ladyartemesia · 5 years ago
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OREOs... and Electroshock Couples Therapy
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You and infuriating precinct playboy Jeon Jungkook go undercover to lure out a killer targeting engaged couples. Literally nothing goes according to plan...
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Genre: Fluff/Comedy/Suspense
Pairing: Jungkook x Reader
Trope: Enemies/Rivals to Lovers ~ Fake Dating
AU Type: Loosely Brooklyn 99 (with a hint of Smallville) Police Detectives AU
Word Count: 3315
Rating/Warnings: (PG-15) kidnapping with threat of harm (not graphic) ~ mature themes and innuendo ~ light/implied smut
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“Your delusions have run away with you again.”
“My delusions? Now I know it was you. You’re even more insufferably pretentious when you’re trying to hide something.”
Jungkook grinned.
“Brilliant theory, Detective. Shame there’s no way to prove it.”
“You could confess,” you fumed tightly.
His grin became positively gleeful. You were this close to tasing him.
“Do you genuinely expect me to confess that I ate your last Oreo?”
“It was a violation of human decency.”
“Yes, and when we find the culprit, I’ll be sure to tar and feather him.”
“You’re not taking this seriously, Jeon.”
“Now, whatever gave you that idea?” Jungkook asked as he folded an arrest report into a paper airplane.
You were saved from responding when Captain Kim barked both your names across the precinct.
“Detectives _______ and Jeon. My office. Now.”
Namjoon sighed as he watched the two of you bicker all the way to the door.
It’s like having extra children. 
“We’ve got a case. Commissioner marked it top priority and you two are taking lead as of right now.”
Your forehead wrinkled in confusion and Jungkook raised a single curious brow.
“But Jimin is my –”
“Why not Hoseok?”
Namjoon raised a hand to silence you both. You weren’t teaming with your regular partners. Questions were to be expected.
“Jimin’s staying on that trafficking case while you work with Jeon. We need to draw out a perp targeting engaged couples. Thus far, all of his victims have been a male and a female, mid-to-late twenties. You two fit the profile, so...” he grinned, “congratulations on your engagement.”
 🕵🏻‍♀️👰🏻🤵🏻🕵🏻‍♂️ 
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As special cases went, this one was … truly bizarre.
The victims always disappeared a few weeks before their wedding. Some couples were abducted, then later returned to their homes or vehicles with no memory of the previous 48 hours.
Others turned up dead in alleyways.
Ligature marks and burns on the bodies indicated the use of restraints and electrocution. After some digging, you discovered that all five couples visited the same jeweler and the same bakery in the process of planning their wedding.
Jungkook nibbled the tip of his pen, absently tugging his curls as he scanned the case files.
It wasn’t sexy.
It wasn’t. 
“Looks like this is the best lead we have. Even though some of them ended up choosing other bakeries and jewelers – they all came through those shops.” He tossed the pen across his desk and stretched back in his chair – causing his shirt to strain over his chest. 
You gulped.
Is it, like, hot in here? -your eyes lingered momentarily on his biceps- Why is maintenance messing with the thermostat right now? People are trying to work-
“Hello? Earth to Detective Space Cadet.” Jungkook waved a tattooed hand in your face. “Are we going with my idea?”
He had an idea? I must have missed it during that brief bout of thirstiness hot flash. 
“I – uh – was analyzing some of the victim profiles …-in my head-” you paused to loosen your collar – which was suddenly strangling you, “-so could you just run it by me once more?” 
Detective Jeon raised a single eyebrow.
“Daydreaming about me again?”
Yes.
“No. I was actually daydreaming about my last Oreo,” you leaned forward with an eyebrow raise of your own. “Really, it meant so much more to me than you do.” 
He laughed and you felt yourself smiling (against your better judgement). 
“Always so cold, Detective. I think you may have hurt my feelings.”
“Impossible,” you sighed airily, “we both know you don’t have feelings.”
“Says who?”
“Gina from Forensics.”
“Fine. Who else?”
“Wendy from Missing Persons.”
“Doesn’t count. I was very drunk.”
“Jimin’s sister.”
Jungkook winced. 
“Is he still sore about that?”
“I wouldn’t accept food or beverages from him any time in the next decade.” 
“That’s fair.”
It was your turn to laugh and Detective Jeon had the decency to blush. He recovered quickly, however.
“As I recall, there was a lot of feeling between those lovely ladies and myself.”
You rolled your eyes.
“Spare me Jeon. If I want to learn about baboon mating habits, I’ll watch Animal Planet.”
Jungkook hissed in feigned pain and clasped his hand over his heart.
“Ouch. Direct hit.”
“I am the top marksmen in the precinct.”
“Hey” he sat up – abruptly serious, “We’re tied.”
“For now.”
“Until I beat you.”
“Until you are beaten by me.”
He bit his lip and grinned – crinkling his nose in a way that was unfairly adorable. 
“Kinky.”
“Oh-KAY,” you swiveled away in your wheelie chair and threw a paper clip at him (which he caught handily). “You were telling me about your plan?”
“Yes. While you were daydreaming about me-” (you snorted at that, but he pretended not to hear) “-I suggested we couple up and head to those shops. Maybe our perp will take the bait.”
You shrugged, “Sounds good.”
Gathering your coat and bag, you tossed a quick glance over your shoulder - already halfway out the door. 
“I’ll swing by my locker and change into a dress or something. Meet me by the front gate in 10 minutes.”  
Jungkook followed after you - catching up as you entered the elevator.
“I noticed you never denied being kinky.”
His grin was seven different types of sinful and if you were even the tiniest bit weaker, you would have cuffed him to the lift rail and addressed his statement explicitly.
You, however, were no Gina from Forensics.
Instead, your features twisted into a knowing smirk as you steered yet another moment between yourself and the delicious infuriating Jeon Jungkook into safe and familiar territory.  
“Impressive,” you drawled cheekily as the doors began to close, “I can see why they made you a detective.” 
 🕵🏻‍♀️👰🏻🤵🏻🕵🏻‍♂️
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The bakery was a famous family-owned establishment near the center of town. Its current owner, Kim Seokjin, had been crowned the city’s most eligible bachelor for 5 years running. 
The man in question was, at the moment, personally campaigning for your vote.
“Now open wide,” he murmured as he slipped a sumptuous square of Seokjin’s Signature Red Velvet ™ between your parted lips. 
Your eyes rolled back into your head. “Oh, that’s delicious,” you moaned.
Seokjin chuckled. “Thank you. I always hope customers can taste my passion in every bite.” The seemingly innocuous words sounded positively lewd dripping from his luscious mouth. You briefly forgot how to exhale.
The baker leaned in a bit closer and brought up his thumb to wipe away non-existent crumbs from your lips, “I find it really helps me connect with them,” he whispered intimately.
You were literal seconds from licking icing directly off Seokjin’s finger when-
“Okay. That’s enough of that.” 
There was a firm tug on your elbow and you collided hard with Jungkook’s chest. It took a moment to regain your bearings (you were still slightly dazed from looking directly into Seokjin’s eyes), but suddenly Jungkook and Seokjin were staring each other down over a plate of cupcakes and all of Jungkook’s limbs were entangled with your own. 
His legs rested on either side of your hips, his left hand latched around your back and torso - pinning you to him from chest to knee caps, and his right hand -
A surprised squeak slipped past your lips as he fully palmed your backside.
Mouth agape, your gaze shot up to meet his, but Jungkook was still glaring stoically at Kim Seokjin. He didn’t even flinch when you pinched him under the arm. 
Frankly, you had not envisioned a scenario like this when you reported for duty this morning. Your mind struggled to process a reality where you were plastered all over Jeon Jungkook - surrounded on all sides by pastries and angry beautiful men - and oh my gosh that hand was still on your-
“Find what you were looking for, babe?” his familiar voice snapped with an extra edge of possessiveness that you absolutely - definitely - for sure - totally hated and did not make you shiver involuntarily.
Lies, lies, lies...
Seokjin’s eyes narrowed. A cool smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. 
“I think the lady was very satisfied with what I had to offer.”
Jungkook’s jaw twitched. 
Oh boy…
You learned long ago to dread that jaw twitch. 
It was the jaw twitch of I-will-win-this-even-if-I-have-to-break-every-bone-in-my-body-and-burn-down-a-building-in-the-process.
Visions of flying muffins and bloodshed danced behind your eyes. 
Not to mention Jungkook would likely wreck Seokjin’s face and that would be a travesty.
Time for some drastic measures.
Thinking quickly, you slid your hands up over his chest to bury your fingers in his hair and yanked his face close to yours.
“Baby,” you purred, letting your lips brush ever so slightly over his, “I wanna go look at rings now.”
Jungkook’s eyes darkened immediately. Tension thrummed in the space between you. Your body suddenly seemed to poised to ignite as you pleaded prettily with him. 
“Won’t you take me, love?” 
The was a sharp flare of something in his gaze and the next thing you knew Jungkook was sweeping you toward the exit - right hand still firmly planted on your-
“I look forward to seeing you again soon,” Seokjin called out - in a tone more suited to a bedroom than a bakery. 
Jungkook froze. His jaw twitched again, but you were out of patience. 
“Come along now, Poodle,” you growled before dragging him out the door. 
 🕵🏻‍♀️👰🏻🤵🏻🕵🏻‍♂️ 
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“What was that?!” you hissed after walking a suitable distance from the bakery. 
“I was about to ask you the same question. I can’t believe you called me Poodle!”
“You're lucky that’s all I did. Between the butt grabbing and the chest beating, I was tempted to bash both your heads in with the complimentary tea tray.”
He snorted. 
“I was just maintaining my cover - unlike you.”
“Excuse me?!”
“You’re my fiancé, Muffin. Drooling all over Kim Seokjin’s goodies while he touches your mouth doesn’t exactly scream ‘I’m in a committed relationship’.”
Your jaw dropped and you sputtered out a noise that was equal parts guilt and exasperation.
“I was probing for information!”
“And he was about to probe right back,” Jungkook muttered.
“What was that?” you snapped. 
“I said the jeweler is on the corner of 5th and Womack.”
 🕵🏻‍♀️👰🏻🤵🏻🕵🏻‍♂️ 
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The tension between you and your ‘fiancé’ was palpable by the time you finally entered the jewelry store. 
“What kind of ring were you looking for, Precious?” Jungkook gushed with nauseating sweetness. 
“The biggest and most expensive we can find, Cupcake!” you cooed through clenched teeth. 
For several minutes you wandered aimlessly through the store playing the role of a hard to please couple (employing increasingly more obnoxious pet names with each exchange). 
The clerk, a tight featured man with tiny glasses, kept shooting disapproving looks and sniffing loudly whenever you asked to see anything. After a few minutes of irritable huffing, Jungkook lost patience. 
“I’m surprised this place is still in business, Cuddles.”
You snorted, equally put off by the jeweler’s brisk demeanor. 
“I think we’re done here, Kookie Bear. I parked the car in the garage by Maxwell Market. If we get back in ten minutes, we won’t be charged for another hour.”
The last thing you remembered before completely blacking out was a sharp pain in your neck.
Then you opened your eyes to very real trouble.
 🕵🏻‍♀️👰🏻🤵🏻🕵🏻‍♂️ 
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It felt like there was a knife in your forehead - probably a side effect of whatever drug was used to knock you out. 
As your eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting, you became aware of several things at once. 
You and Jungkook were strapped to chairs facing one another in (what appeared to be) someone’s basement. Electrical stimulators simmered menacingly over various contact points on both your bodies.
...ligature marks and burns on the bodies indicated the use of restraints and electrocution…
Your gaze traveled cautiously over your partner. There was a cut near his temple - probably caused when he fell after being drugged - other than that he looked unharmed, but his eyes were still closed and his breathing seemed labored. 
“Jungkook,” you whimpered. Your voice sounded cracked and raw. 
How long were we out? 
After a moment his eyes opened and his panicked gaze darted frantically before landing on you. 
It suddenly occurred to you that his face might be the last thing you ever saw. The thought prompted a strange sort of comfort as well as a powerful surge of emotion. 
A single tear slid slowly down your cheek. 
Your head wasn’t entirely clear yet, but you could vaguely hear the jeweler rambling on about how he was going to save you both from the pain he suffered.
“What ...pain?” Jungkook’s voice sounded as rough as yours. He was still fighting off the effects of sedation. 
“The pain of lies,” your captor hissed. “My wife’s lies destroyed me. I lost everything. I never would have married her if I’d known-”
His unhinged monologue continued in that manner for several uncomfortable minutes, but he did finally get around to mentioning why you were chained up in his cellar.
“-to find the truth. If you want to save each other, you must tell the truth.”
Your eyes fell to your fingers, already knowing what you’d find there.
“Lie detectors?” Jungkook whispered incredulously.
“To know for sure if you truly care. Your lies hurt the one you love. Down here, your lies will kill her.”
“What are you saying?” Jungkook snarled. His voice dripped with real menace.
“I’m saying, if you lie, this will happen.” He pushed a button on the small remote in his hand and excruciating pain suddenly tore through your entire body. 
You screamed. 
“Stop!” Jungkook shouted. His body jerked against the chains and the chair creaked precariously beneath him. “I will kill you, you bastard!”
“No! You’ll thank me for sparing you the pain of heartbreak.”
“We aren’t engaged!” you gasped, still shaking from the aftershock. “This was a ruse - to - to draw you out. We can’t pass it-”
But the jeweler ignored you and cranked up the voltage on his machine.
“First question to the groom. Are you hiding anything from her?”
Jungkook swore and yanked against his chains again. 
“Answer the question or I’ll do it,” the jeweler warned. “Your silence can deceive as well.”
You whimpered in terror and Jungkook howled with rage.
“Yes. I am,” he bit out tightly. 
The voltage cranked again and another tear drifted quietly down the side of your face.
“What are you hiding?”
Jungkook’s eyes dropped in shame, but he didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t.
“I do eat your last Oreo. Every time. The first one was an accident. I thought they were Jimin’s... I don’t even like Oreos that much... But I make sure I always get to yours.”
You couldn’t stop a pathetic cough of laughter. “You’re confessing to the Oreos? ...Really?” Your body shook as more silent tears tracked down your face. “Jeon Jungkook you’re so strange,” you whispered softly - almost tenderly.
The jeweler’s eyes narrowed.
“There has to be more than that!” He cranked the voltage again. “Tell her what you’re really hiding!” 
 Jungkook’s jaw clenched.
“She comes to see me when the Oreos disappear. I work mostly homicide and she’s narcotics. We were paired together on a task force a couple months ago and since then I...”
His eyes squeezed shut as he fought for the right words. When they opened again, he was speaking only to you. 
“Our paths don’t often cross, but when you find me to yell about the Oreos... it’s the best part of my day.”
His gaze dropped as he continued, “There hasn’t been anyone else since the moment we met…” He heard your quiet gasp and his mouth tilted into a small tender smile.
“There’s only you,” he whispered.  
The harsh scrape of a lever being pulled caused you both to jump. Jungkook grunted in pain. He passed the test, but the charge was live on his body now.
It was your turn to face the truth.
“Tell me,” the psychotic jeweler snapped - clearly disappointed that no one had died yet, “do you love this man?”
Your eyes widened and Jungkook’s head shot up. Your gazes locked significantly and you felt your heart wrench.
“It’s ok,” Jungkook whispered. “Just tell the truth.”
His beautiful face was filled with trust and understanding. 
You knew what he expected your answer to be.
You knew what you’d say if his life wasn’t on the line.
But only the truth would keep him safe. 
“Yes,” -your eyes fluttered shut - it was too much to face him when everything you buried deep down was now laid bare between you- “I do.”
You saw him flinch - as if he expected the pain to come.
But it never did. 
For a moment there was only excruciating silence... then the barest whisper of your name passing breathlessly over his lips. 
“NYPD! HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!”
You had never been so happy to hear Sergeant Min’s voice in your entire life.
But he’d come too late to spare either of you a confrontation with the truth.
 🕵🏻‍♀️👰🏻🤵🏻🕵🏻‍♂️ 
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The next several hours passed in a blur. You were separated from Jungkook almost immediately. You caught one final glimpse of him as you were both loaded into ambulances.
His gaze stayed fixed on you as the doors closed. 
You vaguely recall giving statements and Namjoon yelling - a lot - like he always does when he’s worried. 
He hugged you so tightly. 
At some point you started to cry.
There was a constant stream of doctors and psychologists...
Then they sent you home. 
Mandatory Crisis Leave. 
Loud banging startled you off the couch and onto the floor of your apartment. It was only the second day of leave, but someone was already interrupting.
In hindsight, you should have known exactly who it was.
“Jungkook ... ”
He looked so wonderful it almost hurt. You savagely beat back the urge to slam the door in his face and bury yourself underneath a pile of blankets.
“I’m... really tired of eating those Oreos.” 
His jaw worked reflexively. After a moment, his eyes crept up to meet yours.
You nodded. 
It was literally all you were capable of doing.
“I want to talk to you every day,” he said with a little more confidence.
Tears began to prick the back of your eyes. You nodded again and he stepped slightly closer.
“I want to hold you. And not just when we’re undercover.”
You laughed. Tears began to fall in earnest.
Jungkook’s hand rose cautiously toward your face and you leaned forward ever so slightly, allowing his thumb to soothe away the wetness on your cheek.
“I am in love with you... and- and I have no idea what I’m doing,” he lowered his forehead to rest gently against yours, "but from now on... I want to do whatever it is with you.”
Pure burning joy bubbled up from your chest as you surged forward - finally pressing your lips to his.
There was laughter and more crying as you stumbled together into your apartment, shutting the door on the outside world to lose yourself in each other.  
As you lay in his arms several hours later with the echoes of his touch still humming over your body and your mouth still swollen from his kiss, you realized that what you’d been running from all those months was nothing more than your own fears.
Here - next to him - was where you were meant to be all along.
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Ask My Muse: Have a question for the characters in this work? Send it to my ask box and hear their side of the story.
Endnote: This is an extensive rework of a piece I originally wrote for another fandom (if you see it elsewhere - but with Reylo - it’s me - I promise). It is based heavily on the plot of one of my favorite episodes of Smallvile (I was a huge Smallville fangirl back in the day). The dynamics are inspired by one of the greatest shows of all time - Brooklyn 99. I haven’t written much for the BTS fandom, but I would really love to hear what you think!  (Let me know what you thought pretty please?) Much like Jimin I survive primarily on takeout and praise.
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craftypeaceturtle · 4 years ago
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Bewitching
Summary: Roman and his trusted friend, Logan, embark on a journey to visit their local witch. 
Note: I was inspired by a post that described this like exact concept. This is just a small fic that struck me! I have no idea why I am only capable of writing rare pair fics but hey ho! At least I’m writing. Analogical and Royality. 
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“Do you even understand where we’re supposed to be going?” Logan muttered as he tried to massage away his upcoming headache. Unfortunately his headache bounded into his side with a wide smirk. 
“Of course! It’s only a simple path through Sanders Woods,” Roman announced as he continued marching through the castle with proud wide steps.
“Do I even need to deconstruct how vague those directions truly are?” 
“Pfft! I’m not an idiot Logan. I do have a map. You just follow through the main path through Sanders Woods but then at some specific stump or something stupid, you turn and then boom! Witches!” Roman wiggled the paper in his face but even that movement didn’t hide that it was just some rushed notes on a napkin from his father. It looked like just simple lines and labels. There wasn’t even an compass pointing north! 
“Ah I stand corrected then, your majesty. Truly you must be a true scholar in the geologies,” Logan sighed and Roman checked his shoulder.  
They were being sent on the incredibly (vague, according to Logan) journey to go track down the kingdom’s local witch to re-establish their trade. A journey that sounded very important and essential so when Logan first heard it, of course he immediately offered his service. The warning sign should have been that Roman was conducting the journey. Another warning sign (as there were many), was the fact that to re-establish their trade, they were trading a kitten and were expecting to get cookies in return. It all painted the very obvious picture that the king wanted his son to do his chores and so asked his friend to ensure the task got done. But then again, Logan prided himself as a man of honour and he wouldn’t refuse to conduct on this journey. He was nobler than this pettiness. He was more serious than any one of the royal family members. He would take great pride in this stupid task.
“Logan!” Roman shouted, Logan whipped round to face him, “Do you mind leaving the kitten alone for at least one second and help me pick out an outfit?”
“Pick an outfit?” Logan squealed indignantly, ignoring his own burning blush as he followed Roman into his room, leaving the poor mewing kitten to sprawl around its basket, “What’s wrong with what you’re wearing?”
He was wearing his typical outfit which was his full princely attire. A pristine white tunic with gold embellishments that all highlighted the strong red of the emblem on his sleeves. He would usually wear a bright red sash across his chest but instead he was flinging it about like a child first trying to learn ballet. But now he blushed bright enough to match the emblem. “We’re meeting new people. Of course a prince should always present their best foot forward.”
“Oh all princes?”
“Okay, don’t pretend that’s fair! We all know that Remus is an octopus dressed as a prince. He shouldn’t be considered along with all other princes!” 
“An octopus?” Logan chuckled.
“Dad got at me for constantly calling him a rat so I’m calling him an octopus. Just as ugly but this time dad thinks it’s just some weird nickname,” Roman said way too proudly for someone who was in his twenties and definitely above sibling squabbles. Then again this was indeed Roman. 
“Ah, you are just so charming and intelligent, your majesty,” Logan smirked before he also bumped their shoulders, “But don’t think that will distract me. Please promise me that you will not flirt with the witch.”
“It’s not flirting! It’s called being friendly, not that you would know that Intronerd!” 
“It’s definitely flirting. And it definitely taints any and all official communication. Do I even need to retell the event with Janus?”
“Right! I’m all ready to go, are you?” Roman bellowed, rushing past him with a satchel of bare essentials. Logan simply sighed and carefully cradled the basket with the kitten. 
It was just after midday and they were finally on their way, the guards around the castle grounds waved with barely hidden laughs. Roman frowned at them and clutched Logan to his side. He was well aware of his reputation around the castle. Foolish and way too optimistic. It stung each time but then Roman knew himself better than any guard could. Plus he could always sick Remus on them! But he also knew Logan was quickly getting mixed in with that reputation. A truly genuine travesty to this world. Logan was a bold, determined and so quietly compassionate but he was only regarded as dumb and easily flustered. And Roman could get it! Like yeah, seeing this emotionless guy walk out of the grounds cradling a kitten was funny, but he knew Logan well enough to laugh at how lovey he was really. They just laughed at the ditzy dumb consort who pretended to be cold and collected. Yet Logan always remained oblivious and Roman would risk his life to ensure it would remain that way. 
He wished he could say it was a beautiful summer’s morn with the birds chirping their victory as they headed into the deep mysterious forest. But instead the sky was a striking grey with a wind that was just the wrong side of cold. Reports stated it would rain in the afternoon and he was unfortunately momentarily defeated by the allure of sleeping in so he couldn’t leave early enough. Meh, he was pretty sure Logan appreciated the extra hours to sit around doing nothing! He waved the famous royal wave to a bunch of children who scattered at their approach with amazed giggles while Logan did his usual Logan thing of keeping his eyes forward and walking away before they could talk. Perhaps it was for the best, they had to focus. 
Well... ‘focus’. The journey was important and all but also this tiny little ginger kitten snuggling into Logan’s muscly bulky arms was very distracting. 
The path into the woods was very simple. It was a worn away path in the grass that become wider and wider each time he saw it. It was pretty much a very wonky lane straight through the forest and the map clearly presented an equally wonky line to a blackened tree stump that “they could not miss”. Then turn left and, as he eloquently put it, boom! Witch. In all honesty, the journey was the very last thing on his mind currently. Sanders Woods was big but it was so close to the kingdom that there was never anything too dangerous in there- people travelled through it every day. But, Roman prided himself on his studies into the kingdom’s history and all the fables and stories that it inspired. It didn’t take a genius to know that witches meant trouble. Witches cursed and violently lashed out at any hero that came their way. 
