentmindedly touching that little sliver of skin bared between your shirt and the waistband of your pants. Haechan shrugs until you’re dislodged from his shoulder, but he’s relaxed as he stands there beside you and says, “Alright. Not tonight, though. Let’s keep our secrets just a little while longer.”

The squeal of brakes alerts you to your bus pulling up.

Before you walk away, you want to hear him promise you that he’s not just saying this tonight, that it will actually happen. 

“Promise?” You hold your pinky finger up to him, daring him to make the promise. 

Haechan hesitates for half a second, but then his pinky loops around yours, squeezing tight. “I promise, angel. We’ll trade secrets and truths someday soon.”

Your heart lights up with Haechan’s promise. A trade of secrets someday soon. That’s good enough for you. Before you can think about it too much, you smack a kiss to the back of Haechan’s hand, and then you walk away quickly.

Unable to resist, you turn to look at him over your shoulder. Haechan is still standing there, looking after you with an amused and bemused expression. You smile and watch the way his smile rises as well.

“Text me when you make it home!” He shouts behind you as you climb aboard the bus. You wave in acknowledgement.

You feel giddy, excited. You’d think it’s a date you’ve just planned given how excited you are, but really it’s just going to be a trade of secrets at an undisclosed date. A trade of secrets, a trade of truths. 

As you sit down, you look out the window one more time.

Haechan is still standing there, looking right at you. You don’t know what that look on his face means. But he smiles a little, offering you a small wave that you return, and before your bus can even pull away, he turns on his heel and walks away back up the street.

previous chapter || next chapter  (Coming Soon)

a/n: part of this was of course inspired by a scene in workplace (mis)conduct the taeil and y/n workplace romance kinktober drabble

And I know that it seems like there's a whole lot more Renjun action in this fic than Haechan, but I promise !!!! there's a lot more of the good Haechan stuff that this story is meant to have coming soon! Like... next chapter? maybe? You'll have to keep reading to see!

[aemiron-main]

do you think the multiple timeline plot is a plot point that’s more introduced in S4/for the HenVecWard TM plot specifically?

Like is there anything from earlier seasons/not related to Henry you would consider as proof that we’ve been seeing multiple timelines the whole time?

I think it would be kinda odd if multiple timelines are so important to the plot but there’s only real proof of it in S4 so that’s why I’m asking

I LIKE COMPLETELY 100% BELIEVE IT BUT IM REWATCHING RN AND I WANNA SEE IF THERES ANYTHING I SHOULD BE LOOKING OUT FOR

OOHOHOHOH SO!! THERE IS A LOTTTTTT OF ALTERNATE TIMELINE STUFF IN PREVIOUS SEASONS!!!

I totally agree that it would be odd if there was only proof of it in S4- thankfully, there’s evidence across all seasons!

So, let’s get into it!

Evidence of Multiple Timelines/Timeline Weirdness Prior To Season 4

So, one of the main things re: multiple timelines pre-S4 is Will’s vanishing. I touched on this in the Edward video too, but I also have a bunch of posts on it!

Basically, we saw two different Wills back in S1, each possibly from a different timeline.

I made this post, this post, and this post about Warm Will versus Cool Will, but TLDR, we see two different Wills on the night he vanished, one with longer, shaggier hair, who looks older & more exhausted & has cooler colour grading (hence why he’s Cool Will) and one with shorter, neater hair who looks younger & less tired & has warmer colour grading (hence why he’s Warm Will):

And there’s also the two different versions of the Byers’ phone- both versions of the Byers’ phone have “AREA CODE 501” written on the white part, but one version has nothing else underneath “AREA CODE 501” whereas the other version has some extra, unreadable line of text under it:

Which, not only is “501” the wrong area code for Hawkins, but “area 501” also connects to NINA (and all of the NINA timeline weirdness as a result), because the NINA coordinates from S4 lead to area 51.

And then there’s also the two different Wills in Castle Byers- the Will that El sees in Castle Byers in the void is different than the Will that the audience saw singing in Castle Byers (see this post and this post).

How are they different? Well, the Will that El sees in the void is more exhausted, barely able to move or speak- whereas the Will that the audience saw singing in Castle Byers has enough energy to sing and shiver.

And each of them also has a different version of Castle Byers- the Will that El sees in the void has drawings on the wall that are a.) in colour and b.) noticeably wet, wheres the Will that was singing and shivering has drawings on the wall that a.) have no colour and b.) are dry:

And one of the BIGGEST pieces of evidence of multiple timelines in the whole show actually comes from the end of S1 & then ties into the beginning of S2- the newspapers.

I talked about this in this post, this post, and this post, but the article we see at the end of S1 about Will’s vanishing has a TON of alternate timeline stuff.

It’s the article that mentions Richard Brenner, who’s likely Martin’s timeline counterpart or something along those lines (ie if Martin was Henry’s Brenner, Richard was likely Edward’s Brenner, especially considering the connections between Eddie Munson and Reefer Rick versus the subtext there re: Edward Creel and Richard Brenner, especially with Reefer Rick being a drug dealer versus Richard Brenner being the head of narcotics at HNL) (see posts like this post and this post and a bunch of other posts LMAO)

Not to mention all of the weirdness with Joyce in this article, and the fact that according to this article, Joyce claims that she found Will as a test subject at HNL, with no mention of the upside down:

Which ties into something I’ve talked about re: how it’s weird that the lab let will go to a normal hopsital- they were ready to straight up KILL HOPPER to prevent any info about the UD/lab getting leaked, and yet, they supposedly just let will go to a normal hospital instead of keeping him at the lab?

Plus, we never actually SAW joyce and jim leave the UD or the lab with Will- if they somehow escaped the lab & got will to a regular hospital after escaping the lab, how did they get through all of those guarded and locked doors that they had to go through to get to the mothergate?

Especially without a keycard and being vastly outnumbered + carrying a dying kid?

So, I wonder if that scene of Will at the hospital might be a different timeline where Will was found in one of the rooms at HNL, rather than in the UD, and if Joyce and Hopper broke in & got a keycard the way Hopper did earlier in S1/were able to get in and out of the lab & to a normal hospital more easily because Will was in one of the upper rooms & not down through all of those extra guarded doors/quaratine rooms that they had to go through to get to the mothergate.

Especially since that newspaper where Joyce seemingly claimed that Will was found as a HNL test subject also says that Will was currently at Hawkins General Hospital- which is where we see him at the end of S1, so it would make sense for those scenes to be the same timeline as that newspaper clipping (and therefore also in the same timeline as Richard Brenner):

And also, that S1 article is also DIFFERENT from the S2 article about Will’s vanishing despite the two of them seemingly being the SAME ARTICLE, with the same title, the same picture, and the same author (Benjamin Buck), but with different content- they seem to be alternate timeline versions of the same article.

There’s also the matter of Will’s poster and eye colour- the S1 poster says that his eyes are brown, but the Will we see in S2 has greenish-greyish eyes. So, yet again, we seem to have two different Wills, especially since they make a point of showing us what Will would look like with brown eyes when flayed, so they arent just calling his green eyes “brown” as a catch-all term.

Which, speaking of Flayed Will’s eyes, why did Will’s eyes turn brown when he was flayed but Billy’s eyes didn’t?

Why did Billy’s eyes stay blue (although sometimes becoming a more saturated shade of blue much like 1979 massacre Henward’s eyes) whereas Will’s turned brown?

I personally wonder if Will’s eyes changing colour is connected to all of the twinner/timeline stuff, especially with the scene in TFS where Alice asks “Henry” where Henry is and “Henry” responds with “he’s right here,” as if he himself isn’t Henry- does flaying somehow combine the two versions of people from alternate timelines?

And as a result, did we get Edward and Henry in the same body/connected mentally somehow/combined (therefore explaining that Alice scene), and were the two Wills combined, therefore explaining the eye colour change if the other Will has brown eyes?

I feel like there’s something here re: flaying & the idea of the hivemind being active across timelines (ie if two people are flayed, but theyre both in different timelines, would they be able to communicate with eachother via the hivemind/would they be connected to the same hivemind?)

Is that why Billy’s eyes didn’t turn brown? Because Billy’s alternate timeline self also has blue eyes? Anyway!

S1 is also the season where Mr Clarke brings up the idea of parallel universes/infinite alternate timelines:

And Connie Frazier from S1 is likely Alice Creel- but not Henry’s sister, Alice- Edward’s mother, Alice (see: this post ), hence how she’s still alive after 1959- she’s not the Alice that we saw laying dead on the floor, this Alice was an adult in 1959 & is Edward’s mother, not his sister, and is Victor’s wife, not his daughter, as according to the Edward paper/Indianapolis Gazette, Edward’s mother was named Alice and his sister was named Virginia, his mother and sister are swapped compared to Henry.

And then, in S2, we have my beloved 8:15gate, which, TLDR, there’s footage on Bob’s JVC on Halloween when Will was using it to record that a.) has timestamps that change when they shouldnt (ie, when Will was supposedly recording the footage, it says 8:04, but when Joyce watches that EXACT same clip back, it suddenly says 8:15) and b.) has footage that shouldnt even exist, because some of the scenes that he supposedly recorded are scenes where he HAD THE CAMERA DOWN AND WAS NOT RECORDING! That footage shouldnt even exist! And yet, it’s there, with a messed up timestamp.

