#i want to sit down and explain everything. every single event in my life that led me to where i am today

[buck-yyyy]

man

[bouncybongfairy]

Angels Like You

Loki x Fem Reader

Summary: After being pruned by the TVA, you were sent to The Void where you've lived ever since. During a storm Loki comes to your setup, seeking shelter. You allow him to stay and explain your nexus event to him.

Word Count: 2.0k

The context for this story: I based the reader's character after Sigyn who is the goddess of victory. In Norse Mythology, Sigyn is Loki's wife and is known for being extremely loyal. In Loki the mythical god's actual lore, after he kills the god Baldr he is banished to a cave where he is bound to rocks as a poisonous serpent drips venom onto his face until Ragnarok. Sigyn is so faithful she stays with Loki in this cave and holds a bowl above Loki's head to protect him from the venom. I based the reader's actions and relationship on the lore of Sigyn and Loki's romance if that makes sense; Thanks for reading!!

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3

You were sent to the void so long ago that it’s hard to remember what life was like beforehand. It was such a beautiful life, living on Asgard with your mother and sisters. Mother was a baker and made everything from sweet to savory and your father was a butcher. They were in love and always were, newlyweds by the time they were only 17. Everyone in the family helped out with the bakery, one of your favorite things to do was teach your younger sisters how to make different pastries. Taking care of the animals and interacting with so many locals. You threw another stick in the fire, trying to shake your head of all the memories. Your handmade shelter was holding up nicely from the storm currently roaring around you. While you were scavenging recently you found a mini DVD player among a bunch of rubbage. It had the movie Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones which you’ve been watching on repeat ever since. It was comforting to you, especially because of how much the background looks like Asgard during certain points of the film. You had your legs kicked up, eating an unknown form of fruit that you picked earlier when you heard rummaging. You slowly start to get up not wanting to alert the potential threat. Arming yourself with your daggers, you get closer to the entrance of the shelter. Throwing the wooden door open you step in front of it. Unsurprisingly, a Loki stood in front of you smiling as if he was coming to ask for a cup of sugar. Instead of focusing on who was standing before the doorway, you whip your body around. The Loki that you saw was an illusion created to distract you, every single Loki you encountered did this so you were very familiar with this technique. You pressed the blade into his neck, causing him to raise his hands in defeat. 

“How did you get my blades?” he asked, looking quite taken back. 

“These are mine, not yours,” you replied flatly. 

“How did you know I was coming,” he asked, most likely to stall. 

“Because all Loki’s think they're clever by doing so, it’s like your party trick at this point. What is your business here?” you asked. 

“Is that an Asgardian accent I recognize?” he said, dodging your question. 

“What. Is. Your. Purpose. Here?” you ask, backing him against the wall and pressing the blade against his neck so hard that you caused a small scratch on his throat. 

“Okay, cards on the table. I only came here looking for shelter from the storm. Truly had no ill intentions, could you please..?” he asked, insinuating for you to unarm yourself. You did pull the dagger away from his neck but kept them in each hand. 

“I don’t believe you,” you said. 

“Like I haven’t heard that one before,” he said, sitting down and putting his hands in front of the fire, “you know you’re incredibly uncharismatic for a Loki,” he said, using magic to dry his clothes.

“I am not a Loki, and I never said you could stay here,” you said. 

“Okay if you’re not a Loki then why do you have those daggers?” he asked.

“They belonged to a Loki and now they belong to me; end of story,” you said. 

“Wasn’t aware it was pawning for a storytime,” he said giggling. 

“Do you want to die,” you said, moving closer. 

“You think you can kill me?” he asked. 

“Me being able to kill you is irrelevant. I know I can keep you out of my hut, and I know that storm will have its way with you,” you said. 

“Fair enough,” he said, putting his hands up playfully to surrender. 

“Why are you wearing a TVA jacket?” you asked. 

“I am a bit of a consultant, helping them with an inside look into the mind of a Loki,” he said. 

After physically showing your disgust for his loyalty to the TVA through facial expressions. You started roasting a chicken over the fire that was in the center of the shelter. Loki again began to pry about the origins of your accent. You ignored his inquiries and turned the roasted chicken that was cooking above the fire. He was eyeing the food like a lion would a gazelle. 

“I thought you worked for the TVA? Don’t tell me your wonderful new friends aren't feeding you,” you said flatly. 

“Well you know sometimes missions go… askew if you will,” he chuckled then conjured himself a blanket. 

“The TVA discarding lives at will? Can’t say I’m surprised,” you said. 

“And what about you? Clearly, you're Asgardian so what was your nexus event?” he asked. 

“I lived in the villages of Asgard, my family and I lived comfortably. My mother and father ran a foodery. They were given the opportunity to work in the castle’s pantry. Without a second thought, they took the opportunity, especially because it meant proper education for my sisters and me. We were shocked to see the interior of the castle. I couldn’t stop laughing because of how mesmerized I was,” you said, turning the chicken again, “as my sister and I lost our minds, the queen came around the corner. My mother was so upset that she saw me acting foolish, she pinched my forearm so hard it bruised. She took us to our separate rooms before showing my parents around. I didn’t want to be in separate rooms, in our old home, the room we shared was so small and the sudden change was jarring. Once I was alone in my room I broke down into tears, I was only 13 and it was all so overwhelming.” You moved the chicken away from the fire onto a makeshift table. Ripping one of the legs off and setting it on a chipped plate. Loki thanked you before you even handed it to him. After taking a few bites, he stared at you, waiting for you to continue. 

“The next day things were getting easier. I came out of my room and saw a snake slithering outside my door. I picked it up and began talking to it, saying things like ‘If someone else would have found you, they’d make you lunch’ or ‘let's get you out of here before you’re killed’ but after I set it free, Loki shapeshifted out of his snake form. The first thing I noticed were his eyes, they were so bright and his pupils were wide. 

“I was uh- trying to scare you but when you picked me up I had to wait till you set me down to shapeshift back,” he explained. 

“Why would I be scared of a creature that is simply existing?” you asked. 

“You have a point there,” he said laughing, which caused you to join him. 

“After that encounter, it was like we couldn’t stop bumping into each other. Everywhere you went, he'd always end up stopping by even just to share a quick glance with each other. Eventually, things got more serious, and we’d both sneak out to meet each other in the library. Loki loved the library, he explained that when he was to rule Asgard, he’d make his soldiers study basic battle strategy and geography to ensure his glorious purpose wasn’t to be wasted. I always loved romance novels which irritated him beyond no end. One that you remember was about a young king named Angus who was turned to stone by Medusa. His queen Rose was wrapped in his arms when turned, he was protecting her. He thought if he shielded the queen from the serpent's view and it did. The queen could have escaped but she would’ve needed to shatter her king’s stoned body. He was gripping her so tightly that the stone was rubbing her skin raw, but she was so touched that in his last moments, he wanted to be as close as he could to her. The love she had for him was so strong that she couldn’t bring herself to it. So she died in his arms. Aphrodite was so moved by the queen's sacrifice that she turned her body into a rose bush with thorns that completely wrapped around him. To protect his stoned body so she could be with him forever. Loki would poke up and talk about how no king would ever do that. Even if he was right, it didn’t stop you from reading them obsessively.

The night before my 14th birthday, Loki appeared at my window wanting to talk.”

Flash Back:

“I have something to show you,” he said, taking you by the hand and helping you climb down from your window. 

When you got to the bottom, there was a black horse that Loki helped you on. You were scared of getting in trouble but he insisted that nobody would notice. This is when you knew feelings were starting to develop, at least on your end. At first, you were scared to fully wrap your arms around him. He reached behind him and pulled you by your arms closer to him. You now had your cheek pressed against his back, watching his long black hair bounce as the horse galloped. You guys were getting deeper and deeper into the forest, starting to see more animals and thicker trees. When you guys finally stopped, it was starting to rain quite hard. He grabbed you by the waist and helped you down from the huge stallion. Taking you by the hand he began leading you to a cave that was nearby. At first, you were reluctant to go into this dark and foreign entryway. Loki dried your clothes and conjured a lantern. When he lit the cave up with light from the lantern you couldn’t believe your eyes. The cave had rose vines on every section of the wall. Your hand immediately threw your hand over your mouth. 

“Like in that book you love, when I found it I knew I had to show you. I know it’s not much-” you interrupted him by pulling him into a hug. 

“This is amazing, thank you for bringing me here to see this,” you said. 

“I actually didn’t bring you here only to see it,” he said, pulling the book out of his saddle bag. 

The cave’s floor was covered in long grass, which made it very comfortable when sitting on the ground. Loki’s back was pressed against a portion of the wall that he cleared of vines and thorns. You were your back against Loki’s chest as you read aloud to the book. You kept stuttering over words at first, being distracted and flustered. Eventually, you settled and were able to read fluently through the story. You guys stayed there until it began to rise, and right before you parted ways to separate bedrooms you shared a chaste kiss. Ever since that night, you knew Loki was the love of your life. The connection that was growing was strong and undeniable. It remained that way even after time aged the two of you. By the time you guys were 18 the love between the two of you was still as fresh as the roses in the cave. A wedding was being planned and the energy in the air was euphoric. Both of your families were healthy, the kingdom was thriving and you loved each other. Long story short: Baldr invaded Asgard. Loki killed him and saved so many people's lives yet he was punished. Banished to the very cave where your love blossomed in, only now the roses were all dead, yet the thorns remained. When you saw him, he was passed out from the pain. A serpent was suspended above his head, dripping its toxic venom onto his skin. You refused to leave his side, at first he would scream for you to leave. Not wanting your mind to be poisoned by the pain of seeing him so weak. You comforted him and held his head with one hand and used the other to hold out a bowl, catching the venom. You weren’t sure how much time passed, but one day you couldn’t stand the thought of living this way. For your love to be punished for doing what he believed to be right by his people. You noticed Loki still had his two daggers tucked into his pant-line. Knowing you would have to be quick, you emptied the bowl of venom and quickly grabbed his daggers. Using your own head to cover Loki’s body from the venom you start attacking the snake. After severing its head, you passed out from how bad the venom burned your skin. When you woke up Loki was already causing Ragnarok, he had so much pent-up rage. The timekeepers found me and when I was at the TVA pleading for answers, they told me certain events on my timeline needed to play out before Loki was released. Because you were the one who released him, they blamed it on you.

End of Flashback

The Loki you’d just met was looking at you with a pitiful expression. You noticed he picked his chicken clean which made you chuckle. 

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said. 

“Not your fault,” you said. 

“I know but, that’s one of the most heinous stories about survivors of the TVA,” he said. 

“I’m glad you liked the chicken. I’m going to bed,” you said, setting your cot up. 

“Is it okay if I stay?” Loki asked.

“If you stop asking questions then yes,” you said, extinguishing the fire and going to sleep.

[silvervinewine]

Hii! I hope you don't mind if I make a request here, because I dont really know where to- Although if you do see this, could you please write headcannons for some of the genshin men (Like Alhaitham, Diluc, etc.) on how they'd act when reader introduces them to their parents? Feel free to ignore this if you dont have time tho!! Thank you sm :)) <33

MEET MY PARENTS (W/ ALHAITHAM, DILUC SEPERATELY)

DILUC: AUTHORITARIAN PARENTS (also commonly known as, "i just want the best for you" parents)

your parents were rather worried about you, after all the man you had brought home was not a lawyer, or a doctor? how would you live with that?

you needed to get a good man, a man that would not be bankrupt any time soon.

needless to say when you brought home DILUC RAGNVINDR, known socialite and sought after bachelor, your parents were more than welcoming.

as soon as he pulled up in his fancy car, with one of his finest suits on, you knew you were in for a ride.

as soon as you welcomed in your boyfriend into your parents' home, was he bombarded with questions.

"where did you study?"

"how much do you make?"

"what are you planning to do with our child?"

"why did you choose them?

just your regular strict parents' shenanigans.

the formal dinner you organized, felt more like an interview, with every single response of his precisely calculated in their wording.

after everything he looks at you with pleading eyes as he paid the bill and left with you.

immediatly hugs you as you arrive at your home.

"felt like he was being watched by hawks."

you chuckle at his comment, as you lay down with him.

"you know, even if they don't look like it" you looked at him, "they actually really really like you."

"i mean you're serious, rich and good looking, everything up to their standard."

he smiled at the comment, after all if he wanted to marry you he would need to get your parent's approval.

AL HAITHAM: AUTHORATIVE PARENTS (also commonly known as, sane parents which love each other very much, #mommy issues)

while somewhat demanding, your parents never really asked much of you.

"just live a happy life, work hard to get what you want and always learn from your mistakes."

you were never asked to get a partner, you were never asked to settle down like this, yet you still chose to get a boyfriend.

AL HAITHAM was always a wallflower, your boyfriend smart academically, stupid socially.

he liked you, you were someone interested in the same things he was, you were someone he could lean on.

you two rode peacefully to the little quaint house your parents' resided on, as soon as you came in you were greeted with cheery smiles and laughs.

the meeting or... hangout spot was a little picnic in a nearby park. a place where you often used to hang out with old friends while sitting around telling stupid jokes while walking around.

you noticed how AL HAITHAM was reluctant to your parents' kindness, while your parents strolled around ocassionally picking up conversation with him he really didn't reciprocate.

you really got it, he wasn't much for small talk.

only ever really nodding or making small comments, chipping in with his commentary here and there.

that was until your mother asked him what he studied, things got real after that.

he looked up and started explaining his past lecture, rambling on about the foreign policies he was interested and the importance of proper storage of information and all that.

yeah needless to say, AL HAITHAM was personally invited to the next big family event by part of your parents' recomendation, he was real glad to have met them.

in reality, even though he did not show it enough, he really appreciated both you and your parents.

(A/N i used some psychology terms to explain the personalities of different parents, sorry if the personalities of these did not apply to your parents. thought this arrangement was necessary as there's no one size fits all in these type of fics.)

[9w1ft]

So there are pictures out there of Taylor with both Butcker and Gracie who defended his speech. With Butcker she's even interacting and joking. Then Travis likes a Trump post. I've seen so many swifties saying she's MAGA now and they should vote this way as well. The Chiefs dropped the other day merch with Eras Tour which means she's doing another football season, giving them some more publicity and not saying anything throughout the election when now it looks like she's MAGA. Taylor and Travis don't respond to this and do clean up image for the Chiefs. I truly don't know what to think anymore. There is a serious risk here of Trump getting re elected and she's helping with it. I feel like it's time we consider she never cared about any political ideology and it was always about money. I'm so disheartened by this. I fell like she played us all and THIS is actually her.

i wanted to preface this by saying i feel that my response is really inadequate here and to apologize for that in advance. but i felt you might be new or recent and so i felt compelled to play the role of the old man at the cave entrance.

i think that part of kaylor is having that unique perspective that allows you to look at things like these with a little more nuance than other perspectives might have. i think it gives a little more insight into why taylor’s psyche may or may not lead her to do this or that. i don’t mean this as a value judgment. none of this is empirically great. but, i can see how we are here.

anon i want you to know, i’ve been here since 2018 and i am fairly confident that every single year someone has messaged me the last two sentences you did, verbatim. some years many people many times. the paragraphs preceding it are something different depending on what the world events of the time are. and i don’t mean to downplay what you are saying. rather, i want to point out that people have felt like you have every single year in recent years, and will continue to feel this way until suddenly it feels that way no longer. and when that suddenly is is something we just cannot know. no matter how certain you may feel about what’s behind the next bend in the road, you simply don’t know. so it’s important to know that you have a choice now.

if i was so inclined, i could get into it further and explain more than a handful of specific times over the years where the turning point felt promised and the glasses i wore were like those special fireworks glasses you get at the fair or at a festival, the one that turn points of light into shapes, like stars or hearts. everything looks like what you’re looking for. but, try as you might, things are just out of our hands.

you might find yourself seeing hearts all the way til you turn that corner and when there’s nothing and you’re faced with another dash to the next corner of the same building.. you might indeed feel used! but, i want to take this chance to tell you that there’s a better way to go about things. because you can just walk out a bit to the bench over there to the side, overlooking the building and the scenery, and you can sit down and enjoy the view. or, if metaphors arent your thing, i recommend engaging in some local work in your community, or through your job if you’ve got one that gives you a chance to be kind to someone. reconnect with your ability to impact on society and uplift people around you in real life. look out for one another. don’t allow the enormity of things make you believe that you and i can’t make the world a better place collectively.

because if you put yourself at the macro level and convince yourself that the world being fixed hinges on things that taylor does or celebrities do, and that efforts are meaningless in the face of people with massive numbers attached to their names, the world will truly pass you by. we all have but one life to live. allow yourself to be fueled and inspired in your daily life by taylor’s art or the story that you perceive, the parts you find worth fighting for, and better yourself. in other words, you think taylor is using you? well, why not use her to become a better you! and if you feel hurt no matter how you try, and if pop culture’s most successful pop artist mega star is just not the beacon that you had hoped for and if all of this is ruining your life, it’s alright and justified to step away or to diversify what inspires you. you gotta do you!

[morelikeravenbore]

What was Auras reaction to Seb calling her ignorant?

🦋 'Aurélie woke bright and early the following morning with a steely resolve to never utter the name Sebastian Sallow again unless it was to curse it to the wind.' — How to Make a Villain, chapter thirteen.

AAAHHH this question is so fun, thank you for asking it! I've been thinking about my answer all day, so in my usual fashion I'm absolutely going to over-explain it because ✨Ravenclaw.✨

So lemme preface this by saying canon Aurélie was never part of the game events. She started Hogwarts in seventh year and thus had to deal with the consequences of Sebastian's quest line as they slowly but inevitably fell in love. In saying that, I have been dabbling on and off with a fifth year AU in which Sebaura reunite post-graduation after seven years apart, so I've given the IgNoRaNt thing a lot of thought.

To set the scene, here's a snippet of their dynamic in fifth year. (If you think their bickering is bad in Villain universe, they're insufferable in fifth year lolol).

[Sebastian's POV]

'Aura! For once in your life, stop being so dramatic!'

A month. A whole bloody month of chasing after, arguing with, and generally lamenting the existence of the most annoying girl to ever walk the face of the earth; one long, agonising month since she'd shown up at Hogwarts as the new fifth year, the new mystery, and completely derailed life as he'd known it. Not that his life had exactly been on track before her arrival, but if he was the out-of-control locomotive, then she was the broken track that had sent the whole bloody lot careening off the rails and into a ravine, explosions and all.

Needless to say, fifth year MC Aura [hates going on quests.] It's not that she doesn't want to help, it's just that li'l fifteen year old fancy-pants Frenchie hates trudging through the cold muddy Highlands, hates getting her nice shoes all dirty, and especially hates using her magic to blast Beasts into the ether (even if they are big scary spiders or killer Mongrels.) So when she relents to following Sebastian through some icky cave or up a freezing cold mountain in search of some weird relic or whatever, she lets him know in no uncertain terms that she is NOT happy about it. She'd probably even ignore him for weeks afterwards and he'd have to do some serious grovelling (ie bribery with new shoes) just to get her to look at him again.

But still, she does it for him because they're both orphans, they're both lonely, and they're both really leaning on eachother for support. Yes, she hates their "adventures", yes, she complains about it the entire time, but she does it for him. Every single time.

So when Sebastian calls her ignorant — when he crosses the line from light-hearted bickering to actually insulting her? She considers it a huge rejection. She followed him into danger time and time again, overlooked his red flags, even forgave him for the whole crucio thing only for him to personally insult her? Nah bro. Aura's certainly not afraid of letting him know when he's acting out of line, but up until that point, their disagreements had never gotten personal.

This is when everything starts to go south for their friendship, culminating with the Solomon incident and leading to their eventual seven-year split after graduation. When she's really hurt, Aurélie withdraws into herself so deeply that it's very hard to coax her out again. — And that's exactly what happens when he dun fucks up and calls her a nasty name.

NOT TO MENTION calling a Ravenclaw ignorant is like a mortal sin. Like, calling an average every day person ignorant is pretty mean, but a Ravenclaw?! Boy, pls. Sit down.

