#every horror classic change can be most likely traced back to

[wjbs-aus]

Sorry for the two Doom 3 posts in a row earlier, but I unironically love all the demon designs they did for it. They're that special type of 2000s sci-fi/horror monster design that I can't get enough of.

Anyway this is now an alphabetical-order Doom 3 monster design appreciation/thoughts/interesting facts post (images from Doomwiki), followed by enemies that only appear in the Resurrection of Evil expansion. Be warned that most of these designs involve heavy amounts of body-horror and gore, and at least two of them might trigger arachnophobia and/or entomophobia in some people.

Regular enemies

Archvile - Basically just a 3D adaptation of its Doom 2 design, with the only differences being the colour, the weird tumorous hands, the smoother head, and the smaller cheekbones. Nothing else to say.

Cacodemon - Due to the original Caco's sprite being traced from a DnD monster, every redesign has tried to make it look different, but I personally think Doom 3's is the furthest from the original design, though it's still recognisably Cacoesque (with the wide mouth and lower "feelers" that people often seem to ignore). Amazing redesign, and I can definitely see some of it in the 2016/Eternal design (specifically the "tentacles", which became the modern!Caco's dangling "legs").

Cherub - I remember, during the leadup to Doom Eternal's release, the Fandom Doom Wiki claimed it would feature Cherubs and used what was clearly a close-up of the Carcass enemy as "proof". As for my actual thoughts on its design, it's very cool, and honestly I really wish it did show up in Eternal, especially if it got redesigned and was a Maykr instead of a Demon.

Commandos - I think it's neat that Doom 3 doesn't just remake the Former Humans in HD, but instead gives them unique twists. In this case, rather than the Chaingunner equivalent being a big dude in red armour carrying a chaingun, Commandos are slightly less bulky, don't wear shirts, and come in two flavours; the one on the left uses its nasty tentacle to do long-range melee attacks, while the one on the right is more "classic" and carries a chaingun. While they are cool, I personally feel like they should have either merged them (like how they work in Metadoom) or had a more traditional Chaingunner and left the tentacle form as it is.

Demon - Much like the Cacodemon, the Pinky got a unique design for 3, with its front half being almost entirely organic, while its back legs are mechanical, and it does that thing I like (for several reasons) where it has a prominent mouth and no eyes. Unlike the Cacodemon, this design was actually used elsewhere, namely in the 2005 Doom movie (which uses designs from Doom 3 for its monsters, which are mutants rather than demons for some reason) where the character "Pinky" gets mutated into one by a virus or something, with his prosthetic lower-half becoming the monster's back legs (albeit with wheels instead of feet).

Hell Knight - When they were first introduced in Doom II, Hell Knights were just palette-swapped versions of the Baron of Hell, so for Doom 3, Id decided to give it a redesign, despite the Baron not appearing in Doom 3. While I think the Hell Knights and Barons looking similar was kinda interesting, this design is really cool and I love it a lot more than the original, especially the alternate texture used in the Hell levels. The Hell Knight is also the only demon to retain its Doom 3 design all the way into the modern games, albeit with minor changes to its design, mostly in regards to its face and palette.

Imp - The first demon encountered in every Doom game, the Imp has varied drastically in design in each game, and much like most of Doom 3's returning demons, is probably the most divergent from the original. Instead of a spiky humanoid with glowing red eyes, this imp is more like an insect, with chitinous grey skin and 14 eyes. Like the Demon and Hell Knight, the Imp appears frequently throughout the Doom movie.

Lost Soul - In the first 3 Doom games (1, II and 64), Lost Souls were giant human skulls with horns, which were inexplicably on fire. For Doom 3, Id got a bit creative with things and instead made them into hideous-looking, sharp-toothed disembodied heads attached to rockets, and there's even a sequence where one flies out of a scientist's head, killing her in the process (though the way the cutscene's set up makes it look like the Lost Soul is her head). Very interesting, though the mechanical details kinda make it fit in more with the later-released Quake IV (which used the same engine and artstyle, but with more of a focus on cybernetic body-horror).

Maggot - The most horrific-looking demon in Doom 3 by far, with two heads, five legs, and what appear to be exposed lungs. I love it. Interestingly, they appear to have influenced the modern Imp design, as they also have gross fleshy back parts that look kinda similar, although the similarity ends there. I also feel like this is the most representative of the Doom 3 design philosophy.

Mancubus - Hell yeah. The Doom 3 Mancubus feels like an update to its classic design rather than an overhaul, with its more cartoonish ogre-like face being swapped out for a disturbing mouth-tube and pair of facial tentacles that evoke an elephant's trunk and tusks, respectively (although apparently it's meant to resemble Cthulhu). Its cannons also look delightfully 2000s.

Revenant - Much like the Mancubus, the Revenant also feels like an update to the original, removing the original's "shorts" (which are actually blood) and replacing them with a translucent, gelatinous mass resembling a human, while also 2000s-ing its chestplate and shoulder-cannons. I haven't encountered them yet in my current playthrough, so I don't know if they still do the silly walk, but I doubt they do, which is sad.

Tick - While Doom's original spider-related demons (the Spider Mastermind and the Arachotron) don't appear in Doom 3, there's still room for spiders. The Tick features a humanoid face incorporated into the front of its carapace, and has 6 legs, meaning it's actually more of a bug, but I honestly don't care.

Trite - The Trite is much fleshier than the Tick, and functions very similarly. Its face kinda reminds me of the Hell Knight, with the Imp's eyes and a disturbingly humanoid nose; in fact, what the whole thing makes me think of is, well, The Thing, namely its upside-down head-spider form.

Wraith - Wraiths are interesting in that they appear to have gone on to inspire two modern Doom monsters, coincedentally both from Eternal; their faces slightly resemble the structure of the Doomhunter's skull, while their body-shape and pose resembles the Gargoyle. Overall it's very cool, especially the avian leg-scales, but weirdly it doesn't seem capable of flight.

Zombie - Unlike Doom 1, II or 64, Doom 3 has human NPCs as part of its attempt at something closer to Half-Life's structure (in fact, Doom 3 released only a few months before Half-Life 2); as a result, there are also zombified versions of them, which are the bottom of the game's enemy heirarchy. They filled a niche that, until this game, the Doom series lacked, namely a weak melee enemy; however, I find their designs kinda uninteresting, mostly because they're just generic zombies, albeit with slightly futuristic-looking clothing. Doom 2016 and Eternal would later introduce more visually-interesting zombies which fill a similar role however, so that's neat!

Z-Sec - The Z-Sec are basically Doom 3's equivalents of the Zombieman and Shotgunner, with two new variants, one with a machine-gun and another with a shield; these two probably inspired 2016's Possessed Soldier and Security respectively. Again, they're not the most inspired designs, though I really like their cool helmets and extremely mid-2000s sci-fi armour designs.

Bosses

Vagary - All I'll say about this one is that the part in The Making Of Doom 3 (a book I have read about half of I think?) where they say that "Sexy + Gross = Creepy" is absolutely correct, and also the Vagary's abdomen contains a Mancubus fetus so that's cool. Still think the Whiplash from Doom Eternal does the whole "feminine torso on a non-humanoid lower-half" thing in a better and more tonally-consistent way.

Guardian - This is the closest Doom 3 gets to having a Baron of Hell, I guess. Apparently it's meant to look like a dinosaur's idea of what a demon would look like, so that's neat!

Sabaoth - I'm pretty sure this one was meant to be a call-back to Quake II's final boss, which is also a giant cyborg with an organic upper-half that uses its game's BFG variant. But this one is different, because it's, like, a mass of meat rather than a weird skeleton, so that's cool, and the guy it's made of is the player's mission-control for the first few sections of the game. I don't know why the three "main" Idtech 4 games (Doom 3, Quake IV and Prey (2006)) all have a boss that consists of a major side-character grafted onto a big (bio)mechanical thing, but I expect to see that return if we ever get a 2000s FPS revival. Also something something "it looks a bit like the Doomhunter from Doom Eternal".

Cyberdemon - Unlike the '90s Doom games, where the Cyberdemon was an end-of-episode boss that eventually became a recurring level hazard/miniboss, Doom 3 made it the final boss that can only be harmed with the game's situational utility weapon, the Soul Cube; this probably lead to the modern!Cyberdemons both being bosses (the one in 2016 is fought midway through the game, while the one in VFR is the final boss) before Eternal replaced them with the Tyrants, which are literally just classic Cyberdemons in 3D with more interesting attacks. This design is... interesting, removing most of the more iconic details of the original Cyberdemon (its asymmetrical legs, the mass of wires in its abdomen, the arm-cannon being smaller and on its right arm, and the small, wide-set eyes) in place of a design that, again, fits more into Quake IV than Doom, but also it kinda makes it fit Doom 3's world more, and it's actually more "cyber" than the original Cyberdemon (the only cybernetic parts of which are its right leg, left hand, torso and some parts of its right arm).

Resurrection of Evil

Biosuit Zombie - Apparently this has some gameplay use in the non-BFG Edition versions of RoE (dropping a useful item), but otherwise it's just a single-level gimmick version of the regular Zombie enemy. Still, I love hazmat suits in general, and this one makes the look cooler by adding that delicious mid-2000sness.

Bruiser - The Bruiser is another candidate for being Doom 3's equivalent of the Baron of Hell (since Barons are sometimes referred to as "Bruisers", and the pair fought as Doom 1's first end-of-episode boss are known as "The Bruiser Brothers"), but with a design that's closer to both the Mancubus and the classic!Cyberdemon, but with the extra detail of having a TV screen for a mouth, which is extremely cool, and its arm-cannons look more industrial than the Mancubus's, which helps differentiate them physically. Apparently they were originally going to appear in Doom 3's main campaign and blend in with the environment before attacking, but this was scrapped, and Nerve (who developed Resurrection of Evil) ended up reusing the model in the DLC.

Forgotten One - According to the Doom Wiki (which is where I'm getting most of my information, since I'm not particularly far into Doom 3 at time of writing and I haven't even touched the DLC yet), these are just reskins of regular Lost Souls, but closer to their original appearance, which is. Fine, I guess? Honestly I prefer the regular Lost Souls over the Forgotten Ones.

Vulgar - Another case of Nerve recycling cut content, the Vulgar's model was used for the Arch-Vile in early versions of Doom 3, before being replaced with the more sprite-accurate design used for the final, and honestly I can see why. This design doesn't fit well with the Arch-Vile's whole "demonic wizard" thing, but what it does work well as is a fast enemy, and apparently the Vulgar is, being the DLC's equivalent of the Imp. I really like the little crustacean legs and the very Xenomorph-like body-plan, and I wish they did something like this again in the modern games. The closest is the Prowler in Eternal (which is essentially a stronger Imp).

The Hunters (Helltime, Berserk, Invulnerability) - I'm grouping these three together as they are all just modified Hell Knights, but as bosses rather than regular enemies, and each unlocks a new ability for the Resurrection of Evil-exclusive Soul Cube equivalent, the Artifact. The Helltime Hunter is really cool and honestly looks more like the 2016 Hell Knight design than the standard Doom 3 one does, the Berserk Hunter is genuinely kinda unnerving and feels like something from a 2000s horror movie, and the Invulnerability Hunter has a really neat armoured design that's kinda hard to make out through the particle-effects it's surrounded by.

Maledict - The final boss of RoE is a giant skull-bat I guess, with a human face inside its mouth. This is a reference to the ending cutscene of Doom 3's main campaign, in which its antagonist, Dr. Betruger, is shown transformed into the Maledict; you only get to fight it in Resurrection of Evil. This design is kinda generic but also very Doom-y, and works really well as the final boss of the entire Doom 3 subseries (after Doom 4 was cancelled and then revived as Doom 2016, which is set in a different timeline).

[fiannalover]

[mosstliest]

mcyt movie night headcanons!

(cc!) Dream , George , Sapnap , Technoblade , Wilbur , Eret , Fundy , Nihachu , Quackity , Karl

requested? yes / no

pronouns used : they / them

cw! light nsfw (Dream) , mentions of jumpscares (horror films)

Dream

he is a big fan of a good old netflix and chill session

something about the warm, dark living room only illuminated by the moving images on the screen, your silhouette barely visible under a blanket and whatever snack you’d found on his cupboard on your hands gets this man in a raunchy mood

he’ll pull you to his lap or slide next to you and start pecking at your neck

“But it’s just getting to the good part”

you stretch your neck to give him more room anyways

“Oh we’re about to get to the good part”

you chuckle and bite your lip to stifle a sigh as his lips begin to trace your jaw

the movie gets paused is what I’m saying

he refuses to buy any snacks from the candy shop  whenever you do go to the cinema

“It is unnecessarily expensive!”

“You have twenty million fucking subscribers!”

“BUT FOUR DOLLARS?!”

he has the most creative ways of smuggling sweets

it started with a classic tote bag

it’s become sort of a game

once, he bought the most ridiculously bulgy jacket and wore it in scorching florida weather solely for the purpose of hiding crisps

he laughs easily at movies and his wheeze has made you get kicked out of a movie theatre at least once

will talk about his favourite parts of the movie for hours after it’s finished

will laugh whenever he thinks about the funniest parts for days

George

(sort of George with a film buff s/o)

he doesn’t talk during movies and actively dislikes people who do

will complain if he doesn’t like the film but only in quiet whispers and not if he suspects you are particularly enjoying it

you made him watch a Tarkovsky film one time

he swears he didn’t fall asleep

he did

but he tried his best <3

can’t choose the movie for the life of him so you always end up having to pick

every time you try and analyze color symbolism he’ll chime in

“I’m colorblind”

before you can finish

you bait him honestly

he likes listening to you talk about your favorite movies and all the films you want to show him

he’ll look up facts about your favourite directors and will make fun of your least favourite ones with you

makes a great snobby-tarantino-fan “you’ve not known real cinema until you’ve watched pulp fiction”  impression that never fails to make you cackle

he is not a fan of horror films

you tried to make him watch one once

“I don’t really like horror movies but you said this one was good so- WHAT IS THAT?!”

turned it off immediately and you ended up watching the hobbit

Harry potter marathons are a must

he can imitate maggie smith’s accent to perfection

Sapnap

you watch anime together

I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like it

he doesn’t either

he’ll make you watch it

he has good taste though, so you end up enjoying it

cuddles with Sapnap cuddles with Sapnap cuddles with Sapnap

movie playing on the tv, your head in his chest and his hand in your waist, blankets wrapped around you and the AC running just a little bit too cold = his absolute definition of happiness

you binge watch shows in one sitting and then get sad when they’re over

he always burns the goddamn popcorn

daily movie nights!

you order in and eat a late night dinner in bed

Your pick monday, wednesday, friday

his pick tuesday, thursday, saturday

a full on debate on sundays trying to figure out a good middle ground

Whenever the movie runs late and you end up falling asleep, he’ll turn the tv off and quietly pull the blankets over your body before kissing your forehead in the sweetest way imaginable

he yells at the screen

he loves watching horror movies but gets jumpscared easily

“Awww are you scared baby?”

“Shut up y/n I’m only holding you so you don’t get scared”

“I won’t :)”

“...I’m not letting go if that’s what you’re fucking thinking”

Technoblade

(take a shot every time popcorn is mentioned and pass out)

one of your first dates was actually a movie date

he turned and whispered in your ear whenever a clever wip popped in his head and his commentary was so funny you had to bury your face in your hands so your laughter didn’t disturb the other people in the theatre

he talks during movies, he can’t help it

"heh?!"

he doesn’t like cinema popcorn and will exclusively buy chocolate

you didn’t get it until the day he made you try his trademark-techno-popcorn and wow

“holy shit this is great!”

“I know”

he’s completely ruined popcorn for you

“please don’t ever leave me, I don’t think I’ll be able to eat normal popcorn after this”

“wasn’t planning on it”

he is secretly into romcoms

you watch movies in bed, laptop propped in his legs and an obligatory bowl of popcorn in your arms

he plays with your hair for the whole time

you hate-watch bad movies all the time and your chests hurt from laughing by the end

he can easily memorize entire scenes and will repeat them to you in a totally monotone voice

It’s great

has never cried during a movie, is dreadfully proud of himself for it

sometimes he’ll get distracted and just stare at you, movie reduced to white noise in the background

“you’re so pretty”

Wilbur

makes dinner for you whenever you have a movie night

his snack game is kind of weak though, as much as I hate to say it

water and dark chocolate only

if you think he doesn’t insist on rewatching hamilton at least once every two months you are wrong

he is a goddamn hamilton kinnie and he likes the fucking songs okay?

constant change of cuddling positions

you made him sit through the entirety of the twilight saga “as a hate watch”

he now quotes it on a daily basis (never on stream, chat would eat him alive)

“Whaddaya mean team jacob? He’s a glorified furry!”

you watch a lot of documentaries

the way he concentrates on taking in every single bit of information is almost more entertaining than the actual film

he’ll tell you random facts he learnt watching the documentary and you’ll have to remind him that you watched it with him

you act out iconic romance scenes and he gets so into it

he can be anything from Jack Dawson to mr. Darcy and William Thacker and it gives you butterflies every time

you’ll stand up whenever characters are slow dancing and dance along with them

You’ve tried to watch shows together but you always end up forgetting or one of you will binge an entire season and

he’s insufferable when he doesn’t like a film but will refuse to change it

he criticizes the smallest details in a way that would make Anthony Lane look like an absolute sweetheart

you dance to the end credits theme

Fundy

(long distance!)

Netflix parties ALL THE TIME

+ discord calls / facetime

you coordinate snacks

sometimes you’ll switch whatever you’re watching to dutch for a second so he can make fun of the god awful translation

most times,you fall asleep together after the movie ends even if your time zones are far apart

you watch entire shows together, the longer the better

four or five episodes at a time

You both get super invested and will have heated discussions about whether rory should have ended up with logan or jess

whenever you talk about meeting up, watching a movie and actually cuddling comes up

he used to be kind of quiet during movies

he won’t shut up now, it’s fun, having his voice in your ears with whatever film you’re watching in the background makes it seem like he's in bed next to you

his voice would be easy to fall asleep to if he didn’t yell so often

he can guess the precise plot of every single horror movie

like word for word, scene for scene

he gets scared anyways

he sent you one of his hoodies once, after you begged for weeks

you wrap it around a plushie or pillow and cuddle it whenever you watch something together

“can’t believe a fucking sweater gets more action than me”

“oh shut up you big baby”

Eret

lots and lots of movie dates

he has excellent taste in films and shows so you let them choose most times

stacking up on cinema sweets and a huge bucket of popcorn when you go to a theatre

buying tons of crisps and candybars when you hang out at home

not the biggest cuddler in this specific setting

would much rather have her arm around your shoulder and your legs up on their lap

you watch award shows solely for the purpose of roasting the outfits

bed/couch absolutely crammed with plushies and pillows

you always make milkshakes together

not smoothies

not frappes

milkshakes

with syrup, whipped cream and a cherry on top

the night isn’t complete without them

you watch a lot of period films

“you’d look great in that”

“who are you pointing to again?”

“doesn’t matter, you’d look great in everything”

(you’ll get them to wear a corset if it’s the last thing you do)

he turns to kiss your cheek every fifteen minutes

Nihachu

you bake cookies before movie nights and decorate them specifically for the theme of the film

you did a horror marathon once

(it may have been a sneaky way to get her to hide in the crook of your neck but we don’t talk about that)

the plate of cookies flew out of her hands in minutes

she got so worried

“but you worked so hard on the decorations :(“

“it’s fine babe, we’ll just eat the plain ones”

she wrapped her arms around you and kissed your cheek so it was totally worth it

the decorations were kinda shit anyways

you watch a ton of coming of age movies and will listen to the soundtrack for days after

she’s so funny during movies

sometimes a character will do something stupid and her remark will be so absolutely stingy both your hands will fly to your mouths and you’ll stare at each other, eyes wide, before falling into a fit of giggles

simping over powerful women with Niki

you have a huge watchlist of gay films and high five everytime you cross one off

cuddling under a huge pile of blankets

switching sweaters

Zuko climbing unto the laptop and pausing the movie at the most inconvenient times

Quackity

he eats dry cereal during movies because he’s just chaotic like that

you sit on the floor with your backs to the couch and eat takeout and drugstore snacks

the amount of times you’ve watched the fucking bee movie

you like watching things in spanish

everything from crappy soap operas to almodovar films

he likes to translate things and can do it super quick so you never really need subtitles

you watch a lot of superhero movies and he has made you watch Adam Sandler’s entire filmography

the floor always ends up messy and cleaning up afterwards is almost as funny as the film itself

sitcoms!

lots and lots of sitcoms

Karl

pillow fort is obligatory

monster energy drinks and a huge variety of candy

microwave popcorn with too much butter

hot cocoa with too many marshmallows

you mostly watch cartoons and 2010’s nickelodeon shows

scream singing the iCarly theme song and hating on tori from victorious

getting really into the adventure time lore

tickle fights when the film gets boring

he takes recommendations from “indie film” tiktoks and you mock him for it endlessly

he has weirdly obscure knowledge on every show you watch

he has a big colección of dvds/videotapes so you get to watch some oldies

he falls asleep with his head in your lap or your shoulder

he gives you a sweater or hoodie to wear and lends you plaid pyjama pants

you quote movies on stream and have ton of private jokes

can you tell I got lazy at the end?

likes and reblogs are always appreciated and have a wonderful morning/day/afternoon/evening/night <3

[nickjunesource]

Full article below.

Max Minghella is sitting in his backyard in the LA sunshine, his t-shirt an homage to the French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve, his adopted shepherd mix, Rhye, excited by the approach of a package courier.

“You okay, sweetheart?” he asks — the dog, not me — tenderly.

Minghella, who at 35 has dozens of screen credits to his name, is best known as The Handmaid’s Tale’s cunning chauffeur Nick Blaine, a character who it’s difficult to imagine saying sweetheart. In airless Gilead, of course, a cautious hand graze with Elisabeth Moss’ June can pass for a big romantic gesture. In a Season 1 episode featuring child separation and hospital infant abduction, Nick’s major contribution is to trade stolen glances with a sex slave while “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” pumps discordantly along. I ask Minghella about playing the series’ closest approximation to a dreamy male lead against the show’s dark narrative of female subjugation.

“I know this is not the answer you want to hear,” Minghella says with none of Nick’s hesitation. “But I like that stuff, right? In the pilot, I think Nick only had a handful of lines. It wasn't clear that this is what the character would turn into. And it's quite fortunate for me personally, because I'm not a massively sort of intellectual person in my real life. I love Fifty Shades of Grey. That's like my Star Wars. It suits me to play a character like him.”

Minghella surmises that this enduring romanticism is an outcome of nurture. His father, the late British director Anthony Minghella, made grand romantic dramas like Cold Mountain and The English Patient. And there was the young, cinema-mad Max sitting on the living room sofa, absorbing everything. “It’s taken me a long time to understand this,” he says of his prolonged childhood exposure to love stories. “My dad made The English Patient when I was 10. So it was two years of watching the dailies to that movie and then watching 50 cuts of it. And then [The Talented Mr.] Ripley he made when I was 13, and it was the same thing.” These were an adolescent Max Minghella’s alternative to reruns. “I think they did shape my perspective on the world in a lot of ways, specifically The English Patient. That was a complicated love story, and I wonder sometimes how much it's affected my psychology.”

