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lettingmydreamsspeak · 4 years

Text

The Heart Knows Best: Part III

Summary: They still can’t get each other off their minds. Little do they know that even though distance plays a huge factor in ever knowing one another, something is bringing them together.

Pairing: Chris Evans x Female Reader

Warnings: None

Word count: approx. 2300

Author’s Note: If this is your first time reading this series, catch up with Part I and Part II here. Thanks to those who have read the series so far and have sent messages. It is great to hear from those who are reading it. It is my hope to have Part IV up shortly.

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You couldn’t be happier to be home. You already felt like you needed a vacation from your vacation, but the demands of work would quickly occupy your mind. As you turned on your phone upon arriving at the airport terminal, the number on your email app grew. It was your boss inquiring about the timelines for various projects. She must have tracked your flight and knew that once you arrived it would be hard for you to avoid all the emails that she would be sending. Since taking an entry level position as a junior illustrator for an international publishing firm, you had worked your way up the ranks to work directly with the lead art director, as the senior illustrator. Because of your talent and determination, this position allowed for you to gain some of the highest profile accounts that came through the firm, working with some of the most well-known authors. Who knew that all those years of drawing since you were a little girl, would lead to this dream job. Even though the demands of the job could be overwhelming at times, no amount of pressure would take away the love you had for it.

Your brother Ben offered to pick you up from the airport, knowing that you would like to see a familiar face at the other end of customs when you arrived. He wasn’t wrong. The two of you were only two years apart. He was older than you, and as a stereo typical older brother to a sister, he protected you. As you passed through the doors to find what seemed to be a sea of thousands of people, Ben’s smiling face greeted you.

“Welcome home sis!”

Ben gave you the biggest hug, as if he hadn’t seen you for months on end.

“Thank you for coming to get me. I would much rather sit in the front passenger seat and control the music for once!”

You both had a good laugh, because you both knew all too well that you were the one that would control the playlists while on road trips with your family and friends.

As you slowly made your way to Ben’s car, you were a lot more quiet than usual. Ben was used to you talking his ear off, telling him all the stories of your adventures you had while you were away.

“Is everything ok, Y/n?”

You knew that he would ask you that very question and debated on whether you would tell him the truth, or tell him the smallest of lies. You felt compelled to tell him the truth, but it would take some time to get there.

“I’m definitely tired. Do you think that maybe we can go for ice cream? I’m not quite ready to go home and just want to hang out with you Ben.”

“I’ll never say no to ice cream! You must want to talk about something though; we never just go for ice cream. Wait a sec……what is his name and do I need to beat him up?”

Not sure how to respond yet again, you stop and look at him before crawling into the car. Looking at Ben’s stature, with was tall and skinny, you weren’t sure that he had the muscles to withstand a fight with anyone.

“You might not want to pick a fight with him, Ben. And if you really want to know, you already know him. His name is Chris…...”

************************************************************************

Chris laid down on the grass, staring up at the clouds through a clearing the in the trees that towered above him. Dodger ran circles around him, stopping every once in a while to lick his face or nudge him in the arm so that he would play with him. He was grateful for the energy of this dog, keeping him on toes and distracting him from what was really going on in his life. He was avoiding his phone and emails for the rest of the day, knowing that he had some work to do.

“Dodge, what am I supposed to do?”

He stopped making circles around Chris and proceeded to lick his face again. It’s like he knew that Chris needed a little extra love and support that day.

“Alright, that wasn’t really the answer I was looking for, but I appreciate all the love you are giving me today, bud. I need it.”

Chris sat up and pulled Dodger in to give him a hug before getting up to make his way back into the house, where Scott just finished making supper for the two of them.

“Hey Dopey, are you ready to eat something?”

“Yeah.”

Chris quietly took a seat at the kitchen table as Scott dished out some food for him, one scoop at a time, seeing if he would tell him when to stop. Chris sat there just staring at the food piling up, as Scott captured it all on video, figuring that one day Chris will need a good laugh at his own expense.

“Do you know if the kids left any books around here last time they came to visit?”

“I’m pretty sure they did.”

“I need to pick out a children’s book to recommend and I would love it to be one that they like.”

“Why don’t you make it a little more personable and it be one that you always read to them. I’m pretty sure they left the books in your office on the bookshelf, thinking that Uncle Chris might need some easy reading material when they aren’t around. Also, you better eat entire pile of pasta…”

Chris looked down as he dropped his fork on the table, laughing at the sight before him, causing him to shake his head. He picked the fork back up, took a few bites and pushed his plate away.

“Thank you for supper Scott. Just leave the dishes and I will clean them up later.”

“You didn’t even really eat! I’m telling mom!”

“Go ahead!”

Chris left the table on a mission to let his mind escape. He entered his office and b-lined it to the bookshelf that lined the walls across the room from his desk. Starting at the middle of the bookcase, he scoured the shelves for the kids books. He stopped for a moment and realized he was looking in the wrong spot. He turned his eyes downward to the bottom shelf, where the kids could safely reach the shelves. There they were. Nicely placed, looking at if they were meant to be a part of the collection, standing upright thanks to the bookend. Chris sat on the floor against the shelf, looking through the books. There was something about those books that made Chris feel sentimental for a moment. He loved those kids and he loved those books. There was one in particular that stood out to him. It had a picture of a dog on the front that always reminded him of Dodger. The kids loved that book so much because of the dog in the story. You could see the love for that book with the bent corner and chocolate pudding stained pages. This had to be the book that he was going to use for his project.

Scott and Dodger snuck into the office and sat beside Chris, looking through the books with him, noticing the book that was in his hands.

“The kids really do love that book. I should record you reading this book and we should send it to them!”

“You know, that’s not a bad idea. They would love it. Funny voices and all.”

Scott pulled out his phone and started to record the video. Sounding very stately as he started reading; he introduced the author of the book, then the illustrator.

“This book is illustrated by Y/N Y/L/N………I love how the dog in this book looks like Dodger!!! Here we go. Once Upon a Time…”

Without even noticing, he had said her name aloud. If only he knew…

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It was time for you to show your face at the office. You figured you could just sneak in without anyone noticing, as you were determined to have a productive day, without any distractions. You felt inspired and ready to create some images for the books that were coming across your desk prior to your vacation. Knowing that it would take a few hours to really get the ideas down on paper, you put your head phones on to help you focus. The hours passed without even taking a break. Your boss scared you out of focus as she reviewed your progress and was pleased with the results so far. She was always amazed with your work and your overall work ethic. As she left you to you continue with your work, you noticed that your phone screen was lighting up. It was best that you took a break for a late lunch and to catch up with the messages that were left for you. For the most part, it was your clients wanting to touch base and see how the illustrations were coming along. There were also a few messages from Haley. She usually sent you random jokes or quotes to help you get through your day, but it seemed as if there was something a little more urgent. 5 missed calls and one text stating that you should call her when you get the chance.

You were feeling a little selfish at that moment, but now was not the time for you to get into a serious conversation with her. You ignored her messages, placed the phone out of sight, and got back to work, knowing that all the drawings wouldn’t finish themselves.

************************************************************************

It was a new day, and it was certainly feeling like it for the first time in a few days. With an early start to the day, Chris was productive on answering a series of emails from producers and his agent. Taking a break from this work, he found a spot in the sun filled living room to do some recreational reading. His brother sat across the room from him, staring at his phone, as if he were in a deep text conversation with who knows who. With a lack of desire to spend his time catching up on social media, little did Chris know that Scott had made a little post that morning, captioning it: “Story Time with Uncle Chris”.

Just as Chris had suspected, Scott was reading through text from friends and a multitude of messages in response to the post. There was so much love for this video, but who wouldn’t fall in love with Chris reading yet another children’s book. Sorting through his direct messages, he saw one titled “I Need Your Help…”. Typically these kinds of messages were from people asking for some kind of hand out to help with their cause and would easily be passed by, but for some reason Scott felt compelled to read this message.

Hey Scott, I know we don’t know each other, but we might have an unexpected connection that I need your help with. My friend Y/n happened to be in Manhattan recently, and was helped out by your brother Chris on a rainy morning in Central Park a couple of days ago. I know she is forever grateful for what your brother did to help out. If you can pass on her thanks to him, I know she would appreciate it.

Thanks so much, Haley.

Ps. You know that book Chris is reading in your most recent post…Y/n illustrated it!

“Shut up.”

“I’m being quiet, why are you telling me to shut up?”

“Sorry! I was just reading texts from friends. I thought I said that in my head.”

In complete shock of the message he just read, Scott started to formulate a reply to Haley. With zero confidence in what to say back to her, his response was short and to the point.

Hi Haley, we should chat…

************************************************************************

“You have reached Haley! Sorry I can’t answer your call right now. Either I’m ignoring you, or I’m actually busy. Either way, just text me and I promise to get back to you!”

Her message always made you laugh, as her phone went right to voice mail. She was actually busy on the other line. You felt a little anxious about what she needed to tell you. It was a long day and it felt like you needed a glass of wine to calm your nerves. A nice spot on your balcony looking over the waterfront was the solution. The perks of your job found you living close to the office, in a condo looking over Coal Harbour. It was the dream and you were living it. As you sat down and put your feet up, taking a deep breath, you saw that Haley was now returning your call.

“Hales, I’m sorry that I didn’t return your call earlier. It was a busy first day back at the office.”

“Hi to you too, can you please look at the text I just sent you. But make sure you have me on speaker…please!”

A little puzzled by her request, you put her on speaker and loaded her message.

“What the heck are you sending me? Is this just another gif of a cat dressed up at an old lady?”

“Just watch it.”

The video came up. It was Chris. A smile came to your face. You see him sitting on the floor of what seemed to be a home library or office, with Dodger snuggled in against his leg. He was holding what appeared to be a book. Not really paying attention to what he is saying at the start of the video, you finally focus in on it.

“This book is illustrated by Y/N Y/L/N………I love how the dog in this book looks like Dodger!!! Here we go. Once Upon a Time…”

Your heart stopped. He said your name without even realizing it. You sat in shock as you closed the video, not needing to watch any more of it.

“So…..?”

“He said my name.”

Staring blankly at the phone, you aren’t too sure what to make of all of this. What were the chances that this would happen?

“Should I bring you more wine?”

“Yes please.”

To be continued in Part IV

#Chris Evans #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans imagine #chris evans x reader #chris evans reader #agirlcandream #chris evans x y/n

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subtlereferencetomyinterests · 4 years

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Complexities Unknowable Chapter 3

Ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23274334/chapters/57175900

Chapter Two link: https://tha-best-url-evar.tumblr.com/post/614327945408987136/complexities-unknowable-chapter-two

MasterPost

Relationships: Established Relationship Dukeceit, eventual intrualiceit, background analogince.

Warnings: Remus says some things (mentions of biblically accurate angels, gore art description), food mention, mild sleep deprivation, cursing. As always everyone is sympathetic. Roast me if I forgot something.

Word Count: 1,851

Remus was, once again, sitting on the counter in the light side kitchen. It was an ungodly early hour of morning, so the Commons were deserted. He was supposed to be waiting for Morality, according to the spiteful little plot Dee had offered him that he hadn’t listened to all that well, but he surmised it meant he was supposed to fuck with a light side, so… Duh. Of course he was in.

Truth be told, three out of four of the self-proclaimed ‘light sides’ hardly bothered him! They were stuffy prudes, sure, but their insults slid off his back like blood off of steel. As long as he was doing his own thing with Deceit alongside him, everything was fine (he was still pointedly ignoring the existence of another Creativity). But looks like what Deceit wanted to do was torment Patton into, like, repenting? Or something? Like he said, he wasn’t listening.

Anyway! Waiting and watching was what he was doing! And doodling, because sitting still was literally impossible in Remus’ experience. Thankfully, he soon saw the paternal trait springing down the stairs. Straightening his back, The Duke put on his best intimidating face (which he thought looked rather silly, but Deceit assured him was very unsettling). He set down his sketchbook and blurred his edges. It didn’t work very well up here, but it was a little trick that they’d all- Virgil included- learned years ago. Honestly, he just used it to get cheap scares every now and then.

Patton strolled into the kitchen, whistling some jaunty tune and holy shit , Remus had figured it was some shtick, but was he just a cartoon character all of the time ? That was- sure, very adorable- but mostly all the more entertaining to scare!

“What’s up, Dilf!?”

Patton shrieked, nearly dropping a mug. With wide, startled eyes, he found the source of the noise. Said source watched the emotional trait force his expression into something amicable, laughing loudly.

“Um- good morning, Remus! I, uh, didn’t see you there.”

“That was the point, MoMo,” Remus replied, dragging his claws screechingly down the side of a cabinet; Patton winced at the sound.

“Can I help you with anything?” Read: Why are you still here? Sometimes Remus wondered if he was too good at his job!

“Nope! Just enjoying the atmosphere, sketching, terrorizing…” He flipped onto his back, throwing his arm out and presenting his open notebook.

“You draw?” Patton seemed weirdly happy about that fact, managing a more natural smile. Seemed he thought he’d found something to work with, but that was likely to change.

“Of course I do, I am Creativity, after all! Here .” He handed over the sketchbook with a Cheshire smile. The creative trait had ensured it was flipped open to a detailed depiction of a being composed of several flaming rings, all of which absolutely covered with bloodshot eyes. It had an indiscernible amount of wings that could only be counted as ‘too many’. In the center of the rings was a swirling black void (a type of ink that took Remus weeks to conjure properly, thank you very much).

He watched carefully as Patton studied the image, looking bemused.

“It’s an angel!”

That seemed to only confuse the moral side more, making him tilt his head to a few different angles to look at the drawing. But he still didn’t seem upset by it, oddly enough.

“It certainly is an interesting interpretation,” He responded at last, “and all of these little lines must have taken you forever, that’s so impressive!”

Truth be told, they had taken a while, and Remus was very happy that the effort had been noticed- but that wasn’t the point!

“That’s nothing,” he took the sketchbook back from Patton and flipped through more pages. Aha! This would fuck him up, for sure! A full-color illustration of someone hung up on a meat hook, rib cage pried open like a spike trap to reveal very painstakingly rendered organs. He was actually quite proud of this one.

The only response that Patton gave, however, was a slight wrinkling of his nose when he first saw it, followed by more quiet observation.

“What do you think?” Remus prompted, watching as Patton set the drawing back down on the counter and began to assemble things for breakfast, seemingly unaffected.

“I wish I could draw that well, but I’m still not super good at it,” he said admiringly.

“I had to crack open my own ribs to make sure it was accurate, you know!”

Morality yelped at that one- score one for Remus! Finally!

“You wanna see my re-imaginings of my favorite Final Destination deaths? I’ve painted some with real- well, conjured- but real enough blood!”

But Patton didn’t even flinch this time; he looked more determined even!

“Art is a healthy outlet for expressing yourself,” he was almost certainly parroting Logan there, and he even seemed to believe the statement. Perhaps Remus would have to be a little more creative to get more reactions.

. “I agree! I didn’t expect you to have such an open-minded point of view. I’ll be sure you’re the first side to know when I make my next amateur taxidermy sculpture! Emphasis on the amateur!”

“Great!” Patton practically shouted, very stubbornly staring at the stove.

Before Remus had the chance to continue, the distinct sounds of Logan and Roman arguing their way downstairs met his ears, and he cut himself off. That was enough for one day, he decided. And anyhow, he looked forward to trying new ways to bother Patton next morning.

Deceit rose into the shadows of the Light Side commons with a smirk. It was an awful hour of the night, which was part of the plan. Not only was Patton the first awake in the morning, he was also often the last to sleep. Deceit supposed that Logan was looking after Roman and Virgil’s sleep schedules nowadays, which made it much easier to catch the artificial patriarch alone. That isn’t to imply that Dee had been tracking their schedules or anything, but the overwhelming lie that Morality surrounded himself with made him easy to track- especially in the night, when he had to pretend even harder that he was fine without the presence of his little family. Deceit entertained the idea that he should feel bad for the side, and maybe he did somewhere deep down. Deep, deep down. No, further than that.

Regardless of any such feelings, he was here to mess with Patton. Still unnoticed, he watched quietly as his target scrolled through Netflix, illuminated only by the dim glow of the television. The side looked so tired that he could’ve passed as a corpse, but gave a tiny smile after finally selecting whatever it was he was going to watch.

Wait. Wait. He was watching that ?

Deceit stared at the unmistakable green text that was the intro to The Good Place playing across the screen. If there was one thing he was expecting Patton to watch (Cartoons? Friends reruns? Slime videos?), it wasn't his own favorite show.

“Hm.” Deceit hummed.

In response, Patton shrieked and fell halfway off the couch. His head darted around until he finally spotted Deceit, who had slid down to sit on the sofa as well.

“Oh- um- good evening, Deceit! Wow, today is just full of surprises!”

“ Surely you won’t mind if I join you? This is one of my favorite shows, after all.”

Patton fixed his position so that he was no longer partially on the floor and looked the snake up and down. He paused the episode.

“ Really ?”

“Really,” and then, after some trepidation, “Honestly.”

Suddenly, Patton lit up dramatically, a happy smile stretching across his face. Fuck, wrong direction, Deceit wasn’t supposed to be cheering him up!

“I’m surprised that someone like you would like it,” Deceit continued hastily. Patton’s smile fell a little and he tipped his head in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean ,” He lounged back against the couch, “I didn’t think you’d approve of a show where all of the characters are such bad people .”

“What?! The whole point is that they aren’t bad!” Good, Back on track .

“Oh? Then what are they? Last I checked, the main character was very selfish .”

“I- okay, I see what you’re trying to do,” Patton turned to face Deceit entirely, “But they’re- they also-”

“Also what ?” Deceit was also sitting sideways on the couch now, his eyes glinting. He was certain that he’d talked the trait into a corner, which was why he was so utterly unprepared for Patton’s response.

“It’s, like, they all start off not great, but that’s because they were all set up for failure before the afterlife! They had it hard before dying, but when they were finally given the chance to actually get better, then they got better! They aren’t perfect , but they care about each other! And I think it really shows that sometimes, somebody can be wrong over and over and over again, but that doesn’t mean that they’re hopeless, or that they’re a bad friend, or…” He trailed off, looking down at his lap and blinking very quickly. “Or that they’re a bad person.”

Suddenly, Deceit wasn’t that sure that he wanted to see Patton upset anymore.

After a very uncomfortable silence that lasted far too long for his liking, the scaled side realized that he should probably be the one to say something.

“That’s… a very in depth analysis, Morality. I’m inclined to agree with you.”

“Thanks,” Patton replied. When he looked up, his eyes held an odd recognition. It was a look that no Light Side had ever given Deceit, but they gave it to each other plenty of times. The side in question wasn’t sure if he liked it, but he sure knew that he was uncomfortable.

“So… The show…” He prompted.

“Oh, right!”

Patton pressed play.

Deceit had planned on doing some more provoking of Patton as they watched, but he found himself rather caught up in the program. The conversation he did end up making with the other incidentally slipped into chatting about their shared views on the show. It was almost nice. Maybe. Whatever.

After a few episodes, Deceit elected to return home for the night. As he was sinking out, he heard a sleepy voice bidding him farewell.

“G’night, Kiddo.”

He popped up in his bedroom after that, eyes quickly landing on a half-asleep Remus half-watching Saw 4 . The lights were dimmed to a glow, and the TV’s volume was so low that it might have been inaudible to anyone other than the more animalistic sides.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” Deceit murmured warmly, sitting beside his fellow Dark side. The trait yawned and rubbed his eyes, instinctively leaning into him.

“Wanted to,” he responded, voice groggy, “How’d it go?”

Deceit snapped his fingers to change into sleep clothes, reaching across Remus to flick off the lamp. As he settled in to semi-watch the movie, fingers automatically moving to card through his partner’s hair, he carefully considered the question.

“Fucking. Weird.”

Chapter 4

Tags: @deceits-left-glove @princemesscharming

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rocksandrobots · 4 years

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Of Rocks and Robots Ch. 4 - The First Day: Shopping Spree (part 2)

The ‘mall’ was a massive indoor marketplace. It was three stories tall with an open courtyard in the center and a sky-lighted roof above. On each level were open walkways and connecting stairs with rooms off to the side serving as individual shops. Stalls lined the center of the walkways selling even more wares and entrances to larger stores were at the ends of each of the three branching corridors that lead off from the courtyard.

Varian was easily overwhelmed by the enormity of the place. He stood still in awe for a few moments just drinking in the sight. After his initial surprise began to fade, he took off, excited to explore every nook and cranny he could find, dragging Ruddiger along on a leash. He wanted to see it all; every store, stall, and vendor.

The first store he came across was one that sold musical instruments. Inside a window display stood a setup of wires and black boxes all connected to what looked like a guitar. Another customer was testing the instrument out and from the boxes emitted a loud strumming noise as he played. Varian ran into the shop with a wide grin, eager to inspect the new invention for himself.

The rest of his new friends followed close behind him, bemused by his curiosity. As soon as the other customer was done testing out the instrument, Varian took the guitar from him and told the others, “this is so much more successful than my own attempts to amplify a guitar’s sound. I just attached a horn to the base of mine.”

He then experimentally began to play an old folk song that he knew. It was just like playing a regular guitar, only it produced a slightly metallic sounding dissonance at the end of each strum. Once he was done, Honey Lemon burst into a round of applause.

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“Oooh, that’s so good!” She enthusiastically cheered and the rest of the group also started to clap. Varian blushed, not used to receiving praise nor ever thinking his musical talents were of anything worth writing home about.

“Man, I would love to have this in my own world.” he said as he placed the guitar back onto its display stand.

“You’ll need electricity to make it work.” Wasabi informed him. “Come on, let’s get you the clothes we came for and then you can check out the rest of the shops.”

With that, they all filed out of the music store and walked over to the first clothing outlet.

As soon as they entered, Honey Lemon gasped in joy and ran over to a bunch of racks where articles of clothing hung and a big yellow ‘sale’ sign stood on top.

“Yay! They have bikinis on sale!” She exclaimed and pulled one of the suits of clothes off the rack and bounded away to the other end of the shop where a couple of enclosures stood. Presumably to try on the aforementioned, ‘bikini’, whatever that was.

“Oh that reminds me,” Hiro said,” we’re going to the beach next weekend. You should come along if you’re still here by then.”

“Yeah, we’ll make sure to buy you a bathing suit on top of the other stuff you need.” Wasabi agreed.

“Bathing suit?” Varian echoed in confusion.

“Yeah, for swimming in. You.. you do know how to swim don’t you?” Wasabi asked.

“Of course I know how to swim.” Varian said indignantly. He had grown up next to a river his whole life, and the ocean itself was in walking distance of his village. Though it was a full day’s worth of travel to get there and back. However, swimming as a leisure activity was one that was normally done by one’s self. It just wouldn’t do to be caught running around in wet under-drawers in public. “I just never heard of needing special clothes to swim in.” Varian continued to explain.

Just then their conversation was interrupted by Honey Lemon calling to them. “Hey guys, what do you think of this one?” She flung open the door to the fitting room and that was when Varian found out what exactly a bikini was.

She was dressed in a rather revealing two piece orange swimsuit. The gang called out compliments to her as she gave a little twirl to show off the piece of clothing in full. All but Varian, who stared at her with bated breath. He had never seen anyone wear so little before in person and in that moment she reminded him of images of Greek goddesses he once saw in a book.

Fortunately, only Gogo noticed his flustration.

"You've never seen a bikini before, have you?" She said.

Varian numbly shook his head no, his gaze never leaving Honey Lemon.

"Well, don't stare then." She advised.

Varian snapped out his stupefied state as it dawned on him that he was being inappropriate. "Oh, sorry." He said as he quickly threw his hand over his eyes.

Gogo just rolled her own eyes. "No, you can look," she said as she gently lowered his arm, "just don't stare. It's just a bikini."

She explained to him that this was what girls normally wore to go swimming in and Varian was reminded once again how out of place he was in this world. That he wasn’t just in a new country with new inventions, but one with its own culture and societal standards.

Ears burning, he turned his attention to the rest of the clothing racks hoping to focus on something else and avoid embarrassing himself any further. He was just grateful that Honey Lemon herself hadn’t seen his faux pas. She had been nothing but nice to him and he would have hated to have accidentally offended her.

However nothing more came from the incident. Honey Lemon went back to the changing room to put on her regular clothes again and Varian, along with the others help, chose some outfits to buy.

He picked out some long sleeved buttoned shirts. One was a dark burgundy and made of a light cotton material. The second one was light blue and made of a sturdier material called denim. It also had pockets on the front and Varian figured it’d make for a good work shirt.

He also found a white linen collared shirt. This one had a single pocket on one side. Such shirts were usually reserved for special occasions in his world and he had never owned anything so fine in his life.

Finally, he found on sale something called a ‘flannel’ shirt. It was made of a thick wool like material and was checkered with crossing red and green stripes. Varian had never seen such a dyed pattern before and personally found it impressive looking, though the others were more non-pulsed by it. He was told it was ‘out of season’, hence it being on sale, but he didn’t care, he was planning on keeping these clothes for longer than just a season after all.

Next he picked out some pants. He found two pairs made of the same denim as the previous shirt. One had a darker blue tint and hung loosely around his ankles. The sign above it said ‘boot cut’ and Varian figured it would do well to have something that went with his Saporian boots. The other was of a lighter blue and was more form fitting. The sign above it said ‘slim cut’.

He also found a pair of light brown pants with several large pockets. Hiro called them cargo pants. They were a little baggy but the idea of having all those pockets on hand while working was enough for Varian to get them. At Wasabi’s insistence he also bought two pairs of ‘dress pants’. They were pressed and straight cut and he got one in black and another pair in a light tan color called khaki.

Satisfied with his selection, they made their way to the counter where Fred generously paid for everything. Varian offered to pay him back as soon as he could earn some money of his own but the older teen just shrugged it off and told him not to worry about it.

Apparently Fred came from a wealthy family and had more than enough money to spare. All he asked for in return was that Varian and the others would stop at his favorite store while here.

It was called a comic shop and it sold games, toys, and various small books full of illustrations. In fact they were made of nothing but illustrations. There were no words on the page save for the occasional line of dialogue and the drawings themselves told the story.

Varian thought them to be young children’s picture books at first glance and couldn’t see the fuss. But Fred was practically bursting with excitement as he ran around the store.

“Now my young protégé, welcome to a whole new world of wonder, excitement, and adventure! Here you shall embark upon your first quest into geekdom..” Fred exclaimed in all seriousness before gathering up various comics for Varian to try.

“Protégé?” Varian questioningly whispered to Wasabi while the other boy was busy.

“Don’t think too much about it. Once you get to know Fred long enough you tend to learn when to tune him out.” Wasabi whispered back.

Just then Fred dumped a stack of comics into Varian’s arms and he had to quickly readjust his stance so as not to drop their collective weight. He struggled to peer over the top of the pile as Fred launched into a frantic explanation about the story of the comic he himself was currently holding. Varian though was struggling to keep up.

Fortunately, Gogo came to his rescue again.

“Seriously, Fred, he doesn’t need you to buy him the whole store.” She admonished the blonde haired boy. “Look, just get him one. Let him try it out and see if he likes it.” With that she picked up one of the comics off the top of the stack, indicating that it should be the one that Varian got.

“Aww but, he needs to read at least one from each of the big two; IC and Wonder comics!” Fred whined in return and held the comic he was currently holding up in a pleading manner.

Gogo rolled her eyes and relented. “Fine, but only two, now put the rest of these back where they go.” She took the comic Fred was holding from him and then gave the stack Varian was holding back to Fred. She then proceeded to watch Fred as he put all the comics back in their place; like a mother making sure her small child was cleaning up his room.

Once everything was back in its place, Fred paid for the two books and handed them to Varian. One was titled ‘Miracle Maiden’ and had a drawing of a woman, dressed in red and blue star-studded armor, wielding a spear and leading an army to victory on the cover. The other was called ‘The Avenger’ and on the front was the picture of a man dressed all in black standing on top of a tower in the rain with a cityscape sprawling behind him. He held in his hand a skull, as if he was reciting Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

Varian had to admit that the covers looked intriguing, but there was little time to read through them as they we’re off to the next store.

---------------------------

The next shop was one that sold electronics. Varian starred in wonder at the various inventions. Fascinated, he went to poke and prod each new device; bubbling over with questions about each one. His friends patiently answered him in kind.

While there, it was decided that Varian would need something called a ‘cellphone’ for the duration of his stay. The phone was the same black box he had seen Wasabi use earlier that day. Apparently the device was for long range communication. One could talk to another person miles away so long as they also had a similar device.