Not to mention all of the stuff in S2 that directly contradicts TFS & reinforces the idea of multiple timelines (for example, in S2, Bob talks about how Joyce didnt even know his name in highschool- whereas in TFS, not only do the two know eachother well in highschool, but Bob also claims to have known Joyce since first grade).

And in S3, there’s a bunch of stuff (including the idea that S3 is its own weird timeline), but one example is what I talked about in this post re: the reference to temporal displacement in S3 and there’s a bunch more in S3/I’m just keeping this relatively brief LMAO!

And that’s not even all of it across the seasons! Not by a LONG shot, these are just a few little examples! The multiple timeline weirdness stretches all across ST, through every season and affects every character- although Henward is more overtly tied to it than the other characters, ALL of them are still tied to it, and there’s evidence of multiple timelines in every season- hell, like I said, some of the best evidence comes from S1, because that’s where we find out about Richard!

[arvensimp]

YFSK Preview, pt. 4.1

I know i've been super duper quiet, but I promise there's a good reason. Please forgive me and accept this teaser for part 4.

“Hey! I dunno if you’ve been keeping track on your end, but Kiki is gonna be graduating from Blueberry, and I know it would mean the absolute world to him if you were able to attend the ceremony.” Carmine called, nearly out of the blue one day to inform you. Her brother had apparently been a part of a trial class that not only earned a high school diploma but also continued on for a few more years as part of a pilot Bachelor’s degree program in pokemon battling. From what you understood, it was basically like a feeder system to train new gym leaders and Elite Four hopefuls.

You look down at your ballooning tummy,

"Congratulations to him! When is it exactly though…?"

You wince and resist the urge to suck your teeth when Carmine gives you the date.

"Ahhh... I'm so sorry, I've got something at that time."

"For real? You can't just ask for time away from your league for even a weekend? This would REALLY mean the world to Kiki..."

"I'm sorry, but…I won't actually be allowed to fly by that point."

"Allowed? What kinda terrorism have you gotten into?"

You snort a laugh. "Pssh, nah. It's... It's medical actually. Here. Lemme, uh..." Without hanging up, you send over the most recent ultrasound photos. Your baby still kinda looks like a Munna in there, but she should get the point. Or, at least you assume she does when you hear the sound of crashing and fumbling on her end.

"You're having a BABY?????"

"Uh...haha, yeah. The due date is, like, a week after Kieran's graduation, so... I, y'know, can't fly. I'm really sorry. I'll be sure to send a gift though!"

"A BABY?"

"Yup. I can hardly believe it myself, most days."

"I didn't even know you were seeing anyone! Who is this guy? Why didn't you let your incredible Unovan friends suss him out for you?"

Another wince. "...About that. Yeah... He's not...um. In the picture."

"What? How? Why? Whomst would even dare? Do I need to kick some ass?"

"It's...." You still haven’t gotten used to talking about the subject. "It's a lot. Don't. ...Don't worry! Really! I have tons of support! It's fine. For real."

Carmine absolutely isn't buying it. "Mm. Fine. I guess I get why you can't make it to the graduation. Could we come visit afterwards though? Like I get you probably wouldn't want us there immediately after he graduates. But...maybe like a few months later? Give the thing a chance to develop an immune system?"

"I can't promise I'll be a great host, but... Well, it would be nice."

"Don't worry yourself none! I've changed diapers and stuff before if you end up needing a nap while we're around!"

-

So around the time Basil is 3 months old, the Kitakami pair head to Paldea.

Of course, Basil is having a rough time of it, screaming his little lungs out as they're knocking on the door, so you can only hope that you don’t look as frazzled as you feel when you welcome them in.

"Hey! Hello! Please, come in, come in. Make yourselves at home.” You give the pair a hug at the same time, barely able to register them beyond the fog of ‘TAKE CARE OF BASIL, TAKE CARE OF CRYING PROGENY, TAKE CARE OF BABY’ that alarms through your brain. “I'm really sorry, but I just need to feed Basil real fast. That should hopefully get him sleeping and happy again."

You usher them in and invite them to sit on the sofa, the TV is theirs, and you hide away in the bedroom to nurse. A few minutes later, Carmine gently knocks on the door and asks if she can be of any help. You joke through the wood that the dishes need doing when she presses past the feeble ‘it’s fine!’ that you offer.

"Kiki! Take care of the dishes, yeah?"

"On it!" You hear, softer.

"Okay, what else?" She continues.

"No! Just. Just relax, please."

"Nah, I'm gonna tidy up. Kay? You just keep feeding the chonklet there, and we can catch up when you're done."

You come back out to the room, and it's not Clean, but it's definitely more put together. You also hear the hum of the dishwasher from the kitchen.

"You guys...." You start tearing up, and both siblings immediately swoop in to hold you. Carmine strokes your hair, shushing you. Now that you’ve got your child content, you have a moment to comprehend your guests.

Kieran is. Bigger.

"I... I promise I'm not this pathetic! I can handle this. Plus, I... I have folks here who can help... It's just hard..." You snivel, sounding way more pathetic than you mean to sound.

"It's okay that it's hard..." Kieran finally pipes up and his voice is definitely deeper since you last heard him. Not a bass or something, but there's been a change there. "This is more or less the hardest thing in the world, right? And we all know you're the strongest person there is, so...ya know. It's okay. You...you can do this. And you can feel overwhelmed."

-

They end up staying for about a week or so, and on the night before they're due to fly back, Kieran pulls you aside while Carmine is grabbing takeaway for dinner. He's fidgeting with his hair a bit, tapping his foot, but he's doing his best to meet your eye.

"I'm staying." He declares.

"What? Like you're gonna look for a job here?"

"Yeah! I know I'm not as strong as you, but I'm certain I could get a job in your league or...or maybe even at your alma mater, maybe. I... I'd need to do a teaching cert in Paldea for that, probably, but..."

"Wow! So you liked it that much here? That's great, Kieran. I can help you learn the language if you want. I can also see if Nemona has any real estate connections. We'll try to find you a place when you're ready to get back, and hopefully by then you'll have a job, and you can get started wi--"

"No! I mean... I'm. I'm not going back to Kitakami." One of his hands grabs yours and the other rests gently on Basil, sleeping soundly in your arms. "He needs...a...a father figure, y'know? I..." Kieran swallows thickly. "I can do that. I'm... I'm a man now."

"Kieran..." You shift slightly, freeing a hand from your bundle while keeping him balanced in your arms. You trace a palm along the older boy--no, man's cheek, your callouses having grown softer in recent months. You can feel where he's begun to grow consistent stubble. Wow... He really did grow up.

"I... I'm not going to keep you from reaching your fullest potential out there. You're welcome, more than welcome, to come visit any time, but... You're not thinking clearly about this. About what you think you're signing up for."

"I AM though!" He raises his voice, showing some hints of the anger he holds onto. "I'm READY for this! God, why can't anyone TRUST me?!"

All the yelling wakes up Basil, who cries, startled. Kieran quickly scoops him up and out of your arms, attempting to soothe the baby.

"Aw, geez... I'm sorry, little guy... I didn't mean to make you upset... Shh, shh... It'll be okay..."

The momentary flare of anger you felt at having your son torn from your grip is placated as you watch Kieran hold him so tenderly. Your heart melts... You lose all affection you may have secretly held onto in your heart for Arven, that loser.

Kieran is here. Kieran is capable. Kieran... Kieran can do this.

"Okay..." You softly tell him once Basil has calmed, the single word hanging in the quiet between you for a moment.

"...Okay?" He parrots.

"You... You can stay. You... You'll be his father."

Then y'all DO IT.

THE END

april fools :)

[charlottehuff]

As you guys know (by "you guys" I mean the two people who read my post) due recent life events (read: small mental breakdown and new T. Swift album) I have made the terrible decision to start talking to my ex-situationship again (well technically we were never not talking, we just talked way way way less than we did before).

And here I compiled a list of funny and/or ironic things about this whole situation:

We still have a Spotify fusion playlist from when we went on the car, and because our music tastes are so different, there are usually only a couple songs that belong to the both of us. So yesterday I check and the only song in common was New Rules by Dua Lipa, which is just hilariously iconic

When we were "together" I tried to get him to listen to Folklore and Evermore cause he likes that kind of indie music sometimes and I thought it would be could to enjoy them together. He never did. But this past week I have been raging on so much about Tay Tay, that I mentioned again he might like some songs and he asked for 3 recommendations to give it a try. This man not only admitted he quite liked them but proceeded to give me individual analysis of each of them and talk about what they meant and that stuff. THE AUDACITY TO DO THAT NOW!!!

One of the songs was Tolerate it, which is casually one of the songs I listened to and cried to on repeat back in November when we broke up. He did not make the connection to our very one-sided effort relationship.

