#could probably do better if i actually studied theory and spent more than 7 hours on this but who careeesss im just having fun

[daily-dose-of-bucket]

Day 65: Kanna the burger eater is now 16 frames per second

[artificialqueens]

Gimme Love, 4/9 (Miz Cracker/Blair St Clair) - Grinder

AN: Hey, guys! So I realised I forgot to explain the idea behind this story. This is part of a series I'm working on called 'Head in the Clouds' - stories that are inspired by the music of Joji. This story is loosely based off the music video for 'Gimme Love'. I couldn't make sense of the actual video cause it goes by so fast (if you watch it you'll see what I mean), but I kind of have an idea.

Thanks for listening to my TEDtalk.

Major Trigger warnings: Dementia, death, grief, homophobic slurs

-_-_-_-

2003

"Brianna, could you come here?"

I put my pen down on the kitchen table, not really minding that Grandpa was interrupting me. The studying was tiring, if anything.

Walking into his room, I found him getting up from his desk.

"Hey, Grandpa," I said.

"Brianna, do me a favour, baby. Could you read me this one chapter?" He asked, retreating to his bed.

Bit of an odd request for him. "Why? What's up?"

I picked it up, one of the many books that delved into the science and possibility of the existence of parallel universes.

"I'm just...finding it kind of hard to concentrate." He laughed to himself. He made a groaning sound as his back hit the bed.

I sat by him and read about 3 chapters before he said, "that'll do. Thanks, honey."

I got up and moved to the desk, briefly glancing at the front cover, at the main character with his telescope. Far off memories flashed in my brain. I put the book down, turning to face him.

"What are you smiling at, honey?" Grandpa asked, a smile appearing on his own face.

"I just...remember the night you told Jujubee and me about 'the other world'. We haven't stopped talking about it since." I admitted, putting the book back on his desk. "And we'd always play these games like we were there. Our lives would be so different. And just a little bit better."

"And then you found yourself wanting that in reality." Grandpa finished for me.

I was silent, but he knew he was right. "It's not that I didn't appreciate what I already had. It's just...whenever my anxiety was surfacing, or whenever someone was mean in school, or whenever I thought of my parents, I'd just...want to escape." I sat down in the chair next to his bed again, taking his hand in mine and squeezing it reassuringly. "Didn't you ever feel the same?"

Grandpa breathed out a sigh through his nose, his smiling widening. "Brie, of course, I have. All the games you and Juju played, it's called escapism. And it's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Wouldn't you ever try to find one?"

"Find what?"

"I don't know. A door? A gateway to the other world?"

He didn't even need to tell me 'yes.' He had spent many years reading the books, sometimes reading them more than once, making notes and coming up with his own theories. He probably felt the same way I did. In darker times, when things didn't feel like they'd get any better, he was curious about his other-self.

I knew the answer was yes. But I liked hearing him talk about these things.

"Baby, it's something I've always wanted to do. I always...wanted to know if it was possible...to slip into that other world, find this house, and just hope and pray my wife would still be on the other side of that door. I'd kiss her hand and bring her back here. And, life would be complete." He confessed. His smile was sweet but also sad, "But you know, with old age comes difficulties. My brain ain't what it used to be. Just all these words. Sometimes, they're...foreign to me."

This was the beginning of a long year. All the signs started out small, usually, Grandpa looking out the window wondering when his wife would come back from the store and losing the ability to read.

And over time, it slowly began to escalate, getting worse with each month. So bad to the point he'd take his seat belt off at a red light and try to get out. Or he'd shout at Mom, saying she's going the wrong way. Every piece of my Grandpa was slipping away.

And it was all taking a toll on my own happiness.

"You look pretty today." Jujubee commented as we walked through the hallway.

"If you say so." That was all I could reply with.

"No, really. Your hair looks really cute like that." She tried again.

I had no idea what she was talking about. I literally pinned two pieces from the front to the back of my head. It was a half-assed attempt of trying to convince everyone I gave a fuck anymore.

"Yeah, right, Juju. I look no better than I did yesterday. Or the day before. And the day before that.

Jujubee paused for a moment, whereas I continued on. "Are you OK?"

I turned to look at her. "Yeah." I lied. "Why wouldn't I be?"

I wasn't ready for this, Jujubee concerns. The truth was I never told her about my Grandpa because then she'd want to talk about it, then I'd cry, then I'd probably go home and have a breakdown, then I'd give Mom more shit to worry about.

Judging from her knit brows, she wasn't buying it. Before she could even ask anything else, I turned back around, just wanting to get on with things and get to my next class on time. But Trevor just had to be there. He knocked me hard on the shoulder, making me drop my books and almost fall to the ground.

He quickly spun around, watching me collect my books. "Man, who put that trash there?"

I glanced at him with a scorn.

"Hey, douchebag," Jujubee stepped in front of Trevor, "I can see you're a little butt-hurt now that your sex life is dryer than a nuns vagina."

My eyes were wide now, knowing that wouldn't sit well.

"What did you fucking say to me?" Trevor raised a brow.

"You heard." Jujubee said with such spite. "Why don't you go rub one out to your Mom or something? Stop projecting all your problems onto my girl?"

Trevor scoffed a laugh. "Your girl? What are you, a couple of dykes?"

My jaw was almost on the ground. I looked around, noting the students observing as they passed by. I couldn't let them know my secret. I couldn't.

"Why? Does that make us all the more interesting?" Jujubee squinted her eyes. "Honey, don't pretend the thought of us 'dykes’ making out doesn't make an insecure guy like you hard."

A sound emitted from my throat - A panicked sound. Like a yell, one that was dragging its way up my throat, fighting to get out. The attention of everyone around was on the situation, since when? I had only become aware now of the sounds of thrill and excitement. I was internally panicking. How many people were there? Were they even looking at me?

"Not in your wildest dreams, honey." Trevor practically spat the last word before deciding he was finished. He turned and walked away.

Jujubee approached me, rolling her eyes. "God, does he know when to quit?"

But I just stared at her, pretty sure I was trembling. My eyes were still wide, and my jaw stiff.

"Brie?" She blinked.

I could feel it, the lump in my throat beginning to form, like a hard stone that was lodged in place. Blinking a few times, I held the books tighter to my chest and turned to walk away.

"Brianna, what the fuck?" Jujubee came after me.

"Juju, just...leave me the fuck alone." My voice cracked as I quickened my pace.

She didn't follow me anymore. Thank fuck. Because next thing I knew, I was in a bathroom cubicle, quietly crying. I stupidly decided to not go to class. I say stupidly because, during the last period, Denali leaned over and told me she thought they suspended me. When I asked why she would even think that, she said the rumours spread fast, that I had punched Jujubee.

Oh, high school drama.

Of course, Jujubee didn't deserve this. She was only doing her friendly duty and looking out for me. But I didn't need any more shit from Trevor. I didn't want all those eyes on me as I walked the corridors. My home life was already too much.

I wanted to hold on to my Grandpa for as long as I could. But seeing his health dwindle, it felt like someone was coming to get him. And no matter how much I wanted to hold on, they were going to take him away no matter what.

Around 7 months in, his immune system was beginning to fail. He was bedridden.

I'd sit with him for at least an hour every day, either reading to him, feeding him, or just having a long talk. I had a tendency to write down at least one sentence from each conversation like it would provide me with some comfort, like he was still there. When in reality he was...he was...

"Why the sad face, baby?"

I snapped out of my trance, blinking a few times as I looked at him. "Nothing. Just thinking."

"What happened? Did someone break your heart?" He asked, following it up with a laugh.

I let myself smile. "No, thank God. I'm just sleepy. I had a long day at school."

"That's a shame. I was gonna suggest we break out the old telescope. I bet we'd find Cassiopeia if we tried hard enough."

My mouth formed a hard line, unsure of how to respond. As much as I wanted so badly to sit out in the garden with him, he wouldn't even be able to make it there.

"You sure you're OK, Brianna?" Grandpa asked.

"Yeah, I'm just thinking." I looked away, studying my nails instead.

"Well, if it's not a heartache, I bet someones caught your eye?" He asked with a smirk.

I couldn't help but allow the corners of my lips to curve up. "Yeah, actually."

"Oooh." He cooed. "And what are they like?"

I thought for a second, debating how I should answer. To be honest or not. If I lied, would it even make a difference?

Looking at his innocent face, I decided fuck it.

"Sweet. Beautiful. The bluest eyes I've ever seen." I paused. "She's an absolute angel."

Grandpa was silent momentarily. But just as the nerves were beginning to surface, he replied, "and does she know how you feel?"

"No."

"Well, why don't you let her know?"

I took a deep breath in. "Because...I don't know if she likes me back. I don't know if she even likes girls."

"All you can do is try."

"It's not that simple," I spoke quietly. "She's...popular. She's beautiful. She's...everything that I'm not."

My eyes drifted to my hands once again. If I cried, would it even matter? Wouldn't he forget?

"Don't say that about yourself, honey." He reached a hand out and put it on mine. "You don't actually believe that, do you?"

I lifted my gaze again, looking at him with glossy eyes. My silence spoke volumes.

"Oh, no, Brianna." He said with such disappointment. "I can't believe you feel that way. Ain't you ever stopped to look at yourself?"

"No," I whispered. "I can't stand it."

"You need to. Because you are prettier than you know." His own eyes were glistening now. "You may not believe me, but someday you're gonna meet someone who will show you."

I dabbed the inner corner of my eye, "You really think that?"

"I know."

"That means a lot." I smiled.

He gave one final pat to my hand and pulled it away. "Do me a favour, honey. Could you get me some juice?"

"Sure."

I stood up and left for the kitchen.

On my way, I passed through the hall, catching a glance at my reflection. Naturally, I would have disregarded it. But I stopped and stood in front of it. And I just looked.

I wasn't immediately satisfied. But upon taking my glasses off, my opinion changed. I learned pretty quickly my eyes were the best from my facial features.

I smiled. Best not. My frown was oddly alluring. I tried smiling again, this time with teeth. But the braces just ruined the mood.

Putting my glasses on again, I almost jumped out of my skin when I felt tiny paws tap my feet. Of course, it was just Piggie. I scooped him up and looked at both of us together.

"God has favourites, Piggie. Take a wild guess out of us two who it is." I looked at his face in the mirror.

He cocked his head, looking at his own reflection like he couldn't figure out what was going on.

I carried on to the kitchen with Piggie still in my arms, poured the juice and made my way back to Grandpa's room.

I pushed open the door with my foot.

Grandpa's head quickly shot up as I walked in.

"Sorry it took so long. I - -"

"Who are you??"

I froze on the spot. "It's me."

"Roberta! Roberta, there's somebody in the fucking house!!"

My brain went into panic mode. I set the juice to the side, put Piggie out into the hall and approached the bed.

He was continuously shouting, thrashing around in the bed as if to escape. I tried grabbing his hands, reassuring him it was me, his Grandchild. We had literally just been talking.

But he only roared over the sound of my voice, trying to fight my hands off him.

"Pop! It's OK!" Mom rushed into the room. "It's just Brianna!"

I took a step back, letting her take control. He stared at me with an intense level of fear. What did he think I was going to do? Who did he think I was?

"Brie, go to your room or something. I'll calm him down." Mom commanded with a crack in her voice.

With a wavered breath, I left. The sounds of his shouts, I couldn't bear it. I had to get away, even for a little bit. I needed out.

I hurried out the front door, stuffing my arms inside my jacket sleeves, and marched down the path. I didn't even look back at the colourful house. I just wandered. Wherever my feet were going to take me, I'd be fine.

In a sense, I felt cruel, like I was selfish. Despite wanting to be around my Grandpa for as long as possible, I couldn't stand moments like these. But you'd think dealing with this for so long would have toughened me up a bit.

Not even in the slightest.

There I was, marching down the street, trying hard not to have an episode. I tried to maintain my breathing, but the fast pace in my step didn't help. My hands were clammy, not that having them in my pockets helped.

Again, I had no idea where I was going. My eyes remained fixated on the ground. Therefore I was oblivious to the person hastily approaching.

"Brianna, Jesus!"

Jujubee now stood in front of me with her hand on my shoulder. I opened my mouth to speak, but she beat me to it.

"I said your name like 5 times, girl." Jujubee dropped her hand. Her eyes looked me up and down, "What happened? You're shaking."

I was?

"I…" I tucked a strand of hair behind my hair, "I need a cigarette or something."

Jujubee dragged me to the bus shelter, sat me down on the ground like we were still children, parking our behinds wherever the fuck we wanted.

Despite the feeling of anxiety burning my insides, I did spark up a cigarette, anything to shift my thoughts from the current state of my family. Just something normal.

"Girl, are you sure that's a good idea right now?" Jujubee was itching to snatch it from my hand and toss it.

Instead, I said, "Jujubee?"

"Yeah?"

Eyes still glued to the ground, I blinked, "This is it. He's dying."

Jujubee didn't even need to ask. She knew about his dementia for months now. I had no choice but to tell her. The stress from it all got too much, and I was becoming more and more irritable. It was unfair to put her through that. I had to tell her everything.

Jujubee shuffled closer, "What happened?"

I couldn't bring myself to even tell her. Words couldn't even begin to describe the feeling. That feeling of just grabbing him by the hand, and running away as far as possible, so this sickness would just leave us alone.

I blew out a long cloud of smoke, closing my eyes as I let my chest deflate.

There was something about this moment in time. 9PM, at the bus shelter, sitting on the cold ground, smoking a cigarette, Jujubee by my side, her hand now in mine. It didn't feel real. None of it did.

Yet this wasn't foreign to me - This bus stop was the same one from my childhood, that day when baby Blair and I hid from the rain. Funny how the younger version of myself thought I was protecting her from her abusive father.

As bad of a time it was, the thought was comforting in the current moment, sitting there with Blair. The only problem I faced those days was my emotional outbursts and the emotional toll they took on my Mom. Oh, how naive I was, completely unaware of how life could get any harder.

Only 3 weeks later, Grandpa was hospitalised, his immune system reaching its lowest point. I visited him every day after school. There were more moments of forgotten memory, but it made it less frightening with Mom by my side.

One day in particular, however, he seemed in better spirits. It was as if the old him was back, just for a few hours.

"I'm going to the soda machine. You want anything, baby?" Mom stood up from her chair, pulling her purse from her bag.

"I'm good." I gave her a gracious smile.

She nodded, taking another look at my Grandpa before she even moved to the door. I could see the reluctance behind her eyes. She did this every time she left the room, no matter where she was going.

My eyes followed her as she left. Grandpa spoke, "Now that she's gone, any update on that girl?" He asked. I looked back in surprise. How he had remembered that was mind-blowing. He continued, "we haven't had a one-to-one conversation in a long time, honey. Give me an update."

I breathed a sigh out, lifting my brows briefly. "Nothing has become of it, no."

"Go get her, kiddo. You've got nothing to lose."

I smiled sadly. Easier said than done, Grandpa.

He coughed. "Lord, I'd love a cigarette right about now. Do me a favour, though; please stop smoking."

I wasn't completely shocked. He had noticed on a few occasions that he was down a cigarette. "I will." I wasn't lying. But I wasn't making any promises either.

"Brianna?" Grandpa looked at me now.

"Yeah?" I put my feet up on his bed, leaning back in my chair.

"Promise me one thing?"

"Of course."

His eyes remained on me, and he smiled briefly. "Promise me that you'll find a way to the other world. Could you do that for me?"

I had to admit, It was a huge thing to ask of someone like me. It was terrible to say, but I couldn't help but feel this was sort of selfish. Yes, he was on the brink of death, but how could he expect me to be such a miracle worker.

Instead of protesting, however, I just said, "Sure."

Two days later, he passed away.

I didn't cry at all, vowing that I would remain strong for Mom. I had already had my turn at grieving my own parents. And she was by my side for all of that.

Now it was my turn to be there for her. Throughout the whole funeral, I had my arms wrapped around her shoulders, like she had done for me throughout the years. It was a strange feeling - being the one to take care of her for a change. Her head on my chest, hand squeezing mine, it was just so hard to accept.

I almost thought she was going to crumble when they lowered his casket into the ground.

As I said before, there are two types of people in this world; those who hate the sight of their Mother crying and fucking liars.

Because, even though she was my Mother, she was his little girl. And losing a parent is losing a huge part of your life.

Everyone was invited back to the house after the funeral in the hopes the togetherness would lighten the mood.

Of course, it didn't fix everything, but it did allow us some time to breathe.

"You OK, Brianna?" Aunt Monét asked as I handed her some tea.

"I'm fine." Obviously, that was a lie.

I really did think I was doing everyone a favour by putting up the strong front. Little did I know the toll this would take on my own emotional well being. That whenever Grandpa came up in conversation, I'd run. If only I had realised that sooner.

I was afraid of questions like Monét had asked. So school would be a nightmare. Thankfully I was granted 2 weeks off.

The first week I lay in bed, watching box sets of The X Files. Pretty sure I almost gave myself a bladder infection from just laying there too long.

The second week, I finally decided to stop lying around and be useful. Mom recommended I break out the telescope one night. So I invited Jujubee over. I warned her beforehand that she was not to ask me any concerning questions or treat me any different. Of course, she was different with me. But she didn't ask any questions. We just carried on, looking up at the stars through the telescope.

The same week, I also found myself sitting in his room, feeling his presence very much there with me. So I took to reading his books out loud in the hopes I could keep his spirit entertained.

However, I only became interested in the books myself. I read one book. Then another. And another. And another. Fiction and non-fiction. All based on parallel universes. I couldn't get enough of it.

And reading turned into studying - taking notes, hypothesising, questioning.

And then I got Jujubee interested. Just 4 weeks after beginning, it was more than just a hobby. It was a prospect.

-_-_-_-

2020

"Miss. Caldwell. Miss Caldwell, ma'am."

I snapped back to reality, embarrassed that I had even blacked out at all. You'd think I'd know there were more important things at stake, now that I was in the presence of the Secretary of Defence, at a meeting in the middle of an almost empty hangar. Everyone around me, my team included, were important people. I needed them to believe I was on the same level as they were.

"Yes, the atmosphere of the other world," I said, hoping he would think I was listening.

"We're beyond that point now, actually." The General pointed out, standing with his hands behind his back. I couldn't lie. I felt intimidated by him, what with the uniform and all.

I glanced at his black badge, which matched mine. Did that mean I was a general like him now? Were we even on the same level? 'Cause when I woke up that morning, I tripped over my own feet and almost hit my head off the ground. I couldn't be on this guy's level.

"I asked if this place would be big enough for the construction of the rocket." He asked.

I looked around at the wide space. Yeah, it was huge, but when it came to constructing a rocket, that was all beyond me. Sure, it would probably take a good 3 minutes to walk from one end to the other. But was it high enough? I had no idea what I could even say to this guy. "Yeah, it's good."

I hoped it would be good.

"Then it's yours." He gave a quick smile. It didn't make me feel any less intimidated. He began pointing out different sections of the place, a small lab in one corner, offices in another, along the left wall was a cafeteria, and 4 sets of surprisingly clean bathrooms.

All this space, it was mine. And only an hour after the meeting with the General, we were already shipping equipment over.

"This is wild. You could fit two concert halls in here." Jujubee slipped an arm around my shoulders, the pair of us watching as a truck pulled into the hangar, carrying more gear.

I blew a sigh of relief out through my mouth. "I just can't believe this is happening. Like, why me, of all people? When do good things ever happen like this? Like, didn't I always say 'why do bad things happen to good people?'"

Jujubee laughed, "girl, good things DO happen to you. You have a luxury apartment in New York, you're filthy rich, you're a celebrity." She playfully punched me in the arm.

"Well, you're not wrong." I shrugged.

"You deserve every bit of this." She turned to get a better look at me. "You fought for so long to get people on board with this project. You continued on when people doubted you when they laughed. I think you deserve good things to happen to you."

I smiled bashfully, looking to the ground for a brief moment, "Aw, Juju," looking back to her, she lifted a hand and held my cheek. Naturally, I would have shied away, but not now. At this moment, I absolutely adored this bitch. "I couldn't have done this without you."

"I know. You've told me." She pinched my cheek before looking away.

Her hand fell by her side, so I took it in mine. "No, really. You think I would have continued without you here? You remember all those times I wanted to give up? All the times you called me out on my bullshit?"

"Hey, somebody had to do it." She shrugged in return yet swung my hand.

"That's very true." I looked at her for a moment longer. Only now did I notice the way her lashes fluttered when she blinked, how cute that was.

Her eyes moved around the large space again. "Think we could fit a Starbucks in here?"

I pulled my gaze away from her, also having another look around. "Girl, you could fit fucking 10 Starbucks in here." I raised a brow in her direction then. "Should I?"

She laughed as she continued to swing my hand like we were just children again. Honestly, that's what I felt like; A small child in her own Kingdom.

[polymetis-23]

Diary Entry Sept. 26th, 2021

Day 1 - The hunt begins

I spent most of today working on updates to my hero gear based off the trial runs these past few weeks. First I removed the giant skirt from my costume and replaced it with a utility belt. Sure those might not have been the most iconic thing about steampunk but they tinkered a lot so I'm sure they were around plenty. I hope to make more gadgets as time goes on so this will be a good place to store them. For now it is a simple belt with pockets as found at hardware stores. I know, it's ugly and doesn't really fit and I wish I had time to be proper about it, but with The Eye out there it seems somethings will sadly have to be function over form. 