The trick, however, was one required the services of an outside source to connect the two devices. So you had to pay another company for 'minutes’ on a regular basis. Since no one knew how long Varian would be stuck in this world the gang collectively decided to buy him a cheap 'prepaid’ phone. You simply bought a new card whenever you ran out of minutes instead of paying a monthly fee and Varian hoped that if he was here for longer than a month he’d be able to earn the money to buy that himself. He was already feeling guilty that everyone was going so much out of their way for him. But everyone kept insisting that it was no big deal and that they were happy to help.

“I’ll help you set the phone up when we get back to the dormitory.” Wasabi told him. “Get you everyone’s phone numbers so you call any of us if you need something."

“Also don’t worry about the money,” Gogo reassured him. “No one expects you to have it all together given the circumstances. If you see something that you would like just let us know.”

And ‘find something' Varian did. He spotted in a display window a shirt with alchemy symbols printed on the front and excitedly ran inside. To his disappointment the establishment was not in fact an alchemy store, but rather a novelty shop that sold various clothing and accessories. However, setting that aside, there were still quite a few things that caught Varian’s interest. Including the aforementioned shirt. It was black, with short sleeves, and in gold print were various triangular images lined down its front.

“What’s with the triangles?” Wasabi asked when Varian showed off his find.

“They’re alchemy symbols. Each one is a different element; water, fire, earth, and air.” Varian explained while pointing out each ideogram.

Wasabi nodded along as if he understood, but he didn’t fully comprehend the significance of what Varian was saying.

“And that’s important because…?”

“Because, I’m an alchemist.” Varian replied like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I had hoped this store would be selling like ingredients for alchemical potions or something, but it looks like this shirt is all they have.”

“Yeeeah, no one’s seriously practiced alchemy in like hundreds of years.” Hiro interjected.

“But you still have chemistry and engineering?” Varian responded, confused by how the two most important applications of his field could be around but not the science itself.

“That’s because they’re considered their own separate fields of study.” Hiro explained.

“Chemistry kind of replaced alchemy in this world,” Honey Lemon carefully interceded. “Now we use the periodic table instead of symbols. Oh, like this one.” She cheerfully held up another shirt that she had found. On it was printed a graph with various colored squares and upon closer inspection Varian noticed that each box corresponded to an element.

“Wow. Look how many new chemical elements have been discovered,” Varian breathed in wonder.

“I know right!?” Honey Lemon exclaimed. “Ooooh, we should get matching tee-shirts. We could be chemistry buddies!” She leaned in towards him as she said this, her face a mere foot away from his own. She had a wild gleam in her eye and a smile so wide that it threatened to split her face in two.

Varian had never seen someone so excited by chemistry before. Well, no one but himself that was, and he found himself agreeing to her proposal in a dizzy haze. The enthusiasm with which the girl threw herself into everything made Varian feel off-kilter. She hardly seemed real; no one was ever this nice, this genuine, this…earnest all the time. Or maybe they were. Maybe his time as a criminal had him so disillusioned that he had forgotten what real people were actually like.

She handed to him the shirt that she was holding and picked out a new one for herself. It was exactly the same as his own, light material and short sleeved, but instead of grey her’s was a bright sky blue.

From there, Varian found other things within the shop that also intrigued him. First was a lighter jacket, called a ‘hoodie’. It was shorter than the great frock coat he currently wore and made of a less heavier material, with a hood attached and a large pocket in the center. He didn’t want to admit it to Wasabi but he did indeed find himself getting overly hot in the bright heat of the day. Apparently, San Fansokyo had a warmer climate than he was used to. The hoodie was red with the image of a raccoon printed on the front with the word RENEGADE underneath in bold white letters. Both he and Ruddiger found it amusing.

He also bought a couple of belts, and a new pair of suspenders. These had a fanciful black and white diamond design woven into the material and were clearly meant to be worn on the outside unlike the leather straps he currently wore under his vest. Both of the belts were in black, though one had silver studs across it and came with a matching necklace that, to Varian, looked kind of like a collar.

He was also lucky enough to come across a wallet with more alchemy symbols imprinted onto the leather. It was the philosopher’s stone diagram and the whole thing came with a chain and clip to attach to his belt.

Wasabi suggested that Varian should also pick out a backpack to carry some of his new stuff in while they were there. He chose one made from a dark green canvas. It had lots of pockets with leather buckled straps and was big enough to hold most of the new clothes he had bought.

Just when he was about ready to check out, he noticed the two girls perusing over a stand filled with tiny brightly colored bottles. Curious he walked over to join them.

“What about this color?” He overheard Honey Lemon ask Gogo as she held up a bottle that was a bright shade of pink.

“Eh, not my style but it should look good on you.” Gogo replied.

“What is it?” Varian interrupted.

“Nail polish, you use it to paint your fingernails.” Gogo answered.

Varian picked up one of the bottles to inspect it. The bottles were made of clear glass and he could see that the various colors he had first noticed were in fact thick colorful liquids contained within each. The one he held in his hand was a black color with a shimmering sheen that glinted when he curiously swirled the bottle around.

“Only it’s not like oil paint. It’s made of synthetic polymers.” Honey Lemon explained further. “Like a type of plastic.”

Varian didn’t know what ‘plastic’ was but he did know a lot about polymers. Polymer was a Greek word meaning ‘part’ and in alchemy was used to refer to organic compounds whose structures were composed of multiple repeating units. He had never heard of a man made polymer though.

“Fascinating” Varian whispered as he continued to hypnotically stare at the bottle as he held it up to the light.

Unbeknownst to him, the two girls shared bemused looks between each other while he was distracted. They found his curiosity over simple ordinary things both simultaneously amusing and endearing.

“Do you want to try some out?” Gogo prompted.

“Yeah,” Varian absently said all while still looking at the liquid trying to decipher its chemical makeup from sight alone.

“Yay! We can have a makeup party! I can help you put it on!’ Honey Lemon cheered, “Which color do you want?”

“This one will do.” Varian said, still barely focusing on what the other two girls were saying. He turned to carry the bottle and the rest of his items to the counter, still never fully taking his eyes off the liquid. Until he was stopped by Honey Lemon that is.

“Oh you’ll need this too.” She pulled a larger bottle off the top of the shelf and handed it to him. It was filled with a clear liquid and the words ‘nail polish remover’ was printed on a label on the front. “It’s acetone, “ She explained “It’ll dissolve the paint once it’s dried.”

“Ahh” Varian nodded his head in realization. Acetone had a lot of alchemical usages; so he was already familiar with the substance. With all that settled they finally went to check out. Once everything was paid for the gang decided that it was time for lunch.

---------------------------

The food court in the center of the mall was a veritable feast of sights, smells, and tastes. Eateries of all sorts were tucked into every nook and cranny. Food stalls were scattered here and there, in amongst tables and chairs for guests to sit and eat at. Vendors sold delicacies from all over the globe and some specialized in serving rare treats like coffee, chocolates, or teas.

Varian was bombarded with the scents of various spices, sweets, and meats being prepared a hundred different ways. And everywhere he turned he spied mouth watering dishes being severed to crowds of people.

Wasabi gave him a slip of the green paper that served as currency in this world. On its surface was printed the number twenty with the image of a woman Varian did not recognize on one side and a picture of a large stately manor on the opposite.

He was told to pick out whatever he liked, while everyone else shuffled off to their own choice of cuisine. However this proved to be easier said than done. There were far too many options to choose from and Varian didn’t know where to start.

Some of the merchants stood to the side and offered free samples to the passing customers. Which Varian figured might be helpful in making a decision, if it wasn’t for Ruddiger.

His pet was all stomach and far too eager to try the tasty morsels to mind any manners. It was all Varian could do to keep the raccoon from climbing on to the poor waiters and stealing pawfulls of the treats. Once he had managed to stop him from assaulting the servers, the animal was off to bother the guests sitting at the tables.

"Sorry,” he apologetically mumbled as he grabbed Ruddiger and pulled him away from another customer’s tray of food.

He held his pet tightly in his arms as the critter struggled to get away. Things were starting to get out of hand and Varian needed to make a decision fast before Ruddiger caused even more of a scene. That was when he spotted Hiro and Honey Lemon standing in line to order food from one of the establishments and he figured it was as good as any other place so he walked over to join them.

The restaurant was one that served meals from the island of Japan and their specialty was a soup that was called ramen. The stew consisted of noodles in a clear broth and from there customers could choose what toppings to be added to the dish. Varian didn’t even recognize half of the options on the menu so he stuck to only things he knew; pork slices, boiled egg, mustard greens, and slices of green onion.

He then joined his friends at a nearby table. He sat Ruddiger down between himself and Honey Lemon in a special enclosed chair predominantly meant for small children and then tied his leash to the back of the chair’s legs. That way even if his pet escaped he still couldn’t run off to bug anyone else.

Though he doubted it would be necessary, as Honey Lemon was already feeding Ruddiger pieces of food from her own meal. The raccoon greedily gulped down the bits of egg and noodle given to him while the tall girl cooed words of encouragement as if he was a small baby and not a wild animal.

“Don’t feed that thing with your bare hands.” Wasabi admonished her as he came to over join them. “It hasn’t had its shots yet. I gotta take him to the vet on Monday."

"Oh good, he’ll need a checkup.” Honey Lemon agreed, all the while continuing to pet Ruddiger as she fed him, completely ignoring Wasabi’s advice.

Varian had to chuckle at the irony of that as he sat down to eat himself. Then he noticed the utensils they had given him.

“What’s this?” Varian asked as he held up two wooden sticks.

“Chopsticks,” Hiro explained. “ You hold the two pieces in your hand, like this, and use them to pick up the food.” He then proceeded to demonstrate how to do just that.

“Who eats soup with sticks?” Varian asked in disbelief. The practice seemed totally impractical to Varian, but he gave it a try anyways, mimicking the other boy’s actions, and promptly failing at it.

No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get his hands to hold the chopsticks correctly and the food kept sliding out from between them. Finally he just angrily impaled the dish with the two wooden dowels, attempting to utilize them like you would a fork, but this too proved to be unsuccessful.

He gave up in frustration and was about ready to just drink from the bowl directly, when Wasabi took pity on him and brought him a spoon that he acquired from another vendor.

The soup had a savory, salty taste not unlike a consommé. It was however the combination of noodles and toppings that made the dish stand out to Varian, giving the stew a unique texture. He also made sure to give Ruggider some so that Honey Lemon wouldn’t have to give the raccoon all of her food.

---------------------------

After lunch Honey Lemon wanted to stop in a store that sold candles, soaps, and perfumes. The combined scents of flowers, herbs, fruits, and pastries wafting through the air was nearly overpowering. Any one of the fragrances might have been nice on their own but all combined together was too much. Fortunately, Varian wasn’t the only one with this opinion and the rest of the guys in the group went into a separate but connected side of the store that sold toiletries for men.

Once there, the other boys helped Varian pick out some soap, shampoo, cologne, and something called deodorant, which was meant to help stop sweating. Wasabi also bought him a shaving kit that included some disposable razors. They looked far safer than the steel blades men had to use in his world. In truth he didn’t really need to shave yet, but he wasn’t going to tell the other teens that. He was already sixteen, and the fact that he hadn’t grown a single hair on his face was a source of some shame for Varian. Better to let them think he was clean shaven then risk having his manliness questioned.

Afterwards they met back up with the girls and continued to explore the mall. There were stores of every kind selling anything you could think of. Jewelry, more clothing outlets, games, athletic gear for sports, shoes, music, sweets and candies, furniture, novelty knickknacks, decorative items for rooms such as rugs and lampshades, kitchen supplies, barber shops and nail salons, a spa, a ‘magic’ store that sold crystal balls and healing stones, (something Varian turned his nose up at), more electronics, and even a second hand store that sold anything as long as it was used. The last one Gogo stopped into real quick and reemerged carrying an old, beat up, guitar that she gave to Varian. It wasn’t electric and it needed tuning and some new strings but Varian was very grateful for her thoughtfulness.

However, out of all the wondrous shops and stalls he had seen that day, his favorite by far was the book store; walls and shelves lined with nothing but novels, magazines, and thick research books. Everything was divided up into categories and genres and he made a beeline to the section labeled ‘Action/Adventure’. He scanned the titles and covers hoping to find something familiar or at least interesting to read.

Reading was one of his favorite activities. He loved being transported away on grand adventures through the words on the page. It was a relief to a lonely farm boy, to pretend he was some hero in a far off land, befriended and admired, where the dangers weren’t real and you could come home again whenever. Sadly, he was no hero and the dangers he had faced were very real. Because of them, he hadn’t had the chance to just curl up and read a good story in nearly a year and a half.

“Do you have any Flynn Rider stories in this world?” Varian asked Hiro, who had walked over to join him.

“No, I don’t think so. What’s it about?”

“Flynn Rider is an amazing ne’er-do-well swashbuckling adventurer. He rides around exploring various far off lands, tricking villains, finding treasures, and saving people from nefarious evil doers.” Varian explained all while thrusting his arm out in a mock display of sword fighting.

Hiro gave a little laugh at the other boy’s antics. “No never hear of him, but there’s lots of other adventure books you may like; Robin Hood, Treasure Island… oh and this one. It’s one of my favorites.”

Hiro picked up a book from off the shelf and gave it to Varian. It was a small novel titled, ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, and on the cover was the image of a boy wearing a straw hat and painting a white picket fence. Varian though couldn’t fathom what was ‘adventurous’ about doing such a menial chore.

“It’s about a boy growing up on the Mississippi river and he and his best friend witness a murder while hunting for buried treasure.” Hiro explained.

Varian had to admit that the description provided was certainly a lot more interesting than the cover would initially suggest.

“My brother, Tadashi, used to read it to me when I was younger.” he said with a more hesitant and somber tone to his voice.

“Tadashi?” Varian queried. He hadn’t met anyone by that name yet and wondered why he wasn’t at breakfast this morning if he was supposed to be Hiro’s family.

“Uh, yeah, he passed away last year.” Hiro said with a little crack to his voice.

Varian’s heart dropped. He had been so caught up in his own problems, and the brief respite from them that this world provided, that it never occurred to him that anyone else was suffering. He felt foolish now for being so oblivious.

“Sorry, I.. I didn’t mean to...I” He tried to stumble out an apology for his lack of tact, but the other teen interrupted him.

“It’s ok. You didn’t know.”

A brief moment of silence passed, where neither boy wanted to meet the other’s gaze, and then Hiro continued on, trying to awkwardly change the subject.

“Uh, if you want to give it a read, I could buy it for you” He said pointing to the book Varian still held in his hand.

“You, sure?” Varian asked, “It wouldn’t be too much?”

“Naw, it’s only five bucks.” Hiro laughed.

Varian didn’t know what a ‘buck’ was nor if five was a substantial amount or not, but he appreciated the offer and made an agreement to read the story the first chance he got.

---------------------------

The last shop they visited for the day was one of the larger department stores attached to the mall. There they gathered up the remaining items that he needed. A couple of undershirts, a pack of underwear, and some socks. Two new pairs of shoes, one pair was white and made for running and were called ‘tennis shoes’, and the other was a pair of brown work boots. Varian didn’t want to mess up his nicer Saporian boots while experimenting, so he figured having them on hand would be prudent.

He also bought a pair of thick brown overalls for working in as well, since leather aprons weren’t common, along with a short sleeved collared shirt in teal green that Wasabi called a ‘polo shirt’. In addition to the work clothes, Varian bought two pairs of shorter britches in case the warmer weather proved to be too much for trousers. One pair was grey and called ‘jogger shorts’ and made of the same light material as the hoodie he had bought previously and the other was dark green ‘cargo shorts’ that held several pockets just like the cargo pants.

To round things off, he also got a pair of swimming trunks, a sleeveless shirt called a ‘tank top’ to go with it, and a pair of pajamas to sleep in. That, along with the clothes Wasabi had given him the night before, brought his total number of outfits to twelve. He still couldn’t believe how much he had been given. Anyone else in his world would be envious of such a vast wardrobe, but here it was deemed comparably small. It was still enough though, that Wasabi thought to buy some cheap plastic drawers for Varian to store his new clothes in. There would be just enough room to place them next to the couch.

Wasabi also bought him some basics that he might need, while there. Toothbrush, toothpaste, washcloth, towel, sheets and his own blanket, a pillow, and a notebook and pencils to work with. He was asked if he would like a hat as well, but Varian rarely took off his goggles so he declined. He did however take notice of several small timepieces that were on display nearby. They were called watches and were like tiny clocks you wore on your wrist. They came in all shapes and sizes and colors, some rustic looking and others more high-tech. Varian went with one that displayed the inner brass gears through the glass and came attached to a leather band.

---------------------------

Finally the day came to a close and they all convened out in the vast parking lot as the sun was setting. Fred had called his manservant to come pick him and Hiro up, and the rest of the gang was waiting for him to arrive. They hung around just simply talking and laughing and Varian thought to himself just how much fun he was having and how much fun the day itself had been. He hadn’t had fun in a good long while. Longer than he cared to admit to himself and he really couldn’t even remember the last time he had enjoyed the company of other people close to his age.

“Oh, there’s Heathcliff” Fred exclaimed as a long black car pulled into the lot. Apparently it was called a ‘limo’ and was quite an expensive vehicle. Though, Fred himself made no big deal about his social status.

“Bye guys, see ya later! Oh, and tell me what you think of the comics as soon as you get the change to read them, ok!” Fred told Varian.

Varian promised he would and waved the blonde boy goodbye as he got into the car.

“I texted Professor Granville. She said she’ll meet us on campus on Monday at nine in the morning. That’s in two days, so I’ll see you then.” Hiro said to him with a parting smile and got into the limo with Fred.

“We better be off as well.” Gogo said. She put on a helmet and sat upon a two-wheeled vehicle called a motorbike that she and Honey Lemon had ridden there.

“I hope you had a great time on your first day here.” Honey Lemon said with a sweet smile and then gave Varian a quick hug before bounding away and hopping on to the bike behind Gogo. That was certainly not something he had been expecting to happen and once again he felt knocked for a loop by the pretty girl. All he could do was dumbly wave back at her as she and Gogo sped away on the bike.

“So did you?” Wasabi asked as he leaned against his own car with a bemused smile upon his face. “Did you have a good time today?” He clarified when Varian looked back at him in confusion.

“Oh yeah, yeah. Loads of fun. This world is amazing.” Varian answered back.

“Well good. I’m glad your first day went well. Let’s head home. I’ll pick us up some tacos for dinner on the way.”

“What are tacos?” Varian asked as he entered the car, while unbeknownst to him, off in the distance, a pair of eyes watched as he and the green vehicle departed.

“Soon.” A voice said to no one in particular. “The time is coming soon.”

#tangled the series #BH6 the series #tangled #big hero 6 #varian #Hiro Hamada #rapunzel's tangled adventure #Wasabi #Honey lemon #fred frederickson iv #gogo #ruddiger

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thebeethathums · 5 years

Text

Observers - 56

Pairing: Sherlock Holmes x Reader

You jumped when, as usual, the door to your flat was flung open but this time you’d taken preventative action. The door hit the bumper you’d installed and bounced back to hit Sherlock’s shoulder and side with almost as much force as he’d used to fling it open. You tried really hard to stifle a giggle as he stumbled back, giving the door a death glare before turning to you to accuse, “You installed a bumper.” You shrugged going back the painting you were working on as you articulated, “If you would stop throwing my door open like a crazed maniac, things like that wouldn’t happen.” He huffed in annoyance but turned his attention to your flat, taking in all the sketches and drawings of various sizes that covered every flat surface and wall of your living room. It had been a good couple of months since he’d seen it with a series of back-to-back cases keeping both him and John busy and you working two jobs in addition to painting. You occasionally went out with them for cases but letting John use your sketches on his blog, something that you now did on a regular basis, had garnered you a job as a freelance illustrator for a publishing company in town and the majority of your time was spent between the café and meeting deadlines.

Sherlock didn’t like it at all but you had said you wanted to take a step back and he was trying to respect that since he felt bad for hurting you. It had been rather easy to avoid you with the cases he’d been working and your busy schedule, even if it put him in a bad mood and John found him insufferable. In fact, the few times that you had gone with them had been after a considerable amount of pleading on John’s part and your own guilt over the fact that the arguments in 221B had doubled since you’d taken the illustrating job.

You missed them both terribly despite the fact that you were glad for a bit of a break from your thing with Sherlock. It gave you time to think it over without him confusing you, which in the end really just resulted in you realizing that you missed him to the point of it almost being painful. It was a fairly miserable situation for all of you but you were determined to be in a place where you didn’t have to worry about choosing between buying groceries and paying rent. Sherlock stepped over to one of your bookshelves where each shelf had a series of drawings pinned to it depicting the adventures of a pink rabbit that was shaped like a very adorable jellybean- your latest assignment from the publishing company. “How long?” you hummed, not looking up from your painting, and he flopped down in your chair as he whined, “Six hours and thirty-seven minutes.” Setting your brush in the container of water, you spun on your stool to look at him, “And John doesn’t have anything from his blog for you?” “He went to Sarah’s an hour ago, grumbling about how I was being insufferable or some other ridiculous nonsense… and he hid the gun and my cigarettes. Will you make me tea?” Your lips twitched into a small smile as you slid off your stool, “Of course,”

He followed you to the kitchen as you stretched your arms over your head, “You’ve been working full days and painting at night every day for nearly a week now. The people at your publishing job are pleased with your work since they’ve given you three more projects to work on within the course of two weeks and they pay you well enough for you to have replaced a few empty tubes of paint and a brush but not so well that you can leave your work at the café. You miss the adventure and potential conflict of coming along with me and John on-“ You sighed, for once not really in the mood for his deductions, and bounced up to press a quick chaste kiss to his lips, “I miss you, genius.” It successfully shut him up as a sprinkling of pink dusted across his pale cheeks and his fingers came up to press at his lips, it was the first time you’d kissed since the whole ‘experiment’ incident and the first time you’d ever initiated the kiss instead of waiting for him to come to you. He reveled in the high he’d been missing for a moment as you went back to making tea and then wrapped himself around you from behind, resting his chin on your head, “I’m bored.” “I’m aware. How about an experiment? Molly said she had some leftover kidneys from a class in the morgue… I’m sure she’d be happy if you took them off her hands.” You could literally feel him pull a face before leaning over to purr in your ear, “I can think of better ways to stave off the boredom if you’re willing.” You pushed him back gently, knowing exactly what he wanted, and slipped the cup of tea in his hands with a firm, “No.” He followed you back into the living room to whine, “But (F/n)-“ “No, Sherlock.” You sat back down on your stool and picked up a paintbrush just as he pouted, “But I’m bored. You know it only gets worse.” You sighed, considering that before setting down the brush again as you decided to give him what he wanted, “Fine. You win. Go get Cluedo.” He jumped up almost gleefully to grab your arm, “We can play upstairs. I can’t have you getting distracted by your work.” You let out a mirthful laugh, bounding up the stairs with him to flop down on the couch while he set up the board on the coffee table, you’d needed a break anyways. You turned your cheek to look at him, “Remind me again why Johnny told me never to play this game with you?” “That would be because John is an idiot,” Sherlock stated giving a tiny smirk and you chuckled, “It’s a good thing I don’t listen to him then.” Sherlock offered you a full grin and you slid off the couch to sit on the floor across from him, letting him take the first turn as you began the game. John came home the next morning to find you both still sitting at the coffee table engaged in an intense game of Cluedo. John just sort of gaped for a moment, watching you giggle as Sherlock moved his game piece across the board, both of you so focused you hadn’t noticed him come in.

The sight in front of him was truly astounding, not only were you playing Cluedo without arguing but it seemed that at some point during the many rounds you’d played the two of you had devised and added more cards and game pieces to modify how the game was played. Sherlock suddenly gave you an intense look as he exclaimed, “I suggest that Mr. Bloom murdered Professor Plum in the office with a syringe of poison. The motive I give is Plum was developing a serum that would put Bloom out of business.” You tweaked your lips to the side in thought and then countered, “I agree with your accusation, location, and weapon but I believe there is more to your motive.” Sherlock folded his hands beneath his chin in thought as he hummed, “Explain.” “I suggest the motive to be a payment from an interested party, namely Mycroft, for eliminating Professor Plum and thereby halting his research into bioweaponry for Russia, his true country of origin.” Sherlock gave a small proud smirk, “Agreed. The points for motive go to you… but I’m still winning.” “Only by two hundred points,” you huffed, puffing your cheeks out, and he chuckled before eagerly asking, “Another round?” John cleared his throat and you startled, turning to blink up at him before giving a wide grin, “Hey, Johnny… Sherlock said you were staying at Sarah’s.” “I did,” John confirmed, cocking an eyebrow at you, “It’s nearly nine in the morning, Squeak.” You and Sherlock both gave him a dumbfounded look, “What?” “How long have you two been at this?” John wondered, giving a soft chuckle at how caught up in the game you’d both gotten. “Nearly twelve hours,” Sherlock offered distractedly, wondering how exactly you’d managed to keep him from the boredom for that long, and you sighed as you flopped down on the floor with a yawn, “No wonder I’m so tired all the sudden.” “Don’t you have work soon,” John worried, stepping closer to survey your game, “And I’m pretty sure that all of this is against the rules.” You sat up to look at him, “You know I’ve never been one for rules, John… and I have the week off from the café. Figured it was time for a bit of a break.” “Good because I refuse to play Cluedo with him ever again and I’d rather he didn’t shoot the walls, as would Mrs. Hudson.” “What do you have against Cluedo, Johnny?” Sherlock pursed his lips, offering an answer for him, “He says it’s not possible for the victim to have done it.” You tilted your head as you frowned at your brother, “Why not? Sherlock’s reasoning seemed perfectly sound to me.” John clenched his jaw and then snapped, “Because it’s not in the rules!” “The rules are wrong, John!” Sherlock snapped back and you had to stifle a giggle as they began to argue over it and you got up to make yourself some tea, stretching your legs before moving towards the kitchen. You had just leaned against the counter to inhale the steam from your tea when the arguing abruptly stopped and Sherlock loudly announced, “I’ve been summoned.” John appeared in the doorway to the kitchen a second later with a pleading look on his face and you chuckled, “Relax John. You couldn’t keep me from coming if you tried.” Within minutes the three of you were out of the flat, you and John tailing a very enthusiastic looking Sherlock down the street as you all felt a sense of relief that everything was as it should be.

Tags <3:

@team-free-sherlock @multifandom-ramblings @madshelily @severusminerva @yes-but-theyre-my-dorks @smitemewiththysherlock @not-fandom-addicted @unknownwonder @deducingdevil @aviien @mrsfrankensteinsworld @lolamurphy @bakerstreethound @musical-doll-x @protectteamfreewill @delightful-pirate @lilcutekittykat @broke-and-overwhelmed @adri1ii @turtle-at-the-disco @fanfictionsilove @chasedbyhowlingwolves @thorkyrie-rights

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disabled-queen-hc-blog · 5 years

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Roger is an expert really. A true natural. An autistic whisperer.

Since Brian and John got the diagnosis he has been an exemplary friend and guide to a sometimes confusing world to his two good friends. He studied books. He sorted through bad sources and purely stereotypical descriptions in both old and new books.

He instructed Freddie how best to show patience when things progressed a little too slowly for him. Told him how autistic minds work. What environments they excel in. Calm and predictable.

So, no, Freddie couldn’t announce half way through a show that they would suddenly mix things up a bit and rearrange some songs.

He couldn’t blame it on Brian when he thought it all became too repetitive and conservative. He couldn’t call John boring and ‘never in it for some fun.’

Roger knew Freddie didn’t mean it harshly. He had his own stuff to deal with. ADHD didn’t always go hand in hand and see eye to eye with autism. So Roger had developed into a perfect little diplomat. A true neutral force between arguments and misunderstandings.

Or so he thought.

The first signs started showing before their third grand tour of Europe. A trying time in his three friends’ and bandmates’ lives. He knew. He was well aware of that.

Brian and John reacted strongly before any big changes. Going from practise to recording. Or going from recording to playing live shows. They enjoyed those three activities separately. Just not the transition between them.

Roger combed through his hair that morning. He was already planning in his head what he would tell his mates.

He would show John a series of pictograms illustrating the next week. He would then tell Freddie to stop rolling his eyes at John, Roger would get to him in a minute, don’t be impatient, don’t blame John for his special needs in having a pictogram of his days.

