#in my defense. its like. very late. or extremely early. its. its the middle of the fuckin night. and immmmm **sleep deprived** [jazz hands]

[imabiscuitinthousandworlds]

I'M GAY DABADEE DABADEI DABADEE DABADEI DABADEEEEE DABADEEIIIIIIIIIIIII DABADEE DABADEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

[mionemymind]

Do I owe her the truth?

Summary: (Hermione x Gender Neutral Reader) Should Y/n tell the truth to Hermione no matter the consequences? 

Words: 5223

A/N: Let me know what y’all think. I’m sorry I having been writing a lot but I figured you deserve something for waiting for so long. Thank you for being patient. You all are the best!!

According to the great philosopher Kant, one must always do the nature of the good principle regardless of the outcome. Simply put, even if a killer was knocking on the door and asking for your friend, you must answer with the truth of their location. Although a lot argue over philosophies, Y/n simply minded their business. They figured that they have their whole life to sort out what good things they must do and bad things they must keep away. However, a bright witch among their age, made them question every single good and bad thing they had sorted out in life. Because on the very most important day of Hermione’s life, Y/n pondered the question, “Do I owe her the truth?”

The story starts out small like any simple home. You must start with a bit of foundation and the right material for it to be built. So, when Y/n transferred from Ilvermorny to Hogwarts, the very first student they were introduced to was Hermione Granger.

Walking around the halls, Y/n found themselves slightly amazed at the walls of the castle. From the decorations, to the hallways, its scenery, and even its people were more amazing than of Ilvermorny. “Right this way.” Professor McGonagall led the young sorcerer to the very Great Albus Dumbledore. Y/n had only read of the magnificent things Professor Dumbledore has done for the wizarding world and was only slightly scared to meet her current headmaster. While opening the vastly large door, Y/n slowly followed Professor McGonagall in. At the sound of the doors opening, a booming but soft voice uttered, “Ah there you are! Do come sit.” Walking up the stairs, Y/n sat at the seat in front of his desk. Sweaty palms and nervous thoughts clouded their mind. “It is a great pleasure to welcome you to Hogwarts. I know you must be eager to survey the school so I will make this brief.” With a slight pause, Dumbledore had signaled for McGonagall to leave. “As a long-standing tradition of Hogwarts, let me first assign you your house.” Quickly, a hat that looked as if it lived through many ages, was placed on Y/n’s head. “Fierce loyalty like no other to those she cares about why you must be HUFFLEPUFF!”

The hat was taken off as quickly as it was placed. Soon, a new attire was placed on her lap. “Here is your new schedule that corresponds with what you should be learning now. I took great liberty to consult with your headmaster about your curriculum. They talk highly about you in regards to your academics and wizarding abilities.” Y/n blushed at the sound of the compliment. They weren’t used to the praise given to them. “To make sure you are consistently tested, I made sure to put you in classes with one of the brightest witches of your age – ah and here she is.” Y/n turned around and suddenly timed slowed down. A girl with red and black robes entered the room as if she already owned it. It was the confidence that surrounded her aura the most, but Y/n had noticed more of the beauty that she shows.

“This young witch is Hermione Granger.” Leaping to their feet, Y/n stood up to shake Hermione’s hand. “Y/n Y/l/n.” Hermione gave a small smile and sat next to Y/n as Dumbledore had briefly explained the rules of the school. “Ah – I believe that takes care of everything. Ms. Granger please give our newest student a welcoming tour around the school. I have already informed your teachers of your absence. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Other than that, welcome to Hogwarts.”

The two young students left the office and went to the nearest bathroom. While Y/n changed to their new robes, Hermione had fiddled with her hands. “Not to intrude, but you must be extremely smart.” Y/n was buttoning their shirt when Hermione had answered the question. Good thing she couldn’t see them otherwise Hermione would have seen how red Y/n turned. Scratching their neck, Y/n replied, “I guess you could say that.”

“Oh, it’s not a guess rather a fact. You happen to have been put with some of the most difficult classes Hogwarts can currently offer for our year. That’s not something every new student experiences.” It was the way Hermione had said it as a matter of fact that made Y/n blush more. Exiting the stall, Hermione turned around and saw that they had their tie around their neck. “Need help?” Hermione said while pointing at their tie.

Once again Y/n blushed and nodded. Hermione was quick to get close to Y/n and started to tie their tie. “I do have to warn you though. There’s not a lot of competition when it comes to academics in Hogwarts. Don’t get me wrong, there is certain bright students, but none seem to come close.” Tightening the tie, Hermione looked into Y/n eyes. It was the first time she noticed how deep they looked. Regardless of their color, they were enchanting as well. “However, you seem to be my closest competition. So, I will have to take every chance I can get to beat you.” Y/n chuckled at the bright young witch in front of them. Hermione backed away after realized how close they were and cleared her throat. “Don’t take it as a laughing matter. Academics are truly important to me.”

Y/n had put their hands up in defense. “Don’t worry…I just find it funny that you think it’s going to be easy to compete with me.” Y/n smirked at their come back. If you were to ask where the hell that confidence came from, don’t bother. Y/n doesn’t know the answer either. With a similar smirk, Hermione said, “You and I are going to be great together.”

The story continues as the home is built. The next few things needed are the walls and roof.

It was the summer after their third year when Hermione, Harry, and Y/n had spent the summer at the Burrow. Ron had almost forgotten to invite Y/n when Ginny saved the day. The three of showed up at the house all dropping in one by one. Y/n was the last one to drop in, showing up during dinner time. Slowly walking in with trunk in hand, Y/n was met with the sound of their name echoing through the house. Ginny was the first to notice Y/n’s presence and loudly yelled, “Y/n!” Ginny quickly gave Y/n a hug when the echoes came from up the stairs.

“Did someone say Y/n?” George asked.

“Y/n?”

“Are they here?”

“Y/n’s here?!”

Hermione was the last one to ask when a stampede of people came running down the stairs. “Y/n!” One by one, they all started a group hug with Y/n in the middle. “Guys, I can’t breathe.” They all broke apart allowing Y/n to regain air, but was cut off when Molly came swooping in. “Oh, hello dear. I was beginning to worry that you couldn’t make it – are you hungry? You must be starving. I cooked your favorite.” Molly was quick to ramble on and on when Fred had pried the two apart. “Mum, I think Y/n needs oxygen. We’ll go ahead and start setting up the table.”

Molly slightly blushed and smiled at Y/n. “I’m glad that you’re here Y/n. Now come on people, dinner won’t serve itself.” The group was quick to help around the house, working like a well-oiled machine. Soon, everyone was sitting down at the table enjoying their home cooked meal. Y/n was sitting smack dab in the middle between Ginny and Hermione. Across from them were the boys.

Over the course of dinner, plenty of topics arose such as school, quidditch, muggles (only because Arthur can’t get enough), and more. The boys plus Ginny and Y/n couldn’t stop talking about the upcoming Quidditch World Cup. Hermione butted in about how glad she was that summer finally came. It was especially hard on the girl considering her tight schedule.

After dinner came the night. The house was quiet as the guests separated to their assigned rooms. It just so happens that Hermione and Y/n were assigned Charlie’s old room. If it weren’t for the dragon paraphernalia, Charlie’s room was actually quite neat and well organized. “Going to take a gander but I think Charlie really likes dragons.” Hermione snorted at Y/n’s obviously sarcastic comment. “Oh really? Could’ve mistaken me, I thought he was a quidditch fan.” Jokes aside, the two changed into their sleeping garments and went to bed.

Well Hermione went to bed while Y/n stared at the ceiling deep in thought. It was not until the moon was shining brightly through the window that Y/n realized how late it was. Considering the time, they tried to sleep but failed miserably. After giving up, Y/n laid on their side and faced towards Hermione. Seeing as the young wizard had already spent too much time alone with their thoughts, Y/n poked Hermione’s face until she was awake.

“Hermione. Psssst. Hermione” Y/n whispered as they poked her. “Hermione. Psst.” At the feeling of someone poking her, Hermione swatted their hand away. Seeing Hermione with an annoyed sleeping face was funny to Y/n but being alone sucked more. “Hermione, are you awake?” Suddenly, Hermione’s eyes opened; it was like a fierce dragon was staring into your soul. She looked mad at the fact someone woke her up from her slumber. “What Y/n?”

With an innocent smile, Y/n looked at Hermione and said, “Wanna tell secrets?” Hermione rolled her eyes and faced the opposite way of Y/n. “Go to sleep Y/n. We have to wake up early soon.” Y/n groaned at Hermione’s words. She was right, of course, but Y/n couldn’t go to sleep. Night was always the hardest.

“Come on Hermione.” Y/n received no response from the girl. Only a silent shoulder. Laying on her back and hands behind their head, Y/n looked at the ceiling. “Ya know, I know your secret…at least one of them.” Y/n glanced at Hermione and she still was facing away. “Or maybe two of them. Well, it’s the same secret, it just so happens that two Hermiones happen to share them.” Hermione quickly shot up and faced towards Y/n to see them smirking. “It’s not that hard to tell that a bright witch like you can’t be in two classes at once, but somehow you were.” Hermione grabbed her pillow and proceeded to hit Y/n with it. “Don’t you dare tell a soul Y/n Y/l/n. I won’t be afraid to hex you.”

Y/n grabbed the pillow and threw it back at the witch, making sure to aim at her face. “Well maybe next time, try not to be in two places at once. It sure threw me off when I had to drop off a note for the Professor only to have found you in a different class. And after I returned, you were still at the same spot I left you.”

“Unbelievable. I knew I should have volunteered to do that, but you just had to be faster than me.” Hermione rolled her eyes and sat up against the bed frame. Y/n followed suit and did the same thing. There was still an obvious smirk on their face. After a couple minutes, the silence broke. “Well, are you going to tell me your secret since you exposed mine?”

“Well Ms. Grainger lets see what secret you get to hear today.” Pondering for a moment, Y/n tried to think of information that no one knew, something of equivalently as important such as time traveling. “I got it! However, you have to promise me that you won’t tell a soul not even Crookshanks.” Y/n held out their hand with only their pinky in the air. Hermione looked them in the eye as she said, “I promise.” They locked pinkies as Y/n said, “I think I like girls.”

Hermione blinked for a couple seconds which only led devasting thoughts in Y/n’s mind. It didn’t take long, but she responded with, “Oh for Merlin’s sake. If you’re going to tell me a secret Y/n, at least make it to something that isn’t so painfully obvious.”

Hermione broke the gaze as Y/n stared in disbelief. “Don’t look so surprised. Just as you said, maybe next time try not to be caught staring at every single girl in Hogwarts.”

Gulping down their fear, Y/n said, “You don’t mind?” Hermione shook her head. “Nope. Not one single bit. You’re still the same, just love who you love except for racists and he who shall not be named. Well there’s a list. As long as they’re not genuinely bad people and you can see them joining SPEW, then I approve.”

Y/n looked at the girl beside her in amazement and wonder. They continued the conversation as the night grew, telling even more daring secrets as the previous. But one secret did remain with Y/n that night, it was their everlasting crush on Hermione Jean Granger.

The second to last thing a home needs is the spark to light the fireplace as well as the furniture. That way the home can feel as warm and as safe to those that harbor in it.

It was a winter wonderland at Hogwarts. Students were preparing to travel back home to their respective families. However, a group of students decided to spend the last weekend at Hogsmeade before leaving the next day. Right now, they had crowed the room at The Three Broomsticks with laughter, joy, and happy memories. The air was filled with a different type of warmth, one that felt safe and even like a second home. Everyone was talking so loudly within small groups, it was hard to even feel alone. Ginny and Y/n were standing near the fire talking when Fred had grabbed the attention of the room. “Everyone. Everyone. I propose a game. Let’s do a simple muggle game called truth or dare.” Everyone in the group oood as they knew where this was going to lead. They would start with a couple truths before someone breaks the ice with a good dare. Typically, the twins were the ones to propose the dare, but not a lot could compete. “Whoever cannot complete the truth or dare shall lose. Completion allows you to stay,” George had added.

The group sat in a tight makeshift circle that almost took up all the chairs and tables provided. “I’ll start. Harry, who was the last person you snogged?” All eyes were now on the chosen one. Everyone could see his nervousness, but everyone knew he would never want to be the first one out. “Draco.” Certain eyes went wide, but Y/n simply went unphased since she somewhat caught the two making out in between classes. “No questions. Neville, is your crush in this room?” Neville immediately turned red at the question and was the first one to back out. There were small boos mainly coming from the twins. “Since Neville backed out, lets go with the person to his right, Ron. Is your crush in this room?” Ron had the same reaction as Neville but had looked at the ceiling to refrain from giving away his crush. “Yes.” Everyone looked among each other trying to figure out who it could possibly be. “Don’t even try asking who it is. Ginny since you’re bloody enjoying this, did you and Y/n ever snog?” Y/n and Ginny both went wide eyed causing the group to lean a little bit closer to the two. What added more was at how everyone knew how close the two were. Not wanting to entirely answer the question, Ginny backed out the circle causing more booing from the crowd. “What a buzzkill. However, lets just ask the second-best person. Well Y/n, have you snogged my sister?”

Y/n looked at the crowded but had kept glancing towards Hermione. Although it was a simple question, Y/n hadn’t wanted to entirely answer it. You see, Ginny and Y/n did kiss before, but it was an accident. There was a bump, a stumble, then a fall, and then an accident kiss. It didn’t mean anything to the two of them, plus Y/n felt like her heart might’ve been for somewhere. So, Y/n had followed Ginny in the same manner and backed out the circle. “Oh bloody hell! You two have a knack to keep this stupid mystery alive.” They both rolled their eyes at Ron and watched the game continue. What Y/n failed to realize was how affected a certain witch was at their answer.

The game dwindled down until there was three left and unironically it was the golden trio that had made it this far. It was a little surprising for Y/n that Hermione had made it this far. Majority of the time, Hermione would be among the first to decline doing a truth or dare. “I’m sorry Hermione, but I must win. So, I dare you to kiss Ron.” It was something about the dare that made Y/n’s stomach turn. Their mood soured so quickly that they almost felt sick. Slightly tapping Ginny’s back, Y/n whispered in her ear, “Hey, I’m gonna head outside real quick. I don’t feel so good.” Ginny gave a concerned look. She was going to say something back, but Y/n was already out the door with their hand clutching their stomach.

Besides Ginny, Hermione was the only other person that noticed Y/n had left. In her line of sight, she saw past Ron and briefly seen them leave in distress. The deafening chants of “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” didn’t register with her. The only thing running through Hermione’s mind was Y/n. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this dare guys.” Quickly getting out the circle, the chants stopped, and the game continued to declare the winner. Hermione excused herself and made her way outside. She made sure to grab hers and Y/n’s coat. “What an idiot. It’s freezing cold out there.”

Stepping out the tavern, Hermione saw various witches and wizards pass by. Some she knew and some she didn’t. Walking further out, Hermione grew frustrated after not quickly finding her friend. “Where the hell are you?” Walking around further, she saw an outline of a person. Clearly, they had no coat on with how much they were shivering. Hermione walked closer to the figure and realized it was Y/n. “For someone so bloody smart, you are such an idiot.” Hermione accidentally wrapped her own coat around Y/n. She didn’t realize she had instinctively put on her best friend’s coat. Y/n chuckled, but it was cut short due to the freezing weather. Hermione sat down beside them and focused on the view in front of them. There was a small silence between the two as they had people watched. Hermione almost forgot why she even went outside in the first place. She shook her head remembering her thought, “Are you okay? I saw you leave in a hurry.”

Y/n glanced at Hermione, giving her a sheepish smile. “Yeah, I think my stomach was just feeling off. I went outside to get better air.” Hermione looked in their eyes and was quick to call bullshit. “Better air? It’s absolutely freezing out here. Even Merlin themselves wouldn’t want to be outside this weather. So why don’t you tell me the real truth? And if you lie Y/n, I will not hesitate to read your mind.” Y/n gulped at the sound of her threat. They glanced back out into the view in front of them. Taking a deep breath, Y/n nervously replied with, “During your dare, I suddenly felt…sick…I don’t know why but my stomach felt so knotty and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. So, I left.” Y/n glanced back at Hermione and immediately noticed the look on her face. It was intense and serious. Suddenly, something in the air felt different. It was getting hotter and hotter regardless of the snow falling around them.

“Can I kiss you?” Hermione asked in such a small whisper. A lump appeared in Y/n’s throat. They didn’t know what to quite say. They never really thought about what their feelings meant towards Hermione, but then again, everyone practically knew that Y/n and Hermione were in love with each other. Y/n just happened to be the biggest dumbass when it comes to realizing their feelings for others. But here Y/n was. They weren’t answering the question, but felt themselves leaning in. The two closed their eyes and was slowly leaning in. Hermione felt her heart beating so fast that she was certain it would explode, but she didn’t care. She knew that for so long, she wanted this.

However…the moment never arrived. It was cut off from a distant yell, “Y/n!” The two quickly separated and looked at different directions. Suddenly Hermione took it a step further and slightly moved away from Y/n. “There you are – I’ve been looking every where for you!” Ginny jogged up to the duo, noting the awkward tension that emerged. “We have to go back to the castle, I’ll explain on the way.” The red head dragged away her best friend while giving a small nod towards Hermione.

When they were far enough and half way towards the castle, Ginny explained the dire situation. “It’s your parents Y/n, you have to go home. An owl was sent towards the tavern. Here, you’re going to want to read this.” Ginny handed Y/n the letter. After reading it, Y/n’s stomach dropped. “I have to get home.” Ginny sent them a look. “Clearly dumbass. Come on, let’s get your stuff.” It was eerie quiet between the two since the situation had escalated. Y/n’s parents were in trouble and needed Y/n’s help.

Back at Hogsmeade, Hermione didn’t quite know what to feel. She was so close to kissing her crush, but Ginny just had to ruin the moment. The same person she was somewhat certain had Y/n’s heart. Asking the younger lad to kiss her took all the courage Hermione had, and here she was slightly heartbroken that she was gone. So deep in thought, Hermione didn’t notice Ron sit next to her until he said something. “Hey.”

“I need you to explain to Hermione that I’m sorry.” Ginny sighed. She slightly felt guilty for ruining the moment, but time was precious and something Y/n very much needed now. “I know you saw what was going to happen, but I don’t even know what I was doing.” Closing their trunk, Y/n stood up and looked at Ginny. “I do know that I also need to realize what I feel for Hermione. For a lot of my life, I thought I just had a deep love for her. I guess now it might be even deeper.” Ginny walked up and gave Y/n a bone chilling hug.

“I’ll try my best, but she’s definitely going to want to hear it from you.” They separated. Y/n saw the tears forming in Ginny’s eyes. “I’m going to bloody miss you. Please be safe in America and you better send me an owl at least once every two weeks.” Y/n gave Ginny and small salute and crossed their heart.

“I will Ginny. Besides, I need you to deliver all the letters I write for Hermione. I really gotta figure this out.” With one last hug and a small punch to Y/n’s shoulder, the young student left Hogwarts on to the next ride to America. The letter was still clutched in her hand and in it was detailed the long passage of how to save Y/n’s parents from the very people chasing after them. Y/n didn’t quite know how long it was going to take to save their parents, but they could only hope Hermione could understand. “Please wait for me.” Y/n whispered to Hermione in particular, but the younger witch didn’t hear those words. Instead, Hermione heard comforting words from a different red head.

The last thing a home needs is the very people that should live in it. It needs family, friends, and most certainly you and me.

Y/n stood, pacing around the bathroom. They knew time was running out, it was now or never. “Why? Why? Why? Why?” Y/n stood still and pinched the bridge of their nose. Eyes closed, Y/n pondered more and more about all of the things they didn’t do. How could they have let this go on for this long? Why did they let it go on for this long? Deep in thought, Y/n didn’t notice a certain ginger walk into the bathroom. “Y/n, what in the bloody hell are you doing there?  Hermione has been calling you and quite worried sick. If it wasn’t her big day, I would have already knocked you out you big prat.”

Y/n glanced at the second most important person of her life. With a heavy sigh, Y/n slid down the wall. Their knees were propped, hands in their face, and heart in their throat. “I don’t know what to do anymore Ginny.” Ginny pursed her lips and looked back out the door, making sure the coast was clear, before locking the door. She laid her small bouquet of flowers on the sink and sat down near Y/n while trying not to mess up her dress.

“Although I love my idiot brother with all my heart…I somehow love you more.” They sat there together knowing where this was going. “I can’t do it Ginny. I really can’t sit there without feeling like my world is crashing apart right in front of my eyes…The worst thing about it is, I can only blame myself for letting it go this long.”

Ginny rested her head on her best friend’s shoulder. She didn’t quite know what to say anymore. Offering her presence and her ear was the only thing left. “I-I-I spent so long in other countries to try and find my parents while trying to find myself. To try and figure out what I feel for her and by the time I have, she’s already engaged to another…And it’s my stupid fucking fault for ever thinking Hermione would wait. I mean why would she? If some other bloke can already provide her happiness, why should she wait for me? For…us?” Y/n hadn’t realized they were crying until their hands suddenly felt wet. “It’s sad, isn’t it?” Y/n said as they wiped their tears. “What is?”

“Knowing I am my own cause for my sadness. I mean who I am to blame Hermione. The girl was only doing what Aristotle says. Because as he said, we all want to be selfishly happy.” Sighing in defeat, Y/n got up and dusted off their attire. Lending their hand out, Ginny got up and did the same manner. “How much time do I got?”

Ginny looked at the clock in the bathroom. “You have five minutes before she needs to be walking down the isle.” With a small smile, Y/n kissed Ginny forehead and said a small goodbye. The two were only going to part ways for merely a bit. After all, Ginny is Y/n’s second-best friend. But here was Y/n, jogging to the very person that was going to forever have their heart.

Standing outside the bride’s room, Y/n silently prayed and opened the door. There she was in all her glory, the bride to be, the love of her life, the Hermione Granger. However, the brunette herself wasn’t feeling so great. With all the stress of wanting the wedding to be perfect, it wasn’t helping that her very best friend was mysteriously disappearing all the time without a single word. She looked up and sighed once she saw who it was. Picking up her dress, Hermione strutted to Y/n as they closed the door behind them. “Do you have any clue how worried sick I have been?”

“I-” With a single motion of Hermione’s hand, Y/n remained silent. “And anytime I happen to need my best friend to calm me down, they’re nowhere in sight. What is wrong with you? This is my special day Y/n and you haven’t been as great of a friend as you should be. So please, enlighten me where have you been running off to that’s sooo important that you need to leave me?” It was those piercing eyes that made Y/n’s heart melt over and over again. It’s those very same eyes that could practically melt the iceberg that hit the titanic. And it’s those eyes that makes Y/n’s world spin again.

“I…I can’t be your friend Hermione.” Y/n’s voice was so soft and so delicate, Hermione almost questioned if her ears were playing tricks. “What are you bloody saying? You’re not making any sense.” And all the remaining courage Y/n could muster up, they held her hands, looked her in the eyes and said, “When I was gone, I learned of this great philosopher named Kant-” “What does this have to-” Hermione saw the silently begging eyes in front of her and shut her mouth. This was serious and she wasn’t quite sure if she was ready for it.

“He always focused on good principles and always asked about the before of the action. Generally, he believed others should necessarily treat people how they want to be treated. So, a short example is that one should never lie under any circumstances. It does not matter the outcome, but it is simply something you must do. And although I’ve never really believed in absolute, I’ve been asking myself if I should tell the truth. And if people actually deserve to know the truth. So while I thought about it and asked, well what if they deserve the truth, should I still tell them regardless of the outcome? Although I thought I knew a lot of the world, it turns out I only know two things. One is that you deserve to know the absolute truth Hermione and the second is…you are the lie I repeat at night. Because every night I tell I love you, the truth is…I am so in love with you Hermione.”

The world went silent for Hermione. Not even a single pin drop could break the silence for her. Here she was still holding her best friend’s hands as they had just admitted that they were in love with her. “And I’m so sorry Hermione that today of all days was when I told you. I know I had my chances in the letters I sent but I must be honest now because you still deserve the absolute truth. And I’m running out of words to say, because it would be too selfish of me to convince you to run away. So I offer my congratulations Hermione, but I must still run. For then maybe in the blur of life, I can see a small fragment where there could have been you and I.” Y/n kissed Hermione’s forehead as tears may their way down. Letting go of Hermione, Y/n silently walked out the room without turning back because if they had, they would have broken down.

So, while Y/n told Hermione the truth directly. Hermione stood still at the alter with someone who she is most positively certain she loves pondering the very question, “Do I run after the truth?”

[honey-hippie-harper]

Infrangible

AFGHSAGHJS THIS IS SO LATE IS NOT EVEN FUNNY ANYMORE LMAO

In my defense, I stopped being a person long ago and now, in all the ways except physical, I happen to be a potato. BUT ANYWAY :’) This is for the Renegades Ship Week hosted by @greasicookies <3 (Thanks again!), for day 5, which is Maxpie. The prompt is “secrets”! <3

I had a tough time writing this because I’m going through a lot of stuff rn :’) still, I hope you can enjoy it x’ddd.