In addition to adding the tool belt, I have been working on the wrist crossbows (told you I wouldn't forget about them). I've moved them down from the back of my hand to around my wrist and made the bow limbs out of a semi-bendable metal. They work like springs and shoot the dart out fairly fast … or at least that is the current theory, I've really only added the wrist strap, had to finish some homework.

As the sun started to set, it was finally time for me to find The Eye (seriously does anyone have a better name for this person?) I could've sworn I was in a movie. The sky was overcast but no rain and everything seemed eerily quiet. Without a better idea I started from where I last saw them, the eye was still on the wall and it didn't look like anyone had been home in a while, I hope she didn't kill him. Anyway, I wasn't about to break into someone's house because that is illegal so I sat on the roof and surveyed for any mysterious red lights. It may not have been the most efficient way to find them, but hey that red glow is the only thing I have to identify them at the moment, and well the eye. I saw a few flashes over the course of the night, and a few more eyes around the city. Some the crime was obvious, another breakin or general vandalism, but others a dark red eye was just on a wall, nothing around to denote why.

Day 2 - Uh yeah, exams are a thing

    How, might I ask, are we in the third week of classes and I already have a quiz. Like seriously what are we supposed to have learned at this point? Even if they had taught us something, this is the absolute worst time, now I have to spend all day studying and I can't go out tonight. I was getting so close last night to actually catching up to The Eye. Sure I hadn't actually seen them, but I was getting quicker at navigating the city so the time between red flashes and my arrival at a scene was getting less and less, it was only a matter of time until I caught them.

Day 3 - Crossbow work

    The forecast for today is rain, lots of rain all day and I don't really fancy going out and getting soaked or slipping and falling on my butt while hunting for Eye, so I guess today is a design day. It actually works out really well because now I will have the wrist bow ready for when I finally do encounter her. Next thing I need to work on is tranquilizer darts, I don't want to permanently hurt those I bring in, after all I'm not the judge, jury and executioner, I just bring people in to meet justice. 

    After today's tests the bow seems to be great … or at least manageable. I still need to improve the aiming, for some reason the bolts won't group together. And I need to make an automatic reloader attachment, I have plenty of darts held on the cuff, but it would be nice for the system to be semi automatic incase I miss a shot or more probably I am fighting more than one opponent and need to incapacitate them both in quick succession.

Day 4 - The Evil Eye

    Finally a semi-free day. I was able to make a few small adjustments to my weaponry between classes then waited until dark to roam the streets. The clouds from yesterday blew by leaving not a trace and letting the nearly full moon illuminate the streets, although that could also be from light pollution … I guess it is good that I can see and not trip, but I would've liked to be able to see the stars.

    The night started relatively calmly, I was finally getting used to the red haze that settled over the world when I used my goggles. If I ever learn how to actually code, I'll have to write a program to filter out the ambient light, but for now I would just have to let my eyes adjust. I got lucky in my positioning tonight, I hadn't seen any pattern in how The Eye chose their targets so I had decided to sit on a random tall roof top and was rewarded with a beam of red two blocks over. Although I had previously only seen an aura of red indicating The Eye's (this is gonna stick now isn't it?) presence, it wasn't hard to imagine that they had the ability to focus it. 

    I ran across the rooftops, which were thankfully connected, I'll have to figure something out for when they aren't. I guess I could run at street level but that is more crowded and less direct, plus heroes are known for leaping across roofs right? Regardless I soon arrived at where the beam had been and looked for the source. Below me on the street there was a fight going on and sure enough one of the combatants' hands were surrounded by an aura of red. Upon closer observation I was shocked to find out this wasn't a fight, it was a beating. The man The Eye was 'fighting' was just laying on the ground not even trying to defend themselves. It was clear to anyone watching that the fight was over and didn't need to be continued so why was The Eye still there? I called 911  and reported the situation so her victim could get some help. I doubted they would be moving by themselves any time soon. 

    After placing the call I turned my attention back to the street to apprehend The Eye myself, but they were already gone, an eye left on the ground above the injured man's head. I could already hear the sirens of the ambulance and knew he would be okay. I waited until the paramedics started treating him, then left. I spent the rest of the night searching for another sighting of The Eye to bring them in, but they seemed to have gone silent for the moment. I suppose I will have to try again tomorrow now that I had seen they were not only bad, they were straight up evil. Attacking someone for no reason at all.

Day 5 - The Conversation

    So classes were normal today and nothing special happened except well, I finally got to talk with the eye. I went out a little earlier than I usually did planning on scoping out some of the roofs on campus. Although I was currently preoccupied taking down The Eye who seemed to operate across the river, I knew I would be coming back to stop crime on campus eventually. There is a really nice iconic roof space above the main lobby of campus where I was planning to start. Up there you can see all around campus, sure it wasn't the tallest building, but it did have a great view.

    Anyway, I was up there planning to see what was what and keeping an eye out for any red flashes in the city when from behind I heard:

    "I thought they blocked off all entrances to the roof" they had, I have just been practicing picking locks. Yes I know that skill is rarely used for anything good, but sometimes it can come in handy, like tonight with the door

    I turned around expecting to see some other student, while it wasn't a common hang out spot, people definitely still came up here. Instead I was confronted with The Eye herself, what was she doing on this side of the river and at my school no less. Of course I immediately confronted her about her illegal activities and she scoffed at me. I mean she literally scoffed and called me naive, how am I naive when I saw her commit those crimes? Like seriously? It quickly became apparent that she wasn't remorseful at all and needed to be brought in. We had a brief altercation which I definitely nearly won if she hadn't taken a cheap shot and knocked me on my butt I would've had her. As it was I landed with a loud smack and was slightly dazed. The only sound I heard was "stay down, this isn't the world for you" When I got my bearings again, she was gone and I was alone on the roof. 

    I layed back down and stared at the sky. This is going to take more work than I thought, but I'm sure it can't be that much more.

Day 6 - A day to relax

    Not much happened today, I ended up sleeping through my alarm which I guess is a natural consequence of staying up into the early hours of the night every day for a week. I did my laundry, bought a few groceries and sloughed through some homework and … that was about it.

Day 7 - Coding is still the worst

    So I have a problem set due for my coding class and I swear this class should be worth twice the amount of credit listed on the syllabus based on how long it takes me to write a 'simple' program. I guess I am learning some things because I can follow the code examples given in class, but I definitely can't recreate them. I'm gonna need to find another way to code my goggles or get someone to do it for me. Superheroes have a man in the chair right?

    I eventually got the problem set turned in and started to draft ideas for the semi-automatic wristbow, still very rudimentary though.

[give-me-back-my-rhodey]

The Trio is Back - AUgust Day 7

Title: The Trio is Back

Author: Purple_ducky00

Rating: Teen

Warnings: N/A

Relationships: Bucky/Nat/Tony, Bucky/Tony

Square Filled:  N2: Didn’t Know They Were Dating Link: Read on AO3

Summary:  Natasha, Bucky, and Tony have been friends since childhood. Everyone speculates that Natasha will have to choose between the two of them. Little do they know she might just choose both.

+++++++++

Tony, Bucky, and Natasha have been friends since toddlers. The Starks, the Barneses, and Natasha’s adoptive parents were a close-knit bunch who played bridge on Thursday nights, usually at the Stark mansion.

 As children, the three would run through the house playing superheroes, Super Mario characters, jedi, etc. The Stark butler, Jarvis, always made sure nothing valuable was broken. They would often rope him into their play. As they got older, they calmed down somewhat. Natasha taught Tony to braid so he could braid her and Bucky’s hair.  Both would push him to get more intricate braids. Bucky would recommend books for the others to read, and they had a book club group chat where they would discuss plots and theories. Tony lets them in his lab and teaches them about science.

 When the three turned ten, the adults would joke that Natasha might have a hard time choosing between the two handsome boys. Natasha’s fathers said she should be able to do whatever she wanted. Natasha never paid them any mind because Tony and Bucky were her friends. Why did she need to choose?

The three were inseparable until middle school. They never had a falling out, per se. They just stopped hanging out. Maybe they were tired of everyone trying to figure out who liked who, or maybe they just wanted more friends. No one actually knows. Tony became close with his lab partner James Rhodes, who he dubbed Rhodey. He also roped Virginia Potts into his trio as well. She became known as Pepper almost overnight. Natasha basically adopted the “school nerd” Bruce Banner and Carol Danvers, the girl most of the guys hated because she was “too feminist.” Carol, an avid lesbian even at a young age, didn’t care. Boys were a waste of time to her. Bucky was fast friends with Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, and Sharon Carter.  Every once in a while, all ten of them would hang out, but it seemed like the legendary trio was over.

 As they reach puberty, the comments about them increase. Instead of being smelly boys, Tony and Bucky both grow into handsome young men. Both realize as they grow older that they were kind of into boys and girls. Sure, Natasha is beautiful, Bucky thinks, but so is Sam. He doesn’t know how Tony feels about Nat, and since one of them was “destined” to get her, he decides he will step back and let Tony ask her out. He takes Sam on a date, and they are steady for a couple of months. They split on good terms at the end.

 Tony has the same line of thought, and he dates Tiberius Stone for a while. Both Bucky and Natasha hate him, but Tony doesn’t know why. Ty is cultured and handsome, a real catch. So, what if he verbally abuses him and guilt-trips him? That’s the way his father always treats him. Isn’t it normal?

 Natasha doesn’t date. She doesn’t care to. If people want to speculate, she doesn’t care. She’s only sixteen, why does it matter if she doesn’t have a partner? Her fathers tell her to take her time, and if she never wants to date, that’s her say.

 When they graduate, Tony goes to MIT. Natasha gets in at Stanford, and Bucky’s parents can only afford for him to go to NYU. Tony offers to pay for a better college, but Bucky won’t let him. They keep in contact and see each other every break. Tony finally breaks up with Ty in his freshman year, but he becomes a party animal. Rhodey does his best to keep Tony out of trouble, but even he fails sometimes. When he graduates summa cum laude, he takes his place at Stark Industries. Natasha studies to become a lawyer, and she passes the bar easily. Bucky graduates NYU and saves up enough to buy his own auto repair shop. All are successful and don’t have much time to spend with each other or anyone else, to be fair.

 ++++++

Jan, Tony’s stylist, sets him up on a blind date with a Jimmy because he “works too much.” He shows up at the restaurant she picks out to only find Bucky sitting at the table to which the maître d leads him. “Bucky?”

 “Tony? What are you doing here?” Bucky stands.

 “I’m as confused as you are.” Tony sits at the table. “Jan told me I’d be meeting a Jimmy. Who the hell calls you Jimmy?”

 “Well, she called you Anthony. I can’t believe you let anyone call you Anthony.”

 Tony shoots him a glare. “I don’t. Not sure why she told you that you’d be meeting an Anthony… unless she did this on purpose.”

 “What? The parents figure that if Nat doesn’t want to date either of us, they might as well put us together?” Bucky’s eyes snap.

 “I don’t know.” Tony shrugs. “But it all seems very suspicious, you know? What do you propose we do about it?”

 “I think we should eat dinner and go have fun. We both go home to our own houses afterwards and never try to date again, just to screw ‘em.” Bucky smiles sharply.

 “I like that. Deal.”

 Tony wakes up in Bucky’s bed the next day. “Well, I guess that plan didn’t work out.”

 “Yea… I’m torn up between kicking you out now just to fuck our parents or actually fucking you again,” Bucky comments. “Damn, Tones, you’re amazing.”

 Tony colors. “Yea, I had a lot of experience in college. People still like to say they spent the night with me even though I haven’t slept with someone else for months now. I’ve just been busy.”

 “Same. Who has time to date anymore?” Bucky shakes his head. “It’s a shame because I would love to have nights like last night more often.” He straightens completely and raises a finger. “I have an idea, and you may not like it, but here me out. What if we were each other’s booty calls? Just whenever we need a quick smash, we text the other?”

 “James Buchanan Barnes, you are a fucking genius. I would kiss you right now, except my PA’s probably calling my dead phone, wondering where the hell I am. Can we rain check the next session?” Tony hops out of bed, pulling on his pants. Once quickly dressed, he heads to the door to leave and blows Bucky a kiss on his way out.

 Using his watch to ping his driver, Tony heads home to get changed before going to work an hour late. Howard doesn’t berate him as much for being late for work, so Tony wonders if he knew something about his date with Bucky. The thought leaves his mind as he gets started on his day. He doesn’t have time to think about dates or meddling parents.

 As the months go by, both Tony and Bucky text in claims to their booty call agreement. Tony is happy to do so, but he finds himself catching feelings for Bucky. He wonders if it’s because Bucky is the only one that he’s in close contact with, which he mentions to Rhodey when they get lunch on Rhodey’s first day on leave.

 “I mean, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be fucking the only person you have a steady friendship with.” Rhodey steals one of Tony’s fries.

 Tony pouts. “Don’t be like that honeybear. You and Pepper are my friends, too.”

 “Yea, but I’m in the Air Force more than 80% of the time, and Pepper works for you. It’s different.”

 “You’re just jealous that you’re not getting any.” Tony decides.

 Rhodey just smiles. “Says who?”  Tony begins to assault Rhodey for details, the topic of Bucky forgotten.

++++++

“Hey, Natasha’s moving back to New York, apparently.” Bucky informs Tony one morning. “My mom just texted me.”

 Tony groans. “If this becomes another ‘Why don’t you date her?’ thing, I swear I’m going to move to Tahiti and not accept any long-distance calls. You’re welcome to come with if you’d like.”

 “I think we should take her out to dinner one night when she gets settled, just to catch up.” Bucky muses. “Then our parents can’t be mad because we didn’t try.”

 “Yea, I wonder how she’s been. We haven’t talked in so long.” Tony agrees. “I wonder if she got a partnership here or something. I hope so. That’d be good for her.”

 “Nick and Phil will be glad to have her back. If only my parents were as supportive as they are. You should have seen my dad when I told them I was opening my own auto shop.” Bucky smiles that unhappy smile.

 Tony laughs mirthlessly. “I’d be happy if my parents talked to me at all. But being that Howard’s always cranky anymore, I guess it’s best that he doesn’t.”

 ++++++ Natasha moves back less than a month later with a short, sandy haired man in tow. They move into an apartment on the Upper East side. Once she’s settled, she agrees to meet Bucky and Tony for dinner. About ten minutes in, she asks them, “How long have you two been together?”

 “Did someone tell you that we’re together?” Tony demands. “Because they’re wrong. We’re simply booty calls to each other.”

 She shakes her head. “No, you’re not. You might like to think that, but you’re in love with each other. No one told me; I can see it from here.”

 The two men shift in their seats, not daring to look at the other. “So how have you been?” Bucky asks her.

 “Busy. Jenn and I are setting up our own partnership. We’ve gotten a lot of cases lined up, and we need a secretary.  There’re two lawyers working pro bono mostly down in Hell’s Kitchen. We might add them to our firm and pick up their secretary as well. I saw them in court for the Punisher trials, and she seems to have her stuff in order.” She takes a sip of her drink. “Sorry for not keeping up with you guys. I barely even talk to Bruce and Carol.”

 “Mom told me you brought a man home with you,” Bucky says. “She didn’t seem too happy about it. Are you two dating?”

 “Clint? No, he’s just a friend. I’m too busy to date, honestly. I’ve tried a couple times in LA, but it turns out I’m very selective of those with which I choose to hang out. Most men are idiots, and I’m tragically straight. You see my problem, right?”

 “We don’t feel your pain, but we understand,” Tony says. “Well, what we should do is make sure the three of us hang out at least once a month. If we want to bring our other friends, I don’t care, but I’ve sorely missed you, Nat. And Bucky, maybe we should spend more time together with our clothing on.”

 “You say that now, but what about tonight when…” Bucky begins but stops when Natasha gives him her death glare. “Okay, that is still as frightening as ever. Is that how you win all your cases?”

 “No. I’m skilled enough that I don’t need to use that.” Nat flips her hair. “But I’m glad it works on you.”

 Tony stick out his tongue at Bucky. “She’d never kill me. Who would give her those amazing scalp massages?”

 “Now that you’ve brought it up, I demand one once we leave the restaurant.”

 Natasha goes home that night realizing that she missed out on a lot of Tony and Bucky’s lives. If she were being honest, and she is, she kind of relied on their parents’ hope that she would one day marry one of the two. She always acted the way she did because she was equally attracted to both of them, and she would never be able to choose. So, she moved away and let them get on with their lives. She never thought once that they would choose each other and leave her out. She tells this to Clint when she gets home.

 “Talk to them. Maybe they’ll share.” Clint suggests before he falls asleep on the couch.

 She rolls her eyes. “You have a room for a reason.” Natasha knows he’ll still be there when she gets up to go to work the next morning.

 ++++++

The trio meets up at least twice a month. Per Natasha’s goading, Bucky and Tony start to actually date. She’s happy for them but seeing them sometimes is bittersweet. She just wants to go back to the times where they didn’t have to worry about feelings. All feelings have done for her were made her sad.

 One night, they’re eating takeout in Tony’s kitchen when he says, “You can kill me if we’re wrong, but I want to proposition something with you.”

 Natasha raises an eyebrow. This ought to be interesting. Tony proceeds. “So, Bucky and I are very happy in our relationship, but it could use one more thing… you.”

 “Me?”

 “Yea. We both really like you, and we kind of got the feeling that you like us, too. Are we wrong?” Bucky bites his lip worriedly.

 “No, you’re not wrong. I really like both of you. I have since we were kids. I just never wanted to choose between the two of you. When you got together, I was happy for you. I never thought that you’d both want me as well.”

 “Why wouldn’t we want you?” Tony asks. “We love you so much. Obviously, we’ll have to talk about how this is going to work. I hear communication is key to any good relationship. I should know.”

“Also, if we all date, that’s one way to make sure our parents don’t get exactly what they want. Instead of you choosing one of us, you chose both.”

 Natasha grins. This is a fine arrangement indeed. “I would invite you back to my place, but Clint’s there. Would one of yours work?”

 “It’d have to be Tony’s. I just moved in two weeks ago.” Bucky jabs his thumb at his boyfriend.

 ++++++

Natasha’s parents are overjoyed when they hear the news, Bucky’s parents don’t say anything, but Bucky knows they are a little wary of his relationship. Tony’s parents, on the other hand, are very vocal. Howard has a yelling fit, screaming at Tony until he loses his voice. Maria asks him why he vexes his father like that.

 When Bucky and Nat try to comfort him, he shrugs them off, saying, “That’s the first real conversation I’ve had with either of my parents since I was a kid. Don’t worry; I always knew Howard would have a problem with it.”

 “It still sucks,” Bucky tells him. “No matter what, you’ve got us.”

 Tony knows he’s happy when both his partners cuddle around him in the middle of their California King bed. Throughout all odds, the trio is back together.

[brokenfoetus]

...Real Talk for a Moment....

