#like yes emails also have their own privacy issues and I feel like walking into my inbox is stepping into a stupidly crowded attic

[faytelumos]

The internet's startin' to look more and more like a sinking ship.

Email chains are looking better and better.

[misora-msby]

scarred love.

rating : mature

word count : 4.3k

themes : angst, slight fluff, implied and mentions of sex

notes : based on vistlip’s CLASSIC OPERA // this is my first work on this blog, i hope you enjoy!

“I don’t think he loves me anymore.”

“No way… That’s not the case, I’m sure!”

“That’s what I want to think but…”

Suna could barely believe as he stood outside the bedroom door, hand barely making contact with the handle. Was that really what you thought? 

“I wonder if it’s normal for couples to fall out of love at this stage.”

“Mm… there’s certainly been couples I’ve known like that. They were in love for years but after they got married they decided it wasn’t the life for them and divorced.”

Suna heard your gasp follow the tinny voice from the phone. He had heard of similar stories before but never thought it would happen to him and you. 

Ever since you had gotten together, he was always subtle in his love. He was never the type to outright say “I love you” in public or to boldly proclaim his love for you on social media. Suna preferred linking pinkies while walking or to post photos of your study dates with simple captions like “another ‘10 minute break’” or “we are going to collapse”. 

Despite this, when you were in the privacy of your apartment, he almost never left your side. It was either his head on your lap, his legs laying over yours on the couch, or you sitting on his lap in some way albeit still being relatively quiet. 

So to think you were getting upset with the little attention he was showing recently had him confused. Wasn’t he always like this?

“But Y/N, I doubt Suna-san’s fallen out of love. Isn’t it just that his new job with EJP Raijin is keeping him busy?” 

“Y-Yeah but… he hasn’t said anything about it. He comes back late and leaves early and it just… It just sucks so much! I don’t know what to do!” you sob and Suna can hear the sound of you blowing your nose and coughing through your tears. 

Taking a step back from the bedroom door, the middle blocker moved to the couch and sat for a moment, head in his hands. He knew love couldn’t be perfect. A perfect relationship without fights or problems was just waiting to crumble from the slightest crack in it. But he wanted to at least prevent you from thinking this way. 

He wanted you to know he did love you. 

Later that night, he crawled into the bed, freshly showered and in his pyjamas - an old thin t-shirt and a pair of boxers. You laid beside him in your own pyjamas - one of his big t-shirts and a pair of shorts. 

“Y/N,” he turned onto his side and called your name, causing you to almost jump while attempting to fall asleep with your swirling thoughts.

“Yes, Rin?” 

“You have a free day tomorrow too, don’t you?”

“Well… yes. Why?”

The bed shifted under his movement to hold himself over you. 

“W-Wait a second! Rin! I’m not prepared or anything- mmf!” 

He pressed his lips to yours, his fox-like eyes shut delicately as he kissed you passionately. Before you knew it, his hands moved to your sides and began to lift the edge of the shirt up, but were quickly pushed down. 

“Rintarou,” you lightly pushed on his chest, “I uh… I’m not wearing any nice underwear… A-And I haven’t shaved. Can I go change and do that?” 

Honestly you were very surprised that he suddenly wanted to do this. Suna was always one to do things out of the blue; your relationship was built on impromptu dates and spontaneous gifts he claimed ‘reminded him of you’, but this really had came out of nowhere. 

You hadn’t been intimate in weeks and you wanted to at least look good for it, but Suna just shook his head. 

“You’re fine like this. I love you however you look.” He leaned back down and began to place kisses along your jaw and neck. 

His kisses were softer than usual, you noted. And his hands weren’t rushing to tear your clothes off like he usually did.

“Rin- ah! Rintarou, why are you doing this all of a sudden?”

“We’re both free tomorrow. Can’t I spend my free day with my girlfriend the way I want to?” he asked, looking up at you through his thin lashes. 

“Still! That gives me more time to go get ready.”

“No,” he shook his head and continued to kiss and bite along your neck and collarbones, leaving his marks of love on your skin, “I want to spend every second that I can with you now that I have the time.”

“Wait a second.”

Suna finally pulled his lips away from your skin, now littered with little marks, “What’s wrong?”

“Since when were you so romantic? It just… Don’t get me wrong, I’m super happy it’s just a little funny…” 

His eyes widened at the sight of tears welling up in your eyes.

“Y/N, are you okay?” he asked, cupping your face in his large rough hands gently. 

“I’m more than okay! No… I don’t know why I’m crying…” you sob softly, rubbing at your eyes. 

Suna chuckled lightly. “Is it because you’re filled with overwhelming love for me?”

“Rintarou!” you whined and hit his chest lightly. “You’re absolutely insufferable!”

“You say that but you were the one who asked me out on our graduation.” 

“...you little shit. I really do love you.” 

“Mm, I thought so. I love you too.” He continued to kiss and strip you.

Unlike your usual nights together which were spent fucking roughly, leaving bodies sore and lightly scarred, tonight was slow and loving albeit passionate as ever. Soft kisses and laughs were exchanged in the dark as Suna made love to you, thrusting slowly while mumbling words of love into your body. 

The next morning, you were woken up by the feeling of a kiss on your forehead. Your eyelids fluttered open and you squinted in the morning light to see Suna sitting on his side of the bed, clad only in boxers. There was also the scent of eggs and toast, and when you looked down, you saw it sitting on a plate between you two.

“I’m no Osamu here. But I think my cooking is still edible,” your boyfriend sighed before flopping down onto the bed beside you and closing his eyes. 

“You actually woke up to cook for me?” you asked, sitting up to look at the sunny-side-ups with broken yolks and the toast that was just a little too toasted for your liking. 

“Surprised myself too,” he yawned before squinting his eyes open, “More like… I wanted to surprise you. And wake you up with a kiss.”

“You’re so cheesy today, aren’t you!”

“I know, I think it’s weird too.”

On that day, you knew he still loved you. And you loved him more than ever before.

But that happiness couldn’t last forever. In the city of Tokyo where sadness and troubles rained down, something was bound to happen. Even the most heavily cemented cracks could once again break under a heavy enough pressure. 

Even if it took a couple of months.

“Rintarou! Welcome home!”

“Mm.”

Your brow furrowed slightly as you noticed his short answer. After shutting your laptop where you were answering some work related emails while waiting for your boyfriend, you made your way over to Suna who was hanging his winter coat by the door.

“Rin, are you alright?”

“Just tired.”

You sighed softly, “You shouldn’t overwork yourself. You need breaks sometimes too, you know?” And reached up to begin massaging his shoulders as you usually did. But he only pushed your hands away quickly, saying, “Not tonight,” before walking further into the apartment.

You bit your lower lip to prevent it from trembling any further while your hands stayed still as if frozen mid air. You were hesitating to tell him what you wanted to say earlier.

“Rintarou… Tomorrow you don’t have scheduled practice, right? I…” you took a deep breath as he turned to face you, eyes dark and heavy-looking. 

“Yeah.”

“I was wondering… Well, I don’t have work tomorrow either so I reserved a place at a nice restaurant for dinner! I think we both need a bit of a break, work’s been so busy and you’re also training so intensely and-”

“No.”

“H- Huh?” you laughed nervously, “What do you mean by ‘no’?”

“It means what it means, I don’t want to go.”

“Rintarou, you can’t just- I can’t- I promise it’s a really nice place! A-And I wanted to spend some time with you…” there was a lump welling up in your throat as you tried not to suddenly pour out your recent feelings towards him. 

The recent frustrations of not being able to spend much time with your boyfriend anymore, the annoyance at the way he would always spend his free time doing self training, the anger towards his schedule which rarely ever allowed you to meet, the sadness of the fact that your shared apartment no longer had the sound of laughter when you two played games or watched silly YouTube videos together...

All that frustration felt like it was just being held up behind that lump in your throat, and to think he would simply dismiss it without a second thought.

“You should’ve asked before you started making plans. I’m going to the gym tomorrow again. We have a match against the Red Falcons in two weeks so I need to become at least a bit stronger,” Suna explained monotonously, as if you should have known that already.

“I- I know but… I thought… it’d be a nice surprise…”

The man sighed and turned to walk towards the bathroom, ready to just shower and go to sleep. He simply could not be bothered to argue with you, thinking this problem would solve itself like it always did. But you had had enough of this issue.

Suna hadn’t even realised it was coming until he felt a small bell keychain hit the back of his head. It fell to the hardwood floor with a loud clang which lasted for far too long, causing him to inhale sharply and turn around, anger and annoyance replacing the bored expression on his face for once. 

“What the hell is-” he was about to raise his voice until he saw the way your features trembled and your eyes had already become red and puffy. His own features softened and his body unstiffened. “Y/N…”

“You know, the least you could do is try to be nice to me!” you yelled, furiously wiping away the tears forming. “You could at least say “Mm, I’m really not free but we can do it some other time.” or some shit like that! But no! I- I’m busy too, you know! I’m trying to get promoted so I don’t have to rely on yer dumb ass all the time, but I still want to make time for you because I love you so much! But I don’t think ya get that!” 

Something in the back of your mind was telling you not to say these things, that maybe you could just talk this out calmly. Maybe you didn’t have to explode, but something else told you this was the only way to get a point across.

“I’m your girlfriend, but I feel more like a roommate or burden at this point! Ya know, even ‘Tsumu’s able to make time for his girlfriend! And- And Bokuto’s always doing his promotions and ads but still makes time for his boyfriend! Ojiro-senpai too! Miyu-chan tells me he’s the one planning the dates! But ya can’t even be bothered to pretend you’re happy I tried ta plan somethin’ for us!” 

Suna knew you really were angry when your dialect started coming out but he just didn’t know what to say. He could only stand there in silence with his head hanging like a child being scolded.

“Rintarou… I love you so much you know… I just wonder these days- no, I just wonder if you ever loved me back the same way.”

Oh, he knew. Ever since that night when he heard you crying on the phone, he knew he wasn’t doing enough. 

“I… I’m sorry.” Suna looked up when he suddenly heard those words from you amidst the sobs and chokes. 

“I already left your pyjamas on the bathroom counter… Please don’t… Just please don’t talk to me tonight.” you hurried to the tiny kitchen to wash your face as he silently made his way to the bathroom, thoughts swirling around in his head. 

Suna stared at your figure silently for a second before bending down to pick up the bell - a cheap gift he had given you for your third month together right after you two first started university. It was old, the string slightly frayed and loose, and the golden paint had chipped in places to reveal the stainless steel underneath it. There was even a dent on the bottom from when you accidentally dropped one of your heavier textbooks onto it. It was old, and Suna had told you countless times it was fine to throw away, but you always kept it. 

The man took it and carefully placed it back on the key rack before heading into the bathroom. He took his time in there, gathering his thoughts as he knew he wouldn’t be sharing a bed with you tonight.

It was understandable really, he hadn’t been a great boyfriend. Suna knew a relationship took work from both sides and he shouldn’t have been as blunt as he was earlier that night. 

One couldn’t count the number of times he had muttered profanities aimed towards himself while sitting in the bathtub thinking about his mistakes. He didn’t know if you would even want to see him tomorrow morning. Maybe it was for the best he just went to the gym…

The next morning, Suna woke up early. Even in winter, the sun rose far too early in Japan for his taste. Sitting up and grumbling, he rubbed his eyes and stumbled to the bathroom to begin his morning routine.

Looking at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, he could only sigh at the sight of the dark circles under his eyes. 

Though you made him sleep on the stiff couch last night, you gave him the shared duvet and his pillow while you took the slightly thinner blanket from the closet. 

Despite the added comfort, Suna could barely fall asleep. He kept twisting and turning, thinking about you. Your pained face, your strained voice, your kindness even when angry at him. 

“I fucked up so bad,” he muttered once he washed his face and stared at his pathetically tired self in the mirror, water dripping from the ends of his hair. Would you want to break up with him after that? He’d understand if you wanted to, though he knew he would never be able to forgive himself for losing you because of some stupid mistake he could have prevented. 

Suna sighed for what felt like the thousandth time in the past 12 hours and dabbed his face dry with a towel. He knew that now would be the hardest bit - entering your bedroom to get his change of clothes.

Opening the door as slowly as possible in order to prevent the loud whiny creaking that he wished he had fixed months ago, Suna walked slowly towards the open closet. As quickly as possible, he grabbed a set of clothes and turned to face the door. Though it wasn’t without looking at your sleeping form on the large bed. 

Your face was puffy, dehydrated from sobbing last night, only emphasised by the wads of used tissues on the nightstand and floor. He noticed your breathing was a bit heavier than usual and your body was curled up as you hugged the thin blanket as close to yourself as you could.

The sight pained him intensely. 

With silent footsteps, Suna set his clothes on his side (the empty side) of the bed and tiptoed out to grab the duvet before returning and carefully laying it over your body. He tucked it right up to your chin as you always liked it and sat on the floor, eyes scanning every little feature on your face. From the smallest moles he loved to kiss to each individual eyelash.

“You’re not hearing this, I guess,” he muttered, looking down at the floor for a moment before looking back up at you, “I thought about it for a really long time. I really should’ve been better to you.”

The silence in the room was deafening. 

Suna gulped and bit the inside of his cheek as he thought about his next words, wondering if you could hear him in your sleep. 

“I always left you alone but you would always be nice to me. When you could, you’d make me bentos and clean the house while I did the laundry. Hm… putting stuff into a machine isn’t anywhere equal to cooking and cleaning surfaces, but I guess that’s another point to make.” 

Suna smiled to himself just a bit at the memory of you running into the bedroom to make him try your new pastries or dinner creations. He always thought you were so adorable in your old and stained apron that sometimes he would just stand in the kitchen to chat with you or watch you cook.

Then he was reminded of the dinner you had planned for the two of you and he suddenly frowned remembering how horrible he acted towards you the night before.

“You never expected me to be perfect since day one. I think I’m the furthest thing from a handsome prince on a white horse. But you’ve always been wonderful to me. And I was thinking…” You were asleep, right? Was it worth it to say such cheesy things?

“I kept wondering if you would leave and I thought I don’t want to lose you. I’m nowhere close to a prince but I thought I want to always be the one who wakes you up with a kiss. Or, I want you to wake me up with a kiss. Either is fine really. But… yeah. I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. ” He was certain you weren’t hearing these things yet there was a dark blush on his cheeks.

Until he saw you shift in the bed. 

Suna swears his heart stopped momentarily as he leaned closer, checking to see if you had woken up. 

Your eyelids slowly opened and you squinted tiredly at Suna, just barely able to see him with how blurry your vision had become. “Rin…?”

The man hurried to his feet, hoping his morning wouldn’t feel any heavier than it already did. 

“I’m gonna give you some space. I’ll be back after my jog.” 

Suna turned to exit the bedroom but was stopped by the sound of stumbling, followed by your warmth around his waist and resting on his back.

“Please… don’t go.”

He stared silently at the floor in front of him. 

“I don’t think you want to-”

“Stay here! …please?” 

Your soft voice broke but mended his heart at the same time. The scratchiness and fear in your voice contrasted with the words that he wanted to hear so badly.

“Did you…”

“Yeah, I heard everything.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Of course I’m still a little mad. But right now I’m just really happy you would say those things when you normally wouldn’t tell me how you feel. So… please, don’t go. Stay with me.”

The few moments of silence seemed to pass in eons as Suna took in a shaky breath before turning to hug you tightly, burying his face into your neck so you couldn’t see his tears of relief.

“Of course I will. I won’t go anywhere, babe.”

Four years have passed since that night. Suna yawns and scrunches up his face slightly at the way the sunlight enters your shared bedroom. Squinting his eyes, he looks around the room and wonders if maybe he should’ve put on a shirt like you did last night to deal with the first bites of winter. Then again, you did take his shirt.

He then looks to you, sleeping quietly by his side. You looked a little like a mess; hair messy, dwarfed in his big shirt, cheek smushed against the pillow, but he thought you looked adorable. 

It’s cold, but he feels warm by your side. 

And when he looks down at your left hand resting under his even in your sleep, the sight of the silver ring with its diamonds adorning your finger makes his heart even warmer.

[thestraggletag]

Virtual Session, A Rumbelle Zoom Fic

Rating: Explicit.

Summary: Town meetings were usually drab, boring events, and having them over Zoom hadn't improved them much. Or so Mr Gold thought, until he forgot to log out of the meeting after it ended, only to discover a half-naked Belle French had also forgotten to do so.

SOMEONE PLEASE COMMENT WITH A BETTER SUMMARY I HATE IT.

Based on this prompt.

“We will review your presentation and hold a virtual vote before the month is up, Miss French. Thank you very much for your time.”

The mayor adjusted her suit jacket, her shirt riding up as she did so and unknowingly displaying the telltale white check of her Adidas yoga pants. Royce snickered, taking advantage of the fact he was muted.

“As there are no other pending topics on today’s agenda this virtual session is adjourned.”

He half-expected her to produce a gable out of thin air and bang it against her marble countertop. All around him people began to say their goodbyes and log out of Zoom, lest Regina decide to spring a surprise motion at the last minute. There was no need to flee, however, as Regina herself was one of the first to log off. Given the amount of smoke he had spotted coming from behind her right before she exited he did not need to guess what had caused her sudden departure.

“I guess no apple turnover for dessert at Madame Mayor’s.”

He heard an adorable chuckle and did not need to glance at the screen again to guess who it was. Very few people found his brand of dark humour palatable, but the librarian seemed to love it. It was nice, he soon found out, to have someone appreciate his often ill-received quips. It was one of the things he had first noticed about her. Well, other than her stunning eyes. And perhaps her hair, which was a lovely shade of reddish-brown. Her legs too, he acknowledged reluctantly, so nicely-displayed by her short skirts and high heels. And her-

He stopped himself. That way lay madness and he knew it. It was one thing to admire in an unattached way, from a distance. He was a connoisseur of beautiful things, after all, and Belle French was certainly beautiful. Unfortunately she also happened to have a lovely personality. Kind, generous, open, but also bold, defiant and the littlest bit dark. She flaunted the rules of smalltown society by wearing what the matrons around town considered “inappropriate clothing” for a librarian, and speaking to anyone and everyone, including those that polite society would urge her to shun. Drank beer with the miners, for example, men deemed “too coarse” for genteel women, and stocked the library with altogether undesirable books, be it because they dealt with unseemly issues or because they were from traditional authors. Which, he was sure, was code for “white men”, even if Mother Superior never quite spelled it out in such terms.

She was altogether dangerous for him, with her mix of light and dark, so he was always on his guard, lest his thoughts veer too far into dangerous territory. He didn’t fear scorn or derision if his feelings became too obvious for her to ignore. Belle was altogether too kind for that. But to be gently yet firmly rebuffed, and have their subsequent interactions laced by the barest hint of pity from her, would be unbearable. 

“I’m pretty sure that at least Mr Spencer didn’t hear a word I said. His camera was off during the whole of my presentation.” The librarian huffed, clearly bothered that her proposal to increase the library’s budget to repair the East Wing’s leaky ceiling wouldn’t get a fair shot. The wing was currently closed, and had been since she had taken the post of librarian, but with the newfound need of social-distancing, particularly in enclosed spaces, she hoped she could change that, make the town council see the need for more space in the library. “Though perhaps he didn’t want to be yelled at again for not being in a three-piece suit for a virtual town meeting.”

He briefly paused to remember Spencer’s red face when Regina had chastised him for wearing a white polo shirt instead of a shirt and tie during the last meeting.

“Kinda hypocritical of Madame Mayor, given she was a couple of clothing articles shy of a full tracksuit tonight.”

They shared a conspiratorial laugh, and he hoped the camera somehow toned down the stupid look on his face. He tried to avoid direct eye contact, looking instead mildly-interested in her living-room. Her laptop seemed to be perched somewhere on her dining-room table, giving him a great view of the rest of her flat, which was a loft, so it was open space, with exposed brick and tall ceilings. Though small it was tastefully-decorated, and with enough bookcases to make it seem like it was a part of the library he had never been to, if it weren’t for the kitchen area and the- and he told himself to stop looking at it- queen-size bed.

“Well, Miss French, at the risk of getting ahead of myself I can confidently state that things are looking good for your project. It was an excellent presentation and I could see Midas and Hopper were clearly in favour. That leaves the Mayor and Spencer outnumbered. Hell, I think even Regina will vote yes on this one. I know she’s keen on finding a place for students with connectivity issues to go do their homework and attend some classes. Fingers crossed the voting goes your way.”

He smiled at her, trying to look reassuring instead of besotted, and they exchanged their goodbyes. He closed his laptop, deciding that he needed a stiff drink first and a cold shower later, and went over to his wet bar, where after some debate he picked up a bottle of Ardberg and poured himself three fingers of Scotch, opting to forgo the ice and drink it straight. The alcohol burned pleasantly on its way down, making him loosen up almost immediately. He went over to the window, undoing the buttons of his vest and slipping it off as he did, feeling warmed by the whiskey. He chanced a glance outside, where the night remained crisp and clear, thankfully devoid of snow. It was still bitterly cold, though, and he hoped the library’s heating system, which was in need of maintenance as well, would not fail. The money for its maintenance had already been allocated and the budget for the work set, but perhaps he could email the person in charge of the job and… persuade them to make it a priority. The work should’ve already been done, but the pandemic had put a temporary stop on jobs like that with the exception of emergencies. Now that things were slowly returning to normal he was confident he could get the people working on the library by the end of the week with three sentences or less.

He went back to his laptop, determined to send the email as soon as possible. He opened it up and noticed, at first, that his camera light was still on. Almost as soon as his brain connected the dots and realised that he had forgotten to log off Zoom he noticed something else: so had Belle French. She was walking around her house, seemingly tidying things up and humming as she went along. It was a lovely, domestic little display, and though he knew he needed to log off fucking Zoom and stop intruding on what Miss French clearly thought was the privacy of her own home, he didn’t move the mouse. Surely there was no harm in indulging a bit. He was a lonely man, partly by design and partly by circumstance, and though he often told himself he wasn’t missing out on anything, he had to admit it was nice to- albeit accidentally- share an intimate moment with someone he had an affinity with. He imagined, for a moment, that instead of her living-room he was seeing her in his, picking up discarded books or perhaps the remnants of a tea they had shared together. He quickly shook himself out of that fantasy, alarm bells ringing in his mind, and refocused in the present, where Belle was taking off her cardigan. Well, surely, that meant the heating system was holding, which was a good thing. Which reminded him of his idea to write-

He glanced at the monitor again, where Belle French was now shimming out of her skirt.

He blinked, idiotically-confused for a second, as if the thought of a woman undressing was news for him. After the initial shock he took in all the details, fixsting on the black stripe on the back of her sheer black stockings, which she rolled down with painstaking care, the gesture almost painfully erotic. She started on the buttons of her sheer maroon shirt, undoing them with ease and shrugging out of the garment. The black camisole she wore underneath did nothing to conceal her lacy black culotte, which hugged her perfect ass like it was made for her. She went to unpin her hair next, letting the bobby pins that kept it off her sides of her face drop into a little ceramic bowl on her vanity. He was surprised at how much seeing her walk around her house with bare feet, shaking her hair out and stretching her limbs affected him. There was nothing inherently sensual about her movements, yet he was transfixed, unable to look away. Any hope of containing his attraction or attachment to the librarian vanished into thin air at that moment, leaving him equal parts scared and turned on.

It was then that his mostly-unused sense of decency decided to let itself be known, a wave of shame washing through him at the notion of what he was doing. Miss French had every right to her privacy, and here he was, violating it in the worst possible way. He should log out immediately and stay away from the librarian for a rather long time, enough for-

“Royce?”

His heart lurched painfully in his chest at the sound of her voice. Slowly, reluctantly, he turned his head towards the screen, telling himself that he deserved the scorn and disgust he was sure to see in the librarian’s face. But whatever hasty apologies and half-formed excuses he was about to blurt out died on his lips the moment he saw her: she was standing in profile, arms crossed in front of her chest and hands grasping the hem of her camisole, prepared to take it off, and her head was turned to the side, her eyes on her laptop screen. She didn’t look accusatory, or disgusted. She didn’t even look embarrassed. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes shone, but it looked more like… like... 

Arousal.

“I’m here, sweetheart.”

He could hardly recognise the low, growly burr as his voice. It sounded uncouth and harsh, like the way he used to speak back in Glasgow. He had worked for years on toning down his accent, letting only the barest hint of it show when he was trying to intimidate someone. Never enough to sound too much like he did back in his youth, and yet he hadn’t managed to quite rid himself of it. 

On screen Belle lifted the hem of her camisole a few inches, exposing supple, creamy skin. Royce tried hard not to swallow his own tongue. She bit her lip, suddenly hesitant, and fuck him if that sliver of vulnerability wasn’t the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. 

“Is this… Is this okay?” 

It took him an embarrassingly-long time to understand that Belle fucking French was asking him if it was alright for her to strip in front of him, presumably for their mutual enjoyment. He reminded himself that he had had only one glass of Scotch, not enough to dismiss whatever was happening as a drunken daydream. Which he might have had, from time to time. About Belle. Maybe.

“It’s perfect, sweetheart.” 

Her lips curled into a coy smile, the growl in his voice making her shiver, and in one swift motion removed her camisole, revealing a lacy black bandeau bra with delicate details done in leavers lace. It matched her knickers, he noticed idly, and the black contrasted amazingly with her pale, softly-blushed skin. His keen eye noticed the exquisite craftsmanship right away. It was an expensive set, no doubt, and given how she was wearing during a commonplace day where she planned to stay home it led him to the conclusion that Belle French simply owned a lot of fancy lingerie, to the point that she wore it as an everyday sort of garment. He was very sure he would never again be able to look at her and not think about that.

“You’re gorgeous.”

In any other situation he would’ve been embarrassed to sound so… Reverent. So incredibly not in control of the situation. He might be fully-dressed, a man of means with a position of political power in their little hamlet and she might be a half-naked small-town librarian but he was absolutely powerless at the moment. And what was worse, he enjoyed it. 

“Thank you, Mr Gold.”

Though he loved the way she said “Gold”, with enough irreverence to turn her tone teasing, he desperately wanted her to say his name.

“Call me Royce, sweetheart.”

She walked over to the table, flipped the chair and sat down, draping her arms loosely around the backrest, the position loose and cocky. There was no doubt in her now, no hesitance. She had assumed control of the situation, for which he was grateful. She tilted her head to a side, sizing him up.

“You’re wearing a lot of clothes, Royce. I feel at a disadvantage.”

She smiled, looking supremely unconcerned, but there was a glint in her eyes he recognised quite easily. Greed. And not the kind he was used to seeing in people who frequented his shop to strike one of his infamous deals. It was different. It certainly felt different to him, hit him right beneath his gut in a way that felt both uncomfortable and pleasant. Without quite thinking his fingers went to the knot of his tie, already loosened, and tugged expertly, untying it in seconds. The silk made a soft, hissing sound as it slipped off his neck, which sounded loud in the otherwise dead silence of the room. Belle followed his movements avidly from the screen, and the look of utter absorption on her face gave him the surge of bravery he needed to tackle the buttons of his shirt till he could shimmy out of it. He was wearing a white undershirt beneath, but his arms and throat were bare, making him feel ridiculously exposed. 