Tag list: @healing-winston-pratt @obsidianfr3sk @the-wee-woo-rita and afsghagshja @all-weather-is-bad (because this is a very...me fic lol and I think you’re already used to my sad attempt at humor haahahaah i’M SORRY AGSHJAKL) AND @lackadae because agshjs I made a reference to one of your drawings, hon :’) (I promise once again, to catch up with your content once I feel better afsghjak).

And that’s it. I hope you like it <3

When Max turned nine, he reached the conclusion that everybody forgot their early years at some point. Before, Adrian had already explained to him that wasn’t quite true, because he misunderstood Max’s statement and thought he was feeling bad about himself for not being able to recall certain things. He told him that, unlike what he thought –which was false because that’s not what Max meant- people usually couldn’t store those memories from when they were younger than three.

“Some people do.” He said. “But it’s normal if you don’t remember anything from when you were…I don’t know. Two.”

“Do you remember anything from when you were two?” Max asked him.

From the other side of the glass, Adrian scrunched up his nose. And then, obviously, he saw himself in the need to adjust his glasses.

“I’m not quite sure whether I was two or not. But I do know I was younger than five.” He started. “There was a small canal on the way to the apartment. When it rained, it would grow a lot. It didn’t have big torrents or anything, but it did grow a lot. The water usually went higher than my ankles. But the thing was…that every time  it grew, it became infested with turtles.”

He paused for a second.

“I really liked turtles.” He continued, shrugging. “My mother used to let me walk down to the water, as long as she was right behind me, obviously; one day, when we were coming back from the city, she stopped to attend a call. I got too impatient and went down alone when she wasn’t looking. The next thing I remember is that, just when I was getting up after catching a turtle, I felt her tugging me by the back of my shirt. The turtle fell on its shell.”

At that point, Max realized he had been staring at how he kept on fidgeting with his pen instead of looking him in the eye, but he continued doing so, because he didn’t like it when Adrian’s voice turned that serious.

“…She had never screamed at me like that.” He said, as if he were talking to himself and then, to erase the tension, he tried to scoff. “I don’t remember what she said, but I remember that she said it so loud I told her she was scaring the turtle. Then I started crying. Like, a lot. I think she was terrified too.”

In the end, everything turned too quiet for his liking, and Max did something his dad had advised him to do for times like these, when he just didn’t know what came next: Improvise.

“I didn’t know you liked turtles.”

“…Well, I did. I really liked turtles when I was younger.”

Max had seen a couple of turtles in his life, but not as many as Adrian had seen, he supposed, because Max had never stepped outside, except when he was a baby.

Which was exactly the point.

He didn’t have memories from when he was a baby, or a toddler. Most of the people who had come to talk to him had said they remembered events that were either too sad (like Adrian) or meaningful in their lives. Max didn’t have anything like that. In fact, his first –very blurry- memory was standing on the edge of the quarantine, with his hands pressed against the crystal, and then licking it.

According to his dads, he was between three and four (“He was three, Simon. What are you talking about?” “He was born in November.” “It wasn’t November yet.” “We had just celebrated his birthday. He was four.” “HE WASN’T FOUR, SIMON! HE WAS THREE! THREE! We were celebrating that his quarantine had just been built!” “IT WAS THE SAME EVENT, HUGH!”) and Aunt Tamaya, plus the both of them, were in the hallway. For some reason, the fact that his eyes were so huge (they were still big. But they were bigger when he was a baby) came off as odd to Tamaya. And the moment they made eye contact, he licked the glass.

Nobody knew why. Not even himself. The adults remembered it better than he did, of course, but none of them had ever been able to guess the reasoning behind it. They often expressed Max had been a very strange baby, mostly because of his lack of social skills. It’s not like he had chosen that, and it’s not like his fathers would’ve allowed it to happen if they had had any other option. But Max wasn’t willing to stand there and pretend that he knew what he was doing, either.

Most of the time, he didn’t.

He barely held any memories of the nurses that had ever been in charge of his care, but, for obvious reasons, he remembered Dad. It was always easier to remember the person who had taken care of you the most, he supposed. And Max knew, among a lot of things, that it wasn’t his other dad’s fault. Though, sometimes, he couldn’t help but blame him.

Again, he didn’t know why, but there were those days, when he needed he the most, where a voice inside of his head told him that, if Simon loved him enough, he would just sacrifice his powers to be with him. His powers weren’t that useful for combat anyway.

“Okay, but that’s kinda mean.” Adrian told him the first time he opened up about it, the night before he attended the Trials to choose the members of his patrolling team. “Pops might not have combat powers, but they’re as important as the rest of the members’. That’s why they work so well as a team, you know? Every power can be extremely helpful during a battle, as long as you know how to use it.”

Max wasn’t doing anything in particular that day. Nothing besides listening to Adrian and sitting on the floor , at least.

“But if every power is useful…” He said, tilting his head to the side. “…Why are you allowed to reject certain aspirants?”

Adrian frowned a little, not in the sense that he looked angry at Max. Rather, he was confused by the question and was trying to word the answer in a way that sounded rational.

“Because…” He gulped and clicked his tongue. “…Like I said…uhm…the Council is an extremely good team. They’ve been doing this for a while. Us, the patrolling leaders are…allowed to reject certain prodigies because we don’t have as much experience as them. And…we might not know how to use somebody’s powers, and that’s very dangerous. We don’t want people dying, do we?”

When he said that, something clicked inside Max’s brain, and he nodded in automatic. Obviously, a few years ago, a non-prodigy teacher had taught him how to read, and the moment Adrian notified him it was his year to be in the Trials, he managed to read the manual and the rules for the event, from a booklet and a pamphlet (respectively) he had asked his dad to bring for him. He didn’t get much new information, different from the one he heard on TV or the one presented in the posters. However, amongst the rules, there was a section that talked about banned powers, which contained only two categories:

-Complete telekinesis.

-Stardust modelling.

“Yeah.” Dad told him. He was bathing him in the quarantine’s bathroom (Of course. Where else?). “Stardust catchers…which….are able to model stardust, are extremely dangerous and there’s not much research about them. Nobody really knows how they work, and it would be pretty difficult for us to… handle a prodigy like that.”

“Like me.”

Dad had always had a pretty specific routine he had to follow when bathing him. If he missed or misplaced a step, he acted like would explode or something. Also, Max didn’t understand why, but ever since he started growing thicker hair, Dad became pretty strict on the fact they should take care of it so it would grow healthy. Hence why they had a full hair routine that they did in the bathtub. That day, the statement caught him so off-guard he grabbed the wrong bottle, and then, when he realized it, he was already pouring the dense liquid (that looked more like a paste to him) on Max’s head. Cursing under his breath, he placed his other hand in the middle so it would fall over his palm, washed Max’s head and started the routine all over again, before changing the subject:

“About complete telekinesis…there’s obviously a lot of research about that power. We know how to manage with that. But telekinetic prodigies are not …very accepted in our society. They’re pointed at…Frowned upon. In the worst of cases, other prodigies hunt them down and then kill them.”

In that moment, Max came to the conclusion that all that changing the subject thing had been in vain.

Because, from his part, the answer was exactly the same:

“Like me.”

And Dad didn’t like that, for he started scratching his scalp harder, accidentally.

“No. It’s nothing like you.” He said. “You’re not like that, Max. Society hates telekinesis because some evil dude decided to use his powers, his telekinesis, for awful reasons and stained prodigy’s names. You’re not like that. You’re not abusive, or selfish or evil. And I don’t want to hear you comparing yourself to him ever again. Understood?”

To this day, that was the most aggressive form of validation someone had ever given him, but Max took it anyway, because he trusted Dad, and if he had said something like that, then there had to be a clear reason behind it.

“Understood.” He whispered.

And he tried, he really tried, to believe it. But, like many other things, no matter how hard Max tried, he was still severely confused. Not that he didn’t know about the Age of Anarchy, or the parties involved in the Age of Anarchy.

The quarantine, needless to say, could get pretty boring most of the time. Max had to do a lot of things to kill time, and some of those activities involved reading books that children shouldn’t be reading. He did read some children’s books, but then he would find himself looking through history articles and books, and reading the chapters that interested him the most. For instance, he was confident he knew about the Age of Anarchy, but one thing was knowing about it, and another, different thing, was having an opinion about in regards to it.

Max didn’t know if he had something to say about the topic. If he did, it was a very incomplete idea, and it was very likely he wouldn’t be able to phrase it correctly.

The group of people Max talked the most to were adults, and those adults, especially the ones who had experienced the Age of Anarchy and somehow managed to make it out alive, refused to talk about it. As for the few children he had talked to…

Well, about them…

Long story short, they had lives.

They all had lives outside of a glass, unlike Max. Maybe they weren’t the most interesting of lives, but at least they for sure had to be more interesting than his’. They didn’t have a pre-established schedule, where a designated person would come in to feed him or extract blood samples from his body, to then take them to the laboratory. They didn’t have to hear a total of seven alarms to remind him what he had to do: Wake up and get dressed, have breakfast and brush his teeth, enter the virtual sessions with his teachers, take a shower, have his blood samples taken,  start doing his homework –if he had any- and do whatever he wanted once he was finished, have dinner, brush his teeth and go to bed, and then start all over again.

That moment, when he had spare time, would be the same one normal kids used to go out with their friends, like Adrian did. To go to the park and get themselves a scarily huge wound at the center of their knee. To live. To breathe air. To do…literally anything that wasn’t this.

Because Max was different from the many children he hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to meet or talk to, because, obviously, they wouldn’t want to spend the whole day hanging out with a person…like him.

The only way Max could see two out of the three people in his family was through a crystal wall. And he couldn’t kiss them, he couldn’t touch them… sometimes he even wondered if he knew how their voices sounded, because, after all, Dad’s voice sounded the tiniest bit different once he crossed that infamous glass door.

He couldn’t walk through the streets of Gatlon, because, for starters, he didn’t know them. And if he dared to go out there, he would get killed on spot for having accidentally neutralized a prodigy who didn’t want to be neutralized.

Other kids had nannies whom they complained about when their parents couldn’t look after them (at least that’s the kind of things he saw on the TV shows he watched) but Max had patrol units that would move from one corner of the room to another, ready to attack anyone who came closer than necessary to him, because the only one who could take care of him in person, was Hugh.

Other kids could go out freely, without being scared of anything at all. They could get hurt while having fun with their friends and family. They could laugh until they cried with them. They could hug them, sleep in the same bed as them. They could walk their pets, go on road trips, go to amusement stores, water parks…

They could experience the current world; watch all the new events that were happening every day, in first hand.

They didn’t have to read about the past, or the people from the past to keep themselves entertained. They didn’t have the need to do that. At all.

They were living the lives Max couldn’t have, because he was too dangerous for that.

And obviously, that’s why he couldn’t just…go around asking other kids about what was their favorite bug, their favorite planet…or their opinions about Ace Anarchy, and if Pops (Simon) saying “Alec, with an A as in Abusive Swine” made them laugh.

Besides, he hadn’t even met that many kids his age. Or kids, for that matter.

He was aware Adrian wasn’t exactly a grown up, but he wasn’t a kid either, so, he usually didn’t make it into that list.

In fact, just like the banned powers in that manual, there were only two kids in Max’s list of acquaintances.

Aunt Tamaya’s first baby was born without powers, when Max was like four years old, and his dads were way too excited about it (Weird thing to brag about out loud, honestly, because all the recruits in the Headquarters were betting ridiculous amounts of money on which powers the Thunderbaby would have –Max could hear them- and one day they just heard The Dread Warden storming into the hallway, euphorically screaming “GUESS WHAT, MY LITTLE CHERUB BABY? YOUR COUSIN IS ABSOLUTELY FREAKING POWERLESS!”), for they thought Max would finally be able to have a friend who was more or less his age. Dad was the one who brought him in, two weeks after he was born. He was still tiny, red and chubby, and wrapped in his three different blankets that way, he looked like a bloated marshmallow.

Aunt Tamaya, her husband, Pops, Adrian, Aunt Kasumi and Uncle Evander were outside (as always) waiting to see what happened…and, it was extremely odd for Max to admit it, but he couldn’t remember much about that moment, even though he was already older than three. There was, however, a video taken by Uncle Evander where, if you narrowed your eyes hard enough, you could see the moment Max burst into tears right after kissing the baby’s cheek.

Neil was his friend.

At least, Max considered him to be his friend. Still, they had an age gap of four whole years, and a part of him was waiting until he was a little older so they could be on the same page. Because sometimes, when Neil couldn’t comprehend something semi-important that Max had just said, things could get pretty awkward, because there were occasions when, if Neil got too frustrated over anything, he would start crying, and his sobs often summoned his mother all the way from across the building. She never particularly tried to put the blame on Max. In fact, she hadn’t even glared at him not once, ever.

But she did choose to take him with her, into her office, or ask Adrian to babysit him while he calmed down.  Afterwards, he usually didn’t come back to the quarantine.

“It’s not your fault, Max.” Pops would tell him, always. “It’s just that…Neil...he’s younger than you. There are things that might be…easy to you, but that are super complicated to him. And you might be able to do things that he can’t, and he can’t understand why he can’t, so he gets super confused and angry and that’s why he cries and Tamaya has to come and comfort him.”

“That, and because she’s like a...very freaky bird mom who hears her children cry and comes around with her super sonic enhanced sense of hea—“

“Hugh, don’t be rude.”

Every time they had that discussion in front of him, Max could never understand why Pops said Dad was being rude. He was right, to a certain extent. Aunt Tamaya was just…being a mom.

And that’s what moms did.

At least, that’s what Max had read and seen on TV because families like his’ were…super rare to find in his cartoons or favorite books. In fact, the times when he had seen himself represented in any of the things were so few that, for the longest time, Max had this weird, messed up idea that biological men could give birth. He thought that Adrian, apart from the fact that he was the closest to him, looked more similar to Simon, and that had to mean he had given birth to him, while Hugh had been the one to give birth to Max.

One year, when Max was six, they finished Lady Indomitable’s gigantic golden statue, placed downtown. It was late June, and though the city had previously looked covered in colors, that day it just looked…white and golden. That’s the best way Max  could find to put it into words.

According to Max’s weather application, the heat was unbearable that day (good thing he couldn’t feel anything because the temperature in the quarantine was always regulated) yet, according to what he was seeing in one of his screens, a great percentage of the citizens of Gatlon were marching in the streets carrying floating lanterns, headed towards downtown where the event was being held.

The Council was standing in front of the covered statue. All of them except Blacklight, who had stayed to take care of the Headquarters, and Max could see him from where he was. They gave a speech about Lady Indomitable together, and as they started revealing the statue, Tsunami sang a song that was supposed to be one of Lady Indomitable’s favorite ones, and that Max was too young to recognize (he supposed). In his opinion, it was a cute event, but he would be lying if he said he wasn’t utterly confused the moment he saw Adrian taking one step ahead to be the first one to let go of his floating lantern, which was different from the other ones, because his’ was bigger, and it had a big “I”. Besides, people waited a couple of seconds until it was stable above their heads to let go of their own floating lanterns.

It still looked cute to him, but now it looked weird as well. So he got up from his chair, and walked towards the edge, pressing his hands against the glass. He hoped that would be enough to magically catch Evander’s attention, who was, at the moment, using his chair as a swing, as he typed a number in his computer, copying it from his calculator and eating from his salad every now and then. Obviously, Max’s telepathic call wasn’t enough, and he had to knock on the glass a couple of times, loudly. Even then, Uncle Evander didn’t look up in his direction.

But he did hear him, because he did respond.

“It’s not gonna work, Maximus. I’m not getting you out.”

As a side note, Max considered telling him his full name was Maximilian and not Maximus, because that was way before he realized it was a nickname. Nevertheless, he just let it pass, for the simple reason he had better things to ask. That’s why he proceeded to knock again, instead of speaking.

“What is it?”

“I wanna ask you something.”

Evander tried to steady himself in the chair without falling on his back, and once he succeeded, he came closer to the quarantine, with his arms over his hips.

“Why is Adrian doing that?” He asked, just because he wasn’t able to find another way to phrase it, while pointing at the screen behind him; Evander narrowed his eyes following his finger, as if he hadn’t been watching the event himself from a livestream on his phone. A few seconds later, he seemed to realize what he was talking about, and bit his upper lip, before pouting barely a little.

Then, he clicked his tongue.

“Because that’s his mom. And today’s her birthday.”

And it’s not that Max was insensitive enough not to recognize that it was very sad, but at the same time those single words were enough to make the idea he had of his life fall apart. All the things he thought he had already managed to understand felt fake and incorrect, and it was so fast it almost made him feel dizzy.

“She’s not his mom.” He declared.

Evander opened his eyes very widely and, next thing he knew, was that, for some reason, he looked nervous. Which, to say the least, was very…unlike Evander. He was usually super…confident, and, in Dad’s words: “He walks with his back too straight for a person who says some dumb shit every time he opens his mouth”.

At that moment, his back wasn’t straight at all, and he kept on wiping the sweat off his palms in the suit.

“…I mean…she’s not…alive anymore. But… that doesn’t mean that…”

“Noooo. I didn’t mean that.” Max cut him off. “She’s not her mom, because Adrian already has a mom.”

He stopped suddenly. Max could almost see his brain working at full speed, trying to process the data he had just received. Then, he blinked, arching his eyebrow.

“Who’s…who’s his mom?” He asked, getting closer to the crystal, and crouching down to be at Max’s height (Evander was almost too tall for his own sake). “Do Simon or Hugh…?”

“No. I mean she’s not his mom because Simon’s his mom.” Max stated, confident enough to move a mountain with his raw determination and his bare hands, which, needless to say, did nothing but make Evander even more confused.

Not that Max couldn’t understand why.

He was a brand new, redeemed person now.

But back then he wasn’t.

“…Simon is what, you said?”

“Adrian’s mom.” Max reaffirmed.

Still bewildered, Evander gawked. Perhaps he understood where that confusion was coming from but, at the same time, maybe he was too disturbed to ask for additional information. Max didn’t know which one of the two would make him feel more embarrassed, especially taking into account the next thing Evander said:

“That is the weirdest shit somebody has ever said to me, and I’ve talked to the Puppeteer an unhealthy amount of times.”

He wasn’t the one who explained to him the way his own family worked. On the contrary, he immediately told his dads about it, and next time the both of them came to talk to him, they tried to make him understand the concept of homosexual couples.

And they failed.

Miserably.

And he was using that term, because after that talk, Max went through life for a while saying that his ethnicity was Gay, because both of his dads were gay. Over and over again, they tried to correct him, but nothing seemed to work, and Max kept on spreading the information that he was gay (something he didn’t know yet) until Aunt Kasumi decided to intervene and, for his birthday, she got him a children’s book called All in Rainbow, which, according to the information in the first page, was actually a translation from a Latin American book written by two lesbians (one of them non-binary) and illustrated by the same woman who had made the Anarchists’ and the Renegades’ graphic novels and was also a Latina.

That book was something similar to a gay encyclopedia. It was narrated by this girl named Phoenix, because it followed her throughout her school and her daily life, where she came across different people and families. After every short story, there was an informative section explaining everything in regards to the new person’s identity, including their flag, the meaning of said flag, and the explanation of certain terms. Max really enjoyed it, and, in fact, he ended up going through it more than once. When he tried to persuade Adrian into reading it too, he admitted he already had, when he was younger,  and proceeded to make a comment about how pretty the name “Phoenix” was.

It was only then that Max was able to understand how his own family worked, and how freaking inept he had sounded when he decided it was a great idea to use it as an ethnicity.

That book was, in fact, the cue for all the grown ups in his life to start buying books for him, which he was grateful for, except for the one that he, ironically enough, had gotten from Uncle Evander. Sure, he appreciated that he had spent money on that,  but Max didn’t appreciate the fact that the plot was about a dog that was sent away to a school for dogs but made everyone believe he was in jail so he could escape. The drawings were cute, but he just couldn’t find the moral of the story and he didn’t like that.

His dads, from their part, got him a book about two frogs that, at least to Max, acted as if they were a couple; Aunt Tamaya was the one of the short books without drawings.

As for Aunt Kasumi…she usually brought a lot of educational books; every time she overheard him expressing something that was making him confused, she brought him a book about it, including that time she heard him asking Ruby Tucker “So, are you always bleeding?” completely out of context.

Max supposed that it had a lot to do with the fact that Aunt Kasumi was in charge of Child Services, and she spent a lot of time with children, especially because she liked to volunteer in orphanages, having been in one herself when she was a little girl. She usually moved in prodigy orphanages, for she was one to know the poor conditions they sometimes presented.

And…to say the least, she wasn’t a woman of many words. She was very reserved with everything she did. And, besides, it was none of Max’s business. After all, he was just a kid.

But, in this case, it kind of involved him.

Kind of.

For the simple reason that there were two names in the list of people his age Max had talked to. The first one was Neil (who wasn’t even his age. He was just close to that) and the second one…

The second one involved Aunt Kasumi.

Just like people were able to overhear his conversations through the quarantine, Max was able to overhear the conversations they were having on the outside, especially when he was trying to do it on purpose.

Every time he was too bored, in other words.

Some of the things older people said were confusing, but, over time, Max had learned to store that information, so he could comprehend it better in the future. He didn’t know at what level that was healthy, yet he still did it because, literally, he didn’t have anything better to do.

During extremely busy days, the Council chose to spend the night in the Headquarters, just in case, and while they could sleep in the common room, if Pops was too insistent on wanting to be close to the quarantine, they slept in the hallway.

In Max’s hallway.

Of course, Dad would sleep with him inside the quarantine but, in order to make it feel more like a pajama party, they slept close to the edge of the “room” (if it could be called that way), so close to the Councils’ inflatable beds, they could’ve touched them if there hadn’t been a wall in between.

When they were sleeping in that hallway, there wasn’t a patrol looking over Max, because they were the patrol and, every two hours, they changed turns to stay awake. All of them except Dad, who stayed the entire night with Max. The others often got up and started walking around the quarantine according to their ages. That is, Aunt Tamaya went first, followed by Pops, then Aunt Kasumi, and Uncle Evander at the end. However, since it wasn’t like they were too used to having many hours of sleep, Kasumi and Evander usually got up at the same time and patrolled together.

That night, Max was having trouble sleeping. Dad was hugging him, which made him feel very comfortable, but, at the same time, before he wrapped his arms around him, he had been moving way too much, and that had made Max feel uneasy, because a part of him, though he knew it was highly possible it wasn’t true, was feeding the annoying worm at the back of his brain that told him he was the one making Dad uneasy. That Dad was moving and couldn’t sleep because he didn’t want to be anywhere near him. Perhaps he would’ve preferred to be with Pops. Perhaps he would’ve preferred to be with Adrian, even. Anyone but Max.

Which, again, he knew things…weren’t like that. But that little, nameless, uninvited worm was always telling him that, over and over again, determined to repeat those awful words until they made so much noise they made him cry.

And even then, when he was already crying, the worm ate deeper into his brain and told him to stop because, in the end, who was he crying for anyway?

Who was he crying for, if nobody was here to see or hear him?

That night, of course, he didn’t cry, for the simple reason that…well, he did have somebody who would hear him cry, and maybe comfort him like Aunt Tamaya comforted Neil when he was crying…

But he didn’t want Dad to do that.

Not today.

Not because he were mad at him, but because he feared that, if he did, then Dad would be the one who would get mad.

Besides, that night he got extremely busy trying to overhear the conversation between Kasumi and Evander who, the moment they got up, started talking as they walked, first at a volume so low their voices could’ve been considered murmurs, but then, with every second, the issue started escalating.

And it wasn’t that they were arguing, it was that they weren’t exactly happy with each other, nor did they seem to manage to get to a mutual agreement.

Max felt like that time he was watching a movie with his earphones on, and instead of paying attention to the plot, he kept trying to identify which sounds were dominant in his left ear, and which ones were dominant in his right ear, because Uncle Evander and Aunt Kasumi were walking around the quarantine, and the echoes of their voices were floating right behind them, making it almost impossible for Max to decipher their messages word by word.

At least, until they stopped in front of him. That is, very close to the inflatable mattresses, too. And with just one eye open, he was able to tell Aunt Kasumi wasn’t amused, with her arms so tight across her chest that way, and with Uncle Evander standing more straight than necessary (because, yes, Dad was right about that...sometimes... because Max had read somewhere that tall people had to be really careful with their posture to avoid spine deformities or have less complications when they were older) waving his –as Aunt Tamaya would’ve called them- Hot Cheeto fingers right in front of her face, in a way so aggressive she sometimes had to lean backwards not to get one of her eyes poked out.

“…and it won’t look good for the organization. It won’t look good, Kasumi. You know why?”

“Yes, Vandy. I know why. I already knew before, yet you took the time to explain it to me another seven times. I mean, thank you, I guess, but—“

“If I kept on explaining it to you, it’s because I didn’t…and I don’t know what’s not clicking.”

“What do you mean with what’s not clicking?” And she tilted her head to the side. “…Are you still talking to me?”