Then trying to get Brian to pack his things. Yes, Brian, I know your guitar picks always go in the second drawer in the cabinet, but you need them for the tour now, so they must be in your luggage from now on. Where do you usually keep them in there? Then put them in the front pocket again.

Freddie. Please stop bending the cords. Freddie, pack your bags, see, just like Brian is. Freddie, it’s been twenty minutes now, I’ve told you to pack your bags one hundred times, please get on with it.

Roger yelped. Ow! He looked at his comb. Blond hair. Almost an entire nest of blond hair. He looked in the mirror. It wasn’t that visible, but a bald spot appeared just over his right temple. He screamed.

He heard Freddie echoing his scream and then making a little tune out of it.

No. No, no, no. He couldn’t be going bald? He was still in his twenties!

The next sign came the day after, during a coffee break. Brian was fiddling with his luggage, still not happy about the changed place of his picks.

Roger’s hand shook so badly that he had trouble lifting the cup. He put it down again and shook his hand. Maybe a muscle cramping up? As a drummer, he had to be careful with his hands and wrists. They were both important and in constant strain.

He massaged his wrists and tried again. Slightly better, but he could still feel his hand being a bit wobbly.

When they entered on stage he almost tripped over his own drumset, from not paying attention.

When they were giving an interview, he rubbed his forehead. John preferred holding hands under the table while talking to the press, but Roger had to let go to lay a hand over his head. A throbbing headache had bothered him all afternoon.

The next days Roger felt worse and worse. Every day had something new and miserable to introduce him to. He’d had cold sweats the night before. After breaking up the tension between Brian and Freddie. John was overly sensitive about changes in the atmosphere, so Roger had spent the better part of an hour talking him down, reassuring him that it would pass and urging him to look at some of his several drawings of mechanical equipment.

Freddie and Brian had started again when Roger returned.

“You always want it your way, Brian!” Freddie shouted.

Brian was sitting on the floor, legs crossed. He was rocking back and forth.

Roger hurried to his side and grabbed his arms. Brian didn’t like light touches, so if anyone had to touch him it should feel heavy on his skin.

Freddie walked back and forth. His pace quickened and by the end he was almost running.

Roger stood up and got in the way of Freddie’s pacing. “Yes?”

“What’s gotten you two all riled up?”

“Oh, you know Brian! Nothing new under the Sun there!”

Roger tried his best to mend their relationship and restore the normally friendly tone between them.

Freddie had wanted change. Brian didn’t.

The next morning Roger couldn’t get out of bed. He tried. He really did. Nothing worked. He was as paralyzed. After an hour he manages to go to the bathroom, but had to go to bed again immediately after.

He could hear John rustling around just outside his bedroom door. He knew why. It was his turn to make the pancakes, but Roger hadn’t laid out the recipe on the counter for him. And now he didn’t know what to do next.

Roger struggled. He had to get up. When he sat up he saw his pillow. It was filled with strands of his hair. He felt nauseous. Almost gagged.

Freddie walked past John and entered Roger’s room. “Aren’t you up yet?” He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the state of his friend. Pale face. Thinning hair. Closed eyes due to headache.

Later, at the doctor’s Roger waited while he wrote something down. Then the doctor looked up at him. He had a stern way of looking above the rim of his glasses.

“Have you been under a lot of stress lately?”

That caught Roger by surprise. “Um, well, we’re just starting a tour. And, well, you know?”

“This looks like severe stress. That will be a serious strain on your health if you don’t rearrange your life, starting immediately.”

Roger couldn’t keep a straight face anymore. He broke down crying, all the years worth of pent up stress overwhelming his senses.

When he left the doctor’s office, it was with a prescription for calming the nerves and a recommendation of a therapist specialising in stress.

His bandmates took the news hard. Brian and John were worried that they would never see Roger again.

Freddie huffed. “Of course we will .”

“Is any of this our fault?” John asked with hesitancy.

Roger looked him deep in the eyes. “No. None of this is your fault. It never will be your fault, John. This is really important. But I might have worked myself too hard. I’ve been a chump and haven’t listened to my body’s signals. And that’s important, right?”

Three heads nodded.

Brian was inconsolable at first. He held on to Roger for what seemed like forever. He rocked him back and forth, humming a tune for him, just like Roger always did for him when he became over-stimulated.

“It will be all right.” Roger reassured him.

Freddie shook his head. “No, you don’t get to comfort us now. You always do. Now it’s our time to comfort and help you.” All three surrounded Roger and held him close until he could barely breathe anymore. Roger thought to himself that they do help and comfort him. Everyday. By being his very own special and loving friends.

The guys started helping each other out more after that. Brian and John drew John’s pictograms together every Sunday evening.

Freddie helped Roger and their manager plan their tours and press meetings.

When they felt an argument approach, Brian and Freddie had written down a script of nice things they’d say to each other instead of arguing. They never made it to the end without bursting out with laughter.

And Queen could once again resume their obligations (almost) trouble-free.

Oh no! This made me so sad for Roger reading this!!! They all need a good sit down to remind each other that Roger is their friend, not their caregiver.

Lovely story, friend! Thank you so much!!

#autistic!brian #autistic!john #adhd!freddie #stressed!roger #submission #autism #adhd #guggi04

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littleogreboii · 5 years

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MIRACULOUS DAZE: 2

BRIDGETTE’S THEORY OF HAPPINESS

Summary: Felix Agreste has been a shut in since the death of his best friend Bridgette Cheng and the disappearance of his brother Adrien Agreste. His only company is the AI, Ladybug, that downloaded itself onto his computer a year ago. However, there might be more to it than meets the eye, and his foster siblings, Nathaniel, Lila and Rose, might know more than him about the events that are happening. And what the ‘Heat Haze’ is. (Kagerou Project AU)

Chapter Summary: “Hey guys look over here!” She called them over. They all quickly swarmed. She stood proud with her hair tied in two pigtails. The red ribbon she had used shone. “Now, where like a secret brigade or something!” The trio stared in awe. “Like the Miraculous Team or something?”

The three of them laughed at that with Lila speaking up. “That’s so cringey.”

Bridgette flushed. “What? I thought it was cool!” She defended. “Like we were superheroes or something.”

Warning: Suicide, Bullying and Major Character Death

Particular Cover I like for this

English Lyrics: Jubyphonic

AO3

1 2

Again those years run on by

My mind filling up with only family

"Ayano now’s your big sister everyone"

"so try to get along with her for me please"

Bridgette thought back to the time where everything went wrong and it seemed every sign pointed towards Felix’s family. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to regret being so mesmerised by them. They were so different to her own family and she was intrigued.

There was Felix. He was so quiet and withdrawn, but she couldn’t mistake the serenity on his face when he found a good book or created a good design. He tried to push her away constantly, yet she could see the walls he made desperate to crumble. He didn’t know how to let someone in and she wanted to be the first. She wanted to see all the expressions he was capable of. She could almost picture them, but to see the real deal was a dream. There was a glimpse she’d seen once. He’d been trying to get a book down in the library and managed to bring the whole row of books down. His flustered expression as he’d glanced about to see if anyone had seen his blunder was frankly adorable. She knew she loved him. She never thought she’d like such a sarcastic, introverted person, but now, she couldn’t imagine life not sitting beside him in class. Then, there were the supposed study sessions they did after school at his house, which mainly consisted of him reading and her interacting with his family. Although, initially it consisted of her watching him while pretending to study.

Adrien was usually around, but due to his health, he tended to retreat to his room in the evening. She suspected he spent most of his energy during his tutoring, especially trying to impress Marinette. She found it funny watching Adrien and Marinette interact. Adrien would throw out joke after joke, which she personally found hilarious, and Marinette would pretend not to like them. However, she knew Marinette was into him. She once hoped they’d be able to go on double dates together.

She still remembered when she was first introduced to Adrien and Felix’s younger siblings. Mr Agreste had recently adopted them, which confused her but she wasn’t going to complain. As even if Mr Agreste rarely ever spent time with them, she knew they’d be loved. Adrien had an endless supply of love and Felix would grow protective of them like he did with Adrien.

However, she also wanted to do her bit for the trio and she nearly cried when Felix introduced her to them. “This is Bridgette. I guess she’ll be like a big sister for you so do try and get along with her for me please.”

Little house of crimson brick, we all had fit inside of that place

To and fro they whispered back, making plans of their own so it seemed

Looking deep into their eyes, so red in all three and then I see

Hidden just beneath are memories grown ups never see

She didn’t quite understand when the treehouse appeared, but she suspected it had something to do with Adrien. He had a way with words when he wanted to and Gabriel, although distant, appeared to have some sort of soft spot for the boy. However, as she climbed up it, she began to realise Felix may have also had an influence on the design of the treehouse. It’s design was far too elegant for Adrien to have designed it alone because the boy had a habit of drawing a little black cat on anything he made.

When she reached the top though, she was alarmed to find the three of them sat close together and whispering. They were already far away from the house yet they huddled together like they would be caught doing something they shouldn’t. It was only her second time meeting them and the first had been so rushed, she hadn’t got a chance to take a proper look at them. So, while standing at the top of the ladder, she took a moment to just watch.

And it hit her. Red. Their eyes were a deep red. Something had happened. Something the grownups can’t see. There was more to these three kids than met the eyes, and she wanted to find out what.

Terror in his face he said "I'm a monster deep inside" filled with fear

But they're wrong and so I said "That's not true at all, just look here"

"That red you hate so much, a hero wears it proud! No really"

"It's okay, no need to be afraid anymore"

When she first tried to get close to them, Nathaniel glared at me and stated. “I’m a monster deep inside.” It was meant to be threatening, a warning, but all she saw was the pain and fear which was consuming him. And she thought to herself ‘how could children think this way?’

She thought for a moment, before grinning. “That’s not true.” She grabbed a comic book which sat in the corner of the treehouse. “Just look here you see!” She pointed at Ironman who stood proudly on the front cover. “That red you hate, well he wears it proudly and he’s a superhero. So there’s no need to be so afraid, ok?”

Thinking of what'd be fun, or might be dumb,

I was a big sister and tried my best to

"Hey guys, look over here!" A crimson muffler I wrapped around me

"A secret brigade -er something"

Her days she spent staring at Felix were quickly changed into days of planning what to do with the three of them. She wanted to bring laughter back into their lives and the way to do that was with fun activities, or even dumb activities. She was determined to be the best big sister out there.

Lila was the easiest, or at least she thought she was. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure. Lila wasn’t exactly forthcoming on her opinions, but she looked happy and that was enough for Bridgette. She was sure if Lila truly hated it all, she would have said something already. Besides, she couldn’t let insecurities overtake her now, not when the children needed her.

Rose was easily overwhelmed and didn’t particularly like being out in public. Bridgette had heard from Nathaniel that Rose was bullied in school, but Lila would often stand up for her. However, Bridgette knew that there was more to it than that. Lila could stop the verbal and the physical bullying, but she couldn’t stop the thoughts the bullies had and that was all the bullies needed to hurt Rose. It was terrifying. Any thought Bridgette held could potentially be heard by Rose and she dreaded the day Rose heard someone she love think something negative about her.

Nathaniel was a challenge. He was similar to Felix in a way, yet he hadn’t been able to put up all his walls at this point. Bridgette would stop him before it happened. She wouldn’t let him close himself off from her. He was shy and sometimes, it was hard to notice him. He snuck up on her constantly, usually causing her to drop something or trip over. She hoped with time he’d open up to her because he was such a kind boy.

“Hey guys look over here!” She called them over. They all quickly swarmed. She stood proud with her hair tied in two pigtails. The red ribbon she had used shone. “Now, where like a secret brigade or something!” The trio stared in awe. “Like the Miraculous Team or something?”

The three of them laughed at that with Lila speaking up. “That’s so cringey.”

Bridgette flushed. “What? I thought it was cool!” She defended. “Like we were superheroes or something.”

“But who would be the supervillain?” Rose questioned.

“Felix.” Bridgette stated with zero hesitation.

“Really?” Nathaniel looked up with large eyes.

“Yes.” She nodded, crossing her arms. “We must go defeat him with love and affection.” And they all set off.

Dye it in madder of roses, so we can begin

Just because we play heroes, it doesn't mean nothing

"So maybe just a little we'll smile again"

And always be one big happy family

It became a regular occurrence. Bridgette would come round and they would play heroes. Although, Felix argued they were more villains than anything with all their pranks. He did nothing to stop them though, even going as far as to let them put fake cat ears on him. The cat ears of course being a courtesy of Adrien, who also enjoyed watching them, even going as far as to join in on days he felt well enough.

It was surprising, but Nathaniel’s leadership skills slowly began to come out. He was timid about it, but the elaborate plans he sometimes came up with were insane. Bridgette was impressed and every time he would carefully slide a plan other to her, she couldn’t help the praise that endlessly slipped from her lips. Sometimes the plans even had illustrations and it brought a smile to her face knowing Adrien was teaching him how to draw. She just hoped Nathaniel didn’t pick up Adrien’s habit of putting cat ears on everything.

Lila seemed to reveal herself as quite a wicked character. The worst pranks always came from her and ended up being the ones which would cause Felix to chase them around the garden. However, she was also the best at feigning innocence, easily passing the blame onto one of the others. Rose had reported to Bridgette that Lila virtually had the whole of the school in the palm of her hand. It made Bridgette proud to say the least.

Rose plans were the most innocent. They were usually something as simple as prank Adrien by filling his room with paper cranes or ambush Felix with hugs. That kindness was something Bridgette hoped Rose would keep with her for the rest of her life.

Bridgette never voiced it because she knew they wouldn’t take it seriously, but there was reason behind her actions. She longed to see them all turn to her with beaming grins for they were her family through and through. Even Gabriel seemed to be accepting of her role in the house and by that she meant he hadn’t said anything about it.

I hope they're happy and laughing at every new day

And if they just couldn't take it, they won’t run away

"Now listen close, hear this secret for you"

And so the sun sets on a day fun and new

Occasionally, Bridgette would sit and simply watch the others. It was blissful to see them all running around and playing together. She wanted this happiness to last forever and she prayed that she had helped even just a little. She wanted the happiness to swallow them to the point they can’t contain it yet she hoped it wouldn’t scare them away. It had already been scary enough when Rose ran away at one point. She’d been missing for two days before returning with no explanation. However, after the incident, Rose had seemed to relax and even though she would be gone some evenings, she seemed happier than ever. Bridgette had her suspicions of what had bloomed within Rose but she didn’t voice it. Rose would learn in due time.

Bridgette would lean over and pull all of them into a hug. “Now listen close, hear this secret for you.” And she would lower her voice before continuing. “I love you.” Felix would sometimes ask what had been said and they would simply grin. Each day would be brought to a close, brimming with happiness.

Blowing spring into the air, the adult world we knew was changing too

Something wrong I couldn't see, like a plan of their own so it seemed

Billow tears and fade away, the people that I love keep crying out

No one seems to notice but it's all dying into black

At one point, Bridgette found herself in Gabriel’s office. She’d been called into see him, much to her confusion. Yet when she’d entered, he was nowhere in sight. All that was left was several documents on his desk. On first inspection, it had appeared to be nothing more than papers about his students, Marinette and Adrien, but it wasn’t. The word ‘subject’ was littered throughout the document, and she took a moment to skim through it. The ‘Heat Haze’ was repeated a few times and the trio were even mentioned. Something had occurred to give the trio those red eyes and there was no way she was going to risk letting anymore suffering happen. She took a glance out the door, checking both ways, before beginning her search. What she found shocked her. There were papers detailing what happened to Lila, Nathaniel and Rose, and reading further, there was even a plan to achieve similar results with Adrien and Marinette. She had to stop it.

At a similar time, Marinette began being plagued by a nightmare. She never got the full details, but apparently, it was the same dream each time. Rose’s bullying had also gotten worse to the point that she was coming home each day in tears. Nathaniel became even more distant and Bridgette found herself constantly having to call out to him. Lila seemed to smile even more than before, seemingly oblivious to everything that was happening, but Bridgette had come to realise by this point that it was simply a mask Lila wore. Adrien’s health seemed to be getting worse and it was increasingly rare for him to play with them. Felix was rarely ever heard from, appearing to be constantly busy, yet to Bridgette it just appeared as though there was something on his mind.

All the adults seemed to be blissfully unaware of what was happening. They didn’t see their struggles and if the noticed, they passed it off as nothing more than the worries of a child. They refused to acknowledge their problems.

It's all gone wrong, but now I knew deep down

I couldn't tell a single soul how I felt

"God no, oh please don't destroy what I had found"

In came a world where our happiness died and flew out

She kept her thoughts to herself. She didn’t even tell Felix what she’d discovered. Shockingly, she even managed to keep it a secret from Rose. Everytime she went round their house now, she would have to force herself to focus on other things. She locked them up and hid the key out of reach.

Every night, she would beg the haze. “God no, oh please don’t destroy what I had found. Don’t take their smiles away. They still have so much left to live. They deserve so much. Please, you can’t take it away from them. I’m begging you.” Yet, the happiness continued to stay hidden.

Oh madder red no, I beg you, can take no more

Why can't you stop breaking futures so there'll be tomorrow?

The tears never stop falling the answer is clear

Hiding behind smiles from ear to ear

So, she made a plan while she maintained her play pretend. She continued to play with the trio, putting her heart and soul into it. She pretended that nothing was wrong and made her smile as large as possible. If the others wouldn’t smile, she would smile enough for them. In the meantime, she continued begging the red that plagued them. Each day, she would hope tomorrow would finally come and their happiness would return. Each day though, she found herself continuing to fake that smile.

If they were my eyes, such red eyes, I wonder could I

be their one and only hero who saves their future?

I'm clumsy awkward and shameful no less

But on this mission, I must go alone...

Finally, her plan was complete and all that was left was to put it in motion. This time she would be the hero. She was probably the worst fit for the mission. She wasn’t smart like Felix. She wasn’t elegant like Adrien. She wasn’t confident like Lila. And, she certainly wasn’t the right fit to go up against someone as powerful as Gabriel. Yet, she was the only one who could. She couldn’t push this mission onto anyone else, she wouldn’t forgive herself for doing so.

She left no note and told no one. She simply went into school in the evening after visiting the Agreste’s. They wouldn’t notice at the moment. They were all too stressed about Adrien, who had collapsed earlier. She snuck up to the roof and looked across the city.

And she lept.

Now I'm gone and wonder what the brigade is doing now and hope again

They're smiling all the time and they're getting along with each other

They probably hate me now or maybe just hurt

I wonder, have I become for them their big sister by now?

She lingers in the haze, unable to leave. Her thoughts linger on the Agreste’s. She tries to picture them with smiling faces. She hopes Lila isn’t teasing Nathaniel and Rose too much, and Nathaniel isn’t retreating too much into his shell, and Rose has been able to stand up to her bullies. She doesn’t want to think about how they feel about her now, yet it nags at her. They probably hate her. She hurt them, even if she did it to save them. She wonders if she’s finally of the title of big sister. She wishes she could ask them.

Will you remember the word I loved with every bit inside me?

That "happiness" ah how strange it is, the feeling

And as tomorrow breaks, I hope you love it too

Their safety fills her will all the happiness she needs and she hopes that with each passing day they will also grow to love happiness.

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sketchesofsam · 6 years

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The Illustration Master Class - A First Timer's Journal

This is a long blog post. It's mostly for my own purposes, but also for those who want an in-depth look at what being at the IMC is like. I have some pointers for first timers, things you might not think of and things to consider in advance. They'll be at the end of the article. I want to thank Dave Palumbo for allowing me to use a couple of his amazing photos too, he's a talented SOB.

probably won't forget the moment my Facebook messages suddenly started pinging off. 'Congrats Sam!' 'Hey Sam, you won!' I distinctly remember thinking, hmm, what did I win? Did I enter another twitter giveaway or something? Then someone followed up with 'you won the scholarship!' It took me a moment. Then the chat I was in the middle of with my other half suddenly filled with lots of expletives and capitals on my end. Holy shit. I'd won the Muddy Colors scholarship to the IMC, something that had been a long-term wish of mine since I'd found out about it 5 or 6 years prior but hadn't ever had the funds to attend. So to find out that my entry to their scholarship program - through the generous donations of the Muddy Colors Patreon - submitted on a 'what have I got to lose' mentality that was still shadowed by the fuzzy sting of not getting into Spectrum, had scored me the full cost of the course. I'd honestly forgotten I'd applied. Let that be a lesson to those of you who hold back on submitting to things, especially the things that are free. It's always worth a punt.

So what's it like to go to the IMC? I can tell you that winning the scholarship made the pre-IMC thumbnail assignment a lot more stressful than if I'd paid for it. The weight of imagining disappointing the people who had seen my work and voted for it - artistic heroes of mine - was pretty heavy. It made me feel like I couldn't just go and do the same thing I'd always done, even if it had won me the scholarship. Before I started drawing, I reconsidered my influences. I'd started a secret pinterest board a few months back simply called 'Ho Fuck That's Good.' Stuff that gave me a gut punch when I looked at it. I spent a lot of time looking at those images and a lot of the others I had pinned. I stopped paying attention to work that I simply found technically impressive, that had awesome composition or great values. I looked for what moved me. Why it moved me. I started making notes about themes I found compelling or that cropped up a lot in my own work. I decided I wasn't going to do just a straight up realistic narrative Whaler Girl piece, I was going to try and make my own work be more like that which moved me. A risky, and perhaps somewhat dumb move, given those same realistic, narrative images had won me the scholarship.

We were asked to provide 4 or 5 thumbnails, either of our own choosing, or from an assignment provided, such as an illustration to accompany a short story, the likes of which are often published on Tor.com. With themes like duality, death, grief and love in relationships crowding my brain, I created a lot of thumbnails. I wasn't going to take the first 3 or 4 that came out. I did about 20 in total and narrowed it down to the 6 I felt most attached to. Some of them even had hints back to The Whaler Girl in a very asbtract way. They'd come out better than I'd hoped for and I could see a tiny glimpse of the sort of painting I might get out of it. It made me excited to put them in front of my chosen faculty member.

We were asked to pick a top 5 from the vertiable smorgasbord of faculty. That was hard. It turned out that most people got grouped with their top pick and that dictated who the other faculty were that would give you feedback. I suspect my pick would have surprised a few people. Kent Williams was actually the instructor I was least familiar with, but researching his work, especially his most recent work, it hit the same kind of buttons that my inspiration board had. His work felt emotionally personal and while I knew I didn't want to necessarily paint like he did, I felt he might be able to give good feedback on how to tap into that sense of the personal. Perhaps someone who could help keep me on track with the first wibbly steps I was taking with my own work. I count myself lucky to have landed in the group with Rebecca, Kent and Tara (McPherson).

I wanted to make a good first impression, but there were so many approaches to the dreaded 'crit day'. Some folks brought only one or two finished colour thumbs, some folks just had small, traditionally drawn thumbnails, occasionally done on arrival the night before. Some brought photo mockups of the exact piece they wanted to work on. All approaches got good feedback. I'd been forewarned that crit day could be rough, but I think the Studio 201 guys were pretty chill. I did peek my head in on the other two rooms briefly. Donato, Greg Ruth and Scott Fischer were all highly animated and I've been told often argued with each other's feedback. Dan Dos Santos, Irene Gallo and Greg Manchess were part of the group that, from chatting to folks, seemed to get the most direct feedback.

I was a little surprised when there was no tracing paper used during my crit. All three faculty members responded favourably to what had been my favourite thumbnail, despite its weirdness. No direct suggestions other than resolving the shapes in my minimal, non-figurative space (that minor bit of feedback would come to haunt me by The Thursday of DOOM, but I'll get to that later). Inspirations like Inka Essenhigh, Hope Gangloff and Dorothea Tanning were thrown my way, I loved all three for very different reasons. It was safe to say inspiration was running high and I had a tonne of positive energy to run with.

I felt like I was well prepped going into the IMC, but I wasn't. Choosing to go full traditional when having to fly internationally was a pain. I didn't have a lot of the stuff I needed and had to rely on the infinite kindness of my fellow students and faculty to see me through. Stephen, Annie, Chris, Julia, you were all lovely, I can't thank you enough.

My Tuesday started with James Gurney sat at my breakfast table. That was surreal but awesome. He and his wife Jeanette are as lovely two people as you could hope to meet, full of insight and always taking notes. The previous day's lecture on photo reference was flowing through my mind and I dreaded having to ask fellow students. My figures were both nudes and that wasn't something I was comfortable with, though I thought perhaps I could take individual legs and arms and use a little online ref to fill in the rest. I wish I'd drummed up the courage to ask my fellow students, but that particular social step eluded me the whole week. I spent the day instead with many sheets of tracing paper, figuring out What marks were what. I had discussions with Greg Ruth and Donato Giancola about how to find those shapes and make them fit in my piece. You have to figure out who to listen to, and whose advice to stash for a later date. You get bombarded with advice if you go in as open-minded as I did. I'd thrown myself into a pool I should have been paddling in first, pretty much at the very public deep end. I'll admit I found ways to put off getting to painting, as it was only the 2nd oil painting I'd done in the last 20 years and the company I had in the room was stellar and a little overwhelming. Eventually, I chose to redraw via a grid so I could edit as I went along and I used some reference I shot of my own limbs to help flesh the drawing out. I left Tuesday feeling reasonably positive about the work.

Wednesday was a full day with faculty feedback, up to the first 5 pm lecture. Dan Dos Santos, who is perfectly lovely, but also very honest with feedback, stopped by my easel. Overall, very complimentary, he pulled me on a bit of weird anatomy, that after using a lot more photo ref with the rest of the piece, had begun to stand out. He suggested I grab Rebecca after our discussion. I'd responded best to her feedback, as she seemed to understand what I was trying to do, so I grabbed her after lunch. She immediately told me the leg and anatomy I'd had in the thumbnail had been working, and that if I liked the weirdness (which I did) to go weird with the rest of the piece to make the leg fit. Literally the opposite of Dan's feedback. Feedback is such a personal thing, every instructor has their own view of art and own journey. I'd probably tried to take a little bit of everyone who'd stopped by and given feedback and every little bit had nudged me slightly off the course I'd intended to take. Dan's feedback was spot on, if I'd been after something with a solid grounding in realism, but I wasn't. I was after an emotional feeling rather than muscles that looked like they fit where they were supposed to go. Rebecca suggested I just print the thumbnail out, mount it to masonite and paint on that. But resolve my shapes first.

That led me to ask Tara for advice and after some back and forth, I thought I knew where I was going, and decided rather than be tied to the values I'd got in the thumbnail to start with, I'd trace down the printed thumbnail and resolve my shapes. All went well, I got the drawing on the board, and aware of the ever-ticking clock and my ability to get feedback on my painting process, I was keen to get started the following day.

I nick-named Thursday 'Thursday of DOOOOOOOM' in my sketchbook notes. With that many 'O's'. It started well, with my sketch on my illustration board, I figured I'd use acrylic underpainting to speed up the process, then seal with matte medium and start on top in oils. I'd brought a lovely lime green and violet with me, my underpainting was done in warm purple-reds as a counterpoint, and I was winging it. It felt good. I stepped away for a bit before lunch and came back after to the horror of a C-shaped warped board. A brand I'd not used before, I hadn't been heavy with it at all. I threw some matte medium on the back in the hopes it would pull itself out of the curve, but it only stiffened. I think panic set in at this point, I knew there was no point in doing more on the board, but I'd been stubborn over mounting the printouts I'd done. Old dog, new tricks and all that.

Distraught, I knew I had no choice. I slunk off to the back of the studio and tried not to blub my eyes out as I tried a totally new method of mounting with less than perfect tools. Flustered, my hair constantly got stuck in the medium, making me even more panicked that the whole thing would be a disaster and that I'd missed the last supply run and would have to face the very public shame of asking someone for actual help. If there's one thing I hate, it's not being self-sufficient. My fellow students would have happily helped out, but shame is a pretty powerful emotion, it tends to rule what you do. I prayed the mounted paper wouldn't need a 2nd sheet mounting on the back to counter the drawing mounted on the front. At best, in the blazing sun, this stuff would take a couple of hours to dry to the point I could paint on it. The wind did its best to prevent me from stacking the board outside and in my hours of deepest bleakness, I figured that maybe if it blew over into the dirt and insects, I'd say fuck it and make them part of the fucking thing too. It was also at this point I realised the printouts had cropped the two thumbnails I'd chosen to work with, altering their composition drastically. My own dumb fault for not setting the page size up properly in the printer. One more shame I'd suck up and live with. I wish I'd asked for help. I think knowing the pieces weren't what I'd initially intended broke my ability to give them my full attention and killed my mojo for the next couple of days. My anxiety rats, as Rebecca delightfully referred to them, were in full swing.

