#i feel more able to Squiggle and Scrawl

[little-eye-guy]

4 and 14!!

4) favorite thing to draw

i really like drawing and shading hair.. the process of figuring it out is fun, like it's a puzzle :-)

i'm also partial to hands but sometimes cleaning em up can be troublesome haha

14) digital or traditional

gotta say digital since that's what i do 90% of the time nowadays but i do miss my traditional art days a lil bit..... i only ever draw traditionally with a pencil but there's something very particular about it that doesn't get matched by digital. like the convenience and wealth of tools available digitally has been a huge help but it's not the same as pencil to paper yknow?

[ishouldgetatumbler]

Kissed an cast into the sea

Fandom: HunterxHunter

Pairing: Mito Freecs/Illumi Zoldyck (Miumi)

Warnings: Alcohol, Illumi’s brain

Word count: 5343

AO3

1

      A man was sitting at her kitchen table. He was tall, even sitting he was nearly as tall as Mito. He was watching her with the palm of one hand resting on the back of his other. His hair was long and black; it seemed expensively cared for. His clothes were clashing, and poofy, but his face was all business. Mito wanted to curl up in fear of his big dead eyes.

      Right. Okay.

    She was standing in the doorway of her home, holding a fish by the severed fishing line. Her hair was tied back and her dress was sky blue with clouds drawn from spilled bleach and white paint. It was darker blue at the knees and below, where the marsh water soaked it through. Her rubber boots squelched on the tiles of her kitchen, mud caked wellington boots oozing onto the floor.

    Right. Okay.

    She set down her catch on the cutting board before stepping on the toe of her rubber boot and working herself free of it. The next shoe she stood on one foot to pull off with her hands. She set the both of them in a tin caked with sand and dry and turned to the person sitting at her table. 

    He was still there, eyes on her curiously as she stood in soaked wooly socks. The fact he was still there made the fear worse.

    Right. Okay.

    "Ging isn't here right now."

    The man cocked his head to one side, curiously.

    "You're not the first person to try this. I don't know where Ging is and I don't know how to find him."

    She'd said that to everyone who had come through looking for Ging. It was the truth, but she always imagined she could find Ging if she really wanted to.

    "Gon Freecs? Do you know where he is?"

    That was new. Gon really did take after his father.

    "No."

    The stranger looked at her reproachfully. He wasn't the first to believe breaking into her house would scare her. They'd come and gone, polite euphemisms for threats and poorly concealed weapons. She didn’t see any weapons, but the man was too calm to be threatening her without one.

    "He broke my arm." He added after a moment, still reproachful.

    She gave a tight smile with no humor or joy.

    "I'm sorry to hear that."

    The stranger continued to look reproachfully at her.

    "He kidnapped my brother as well. Boys really should not be taken from home at such a formative age."

    "Kidnapping? That doesn't sound like Gon."

    "I'm very certain he did. Killua Zoldyck?"

    Things clicked into place. She tried to remember his name, scrawled on loose leaf paper three times folded. Gon's handwriting was nearly illegible when he was excited. That name was in one of the three paragraphs reduced to squiggles as he talked about Killua.

    "Illumi is it?"

    He raised both his hands from the table, putting them up as if to say 'you caught me.'

    "Hi."

2

    He watched her as she gathered laundry for the drying lines, swept out the mud she'd tracked in and washed her hands again to begin preparing the fish. She hesitated for a moment before grabbing her knife. Good, she understood the situation.

    She scraped the scales from the fish with the same intense focus Gon had broken his arm. So it was hereditary. She laid the fish on its side, deboning it and gutting it with a few sharp moves. She glanced at the fish as she set it aside, blindly reaching for another. Her hand found an empty countertop, and she turned to Illumi.

    "Could you go to the market and buy another salmon?"

    Illumi cocked his head to one side. She didn't seem unnerved. "Why?"

    "Because I have two people to feed tonight." She grabbed her apron, using it to wipe at the bits of fish on her hands.

    She’d moved on very quickly. She knew he was dangerous, she knew he was after her son by extension, but she didn’t know why. It was probably in her best interest to stay polite, in case he was there to help. But she knew about him, she knew his name. How much did she know? She was offering him dinner, so it couldn't be much.

    He could kill her and puppet her, but maintaining that concentration would be harder than just waiting for his brother to return. Maybe a few needles, to make her more obedient. The Zoldycks were made to have power in any case. 

    He tutted his tongue as it occurred to him Killua would notice if he ever came back, and that attention to detail was why he'd tried to cut his prodigy brother out of the mix in the first place. Everything would be so much more… cooperative when he'd stuck a few needles in Killua's brain. He was twirling a needle now, spinning it end over end between his fingers. 

    Killua would be the head of the family, of course. Tradition had to be upheld, and it was easier to deliver bad news through someone else's lips. And maybe, for some mysterious reason, Killua decided never to marry or officially sire that duty would just have to fall to the eldest relative. And after having a son who could be heir, Illumi could-

     Illumi noticed he was walking back up the hill, holding a bag in his other hand. He stopped, instinct stopping the needle he was holding in the throwing position. How had she done that? He stared at the ground, at the foot worn path back up the hillside and he waited for the feeling of nen to crawl over him.

    Instead, he remembered what happened; his memories creeping out from hidden places like they were ashamed. He was embarrassed to see them.

    She had just… asked him to go shopping again. He replayed it in his head over and over, trying to piece it together. He was distracted, thinking about the future, and she'd said, very firmly, "You're just going to sit there and think, go out to the store already!" He’d idly translated this, before saying "Guáng  jiē", repeating the verb to indicate he'd do as he was told.

    He'd only ever spoken Chinese with his mother and grandfather, and both of them spoke like that to him. Was that all it had taken?

    Illumi started walking again; his steps short and angry. No, that was quite impossible. He'd worked very hard to remove such needless extremities from the brutal, exact machinery of assassination. Emotional blindspots were a luxury he couldn’t afford. The six dozen needles he kept lodged in various parts of his body were supposed to help with that.

    He stopped, before digging his heel into the dirt with force enough to fold sheet metal. He was pouting, he knew he was pouting and he was basically stomping and whining, but it was a Command. A command he had listened to. He never wanted that to happen again, that's why he did any of this. Power is just the ability to say No.

      Mito was halfway down the glass before she caught herself. She was thinking about the boys again, about Gon and Killua. Apparently her hands had grabbed the bottle and a pair of glasses from the cupboard. Scotch. She licked her lips, trying to chase it’s cruel taste away. The scotch laid plans on it’s own; oiling the inside of her skull to send her brain skidding across it.

    They were probably in the forest somewhere, having an adventure. Chasing rumors and stipulation through the wild places. She scoffed at her own fantasy: it would be nice if the world worked like that, but it didn't. There were people out there, intelligent motivated people, who only wanted to hurt people. As she thought this to herself, she saw Illumi crest the top of the hill, gaunt form holding a gently swaying bag. He might kill her.

    She took another drink and her eyes watered; at the taste, at the smell, but mostly at the fact she hadn't been strong enough to dump out the glass. 

    She could still see his silhouette from the road. He was tall, must have been more than six feet. His hands, fingers long thin and agile, sprang into her mind. It was easy to imagine them slipping gently around her neck. She gripped the front of her dress and tried to make that a scary image.

3

    She was sitting at the table: brown skin and freckles, soft red hair cut short and strange. He gestured with the bag. She smiled at him.

    "Thank you."

    He made a noncommittal noise and nodded his head.

    She stood, before walking closer, but he cut her off, stepping smartly to the counter's edge and placing the bag down on it, before looking at her.

    "Yú."

    Mito nodded, and took one or two slow, lumbering steps to the counter. He couldn't be bothered to count for once, he was busy watching her face.

    You were supposed to be able to learn alot from watching someone's face, but Illumi had never quite got the trick of it. He could tell you what a face was like, if he liked looking at it and what it was doing, but had no idea what it was supposed to mean.

He could see the redness of her cheeks. The glassy, watery look in her eyes. Her eyelids were puffy as well, agitated and swollen. She took a short glance at him, before turning back to her fish and cutting board. 

A moment later she said, "If you're just going to stand there gawking, go and close the door."

    Illumi was halfway turned around when he caught himself. There it was again: that emotional blind spot. He turned back to her.

    "You keep doing that. Do you mean to?"

    Mito’s knife dug in at the base of the fish's spine, and froze there. Her eyes went wide looking at it. Fear was an expression he knew, but it was a volatile thing: it melted into other expressions and emotions so quickly it was useless to identify.

    "No." She said, after a pregnant pause.

    Illumi considered this, rolling it around in his mind, this way and that.

    "You're lying," he concluded.

4

    Fear pounded at the back of Mito's mind. She would have a headache from it later, if the scotch hadn't already taken care of that. He was looking at her like a child inspecting an ant. She wanted to be angry about this, but she was just scared. He could kill her.

    She mustered the will to look him in the eyes. They were dark brown,  she'd mistaken them for black from a distance. His nose was small and pointed. His mouth pressed into a thin, expressionless line. She looked away, back to the fish before deboning it.

    He was tapping his finger on the counter. His body was contorted, bent at nearly every joint to put his face next to hers. His hair drooled down onto the cooled burners, and his eyes bore a hole in the side of her face.