“You have many layers. I like that about you.” Belle dropped her gaze, looking coy and vulnerable at the same time. “I like a lot of things about you.”

“Me too.” He tried to stop himself, but it was easier said than done. “Too many things, actually. But I’ve always understood that it would be foolish to expect anything to come of that.” He looked at Belle, draped over her chair and in her underwear. “Well, perhaps I was wrong.”

Belle smiled.

“You’re finally getting it. Good boy.”

He forced himself not to react visibly to those words, even though the moment he heard them it was like being struck by lightning. Thankfully the camera caught him from the waist up, hiding the embarrassing way his cock had perked up a second earlier. He could not hide his flushed face, however, or the way his eyes glazed over the slightest bit. 

“Tell you what. I’ll take off my bra if you lose the t-shirt. It’s a fair deal.”

It wasn’t. As far as he was concerned he was getting the far better end of the deal but he would never dream of telling her that. Tipping his hand was not his style. 

“Deal.”

He said it in the pleased, soft burr he usually reserved for his less savoury business arrangements, the kind that needed to be sealed in the cloak of night in some remote, deserted location. Belle shivered, and he enjoyed the thought that his voice made her react so. Feeling bold he grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked it off,      baring himself from the waist up. He saw and felt the librarian’s eyes roam over his torso. It wasn’t a pretty sight. He had scars from his dodgy upbringing in Glasgow, and some from his learning days restoring antiques. He was fond of the sun so at least he was not pasty white, or overly hairy, but he didn’t have much in the way of muscles. Belle, however, seemed to appreciate his more lean physique, if the heat of her gaze was any indication. After she seemed to have her fill of staring she leaned back and deftly unhooked her bra, letting the straps slide down her arms till the garment was on the floor. 

He stared. Couldn’t help himself really. Belle French’s tits were perfect. Fucking perfect. Just the right size, incredibly soft-looking and with the loveliest nipples he had ever seen, a rosy-pink that he would never be able to get out of his head. The kind of breasts that would ruin a man for other women. He certainly felt like no other breasts could ever tempt him again. 

“Royce, are you okay?”

Her voice sounded a delightful mix of amused and slightly worried, so he forced himself to nod, still unable to look away.

“Fucking perfect.”

Fuck, was that his voice? He sounded… dazed. He fought the instinct to slap some sense into himself. Belle draped herself across the back of the chair again, and though the position hid her breasts somewhat it didn’t do so completely. 

“I love how soft you are. Underneath the hardass pawnbroker exterior, I mean. Soft, and kind and funny. So funny. It’s one of your most attractive qualities.”

Most people wouldn’t think so. His brand of humour was dark, sometimes too much. And yet Belle always laughed, always caught on to his quips and seemed to appreciate them in a consporatory way. She could also dish it out, but in a far more subtle way that he was sure most people didn’t catch on to. Softly-spoken sarcasm delivered in a lilting accent. 

What was not to love?

He told her so. Unburdened himself completely, caught up in his own physical vulnerability and hers. It felt safe to tell her of his feelings, of how days where he knew he would see her were brighter, and how he liked when they shared a smile or exchanged a comment on a book. How his heart fluttered when he watched her read to the children, and how another part of his anatomy altogether reacted when she strutted around town with her short skirts and devil-may-care attitude. Liked how she thumbed her nose at the pearl-clutchers in town, doing things her way. Completely unsuited for boring, conventional small-town life, and yet wholly at home in Storybrooke, to the point where he could not imagine the town without her.

He shut up after that, noticing how she seemed to have changed, her mood going from loose and flirty to… anxious? No, that wasn’t the right word. Unsettled, perhaps.

“I can’t do this.” The sudden sentence felt like a slap in the face, but the moment his face dropped she seemed to backpedal. “No, no, not like that! I mean… I wanna touch you. I want to be in the same room. With even less clothes on. This… It suddenly doesn’t feel like enough.”

She was fucking right, he realised. He felt itchy all of a sudden. Unfulfilled. Empty.

“Come over.”

“What?”

Belle seemed genuinely surprised, but the way her skin flushed and her eyes got big let him know she was very open to the idea.

“Come the fuck over. It’s fucking cold anyway and the heating system at the library is shite at the moment. Come over and I’ll keep you warm, sweetheart.”

He was rather impressed with his blunt bit of bravery, born out of a consuming need more than anything, and even more impressed when it looked like it worked. Belle scrambled out of the chair, throwing a lovely little nightie on before getting her coat and scarf. 

“Be there in a few. See you!”

She disconnected before he could tell her to bundle up. It was fucking freezing outside and that nightie and her stockings and shoes would do nothing against the cold, coat or no coat. A moment later he realised he was sitting down in his pants, socks and shoes and nothing else while Belle fucking French was coming over to... 

Fuck.

He scrambled up, fishing for his cane in a hurry and having just enough presence of mind to disconnect from Zoom. He went upstairs to his room, deciding that it would be awkward for him to still be wearing pants. And socks. And shoes. So he chucked all that off, throwing a dressing gown over his boxers, pausing to put on his house slippers, glad beyond words he had recently bought new ones. After that he went downstairs to the kitchen and popped a bottle of champagne, looking into his pantry for the box of chocolate truffles from Kreuther, a treat he had gotten himself after visiting a state sale in Midtown Manhattan a week ago. He arranged the impromptu offerings on the dining room table, and when the bell rang he told himself he was ready. He opened the door, finding a rosy-cheeked and clearly shivering Belle on the other side, hair windswept, as if she had run there. Taking into account her heels it was rather impressive.

Belatedly he thought about the scene she had walked into. He in his dressing gown, with champagne flutes and truffles on the table and a fire roaring in the living-room, a scenario ripe for debauching. But perhaps she wished to talk more, to explore their emotional intimacy. Perhaps the trek there had killed her ardour and all she wanted and needed was to get warm and comfortable. He didn’t want to come off as… expecting anything.

Belle, however, seemed to not share his concerns. She took one look at him, one look at the softly-lit space behind him and the food laid out and smiled.

“You brilliant, wonderful man.”

A second late she was in his arms. Cold, but soft and smelling of orange blossoms and frost. She tilted her head up, slanting her lips across before he could blink and it was… wonderful. The coolness of her lips contrasted with the searing heat of her mouth, making for a rather delicious contrast of sensations. He used the hand not clutching his cane for dear life to find the buttons of her coat, undoing them one by one with barely-contained impatience. Finally he had the coat opened and could snake his arm around her waist. The silk of her small camisole was soft to the touch, and let him feel the warmth of her skin beneath.

He needed to feel more. Now that she was safe in the warmth of his house she didn’t need her coat or scarves and went about the business of removing both without separating himself from her. It took a lot of tugging and pulling and a couple of missteps that landed her up against the wall, to his utter delight, but she was finally rid of both. Her skin, despite the toasty temperature inside the house, was still chilly from the outside.

“Come close to the fire, sweetheart.”

They managed to stumble across the hallway and into the living room, where they seemed to come to the mutual conclusion that remaining standing was not conducive to their current situation. The rug near the fireplace, thankfully, was thick and soft, and the couple of throw blankets he quickly spread over it made it more so. Once he was satisfied she would be comfortable he let her tackle him to the ground, enjoying having her above him. She was small, especially once she wrestled her heeled boots off. A tiny slip of a woman, shorter than him even, but there was a presence to her, a strength, that he couldn't help but surrender to. Beautiful, terrifying Belle.

“I’ve dreamed of this.” Her voice was low, husky. “You weren’t wearing a dressing gown in my dreams, though.”

“And you weren’t wearing anything in mine.” His accent was so thick he feared she might not be able to understand me. “Tit for tat, dearie.”

She ground herself against him, causing him to hiss and arc. Enough pressure to elicit a response, but not nearly enough to satisfy him.

“Don’t call me that. That’s how you call everyone else, and I’m not everyone else, am I?”

Her confidence slipped for a second, exposing a hint of uncertainty that he was quick to dispel.

“No, sweetheart. Of course not.”

He untied the belt of his dressing gown, managing to slip it off while still pinned by Belle. He didn’t imagine it was a very sexy spectacle but she seemed to appreciate it nevertheless. To reward him she yanked her nightie off, revealing her glorious breasts once again to his hungry stare. She was absolutely perfect, made even better by the way the fire lit her skin and hair, and turned her eyes a deeper blue. She looked fierce yet soft, a magnanimous mistress looking down fondly at a favoured pet. Idly she traced a scar near his right shoulder with the tip of her index finger, frowning the slightest bit.

“I want to know the story behind this. I want to know… more. About you. All there is to know that you wish to tell me.”

“Yes.” Usually he’d balk at the idea of such intimacy, of being so bare. Yet it felt like something he could do with Belle, something he wanted to do. “Yes, of course, sweetheart. And I want to know everything about you.”

She smiled, the gesture slowly turning sultry as she crossed her elbows over his chest.

“We’ll talk… later.”

She kissed him then, slowly and thoroughly, sinking one hand into his hair so she could tilt his head just so. Her fingernails felt delicious against the sensitive skin of his scalp and were a welcome distraction from the uncomfortable pressure of her ass against his groin. He wanted to last, desperately, but she was every wet dream he’d ever had come true. He needed to redirect his attention to anywhere but his aching cock. So he forced himself to focus on anything else. The soft, silky feeling of her skin against the rough pads of his fingers, and the taste of her, faintly sweet. She kissed like it was an art, managing to somehow find every spot that made him want to rip her panties off and just bury himself in her, foreplay be damned.

He startled when he felt her hands trail down his body and grasp the elastic of his underwear, tugging on it to hint at what she wanted. He obliged her before he could talk himself out of it, raising his hips so she could slide the boxers off his legs while still kissing. He felt her touch his mangled ankle and forced himself not to flinch or pull back. Blessedly she seemed to notice his discomfort, tugging his boxers off completely and reaching out to place his hands on the sides of her hips, against the scratchy fabric of her underwear. The message was clear, especially when she propped herself against the floor with her hands so she could raise her hips. He gently tugged her pantied down, with slow, careful movements to avoid accidentally ripping the delicate lace and not simply to watch in aroused amusement as Belle fidgeted above him. 

“Patience, sweetheart.”

She whined, kicking her panties off when they reached her ankles and pushing him back a second later, her expression demanding.

“No more delays. We’ve had months of foreplay.”

He found himself agreeing with her. It certainly felt like they had been teasing each other for months, with the shared jokes, the furtive glances, bitten lips and coy smiles. Not that he had even dared dream of it before that night. Belle was too good in every way for a bitter old cripple like himself. Her hands on his cock chased his self-deprecation away, leaving his mind in a blissful state of blankness. Slowly, torturously so, she took him in, her hot, wet cunt enveloping him with the right amount of pressure. It was almost too good a feeling, leaving his nerve-endings too excited to register much else. She was fucking perfect, the feel of her the weight of her above him. Like she was made for him, only he wasn’t that lucky. 

He needed to somehow make it up to her, make it so good she would not regret it. So he focused on establishing a rhythm, steady enough to build up their pleasure, but not too perfect to make it boring. He concentrated on the sounds she made, the perfect little gasps and the occasional, shivery whine that let him know she was enjoying herself. Soon enough, however, coordination and any form of higher thinking went out the window, the pleasure getting to be too much to focus on anything else other than driving himself as deep into her as he possibly could. He had enough presence of mind to sneak a hand between their bodies, slipping it across her wet fold to stimulate her further, determined not to come before she did. When he finally felt it, the blissful fluttering of her inner walls accompanied by a triumphant cry, he let go of his last shreds of self-control, letting his body seek out its needed release, the feeling travelling up his spine and leaving his whole body boneless with satisfaction. 

He grunted when she practically fell on top of him, though he welcomed the reassuring weight of her and the heat from her body. He thought about the champagne and the truffles waiting for them on the dining room table and decided they could wait. As soon as he was able to move he would wrap his dressing gown around Belle and take her and the food and drinks to the bedroom, where they could recoup their energy and talk. And perhaps much later, if he was good, Belle would let him drink champagne from her navel. 

Thank Regina and her fucking Zoom twon halls. He would never complain about them again.

[sanderxxrobbe]

🤔 Personal Note..

I just want to make a few things clear...

The last day or so my accounts, my name and personal information (which some are false) has been circulating on tumblr leading to online hate, abusive messages and threats to me and my family. Just because one single person decided to voice their opinion and their personal views (YES THEIR PERSONAL VIEWS) and attack me online. I do not know this person or why she felt the need to do this personal attack in this manner (as a simple / healthy discussion about the topics she raised would have been sufficient). She nor anyone else has never messaged me on tumblr. She planned / intented from the beginning to attack me so this wasn't going to happen nicely (Yes anything can look and sound inappropriate when you only take sections of a post..Read the whole post and then comment). And by what i can see by her account/ posts i'm not the first and won't be the last account she bullies or abuses.

Yes everyone is entitled to their opinion and i value / accept this but the way this was executed was just vicious, calculated and right out harmful. And it shouldn't be allowed on here or on any social platform. I feel sorry for people who think this is acceptable behaviour. I would hear of this type of behaviour but never thought it would happen to me. How these accounts think its ok to go into another fandom in this manner..Wasn't SKAM & ALL SKAM REMAKES created for people to come together and enjoy a fun show and discuss everyday life topics..Togetherness.The SKAM CREATOR would be mortified by these people's behaviour and actions. Attacking other fandoms creates such a toxic environment. I'm sure that's not the message she wanted to portray..Also to have abuse and hate towards people just for fun and for their  own twisted pleasure is beyond words..To belittle people is not a form of fun..And attracking people trying to enjoy their love of their favourite fandom instead of having proper conversations. Its crazy. Watching my every move and documenting it over a year..WOW..serious issues there. This in its self is scary, stalking and bullying.

I'm not here to play the VICTIM. NOT AT ALL..Yes i too am to BLAME..And Thank you for bring my flaws and behaviour to my attention. I take full responsibility for my accounts and what i post and if i have offended or made anyone uncomfortable or feel like they need to leave this WTFOCK fandom I do sincerley apologise with all my heart. This was never my intention when i joined. Yes I may have been naive and not thought about how my posts would impact others but i guess i just assumed since wtfock covered so many serious and adult topics and there were so many written SOBBE Fanfics (mature / explicit) and mature gifs out there. Fans would be mature enough to understand my harmless, funny & loving posts (Mostly loving banter between Characters). Not acknowledging there maybe minors (18 years or less) in the fandom was my mistake. My sincere apologies to you. Yes I will take a good hard look at myself and take responsibility for my actions and think carefully before posting or saying anything in the future.. Everyone joins these platforms of their own free will..no one is forcing you to be here and you have the freedom to comment, dislike, unfollow,  block people or leave. My inbox has always been open for everyone. I created my TUMBLR and INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT for my LOVE of WTFOCK & the CAST (My love for S03 - SOBBE, the Willems (DS & H) & CAST) & to be a constant support to these amazing actors and the show...As they don't always get the credit they deserve. I only follow people who have approached me. Who are they to judge who i choose follow. If i am such a threat and annoying to the wtfock cast then why haven't they blocked or ignored me. Why does one of the cast members follow me. Then why does some of the wtfock cast chat with me. Why do they like my comments. (This is Not public knowledge as i don't see the right in posting personal conversations like many do)..Making accusations & assumptions without all the facts is immature and unacceptable.

I like /enjoy being creative & spreading joy & happiness in all that I post..i spend alot of time thinking about my posts & making sure they don't offend or make people uncomfortable (most times checking my posts with my mutual / asking permission to use their post and to see if my posts are ok to post 😏)..I use quite alot of other accounts posts (Their words eg: incorrect quotes) and add my spin to them (Mostly adding pictures). So if you know my style or me I always comment with my heart, with love & say what i feel. I do not stalk or post people's personal information or conversations..I try not to invade anyone's privacy. I genuine mean well..What you see is what you get .For those people (accounts) that have messaged me abuse & hate recently towards me and my family in regarded to this person's personal post / comments..Please STOP..if you don't like what i post just unfollow me, block me or ignore my posts..There is no need for it. SO JUST LEAVE..Everyone is intitled to an opinion (Which i value) but being mean / hateful in the process is not acceptable..

I have made some amazing friendships / friends on here from all over the world which i'm greatful for & will cherish forever..Thank you to all the beautiful people that have emailed me. Everyone has had a tough year with so much uncertainty (Covid) and we are all trying to manage / live it the best way we can..So to add this to the mix my year has started well..Not..My inbox is always open for a chat or a hello..I know what i have written here will be dissected, scrutinised, distorted & torn to pieces by these toxic accounts but i know the truth and so do my true followers and mutual. So do what you will with this post as i have said my bit and your not worth my time anymore. I won't be replying and i won't let you get to me. I'm done with you (BLOCKED). Thank you to all my mutuals and followers for joining me on this WTFOCK ride.

Please in the WTFOCK STYLE ALWAYS be kind & don't judge unless you have walked a day in that person's shoes. Love to you all always..❤ Elsa 😍

[prorevenge]

Won’t pick up your dog’s shit and then steal from me? Move out then.

So this happened at the last apartment complex I lived in. Sorry it’s so long.

My SO and I were renting a ground floor unit at a really nice apartment complex. I wouldn’t say it was a luxury apartment or anything but our ground floor unit had a little patio off the back that led out into a really nice court yard area with hammocks, a walking path, outdoor fireplace/seating area, etc. A lot of people walk their dogs out there or let their kids play out in the grass, including us.

We have a 1 year old cane corso, we got her when we’d been living in the unit for about 2.5 months and she was only 8 weeks at the time. She’s a really good dog and we trained her well. We could let her out to go potty and she’d come right back even if there were distractions/people/dogs out (we always stood on the patio and watched her anyways because our pet agreement said we couldn’t leave our dog unattended). Then we’d go pick up her poop right away if she pooped (also part of the pet agreement as I’m sure is standard at most apartment complexes). We kept a small step trash can outside specifically for her poop bags because we didn’t want to throw them away inside and the only outside trash cans were on the other side of the building (which i agree is super dumb). It really was a small trash can, like the kind you’d tuck into the bathroom between the toilet and the wall. We also had her poop bags hanging on our patio door handle for easy access so we didn’t have to hunt for them every time we needed them.

This lady and her kid moved in on the ground floor in our building, two units down from us. No biggie. We ran into her one day carrying in groceries and my SO held open the door for her. She seemed kind of Karen-ish but was polite and her kid (probably 10-11 years old) didn’t look up from his phone. Whatever that’s pretty typical of kids these days. They also had a dog, a little black and white fluffy thing super cute but not trained very well. Don’t know what kind of dog but it was much smaller than our already giant puppy.

After about two weeks or so, we realized that there were dog turds in the grass right off our patio. We found out the hard way because my boyfriend stepped in it the first time. Luckily he wasn’t barefoot. They were clearly not our dog’s turds as 1.) we always picked up her poop right after she went and 2.) they were very obviously from a small dog, not our 70 pound puppy. We’d been in the apartment about 7-8 months at that point and had never had an issue with this so we figured it was EM’s little dog. I wrote her a polite note that basically was like “Hey neighbor! We noticed that some of your dog’s poops aren’t being picked up and are right off our patio. Per the pet agreement we all have to sign, we all need to be picking up our own dog’s poop each time they go. I’m sure it was an accident and you just didn’t notice, so if you could make sure to do that going forward we’d appreciate it! -Your neighbors in (unit#)”

She wasn’t home so I slipped it under the door and went back to my apartment. A couple hours later this lady is banging on my door and gets really angry with me, insists that it couldn’t have been her dog and how dare I assume. I felt really bad and I apologized immediately, said I didn’t mean to offend her and it must have been someone else. She told me never to bother her with “crap like this again” and stormed off. I was like okaaaaayyyyy.

Not three days later, I was sitting on my patio with a book enjoying the cool weather when I see their little dog run out of their back door - no one with it - and it comes over to me. I said hello to the pup (bcuz I love pups) and then it took a shit right off patio, ran back home and scratched the door to be let in. I saw her kid slide the door open enough to let the dog in and then closed it again without coming outside to pick up the poop. I was annoyed because here I saw it with my own eyes that it WAS their dog and no one was even watching it when it was outside.

So I grabbed a poop bag, picked up the poop, wrote another less polite note about her kid neglecting to watch the dog or come to check if it had pooped/pick up after it, and dropped the poop bag and the note on their patio right by the door, then went back to my reading. EM was quicker to come by this time and stomped right up to me, waving the note around. Then stated that her kid was just a kid and probably just forgot to check. I said I didn’t care, her kid was old enough to stand outside for 3 minutes and come pick up the dog’s poop. She said well there’s no poop bags/trashcans on this side of the building and she didn’t feel comfortable making her kid walk all the way around the building for that. The next part is my own fault, in hindsight. I suggested she put a trash can like mine on her patio and leave their own poop bags handy like we do for our dog. She eyed our stuff, huffed some more, rolled her eyes, refused to do anything about the poop and walked off. At this point I was super annoyed.

I stalked my patio door for the next couple days as much as I could, just waiting. And sure enough on day 2 in the evening when I was about to give up, I see the puppy run outside towards my patio. I whipped out my phone, took some pictures of the dog outside alone (not allowed) and the dog pooping and then took another phone an hour later of the poop still there and time stamped all of them. Then I sent an email to the apartment office people who were always pretty nice and they responded quickly they would give her a warning about it.

And sure enough this lady comes back AGAIN, to get mad and yell at me about how petty I was to report them to the office and now they had a $150 fine for not picking up their dog poop. (It’s worth noting that these fines were rare. PooPrints were not used at this complex. In order for the office to fine someone for dog poop they had to have proof it was that specific tenants dog’s poop and that it wasn’t picked up. Hence the photos I’d taken and timestamped.) I told her that I had tried to be nice about it with her TWICE before and it was her own fault at that point for not abiding by the terms of the pet agreement we ALL had to sign (everyone who had a dog at least).

She went off about how she’s a single mom and she works during the day and her precious baby can’t be expected to pick up after their dog. I told her that a 10/11 year old was plenty old enough to pick up after a dog and that if they weren’t responsible enough then maybe the kid shouldn’t be letting the dog out at all and she should be the one to do it or maybe whoever is home with him should be looking after it. She got angry, told me I had no idea how to be a single mom, that her mom stays with him during the day and shouldn’t be expected to look after her kid and her dog and she stomped off again. I expected to hear more about it but I didn’t. (The ironic part is I AM a single mom; my kid isn’t my SO’s and I raised him alone for 2.5 years before I met my SO, so yes I do know how hard it is and I live 1000 miles from my closest family so I never even had the luxury of being able to have my mom watch my kid.)

Over the next couple of weeks we didn’t find anymore dog turds off our patio. But we did notice our poop bags were depleting and our trash can filling up way more quickly than usual. I had my suspicions and wanted to test it. We had recently bought some small security cameras for inside of our apartment for different reasons and I had my boyfriend set one up outside on the patio. We faced it where it could see our door and trash can but didn’t point to the rest of the court yard or other people’s units (we respect privacy around here).

Sure enough the same evening my boyfriend set it up, I see the kid walk onto our patio, take a poop bag, walk out of frame, and then come back to throw it in our trash can. Okay. Now I’m PISSED but also not trying to fight this lady or her kid. So I moved the poop bags to the inside door handle. It’s a glass door so you can still see them but we always lock our sliding door.

Next morning, I hear someone knocking on the back patio door and I go to see her kid standing there looking annoyed. I didn’t open the door I just spoke loudly enough to ask what did he need. He demanded a poop bag for his dog’s poop. I said I’m sorry but these are our poop bags for our dog and they weren’t free for anyone else to use. The apartment provides poop bags in a dispenser near the trash can on the other side of the building. Kid started demanding a poop bag, saying his mom told him he could use ours, slapping his hands on the glass a few times (trying to scare me? yes I’m so terrified of a ten year old boy...), and finally screaming at me that he’s telling his mother on me. I said fine go ahead I’ll tell her the same thing. Sure enough, a few minutes later his mom is standing on my patio also demanding a poop bag for her dog’s poop. I denied her a bag and asked her to please step off of my patio as she was making me feel unsafe and uncomfortable (my SO wasn’t home). She told me I was a bratty child (I’m 24...) and she demanded I let her use my poop bags as I had already told her she could before. I said no, I told you to get some yourself and do what I do - keep them close by and put your own trash can on your own patio - not use the bags I buy with my own money for my own dog and then fill up my tiny trash can with your dog’s poop. I pointed out she could use a plastic shopping bag if she didn’t want to buy her own poop bags or she could use the bags the complex provided on the other side of the building. She kept going off on me and I finally told her if she didn’t leave my patio I’d call the police as she was harassing me (the apartment office was closed on Sundays and of course it was Sunday). She acted like she was going to call my bluff but then my boyfriend got home and walked up behind me to ask what was going on and she ended up dragging her kid away - again, leaving the poop in the grass off my patio.

So once she was gone, I took ANOTHER timestamped picture of the dog poop, downloaded the footage from my security camera of her kid stealing my poop bags and throwing them in my trash can and the footage from them that morning yelling at me and demanding my bags and my denying them and emailed all of it to the apartment management. I told them that she made me feel unsafe and uncomfortable in my own home, that she and her child felt entitled to come onto my patio and take my belongings. I also went outside, picked up her dog’s poop, looked in the trash can on my patio and pulled out the bags with her dog’s poop (they were significantly smaller than my dog’s poops as I’m sure any dog owners could tell the difference in poops of a 12lb dog vs a 70lb dog). I went and opened all the bags and dumped the poops straight on her patio right outside the door.

On Monday, I heard back from the office lady who said she would take care of it. By Friday, there was a moving truck and the lady and her kid were moving out. Pretty sure they were evicted or at the very least urged to move before a formal eviction process was initiated. After talking to some of our other, much friendlier neighbors, it turns out we weren’t the only ones who had been complaining about her. They’d only lived in the complex for like 2-3 months before they made so many enemies they were kicked out.

Sometimes I think I should feel bad for playing a part in them getting evicted but honestly I can’t bring myself to feel guilty about it. Not my fault she was a lazy entitled bitch who couldn’t even be assed to get a shopping bag to pick up her dog’s shit. I never heard from her about the turds I dropped on her patio but I like to think she stepped in them without looking and knew better than to come bitch to me about it.

sorrynotsorry

(Also, I’m sure they were given more than a week to vacate as those are the tenancy laws here but she packed up and left like a bat out of hell. Guess she didn’t want to stay somewhere she was clearly seen as an enemy... I don’t know for sure that she was evicted or if she was just asked to leave or abide by the lease or what. Office can’t give out that type of info and she and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms for her to give me the scoop about it.)

