#looser on the other hand is both more and less self aware at the same time as in he is aware of more of his issues but goes out of his way

[chisatowo]

Thinking soooo hard abt past timeline stalien stuff rn.... Just Sprinkles and Looser just completely centering their worlds around eachother, both so desperate to break away from eachother but unable to conceive a world in which they're not the only ones in it. It's not until one of them is gone, when Sprinkles should have finally won, that the tears in her worldview become too evident to ignore, that it becomes unavoidable that the world is much bigger than she let herself grapple with, that people outside of her lead real lives, that things were never as simple as Looser being the sole thing dragging her down. Also then all the others start dropping dead like flies and she's having like 50 breakdowns at once and she tells Brute abt None of this because of course she didn't

[mintjamsblog]

Does Alfie ever demand that Tommy calls him Sir?

Okay, this is so late, (I'm sorry, I have sat on this answer for literally weeks). It also answers another ask I seem to have lost/deleted, which simply said 'sub-drop?' So, here you go, it turned into 1600 words of smut, I'm afraid. (Set in my Mistakes AU, but can be read without that background).

Subdrop

"How many fingers Tommy?"

Tommy lifts his head but it drops back immediately.

"Tommy, love, how many fingers am I holding up?"

"Ten," Tommy says, without even looking. "Everyone has ten."

"Alright, love, up we come."

It's no wonder, really, Alfie has toyed with him mercilessly for — he checks his watch — fuck, well over two hours, has brought him to the brink of orgasm over and over again, watched his face flush and his thighs tremble and his stomach contract in anticipation of the release he's repeatedly been denied.

Tommy's so fucking pretty when he lets himself go (when he's made to let go) and Alfie, well, he's always been a sucker for pretty things, ain't he? Beautiful things.

Tommy finds it so hard to relax that once Alfie gets him loose, persuades him into handcuffs or a spreader-bar or, immobilises him somehow, his inclination is to make the most of the situation, to wring him out like a wet towel, count every last drop of resistance as it splashes onto the floor — a puddle to be licked up and savoured (metaphorically speaking, of course, there's no way Tommy's licking anything off any floors with his arms and legs fastened securely to the straps of a leather sling).

The silly boy still approaches these scenes as if they're a test of his fortitude rather than a willing exchange of power and trust. And that's fine, mostly. A click of his fingers or a safeword could end it all, but Tommy'd far rather grit his teeth and pretend he don't want this at all. Alfie can allow that for a while, can give him something to bite down on until he's too far gone to care about giving a voice to his plight.

Usually it takes some impact to get Tommy to give up his sounds. He needs to be pushed past some physical threshold. A firm hand, a paddle, a whip — they each make him sing different notes, eventually, but always the same fuckin' undertone. Anger. Whether Tommy's angry at Alfie (likely) or at himself for needing this (even more likely) is neither here nor there. Tommy has plenty to be angry at; the world ain't always been kind to him and he's even less kind to himself.

But anger, well, it's corrosive innit? Useful when controlled, maybe, when mastered effectively and released into the world in small bursts that serve a purpose; to warn or threaten or reinforce the hierarchy. But not when it seethes in your blood, pumps through your heart and into each artery like slow-acting poison that seeps through veins and capillaries, reaches the tip of every extremity, hides beneath every thought. That sort of anger, the sort Tommy lives with, that anger needs to be let. Like blood.

Not that Alfie's some antiquated physician restoring balance to the humors. Nah, he fancies his particular form of therapy's far more effective, even if his tools are barely less crude than the old-timers' scalpels and leeches. Alfie prefers to mix things up, to intersperse the blows of a bullwhip with the soft, wet heat of his tongue; to lash Tommy with a folded belt, then hold his cock like a delicate creature he's trying to stroke back to life. He'll pinch and tease and whip and probe until Tommy rails and rages, fists balled, teeth bared, every muscle pulled taut as tension wire. Eventually he'll scream at Alfie, at himself, at the universe, then let the breath shudder out in increasingly shaky increments, like he's tumbling down the stairs.

The journey to that point is best travelled slow. Given time, Tommy's tight grunts and growls always soften into something looser, gentler, pain still evident in the pitch of his voice, but threaded through with desire and resignation and something else entirely ... an underlying need to give up or give in. To please, Alfie flatters himself.