While I waited for it to dry, I headed back into the studio and mentioned to Rebecca I'd given in with the curved board and mounted the thumbnail and would she have a look over what I'd chosen to do with the background. Rebecca is gracious and lovely and patiently listens to me explain what I've done. Then she points to some of the graphic elements I'd put in and gently says that they still feel too literal and forced, that the motifs I choose should be something I relate to closely and that it doesn't quite live up to the right hand, figurative side of the painting. I suggest a couple of other ideas, feeling a scrabbling panic bulding in me, only to hear her tell me everything still feels too literal. My logic brain knows she's right, but after a distraught morning, I'm clasping at any straw I have to salvage the situation. I don't know if it showed, and she saw that I was struggling with it or if it was just honest feedback for the moment, but at that point, she looked at me and said 'maybe this piece is a step too far for you right now, maybe you should do the other piece, if that's something that's more comfortable for you.' I think I agreed with her, nodded and extolled the virtues of taking a step back into my comfort zone, getting a painting I knew how to do done was a good thing, yes? But damn if that wasn't a kick to the gut at that very moment.

She was absolutely right, though. I'd throw myself into a deep pool, with people who were olympic athletes at diving its depths, and in the course of a week expected to be able to at least dive a good distance with them. I'd been able to get my head underwater with my well-planned thumbnails, but in this overwhelming, information packed, inspiring, public test of artistic mettle, I'd punched above my depth, so to speak. Trying to shift gears artistically when you have your own space and the time to find your journey is one thing, I don't know if it can be done in a week, no matter how much amazing input you get from your artistic heroes. Chris, Erin, Annie, I'm sorry if my energy those next 48 hours was a bummer, it wasn't a place I was familiar with being.

Kent Williams came to the rescue of my very bruised ego that evening with a talk about his personal journey through art. Indirectly, seeing the bredth and depth of his work over such a long time span, I confess to feeling a little idiotic that I'd expected to be able to make that leap in a week. Every faculty member who gave a talk like that had shown me that their journeys were long, and often fraught with failed ventures or periods of doing artistic things they didn't want to. I left the lecture with my tail between my legs, but a renewed sense that I would do my best with the hand I'd given myself. I did a couple of colour studies that evening, traditionally, inspired by seeing James Gurney's master studies in his lecture. I loved doing them, and wish I'd had more time to do more. But I found a piece online that had a palette I liked and did a couple of explorations of a similar theme. I finally, finally, 4 days into the escapade, managed to put down some oil paint.

Friday and Saturday I painted as much as I could, but tentatively, I was making marks I'd never made before. I listened to the feedback being given around me and let anyone who wanted to stop and give me feedback, do so. I'm not sure I actively asked for it. I struggled as the ladies around me with their amazinly characterful pieces drew the attention of everyone who went past. I wondered if I was so far off the mark and weird that no one knew what to say about my piece. Maybe it was so bland that they couldn't praise or crit it. In retrospect, I recognise that my mood and lack of decent sleep was tinting my mood heavily, and I suspect I was giving off the same vibe, which is enough to make folks give you a bit of a wide berth.

The theme of finding your niche and doing what you love came up in more than one lecture over those days. I went to bed at 2 am both nights, in an attempt to get as much done as I could. I socialised a little more, realising that was as much a part of the experience as the painting. If not more. I'm hugely thankful for the bonds I forged during that week, something I couldn't have done at home, no matter how much I painted. Those bonds were worth much more to me than the painting I half finished. I think I came to accept that what I wanted to do was going to be a journey that needed a little longer than a week to take. I wish there had been more 'round table' lectures with all the faculty, seeing them interact together on the business lecture was amazing.

Sunday was chill. I'd had the intention of painting more, but clearing up took a while, and I felt good being relaxed. So I socialised more instead. Our final lecture with Donato was the perfect note to end the experience on and the open house was a chance to take in everyone's work, the standard of which was amazing. After a super tasty mexican dinner and strawberry margherita, the bar beckoned. After drawing I don't know how much hentai in people's sketchbooks and getting a badass Bill Nighy sketch from the awesome Bud Cook in my own sketchbook, alongside the weirdest pseudonyms and animal drawings ever, I crashed and burned as being under the influence after a week of mental stress and lack of sleep took its toll on me. Conan, thank you for making sure I got back safely that night, I really appreciate it, I suspect I'd have passed out in a dark corner of the bar otherwise. Sad I missed out on the late night partying that ensued, but damn, did I need that night's sleep.

So there's one woman's view of what it's like to go to the IMC, to throw yourself at the mercy of the faculty and your own desires. To fail and not deal with it well, to realise that the painting was never the important thing. IMC was amazing. I can only hope this gives those of you who haven't been a teensy insight. I'm not going to cover what the lectures were or what faculty shared with us, that's a very specific IMC experience, that you really have to go to appreciate. I will say I am hugely thankful to Dan, Rebecca and all of those on Muddy Colors who made that experience real for me. It has enriched me in ways I suspect I'll only realise as my journey continues. Thank you to everyone who gave me kind words and praise and to those who tried to guide me on my way. If ever the opportunity arises for you to attend, I would say grab it with both hands and run with it. Even if your experience doesn't run as profound as mine, and it simply lets you have some time to paint whatever the hell you want, being in a huge room full of people going through the same thing is well worth the price, not to mention watching faculty paint in real time is invaluable.

So, what if you've taken that leap, some months from now and you're going to the IMC? Here's a few pointers from someone who thought they were prepared and was woefully not.

1 - THE DORMS Are basic AF. I was somewhat prepared, but when the FAQ says the beds are firm, they mean it. Think springs wrapped in a bit of plastic tarp. The sheets are functional, but the blanket looked like someone had put used dog bedding through a shredder and mushed it out into a rectangle. I bought a spare blanket at the CVS store, cause no way was that thing touching my skin. I may be a little sensitive though. I affectionately referred to the whole set up as my prison bed, cause honestly, that's all I could think of. If you can bring your own bedding, I'd recommend it.

The dorm bathrooms are gender neutral, which means anyone can use them. I was fine with it, but it's odd the first time you wander into the bathroom and find the opposite sex brushing their teeth. I never had any problems taking a shower, though, they were pretty quiet.

Morris Pratt Dorm was definitely the more social, I was very thankful to be on the 3rd floor, as a light sleeper, the partying into the wee hours would have kept me awake had I been on the lower floors. The box fans helped with white noise, but the doors are all pretty heavy, so unless folks are very delicate with how they close them, expect some noise. I found the box fan enough without the AC, even when it got pretty warm on the last couple of days.

2 - FOOD. Having never been to a large educational establishment in the US, I wasn't sure what to expect with the food. Would I have to venture into Amherst to find healthy stuff, would there be much choice? The food was surprisingly decent. It's still a large facility, so it's never going to be amazing restaurant quality, but there were a few choices every day and a well-stocked salad bar. They even had a soft serve ice cream machine, that I managed to avoid until Sunday. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I had it on good authority that the coffee in the dining hall wasn't great. It might be an idea to bring a drinks container with you, as mealtimes are the only time you can get drinks on campus, outside of water fountains. Amherst is only a 10-minute walk down the road, though.

3 - ART SUPPLIES AND STUDIO SAFETY. I brought paints, brushes and surfaces with me, with the knowledge I'd ordered a couple extra things for while I was there and that there was a supply run. If you work on specific surfaces, it's best to bring those with, Michael's wasn't super well stocked, and more speciality things like large clayboard weren't available. A lot of people bring extras and are happy to share, thankfully. I would have brought more old rags or kitchen towels and some tape. People often used walls to tape up thumbnails or other pieces of art.

The university runs a very strict number of safety policies surrounding paints, water and mediums. Bring some lidded jars with you for mediums and water. Everything has to be labelled clearly and remained closed when not in use. Even water used for rinsing acrylic and watercolours. All have to be disposed of carefully too. Same with anything you wipe paint or mediums on, so using something a bit more disposable like kitchen towel might do you better. They ask you to cover your oil paints when not in use, though that can be with a simple piece of palette paper.

If you choose an easel, if you have space for a little extra table, you'll likely make good use of it. The chairs they supply are also very basic and not comfortable for long periods, so bringing a cushion is definitely a good idea. Oh, and they say the studio opens at 8 am on Monday but I got there at 8 am and a lot of the spaces had already been taken, so if you want prime real estate, get there early!

4 - SELF PROMOTION This sounds like a no-brainer. I brought business cards for the faculty and my portfolio review with Irene Gallo. I thought I'd sorted my work out reasonably well, but actually, my website would have been a better place to show off my work. I also wish I'd brought a physical portfolio to leave out for students and faculty to flick through, perhaps an example of finished work that was either nicely printed if I was doing digital, or one of my traditional pieces. The latter is tricky when flying. My business cards were on the pricey side so I wish I'd had some decent postcards or stickers, printed for the open studio, where folks were picking stuff up. You never know who's going to pick one up! The internet can be spotty in the building, so unless you have some 4G going on, it can be tricky to show off folios digitally.

You might also be lucky enough to score a second portfolio review if the guests have enough time, I am so glad I could put my work in front of WotC's Jeremy Jarvis. It cheered my Saturday up no end! Make sure you check the lists when they go up and bag your second spot early. And don't puss out.

5 - DON'T BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP I'm stubborn and British, so asking for help is the worst, but everyone there will gladly help you out if they can. Especially the assistant team, Daneen, Julia and Stephen and the 'honored easels' who've been in your situation. Take advantage of them, they are all lovely people.

And that sums it up! An amazing, tiring, exhausting, mentally demanding, inspiring, overwhelming experience that I wouldn't change for the world. I hope to repeat it in the next year or two. I count myself lucky to be part of the alumni and perhaps if you're reading this, I might see you there too.

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pocketseizure · 6 years

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The Price of Wisdom, Chapter 6

A Thousand Years of Solitude

Zelda finally discovers the ancient Sheikah laboratory and the horror that dreams within it.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! Special thanks to @corseque, whose meta, speculation, and moral support enabled me to write this story.

Chapter 6/6 ☆ 3,300 words ☆ Also on AO3 ☆ Cover Illustration

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Zelda yanked her hand back from the windowsill, and her vision exploded into itself. Her stomach plummeted, but the sensation no longer bothered her. When she could finally see clearly again, she walked over to the book of legends lying on the floor and kicked it as hard as she could. It catapulted across the room and crashed into a table covered in glass beakers, which went flying and shattered on the stone floor.

She'd told herself that she didn't care who Ganon was or why he attacked Hyrule, but now that she knew she could never return to a state of not knowing. Had the Champions been aware of the danger of reviving the Divine Beasts? Had Link understood the cycle of destruction he was instigating by drawing the Master Sword? Had Purah known that the Guardians were specifically engineered to storm the castle? Did her father understand that her role in this drama was to be nothing more than a sacrificial figurehead? Is that why they had kept her innocent and stupid?

"May the goddess damn you all," Zelda whispered, clenching her fists at her sides. Despair and frustration overwhelmed her, but she had no tears left to cry. She felt a new power swelling within her, fueled by the white-hot core of a growing rage.

While she had been lost in her vision, the black slime had oozed its way across the floor and puddled at the base of a bookcase on the far wall. What did it want from her? She stepped over the trail of muck and approached the bookcase. It seemed to be tilting to one side. Not caring what sort of mess she made, Zelda gave it a strong push. It fell on its side with a crash, and books slid off its shelves like paper snakes.

On the wall behind the bookcase was a door. Zelda was certain that there had never been a door here before, as the tower wall was not wide enough to accommodate any sort of passage. Although the door seemed as real as anything else in the room, it shimmered with the same sort of golden light that had burst from the palm of her hand only hours before. Had it really only been a few hours? She couldn’t be certain, but it no longer mattered to her.

Zelda twisted the knob and pulled the door open, revealing a stone staircase. It was impossible for there to be a staircase on the other side of the wall, but it looked like any of the other narrow and utilitarian corridors used by the castle staff to move behind the scenes of the large audience halls. Holding onto the edge of the wall for good measure, Zelda tentatively placed one of her feet onto the landing to test it. It seemed solid enough. She looked over her shoulder at her ruined study, where the eerie half-light of the dark sky pooled in the shattered glass on the floor. There was no longer anything for her here, so she might as well move forward. She crossed over the threshold and, not giving too much thought to what she was doing, pulled the door closed behind her.

The stairs curled around a central support column in a spiral as she climbed down, and down and down and down. As Zelda walked she heard echoes of voices speaking in strange languages, only some of which she recognized. She wondered how this magical staircase had been created and how long it had been here, just waiting for the right person to find it. Did it exist outside of time, or was she perhaps passing through time as she descended? A multitude of questions drifted through her mind as she climbed, but none of them seemed particularly urgent. Her ankle had stopped hurting, and she felt no weariness or hunger or thirst. The repetition of her equally measured steps was calming, and as her mind settled it gradually occurred to her that she herself had now passed out of time. Within the seal she had created, the concept of time no longer held any meaning. Ganon would remain here for as long as the seal was maintained – but so too would she.

After a dozen minutes of climbing, or a dozen hours, or a dozen days, the light in the stairwell became marginally less dim, and finally the stone steps ended in another shimmering golden portal. Zelda stepped through it to find herself in the large cavern on the north side of the castle complex that housed a small and mostly forgotten wharf. At the edge of the slope above the water was a shrine. Its glow cast an eerie illumination into the darkness.

Surely there hadn't been a shine here before. When she was still a girl, Zelda had occasionally used the hidden passage in the library to venture down to this cave, which was filled with empty crates and broken furniture and other castaway detritus of the castle. The docks themselves were a shambles. The wood of the piers rotted into the water, and the moored boats were filled with spiderwebs and already half waterlogged. No one had any need to escape from a castle that hadn't been under siege until the present day – if one could even consider this a siege. Truly, Zelda thought as she watched the febrile magenta light leaking from between the swirling cracks in the shrine disappear into the inky water, this can only be called a haunting.

As she walked toward the shrine, a soft wisp of white light caught her attention by one of the docks. She squinted and drew closer until she could make out the figure of a woman. She wore heavy silver armor on her small body and tight braids in her hair, and though her face was older Zelda could see that this was the same princess from her earlier visions. The princess was pulling someone from a flat-bottomed skiff, which was poled by a large Moblin wearing loose robes dyed in a bold geometric pattern. The princess reached out to the Moblin, who clasped her hand as she bowed her head. She began to speak to it with complete fluency. Zelda couldn't understand a word, and she felt a piercing shame that it had never occurred to her to speak with a Moblin or Bokoblin herself. Link had always stood between her and the enemy races, and...

The figure huddled on the dock groaned, cutting through the tangle of Zelda's thoughts. She could see a dark puddle of blood forming around him. The princess must have seen this too, for she leapt lightly from the boat and knelt next to him. She helped him to his feet, and when he raised his face Zelda was not at all surprised to see that the injured man was Ganondorf. He was wearing obsidian armor adorned with the same ceramic swirls and glowing nodules that patterned the exteriors of the Guardians, but the surface of his armor plating was cracked and broken. He held both of his hands pressed against a hideous wound that split his torso from his sternum to his belly, and it seemed that he was only keeping himself together through the sheer force of his will. As the princess guided him up the hill to the shrine, he trailed bloody footprints, and an oily grime fell in heavy drops from the tattered cloth of his cape.

When they reached the raised platform in front of the shrine, the princess helped him sit, carefully leaning his back against the command pedestal. She waved her hand in front of her face, and a Sheikah Slate materialized from thin air and floated into her waiting fingers. Surely this must be magic. So it was true, then – the daughters of the royal family did indeed have special powers. Zelda moved closer to get a better look. If she wasn't mistaken, this was the very same device that she had carried herself.

"Hold on just a little longer," the princess said to Ganondorf as she tapped the screen of the slate. "I'm going to take you to the stasis chamber in the main laboratory. It's not perfect, but it's the best chance we've got to save you. The place should be deserted, so no one will try to stop us. It's just a little farther..."

"I won't make it," he slurred. "I won't... the teleportation."

There was something horribly wrong with the way he was speaking. Zelda closed the distance between them, and she immediately understood why. Ganondorf's injuries were severe, and his face was a mask of pain. It was a marvel that he was still alive.

"If we haven't killed you yet, you'll survive this," the princess said in a dry and brittle voice. "I'm initiating the sequence now. Just try to relax. You'll probably pass out, but I'll make sure you get to the stasis chamber in one piece."

The panel in front of the shrine began glowing with cyanic light, and the princess knelt to take Ganondorf in her arms.

"When all of this is over," he said, reaching up to stroke her face, "will you come to wake me up?"

As a circle of light surrounded the pair, their bodies were lifted several inches above the surface of the platform, and their shapes began to fade. Zelda jumped forward into the warp field, and she felt herself rise and dissolve. Suddenly the world was snatched from her blinded eyes, and her skin was pricked by millions of needles before a strong force struck her like an explosion.

When she recovered her senses, she was lying on a cold tile floor. She opened her eyes but could see nothing. She raised her head and was overcome by nausea. She pulled herself into a sitting position and took several deep breaths, keeping her eyes open all the while. If she could survive the freezing waters of the sacred springs, then she could survive this.

Gradually her vision returned to her. She was surrounded by Sheikah machinery whose tubing glowed with an eldritch light. Above her was a huge dome covered in patterns of golden lines and circles. These patterns resembled constellations, but there was an order to them that suggested writing. The dome was impossibly large, perhaps larger than the entire castle. To think that it had been underneath her this entire time! It had obviously been built to last for centuries, so perhaps the constellations drawn across the ceiling were indeed meant to be writing. Perhaps there was a code in the patterns that transcended time and culture. Despite everything that had happened to bring her to this place, Zelda was mesmerized by the possibilities, and she had to force herself to look away from the magnificent spectacle.

The dimly lit space around her was filled with machines that Zelda couldn't even begin to understand. Some were ceramic, and some were metal, and like the room itself they were all built to an impossible scale. As she walked through the maze of glowing lights, Zelda began to realize that this must be the factory where the Guardians had been manufactured, and perhaps it was the birthplace of the Divine Beasts as well. Despite its dereliction, everything was clean and untouched by decay. There was no dust or debris, nor any of the black ooze that had infested the rest of the castle.

Although she had no way of knowing where to go, Zelda felt as if her feet were being guided to her destination. When she arrived, she knew it immediately.

In the middle of the graveyard of abandoned machinery was a large glass tube, and the tube was filled with slime. Zelda felt a chill pass through her, but she still walked directly to the tube until she was so close that her nose was practically touching its surface. Looking closely, she could see that the slime was cocooning some sort of hellish nightmare imperfectly assembled from tangles of wire and twitching clumps of flesh and hair.

She reached forward to touch the glass, and there was a sudden movement on the other side. In the endless horror of a split second she caught a glimpse of something resembling the sweep of an arm, but it was like no arm she had ever seen, twisted and necrotic and entirely inhuman. Was this the stasis chamber where the princess had brought Ganondorf hundreds of years ago? Was this what remained of his body? Was the fleshy tar surging up through the castle not a manifestation of Ganondorf's malice, but a biological byproduct of the monstrous creature he had become?

Zelda understood that there must be very little of this man's human mind left. How long he must have slept, and how terrible his dreams must have been. Did he ever wake, encased in this grotesque prison of flesh, and experience a moment of hideous lucidity? Or had he long ago descended into complete madness? The only trace of him that remained was the overwhelming rage that guided his terrible purpose, and this was the diseased tumor at its core.

If the legends were correct – and they had been correct, even despite being clumsily varnished with convenient lies – then only the divinely endowed blade of the Master Sword could destroy this thing. With the Master Sword she could end everything now; if it had been in her hands she could vanquish this evil and restore peace to her kingdom. But she was just a princess, just a girl, just a sacrificial vessel. She was not meant to wield the sacred sword, or to access the secrets hidden within the shrines, or even to save herself. She had no choice but to wait in this haunted castle with this horrific monstrosity and wait for Link.

"Damn it!" Zelda hissed. She balled her hand into a fist and punched the glass of the stasis tube. The mass of flesh inside did not react in the slightest, and she continued to pound the edge of her palm against the smooth and unyielding surface as the tears she had been holding back for so long finally began to leak from her eyes.

Once again she felt weak and useless, and she cursed herself. How could she keep the incredible malice generated by this ancient and awful thing contained? If the magic that created the seal enclosing the castle sprang from the strength of her spirit, what was to become of her? She reached for any shred of hope in her heart, but all she could feel was bitterness and an overwhelming sense of wanting – wanting a power that had not been granted to her, and wanting the freedom that she had never been allowed to have.

Zelda bowed her head and allowed her tears to fall freely, and when she looked up again there was a hazy shape behind her reflection on the glass. At this point there was very little that could cause her to feel fear, so she simply dried her eyes with the back of her hand. She blinked, and the shadow behind her reflection was clearer.

It was Ganondorf, his face unscarred and his armor unbroken. It seemed as though he were standing only a footstep or two behind her, but she sensed no other presence in the room, no warmth of proximity or even the slightest sound of breathing.

Zelda met Ganondorf's eyes in the reflection, and for a moment they regarded each other in silence.

She had dozens of questions, but they all evaporated in the sudden glare of her anger.

"You did this," she snarled.

"I did," the reflection agreed, speaking to her in her own language. Despite the ferocity of his appearance, his voice was smooth and mellifluous. "But I could not have done it alone."

Zelda frowned, wanting to accuse him of lying to her, but she knew he spoke the truth.

"That princess, all those years ago... Why did she do it?" she asked.

"She desired peace, and she attained it." Ganondorf's eyes softened. "There has been peace in Hyrule for hundreds of years. She knew what the price was, and it was her decision to pay it."

Zelda shook her head. "Why did you show me those visions? None of this changes anything. We will still defeat you."

"I can only pray that you will, but first you must understand what happened to Hyrule."

"And what am I supposed to do with this knowledge? All you've done is cause me pain."

"Wisdom also has a price."

"And why do you care whether or not I'm wise? If the price I have to pay is constant doubt, how can I rule this land? If I don't even want to be a princess, how can I serve Hyrule?"

"Hyrule no longer exists," he answered her, smiling for the first time.

"Then where will I find the power to defeat you?"

"You've had it all this time. It's a shame no one taught you to use it."

"But if I've had it, why hasn't it come to me when I've needed it?" Zelda asked in desperation. "Why haven't I been able to fight you?"

To her surprise, the reflection behind her laughed. "You remind me so much of her," he said. "They probably told you to pray, didn't they? They told you to deny yourself, and to purify your heart. They treated you like a sacred doll, I'm sure they did. They must have, to think you could walk into battle wearing that ridiculous dress."

Zelda nodded, biting her lip to prevent herself from answering Ganondorf's smile with one of her own. Now that he said what she had been thinking, in a gentle tone with laughter in his voice, it all seemed so silly. Why had she ever taken any of that nonsense seriously? Why had she felt compelled to perform her duties so assiduously even though they clearly benefited no one?

"They told you that you must only care for the good of your people," Ganondorf continued, "but they lied. They lied to you because the power you wield is great enough to break and remake Hyrule many times over."

Zelda placed her hand on the glass of the stasis tube, no longer disturbed by the writhing mass within. "Then tell me," she murmured, hardly daring to believe that she spoke these words aloud, "how do I claim this power?"

The reflection behind her leaned forward, and she saw the faint ghost of a hand cover hers. Suddenly the three triangles of the royal family's Triforce crest appeared on her skin, shining a warm golden light into her face.

"Your power belongs to you, and no one else," a soft voice said in her ear. "If you can be wise enough to understand what you really want and brave enough to trust your heart, then you will find the power to achieve your desires. For once in your life, be selfish... Zelda..."

When he said her name, his hand vanished, but the Triforce crest remained.

"Ganondorf?" Zelda called out, but there was no response.

"Ganon?" she tried again, but there was only silence.

Zelda took a deep breath. What do I really want, more than anything? she asked herself, but her heart already knew the answer.

"Link..." she whispered. The light of the Triforce on her hand gleamed brighter as the desire in her heart grew stronger.

"...open your eyes," she commanded, and then she could see him, floating within a stasis chamber much like the one she stood in now. His body had wasted away, and he looked dreadfully weak. Zelda willed the stasis tube to deactivate, and its fluid began draining away, placing Link gently in the cradle at the bottom. She saw his eyelids flutter, and she could feel the thrum of her power flowing through her veins.

"Open your eyes!"

#Zelgan #Breath of the Wild #Princess Zelda #Ganondorf #Calamity Ganon #Zelda fic #my fic #The Price of Wisdom #Dubious Wizard Mentor Ganondorf

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audreycritter · 7 years

Text

Summer Reading Program

A short fluff for @cerusee . Thanks to @preciousthingsareprecious for brainstorming! ~2700 Words Robin!Jason, Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth Gen/Family Bonding Tooth-rotting fluff Summer Reading Program

The Manor library was quiet except for the ticking of a clock and Bruce Wayne was plowing through a stack of papers that needed signatures. He'd been working on it all day and had moved from the study an hour ago just for a change of scenery. If he finished enough of the thick ream of contracts and disclosures and other legal documents he'd previewed ahead of time, he wouldn't have to do as much when things got crazy at night.

It had been a slow week for patrol and Bruce wasn't sure how much longer it would last.

With a bang, the door flung open and Jason Todd shuffled into the room. His eyes were just visible above the tower of books and fliers balanced in his arms and he made a beeline for the desk Bruce was sitting behind. He eased the pile onto the edge of the desk and then set a flier right in front of Bruce, on top of a paper waiting for a signature.

It said SUMMER READING PROGRAM in large purple letters and had the Gotham County Public Library System seal printed in one corner. The illustration was a cartoonish crowd of fictional characters with various identifying costumes or trinkets.

“I need your help,” Jason said bluntly.

Bruce flipped the trifold open. Inside, on the line for a patron name and phone number, Jason had already filled in Bruce’s name in his childish but improving cursive scrawl.

“What is this?” Bruce asked.

Jason gave him a look that told him just how stupid he thought that question was.

“It's for your book list,” Jason said, tapping the numbered lines. “You gotta read ten. I already picked out mine.”

“Why do I have a summer reading list.” Bruce read over the poorly chosen italic font. It wasn't the easiest to read.

“Because I'm asking you to help me,” Jason said. “If you turn it in, they put your name in a drawing. The grand prize is a Kindle and $25 in Amazon credit.”

“This has my name,” Bruce said, switching his gaze to the stack of books. It was a mix of middle school fantasy, Hardy Boys, and something that looked like a survival series about mountain climbing. “These are books for you.”

Jason gave an exasperated sigh and put both hands over his face and then dragged his fingers downward, pulling at the tender skin beneath his eyes. Bruce reached out and moved one hand away, worried for his exposed sclera, and Jason yanked away with an irritated huff.

“You have to pick your own books,” Jason said. “This is for my list. I need you to hurry. I just found out today and it ends in eleven days. Three chances are better than one.”

“Alfred is helping,” Bruce surmised.

“Yes,” Jason said. “All hands on deck.”

“For a kindle.”

“Do you need coffee? Are you asleep?” Jason waved his hand in front of Bruce’s face and this time Bruce leaned his head away. “I just said that. Pay attention, B. It's urgent.”

“Why do you need to win a kindle.” Bruce felt like he was missing some crucial piece of information and he scanned the flier again. Was there some kind of school credit involved? It didn't look like it.

Jason took a deep breath and launched into a rapid-fire bullet list that sounded rehearsed and bordered on pleading.

“I know I'm supposed to have limited screen time but is it really a screen if it's e-ink? It's not the one with games or movies and it has parental controls and it would help with school and I could borrow books from the library website and save money and it'll be easier to pack for trips and when I come spend the day at the office and heavy backpacks are a source of bad shoulder strain and it's not good for me and I can get books in Spanish to practice my—”

Bruce had said Jason’s name three times with no break and he finally gave up and pinched Jason’s lips together. Jason kept trying to talk, mumbling through his pressed lips.

“Jason.”

The boy stopped.

“I didn't ask why you needed one. Why do you need to win one? If you want one that badly, we can talk about buying one for you.”

Jason looked affronted and immediately after Bruce let go of his face, Jason’s fingers were pinching Bruce’s lips shut in return.