🦋 Thank you again anon for the cute question, I had so much fun answering it! Here are some more piccies of my girl for you. Have a perfectly scrumptious day!

(the dress was a gift from my love @sleepywitchlory, made by @ominouscorridors)

[archivxx]

✯[0.09]✯

Previous || Next

Note: maybe fake dating Clyde Donovan isn’t too bad…just maybe…

Pete Thelman.

Pete Thelman. Took the rock world by storm in 2015, topping the charts within a year of his first single. Probably one of the most popular rock singers to date. With his own record company with the most prestigious label behind it. Most singers come into the industry with his status as an end goal. Holding some of the most insane musical records. More Grammys than you could count on your fingers. Every musical artist aspired to be like him, took inspiration for him, no matter what type of music the create. Holding some of the most staple and massive concerts. More than enough speculations behind him. Pete Thelman.

Pete Thelman. Stood in front of you calling your fake-date “bro” and “dude.” To say this situation had shocked you would be a complete understatement. You were void of words, thoughts. You couldn’t make a single coherent string of thoughts.

You were staring at him, baffled, his mouth was moving but you had no clue what he was saying. You needed to sit down asap.

He was looking at you with a slightly cocked head, had he asked you something? You clocked back into reality.

“Wait…” he narrowed his eyes at you. “Are you..?”

Clyde watched as you two communicated, it was like just by looking at your faces you could hear the cogs working in your heads.

“Y/N L/N.” You stared at him for a long moment while the puzzle pieces fell into place. “We we’re supposed to meet this afternoon to discuss the event.”

He took a breath and held it then released it slowly. His eyes flicked between you and Clyde a few times before his eyes blew wide. A long “ohhhhh” falling past his lips. “So you’re the girl I’ve been hearing about. Man, I didn’t think you had it in you.” He clapped a hand against Clydes shoulder.

Clearly the whole not wanting to feed the fake dating crap to someone who was clearly a good friend was completely thrown out the window as Pete had heard about it all himself.

You opened your mouth to explain when Clyde cut you off, “You two know each other?” You both looked at him, you had almost forgot he was standing with the two of you.

“Oh right, I already told you, Y/N is the lady I was meeting with today.” Clydes mouth changed into a “o” of understanding. “Hey since we’re already here why don’t you pitch yourself you me now?” You froze. Your blood felt cold. What did he just say? Pitch it now? You weren’t ready.

There was no way you were doing it now, you couldn’t even think straight, let alone pitch it. How were you going to recite everything without messing it up. Your mind felt like a tornado had just gone right through it and messed everything up.

Before you could respond Pete had a hold of your hand and was dragging you back into the cafe. He took you over to a table, Clyde following closely behind you. He sat down and motioned to the place across from him. You parked yourself.

“Okay, Y/N tell me why you want this. Sell your band.” You stared at him, recollecting your thoughts, he was staring at you, waiting. You began to recite what you had practiced, maybe your voice had sounded robotic or something but he cut you off. “No no, not what you practiced. Tell me why you want to do this charity event, what it means to you.”

You really didn’t fancy telling this man your whole life story so you decided to condense it down. “I feel that the band will really benefit from a charity event, additionally cancer is a close subject to me and the other members. It would be empowering to do an event for it.”

“Which is really nice, but it’s still not why you want it, Y/N. Tell me, what does this mean to you.” He poked his finger against the table. Clyde could sense your growing discomfort. He gave Pete a look but he simply dismissed and continued to persist.

“Okay, fine. When I was younger I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer, doing an event to support a charity fighting against it would be empowering for me. My mother was very important to me and the last person I had. I want to do this for her.” You hadn’t noticed it but a tear has rolled down your cheek. You were too focused on watching your hands ring in your lap.

Clyde slapped his hand across Petes arm. Pete once again dismissed it, smiling brightly at you. “I’m sold!” You looked up from from your hands at him. “I mean, first you make this sadistic fucker happy and I’d love to give you an outlet to honour your mother. Also I listened to your music and I like everything that you guys make! I’m sold!”

You sat up straight reaching your arm out to shake his hand. He didn’t return it, instead he got up and hugged you. You hugged back.

When he released you, walked back over to his seat. He sat down and looked between you two. “Okay, now tell all the juicy details about you two.” For such an “emo” looking guy, he sure was social, you’d be lying if you said it hadn’t caught you off guard.

Your head swung round to Clyde, you hadn’t spoken about this yet. He wasn’t looking at you, so you decided to take the initiative. “Well we were both, uh, here late one night and we were both in the break room and I dunno it just sort of happened.”

Clyde stayed silent, clearly he couldn’t come up with anything either so decided to let you do the talking. “You know what eve seen each other around and stuff. I made the first move.” Clydes head snapped around to you, his eyebrows furrowed. You shrugged at him trying to make the unspoken communication between you and him unnoticeable. If Pete had seen either of you, he would have known immediately and called bullshit, they seemed like really good friends.

Pete nodded. “Well I must say I’m shocked that anyone at all can make this guy happy, in the ten years I’ve known him I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him smile. Well done, Y/N.”

You smiled to yourself. Even if the relationship was fake, it was still nice to hear people talking about you like that. You grabbed your phone to check the time. Shit. You were late again. You stood up quickly.

“I’m so sorry I’m going to have to go.”

Pete smiled, understanding. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow with the rest of your band to discuss the business side of things. I look forward to doing work with you, Y/N.” He extended his hand at you, you cupped his hand. A hand shake. Now this whole deal felt a little more real.

You smiled and thanked him then slung your bag over your shoulder and left the cafe. You head for the elevator, pulling your phone out of your pocket and immediately went to your messages.

Masterlist

Taglist: @ryenwritess @southparktegreity @h3artilly @bootsieboo

[iviarellereads]

Nona the Ninth, Chapter 29

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For detail on The Locked Tomb coverage and the index, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

(First House icon) In which oh yeah, that WAS in the day's events preview, wasn't it?

Everyone makes to get into the big truck, and Nona thinks longingly of her home. Pyrrha sits Nona in the chair Cam no longer needs. The new person herds everyone, stopping and healing all the worn-down people. The Angel and Pash show up, with Noodle as well. Nona asks if they're coming with, and Pash says not to get her started. She goes where Aim goes, and Aim is going with the crew, to the Nine Houses. Aim says they are a liability, and the commander will get some breathing room once they're safe.

Nona said: “Who are you?” Then she explained, “Everyone asks me the same question, so—I feel like it’s my turn.” “You don’t get to ask,” said Pash roughly; which Nona thought was a wonderful and very cool answer she wished she had come up with herself. But the Angel leant down and looked at Nona. There was something settled in her face: a calmness that had not existed there before—a kind of immovable, fixed-concrete resolve. [...] She suddenly reached up and grasped the Angel’s hand, and the Angel grasped hers, and the Angel looked at her. “I’m the Messenger,” said the Angel simply. “We are the Message … the message has two parts left, and you are looking at one of those parts. The name for this part of the message was ‘Aim’ when the message was passed to us through my forebear Emma Sen.(1) The message is too simple for human beings like us to understand. What do you think the message is?”(2) Nona couldn’t guess. “I hope you hear it one day,” said Aim. She reached out—she ruffled Nona’s hair—she smiled. Then she said, “Noodle, let’s go,” and she stepped resolutely up the ramp and into the truck.

Pash makes a joke about having to shoot Nona now,(3) waits a beat, then says it really was only a joke, and goes up the ramp. Pyrrha picks Nona out of the chair and remarks that she's been very calm. Nona says there's not long left, and asks if they're going to find her. Pyrrha says yes, it might be time to wake her up.

Pyrrha brings her to a huge cockpit with massive wraparound windows. Kiriona is already there, strapped into a seat.

She did not speak to them, even when Pyrrha said, “Hey, kid.” She had not said much of anything since Camilla and Palamedes had become Camilla-and-Palamedes—seemed withdrawn and lost in thought, unwilling to look at anyone or anything.(4)

The new person enters, with We Suffer, and Crown supporting Judith. The new person takes the biggest seat at the front.

“Mind showing me how this thing starts?” they said to the commander. “Oh, dear God,”(5) said the commander. “For what I am about to do, I will go down as history’s greatest monster.”

Nevertheless, she leans down and gives instructions. Pyrrha asks to be allowed to drive instead.

“No chance,” said Palamedes-and-Camilla comfortably. And: “Commander … thank you. Leave everything to me.” “I do—I have,” said We Suffer. And— “Every single hope of Eden(6) now rests within this clapped-out vehicle.” “Same for the Nine Houses,” said Palamedes-and-Camilla. “You know what I want,” said We Suffer. She turned to address the rest of the driver’s cockpit. “To complete what she started. Troia, listen to me. Every so often there is invoked a Blood of Eden mission protocol—we call it Protocol One. It is used in times of either terrible joy or the worst possible outcomes. Protocol One means there are no more formal orders—if given in the field of battle, often it is understood as ‘Scatter. Retreat. Disunite,’ but it is not quite that. There is a different protocol that is simply used for retreat, protocol that means ‘Save yourselves.’ I received the order to save myself when I was young … and I saved myself, which is why you hear me now, starting this terrible truck, putting my life’s work in the hands of my enemies and of strangers I do not understand. But now I give you Protocol One … and Protocol One is ‘Live.’”(7)

Crown and Pyrrha salute WS, and the new person asks what mission protocol she'll give the local forces. WS replies, basically the standard, "Fight like hell and do not shoot any civilians." She starts wishing them luck in turn, Crown, Nona, even Pyrrha, but when she comes to the new person…

We Suffer paused. Camilla-and-Palamedes cocked their burnt head to one side. “Paul,” they suggested.(8) “Paul. Good luck, Paul,” said We Suffer. “Now … you have my coat, which you can keep, but my wallet is in the breast pocket, so hand it over.”

Paul obediently hands over the wallet, and WS leaves to give final orders to those not in the room. Pyrrha asks how long they'd been planning the conversion, and Paul says "They had a lot of rainy-day backup plans."

“Yeah, but—Paul?” “Just Paul,” said Paul. Crown suggested, “Paul … Hect?” “Just Paul,” said Paul. “U Lap,” said the corpse prince, from the back of the cabin.(9) “Thanks for your contribution,” said Paul. “Aulp,” said the corpse prince. “No,” said Paul.

There's a final burst of radio comm with WS, wishing luck and such, and then Paul starts up the truck. Nona feels so strange, insulated from the mechanical movement feelings by being in Pyrrha's lap, with her body feeling so numb. Pyrrha asks, what now, and Paul releases a lever allowing the truck to lurch forward. The cabin grows cold. An automated fan starts whirring to clear the condensation from everyone's breaths, and a heater melts it into water that pools, then starts to run up into the windshield.

Paul leant forward on the accelerator, and then—

=====

(1) The Messenger. I think I already alluded to AOL Instant Messenger in a previous chapter. This just confirms it. Emma Sen, MSN messenger. I can't tell if I think this was just an incredibly elaborate setup for a joke, or if I think Muir is going to pull something out of this reference in Alecto. Both, really, I suppose. (2) What do you think the message is? Why are there two parts? Who, or what, is the other? The message is too simple, but they didn't say the message, they said codewords that imply a message. I can't wait to see if this comes back, honestly. (3) The classic "you know too much" beat from spy movies. Is it really a meme or reference, in the modern senses, or just… universal language of storytelling, at this point? (4) Wondering what it would be like to have fused with Harrow so thoroughly. Wondering if there's still a chance they could. Wondering if it's better not to know the insides of Harrow's thoughts so intimately after all. Thoughts wandering (intentionally confusing usage) onward down through all the questions she still has about and for Harrow. I see you, Kiriona. (5) Very likely, a very different God from the one most of the Nine Houses characters have invoked. Though, maybe the same one as John. (6) Every hope of Eden. What does We Suffer hope for Eden? There's so much symbology in the choice of the name of the organization, after all. We just saw in John's recounting the way that the ancestors of the modern non-House civilization cast themselves out of Eden, out of the origin world, out of the safety of the garden of home. How much has the Blood of Eden mission changed in ten thousand years? How far have they warped? What do they even want anymore, besides… no, not besides, what do they want after elimination of the Nine Houses empire? Do they even know? Do they have the faintest idea? (7) I can't find a good specific reference for this, it's so vague as to be unsearchable, but it's a beautiful backup mission statement to have at the ready.

(8) This one word, this one line, is quite honestly what made me want to do this whole project. It's been percolating in my brain for the entire 10 months since I first read the book. Honestly I don't even think I have space for my entire yell about it, so the shortest version is "go look up some articles about Paul the Apostle, and yell with me." The next shortest version is that Paul was born Saul (which calls back to the longish ah sound that Muir said in the GtN bonus materials tied Palamedes and Camilla's names together as a matched pair) and was an enemy of Jesus, before he had a revelation, and converted. As many as fourteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are sometimes attributed to his writing, though only seven can be undoubtedly verified. Contrary to common belief, Paul wasn't exactly a name given on his conversion. It was fairly typical to have a Hebrew name and a Greco-Roman name at the time, and the names are used somewhat interchangeably in some contexts within gospel. Using "Paul" would put a lot of his converts more at ease than using "Saul" in the same era. At any rate, Paul was one of the biggest names in the early Church, big on conversion this guy. And I think the symbolism of all that, rolled up into this new unfaithful Lyctor who started faithful to John and now is faithful to their own ideal… it's just very interesting. Especially since Kiriona the actual son (daughter) of God has shown up just as the final stages of conversion were underway. (There may or may not be an even longer version of this essay but it's better done by someone with more professional biblical scholarship and possibly as a degree thesis.) (9) Sorry, Kiriona, but Paul is a lot less anagram-able than Sex Pal.

[dreamlandforever]

When History Met Science

(Teen Wolf | General Audience | Sterek | 30k words | 11/11 Chapters)

AO3 Link

Professor Derek Hale has been teaching History for three years, and has painstakingly kept his private life, private. He would not consider himself a lonely man (no matter what his sister says). Until a certain biology professor, Stiles Stilisnki, arrives at the university. From mistaking him for a student, to becoming friends, could Stiles be the person that makes Derek want to give love another chance?

Chapter 1.

The Wrong Vibes

Professor Derek Hale was in the middle of explaining the Ottoman rule in Palestine from 1840 to 1918, deep into the topic of the Second Wave of Jewish Immigration to Palestine. It was one of his favorite topics, so he allowed himself a little more time to explain certain events. Given the significance of the time period, it was important his students understood what exactly had happened and why.

His class was almost always full, which he was thankful for. However, he was aware that some students were there for all the wrong reasons. He had joined the faculty almost three years ago now, but, according to Isaac, he had become somewhat of a sensation among the students. Derek liked to believe it was due to his very thought-out explanations and his willingness to always answer any question a student may pose, but he isn’t blind. Even if he’d rather lie to himself sometimes.

To his credit though, he seemingly developed a sixth sense about two and a half years ago. He’s very good at knowing when someone walks in late, even with his back to the door, and at knowing when someone is being disruptive, even in a lecture hall of over 100 students. And right now, someone walked in almost halfway through his lecture, and was sitting somewhere in the back whispering to someone else. Derek stopped talking for a second, letting his chalk remain on the chalkboard without writing anything down. He stayed like that, not saying a single word, until the only sound he could hear was the low buzzing of the projector. It took less than a minute, and then he continued on like nothing had happened for the last thirty minutes of class.

Once class ended, he turned around to dismiss his students, while trying to dust off the chalk from his hands. It had taken a while, almost his entire first semester teaching, but now all his classes knew better than to leave without being dismissed. All 107 eyes were still set on him, and everyone was still sitting down. Which made it easy for him to find the person who had disrupted his teaching today.

He was slightly taken aback, but not completely surprised, when he saw a smiling Stiles Stilinski sitting in the back row. Derek scoffed slightly, trying not to laugh in front of his entire class.

“Class is dismissed, thank you for your time,” he said, loud enough for every row to be able to hear him. The class erupted into chaos, everyone trying to rush out while cramming everything on their desks inside their bags.

Derek turned toward his desk, back to the class once again, carefully putting everything into his briefcase in the exact order he liked it. If he took a little longer than usual to give Stiles time to navigate the wave of people while going against the flow, no one other than himself had to know that. He zipped his briefcase at the same time as he felt someone stand right next to him. It was always easy to know when Stiles was near, the energy around him seemed to vibrate in a way that only someone with Stiles’ levels of anxiety might be able to emanate without physically shaking.

“You interrupted my class today,” he said in lieu of a greeting, turning to the younger man.

“I got here as soon as I could, the Biology and History departments aren’t exactly next to each other. And we scientists aren’t exactly known for our physical prowess either. I ran like a madman which, you know, means I was going barely above average speed.” Stiles smiled widely, sitting down on the desk.

Derek couldn’t help but snort at that. “Stiles, I’ve seen you run. Sure you run weird, limbs going everywhere, and most of the time you end up on the floor, but you’re actually fast.”

“Not fast enough for you not to bite my head off, apparently.”

“Why are you here, Stiles?” he asked at last, motioning for Stiles to follow him to his office. The lecture hall will be needed in about 15 minutes, and Derek is a firm believer in better safe than sorry.

“Oh, so, you know…”

“So, a favor. Start talking, Stiles.”

“There’s a faculty dinner tonight.”

Derek was slightly more confused now than he usually was in all his interactions with Stiles. “I…Yeah, I know.”

“And, you know, I am faculty.”

Derek rolled his eyes at that. “It was one time, Stiles. One time.”

“You almost threw me out of the break room! I had had a total of 0 coffees that day, and we were doing bacterial growth kinetics. I was sleep deprived!”

“Okay. We’ve had this discussion before, Stiles. You looked way too young to be faculty, you had a Batman shirt on and the biggest under-eye bags I have ever seen, and when I walked in you greeted me with ‘hey, dude’. Was I really supposed to think you were a college professor?” Derek raised a single eyebrow at Stiles, daring him to fight him on this. Once the man had opened and closed his mouth three times without emitting a single sound, Derek turned around to open the door to the office he shares with Isaac, stepping aside to let Stiles walk in first. Isaac was probably still in the middle of his class, so they had a bit of time. Isaac usually arrived at the office after class with one or two students trailing behind him, asking a million questions.

“Look, whatever. You were wrong, dude, “

“Don’t call me dude,” Derek admonished, before Stiles could really get started in on his tirade.

“You were wrong, Professor Hale. I’m a genetics professor, and I’m old enough to be a genetics professor. Actually, I’m old enough to have a PhD in something you still think is a weird STD.” Stiles bypassed Derek’s chair and both the visitor chairs to sit on the desk, his pointer finger flying wildly while he accused Derek.

“I still think transposing cripsy cas sounds like an STD,” Derek said, grabbing Stiles’ finger and pointing it away from his face, while he made his way to one of the guest chairs, so he could sit down facing Stiles. He had long ago given up on trying to force Stiles to sit on something made for sitting.

“I know you know that isn’t what it’s called! And transposons and CRISPR-Cas technology are absolutely going to save your life one day, mister. But now that we’ve established that we’re both professors and, therefore, members of the faculty, I wanted to know if you’d be my ride to the faculty meeting. I’m staying late to work on an experiment tonight, and my car is still in the shop. Lydia said she’d pick me up, but the school is way farther away from her than the restaurant,” Stiles explained, turning big hopeful eyes at Derek.

Derek tried hard not to let his feelings show. Lydia Martin was their star math professor, just back from a year-long absence, where she was working on a new math program with the university, in collaboration with MIT, while also winning two world-wide contests. The woman was as smart as she was elegant, and she seemed to be really close to Stiles.

When Derek first joined the faculty, Lydia Martin was all the students and professors seemed to talk about. About a year later, she left to work on the new joint program, which the university was more than happy about. During that year, Stiles arrived, mid-semester, after Professor Greenberg had to take sick leave from some kind of lacrosse accident. Somehow, during that first semester, Stiles and Derek had become really good friends. Derek had even thought that maybe they could be something more. But then Lydia Martin had come back, and now Derek had to share Stiles’ times with Lydia.