Some sons rebel; others resemble. Minghella’s co-star O-T Fagbenle, who plays June’s other lover from before the time of Gilead, got his first job acting in Anthony Minghella’s romantic crime film Breaking and Entering. “Anthony is one the kindest, most beautiful men that I've ever had the privilege of working with before,” Fagbenle says. “And Max has his gorgeous, sensitive, open-minded soul.”

Though Minghella spent his childhood on the set of The Talented Mr. Ripley, playing an uncredited Confederate soldier role in Cold Mountain, and tooling around with a Super-8 camera Matt Damon gave him, he insists his upbringing was normal. He grew up in South Hill Park overlooking Hampstead Heath in London with his father and mother, the choreographer Carolyn Choa. (Minghella also has a half-sister, Hannah Minghella, who is now a film executive.) Yes, technically, it was London, but that’s not how it seemed. “I feel like I grew up in a very small town. Every school I went to was in Hampstead. I was born in Hampstead,” Minghella says of the small map dot of his life before university. “When I went to New York, I felt I was going to the big city.”

Despite his illustrious surname, movie-watching was far from restricted to the classics. “Beverly Hills Cop is definitely the movie I remember having an unhealthy obsession with. I think I saw it when I was 5 for the first time, and I'd watch it just two or three times a day for years. I'm just obsessed with it.”

Plenty of actors can trace their love of movies back to a love of stories, but for Minghella the relationship seems to flow in reverse. When he left for Columbia University, Minghella opted to study history for its connection, through storytelling, to film. It was during the summers between his years of college that he started taking acting more seriously. Before his graduation, he’d already appeared in Syriana, starring Damon and George Clooney. Soon, he’d make a splash as Divya Narendra in The Social Network in 2010 and be cast in Clooney’s Ides of March. As all young actors eventually must, Minghella moved to Los Angeles.

It’s been over a decade since he last lived on the Heath, but, perhaps unusually for a person who’s chosen his profession, Minghella is adamantly not a “shapeshifter,” in his words. Home for Christmas this year, he started sifting through old journals stored at his mother’s house, “just like scraps of writing from when I was extremely young up through my teenage years,” before coming to America. “It was hilarious to me,” Minghella says of staring at his childhood reflection. “My review of a movie at 7 years old is pretty much what my review of a movie at 35 will be. My taste hasn't changed much. And when I sort of love something, I do tend to continue to love it.”

Which brings us back to his enduring love of romance, born of his bloodline, which is all over Minghella’s own 2018 directorial debut. Teen Spirit is a hazily lit film about a teenage girl from the Isle of Wight — the remote British island where Max’s father Anthony was born — who enters a local X-Factor-style singing competition. (It stars Minghella’s rumored girlfriend of several years, Elle Fanning.) The story is small, but its crescendos are epic.

Minghella calls the movie — an ode to the power of the pop anthem — “embarrassingly Max.” Max loves a good music-driven movie trailer — he’s watched the one for Top Gun: Maverick “many” times. And Max loves the rhythmic beats of sports movies like Friday Night Lights. Max loves movies with excesses of female energy, like Spring Breakers. He likens Teen Spirit to an experiment, his answer to the question, “Can I take all these things that I love and find a structure that can hold them?” The result is a touching “hodgepodge” of Minghella’s fascinations, inspired by the songs from another thing he loves: Robyn’s 2010 album Body Talk (itself a dance-pop meditation on love).

Minghella hasn’t directed any films since, but he sees now how making movies fits his personality — organized, impatient — more organically than starring in them does. Directing also helped him to appreciate that acting is “much harder than I was giving it credit for,” which, in turn, has made him like it more. Besides The Handmaid’s Tale currently airing on Hulu, Minghella appears in Spiral, the ninth installment in the Saw horror franchise and, from where I’m sitting, at least, a departure.

“I do like horror movies, but the thing that was really kind of magical is that I was feeling so nostalgic, right? We talked about Beverly Hills Cop earlier. I was just missing a certain kind of movie,” Minghella explains of his new role as Chris Rock’s detective partner. He was yearning for simple story-telling, like in the buddy cop movies of his youth, especially 48 Hours. It almost goes without saying that a buddy cop movie is another kind of love story. “And then I read the script and it was very much in that vein.” He clarifies: “I mean, it's also extremely Saw. It's very much a horror movie.”

His renewed excitement for acting translated onto The Handmaid’s Tale set, too. Veteran Hollywood producer Warren Littlefield describes casting Minghella in the role of Nick as an effortless choice: “Sometimes you agonize over things. [Casting Minghella] was instantly clear to me, and everyone agreed.” Now in its fourth season, the tone of the Hulu hit is graver than ever. Gilead is more desperate to maintain its rule, and so more audacious in its violence. Perhaps it’s fitting that the show’s romantic gestures finally match that scale.

In one particularly soaring moment, Elisabeth Moss’ June and Minghella’s Nick meet at the center of a bridge and crush into a long kiss. It’s been two seasons since they held their newborn daughter together, and it’s hard to see how this isn’t their last goodbye. Littlefield, like Minghella, is here for the romance among the rubble. “It's spectacular when they come together. In the middle of all of the trauma is this epic love story,” he says. “Max is just magnificent in the role.”

For Minghella, the satisfaction is more personal. He works with good people, he likes his scenes, and he thinks Nick is a complex character. Minghella read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time in college in 2005. Like all the things Minghella has ever liked, he still likes it. He’s as proud of this most recent season as he is the show’s first. And he watched Nick and June race recklessly back to each other across the expanse of the screen exactly how you might expect. “I watched it like a fan girl.”

[ibijau]

Lapse in memory pt 3 / on AO3

aka the fic where nhs is cursed into amnesia a few years post canon, and came to lxc for help

The worst part of Nie Huaisang’s amnesia, Lan Xichen soon decided, was the realisation that he should have seen long ago that there was something wrong with Nie Mingjue’s little brother.

Although the other man had apparently always possessed frightening self control which made it difficult to know how much his current loss of memory impacted him, he used that control in a manner very different from what he had done after the death of his brother. Instead of displaying eternal sorrow and helplessness, Nie Huaisang was acting exactly the same as he had done before his life took a turn for the worst. He smiled, and chatted with people as if things were perfectly fine, only to break down once alone with Lan Xichen, asking when this person had died, whether that remark had been a joke or a reference to a true event. 

If he hadn't known better, if he hadn't been shown the other side Lan Xichen might have fallen for that new comedy as he had fallen for the old one. Nie Huaisang was good at this.

In fact, as Lan Xichen started remembering over the following days, he was good at many things. 

For example Nie Huaisang was smart, it turned out. After a decade of lies, Lan Xichen had forgotten that, too used to a man who barely managed to pick his own outfits without needing three different opinions, and would make four mistakes in a two digit addition. And indeed, when it came to cultivation, or when Wei Wuxian tried to discuss his ideas about what curse might have hit him, Nie Huaisang was clearly lost. But when the topic interested him, when someone mentioned art or literature, he spoke expertly and always made excellent points. 

Because he had his own duties to attend, and he aimed at being a better sect leader than he had been in the past, Lan Xichen spent little time with Nie Huaisang at first, and thus rarely enjoyed his conversation. Since the other man couldn’t be allowed to wander freely when there was still the possibility that all this was only a deception, Lan Xichen assigned one of his young disciples he trusted the most to stay with Nie Huaisang and make sure he didn’t misbehave. Almost immediately, he started hearing about the heated debates that Lan Jingyi and Nie Huaisang got into over classics, over art, over just anything that could be debated, and quite a few that shouldn’t. Lan Xichen had offered to find another person to keep Nie Huaisang company, only for Nie Huaisang to protest he was having great fun with Lan Jingyi.

It surprised Lan Xichen at first. Nie Huaisang wasn’t a man who enjoyed confrontation.

But he had once been a boy who did. Nie Mingjue used to complain at length about that, as did Lan Qiren when he’d had the dubious pleasure of teaching him. Nie Huaisang once had opinions on just about everything, especially if it could get him out of doing something he didn’t enjoy. Lan Xichen had found it amusing for a long time, and even he had been tricked into the odd argument here and there. But then there had been the war, there had been the constant worsening of Nie Mingjue’s temper, and Nie Huaisang’s tendency to argue over everything hadn’t felt so cute anymore.

After those difficult final few months, it had been a relief, in a way, when Nie Huaisang’s grief had made him so mild and pliable. He had never objected to any advice given to him, agreeing to everything and anything that Nie Mingjue’s sworn brothers suggested. If Lan Xichen hadn’t been so devastated by the loss they had both suffered, perhaps he would have noticed something was wrong.

Perhaps it was guilt, then, that soon pushed Lan Xichen to rearrange his schedule so he could spend a little more time with Nie Huaisang every day. He refused to let him down again. Or perhaps it was selfishness, the joy of having an old friend back in his life, someone who didn't know about his failings, and didn't judge him for being imperfect. 

"Imperfection is more fun," Nie Huaisang claimed one evening, as they sat together inside the Hanshi's courtyard, watching a pair of swallows build a nest under the rafters. "I like you better when you're not trying to be Zewu-jun. Zewu-Jun is a very boring person, while Lan Xichen is delightful company. Do you remember how we used to laugh sometimes when I came here to study? You did such a good imitation of your uncle. And you'd help me with my homeworks, and I'd let you have candies… wasn't that more fun than being perfect?"

"I miss those days," Lan Xichen admitted, something he had never told anyone except Jin Guangyao, once. He'd instantly regretted it back then, realising that Jin Guangyao had never had a chance to enjoy a carefree youth. He didn't regret telling Nie Huaisang who laughed so hard he startled the swallows, making them fly away for a moment. 

"Of course you miss that! Well, I'm back now, and until I'm better I can give you a taste of how it used to be. If I make you laugh enough, you'll stop being angry at me, right?"

“I’m not angry at you,” Lan Xichen said, which to his surprise wasn’t even a lie. This young and innocent Nie Huaisang, whose biggest crime was cheating during exams, who hadn’t yet discovered his own viciousness through fighting with Nie Mingjue and then for him, who could be irritating but always remained endearing… how could Lan Xichen have been angry at him?

“But you’re angry at the man I’ve become,” Nie Huaisang said.

Lan Xichen looked at him, that handsome young man sitting just a little too close, leaning somewhat toward Lan Xichen and yet tense enough that at the first sign of anger he’d probably leap away and disappear, the way he used to do with Nie Mingjue.

Lan Xichen wondered again how he had forgotten how observant Nie Huaisang could be. He should have known. The moment Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji told him that something terrible had been done to Nie Mingjue’s body, Lan Xichen should have guessed that Nie Huaisang knew as well, and that he’d be doing anything to avenge his brother.

“I think I’m more angry at myself than at you,” Lan Xichen said. “What happened, what you’ve done, it was… Maybe you really had no choice, or you thought you had no choice anyway, and I’m not sure I have a right to judge you. You… you still don’t remember, do you?”

“No. I don’t think I want to,” Nie Huaisang said. He started playing nervously with his sleeve, having forgotten his fan somewhere, and hesitantly spoke again. “I don’t think he wanted to remember either,” he whispered. “Him. Me. I… I don’t think it was an accident, Er-ge. I think I forgot on purpose.”

Startled by the confession, Lan Xichen stared again at Nie Huaisang who avoided his eyes. He looked pale, and started shaking slightly, as if again expecting a burst of anger that didn’t come. Lan Xichen was too stunned for that.

“When did you start suspecting this?”

“Right away,” Nie Huaisang confessed, nervously playing with his sleeve, pulling and tugging at the fabric. “It was just too odd that there was nothing at all about those lost years. I found some recent correspondence which let me know I wasn’t on very good terms with you, Jiang Cheng and Jin zongzhu, but that was it. And I know myself, Er-ge. I’ve kept a journal of everything I do since I was seven. Everything important, I write it down so I remember, I should have had a trace of those missing years.”

Lan Xichen nodded. Nie Huaisang had mentioned that habit of his, back when he was studying in the Cloud Recesses. Back then he’d complained that too little happened and he had nothing to write down, but also that homework and studying took so long he almost didn’t have time for his diary. Lan Xichen hadn’t realised that the habit was such a serious one, and he’d never heard Nie Huaisang mention it again as an adult, so he hadn’t thought to ask about that.

“Could it be that you simply stopped doing this?” Lan Xichen asked.

Nie Huaisang shook his head and frowned.

“It’s not just a hobby. My memory isn’t great, I really forget things if I don’t write them down. Everything important… in code if it's too important, of course, I’m only a little stupid. And I hid the journal, and kept all of them, from the very first. I’m the only one who knew where they’re all kept, but when I went to check, many of them had been destroyed, or at least moved somewhere else. Everything after the Sunshot Campaign is gone. Maybe he hoped to forget the war too.”

Not so much the war as what had happened just before it, Lan Xichen thought. He’d heard about the way hostage juniors had been treated by the Wens, and the horror of the Xuanwu of Slaughter killing people in that cave. Nie Huaisang had never wanted to talk about that, Lan Xichen recalled. He usually loved to complain, but on that particular topic he’d always close off or change the subject.

Aside from the death of Nie Mingjue, the terror of the evil Xuanwu had to have been the worst moment of Nie Huaisang’s life.

Without thinking Lan Xichen took Nie Huaisang’s hand, hoping to comfort him. Nie Huaisang startled and trembled, but didn’t try to remove his hand.

“I think it’s like you said,” Nie Huaisang explained, looking pleadingly at Lan Xichen. “That he did certain things because he thought he had no choice. He… I… if someone harmed da-ge, then I’d want to harm them back," he hissed with such rage that Lan Xichen shivered, reminded of the man Nie Huaisang had indeed become. "Even if it was san-ge! I can’t believe he’d do something like that, he’s always so nice, but it doesn’t matter. If I had been sure he’d hurt da-ge, then I… I would…”

“I know,” Lan Xichen said, squeezing Nie Huaisang’s hand.

“I think I had regrets of a sort though,” Nie Huaisang said. “The way it seems to me… I didn’t regret that these things had been done, I didn’t regret that people had died or been hurt, but I didn’t want to live with the weight of that either. I think… I’m a little bit of a coward, Er-ge. I’m fine with knowing I did horrible things, I just don’t want to know what they are, because that way it’s not really me who did them. So I can see why I chose to forget, and I also don’t want to remember.”

Had it been anyone else, Lan Xichen would have found that person cowardly indeed. Just as he bore the guilt of his failures and strove to do better, he would expect others to face their own faults, take their punishment, and try to improve in the future. But Nie Huaisang wasn’t just anyone, and Lan Xichen pitied him too much to wish for his suffering. Nie Huaisang had already been punished enough for what he’d done, having lost his brother, having lost all his friends, having lost the respect of his sect.

Having lost himself, too.

“It’s fine if you don’t remember,” Lan Xichen said. “You can stay here with us. Wei Wuxian seems happy enough to have you around, Lan Jingyi loves having someone to argue with… even uncle said the other day that it’s been a while since he’s had a decent opponent at weiqi.”

“And what about you?” Nie Huaisang asked, his cheeks a little pinker than they ought to be. “Are you also happy to have me here?”

“I am,” Lan Xichen replied, surprised to find that this, too, was the truth.

Partly because he’d always been a little too fond of Nie Huaisang, back before the Sunshot Campaign changed everything and forced him to set aside most of his personal attachments to better serve his sect. Partly, also, because he liked this current Nie Huaisang, who wasn’t quite as naïve and self-absorbed as he’d been as a boy, but lacked the cruelty years of solitude and resentment had taught him.

This was Nie Huaisang as he would have been, had the world been a little kinder. A clever young master who watched the world around him and understood people a little too well, but loved fun too much to ever do anything with what he learned, as long as his loved ones were safe.

“I’m glad to be here as well,” Nie Huaisang said.

He shuffled a little closer until he could rest his head against Lan Xichen’s shoulder. It had been years since anyone dared to be so carelessly intimate with Lan Xichen, who found he didn’t mind. Not if it was Nie Huaisang.

“You know, I’ve talked with Wei-xiong today, about this,” Nie Huaisang continued. “About what happened to me, and why, and how. He thinks it’s a curse, and there’s probably a condition that would allow it to be lifted. There usually is, after all. But I think if I really did this to myself, I'd have picked an impossible condition, because I wouldn't want to be saved from it. So I might stay like this for the rest of my life.”

“And you’ll be welcome to stay here that entire time,” Lan Xichen promised without thinking, squeezing Nie Huaisang’s hand again.

“That sounds really nice. I think I’ll take you on your offer, Er-ge,” Nie Huaisang said with a smile that Lan Xichen would have kissed if he’d dared. Later, while lying in his bed, he would wonder if he should have tried, only to eventually decide it would have ruined the moment.

Perhaps someday, in the future, thing would take that direction. For now they both had too much to deal with, too much to learn again about each other. It was fine. Lan Xichen was content to remain like this, sitting close together, holding hands, and watching those swallows finish their nest.

Just this was already more than he’d ever imagined he would get.

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: Japanese Myths And How They're Depicted In Horror Anime

  No matter the time or place, the folklore and myths of the past always persist. The same can also be said for anime, especially when it comes to horror. Certain franchises, such as Shigeru Mizuki’s classic GeGeGe no Kitaro, have solidified the omnipresent status of traditional Japanese folk monsters in popular culture. Other series, such as Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo interpret traditional folklore in relation to historical periods and changing attitudes toward religion. More recently, series from the 2010s and 2000s, such as Bakemonogatari and Ghost Stories, interpret the classics with modern sensibilities. When it comes to stories with a penchant for horror, it would be far more surprising if they didn’t allude to a shared supernatural mythology — the ubiquity is the point. 

  Neko-Musume on her smartphone

The best horror always tries to do something new. While creatures like yōkai (a wide umbrella of supernatural entities) are well-known among English-speaking fans today thanks to series like Yokai Watch, these re-imaginings always tend to play fast and loose with fidelity. Wouldn’t it be boring if every vampire movie started and ended with Dracula? In a 2016 interview with The Comics Journal, veteran manga translator Zack Davisson emphasizes this important tendency to re-contextualize old folklore:

  “It’s a tricky question, as it is impossible to say what is ‘actual folklore.’ Vampires bursting into flame is considered ‘authentic,’ but that actually comes from the films, not folkloric sources. Folklore evolves and [Shigeru] Mizuki is an important part of that evolution. If you trace them back, most yokai we know come from Toriyama Sekien, who also just made things up. In fact, I would say that making up yokai is part of the grand tradition of yokai! If you are a writer/artist working with yokai and not making up at least a few of your own, you are missing the point!”

  The original spirit gun

  So that’s all to say — there really is no such thing as a definitive, one-to-one story based on centuries of tradition. Yōkai, as endearing as they are, are also just one part of the equation. Long-running anime such as Folktales from Japan and fantasy series Inuyasha-continuation Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon either re-tell or draw inspiration from that folklore. But that’s beyond the scope of this piece. Whether it be adaptations of urban legends about school bathrooms or vengeful spirits, I hope this round-up helps any casual or long-time anime fan appreciate how these series reimagine supernatural traditions.

  Fantastic Folklore: GeGeGe no Kitaro & Mononoke

  The late Shigeru Mizuki’s most influential character, Kitaro, hardly needs any introduction. In his book Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide, translator Matt Alt describes yōkai as “the attempts of the fertile human imagination to impose meaning and rationality on a chaotic, unpredictable, often difficult-to-explain world.” Many yōkai are quite strange and sometimes even comedic. Scholar-artists, such as the previously mentioned Toriyama Sekien, are largely credited with inspiring their uncanny visual representations, making them the perfect subject matter for an accessible series.

  The tanuki plot world domination

The titular Kitaro himself is a half-human, half-yōkai one-eyed boy who travels between the human and spirit world to resolve monster-of-the-day conflicts with his friends. Although Mizuki’s Kitaro as we know it began serialization in 1960, Mizuki originally received permission to re-imagine the character from Masami Itō, who first created Kitaro in the 1930s in pre-war Japan. The most recent 2018 anime series re-establishes Kitaro in a modern setting, yet still adapts many of the most iconic stories. Characters such as Neko-Musume, based on volatile cat spirits called bakeneko, are updated with new designs while Kitaro mostly remains the same. Mizuki’s older creations, such as the jubokko (vampire tree) yōkai, are still featured alongside a new re-imagining of the “wall monster” nurikabe — inspired by the discovery of an Edo manuscript in 2007. The appeal of Kitaro isn’t so much the meticulous adherence to yōkai mythos, but rather Mizuki’s continual improvisation of the folklore-informed monster-making tradition.

  The Medicine Seller

Beyond Kitaro, other series, such as 2006’s Mononoke, dedicate entire storylines to a wider category of ayakashi (sea-bound yōkai) and funayūrei (boat spirits) written by none other than Chiaki J. Konaka. Later episodes feature bakeneko and nue (chimera monsters), but with a twist. The term mononoke itself refers to a variety of yōkai specifically referring to vengeful spirits possessing people or things. When it comes to series taking a more “fantastical” approach to folklore, both Mononoke and Kitaro thankfully never dissolve into simple rogue galleries of monsters — their (mostly) human protagonists largely remain the heart of their chilling saga.

  Horror-Historical: Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo

  Lord Kagemitsu Daigo makes a pact with the demons  (Source: Amazon)

  In Anime and Its Roots in Early Japanese Monster Art scholar Zília Papp comments Mizuki’s “Kitaro characters became synonymous with yōkai in the postwar period, continuing to the present time” compared to his peers like Tezuka. But if Kitaro made yōkai big in comedic manga, then Tezuka’s short-lived Dororo manga drove this interest toward the historical context of the Sengoku Period, or the “warring states” era of feudal Japan. 

  Rather than depicting spirits as purely whimsical mischief-makers, Dororo’s inciting event is a feudal lord of the fictional Daigo clan forging a pact with 48 demons, who persist to hunt his son long after the pact is forged. In his feature The History Behind Osamu Tezuka’s Dororo, Marco Oliveros comments that by depicting yōkai during this period, Dororo draws inspiration from actual shifts in changing Buddhist attitudes toward these entities:

  “One of the foremost examples of this change to yokai is the tengu. Wrathful and demonic, the avian creature tricked and assaulted Buddhist clerics and civilians alike, becoming characterized as the sworn enemy of Buddhism. The apparent hostility of these yokai to Buddhism makes their dark deals with Dororo's Daigo an unsurprising turn of events for the Sengoku Jidai era.”

  The Amanojaku is captured and sealed inside a Buddhist temple (Source: Amazon)

  Matt Alt’s 2016 translation of Japandemonium Illustrated: The Yokai Encyclopedias of Toriyama Sekien describes the tengu (mask-wearing entities usually depicted as half-man half-bird) as “deeply associated with the religion of Shugendō,” which originated during the Heian period; however they were depicted very differently in major Buddhist sects of the same era. Unlike solely “fantastical” stories of the supernatural without much acknowledgment to historical context, Dororo is interested in this context regarding capricious attitudes of spirits of people alike. Impressive malevolent entities such as kyūbi (nine-tailed foxes) also fight against Dororo’s protagonist, Hyakkimaru, typical of supernatural jidaigeki (period drama) horror stories set in feudal Japan.