“Are you conspiring to interfere with an educational pursuit?” Jason asked just as seriously. Bruce looked into his frowning blue eyes and considered for a moment the enthusiasm with which Jason had entered the room, the way he'd dragged his feet about school the previous fall and then drastically changed his tune after just a few weeks.

He considered the stack of books and gently took Jason’s wrist and moved his hand away from Bruce’s lips. He thought Jason pinched much harder than he had, but he wasn't sure it was intentional.

“You think you can make it through all those?” Bruce asked, thinking about a balance between realistic goals and pushing one’s boundaries. He admired challenge but didn't want Jason to be overwhelmed; he was a steady reader and becoming a better one all the time, but was still slow for all his heart. They'd spent a lot of time the past year playing academic catch-up in almost every subject.

Jason scowled at him with a bright flash of anger and Bruce internally scolded himself for being an idiot.

“Why? You don't think I can?”

It sounded like defensive daring, but Bruce had spent enough time with Jason to know he wasn't Dick. Whatever bubbled to the surface was often a mask for some fear or anxiety and he'd become aware (sometimes with Alfred’s pointed help) that Jason deeply needed their simple belief in him.

“Of course you can,” Bruce said quickly, hoping it wasn't too quickly. “And I'll help. I think I can spare you from patrol for a night or two if you need it.”

“You'll do it, too?” Jason asked, brightening instantly. He was thumbing through the stack of books and looking over covers.

Bruce looked at the papers spread across the desk. He thought of the ones he'd left in his study. He glanced over at the shelves lining the walls of the room he often sat in but rarely used recently.

“Eleven days?” he asked.

“Mhmm,” Jason nodded, already with his nose in a book. It looked like something about animals with swords. “Ten books.”

“If I win, I'll let you borrow the kindle sometime,” Bruce teased, standing and pushing the papers to the side. Jason kicked at his shins when Bruce walked by, and missed, but didn't look up from the book.

Bruce plucked a book off the shelf and snagged Jason’s t-shirt collar with a finger and tugged. The kid was leaning, half-sitting, on the edge of the desk. “C’mon, Jay. Couch. Keep me company.”

The boy trailed after him without lifting his eyes and his lips moved when he was sounding out longer words. He sank into a corner of the couch with his feet stretched out and pressed against Bruce’s leg.

Neither of them moved except to turn pages until Alfred rapped his knuckles on the door frame to call them to dinner. Jason looked up and blinked owlishly, then his eyes widened even more and he was on his knees peering over Bruce’s shoulder in a second.

“What are you doing?” he demanded breathlessly. He flopped back on the couch and threw his arm over his face. “Bruce! That's like a million pages. How are you gonna finish ten books if you start with that one?”

Bruce held a finger to mark his place in The Count of Monte Cristo and held out a hand to cushion Jason’s head when he rolled off the couch toward the floor.

“I’ll finish, Jay,” he promised. Jason shoved his hand away.

“Can we read while we eat?” Jason asked. His face was buried in the plush rug but he fumbled around for his book, abandoned on the couch. “I’m at a good part.”

“I don't—” Bruce started.

“—see any issue with a temporary allowance?” Alfred prompted from the doorway. He was holding a slender volume of essays. “I wholeheartedly agree.”

Bruce thought it was pointless to argue this on the grounds that he had long been strongly discouraged from bringing work of any kind to the table in the dining room.

They ate while reading, all three of them. The only conversation was when Jason asked for a definition of a word and Bruce was halfway through an etymology of Latin roots when he saw Alfred’s raised eyebrow and Jason’s impatient lip-chewing.

“...but we can talk about that part later,” Bruce finished a bit lamely.

“I want to,” Jason said, and he sounded like he meant it. “Twelve days from now.”

The next nine days brought four patrols without Jason and a boy who was reading so constantly that one night, he missed both reading and patrol when Alfred forced him to bed early with a headache from eye strain. Jason sulked more than he slept and Alfred tried to make it up to him by reading a chapter from his current book aloud, and Bruce read another before going out for the night.

He was less than impressed with the child-protagonist’s climbing skills and problem solving abilities but kept his opinion to himself.

Despite Jason’s worry, Bruce himself made blazing progress through a whole slew of novels he'd wanted to revisit or read. He hadn't had such a good excuse to set aside work and other tasks and read for a long time and wished he'd done it sooner.

Alfred didn't seem to mind the excuse either, and Bruce frequently found him cooking or cleaning with a book in hand and unapologetic about the distraction.

Eight days in, Bruce took the whole day off of work and spent it shut up in the Manor library again with Jason and a steady stream of snacks from the kitchen. In the afternoon, Alfred joined them for a while.

Alfred was the first to finish his list, two days in advance. He clipped it to the fridge with a magnet and read another book anyway.

Bruce was two away and slightly regretting his choice of Le Morte d’Arthur when Jason kept checking his page number progress and humming worriedly at the calendar.

When he got back from patrol early, early that morning, Jason was sitting in the cave with his own final book in his hands and Bruce’s next to him.

“Read,” Jason ordered, pointing. “You have over a hundred pages left and tomorrow is the last day.”

“Jay,” Bruce said, worn out to the middle of his bones. It had not been an easy night.

“B,” Jason said, verging on pleading. “We’re almost there.”

With a sigh, Bruce pushed back the cowl and dropped into the computer chair and propped his booted feet on the desk. If he got any more comfortable he wasn't going to make it.

He wished Jason could just ask for things. Dick hadn't come from much money, and had been a frugal kid, but had few qualms asking for needs or mentioning wants. He didn't take money for granted, exactly, but also seemed more like a normal kid in his acceptance of provided material goods.

Jason swung wildly between actively resisting money being spent on him and gleefully allowing himself to be spoiled, only to collapse into guilt or self-punishing behaviors later in an attempt to retroactively earn whatever they'd given him. He'd balked at tickets to a Knights game, gone happily on the day of the event and come home with a jersey and stuffed full of junk food, and then disappeared for a day a week later.

They'd found him with a bucket of soapy water, worn out after washing every car in the garage.

But when Bruce tiredly looked up from the text to Jason, sitting on the computer desk with his face reacting to every development in his book, occasionally sounding out words under his breath, his eyes rimmed red and a happy, secure slackness in his posture, none of the comparisons or worry mattered. Bruce reached out and ruffled his hair. Jason didn't pull away but instead flipped back a page and said, “B, just listen to this part.”

Bruce didn't mind anymore.

Fifteen hours (and some sleep) later, Jason watched him like a hawk while he filled out the final line of the flier. After dinner, Bruce double-checked the spelling and legibility of Jason’s own list minutes after Jason triumphantly slapped the last book down on the dining room table.

They went to the public library together, all three of them, per the library’s policy of turning in one’s own reading list. Bruce had to fill out a form to replace an expired library card under Jason’s accusing glare.

The glare faded when Jason watched the librarian drop all three names into a decorated glass jar.

Jason talked non-stop, almost without breathing, the walk to the car and ride home. Bruce and Alfred listened to every recalled detail of the ten books Jason had read, and his opinions (with occasional profanity) on those details. It seemed like he'd been saving it all up in his rush to move on to the next book and it was all spilling out of him now.

He didn't stop through the trip up the stairs into the house or until nearly dinner, when he sighed happily and announced gravely that they had to start earlier the next summer.

The weekend passed without incident at the Manor or on patrol or otherwise. Jason roamed the house with nervous energy when he was awake and kept borrowing Bruce’s laptop to double-check the library prize drawing date.

Monday rolled around with a morning forecast of summer storms and Bruce got ready for work and offered to take Jason with him for the day. Jason usually liked going to hide in Bruce's office for the day but today, he refused from his spot by the kitchen phone.

“Should I keep him busy with something else?” Bruce asked Alfred in the foyer, slipping his arms into his raincoat while casting an eye back toward where they'd left Jason.

“I doubt it would be very effective,” Alfred said with an equally worried frown.

Around three in the afternoon, right around the time Bruce had been planning to head home early, his cell phone rang.

“I won!” Jason yelled in his ear as soon as he answered. “B! I never win anything but they drew my name! I won!”

“That's great, Jay!” Bruce said, thanking whatever gods were listening. It wasn't even the idea of not having to console a disappointed kid. He would have read twenty, thirty books in the same time frame to hear Jason so excited again.

“I gotta go, Al’s driving me over right now. The library closes at five. Bye!”

The line went dead and Bruce decided to call it a day. He drove himself home in the rain, under ominous flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder. He made it home before Alfred and Jason by not much more than twenty minutes and the rain had let up by the time they pulled into the drive.

He helped Jason set up the device in the kitchen while Alfred cooked and the wide grin didn't leave Jason’s face for hours.

They were on a stakeout later that week, hunched down in the Batmobile, when a faint glow lit the interior of the car and Batman looked sidelong. Robin was curled up in the seat reading.

“We’ve gotta couple hours,” Robin said. “You told me yourself. Is it too bright?”

Batman studied the alley and streetscape outside the windshield of the hidden car and almost said yes. Then he changed his mind, shifted his cape, and threw it over Robin’s head.

“No,” Batman said.

“Okay,” Robin said happily from under the cape. The glow didn’t make it through the dark fabric and the interior was pitch black again. “Thanks, B.”

#batman #robin #batfic #ficblogging #robin!jason #jason todd #bruce wayne #alfred pennyworth #reading #no profreading we die like mne

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fangirl-overload13 · 7 years

Text

Write my love and draw my heart

I’m just gonna leave this here... (Sorry this took so long!)

Ch. 1

Ch. 2

Nico kept staring down at the phone number scrawled on his arm where Will had written it. The ink had become smeared a bit because of how nervous he felt about actually using the number, he’d already copied it into his phone but he couldn’t bring himself to wash it off just yet. Nico sat on the bus with his headphones on as he headed towards his weekly appointment, he wasn’t too happy with the timing because he had been looking forward to seeing Will’s game today but this week’s session was expected to take longer than usual.

His teachers knew about these sessions so he was exempt from classes when they came up, he just needed to be sure that he got the notes and assignments that he missed while he was away. It wasn’t like he was behind in any of his classes anyway.

These sessions usually occur on Tuesdays but due to this being the anniversary of the reason behind them it had been agreed (quite grudgingly on Nico’s part) to reschedule for Thursday this week. Unfortunately that meant that he wasn’t going to be at the game. He knew that that sounded weird seeing as he didn’t even follow the game or understands much of it, but it meant not seeing Will or sitting with him afterwards and really that seemed to help him a lot more than professional help did.

Not that he was against professional help or anything; he would just rather talk to someone who felt like a caring friend than sit in a room with someone who was studying him. Nico sighed, he wished this wasn’t necessary but knew that there was nothing he could do to change the past. Somethings just can’t be changed no matter how much you wished otherwise.

As the bus approached his stop he rang the bell and made his way to the doors, when they opened he thanked the driver and hopped off then headed over to the same old building that he knew so well after all these years. He clutched the strap of his backpack a little tighter as walked through the door and made his way to the elevator to head up to the office where he would be spending much of the afternoon today.

…

The elevator doors slid open and Nico stepped out and without needed to look at the list on the wall, made the long since familiar trek down the hall to the end and walked into the office of his counsellor that he had been meeting with for the past six years. He hated that he still needed to come to these sessions but she told him that everyone grieves in their own way and these things take time. She had been the one to help him find an outlet for his grief and that was how he had been introduced to drawing.

After he met his step sister Hazel he started learning from her and his skills improved to the point that they were at now. He didn’t care that most people found his drawings creepy or disturbing because he wasn’t drawing them to please people, well for some reason Will really liked them and that really made Nico happy but he wasn’t going to admit that to anyone. It had been Hazel who had first suggested using his skills to become a horror graphic novel artist.

…

“Hello Nico, how are you doing this week?” the therapist asked as he sat down in his usual chair and took out his sketchbook before setting down his backpack next to the chair. “Hey Tina, alright I guess.” He said as he flipped to his most recent drawing and set to work as the session began. She watched him for a while and observed that his mood seemed different from it usually was at this time of year. “Why don’t you tell me about your day, I have a feeling something good happened. She watched as his eyes glanced briefly at the numbers scrawled on his arm and she tried to hide her smile.

“We have this project we need to do for English class, I got paired up with a friend of mind and he wants me to do some drawings for the assignment.” She nodded as she made some notes in her book. “That sounds like a good idea, what do you think?” Nico stared at the drawing he was currently working on and a mix of emotions flitted across his face. “I don’t know… most people think m drawings are creepy. Well Will doesn’t, he actually likes watching me draw. He says that they’re really awesome.” He had a faraway look in his eyes as he spoke of his friend and a ghost of a smile played at the edge of his lips.

This was new, usually Nico only talked about his home life or his past. He tended to only give vague answers when it came to school, usually sticking to saying that his grades were going well. To hear him talk so freely of a friend from school seemed like a step in the right direction. “He sounds like a good friend why don’t you tell me more about him, when did you meet him?” she asked hoping to get Nico to open up more.

“He’s captain of the basketball team, I met him freshman year in the gym.” So they have known each other for a while now then, that was good. “Do you ever go to watch him play?” she asked and Nico nodded. “We usually sit together after his practices or games and talk.” A sad look crossed his face as he stopped drawing. “He has a game today at 3:00 but I won’t be there.” Hmmm… “Well, why don’t we see how things go today and if we can get you back in time for the game, shall we?” she asked and he looked up at her. “Really?” she smiled at him warmly. “Yes, I’m sure that can be arranged.”

…

Nico had managed to get through this week’s session in record time. He was really amazed by how much easier it had been to talk about things this time round, he had been able to talk about more happy memories this time and was even able to laugh while looking back instead of feeling an overwhelming sense of grief as he thought about his mother and sister before they had passed away in a horrible accident.

After leaving he had caught the first bus back to school and made it just five minutes into the game. He found a space to watch and silently cheered Will on as he watched the game. Sure he didn’t really know what was happening but he knew that Will was doing really well and even joined in with the crowd in cheering as Will made an amazing shot.

…

When the game was over Will hit the showers, they had won by a large margin and the whole team was ecstatic. The cheering going on in the locker room could probably rival that of the crowd from when the clock ran out after the last shot he scored. After toweling off and getting dressed he dug out his bag and his heart did flips when he saw a text from an unknown number. He opened it and saw that it was from Nico and his smile grew even more when he read it.

Unknown: Hey Will it’s Nico. Great game, sorry I was a little late but I saw most of it. Meet up in the usual spot?

Will shot back a fast response as he hurried to get his things together so that he could go meet up with Nico right away.

Will: Be right there.

Will rushed out of the locker room so fast you would have thought that hellhounds were on his heels. He made it over to the usual nook where Nico liked to sit with his sketch book and tried to catch his breath as he leaned against the wall next to him. “Hey, I thought you had an appointment today.” He said with a smile as he looked at his friend he hadn’t expected to be here.

Nico shrugged nonchalantly “I got out earlier than anticipated. I thought I’d drop by and see how the game was going and maybe ask you about the project?” he seemed a little hesitant with that last bit but Will didn’t mind. “Sure, I’m glad you made it. So I was thinking that I’d write something based on mythology since that’s been a constant theme lately in class and you could add illustrations for it, that is if you feel up to it, I won’t force you or anything.” He said hurriedly so that Nico didn’t feel pressured.

“I think I can manage, what kind of myth do you want to do?” Nico asked as they began to walk out of the school. Will thought about it for a moment before turning back to look at Nico. “How do you feel about Greek mythology?” Nico smirked. “I live for it.” Will laughed at his answer. “Well then I guess we’ll do just fine. Now this will probably take some time so why don’t we get started right away?” he asked as the reached the school parking lot. “What did you have in mind?” Nico asked. Will fished for his keys and pulled them out as they reached his car.

“How about we hangout at each other’s houses and work on it as much as we can to be sure we get as much done as soon as possible? You can come to my house or vice versa during the weekend.” He looked at his phone and saw that it was getting close to dinner. “How about I give you a lift, I’ll take you home today so that you don’t have to take the bus.” Nico seemed to think everything over for a couple heartbeats before agreeing. “Okay, uh to both. I guess you can come over after school tomorrow and we can work on it. That way I’ll have my supplies with me and we can do some rough sketches or whatever we need to do while we figure things out.” Will smiled and nodded as he opened the door for Nico. “Sounds like a plan.”

Next Chapter

#nico di angelo #will solace #solangelo #solangelo fanfiction

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ponyregrets · 7 years

Note

Clarke POV for Exiles Among Us?

fun fact whenever I get alt pov requests I try to alternate between doing bellamy and clarke (actually I always try to alternate between bellamy and clarke pov) but I get like five bellamy requests for every one clarke request so sometimes I dig to find clarke ones

well also I remembered I wanted to do this but it is kind of hilarious how unbalanced it is, rock on, bellamy povs

Original series here, and alt pov on AO3!

One of Clarke's dad's favorite stories about her childhood comes from when she was in kindergarten, and the teacher had everyone in the class write and illustrate short books called In the Future. As with most kindergarten activities, it was mostly just a lot of messy writing and incomprehensible drawings, but the teacher had at some point started prompting her because she wasn't coming up with ideas of her own and was just drawing pictures of dogs.

Her father hadn't been there, but the way he tells it, based on Clarke's and the teacher's accounts, was that the teacher first asked Clarke if she thought she'd be married.

"Yes," said Clarke. "I'm going to marry Ariel from The Little Mermaid."

To her credit, the teacher took this in strike. "And will you live on a ship? In a house? On the beach."

Clarke scribbled a lot of blue on the page. "Under the sea. We're going to live with Flounder."

"And how many children will you have?"

It didn't rankle her back then, not yet, but it started to around high school, when her father told her about it. The casual assumption that children were a given.

But in kindergarten, it just seemed straightforward. "We won't have any. Just dolphins."

"No children?" the teacher asked.

"Nope. Dolphins. And fish. Dolphins aren't fish," she'd apparently added. "They're mammals."

"Yes, they are," said the teacher. "But wouldn't it be nice to have a baby?"

Even now, Clarke doesn't understand this impulse people have. She doesn't get why anyone would start a fight with a thirty-year-old about how many children they want, let alone a kindergartner. But apparently that was what bothered her teacher. Not that she was going to marry a fictional character and live under the ocean with dolphins, just that she wouldn't have a human baby with her when she did it.

"No," she said.

"All girls want babies," said a boy sitting next to her, which had been the real trouble. The teacher would have, she assumes, moved on at some point. But other students could be fought.

Which was what ended up happening, Clarke and the boy in a tangle of limbs, Clarke insisting she was never, ever going to have a baby. Ever. Which she continued to do the next day too, as her parents talked to the principal about how violence was not an acceptable way to solve her problems.

She doesn't think she really committed to not having children just because of one kindergarten experience, but it is proof that she's never quite gotten the appeal. And the more people assumed children would just be a natural part of her future, the more obstinate she became about it. If her partner wanted them, she was open to the idea. Ready to negotiate.

But left to her own devices, she's never been interested in children, for their own sake. They don't inherently do anything for her.

And then she falls in love with Bellamy Blake.

Even before he gets Octavia, it's obvious that Bellamy loves kids. It's something Clarke assumed would be basically standard, when she started teaching high school, an actual source of stress for her. She likes teaching without having changed her general opinion on motherhood, and she didn't want to feel isolated because of it.

As it turned out, maternal instincts weren't any more of an expectation with teachers than they were with anyone else. So, as usual, her eventual motherhood is taken for granted, and when she protests, she's told she'll change her mind. The only real difference is that when people say she seems so good with children, they have actual grounding beyond the fact that she's female. But Clarke knows how different it is, being a teacher than being a parent, and just because she's good at the first, it doesn't mean she has any interest in the second.

Bellamy's there, once, when Dr. Peters asks her about it, and when Clarke says she's not planning to have any, he says, "Yeah, it's not for everyone," and changes the subject before Dr. Peters can push.

Which isn't, of course, why she falls in love with him, but it is one of the thousand things. Another in the long line of reasons he's her favorite person.

It's a few months after that when he texts and asks if he can come get drunk, and that's when she finds out about his sister.

"I just don't know what to do," he says, sounding lost. "I've tried--fuck, Clarke. I've tried everything. And nothing works, and I just--" He cuts himself off with harsh noise that sounds a lot like a sob. It's alarming for a lot of reasons, not least because she has absolutely no idea what's happening. So she shifts closer, pressing her leg against his, bumping his shoulder.

"If you told me what you were talking about, I might be able to offer some advice."

"My sister," he says. "My responsibility."

Clarke had heard about Octavia before this, of course. She knows that she liked to draw when she was a kid, that Bellamy had to trick her into eating broccoli by telling her that eating something that looked like a tree would make it easier to climb them. She knows he loves his sister with a fierceness that sometimes makes her feel small and alone.

And she knows that she makes him sad, but she doesn't know why.

"What happened?" she asks. "You're drunk, so I can ask now, right? If you come over to get drunk on my couch, I get to ask you uncomfortable questions about your family."

"I left her." His voice is desolate, and he's staring down at his hands as if they're unfamiliar, as if he doesn't recognize or control them. "I didn't want to, but--my father wanted custody of me, and my mother didn't want to fight for it, so I left with him, and I never saw her again. I don't--fuck. I don't know how to find her. My mom won't talk to me, I don't even know what school she's in now, they might not even be in Baltimore anymore." He scrubs his hand over his face, wiping away tears, and Clarke wraps her arms around him and tries to understand, even though it's unfathomable to her.

"How long has it been?" she asks, and that makes him smile.

"That's what you care about?"

His voice is teasing, so she smiles. "I can't help unless I have a full grasp of the situation, Bellamy."

"I was fourteen," he says. "She was six."

"You didn't leave her." He huffs out a bitter laugh, and she squeezes him again, moving closer. "You didn't. You were taken away, okay? You were a kid, and you had to leave. You don't have to blame yourself for that. You couldn't help it."

"It's been eight years, and I haven't found her. I haven't even talked to her." He rubs his face. "What if I never see her again?"

"You will," says Clarke, and his laugh is only a little strained.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Her name is Octavia Blake, come on. You only have so long to wait before you just hit her on a google search."

He laughs again, rests his cheek on her hair. "You're the weirdest kind of comforting, you know that?"

"You're the one who called me," she retorts. "So clearly weird comforting was what you were looking for."

"It was." She can feel his breathing slowing, calming, and she matches her own to it, the two of them just resting on each other for a long minute. "I emailed my mom," he finally says. "I just--I laid everything out. Wells moved out, so I have a nice place with an empty room, a job that pays enough to support me and someone else, some savings in the bank, so--I asked if she'd give me O. I thought--fuck, she just gave me up without a fight, why wouldn't she get rid of another teenager when she got the chance?"

"Bellamy--"

"I know, that's unfair."

"That's not what I was gonna say."

"No?"

"I was going to say I'm sorry." She rubs her hand up and down his side, slow, easy comfort. "What did she say?"

"Nothing. I've emailed her every break I've had since I started college, and she's never fucking replied. I don't know why I thought this time would be different. I don't even know if that email still works, or if she forgot the password, or--"

It's almost too big for Clarke to really think about. She and Bellamy are about the same age, twenty-four, and while it's in some ways easier to think about having a teenager than having a baby, because she deals with teenagers all the time, she still can't really wrap her brain around adopting one. Not only adopting one, but fighting for one, spending years trying to reconnect, to get in touch, to reclaim this one girl.

His sister.

"I promise, you are going to be able to google her," she says, and he laughs.

"Yeah, I probably am." He lets out a long breath. "You want to put on Netflix?"

"Whatever you want, yeah."

"Not quite whatever I want," he says, and she rubs her hand through his hair, gentle.

"Whatever I can do," she corrects, and means it.

"This is good," he he says, settling in closer.

She fumbles a little getting the remote, a little overwhelmed just hearing what it's like for him. She can't imagine feeling how Bellamy does about his sister. But at the same time, she understands some parallel version of it, because she can't imagine feeling the way she does about him and being anywhere but by his side, no matter what.

It's a staggering thought, to feel like you belong with someone. But Clarke has never been more certain.

"I thought if I asked if you had pads in front of him, he might actually di--" Clarke cuts herself off, glancing down at the girl next to her and swallowing hard.

It never occurred to her how often she casually references death in conversation, not until she was absolutely terrified of fucking up with Octavia Blake.

So far, she thinks the whole thing is going as well as can be expected. Bellamy seems trapped somewhere between joy and terror, which she saw coming, and Octavia is quiet and wary, but it's impossible for Clarke to believe it's not going to work out for them. Bellamy loves his sister so much, and if Octavia doesn't understand that yet, Clarke is sure she will. It's just so obvious. Now that they're together, it's going to work out. It has to.

So she clears her throat, corrects to, "Pass out," and offers Octavia a somewhat sheepish smile.

Octavia looks like she's trying not to smile herself. She's a lovely girl, her skin paler than her brother's, her face less freckled, eyes lighter. Clarke's brains settles on those differences, can't help it, and wonders how, with all of those, she still manages to look so much like Bellamy.

"Yeah, probably," she agrees, worrying her lip. "Do you think if we brought some back, he'd still pass out?"

"Fifty-fifty," she says, although she's doesn't really think it's true. He's going to be fine.

But making fun of Bellamy is the easy part of this for her. If all she ever had to do with Octavia was tease Bellamy, she'd be in great shape. It's what Raven will probably do, and Bellamy will be happy with that.

It's not enough, though. Octavia is the most important person in Bellamy's world, and he wants her to be happy. Which means Clarke wants her to be happy too. She doesn't want to be a mother, but--she doesn't have to be a mother. She just needs to be there.

There are other ways to be a family.

"Look, I know you don't know me," she says, awkward, as she and Octavia stare at the bright rows of shampoo together. Even when she speaks, Octavia doesn't look up, which is appreciated. It's easier to talk to her without eye contact. "But--if you need anything, you can ask. Anything you can't talk to Bellamy about, or--just absolutely anything at all. I'll give you my number. You can call any time."

Clarke doesn't know her well enough to read her tone when she asks, "Really?"

"He loves you, and he's my best friend. So yeah. Any time."

"Your best friend?"

The dubiousness in that question is unmistakable, but Clarke makes her reply light. "Sad but true."

Octavia worries her lip, letting her fingers skate over a bottle of Pert Plus. Clarke knows what's coming before she says it, and Octavia doesn't disappoint. "I thought you guys were, um. I thought you were his girlfriend."

It's far from the first time someone's assumed that, but Clarke would have assumed that whatever explanation Bellamy gave of her would have included the term best friend. On the other hand, he's been basically a mess since his mother died and he found out he was getting his sister, so it might have slipped his mind to clarify. He might have just called her Clarke with absolutely no qualifiers.

It's easy slack to pick up. "Oh, no," she says, smiling. "Not his girlfriend." Octavia looks dubious, and she feels a flush climbing up her neck. It's tempting to add something else, to try to explain, but protestations will just seem even more suspicious, so she forces herself move on. "Seriously, pads? Tampons? Awkward stuff that Bellamy won't be able to look at?"

Octavia's smiling a little, faint and slightly vague, and Clarke has to stop herself from reaching out, like she would if it were Bellamy. "Not right now. But I might ask you to take me later. Just so Bellamy doesn't have to deal with it," she adds quickly.

"Like I said, any time."

She nods once, decisive. "If we don't bring anything back, he's going to worry," she says. "I should get something."

"But not pads," says Clarke. "Or he'll probably faint. What kind of shampoo do you use? We can pick up some of that, and he'll feel better. He just wants to make sure you're comfortable," she can't help adding.

"I know." Her voice is harsh, but this part Clarke does understand. It's easy for her to think about all the time Bellamy lost; since that drunken night, he's told her a good deal about what it was like for him, these last eight years, what he went through. And through that, she got some ideas about what it would have been like for Octavia too, what it would have been like growing up without someone there for her.

"Yeah, it sounds kind of fake to me too," she tells Octavia. "But you can never have too much shampoo."

Bellamy's still in line when they get back, leaning against the cart, looking like he is putting every single ounce of focus and concentration he has into looking relaxed. Which is, of course, completely ineffective, but also incredibly endearing.

Someday soon, having his sister around is just going to be good for him, and Clarke can't wait. Even with all his odd tension, he looks better, more sure of himself. Happier. Like he's regained something she didn't realize he was missing.

Or maybe she's just romanticizing it. That's a possibility too.

"Shampoo," she tells him, bumping her hip against his. "And conditioner."

"Oh right, girls want both of those," he says. "I still don't know the difference. Why does your hair need conditioning?"

"Because beauty standards are a thing. Don't judge, Bellamy."