TLDR; Entitled mom lets her dog shit wherever it wants without cleaning it, I tell her to pick up her dog’s shits or make her kid do it, she refuses, gets a fine from the apartment complex after I send them pics of her dog unattended and the poop not being picked up. She starts letting her kid steal my supplies from my patio, I send video footage and photos to the management and they end up being kicked out of the complex.

(source) story by (/u/MotherhoodEst2017)

[samanthalendo]

Why I Almost Went To UT Austin; And Why I Didn’t

(As a preface: I will be speaking mainly in vague details about my personal life and the college I ended up choosing. This is for my own privacy and comfort. In addition, I am not bashing the UT system or anyone who choose to go there; I have loved ones going there very soon, and I have a lot admiration for the school and all the opportunities it can afford someone. However, these are the reasons I will not be attending and some reasons any school might miss out on students they might have otherwise garnered. As well, all photos are mine unless otherwise stated. Enjoy!)

Let me set the scene.

Choosing a college is hard. It’s freakin hard. It’s even more difficult in the middle of a global pandemic. You can’t actually go anywhere, can’t take tours or go to fairs or get a feel for the city you want to call home. I struggled a lot with really connecting to any of the schools I was interested in. Lots of apathy towards the whole process. Despite all this, I had one school I had been interested in since the end of sophomore year, and I thought that was the only place I wanted to go. 

The University of Texas at Austin appealed to me for a few different reasons. In no particular order:

It was close to family.

I have tons, and I mean tons of family in Texas. This would have put me significantly closer to them and meant I had a support system when going to college. Making sure I would have a nice warm dinner and bath to escape to on crappy days seems pretty nice during global pandemics! Notably, however, it was not close to my immediate family. 

It was in a big city. 

Looking back I can laugh at myself and the idea I had for my college experience. At the time I was much more focused on the social and Instagramable side of the school I chose. Any time my parents suggested a school, the first thing I did was look for photos of it. If it didn’t have the feel I was looking for (young, new, hip, growing) I seldom looked further. 

Austin was exactly what I was looking for. A city with a 32.4% growth rate in the last decade (1), it screamed new and exciting. I wanted to be apart of that vibe during college, especially when I thought my boyfriend and I would be going to the same place (we are still happily together and just going to different schools, btw). Anything less didn’t seem worth it or fun enough. 

It’s a high ranking journalism school. 

Rankings are subjective so it absolutely depends on where you look, but UT Austin consistently ranks within the top ten journalism schools in the nation, which is incredible. I’ve wanted to study journalism since about sophomore year and I was so excited that on top of the aforementioned attributes, this would be a reputable place to study and get a degree from. Truth be told, I didn’t do nearly any research into the actual programs, opportunities, or benefits UTA offered, #foreshadowing.

UTA was the first school I applied to, and as such it established my expectations for how applying to a big name school would work. Let me just say it, the application process sucked. I ended up writing two full-length essays, only one of which I used and extensively edited, and at least five different short answer paragraphs. I believe I also had to submit a resume when I applied for the Journalism Honors program, though that was additional. It was intense, and quite honestly didn’t seem worth it. Up until this point I was pretty much riding the wave of, “Yeah, UT Austin, that’s a school people will respond positively to when they ask where I’m going.” As aforementioned, I hadn’t done any in-depth research into what programs UT had to offer me, but from what little looking I had done, nothing was jumping out at me. With nothing spectacular being shown to me on a silver platter, enticing me to #golonghorns, the arduous application process felt taxing and stressful. 

(A little side note on writing college essays: do not force yourself to write about something that doesn’t feel genuine to you. I don’t care if you think you have something that they’re bound to notice or admire; if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get anywhere. As mentioned, I wrote two different essays when applying to UT. In my first essay, I wrote about leadership experiences in high school and how they shaped me. Important? Yes. Influential for me? Absolutely. But nothing I’m ready to rave about to anyone who walks through the door. That essay felt fake and artificial. I knew I didn’t like it or want it to represent me. So, I sat down and started writing about a situation that happened over the summer at my high school, one that really ground my gears. I couldn’t stop talking about how upset I was. I wrote all about the experience and how it made me want to be a better journalist and to always help to portray the truth. If anyone would like to know more about that story, let me know. The point is, I was passionate about the topic and it made it much easier to write believably. I didn’t just need this piece to represent me, I wanted it to represent me. I wanted the application readers to understand my frustration and feel all the emotions I felt in those moments. Pick something you feel that way about.)

I’m not going to BS and say that the application process will be fun if the school you’re applying to is the right one for you. All I’m saying is it should feel worth it, like all this hard work and effort is really going to culminate into your dream school. I definitely didn’t feel that with UTA, which was one of my first red flags. I felt very disconnected from the school, like I was just another fish in the pond of out of state applicants, hoping they’d like my bright colors over the next. 

A little background: I am, for the purposes of Texas schools, an out-of-state applicant. I don’t have residency in TX and I didn’t go to a public high school in TX, and this contributes heavily to UTA admissions. I’ll link a great article going further in-depth on the admissions numbers and percentages, but due to the advantages granted to TX resident applicants, approximately only 9% of UTA students are out of state (2). That number is so low because TX students in the top 6% of their graduating class, no matter their test scores, are automatically accepted. This means that on top of great grades, out-of-state applicants for UTA have ACT scores that are between 3-5 points higher and SAT scores that are about 150 points higher than their average TX counterpart. 

If you aren’t stressed out just reading that, teach me your ways because I was sure was.

This was sort of where the perceived animosity started between myself and UTA. I constantly checked my email and mailbox, hoping to get a letter or promotional email or something to indicate they were interested in me as a student. Seldom did they ever come. I got hundreds of emails from other schools and received nearly as much snail mail, but hardly ever from UT, even after I asked to receive their newsletters and an informational packet (which never came, BTW). 

I quickly came to realize that all of this was likely due to the fact that I was so far away, out of the UT sphere of control or influence. Most of the emails I received were from schools in my neighboring states or in my state, closer with a higher likelihood of recruiting me. A school in TX, where I did not study or hold residency, would not seek me out.

Here’s my issue. They didn’t have to seek me out. That’s fine, whatever, makes sense. But I sought them out. I signed up for everything. I filled out their long application, sent it in early. I tried to tour the school in the throws of COVID, having to settle for a self-paced walk about an empty campus to satisfy my need to know more about this school, to learn more about what it could offer me. None of my efforts proved fruitful, and it didn’t feel like the school really wanted me there. I wondered whether this was really where I wanted to be. 

By mid-November, while I wouldn’t have called myself discouraged, I would definitely have identified with the word antsy. When I sent in my application in September, they notified me that I would get my answer sometime in January or February. I can’t even explain how far away that felt. Especially being out of state, I wanted to know their decision as quickly as possible. The wait felt like an eternity.

My dad has always stressed the importance of not putting all your eggs in one basket. While I had shot my shot with UT and was waiting for the scoreboard to change, he was still exploring other options I had in the world of journalism schools. Without me knowing or really agreeing, he scheduled a tour with a school about two hours away from where we lived. It would be on a Saturday, just the two of us, and we’d make a day trip out of it. Honestly, I was more excited for the trip than the school itself. It had always been one I had turned my nose up at; to be fair, I did that with almost any school that wasn’t UT. 

We were about five minutes late to the opening presentation at the school. Quickly shuffling into the only seats we saw, some in the very front row of the socially distanced conference hall, we settled in for a lot of new information  coming our way. Though he had planned it, my dad didn’t know that much about the school either. We were both skeptical, a bit frazzled, and tired from having woken up around five o’clock that morning.

But with every slide, every question, every time the presenter opened her mouth, we were drawn further in.

It wasn’t just the feel of the school, or the location, or the looks. The facts didn’t lie. I won’t share too many so as to keep at least some privacy, but to say this school was my diamond in the rough wouldn’t be too much of an overstatement. Despite that, throughout the day and our two guided tours, I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind, keeping me from getting too excited about this new school. I couldn’t help but think about UT and all of the emotional commitment I had already made to it. How excited my family was that I was hoping to go there, how happy my grandmother was that I would be closer to her. I thought of the teachers I had complained to about the long essays, the people who had edited those essays for me. I thought about the burnt orange hoodie sitting in my closet, towards the front due to how often I wore it. 

The new school won over both my heart and my head. While I really felt at home there, I also would have to have been dead to overlook all of the opportunities it could afford me. I was close to my immediate family and the town I had gone to high school in. I could come home often, visit family and friends more frequently than if I moved states away. Everything seemed right.

In between our tours, due to the nagging I was feeling, I tried to schedule a tour with UTA, to at least give it a fighting chance. I figured, had I not had an in-person tour of this new school, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Maybe a real tour would make me fall in love with UT again. However, when I tried to schedule one, all of the tours for the rest of the semester were completely booked, and the calendar wasn’t yet available for the spring semester. I immediately called to find out more, only to be told that they weren’t sure the state of in-person tours upon return to campus after holidays due to COVID. Looking back, I know it was a sign. UT had, for all intents and purposes, closed its doors on me. It was time I accepted the willing arms of the school I gazed upon with wonder, truly in limbo as to what might happen next. 

By the end of December, I was admitted and had committed to the new school. I wouldn’t find out about UT for another month, but honestly, I didn’t really need to. This new school had everything I could ever want, and UT had a fair amount of drawbacks. I didn’t and still don’t feel any remorse for committing without having known UT’s decision on me. 

I received an email January 29th, over a month after having committed to the new school, that I needed to check my UT MyStatus page. I never really worried about getting in due to my test scores and grades, but I felt a level of anger towards the school that I thought I had gotten over, and finding out I had gotten in after all would bring up new emotions. I checked the page, and sure enough I had been admitted to the University of Texas at Austin’s class of 2025. I wasn’t elated or jumping up and down with joy or breaking down happy crying in my parent’s arms. I was pretty stoic, thinking about all that could have been had I felt any more like UT really wanted me. 

(3)

All things happen for a reason. Because I didn’t feel much reciprocation in my love for UT, I instead found the school of my dreams, one that I know I’ll be much happier at. I wouldn’t change any of my decisions, except maybe stressing over the essays as much as I did. 

My final thoughts would have to be this: I don’t blame the UT system for not focusing as much on its out-of-state applicants. I mean, I do, but I understand that it’s often simply not in their best interest. I do think that they should have reached out, sent more newsletters, have actually sent me the information packet I requested, anything to make me feel more connected with this place I was dying to call home. While I know they aren’t very focused on bringing in students from other states, I think they should be, especially for those that are going the extra mile to reach out to them. 

The right school will have a lot of different things for every different person. For me, that meant being close to my immediate family, knowing I would have all of the opportunities I wanted, being financially secure, and feeling like the school wanted me, not just the other way around. UT didn’t provide me all of that. Finding the school that will is the most important thing. Your needs and wants may be different, but don’t toss all of your eggs in one basket. Don’t be afraid to change your mind and always keep looking for something better. For all you know, it may be out there.

(Thank you so much for reading! Links are below. This is just meant to be an opinion piece and is the first thing I’ve written for myself in a very long time. I hope you learned something and that this may be helpful on your college journey! Au revoir!)

1. https://www.austinchamber.com/economic-development/austin-profile/population/overview

2. https://magoosh.com/hs/college-admissions/ut-austin-admissions-the-sat-act-scores-and-gpa-you-need-to-get-in/ 

3. https://news.utexas.edu/2020/09/22/four-year-graduation-rate-tops-70-as-ut-austin-admits-one-of-its-largest-first-year-classes/ 

[kpoptrashibnida]

Enough Pt. 14

A/N: Hey guys! Here is the new update for Enough! I hope you guys enjoy it and as always I enjoy receiving feedback! Please don’t hold back and let me know what you guys think! Also, I did my own gif lol I could not find what i wanted for this chapter, so I decided to ‘make’ my own. Please don’t judge me too harshly, I am not tech savvy xD

Mina and Suho were kind enough to pick you up from the airport once you arrived at Seoul. They were being very tentative with the way they spoke to you and it annoyed you that they were treating you like a ticking time bomb. You tried to ignore it and smile as much as possible without it looking fake. You tried to keep up with the conversation as Suho drove you to your house. Mina was updating you on how her doctor appointments were going and you were genuinely happy to hear about your future niece or nephew. They insisted on taking you out to dinner but you were tired and just wanted to go home and sleep. Suho and Mina shared a look and agreed to drop you off home. 

Pulling up to your apartment you felt a strange wave of sadness overcome you when you realized that you actually moved. You’re back in Seoul, away from what means the world to you. Suho helped you with one of your suitcases as you rolled the other one up to your apartment. Mina tagged along, insisting on helping even though you refused to let her carry anything heavy. You opened the door with the new code your building manager gave you and you were surprised to see how it looked exactly the same. You don’t know what you were expecting, since no one entered your apartment during your time away. But you definitely were not expecting to feel an emptiness. The place that once felt like home now felt like a foreign place to you. 

“Okay, well I guess you don’t have much to unpack. Do you want us to stay and help?” Mina offered, feeling bad about leaving you alone

“No, it’s fine. You guys have done enough for me. Go home and rest, you must be tired.” You say, rubbing Mina’s stomach in a loving manner.

“If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call.” Suho said and gave you a pointed look, which made you smile.

“Of course. Thank you guys, really.” You gave them a smile, not knowing what you would do without them.

“Okay, good night.” Mina gave you a strong goodbye hug, making you emotional all of a sudden.

You walked them to the door and bid them farewell, thankful to be left alone. You sat on your couch and closed your eyes, exhaling a long breath. The last 36 hours replaying in your head like a movie. 

When you arrived at the Friends Corp. building you were nervous and full of jitters, not knowing if you were going to see Jaehyun or not. You walked to the HR office to return your employee badge and access card. You then proceeded to go to Wendy’s office, saying goodbye to her and answering her questions about why you were leaving all of a sudden. You gave her a brief explanation as to why you were headed back to Seoul and kept an eye out to see if you saw Jaehyun. Once you were done talking to Wendy you went down the hall to look for Johnny and Mark, hoping that Jaehyun might be with them.

“Noona, I just can’t believe that you’re leaving. Why?” Mark asked, extremely sad that you were leaving.

“I know, we didn’t even have time to throw you a going away party or anything.” Johnny whines, still not believing that you were actually leaving.

“Wait! Does Jaehyun know?” Mark asked, realizing that he wasn’t there.

“Wait, he called out sick this morning.” Johnny says, trying to put the puzzle pieces together. “Did something happen?” He questions.

Your eyes welled up with tears as you look at your two friends and you try with all your might not to cry in front of them.

“Um, Jaehyun and I broke up last night.” You say in a whisper, hoping that if you don’t say it too loudly it isn’t true.

“WHAT?” Both men exclaimed, shocked at the news that their two great friends broke up.

“Why? What Happened?” Mark questioned, not believing that this happened.

“There were just some… issues we could not work through, and I have a lot of projects waiting for me in Seoul that cannot wait.” You explained, not wanting to get into the details. 

“Damn I’m sorry.” Johnny says, giving you a hug.

“You guys can come and visit me any time.” You say with a small smile. You say your final goodbyes and leave the building, a dull ache in your chest. 

It does not surprise you that Jaehyun was not at work but you’d be lying if you said you weren’t sad. You were really hoping to see him to at least give him an explanation. It would have been ideal if you did that at your apartment, but you were frozen in place, just watching your life crumble around you. You were angry with yourself for not fighting for your relationship; for not fighting to keep Jaehyun in your life and saving your relationship.

The whole process of getting to the airport, going through security and finding your gate was all done on autopilot. Your mind was not present and your body was just going with the motions. Namjoon got you a seat on Business Class and you were thankful because all you wanted to do during your 15 hour flight was sleep and cry with some privacy. And that is exactly what you did. Plus watch a movie or two once your eyes burned from all the crying you did. Thankfully once you landed you had regained some control over your emotions, so Suho and Mina did not know of what you did on the plane. You’re pretty sure they had an idea though because you were uncharacteristically quiet.

You had not realized you were crying until your body was shaking with sobs, tears streaming down your face. You hated feeling sorry for yourself. You felt pathetic and dumb and crying was not going to fix anything. Crying was not going to take you back to New York and fix everything, it’s not going to take you to that night and not let Jaehyun go until this was resolved. It’s not going to take you back to the moment Chanyeol entered your life again and put up your walls to keep him out completely. Even though crying was not going to fix your broken heart, you could not help it. Your sobs echoed in your apartment, filling the empty spaces around you. With a trembling body, you made your way to the bathroom and took a shower. The hot water helped relax your tense muscles and wash away the grime from the long plane ride. You were grateful to come home to a clean apartment, courtesy of Namjoon and the company. The time you spent in the shower was enough to relax you into a sleepy lull. You were exhausted from the plane ride, the crying and all the events that took place. You closed your eyes and hoped that sleep would soon envelop you and temporarily make you forget about everything that happened. 

_________

“Noona! I am so happy you are back!” Jungkook greets you with a tight hug the second you enter the building. You can't help the laugh that escapes your lips at his tactics, the sound sounding foreign to your own ears.

“Kookie! Look at you! I wasn’t gone a full year and look how buff you got.” You say playfully, pinching his bicep.

“I have been hitting the gym with my hyungs. I wanted to be buff for when you came back.” He says, jokingly flexing his muscles.

“Okay gym rat.” You say with an eye roll, headed to the elevators.

You were greeted by all your coworkers, pleasantries exchanged as you made your way to your office. You felt strange in your office but you knew the feeling would go away soon. Once you were back in your routine and submerge yourself in your projects, you knew the feeling would go away. You heard a knock on your door and you whip your head towards the noise, heart hammering in your chest.

“Hey! Can I come in?” Namjoon asks, hovering by the doorway.

“Yes, of course.” You say, heart still hammering. You were stupid to think it was Jaehyun knocking at your door. Old habits die hard. 

“I emailed you the new projects that need to be handled first. After that, you can choose the order in which you complete the other ones.” Namjoon explains, noticing the lack of a smile on your face.

“Sounds great, I’ll get right to it.” You say with a small smile, giving your attention back to your computer.

“Is everything Okay?” Namjoon asks, noticing your odd behavior.

“Yes, everything is fine. I’m just a little tired, I’m not used to the time difference yet.” You say, hoping he’d take that explanation. 

“Okay, well pace yourself and take it easy.” He gives you one last knowing glance before he leaves your office.

And just like that you shut yourself out of the real world and immerse yourself in your work, something you were good at and wouldn’t sabotage. 

________

“Get up. Now!” Mina says as she pulls the comforter off your body.

“What the hell Mina? How did you get into my apartment?” You complain, the bright sunlight burning your eye balls. 

“Because I know your pin, genius! Now get up, you’re not going to spend the whole weekend wallowing in self pity. We are going for a nice walk to the Han river.” She says matter-of-factly, looking cute in her exercise clothes.

“No.” You reply, trying to snatch the comforter back.

“I said get up, I’m not playing with you! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to make a pregnant woman angry?” She questions, smacking your but hard.

“Ouch!” You whine, kicking your feet like a toddler. “Mina, I don’t want to go to the Han river, I just want to stay here. Leave me alone!” You whine, wishing she wasn’t a good friend right now and would let you rot in your apartment. 

“Bitch if you don’t get up I swear I will punch you, you know I will! Me being pregnant is not going to change the fact that I will beat your ass.” She threatens. You know not to mess with Mina because she will beat you up if you make her angry enough.

“Fine! Fine! I’ll fucking go. But just so you know I will hate it and I will complain the whole time!” You huff, getting out of bed and heading for your closet.

“That’s what I thought.” Mina says, satisfied with herself. She doesn’t like to get violent but she will if she needs to. 

You come out of your closet dressed in a jogger set, glaring daggers at a smug Mina.

“See? That wasn’t so hard.” She smiles, making you roll your eyes at her.

“You’re lucky you're pregnant with my niece or nephew.” You say, making her laugh.

“Okay, let’s go before it gets any later.” She says in a sing-song voice, annoying you already.

The walk along the Han river was actually very relaxing, but of course you would not admit that to Mina. You enjoyed the breeze hitting your face, alleviating the perpetual weight you felt in your chest. You inhaled the cool air and blamed the stinging in your eyes to the cold wind. 

After a nice and relatively quiet walk, you agreed to get some lunch with Mina. she needed to eat because she was eating for two and could not skip any meals. Suho actually had set up reminders on her phone, much to her annoyance. You thought it was cute though, Suho was very immaculate with the things he cared about. 

After eating some jjajangmyun, you went to some shops to buy a few items you needed as well as some groceries. You had been ordering take out all week since you got back to Seoul and you decided it was time you started cooking again. 

“I can’t believe you have been eating take out this whole time! You are insane.” Mina chastises as you make your way up your apartment building, grocery bags in tow.

“Yeah I know.” You huff, not wanting to be lectured by your best friend. At least she has that aspect of motherhood down.

“Thanks for helping me out today. And for taking me out for a walk.” You say once you have put all your groceries away, Mina getting ready to leave.

“No problem. You know I’m always here for you. Don’t hesitate to call, okay?” She says. 

You nod and give her a hug and kiss her belly before she leaves, leaving you alone once again. This time however, you did not feel as empty as you had been, which I guess is a good thing. 

_________

“Are you sure I need to go? I can stay here, I really don’t mind.” You say to Namjoon, hoping he would let you have your way.

“What? No! What are you saying? I sent you over there to oversee this whole project and now you’re saying you don’t want to go? Don’t be ridiculous! Our investors are expecting to see you there, a lot of people are. I’m sorry but you’re not getting out of this and that’s final.” Namjoon rants, not believing what he is hearing at this moment. 

“Okay, I’m sorry.” You sigh, you didn’t like making Namjoon upset. 

“We leave in two days, so if you don’t have a dress already, please go buy one. The company gave you a card with a wardrobe budget for events like this. Use it.” He commands, not taking no for an answer. 

“Okay, I will.” You put your hands up in surrender, already hating the thought of going shopping. Normally, you’d love to go shopping with Mina. But as her due date is approaching, Suho has been even more overprotective than usual and does not want her going out and doing too much. So now you are left to go alone and you completely hate that.

“Hey Noona!” Jungkook greets cheerily, sitting down on the chair in front of you.

“Hi Kookie.” You greet, moving the food around on your plate. Just the thought of returning to New York after three months of being back in Seoul is enough to make you lose your appetite. 

“Are you excited about going to New York with Joon hyung?” He asks, oblivious to your sour mood.

“Not really. I still need to buy a dress.” You groan, pushing the food tray away from you.

Jungkook gives you a pointed look and swallows a mouthful of rice.

“I can go dress shopping with you.” He offers, giving you a sweet Jungkook smile. 

“Won’t you get bored?” You chuckle at his ridiculous offer.

“Of course not! I’d never get bored while hanging out with you noona.” He says, warming your heart a little.

“Well I have to go tonight. Are you available after work?” You ask, not believing that you are actually taking him up on his offer. 

“Of course! We shall meet at the lobby at the end of the day. There are some good shops in Gangnam that we can go to.” He offers with a smile.

“Okay, sounds like a plan.” You say, a small smile creeping on your face.

“Now eat. You’re too skinny.” Jungkook pushes your food tray back to you, making you roll your eyes at his antics.

You did manage to eat your food however, some of the previous nerves ebbing away. 

At the end of your work day you made your way to the lobby of the building where Jungkook was waiting for you.

“Noona! Ready to go?” He asks, opening the door for you.

“Yes, let’s get this over with.” You say, Jungkook whining at your lack of enthusiasm.

You guys took the subway to Gangnam and Jungkook pointed out some shops that he knew had some nice dress selections.

“I don’t know Kookie, these dresses seem a bit…. Extravagant.” You say, looking through the racks of dresses.

 “Noona, it is an extravagant event, so you need to dress the part.” Jungkook says, holding up a dress for you to see. You scrunch your nose and shake your head no to the insultingly revealing dress.

“Come on! You gotta show some skin.” He whines, making you laugh.

“Jungkook, are you sure you did not just come with me so you can see me in a skimpy dress?” You  accuse, laughing when you see Jungkook turn a slight shade of incriminating pink. 

“Noona~!” He whines, he did not do it for that reason but he will admit it was a perk.

“What do you think of this one?” You ask, pulling a silk dress from the rack. 

Jungkook looks at it for a few seconds and nods, thinking it's a good contender.

You looked at the reflection in the mirror and smiled, liking what you see. The dress was a beautiful midnight blue. It had a plunging V neckline with necktie straps, a partially open back and a high slit that showed a hint of skin. You felt beautiful and sexy and you hoped that the dress caught the attention of a certain someone that was going to be at the gala. 

You open the door to the dressing room and twirl the fabric around, showing the dress to Jungkook.

“Whoa noona, you look amazing.” Jungkook exclaims, eyes roaming your figure in the dress. You looked amazing in it, like the dress was made just for you. 

“It’s not too much?” You ask, feeling the silky material in between your fingers.

“Not at all! It’s perfect. You’re perfect noona.” He smiles, making you blush at the compliment.  

“You’re too sweet Kookie. Okay, I guess this is it. I’m sick of dress shopping.” You say, heading back to the dressing room.

“We have only been shopping for like an hour and a half.” He laughs, thinking it was funny that a girl did not enjoy spending hours shopping. 

Once you had paid, Jungkook convinced you to go out for some drinks and dinner. You were hesitant, not really in the mood to socialize. Even though three months had passed, you were still hurting from your breakup with Jaehyun and you just wanted to go home, drink too much wine and pass out. Jungkook thought that the sound of that was ridiculous and convinced you to do otherwise. You went to a trendy place that had recently opened up and it was full of young people drinking and having a good time.

Jungkook was fun company and you were enjoying his conversation. It was really helping you keep your mind off of things but you were not keeping track of how many shots of soju you were shooting back. You had pent up frustration and sadness that you needed something to numb it. 

“Whoa noona, are you okay?” Jungkook asks, eyeing your swaying form.

“Of course Kookie! I am doing grrrreat!” You say, imitating Tony the Tiger.

Jungkook laughs as he moves the soju bottle away from your grasp.

“Okay Noona, I think that I need to get you home. You are done for the night.” Jungkook pays for the bill and helps you up, offering to carry your garment bag and purse. He had your arm draped around his neck as he maneuvered you out of the restaurant and out to the uber he requested. 

“Okay noona, just rest your head and don’t make sudden movements.” Jungkook Instructed, making sure you wouldn’t vomit in the car.

Jungkook struggled to help you out of the car and to your apartment. You were very dizzy and had to stop twice because you thought you were going to throw up. Getting into your apartment was an even bigger challenge because you could not punch in the right code. So after a few minutes of trying, you were actually able to open the door.