  However, Dororo also features lesser entities such as amanojaku (tiny, goblin-like demons). According to the influential illustrated encyclopedia Wakan Sansai Zue compiled by Sekien-predecessor Terajima Ryōan, amanojaku and tengu were described as paired descendants of the evil goddess Amanozako (literally "tengu god"). According to scholar Haruko Wakabayashi in The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, tengu were symbolically invoked in inter-personal and religious feuds amongst Buddhist sects during the Heian period. The amanojaku depicted in Dororo is minor. But with a (simplified) understanding of its affiliation with tengu’s pre-Heian origins and its subsequent disavowal by influential Buddhist sects, Dororo's amanojaku cameo is an undeniable nod toward its theme of “old ways” impacted by a "new" institutionalized status quo.

  Hyakkimaru battles the nine-tailed fox spirit in its spectral form (Source: Amazon)

  While the nine-tailed fox spirit is flashy, Dororo’s amanojaku ends up pathetically sealed inside a Buddhist temple. Ironically, the amanojaku trapping scene pans from the top of a Buddhist statue, ending with the cartoonish amanojaku crushed underneath to visually imply its irrelevancy. Dororo is a story about the cultural and religious tensions brewing during this violent episode in history — making Hyakkimaru’s journey one that doesn’t simply depict supernatural folkloric tradition in stasis, but as something always under complicated socio-political stakes.

  Modern Ghoul School: Ghost Stories & Bakemonogatari

  What do you do if you can’t solve your evil spirit problems with a sword? For the most part, classics like Kitaro and Dororo take place in the past, or at least worlds very unlike our own. A traveling demon slayer never has to deal with student council or smartphones. 

  In a previous article, From Bakeneko to Bakemonogatari, I discussed all the possible lineages of the catgirl character archetype. In that piece, I claimed one of the more accurate representations of the bakeneko today was Bakemonogatari’s Tsubasa Hanekawa’s cat spirit-possessed alter-ego. It’s not simply because she is a supernatural catgirl, but rather her portrayal was obviously informed by the wider context of pre-existing bakeneko mythos. Is it possible for a “modern-day” series to tackle yesterday’s folktales while still preserving the uncanniness of the past?

The spirits possessing Bakemonogatari’s cast, referred to as “oddities,” all nearly function like vengeful mononoke spirits. For example, Bakemonogatari’s first arc, Hitagi Crab, features a crab “oddity” haunting classmate Hitagi Senjougahara. The existence of heikekani (face-shaped crabs allegedly the spirits of drowned Heike warriors from the Sengoku Period), might be a parallel, considering the arc’s theme of unresolved conflict. Another arc, Suruga Monkey, features an “oddity” taking the form of a beastly paw growing on classmate Kanbaru Suruga’s arm. Senjougahara and Suruga's crab/monkey relationship can be read as alluding to the well-known Buddhist tale “The Monkey and the Crab.” According to The National Gallery of Art on its 2019 The Life of Animals in Japanese Art exhibit, the monkey and crab are usually depicted as friends, then compete until they either make amends or resolve their conflict. Often the subject of artistic interpretation, it’s no surprise this tale found its way into anime as a metaphor for teen drama.

  The kids scan a talisman and e-mail it to exorcise internet demons. Yes, this really happens.

  In comparison, the 2000 series Ghost Stories is best known to English-speaking audiences for being an edgy comedy. However, its original source material, a book series titled Gakkō no Kaidan (School Ghost Stories), is more akin to a heavily researched Goose Bumps. Written by folklore scholar Toru Tsunametsu, the series showcases various urban myths and monsters, most famously “Hanako” a ghost girl who haunts school bathrooms. A 2014 NPR piece describes the most popular version of Hanako being a schoolgirl in WWII “using the bathroom when a bomb fell on top of the building.” Although Hanako gained enough popularity from the books to warrant her own spin-off anime series in 1994, she only makes a handful of cameos in the 2000 series. Entities like the previously mentioned amanojaku also appear, alongside shinigami (death gods) depicted in many other anime.

  How to channel your ghost powers for success (Source: Funimation)

  Hanako, because of her relatively modern backstory, is just as ubiquitous. Versions of Hanako appear in an episode of the 2018 Kitaro and most recently in the 2020 series Toilet Bound Hanako-kun. Tsunametsu currently edits the Folklore Society of Japan’s official academic journal, no doubt a testament to his priceless contributions to folklore representation in anime.

  Who You Gonna Call?

  There’s no way to tell the same ghost story twice. With such a layered history, contemporary anime have a nearly endless well of folkloric material to pull from. Recent series like the hit Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and Toilet Bound Hanako-kun prove that fans will never get enough of the supernatural, just as long as things stay fresh. 

  Hanako politely warns the ghost-hunting kids

  Long live artistic liberty and specters trying to watch you pee.

      Blake P. is a weekly columnist for Crunchyroll Features. His twitter is @_dispossessed. His bylines include Fanbyte, VRV, Unwinnable, and more. He'd like a tiny yōkai cat.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Blake Planty

[lesbianlotties]

five times Deena and Sam met in secret (and one time they didn’t) - Chapter 4

Chapters: 4/6 Fandom: Fear Street Trilogy (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Fraser/Deena Johnson Characters: Deena Johnson, Samantha "Sam" Fraser (Fear Street) Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Canon, High School, Cheerleaders, Band, Teenagers, Teen Romance, First Meetings, First Love, First Kiss, Fluff and Humor, Fluff, Happy Ending, Light Angst

Secrets.

Deena and Sam met by accident. They fell in love in secret.

But how long can they last together like that?

Chapter 4 - secret fears

“So this is Samantha Fraser’s room,” Deena said, slowly walking into her girlfriend’s room.

“Ugh, don’t call me that,” Sam scrunched up her face adorably in distaste as sat down on the edge of her bed.

Deena gave her a small smirk and said, “Sam fits you better.” For a moment, she placed her hand on Sam's cheek and looked deep into precious blue eyes. Then she moved on, distracted by every little thing she was seeing.

Sam, on the other hand, couldn’t so easily move on from the feeling of having Deena stare into her eyes like that. She felt a little breathless. Because Deena’s eyes were full of love, understanding, and honesty. That little sentence “Sam fits you better,” wasn’t just a little joke. It was the full weight of Sam’s entire existence in this world. Deena and her friends were the first ones to call her Sam instead of Samantha. Back then, when she came home after hanging out with them and her mother’s yells were addressed to Samantha, something had inevitably changed. Something inside Sam had been broken down in two. Sam and Samantha. Unacceptable feelings and suffocating expectations. Another Shadyside outcast and anything but that. Holding on to two parts of herself was difficult, and every day it became a little more painful. Especially considering she refused to let go completely of each of those sharp-edged pieces of herself. Letting go of Samantha would be giving up on her own mother and the concept of a different and brighter future for herself. But she couldn’t put down Sam’s reality either, not only because that would mean losing Deena and her friends, but because it was the most real part of her, as scary as that was. So, all she could do was wrap her arms around herself and hold tightly in hopes the secrets and lies wouldn’t come bursting out of her, and try not to think too hard about how much longer she could keep up that balancing act of Sam and Samantha.

In the meantime, her mother would be out of the house the entire day, and it was the first time she could bring her girlfriend home. Even if Deena’s own bedroom was starting to feel much more like home than her own house anyway.

“It’s very you,” Deena was saying, staring at the walls, the shelves, the essence of Sam on every surface.

“Can’t let my mom control everything,” Sam shrugged, putting on a smile.

“Shouldn’t let her control anything.”

Deena’s comment had been accompanied by a small frown, but she was distracted still, she wasn’t starting a fight, she was leaving that ball on Sam’s court. And Sam decided to lower her head and stay silent this time. That had been an ongoing argument for a short while already. Deena seemed completely against even trying to understand why Sam would want to be civil with her own mother. Why Sam tried so hard to find a middle ground, a little peace in trying to satisfy her mother even at the expense of some of her own happiness. Much like Deena would immediately snap if Sam so much as suggested that she should stop cleaning up after her alcoholic father. It was strange, Sam thought, fighting with Deena. Their situations weren’t so different. They understood each other. It just appeared that they weren’t ready to fight against or fight for the same things at the same time. They weren’t each other’s enemies by far. They had plenty of threats around them already. But, while still being kept a secret, who could they end up fighting but each other?

Either way, at the moment, Sam decided to shake herself out of her continuously darkening thoughts, which Sam greatly preferred to ignore and instead focus on Deena’s own tendency for pessimism. Instead, she chose to focus on the experience at hand. How vulnerable but happy it made her to see her girlfriend’s delight and curiosity upon being in Sam’s personal space as never before.

“The Pixies,” Deena pointed at one of the posters on Sam’s wall. “Nice,” she was smiling brightly, looking closely at the details on the walls, “and I have this same one.” She continued looking at the posters, flinching a little from at least five classic horror movie posters. She turned toward her girlfriend with a playful grin. “Tell me, the other cheerleaders know you’re a horror movie nerd?”

“Hey!” Sam chuckled.

Deena playfully gasped. She kneeled down to take a closer look at some of the books on the shelf. As colorful as they seemed to be, Deena recognized them as horror books too. “Babe, even your books are creepy!”

“Okay, enough snooping around!” Sam laughed. “Come here.” She extended her arms and Deena quickly approached her, taking her hands and holding on, letting their joined hands hang in between them while Sam continued seated on her bed and Deena stood in front of her.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Deena tilted her head. She looked earnestly grateful.

Sam gave a small shrug. “I wish I could’ve done it sooner.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Deena replied and softly pushed a strand of hair behind Sam’s ear.

“I wish…” Sam started to say, looking up at Deena. In a brief pause, she looked down and reached out to hook her fingers on the front belt loops of Deena’s jeans, lightly pulling her closer. “I wish I could keep you here forever,” she sighed. Deena was now standing between her legs, looking down at her with an amused smile and affectionate eyes. Sam was still holding on to her belt loops. “Everything feels better with you here,” she confessed, her heart on her throat as she stared into her girlfriend’s eyes, “I feel better… with you here…”

Deena sighed too. Sam’s words were wreaking havoc on her heart, but she continued to try to hold her composure. She softly ran her hand over Sam’s arms, reaching her shoulders, her neck. Her thumbs softly stroking the delicate skin of Sam’s jaw. “I’m here,” Deena told her in a whisper, “I’m all yours, Sam.”

In response, Sam’s eyes couldn’t have looked more in love if she’d tried. “Kiss me,” she breathed out.

“Gladly,” Deena replied, smiling for a moment before finally closing the gap separating them and getting lost in the kiss.

Sam gave another tug to Deena’s belt loops, earning a quick laugh pressed to her lips, and getting her as close as possible, so Deena’s was standing between her legs. Then her hands settled comfortably on her girlfriend’s waist. Deena’s hands were just a little more adventurous, descending from Sam’s jaw to trace her collarbone and finally resting a little lower, distinctly aware of the heartbeat wildly beating underneath her palm. Then, she followed the neckline of Sam’s blouse, reaching the first button, toying with it between her fingers, pulling at it just a little.

“Can I?” Deena breathed against Sam’s lips

“Yeah," Sam nodded quickly, before reconnecting their lips.

It might have been Sam’s shirt, the one being unbuttoned, but it was Deena who was starting to tremble. Her attention was being split between Sam’s lips, the buttons of the blouse, and Sam’s hands sneaking under her sweater, thumbs rubbing teasing circles on her bare skin. Although it felt like centuries had been leading to this moment, when Deena ran out of buttons on Sam’s shirt, she felt like the moment came too soon. She pulled back slowly from the kiss, and nearly gasped at the sight in front of her. Her hands froze and her lips parted as she studied the expanse of skin revealed to her.

“Sam…” Deena sighed, when Sam finished taking off her shirt.

Then, Sam’s hands didn’t return to their place under Deena’s sweater. Instead, she tugged on the hem of it. “Take it off,” she asked her girlfriend in a breathy whisper. She attempted a teasing smile, but it was obvious in her eyes she was as deeply affected by this development as the other girl.

Deena didn’t need to be asked twice. In a not-so-effortless but definitely quick movement, she took off the colorful garment. Any thoughts Sam might have had about teasing her girlfriend for her reaction after seeing her without a shirt on for the first time flew out the window. Because now Sam had Deena standing there between her legs, only her bra on, and looking down at her with the most passionate pair of eyes in the world. Sam’s head went blank and the only thing she thought of saying was, “I love that sweater.”

In response, Deena chuckled fondly. “Should I keep it on?”

“No,” Sam quickly shook her head. But she was smiling again, and soon enough the two of them were laughing.

They could hardly hold off their smiles long enough to kiss. Especially when Deena joined Sam on the bed and they started the ungraceful process of scooting up in bed. It was a collection of all the imperfect details necessary to make up a perfect moment. A moment that they wouldn’t change for the world. There were messy kisses, knees knocking against each other, hair falling on their faces, fits of laughter pressed against one another’s necks. Buttons on both their pants coming undone, breathy gasps of delighted surprise, sweetly inexperienced hands trying their best and succeeding. 

They weren’t ready to move a single inch away from each other. Not after the precious discoveries they’d just made. In fact, they only wanted more. Sam was mostly on top of Deena, kissing her neck, saying with lips and teeth things she wouldn't dare say out loud. Deena’s hand was traveling Sam’s back, settling on the clasp of her bra, a question on the tip of the tongue… when they heard the front door of the house open.

“Goddammit,” Deena sighed gravely, letting her head fall back on the pillows, knowing their moment was over.

“What the hell?” Sam whispered, scrambling off the bed at a quick speed. “She isn’t supposed to come home yet!”

“Fuck,” Deena groaned, “Now what?”

There was a moment of complete silence. Sam was standing still as a statue, the wheels turning furiously inside her mind, faintly hearing her mother move downstairs. Finally, she looked at her girlfriend and said, “You have to hide.”

“Sam, come on,” Deena protested. She wanted to think Sam was kidding, but the blonde looked dead serious.

“Deena, please,” Sam begged. At that point, her voice was starting to shake. Deena felt frozen in place, because she was looking at her favorite pair of blue eyes and the absolute terror in them was heartbreaking. But, soon enough, Sam was grabbing her arms and urging her off the bed, continuing to plead, “Please, please, hide in the closet.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Deena asked her with a bitter chuckle. She had trouble focusing on one single emotion, because this situation was tragically funny, because part of her was growing outraged at being shoved away like a dirty secret, and because her heart couldn’t help but ache for the girl she was falling for, the girl fumbling to put on her shirt and shaking with fear. Deena scoffed, “Let me help you,” she whispered, and despite her anger, she gently helped Sam recover her composure to look as innocent as possible.

“Thanks,” Sam breathed out in relief, but she still appeared beyond terrified. “I’ll figure something out, Deena, I promise. But… I can’t… not like this, not right now…”

“Not ever?” Deena snapped back at her, but complied as Sam gently pushed her inside her closet.

“Deena!” Sam whispered-yelled, but before she continued they heard a voice call out from the stairs.

“Samantha? Are you home?”

Before replying, Sam took a deep breath, and Deena could’ve sworn she turned into a completely different person. “Yes, mom. I’ll be down in a minute!” Sam- Samantha said.

“Sam?” Deena took a step back, deeper into her hiding place, away from her own girlfriend.

“Deena, please,” Sam pleaded one last time. After another deep breath, her eyes softened. The fear dimmed from the blue of her eyes, but the sadness persisted. She was trying so hard not to let any of it show. “I’ll make it up to you… okay?”

“Yeah…”

Deena didn’t sound particularly convinced. The image was enough to make Sam’s heart speed up. She couldn’t ruin this, she couldn’t. But there was that voice, that Samantha voice in the back of her mind telling her that every time she was with Deena could be the last time. Impulsed by such an awful fear, Sam reached out to hold her girlfriend’s face in her hands and pulled her in for a kiss that she hoped could convey all the feelings she had for her.

After Sam walked away and the closet’s door was closed, Deena, unfortunately, had time to think. Having time to think, in that particular circumstance, is a terrible thing. Because she started thinking about the afternoon they just spent together, and how serious her feelings for Sam were. Sadly, it was too easy to end up thinking about how difficult their whole situation was becoming, how much it looked, from her perspective inside Sam’s closet, like it wasn’t working. But all things considered, this time, like always, Deena was reassured by the firm knowledge that both of them really wanted this to work, they were both willing to fight for it, right? They… loved each other. She nearly gasped out loud in her hiding place when the thought popped up in her mind. She loved Sam, she really did. And she felt Sam loved her just as much. That was enough, wasn’t it? It had to be.

The problem was that, unbeknownst to Deena, Sam’s mother had arrived home that day with a folder carrying divorce papers. Those documents would change her and Sam’s lives, would put it all upside down, would threaten their already fragile relationship.

[doorsclosingslowly]

This Is the Time of Our Great Undoing

“Do you think Kaz could fuck someone in a full-body bondage suit?” Jesper whispers, more to distract Inej from what’s on the screen than anything else, but still—the idea won’t leave Kaz alone.

5.8k | modern AU | Kaz[/&]Jesper, part of a polycule

content note: despite the premise this is about cuddling, gambling addiction and existing during climate change

It starts the way most things used to start: with all of them piled onto ancient couches on the fifth floor of an otherwise empty building on the edge of Amsterdam, also called the Slat. These days, it’s harder and harder to get everyone together. Nina and Matthias are both in Rotterdam now, doing associate degrees that Kaz doesn’t care about. Wylan’s got room and board and a plan for the future and a social worker, and she already disapproves of Jesper as a bad influence so it’s not worth it, generally, for Wylan to come back to his old squat and hang out with the whole gang of ex- and current reprobates.

And Inej—fuck, Kaz wishes she was just a little less righteous, less concerned with how the world’s going to shit. She’s faced off against more cops now than he has, probably. Water cannons and charging horses and riot shields. She knows criminals all over the country, Europe, probably the world—but they’re the kind of criminals with morals and worthless targets, with bandanas and badly sewn patches, who will talk about Federici and sea levels and the Invisible Committee and use value if you don’t leave quickly enough. The kind that live on trees, as Inej’s going to do in a few days. The kind that don’t make any money. The kind that have even less of a chance of making it out of a job alive and free than Kaz does—and with the enemies she’s talking about, politicians, banks, Shell, he doesn’t even know if he’ll be able to extort her out of jail next time.

For now, though, they’re all together in the big room, watching some ancient movie on the massive 8k screen with mood lighting, etc, the works, that’s in the Slat courtesy of some MediaMarkt manager desperate enough to save her marriage to bribe Kaz into silence, but not so desperate she wouldn’t fuck two other women in the breakroom.

It’s impossible to know whose fault it is that they’re currently watching Pulp Fiction.

Kaz is inclined to blame Jesper, because most things are his fault in some way or another, and he’s supplying the login data for an old uni flatmate’s streaming accounts, which is where they found that film, front and centre, paid to rent until tomorrow. Who even pays for films? If that’s the calibre of people they send to university these days, it’s no wonder the planet’s going to the dogs. Jesper, though, swears he wanted to watch some goofy horror flick, so he’s splitting the blame with Nina and Matthias: Matthias, for growing up in a cult and having never heard of what’s apparently a film classic and mentioning that to Nina, who of course cooed over her boyfriend and insisted on it, even though actually none of them have watched it before either so it’s not like it’s an important cinematic milestone. Or just not b horror, crime, some weird arthouse thing with complicated morality… It’s weird and has crime but there is nothing to figure out, so Kaz is bored. It’s Inej’s fault, because instead of vetoing it she said yes, just because she has a heart-shaped soft spot for Nina. Wylan could have done his oh I’m still an innocent barely-two-years not a minor this looks bloody thing, and Kaz might not even have mocked him this time if he'd insisted on Jesper’s pick instead just so he could hide in Jesper’s arms for the most minor decapitations.

Jesper’s been talking through the whole film. Kaz got used to that a long time ago: the landing and failing of small non-sequitur jokes like rain against the window, whispered to Wylan who’s cuddled into his side on the left, or to Inej who’s burrowing under Jesper’s outstretched right arm. Sometimes Jesper thinks a quip will land better with Nina, so he shouts it over to the futon where she and Matthias are always just shy of engaging in heavy petting, and the really mean and bleak jokes he saves for when he’s made eye contact with Kaz.

Now, though: in this scene Mr Motorcycle and the gang boss are captured in a pawnshop and dragged into the basement, and Gang Boss gets raped. Inej’s hand is white-knuckled on Jesper’s arm, and Jesper’s talking non-stop. He’s talking about the flooding, and asking whether Inej thinks Doggerland will happen again but here, soon, you can never know when the scientists are so wrong about the speed of climate change, and apparently it all flooded in a day because something broke off Norway, and then he abruptly pivots to some demo where he bashed in a shop window and got new shoes, and then if she’s got dates for more street fights because then he’s in but please, don’t trick me into another book club, I don’t care about why the cops are bad I already know I just want to hit them—not topics Kaz would have chosen, exactly, but he’s rooted in his red leather armchair off to the side, not even able to hold her for comfort, not like Jes does now, and why didn’t they think to look up the content beforehand, why did they assume it was tame just because it’s an old film—and then, long after it’s over, Jesper idly asks, “Do you think Kaz could fuck someone in a full-body bondage suit?”

Wylan groans. Kaz wishes a sound existed that could express his own current emotion.

“You saw the guy, right?” Jesper turns over to Wylan, while still stroking Inej’s hair. “There was no skin on him. All leather. And that’s the trigger, so—might solve all our problems. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before!”

“I don’t see a huge difference,” Nina snipes. “Kaz is already in all-black, with gloves. Though I guess, that hood would hide his atrocious haircut…”

“Stop being so mean to Kaz, Jesper,” Matthias mumbles. “Although he does deserve it.”

Kaz downs his entire glass of vodka. When he tops his drink up for the second time—he exed the first refill right in the kitchen—he brings the bottle and some maracuja juice over and refills Jesper’s, too, because Jesper’s been anxiously glancing over at him, every moment he thinks Kaz has turned his head away, since he shot his stupid mouth off and actually, it’s—Kaz isn’t thinking about it now but it just might—maybe it could work—well, he fills up the glass to stop Jesper from worrying himself into yet another mental crisis and also so he can bend over Jesper’s ear and whisper lovingly, “I’m going to make the leather for the suit out of your skin.”

“We should look for an Ed Gein film next!” Jesper laughs, much more brightly than the joke warrants, and Kaz refuses to interpret the look on his face.