“Don’t play dumb, Kasumi. Especially not in front of me, because I know you.”

“Right. But I still don’t get what you’re referring to. What’s not clicking about what, exactly?”

Evander laughed in a way Max would’ve just…understood if she had decided to punch him in the face so he would stop.

“We’re a big organization, Kasumi. People talk.”

“Of course that people talk. I mean, our citizens support our cause and our government system. In fact, statistically, more than half of the population do, but sometimes there are things that… are for their own good but they will refuse to understand and accept them anyway. And that’s normal. We might be the law, but we can’t control how the masses think, you know?”

“For their own good, you say. Beneficial.”

“Exactly.”

“Beneficial for who, if you’d be so kind?” Evander laughed again. “As far as I understand, we’re talking about one single problem, from a single person. It won’t bring anything beneficial, as you call it, for our organization, or for our system…if anything, it will damage it and make us lose credibility.”

“…Why?”

As a response, he started flapping his arms around, as if he were trying to point at something invisible. Or at something that wasn’t really there.

And this time, Aunt Kasumi didn’t try to pretend she was seeing it, and remained silent until Evander realized he would have to make himself understood.

“Because…” He clenched his fists, sighing loudly, almost like he was certain he was right and Aunt Kasumi wasn’t. “Our policy. Remember that? You know, a thing that actually exists and you helped write?”

She didn’t respond.

“Our policy as Renegades, it’s that we shall keep our people safe, and that includes prodigy and non-prodigy citizens. We shall preserve their lives no matter the cost, and create a safe environment where all can coexist and protect each other. That means that no prodigy individual with questionable reasons is to be allowed to cross that gate and disturb the peace or, worse, put somebody’s life at risk.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Yes, you should be, because we wrote it, for fuck’s sake.”

“Evander, please. There’s no need to curse or—“

“…But you know what that means? It means that we can’t just…go against that policy and expect our citizens, our recruits, even, to still take us seriously.”

“Oh, but I’m following that policy because, as you might remember, we also pledged to assist anyone whose life was at risk, and people who, day by day, have to live under very vulnerable circumstances. It is our job to intervene and take them to a safer place, where their quality of life can improve, isn’t it?”

“It is, but that applies for people who aren’t dangerous to society.”

At that point, Max had both his eyes open, and he was seeing the scene more clearly.

In fact, everything was so clear, that he was able to read the confusion in Aunt Kasumi’s expression, even before she said:

“…This is a kid we’re talking about.”

“She is dangerous.”

“She’s not dangerous, Evander. She's a kid. Sure, her behavior has caused her to go bouncing from orphanage to orphanage like a rubber ball but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be helped, that doesn’t mean we should just turn our backs at her, and that doesn’t mean she’s dangerous.”

“You know damn well her behavior’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Well, I am, because that’s the only thing that should concern us at the moment.”

“No, it’s not?”

“It is. Because she’s a kid…and, honestly, Vandy…” Aunt Kasumi sighed. “… I know we were raised thinking life is war, but… the truth is, people are not born evil. Or dangerous, for that matter. Take your time and think about it, and  you can talk to me again once you’ve calmed down, because you must be pretty much aware I don't appreciate this tone. Besides, it’s not like this little argument is going to stop me anyway.” She shrugged.

“…after all, I already talked to Hugh.”

“…And what did he say?”

“It’s not my place to tell you that. Ask him.”

Max never knew whether he had taken that suggestion or not but, knowing Evander, he just assumed he hadn’t. And, to be honest, he never asked Dad about it either. He just stood and watched how everything proceeded to go down and chaos unleashed.

Though, he had to admit, unlike what had happened with other “big” events, this one specific chaos was rather discrete. A kind of well-kept secret.

In fact, the only explicit hint that something would happen in the next few days, was the little disturbance caused by Team Frostbite (it was always Team Frostbite. Max had no idea why everyone was so…willing to put up with their…issues so much, and without hesitation) when it was their turn to patrol around the quarantine and Evander came around, holding his notepad, and muttered something to them.

“Whom?!” Genissa Clark, Frostbite, snapped immediately.

Evander frowned and, judging by the way his moustache moved, he also pouted, before turning at Mack Baxter, Aftershock, to start talking to him instead.

“Do you have any idea of what she’s talking about?” He clicked his tongue. “Like…okay, nevermind…”

When Max looked up, he saw the exact moment when Evander realized he was listening to the conversation, so he lowered his tone once again.  Yet, Max was still able to see the million ways in which Genissa Clark's face contorted and, in the end, the first second Evander shut his mouth, she declared:

“We’re not available for that. Perhaps that task should be assigned to Team Sketch or Team Peregrine. They’re always lollygagging around, it’s about time they get some real responsibi—“

“That’s a no, then. Alright. Thanks for your cooperation, Team Frostbite. Or, lack of, more likely. Do better next time, okay?”

If Max wanted to be honest with himself, it hadn’t taken him much time to realize he wasn’t fond of any of the members in Team Frostbite. Or Frostbite herself. In fact, he considered her to be almost insufferable, and, again, he couldn’t quite understand why they were allowed to boss everybody around. To a certain extent, they reminded him of the popular kids (who were also bullies) in every movie he had ever watched. They weren’t nice. Not even likeable.

Maybe Max was just very specific on the type of people he liked.

Or maybe he liked everyone and their mom, except Team Frostbite, because he didn’t know any better than that, while  at the same time he knew better than liking Team Frostbite.

But he didn’t know better than liking Margaret White, because…well…

She hadn’t done anything particularly awful for him to have an opinion as strong as Uncle Evander’s about her.

She came on a Friday.

Not that she exclusively came to talk to him.

She, in fact, arrived alongside Aunt Kasumi, who was wearing her civilian clothes –High-waisted jeans and a baby blue shirt, damp with sweat because it was hot outside- and kept leaving her car key on every table that came across her, before coming back to it to grab them.

At first, Max wasn’t able to see Margaret very well, mostly because he was distracted with his online classes, and she was taken straight to Dad’s office, along with Adrian’s entire team. And though Max didn’t see much, he was able to catch a glimpse on how Adrian kept on trying to grab her hand, and she insisted on pulling away.

At some point, he had read about that too.

The Renegades accepted recruits from ages 14 and up, talking about patrolling. However, they had a child protection program, where, basically, they assisted orphan prodigy children with behavioral issues or, though only few people liked to admit it, potential to be a part of the organization when they were older. Adrian didn’t like it and, strangely enough, out of everyone, Evander didn’t like it either. Nevertheless, Evander was one to get more aggressive when it came to child recruitment, which, thankfully, wasn’t common at all.

In fact, those cases were so rare, that they referred to them as “exceptions”. After all, children were not allowed into the Trials. As far as Max knew, they weren’t placed in patrol units. On the contrary, they were given small positions in the organization, and their paychecks were directed to their respective savings account, something that Pops was in charge of. However, they could use that money for their personal needs or something they wanted to buy, as the few children recruits resided in orphanages around Gatlon and went back there after their shift was over. Max supposed that sometimes their caretakers refused to buy them something because it wasn’t good for their health and it must be very satisfying to tell them it was their money (That’s what Adrian always did when Dad refused to buy something for him).

(That, or he went and asked Pops for that same thing).

Usually, they could have cash withdrawals just by presenting their Renegade Recruit ID because, obviously, they didn’t have an official ID yet.

And not only that. The children recruits were assigned a patrol unit with older members to look after them, or help them with anything they needed. Taking into account the conversation he had overheard, he supposed that duty had fallen on Adrian’s team (A theory that was later confirmed to be true by Adrian himself).

They were never left unsupervised, just like Max.

The day Margaret arrived, for a couple of minutes, maybe hours, Max was submerged in his own little world, and in the assignment his last teacher had told him to do. It was just him, his colored pencils, his paper sheets, his notes, his head, his hands, and the miniature planet Earth that his quarantine supposed, against the real world that he had never stepped on.

But every now and then, a little piece of the unknown, mysterious real world came running to his encounter and talked to him, sometimes in the most sudden, unsolicited way.

Sometimes it was Dad opening the door without calling. Sometimes it was Adrian pressing a new drawing against the crystal. Sometimes it was Pops, making a little “Psst” sound to get his attention.

Sometimes it was three little knocks, and the girl that was producing them with her knuckles.

Back then, Margaret’s hair was longer, to the point where she could tie it in a high ponytail, decorated with a blue bow, which combined with his orphanage uniform: A white polo, with the institution’s symbol by the right side of her chest, beneath a cobalt blue skirt with suspenders, long white socks and black scholar shoes.

He saw her and recognized she was real the first time, but Max still gave himself a couple of seconds to grasp the fact that she was really there.

Well, not there-there.

That she was there, as in, through the glass.

And she was calling him, even if she wasn’t saying anything. In fact, she was just there, eating from a chocolate bar with puffed rice. Her free hand was still over the glass.

And she was waiting.

So, he figured he didn’t want to keep her waiting anymore, and leaving his task and his tools behind, Max walked in her direction. And like it always happened, he stopped right before bumping his forehead against the hard, translucent surface.

Margaret took another bite from her chocolate, with an arched eyebrow, but she said nothing. From afar, Max hadn’t been able to really appreciate her features, but now that he was closer, he realized she was taller than him; her small, brown eyes were making her lashes look bigger; her black hair looked thicker and he was able to conclude that her skin tone was more or less like Pops’, maybe a little darker. She had a mark over her cheek, and at first Max thought it was a mole or a birthmark…until, of course, he realized that moles weren’t (or, at least, shouldn’t be) purple, and realized it was a bruise.

He didn’t ask her about it. Adrian had once told him that there were people who might not want to talk about their bruises or open wounds, not because the stories behind them were painful to tell, but because they were too embarrassing and telling embarrassing stories was an inconvenience.

“…well… now that I think about it…” He said right after. “…That’s not it. No. Not really. Sometimes your wounds’ backstories are painful. Or sometimes…you just want to keep them a secret, you know? And secrets are…sort of important.”

He believed every word.

Hence why, instead of saying something too nosy about that bruise, a little slowly at first, Max started lifting his hand up, until he reached the spot where Margaret’s was, and pressed his palm there. When she stared at his palm in confusion, Max clarified:

“Hugh five. You know?" Max giggled a little." As in… the Captain? Hugh? ...No?"

She didn’t laugh. And that was odd because Adrian would’ve.

Margaret wasn’t Adrian, sadly. And, it seemed to be, she hadn’t had an older sibling to tell her that some things just…weren’t adequate as icebreakers to start a conversation. Because, like Adrian had said, there were certain things other people might not want to talk about.

“Are you sick?” She directly asked.

Max was still “pressing” his hand against hers.

Gulping hard, he felt his throat boiling hot, almost as if it were growing blisters.

“No.” He said in a hoarse voice. “Why?”

Not pulling away either, Margaret said:

“The other day, Sister Malinda brought a very tiny baby into the orphanage. They were so small they had to take them to the medical wing.” She took another bite from her chocolate, and kept on speaking with her mouth full. “I sneaked out of my room to see them, and they were inside this little glass box that helped  keeping them alive. Sister Tam told me so.”

Max kept quiet for a while. He would’ve been lying if he said he didn’t have a little curiosity about the name, but Margaret solved everything that had to be solved even if he didn’t ask her to.

“Sister Tam was named after Thunderbird. She’s younger than the other nuns.”

He guessed so.

Aunt Tamaya’s real name had been revealed to the general public on the 13th year into the Age of Anarchy, when she reappeared after being away for months thanks to an accident that involved Queen Bee and a cliff or something like that (Max couldn’t quite understand it, and Aunt Tamaya couldn’t remember much about it either. If she did, then she just didn’t desire to talk about it). It wasn’t a fun anecdote or anything like that but, according to his dads, the name Tamaya topped the lists for the most female-assigned names for at least a year, and the same thing happened in the 20th year into the Age of Anarchy...however, by the time she was buried, the world didn’t know Lady Indomitable’s real name, and for an entire month, people used Regina instead of Georgia. When Max asked why, Dad answered that, when attending public events, Lady Indomitable used to wear a pair of shiny golden R-shaped earrings that caused everybody in Gatlon to develop mass hysteria and made themselves believe that those Rs meant Regina, when in reality, according to Lady Indomitable herself, one of them meant “Rawles”, and the other “Renegade”. In fact, Oscar Silva (Smokescreen, one of the members of Adrian’s team) had once said that one of his cousins, who lived in Mexico, had been named Renata Regina (Though nobody knew what the heck that first name was, and Oscar had a really peculiar way to pronounce Regina) because she was born a few days after Lady Indomitable’s decease.

“I knew that.” Max lied.

“Sure, buddy. I bet you did.” Margaret chuckled. And there, Max realized she thought she was too clever.

Which, he didn’t doubt she was. He wasn’t in the position to state that. At least, not yet.

But what he was in the position to state, was that, if she thought herself to be clever, then it was his opportunity to think of himself as clever too. After all, he had been reading his whole life because he didn’t have anything else to do.

If Margaret was clever, then so was he.

“You’re talking about an incubator.” He said.

Margaret looked up out of a sudden (Max hoped she hadn’t gotten dizzy). He could still see the chocolate, that at this point should’ve been mush, stored in the inside of her right cheek.

“Uh?” She asked, struggling to keep her mouth closed.

Max gulped, and tapped the surface with his fingers.

“The thing where they put the little baby. It’s called an incubator. That’s where they put pre-term babies, because they’re not ready to survive outside of their mother’s womb. Sometimes their lungs don’t work on their own, sometimes their hearts are too fast or too slow…”

“You look too old to be a baby.” She observed. “Are your powers something related to that? Like, are you a baby who doesn’t look like a baby?”

For a second, Max thought about quoting Evander that time he had boldly stated that Simon was Adrian’s mom, but he didn’t because he wasn’t in the mood to curse.

“…No. First, this is not an incubator. And second,  I’m a kid.” He answered. “I’m not a baby.”

“Then why are you here?”

The short answer was that, honestly, that was none of her business. And the even shorter answer, was:

“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret. And secrets are sort of important.”

“A secret.” She repeated, as if tasting the word. “…You don’t look like you want to be here. Are you allowed to come out?”

The short answer was still that it was none of her business. But, if he wanted to be honest, for some reason, he didn’t want to give that answer. Because, to be fair, she would find out on her own sooner or later. Because, yes, people talked, and while his dads were kind of secretive about him, everyone in the headquarters knew him. Her being clueless was just a temporary event that would vanish into thin air in a blink.

And, for some reason, he wanted to enjoy it while it lasted.

Maybe tell her something that wasn’t real. Maybe… tell her something that wasn’t necessarily true but that he wanted it to be. Maybe something that was more interesting than what he was, in reality; maybe something that would make the worm in his brain go away for two weeks.

"I can't get out." He finally decided. "Because this glass is infrangible."

Then, he knocked on it three times.

"See?"

Margaret tilted her hair to the side, looking like a cat.

"What does that word mean?"

And dumb as it sounded, Max felt a twinge in his stomach along with a violent wave of pride. Because, even if it was hard for him to admit it, he was hoping she would ask that.

He wanted her to ask that.

"It means you can't break it."

Margaret's eyes seemed bigger. But just as she was separating her lips to speak, somebody behind her cleared their throat.

That's when Max spotted Aunt Kasumi leaned against a wall with her arms crossed. When Margaret looked over her shoulder, she found her there too. But while Max waved at her, Margaret remained inexpressive.

"You're very far from the restroom, Maggie." Kasumi said, in a serious tone. Afterwards, she massaged her temples.

"Please, darling. Just… help me here, okay? We have to go back to the office."

And she didn't seem mad, but rather disappointed.

When it came to Aunt Kasumi, that was enough. Max knew that, and Margaret knew that too. That's why they both removed their hands from the glass, and Margaret started going away.

However, before she was too far, Max asked:

"Why are you here?"

And Margaret turned around, smiling.

"If you're not telling me, I'm not telling you." She sentenced. Then, she proceeded to imitate his voice as she said:

"It's a secret."

And for a while, obviously, it remained that way. A secret. But it wasn't long before they both knew everything they needed to know.

Margaret was integrated into the janitorial team, but, for a while, people talked about her and her powers, and Max couldn’t help but remember what Dad had told him in the bathtub, and the conversation between Evander and Kasumi.

Yet, more than scared, Max felt… something he didn't know what it was. In fact, he wasn't scared of her. More likely, a part of him felt that he knew what it was like to be her, because maybe they weren't that different after all.

People were scared of them both.

But he wasn't scared of her. No, not really.

He hoped she wasn’t scared of him either.

Maybe they could've been very good friends, even through the infrangible glass that kept him from getting pointed at, frowned upon or killed.

[swimfuel]

okay humanstuck thoughts under the cut

i owe a lot of this to @/rhythmic-idealist's kankri/vantasposting bc holy shit theyve got such a big brain (ill link to their individual posts when im on desktop since im using this to keep all my thoughts straight and i agree with most of what they say wholeheartedly)

general status quo stuff:

signless works in an extremely demanding career involving helping others (i'm leaning towards an attorney who works with organizations and does pro bono work), and is also extensively involved in social justice work outside of his job... he is very rarely home

he loves and cares for his children deeply and tries to express it whenever they're face to face, but the couch in his cramped and messy office has seen far too much use over the years for him to have been able to say it enough

his habits of working himself to the point of exhaustion are handily passed down to his kids btw

the kids had to grow up quickly because signless was out of the house so often and so consistently—kankri, who was already pretty high-strung, has to learn to take care of himself and karkat

they grow up near ms firuzeh maryam, who's their pseudoaunt/grandma (she took in a nine year old kavana vantas when she was about twenty), but they just call her ms rosa

they spent a lot of time in the maryam house growing up, with miss rosa's two nieces. porrim is a year older than kankri, while kanaya and karkat are the same age

kankri grows kinda sensitive to people trying to mother him since it rubs against the notion that he's the "adult of the house" and that he can take care of himself and karkat just fine

(and it also kinda underlines the fact that kankri has no idea what he's doing at the best of times)

and ironically enough, kankri becomes overbearing and naggy towards karkat in his own right, which forestalls them becoming close in any brotherly sort of way

they grow up really just... unable to communicate with one another clearly

karkat develops his ornery exterior in response to kankri's constant stream of opinions and frantic attempts at making up for the presence of a guardian in the house

i think there would actually be some really interesting parallels with rose in this au.. maybe i'm drawing from my own experiences as well but i think he'd begin to assume that every time his brother opens his mouth, he's going to criticize karkat

but instead of reacting like rose with the "making yourself more of a puzzle"/passive aggressive stuff, he gets a more defensive/hackles raised/"argue with you before you can argue with me" approach

and the thing is that they do love each other and would take a bullet for the other etc etc etc.. but they don't know how to express it because they've fallen into these shitty patterns

and it really doesn't help that kankri has grown somewhat resentful of signless over the years... that mix of resentment and fear and love gets more extreme and more polar every time signless gets injured during a political demonstration

i think kankri and signless would also be slightly closer than karkat and signless, as signless' job really only started to ramp up when karkat was less than years old and kankri was in his early double digits

kankri autistic btw its word of god (i am god)

karkat has a pet crab. its name is also karkat. he vents his frustrations to it.

i feel like the vantases exemplify both the best and worst parts of their aspects with one another as well... the strength of their bonds keeps them together and grounded, but TOO grounded. [insert Blood rant here]

the Blood rant:

i define Blood as bonds, responsibility, and the "core". if Life is the fertile soil and everything living on a planet's surface, then Blood is the gravitational core of the planet keeping everything together

i also think Blood, Heart, & Mind work in tandem to define a person just as blood serves to connect the pieces of the human body... Heart is the soul and the self, Mind is the application of one's self through active choices (agency), while Blood defines both the self and the choices one makes in greater detail [and, as an aside, Life provides the physical spark of life needed to keep the heart pumping blood]

OKAY wow that got tangential anyways

SO BASICALLY! too much Blood makes you stagnate, so for example:

kankri is split between staying home with karkat or going to college across the country and being truly unbound for the first time in years

another crisis of Blood: signless is caught between his empathy and responsibility to the whole world and his responsibility to his own children

okay so here's more status quo stuff:

the maryam and vantas kids grow up together and its hilarious because you'll see them all together and its just like (girlboss) (girlboss) (physical manlet) (emotional manlet)

the maryam girls are actually miss rosa's nieces but she took them in when they were both pretty young

the pyropes know the vantases well enough considering pyrope senior and sign have known one another from their respective legal practices for years, but they live on the other side of town

the leijons lived in town when kankri and meulin were very young, but they moved and travelled for a long time before coming back and reestablishing their roots

the captors (psii being one of sign's oldest and closest friends) move into town with the peixes family pretty early on though

the condesce is.. a horrible spouse and guardian, to put it plainly. she's very emotionally manipulative and isn't averse to smacking people around, including her own family. she moves herself and her perfect little family into town so she can properly oversee a new business venture close by

feferi is one of the best young swimmers in the country and has a pretty good shot of getting onto the olympic team.. a lot of this drive to be perfect and to be better results from the condesce's unrelenting pressure and thinly veiled resentment throughout her whole life

so yeah psii, )(ic, feferi, and sollux all live together and it's really not great for anyone involved. (meenah ran away years ago, and crashed on aranea's couch for a pretty long while—mituna moved out with latula for college before psii and the condesce got married)

it gets bad to the point of sollux staying with the maryams for two months while the adults try to sort out that absolute clusterfuck and get the divorce proceedings going (meenah finally convinces feferi to get out and come stay with her and aranea for the duration as well)

in terms of relationships i think latula and porrim were really really close in high school, and probably had some kind of unacknowledged thing going on for a while that never actually turned into anything because latula and mituna were going steady

kankri has had a crush on latula for years but never acted on it for similar reasons

meenah still carries a lot of that give no fucks attitude (it's developed moreso as a defense mechanism here) and can't understand why feferi refuses to leave the condesce with her

okay back to VANTAS MANPAIN i also think that karkat feels the weight of a lot of expectations on his shoulders as well

he feels responsible to live up to the example his dad and his brother set, even if it's to his own detriment—and kankri's oblivious rambling about his grades and his teachers and all his clubs certainly aren't helping the matter

kankri is one of those overinvolved kids taking a million AP's while simultaneously shitting on the collegeboard at every single step

hes this super overachiever anal retentive perfectionist type dude and (just as karkat preemptively criticizes others to forestall their criticisms of him only to harshly criticize himself) kankri subconsciously holds the people around him to the same expectations he holds for himself

so karkat also develops this sense of lacking which, in combination with everything else, culminates in self loathing and thinking he has to solve everyone else's problems and getting horribly mad at himself for every little mistake

GOD i have a lot more but lemme post this before i accidentally close out of the app and lose it all

more little details:

vriska's mom and terezi's mom HATE each other like HATE HATE HATE one another it's so bad

karkat wrote a ten page review of my immortal in middle school

jade is one of nepeta's best online friends

sollux can't raise one eyebrow at a time.. karkat gives him so much grief about it

the vantases eat a lot of shitty renditions of persian dishes until karkat learns to cook because literally the only person in the world with a CHANCE of getting KANKRI VANTAS to make an EDIBLE DISH is miss rosa

kanaya is really good at persian dance too but is VERY VERY embarassed to perform in front of people.. however porrim definitely is not

karkat has insomnia while kankri just stays up stupidly late for assignments that really shouldnt be taken that seriously.. but they both have the same rumination/sleep anxiety thing where your brain goes insane with horrible and depressing scenarios as you try to sleep

and more ideas that i thought were interesting but idk how to fit in the context of this au:

signless and disciple getting married pretty late in life after having been in love for years, the vantases move in with the leijons and karkat suddenly has two sisters

nepeta and karkat are both juniors at this point, meulin is probably in her third year at a local college nearby while kankri is about to start his second year at a university pretty far away

the kids in general honestly but ill figure it out

more random hcs this time with kids:

kanaya and rose get into a flame war online that gradually settles into elaborate courtship rituals

also nepeta + jade online besties

also bec can inexplicably still teleport

the first sbahj movie comes out and the next six months of dave strider junior's high school career are absolute hell

actually hc that dave senior goes by d strider professionally. the d stands for a lot of things

aradia and dave frequent a lot of the same forums but never end up really interacting

meanwhile karkat and john frequent a lot of the same forums and DEFINITELY end up interacting. this turns into grudging (at least on karkat's part) friendship after they find themselves fighting for their lives defending an objectively shitty movie together on the same thread

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

The Strange Saga of Spinosaurus, the Semiaquatic Dinosaurian Superpredator

I’ve been captivated by dinosaurs for as long as I can remember. My parents tell me that I told them that I wanted to be a paleontologist as early as age four. Naturally, then, I had lots and lots of books about dinosaurs when I was a boy growing up during the 1980s. One of the dinosaurs that always fascinated me the most was Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Found in 1912 in the Bahariya Oasis of the Western Desert of Egypt (could anyplace sound more exotic to a small-town kid from upstate New York?!), Spinosaurus was originally known from a highly incomplete but also very large and extremely distinctive partial skeleton found in a middle Cretaceous-aged (roughly 95-million-year-old) rock layer in the oasis. Among the few skeletal elements known were part of a strangely shaped (for a dinosaur) lower jaw, some crocodile-like teeth, and most strikingly, several back vertebrae that each sported tall spines, some of them measuring nearly six feet. These spines clearly impressed Ernst Stromer von Reichenbach, the German paleontologist who studied the skeleton and gave the animal its name in a 1915 publication. Tragically, however, that original Spinosaurus skeleton—and all of Stromer’s other dinosaur fossils from Egypt—were destroyed during the Second World War, more specifically in a British Royal Air Force bombing of Munich on April 24, 1944. The story of Stromer’s lost dinosaurs found its way into many a children’s book, including several that I read cover-to-cover. As such, the tale took on near-legendary status for me, and, I’m sure, many other young dinosaur enthusiasts around the world. Here was an absolutely extraordinary dinosaur from a faraway land, similar in size to the gargantuan Tyrannosaurus rex, but clearly very different from all other predatory dinosaurs known at the time – and it was represented only by a few teeth and bones that had been blasted into oblivion decades ago and so now existed only as pictures in books.