“Okay noona, I put the garment bag in your closet. Do you need anything before I leave?” Jungkook asks, making sure you were not going to fall over.

“No, thank you Kookie, you’re the best.” You say, pulling him in for a tight hug.

“Of course. I had fun with you today.” He says, giving you a small squeeze.

He was about to pull away when you pull him back in for a kiss, taking him by surprise. He did not react at first but soon enough he reciprocated the kiss. You pull him closer, if that was possible, and let your hands roam his chest. You lightly moaned into his mouth, hands reaching under his shirt to touch his skin. Your hands were starting to lift his shirt up when Jungkook finally realized the turn of events.

“Noona, noona hold on.” He murmurs against your lips, trying to stop your wandering hands.

“What? You don’t want this?” You ask, biting your lip and looking up at him from under your eye lashes.

“Noona, I think you are very attractive and trust me, I would love to go further with you but you are drunk. And I don’t think you are in a good place for this right now. I’ve noticed that something is wrong and if I were to ever… sleep with you, I’d want to make sure it was right.” He says, placing your hands by your sides and giving you a small reassuring smile.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to come on to you like that.” You say, tears welling up in your eyes.

“Hey, it’s okay. Don't cry, it’s okay. I’m not upset.” He says, taking you to the couch and gently sitting down next to you.

“I just, I went through a hard breakup and I am feeling very emotional. I don’t know what to do or how to feel. I’m sorry I roped you like this. I appreciate you so much Jungkook. I really do. And I roped you into all of this.” You say, the guilt creeping in from attacking Kook the way you did. 

“Noona, it’s fine. If you ever need anyone to talk to, I’m here for you. We are friends.” He gives you a small smile, squeezing your shoulder. “Are you feeling better?” He asks, noticing that you looked more sober.

“Yeah, I do feel a lot better. Thank you for today, I really needed it.” You say, giving him another hug.

“Any time. I’m heading out. Have a fun time in New York. you’re going to be the belle of the ball.” He says with a cheesy wink, making you laugh.

After Jungkook left you decided to take a shower to clear your head and sober up. You needed to pack for your trip to New York because you did not want to be doing it last minute. The thought of seeing Jaehyun again made your heart beat uncontrollably in your chest, stomach churning uncomfortably. You knew it was going to be awkward but you were really hoping you could see him and speak to him. You were so tired from all the overthinking and drinking that you went straight to sleep without realizing it. 

_________

“You okay?” Namjoon asks, looking at your silent form next to him on the airplane. 

“Yes, I’m fine.” You say, closing your eyes and trying to ignore the people still boarding the airplane. You wish you could close the door to your seats. 

You were not in the best of moods but you didn’t want to project that to Namjoon. Your head was still whirring with chagrin at the thought of coming on to Jungkook the other night at your apartment. He had made it clear he was not mad and that it was not going to be weird between the two of you. And you also had the prospect of seeing Jaehyun again, which had your heart hammering and your stomach feeling nauseous. It was going to be a long flight and you did not want to be a bummer to Namjoon.

“I’m not stupid, you know? I know we have a professional relationship but I like to think we are friends too.” Namjoon gives you a pointed look, a clear indication that he was not going to drop it until you talked to him about it. 

“We are friends Joon.” You sigh, looking at him between the seat divider. He raised his eyebrow, a silent sign for you to go on.

You took a deep breath before you delved into the story. Telling him about Chanyeol to that ending and then to Jaehyun and how you sabotaged that. You told him about Chanyeol being back in the picture, how he was Loey and why you were dreading this whole event. He was stunned at the story, of how you kept this from him all this time. If you really wanted to stay back from the gala, he would have considered it because he did not want you to be uncomfortable. 

It felt good to talk about the whole thing with someone, a great pressure lifting from your chest. You had killed a good three hours talking to Namjoon about your situation, you had dinner and you were starting to feel tired. You were glad that you had Namjoon with you now that he knew about what happened. You just hoped that you could survive this thing.

___

“Okay so after dinner, the performances are going to start. The opening act will be Loey and Ara.” Wendy gives you the run down as she walks you to your table.

“Sounds great, let me know if there’s something else you need me to do. I have my phone with me.” You tell her, approaching the table. You look around and notice the slightly different people sitting at the table.

“What, um, is this the original table I was supposed to sit at?” You ask Wendy, remembering that you created the seating chart with her. 

“Oh.” She starts hesitantly, going slightly pink. “Yeah it is, but Jaehyun asked to be moved to a different table.” She says, looking visibly uncomfortable.

“Oh!” You say, trying to ignore the pain in your gut that made you feel winded. You thank her for guiding you to your table and taking a seat, greeting the people in your table. Namjoon was sitting there so you were glad you were with someone that you felt comfortable with. 

You tried to focus on the conversation taking place at the table and not on the fact that Jaehyun asked to change tables. You understood why he did it, but it didn’t hurt any less. You tried to be discreet while you looked around to see if you could find Jaehyun, but it was hard to locate him. You reprimand yourself for being so unprofessional, remembering that you were not here just as a guest but you also have responsibilities in this event. 

After dinner you went to look for Wendy so you could get ready to begin the musical acts of the night. 

“Everyone, we want to thank you for being here tonight. Your support and contributions to the opening of this pop up shop. This would not be possible to everyone’s contribution. So without further ado, Miss Wendy Son will be presenting the acts for tonight!” You say, passing the microphone over to Wendy as she steps up to the stage, a dazzling smile gracing her face.

“We all know everyone has been anxious for our opening act, so without any more delay, I present Ara and Loey!” She presents, the crowd roaring with applause. 

The two of you made your way off the stage and made your way to your seats again, waiting for the show to start.

You glance around one more time before Loey and Ara hit the stage and you finally find what you are looking for. You see Jaehyun sitting at a table close to the stage, surrounded by people from his department plus Johnny and Mark. You made eye contact with him and you felt like your stomach dropped to your knees. He only held the eye contact for a few seconds before turning to the woman next to him and smiling at something she was saying. You recognize her from the PR team, which made sense that she was at the same table as him. You tried to normalize your breathing as you look at the stage again, the lights of the room dimming and the music blasting from a speaker. 

All the performances were spectacular, Loey and Ara definitely were the highlight. They did a spectacular job with their duet, the crowd amazed when Loey was revealed. Ara also had a solo and there were other bands and artists performing. The performances lasted about forty five minutes total, leading to the final portion of the gala which was just dancing and drinks. You tried to make your way towards Jaehyun’s table but you were stopped by some of the investors, wanting to congratulate you on your collaboration of the gala and the opening of the pop up shop. You were trying to be a gracious host, but you noticed that Jaehyun was no longer seated at his table. 

You knew it was very unprofessional to be looking around while having investors and members of the board speak to you, but you were looking through the crowd trying to find Jaehyun. 

You were finally left alone and you decided to do a lap around the reception hall, hoping you can find the person you’re looking for and without interruption. You were trying to get by people without touching their sweaty bodies and without getting stopped again. After a futile attempt you make your way to the back table, wanting to get some punch because you were too thirsty from all the talking you did. You felt a finger poke you on the side and you whir around, anticipation clouding your mind. 

“Hey, you look amazing.” Chanyeol says, dazzling smile highlighted by his new platinum hair.

“Hey, new hair?” You ask, not knowing what to say. 

“Yeah I decided to do something different for the gala. You like?” He asks, twirling around and showing you a 360 degree view of his haircut and  outfit. He had changed out of his performance outfit and into a black tux paired with a white shirt and a black bow tie.

He looked very good, you give him that, but you were not in the mood to engage in conversation with him.

“Yeah you look good.” You say with a smile, glancing behind him to see if Jaehyun was behind him. You did not want the night to end before you could at least greet him.

“There you are! We need to go with Namjoon, he wants to present us to a possible investor.” Wendy says as she approaches you, noticing that you were with Chanyeol after she was speaking a mile a minute.

“Oh, hello Mr. Park.” She greets with a bow, embarrassed at interrupting the conversation.

“Hi miss Son, no worries. I know you are busy ladies. I’ll leave you to it. I guess I should look for Ara and make sure she is okay.” Chanyeol says, bowing once before leaving.

You follow Wendy to where Namjoon was, passing many people along the way and greeting them with smiles and hellos. You caught a glimpse of Jaehyun with a group from the HR department. He looked gorgeous with his charcoal grey suit, white shirt and dark red bow tie. You once again made eye contact with him, but it was very short since you had to keep moving to keep up with Wendy and not lose her in the mass of people. 

It was about an hour later when you were finally free. You were walking with intent even though your feet were screaming. You frantically looked around the hall, hoping to find Jaehyun. You noticed Mark and Johnny hanging out by a wall, speaking to each other. You march towards them hoping that they know where he is. 

“Hey guys, how are you?” You ask, approaching the dapper young men. 

“Noona! You look so awesome!” Mark says, giving you a hug.

“Thanks Mark.” You smile, ruffling the boys hair.

“You did an incredible job! But you have been very busy, I noticed that you were speaking to people non stop all night.” Johnny says, giving you a hug as well.

“Yeah it’s been a pretty crazy night. Hey, have you seen Jaehyun by chance?” You ask, feeling bad for cutting the conversation short, but you really wanted to find him.

Johnny and Mark shared a look, something made you feel like it wasn’t a good sign.

“Yeah he left about a half hour ago.” Johnny says awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. 

“Oh, I see. Well, he must be tired too, he also played a big role in all of this.” You say, trying to mask the disappointment in your voice.

“Yeah he was. Well we are heading out too. Have a good night and a safe flight back to Seoul.” Johnny says, hugging you. 

“We are going to come visit you, okay?” Mark says, giving you a reassuring hug.

“Yes please, I really want you guys to come.” You say with a smile, bidding them goodbye.

You stand where they left you, mind blank and eyes not focusing on anything. You could not believe that he was gone. Just like that. So this was it. No chance of speaking to him again. You did not know when you were going to see him again and you were too big of a coward to call him. Besides, what you wanted to say was better if you did it in person and not over the phone. You felt defeated and thought it was time to go to your hotel so you could take a shower and drink all the contents of the mini bar. You were so busy tonight you didn’t even get a chance to fully enjoy yourself and have at least one drink. 

You found Namjoon and told him you were going to head over to the hotel, deciding that it was time to call it a night.

You were waiting for your town car to come to the front of the building when you hear someone calling your name.

 “Hey! I was trying to get your attention since before you left the building. Did you not hear me?” Chanyeol asks as he jogs up to you, breath visible in the cold night.

“Oh, sorry, I did not hear you.” You say, looking out for your car.

“Are you crying?” He asks, peering at your face.

“No.” You say, not realizing you had been crying, a few stray tears running down your face. 

“Uh, okay. Well I sort of wanted to get a dance with you.” Chanyeol tries, getting closer to you and placing a hand on your arm.

“Chanyeol, I’m  not in the mood right now. I just want to go to my hotel, I’m exhausted.” You say, biting your lip in an effort to hold your tears in.

“Hey, hey look at me.” He says gently, lifting your face to look at him. “Are you okay?” He asks again, emphasizing the ‘okay’. 

You feel your lip quivering and shake your head no, tears finally overflowing. 

He hugs you into his chest, feeling your body shake in his hold. You cry into his shirt, hoping that you would not stain it. 

Chanyeol held you and felt his heart squeeze; he did not know why you were crying but he hated seeing you like this. All he wanted to do from now on is be there for you, whenever you wanted or needed him, he would be there. Just like he always should have.

Previous                                                                      Next

[calypsoff]

Thirty Five.

Trying to find a therapist was hard, there is a lot of people that need it and a lot of them were booked up. It’s taken me a whole week to get someone for him, I finally did, and he has the appointment with the therapist today and also his rehabilitation, which I am at now. Chris looked over at me and smiled and then looked away “hold the bars at the side of you” getting my phone out to check my emails, I have been trying to get things done for him because my overseas tour is glooming over so quick and I want to be here for him, but I know I can’t, I can’t just change every overseas date. I think I was deciding to get Clinton flown out to be here for him, he has settled better. I mean I sure do be in bed by ten now, I think the sleep is good for him. He refuses to take the depressants, but he will have the sleeping ones, but he refuses to have a haircut though. I mean he also tried to act like he had a shower, but he didn’t, and I think he got confused but whatever, it was dealt with, my forcefulness worked. But sleeping is working, he does talk to me. He smiled at me, he is less irritated but there is issues still there “I can’t do it though?” looking up at my phone at him saying that “but you just did it, you feel pulling here. That happens Chris because your leg hasn’t been in use so let’s try again, stand up straight. Try and keep the weight off and more on your hands when holding the bars” he says I can’t a lot, he can do it. I just been so busy with Chris that I haven’t replied back to a lot of the things I was supposed to, I am trying to start a beauty line, so I am trying to build my contact list and well, I am failing at it because I am so busy just trying to help Chris every time, a breakthrough happened though with Chris, he ate a whole meal.

The door closed behind me as I got into the car “tired?” I asked him, he nodded his head. Opening the backpack “I bought you some drinks and some snacks, I assumed you would have got tired from it all. I got you some Gatorade or water? Which one?” I asked “Gatorade” grabbing the bottle “so tell me. How was the first day there? I don’t want to hear the negative side, just the positive” holding the bottle out to him “lots of leg exercises done, he kept pushing my foot to be straight. He says that I seem to be standing a little slant, and before we finished he said my foot is straight, see if I can do it automatically. He said that your leg has been through trauma, it’s just learning. Your left leg will mimic your right soon, but the leg exercises were tiresome, felt good though” he actually gave me positivity “good, I am happy to hear that. So you are happy yes?” he nodded his head “I am glad to hear, how do you feel that we are going to a therapist?” he was playing up with that “I won’t speak to them, I don’t want to know” rolling my eyes “Chris, I refuse to let you keep this inside you. You’re going there and you’re going to speak to him, alone. I will wait outside the room” I won’t go in, I might just ruin the privacy he may want “why?” he questioned “because you may want to say something I don’t need to hear, this is your time Chris. Please speak on your feelings” also that shit wasn’t cheap, this is a good guy too.

Holding the crutches while waiting for Chris to come out of the car “here, be careful” I said to Chris, he slowly got out of the SUV “does it hurt coming out now?” it did hurt him before, but it seems like he is not cringing in pain anymore “thank you” he actually thanked me, that is so sweet of him now. Closing the door and letting Chris hop off slowly, walking behind but then he stopped “you can go ahead of me” he said, walking ahead of him “I have your jacket if you need it” walking towards the building, pressing the buzzer and turned around to see what Chris is doing, he is slowly coming bless him “Bruce Sarlin office” he said “hi, I am here for an appointment for Chris Brown” I spoke, hearing Chris huffing and puffing, he is tired clearly “come in” the door buzzed open for me, pushing the door open and holding it open for Chris to come in “we don’t need to do this you know” shaking my head at Chris, I refuse to let him get away with it “we are going” letting the door close “you know what Chris, I am proud of you” I have to give it to him because has done things I have asked of him even though he says no “really? Shall I press the elevator button?” nodding my head “yeah I am, I am proud of you for what you have done Chris, how far you have come and done for yourself” clearly this trauma has stemmed from jail, it has got too because when I met Chris he wasn’t the same man, also his dad said the same thing.

Sniffing Chris’ jacket “that is weird” looking over at Chris “it smells like you, how is that weird? You know I like to wear your things” I breathed out heavily “how can I be tired but yet I sleep so early, this is on you by the way, how early you sleep. But it’s ok, also I got a smile from you today. Didn’t think I would get such a thing” I grinned to myself, it’s there I just need to have patience. Resting my head on his shoulder “you have also ate a meal of mine, you smiled at me today. You’re taking your medication, what more can I ask for” Chris hasn’t shrugged my head off from him, I think this is the first time I have had my head anywhere near him because in bed we sleep apart, we do not sleep close because first I don’t want to hurt him but also I don’t want to be in his space, some affection and I like it “I do it for you, I came here for you. It’s you Robyn, I do it for you not for me. I am just living, more so you because I don’t want this, being in my head. I just don’t want it but I do it for you” I hate when I hear that “you do it and I can deal with that” that is all I know “Chris Brown” lifting my head up from his shoulder, Chris stared at this white old man with a pure white beard, like his beard is pearly white, it’s crazy “would you like to come in” he smiled at Chris but he just stared at him “if you want we can have Robyn come in?” he gestured “Rihanna” furrowing my eyebrows, that was random “or Rihanna, I don’t mind which personality she would like to bring to the room, come?” he smiled, he didn’t want him to call me Robyn. I got up from the seat, I really wanted him to go alone because he may have been better that way “come, let’s go in” he isn’t going to go in without me, clearly.

This man seems so sweet “would you like to be called Chris or Christopher?” he asked, this room seems so peaceful in a weird way. It’s giving me peace vibes anyways “Chris” he answered him “Chris, I am Bruce Sarlin. I have been speaking to Rihanna” he pointed at me “yeah” he drifted off “I am concerned about him, like I am not going to speak on his behalf like a mother but the reason why I reached out to you because his doctor said she feels he has PTSD and he has been saying how much he doesn’t want to be here which to me is concerning so I bought him here to get some help, he deserves to happy and I know he doesn’t feel it right now. He’s changed since I first met him and I feel like certain factors in his life changed him but that is me done, I am not speaking again” I held my hands up, Bruce smiled at me “that is fine, Chris how do you feel when Rihanna speaks on you being changed, do you feel there is something wrong? Do you think there is” he questioned him, I think that is a hard question, it’s hard to admit something is wrong “no” he is such a liar “that is fine, so you’re ok and Rihanna is just concerned over nothing?” looking over at Chris and he shrugged, he is not being truthful “what happened to your leg? Did you break it?” he pointed “I got shot in the thigh, because of some obsessed fan that wanted Rihanna” Bruce started writing that down “does that play on your mind at all?” I want to kick him for lying “no” I knew he would say that “then tell me Chris why are you here? Do you think there is something wrong, now this is a safe space and if you rather do this alone, we can also let Rihanna leave the room?” I rather go so he can tell the truth “I go if she goes” he is working my nerve “Chris, poppa. Listen to me, you need to get better. You need to tell the truth; I did this for you. This may be painful, but you need to let it loose” Chris needs to do this, he has to do this for us.

Chris didn’t respond at all, he remained silent, I am not sure what that even means, is this him agreeing to cooperating “let’s try an open question, what would you say is the most traumatic and frightening experience you had in your life, there could be many but is there a main one where you say it was a changing point” Bruce asked Chris and I hope he answers as I would like him too, he can’t keep saying no to everything, he needs to open up and say how he feels “when I want to jail” the relief I feel right now, to know he is saying something “and if you don’t mind me asking, why did you go to jail? I want to know” I am just going to remain silent, unless he starts talking shit again “drugs, I am not a bad person, but I got caught with moving it for my cousin” Bruce nodded his head “and how long was that for?” he asked “five years” Bruce raised an eyebrow “so it was weed or what? Was it a small amount” Chris laughed “no sir, we are talking about keys of cocaine. It’s quick money for a nigga, but yeah. I got caught and I got asked to snitch, this to get a lesser sentence and I just sat there thinking about my life, I didn’t want to be locked up for the rest of my life, so I did it, on my own cousin. I am never proud of it because I am constantly looking over my shoulder, nobody likes a snitch, but I was looking out for me. My cousin got caught and life goes on, someone else took over but that meant he was jailed in the same place as me” Bruce is just writing, he is writing a lot “so you got jailed in the same place as your cousin, how was it in there?. Describe jail for me Chris” that is a lot of context, I wonder if Chris will answer that.

My eyes dragged to Chris; he is quiet. I mean it is a lot to answer “I was in a detention centre with a bunch of niggas, I mean as soon as I got there they stripped me, ass cheeks spread and all that. I was young as hell, I just wanted quick money. I didn’t want that, I was in a centre with niggas that were in their thirties and there for life, they put me in jail with niggas that were worse than me. I kept myself to myself, I didn’t speak to anyone, it was depressing. I been there for a few weeks now, I heard my cousin arrived. He saw me, and I saw him, but we walked by. Then it got out, I am a snitch. Nobody likes a snitch, I was scared. One of the niggas mentioned it to me on the low, it’s getting around that I am a snitch. He probably felt sorry for me, I don’t know. And erm” he paused, he is emotional “I was scared to sleep at night, and I get why. They were there, we all sleep in this one big room, I was fucked up. I couldn’t go anywhere, the guards weren’t there, and I got beat in the night, on my shoulder I got stabbed too. I thought this is it, this was the moment I die but no, I woke up in the jail hospital. They barely let me heal and threw me in the box because I started the fight, I was in there for what, three weeks. An hour of daylight, I did nothing. Jail was hard for me” his voice broke “and uhm I was in there, for so long until my parents fought to speak to me, I didn’t speak to anyone for weeks. They moved me to somewhere that was better but even then I was on edge because I was a snitch, it moved with me. That title, I had it forever. I had to show I wasn’t going to take their shit, I made my own knife, I had to be clever, and I had to show I wasn’t going to be beaten up, so I had to beat someone up there, he lived anyways but every day I had to live on the edge.”

“And then while I was in jail I was hearing you have my heart, and we'll never be worlds apart. Maybe in magazines. And I couldn’t escape her, I couldn’t escape her voice. I was stuck in a cell and I just be thinking and being hateful because she left without saying anything to me” Chris paused “I loved her, she didn’t know but I did and it just sucks, I don’t know how I made it out and I feel like I can’t relax. Five years there felt like twenty years, the days dragged because I refused to make friends with people that knew I am a snitch and would have killed me in my sleep and being in VA everyone knew what I did. He is my cousin; it’s a code and you won’t get it. Jail made me toughen up, I ain’t ever want to harm anyone, and to stab someone was the start of my downfall but I had to do it, they were going to kill me if they knew I did nothing. You know how hard it is to fend for your life? To be looking behind you when getting your food, not knowing who is out to get you. I slept with my fist balled up, but everyone wanted that Chris, the sweet Chris. I am not the same and never will be” I never knew he did that, frowning at Chris in concern “do you get flashbacks?” Bruce asked, I am still reeling in from the first part “I do, happiness is a thing I think won’t last long for me. I do think to the moment where I got beat and then me beating another man for my own fight to show I will kill a nigga if they come near me” Bruce cleared his throat “how hard is it to speak on this? Is this the first time for you?” he nodded his head “I ain’t ever told a soul this, I feel like I lost myself when I went to jail and I try so hard to be happy, I want it but things happen to me which just confirms to me that I should be dead. I often think about the guy I stabbed, and if I am being honest the image of blood comes to me, but he made it, he was alive, but I knew what I did and so did everyone in that block. I feel like I had to be them. And then when that guy, that crazy guy had his gun to me. It was just like I was back in jail and I was feeling myself dying from pain and just the whole thing. I have so many scars, battle wounds, you can never be the same once you be in jail” this was just a big insight, I am shocked because I wasn’t expecting it.

Bruce set up another appointment with Chris, I think I will be able to go to about two more of these before I leave for overseas. I don’t want Chris to think I am quiet with him because of what I heard, I also don’t want to take it away with us because it’s private to him, that is what it will be “you must be tired after all this” I said breaking the silence “you looking at me different now?” Chris bought it up “why would I? This is private to you; how do you feel? I know it’s the first session” I can’t judge it already “erm, I don’t know yet. He’s going to continue to push me at things” now I am scared to know if there is more bad things “that is fine, you needed to speak on it Chris. Everyone deserves to be heard, speak on your feelings” I want that for him but I am just scared to know the fuck else is there to tell, I hope nothing even worse.

[dafukdidiwatch]

Cool Cat Saves The Kids

I watched this movie and I still can’t believe this is the actual cover art for it.

God I wrote so many notes about this that even my flipping Bullet Points were basically an essay. I don’t even know how to begin just thinking about it hurts my head.

Overview: Cool Cat is Cool. Things happen to him, and he has to deal with bullying.

That’s it. That’s the thing I watched. Because there is no Real Flipping Plot to this movie.

This is a kid’s show. Or at the very minimum, a movie that is intended for children. It was based on a kid’s book series I’ve never heard of whose author Derek Savage decided to turn it into a movie. Though movie isn’t exactly what I would call it. When you watch it, it honestly feels like there are six 15 minute shorts that they just mashed together to a feature film, but even then that is a Generous Description.

Basically, the film tries to be a children’s program (and I guess has beef with Barney?). And you can see intent behind it being informative child-friendly psa. But the execution was so bad.

First, there is no plot. Sure the cover says that this is “an anti-bullying kid gun safety movie,” but it really give you nothing. What would happen is that Cool Cat has a problem, like someone bullying him or his friends. It would either A) be addressed immediately and solved so that’s great, or B) it is dropped immediately and never really addressed throughout the rest of the film.

And example of A is that the bully kid Butch just starts stealing candy just to be “evil,” Cool Cat sees that and chases him, and the kid gets arrested twenty seconds later. The End.

For B, Cool Cat gets a mean email. And...that’s about it. He responds to the email, but doesn’t actually address the issue and the subplot drops entirely until that VERY Last wrap up scene.

I think the reason for this lack of plot is that there was just WAY too many messages in here. Like, take a shot every time you see a psa announcement. It ranges from don’t bully, how to deal with bullies, being creative, crossing the street safely, to fricking GUN?! Like, the gun thing that I Guess was promoted in the movie tagline, only shows up the last 10 minutes. It caught me so off guard. You cannot call this a Gun Safety movie when guns aren’t even prevalent!!

And the lack of plot is counterproductive when you want to make a Kid’s Movie like this. If you want to tackle each issue as a show or a short, the messages would come across better. There would be more time to develop each message for kids to really understand. But because there is So Much to cover, a lot of the things are gonna fall to the wayside. There is no way a kid would pay attention to this, and if they do I doubt they are gonna learn everything that Derek Savage is trying to teach. There just isn’t any real focus.

The acting, god like they Tried to go with the kid friendly vibe, but was not working. At All. It was like they thought that to add emotion is to just enunciate your words as loudly as you can. Cool Cat was way too yelly. Every line he was just screaming, has no change whatsoever. Even Elmo can sound sad when need be (fucking love Elmo, but he does has a similar voice vibe to Cool Cat, just better).

Then the kids....I don’t want to be mean but I’ll be blunt. They are just reading lines, this is a middle school stage play basically. I’m not blaming the kids, Butch look like he had a hell of a time doing his villain laugh. It’s just that some of the scenes felt like it was taken in one shot and they didn’t bother to retry. Example: One kid got too excited and jumped his line, but they couldn’t just retake that??

And the lines, man. OOF. Some of it was bad. Like, really really bad placement.They should have had someone proof-read this.

Cool Cat: “Why Are You Painting That Wall?”

Random Kid: “Because Nobody Loves Us”

lol what?

Maria: “I bet those kids have never been shown love before.”

Cool Cat: “Thanks, and it’s all true”

LOL What??

There are just a LOT of lines like that that should have been rephrased.