That medley of sounds, the unwinding trajectory of 'em, awakens some possessive creature in Alfie. He can feel it uncoiling inside him, muscles sliding and flexing as he drives Tommy towards an apex neither of 'em can see — a pinnacle of endurance or restraint beyond which Tommy simply is. Or maybe isn't. Beyond which he is merely a consciousness, untethered from any worldly woes and oblivious to the sensations of his own flesh. Or perhaps oblivious to anything but the sensations of his own flesh. Either way, Alfie knows to watch when the sounds turn animalistic, when the groans are so low and feral that they peter out into breaths. Into nothing. Into rolled-back eyes and gaping mouth and climaxes so molten they look more like pain than pleasure.

"Come on love, that's it, down we come."

It's a struggle getting Tommy out of the sling, he's too exhausted to cooperate, to untangle his own limbs from the leather, so Alfie releases the two lower straps and pours him out like water. Like water he slips through Alfie's waiting arms and pools at his feet on the floor.

"Up you get," Alfie says, hoisting him under the arms, and up Tommy comes, unsteady but obedient in his altered state of mind.  Alfie braces him for a moment, waits for Tommy's body to harden, for a flicker of conceit to return to those down-cast eyes. Now is when Tommy should swipe a hand down his face, curse under his breath and huff an almost laugh, a poor disguise for self-consciousness, but a sign he's aware at least.

But Tommy offers no such reassurance, regains none of the control that usually washes back as soon as he's up on his feet. He's deep, Alfie realises. Deeper than usual.

He whispers into Tommy's ear, small praises that have no place in any moment other than one such as this. His fingers run down Tommy's back, tracing small paths through sweat that's turned cold, an attempt to distract and reassure, but already he knows it's too late. He's left it too late. He can feel the distant vibrations and knows they'll soon take Tommy's legs.

By the time Alfie gets him onto the bed, onto his side, the trembling has tipped into shivering, a violent reflex that even the finest goose-down duvet fails to subdue. Alfie curses himself for missing the cues, for pushing Tommy too hard. "S'okay," he whispers, "you were beautiful."

But Tommy is straining against the hold, against Alfie's leg wrapped over his own. "I need ... I'm gonna be sick," he says, and throws himself into a sitting position with a violent retching sound. The purge that follows isn't from his stomach, it pours down his face in scalding tears that drench Alfie's waiting hands. Tommy throws his arm up and buries his eyes in the crook of his elbow, taking frightening gasps after every few breaths.

"Come on, now," Alfie says, entirely at a loss. Sure, he pushed Tommy hard tonight, but it seemed like what they both wanted. Needed. "Please, don't," he whispers, hands searching beneath Tommy's forearm to thumb away some of the tears. He wants to tell Tommy he doesn't mind, he can cry as much as he likes. Alfie don't see this as victory; Alfie's not him. But he says nothing, afraid of dredging up ghosts as he coaxes Tommy back down to the mattress, runs fingers through his hair, holds him tight against his chest and lets him cry himself out till the tap runs mercifully dry.

"Why?" Tommy says, eventually.

Fucks sake, why what? Why anything? Why do they do what they do to each other? Why does Tommy allow it? Allow Alfie to pull the meat from his preverbial bones? Alfie's asked himself the same question often enough. Not why does he do this, exactly, he's well past shame over that, but why did he get this lucky? Why does he get to do this with Tommy? To see what no one else sees?  Why did he push him so hard tonight? Why did he think Tommy could take it?

"Why did you spend so long ... you know ..." Tommy sniffs, "when there's nothing in it for you?"

Alfie pulls Tommy out from his chest enough to look him in the eye. "Nothing in it for me? Are you fucking kidding me, Tommy?"

"You didn't even come," Tommy says.

At that, Alfie grabs Tommy's arm, fumbling to open the top button of his jeans and force Tommy's hand inside. "There," he says, in his sternest voice. "Nothing in it for me, hmm?"

"Oh!" Tommy says in surprise.

"Yeah, oh, you blithering idiot. Twice. No fuckin' hands."

He watches Tommy swallow, feels fingers flex through the undeniable evidence soaked right through Alfie's boxers.

"Why?" Tommy asks again.

"Why what Tommy? Why does God allow famine and pestilence? Why do good people die? Why didn't I meet you ten years ago, hmm?"

"Why did you fucking come?"

"Because you’re sexy as all burning hell, aren't you? Turn me on like a switch."

Tommy curls into him tighter, buries his face again, and it dawns on Alfie that he really and truly doesn't get it, does he?