A scan of my photocopy of plate I of Ernst Stromer’s original 1915 publication on Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, showing some of the teeth and bones preserved in the holotype (= name-bearing) partial skeleton, discovered in 1912 in Egypt’s Bahariya Oasis. Check out the long spines on the back vertebrae at lower left!

Stromer’s conception of Spinosaurus, as depicted in a 1936 publication and on a glass slide of his that colleagues of mine scanned during our visit to the Paläontologisches Museum München in Munich, Germany in 2001. Stromer knew this animal was big, as evidenced by the human skeleton he included for scale. Interestingly, too, he reconstructed Spinosaurus with unusual proportions for a carnivorous dinosaur, such as an abnormally elongate torso and short hind limbs. We’ll come back to those odd proportions a little later…

When I arrived in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, one of the first things I did was make a lengthy list of all the paleontological sites I was interested in exploring, ranked by their potential (in my mind, at least) to produce scientifically significant finds. The Bahariya Oasis and the search for a ‘replacement Spinosaurus’ quickly rose to the top of the list. Amazingly, no one had ever found—or at least officially reported—new dinosaur fossils in the oasis in the more than half-century since Stromer’s beasts were obliterated during that fateful airstrike. A need to keep this post to a reasonable length prevents me from describing the stars that had to align to make this happen, but in January 2000 I found myself in the Bahariya Oasis—one of the places I’d dreamed about going since I was a small child—as part of the first significant ‘dinosaur hunt’ to take place at the site since the early 20th century. It was bittersweet, though, in the sense that we never really found that ‘replacement Spinosaurus’ I’d fantasized about – all we ever discovered of that creature were a few isolated, fragmentary teeth and bones (and, in a very different location, a couple previously unpublished photos of the original skeleton in a Munich archive). We did find and dig up a gigantic new species of long-necked, plant-eating sauropod dinosaur, Paralititan stromeri, a creature that to this day is one of the largest land animals of any kind that’s ever been found, anywhere – but that’s another story for another time.

One of the rare contributions that I personally have made to scientific knowledge of Spinosaurus: a glass slide showing the only known photo of the right dentary (tooth-bearing lower jaw bone) of the original, name-bearing partial skeleton from Egypt. Like all of Stromer’s Egyptian dinosaur material, this specimen (including this bone) was destroyed in a British air raid on Munich during World War II. Several colleagues and I ‘rediscovered’ this photo—which nobody apparently knew existed—in an archive at the Paläontologisches Museum München in 2001. We published it and one other previously unknown photo of the Spinosaurus type specimen in a 2006 paper in the Journal of Paleontology.

A much younger yours truly digging up the incomplete left humerus (upper arm bone) of the gigantic sauropod (long-necked herbivorous dinosaur) Paralititan stromeri in the Bahariya Oasis of Egypt, February 2000. Paralititan is one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered – a nice ‘consolation prize’ given that we didn’t find much of Spinosaurus during our expeditions to Bahariya. (A cast replica of the complete right humerus of Paralititan is on display in PaleoLab at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.) Credit: Josh Smith.

Back to the matter at hand, meaning Spinosaurus. Fast-forward to 2011. I had the honor of serving as the external thesis examiner for Nizar Ibrahim, a promising doctoral student at University College Dublin in Ireland. I’d known Nizar for years, ever since he reached out to me by email while an undergraduate at the University of Bristol, England, to discuss our mutual interests in African Cretaceous dinosaurs. Nizar’s Ph.D. thesis was on dinosaurs and other middle Cretaceous-aged vertebrates from the celebrated Kem Kem beds of southeastern Morocco, a set of rocks that had yielded a fossil fauna very similar to, though seemingly more diverse than, that of the Bahariya Oasis. Among the many finds that Nizar documented in his colossal thesis were intriguing new remains of Spinosaurus. I went to Dublin to participate in his successful thesis defense, and afterward, he and I hit up some of the city’s finest public houses to celebrate (no surprise for those who know me). Over a pitcher of yummy Irish stout, he told me an exciting story – he and his team had lately discovered not just isolated bones of Spinosaurus in Morocco, but parts of a probable new skeleton. If so, this find would be the first skeleton since Stromer, and moreover would be exceedingly important given how little was known about Spinosaurus, even as recently as the early 2010s. The more parts we paleontologists have of a given fossil animal, the more we can generally learn about it, so the prospect of a new and relatively complete Spinosaurus skeleton—in other words, many bones belonging to a single individual dinosaur—was thrilling to say the least.

Again I’ll skip details for brevity’s sake, but fast-forward once again, to 2014. I was contacted by an editor of Science—one of the foremost scientific journals in the world—to peer-review a paper that had been submitted by (you guessed it!) Nizar and a long list of collaborators describing that new skeleton of Spinosaurus that he’d told me about over beers in Ireland three years before. Nizar and team had revisited the quarry and it had panned out in a big way. From this one, single individual Spinosaurus—again, the first associated skeleton of this dinosaur to have been found in roughly a century—they had bones from the skull, backbone (including a few of those famously long-spined vertebrae!), forelimb, pelvis, and hind limb. More importantly, these ‘new’ bones revealed that Spinosaurus was even more bizarre than anyone imagined! We already knew, from Stromer’s specimen and other, isolated finds made through the years, that the shapes of the skull and back were really weird for a predatory dinosaur. Now, the new skeleton showed that the bones were remarkably dense, the hind legs were oddly short, and the hind feet may have been webbed! All of this led Nizar and colleagues to propose that Spinosaurus may have been semiaquatic; in other words, that its lifestyle was much more comparable to that of a modern-day alligator or crocodile than it was to a more ‘typical’ land-living predatory dinosaur such as T. rex. Other evidence for an affinity to watery habitats had been found in Spinosaurus and closely related dinosaurs (known, perhaps unsurprisingly, as spinosaurids) before, but this was, in my mind, the most convincing case yet made that these animals spent significant amounts of their time at least partly submerged in lakes and rivers. The paper was published in Science a few months later, accompanied by a cover story in National Geographic magazine and a special on the venerable PBS TV series NOVA. Almost exactly one hundred years after it had been named, Spinosaurus had become a celebrity.

Nizar Ibrahim and colleagues’ initial conception of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus in the flesh, released to coincide with the publication of their Science paper in 2014. Two aspects stand out: as Stromer already knew (see his skeletal reconstruction above), the animal is enormous, but it was more oddly proportioned than even he had imagined. Note also the ‘regular-looking’ (for a dinosaur) tail, and read on. Credit: Davide Bonadonna.

Semiaquatic Spinosaurus chowing down on a tasty lungfish in what is now northern Africa some 95 million years ago. Italian paleoartist Davide Bonadonna has produced some of the most beautiful and accurate modern depictions of this extraordinary dinosaur, and I’m grateful to him for letting me reproduce his art here.

But the story didn’t end there. Some prominent paleontologists criticized Nizar and colleagues’ semiaquatic interpretation of Spinosaurus. These opinions weren’t a final judgment. Instead, this is just how science works: we scientists propose ideas, or hypotheses—in this case, that Spinosaurus lived and behaved more like a crocodile than your garden-variety carnivorous dinosaur—and then test these hypotheses by reevaluating the existing evidence and/or bringing new information to light. If a hypothesis repeatedly stands up to testing, then it gradually gets incorporated into the body of knowledge. Other paleontologists presented evidence that they claimed refuted the semiaquatic hypothesis, but Nizar and team eventually countered with new data of their own. In late 2019, another prominent scientific journal—this time it was Nature—came calling, asking me to review a second paper by Nizar et al. on Spinosaurus. What, I thought, could these researchers have to say about this dinosaur that they hadn’t already said before? Well, as it turns out, Nizar and colleagues had kept digging at their Spinosaurus skeleton site, and incredibly, they’d continued to find important new bones belonging to the same specimen. Among these post-2014 finds was the almost complete tail. When I saw what it looked like (via an illustration in their paper), I literally laughed out loud with surprise and delight. Somehow, the shape of the Spinosaurus tail Nizar’s team had discovered—the first even reasonably complete tail of this dinosaur to have ever been unearthed—was simultaneously both unexpected and predictable. It looked really dissimilar from the tails of other predatory dinosaurs, but it was nearly exactly like what one might expect for a dinosaur that used its tail to propel itself through water. In other words, the tall, fin-like tail of Spinosaurus looked more like that of a supersized alligator or newt than that of T. rex.

Nizar and team’s Nature paper on their Spinosaurus tail was published this past April 29. Is it the last word on this dinosaur and its mode of life? Most certainly not, but the evidence is now stronger than ever—in my opinion, very strong—that Spinosaurus spent more time in the water than any other non-avian (= non-bird) dinosaur that we currently know about.

The modern view of Spinosaurus, not as a ‘regular’ predatory dinosaur, but rather as a specialized semiaquatic hunter that spent much of its life in the water. Self-serving side note: the three smaller, spiky-looking fish are Bawitius bartheli, a polypterid (an archaic, still-extant group of thick-scaled ray-finned fishes) that several colleagues and I named in 2012 from fossils found in the Bahariya Oasis. The larger fish at lower left is the giant coelacanth Axelrodichthys (sometimes called Mawsonia) libyca. Credit: Davide Bonadonna.

Two Spinosaurus invite the sawfish Onchopristis numidus to lunch in what’s now northern Africa some 95 million years ago. Look at those fin-like Spinosaurus tails! Credit: Davide Bonadonna/National Geographic.

Nizar (who’s a Research Associate here at Carnegie Museum of Natural History), myself, and our many colleagues and collaborators are continuing to study the mysterious dinosaurs and other fossil vertebrates from the middle and Late Cretaceous of northern Africa. Indeed, Nizar and I have several collaborative papers in the works right now, and I’m also working with an amazing team of paleontologists at Mansoura University on multiple new Egyptian fossil finds. It’s a good bet that African Cretaceous dinosaurs even stranger than Spinosaurus are still out there, waiting to be discovered!

Further reading/watching:

Nothdurft, W. E., with J. B. Smith, M. C. Lamanna, K. J. Lacovara, J. C. Poole, and J. R. Smith. 2002. The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. Random House, New York, 256 pp.

Smith, J. B., M. C. Lamanna, H. Mayr, and K. J. Lacovara. 2006. New information regarding the holotype of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus Stromer, 1915. Journal of Paleontology 80:400–406.

Ibrahim, N., P. C. Sereno, C. Dal Sasso, S. Maganuco, M. Fabbri, D. M. Martill, S. Zouhri, N. Myhrvold, and D. A. Iurino. 2014. Semiaquatic adaptations in a giant predatory dinosaur. Science 345:1613–1616.

Bigger Than T. rex (NOVA documentary): https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/bigger-than-t-rex/

Henderson, D. M. 2018. A buoyancy, balance and stability challenge to the hypothesis of a semi-aquatic Spinosaurus Stromer, 1915 (Dinosauria: Theropoda). PeerJ 6:e5409.

Ibrahim, N., S. Maganuco, C. Dal Sasso, M. Fabbri, M. Auditore, G. Bindellini, D. M. Martill, S. Zouhri, D. A. Mattarelli, D. M. Unwin, J. Wiemann, D. Bonadonna, A. Amane, J. Jakubczak, U. Joger, G. V. Lauder, and S.E. Pierce. 2020. Tail-propelled aquatic locomotion in a theropod dinosaur. Nature 581:67–70.

Matt Lamanna is Mary R. Dawson Associate Curator and Head of the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

[fatefulfaerie]

Written In The Stars Part 6/7

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Part 4 here

Part 5 here

"Sir Link," the guard said, quickly standing to attention at the sight of the approaching young man who outranked him. It was no matter that Link was four years his junior. "I wasn't expecting you at this late hour."

"At ease," Link said. "I seek counsel with Her Highness."

"Sir, it's the middle of the night," the guard reasoned. "She is likely asleep."

"It is an urgent matter," Link argued. "Waking her is a small price."

"O-of course," the guard said as he stepped aside.

"You're relieved for the night," Link said as he placed his hand on the doorknob.

"S-sir?" He heard the guard ask. "But my shift doesn't end for another five hours."

Link turned his head back to the guard.

"I will be watching over her from the inside," Link said. "King's orders. You are dismissed. Get some rest."

"Yes sir," the guard said, standing to attention with a hand on his forehead saluting Link before he walked off. Link opened the door.

The room was dark, with the quietude of night and the stillness of sleep. The only sound that betrayed the peace was Link latching the door closed behind him.

Princess Zelda was sleeping in her bed, blonde hair messily strayed along the pillow as she breathed cooing, calm breaths. Link regretted having to wake her up as he approached, but somehow he knew that if he didn't wake her up, she would be extremely upset. In fact, he could already hear her.

You got back to the castle and you didn't think to tell me? I was so worried, Link! So what if I was sleeping?!

Link figured that was his best estimation, so he decided to wake her now, stopping right before her and pausing only to gaze at her beauty. Even without her shining emerald eyes, she tugged on his heart like no woman ever had. His eyes melted as he adored her frame, bathed in the moonlight. The love that burned warmly in his soul was unmistakeable.

Link shook himself out of his trance, remembering his objective. He covered her mouth with his hand and shook her shoulder.

"Zelda," he said softly.

"Zelda," he repeated, continuing to shake her shoulder. "Zelda, wake up."

Her eyes shot open suddenly and her instinctive scream was muffled by his hand. Her green eyes soon softened with familiarity before lurching forward and hugging him tight.

"Goddesses, Link," she said, clutching him tight. Link finally decided on placing his hand on her back. Her skin-revealing nightgown had made him hesitate, but he just as soon embraced her like she did him, burying his face into the crook of her neck. "I was so worried."

"It's okay, it's okay," he assured her as he let go of her. Link hurriedly unstrapped the Master Sword in its sheath from his back, offering it forward.

"I got it back from the Yiga," Link explained. "Stole it from right under their noses just before they were about to enter the desert. They finally stopped to rest."

Zelda took the sheathed sword into her hands, shaking her head as her fingers tensed around the gold encrusted hilt.

"Link," she said, looking up at him. "For goodness sake, I wasn't worried about the sword, I was worried about you!"

Link's eyes blinked wide.

"Are you okay?" She asked. "Did you get hurt?"

"No," Link said weakly, obviously lying. Zelda tipped her head and the moonlight finally caught the slight darkness near his left cheek.

"Yes you did," she observed, forcefully taking his chin into her hand. "Hold on, I can't see quite see it."

"It's really nothing," Link argued calmly as Zelda lit a nearby candle, bringing the light to his face. Her eyes widened.

From his cheekbone to the bottom of his neck there was a large burn, colored red.

"Link!" She exclaimed, like a mother scolding a child.

"It doesn't hurt, really," Link insisted as Zelda peered at it, scanning down to where the rest was hidden by his blue tunic. "I ran into a Lynel that had fire arrows, it's no big deal."

It was at this moment Zelda noticed that his tunic was in fact not blue, but a standard Hylian green. He must have bought it from someone off the road.

"Also I might need you to repair my champion's tunic," Link said. Zelda looked up at him with impatient eyes. "No relation," Link added.

"Goddesses, Link," Zelda said, placing the candle down. "How far does the burn go?"

"Just to my fingertips." Zelda gave a sigh, closing and opening her eyes. "It's really nothing, I don't even feel it."

Zelda took his hand, her fingers splaying out his and stroking them softly. Link began to blush as she stared at his calloused hand in silence.

"How many times must I tell you to be careful?" She asked, nearly whispering the way she spoke under her breath. Link's mouth hung parted in the uncertainty of his next words. The uncertainty of her next words. To Link's surprise, her lips cracked a smile. "Will you ever listen to me?"

"I do," Link said in his defense.

"One of these days you won't come back," Zelda said. The words spoken by anyone else could have been taken as a threat, yet she spoke them so softly that Link knew it wasn't. "I don't know what I would do without you."

Link searched her, his blue eyes moving with concern.

"I worry you think yourself invincible," she said. "With the calamity approaching, I fear…I fear for you greatly."

"I'm not invincible," Link said before taking her hand. "You know that and I know that."

Link bowed his head.

"But you are right," Link said. "I have to be more careful, hinder what may detract me from being the hero Hyrule needs. Arrogance in combat is one of those dangerous hindrances."

He looked at her and noticed her head was still bowed. Link brought a soft finger along the bottom of her chin, prompting her to lift her head so that her gaze aligned with his.

"The other is my feelings for you."

Link looked at her with such a deep love that she pushed it away, literally, averting her gaze from it and walking away with her arms hugged close to her chest.

Link studied the way her bare shoulders glowed in the moonlight, the way the candlelight almost reached her like her slumbering sealing power, hesitating and flickering and just not quite enough.

"I'm sorry, Link but…" Zelda said before turning around, her arms returning to her sides. "I don't know for sure what this is between us and I can't afford to indulge it. I was kidding myself before, distracting myself with notions like this, but…the calamity has to be the priority."

Link nodded.

"I agree," he said. "That's actually the point I was trying to make."

Zelda nodded, sitting back down next to Link on the bed with her hand braced on the edges.

"I should also tell you that the Yiga are getting bolder and more desperate. I'm to guard you from inside your chambers, your father's orders."

"My father?" Zelda said, turning her head to Link. "My father knows you had to go retrieve the sword from the Yiga Clan?"

Link panicked. She had picked up on his lying before. He obviously wasn't very good at it.

"Yes," he said, hoping that would suffice.

Zelda obviously took it as truth, nodding as Link stood up.

She watched with curious green eyes as he pulled out a chair, moving it to some distance from the bed and thus preparing to sit on it.

He was willing to sit there awake all night, just for her safety. He couldn't have gotten any other trusted guard to do it, and likely should have since his shift started early tomorrow, but he knew he was the best for the job. He would endure, tired, stinging eyes, heavy and darkened eyelids, fatigued muscles and he would have to resist sleep for hours on end.

"I don't deserve you," Zelda said in a fragile voice as she figured out the truth behind his lie.

Link turned around and his eyes blinked as he decided on his next words, his next actions. He cracked a smile.

"Don't think I won't kiss you, now," he said teasingly, approaching her where she sat on the bed. She backed away on all fours with the same teasing smile.

"Were supposed to not indulge this, Link." They were now standing on opposite sides of the bed.

"I thought that was the agreement," Link said. "But then you go on saying things like that. You deserve better than me and I have to prove you that I think you are lovely, worth every trouble in Hyrule."

"Goddesses, Link," Zelda said. "You make this so difficult."

"Sorry," he said. "I can't help it."

"But you can," Zelda said. "My father didn't order you to be here, did he?"

Link gave a sigh. She was smart.

"No," Link said honestly before arguing. "But it's the prudent action with the Yiga resorting to different tactics. If they come in through your window…the guard outside the doors would have known nothing of it until it was too late. The journey scared me into thinking they were smart enough to hurt you while I was gone."

Zelda rolled her eyes with a slight smile.

"I suppose you can stay," she said. "But just for tonight, smooth talker."

Zelda crawled back into bed and under the covers. Link waited for her next words as she sat with bent knees in front of her, thinking upon them.

"Link?" She asked. Zelda addressed him but stared blankly ahead. "Maybe just for tonight for…for us too…"

Link's brow knitted creased.

"What?"

Zelda looked over at Link with pleading green eyes. Link searched them to ensure she was suggesting what he thought. He shook his head.

"Zelda," he said. "We can't."

Zelda's face flushed red completely and her eyes went wide.

"Oh goddesses no," she hurriedly insisted. "I…I-I didn't mean that, really…I…I just meant sleeping in the same bed not…not that…that's not…"

Link smiled with a deep adoration as Zelda buried her face in her hands. She didn't hear Link taking off his boots and unsheathing his sword. She didn't notice he was joining her in her bed until she felt his weight upon it. She looked over.

Zelda felt completely energized by how rebellious this was. There was a man in her bed and she wasn't married. No, her knight attendant was in her bed and they weren't married. It was wrong, so very wrong.

And yet nothing felt more right as she cuddled in Link's safe arms, gentle like that of a lover she never knew she needed, warm like a fire just at the right distance, secure like a saddle on a horse.

Although the sword was lain on the bed so he could easily grab it at a moment's notice, he held her close with no more words between them. Link kissed the top of her head and Zelda didn't object.

The moonlight shone upon them, but also upon the book Zelda had messily tossed to the foot of her bed about a week before. The bed was large and because her feet didn't reach it, she didn't think to move it.

Zelda stared at the book, the romance book Link once mocked. She thought of its contents, a story about a pair of star-crossed lovers, fated for this or that. She thought of whether or not she believed in fate, in destiny like she always thought she did.

"Our victory over the calamity," she finally said. "It isn't written in the stars, is it?"

She wanted Link's answer, but at the same time, she wasn't sure if she actually did.

"Neither is our loss," Link replied. "Nothing is written in the stars."

Zelda blinked as she thought upon his answer, looking at the book. The Princess could be colored surprised when Link reached forward and grabbed it, flipping through the pages as she nestled back into his hold.

"The taste of your lips is like biting into forbidden fruit," Link read aloud. "One I cannot have any more of, and yet must avert my gaze away from. Your eyes, soulful and pleading, beg for what we cannot change. You see, my love, these people who divide us don't see the stars above them. Our destiny of love is too great a picture for their feeble minds, endlessly filled with hatred. This is why I must leave you now. For us to be caught in this manner would confuse them into more violence."

"Wow that's wordy," Link said.

"That wasn't too bad of a reading, Link," Zelda said. "And you picked a good scene for someone who has never read it."

"Keep going?" He asked, moving the open book so they could both see it. "It looks like the girl part is up next."

"Juliette, Link," Zelda reminded him. "Her name is Juliette."

"Right, right," Link said with nods.

"Romeus," Zelda said. "I know the lust you hide, for I harbor it too. Why consider the earth when we have the stars, why care for their hate when we have our love? What is more important? Stay with me in this time of conflict and I know you'll be with me forever. Let me feel your fingertips soothe me, let them play a lullaby upon my skin I haven't yet heard, let your lust free as no nobleman should. I love you with all my heart. Can you in honesty say you do not wish to stay?"

"I cannot," Link continuing with his characters next line. "But as the sun draws nearer, peaking around the horizon, I fear our love is too much, that too much it will endanger us. With the death of Marcuccio, I with every next passing moment fear for you. My family will you say you took advantage of me, and yours will say I took advantage of you. They will never see love. Our union is not enough to dispel them of their hate."

"You're lying to me," Zelda said, continuing as Juliette. "Something happened you are not telling me of. Why do you refrain, why do you guard yourself?"

"I am protecting you from the truth," Link said.

"You do not lie of your love for me," Zelda argued. "Why would you lie of anything else?"

"I apologize," Link replied. "I was concealing something from you, to perhaps protect my honor, but…your cousin…you received word that he has passed away, yes?"

"Yes, Romeus," Zelda said. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Because I killed him for murdering Marcuccio," Link said completely out of character before looking to Zelda. "He killed her cousin?"

"This author adds a lot of drama for drama's sake," Zelda explained.

"Apparently," Link said before continuing to read. "I have been banished on account of my crime and you are to marry the Count. I killed your cousin in blood cold as ice. I have succumbed to our families feud. You should want nothing to do with me. Romeus stands up and begins to leave."

Zelda had to keep from laughing.

"That's stage direction," she said. "You don't read that part."

"Oh."

Zelda cuddled in closer for her next line, truly becoming comfortable in the crook of Link's neck.

"Don't leave," she said, with more sincerity than any other prior line.

Link heard it and didn't continue on with his next words, placing the book down as he folded it closed. He searched for his next words as Zelda waited for them with heavy eyelids.

He knew sometime after this night he would have to leave, so he knew couldn't assure her of anything else. Zelda resigned herself to closing her eyes for just a second as she waited until sleep succumbed her.

After about an hour of staring at the dark room in front of him and thinking of nothing else but their fate, Link fell asleep as well.

Thus, their actions were nothing too salicious, as Her Highness still had her virtue when Link left the next morning, but they cuddled closer together than they likely should have, and fell asleep in each other's arms.