He stared up at Logan out of the corner of his eye. Logan looked the part certainly with his official royal uniform and he was fairly built. But Roman also knew Logan. While he could look intimidating, he was anything but. At the first sign of conflict he would freeze, and even if he didn’t, he was in no way trained for battle. He looked built but his muscle purely came from grabbing heavy books from high shelves. He wouldn’t last a second against a witch in a physical battle.
“How have your studies been going?” Roman innocently asked innocently.
“As expected, why?”
“What do you mean why! I can be interested in your studies! What are you learning about now? It was magic right?” Roman kept his focus on his light marching steps. Logan huffed a chuckle.
“Magic is such a broad term I don’t even know how to go about correcting you. Yes, I have largely been studying magic. It is...” Logan scrunched his face up, “going, to put realistically. I’m struggling to fully grip the module I am currently on. But overall, my study of magic is going better than I first thought. How are your studies? Are you studying anything right now?” Logan raised an eyebrow.
“Not really. I finished the whole economics junk and I have a bit of a break before I launch back into studies. Trying to make the most of it,” Roman answered honestly but he kept his gaze straight ahead, “Anyway, what kind of magic are you doing? Like any... cool spells?” 
“Cool... spells...” Logan said, stopping completely in his path, “Why are you so interested?”
“As I said! I can be interested in what my friend is doing!” 
“You haven’t ever before taken interest in my, how did you put it, ‘nerdy junk’!” 
“Well!” Roman snarked back but he could feel Logan looking right through him, “It’s just important to know what kind of magic you can do. Just in case we ever n-”
“You think this is dangerous don’t you!” Logan gasped, feeling panic slam into his chest. 
“What?” Roman nervously laughed off, “No...”
“You do!” Logan dramatically pointed at him, “Oh we don’t have nearly the right supplies for any kind of conflict! We’re carrying around a cat!” 
“It won’t be dangerous!” Roman tried to soothe while panickily pacing. 
“I asked you! I asked you! I asked and you said that it was a simple trade. That we are practically just acting as postmen!” Logan threw his head back. 
“I’m sorry!” Roman gasped.
“You’ve got your sword. Plus, I really don’t think your dad would send us on some dangerous journey without at least some back up. I think you just got into your head with worry. There’s lots of rumours about witches despite those spreading them having never met a witch, we should be fine,” Logan answered softly. There was no use having them both panicking when they were already significantly through the woods. But then again maybe they could turn back now before they truly prove themselves to be idiots. 
“Yeah!” Roman lit up and snapped up straight with an obnoxious smile, “C’mon, we’ll be fine!”
Logan simply ran through his warning signs he listed earlier about how this task was a stupid chore. His hand found the kitten’s fuzzy little forehead and he gave some scritches before following in Roman’s footsteps. 
It was another hour where each minute felt more and more uncomfortable. They were a decent way through the woods but they had yet to see anything resembling a tree stump. Even Roman was now flicking his gaze behind him, checking to see if they had perhaps passed it without realising. Logan was practically chanting about how King Thomas wouldn’t send his idiot of a son on a difficult journey without a proper map. But then again both of his sons were idiots so maybe he just chose Roman as the lesser of two evils? Maybe the wobbly scrawled line on the map was just longer than expected. This was why people added scales and a compass! Eventually they paused at a blackened tree. They didn’t even talk or notice the other had paused as well. 
“Maybe by stump they more meant a stumpy tree?” Roman cautiously looked around. 
“Did your father not describe it any more than that?” Logan asked, still not convinced.
“I mean he even drew it in black!” Roman yelled out in what was supposed to be confidence. Logan winced as Roman marched slowly forward into the treeline.
“That cannot be where the line is. That map should never be considered as accurate or, or- just slow down Roman. We have no idea if this is the right direction!”
“Yeah well, we literally just go left into the trees. If it turns out to be wrong then we know which direction we went and just go back.”
Logan sighed at the legitimate logic the illogical prince presented, “It’s going to rain soon.”
“Well hurry up then!” Roman had already started running into the woods and Logan grumbled out some swears before reluctantly trudging after him. 
Now underneath the thick canopy of the woods, it was quite dark and moody. Roman tried to lighten the mood by pointing out every single squirrel that skittered away when they passed but even that didn’t fix the tension. The ideas of danger were swirling uncomfortably through them. The kitten was now restless and was mewing very pathetically. Logan winced at each quiet mew and Roman knew that it was a matter of seconds before Logan demand they go back and get the kitten to safety. And he was about to agree until he saw a tiny mushroom on a tree.
It softly glowed, and if that wasn’t a strong enough indicator of magic and witches, it was illuminous purple. It almost seemed transparent as black smoke billowed underneath it’s surface but it still somehow glowed brightly. 
“Logan, I think we’re almost there,” Roman muttered and tugged him forward.
“Roman.” Logan stopped them dead in the path. He was shifting and looking away but his back was straight and his posture screamed listen. Roman, of course, stopped in his tracks. “What if they use the cat... like... what if they kill the cat?”
Roman paused. That... would be very in character for witches. The kitten was frumpily stomping around and of course released an adorable mew as if it very well knew they were talking about it. “We’ve got to establish trade routes... Maybe we could be the ones to persuade them to see the light and understand cuteness and love for all living things!”
“Hmm.” Logan took the lead and stepped forward. 
They had walked for another ten minutes but yet the woods felt unrecognisable. The woods went from very stereotypical brown and green woods that seemed to stretch onwards forever. Now the mushrooms were everywhere and they couldn’t see the trunks of the trees anymore. The forest was filled with an overwhelming nauseating swirls of colours. Now they were seeing flashes of deer and groans from toads under their feet. The sun was completely blocked from the trees and it was almost like walking inside a building. 
It wasn’t long until they stumbled finally into a cottage looking house. A thatched roof and everything. It almost blended in, blackened charred wood with no windows or even sign of anyone living there. Dead leaves were still swamped up again its sides like it was still autumn. Logan cradled the kitten tighter and Roman couldn’t exactly blame him. 
It seemed straight out of a storybook. 
When the main characters stumble into the villain’s lair. 
Roman gulped and latched on arm on to Logan’s shoulder, which Logan happily sank into. They approached the door in timid steps. The wind harshly ripped through the forest, whipping around the wet clumps of leaves around the sunken door. The rain finally arrived and a few drops pattered on the ceiling of leaves. Logan stuttered in his steps but Roman winced and guided him forward. 
As they were a few metres from the door, it slammed open. 
“AAAH!” They both shrieked. 
A witch stood there... kinda proudly. He had a wide stance and the hood hid his face. But also his arms were crossed and he was hunched over to look extra small. He probably reached Roman’s shoulder standing straight... he looked like the wind around his house would knock him over. But also the billowing black cloak and clenched fists also spoke for themselves. “What are you doing here!” A whiny voice broke through their panic. 
Logan was clearly frozen and his mind only screaming about the kitten in his arms. It took a few moments for Roman to realise he wasn’t going to snap out and talk. He stuttered out, “Oh ah... hello there. We are fr- We come from the kingdom of Sanders to present a trading opportunity. I understand you have been in discussion with our king to re-establish our long ancient trading with you, Witch.”
The witch frowned, “Oh I’m not a witch. That’s Patton you’re looking for.”
He pointed over his shoulder to a cottage past his house. Now this looked like the idyllic cottage countryside house. Thatched roof, pristine pastel pink house and a beautiful neat line of wild bluebells. Roman found himself drawing near it without realising. It looked beautiful and the house straight out of his dreams. “Oh sorry sir! C’mon Logan, we’ll sort this out!” Roman tugged his arm but Logan remained statue still. “Uh, Logan?”
Logan was completely trapped under the gaze of the random civilian that stumbled into.  His chest glowed along with his bright red face. The man had very strong features and was clearly much more awkward than anything dangerous. It took a minute before he realised that words were needed if he was just going to stare, “Oh H-hi, I’m Lo...” He winced but tried to battle through, “Y-you’re not a witch?”
“Nah, I’m... I guess you’d call it emo and just hate people,” The guy awkwardly chuckled as he stepped out from his doorway. Logan allowed himself to smile and only just remembered Roman’s advice to puff out his chest and show himself off. Right, time to sweep this handsome man off his feet. 
“Ah I understand that sentiment. People can be so frustrating and exhausting.” The man walked forward before he awkwardly looked away.
“Uh can I?” The man asked with his hand out stretched towards his chest. Logan burst into a childish smile. Maybe Roman was right and he is handsome! All that heavy book lifting did pay off if cute emos then wanted to feel up his chest! Maybe he can sweep someone off their feet. Maybe he should work out more!
“Sure!” He squeaked.
The man smiled in thanks before grabbing the kitten from his arms and pressing loud sappy kissies to his fuzzy little forehead. His croaky foreboding voice snapped to a squealing happy coo. 
Roman laughed at how ridiculous he was and went down to the next house. He’s never seen Logan so useless! He was never going to let me live this down- after all that teasing he’s been putting up with for flirting with Janus. Now he had some fuel to fight back. 
He knocked on the door with a new found confidence as the rain finally started to slip through the leaves and actually start to slowly soak him. Humming to himself, he looked back at Logan still failing to flirt with the random scary guy. He’d never be that useless. The door opened, “Hello there. Are you the witch that lives in these wooooo-”
A young man opened the door with a cheery smile, ginger curls flying about his head with wire frame glasses. Freckles absolutely everywhere. He was a little taller than even him! He was of course wearing a pink frilly apron with a blue soft chunky knit jumper. Everything about him looked soft. “Oh hello there. What’s your name!” 
“Uhhhhhhh... Ro?” Roman awkwardly drawled out while trying to pick his jaw off the floor. He looked back at Logan who was now walking over with the other man. 
“Hey Pat. We need a talk.” He growled out while Patton awkwardly laughed. Instinctually, Roman stepped forward to protect this marshmallow from this emo. 
“Y-yeah Virge?”
“Did you really organise for the king to sneak you a kitten?”
“Maaaybe!” Patton squeaked before launching forward and spinning him in tight excited circles. Logan was now carrying the kitten, he looked very confused and flustered as he kept his gaze firmly on the kitten. 
“Don’t distract me! You’re allergic!”
“Well are you going to make these nice young men walk all the way back with the heavy basket and wiggly little itty bitty kitty!” 
The man, Virgil, frowned with a look. “Okay. I will take the kitten and you can have visiting rights. But! Those visiting rights can be revoked at any time!” 
“Yippee!” Patton laughed with all of himself. His arms flailing into a hug for himself, his belly bursting and moving with the genuine happy laughter. Roman was thoroughly star struck. 
“Can’t believe you’re the witch of us...” Virgil groaned with his own fond smile, to which Logan was also star struck. 
They both paused as a fat raindrop slapped against Patton’s forehead. The rain must have been truly heavy if it was still dripping through the thick canopy. They turned and faced the two men and only now noticed that they were fairly wet with their hair plastered against their foreheads. They did look pretty pathetic.
Patton smiled, “Hey, Ro was it? Would you like to come in? Just to wait for the rain. Sorry, uhh,”
“Logan,” Logan introduced.
“Logan, the house is fairly small but I’m sure Virgil would love to show you around his little place!” Patton smirked innocently. 
All three of them gulped with bright blushes... but of course they all nodded along to that plan.
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maulusque · 6 years ago
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OK Unpopular Opinion Time
The Jedi absolutely were guilty of mass slavery, as well as complicit in- and then guilty of, because they were in charge and didn’t stop it- every single war crime, ethical violation, and crime against humanity involved in making the clones. And the excuses fandom throws out to defend them are nonsense. 
“they genuinely cared about the clones/saw them as human/felt really sad when they died”
so what. a slave master might feel sad when their favorite slave dies. They are still a slave master. I once read a holocaust memoire, in which a guard once came into the flea-infested prisoner barracks to give medicine to the narrator’s sick sister. That doesn’t magically absolve that guard of the crime of being a nazi guard in a concentration camp.
“they had no choice, the senate/the chancellor made them do it. If they had refused to lead the army, they would have lost their funding/been made homeless/had to watch their children starve/been disbanded/the public would have hated them”
There is always a choice. You can say yes, and commit horrific crimes, or you can say no, and suffer the consequences. “I was just following orders” is not an excuse. Remember the Nuremberg trials? ORDERS IS NOT AN EXCUSE. The Jedi should have refused to lead the army. Flat out. If they got legally disbanded, so be it. If they lost Senate funding/protection, then so be it. If they would have been made homeless, then so be it. Remember recently when ICE agents sprayed tear gas at families and children at the border? and people were saying that if your superiors tell you to tear gas children, you should quit your job? Same thing. If the Senate tells you to take possession of a slave army and lead them into battle, you should quit your job.
And even if they lost Senate funding (are the Jedi even being supported financially by the senate? seriously? they existed way before the Republic did), the Jedi have the entire Service Corps, including teachers, explorers, and a SHIT TON OF FARMERS. They’re gonna be fine. 
“oooh but the Jedi need Senate protection because force-sensitive children are in constant danger of being kidnapped and sold into slavery” ok first of all, i think that threat is greatly exaggerated in much of the fandom. Second of all, the Jedi can still stick together and defend their own. There are literally thousands of them. And somehow the kids sent to the Service Corps seem to do just fine. And also literally every single other force-sensitive organization/religious order in the galaxy seem to do just fine without official senate backing/protection. Also, masters and padawans regularly go on missions with just the two of them, so it seems that a force-sensitive youngster is sufficiently protected by the presence of precisely one (1) adult jedi.
“but then the jedi will lose the legal right to go around the galaxy and solve disputes/do whatever the fuck it is the jedi are supposed to be doing” first of all, GOOD. imho the Jedi have waaaay to much leeway and no legal oversight and seriously need to have their legal powers curtailed. secondly, so what? if you have to take possession of an ENTIRE-ASS ARMY OF SLAVES in order to keep doing good in the galaxy, how much good are you doing anyway?
“if the Jedi didn’t do it, other people would have been put in charge who didn’t care about clone lives as much!” first of all, the Jedi did a pretty shit job of protecting clone lives. An experienced, non-jedi military commander would have been more effective at that than your standard Jedi, by simple virtue of knowing that “follow me” and then yeeting yourself off a cliff is not a valid battle plan. seriously, aside from the moral concerns, putting the jedi in charge of the army instead of having them as, say, field commandos and sometimes special consultants because ~force knowledge~, was the most bone-headed idiotic thing the Senate has ever done. Kudos to palpatine for somehow convincing the entire Senate that a bunch of scholarly sword-waving space monks would make good generals. 
Honestly the Jedi fucked up big in agreeing to take the clone army.  So what if they were in a catch-22 “if you take this army, you’re secretly screwed because order 66 and if you don’t you’re screwed because palpatine has engineered the situation such that a refusal somehow means the disbanding of the order/really low public opinion polls”. The choice is still obvious. If your super special Order, which you consider to be a guiding moral light for the galaxy, cannot continue to exist unless it agrees to take possession of an entire slave army, then your order cannot continue to exist. 
The Jedi should also have owned up to their role in the creation of the army. “whoops one of our previous council members went rogue and secretly ordered the creation of an illegal entire-ass army of slaves, our bad”. that should have been the biggest fucking scandal of the century, and the Jedi effectively covered it up and swept it under the rug. And then continued the travesty by going “welp the army’s already here might as well use it”. If they truly felt that the clones would have been subjected to significantly more abuse/horror under someone else’s command, they should have taken command and then immediately turned around and gone “hey senate how about some legal rights for these clones and also surprise we’re not letting you use them to fight a war lol”. The Jedi should also have been responsible for paying reparations to the clones and arranging for their citizenship, education, etc. 
“oh no but the separatists are attacking how will the republic defend itself” 
a) have they tried negotiating? no, they did not
b) buy a shit ton of battle droids, like the separatists (which would make for the most ridiculous fucking war ever, but i digress)
c) conscript your citizens like a normal fucking nation
P.S. remember that this is fiction, and we aren’t required to only like morally pure characters and stuff
the jedi can suck and still be your faves. any individual jedi can be guilty of horrific war crimes (looking at you, obi-wan “false surrender” kenobi) and still be your absolute fave, and that’s ok. i feel like this whole purity culture bullshit, where if you like a character or pairing that’s “problematic”, then it somehow reflects on your moral character as a real life person, is fucking bullshit. And it makes people try to bend over backwards to try and prove why their faves are actually morally pure cinnamon roles. because if the jedi are guilty of slavery and crimes against humanity, then i an’t like them and i can’t like any individual jedi or think about them as a good person or sympathize with them or write them doing good things. nah fuck that. they’re fictional. you can absolutely be like “yeah in canon the jedi fucking sucked and this jedi did nothing to absolve that, but i’ma just pretend that he had had good intentions and did a significant amount of good for the clones under his command because i want this jedi to be indisputably good in my fic” that is ABSOLUTELY OK AND VALID because the characters are FICTIONAL and tweaking canon or asserting that “no, THIS one is a good one” hurts zero real people. If you were trying to assert that, say, a random white supremacist was actually a really nice guy who felt bad for POC and had no choice or something? yeah i’d call bullshit because, when weighing the extremely slight chance that that’s actually true vs. the harm caused by doing anything other than shutting white supremacists the fuck down, it’s obvious that people like that don’t get the benefit of the doubt. white supremacy is harmful, dangerous, and horrific to a degree that there is absolutely no room for sympathy or benefit-of-doubting its perpetrators. But in a fictional environment, where not only the characters are fictional, but the society itself is also fictional, there’s a bit more wiggle room. Yes, i realize this segways directly into potentially perpetuating the White Savior and other racist tropes, but that opens up a whole nother can of worms about whether or not fic is required to be moral and if so to what degree.
so anyway that’s my unpopular opinion of the day, if you @ me on anon i will be very put out
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crowdedchatroom · 5 years ago
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the most dangerous game (for the world’s biggest virgins) | Chapter One
the first fic posted on this blog! i posted a few mysme fics on my main blog since they were for zines, but since this one is sort of its own thing, i’d figure i’d make use of this silly little sideblog.
the idea of there being a chapter 2 is a little questionable, but we’ll see how it goes.
AO3 | writing commissions | main blog.
                                                            0
They meet over coffee. Jumin sits quietly in his chair, reading a book, and Zen sits across from him, impatiently drumming his fingers on the table.
“Stop that,” says Jumin, not lifting his eyes from his book. “I find it annoying.”
Near immediately, Zen counters with, “I find you annoying.”
“The feeling is quite mutual.”
They sit in silence for a few more moments, and Zen begins to get a little irritated. “Why am I here?” he asks.
“I wanted to have a chat with you,” says Jumin, and he pauses, “I never thought I would say that sentence in earnest. It’s an interesting change.”
Zen would probably make a snappy comeback, if he weren’t already so done with Jumin. “Then why have we just been sitting here, not talking for—” he looks up at the clock by the front counter, and MC waves happily at him. He waves back, then turns back to Jumin, “five minutes.”
“I wasn’t in a rush,” says Jumin, “and I figured now was as good a time as any to conduct a little experiment and see how long it took for the silence to get to you. That’s the thing about children, you know?” He lifts his head to meet Zen’s eyes. “They can’t stand boredom.”
He looks back down at his book, and Zen briefly ponders if his career could survive the inevitable controversy he would face for murdering the man in front of him. And Jumin is quiet for a few moments longer, giving Zen plenty of time to think, until he opens his mouth once again.
“So,” Jumin says, “What are we?”
There are a few blissful moments where Zen is only attempting to process those stupid, terrible words coming from Jumin’s stupid, terrible mouth. Not that Zen thinks about Jumin’s mouth at all, ever—shut up.
When he does manage to process said terrible words, it’s as if Jumin has poured water directly onto Zen’s motherboard in an attempt to kill him dead. If it were possible to short-circuit in real life, Zen would surely be doing so.
“What are we?” he manages.
Jumin turns a page in his book. “I believe that’s what I said, yes.”
Zen shakes his head, “We aren’t anything. We don’t have anything to do with each other.”
“I see,” says Jumin, “I assumed that was the case. I just wanted to clarify.”
More silence. Zen continues drumming his fingers on the table, now in the midst of developing a distinct rhythm. To be in this situation, he thinks, is surely the universe’s retribution for all his sins. Which ones? That is yet to be figured out. He begins to replay the interaction in his head, and something bothers him.
Jumin assumed that was the case? What does that mean?
Of course, there’s the obvious interpretation—which is that Jumin took the events of last weekend and deduced that they were the product of a lot of drinking between both parties. Then there’s the explanation Zen falls on, which is that Jumin thinks he’s some kind of commitment-phobic playboy. An astrological leap, to be sure.
And who is Jumin to make this assumption of Zen, who is totally dedicated to anything he puts his mind to— including relationships, thank you very much. Jumin, on the other hand, has probably walked through all of his relationships with indifference, letting them pass as quickly as they arrived. Last weekend probably didn’t even mean anything to him. In fact, that’s probably Jumin’s every weekend, and Zen is one of many—
In the midst of Zen’s spiral, Jumin speaks again, “You can dismiss yourself. I’m waiting on a cup of coffee.”
“—I’m not some kind of playboy, for your information!” exclaims Zen. Jumin looks up at him.
“I see,” he says, “Now, I’m not sure what logical leap you’ve been privately making over there, but rest assured, whatever you think I think of you is absolutely true.”
He’s messing with Zen, now.
“I mean, what do you want us to be?” says Zen, and Jumin seems to think about it for a few seconds.
“I’m impartial,” he says, “I think we have very little compatibility as ‘friends,’” he lifts his hands from his book to put ‘friends’ in air quotes, “so a relationship seems a bit hasty, but I didn’t know if you were the sort of person to care about that sort of thing, so I asked.”
“And what does that mean?” says Zen, tone accusatory, though this whole interaction has been pretty accusatory in general. They’re an accusatory pair.
“Well, I had reason to consider either possibility,” says Jumin, “You seemed to be trying very hard to forget the whole ordeal, but at the same time you did agree to meet me here, which I doubt would happen if you were completely uninterested.”
“It’s not hard to be uninterested in you,” says Zen.
“And yet you’re still sitting here,” retorts Jumin.
“You’re a dick,” says Zen, “and you’re really not funny at all. Or interesting. Or nice.”
“I see,” says Jumin.
“It just makes me so, ugh, to think that I—that you—that we—” says Zen, running his hands through his hair in frustration. Jumin is sitting across for him, observing him curiously.
“So you’ve been thinking about it?” says Jumin, and if Zen didn’t know any better, he’d say that there was a smile forming on his stupid, terrible face. Just awful. The worst. “If it makes you feel better, it was ‘only a kiss.’ Of course, I suppose that comfort depends on how much you value a kiss.”
“If it was with you, not at all,” tries Zen. Jumin nods.
“Same here,” says Jumin, “It was, as Lucien or Yoosung would say, ‘wack.’”
Zen’s brain is short-circuiting again. “Did you just say ‘wack?’”
“Yes, I’ve been meaning to expand my vocabulary to something more current, in order to appear less stiff,” says Jumin, a man who is sitting in a coffee shop in a full suit. Had it been any other day, Zen is certain that said suit would be covered in pale cat hair. “Why are you still sitting here?”
“Why are you?”
“I believe I mentioned that I was waiting on a coffee?”
“Maybe I’m also waiting on a coffee.”
“I think that you’d have to order one in order to wait for it.”
“Die,” says Zen, “I just—nevermind your assumptions of me, what is this whole situation supposed to say about you, Jumin Han?” He tries to say Jumin’s name as if that were an insult in itself. Jumin merely raises an eyebrow.
“That I don’t feel we’re compatible?” he says.
“No! It’s that you’re a playboy!”
“A playboy?”
“A playboy!”
Jumin seems to consider this for a moment. “I suppose, from a certain perspective, it could look that way,” he says. “That said, I consider myself quite conservative with my sensuality.”
Hearing Jumin refer to his sensuality in conversation is quite possibly the worst thing Zen has ever heard. Instead of abruptly vomiting, however, he stands his ground. His very thin, shaky ground. “Well you aren’t! And it’s weird that you’re pretending to be all professional about this situation and trying to say that I don’t value a kiss or whatever. You—you’re weird!”