"The first time, right, you wouldn't lay back." He keeps his voice low, strokes Tommy's perfect little ear. "I'd fingered you till you were leaking all over your stomach, all over the marks I'd left with the flogger. You should've been way past defiance by then, but you just kept trying to sit up ... your mouth hanging open, like you were trying to fuckin' kiss me." Tommy burrows further still. "So I slapped you," Alfie continues. Maybe that was a bit cruel. "And you only tried even harder. Lay your sinful tongue on your lower lip and strained up out of the sling." Alfie's hardening again at the recollection, at the way he'd thought Tommy was acting, playing the little minx, struggling to reach forward with his wrists and ankles bound to the straps above him. Only Tommy'd never appear so needy, not in his rightful mind, wouldn't chase Alfie's mouth like a newborn pup seeking out its mother's teet. And he'd gazed at Alfie through half-lidded eyes, in that way he had no right to do, like Alfie was the only face he knew in the entire unholy world, like Alfie could fuckin' save him, reach inside his body and take all the pain away, maybe, or make it ten times worse. Like whichever option Alfie chose Tommy'd fucking let 'im.

"And?" Tommy says, when Alfie falls silent. God, he really doesn’t remember, does he?

"And I leant down and kissed you, you silly boy. And I came in my pants, like a teenager."

Tommy makes a wet sound that could be a huff, or could just as easily be more tears.

"Weren't my fault," Alfie adds, defensively. "Your mouth was so fuckin' soft, despite what I'd done to you. And you. You mewled like a Siamese kitten..."

Tommy squeezes him, through his pants, seemingly soothed by the hard line he's holding, proof, perhaps, that Alfie is part of this.

"And the second time ... the second time ... fucking hell. Right at the very end. The last time you came. You looked so fucking fucked-out, love," Alfie's hands are roaming now, sliding over the marks he's left all over Tommy's skin. He seeks out the curve of Tommy's throat, presses kisses there. "All the fight gone out of you. Covered in sweat and welts and come, so exhausted you were trembling ... and please, you kept saying please." He cups the back of Tommy’s head, pulls him closer still. "And I didn't know what for. And I kept asking you, please, what, Tom? but you wouldn't answer. Couldn't, maybe. Too far gone to know." He bites gently on Tommy's ear, at the little crease where it joins his jaw, the tiniest sign of age on his otherwise youthful face.

Tommy's hand is working now, struggling to find its way beneath the fabric of Alfie's underwear. "Then what?" he breathes into Alfie's ear.

"And then you said please, Sir."

Tommy's hand stops dead at that.

"I ... I didn't--"

"S'alright, love, you were under, weren’t you? Too fuckin' deep to know." And there might be a tiny part of Alfie that wishes that weren't the case, that would like to hear that word on Tommy's lips again, but not at the risk of a drop. Hurts too much to see Tommy so upset.

He removes Tommy's hand from his trousers and laces their fingers together, pulls them up high enough he can kiss every sticky knuckle.

"You want me to clean you up, love? Tommy barely shakes his head; his fingers clench around Alfie's hip. "Okay, in a little while then."

Ain't right to feel so tender about being stuck to someone with come. To like the smell of their sweat so much you don't wanna wash it off. Hell, he'd sleep like this all night, in jeans and boots an'all, if it gives Tommy the reassurance he'll so surely claim he don't need.

[snlhostharry]

to be determined / one

harry styles x reader friends with benefits au

soon after moving to new york, you meet harry styles at a party. you convince yourself that there’s nothing between the two of you until it becomes too intense to ignore. if you keep telling yourself that he doesn’t mean anything to you, does that make it true?

a/n: hi everyone! welcome to my first harry styles series. This originally started as a challenge for myself to try and write a harry fic inspired by taylor swift songs so that’s where the chapter titles come from, it’s kind of become something bigger than that but I figured I would keep the theme anyway 

chapter 1: welcome to new york

The story starts in New York City. 

A place written about in countless stories, about love, about heartbreak, about giving up, about standing tall, and about putting broken hearts into drawers and slamming them shut. It’s easy to say that writing another story about New York is beating a dead horse, throwing characters into the same tired old setting and letting them live out the writer's wildest daydream. But it’s never been about the city itself, it’s always been about the people. Something about the city always manages to be the perfect stomping ground for people, for characters to find each other in a  whirlwind of A list parties and harsh billboard lights. 

Speaking of which you are suddenly very sick of said harsh billboard lights in the middle of times square. As someone who has read (and written) countless articles describing times square as a flurry of activity but also with some kind of inherent magical appeal, the center of everything it’s own small utopia, you know that everyone who wrote that had to be aware of their own bullshit. It’s a nuanced way of tourist trapping, smart, albeit annoying on a variety of levels. A gimmick to get wide eyed little girls to stand in the middle of chaos and think that maybe they could carve out a place for themselves here. 