The next morning Zelda found a note in Link's handwriting that read:

Zelda,

Last night I said that nothing is ever written in the stars. But when I got to thinking about it, you in my arms and my heart full, I started to think that if anything is written in the stars, I think it may be us. For now we'll go back to how things were, but once the calamity is defeated, I think we are due to read those stars, truly comprehend them and marvel at them. Let's deal with these earthly concerns first, then live to love another day.

Yours, Link

Over the next couple weeks, the pair stuck to their word, prioritizing the calamity and not indulging their feelings. There would be a lingering touch or gaze here and there, but nothing as improper as the kisses in their daydreams.

In fact, Link and Zelda did well to ignore it right up until Link had to make the choice between defeating Calamity Ganon or fleeing to continue to protect the love of his life.

He chose the latter and all of Hyrule paid the price.

[terreisa]

Love Down the Line: Chapter 2

The last thing Indie musician Emma Swan needs is a gigantic wrench thrown in the workings of her biggest tour to date weeks before its launch.  When her backing guitarist that caused the problem says she has the perfect solution Emma is skeptical but left with little choice but to accept.  Unfortunately she isn't really prepared for said solution to be former Rock Star and leading man of Emma's teenage fantasies, Killian Jones.  With no other options and a month of performing across the country ahead of her Emma just hopes she doesn't come to regret letting Killian onto her stage and into her life. 

Ch 1, AO3

~*CS*~

Portland, Maine- April 10th

Emma hadn’t intended to be late to rehearsal.  In fact, she wanted to be early to get a step up on Jones.  She figured just because she was doing Ruby a favor didn’t mean she couldn’t exert a little pressure on the guy at the same time.  By the end of a tour she was usually ready to kick everyone off the bus and finish the damn shows herself and she was good friends with Ruby and the others in the backing band.  Jones had to more than prove himself to her during the rehearsal turned audition.  He had to blow it out of the water.

Of course, that had been before she was the one showing up almost forty minutes late.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” she huffed under her breath as she ran across the parking lot, the guitar strapped across her back knocking her in the ass with every step.

“You’re late Miss Swan.”

Emma grimaced at the sound of her manager, Regina Mills’, voice.  The woman was scary on a normal day with her custom designer suits, red soled stilettos, and three hundred dollar haircuts that made sure not a single dark hair was out of place, or grey.  She was holding open the door for her with a look of extreme annoyance or impatience or disappointment.  It could have been all three but Emma blew past her into the building and down the familiar hallways towards the space she and the others had been rehearsing in for years.

“I know, I know.  Sorry-” she shrugged in apology and nearly dropped the three notebooks and handful of loose papers in her arms.  Hugging them tighter into her chest she kept moving, “The bug wouldn’t start and I had to call Mary Margaret to borrow her car and then there was an accident on the highway.”

“And why couldn’t you have carpooled with Ruby?” Regina asked cooly as she followed, clearly unmoved by her tales of woe.

Emma stopped dead in the middle of the hallway and spun to face Regina, “Ruby can’t be here.  She’s not supposed to drive with the pills she was given.”

“She is and she didn’t,” Regina said with a roll of her eyes, pushing at Emma’s elbow to get her moving again. “Some other woman who has the manners of a barn animal is here with her.  If you keep inviting people to rehearsals I’m going to start charging for the privilege, maybe even turn it into a VIP package.”

“It must be Dorothy,” Emma smiled, her first real one since Ruby’s practically world ending phone call. “Good for her.  And the only other person who should be here is that Jones guy Ruby swears is worthy of replacing her.  She said he’s a session guitarist, do you not know him either?”

She’d opened the door that led to the rehearsal space, looking over her shoulder as she asked.  Regina raised an impeccably plucked brow and settled her gaze behind her.  Turning towards the room she immediately saw who the stranger was and promptly dropped everything in her arms in shock.

“Careful there, Swan, if you’re anything like every other songwriter I know those things are worth more than their weight in gold.”

Emma could do nothing more than stare as Killian Jones set his guitar aside and crossed the room to pick up the papers and notebooks at her feet.  He gathered them all and tried to straighten them before handing them up to her, a crooked grin on his face.  It faltered a little as she continued to stare at him before he chuckled and scratched behind his ear.

Killian Jones was definitely not the random guy off the street Emma had been imagining, he wasn’t even a vaguely familiar face she’d seen in the halls of their rehearsal space.  He had been the lead guitarist and second vocalist for one of the biggest rock bands in the world almost fifteen years earlier.  His band, Realm of Jewels' second album had gone multi platinum, they’d played arenas and headlined festivals across the globe.  Rumor had it that their third album was supposed to be even bigger.  Then there had been a terrible accident and half the band was gone in an instant.  Killian Jones had survived but emerged from the wreck with one hell of a dragon, in the form of alcohol and pills, on his back.

As far as she’d known he was just another rock star that had gotten lost in the world because of his addictions.  Apparently the story hadn’t ended there.  No, it had seemingly kept going with him ending up in her goddamn rehearsal space looking bashful and hot as fuck.

“You’re Killian Jones.”

He blushed and it almost killed her, “Last time I checked.”

“Realm of Jewels,” she challenged, wondering if he’d shy away from his past.

“Once upon a time,” he shot back, a glint of humor in his eyes as his blush faded.

She hummed, “Rolling Stone called you a ‘not so hidden gem in the rock world, poised to be among the pantheon of rock gods’ if I’m remembering correctly.”

“Good memory,” he grinned, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “And that same illustrious publication said you were on the road to being the Stevie Nicks of your generation.  A bit belittling but not far off the mark.”

“Belittling?” She asked sharply, her hackles rising.

He held up his hands in defense, “Not in the way you think, Swan.  If I had written the article I would have perhaps said that you were a talent beyond compare.”

“Oh,” she said, deflating a bit but still on edge due to him being there at all, “um, okay.”

She glanced around the room, trying to find a way out of the suddenly awkward silence that had settled between them.  Tink Greene and Will Scarlet, the other members of her backing band, were huddled by the drumset, watching them with barely hidden awe, clearly star struck at being in the same room with the Killian Jones.  Ruby was sitting on the couch, whispering to the woman sitting next to her, who could only be Dorothy.  Emma caught Ruby’s eye and not so subtly jerked her head back towards the hallway she’d just come from.

“Emma-” Regina snarled as she started backing out of the room.

“I’d like a minute with my guitarist if you don’t mind,” Emma said through gritted teeth, giving Jones an insincere smile that had his own widening in glee.

“Oh, do let them go, Your Majesty,” Jones said with a laugh. “I believe we still need to discuss certain terms and conditions of this little arrangement.”

Emma opened her mouth to argue that nothing was decided when Ruby pushed her fully into the hallway with surprising strength in her uninjured arm.

“Are you fucking kidding me Ruby?” She hissed as soon as the doors closed behind them. “Killian Jones?!”

“So you obviously know there’s no need for him to audition,” Ruby said with a sly smile. “I mean you have seen him in concert four, no fi-”

She covered Ruby’s mouth with her hand, shushing her as she pushed her further down the hallway.  They only made it three steps before Ruby licked her palm, cackling with glee when she yanked her hand back, disgusted.

“It’s not gonna happen.”

“Come on.  He can play, he’s available and he knows the songs.  This is the best you’re going to get and you know it,” Ruby stated proudly, her grin smug.

“The best,” Emma muttered, shaking her head and trying to keep hold of her temper. “The best?  Jesus Christ, Ruby, the second he steps out on stage it’s not my show anymore, it’s his.  I have worked too fucking long and hard for that asshole to come in and take it all from me in some bid to reclaim his glory.”

“Oh, oh no, Emma, that’s totally not at all what this is,” Ruby whispered, her face pale and looking stricken. “He owed me, big time, and I obviously didn’t think about any of that when I called it in.  Look, don’t repeat this to anyone.  Like, anyone.  But Killian hasn’t played in public since he got out of rehab.  That he even agreed to do this is I think big enough for him.  He’s not looking to steal the spotlight.”

“Then why is he here?” Emma asked, slightly mollified but still seething.

“He misses playing for an audience but I think he has a kind of block or something about going for it on his own,” Ruby said softly.  She gave a half-hearted shrug, “I’m just trying to help out two friends in one go.”

The last of her anger drained away at the sincerity in Ruby’s voice.  It wasn’t often that Ruby was the serious one in their friendship but when she was Emma always paid attention.  If she hadn’t she’d have still been waiting tables at Granny’s Diner and only playing her guitar at barbeques and bonfires for their small group of friends at home.  She also wouldn’t have been able to call Storybrooke home for that matter.

No longer angry but still infinitely annoyed she tipped her head back and let out a sigh, “Fine I’ll give him a chance on two conditions.”

“Excellent!” Ruby crowed.  Emma dropped her gaze back down and raised a brow at her, “Whatever the conditions he’ll totally do it.  He wants this, just doesn’t know how badly he does until you start making him jump through hoops to prove it to you.”

“Oh, only one of the conditions is for him,” Emma said with a smirk.

Ruby’s eyes widened, “What?  Why do I have to prove myself?”

“You don’t.  I just want to know how you can call Killian Jones, one of the most famous guitarists-”

“Who you had a poster of on your wall,” Ruby broke in with wiggling eyebrows and a giddy grin, “and a laminated photo in your-”

“Who had a very public and very destructive drug and alcohol problem, your friend,” Emma continued pointedly.

Ruby’s grin faded, “He was in the same rehab facility as my mom.  Well, one of them.  On one of her bad days I went for a walk around the gardens to cool my head a little and recognized him.  Had a bit of a fangirl moment, if I’m being honest.  Not exactly my finest moment since he was there to get his life back together and I go gushing about how great I thought he was before it all went to shit.  I could tell he was humoring me until I started talking about gigs and asking him how to improve my playing, then his eyes kinda lit up and he started offering me advice and some tricks for the road.  So whenever I went to visit my mom I would also stop by to talk to him about music.

“After my mom decided she was done being sober, again, I still went by to see him.  He needed a friend and I guess I needed to believe that someone could actually follow through with getting clean.  When he got out we stayed in touch.  Just a ‘hi, how’re you doing’ text every so often.  Until, of course, the arm thing happened.”

“And you never mentioned it because…?”

“I wanted to but it seemed-” Ruby shrugged, “like an invasion of privacy, somehow?”

Emma nodded, getting what Ruby meant but still a little hurt that she’d kept it from her.  She’d only admit it on threat of death having met him but Jones had been her number one celebrity crush since she’d discovered Realm of Jewels in her senior year of high school.  Ruby was a witness to it then and clearly still remembered that embarrassing fact.  Then it occurred to her that there were dark parts of her life that she wouldn’t want shared with a fan no matter how close of a friend Ruby was with them.  She nodded again, fully accepting the truth of what Ruby had told her.

“I’m not going to go easy on him,” she warned, spinning on her heel and walking back to the rehearsal room.

Ruby laughed, “I would have been suspicious if you did.  So what are you going to make him do?”

“You’ll see,” she said cryptically with a grin before opening the door.

“Finally,” Regina muttered as they walked back in.  She pointed a perfectly manicured finger at Emma, “You may be a favorite of the owners here but we’re still paying for every minute this room has people in it.  So start playing or find somewhere else to work out your little grievances.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Emma apologized again, knowing that if there was something that pissed Regina off more than wasted time it was wasted money.

She felt Killian’s eyes on her as she greeted Tink and Will before moving to the piano.  It was like a phantom pressure between her shoulder blades that she was trying her best to ignore.  If he was trying to unsettle her she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction and if he was trying to figure her out she wasn’t going to make it easy for him.  When she finally had all her things set up how she wanted and ignoring him was no longer an option she turned to face him, valiantly trying to hide that she was still slightly shocked and unnerved that he was there.

“Ruby said that you’re a session guitarist now,” she began without preamble, hoping to gain whatever upper hand she could.

“I may not be hurting for cash, love, but a man does like to keep busy,” his voice dipped low at the end of his statement.  Paired with a raised brow and feral grin she had to hold back a snort of amusement at his innuendo.

“Not your love,” she shot back dismissively, “She also said that you’ve played on my albums?”

His grin faltered, “Aye.”

“And would you say you enjoyed the songs you recorded or were they just a forgettable few in a long set of recordings to… keep you busy?”

There was the sound of a violent snort and then a deep spluttering a cough that belonged to Will from behind her.  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ruby rolling her eyes at her and Regina throwing up her hands in exasperation.  She kept her face impassive and gaze on Killian, pleased to see him fidget and scratch behind his ear in what had to be nervousness.

“Erm, well when I first recorded one of your songs I’ll admit I had no clue who you were and no interest in discovering more,” Killian admitted but instead of dropping his eyes he held her gaze. “Then I had the fortune of recording another one and found myself intrigued.  I’ve listened to everything you’ve released up ‘til now and I’ve enjoyed all of it, not just what I was hired to play.”

“Okay then,” she said as cooly as she could, despite the giddiness and disbelief running through her knowing that he liked her music. “Now I hope you don’t mind but I’d like to hear you play something.”

“Play something?” He repeated, flabbergasted.

“Just a few different songs,” she said innocently, “so I know you’ll be a good fit.”

His mouth opened and closed several times before he shot an incredulous look at Ruby.  Emma could barely hold in her laughter as Ruby shrugged and said nothing.

“Problem, Jones?”

He turned back to her, looking incredulous, “Let me get this straight, Swan, you can quote an article from Rolling Stone that was released well over a decade ago about my playing and you want me to audition?”

“Only if you want the gig,” she said with a shrug.

She could see the muscle in Killian’s jaw jumping, though she wasn’t sure if it was from annoyance or contemplation.  Either way it gave her a little inspiration.  While he continued to stew she pulled out her phone and did a quick internet search for what she needed.

“Fine, love,” he said, drawing her attention back to him.  He picked up his guitar and slid the strap over his head. “What would you like to hear?”

“Can you read music?” She asked with honest curiosity.

“I can,” he said warily.

“Good-” she turned to Ruby, “I need your Ipad.”

Ruby gave her a calculating look before slowly extracting the tablet out of her purse and handing it over.  Emma gave her what she hoped was a look of innocence before pulling up what she needed and handing it over to Killian. 

“Layla?  A classic-” he smirked and handed her back the Ipad, “and one I already know by heart.”

With that he started playing, amazingly, and Emma almost didn’t have the heart to stop him.  Almost.

“Whoa there, Jones,” she said loudly, waving her hands for him to stop.  He did with a discordant note and stared at her in confusion.  She handed back the Ipad, “I wanted you to play this.”

He looked at it and then back at her, his brow furrowing even more, “But I was.”

“No, you didn’t read the music-” she wiggled the Ipad at him, “You were playing the lead.  I want to hear you play the rhythm.”

“Ah,” he breathed, a look of bemusement and something that was too much like awe replacing his confusion, “I see.”

From there he played every unflashy guitar part she could throw at him.  He didn’t complain and his annoyance didn’t make a reappearance.  The others listened happily and even offered suggestions, though Regina had left with a disgusted huff after the fourth song.  They passed the tablet back and forth several times before she decided to end the teasing with one of her favorites.

Killian snorted when he saw her choice, “You do know that two great guitarists play on this one right?  Even playing rhythm on this one is an honor.  Although, the same should have been said for Layla, but I have enjoyed this little challenge.”

“Good to know,” she said, smiling. “I don’t want you to play rhythm on this one though.  If you don’t mind.”

“It would be my honor,” he hummed, handing her back the Ipad.

The chatter in the room fell silent as the familiar chords of While My Guitar Gently Weeps swept through the room.  Emma closed her eyes and let the music wash over her.  There was only one constant in her life and it was music, first listening, then playing, and finally creating.  It had never sent her back, never sent her to prison, and never forced her to send her child away.  As Killian played the last notes she felt the familiar pang of melancholy the song invoked in her but made sure the smile she gave him when she opened her eyes was genuine.

“Thanks.”

“Shouldn’t I be thanking you for giving me the opportunity?  I’ve never had to audition before-”

“Lucky git,” Will grumbled as he ambled by them, heading toward the snack table on one side of the room.

“Will Scarlet, drums, constant pain in the ass but our pain in the ass,” Emma commented lightly, batting away the Red Vine Will had tossed at her.  She hitched her thumb over her shoulder to where she’d last noticed Tink, “That’s Tink Greene, bassist, she’s small but she’ll knock you out if you mess with the current rotation of romance novels she’ll be bringing on the bus.”

Killian raised a brow at her, “I can’t quite tell by your tone but am I to believe I got the gig?”

“You had the gig as soon as she saw your pretty face and hot ass,” Ruby called out from her spot on the couch, causing Emma’s cheeks to heat up and Killian’s lip to curl.

“Yeah, well-” she cleared her throat, “We’ve, uh, already used up our reserved time for today and Regina won’t be happy if we stay late, even if we actually rehearse.  We’ve got a couple more weeks of rehearsals on Mondays and Fridays and then it’ll be almost every day until the tour starts.  If you need somewhere to stay just let Regina know and she’ll book the hotel room or whatever.”

“So I got the gig?” Killian pressed, his blue eyes glittering in mirth.

“You got the gig,” she sighed, rolling her eyes at his toothy grin. Then she let her features settle into what she hoped was a menacing look, “There’s some conditions.”

“Of course,” he said, nodding sagely.

“Your name isn’t going to be in any of the advertising, or brought up in interviews, and absolutely not on any of the damn marquees.  You’re being hired as a guitarist in my backing band, not as the feature player.”

He nodded again but with understanding, “Of course, I have no desire to upstage you or hijack the tour for my own needs.”

“Good,” she said, slightly surprised he agreed so easily. “This is also temporary.  Once Ruby gets the all clear from her doctor she’s back and you’re out.”

“As I wouldn’t want to keep a fellow musician, or friend, out of work I will happily step aside-” he gave a little bow that she refused to see as charming.

“And last, no groupies on the bus,” she added, fighting to keep her face impassive and the blush that threatened from pinkening her cheeks.

It had never been a set rule, in fact it was one they’d each bent a little one time or another, but a weird pressure built in the back of her neck at the thought of having to see and listen to Killian with some doe eyed fan.  Not that she cared.  She just didn’t want to get to know him that intimately, even if it was by proxy, when she barely knew him as anyone other than the rock star she’d had a crush in high school.

His jaw clenched almost imperceptibly before he laughed.  It didn’t sound forced or off but somehow Emma knew it was fake all the same.

“Understood, love.”

“Still not your love-” she held out her hand and his hand was calloused and warm when he grasped it, “Welcome to the band.”

[julesby10]

i am easy to find

A/N: Hello again! Here’s a very late ShinoMitsu Week Day 2 entry! Prompt was insecurities / healing, taking care of each other.

Slightly more angsty than last time but hey.

Yet again, took inspiration from one of @tanukified ‘s drawings, but the drawing itself couldn’t be farther from what I wrote oops

Rating: G

Tags: Fluff, almost canon compliant, hurt/comfrt, late at night, insecurities

Summary: Shinobu has a tendency to lose track of time, staying up late into the night to work on her notes. Mitsuri is recovering from an injury at the Butterfly Estate.Mitsuri tries to talk Shinobu out of her self-destructive tendencies, but maybe she isn't ready just yet.

AO3 | FF.NET

The hallways of the Butterfly Estate were shrouded in darkness and silence. It was the middle of the night and Mitsuri was being very careful not to make any noise, to avoid disturbing all the other residents who were, supposedly, still sleeping. She usually wasn’t much of a night owl, but she’d abruptly woken up with this weird sense of uneasiness in the pit of her stomach and felt like she needed to get out of the stifling infirmary.

Honestly, she expected to be the only one awake, but a very small part of her wasn’t surprised when she noticed a blade of light coming from under the door of Shinobu’s private study.

Mitsuri should have really gone back to bed, an early morning was waiting for her and she wasn’t even supposed to be up in the first place. Shinobu had very clearly instructed her to rest as much as possible until her shoulder was fully healed. She could feel the bandages brush against the burned skin, but she also knew why Shinobu was awake and she had no intention of leaving her alone.

She headed for the door and carefully slid it open. The room was mostly dark except for the corner where Shinobu’s desk was, her silhouette outlined by the light of a single lantern. She was still wearing her hashira uniform, her haori neatly placed on its stand on the side when Mitsuri was used to seeing it on her shoulders. She cared so much for it and for a reason.

Seeing her at her desk was far from an uncommon occurrence. Shinobu had a bad habit of overworking herself to the point of almost physically collapsing until someone, usually either Mitsuri or Kanao, forced her to rest, sleep, eat. It was a cycle that seemed very hard to actually break. Plus Shinobu was stubborn as much as she was hardworking.

Mitsuri closed the door behind her and took a few steps into the room, fully convinced Shinobu would hear her, as she always did, and scold her for being there. Nothing happened, though, which was odd in and of itself. She got closer to the point she was standing in Shinobu’s peripheral. Still nothing, Shinobu was silently scribbling away at her notes.

“Shinobu?”

Shinobu jumped up from her chair, her pen falling out of her grip and clattering on the ground. Mitsuri looked down with concern in her eyes. Two buttons of her uniform were undone and her sleeves were rolled up which, to anyone else, would have been small details, easy to miss, but to Mitsuri it was a sign that not everything was at it should’ve been. She could count on one hand the times she’d seen Shinobu with a less than perfect attire. And then there were the bags under her eyes and her chapped lips. It looked like she’d been biting on them.

Mitsuri knew first-hand what self-destructive looked like and, even when Shinobu pretended she had it all under control, sometimes it felt like she really didn’t.

When Shinobu registered that it was only Mitsuri next to her she relaxed.

“Heavens, Mitsuri, you scared me.”

She sighed and brought a hand to her temple with a grimace as if trying to keep a headache at bay. Then she lifted her eyes to Mitsuri again and spoke in a rough voice, lower than her usual pitch. Another sign that she was way too tired to be awake.

“What time is it anyway? And why are you up?”

Her notes were scattered all over her desk, countless sheets of paper filled with neat writing, formulas and dosages that would never make any sense to Mitsuri. In all honesty, few could really understand the complicated chemistry Shinobu treaded around so casually. She’d mastered the craft of making poisons to the point where it had become an art. The art of killing.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Mitsuri said softly, placing her hand on Shinobu’s shoulder, dragging her touch over the stiff muscles in her back. “How long have you been up?”

Shinobu seemed to loosen up her posture slightly.

“I don’t know. Yesterday?”

Mitsuri moved her hand to Shinobu’s cheek and Shinobu leaned into the contact, closing her eyes. The small flame of the lantern cast pretty shadows on her skin, but they only highlighted how pale she was.

“Shinobu, it’s almost dawn , you can’t keep doing this to yourself.”

Silence fell between them. They’d talked about this, how pushing herself to her limits was nothing but dangerous. What if Shinobu was suddenly called on an assignment? What if she was too tired to fight? What if she got injured? What if-

“You know I can’t stop,” Shinobu murmured, breaking the quiet. “This is... the only thing I can do.”

Everyone was aware that Shinobu wasn’t physically strong enough to cut a demon’s head off, but no one had ever held that against her. She was perfect with her poisons so there was no reason for critique. Except she didn’t seem keen on thinking the same.

They did share that trait, being too strict on themselves, but Mitsuri had learned to be forgiving thanks to Shinobu and her words, the way she just cared. She had shown Mitsuri that she had value, as a person and not just as a pretty doll to be given away in marriage, that she had no reason to be ashamed of her body or her eating or anything, really. Mitsuri had learned to not resent her strength, she wished Shinobu could learn to not resent her weaknesses either.

Taking another step, Mitsuri pulled Shinobu into a gentle hug. It was at a weird angle, but Shinobu didn’t seem to mind as she gripped the back of Mitsuri’s nightgown. Mitsuri’s heart ached.

“Oh Shinobu, you are so, so much more than the things you can do. I wish you could see yourself the way I see you, how much you mean to me," Mitsuri whispered into her hair.

Shinobu never cried. Shinobu never let down her defenses, except when Mitsuri was there, because Mitsuri was so painfully honest it was hard to hide anything in front of her.

Shinobu didn’t cry, but Mitsuri felt her shake in her embrace, taking deep breaths to calm herself down. The nights that were quiet made it easy to fall apart.

After a few minutes, the room was silent again.

“C’mon,” Mitsuri said, tugging her up and into her arms. "Let's bring you to bed."

Shinobu sighed into the embrace, leaning all her weight into the contact, still careful to avoid Mitsuri’s injured side. If there was one thing Mitsuri was grateful for, it was the way Shinobu had learned, albeit begrudgingly, to lower her walls when it was just the two of them. She loathed feeling weak, yet she allowed Mitsuri to see her when she was not as strong.

“As your doctor, I think you should really go back to the infirmary,” Shinobu murmured in her chest. “But I’ll let it slide this time.”

“As if you’re in any place to say anything about taking care of myself,” Mitsuri retorted, a smile at the corners of her green eyes. The way the light reflected in them was mesmerizing, so much Shinobu could’ve spent the rest of the night like that if only sleep hadn’t been aggressively creeping up her spine. She felt at peace with Mitsuri around.