    She realized he was offended, and was waiting for her to apologize. She, an ant to his eyes, had told him to do something, and he'd done it. This was an affront to his power and oh, he's a boy. Roughly her age too, by the look of him. Boys never liked to be bossed around by a girl their own age; they were sensitive about that sort of thing.

    Her mother and father had met in a similar way, albeit less veiled threats and mysterious intentions. She had walked into the wrong house, and was halfway through making herself a snack before she noticed. From her father’s perspective, a beautiful woman had wandered in and started eating his food. 

It was like that, the scotch told her, before she tamped the thought down. The giddy feeling still bubbled up out from under her heel and let out of her in a soft teary giggle.

    "What's funny?" He asked finally.

    His tone was calm, speaking like the sound of an iced over lake cracking. Mito's brain whirred, and her hands gutted the fish on instinct. 

    "I was just thinking this almost feels like a date."

    She shouldn’t have said it. She should have kept it to herself, but the sickening taste of booze made her tongue eager to move.

    Illumi took a step back from her.

    Oh. Oh. Why had he never thought of that? He had never considered she could be useful. He was daydreaming instead of planning. After he'd puppeted Killua, after his father retired as head and Killua succeeded him, Illumi would need to sire the next heir. 

    She had clearly raised a capable son. She would, as was tradition, kill his mother and take her role as matriarch and teacher. He could sculpt the next generation through her. It would be so eloquent. The same person he used to establish his power would solidify it.

    Illumi sat at the table, brushing away imaginary dust.

    "I suppose it is." He said finally.

5

    They had never said a word.

    Illumi had sat across from her, taking seconds and thirds without a moment of eye contact or conversation. He seemed to be judging her by the food, taking a moment or two sometimes to slowly chew, or try a sauce in isolation. He didn’t speak, perhaps waiting for her to crack. She could feel him watching her when she looked away. It was like the feeling of a spider crawling up your back.

    Mito hadn’t spoken either, but she had no idea what to say. Her drunken suggestion had been taken all too seriously, and she really didn’t know what to do now that she had been taken up on it. What was she supposed to say? "Why do you want to kill my son?" The answer was obvious: Gon had stepped in Illumi's plans, sprinting down the muddy road towards Ging. He must have done it a hundred times on his journey.

    And what about Illumi? What did he want in any case? Why sit down to dinner? She had decided not to ask based on a parable Abe had once told her, about asking a tightrope walker how he kept his balance. If you asked the wrong question, someone could die.

    She dabbed at her mouth, cleaning the sauce and fat from the edges of her lip. Illumi looked up, fork laden with breaded fish and seared vegetables.

    "Can I help you?"

    It wasn't a rude thing to ask, and she was genuinely interested in the answer. He was on his third plate in any case, When someone's belly was full was the best time to ask probing questions.

    Illumi set his fork down.

    "Do you live alone here?"

    Mito stood sharply up, turning to wash her plate. His hand was around her wrist. Her brain sloshed angrily around in her head as she jerked to stop, mashing into one side and the other. The back of her eyes hurt too, stinging and aching in turns. She tugged against his gripping fingers, the joints in her arm threatening to dislocate as she pulled

    "You're very strong." He commented.

    She looked back at him.

    "Yes, I am. Those who live on Whale Island are hardy."

    She tried to spin the inflection so that it sounded like they were a community. The truth was that she was so strong because she worked the pole barges and row boats by herself, refusing to split her wages with anyone. They'd needed that money once; doctors were expensive on Whale Island. Now that Abe was gone, she did it for the principle of the thing. 

    "You're angry." He said, slightly accusing.

    "Never touch a woman without permission, you're liable to lose a hand."

    He looked at her, and then cracked into a smile. She tried to not to be fascinated by that smile.

    "You know I live alone," she finally answered.

    Illumi nodded, saying "yes, I suppose I did. I was waiting for you to lie to me."

    The anger and fear were mixing with something in her guts, probably the alcohol, and the mixture made her stomach froth with undigested butterflies. 

    “I don’t lie.”  she said, lying.

    “Then perhaps you’ll tell me the truth this time. Where is Gon Freecs?”

    He wasn’t squeezing her arm, just holding his hand in an implacable shape around it; only touching her skin when she pulled against him. She tried to think, but found her mind stumbling back and forth over the warm pressure of his hand around her wrist as she pulled. She was still drunk, the processes of her mind mummified by alcohol.

    “Do you really expect me to sell out my child?”

    Illumi hummed.

    “I hoped you would.”

    Mito snorted, “You don’t know me very well.”

    Illumi nodded, and said “I suppose I don’t, but I think you could be useful.”

    He added, after a moment, “I could make you tell me.”

    For the first time, he tightened his grip slightly around her wrist. It wasn’t a painful grip, like sailors would use, it was nearly promissory; implying he could squeeze much, much harder if he had to.

    She could struggle, but part of her suspected he would tear her arm from the socket and that would begin the pain. He’d reacted well to an offer of dinner, perhaps he would be willing to sit through more. Or he would get tired of the charade and break her arm. The heavy meal was sobering her quickly, and aggressively apparently. She licked her lips, and tried to pitch the tone right.

    “Drink with me.”

    Illumi browsed over her liquor cabinet, and she busied herself with the dishes. Her pulse jumped when she suggested it, which meant she may have poisoned them. At the same time, he had no idea what he was looking for, and it’s not as though poison would do much. There were bottles of various heights all crammed into the cabinet, and at least a dozen of them were identical and unlabelled: frosted glass and rounded edges. He tapped a finger on his chin, and turned to look at her by the sink.

    She was humming to herself. It was sad, and the tone tilted and swayed like a ship in the sea. He could feel his emotions stir inside their cage. One of the pins in his chest twinged, regulating his heartbeat. He looked back to the cabinet, before pulling out one of the identical bottles from the middle of the pack. He set it on the table as she wiped her hands on her apron.

    "You can pick one of the nicer boozes." She said lifting his bottle to  inspect it.

    Illumi cocked his head to one side.

    "Isn't it what you use the most of? I imagine you'd be less likely to poison those. Not that poison would do much mind you."

    She scoffed, and delicately bit the cork and pulled it loose with her teeth.

    "Boaster."

    She made a good point. Why had he told her that? It served no practical use to mention, it was better to wait for the taste of poison. His father had once mentioned that he believed everyone could be seduced by power. This probably wasn't the seduction he meant, but Illumi supposed it would work. He could show his power to her, informing her the differences of their abilities.

    Gently, he slid his fingers between hers, around the bottle. She turned slowly to face him, her other hand frozen while rooting through a cabinet for glasses. He took the bottle, pressing the mouth of it to his lips and drinking.

    The taste was unpleasant.

    He set the bottle on the table without looking at it. Her eyes were hazel, not the pure brown of her son. They were looking at him the way Hisoka looked at everyone, though perhaps not exactly the same. She wasn't like anyone else.  After having this thought, Illumi realized two things. 

    One, his mother should have trained their tolerances for poison more broadly. She had insufficiently trained them for what she called "low poisons," or poisons people generally used for entertainment. This would be rectified when Mito was matriarch.

    Two, whatever they were drinking was, at least legally speaking, unfit for human consumption. It had more in common with disinfectant alcohol than anything most humans could safely drink. Perhaps Gon's remarkable tolerance was genetic.

     She looked him in the eyes as she turned her head slightly away from him, lifting the bottle and pressing it to her lips. She drank silently and greedily, and when she turned back to him, her mouth smelled of pungent moonshine. He wanted to kiss it. Instead, he took the bottle back from her, feeling the skin of her hands a much as he could before she relaxed the neck into his grip, and took his own drink. 

    Chasing the imagined taste of her lips, he drained the bottle through his Adam's apple, feeling it burn in the backs of his eyes and the weight of his stomach. He hadn’t been truly poisoned in such a long time, the feeling was nearly pleasant. He sat at the table, deliberately and carefully setting down the bottle with the care of someone who doesn’t trust his fingers. He adjusted his ass, having apparently missed the chair the first time. He looked up at Mito expectantly.

    She grabbed another bottle, and a pair of glasses, before sitting across him, apparently less drunk. She poured each of them a generous glass of ethanol flavored like sulfur. She drank first, taking a long shallow drink of the stuff. He matched her pace, drinking less steadily and more deeply. He could feel the tight pressed spring of his instincts and reaction time starting to loosen. It made him feel vulnerable, insecure. 

She was pouring him another glass, hardly looking at him. He furrowed his brows looking at her, trying to read her face.

    “What are you thinking about?”

    The clear, reeking liquid stopped in it’s journey to his glass, the bottle turned at an angle to stop it. She chuckled slightly.

    “Gon and Killua,” she said.

    Another needle jammed into the base of Illumi’s throat twinged, stopping a hiccup before it formed.

    “He would be safer at home,” he said.

    Mito chuckled.

    “I don’t think Killua would see it that way.”

    Illumi shook his head, before taking another few swallows of the stuff. It hurt, and the needle he’d used to stop hiccups would twitch every few seconds, hurting him to inform he was drunk. The tears dried behind his eyes made it clear they wanted out.

    “ I’m not talking about Killua. Gon. The boy. Things would be easier for me too if he was home.”

    He finally drained the glass again, and as he set it down Mito refilled it, expression blank, staring off at his chest.