Today I got him to listen to The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, and before listening he made the following joke "A song name after me haha". He was making a joke about his dick. But for different reasons he could not be more right.

He also had the audacity to like it and quote back to me one of my favourite lyrics in it.

I have now made a playlist with all the ones I think he might enjoy and honestly the amount of them that I have cried with because of him is ironically high

A few days ago he made a memory muscle mistake and called me Sweetie, and then I didn't respond and he profoundly apologised and like, I just completely changed the subject cause how do you answer that?

He also forgot my birthday last month and I am still kinda salty about that even tho we were barely talking but like... He could have remembered... (That one's on me, I'm aware)

Anyway, here is today's public diary entry cause why the hell not, what's the worst that could happen? This goes viral? Hell no!

If you've made it this far, thank you. But also... Why?

[val-ur-pal]

IN SEMI-DEFENSE OF JACKSON <3

Jackson hate is a little forced imo cause he’s really just a teenage boy battling depression and grief and is constantly stressed and anxious about things being out of his control for really no reason. Like you have to remember Jackson has known these people for only a couple of months at this point and they bullied him and Exer made his life shit for a good bit of it 😭 now I love Exer that’s my princess and Jackson has made mistakes but it’s what makes him an interesting and dynamic character, people complain all the time that Jackson is boring and one note but he’s really not if you pay attention to his flaws as character traits and not just “oh Jackson here we go again 🙄”

+

For just season 3 stuff so far he’s kept 1. leaving therapy a secret from Pam 2. Not telling anyone about the diary and Used the diary to manipulate Exer (both consciously and unconsciously) and 3. Spent time with the reds as a form of getting information and its kinda manipulation tbh so I just wanted to give my 2 cents on it in defense and criticism of Jackson cause he’s paralleling Exer in a lot of ways and it’s unfair that he gets shit on so much when Exer is loved and praised by the fandom (again Exer is my favourite character).

+

1. Leaving therapy a secret from Pam is not a good thing Jackson is doing, he shouldn’t have kept it from her and he shouldn’t have lied that it wasn’t that big of a deal because a big theme in this comic is that keeping secrets and lying really hurts people and relationships and you need to be open and honest with those you love. That being said it’s a really hard subject that he’s still getting over himself, therapy was a safe space for him where he was finally in control and was heard not just listened to. He’s still getting over this and he could barely even talk to Harry for weeks without feeling horrible so yea it’s a really troubling thing for him to think about. He told the detention kids because sometimes it’s easier to be open with friends who get the situation than your girlfriend who you don’t want to disappoint because she was so happy you were getting better and how do you tell her your world fell apart all over again and you’re scared. I’m not saying this excuses his actions I just think there needs to be a bit more understanding here, Jackson should have told her sooner and tell her that he’s not happy about it but he’s also not ready to talk about it just yet, it’ll be good for him to open up to Pam more instead of trying to keep up an illusion that he’s doing great but it’s a hard thing to shake.

+

2. Telling anyone about the Diary, especially Exer is not fucking easy at all. Some of you are making it sound like if he just told them everything would go smoothly and well and that he’s the bad guy for keeping it hidden. So go on and tell me how exactly you’d tell the person who bullied you over petty reasons that you might have accidentally manipulated and fabricated their feelings and that you’re the reason he apologized, you’re the reason he got a job and started over, you’re the reason he confessed as is dating his boyfriend and that none of it is real and that you did it all by accident. Because that’s exactly what Jackson thinks he did, while I don’t agree with Jackson’s theory he’s convinced of it himself. For all Jackson knows Exer really is that prick back in season 1 and the only reason he changed is cause he wrote it down. That’s a lot of weight on your shoulders especially the whole romance thing I mean Jackson wholeheartedly thinks he accidentally manipulated Exer into falling in love with someone and that’s a very heavy burden to carry cause wtf do you do with that as a 17 y/o depressed child. Not to mention that the Diary is his therapy journal so that’s his one healthy outlet destroyed and he feels guilty about ever coping using it so that only fuels his self hatred and mental health issues. All of this without mentioning he’s still grieving over his mother who gave him the damn thing and now he can’t even have that once connection he has with her because of course it’s tied to Exer the person who’s made his life so difficult up till now. NOW!! Pause, this does not excuse his actions but it does explain them, Jackson is not in the right here because at the end of the day he does need to talk to Ex about it because, accident or not, he’s manipulating him and he needs to know. It’s actually incredibly interesting how much this parallels to season 1 Exer, Exer who started purposely using his magic to cause harm and then slowly losing control and doing it by accident (all while not telling Jackson he has magic which made it hurt so much more) versus Jackson’s harm being on accident at first but now he’s experimenting and knowingly causing changes to Exer. This is a big flaw of Jackson’s, he wants to understand before he takes action but only in ways that benefit him. He wanted to understand Exer’s magic before he told Pam and now he wants to understand his own before he tells anyone and we all saw how that turned out with Pam and the others in season 1/2 so Jack’s definitely going to learn his lesson. Remember that if Exer got that mad cause he was jealous over petty things how do you think Jackson, who thinks he’s one of the only reason Exer became nice, thinks Exer is gonna react to something as big as this!!

+

3. This is a bad thing aaallll around and Jackson needs to stop 😭!!! Jackson hanging out with the reds just because he wants to study Exer is not a good thing but it’s an interesting character flaw!! This goes back to what I was saying earlier, he wants to know and understand and will fixate on it so bad he neglects the consequences. Not only is he harming the reds by manipulating them into thinking he cares and is friends with them he’s also really hurting himself. As much as I would love for them all to be friends again, Jackson just isn’t in that headspace right now where he can. He’s so obsessed with the magic and how it’s affected him that he can’t get over the bullying, he can’t get over how Exer used his magic to hurt him, he can’t get over him hurting Pam, he can’t accept the many apologies, he hasn’t even accepted that Exer wasn’t in control all the time. He just can’t move on. He needs to move on and not because what happened wasn’t hurtful and is all in the past now (it’s been like 2 months since Halloween mind you) but because he needs to let go and prioritize himself instead of holding onto all this anger. He’s not just an asshole who can’t get over being bullied (which like even if he was that’s valid to a degree), he’s so obsessed with regaining control of his life and understanding what the fuck is going on that he’s actively choosing to hurt himself to hang out with people he doesn’t like. He doesn’t have to be their friends and he doesn’t have to forgive them, yes they’ve gotten better and yes they’re sorry but tbh if my bullies apologized and everything I would not forgive them and I’d certainly not be friends with them. They just need to go their separate ways until Jackson knows what he wants. But it’s hard. Being 17 and struggling with mental health (IN THE 80s!!) is very very hard and that’s before you even begin with the magic shit so cut him some slack.

Anyways this was so long and rambley I’m sorry, I just don’t love the Jackson hate I see when he and Exer are so similar but he doesn’t get the grace of being adored and pawed at. Do I love Jackson? Not as much as I do Exer but I get him, I get being a teen trying to save myself while everything around me keeps trying to push me down so I respond in anger and I’m so over everyone being so mean to him. I could go on for ages and make more points but that’s it for now so!!!! Anyways support Paola on patreon 🩷🩷🩷

[not-souleaterpost]

ENTP CRONA DUMP

Not going back on my word, just forgot to post a dump of "ENTP Crona" stuff I planed to just post all at once in a year, but after trying to stop doing stuff like that, I just thought I post what I had and be done with it.

, the thing even I don't really find funny, but I think I have to do it to get it out and book end it. A lot of it isn't really funny, some of it may sound a bit edgy or abrasive, but it's just in good fun, still putting it under the "keep reading thing" because of the amount and shittyness of the "content" Enjoy or yeah...sorry

ENTP Crona experiencing a soul rejection, screaming in agony because of not being able to deal with figuring out if "video games are art" or "video games aren't art" is the more contrarian oppinion at the moment

ENTP Crona reading shizophrenia symptoms on google "Wow, he is literally me"

ENTP Crona fleeing into the desert, going down a hole to cry

Ragnarok "Wait, the cow already killed Medusa a year ago, why we doing this bitch shit again?"

ENTP Crona "I posted a deliberately controversial and edgy meme into the group chat again, when they all see it, I wont be able to deal with how angry everyone will be..."

Soul: "You cant just nonstop spam shit on the internet, people will think you don't have a life"

ENTP Crona: "But I kinda don't..."

Soul: "Still writting on every single subject for 10 hours straight must be tiring and exhaustive, take a break"

ENTP Crona: "But I wrote everything in the last 5 minutes

Soul: "Heh, dont like partys either? Guess reading the room can be stressful even for somebody as cool as me sometimes-"

ENTP Crona "No, I can read it just fine, just then choose to say the thing that sets the roof on fire and regret it five seconds later.

ENTP Crona trying to figure out if Maka subscribes to the theory that Holden is a child abuser himself in "The Catcher in the Rye", only if yes, to arguee that not even the creep teacher was one and it is a misreading, and its actually about idk, read it in school so cant even come up with an explantion.