"If I'm not judging, I don't have anything else to do. You sure you're good, Octavia?" he adds, turning his attention to his sister. "We probably have time before we get to the checkout."

Octavia rolls her eyes, looking exactly like a petulant teenager for the first time since Clarke has met her. It feels like a good sign, that she's already comfortable enough with him to fall into those unconscious patterns. "Are we never going to get to go to the store again?" she asks. "Do we have to get everything I'm ever going to need right now?"

"Everything you want for the next twenty-four hours," he says, but back of almost immediately. "I mean, we're going to the grocery store tomorrow, so--"

"I want a candy bar," says Clarke, reaching over to grab some peanut butter cups. "Octavia, do you want a candy bar?"

Octavia's mouth tugs up a little. "Can I get M&Ms?"

"Not a bar, but I think I can allow it. Bellamy?"

His own smile is soft, grateful. "Get me a Butterfingers, thanks."

She puts the candy on the conveyor belt, and Bellamy pays for everything without any apparent worry about the total. She's already got a reminder in her phone to ask him about money next week, so she doesn't mention it either. It's not a conversation to have in front of Octavia, anyway.

Clarke helps him with the bags, and Octavia lags behind a little. It's understandable, but so is Bellamy's tension, so she says, "So, dinner. What are we having? You're taking us somewhere nice, right?"

"I don't have to," he says, and seems to only realize how it sounds when she raises her eyebrows. "I mean, uh--you can just go home."

"I still like hanging out with you," she reminds him. "Really, Bellamy. I'm having fun. I want to come."

He clears his throat. "Thanks, though. Really."

"Always," she says, and means it. "But seriously, I want a nice dinner."

"I already got you a candy bar." There's less strain around his eyes already, so she must be doing something right. "Don't be greedy, Clarke."

The thing about being an actual parent is that there's usually some kind of preparation period, from what Clarke understands. Even if whatever kid you end up with isn't the result of a planned pregnancy, there's usually some sort of thought or discussion: the decision not to terminate, the decision to foster, the decision to accept some kid into your life.

Clarke knew that Bellamy's mind was always made up, but she hadn't ever thought about his mother dying and his sister coming to him, so she hadn't put much thought into what actual effect Octavia would have on her.

Which, obviously, it's not about her, and she'd feel bad if she'd been obsessing about it. But her focus has always been on supporting Bellamy, and it hadn't occurred to her that she might need support too. That she might have to figure out how she fits into all this.

"I don't see how this is a surprise," Raven says, because support isn't really her thing. "Bellamy got a kid, of course she's your kid too. You knew it was coming."

"I did," Clarke says, with a sigh. "But--not like this."

"Like what?"

"It's hard to explain. You help out, but--"

"But I'm not in love with him."

She inclines her head, granting the point. "Not just that. I don't know what I am, you know? I want to be around all the time, helping him take care of her, but I'm not--" She huffs. "My students all think we're having a secret affair, you're convinced we're going to start dating any day, but I don't even know if I'm supposed to tell him when I think he's fucking up, or how to--"

"Whoa," says Raven. "Okay, yeah. Take a deep breath. What happened? Did you guys have a fight?"

"No, nothing happened. But it's going to."

"What is?"

"She's got a crush," Clarke admits. "On a kid who hangs out in my art room. And I know Bellamy's going to freak out about it, and I want to tell him not to." She rubs her face. "Actually, I don't. I don't want him to find out about it, because it's not a big deal. But it seems like it might be beyond my pay grade."

Raven puts her arm around Clarke's shoulders, squeezes. "You want to tell me about it from the beginning?"

"Seriously, nothing bad has happened. I know Bellamy's--" She smiles a little. "I know how grateful he is that I'm helping him out. But--I'm helping. Every time I do anything, he acts like I'm doing him a huge favor. And I get why, but--I don't want it to be like that. He doesn't expect to get thanked for just--she's been his responsibility his whole life. I get it. But I don't want him to feel like he's alone with all this."

"He knows he's not, Clarke," says Raven. "Trust me."

"Not like he should."

There's a pause, Raven watching her with an expression that makes her slightly nervous. "Look. I know you're gone for him, okay? Wells knows. His sister knows. We all fucking know, except for him. And I get that it's scary, but--"

"I think I need to convince him I'm in this," Clarke admits. "I think that comes first."

Raven looks dubious. "How do you do that?"

"No idea."

"You could just sit him down and tell him you're in love with him and you want to help him raise his sister. I'm pretty sure he thinks about you saying that when he jerks off."

Clarke has to smile. "I'd prefer he just thought about my breasts."

"Okay, you saying that topless," Raven corrects. "You know what I mean."

"I do know what you mean," Clarke agrees. "I'm going to tell him. I really am. But--I don't think it's time."

Raven nods. "But you're good, right? You're happy? This is one of those problems you're happy to have, like how Wells and I are fighting about how big of a wedding we want."

She smiles. "Yeah. It's a great problem to have."

As much as Clarke looked forward to breaks as a student, it's nothing compared to how much she loves them as a teacher. Vacations, as a teacher, are the fucking best, and she's even more excited for Thanksgiving, because it's going to be so much time with Bellamy and Octavia, family time.

Honestly, she might crash at their place for the entire break. It's tempting. They probably won't stop her.

She thinks about texting Bellamy before she goes over, but she told him on Friday that she'd see him tomorrow, so she assumes that he's at least theoretically expecting her. And if he and Octavia aren't awake yet, she does know where the spare key is. She can absolutely let herself in and fool around on the Wii until the Blakes drag themselves out of bed.

But, to her surprise, Octavia opens the door promptly, and not only are they awake, but they have company.

Bellamy is the most distracting, of course, because he's in early-morning mode, shirtless in his pajamas, glasses slightly crooked on his face. In an ideal world, she'd just be able to stare at him non-stop, but there are other people around, including students, and she turns her attention to Monty, Jasper, and Harper, who are all gaping at her from the couch. She is, definitely, dressed for leisure, and completely unprofessional.

And showing up at her coworker's door when he's half naked. The coworker everyone thinks she's dating, even. Just because it's vacation doesn't mean it's not awkward.

"You guys are giving me a lot to process here," she finally says, settling her attention on Octavia.

Octavia huffs. "I told him I had friends coming over. I think his brain stops working once vacation starts."

Clarke considers her response, weighing her options carefully. There is, of course, the option of pretending she was coming for legitimate reasons, like because her car broke down and she needs a jump, or he has some paperwork for her, or something.

Or she could just lean into it. This is something she wants to be a regular occurrence in her life, and she has to learn to deal with it sooner or later.

"Yeah, well," she says, giving Octavia a smile, "his brain is always pretty questionable. What are we playing? I want in."

Jasper opens and closes his mouth a couple times before he manages to speak. "Smash Brothers. You can sub in for me, I don't mind."

"Appreciated." She settles on the floor, glances back over her shoulder at Bellamy, who doesn't look much less slackjawed than Jasper, honestly. "And put a shirt on, Bellamy. There are kids here."

"Happy Thanksgiving to you too," he says, but it's enough to get him moving. And, to Clarke's unspeakable relief, when he comes back into the living room, he's still wearing his pajama pants and glasses, so he's decided he can take the day to relax too.

Or relax relative to being Bellamy, which means he takes about thirty seconds to watch the end of the match and then asks, "Did you guys have a plan for lunch?"

"Pizza, probably," says Octavia.

He makes a face. "Pizza?"

"You like pizza. Don't act like you're too good for pizza now."

"I'm not too good for pizza, it's just too early for it."

"It's 12:15, Bellamy," says Clarke. "Just because you slept in doesn't mean it's actually early."

"Fine, I don't want pizza, so if you guys play your cards right, I'll make waffles."

"Is playing our cards right just telling you that we want waffles?" she asks. "Because I'm not willing to put any more effort into it than that."

"I'll say please," says Monty. "And beg, if necessary. I love waffles."

"Yeah, same," says Jasper. "Basically whatever I need to do. We're shameless."

"You're lucky everyone else is picking up your slack," he tells Clarke, pushing himself off the floor and heading into the kitchen. "None of you are allowed to have coffee, though. You're all hyperactive enough already."

Clarke waits until she loses, which doesn't take long, and then hands her controller back to Jasper and goes to check on Bellamy in the kitchen. There's a clear line of sight from the living room, so none of the kids will actually be able to wonder if they're doing anything inappropriate, but she can talk to him in a fairly private way.

"I can take off, if you want," she murmurs.

He frowns. "Take off?"

"If we want to keep the gossip down."

"I think it's a little late for that," he says, apparently without thinking, and the winces. "Not that, uh--I don't care," he settles on. "Octavia lives here now, she's going to have friends over, so am I. I'm not going to try to arrange my life around them not realizing I have personal relationships. And everyone already knows I have one with you."

"Cool. You need help with the waffles?"

He snorts. "Not from you." But then his expression softens a little. "You should have fun with the video games. I'm set in here."

"Division of labor," she agrees. "You do the cooking, I beat teenagers at video games."

"The two most important responsibilities in any household. You should take some coffee too. Just to rub it in their faces."

"And so I don't die of caffeine withdrawal?"

"I wasn't going to say it."

She heads back into the living room and flops back down, listening with half an ear to the comforting sound of Bellamy in the kitchen. Even when he's not doing much, just making coffee or cereal, there's something about his presence there that makes the room feel alive, that makes the house feel like a home.

That might just be him, though.

Once they've eaten, he does come back to socialize too, and he even gets out of his own head, doesn't worry about being the right person for once. Which is always Clarke's favorite, because he is the right person, always. And, even better, he doesn't worry about being her friend, about nudging her shoulder to mess her up and teasing her and smiling at her, and it does feel like the perfect test run for the life she wants.

It even feels like something she can have.

The kids leave at around six, when Jasper's mom comes to give rides home, and Clarke lets herself snuggle into Bellamy's side on the couch. His only response is to raise his arm so she can get closer and then wraps it around her, so that's great too. He smells like detergent and sunshine, and he might actually be perfect.

"Worn out?" he teases.

"Just thinking about all the other things we've done and trying to compare it." Octavia sits down on the floor next to them, and she directs the question to both of them. "So, how bad is this one going to be?"

Bellamy considers. "I was the one who walked into a bunch of students shirtless."

"I was the one who came over to your house while you were shirtless," she shoots back, and he grins.

"You handled it like a champ, though."

She pokes him in the side. "Yeah, I really reined in my incredible lust. It's so hard not jumping you in front of your sister and her three over-invested friends. I deserve a gold star for restraint."

"I was looking really hot," he says, but in a sort of faux-contemplative way that makes her think he doesn't realize how true it is.

"I'm the one who has to witness this, you know," says Octavia, which is a good reminder that they're not alone and she should not be thinking about climbing into Bellamy's lap and tugging off his shirt to demonstrate exactly how hot she finds him. Not that those thoughts are ever that far from her mind, but still. They can wait for her to be alone in the shower. "Why are you even here, Clarke?"

As distractions go, it's not much, but she'll take it. "It's vacation, I'm bored. Hanging out with my favorite siblings."

"Yeah, she basically lives here when we're on break," Bellamy says. "I should have warned you."

"I'm a perk." She pokes him again. "You should order pizza."

He groans, but at least doesn't object to pizza this time. She's honestly been craving it since they brought it up earlier. "Octavia should order pizza, I don't want to move."

"You're the worst adults ever," says Octavia, and Bellamy fumbles his phone out of his pocket and gives it to her.

"We definitely are," Clarke agrees. "But you're stuck with us."

She can feel Bellamy tensing next to her, just slightly, and she snuggles closer. Every day isn't going to be this good. They're going to fight and disagree and Octavia is going to be a handful, once she gets used to them.

But Clarke wants it all. Clarke wants to be a part of it.

"And you're suck with the toppings I want on this pizza," says Octavia, oblivious. "Suck on that."

Bellamy relaxes by degrees, leans into Clarke more heavily, and Clarke lets her eyes drift closed.

"Yeah, yeah," he says. "I'm sucking on it."

"We finally had that fight," Clarke tells Raven, flopping down onto her couch and closing her eyes.

"I assume this is about Bellamy because everything in your life is about Bellamy. You're like a walking Bechdel test failure."

"Just around you. I talk to my students about things that aren't Bellamy all the time." She pauses. "But, yeah, this is about Bellamy."

"You seem pretty upbeat for having a fight with him."

"A good fight, I think. It was just kind of us glaring at each other for a minute and then Octavia pointed out it was none of our business. But he told me to butt out and I didn't, so--I think that's good."

"Honestly, I can't believe it took this long for that to happen. If that's all you had to do to get in a fight--"

"He's usually good at this," Clarke says. "I don't disagree with him that often."

"But it's good, right? That you guys disagreed."

"Yeah, I think so. He needed to someone to argue with him, and he needed to know I would."

"So does that mean you're going to tell him you want to marry him now? Or do you have another excuse?"

"No, I'm going to. I just need to psych myself up. So--probably by Christmas."

Raven rolls her eyes. "This is why I bet Wells he was going to make the first move."

"You and Wells bet on my love life and you're making fun of me for not passing the Bechdel test?"

"Come on, when's the last time you saw a black guy and a latina talk about anything in a movie? We're already beating the odds."

Clarke smiles. "Okay, fine. You want to hear dumb student stories? Will that make you feel better?"

"Only if we're done with Bellamy."

"We're never done with Bellamy," she admits. "But we can take a break. I think we're good."

She means it, but she still can't quite relax until she talks to him. His offer of hanging out made it fairly clear he wasn't pissed at her, but she still feels a little at loose ends until she opens the door the next morning and finds him at the door, looking sheepish and a little cold.

Her smile is unavoidable. "Hey. What's up?"

He holds up a bag from the bakery down the street. "I'm an asshole, so I got you cupcakes."

"If you got me cupcakes every time you were an asshole, I'd never be able to eat them all," she points out, stepping out of the way so he can come in. He's untying his shoes, which is a good sign. That means he's probably staying. "Where's Octavia?"

"Library. She's texting me when she's done, so I was just going to hang out here. It's closer than going home," he adds, sounding slightly defensive.

"Yeah, you really want to avoid that extra five minutes in car. You want coffee? Are these breakfast cupcakes?"

"All cupcakes are breakfast cupcakes," he says, which is one of those things he'll only ever say to her, because he wants everyone else to think he's a real adult who believes in the food groups. That's nice too. She's special. "And coffee would be great."

She leads him into the kitchen and doesn't sit yet, just hovers by the table, drumming his fingers on the edge as she gets the coffee going. It's a pretty classic tell of his, and she stays quiet, letting him decide what direction the conversation is taking.

To her relief, it's the one she wants. "I'm sorry about yesterday. I was being stupid, and I shouldn't have taken it out on you."

"I was baiting you," she says, unapologetic. "I pretty sure you'd rather take it out on me than Octavia. Or, god forbid, Lincoln." Fairness compels her to add, "And you weren't even that bad."

"Yeah, but I'm not allowed to thank you for distracting me. So these are officially apology cupcakes, not gratitude cupcakes."

It is honestly kind of adorable, how dedicated he is to her don't thank me rule, which wasn't even supposed to be a rule, really. It was mostly her first attempt to explain to him how she thought she should fit into this, and it obviously didn't work.

But his twisting himself around to figure out ways to thank her without thanking her is great, so she's never going to tell him that. "Don't exploit the loophole, Bellamy."

"Seriously," he says, sobering again. "I really wasn't ready for that."

"Did you guys talk about it?"

"Yeah, some. Just--I don't know. I assumed she wouldn't be thinking about that stuff yet. Not because she's too young. But I figured she'd still be--Mom only just died."

"Yeah. But that can help, too. It's nice to have a distraction. And as distractions go, Lincoln's a good one. He's a good guy. Which I know you know. I'm just going to keep reminding you."

"Yeah, that can't hurt." He lets himself lean against the counter next to her, which is at least getting close to relaxing. "If it makes her happy, I'll drive her to every fucking date, honestly."

She grins. "He has a car, so you don't even have to drive her."

"Let me be a little bit of a control freak, okay?"

The coffee machine switches itself off, and Clarke pours them two mugs and grabs the cupcakes, gently pushing Bellamy to the table to actually sit down before she asks, "Are you going to make him let you pick him up too? And then they sit in the back, but with the middle seat between them?"

"This is the stuff I missed out on growing up in cities. I just took the bus to dates."

"I know all the tricks," she agrees.

"That's, uh--" He looks down at his coffee, worrying his lip. "That's the other thing."

"Do you need me to teach you how to date?" she teases. "Do you not know?"

"Shut up, I'm being serious," he says, like she doesn't know. But--it's a little intimidating. It's a lot of serious for Saturday morning. "Look, I said--I told you I don't need your commentary, and you said I did, and you're right. If you think I'm being an idiot, I want to know. If you think I'm fucking up, tell me. If you've got commentary, I always want to hear it. I don't promise to always remember that I want to hear it, but--I do. And if I forget that again, I'll buy you more cupcakes."

She's going to marry this boy. There's no question. She doesn't care how many strings he has or how many kids he wants. As long as she gets him, she'll be happy. More than happy. "That was probably the nicest speech anyone's ever given me." She nudges his foot under the table. "But the cupcakes don't hurt either."

His laugh sounds more like a release of tension than amusement, and Clarke gets that too. She thinks, finally, that they might actually be completely on the same page. "Well," he says, "I wanted to cover all my bases."

"Yeah," she agrees. "I think we're all set."

Christmas still seems like a good time to talk to him, if for no other reason than it's far enough away, she has plenty of time to plan. And it's the kind of time when big gestures are both expected but also kind of safe. She could give him a romantic present and play it off as a joke if he didn't respond well, and while he'd still know, it would give them both the out they need to pretend it's not a thing.

She's already brainstorming ideas when he completely ruins the plan by kissing her.

As ways to ruin her plans go, it's pretty great, even if it takes her a second to figure out what's happening. It's obvious he's stressed and more than a little frazzled, but Clarke's seen him like that a thousand times, and he's never reached up, tangled his hand in her hair, and pressed his mouth against hers before.

For all she's thought about it, she never thought it would happen. Not without warning.

That's about when she realizes it is happening and starts to kiss back, nipping his bottom lip, settling her hand against his jaw, feeling the slight rasp of stubble under her fingers. He smiles, but only for a second, because she's deepening the kiss, getting the rhythm of it down, and all she can think about is how good it feels, how much she loves him, and how he probably feels the exact same way.

Raven was right; he did make the first move.

When he pulls back, she can't help gaping for a second, but then she sees him, gazing up at her, all adoration, and she feels her own smile taking over her face.

Christmas suddenly seems so far away. She doesn't know how she thought she could wait. She doesn't know how she waited this long in the first place.

"Thanks," he says, voice rough and deliberate. "I appreciate--I appreciate you."

She has to wet her lips to get her voice back, and she sees him track the movement. "Yeah. I'll bring her home after dinner, okay?"

"Cool."

"Good luck with your grades, that really sucks," she says, and he's still watching her, and she can't help leaning in to kiss him herself, just a quick goodbye, assurance that they're good.

Or that's what it's supposed to be. In practice, she hasn't kissed anyone for two years, and she's wanted to kiss Bellamy almost that whole time, so she can't bring herself to pull back.

He's the one who finally manages it, looking a little dazed, like he somehow wasn't expecting her to keep wanting to kiss him. Which is ridiculous, because she's currently biting the corner of the mouth just to keep herself from doing it again.

"Yeah, uh--" he manages, only somewhat regaining his composure. And he still has to clear his throat again. "See you tonight. Raven can work wonders, probably." She can see his throat bob as he swallows. "Eat vegetables, Octavia."

Octavia sounds as smug as anything, so everyone really did see this coming. "Thanks for the tip, Bell." But she's at least nice enough to wait until they're in the car to say, "So, I was going to ask you for advice, but you're probably useless now, right?"

"No, it's fine," she says, bright. "I can carry on normal conversations when I'm thinking about making out with your brother. I do it all the time. Go ahead."

Octavia laughs."Was that him asking you out, by the way?"

"It better be." Honestly, if anyone can overthink this one, it's Bellamy. But--it was his idea. There's no way he doesn't want to. "If he doesn't want to date me after that, I'm going to murder him. And then I'll get you out of foster care, obviously. Don't worry. Me and Raven and Wells will adopt you."

Octavia rolls down the window a little, even though it's freezing out. Clarke's found she always likes a little air to start a car trip, and it's the kind of quirk she likes knowing. These are her people. She gets them. "I wasn't worried. He totally wants to marry you."

It's possible she'll never get tired of people telling her how much Bellamy likes her. "Good."

It's four years before he actually asks her, which doesn't bother her in the least. It takes roughly ten minutes after she drops Octavia off that night for them to get their relationship squared away to her satisfaction, and she thinks they both know exactly how serious they are, right from the start. There are bad days, of course, serious disagreements, growing pains with the relationship and with Octavia. But she never doubts them, somehow, snd by the time he proposes, she's sure that there's nothing they can't survive together.

Which is why she says, "One question."

"You're responding to my proposal with a question?" he asks, sounding amused. "I proposed first, you can't do it now and get credit. I got dibs. You missed it."

"Not that," she says. And then she leans in and kisses him, just to get that out of the way before she makes it awkward. "I just--we haven't actually talked about kids."

He frowns, looking confused. "What about kids?"

"I know that's weird, we basically already have a kid. And it's not like--I just thought we should talk about it. Before we--"

He looks completely baffled. "You want to talk about kids." And then, to her shock, he laughs. "Jesus, Clarke, I don't fucking care. Kids, no kids, whatever. I love you, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. That's it. That's all." He bumps his nose against hers. "Honestly, if I'm done with fatherhood after this, I'm fine. We can just get a bunch of cats or something. We already raised a teenager."

Clarke laughs, leans up for another kiss. "Okay then, yeah. I'll marry you. Absolutely."

"Cool." He gives her a crooked smile. "You weren't actually worrying I was going to dump you because you didn't want kids for four years, were you? We really could have covered that sooner. Like, the first day."

"Not worrying. Just--it always seemed like you'd be a good dad. Like you should be one. But I figured it wouldn't really be an issue until after Octavia left."

"I guess," he says, sounding dubious. "And, yeah, I'd probably be a good dad. You'd be a good mom too, but who cares? We can be whatever we want. And I want to be with you."

"Sap."

"It's a proposal, I'm supposed to be sappy. Not that your a belated freak out about whether or not we're reproducing wasn't--"

She elbows him, snatching the ring out of his hand to slide onto her finger while she's at it. It fits perfectly, and she's probably not going to wear it regularly until summer, but--she can wear it until Monday, for sure. It looks really nice on her finger.

"Just wanted to make sure we're on the same page," she says.

"I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Does that sound good?"

"Yeah," she says, pressing a kiss to his jaw. "That sounds exactly right."

#doctormongoose

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adjectivebear · 7 years

Text

Can’t Believe You Don’t Know

Pairing: Zevran x Female Amell Rating: NSFW Summary: Solona believes she's unattractive. Zevran vehemently disagrees. And what's more, he knows exactly how to prove it. (Did I finally finish my ancient Kink Meme WIP? Why yes, yes I did.)

“Ah, there you are, my dear. I was beginning to think you were hiding from me.”

“Not at all,” Solona lied, unable to contain a disappointed sigh as she closed her book and lifted her gaze to the assassin sauntering toward her, already mourning the pleasant evening that could have been.

They’d been staying at Castle Redcliffe while the Arl made his preparations for the trip to Denerim, and though her companions were getting more restless by the day, Solona was rather enjoying it. It wasn’t that she hated camping—well, no, she did hate it, actually, which was why it was so nice to finally be indoors again, where it was warm and dry and blessedly free of insects, with real food, a proper bed, and plenty of light to read by.

And yes, more places to hide from Zevran.

It wasn’t that she hated him, either. Indeed, she rather liked him when he was slicing up darkspawn, engaged in meaningful conversation, or joking with the rest of the party. She imagined they could have been very good friends if he took slightly less amusement in playing at seducing her.

Or if she didn’t wish so desperately that he weren’t playing.

For a few precious hours she’d dared to believe he was serious. No one had ever flirted with her before, and he was so handsome, and yes, he’d tried to kill her, but she’d been more than willing to forgive that particular offense if it meant she would no longer have to resign herself to the overwhelming likelihood of dying a virgin (she knew how pathetic that sounded, but there was a bloody Blight going on, and beggars couldn’t afford to be choosers). But then he’d started flirting with everyone else, and Solona had understood.

He wasn’t interested in her. He just liked flirting.

She couldn’t believe she’d ever been foolish enough to believe otherwise. She knew what she looked like. She was chubby, no taller than an elf, could not so much as look at a sunny day without sprouting a dozen new freckles, and had an unruly mane of not-quite-brown, not-quite-blond hair that stuck out at odd angles even when she wound it tightly into a bun. She’d been a laughably easy target back at Kinloch Hold, and that was even before her twenty-first birthday had come and gone, granting her the dubious honor of being the oldest virgin in the Circle and earning her the horrid nickname ‘Saint Solona’ as though her continued chastity were born of some prudishness of her own rather than everyone else’s refusal to have sex with her.

No one had ever fancied her. It was absurd to think anyone ever could.

Well, no—that wasn’t entirely true. Cullen had fancied her. But he hadn’t bothered to tell her so until it was far too late for them to do anything about it, and after what had happened during Uldred’s rebellion…

No. It didn’t bear thinking on. It was done now, and there was no use in regretting the things she couldn’t change. Like the inevitability of dying alone and untouched, the crueler part of her mind supplied helpfully.

She scowled, suddenly in even less of a mood for Zevran’s nonsense.

In the grand scheme of things, his teasing was probably was a stupid thing to be bothered by. However much it felt like he was deliberately taunting her, she knew he was just having a laugh and that it was ultimately nothing personal. And yet, despite constantly reminding herself of precisely that, the playful mockery never failed get a rise out of her, which only encouraged him to do it more frequently.

Much more frequently. While originally he’d flirted indiscriminately with the entire party, he’d been focusing solely on her for months now, to the point where it seemed that half of their interactions ended with her stomping off in frustration. It wasn’t a tendency she was proud of, and lately she’d begun to resort to simply avoiding him.

Or not so simply. Avoiding someone was actually stunningly difficult when you shared a camp.

Apparently, Zevran was keen to make it just as difficult in Redcliffe.

Solona sighed again as he got closer, the warm glow of the lamplight playing distractingly over his brown skin and those unreasonably tight trousers he favored. He leaned casually against the table next to her, presumably to make absolutely certain she’d noticed the latter. She felt her cheeks flush and gritted her teeth. She would not play this game tonight. She was reading, damn it, and she was just getting to the good part.

“Was there something you needed?” she asked in a clipped tone, forcing her eyes to stay locked on his face. Those damned trousers left nothing to the imagination, and she refused to give him the satisfaction of catching her gawking at his legs, backside, or… other areas in the vicinity.

“My dear Solona,” he said, pronouncing her name in that maddeningly Antivan way of his, “my intention was simply to provide some company. Look at you, all alone in this dusty library. What a sad way to spend an evening! Why are you here, and not celebrating your victories with Alistair and Leliana?”

Solona snorted. Not long ago, she would have been with them, but now she doubted she’d have been particularly welcome. She adored her friends, but sometimes she rued the day they became a couple. “As much as I love being a third wheel, I thought the night might be better spent catching up on my reading.”

“Oh? What is it that captivates you so?” Solona moved to grab the book, but Zevran’s hands were quicker. He snatched it up, glancing briefly at the cover illustration before turning to the summary inscribed on the back and reading aloud. “‘Enchantress of His Heart: the sultry tale of the forbidden love between the handsome and noble Knight-Captain Marius and the beautiful, seductive Lucienne. Their passion burns brighter than any flame she can conjure, but how long can they keep it a secret—’”

Solona seized the book, her cheeks burning. “I never claimed it was intellectually stimulating reading,” she said defensively, clutching it to her chest lest he make another grab for it.

He laughed. “No doubt it is stimulating in other ways, yes?”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” she said primly. “And even if I did, so what? A girl’s allowed a little wish-fulfillment every now and then.”

She realized she’d just handed him the perfect bait the second the words left her mouth, but by then it was too late. She scolded herself as he leaned closer, fixing her with that smoldering look he so loved to employ.

“You don’t need fiction for that, Solona. I assure you, I am both willing and quite able to fulfill your every wish.”

Solona played off her shiver as a sudden chill, counting her blessings that the dampness between her thighs was known to her alone. That she’d have had no good excuse for. “I wish to be allowed to continue reading.”