    “We want the same things,” he ventured finally.

    She chuckled. It sounded like windchimes 

    “Do we?”

    He nodded, ignoring the pain of bouncing his head.

    “Safety for the people we love. A future full of choice. Power.”

    She chuckled again. It sounded like rain tapping on the roof.

    “You’re a very sad man Mr. Zoldyck.”

    Illumi shook his head, making himself briefly dizzy.

    “Nuh-uh.”

    “Drink up.” she said, in that ordering tone of hers.

    Illumi pressed the rim of the glass to his mouth, and paused.

    “You’re poisoning me.” he said after a moment.

    Mito hummed a questioning sound.

    “You’re poisoning me.” he repeated.

    “No,” she mused, “you’re poisoning yourself.”

     He surged to his feet, but drunk he was too slow. Glass shattered and her hands were wrapped around his throat. She had to stand on tip toes to reach him. He could feel the cool edges of her fingernails scrape the skin. She’d overpowered him. A needle he’d stuck into his hip twinged, keeping his cock flaccid. They froze for a moment. 

    “What now?” he asked, airways unrestricted.

    Mito looked him in the eyes, before finally answering, “you’re drunk.” 

    Illumi nodded limply.

    She pushed and he keeled backwards, losing balance like he’d never had it to start. His view of the world sloshed and slid, like his eyes were made of water.

    Why had he played this game? He would have never challenged father, or Killua, or even Gon to it’s like. Perhaps his mother. Perhaps any other woman. Did the Zoldycks have blindspots just the same as everyone else? That was a worrying thought.

    Fortunately, his head impacted the floor a moment or two after he’d had it.

6

    Mito tried to find her balance, her equilibrium apparently as drunk as she was. It swayed and tottered as her feet danced the sailor’s two step, then five step, then steadied her. She’d had to put her full strength and weight into shoving him over. His skull had dented the flooring. She wound one leg back and swiftly kicked him between the legs.

    He didn’t make a noise, just rocked slightly in place. Then he was good and unconscious. She waddled drunkenly to his other end and tried to weave her arms under his armpits. It took a few tries, between drunken guesstimation and catching, vinyl fabric of his clothes. Once she had a grip, she crouched low and heaved. His body dragged and Mito took it with her as she took a few clumsy steps back.

    His ass caught on the doorframe. She hadn’t actually thought this out past this. What was she going to do with him? Drag him out to a sandbar and leave him to drown at high tide? Drop him face first into a puddle? Somehow it all felt cruel. He hadn’t hurt her, and the fact he would if he could was hard to hold against him, seeing him laid out. In any case, he had to get out of her house.

    She relaxed, letting his head hit the porch wood. She stretched out her back, wishing she hadn’t been so damn hard on her body when she was younger. She looked down at him. His shirt had hiked up to reveal skin across his stomach, equal parts toned and scarred. He clearly hadn’t had a terrific childhood either. He could just be a victim of circumstance.

    She stepped carefully around his sprawled arm, grabbing a tacky high heel shoe with each hand before stepping back. She heard his head impact the wall as she tried to rotate him through the door, watching his body curl to fit. With a last, less-than-safe heave, she pulled him though. He would likely be in a lot of pain tomorrow anyway. Would a hangover and mountain of bruises not suffice?

    She squatted low again, and a little sobered by the work, she tried to lift him. Carrying it like Abe’s bags of sweet trout, she laid him across her shoulders. He was dangerous, that much she could be certain. She could write a note, explaining he would be killed next time she saw him. But he was well mannered, human even, under the odd clothes and blank expression. She started waddling to the port. She wanted him off her island at the least.

    She found a secluded jetty, a few rowboats with sailor’s most complicated knots tying them to the docks. She picked hers, farthest inland and threw, as best she could, 200 pounds of murderer into it. He landed feet first, the boat keeling and splashing as his full weight hit the bow. In a moment of surprise, she found her hands reaching for her apron tie, ready to strip the excess fabric and dive in to save him. The boat steadied. 

She stepped in, carefully to avoid stepping on him. She let out a sigh. What now? She could row him to the Gzana, drop him at one of the hotels near the port. She hadn’t brought her coins, and she couldn’t risk him coming too while they were halfway there. She sighed, looking back at him.

He was pretty, and that might be the hardest part about killing him. It was a shallow reason to be sure, but she couldn't shake the feeling it would be wrong. The world would be a better place, but it wouldn't be the right place. She traced her hand along the line of his jaw, feeling the steady pump of blood. She hadn't killed people before, and it was supposed to change you to do so.

He was very pretty, lips softly parted and long black hair splayed out like an angel's halo. It mingled with the water, cast across the boat like the shadows of night. His eyes, wide and disconcerting, were closed.

She leaned down, careful to keep balance in the small row boat, and kissed him. Then she clambered back onto the pier, taking a sharp breath to bring down her blush.

One hand on the dock’s pillar for support, she got down on her knees to unmoor the boat, and, as an afterthought, snatched one of the oars, before gently shoving the boat out to sea with a bare foot

The tide around Whale Island is different than it is around most land masses; the sea seems to ignore it, like a sandbar or a sea stack. On clear night at low water, it's as good as riptide for getting out to sea. Mito watched as the horizon, blurred by fading moonlight, swallowed her small boat.

7

    Illumi awoke to the scream of seagulls and the piercing pain of his headache. There were other aches and pains, spread out like paint smears across his body. Without open his eyes, fearing he would be blind with pain and sunlight, he stuffed his hand in his pocket and withdrew a needle, sticking it carefully between the ridges of his spine. The pain stopped, and he dared to open his eyes.

    A sky blue dress with clouds of bleach and flour.

The needle in his spine was not something he liked to use, he was liable to forget it was there, and pain was useful for keeping track of damage, but worst of all it stopped his other needles from hurting. The only way he knew his heart rate picked up was the feeling of it, hammering in his chest. He sat up.

The ocean surrounded him, featureless. He might have imagined it was heaven or hell if not for the smell; too imperfect to be either. He withdrew his phone from one pocket, turning it on to ascertain his location.

He’d missed messages from his father. That would be trouble, but it could wait. He flipped on the GPS, and tried not to sigh. He was nowhere near anything, floating in the international waters between Azia and Yorbia. He looked around, trying to take stock of what he had. One oar, an empty tackle box, and his phone.

Only one oar. Quaint. It left him unable to row his boat, only to meander in circles. No doubt it was a popular way for amateurs to kill, they generally don't enjoy the crunchy parts of the work.

For a moment, he considered calling his family for help, but he knew better than that. He took a few minutes to braid his hair, holding the phone in his teeth, before stripping and folding his clothes in the boat. For a moment he took the phone in his hand, ensuring he understood the direction he had to go, before smashing against the floor of the boat. It would never survive the journey.

He tried not to think about her, and found it vexingly difficult. She could have killed him. She should have, by all rights. He was a danger to everything she held dear. He cracked his neck, then his shoulders, then his back.

She should have killed him. Why hadn’t she?

He dived.

[diamond-seventeen]

Mini Me [S.Coups]

a/n: i haven’t wrote anything in an entire year and i found this request difficult for some reason but i enjoyed getting back into it and hope to create more n better scenarios in the future... i hope u like it anyways

words: 1.1k genre: fluff, dad!au

summary: seungcheol looks after his two young children by himself for the day while his s/o is away

When you had married Seungcheol, he had always been eager to start growing your family. He believed that the children that you raised together would be the most perfect little lives he had laid eyes on – not only would he make sure to teach them to be kind and patient, but also well-behaved.

However, he eventually came to realise that his daydreams as a newly-wed husband were mere fantasies and being actual parents was a lot harder than raising the imaginary child in his head. That is why, when you had to go on a trip to see a family member for the day, Seungcheol felt slightly apprehensive about his first full day looking after your two-year-old son, and ten-month-old daughter by himself. While they were generally polite and sweet children, seeming like angels to the naked eye, when set loose within their own territory of your family home, it seemed they shifted into more that of devils.

After you’d left in the morning, instructing him that you’d left all the food they’d need for the day in the fridge, Seungcheol had urged you to not worry about anything and enjoy your day with your family. Despite his efforts to take the pressure off of you for once, he was still a bit worried – when the children became rowdy, it was undeniable that it was you who could calm them down in a heartbeat. Your husband had always admired this side of you; while he believed he was good at controlling situations before it got out of hand, being a leader of a large relatively group of boys when at work, your calm and gentle approach with your children always warmed his heart and seeing your relationships with them almost made him fall in love with you all over again.

Pushing your daughter in a swing at the park, he watched as your son ran around the small enclosed area, testing out each piece of playground equipment that came into his eyeline. He slid down the slide, squealing with joy as he did so which caused a chuckle to erupt from Seungcheol’s throat. His thoughts were filled with thoughts of how this adorable little boy was half his – surely most of the genes had come from you, to be growing up and forming into such a beautiful person. “Daddy!” he called, pulling your husband from his thoughts and back to the real world. “Let’s go buy chocolate! We’re usually not allowed to have it except on weekends when you are doing your job!” His demeanour was so excited, obviously looking to get up to some mischief while you weren’t around for a day.