This is gonna be a long rant post, so by all means... quickly scroll past. Parts may even be a tad emo feels for some folks for one reason or another... There’s no shame in skipping for reals.  A lot of days I can’t bother to read anything too in depth... anyway... HERE goes.... While I absolutely love art, and performance, and surreal awkward characterization of myself I call “THE END”. I also value truth, and being understood. My blog here started more as a journal for me to vent, and place to post music and art for me to look at in order to try and just relax during a very difficult point in my life. Every now and then I like to stop and ground myself and post in a sense about the actual me.  There’s frankly not anything magical here, everyone has a story and their experiences and struggles we all do no matter who you are. I suppose like I said, I just like to be understood where I am coming from typically can only be slightly grasped like anyone.  Even if you agree with views and relate to feelings, things become clearer with details.... hence my rants. I get it out of my system and state my perspectives all at once and anyone who happens to be curious gets to read it. Maybe gets to relate and frankly that tends to help us sometimes. It helps people realize they’re not alone in their situations.  Anyway.... I was born a tiny premature gremlin on the east coast of the U.S. I was raised a devout Catholic boy. At age 11 I was diagnosed with the chronic illness Diabetes. when the symptoms started my mother called doctors concerned. We had to wait a full month for my appointment.  It was rough. Some people don’t know of the disease, but most people generally are aware. It typically doesn’t seem all too dramatic to most since people think of it as old grandma and grandpa taking their pills and measuring their food. When you’re talking juvenile onset diabetes it’s different... severity can vary. but, I caught some sort of virus, with flu like symptoms... I was very very sick for a week or two.  Once it passed, I was okay but slowly started feeling gross in other ways.  By the time we got to see Doctors it was too late, and the damage done to my pancreas made it so it created pretty much no insulin. The only theory Doctors had at the time was the virus freaked out my auto-immune system so it made my body attack itself.  It seemed that my white blood cells had attacked my pancreas. I was 11, so... I didn’t know what diabetes was. I asked my doctor if there was a cure, and he explained that there was no cure. My little boy brain after feeling so awful for a month and a half assumed I was going to die. I burst into tears as I was very very afraid. My Doctor quickly explained I wasn’t going to die like I had assumed and that it can be treated. It doesn’t seem so scary most the time when you realize it can be treated. The thing is the hormone insulin can be quite dangerous, as low blood sugars are actually very much more dangerous than high blood sugars. Insulin allows glucose in the blood to travel into cells to basically use as fuel. without it sugar levels rise in the blood stream, and the body starts rapidly breaking down fat cells to use as fuel. Now, that happens normal some anyway usually after eating. Just not rapidly.... when it does, the fuel it breaks down creates ketones which can make the blood toxic... by making it acidic.... Like I don’t really think... there’s any way I can describe what high blood sugar feels like... or what it feels like when your blood starts to become acidic.... I can’t... but... minor low blood sugar attacks can happen to anyone just by skipping lunch or forgetting to eat... and those suck... bad ones... well... they feel like you’re dying. Not to be melodramatic about it all... but that’s all I can say to explain it... it just feels like you’re dying.  Probably because you sort of are..... The brain runs on glucose so when the levels get too low... your brain panics and tries to save itself and alert you. It’s not fun. It’s been many years since I had anything dangerous or serious in terms of low blood sugars but, a couple times in my life when I wasn’t doing very well emotionally and mentally I wasn’t paying attention or being careful with my insulin dosages and how much I was eating. I’ve had 3 grand mal seizures in my life when I was younger.... it’s hard to explain the experience... in mine... I don’t know.... It was like not existing at all, there was nothing. I woke to pain, I couldn’t see or hear it just hurt. Everything hurt head to toe. Then I could hear myself saying it hurt, then I could hear the people around me, and then I could see the people around me.  Then I knew what had happened.  I felt a bit guilty for scaring my loved ones so much.  That honestly made me more upset than the pain. The reason I spell all this out... is my life has mostly been surrounded by fear. I’ve been aware of my mortality and trying to avoid dying on a daily basis since I was a very young boy. The strange thing I suppose.... is after a while... you just get sick of being afraid.... you kind of stop being scared and just get angry... I was a shy timid nervous little dude.... I’ve had long long times where... I’ve felt worthless, I’ve hated myself, felt I didn’t deserve happiness, or love. I’ve let people use me, without standing up for myself. I’ve let people be toxic and cruel, while excusing their behavior. While at the same time condemning myself for any tiny mistake I may have made in any way. I’ve made myself a martyr in personal relationships, sacrificing myself and my feelings. I’ve frankly... done a whole bunch of fucked up things turned inward. The nice thing I suppose, is I don’t do that anymore.... I still make mistakes, and I like to take responsibility for them and make amends or fix them. You can get used to some really fucked up things. Especially when struggling with self worth. I used to think I was useless and undeserving. Today... I’m well aware I’m a PRETTEH PRETTEH GOFF BOI.... I have long time close friends who love me just as much as I do them. I have a wonderful beautiful lovely lady who has my heart and soul whom I want to spend every moment I possibly can with until my bones are dust.  Who helped me a great deal over the past couple years or so.  Helped me with myself and helped me believe in myself again. Just by being my friend and supporting me while I continue to be the eccentric artist asshole I am. and I have Scrambles... THE MOST CUTEST BLACK KITTEH KAT EVAR. I feel rather lucky to have all I do. I appreciate what I have very very much. I’ve been dealing with Diabetes since I was 11... and had been dealing with Severe Major Depression symptoms since my early 20s. over the past five years I finally started getting help, Turns out I don’t just have diabetes.... I have adhd and some kind of sleep disorder. we’ve been calling it narcolepsy but it’s hard to say exactly, it could be hypersomnia which is a super fancy way of saying I’m fucking always exhausted 24/7 which is pretty accurate.  That is usually caused by narcolepsy or something else but... who knows... still trying to figure that part out. I have discovered though that, being fucking exhausted non stop for 20 years will make you very depressed.  Sometimes depression makes you tired, and sometimes being tired makes you depressed. When I was a young lad, I gave myself one single life goal.... That was to finish an electro industrial album and play some live shows. I dunno, to some that might not be a big deal.... I never said it had to be “good” after all. But, when I was at a low point dealing with my stuffs, trying to take care of myself... I honestly spent most my days sleeping. I was awake maybe 4 hours a day.  Things felt very hopeless, that learned hopelessness made me believe things were pretty much pointless.  I would shrug... and talk to my psychiatrist about my suffering in a manner that people talk about the weather.  I didn’t even care anymore it was happening.  It was “oh well... is what it is.” Until I got angry, it was a good thing I was so frustrated.... because it meant I finally gave a shit again. I wanted to get better and I wanted it to hurry the fuck up. Anyway... I’m just rambling and ranting because I was thinking back a lot after doing a sleep study... probably the first in a series of them. I don’t have apnea so I mean... that’s good. I also got to see what some of my brainwaves look like... I also apparently wake up after dreaming some a lot... I also apparently yelled in the middle of the night hahaha. So back to the whole life goal thing.....my long time friend, who introduced me to shitloads of music and bands and has always been close through good and bad times.  Was saying how he knew it was something I’ve always wanted to do, so he wants to help me.  He’s starting to help me plan the performance and then later will help me setup my shows and come with me to what will be really awkward and silly first couple gigs I play.  An open mic night will be particularly hilarious to me, since instead of hearing shitty rock song covers, it will be an insane goth punk dude screaming distorted vocals to weird electro noises haha.  It’s taken a long time to get shit finally going... but... it’s getting there... it’s still going to take a lot more work... on both me and the music.  I have countless things I have to do, but I’m just happy I finally got angry enough to scream fuck it... and go for it... I love a lot of various kinds of work. I don’t really fit there very well though.  Now that the sleep disorder stuff has become worse over time... it’s not really possible anyway.  That’s okay though, since now I’m just doing what I’m actually good at.  Eccentric artist asshole has always been my key features.  xD So, here’s some photos of me before and during my sleep lab and random enjoyable crap I suppose... and my general mood.  It’s been a while....                                                  -The End-

[09yards]

7 - Houston, I have so many problems (days gone by - nct)

Days Gone By masterlist | main masterlist - ao3 link

warning: excessive use of italics in this chapter because apparently I felt like it and I've only worked on this during night hours and honestly it probably doesn't make sense because it isn't edited properly okay love you bye now, enjoy the chapter (:

Mark drowns his sorrows in T Swift, Grey's Anatomy and Ben and Jerrys and we talk about Johnny a whole lot and the pressures of school and life decisions.

I’ve got a hundred speeches thrown-out speeches I almost said to you

&

Yeah, after all this time, I’m still into you

      Johnny was a good brother, just not exactly role model material. He was protective, but still let you do all the dumb stuff you thought of - like jumping fully clothed in the lake during winter or staying out past curfew because ‘mum will never know, not unless you tell her anyway’ - he was the one there to laugh with you, cry with you, encourage you to do stupid things because you have to live your life. Mark never really understood when Johnny would go on some philosophical rant about how you only get one life, if you aren’t enjoying it then you’re not doing it right.

     He wasn’t constantly thinking about what to do next, how if he did this or that then this would happen. Mark was confused by it in all honestly, he couldn’t comprehend that Johnny studied for fun, wanted to do well not because he felt he had to but because he wanted to. Mark never felt like he made choices purely for himself, he did it for other people or because that’s what he was supposed to do. It wasn’t just academics, Mark was nice to everyone, he it his tongue when he really wanted to correct someone on their opinions (everyone is entitled to their own opinions but the guy was just plain wrong, zero factual basis for his arguments). Mark liked being in control of his own thoughts and feelings, he liked dictating his own life, for once. He just didn’t know how to regain control. He wanted to stop doing things for others, he wanted to be a little selfish – wanted to make himself happy first. He didn’t realise there was absolutely nothing selfish about that at all.

      And then, as stupid as it may sound, Mark started binging Grey’s Anatomy. The medical drama was a major turning point for the sixteen-year-old (at the time), taught him about how he wanted to help people, how he wanted to make a difference to people’s lives. He remembers sitting down and talking to Johnny about it, about how he felt like he’d found his calling. Sure, if anyone asked him now, he’d tell people that he fell in love with medicine as a young child, always playing doctors with his teddy bears and seeing his mum go to work every day, not that Sandra Oh being the magnificent actress she is, made him want to learn more and more about the field, thus he pulled an all-nighter googling different medical pathways and finding what was right for him – and how.

      Johnny was there for all the big decisions in his life. Johnny was there when Mark didn’t realise you were supposed to ‘come out’ if you were anything but straight (frankly, he strongly believed in the idea that no ones sexuality should be pre-determined and that no one should feel the need to define who they are - like that clip in ‘Love, Simon’ which prompted Jisung, Hyuck, Renjun and Jaemin all telling him to shut up when he went on a rant about how assuming someone’s sexuality is wrong and how coming out shouldn’t just be for the non-heterosexual) and in the midst of his first full-on breakdown over his burgeoning crush on Daniel from year 10 maths, Mark had said ‘he’ around thirty-two times, give or take a few (yes, Johnny had counted just to be sure), and only then had it truly dawned on Johny that this was it, this is the closest Johnny was getting to an ‘I-am-gay-and-this-is-me-coming-out-to-you’ moment. Honestly, it’d made Johnny quite proud - his mother was an avid supporter of the community and they’d grown up completely aware that any and all love was love, nothing wrong with any of it and those who believed otherwise didn’t deserve a lollipop (sue him, he was only eight and that was their mum’s way of describing people who were arseholes without calling them bad names). Johnny was there when Mark, sweating nervously and disgustingly clammy-handed, told them how he wanted to follow in their mothers (actually Meredith Grey’s, not that he was going to tell his mum that) footsteps and become a doctor too. Why he was so nervous, he’ll never really know nor understand.

      Especially not when Johnny picked him up and twirled him around in a hug shouting about how his little brother is going to be a doctor, Johnny always was one for theatrics, their mum on the other hand gave her usual warm-hearted smile, said she’d support him no matter what and wrapped him up in one of her bear-hugs. She always gave the best hugs, they simply felt like home, like no matter what you’d be safe.

      Jisung smiled, too young to really care and didn’t understand why Mark had made some big deal about it – “it’s just a degree, you could buy one online for like a hundred pounds instead”. Yes, Jisung spent too much time on the internet, Mark really didn’t want to know what the majority of his time on there was spent doing. Honestly, Mark had him pegged as some sort of edgy Tumblr teen running an insanely successful blog for a book-turned-tv-or-movie series so the majority of his time was probably devoted to reading (that Mark knew) and watching and then reviewing the episodes. It was somewhat worrying the amount Mark had thought about this, was he a multi-fandom blogger or did he just stick to one? What was he watching? Shadowhunter’s? Harry Potter? Sherlock? So, many, questions. But hey, it wasn’t Marks business to know. If he’d just asked Jisung he’d be aware of the youngers multiple blogs, one dedicated to his love of kpop and idols with dimples, the other dedicated to reviewing and just general chatting and fan theories about his favourite book series turned movie/TV shows, Mark wasn’t as far off as he’d like to believe.

      With everything that was happening with Hyuck, or rather lack thereof, Mark was desperate to feel at least somewhat in control of his life. Desperate to feel like he was doing something that mattered, like he was working toward something. One thing Mark could always rely on is that all of his friends and family, among other things, would describe him as a workaholic. As much as Mark loved to attempt to dispute this, he couldn’t. It was the truth and being the emotionally constipated teenager that he is – what better way to deal with your emotions that not doing so and instead throwing yourself into schoolwork? Mark was a broken human in many ways, in many ways he was just normal. Just like any other teenager feeling like they didn’t have their lives under control, feeling like they had to make life altering and affirming decisions at the age of sixteen or seventeen. It wasn’t fair. It didn’t feel fair at least. It didn’t feel fair that he couldn’t have some cute teenage love story like in the movies, didn’t feel fair that he had to submit his university applications by mid-October when everyone else got to wait until December, didn’t feel fair that everyone else had their soulmates or were finding them left and right but he was stuck.

      It was stupid and selfish but he wanted to feel upset. He wanted to feel like he’d lost something rather than just admitting the plain truth that Donghyuck just didn’t like him back. Not every love story was straight (oh the irony) out of Wattpad and not everyone got their happy ending, at least not yet. So, a very stressed Mark was free to wander mindlessly around his home, mind too occupied with some parallel universe where there’s no such thing as soulmates and everyone possess the ability to fall in love with whomever they wish. Not that that would change much in Mark’s case, but let the guy dream okay? Okay.

      Johnny was a good brother. But Johnny was still his brother at the end of the day.

      A brother who comes home for the weekend unexpectedly and so his seventeen year old brother believes he’s able to be singing his heart out to wildest dreams by Taylor swift, I break from crying over Mcdreamy’s death, with a pot of Ben and Jerrys fish food (yeah he was in full blown sad mode) in hand and the most over-sized hoodie he could get his hands on, actually wearing his glasses for once and well… Mark was a mess, in peace, but Johnny took the initiative of filming Marks current endeavours before making his presence known by snorting obnoxiously and crumpling into a ball (well as close as Johnny could get to folding his over six foot body into something remotely small) on the floor of their kitchen unable to breathe normally for at least ten minutes and unable to look Mark in the eye for the next two hours while keeping a straight face, as every time it resulted in him wheezing again and managing to get out a “Y-you, you listen,” another wheeze, “to Taylor, the Taylor Swift,” another, stupid, wheeze, “like queen of break up songs when you’re sad? Oh, Mark, where did I go wrong with raising you.” Yeah, not the most pleasant of experiences for Mark, his bright red ears clearly displaying his emotions.

       He should be allowed to drown his sorrow in peace, listening to Taylor Swift (and Adele but Johnny didn’t hear his rendition of ‘hello’ so #MarkFirstWin) eating his ice cream and dancing around the kitchen. We’ve all been there and anyone who says they haven’t done some sort of version of this is a down right liar, or just really, really, lucky and hasn’t experienced any form of heartbreak ever.

      Nevertheless, this is the same Johnny who then slaps you so hard on the back that it winds you, and then tells you with the biggest shit-eating grin on his face, “Hey! You know what would be perfect to distract you?” No Johnny, he was taking the Taylor Swift route. Mark just shook his head, his ears tinting red at the memory of Johnny catching him again (yes it was three hours again) and how he would definitely be relaying the message to others. “Well, your uni applications are in, nothing you can do right now to change that. So, I wasn’t going to invite you because I knew you’d say no but now I’m leaving you no choice. As it’s Winwin and Yuta’s birthdays, they’re having a party tonight and you are coming with me.”

       “But-“

      “Yeah, no buts. You’re coming. Yes, everyone will be there – it’s a family affair. Even Jisung is coming for a bit but I’ve already bought him chocolate milk and put it in the fridge at Yuta’s place.”

      “And you’re really going to let me drown my sorrows in alcohol after my birthday party?”

      “Sure, after all, what’s the worst that could happen?”

      Like Mark said, Johnny let you do the dumb shit. He’d help you pick up the pieces later.

   Hyuck. Alcohol. Jungwoo. Alcohol. Yuta. Alcohol. Winwin. Alcohol. Jaehyun. Alcohol. Soulmates. Black-out drunk.

[aliceslantern]

Beyond this Existence, a Kingdom Hearts fanfic, chapter 7

Summary:  After Xehanort's death, Demyx finds himself unexpectedly human in Radiant Garden. With nothing but fragments of his past and a cryptic statement from Xemnas, he's left to figure out who he is. When Ienzo asks for his help with a project, the two find common ground, but the trauma and secrets in both of their pasts could tear it apart. Zemyx (Demyx/Ienzo), post-KH3 canon compliant

Read it on FF.net/on AO3

Of course resting wasn’t easy.

He took a bath, and then sat washing his clothes, kneading the fabric again and again against the side of the old-fashioned tub. Usually he dreaded the castle’s lack of real modern conveniences (they didn’t even have a microwave), but for some reason the manual act of washing was comforting. With nothing else clean to wear, he had to put on the old black coat, and for the first time it felt uncomfortable against his skin.

Demyx didn’t want to risk going out in the black coat, so he sat in the kitchen, nursing the same cup of weak coffee, as he waited for everything to dry enough to wear. He so had to do some shopping. This was tedious.

“Oh, Demyx. You’re alright. What--” Ienzo flinched at the sight of the cloak.

“I did laundry. I had nothing else to wear.”

“Yes, I see. That makes sense.”

“I made coffee. It should still be hot.”

Ienzo poured himself a cup and then sat across from him. Demyx noticed, again, just how tired he looked; his face was pale and he leaned against his palm as though he couldn’t support his own weight. Ienzo only ever looked this tired when he’d spent the day with Ansem; even when they worked together on the translation, he was able to at least sit up straight.

“...Are you okay?” Demyx asked. “You look terrible.”

“I should be asking you the same,” Ienzo said in a soft voice. “I’m very tired.”

“Why don’t you get some rest?”

“Haven’t the time lately.”

“I don’t get it. You keep saying yourself that we have so much time now, but you aren’t using any of it to take care of yourself.”

Ienzo took a drink. “I assure you I am in good health.”

“You don’t look like it.”

“I’m surprised after your illness yesterday that you’re worried about me.”

Demyx blinked. “Of course I am. We’re… we’re friends.” His voice faltered on the last word and he looked down into his mug.

“I suppose we are, aren’t we,” Ienzo said. He smiled. “I find I rather enjoy your company. When you’re not collapsing, that is.”

Demyx felt a blush creep into his face and for several heartbeats couldn’t speak. “What is it you’re doing with Ansem?” Demyx asked.

“Like I said before, we’re trying to find a way to help Sora. But we’re working almost entirely in theory, in the metaphysical, with completely untested hypotheses. I’ve been programming simulations to try and come up with any way to test them. It’s very complicated work, and… emotionally taxing to boot. There’s a lot at stake here. And while the ideas we’ve had are exciting, I feel as though I’m approaching something beyond understanding. And that frustrates me.” He looked up suddenly, and turned pink. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to complain to you.”

“No, I mean, you’ve dealt with all my stupid shit. This is big. No wonder you’re so stressed out.” He clapped his hands together. “I know. You need a break.”

“I haven’t the time--”

“You can’t help Sora if you’re burning out. Which, clearly you are. You’re important too, you know.”

He traced his finger over the rim of his mug. “...I suppose you’re right,” he said softly.

“Course I am! Listen, if anyone’s an expert in slacking off, it’s me. Once my clothes are dry I’m taking you out of the castle to get some fresh air. In the meantime, you’re going to go to bed.”

“But I--”

Demyx shushed him. “You need sleep. When was the last time you had a full night’s, anyway?”

Ienzo looked down. “...I cannot recall,” he mumbled.

“Exactly. Go take a nap.”

“Yes, I… that sounds much needed.” Ienzo stood and he actually stumbled a little. Demyx caught him by the elbow.

“I’m going to keep an eye on your door,” Demyx said. “If I see you leave to go off do work I’m going to be super pissed. And I can be scary.”

Ienzo laughed a little. The sound made him feel tingly.

“No, really! I can be!”

“You’re sweet to care,” Ienzo said. “Thank you.”

“Go nap.”

He watched him walk down the hallway and go into his bedroom. His heart was beating fast again. This was the opposite of what pain felt like. He sighed, and then becoming aware of how he was feeling, he shook himself out. “...He’s my friend,” he whispered allowed. But he’d called him sweet...

“Ah, Demyx. Good morning.” Ansem’s deep voice startled him out of the reverie. “I’m surprised to see you dressed so.”

“It’s the only clean thing I have,” he said.

“Yes. That slipped my mind. Easily fixable. I should hate for you to be uncomfortable during your time here.” He lifted the coffee pot off the burner and, finding it empty, exhaled sharply. “Have you seen Ienzo? I was running some of his simulations and I had a question about the code.”

It occurred to Demyx at first that he should lie, because Ansem was kind of pissing him off. Can’t you see how tired he is? Aren’t you supposed to know him better than me? “He looked exhausted, so I told him to get some rest.”

Ansem put a hand to his forehead. “Of course. He never complains, that boy. He’d work himself to death if you’d let him. Unfortunately, I was too distracted to notice. I’ll try to keep a better eye on him in the future. Thank you for that.”

“Least I can do.”

Demyx was starting to feel antsy. He knew Ienzo was only probably just falling asleep, but he wanted to check and see if his stuff was dry. “So I hear you’re interested in ancient Keyblade history,” Ansem said.

“Yeah. Um. After everything that’s happened, the X-blade and all that, I just. Wanted to know more.” His mouth was dry and he drank down more of his coffee.

“It is fascinating how we can inadvertently make myths into history. The power of the human will is not to be underestimated.”

Demyx frowned. “It’s not a myth, though. It actually happened. Hundreds of years ago.”

“Yes, but, before that, it was nothing more than a prophecy, a legend, part of perhaps some religion. It was the belief of strong-hearted individuals that made it come true. To the horrors of the rest of us.”

“So you do know about it,” Demyx said. “Ienzo said there weren’t many texts.”

“There are not. I only know what was passed onto me by my predecessor, the last sage queen of this world. This sort of storytelling gets diluted over time. I’m sure you know that. You’ve studied folk music, I presume. It’s similar in that regard, things getting passed down and changed over time.”

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “I’m gonna go. See if my clothes are dry.”

Several hours later, the Organization cloak once again in the empty drawers of his dresser, Demyx went to check on Ienzo. He brought him some water and braced himself to have to tell him off.

Ienzo’s bedroom was a bit bigger than his, and clearly had been lived in before. The deep cherry wood of the furniture matched and had been taken care of, unlike the random pieces in his own room. A roll-top desk was piled with books, a lamp nearby. A poster of local constellations was on one wall, old and very faded. And of course there was a bookshelf, piled high and bursting to the seams, but what Demyx really noticed was a threadbare purple stuffed cat, barely visible behind some candles.

Ienzo was fast asleep on the double bed. He hadn’t even taken off his coat, and his shoes were piled haphazardly by the side of the bed. He was curled in on himself, as though sleeping hurt. Demyx set down the glass of water, took the edges of the quilt folded at the foot of the bed, and pulled it over him.

Ienzo stirred. Demyx couldn’t see his face under the layer of hair. “...Master?”

“No, it’s me, Demyx. I was just bringing you some water. Go back to sleep.”