“Fine, but I’ll need to change your bandages first thing in the morning.”

Shinobu looked beautiful, even with the heavy weight of her worries on her shoulders, even when she was this tired and vulnerable.

“Can’t say no to my doctor, can I?” Mitsuri smiled, then bent down to catch Shinobu’s lips. The kiss was brief, but extremely sweet, as if Shinobu was being careful. Mitsuri didn't have any explanation for that, but, then again, she didn't have an explanation for why Shinobu tasted like flowers either.

When Mitsuri looked again, Shinobu was looking up at her with fondness, a pinch of something Mitsuri couldn't quite recognize in the corner of her amethyst eyes. Sadness maybe?

Shinobu swallowed and her irises seemed to clear. "You know I love you, right?"

Mitsuri smiled softly. "I know," and kissed her again, one hand carefully freeing her hair from the butterfly pin and then placing it on the desk. "And I love you too, so much."

Shinobu smiled then, and Mitsuri knew it was not out of courtesy. It was small, but it was there and it was genuine.

Mitsuri quickly took care of the lantern as Shinobu changed into something that wasn't her uniform. They would need to wake up soon, but it didn't matter, not now. As they lay under the covers, all tangled limbs and warmth, what mattered was that they were together.

As Mitsuri closed her eyes, she noticed the bad feeling that had woken her up was gone.

[ravensimps]

Hughie’s sister Chapter 1

Hey my name is Raven Campbell, I'm 23 and I have 'Super Powers'. I can Teleport, I have Telekinesis, And I am stronger than normal people when I choose to use my strength. I have a big brother his name is Hughie and we live with our dad Hugh in New York. I have been staying at an Air BNB Cottage on the edge of town for the past 7 months to work on my powers and self-defense.

XX

I wake up to my alarm blaring, Throw my covers off, And get changed into training gear. I brush my hair and tie it up in a high ponytail before heading to my kitchen to make breakfast.

XX

I make my usual breakfast of Bacon, Eggs, Baked beans, and a cup of English tea. I take my breakfast to the dining room table and watch YouTube videos on my phone while I eat.

XX

It's been roughly an hour since I finished my breakfast, I have been letting my stomach settle because my trainer told me to wait at least an hour between breakfast and training or I will feel sick when I do train.

I put my dishes in the sink, grab a bottle of water from my fridge, And head to the gym.

XX

5 hours of physical training later and I am finally home.

I did a normal workout, Cardio, Weights, Resistance, Etc. I have also been learning Muay Thai, Jujutsu, And Taekwondo. I painfully slowly walk into my bathroom, Strip, And hop in the shower.

XX

I get out of the shower 40 minutes later.

I dry my body and get dressed in Black leggings, An oversized grey sweater, And black ugg boots. I blow dry my hair, Brush it, And leave it down in its natural wavy state. "Grrbrrgugrlegurgle" My stomach growls extremely loudly drawing attention to the fact I have not eaten in about 7 hours. I grab my laptop, Phone, Earphones, And head into the kitchen.

I put my stuff down on the kitchen table and go look through my fridge.

XX

40 Minutes later I have made chicken breast, Potato wedges, And Baked beans. I take a can of cherry cola out of the fridge and take my dinner over to the table.

I start watching the TV show Lucifer while I eat.

XX

45 Minutes later I finished my food and episode, I put my dishes in the sink, grab my stuff from the table, and walk into the living room.

I turn the tv on and sit on the sofa Indian style.

"And now a statement from A-Train" I scoff but look at the TV, The headline reads 'A-Train offers deepest condolences' I tilt my head and turn the volume up "My deepest condolences to Robin Ward's family. I was chasing these bank robbers, She just stepped in the middle of the street and I-I couldn't" I turn the TV off "Robin Ward? Why does that sound familiar?" I whisper racking my brain..."Oh my god!" That's my brother's girlfriend's name! I close my laptop, Grab my phone, Earphones, And focus on my brother's workplace. "Bryman Audio Visual" I repeat over and over, I close my eyes and use my teleportation power.

XX

I open my eyes 10 seconds later and I'm...Across the street from the store! Thank god I did it right! I take a deep breath and walk over to the store.

A man in his late 40's early 50's walks out of the store and smiles at me as he holds the door for me "Hughie?!" I ask recognizing his poofy hair "Raven?!" I nod, run behind the counter, And he gives me a bear hug. "The girl on the news was that-" He pulls back tears in his eyes and nods "Oh Hughie" I pull him back into a hug "S-She wasn't in t-the s-street, S-She was 1 step o-off the c-curb" He cries "I know Hughie, I could see the Bull in his apology" He pulls back and wipes away his tears "Look at you!" He yells making me laugh "You're smaller than I remember" I playfully elbow him in the ribs "Hey!" We both laugh, We stop laughing as we hear the Ding signaling someone entering the store.

"Sorry we're closing up" Hughie and I look at the door but there's no one there? "Hello?" We hear footsteps walk over, I am so confused!

"Who are you?" Hughie and I jump back as we hear a male voice "The fuck?" Hughie asks looking around "Right in front of you Prick, You think I wouldn't find this thing?" The person/Voice/Thing, Drops a small round black disk on the counter, Hughie's I'd badge starts floating "Hughie" The Person mocks and slams Hughie face-first onto the glass counter cracking it "Hey!" I yell as Hughie is now pulled over the counter and onto the floor "You pussy, I followed you from the fucking Tower" Hughie is lifted up in the air and thrown into the store glass window "Stop!" I yell and try to run over to Hughie but the person grabs me by the throat "I'm not one to hit girls but don't FUCKING push me" He lets go of me, rips a freaking TV out of the wall, and lifts it up over his head! "Who's the guy you were with in the car?! He put you up to this!?" The invisible man asks and poor Hughie is panicking "I don't know, He was just some uber driver! Ok?!" I run around the floating TV and crouch beside Hughie "Do you think I'm some fucking idiot? Why'd you plant the bug?" He's going to kill Hughie maybe me too and I can't freaking do anything! "Please, No, Please, Please!" Hughie pleads "We're the Seven, Earth's most mighty, Champions of the innocent, Motherfucker!" As he prepares to slam the TV on Hughie and I, A Freaking Car crashes through the store wall and throws the invisible guy into the far wall "I'm so sorry Hughie, I'm useless and I couldn't see him" He smiles a little at me, A guy around 6ft, Dressed in black, with messy hair, A beard, and Hazelnut eyes gets out of the car. "Sorry about the mess" He says with a Cockney/ English accent "Huh" I didn't expect that "You should fuck off Hughie" He says with a crowbar in hand "Hughie run! Well, Well, Well if it ain't the invisible cunt" I hear the smirk in his voice as Hughie and I head for the back door.

Hughie and I get to the back exit, He opens the door, but doesn't go out "I know that look" I smile at Hughie as he looks back "I have an idea" He mumbles and we slowly walk back to the front.

We get to the front of the store just as the Invisible guy sweeps cockney guys legs out from under him and kicked him in the face "So who are you? Fucking spy?! For who? Huh? You're gonna tell me or I'm gonna smash your fucking scalp off!" Invisible guy yells grabbing the crowbar Cockney guy brought, Hughie creeps behind invisible guy and waits "Who are you?!" Invisible guy screams "I'll tell you who you are, A fucking moron" Wow Cockney is ballsy, Hughie now grabs the TV cable from the wall " 'Translucent' doesn't even mean 'Invisible', It means 'Semi-Transparent'" Hughie tries to hit? shock? The Invisible guy but the cable is too short, Invisible guy looks back at Hughie then at me, While he looks at me Cockney takes the opportunity to kick him into the cable Hughie is holding! Hughie starts screaming and I look at the Cockney guy in awe? Fascination? Something and I think there's something wrong with me.

The Invisible guy or Translucent I guess falls to the floor dead? I crouch down beside Hughie "Is he...Is he dead?" Hughie asks Cockney "Well he ain't moving" Cockney groans kicking the dead body "Oh fuck, Oh shit" Hughie's voice cracks as he visibly relaxes a little.

My eyes drift to Cockney again and I take a good long look at him, He is definitely 6ft ish, His hair looks super soft and fluffy, His beard isn't too long, And even under the black clothes I can see he is physically very fit, He's a very attractive man.

"Earth to Raven" Hughie snaps his fingers in my face "What?" I blush looking away from the now smirking Cockney "Good job, Let's get him in the boot" He continues smirking as he lifts up the top half of the body "Wait, What?" Hughie is still in shock I think "The trunk" The guy locks eyes with me and I look away as Hughie panics "What are we doing with him?" Hughie asks "Well Hughie, You just offed one of the Seven mate" That's who he was...Shit!

"Me? I...You hit him with a fucking car!" I might be crazy but I find this hilarious, I start laughing and Hughie looks at me like I am crazy "Look potato fucking po-tah-to, We're in a shit load of trouble" Cockney glares dropping the body and I stop laughing he looks scary "No! No! We're not! He attacked us, Ok? And you're - you're a federal officer, You know? Just-Just call the fucking FBI" The guy stops glaring and looks between Hughie and I "Yeah o-ok, So look technically I'm not a fed" I groan "WHAT!? THEN WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?!" Hughie yells his voice cracking and I burst out laughing "I-I'm sorry I don't know what's wrong with me" I choke making the Cockney guy smirk at me "So you're- you're not a fed?" Hughie asks as we hear sirens approaching "You hear that? That's the old bill. So unless you wanna explain why you've got America's favorite invisible wanker dead on the floor, Give us a fucking hand will ya?" Might be inappropriate but I can't stop thinking about how attractive Cockney is "Aw shit" Hughie sighs in defeat and helps Cockney put Translucent in the 'boot'.

About a minute later Cockney opens the car back door "In ya get Love" He smirks making me blush "Thanks" I mumble and get in the car with my head down, I sit in the middle of the back seat in silence while Cockney drives and Hughie is in the passenger seat.

XX

We have been driving for a while and it's really bothering me that I don't know Cockney's name, I lean forward between the front seats "So Hughie...You haven't introduced me to your friend" I lock eyes with Cockney and he smirks "Billy Butcher, Nice to meet ya" I smile "I'm Hughie's little sister, I'm Raven. I can stop calling you Cockney in my head now" I laugh and he smirks "How old are ya Raven?" I tilt my head "I'm 23" His look changes and the smirk gets bigger, I blush and sit back in the seat.

XX

"All right listen, I have worked for the feds. I've worked for loads of people, I'm what you might call an independent contractor. You got a problem, You call me, I solve the problem" Butcher explains breaking the silence after 5 minutes.

"Agh!" I jump and move closer to the back of Butcher's seat as there's banging and thumping in the 'boot'.

"What is that?" Hughie asks as he and Butcher look around "Imveryclosetoyouimsosorry" I blurt out as Butcher and I are so close I can feel his beard on my cheek "That's a problem, Not you Love" Butcher groans turning back around, I'm surprised he understood "Oh thank fuck he's alive! Yes! Yes he's alive! Ok pull over" Hughie yells relieved "No, No, No Hughie you don't fucking get it" This is a lot worse "This is a fuck sight worse, He's seen our faces" I groan and think of a plan...I've got nothing!

End of chapter 1!  I hope this was somewhat enjoyable.

-Ray

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #298

“i don’t like what i am becoming  /  wish i could just feel something”

Do you have sensitive skin? Very. Do you wear necklaces or earrings more? Just my tragus piercing, really. I only ever wear a necklace sometimes if I'm taking a "nice" picture. Rings or bracelets? I currently don't wear any bracelets, but I do always have one ring on. How many toilets are in your house? Two. Is your current crush younger than you? By just a couple years. Are you a lighter complexion than your father? Yes; he's very tan, especially his arms from being a mailman. Ranch or barbeque sunflower seeds? I don't like sunflower seeds. Do you know the first five books of the Bible in order? No. Do you have a pet fish? Nah, they're not my thing. Do you believe being gay is a choice or a "disorder"? Neither; I believe it's a genetic mutation. It defies biology and the very motive for life, but I always say that a mutation does not, in any way, equate to "wrong." I am extremely adamantly pro-gay rights and bisexual myself, so I can't shit-talk it. What are some of your favourite sounds? Crunching leaves, rain gently tapping on windows, windchimes, birdsong... mainly nature sounds. There are others, I'm just blanking right now. Are you a warm weather or cold weather person? Cold, 100%. What time do you wake up? What for? This spans over a massive gap, honestly... I can wake up as early as 5 or as late as 9:30. Most often, it's pretty early, and I call that my "trial" of being awake, lol... because I will almost without fail go back to sleep for a couple more hours. Hell, that happens even if I sleep on the later side. Do you ever listen to music to fall asleep to? I used to do that in middle and maybe some of high school, I think; I'd fall asleep with my iPod on and earbuds in. I haven't done that in a very long time, though. Could you spend the rest of your life with someone who had bad taste in music? ... Yes? Their taste in music has nothing to do with them as a person???? Do you still talk to the person you fell hardest for? No, and it's best I don't. Have you ever wanted to get drunk and get your mind off everything? Yes, and that's how I found out I'm far from a lightweight. I wasn't going to drink more than I actually wanted to drink just to get wasted. Did you love playing hide and seek as a kid? Yeah. Who is the last child you held? My youngest niece. Have you ever woken up not knowing where you were? Maybe for a few moments after my surgery? I don't really recall. When is the last time you made the wrong choice in anything? Every fucking day when I decide what to do with my time. What is the most interesting thing in the room you are in? My snake, I guess. She's a champagne morph ball python. When washing your hands, do you wet your hands or put soap on first? I put on soap first. When was the hardest you ever cried? What was the circumstance? Probably when Mom literally dragged me home after I tried to walk to Jason's to talk the night of the breakup. I lost my fucking mind. Which gift cards do you have in your wallet? I don't think I have any. Coke or Pepsi? Coke. I hate Pepsi. What is better: cute smile, or amazing eyes? A cute smile. What song are you listening to? "Drilled a Wire Through My Cheek" by Blue October is on currently. Name your best friend(s): Sara. Do you know any mechanical stuff about cars? Nope. Last night you felt? I wasn't suicidal, but still kinda wanted to die lmao. Do you still watch Disney channel? No. How do you like your eggs? I only enjoy them scrambled, and preferably with cheese. What’s your all-time favorite song? "False Flags" by Massive Attack. If you could be any TV character, who would you be and why? Idk, I don't watch TV enough. Maybe Donna from That '70s Show. Very strong and independent, outspoken, and not to mention she has great taste. I find her to be a good female character to look up to. Do you ever come up with really good ideas for stories or movies? Do you do anything with them? Yeah; I'll try to integrate them into RP characters and plots. What sort of things do you post on your Tumblr? Vintage photos, screen caps, girly things? It's a Markiplier cesspit lmao. Sometimes I'll reblog shit I find funny. I've been very inactive on it, though. Have you ever had a dream that you couldn’t shake, even for days after you woke up? Oh yes. When was the last time you felt like a nuisance, or unwanted? Recently, I'm sure. When was the last time your dreams were crushed, or at least hindered? I dunno. How’s school going? I'm not in school. Are you angry at anyone right now? Myself. The last person to say they loved you? Mom. When is the last time you laughed hard? Hard? I'm really not sure. Are there any words on your shirt? No, it's just a blank black tank. Does it take a lot to make you cry? NOPE. Do you tell your parents everything? No. Do you get bored easily? I'm bored to the point of thinking being dead would be more fun at some point almost every day. I have anhedonia badly. I'm honestly starting to think I've over-medicated to a numbing degree so am trying to wean off some things. Have you ever burned someone's picture? No. How long was your last nap? Maybe three hours? I was really, really tired, though. Can you name the last time you felt happy? Probably when Sara and I talk-talked for the first time in a while. When was the last time you played with sidewalk chalk? Oh, I have zero clue. Probably not since I was a kid. Do you have friends obsessed with World of Warcraft? Bro wtf don't @ me. Have you ever punched a hole in the wall? No. Have you ever told someone you hated them? The only time I've seriously said that was to my dad before we reconciled after the divorce. What was the color of the bridesmaid dresses of the last wedding you went to? I actually don't remember... Favorite thing to do on Facebook? See The Memes. Do you wear flip flops, regardless of weather, all the time? I SAID don't @ me. What is in store for your future? I both do and don't want to know. Have you ever seen a live bat? Yeah. I adore bats. Do you chew on straws? No. Do you have any trophies? Yeah. Who’s the last person that creeped you out? Some guy who walked into the store I was at with Mom, continuously looking back and forth. Would you believe an ex if she/he said they love you? Well, that would depend on the person. Have you ever been kissed in the rain? Yeah. Anything exciting happening soon? My half-sister and her kids are visiting tomorrow and staying for a few days. It's a surprise for Mom. Do you keep a diary or journal (offline or online)? You could say these surveys kinda are. I don't have a designated "diary," though. When was the last time you took a painkiller? What was it for and did it work? I had womanly issues a few days back, and yeah, it helped. Have you ever had to go and rescue someone because their car broke down? When was the last time that happened? I mean, I've driven /with/ Mom to do so. I myself don't drive. What’s one sweet/candy you miss from your childhood? Is this item something you can still buy or has it been discontinued? Y'all remember Baby Bottle Pops??? 'Cuz I do, and I love those fuckin things. I still see them sometimes in gas stations. When was the last time you used some kind of moisturiser? A few days back for my hands. They were painfully dry. If you’re under lockdown/stay at home orders at the moment, are you struggling or managing okay? A bitch is s t r u g g l i n g. Has anything positive come out of the pandemic for you? Fuck no. Do you wear a watch? Is it analogue/digital? Does it it have things like a step-counter in it? No. Do you have any gifts from Christmas that you still haven’t opened or used? Not used, yes. Well, then some things are still in their boxes, but they're unwrapped. Do you know how to tie a tie? If so, who taught you? No. Who was your last missed call from? Did you ring that person back? Some number I didn't recognize, so no. When was the last time you had some kind of problem with your internet connection? Is this something that happens often? A few days back. It has occasional instances where it'll go out but come back on shortly. Do you have a favourite celebrity chef? No. Do you prefer pizza or pasta? Pizza. Have you ever volunteered anywhere before? What was the reason behind doing so? Once at PetSmart when they had dogs to adopt out, which was for school volunteer hours. I spent time with them, giving them attention and taking them outside. I also had two other animal-related volunteer days, but each was only a few hours because my fucking weak-ass body couldn't handle them. Have you ever been truly obsessed with something? What was it and how did you come to feel that way? I have an incredibly obsessive personality; I could probably name near on a dozen or so things I've been genuinely obsessed with. I don't know what it means to love in moderation. Some are/were pleasant obsessions, some aren't/weren't. Does it bother you when people turn up at your house without asking or waiting to be invited? Yes. Are you taller or shorter than average height? I'm the average for an American woman. Do you have any family members whose beliefs or ways of life completely embarrass you? YUP YUP YUP YUP. Are you scared of heights? Yes. When was the last time you lost something of great sentimental value? Did you ever end up finding it again? I don't know. Have you ever injured anyone in self-defense? No. What food do you find to be the most filling? Is this something you eat a lot of? In relation to its portion sizes, oatmeal or eggs. I can't have a whole lot of either. I wouldn't say I eat either a lot, but oatmeal is more common. Have you ever heard people talking badly about you behind your back? Did you confront them about it? Yes, and in at least two instances. Do you consider “home” to be the place you were born, or is it somewhere you create for yourself? I consider it to be my childhood home; not the one I was actually born in, but only because I was way too young to remember and we only lived there like, maybe two years into my life. Have you ever experienced having to leave your home due to a fire, or due to the threat of fire? No, thankfully. When was the last time you felt you were in a dangerous situation? When we had a serious tornado warning Christmas Eve. Yes. In winter. Are there any superstitions that you believe in? Which ones and what are your reasons for doing so? No. Are there any series of books/films that you never finished - either because you got bored of waiting or just lost interest? Oh, I'm sure. I Wouldn't say I lost interest in a lot though, I just wasn't interested enough, like for The Hunger Games. Which theme park is your favorite? I haven't been to nearly enough to know. Like, just one. Do you eat healthy? I try to be, at least. Though I've been doing very poorly about it lately because I'm a emotional goddamn eater and am having a very hard time. Do/did your parents fight often? They're divorced for a reason. Do YOU fight with them often? No. Would you say that you're respectful? I hope so. Are you a fan of Green Day? Yeah, I love them. Would you rather have 4 kids at one time or never have a kid? Jesus Christ, never. I don't want any anyway. Do you think 'friends with benefits' relationships really ever work? No. Do you or have you ever known a drug addict? Yes. Do you turn off the water while brushing your teeth or leave it on? I always turn it off. No reason to waste it. Do you have any nieces or nephews? Lots, if you include my half-siblings. Are caterpillars more cute or disgusting? I tend to find them cute. What's your homepage when you bring up the internet? Google. Was the last book you read for fun or was it for some type of assignment? It was for fun. Have you ever dated someone you met online? Yes. Would you go on a date with someone right now if they asked? Depends on who's asking. Do you own any band tees? Oh, I have lots. Off the top of my head, some that I frequently wear are Metallica, Otep, and Korn. Do you know someone who wears a wig? No. Have you ever kissed someone under fireworks? I don't think so. What kind of dressing do you eat on your salad, if any? I strongly prefer the Olive Garden kind, but I also enjoy ranch. What genre of music do you listen to the most? Metal of some sort. Have you ever dated someone who was way overprotective of you? No. Do you personally know any cops? No. How many different colleges have you gone to? Three. How much stress can you handle? Not much at all. How confident are you in achieving your dreams? I ain't got the slightest clue by this point in my life. What is one thing you thought you’d never do but have done or are doing? There's a lot of things, most bad, some good. Do you have to take medication for any mental illness? A lot. Do you like looking at pictures? It depends on what's in them. Specifically pictures from my past, that's usually a big no. Do you believe the dead can have connections with the living? I guess in very vague ways. Which family member do you get along with the most? Well, define "get along with." I by far have the strongest relationship with my mom, but we fight sometimes. As for who I stay on the most stable ground with, that's probably my dad. Would you ever be able to become a vegan? I know I couldn't, but I'd love to. How did you meet your newest friend? Who even IS my newest friend... Have you ever watched the show Teen Mom? What did you think about it? No, and I think it's an awful fucking idea for a television show. Put a spotlight on and money into teen pregnancy, yeah, that's a genius plan. Are you old enough to remember MySpace? Yeah. Do you think you’ll be a good mother/father? I wouldn't be. Do you have trouble deleting your text messages? I don't need to. Is there something that you haven’t told anyone that you actually would like to tell someone? No. Have you ever been called a tease? Yeah. Do people ever make fun of your religion or lack thereof? No. Do you say/do things a lot for shock effect? No? What was the last compliment you gave a guy? I probably told my nephew Ryder he was a good brother. Was one of your grandpas in a war? Maybe? Idk. I never knew either well at all. Have you screamed in a pillow before? Yes. What do you like more, acoustic or electric? Electric. Have you ever ordered something off a commercial on television? No. What's worse, having someone mad or disappointed in you? Disappointed. Do you still consider Pluto a planet? Yes. Didn't they reinstate it as one, anyway? Right now, are you at a high, leveled, or low point? What's lower than "low?"

[jaybug-jabbers]

Bug Run 4: Final Comments & Movesets

(Apologies for Cleo barely being in frame there, I had to take screencaps crazy-fast)

This fourth bug run was interesting in a number of ways. For starters, I lacked a lot of moves I was used to getting extra help from on these types of runs. I didn’t have any Sleep Powers or paralyzing moves, I didn’t have any confusion-causing moves; no accuracy-dropping moves save for a quick, dirty affair with Double Team; I didn’t have Swords Dance or other buffing moves, and I had very few stats-dropping moves (Scary Face and Screech, the exceptions, were often essential).What’s more, many of the movepools of my pokemon were incredibly shallow when it came to coverage moves.

In addition to all of that, half of my team was Bug/Flying. This is not so surprising; Bug/Flying is an incredibly common combination. Still, it certainly adds to the difficulty. As a result of all of this, I sometimes had to be very creative with the limited options I had available to me.

However, this run was also surprising to me. In particular, bugs I had underestimated in the past really managed to impress me again and again.

Mothim: Air Slash/Psychic/Bug Buzz/Hidden Power Ground - Razor Claw

Mothim, which I had always assumed had terribly pitiful performance when compared to his fellow butterflies and moths of other gens, actually performed pretty damn admirably. Sparkler often somehow survived hits I assumed would slaughter him, and he actually packed quite a punch with his attacks. In addition, his movepool, while not the biggest in the world, actually was really generous when compared to the rest of my team for most of the run. Being an early-game bug, he tended to earn the high-basepower moves sooner then the others, and so he often was a huge help; the fact he was blessed with Hidden Power ground also was an enormous boon in this run. For a very, very long time, he was my only defender against the ground and rock type pokemon with his HP ground, a very bizarre situation but one that worked out for us. His Psychic also helped out against the extremely, extremely common Zubat line endlessly. He more then pulled his weight on the team; he was essential for me.