ENTP Crona trying to cheer up a crying Maka, after she got made fun of for liking bad music by Soul

"No, I like Speeding bullet 2 heaven too! Well except the Beavis and Butthead skits, even I am not that contrarian"

ENTP Crona curled up in the corner of the dark dungeon, not able to face the world, cause liking Ringo Star is to mainstream now but changing to hating him is just too painful...

ENTP Crona after everyone gets confronted with their lives just being fiction

"Well actually I prefere the anime ending"

But after mostly everyone agrees

"But, actually the manga works in a certain way afterall-"

ENTP Crona during the anime only scene where Maka and Crona talk about Maka's mom - its the same scene lol, remember those 4th wall breaking snide comments Crona barely managed to not blabber out loud lol

ENTP Crona "Marvel movies were allways bad"

Marie "Oh you aren't dumb and incompetent!"

ENTP Crona "Why did it took me 8 hours to put together the IKEA table?"

Marie "Oh dont be to hard on yourself, screwing in the table legs upside down could happen to anybody!"

Maka confronting Medusa: I'm here to save ENTP Crona and Mary!

Medusa: Nah, they both are still stuck in the maze going in circles

ENTP Crona after a tourist asks for directions in Death City: "I'll be honest, even though I am living here for years now, I myself cant deal finding my home without google maps"

ENTP Crona "I'm the Joker, baby! (Jared Leto version)"

ENTP Crona "-oh so a glorbo, or smol bean, cinamon bun is a charachter like Paulie from the Sopranos!"

ENTP Crona after trying to read "Finnegans Wake" "Damn, thats how high I still have to climb..."

ENTP Crona watching X:RA "Wow, I actually get 90 percent of the wordplay! This show is great!"

MGMT Patty : "Time to pretend..."

*ENTP Crona visualising all the different ways to take out and kill the people around*

Ragnarok "And I thought I was the psychopath! We aren't even eating souls anymore, whats guipi wrong with you?

ENTP "Grocery shopping is boring and I thought about the 3 different storys I'll never write down enough for one hour..."

ENTP Crona "-and that's why the metodology that is used to diagnose diseases by only relying on a checklist of data points that may have many different origin points is flawed

Stein "I am the doctor with 10 years experience, take your antibiotics prescription and get out!"

Stein, litting a cigarete after ENTP Crona goes out after apologising "Damn, the kid may be right, shit..."

ENTP Crona be like "Actually, I think Epstein is still alive"

ENTP Crona "Yeah Myerrs brigs and Horrorscopes are the same... Because they both actually are describing something and aren't completly wrong, if you know you know...

ENTP Crona actually getting a tatoo even though it is a stupid thing to do in general, because thats the only way to remember Maka's birthday. Cause aint nobody remembering more than 4 digits...

ENTP Crona using all experience and time to reflect, to start a dramatic uplifting speech that leads into Maka defeating the Kishin with a punch- Ah wait thats just what happened in the anime again lol

ENTP Crona: "I wore a dress for most of my life, yet that is not as embarassing as riding on an electric scooter"

ENTP Crona "Oh ofcourse I'm to scatterbrained and lazy to actually finish a webcomic, that's why I included an in universe callout by a charachter, so I will stay motivated out of spite and want of being better than those, proving the mean pixels wrong!"

ENTP Crona: -the setting being the aftermath of a nuclear testing site is a brilliant synedoche of our society pre and post world war 2, how the atomic age is nearly unrecognisable, being both so much more advanced that previous incarnations do not even look human in retrospect, while exagerating ourselfs into cartoon versions of ourselfs do to paranoia and stereotypes, shared faster and faster, that we soak up like Sponges, being the perfect worker and consumer in one - in a way thats Rock Bottom, the breakdown of communication, only restored by recognising the humanity of the other, even if they look at us with even more potent disgust than we already do.

Maka: Wait, I thought these iceberg videos were just supposed to list of fun facts and triva about Spongebob

ENTP Crona: What gave you that idea, Maka?

TERF Maka: I STILL hate J K Rowling

EC: "Borat is racist-"

M: "No the joke is that he exposes the prejudices of the common american person-"

EC "against Kazakhstanis"

M: "No no- wait... you are right..."

EC: "If MF Ghost was with the culture, it would have used Phonk instead of Eurobeat"

EC: "Where the fuck is Marioh Judah?"

*EC annoys excalibur into quitting*

EC :"Im like prince, everybody thinks In gay but actually im homophobic-"

EC: "Non-cellular phones actually had their purpose - like if somebody called them, you would either know nobody is home, or the person who answered could either inform you where the one you are calling is if you didnt reach the person or just find them - also the fact it was in the same spot ment nobody lost it and could allways find it when needed and it never ran out of battery, also-"

M: "If you don't like the phonecase I gifted you just say so...

R: "Dude, dont we still use mirrors for comunication"

EC "Think Im constrained by the limitations of canons?"

TRAD Tsubaki "Well they didn't make a sign of the cross in the church, so they kinda deserved being slayn by Ragnarok..."

M "Hey you are looking down, everything ok?

EC "Thanks for caring, but the thing is, to explain it all, all the connections and reasons and evidence would make me just look more weird and whiny, and this all, including the fact that I cant even say why I cant say without being whiny and long winged is part of it...

EC "I used trouble not descending into negative loops of self pity and disgust with myself and the world... But then I just developed a hyperfixation on not-having-hyperfixations"

???? Death: IDK

EC *reading the bible* "It even predicted people obssesing over lolcows with the whole golden calf story, damn...

EC: Rip Kissinger

EC: Slouching? No, I'm just posture-divergent

EC: I do love myself - one has to love even their biggest enemy...

EC in the future:

M: Are you really ready for children?

EC: I accidentally watched a trailer for despicable me 4, and after hearing all the pandering 80s song and repetitive family hinjix humor I just thought "Oh, how cozy would this be to watch with my Kids and Wife!"

So yeah, I CAN deal with it

[sunshineman2-0]

Art Teacher!Reader x Math Teacher!Sanemi Shinazugawa x Science Teacher!Kyojuro Rengoku

Reader is black female

Modern A.U.

Tw: Kyojuro is kinda a creep here. Also Sanemi gets a little possessive. Both they ass are asses. Mentions of stalking. Your landlord putting someone in their place. Shinjuro being an idiot. He's not homophobic, just an ass. (Bare with him)

I dont condone any of the actions depicted. This is only for entertainment purposes only. This is your warning. Do not read if these subjects make you uncomfortable. And ffs do NOT make comments about how this isn't something you like to read. It happened on one of my other blogs and it killed the vibes I had to write. I WILL DELETE THIS BLOG IF I SEE IT.

You have been warned

Chapter 6: Whipping Pot

🔥🔥🔥🔥

Kyojuro sat next to you. Interested in your "play-date" with Shinazugawa and his dog. The younger brother was there, but Kyojuro assumed he was there only because Sanemi didn't have the courage to meet you alone. The older flame haired brother never had a problem with women. Usually because of Tengen, they would flock to him.... But Kyojuro never paid them any mind...

You were different. You never begged for his attention, nor did you chase him. He had been chased for... He stopped keeping count honestly. And when Tengen couldn't get a bite for Kyojuro, the music teacher gave up and shifted his attention to Sanemi.

But back to you. Your two toned lips, soft and plump. He always daydreamed about how'd they feel against his own... And he remembered the night at the club. He just only acted like he didn't. But the way you felt against him felt right. Your thighs so plush and soft. No other woman had felt right against him. Not when they held on to him, he pushed them away. They pressed against him while dancing, he would dissappear in the crowd.

He watched as you smiled about his competition. You were beaming, mostly rambling about the man's dog, Winter. Happy to know about Sanemi's situation with his PTSD. Kyojuro had to fight to roll his eyes as you started to talk about the other man.

"And then I went home! Well not fully home."

Kyojuro perked up at this. Alarmed at the fact that you didn't go home.

"My neighbors invited me to eat with them."

"Ah, your landlords?"

He asked stuff like that to show you he's paying attention. In reality, Kyojuro had followed you to the park. And them back to your apartment complex. Oh, it was easy to find out where you lived. The office women really liked him. Kyojuro could ask them anything and they'd tell him. Yes. He did break into your apartment, on the days he could manage to get away from home. Maybe you thought some of your clothes went missing?

You nodded at his question. Then you looked at your plate. It was empty,

"They're always letting me eat with them."

Kyojuro saw you eyeing his dessert, and slid half of it on to your plate. When your eyes lit up, he smiled. Allowing you to eat and clear your mouth. Then you looked at Kyojuro, your honey eyes shining at him.

"So what'd you want to do today? Or did you have any other plans?"

You had been out trying to do some grocery shopping, and he had "bumped into you". And insisted on treating you to lunch. He looked up and thought for a second.

"Not really. I can join you on-"

His phone began to ring, and he looked at the call. His father, Shinjuro's name popped up and he frowned. He looked at you apologeticly, and answered the call.

"Yes, Father?"

"Just say "dad" damn it." His father fussed, but continued, "pick me up some stuff. I need-"

Kyojuro cut his father short and smiled at you,

"Im on a date. I'll bring your things to you, when I've finished here, alright?"