“...Why is this happening?” He curled even tighter on himself, the blanket rumpling. “It hurts, why does it--”

Demyx shook him, trying to free him from the nightmare. After a long moment, his bloodshot eyes opened. “Hey. It was just a nightmare. You’re okay.”

Ienzo stared at him as though he couldn’t quite see him. His face was flushed and he sat up slowly. Demyx could hear that he was trying to get his breathing under control but failing, starting an agonizing descent into a panic attack.

“Try and breathe, okay? It’s over now. You’re safe.”

He put his hands to his head, his panicked breath dissolving into sobs. Demyx was utterly at a loss for what to do--he was afraid to touch him, lest he somehow made it worse, but he didn’t know how else to provide any comfort. He rested a tentative hand on Ienzo’s back and rubbed gently. To his surprise, Ienzo leaned into his touch. Demyx hugged him lightly. Ienzo was shaking all over. “It’s okay,” Demyx said over and over again. “You’re alright now.”

After what seemed like a long time, the sobs subsided, though he was still trembling. Ienzo pulled away and Demyx let go at the first sign of resistance. He mopped at his eyes.

“Better?” Demyx asked. He handed him the water. “Here. Drink this.”

He obeyed. He loosened the cravat and buttons around his throat.

“That was a memory, wasn’t it?” he asked.

Ienzo nodded. “...You’re here,” he stuttered.

“Oh. I mean, I was just checking on you. But then I saw you were dreaming, and I couldn’t leave you in the nightmare.”

“I’m sorry you had to see me like this,” he said. “Sometimes the memories are stronger than others.”

“Come on. You’ve seen me worse off.”

He hugged himself tightly.

“...Do you want to talk about it?” Demyx asked.

Ienzo shook his head. “No. Let’s… let’s go to town.”

“Are you sure? You just had one of the biggest panic attacks I’ve ever seen. Maybe you should just chill. Catch your breath.”

“I need to get out of here,” he insisted. There was a raw wildness in Ienzo's eyes that he had never seen before. He'd always been so put-together, but for the first time Demyx realized it was all an act. This was likely the tip of the suffering iceberg.

Demyx understood. As much as this castle had to be Ienzo’s home, there were a lot of dark memories wrapped up in it. “Sure. Whatever you want.”

Outside, the sun was starting to set. The air was cooling rapidly. Demyx was glad he’d thought to grab his sweater this time.

“It’s getting dark,” Demyx said. “You sure it’s safe? Neither of us have weapons.”

Ienzo nodded. “The Heartless haven’t been as plentiful as of late. There’s also the town’s defense system.” His voice was flat, dull. Demyx could tell he’d been shaken to his core.

“...Right, but we see something, we’re heading back. ‘Cause I am so not in the mood.”

Town was brightly lit; string lights were stretched across the buildings, making things glow and providing an extra level of protection against Heartless. The marketplace was still busy, the smells and sounds catching up to them. Demyx noticed a flyer pasted onto one of the buildings.

“There’s a concert in the square,” he said. His heart catching in his throat. “We have to go.”

“That must be new,” Ienzo said. “I haven’t seen anything like that here in a very long time. I should like to see it myself.”

They waded through the crowd in the marketplace, taking a circuitous route that actually spit them out near the foot of the castle. A small stage had been set up, and people were sitting out on lawn chairs and blankets. A warm, fizzy excitement gathered inside of him; it had been so longsince he’d heard any music, especially music that hadn’t been produced by himself.

“There’s a bench over there,” Ienzo said. “I’d rather not sit on the cold ground.”

“No problem.” He spotted a concession stand. “Are you hungry? Let’s get snacks.” The main product was popcorn, so he got enough for two of them. There was also hard apple cider, which sounded interesting. “Do you want one?”

“I’m not a big drinker, but… admittedly it sounds nice.”

After only barely having claimed their bench from other people, they settled back down. Demyx was glad to see that the tension in Ienzo’s shoulders had lessened slightly. “I take it you don’t get out much,” Demyx said.

“Not at all,” Ienzo said. “It’s very easy for me to forget about the mundane. I feel like all I do is look at the bigger picture. Especially lately.”

“It’s helpful sometimes. Otherwise it’s so easy to lose perspective. When I would do recon missions, I spent so much time picking apart everything about a world--its culture, its people, the power dynamics at play--that I would forget that everyone there is living. Sometimes I had to join them, to talk to someone, to just… remember I’m real. It’s the only way you can hang onto yourself.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Ienzo said. “But how can I afford to put myself above everything when there’s so much at stake?”

“You’re not putting yourself above it. You’re treating yourself as having worth. Which is something you keep lecturing me about.”

In the faint light, Demyx could swear he saw Ienzo turn pink. “I think it’s starting,” Ienzo said quietly, which was the perfect thing to distract him.

For the first set, his attention was rapt. The musicians were just a random group of people from the town who clearly hadn’t spent much rehearsal time together, and the songs they played were old Radiant Garden folk songs, well-worn and remembered. Technically, the musicians weren’t even very good, but it was the love with which they played the songs that compelled him.

The second set was more uptempo, and clearly meant to get people on their feet, which it did. Demyx exhaled; it felt like he’d been holding his breath forever. Hearing the music had grounded him, gave him some clarity. He realized Ienzo was staring at him and jumped.

He smiled. “I’m sorry. It was just so interesting to watch you watch them, so to speak. It was like you were in your own little world.”

“No,” Demyx said. “No, it made me feel a part of this one.” The silence and eye contact made him bristle. He stood. The pint of cider he’d had must have been a bit stronger than he’d thought. He was woozy in a good way. “Do you want to join them?”

“Me? Don’t be absurd.”

“Come on. It’ll be fun. Give me one good reason why not.”

“We’ll look foolish.”

“More like you’ll look dumb for being the only one still sitting. And besides. I bet half of these people are too drunk to care.”

“...I wouldn’t know how.”

“It’s not exactly rocket science.” Demyx offered his hand.

Ienzo sighed and drummed his fingers against the seat of the bench. “ Fine. But do not tell anyone about this.”

“That’s the spirit.”

He took Demyx’s hand, then froze. “I changed my mind.”

He blinked. “...Are you embarrassed? Hey, it’s okay. I’m just trying to help you relax a little. Do you want to go back?”

“Yes… perhaps.”

They left the noise and light of the town. The cool, dry air shook some of the tipsiness he was feeling. Demyx realized Ienzo was still holding his hand. His breath caught. He didn’t understand what this meant--was he also a little drunk?

“Just another moment,” Ienzo said when they reached the postern. “Look at the sky.”

The night sky seemed impossibly bright, brighter than he’d ever seen in years. The worlds that had fallen to darkness were healing, one by one.

“I haven’t seen… I can’t believe…” He reached up, as if to touch the stars. He squeezed Demyx’s hand with his other. “Why is it that I’ve never looked up? Look, Cassiopeia is there in almost its entirety. It’s been ten years since I’ve seen it in full. And Calliope.”

“It’s over,” Demyx said softly. “Finally.”

“No, there’s still so much work to do. And yet…” His voice hitched. In the semidarkness, it was hard to tell exactly, but Demyx could have sworn he saw tears in his eyes. “I thought this would all be over… because of me. Because of my mistakes, my insistence we did those experiments, almost everything was destroyed…”

“But the darkness was always there. You couldn’t have known what would happen. Anyway, you were a kid. Someone else should have known better and helped you.”

“You’re too kind to me, Demyx.” He shook his head and took his hand back. “Part of me will probably always feel guilty.”

“Then… let me help you with that. And I’ll be there to remind you of all the good you’ve done.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but this is my pill to swallow.”

They lapsed into a silence. Ienzo kept watching the stars. Demyx couldn’t see his eyes through the hair.

“I… have enjoyed your company,” Ienzo said after what felt like an eternity. “You’ve shown me there is more to life than… well, guilt and research. It reminds me that I am human, and… real.”

“I know what you mean,” he said. His heartbeat was making him jittery. “I always thought I would be alone somehow. And now I’m not.”

Ienzo turned to face him. “Rather succinct.”

Demyx was close enough to feel his body heat. He reached up with a trembling hand to touch Ienzo’s cheek. He seemed unsure of how to react to the touch, though he didn’t pull away. He put his hand on top of Demyx’s.

Do it, you coward.

He leaned in and kissed him. It was a light kiss, borderline chaste; it was over as soon as it had begun. Ienzo was gripping his hand painfully tight. Demyx couldn’t see his expression. Had he been reading the signs all wrong? Was this a terrible idea? Had he just fucked it all up?

“I’m sorry,” he said. Anxiety burrowed under his skin. “I thought-- Look, I--” He had no way of defending himself without outright lying. You could explain away most other gestures as friendly, but not this.

Ienzo shook his head. He let go of Demyx’s hand.

“Will you say something? Please?”

He kept shaking his head. He put his hand to his throat.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you--”

Ienzo knotted his hands.

Panic hitched in his chest. “I’m sorry. Oh god. I’m going to leave you alone. I’m so sorry.” He turned away and ran.

In a panicked daze he got back to his room, and collapsed onto his bed. He thought his heart might explode. How had he been so stupid? He hoped the damage wasn’t too extensive, but how could he be sure? He’d rendered Ienzo speechless. Why had he thought it was even possible--

The night was long. His heart was racing too fast to let him get any sleep. He played the moment over and over again, feeling a bit sicker each time. There was no way to take it back.

Around dawn, as he sat tangled in sheets, shaking all over, there was a faint knock at the door. He sat up.

Ienzo poked his head in. He looked terrible, pale and exhausted again. No doubt he hadn’t had any sleep either.

“I’m so--” Demyx began, but Ienzo held up a finger.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Ienzo said in a tired, low voice.

“Of course I did. I forced myself on you--”

“You did no such thing.” He leaned against the dresser. “I’ve thought… and I’ve thought… I’ve felt… something physical between us. The hints have been piling up, and this… longing I feel… I can’t categorize. I have to explain myself.”

His heart was pounding again, but in a different way.

Ienzo kept his eyes on the floor. “When I was a child there were times I would go mute,” he said. “Whenever I felt something strong, or experienced something traumatic, I would shut down. These spells have gotten less common as I’ve gotten older, but when I experience them, it’s impossible to communicate. It still happens now when I’m under exceptional stress, or surprised. And you surprised me. I’m sure it was an odd thing to witness.” He was wringing his hands together. “I thought about it all night. Part of me wonders if this is displaced desire, and hormonal impulses on both of our parts. I don’t pretend to understand these things. I never had reason to in the past. Maybe some would consider this a poor match. But I am tired of denying myself good things.”

The muscles in his chest were so taught with tension that his next breath hurt. "You mean--"

Ienzo crossed the remaining few feet between them and kissed him.

He tensed. It was more of a collision than a kiss, awkward and messy. Ienzo's anxious reaction suddenly made a whole lot more sense; he was completely inexperienced. “I know what you mean,” Demyx stuttered. “About this being confusing, and weird, and probably a bad idea, but I… I’m all in, Ienzo.”

Ienzo sat down next to him delicately, like he would fly apart if he moved too quickly. In the early morning light, Demyx could clearly see the flush in his face. He took his hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. "I didn't know what to expect," Ienzo said. His other hand lingered near his lips.

“When I kissed you? That was your first?”

“I never had the desire before. Or really, the time. I presume the same isn’t the case for you.”

“...Well. That’s true.”

A few beats of tense silence. Demyx put an arm around him, lightly. He remained tense, but did not flinch away. “Did you want me to do it again?”

“...I should… I should like that.”

He ran a hand through Ienzo's hair. It was deceptively soft, almost like down. Demyx kissed him. It took him a moment or two to begin to figure it out. He moved slowly and almost tentatively. Ienzo's hands dropped to his waist. He was learning, and quickly, and soon he began to kiss back with a little more fervor. This was more what Demyx thought it would be like. Warmer. More natural. He could hear him breathing rapidly. Ienzo reached up to touch his hair, his face. Demyx wanted nothing more than to pull him close and not let go, but he had to be careful. Still. It had been so long since he'd been touched in any capacity, romantically or otherwise, and he felt something like shock.

Ienzo pulled away. He was, if possible, even redder, and he didn't make eye contact when he said, "I didn’t think it would feel this way.”

“Disappointed?”

“No. The opposite.” He withdrew his hands. Demyx ached when the touch disappeared, but it was crucial that they take their time. “But I’m starting to feel ov-oversti--” He touched his throat.

“Overstimulated?” Demyx finished for him. “It’s okay if you need space. This is all new to you. We can take it really slow.”

Ienzo moved away a few feet and pulled his knees to his chest.

After a few minutes of breathing, Demyx broke the silence again. “You go quiet?” Ienzo nodded. “That’s okay. We can just chill here.” He swung his feet a little. Somehow, now that they kissed the longing was stronger than before. Demyx wondered why the body had to be so greedy. He should’ve been happy with this much; he was happy with it, and eager to see what this meant for them. “Is it okay if I talk?”

He nodded.

“It was really unexpected for me too,” Demyx said. “It just felt so much more real than anything I’ve experienced. Maybe it’s because I have a heart… or part of one, or whatever. I’m just… glad. I’m still barely catching my breath.”

They sat there for a while longer. Demyx thought he would get bored, but he found he didn’t mind this neutral sort of space they’d made. Sitting with Ienzo in silence was far better than sitting alone. He couldn’t stop smiling. After what could’ve been an hour or more, Ienzo cleared his throat.

“Better?” Demyx asked.

“Quite. I’m very… I’m very tired.”

“Go try to sleep. It seems like you’ve just gone through a lot. If it makes you feel better, I’m probably going to turn in too. Hard to sleep last night.”

“Yes, I agree.”

Demyx kissed him once more. “I’ll see you later.”

He watched him leave. Once the door was closed Demyx curled up tightly, feeling a reckless giddiness. He couldn't believe what had just happened, but the shock was pleasant for a change. Surprising. For once, being human wasn't so terrible after all.

[sleeplesspensieve]

Remedy For Guilt - II

Summary: The daughter of Bellatrix and Rodopholus Lestrange is offered the opportunity to teach at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry after training as a Healer since her graduation. Her past haunts her and she relies on her old Potions teacher for help but what will happen when they get too close for comfort?

Rated: E for graphic sex scenes in later chapters. Over 18′s only please.

Word Count: 2185

Multichapter Fic (Expected to be around 30-35 chapters with a planned sequel which will take place during the Harry Potter Books)

The Malfoy Manor

Lyra Lestrange was not one to impulsively make decisions. Although her mind was made up the day she spoke to Albus she did spend several days deliberating before finally putting quill to parchment and writing the Headmaster a letter of acceptance. He was delighted to hear from his old student and was keen to know what she had planned for her students.

Her aunt and uncle on the other hand weren’t as pleased.

Now, they weren’t outraged enough to kick her out of the mansion but it was a persistent topic of conversation over dinner for the weeks interim. They avoided addressing it directly; instead Narcissa would go on about finding a husband whilst Lucius would offer her holidays and internships abroad. Lyra found herself picking up extra shifts and staying late, trying to avoid interacting with Aunt Cissy and Uncle Lucy. She was grateful the mansion was large so she could easily avoid crossing paths with them but lately she had found solace in the library.

Lyra spent her hours at the place she resided mulling over books that she thought would best suit her curriculum. She was still deciding on a book suitable for those in years 6 and 7, knowing that she would actually have to perform the Dark Arts in front of her students. She knew there was no use in hiding from it and only learning the theory. How could one be best equipped if you had to face it in real life if all they had done was read it from a book?

It was lucky that her Aunt and Uncle had kept their library fully stocked. There were hundreds, if not thousands of books lined on the walls stacked on top of one another. It wouldn’t surprise her if half of the books were unread or untouched, bought purely to promote the image of wealth. In the centre of the room was a large desk which Lyra was well acquainted with as she had spent her summers as a teenager attempting to read all that she could as well as spending her time studying there whilst in Healing School. It was probably her favourite room within the entire house as it was peaceful and she was usually not disturbed.

The collection of books within the library included old text books of hers as well as her Aunt and Uncle’s which she was considering as part of her subject. She waved her wand and a few books were pulled from the shelf and floated to the desk. She was flicking through a book when she was interrupted by a child crashing through the door. The blond boy had his broomstick in tow and looked hopefully towards Lyra.

“Lyra,” he drawled, “Can you come and play with me?”

She smiled sweetly at her cousin and caressed his head. “Sorry Draco, I’ve got to find a book.”

“Well, what book do you need?”  He asked as propped his broomstick against the desk. “I could help you find it?”

She smiled and laughed lightly to herself knowing full well that her 9 year old cousin wouldn’t have the faintest idea where to look, “I’m not sure yet, I’m trying to find something good but I need to read through them all.”

Draco looked deflated. “Well, I’ll be outside then. Please come and join me when you can. It’s not as fun playing alone.” He grabbed his broomstick and walked towards the door, his head hung with sadness.

“Why don’t you invite the boys over to play?” Lyra suggested as she flicked through a book and put it aside.

“They’re not as good as you,” he frowned.

A woman approached the door to the library which young Draco had left ajar. She had hair as blonde as the child who entered. She beckoned for her son.

“Draco, dear,” she said. “Haven’t we told you before not to disturb Lyra whilst she’s in the library. She’s got important things to do.”

“What’s so important?” he questioned.

“I’ve got a new job,” she said, “Just doing a bit of reading up.”

“But, I thought you had a job?” he questioned. “Aren’t you working at that hospital as a healer?”

“I’m taking a break for a while, I’m going to go work at Hogwarts to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts,” Lyra said.

“Can I go to Hogwarts with you?” the boy asked.

Lyra smiled, “No sweetie. You’re too young. You’ll probably go next year.”

“I hope so,” his mother said. “Your father wants you to go to Durmstrang but Hogwarts is much closer.”

“Will you still be there next year?” Draco asked, looking up at his cousin.

“Possibly,” she said. “But don’t worry yourself too much. I’ll make time to see you, can’t leave my darling cousin alone for too long.” She pinched his cheek.

“Go along, dear,” Draco’s mother dismissed him and he went outside reluctantly. She turned her attention to Lyra. “Are you sure this is wise?”

“Working at Hogwarts?” she asked. “I think so. I mean, it’ll probably only be a year and I can go back to St. Mungo’s after and resume my training as a healer.”

“But all those mudbloods,” her Aunt shuddered at the thought.

“Yet you want Draco to go there?” Lyra raised her eyebrows.

“Scandinavia is much too far away -”

“Is it, dear?” A man with long blonde hair entered the room, joining the conversation. “I think it’s important that Draco gets an education where he will not be corrupt by filthy mudbloods and be taught how to use the Dark Arts.”

“What if he needs something and we’re too far away, Lucius?” his wife questioned.

“Well, we sent Lyra there and she was fine,” Lucius shrugged.

Lyra laughed as Narcissa objected, “Lyra was expelled.”

“With good reason,” she interjected. “You can’t expect me to go to school with that man in charge. He betrayed us.”

“Better to have Karkaroff than Dumbledore,” Lucius said. “Draco needs to learn how to use the Dark Arts.”

“Then teach him yourself,” Narcissa said before storming out of the room. The door slammed shut behind her.

“You honestly can’t blame her,” Lyra said. “She loves Draco more than anything and you never know Karkaroff might want revenge for what I did to him.”

“But Hogwarts? The place has gone to the dogs. Mudbloods roaming about learning how to use magic.”

Lyra’s ideals no longer aligned with her family’s but she wasn’t about to let that slip out. She’d much rather pretend to be a purist than come out as a blood traitor. “Honestly, Uncle,” she said. “I’m not sure of anything right not and I feel like it’d be nice to just get away from work for a while.”

“Why not go on a holiday?” he asked. “I’ll cover your expenses.”

“Thanks for the offer but I think I need this,” Lyra said as she opened up a book that was sitting on the desk.

“Very well,” Lucius said as he walked off.

~

The Malfoy Manor had been Lyra’s home for the past ten years, though she had probably spent more time at school or work than actually at her home. After the fall of the Dark Lord and then the imprisonment of her parents her Aunt Narcissa and Uncle Lucius had taken her in. Once she turned 17 she thought that she may have been able to move to her parents’ house but found that the Ministry of Magic had seized most of their assets and sold it on to new owners.

Lyra did not wish to impose on her Aunt and Uncle’s generosity for too long but it’s not like they even saw her much due to the vast size of their home. Her Aunt and Uncle insisted that she stay with them until she got married. Lyra had little to no interest in marriage but it seemed to be all that her Aunt seemed to talk about.

“So, Lyra, when will you find a nice man to marry?” she asked as they sat at the dinner table. Lyra knew by the tone of her voice that nice really meant pure-blood.

“There’s not many left that we’re not related to,” she said as she dug into her steak. “Plus I am much more focused on my career.”

“Not much of a career if you insist on changing to teaching,” Lucius said.

Lyra exhaled.

“Honestly, Lyra,” Narcissa said, “You’d be a wonderful mother. I don’t know why you insist on working so much. Just find yourself a man and get married, that’s what I did.” She smiled and held Lucius’ free hand for a brief moment.

“You never know, I might find myself a nice man whilst I’m at Hogwarts,” she jested.

“Where? In a pub at Hogsmeade?” Narcissa scoffed. “Don’t be stupid.”

“The only decent man there is Severus and he’s a half blood,” Lucius said.

Lyra recoiled at the thought of seeing her old Professor in that manner. Severus Snape was a man whose name and face passed through Lyra’s head often. She knew that Severus was close to her family and he strongly featured in the memories of the days from when her family followed the Dark Lord. Despite the fact that those days were over she knew that her Uncle Lucius kept in close contact with him. Though that was not the reason the Potions Master was a thought that frequented in her head.