Wormadam: Iron Head/Psychic/Protect/Stealth Rock - Shell Bell

Mothim’s counterpart, Wormadam, was another bug type that never interested me much before. And while Fiberglass’ attack was never hitting particularly hard, as a defensive poke, she was my rock. She formed an essential part of my defense core in a team that consisted mostly of attackers and pokemon with low defenses, and allowed me to grit and stall things out when stall was what I needed. While I may not be able to reccomend using Wormadam in all settings, in this particular setting, she filled her role on the team admirably.

Vespiquen: Attack Order/Heal Order/Toxic/Power Gem - Quick Claw

Cleopatra had an interesting journey in this game. When she joined the team, at the time she was the strongest teammember. For a while, her power in both attack and in defensive bulk made her the ace of my team. She felt a lot like the mother bee watching over the rest of the team, somebody to run to when I was in deep shit so she could take care of things. Gradually, over time, her status as the ace faded. Eventually, the other pokemon she had watched over began to even outpace her; Mothim often was fast enough and hit hard enough– and had the coverage– to take care of foes that would otherwise fell Cleo, and the same could be said of the others. Cleo was slow, was the thing; terribly slow, and at times, that worked heavily against her. She still retained a vital role on the team, though, even in the late game, and despite her extremely shallow coverage moves. She held my Toxic and she had excellent recovery and very good bulk. Toxic stall was simply a vital tactic on my team that often had limited options available to them. Many foes I didn’t have super-effective moves for just wouldn’t go down any other way.

Yanmega: Air Slash/Ancient Power/Giga Drain/Hyper Beam - Wise Glasses

ROFLCOPTER sat in an often very frustrating position on my team. There is something deeply cruel about the movepool that Gamefreak gave Yanmega when they first introduced it. It does not get proper special attacks until extremely late into its life. The poor bug had to limp by with some truly shitty attacks for most of his time, never reaching his true potential until very late on. Once properly used, though, ROFL’s speed and special attack are practically unparalleled for bugs. His speed was my saving grace when squaring off against the tougher teams that had pokes in very high tiers. He is, of course, a glass cannon, but without that glass cannon, I would not have been able to punch through a number of the scarier obstacles.

Drapion: Poison Jab/Rock Slide/Earthquake/Scary Face - Soft Sand

Black Fang started out as an almost purely support pokemon. With Scary Face and Toxic Spikes and a very late-level evolution, he was the last unevolved poke on my team for a while, and just wasn’t hitting hard enough to score kills on his own at first. Despite that fact, he often played an important team role anyway. I had played without a speed-dropping move for most of the game. His Scary Face was insanely helpful. Getting off toxic damage was just a wonderful added bonus. Of course, once Fang picked up some proper attacking moves and I got access to some TMs, his utility increased dramatically. He could learn vital coverage moves nobody else could, filling in some very major gaps in my ability to hit things. Dig and then, eventually, Earthquake were essential. Rock Slide was also very important  to hit Flying types, though I did already have a few special rock moves with my other pokes. And when Fang finally evolved, of course it helped that he lost his bug typing and offered a slightly wider range of defensive possibilities on my mono-team. I won’t lie about that. He did a lot of work late-game, and carried a lot of weight. Would we have managed without him, and with somebody else on the team? No way of knowing for certain, but I like to think yes. I don’t think his usefulness meant we were utterly dependent upon him late-game; we would have found a way. Still, it was fun having him around– even if I never really could get used to his strange design.

Kricketune: X-Scissor/Natural Gift/Brick Break/Screech - Black Belt

Then there is Maestro.

I am so damn proud of my Kricketune. I remember when I first played Diamond/Pearl and ran across Kricketot and was so happy, but once I tried him out I was disappointed. Ever since then, I learned what a huge reputation the line had for being weak. As my starter, I didn’t hold out very high hopes of him accomplishing too much.

And yet, somehow, he accomplished so much. There came a point around mid-game when I assumed his usefulness had reached the point of diminished returns, and he would rapidly become the deadweight on the team used as death fodder and nothing more. It saddened me, but I thought it inevitable. But it was not. He kept going and kept surprising me. Screech became a crucial asset. When I taught him Brick Break, it opened so many doors for him. He often ended up felling foes I never would have dreamed he could. Far from deadweight, he was an important teammember who took care of us.

He even defeated Cynthia’s ace. While the rematch had Cleo win with tox-stall, if she had full restored, I still would have used Kricketune to deliver the finishing blow again. Because the strange fact of the matter was– Kricketune had the highest base Attack of my entire team. His speed was middling and his defenses were pretty squishy, but he actually could pack a punch. And when the chips were down, he was there for me.

If there’s anything this run has taught me, it’s not to underestimate the dele-dele-whoop.

This is a repost on a new blog. The original post was on Dec 14, 2018.

[racingtoaredlight]

RTARL’s 2020 NFL Season Week 11 Extravapalooza

Holy moly, we’ve already made it to Week 11. I’m honestly conflicted over whether or not this is a good thing. In terms of basic pandemic mitigation practices, the NFL conducting its season is fucking insane. These guys are all well-compensated pros, but they’re still taking risks well above and beyond what they normally do, and I truly feel pretty shitty about that. In addition, the fact that some stadiums are allowing thousands of fans inside during games is a crime against humanity, and it really lays bare how craven and sociopathic the ghouls who own sports franchises are. 

With that said, it’s extremely hypocritical of me to be so disdainful of the NFL’s current existence, since I watch the games, set my fantasy lineup, and generally enjoy all the stuff that comes with an NFL season. I usually bristle and roll my eyes whenever a sporting entity trots out the whole “We feel like we’re helping society by providing a distraction from everything going on” line, but in this case, with where we are right now as a country...the NFL really is doing that. For me, anyway. Is the stress-relief that the NFL provides to me and millions of other people worth all the bad stuff that comes with it? I don’t know. Probably not. But, I’d be lying if I said I’m not thankful that it’s there.

My picks are in BOLD, and the lines come to us courtesy of our friends at Vegas Insider. I use the “VI Consensus” line, which is the line that occurs most frequently across Vegas Insider’s list of sportsbooks. Your sportsbook of choice may offer a different number, and if you’d like my opinion on said number A) you are insane, and B) leave a comment below and I’ll try to answer at some point before things kickoff today.

EARLY GAMES

Tennessee Titans at Baltimore Ravens (-6)

It’s odd to have a game between a pair of 6-3 teams widely considered contenders that feels like a “must win” for each scuffling side. A great man once said “Desperation is a stinky cologne,” and the Titans absolutely reek coming into this one, so I’m giving them the edge. Baltimore being down two starting defensive linemen when Derrick Henry comes to town also factors into my pick, but nobody wants to hear that nerd shit, gotta go with my GUT, baby!

Philadelphia Eagles at Cleveland Browns (-2.5)

Hey, Cleveland doesn’t have to play in the middle of a tornado this week! There will still be driving rains, though. Fortunately, the Browns are built for the slop. RBs Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt are both ridiculous, but I’d like to give a special shoutout to G Wyatt Teller, who is currently Pro Football Focus’ highest-graded player...in the entire NFL. That’s some grade A beef! DE and straight-up superhuman Myles Garrett is out for this one, which is an enormous blow for the Cleveland defense. If I had any confidence whatsoever in Carson Wentz I’d think about taking Philly, but that young man is a mess.

Pittsburgh Steelers (-10.5) at Jacksonville Jaguars

I’m once again betting on the Steelers playing down to the level of their competition. The Jags kept things close against the Packers last week, there’s fight in them thar cats.

Cincinnati Bengals at Washington Football Team (-1.5)

I’m still extremely nervous for Alex Smith the entire time he’s on the field, but I have to admit there’s something magical about him making it all the way back to being exactly as Alex Smith-y as he was before (minus the scrambling ability, obviously). Washington RB J.D. McKissic has 16(!) catches on 29(!!) targets over the two games Smith has started. If this continues J.D. is going to owe Alex a cut of his next contract, and possibly the mineral rights to his legs if the need arises.

Today is Cincy RB Gio Bernard’s birthday, so LOOK OUT LADIES!

Atlanta Falcons at New Orleans Saints (-3.5)

I’m making this pick based on the assumption that New Orleans really does roll with Taysom Hill at QB for the entire game, because that’s what all currently available information indicates will happen. I really do wonder if that’s going to be the case, though. I’ve read a couple of things speculating that the reason Hill is starting is that if Jameis plays he’s likely to reach various incentive clauses in his contract and cost the Saints a bunch of money. That seems utterly ridiculous to me, because why the hell would you bother signing him at all if this is how you were gonna roll? Then again, I’m not a Football Man, so maybe my un-browned normie brain just doesn’t understand.

Detroit Lions (-3) at Carolina Panthers

CATFIGHT!!!

The Lions are the orange kitty in this scenario, because Matthew Stafford will be playing through a torn thumb while not having WR Kenny Golladay or RB D’Andre Swift at his disposal. 

New England Patriots (-2) at Houston Texans

The concept of an “emotional hedge,” first introduced to me by RTARL commenter Beer, is in play here. I have NO idea if the Patriots are actually decent or not, and this has all the makings of a letdown game coming off of their unexpected win over Baltimore. Reigning Defensive Player of the Year Stephon Gilmore is expected to be back for the Pats in this one, which is very nice. RB Sony Michel is also likely coming back, which could muddy the backfield and take touches away from Damien Harris, which is less nice. 

The Patriots have an atrocious rush defense, but Houston’s primary RB, Duke Johnson, is far better as a receiver than as a straight-up runner, so I’m not sure they can take advantage all that much. In addition, Duke’s receiving skills are mostly squandered because QB DeShaun Watson hates checking down and seemingly prefers to take sacks while looking for throws downfield instead. Wait, why the hell am I picking Houston here??? Is this what hedging is? I don’t like it!

LATE GAMES

New York Jets at Los Angeles Chargers (-9.5)

It feels weird to lay 9.5 points with a 2-7 team, but such is the power of the Jets’ ineptitude. To New York’s credit, they were competitive in two of their last three games (against NE and BUF), but those two games were sandwiched around a 35-9 beatdown at the hands of Kansas City. We would all feel better if the cool, young Chargers steamrolled these sad sacks in a joyous explosion of big plays, and this pick is my attempt at speaking it into existence. 

Miami Dolphins (-3.5) at Denver Broncos

I don’t know why I have an affinity for Drew Lock, but I do. He probably appeals to the same part of my brain that delights in terrible movies and horrible jokes, which is the most backhanded compliment I have ever given anyone in my entire life. Drew's gonna tough it out and try to play through a rib injury this week, which is gutty and admirable and all that, but I can’t imagine it’s going to help his already shaky accuracy.

Green Bay Packers at Indianapolis Colts (-1.5)

The Packers are getting their best defensive player back in CB Jaire Alexander, which will make life more difficult for increasingly-noodle-armed Colts QB Philip Rivers. Conversely, Indy’s defense is among the best in the league, so I don’t really see a carnival of offense coming from the Packers, either. Honestly, this should be a close, well-played game between two exceedingly competent squads. The kind of game where there will be long stretches where nothing major happens, but you can point out random shit that happens away from the ball and talk about line play and really sound like you know what the fuck you’re talking about. A tremendous game for fraudulent football-knowers everywhere.

Dallas Cowboys at Minnesota Vikings (-7)

It would be an INCREDIBLY Vikings move to lose this game outright. The return of Andy Dalton is being treated like it’s something that’ll get the Cowboys somewhat back on track, but prior to his injury he looked like crap, so I don’t really know where that’s coming from. Also, while he was out with a concussion he had a bout with COVID-19 that “hit him hard.” It’s tough for me to imagine he’s going to play BETTER coming out of what sounds like a truly shitty few weeks.

SNF: Kansas City Chiefs (-7.5) at Las Vegas Raiders

A lot has been made about how pissed Kansas City is about the Raiders taking a supposed “victory lap” in their team bus around the Arrowhead parking lot after their win over the Chiefs earlier in the season, and I’m choosing to completely buy into this narrative because it’s fucking hilarious. If K.C. has already reached the “needing to exaggerate/outright invent slights to get up for regular season games against inferior opponents” portion of their reign, we’re in great shape for entertainment purposes going forward.

MNF: Los Angeles Rams at Tampa Bay Buccaneers (-4)

I don’t remotely trust Jared Goff against Tampa Bay’s defense. I do think this is probably our SMASHMOUTH NOSEBLEED GRIND IT OUT Game of the Week, and I can already see Tom Brady screaming at his offensive linemen at some point after he gets popped a couple of times during a single possession. Should be fun!

Last Week’s Record: 7-5-1

Season Record: 65-68-5

[eledables]

Carry You

A few moments while I wait out for the Youtube release of Novo Amor’s newest single, Opaline, I turned to listen to Novo songs I first liked, and one of them was Carry You. 

It is only that moment that I noticed one of the top comments, which I didn’t pay much attention before despite having the music video being repeated over and over in my Youtube playlist. ‘Cause why, Novo Amor music! 

I was so moved I felt compelled to actually write a short post about it, which is exactly what I am doing right now.

gracefull mess (from 3 years ago): “Only gonna marry someone I can listen to Novo Amor with”

...

I am usually a fan of artists who has this distinct, varying voice ranges and pro skilled with musical instruments. Quite picky, but I am one of those who also appreciate the mainstream, the pop, the upbeat, the music that probably a lot of people like, or at the very least, familiar.

Not with Novo Amor. 

I was then trying to recover from a break-up. It is when I let my Youtube autoplay that I discovered his music. I just let the song play, Carry You, my first favorite, and I just remember being very into it and finding myself reading a blog post about the song and its lyrics.

...

Since then, Novo Amor’s music give me a soothing experience into my core. His detailed guitar/ piano intros coupled with fluid violin seem to gently invite me into his song. In the middle of his music travels me through different depths of my feelings, making me unsure if it’s sadness or peace or deep joy. Then there’s the climax, enjoining all the instruments which drives me in highs. Followed by the element of dim, and soft build up of intruments that puts my soul gently back into the ground; ending with a complete halt. An experience quite synonymous to waking up not too early, not too late, after a good dream, from a good night rest. 

In all his songs were poetry; with lovely and intense thoughts that leaves an etch in one’s heart. Listening to the song, this time knowing the song’s message/ concept, and my listening experience is elevated.

Novo Amor’s music has pierced me deep into my heart, into my soul. 

...

And I think, for me to share Novo Amor to another being, feels like I’m stripping myself of all the earthly defenses I’ve built; barenaked. I’m sharing my soul. In all my bold highs, pinks and violets, and also in my pitch black and steep lows.

Which is why I feel with the comment.

Sharing something you feel so deeply and intricately to another human being, can be threatening. Can be hurtful. Can be soul-breaking.

And on the other hand can be extremely wonderful: being appreciated, understood, and met eye to eye. A pure union between souls.

So yes.

I look for, aspire, hope, and pray for that deep connection.

And soon, all the moons, stars, colours and galaxies that form in my soul whenever I listen to the guitar plucks, violin, and falsetto voice of Novo Amor will be freely revealed to someone.

Someone who can bear it. Who can appreciate. Understand. Take care of.

And who will gladly share theirs as well. 

...

Resonate with me? How about you? Which artist or song carries your soul? :)

[uncomfortable-writers]

Trepidatious (Bucky x Reader)

(Gif credit to owner)

Fandom: Marvel

Character: Bucky Barnes

Persona: Female

Word Count: 1,817

Warning: Mentions of extreme anxiety 

Request: Can I request a Bucky imagine where reader has anxiety, she's nervous about everything, and it's easy to make her cry. Maybe a scenario when some of her co-workers pranked her and she got really scared and started crying (you can add a panic attack) and Bucky hears her sobs when he comes to pick her up and calms her down? Thank you dear ❤ 

A/N - I based this off of how my own anxiety feels so if it doesn’t feel right/accurate I’m sorry :( Also my inbox/social media is always open for anyone who needs to talk, I love you all <3

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Hey and if any of them give you trouble today, you call alright? Me and Steve will come sort them out right away”, Bucky playfully huffed, even going so far as to puff his chest out dramatically. Even though it was light-hearted you detected the subtle truth behind it; there was no doubt in your mind that Bucky wouldn’t follow through with his promise. You smiled at him, subconsciously squeezing his fingers as you usually did when deep in thought.

Bucky, being ever alert, could tell your anxiety was peaking as you often disconnected from reality when your nerves were bad.

“You know I’d never let anything hurt you”, Bucky stated in a soothing tone, “You’re the most precious thing to me”. He pulled you into a warm hug. Breathing in the scent of his cool, fresh cologne brought you back down to Earth, wrapping your arms around his thick middle you replied, “I know, I love you”. Bucky slowly dropped his arms and pressed a kiss to your forehead, “Go get a move on, you’re going to be late doll”.

You chuckled as you knew you were at least half an hour early, arriving with plenty of time before your shift started was one way you combatted your worry.

“And I’m sure Steve’s getting into all kinds of trouble without you”, you teased,  touching your bag one last time to make you had it, you started to walk towards your work entrance. “Of course he is! Damn kid can’t stay outta it!”, Bucky called getting into his car, “I’ll be here to pick you up at 5 sharp! Have a good day, I love you!”. Smiling to yourself, you opened the doors and let yourself into the office but not before turning around one last time to watch Bucky go. As was the norm Bucky had his head sticking out of the car window, his hand already raised to wave you farewell. After copying his action you finally went inside. The Winter Soldier waited till he saw your figure disappear through the clear-paned doors, and he even waited a few extra minutes just in case you’d forgotten something, but when you never came back out, he decided it was all good for him to leave.

Having your boyfriend drop you into work always left you in good spirits.It set a positive tone for your day, so when you saw your least favourite co-workers huddled together you tried not to let the good vibes falter. You couldn’t help but notice the way their faces seemed to develop sinister smirks, or how their voices became hushed whispers. Trying to push the distress to the back of your mind, you greeted them softly and rushed to your desk, painfully aware of how on edge you could feel yourself becoming.

Pulling out your phone, Bucky had already texted you:

From: Winter Princess <3

Miss you already :((

Don’t stress about ur colleagues, they’re a bunch of asses anyway.

love you xoxo

His message caused you to relax slightly, growing more content you tapped out a reply. Unfortunately for you, you didn’t see your co-workers creeping closer to you, mischief all to clear in their minds.“Hey (Y/N)”, Todd’s voice broke your tranquil state. Your eyes dashed up to see that Todd was in the entryway to your booth while Jessica was leaning on the top of it, an insidious look on her face despite the sickly-sweet smile. Your mouth suddenly felt dryer than a desert, “Can I--um--Can I help you?”, you stammered out.

 It was no secret that recently this pair had become more troublesome than usual. It was nothing too serious, just the occasional tormenting here and there. To anyone else it would’ve seemed like nothing more than playfully work banter, but to you it was so much more. Your anxiety justified it as some personal vendetta that the two had against you, you couldn’t prove this though so you opted to not tell your boss. 

Once Bucky had found that they were causing you hassle, he wanted nothing more than to come into your workplace to shake them up a little, to see how they enjoyed being made to feel purposely uncomfortable. Of course you told him no, your boss would fire you. To say Bucky was overprotective was an understatement but he had good reason to be. You were the most important person to him and he’d be damned if he’d let a bunch of lowlifes upset you, even for a second.

“You can actually”, Jessica chimed, “There’s this totally cool video floating about recently about this new game, have you seen it?”.

You could already feel the sweat forming on your brow, nonetheless you willed yourself to remain calm. “I haven’t actually, what’s it about?”, you hadn’t meant to indulge them in their twisted enjoyment, but it felt rude to tell them to go away and just the mere thought caused more stress. Todd made his way over to your computer, “Oh you’ll just love it, I promise”, he grinned in a friendly manner, although there was nothing friendly about it. 

All you could do was smile meekly as you watched Todd invade your personal area, He pulled up YouTube, clicked on a video and made it full screen. “Watch this”, he instructed before returning to Jessica. You could hear them snickering behind you, instead of focusing on them you put your attention into the video. You were genuinely confused. The video seemed to display a room in which absolutely nothing was happening, it caused you to pay even closer attention to the detail in the video as you were worried you were missing something. And that’s when it happened.

Out of nowhere an ugly, contorted face popped up on the screen accompanied by the loudest, shrillest scream you’d ever heard. One that you were sure would provide you with nightmares if the face didn’t.

You lurched backwards, falling out of your chair. A shout that rivalled the one from the video left your mouth as you started to convulse. Your heart was violently beating so fast that you swear it was causing your ribcage to vibrate. It was a pain like no other. Your lungs couldn’t get in enough air. You scrambled around on the office floor for your phone while your co-workers laughed in hysterics. As you opened up your messaging app, you could already feel pins and needles spreading throughout your body making it harder to type as every few seconds your muscles would intensely shake.

Your brain was in fight or flight mode as you mindlessly texted Bucky. A fresh sob elicited from you every few seconds as the video played on an endless loop in your mind. Your body was feverishly hot, your cheeks like tomatoes, whether from fear or embarrassment or a combination of both, you didn’t know. With your phone in hand, you raced to the restroom too afraid that by staying out in the open something else could hurt you.

“It was only a joke (Y/N)!”, Jessica shouted after you even though barely heard it due to the drumming in your ears.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I’m gonna kill ‘em”, Bucky growled, a look on his face that would make even the devil shake. His human hand was turning white from how hard he had it clenched, and he almost ripped the door off it’s hinges when he entered the office. Steve followed closely behind, trying his best to help his friend keep his cool, “Maybe don’t kill them? It’s not very beneficial in the long run”. Bucky shot a glare over his shoulder to the Captain, “Not. Now”.

They made it into the office workspace, Bucky used his skills to survey the area but he couldn’t see you. However, he did notice Jessica and Todd with sheepish looks on their features. Bucky’s boots thundered on the floor as he stomped over to them, he didn’t even need to get close to see how much they were shaking.

“Look we didn’t know alri--”, “Save it”, Bucky spat interrupting Todd’s poor excuse, “Just tell me where (Y/N) is”. Jessica gulped, “She’s in the women’s restroom”. The air in the office froze due to the cold coming from behind Bucky’s eyes. Your co-workers didn’t realise that you knew the Avengers let alone date one of them. “You go make sure she’s okay, I’ll see to these”, Steve quipped, rapidly adapting his Captain persona, an intimidating expression furrowed his brows. Bucky didn’t bother to wait around to hear the upcoming lecture from Steve.

Upon approaching the restroom, Bucky knocked softly on the door before entering. 

“(Y/N)?”, he called out gently as to not frighten you. All of the anger and rage he felt quickly dispersed as he looked for you, feeling only sadness and a need to comfort you take its place. His ears picked up muffled cries. He followed it to the stall it was coming from. “(Y/N)? It’s me, it’s your Bucky”, he repeated in a steady whisper, giving the stall door a light nudge. The light poured in to reveal you sat on the toilet lid, your knees pulled into your chest as you rocked slightly. Your head tucked away. “It’s me doll, you’re safe now”, Bucky dropped to his knees to be level with you. 

The noise of his movements caused you to lift your head slowly, still afraid of what you might see. Bucky’s blue eyes held nothing but love for you, his smile was warm and inviting, an incentive to go to him but you felt like you couldn’t move. Everything was stiff from fear, stress and paranoia. Ever so gradually, Bucky moved his hands until they touched your legs on either side. He drew patterns into the fabric covering them while murmuring sweet nothings about how you were safe now, coaxing you out of your defensive position.

In a flash you were pressed into Bucky’s chest. His arms around you in a protective cocoon. 

“I was so scared”, you hiccuped, “It came out of nowhere”. New cries racked your body, Bucky did his best to calm them as he stroked your hair. “Nothing can hurt you now baby, you know I’d never let anything harm you”. Your arms were locked around his neck. Kiss after kiss Bucky placed on your temple, reassuring you every few second. When he could no longer feel your heartbeat stammering in your chest, or feel your body jolt from your cries, he rose slowly with you still encased in his arms.

“Where are we going?”, you sniffled. “I’m taking you home doll, then I’m going to run you a nice bath and wash your hair. After that we’re gonna eat some ice cream and you can pick any movie you want to watch”, he replied, pressing you closer to him. “Even chick flicks?”. A light chuckle rumbled through Bucky’s chest, “Even chick flicks”.

[vincess-princess]

What Is Lost, What Is Found

Chapter 2.

Word count: 3493 Trigger warnings: none

The next morning Mick raked clean a good half of the snack stalls in the store near his shop. He didn’t have a fridge in his store, or he would get some more decent food than chips, cookies and chocolate bars. He probably looked like an oversized ten-year-old who accidentally got ahold of twenty dollars, but at least he could be sure the kids would eat it. Kids always love things like these. Super unhealthy, yes, but better to eat snacks than nothing at all.

Mick left the bag in the back room conveniently open in case Tommy would be too shy to ask directly or straight up dig into it right there. He highly doubted Tommy would take it without permission, but how could he be so certain about a boy he only talked to for half an hour before?

He, however, was; he had no clue why.