He smiled tightly. “Yes, I will drive you to the dinner, Stiles. I’m working late today, anyway,” he offered, not meeting Stiles’ eyes.

“I know, man! You have to grade papers today; I’ve been hearing your students complain for like a week. That’s why I knew you wouldn’t make me walk! Or get a taxi. I get very dizzy when I ride in the back,” Stiles talked animatedly. Soon, the topic changed and both men were talking about nothing and everything, in easy conversation the way they had always done. Exactly what had made Derek once believe they could be something more. But now was not the time for that.

“It is not a generality, Aimée, like I said you need to apply it case by case. There are no laws when it comes to psychology.” Isaac’s voice carried from the corridor, as he made his way to his shared office. Like Derek predicted, Isaac came inside followed by two girls and a boy. Based on Isaac’s face, they seemed to be very curious about a topic Isaac loved talking about. Derek did what he did best and ignored everything happening on the other half of the office and focused on Stiles. The man talked with his whole body, so it was easy to dedicate all of his attention to him.

After a few minutes or maybe a half hour, Derek wasn’t really sure anymore, Isaac made his way to the other visitor’s chair to Derek’s left. It had to be before 3 pm, because Stiles had class at 3.

“What are we talking about?” Isaac asked animatedly, while taking out a few tests to grade.

“Aliens!” Stiles answered happily, grinning at the Psychology professor. To Isaac’s credit, he didn’t even blink.

“Do we believe or do we not?” he asked without looking away from the test he was currently grading.

“We, as smart people, do. Derek, as a general hater of the universe, does not.”

“I… you know what? Yes, that, Isaac.” Derek gave up trying to explain to Stiles he believed in aliens, he just didn’t believe in short, green, angry people. Or gray probe-obsessed things.

Isaac nodded once. “You know, I was under the impression that professors were mature and professional. You two prove to me every single day that that isn’t the case.”

“I only signed up for being hot and smart, scarf boy,” challenged Stiles, crossing both legs under him, now entirely on top of the desk. How that was comfortable, Derek would never understand. “Is that why you wear the scarves every day? For professionalism?”

“No, Stiles, same as you. For the hot factor.”

Derek just sighed. He had known Isaac for almost 12 years now—they were both on the basketball team in elementary school, though Isaac was a year below him. They had been inseparable ever since and had somehow ended up teaching at the same university, reuniting after having gone to different colleges. And while he was glad for the chance to spend more time with his best friend, he sometimes felt like there was a much bigger age difference between the two of them than there actually was. Like whenever he was speaking to Stiles.

“Oh, don’t worry, you are the hottest girl at this university,” assured Stiles, taking one of the tests Isaac had finished grading. “And also the meanest girl. Half points for this half-a-page essay?”

“It doesn’t say what it’s supposed to say, no matter how long it is.”

“I don’t understand how you can be this big of an asshole and still be so loved.”

“It’s the scarf,” Derek quipped, making Stiles bark a laugh. Isaac only shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe it’s the hot girl part. We will never know.”

“I think it’s the whole hot girl/mean girl combination. Makes you irresistible,” joked Stiles, winking at Isaac.

The three of them were laughing openly when someone knocked on the door. Derek stood up to answer, only to find Lydia Martin standing there, in a beautiful baby blue tartan skirt suit. Sobering up immediately, Derek smiled tightly.

“Doctor Martin, how can we help you?” He moved aside to let her come in. Lydia had never come to his office before, but he guessed it had more to do with Stiles currently being there than anything.

As if to prove his point, Stiles immediately jumped off the desk and stood up straight. “My queen. To what do I owe the pleasure? I thought you had lunch off campus today with Erica?” he asked confused, though he relaxed his posture. He was back to half-sitting on the desk.

“Hello, Professor Hale, Professor Lahey,” she greeted them cordially, giving them a small smile, and completely ignoring Stiles. “You can just call me Lydia, both of you, no need for so much formality,” she added with another smile. Then she turned to Stiles, the warmth she previously had when speaking to the other two professors suddenly gone. “And no, Stiles, we do,” she corrected, crossing her arms over her chest and giving Stiles a meaningful look. She looked like a predator.

Derek expected Stiles to recoil at that. Even he felt the need slightly, but he found that the younger man was anything but intimidated by her.

“What? No, she specifically said girls’ night, and I have that experiment in class in like an hour. I cannot do lunch, Lyds,” he defended immediately, pointing widely at his wrist watch. Derek noticed that it was a digital Star Wars Casio watch and tried not to laugh. Although he was pretty sure those were collectible, it looked much too old-fashioned to just be from Stiles’ childhood.

“That still gives you an hour, move your ass or we’re leaving without you.” With a small nod at both Isaac and Derek, she turned around to leave. “Have a good day, professors.”

“Derek.” Derek hadn’t even realized he had spoken out loud until he felt all eyes on him. “If you’re just Lydia, then I’m Derek. Like you said, no need to be so formal. I don’t actually like being called professor by my colleagues,” he explained quickly, fighting hard not to blush. He might have pulled it off because while Isaac was looking at him weirdly, he wasn’t outright laughing at him.

“Isaac,” his best friend offered immediately after. “And it’s very nice to have you back, Lydia. The Math department just wasn’t the same without you. I really missed seeing students cry right after my Psychology of Cults class.”

Lydia smiled widely at him—the first time Derek had ever seen her smile like that. She was absolutely gorgeous; no wonder Stiles was always around her. “Me? Isaac, I have had your students come crying to me, begging to be allowed late entry to one of my classes.”

“I don’t know whose idea it was to keep your introductory math class right next to mine, but I love it,” he answered honestly. Derek could see he was still looking at him from the corner of his eye, but he ignored him, keeping his attention on Lydia Martin.

Stiles marched over to Lydia and offered his arm to her, which she took gratefully. Derek saw another type of smile he hadn’t seen on her. While not as wide as the one she shot at Isaac, the smile was warm and completely sincere. “I knew you would come around, Stiles,” she said, almost too low for Derek to catch.

“I have no clue what the two of you have planned, or why you want me there, but we have 50 minutes. I hope you can walk fast in those death traps you have on,” he mentioned, signaling toward Lydia’s stilettos.

“Stiles, I can walk better in these shoes than you can barefoot. If you trip on your own feet and make me fall, I will make sure you wake up bald. And your hair is one of those things that are actually working for you.”

“I used to shave my head in high school.”

“I remember.”

“You said I looked okay!”

“That I did.”

Derek could still hear them bickering until they were too far down the hallway for him to make out what they were saying. Isaac and he remained silent for about 3 minutes, before his best friend decided it was time to grill him.

“Why do you always bring him here after class? Is this some weird attempt to make him fall in love with you? Normal people just ask other people out, you know. Your office—actually, your shared office—isn’t exactly romantic.” Isaac spoke way faster than he normally did, while closing the door to their office and going back to sit on Derek’s visitor’s chair.

“I love teaching right next to you?” Derek shot back, unable to get over that little comment.

“That is not what I said, but unlike you I do speak to other professors on the regular, and it’s nice having Lydia around. The man that was filling her position while she was away nearly as fun, and the students didn’t seem to want to cry every time. It was as if you were replaced by Professor Harris. No one likes taking history with that guy, he’s weird.” Isaac was speaking slower now, and Derek realized he was sidestepping what he wanted to say.

“Out with it, Lahey.”

“You’re jealous of Lydia Martin. But I don’t think she’s dating Stiles. Sure, they seem close, but I don’t think they’re dating. I don’t get those vibes.”

“Vibes?” Derek asked incredulously.

“Yes, vibes, Derek. Like those very strong vibes I get from you because you really want to smooch Stiles within an inch of his life. Lydia and Stiles don’t have any perceivable sexual tension between them.”

Derek nodded, thinking about the interactions he had seen between the two adults, before the full meaning of what Isaac had just said dawned on him.

“Wait, no, I don’t…”

“It’s too late, bro. You gave yourself away,” Isaac interrupted, with a satisfied smile. He looked like a proud puppy.

Derek sighed. “Look, Stiles is not interested. And I am not interested in dating. So, it’s all for the best.”

“Derek, Stiles is interested. Why else would he follow your weird mating rituals and come to your office almost every day, or join your weird coffee run every morning at 6:30 am? I think you keep denying yourself the right to be happy, man. And I don’t know why, because while he is the weirdest person at this university, and that’s counting the students, he makes you smile and enjoy yourself in a way I haven’t really seen you do before.” Isaac spoke softly, but every word still felt much too heavy for Derek to really digest.

“He was here because he needed a ride to the faculty dinner, nothing more Isaac.”

“Yeah, but you do know he is friends with the entire Humanities faculty, right? Not just you. I think he’s roommates with Kira Yukimura, from English Literature and Asian Studies. But I’ve also seen him around with Vernon Boyd from Archeology, and Malia Tate from Dramatic Arts. I think they’re all like friends from before they started teaching here. He could ask any of them for a ride, but he made his way here—and to be clear, we are not the closest building to the labs—to ask you for a ride to dinner.”

Derek stared slightly open mouthed at Isaac. “How do you even know all that?”

“Like I said, I hang with the rest of the professors. You should know that too, really, since they’re mostly from your college.”

And Derek knew all of those professors, had shared a conversation with them here and there. But he didn’t know they were friends with Stiles.

“I have to go, I have class. But think about it. I’ll see you for a late lunch after your Shakespeare class?” Isaac asked, while making his way to his desk to pack his already marked exams in his bag, grabbing a few other things from his desk as well. Derek only nodded, before being left alone with his thoughts.

Stiles Stilisnki was friends with all these people?

[tomanpeach]

I loveeeee the boyfriendification of ran haitani! It was sooo good to see a new side of him with the reader. It was well written! Love it some much! If your request is open, I was wondering if you could do something within the line, when they are officially dating and some random chick in the bonten office or club trying to get into ran's pants. I know he wouldn't do such a thing but wanna make it a misunderstanding, like the reader went in the room or something then she saw the girl was sitting on Ran's lap but he wasn't doing anything the girl just push him down and kinda force herself to be on top of him but sadly the timing before he can brush her off his lap the reader came in and misunderstood the thing. He's trying to explain grabbing her and begging her to listen for a while but the reader is hurt so she rushed back home to her apartment without letting him explain because she was hurt. I dunno why I wanna see him desperately trying to explain to you and win you back for days or weeks. I am a sucker for crying man child. Wanna see my boy cry for a girl for the first time in his life 🥺 I just love angst to comfort fluff.

-🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋🦋

a/n: 18+!!!! NSFW!!! SWEET BUTTERFLY ANON I AM !!!!! LOSIN !!!! MY MIND!!!! I LOVED THIS IDEA SO MUCH THANK YOU FOR IT AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND WORDS! THIS ACCIDENTALLY GOT SO LONG AND IT ISN'T VERY PROOFREAD BUT I HOPE IVE DONE YOUR REQUEST JUSTICE PLS ENJOY 💛💛

content: ANGST/COMFORT, sex!!! (maybe unprotected? it's unclear), language, drinking/smoking/ lil bit drug references, more talking kinda fucked up about women knock it off sanzu!!!!

word count: 4,492

"sanzu, you motherfucker..." ran hisses as he arrives at the address in the group text. bonten was having a huge event tonight, celebrating some major investment that was panning out exactly as koko had anticipated. mikey had given sanzu the reigns on party planning as he objectively partied the hardest out of the entire organization.

but sanzu was sanzu and ran wasn't sure why he had expected anything other than a party at the strip club.

sitting in his car, hands tightening on the steering wheel, ran stared up at the brick building, at its neon pink XXX sign and the flashing silhouettes of girls that danced beneath it. he mumbled a few curses under his breath, unsure of what he should do.

on one hand, he knew he was expected– no, required– to show up tonight as one of bonten's executives. on the other hand, the thought of sitting around getting drunk with half naked girls all night while you, his girl, was waiting in his apartment for him to get home, made him feel a little queasy.

ran worried about pushing you too far. he worried about it all the time. when he'd take business phone calls in the other room so you wouldn't hear, when he'd come home with injuries he couldn't explain, when he'd give some shitty explanation and disappear for a week, he always braced himself for you to leave him. and he wouldn't blame you. he had never been the most patient or flexible person, and he doubted he would be able to put up with such treatment if the roles were reversed.

but you were everything ran wasn't. and he loved that about you. where he was coarse and unforgiving, you were tender and compassionate. every time he was sure you'd had enough, every time he came to you with an apology and a bad excuse, you had kissed him and held him and understood that it was out of his control. fuck he loved you for that.

one thing you and ran did have in common, however, was your jealousy. and ran knew that finding out he had spent the night at a strip club, even without him doing a single thing with anyone else, would hurt you deeply. especially because you knew him so well, and would know that he hadn't even wanted to be there in the first place.

massaging his temples with his fingers, ran sighs. he realizes he's dialed your number without thinking.

"hi hon," you answer on the second ring.

"hi baby," he finds himself smiling at the sound of your voice, already less tense.

"how's the party?" you ask. "is everything okay?"

"i didn't go in yet," he sighs again, resting his head against his hands. "it's at sanzu's fuckin' strip club, babe."

you're silent on the line. ran inhales deeply, tells himself to stay calm, but he can't. "please say something," he groans.

"i meaaaan," you draw out the word, trying to organize your thoughts. "that's not... ideal."

he exhales a laugh through his nose, finding it so amusing how you're always able to keep cool like this.

"well, you don't want to, like... i don't know..."

"i don't want to do a fucking thing with girls who aren't you," he finishes your sentence for you. "you know that, right?"

he thinks he can make out your sigh of relief over the phone.

"that makes me feel better," your tone changes. "ran, babe, it's a celebration, right? go have fun with your boys. i'm really glad you told me, i appreciate you being upfront like that."

"jus' didn't want you t'get mad n' shit," he mumbles, cutting the car's engine. "didn't wanna hurt your feelings. you know you're my girl."

"i know, baby," your sweet voice makes his heart swell. "and i'm not mad."

"thanks, gorgeous," ran prepares himself to get out of the car. "i'm gonna be home as soon as i can to see you." he stuffs a pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket and steps out into the cold night air, "and every time i see titties tonight, i'm gonna imagine yours instead, okay, baby?"

you hang up on him.

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

when ran had gotten home that night, it was nearly 4 in the morning. he had tried so hard to come in quietly, to tip toe into the bedroom and curl up at your side without waking you. but he quickly found that he was much too drunk to maneuver his long limbs with any amount of grace, and ended up missing the doorway completely, walking straight into the wall of the hallway. you jolted awake at the loud fuck! he blurted out.

you had helped him take off his shoes and strip down to his boxers after that. once you were back in bed and he'd pulled you into his arms, you listened to him tell you about his night. he'd had fun letting loose with his boys, but whined about missing you, seeing too many women who weren't you, wishing it had been you up there dancing for him. before he fell asleep, he asked you to remind him when he was sober that he wanted a strip tease from you. you didn't, but thought it was funny and cute that he had sounded so delighted by the idea.

but now it's been a week since the party, and you've nearly forgotten all about it. the only parts that stick in your memory from that night are the ones when ran had called you from the parking lot, a nervous wreck about being in a situation which could have hurt you, and where he told you how much he had missed you while hugging you close to his chest after the event.

"what are you thinking about?" ran's voice snaps you back to the present. he's coming back over to you from his liquor cart, placing a glass of whiskey into your hands.

"you," you tease, sipping the drink, watching his face light up.

"good," he purrs, cupping your cheek and pulling you toward him for a kiss. the taste of whiskey and cigarettes on his tongue is so familiar on your own.

taking the glass from your hands, he steps forward, backing you up until you feel the firm edge of his desk at the back of your legs. he puts the drinks aside and lifts you easily onto the dark, wooden surface.

tonight was special for two reasons. the first, was that it marked six months since you and ran had officially been together. he never failed to remind you that it was his longest relationship ever, and you took pride in the fact that you had been the lucky one who got him for so long. and second, tonight ran had allowed you into his office at the bonten building for the very first time.

granted, it was mostly because it was around the corner from the restaurant where you'd had your anniversary dinner and by the time you got to ran's car, he was desperate to get you alone. the crowded restaurant parking lot was not an option, his apartment was too far, and, after calculating that not many people would be in the office with all the shipments coming in this weekend, ran decided it was worth the risk.

he stands between your legs, kissing you hungrily. a hand remains behind your head to hold your face to his. you fist his jacket, tugging him closer. "got another anniversary gift for you, baby." you laugh breathlessly as his words fall just sort of sexy and land somewhere around cheesy porno dialogue. you love him so much that it's still endearing. he fumbles with his belt, sliding you closer with a hand at your lower back.

he tugs down the front of his pants to free his throbbing length. he's painfully hard already, been yearning to feel you around him all night. you scoot your hips closer to the edge of the desk, pulling up your dress to your hips. "good girl," his voice is low in your ear. the praise sends a spark of desire through your body. you manage to slide your panties halfway down your legs and kick them off before ran is nudging your thighs apart with his hands.

"gorgeous," he remarks, spreading your pussy lips with his fingers. he coats his fingertips in some of the arousal that's already leaking from your needy hole. "such a good girl. you get so fuckin' wet for me, don't you, angel?"

you whimper and give a nod, wrapping your arms around his neck to brace yourself. six months and you still haven't gotten used to his size. you're privately grateful for it, the way every time he fucks you feels like the very first time. and you can tell from the lewd way he groans as he presses inside you that he feels the same way.

gasping for breath as he bottoms out, you can't hold back the whines that are escaping your lips. "why are you so noisy?" he teases, tugging down the front of your dress to expose your tits to him. "i haven't even done anything yet."

he punctuates the point by pulling back and thrusting up into you roughly. you cling to his shoulders, crying out with each snap of his hips as he gets into a rhythm. the way he's pounding into you is making you feel lightheaded. your face is buried in his neck and with every breath you inhale the familiar scent: cologne, cigarettes, whiskey, soap. everything is ran, the sharp press of his fingertips into your hips, the stretch inside your tight walls, the hot breath fanning over your cheek as he pants with exertion.

his thrusts get sloppy, you realize he isn't going to last much longer. one of his hands slips between your bodies, fingers searching for your swollen clit. when he finds it, you moan against his throat, incoherent sounds mixed with swear words. you hear him chuckle, "you like how i play with you, baby? fuck, you're so fuckin' sexy." your hips are jerking with a mind of their own at the stimulation, and soon you're cumming, clenching around him impossibly tight. "shit," he hisses through gritted teeth. "gonna make me fuckin' cum." "p-please," you whimper, hands fisting his hair. "please please please." your pleading is enough to finish him off, and he explodes inside you with a primal grunt, head thrown back in pleasure.

you both relish in your releases, chests heaving, the room filled with the sounds of your labored breathing as you come down from the high. ran leans in, kissing across your collarbones. his lips make their way up your neck and trace the line of your jaw. finally he holds your face in both his hands and kisses your forehead.

you feel a swell of pride in your chest, knowing that only you get to see this side of him. you hope he can see the adoration in your eyes as you smile back at him and, just in case he can't, you pull him close, arms still draped around his shoulders, to whisper right in his ear, "i love you."

ran turns his head, catching your lips and kissing you for a long moment as his response. it was rare that ran said i love you back. in fact, he'd only said it a total of three times throughout your relationship. twice during sex, and once when he was blacked out drunk. but you didn't mind it, really. he showed his love in other ways. ways that came more easily to him. lingering touches, extravagant gifts, weekend getaways to have time alone, the tenderness in his kisses.