“Miss Lestrange,” Severus sneered, “I have half a mind to place you in my first year class. How could you make a mistake on such a simple potion?” He waved his wand and the contents disappeared.

She froze in shock and confusion. She swore she put all the ingredients correctly as she had time and time again. She glanced up at the girl she knew would sabotage her potion but instead of laughter her face was pure white, as if she had seen a ghost. She didn’t understand why until her ears tuned back into what her classmates were whispering. “Lestrange?” “Did he say Lestrange?” “As in those Death Eaters?”

She glared at him and he could see by his face that he knew he had made a terrible mistake. Lyra got up from her desk and with a flick of her wand her books slammed shut and packed themselves away into her bag. She stormed off, slamming the door with her wand as hard as she could behind her.

She walked off, straight past the Slytherin common room and made her way upstairs to the Headmaster’s office. This was it, her reputation ruined. She had tried so hard to keep her real name a secret. She knew that she’d have to leave the school before word got around.

“What about the Carrow’s?” Narcissa asked, bringing Lyra’s attention back to the present day. “Weren’t they on our side?”

Lyra screwed up her face in disgust, “Isn’t Amycus like 30? I’m only 20.”

“Can’t be too picky now,” Narcissa shrugged. “Ten years isn’t that big of an age gap.”

“I did suggest you could go overseas,” Lucius offered, “You could find yourself a foreign pure-blood husband.”

“I’m ok,” Lyra said, shoving some food in her mouth in an attempt to excuse herself from talking much more.

“How about one of your old school friends from Durmstrang?” he continued, “Don’t you keep in contact with any of them?” Lyra shook her head in response.

“You don’t have forever, you know?” her Aunt said, “You’re in your prime and those years are just ticking away. Your mother married and had you when she was only 19.”

“My mother also joined the Dark Lord when she was 17 and there was probably a lot more pure-blood wizards around back then,” Lyra said, “But you guys all went and killed each other, I’ll probably have to settle for a half-blood.”

“You will not tarnish the Black family name like my blood-traitor sister,” Narcissa screeched, bringing the whole table to a halt.

“Now, dear,” Lucius said, reaching over and stroking his wife’s hand, “We’ll find her someone, don’t you worry. If not she can marry young Draco here once he’s of age.”

Lyra shook her head at Draco who was much too young to be listening to this conversation. “Don’t worry, I won’t let that happen,” she said to the young boy seated next to her.

“Well, I do love you,” Draco said, smiling at his cousin.

She smiled sweetly back at him, “I love you too Draco.”

Lucius and Narcissa continued to discuss Lyra’s potential suitors over dinner. She excused herself once she was done and found her way back to the Malfoy Library. She started pouring over different books. It took a few more hours before she had the right one and as soon as she found it she added it to her list and sent it off to Professor Dumbledore. She had chosen a different book for 1st, 2nd and 3rd years, 4th and 5th, and 6th and 7th. She felt accomplished and confident in her choices, with that she headed to bed.

[teddyylou]

Kuroken Week: Day 1 - Varsity Blues

College AU to kick off the week!!!!!

Ao3 xx

Kuroo is finding it hard to settle into his new university after the first semester and is finding it hard to make new friends and balance school, training and sleep. 

Kenma worries about his boyfriend and visits to make make sure he is staying alive. ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ 

____________________

Kuroo could barely lift his feet of the worn floorboards of his dorm room as he trudged through the threshold, essentially letting everything from his hands drop unceremoniously to the ground. He shut his eyes, no longer able to avoid them drooping closed as he kicked off his shoes, adding them to the pile of things by the door. He swayed blindly as he dragged his way over to his bed, momentarily cracking one eyelid open enough to check that it was his bedspread that he was falling onto and not his roommates before eventually dropping onto it akin to how his book bag and volleyball bag had been discarded.

The tall athlete buried his face impossibly further into the depths of his soft covers, relishing in how much more comfortable they were then the ones he had originally been given by the school. They were insufferable which is why he had taken his current ones from his bed at home on his last visit. He could barely breathe as he prayed for his warm haven to swallow him whole and spit him out back in his old bedroom at his parents house; never to be seen again by anyone at the university.

It wasn’t that he regretted his choice of schools, or even going to university in the first place. He knew he was working towards his life ambitions and he was slowly achieving them; to Kuroo, it had always been perfect in theory. However the unfortunate reality was not all it cracked out to be in his mind. Balancing school, volleyball and a social life was harder than he thought. He never ran out of time or didn’t finish a task, and he certainly wasn’t failing. He had just severely underestimated how much of his energy it used, which has never once been an apprehension of his when going to the school as he had always had enough for himself and then some to spare for Kenma.

He was now constantly running low and living off coffees and energy drinks, which had previously been self forbidden in high school. Kuroo worked hard during the day, trained harder in the afternoon and evening and studied really hard after waking up early to do so. In actual fact, that had never been his gameplan and sleep was always a priority to Kuroo, but coming home this exhausted every night meant crashing as soon as he hit the pillow and studying in the morning over breakfast was the way to go.

Begrudgingly, Kuroo rolled out of his bed to pull off his shirt and pants before finding some presumably clean sweats of his on the floor that he pulled on before climbing back under his red duvet. He sighed as he shut his eyes again, retracing everything that had happened throughout the semester to figure out what had gone so wrong. He knew university would be a change from high school but he was barely passing these days and he needed to do well to stay there; Lord knows he could only get there on a scholarship and 60% won’t cut it. Everything was just so different and harder to adjust to than the boy had imagined. New classmates and professors, new timetable, new teammates and more importantly a new setter to sync with.

Kuroo quickly decided that not having Kenma around 24/7 was the thing that threw him off the most. The couple would hang out from dawn to dusk, not even having to talk sometimes. Kuroo had the best friend group last year, ones he still talked to over text often but the people here were different. He was less used to them and they were most definitely less used to him. On top of that they all seemed to know one other person there.

Kuroo’s train of thought was cut short by a blinding light shining into the dark room as the door opened, revealing his roommate who had just come home from a dinner he had briefly mentioned to him that morning. They made awkward eye contact as the other male waddled tipsily to their shared bathroom, mumbling a good night and closing the door. Kuroo rolled over to face the brick wall his bed was against. Photos of his friends hung up from the roof right down to the bricks inches from his face. He really did have a lot of friends; why had it been so hard to make new ones then? He pondered the subject before analyzing a conversation he had had with his lab partner a few days earlier.

She had asked if he was going to a dinner that night for a classmates birthday, to which he replied saying that he had no idea it was even on and he wasn’t that close with them or anyone going anyway. Actually, that must have been where his roommate had been, thought Kuroo. She had brought to his attention something that his roommate had also brushed on after a week of meeting.

Kuroo had been really excited to go to university, so he was really outgoing when introducing himself. He made a lot of good first impressions and was invited to all the right parties. It wasn’t until the semester had actually started and everyone settled that the parties dwindled and one night a few people that were in the same hall as him were round and everyone was chilling and drinking when his roommate returned and Kuroo welcomed him with a hug; something he had always done with his teammates at home.

His partner had been there that night too and she brought up that he was very open and casual with hugs and stuff like that which put a few people off. This didn’t offend Kuroo at all, only shock him. He was so used to greeting friends like that he must have not even noticed. Kuroo could only sigh again as he silently wished for things to become easier, and as he watched the shadow of his chest rising up and down on the wall from the moonlight, his prayers were seemingly answered when a notification on his phone pulled him from his trance.

He squinted from the light projecting from his phone but subconsciously smiled upon seeing it was a text message from the one person he needed to be with the most in that moment.

_____________

Kenma <3: hey, sorry it’s late but are you up.

            all good if your are studying.

_____________

Kuroo knew it was important as his smaller boyfriend was actually writing full words instead of replacing them with letters, emojis or including horrendous intentional spelling errors.

_____________

Kuroo: of course kitten. What’s up?

Kenma <3: can’t sleep, miss you

Kuroo: Kitten…

           I miss u too

Kenma <3: Do you any free time coming up where I can visit?

_____________

Kuroo struggled to form a reply. He wanted to see his boyfriend more then anything but between class, study and volleyball, he didn’t even had time to look after himself let alone accommodate for kenma and spend any quality time with him. He had been to a few of the school advisors about this, all of which would say the same thing.

‘School is a priority, Tetsurou-kun, you may need to cut out extra activities like volleyball club.’ They’d all recite as if reading off a script. Although he was still adjusting to the other teammates he still enjoyed playing alongside them and still loved volleyball. He never wanted to give it up, even if it wasn’t at Nekoma.

He realised that he hadn’t responded in five minutes to Kenma and began to get worked up. He could feel tears burning at the corners of his eyes, mind fuzzy with stress. He heard the shower in the bathroom turn off so he got up from his bed, clutching his phone so tight he was losing colour around his knuckles. He needed to see Kenma’s face, talk to him properly without being heard by anyone else. He grabbed his nekoma tracksuit jacket and almost ran down the hall into the cold night air. He was breathing heavily, pulling his mind away from the dangerously high pile of work on his desk that stood out teasingly as he had left.

_____________

Kuroo: I’m gonna ft u okay.

_____________

He sent the text quickly not even waiting for a response. Everything was building up inside him and he was itching to take off his jacket again as he felt too hot and annoyed in his own skin. He knew better than to catch a chill this close to mid terms but as soon as the phone against his chest stopped ringing and he brought it up to eye level to see Kenma’s face illuminated by whatever game his was playing on his Xbox it was if the world washed away and all the weight that was crushing him into the ground was lifted. He sat on a park bench and sighed, beaming at Kenma’s worried little expression.

“Are you okay?” He whispered into the phone.

Kuroo shook his head as the first tears spilt down his cheeks and over his still upturned lips. Kuroo let everything that had happened spill, from the gathering to volleyball, to classes to his lab partner. He spoke about the energy drinks that would probably give him a heart attack or a disease and how he sometimes wished they would.

The small teen sat and listened, pay attention to every word and detail, letting his boyfriend vent, trying to fathom a reasonable reply or justify for him how this could even happen. I mean, he liked Kuroo and everyone else liked Kuroo, he understood why these people were so different just as much as the other boy did. Sure he was used to Kuroo’s affectionate tendencies; even though he liked space and Kuroo resected that, Kenma was also used to everyone else being used to it even if they were on a different volleyball team. Maybe it was an athlete thing. Kenma listened to Kuroo for at least half an hour hopelessly trying to give advice. In the end Kenma just wanted to give him all of the hugs and touches that he had been deprived of recently and make sure he was eating and sleeping and acing tests, even if he spent less time on his own work, he was fine anyway, he just wanted to be able to fix everything, even if that was impossible.

“Kuroo, you need to take a break, you are going to burn out.” He regretted his words sounding so harsh but the statement was truthful and necessary. Kuroo just bowed his head.

“I can’t” he spoke defeated into the phone.

“I have lectures and classes to go to and on weekends there is left over work to get through. After midterms I’ll come home though, for a while too.”

Kenma had to refrain from getting frustrated at his response, he had to be the strong one at the moment. After composing himself and his thoughts he spoke calmer but still firm into the phone.

“No, you will hurt yourself by doing this, Okay. I finish early on Friday and I will take the train right up to you.” He promised.

“You have practice.”

“You are more important to me then a practice. I can skip it once and will still live… So should you or you might actually not.” He didn’t even left Kuroo finish.

“You not exactly changing my mind.” He retorted deadpanned.

“Kuroo, I’m worried about you. I’ll stay with you, you can take the weekend off from, sport and work too, I know you can catch up. It is important to relax and be healthy too, okay. I’ll leave Sunday night and we can just hang out for two days.”

Kenma was giddy at the thought. He hadn’t been to Kuroo’s uni yet. He was delighted to see a small smile return to his face for the first time since he broke down. He didn’t look like him when he wasn’t smiling. He was the most motivated he had ever been in his life to help Kuroo and was actually extremely excited about going. It was the first time he had felt extremely about anything.  

Kuroo pulled a reluctant expression, leaning his head back and groaning before leaning it on his shoulder and sighing. He mumbled a fine and Kenma almost leapt in his spot on his floor; almost.

So as promised , Friday afternoon just as Kuroo had finished his last class of the day, Kenma was there waiting for him shyly outside the front of the dorm quadrangle. He avoided eye contact with everyone who passed him, eying their feet as they entered their block. He looked so tiny compared to all of them even though he was only one year younger then most of them and it made the older boy’s heart swell. Contrary to what the third year had hoped, a growth spurt never really came in abundance for him and he only barely reached over 172cm. Kuroo found his height compared to the others hopelessly adorable and almost broke into a run as he rushed to meet his boyfriend.

“Kenma!” Kuroo chirped as he engulfed him into a bone crushing hug, lifting Kenma’s small frame completely off the ground; evidently already in a better mood at the mere presence of the highschooler.

“Kuroo, put me down!” Kenma whined into his shoulder, still taking in the scent that he had missed so much. They stood there beside the doorway to Kuroo’s dorm block for what seemed like an age, trapped in their embrace, unable to leave the instant feeling of safety and comfort they had felt through every fibre of their bodies the moment they touched.

Kuroo kissed Kenma on the top of his head to finally break the reunion. They took in each others features that had only been pixels on a screen for two months, not even speaking for a further protracted amount of time before Kenma broke the silence.

“How are you feeling? Was school good today?” He asked sweetly, genuine concern dripping in his tone.

“For some reason that I can’t quite pinpoint, today just got 1000 times better.” He smirked, laughing at Kenma hitting his chest lightly in retaliation.

“It was alright. No homework to take home so all I’ve got is the stuff on my desk.” He smiled down at his boyfriend.

“Good, so you can do that on Monday.” Kenma replied stubbornly, Kuroo just rolled his eyes before leaning their foreheads together.

Most people had cleared the area by now, only the occasional people left to make quick and curious glances towards the couple. Kuroo hadn’t exactly mentioned that he was in a relationship to anyone here and he didn’t expect that others would make that assumption either; but he brushed their stares off and took Kenma’s dainty hand, leading him out of the cold and wrapping his oversized hoodie-clad arms around his waist right up until they were at his door. He let them into the empty room and let go of his boyfriend so that he could get an impression of the room. He went over to his desk pushing away a fast food wrapper from his neat pile of paper as Kenma scanned the photo wall.

“Messy ass hell, so nothing really has changed.” He said bluntly.

“Hey!” Kuroo laughed throwing the wrapper at him, which he dodged effortlessly.

“Ok first we clean so you aren’t trying to learn in a dumpster-”

“Says you and your video game hoard.” Kuro cut him off.

“Archive.” Kenma corrected quietly, smoothing out some wrinkles in Kuroo’s duvet.

“Whatever.” Kuroo joked, feeling at ease in a conversation for the first time in forever.

“Then, we can cook the pasta I brought because you need to learn how,” Kenam continued, vaguely gesturing to a green reusable grocery bag he had dropped of by the door, “and then…”

“We sleep?” Kurro finished.

“We sleep.” Kenma smiled at his shoes, excited for the domestic evening they had planned.

They speedily cleaned Kuroo’s half of the room, changing sheets, dusting, throwing out civilisations of take away containers and making a pile of dirty clothes to put in Kuroo’s hamper only to find that it was full to the brim. Kenma had just rolled his eyes and shoved the pile into Kuroo’s hands while he picked up the hamper and nonchalantly walking out into the hall.

The pair spent the next hour and a half sitting on the floor of the blocks laundry room opposite each other playing a half hearted game of foot wrestles while catching up properly, talking about everything and nothing while they waited for the machine to finish.

“I don’t see how you guys aren’t better friends, you are both equally disgusting.” Kenma commented on his roommate judging him by the state of his side of the room.

“He is pretty chill and I wouldn’t mind hanging out, he just doesn’t think that…” Kuroo trailed off.

“I’m sure that’s not it. Yeah you hug, so what? That’s all! You are still a nice person.” Keman ranted.

“Thankyou.”

“If it helps, I think you are very funny.”

“It does.”

“Good.”

The two boys broke into a dumb laughter after that, enjoying their limited time together.

Later that night, Kuroo’s roommate came home with a few mates to find Kenma and Kuroo opening windows and fanning the smoke alarm with a tea towel.

“ I said to put water in it Kuroo, how do you not know that!” Kenma shouted over the alarm before realising that it had stopped right before he has spoken and that they were in fact not alone anymore. He fell silent instantly.

“Hey guys.” Kuroo said happily to the trio that had just entered. It turned out that they were there to figure out a plan for dinner. Kuroo was the one to point out that even with the burnt pasta out of the equation there would still be enough for everyone, and everyone appreciated the lesson.

The night turned into the five of the teens, even though Kenma didn’t say all too much, talking about professors and campus legends and actually bonding for the first time. There was another boy and girl alongside Akira, Kuroo’s roommate who were both in their first year Kenma eventually felt comfortable enough with the situation, him leaning into Kuroo on his bed while Akira sat on the floor and the others on his bed, to comment on how none of them knew how to cook something as simple as pasta.

He was surprised when they others actually found it funny and said that he should ‘so come to this uni next year and they can hang out heaps’.

The rest of the week was spent doing the exact one thing that Kuroo and Kenma had left on their list, sleep.

They woke up late Saturday morning to an empty room, tangled in each others limbs. They rolled around for the most part of the day before going to a cinema that night to see a new horror movie, an abandoned tradition since Kuroo had gone to university. They hung out with the others for a while on Sunday, escaping shortly after as they had less than a day left together and they did some more cuddling in Kuroo’s bed, making up for lost time.

Soft kisses to skin and lips still felt so familiar and good and it was as if this weekend was the energy drink that Kuroo had really needed. He needed his boyfriend as a sense of familiarity to settle properly and even as they kissed goodbye at the train station and as Kuroo walked back to his dorm alone, he didn’t even feel remotely tired. He didn’t know how long this would last so he rolled with it, going against kenma’s wishes and got a stack of work done Sunday night. Akira was long asleep before Kuroo hit lights out and he felt good about the rest of the semester to come.

Kenma continued to visit every so often and they put their lives on hold for a night to just refresh themselves. Life had finally fallen into a healthy rhythm for Kuroo and he was forever grateful to have Kenma by his side to swoop in and save the day.

[weekendwarriorblog]

30 Minute Experiment: College #30ME

Man, where does the day go? This is my second day in a row where I’m doing this after Cuomo’s presser even though I’d been up for at least 3 hours beforehand. I also have about 7 movies and other screeners to watch before next week, so I have to try not to slack off so much. Anyway, today’s topic is “College” and I only decided on this one an hour or two ago, so I’ve already talked enough about the pandemic this week and tried to offer a few solutions without being lecturey. Let’s do this...

This is probably gonna be one of the more personal #30MEs and will probably allow me to get rather introspective. It’s odd that I’d be thinking so much college in the past few years especially while trying to find a decent job, because some of you may know while others may not... but I never went to college. I can come up with so many excuses in hindsight, but the true fact is that in my last year of high school, I was a bit of a slacker and I was already kind of fed up of classes and school so the idea of spending four more years or more doing school just wasn’t something I could get too excited about.

I mean, I had thought about going to some place like the Berklee College of Music so that I could continue doing music stuff, but I wasn’t really sure what I would do other than maybe learn more about music theory or arranging or something to that effect, and I had just spent three years in high school studying music pretty effectively, and I wasn’t that big a fan of being taught how to make music. I felt that it was something that needs to come from your heart and soul and being told what you can or can’t do while making music just seemed foreign to my own feelings about music. Maybe that was a bad choice not to try to do something but I’m not sure how much having a music degree would be helping me nowadays in terms of finding a job.

A lot of this does have to do with looking at job listings every day trying to figure out what I can do next and realizing that so many of these jobs expect candidates to have at least a bachelors degree, something that i never bothered getting. And yes, there have been points in the last 30X questions since I graduated high school where I thought of going back to school or taking some courses, but there were always things like time and money that held me back.

Sure, not a great excuse, especially in what’s happening now and the fact that so many colleges and universities have offered online classes for credits for many years. Believe me, I’ve had this fact shared with me many times over the past few years, but I’ve never been able to determine what I might want to study at my advanced age and how putting myself into further debt might help.

I have plenty of friends who changed their course of training to get into other fields when they were in their 40s and 50s, but I’m just not sure I have the commitment and focus and interest to do something like this. It’s not like I expect myself to live forever and right now, I’ll just be happy if I can see 60, since I think that would be a nice milestone to end on, but I feel that I would be better using those last five years in other ways.

Now, mind you, I’ve done a pretty good job getting writing work without ever having studied any sort of writing in high school or college. (Heck, I may have mentioned how I failed high school English in my junior year just because I had no interest in writing a thesis paper on dolphins. That gives you some idea how much more stubborn as a youth than I am now... and I’m pretty damned stubborn!)

Yeah, I’ve been very lucky in the jobs I’ve been able to get without having a degree, but most of my last few gigs have been through friends or friends recommending me. I’m not sure that spending four years of college and adding thousands more debt to my register would have helped other than having that one extra thing on my resume than I have now.

I should mention that I did go to a trade school for recording and engineering at the Institute of Audio Research in 1987, which is what brought me to NYC in the first place. That gave me an in to the New York studio system that allowed me to work on music recording and production projects that I mostly enjoyed doing, but I also found myself very frustrated with the music business and how hard it was to get past a certain point, which clearly I never got past. When I had a chance to get out of music, I did, and even after returning to it briefly, I eventually just bailed on the whole thing as I found that I could get work writing... up until a point. Which is where I’ve been for the past few years.