“Perhaps,” Jumin places his book down on the table, “we would benefit from a reevaluation of the incident. As I recall, it was you who leaned in for the kiss, Zen.”
“Oh, fuck you! That’s not what this is about and you know it—” Zen begins, fully prepared to go into a tirade about how he was drunk and how Jumin was being weirdly cool and how the moment was a particularly bizarre exception, as far as romance goes, but Jumin is just… looking at him. “What?” he says, “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“I’m thinking,” Jumin says, and there is the briefest moment of blissful silence before he says, “I don’t find you unattractive,” and Zen once again feels as though he has just been shot.
“I’m sorry, what\—”
“As insufferable as your personality is, you are fairly handsome, and I was fairly drunk at the time,” says Jumin, “and so when you leaned in for the kiss, I was receptive.”
“God. Why are you doing this? Are you trying to kill me?”
“I’m merely analyzing the events of last weekend in order to paint a clearer picture of my character, since you insist I fit some kind of ‘playboy’ stereotype,” says Jumin. “Now, I will admit that my decision to introduce tongue to the kiss was very questionable, however—”
“Stop! Stop! I get it! You can stop now!”
“Zen, you are making a scene,” Jumin appears serious at first, before a slight curve appears at the corner of his lips, and he blows some air out of his nose. “Though, I suppose that’s natural for an actor.”
“You’re not funny,” Zen says. God. Thinking about that night is—
(kind of hot)
—awful. What was he thinking? He has to live with the fact that Jumin’s tongue has been in his mouth forever now. This is a travesty.
“Zen,” says Jumin. “Was it such an unpleasant experience for you? Because if so, I—” he stops for a second, as if truly hesitant to say anything further, “I… am sorry.”
He’s apologizing. Holy shit. Zen just got an apology. Out of Jumin.
“What was that?”
“I’m not going to say it again, especially since I was not initially responsible for the incident.” Holy shit. Jumin seems flustered. This is hilarious. And kind of adorable. Or, not adorable—Zen definitely did not refer to Jumin as adorable, but it’s like… well, it’s something, and Zen is all about it.
“No, no, say it! You can’t backpedal.”
“I am,” Jumin sighs, “sorry for making you uncomfortable, if that was the case.”
“Oh, that’s good. I could get used to that.”
“That is an inherently weird statement to make, Zen. I believe you were arguing the point that I was ‘weird,’ earlier, and that only serves as incriminating evidence to your own ‘weirdness.” Jumin is turning a bit pink. “Where’s my coffee? Could you leave? I’d like to drink my coffee in peace.”
“It looks like it’s gonna take a while,” says Zen, “in the meantime, let’s review another point: you find me attractive?”
“Do not get me started, because I seem to remember that your hands certainly found themselves in some interesting places that evening, and—”
“Okay, okay! Point made!” Zen interjects. A few seconds pass, and he lets out a confession. “You didn’t make me uncomfortable. I just thought your apology was really funny.”
“I am going to kill you. I have the money to do so cleanly and without any trace to myself.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” says Zen, dismissive. “So, we’re agreed? We’re forgetting about the whole thing?”
Jumin nods. “It would be a service to the both of us. I mean, just imagine it. If we dated.”
Zen says, “Not possible.”
Jumin adds, “Completely incomprehensible.”
“Disgusting.”
“Terrible.”
“The worst.”
More silence. Extremely, wildly uncomfortable silence. The kind of silence that only occurs between parties with an it’s complicated status on social media.
Zen tries not to think about the kiss, but, well, it’s not like he’s kissed that many people in his life—and Jumin happened to be much more skilled than expected, and it’s hard not to think about that. Zen has barely ever kissed another person with tongue in his life, but Jumin was a total natural. A real team player.
And, well, he isn’t hideous. Kind of the opposite. There’s a reason this guy also models, Zen supposes. A cursory glance to Jumin only serves to confirm this. Sure, he’s pretentious and repulsive, but he does really pull that suit off. His hair looks soft (it is soft. Zen remembers, because one of his hands ran through it when they kissed. The other hand was kind of preoccupied with things below the waist, but whatever. Not relevant, right now) and his skin is immaculate.
“It would be kind of funny,” says Zen, talking before thinking. “If we dated, that is.”
“Oh, it would be hilarious.”
“Maybe we’d do it for, like, a trial run. You know, if I can tolerate you for a month, then you have to pay me some ridiculous amount of money.”
“That wouldn’t be much of a challenge at all. I’m very tolerable. And what would I get if you lost?”
“I have no idea. Maybe I’d have to do something stupid, like babysit Elizabeth or something—”
“Deal.”
Oh.
Oh.
Oh?
“For real?” Zen says, incredulous. “You’d make this stupid bet on the off chance that I would have to watch your stupid cat?”
“Yes, absolutely. It would be hilarious.”
“Well,” says Zen, thinking about his impending sum of money and definitely not thinking about Jumin’s tongue in his mouth, “Then we have a deal.”
“Certainly. We’ll need to work out the details a bit later, perhaps in a written contract—”
“I am not doing a fifty shades style contract with you.”
Jumin shakes his head. “Nothing like that. This would merely cover the terms of the wager, in order to ensure equal chances of winning for both parties. My affinities are none of your business”
“Um, I think they’re totally my business. I’m your trial-run boyfriend.”
This banter would probably go on forever, if not for the sudden presence of Jaehee, who clears her throat. Zen instantly jumps in his seat.
“How long have you been here?” he asks, instantaneously. Jaehee looks at him with some unholy combination of grief and amusement.
“Long enough,” she says, before turning to Jumin. “You ordered coffee?”
This, Zen thinks, is going to bite him in the ass.
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moseswilhelm · 5 years ago
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Now that you’re all gone, I’ve got a few squishy bits to air out. I don’t feel normal. Whether that means quirky or broken or eccentric depends on the day or hour or seconds between the particular anxiety of waiting on someone to respond to a long string of text. Internally, I’ve cycled between deciding if I am alien, demon, mutated evolution, a plaything of God, a challenge, or just plain old mentally ill. We can guess the healthier option, but there isn’t much use or fun using that.
Knowing you’ve lacked socialization in your youth doesn’t really mean much in trying to solve that problem in the same way that knowing you were just shot won’t help close the wound. What I am trying to say is I wasn’t socialized when I was young and that consistent distant feeling from your peers comes from that.  Hearing that you think differently, or have an interesting brain is a nice little compliment albeit a little condescending. Unfortunately, you can’t really monetize excellent explanatory metaphors without the true meat and potatoes of capitalist society: focus. Arguably, effort and hard work and all that, but the measurement of how much you’ve put into something gets a bit blurred when you’ve somehow acquired detail knowledge of the economic turmoil that initiated the Pontic Wars. Someone please give me money for that. Easily an entire week got a bit lost in trying to understand centralized economies in the classical era and not one person paid me. Outrageous. I think writing was my way of trying to accomplish that level of usefulness that we are all trying to achieve. I knew that whatever I went through as a kid helped me develop an approach to understanding things in a unique way, but this is arguably not even useful to myself let alone the world as a whole. Unfortunately this hobby/career is top tier ADD nightmares and require a level of focus and drive comparable to Stephen King just ripped on coke. I neither have the proclivity for weird child orgies and dog monsters or coke.  Well thats a lie, coke suits me just fine but my scantron has enough bubbles filled out and I’m already late turning in my “how much of a trainwreck are you” buzzfeed quiz.  I see you, red squiggly telling me that “thats” needs an apostrophe. Fuck off, this is art and I refuse to change. Hey, what do you think happens when you’re told that confidence has to come before... y’know... actually being proud of yourself? Arrogance and self-absorption, obviously. You learn very quick that empty confidence is just as meaningless as no confidence, so to kind of fake it you have to really inflate things you have no right inflating and they are inflated on a scale comparable to those around you. Which is arrogant! Its awful! People can do different things at different levels and still be valid! Confidence is valued at an extremely high level to the point where the confidence to present yourself is a bit more important than the character you are supposedly proud of... evidenced plenty by the folks in the public eye known specifically for their charisma and yet somehow failing to actually be a person worth being around. That said, it can get tangled up in actually being proud of yourself. Shocking, I know, but you can’t really lump people who have characters worth being proud of to those just decent at faking it.  Faking it. I know imposter syndrome is a thing. I am certainly not really alone in the concept of “oh god I’m faking it” so I won’t really pretend I have some magic insight on the concept (I’m lying I’m absolutely going to present myself as someone with Answers welcome to the fucking show) but when does “holding it together” and “how you present yourself” become imposter syndrome.  “Hi this is me who has to be this way in order to balance between seeming different enough to stand out but not so different that you feel disgusted at the concept of change, nice to meet you” I mean what the fuck is a person anyways. Thats not a question. Not even a rhetorical one so if you answered aloud in your head I’m sorry but my psyche is not emotionally prepared for audience participation right now so clam up. Finding yourself is always a precarious as hell phrase because that often means one of two things: 1. Learning not to care about how others feel about who you are, despite all evidence of existence point out that this is the absolute most important aspect of your life 2. Presenting the parts that you were afraid to present to people.  Look, I get it, you can’t please everyone and I’m not really here to talk about how to please anyone. In fact, I’m not even here. This is a lucid dream you’re having in your chair and shortly you’ll wake up and not remember if you were sleeping at all. Its fine, you’re fine.  You have to please someone though. I think we underestimate the value of the tutorial level of life regarding this. You are given a set amount of people who are, usually, just going to be pleased by your existence. This always sets up your expectations of how that looks, how it feels, and how important it is. I mean imagine if right now I decided to criticize the immense value society puts on children. You’d hate my fucking guts! “Look at this asshole, kids deserve to be cared for” To be clear I don’t disagree with that. I think a lot of the current “you are valid” rhetoric is based on the concept that adults deserve to be cared for as well. This sorta rounds off my point that attention and reassurance is an important part of being cared for. In my opinion, this gets overlooked very often in favor cheap performative actions like hitting a heart button and oh my god I’m like a baby boomer writing for the new york times okay hold on I promise this isn’t a cynical criticism of millennials.  People want to be heard. Importantly, people want to be understood. Spicy hot fucking take. Its a bit more than “this person knows who I am” although thats precisely how its framed. People want to be cared for, and this means knowing the... other person knows who they are caring for. Ah holy shit this is why I use metaphors.  You have a snickers bar and you are hungry. Congration, you done it. Its the middle of the day and you never had any breakfast and frankly your bank account could use a break from pleasuring Starbuck’s atm reader so you somehow found the last snickers bar in a box you bought off of impulse bought off of Amazon and immediately regretted because it was gone two days later. Or so you thought. As you threw away the cardboard you hear the tell-tale tumble of a forgotten rod of peanuts and caramel that must have gotten jammed in the back of this thing. It was, however, 7am and you had to get to work and maybe having bubbleguts while dealing with people is not your recipe for a good day so you throw it into your purse or bag or whatever the fuck and move on.  “Lunchtime” rolls around and as you do the mental gymnastics required to find the conclusion that food=energy in between bouts of fury over why your workday insists on starting at 8am and how you can’t seem to cope with falling asleep early enough for that not to matter, you remember your snickers bar. Reaching into whatever bag you put it and coming to the horrifying dread of realization that you left this bag in your car in fucking July, you find the sweet sugared respite in a corner. Squeezing it a bit just to test, you are surprised to not find it in the horrible (and yet delicious) state of melted confectionary. Your stomach grumbles a bit as you fidget with the perforated candy wrapper, vaguely thinking to yourself that it might be interesting to read the ingredients as you eat this thing like that isn’t going to fill you with inexplicable Eldritch dread. Nobody needs to know they are ingesting something that might have been made in a facility that also processes every other nut you can think of, delightfully shortened into “tree nuts”. I wonder if anyone has cross referenced all the allergen warnings to deduce which candies are made in the same factory, or if that information is just freely available. What if we kissed in the snickers production facility??? haha jk but...? Anyways, as your mind cycles through a list of stale memes you manage to unsheath this uncut chocolate delight from its wax(???) plastic prison and proceed to take your first, and arguably best, bite into this lunch.  Your teeth sink softly into it, as you would expect. In fact, expectations haven’t really filtered into your skull soup you call a brain, so all manner of things can just slip through your recognition. Not this, however. Instead, fireworks of electric signals screaming “BITTER POISON” shock your brain from its previous state of vaguely functioning. Now you truly see the color of light, feel the air cocooning your skin, the squirm of your organs in your belly. Full panic ensues. You are not human, you are animal, and you have taken in a poison thing.  You spit it out right there on your lap.  You stare at the sad and ruined chocolate mutant nestled grossly in between your legs as your brain high fives itself for saving your life before frantically scouring your subconscious for whatever Vine gives it enough dopamine to not just fucking kill yourself right here. What happened? The fugue of panic washes your perceptions with a mixture of justifications for this travesty. It probably just went bad, but that didn’t taste spoiled (you consider yourself a mild expert having scraped clean many an old collection of halloween candy collections in August the year after the fact) so maybe it melted and rehardened? Baking stuff is weird so maybe that broke down some of its components. You pick it up (holy shit that is slimy. Of course its slimy, just touch it) and its insides look fine. I mean, how often do you examine the insides of a partially chewed bite of snickers? No weird colors. The remaining chocolate lasagna brick also looks exactly what you’d thought it be.  You jokingly think to yourself that maybe you had a stroke but despite the apparent hilarity of that possibility you do the smile thing in the selfie camera of your phone. Everything seems fine, but now you’re getting mad that some turn of events has just ruined your perfectly good slab of sugar and fat that surely would have made the rest of the day bearable (and full of indigestion) Now that is a metaphor. 
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wellhalesbells · 6 years ago
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I see you reblogging some comic stuff an I was wondering if you have a favorite comic or favorite character or ship?
this ask is from so long ago but [DEEP BREATH IN] i’m finally going to answer it, nonny.  finally.  i kept wanting to read a little bit farther in my comics stack because.... maybe i’ll like that and will regret not having recced it, i just hafta--get--to it, see?  and, honestly, i’m still there BUT, come on, i’ll never be caught up because that would mean comics would just have to stop coming out and i would be sad forever if that happened, SO
i’m not even going to pretend like i can narrow this down to one comic.  (one ship?  sure, that’s spideypool.  one character?  sure, that’s the merc with a mouth, the regenerating degenerate, wade motherfucking wilson.  but one comic?!)  there is just straight-up too much out there to make a definitive ‘yes, this is it, this is THE ONE ™ ’ statement.  instead, uh, let’s break this shit down, yeah?  (super special secret bonus round, will note all lgbt+ rep and standalone comics.)  in no particular order, here the frig it goes!
HORROR
infidel, by pornsak pichetshote and aaron campbell.  in case you haven’t seen this on every 2018 best list ever, here it is.  and, yeah, it was good.  a muslim-american main character living in a haunted apartment building where the entities feed off the xenophobia of its occupants.  if that’s not a fucking modern horror story i don’t know what is.
spread, by justin jordan and kyle strahm.  THIS IS ONE OF MY NEW AND ALREADY ALL-TIME FAVORITES.  what an awesomely weird and epic story.  the spread is an uncontrollable, unstoppable monster-making force that humanity accidentally unleashed by digging too deep.  it infects everything it touches and basically all of humanity is running from quarantine to quarantine just hoping for the best.  and speaking of hope.... she’s a baby, rescued by no, and the only thing that’s ever been able to stop the spread.  also, no’s gay?  and i just DID NOT see that coming.  it seems like it’s going to be such a formulaic, bro-y story about the action hero who kisses the face off his girl (her name’s molly and she’s batshit insane and amazing) and instead, nope, it is not that at all.  lgbt+ main characters.
the black monday murders, by jonathan hickman and tomm coker.  hate capitalism?  think all the rich and powerful are evil, soul-sucking monsters?  [obnoxious, low-budget commercial sound effects] MAN, HAVE I GOT THE SERIES FOR YOU.
the beauty, by jeremy haun and jason a. hurley.  i just started this recently but so far, oh my good golly gosh, i looove it.  a sexually transmitted disease that makes you conventionally gorgeous.... at least before it explodies you.  [wide, creepy smile]  the art is gorgeous, the characters are aces and i am very, very pleased so far.  lgbt+ minor characters.
the great divide, by ben fisher and adam markiewicz.  this?  was a COOL idea.  the execution stumbled a bit but, gosh, was it neat.  it’s post-apocalyptic where touching another person will literally kill.... one of you.  the survivor then absorbs the memories of the person who dies, taking on a ‘rider.’  some people collect them, some people go mad, some form a bond, all have the side effect of dyslexia.  like i said, neat as all get out.  lgbt+ minor-ish/main-ish character.  standalone.
revival, by tim seely and mike norton.  a rural town in wisconsin experiences ‘miracle day,’ where the dead rise again.... except, they were kinda already mourned and buried and this is really just fucking up the status quo.
the woods, by james tynion iv and michael dialynas.  a high school gets picked up and plopped down in an entirely new, and wickedly hostile universe.  it’s all survival and alliances and seeing what you’re really made of when it comes down to it.  lgbt+ main characters. 
clean room, by gail simone and jon davis-hunt.  a cult, a journalist and a clean room walk into a bar...
anya’s ghost, by vera brosgol.  you think it’ll be a cute story of a girl and her ghost.  HA HA THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS AT ALL, OKAY.
FANTASY
rumble, by john arcudi and james harren.  SCARECROW WARRIOR GOD, SCARECROW WARRIOR GOD, SCARECROW WARRIOR GOD!!!  okay, first off, the art in this?  pushes every friggin’ button i’ve got, and many i did not know i had.  second, this book is so fucking fun.  it’s mythology that’s balls to the wall ridiculous, funny, and features a main character whose life motto is basically: ‘do i have to?’  infinitely relatable and then some.
heathen, by natasha alterici and rachel deering.  UGH, ONE OF MY FAVORITES.  the art is just horribly, horrendously gorgeous and it’s LESBIAN VIKING MYTHOLOGY, OKAY.  OKAYYYY???   lgbt+ main characters.
the wicked + the divine, by kieron gillen and jamie mckelvie.  one of my favorite ever series right here.  it’s a hella cool concept (gods reincarnating as humans every twelve years, and burning up their hosts in two), whip-smart and if you’ve ever met a human being who likes a pun more than kieron gillen i defy you to produce them.  lgbt+ main and minor characters.
batgirl, by gail simone and adrian sayaf and vicente cifuentes.  you know how people rave about gail simone?  there’s a reason people rave about gail simone.  honestly, i’ve never had much interest in babs.  i don’t tend to go for superheroes who don’t kill and i have even less interest in ‘the killing joke’ story line and i am convinced only gail simone could’ve done the recovery on that and she did a GLORIOUS job of it.
red hood and the outlaws, by scott lobdell and dexter soy.  (ignoring recent - and annoying - developments), this is my favorite of all the rebirths dc did.  scott lobdell is the only writer to have gotten the idea down of: okay, we’re starting over, i assume you don’t know anything but i also assume there are a bajillion people reading who know everything, and hit the perfect medium between those two things.  so if you want to start a jason todd run, you legitimately can here, and get all the found family, badassery, batman-teasing enjoyment there is to be had.
iceman, by sina grace and robert gill (covers by kevin wada).  classic super-heroing here and bobby’s first solo title.  he’s figuring out coming out while fighting (and flirting) with baddies.  sina really gets his humor and how truly wonder-awful it is!  lgbt+ main character.
spider-man/deadpool, by joe kelly and ed mcguinness.  watch those names there, those are your guys right there, period.  they looked at the void of a spider-man/deadpool series and filled it with absolutely everything you could possibly want for the pair (sans a hardcore make-out sesh, though they did get a few variant covers with some puckered up lips in there!)
limbo, by dan watters and caspar wijngaard.  a fusion of 80s aesthetics, voodoo elements and a noir tone.  just some remarkably cool shit in this.  the ending, for me, left something to be desired but it was more than worth it to see worship via mixtapes.  standalone.
hawkeye: kate bishop, by kelly thompson and leonardo romero.  kate bishop is, apparently???, a super impossible character for a lot of writers.  kelly thompson is not one of them.  kelly thompson is my favorite kate bishop writer, actually, and the fact that she is ever not writing her is a gd travesty.
the unbeatable squirrel girl, by ryan north and erica henderson.  honestly, i’m so tempted to just stick this under ‘contemporary,’ because it really does just feel very... normal.  doreen’s navigating college, new friendships, and y’know... the squirrely-ness.  this had every opportunity to suck and instead it’s funny as heck, never takes itself too seriously, and is just pure good-hearted entertainment through and through.
wolf, by ales kot and matt taylor.  a paranormal detective and the-possible-antichrist go on a road trip.  people hated this comic and i don’t know how you can hate a comic that has a character called freddy chtonic who has tentacles for a mouth??? 
ms. marvel, by g. willow wilson and adrian alphona.  hi, you read ms. marvel because the world is a garbage fire and people are terrible and your cynicism is at an all time high and then kamala khan waltzes in and reminds you people generally want to help each other and the world improves when we work together and that thing optimists feel?  you’ll feel that for as long as you’ve got the pages open and that’s a magical thing.  lgbt+ minor character.
monstress, by marjorie m. liu and sana takeda.  psychic links with monsters, matriarchal societies, magic and witchery, half-human/half-animal (and other ratios) characters, all through a steampunk lens.  what’s not to like about that??
inhuman, by charles soule.  i love this series, i love the idea of being a total average joe/joanne, getting smacked in the face by a cloud of mist and suddenly having to figure out how to live basically a whole new life.  also, if you don’t fall madly in love with dante pertuz, i don’t even know what to tell you, my dude.
heart in a box, by kelly thompson and meredith mcclaren.  break-ups suck, but only because of that whole pesky broken heart thing, right?  so emma gives hers away.  problem solved, no?  standalone.
i kill giants, by joe kelly and j.m. ken niimura.  i didn’t cry my eyes out or anything.  did not.  standalone.
sex criminals, by matt fraction and chip zdarsky.  having sex = stopping time, which leads suzie and jon to the only logical conclusion: let’s rob some banks!
hawkeye, by matt fraction and david aja.  honestly there are a lot of other artist combos in this run but the only ones that are worthwhile are the ones that have fraction and aja’s names on them - sorry not sorry.
SCIENCE FICTION
black bolt, by saladin ahmed and christian ward.  saladin revived this character one hundred million percent.  there is absolutely a reason this was parading around all over ‘best’ lists when it was released.  it really, really did the damn thing.
saga, by brian k. vaughan and fiona staples.  this is the comic you recommend to people who don’t even like comics because it is that good.  like, my dad - who hadn’t read a comic since he was a pre-teen, eagerly awaits each new trade.  the world-building, the characters, the care put into every single solitary bit of all the things?  unparalleled.  lgbt+ minor characters.
frostbite, by joshua williamson and jason shawn alexander.  a post-apocalyptic story that has humanity dying from a plague that literally freezes you from the inside out.  very neat, very cold, very readable.  standalone.
descender, by jeff lemire and dustin nguyen.  this had a rough start, for me, with the main character of the first trade being tim-21, an android who is literally incapable of having the depth to be a lead BUT that does not last through to the next trade, thank god.  lots of space and found family and world-building in this to be had!  but you know how people rave about jeff lemire?  there’s a reason people rave about jeff lemire.
paper girls, by brian k. vaughan and cliff chiang.  the 80s and time travel and lifelong friendships.  it’s brian k. vaughan, you know it’s good, okay?  why do i even have to sell you here, man?  lgbt+ main characters.
injection, by warren ellis and declan shalvey.  this is another one on my list that started out a little rough but really appealed to me later on.  there was just a lot to absorb in that first trade but, once you’ve got it, the ride gets way, way smoother.   lgbt+ main and minor characters.
black science, by rick remender and matteo scalera.  this was a rocky start, because the main character is such an asshole but in a way where he can’t see he’s an asshole, he’s just a tortured genius who’s superior to all of you, don’t you know? but i am so glad i persevered because if that’s the set up?  the rest of the series is knocking him back down.  super scientist grant mckay finds a way to access the eververse, every possible reality the universe has on offer, and that’s really what causes every single problem that follows.  hard to cause the apocalypse and be an arrogant prick, ya know?