"yeah, it just doesn't feel right sayin' that shit," he'd laughed on that drunken night. "not even to rin. just feels... i don't know... fuckin' weird comin' outta my mouth." you had nodded, drunk as well but not enough that you hadn't remembered the conversation the next day. he'd grabbed your hand abruptly, squeezing it tightly to get your attention. "obviously, i fuckin love you," he had said matter of factly when you looked over at him. "so i don't have to say it all the time, right?" you had assured him that he didn't have to say it if he didn't feel comfortable. you already knew.

ran retrieved your panties from the floor and helped you get re-dressed where you sat on the desk. "your office is nice," you say nonchalantly, grinning at him as he does up his belt buckle. he smirks, "a lot nicer with you in it."

you hop down from his desk, "i should get going, hon." ran's face falls. he tries to convince you to stay, but knows that you're too responsible to not go home and finish up your big project for work. "don't work too hard," he teases, leaning down to kiss you. you smile against his lips, "not a chance." ran lifts his office line, calls for a car to take you home, and then you're gone.

ran drops into his desk chair, heaving a contented sigh. he's already missing you, wondering when he'll see you next and hoping it's soon. he's shuffling the papers that have been displaced across his desk back into some semblance of a neat stack when the door to his office bursts open.

at first ran thinks it's you, that you'd forgotten something. but then dance music and high pitched giggles come streaming in from the hallway. "whoops!" sanzu slumps in the doorway, reaching for the doorknob but stops when he sees ran seated at his desk inside. "raaaan," sanzu slurs, seemingly unable to process the death glare he's being given. "whuddarya doin 'ere, maaan!"

"what are you doing here?" he raises an eyebrow, rising from his seat.

"mikey's gone," sanzu's grin widens. "koko's gone, kaku's gone, fuckin' everybody's gone! so i brought my hooooess!"

ran watches with judgment filled eyes as three half naked girls stumble down the hall past sanzu, laughing and yelling and presumably also high on the same shit sanzu had taken.

"wow," is all ran can manage.

"you should come partyyy!" sanzu's face catches up to his words a few seconds later and he beams at ran, pupils dilated to fill nearly his whole iris.

"no thanks," ran scoffs disdainfully. "shut the fuckin' door."

"noooo, why are you over here??" a woman's voice whines, high and nasally from the hall. sanzu looks over his shoulder and just laughs. "i was all alone in there 'n you promised me a dick in my fucking throooat!"

the woman finally appears next to sanzu, and ran recognizes her as one of the dancers from his club. she's topless and wearing a pair of bright red panties and glittery red heels. she whines again, leaning into sanzu's chest tits-first.

ran winces, finding the whole situation to be unbelievably cringey.

"oh!" the stripper cries, peeking into the office. "i remember you from the club the other night! tight suit, tight ass, drinking whiskey, right?"

sanzu laughs like a hyena and disappears from the doorway. ran swears he's gonna beat the shit out of him one day.

"would you shut my fucking door please?" ran asks again, getting seriously irritated with sanzu's antics ruining what had been a perfect evening.

"oh, sure, sweetheart," the stripper purrs, stepping inside and pulling the door shut behind her. ran wants to tear his hair out.

"no, fuck," he stands abruptly. "can you get out of here? i'm not a part of this fucking party."

"not yet, handsome," she slinks toward him. "but you can be."

she places her tiny manicured hands on his shoulders and shoves him back down into his chair. he's so startled he can't react, even as she sits herself down on his lap, her hands running down his chest.

"big man like you must have a pretty big–"

"what the fuck?"

ran's eyes nearly pop out of his skull. you're standing in the doorway to his office, looking like you'd just witnessed a fucking murder. and he's sitting under a topless stripper who was about to ask about the size of his cock. ran feels his brain short circuit.

you march into the office, snatch the purse you'd left behind from the chair near the door and disappear as quickly as you'd came. the look on your face was one ran had never seen before but anyone would've been able to tell that it was one of pure, unadulterated betrayal.

ran shoves the woman from his lap. she stumbles backward, nearly falling to the floor, "hey!" but ran can't hear her, he's already halfway down the hall after you.

you almost break into a sprint trying to get the fuck out of the building. it's getting harder to see from the angry, heartbroken tears that are already burning in your eyes. you hear footsteps echo in the corridor alongside your own and suddenly ran's hand is around yours, pulling you to a stop.

"hold on, you need to listen to me," he blurts, voice sounding strained.

"let. go."

"i'm fuckin' serious, that wasn't what it looked like!"

"i don't want to hear you say a fucking word right now, i don't want to be around you, i don't want to look at you–" you tug your hand out of his but he lurches forward and grabs your forearm.

“STOP IT! FUCK! can you just fucking listen to me??"

his grip is too tight. the look on his face is one of frustration, of desperation. the look of getting fucking caught, you think. you can’t look at him anymore.

“no, i need to go right fucking now. i can't look at you," you jerk your arm away from him sharply and continue down the hall. your head is swimming, you need to get the hell out of the building before you pass out or throw a punch or start fucking sobbing.

ran lets out an exasperated yell, stomping back to his office and slams the door. he lashes out, swinging his arm across his desk. your unfinished glasses of whiskey hit the bookcase and shatter. ran can't fucking think, he's seeing red. he can't decide what would make him feel better: to take his baton to sanzu's face, push the fucking stripper down a flight of stairs, drive his car off a bridge–

"what the fuck are you doing?"

his head snaps toward the voice, practically snarling at the intrusion. he blinks at the man in the doorway.

"heard you screaming from down the hall. seriously, what the fuck's going on?" rindou looks deeply concerned.

ran deflates, collapsing in one of the dark leather chairs nearby. his large hands drag down his face, "ev'rything got so fucked up, rin, fuckin' hell."

rindou leans against the doorway watching as his older brother unravels, crossing his arms across his chest. "i saw your girl leaving. she looked pissed, what'd you do?"

"i didn't do shit," ran snaps. "not a god damn fucking thing. but she saw one of sanzu's whores in here and thinks i'm–" he heaves out a sigh to stop himself from screaming again– "fuckin' other girls or some shit! an' i'm fuckin' not!" a long leg shoots out and sends a side table flying across the room. rindou watches it go. he's never seen his brother like this before. not over lost fights, not over gang shit, and definitely not over a fucking girl.

"have you fought with her before?" rindou asks curiously. ran's head is in his hands but he wordlessly shakes it no. "well, then you're due for one. shit happens, go n' apologize, be a fuckin' grown up." ran remains in his pitiful position. "you actually like her, right?"

"i fuckin' love her," ran's voice is merely a whimper.

"you piece of shit," rindou scoffs. ran's head shoots up to give him a glare. "that's all the more reason to go fix this."

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

fixing this was much easier said than done. for nearly a week you dodged his calls. 54 to be exact, with 54 accompanying voicemails that you haven't listened to. after hearing his voice shaking in the first one, you decided you couldn't bear it. you had also left 77 texts of explanations, apologies, desperate pleas to talk with him, all unanswered as well.

it felt like you'd been crying since the moment you'd gotten home from the bonten offices. the ache in your chest refused to go away. you replayed the scene in your head over and over, wanting so badly to trust ran but seeing very few ways that the situation could have been misinterpreted.

how could you have been so stupid? you ask yourself, curled up in your bed. he's never been in a relationship that meant anything, why would you be any different? he was just at a fucking strip club!

your phone vibrates near you, lost somewhere in your blankets. you've considered blocking ran's number, but know that with him working in the line of work that he does, he'd find a way around that. you stare up at the ceiling as your phone buzzes away, the sound bringing you to tears again. sitting up, you work to excavate it and are surprised by the messages at the top of the screen.

i'm losing my fucking mind here baby

i need to talk to you

i'm coming over i still have a key

as if on cue, you hear your front door unlock. you scurry to your bedroom door and sit with your back against it, heart pounding in your ears. there's a knock, the wood vibrating against you. "baby, can we please talk?" ran's voice is pleading. "i'm fuckin' begging, here." "i don't know what to say to you," you whimper, trying to hold in a sniffle. he hears it and it feels like a slap in the face. "baby, please let me come in there and hold you." "no," you grumble, swiping away at a few tears that have managed to escape.

listening to your movements, ran realizes where you are. crouching carefully, he maneuvers his long limbs to the floor. separated only by the few inches of your door, ran heaves a sigh. it's the closest he's been to you in a week. "will you listen if i talk?" he asks softly. you don't reply.

"well," he inhales shakily. "i, uh. fuck. i know you don't believe me, but i really didn't do what it looks like. and i know if i saw you in that fuckin' position i wouldn't believe it either. but i need you to trust me. please. being away from you is like–fuck!" he bangs his head against the door accidentally. "everything feels like that! this is the shittiest week of my fuckin' life! and i've gotten fucking stabbed before! this is worse!"

you're allowing your tears to fall freely now. the aching is getting worse, the desire to believe him and the feelings of betrayal are carving out a hole in your chest as they battle it out. you hug your knees, sniffling. "i just don't know how i can believe you," you manage in a quiet voice. "you said you wouldn't even believe it either."

ran wrestles his phone from his pants pocket. he had prepared a sort of hail mary specifically for right now. he was praying it was enough. "here." his phone slides under your bedroom door. it's open to his voice memos. you eye the play buttons, wondering what could possibly be on the recordings. figuring it couldn't hurt worse than anything you'd already felt this week, you reach for his phone and play the first memo.

"state your name," ran's voice is gruff, his business tone. another voice responds, "sanzu haruchiyo." "go ahead," ran orders. "okay," you hear sanzu clear his throat. "well, i was uh, partying, at the office. and i went into ran's office by mistake. and one of my whor– sorry, um, one of my friends came up and saw ran. she thought he was hot, i guess, and she went in to try and get at him. i left them alone, which was fucked up of me, i guess." you click the next memo, dragging the playhead forward a bit. when the audio picks up it's a woman's voice, "–him, but he definitely said he wanted me to leave. said to shut the fuckin' door. the ecstasy was making me horny and i just thought i'd try my luck, but he kept tellin' me to leave." "and did ran haitani ever reciprocate any of your advances?" "no, baby doll, you didn't."

despite the tears pouring from your eyes, you allow yourself to laugh. "you're so fucking stupid," you choke out, pausing the audio. "this is so ridiculous."

"it's not! if it gets you to fuckin' believe me, it's not!" ran feels so fucking close and his eyes start to prickle. "there's more. i got rindou, i got the doorman, i got security, i got the fuckin' janitor who heard some shit from the stairwell–"

ran catches himself before he can tumble backwards as the door pulls away from his back. he looks up and sees you standing there in the doorway in your pajamas, eyes watery and red.

ran haitani hadn't cried since infancy. not on the playground, not when he and rindou were left on their own, not after getting beaten nearly to death or any of the startling number of fucked up things he'd endured in his life. but when you climbed into his lap and wrapped your arms around his middle, when he felt relief for the first time in many days at having the only girl he'd ever loved and almost lost back in his arms, he couldn't hold it in. he buried his face in your shoulder, breathing in your smell, curling his fingers into your hair, hugging you tighter against his chest.

"say you fuckin' forgive me," he begs, choking on a sob. "need to know that you know i'd never do some shit like that. never hurt you so fuckin' bad." you pull away to look at his face, mystified by the sight in front of you. you wipe at his wet cheeks with your hands. "i forgive you," you're still crying, not sure if you'll be able to stop. "you did a whole fucking deposition to prove your innocence. of course i fuckin' forgive you." his lips press to yours, laughing into the kiss in disbelief. "i love you," he says against your mouth, so softly you almost wonder if you'd made it up. but then he kisses both your cheeks and says it again in your ear, "i fuckin' love you." kissing all over your face, he repeats the words like a mantra, like they're fucking demanding to be said.

[kuroosweakness]

domestic things the haikyuu boys do to show that they care

 ↳ it all seems too good to be true. that’s because they’re not real :’ 

━ sakusa kiyoomi 

- always let you shower first so you can get all the warm water. (but don’t too long, don’t leave him without any hot water at all :’) (or i guess u guys can shower together ... ) 

- puts your towel in the dryer before your shower. he has many, many reasons for this: 

your towel will be nice and cozy when you walk out the shower 🥺 

he’ll have to hand the towel to you, meaning he’ll have a reason to go inside the warm, steamy bathroom 

he’ll be able to wrap you tightly with the towel the moment you step out. sakusa can’t leave you abandoned with just a towel, so naturally, he’ll sit you on the bathroom counter (even with you sitting on the counter, he’s still taller <3) and dry your hair, comb your hair, pat your body dry, lotion your body, blow-dry your hair, and all the other steps of your skin-care routine 

imagine standing next to each other, staring into the mirror as you both brush your teeth, him softly side-butting you, you side-butting him back (except he moved to the side and now you just awkwardly side-butted the air ... there goes his satisfactory smirk 🙄<3) 

(just before drying your hair, he’ll rub strands of your hair between his palms to make it stick up, and stand back to admire the view. you’re adorable) 

(oh to be pampered by sakusa :’)) how does it feel to have won life?) 

(it hurts knowing we’ve never seen animated sakusa smile) 

━ kita shinsuke 

- he always walks on the outer side of the sidewalk when the two of you are walking side by side to keep you safe from the road. it’s a small, subtle gesture, but a gesture that doesn’t go overseen. this also means his left hand will always be holding your right hand 

- picks things up for you. on his way home, he’ll always call and ask if you want anything. if you have a delivery package you need to pick up, he’ll do it for you. if you want a cup of coffee from your favorite cafe, he’ll buy one for you :)

- he loves and cares for your family like his own. this goes a long way. it truly shows how important you are to him

(to those who doesn’t have a very ... good family or a family that wouldn’t be interested in caring for your partner, i’m sorry to hear about that babes :’( i can relate, we’re in this together!)

━ oikawa tōru 

- always talks in terms of “we” instead of “i”, “me”, and “you”. he always includes you in conversations so you never feel left out! whenever you are, he wants you to feel acknowledged and included. 

- defends you in every conversation. if someone were to talk badly or make unwanted remarks about you, oikawa will be right there to drag them down.  oikawa may talk a lot but it’s gotten him the advantage to be really good with his words. try winning an argument with him, you can’t (unless ur iwaizumi lol)   

- anyone that stares at you for too long, he’ll give his harshest glare. oikawa’s one of those people who can just sense bad vibes from people. he tells you all about his instincts so no “bad guys” can get to you

- relationship with oikawa = lots of pillowtalk 

━ miya atsumu 

- if you carry purses/bags around, he always offers to hold onto your purse/bag when you go to the bathroom. he’ll casually sling it over his shoulder like it’s his own, no awkwardness here! he’s proud to be your boyfriend and it shows. 

(guys who carries purses for their partners with confidence > other guys)

- if the two of you walk out of a store into pouring rain without an umbrella, atsumu will tell you to wait inside the store while he goes to start the car. he’ll drive to the front of the store so you won’t have to get wet from the rain 

(i just know atsumu’s one of those guys who looks so hot while driving without even trying- darn him <3) 

━ akaashi keiji 

- beings extra everything around for you. band-aids, hair-ties, gum, cash, an extra jacket in his trunk, a cup in case of stomach-emergencies, and even a pair of socks in case the rain seeps through your shoes. he has it all. feeling safe is one of the many good feelings you feel around akaashi 

- when you share a small umbrella, akaashi always makes sure it completely covers you, even if it means water is dripping down his shoulder. 

- when he comes across a good book, a good movie, good song, he’ll have that spark in his beautiful eyes when he tells you all about them. he wants you to also enjoy the good in his life :) (he also tells you about his past mistakes/incidents to warn you about the bad) 

━ bokuto kōtarō

- goes to bed before you, lying on your spot of the bed to warm it up. when you walk into the bedroom, you’ll see bo’s head sticking out of the covers with a huge grin. he’s so cute without even trying djkfldj 

- adores massaging you. he’ll regularly massage you, run his hand across your tummy, sit you in his lap, squeeze you with his biceps, play with your thighs, yeah it’s quite obvious how much he loves you. 

rough day? regular day? be prepared to lay on your tummy so bokuto can give you a massage :) don’t be too surprised when he attempts new massage moves that “our professional massager did on us! (msby)” 

you know what else he loves? when you massage him! he loves coming home with sore muscles to a home-made massage by the person who never fails to make him smile. not the best massage in the world, but you’re trying and he loves it more than explainable. 

- brings you the remote without complaint. puts your plate back to the kitchen without complaint. puts your clothes in the laundry basket without complaint. 

━ miya osamu 

- always offers to carry the grocery bags. even if he can barely see past the pile of bags in his arms, he’ll insist on carrying them. his competitive side comes out during times like these; he’ll try to impress you by carrying more and more each time. even with how heavy the groceries may be, he hasn’t dropped/broken anything ...yet! 

- leaves the last bit of food for you. last slice of pizza? yours. last bit of milk left? for your cereal. last piece of cake? yours. he never eats the last piece without checking with you first, no matter how hungry he is. eating food without leaving you any is like betrayal. 

- blocks the sunlight out of your eyes with his arm/hand. especially in the morning when the sunlight glares through the window. 

━ suna rintarō 

- charges your phone for you. sometimes, he’ll tap on your lockscreen to check your battery percentage when you go to sleep and charge it when the battery bar is low. you don’t have to worry about forgetting to charge your phone with suna around. 

- turns off his phone when you talk to him so you can have his full attention

- untangles your mess of cords. he always glares and heavily sighs whenever he sees tangled cords. no one knows how, but suna’s exceptionally good with untangling stuff 

━ kuroo tetsurō

- cleans the hair from your shower for you. he really doesn’t like it, but he knows you hate it more, which is why he does it for you. even though it’s not a favorite activity of his, he doesn’t really mind, it’s natural. 

- he’ll talk to the people/call the people you don’t want to. if you don’t want to say your drive-thru order, he’ll do it for you. if you want to know the price of a shirt but there isn’t a tag, he’ll talk to a store-worker for you. instead of being annoyed at you for “not being to do simple things”, he’ll help you out without a single word of complaint. there’ll be some teasing, but no harm done. he’s very understanding and patient

(my bias is showing. he’s my comfort person, what can i do :’) 

- he made up a code with you. four tugs on the hem of his shirt means you’re not feeling well/uncomfortable. (there are also many other signals and code words)

this is especially helpful when you’re out at parties, big events, malls, etc etc. as soon as he feels your tugs, he’ll whip around and study your face, leading you to a quieter place to ask how you’re feeling. if you want to go home, then home it is. 

[maaarijaaa]

Mine❦Sherlock Holmes Part Four

Sherlock Holmes x Reader

Summary: Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective in the world. After finishing a case, he decided to visit Enola and his mother. On the first day of the visit he laid his eyes on a beauty, you

Disclaimer: I do NOT allow for my work to be translated or posted anywhere else on this app or other platforms. English is not my first language so let me know if I made any mistakes!

Masterlist 

Series Masterlist  

Part Three

A/N: Hello guys, here is the part four. I know this one is not the best but I was thinking writing a smut in the next part since they are alone. Anyways, I am so sorry that I have been changing dates very often but I had so much to do with school that I did not have time to write. Thank you for 193 followers🫶🏻🥹

Words count: 1.2k

Sherlock had the best day of his life.

He opened his heart to you and told you how he felt. Turns out you feel the same way. Right now you were sitting next to a tree, not far from his mothers house. 

A few days later, you met up again. It was not long before the event and surprisingly, your father liked that you will be attending the event with Sherlock. He was first unsure since it was Mycroft’s brother but later 

You laid your head on his shoulder while he smoked his pipe. 

It was a beautiful spring day. 

Later on Sherlock turned his attention to you. His crystal blue eyes admiring your y/e/c. 

“I am glad your dad liked me or otherwise I would probably see you with Mycroft.” 

“I am honestly surprised by his reaction. He was doing anything to make me go on that stupid event with your brother.”

“Does Mycroft know about this?”

“Not yet but my father will tell him today.”

After that, you two just looked at each other. Sherlock gave your cheeks a kiss while he continued with smoking his pipe, and you laid your head on his shoulder again. 

But what you did not know was that Mycroft knows every detail about Sherlock being your plus one. 

Mycroft’s POV

After the day Sherlock opened his heart to you, Mycroft has been furious. 

He wanted to destroy whatever was going between you two. He still remembered the day your father told him that you will be attending the event with his brother, even though he found out about that before your father did. 

He had to come up with a plan. 

The thought of you being in love with Sherlock made him sick. What's even worse, is that Mycroft would lose his business opportunity with your father. 