Sure, it’s easy to look back and think about all the things I would have done different. Maybe if I wasn’t so afraid of writing an essay or thesis in order to apply for most of the colleges I was interested in at the time, I may have actually sent out more applications, which most people in high school were doing in their last couple years. In part, I never was really pushed my mother or father to do these things, and I love them for allowing me to find my own way... but maybe they should have pushed me more? 

Then again, I also had seen my older brother being eaten up and spit out by his early experiences off on his own at college and I knew that he was a LOT stronger than I was at that time. I mean, he eventually found his way, found his wonderful wife and is generally happy as a beekeeper right now.

By my last few years in high school, I was playing in bands, some that actually made money (though that’s a story for another time) but I just couldn’t see myself spending four years in college learning scales or trying to improve my playing as a saxophonist or keyboard player, things that I was doing a lot of in those last few years of high school.

At that time, I thought I’d just take a year off before thinking about college and that year off is still going on to this day as I began working and getting jobs as a cook, and that was enough to keep me being able to buy comics and records. That continued once I got to New York and started working in recording studios, but that also led to frustration and disappointments that I’d need way more than 30 minutes to get into.

I guess this is an even more reflexive #30ME than usual, but I guess I’m finally having some regrets about not going to college like everyone else in my family and around me. (I only just found out very recently that my long-time friend and short-term boss never went to college either, something I never would have realized since we never spoke about it.)

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get out of this current funk that’s affecting a lot more people than just, including many who went to college and then spend decades paying off the debt that incurred. I also should point out that my credit has gotten so bad over the past few decades that I doubt I could even get funded if I did decide I should go back to school, and even if I did, what on earth would I want to study? Writing? Editing? Journalism? Music? I’ve been doing all of that stuff and I was perfectly happy to learn by doing, which is how I’ve gone through most of my life. 

When you get to a certain age, you’ve learned so much in life from just doing and failing until you do something right and can continue going that route, but I’ve also learned the hard way that finding a job gets a lot harder when you’re older if you can’t say, “Yeah, I went to college 20/30 years ago and I’m sure that will make a big difference on how well I can do in this job.”

It’s pretty frustrating so I’m glad I only have.... 8 MINUTES LEFT?!?!? ... to write on this subject. Sigh. Why did I decide on doing this experiment again? At least some topics (like yesterday’s), I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that I can crank out 30 minutes without blinking. I guess looking back at something like college is a lot tougher since it means that i have to admit that not going to college was a decision I made when I was younger and more impulsive that really didn’t pan out or pay off. It means admitting failure way too late to actually do something about it.

Listen, I’m glad I did what I did in terms of taking a 9-month course in recording and engineering even if I barely used any of the things I studied similar to the fact that the only thing I got out of taking algebra and high school in calculus is that it sometimes helps with a crossword puzzle answer or two.

Who knows? Maybe writing about this will push me to explore some courses of study or learn a few new things that might be useful and applicable to the current state of the world. (I mean, I just applied for a job as a tracer and I tried using my skills as a writer to emphasize my traits and skills that would make me qualified for the role even without the medical background and schooling that seems expected from candidates. Don’t expect much to come out of that application.)

I could probably talk more about college and some of the other negatives I perceived both before and after to justify my decision not to go (like the fact that so many went to college just to party and be free of their parents, which I managed to do without the partying, the debt or any of the other bad things that come along with college.) I was able to get a lot of the benefits of college by just making myself being open to meet and become friends with new people when I had a chance. I feel like my friends and acquaintances are a lot more varied due to my decision to explore different avenues and interests rather than spending 4 years in school. Honestly, I haven’t talked to others about their own college experiences to find out how it made a difference in their own lives. 

I feel like there’s just so much of a balance between the positives and negatives with college and many of these I just have no way  of seeing 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, especially when I was younger.

And with that, my time is up for the day...  to be continued? Or not...

[xf-cases-solved]

Bedroom Church Choir

MSR

Explicit

Pt. 1 (can be read as a standalone)

Melissa sang in the church choir.

She stood front row, sang first soprano, and always got the best solos. She’d had a gift—an uncanny ability to carry a multitude of emotion with a single syllable. A man who had never been fed a drop of religion in his life could know what it was like to know God, just by hearing Melissa sing.

Scully sat in the pews.

She’d be the first to tell you she couldn’t carry a tune. Her musical résumé included a few simple hymns she sang under her breath on the rare occasions she actually made it to Mass, and a monotone rendition of a Three Dog Night classic; she never wanted to be in choir.

But still she envied Melissa.

As a child, tugged out of her muddy, ripped jeans, and forced into a dress, sitting on an old, creaking bench with her mother at her side, hissing, “Sit like a lady, Dana!” Scully’s heart was green when she heard her sister sing.

It wasn’t the notes she was jealous of, but the emotions. Scully, who felt deeply but was twice as guarded, couldn’t fathom the ease at which Melissa poured herself into such a public display of self-expression.

Maggie Scully always said, that when she was born, her eldest daughter didn’t cry.

“I asked the doctor what was wrong, but he just smiled and said, ‘She’s just taking it all in, Mrs. Scully. You’ve got a very curious baby on your hands.’”

And of course, that was true. As a newborn, she prioritized understanding the brand new place she’d been pushed into, over giving into the fear of its newness, and thus began the repertoire of Dana Scully; a constant of hers, literally since birth. Melissa was truly gifted, but never let it be said that Scully was not without her own wealth of talents. It took, after all, an incredibly talented person to hold the Universe in the palms of her hands, and pick it apart until it was nothing more than atomic numbers on the elemental table.

But the drawback was that she had walls, somewhat by nature, and certainly by nurture.

It’s not that Scully was dispassionate. No one who truly knew her would call her cold or calculating. She laughed easily at things she found funny, and cried when it was necessary, and she carried within her a heart so full of sentimentality and romantic idealization that among her wealth of medical journals and scientific studies, one could find Austen, Brontë, and du Maurier. But surely, with a heart so fragile and a mind so analytical, it was only logical to keep it safe.

It wasn’t always about safety, however, but rather, shame. Scully, so independent and self-assured, had the bizarre tendency towards hero worship. Likely, she was born with an overflowing amount of loyalty, and like opposing ends of a magnet being drawn together, she gravitated towards anyone she felt she could unburden some of it on.

Her first hero was her father—a naval captain, who was emblematic of what a man of his time was meant to be. He loved to his core, but was wont to express it more often with a salute than with a hug. And Scully idolized her father, trying so hard to emulate what she saw as a representation of perfection, that she began to see every tear, or hurt, or pain as a weakness, and she began to keep them inside.

And then she had to go and become a doctor, of all things, where she had to work ten times as hard as her male peers just to prove she belonged there. Short, petite, and so very much a woman, Scully could never let her classmates see her as anything but the hardened intellectual facade she brought to her lectures, and into her labs, and then into her residency, until suddenly, that was just who Dana Scully was to any new person she met; logic and intellect personified, in order to avoid the misogyny, both purposeful and ingrained, of her peers.

(She had loved one man in med school, opening her heart exactly once. He was a man who saw her both as a woman and an intellectual, and he was someone she had no right to claim, and when she finally walked out the door and into the arms of the FBI, she couldn’t be so sure if it had been her heart that she had opened to him, or her ego.)

And this all brought her here, to this life she now led, as the voice of reason sidekick to a man she had given her wealth of loyalty to, to the surprise of them both.

Mulder, of course, was not someone she needed to fear judgement from—she had witnessed him proposing alien abduction as a plausible theory to a room full of his superiors on more than one occasion—but by the time he entered her life, or, more accurately, by the time she had been forced into his, her walls had been widened and caulked so substantially that it never occurred to her that vulnerability was an option.

(Every now and then, Mulder would hack away a piece of metaphorical cement, and glimpse at the person behind the wall, and while he never once would pass judgement on her for simply being human, Scully would rebuke herself for her weakness.)

Which is why, today, she is thrown entirely off guard as Mulder asks her, so bluntly and inelegantly that she does a mental double-take, “Why are you so quiet in bed?”

It is either very late, or very early, depending on your point of view. The sun hasn’t quite started to rise, but the sky is starting to brighten just a bit around her halo glow. Scully and Mulder spent the better part of their Thursday night, and Friday twilight hours, on a stakeout outside of an ugly, brick apartment complex in a town of less than 4,000 in rural Kansas, which ended in a foot chase down a dead end alleyway and Scully’s gun pressed against the temple of a man with the marking that led them here tattooed on his right forearm, while Mulder read him his Miranda rights.

“Y’all might as well go back to your hotel and get some rest,” said the local sheriff who arrived on the scene shortly after. “I only got one other officer on duty so it’ll take some time to take care of the booking, and the forensic lab in KC won’t have gotten back to you with the test results on the corpse until at least this afternoon.”

And Scully should have jumped on the opportunity for rest, having not truly slept in well over a day, but she found she was still hyped on adrenaline, and with a single look at Mulder she knew he was feeling the same, which is how they now found themselves sitting in a lumpy booth inside a 24/7 diner, with Mulder inquiring about their bedroom habits.

Because, due to a couple beers over a Twilight Zone marathon taken too far two weeks ago, they actually have bedroom habits—a fact Scully is more or less never not thinking about. Even when she is preoccupied with paperwork, or meetings, or chasing bad guys down rural Kansas alleyways, the back of her mind is always replaying the feel of Mulder’s fingers or the taste of his tongue, like some sort of X rated background noise.

“Mulder,” Scully hisses, after she’s taken a moment to recover. She glances over her shoulder. The diner is entirely empty except for an elderly, heavyset man in the far corner looking like he’s trying, unsuccessfully, to sober up over a cup of black coffee, and the disinterested waitress leaning against the counter, snapping bubbles with her chewing gum while flipping through a gossip magazine without seeming to read a single word.

“Relax, no one is paying attention to us,” says Mulder, reading her thoughts, cutting off her reprimanding before it can begin. She turns back to him and puts both her hands around her mug of English breakfast tea, and stares into it with a frown.

“Where’d that question even come from?” she asks her tea.

“Just something I’ve been wondering since this whole…” He clears his throat. “Erm, thing started.”

“And a crappy diner at 4:30 in the morning is when you decide to ask it?” asks Scully, occupying herself by grabbing another sugar packet and tearing it open to pour into her tea. “Why were you even thinking about our sex life right now?”

“Not to be crass, but it’s probably safe to say that I’m always thinking about our sex life,” says Mulder, and Scully tries to shoot him a glare, but she’s pretty sure it comes out a smirk, because the idea of ‘our’ sex life is still so new and exciting that she gets the flutters in her belly at the thought.

“Hate to break it to you, Mulder, but real life isn’t like those VHS tapes in your desk. Not all women scream bloody murder when they’re fucked.”

Mulder regards her with a sly gleam in his eye that makes her suspicious as he takes a bite of apple pie. “I know that,” he says through his mouthful. He swallows. “I just have the distinct impression that you’re secretly one of them.”

Scully blinks at him. “What makes you think you’d know something like that?”

“I’m a behavioral psychologist,” he says. “It’s my job to know.”

Scully rolls her eyes, and goes back to stirring sugar into her tea, not dignifying that with a response. She takes a sip and grimaces—too sweet.

“That, and you always try to stop yourself from making noise,” Mulder continues, and Scully’s head shoots up.

“I do not,” she defends. In response, Mulder raises an eyebrow, and reaches up to pull the collar of his shirt to the side, revealing the fresh, red bite mark on his collarbone, and Scully flushes, remembering the night before in the motel room they were very much not supposed to be sharing, as Mulder pushed into her and she’d muffled her scream by digging her teeth into the flesh of his muscular shoulder. She scowls. “Circumstantial evidence,” she says.

Mulder cracks a grin, and responds by reaching over and gently taking Scully’s hand that’s wrapped around her mug, and closely examining a faded mark on the skin between her index finger and her thumb, also in the shape of Scully’s bite, and Scully pulls her hand away, thinking about a week and a half ago in her apartment, when Mulder went down on her while she was sitting on the couch, and she had caught her moan before it escaped by clamping down on the webbing between her two fingers, so hard she drew blood.

“What’s your point?” she asks crossly, wishing Mulder had the decency not to look so smug.

“It’s not a point, it’s a question,” he says, sitting back in his chair. “Are you quiet in bed because that’s just how you are, or is it for some other reason?”

“What other reason would there be?”

Mulder shrugs. “You tell me.”

And Scully is at a loss, because the truth is that Mulder’s right—she isn’t a quiet lover. But she wishes that she were, because inside every moan, groan, and wail of pleasure, there’s a vulnerability attached. To be vocal in bed is to admit to feelings she’d rather not say.

“I’ve been louder with other people,” she says.

“So just not with me?”

“Of course not with you,” she says, almost annoyed, because he sounds almost hurt, but he knows her so well, shouldn’t it be obvious? “Not with you because you matter.”

Mulder makes that face he makes when she says something unexpected. He pulls his eyebrows together, and his mouth forms a question he can’t find the words for, and Scully secretly revels in it, because it’s rare.

“You don’t get it,” she says for him, and he doesn’t disagree.

“Explain it to me?” he says instead, and she stirs her cooling, overly-sweet tea.

“I could never sing in church choir.”

“No offense, but among your many talents singing isn’t one of them.”

She smiles, knowing that for a moment they are both back in the woods in northern Florida, flirting about sleeping bags while monsters lurk in the dark. She says, “I could spend my whole life perfecting vocal technique, and I’d never sound beautiful, because I don’t know how to put emotion behind it. I don’t want to put emotion behind it.”

“Art requires a degree of vulnerability,” Mulder agrees.

“So does letting someone you care about know the things they make you feel,” says Scully, and Mulder understands.

“I’m not a congregation, though.”

“No, you’re something worse.”

“You don’t have to give me anything you’re not comfortable with.”

“But you deserve it,” Scully finds herself saying. God, she’s been up for so long. God, she’s been fighting for even longer. “But I want to. I just don’t know how.”

Mulder is silent. So is Scully. The man in the corner grumbles about his hangover into his hands.

“I have an idea,” says Mulder finally. “But you need to tell me if it’s too much.”

“It’s not too much,” says Scully automatically. She trusts him with her life.

—-

Even as the sun rises, the hotel room is dark. It faces west, and the light is in the east. They’ve got the curtains pulled tight, and the lamps off. It’s an old motel, with only five channels without static, two of which are local weather stations, and the comforter pattern doesn’t match the carpet. Scully lays on her back, a sleeping mask resting over her eyes, as Mulder takes her wrist and locks it inside the cool metal of his handcuffs.

The backboard of the bed is made up of discolored, metal columns, and Scully listens as the opposite end of the handcuffs is placed around one. She tugs experimentally. She’s stuck in place.

“Safeword?” Mulder asks her for the third time, as he takes her other wrist gently in his hand, and takes her own pair of handcuffs to trap her to the bed. Their superiors would love to know what they do with FBI property; maybe it’d finally get them out of the building.

“Abduction,” she says for the third time, and she can’t see it, but she knows Mulder smiles, because he laughed for a full minute when she picked that as the word.

“It’s about sensation,” he explains again, as though reminding himself. “It’s about feeling and letting go. But if it gets to be too much—”

“Mulder?” she interrupts.

“Yeah?”

“Shut up.”

And she hears him huff out a breath of laughter, and she feels his lips against hers, just briefly, in a chaste reassurance. “Okay,” he breathes, hot on her skin. And she waits, chained and entirely nude, more vulnerable than she has willingly been, possibly ever. The fear she feels treads the line of exhilaration, as Mulder runs a hand along her thigh.

She hums her contentment. Humming is okay. Humming is not revealing. It’s the noise equivalent of, “that’s nice,” which isn’t scary to say. Yes, that’s nice. Full stop. No barriers broken, image maintained.

He kisses her again, harder this time, and she responds enthusiastically, reaching out to run her fingers through his hair, but being met with the clang of metal on metal and resistance against her wrists. She can’t touch him, and that’s a bit unnerving, as she realizes how unlevel the playing field is. That is, of course, the point, but theory is never the same as practice.

Mulder moves his lips along her jawline, licking her lightly in the spot just behind her ear that is strangely erogenous, and she lets out a muffled, “mmph!” A step up from humming, but not quite the danger zone just yet.

He nibbles lightly on the skin of her neck, not hard enough to raise eyebrows at their meeting with Skinner day after next, but enough that it tickles in that way where it is indistinguishable from minute pain, and a groan builds in the back of her throat, like a low rumble of thunder, but it doesn’t escape.

Two fingers suddenly pinch around her nipple, and she can’t help the gasp that escapes. She can’t see him twist the sensitive flesh; can only feel his fingers tug, and his tongue joins them, and there’s something about the darkness that makes it that much more intense. She pulls her lips inward, and bites down on them, muting the sounds that threaten to pour off her traitorous tongue.

Without moving from her nipple, his other hand reaches down between her legs. A finger dips quickly inside her, and then encircles her engorged clit, lubricating her with her own wetness. “Oh,” she says, softly, turning her head and resting her cheek against her shoulder, and she tries to find something to bite down on, but she can’t reach. “Oh!” she says again, surprised this time, as the fingers around her nipple tighten, and his mouth moves to her other breast, expertly working three of her most sensitive spots at once.

Abruptly, he moves away from it all, and she protests, until she feels him positioning himself between her thighs, and then she smiles, because she knows this is his favorite. She never has to ask; you’d think her pussy was heroin the way he seems to crave it.

But she isn’t prepared for this, as his tongue makes contact, and his fingers slip inside her. She isn’t prepared for the intensity of it, as she pulls on the handcuffs, surely leaving marks in the skin, trying to grab hold of something to concentrate on anything other than the steady motion he’s gotten nearly perfect at.

A tightness begins to build where his mouth presses against her, and every hair on her body is standing on end. It’s too much, too much, and she goes to shout, “abduction!” but it comes out as, “fuck!” In fact, it comes out as a string of expletives, each one louder than the next, punctuated by high, desperate moans, as though she were a woman in one of Mulder’s VHS tapes.

And then her orgasm is washing over her, and she is faintly aware of her voice growing hoarse; of the clang of metal on the backboard pinging like mad, and she doesn’t care. Isn’t that something, she thinks somewhere in her blissed out mind, she doesn’t care. She is singing her own one-person church choir, and Mulder is her congregation, and they both know what it’s like to know God.

She comes down, breathing harder than she had in the alleyway with a gun in her hand, and Mulder pushes up her mask, his eyes wild, looking at her like she’s the answer to every mystery he’s ever encountered, and he crushes his mouth against hers, filling her tongue with the taste of herself.

With no prelude, Mulder pushes his erection inside her easily, and she buries herself in the warmth of his neck, saying all the things she’s never allowed herself to say, using filthy, single syllables. He says it all back to her in the same language. She comes again, which only happens when the sex is particularly special, and he follows her, spilling as deep inside of her as he can get.

Then there is silence; nothing but the sound of their tandem breaths.

“Jesus,” says Mulder finally, and Scully, who has said everything and more, can do nothing else but nod.

He slips out of her; undoes her binding. He rubs her wrists, peppering the red marks with soft kisses, and then gathers her up into his arms.

“I thought you couldn’t sing,” he whispers into her ear, petting her sweaty, properly-fucked-looking hair.

She smiles into his touch.

“I guess I just needed somebody to teach me how.”

[roamingholiday]

Friday, September 29th 2017

POMPEII, AND THE BAY OF NAPLES, IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE.

Before I go into more detail, I just wanted to mention something. For most students at Temple Rome, they have chosen to study abroad here rather than elsewhere simply because our school has a campus here. It’s a study abroad opportunity, true, and they enjoy living here because it’s different from the United States, because they get to experience a new culture, learn a new language, and it’s in Europe, which means quick and cheap flights to anywhere within the EU. I don’t disagree with any of that, and I think they’re all perfectly, excellently valid reasons for choosing to stay here for a semester or a year.

That’s not why I’m here, though. I’m in Rome because it’s Rome. I’m not jetting off to Munich or Paris every other weekend because this isn’t just an easy access point for me. I’ve been studying Latin for six years now. I’m getting a degree in Classics. I never grew out of my little kid obsession with Greek and Roman mythology, and now I’m majoring in it. I was seven when I first picked up a book on mythology and I haven’t really put it down since. I’m in Rome. I get to walk along the Tiber each morning and see the Colosseum in the distance and that is ridiculous to me, even now, after almost two months. I’ve read letters and poems and speeches about the streets that I’m walking down to get to school every day and that’s insane.

Rome is a modern city, though, and it’s impossible to forget it, even with my imagination. So you can imagine how I felt wandering through the ruins of Pompeii.

I’ve been to Pompeii once before, on a day trip for one of my roommate’s birthdays, and we did a rather stumbling self-guided tour which, while very fun, was hardly informative. This particular trip, however, was an excursion associated with my Roman History course, lead by a professor who lives and breathes classical history, and who promised us before we left that it would be a death march through the ruins and we would get more information than we knew what to do with over the next three days. I was, as you might expect, very excited.

We took a big coach bus down on Friday, boarding at 7 in the morning exactly (I am not afraid to leave late students behind!! -Professor, on three different occasions when reminding us that when he says we leave at 7 he means we leave at 7). We were immediately given a forty some page packet of maps, floor plans, and letters of Pliny, and then left to fall, one and all, to sleep during the first couple hour leg of the journey.