CONTEMPORARY
giant days, by john allison and lissa treiman.  this series is so funny and smart and warm.  these girls are so kind to each other and relatable and failing at adulting regularly and often and i love reading about them.  lgbt+ main character.
lumberjanes, by noelle stevenson and grace ellis and brooke a. allen.  this is funny and ridiculous and kind and cool and all other awesome adjectives and you should read it, fact.  lgbt+ main characters.
my brother’s husband, by gengoroh tagame and anne ishii (translator).  this is such a sweet story about acceptance and family tbh.   lgbt+ main character.
fence, by c. s. pacat and johanna the mad.  i mean... i need to see nicholas and seiji hook-up, i need that, stat.  stat means now!   lgbt+ main characters.
WEB/INDEPENDENT COMICS
long exposure, by kam heyward.  so mitch and jonas are my absolute faves and i love them to death and the author is so kind in that they actually put this up in print on indyplanet so i can read it the way i, personally, love to read comics (and - bonus! - support them with the monies).  lgbt+ main characters.
modern dread, by pat shand and ryan fassett (editors).  i’ve been trying to find more better horror comics lately so i’ve been kind of half-heartedly stumbling through kickstarter on the hunt and this was SUCH a great find.  it’s an anthology but more cleverly done than any other kickstarter anthology i’ve read, with a main story line that seamlessly strings together the would-be-disjointed ones.  this was really thoughtfully put together and really well done!  standalone.
heartstopper, by alice oseman.  a very sweet story about two high school-aged boys becoming fast friends, playing rugby and falling in love.  the two characters are mentioned as an aside in the author’s book, solitaire, and she became so invested in them that she wrote their backstory as a free webcomic.   lgbt+ main characters.
the pale, by jay fabares.  JUST started this (like, just a day or so ago) but i’m enjoying it so far!
hotblood!, by toril orlesky.  i mean... is it a webcomic about a centaur falling in love with his boss?  it just might be.  did i get a bound edition through a kickstarter campaign?  maybe.  maybe i did that.  who’s to say?   lgbt+ main characters.
the bay, by bbz.  life on mars through the lens of three young professionals who form an odd but lasting friendship.  lgbt+ main characters.
hard drive, by artroan.  is it a nsfw comic about a dude and a robot?  .... it might be a nsfw comic about a dude and a robot.  [coughs]   lgbt+ main characters.
seen nothing yet, by tess stone.  a nsfw comic about two amateur ghost hunters.  can’t imagine why i might be interested in that [coughs]   lgbt+ main characters.
captain imani and the cosmic chase, by lin darrow and alex assan.  i mean did i want a starship captain who can’t help but lust after the smuggler he’s chasing.  i mean, maybe i did.  maybe.   lgbt+ main characters.
taproot, by keezy young.  ghost falls in love with boy, boy falls in love with ghost, AND THEY LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER.  lgbt+ main characters.
always raining here, by bell and hazel.  just two boys falling in lurve.  lgbt+ main characters.
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hp-nextgen-fest · 6 years ago
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2018 HP Next Gen Fest Reveals!
The time has finally come for the 2018 @hp-nextgen-fest​ reveals!
Thank you so very much to everyone who has made this fest such an amazing success! We were incredibly impressed with the overwhelming enthusiasm you all have for our favorite Next Gen characters. Everyone who submitted stories and art, and those who read, reviewed and recced: You guys are amazing!!
It's been really great seeing everybody's fantastic creations, and we hope you all enjoyed the fest as much as we did!
Without further ado, here's a list of all the amazing participants who worked so hard to create fabulous things for this year's fest! 
ART
@mzuul​ drew Sick Day [James Sirius/Teddy & Albus | General] Albus insists he’s not sick, James and Teddy say otherwise.
@fidgetyweirdo​ drew Every Christmas From Now On [Albus Severus/Scorpius | General] While decorating their flat for the holidays, the new couple discusses where they should spend Christmas day.
@julcheninred​ drew Deep Roots, New Growth [Draco & Teddy Gen | General] With Draco’s help, Teddy learns about his Black Family ancestry and helps to restore the damaged tapestry.
@gee-nx​ drew Ebb Tide [Rose/Padma | Explicit] Rose, normally very shy, finds the courage to get what she wants at a masquerade ball.
@nearly-conscious​ drew SHE ROCKS!!! [Dominique & Roxanne | General] Summer 2016. Roxanne and Dominique never get tired of playing Quidditch together. The rest of the family does get a little tired of hearing Dominique yell "SHE ROCKS!!!" everytime Roxanne scores a goal, but they don't say a thing.
@fidgetyweirdo​ drew On Holiday [James Sirius/Teddy | General] It's their first holiday together without the family, but they haven't done much sightseeing. Correction: they haven't done any sightseeing.
@nearly-conscious​ drew Pining [Lily Luna/Rose | General] It's a wonder no one besides Hugo has noticed that Lily Luna is pining for Rose.
ART + FIC
@maesterchill​ drew & wrote Swim To Me [James Sirius/Teddy | Teen] Nestled within the Lake District, among rolling green hills, spindly birch trees and tall pine trees, lay Teddy’s cottage, just a stone's throw from a serene lake; the perfect place to swim in the warm late-summer sun. There was just one problem: James’s fear of swimming. "I’ll teach you", Teddy said. "I’ll make it fun." James was sold on the idea pretty quick. Being in close contact with the half-naked object of his crush? It was a no brainer.
FIC
@nerdherderette​ wrote Drink Me [James Sirius/Teddy; Albus Severus/James Sirius/Teddy | NC-17] Before going to bed on his 18th birthday, Albus drinks one of Weasley Wizard Wheezes' newest wish-fulfillment potions, his gift from Lily.
lash_larue wrote Lavender's Iris [Lily Luna/Lavender | Teen] Lily does some hard thinking before her upcoming wedding. What she discovers is a bit of a surprise to her.
@letsdothepanic​ wrote Close To Me [James Sirius/Teddy | Explicit] “I can’t believe you want to suck your own cock.” “No, the other way around. I wanna see me suck my cock. It’s a world of difference, Tedward. Keep up!”
@gracerene09 wrote Activate [Draco/James Sirius | Explicit] Draco always figured he was a common Beta, and though he may have had childhood dreams of presenting as an Alpha, after forty years of living he's made his peace with his lot in life. He had a loving relationship with his late Beta wife, has an amazing son, and his work at his Apothecary and Potions shop keeps him occupied. Draco has a very pleasant life indeed, until one day his son drags James Sirius Potter into his life and everything gets turned on its head.
@maraudersaffair​ wrote Waiting for You [James Sirius/Teddy | Explicit] When James was sixteen, Teddy agreed to take his virginity if he made it to eighteen without losing it. He never thought James would make it the two years without shagging anyone, but now James is eighteen and asking Teddy to fulfill his promise.
@alis-anne​ wrote My Potter Boyfriend [James Sirius/Scorpius | Mature] Scorpius has a Potter boyfriend, it’s just not the one everyone thinks.
rillalicious wrote On the Same Side [Charlie/Teddy | Mature] Teddy is heading to Romania to protest a proposed anti-dragon law. He finds an interesting ally there.
@josiemoone​ wrote It's Just A Little Bond. Bond. [James Sirius/Teddy | Mature] When James and Teddy are pushed to the limits of their relationship, which include a bonding charm and several secrets, will they feel as strongly when everything is out in the open?
@thealmostrhetoricalquestion​ wrote Where The Apples Grow In Winter [Albus Severus/Scorpius | Teen] Albus was determined not to join in with the Owl Exchange at first, but he didn't count on the awkward charms of a sweet, lonely boy who, by history's reckoning, he was definitely supposed to hate.
@all-drarry-to-me wrote Mile Markers and Wizarding Wonders [James Sirius/Teddy | Teen] James plans a road trip to see the Seven Wizarding Wonders and Teddy ends up coming along. Cue weeks and weeks of bed sharing, accidental cuddling, Teddy's musical selections, a bit of stargazing and lots and lots of figuring each other out during long drives across Europe.
@violetclarity​ wrote Neapolitan [James Sirius/Scorpius/Teddy | Explicit] Scorpius never felt bad about fancying both James and Teddy, because he never thought he had a chance with either of them. So when it turns out that they both like him back, what’s a bloke to do? (Take advantage of the situation. Obviously.)
@call-me-hopelesss​ wrote Alt Er Love (Everything Is Love) [James Sirius/Teddy | Teen] There are sparks flying between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Albus and Scorpius are sure of it. So they do the most logical thing everyone would do in their situation: They ask James and Teddy for their help playing matchmaker. Thinking about love 24/7 comes easy for Albus and Scorpius, but for James and Teddy, it makes it harder and harder to pretend the feelings they hold for each other are strictly platonic... This is the one where the boys try to set Draco and Harry up five times and one time they don't.
@niakantorka​ wrote Love Our Way [Albus Severus/Blaise | Explicit] Blaise loves Albus. He also loves Albus' pale skin and how it contrasts so well with his own rich colour. Fortunate for him, it is just the same for Albus.
@fidgetyweirdo​ wrote These Hearts They Race... [Albus Severus/Scorpius | Mature] Albus thought that three weeks without his secret boyfriend had been hard enough, but now that Scorpius has arrived the lack of privacy in the Potter house may actually kill him.
@restlessandordinary​ wrote Show Me Where Your Love Lies [James Sirius/Teddy | Explicit] At 23 James is one of the top Seekers in the world, Witch Weekly's most eligible bachelor 4 years running and never far from the front pages of the paper. Oh, and he just so happens to be a virgin desperately in love with Teddy, both facts he plans to take to his grave. But when the Daily Prophet runs a story on "England's Most Eligible Virgin" all the secrets James has worked so hard to conceal begin to come out.
@sylviawitch​​ wrote Can You See Me? [Albus Severus/Teddy | Teen] Albus has been watching Teddy since he was fifteen.
randowskie wrote Dreams Do Come True [James Sirius/Teddy | Mature] Teddy has it bad for James, but he knows that James is completely off limits and not interested. When a date with James is being auctioned off for charity, Teddy realizes he may not be able to keep his feelings quiet.
titti wrote The Clock That Changed Life [Draco/James Sirius | General] James is reluctant to come out, but when Draco gets cursed, he realises what's truly important to him.
@goldentruth813​ wrote my youth is yours [James Sirius/Teddy | Explicit] At twenty-eight years old James is a respected Auror with a comfortable life. And alright, perhaps his love life is a bit lackluster and something has always seemed like it was missing. But he’s got a job he loves and Teddy as his Auror partner and best mate. That's more than enough for James. At least until an Auror raid gone wrong leaves James in his eighteen-year-old body grappling with feelings he thought he’d left in the past.
@littlerose13writes​ wrote Chess and Gobstones [Albus Severus/Scorpius | Mature] James sighed and shook his head. “You want to run with me because you have something you want to ask me. You’re not asking Scorpius, which means it’s about Scorpius. I’m right, aren’t I?” Albus scowled at his brother’s smug expression and muttered the most unenthusiastic confirmation he could. James’ grin grew wider as he started gesticulating with both hands. “So it’s about your boyfriend, and you’re not asking Mum, like you did when you needed help with his Christmas present, which means it’s about sex.”
@regblvck​ wrote Let it Bloom [Lily Luna/Pansy | Explicit] After their one-night stand, Lily had thought she wouldn’t be seeing more of Pansy. She’d never been so happy to be wrong. 
barry_manilows_wardrobe wrote They would have told me, right? [James Sirius/Scorpius | Teen] Albus had heard the rumours. It was hard not to when his best mates were the subject. He loved them. Scorp and James. He really did. But he wouldn't complain if they decided to take it down a notch, though. Snaps with the people they presumably actually dated. Maybe a statement to the press. But Scorpius would just laugh in that disarming way he had from years of PR witches' work to smooth out the awkward. We're just mates. And then turn around and he would have Jamie on his lap, handsy as only two boys living out of suitcases and Quidditch locker rooms could be. They were up in each other's pockets so long now, it was impossible to think of one without the other. The press had a name for that: Scames.
@faeheyjesper wrote The Boyfriend Look™ [James Sirius/Teddy | General] General reviews for Teddy’s taste in clothes include: a sartorial travesty (Albus Potter), absolutely painful (Lily Potter), very 80s (Hugo Granger-Weasley). James just sees Teddy.
@mykesprit wrote Love and Letters [Albus Severus/Scorpius | Teen] A series of letters between Unspeakable Scorpius Malfoy and Professor Albus Potter.
@cassiaratheslytherpuff wrote Rarely Pure and Never Simple [James Sirius/Teddy | Explicit] James really enjoys his life. He likes sharing a flat with his best mate, Teddy. He likes being work-partners with said best mate. He likes going out at the weekends and shagging random girls. At least, that’s what he tells people. The truth isn’t that simple, and when James accidentally manages to get hit by a curse that makes him unable to lie he learns that hiding the fact that he’s completely and utterly arse over tit in love with Teddy is more complicated than expected. 
@rose-grangerweasleyisbae wrote I Have To Tell You Something [Lily Luna Gen | General] Lily used to love family dinners until divorce, Quidditch contracts and one too many arguments ruined the atmosphere. Now that things were finally getting better, she's forced to bring her own problems to the table. Because even her tough-woman act isn't strong enough to hide the demons in her mind anymore. 
@nifflers-n-nargles wrote Everything He Ever Wanted [James Sirius/Teddy | Teen] James has had a lot of favorite things in his life...or has he?
torino10154 wrote Out of Hand [Albus Severus/Harry | Explicit] Al gets into constant trouble at school and Harry is at his wit's end. Maybe a firm hand will set him right.
@shiftylinguini wrote Hallo Spaceboy [James Sirius/Teddy | Teen] “If this mirror could talk,” James remembers declaring, already one drink down and trying to tidy up his ridiculous costume eyeliner, “it would say we look bloody amazing.” Teddy’s arm was warm when he wrapped it around James’s shoulder, pulling him closer. “We always do, love.” Teddy tugged on a long curl of James’s hair before tucking it behind his ear, then smoothing the whole lot of it back. “We’re the fittest blokes at the party, us.” James’d had to give up on the eyeliner after that; he was grinning too hard, flushed and happy and basking in Teddy’s attention (fit blokes, we’re fit blokes, that’s us), and he couldn't bloody stop.
@huggingscorbus wrote the salacious ideas of peculiar boys [Albus Severus/Scorpius | Explicit] Albus and Scorpius have never been lacking on the idea front, but this time, rather than trying to change time and consequentially resurrecting a great darkness and eternal gloom, they've decided to try out something a little more... sexually experimental. alternatively titled: fellas, is it gay to jerk off your best friend?
@mindabbles wrote The Frame [James Sirius/Sirius| Explicit] What are the ethical complications of falling for a person you're named after? How about the logistical complications of falling for someone who shouldn’t be alive? James would rather, he finds, not look too closely at either, not when Sirius makes him forget anyone else exists.
87 notes · View notes
displacedprincess · 6 years ago
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come one come all to this tragic affair
@wizardroyale
Word count: 3200
Triggers: inects, allergic reaction, health anxiety, potential death implied
ELENA
 So it’d been a few weeks since...the incident. The one where Elena kissed Mateo and he’d rejected her— or, rather rejected himself for her. It hurt her, a lot.
 She’d cried to Goliath about it afterward. He sat there hugging her and silently patting her hair while she raged about what a stupid boy he was.
 That much was true, still, but at least they were...somewhat talking again, her and Mateo. It was awkward between them, yet again, but after that nice letter he wrote to her, she’d softened up. Her icy rage melted leaving only a mix of affection and frustration in its place. And that, they could work with.
 “You could’ve just stayed in,” Elena said. “But thanks for agreeing to come on my walk with me. I feel like a caged bird half the time in that apartment.”
 MATEO
 “Mmm…” Mateo simply smiled quietly and hummed a little in acknowledgement as they walked. The truth was he had nearly been overcome with relief when Elena has asked him to join her for a walk. Things between them had been––tense. To say the least. And the past weeks had been nonstop worry and anxiety that he had broken their friendship beyond repair.
 The weeks had also been filled with doubt and second guessing. The more he tried to reconcile what his choice had done to both Elena and himself, the weaker the argument seemed. He still wasn't convinced that he was a good choice for her, buuuuut...he also wasn't sure that had been his call to make.
 For now, however, a simple walk in the park was a great place to start rebuilding their friendship—yet again.
 “I really don't mind,” he shrugged, “It's a beautiful evening and if I'm being honest, I feel the same way a lot these days.”
 ELENA
 “You don’t have six bodyguards and a shark mermaid insisting you keep your unstructured time indoors.” Elena pointed out. “Why don’t you get out more alone?”
 “You don’t have to live in a chicken coop because I do.”
 She was careful to keep her hand from brushing against Mateo’s.
 MATEO
 Mateo's face warmed at her question. It was a simple question, really, but his answer was—complicated. Ok, maybe not that complicated. Just—silly. On the bright side, his months of self-imposed isolation had given him a lot of time for self introspection. However, as the months passed, the more frustrated he became with himself and his recent choices. Some more than others.
 “Oh, you know—“ he hedged. Mateo rubbed the back of his neck and chuckled uncomfortably. “You have bodyguards making you feel like you’re in prison and I have my own mind.”
 Exhaling a large breath, he continued, “I—I guess the thought of going out in public after—everything was just too much. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it?”
 ELENA
 “No it doesn’t.” Elena said quietly.
 She knew exactly what that was like. Maybe she’d never been accused of murder, but, well. She’d absolutely been too overwhelmed to go out in public before.
 Too depressed, actually. But close enough.
 “After my parents died, cameras were always being shoved in my face. Which was nothing new in itself but it felt so invasive. Hours after I heard they were killed, I had to address the country as their de jure head of state and government. I didn’t feel comfortable really being out of the palace until— oh.” Elena laughed bitterly. “A few months before the coup.”
 “Mateo, you really need to shut me up when I go on woe is me tangents about my parents. I didn’t ask you to walk with me to depress you. This is to cheer us both up.”
 She gestured around them. “It’s a sunny afternoon! We’re going to enjoy it.”
 MATEO
 Tell her to stop talking? Right.
 “You know that will never happen,” Mateo replied with a small chuckle, “Anyways, I’m pretty sure that’s one of my official best friend duties—listening when you need me to. It doesn’t matter if it’s happy or sad. I mean, of course I want you to be happy!” he added quickly, “But—I don’t want to you to pretend you’re something you’re not either.”
 The truth was that he remembered those days all too well. Of course she hadn’t wanted to be out in public! She had been a shell of her former self for a long time, barely hanging on by a thread. Mateo was just thankful he had been able to help her in small ways, though he always wished he could do more.
 Like now, he wanted to reach out and touch her the way he used to years ago when everything was simple between them—touching her shoulder, taking her hand, even holding her while she slept was nothing more than a simple comfort back then.
 But nothing between them was simple anymore and they were just now recovering from the last time he’d pretended things were, so he shoved his hands in his pockets instead.
 “Besides, nothing you could say would ever depress me, you know that, right?” he flashed a crooked smile, “I always want to know what you are thinking.”
 ELENA
 She was much more observant than people gave her credit for. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him shove his hands in his pockets. It was a move that both helped and hurt. It hurt he didn’t move to touch her, but it also helped that he had to force himself not to.
 It meant they both would’ve preferred he touch her, didn’t it?
 “What if what’s on my mind is something depressing, querido?” Elena countered, smirking at him. “Gotcha there, don’t I?” With a far too cheery grin, she skipped ahead of him a few feet to Messi-kick a pinecone. Really, her football talents were wasted on her being royalty.
She stood still to let Mateo catch up before falling back in step with him.
 “Anyway. My mind has been far too depressing lately. I asked you out with me to make it the opposite.” A beat. “We should play a game!”
 Here, the cheery grin returned, but it wasn’t out of place this time. “We knew everything about each other, so two truths and lie or never have I ever are both out. So that leaves us with Would You Rather, Word Association, or Existential Rock, Paper, Scissors.”
 MATEO
 What Elena didn't understand—had never understood, really—was that shouldering her burdens alongside her was far from depressing. No, Mateo found a strange sense of joy in knowing that he was doing something to take care of her needs.
 But he certainly wasn't going to argue the point, it would just annoy her. And that was the last thing that he wanted. Especially when she was trying so hard to lift her own spirits—to the point of putting on a false smile. If she needed to be cheered up, then that's what he would do.
 Mateo smiled, his heart fluttering when she smirked at him and skipped playfully ahead, kicking at the pinecone like a star football player. He shook his head, his lips pursed as he held back his own laughter at her antics.
 When he caught up to her, he was nearly overwhelmed by the force of her smile. A real smile. God, she was so beautiful. And he was such a sap. He knew it. And he didn't care.
 It was a good thing his hands were still firmly in his pockets.
 “Sure, ok Elena,” he shrugged. “Hmmm…” he considered a moment before coming to a decision, “how about Would You Rather? You can go first.”
 ELENA
 Elena turned to Mateo with a truly sinister grin, complete with an evil finger pyramid of villainy. Oh, Mateo. Sweet, naive, trusting Mateo. Like she was going to let him play this game without forcing some really awful choices on him.
 Fortunately, it was only a harmless conversation game.
 “Excellent. I’ll start vanilla. Would you rather...always be stuck in traffic, or always have a slow internet connection?”
 MATEO
 Mateo wasn't sure if he should be worried or slightly turned on by the look Elena turned on him. That was the look she had when she was up to no good and things could go one of two ways for him. Bad or—well, considering that they were in a very public place and weren't currently...you know...It most likely meant he was in a world of trouble.
 Clearing his throat, he pushed the inappropriate thoughts aside, hoping his too warm face hadn't given him away. He smiled and said, “Hmm...that's tough. I suppose I'd rather be stuck in traffic because if I had to I could just get out and walk. But if my internet sucked—” he put his hand to his forehead in a mock dramatic pose, “Good bye YouTube! And we all know that would be a travesty.”
 He thought a moment, trying to come up with a good question. Oh! He had a good one. He looked over at her, grinning crookedly, “Ok, your royal highness, I've got a hard one for you,” he began, bumping her playfully with his shoulder as his eyes sparked  with humor, “Would you rather lose the ability to read or the ability to speak?”
 ELENA
 Elena let out a truly offended gasp at Mateo’s challenge and narrowed her eyes at him. Rude, honestly. He knew how much of a language nerd she was! That was like asking her mother to choose which child was her favorite!
 “First of all, how dare you. Second of all, to speak, absolutely! Literacy is sooooo important. I’d rather be a mute that could read and write than someone who can speak but not read or express my thoughts in writing.”
 Okay, so maybe that wasn’t so hard to answer. Awful to think about, but the choice was simple.
 “Anyway, I always like the written versions of my addresses to Avalor better. So, yeah, speaking for sure.” Elena loosely bobbed her head from side to side as she considered her next question. How evil did she want to be?
 Trick question. In the game of Would You Rather, the answer was always excessively. “Would you rather lose all the memories you’ve gained in the past year, or lose any money you’ve ever earned?”
 MATEO
 He couldn't help but laugh at her outrage. Half of the fun of this game was in the reactions. And Elena was nothing if not passionate about literally everything.
 And just as quickly as the laughter came, his throat tightened and it was gone. Oh. He blinked. Actually the answer to that question was ridiculously easy. There was no question really. The last year's worth of memories? God, there were so many that he treasured above any object money could buy. Sure, there were some painful, horrifying memories there, but he wouldn't want to give up a single one of the memories he'd created with Elena even if it meant never having a single penny to his name.
 “I—I'd keep the memories, definitely,” he said simply, his voice thick with emotion, though he tried to act natural.
 With the next question that popped into his head, he wondered if maybe he should try to steer the game back to fun and playful. But. Mateo was never known for his great choices, so he said, “Ok, would you rather,” he took a deep breath and looked straight ahead, “live with a broken heart or live without love?”