So he had to get help from someone, and that someone was Enola. 

He will not ask her to help him ruin the relationship between you and Sherlock, but rather ask her for some information. 

He went down stairs to the library and luckily found his sister there.  

“Hello Enola, I was wondering if y-” 

“What do you want, Mycroft?” 

“What? Can't I spend some time with my little sister?” 

“Well of course you can, but you always come to me only when you need help. You have not spoken a single word with me since you came back. Not to mention that when mom went missing years ago, you sent me to a girl school and took away the money my mother left me!”

“First of all, that was my money. Second of all, you were not behaving like a real woman so a girl school was the best option.” 

“That does not explain why you are always hateful towards me!”  

“No, I am not-” 

“YES YOU ARE!” 

Enola waited a few seconds before she spoke up again. 

“Now leave me alone. I don't have time to listen to you.”

Mycroft was honestly shocked and pretended not to know everything he did to his sister. Their mother and Sherlock did not know this but there was an incident that happened when Enola was a toddler. 

Flashback

Mycroft just came back from his trip in Italy and brought a vase as a souvenir. The vase was so beautiful, he could not take his eyes off of it. He putted it on the kitchen table. 

That one specific day, he was supposed to watch over his six years old sister, but since the business was more important, he left the house leaving little Enola all by herself.  

He came back in a good mood because he found some really good business partners, but his mood got destroyed when he saw the vase lying on the ground, broken into a million pieces. 

He ran to Enola’s room and saw that she was sleeping peacefully, but he thought that she did not deserve it because she destroyed the vase.  

“Enola, wake up now!!” 

“What did I do?” Her little voice sounded so innocent. 

“YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU DID YOU LITTLE BITCH!” 

He wanted to yell even more at his little sister but their mother came in the doorway. 

“Mycroft, what are you doing at such a late hour?!”  

“She destroyed my vase!” 

“It was not Enola, Mycroft! We had a visit from a little kitten this afternoon who jumped on the table and pushed the vase and it hit the ground and it broke. Now, apologize to your sister!”  

After that, Mycroft left the room feeling stupid. He did not feel guilty at all which is why Enola does not like talking to him. 

So now he had to come up with a better solution.. 

Your and Sherlock’s POV

You and Sherlock decided to head to your father's mansion. 

Your father was not home yet so you and Sherlock got to spend some time together, alone. You showed him around the mansion and after that went straight to your room. Sherlock was really fascinated by how many books you own. It was really unusual for a woman at the time to read and own so many books. 

You realized it was getting darker but did not want this to end, so you asked him something none of you expected. 

“Do you want to stay over? I have some pajamas you could borrow.” 

“I would love too, but where would I be sleeping?” 

“Well they are renovating the guest rooms, so you can sleep here with me!”

“That would be great ,but will your father approve of it?” 

“Don't worry about him. I will now go ask the help to pick up some clean sheets and a set of pj’s for you.”

After that you left the room leaving Sherlock alone in it. 

He was looking around the room when a certain painting caught his attention. It was a painting of a woman that looked exactly like you. He thought it was you for a second but then he read the date and realized that this was your mother. The painting was made a few years before you were even born. 

You later came back with the helpers who began changing the sheets and you gave Sherlock the pj set. He went to the bathroom to get changed. He came out to see you already in pj’s and laying at your side of the bed. He joined you. 

“Are the pj’s good?” 

“They are really comfy, thank you!” 

You stared at each other before sharing a kiss. His lips were so soft and you melted instantly when you felt his lips on yours. You have only known each other for a week but that did not stop you from falling in love. You and Sherlock wanted to start a relationship but decided that baby steps would be a better option. 

You kissed each other good night and drifted off to sleep. 

You dreamed about your future with Sherlock. You dreamed about marriage and having kids with him, but was he actually willing to give you all of that?

Tag list: @summersong69 , @muffinsssss , @mis-lil-red , @cynic-spirit , @stfu-im-a-gay-popcorn

[lathalea]

Hellos! For the imagine ask game I was wondering if I may request a Fili fic 🍌? A small thing about me is I love reading books :3

@dark-angel-is-back Hello! Thanks for joining the fun 💙💙💙 Your imagine is here! Surprise!

Tagging @lelapine (you sent a very similar ask, but unfortunately it happened after I closed my ask box for this event; I hope you'll enjoy this story anyway!) and my two favorite certified Fili Simps @laurfilijames and @guardianofrivendell (hope you don't mind) :)

🍌 Forbidden love with Fili

Warnings: slightly M content here and there.

This is going to be delicious:

Kurdelê - my heart

* * *

Some time passed since Erebor was reclaimed, but Fili still had problems adjusting to all his duties as a prince and heir to the throne. He understood the need for all the trade and diplomacy lessons uncle Thorin insisted on, but he couldn’t understand why he had to wear all those opulent clothes, including a golden circlet on his head, and withstand all the constant bowing and complimenting from everyone around. He preferred the simple life he led in the Blue Mountains or on the road, even though it was a thing of the past. So he soldiered on, trying to do everything he could to be worthy of his new role.

Unfortunately, with the weight of his title and all the ridiculous privileges came his personal menace. His chambermaid. You. He wasn’t fond of the idea of having servants, but his mother explained that it was considered a great honor to become a servant of the house of Durin and a way for the common folk to earn some money. And one of the duties of the future king was making sure his people had decent work. It was also a way for them to show their gratitude for reclaiming their homeland. He had no other option than to suck it up and allow his servant to pamper him every day.

The problem was, you were the most annoying person he had ever met in his entire life. He liked to sleep in, but you were there at his chambers at dawn every single day, waking him up and filling the air with friendly chatter and bustling about, making everything ready for him. He never cared about breakfasts, but you made sure he always had a hearty meal first thing in the morning. Yes, it was delicious, but it also contained too many fruits and vegetables for his taste. What was wrong with a simple meal consisting of a chunk of meat and a few pieces of cheese anyway? You weren’t all bad, you made sure that he had enough pipeweed (but you liked to mumble something about his lungs whenever he smoked), along with clean clothes and perfectly polished braid cuffs for every occasion. Yes, you polished them from time to time and then oiled them properly to make sure they shone against his golden mane. That was nice, but you had that annoying habit of humming whenever you worked on them, sitting by the table, with your back towards him, your shapely bottom pressed firmly against the chair, and he would wonder… No, he wouldn’t. He would simply become even more annoyed by your presence, your melodic voice, your long hair cascading down your shoulders, your brilliant eyes, and by the way your clothes seemed to cling to your figure in some very interesting places. You were too annoying for your own good.

Let’s face it. Fili was enamored with you like a schoolboy, but he wouldn’t admit it to himself. Seeing you every morning as you walked in through the door to his bedchamber, swaying your hips slightly made him want to… turn away and cover the general area of his hips with an extra layer of furs. So annoying!

There were many beautiful and clever highborn Dwarves of every gender in the court in Erebor. Dis and Balin hinted at the possibility of him marrying one of them soon, but Fili wasn’t interested in any of them. None of them could match the way you… annoyed him every single day, morning to evening.

Working as the prince’s maid wasn’t your chosen job. You loved books and wanted to be a librarian, but apparently the Great Library was still getting restored and your services were not needed, so you had to earn your money elsewhere. When you started your job shortly after arriving in Erebor, you were sure that you would quit very soon after becoming a maid, the work seemed quite boring and repeatable.

Things changed when you met prince Fili for the first time. You were sure that it had to be a crime to look as handsome as he did. You had seen him before several times from a distance, but his looks from up close made butterflies dance in the pit of your stomach. Somehow, making his bed (and putting a lavender twig under his pillow every night to bring him sweet dreams), folding his clothes (and totally accidentally brushing your nose against the fabric, the smell of sandalwood, leather and sweet tobacco filling your nostrils), and bringing him his favorite chocolate chip cookies every afternoon as a snack (that you might or might not have baked on your own) wasn’t that bad.

Fili wasn’t a demanding employer and he didn’t require much help. The only problem was he seemed very annoyed with you, whatever you did. But you wouldn’t let him have the last word and very often your exchanges turned into verbal sparring matches. He complained about the abundance of vegetables in his diet, you complained about his smoking habits (even though you secretly liked the smell of tobacco and the peaceful look on his face when he smoked his pipe). He complained about you waking him up too early, you asked him whether he’d perhaps prefer to get up two hours earlier, just like you did, and so on, and so forth. After a while, you discovered that you actually enjoyed your little verbal jousts more than you should.

Since Fili spent a lot of time away from his chambers, fulfilling his princely duties or training with his double swords, you were often left to your own devices. Often, after cleaning his chambers, you would sit in the corner of his study with a book that you managed to sneak out of the library, thanks to your friend Ori’s help.

One day you were so immersed in the story you were reading that you didn’t notice Fili entering his chambers before it was too late. You jumped up and started apologizing for taking his favorite armchair but then his gaze fell on the book title and it turned out it was one of his favorites. To your surprise, he didn’t scold you. On the contrary - since that time you started talking about the books you both read. To your astonishment, the prince who previously seemed to be only a pretty face and some muscle, turned out to be an avid reader. Since the Quest Fili hadn’t had the opportunity to return to reading books but you rekindled that fire in him.

Fili hadn’t noticed how it happened but you started spending late evenings together by the fireplace, reading in silence. When you weren’t looking he would often look up from the pages of his book and admire your profile shining with the reflected light cast by the flames. Somehow you started becoming less and less annoying to him and more… kindred.

One evening when Fili returned to his chambers, he found you sobbing. He couldn’t believe his eyes. You, a sharp-tongued and one of the feistiest people he’d ever known, crying? With gentleness he didn’t know he had, he offered you comfort, wrapping his arms around you, his warmth enveloping you.

You finally told him that your family arranged a marriage between you and some elderly, widowed Dwarf, without even consulting you. You didn’t even know your future husband, but the honor of the family demanded that you follow the tradition and marry him, even if that was the last thing you wanted to do.

What you didn’t tell Fili was what you felt for him. Your impending wedding made you realize what really bloomed in your heart. Being a commoner and not a noble, you knew that you didn’t have a chance to marry him even if you returned your feelings, which you doubted. How could you marry someone else if your heart was not free? And what’s worse, your future husband wished for you to take care of his household and stop working altogether. With that marriage, your dream of becoming a librarian would never come through.

Fili reassured you that everything would be well and gave you another hug before you left for the night. You slept on a tear-stained pillow that night while the prince sat by the fireplace, smoking his pipe until dawn, never closing his eyes. He realized that it was impossible for you to be together, besides he didn’t think you would reciprocate his feelings, but he was going to help you as much as he could.

Next evening, when you were done with your work in his chambers, he told you that he had a plan. His aunt, his father’s sister, lived in the Blue Mountains, had a small bookstore there, and was in need of someone to help her with her work. In two days’ time, at dawn, a merchant caravan was leaving Erebor and you could accompany them all the way to the Blue Mountains. Fili gave you a letter to his aunt and told you it would help you get the job. This way you could escape and be free from your future husband.

Your eyes widened in disbelief and you thanked Fili, eagerly agreeing to his offer. You saw a glimpse of hope in his plan and wrapped your arms around him, hugging him closely, whispering words of gratitude. When you finally looked at him, you noticed how close his face was to yours, how brightly his eyes flickered with some hidden meaning... and then your lips met in a gentle kiss, sweet like a spring breeze. You didn’t want it to end, but it finally did.

Fili caressed your cheek and smiled sadly, “I wish I was a miner’s son in the Blue Mountains. I wish I could offer you more, Kurdelê.” “You offered me more than I’ve ever hoped for,” you whispered and kissed him once more before you left his rooms, a bittersweet secret filling your heart.

On the next day none of you mentioned what happened between you last night. Soon, you would be gone, never to return to Erebor, never to see Fili again. You both tried your best in these circumstances, offering each other faint smiles that refused to reach your eyes. In the evening, you said your goodbyes. You were to leave at dawn on the next day.

Fili woke up exactly at dawn, but there was no one to greet him cheerfully, no one to enter his bedchamber, no one to grumble at the heap of dirty clothes by the bed. You were gone from his life forever. He quickly left his rooms without breakfast and on the way to the training grounds he met Ori. The scribe didn't know about your secret escape and he was worried. He hadn’t seen you since the day before, and there was a very interesting story of the kings of Khazad Dûm he wanted you to read. Ori left it in Fili’s hands asking him to give it to you, and then he was gone before Fili could protest.

When Fili returned to his chambers late in the evening, he saw a familiar figure sleeping in his armchair. It was you. It couldn't be you. You were gone, traveling towards the Misty Mountains.... And yet it had to be you. Not understanding anything and not wanting to disturb your sleep, he carried you to his bed and covered with his quilt. While you slept, he read the story Ori gave him, resting on the bed, watching over you. He never noticed when he fell asleep beside you. None of you noticed how you ended up embracing each other in your sleep.

You both woke up hearing loud banging on the door. Suddenly the door opened and an angry Dwarf barged in, followed by Fili’s uncle, king Thorin, and several other Dwarves, Dis and Balin among them. “What does this mean?!” Fili shouted angrily and rose from the bed. Judging from the burned out candles, it had to be shortly before dawn. “Master Raur here dares to claim that you seduced his only child,” Thorin said calmly, but Fili could see the anger in his eyes whenever he looked at the Dwarf in question.

“Prince Fili did not…” you started, but Fili interrupted you. “I did! And now I wish to marry her, if she’ll have me,” the prince turned to you, the cuffs in his golden mane clinking.

“But we are not a noble family,” your father protested. “You will not trick me! She is to marry someone else!”

“I can marry whomever my heart chooses,” Fili replied to him and then turned towards you. “Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” He asked in a low voice, his tender gaze meeting yours. “Oh, Fili… I wish I could… I’m not a noble… It’s forbidden,” your voice trembled, feeling the eyes of everyone in the room on you. “You can, if you wish to,” Fili took your hands in his. “Long ago, King Thorogrim of the Orocarni clans married a seamstress, not a noble, because he loved her more than anyone else in the world. And they lived happily ever after.”

“They did?” You asked. “Does it mean… How do you know?” “Let’s just say I had an interesting read last night,” Fili chuckled. “Will you make me the happiest Dwarf in the world, Kurdelê?”

“I will,” you smiled as he took you in his arms.

As you glanced around the room, you saw Ori grinning at you happily.

The seven days of your wedding was the happiest time in your life. As king Thorin and princess Dis made the last toast to your happiness, Fili took you to your new, beautiful chambers you were to live in as a married couple. You spent the night in each others’ arms, exchanging words of love and caresses.

When the morning came and you were both getting ready to leave, you started making the bed, out of a habit. Fili stopped you and said, “Let me be the one who makes the bed for us from now on, my love.” You kissed him with a chuckle, and then he ran his fingers through your hair, and kissed you back. Then you felt you had to kiss him once more… and it turned out that the bed was going to be left unmade for quite a bit longer. Being Fili’s wife certainly turned out to be an adventure.

💨💨 Imagine Ask Game rules (asks closed) 💨💨

[letarasstuff]

Making the Voice quieter

(A/N): This was requested by an anon. I hope you like it!

Summary: Spencer finds out about his daughter's eating disorder, he will he react?

Warnings: Angst, discription of an eating disorder (bulemia to be more specific), discription of (binge) eating, bad body image, self hatred, abuse of pills (diet pills)

Wordcount: 2.2k

✨Masterlist✨

______________________________

Prison. Cat. Diana. All those things happened close to each other. Luckily a few months have passed since then and slowly everything settles down. Spencer is able to get his feelings sorted through, processing the events.

Ever since his imprisonment he follows a more or less strict routine, given the uncertainty coming with his job. Spencer still tries to keep it up. So is every Friday dedicated to buying the majority of groceries and needed non food articles.

Sometimes (Y/N) tags along, other days she already has plans with her friends. Her father doesn’t mind it much, he is happy to see her socializing with people her age. The two of them have one father-daughter-night in the week anyways.

“Sweetheart, I’m heading out! Did you put everything you need on the list?” He shouts into the apartment. A faint “Yes! Love you!” echoes back to him. A smile forms on the doctor’s face. Oh how he longed to hear those words from her every night while he laid in his bed, locked up for a crime he didn’t commit. “Alright, love you, too!”

Meanwhile her father has to deal with Karens being their ignorant selfs, (Y/N) is under the biggest stress she has ever been. The end of her sophomore year and suddenly every teacher thinks it’s alright to give the students a load of work in every single class.

It’s beginning to get to her head. Four essays, three projects and studying for two tests and everything is due next week. She can see herself sitting at that very desk for the whole weekend, trying to contain control of her current situation.

As (Y/N) begins to read the page in front of her again to pull any information from it, it feels like her brain shuts down. Only one thought possesses her. One thing that can assure her, make her happy again.

Her body moves automatically, into the kitchen to the fridge. Her hands grab what they can. Puddings, yogurts, bananas, apples, last night’s dinner, everything that she can carry. Then the teenager sits down at the floor and devours everything she just got out. (Y/N) doesn’t stop until she gets to this intense feeling of being full.

It seems like she snaps out of a trance. Upon seeing what she ate in the shortest time, the girl feels even worse. Quickly she tries to destroy any kind of evidence, getting the trash out, making the fridge appear more full than it is, anything.

In her panicked state she remembers the small container of pills in her room. Relief washes over (Y/N), thinking everything will be better. She takes two of them for good measurement.

With the relief also guilt takes over. What just happened wasn’t normal. But (Y/N) tells herself that she can stop any time she wants. It’s not like she is sick or something, everything is fine. It’s just her way to copy stress. A way she discovered while her father was in prison. The diet pills help her to undo her mistakes. Someone from her friend group, who is already 18, got her them from the doctor for a fair price.

Feeling calmer now, the teenager sits back at her desk. A new perception of control helps her to continue her school work. She has to get done as much as possible, because in not even half an hour (Y/N)’s best friend will be the toilet.

Spencer is completely obvious to it. Sure, he is a profiler and he noticed his daughter’s new view on eating healthy food and working out. He just assumes that (Y/N) and her friends are on a healthy trip and he doesn’t see a problem in this. On the contrary, he is happy that she wants to be good to herself and her body.

But as the weeks go on, a suspicious feeling captures him. “(Y/N)? Why is the fridge nearly empty? We got groceries last Friday and it’s only Tuesday. Did you have a party over here while I was away on the case?” Spencer enters his daughter’s room, trying to joke about it.

(Y/N) freezes. Of course she isn’t able to say that the food went bad and she threw them away, her father is meticulous regarding this subject, always checking the best before day date. “Uhm, please don’t be mad. But Alex, you know her, the short one with red hair, uhm her parents are on a business trip and she is not the best cook. So I brought her lunch and dinner over. I’m sorry for not telling you.” She looks down at the floor, not only to feign sadness but also to avoid his eyes.

The second the teenager talks Spencer knows there is something fishy. Her voice is higher and she fidget with her hands. But he writes it off as being nervous for not telling him. Ever since he is out of prison, it feels like his daughter is withholding something.

“It’s fine, Sweetheart. Just give me a heads-up beforehand, so I know to buy more groceries. What do you think about ordering something tonight? I heard from Luke that a small Chinese restaurant opened a few streets down. We can celebrate the end of the stressful phase in Sophomore year.”

It seems like (Y/N) is calculating something in her head. Spencer knows exactly what she thinks about. “You can forget about your calorie intake for one night. I see how much time you invest in living healthy, but we can let loose for a night together. Just some noodles with chicken or spring rolls and us trying to use chopsticks and giving up after two minutes and resorting to forks. How does that sound?”

The teenager would love to sigh, but it would only alarm her father further. “Yeah, you are right. Let us let loose. But only if I can choose the movie we watch after dinner!” (Y/N) feels bad for eating unhealthy food again. Her last binge was only yesterday and usually she tries to consume lighter things. But she has to bite into the sour apple, else her father will be more suspicious. After all, she can just stop. (Y/N) promises herself to not think about her weight, her shape or the calories she will eat.