Seungcheol shook his head at the young boy, a sorry smile on his face. “Sorry, buddy,” he begun. “I’ve been told to only feed you the yummy, healthy food that’s in the fridge. That way you’ll grow healthy and strong!” His son’s face faltered at the response, followed by pleading to which your daughter also passionately joined in with after sensing the excitement in the atmosphere.

Of course, the puppy-eyes of his two children won over Seungcheol and it wasn’t until he returned home with the two that he realised the true extent of what other parents called a ‘sugar rush’. While he knew youngsters became hyper on the stuff, he truly believed his own could win a world record for the lowest tolerance in the country. While he had tried to settle his son with a colouring book, and his daughter with her favourite toys, it proved rather difficult to prevent them from bouncing off the walls. While under normal circumstances, it would be one of the purest sights to see your eldest son teaching his younger sister how to colour, there was nothing more scary than a ten-month-old with a sugar high wielding a colourful marker – Seungcheol didn’t escape the battle unscathed, a vibrant squiggle on his left cheek being his wound. “Okay, okay!” he exclaimed, replacing the caps on the lethal weapons. “How about we play another game… Let’s put all the toys in the box, and books on the shelf to make mummy really happy when she comes home!”

It never failed to amaze him how enlivened children became about the smallest task – the pair did their best to neatly pack away their belongings, laughing joyously as they did so. While your daughter didn’t seem to be able to input as much, considering she could only crawl, Seungcheol praised them both profusely.

After giving them their dinner, bathing the children of their ink-covered bodies, and brushing their teeth, he brought them to the bedroom. By this point, they were becoming drowsy as the effects of an exciting day with their dad were wearing off, and physical exhaustion was finally sensed.

-

When you walked back into the house at 8pm, you were surprised to find that Seungcheol was not waiting for you in the living room or kitchen. Searching each room of the house, you finally walked into your son’s room to find Seungcheol, your son and your daughter fast asleep together in a little bunch. Seungcheol was seated on the floor, head resting on the bed as he slept soundly with a colourful picture book grasped between his fingers. The little boy and girl were laid on the bed comfortably, both of them hugging their dad, whether it be his leg or his shoulder. The sight before you made you feel as though your heart would burst; you were sure that Seungcheol was the most amazing dad in this world.

After admiring the sweet scene for a few minutes, you walked over to your family and shook Seungcheol’s shoulder. “Babe, I’m home,” you announced, to which you were eventually greeted by the sleepy eyes of your husband.

“I fell asleep,” he said, stating the obvious which made you laugh. You stood up and reached out your hand to him, signalling him to get up. After prying the small hands of the children from his body carefully as not to wake them up, he took your hand gladly. “Sorry, they should already be tucked into bed properly by now,” he frowned.

You shook your head, telling him that it was okay before carefully picking up your daughter, trying not to wake her up. “It looks like you had fun together. They’re completely worn out, and so are you.” You giggled as you took in the tired look on his face, plus the felt tip marker which was scrawled on his cheek. “You have a little something there,” you pointed out, pinching his cheek.

He lifted his hand to his face in embarrassment, covering the colourful doodle. “Giving them chocolate probably made the job a lot harder than it had to be,” he admitted, but smiled radiantly nonetheless, “But I loved being able to spend a whole day with them. We made such beautiful kids, huh?”

You beamed back at him, nodding. They were bound to beautiful inside and out, considering they were raised by a man like you, you thought to yourself.

[itsmyusualphannie]

you had me at hydrangea

Chapter 6/6 - last bud not least

“I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.” ― Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels

a phan flower shop/video editor au

(read on ao3) - start from the beginning!

previous chapter

~~

Dan kind of hated everything right now. He hated the smudged, scribbled papers on the floor in front of him, he hated the ugly dead bouquet by the trash bin that seemed to be reflecting his own misery back at him, and he hated the goddamn floor for being so cold under his ass.

He angrily scrawled a few music notes down onto the sheet paper before him and stared down at them, then immediately scratched over it. How could he think that that would sound good? He wanted to crumple this paper and throw it away, but he only had two weeks left to finish and then practice his entire piece, so he couldn’t afford to waste any more hated papers.

The unfinished music notes cheerfully mocked him. Dan scowled down at them, running the arrangement briefly through his mind before deciding that it all sounded terrible. This wouldn’t work. This was horrible. He hated it even more.

“Dan!” Louise called from the front room. “How’s it going back there?”

It was going fucking spectacularly, that’s how it was going. He told her as such.

“Oh, Dan,” Louise said. She came through the door, trailing petals with every step. Her hands were piled with limp flowers. She smiled fondly down at him, dropping the assortment onto the floor beside the other dead bouquet. “You know, I have a perfectly good chair that you could be sitting in to work on that.”

Dan spared it a scornful glance. It was ugly and stout, so close to the ground that he’d have to sprawl his legs out in front of him to even sit on it. The small table beside it wasn’t much better. The rickety stool behind the counter in the front room was dangerous, but it was much better than this alternative. “No thanks,” he said. “I like the floor.” He did not. He would like it better if it was comfortable enough to lie down on face-first.

Louise looked like she was considering sitting beside him on the floor and commiserating with him, but ultimately she must have decided that she had too much work to do. “Well. Take your time, I’m just cleaning now that we’ve gotten that big order ready to go.”

Fortunately, the big order was piled and arranged in the front room, not crowded into this already-small back room. Dan had practically been choking on pollen by the time he and Louise had finished preparing them. He didn’t understand how Louise could still be cheerfully cleaning after their hours of work.

His phone dinged with an alert. Dan spared it a glance just to see that it was a message from his talent manager. She probably wanted to know how his piece was coming along. He definitely wouldn’t be answering that right now. He caught a glimpse of the time on his phone and glanced up at Louise, who was still hovering beside him. “Are you going to close up the shop? It’s almost two.” They always closed early on Saturdays so Louise could spend more time with her kids and so Dan could go back to his flat and be pathetically alone in peace.

She glanced at her watch. “Oh,” she said. She suddenly looked so acutely disappointed upon seeing the time that Dan was thrown off-balance. “Hmm. I might stay open for a little longer. Who knows who might pop in?”

“Are you expecting anyone besides the pick-up truck for the big order?”

Louise’s eyes casually darted away from him and Dan was instantly suspicious. “Er, no,” she said, unconvincingly. “I mean…no.” She whirled, ruffled skirt bouncing around her, and vanished into the front room.

“Yeah, right,” he called after her. Maybe she was going to have the babysitter bring her daughters by the shop. Dan hadn’t seen them in a few weeks and, though he wouldn’t ever admit it to Louise, he missed their tiny faces and adorable smiles. They always lit up when he performed his occasional ritual of tying a flower stem into a knot and wrapping it around their fingers like a giant, petaled ring.

“It’s not the girls!” Louise told him, her voice echoing into the room. Apparently, she was now a mind-reader.

Dan didn’t want to think about anyone else coming into the shop. Especially Phil. He certainly didn’t want Phil to come into the shop today. Not with Dan’s fresh memory of that hurt look on Phil’s expressive, open face that Dan had inflicted upon him yesterday.

Yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that had all been...bad days. Dan still didn’t feel completely recovered from them. He didn’t think he’d ever be completely recovered from any of his bad days.

“Fuck bad days,” Dan muttered to himself. He regarded an open space between sprawled, cascading notes on a piece of paper and he scribbled down what he’d just said. He felt pleased upon looking at it. That was how he felt. That was what he wanted this piece to be about. “Fuck bad days,” he said again, more vehement this time. The words echoed in the small room. He squinted as a few notes played cautiously in his mind and he began reluctantly writing squiggles that vaguely resembled notes across the paper. The door to the shop whooshed open and Dan could hear Louise greeting someone, but he ignored it.

The notes stubbornly churned in Dan’s mind, but they began to take shape as he repeated “Fuck bad days,” under his breath. A few fell into place at a time and he scrawled them down, ignoring bars and repetitions to get down the basics of what he was imagining himself playing. It was almost like he’d crossed some sort of hurdle and the notes began cascading from his fingers to dance across the lines of the paper.

His fingers ached after only a few minutes, but he pressed on urgently, desperate not to lose this streak. The half-imagined, distant ideas that he had been forming, yet unable to write down over the past few weeks, had pieced themselves together in his mind with shocking clarity. It wasn’t perfect, but it was more than he’d written without furious back-tracing in weeks or maybe months.

It was four long pages later when Dan finally sat back, hand almost numb, and eyes aching from his fear of closing them, as though he might’ve lost the notes if he'd looked away from the papers. An unfiltered outline of music lay spread before him, the pages crinkled and worn with his handling. It was raw and beautiful and he hated it, but he also loved it a little. It was a start, finally. It was so much more than he’d been doing. Nothing more pressed at him, no more urgent notes that begged to join the piece, so he let himself relax, sitting back and massaging at the reddened indentations the pencil had left in his fingers. He blinked, feeling like his eyelids were scraping against his eyes. Maybe he’d be able to actually sleep tonight.

Dan felt a belated rush of accomplishment. This was something and it was maybe even good. He unfolded his legs and hauled himself to his feet, grabbing the ugly little chair for balance. With a swipe of one hand, he gathered the suddenly-inspired pieces of paper and clutched them to his chest. His head spun as he stood up, either from the abrupt change in altitude or his growing excitement at the breakthrough. He needed to tell someone about this, and since it wouldn’t be his manager, who would likely just be exasperated that it’d even taken him this long, it would need to be Louise. She would certainly be excited about his progress.