 ELENA
 At his answer, Elena felt the acid rise in her throat, as it always did when she got a new wave of self-loathing. See, she knew she was selfish and fucked up. Elena would have chosen to forget. If she could forget being in love with Mateo, she could forget the pain she still woke up to every day.
 Elena was always dramatic, but took a stone cold bitch page from her mother’s book. She hated what her breakup with Mateo had made her become.
 Mateo’s turn was uncharacteristically devious, and Elena would’ve congratulated him if it weren’t so laden with hidden questions. He wasn’t going to like her answer.
 “I’d rather live without having loved, to be honest.” The princess answered, heaving a sad sigh as she looked up to the partly cloudy sky. “There are no lessons to be learned from a broken heart other than that it just hurts. I’d be stupid to choose heartbreak, ha.”
 “Would you rather have thought bubbles appear above your head for everyone to see or everyone you know has access to your search history?” Elena then asked, turning her head to face him with a cheery little grin, as if she didn’t just say what she’d just said.
 MATEO
 Mateo froze in his tracks with a gasp. If she wanted to hurt him, he wished she would have slapped him or something, it would have hurt less.
 His mind was racing as fast as his heart. Somehow, while he knew she was hurting, he thought—hoped—it would fade into a distant dream in time. A fleeting memory of a lost love. A small ache compared to the precious moments they'd shared. Well, he hoped that for her. He knew better than to think he would ever get over Elena. But this wasn't about him. She was stronger than him. Better than him.
 She would give up everything they'd had together to get away from the pain? He'd hurt her that badly in his attempt to protect her? That she'd rather never have known his love than live with the memory of it? God, how could he have been so stupid?
 Enough. He couldn't do this anymore.
 “Elena. Wait,” he choked out, taking her hand and tugging her back to him. “Please, wait. I—” his eyes stung but he looked resolutely into her eyes, “There's something I have to tell you—”
 He paused, momentarily distracted by a loud buzzing near his ear.
 ELENA
 Elena was suddenly jerked backward and spun around to face Mateo. He hadn’t been this forceful with her since demanding she go up the fire escape ladder first during the zombie apocalypse 2k18. Her mouth hung open in shock at his random boldness, and she stood there, blinking. What was so urgent? Probably nothing she actually wanted to hear. If it wasn’t a declaration of his undying love that ended with a kiss, she didn’t need to hear it.
 To diffuse the tension in her own body, she wriggled her hand away from his with a musical laugh tainted with shaky nerves.
 “Ay, Mateito. If you’re going to choose now to tell me you’ve been gay all along-” there was a faint buzzing near her ear, which Elena assumed to be a fly. After a beat, it hadn’t gone away. She scowled and swatted at it, with a hissed “Get fucked, eh?”
 She turned her focus back to Mateo. “I’m sorry, querido. What were you s- ow!” a sharp pain in her arm sent her gaze that direction.
 And she was sure she went white as a sheet when she realized what the source of the buzzing must have actually been.
 MATEO
 Wait. What? He stared at her, mouth open in disbelief. After months of regret. Of barely managing to keep his hands to himself. Of dreaming about her. Of seeing reminders of her everywhere he looked—
 “No! That's not what I—” he froze as she swatted the air near her head. His eyes locked onto the buzzing insect and he felt like everything had suddenly devolved into slow motion. That was a wasp. And wasps were bad for Elena. Very very bad.
 “Elena, no!” He cried out as she swatted at the insect again. Jumping forward, he tried to swat the creature away from her, attempting to direct its attention to him. But he was too late. Fear filled him as the wasp nimbly dodged her fingers and his clumsy swats and swooped in, hitting its target. Elena's arm.
 His eyes flicking to Elena's face, he felt terror rising up mirroring her own as she realized what had just happened. Just as her knees gave out he caught her, lowering them both carefully to the ground.
 His head was spinning as she gasped for breath, the venom working its way through her body faster than he'd imagined possible. Every second, her breaths became more labored and her skin more red and splotchy.
 Though he was nearly overcome with terror for her safety, he knew what needed to happen. He couldn't lose her. Not like this. Not ever. He had to do something.
 “I'm here, mi amor. You're going to be ok,” he murmured in what he hoped was a soothing voice, smoothing her hair away from her face.
 She'd made enough bad jokes over the years about being “equipped to handle every obstacle death sends my way with this ultra powerful epipen” that he knew where she kept it and how to use it. So with trembling hands, he dug through her purse, through zippered pocket after zippered pocket.
 “How many zippers can one bag have?” he muttered, frustrated that he had not found it yet. Finally! In an inner pocket of her purse, he found the slim box that he hoped would save her life. Tearing it open, he uncapped the pen, shuddering involuntarily at the needle. He did not care much for needles.
 It was a mark of how serious the situation was that he slid her skirt up to reveal her bare thigh beneath without so much as a second’s hesitation. Adjusting his grip on the pen, he found his mark and tensed, gritting his teeth as he jabbed the needle through her skin, releasing the antidote into her bloodstream.
 And he waited with bated breath, whispering comforting words to her as he prayed he'd been fast enough. Hoping beyond hope that she was going to be ok.
 “Elena?” he asked tentatively as her breathing quieted a bit, “Are you—ok? How can I help?”
 ELENA
 The first time Elena had been stung by a wasp, she was five years old. She’d been playing with Gabe in the palace gardens when she’d disturbed a wasps’ nest, and it wasn’t until someone heard Gabe scream because Elena wasn’t breathing that her allergy to wasp stings was discovered.
 Elena couldn’t sleep for a few weeks after. All she could think about when she got sleepy was how hard she tried to stay awake in the gardens that day, and how she just couldn’t.
 The second time, she was eleven years old, and Goliath had been quick enough with the epipen to prevent the worst while they waited for transport to the hospital. She didn’t lose consciousness that time; maybe. Elena didn’t remember anything clearly past clinging to Goliath and crying for her mother and father, and she only had a vague recollection of flashing lights, being flat on her back, and unfamiliar voices.
 Here, wasn’t much different. There was the realization that she was probably going to die. There was Mateo. Mi amor. There was Mateo. Zippers. There was Mateo. There was Mateo. Mateo. Mateo. Mateo. Mateo...
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ekebolou · 6 years ago
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New Book Prelude: The Armistice
Okay, I said I would create another blog for this, but I didn’t.  This is sort of a free-story lead in for New Book.  I’ve posted it before.  It’ll be in several parts.  I’m going to post the first chapter of New Book after I get done with this.  Maybe posting will force me to come up with a title.  You may have seen this before, since I’ve posted it before, but the first chapter should be new, I think...
Be warned: Naughty language ahead.  Link to the next part at the bottom of the post.
Anyway, here goes:
The Armistice: Part One
“I will tell you the great secret that so escapes you, muj – a soldier’s life is very simple.”
Each swept their own heavy flap of fabric back to enter the tent, but it was Boera who pushed to the front first – and truly pushed, for a good wager brought a good gathering.  Through a crowd made twice as thick by layers of armor and twice as loud by game, he trailed his dark company by the inexorable and – for his companion – unfortunately irresistible bond of friendship in vast parties. 
“This is what troubles your life – you don’t realize this.”
As they had settled into the front, a hand was instantly flat before him – whose hand, what kind of hand, how did it matter?  Gamely, Boera fished in the purse at his belt and took out few bits, pointing to his chosen contender to place his bet.  It was a fine contender, its shell shiny, its squeaking high and impassioned, and even his sour friend nodded his approval.  “It is only this: Do as you’re told!  And when nobody is telling you to do anything–”
He knelt and gestured down at the elaborately constructed dirt-track circus.  “’Ta! Rev, then you do as you like.”
The rat racers were ready to unleash their steeds; some even had intricately woven leashes, made from filched silver thread and scrounged bits of metal.  These were nothing compared to the finely worked hats perched delicately, even jauntily, between their tiny rodent ears.  One had wings, to match those fixed to the twine holding its turtle shell on! Boera repeated his enthusiastic gesture as the race began, bald tails scraping the ground as the rats scampered down the track.
“No, Boera,” Rev said.
Boera’s enthusiastic gesture wilted.  Rev stepped over his shoulder and walked to the edge of the track.
“I like the little hats, for instance,” Boera tried.  “That’s new.”
“Life is complicated when it’s short.”
“And there is Rev, our shining bright dawn,” Boera rose and stepped away from the crowd. 
“I am,” Rev said, grinning.
Over the objections of seven nations worth of soldiers, Rev took a hunk of cheese from his pocket and tempted one of the competitors away from its circuit around the circus so he could coo and scratch its chin.  The Sathian among the crowd threw their arms up, much as Boera had, while their Erro allies sighed.  The Baathians immediately tried to renegotiate the odds, Sivery as quickly trying to block them.  Felanese, Sulerian, and Tarkesh soldiers all shouted for their race to continue despite this interruption.  The tent, quite beyond the cacophony of rats, filled with the chittering, sliding, bellowing sound of a half-dozen languages mixing in a way that had no meaning to anyone, yet was understood.
Get the fuck out of the way, so we can lose money reasonably!
Shrugging, Rev let the rat down and stood, nodding his head for Boera to follow or not as was his wont.  Boera rolled his eyes, aggrieved at this faithless turn – of course it was against his wishes, but he would follow.
Rev kept his grin; his ears felt empty – nothing jangled, tugged, or rang – but that was what four years’ campaign would do to a man.  Each and every Sivernisat had gone back to their tent and carefully and with much thought removed the heavy bangles piercing their ears and set them aside. It was a grave and serious ritual, completed in a moment, which meant they could commence the labors of peace instead of shouldering the burdens of war. 
They could, for example, construct tiny hats for racing rats, and set odds using an elaborate system of tortoise shells for handicaps.  Or, as Boera would have pointed out, fuck an innumerable host of their former allies and enemies alike.
The labors of peace varied from Sivery to Sivery, Sivernisat and Sivereponet; the earrings were mostly the same.
They shouldered their way out of the tent, through a hole that probably shouldn’t have been in the tent wall.  Of course Boera would follow.  Boera had been his tentmate for the last eight months, since the others had died.
“All of the handicaps will have to be recalculated,” Rev cried, throwing his own hands up.
“Yes,” Borea said, leaning away as they walked, leading despite his implied intention to follow, “you’ve weighted that one with cheese.”
“That’s all it was fit for.”  Ren turned, roughly guessing his next trajectory and angling it to agree with Boera’s.  “Weighting rats.”
“And soldiers,” Boera agreed.
In truth, the cheese was the best cheese they’d had in nearly a year. It was certainly better than starving. Certainly better to have a companion.   Certainly better than the cold. But it was the soldier’s prerogative to complain, and they were still soldiers, if only for as long as the celebration.
As if to deny the cold of their memory, the night was warm, weather neutral as the armistice that gathered them here.  Loud, foreign insects did their best to drown out the celebrating ‘honor guards’ and ‘escorts’ and ‘name-your-dynasty’s-ruler’s vaunted immortals’ – the mighty survivors.  The moon was full and pendulous; the stars glittered under the few faintest wisps of gray-black cloud.  Warm as it was, Boera and Rev passed by numerous bonfires filling the camp, because, so it was: fires and festivals and soldiers and the end of war – warm or not: big, big fires. 
“Rats like soldiers,” Boera said, leaning in close, well aware the conversation had only begun to tiptoe around the actual subject.
“Rats,” Rev replied, “are so much more noble.”
“You were stood up.”
“Stood up!”  Rev threw his hands up, identical to a thwarted Sathian gambler.  Bringing them down, he seized an errant tall stalk of the local grass, not yet beaten down by the young festival, and stuck it in his teeth.
“Stood up,” Boera clucked.
“Almost stood up,” Rev admitted.
Boera nodded sagely.
“Eh...” Rev elaborated.
Boera waited.  A small troop of naked soldiers scampered by, no doubt aiming for the river nearby, by their trajectory going to miss it by some twenty yards.  Either that, or they really wanted to run through the tent that several others had set up to cover a very somber discussion of the philosophy of war and a rousing game of dice.  The chase to the river would be fantastic.
“It just didn’t last very long,” Rev said, tossing down his piece of grass. 
“How could it!”  Boera gestured out at the madness around them.  “How could it!” he repeated, gesturing with a remarkable lack of ambiguity at Rev.
This was not a compliment, but rather a statement of stale disbelief. As this was not the first day of the festival, nor the first day of their tentmate-ship, the conversation had been had long before.
“It’s been so long,” Boera snagged his own piece of grass, whipping Rev in the chest with it before sticking it in his teeth, “since you have let someone fully enjoy your... physique, you have become an infernal expert in the... extraneous arts.”  His gesture was amply illustrative.
“Don’t stress your Sivereponet tongue, Boera, you’ll want to use it later – and who calls those extraneous arts?”  Rev returned with an illustrative gesture of his own.
“Anyone who just wants a simple fuck!” Boera shouted, calling the attention of some thirty reveling soldiers around them.  They focused like hawks, howled like wolves – a few Felanese, by their uniforms, went so far as to queue up.  Rev raised his brows, then his shoulders, then had to glower and close his posture off with an elaborately undiplomatic line of Felanese (or – all the words he knew) to dissuade them. 
“You’d think we’d learned better than to volunteer,” Rev muttered.
“Eh,” Boera shrugged, “for war.  For fucking, why–” and he performed a little triple-step, ending in an elaborate presentation of himself that received scattered applause, “–begin the line here.”
Boera took his bows, and they continued their walk, now directed by his impeccable sense of ‘finding something to do.’  “You are a complex fuck.  You are the Alta-puzzle of fucks.  Scholars for generations will talk about what it takes to actually unlock to combination to your pants.  Actually – no, you’ll just test a man until he spends himself before he can touch you. And that means you’re not a puzzle at all, you’re actually just a choosy bastard.”
They’d had this conversation before.  They paced out its rhythms and responses as they walked, encased in the total silence of uncrowded merrymakers.  Until they got to the important part; call and response.
“You could choose me.”
Rev shook his head.  “The bed moves for lovers, but a wise men stakes down his tent.”
“It’s a fool’s adage, I tell you,” Boera groaned.  “A travesty to believe tentmates should not be lovers.”
“You’ve not yet broken it, and you’ve all the cause in the world.” He lifted a finger to correct himself. “All the character in the world.”
“With but your consent I would.”
Rev gave him a sideways look.  They walked in silence.  Relative silence.  There was a great deal of singing.
“Boera,” Rev said, and waited for his friend’s sly and eager glance. “That is a terrible notion.”
“Yist,” Boera chirped.  “But I, my dear, would consider it a personal achievement to be able to hold out against your extraneous enticements.  How long is the average?  Nevermind – to know would dissolve my dreams – how do you resist?”
Rev laughed, and kept his secrets as Boera entertained him with a series of exceedingly crude gestures.  This ended in another companionable silence while Rev pretended not to notice how Boera nudged, bumped, and directed him with false fronts of fleeting interest in yet-further-away displays of debauchery. It was no issue, until Rev noticed a decided turn in the tone of the slurred singing, a slight change in the way the camp sprawled around them, a different mixing of the colors of fabrics.
“Boera.”
“Mu’ vlastni?”
“Where are we going?”
Responding with only a look, Boera quickened his pace, dragging Rev behind yet again.  After a moment it became clear enough that Boera intended to go into a long tent bedecked with wildly colored flags.  That was part of the strangeness – the way the tents stretched to great lengths rather than peaking like the Erro or draping like the Felanese.
“This is the Baath camp,” Rev hissed.
“So you noticed?”
But Boera didn’t slow down, leaving Rev with little recourse beyond sulking silently in step behind him. 
“What are we doing here?”
“What, you think they’ll kidnap you in the middle of the armistice signing?”  Boera was slightly more delicate with his tone; he made sure to laugh.
“I think we were better off with the rats.”
“You mean back by the Sivereponet?”
“Them and the small rodents in shells.”
Letting himself be mocked was Boera’s concession, and he rounded it off with a laugh and an arm over Rev’s shoulder, bearing him down to have his ear tweaked as if Boera were an extra-heavy earring.  He did not, however, then let Rev go.
Rev’s incredulous and confused expression stood in for many words.
Wordless stammering was also the bones of an old conversation: Boera couldn’t possibly have brought Rev down here for a fight.  Though a soldier sick of war, as all soldiers always were, if they were sane, he would admit he picked fights because he enjoyed it.  The very notion disgusted Boera.  Like a spouse with a drinking habit, Rev had come to slinking about when he went abroad for trouble. 
This time, Rev refused to help as they barged into the tent and got a face full of canvas for his trouble.  Blinking back the light from what might have been the most furious bonfire of them all, he breathed the heavy, sweet scent of Baathian fruit-and-honey wines, as well as fresh timber and old sweat.  Several tables and benches pushed together created a single long table the length of the tent, blocking them from the impressive pit and chimney (those surely weren’t stone bricks – even Baathians weren’t so foolish as to have hauled stones to a treaty camp) over the bonfire, long and low as it could be made while still being ferocious. 
He freed himself from Boera’s arm and fixed his tentmate with a look of grave disapproval. 
“So, I have followed you here, Boera.  What business could even you have among Baathians?”
“Well, muj, the people I know, you know I know, and I must know at least a few Baathians...”
“Bullshit,” Rev said.
Boera looked mortally offended.  “You are a man of pressing needs, o tentmate, and I only seek to relieve you of them.”
Rev narrowed his eyes, pulling his head back in a gesture of suspicion that would have been much more effective if accompanied with the slow jangle of earrings.  “You didn’t bring me here for a fi–,”
Boera’s hand came up so fast, Rev thought he was going to be punched, but instead, he pressed soft fingers to Rev’s lips.  He only removed them after a tedious spate of muttering what Rev assumed must be highly sacrilegious prayers, as Boera believed in no gods.
Boera took a deep breath.  Seeing impatience still writ large on Rev’s face, he made a weighing gesture with his hands and started peering about. 
“There’s a man here I want you to meet.”
“I don’t want to meet any Baathians–” but before Rev had finished, Boera seized his elbow and dragged him towards a gap in the long benches. Whatever comforting noises Boera was making to try to ease the scowl on Rev’s face were soon lost in the raucous conversations of the soldiery at the tables.  Both of them had to skip lightly aside to avoid a man launched bodily over the back bench by a Sathian woman who’d mounted the table to plant her foot in his chest.  She paused to secure her footing, bare chest shining with sweat and hair backlit by the fire such that she seemed to embody the night itself, imbedded with stars, before she stomped down on the bench to step over her foe and continue a leisurely stroll towards the hogsheads. 
“Not that man, I hope,” Rev said.
“Ah, no,” Boera said, but as the soldier next to him slipped head-first backwards off the bench, he used the chance to throw Rev down in a the space just cleared.  Before he could protest, Boera slapped him on the shoulders, and made fading excuses as he disappeared after something for them to drink.
Rev refused to have anything to do with this.  He would demonstrate his displeasure with a sullen silence, completely useless as Boera wasn’t here to be bothered by it.  He adjusted his seat on the bench, considered eating a bit of cheese from his pocket, remembered he’d given most of it to the rat, renewed his scowl.
He didn’t like Baathians.  He would admit that Baathians in general had a pleasant aversion to shirts – or maybe that was just because they seemed to be mostly celebrating with Saathians, who saw shirts as a sign of weakness.  Maybe Baathians did, too, though everybody – Saathians included – wore something into battle.  He wouldn’t know, not liking Baathians one bit, and certainly not enough to have learned any of their cultural mores.  He demonstrated his distaste by not participating in them, which was completely useless because it amounted to sitting there doing nothing.
His scowl deepened when he realized just how unoccupied Boera had left him.  No one tried to speak to him, too busy being Baathian, which was simultaneously offensive and uninteresting.  He, of course, couldn’t understand Baathian, so he couldn’t even sneer derisively at the right moments to insult people who were speaking, no doubt of reprehensible Baathian things. 
He did really like the Baathian aversion to shirts.  Not being able – or, rather, unwilling at least while Boera was waiting upon him – to pick a fight, and so cruelly forced to idleness, he could do nothing but watch people parade past, and kick away the soldier trying to take her seat back when he woke up.  The other Baathians seemed to approve of this, as the woman next to him issued something that was either a congratulatory cheer or the final stages of a wasting disease, and slapped him on the back.  This did not lead to fight, but rather, due to his morally-maintained silence, to more watching people parade past.  He was rather more relaxed when Boera returned. 
“I see no man,” Rev said, peering around Boera and raising his hands.
Boera knocked him in the forehead with one of the mugs he was holding and threw a leg over the bench.  “You see your favorite man.”
“I see a man who abandoned me amongst savages.”
“And who brought you delicious Baathian wine, gained at great personal risk from the horde of savages by the barrels, without you so much as even having to move or attempt to summon to your tongue enough Baathian to order it.”
Rev checked his hair for spilled wine, and sipped what was obviously meant as a libation of appeasement.
“Who do you see?”  Boera grinned at him.
“I see... very nearly my favorite man,” Rev replied.  He glowered at the Baathians around them.  “If only he kept better company.”
“I could not agree more,” Boera grumbled.  Before Rev could grasp this reversal, Boera had turned and said something witty enough in Baathian to get his own slap on the back, not that Rev was jealous.
The Baathian wine was good enough – and alcoholic enough – that Rev fell easily into the business of getting drunk.  Decently drunk, that is; not nearly sober, but just drunk enough to ensure he wouldn’t cause someone to come over the table at them.  Also not drunk enough to try to speak to any Baathians, no matter what language they chose, so the burden fell to Boera, who was able to slide into the conversation smooth a snake in a mail suit. 
Boera, in turn, felt far more comfortable when he finally noticed Rev falling into a pleasant and languid silence beside him, almost half as drunk as he needed to be to not start any fights at all.  In fact, for the past few minutes of mindless, half-Sivery, quarter-Felanese, quarter-mimed conversation, Rev had paid no attention at all, no doubt due to some ridiculous notion he was somehow being both superior and insulting.  So Boera let his own attention wander – he let his smile grow warm, let his pose grow alluring, let his current company knowingly begin a grinning departure and smiled broadly as decidedly different sort of company approached.
Boera sampled and rejected a few, who did not take it poorly.  After all, the armistice signing was a veritable open feast, full of soldiers happy to no longer be dying, and eager to express their zeal of life by wasting copious amounts of its generative fluids. 
But finally, a very smooth-looking Baathian, sadly shirted, slid onto the bench beside Boera.  They ran through a few different greetings in sundry languages until it turned out the Baathian spoke decent Sivery.  He passed a number of tests Boera lobbed his way in the form of gratuitous insults, ridiculous challenges, and pointless diversions, proving he could survive a conversation with Rev.  In fact, Boera dared even believe he might thrive.  Then, with his most practiced lascivious and welcoming smile, Boera turned, seized Rev’s lapel, and used shunting him into the Baathian’s lap as a means of levering himself off the bench. 
“Let me get us drinks,” Boera said, then turned his grin to Rev. “Stesti!”
“Stesti-fuck!  Boera!” but Rev called to a hand waving farewell over the passing walls of Baathian soldiers.
“That went poorly.  Is that your friend?” the Baathian asked.
“No.”  Rev seized his flagon – full, he noticed, which it hadn’t been a second ago but somehow Boera must have dumped his in before he disappeared, which meant Rev now had a disgusting mix of peachy-berry wine Boera had been drinking and the salty-bloody wine he’d been drinking.
“You’re the only Siver here,” the Baathian pointed out.  “I think.”
“That Eponet, horse-thieving scum is not my countryman,” Rev growled.  In his furor he took a drink of the wine, which was worth spitting on the table. 
The Baathian laughed.  “Baathian wine doesn’t agree with you?”
“Nothing Baathian agrees with me,” Rev growled, topping his threat off with a grin. 
“I agree with you,” the Baathian said.  When Rev gave him a skeptical look, he half-stood to reach over and sniff the wine in Rev’s cup.  “That would taste terrible.  Why did you mix them?”
Pulling back, Rev slopped wine up his sleeve and cursed.  “You know I didn’t, you fool.”
“Better a fool than a lush,” the Baathian said, still sporting a small smile, perfectly undisturbed.