He was going to get an earful and probaly a smack to the head, but you were the most important thing right now. After putting his phone back in his pocket, he stood up.

"If you'd like we can take a walk. Or-"

You smiled standing up with him.

"Maybe you should get home? I don't want to keep you all day."

Kyojuro frowned for a moment but then he smiled,

"Why don't you just come with me? Senjuro would be happy to see you. And you could meet my father."

He'd make the old man behave if he needed to. Kyojuro respected his father, but if the man started to make you uncomfortable or did any thing that was less than a gentleman... Well punishment would be handed out accordingly. Giving him a smile you nodded and linked your arm with his own. Kyojuro tensed for a moment, it wasn't out of surprise. He was trying to restrain the psychotic part of him that wanted to make you his right in that moment. When you felt him tense, you started to back away. He forced himself to relax, and gently pulled you back to his side.

"Forgive me. You just surprised me a bit."

You smiled at his explanation, and giggled, letting him lead you to his home.

💜💜💜💜

Standing at the door way, Kyojuro opened the entrance and let you walk through first. You both were holding groceries, and Kyojuro announced that he was home. Being sure to say that you were accompanying him. Senjuro rushed into the hallway, excited to see you and gently took the bags you had in your arms.

"Miss (L/N)!! Are you staying for dinner? If so, I've got something special to fix for us!"

You nodded at him and slid your shoes off, setting them next to Kyo's. Shinjuro made his way to the hallway.

"This is her?"

Kyojuro's face twisted in to a snarl, just for a moment, directed at his father. A silent warning to keep his mouth shut. You blinked at Shinjuro, unsure of what to say...

"I've told Father about you. Being new and all to the school. He likes to hear about my day, sometimes."

You nodded, a bit unsure. Kyojuro had never acted like this... You'd only seen it in small intervals... And it was usually over you... You just figured that it was because he was your friend and it just came with being around him...

"Ok. Calm your shit."

Shinjuro waved you both into the house more. And you followed a bit eager to see where Senjuro scurried off too. You heard him buzzing around the kitchen. He had music going, while he cooked, Senjuro was doing a little dance. You smiled, as he seemed to be in his element. Plus it was cute. Shinjuro just stared at his youngest son.

"Boy may have some sugar in his tank..."

He gave you a look and then raised his eyebrow.

"I dont think so. He's just happy to be cooking."

Shinjuro nodded, and smiled a bit. Then kept walking. Instead of following you walked into the kitchen and sat at the island. Kyojuro joined you and nudged you with his elbow.

"SEN!"

At his brothers bark, Senjuro threw the large spoon he had at Kyojuro.

"Dont do that! You know I'm easily spooked!"

Kyojuro caught said spoon and gave it a lick,

"The curry is coming along great! And I have to be sure your aware of your surroundings even at home."

He nodded, satisfied with his own answer, only to get a pinch in the ribs from you,

"Hey! Ow!"

"Thats not nice! Sen should feel comfortable in his own home!"

Senjuro, snatched the spoon from his brother and gave Kyojuro a light smack. Then turned to clean the spoon and retrieve a new one from the drawer. He quickly stirred the curry. You took a seat at the counter, and watched the teen cook. You admired Senjuro, he took up a lot of the house work while Kyojuro and Shinjuro worked. For a moment, you wondered what it would be like to be apart of the house hold here...

But you were snapped out by Kyojuro waving his hand in your face.

"(Y/N). Are you ok? You seemed abit out of it..."

His big eyes looking at you gently. You nodded and smiled at the man.

"Yeah! Just entranced by that delicious smelling curry!"

Senjuro smiled bashfully,

"Thank you... its just seafood curry..."

You nodded at him. Eager to eat. Shinjuro walked back into the room and sat on the other side of you. Looking you on the face.

"So. You datin my eldest?"

You snapped your gaze to him, speechless at the fact that Kyojuro's father would even ask that!

"N-no! We're jus-"

"Father. (Y/N) and I are just co-workers."