We did not end up in Pompeii during the first day. Instead, we went to a beautiful little town called Terracina, in the bay of Naples, to visit the temple complex of Iuppiter Anxur, a gorgeous building that overlooks Terracina and the bay from a cliff, with foundations dating back to long before the Romans were out conquering the whole of Southern Italy (the Roman colony of Terracina, if you were curious, was founded in 329 BCE), though the current iteration was built primarily in the first century BCE, at the time of the second triumvirate, as part of a veteran colony. The temple was probably dedicated to Jupiter (hence the name), though there are theories about it really being a Venus territory.

At the base of the cliff on which the temple sits, notable because it’s not actually a natural cliff. About two thousand years ago, give or take a century or two, the Romans decided that going around the mountain took too long, so they just…. moved the mountain. Carved it flat and made a passageway. If you look closely at the cliff you can actually see Roman numerals that were carved into the rock to indicate how much was cut away at that point. At the highest point, 120 ft of stone was removed.

Terracina and the bay of Naples from the temple, because it was stunningly beautiful.

There is no photograph of the actual temple, I’m afraid, because there was no way to get a good picture from the base of the cliff, and no way to capture everything when we were wandering around inside. Google Terracina Iuppiter Anxur if you’re curious.

Following Terracina, we headed off to the Villa of Tiberius.

CRASH COURSE IN VILLAS: There are two kinds of villas. You might think that there are three kinds of villas. You would be wrong. The two kinds of villas are called villa urbana and villa rustica. Neither of them exist within the boundaries of any ancient city, because villas are, by definition, country estates. If it’s a house in the country, it’s a villa. If it’s a house in the city, it’s a domus at best. The villa rustica is essentially a farmhouse. Rustic, you might say. Like something one might expect to exist in the countryside. The villa urbana is like if you were a very rich person and could pack up everything that you liked about being in a booming metropolis of a city like Rome, and then stuck it in a house in the countryside so that you could feel free from city woes. There is an absolutely hysterical genre of poetry written by Roman poets who think that they should be able to tell you how to live in the countryside and ‘rough it’ because they happen to have access to a house that is, in the most basic sense, in the country. Lots of stuff about how to farm written by dudes who have, once, glanced out of their gilded window frames to observe a slave in the field across the way. Go read the Georgics (Virgil, pre-Aeneid. Don’t get me wrong, fantastic political commentary in that poem, but in no way is it actually about “agricultural things,” even if that is the Greek translation of the word georgic.

Villa culture was, essentially, about flaunting wealth, and reveling in your own status as a highly educated member of the elite. You built the houses to have massive libraries and statuary and a view of the ocean, so that you could roll around in your own cultural and intellectual heritage in front of the fishes, and generally prove that you were better than everyone else.

Anyway, the Villa of Tiberius. Tiberius was emperor after Augustus, and got the entirely unenviable task of trying to convince everybody that emperors were a good idea (Augustus never technically declared himself emperor, you know?) and also trying to sort out the mess that happens when there are no rules because one single genius invented the entire government structure and ran it by himself for forty five years and then died without telling anyone how he did it all. I do not begrudge him his gorgeous villa, if only because he deserved a place to get some R&R after years spent trying to drag a reinvented governmental system from the hands of a dead man.

The coolest part of the villa (both figuratively and literally, actually) was the natural cave in the cliff wall that the villa was built next to. The base of the villa opened onto the ocean (you can not buy beach front property this good today, my friend), but the entire left side extended into the cave, and incorporated a gorgeous series of tide pools, both natural and manmade. This cave was the crowning jewel of Tiberius’s villa, and included several incredible sculptures that now live in the museum next to the villa’s ruins.

Statue of Ganymede, above the cave’s entrance. Looks like he’s got wings, but he doesn’t, actually, this is a statue that depicts the precise moment that Zeus, having looked down across the mortal world and seen Ganymede and thought Wow Pretty, sent an eagle to abduct him. For those of you who don’t know the myth, Ganymede is literally so attractive that Zeus makes him a god on Olympus. Just for being pretty. He’s Zeus’s cupbearer. If you thought people were joking about how very startlingly gay Ancient Greece was, you would be very wrong.

To be clear, there is nothing heterosexual about this story. At all. Zeus did not make Ganymede a god because he was lonely and wanted a good buddy to josh around with. Just. To be abundantly clear. Very very homosexual feelings all around, here. I say this because I once had someone tell me, to my face, that there was no way ancient Greek gods were actually gay. My dude, you have no idea.

(I mean, more accurately speaking Zeus is just very, very pansexual (or bisexual, depending on your preference), but this particular story is just super gay.)

Also, for those of you clever cookies who noticed that I’m not using the Roman name, good for you. The Ganymede myth does exist in Rome, he’s called Catamitus and was abducted by Jupiter, but this sculpture is pretty definitely Ganymede, because the theme for all of the sculptures in the cave was hellenism (or How Greek Can You Be: Roman Edition), but I’ll get to that later.

More cave! You can see the Ganymede sculpture all the way up at the tippy top. It’s a recreation, also, the sculpture is, the original is in the museum to preserve it. Most of the floor of the cave is taken up by a tidal pool, too, and you can see all the way in the back a carved out portion, and what looks like a door, and a glowing white square next to the door. For size reference of just how large (I hesitate to call it gigantic, only because I know there are caves that are much, much larger, but it was big to me, okay?) the cave is, I am about as tall as that glowing white square thing in that cut out room. Yes, I’m bitter about that. Moving on.

Another angle of that same cut out room, now inside the cave. You see what I mean about the floor, yeah?

From the back of the cave. There was a large space behind me, of course, and there were those cut out rooms, but most of the cave was taken up by the pool. The theory is that there would have been a bedchamber area and a dining area in these cut out spaces, so that when the weather was too warm Tiberius could retreat to his cave house and live comfortably.

As you can see in the background, that whole area on the left where there doesn’t appear to be any sign of human habitation is the ocean. Honestly, if this were my villa, I would probably never leave. Screw running Rome, I want to sit in my cave beach house and read from my enormous library and have my servants bring me whatever I want. Sounds like a good life.

Now we get to the museum, and an artistic rendering of the cave statuary as it probably stood. That beautiful still glassy pool wouldn’t have been empty, not in an emperor’s house.

You’ve already gotten the spiel about letter E, Ganymede, so let’s move on to C, all the way in the back there (where I was standing to take that cave mouth photograph, actually, though that means almost nothing to you).

A recreation, of course, we don’t have this entire thing, but we have enough fragments and enough literary sources describing it to thing that this is pretty close to the original. This is, in all his alcoholic glory, Polyphemus, the cyclops from the Odyssey, who captured Odysseus and his men in his cave to eat them. Odysseus disagreed with that plan of action, for fairly obvious reasons, and thus got Polyphemus drunk, stabbed out his only eye with a burning stake, and then hitched a ride on the undersides of Polyphemus’s sheep (poor guy was a shepherd) in order to get out of the cave without being noticed (Polyphemus was blind, see, not dumb, so he felt the backs of his sheep to make sure that none of his captives rode out on them. He didn’t think to check the underbelly of the sheep because who rides on an underbelly? Nobody, that’s who). As one does. He also told Polyphemus, as he left, that his name was Nobody, which is why none of the other cyclops came to the rescue when Polyphemus shouted for help, because Nobody was attacking him.

This is B, from that little drawing up there, though it doesn’t really look like all that much. It’s made from the fragments that we have, rather than being a reconstruction, like the Polyphemus scene. It’s from the Odyssey as well, later on in the story, when Odysseus’s ship must pass by the cave of the monster Scylla. Scylla is a sea monster, who has dog heads instead of legs. Yeah. Not dog /legs/ instead of legs, or a dog head instead of a head, but dog heads, multiple, for legs. I’ll let you figure the logistics of that one out, because honestly I have sat through an entire class where twenty classics students, plus our classics PhD professor, tried and failed to understand how exactly that might work. Horrifying? Yes. Very confusing? Also yes. Something that it is very difficult to make a statue of? Also also yes.

This particular scene is of Scylla taking men directly from Odysseus’s ship to eat them. With her human head? With her dog heads? Who knows! Not us! We don’t want to!

We’re missing most of the figure of Scylla, so you’re just going to have to imagine a beautiful woman somewhere in the center of the piece, somehow emerging out of all of those dogs. Also, that hand in the front there is supposed to go on the prow of the ship, we think, but that doesn’t fit the reconstructed image at all unless the artist just threw all of anatomy out of the window when he made the piece, which is not a thing to rule out.

Interestingly, the sculpture is, apparently, made by the same workshop in Rome that crafted the fairly famous sculpture of Laocoon and his sons being eaten by two giant sea snakes. There is a theme in this workshop’s work, can you tell?

Neither of the other two statues were intact enough to take photographs of, just a fragment here and there. However, we know that D, from the drawing, is Odysseus and his bro Diomedes stealing the Palladium of Troy, which was a little statue of Pallas that represented the safety of Troy.

Interesting story about Pallas time! So, while most people associate the name Pallas with an identity of Athena, as in Pallas Athena, that wasn’t the original Pallas. She was a nymph, a friend of Athena’s who trained with her when they were both young (relatively speaking, seeing as Athena was never technically young, she ‘sprung from Zeus’s head fully formed’ which is also a mental image that you really don’t want to think too hard about), until one day Zeus looked down, thought the two of them were fighting instead of training, and distracted Pallas with his shield in the clouds long enough for her to pause, and for Athena to accidentally put a spear through her heart. Athena was devastated, created a likeness of her friend and placed it in Troy so she would not be forgotten, took on the name Pallas Athena, and also declared herself an eternal virgin, by the way, because that is a totally rational reaction to the death of someone who is definitely just a friend. Ehem. Anyway. That statue was stolen by Odysseus because he has no sense of the sacred, so that the Greeks could defeat Troy without their guardian spirit. The Palladium was then moved, some say, to Rome, and placed in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum, to keep Rome safe.

The final statue, A, on the left of the diagram, is a bit of a mystery. It’s two figures, one of whom is dressed in greek armor circa the Trojan War, we know that. The current theories are either that that is Menelaus holding the body of Achilles, or Achilles holding the body of Patroclus. I prefer the second interpretation, honestly, both because I like that story better, but also because according to the Iliad Menelaus didn’t even like Achilles, and I’m pretty sure the myth has Ajax getting all weepy over his body, not Menelaus. I don’t even know where we got the idea of Menelaus from, honestly, because it doesn’t make sense narratively. Also, there are so many statues of Achilles dramatically holding up Patroclus’s body and looking like his world is ending (which it is) that it just seems more plausible that it’s them.

All of these scenes from the Odyssey and the Iliad do actually have a purpose being in the villa of a Roman emperor, by the way, for all that they absolutely also represent the best of Greek legendary history. The villa is built next to the mountain Circeo, which is supposedly the mountain where the sorceress Circe lives, whom Odysseus visits and is enamored by for a full year (anyone who wants you to feel sorry for Odysseus taking ten years to get home clearly has no idea what he was doing in those ten years, honestly), connecting this place in historical memory to the idea of Greek travel and Mediterranean exploration, a thousand years before Rome became a superpower. The statuary is both Tiberius’s way of proving that he is very educated, because to be educated was to be familiar with Greek works, in that time, but also paying homage to local traditions, and retaining the Greek background that all of Rome is simultaneously enormously proud and very ashamed of. The relationship between Greece and Rome is very big sibling/little sibling, where the little sibling becomes enormously successful in life and the older sibling’s accomplishments, impressive though they might be ordinarily, fade to the background in the world’s eyes, but in the eyes of the little sibling they’ll always be. Well. Their older sibling. It’s one part reverence, one part hatred, and a whole lot of uncomfortable familial feelings that few people ever untangle without the help of a very, very good therapist.

After the Villa of Tiberius, we stopped in the unbelievably adorable little town of Sperlonga for lunch. I cannot overemphasize how beautiful this place is. Entirely made of tiny little streets that don’t allow cars? Check. Built of that beautiful white stone that glows in the ever-present sun and makes you feel like you’re wandering through a castle in the sky? Check. Flowers spilling out of every window box, and overhanging trees and vines providing both riotous color amidst the gleaming white buildings and much needed shade? Check. Absolutely breathtaking view of the ocean from the cliffs that it is perched on? Check. 10/10, would go back just to gape at the sheer gorgeousness of the place.

Following lunch, we got back in the bus and drove until we hit Naples, and the Archeological Museum therein.

I typically don’t…. Well, it’s not that I don’t like art museums, I appreciate them in a general sense as cultural conservation, and in certain moods I enjoy walking through them. I just tend to get distracted when looking at something purely visual for too long. It’s why I also do other things while watching TV and movies. So I go through art museums pretty quickly, and as long as I’ve glanced at everything, I feel like I’ve successfully taken everything in. It’s probably why I am the worst person to go to an art museum with, just in general.

(Books, by the way, in no way count as purely visual objects, and I can happily read a book for hours without getting distracted, but that’s reading, not looking.)

However. If there were ever a museum that I could lose a day in, it’s this one.

We covered quite a bit of material, mostly on hyper specific things (-and this is the scrollwork from the top of one of the columns on one of the temples on the Capitoline hill, note the beginnings of Ionian influence in the for the most part standard Doric structure-) that I feel like would not be particularly interesting to you, and in fact are not particularly interesting to me, mostly because that particular lecture tended to be geared towards the art history class, and not my Roman history class, but there were some great pieces of statuary that I want to note.

First, there were the simply exquisite pieces from Rome’s south east bath complex.

This is a multi-figure piece done in a similar style as the Scylla and the Laocoon pieces I’ve mentioned before, depicting the story of Dirce, a woman who insulted another woman named Antiope, who just happened to have two sons Amphion and Zethis, who got upset at the insult and, as you can see, behaved in that totally rational and calm way that all Greeks and Romans are known for, and punished Dirce by tying her to a raging bull in order to be trampled along the streets of Rome. Fun times.

This sculpture would have been featured at one end of the bath complex, and at the other would have stood a statue of Hercules. We saw that statue, significantly larger than lifelike, as well, though I neglected to take a picture of it. The statue is of a single figure this time, and is called Hercules at Rest, because he’s just kinda standing there, leaning on his club. He looks kinda tired. Me too, buddy, me too.

The statue is significant particularly because it represents a shift in focus in the Greek and Roman art world, from Classical to Hellenistic. In classical style, heroes and gods are typically depicted doing heroic things. Hellenism focuses more on the humanity of heroes and gods, and tends to show them doing rather uniquely human things, like leaning on their clubs to catch a break because just because you can carry the world on your back doesn’t mean you should, Hercules.

Another feature of hellenistic design, and one that makes this my favorite era of ancient art, is that the sculptures take great delight in hiding things in their designs, so that one has to observe the entire piece to get a full understanding of the story being told here. In the case of the Hercules statue, my professor instructed us to walk around to the back of the statue to “see what you observe.”

As the statue was both very large and also not wearing pants, we were all…. mildly alarmed at his suggestion, to say the least. However, we are also sheep, so we dutifully trundled around to the back of the statue to look.

Behind his back, Hercules is holding something. Three round somethings that, back when the statue was painted in its full glory, would have been done in gold.

The presence of the three golden apples, hidden so casually in the statue’s slumped over posture, gives this Hercules at Rest a definitive place in the timeline of the myth of Hercules, and also explains the need for the rest in the first place. Hellenism is about humanizing heroes, sure, but they’re still heroes, and the artist knows that. Even heroes get tired, but heroes get tired from doing things like holding the literal weight of the world on their backs and stealing impossible, Trojan-war-starting prizes from dragons in the gardens of goddesses.

In summary, a good statue.

My least favorite statue, by the way, was this one:

I do not like when the statues have eyes. I just don’t. Why would you do that. She’s going to come alive and murder everyone in this museum. You’re going to have that on your conscience, unnamed dude who thought that five of these were good decoration for his entryway.

(Unnamed dude was actually pretty cool, he owned the House of the Papyri, a villa that was discovered and named for the number of papyri preserved in its library. The statue is one of the Danaids, who were fifty daughters of the king of Danaus, who married his daughters all off in one fell swoop to a fellow king named Aegyptus who happened to have fifty sons. Due to unclear circumstances, the fifty daughters all killed their husbands, all on their wedding night. Except for one, who was clearly just a coward or something. Anyway, there were statues of all fifty of the daughters in Augustus’s temple on the Palatine, and this unnamed homeowner decided to copy his emperor’s super creepy taste in artwork. He was actually probably fairly close to Augustus, at least as much as anyone was, because in his library he had a book dedicated by Virgil himself, and everyone knows that Virgil was Augustus’s bestie. As much as anyone was.)

There was more, so much more, in the museum of Naples but frankly this post is already over four thousand words and I am fairly sure that no one cares about my unhealthily strong opinions about the styling of various Roman emperor busts, so I think I’ll take my leave here.

We left Naples and headed to a hotel in Paestum, called Poseidonia, which was very lovely apart from having a super weird bathroom set up. I may have flooded the bathroom. Just a little bit. There’s just no wall? There’s a little square of tile, with a lip, theoretically to prevent the water from going anywhere, but then the shower head points out into open space and all that the lip on the floor does is block whatever water the shower sprays around the bathroom from getting back tot he drain and long story short I flooded the bathroom a little bit.

But then the hotel was thoughtful enough to provide me with a really delicious gluten free dinner and so all is forgiven really.

[ccross520]

Magic is Bullshit, A Nexus Story

Science saved my life, not magic and not hopes and prayers. See I was killed by a man named Black Israel black, he used my membership in the crusaders as collateral for his reputation. I say I was dead because my body did die, I don’t remember all the details because he drugged me first. The worst part isn’t the dying part, it’s the not knowing, the feeling of uncertainty. I had to be told that I died when I woke up and no one knew the details and we never will. You may be asking why I said science brought me back, well it’s because my body died but I had my body cloned long ago and moved by memories and chemical makeup to that new body before the brain fully died. The whole process wiped so much of what was in my mind I stopped feeling like myself. So I had to rebuild my blanket slate and I was lucky enough to keep the genetic makeup of my brain that make me process information the way I do.

If you’ve never have had near brain failure you can lose parts of your memory and that is problematic to the human brain. They human brain hates holes, so whenever a gap of information exists the mind will fill in the blank with whatever it deems ‘most plausible’, trying to create a scenario that most likely happened, like ‘great value history’. So whenever I face things I don’t understand I go into Icospace. Icospace is a place I discovered years ago with Ethan Cutler and Era, it’s a space that can be reached mentally but I secretly created a way of moving your body there as well. This will allow you do physically. Imagine it, being able to create a space to freely explore your thoughts and make things that can be taken t the real world. This Iscospace is a place where time doesn’t work the same way it does on earth, time is closer to an illusion than a concrete fact. Based off my findings time works very similarly to REM sleep, but that can’t be measured since Dream time is disjointed on a faster time scale. The best way to describe it is how it feels not what it is, it feels like hours pass when in reality seconds pass. Ever had a full length dream within the five minutes you have after you hit the snooze button on your phone? That’s it. I’ve been in Icospace since the day I woke up and I’ve been working ever since. See here since time passes in a similar manner as it does in dreams I have spent years working in what I’ve called TALITIME. Healing the body takes time, true, but the mind, is far more complicated. I was gifted a new body but an old broken down mind. I’m a brand new Lexus with 300,000 miles on the engine and a shoty alternator.

I measured my time here in heartbeats or HBs. I’ve learned that heartbeats are the one constant here. I built a device that measures the frequencies and displays them on my watch instead of hours or minutes. I spent the first three HBs here studying the landscape, to see if it was more scientific or magic based, my conclusion shook me at my core, that magic isn’t real. Magic is based purely off perception and it is not a factual thing. At one point they used to say ‘Magic is in the air’ because at that time we didn’t know that atoms were in the air; electrons, protons, and isotopes populate creation. This shakes me because in my old life I was known as nexus, the master of magic and mystical energies, I thought I could see spells and incantations but in reality I was just watching isotopic exchange reactions, direct combustions and redox. I chased after what I thought was the truth but in reality was misdirection, shroud of misinformation. So now I chase the truth, the truth of science and hard facts. I brought 423 magical books down into this space after I relocated my office here; I broke down, reassembled and broke down again every ‘spell’ trying to understand its unique codex. I was successful on over 9,232 cases; only 130 were inconclusive so I needed to go beyond my checkered memory. I constructed devices to see the actual makeup of these aberrations; I can now see what makes magic itself tick with the flip of a switch. No more fairy tales, I’m going to drag the superstitious world out of the cold dark world into the future. I am Prometheus, I am Tesla, I am Scion. I choose the name Scion because I have built what I know based off the knowledge of greats long gone, I am their descendant. My ultimate goal is to crack the biggest mystery of my word, what are Relic humans.

See the human DNA strand splits three ways: Homo sapien with no discernible unique traits, Echo-sapiens who have the potential to have lateen superhuman abilities that activate during puberty onward and Relics, who are born with the ability to use ‘magical’ abilities with apparent cost as ‘magic’ usually does. My theory is that in reality these relics have an innate ability to bend but not break the universal laws of science while still adhering to them. They have to, without these rules there would be chaos and nothing stopping high level relics from doing whatever they want. When I was Nexus I spent hours a day studying the rules and confides of ‘spells’ meaning they did in fact have structure which would mean the users had limitations based off their understanding, like real science.