THEN there are the freaking technical issues.

The audio kept fluctuating in sound quality, which honestly started to hurt with Cool Cat’s constant yelling. Some scenes it sounds like they recorded in a studio, sometimes it sounded like the actors had to yell in order for the camera to capture it. There were echos, there were layers, you can’t hear the lines over the song, you can’t hear the song over the cheers. There was one point whispers overlaid on top of the lines where I thought that Cool Cat just got haunted now. And the fun side of having headphones on means I heard the phone button noises in only One Ear. LOUDLY.

Blocking could have been better. There were a lot of backs to the camera, shots of characters walking away from camera not just off screen. This didn’t bother me as much, because I know this isn’t professionally made. But it didn’t feel like they really tried as much as just half-assed it. Example:

Cool Cat was drawing a picture with different colors, but the actor only used one marker and just said different colors. Or Cool Cat is working on a poster but really just rubs the already completed poster  on a clean table as him “working.” Like, how hard is it to just film on a table with a bunch of craft supplies around you?

Then there are the questionable camera shots. LOTS of lingering shots to I assume fill up run time. These are shots of just showing Cool Cat walking round without having any real purpose. It shows Cool Catwalk all the way Up Stairs. Walked all the way Down Stairs. Walking into the House, walking into the Car. Even just shots of the parents doing things with no real motivation or impact to whatever Cool Cat is doing. It’s just there. If you want to say stuff like "oh well its to show the parents relationship" no it doesn’t. You can’t really add nuance to characters when the rest of the film is just one chaotic shot after the other. It just gets lost in translation.

The music number is probably what hurts me the most. You see Cool Cat WRITE the song. Then he SINGS the song. Then he DANCES to a DIFFERENT song. And that was it. He just needed the song for the parade, but there wasn’t any explanation or anything. I don’t even know WHY he needs the song for the parade! There was no explanation. It was just an excuse to have two back-to-back bad music video of poor choreography that again, NO POINT to whatever plot/message/psa thing he is trying to do.

I get that there should be some leeway since it looked like this was shot at Derek Savage’s house/neighborhood, so there really isn’t much they could do with their setting. But they could at least tried more with what they had. Cool Cat’s room doesn’t look exactly child friendly. There are only blank drab walls with two, maybe three posters of just Cool Cat himself. There is a reason the settings in other children shows have vibrant colors to engage them. Along with that, another half-assing moment was Butch graffiting Cool Cat’s poster, but it was one of those political posters you stuck on the lawn so it was like a foot tall outside. 1) You can’t really see that shit that small. 2) You couldn’t put the poster on a wall to film that scene at, to give a better view to the audience? It’s just a bunch of little things like that all over this film that really adds up.

Also, what’s with the posters only being about Cool Cat in his own room? A bit narcissistic if you ask me.

I'm also like 70%,sure they made this movie around the footage of them being in the Hollywood parade twice. They were at the parade, got the film, and wanted to use it so they made a movie for it. And I know it was twice because the announcers that were there to announce the arrival of Cool Cat had a costume change after switching scenes.

And after ALL of this, there is just so many random shit that really don’t do anything. Elements are randomly introduced and just as randomly dropped. We get a “next day” transition in the middle of the movie when days have already passed before them. Cool Cat breaks the 4th wall a couple of times with no real reason why. There is this joke where the camera was following Cool Cat into the bathroom for Cool Cat to ask for privacy, only to just ignore that bit every time he goes to the bathroom afterwards. Cool Cat just makes random ass noises when doing things, not important stuff. Just Doing Things. And he does this weird thing where I think he is trying to do Air Guitar, but it just looks like he is just shaking his leg a lot. I don’t really get it.

(Oh Shit, it is only after like the 3rd proof-read of this review I notice that in the gif you can clearly see the dude’s actual leg. I don’t know how mascot suits actually work, but I’m pretty sure that you’re not supposed to let kids actually see that there’s a person underneath in a kid’s show.)

There is also this....lowkey humblebrag going on? Which does not do the movie favors. After the first dumb song number, Derek shows off that he has a signed guitar by Van Halen. Like not just him playing it (which after the 15th zoom in on the guitar how could you NOT notice it thank you Derek), but pointing out to the audience that, Yes it was Indeed signed by Van Halen. Then there is the footage from the Hollywood Parade about the cars there. Sure, I get showing off like the Ghostbusters car, or Jurassic Park car, or the Batmobile. But Hurby the Love Bug? Night Rider?? Starsky and Hutch??? Magnum P.I.?????? The target audience is elementary kids, they aren’t going to know these old shows. So who is this for exactly?

Kudos to the cop for actually doing this, seriously. That cop probably had a hell of a lot of better things to do than arrest children for a bad after-school special.

And this is just SOME of the main problems of this film. There’s so much going on it would be impossible for me to go over everything without

The thing is, there is good material here. Maybe not great results, but there are a lot of ideas here that you can work with to make a decent kid’s movie. I actually loved the part where Cool Cat is dreaming and trying to figure out how he should handle bullies. I thought that was a good scene and a good way to show kids how to think through different options. There are good ideas here, but it was just way to much going on at once the movie basically shoots itself in the foot.

So here is My Version of what Cool Cat should have done. 

Cool Cat is running for School President. That’s the main story line. Early in the movie he learns of a writing contest where the winner gets their own float at the hollywood parade (stretch but roll with it). But Cool Cat has no idea what to write, and talks to it with his friends who offers ideas. So he is juggling that along with running for Student President.

However, the Butch the Bully doesn’t like that. He doesn’t want Cool Cat to win. So he vandalizes his posters. Cool cat still runs and makes better posters. Butch tries to frame Cool Cat for vandalizing the playground, but instead his cronies get caught and convinced that it was a bad idea. So Butch decides to cyberbully Cool Cat and his friends to scare them off. He works with the other kid running for President to make a hate ad against Cool Cat, telling everyone how terrible and bad Cool Cat is. Cool Cat tries to go against this my making his music video song over how cool he is to swing the votes, making Butch more angry and vindictive to his bullying scheme.

Cool Cat doesn’t know how to get Butch to stop, but after getting advice from his friends, parents, teachers, and some hard thinking, he decides to confront Butch about his bullying issue, tell someone, and thus solves the problem. Later on after talking to Butch, maybe manages to convince him to start being friends. 

Finally, Cool Cat uses this scenario to write his story about how to deal with bullying and make new friends. Which wins and we end with the Hollywood Parade.

Is this perfect? No. But it focuses the idea to one main plot (running for president) with the other issues naturally coming off of it, instead of making each issue it’s own separate thing. There is no random shifts in narrative, no GUN moments (or GUN in general we kick that shit out) and just focus on the main bullying theme.

Overall: This was a weird and bad children’s show. You have to put in a lot of effort into making a movie, but there was just too much going on for this to be a Good Children’s Movie, least of all a Good Movie in general. But it isn’t to say that it wasn’t morbidly enjoyable. It’s was like playing Spot The Difference to find all the Wrong Things in here. It was fun in a bad way.

So will I show this to children? No. But will I play a drinking game with my friends where we take a shot every time someone says the phrase “Cool Cat”? Yeah that sounds enjoyable. 

Take a shot for every time you read “Cool Cat” in my review.

Side Note:

You had this as a GUN PSA, wtf are you doing holding a gun!? Given how the only 3 videos this channel has is only Cool Cat Trailers, I’m assuming this is official Cool Cat. Soooo.....what the hell?

[oddcoupler222]

I'm in love with the little ficlet that you wrote about Ned, I wish all dads were like him... but yeah I'm kind of in love with everything you write for Sansa and Margaery, thank you for sharing! :) PS: I'm still extremely curious about Jeyne and Mya and what's their deal

Ned is very much an ideal dad. What he lacks in observance, he makes up for in heart.

OMG how could I have forgotten to share the Jya?!

Saddle up (kinda) for good old enemies to friends to lovers tale.

Of course, they met the year prior to TWW, and instantly disliked one another. Mya is a very private person - like extremely so - and very dry, low-key. Like, she would consider Sansa one of her closer friends, but even then, Sansa doesn’t know a ton about Mya’s personal life (Sansa also never pries, and Mya likes that). She enjoys a drama free existence, being organized, and values having security.

Fairly needless to say, Jeyne, right off the bat, is not her favorite person. She’s extremely nosy, decently loud, loves the hot goss, a bit unorganized, and still isn’t sure at this moment what she wants to do with her life. And honestly, Mya’s brand of exasperated condescension isn’t Jeyne’s cup of tea, either.

But - it’s fine. They’re generally, “ugh. whatever” around each other, as we all know, through TWW.

Things start to change a bit post-TWW because my god! they become roommates!

And tbh it is a bit rough at first. Because all of the things that they don’t quite agree on are right in their faces. I mean, off the bat, Mya sent Jeyne a “roommate agreement”/set of rules (to which Jeyne was like wtf, we will just live together and figure it out?) and in response, she wrote, new email who dis? … and that was about as far as their roommate agreement went (as far as Mya knows).

Jeyne doesn’t do well with not having someone around, you know. Like, she loves living with Sansa; if she had the choice to live alone in her own place or with Sansa (or like a friend in general), she would choose to live with Sansa/a friend. She likes to talk and share clothes and meals and talk and watch movies/shows together. She listens to her music loudly when she cooks/bakes, and when she showers, and when she is getting ready to go out.

Mya… is very much used to living alone. She’s been in and out of foster care since she was a child, and has been on her own since she was 17. She appreciates having quiet and her own space, and she’s worked her ass off to have moved to King’s Landing and to put herself through school – which is why it also sometimes baffles and irritates her that Jeyne’s father works closely with Sansa’s, meaning she comes from a comfortably wealthy family, and that she is just kind of flitting away her life (aka dropped out of college, just decided she was going to move to KL, working in the cafe without really thinking about what she seriously wants to do, etc)

So. It’s rough for the first couple of months while living together. Jeyne is fairly willing to put aside any issues she has with Mya in order to spend time with the person she lives with, as a social creature. As such, she also has some boundary issues (you know, all the times walking into Sansa’s room whenever she wants because that is how it is between them, etc.Not that she does it to that extent with Mya, but still. And she has some trouble seeing how she oversteps).

And Mya has very little patience for Jeyne overstepping her boundaries, and if anything, it makes her feel even more snappy/serious about maintaining her own privacy. (there may have been a Serious Argument, when Jeyne sort of went through some of her boxes to try to help unpack. Jeyne intended for it to be a good deed, but Mya walked in to Jeyne sitting in the middle of some of her stuff, including the few things she has of her mothers, which she is very protective over).

Meanwhile, Jeyne doesn’t want to tell Sansa the WHOLE of the issues she’s having in her absence, because she wants Sansa to not stress about this while she’s loving Volantis. So, this is when she and Margaery sort of start to become friends. She asks Marg, eventually, what she thinks she should do to try to bury the hatchet with Mya, because she can’t take living like this for the months to come.

And Margaery advises her to do something nice for Mya, “For the sake of the seven, don’t be wildly over-the-top. Keep it simple.”

“What, I’m supposed to not be myself?” She’s half-asking for real, half-teasing.

And Margaery smirks, “Exactly.”

So, she decides she will be simple. She will surprise Mya with dinner – cooking, another thing she misses about Sansa. Yes, she can cook. But Sansa enjoyed it, and now that she’s not around, she has to cook for herself, blah. But it’s kind of nice, because she is focusing on making food she has realized Mya likes after having shared a kitchen with her for a little while.

And she will not be loud while doing so (no singing, playing her music softly) and that she will clean as she goes, since Mya has had fits about her leaving pots and pans and silverware and food out (which, for the record, she truly was going to clean. She was just going to do so after she ate and relaxed; what is the rush). Bonus! She picked up a book-to-movie adaptation of some novel Sansa loves (and she has seen Mya reading it, too), that she is going to suggest to watch; a nice peace offering, she thought.

When she gets to the apartment - she had told Mya that she was going to be out late in order to make the dinner a surprise - she is the one who is in for a surprise when she sees a woman, wearing only Mya’s short robe, walking out of the bathroom. The woman screams. Jeyne screams and drops the bags of food she was holding.

Mya comes running out and is pissed at Jeyne because “I thought you weren’t going to be home tonight! You told me you weren’t.” And Jeyne is so, “There’s a girl in a robe??? Who is that?!”

The woman leaves in a hurry. Mya and Jeyne end up having a tense argument about Jeyne clearly lying about being out about about and for being so fucking nosy and Jeyne for being like, this is my apartment. It evolves into something bigger, about how Mya needs to loosen the stick up her ass - especially since it seems to only be there when around Jeyne - and about how Mya thinks Jeyne is far too flippant and frivolous and intrusive about everything and can’t she just take anything seriously for once, even if it’s just keeping a schedule (which hits somewhat hard, because. well, Jeyne knows she doesn’t have her life “together” and all, and it is a Big Conversation she has with her father relatively often)

It leads into a Jeyne not making dinner, tossing the ingredients into the cabinets and throwing the movie on the table, before staying in her room.

And Mya kind of cooling down in her own room for a bit before going into the kitchen and seeing everything, and sort of putting together that Jeyne meant to be doing something nice for her. Plus she thinks about the many times Sansa had told her about the good aspects of Jeyne, and she starts to feel like. Somewhat guilty. Which is a first for her when it comes to Jeyne.

Going to her room, she knocks on the door, and Jeyne has her come in. They do talk some stuff out, Jeyne apologizing for not always recognizing when she is crossing a line and Mya apologizing for being… prickly, sometimes. It makes Jeyne snort a laugh, and there’s a few moments of peace, until Mya mentions that having/keeping schedules was in her roommate agreement -

And Jeyne cuts her off, quoting back to her why the scheduling part was number 2 on the list.

Mya stares at her for a few seconds, “You… actually read it?”

“I mean, I thought it was kind of ridiculous that you were trying to map out living together before we even spoke about it face to face, but of course I read it,” Jeyne rolls her eyes.

“How was I supposed to know! You send back a ridiculous response!”

Jeyne just kind of laughs at that, and the look on Mya’s face. And for the first time, Jeyne laughing at something like this doesn’t piss her off, and she can’t help laughing a bit, too.

A little later, after they made dinner together, Jeyne - truly unable to help herself - asks, “So… who was that girl?”

And Mya sighs, and tries very much to not get prickly about Jeyne asking an understandable question, “She was a woman. That I used to date. Who is back in town for the weekend.”

Jeyne stares at her in shock, “You’re -”

“Bi. Yeah,” she knows Jeyne is staring at her and she fastidiously avoids staring back.

“But! You…” she is shouting but she can’t help it! “Sansa - does -”

“No,” she cuts her off, sighing, as she wipes her hands on her apron, “She doesn’t know.” And she leans against the counter, pouring herself another glass of the wine they’re drinking because this is personal and she doesn’t like to share personal but she knows she really isn’t getting out of it, and she doesn’t want to make anything between them worse.

She explains that sharing very personal things is… uncomfortable for her, and that Sansa had come out to her for the very reason that she knew Mya wouldn’t make any sort of deal out of it. Mya hadn’t wanted to make it about herself, either, and honestly had been a little worried that Sansa might try to lean on her a bit… and that made her nervous because she has a good amount of insecurities about her ability to really be there for someone, after having not had any serious/lasting connections in her entire adult life. (well, she doesn’t go too deeply into that personal shit, but the gist is explained)

“But when I tried to get you to go to speed dating you said it would be giving women false hope!” Jeyne insisted, her mind still spinning.

And Mya can’t even help but laugh, with the serious bafflement and outrage on Jeyne’s face, “Yeah, it was false hope because I don’t want to date anyone from lesbian speed dating.” she lifts up one finger, then adds a second as she says, “Plus, Sansa did not want either one of us there.” And a third, with a smirk, “And I had to stop you from going.”

Overall, that is a big turning point for them. Jeyne starts respecting space more (trying, anyway, she will never be great at it), and they form different schedules and roommate traditions than Jeyne had with Sansa, but it’s a nice different. She enjoys Mya’s cynicism and snarky comments - when they aren’t directed at her - and finds that she is truly, really hilarious tbh.

On the other hand, Mya learns how to share her space and open up a little bit with Jeyne - who often times doesn’t give her a choice, and weirdly, Jeyne is very good at getting her to say things that she ordinarily wouldn’t ever say to other people. She kind of, reluctantly, ends up enjoying the injection of Jeyne-drama-loudness-exuberance into her life.

They’re strangely, actually friends? It’s, weird? Friends but not like friends the way they are with Sansa (or most of their other friends). It’s a comfortable closeness that they’ve formed, and when Sansa is coming home from Volantis at the end of the seven months, they both are excited to have her back but are honestly a little sad about their roommate-ness ending.

Sansa returns (Jeyne literally tackles her to the ground in excitement at seeing her) and Mya moves into her own place. Her own place feels a little quieter, now, and it’s… weird. And Jeyne loves having Sansa back but she misses some of the stuff she did with Mya as a roommate, especially now that Sansa is with Marg and spends a good amount of time with her.

A couple of weeks after Sansa returns home, a few weeks before Christmas, Jeyne and Mya hang out. Jeyne asks Mya what she’s doing for the holidays - she knows more about Mya’s childhood than Sansa/anyone does, really, at this point, and knows she doesn’t have family to go home to.

Mya shrugs, “I have a week off from work. I’ll probably just enjoy some peace and quiet,” she jibes with a smirk.

And Jeyne just rolls her eyes, “If you have time off, you should come home with me.”

Mya is… well that isn’t something she does with anyone. Not ex-girlfriends. Not Sansa, who has invited her to her family’s place and to their NYE party. So she says no.

But Jeyne has a way of wheedling (and brow beating) and ends up getting Mya to agree to come with her.

So, she goes North with Jeyne and Sansa - who is amazed that she came - and stays with Jeyne, and feels a little off kilter at first. But then eventually, with Jeyne’s intensity and excitement and just everything feels so normal… it kind of starts to feel nice? To be there with a family rather than on her own, like she has been ever since her mom died when she was ten.

On that Christmas morning, when Jeyne is talking quickly and going over plans for the holiday and including Mya in future holidays in an off-hand comment, sitting there with wrapping paper all around her on the floor and messy hair from sleeping… it’s where Mya’s heart skips a beat and - oh. Well. Fuck.

(because Jeyne is kind of now her best friend, totally unexpected, and also very straight)

In true Mya fashion, conceal don’t feel, and never says anything, trying to live her life as normal. Even if - UGH - she lets Jeyne in so much easier than she wants to, because it’s not something she wants. But it’s fine. Jeyne doesn’t know and she’s just acting as Jeyne, and that’s - it’s scary but also not.

This continues on for another year and a half, when Sansa finally moves in with Margaery officially, and Jeyne exaggeratedly bats her eyelashes at Mya, “Gee… I wonder… who could possibly want to put up with me and move in?”

So, they end up moving in together again. Which makes Jeyne ecstatic because she’s become super close to Mya in the last couple of years, and itt’ll be nice to live with someone who isn’t staying at her girlfriend’s place for like half the week (though she IS Sansa and Margaery’s number 1 fan, make no mistake).

While they live together this time, though, they have some Moments. Jeyne has forgone the whole boundaries thing, now that they’ve come so far. There are times of cuddling. A lovely time where Jeyne (who is in the shower) calls for Mya, who thinks something is going on… and then goes in and see’s Jeyne who is like… silhouetted in the shower curtain and is also almost halfway leaning out of the shower (because she has 0 shame or inclincation to hide her body) and Mya short-circuits before spinning around and, “You’re - naked!” “Well you knew I was coming to take a shower.” “I didn’t think you… why did you call me in here?” “Oh. I wanted to ask if you would order dinner so it would be here when I’m done.”

(needless to say, living with Jeyne does not help her feelings. but she’s resigned)

Unnnntil!

The night of Sansa’s planned proposal to Margaery, where she has Jeyne and Mya both in on the plan and helping her out. When things go awry, Jeyne returns back to their place, arms full of the flowers and the champagne that she’d gotten back from Sansa and Margaery’s place.

She and Mya, instead, drink the wine together, discussing Sansa/Margaery’s proposal-that-wasn’t and the election and how Jeyne worked with Marg on her campaign and is thinking about going back to school to something she might enjoy (but she’s a little nervous).

And Mya shakes her head, tipsy, but she thinks she probably has a lot of stars in her eyes when she looks at Jeyne even sober, but she is very serious, “Jeyne, no. You would be amazing, doing anything you’re passionate about. You… you are so…” she trails off, gesturing at Jeyne, before she uses that hand to twirl some of Jeyne’s long, glossy dark hair around her fingers.

Jeyne scoffs, “So flippant? So much?” It’s a rare time for her to feel genuinely, openly insecure.

And Mya instead slides her hand down and turns to look at Jeyne completely, “No. Well, yes, you are a lot. But not… bad. You are so smart. And so unafraid to say what you want and what you feel. And so good at getting other people to do the same. You are amazing, Jeyne Poole, and don’t you dare be afraid to do anything you want.”

Jeyne turns to look at Mya, too, and realizes in that moment how absolutely close they are. Like she can see how the dim lighting of the room reflects in Mya’s vibrant blue eyes and makes them almost mystical, and she can feel her breath wash over her cheek and her hand feel so strong and warm, stroking her thumb over the back of her hand. And her words… she can feel how much Mya means them, and it makes this heavy, warm, tingling feeling shift inside of her that…

is so strange. Like almost like the feeling she’s had in the past when having interest in a guy, but like more and it’s unfamiliar and a lot and good and… she doesn’t pull back but doesn’t move forward, and squeezes her hand around Mya’s as she manages a whispered, “Thanks.”

And the next morning she wakes up with Mya curled around her (she does get amusement from the fact that everyone would assume she is the primary cuddler between them but it is in fact Mya who gets all cuddly during sleep). And it’s not like they haven’t cuddled together many times in the last couple of years (it took her TIME to knock down that wall, and she is very proud and honored to have done so).

But it’s the first time she’s ever felt like this. Like something sliding through her that feels a lot like want and maybe like more-than-like, and she doesn’t know what is happening or where it’s coming from, exactly? But like. It’s here. And Jeyne isn’t one to avoid how she feels…

So she goes to her number one trusted source, going to see Sansa the weekend after Sansa and Margaery actually got engaged. Does the genuine and appropriate squealing. Before she thinks about Mya, again, and sighs, and Sansa is like, “What was that sigh about?”

So she confesses, of course, “I think I like Mya and maybe love, in not a friend way!” she bursts out.

And Sansa is shocked, staring with her mouth open, before, “WHAT?!” comes out on a shout.

“I DON’T KNOW! WHY AM I FEELING LIKE THIS?!” Jeyne screams back, and they stare at each other for some long beats, before Sansa shakes her head before they calm down and have an actual talk.

Sansa is still shocked, but is always Jeyne’s best voice of reason and sounding board, and Jeyne ultimately leaves feeling convinced that she does actually like-maybe-love Mya? And she has been spending like every waking moment thinking about this, and going over all of their interactions and like. Gods. What if they’ve been basically dating for years and she hadn’t even realized it?! That’s kind of what it feels like.

And because she’s Jeyne, she goes home in a whirlwind. Sees Mya in the kitchen and marches up to her, determined.

Then kisses her because she is Jeyne and she isn’t going to not go after what she wants, even if it’s uncharted territory.

And holy fuck, was it worth it, when Mya - shocked still for a long moment - slides her hands into Jeyne’s hair and responds.

(Margaery, for the record, totally told Sansa months before that there was something between Mya and Jeyne and Sansa was like, “No way!”… she is very vindicated now)

aaaand for the record (i posted/mentioned before, but it’s been like over 2 years, so), Jeyne:

Mya:

[anxiousprincedad]

Move-in Day (pt 2)- Detached

Second part of my Home series, also found on Ao3 here. College Roommate Au, LAMP/CALM, slowburn, etc etc. I just liked the idea so much I wanted to write a bunch of one-shots and stuff for it, just a ton of scenarios, so here’s their first meeting (from Logan’s POV)

pt 1: (x)

Logan wasn��t usually one for mistakes. Especially when it came to his education. The one time he did, he ended up being put on a whole separate campus than the one he was meant to go. It wasn’t the biggest deal, but it was still a slight nuisance of having to take the bus every morning to get to his classes.

“Logan, are you alright?”

Logan blinked out of his reverie, tearing his gaze out of the window to look at his mother, who was looking back at him.

“Yes,” he adjusted his glasses, clearing his throat. “I was just thinking about what I would unpack first.”

That was the end of the conversation. She turned back to driving and Logan turned back to watching the buildings pass. The dorm he’d ended up in was across the city from the main campus, and this campus was hardly an actual campus. There were a few buildings around the small town designated for the university, entered only through an issued keycard, but they were nearly indistinguishable from the restaurants and shops around them. Everything was old brick and stone, buildings that had been standing there for many, many years. Logan hadn’t gotten around to researching about them, having focused on the main campus.

As he watched people walk around town, college students mixing with joggers and families, he supposed it was cozy and charming in its own way. He saw the sign on one of the buildings, “Columbus State University Student Housing”. He waited to feel some sort of excitement as the car parked in front of his new dorm. He didn’t feel much of anything.

They checked in and he got his keycard, room key, and a T-shirt that he would never wear. He and his mother began carrying boxes up to the third floor, finding Logan’s room. 328. They’d put signs on the door with all of their names in some sort of Disney themed design that matched the paper cutouts of characters all along the wall. It was the arts campus, after all. Seemed like he’d been put in with three other boys named Virgil, Roman, and Patton.

He unlocked the front door to find an empty apartment. Unsurprising, as they were some of the first to arrive at the check-in downstairs. A few more trips later, and all of his boxes were in the living room.

“Alright, well I’m going to head home now. Should get back around four. Have fun, Logan, try to make friends and make good grades. I’ll call you later,” his mother said after the last box was set down.

Logan simply nodded at her, only glancing back once the front door shut. He wondered if he should feel bad about not even giving her a proper goodbye. It didn’t last long as he got to work, trying to get ahead of unpacking before anyone got there.

Busying himself with moving his personal belongings into his bedroom, he almost didn’t hear the door open slowly. He paused, looking up at the new arrival. It was a tall, skinny boy with purple bangs, dark eyeshadow, and a hand stitched patched jacket. Logan noticed all he had was a bookbag and a duffel bag as the boy closed the door behind him. Logan stood up straight, outstretching his hand to him.

“Hello, I assume that you are one of my new roommates?” he questioned.

Virgil shook it awkwardly. “Uh, yeah, I guess. I’m Virgil.”

Logan was a little surprised by the literary name, but perhaps his parents were simply fans of the arts. Either way, Logan decided not to comment on it.

“Logan, nice to meet you.”

Unsure of what else to say, he turned back to his boxes and began moving one into his room, while Virgil went into the other room. After a few moments, he could hear Virgil moving furniture around, but he decided to ignore it while he set a couple of small cacti on the windowsill. He was admiring the way the sunlight shone on them when he heard the door open behind him.