+

By the time Kaz gets back to the Slat, on a day roughly three months later, it’s long past two in the morning. He’s in a foul mood: of course Haskell won’t even reimburse him for the taxi he had to take because he missed the last metro. Of course he just told Kaz to take a night bus. Haskell won’t even apologize for the last minute details he wants included in his casino’s tax returns. The old man’s not even mentally capable of understanding the extra work he caused. Yes, Kaz is good at filing taxes creatively, exactly tailored for the business to pay nothing whatsoever and meticulous enough to never arouse any suspicion, but that takes work. Things have to balance. Haskell thinks Kaz just has to press a button, and that he’s paying Kaz so he doesn’t have to press the button himself, and that it’s only worth it because he doesn’t want to sully his mind with ‘the Spreadsheet Program’. Which is also why he’s loaning Kaz out to a friend of his, which he just remembered to mention today, for that guy’s mattress store slash money laundering business, so that’s even more work for nowhere near enough money.

Sometimes, Kaz amuses himself with the idea of sneaking in small ‘mistakes’. Enough for even the stupidest tax official to unravel the whole sordid scheme and land Haskell in prison for tax fraud, whereupon he’ll also be discovered to be involved with drug smuggling, blackmail, murder, … none of which will ever trace back to Kaz. But the one time he was livid enough to try, nothing happened. He’ll never manage to plunge the true depths of stupidity of an average bureaucrat, apparently, and is thus doomed to failure.

And anyway, it’s good regular money for little work. Usually. He can’t really complain. Especially not to his friends, because three are going legit, Inej will just rant about the uselessness of defrauding the Belastingdienst for a few measly million euros a year when the world’s being set on fire every day, and Jesper’ll tell him to quit, again, because they live in a squat after all. It’s not like they’re paying rent. Jesper’s never heard of forethought, or gratitude. He doesn’t know how many of his bills Kaz has paid off.

Kaz’s leg aches after the climb to the third story. Two more to go. As usual, right at this point he remembers the joke Jesper made eight months ago about fooling someone into installing a stair lift, and as usual, he dismisses it in disgust after two more steps. Stomps harder on the next flight of stairs, with grim satisfaction at the shooting pains in his knee. He doesn’t need help. He doesn’t need to move to a house with a working lift, and he doesn’t need a stair lift, either. Fuck you, Jesper. I’m the actual functional adult with a job in this household. I don’t need a stair lift.

That’s what he would throw at Jesper’s head, but it’s nearly three o’clock, and Jesper’s probably out. Over at Wylan’s, if he knows what’s good for him, but given how evasive he’s been all week, how manic… Inej’s still camping high up in some forest to save the frogs or something, but no news there is supposed to be good news. If the cops had chucked her off a tree house, it would have been on tv. About everything else, he can worry after he’s slept.

He doesn’t bother with the lights in his room. The streetlight coming in through his open curtains is more than enough, and anyway, he found the empty tenement he turned into the Slat five years ago, fully moved down here three years ago when he met Jesper, and he knows every single thing in his room by heart. The antique dresser he made Jesper and Matthias carry up with the threat of cutting off a finger for every scratch it received is next to the door, the place where he leaves his gloves and wallet and phone and cane. The coat rack beside it, where the hangers for his suit are, then the hamper, and at the foot of his bed the long black linen nightgown that Jesper’s never, ever allowed to see, and—

There’s a black shape on top of his bedcovers, Kaz realizes when he’s pulled on his nightgown.

Kaz takes his cane back. He hasn’t made any new enemies recently as far as he’s aware—none who know his name—but he was careless, brutal, desperate when he was a lone kid getting by on the streets, and those victims had gangs, families, business partners. Just because no-one’s ever traced little Kazzie the bastard rabid dog back to the Slat-that-wasn’t-then doesn’t mean a thing. The fact that the friends he started collecting press-ganged him into doing more behind-the-scenes embezzlement and fewer turf wars because ‘they’re watching us, they have all our faces and fingers and DNA on file and cameras everywhere and did you hear about that informer having kids with the activist he spied on?’ or the more pragmatic, ‘If you don’t stop fucking up your leg on purpose I’m going to send you to a kink party you fucking masochist’…

None of it means safety, not really, and Kaz is glad he’s alone now. They’ve all moved on, and even Jes… well, if he’d been here tonight then the whole squat would be trashed because Jesper doesn’t come quietly. And now, if he comes back to find Kaz gone or his throat slit… Jesper’s going to fucking collapse. He’s been one phone call away from going hysteric all week. Who knows, though—he has Wylan now, and maybe it’ll be the push he needed, the path none of them could ever find, to get his life back on a solid track.

All of that is presupposing that Kaz loses, of course.

And he does not intend to.

The weird black ninja on Kaz’ bed hasn’t reacted yet. They’re curled into a foetal position and they’re snuffling, quietly, because they’re asleep.

Not even assassins dressed up as b movie henchmen expect the toll taken by Per Haskell’s technical naïveté and utter disrespect for Kaz’ work-life balance, apparently. He got back home so late he missed his own murder. Well, then. Kaz hasn’t tortured anyone in two years and he may be out of practice, but the films he’s been forced to watch in the meantime have, if anything, made him more creative. He’ll teach them not to underestimate the brutality of Kaz Brekker, even when he’s moved up a few rungs in the ladder of Amsterdam’s underworld and landed a desk job.

He’ll—but Kaz hasn’t had to stalk silently towards his prey in two years, either. He’s underestimated the extent to which his lame leg’s gotten worse.

Also, someone’s pulled a box out from under his bed.

Kaz stumbles, and in the split-second before he catches himself on the edge of the mattress he wonders—will they have a gun? I can still bash them in the head before they fire, I haven’t gone that soft—and then the would-be assassin stretches out their lanky body as they wake up.

With their arms raised over their head, Kaz can see the bright white light of the street lanterns outside reflect off the gleaming black PVC fabric they’re wearing. Sleek and skin-tight, no ornamentation except a few steel buttons glinting at the crotch, and a full-cover leather hood over their face adorned with one-euro-sized rivets at the jaw, the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the large buckle around the neck. More buckles, at the back of the head and hanging off the right side at eye-height. The open silver zipper at the mouth reflects the streetlight, too, as does the padlock that hangs off it.

Oh no. Kaz knows that mask. Not even shoving it all the way back to the furthest corner under his bed allowed him to forget the way it looks.

Oh no.

Jesper yawns loudly. “Morning, boss. Evening. One of those. I thought you were finishing work early?”

“Haskell had some last-minute revisions to his tax returns.” Kaz sighs. “Don’t cook tomorrow. I’ll be out late for the whole next week—don’t expect me before three am. New client. I need to create a whole year’s documentations from scratch.”

“Just fuck him over, boss. He doesn’t appreciate you, and you don’t need the money. We live in a fucking squat.”

Sweet, financially illiterate nuisance Jesper, who probably doesn’t even know what that awful mistake he’s dressed in right now cost. The thing he’s dressed in. Which was hidden under Kaz’ bed. In Kaz’ room. Which they are inside right now. “You broke into my room,” Kaz rasps. “Again.”

“You know, Kaz,” Jesper replies with poorly feigned innocence, ”this thing is a little big for you. Fits me pretty well, though.”

“I told you I don’t keep cash under my bed. I told you that, the last time you tried to steal from me to pay off your gambling debts. I like my room organized as it is, and so I don’t keep any money here. Not under the bed, not in the wardrobe. And you won’t find any of my actual caches, because I’m smarter than you.”

“You’ve lied to me before.”

“You’ve stolen from me before. Remember last year? Remember you made Inej cry? I though you were clean. I thought you promised Wylan, when you asked him out, that you were done gambling. Maybe we all had too much trust in you.”

Jesper pulls his PVC-clad shoulders up to his en-leathered ears: a ridiculous sight, and Kaz doesn’t know what’s worse. That a bondage sex slave could actually look this dejected and humiliated and alone, or that Jesper does. He’s almost ready to call off the assault. It took a while to figure out, but as usual Inej was probably right, because she’s been researching and discussing the mental health industrial complex in general, and the traumatizing nature of modern life, with her comrades. Even though Kaz is neither the kind of person to touch people with kid gloves, and nor does he like thinking of Jesper as someone who needs that kind of handling—when Jesper’s in a shame spiral this deep then any criticism will drive him even deeper into the arms of the next casino. So the adrenaline and dopamine can wipe out everything else, or to feed his self-loathing even more by being exactly the person he’s terrified people think he is—Jes couldn’t quite explain it himself during the Intervention, except that everything is too much sometimes, even more too much and faster than usual.

He’s a pitiful creature. Kaz almost has pity. Then, though—

“It’s not working, boss. I know why you’re reminding me I fucking relapsed, again, and tried to steal from my best friend, again, and that I’m going to beg you to lie to Wy, again, but I still haven’t forgotten I’m wearing a bondage suit that you’ve been keeping under your bed for—two months now, is it?”

It’s just one month, actually. The manufacture and shipping took six whole weeks.

Two can play that game. Kaz might be very slightly embarrassed, but Jesper’s relapsed into the combination of addiction, theft and deceit that destroyed his life three years ago, and nearly did so again, two-and-a-half years ago and one year ago. “Careful. I haven’t even yet agreed to lie to Wylan, Jesper. About your problem. That you promised you’d tell him about.”

“Also, I notice it fits me, not Inej. Not Nina. Not Matthias. Not even Haskell, I bet. Me. Almost like it was made for me.”

Kaz ignores his insinuations. The answer’s obvious, anyway: yes, he did take clothes from the main washing pile in Jesper’s room and measured them. Yes, he used the measurements when he ordered a bondage suit. Yes, that’s creepy. Yes, a decent person would have asked. No, he’s not sorry. Jesper knew who Kaz was when he moved in with him. And it’s not like Kaz is the one who’s really at fault here. If Jesper just stopped gambling, he’d never have found out.

“Even attempted theft is illegal, Jesper. Completed robbery is worse. I cover my tracks, but you… you should be careful what you say now. They’re still looking for whoever robbed that jeweller last year.”

“Inej’s gonna cut off your head if you try. It’s like you never read her hoodies. All cats are beautiful, et cetera, Kaz. Thirteen-twelve. Keep up.”

Sometimes, the only thing that keeps Kaz from tossing Jesper out of the Slat is that Inej hates landlords and landlord-adjacents just as much as the pigs. If only he’d known back when he let the drunk penniless fancy uni boy who jumped into a fight to defend Kaz from some thugs—a fight Kaz would have won regardless—if only he’d known, before he let Jesper crash on his floor for a night or two, where all of this would end. “I’ll never mention anything about tonight again if you don’t either. Forget it. It was a bad idea. A failed plan. That’s all.”

“Without even trying it?”

“I will zip your mouth shut,” Kaz rasps. “I’ll lock it. I’ll throw the key into the harbour. Fuck you.”

Jesper, though, somehow got even mouthier when he put the bondage suit on. Less respectful. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. “Come on, Kaz,” he wheedles. “I put it on, right? So I’m fine with it, if you’re worried. Aren’t you curious? If our places had been reversed—well, if you’d found it in my room you’d have murdered me, so we’re not exactly identical, but still. Come on, sit down next to me. This is—PVC right? Good job choosing me. Inej would hate it. So much plastic.”

“It’s less like skin than leather.”

“Not complaining, Kaz. I have some juice with a straw over there to keep me hydrated in case I sweat like a pig, but I haven’t, yet. I can probably camp out in this for a few more hours.” He tries a patented Jesper I’m flirting in an over the top way to make you laugh which is my flirting style for when I’m genuinely worried about the reaction because this way I can pass off exasperation and mockery as the response I intended look, probably with fluttering eyes, but since Kaz can barely make them out through those open zippers and the rest of his face is a complete mystery, it falls flat. It looks ridiculous, though, so it also works, and Jesper has the nerve of complaining about Kaz’ eight-dimensional chess plans. He’s worse. He’s worse, and animated by Jesper’s ridiculous, familiar movements the bondage suit doesn’t look like a pathetic attempt anymore. Not like the desperation of an emotional cripple. It just looks like Jesper, with an extra layer on his skin. Jesper, probably making a duckface, purring, “Don’t you think I’m sexy?”

Kaz looks away. “Are you serious right now?”

“Of course,” Jesper replies instantly, as if there was never any reason to doubt him. As if he doesn’t blame Kaz for doubting, simultaneously. As if Kaz is allowed to try. To fail. To fuck up, risk hurting him. There is a reason why Kaz never even considered someone else for the suit. “Come on, get on the bed.”

“We have to talk with Inej first. And with Wylan.”

“One-track mind,” Jesper replies, and just like that Kaz is ready to murder him again. “We’re not fucking. We’re not doing more than normal, except maybe touch. We don’t even know yet whether this helps you. I’m not risking it. We’ll just try touching, and if you think it’s triggering, we stop. We’ve got all the time in the world to work up to more. Until this city sinks into the ocean and the grid collapses from heat, which might be tomorrow, so. Or the fascists win.”

“You’ve been listening to Inej.”

“I do try to keep up.”

“Well, stop. Or listen more carefully, until the end, when she gets to the doomerism is the opiate of the masses part.”

“Just get on the bed, Kaz.”

Kaz puts his bent good knee onto the mattress and pulls himself over to Jesper. The fabric of his linen smock rubs against his heated skin: not like corpses, not like that, not like Jordie and he won’t even think about him or this will be over but—it just feels like his own familiar coarse age-softened nightgown that Jesper hasn’t even made fun of yet, his thin nightgown that in a second will be one of only two layers between him and Jesper.

He rolls over so he can sit down next to Jesper, at first. Daringly, he leans an arm against his best—well, they’ll figure that out later.

“Okay?” Jesper asks. He has to crane his head a lot to look through the thin eye slits of his bondage mask at Kaz’ face, and even then he’s probably mostly seeing the gleaming teeth of the eyehole zippers. And still he leans forward forty-five degrees and twists his torso and neck so he can look up into Kaz’ face, carefully keeping the arm that’s touching Kaz as motionless as possible, because he’s being careful with Kaz. Kaz has told him a thousand times he hates being coddled. He’s not a poor little abused dog, he’s a vicious murderer who destroyed his leg and his ability to be close to people while he was murdering, that’s all he ever told Jesper. That lie. And yet—even if he’s only fooling himself because this scene is so patently ridiculous, and the psych ward he got sent to once for the crime of rough sleeping while underage would stamp every single thing about what they’re doing as deeply unhealthy, and he can’t see Jesper’s soft concerned expression under the hood… Whatever it is, Kaz feels warm all over. He feels good. Safe.

Jesper can tell, apparently. “Want to touch my chest? Or climb into my lap?”

Kaz moves over, carefully smoothing down his nightgown before he sits down on Jesper, angled so he can lean with his left arm pressed against Jesper’s chest. It’s safer, somehow, than giving him the back, but perhaps someday…

Jesper loosely wraps his arms around Kaz. They’re just there, barely touching, the hands lax on top of Kaz’ right knee. You can leave at any time, they say, I’ll let go as soon as you’re uncomfortable, and Kaz would have known that regardless. Jesper’s never usually this still, unless he’s lost in concentration: and Kaz, who’s seen how gambling can destroy someone’s life, how it is currently destroying someone’s life, would still bet everything he has ever owned that Jesper’s concentrating on every single aspect of Kaz’ body language right now.

It’s not necessary, though. Those hands are gleaming black PVC. They don’t look or feel anything like Kaz’ memories.

He drops his own naked right hand onto Jesper’s gloved one. Joins them. Anchors Jesper. “How much do you owe this time, Jes?”

A beat. Jesper’s face drops down towards Kaz’ lap. Trying to hide his shame, and he’s forgotten that he’s wearing a full bondage mask, that Kaz can barely make out his eyes through the slits of the zippers. If he’s trying to deny everything, Kaz will just beat it out of him. He’s done it before. A year ago, when it was bad, but Jesper promised he got it under control. But Jesper’s promises were never worth much, not for this. If they were, they’d never have met.

“Four grand.”

“To?”

“Tom Geels. One of Big Bol’s old friends—”

“So he put you up to—”

“I was already playing when he walked up to me, Kaz,” Jesper grinds out. Aware that he could save himself from at least a little of Kaz’ disappointment by casting Bollinger as the tempter. Simultaneously aware that Kaz promised to feed Bollinger to a marine propeller last year if he ever took Jesper gambling again. Noble, to try and save Bollinger’s life—or to save Kaz from committing another murder—not that either of them deserves his loyalty. “I’ll pay you back, Kaz. I’ll have the money. Give me—give me half a year, Da’s still sending me—sending me rent money, Christ, he’s—I’ll save it. No, you’ll get it straight as soon as I get it, and in six months, you’re paid back in full. I promise.”

“We’ll figure it out. I have some jobs I could use you on. Nothing big. Intimidation, mostly. Some breaking, some entering. Boring stuff, not even worth mentioning to Wylan I should think.”

“Thank you.” Jesper’s forgotten all his restraint. He’s kissing Kaz’ forehead, or rather kissing the inside of his mask that’s pressed against Kaz’ forehead. He’s wrapped Kaz tightly in his long bondage arms too, painfully twisting Kaz’ shoulder and elbow and wrist because Kaz is still holding onto his hand. It’s that welcome pain, and the texture of the bondage suit that Kaz still isn’t completely used to, that keeps him from breaking Jesper’s nose. Keeps him—he isn’t back in the North Sea. He isn’t with Jordie. He should be, but he isn’t, and even if it comes…

Inej taught him about grounding. None of them trust the system as far as they can throw it, so she didn’t send him to a shrink when they started dating, unlike he feared, but—she said they helped her, those grounding exercises she found on the internet, and so Kaz has been diligently practicing breathing techniques and focusing his awareness on details of the present moment. Five things he can see: well, it’s dark, but the way what little streetlight gets through reflects off the folds of the suit on Jesper’s bowed stomach is quite interesting. His own knees. His hand, still clutching Jesper’s. The cane, on the floor. The floor. Five things he can hear: early morning traffic, Jesper’s breath, Jesper trying not to sob out loud in relief or shame or a mixture of both, the rustling of fabric, the squeaking of fabric. Five things he can feel: The old ache of his leg, always. Jesper’s hand. Jesper’s thighs. The hard buttons at the flap over Jesper’s crotch, digging into his side.

Somehow, Jesper’s noticed his shift in focus. At least he’s stopped crying now. “You know, you could have just asked how big I am if you wanted a suit with a dick pouch,” he teases in a voice that almost manages to sound happy. “I wouldn’t even have been suspicious.”

“Just because you have no boundaries, Jes, doesn’t mean I have to sink down to meet you at your level.”

Jesper takes a big breath. To forestall the whole Who bought this bondage suit argument Kaz elbows him in the stomach, hard. Once Jesper’s done coughing—a wriggling movement against Kaz’ side that he’s never even felt before—he mumbles something else, though. “I texted Da my new number. He called last week. Wanted to know how I was doing,” and oh. That makes sense. That’s what did it. “Apparently I’m graduating in seven months, according to that fake schedule you made me so I could keep my lies straight. He wants to come to the graduation. He asked me whether I have a job lined up.”

“I could hire somebody to fake you a degree,” Kaz offers. This should be Inej’s job. She shouldn’t be off somewhere, saving grasshoppers. She should be here. She’s the one who tried to talk Jesper into coming clean to his father, last year. All Kaz knows, all he has ever done, is to keep digging, and it’s worked for him. So far. “It’s all the rage now I hear. Cheap, too. No-one will find out. Just don’t become a politician in Germany.”

Jesper sighs. The air kisses the back of Kaz’ neck. “I don’t even care anymore. I could have a degree, or not, it all doesn’t matter. Universities are a scam to regulate economic class relations anyway. I don’t know that I can keep lying forever, or get a job, just so I don’t have to tell Da I betrayed him. Because nothing matters anyway. We’re collectively throwing the future down the drain. It’s not like anyone needs another mechanical engineer when we hit four degrees. I don’t know what we need. I just know everything I know is pointless.”

“I’m sure Inej can hook you up, if you want to blow up a coal power plant.”

“But what about you, then? What would you do?”

“I could have you kidnapped,” Kaz says. That’s not what Jesper meant. Kaz refuses to think about what Jesper meant. “Fake your death. Colm will be so relieved when they find you that he won’t even care you failed all your studies so you could become a live-in human blow-up doll.”

“That’ll only keep Da happy for a year at most and you know it.”

“Well, then Colm’s just going to have to get used to it. Get used to you, like we did. Real, annoying, good-for-nothing directionless screw-up Jesper.”

Jesper rubs his leathered cheek against the crown of Kaz’ head. “Fuck you. Thanks.”

Kaz runs his fingers over the squeaky PVC on Jesper’s forearms, steeling himself before he whispers idly against Jesper’s neck, “If Inej’s right about the warming and the sea level over the next decades, it won’t just be refugees from the south we’re letting drown, people it’s easy to lock out. Maybe you’re right about the Doggerland thing, and we all get flooded.” He swallows. The words are high up in his throat, trying to spew out. “Then it won’t just be one stupid child with a stupid family going out boating in the North Sea when there’s a storm coming. Not just that one kid thrown out of a sinking boat nearly drowning and clinging to his brother’s corpse. Your blow-up doll skills will be in high demand if everyone else gets triggered by skin contact too.”

Jesper, miraculously, reveals a talent Kaz didn’t even know he possessed: he shuts up. He ghosts his gloved hands over Kaz’ shoulders, and then he starts carding his fingers through Kaz’ hair. Kaz can feel the static electricity building up, the crackles and the safety, and then he realizes his eyes have drifted shut. He realizes he doesn’t know how long Jesper’s been petting him.

“Take off your hood,” he mumbles.

“Kaz?”

“Take it off. Scuttle over so your head’s on the pillow.”

Jesper obeys, like Kaz always knew he would. He looks up at Kaz with something that might be confusion but might also be—trust and deep joy and more, something Kaz can’t quite admit anymore now he’s in his bed, and Kaz puts his head down on his chest. His legs will still fit, and this way, he has the squeaky PVC right where he needs it. Squeaky, rhythmically rising warm dry plastic under him. The exact opposite of a waterlogged corpse.

“I don’t have time to call you an ambulance when you get into a bondage suit erotic asphyxiation incident, just so you know. I have a full schedule for today, remember. I’ll be at Haskell’s until after midnight. I have to break Bollinger’s thumbs. My alarm is at seven. Turn it off and I’ll send you to Colm in bite-sized pieces,” Kaz rasps, and then, with a movement that no-one would call timid if they wanted to keep their tongue attached, wraps his arms around Jesper. “You’ve kept me awake for two hours, so be a good pillow. If I kick you off the bed while I’m dozing, remember. This is your fault.”

[dreamiesdotcom]

of inked pages and adventures | n.jm

Summary: Jaemin plays rock-paper-scissors, loses, ends up being dared to spend one boring hour every day in a boring library, and finds love in a person who's spent more time behind a book than under the Sun.

Word Count: 1975

a/n: so I tried to give y'all a fic with a happy ending bc some people yelled at me after slow akshdjdj

Of course, as to most of Jaemin's life-changing decisions, it starts with losing rock-paper-scissors, a dare, and Lee Donghyuck.

The second rule to life is to never listen to Donghyuck sober. Renjun kinds of disagrees with that, but in his defense, listening to sober Hyuck got him a boyfriend, after all — but in Jaemin's case, it's only given him headaches and careless adrenaline. Jaemin stands true to his words: the second rule to life is to never listen to Donghyuck sober. The first rule is to never listen to him drunk.