It was only as Dan stepped through the open door to the front room that he realized he hadn’t heard Louise bustling around out here pretty much the entire time he’d been writing, and now he could see why. She was standing just inside the door to the shop, blonde curls cascading over one shoulder as she talked to Phil, who practically towered over her. Phil, facing the back of the shop, glanced over her head just as Dan caught sight of him, and his gaze landed on Dan.

“Oh god,” said Dan, without meaning to say it. He backpedalled hastily, almost tripping over the flowers on the floor by his feet. Louise and Phil vanished from sight as he ducked back around the corner. His breaths came short and fast. He was not prepared to deal with this right now.

Now that he was listening, he could hear them both talking. Something about cacti plants. Dan wanted to hide in this back room forever, but he also wanted to go out and somehow apologize to Phil for being an asshole yesterday. He also, kind of, wanted Phil to apologize to him for being so absolutely confusing on Sunday.

Dan heard his own name, then, and his attention snapped back to the conversation in the front room.

“ - Yeah!” Louise was saying. “He’s in the back, gimme a sec.” She apparently didn’t know that Phil had seen Dan walk out, catch sight of them, and then immediately flee back to safety. Her boots clopped against the floor as she walked toward the back room.

Dan allowed himself a few moments to steel himself, dropping the papers in his hands onto the table, then he let out a long breath and stepped back out into the room again. Louise almost collided with him.

“Oh! Dan, hey.” She was grinning up at him, a big, too-convincing smile. “Great timing! Phil wanted to say hi.”

“Hi,” Phil offered, lifting a hand in a timid wave. His eyes looked careful, like he was afraid of spooking a wild animal.

Louise pushed past Dan. “I’ve got to finish sorting these flowers!” she lied blatantly. There were no flowers that needed sorting, and Dan knew it, but he didn’t stop her. He stepped involuntarily toward the counter, meeting Phil’s gaze unflinchingly.

“Uh,” said Phil. He also took a few steps toward Dan, stopping in front of the counter and the slumping boxes of flowers that were waiting to be picked up. One hand was tucked awkwardly behind his back. “Hey, Dan.”

Dan felt his heart judder in his chest. He didn’t know whether to shake Phil by the shoulders and demand an explanation for his confusing actions over the past few weeks - no, months - or to just apologize for being rude to Phil yesterday. He didn’t know what to do, but he couldn’t help but notice the annoyingly perfect arch of Phil’s cheekbones and his unbelievably blue eyes that were even bluer behind his glasses. “Hey, Phil,” he said.

“I wanted to...” Phil stopped and glanced down at the Luigi bobblehead by the till, his eyebrows furrowing. He heaved a sigh and continued, “I, well, I wanted to say sorry for being so weird the other day. Well, I’m weird all the time. You’re probably used to it. I mean...ignore that.” He had looked back up at Dan, and the intensity of gaze, belying his soft tone, made something burn inside Dan. “I thought - never mind what I thought. I just wanted to apologize. And, if you might want to, I wanted to ask…”

“Wait,” Dan interrupted him. He blinked. He hadn’t expected the words to leap from his mouth, but they had. His gaze fell subconsciously to the loose shirt that Phil wore, hanging open over an undershirt.

Phil waited.

“It’s fine,” said Dan. “I mean, I’m sorry too. We were both weird. I was kind of an asshole yesterday. A little bit.”

The wrinkles around Phil’s eyes became even more wrinkly with his small smile. “A little bit, maybe. It wasn't completely undeserved.”

“Maybe,” Dan repeated. His feet moved without his permission, carrying him past the sad, warped stool, the wall full of flowers, the cracked and meticulous counter, and finally, the heaps of boxes piled by the counter. He stopped in front of Phil, barely a foot from him. He could hear the dramatized sounds of Louise crashing through the back room, her way of letting him know that she was giving him time and wasn’t listening in.

Phil had drawn back a little when Dan came toward him, but now he leaned forward into Dan’s space, the one arm still clumsily held behind his back. “I - ” he started, but Dan interrupted him again, not willing to let him spoil the moment with a panicked declaration of friendship.

“What do you want?” Dan asked him, rather bluntly.

Phil blinked, a slow sweep of his eyelashes. “What do you want?”

“That’s not what I asked.” Dan could feel something thudding dangerously in him as he reached up and tugged at the loose edges of Phil’s overshirt, drawing them closer together. He let his fingers linger purposefully, smoothing over the dips of the fabric. There was peril in what he said without saying it, his actions obvious and yet skirting the edge of meaning. If Phil didn’t understand what he meant, then Phil meant something else entirely. Maybe he really did just want to be friends. Maybe so. Dan wouldn’t bet on it.

Phil had gone still and quiet under Dan’s touch. His eyes were dark when Dan glanced back up at them. “Dan,” he said, and then nothing.

Dan waited for a few moments, his breath stilling in his lungs, and then he took a meaningful step backwards, giving Phil space. He wasn’t giving up, though. He remembered the music he had just been writing, the notes that had poured out of him, and the feeling of triumph after getting it all down. “I have a piano recital in a few weeks,” he said, the words tumbling from him, “and if you can, I’d like you to come.”

Dan hadn’t noticed how tense Phil’s shoulders had been until they relaxed suddenly. His whole body was somehow looser, relieved of strain. “You play the piano?” Phil asked, instead of answering the indirect question.

“Yeah,” said Dan. “I write a little, too. I’ll be playing one of my pieces. Do you think you can make it?”

It was no longer indirect. Something was soft around Phil’s eyes as he looked into Dan’s.

“As a date,” Dan clarified before Phil could answer.

“Yes,” Phil said, and it was almost instant, the word escaping from his lips with a suddenness that seemed to surprise him. “Yes, I’d - I’d love to go with you. Of course I do.”

“Of course,” Dan echoed. Something giddy was taking hold of him, burning bright inside of him. He couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at his lips. “As a date.”

“Definitely as a date.” Phil hesitated, the corners of his lips slowly lifting to match Dan’s grin. “I...I really like you, Dan. Like, a lot.”

“Is that so? I happen to like you, too. If you hadn’t noticed.”

“I might have noticed a little bit,” Phil admitted. “But I thought - never mind. I. Um. I got you something.”

Dan was surprised and he didn’t think to hide it. “You did?”

“Yeah, I…” Phil finally withdrew his hand from behind his back, his shoulders twisting with the effort. In his tightly clenched hand, he held a beautiful black lily with arching petals. “Louise told me that it’s your favourite.”

“Oh!” It was a pleasant feeling, this surprise. Dan reached out to let a finger stroke the softness of a petal. “It is my favourite.”

Phil let out a little huff of satisfaction, then lifted the flower and tucked it behind Dan’s ear. Dan could feel the coolness of the stem nudging against his ear and tangle into his hair. The base settled against his ear and the long petals tickled against his cheek. Phil’s face had melted into an open, pleased expression, his gaze warm. He didn’t pull his hand away immediately, however. Dan felt the brush of Phil’s thumb against his cheek and he leaned into the touch subconsciously, smiling helplessly, giddy with the sudden joy of everything.

“I love your dimples,” Phil said quietly, his thumb pressing into one. He leaned ever closer, swaying toward Dan.

Dan knew he did. He’d noticed the glances over the past few months toward his cheeks, and though he didn’t understand the obsession, he knew. He let Phil cave in the dimple, his thumb gentle against the curve of Dan’s cheek.

“Dan,” Phil said. The word was a hot breath against Dan’s lips, so close Dan could almost taste the vibration of the air. Phil’s voice sounded tortured with the effort of staying even that far away. “Can I kiss you?”

“What are you waiting for?” was Dan’s answer.

And then Phil’s lips were on his, and his hands were sliding into Dan’s hair, and Dan was surging up against him, and...it began.

~~

“I must have flowers, always, and always”

~ Claude Monet

[merigreenleaf]

Unexpected Inspiration Short Story: “Someday They’ll See”

( @elliot-orion encouraged me to write a fluffy story about two of the characters I’ve introduced recently in moodboards. Piquant’s board was this week and Daegal will be next. The two demanded a moodboard to go along with this story so you get that as a bonus. ;) This story takes place at the very start of Concordia’s history, when the small population was in the middle of a war and dealing with imps on the enemy side. Piquant’s trying his hardest to be on the side of the artists, but they’re making everything difficult. There’s a masterpost here of all the short stories from this series.)

—————————————

"This is ridiculous."

Daegal stood at the flat surface he used to create his glowing objects. The sight of him with his hand raised above a familiar crumpled paper made Piquant’s human stomach rumble, just as it did every time the sky grew dark. This time, though, instead of lowering his hand to the page, Daegal remained with it almost tauntingly distant. “Seriously, Peek. This is ridiculous.”

Non-imp people-- humans, they wanted to be called-- used that word to describe things that were funny. There was nothing funny about food! Or, as Daegal called it, "dinner." Presumably it meant the same thing.

When Daegal continued to keep his hand away, Piquant’s stomach made that awful noise again. Was there something wrong with the paper and it would no longer work? It was creased and torn, well-used because there wasn't much of it here in the stone nest. City. The illegible words scrawled over older, faded words hadn't mattered. Daegal couldn't see them and Piquant couldn't read them. They only needed the paper to hold the food, not be the food, so a few rips hadn’t been a problem before.