“Of course! How rude of me to interrupt. In fact, I shall join you.”

Before Solona could protest, he’d selected a volume from the pile of books in the center of the table, settled into an adjacent chair, and begun to read. She groaned inwardly, but grudgingly admired the lengths to which Zevran would go to annoy her. If he’d been even half as dedicated an assassin, he must have been the golden boy of the Antivan Crows. Still, he was being quiet now, which was a vast improvement, and since there was little hope of convincing him to leave, she decided to just accept it and reopened to the page she’d left off on.

It was initially a bit awkward, as she’d just gotten to one of the steamier scenes, but after a few moments she’d all but forgotten Zevran’s presence, the occasional sound of a page being turned the only reminder that she was not alone. She felt her irritation begin to wane. Was it possible he really did just want to keep her company? Perhaps she’d judged him unfairly.

She’d finished one chapter and was well into the next before she chanced a furtive glance at her companion.

Or, rather, she’d intended it as a furtive glance. The secrecy was rather lost when the target of one’s gaze already had his eyes fixed intently upon her.

“Do you stare at everyone like that?” she asked, shifting awkwardly in her seat and praying to the Maker that the dim light camouflaged the hot flush rising in her cheeks. The smirk playing at Zevran’s lips spoke to the contrary.

“Not everyone. But a beautiful woman like yourself?” He reached out to toy with a lock of her hair. “Why not? I am sure you draw many stares, from men and even other women.”

“Oh, for the—honestly!” she sputtered, slamming her book shut and rising from the table so quickly that she nearly knocked over her chair, suddenly more furious than she’d ever been in her life, and not at all sure whether this new fury was aimed at Zevran or herself. He had the nerve to look confused, which only fueled her rage. “You are absolutely insufferable!”

“I am... not sure what—”

“The more fool I for hoping we might actually be able to pass the evening like civilized people,” she continued, shoving her belongings haphazardly into her satchel, “because you obviously cannot be in the same room with me for more than five minutes without getting the overwhelming urge to mock me.”

He began to open his mouth, but Solona was having none of it, determined to speak her piece before the angry tears prickling behind her eyes began to flow. She was a sodding Grey Warden now, not the pathetic schoolgirl who’d been bullied at Kinloch Hold. She would not weep.

“Can’t you see that I don’t think it’s funny? Can’t you just leave me be? Don’t you understand how cruel it is to make me—?” she bit her tongue then, mortified to have come so close to confessing herself, to admitting just how deeply his playful flirtations affected her.

Maker, she was pathetic. Tears threatening in earnest now, she abandoned the half-packed satchel in favor of just leaving as quickly as possible.

But this, like a peaceful evening of reading, was not in the cards.

She had not gotten three steps toward the door before a hand wrapped around her wrist, its grip not so tight as to be uncomfortable, but difficult to break nonetheless. Resisting the juvenile urge to stamp her foot in frustration, Solona reluctantly turned to face her captor, who still wore the same damnable expression of puzzlement.

“Mocking you? Is that what you think?” The uncharacteristic softness in his voice left her too stunned to reply, snapping out of it only when he raised a hand toward her cheek. She dodged the touch, irritated anew.

“What do you expect me to think?”

“That I mean what I say?” The suggestion earned a particularly unladylike snort from her. “Is it so hard to believe?”

“Yes, actually!” she snapped, taking some morbid pleasure in the frown it brought to his face.

“Why?”

A mirthless laugh escaped her before she could stop it. “What do you mean, why? Andraste’s mercy, Zevran, how stupid do you think I am? What could you possibly want with some fat, freckled little mage?”

The frown deepened. “You say such things about yourself, yet think me cruel for saying you are beautiful? I am not certain I follow your logic.”

Solona huffed and stared at a spot on the wall.

“But no matter,” he went on, waving away the issue. “I do find you quite lovely, my dear, but no doubt you still question my sincerity. Perhaps a bit of convincing is in order, yes?”

Solona was not quite sure she trusted the purr in his voice, nor the gleam in those golden eyes, but if Zevran marked her wariness, he paid her no heed, instead giving off the appearance of one deep in thought.

“Hmm, where to begin? Ah, yes! I believe it was your eyes which first caught my attention, my fair Warden,” he said, pressing blithely onward despite the suspicious narrowing of the features in question. “They are truly remarkable. I have always been partial to green eyes, but yours are a particularly enchanting hue, like new leaves at the first light of dawn. They remind me of the Brecilian Forest.”

“They make you feel as though something is going to jump out and eat you?”

“Why must you always make the seduction so difficult?”

“Right, how silly of me. My eyes are like the Brecilian Forest. By all means, go on.”

Zevran gave her a mildly exasperated look, but quickly recovered and continued as though she’d never spoken. “And you have such beautiful hands.” Solona bit back a gasp as he ghosted his fingertips along the insides of her wrists before capturing her hands in his own. She tried not to think about how warm they were. “So graceful and soft. Getting to feel these lovely hands upon my flesh almost makes it worth getting wounded in battle.”

“And to think, all this time I assumed you were just careless.”

“I am beginning to suspect that you and Alistair are somehow related.”

For reasons she could not explain, Solona burst out laughing at that. And then found it remarkably difficult to stop. So preoccupied was she that she did not notice his hands moving once more until one was cupping her cheek.

That sobered her.

Her first impulse was to move away, to shake him off, and yet she found that she couldn’t force her muscles to obey. The feel of his palm against her cheek was… nice. The warm, tingly feeling she’d come to associate with Zevran’s presence began to spread through her body.

Oh, she was in trouble.

“You laugh too rarely, Solona,” he said softly, his thumb stroking her cheekbone. “It is a sweet sound.”

“I don’t—”

“Shh. No more commentary from you, I think. For now you only listen, yes?”

Solona found herself nodding, having at some point become completely enthralled by those breathtaking golden eyes. Eyes which were now mere inches from her own. Too close. Much too close...

“You have such soft skin,” he said, running his knuckles along her jawline. “And these freckles of yours—ah, would you forgive me the pun if I said I found them bewitching?” Solona’s breath caught in her chest as he leaned forward to rub his cheek against hers.

Sweet Andraste, this couldn’t be happening. She must be dreaming, imagining the caress of his skin, the soft scent of leather that clung to him long after he’d changed out of his armor, the hot breath tickling her ear as he nuzzled her and—oh, Maker—the warm press of his lips against her temple. Any moment now she would wake up in bed, hot and bothered and alone.

Wouldn’t she?

“And you smell divine,” he purred, the vibrations against her ear sending shivers down her spine. “Like books and incense. When I was a child that is how I imagined all mages must smell. In fact, it is only you.”

She was briefly compelled to ask if he routinely went around sniffing mages in order to test that theory, but the words died on her tongue, replaced by a gasp at the first gentle nip on her earlobe. She felt his lips curve into what she could only assume was a wicked smile.

“I think you like that.”

The shudder that wracked her body seemed to be all the answer he needed. Slowly, teasingly, he began nibbling his way up her ear, each little scrape of teeth sending a corresponding jolt straight to her groin.

No, this couldn’t be a dream. Her pleasant dreams were never this vivid. Which begged the decidedly unpleasant question of why, exactly, this thing that was actually happening was actually happening. Some spell, perhaps? Residual energy left over by the demon that had possessed the Arl’s son? Or something of her own doing? Maker, had Avernus’s potion turned her into a blood mage without her knowledge? Was that even possible?

“You are thinking, my dear,” Zevran admonished. “You must stop that.”

Solona meant to argue, really she did, but he chose that exact moment to slide his tongue along the whorl of her ear, making her toes curl and rendering her incapable of any response more coherent than a needy mewl. The rational part of her mind protested that this was absurd, that she couldn’t possibly be this desperate, even as she eagerly tilted her head to allow him better access, her cooperation rewarded by an enthusiastic series of nips and kisses along her neck.

Yes, thinking… thinking was entirely overrated.

She let out a whine of protest when he pulled away, only to be distracted once more when he brought both hands up to cup her face, his bright eyes locking with hers. Her heart was pounding so hard, her breath coming so quickly that she worried she might faint.

“And your smile… my dear, my heart aches that you do not grace me with it more often. I’ve seen many great beauties, and yet when a smile lights your face they all seem plain in comparison.”

She flinched back in surprise when he leaned closer. He looked confused and slightly hurt, and she’d just begun to berate herself for ruining everything when realization dawned on his face.

“Sweet Solona,” he said softly, tracing the pad of his thumb along her bottom lip. “Has no one ever kissed you?”

Embarrassment washed over her. Slowly, she shook her head.

“We must fix that,” he said, closing the distance between them.

Her knees nearly buckled at the touch of his lips, and she clutched his shoulders to keep herself upright. It was somehow at once exactly and nothing like how she’d expected a kiss to feel, and Solona had spent a great deal of time thinking about kissing lately, due in equal parts to her lamentable taste in literature and the fact that Alistair and Leliana couldn’t go five minutes without doing it, which was either adorable or nauseating depending on her mood.

This kiss was not at all as described in the books. There were no fireworks flashing before her eyes, nor did the earth tremble beneath her feet, nor was she especially conscious of her body thrumming with desire, whatever that felt like. But his lips were soft and warm against hers, she felt pleasantly toasty all over as though she’d had a bit too much wine, and she was fairly certain that if she reached between her legs at that moment, she would have found herself drenched.

Her hands slid down his back, her means of supporting herself evolving into an embrace. A thrill of excitement shot through her when his tongue played at the seam of her lips and she obediently parted them, allowing him passage. Having another person’s tongue in her mouth did not feel nearly as odd as it really ought to, and she must have moaned at the sensation because she felt him laugh as he flicked his tongue teasingly along her own, coaxing her to respond in kind.

And respond she did. She was unpracticed and clumsy, and it couldn’t possibly have been a very good kiss for him, but he gave no indication of displeasure as his tongue danced with hers, gently instructing her on the proper form. She had nearly gotten the hang of it when a sudden chill gave her pause.

She broke the kiss and glanced down to find her robes opened to the waist, Zevran’s fingers still upon the laces. She shot him an incredulous look. He grinned back, entirely unrepentant, and though she knew she ought to have been scandalized, she found herself trying not to laugh.

“You can’t pick locks to save your life, but you can get a girl’s robes open without her being any the wiser?”

“Locks are not quite so easily distracted by a thorough snogging,” he pointed out, sliding his hands along the edges of her robes. “Now, let’s see what we have here…”

He attempted to slide the garment off her shoulders, and Solona immediately clasped it shut. She looked away, blushing furiously.

“Ah, Solona, forgive me.” He pulled her into his arms. “Forgive me, that was too bold. I did not mean to make you feel threatened.”

“No,” she said into his neck, kissing him there to prove she meant it. “No, it wasn’t, I didn’t, it’s just…”

“You are shy?” he guessed, and she nodded, because it was easier than verbalizing the truth. He released her, grinning once more. “Of course you are! Where are my manners, trying to relieve you of your clothing while I stand fully dressed before you? You have my humblest apologies.”

Undoubtedly, the honorable thing would have been to screw up the nerve to tell him what was really on her mind, but Solona was only human, and the impossibly handsome man on whom she’d harbored a massive crush for the past several months had just divested himself of his shirt, so perhaps she could be forgiven. And if she couldn’t be, the sight before her was well worth an eternity in the circle of the Void reserved for dishonest ninnies.

She had seen Zevran bare-chested before, but he’d been bleeding on each of those occasions, which was hardly conducive to ogling unless you were a blood mage and into that sort of thing. Now, with no such impediment, she found she could not tear her eyes away.

Maker, how was it possible for any man to be so perfect? He may as well have been carved by a sculptor: lithe and muscular, every delectable contour so marvelously defined that just looking at him felt somehow sinful. He also had not been joking about the extent of his tattoos. There were a number of them curving sinuously along his arms and torso, all seemingly designed for the sole purpose of emphasizing his magnificent form.

“It’s just occurred to me that if you’d taken your shirt off the day we met, I would be dead right now,” Solona admitted, having quite a bit of trouble averting her gaze from the sharp V of his hips.

Zevran laughed. “And what fun would that have been for either of us?” He took up her hands, kissing each palm before placing them on his chest, and Solona was briefly mesmerized by the contrast of her white hands against his dark skin. Then she became aware of the heat and texture of that skin, and suddenly mere aesthetics were the furthest thing from her mind. Her fingers drifted over his collarbone, his neck, his jaw.

Something childish took over inside her as her fingers approached his ears. Solona had always liked elf ears. She’d always secretly wanted to touch them, just to see what they felt like. It was beyond her comprehension how anything so delicate and pretty had inspired a racial slur.

She had also heard rumors that those lovely ears were extremely sensitive. She traced a fingertip along the edge of one, barely stifling a giggle when Zevran let out a hiss of pleasure.

Ah—the rumors were true, then. That was good to know. She traced it again, then, growing bolder, leaned in to kiss it. He made another pleased sound, grasping her about the waist, and she really did giggle. She mimicked the attentions he’d paid to her earlier, spurred along by his little sighs and the unconscious flexing of his fingers when she found a particularly good spot. She flicked her tongue against the tip and he groaned, clutching her waist nearly hard enough to bruise.

“You are not as innocent as you look,” he said, sounding slightly breathless. His hands covered hers again, prompting them to continue their exploration of his body, and shyly she let them begin to drift lower, skimming over his toned arms before traveling inward to study his chest and stomach, tracing the lines of each tattoo she encountered along the way.

“I look innocent?��

“Terribly innocent,” he confirmed as her fingers trailed along his taut abdominal muscles. “Saintly, almost. It makes me want to do wicked things to you. Ah, you’ve no idea how becomingly you blush!”

Solona stubbornly ducked her head to hide her coloring cheeks and Zevran laughed at her, at which she might have summoned the will to feign annoyance had she been any less fascinated by the vibration of it within his chest or the small, brown nipples pebbling beneath her fingers. The tiniest hint of a smile tugged at her lips. Saintly, indeed, she thought, placing a fingertip on each nipple.

She couldn’t help but laugh at the surprised noise he made as she sent the first gentle pulse of electricity into the sensitive flesh. A second pulse had him purring, his head tipping back as his eyes slipped shut.

“You approve, then?” Solona said, setting a rhythmic pattern of many smaller bursts of magic. “One of the mages gained himself quite the fan club with this trick. The other girls couldn’t shut up about it. It seemed worthwhile to figure it out for myself.”

“Oh? Is this the cause of those delicious sounds coming from your tent at night?” Solona’s mortification must have been palpable, because he continued, “Not to worry, my dear, you are perfectly quiet. Elf ears are keener than most. Especially when they happen to be pressed up against your tent.”

Solona sputtered indignantly, blushing anew, and he chuckled, preempting any more coherent scolding by kissing her soundly. When he finally pulled back she was too dazed to recall why she had taken exception to his confessed misbehavior in the first place.

“Can you blame me? Knowing that you are right there, pleasuring yourself, a flimsy bit of canvas the only thing keeping us apart? The temptation is too great.” The liquid heat pooling in her groin had Solona fidgeting helplessly as he leaned forward to nuzzle her cheek, his voice dropping to a sultry purr. “What do you think of, my pretty witch, when you touch yourself?” He dragged his tongue lazily down her neck. “Do you imagine that it is my fingers between your legs? My tongue?"

Solona swallowed hard. The answer, of course, was a resounding yes, but her pride—what little that remained—refused to permit so effortless a victory. “That’s rather presumptuous of you,” she said, the whimper that escaped as he nipped sharply at the juncture of her neck and shoulder doing little for the air of cool composure she’d striven to project. “What makes you think you feature at all?”

“Excluding the position in which we currently find ourselves?” One finger found the gap in her robes, eliciting another whimper as it scorched a path from her clavicle, between her breasts, and down her stomach, stopping to trace a slow circle around her navel. “I am not blind, Solona, and I am certainly not naïve. I know what it means when a woman looks at me as you do.”

“I… I don’t—” she began weakly, only to be silenced by his lips again. When he released her, he held the edges of her robes in his grasp once more, but made no move to undress her. He caught her gaze, and Solona realized belatedly that he was waiting for permission. “You won’t like what you see,” she blurted.

“Perhaps you should let me be the judge of that.” There was something approaching tenderness in his expression, but Solona did not have time to marvel at the strangeness of such a thing because in the next instant her robes were being pushed from her shoulders and she was squeezing her eyes shut, unable to watch that expression turn to disappointment. If that meant she was a terrible coward, so be it.

The fabric slid down, pooling at the belt still slung around her hips as her top half was bared to his view. He said nothing, and with each passing second Solona’s heart sank a bit further.

He found her disgusting. She’d known he would. He may have thought she was cute when she was dressed, but naked…

It’s not as though I didn’t warn him, she thought sourly, more painfully aware than ever of her own imperfections. If only she were like the girls in the Circle who could eat whatever they wanted and never gain an ounce, or the other girls who just never seemed to be particularly hungry in the first place. Or, at the very least, the other girls who were just as heavy as she, but had large enough breasts that no one seemed to mind.

Solona felt her own breasts—her sad, disproportionately small breasts which hadn’t grown a bit since she was twelve, no matter how fervently she hoped and prayed for them to do so—tightening, though whether it was a result of the sudden chill or her mental scrutiny, she couldn’t say.

“Oh, Solona. You are even more beautiful than I thought you would be.”

Solona’s eyes flew open in surprise to find him regarding her quite strangely indeed. One of his hands skated down her ribs, leaving gooseflesh in its wake as it came to curl around her waist, giving her a little squeeze there.

“So soft and lush,” he said, his free hand trailing softly over her bare skin. “These cold Fereldan nights would not be nearly so inhospitable with you in my arms.” He ran his knuckles along the underside of a breast, which tightened further at the attention. Solona flushed.

“They’re too small,” she said, feeling the need to apologize.

“They are perfect,” he corrected, cupping them in his warm palms. “You see? Just the right size. And these,” he said, rubbing his thumbs over her nipples in a way that made her knees go wobbly, “these I am truly enamored with. I have never seen nipples quite so pink. How pretty they are.”

He gave them a gentle tweak and she nearly lost her balance altogether. Looking entirely too pleased with himself, he maneuvered her around to lean against the table before resuming his attack, teasing her with soft strokes and hard pinches until she was gasping for air and gripping the edge of the table for dear life. Why, in all the years she’d spent doing those exact things to herself, had it never felt like this before, the very lightest of touches sending throbs of desperate, aching need to her cunt?

She barely noticed the muscular thigh insinuating itself between her legs until he ground it against her—hard.

Pride, dignity, and other such inconveniences fell by the wayside as she rubbed herself against it, her oversensitive flesh craving the sweet friction it granted. He obliged her with firm pressure, and she was vaguely aware of making noises she wouldn’t own up to later as a hot coil of pleasure began tightening in her belly more quickly than it ever did when she was alone in her bed. One more nudge, one more hard tug on her nipples and she’d be done for. Almost. Oh, Maker, almost...

The hands and thigh withdrew suddenly, and Solona nearly screamed in frustration. She glared at Zevran, who smirked back before pulling her flush against him and claiming her mouth once more, which was entirely unfair because she wanted to stay cross, and it was all but impossible to do that when his delicious bare skin was pressed up against her and he was doing those things with his lips and teeth and tongue.

She conceded defeat, moaning softly into that unbelievably talented mouth and slipping her arms around him to tighten the embrace. It took her a few seconds longer than it really should have to notice that there was something hard pressing into her pelvis, and she must have let out a startled noise when she finally realized what it was, because she felt him smile against her lips.

“In case you still had your doubts,” he said, his voice rich with amusement as he captured a trembling hand and led it to the bulge in his trousers, “I can assure you that this does not happen unless I very much do like what I see.”

She supposed he had a point, there.

She gave the bulge an experimental caress, drawing a groan from his lips that somehow had her throbbing in anticipation. Zevran caught her hand again, this time depositing it pointedly on the laces of his trousers. A glance up at his face gave confirmation of the silent instructions and, blushing furiously, Solona set about her task. Her fingers felt awkward and clumsy as they worked the laces, and she suddenly, irrationally wondered if she ought to just flee—a notion she quickly abandoned as the evidence of his arousal sprang from confinement.

With only medical diagrams and the vague descriptions in romance novels to draw from, Solona wasn’t entirely sure what she’d expected a real penis to look like, but she was quickly deciding that she found this one quite attractive. She had no way of telling whether it was any larger or smaller than most, but to her untrained eye it certainly looked impressive enough, swollen and flushed and displayed all the more prominently for the swirling tattoos that flanked it in lieu of hair, drawing the eye inexorably toward it.

As if anyone would really have wanted to look away.

He chuckled, and she realized she’d been staring. She grinned sheepishly. “It’s lovely,” she said, drawing a fingertip along its length and discovering that it felt even better than it looked. She had never imagined that skin could be so soft, so hot. He made little noises of encouragement as she slid her thumb over the head, smearing the drop of fluid glistening at the tip.

It twitched suddenly, and she jerked her hand back in surprise. He laughed.

“Sometimes it has a mind of its own,” he said, calmly recapturing her hand and guiding her to wrap it around him. He showed her how to grip his cock so that the silky skin slipped back and forth over the rigid flesh beneath with each pump, and she delighted in the feel of it in her hand.

Once comfortable with the basic principle of the act, she began to vary her strokes—fast and slow, gentle and rough, trying to determine what he liked best. It didn’t take her long; Solona had always prided herself on being a quick study, and Zevran wasn’t remotely shy about expressing his approval when she did something right. He moaned when she handled him roughly, gasped when she squeezed tightly on the upstroke, and so she continued to do just that.

A few moments of her specially-tailored attentions had him panting as he thrust his hips into each stroke, and Solona blushed at the sudden realization that she dearly wanted to watch him come. Would he cry out? How would his face look? Would he shoot his seed all over her stomach? And why, in Andraste’s name, was the latter such a bizarrely appealing prospect at the moment?

Before she had the chance to learn the answer to any of those questions he pulled her hand away, swallowing her protest with a kiss as he guided her to sit on the edge of the table. He began hitching up the skirt of her robes.

“Wh-what are you doing?” she asked, squirming uneasily as he dropped to his knees before her. He grinned up at her as he inched the fabric slowly, teasingly up her thighs. Solona bit back a groan. Maker, how she loved and hated that grin.

“I believe it is your turn to show me something of yours, yes?” he said, hooking his fingers suggestively into the waistband of her smallclothes. Solona’s cheeks burned.

“I…” She swallowed hard and tried again. “I suppose that’s only fair.”

Later, she imagined, she would be terribly flattered by how quickly her smallclothes found their way onto the floor; at the moment, however, she was too busy trying to get a rein on the nerves and desire warring within her as his hands stroked along the outsides of her tightly-clenched thighs. She moaned pathetically as he dropped a kiss to one.

“Sweet Solona,” he murmured, massaging the flesh beneath his palms, “let me see. I promise you, I won’t bite. Well, not unless you want me to,” he amended, flashing a cheeky smirk. When after a moment she still did not comply, he ducked his head to press more soft kisses to her thighs. “You asked me what I want with you,” he said between kisses. “I want to taste you. I want to hear you call my name as I bring you to ecstasy, over and over, until you think you will die of it. I want to bury myself between these plump thighs and make love to you until neither of us has the strength to move any longer, and to rest on your soft belly after I have spent myself inside you.” He raised his eyes to catch her gaze. “But first, I want to see you.”

Solona shivered. “Yes, okay.”

Her thighs were pushed apart, Zevran settled between them as soon as the words left her mouth, and Solona lay back on the table and tried to remember to breathe, uncertain whether she was mortified or excited to be spread so lewdly for him. She had a feeling it was a bit of both. She heard him inhale deeply, and her cheeks grew even hotter.

“What a fine little cunny this is,” he said, brushing his fingers softly along her outer lips before gently parting them. He dragged a finger through her folds and Solona whimpered, embarrassed by the slick sounds of his ministrations. She could hear the satisfaction in his voice when he spoke again. “So wet for me already?”

Solona couldn’t quite muster a coherent response, which he must have realized, because he didn’t wait for one.

She gasped at the feel of a hot, wet tongue sliding up her cleft, letting out a particularly undignified squeak when it finished its journey with a flick against her clit. She squirmed helplessly, willing him to do it again.

“Delicious,” he purred. “Just as I thought you would be.”

She wasn’t sure whether to blush at the compliment or cry out of sheer frustration, but both soon proved irrelevant because that tongue was back, lapping at her as though she was the best thing he’d ever tasted. And she’d thought he was good at kissing! Those skills paled in comparison to what his mouth was doing to her now, eagerly licking and suckling the sensitive flesh, robbing her of any higher thought than Yes, more, please!

She let out another squeak as that tongue was plunged deep inside her, and then moaned, threading her fingers into his hair. Maker, she never touched herself there; she’d tried once or twice but, finding it slightly uncomfortable and an awkward angle at which to hold her wrist to boot, she’d abandoned it in favor of her clitoris, dipping her fingers into herself only when she wasn’t quite slick enough outside yet. But having a warm, wriggling tongue inside her? Even in her wildest dreams, she couldn’t have imagined how incredible it would feel!

She whined at the loss when the tongue withdrew, only to draw the sound into a sharp keen as it slid up to tease her neglected clit. The tingling heat came flooding back as his tongue flicked and circled, and she must have been closer to the edge than she realized because he captured the swollen bud between his lips and sucked and suddenly she was coming harder than she ever had, her cries echoing through the library.

Too sensitive now, she tried to squirm away, but he caught her hips, holding her firmly in place. “Again,” he said, delivering a feather-soft lick that made her shudder all over. “I know you can.”

Oh, and he did, didn’t he? That terrible, wonderful, absolute pervert!

She groaned, ceasing her struggle as he lavished her with gentle attentions until it was no longer too much but just right, and she wasn’t sure how he could tell when it was, but he could, licking her harder and faster until she shattered beneath his tongue a second time. Once more she tried to escape, and once more he held her fast, soothing her with barely-there strokes until she was ready again.

Once, twice, thrice more that clever tongue brought her to orgasm, leaving her a panting, quivering pile of useless limbs when he finally began to pull away.

“Why are you stopping?” she demanded breathlessly, propping herself up on her elbows with no small amount of difficulty. He laughed, bestowing one last kiss to her nether lips before wiping his mouth on her robes and rising to his feet.

“As flattered as I am by your appreciation of my talents, too much more attention to your little pearl may leave it sore in the morning,” he said. He bent to kiss her, slow and lingering rather than insistent, and she melted into it, blushing at the taste of herself on his lips.

He stood back up and began to redo the laces of his trousers. Panic lanced through her.

“What—why are you—?”

He quirked an eyebrow at her.

She cleared her throat and tried again. “I mean, I thought you wanted to… you know,” she finished lamely.

“I do very much wish to you know,” he said with a grin, “but I think it might be wise to adjourn to a bed before we do so.”

Fear knotted in her stomach. If they left this room, if he saw her in better lighting, he would change his mind. Deep in her gut, she knew it. This was her only chance. “No. Now.”

He cast a brief glance around the room, and it occurred to Solona that she had never seen Zevran look awkward before. Under different circumstances, she might have laughed. “To… speak truthfully, my dear, I had not anticipated quite this level of enthusiasm. I’m afraid I, ah, came a bit unprepared.”

It took her a second to catch his meaning, but her entire body sagged with relief when she did. “Grey Wardens are all but sterile, and besides, I’m a mage. We have ways of handling these things.”

“Ah… yes, but there is still the matter of—”

“Zevran Arainai, if you do not penetrate me this instant I will set your hair on fire.”

His eyebrows shot skyward. Slowly, a smile began to spread across his face. “Yes, ma’am.”

Solona’s heart sang in victory as he undid the laces, freeing that beautiful cock again. It had wilted slightly, and this time she needed no prompting to take it in her hand, leaning up to kiss him deeply while she coaxed it back to readiness.

When he was fully hard once more, he broke the kiss, gently pushing her to lie back on the table. Her heart fluttered madly as he spread her legs wider, her breath catching in her chest as she felt the very tip of him pressing against her. She closed her eyes, bracing herself for the intrusion.

“Are you ready, Solona?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

“Tell me what you want.”

She cracked one eye open, finding a mischievous grin on his face. “You know quite well what I want,” she said peevishly. She shifted her hips to try and take him in, but he moved just far enough away to prevent her from succeeding. She scowled.

“I do, yes, but I would like to hear you say it,” he purred, complicating matters all the more by taking his cock in hand and tracing the tip in teasing circles around her entrance. “Ask me to make love to you.”