Well yeah, no. Just after the first noodle hits her tongue, intrusive thoughts take a seat in her mind, getting settled.

‘You already look like a potato.’

‘Are you sure this is the right thing to eat?’

‘Can you really stop?’

‘Dad is going to hate you when he finds out.’

All of them and more enter her head. (Y/N) is unable to shake them off. She is fine. She doesn’t have a problem. She just doesn’t feel like eating now, that’s fine, right?

“Uhm Dad. I’m full and really tired from the day. Is it ok if I go to bed? Maybe we can rain check on that movie?” The girl asks, feeling even worse for ditching her father. Usually it’s the other way around.

“Are you feeling ok? You look a little pale. Are you sick?” Spencer fires his question canone being the borderline helicopter father he always is. “Yes, just really exhausted from all the assignment and school work. A good night's rest and I will be good as new.” (Y/N) attempts a small smile, but fails miserably at it.

“Ok, sleep tight baby. I’ll put the leftovers in the fridge for you tomorrow.” Quickly she goes into her room. The thoughts in her head scream louder and louder with each step she takes. Can she really stop? Maybe she should come clean to her father.

‘And risking him hating you? Look at you, thinking you are sane is the only thing keeping him from abandoning you. How would you explain him keeping you otherwise? It’s definitely not for your looks.’

Later that night, (Y/N) hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep because of the voices, she makes her way back to the kitchen. In an attempt to distract herself, the teenager scrolled through her social media sites. There she was met by pictures of perfect people.

Perfect bodies. Perfect lives. Perfect smiles. Perfect family. Perfect friends. Everything about them is perfect.

And then there is her. Her body is unperfect. Her life is a mess. Her smile is not that of a model. Her family is just her, her father and the people he works with. Her friends aren’t always the best associates.

The stress of not feeling enough is getting to (Y/N)’s head. Like several times before that her body goes into auto. She doesn’t control her movements, though she tells herself all of this is willently.

Like so many times before the girl goes through the fridge and eats everything up she can get her fingers on. But this time one thing is different. Her father is at home. And he isn’t a heavy sleeper.

The movement in the kitchen wakes him up. Immediately his brain jumps to a burglar or even worse, an UnSub they once arrested coming after him. Quickly he gets his revolver and sneaks through the hallway to the source of the noises. As Spencer only sees his daughter sitting there, he instantly relaxes.

“Hey Sweetheart, what are you doing up? It’s a school night”, he softly asks in order to not scare her. Still, (Y/N) gets startled at the sudden voice.

“Uhm, nothing much. Just hungry. Probably because I didn’t eat dinner”, she explains, looking at her father like he caught her with her hand stuck in the cookie jar. Spencer watches her closely. “This is it? Because from what it looks like you not only ate your dinner but also tomorrow’s breakfast and right now lunch.”

(Y/N) swallows her bite, feeling that sinking reality in her stomach. The pills. She needs the pills fast before her body begins to digest the food. “Uhm, yeah. I probably should go to bed. I need my sleep. Just let me tidy up. Good night, Dad.” But he is quick to stop her.

“(Y/N), I want you to sit down. There is something we have to talk about.” Hesitantly (Y/N) takes a seat. “What is it Dad? Are you reprimanding me for eating? I thought you wanted me to let loose for a night.”

Spencer sits, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Baby, I want you to be alright. But I think you are not.” His eyes get a sad look. “I’m alright. I am fine, Dad. What do you think is wrong with me?”

“Look, (Y/N), I don’t need to be a profiler to see that you are struggling with something. Do you want to tell me about it?” Her answer is a tight lipped smile and a “I’m fine. There is nothing to talk about.”

The father sighs. She is not leaving him much of a choice. “And what about them?” Spencer asks after getting something from the highest shelf in the kitchen, the one (Y/N) barely reaches by stepping on a stool. He sets a little container down on the table.

“Dad I-” “No (Y/N). You don’t need to explain anything. It’s my turn to talk. I found those in your room yesterday while I was looking for a book. At first I thought nothing of it, I mean you are trying to live healthy, so I thought this is part of the process. But then I saw that they have to be prescribed and I know that these aren’t yours.

“I wanted to talk about it with you anyway. But now I know that I caught you binge eating and I see all the signs. I see them and I’m sorry for not acting sooner. (Y/N), you need help and I’m here for you. I know the last few months were especially hard on you. I can’t change what was and what happened, but I will be here for you now." Tears stream down on boths their faces.

(Y/N) is stammering for words. “I-I am fine. I can stop anytime I want. Th-this was a conscious d-decision.” Her father envelops her in a hug, cradling her head to his chest. She begins to sob.

“I know, Sweetheart. It’s hard and it won’t get easier from here on, but I’m here. You know you can’t stop, it’s only an illusion your eating disorder wants you to believe. But we get through it together. You, I and the team if you want to. We take it at your pace.” By now the two are crying loudly.

“I want it to stop, Dad. Please make the voice go away.”

He can’t make it go away. No one can. But Spencer helps to quiet it. Together they tackle the disorder, through the good and the bad times. He takes off from work for a time and (Y/N) out of school for a few weeks to be able to work on it together, to make the voice quieter and her life better.

Taglist:

All works:

@dindjarinsspouse

Criminal Minds:

@averyhotchner @mggsprettygirl @herecomesthewriterwitch @ash19871962

[libraford]

I owe you all a story about kittens. But its about... a little more than kittens. It's a long one.

I want to tell you all about the kittens, which took place in 2019. But in order to do so, I have to take you back even further, to March of 2018, and concludes in 2021. Because it's about kittens, but it's also about business and all the things that can go wrong.

In March 2018, tragedy struck. The owner of the flower shop died unexpectedly, leaving the business to four capable managers. One of those managers was the man that had hired me, leaving a power vacuum at our location. Grandpa was not the first choice to take the lead, but she stepped up and she became manager. In my opinion, there was no better person for the role: she had only ever worked in the flower industry (assuming we're not counting the one week in 1976 when she worked at a pizza parlor,) and as such she knew the business inside and out.

Prior to this, she had taught all of the designers and practically ran the place when the boss was out, so it was the next logical step. And it was good.

Of course, we had our ups and downs. What I did not realize when I joined the flower shop is that the flower industry is volatile- there are so many variables that went into the creation of floral pieces and if there is one misstep you can be set back anywhere from a day to several thousand dollars. There are late deliveries, there are frightening brides, there are missing piñatas… van fires, flower snobs, color corrections, failed psychics, friends, enemies…

You can set the bar so very low and yet…

The rise and fall of drama at this particular flower shop could be dictated into hours and minutes because sometimes you need to hire people just to fill that space. Grandpa was on record by saying 'if they can walk, talk, and spell their name, hire them.' Even so, we were critically understaffed most of the time because if you hire anyone you're going to get a lot of quitters.

It's a tough cycle to break, and our power was limited.

And we had bigger fish to fry: we had an average of thirty funerals, two weddings, and well over six hundred deliveries per week. Business was booming and we just had to keep up- if you make it one week after the next it doesn't feel so bad.

By March of the following year, the four owners had whittled down to two: my former boss and the former webmaster. We had a district manager now, some kind of accounts position… things like that. It was kind of astonishing that before this, all the work had been done by a single man. But the secrets to his success had died with him.

Things were looking good, actually: the flower business was full of life! We were doing all kinds of special events, starting contracts with businesses and getting our name out there. Drama still plagued us, but as far as I'm aware, that's par for the course for flower shops.

Then, in May 2019, tragedy struck. A tornado ripped straight down the street of our headquarters, demolishing the greenhouse and the historical building that it all started in. No one was injured, but the damages were devastating. Despite all this, we kept working.

We worked hard. And hard. And hard.

And though the new warehouse wasn't slated to be finished until 2021, we reached an equilibrium where things were okay.

But before I get to that, I made a promise to you.

It was a hot day in August and I was walking into my closing shift at 10am. After two years of working with roughly the same people, you got to learning how to tell when something was happening. I walked in to everyone staring at me and acting 'natural.' It never looks natural.

In the back of the store, there was a box that Cherry was standing very purposely in front of.

"What's in the-"

"Sh!" Grandpa spied through the window in the cooler door as someone swung out with a purchase. "Did you find something you like," she asked the customer, trotting over to help him at the register.

"What's happening," I asked Blue.

"Nothings happening, it just kind of… happened."

"Blue… what does that MEAN?"

"There's a customer here, I can't talk about it."

I am bursting at the seams to know what's going on.

Grandpa fared the customer well and went back to her station behind the computer. "Open the box," she said.

Ominous, but okay. I go over to the box and Cherry steps aside. There's something moving inside the box and I wonder if Pam's daughter had folded herself into a box to ride out a panic attack again. I carefully opened the flaps of the box and accidentally disturbed the sleep of-

Four.

Tiny.

KITTENS!

Oh my god, it was the most adorable thing in the world and the poor things were screaming because they had only known the world for a few weeks and everything was strange and blurry and all they knew to do was cuddle for warmth and scream. The box consisted of two black kittens, one tuxedo kitten, and a white seal-point with terminal eye goop.

They immediately started climbing up my arm.

"Not that I'm not thrilled, but… why?"

"Stray cat left her babies out by my pond and wasn't just gonna leave the little fuckers," Grandpa said. The seal-point made it all the way up my shoulder to scream in my ear and stare at me with one clear blue eye. "That one's name is Pop-eye. He's my favorite."

"Jake doesn't get along with them," I surmised. Jake was Grandpa's Australian Shepherd. He was old, blind, deaf, and losing his sense of smell. And he was ornery.

"First thing he did was sit on Pop-eye. So they're gonna be at the shop during the day until we can get them all homed. Know anyone that needs a kitten?"

So, for awhile, we had shop cats. One of the all black twins had been claimed the very next day, but the rest of them were with us for some time. We got very good at feeding them all every hour on the hour and eventually they settled into accepting that 'mom' was seven different people.

In the meantime, we had to hide the three of them from visiting management.

This was not my first round with cat-related crimes.

The district manager, Puppet, was due to come for a visit any time that week. He was supposed to come once a month for a routine check in, and there were only ten days left in August. Likewise, we had to hide the kittens from the customers on the off chance that one of them was a secret shopper.

Backtracking once more to explain: the company had shelled out money to pay a third party to send secret shoppers to grade us on a rubric and also whatever they thought was appropriate. The grades were cleanliness, customer service, how knowledgeable we were of products, things like that. If we got above 90%, there would be a bonus in our next paycheck.

Sounds great, right?

The spies could decide that anything wasn't up to their standard. One woman went on and on about our 'black wall,' which was the outside of our cooler and I'm sorry but… that's not changing. There was a complaint that the table at the front used to showcase our bridal seemed out of place and odd. There dirt in the flower pots… where dirt goes. Corporate reads those comments.

So keeping the children out of sight of the customers and any visiting management became our priority.

'So just keep them in the break room,' I hear you, the reader, suggest.

If you've never owned cats, it is imperative for you to know that they are mostly comprised of spine, and only the smallest of openings will deter them from squeezing into parts unknown. Cats are semi-solids. Kittens are semi-solids with a sense of adventure and little tiny needles for fingernails.

And you can't just tape the box shut.

So… they got out. Well, two of them got out. The tuxedo awoke to find that her brothers had gone exploring without her and did the sensible thing, which was cry about it.

Mood.

I have named this cat Brood X Cicada. The black one can be named Abyss. I'm great at naming cats.

Lucky for us, they're only a few weeks old and walk kind of like little tin soldiers. It took all of five minutes to pry Pop-eye from a piece of Styrofoam and locate Abyss exploring an old toolbox. However, by the time I'm done cat collecting, Brood X Cicada had toddled off in search of her brothers and I'm out of hands to hold kittens in. I stuffed Abyss into my apron pocket and tried to save X from eating plastic.

It is at this moment that Cherry came in to tell me that Puppet the District Manager was on his way, and saw that I was helplessly juggling kittens. Abyss was climbing out of my pocket, eager to join his siblings in the high and exalted position that was my hands.

"We need these kittens out of here," I said. "Who hasn't been on lunch yet?"

Cherry dodged her head back into the workshop. "Hey Key, you been on lunch?" Pause. "You wanna go now?"

Key came into the back room and I handed her the box of kittens. "Take these, in your car. Go to burger King or something, I don't care. Puppet cannot see these. If anyone asks, you're on a route."

Key held the box and took a moment to appreciate the series of events that lead to her being handed a box of kittens in a 'Take this, don't ask questions' kind of matter.

Puppet was in the front door as Key was out the back and we successfully avoided a serious mistake. His visit was only an hour and she walked back in without anyone the wiser.

We made it through the big challenge, now to continue looking for homes for them. Ms. Crow found a friend of a friend of a friend that was excited to take Abyss from us. After some interrogating my friends, I found someone who knew someone who could take Pop-eye and Brood X Cicada. (They were renamed Hocus and Pocus.)

Grandpa cried for every single one of them that had to go. And I remembered my very first day of working there when she introduced herself as 'The Tinman.' What a liar, the softy.

Our days went on kitten-free, the management none the wiser.

It was December when I got the feeling that I should be taking photos of my work to build a portfolio. Something wasn't right, I felt. I couldn't say what it was that put me on edge, but I could only say that all was not well. I took photos of everything that I was proud of, and I was proud of a lot of things. By February, I had over fifty items that I could show off to a potential studio. And I thought- in March, I should start looking to see if other shops are hiring.

And in March 2020, tragedy struck. Our state went into lockdown on March 13, dictating that all non-essential businesses close and non-essential staff be laid off. There were two days where none of us knew what was happening, if we had jobs or if that job was safe.

They laid off all but three designers and Grandpa but kept most the drivers, changed our hours to 8-5, closed Sundays. Canceled weddings. No walk-ins. The three designers were Blue, Red, and me.

Blue was worried about her children. She resigned.

Red's wife was worried about him and harassed him into quitting.

And then there was one.

There's a series of poems I wrote in my journal about being an essential worker during lockdown. There's adorable little doodles of skeletons around the margins, festooned with flowers. They all go something like this:

We are the Skeleton Crew.

We once were seven but now are two

We don't know what to do

So we just work, work, work.

Many may wonder how a flower shop would be considered an essential business. The answer is funerals. We were allowed to remain open because of our relationship with the funeral industry. And sad to say: the industry was booming.

And I did all of it. I made every spray, every 'get well soon' vase, every 'happy quarantine' bouquet. I called angry brides to see if they could postpone, I dealt with everyone's grief and uncertainty.

All the flowers that arrived at US Customs through Italy were destroyed because we didn't know whether coronavirus was transmitted through physical contact and there's no way to sanitize flowers. Not without killing them.

It was me and Grandpa. That was it. Ten funerals a day, and everything else. Flowers were more important than ever: you couldn't be there, so you sent flowers. And flowers and flowers and flowers…

I couldn't leave now. I was important, I was needed.

The work became overwhelming for both of us and we began hiring back some of our staff. Some came back right away, bored out of their skulls having to spend time at home. Can't relate. Key never responded, Cherry was pregnant and shouldn't be out of the house.

Dandy came back, Kali came back, Astra came back. Eventually, Blue. After a month of just me and Grandpa, there was almost a full crew and it was enough for us to get through an average week. It took us a month on our bare knuckles but we finally weren't shouldering the responsibility of seven people.

But we still didn't know jack shit about the future there.

In May, the 'economy opened up,' which is a strategic way of saying that people got tired of never leaving the house and stores were pressured to open back up again before a vaccine was released under threat of… you know what? This isn't a story about how America responded to the coronavirus poorly and you can probably find a better thinkpiece about it written by someone with facts and feelings if you want to squeeze yourself behind a pay wall.

This is about workers rights and kittens, two things that are far more important than the economy.

We got 'Hero Pay,' which was two dollars extra per hour and damn did I grasp onto that with the tendons in my wrists. I had never been paid $12 an hour for anything in my life. They started talking about permanent raises, and benefits, 401K, pregnancy leave… and I started thinking… maybe I could stay. Maybe I can stay here for awhile and it won't be so bad now that I'm getting paid actual human wages. Maybe it will be okay.

Life returned to an uneasy normal while we navigated mask laws, sanitation regulations, safety screens, and daily temperature checks. There are stories to tell about some less than great customers we'd had as people realized that they weren't coping with the pandemic as well as they thought, but they deserve their own entries.

We had a revolving door of open positions. If it wasn't a designer it was a driver or both. People weren't ready to come back to work yet but we still had a business to run. People asked if they could perform this job remotely. I'm not sure how one does flowers from home.

It was August when we started feeling the roots of our problems seep into the foundation.

Grandpa's pride and joy was her funerals. She had spent thirteen years building a relationship with the funeral homes in the area to make sure they trust us and our work. If anything was wrong, even a hair out of place, they knew they could call us and have it fixed before the visitation.

"We want unity across the board on our products," Puppet said. "If you're doing the sprays one way and others don't look the same, it doesn't look very good for Oldman Funeral Home, which has locations in all our cities, does it?" He swept his bangs out of his eyes, which was strange tell but we weren't sure for what.

"Okay," Grandpa said. "Schedule a time for me to go down and I'll teach them the way we do them."

"Okay, then."

She went down, prepared to show the crew in the warehouse what 40 years in the business was capable of, only to be met with a strange kind of resistance.

Their head designer greeted her and immediately started instructing her on how he makes sprays. Grandpa, confused, blinked at him with no words. When he was finished, she picked up her clippers and began making her own.

"That's not how we do it," he said. She was met with criticism after criticism. "That's not enough flowers, you're putting them in wrong, you're still making it one-sided. Why did you put the bow there, this looks nothing like our products."

She stood back after his barrage of blows to the ego. "I guess I'm a little confused."

"I'll say."

"Am I teaching you or are you teaching me?"

"I'm teaching you," he said. "Since they're going to all be made here from now on, they want me to show you how we make them in case of emergency."

She let that simmer. "That's not what I was told."

"You didn't think you were supposed to show me how you do it, did you? That doesn't make any sense. Why would we want to look like yours?"

"Oh, I dunno… maybe because we've kept up 30 accounts for 13 years and your location just lost your very last one because you can't make their delivery times and they're across the damn street."

This was how we learned that corporate was planning on taking our funerals from us.

Funerals were something I was immensely proud of. My ability to turn out a thousand dollar funeral order with limited stock was a subject of envy. I could take a phone order, make the flowers, and the deliver it all by myself within an hour. I was good. We were all good. And we trained anyone that stayed longer than two months how to do this because we wanted every person to be able to fix any problem.

And they wanted to take that away from us.

And they did. Because who was going to stop them?

'But what does that matter to you,' I hear you, the reader, ask. 'Surely this meant less work for you!'

Ah, but for the sprays to get to us, they had to come on a truck. Making them in-house meant that we knew we had them. We had to put our trust in corporate to deliver the goods to us by 7 am or we would have to make them day of.

There were days when the truck didn't come, or where only half the pieces were delivered, or a spray got left in the workshop an hour away. At least once a week, often more.

But you know… we adapted. You just schedule more openers to make sure no one is doing it alone and hope to God that you have all the flowers you need to make it. Which you could never anticipate how many flowers you would actually need because them taking our funerals was supposed to reduce the amount of stock flowers we got as well.

Mornings were nightmares, but we adapted.

Another visit, Puppet told Grandpa that she should get all weekends off. All the other managers do. He suggested that I learn to run routes so she can have weekends, and I said okay. I'll learn it.

I got real acquainted with the map of Ohio, and I hated it. I was a weekend manager with no real managerial power. If someone needed a refund, I had to write a note for Grandpa to email the accounts manager because she wouldn't take requests from anyone that wasn't a manager. Everything just waited until Monday. What was the point of me? I couldn't design while managing and I couldn't fix what was broken, so why even have a weekend manager? Let the animals loose in the zoo and it probably would have been a better fit.

But I powered through. I adapted.

Throughout all this, spreadsheets. Spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets. Completely pointless spreadsheets that we were bound to fill out all day every day. They had simple purposes: inventory. You filled one out to take count of the specials so you knew how many there were. Then you had to count again to put them in the system so that they knew how much we had. Then you had to go back and count them again and put that number in the computer so they knew how much to make and send tomorrow.