Rev was getting a good look at that smile because the Baathian hadn’t moved back.  Rev would have, of course, leaned forward so to follow up on his threatening tone, but the Baathian had moved in for him.  It didn’t feel properly threatening that he only to had to lean forward an inch or so to put himself in biting distance of the Baathian’s face, but he did it anyway. 
“Better anything than a slaver.”
The Baathian’s expression didn’t waver.  That, Rev had to admit, was the teeniest bit admirable.
“We agree again,” he said.  This close to his face, Rev noticed that he said it with delightfully curved lips. 
The Baathian’s hand was moving somewhere over to Rev’s right, but Rev wouldn’t let himself look; it’d break his intimidating stare. 
He needn’t have worried.  The Baathian broke first, as he brought Rev’s cup up to his lips, and glanced down at the liquid before turning – only just enough to sip. 
His expression folded instantly into disgust, and he pushed away, laughing.  “Dear God, that’s disgusting, Siver.”
“Yes!”  Boera said, appearing from behind with three newly filled cups.  He intervened between them only long enough to set the cups down, then forcefully and with several intrusive nudges forced Rev over on the bench so he’d be next to the Baathian.  Actually ‘next to’ didn’t cover it, as Boera pushed so close Rev could barely move his arms with elbowing one or the other.  With unobliging eagerness, strangers pushed onto the space Boera cleared, leaving Rev with nowhere to run. 
Rev was all right with that, for the most part, as Boera had noticed. Boera reached across to push a cup towards the Baathian, whose confusion at Boera’s change in position didn’t go so far as to refuse a drink.  At the same time Boera blocked all of Rev’s attempts to use his right hand to grab his drink, forcing it into his left so he couldn’t elbow the Baathian without spilling on himself.  
“How are we going to get you properly drunk with that disgusting slop?” Boera said, with rather more teeth than were strictly friendly. 
“How am I responsible for that disgusting slop?” Rev hissed back.
“How can either of you get drunk on wine?”  the Baathian asked.
Both Sivery turned, and he shrugged at his cup.  “I always end up behind a tree first.”
After a moment’s shared silence, Boera threw his hands up.  “What a manly constitution!”
“What a crock of shit,” Rev said.
“What is going on here, exactly?” the Baathian asked.
“A pleasant evening among friends and allies,” Boera replied.
“Baathians are not friends,” Rev hissed.
“Nor is that Siver, according to you,” the Baathian said cooly, sipping his wine.  “Horse-thieving epo-something scum, wasn’t it?”
Rev’s head sunk between his shoulders; it had been a bit much, the horse-thieving part.  Through one squinted eye, he glanced at Boera, whose expression bore the marks of infinite hurt.  Reaching out, Boera slapped the back of Rev’s head so hard his forehead hit the table.
“I need someone to fuck my friend,” Boera said, while Rev whined like a kicked dog.
“That one?” the Baathian said, glancing at Rev.
Boera’s expression confirmed this, with the utmost reluctance. “Though if you pass him over, I’m not too proud to become a runner-up.”
“I am not to be passed over, for I’m not being offered – offering – and I wouldn’t be passed over, anyway, were I even on the table, which I’m not.”
“You’re on the bench,” the Baathian observed.
Having confused himself in his own retort – perhaps he’d already drunk too much – Rev chose to ignore him.  “I am not involved in this!  Boera, are you insane?  And if I were, it would certainly not be for a Baathian!”
“Muj – muj Povstalec,” Boera said, seizing Rev by the back of the collar.  Generally a peaceable fellow, it wasn’t so much that Boera was being so confrontational as it was that he’d called Rev by his real name – or as close as the Eponet got – that told Rev he was serious. 
“We are all so very aware of your opinion on Baathians.  How could you doubt me, think I would not take this into consideration?  Have you not courted every other breed of soldier around here?  Have you not found yourself disappointed at the end of each one? Are you not, infected by your madness, beginning to yearn to fight someone, you great idiot?  It is an armistice.  In the war, it was madness to try to get yourself killed when three other nations were offering to do it for you, but now it is insanity.  Tasteless insanity, too!  Even the great, be-medaled fucks and flouncing court fops have finally seen that we should not be fighting anymore.  The insanity that afflicts you is now out of place, even more so than usual.  Fuck someone, please, so that I don’t have to deal with your madness disturbing our nice and peaceful tent while the armistice is being signed, so I can fuck whomsoever I like without you deciding to fight them when they wake up.”
“That was once!”
“Three times!”
“Those other two were assholes!”
“Which I thoroughly enjoyed, and you had no right to treat any of them that way and you know it, you bastard!”
Releasing Rev’s collar, Boera gave him a great clap on the shoulder, pushing him towards the Baathian.  “Look – if you do not like him enough to fuck him, then you can fight him instead; either way you will finally be satisfied.  I would put my money on a little bit of both.”
“You know, I’m right here,” the Baathian said.  “Don’t I get a say?”
Both Sivery fixed him with stares like a pair of cats in the dark. 
“It’s an armistice!  Who’s being picky?” Boera said, ignoring Rev’s glare.  “Besides, don’t you like my friend?”
“I can’t say he’s taken a shine to me.  If I say I do, do I still have to fight him?”
“Well, I don’t like you,” Rev replied, “and I’ll fight you any time.”
“Well, if any time includes never, then we have a deal,” the Baathian said, sipping his wine.  “But there are quite a few others here who I would neither fight, nor fuck, and your friend here hasn’t exactly been charming me from my cup.”
“Ah,” said Boera, sweeping himself up from the bench to put a hand on each of their shoulders.  “But that’s because you haven’t heard the best part.”
“Is it not the fighting?”  Rev asked.
“Is it not you?”  The Baathian said, and smiled. 
The shine of that smile made him completely impervious to Rev’s burning glare.
“I like him,” Boera said.  “I’m reconsidering this plan.”
“Then I can fight him in the morning?” Rev asked.
“The best part,” Boera said, leaning heavily on the Baathian, “is that nobody gets to fuck him.”
“How is that the best part?”  The Baathian asked, genuinely confused.
“You have not heard my challenge,” Boera said, gesturing grandly.
“I am not a challenge,” Rev roared, and stood, and the standing was an issue, or at least standing so suddenly.  He didn’t quite fall, and didn’t quite trip, but did get an uncomfortable rush of blood, and the bench didn’t help him stand.  Boera caught his shoulders -
Boera grinned at him.  Rev’s eyes widened, and he shook his head, but Boera’s grin only widened.
Twisting his grip, he threw Rev’s unsettled weight into the Baathian’s lap. 
It was not for nothing that the Baathian had on that soldier’s uniform, for he dodged any untoward damage from Rev’s violent upheaval by throwing himself into the drinkers behind him.  Could not have been more than a second Rev spent in his lap.  In his fury at being so mishandled, Rev only managed to clip Boera’s temple with an open-handed slap, stinging his fingertips to a degree that nonetheless satisfied his vengeful impulses.  He ground the dirt under his heel as he turned to stalk out of the tent, a meaningless and rising cacophony of Baathian following him out.
Part Two
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adamcoled · 7 years ago
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onsra pt. 2 | kenny omega | adam cole
kenny omega x reader, adam cole x reader
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 pt. 1
Summary: Long distance relationships are tough, but maybe it’s not the distance that gets in the way.
A/N: I managed to get this up just a day after part one! I’m shocked, really. I also managed to end this how I wanted to in just two parts, meaning no third part, but I hope this makes up for that anyway! Per request, tagging: @daintymissdevitt
A night that had begun with my inability to sleep was ending just the same way; it’s quite funny how everything does, indeed, come full circle. Those walks were meant to rid my mind of troublesome thoughts, but this time, it only gave me even more to think about. All I’d known to do when my overthinking habit kicked in was shoot Adam a text, my metaphorical melatonin, and since that wasn’t exactly an option right now, I had to rely on my own abilities. At some point, my mind had run its course, finally giving into my desperate wish for sleep.
Quick, irate pounding on my door wasn’t my ideal way of waking up, but there was no way I could ignore the harshness of the knocks. Each second I let pass by only seemed to make the visitor louder, and with an annoyed groan, I hopped out of bed and yanked the door open, failing to even check the peephole.
“What?!” I exclaimed.
Right before me, still dressed in his outfit from the previous night’s events, was Adam, combing his hand through his hair as if he hadn’t just been banging on my door like a madman. “You never texted me when you actually got back,” he said simply. 
I shrugged, seeing as it had no importance now, anyway. Here I was, in my hotel room, safe and sound, albeit mildly irritated by the man in front of me. “Well, I’m fine. You can leave now.”
“Listen,” he growled, “You’re the one who said we can’t do this, not me. I offered to forget it, why can’t you do the same and let it go?" 
"Because, Adam!” I snapped, “You don’t get to confess something like that and get mad at me for being a little confused.”
The heavy rise and fall of his chest and shoulders told me he was getting fed up with the situation quickly; he’d intended to move past it as if nothing really did happen, hoping I would do the same and things would go back to normal. Now, Adam was no idiot; he had to have known that just wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. “Then what the hell do you suggest, Y/N?” he demanded, his tone increasing little by little. 
That was a question even I didn’t have the answer to, one so profound that the answer could potentially change everything we’d built up. “I don’t know,” I sighed, admitting defeat. But that didn’t mean his proposed solution was any better than my absolute uncertainty. I walked back over to my bed, leaving the door open as a silent invitation for Adam to follow me. He did, sitting down beside me and placing a comforting hand on my thigh. 
“Alright, then let’s talk. I’ll start- I meant it.” My eyebrows furrowed, not sure exactly what he was referring to. Well, I knew full well what he was referring to, I just pretended I didn’t. It was much easier to pretend these days. Now, he was tracing odd shapes and patterns on my thigh, half-smiling once I tensed beneath his touch.
He sighed, a wretched sound of frustration and sheer exhaustion. “I know I shouldn’t. Hell, Kenny’s my brother. But you’re just somethin’ else,” he shook his head, “You’re just so special. So talented, so smart, so confident…”
The space between us was getting smaller and smaller, until there was no possible way we could get any closer. His warm breath left the sensitive skin of my neck begging to be touched by the same lips I’d kissed only hours before.  
“So beautiful,” he finished, pushing me to the bed as his mouth was on mine once more. This time, it was all tongue and passion. There was no holding back, no second guessing. He’d released my lips for a brief second, pulling back to examine the look on my face. I nodded, and that was all it took. 
I wish I could say I felt some regret as he kissed all over my body and touched places that’d only been touched by Kenny for years, but all I felt was the overwhelming desire to be completely enraptured by the beautiful man above me.
The guilt settled in afterwards, but for all the wrong reasons. I only felt guilty that I didn’t feel guilty.
My mind had gone blank. Here I was, in bed with Adam by my side, completely unbeknownst to Kenny, who should have been on my mind the entire time. When Adam’s hand snuck beneath my back and pulled me a little closer, I realized the gravity of the situation and the fact that we still had a schedule to attend to. 
“Adam,” I mumbled, almost wishing he didn’t hear me so we could stay like this a little longer. The muffled hum was a sure sign that he did, in fact, hear me, however. “We have things to do.”
“I already did the number one thing on my list,” he lifted his head, grinning at me lopsidedly. 
I gasped, a feigned reaction to his less-than-subtle teasing. “Are you saying I’m a thing now?" 
”‘Course not. Didn’t I make it clear you’re so much more than that just now?“
"I guess so,” I smiled half-heartedly, “We really have to talk about this. Later. But right now, you need to go to your room and get dressed.” I pulled him out of bed and playfully pushed him towards the door, the laugh he released sounding like everything good in the world.
Once the door was shut, a division created between Adam and I, my heart and my mind, I pressed against it, letting out breaths I didn’t know I was holding. Time had fast-forwarded, leaving me in a position where I was utterly clueless on what, exactly, just happened. The thing that scared me the most? I didn’t regret it.
As much as I’d like to say that was the first and last time that happened, it wasn’t; it might of been the first, but it sure as hell wasn’t the last. We’d discussed the state of our undefined relationship, since it was clear it exceeded the friendship boundaries, but neither of us could explain it straightforwardly. I’d said many times that Kenny was still a huge part of me, my feelings of saudade only dissipating when I was with Adam. That was just a simple fact, an undeniable truth Adam was forced to face. But, just as I had a repeated mantra, so did he. His was along the lines of, “I know you’re still in love with him, but I just need you to know that this means everything to me.” It was no secret that I was putting us both in tumultuous disarray, and it was no secret that I felt so awful about it. I couldn’t come to terms with the mess I was in, and Adam was no longer just a lousy crush, I owed him that much. Even so, I couldn’t accept any form of official relationship with him, not when my heart wasn’t fully devoted to him; he deserved so much more than that. 
I had hoped he would be less keen on me once he realized what a confused mess I truly was, but, even though I erased any chance of there being an “us” anytime soon, he assured he was in for the long-run. He actually seemed almost offended at my acceptance if he were to abandon me- “Is that what you think I’ll do to you?”
Quite frankly, no. I knew he would never, ever do that to me because Adam was too perfect to be real in every single aspect, but I at least could try to ease his troubles.
So here we were. A strange, unexplainable relationship that wasn’t exactly a mutual satisfaction, but a mutual agreement; Adam wanted something more, I just wanted time. And time is exactly what I got until a simple text revealed perhaps things were about to get ten times more confusing.
“Can we talk?”
Of course, it had to be from Kenny. After months of little to no talking, he finally decides to make an appearance, just when I was nearly getting somewhere with the moving on battle (Maybe that was a lie, maybe not.) I initially typed out an icy reply, an immature way to display my irritation, though my ever-present soft spot for him led me to quickly deleting it and opting for a more gentle approach. “About what?” would do, surely. 
“About us.”
The scariest thing of all was that, at one point, all Kenny had to do to have me back was say the word; now, however, I’d have too much thinking to do, too tough of a decision to make. Someone was destined for heartbreak no matter what I chose, the thought alone breaking my own heart. 
Kenny and I had a chemistry I’d once considered unattainable, a distant dream. Having it in my grasp and then ripped away hurt more than anything, and I’d be a fool not to take the chance at gaining it all back. Naturally, I agreed and we arranged a convenient time to talk; this wasn’t going to be a ten minute chat, that’d be a travesty to us both. This had to be an opportunity to make up for countless months of separation.
When my phone finally rang, I’d answered much too quickly. A rookie mistake, answering before the second ring even came, my impatience proving traitorous yet again.
“Kenny,” I breathed, anticipating the voice I’d come to love. I’d much rather have this conversation in person, where I could read his face, understand his thoughts, feel his warmth, although this would have to do.
He was silent for a moment, more than likely choosing his upcoming words carefully. He was so intelligent in that way, in every way. “Hey. How are you?” Things were quickly becoming nothing more than a friendly chat you’d have with a neighbor. This was meant to be a reunion, a riptide of emotions threatening to pull me under- only I’d drown in my own tears. And yet even so, I went along with it.
“I’m…good,” I concluded, deciding there was no reason to discuss the hidden undertones that told me otherwise, “How are you?”
“I’m alright. I miss you,” he sighed, an abrupt confession I was not expecting in the slightest. Just seconds ago, I’d been practically begging to cut to the chase, but now, I just wanted a rewind option.
The silence on both ends was discomforting, neither one of us having the words to say. Or maybe we just didn’t want to say them. I had an inkling that the latter was probably the case for Kenny.
“I miss you, too.”
It wasn’t a lie. Of course I missed him, but I had terrible ways of going about it. A relieved sigh left his lips, echoing his fear that I wouldn’t say it back. “I know we haven’t talked very much, if at all. I’ll take some responsibility, but it wasn’t just a one-way street,” he noted.
“I know, Kenny. I’m sorry for that, really.”
“Yeah, me too. But,” he agreed, “We were both caught up in chaotic parts of our careers. I think we could make this work now, you and me.”
My breath hitched in my throat, my nails becoming victims of my nervous biting habit. “Kenny…”
“You don’t agree,” he said plainly, not asking, rather stating it, as if he already assumed I wouldn’t be willing to try again. 
“It’s not that. I can’t go through that pain all over again, if things don’t work out,” I admitted, my weakness belittling me. 
The common theme of silence took over once again, the only noises being the heavy breaths he expelled. I’d hoped my breathing wasn’t as loud as his, because if so, he definitely could tell how anxious I truly was. “Don’t you think I was hurt, too? Letting you go was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do,” he confessed, a twinge of anger lacing his voice. 
Sadly, it wasn’t just that that left me apprehensive about attempting our relationship again. I’d built up something with Adam, what I wasn’t exactly sure, but I couldn’t be cruel enough to destroy it as if it meant nothing. “Well, what do you want to do? Act as if nothing ever happened?" 
"Not at all. Something happened, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I just want to know that you’re willing to try.”
Trying was simple. Trying seemed simple. I could try, and that still gave me plenty of time to make important decisions. I nodded, as if he could see me, before confirming that I’d put in the same effort as him. Once the call ended, I threw myself onto my bed, half-expecting Adam to be next to me. I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed or relieved he wasn’t.
This “trying” Kenny spoke of included the same components of our past relationship- daily conversations, Skype dates, FaceTime calls. Meanwhile, I’d slowed things down with Adam, telling him I needed a break from whatever we had to think. A half-truth I felt terrible for concocting.
The truth of it was that I had done more thinking than usual. I couldn’t help but notice the feeling of utmost adoration I felt when talking to Kenny had simmered down quite a bit. And at the same time, it only grew with Adam. That was sign number one.
Sign number two came about when I admitted, in a hushed, fearful, guilty voice the ground I was making with Kenny to Adam. 
“So that’s why you’ve been so distant lately,” Adam connected, a sad smile exposing how he truly felt. 
“Yeah…I just didn’t know how to tell you.”
He closed the space between us, placing his hands on either side of my head, pressing a few kisses to top of my head. “Is that what you want?”
I didn’t have a good enough answer, but I had to provide him with something. No more lies, or half-truths, or just downright dismissal. “I…don’t know,” I said honestly, my voice failing me a bit. 
“I just want you to be happy, you know.”
Just like that, I knew. Adam would suppress his own happiness if it meant I’d get my own. He would give up what we had built, the nights full of quiet love proclamations, the Disney dates, the dream he talked about so frequently. He’d give it all up for me. 
Kenny and I had something absolutely real. That wasn’t a façade, not in the slightest. I’d imagined spending the rest of my life with him, but if I had learned one thing over this past year, it’s that life will always fall victim to change. Things weren’t the same and I wasn’t sure they ever would be again; the two years we had were unmatchable, the peak of our relationship. I could do a lot of things, but holding on to something that needed to be let go wasn’t one of them.
I was confused for far too long when the answer was right in front of me the entire time. I was at war with my own thoughts when in reality, I knew. I found so much comfort in Adam because he was just my person. He had endless words of solace and support, too much selflessness within him, and more love for me than I could ever fathom or ever deserve. And all he wanted in return? For me to be happy.
And I’d found out long ago that I couldn’t be anything but happy when I was with him.
It was so simple that it was hard. For too long, I’d been used to difficult choices and pure mayhem. Now that it was clear to me what I had to do, I found my hands shaking as I pressed the button to call Kenny. No prior warning, just a random call that I felt had to be done as soon as possible. All I had to do was confess everything and hope that he’d forgive me, and Adam, in time. Those two didn’t deserve to be at odds with each other because of me, one of my biggest fears of them all. 
“Hello?” Kenny answered, the confusion that more than likely had his eyebrows furrowed and nose scrunched up evident. 
“Hey, Kenny,” I started, “Sorry this is so sudden. I just really, really need to talk to you.”
The soft sound of sheets rustling took over his end- shit, he was probably in bed, either asleep or close to it. I had forgotten about timezones in my haste.
“Alright?” he questioned, sounding notably more alert, “What is it?”
I exhaled loudly, stalling for even just a second. One second farther from creating a potential war zone. “Kenny, I know we were trying to fix things. But I don’t think that’s possible…Being with you made for two of the best years of my life, honestly,” I paused, “And I really do love you. But not like I used to, not like a year ago.”
I stopped for a second, anticipating some kind of response from him- nothing. I took that as my liberty to keep going. “Kenny, I fell in love with Adam.”
It probably wasn’t the best way to go about things, though I had no clue if there was any good way to say it. 
“I should have known,” he sighed, most likely blaming himself or feeling like an idiot, or maybe both. It was an awful feeling knowing I had caused it. “It didn’t feel the same from the start. You always seemed a little off.”
I should have known he would pick up on my habitual inattentiveness; he knew me better than anyone, after all. But had he heard the last thing I said? He didn’t seem to address it at all.
“Yeah, I feel like shit knowing my ex-girlfriend and one of my best friends went behind my back. But what can you do? Things weren’t going well for us and you found someone else. It happens,” he said simply, so simply it seemed like it didn’t affect him at all. And maybe it hadn’t, but that would have hurt more than anything else. 
“Are you just trying to make it easier for yourself?” I wondered aloud, my voice softer and overtaken with sympathy.
“Maybe,” he agreed, “There’s no way I’m losing you both. It’s gonna hurt a lot, for a long time. But I’ll get used to it, I have to. No use in dwelling on something that’ll never happen, right?”
His calmness threw me off the most. I could deal with arguing or yelling, but this was simply beyond me; I’d expected calamity and instead received a godsend. The way he was so accepting and matter-of-fact about it all pained me even more. His only solution was to “get used to it.” Even if it meant seeing the two of us together and letting our relationship become nothing but a thing of the past. 
We said only a few more words, him stating he needed sleep more than ever. With even shakier hands than before, I ended the call and all chances of a future with Kenny, calling up Adam instead this time.
“Adam?” I half-asked once he picked up almost immediately, “Can you come over?”
He didn’t ask why, he didn’t ask any questions; he came over just as I asked, a very Adam thing to do. Considering he had a key to my apartment, I didn’t even flinch when the door opened and footsteps could be heard coming to my bedroom quickly.
“You called?” he grinned, the smile I could never shake from my mind. I had never appreciated it enough before, until I finally saw it much more often and realized just how radiant it truly is. It was the quickest supplement of happiness in this world, his smile. I made sure to tell him that once or twice, (or maybe many, many more times) hoping he’d heed my advice and stay smiling forever.  
“That I did,” I smiled in return, patting the space next to me on my bed. Rather than taking off his shoes and snuggling right under the blankets with me like he usually would, he sat on the side of the bed. Since I’d told him all about the situation with Kenny, he’d paid more attention to his actions and attempted to keep them at bay. “I told Kenny about us.”
His eyes opened wide in shock, eyebrows shooting up. “You did what?”
“He’s not mad at you, don’t worry,” I reassured, “At least, not really…I don’t know what he feels, honestly. He took it well but of course he’s more than likely a little pissed.”
“Why would you tell him that? I told you I would leave it alone,” he said lowly.
“Because I’m tired of not knowing what I want. I’m tired of leading people on and letting people down. I know what I want, Adam,” I whispered, sitting up and turning his head towards me, “I want you.”
“You serious?”
“Always.”
Adam must’ve been a firm believer in the phrase “actions speak louder than words,” because when he captured my lips in a kiss more intense and more passionate than any of the others, I’d heard more than I ever could have through words. I’d heard his silent plea to stay by his side, his gratitude for this moment, his elation at how things had panned out. And I certainly heard the repeated “I love you"s mumbled against my skin and throughout brief moments of paused liplock. 
For once, I could return them and be absolutely certain of their sincerity.  
"Say it again,” he begged, mouth pressed against my neck.
“I love you, Adam,” I let out breathlessly.
“I’ll never get enough of that,” he beamed. 
If that’s what it took to make sure that smile was always around, I’d tell him it every single damn minute. That I was sure of.
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survivorsupport · 7 years ago
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Gasoline&Harmonies
Ever bought something brand new from the store, only to arrive home and tear open the packaging like a salivating canine and find that your freshly acquired and carefully wrapped possession was already cracked, scuffed, shredded? I know that you have, and within that knowledge I am equally as aware (if not more so) of the fact that though your face may or may not have betrayed the holocaust of anger roiling around inside of your chest at your misfortune, the great fire was burning bright and hot.