Oh. Oh. Daegal must have come to his senses. The next words out of his mouth were going to be "we need this weaving. You're fine with what you took yesterday." Or "the other day" or "last week." He'd heard too many variations too many times before Daegal caught one of the denials. His lovely voice turned loud and sharp when he informed the other humans that he'd supply Piquant's food and too bad if they needed his weaving for something else. Then he’d spun around, taken Piquant’s hand, and tugged him out the door. Once back in the room that only the two of them ever entered, he handed Piquant one of the papers from the flat surface-- table-- and told Piquant to eat it.

[More]

Piquant wasn’t stupid. What Daegal wanted from him was obvious, but he also knew that Daegal had spent many days speaking to this paper until it was covered in the squiggles the humans used to cage their words. Daegal had grumbled something about Piquant being worth more than a page of mistakes. Then, in the soft voice he used around Piquant and no one else, asked him again to feed. This continued many days-- Piquant still couldn’t grasp the way humans kept time beyond that-- with Daegal switching to an older paper after the first night. He would touch it every time the sky grew dark, whisper something to it that Piquant couldn't quite make out, and then hand it over once it began to glow. It wasn’t a lot of food, but it was consistent, and if Piquant understood what humans meant by “flavor,” Daegal’s was the tastiest. It was warm in a way he couldn’t describe, sort of like the feeling of Daegal’s hand in his whenever someone muttered words like “pest” or “blight” when they thought he couldn't hear.

But Daegal must have changed his mind. That “something else” he’d mentioned to the other humans must be more important to him now, too. Piquant couldn't blame him. He would miss this good food, but he could go back to sneaking little feedings here and there like he had before the humans agreed to give him some of the glowing objects they created. Maybe he'd get lucky and there'd be some forgotten ones stashed in a corner somewhere and he could--

"Why am I putting my weaving into this and handing it to you when I could just give you the weaving?"

It was worse than he'd thought! He definitely couldn't let Daegal do that. He bit his lip as he tried to think of an answer and tasted wetness that was all too familiar. He'd nicked his lip with his tooth. Again. Most of him was human enough, but not his teeth. He wiped at his mouth with his shirt sleeve, knowing it would leave those awful dark spots in the fabric. He didn’t like those spots. They didn’t wash out and humans didn’t get spots on their clothes. Their teeth were flat.

Daegal held his arm out until he reached the pushed-together pile of boxes where Piquant sat. He'd promised to get a couch-- whatever a couch was-- soon, but there was too much going on and furniture wasn't at the top of anyone’s list. Whatever furniture was. A better box to sit on, maybe. After he sat, he found Piquant's hand. As much as Piquant normally enjoyed its warmth, this time it might mean that Daegal was going to make him feed from him. He couldn't risk a touch, so he reluctantly pulled his hand away.

To Piquant's relief, Daegal put his hands in his lap instead of touching him again. "I don't get it. I know you don't want to take your food directly from artists anymore, but how is that any different from taking it after I put it inside something else? It's still mine."

It was a big difference. Because taking it by touching Daegal would make Piquant no different from the other imps who fed whenever they were hungry, with no regard for the human who was the source of their food. Because at least if it was inside an object, the human who had created it wouldn't miss it as much. Because he didn't want everyone thinking he was falling back on instinct because then they'd never trust him. If they didn’t trust him, he couldn’t help them.

When he didn't answer, Daegal spoke again in that low voice. "I just want you to be okay. You know I wouldn't mind if you took it from me. Wouldn't doing that make you stronger like the other imps?"

It would. He couldn't get a lot of... of energy by not taking it directly. But if he fed indirectly, if he just took a little from something the human made, no one got hurt. That was why the other imps were such a threat. One touch to any of the glowing humans-- artists-- and that human wouldn't be able to make or do anything with their glows-- their weaving-- for days. To make it even worse, the imp who fed from them would temporarily be able to use the weaving or bring it to the person who had sent them against the artists. This was the humans' greatest enemy, much more so than the imps, but the imps were a persistent part of the problem.

Daegal knew all this. Piquant had told him everything about imps that the humans hadn't worked out on their own. Sure enough, he nodded when Piquant couldn't bring himself to talk about this again.

"Can I?" Daegal held out his hand. When Piquant didn't take it, he added. "Not to give you food. I promise. I just... I want to be here with you, okay?"

That was okay. Focusing really hard on Daegal being a friend and not dinner-- it was so difficult when he was this hungry!-- Piquant took his hand. Daegal locked their fingers together, ignoring the scratches. He never seemed to mind that Piquant had claws where he had short, dull nails. But that was just the thing. The other humans did.

If Piquant took what Daegal offered, he could look like the other imps. They were all entirely human, at least to human eyes. This was how they kept sneaking up on the glowing humans and feeding from them. The humans couldn't tell who was human and who wasn't. Feeding from Daegal would most likely take away his remaining imp parts and leave him looking fully human, as well. While the humans would know who he was and that he was an imp, they might treat him better without these constant reminders. Maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to shoo him away. Other than Daegal, the only people who ever wanted to talk to him were the non-artist humans, the ones without the glows. Even then, though, they usually just asked about his face and how he managed to grow a plant. He let them think this because it was easier than trying to explain that he once had skin resembling the mushroom colony of his birth-nest. The marks on his face were what was left of that imitation. He wasn’t growing anything except gradually annoyed.

He covered his face with his hands in a move that was becoming habit and closed his eyes. He could change all this. The claws, the teeth, the face, and whatever else he might not have noticed because the reflective things humans hung everywhere frightened him. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Daegal brushed his fingers over his cheek just below his hand. In that same, soft voice, he said, "You're thinking so hard I can feel a headache coming on. Please tell me what's going through your head. Can I help?"

Piquant's mouth twitched. He had to be the first imp in the history of his kind to be accused of thinking too much. "I would be strong. Yes. But do not wish harm. To you. Anyone. But you most. And I would human... be human. Not be imp. And if not imp, they allow to help." 

No, that wasn't right, either. It was still so hard to put his thoughts into words! That would be another benefit if he fed from Daegal. Any imp who fed from humans directly picked up the language much faster than the pieces Piquant got from his object-food. He could think circles around the other imps, but he couldn't out-human them. 

"No. I am imp. Imp I would stay. This would not stay." He tapped the side of his face. Daegal couldn't see it, but with his hand on Piquant's cheek, he could feel it. 

Despite Piquant's frustratingly incomplete words, Daegal understood. His arms wrapped around Piquant and pulled him closer. "Oh, Peek. Listen. Someday they’ll see how wonderful you are. Like I do. It’s up to you if you want to change how you look. It’s up to you how you want to feed.”

That was no help at all. Piquant still didn’t know what to do. It was hard to learn to be human when he was beginning to suspect that he also wasn’t very good at being an imp.

Daegal placed his hands on either side of Piquant’s face, his thumb brushing the lingering cap of a small faux mushroom. When he rested his forehead against Piquant’s, all of Piquant’s racing thoughts ground to a halt. “You’re you and that’s all that matters. If they’re too stubborn and small-minded to realize that you’re nothing like they think you are, that’s on them, not on you. We’ll find a way to get through to them. Together.”

This was a nice promise and it made Piquant feel warm inside, like when he fed from Daegal’s paper, but he found that he didn’t want to think about rude humans for a while. Not when Daegal was this close and speaking to him in that sweet tone. There was something he’d seen humans do together when they were close like this and he wanted to try it out. First he had to make sure Daegal wouldn’t mind. He leaned forward to press his lips against his friend’s as fast as he could, then pulled back to make sure this wasn’t the wrong thing to do. Sometimes humans didn’t like this.

Daegal’s face was split by that wide, tooth-baring expression humans made when they were happy. Piquant found himself doing the same. Showing his teeth didn’t matter here, and not because Daegal couldn’t see them. Daegal didn’t have to when he was running his fingertips over Piquant’s lip. It seemed his teeth didn’t bother Daegal any more than the claws or mushroom did.

For the first time since Piquant had met him, Daegal was without words. He continued to smile, so Piquant kissed him again. And then again. Then a few more times since it seemed to be going over so well.

Finally Daegal pulled away and found his words, but not before stumbling over the first few. "Whatever possessed you to do that should possess you more often. But later. You need dinner first. How do you want to do this?"

Piquant caught himself before biting his lip again. If this was going to continue, Daegal probably wouldn’t appreciate him cutting up his own mouth. And that’s what gave him his answer. If Daegal truly didn’t mind that he was an imp, if he went so far into not minding that he liked kissing him, that meant there had to be other glowing humans who also wouldn't care what he was. Although hopefully without the kisses because he didn’t want to share those with anyone else. 

The open-minded humans, the artists who would accept him, those were the ones they had to find. He knew the answer now. “The paper.”

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

(Part of the moodboard is a secret to Piquant. Every day Daegal whispers to record the words “I love you” on the paper he gives Piquant because he knows Piquant can’t read the text and he didn’t set the magic to play back his voice as a recording. Piquant can sense the warm feeling when he feeds from the magic, though, and that’s what makes it taste so good. And if you’re wondering why the artists are so iffy about Piquant, it’s because imps have been plaguing them as pests for generations upon generations. They’re not used to an imp not being a problem.)