I spent an hour each day counting and recounting the flowers in the far-off and futile hope that the counts would remain accurate to the end of the day (which they did not because the call center consistently used the wrong codes) and that the stock would be replenished properly in the morning (it was not.)

An hour was lost each day to this and it accomplished nothing, yet they always yelled at Grandpa if the counts were off or it was late. Why stress a system that does jack shit?

And every time there was a new feature or there was a new… thing, oh look! Another goddamned redundant spreadsheet that served no purpose.

But we adapted. We created a rhythm.

Show up early at 6:30 to make sure everything got in, make everything that didn't, get the drivers routed, pull routes for the third party deliveries, process same-day orders, data entry for the funeral consolidated. Then at 7, when the phones start ringing…

Okay, so before I forget:

Instead of installing a new phone line and hiring a few more call center people like a normal company would, our headquarters decided it would save us money if call overflow rerouted to the next available phone line, regardless of which location the phone was at. So we would get calls for the Kentucky store asking questions about what that store has and for the sake of preserving confidence in our brand we were supposed to pretend that we were the Kentucky store. We're just supposed to know or assume to know what each store had in stock because there's no way that could ever backfire.

It was… another thing to yell at us for. And boy did they, because they were listening in on our calls. Not to like… coach us on how to do better, but to tell us we were wrong. Sometimes they would call one of us on the other line to tell someone currently on the main one that they said something wrong. They also would straight up lie and scold us for calls we didn't take. The phones system, was simply a mess.

...so when the phones started up at 7am, and one person is designing, one person is taking unending phone orders, Grandpa is doing damage control. By 8, we have most of last nights orders figured out and it's time to start on same day orders and tomorrow's orders. It's too early to do inventory now because they'll yell at us for doing it too early.

By 9 we have our second wave of same day orders and next day orders, the rest of the world realizes we're open and starts walking in. That requires the attention of an entire person. We're at this point also taking out trash, breaking down boxes, disinfecting, sweeping the cooler.

Typically, there were only two openers on any given day, which meant most of this was all being handled by Blue or me.

By 10 we've caught up, we can do the inventory now without getting yelled at by the four heads at corporate. We're on route #3 by now and someone probably had to go to the same place twice because the orders came in late.

At 11, a crisis has probably happened. Something dropped, something wilted, something wasn't what they imagined. Someone has to go fix it, and that someone was usually me because I knew my way around town better than the other transplants.

This typically returned me to the shop around 1pm, which meant it was time for lunch, bringing me to 2. 3 o'clock was the cutoff for any next day orders to be sent to corporate, which meant that if there were any funeral orders taken for the morning, they would have to be made in-house. This included sprays, which takes half an hour to an hour depending on how complicated it was and if we had the materials and how much else we needed to make for the next day. Or how busy we were.

There was always something called in at the last minute, taking us to 4 and then 5 o'clock, when the openers went home and the same-day orders were cut off.

But see, that was when we stopped taking orders, not when we stopped processing orders. So if an order was placed for the same day at 4:59, it may not go through until 5:30. And by 5:30, chances are you've sent your drivers home for the day. Which means calling the customer to apologize and explain why something can't be sent out today, and no one wants to hear that they fucked up by sending it out late.

So, on more than one occasion, I had to personally deliver flowers on my way home from work in my personal car, thirty minutes out of my way because if we miss a delivery by God will we hear about it. And it was always some damn $25 arrangement with 'God Loves You' written on the tag, hardly worth the gas to Johnstown.

The irony of it being delivered by the witch was lost on no one.

If that didn't happen and the screen was clear, the night was easy and all we had to do was clean up and watch the door.

Unless a last minute order for the next day came in, which was about half the time. All of this for $11 an hour. (Once they got rid of the Hero Pay, it went back down to $11.)

That was an average, unexciting day for us. You got used to those kinds of stresses, but every day I came home and I was so tired and sore that I couldn't move. I started walking with a cane, had a low-grade fever most days, and my hands looked like I'd taken to them with a cheese grater.

But I powered through. I adapted.

Then it was December. The owners had always been generous with Christmas bonuses, handing everyone an envelope of cash. Mine was $500. This was the largest amount of cash that anyone had ever handed me (feel bad for me later.)

And then it was Grandpa's turn, but there were no envelopes left. It had to be a mistake, she thought. She didn't get paid very much for all the work she put into the shop, so she was counting on that bonus to buy presents for her grandchildren. It… it… had to be a mistake, right?

"I didn't get a bonus," she said. "I thought the accountability didn't take effect until January," she said to Puppet.

Before he opens his mouth again, I have to explain yet another thing.

In September, there was a meeting. Now that we were working on benefits and bonus programs and other things to make sure the staff stays, they needed to put in accountability measures for the managers. Effective January 1, managers are reflected by the income of their store, the number of returns, accidents in company vehicles, and high turnover rates.

Pick one of those attributes and decide its bullshit to begin with, and I'm about to show you the entire steer.

"We had to make an example of someone," he said. "So that the other managers know we're serious."

She was being personally punished for a car wreck that happened in 2019 even though she fired the guy that was in it. We had too many returns, he said, but most of them were sent to us from corporate. She was personally held responsible for the high turnover rate during an economic crisis AND a goddamned pandemic… because they needed to make an example out of someone.

And her grandkids didn't get presents this year because of it.

She cried. The last time I saw her cry was when we were saying goodbye to the kittens. It's not the same.

But she got up every day and listened to them scream at her while we counted and counted and recounted the fucking Christmas specials because the numbers weren't right and we couldn't make them right because someone in the call center couldn't figure out the codes and in their eyes it was our fault, too- we had to be stealing the flowers or something.

"It sucks and then its over," she said. It was how she dealt with holidays: "It sucks and then its over."

We were all angry for her. I got asked to go to the headquarters and help them mass produce more fucking specials and I offered the beat them up for her and she told me not to get involved. Head down, do the work, get it done.

One of the call center girls died of a heart attack a few days before I was due to help them mass. We were supposed to go to her funeral, but we all missed it because there was so much work to do.

Wait, let me back up… again. The company gave us all life insurance. The number we were quoted on our life insurance policy was $10,000, which seems like a lot but in the funeral business it's not. Your average funeral will eat up most of that, if not all. It's very expensive to die right now.

At least… we all thought it was $10k. I was certainly told $10k.

Turns out it was $1k, which isn't enough to buy you a box for your remains. The call center crew ended up crowdsourcing the rest- she didn't have much family.

And none of us could go to the funeral because we were working.

I worked two twelve hour shifts in that warehouse making the same goddamn centerpiece over and over again while a Frenchman in a scarf told me I was doing it wrong, while everyone was grieving on a time crunch.

I really should have beaten them up.

But we got through Christmas, for what it was worth. We found Grandpa some sales that she could get gifts from and we all worked together to make sure we were okay through it. I mean, we weren't- it was blind leading the blind. But we tried.

And then it ended. "It sucks and then its over," she'd always say.

And into January we go and we're back into the stupidity of trying to fight with hq about funerals. I'm constantly told that if we needed certain things we should have ordered them.

I… did. I did. I ordered everything we needed every damn day and it still never came because the left hand and the right hand can't even coordinate enough to pull off a high-five. But it can't be their fault. It has to be Grandpa's somehow.

Now during the week of Christmas, Grandpa had to take an extra day off because she got sick. It wasn't Covid, thank goodness. I can imagine it was a stress-related issue, but it's not my business. Due to the holiday, this put her at under 40 hours for the week.

So they paid her hourly.

...which is extremely illegal to do to a salaried employee, especially one that works way more than 40 hours a week with no overtime.

And then they told her that she'd already lost her quarterly bonus because of a fender-bender that happened on my watch, and because she lost 39 employees last quarter.

I write everything down. I keep a journal. I cannot find 39 employees, even going back the entire year… during a pandemic. They have to be making this up. They have to be because there is no way they can hold the dude that was fired for literally sleeping in the men's room against her.

And I was close to just telling them all that… when my grandma died.

I'm not getting into it, really. Because you know… she was 96 years old and… it happens. It's sad, but it happens. But the relevant point to make is that I was given an… inheritance. It wasn't a lot. Grandma wasn't loaded. But it would be enough for me to keep afloat for awhile if I ever needed to.

When I told my girlfriend, she said: 'you could quit your job.'

And I didn't want to think about that because the flower shop needed me. I was important there. I was special. And Valentine’s Day was just around the corner.

But I was thinking about it. I thought about it every day.

A week before Valentines Day, Grandpa was inconsolable. She had to leave work because her dog, Jake, wouldn't stop bleeding. She needed to get him to the vet.

Two hours pass and Blue gets a message asking her to come help her move the dog. Grandpa lives alone and she's not very strong.

Blue doesn't like dogs. She was bitten by one the first time she ever made a delivery.

And I am known for exceptional physical strength. So I went.

When I arrived, Grandpa was a mess. I had never seen her cry so much, and it wouldn't stop. And I was trying to be strong, but it's hard. Jake was still alive, but bleeding. He was confused and upset, and blind and deaf. He barked, he growled, and he lunged… but always pulled back when his legs buckled from the pain.

I had her grab a blanket and we rolled him onto it, using that to lift him. He thrashed and growled and snapped at me while we walked him towards the door, but he wasn't getting out of the wrap we had him in.

As we're out the door, I noticed a man at the neighboring house. He raised his hand in greeting, but lowered it in confusion.

"Grandpa, is it alright if I get him to come help while you bring the car around?"

The best she could do was nod.

"Yeah, sorry, to bug you but can I ask for a little help here?" He looks at what we're doing and drops his trash can lid to come help. "Yeah, just take that end there and we're gonna ease him into the car when she comes around."

He nodded, took the ends, and we tucked a very confused Jake into the back seat. I thanked the neighbor, Grandpa sped off, and I went back to work feeling extremely odd about it.

That was the first time that I'd ever met the dog: on his way to be put down.

I know it seems weird to tell that story, but there's a reason. Part of it is symbolic. Part of it has to do with kittens. But we're not there just yet.

So now it's February and it is crunch time for Valentine’s Day. We have no earthly idea what this holiday is going to look like because past experiences have us anticipating a large number of walk ins, but state regulations have put a limit of six customers inside the store at any one time. We were never given any… instructions on how to enforce that rule, so we just kind of vaguely set out roles for who has to be the bouncer at the flower shop.

But before all of that, we had to make 275 two-dozen red rose arrangements in bowls. Based on our sales last year and general growth, we were expecting something close to five hundred deliveries on our busiest day. If I wasn't making them, I was counting them. And I was counting, and I was counting, and I was counting… every hour, just like it was at Christmas. We used up every single red rose in the place and came up short.

To which we were scolded: we must have used the roses they sent us for other orders because there was no way the error could have been on their end! Their inventory was impervious to mistakes. Somewhere between the warehouse and our store, twenty-five packs of roses went missing! And why is it only our store that has these problems? Clearly it must be our fault- a store full of thieves and liars and delinquents.

They ended up sending more just because… you know… they care. I guess.

And every hour, they needed a number of something and I counted, and counted and counted…

I think it was February 8 that I started crying every day. When I slept I was stiff as a board because I made so many mistakes throughout the day that the idea of coming to work the next day just to make more mistakes made me lock up entirely. There was no way to relax. There was no winding down from a hard day of work because my body could not move anymore.

I felt like I was made of splintering wood.

I had a dream around this time that I quit my job. I was so happy. I thought about it almost every hour.

So I stayed out of the way at work, picking up cleaning projects because at least there I could be useful and it was dark enough in the cooler that if I started crying no one had to see it.

That cooler was so clean. I wouldn't recommend eating off of it because I used an entire bottle of bleach to clean the floor.

If we're not counting the constant barrage of demands from corporate to count, count, count; Valentine’s Day was worryingly uneventful. Previous holidays were chaotic: filling the requests of the most desperate and clueless men with deep pockets and expensive tastes. Corralling the temporary drivers and make sure no one gets into any crashes or… uh...tries to sell unregulated merchandise from their trunks. Trying to decide what "Malibu Barbie Pink" meant for that one customer who comes in every six months and orders it but has rejected every color pink on the spectrum that our store has ever offered.

On this one… nothing important happened.

We were… slow.

Grandpa started sending people home early because there weren't many orders. We ran out of projects to do.

Sounds great, right?

...heh…

Corporate would like to know why our store is under projected sales by over 200, as if we have any say in how many people buy from us. Like we personally called all our typical customer base and told them not to come to this store. "Yes, hello Mrs. Penderghast? I'm sorry we can't fill your Valentine's Day order this year because we suck balls and don't want your business. Have a nice weekend. Say hi to the grandkids for me."

I don't… fucking KNOW! I don't work in PR! I'd ask the people in that department if they know what happened but… that's the owners. So who really is the fuckup here? Not me, that's for fucking certain! I cleaned the cooler. That's all I did all weekend was clean the Gods damned cooler because there wasn't enough work to go around so I made work for myself.

And then: "Why are the counts off," asked Mt. Rushmore. See, we called them that because between the owners, Puppet, and the head designer we had four white men looking down at us while we did all the work and built their success on the backs of their forefathers. Well… to me it was anyway. To everyone else it was four dudes that looked down on you.

"Why are the counts off?"

Oh, the COUNTS are off? Well, let me just drop everything I'm doing right now and count them for the third time in the past hour because that takes fucking priority.

"There's 95 specials missing from your inventory. Where are they?"

...okay, 95 is a lot. But it was also kind of hard to know how they were 'missing' when we'd sold all of the 275 that we made. How can they be missing if we sold them.

"We need to know where they are."

We don't know where they are. Because we sold all of them. The math didn't add up.

But they hounded us about it like we'd stolen them and resold them on the street corner. Which, to their defense, had happened once (but Sugar stopped doing that when her corner was taken over by the woman who accused Jay of being a demon.) But 95 is a huge number, and these arrangements were a foot wide and two feet tall. Someone would have noticed if a 100x200 foot square opened up in the cooler.

We literally could not know what the fuck they were talking about.

And the truth was extremely stupid: those 95 pieces were redeliveries. When someone has an issue with their order, like it didn't come or it was left out in the snow and got damaged or… someone put the name of their ex on the card instead of their wife… we send a replacement. But depending on who took the phone call, a person might use the wrong code and put it in for 'redeliver' instead- which counts it as another order.

We weren't missing 95 arrangements. We had 95 redeliveries. They hounded us about inventory for two days over a clerical error.

I decided I'd had it. We were going on a full week of crying every time I had a moment alone. They had made us feel like everything that went wrong was our fault: from low turnout to high turnover, missed deliveries and trashed sprays, lost accounts and new grievances…

But did they ever say a Gods damned thing about how hard we worked? How good we were? About how great a team we were under pressure? We once pulled together an entire wedding in fifteen minutes. My ass carried this store through the pandemic. I have done… so much.

So fucking much.

And yet it's our fault.

I had been reasoning with myself that I would stick around for the aftermath when Grandpa was eventually fired: we'd all felt it was coming. But I got that little bit of cash and all my joints were screaming and every time we got negative feedback a part of me died.

The following Tuesday had seen a massive snowstorm. Things that weren't already closed due to the pandemic were closed due to weather.

But we still had to be there. Because someone had to be there to make all the funeral pieces.

Because there wouldn't be a truck the next day, which meant that all of the funeral pieces that we'd sent to the headquarters needed to be made in-house. Which, once again, could have been avoided if we had kept the funeral orders in-house to begin with.

I waited until everyone had cleared out before I said it.

"Grandpa, I have to quit."

I don't think anyone ever looked so disappointed in me in my life.

"Why?"

"The way they treat people here is terrible and I can't see myself doing another Mother's Day for this company. They're so… mean! And for no damn reason! I have cried every day for the past week because I see the way they treat you and I'm… I'm tired."

I thought she was going to cry, but she nodded. "I can't stop you," she said. "I shouldn't stop you. If it's affecting your mental health like this, I'll miss you but its for the best. You know they'll want a written notice."

"And you know I'll tell them the truth," I said.

"...it's not me, is it?"

"If I worked for just you and those fuckers were out of the picture, I would stay. And you can count on me to tell them that."

"Any flower shop you apply to would be lucky to have you."

So I drafted up a resignation letter telling them exactly how I feel: that the way they run this company was asinine and they treated their employees like garbage. They received it on Thursday. Everyone at the shop knew by then. They were upset…

...but they understood.

Puppet did not understand. He emailed Grandpa asking her what she's doing that her people keep leaving.

He didn't see it. He didn't see that he was part of the problem. It always had to be someone else's fault. I explicitly said in my letter whose fault it was and he still didn't take any responsibility.

But suddenly I'm one of their best designers, and he begged me to reconsider, take some time off to think about it. They desperately wanted me to stay and they were willing to bargain, I just needed demands.

No one's ever… begged me before. I don't know if I like that.

This is when it dawned on me that I was next in line. It all made sense now: training me to route, making me do all the extra work, and now they want me to stay?

They were planning on getting rid of Grandpa and promoting me to manager. In a perfect world where Grandpa resigns willingly and I’m promoted on my merits as a designer and the company wasn’t very quickly circling the drain, I would be excited. But I wasn’t. I was frightened. I watched them take a confident, extremely talented woman and turn her into the whipping boy of the flower shop. And if I were in her position, I would have quit. But I don’t have the strength to stand up to the people that are signing my paycheck.

Why… am I at a place where the idea of moving upward makes me more scared than excited?

Flattering, but no. I've seen how you treat your people. My demands are to treat them better.

It was the longest week for me: making lists of pros and cons. I had made a lot of friends there and there's stuff that I will never forget. But the fact that the only people who didn't understand why I was leaving were the people who had the most to lose really hit me in the knees. I could tell them every day for the rest of their lives why they suck and it wouldn't matter because nothing was ever their fault.

And at 7:00 on Friday, I turned in my key.

I didn't have a plan, I didn't have anything lined up. This was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make and I was just kind of… throwing myself at it.

I don't do that. I always have a plan. I look into every possible scenario and I try to make the smart choice. And this time…

I didn't.

It was probably stupid.

But I slept for 12 hours the next night and I could feel my bones settling into their rightful places. I didn't realize how many health problems were caused by standing for 9 hours a day, 11 days a week until I was home all the time to notice them changing. I will always have a limp from trying to pretend I don't have a limp. I'm pretty sure that ulcer is chronic. But my back isn't seizing up and I don't cry every day anymore.

That's something, I think.

About a week after my departure, I got a text from Grandpa that said:

"Hey guess what."

"What," I replied.

The next text was a picture of a week's old seal-point kitten with terminal eye-goo, wrapped in a towel.

"Pop-eye!?"

"I'm keeping this one," she said. The strays had dropped a litter of identical baby kittens by her pond. Two years later, with Jake put down, she could finally have Pop-eye, even if it was version 2.0.

The next text was a few days later. "Puppet fired me."

"What!? Why?"

"Too many accidents, too high turnaround. The new people suck, he says no one wants to work with me."

"Are you okay? How are you doing?"

"I'm okay." She paused and the loading screen did its little dot dance. "I'm playing with my kitten."

[scintillasofbeomgyu]

ᝰ 14:12 PM — choi soobin

pairing: choi soobin x reader. genre(s): fluff; comfort (?). word count: 696. warning: extemely vague elusion to anxiety, but this is literally just fluff; not proofread. playlist: hour 24 ;; tangerine an: i really hope this is okay!

you were sitting at the edge of the bed, hunched over your knees, moonlight painting your figure with the soft silvery beams which managed to escape through your curtains. the soundly sleeping tomcat at your feet offered you some solace as you absent-mindedly stroked his sleek black fur, but your ears were still ringing and your breathing was still unsteady.

“what’s wrong, sweetheart?”

soobin’s voice startled you; you turned around to find him sitting up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. the absence of heat soobin felt when you shifted out of bed was not something he could easily miss. he didn’t have as many opportunities to spend time with you as he would have liked, but that gave him even more reason to take extra care and whenever he did.