Everybody knows how terrible some people are at following such rules, and unfortunately, Jaemin is one of those people. Right now, he momentarily hates that.

It's nothing wild, per se, just strange — normally, the dares are either risking your life, reputation, or morals. Today, they've chosen for him to suffer; "Go and read books for at least an hour in the library. You can't fall asleep."

So here he is, standing in this dimly lit room full of books. He takes one of them blindly, dragging himself to a table in the farthest corner, and doesn't realize it yet that someone is already sitting there. You looked at him with an exhausted gaze, but as your eyes catch at the book's cover, they quickly brim with life.

"Psychology? Interesting."

"What?" he says, pouting a little, used to talking to people. Normally, it would make most people melt — your still expression doesn't change, so he tries a joke. "A handsome guy can't read psychology now?"

It doesn't work, but the barest hints of a smirk tugs at the sides of your lips, and you shake your head as if to say no.

"It's not everyday a cute boy reads the same books as I do."

Red stains his cheeks and in his panic, he keeps his eyes on his book. He feels distracted, kind of heady, a little lost; butterflies seem to soar in his stomach, a feeling he's only ever caused, not experienced. It sucks for him that he doesn't know what to do about it — because what do you do when you've met someone for the first time, and they told you such things like that, and your stupid heart won't calm the fuck down?

What kind of first meeting, right?

#

The first week was nothing compared to the first day. He learned to stay comfortable with this kind of silence, the type that's somber and kind of lonely; the one that makes whispers reverberate inside the room, almost haunted. He's grown familiar with some books, be it the ones that smell like fresh paper and ink or the musky ones with sweet undertones, both scents lingering around the room.

He learned how to exist in silence. For days, surely, he missed the noise even if the loss was just for an hour, being used to Donghyuck chattering the time away and Renjun calling him out on it. The quarrels were always there, and as much as back then, all he wanted was for it to stop, right now he wants nothing but for someone to speak.

But as days pass by, he starts to see its charm. He starts to grow fond of the small talks. More specifically, he starts to get used to the way all the words that needed to be said are laid out like exposed cards, no guessing of intentions or games. They're just words that mean exactly as they should, and that's all that Jaemin needs. Certainty. Assurance. Truth.

He looks up from his books, scanning the cover of yours. "You got a classic now?"

"Exams," you say, shoulders rising slightly. Your eyes don't lift from the sentences, but he's certain you've stopped reading. Only then does he notice the heaviness in your eyes, the invisible wall you've put up around yourself against everybody else.

"Shouldn't you be reviewing by this time?"

"No."

Amusement fills his gut, and he shakes his head a little. You go back to reading and he tries to do the same as well, but for a reason or two, he couldn't focus — under the warm library lights and beside the strange person he's shared counted words with, he flourishes like a rose in a full-blown spring.

#

To be true, Jaemin no longer has to spend an hour in the library. It was a silly dare, and it's over, and he can go back to going to parties or hanging out with his best friends. He doesn't even really like reading; to be fair, they're interesting. He just doesn't feel them as hard as people like Renjun does.

He can go back to his old ways now, to the lively nights and tiring thrills. In fact, he could've done so weeks ago — but these days, as if a habit, his feet take him back to the street he spent a month getting to know, walking to a place he spent hours trying to understand. There was a dull something about the library that makes him breathe.

It's not the books. It was never the books — he's heard of these magical things, the way they bring you to different places and timelines, each time a different person with a different story. He's heard of the spark they have and the addicting scent of ink on paper. He's heard it all, and that's pretty much it — he never got to experience the entertainment they seemed to hold for a special kind of people. He's seen a glimpse of it, though, in the reflection of your eyes; the way they gloom when something bad happens, the way they shine when something good does. He finds bits of magic there, alongside the wanderlust glittering behind your lids.

And if the books couldn't take him to an adventure, your eyes do.

"Why're you staring?"

Why was he staring?

"Poetry, huh?" he hides his nervousness with a grin. He rests his chin on his palms, staring at you as if he was in a reverie because he is. "Cute."

You run your fingers at the spine of the book, tracing the delicate covers with equally as delicate fingers, a heavy sigh hanging on your lips. "They're mostly free verses about world tragedies."

He couldn't help but grimace, "Oh, damn. That's hardcore."

Something in the proud smirk on your smile screams rebelliously regal, and he somewhat struggles to look away.

#

The first time you two meet outside the library, it's at a convenience store and you were pretty much half-awake. Jaemin points an accusing finger at you, "What're you doing here?"

"Buying coffee."

"At 4am?"

"Dude, you're doing the same thing?" you ask, amused. "Just let me pass."

And just like everything with Jaemin, it begins with a straightforward question: "Wanna walk together?" You can't really pinpoint who asked first, just that you both wanted it, and that you both spent minutes walking in circles until you decided on going to the park. It's a silent trip, something he's not used to, but either way, it's something he liked. The emptiness of the streets, the gloaming of midnight.

By the time you've reached the park, it's already five a.m and what's left to the darkness is the lingering scent of nighttime, fleeting around the breeze and cold touches. The shiver this phantom gives you is shortlived, the sun starting to make itself known through first warm rays. The foggy image of the street ahead stains golden, and to watch the town rouse awake stirs in your gut something oddly specific yet unnamed.

You let out a dreamy sigh.

"I just want melodrama, is that too much to ask?" you kick at a rock. "Can't a person just run in an empty hallway looking fancy as hell? Can't a person just scream angrily at the world as they hold their dying lover in their arms?"

Jaemin momentarily chokes on his coffee, eyes widening in horror. "Can't a person just what?!"

You laugh, a pleasant sound comparable to tinkling bells you'd probably hear when you enter a fantasy land. It's not a delicate laugh, nor is it a careless one; it's just a laugh, beautiful even if it's obvious that you didn't let your guards down. His heart swells in adoration.

###

Jaemin doesn't go to the library after that morning.

He's heard of the different ways some people fall in love; his friends didn't do it much, but whenever they do, it had been interesting. Donghyuck only experienced it once before he declares he's given up on it; it was young love, the kind of love that's what you knew it to be at the moment. Jaemin calls it the first kind of love, the one that's hard to forget.

Renjun's was a difficult kind. It longed for people who didn't want to love anymore, hearts that had been closed to the world after it tried to break it. Jaemin understood it as the kind that waits — through the pain, after most everything.

Jeno's was the most simple. He didn't understand a single bit of what he tried to say, but Jaemin called it the most simple because it's the hardest to understand; the in denial kind, the complicated kind, the thing most people feel.

This one, he hasn't heard of. He hasn't been warned about it, either; it came without notice, no alarms. It came blindly, and it looked nothing like what he thought love should look like. Every wall he's built crumbles down, and he ignores the fact that you've known each other for short months and barely even knew each other's names. This one, he calls a tunnel. To him who's quite confused, it's as if a deep, dark, and chilly tunnel; maybe a museum of realizations and you come out of it feeling like something's not quite right of yourself.

Once he accepts it, he finds himself here again, in that same table. After his long absence, he expected some anger, he expected coldness. Instead what he gets is softness, an empty seat directly in front of yours, and a very emotional string of words: "It's been lonely without you."

Jaemin doesn't think much before he speaks and it's one of the flaws that he didn't really mind because all he's said are nice words. He kind of rethinks that thought as he lays both arms on the table, resting his cheek on one and them dreamily staring at you; "You're gonna be the death of me."

There's no books this time. Instead, papers scatter uselessly, notebooks opened and pens of different colors rest wherever. Somewhere inside his brain, he almost hears Renjun scoff at how he's blatantly not studying despite having everything he needs to review, but he doesn't mind that. He sets his eyes on you, focused on jotting down important terms and their meanings. Under a trick of the light, he sees angel wings spread behind you.

Your stare shifts to him, and he basks in the sunshine it never fails to make him feel. You glow like fantasy and the admiration surges straight to his head, skipping his logic and rushing for his feelings; he thinks of you as a person who was never meant to be human — such etherealness simply couldn't be meant to be mortal.

"Huh?"

"I kind of fell in love with you and I just won't stop falling," he mutters, eyes closed. "You're gonna be the death of me."

"Are you trying to ask me out on a date?" you laugh, and he shoots up, sitting straight. Red flushes his cheeks again, much like the first day, but this time he couldn't look away — your hand rests atop of his, warm against each other. "If so, then yes."

"What?"

"Take me on a date first." you say, slower this time. "and then hopefully, many more."

[raz-b-rose]

Daminette Soulmate AU Scars

https://archiveofourown.org/works/23608933/chapters/56792128#workskin

For as long as Marinette could remember, she had always been covered in scars. Her parents were concerned to say the least. What was going on in her soulmates life for a new scar to appear on their daughter's body on an almost weekly starting at the age of four. Marinette however felt differently. Yes she was worried but she had the feeling that he was a fighter, and he was, in her heart, the strongest person she knew. 

The scars slowed as she grew older, but never gone for long. They almost stopped altogether when she turned eleven, only the occasional scrape in her knuckles or knees now. She did have one thing to thank about this bond though, that only she could see the colors. To everyone else she would be walking around painted in pale green lines on almost every surface of her body. She would trace his scars over and over, dreaming of the day she could see his green eyes for herself. 

She would dance around her parents, spouting her all her dreams and desires. Everything from their wedding to what their house would look like and how many kids they would have. Her parents tried to be supportive, but the possibility of what her soulmate's life was like left their hearts heavy. Marinette remained the optimist, believing that everything would be ok. 

All those dreams were crushed one day however, shortly after she turned thirteen. She had been taking a shower, when the worst pain she had ever felt pierced her heart. She cried out, grasping at her heart, trying for anything to make the pain stop. She started to cry, it hurt so bad.

Then she felt it, a new scar forming just below her clavicle, before everything went numb. 

She laid there in the bathtub, the water beating down on her, but she couldn’t feel a single thing. She can feel her panic rising, it takes her a few tries to get out of the tub, her brain having trouble connecting the loss of touch to the grip her hands are trying to maintain on the tub's rim.  

She collapses onto the floor, crying when she can’t feel the cool tile against her cheek, or the water pooling around her body. Her sobs increase when she can’t feel the tears she knows she is crying. Why can’t she feel anything?

She can hear her mother knocking on the door, her voice rising in hysteric as Marinette fails to respond. She pushes herself up slowly, fumbling at the lock on the door, feeling a small victory when she finally unlocks it before falling to the floor again. 

Her mother rushes in, quick to scoop her daughter up, crying when she sees her daughter's newest scar, quick to cover her in a towel, attempting to delay the inevitable. “Mom, I can’t feel anything.” 

Sabine tears up even more, knowing the harsh truth her daughter had to face at just thirteen years old, much too young for heart break. But was there ever a proper age for it? She gently carries her daughter to her room. She dresses her, and brushes her hair, knowing that any gentle touch she normally used to calm her Dou Dou, would have no effect now. 

Marinette kept asking her mom questions, anxious for answers, confused and scared. Her mother remained silent, only sitting behind her. Marinette glances at her mirror in the corner, watching as her mother brushes out her hair, wishing just this once she could feel the pain from a stubborn knot. Then she sees it, an ugly green scar right where she had been in intense pain earlier. 

Marinette can feel herself starting to hyperventilate. She pulls at her shirt, frustration growing when she can’t feel the soft cotton. Most of the time, scars healed in thin lines or round circles, depending on what made the original injury. This however looks like it had healed over rough and bumpy. It was still a little red, blotching around the edges, a few scabs covered it as well. 

“Mom he died” There was no way to survive an injury to cause this scar. Her soulmate was dead. Before she had even gotten to see his green eyes, he left this world. She watches, horror growing as her mother brushes her hands over her back. He had been impaled straight through. Marinette started to feel sick, at least she still had that. 

“I’m so sorry Dou Dou, but you will never be able to feel anything again.” She hugs her close, kissing her head softly. Marinette doesn't miss how her mother doesn’t tell her she’s wrong. Now her heart feels just as numb as the rest of her. It was a solemn night in the Dupain-Cheng household.  

She started therapy that week, learning to move without touch, learning to function as if her second half wasn’t snatched right from under her. It was a good thing she did, or Marinette figures she would have only wallowed in self pity, and festering anger at the unfairness of it all. But she would be strong for him, whoever he was. Was, she reminds herself. 

And strong she was. When she returned to school, she didn’t let any of her friends know what had happened, practicing careful movements, too careful sometimes and overcompensating her reactions into clumsy falls and spins. She put on the facade of one who spaced out easily, one who you had to call loudly to grab her attention. A classic space cadet. 

Life became a new normal, and the pain lessened, and she grew older. Life was good, and she was finding the ability and joy to see all the blessings she still had in life. She genuinely smiled more, her heart healing and ready to overflow with love for those around her. 

It was because of this life through her for another loop. She became the hero known as Lady Bug, and one could say her loss was a perk for how often  she was thrown against solid objects. But she took it in stride, and worked hard to improve her skills to help Paris survive. 

Chat Noir became suspicious as more and more fights continued. He finally asked after a particularly nasty akuma, if her miraculous offered extra protection. “I can handle a hit ok, but I can definitely feel it. You always get back up without flinching.” She flinched at that, and he definitely noticed. 

“My soulmate died a couple years ago, so I am unable to feel anything anymore.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry Bug, oh man”

She rubs her chest where her reminder sat, “I never knew him, but it still hurt you know, left quite the nasty scar.” She tried to lift the mood with a dry laugh, but it just made the air thicker. 

“Pain like that never goes away.” He was so quiet and gentle, leaving both relieved and saddened for the other that they could understand the pain of loss. Their bond strengthened a little more that day, and only increased more over the years. 

Her carefully built and maintained facade was quickly broken however with the arrival of one Lila Rossi. The girl was cunning and perceptive. Why she had it out for Marinette, she may never know. Lila was careful, starting with the casual talk of soulmates, before moving onto the unfortunate topic and widely varying stories of those who lost theirs. Some say you died with your soulmate, others said you couldn’t tell when your soulmates died, and of course Marinette's reality, that you lost the ability to feel. 

Lila however took these speculations a step further. She claimed that her cousin lost her soulmate and not only lost physical touch, but her emotions as well. That she could no longer love, that she went to acting classes to hide among those who could feel emotions, that she was nothing more than an empty shell. 

Marinette never engaged with these conversations, put off by the idea that it could be the truth. After all, she was proof that it wasn't always true after all. She still loved deeply and felt joy and anger and sadness. She was still herself, just without her perfect other half. 

Her friends were quick to sympathize with Lila’s cousin. How tragic, and how horrible that she would never be normal again. It wasn’t until she entered the classroom one day, faced by the suspicious and scared stares of her friends, that Marinette knew her life was to change again. She doesn’t know how Lila found out, but the reality is she did, and Marinette would take it in stride. 

Lila accused her of pretending to be everyone's friend, that she was a monster trying to fool everyone around her. The class seemed to trust every word that Lila spoke, after all, logically speaking, she couldn’t have good intentions if she couldn’t feel anything. Marinette could only be offended, betrayed, shocked and hurt. 

She told them it was true she could no longer feel the physical world, but she assured them that her emotions were intact. She loved them all dearly, and nothing would ever change that. She could tell they didn’t quite believe her.

“You are a great actor Marinette, trying to trick us like that” Lila whimpers, trying to make herself look small. 

“In theory, if I can’t feel good emotions, why would I be able to feel bad ones?” Marinatte asked, desperate for them to think this through. “I could never be anything, much less mean spirited and conniving.” Lila looked like she took personal offense to that. 

“That's a good point” Rose whispers, her hands clasped tightly, clearly the whole situation stressing her out. She did hate confrontation afterall. 

“I have always loved you guys, but if you want to believe differently, I can’t stop you.” 

“How do we know you really can’t feel anything, maybe you’re just trying to get sympathy” Chloe just had to spark the situation back into a raging fire. Soon everyone is talking over the other, each looking more and more agitated as moer words are exchanged. 

Marinette just sighs. She walks up to Nathanial, asking for his exacto knife. He hands it over, with some trepidation, but hands it over nonetheless. Marinette smacks the table top loud enough to get everyone's attention.

“I was thirteen when he died,” she pulls down her shirt enough for everyone to see her scar, the emotions ranging from sympathy to horror. “And I haven’t been able to feel anything since this scar appeared.” With that she takes Nathanial’s knife to her forearm, cutting three even lines, her hand nor flinching or wavering once.

“Marinette!” Everyone cried out, scrambling to help her. She doesn't realize she's crying until someone, Kim she thinks, is asking if it hurts. 

“It’s never going to stop hurting,” she sobs, “he’s gone forever and I will never be the same again! Is this proof enough for you!”    

“What is going on here- Oh my goodness Marinette!” Ms. Bustier rushes up the steps, quickly taking Marinette to the nurses office. The adults are panicking, Marinette tells them the truth, letting the nurse know that she doesn't feel anything so she doesn’t have to waste her medicine on her. It took quite a bit of convincing from her parents to let her leave without the medicine or a doctors office visit. 

Things were tense in the classroom for a while after that, and Lila and Chloe stopped talking to her altogether. Marinette had imagined worse than this if her friends were to find out, she would take the tip toeing over the silent treatment anyday. 

The girls tried to stop talking soulmates around Marinette, but she wouldn’t have it. She encouraged them to talk about their dreams and thoughts about at all. She wanted them to continue to hold onto that hope and future for as long as they could. 

It wouldn’t be until Marinette was sixteen that her world shifted once again. It was dinner time, she had a slip with the knife, and sliced her finger. “Ow!” Marinette turns to throw away the food when the burning sensation actually registered in the unused part of her brain. She freezes, staring at the blood pooling around her finger, relishing in the hurt. Not that she enjoyed pain, no she just couldn’t believe she could feel pain once more. 

“Mom! Dad!” Marinette starts to scream because this could only be a dream. There was no way she could feel again. “Mom! Dad!” 

“What is it Marinette?” They bust into the apartment, her mother quick to grow frantic at the sight of blood now covering her daughter's hand and arm. 

“It hurt. The cut hurts.” Her parents freeze, exchanging bewildered glances. 

“What?” Her mother sounds like she’s trying not to believe it. Marinette agrees, it's too good to be true. So she reaches up to touch her hair, relishing in the greasy unwashed state, her face too oily, her shirt a soft silk. She spins around, swinging open the freezer, laughing at the burning cold of the ice cubes. She fails to notice the new scar forming along her knuckle on her right hand. 

“Marinette sweetie, please sit down so we can take care of that cut.” Her father pushes towards the island, 

She winces at the disinfectant, trying not to wiggle in her seat to feel the hardwood beneath her. The pressure from the bandaid just adds to her new reality, she starts with a laugh before it mixes with tears. 

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know sweetie, we will go to the doctors first thing tomorrow,” 

Despite Marinette having stayed up too late touching anything and everything in her room, she didn’t feel overly tired while waiting in the doctor's office. The fabric used on the waiting chairs were itchy and Marinette decided she did not like that, but couldn’t feel regretful towards her shorts at all. 

“Well Ms. Dupain-Cheng, there have been stories about soulmates falling into a coma, and that could explain what is happening now.”

“A coma?” Marinette whispers in surprise, hope blossoming in her chest once more. 

“Yes, it's very unlikely that you have a new soulmate, with you being sixteen and all.” 

“Doctor you said stories and not studies, sorry if I would like a little more of a solid reasoning.”

“Unfortunately, it's been a hard area to study so research is often limited and incomplete.”

“I see” Her mother murmurs, gripping her hand tightly. 

“The only other explainable reason is her heart healed from the loss. After all, people can’t come back from the dead.”

Marinette felt a little crushed after that. The possibility that her soulmate was possibly still dead was not one she really wanted to consider but she needed to be realistic. It has been three years now. Her body had probably finished healing from the shock. So Marinette pushed aside the notion of an awakened soulmate in a hospital somewhere and instead focused on her second chance at living life to the fullest. 

Her friends couldn’t believe it, the romantics holding out for the coma theory, despite Marinette protests. She melted into the first hug she had felt from Alya and Adrian, each of them crying tears of joy. 

When she told Chat Noir later that day, he looked at her in confusion before exclaiming something she never thought she would hear him say as LadyBug. “Marinette?”

“What?”

“You are! You’re Marinette, oh my gosh”

“What are you talking about Chat?” She laughs nervously. He drops his transformation before she can protest, leaving Adrian in his place. She gapes in surprise for a few minutes before joyously throwing herself into his arms. It had been a rough and wild two years, but things didn’t feel all that different in the long run.

Things weren’t all that different for Damian. He felt lost and empty when he woke up in his father's arms. Yes he was thankful at a second chance at life. He felt overjoyed to be with his family again, but something was missing. A year being dead so it was understandable that he couldn’t feel anything. Titus’ fur, bat cows horns, or the cool steel of his blades. Something must be wrong with him. A side effect from the magic? How would his family react to finding out? So he kept it a secret, afraid of the possible rejection. 

It was one week later that he discovered another side effect of the magic. He now had super strength and flight. It was a learning curve to say the least. At least the loss of physical touch helped with the super strength part of things. 

He couldn’t keep his secret for too long though, however six months was an amazing feat to say the least. He had gotten cut during a scuffle, the blood going unnoticed until Dick had panicked, calling for Alfred to bring the medical supplies. 

“Why did you say anything!” 

Damian can only sit quietly, refusing to look at Alfreds hands as he works the stitches into his skin. He knows he won't feel it anyway so why look. 

“Master Damian, normally you would be a squirming mess as I do this, care to explain” His words may be stern, but his voice was so gentle. Of course he already knew the answer to his question. Bruce walked over, kneeling in front of his son, and Damian was shocked by the emotion on his father's face. He looked so solem and heartbroken. 

“Damian can you feel anything?”

“No...but I’m sure it's just from the magic so I wouldn’t be too concerned father”

“Oh baby bird. Damian…” Dick sighs, coming up to hug him. Damian sits confused by everyone's reaction, for no one said anything else for a few minutes. Bruce was holding his head in his hand, and Alfred just continued to stitch him up, moving faster than normal. 

“Damian I am so sorry, but when you died, your soulmate must have died as well.” 

Well, Damian thinks to himself, that explains the empty feeling. He looks at his fingertips, where little blue prickmarks sat, then at his arms where the circled burn marks sat around his wrists. He had always theorized about what kind of girl his soulmates was. She must have a hobby like cooking for her to get the burn marks. And probably a craft of sorts for the marks on the tips of his fingers.

He always felt like she was a gentle spirit, patient and energetic. He tried to not think too hard about when they would meet, if they would ever meet. At the time he was with his mother, and soul mates were a taboo topic. With his father, he never felt the need to bring it up, and no one ever discussed it freely. So he assumed the same rules apply. 

“They say sometimes when one soulmate dies, so does the other. If you still can’t feel anything then..” Dick doesn’t finish his thought. 

“Oh” Damian hops off the table, shuffling back towards the manors elevator. He pauses before he pushes the button. “So I will be like this forever?”

“Most likely.” His father answers him.

“I see, I will use this new development to the best of my ability. Good night.” Dick can’t find the emotional energy to chastise him for taking such a rational approach. It must be his base morals rising back up to cover the hurt. 