🔥🔥🔥🔥

Kyojuro's face darkened, and he glared at his father. A sign for the other man to shut up.

~~~~~

After dinner, Kyojuro walked you home. You thanked him profusely and he waved it off. Telling you it was fine. Once you scampered off, Kyojuro turned to leave but was stopped by Benimaru, one of your landlords. The elder man frowned at Kyojuro.

"You're the second man to walk (Y/N) home. What the hell do you want with her?"

Kyojuro stopped in his tracks and tilted his head to the side.

"Im just-"

"There are cameras all around here boy. I've seen you break into her apartment. The only reason why I haven't called the police is because I know (Y/N) would be a bit upset."

Shit... Kyojuro had slipped up in his eagerness to be closer to you... He put his hands up.

"I only broke in to return her things. She had left them at the school."

Kyojuro was trying to lie... But he could tell Benimaru wasn't taking any of it.

"Stay your ass out of her damn apartment. Or you'll deal with me."

The elder walked back into his apartment. Leaving Kyojuro to glare after him... He'd have to be more careful...

Uh... so it's been a while... I just lost the motivation to write. But this mf will get finished! And there will be two endings. One for Nemi and the other for Kyo. Thanks for reading. And any feed back is welcome.

[mothxart]

Heyy broskies !! It is been a long time since I haven’t talk or even post something.

I know, I know I said I just felt that it wasn’t worth it, and I just felt insecure and careless so I decided to quit in some sort of ways. I needed time to myself, also I was in a pretty nasty time of my life where I kept getting sick, people and school were pressuring me and my self esteem was at the lowest point. All of this caused me to stop posting or even be active on Tumblr, as well as Twitter and my Instagram account. All in all, I was just not certain to continue this blog. But here I am again, trying to adjust and have some fun!

It’s just weird for me to have almost 100 subscribers but only 10 interacts with me, the others might be bots or something or just people who goes there once in a while, that kinda discouraged me but I understand better now, and I think it’s better to have close friends you can trust than a ton of people you barely know.

At the really beginning of this blog, all my contents were about to be circling around plants vs. Zombie. But at some point, it was pretty hard for me to stay on one subject and I needed change. That’s kinda how it is now on my blog presently. I keep changing fandoms because I need changements, I need new subjects to explore, new stories, new characters…etc. And with all that change, I can improve my art skills on different things, like clothes, plants, humans, undead, animals, cartoons, dragons, monsters, ghosts, and now cars!!! I literally felt in the cars fandom it’s been a week now and I love it lol!

Not so long after Cuphead the delicious last course has come out, I created an other account and not a side blog, and decides to do things related to cuphead, and boyy I became quite popular hahahaha, I was known as QuietUnstable Frog on that blog that no longer exists and I was creating memes and stuff, with art content ofc. related to cuphead. But I shutted and deleted everything down because it was too much for me to be on 2 blogs at the same time. So yeah, a stressful experience that was quite nice actually come to think of it!

After, I was in the backrooms fandom, the Rainbow Friends fandom and the doors fandom. we can count Madness combats OH AND SPOOKY MONTH HOW DID I ALMOST FORGOT- anyway I kinda switched to one and an other because I was bored, I’m not really invested in it anymore (talking about doors and rainbow friends) yeah… I don’t know if I’ll do artworks about that.

All in all, I want to say to my friends and others, that I will be back soon with new artworks, maybe more traditional than digital because I felt like I wasn’t going anywhere? But I still want to try again. Have a nice day and thank you for reading this to the end, because I don’t think anybody would actually read this completely hahahaahha

[a-student-out-of-time]

Honestly kinda disagree with you on a few points. The first is that just because you don't think the quality of work was acceptable doesn't mean it's a true blanket statement, because that stuff is subjective. The second is that even if the work is publicly available, it doesn't mean the creator has to do jack shit for the audience considering the work itself is completely free. This isn't a case of a genuine level of quality being expected for a product because nobody's spending money on SDRA2.

//If you're focusing very strictly on the money aspect, you're kinda missing my point. This isn't about money, this is about disrespecting your audience and derailing your own story.

//First of all, I've talked at length about why Chapter 3 is bad not just because it derails the twins' characters, but because it's objectively badly-written. It doesn't do anything to service the narrative, it doesn't advance the characters, it doesn't do anything but point and go "Hey, isn't Kanade wacko?"

//Say what you will about the quality on its own, but you can't seriously tell me that wasting 1/6th of your own plot on a completely irrelevant and self-indulgent side-story is a good idea. Especially when that side-story is the longest out of the entire game.

//Almost nothing in Chapter 3 is relevant to the ongoing plot about the Voids, and the bits that are can be learned later on. There was no real reason for things like Iroha being revealed as a Void to happen beyond dramatic irony, but when she doesn't even really do anything in service of the plot or grow as a character, I must ask what the point is.

//The only thing of note that happens is, as I said, Hibiki and Kanade's characters being derailed. Hibiki had a great arc in Chapter 2 and was one of the highlights of that chapter, but then she basically becomes a background extra in Chapter 3 who does nothing but cry and then die for a crime she had no conscious role in. Her death isn't tragic or poignant, it's cheap and emotionally manipulative.

//Kanade goes from a shy girl with a dark streak to a serial killer with a ridiculous body count not because it serves the story or has any bearing on the greater plot, but because LINUJ thought Korekiyo was cool and wanted to do his own spin on V3 Chapter 3. That's it. She turns out to be this manipulative murderer with a body count of over 60 people- which would make her one of the most prolific of all time- and none of it has any meaning.

//There were absolutely ways one could integrate the existing elements of Chapter 3 into the story, where maybe Kanade exposes Nikei as a Void like my friend Mod Poi has suggested. As it stands, however, it doesn't service the plot in any way. The characters barely even seen phased by it come Chapter 4.

//And thanks to wasting a chapter on the irrelevant, that means much of the room for exposition had to be shoved further and further down the line. This is why I think Chapter 6 became a mess of one infodump after another, because there was no room to put it anywhere else.

//The real kick in the teeth for me, however, is that in a character Q&A, LINUJ straight up confirmed that Hibiki- had she survived and gotten away from Kanade- would've eventually recovered from the trauma. If we want to take the creator at his word, this demolishes any notion that Hibiki wouldn't have been a good survivor.

//Kanade, meanwhile, has no qualities or interests beyond her obsession with her sister and just being smart. Without Hibiki, she would've offed herself.

//So essentially, one of them could've had an interesting arc had she survived and the other has no character beyond just being an evil obsessive freak. He deliberately chose to write them like this. And yes, the Q&A has some contradictions, like how he said Emma would've forgiven Kokoro in the afterlife, even though he said she wouldn't have in Emma's character sheet, but this just adds to my point.

//I'm not saying you can never be self-indulgent as a small creator or that you need a flowchart for your entire story. I'm just saying, if you've got a fangan or any story in mind, there are some things you really need to plan out and have nailed down ahead of time, otherwise it's going to end up cluttered, disorganized and full of plot threads that don't matter. Discovery writing doesn't really work when you have a story that needs a definitive outline and conclusion to work.

//Hell, I'm a small creator and my work is free, and I never want people to feel like I should never be criticized because of that. I admit I've made some bad writing choices in the past, but I'm trying to build off of that and make something better. It's a lot of discovery writing, sure, but there's just as much planning behind the scenes for the arcs I have in mind. The relevant points have been decided on ahead of time.

//As a creator, regardless of whether or not you're making money off of a project, if you make it publicly available, that doesn't make you immune to criticism. It also doesn't mean you're free to disrespect your audience and basically tell them they were stupid for ever wanting to get invested in the characters. Even if that's not the language used, it's what's implied with statements like "Oh yeah, she would've grown as a person if she survived."

//Yes, there is such a thing as fan entitlement, but that entitlement and basic criticism are not the same thing. Creators can be just as entitled and self-absorbed, and saying that any creator doesn't have to "do jack shit for the audience" just because it's free? No, you really do. You have to show them basic respect.

//I'm simply speaking as a creator myself and a fan, and on both levels, Chapter 3 fails hard for me. You can explain to me why it ended up the way it did, but that's not going to magically make anything about it better.

[short-horse]

I watched Wolf(2021) and it was FUCKING BORING! Like holy shit it took me three different sittings to get through and the last I though I had more than 2 minutes left but the remainder of the timer on the progress bar is all credits. The main character, Jacob, is a wolf who constantly has no shirt on like did they write this during the Twilight craze and it only got green-lit years later? Spoilers below, this movie has an R rating so read at your own risk it has lots of triggering stuff in it like abuse, there's nudity, ect...

It just… ends. There's like no real conclusion either satisfying, bittersweet, or downer ending. :[ Jacob just… escapes with the help of the cat girl. And the evil institution where all the animal kids are being held is just left there? Like the production ran out of money and they had to literally stop filming right at the big escape scene. The abusive guy who runs the place never even gets into a fight with our main wolf character even though he's supposed to be "vicious" at this point in the film. Jacob pounced on and growled at a staff member once. Which ALSO is a stupid as fuck scene. Jacob didn't even bite him, slap him, claw at him, or anything. Just growled. And he did this because the youngest of the animal kids, a little duck boy who was like?? maybe 10, was being pushed around by said staff member. Either decide if our "hero" is going to "attack" staff and defend a kid or if he want's to eat the other animal people. Because both happened in that scene. Jacob attacks the staff member and THEN stares at the duck kid like he's lunch? Pick a tone. On the subject of tone this whole film reeks "I wanted to write a kinky film but I only heard of petplay once online and never researched it." vibes. But they couldn't get their sexy film funded so they had to write a half-assed story so a studio would pick it up. -_- But lets talk about the side characters. The other animal kids are kinda great. Rufus was pretty good. Macaw girl whose name I don't remember? Her only shtick is mimicking what the staff members say to her but it's so bitchy and I like it. The "zookeeper" villain's actor does make you hate him with his performance so yay? Also, whoever is doing the whinnying for horse girl is pretty great at it. xD If it's the actress I hope they hired her because she can whinny as well as act. If Jacob was just supposed to be a reactive blank slate and we're supposed to learn about the others through him that would have been better but we don't spend a lot of time getting to know them. The sad thing is there are elements in this movie that seem okay and may have been great if someone took the time to expand on it. They were going somewhere with the secondary character, the cat girI's back story and then the film ends. We learn zip about her. It started off okay and then just had this downward spiral into MEH. I really didn't care about what happened to Jacob because he wasn't a character, he was barely a trope. DX And just exactly how old is the character supposed to be? They sorta treat him like he's a teen but his actor is really not convincing even as a someone in their early20's. *checks actor's age* and it's because he's thirty. My friend made a joke about the 30-year-old actors playing kids when I showed her the trailer but I didn't expect her to be right. There's also this scene early on in the film where Jacob sneaks out of his room at night and starts wandering around the place. He winds up in the kitchen with Cat Girl. At some point they have to hide because of the noise they are making and they choose to hunker down behind this stainless steel counter with part of the kitchen visible. Someone photoshop a Jurassic Park raptor in a screenshot because that's all I could think of. Overall if you've got time to kill I guess this movie would be fun to watch as something to make fun of in a group but watching it by myself was not something I want to do again.