A small, young-looking boy came in, cheering excitedly before spotting Logan and running over.

Logan, on instinct, held out his hand for the boy to shake. The boy took his hand and shook it with a lot of… vigor, startling Logan a little.

“Hi, I’m Patton, you must be my new roommate! Can I take this room?” he said in a rush, pointing to the room Logan had been moving into.

“Uh, I’m Logan, and I suppose, it’s just me in there curren-”

“Yay!” Patton leaped up, bouncing out the door only to come back in holding a box and being followed by two women, who were also carrying boxes.

Logan went to the kitchen, where he started putting away dishes. Patton came back out to the living room after dropping the box in his room, spotting Virgil.

Virgil looked like he was about to duck back into his room, but Patton caught him before he could.

“Hi, I’m Patton!”

“Virgil,” Virgil said simply, looking sheepish.

Patton’s face split into a grin, “Ooo, that’s a cool name!”

“It’s like the guide in Dante’s Inferno,” Logan added, surprising himself. He hadn’t meant to join the conversation. He cleared his throat. “It’s a good read.”

Virgil smirked at him, leaning against the doorframe. “Yeah, never heard that one before. English sucked ass those couple of weeks, the teacher kept trying to make me read it aloud since I shared the name.”

Logan flushed a little at Virgil’s expression, a little unsure why he was feeling… almost tingly all of a sudden. Before he could think about it too much, one of the women with Patton came out of their room and asked Patton a question, while Logan adjusted his glasses and took a deep breath while no one was paying attention to him.

Patton answered whatever she had asked before turning back to Virgil. “I hope we become the best of friends!”

Virgil blinked in surprise as Patton bounced away, looking at Logan with a confused look. Logan shrugged at him, raising his brows at him.

“Let’s just hope that our last member isn’t so… ecstatic,” Logan mumbled, half to himself.

Logan finished putting away the dishes and shut the cabinet, breaking down the box and setting it beside the trash bin before going to his room. Patton looked up from where he was putting a few plushies on the bookshelf. Patton grinned at him, and Logan gave him a small, awkward smile in return, with a short nod. He began putting his books away.

A couple minutes later, the door opened again with a boy singing loudly, and Logan looked up as Patton jumped up and bounced to the door to meet him. He heard him introduce himself as Roman Prince. He listened in for another moment before returning to flipping through “And One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”. He didn’t really see the need to join the conversation, although that wasn’t a new feeling. He was used to being alone.

Waking up at 7 am was a nice change from his usual 5 am wake-up. As he was tying his usual blue tie, Patton sat up sleepily.

“Good morning!” he said cheerily before yawning and stretching.

“Good morning,” Logan responded absentmindedly as he straightened his tie and adjusted his glasses in the mirror Patton had hung on the door.

Patton got up and followed him out to the kitchen, his hoodie too big and falling over his hands. Logan wasn’t sure if Patton was wearing shorts underneath, but thought it would be rude to stare or to ask. So he simply opened the door and started to leave.

“Where are you going?” Patton asked, sounding almost disappointed.

“Oh, uh, I was simply going down to the mart downstairs to get breakfast,” Logan said, looking back at Patton’s pout.

“But I was gonna make breakfast for everyone to celebrate our first day together,” Patton said sadly.

Logan pointed out the obvious flaw in that plan, “We only have three leftover slices of pizza from last night in here.”

“Oh…” Patton pursed his lips as he looked around as if suddenly food would jump out at him. Then he lit up, “Then we can go down to the mart together and get ingredients!”

Logan nodded, “That sounds adequate.”

Patton cheered, albeit quietly as to not wake the other room. He went towards the door, and Logan stopped him.

“Patton, you can’t possibly be planning to go outside wearing just a hoodie…” he berated.

“I have shorts on under it,” Patton said, pulling the hoodie up to his stomach to demonstrate.

Logan flushed, quickly looking away before he could get more than a glimpse of Patton’s short shorts and bare stomach.

“Still, you must get properly dressed if we are to go out in public,” Logan said in exasperation.

Patton huffed dramatically, but went back to their shared room to change. Logan, giving him his privacy, took a seat by the bar counter and looked at his email. A couple of welcome messages from the school to his university email, and a newsletter from an astronomy website he follows. He looked through it to see what constellations and planets could be expected in the night sky in the coming week.

“Ready!” Patton said cheerily, a little loud before he covered his own mouth while looking at the other bedroom.

Upon being sure he hadn’t accidentally woken the other two, he looked back at Logan expectantly. Logan stood and put his phone in his pocket, following Patton out the door. He locked it behind him as Patton waited, bouncing on his feet.

They took the stairs, and Patton bounded down them, jumping down the last three steps at every turn of them.

“You are going to hurt yourself doing that,” Logan pointed out as Patton landed with a loud thud on his feet.

“No I won’t, I always do that!” Patton giggled back, looking up at him as he waited for Logan to reach the bottom.

Going out the front door of the lobby, they went inside the little store next door. It was just like any gas station mart, only without the gas or the probably inedible hot food. Plus, it was catered more to college students, Logan noted as he realized that this shelf had ramen noodles, notebooks, and condoms all in the same place. He quickly turned his gaze to Patton, who had run to the next aisle and was holding up a box of pancake mix and a bottle of syrup triumphantly.

“We’re gonna make pancakes for breakfast!” he said determinedly as Logan walked to him.

‘Well, he’s just adorable,’ Logan thought as Patton skipped across the store to the fridges to get milk, eggs, and butter.

Patton came back, shoving everything into Logan’s arms. Logan was startled, nearly dropping the milk jug as Patton went over to the boxes of cereal with a huge grin. He grabbed Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms, much to Logan’s displeasure.

“Patton, those can hardly be counted as a healthy breakfast,” he scolded.

Patton shrugged, “But they are tasty!”

Logan rolled his eyes, but it was Patton’s own choice, so he didn’t stop him from taking them up to the tired looking girl working the register.

“I think that should be enough for now, and we can go to the grocery store later to stock up everything else when Roman and Virgil wake up,” Patton said happily.

He paid and they decided to take the elevator up to their floor. Logan had never really been good at conversation, so he was a little glad that Patton was distracting himself by humming a song. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that Patton was wearing something under his shirt, like a plain white tank top, but with a different fabric than Logan had ever seen on one. It looked somewhat like Spandex, and Logan couldn’t help but wonder why Patton was wearing it. The elevator stopped before he could think to ask it aloud, however, and they went back to their dorm.

As Patton began getting the ingredients out, Logan put the cereal boxes in the pantry. They looked very desolate amongst the rest of the empty shelves. He shut the door and turned back to Patton, who was getting a couple of pans from the lower cabinets as quietly as he could. Logan stood there, unsure of what he should do. He supposed that Patton expected him to help, and it would potentially be rude to not help. Patton looked up and seemed to sense his uncertainty.

“Can you get a mixing bowl down? You put them on the top shelf, so you’ll be able to reach them better,” Patton asked as he grabbed the pancake mix and began reading the instructions.

Logan nodded in affirmation as he opened the cabinet and reached up to get said mixing bowl, grabbing the largest and putting the other two smaller ones back on the shelf. As he closed the cabinet and set the bowl on the counter, Patton handed him the open bag of batter mix.

“Two cups of that will make 14 pancakes, but we’ll double it, and we might have some left over.” Patton said happily. “Depends on how hungry everyone is, I guess.”

Logan stared at the bag for a moment, unsure of what to do.

“So add four cups to the bowl?” he asked.

“Yup! Then four eggs and two cups of milk, and then you’ll whisk it until it turns into batter!” Patton affirmed as he found the right measuring cup and the rainbow colored whisk he’d brought.

Logan set about measuring everything out as he was told, and Patton showed him how to crack an egg after he messed up and got eggshells in the mix. After getting said eggshells out, of course.

“Don’t want crunchy pancakes, silly! Well, actually, I guess you could if you were making a special recipe with like… bacon. Or Pop Rocks. Ooh, that would be fun!” Patton said as he cleanly cracked the third egg in.

Logan was too focused on Patton’s technique to respond with anything more than a strange look at that.

Patton started heating up the pan with butter as Logan whisked, and Patton cheered him on, reminding him to make sure to get the bottom. Logan couldn’t help but smile at the other boy, who met it with an even bigger grin. Something felt a little funny in Logan’s stomach, he dismissed it quickly as he went back to whisking.

Once Patton had approved the consistency of the mixture, he took the bowl from Logan, setting it beside the stove. He quickly swiped his finger along the side to taste the batter, his face lighting up.

“You shouldn’t do that, you could get sick from the raw eggs,” Logan said.

Patton waved it off, “I always taste the batter! It’s yummy and you gotta know how you did.” He shot a quick smile at Logan before ladling a portion of the batter into the heated pan.

Out of a job, Logan stood against the counter and observed. He realized his heart was beating faster than normal as he watched Patton sway to a nonexistent song. He looked away for a moment, trying to steady himself. He wasn’t used to this… elation. Most of his joy came from reading a good book, not this kind of… almost domestic event with a near stranger. It was so different. And it was only the first day; then what would the rest of the semester be like?

His mind beginning to race, Logan looked around the room for something to talk about. Finding nothing of interest, his eyes fell back onto Patton, and the fabric hidden beneath his shirt. Curiosity got the best of him.

“What’s that you’re wearing under your shirt?”

Patton nearly jumped, although Logan was unsure why; he hadn’t spoken loudly enough to startle him, surely.

“Oh, uh, well…”

Logan stood up straighter as Patton began to fumble with the pan, looking nervous.

“It’s a… binder,” Patton said, looking at Logan, seemingly to gauge a reaction.

Logan, however, was just confused.

“Like… a school binder? I don’t understand,” Logan said, furrowing his brows.

“Oh…” Patton looked back at the pan, flipping it over before he spoke again. “Well, do you know what transgender means?”

Logan thought for a moment. “Well, “trans” comes from Latin, meaning “across, over, or beyond”, and gender is obviously the sex of a person, so I would assume it means something like… Across gender? Possibly?”

Patton let out a snort, “Well, I guess. Transgender means that someone identifies as a gender that they weren’t born as.”

Logan pondered this for a moment before nodding in understanding.

“I’m transgender… I’m AFAB, or Assigned Female at Birth. But I realized that I was a boy in high school, and started transitioning. The binder is to give me a flat chest so that I pass in public,” Patton explained, not looking at Logan until the very end, to see what his reaction was.

Logan found that this only raised more questions for him, but he didn’t want to accidentally offend Patton.

“I suppose that might explain why you look so young…” Logan said, immediately hoping that that wasn’t hurtful.

Patton smiled sheepishly, “Yeah, I’ve always been shorter than most people, and I haven’t been able to go on T yet.”

“T?” Logan asked.

“Testosterone. You can get it from a doctor, but I still haven’t been approved for it yet. Hopefully soon though, then my voice will drop and I’ll look more like any other guy.” Patton said, his voice filled with hope and longing.

Logan was unsure of what to say. They fell into a silence, and Logan could still tell that Patton was nervous.

“So… What classes are you taking this semester?”

Patton seemed relieved at the topic change, and happily went into detail about his schedule and his excitement to start learning. Logan listened with earnest, going into his own schedule as Patton kept the pancake stack rising.

By noon, the other two had woken up and they’d eaten their pancakes at the little coffee table in the living room. Patton had suggested they all go shopping, and Roman offered to drive them to Target. Virgil decided he had nothing better to do, and Logan decided he would stay behind. The morning had already worn him out, he wasn’t sure if he could handle another trip with the rest of them at that point.

So while they all took off, Logan went back into his room, sitting at his desk and opening his laptop. Going to Google, he started his search for “transgender”, finding dozens of news articles on the first page. None of them looked good, however, and he skipped over them. Scrolling down, he found some articles about reference guides and explanations of the terms used, so he opened those in new tabs and began to read.

Somewhere between articles, he wondered why he was so determined to learn this. Was it simply not to offend? Was it because it was simply a new term he’d never encountered before? Or was it because he wanted to understand Patton better?

He shook the thought off. It was simply an interesting topic to educate himself about, a new fact about the world he had been ignorant of. Nothing more.

Nothing more.

[empmoniitor]

AMP UP YOUR EMPLOYEE MONITORING ETHICS IN SIMPLE STEPS

Employee monitoring is by far the most considerable method to keep track of employee activities during working hours. But does it interfere and disturbs the privacy of the employee? And is it even legal to monitor employees at the workplace? Even if it is legal, then to what extent is it considerable?

To clarify all these concerns, you need to have a closer look at the workplace monitoring ethics. You require to grab some ideas on how far it is ethical to manage the employees by keeping records. When workplace monitoring ethics comes into action, it is necessary to understand the tactics to do everything within the legal boundaries.

EMPLOYEE MONITORING AT WORKPLACE

Employee monitoring is all over the place in 2021. We all know the reasons behind it. As the entire world is undergoing pandemic situations, employees get advised to work remotely. Now the managers must keep a check on their teams. All thanks to the technology. It introduced us to some of the best employee monitoring software that makes the entire process uncomplicated.

Monitoring includes various aspects to check and record the activities of employees. It incorporates features like screenshot monitoring, website and app usage monitoring, keyboard monitoring, and most importantly, productivity monitoring and management.

But yes, let me tell you, even if the higher authorities use various software to manage and monitor employees, everything goes behind the scenes. The employees remain unaware that they are getting monitored. But it is legal. Always keep this in consideration.

Monitoring employee activities and remembering their passwords do not go hand in hand. Employers own no right to trespass the employee’s personal information even if they have the reach to it. The entire goal of employee monitoring is to create a productive environment and not data breaching.

IS THERE SOMETHING CALLED INTENTIONAL UNETHICAL EMPLOYEE MONITORING?

Higher authorities will never do something unethical. They never grow these intentions. But they always wish to protect all their business data and never want anyone to interfere. In turn, this sometimes goes off the track. At times the employers forget to consider the ethics of employee monitoring. And as we know that there are plenty of employee monitoring tools available, it also creates room for unethical monitoring.

Mostly the employers try to stay away from all these. But it creates significant trust issues within the employees. They think it might take up their personal information, and they end up losing interest in work. Demotivation, unproductivity, and distraction are all that it leaves behind. So, employers must have ethical employee monitoring and maintain trustworthiness.

WHY IS IT NECESSARY?

If we consider the case of remote workers, they do not visit the traditional workplace regularly. So the managers must use an employee monitoring tool to monitor them. The device provides detailed reports of the activities of the employees throughout the working hours.

But if the remote employee works on the personal workstation, the employers get an opportunity to interrupt their personal information. So this might bring some concern within the remote employees. But if the higher authorities go for ethical employee monitoring, things become more cut and clear.

You have to make things transparent for your employees. Tell them why they need to install an employee monitoring software, and there must not be any issue if they do so. If not, what are the benefits, and what actions will you take if someone misuses it. It is necessary to clear everything out. Otherwise, they will always remain a little skeptical before installing it.

CONSIDER THE CONSEQUENCES

There will be some consequences if you start walking on the wrong path. Let me show you some of the possible outcomes you have to face if you choose the unethical way of employee monitoring.

DATA BREACH

We keep our personal and professional life apart, but will a monitoring software understand the difference. Most of the employees feel insecure because they fear that there might be some tampering with the data. And even after knowing it, while would someone take the risk? Again if the employers keep checking on the employees throughout the working hours, they might get their hands on all the data stored.

The employees will have a lot of queries if they are getting monitored for the very first time. If there are so many issues, then why not start tracking employees without their consent. Make sure you never have these thoughts! It can get you into serious trouble. Not only will you lose the trust of your employees, but you might also get yourself into facing legal actions.

The most efficient way is to honestly let your employees know that they are getting monitored and do everything legally.

DECREASE EMPLOYEE TRUST

Yes, this will top the list because once they see their employees are into some illegal activities, they will lose trust and interest in working for your company. So do not do anything secretly. You have no right to check on personal emails, social media messages, or any other notification popping up. Again it can happen from the employee’s end too.

Some employees involve themselves in malpractices like sharing out the confidential data of the company. But if you consider every employee to have a similar mindset, you can never find a solution. Hence, go for ethical workplace monitoring rather than indulging in illegal accomplishments.

And, of course, there is a difference. Employee monitoring is tracking the progress of the project on which the employee is working. It makes no sense to get into every detail and information of the employee. It would create a wrong impression whenever your employees get to know about it.

SUSTAINING WORKPLACE MONITORING ETHICS

Here are some practical ways to monitor your employees ethically.

CONSIDER THE LEVEL OF EMPLOYEE POLICY

Sit down with your HR’s and design a proper employee policy. The policy must include the reasons to monitor the employees. The next thing is to mention what exactly will get observed. Keep everything transparent. Again you have to introduce the different monitoring types like capturing screenshots, website and application usage, and keystroke logging.

Let the employees know which websites and applications get considered as unproductive for the tool. Accordingly, they will receive productivity alerts for not working efficiently. Also, let them know about the hours they will be kept an eye on.

STICK TO THE RULES

Even if it is legally permitted to track the employees if working remotely, keep following the rules. You have no right to go beyond the laws and check on every information of the employee. It might put the company’s reputation at high risk. Hence, you have to stick to the rules provided by the government. It will help the entire process to keep running smoothly.

REALIZE THE NEED FOR MONITORING

To need to make your employees understand the need for monitoring. May it be your in-office employees or remote employees, they should realize why employers keep track of every activity they perform. If you let them know about everything, they might not have any issues getting employee monitoring software installed in their system.

THE MOST ETHICAL WORKPLACE MONITORING SOFTWARE- EMPMONITOR

We have been talking about employee monitoring software throughout the article. By now, you must have made a clear picture of the best employee monitoring software that you need for your company. Let me put your imagination into words.

EmpMonitor is the most ethical employee monitoring software that monitors each activity of the employee during working hours. It also provides a productive report which shows the details of employee’s assignments. It offers productivity alerts if an employee is remaining unproductive throughout.

Again the tool has some extra added features like screenshot monitoring. It helps receive screenshots of different time intervals. It helps in more precise employee monitoring. It also provides a detailed report of the website visited and applications used during office hours.

Keystroke logging is another remarkable feature provided by EmpMonitor. It constantly keeps monitoring the keypunches of the employee’s workstation and dispenses a report. Hence, you can check which employee is working and who has left the workstation ideals for hours.

The employee time tracking tool also helps in marking the attendance of the employees. Hence, it can monitor them right from logging in to logging out from the workstation. There is no need to invest in any other tool for maintaining the attendance record of the employees.

Were you considering all these points while imagining the perfect employee monitoring tool? If yes, then you have just landed at the right place. EmpMonitor is one of the best employee tracking tools that acquire all these features and monitor employees ethically. It also offers a free trial, so do not miss the chance and grab the opportunity right away.

Check Out Our Latest Posts:

7 Insider Threat Statistics That You Shouldn’t Overlook In 2021 Getting Employee Behavioral Analytics Back On Track And Why Does It Matters? Insider Threat Detection Software| Problems, Benefits And Solutions

CLOSING LINES

May it be a large-scale company or a small industry, every company must monitor its employees while working. But if you get into illegal actions, it might end up spoiling the reputation of the company. Keeping all these aside, focus on ethical employee monitoring remembering the consequences we mentioned. And do not forget to implement EmpMonitor for better results of workplace monitoring.

I hope the article helped you know about workplace monitoring ethics. Is there something that we can incorporate? Please drop your thoughts in the comments below. I would love to hear from you!

Originally Published On: EmpMonitor

[ruminativerabbi]

Game-Changers

Everybody knows the old French saw about how the more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same. And mostly it’s true—we can surely all think of a dozen innovations touted in their day as societal game-changers that turned out merely to be variations on the theme they were supposed not merely to revise slightly but totally to uproot and replace. You can make scrambled eggs in your microwave slightly more quicky than in a frying pan, but you still end up with a plate of scrambled eggs. And your wireless printer does exactly the same thing as your non-wireless printer did, just without the wire. It’s nice to have fewer wires under your desk, of course. But was the world—or even just your world—really changed by the advent of wireless printers?

But then, every so often, something comes along that actually does change everything. It generally takes a while for people to understand the implications of that innovation, however. Gutenberg’s printing press is a good example: it’s hard to think of a day that more totally changed the world—and for the better—than that fateful day in 1452 on which Gutenberg produced his first printed Bible, thus opening the path for printed books to supplant hand-written manuscripts by making it possible to create hundreds, or even thousands, of  copies of a book in the time a scribe would have earlier on needed to create a single volume. And, yes, things got off to a strong start: by 1500, there were a cool 30,000 books in print across Europe. But even so it took almost a century and a half before it dawned on someone that Gutenberg’s invention could be used to publish a daily printed newspaper. (That first effort was the rather infelicitously named Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, a German-language newspaper that Johann Carolus began publishing in Strasbourg in 1605.)

Some of these game-changing moments seem less momentous as time passes: I can remember the teenaged me thinking that nothing would ever be the same again after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, only later on to realize that it was a come-and-go moment that, practically speaking, changed nothing at all in terms of the way we live our lives down here on earth. Others seem only in retrospect to have  been crucial turning points, but went totally unnoticed at the time: surely the invention of email counts as an innovation that permanently altered the way society functions, but I myself can’t say with certainly who invented it or when exactly. (I can now—I just looked it up and so can you: click here. But why V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is basically unknown, while Neil Armstrong’s name is known even to young children—that would be an interesting issue to think through. Perhaps I’ll return to that one of these days and see what I can come up with.)

But I write about all this today because I noted in the paper something a few weeks ago that feels to me as though it might well be—at least in retrospect—a true game-changer moment. It surely went unnoticed by most. In the end, it may end up to have been a fancy parlor-trick that only felt momentous at the moment. Or it may be an innovation that possesses the potential to address the scourge of homelessness.

As recently as ten years ago, it was estimated that there were as many as 100 million people in the world living without roofs over their heads. Nor is this a Third World problem per se: in 2018 it was estimated by the government that there were about 553,000 homeless individuals in the United States, 65% of whom were temporarily being housed in shelters and 35% of whom were fending for themselves on our nations’ streets. Just this spring, the New York Times reported that there were about 114,000 school-age children who were or will be either permanently or temporarily homeless during the current school year. (To read more about that almost unbelievable statistic, click here.)

The roots of homelessness are complicated and vary from context to context, but the cost of owning a home is surely part of the problem. Maybe it’s the advent of Pesach that has made me especially sensitive to the whole issue: the holiday is formally about freedom from slavery, but the famous image of the Israelites yearning for home while spending forty years living in flimsy, roofless sukkot that provided no real protection from the elements, no meaningful security, and hardly any privacy at all—all those themes came together to draw my attention to an article in the New York Post last week that announced something that struck me as the kind of innovation that could conceivably take its place next to Gutenberg’s press one of these days. And it too had something to do with printing.

Or at least with a printer.

The article, by Mary K. Jacob, reported that 70-year-old Tim Shea, formerly a homeless soul living on the streets in Austin, Texas, now resides in a 400-square-foot home that was created with a 3-D printer and which is part of a community of such structures created especially to house 180 people like himself in homes they rent for $300 a month. (The community also provides work opportunities for the residents, so all who live there can earn their rent and remain permanently in place. To read the New York Post article, click here.) The cost of creating such a home, using machines called “large concrete 3-D printers” is about $10,000. But the price is expected to drop as the technology becomes more advanced and one essay I found projected the eventual cost of using such a machine to create an inhabitable home to be about $3500. Also relevant is that such a building can be constructed by four workers in less than twenty-four hours. (For a more detailed account by Adele Peters of how this unbelievable technology works, click here.) Each printer—obviously something akin to the printer on your desk but also quite different from it—costs about $100,000 and is expected to be able to produce about 1,000 homes. So that would add about $100 to the cost of each home, a more than bearable addition. The homes are made of concrete and mortar, both substances readily available in most Third World countries. The roofs are not 3-D printed.

As noted above, lots of innovations present themselves to the world as game-changers but only very few actually do alter the course of human society. The invention of the printing press certainly deserves its place on the list. So do the introduction of the personal computer and the invention of the Internet. But the thought that society could address the problems of homelessness and the extreme poverty and lack of resources that brings people to live on the street by constructing homes so inexpensively that even people with the most modest incomes could afford the rent…and then by constructing communities for such people that also provide the employment opportunities necessary to earn that rent and to survive with dignity in a secure and safe environment—that seems to me a development truly with the potential to change the world.

One of the Torah’s most chilling lines is in the fifteenth chapter of Deuteronomy. The text enjoins the Israelite to be generous and kind when it comes to charitable giving, and never to begrudge the poor their alms, “for it was precisely to grant you the ability to show such solicitude to the poor that God blessed you with whatever wealth you possess in the first place.” And then Scripture goes on to note wistfully that this shall be a permanent obligation, “for surely the poor will never vanish entirely from the land.” Ramban says to take this more as a dour observation than as an actual prophetic oracle—and thus specifically not to conclude that the eradication of poverty is something that could never actually be achieved—and I’d like to think that that is exactly correct. (Ramban, also called Nachmanides, died in 1270 and is still considered one of the greatest Torah commentators.) And that is why I responded so emotionally to that story in the paper the other day: the thought that it could be possible to address the world-wide problem of homelessness by building habitable homes for less than the cost of a car and then by constructing communities that present future residents with the kind of work-opportunities that will make residence in such homes affordable for all—that really does seem to me like a game-changer. If I had to bequeath to my lovely granddaughters a world in which no human being had ever walked on the moon, I could live with that. But to think that the possibility exists to offer them a world in which all human beings can live in dignified, secure housing—that seems to me like the kind of innovative change that really would be a game-changer in terms of the way we live in the world.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

In 2002, a Chicago comedy duo, Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, landed their big break: a chance to perform at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. When Louis C.K. invited them to hang out in his hotel room for a nightcap after their late-night show, they did not think twice. The bars were closed and they wanted to celebrate. He was a comedian they admired. The women would be together. His intentions seemed collegial.

As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C.K. asked if he could take out his penis, the women said.

They thought it was a joke and laughed it off. “And then he really did it,” Ms. Goodman said in an interview with The New York Times. “He proceeded to take all of his clothes off, and get completely naked, and started masturbating.”

In 2003, Abby Schachner called Louis C.K. to invite him to one of her shows, and during the phone conversation, she said, she could hear him masturbating as they spoke. Another comedian, Rebecca Corry, said that while she was appearing with Louis C.K. on a television pilot in 2005, he asked if he could masturbate in front of her. She declined.

Now, after years of unsubstantiated rumors about Louis C.K. masturbating in front of associates, women are coming forward to describe what they experienced. Even amid the current burst of sexual misconduct accusations against powerful men, the stories about Louis C.K. stand out because he has so few equals in comedy. In the years since the incidents the women describe, he has sold out Madison Square Garden eight times, created an Emmy-winning TV series, and accumulated the clout of a tastemaker and auteur, with the help of a manager who represents some of the biggest names in comedy. And Louis C.K. built a reputation as the unlikely conscience of the comedy scene, by making audiences laugh about hypocrisy — especially male hypocrisy.