“i’m fine,” you smiled, placing a hand on top of the one he placed on your shoulder. that smile faltered for less than a second, but it could not escape your boyfriend’s almond-shaped, deep browns.

soobin reached foreword, snaking his arms around your waist before reeling you in and tightening them around your form. he pressed a kiss to your shoulder, “having trouble sleeping?”

you sighed into his touch, the warmth chasing away any other thoughts and feelings which sought you suffocate you until they were all but one— him.

truthfully, you didn’t want to worry him. it wasn’t as if you could fully explain it in any event. waking up in the middle of the night with a weight on your chest that made you want to cry out, even though there was no reason to. you had many things you were grateful for in your life; you considered yourself a very lucky person. so why did you feel this way?

“i’m okay,” you rested your head against his, “go back to bed.”

he was quiet for a moment, and you were almost sure he had fallen asleep, before he lifted his head onto your shoulder.

“hold my hand,” he said, stretching his palm out and intertwining his fingers with yours, “you’re going to be fine, my love. i’m here.”

you bit down onto your bottom lip before swiftly turning around, burrying your face in his chest before he noticed your glossed over eyes. soobin lowered both of you back into bed and pulled the sheets over you once more..

“thank you,” you sniffled.

“what for?”

your cat stretched it’s limbs, awoken by all the commotion. but instead of moving away, he only plodded closer and curled up against you and soobin. you smiled, he kind of reminded you of your quiet boyfriend in so many ways.

“for... everything.”

soobin shook his head as he ran his fingers through your hair, “you deserve every single bit of what you have. i’m here because i want to be and i take care of you because i want to, too.”

“even if i love avocado more than you?”

“oh no, i think there’s been a mistake, i need to leave”

you gasped, hitting his chest, “soobin!”

you attempted to push yourself up, but he flipped you over and tackled you down into the pillows. he laughed when you glared up at him playfully. sighing, he bent down and left kisses on your lips and your forehead.

“i love kissing you”

you smirked, draping your arms around his neck, “oh really?”

he chuckled, his pink cheeks pushing smiles into his eyes that were nearly as big as the one stretched across his face. his eyes flitted to your lips as he leaned closer and your breathing hitched before you closed yours.

he planted a soft, lingering kiss right on the corner of your lips, “let’s have some noodles”

“right now?” you whined, glancing to the clock on your bedside table, “at two a.m.?”

“why not?” he shrugged, tapping your nose. he looked into your eyes once more, a seriousness within them, “you’re feeling better?”

you nodded. you didn’t know if the feeling would disappear forever and you knew it was something you had to work on yourself. but you also knew, as you stared into his soft, glistening eyes filled only with love for you, that you wouldn’t face it alone.

[robininthelabyrinth]

genderbent wens, like the siblings and the head family?

ao3

“- and in one generation, they were all women, every single one of them!” Lao Nie laughed so hard he was very nearly hiccupping, but Lan Qiren supposed that was understandable on account of the other sect leader having consumed a truly unbearable amount of wine. Some of which was on his behalf – Lao Nie had been in a strange mood during the conference, especially excited, and had boisterously interjected himself into Jin Guangshan’s regular attempts to get Lan Qiren drunk by volunteering to take all his toasts for him – so Lan Qiren felt obligated to stay and keep him from making a nuisance of himself. “So be careful what you wish for, Jin-xiong!”

“Let go of me!” Jin Guangshan yelped, and really, getting squashed like that by Lao Nie tipping over onto him was exactly what he deserved. Only Jiang Fengmian was nice enough to try to help him, and all that accomplished was to get him pulled, laughing, into the drinking as well.

Possibly that had been his goal.

“That seems remarkably unlikely,” Wen Ruohan remarked. He, at least, was sitting properly, and had for once restrained himself during the festivities – he was friends of a sort with Jin Guangshan, which never seemed to go well for anyone else, but Lao Nie’s rowdiness had apparently severed that for the night. He looked sidelong at Lan Qiren. “Don’t you think, Sect Leader Lan?”

Lan Qiren could never figure out if Wen Ruohan meant for that term of address to be an insult or a compliment, and he was tired of trying.

“What is so unlikely?” he asked, having been paying more attention to Lao Nie’s stability than his words.

“An entire generation born as women,” Wen Ruohan said. He was playing with the cup of wine in his hands rather than drinking it. “Statistically possible, but highly improbable, given the size of the Nie sect.”

“Well, I assume he’s accounting for the misaligned,” Lan Qiren said, because Wen Ruohan wasn’t wrong – the Nie sect might be smaller than others, but it was still a Great Sect; it was very far from being small. “That would affect the numbers.”

“Misaligned?” Wen Ruohan echoed.

“A tradition among the Nie,” Lan Qiren explained, because it wasrather unusual. “They believe that the reincarnation cycle occasionally errs, with the soul of a woman ending up in a male body or a man in a woman – or I suppose neither and both, I’m not entirely certain about that one. At any rate, it’s not terribly common, but neither is it especially uncommon, so I suppose it’s possible –”

“Isn’t it a punishment?” Wen Ruohan interrupted.

Lan Qiren blinked at him, not understanding.

Wen Ruohan was looking down at his cup, which he had started to hold rather tightly – his knuckles were white, and it was only his especially good control over his cultivation that was keeping the cup from shattering. “The misalignment,” he clarified. “It’s said that those who commit sins in one life will be condemned in their next: reborn as an ant, or a chicken raised for slaughter. To be reborn into a body that does not fit you would surely seem to be along the same lines.”

“I suppose I see the argument,” Lan Qiren said, relieved that for once Wen Ruohan was in the mood for a theoretical discussion rather than causing trouble just to show that he had the power to do so without consequence. “I believe the Nie would argue in turn that being born as a thinking being capable of expressing oneself is sufficient basis to assume error rather than retribution – we’re all cultivators fighting the dictates of fate, after all. If one can seek immortality against all heavenly restrictions, then seeking to be recognized in the manner of your soul rather than your body would appear to be a much smaller issue.”

He shrugged and took a sip of his tea, rolling it in his mouth first to confirm it hadn’t been spiked with anything alcoholic.

“My assumption entirely,” he added. “I’m not actually that familiar with the Nie sect doctrine on this matter. Lao Nie is not the most academic, and if anything seems more bemused by our lack of understanding on the matter.”

Wen Ruohan was frowning into his cup, but at least he wasn’t gripping it so tightly.

“Fighting the dictates of fate,” he murmured. “Yes, I can see that. If you decide you are something, who dares say that you cannot be that, even the Heavens themselves?”

Such a Wen sect way of thinking, Lan Qiren thought to himself, shaking his head. Arrogant, defiant and proud – always raising their heads up high. Admirable in small doses, irritating in large!

“What would you do?” Wen Ruohan asked him, and Lan Qiren looked at him, surprised. “If there was – something like that, but in your sect? The Lan is the most orthodox of the sects; you do not even permit intermingling between men and women.”

“We don’t – men and women live separately; it’s not the same thing as not permitting intermingling,” Lan Qiren protested, but he supposed he could see the value in the question. “If one of my sect disciples informed me that they believed themselves to be a misalignment, I would – accept it, I suppose. Perhaps after a period of supervision, to ensure that they were serious and understood the consequences of their actions, that they would live and be perceived socially in the manner their soul for the rest of their lives; that would help ensure no one would engage in such a thing lightly or as a prank.”

He thought about it a little more.

“Yes, I think that’s right,” he concluded. “There are many rules that touch on the subject of being true to oneself, and none requiring adherence to the gender of one’s body; therefore, it is more in accordance to the rules to permit it. In such an event, I might also send them to the Unclean Realm for a time to further their understanding of the concept, to allow them time to reflect on the proposed change and to ensure they have access to a place where they can feel safe in exploring –”

“What if it were you yourself? Given your position?”

“Me?” Lan Qiren blinked. “I’ve always been comfortable being a man, so it isn’t an issue. But if it was, I would imagine that the same would apply to me as to anyone else in my sect. After all, we have precedent of a woman taking the role of Sect Leader, so that isn’t a consideration.”

“I suppose you do,” Wen Ruohan said. He seemed thoughtful. “What do you think the other sects would think of it?”

“Well, I can hardly say. Of the Great Sects? The Jiang sect would probably approve of it; their sect motto is ‘attempt the impossible’, and their emphasis has always been on freedom and finding your own way – I can’t imagine them objecting in a way that wouldn’t make them come across as complete hypocrites. The Nie would of course accept it. The Jin…”

The Jin sect, under Jin Guangshan, would reject it utterly. Perhaps it might be different under a different sect leader, but Jin Guangshan was even more wedded to the idea of people being in what he considered their ‘proper’ place than most. He hated the newly rich, the self-made upstart, even the poor young men who fought their way up from nothing – in his view, immortality was best reached by nothing ever changing. It was, perhaps, an understandable viewpoint from a man who felt as though he already had everything, but still rather disgusting given how despite all of that Jin Guangshan still grappled and sought after even more power and wealth than he already had – as if he were the only one allowed to rise, and everyone else had to stay where they were so he could more easily step on them on his way up.

“Oh, the Jin. Leave Jin Guangshan to me,” Wen Ruohan said with that dangerous smile of his, the one that promised blood on the ground.

Lan Qiren nodded agreeably, then frowned. Since when had they been discussing how to convince Jin Guangshan to be more open to an admittedly idiosyncratic Nie sect custom?

He was about to ask, but then Lao Nie started singing – with Jiang Fengmian providing the harmony, insofar as ‘harmony’ could be used to describe something that sounded not unlike a duet for elephants in heat or possibly someone using a brick to bludgeon people mid-opera – and they all got distracted in the unified effort of trying to get them to stop.

Lan Qiren then forgot about the entire conversation for approximately two months, and abruptly recalled it when Wen Ruohan issued an announcement that the Wen sect now permitted female sect leaders, that, furthermore, shewas the first one, and, finally, that if anyone objected on any basis whatsoever they were welcome to fight her personally.

Which –

Well, in all, Lan Qiren wished his fellow sect leader the best and started resigning himself to having to suffer from even more of Lao Nie’s flirting at the next discussion conference. That man had never yet met a man or woman who could kill him that he wouldn’t try to sleep with, and he generally preferred women…

-

“It’s nice to have the company of another girl,” Jiang Yanli said with a smile.

Wen Xu snorted. “I agree, even if I wish it were under different circumstances.”

Jiang Yanli managed to maintain her expression of peace and tranquility for exactly four breaths before she burst out into giggles, an incredibly infectious sound that finally made Wen Xu start laughing as well.

“It’s mean,” Jiang Yanli said, only laughing harder. “I should – I’m glad they’re happy! Really!”

“We can be glad that they’re happy and also think that our parents are insane,” Wen Xu said. “I can’t believe – your parents are already married! To each other!”

“They weren’t very happy, though,” Jiang Yanli said. “I honestly think Sect Leader Wen has been very good for them. Even if I don’t want to think too hard about it.”

Wen Xu nodded. They were both twelve, which was exactly the age at which you tried very hard not to think things like I’m pretty sure my mom’s railing your dad while your mom provides commentary with his face in her lap right this very instant and yet you did think it because the adults were very not subtle sometimes and then at that point there was nothing to do but laugh.

“I heard that lots of people thought she was going to get together with Sect Leader Nie at first,” Jiang Yanli said. “You know, because they flirt so much?”

“My mom says that Sect Leader Nie flirts with anyone who can kill him,” Wen Xu said, and still marveled a little at being able to say things or think things like mom. Before, she’d only ever been allowed to refer to his father through the most formal terms, with any attempt to use a more intimate sobriquet being viciously punished – she’d often thought that her father would rather she called him Sect Leader Wen instead, and maybe she’d been right.

Her mother was a lot more easy-going about that sort of thing now, though. Wen Xu still wasn’t sure whether it was because she preferred ‘a-niang’ over ‘a-die’ or if it was just that, having blown up the entire cultivation world through her gender choices, her mother felt a lot freer in ignoring the rest of the expectations that had burdened her, too.

“So he’s not serious about her?”

“I mean, maybe he is, I don’t know,” Wen Xu said. “But apparently the whole thing with my mom deciding to announce that she was a woman happened right around the time he was getting back together with his second wife so I guess he was taken?”

“Wait, he got back together with – wasn’t she dead?”

“Apparently not? I really don’t know what happens in the Unclean Realm.”

“Probably for the best,” Jiang Yanli said. “I mean – I don’t – uh, that is –”

“If you’re talking about the fact that my mom still wants to take over the entire cultivation world and declare herself an immortal Empress, trust me, I know.”

“Oh, good,” Jiang Yanli said. “I wasn’t sure how to bring it up.”

Wen Xu shrugged. She mostly just hoped that her mom’s current relationship with the other sect leaders was such that she didn’t actually murder them all in her inevitable effort to take over – it had always been something of a concern, and greater now that she actually knew Jiang Yanli was pretty cool.

“I also thought…” Jiang Yanli hesitated. “You yourself…?”

“Oh, no, I’m different. My birth mother made me pretend to be a boy,” Wen Xu said. “So that I could be the heir and she could keep her place as my father’s main wife, though of course in the end it didn’t really work out that well for her…I think A-Chao’s like mom, though. She wants to be a princess.”

“So she’s like your mom in the – ambitious sense?”

Wen Xu snickered. “Yes, that too. Actually, it’s a little funny. The whole thing started because my mom overheard Lao Nie talking about how a whole generation of Nie sect got cursed to be girls one time, and now I think mysect’s current generation is all girls.”

“Oh! Are they really?”

“Well, not really, but almost?” Wen Xu said. “There’s really just my mom, A-Chao, and me in the main branch, though we have some cousins that got sort of pulled into the main branch after their parents died – A-Qing and A-Ning. They were both born as girls, but recently A-Qing’s been saying that he thinks he might be happier as a man…it’s interesting. He’s not unhappybeing a woman the way I’m pretty sure my mom hated being a man, but he really likesbeing a man, and according to the Nie sect that’s the same thing, just a different expression of it? I don’t know.”

“How old are they?” Jiang Yanli asked.

“A-Qing’s about our age, and A-Ning is your brothers’ ages. You can meet them the next time there’s a conference in Qishan…”

-

“Can I bring Jiaojiao?” Wen Chao asked, and quailed under Wen Qing’s glare.

Wen Ning was just happy to remain underfoot and out of attention range. Her brother had a wicked way with needles when he wanted, and she wanted no part in any of that.

“Are you serious right now?” Wen Qing demanded. “You want to take your whore with you when we run away from home?”

“I’m not leaving Jiaojiao behind!” Wen Chao insisted. “And she’s not a whore! She doesn’t sleep with anyone but me.”

Hasn’t doesn’t mean wouldn’t, Wen Ning thought, then promptly felt bad for thinking it. It was a very catty thought and she was ashamed of it, even if Wang Lingjiao did strike her as rather…mercenary.

“Also I don’t understand why we have to run away anyway,” Wen Chao said, pouting. “So what if Mom started a war? We’re going to win, and then I’ll be a princess.”

“You’re an idiot,” Wen Qing said. “We’re not going to win.”

“But we control half the cultivation world!”

“Yes, and maybe if your mom was as ruthless as she used to be, she would’ve done the things necessary to win the war,” Wen Qing said. “Like take out Lao Nie early on, maybe. Now that the Nie sect’s got both him andNie Mingjue, any of our cultivators that go to the Unclean Realm are going to be slaughtered.”

Wen Chao winced, acknowledging the point.

“And ever since Lao Nie and Lan Qiren started their thing, it’s not like the Nie sect won’t also go defend the Lan sect, right?”

“…right.”

“And of course there’s the Jiang sect, which we probably couldraze to the ground if we really wanted to. But we’re not going to, and you know why?”

“Because Mom is fucking their sect leaders.”

“Because your mom is fucking their sect leaders,” Wen Qing agreed. “And that is why we declared war first on the Jin sect, because no one likes them.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that the Jin sect makes no sense at all as a target! If we take over the entire stretch of territory between Lanling and Qishan, Qinghe gets completely cut off from Gusu and Yunmeng and there’s no way they’re going to let that happen, which means that they’re going to declare war on us. And that is why we are running away from home, because we do not want to be here when the Nie sect shows up.”

Wen Ning’s brother was awesome and everyone should listen to him.

“Maybe your mom will rethink her actions once she’s seen that we’ve run away,” Wen Ning told Wen Chao in a low voice, since she was still scowling. “And I think it’s fine if you bring Jiaojiao. She’s your girlfriend, right?”

Wen Chao frowned. “I mean…she’s someone I’m sleeping with. For now. That’s all – she’s just a maid.”

Wen Ning would normally refrain from commenting, but… “If she’s just a maid, then why do you care about her potentially dying when the Nie sect invades?”

Wen Chao’s face did something. “I – maybe I just want to have her around to keep sleeping with her!”

Wen Qing looked on the verge of saying something, but Wen Ning stepped on her foot.

“Maybe you should think about it,” she said. “I don’t think we can let a servant to come with us – same reason we can’t take Wen Zhuilu, since he’d just report the whole thing to your mom – but if she was your girlfriend and you trusted her…”

She trailed off and shrugged.

Wen Chao’s face was doing weird colors.

“A-Ning, stop trying to teach A-Chao to have mature emotional reactions, it’s a hopeless case,” Wen Qing said. “Keep packing instead. If I was smart, I’d let A-Chao stay here with her Jiaojiao and her dreams of being a princess.”

“No!” Wen Chao exclaimed, then flushed red.

“No? Then pack.”

-

“How about we just assume girl until otherwise proven?” Wen Xu suggested, patting the baby’s back to try to keep calm. Whether the person to be calmed was the baby or Wen Xu herself was unknown. “She doesn’t need to have gender imposed so early.”

“Deciding that she’s a girl is imposing a gender,” Wen Chao said. Her head was in Wang Lingjiao’s lap, and she was pouting. “I can’t believe we have to take care of a baby.”

“She’s family,” Wen Qing said.

“Her parents aren’t!”

“Mom’s rules are that anyone who has the Wen surname and blood who doesn’t have parents gets adopted into the main family.”

“Do Sect Leader Wen’s rules even matter any more?” Wen Ning asked, wringing her hands. “With her being under house arrest…”

“It’s temporary. Once she vows not to wage offensive war without approval of the other Great Sect leaders, she’ll be released and things will go back to normal. Mostly. Possibly with slightly less war?”

“Yes, but in the meantime, why do we have to be in charge?”

“Uh, because you’re the heirs?”

“I’m not the heir,” Wen Chao sniffed. “A-Xu is.”

“This is so stupid,” Wen Xu said. “I can’t believe our mother’s military campaign and inevitable tragic defeat was derailed by the giant man-eating tortoise A-Chao found.”

“Anyone could’ve stumbled over that cave!”

“We weren’t even supposed to be heading in that direction! If you hadn’t stolen the map and insisted on being the navigator –”

“It all turned out for the best,” Wen Qing interrupted. “No blood feuds – or at least, not any we can’t afford to pay off – and that awful Jin Guangshan isn’t around anymore, which the other sect leaders are pretending to mind but really don’t. Mom will be back in charge of the sect soon enough, and with luck will forget all about trying to take over the world and will instead go back to fucking her two lovers that swooped in and saved her life instead defeating her because she’s incredibly touched by that even if she’s pretending she’s not. It’s like a scene out of a bad play.”

“Can we get back to the bit where we got a baby?” Wen Xu said. “I don’t want to deal with a baby.”

“I already explained –”

“I’ll take A-Yuan,” Wen Ning volunteered. “She seems sweet.”

“Girls usually are.”

“We are not saying everyone is a girl until otherwise determined!”

“Why not?” Wen Xu wanted to know. “Worked out pretty good so far.”

“I – that is – I mean…” Wen Qing floundered, then scowled. “Okay, listen. Not even the Nie sect does that, and I refuse for the Wen sect to be weirder than the Nie. All right?”

Everyone considered that, and agreed.

They might be weird – but they weren’t that weird.

Right?