[twinhood-2dot0]

A Shallow Dive Into: Evolution

Evolution is a funny thing. Here’s a quote from a YouTube video that stuck with me: “If evolution were a person, it would be the ultimate C-student. It wouldn’t be trying to get straight A’s by putting together a perfectly crafted organism, for it, good enough to pass, a.k.a survive and reproduce, is good enough.” The video was about Pumpkin Toadlets, a frog who’s barely 2 cm at most. 

So in most vertebrates, the ear contains the vestibular system, which is responsible for balance. But because it’s so tiny, it’s ear is underdeveloped, therefore have no idea which idea is up when they jump, so they just go rigid, which seems to be the best strategy to land with their physiology. They usually walk around the forest floor, which is kinda adorable to watch, and only jump to avoid predators. Their mating calls are also inaudible to them, so they keep screeching for a lover but their cries go unheard, which is kinda sad to be honest. I’m too lazy to find sources but I’m pretty sure I heard somewhere that this is because this species branched off from other frogs before they evolved hopping as a method for locomotion instead of escaping predators (take it with a grain of salt, I’m not a very reliable source of information with my barely functioning memory). This is a video of a close relative with more developed inner ears, and their jumping isn’t exactly graceful either. This is the video I quoted, you can watch the whole thing for more details. 

Living Fossils

I’ve touched briefly on the topic of living fossils the first time we started this blog, but never really went into detail. Living fossils are special in the way that they came into their current form way, way long ago, like hundreds of millions of years ago. This has fascinated me ever since I found out about them, like, it just went “Okay, good enough, I’m gonna go rest for 400 million years now”, and because of their ancient evolutionary features, they look otherworldly.

Just look at them

Okay, the next one I’m just gonna link, fair warning, it’s an image of hagfish teeth, it’s uh, if you told me it was from a Lovecraftian horror media, I would totally believe you.

https://www.ualberta.ca/science/media-library/news/2019/jan/hagfish-fossil-modern.jpg

Funny fact that you probably know >:( but in the tiny off chance that you don’t, vertebrates are first separated into jawless fish, which contains the hagfish and lampreys, and jawed vertebrates, which contain cartilaginous fish (sharks, rays and chimaeras), and bony vertebrates, which contain ray-finned fishes, and lobe-fins, which contain lungfishes, coelacanths, and, yours truly (ours truly???) tetrapods, which leads to some funny stuff, like sharks are more closely related to us than hagfish, and lungfishes are more closely related to us than salmons.

Okay, BACK ON TOPIC.

What I want to talk about, however, is the subject of the second image, the horseshoe crab (which is a misnomer, they’re more closely related to scorpions and spiders, I guess it’s like a starfish crayfish situation). Specifically, their blood. Unlike most animals, as you probably know, they have blue blood. That’s because instead of containing iron like us, they instead have copper. Their blood also contains an amebocyte, which functions similarly to our white blood cells in defending against pathogens. Limulus amebocyte lysate, made from their blood, plays a very important role in medicine. Their blood clots in the presence of bacterial endotoxins, so they’re used to test a lot of drugs and surgical implants and the like. So, for this, approximately 500,000 horseshoe crabs are captured annually for their blood. Most of them do, fortunately, release them back, but they have a mortality rate of 3-15% or 10-30% depending on how much blood is extracted. They’re also captured during their breeding season, when they come to the shore, so there’s a lower number of them left to breed, and they also could start to avoid breeding at all due to this.

If you thought that was bad, a million of them are harvested for bait annually in the United States. Some states have fully or partially banned this, luckily. This is also bad for the red knot, who are long distance migratory birds, who feed on their eggs on their stopovers in New Jersey and Delaware.

Shoreline development and destruction is a threat to them, with a species declared extinct in Taiwan and another endangered in Hong Kong.

I wanted to talk about a few more, but it has droned on a little, so I’m gonna end it here. Also, I think I should explain why I call these posts “shallow dives” when they are quite long. The topics I cover here are mostly stuff with a ton to explore. Sampling and leitmotifs (although, that one was pretty comprehensive) in Music, DC Comics, video games, AI, and of course, evolution. I try to explain them on a superficial level so you may get interested and explore it on your own, hence, a shallow dive.

Also, I know scientific stuff is your thing, I stole it, it's mine now, at least for the next three days >:). I'm also gonna steal your song recommendation thing >:)

Swedish song but it's awesome, I've become obsessed with this artist recently.

I would steal the handwritten thing too, but I handwriting is completely illegible.

Here’s some videos and articles if you wanna learn more about what I touched upon here:

hey look, this link has a face at the end!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXVnuG3zO_0

Uh and also if you want horrific imagery, look up candiru, I was unfortunate enough to stumble upon this while looking up lampreys, the only other extant jawless fish.

[wellthatschaotic]

Hello! I hope I'm not bothering you with this but I've been struggling to figure something's out and someone on amino told me I should try here. I'm going to try and explain the best I can but it'll be a long explanation, so I'm sorry. I guess I should start off my saying, I'm trying to figure out if I might have some kind of dissociative/personality disorder. I dont really want to self diagnos but maybe after telling me your opinion on the matter I can figure out if I should try and get a diagnosis (depending on what you say). Again the explanation will be kinda long so I'm sorry!! So I guess here it is: Basically to start off, I hear other people in my head, like all the time, specifically 1 person, who I hear the most, but sometimes theres other, but they're not so common. They dont have names, or at least not that I know of, but then again names haven't really been discussed before. (They also have their own personality and opinions etc.) Like, me and the voices will have full blown conversations about different topics/subjects. They also have their own opinions on certain things as well, like I said before, and they and I will even bicker and have arguments here and there. It's been happening for a while but I noticed it became a lot more common in the 6th grade I also barely remember my childhood up until the 6th grade as well, but other than that I haven't noticed any other amnestic event. (I do forget things sometimes but that's probably just because of my ADHD) Another thing, my mom said I used to disassociate a lot, like almost all the time and for hours on end. I dont much anymore, I do still disassociate sometime but that also could be because of my ADHD and Autism. I don't think theres anything else really and I hope I explained it well enough (sorry if I didn't) but that's all for now. Again sorry for the long explanation!!

(don't worry, you're not bothering us!)

there is definitely a chance that the people you're hearing are headmates, especially if they're sentient and aware of their sentience (which, from your description, they seem to be).

dissociation comes in a whole bunch of different forms, one thing I might look for is how you feel when you're going into/are in/are coming out of an episode. also, look for the "when did i do that" moments- maybe a text you don't quite remember typing or you worded strangely, or a drawing that logically you drew but it feels like another hand drew it.

it's also somewhat hard to remember amnesic events, since...you forgot them(/lh), but i'd definitely suggest taking notes, just in case.

above all, my main suggestion is communication. "sit down" with the other people in your head, when you have unobstructed free time, and just..."hey, what's going on?" for us, when we suspected plurality, we pictured a cafe and just sat and waited. eventually, emily and alisha came into the cafe and chilled there (although they were already recurring paras so it was still hard to tell at first), but the second time alisha kinda admitted "yeah no we're here". kind of a scary/confusing moment, but also a "well that explains a lot" moment. maybe ask about names if you want, too?

TL;DR: talk to eachother, and do your best to pay attention to your brainy parts

good luck figuring stuff out and our inbox is always open! /g

[carriongoat64]

alright, we're in bed. bad coworker story time

shift start i find out im working in COD, basically its the division that finishes and packs products that go directly to retail. we were making walmart's pharmacy brand medication application droppers. the machine could put the packin instructions & vials on the belt, but not the ldpe caps. that's my job tonight. its downright mindnumbing, like painfully so. if you think you know understimulation you fucking dont. two machines down in COD, barely anythings cooking in blow mold where i belong, orion is down so i cant slap labels. orion label slapping is not mindnumbing, because i can use my phone & listen to music in orion.

so anyway this machine is getting cranked to 75ppm as opposed to it's usual 35 because im there, to act as second loader bitch. i put two, i skip two, the other guy ken puts two in where i didnt, double speed. his name is ken, its generic enough i am not bothering to replace it. we start with small talk, he wants to fill the air, he's mega bored, he says hes been getting into real old tunes, he says he listens to beastie boys and asks if ive even heard of them. of fucking course i have so we're off to a great start, i tell him ive been really enjoying the grateful dead lately and he kinda grimaces at me. he changes the subject and starts complaining about the job, mismanagement, all that. 100% yeah man i can get behind this, lets do some pay comparisons. after like fifteen minutes of back and forth about how shitty the business is to the COD guys vs us in blowmold i say my catchphrase when im abt to behave class consciously. "now, not to get all communist on you, but,". and this kind of sends him off the rails, because he starts getting worked up about like, how theres evil happening behind the scenes at our job. he tells me as a born again pentecostal christian, he's been around the block with this stuff, and feels strongly that demons cause all of our problems, not capitalism.

i tell him, "i grew up athiest, my parents were raised christian but never really believed any of it, just went to church because they had to. i have no frame of reference for this stuff but regardless i disagree greatly." this is where his testimony begins. he tells me he was raised a jehova's witness, and the implications behind that, primarily that the body and soul are one. he recalls a time where he was swimming in a lake, and had an out of body experience, which was supposed to be impossible according to his religion. he also saw a giant praying mantis attack him while he was in a shed as a kid. he said as he got older he had to start looking this stuff up, because it didnt line up at all

our friend ken was reading complete bullshit on the internet and believing every single word of it in the 2000s. this guy is a grandfather, he's old, this stuff isnt new. he got into new age spiritualism, he described meditation rituals for focusing his chakras seeking more out of body experiences and potential astral projections. he says he was doing it constantly, and he was in a bad place in his life. he could see shadow people, he could speak to them during his oob meditation sessions, every time he'd try to touch one he'd fall back into his body. he sought the akashic record, he said he wanted all knowledge. he could astral project and he described actually planewalking, and in one session he found the record. it was in front of a giant version of himself, taller than a building, who said it was his "Higher form". ken told me about how this higher form was his true self, and that it stored all the memories of a thousand kens across a thousand universes all living slightly different lives. ken cried out of joy, and the higher form was shocked. it asked him why he was crying, ken said it's for joy, and then reached for the tome and instantly woke up. he then described a few instances where he woke up to see shadow people standing over him while he slept, staring at him, and one instance in which a shadow person was trying to swallow him. it had it's mouth all the way up to his waist when he caught it.