And fighting to cover the hurt Damian was. The idea that something he only realized he wanted now that he couldn’t have it stung worse than any physical would he had ever gotten. Except maybe that stab through the chest. That definitely didn’t feel great, and he can only hope his soulmate didn’t suffer from it like he had.  

Damian decided to stop focusing on the impossible and strived for perfecting his new found abilities and refining his ingrained training. Two years and a good portion of the training was wasted. It happened in a moment with no warning. 

He had been practicing his punches on a cliff side, the rock having a similar consistency to a punching bag. He paused to take a drink of water before throwing another punch at the rock wall, only to recoil in pain. “The hell!” His hand started to throb, the skin tinted red and knuckles bleeding. 

Damian was now more confused than ever, jumping when the spray from the ocean splashes against his legs. Crouching down he runs his fingers through the sand, the damp grainy sensation oddly satisfying. He tries to fly back up to the manor, but finds he can’t do that anymore either. Well crap, Damian eyes the rocky cliffs. That's the last time Damian relies so heavily on magic.  

Finally back on the Manors grounds, he lays for a moment, enjoying the cool grass, still damp from the morning sprinklers, and the warmth of the rising sun on his face. Now the only question was, why is this happening and what does it mean. 

He marches past his family in the kitchen, heading straight for the cave, quick to gather as much information he can on soul mates that he deems necessary. Hours later the only explanation he can find is that his soulmate could have fallen into a coma at the moment of his death. So he started searching the world for anyone who had fallen into a coma the day he died, but found nothing. His frustration grew.

“Hey, you’ve been down here for awhile. Do you have a new case?” Damian eyes Tim, deciding whether or not he wants his input or not. He decides he has nothing to lose, only to gain from his thoughts on the matter. 

“I regained the ability to feel while simultaneously losing my gained powers.”

“Whoa that's like near impossible to happen”

“Unless my soulmate was in a coma for the last three years, which I have found no record of.”

“Well perhaps neither of those things ever happened, so the magic has worn off.”

“Or?”

“She really is gone, and the magic restored your body to normal with the exchange of your powers. It would be better to ask one of the magic users in the League, not really my preferred area of speculation.”

Damian immediately sought out who he could, eager to find an answer for this phenomenon. However they all had either the same theories or no answers. Even Zatanna couldn't help him, it was after the urging of his family that he halted his search. 

She might not even be out there, she could honestly be dead and his hyper focus on this false hope isn’t helping. So he let it go, let the idea of her go, let go the last sliver of hope he had that she was still out there waiting for him. It was time to move on. He tried to ignore the lingering blue on his hands, and took to wearing gloves on the regular. This decision would leave him ignorant to all the new scars that would appear as Marinette would forget to be careful some days and had reignited her passion for sewing. Marinette as well would miss her new scars as she had so many already, it was quite easy to miss the fresh ones. She would simply overlook them, focusing on never entertaining the idea of a second chance. 

It was shortly after Marinette regained her feeling that Wonder Woman approached them with the offer of mentorship and even league membership in the future. To say she and Chat were surprised was an understatement. While Chat was quick to agree, it took some convincing from her partner and the prospect of meeting a past user of Tikki’s for Marinette to agree. She also met Nightwing, the lead trainer of hero youths and Zatanna, another magic user. They both offered invaluable insight and wisdom they eagerly accepted. It was tough learning on the fly all these years. 

Damian had heard of these new heros, but elected to keep his focus on Gotham while the rest of the family was quick to introduce themselves. Chat made frequent trips to the space station to meet with other heros while Marinette stayed in Paris as much as she could, continuing her work on their search for Hawkmoth. It was through Chat that she and Red Robin met, both quick to help the other with their research. 

They quickly became profesional friends, and it was during one of their virtual brainstorm sessions that she became acquainted with Red Hood. It took a little longer for her to open up to him. Jason would consider them good friends while Marinette considered them to be good colleagues. Jason was determined to win her over to his view of things. 

Thanks to everyone's constant assistance, Hawkmoth was finally defeated by the time she was just shy of turning twenty. It had been far too long a fight in her opinion, but the man was smart, Marinette had to give him that. Now that Marinette felt safe enough to leave Paris, she accepted Red Robin's offer of training further with the league. Under the pretense of going to American College, she left home. 

It was on her first night in Gotham that fate finally played its final card. She was on her way to the assigned meet up point, enjoying the taller buildings for longer free falls. She relished the air rushing into her eyes and past her ears. Just as she was reaching for her yo-yo she saw a figure swinging towards her. Before she could react, it had grabbed hold of her, leaving them tangled together swinging through the air. Marinette squirmed to see her mysterious rescuers face. Then she felt it, a strong pull of her eyes to his and an electric spark between their bodies when their eyes met. 

Damian wanted nothing more than to stare into those ocean blue eyes for the rest of his life, but he didn’t want the rest of his life to be the next minute. He quickly swung them to a safe and secluded building top, conveniently the same Marinette had been heading for moments before. They stumble a little upon landing because of their refusal to let go of the other person. 

“You’re alive.” Their whisper of unity only draws them closer to the other. 

Marinette refuses to let pessimism take over, this is real, this is her soul mate, and he's very much alive. However she still reaches up to touch right above his heart, signing in relief as she feels the originator of her scar right there under his uniform. 

“Woah hey Demon-spawn you can let Little Bug go now, you’re scaring her” Neither register the watching parties voices. Damian reaches up to brush away her tears, hyper focused on every feature he can take in at this moment. Her button nose, the barely concealed freckles across her nose, her peach lips mouthing the word alive over and over, and obviously her eyes. 

Slowly Marinette reaches up to remove his mask, the boys freaked for a moment. After all, even they haven’t revealed their identities to her. They start to freak even more when Damian doesn’t stop her, but reaches up to help. His eyes were more beautiful than she had ever imagined. A dark green that complimented his arabian skin tone better than any color ever could. He was perfect. 

She whispers the word alive one last time before standing on her tiptoes, tangling her fingers into the hair at the base of his neck and her lips meeting his. Damian leans down, arms wrapping tightly around her waist. 

“What is happening!?” Jason shouts, desiring to run from the scene and needing to see it through to the end at the same time.

It was finally Jason’s freakout that they registered their audience but still didn’t have a care in the world. Damian pulls away first, leaning his head against hers, eyes closed, just relishing in the feeling of her in his arms. 

Marinette’s legs give out from under her, Damian softly pulling her into his lap, still refusing to let go of her. She starts to cry uncontrollably, a death grip on the hood of his cape. “You’re really here, you really are alive.”

“I didn’t kill you,” Damian sighs, burying his head into her shoulder. Letting his brothers watch him kiss his soulmate was one thing. To let them see him break down and cry was another entirely. “You lived.”  

Tim finally put all the pieces together, pulling Jason along with him off the roof. “Whoa, wait Red, they still haven’t told us what’s going on”

“And they won't for the next few hours. I’ll explain everything, just let them process this alone.” Jason finally relents to that, following him, but not without one last look at his baby brother. Damian had always been a tense on edge child, a habit that never fully went away as he aged, but never before had Jason seen him so relaxed and at peace. 

Marinette and Damian stayed in their own little world for the remainder of the night, having moved from the roof top back to her apartment. They talked about anything and everything, always touching the other in some way. Damian was the first to awaken well after the sun had risen, Marinette sleeping between him and the back of her couch. He marvels in the fact that she was here. His fingers brush over her cheek, moving her hair out of the way. 

Damian chuckles to himself. She looked like snow white with her ebony hair and peach colored lips contrasting with her fair skin. Finally Damian felt complete, no longer wandering lost in the world. He had found what he had looked for for so long. He would protect her from any more pain at all cost, the guilt heavy from having put her through so much turmoil. 

“Stop that?” Damian eyes her curiously as she stares up at him through her lashes, sleep still heavy in her eyes. 

“Stop what?”

“Blaming yourself for what happend.”

“But I-”

“You were taken advantage of, and manipulated to achieve the outcome your mother wanted. You were protecting your family, that is all that matters. That and that you’re here now.” She snuggles against his chest. “Leave the past in the past”

“Ok love, I will try for you.” Marinette hum, content with that answer for now.

Damian finally speaks again after giving Marinette a few minutes to fully reach functioning capacity, “We best go talk to everyone and get the drama over with”

Marinette chuckles at that. She would never have imagined that her soul mate would be the little brother to her two closest friends. Fate plays a funny game. “If I think too hard about it I get really embarrassed.”

“Then don’t think about it, see it as another mission to accomplish and that you will complete it flawlessly.” He kissed her hairline, slowly sitting up to stretch out. Rarely did he fall asleep in uniform, and no previous time has ever been comfortable. 

Two hours later and they are at the Manor, Jason and Tim not overly surprised to see her, neither mentioning the night before except saying she should let them know when she’s ready to go out for patrol again. Damian is surprisingly docile towards everyone's inquiries about himself and Marinette. That is until Jason says Damian should have met her sooner, then maybe he wouldn’t have been such a murderous demon. That comment did not go over well with either of the pair, however one handled it better than the other. You would think it the other way around until Damian slaps his hand over Marinette's mouth to keep her from going off on Jason.

“Let's go eat lunch now, I’m sure Alfred is close to finished anyway.” Damian gently pushed Marinette through the door, but he can’t stop her from throwing a glare over her shoulder. 

“Watch yourself Jason,” Marinette herself was growing increasingly overprotective of Damian, scared to lose him again. Jason can’t help the shiver of fear that runs its course through his body, Tim only laughs at his expense. 

“Wow she still doesn’t trust you.”

“Oh common Little Bug, don’t be like that!” Tim shakes his head at their shenanigans. It was going to be an interesting new chapter in the Wayne household.Tim Watches from the doorway, leaning heavily on it as he observes them. He had never seen more life in their eyes or on their faces. Marinette had this new glow about her, and Damian looked at her with a gentless that none of them had ever seen before. After all, scars may remind you of your past, but they also show you the potential for your future. And those two had all the potential in the world.

[felicia-cat-hardy]

Max Minghella On 'The Handmaid's Tale,' His Dad, Romance, &amp; 'Spiral'

Max Minghella is sitting in his backyard in the LA sunshine, his t-shirt an homage to the French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve, his adopted shepherd mix, Rhye, excited by the approach of a package courier.

“You okay, sweetheart?” he asks — the dog, not me — tenderly.

Minghella, who at 35 has dozens of screen credits to his name, is best known as The Handmaid’s Tale’s cunning chauffeur Nick Blaine, a character who it’s difficult to imagine saying sweetheart. In airless Gilead, of course, a cautious hand graze with Elisabeth Moss’ June can pass for a big romantic gesture. In a Season 1 episode featuring child separation and hospital infant abduction, Nick’s major contribution is to trade stolen glances with a sex slave while “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” pumps discordantly along. I ask Minghella about playing the series’ closest approximation to a dreamy male lead against the show’s dark narrative of female subjugation.

“I know this is not the answer you want to hear,” Minghella says with none of Nick’s hesitation. “But I like that stuff, right? In the pilot, I think Nick only had a handful of lines. It wasn't clear that this is what the character would turn into. And it's quite fortunate for me personally, because I'm not a massively sort of intellectual person in my real life. I love Fifty Shades of Grey. That's like my Star Wars. It suits me to play a character like him.”

Minghella surmises that this enduring romanticism is an outcome of nurture. His father, the late British director Anthony Minghella, made grand romantic dramas like Cold Mountain and The English Patient. And there was the young, cinema-mad Max sitting on the living room sofa, absorbing everything. “It’s taken me a long time to understand this,” he says of his prolonged childhood exposure to love stories. “My dad made The English Patient when I was 10. So it was two years of watching the dailies to that movie and then watching 50 cuts of it. And then [The Talented Mr.] Ripley he made when I was 13, and it was the same thing.” These were an adolescent Max Minghella’s alternative to reruns. “I think they did shape my perspective on the world in a lot of ways, specifically The English Patient. That was a complicated love story, and I wonder sometimes how much it's affected my psychology.”

Some sons rebel; others resemble. Minghella’s co-star O-T Fagbenle, who plays June’s other lover from before the time of Gilead, got his first job acting in Anthony Minghella’s romantic crime film Breaking and Entering. “Anthony is one the kindest, most beautiful men that I've ever had the privilege of working with before,” Fagbenle says. “And Max has his gorgeous, sensitive, open-minded soul.”

Though Minghella spent his childhood on the set of The Talented Mr. Ripley, playing an uncredited Confederate soldier role in Cold Mountain, and tooling around with a Super-8 camera Matt Damon gave him, he insists his upbringing was normal. He grew up in South Hill Park overlooking Hampstead Heath in London with his father and mother, the choreographer Carolyn Choa. (Minghella also has a half-sister, Hannah Minghella, who is now a film executive.) Yes, technically, it was London, but that’s not how it seemed. “I feel like I grew up in a very small town. Every school I went to was in Hampstead. I was born in Hampstead,” Minghella says of the small map dot of his life before university. “When I went to New York, I felt I was going to the big city.”

Despite his illustrious surname, movie-watching was far from restricted to the classics. “Beverly Hills Cop is definitely the movie I remember having an unhealthy obsession with. I think I saw it when I was 5 for the first time, and I'd watch it just two or three times a day for years. I'm just obsessed with it.”

Plenty of actors can trace their love of movies back to a love of stories, but for Minghella the relationship seems to flow in reverse. When he left for Columbia University, Minghella opted to study history for its connection, through storytelling, to film. It was during the summers between his years of college that he started taking acting more seriously. Before his graduation, he’d already appeared in Syriana, starring Damon and George Clooney. Soon, he’d make a splash as Divya Narendra in The Social Network in 2010 and be cast in Clooney’s Ides of March. As all young actors eventually must, Minghella moved to Los Angeles.

It’s been over a decade since he last lived on the Heath, but, perhaps unusually for a person who’s chosen his profession, Minghella is adamantly not a “shapeshifter,” in his words. Home for Christmas this year, he started sifting through old journals stored at his mother’s house, “just like scraps of writing from when I was extremely young up through my teenage years,” before coming to America. “It was hilarious to me,” Minghella says of staring at his childhood reflection. “My review of a movie at 7 years old is pretty much what my review of a movie at 35 will be. My taste hasn't changed much. And when I sort of love something, I do tend to continue to love it.”

Which brings us back to his enduring love of romance, born of his bloodline, which is all over Minghella’s own 2018 directorial debut. Teen Spirit is a hazily lit film about a teenage girl from the Isle of Wight — the remote British island where Max’s father Anthony was born — who enters a local X-Factor-style singing competition. (It stars Minghella’s rumored girlfriend of several years, Elle Fanning.) The story is small, but its crescendos are epic.

Minghella calls the movie — an ode to the power of the pop anthem — “embarrassingly Max.” Max loves a good music-driven movie trailer — he’s watched the one for Top Gun: Maverick “many” times. And Max loves the rhythmic beats of sports movies like Friday Night Lights. Max loves movies with excesses of female energy, like Spring Breakers. He likens Teen Spirit to an experiment, his answer to the question, “Can I take all these things that I love and find a structure that can hold them?” The result is a touching “hodgepodge” of Minghella’s fascinations, inspired by the songs from another thing he loves: Robyn’s 2010 album Body Talk (itself a dance-pop meditation on love).

Minghella hasn’t directed any films since, but he sees now how making movies fits his personality — organized, impatient — more organically than starring in them does. Directing also helped him to appreciate that acting is “much harder than I was giving it credit for,” which, in turn, has made him like it more. Besides The Handmaid’s Tale currently airing on Hulu, Minghella appears in Spiral, the ninth installment in the Saw horror franchise and, from where I’m sitting, at least, a departure.

“I do like horror movies, but the thing that was really kind of magical is that I was feeling so nostalgic, right? We talked about Beverly Hills Cop earlier. I was just missing a certain kind of movie,” Minghella explains of his new role as Chris Rock’s detective partner. He was yearning for simple story-telling, like in the buddy cop movies of his youth, especially 48 Hours. It almost goes without saying that a buddy cop movie is another kind of love story. “And then I read the script and it was very much in that vein.” He clarifies: “I mean, it's also extremely Saw. It's very much a horror movie.”

His renewed excitement for acting translated onto The Handmaid’s Tale set, too. Veteran Hollywood producer Warren Littlefield describes casting Minghella in the role of Nick as an effortless choice: “Sometimes you agonize over things. [Casting Minghella] was instantly clear to me, and everyone agreed.” Now in its fourth season, the tone of the Hulu hit is graver than ever. Gilead is more desperate to maintain its rule, and so more audacious in its violence. Perhaps it’s fitting that the show’s romantic gestures finally match that scale.

In one particularly soaring moment, Elisabeth Moss’ June and Minghella’s Nick meet at the center of a bridge and crush into a long kiss. It’s been two seasons since they held their newborn daughter together, and it’s hard to see how this isn’t their last goodbye. Littlefield, like Minghella, is here for the romance among the rubble. “It's spectacular when they come together. In the middle of all of the trauma is this epic love story,” he says. “Max is just magnificent in the role.”

For Minghella, the satisfaction is more personal. He works with good people, he likes his scenes, and he thinks Nick is a complex character. Minghella read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time in college in 2005. Like all the things Minghella has ever liked, he still likes it. He’s as proud of this most recent season as he is the show’s first. And he watched Nick and June race recklessly back to each other across the expanse of the screen exactly how you might expect. “I watched it like a fan girl.”

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[insanityclause]

Guillermo Del Toro is no stranger to widespread acclaim, especially from his ride or die legion of fans. Pan’s Labyrinth, the Hellboy duology, the list of genre-bending, timeless masterworks goes on. Coming off his 2 Oscar wins for The Shape of Water in 2018, and moving into finally releasing his animated Pinocchio film from the pits of development hell along with an adaption of Nightmare Alley next year, this couldn’t be a more thriving time for the Mexican auteur. Though amongst all the praise and glory, something has still felt missing these last handful of years. Besides his Oscar-winning film, Del Toro’s works prior to the 2010s are what generally buzz conversations of his genius. Those aforementioned films did, after all, skyrocket his name to fame. His titles from the last decade, however, are just as crucial to the Del Toro canon and emphasize his greater influence as a filmmaker. One, in particular, has seemingly gotten by in its young life at the hands of few. But now that Crimson Peak has officially turned 5, it’s time to turn that few into many.

Del Toro’s trifecta of the 2010s (not counting his work on television) stand out vastly from one another. Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak, and The Shape of Water: all love letters penned from the ‘nichest’ corners of his mind. These 3 arguably boast more diversity in genre than Del Toro’s 5 films of the 2000s (3 comic-book adaptations and 2 Spanish-set fantasies). Not a criticism, as established, those films now flaunt an immovable place within the cultural zeitgeist. Though with a career notoriously marked by a slew of unrealized projects (more on this later), it’s not often recognized how the ideas that did make the cut still lead a crystal clear trajectory in Del Toro’s growth as a storyteller. In the eyes of many, Del Toro pulls ideas out of a hat and gambles on which one actually sees the light of day. Humorous sure, but this is far from the truth.

Each Del Toro project feels like a pivotal step for what would come later, take his work on Trollhunters paving the way for his upcoming first animated feature for instance. Despite this trajectory, Crimson Peak feels criminally unsung 5 years later. Pacific Rim continued its life with a sequel and more planned spin-offs. The Shape of Water literally set a new bar for the Academy. This leaves Crimson Peak feeling like the pushed aside middle child of this trio. This isn’t a call for a sequel, and ‘underrated’ gets tossed around very loosely in modern film discussion. But for cinema as quintessential as Crimson Peak, it just doesn’t feel like it gets enough recognition – especially when the current film industry is seeing less big-budget, R-rated projects heavily steeped in genre.

You can easily trace Crimson Peak‘s short-lived spotlight back to its marketing. The timely October release and scare-heavy trailers sold a classic ‘Haunted House’ horror, when in reality, Del Toro’s film is a Gothic Romance. Set in the early 1900s, an aspiring American writer, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), is swept away by a promising English baronet, Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). They discover true love and marry, leading the young newlywed to her husband’s decaying mansion in the English hills. The age-old manor is slowly, but surely, sinking in red clay – the very source of Sharpe’s wealth. Here Edith is forced to live with her new sister-in-law, Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), a reserved yet commanding force who works to hide the true nature of the house and its endless secrets. Mystery lingers as untamed lust, envy and greed unfold between the mansion walls, not leaving enough room for the restless red-colored spirits who haunt them. When it snows on this cursed hill, the clay surfaces, making it seem as if the land bleeds. Given more than just red clay rises from beneath, a deeper meaning is given to the place locals call ‘Crimson Peak’.

Just like the clay at the center of its mystery, Crimson Peak is an amalgamation, but of genre. It would be novice to expect anything less from Del Toro. The Gothic elements call back to many classic tales, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s adaption of Rebecca and, of course, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. On the horror side, homage is paid to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. It’s a devilish blend that only this filmmaker could pull off so beautifully. And oh is Crimson Peak so god damn gorgeous. To contrast common period pieces that go for muted or sepia-toned color palettes, Del Toro turns the saturation on high. The result is an eye-popping picture that heightens the core emotions at play: fear, pain, and more importantly, love. Simply mesmerizing, avid fans will be quick to recognize the same shades of golden yellows, sea greens, and ruby reds found in Del Toro’s other works. It feels right at home in his filmography visually, while packing its own unique punch.

Red, a color mainly associated with passion, here instead intricately represents endless bloodshed. A twist that would suggest Crimson Peak is just as equal a horror film as it is a love story. Regardless of what might have been initially marketed to audiences in 2015, this film is a Gothic Romance from start to finish. Del Toro himself made this distinction clear to the studio from the get-go and repeatedly draws the line whenever given the chance. Yet, much like the rest of his repertoire, Crimson Peak utilizes horror not as a means to an end, but as a means for introspection. Yes, there are classic horror conventions such as jump scares, but it couldn’t be more obvious that Crimson Peak isn’t trying to evoke the same kind of high and dry fear other films heavily rely on. Del Toro is actively trying to get under your skin to achieve a hell of a cathartic viewing experience.

The ghosts of our past and how we let them define us is a core theme in Crimson Peak. The film opens on a flashback in which Edith is visited by the charcoal black ghost of her recently deceased mother. The nature of this visit sets the groundwork for the rest of the narrative. Mother Ghost, dreadful in appearance, doesn’t necessarily come to haunt her child, but to warn her. “Beware of Crimson Peak,” she says. The way Edith takes in this otherworldly occurrence, and those that follow, sets her apart from everyone else in the film. Wherein others flee from or lock away the ghosts of their past, she learns how to wear them on her sleeves – reaching out to the dead multiple times in the story, each attempt more confident than the last. Not too dissimilar from what Del Toro was playing with before, Jaeger pilots confronting past trauma in their quest to defeat Kaiju. At the same time, the transformation that occurs in Crimson Peak when neglected demons consume you from the inside – humans becoming the true monsters of their supernatural tales – would only be amplified in Del Toro’s next film.