You’re not trying to carve out a place for yourself, you’re trying to get to a stupid party. That and manage to not get any mud or other stains on this very nice dress you’re wearing. After what seems like forever of looking around and then suddenly looking back down at your phone just in case anyone wanted to even try to make eye contact with you, familiar faces appear out of the sea of people. 

You greet them with a look of disappointment, “Two questions: why did you want to meet here-” a tourist elbows there way past you mid sentence, inadvertently proving your point, “-and why aren’t we just taking an uber?” 

Molly, a tall black woman with objectively perfect hair (which is somehow gorgeous at all times), smiles and pats your shoulder like a kindergarten teacher, “I thought you would want to see Times Square.”

“I’ve seen it,” You shoot back, squinting again at the bright light coming from directly behind her head, and adjusting your jacket over your shoulders. 

She squeezes your shoulder quickly, “And also to teach you that any time someone asks you to meet them in Times Square  they’re fucking with you.”

“I figured you were fucking with me,” You tell her, “But thank you, god forbid the midwestern girl gets lost in Times Square waiting for someone to meet her who is obviously not coming.” 

Molly laughs, and so do you. She looks down at her phone briefly, and then back at you, “To answer your question, why would anyone ever try to get an uber in the city at seven?” 

You shrug, “What kind of self respecting party starts at eight?” 

Fletcher, who’s name admittedly sounds like it should belong to anyone but him, finally stops staring at the large elmo mascot a few feet away and jumps into the conversation. “The kind with an age range, twenty somethings to late thirty somethings, who no longer have the energy to go from nine to six am.” 

You sigh, “So boring then or-?”

“It’s about networking,” Molly says, “And also drinking, but mostly networking.” 

“One of those unique business opportunities where you get free food, and possibly run into celebrities, singers mostly.” 

You roll your eyes, “Wow you had me at various singers.” 

“Says the woman who did an interview series with Tik Tok kids who all live in the same house,” Molly snips, half joking. 

You shiver, half from the memories of that objectively terrible experience and half from a sudden breeze. Needless to say a significant portion of the reason why you’d left LA, was because their entertainment section was suddenly drifting away from profiles on actors and towards compilations of one minute videos made by sun tanned twenty somethings that somehow made them millions a year. That and after you’d spent two weeks semi living with ten of said twenty somethings for a story that had gotten a lot of buzz you never wanted to see anyone connected to the app ever again. 

You give Molly your best ‘I’ll kill you’ smile, “You have to decide what you’re going to make fun of me for, is it the midwestern thing or is it the Tik Tok thing because one of those involves you admitting that I lived in Los Angeles for a year which means I’m perfectly capable of handling Times Square in all of it’s elmo public urinating glory.” 

Fletcher looks again at the mascot who is not in fact publicly urinating, but honestly if it did suddenly start none of you would be surprised. 

Molly looks at you for a second and says, “Both,” She looks at Fletcher. 

He looks at you then back and Molly and nods, “Yeah. Both.” 

You roll your eyes, “So can we get going now or-?” 

The ride to the location Molly had all but refused to tell you was filled with talks of the impending deadlines on Monday for pieces that were anywhere from fifty to seventy percent finished. (your’s is at the lower end of the spectrum because there is only so much one person can write about an art installation that you found less insightful and more literal in the sense that the sculpture was literally just large amounts of clay pressed together in something that shouldn’t even be considered a shape with no metaphor or meaning behind it). 

Soon enough you’re standing in what looks like mostly a residential neighborhood, with one precariously nice building in the middle of the block. You turn to Molly, “What the-?” 

“Don’t finish that, just be patient,“ She interrupts as a response. “You are very impatient, you know that?”

“I’m a journalist,” You say, “I need to know all of the facts, including what the-” You take a breath, “-heck we’re doing in the middle of a nice little neighborhood, I was expecting something more Gossip Girland Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” 

“You’re definition of journalist is a lot looser than mine,” Molly says.

“Have you ever watched Gossip Girl? And isn’t Brooklyn Nine-Nine set in a precinct?” Fletcher adds. 

“No, and Jake and Amy live in an apartment.” 

“Beyond the fact that you’re a TV writer who has never watched Gossip Girl-” Fletcher sighs, even though you know he hasn’t watched it either beyond random snippets for a hit piece he wrote on it a few months back (not received well by the way), “The top floor of that building-” He points to the precariously nice building, “isn’t apartments its a loft, the floor is huge and only one house.” 

You squint your eyes, “You’re kidding.”