[love-and-socialism]

Roasted veg, boiled meat

A friend wrote a story about their main character and asked me to look it over. After giving my edits and comments, they asked me to write about the scenario from the point of view of the throwaway character in this part.

So here it is;

Roasted veg, boiled meat

“Navid, your next appointment is ready.”

“Thanks, Josephine. Send them on through.” I said, finishing transferring the notes from paper to the computer of my last appointment, an eczema patient. She’d been getting better, but her skin had been flaking off during the course of our meeting and the floor looked like someone had bitten into a coconut cream cake and left a sprinkling of powdered frosting. My stomach grumbled, it knew that it was time for elevenses. But it would have to wait until after the next patient… a Mr Royce.

I heard a knock at the door and told them to come in, which they duly did, shuffling gingerly onto my seat. “Hello there, I’m Dr Singh” and I offered my hand for him to shake, which he did albeit using it as some kind of leverage to help him sit down on the chair. “Can you just confirm your name and address for me please?”

“It’s Stephen Rice.” he said.

“Oh, I have you down as Royce here.”

“Yes, that’s roight.”

Ah, a west country lad. We had one of them in medical school. Of course, he had the unfortunate luck to have the surname Farmer. In grad school, the joke went ‘Doctor Farmer? Well which one is it?’ This meant that their nickname was changed to ‘two jobs’ at the university hospital. This was all good fun, unlike some of the cruel nicknames that plagued me.

He told me his address and his date of birth and I checked them off my sheet. “Now then, what seems to be the trouble today?”

There was a long pause, which made me look up from the papers in front of me to notice him finally blurt out “I burnt the top of the end of my knob.”

Well I didn’t think I’d be hearing that particular word today. Do I still have my patient bingo card? I could probably cross the ‘phallic’ square off. Okay, be calm. Let’s not say anything. Remember your poker skills. Let him continue.

Except, he didn’t continue.

I stared at him, trying to use the powers of my mind to get him to elaborate, but I was going to have to use other cues to get him to open up. Maybe if I cough and write down some lines on the paper that might do the trick. I wrote down my name in indecipherable scribblings. Is he talking yet? No?

“And how did it happen?” I could see out the corner of my eye as he squirmed delicately in his seat. He stumbled over a couple of ‘err’s’ and ‘well’s’ before rapidly firing off a breathless monologue; “I was taking a wee at the urinal at this cafe near my flat the other day ’cause it was the only time I’d be able to before TA’ing a discussion section for a class that morning. I’d not found a table to leave my things at, so I brought in a book and my coffee so I could review my notes and drink at the same time.”

I wrote down ‘urinating’ as the legible word and put a question mark next to a squiggled ‘coffee burn?’. I’d give myself five points if that was the case. Oh, he’s stopped talking? Better prompt him again.

“I was carefully turning the pages with my chin, but the book must not’ve been secure enough in the crook of my arm, cause after I got through a couple of pages, it fell in the urinal.”

“So, you dropped it.”

He was adamant that he didn’t. Very adamant. He insisted that it fell. And while my understanding of physics is somewhat lesser compared with biology, I admit that he was correct. Technically correct, which, as everyone knows, is the best kind of correct. I asked about how and when he would normally carry the books like that and he sheepishly admitted that he doesn’t usually do it, unless he’s holding something else “like a pencil.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to a writing implement or it was another reference to his appendage. He went onto explain how he attempted to retrieve the presumably urine-soaked book, and  “..hot coffee spilt all over my knobhead.”

Knobhead.

There it was. The nickname from school. The one that made him strive to improve on his Hindi accent. He wasn’t ashamed of having Indian parents, they’d worked hard to give him a better start in life. But his youthful shyness coupled with deviations in his speech using a soft ‘v’ in his name and introducing himself on the school playground as ‘Na-bhed’. One of the more coarser and rougher boys, who would have been a quick-witted urchin in any Dickensian novel, picked up on it immediately and labelled him ‘Knobhead’. And so it stuck. Cruelly, for twelve years.

When he moved away to college, he left the nickname as well as the churlish contemporaries. If they could see him now, he’d like to think he’d be treated with respect and held in high esteem of him working hard to become a medical professional. Ah, who was he kidding, he’d end up being called Doctor Knobhead by those philistines. I slammed my pen down onto the clipboard, awaking us both from my daydream, before I had to clear my throat to shake off these lingering thoughts of childhood trauma, and get back to the current situation of manhood trauma. I wrote down the circumstances of the burn and asked more questions about the full extent of the injury. Naturally, I would have to prepare him for physical examination and I asked him to undress and lie down. I turned away on my chair towards the sink to wash my hands. He protested that the blisters weren’t that big, and I nodded, continuing the scrubbing of my fingers with sterile soap, before he relented and started undressing behind me. I pulled the rubber gloves on, accidentally letting the elastic snap against my wrist, the sound puncturing the air of awkwardness.

I tenderly moved his thighs, furrowing my brow when he instinctively clenched. This seemed to embarrass him slightly, and I felt bad for making him feel that way. “I’m sorry that you’re going through this situation.” The poor lamb.

He asked if it was the worst I’d ever seen, while I was gingerly looking at the underside of him. If only he knew about some of the videos I’d seen in medical school. At least he still had a penis. One such instructional showed a man who had it burnt off completely, his crotch looking like the one of Jeff Goldblum’s character in ‘The Fly’. Normally one wouldn’t associate having the body of Goldblum as a downside, but in this particular film, it would be rather unfortunate. So I reassured him that it wasn’t. “How long have you been caring for it?” Albeit, his care had somewhat lapsed in concentration.

He told me about his use of frozen peas and I had to stifle a laugh thinking about them pairing quite nicely with his boiled meat and roasted veg. He should heal up fine with some more modern treatments.

I told him to get dressed and turned around, tossing my gloves into the bin and washing my hands once more. I wrote him a prescription for some ointment in my best scrawl, and told him to wear loose-fitting clothes, and dress the area in bandages and that he should be better in a couple of weeks. I had to hurry because all this talk about urinating and coffee had pressed home the urge for me to do both of those things. But, unlike Stephen, not at the same time.

[wellyfullofale]

i’ll never send it, anyway

Aaron's counsellor tells him to write a letter to Robert with all of his feelings.

(or, self-indulgent pain relief that i cried whilst writing. should probably come with a heartbreak warning.)

Word Count: 2,175

AO3 link here

There’s five balls of paper scrunched up at his feet already, another one lying aimlessly beside the door after having been catapulted across the room.

Aaron bites down again on the end of the pen – some freebie from a supplier that Adam’s probably had in his mouth at some point too, the realisation of which makes him grimace and pull the pen from between this teeth – and he taps the end of it at speed against his notepad.

He doesn’t even know why he’s doing this.

Well, that’s a lie.

He’s doing it because his counsellor told him to.

“It might help you get some clarity if you write it all down,” she’d said.

He’d resisted for three sessions, questioned what the hell the point was in writing things down when he’d said everything he needed to say to Robert already.

The look she’d given him at that point made it pretty clear she didn’t believe him for one second, and Aaron had sighed and dodged the question.

He’d carried on grimacing whenever she’d suggested it, until one not-so-special session where she asked him to write down the three most important things in his life onto a slip of paper, and he’d realised that seeing -

1.    liv

2.    mum

3.    me?

- written on a scrap of paper with some medical suppliers details on the header had actually managed to given him a little perspective.

So maybe his counsellor hadn’t been completely hopeless, after all.

So here he finds himself, pen in hand, wondering how the hell he’s even meant to start it.

Dear Robert seems too formal.

Hello too…not him.

Hi seems like they’re mates, and he’s not sure that’s the message he wants to be giving Robert right now.

He scrunches up another sheet of paper and fires it in the direction of the bin; misses.

Robert,

He starts, staring down at the word until it becomes blurry between the feint blue lines on the page.

What now?

He shakes his head and he presses the biro to the page, making a little squiggle before pulling it away and tapping the other end of the pen against the page again, sighing loudly as he stares at the ceiling.

“Doesn’t even matter,” he mutters out loud to himself after a few minutes.

It’s not like he’s even going to send the letter – that had been the condition he’d given his counsellor. He’d do it, but no way was he sending it.

She’d told him that was fine, that the point wasn’t to tell Robert, but to get things clear in his own head, and he’d found himself strangely eager to get it done once that penny had dropped.

It had seemed so much easier that way.

Robert,

He looks down at the page again; exhaling sharply before biting down on his lip and letting himself open up.

My counsellor made me write this. You’re never going to read it so I guess it doesn’t really matter what I say, does it?

He reads the sentence back to himself, let his eyes scour back and forth over the words, barely legible in his scrawled handwriting. He resists the urge to rip the page from the spine of his notepad and hurl it across the room to join its brothers on the floor.

“Just fucking write it,” he mutters to himself again, scrubbing his face with his hands before allowing himself to try and order his thoughts.

Robert,

My counsellor made me write this. You’re never going to read it so I guess it doesn’t really matter what I say, does it?

I don’t even know where to start. What am I even meant to be saying to you? Whatever I couldn’t say to your face? Okay then.