But I wonder if you know what it is like to realize that the shiny cellophane paper printed with raving reviews of its supposedly phenomenal contents is you, your own body, mind, heart and soul? I wonder, dear one, if you could ever begin to understand what it feels like to have your life inside of a cardboard box sent in the post marked as FRAGILE: HANDLE CAREFULLY, and then crushed mercilessly under someone else’s foot.
Typing this now, my mouth fills with a faint sour taste, one akin to noxious chemical burn searing canker sores that would never fully heal to the roof of my mouth and destroying my esophagus completely. It is a taste that I know, a flavor my palette only encountered once yet never, ever forgot. Gasoline, in a metal cup that you served me in a ditch just far away enough from society that no one could hear me scream, no one could bear total witness to the inhumanity of your callous actions. An inhumanity that was brushed underneath the rug that we never moved when we vacuumed, underneath my bed where I hid my favorite toys, begged of the dust bunnies to watch over them (the way the man they sing the songs about, the reason we dye Easter eggs and eat chocolate bunnies was supposed to watch over me).
 It is not an evil thing, gasoline. Rather it is an incredible accelerate, a catalyst to the inevitable demise of the stratosphere. I thought that my throat must feel exactly the way the ground does as a vehicle speeds over it at 90 miles per hour, burnt rubber. I think that day was when my vocal chords were forever altered in a way so that I no longer could sing beautiful hymns. Irreparable damage done to the tone of my melodies that did not make it so that I was never able to sing again, instead the defamation of my insides and my purity was mutated to a frequency only certain ears can hear.
Sadly, flammable chemicals were not the worst horror I would ultimately bear.
I will not go into detail about the things that took place under the blanket of darkness. An artificial darkness created by off-white walls that mother insisted were painted with actual top-coat and not just a thick layer of primer. A sheet of white color that remains sticky even after it has been drying for an impossible amount of time, an avalanche of snow so cold and lackluster, its ivory body streaked with dirt, caked with mud, and littered with debris. The walls were a color that somehow made even direct sunlight feel like cave darkness, like an eternal winter spent in Alaska.
A single window, above either my bed or yours, my mind’s lockbox has mostly blurred the memory of the iciest, most lonely and hopeless chrysalis my caterpillar alter ego would ever know, icier than any place meant for a creature meant to grow their wings out properly. I was forced into a morbid metamorphosis that irrevocably warped my ability to fly, and while almost the entirety of my essence had transformed into a new being completely, a tiny slice of my heart, mind, body and soul were cryogenically frozen.
There will always be a memory, a whisper of the frost that will never die, that I can never truly kill, no matter how many ways I try. In between my ears is quite a loud and busy place, often as I tell a story the words that I was so sure of a moment before dissipate completely into the foggy layer of my neurological stratosphere that hangs just above my temples, though only on the inside. This fog is not unlike the kind that plagues the Northern Pacific, even on Independence Day the brightest of any and all star rays cannot do any damage beyond faint and miniscule Swiss cheese holes in this pseudo-atmospheric reminder.
Through the fog, I once heard a child’s voice, a lullaby so sweet and delicate I dared not breathe. Faint at first, willfully reasoned away as the wind catching chimes on the front porch on a particularly stormy day. But the soft and supple nursery song then grew to a dull yet cutting roar that could not be drowned out and could never be mistaken. Notes lilting through the tunnels of my nasal cavity, the complete and all-encompassing harmony healing the raw, red, bloody trails that carried oxygen to my brain. I had not realized just how much time had passed since the last clean breath I inhaled had filled me with the human body’s least noticed and yet most sacred necessity. But we tend only to notice oxygen when we are deprived of it. And the way a song on the radio reminds you of a break-up or a road trip, this tune conjures up the feeling of suffocation, tearing in every way possible, skin or soul, or heart. I may be alive, but there is a part of me that knows the way it feels to truly suffocate.
Cracks are okay, they let the light in.
Darling I know your scars, as I’m the one who received them.
My tears fill bottomless wells, somehow you prefer dying of thirst.
I’m sorry you’re throbbing- but I felt the worst.
I know that you love to read, escape to Neverland
where you fight off pirates in your sleep,the floor hasn’t ever met Tinker’s feet
and you grew up nice and balanced
(although if that had happened we’d likely never meet)
Even still you love to scribe, your version of events was how you survived
you wrote infinite alternate endings where I stayed alive.
But please don’t disrespect me, my ashes deserve the memory
of recognizing our travesty, still you choose to live in the desert
sand every way that you can see.
And of course no one ever drowned in the desert, So you wonder how you cannot breathe?
Return with me, for once, though the theme of my lullaby is my pain.
The setting of our horror film, that primer coated bedroom,
filled with such a humid inhumanity-
stealing the last spark from my fading hopeful eyes-
summertime, or hurricane season, no one heard (or at least pretended not to)
the caterpillar’s final cries.
Instead you grew up to hide just like I did, in the folds of the dark blue curtains,
Pink insulation peeking out from behind them, killing the last shred of possibility,
That there could ever be light in this place.
You call that cave a chrysalis- there’s been fiction shelved with fact.
The cold prison where I died (and you grew) was a pupa.
Moths are drawn to the light, For Godsakes, a child would have gotten that right.
Most of my senses are dulled now, as I have worn away my nerves with all the ways I tried to numb wounds that were much too severe for my psyche to bear. The cruelest truth is that my blanket of chemical amnesia ended up taking my capacity for any feeling at all (especially joy) and leaving only the softest whisper of emptiness as my homeostasis. A sound so low that it is felt and not heard, the hiss of the horror haunts me no matter what time of year. I wonder if you know what I mean when I say that every part of who I am disappears in between those ivory lines or dissipates along with supple, serpentine trails of smoke. It is as if the world as I once knew it still exists all around me, present in body. Shades of red and pink muscles stretched across bones, covered in skin and adorned with scars I’ve never seen before and wavy lines on my fingertips that are unique to me, and only me. I know a certain secret that is written within the vices long since tucked in the box labeled “taboo” and hidden in the back of morality’s messy closet.
Visualize a time lapse, mental moving pictures of smoky garages, dried herbs and blown glass, red eyes and a cough so bad that I threw up several times. Then blue footballs and yellow submarines that carried me with velvet arms into a living purgatory, an absence of all memory. Fermented fruits that tasted worse than even the contents of that gas can did and burn just the same way all the way down my body. Ivory lines that numb my tongue and shake the world, then icy ones melted in the most unnatural and revolting igloos. Finally the taste of toasted marshmallows on my tongue, roasted by hand with no stick, instead foil underneath. Does this make you feel uncomfortable, the details of all the awful things I’ve done to because of the awful things you’ve done to me?
I grew into a creature who I wasn’t meant to be, somehow with your filthy hands you changed my very DNA. So, I became a moth instead of a butterfly- and all we seek is light. A moth is desperately pinging from streetlight to strobe-lights, looking for a source that will make up for all the darkness faced alone in that prison. I sought it through every facet I could find. I gave my body, and I gave my mind. I gave my money and I gave my pride. I gave the love I could have saved for myself and I loaded up the rig with it. I traded green papers in parks for bags of white, step into my teacup and spin around all night. That’s all I’ve ever done, is spin, and I don’t know how to stop, a carousel in Hades, attended by my flesh and blood. I can’t remember a time when I did not feel alien, empty.
I would not say you ruined me, as without you I would not exist. Instead you ruined who I might have been, how I might have lived and loved and lost. Certainly, you were the first person to teach me what it felt like to be lost, and I remain that way to this day.
              Our family will not talk about it, Daddy even asked if I made it all up. They still bring you up at holidays, though they know if you’re attending I will not be. You called me on my birthday last year, and I wasn’t even disgusted. I was at a loss, and I still am. I do not know where the story ends of how I lost my innocence. What I do know that it’s my duty every day to live, not as if I have never tasted gasoline, but to use mouth wash every morning, look into my hazel eyes and remember that there is nothing but honor in being a survivor. Every day I remind myself that though my melodies are off-key, they are notes as beautiful as the ones Orpheus played on his lyre, and I feel the singing girl in my head float softly closer and closer to the light. One day soon she will be free, I will be free, and you will be damned to hell, or whatever horrid after-life that you deserve. I sleep well at night now, though I cover my windows with blinds.
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sonofapunk · 5 years ago
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I think there's something really amazing about a story that makes you so passionate you have to get up and move in order to process all your feelings for it
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thewebofslime · 5 years ago
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October 9, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Back in June, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire wrote a savage column titled “Now the Left is Normalizing Pedophilia Right in Front of Our Eyes.” The growing phenomenon of so-called “drag kids,” he pointed out, is normalizing the sexualization of children, with “the ‘drag kid’ who posed with a naked man, and the ‘drag kid’ who danced at a gay bar while men tossed money at him” being two of many prominent examples. Most recently, one of the drag queens at Drag Queen Story Hour performed a stripping dance for children. Yeah, you read that right. Walsh, of course, received immediate pushback, with some progressives even accusing conservatives who had the gall to condemn this public grooming of being the weird ones. There’s nothing sexual about this at all, they lied, and thus anyone who sees something sexual about stripper dances, posing with naked adults, and gyrating in outfits modeled after sexually provocative adult clothing is the one who should be ashamed for even thinking that this is inappropriate. It doesn’t matter how obviously grotesque the displays get—progressives will defend them. They’re all in, and they’re betting the kids. It gets worse. Two days ago, I spotted a tweet from renowned radical feminist Julie Bindel, who has recently found herself a constant target of transgender activists for her refusal to cede the word “woman” to biological men (Bindel has not only received threats of physical violence, but trans activists—biological men—have swarmed her recent events). Bindel had posted an article titled “Desmond is truly amazing—and hot!” with the comment, “Here is the founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange Tom O’Carroll (who I interviewed 4 years ago—he made my blood run cold) celebrating child drag acts.” Desmond, for those of you who don’t recall, is an 11-year-old child drag queen, and his performances are all the rage in the LGBT community at the moment. Tom O’Carroll is a British pro-pedophilia advocate, who was convicted and imprisoned for distribution of child pornography as well as multiple sexual offenses against children. His 1980 book Paedophilia: The Radical Case argues that adult-child sexual relationships should be normalized, and describes his own sexual experiences with children. Pedophilia, O’Carroll says (and he has had support from GLBT pioneers like Richard Green), is an orientation like gay or straight, and thus there are no moral grounds for preventing people like him from finding sexual fulfillment. “I am not interested in why I am a paedophile,” he wrote, “any more than others are interested in why they are ‘normal.’” I’m not going to link to his disgusting blog, but here is how O’Carroll—who, again, has been advocating for the normalization of child-adult sexual relationships for decades—sees the drag kid phenomenon: Let’s face it, when a pretty young boy tells the world he is gay and dances sensuously in front of grown men, wearing vampish dresses and makeup; when “she” strips off items of clothing or goes on stage scantily clad right from the off; when dollar bills are accepted as “tips” from an audience apparently wild with excitement; when all this is going on we are getting far more than just a celebration of gender diversity or an innocent display of precocious performance talent. And that’s great. It is wonderful that a rare niche has been found in the modern, developed world within which at least a few kids can truly be themselves, in ways that deny neither their gender feelings nor their sexuality. Being a drag queen, or a drag princess if you will, puts it right out there, in the open for all to see. It says, loud and proud, “I am a sexy kid, with sexy feelings. It’s totally cool for grown-ups to get turned on by me. I love it. That’s why I do this stuff. It’s great. It’s fun. It’s me!” Panicky conservatives, needless to say, spin it differently, desperate as they are to pretend that kids have no erotic dimension, or at least none that is self-generated. In their telling, performances such as Desmond’s and those of fellow artists such as ��Queen Lactacia” (Nemis Quinn Mélançon-Golden) are a travesty in the worst sense: these are kids, they claim, who are being “sexualised” by exploitative adults hell bent on corrupting their supposed natural innocence. It isn’t just conservatives who recognize these drag performances for what they are. Chillingly, pedophilia advocates do as well. In fact, O’Carroll goes so far as to call out those denying the sexual nature of these performances and points out why he believes they are doing so: So why all the denial? Why the coy insistence that kids’ drag performance has nothing to do with their sexuality? Hypocrisy, basically. For decades now, gay politics has revolved around respectability, and that has meant aping hetero-normativity: gay couples with committed relationships, marriage, and parenthood, have become the promoted model; the old, carefree “promiscuity” of the gay life is frowned upon (if still a reality for many) and any cross-generational sexual contact with youth is now far more taboo than it ever was in the “bad old days” when homosexuality was a discretely practised underground phenomenon. Hypocrisy is detestable for its dishonesty; but on the other hand it works. Politically, it makes sense. Denial of the sexual element in kids’ drag performances has recently resulted in them being perceived as on the “respectable” side of the gender revolution, despite all the excitable right-wing huffing and puffing. While It cannot have been much fun for the Napoles family to be subjected to official investigation for child abuse, it is now becoming clear that they have gained a measure of support from the authorities. O’Carroll’s comments don’t need much analysis. Yes, he mocks conservatives—but that’s because he thinks we’re backwards, oppressive prudes who want to shut down events with the potential of assisting him in pushing his cause to the mainstream. In fact, he is giddy that thus far, polite society appears to be willing to let Desmond’s parents get away with enabling their son in this awful fashion. He defiantly agrees with what Matt Walsh wrote in his column a couple of months ago—but says that this is a good thing. Walsh is right. Pedophilia is being normalized right in front of us—and that is being celebrated by activists who believe that this is a step in the right direction. Jonathon’s new podcast, The Van Maren Show, is dedicated to telling the stories of the pro-life and pro-family movement. In his latest episode, he interviews Fr. Frank Pavone, the National Director of Priests for Life, the largest pro-life ministry in the Catholic Church. Van Maren speaks with Fr. Pavone about his experiences as a pro-life priest and leader. Fr. Pavone shares how his dedication to the pro-life movement began in high-school and continued while he was in seminary. After he was ordained a priest, he preached about abortion almost every weekend from the pulpit, leading to a profound impact on his parish. You can subscribe here and listen to the episode below:
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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago
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BoJack Horseman is not a good person.
That seems self-evident. Over the course of his show’s first four seasons, he’s nearly slept with teenagers. He’s been privy to the overdose and death of a young woman who looked up to him. He’s drank and caroused and just generally burned his life down, over and over again. But he’s rich and powerful. He has money. He has fame. He has excuses, like the undiagnosed depression, or the chemical dependencies, or the shitty childhood.
But he still does bad things. And yet he is not a bad person, necessarily.
He does care for people, and he occasionally thinks beyond himself to care about them on a non-superficial level. He’s helped out many friends, and in the show’s fourth season, he was a surprisingly stable rock for the woman eventually revealed to be his half-sister, who found herself trying to track down her roots (she was given up for adoption) and instead found… BoJack.
The gap between BoJack as he wants to be seen and BoJack as he actually is has always driven BoJack Horseman. It’s one of the reasons I suggested, back in the show’s second season, that it would be a successor to Mad Men, and I’m astonished at how the series hasn’t really gone wrong since. It just might be the single best TV show in production right now, with great laughs but also rich, thoughtful character depth.
And in season five, BoJack Horseman brings all of that character development down around its ears, in a stretch of episodes that represents the most precise dissection of BoJack Horseman yet — and perhaps the first truly sustained artistic response to the #MeToo movement, albeit one that was largely crafted before the fall of Harvey Weinstein (though Mel Gibson was on the show’s writers’ mind).
Look out, folks. Major, major spoilers for season five follow. If you haven’t seen it, look away!
If you’ve seen the entire fifth season of BoJack, then you’ll perhaps recognize that my attempt to frame him as neither a good nor a bad person is deliberate. That is, after all how Diane — perhaps BoJack’s truest friend in the whole world — explains her friend to himself when, in a fit of self-loathing, he asks her to essentially destroy his career by writing the sort of exposé of his terrible deeds that has taken down so many other Hollywood bigwigs, in our reality and his.
But Diane refuses to do that, telling BoJack that he’s not a good person or a bad person — he’s just a person. (Or, rather, a horseman, but you get the point.) Yes, he’s done all of those terrible things, and yes, his career might end because of them. But she’s not going to be the one to set that outcome in motion, because it would, on some level, be doing him a favor. It would be indulging one of his self-destructive impulses, and she’s not going to let him commit career suicide by journalist.
As I watched this sequence unfold, I wondered if I would end up feeling like it was a cop-out, if I would grumble to myself at how creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and his writers had tiptoed up to the precipice of holding their main character accountable in a forum larger than his own mind, then tiptoed right back. In the season’s last section, BoJack checks into rehab to work to contain his latest addiction (to painkillers). The show he was on gets canceled. The reset button is hit.
But the more I think about this sequence and the many leading up to it in season five, the more I think Bob-Waksberg and company haven’t avoided holding their protagonist accountable. After all, if any showbiz satire on television could plumb the depths of its main character being held accountable for past misdeeds by a #MeToo-esque movement, it’s BoJack Horseman, which is as haunted by the past as any great ghost story.
BoJack has an idea — sort of. Netflix
It’s easy enough to imagine BoJack’s ghosts stepping into the light. It’s easy enough to imagine the rest of the series taking place in a world where BoJack keeps fighting to get his career back, only to realize that the meaning of words like “redemption” and “forgiveness” has to be more than skin deep. And it’s easy enough to imagine these writers finding a way to make that battle resonate with our current era.
But that is also, on some level, too easy an answer for this show. BoJack wants Diane to write an article taking him down, because he wants to punish himself. He doesn’t believe he’s worthy of love or admiration or anything good, because he’s done monstrous things. He wants someone to slot him into the role of villain, because he knows that he has acted like a villain and might still do so again. And once he’s accomplished that, he can finally drift away, secure in having isolated everyone he cared about.
BoJack Horseman has always been about how our worst impulses feed into each other, all of the ways that mental illness can feed addiction, or that addiction can feed doing terrible things to other people. (BoJack physically assaults his female co-star and lover this season, in an on-set stunt that goes horribly wrong partly because he’s so high.) And the show concentrates on this theme not to excuse bad behavior, but, instead, to try to help us understand how it can be better combatted before it happens, how self-loathing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction — I am a shitty person, who does shitty things. Well, what if you’re not?
Yes, there are monsters in the world. But there are also so many people like BoJack, who have done monstrous things — perhaps many monstrous things — but who are not beyond redemption, who might yet be forgiven. What does that look like? And how do we find our way there? Answering those questions is the work of the rest of this remarkable series, I suspect, but it’s also ground zero for season five.
The role BoJack plays in season five is that of a disturbed and distressed detective named Philbert, in a series named Philbert (just as BoJack Horseman is named for BoJack Horseman). Run by the self-proclaimed genius Flip McVicker (a very funny Rami Malek), the in-show series allows BoJack to lampoon just about every trend of dark cable and streaming dramas, which leads to some of the season’s best jokes.
But it also adds a surprisingly important thematic underpinning to the entire season, as these sorts of dark dramas are often about those who seek to skirt responsibility for terrible things they’ve done. When Philbert suspects that he might be the one who killed his wife (the crime that haunts him), his show lets him off the hook by inventing a twist that proves he didn’t do it. It’s indicative of a culture addicted to pretending responsibility is a joke, that if you really try hard enough, you can absolve yourself of bad deeds without having to work at redemption.
These ideas course through the season, with each and every character longing to avoid responsibility for something they’ve done — be it playing a part in a crumbling marriage, not breaking up with someone who’s not going to be a good long-term partner, or the darker deeds of BoJack.
Don’t worry. Everybody else is back too. Netflix
But the series also twins that idea with the idea of blame, the idea of finding a scapegoat and sometimes even a completely justifiable scapegoat. The most daring episode of the season is its sixth, which consists entirely of a single long monologue delivered by BoJack, a eulogy for his recently deceased mother. (If Will Arnett doesn’t win an Emmy for his voice performance, it will be a bigger travesty than usual.) It’s a full episode’s worth of grappling with what it means to be someone’s child and maybe someone’s parent, with how hard it can be to have traumas you weren’t privy to visited upon you by a parent, with the challenge of accepting that you might have inherited their damage, might literally be carrying their time bomb in your genes.
But even as the series insists we can inherit damage, can have trauma visited upon us, it doesn’t let those who pass along that trauma to others get off easily. If there is a reason BoJack can remain our protagonist, it’s because he, however fitfully, makes a few steps forward every season. Season five might feature his blackest pit yet, but it also features genuine moments of kindness between him and his friends, and what might amount to his most successful relationship yet on the show — before he destroys it with his actions, that is.
I realize this makes the series sound a little like Philbert, at least in the sense that it’s a self-important slog. And the construction of season five might be a little less cohesive than the show’s gorgeous, devastating season four. (I will have to watch it six more times to be sure.) But the series remains as winning and funny as ever alongside all of this, and possessed of a confidence in its ability to do whatever it likes — including staging an episode where two characters who seemingly have nothing to do with the main plot fill us in on the other characters’ adventures anyway. There’s also side story involving a mad sex robot who ends up running the series’ version of Netflix. What’s not to love?
And yet it doesn’t matter if season five is BoJack’s best season yet or not quite as good as last season or [insert your ranking here]. It feels ever more like a miracle that this show exists and that it refuses to give lazy answers to complicated questions. There is no show as effective at plowing this particular ground and at finding answers that are at once satisfying and elusive. It is a beautiful show, and one that constantly finds new ways to surprise me.
Long may it run.
BoJack Horseman’s five seasons are all available on Netflix. Did I forget to mention that BoJack is a literal horse man, and the show takes place in a world full of bipedal animals who live alongside humans? Well, it does, but you probably knew that already.
Original Source -> BoJack Horseman season 5 is a bold, bracing look at a culture that shirks responsibility
via The Conservative Brief
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anticosmic · 7 years ago
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September 4, 2017
All things considered, August was a piece of shit. There’s been a shift, however, especially over the last few days. It’s like I can see things clearer than before, or rather I can see what’s in front of me and what I need to do better than before. I spent a good part of the last two years sort of not knowing what or who the fuck I was. It’s a byproduct of all the Crazy Shit I’m up to on a near constant basis, no doubt, but still, as the last six months of my twenties now approaches, and Saturn prepares for its return in my life, it’s good to get some of the latent garbage out of the way.
Hung out with L Friday night for the first time since June, when he was still a lowly single-man with no hope for life. Now he’s A Man in a Relationship, imparting relationship/love advice, with life all figured out. Oh how a few short months can change someone. Was I like this/am I like this in relationships? Can’t recall. L’s had far less luck in the relationship department–who knows when he was last in one, he keeps that data under tight lock and key–so I’ll give his idealism a break. Since he and I do keep in touch via the intimacy of FB messenger, I’ve received quite the digital earful about his girlfriend, how she’s so talented and smart and full of insecurities and has dated/fucked her fair share of guys and how he pretends that that doesn’t bother him and how she may, in some Foucaultian power struggle, wish for him to punish her for her past sexual indiscretions. We’ve covered quite a few bases, L and I, despite not having actually seen each other in meat space for a while. Feeling nostalgic for my past life when Jay and I used to drink 40s in the park back in Old Town, I suggested we buy a couple beers and make our way to the park in College Town. L was hesitant, but as per usual I peer pressured him and he followed along due to his jelly-like spine. We had a good conversation, mostly about the quite obvious impending civil war our country will see in the near future and the insufferable nature of white people inflicted with White Guilt that makes them say the dumbest fucking things of all time. All-in-all, it was a good conversation. Then L’s girlfriend, whom I can say I was partially interested in meeting just to see who she was and what she was like, arrived  and I notice she has a dog. Well, no biggie, dogs are cool, and she’s a girl walking around College Town at night, so… well, it turns out she’s the archetypal Girl With a Dog. That is, a 30-something hipster whose life is devoted to a small, mostly useless type canine, who will cut off a reasonably engaging conversation about identity politics with a hearty “Fetch Ziggy!” as she throws a ball for Ziggy the Dog to catch. It’s all a bit much.