After being contacted for an interview this week about the on-the-record accusations of sexual misconduct — encounters that took place over a decade ago — Louis C.K.’s publicist, Lewis Kay, said the comedian would not respond. “Louis is not going to answer any questions,” Mr. Kay wrote in an email Tuesday night.

Neither Louis C.K. nor Mr. Kay replied to follow-up emails in which the accusations were laid out in detail, or to voice messages or texts. On Thursday, the premiere of Louis C.K.’s new movie “I Love You, Daddy,” was abruptly canceled, and he also canceled an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

The stories told by the women raise sharp questions about the anecdotes that Louis C.K. tells in his own comedy. He rose to fame in part by appearing to be candid about his flaws and sexual hang-ups, discussing and miming masturbation extensively in his act — an exaggerated riff that some of the women feel may have served as a cover for real misconduct. He has all but invited comparison between his private life and his onscreen work, too: In “I Love You, Daddy,” which is scheduled to be released next week, a character pretends to masturbate at length in front of other people, and other characters appear to dismiss rumors of sexual predation.

At the same time, Louis C.K. has also boosted the careers of women, and is sometimes viewed as a feminist by fans and critics. But Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov said that when they told others about the incident in the Colorado hotel room, they heard that Louis C.K.’s manager was upset that they were talking about it openly. The women feared career repercussions. Louis C.K.’s manager, Dave Becky, was adamant in an email that he “never threatened anyone.”

For comedians, the professional environment is informal: profanity and raunch that would be far out of line in most workplaces are common, and personal foibles — the weirder the better — are routinely mined for material. But Louis C.K.’s behavior was abusive, the women said.

“I think the line gets crossed when you take all your clothes off and start masturbating,” Ms. Wolov said.

‘You Want to Believe It’s Not Happening’

Ms. Corry, a comedian, writer and actress, has long felt haunted by her run-in with Louis C.K. In 2005, she was working as a performer and producer on a television pilot — a big step in her career — when Louis C.K., a guest star, approached her as she was walking to the set. “He leaned close to my face and said, ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said, ‘Yes,’” Ms. Corry said in a written statement to The New York Times. “He asked if we could go to my dressing room so he could masturbate in front of me.” Stunned and angry, Ms. Corry said she declined, and pointed out that he had a daughter and a pregnant wife. “His face got red,” she recalled, “and he told me he had issues.”

Word quickly reached the show’s executive producers, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, who both confirmed the incident. “What happened to Rebecca on that set was awful,” Ms. Cox said in an email, adding that she felt “outrage and shock.”

“My concern was to create an environment where Rebecca felt safe, protected and heard,” she said. They discussed curtailing the production. Ms. Corry decided to continue with the show.

“Things were going well for me,” Ms. Corry said in the statement, “and I had no interest in being the person who shut down a production.”

A fifth woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her family’s privacy because she has not been publicly linked to the incident with Louis C.K., also has disturbing memories about an incident with the comedian. In the late ’90s, she was working in production at “The Chris Rock Show” when Louis C.K., a writer and producer there, repeatedly asked her to watch him masturbate, she said. She was in her early 20s and went along with his request, but later questioned his behavior.

“It was something that I knew was wrong,” said the woman, who described sitting in Louis C.K.’s office while he masturbated in his desk chair during a workday, other colleagues just outside the door. “I think the big piece of why I said yes was because of the culture,” she continued. “He abused his power.” A co-worker at “The Chris Rock Show,” who also wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that the woman told him about the experience soon after it happened.

Ms. Schachner, a writer, illustrator and performer, admired Louis C.K.’s work. They had met in the comedy scene; Ms. Schachner’s former boyfriend was a comedy writer who had worked with Louis C.K. In 2003, when she called Louis C.K. with an invitation to her show, he said he was at work in an office as a writer on the series “Cedric the Entertainer Presents,” she recalled.

Their conversation quickly moved from the personal — Louis C.K. had seen photos of her on her boyfriend’s desk, he said, and told her he thought she was cute — to “unprofessional and inappropriate,” Ms. Schachner said.

She said she heard the blinds coming down. Then he slowly started telling her his sexual fantasies, breathing heavily and talking softly. She realized he was masturbating, and was dumbfounded. The call went on for several minutes, even though, Ms. Schachner said, “I definitely wasn’t encouraging it.” But she didn’t know how to end it, either. “You want to believe it’s not happening,” she said. A friend, Stuart Harris, confirmed that Ms. Schachner had described the call to him in 2003.

For years afterward, Ms. Schachner said, she felt angry and betrayed by an artist she looked up to. And she wondered what she could have done differently. “I felt very ashamed,” she said.

A Run-In, Then Fears About Speaking Out

During Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov’s surreal visit to Louis C.K.’s Aspen hotel room, they said they were holding onto each other, screaming and laughing in shock, as Louis C.K. masturbated in a chair. “We were paralyzed,” Ms. Goodman said. After he ejaculated on his stomach, they said, they fled. He called after them: “He was like, ‘Which one is Dana and which one is Julia?’” Ms. Goodman recalled.

Afterward, they ran into Charna Halpern, the owner of influential improv theaters in Los Angeles and Chicago, where Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov performed, and relayed what had happened. “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to tell them to do,” said Ms. Halpern. Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov decided against going to the police, unsure whether what happened was criminal, but felt they had to respond in some way “because something crazy happened to us,” Ms. Goodman said.

Hoping that outrage would build against Louis C.K., and also to shame him, they began telling others about the incident the next day. But many people seemed to recoil, they said. “Guys were backing away from us,” Ms. Wolov said. Barely 24 hours after they left Louis C.K.’s hotel, “we could already feel the backlash.”

Soon after, they said they understood from their managers that Mr. Becky, Louis C.K’s manager, wanted them to stop telling people about their encounter with Louis C.K. Lee Kernis, one of the women’s managers at the time, confirmed on Thursday that he had a conversation in which he told Mr. Becky that Louis C.K.’s behavior toward the women had been offensive. Mr. Kernis also said that Mr. Becky was upset that the women were talking openly about the incident.

Mr. Becky denied making any threats toward the women. “I don’t recall the exact specifics of the conversation, but know I never threatened anyone,” he wrote by email on Thursday. Ms. Halpern and Robert Schroeder — Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov’s agent at the time — said that the pair told them that they felt they had been warned to stop talking.

Mr. Becky arguably wields even more power in comedy than Louis C.K. He represents Kevin Hart, Aziz Ansari, Amy Poehler and other top performers, and his company, 3 Arts, puts together programming deals for nearly every platform.

Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov moved to Los Angeles shortly after the Aspen festival, but “we were coming here with a bunch of enemies,” Ms. Goodman said. Gren Wells, a filmmaker who befriended the comedy duo in 2002, said the incident and the warning, which they told her about soon after Aspen, hung heavily over them both. “This is something that they were freaked out about,” Ms. Wells said.

In the years since, Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov have found some success, but they remained concerned about Mr. Becky and took themselves out of the running for the many projects he was involved in. Though their humor is in line with what he produces, “we know immediately that we can never even submit our material,” Ms. Wolov said.

Private Acts, Public Jokes

Jokes about masturbation have been a regular part of Louis C.K.’s stage shows. In one bit, he complains about not being able to find a private place in his house to do it. “I’m on the streets now,” he says, “I’ve got nowhere to go.” In another bit he laments being a prisoner of his perversions. “Just the constant perverted sexual thoughts,” he says, then mimes masturbating. “It makes me into a moron.”

Tig Notaro, the comedian whose Amazon series, “One Mississippi,” lists Louis C.K. as an executive producer, is one of the few in the fiercely insular comedy world to speak out against him. Her career received a huge boost when he released her 2012 comedy album, about her cancer diagnosis. But their relationship has crumbled and she now feels “trapped” by her association with him, she wrote in an email.

Her fear is that “he released my album to cover his tracks,” she said. “He knew it was going to make him look like a good guy, supporting a woman.” Ms. Notaro said she learned of his reputation after they sold the series to Amazon, and a recent story line is a fictional treatment of the alleged masturbation episodes.

“Sadly, I’ve come to learn that Louis C.K.’s victims are not only real,” she said by email, “but many are actual friends of mine within the comedy community,” like Ms. Corry, who confided in her, she said.

In his forthcoming film, about a television writer whose teenage daughter is wooed by a Woody Allen type, one character aggressively mimics masturbating in front of others. The content has raised eyebrows. Given the rumors surrounding Louis C.K., the movie “plays like an ambiguous moral inventory of and excuse for everything that allows sexual predators to thrive: open secrets, toxic masculinity, and powerful people getting the benefit of the doubt,” Joe Berkowitz wrote in Fast Company.

Yet in an interview with The Times in September at the Toronto film festival, where “I Love You, Daddy,” was shown, Louis C.K. dismissed stories of his alleged sexual misconduct as “rumors,” and said the notion that the masturbation scenes referred to them never occurred to him. “It’s funny, I didn’t think of that, ” he said.

Apologies With Troubling Implications

In private, though, he appears to have acknowledged his behavior.

In 2009, six years after their phone call, Ms. Schachner received a Facebook message from Louis C.K., apologizing. “Last time I talked to you ended in a sordid fashion,” he wrote in the message, which was reviewed by The Times. “That was a bad time in my life and I’m sorry.” He added that he had seen some of Ms. Schachner’s comedy and thought she was funny. “I remember thinking what a repulsive person I was being by responding the way that I did,” he wrote.

Ms. Schachner accepted his apology and told him she forgave him. But the original interaction left her deeply dispirited, she said, and discouraged her from pursuing comedy.

In 2015, a few months before the now-defunct website Defamer circulated rumors of Louis C.K.’s alleged sexual misconduct, Ms. Corry also received an email from Louis C.K., which was obtained by The Times, saying he owed her a “very very very late apology.” When he phoned her, he said he was sorry for shoving her in a bathroom. Ms. Corry replied that he had never done that, but had instead asked to masturbate in front of her. Responding in a shaky voice, he acknowledged it and said, “I used to misread people back then,” she recalled.

The call confounded her, Ms. Corry said: not only had he misremembered the incident, which made her think there were other moments of misconduct, he also implied she had done something to invite his behavior. “It is unfair he’s put me or anyone else in this position,” Ms. Corry said.

Ms. Goodman and Ms. Wolov said that with other allegations swirling around the entertainment world, they could no longer stay silent. “Because of this moment, as gross as it is, we feel compelled to speak,” Ms. Goodman said.

Ms. Notaro said she was standing in support of those with the courage “to speak up against such a powerful figure,” she said, “as well as the multitude of women still out there, not quite ready to share their nightmares.”

[arse-blathanna]

Evening Report - Chapter 11/?

Chapter 11: clarity

[Ao3] [FFN] [Fic Tag]

Fic Summary: Blake Belladonna has one job in her life, and its to provide accurate information in a timely manner. A relatively mundane story is all that it takes to throw her into direct contact with Weiss Schnee, whose family secrets could make or break Blake’s career as a journalist.

Word Count: 4,857

Chapter Summary: Blake returns from Kuo Kuana, and she and Weiss get to talk for the first time in a little while. It goes well.

Author’s Notes: Thank you all for reading! I hope that you enjoy the chapter. 

Weiss sat in Klein’s car outside of the airport, watching the skies from her window because she knew that her sister’s plane was about to leave. She didn’t want to miss it, since it felt like a bigger goodbye than it was, and so she was just waiting for Winter to leave for wherever she was going next. After that, she and Klein were going to be sure to go back to the manor, and Weiss knew that she would be once again left to her own devices. It wasn’t an ideal situation by any means, but that was something that didn’t necessarily bother Weiss. Home was still home, even if she ended up feeling foreign and wrong when she was there. At least now she was going to be able to stop worrying about hiding her sister’s presence. That wasn’t to say that she was glad that Winter was gone. Weiss couldn’t know when she was going to be able to see Winter again for sure, and so that was stressful in its own right. But she’d gotten to see plenty of her sister. The two of them had spent more time together than they had been able to in years. Winter was going to be fine. Weiss was going to move on with her life, doing her best to make sure that she wasn’t pushed out of the company. When the time came, she was going to be sure to be available to the Board of Directors if they needed her. And if Blake needed her, Weiss wasn’t sure that she would be opposed to another meeting. 

[Read it on Ao3] [Read it on FFN] 

In the last week or two, Blake had gotten more and more scarce. The last time that Weiss had talked to her properly had been that night together in Blake’s apartment. The reports that Blake had put out since then had been few in numbers, and usually offered very little that was new. That didn’t bother Weiss as much as it could have, but it did make her worry. She couldn’t know whether something had happened, or whether Blake was just keeping a distance from her. Regardless of the true situation, Weiss didn’t consider any of it to be to her liking. Not when things were still so complicated with her own family and she was without any reliable sources to talk to that weren’t directly connected. Weiss loved Klein, and her mother, and her brother, but she needed someone that was separate from the family in as many ways as possible. Blake had fit the bill, but now Weiss wasn’t so sure. A part of her even felt used, as foolish as it was.

But in the end, that wasn’t going to matter, Weiss figured. In the end, she and Blake were going to go their separate ways because that was what their lives dictated.

And she was ready to leave the airport, then. She looked up to the sky and watched as the plane that carried her sister left, going over her head and flying off to wherever in the world where Winter was going to end up being needed. They’ll see each other again, Weiss is sure of that.

“Klein, could you-” Weiss began to speak up but she froze when she watched a familiar figure leave the airport. Blake was there, looking down at her phone (no doubt looking to figure out whether or not she had missed an email). She was pulling a bag behind her, a relatively small one.

And Weiss couldn’t help but roll the window down and try to get the reporter’s attention. It was the least that she could do, right?

“Blake Belladonna.” Weiss said, holding her head high as she looked out the open window at the woman.

Blake heard her and perked up, looking away from her phone and then staring at Weiss in surprise. She hesitated, looking back over her shoulder like she was looking for something but then sighing.

Without too much hesitation, Blake began her approach and Weiss waited patiently. She set her hands down in her lap, because at least this way she could avoid any strange reactions.

“Weiss.” Blake greeted her, giving a very slight bow as she got close. “What are you doing here?”

“Winter just flew out.” Weiss explained herself. “What are you doing here?”

“I just flew in.” Blake sighed, reaching up so that she could brush her dark hair away from her face. “Waiting for my ride home now.”

“Cab?”

“Yes.” Blake sighed.

Weiss hesitated then looked to the front of the car. “Klein?” She asked, leaning forward just the slightest bit. “Would you mind taking on another passenger?”

Klein hesitated. He looked back at Weiss and raised an eyebrow, just doing his best to check that this was indeed what she wanted. “Are you sure that you want to, Miss Schnee?”

“I am, Klein.” Weiss answered, holding her head high. “It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten to speak to Blake.”

Klein seemed to stare at her warily, but after a moment he finally sighed. “Very well.” He offered, unlocking the car door with a quiet thump. “Miss Belladonna, you may join Miss Schnee if you wish.”

Blake blinked, and she looked like she was in a complete state of disbelief. She smiled though, and walked around the car so that she could sit beside Weiss.

Once she was in beside her, Weiss hesitated for a moment before looking to Klein. “We can leave now.” She announced, and the man took the order well enough. He started the car, and Weiss took the chance to relax a little bit more and talk to Blake.

“So.” Weiss started, looking the reporter down. “Where have you been?’

"I went home to Kuo Kuana for a bit.” Blake said simply enough. “I wasn’t in much of a mood for work.”

“That’s understandable.” Weiss said, smiling softly. “I was just wondering where you’d gone.” She hesitated, but then decided to bring another question up. “Are you going anywhere particular?”

“No.” Blake replied calmly. “I was planning to just go back to the apartment and unpack.”

“Right.” Weiss answered. She thought hard- there had to be something that she could do or offer to make this less awkward. Lunch perhaps? If Blake was getting off a plane, she was probably hungry.

“How would it sound to you for us to get something to eat?” Weiss asked, cocking her head to the side slightly to talk. “Maybe we could use it as a chance for us to catch up.” Weiss was fairly certain that the request was going to end up being forward of her. But, it was also that she could think to suggest at that point. Blake hesitated, reaching for her wallet like she wanted to check inside and figure out whether she’d be able to afford a meal. Weiss leaned in towards her and held a hand over Blake’s. “I can pay.” Weiss offered, smiling across at her. “It wouldn’t be a problem.” And Weiss wasn’t surprised when Blake stared across at her with disbelief on her face. However, Blake just nodded and pulled her hands away from her pockets in an attempt to relax again. “Lunch sounds lovely.” Blake said finally. “So does a cup of tea.” “I prefer coffee.” Weiss said, smiling as she leaned back in her seat. “Klein, could you take us to the Platinum Swan for lunch?” “Of course.” Klein called back to her. “Would you like for me to call ahead and set a reservation for yourself and Miss Belladonna?” Weiss felt her face heat up quite a bit over the question because somehow putting it in the terms of needing a reservation felt different. She glanced over at Blake, and the way that Blake was looking at her was only enough to make her blush darker. And that was embarrassing in itself. But she needed to give Klein an answer regardless of how nervous it made her feel.   “That would be wonderful.” Weiss answered her family’s butler. “Thank you.” Klein looked away from her then and picked up his phone to make a call. Weiss coughed quietly and looked to Blake. “I hope that this isn’t too forward?” “It’s definitely not what I was expecting.” Blake replied, also doing her best to keep her voice down. “I’m going to feel out of place.”   Weiss frowned, because there was the issue of formality, but if Blake was with her then surely she would be able to get in just fine. Klein was also sure to request a private dining space for the two of them. “I’m sure it’ll be okay.” Weiss said, smiling at Blake encouragingly. “And if it isn’t then we can find somewhere where it is.” She reached up and brushed a lock of hair away from her face. She was still blushing, and Blake was sure to have noticed by now. But as things stood, the two of them didn’t have the most privacy. Later on they would though. Blake nodded, letting herself get more comfortable. She looked like she felt like she was out of place. Weiss wished that she had some way to make Blake more comfortable, but that didn’t seem to be so easy. Not when the two of them were so far apart from each other in their backgrounds and standing. “I’m surprised that you would be willing to do that much.” Blake mumbled. “It doesn’t have that much for you to gain.” Weiss hesitated. It wasn’t as though there was that much good that would come out of it for Weiss on a business standpoint. Other points of view, however, Blake offered quite a bit.

“That’s quite alright.” Weiss said, hoping that she would be able to distract Blake away from how things were. That would make it better. Easier. “I just wanted to talk to you is all.” Blake nodded and leaned back in her seat, busying herself with her emails as she always did. Weiss had reason to suspect that it had to do with the fact that Blake was in a situation where she didn’t necessarily have all of her supplies for her job. That was fine, Weiss thought. If Blake needed help, then they would be able to get by. The ride didn’t take long before the car reached The Platinum Swan. Klein said his goodbyes and then Weiss and Blake were on their way in. It occured to Weiss as she requested to be brought to their table that it would end up looking somewhat strange. But, if it did, the server that led them back didn’t comment on any of it. As Weiss had been hoping, Klein had requested a table in the back, and it was already set and ready for the two of them. Well out of the line of sight of any patrons, and in a quiet area. That was more than she could have hoped for. Before when she and Blake had dinner at a place like this, Weiss had used it for a dressing down of sorts. Now, it was different. The two of them slid into their seats on opposite sides of the table. Weiss made quick work to slip out of her jacket and hang it over the back of her seat. Understanding, Blake did the same and revealed that she was just wearing a black t shirt under her jacket. If it hadn’t been for Weiss’ presence, she was sure that Blake would have been turned away long before. “You can get whatever you want off of the menu.” Weiss offered, gingerly picking up her menu up and opening it. “I know that it may seem like it would be too pricey, but that’s fine.” Blake nodded and picked up her own menu, opening it and going pale almost immediately when she saw it. “It’s… very expensive.” “I can afford it.” Weiss said with a slight shrug and a smile. “Don’t restrain yourself, really.” Blake nodded and sat up straight before staring Weiss in the eye. “I’m not sure that I’m comfortable here.” Blake said, leaning back in her seat a little bit but not by much. Like she was afraid that going any further would end up putting her in a worse place than she already was in. “But if you insist.” Weiss hesitated. “Would you… rather go somewhere else?” She asked, cocking an eyebrow just slightly. “Because if you’d prefer that I could call Klein and get him to come and get us.” Blake’s face began to change colors again, redding slightly as she looked across at Weiss. “You… would be willing to do that?” “I would.” Weiss said, sighing. “Of course there’s always the chance that we run into too much attention, but I would still like a chance to speak to you privately later on.” “Of course.” Blake said. She hesitated for a long time, and Weiss was left with the creeping feeling that this was going to only get worse and worse. “ If you wouldn’t mind.” “Very well.” Weiss said, closing her menu and setting it down on the table. “Do you have somewhere that you would prefer?” “I think so.” Blake replied, smiling back at her. “But I would like the chance to stop at my apartment first, if that would be alright.”

“Of course.” Weiss said, smiling as she got up to her feet and began to pull on her jacket. She tried not to focus too much on the way that it felt like Blake was staring at her. That was something that she was going to be able to work past, Weiss was sure of it. “We can go whenever you’re ready.”

Blake nodded and got up, doing the same as Weiss did and then the two of them started on their way out of the private room.  Their waiter stared at them in disbelief, and Weiss flushed before reaching into her bag for her wallet.

“I’m sorry for the trouble.” Weiss said as the two of them made their way out.

When they got outside, Weiss reached for her phone and called Klein. The conversation between the two of them didn’t last long at all before the Schnee car was pulling up in front of the restaurant.

Weiss and Blake climbed in together, and Klein was glad to just drive off towards Blake’s apartment.

The two of them departed there, and Blake decided to stop just as they got out of Klein’s car.

“Klein.” Blake said, catching Weiss by surprise. “If you want, you can call the day done.”

“But Miss Schnee-”

“I can get her home.” Blake offered. “If that won’t be too much of a problem.”

Weiss stood behind Blake and lowered her head. She was blushing a little harder than she would have liked. “It’s alright.” She said, stepping in just slightly. “Thank you, Klein.”

Klein hesitated and looked between the two of them. Weiss couldn’t help feeling like she was under a microscope. Whatever was going on in his head, Weiss wasn’t sure that she really wanted to know. But the squat man sighed and nodded.

“Of course, Miss Schnee.” He said quietly. “Be sure to let me know when you’ve gotten back to the mansion.”

“I will.” Weiss sighed as she watched Klein climbed into the car and make his way off. She and Blake stood there for a little bit longer than they strictly needed to, before Blake finally decided that it was time for her to take the lead.

“So.” Blake said, shouldering her bag. “Now that he’s gone, you can come in.”

“Right.” Weiss whispered as she turned and followed after Blake. The two of them didn’t say all that much, but the entire time Weiss was still left with an uncomfortable churning feeling down in her stomach that she wasn’t going to be able to ignore or forget.

The ride across the city had been easy and comfortable,  and Blake was loathe to admit that having Weiss pressed up against her back was nice, in its own way. She hadn’t been thinking in terms of how that would make her feel.

But it was fine, Blake thought.

She couldn’t really pretend as though she hadn’t stared a little too long at Weiss earlier. She couldn’t act like Weiss wasn’t attractive at all, or that she hadn’t thought about the heiress a few times when they’d been separate.

Weiss was kind, and she had only managed to go further than she’d needed to that day. She hadn’t needed to give Blake a free ride home, she hadn’t needed to offer Blake dinner.

And yet Weiss was still there.

Blake didn’t even really know where she and Weiss were going to end up going. There was something that told her that going out for fast food (which would have been Blake’s plan as soon as she got home anyways) wouldn’t be the best choice with Weiss. Weiss probably had never even touched the stuff, Blake guessed. Or maybe that was incorrect and Weiss wouldn’t care. It occurred to Blake deep in the back of her mind that it was entirely likely that Weiss had chosen somewhere fancy for a reason. Like she was doing her best to treat Blake, or perhaps even trying to butter her up for something later down the line. Blake sincerely hoped that it was a case of the latter. A thought occurred to her, and Blake turned off of the road that she was on. If she went the right direction, she could bring Weiss downtown and the two of them could just get something there. The two of them could talk around and talk, and once they had everything together… Blake thought of the waterfront where she and Weiss had sat a few weeks earlier. They’d gone there after going to a fancy restaurant that night too. Maybe it was just a place where the two of them could go and talk, since last time they had certainly been able to get their privacy like Weiss had wanted. And that didn’t sound like such a good idea. At her back Blake felt the slightest shift of Weiss, and tried hard not to go making too much of it. If Weiss was trying to say something to her,  then it would have surely been drowned out by the sound of the motorcycle engine. That didn’t matter though. The two of them were going to have plenty of time to talk, Blake thought to herself as she pulled into a no-meter parking spot and parked them. She hesitated for a moment, just looking back over her shoulder to see that Weiss was there and fine. “We’re here.” Blake announced. She waited a moment, letting Weiss get off first before following. Blake pulled her helmet off and then her hair out of her ponytail and watched as Weiss did the same, though with a bit more fuss. “Downtown?” Weiss asked, looking at up as she did her best to get her hair back into the intricate high ponytail that it normally would have been. Something was wrong, and without a good way to check,  Weiss just gave up after a minute, opting to pull her hair down out of its style and letting it hang free. “Really?” “Really.” Blake responded, looking down the street. There were a few passersby, a couple talking to each other, a couple of teenagers walking in a crowd and laughing. A small family on an evening stroll. “I figured that it would be a nice change of pace.” “I don’t-” Weiss started but clamped her mouth shut just as quick. Her blue eyes flickered away from Blake, and Blake couldn’t help the thought that Weiss felt nervous. Weiss quite possibly felt even more nervous than Blake had felt at The Platinum Swan. “I can’t say that this is what I would normally do.” “I know.” Blake smiled, gesturing to the sidewalk. “I’m ready to go whenever you are.” “Right.” Weiss said. She took a few nervous steps forward and stepped up onto the sidewalk.  A moment later, Blake was at her side and the two of them were walking together. “So was there somewhere in particular that you wanted to go?” “There is.” Blake admitted, since she could practically smell their destination already. “I hope you don’t mind roadside stands.” “I… can’t say that I’ve been to many of them.” Weiss sighed. “I’m sorry.”