I wish I didn’t feel anything when I see you

He rips at the page, feeling a tear tracking down his cheeks as he scrunches the paper into his palms and drops the crumpled remnants of it back down onto his desk.

He feels the need for some air, grabs his gloves and heads outside of the portacabin, kicks at the tyre of a car as he makes his way over to the racks to start pulling at the parts in need of sorting.

It’s almost an hour later when he lets himself give up; when he feels his breathing return back to normal and that ache inside of his stomach lose intensity; when he’s written the letter twelve times over in his head and knows what he needs to get onto that paper.

He takes a deep breath and heads back to the portacabin, gloves thrown aside as he makes his way back to his desk and smooths his palm out over the crumpled up paper that still rests on his desk.

He sits down and picks up his pen, reading over what he’d written an hour before, and he lets his thoughts spill out onto the paper, writing so furiously he gives himself a cramp; tears littering against the page, pausing in parts as the pain of what he’s writing causes him to almost double over in grief.

He pushes past it, knows he needs to finish this now he’s started, can feel it working as he lets the words spill out of him onto the page, can feel the cloud clearing somewhat.

He can feel a weight lifting as he finishes it; can feel fresh air filling his lungs for the first time in a month.

He wipes his eyes and holds the letter out before him, letting his eyes scan over the page to read his thoughts back to himself, choking down the tears as he does so.

Robert,

My counsellor made me write this. You’re never going to read it so I guess it doesn’t really matter what I say, does it?

I don’t even know where to start. What am I even meant to be saying to you? Whatever I couldn’t say to your face? Okay then.

I wish I didn’t feel anything when I see you around the village. I wish looking at you didn’t bring up everything I still feel for you. I wish you hadn’t put me in this place where I can’t just love you the way I want to. Where I can’t just be with you the way I want to. I can’t sleep – I haven’t slept a full night since you moved out. I can’t bear waking up in the night and you’re not behind me, I can’t feel you beside me – you were always so warm, always there – and it hurts. It hurts so much Robert. You were supposed to be there, sleeping next to me, for the rest of my life. And now what do I have? Nothing.

Staying away from you is so hard. It hurts so much.

I’m angry at you Robert – I’m angry that you did this to us, after everything. You sat and you promised me once that you only wanted me, that you wanted messed up with me forever. That you were sure, and that you loved me. Did you even mean it? Did you? Because I tell myself you did, and I believe it so much of the time, but then I remember what you did, and a part of me feels like I’m never going to be enough for you, Robert. Like you’re always going to be looking for something better, because that’s what you’ve always done before, isn’t it?

Am I ever really going to be enough for you?

And this isn’t about forgiving you. I said I forgave you for what you did, and I do forgive you Robert. I know us. I know what happened. I know that I pushed you, and I’m angry at myself too because I made mistakes as well. But it doesn’t end there, does it? It doesn’t end with us both making a mistake and moving past it. There’s more now, isn’t there? And I can’t handle it. I wish I could be a better person – the kind of person who wouldn’t hate your child and wouldn’t just break down at being reminded every single day about what you did – but I can’t do it. I can’t do that to myself.

Do you see that I can’t?

I hope you can see it. I hope you can see how much I want you still – I’ll always want you – but how much I can’t do it for the sake of myself. I need to be better than I am, Robert. I need to be able to cope with things better than I do. And I don’t trust myself around you – I nearly hurt you, didn’t I? I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you which were my fault. I couldn’t live with myself, if I hurt you. I need you to be okay, and I need me to be okay too. And right now, we can’t be okay if we’re together.

As much as it hurts. Every single day.

We need to be apart. I need to learn to live without you, and without the way that I hate myself some times when I’m around you, and the way that it hurts to have to talk to you about being a father, when all along I want us to be doing that together. I hadn’t even thought about it – hadn’t thought you’d ever want to go there – but now I realise you’re going to be such a good dad, and I just wish it was something we could have done together. But it isn’t. It isn’t now, is it? There will always be this. And I can’t stand it. I can’t live with it. It hurts just so much, Robert. So fucking much, and I hate the way it makes me feel.

Not all of the time – I don’t want you to think that you didn’t also give me the best times of my life, and I will forever appreciate that you were there for me and that you stepped up when I needed you the most – but right now, how my head is, I can’t be around you. I can’t be reminded every day of the way you broke my heart.

It hurts too much. Right now.

Right now? I know how that sounds. It sounds like this isn’t forever, doesn’t it?

I don’t know if I’m saying I’m always going to feel this way. I know I’m always going to love you – I said that and I meant it. If I couldn’t stop before there’s no way I can stop now, not after everything. Maybe in time I can get my head around things, but not now, and not any time soon.

I don’t know if I should even be saying this. Should I be giving you this hope, knowing that I might not be able to get past all this?

I don’t suppose it matters. It’s not like I’m ever going to give you this letter, anyway.

I suppose if that’s the case I can just tell you that I love you.

I miss you.

I miss how we were – how you made me feel on our wedding day. How you made me feel like we’d finally made it. Like we could finally be how I’d wanted to be for so long. So long, Robert. Sometimes I think you must really have no idea how much I love you.

And sometimes I think you’re the only one who understands it at all.

I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. I know I will never love anyone like I love you.

But I know that I need to love myself a little bit, too. So that’s what this is – that’s what I’m trying to do.

You’ve got to let me do that, too – and learn to love yourself a more, too.

Please, just – don’t forget me, okay? Don’t forget what we had. I couldn’t bear that.

You’re the love of my life, Robert. You always will be.

Look after yourself.

Aaron

  He wipes his hand down his face again, tears staining his cheeks and nose running as he takes a deep breath to steady himself.

He folds the paper in half, scribbling Robert onto the front of it and underlining his name twice. He doesn’t know why he does it – has no intention of ever showing the letter to his husband – ex-husband – but he places it back down on the desk and takes a deep breath.

He smiles to himself.

Something feels…settled; clearer, somehow.

Maybe his counsellor had been right.

He feels his phone vibrate in his pocket, pulls it out to find Cain ringing him and demanding his assistance at the garage.

He throws the letter under a pile of papers, mutters to himself something about dealing with it later – sure he’ll probably burn it or something – before quickly scooping up the discarded balls of paper around the floor and chucking them into the bin before leaving the portacabin, door slammed shut in his wake.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Telltale Signs of a Young Artist

Does this drawing manifest signs of future greatness? (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

We tend to believe that artists are born brilliant, that their talent is evident from childhood. Vasari was enthralled by the story of Giotto’s gifts being discovered when the young shepherd was seen sketching sheep on the ground with a stick — so much so that he also used it in his biographies of Domenico Beccafumi, Andrea Sansovino, and Andrea del Castagno.

But if you look at the walls of any day care center, it’s obvious that all children draw sheep, and at pretty much the same skill level; it’s only in retrospect that we endow one kid’s doodles with evidence of her incipient talent. Looking back at my own childhood, the signs that I would become an artist weren’t necessarily about how well I drew, which we all know is not a requirement for success. They were about the qualities necessary to sustain a career path with lots of challenges and few rewards.

Sign #1: One of my earliest memories dates back to when I was around four years old. Mom was busy in the kitchen, and I, left on my own, was terribly bored in our tiny Mexico City apartment. I decided to put pen to paper and try to draw.

I’m not sure what I was aiming for, but I do remember the result: a bunch of squiggles. I can still feel my surprise and frustration at not being able to make the pen do what I wanted it to. I tried again and got the same result: more squiggles! I shrugged my little shoulders in resignation and continued to draw squiggles.

Later, I showed the drawing to my mother. “Look, mom! I drew bushes!” I remain surprised by her reaction. Instead of being amused or expressing encouragement — as she would when I got older and still does to this day — she looked at my squiggles and said, “Those don’t look like bushes.” But I wasn’t discouraged; I just figured she didn’t understand what I was doing. The first indicator that I could lead the life of an artist wasn’t my drawing talent, it was my indifference to criticism.

Sign #2: I did gain some mastery over my medium by the time I got to kindergarten, and it caught my teacher’s attention. On Mother’s Day, the teacher — whom I had a crush on — asked me to stay in the classroom during recess. After the other children had left, she closed the door and brought out a large sheet of paper and a box of crayons. “I got special paper for you to draw something nice for your mom,” she said.

Beaming with pride, I decided to draw an elephant, since my mother collected anything pachyderm-themed. Inevitably, some of the kids realized I wasn’t on the playground and came into the classroom to see what was going on.

A fat little asshole named Neto grabbed the black crayon. “What are you doing?” he asked, as he scrawled an ugly scribble across my beautifully rendered elephant. I was furious, which surprised Neto. I can still see his dumb little face wide-eyed in horror at my response.

Again, it wasn’t a question of drawing aptitude here. The important thing was the knowledge that I was special and that others were simply too stupid to see it.

Sign #3: Probably the most significant early childhood art memory I have is of going into the bathroom in kindergarten with a ballpoint pen in hand. As I sat on the toilet, I thought of the teacher. There was something undeniably sexual in my feelings, but of course I didn’t understand what those feelings were or how to process them. Not knowing why, I drew a line around my waist with the pen.

I still have no idea what that indicated, but it would be the closest I got to making real art for another 15 years.

The post Telltale Signs of a Young Artist appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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