at this point im like, scream laughing at him. because youre fucking kidding me right you cant be real. this ex witness reformed new age spiritual is surfing the astral plane in search of the akashic record. and he's getting flustered, because of course he is, so i chill out. but all ive been saying through this and through the next part is "Oh Wow. Yeah? Yeah. Ohh Shit. Cool, cool." and occasionally repeating a statement back to him as a question to make him keep spilling. he moves to telling me about his wife, and how upon moving in with her she started seeing the shadow people and taking longer at her pentecostal church. it turns out she was getting checked for demons, and she was asking ken to stop meditating so they'd go away. well he does, he says he doesnt want to hurt her, and he starts seeing them act more violently and she's getting hurt by them apparently.

so he decides instead of just stopping, he was going to accept gods love fully and live his life in service of christ. he makes this decision, speaks to god, and he says he immediately lost this handprint he had on his chest, both a physical handprint and a metaphysical weight of a hand laid on his chest at all times. he begins to smell sulfur pockets in his home, which apparently indicates demons, and can also utilize the power of christ to heal his wife. so he attempts to exorcise her. i am not going to mince words: with the confidence of a bird flying out in front of a car he describes beating his wife as an exorcism. her church priest comes through and confirms she's clean. ken says the house stopped smelling of sulfur, and the shadow people left for a time, and his wife immediately felt better. ken describes more times where demons return, as it says that they will in the bible, which are really insane and i dont feel like typing out.

this whole thing goes on for about six hours. i say to him nearly verbose "i respect you and i respect that your life experiences are real, and are your's, but i have not heard more horseshit out of someone's mouth in my entire life. i am stunned at how much your opposite i am, i dont believe youve diagnosed any of your experience's causes correctly. i respect you, if you respect me, then ill tell you my life story and i want you to tell me how you feel about it." in maybe ten minutes, no less, but a little more than five, i tell him again i was raised athiest, i tell him i believe in people and that there is no god. i tell him im kind of an anarchist, kind of a socialist, i tell him i believe in the collapse of 2030 and it's why im working here, so i can afford to play capitalism's game and prepare to help people when the time comes due to climate change and late capitalism buckling under it's own weight. i tell him i take a mental health angle on the life experiences ive had that are, admittedly, similar to his, and that i believe to an extent i may be schizophrenic. i tell him i don't judge anyone for any mental illnesses or addiction, and that i love all people, because we are all oppressed by capitalism. this is where he stops me.

the next hour he tells me about gap theory, where between humans and dinosaurs, before adam and eve, there were aliens on the earth who god destroyed to make room for mankind. he told me there are pyramids all over the earth, literally everywhere, and no one knows how any of them are built. he insinuated that socialism leads to marxism leads to Nazi-ism, thereby calling me a nazi. he tells me that theres a conspiracy orchestrated by russians called the weathermen project, in which russians inject anarchist beliefs into american youth to destabilize the country so they can take over. then he insisted he wasnt calling me brainwashed. he tells me climate change is bullshit because the earth changes in cycles, he tells me hydrogen fuel cells will solve all energy crises because its just water, he tells me that capitalism is freedom and the free market is perfect but the reason why things dont improve is because of the illuminati. demons control extremely powerful families who seek to become sole rulers of the entire world. if the demons are stopped we'd have hydrogen fuel cells in everything, but the illuminati and these wealthy families need oil money. i try to tell him, man, the largest polluter is the united states military and the forever wars they fire off are mobilizing tons of carbon. he says there's less carbon in the air now than there was centuries ago.

at this point ive logged off because i just got called a fascist for signalling comfortable antifascist beliefs. i know im not winning and anything i say can and will be used against me. i take my lunch, i come back, and i am so scared of him telling someone im like some kind of brainwashed nazi freak based on 10 cumulative minutes of minor interjection that i cannot stop mean mugging. like i look like i want to fucking kill someone, i could feel it on my face, and i did. i was just completely miserably furious that he trampled over me like that and that id have to be near this guy for another 5hrs. he did not speak another word to me all night, he knew how pissed i was, i didn't have to say a fucking thing. there is more detail to this but i literally cannot remember more and can't fucking type it either. i need to go to sleep, good night ♥️

[beesbraindumps]

What's up with the Barbie movie??

In light of the Golden Globes, let's talk about Barbie. It’s mind boggling to me how someone was able to take one of the most successful movies of the year and reduce it down to one thing “a classic doll with big boobies”. 

It’s ridiculous. This reductionist perspective is not only absurd but also frustratingly predictable, considering the comment was made by a man.

I’m just so tired of women’s achievements being brushed off as if it was nothing. Oppenheimer made $850 million globally. Wanna know how much Barbie made? $1.36 billion. 

Now I’m not shitting on Oppenheimer, but the two movies are in vastly different categories. A movie like Oppenheimer should rightfully stand on its own merits but due to the “barbieheimer” phenomenon, it just gave another reason to undermine women’s accomplishments.

And well the "barbieheimer" trend was cute and fun, it inadvertently creates yet another box for women's projects to fit into, reinforcing the notion that women must dilute their accomplishments to be more palatable to society. Another standard it should’ve conformed to.

Why do we always have to dilute ourselves to make society more comfortable? Women are always trying to conform to some kinda of box or standard but guess fucking what, the box is different everytime! You will never win. 

Moreover, the backlash against the Barbie movie from some people (not gonna name names) were under the impression that it was an anti-men campaign because apparently when men aren’t the center of attention it means they are the antagonists. The main threat was the majority female cast of the Barbie movie, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, given its subject matter. Giving women the chance to share their narratives without men doing it for them.

The Barbie movie being about barbies (aka women), shocking. 

For too long, men wrote women however they wanted (over-sexualized, insane, materialistic, clingy, and the list can go on) but simply put, they wrote us as they saw us with their own distorted portrayals. Yet here’s a classic taste of men not being able to taste their own medicine.

Meanwhile, critics argue that the only male characters in Barbie are shown in a negative light, demonstrating typical male behavior ( creepy, useless, dominant, ex). However, maybe they were given a new perspective, a woman's perspective. For once male toxicity is shown in major media lacking romanticization, which is why some view it as negative. When in reality, the rose coloured glasses were just removed.

However, this is more than just about the Barbie movie. It’s about the double standard between men and women, not just in Hollywood but also in our daily lives. More often than not I’ll see videos on the internet of men doing the bare minimum and the comment section is filled with “where can I find one like him??”, “brb  sleeping on the highway”, “need someone to treat me like this''. News flash this isn't revolutionary, and if you saw a post about a woman doing all that you wouldn’t even think twice.

Doing the laundry, cooking dinner, watching their own child, all basic stuff. Yet, since these are all activities society is used to seeing women do, when a man does it we all basically trip over ourselves. So as some say, the bar is literally in hell.

 Additionally, our perception of being treated right has become so warped from toxic media portrayals of relationships that someone showing basic consideration deserves awards. This is also affecting how young girls will view love and relationships, which is worrying considering the ‘teen shows’ that are out there now. 

For that reason I think the honest portrayal of men and the relationship between Barbie and Ken is a good thing, giving younger girls the chance to see that you don’t have to be in a relationship at all, especially one that doesn’t make you happy.

In conclusion, the discourse surrounding Barbie and its reception highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of gender dynamics in media and society at large. Women's achievements should be celebrated on their own terms, free from the constraints of outdated stereotypes and unfair comparisons. Only then can we begin to truly appreciate the diversity and complexity of women's experiences and contributions.

[tea-drops]

argued a lot with mom yesterday. Mostly about how mental health can be just as physically debilitating as physical health conditions. She got really angry (which was kinda funny-) whenever I rephrased he statements about my mental health to do with her physical one. I kept trying to change the subject back to tea (as she made a VERY sarcastic comment about 'well i don't know if you'll be mentally able to go out tomorrow') but she kept going back to the argument. Tried descalating multiple times too but she kept at it. She stayed all huffy the rest of the night

When she starts getting huffy and angry I know I'm right. Mental health can be just as awful and stop someone from going out just as much as physical health. And if she has a problem when I pretty much rephrase or fire back her statements like :

'your mental health doesn't mean you're not able to go out. you're on medication to fix that' to 'your physical health doesn't mean you can't go out. you're on medication to fix that.'

kinda funny that she has double standards, says 'mental health is no less than physical health conditions' but still says this AND worked in a psych ward? Then again though she ended up marrying the mentally ill deadbeat and had me and gave me slews of issues. So I don't know if she's really in the target demographic for 'thinking about her actions and words'.

That and she keeps trying to shame me for being a system. Keeps saying shit like 'oh you can just say one of your little friends in your head said all these mean things to me and just say you forgot you said them' no. Almost all of us hate you. Some of us like to try and keep things civil. I didn't tell her that. Just tried to reinforce the fact that nothing has changed other than her now knowing that someone else said those harsh words and I don't remember it. That nothing's changed because even before this I've still forgotten what we've said but just not explained it to you. Stop trying to make out that we're all assholes and hostile and use our system against you. We don't. All the time we own up to our actions. we say sorry countlessly. We always try and make things up to you. And even when we were younger the words 'sorry' for hurting us never left your fucking mouth. for making us cry because we mess up something so minor. for continuing arguments when we're trying to change the subject.

Sometimes we're good, and the memory fog's settled in. I don't know why I hate you. But then I look back on stuff like this. And god the things you do make me insane, woman. It's so hard for me to trust cis women now, seriously it's insane. I'm so scared around them, can hear her in the back of my head (delusionally speaking- we're very acute on checking members) whenever women look at me and I'm terrified. I think they're watching me, judging me, wanting me to fail and slip up so they can berate me. The only positive woman I can barely trust (and even then I'm scared to ask her things) is my aunt. who knew she'd be sisters with that beast if you talked to them both.

Anyway im still pissed, i've blocked her on my phone, she's bound to bring it up when she tries to message me but one of the reasons I don't fucking charge it is BECAUSE she messages me and calls me non-stop. Plus she doesn't even call the body by it's name or bother with learning our names. So. Yeah its really REALLY dysphoria enducing to see that name over and over again, especially because she still screams it down the halls and told our new neighbours our name was our deadname. that's embarassing as hell. I've not had the heart to tell them our name's Jay.

My body hurts a lot, I'm being told theo watched Sweet Tooth with our friend for hours on end last night. til 3am. Good for him but bad for me I guess as I remember coming into co for the end of the night and asking why mom was being all annoyed about me (an adult-) staying up late when I told her it was the last time I'd be talking to my friend for a few weeks as they're going on a trip. She got even more huffy at that.