Every minute detail coincides with this strategized, therapeutic use of horror. And to the everyday moviegoer trained by common tropes, Crimson Peak is quite deceptive. Just like Mother Ghost at the beginning of the film, the red spirits never manifest with the intent to cause physical harm, but instead to give messages and guide. Red clay seeps down the walls and the mansion ‘breathes’ as the country winds burst in. The house feels alive in the most cinematic sense possible, but the case as to it being ‘horrifying’ is not so black and white. Expertly designed to every inch, there is plenty of beauty to be found in the manor. Much of it has just been corrupted by a debauched affair – keeping this story rooted as a Gothic Romance. Subversion has always been the name of Del Toro’s game, and it’s within Crimson Peak that he uses it to mix genre so well while still staying true to his vision.

Though Crimson Peak saw Del Toro take subversion to a new level, notably with his main character. This film is a key chapter in his overarching legacy; not the first of his works to be lead by a defiant woman, but the first to have the female hero entangled in an unabashed love story. Effortlessly played by the brilliant Mia Wasikowska, the not so damsel in distress at the center of Crimson Peak is one of the most significant characters of Del Toro’s career. In discussing Gothic Romance with The Mary Sue in 2015, Del Toro explains: “This is quintessentially a female genre, that was written with characters that were very complex, very strong. I wanted to make a movie in which to some degree I recuperated and, maybe if possible, enhanced all that.” And enhanced he did for every central male character acts in more distress than Edith ever does, even when she is literally at the edge of death. A more than welcome change of pace that makes for a more resonating film.

Edith’s willingness to tackle the unknown is captivating and her vigor inspiring. But she isn’t absolved of frailty. For someone who comes to terms with facing the dead, her sheer vulnerability to heartbreak and suffering brings great humanity to the role. Hardly recognized, but Edith is one of Del Toro’s most self-reflective protagonists. A marginalized writer, inspired by the great Mary Shelley no less, in the midst of drafting her magnum opus, she immediately faces backlash from her novel’s inclusion of the paranormal. “It’s not [a ghost story]. It’s more a story with a ghost in it. The ghost is just a metaphor… for the past,” she says – giving Crimson Peak a rare Del Toro tongue-in-cheek quality that he utilizes until the credits roll. Meta enough given that the crimson ghosts Edith later encounters are, in fact, echoes of the past, but when looking back on the public’s initial perception of the film, it creates a charming, albeit ironic, wit only found here.

Additionally, when tracing back to Crimson Peak‘s pre-production days, you’ll find something even more profound. Penned by Del Toro and an old collaborator, screenwriter Matthew Robbins; this was the first script completed after the release of Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006. The two first worked together an entire decade earlier on Mimic, which has now gone down as the only film Del Toro has truly lost to studio interference. Del Toro was supposed to direct Crimson Peak in the late 2000s, but along came Hellboy II and his involvement in launching The Hobbit (another R.I.P). Through this hectic time, Del Toro would reunite with Robbins in writing 2010’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, directed by Troy Nixey. However, the two also spent time together writing something else: an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

For those unfamiliar, At the Mountains of Madness is by far one of, if not, the most tragic of this filmmaker’s unrealized projects. After spending years trying to get this dream off the ground, Del Toro had the following to say to Empire in 2010: “It doesn’t look like I can do it. It’s very difficult for the studios to take the step of doing a period-set, R-rated, tentpole movie with a tough ending and no love story.” The payoff of Crimson Peak being a period-set, R-rated, tentpole film only 5 years after that statement couldn’t be sweeter. In the film, Edith is told to insert a love story for the better of her novel. Del Toro is obviously commenting on expectations tied to gender here, but you can’t help but wonder if he’s also referring to one of the biggest thorns in his own writing career – one that also ties back to writing partner Matthew Robbins.

When faced with the question, Del Toro has consistently said that all of his films carry an inherent Mexican touch just from the utter fact that they come from him, and Crimson Peak is no different. Whether if deriving from his personal experiences with tackling genre, both on and off paper, or from actual events tied to his life – Del Toro reimagines two separate ghostly encounters experienced by him and his mother through Edith – this film beams with the very essence of Del Toro’s soul. Perhaps most personified when the marginalized writer gets bloody and fights back with nothing but her pen, a visual that cements this as an important stepping stone in his career. It’s a fascinating through-line, connecting to very different segments of his canon while still defining a clear path. The mending of our wounds and subversion of gender roles is continued from Pacific Rim, while setting a bold new course for delving into unfiltered, mature romance in The Shape of Water.

This is only a fraction of what makes Crimson Peak quintessential Guillermo Del Toro. Gothic Romance has long been part of this auteur’s framework, and you would be remiss not to indulge in all of its glorious melodrama. Even if it isn’t your cup of tea, Del Toro will make it so. Reaching its 5-year anniversary, the film hits stronger than before. The intricate motifs, compelling use of practical effects (complete with the involvement of Del Toro veteran Doug Jones), and cathartic use of horror make for something that has yet to be replicated by a major studio. Its lacking box office performance suggests that maybe the world merely wasn’t ready for this masterwork? But just like its characters, we hold the power to define what comes next. Del Toro himself has previously ranked Crimson Peak as one of the 3 best films he’s ever made, and straight-up called it the most beautiful. Take his word and dive in no strings attached, because who knows when we’ll get another large scale, unapologetic Gothic Romance with this much grandeur.

[nad-zeta]

Match up ~(˘▾˘~)

Hi I’d like an Ikevamp matchup! (This is my first time doing this but oof) i’m a shy(at first) brown(Filipino to be exact) girl that’s a lil on the chubby side, Virgo, messy short hair, 149 cm(short-), and an INFJ T and a Ravenclaw. I’ve also got really fat legs and as much as i like them some dont :”) i like to read books than listen to people read them aloud cuz I’m a visual learner. I like writing bc it helps me get all these ideas out of my head. But i’m really unorganized so i never really finished anything other than a few poems and one horror short story. I enjoy cracking a good joke for anyone to laugh at and am really affectionate with my loved ones. I draw sometimes too but they’re not that good :> so my hobbies are:writing(mainly), drawing. I love learning about new stuff that’s not really included in school bc it’s not one of my biggest priorities to me lmao. I also really like studying whilst listening to music. But unto my dislikes, i really dont like injustice for other people and have this belief in me(i belive everyone is equal). I hate loud noises (eg. rain, or a truck) it messes with me more than my hair lol. I don’t like people insulting me in a more meaningful sense, meaning im not hurt if anyone curses at me but if it’s a little more meaningful then that hits me hard. Most people think im insensitive but i get hurt too ya know. But i always welcome critique even if it doesnt seem so. I flirt sometimes with my friends cuz thats how much i love them ig. I can play the ukulele but im not too fond on playing instruments so i ight sing instead of both. Anyway, i hope that’s enough. Message me if it wasn’t and i’ll add more! Thanks!

 Hi hi, love! ❤🥰Thank you so much for the request! Ooooh your first match-up, how exciting! I hope I can live up to your expectations. 🦋🥰☀️Anyways sorry for the long wait and I truly hope you enjoy. Hope you have a super good day!❤🥰  @la-liar​

So I match you with…………… Mozart

So the first time the two of you interact, it was basically silence. Both of you cuties were too shy and reserved to speak to each other. That is basically how it was for the first few weeks of your stay at the mansion. 

You were rather shy, so you kept mostly to yourself spending all your time in the library, reading and writing. But that all changed one day when you discovered the music room. 

You had decided on a whim to explore the mansion a bit and stumbled upon a pristine music room. You made your way inside and smiled as you spotted a ukulele in the corner of the room. You simply couldn’t help yourself, as you picked up the instrument and started to play. Closing your eyes as you played, you started to sing along to the familiar tune.

At that moment, Mozart had walked past his beloved music room. He had stepped out for a moment, only to get himself a freshly brewed cup of hot chocolate before continuing to compose his newest piece. The second he heard the sound of an instrument coming from his beloved music room he sighed internally. He slammed open the door and froze in his tracts when he spotted you sitting on the floor in the corner of the room absorbed by the music you were producing. He had every intention of scolding you, but all that dissipated as the soft, soothing tones of your voice wash over him like a gentle ocean wave. He found himself calm and at peace for once in his life. 

Inspired by the tune you were singing, he sat down at the grand piano and started playing along. The second the first note of the piano echoed off the walls of the room you opened your eyes in shock, not realizing someone had come in midway through your song. You profusely apologized to the man and left before he could say anything.

For the rest of the day Mozart was stuck, he couldn’t get that song you were singing out of his head. He was starting to get frustrated as thoughts of you were plaguing his mind. That night he stormed up to your room, took you by the hand and guided you back to the music room where he handed you the ukulele, “Play.” His words were blunt and his violet eyes were sharp and determined. You stared up at the man in confusion as he sat down at the grand piano, waiting for you to start the song. You sighed sitting down next to him on the bench and softly started strumming the strings. Mozart couldn’t keep the faint smile from forming on his face at the sound of the perfect harmony and melody the two of you produced together. Since that night you were the only other person, other than Sebastian permitted to enter into the music room whenever you wanted.

Every day since, you would wander into the room as Mozart would play the soothing melodies. You loved to study while listening to music. So every day you would bring your books to the music room as Mozart played and just sit and read or write, as Mozart’s symphonies would echo in the background. Although the white-haired man would never admit it, he very much enjoyed your company. Unlike the rest of the residents, you were quiet and soft-spoken, and you didn’t irritate him like the rest of his housemates. 

Often during the afternoons, when Mozart would take a break from playing, he would walk over the corner of the room that you would occupy and just stare down at you. He would usually in his classical tsundere roundabout way, ask you if you wanted to grab lunch with him. You honestly had to smile at his clumsily blunt tone and the dust of pink that would grace his features.

The two of you would sit under the shade of a tree and chat for hours and hours about the most random of topics. You had quickly come to realize that the brutal way in which Mozart spoke, was just a front to cover up his true feelings. Thus you never minded the meaningless insults that he would occasionally throw your way. Cause they were just that meaningless. If anything, the way he would say them with that slight smile dancing across his lips, they were probably meant as his own type of endearments towards you.

Both of you cuties often get so absorbed in your daydreams that during your lunchtime picnic, that you can be found just staring into space. Mozart’s mind would be occupied with the latest songs that he would like to compose, and your mind would be drifting off, thinking about the latest topic that you have learned about or read. Its actually pretty hilarious, especially when the two of you are at the dinner table and Arthur is chatting away to the two of you, while both of you would be off in dreamland. It’s only when Arthur waves a hand in front of your eyes that both of you come back to reality. During these times, you and Mozart usually lock eyes and laugh, as it had become a somewhat, inside joke between the two of you.

You often flirted with the man, especially after the two of you had started to become friends. You loved the way his cheeks would get dusted in a light pink shade matching his eyes perfectly. And you can’t help but laugh whenever he stutters a little insult in response. Although don’t get me wrong, he is the only person who can give you small insult endearments. Anyone else who dare utter one bad thing about you, will face Mozart’s scorn. 

Like one time the two of you went to the bookshop to browse together, when some dodge man came up to you and started telling you that a woman shouldn’t be in a book shop and that the book you were holding was too advanced for you. Cue Mozart practically tearing apart the man with his sharp gaze. Mozart’s voice boomed in the bookshop like a crack of a whip, and by the time he was done giving the man a verbal smackdown, the dodgy fellow couldn’t leave the shop quick enough. 

Just then violet eyes met your dark brown ones, as Mozart gave you the most tender look and asked in a soft tone if you were okay. He could see the sadness in your eyes, and he knew even though you put up a tough front, you were also rather sensitive deep down. He gave you a tight hug and kissed your forehead as he told you not to ponder on the man’s hurtful words. “Mein Liebe, don’t let that man’s mindless babble bother you.” He then took you by the hand and lead you to a coffee shop where he bought the two of you some hot chocolate. And the two of you spent the rest of the afternoon chatting away.

It wasn’t clear exactly when you and Mozart transitioned from friendship into a relationship, but regardless you were the only person privileged enough to see this man’s soft side. And boy oh boy was his smile enough to make your heart melt. Mozart is actually a massive softie under his harsh words, and loves to shower you in affection. He knows you hate loud noises, so he is always sure to, take you the town route with the least amount of people and noises. And you best be sure he will be by your side to soothe you in a split second during any type of thunderstorms

He never knew just how much you hated loud noises like thunderstorms until one night. It was the dead of night, and the sky was littered with dark stormy clouds and flashes of lightning. You woke up abruptly to the loud rumble of thunder that followed a flash of light. You let out a loud squeak as you pulled your blanket over your head, in an attempt to block out the noise. By the second flash and roars of thunder, you were on your feet making your way to Mozart’s room. 

You gently pushed open the door, when yet another loud crack of thunder and lightning could be heard shaking the mansion’s walls. Mozart had no time to react, as all he heard was the patter of your bare feet on the wooden floor, and then the weight of a warm body diving onto his bed. He cracked open an eye and was shocked to see the expression of dread on your tear-stained face. He wasted no time at all in pulling you beneath the covers into his warm embrace and he pressed your face to his warm chest. He gently traced soothing circles on your back, while he tenderly sang you a soft lullaby to coax you into sleep. The noise of thunder and lightning faded into the background, as you focus on the feeling of Mozart’s fingertips dancing across your skin and his soft, soothing voice. 

Since then, at any sign of a storm, Mozart would be sure to drop everything and seek you out. He would usually wrap the two of you in a fluffy blankie, and he just holds you tight in his arms. Sometimes he would play the piano to soothe your anxiety, while other times he will just sing to you.

Mozart absolutely loves your sense of humour, and his stony features will always crack with a slither of a smile whenever you make a joke. Bonus points if you actually get him to laugh. He will legit huff out in laughter, while shyly hiding his face in the crook of your neck as you continue to crack hilarious jokes. Anyone privileged enough to see this rare scene unfolds is very lucky indeed, as Mozart’s smile and laughter is like the sun coming out after a very long stormy week. It is bright and filled with warmth, and reserved for your eyes only.

Even though you have a tendency to never really finish writing, Mozart will insist you show him any of the pieces that you do manage to complete. He loves the way your words flow on paper, and it down right inspires him to write a few songs to accompany your stories. He also beams with pride whenever you draw him a cute little scene on his sheet music. He will be sure to keep that page with your doodle safe for all eternity, cause he just loves them so much. 

The two of you cuties are the most affectionate couple around, behind closed doors of course as Mozart might just die from embarrassment if the two of you engage in any sort of PDA. He loves it when you sit beside him and rest your head on his shoulder as he plays you the newest ballad of his love. You are the love of his life, and he will spend every day of his existence loving you. He loves to give you cute little Eskimo and butterfly kisses whenever the two of you meet in the hallway.

You best be sure this man will spend every free moment he can get hugging and cuddling you. Often the two of you cuties will simply be spending a quiet afternoon in the music room together, nestled in each others arms while drinking a warm cup of hot chocolate, listening to the pitter patter of the rain outside. 

Other potential matches……………. Dazai

I hope you enjoyed this dear and I hope you have the best day. 🦋☀️❤

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Oooooh I am very much looking forward to seeing this B and Demetri and Connor dynamic!

“Hey Manning, I almost thought you wouldn’t show… Oh you brought the dog.”

An eye roll but the handler kept his smile in place. 

“He still looks like a handful, he’d eat this little one alive.” A  gentle tug and Demetri moved obediently to stand in front of the handler with his head still bowed.

Connor turned, keeping one arm tightly around B. 

 "Yeah, he goes everywhere I go, now. You think I want to be in that hotel bed by myself? Show me the stray." 

 When Demetri moved out in front, Connor blinked with no particular memory sparking. He'd seen a lot of pets come through before he quit. "Oh, okay. This is him? He's pretty."

When B saw who was waiting from them he couldn't have been happier to be there. "Demetri!" He gasped, wiggling out of Connor's tight grip on him to rush forward and slam his hands on the desk. His eyes tracked the hands on his dear friends' back and he growled and curled his top lip to bare his silver canines. "Let 'im go... Right now."

The handler recoiled and unconsciously yanked Demetri back with him, startling the blond into looking up. 

There was a vague recognition of the name that felt almost like his own but drifted too far out of reach to grasp. He stayed pressed to the handler for a long moment before a faint smile cracked through his panicked expression.

 He could hardly believe his luck of who had come to save him. 

 He could never forget B’s face, the only kind face he had known for years and had been grieving the loss of for too long. 

After a moment of stunned but elated staring he squirmed away from the handler, no longer needing the man’s reassurance. 

 Demetri skirted round the desk and launched himself at B with all the strength he could muster, clinging on to the familiar source of comfort without concern for the other two men watching the display. He hissed through his teeth when he bumped the sliced up brand against B but still refused to let go. He was terrified if he let go it wouldn’t be real anymore. He would still be on the street lost and afraid.

Connor stared blankly at B as he ran forward. 

He barely had time to open his mouth to order him to drop the aggression before the hot little blond had jumped forwards too, and the two pets were holding each other. "What the fuck...?" He blinked rapidly, then looked at the other handler and gave a shrug. 

 "Hey." He gave a quick, low whistle to get B's attention. "You know 'im, baby?"

B couldn't believe it, sure that he was dreaming and he'd be woken up by a soft touch on his shoulder and be back in the truck again. "I... How?" 

His words stuck in his throat, his chest swelling with light as he caught the boy flinging himself onto him. He held him tightly, rocking him from side to side like he used to do and tucking Demetri's head under his chin. 

 At the sound of the whistle B looked up, eyes glossy and a smile splitting across his face. "Yes! Yes, sir! This... This is Demetri... He was... He was Mister Rossi's pet..." He said, feeling the tension in the other and the pained hiss. 

 "W-Wait... You're hurt..." He murmured, gently pulling him back to look at Demetri's chest. "Oh..." He noticed the blood staining through his shirt. "Oh ... isn't that... Hey... Dem-... Pretty? You alrigh', lad?"

The handler behind the desk couldn’t keep his jaw from dropping, everyone had heard rumours that Rossi’s pet had been run through the system but of course his links to WRU were very hushed up. 

 “Fuck.. that’s Rossi’s pet? Shit, we probably need to let someone know, who was his primary? They’ll know how to reach him.” 

 Demetri let all of the distress from the moment Rossi had dropped him on the street drain out of his body. B was safe, B could protect him. He glanced at the man who had whistled, the dark hair and eyes were disturbingly similar to Rossi but this one seemed less of a threat. 

 There wasn’t a response until B used the correct name and Demetri glanced down at the spotting on the pale grey shirt, staining the fabric. He tugged the neckline down and exposed the damaged brand, it was bleeding a little from slamming into B with such eagerness but was obviously deliberately done. “It’s... it’s fine... I was good, I didn’t move I swear.”

"Oh, Jesus fuck, not those assholes," Connor muttered, feeling a drop in his stomach. B was so excited, he'd be heartbroken when Rossi showed back up to take his pet back- 

 Then Demetri pulled back enough to pull down the neckline of his shirt and Connor's eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline. He held up a hand. "Gonna guess you don't need to call Rossi," He said to the other handler, moving closer to take a better look, leaning over with one hand on B's back, casually possessive. "Look at that. That's not amateur work and it wasn't done mad. Bet you fifty bucks Rossi did that himself."

B blinked, struck by the horror of what had happened to his friend. And fury at Rossi. He had never been good to him unless it had served him a purpose. And he used him and hurt him. 

Demetri had been changed by this place as much as he was. Because of him. 

 "It was him..." B said lowly, leaning instinctively into the touch on his back and looking at Connor. "He ... He hurt him. He can't go back to him, sir." B's voice cracked slightly, trembling slightly as he carefully angled Demetri so he could hold him without pushing into the wound. "Please... Connor. He needs to come home with us."

Demetri laid his head on B’s shoulder, offering up a smile to the man who was now close to them. If B trusted him then this man, whose face Demetri was still trying to place, he would have blind allegiance without question from Demetri. 

The handler had shifted around the desk to get a better look, a small piece of scarring was untouched, the only suggestion there had been a brand under all the slices. “Shit, they’re always so much harder to sell on with this kind of damage. I’ll have to see if anyone has space for a refurb this week before he gets a fucking infection..” 

Even with the dog cradling the blond so possessively, the handler never expected that Connor would want to take on more damaged goods.

Connor had a reputation for how he dealt with pets, he couldn’t possibly want this emotionally fragile little wisp of a pet. 

 Demetri lifted his hand and gently traced over B’s chest, the firm planes of muscle just as he remembered them. Capable of so much damage while only ever trying to protect him. His voice was a low wistful murmur. “I missed you B... I wanted you to come home.”

Connor frowned, watching the two pets together. B was always gentle as a lamb with other pets, whether it was Socks or when he was in the Facility training. And B so rarely asked for a single thing for himself - he just took what Connor gave him with gratitude and adoration. 

But he was asking for this. 

Connor moved forward, taking Demetri's chin in his thumb and fingers to tilt it up and look at him, at his eyes. 

 "Baby," He said to B while looking Demetri over, "Baby, I am not a halfway house for stray pets. I can't just bring home every pretty thing that catches your eye..."

B kept his arms tightly wrapped around Demetri, allowing him to touch his chest. His own brand still stung from time to time. But Connor had transformed it. And he hadn't cast him aside when he did. 

 "Missed you too... I missed you so much... I'm sorry..." He rumbled, burying his face into Demetri's hair. He swallowed the lump in his throat, loosening his grip slightly to allow his owner to look over Demetri. 

 He crushed down the urge to smack Connor's hands off him. Connor was kind. Connor wouldn't hurt him. 

"He's... He's not just Pretty..." B murmured. "He's Demetri... He's my ... my friend... I... I love him very much, sir. He needs to be with us... He can be good for you too. He's very good."

Demetri tipped his head with the slightest pressure from Connor, turning his face until he met the man’s dark eyes. There was no hiding his enjoyment at even the barest of contact, the gentleness was what he craved. 

 The handler scoffed from a few feet away, he was still wary of the dog. He had heard about the state of the rookies after a tangle with it and now it had something to guard. But Manning had a point, surely here wasn’t going to let his dog tell him what to do. 

 “You’re not running a charity Manning, don’t want people to talk. The boy’s got Romantic training, the clinic can clean up the wounds and he’ll be on his knees for some cheapskate client in a week or two. He is very pretty..” 

 Demetri couldn’t hide the fear that shone in his eyes, he was supposed to be for Rossi. He should go back to Rossi... but they were talking like Rossi didn’t want him... like he wasn’t good enough. 

He prayed he could stay with B, not daring to want it yet, he could at least understand Connor was in control. Teeth caught his lower lip, his head tipped to the most attractive angle as he all but batted his eyelashes up at Connor. Classic Romantic look, perfected to be irresistible, combined with the low needy whine, most people caved and gave him some attention at that point.

Connor bristled a little at B pushing him in front of the other handler. While technically he wasn't one anymore, he still sure as fuck didn't like the idea of someone looking down on him for being pet-whipped. 

Some owners got that way, spoiling the shit out of their pets and treating them like real people, and Connor had mocked plenty of those in his time. He definitely didn't want to invite the same mockery from the other handler. 