So Girl With a Dog made a bad first impression. But, I don’t know her, I don’t want to reduce her to a simple catch-all signifier right off the bat, right? Unfortunately, aside from her all-consuming affinity for her dog, there didn’t seem to be much going on with her. How old did L say she was? 30? 31? Roughly our age. Well, she just sat there, making occasional interjections about pretty much nothing, her focus being mostly on the dog. It was all quite disappointing. I truly cannot see what L sees in her, which is fine because she’s not my girlfriend after all, but I get the sneaking suspicion that he’s just with her because she’s there, and that his ego, brutally beaten through several unfortunate dalliances over the past few years, needed a bit of rehab. But I don’t know. It’s not really my place to conjecture what their relationship is like. Just as no one really knew why the fuck I tolerated K’s bullshit, I’ll go ahead and assume that L and Girl With a Dog have some certain unspoken, certainly ineffable, thing going on.
I just wish she talked about something, or at least gave me something to work with while we were at the park. She’s too old to be socially awkward. Socially insecure and anxious, yeah, I got that too, but I fake it when I’m in public, and just rue social interactions when I’m in the comfort of my own home. But in front of people I’m affable, somewhat charming, good at conversations. And so is L, who has many of my same anxieties more or less. We fake it. She just sat there, like a lump on a log, listening to L and I talk, which sadly wasn’t about much of anything when she got there because L’s attention was now split between her and I. She did have more input when we talked about weed and getting high (which I don’t do much of anymore but pretended I did at that moment for the sake of conversation), but it was mostly about how she enjoys spliffs. I do not enjoy spliffs. Spliffs are the Laodicea of joints. Joints are not my preferred method of smoking, but if I do find myself with joint in hand I want it to contain only some good ass weed because I’m a goddamn American! Get the fuck out of here with your spliffs.
She also rolls her own cigarettes which is nothing short of a travesty in my world. I never understood the point of rolling your own cigarettes. “It’s cheaper,” they say. “It makes you work for your fix,” they say. Well, if my Postmates, Door Dash and Instacart accounts have anything to say, it’s that I value convenience and efficiency over price or, god forbid, effort. Some things–love, career, art, consciousness–require the upmost amount of discipline and effort to fully realize their potential. However smoking, as well as any other drug, should be attained quickly and easily, with as little effort as possible. Just because something requires more effort does not mean it is more valuable, or is on a higher hierarchy than it’s easier attained siblings.
Of course, I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. I smoke weed maybe once or twice a year now. The singular Coors Light I was drinking in the park not withstanding, I never drink anymore either. However, my twenties having been devoted to all manners of consuming various substances, I still have opinions. Very strong opinions at that. Clearly.
Anyway, Girl With a Dog was a bit of a nothing person. Not quite a tabula rasa, I’d compare her more to a lump of clay. I don’t know what L sees in her, but she doesn’t seem to have much going on inside her. In many ways she was the Platonic ideal of a hipster, which is such an antiquated term these days with no real definition but it’s all I can think of when I think of her. Of course, she is a person, and people have worlds upon worlds living within them, but some of those worlds are a bit more populated than others. Whatever landscapes she has residing within her, I’d say it’s on par with a night time road trip around Idaho.
Saturday arrived and I felt more or less depressed, like I’d hit a spiritual wall of sorts. With this coming Friday being my last day at the office, I’ve been realizing the existence of these sort of blocks more and more. Leaving my job is a terrifying prospect, but for every con I can think of, there are maybe ten pros as to why this is an overall good idea. My savings has given me enough of a cushion to work on other ventures for a while, and I’d really like to spend more time with Mom. She may be here for six months, she may be here for six years, but I really want to be with her now because this is when she needs me the most. However, she’s been active lately, going out with Dad a lot. She’s gained a bit of weight, which in this case is a good thing, and she seems overall fairly content with life, but there’s always the question of her mortality lingering under the surface of all our thoughts. No matter what happens to me professionally now that my job will soon be in the rear view mirror, I will not regret spending more time with my mother.
If there’s any signifier that I’m going through quite a few life changes, it’s that my dreams have gone off the chain. Every night for the last couple weeks has been full of some pretty crazy dreams, and lately there’s been an influx of sex dreams, which I don’t normally have much of. My dreams only get like this when my life is undergoing a major transformation. Thus, my goal for the foreseeable future is to keep a record of my dreams. I’ve been meaning to do this anyhow, but now, with so much going on in my life, seems like an especially auspicious time to keep a journal of the Dreaming. However, dreams, no matter how fascinating, are inherently boring due to their highly subjective but equally nonsensical nature. They’re best kept secret. Also, even when I’ve kept dream journals in the past, they only seemed important or useful in retrospect. However, we spend a third of our lives asleep, our minds going elsewhere. To not at least do something with this time is to experience only a partially-lived life. Of course I need to get past the abundant mountain of laziness that always lands in front of me when I first wake up in the morning, but I think that keeping a dream journal, especially at this juncture in my life, will yield some incredible benefits.
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survivorsolomonislands · 7 years ago
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Episode 8 “Worst case scenario: Everything else”- Johnny
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Well the last thing I thought would happen happened... my plan actually worked, like flawlessly. Everyone did what I wanted them to do, nobody turned on me, I didn't get a single vote, I can rest easy for two days at least. I got rid of a rookie, possibly an idol, and solidified something with Allie and Willow and even Aro and Zak. Jacob is on the outs now so I hope he feels bad. Hey Jacob, next time you're gonna throw someone under the bus make sure they're not driving it!! Would honestly love to vote him out soon, maybe we'll merge maybe we won't.
(a little bit later)
I think this is for sure going to be the biggest tribal(s) of the season. RTP seems ready to draw the line and get rid of Mitchell and has ordered me to get rid of a Makira, but I made the decisions to tell Mitchell that RTP is afraid of nuMakira, because I don't really see myself working with nuTemoana because I only trust RTP out of those people, like Jacob tried to throw me under the bus, Luca tried to throw me under the bus, Johnny and Lex both withheld from me that Luca was gunning for me even though I told Lex when Luca threw out her name, so really why would I wanna work with them? Like a number's only a number when it's specifically my number. I think come merge, if Mitchell or Dana gets voted out of Makira and Jacob gets voted out from Temoana it'll be Dana/Mitchell, Willow, Allie, Zak and Aro vs. RTP, Lex, LA, Johnny, Luca and me smack dab in the middle, or so it would seem, because even though I may be the swing vote I really am actually in a good spot with Dana and Mitchell, and I'm not a flipper, I'm actually leading the charge. Interesting...
(a medium sized bit later)
At this point even if I get blindsided tonight I'm probably playing the best game I've played so far, I've got solid alliances worked out where I am sort of the mastermind, yet at the same time I'm able to play both sides. Ryan trusts me and trusts that I'm gonna be all Temoana strong, but honestly everyone's a fake ass Temoana except me I've literally never left this beach. No one knows how far i'll go, except I hope it's final tribal. I think tonight may be drawing the line, maybe just pencilling it in a little bit if Mitchell plays his idol. I may still have a slight chance to pretend like it wasn't me who told him but who knows. If we go into the merge with a 7-4 advantage it doesn't necessarily matter. We can pick off whoever's left 1 by 1 and I can get to the end hopefully with Mitchell and Dana, or Allie and Willow, or Zak and Aro, haha I hope nobody catches on to how well I'm playing this game. Tonight for Temoana the plan is to blindside Jacob, he's really fake in my opinion, but honestly I'm lying to him too so I guess so am I? But he started it so that's his fault. I'd love to blindside him right after Daisy, especially since he got votes last tribal council like how could he actually think we just decided to switch to Aro, and then he's like dictating to me that we should split between Zak and Aro and I'm like a giggly little hyena bc you need more than one person to split, unless you're Debbie.
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First off, I'm SHOOK that I won the first individual immunity of the season. Holy crapola I didn't see that one coming, so that's pretty good for me, even though it does put a HUGE target on my back, but I'm just hoping that my social game is strong enough to the point that people will forget about me winning the challenge. I really wanted Willow to win the challenge, so she could give immunity to Jacob, and now i'm really torn whether to give immunity to Jacob or not, considering he's my closest ally in this game, and now I really really have to think. The main issue is that giving immunity puts a HUGE target on Jacob and my back's as a duo later down the line, which is concerning. I'm not at all worried about this tribal council, even if I wasn't immune, which is why I'm a little pissed off that I won it, because I really didn't need it, it paints a target on my back, and Willow was going to give it to Jacob, but one thing I do know is that i'm guaranteed top 11 now, which is pretty good, and I'm about 2 more tribals away from beating my record from Survivor: Tibet (side season, placed 9th), so I'll take that. I honestly can see myself winning this game. My social connections are up to par, I have a really good connection with nearly everyone in the game, except Aro and Dana, and hopefully those are the two going home in both of these tribal councils, and funny enough, I'm pretty sure that both of them have immunity idols too, so worst case scenario, both their idols get flushed and Mitchell or Matt/Zak will go home, all of which I don't trust too much either. I think it'd actually be a travesty for my game if Mitchell went home, because I'm really really vibing with him well, and I'm hoping that this split vote doesn't cause any dissension, however, I think I can rebound and make sure I'm not one of his targets, if he survives this tribal council, which It's about a 50-50 shot whether he survives or not. As for my tribal, the plan is for LA, Luca and I (the people I trust most to not flip their votes and try something ballsy) to be voting for Dana, while Lex and Ryan are going to be voting for Mitchell. Just in case Ryan tried something ballsy, to keep Dana safe and take out Mitchell, who I know Ryan would prefer more to be voted out more, I need to keep Ryan's vote planted on Mitchell, so just in case he was supposed to vote Dana, and tried to switch the vote, he wouldn't even be able to switch his vote to Mitchell since he's already on Mitchell to begin with............ if that makes any sense. As for now, I'm hoping merge is around the corner, I'm ready to get this game REALLY on the road, and I am fairly confident in my abilities to make it to the final 8 of this game at least without getting targeted, and we'll see how it goes from there. I truly can see myself with one of the higher probabilities to win this game, and I think people are seeing that as well, and I just need to hope that it's not me at the final 6 or 5 getting blindsided, and throwing my ass onto the jury. It's gonna be a tough game, but I'm ready for it to pick up and start playing the way I know how to..... slick as fuck (throws sunglasses on). It's game time.
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I'm zakriah and I can't even find an idol when I have a clue Also either Jacob is going or its tying with me and going to rocks tbh and thats all I have to say about that
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I hate this. Being on Ulawa has fucked me over so much, everyone is well connected and has alliances and I'm basically on my own, all I can do is hope people want me as a number so they keep me around. I have a terrible social game, I'm a shy person, and being trapped on Ulawa for all those days has not helped my situation. Its down to Aro and me, and I have no interested in working with Aro, not that I had any interest in working with Aro but a lot of people are loyal to their second tribe and I'm not, I don't have that to fall back on. My goal is just to make jury at this point. It would be awesome to have at least one person I trust, but Jacob is being weird? We basically use each other for information and he said he'd bring me into whatever he had going on, AFTER the merge so I'm like okay.. We're one world but OKAY. All I can really do now is hope Ryan, Johnny and Luca are telling me the truth, that they want either Dana or Mitchell gone and not me. I hate it so much though, I kind of hate not having a say or level or control but this isn't like Ulawa so I can't just go for it, I need some tact here.
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OKAY. WELL THIS MOTHERFUCKER (YES ME) FOUND THE IDOL!! I was screaming honestly, because according to what everyone had told me, I was 99% sure that Dana had it, according to what Willow told me. SO! I asked Willow where she thought the idol was, just so I could double back and see if it was really gone, so I'm casually searching, for the first time in forever, not using my random.org strategy of searching for idols, and I ask Willow where to look, and she tells me exactly where to look and then... On 4/23/17, at 5:13 PM, Andrew (Solomon Islands/Hawkins Host) wrote: > Congrats! You have found a hidden immunity idol! You must play this idol after the votes are cast but before the votes are read, this idol can be used to save anyone up until the final 5. I FUCKING LOST MY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT. All day I had been contemplating giving immunity to Jacob to ensure his safety, and now I am able to be so much smarter with it. So immediately my first thought is that I'm 100% giving Jacob the idol, keeping my closest ally in the game, and biting the bullet by losing the idol in the first place, but it's fine since any suspicion of having an idol can be a MAJOR hurt to my game, so I took it like a hot potato, threw it in Jacob's direction, and now he's going to play it at his tribal council, and idol Matt out of the game. Here's the sad thing about this (and by sad, I mean fucking hysterical). I told Ryan last night that he needs to message Matt, and make sure Matt understands that him and Jacob working together is the best move, and that if all six of us make the merge, then we're in an incredible position.......... WELL, Matt didn't take that advice, and instead lied to Jacob's face, telling him that him, Allie, Willow and Jacob were going to work together to 2-2 the vote, and then Matt went behind Jacob's back and said there was no chance he was doing that. So now, Jacob is going to use his idol, nullify the five votes against him (since Willow and Allie are bitches and would rather take the easy vote than stand up for a close ally of theirs), and take out Matt, and it is going to be GLORIOUS! This means that Matt's alliance with Allie and Willow frees them up into my hands, it frees up Ryan's previous allegiance to Matt, and focuses his attention more on Lex, Jacob, Ryan and I as a foursome, without Matt involved, and it basically gives me a severe amount of control in this game. As for my tribal council, finding the Makira idol means that there is a very slim chance that Dana actually has one, but I can't stop the splitting the vote plan I made up because then LA, Luca, Ryan and Lex are going to know I was the one who found the idol, and gave it to Jacob, and I don't really want that to happen. Jacob and I are the only ones in the game that fully 100% know what is going to be happening at both tribal councils tomorrow, and if everything goes according to plan: Matt and Dana going home, we are headed into a potential merge with 4 veterans and 7 rookies. TAKE THAT MATH! Honestly, I could see the split vote going poorly in a sense, but I do know that they're targeting LA, and personally I don't give too much of a shit if LA goes home, but the only way it wouldn't work is if Lex AND Ryan flipped on me, and considering Mitchell is trying to get LA to vote for Ryan, I don't entirely see anything going south this round. . However, if things do go south on my tribe with the split vote, I have a SHIT ton of quotes that Ryan has said about not trusting Mitchell that I can hopefully use against him. Either way, I've got Luca, Allie, Willow, Jacob and I working together, hopefully able to swing things at merge if things do go south, and I've still got six people on my side (hopefully), and potentially even swinging in Aro to get him to wanna work with the rookies he started this game with. I've got a plan B to my plan B in this game, but I'm hoping I don't have to drop to plan B. This is probably the only round of the game I can see things going south, but I highly doubt that things will actually go south, and I'm going to be more than okay this round with both tribal councils going exactly how I want them to. Best case scenario: Dana and Matt go home, with Aro burning his idol at tribal when Jacob whips his out. Next best case: Mitchell and Matt go home, with Dana's idol out of the picture. Worst case scenario: Everything else.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VSwosbWktg&feature=youtu.be also this because YAS: [4/23/17, 2:09:11 PM] Matt: I want final 3 with you and Mitch [4/23/17, 2:10:17 PM] Dana: i would absolutely love that. like that’s an ideal situation for me, and i think it would be really fair 2 [4/23/17, 2:10:26 PM] Matt: I agree [4/23/17, 2:10:36 PM] Matt: I don't think we could beat RTP
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ok so i havn't made a confesshy in a while but here we GO so the challenge was a load of barnacles but we won so idc??? and miss daisy goes home MAYBE with an idol so??? all good to me!! the important thing is that i've been talking to people. in particular, i've been tryna shore up relations w luca, johnny, and LA; been talking to them for a while, tryna establish trust... you know, dancin. and i think we've been vibing really well which made me feel good bc i like them!! i like people for the most part in one world, which is one of the most intricate elements of the game - from here on out, we all know each other. votes are gonna get harder for that reason. and then i'm dancin at junior prom, come back and see i may have been the first infected with the virus, and then we're goin to double trbal. FJWROIDHFLCUI i fucking hate double tribal. the whole point of the tribal stage is just that - you're a tribe. if you can come together and win, you get to stay a tribe. double tribals undermine that and punish everyone for nothing. it's ridiculous and goes against the very point of the tribal stage; they only work in seasons with more than two tribes. tribes are supposed to stay in tact if they win, but there's no chance to do that here, which is dumb!!!! but ANYWAYS idk what's gonna happen bc i'm all prom'd out and like everyone... but then miss matt, my BOY from day 1, pulls me and dana into a chat to say that RTP is gonna strike at us tonight. matt had already informed me that RTP wanted to me nuMakira vs. nuTemoana in the merge. there's no chance he'll know for sure how tight we all are so maybe he thought he could divide and conquer us, but if jacob goes home on makira, we might be seeing willow/allie/aro/zak/matt/dana/me kick some grassy ass post-merge!! and that's bc i'm playin my idol and gonna send RTP's ass home. i thought i had real relationships w the people here on nunuMakira, but I can't blame them for wanting to vote me out. RTP, on the other hand, is gettin too big for his britches and just had to fuck up a good thing. i knew this would come eventually - there's a reason this kid hasn't reached single digits in seven times playing and it's bc he sux - and of course he just has to fuck up somethin good and now he'll pay the price. either he votes for me w everyone else and i play the idol and he's gone and he feels a fool, or i play the idol and he votes dana and we both still here and he knows that his time is numbered bc matt is a good boy is it too much to ask to just get a good cute alliance together and ride it out??? why y'all got such a BONER for BIG MOVEZZZ and #BLINDSIDEZZ????? old school survivor is legit the best way to play the game and it was the best era of survivor too so fuck y'all goodbye mitchell kalabang ain't goin home tonite!!
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Mitchell, stop telling me that I'm your ride or die. We've been on the same tribe for four days, and just because I smoke weed and I'm in a fraternity does not mean I trust your ass. Do you think I haven't heard stories of you leading a charge to take out Lex and Karen the first round of this game, and that you were the one calling the shots on the old Temoana, and that you probably have more connections in this game than anyone? I love that people in this game think I'm stupid. It's starting to fire me up... Let me tell you something. If you think I don't know what I'm talking about in this game, that means that you haven't had a strategic conversation with me yet, and that means I don't trust you. Everyone can take note of that for the future *puts on shades*
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  We're getting at a pretty far moment in the game right now and I think it's showing, these votes will be crucial when determining which players will be in the right spots come merge. There's this feeling going around, a constant mash of anxiety and paranoia, nobody really trusts each other and it shows. Johnny is really well-placed right now but he's my closest ally at this point. There's a rumour going around that Jacob is going home in the Temoana tribal which will be a big, big warning sign. The issues with Matt still haven't fully healed and suffice to say, I don't trust him at all. As about our vote, I'm very paranoid. I'm being told it's a 3-2-2 vote split, with 3 on Dana and 2 each on Mitchell and LA. This plan should hold together but will it really? Dana is a huge threat to my game, she's been throwing my name around and she has much closer allies in this game than me. So I guess we'll see what happens.
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Ok so currently I have like an insane Jacob who is like "It's 5-1 me, you targeted me, this is your plan!" which I mean, is true, but like what the fat hell who thought it was a good idea to tell this crazy ass twink that he was the target because now he could play an idol or do something or expose me to nuTemoana and now I wanna actually shoot somebody :)
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this is so dumb but if it works i s2g i'm gonna LAUGH i've been telling like luca and LA that RTP threw their names out knowing that if they were with RTP that would get back to him, and matt confirmed to me that it did FJWMIDSOFJCW my plan's been to make RTP mad and since he's so arrogant he'd be like "oh well mitchell gotta go he's shady" well BITCH it's intentional shade you think i'd get caught??? the funny thing is that it's ridiculous. playing so bad on purpose to get caught without everyone else knowing it's a setup so they vote for you and you idol someone out.... i love the concept but then again it's so fuckin stupid there's no chance it'll work but if it DOES im gonna SCIOEFKNDCEWDISJ tribals gonna be fun bc i know im not dancin outta here yet :) oh and if jacob plays an idol and takes out like matt, and they split the votes and dana goes home here, and we merge right after and my numbers are me, aro/zak, and allie/willow against the world... worse shit could happen!! at least i'm beatin my previous placement know THAT ! (remember when i said the same shit in machu picchu but then actually did go home lol well at least this time i got mr idol :'] )
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RIP ME. Stop being so casual Matt, because if you fuck up, I go home. They better be voting Mitch tonight so he can play his idol, because if not IM IN TROUBLE. Also if they split, i'm also probably in trouble unless we can talk LA and Luca into flipping in like a single minute. Basically Matt just told us that Willow and Allie told Jacob that Matt was targeting him for the vote- AND YOU'RE PROBABLY THINKING- WHAT DOES STUPID TEMOANA AND THEIR LAME ASS VOTE HAVE TO DO WITH THE MAKIRA VOTE?. THE ANSWER: LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Matt is the informant from Temoana lettin us know that RTP is coming for me and Mitch, and if this mix up with the Jacob vote got back to RTP then we're fucking screwed because Matt may have inaccurate information about who is going home on our tribe. Who knows what the odds that this happened are, or that RTP decided to flip the vote on me, but irrelevant, but i'm just hoping Mitch and I idoling out RTP doesn't backfire tonight. Here are the scenarios I see happening tonight: 1) Everyone actually is voting LA like RTP told Mitch and I. Mitch and I will still vote RTP, Mitchell will waste an idol, and we lose everyone's trust on this tribe forever (unlikely). 2) Everyone votes Mitchell, we vote RTP, Mitchell idols him out in the biggest heroic fuck-you RTP has ever seen. 3) Everyone votes for me and not Mitchell, I have no idol, and I leave here as a queen who has been wronged by her tribe. 4) They split votes (a big risk), and either i go home (again, as a queen who has been wronged)  if it is 3-2 for me, or if it is 3-2 Mitchell RTP and I will tie, at which point Mitchell and I start threatening Luca, LA, and Johnny to vote with Mitch in revote. 5) Something else upsetting happens and i die a spiritual death in the process. [4/24/17, 6:37:22 PM] Dana Barry: is you tribe solid for the vote? [4/24/17, 6:38:11 PM] Matt: Yeah except they decided to tel Jacob I organized the plan to get him out [4/24/17, 6:38:19 PM] Matt: They pulled a Laura Boneham [4/24/17, 6:38:27 PM] Dana Barry: who the fuck told him [4/24/17, 6:38:38 PM] Dana Barry: like that didnt need to happen [4/24/17, 6:39:47 PM] Matt: The girls [4/24/17, 6:39:54 PM] Matt: And like don't blame me [4/24/17, 6:40:06 PM] Matt: Because I was working as a spy to the other tribe and now they know I'm a flipper [4/24/17, 6:43:55 PM] Dana Barry: do people on our tribe from nuTemoana think you flipped? [4/24/17, 6:45:00 PM] Matt: I don't know [4/24/17, 6:45:05 PM] Matt: Jacob might have exposed me [4/24/17, 6:45:23 PM] Matt: in which case I'm worried [4/24/17, 6:45:24 PM] Matt: But idk [4/24/17, 6:46:00 PM] Dana Barry: yeah that would be worrisome, because if he did they could be lying to you about who is going on our tribe tonight so that we’ll waste an idol [4/24/17, 6:47:38 PM] Dana Barry: i wonder if there’s any other way to confirm [4/24/17, 6:49:21 PM] Matt: No clue WISH ME LUCK 2NIGHT CREW
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Okay so I'm pretty sure our vote is gonna be a simple 5-1 vote for Jacob, which I feel really bad about. Because Jacob is someone who I really like and have wanted to work with from the beginning but I accidentally screwed that up. I hope I can be friends with him after the game, and hopefully backstab Matt because he's highkey a shady bitch. Allie thinks Matt is just trying to scare us into being his ally. Anyway I hope tribal over on Makira goes well, and that either Ryan or Lexi get voted out since I know them the least.
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RTP i'm swingin my big ass dick w my idol around it and u ain't touchin me or that idol but i'll make sure to smack u with it on ur way out
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