When Mick headed to the door to open the store, some little part of him expected Tommy to already stand behind the door, pressing his face into the glass in an attempt to get a peek of what was inside. Of course, Tommy didn’t. Of-fucking-course, he wouldn’t have come so goddamn early. Teenage boys always sleep a lot, especially if they don’t have to go to school. Or he could be busy with his mates, lifting from some other, worse-guarded store. Or roaming the streets looking for work. Or roaming the streets looking for nothing at all. What were teenage boys even up to these days?

Enough, Mick cut himself off middle-thought. Why did he even spare those three little shitheads that much thought?

Mick went back to the register, picked up a book and began reading it. Ten pages in, he found himself not remembering a single word from what he had just read. He cursed under his breath, suppressing an urge to throw the book across the room. The book didn’t deserve such treatment just because its owner was such an idiot.

The door opened, and Mick raised his head up so abruptly a sting of pain went down his neck. A customer. Very regular, very middle-aged, very female customer. Probably gotta serve her.

During the day Mick's neck had to endure this exact same experience so many times that by the end of the day a dull pain settled in its base. At least it wasn’t debilitating, for now, just pretty fucking annoying, but it could easily become such if Mick kept up this foolish behaviour.

Berating and calling himself names in his head didn’t help much, though. Once some customer had left and no other was in sight, Mick pulled the bottle of whiskey out of the register, the one in which he found peace during the blondie's (Vince, right?) visit to his store. The bottle was almost empty. Damn. He had surely gone through a lot lately, and handling it was, apparently, too daunting for a sober mind. 

Mick looked at the bottle wistfully for a few seconds, called himself a fool one more time, finished the bottle in one long gulp and hurled it in the trash can behind his back. It missed, but he couldn’t bring himself to pick it up.

In the evening the flow of customers grew more steady. It helped Mick stay distracted enough - enough not to constantly cast glances towards the back room, where the bag with the snacks was still lying, untouched. Still, it was always present in the back of his mind, a silent but at the same time an incredibly loud reminder of his own naivety.

Mick closed his shop at eight p.m., as he always did. Some said this early it was unreasonable, that he was losing potential clients. Mick did and knew that - the influx of them increased greatly in the late evening when young people went hanging around the streets. But he couldn't afford hiring a shop assistant, and running the store twelve hours a day all alone was physically impossible for him, not with his goddamn back.

Mick left the bag with the snacks where it was and headed home, his heart heavy. The kid looked so enthusiastic yesterday that he had expected to find him sleeping on the doorsteps this morning. What stopped him? No, that was the wrong question. Was he mistaken about him? sounded closer to reality.

The next day went in the same fashion. Mick's anxiety grew and grew, and he had to make a conscious effort to stop himself from glancing at the window every few minutes. He didn't even know what he wanted to see there. Surely he didn't expect to see Tommy pressing his nose to the window and looking wistfully inside, did he?

Although only God probably knew what Mick could expect from that boy. “Probably” because Tommy looked like the type to act first and think second, and to predict someone’s actions in the absence of a forethought was most likely impossible even for God.

When the third day had gone by with no Tommy in sight, Mick shoved the bag with snacks into the deepest corner of the cupboard, solely because it was no good for food to lie in the middle of the room. He didn't want cockroaches in his store, right?

Fourth day passed, fifth, sixth, then Mick stopped counting. When he was taking out the trash, he found two more empty whiskey bottles in it. He didn't even notice he had drunk so much. He definitely needed to do something about it – not drop by the liquor store every other day, for example, suggested the obnoxious voice inside his head. Mick pushed it to the back of his mind, as he always did, but decided to take the suggestion into consideration. He had been trying to give up alcohol, after all.

Deep Purple's "Fireball", being quite popular with customers, got sold out, and Mick ordered no more copies. He hadn't had the chance to check it out himself, not that it really mattered. After all, it was just an album. Probably not even a very good one. Definitely not good. Not even worth giving it a try.

***

Then, about two weeks later (who did Mick try to fool, though? It was exactly twelve days after the day), Tommy came.

He stood in the doorway looking like a puppy that had just ruined the carpet, wrapping his arms around his body in what seemed a defensive gesture. His hair somehow got even messier, his sneakers dirtier. Mick recalled the rain that had poured down three days ago. Hadn't the boy heard about public laundromats?

A pang of nervousness so strong it echoed in his stomach went through Mick. He gripped the record he was holding so tightly it almost cracked while hectically trying to come up with a suitable greeting. What the fuck was even happening with him that he panicked like a virgin on a first date? This was as far from a date as it could get, and he sure as hell wasn’t a virgin.

"Mr. Mars," Tommy finally called him quietly. "Mr. Mars, do you remember me?"

Mick inhaled deeply and turned towards him.

"I told you to call me Mick, kid. Come in."

Mick wasn't sure if his carefully mastered nonchalant tone was convincing enough, but it seemed to work. Tommy beamed and ran inside, slamming the door behind him with such force Mick could feel the nearby shelves shake. The kid gasped at the sound and dashed back, then halfway through realized it was too late and ran back to him, all of that so fast Mick didn’t even blink once.

"How can I help?" Tommy tried to catch Mick’s gaze, his enthusiasm so zealous it seemed almost desperate. "I can wash the floor, dust the shelves, sort the records, make you some coffee, whatever you-"

"First things first." Mick had to interrupt him. Otherwise, he couldn’t get a word in edgeways. "Are you hungry?”

"Er…"

"I thought so. Go fetch some snacks in the back room. Third cupboard on the right."

"But I didn’t do anything yet-"

"Working on an empty stomach is no good,” Mick cut him off, his voice a little bit harsher than he intended. Tommy got the hint, though.

"Oh. Okay."

He took a few unconfident steps towards the back room and turned his head to check up on Mick. Mick didn't look back, pretending to be extremely interested in the record he just pulled out of a box. The uneasiness in the air was so thick Mick could probably grab it with his bare hands.

He let out a sigh of relief once the boy disappeared behind the door. Sure, it was going easier with Tommy than with any other kid, but that didn't mean it was actually easy.

By the time Tommy showed up Mick had pulled himself together. The boy tried to look serious, but Mick could see a smile hiding in the corners of his mouth. He waved his hand with four empty chips bags in it. Mick pointed at the trash can behind the door, silently admiring the boy's, hm, capability.

Tommy must have caught something in his expression because his cheeks turned faint pink. He threw the bags into the can and turned back to Mick. "I'm sorry,” he began anxiously. Mick frowned, and he started talking even faster. “I ate too much, right? It’s just that those are my favorite chips. Haven’t had them in a while."

"Oh God, kid." Mick rolled his eyes. "All of that is for you. Take as much as you want. You're a teen, teens need to eat a lot."

"Yeah," Tommy chortled, his face switching back to enthusiasm in a heartbeat. "The guys always wonder how it all fits inside me."

"Well, you're growing, your body needs nutrients. How old are you, by the way?"

"Me? Sixteen," Tommy said quickly, then added reluctantly: "Well, almost. Still one month and a half to go."

Fifteen. Not even in high school yet. God fucking damn.

Something hot, boiling, angry rose in Mick's chest and in a matter of seconds spread within his whole body. Mick’s hands itched to throw something into the wall, and he had to make an immense mental effort to push the anger back into his subconsciousness, to deal with it later and on his own. He couldn’t do anything with it now, not in front of the kid.

Why do you even give a shit, a small, indifferent voice awoke once again in the back of his mind. You didn't care that much even when your wife dumped you.

She was a bitch, Mick retorted. Not a big loss anyway.

"You're not even eighteen. Don’t you have any relatives out there to help you until then, since you’re out of the orphanage? Aren’t they, like, legally obliged to take you in?"

Tommy's dynamic, lively face immediately hardened, as though turned into a mask, sparkles of enthusiasm in his eyes died out. Fuck, Mick realized panicky, wrong move, wrong, wrong.

"They probably are," Tommy said bleakly.

"But didn’t do it," Mick concluded quickly. "Okay, got you. So, how about we finally do some work around here?"

"Yeah!" Tommy's face lit up again - thank God, that lifeless mask was gone. "Whatever you want. I can do anything."

"Let's start with washing the floor,” Mick suggested. "You can get a mop and a bucket in the toilet."

"Just a second!" Tommy darted towards the toilet and disappeared behind the door. Something inside fell down and clattered across the floor accompanied by a loud “Shit!”. A few seconds later Tommy returned with the items, looking slightly disheveled. "Should I clean the back room too?"

"Yeah, if you don't mind."

Such politeness took the boy aback for a second, but he quickly recovered and strolled to the door, splashing the water all along his way. Truly a walking ball of vigorous energy, Mick thought with unexpected fondness. Although, to be fair, almost all the emotions he felt towards the boy were unexpected for him. He didn’t even know him that well, after all.

Tommy clearly put quantity above quality. Though he completed the task in a mere fifteen minutes, the floor still had stains of dirt in the corners and puddles of water with visible traces of Tommy's dirty sneakers in them.

"Sorry, kid, but that needs to be redone," Mick had to tell him, partly fearing the boy's potential reaction. And with good reason, because Tommy’s face dropped, he bit his lip anxiously. With a frantic wave of his hand, Mick managed to stop the torrent of apologies before getting flooded by them completely, but the boy still looked heartbroken.

“That’s really not a big deal,” Mick told him, trying to sound gentle. “There’s nothing bad in not getting something done well at first.”

“I kno-ow,” Tommy sighed. “But like, I never do things well. I either hurry too much and totally fuck everything up or give up in the middle.”

“So what? We all do. It’s only gonna work out if you keep trying.”

Tommy looked utterly unconvinced, but nodded anyway. “Sorry for wasting your time.”

“I ain’t in a hurry, kid. Take as much time as you need.”

“Thanks.” Tommy grabbed the bucket and headed to the front of the store. “You’re the first to not call me lazy over that,” he said, looking anywhere but at Mick.

“Really? That’s stupid. No one can learn without a few errors first.”

“Well, yeah, but I’ve got too many of them.” A stray strand of hair fell on Tommy’s face and he pushed it behind his ear with a sharp jerk of his hand. “Nevermind. I know I’m inattentive. I always overlook stuff. Just tell me when I fuck up and I’ll fix it.”

“Who told you that?” Mick was starting to get frustrated. He could see the eagerness, the enthusiasm, and that was what mattered, not some missed dirt stains. Yet the kid absolutely couldn’t see anything beyond that and automatically deemed himself a failure.

"Teachers always do.” Tommy looked at Mick in confusion, trying to understand what he was getting angry about. “Well, did.”

"Did? What, you're not going to school now?" he asked and immediately regretted it, realizing the sheer stupidity of his question. The boy wore rags, slept on the streets and often went around hungry. Of course, he wouldn't add school to his already numerous concerns.

"Nah," Tommy shook his head. "Used to. Vince and I were in the same class actually. Then he dropped out, and a lil’ bit later I did too."

"And what grade did it happen in?"

"Tenth. Don't worry, I can read, write, count and shit - sorry, uh, stuff - like that just fine," Tommy added, as though reading Mick's thoughts. "There's really nothing else school can give us, is it? For me, it was just a pile of garbage. It was so boring. I only liked music and arts."

Well, that was pretty predictable. The kid seemed like a creative type.

“It depends on the teachers, I think." Mick couldn't help but partly agree with him. His own memories about school, still fresh in his mind, weren't too far from what Tommy had described. "Although a diploma can be pretty useful in later life, y'know."

"What for?" Tommy carelessly shrugged his words off. "I'm going to be a rockstar! They don't need no diplomas."

Mick felt like he got punched right in the guts. He could have said those words some seven or eight years ago. He, in fact, did. Naive and hopeful, just like the kid in front of him.

Those eight years now felt like eighty.

It was better now, he thought with grimness unfit for such a positive thought. He had a stable, not very high, but stable income. He had a nice flat. He was his own boss and didn't have to bend to anyone’s will. It might not be an ideal life, but it was a much better life than the one he used to lead, in infested with cockroaches shelters for homeless  or shitty rental apartments. It was disillusioned and monotonous and predictable and good, right?

Right?

Through great effort, Mick cut off his own thoughts. Was he actually fucking nostalgic about the past that he had been trying to escape for so long?

The kid interpreted his prolonged silence differently.

"Mick? You don't agree?" panicky undertones trickled into his voice, no matter how much he tried to hide them. 

"What?" His voice quickly brought Mick back to reality. Christ, his expression just went slightly aloof, and Tommy already started panicking? "Oh. Well, you understand that out of all the boys that strive to be rockstars only few actually become ones, do you?"

"Of course. But why can't I be among those chosen few? You think I'm no rockstar?" Tommy asked nervously. Although Mick would rather not have this conversation, Tommy’s anxiety over his opinion was almost flattering, in a way.

"Of course not," Mick quickly corrected himself. Delving into memories made him lose caution for a second, and he couldn't afford that with Tommy. "But it's always good to have a second option in case the first... goes not as planned."

He almost said fails. Almost.

"O-oh." Tommy frowned pensively. "I haven’t considered that."

"Then it's probably a good time to do it," Mick said maybe too quickly to sound natural, but Tommy paid no mind. The foundation had been laid; now it was up to Tommy to accept or deny it. "While you're rewashing the floor, for example. Do you want me to put something on?"

Tommy beamed. "Yes, sure! Can I choose?"

"Grab whichever you want," Mick pointed at a pile of second-hand records some people had brought him to resell. Tommy practically dove into the pile with unintelligible sounds of pleasure.

Rewashing took Tommy much less than "Dressed To Kill" by Kiss lasted; Mick was careless enough to call it "some pop tunes" and was punished with an angry speech on the superiority of glam rock over any other genre. It had no effect on him, though. Jeff Beck was better than those Kiss anyway. Those were just facts.

Half of the day flew by unnoticed, and Mick only realized it was almost two when his stomach started grumbling. He usually took half an hour lunch break and headed to the nearest cafe for a sandwich and a coffee. This time, though, he was not the only worker in the shop. Mick thought of closing the store and going to the cafe with Tommy to have a proper lunch, but then another, much better thought crossed his mind.

"Tommy," he called him from where the boy was slowly wiping the shelves. He was taking out every record and examining it, holding each of them in his hands so carefully it was like they were made of glass. Mick watched him proudly from behind the register. Over the course of his career, very few customers had enough respect for the records to treat them properly.

Tommy quickly put the record in his hands back into place and ran over to him. God, did the kid even know what “walking” means?

"Do you feel like grabbing some lunch? Good,” Mick continued after Tommy nodded enthusiastically. “There's a cafe five minutes down the road, I usually eat there. Get some chicken wings and a hot dog for me and something of your choice for yourself. Here's the money." Mick handed him a fifty-dollar bill. It was much more than actually needed, but that was the plan.

Tommy stared at the money in his hand. Mick could almost see him swallowing a question.

"O-okay. I can… absolutely whatever I want?"

"Except booze, of course. And cigarettes."

"Oh. Yeah. Sure. Alright. I'll go then." Tommy pushed the money in his pocket and with shaky steps headed to the door. Mick followed him with his gaze and wondered if he'd ever see him again.

He did – thirty minutes later. According to Mick’s experience, Tommy should have been back in fifteen.

"Here are your chicken wings. Oh, and a hot dog!" Tommy said cheerfully, handing Mick the change. Mick immediately spotted a couple of dollar bills. "I got a burger and some cola for myself, if that’s alright?"

"Sure, sure," Mick answered absent-mindedly, being completely absorbed in counting the money. He knew all the prices in that cafe and he knew exactly how much the boy should have spent there.

The amount of money spent and the estimated price absolutely matched.

Mick let out an audible sigh of relief. Those fifteen extra minutes had him thinking some very unpleasant thoughts. Thank god, they were all wrong.

"Are you sure a burger will be enough for you?" Mick asked, biting into a chicken wing. "You can take my hot dog, I'm not that hungry anyway."

[straightfacedstrangeness]

Patlabor fanfic WIP

Summary:  Shige has a cute moment with Noa.  Asuma is definitely not jealous.  Because this is SV2 and nobody ever has anything better to do, absolutely everybody gets involved.  Basically, Noa becomes the center of a (PG) harem comedy and has absolutely no idea.

Backstory:  I’ve been going through a handful of fanfic WIPs and story notes from the past few years, seeing if anything really sparks my interest / seems like it’s worth finishing up...and I really like a lot of lines and concepts in this one, but I also probably won’t ever finish it.

At the time (sometime in 2018), I never finished it because the ideas got more complicated than I felt like wrangling, and because the “she was actually just blushing over Alphonse all along” ending seemed so obvious that it didn’t feel like the shenanigans leading up to the reveal were “worth it”.

And now, I probably won’t finished it because at the time I thought Noa was in her early or mid-twenties, and that Shige was in his mid- or late twenties...but it turns out that Noa is 18 in the Early Days / TV timeline (and left SV2 by the time she was 23 in Patlabor 2) and that The Next Generation set Shige’s canon age at 59, making him fucking 45 during Early Days / TV.  8′)  Since part of the story hinges on Shige crushing on her, even though (or especially because?) it’s onesided, the age difference kinda squicks me out too much for me to want to write any more.  But again, a lot of the lines and concepts make me laugh, so I figured I might as well share.

If you like this but wish it had more terrible sex jokes and/or that it was just poorly written Shige/Sakaki smut, check out my AO3 page cus that describes the only two Patlabor fics I've finished thus far  X’D  (And I definitely won’t be offended if that’s not your cup of tea.)

And now, the story~ (+ notes)

“AHH—!”

Shige started, banging his head on the raised hatch.  It took a few moments of swearing and cradling his skull before he managed to straighten up and turn around.

Noa had her hand over her mouth, a fiery blush spreading across her face.  He hadn’t expected to see her—it was so late, and she was clearly dressed to go home.

“Oh, uh,” she fumbled, shuffling her feet a bit.  “S-sorry, I didn’t—didn’t mean to interrupt—”

Shige grinned, though the muscle movement made his head injury sting.  “No problem!  ’Sup?”

“I, uh...”

Another surprise.  The blush deepened, and—Shige had never seen her shy.  Hadn’t thought her capable of it, honestly.  Noa was the only girl he’d ever met who burped openly instead of holding it in.

Noa’s hand slowly rose up to point at—him?  Oh, no, past him, into the cavity of her Ingram’s leg.  The hatch on its shin had been opened and the curved guard over the ankle removed, exposing a tangled web of pistons and wiring.

“Hm?”  Shige blinked, then seemed to get it.  “Oh!  Oh, you’re worried about your ‘Alphonse’, right?”

“Oh, n-no, that’s not—”

“ ‘He’s’ just fine, Izumi-chan, cross my heart!  I’m just taking a peek at the ankle servos, you’ve been shifting to the left a teensy bit when you walk lately—not enough to interfere with the auto-balance, of course, but who wants to worry about maybe possibly potentially tripping over six-ton feet in the middle of a chase scene, right?  I’ll get ‘him’ back in tip-top shape in no time!”

“Ah, well, th-thank you, Shige-san...”

Shige grinned again, turned back around, bent into the leg cavity and picked up his toolbox.

Sound echoed in here.

He heard the slight whistling through his teeth as he tried to expel the tune stuck in his head, every little reverberating clink when his tools touched the mechanisms.

He didn’t hear footsteps.

More carefully this time—squatting further down instead of straightening up—Shige extricated himself and turned around.

Noa jumped, glancing away sharply, shuffling her feet again.  That pink in her cheeks looked utterly alien, but...very, very cute.

Shige swallowed.

“H-hey, c’mere,” he blustered, grin a bit more lopsided than before.  “Lemme show you.”

Noa hesitated—wow, shy was a really great look on her—but stepped forward.  There was only room for one on the awkwardly curved slope of the Ingram’s foot, so Shige slid off and gallantly helped her up, being extremely careful about the placement of his hands.  Noa’s fingers dug into his shoulder as she steadied herself, peering into the inner workings of the Ingram.

Shige pointed at things, his already-too-loud voice echoing throughout the cavern of the exposed leg.  He explained what was what, Noa nodded and “oh!”ed and asked all the right questions, her hand on his shoulder the entire time.  She glanced clumsily back and forth between the towering mechanisms and Shige, eyes bright, breath a little ragged.

It was Noa who almost slipped and fell climbing down, but Shige was absolutely dizzy.

---

“Sucks to be you, Asuma-chan~”

Asuma and a handful of the maintenance crew were crowded in the break room divvying up their Shanghai Noodle lunch orders.  He squinted skeptically.  Shige had been bursting at the seams with swagger and pride all day, and the tone of this latest remark implied a dramatic reveal.

But Asuma refused to give him the satisfaction of showing he was curious, and instead calmly dipped his chopsticks into his ramen with nothing more than an “Oh?”

“Izumi-chan’s got a crush on me.”

SSSSPPGHHHKHKG!!

Half the room jumped.  Shige crowed with laughter.  Asuma tried his best to hurriedly wipe the wet noodles off his vest and to look coolly aloof at the same time.

“So, what,” he grumbled, failing at the latter, “is this like the time you thought the mailman had a crush on you?”

“He did,” Shige retorted defensively.  Then he settled back in his chair again, arms folded behind his head, the picture of perfect smug serenity.  “But I caught Izumi-chan staring at my sexy ass while I was bent over the Ingram’s ankle servos last night.  You ever seen her blush?  Almost reminds you she’s a sweet young girl!”

“What makes you think she was staring at your ass?” mumbled one of the mechanics.

Asuma almost dropped the paper towel he’d been furiously wiping with.

“Yes.  Yes!” he blurted, then remembered he was supposed to be coolly aloof and crossed his arms (spreading the broth stains to his sleeves).  “I mean...it was probably ‘Alphonse’ you were working on, right?  ‘He’s’ the only ‘man’ she has eyes for.”

“Oh, so you think just ’cus she hasn’t jumped on you that she’s completely immune to masculine charms?”  Shige snorted, but he was already starting to go red at the ears.  “All you ever do is yell orders at her!  I’m the one taking care of her beloved ‘Pat-chan’ every day—nursing ‘him’ when ‘he’s’ sick—making sure ‘he’ always looks ‘his’ best—it just makes sense that she’d fall in love with—”

“Seriously?  By that logic, Noa’d be sleeping with the entire maintenance staff!”

All the mechanics in the room became very alert.

“Or Chief Sakaki!” added Asuma.

The mechanics instantly deflated.

“Whatever.”  Shige snapped up his bowl and dug in, pointedly avoiding Asuma’s gaze.  “You’re just jealous.”

A triumphant smirk played across Asuma’s face.  He sat back down, stain be damned.  “Aw, don’t worry about it,” he said soothingly, blowing on his own ramen.  “I get it.  You’re crazed with loneliness being cooped up with a bunch of sweaty guys day after day, right?  Of course you’ll take any smile from a girl as a—”

“I am not—”

“Shige-san!”

Both men nearly fell out of their chairs.

“There you are!” chirped Noa, though she gave a self-conscious start as she glanced around the room and saw just how many people were in it.  Asuma stared.  He’d never actually seen her blush before.

“U-um,” she went on, suddenly timid again but trying to smile through it.  “So, Shige-san...I just wanted to ask...c-can I, uh, hang out with you again after my shift’s over?  ...Like yesterday?”

“Absolutely, Izumi-chan,” said Shige smoothly, flashing a toothy grin at Asuma.  “Absolutely.”

---

Hiromi groaned.

“C’mon, c’mon!” Asuma hissed, shaking him.  Well, as much as he could shake the big man.  “You’re curious too, right?”

Hiromi groaned again.

“What?  It’s gotta be you, it’d sound weird coming from anyone else!”

Groan.

“You’re nonthreatening, man, you’re like a big teddy bear, you listen to people and care about their feelings and stuff!”

 ___

Notes:

Asuma bullies Hiromi into discreetly asking Noa cus Hiromi’s nonthreatening (like a big teddy bear)...Noa misinterprets & thinks Hiromi’s asking her out?

Ota thinks crush talk and/or dating a coworker is super unprofessional but now he can’t stop thinking about it either, is jealous that no one’s hitting on him?  Starts alternately peacocking & being really irritable? Demands Noa and Kanuka rate the men in terms of attractiveness and then immediately gets mad cus that’s so dumb?

Noa keeps hanging out w Shige after work, looking at Alphonse’s schematics...he tries to ask her on like an actual date and she’s disappointed? Goes anyways (& went with Hiromi too)?? Now everyone’s really confused??? Asuma asks her out too???

Kanuka’s stoically scornful, like “are you all that desperate for a woman?” (like they’re all crowding around Noa cus she’s one of the only girls they know, and/or comparing it to kids who don’t want a toy until they see someone else play with it)  Hiromi’s just really embarrassed and too shy to admit to Noa that there’d been a misunderstanding

Shinshi’s glad that everyone’s thinking seriously about their romantic futures

Shige & Asuma start getting weirdly competitive and start going on like trio dates where they keep one-upping each other and/or Noa thinks it’s a group hang and invites the others along

Eventually Kanuka just spells out to Noa what’s going on & she’s really surprised and embarrassed. Admits she was so shy and cagey with Shige cus she didn’t want anyone making fun if her for looking at Alphonse “naked” (since he was a mechanic, he’d understand the fascination)