“I hardly think this falls under the mantle of ‘making love.’”

Zevran sighed. “Do you want to argue semantics, or do you want to get fucked?”

Solona blushed. “The latter, please.”

“Then perhaps—” he pressed forward slightly, just barely dipping into her “—you should humor me, yes?”

“OhholyMakerpleasemakelovetome,” she gasped, not even minding the victorious smirk on his face as he withdrew once more to line himself up properly.

“Remember to breathe, amora,” he said softly, and she didn’t fully understand why until he’d thrust inside her, sending a shock of white-hot pain through her lower body.

He stilled, allowing her time to stretch to accommodate him, but the pain showed no sign of subsiding. No, no, no, this wasn’t at all how it happened in the books; it only stung for a second, and then the heroine was perfectly fine. Romance novels had lied to her! She felt horribly betrayed.

Zevran shushed her, and she realized she’d been whimpering.

“Darling Solona,” he cooed, rubbing her stomach, “it won’t always hurt. Just this time and the first few hereafter, and then you will know nothing but pleasure from love-making.”

“Are you… are you trying to be comforting?” she asked. “You?” She couldn’t help it: she burst out laughing.

Above her, Zevran let out a groan that did not sound born entirely of exasperation. “And just why is that so funny?”

“I don’t think this was what Loghain had in mind when he hired you to impale me,” she managed, before dissolving into laughter again. He rolled his eyes, grinning nonetheless.

“You have a strange sense of humor,” he said. Very slowly, he pushed the rest of the way inside, stilling again once their hips met. “Are you alright?”

There was something in those lovely eyes that made her feel warm all over, and Solona shifted her hips a bit, discovering that the pain, though still sharp, was not as unbearable as it had been. “Yes, I think so. Mostly.”

“Let me know when I may begin to move. There’s no hurry; we have all night. I assure you, I have exemplary self-control,” he added, only slightly boastfully.

He stroked his hands up and down her sides, pausing now and then to worry a nipple between his fingers, and little by little Solona felt herself relax around him. Soon—so soon that she wondered if Zevran had been trained to do precisely that (and came to the conclusion that yes, there was a good chance he had been)—his soothing touches had chased the worst of the sting away.

She caught his gaze and gave him a brief nod.

She winced the first time he withdrew and thrust back in, and the second, but by the third or fourth she’d grown accustomed enough to the smaller twinges of pain that she was able to focus for the first time on how it actually felt to have a man inside her. “Odd” was the first word that came to mind, though not in a bad way. The sensation of being filled and stretched, of him moving deep within her was alien, but she could tell that it would be pleasant once she’d grown used to it.

“Oh, Solona,” he breathed. He gripped her hips, squeezing the doughy flesh there with a groan of approval that quickly dismissed any instinct she might have had to be ashamed of it. “Solona… amora… you feel so good.”

She blushed at the praise. Or was it because of the wet sounds of their coupling, and how very loudly they echoed in the empty library? Or the heat in those golden eyes as he slid his hands up and down her body, kneading at her breasts, her belly, her hips, her thighs; the way that thin sheen of sweat made his skin glisten in the lamplight as he rolled his hips against hers, or the soft murmurs of Antivan that she didn’t understand but could only assume were complimentary?

With so very much to blush about, would she ever be able to stop blushing?

His hips stuttered, and this time she recognized the word he uttered as a curse. “Apologies, my dear,” he said breathlessly, “but it appears I may have overestimated my powers of self-control. I’m afraid this will not be my finest performance. You feel so good, and I’ve wanted this too long. Oh, Solona…”

He swore again, sinking his fingers deeply into the flesh of her hips as the rhythm of his own became erratic, leaving her gasping at the force of his thrusts until, mere moments later, his entire body went rigid, his eyes shut tightly and his mouth open in a silent cry.

Solona's heart did a little somersault. Maker, but he was gorgeous when he came.

Zevran released her hips, bracing his hands on the table as he sagged above her, his breathing ragged. Solona wanted to kiss him again, but since doing so would require moving--which she did not want to do--she contented herself with revisiting the thick lines of black ink on his arms and chest.

He smiled. “You like them.”

“They're beautiful.” She traced the tattoo on his cheek, her heart fluttering strangely when he turned his head to kiss her palm. “They suit you,” she continued, largely to mask the fact that she had no idea what one was supposed to do after sex. Back in the Circle, this had always been the point at which the participants slunk back to their respective beds while everyone else politely pretended to be unaware of what they'd been up to. Out here in the real world, she was at a bit of a disadvantage.

“Pleased to hear it, amora,” he said. He straightened, leaving her feeling suddenly, disconcertingly empty as his softening cock slid out of her. He helped her to her feet, then gathered her into his arms for a soft kiss. “How do you feel? I... forgot myself a bit in the end. I did not hurt you?”

Solona shook her head. “No, I'm fine. I feel like I probably could use a wash, though,” she added sheepishly, feeling a fresh stab of betrayal at the uncomfortable wetness between her thighs. Scores of smutty books, and not a one had bothered to mention that you leaked afterward. She had a good mind to unload the whole of her collection on the next shopkeeper she met!

“It's a messy business,” Zevran said with a laugh. He set about getting his clothes back in order, so Solona followed suit. “Come. We will get you cleaned up.”

Solona took his hand and allowed him to lead her into the hall, comforted—if oddly disappointed—that post-coital etiquette outside the Circle was very much the same as it was inside.

At least, it had seemed that way until she turned toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?”

Confused, and with the growing suspicion that she had once again failed to recognize some important social cue, Solona replied, “To my room, of course.”

“Mine is closer,” he said, giving her hand a gentle tug in the opposite direction. Still puzzled, but trusting that Zevran was more of an authority on these matters than she, Solona followed him.

True to his claim, Zevran’s room was just around the corner. Though much smaller and simpler than what seemed customary for a nobleman to offer his guests, it was blissfully warm compared to the large, drafty tower room she’d been set up in. Solona wondered if he might agree to trade, but suspected this was not the most appropriate time to ask.

Zevran shed his clothes and began filling the wash basin with hot water from the pot in the hearth. Tamping down a resurgence of self-consciousness, Solona began removing her robes. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t already seen her mostly naked, she reminded herself as she worked the laces. If he hadn’t fled from the sight of her in the library, he wasn’t particularly likely to do it now, even if this room was rather more well-lit.

Quite well-lit, in fact. Indeed... curiously so, Solona realized, counting dozens of flickering candles scattered about, casting the room in a hazy golden glow. There was a censer in the corner releasing the sweet, spicy aroma of frankincense, and, when Solona turned to place her folded robes atop the bed, a decanter of brandy and a pair of empty glasses on the nightstand, accompanied by what looked to be a bottle of massage oil.

“Andraste’s flaming sword, Zevran, did you plan this?”

“Would you think me a scoundrel if I said yes?”

“Yes,” Solona laughed. “But… I wouldn’t mind.”

“Then I am a fortunate man, indeed,” Zevran said cheerfully, carrying the steaming basin to where Solona stood at the foot of the bed. “I confess, I did have a rather more elaborate seduction in mind. But you made a very persuasive argument to the contrary,” he added.

Then, before Solona had a moment to think, he’d knelt at her feet. She watched, dumbstruck, as he plucked a sponge from the basin and began gently cleaning their mess from her skin.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked once words returned to her.

“You said you wished to bathe,” he answered matter-of-factly.

Solona shook her head. “No, I mean why are you doing all of this? Why are you being so nice to me?”

Zevran grinned up at her. “Should I be cruel to the women I take to bed?”

“Haven't you killed a number of them?”

“A fair point,” he chuckled. He paused to rinse the sponge, then returned silently to his task. It was not until Solona had accepted that she would be receiving no answer that he finally spoke again, his face a mask of impassivity. “When you found me in the thrall of the Sloth demon, you wept for me.”

Solona sucked in a breath. It had been nearly two months since they liberated the Circle, and the image of him being stretched on the rack by the Crows was still all too fresh in her mind. “Zevran, that was awful. Anyone would have--”

“Anyone did not. You did.”

Solona turned the words over in her head. “So... you’re doing this because we’re friends?”

“As you say, I have had worse reasons.”

He sounded sad, and Solona regretted forcing him to dredge up the memory. Should she apologize? Would that be weird? Certainly, it wouldn’t change anything. She could be as sorry as she liked, and his training would have been no less barbaric.

Reminding herself that words were seldom her ally in such situations, she reached out to stroke his hair. He leaned into her touch like a cat, and she considered herself forgiven.

Silence fell between them, but it was a comfortable one, and Solona thanked the Maker that she had not ruined the evening. She closed her eyes, allowing herself to indulge in the sensation of the warm sponge travelling up and down her legs as she carded her fingers through Zevran’s hair. She’d never been bathed before. It was pleasant.

Perhaps a bit too pleasant, she discovered, unable to contain a soft moan as he drew the sponge over her sex. She looked down, mortified, but if the smirk was any indication, Zevran was not offended in the slightest.

“Excited again, amora?” he teased, giving the over-sensitive flesh a more deliberate caress.

“So are you,” she pointed out, glancing at the half-hard cock between his legs. She felt herself flush, lust coursing like wildfire through her veins. “Can we do it again? No, it’s too late for that. Unless it’s not?”

He laughed. “You are insatiable, Solona! I knew you would be. One can always tell with women.”

Solona frowned. “How?”

“Ah, a master never reveals his secrets,” Zevran said, rising to his feet. He took her hand, kissing it softly. “Come.”

He reclined atop the blankets, and Solona was struck anew by how beautiful he was. His smooth brown skin glowed in the candlelight, his pale hair shimmering like moonbeams where it lay across the pillows. His bright eyes locked with hers, gleaming with promise as he gave that perfect cock a languid stroke.

How was this not the form Desire demons took?

Solona scrambled into his open arms and he rolled her onto her back, rising on his elbow beside her. He ran his knuckles along her cheek. “More comfortable than the table, yes?” he said with a grin.

“I stand by my decision.”

Zevran laughed and ducked his head to kiss her. Soft and slow, it was not quite the sort of kiss Solona was expecting, and it took a moment’s recalibration before she was able to return it with any measure of success. But, in what looked to be the theme of the evening, Zevran didn’t seem to mind, meeting her clumsy attempts at participation with patience and good humor.

After what felt like ages he deepened the kiss, and she moaned, eagerly welcoming his tongue with her own. His free hand roamed her body, light and relaxing at first, but growing more heated in time with their kiss. She sighed, pressing herself into his palm as he kneaded a breast, and she felt him smile against her lips.

He broke the kiss, trailing his lips down her neck. He pressed soft kisses and gentle bites along her throat, her collar, her breasts. He caught a nipple in his mouth and she gasped, arching off the bed as throbs of aching need shot to her clit.

Too soon, he released her nipple with a wet pop, his eyes glinting wickedly as he met her gaze. “Do you like that, amora?”

“Is this really the time for rhetorical questions?”

Zevran rolled his eyes, but didn’t look especially bothered. “Ah, woman, can you not humor me?” He laved his tongue over the abandoned nipple, giving the other a gentle pinch. “It pleases me to hear the words.”

An unexpected flood of arousal rushed to Solona’s core. “Yes,” she said, her voice just above a whisper as heat rose in her cheeks.

“Yes?” he echoed, planting lazy kisses over her breasts. “Yes to what, amora? Yes, you can humor me? Yes, you like being suckled?” He gave the nipple another hard suck and she barely contained a squeal.

“Yes,” she repeated, sinking trembling fingers into his hair. He chuckled, but had mercy, suckling the opposite nipple until she squirmed, desperate for something, anything between her legs.

“Still so shy, my dear,” he purred, relenting in his assault to kiss his way down her ribs. “Hmm. Do you like this?”

“Yes.”

“And this?” he asked, dipping his tongue into her navel.

“Y-yes.”

He drew lower, peppering her belly with kisses until he reached her pubic mound. “And when I kiss your cunny--you like that, too?”

“Maker, yes,” Solona said, parting her legs in anticipation as his kisses fell lower still. Her toes curled as he swirled his tongue over her clit--it was a bit sore from before--but he did not remain there long before climbing back up her body to capture her lips in a deep, dizzying kiss.

“And when I make love to you,” he said breathlessly, his hard cock twitching where it was pinned between their bellies, “do you like that?”

Solona swallowed. “Yes,” she said, and felt a tremor run up the length of his body.

“Shall I make love to you now, amora?”

“Yes,” Solona breathed. “Yes,” she repeated, winding her legs around his hips as he nestled between her thighs, dragging the head of his cock through her sodden folds. "Yes,” she whimpered, digging her nails into his back as he drove himself in to the hilt. There was still pain, but it was dull, a mere annoyance accompanying the wet slide of his cock inside her, and she sighed, tightening her legs around him.

It was nice, she decided, having him so close during sex. It felt cozy. Intimate. For a moment she thought she understood why he insisted on calling it “making love,” but she banished the foolish notion from her mind.

This was sex. Sex between people who cared for each other as friends, perhaps, but nothing more than that. It wouldn’t do to go letting herself get carried away on flights of fancy when, come morning, things between them would be exactly the same as they had been yesterday.

Zevran shifted the angle of his hips slightly, and that niggling thread of disappointment vanished as he thrust against something deep inside that made her eyes roll back. She heard him chuckle, but couldn’t find it within her to be annoyed when he picked up his pace, hitting that spot on every stroke.

He was speaking again--her name, and “amora,” and strains of Antivan that she remembered from earlier but still could not hope to decipher. He said a phrase she she didn’t recognize, his thrusts coming to a halt. He licked his lips, then repeated so that she could understand. “My name, amora. Say it.”

Solona flushed. Feeling a bit silly, she said, “Zevran.”

His whole body shuddered. “Solona,” he sighed, stealing a searing kiss as he began to move again with more vigor than before.

“Zevran,” she said again, emboldened by this passionate response. She raked her nails lightly down his chest, feeling him shiver beneath her touch. “Zevran,” she moaned as his cock thrust against that particular spot, over and over, until she felt herself beginning to unravel. “Zevran, Zevran, Zevran…”

He opened his mouth, but if he said anything Solona didn’t hear it because she was coming, and he followed right on her heels, burying himself as deep as he could while her body clenched around him as though it never wished to let go.

He collapsed on top of her, and she held him close, briefly entertaining the irrational fancy that she would be perfectly content to stay that way forever.

“You’re all sweaty,” she said finally, combing her fingers through his damp hair.

Zevran laughed tiredly. “Yes, that happens,” he said, pressing soft kisses into her neck. He rose up to lay another kiss on her lips, then rolled off of her. “Come,” he said, sliding under the covers. “You will catch your death of cold.”

Solona’s hand had nearly reached her robes before she realized that he meant for her to join him in bed. She looked toward the door. Then back at him.

They were finished, though, weren’t they? Late as it was, they were unlikely to do it again. But, once more, she conceded that he knew things about the world outside the Circle that she didn’t, and crawled beneath the covers.

He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her to lay her head upon his chest.

“And...what’s the purpose of this?”

“Do you not find it pleasurable?” he asked, kissing her hair.

It was rather comfortable being cocooned in his arms under the warm blankets, feeling his heart slow to a steady rhythm beneath her cheek. So comfortable that her eyelids were quickly growing heavy. “I suppose it is.”

“Then, what other purpose is required?” He squeezed her. “Rest, amora. It’s late.”

Solona closed her eyes. “Just for a few minutes.”

“A few minutes,” he agreed.

Solona awoke to the pale grey light of pre-dawn filtering through the curtains. Keeping her eyes shut tightly, she turned away from the window, just as she’d done every morning since they began their stay at Castle Redcliffe.

Except that this morning she turned right instead of left. And she was naked.

She gasped, bolting upright to find an equally naked Antivan Crow lying next to her.

Maker’s balls, she’d had sex with Zevran.

Twice.

Careful not to make a sound, Solona climbed out of bed as gingerly as she could, looking back once both feet were on the ground to make sure she hadn’t woken Zevran. Confident that he was still asleep, she tiptoed over to retrieve her clothes. Her robes had been kicked onto the floor at some point in the night, and she said a silent prayer of thanks that they’d managed not to fall into the washbasin as she shrugged them on. Unlikely as she was to meet anyone in the hall at this hour, sopping wet robes would have been difficult to explain.

She toed on her shoes, casting her eyes about the room for her smallclothes. Where had they--?

Oh, Maker, they were still in the library. Saint Solona had left her knickers in the library. Hysterical laughter bubbled up in her chest and she clasped a hand over her mouth to contain it.

Right. She would finish dressing, find her smallclothes, then slip into her room before anyone was the wiser. She could do this, she assured herself. No problem. She cast another glance toward the bed to make sure Zevran was still asleep.

She was met with golden eyes tracking her every move.

Shit. Of course he was a light sleeper. Shit. Shit, shit, shit…

“Um. Good morning?”

“Good morning,” Zevran said, making no move to leave the bed. “You seem in quite a hurry.”

“I, er. No,” Solona said. “Yes. What I mean is, thank you so much for last night. It was--you’re very good at sex, and… thank you, for--ah--for that. But I should--I should really go. People will be waking up soon, and--” she shrugged, unable to locate any more words.

Zevran looked thoughtful. “I believe I understand.”

"Thank you.”

“You are a Grey Warden, I am a Crow. I can see how you might not wish such a dalliance to become public knowledge.”

Solona’s stomach dropped. “What?”

“It is perfectly sound judgement,” Zevran continued. “You are attempting to court the favor of the Fereldan nobility. Sharing your bed with an assassin is perhaps not the best look.”

“Me? No--you! I thought that you wouldn’t--because I’m--” she gestured helplessly at herself. “I mean, last night was one thing, but in the cold light of morning…”

“Ah. I see,” Zevran said, crossing the bed to where she stood. Before Solona could act, he grasped her partially-laced robes and pulled them open, looking her up and down. “Yes. Yes, this will be a problem.”

Solona’s heart sank. “It will?”

“Now that I have had my hands on you, I fear I shall not be able to keep them off.”

Solona opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

Zevran laughed, resting his forehead against hers. “Come back to bed, amora.”

He did not have to ask her twice.

#dragon age fic #da fic #zevran #Zevran x Amell #smut

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doodlewash · 4 years

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Hello! I am Vasundhara. I am born and was brought up in Satara, Maharashtra State, India. A beautiful scenic town situated amidst seven hills, Satara is a five picturesque hour drive from Mumbai. As a child, I was always fascinated by the beauty I found around me. My eyes used to form objects by seeing uneven shapes of stones, clouds, tiles, brown crust of chapati (flatbread). Anything could be endearing for my visualization.

But nobody, including me, realised my exceptional talent for drawing until the age of 6, when I enlarged an approximately 5cm sized image of Lord Krishna into the 3ft tall sketch on the blackboard without scales. Everyone was amazed! I remember my father clicking my picture along with the sketch in his camera. Maybe that’s how I started. It felt so good when my drawings made everyone happy.

The encouragement I received from my grandmother had a profound impact on my paintings that you see today. I have seen her sewing and knitting beautiful things, along with her absolute hand for beautiful rangolis. So, I would definitely say that it is in my genes, as in family, my parents are pretty much obsessed about perfection, and I perceive them as a blessing. Also, there are many members in my family who can draw perfect lines and sketch sometimes, but they’re all in different fields, and never enrolled themselves in the Fine Arts because there was no Art School in our town those days.

But I was very sure and clear about my goals at a very young age. I did not want to go into the fields of commerce or science (the only options we had in our town, moreover it would have added another two years of waiting to go for G D Art & I had no patience to wait). I used to participate in drawing competitions, and even though I bagged the first place in my batch, unfortunately it was never considered as a core subject to include in grades.

At the age of 15, I took the big decision of my life. I somehow gathered courage and told my art teacher in the school that I wanted to pursue my education in Fine Art, that I wanted to do G.D. Arts (Graduate Diploma in Arts). My teacher considered the conversation with warmest regards, later to find out my father’s agreement to my decision and wanting to send me to Pune (two hours’ drive from my town, which was a big deal for my family then, as sending daughters away for education was something they weren’t familiar and comfortable with), where I could pursue my dreams.

I was amazed, excited and nervous at the same time. To achieve my dream, I had to leave my loving family, my town, my comfort zone and go to Pune City, which has a rich legacy in education and considered as the Oxford of India.

My 10th standard exams were over and like every year I bought a new drawing book for myself, so that I could draw the way I wanted to with no worries about other subjects like history, maths etc. My results were out and I passed with 56% which was not something to be proud of, but still I distributed sweets to all the members of my family and friends as a funny ritual. The next day my father took me to Pune to get a prospectus of the college. I glided with joy after seeing the college of my dream. I wonder how hard it was for my parents. I am grateful they could control their emotions while sending me away for my education, or rather, for the sake of my dream.

I got the admission for Foundation (1st year) in Bharati Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune. On the desired date, my parents and siblings came to drop me to the hostel. Thankfully, one of our relatives were there to guide me till the second day of college, until which whom I was supposed to stay with. I didn’t realise the pain I was going through staying far from my family. I used to cry a lot (as if someone had forced me to go away from them). But college was a blissful distraction. I used to learn deliberately and most importantly enjoy everything which came along my way.

My professors appreciated me all the time. The things I learnt in college still stand strong, the values cherished every day. I had learnt good understanding of light, shadows, depth, perspective at that age. I used to do my assignments in poster colours aka gouache. I never tried watercolours those days (which is a regret, how I wish I had known it is a delight of painting). I stood out first in the annual examination among girls and second in the class. I wanted to continue in the same college for the next four years but as I hadn’t completed my 12th grade, I wasn’t qualified for the degree course.

I had to move to another college which has a Diploma course, which is equivalent to a Degree, that’s how they call it, `Graduate Diploma in Art’ aka G.D. Art. I was selected through merit in Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune, for the Elementary (2nd year). I got to learn the things which are efficacious for a lifetime. My personality developed from a shy girl to a confident artist. I became proficient in subjects like life drawing, illustration, graphic design, caricature, portraits, calligraphy and typography.

Even at this stage, I never considered watercolours for my projects. I used to do it in acrylics when I had to paint on the canvas. I had plenty free time in those days and I hardly did plein-air landscape paintings in poster colour. I remember doing a commission work of 6ft x 6ft mural in acrylics and I bought a first model of 3.2mp camera phone for myself, to help with my projects. In those days I was a career enthusiast and often dreamed of making a career in painting.

I worked as a graphic designer in TimeOut Bengaluru Magazine after I was married. Needless to say, life changed completely as I moved to Bangaluru, Karnataka State with my husband. A state where the regional language was different than my native place. I feel fortunate to have wise in-laws, who always encouraged my art even though everyone comes from a technical background and didn’t know what exactly I was going to do with my degree. I used to get few commission works and for that I had to search for materials which was not as easy as it used to be in Pune. I had to start everything from scratch.

I hardly received funds from the clients which was minimal compared to my efforts and contribution to fetch perfect results. But it certainly gave me different subjects to work on and helped me learn new things. It was heart-warming when people didn’t know me, yet tried to trust my work. Later on, I got pregnant and took a huge break and my baby became my passion. I was enjoying the contrast in my world. My basic trait of enjoying the beauty never diminished and I used to feel the nature intently with my baby now. It developed the little world in my womb. My childhood literally came back to life.

When my little one was about 4 years, I gradually tried to explore the spectrum of my art. I fashioned handmade greeting cards along with customized envelope from scratch. I designed my logo as `Piece of Mind’ and received orders for customised work. It used to fulfill my creative yearnings. I managed to paint some canvases with a different illustrative character. I exhibited my work in Chitra Santhe (Art Market) where artists from all over India get an opportunity of exhibiting their work for a day. My work did good business and I acquired good connections in the field. When I finally felt settled, my husband was relocated to Scotland.

I was going to get a new world but, for that, I had to leave so many things behind, again! I had to search things related to my art, again! I had to prove my talent in the unknown place, again! Most importantly, I couldn’t carry my beloved art materials which I had gathered after all these years. Obviously buying things related to art is not easy. It is quite challenging financially and qualitatively.

We moved to Glasgow in Scotland (a place I had never heard of before). It was love at first site. It released a true artist hidden inside me. Naturally, it took a few months to find what I could do with my art here. As being in a new country has its own many challenges. After dropping my child to school, I used to walk miles in search of materials and waited for my calling. My husband encouraged me to advertise my cards in the Scottish Design Exchange, but unfortunately I could not reach my expected targets. I was completely embarrassed but did not give up on hope.

One fine day, a friend took me to Glasgow City Mission (GCM). I met a few of the kindest people who work for homeless and refugees. In order to gain proficiency in the English language, everyone was welcome to attend. It encouraged interactions from people all over the world and it was a huge confidence boost for me. I had a look at their event schedules and it said ‘Art’ on Fridays. I was overjoyed to see this and I went there on Friday and was enchanted by the lovely artistic aura of the place. People were doing everything related to art, sketching, painting, pottery. I tried pottery for the first time and it blew my mind. I found it very satisfying. I started looking forward to Fridays.

Once, I observed an artist painting a wreath with watercolours and I also felt like experimenting. I borrowed a lightly tinted paper and gave watercolour a try. It was extremely overwhelming. I sensibly invested in WHSmith watercolours and A4 watercolour paper book and started experimenting with it. I first painted live, sitting in my living room. It was a view of sunlight falling on the bedroom. I was happy with the result. The next day, I captured a sunset image while going to a grocery shop. I painted it after returning home by seeing it on my phone. It took me nearly 2 hours to complete it. I was stunned with the alluring effect of watercolours. I wanted to do more.

I referred another image from Edinburgh, which I had captured from a hop on-hop off bus. I was satisfied when I discovered I could do better than I expected. I have a habit of clicking pictures on my phone. I don’t own any DSLR camera as of now. So that’s how I took a shine to this new side of my art. I never stopped from that point. Later on, I got to know that, for watercolours, I should use good quality paper, which must be 100% cotton. I didn’t want to buy it immediately, though I dreamt of painting on that. I wanted to gain more confidence to achieve the best results.

Also, those papers were expensive to start experimenting with. (I always considered my logo ‘Piece Of Mind’ (POM) is going to present me as my brand. And I had no funds remaining at POM. Even though my better half would love to invest, I didn’t want to treat myself with easier options. Challenges can bring out the best in you. So, I bought an A4 size Cass Art watercolour book after I completed my first book with good results. I started posting my work on Instagram. I made a video of the book flipping by taking help from GCM. My second book was a bigger accomplishment.

I do not own a studio for my art yet. As my work requires a lot of floor space, I paint in my living room sitting beside my kid’s toy arrangements. It is funny and challenging at the same time. It is my dream to own a studio plus workspace, with ample amount of natural light, a good storage space for materials, a desk, an easel, and essential gadgets like DSLR camera, scanner, printer.

Now, I am working on my third book, an A3 sized Winsor & Newton watercolour book. From the first painting in this book, I was elevated with the relaxing strokes I painted on it. I have bought three shades of Winsor & Newton professional watercolour tubes. The paper felt very beautiful for the washes and it dries out late so it helps to do wet on wet technique easily. Also, the texture is amazing to see the pigment granulation. Every painting I paint is a subject of profound happiness.

The credit goes to Glasgow and its environment, for being purveyors of eternal beauty of its buildings. I got inspired seeing this and my real talent started to transpire. I wish I had known my passion for paintings much earlier. Being a homemaker, I face many obstacles and get involved in many time consuming chores which keeps me from my painting, but I manage to find the time to engage in my fancy for watercolours. I give myself more challenges to overcome the anxiety of painting complex subjects. Believe me it works the best!

I am someone who prefers looking for art materials rather than jewellery, accessories and clothing. People think I should invest in gold, which can be useful in the future. Either way they’re right. But each piece I create is more precious than gold for me. I may not earn today. But it will be respected even after my life! Gold can be melted and turned into another piece. My paintings will be engraved in many hearts and remain forever as a beautiful memory. Thank you for reading and I wish you all the best for your artistic journey!

Vasundhara Instagram

GUEST ARTIST: "My Profound Love For Watercolour" by Vasundhara - #doodlewash #WorldWatercolorGroup #watercolour #watercolor Hello! I am Vasundhara. I am born and was brought up in Satara, Maharashtra State, India. A beautiful scenic town situated amidst seven hills, Satara is a five picturesque hour drive from Mumbai.

#watercolour painting #WorldWatercolorGroup #artist #doodlewash #drawing #featured #India #inspiration #painting #plein air #sketching #travel #UK #watercolor #watercolor painting #watercolour

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