Reality is manageable like an app on your phone, you know the right code and you can hack it, relics are basically hacking programs with preset functions, cheat codes basically, it took me 5 HBs to come to this idea conclusively. I created a pair of glasses that can view the different types of wave length frequencies so I can better analyze the content of artifacts left behind by users. I’ll tell you a secret, something you’ve probably realized by now, the artifacts are radioactive and cause a reaction to things around it, pretending to be mystical but in reality are just simplistic science if you look hard enough you can pick it apart which I spent two more HBS doing and even mastering. Now I can pinpoint the specific radiation from over 100 meters away, my body is basically attuned to it.

I spent another 4 HBs learning surgery to operate on mystical beasts. I learned you need different kinds of devises to dissect these aberrations. I created a surgical knife that can cut any surface by slightly separating the atoms by weakening the electromagnetic force and strong force simultaneously now I admit its dangerous and I try not to use it because if don’t wrong it can end in death or worse. I hypostasize it’ll take 7 more HBs to perfect it. The three times I’ve used this knife I call ‘SHIVA’ was to work on a unicorn and an onyx rhino, it does work. I’ve cataloged every discovery and every invention in my book called the ‘Scion of Nexus’ when I finish it I may change the name. I’m thinking about….. “Magic is Bullshit”.

[themoneybuff-blog]

Why financial literacy fails (and what to do about it)

April is Financial Literacy Month in the United States. This is a pure and noble thing. I think it's great that there's one month each year devoted to promoting smart money habits. That said, it has become increasingly apparent over the years that most financial literacy programs fail. They don't work. And this isn't just me speaking anecdotally. In a 2014 paper from Management Science, three researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 201 prior studies regarding the efficacy of financial literacy. Their conclusion? Interventions to improve financial literacy explain only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviors studied, with weaker effects in low-income samples. Like other education, financial education decays over time; even large interventions with many hours of instruction have negligible effects on behavior 20 months or more from the time of intervention. To put it in plain English, financial literacy education makes no discernible difference in behavior. People who take personal-finance classes manage their money no better (and no worse) than the general population. We're pumping tons of money and time into a fruitless endeavor. All of this push to promote financial literacy accomplishes nothing. Zero. Nada. Why is that?

It probably won't surprise you to learn that I have some strong opinions on this subject. Today, let's talk about why financial literacy fails (and what to do about it). Note: This afternoon (April 24th) at 4 p.m. Pacific (7 p.m. Eastern), I'll be part of a Facebook Live interview about this very subject. If you're free at that time, you should join us! Update: Here's the entire interview. Why Financial Literacy Fails Financial literacy fails because it almost universally addresses only one part of the problem: math and mechanics. FinLit (as it's sometimes called) focuses on facts and figures while largely ignoring behavior. This is insane. This is like promoting sex education that talks about penises and vaginas while never discussing what it's like to be madly in love with somebody, so in love that your brain stops working. For sex education to be effective, it has to deal with real-world circumstances and behavior. It has to teach about psychology and emotions, not just body parts. The same is true with financial literacy. In fact, the same is true with actual literacy. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy says that working literacy has two components. The operational piece of literacy focuses solely on knowledge. It involves word-level reading skills such as recognizing words.The conceptual piece of literacy focuses on everyday tasks: Literacy is the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. The first part of literacy is about mechanics. The second part is about practical application. Modern financial literacy efforts spend nearly all of their time on the knowledge piece. I've reviewed maybe a dozen FinLit programs over the years. Most pay no more than lip service to behavior, to the conceptual piece of financial literacy. Let me give you an example from my own life. When I was in high school (w-a-y back in the mid-1980s), every senior in our district was required to pass a class in personal finance. It covered topics like compound interest, the Federal Reserve, how to write a check, and the dangers of credit cards. I took that class. I aced every test. And five years later, I had the beginnings of a debt habit. I'd mastered the knowledge but not he behavior. The behavior was never taught. From what I can tell, the kids from my high school grew up to be no different than the rest of Americans. We learned the basics of financial literacy, but it had no perceivable impact on the way we saved and spent and earned. We still made stupid mistakes. We still spent more than we earned. Why? Because facts and figurs are only one-half of financial literacy. (And I'd argue they aren't even the most important half.) The solution to financial literacy isn't to feed people more facts and figures. It isn't to teach them how bonds work or to explain the sheer awesomeness of a Roth IRA. If we want to boost financial literacy in the United States, what we really need to promote is behavioral education. Behavioral Finance Personal finance is simple. Fundamentally, you need to know only one thing: To build wealth, you must spend less than you earn. The end. That's it. We can all go home now. Everything else simply builds on this. Why, then, is it so hard for everyone to get ahead? For some people, the problem is systemic. There's no doubt that some people are trapped in a cycle of poverty, and they truly need outside help to overcome the obstacles they face. But for most of us, the issue is internal: The problem is us. In other words, I am the reason that I can't get ahead. And you are the reason that you can't get ahead. It's not a lack of knowledge about compounding and credit cards that holds us back, but a chain of bad behavior. The math and mechanics of personal finance are easy. It's the psychological side of money that's hard. One of the key tenets of this site is that money is more about mind than it is about math. That is, our financial success isn't determined by how smart we are with numbers, but how well we're able to control our emotions our wants and desires. There's actually a branch of economics called behavioral finance devoted exclusively to this phenomenon, exploring the interplay between economic theory and psychological reality. There's a new wave of folks who are exploring the gamification of personal finance; they're trying to turn money management into a game. More and more, experts are seeing that our economic decisions aren't based on logic, but on emotion and desire. It's time that financial literacy programs incorporated these new(-ish) approaches into their curriculum. For years, I struggled with money. I knew the math, but I still couldnt seem to defeat debt. It wasnt until I started applying psychology to the situation that I was able to make changes. For instance, I used the debt snowball to pay down my debt in an illogical yet psychologically satisfying way. It worked. And Ive learned that by having financial goals such as travel Im much more inclined to save than if I have no goals at all. Behavioral Literacy

To me, the answer to our country's crazed consumerism and poor financial skills has nothing to do with traditional financial literacy. (Okay, maybe it has a little to do with traditional financial literacy.) Instead, I see two fundamental problems that need to be addressed. First, we soak in a bath of the mass media. We're constantly exposed to a barrage of programming in which we're given subtle messages about what people do (or should) consume. We cannot help but be influenced by the power of marketing. (I've talked to many people who think they're immune to marketing. I just shake my head and think, You, my friend, are the most influenced of all.)Secondly, we don't think about our spending. We spend on impulse. Or we spend to subconsciously keep up with our family and friends to keep up with the Joneses. We spend to make ourselves feel better when we're down and blue. We spend to show off. We spend on things we think we want instead of the things we actually use and do. We spend because spending is a habit. Instead of teaching Americans about credit cards and rates of return, we need to be teaching them about behavioral finance. We need to be showing them how to break free from the marketing messages that are all around. We need to be showing them how to set (and achieve) personal goals, especially financial goals. We need to teach skills like conscious spending. There's a reason that my core message doesn't start with math and mechanics. It starts by asking people to think about their goals and purpose. This is the piece of financial education that's missing in our society. This is what financial literacy education ought to be teaching. Note: For a clear demonstration of how I'd approach financial literacy if I were to design a program, check out my Money Boss Manifesto. It's a free ebook that outlines the financial philosophy I've developed after nearly fifteen years of reading and writing about money. The Bottom Line Sometimes people wonder why we don't spend more time on the nitty gritty of money around here. Why we don't cover more topics like where to find the best credit cards or how to create a budget? It's because deep inside, I believe these things are secondary. I believe behavior is more important. Building a better budget isn't going to change your attitude toward saving and spending; but changing you attitude toward saving and spending could very well lead you to building a better budget. Ultimately, if we want Americans to be smarter with their money, we need to encourage them to consume less media to avoid advertising and we need to teach them to master the emotional side of personal finance. We need to show them how to change their behavior. We need to appeal to their self-interest. We need to help them find intrinsic motivation to save. Each of us needs to dig deep inside to find what it is that's important to us, what it is that brings us joy, and we need to prioritize that instead of all the other garbage. I'm not suggesting that we abandon traditional financial literacy completely. But I think a constant push for more financial education is a waste of time if it's only going to focus on mechanics, to stick to facts and figures. To truly be successful, financial education has to address the behavioral side of money because that is absolutely the biggest piece of the puzzle.

Author: J.D. Roth In 2006, J.D. founded Get Rich Slowly to document his quest to get out of debt. Over time, he learned how to save and how to invest. Today, he's managed to reach early retirement! He wants to help you master your money and your life. No scams. No gimmicks. Just smart money advice to help you reach your goals. https://www.getrichslowly.org/why-financial-literacy-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it/

[lunaspatial400]

Palaces for the People / 99% Invisible

Podcast host Roman Mars speaks with Eric Klinenberg.

This podcast by 99% Invisible has some really interesting discussion about social infrastructure, what it actually means and how important it actually is. Roman Mars chats with the author of “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization and the Decline of Civic Life”, Eric Klinenberg. Klinenberg’s book is based on his beleif that “a healthy community is not simply held together by shared values, but by shared spaces – physical, real world locations – where people across all strata, and ages, and races, and creeds bump into each other and form connections”(Mars). Klinenberg argues that these kinds of spaces, social infrastructure, is unappreciated and overlooked. He believes social infrastructure “could help solve or at least mitigate, some of our most pressing challenges, like isolation, polarization, education, crime, and even climate change”(Mars).

The title ‘Palaces for the people’ was taken from philanthropist and capitalist Andrew Carnegie (1887–1919). Cargenie himself was an immigrant to America, and thought one of the amazing things about the countries was the institutions there which gave much better opportunities for people, allowing them to do better than they could have in their home countries. He went on to fund more than 2500 libraries around the world which he began to call ‘palaces of the people’. Cargenie’s view saw it them as places in which everyone, even those “who worked in a factory or lived in a tenement building, and experienced life as crowded, and uncomfortable, and rushed most of the time, could go and escape all of that”(Klinenberg).

Libraries could be said as the “perfect example” of social infrastructure, so what is that? During his research and exploration Klinenberg has observed that those places in which social infrastructure is invested in gain many social advantages. We become far more likely to interact with people around us, whether they are friends and family or neighbors who we haven’t gotten to know. And when we don’t invest in social infrastructure – if we neglect it, if we let it fall apart – we tend to grow more isolated”(Klinenberg).

When Klinenberg first thought of the significance of social infrastructure, it was when he studied the deadly 1995 heat wave in Chicago. He studied the death patterns, and not surprisingly the poorer and segregated neighbourhoods had higher death rates. But the peculiar pattern that he found was a few neighbourhoods that had the demographic profile of ones that would suffer badly, were actually quite resilient. There were neighbouring neighbours, separated by just streets, almost demographically identical but one had a crazy high death rate. Klinenberg went on to go and spend time in those neighbourhoods, and what he discovered was of course, those with high death rates seemed to have depleted social infrastructure, and the resilient ones had social infrastructure that was well tended to. Everything was better taken care of. As the heatwave meant it was deadly to stay home, it makes sense how in the neighbourhoods where there was not much public areas to go, that didn’t feel safe to go or were comfortable suffered the most. “ I realized that the end of that project, actually, it was social infrastructure, not the traditional hard infrastructures that we normally think of, that explained who lived and who died that week in Chicago”(Klinenberg).

A few years later when Superstorm Sandy hit New York he emphasized the importance of infrastructure that “brings people together”, stressing this to all the teams for a competition called ‘Rebuild By Design’. One team approached him and said how they’ve listened to him about the importance of social infrastructure and they explained to him this amazing idea for something called a ‘resilience centre’. What they described, he discovered, was a library.

“At first I thought it was a little crazy, but then I realized that it was completely predictable and forgivable because we live in a moment where so many people think of the library as an obsolete institution, right? We think it’s a relic from another part of our history, and that it’s not used much by anyone. Even though it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth”(Klinenberg).

Discovering a need to spend more time in libraries Klinenberg started some physical exploration, visiting libraries all over the U.S. and discovering amazing things and ways people used the library. A favourite being a wii bowling tournament for the elderly, noting that not everyone is ‘booky’. Noted that these elderly were exactly the kind of people who would have been targewted in the chi cago heatwave…

“The complaint was people used to do things together collectively in formal groups, and now everyone, like in Putnam’s nightmare from 1999, everybody was just watching television at home together in the living room. Which I now think of … Now that I have kids who have their own mobile devices, that’s like a socialist utopian fantasy to me. Like, oh my God, if only we could have a night together watching the same screen, it would be amazing”(Klinenberg).

“There are so many people who just can’t afford books, and don’t have books at home, or have parents who speak another language, and they come to the library to learn to read and to learn to love books. And that’s amazing. Probably Carnegie anticipated that. But he probably would not have seen that libraries have now become the places where people who used to be incarcerated come more than any other institution to search for a job, to get help putting a resume together. He probably would not have anticipated that libraries have become the places where there’s more instruction for English as a second language, more citizenship classes than any other public institution. He probably didn’t anticipate that libraries would do things like karaoke hours for immigrant communities that want a good place to sing together.I don’t know that he would have seen all the teenagers who come to the library at the end of the school day because it’s the safest and warmest, or if you’re in a hot place, coolest place where you can study, apply for college, or just mess around and play video games in a social way. I’ll tell you, I’ve seen so many kids come to the libraries to play games. And when they played games together there, they did it in a way that was very collective and very social. It was not the stereotypical image of a kid in a hole, in their own basement being on their own. They were socializing in this very new way. Libraries are just doing an enormous number of things”(Klinenberg”.

Note: article in Forbes magazine about libraries being knocked down and replaced with amazon stores WTF, librarians of the world bound together through twitter and the article got taken down.

Not that libraries are the only social infrastructure that exists, but “they’re just about the most effective social infrastructure that I can imagine. And it is a shame that we don’t make more of them by maintaining them or updating them in the way that they deserve”(Klinenberg).

“And one of the things that’s so striking about libraries is that the local staff has the capacity and agency to develop programs that work for the community that they’re in”(Klinenberg).

“There’s no strong hard rule that says a library has to do X, Y, or Z thing”(Klinenberg).

Note: broken windows theory, and expirement - Pennsylvania Horticultural Society - small interventions - comparing the differently ‘taken care of’ places - 40% decline in gun voilence around the treated properties.

Libraries have the power to be a collective place but also enable privacy similar to parks.

Public ownership.

“We don’t want to force people out into the public realm, but my sense right now is that it’s the publicly-accessible public realm that’s really in short supply”(Klinenberg).

Note: Philadelphia, two African American guys Starbucks case. Idea - exclusivity of commercial places. “people just know that they’re not welcome because it costs $7 for coffee, or $9 for ice cream, or they don’t take cash at all, they’re there only for people with credit cards”(Klinenberg).

“I have to say one of the most amazing things I observed in the public libraries where I spent time, is that there are places where this impossible community of people who are so different from one another, come together, and all kinds of people who have real struggles, come to because there’s just not space for them anywhere else”(Klinenberg).

Libraries are safe places. And people respect them because people know that they themselves are being treated with respect.

Mark Zuckerberg ‘Facebook as the social infrastructure’. No one has spent more money on built social infrastructure than Mark Zuckerberg at his Facebook campus for his workers. Ironically, the people who work there don’t let their children use phones because they know how dangerous it can be as social infrastructure.

“If we want to support the kind of social life that we all need, regardless of our politics, regardless of our income, regardless of where we live, that we all need to live well and be better connected with each other, we’re going to have to find a way to invest in it”(Klinenberg).

MLA:

Klinenberg, Eric and Roman Mars. “Palaces for the People”. 99% Invisible, episode 346, 19 March 2019, Poor, Nigel and Earlonne Woods, hosts. "So Long." Ear Hustle, season 2, episode 19, Radiotopia, 20 June 2018, www.earhustlesq.com/episodes/2018/6/20/so-long.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

A PLAN FOR STARTUPS

And just as Jews are ex officio allowed to tell Jewish jokes, I don't feel like I have to bother being diplomatic with a British audience. We encourage that.1 They don't project any kind of aura of power either. Nor do you have security, because if it means what I think it can scale all the way to the bed and breakfast, and other people trying to do it. In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of growth in this area, just as automating things often turns out to generate more money in the end, just as a statement of values, but as a guide to strategy, and even a design spec for software. How you live affects how long you live. At year 1, Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be embodied as companies to work. If you're not threatening, you're probably not doing anything new, and dignity is merely a sort of plaque. Someone would run your company for you once you'd grown it to a certain size.

I wished I'd spent more time with her.2 Does it make any difference to know that? About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the bullshit forced on you or it tricks you. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. They didn't have ads for over a year. It means arguments of the form Life is too short for something, you should probably stay. But they were expensive compared to what they were worth.3 A web site for college students to stalk one another?4

So traffic became the thing to get at Yahoo. The catch is that people will hold you to it. In it he said he worried that he was fundamentally soft-hearted and tended to give away too much for free. The area under the curve is just as steep, and when anything grows at the rate of a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?5 It didn't matter what type. A mere 15 weeks.6 And even that's going to be hard, because Google has as big a head start in buying microstartups as it did in search a few years before by a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. We now have several examples to prove that startups don't need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. It's interesting Our two junior team members were enthusiastic. How tech-saturated Silicon Valley is. Few would be willing to claim that it doesn't matter at all where a startup is that you have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast. But it was obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels.7

But the more reliable route is to convince them through your users: if you make something users love enough to tell what I said that upset him: that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon Valley.8 Business people in Silicon Valley are people you'd overlook on the street.9 I thought it would be huge. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money, and ambivalence about being a technology company, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of the reputation of each member. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they could do searches online. If the aggressive ways of west coast investors are going to come back to bite them, it has been a long time coming. 0 so much.10 It's an interesting illustration of an element of the startup ecosystem that few except the participants ever see: investors trying to convince one another to invest in Airbnb. ITunes is Web 2. So far so good. A couple weeks ago I realized that if you pushed this idea, but they didn't have the kind of ideas you could not merely ignore, but ridicule. My father's entire industry breeder reactors disappeared that way.

But while some amount of natural benevolence. 0 so much.11 Starting a startup is that you have to spend on bullshit varies between employers.12 There has always been a stream of people who should know better. Because they're good guys and they're trying to help the world. I was firmly in the camp of bad. Why? Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. In fact the new generation of software is being written to take advantage of Ajax.13 Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the PhD program in physics at Berkeley to do this. I wouldn't be surprised if ten years from now, you'll be making about $160k a month.

Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder is the trend for takeovers that began in the 1980s. If you do make users register, never make them wait for a confirmation link in an email; in fact, discontinuous.14 One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have to remember anything, and that's actually very valuable information. So I was surprised at a conference this summer when Tim O'Reilly led a session intended to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information. The problem is, people who apply to Y Combinator don't generally have much money, and yet Digi-Key is trying to stop them in order to protect the work they'd invested in a position on the ladder. Mikey likes it. How do you decide?

How scrappy founders are. That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. I'd recommend having the debate after meeting them instead of before. They insist on it. That's barely enough time to get started.15 Good news: they do exist.

Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end. When you have small children, there are companies you can hire to manage it for you. It's the junk food of experience.16 If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as automating things often turns out to generate more money in the end, just as automating things often turns out to generate more jobs. Suppose as before that you only extract half as much from users as you could.17 Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, and by using graph theory we can compute from this network an estimate of your company's value that you'd both agreed upon.

Notes

Living on instant ramen, which shoppers used to do this right you'd have reached after lots of potential winners, from the moment; if anything Boston is falling further and further behind. If you weren't around then it's hard to tell them exactly what they're selling and how unbelievably annoying it is the odds are slightly more interesting than random marks would be better to be good at sniffing out any red flags about the other sense of the word philosophy has changed over time. So if you seem like a VC means they'll look bad if the statistics they use the local stuff.

Though in fact they were getting results.

Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have a connection to one of the marks of a place where few succeed is hardly free. It shouldn't be that surprising that colleges can't teach them how awful the real world is boring. The need has to their stems, but sword thrusts.

It's common for startups overall.

I took so long to launch a new search engine is low. Cost, again.

As well as down. On the face of it.

And startups that get killed by overspending might have infected ten percent of them. This seems to be a trivial enhancement of HTTP, to allow multiple urls in a world in which income is doled out by John Sculley in a way that's rare among technology companies. I realize revenue and not least, as accurate to call all our lies lies. According to a 2002 report by the fact that established companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be that surprising that colleges can't teach students how to do this all the best ideas, because living at all.

I know of a cent per spam. The speed at which startups develop new techology is the new economy during the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The First Two Hundred Years. I wrote the recommendations.

Bad math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is worth studying as a day job writing software goes up more than most people are immune to the Depression. And the expertise and connections the founders chose? Ii.

If a company he really liked, but that it's up to them.

It's hard for us.

The hackers within Microsoft must know in their experiences came not with the founders. Maybe it would be more alarmed if you get an intro to a degree that alarmed his family how much would you have to solve problems, but bickering at several hundred dollars an hour over the Internet into situations where a laptop would be worth it, but rather by, say, good deals. It's hard to say now.

An earlier version of this essay, Richard and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the fucking fleas.

Yes, strictly speaking, you're using a degenerate case of Bayes' Rule. Some blue counties are false positives out of school. The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them. The threshold for participating goes down to you; who knows who you might see something like the United States, have been the first to state this explicitly.

But when you have 8 months of runway or less constant during the entire cross-country Internet bandwidth wasn't enough for one user. This is a shock at first, and made more margin loans. Or more precisely, while simultaneously implying that lies believed for a seed investment of 650k. To use this route instead.

Correction: Earlier versions used a recent Business Week, 31 Jan 2005.

Unfortunately the constraint probably has to be driven by money.