Blake hesitated, and she felt a slight twinge of guilt. Weiss had never had something like this, so that meant that it was going to be up to her to make sure that Weiss got the best possible experience that day. She just smiled down at the heiress and kept on walking. “I promise that it’ll be fine.” Blake said calmly. “People probably won’t notice us too much…” She paused, because something occurred to Blake that she probably was going to need to keep in mind. Weiss was still wearing her nice clothes as she always did, and when they’d stopped at the apartment Blake had decided to change into something a bit nicer anyways. She’d been dressed for comfort on a plane, not for fashion. Now she was dressed and ready for actual time spent together. It probably would end up looking like she and Weiss were on some sort of date, and that wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? Blake was sure that it wasn’t. It had to be fine. Although… She looked over at Weiss. There were still so many things that the two of them didn’t know about each other. “It might look like we’re on a date.” Blake said matter-of-factly, but she decided that if that was a conversation they were going to have she needed to be as relaxed about it as possible. It occurred to her that she didn’t know whether or not Weiss was seeing anyone, or if it could be a problem if the two of them were seen together. Blake was sure that it probably wouldn’t be great for Weiss on at least some level, but she needed to be sure. “Is that okay with you?” Weiss hesitated, her blue eyes flickering to the street almost nervously. “I’m… not really sure.” Weiss admitted and she sounded almost sad. “If it got to my brother it wouldn’t be great, but…” She paused. “I don’t know that I want to talk about it that much.” “I’m listening.” “Off the record?” “Off the record.” Blake affirmed, because what else could she really do? Weiss sighed and she hugged herself,  falling into step beside Blake and looking up at the sky instead. She was paying enough attention that she could just keep walking, that was something that Blake was sure of. It was just that Weiss was clearly very nervous about something. “So my brother thinks that I’m seeing someone.” Weiss began to explain, and she sounded so annoyed and exasperated that she felt a pang of sympathy. “He noticed that i was spending a lot of nights away from the mansion and when he asked I needed…” Weiss paused. “I needed to cover up that Winter was in the city and that I was spending time with you. So now he thinks that I’m dating one of my friends.” Blake felt a weird sinking feeling in her chest, but she couldn’t put a finger on why. Something about it just felt wrong and disappointing, and Blake didn’t like any of it. “Which friend?” “Neptune Vasilias.” Weiss said matter of factly. “And it’s not like he and I have never dated before, it’s just that…” She shook her head. “I don’t see him that way anymore. He’s one of my best friends, but…” Weiss flushed red, and Blake felt herself get a little bit more nervous. There was a catch. Of course there was a catch. “But I’m not interested. And he doesn’t know that my family think we’re dating and it’s just a mess.” Weiss sighed. “Especially when I want to see someone else.” “Am I allowed to ask?” Blake asked, and it occurred to her that that specific question was all but surely overstepping. It was too personal. Something that a close friend would ask another close friend and Blake didn’t think that she and Weiss had that at all.

The question certainly managed to leave an impression, if the way that Weiss stopped dead in her tracks was any indicator. The heiress stood there under a streetlight, which shined down onto her and made her white hair light up in a way that was too striking for the area. Weiss was blushing, and Blake was sure that she had only managed to make a serious mistake. She swallowed and looked away from Weiss for a moment to try and collect her thoughts before she spoke up again. “I’m sorry.” Blake sighed, finally looking back at Weiss more directly. “I know that I was probably asking for a bit too much, I didn’t mean to-” “It’s fine.” Weiss said quietly, reaching up and wrapping her arms around herself in an attempt to comfort herself a little bit better. Blake felt bad, because she should have been doing more to apologize, but Weiss was just taking it. “I don’t know that I want to talk about it… well, specifically.” “Well,” Blake said, stepping in close and offering the heiress her hand. She didn’t miss the way that Weiss’ visage reddened even further at the gesture. “I’m not going to make you tell me.” “But-” Weiss began to protest, taking Blake’s hand and stepping in a little bit closer, almost like Blake was managing to act as her escort. Blake couldn’t help but feel like she was trying to do things that were meant for people from a social class far above her own. Far above anything that she could ever accomplish, even if things turned out well for her family. “It’s so complicated.” “That’s fine.” Blake said, turning and gently leading Weiss by the hand. Weiss followed and fell into step beside Blake, and Blake was surprised when the heiress actually wrapped her arm around Blake’s. It was an attempt to keep the two of them close, but it meant something else. “I won’t force it.” Weiss’ grip tightened just slightly, but she kept her head up and didn’t look back over at Blake. “Thank you.” She said quietly. “I trust you, Blake. More than I thought I would.” “Thanks.” Blake replied, smiling back at the heiress and staring at her out of the corner of her eye. “I just want to tell you that whoever it is, I’m not going to judge you for it.” Weiss paused, her eyes widening and that pink on her cheeks still refusing to go down at all. “Even if it’s a woman?” “Even if it’s a woman.” Blake said, feeling some odd feeling rising in her chest that was going to be hard to ignore. “I used to date my editor, so I wouldn’t be in a good place to judge.” “Even if it’s…” Weiss’ voice trailed off. “Even if it’s you?” And that was enough to make Blake stop dead in her tracks. When Blake took the moment to stop, so did Weiss, and that told her more than Blake had ever been expecting out of the experience with Weiss. The two of them stared at each other, both looking the other in the eyes, and neither of them knowing quite what they were supposed to say. “I wouldn’t judge you for that.” Blake finally said,  swallowing hard and doing her best to work through the quiet and the awkwardness. “I’m-” “I’m sorry.” Weiss cut Blake off, pulling herself away and wrapping her arms around herself defensively. Weiss was afraid. That wasn’t good, and Blake had a feeling that it was going to be a problem later. “I shouldn’t have-” “It’s fine.” Blake stopped Weiss. “Really. I don’t mind.”

That made Weiss pause. It created a recognition of something that Blake hadn’t considered before, and hadn’t really considered. The two of them were going to have a lot to talk about later on, that was something that Blake could be considerate towards. “You… mean that?” Weiss asked, staring at Blake with her blue eyes wide. “That you don’t mind.” “I mean it.” Blake confirmed, slowing down as they got closer and closer to their location. “I don’t mind.” Weiss and her both stopped, just outside of the tiny restaurant that the two of them were going to be using that day. Blake reached for the door and pulled it open, holding it there for Weiss. "You first.” Blake said calmly and Weiss smiled back at her before stepping inside and made herself comfortable at a small table. Blake followed her in and sat down there across from Weiss. Maybe, just maybe, this could be considered a date. And if it was going to be called a date, then Blake didn’t know what to make of it. Either way, spending it with Weiss wasn’t such a bad thing.

[itspatsy]

the girl who could be you

Summary: Trish has met a few superheroes, but she's never had one break into her apartment and sit in the dark waiting for her. Not even Jessica was that rude. (or: Trish Walker and Natasha Romanoff have something in common, and they talk about it without actually talking about it.)

Notes: Inspired by this awesome idea by @allofthefeelings.

Read on AO3. 

Trish scrambled through the doors of her building, relieved to escape the downpour. Shaking her head and wiping water out of her eyes, she cursed herself for forgetting an umbrella. She exchanged a silent nod with the sleepy-eyed doorman, glad to see him actually awake for once but knowing it wouldn't last long. She envied his ability to sleep anywhere. She could barely manage it in her own bed. She stepped onto the elevator, looking down at her watch to make sure it survived the torrent. It was after nine, not an unusual time for her to be getting home these days.

Until recently, she’d spent as minimal time at the office as possible. But Jessica had still been around then. Had needed Trish there with her. At least, that’s what she’d thought at the time. When Jessica walked back into her life after disappearing for months, traumatized and guilt-ridden and plagued by nightmares at every moment, Trish had worried about leaving her alone for too long. What if she tried to hurt herself? Who would pull her out of her flashbacks? The only reason she went to work at all was because Jessica insisted.

It was slow going, over half a year, but Jess started talking to her about what happened, her snark was coming back in full force, and she’d even cracked a few smiles. It seemed like the therapy was making a difference, that things were getting better. But then Jessica was gone again, and Trish was left wondering if it was her fault. If she’d been too smothering and controlling, or if she hadn't been attentive enough. If she should have given her more space, or if she'd given her too much space. She didn't know, and she couldn't ask Jessica, because Jessica left her no way to find her or get in contact with her.

And it hurt. It hurt to even think about, so she did what she always did when it felt like her chest had permanently constricted and she would never get enough air in her lungs again. She directed all of her emotional energy into external things. Her job provided the perfect source of distraction, and even if there were about a million studies proving how overwork and exhaustion led to an early grave, it was still far healthier than the means of diversion she used when she was younger. So she worked until she was too tired to think, until she felt nothing.

Well, almost nothing. As she opened the door and padded into her darkened apartment, a chill ran up her spine. Something seemed... off. The door had been locked, there was no sign of forced entry, and nothing seemed out of place. There was no reason for her to feel on edge, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t alone.

She quietly stepped through the hallway, staying close to the wall and grabbing a vase off the table as she crept towards the living room. She couldn't help but feel silly skulking around her own apartment in the dark. She was tired, her mind was playing tricks on her. That’s all it was. And yet, in a world where aliens invaded New York, Nazis infiltrated government security agencies, and her best friend was mind controlled by a rapist sociopath for months, maybe it didn’t hurt to be overly cautious.

Trish carefully peeked around the corner into the living room and held back a gasp. There was still enough light to make out a figure seated on the couch. Thin. Leather-clad. Long-haired. Her heart stopped in her chest. Could it be?

Before she could decide her next move, a feminine voice that definitely did not belong to Jessica called out, “I know you’re there, Ms. Walker. Don’t be—”

Before the intruder could finish her sentence, Trish was chucking the vase at her head. Her aim was true, but the woman dodged, and the porcelain smashed against the wall. Trish leapt to the kitchen island, grabbing for a knife and yelling, “Who are you?! What do you wan—”

The light suddenly turned on, and Trish stopped mid-sentence as she came face to face with her mysterious visitor. It was… the Black Widow? Natasha Romanoff. The SHIELD agent that fought in the Battle of New York, the whistleblower that revealed HYDRA infiltration to the public, the Avenger. That was... holy shit, that was awesome, but also what the hell?

With her heart in her throat and brain short-circuiting in confusion, she could only feel a surge of relief that she picked up the ugly vase. Then she gave a quick prayer her mascara wasn't running from the rain. Priorities. She was rarely at a loss for words, but her usually expansive grasp of the English language failed her now, and all she managed was a dumbfounded, “Ummmm… huh?” So much for Trish Talk.

The Black Widow raised a calming hand and seemed utterly unperturbed at having a knife pointed at her. Of course, she’d obviously been in far more dicey situations, and Trish figured a blonde lady moonlighting as a drowned cat probably didn’t cut the most intimidating of figures. Still, she was mildly offended. She could be fearsome and formidable, dammit.

“I apologize for the scare, Ms. Walker. This probably seems very strange to you,” Agent Romanoff said, hand still raised and clearly in soothe-the-terrified-civilian mode.

It was a little condescending, and Trish didn’t think it was particularly fair, seeing as how Romanoff was the one that decided to take a page out of the serial killer handbook and introduce herself by breaking in and lying in wait. But Trish returned the knife to the counter and with as much prim politeness as she could muster (which was a lot, she was used to putting on a show and smiling graciously through discomfort and alarm) responded, “You could say that, yes.”

“Let me help you clean up.” The agent gestured to the broken shards on the floor.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll get it later,” Trish said, waving her off. The superspy standing in her living room was a far more pressing issue. Was it... could it have anything to do with Jessica? She didn't know how Agent Romanoff would have any connection to Jessica, but she couldn't stop the fear from gripping at her chest. Why else would a superhero want to talk to her? 

She took a breathe and tried to sound as causal as possible. “I’d rather know what brings the Black Widow to a radio talk show host’s apartment. I doubt you want to set up an interview, not that I would object. But if that is why you’re here, I have to admit, this is a bit of an extreme way to get my attention...” she trailed off, leaving room for an explanation, but the other woman just stared at her, unblinking. It was kind of unnerving.

Romanoff tilted her head to the side slightly, considering, expression inscrutable. After a long moment, she finally said, “Your personal security system leaves a lot to be desired.”

Huh.. okay. That wasn’t really an answer. She was relieved this didn't appear to have anything to do with Jessica, but that just made the whole thing weirder. Trish stared back silently, taking a closer look at the woman in front of her. She looked and talked like the Black Widow she’d seen in the news. The hair was different, but still that brilliant red. Almost the same as the damn Patsy wig, actually. But it looked right on Natasha Romanoff in a way it never looked on Trish. So did the dark leather jacket and fitted jeans and tall boots. She looked good, but her eyes were weary and worn, clear even through her air of cool professionalism. Knowing what she did about the things Agent Romanoff had gone through in the past few years, it made sense. It felt real.

Granted, the technology was available for someone to disguise themselves as another person, but Trish couldn’t imagine anyone with access to that tech would use it to play mind games with a former child star and make themselves look like the Black Widow to do it, no less. On the other hand, was that really more far-fetched a possibility than the actual Black Widow breaking into her apartment to give her security tips? She crossed her arms over her chest, unsure what to think. “So… you broke in to test my security?”

Agent Romanoff apparently decided to continue not answering questions and instead said, “I have a few recommendations. Surveillance, reinforced door, safe room, bulletproof windows, and the like. Check your personal email.”

Trish raised an eyebrow. “You have my personal email?”

She wasn’t naive enough to be surprised someone could access her private email, especially not a spy. Not when regular people did the same sort of thing all the time. Privacy and celebrity didn’t exactly go hand in hand, and Trish understood the enthusiasm of fans. Most of them were harmless, if occasionally overwhelming, but a few crossed the line into creepy invasiveness. Sometimes they’d managed to access personal information: addresses, phone numbers. It’s how she’d ended up with a couple of stalkers.

Hell, her own mother might as well have been a stalker. Ever since she and Jess had left, Dorothy Walker always seemed to know the details of her daughter’s life. Where she was living, her phone number, her work schedule, her favorite coffee shop, her jogging route, every goddamn thing. Of course, Trish blocked her number to cut down on unwanted contact, but Dorothy would just hide her caller ID or use another phone or even change her own number to circumvent it. Trish had gotten wise and rarely answered unknown calls but she was still left with drunken, rambling messages, sometimes remorseful, sometimes berating, but always manipulative and designed to make her feel like shit. A few times, Dorothy had even called the station to pry details about her life out of her co-workers. She was equally a menace when it came to email.

But all of that wasn’t half as bad as when she would orchestrate “accidental” run ins in public, which forced Trish to remain polite lest she draw attention. The last time she’d done it was just a few weeks ago, at one of Trish's favorite delis, and somehow Dorothy just knew. She knew that Jessica wasn’t living at the apartment anymore, and she knew it hurt Trish, so she wouldn't shut up about it. Her mom loved to pick at her scabs, but she loved fresh blood even more. It was almost enough to make Trish change her routine and pick new places to go, but it was her life now, and she’d be damned if she was going to let her mother drive her away from the things she liked. She was often tempted to get an actual restraining order, instead of a Jessica enforced one, but it didn’t seem worth the headlines and publicity. Being in the spotlight, even in a negative way, gave her mother power and satisfaction.

But this was the Black Widow. She wasn’t a fan or a stalker or a controlling mother. Why would she bother with all of this? Before Trish could ask as much, Agent Romanoff continued, “I also included contact information for some reliable personal trainers to start you out.”

"Start me out on what exactly?” Trish asked, a little irritation creeping into her voice. This conversation was becoming increasingly opaque, and she was running out of patience. She just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Romanoff stared at her as if the answer was obvious. “Self-defense lessons.”

Oh, of course. She should have known. “Okay...?” she intoned, clearly expecting more of an explanation but already figuring she wasn't going to get one. 

"You want to be able to protect yourself, right?" Agent Romanoff asked.

And yeah, there was no escaping the cryptic non-answers. But this time what she'd said roiled something deep-seated in Trish. She'd phrased it as a question, but it felt like a statement: you want to protect yourself. It was truer than anything else in Trish's life. Was she just that easy to read? Did she have her victimhood tattooed across her forehead? She considered Agent Romanoff again, in confusion and weariness and, for all her current frustration with the woman, a kind of giddy awe. 

Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the Black Widow. She was in the news more often than not. In defiance of the usual 24-hour news cycle, talking heads and pundits were still dissecting her actions in DC months later. In general, governments of the world viewed her with suspicion, and the United States in particular was incensed at the national security risks and damage to international relations her transparency had wrought. At worst, a few countries considered her a criminal and wanted her extradited and put on trial for past actions. Public opinion was polarized, and there didn’t seem to be much middle ground. Many considered her a hero, but as many, if not more, considered her a dangerous loose cannon with unknown loyalties, someone that could not be trusted and should be wearing an orange jumpsuit instead of black leather.

Trish had made her view of the woman clear on her show, after the Battle of New York and once again after the HYDRA Uprising. Natasha Romanoff was a hero as far as she was concerned. The infodump revealed her past for the world to see, at least in part, and it was... awful. The things she had done, yes, but also the things that had been done to her. The incredible violence and abuse, the brainwashing and mental manipulation. It was the kind of thing pulled from the pages of a dystopian horror novel. And still, despite everything in her past, Natalia Alianovna Romanova made a choice to become Natasha Romanoff. She made a choice to be good and do good, to protect people, even when it came at great cost to herself. Trish admired and respected her for that.

The Black Widow was a cipher in so many ways, more so now that she was inexplicably standing in her living room, but Trish had always felt like she could understand her on some distant level. She knew how hard it was to take control after having none and how good and terrifying it felt to finally be able to make your own choices. She understood the need for reinvention, the power that came with making a new name, and the liberation of forging a new identity separate from the things other people forced on you. It took strength and courage to become a new person, to be someone that fought for good, especially if you grew up with no real guidance of what exactly constituted right and wrong.

Of course, Trish knew she could just be projecting her own issues. Scratch that, she definitely was. She didn’t know the woman. Knew nothing about her but for some publicly available records. It was easy for people to think they knew who you were just because they saw you on TV or read your Wikipedia article. She didn’t want to do to Agent Romanoff what people had done to Trish Walker her entire life.

But what Trish knew with certainty was that Natasha Romanoff did the things Trish wished she could do. Despite being a regular human, she held her own with super-powered heroes. She protected people. She saved the world. Whatever darkness was in her past, she was a goddamn superhero in her own right.

Trish Walker wasn’t a superhero. She couldn’t save the world. She couldn’t protect anyone. Not herself. Not even the person she loved the most.

Trish could only stand on the sidelines as her best friend vanished from her life, knowing something was wrong, so completely wrong, but unable to do anything about it. She could only call again and again and leave message after message of panicky where are yous and are you okays. She could only sit with the phone at her ear, baffled and angry and heartbroken, as Jessica told her she had a boyfriend she loved, and she was finally happy, truly happy, so fuck off and mind your own business for once in your life, christ, you’re just like your mom.

When Jessica turned up at her door again, shaking and empty and shattered to pieces, all Trish could offer was shelter and expensive therapists and it’s not your fault. And when she came home one evening to find a note saying I have to work this out on my own and don’t try to find me, she could only hyperventilate on the floor of her kitchen, tears rolling down her cheeks and fingers itching for pills or whiskey or anything that would let her lose herself in a way she hadn’t been lost in years, in a way she wasn’t supposed to still want because she was better. She could only go on with her life, pretending everything was fine and hoping Jessica would walk back through the door one day.

Trish Walker couldn’t help anyone because she was just a useless talk radio host, not a hero. Not like Jessica.

But a different hero was standing in her living room where Jessica once stood, telling her how she could be a little bit of a hero too, if for no one else but herself. Maybe she couldn't protect everyone, couldn't protect Jessica, but she could at least learn to protect herself. It was something.

"Yes,” Trish said, fervently, feeling a shiver in her spine. She could have told herself it was because she was still soaked to the bone, but she knew it was hunger, the kind of desperate craving she'd only ever felt as an addict. “I want to be able to protect myself.” She didn't just want it, she needed it. She needed it so much her body and blood ached for it.

But she still didn't understand, and a question settled in her throat again. Why? “I just… this is all a little hard to comprehend. You don’t know me, but you break into my apartment to give me recommendations on security systems and self-defense lessons? Why are you doing this? It’s… it’s pretty strange, and you must have more important things to do."

A shadow crossed Romanoff's eyes. Gone was the steady, polished indifference. She looked… lost and young and tired and so much like Jessica the night she’d turned up at the door and collapsed into her arms. So much like… like what she once saw in her own eyes when she looked in the mirror, what she still sometimes saw when she let her guard down and stopped pretending it was all okay. It quickly passed, however, a moment so fleeting Trish almost thought she’d imagined it. But even though she wasn't a spy, when it came to acting, she was as much a professional as Romanoff.

Placid expression restored, Agent Romanoff said, "I used to watch your show."

Trish’s eyes widened in surprise. That… what? That was not what she was expecting. And she didn't see what it had to do with anything. Couldn’t the agent just give her a straightforward answer for once? Why did she have to be so enigmatic? Secretive superspy or not, Romanoff broke into her apartment and decided to offer up unsolicited advice, and she owed Trish a proper explanation for it.

What she did offer up didn’t even make sense. When and how and why had the Black Widow watched It’s Patsy? They were about the same age, but from what was publicly available about her background, the Black Widow started young, trained in spywork by an underground government organization in Russia. There was no way the grown Romanoff spent her free time sat on her ass watching old American tween programming, as hilarious a visual as it was.

Though… maybe it wasn’t completely outlandish to imagine foreign spies being exposed to American culture for their training. They had to learn about it somehow. But using It’s Patsy? Of all things? That was just… it couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. It was ridiculous. Insane.

It was insane, but now that her brain had latched on to the idea, it wouldn't let go. It did make a twisted kind of sense. If you were using little girls to do your dirty work, you’d want them to seem like regular little girls, right? To blend in so they could lie and kill with more ease? So why wouldn’t they watch the same thing little American girls watched? Why wouldn’t they learn to act like the perfect All-American girl next door Patsy Walker, squeaky clean and sunshine bright with her green eyes and red hair and utterly mundane problems?

Of course, Patsy Walker wasn’t real. There was no actual little girl like her, American or Russian or otherwise. Trying to be Patsy, it had nearly ruined her life, but she’d never imagined it doing the same to other girls, certainly not in this manner. It made her sick to think of it being used to literally brainwash children, to mold them into better killers. But it made her even sicker to realize that she… that she almost felt less alone thinking that damn show might've made another girl suffer as much as she did. God, what was wrong with her? Was she really so selfish and warped?

Agent Romanoff half smiled, a little corner of her lip tilting up. There was no joy in it, just sadness, and that felt like the closest thing to a confirmation of her wild impossible theory she would ever get. Romanoff added in a slightly strained voice, “I hated it."

Trish almost laughed. "Yeah?” She smiled back, and it was probably an ugly thing, twisted and bitter. Her mother would've jabbed her in the ribs for a smile like that. But her mother wasn't here, and maybe, just maybe it was all right to be ugly and sick and wrong sometimes. To be imperfect in the ways Patsy was never allowed to be. “Me too."

They stood for a minute in companionable silence, both lost in their own thoughts. Two women who had nothing and everything in common stopping long enough for a shared ghost to catch up with them. But neither were the type to linger for long, and it was time to bury Patsy Walker again.

Trish cleared her throat. “So, these self-defense lessons you recommend? How long will it take before I’m flipping people around with my thighs?”

Romanoff chuckled, throaty and full. “For you?” She looked her up and down appraisingly, raising an eyebrow. Then her lips twisted into a smirk, and she winked. “Not long.”

Oh. The Black Widow was flirting with her. This night was a rollercoaster of emotions. Before she could really process that, Romanoff began making motions to leave. Trish didn't want to keep her, but she knew she couldn't let a secret agent walk away without doing one last thing. 

"Hey, before you go, I'd like to ask you a favor," she said. "I have a friend. She went through something... horrible, and I was helping her, but then she left, just went off the radar. Could you... I'd like to find out where she is. I just want to know if she's okay.”

It would've been easier to be angry at Jessica. It would've distracted from the worry, the loneliness, the ache in her heart. She wasn't used to being alone anymore, not when it had been them against the world for so long, and she felt like she'd been abandoned, and it wasn't fair, for either of them. But she couldn't be mad at Jess, never truly and not over something like this. She only wished she could do for Jessica what Jessica had done for her, the way she'd looked at a broken, abused, drug addled mess of a girl and saw something worth loving anyway. Jessica had saved her. She wanted to return the favor. Return the love.

But it wasn't for Trish to decide what Jessica needed now. If distance is what it took for her to heal, then Trish would give it to her. Even so, she just couldn't go on knowing nothing. God, maybe it did make her like her mother to be that way, but it came from a place of caring, and that did make a difference. Jess was strong, and she could take care of herself, but she wasn't invincible. All Trish needed to know was if she was alive and as okay as she could be. She could find a way to breathe with that.

Agent Romanoff nodded in understanding. “I’d be happy to assist, Ms. Walker. Send me her details.”

Trish smiled. There'd been enough self-pitying introspection tonight. Jessica wasn't another ghost, and it was time to stop treating her like one. “Thank you, Agent Romanoff. And please, call me Trish.” She stuck out a hand. Romanoff took it, and Trish could feel calluses and scars across the otherwise soft skin. It was a small hand, but strong. 

“I'll call you Trish if you call me Natasha. You know, I’m actually not an agent anymore. Anyway, you should change out of those clothes, and I really need to...” she trailed off, knocking her head to the side.

Trish nodded, letting go of her hand. “Sure, of course. Innocents to protect and vast government conspiracies to uncover, right?”

Natasha smiled, a real one this time. It was lovely. “Something like that.”

As Trish made a move toward the door, Natasha instead walked towards the balcony. Trish quickly noticed, rolling her eyes. “Should’ve known superheroes don’t use doors,” she muttered under her breath, changing course after Natasha. It had stopped raining, but the brick was still slick, and Trish eyed it wearily. It would be just her luck for the Black Widow to die in a freak accident on her terrace.

Strolling out into the open air, Natasha glanced back with a chuckle and mischief in her eyes. “You know, Trish, I hope this is the start of a beautiful friendship. Because I—”

“No.” Trish shook her head, eyes widening in horrified realization. “Don’t do it. Don’t—”

“—really wanna be your friend,” Natasha finished.

“Goddammit,” Trish grumbled. “Not you too.”

Natasha was practically grinning at this point, utterly satisfied with herself. It was annoying and endearing at the same time. She’d been so professional and distant at first, and then so sad, it was a joy to see her lighter, happier... telling unacceptably obnoxious jokes. It was also a comfort. If someone that went through the things Natasha went through could still be like this, it gave her hope that Jessica would make it to that place one day too.

Trish sighed in exasperation, but grinned back. “Usually making that joke is a one way ticket to my shit list, though I suppose I could make an exception for my biggest fan. But if I hear one joke about me not being a natural redhead...” she trailed off, waving a fist threateningly.

She wouldn’t say it out loud, at least not in the words of that ridiculous catchphrase, but she really wanted to be Natasha’s friend too.