 "Baby, I think I decide what we need in my house, yeah?" His voice was still mostly gentle, but there was an edge of irritation, a warning there. He'd never really hurt B beyond the bedroom - and they did plenty of that, which was perfect and B did so well - but a couple of days barred from petting Socks or the barn cats usually did the trick for discipline. 

 He watched Demetri tilt his head just the right way, blinking at him. "Yeah, he was definitely one of ours. Rossi's pet..." His voice trailed, off, turning Demetri's head to the side, catching faint scarring along his jaw. "Wait, didn't I fuck you once?"

B swallowed thickly, chest tightening at the edge to Connor's voice. He bowed his head hastily. "Yessir... M'sorry, sir... I'm... I just... I thought we could..." He mumbled, heat spreading across his cheeks. 

He had forgotten his place. He wasn't allowed to want things. That wasn't his place at all. 

 He took a small step back, keeping his head lowered reverently.

Demetri still felt the little flutter of panic when people caught sight of the scars. If you aren’t Pretty what’s the point in keeping you around? 

At least Connor didn’t seem put off by them, in fact his words reached into the blond’s scrambled brain and plucked out a memory with shocking clarity. He grinned, a warm natural expression rather than one designed to entice. “Asshole number two...” 

Flickers of shared food, kneeling for the man, the heated mat and a few hours reprieve danced through his mind, they didn’t linger but he knew enough to know this was one of the nice ones. His attention turned back to B who was visibly distressed. 

Without hesitation Demetri was nuzzling his cheek and sliding his hands under B’s shirt. His usual conflict resolution skills kicked in without a second thought, he needed to make B happy, he needed to be good. 

“Shit, are you taking him or not? I would really rather avoid the paperwork and not have him fuck your dog in the lobby.” The handler just needed to wash his hands of this. Rossi was trouble and he needed to avoid that if he wanted to get taken off of desk duty.

Connor took a deep breath, watching the embarrassment and sadness on his dog's face, and then audibly groaned, putting a hand up over his face. Jesus, if B turned on the fucking waterworks he'd be totally lost, right in front of the other handler. 

 "Yeah, fuck. Yeah. Damn it. Baby, you know I hate when you-... fuck." 

Connor sighed and waved his hand at the handler. "Yeah, fine, okay. Just... just whatever means we don't have to call that piece of shit two-bit mob boss." 

 He took Demetri by one arm, pulling him closer to himself and slightly away from B. 

 "This is not because you made your sad face at me, sweetness. It is not. Now come on, we're going outside to figure this shit out a little bit and get you two out of the lobby before someone calls the cops for public indecency." He moved towards the door, pulling Demetri with him, trusting B to fall in as well without even a glance back.

[thebridgehqs]

One day, there is blinding sunshine and you can’t spend an hour outside without getting a bit burnt in the heat. The next, the rain has come back with a bitterly cold wind that gets into your bones. The seasons have changed, and with it, Halloween is quickly approaching. All over the city, things are happening, and not all of them can be explained.

See under the cut for a list of Halloween events that are running, some all month, and others just for the spookiest night of the year.

ooc information: 

Threads can start any time, but we ask that people do not post event starters past Friday the 13th of November, to bookend the spooky season. Of course, you can take as long as you’d like to continue threads after that.  

Please tag any open starters with thebridge: halloween and the location of the starter to make it easier for other players. 

CBD:

Platinum Cinema is airing a different scary movie every day of the month and offers a five percent discount on concessions for anyone dressed up. That discount goes up to ten percent if you are dressed as a character from the movie you’re seeing. Don’t ask how they got movies that weren’t made in this time, that’s not a question you want answered.

The Jolly Roger is offering pirate cruises around the harbour. The crew are all pirates – some of them even real pirates – and they’ll teach you how to swordfight if you ask nicely. If you cause trouble, you’ll really walk the plank, so don’t wear a costume that might weigh you down. If you have a little magic to spare, the captain might even arrange for a flight cruise over the city itself.

The Rocks:

Ghost tours are running every night of the month, starting through the Rocks but leading through other parts of the city to showcase the true and often horrifying history of the city. The thing is, the tour guides, they don’t seem to be real, exactly, and you’ll come away wondering where the ghosts really were. 

The Roadhouse is not the type of place ghosts are welcome. You’ll notice the tour guides stay well away from it, but for any people who do go in, there is a chance for a free drink. If you can tell a scary story that impresses owner Jo Harvelle, your next round is free. But fair warning, she does expect realism. 

Want a stunning costume and a guarantee you won’t look exactly like someone else? Marinette Dupain-Cheng has rented out a room here in the Rocks and offers a cheap tailoring service if you’ve bought a costume that doesn’t quite fit, and a more exclusive costume design service where she’ll make you a one of a kind costume.

Darling Point:

Crimson Rooftop is well known for being a classy place, and Halloween is no exception. On the night of Halloween itself, they are offering a free drink with dinner to guests who are dressed as classic characters, nothing gaudy or foolish. There are also rumours that the meals might even just magically appear on your plate.

Harry Osborn has issued an open invitation to a masquerade party at his manor on Halloween night. It is hardly the only party going on that night, even in Darling Point as well, but it will be a fancy night for all guests.

King’s Cross:

Ember’s Club has decorated appropriately for the month, and the dancers have changed costumes for the month to get into the spirit – absolutely no pun intended, no matter what you might see around the place.

On Halloween, Club Loophole will be exclusive to Arcadia members for the night, with the mysterious leader hosting a party for only the gang itself. Costumes are optional but highly encouraged, and everyone knows better that to disappoint the leader.

In contrast to their well-known rivals, The Phantom is opening their doors to everyone, and making a point of it. They’ll also be holding a costume competition – the person with the best costume in the club at midnight will get their tab paid off, meaning they drink free.  

The Whiskey Chef is offering thematic drinks with their meals all month, and on Halloween, they’re offering a lucky raffle. If your name is called out, you’ll dine free.

If you want to party and you’re okay with the odd displays of magic, but don’t want to go somewhere too crazy, then why not stop by Magnus Bane’s party? Please dress up, whether that means just dressing nicely or in a costume, but a good time is guaranteed to be had – if you don’t drink the wrong thing.

Newtown:

One street, popular with university students, is running a series of haunted houses. Some of these are exactly what you’d expected from a bunch of students, while others are more innovative and use creative technology for bigger scares. And if it so happens that maybe some Weirdsister students got involved in the fun to make their house the spookiest, well, it’s all in good fun.

On the night known by most as Halloween, the university campus will find it much harder to deny the allegations that there is a secret magical campus hidden within the school. To fit the actual season of the southern hemisphere, a Beltane feast will be held on the 30th, and it’ll magically appear on the university grounds for all to enjoy. There will be many traditional events surrounding the feast, such as a bonfire, and it will last from sunset on the 30th to sunset on the 31st, where all traces will magically disappear again.

Ever wanted to learn your future? Ron Weasley is offering the chance for you to find out. If you can find him in the haunted houses in the whole week leading Halloween, he’ll take you aside and tell your future. He doesn’t guarantee you’ll like what he tells you, or that it’ll make sense, but it will be true.

Bondi:

Over the weekend before Halloween itself, Bondi will host a series of competitions during the sunny days of the weekend. To enter, you must compete in a costume the entire time. For each competition, you are scored, and the winner of each round gets a free dinner for two at the Beach House, located right on the waterfront, and the ultimate winner gets $1000. The competition includes: a 5km race, surfing, a 5km swim, weightlifting, and long jump. It is possible to just compete in one round and not the whole thing, but you’d lose the chance of the final prize.

It’s not strictly allowed to host parties on the beach, not that it stops smaller gatherings which go ignored. However, it’ll be impossible to ignore the fantastic display put on by Rose Weasley. With fireworks, bonfires, and plenty of alcohol, this party is sure to end up with more than a little trouble by the time it’s over. 

Balmain:

Interested in something family friendly? Well, Balmain is closing off several streets to make a safe zone for children to go trick or treating without worrying about traffic. Each house along those streets will have appropriate décor – nothing too scary for the little ones – and plenty of candy to give away.

One street will also be holding a street party on All Hallows Eve, where everyone is invited. It’s potluck, so consider bringing something to share. There’ll also be dancing, but the party will be over by 1am.

Parramatta:

Just outside Parramatta, a large field has been turned into a drive-in theatre. Every day of the month, they’re showing family friendly Halloween movies, and after sunset, the movies are truly horror movies. It doesn’t matter if the movies are from another time, or if characters see their stories played out on the screen, it’s free and it’s fun.

Also just outside Parramatta, Rohirrim Stables is offering spooky horse rides, led by owner Eowyn. Bring a picnic lunch or dinner, depending what time you come by, if you dare to eat in the middle of the woods. 

Liverpool:

One farm just outside Liverpool has been turned into a delightfully spooky maze. There are some people who come out of it saying that there are impossible creatures inside the maze, but… at least they got to leave the maze.

Inspired by a legend of a nearby suburb, Liverpool is holding a festival. There will be performers entertaining the crowds, a couple of rides that should certainly not exist in the 20’s, and a parade of spooky costumes. It’s family friendly, and also very popular for daredevils who want to go on the rides.

Note: if you want your muse to win any of the competitions running at any of the locations, please message Admin Mac. You can also message Admin Mac if you want to add any events that are open to muses, whether at someone’s home or their business.

[wavejhs]

Scream

Genre: Thriller/Horror

Pairing: Hoseok/Reader

Word Count: 2,812

Tags: Thriller, Horror, Murder, Some fluff, Angst

Summary: It's tradition for you and your boyfriend to have an annual movie marathon on the eve of your birthday. A mysterious caller makes it a night you'll never forget. Scream!AU

You've always thought it was a satisfying sound; the popping of popcorn as it gets cooked.

In the living room, the screen of your Smart TV displays the Netflix homepage. It's the eve of your birthday and you're getting ready to watch a scary movie. It's a classic slasher one. Your boyfriend had phoned you no less than half an hour ago, telling you he'd be present to hold you as you start your annual movie marathon. You appreciate it, knowing Hoseok wasn't a fan of the horror genre but he was willing to spend one night a year to watch scary films with you.

You make it up to him, though, watching cheesy romance comedies and action movies on his birthday. A balanced compromise means a healthy relationship.

You're walking back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, wanting to make sure you don't miss a spot cleaning up, making sure you've got a large enough blanket draping the couch for when the night gets chilly, making sure your beverages are ready. When you deem everything presentable, you focus on your TV, clicking the first movie on your list.

Your boyfriend lived a few blocks away from your house, usually taking him less than 10 minutes from his house to yours and you wonder what's taking him so long. You're just about to pick your phone up to dial him when it rings, startling you enough to fumble with it when it nearly slips out of your fingers.

It's an unknown number. Pursing your lip, you answer the call.

You clear your throat, "Hello?"

"Hello." It's a man's voice.

You wait for a response. When only silence follows, you shut your eyes, rolling them behind your eyelids. It's a prank call.

Trying to sound as polite as you can, even using your customer service voice, you follow with a, "Yes?"

It takes two seconds for the receiving end to answer. "Who is this?"

You absentmindedly stride towards your kitchen, checking on the popcorn in the microwave, "Who are you trying to reach?"

"What number is this?" The man's voice was deep and smooth, but had a gentle tone. He sounded like he was genuinely asking, and you start to think your assumption was wrong.

You hum patiently. "What number are you trying to reach?"

"I don't know."

You nod, still staring at the microwave, "I think you have the wrong number."

"Do I?"

You hum again, hanging up with a, "It happens. Take it easy."

Your lips lift in a soft smile, the conversation with the soft spoken stranger turning out to be one of the most polite ones you've ever had. It takes a exactly second for you to remember why you even had your phone in your hand and you unlock the screen to dial again when,

It rings. You pick it up.

"Hello?" You start, tentative.

"Why don't you want to talk to me?" It's the man again and you're starting to sense in the pit of your stomach that something might not be right.

"Who is this?" You reply, closing your eyes and taking a silent breath, telling yourself not to assume the worst every time.

There's a chuckle on the other end, boyish and light. "You tell me your name, I'll tell you mine."

Just as you start to ponder if playing along would get this over with, your microwave dings. You peek at it and take out the popcorn.

Walking to the cupboards where you keep your boals, you make a disapproving noise. "Hm. Yeah, no. Sorry, it's just..stranger danger. You know how it is."

"What was that noise?" Still smooth, still gentle. Still a mystery.

Rolling your tongue in your cheek, you bite and play along. "My microwave. I'm making popcorn."

"Oh," There's a rustle, "You watching a movie? I only eat popcorn at movies."

"Well yeah." You giggle, giddy at the thought of spending the night with your boyfriend's hands gripping yours tightly.

"Really? What kind?"

Grabbing the bag of fresh popcorn and transferring it to a bowl with one hand was inconvenient, but you'd rather deal with it than stop the conversation with a stranger whose tone of voice you start to feel is familiar, "Just a scary movie. Pretty old."

The man drawls the next question, "do you like scary movies?"

You nod, even though you think he can't see you, "Yup."

His voice is husky now, his words throaty and drawled, "What's your favorite scary movie?"

Oh, now he's flirting with you, you realize. It might be one of Hoseok's friends playing a prank on you, maybe even your boyfriend himself and you inwardly huff.

"I don't know. They're all different in their own way, so there's no way to compare."

"Well, you have to have a favorite."

"Uh," You wrack your mind for a title, "well there's a recent one I just watched. New to the slasher franchise. The Boy. Heard of it?"

"Ah, yes the guy hiding inside walls, stalking his own baby sitter."

You're in the living room now, bowl of popcorn in your hand and setting it on the coffee table. "Yeah. Brahms Heelshire."

"Brahms! That's right. I liked that movie, it had a nice twist."

"It did have a nice twist, the ending kind of sucked though." You glance at the clock and your eyes twitch, not looking forward to your boyfriend once again apologizing for being late.

"Maybe. Do you have a boyfriend?" Speaking of boyfriend, you roll your eyes. It's Hoseok now, you're convinced. Hoseok with a voice changing app.

"Yes." Not for long unless he gets arrives in less than a minute to save his ass. You don't notice the way your finger accidentally taps the 'End Call' button.

Your phone rings again and you answer on first ring.

"So sorry! Didn't realize I hung up."

"Tell me your name."

You want to scoff, instead you shake your head. "Why do you wanna know my name?"

"Because I wanna know who i'm looking at."

Your blood seems to have went cold inside you, goosebumps suddenly erupt throughout your whole body and you shoot up, looking around you.

You swallow a lump in your throat. "What did you say?"

"I want to know who i'm talking to."

"That's not what you said." You rush to open the small drawer installed in your coffee table, taking out a bottle of pepper gel before bolting to your front door to make sure it was locked. You turn on the light on your porch and see no one present. You turn it back off.

Walking briskly to the sliding door between the small garden and the inside of your house, you turn the light on too, but again, you don't see anyone present. You huff now, gripping your phone tighter.

"I have to go now." Your cold, shaking fingers struggle to remove the phone from your ear.

"Wait.. I thought we were gonna go out."

"I don't think so. I have a boyfriend."

The voice, previously so gentle, turns hostile and violent, "DON'T HANG UP ON ME."

"Gotta go." You force out, willing yourself to hang up.

"DON'T—"

Your shaking as you try to recollect yourself. Yoongi left a gun here, you think. Said it was for self defense and he doesn't go without it whenever he walks his girl home. The last party, he was showing off. He had a gun and he passed out. He left it and you were going to return it tomorrow. But it's still here. Still in the house. You could go get it.

You clench your eyes shut, panic consuming you the more you try to remember whether you placed it in your father's seldomly used vault or in your bedroom's private drawer. Both were at the opposite ends of the house. You were having trouble just standing.

The phone rings again and you're tempted to let it ring until it goes away.

But you have to know..

"Yes?"

"I told you not to hang up on me." The gentle tone is completely gone.

You clutch the pepper gel tighter in your other hand, making sure it was unsealed, ready to be used. "What do you want?"

"To talk."

"Well, dial someone else, okay?"

The voice sounds amused now. "Getting scared?"

You grit your teeth. "No. Bored."

You hang up immediately, tired and afraid.

You run to check your back door, finding it locked as well. All of the doors were locked. There was no way someone else could get in.

Just as you back away from the door, your phone rings again and you're fed up.

"Listen, asshole—"

"NO. YOU LISTEN, YOU LITTLE BITCH. IF YOU HANG UP ON ME AGAIN I'LL GUT YOU LIKE A FISH. UNDERSTAND?"

It's deep and it roars.

You suppress a whimper. "Is this some kind of joke?"

"More of a game, really." It's calm again but you don't trust it one bit.

"I'm calling the police. I swear. They'll trace this and i'm filing charges." You threaten, gripping on to one of the curtains to ground yourself.

"They'll never make it in time." It's dark, it's deep, and you're so scared.

You release a sigh, and you sound defeated even to yourself. "What do you want?"

It's deeper this time, more throaty, less human, "To see what your insides look like."

You fumble to hang up, letting the phone fly out of your hands right after.

Your hands are shaking but you shake your head in determination as you reach for it again. You dial 911.

"Hello, 911. What's your emergency?"

"Can't—No time, he said he was here. Someone threatened to kill me. Said—said he could see me. Think he can see me. Said he'd kill me. Please send someone! Anyone!" You whisper frantically, backing against a corner to avoid any surprises.

"I understand. We'll send someone immediately."

You nod, unable to find your voice to even thank the receiver.

As you're curled up in the corner, you bury your face in your arms.

Then, you remember.

Hoseok is supposed to arrive any second. If someone dangerous was waiting to break in, Hoseok would be completely unaware and helpless.

Your pacifist boyfriend Hoseok wouldn't have anywhere to hide. To run to. You know for a fact he'd be walking this late at night with his car broken down since the previous week.

Better if it was just you. Better if you didn't drag him in.

Trembling, you dial his number.

"Hoseok?" You jump when he picks up the phone.

"Yeah, honey? I'm so sorry i'm late! I'm almost there!"

"My parents are here!" You squawk, and in the back of your mind, you're taken aback at how easy the lie fell off your tongue.

"My parents are here and pissed. Have—have to cancel." With a shuddering breath, you whisper delicately, "I love you."

"Wait, what? Y/N? DON'T HANG UP ON ME!"

You hang up.

Your phone rings again and you already know it's an unwelcome call.

"Hello?"

Silence.

"Who's there?"

"You should never say "Who's there?". Don't you watch scary movies? It's a death wish."

You loose your grip on the phone, letting it clatter to the floor just right by you. The voice buzzes. You tap the loudspeaker option.

You sigh. "What did I do?"

There's silence. You physically feel the energy draining out of you, the adrenaline taking its leave and in its stead, defeat. Your eyes are clenched shut, so that you don't have to see yourself die.

Your voice is croaky, and when you touch your face, it's wet with tears. You were crying? "There's must be something I did. Something I must've done for this. Can't you tell me?"

The phone clicks, signaling the call was ended from the other side.

You hear a crash from upstairs. The shattering of glass. You locked the doors, but the windows are breakable.

"Y/N!!" You hear Hoseok's voice, his fists banging on your front door. "LET ME IN!"

Multiple thuds from the other side. Hoseok was trying to break down the door.

It's too late. You hear footsteps approach you and you curl tighter around yourself, keeping your eyes shut.

You whisper then, "Get it over with. Just don't touch him."

The footsteps stop in front of you. "Sure. Loverboy's queued right after you."

It's like you've been brought back to life, hearing that sentence. You snap your eyes open and realize you're still gripping the pepper gel in your hand. You look up at your tormentor, sees a a shapeless silhouette with a mask on, a knife aiming to pierce through you but just as he gets close, you empty the bottle. Even through the mask. It has to have a hole for him to see, right? You hope.

There's a yelp from the masked man, and you dash towards your front door, your hands still shaking as you undo all the bolts. Hoseok looks red in the face, but you grab his hands to run.

"Fuck!" The masked man sputters, throwing his disguise down and upon hearing something hit the ground, you risk a glance behind you.

Your blood boild at the sight of a familiar face.

"Yoongi?!"

"Fuck. Who the fuck do you think? Fuuuck!" The man rolls on the ground, grunting in pain as he rubs at his eyes.

"Yoongi! I told you I didn't approve of this shit!" Hoseok growls, marching towards his best friend.

"Fuck you! It was you idea, asswipe!" Yoongi bites. "It was his idea, Y/N!" Yoongi chances a peek at you with one eye as he totally rats his best friend out, his whole face red and wincing, "Said you liked horror movies! Said this was foreplay for you! I'm the victim! I fucking climbed up with the tree that had a fucking bee's nest! I have ant bites all over my fucking ass! I have three splinters! Fucking hell! Ow!" He chokes on a sob as the gel finally settles in his eyeball.

"Wha.." You look at your boyfriend, confused beyond comprehension.

"Listen, I said it in passing and I was drunk! I didn't know they'd do this to you!" Hoseok raises up his hands in a defenseless manner.

"You scared the shit out of me, Yoongi!" You growl, marching towards where he's curled up into a ball, clutching his face in agony.

"God, please take me to a hospital." Yoongi pleads.

"You deserve this, you son of a bitch! I can't believe you took him seriously while he was drunk! You gave me that advice yourself!" You stomp on the mask he was wearing, picking it up to examine it just to throw it back to the ground in pure rage.

"So," Hoseok nuzzles his head against your shoulder, trailing kisses to your neck, "happy birthday?"

Yoongi huffs from his hospital bed as he watches the two of you practically melt into each other.

"Oh, shut it. You brought this on yourself." You stick out your tongue at your boyfriend's best friend.

"Whatever." Yoongi grunts, "Call Jiah. Tell her I have to cancel on our plans for tomorrow. My eyes hurt."

You giggle as your boyfriend's lips land on a ticklish spot behind your ear.

"Fine. Let me get my phone." You reach over to grab your bag and Hoseok whines at the momentary loss of your warmth. You stare at your phone, head tilting in wonder and you call out, "Hey Yoons, I can't believe you could say all that stuff."

Yoongi glares at you from his spot. "What stuff?"

"About gutting me and shit. That was traumatizing." You shake your head, and you miss the look of confusion shot in your direction.

"What?" Yoongi looks at you like you've morphed into a duck. "No I didn't."

You hum as your boyfriend resumes rudely ravaging your neck. "Didn't what?"

"Say that. I only called you twice. It was a prank call. I asked you if you had a boyfriend just in case you were playing Hoseokkie and you said yes so I clearly failed."

You feel your heart drop to your feet.

"Why did you break my window, then?" You whisper, pressing yourself closer to Hoseok as fear crawls back up your spine.

"What? I didn't. You said your parents' windows were never locked so I went in through there."

Your hands twitch, still holding your phone.

"Y/N? You okay?" Hoseok asks, wary of the way your face loses color.

You whisper, barely audible, "Someone was really there."

A few blocks away from your house, a girl grips her phone with a bloodied hand.

Your caller ID flashes on the screen. Too late.

(A/N: don't know if i'm making this a series. user @curlykoo who has since deactivated but complimented me and liked horror fics this is for u 💕 + most of the dialogue is actually from the movie itself!)