“And the rest are offices?” 

“How did they get zoning for that?” 

They both shrug at the same time. 

“Guys I want to know that if the police bust up this party, speaking of loose terms, I’m going to say that you dragged me here against my will.” 

“I always knew you had good survival instincts.” 

Molly turns to you, “Look when you’re getting special press access to the inside of the met gala you will be saying thank you Molly for bringing me here to catapult my career.” 

“I have catapulted my own career thank you, the Tik Tok thing-” You shake your head, “Nevermind can we go in and stop loitering, then we’ll really get arrested.” 

Party is a loose term but you learn that's not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not a rager with strobe lights and pumping bass but there is music playing albeit classical. People mill around at tables talking to one another, both twenty somethings and thirty somethings, you recognize a few faces from the media mostly. Fletcher was right about the food, and Molly was right about the drinks. You talk to a few people just to introduce yourself, a couple of them have heard of you, if only because your sudden cross country move to newspapers that aren’t necessarily competitors but might have a bit of a rivalry was something that people talked about. You’d made a couple thirty under thirty lists (no not the Forbes one) while in LA, which meant nothing to you if you were being completely honest but apparently meant things to other people which is fine.

When you’re finally exhausted at putting on a smile and nodding like you’re actively engaged in conversation and not thinking about something completely you hang out by the bar, not even drinking, just watching the room and all of the people there. You never wanted to get a reputation for being the quiet girl in the corner who just watched and listened because those kinds of people are always seen as weird or doormats or both but if you’re being honest this is where you’re the most comfortable. Making small talk just to get some opportunity down the road has never quite been your style. 

You turn to go and find Molly when you suddenly come face to face with someone you recognise right away. 

In that moment you realize that Taylor Swift was in fact onto something when she said, “Didn’t you flash your green eyes at me?” As weird as it is, the first thing you think when you meet Harry Styles is how that song is definitely about him, because those green eyes are striking and they are staring right at you. 

“Hi,” He says, quick to the draw. 

You take a step back just because of how close you are and say, “Hello.” 

He looks at you like he’s thinking about something, and then holds out his hand, “Harry.” 

“y/n,” You shake his hand. You recover from your initial shock quickly, and plaster on that fake conversation smile again, ready for whatever it is he wants to say, if anything. You came here to ‘network’ and you’re not sure what kind of advantage talking to Harry Styles could possibly give you, but for some reason you want to talk to him. 

“What brings you here?” He asks you. 

“My co-workers,” You shrug, “I would much rather be at home watching Succession on HBO and listening to the Beatles on my record player, like true people of culture would.”

He looks at you for a second, as you try to keep a straight face. Then he laughs, “Seriously?”

“Fuck no,” You say, “That’s my impression of the girl who meets Harry Styles at a party and has to convince him that she is not like all the other girls, she is the one for him.” You smile, “Was that good? Or should I try again?” 

He thinks about it, “I think you should try again.” 

“Because you think it’s wrong or because you think I’m funny?”

“What do you think?”

“Well if you think I’m funny, then I’ve already won, I’ve tricked you into thinking that I’m not like all the other girls with reverse psychology .”

“Are you screwing with me?”

“Of course I’m screwing with you,” You take a sip of your drink. “If I were home right now I would be playing Lizzo on my record player, and drinking something with a medically unsafe level of caffeine.” You pause, “What brings you here?” 

“Honestly,” He looks out over the room, “I thought that this was going to be a much cooler party. Instead it’s just a bunch of reporters, and editors and media people.” 

“Who are inherent mood killers?” You ask. 

He narrows his eyes at you, “Am I allowed to say yes to that?” 

“You can do whatever you want,” You tease him, “You’re Harry Styles, who am I to tell you what to say?” 

“I feel like it was a trick question, which means that you are also a reporter.” 

You laugh again, “That was funny, I’m going to write that down for my story. ‘Harry is genuinely funny which he tries to use to make up for the lack of small talk abilities’.”

“You’re screwing with me again.” 

“Of course I am,” You say, “I work in the arts section of the Times, well not the actual art anymore but the movies and television.” 

“TV critic?” He says, “So you’re harsh.” 

“TV critics are just harsh for attention, I don’t need to be because no movie snob or well meaning director is going to go to the Times to see what we thought of any given movie. I write honestly, sometimes under the influence of caffeine and try to contain my excitement at narratively unnecessary plot twists.” You explain, “That and I get paid to watch TV, and usually private screenings of movies.” 

He leans against the bar a sign that he doesn’t plan on moving anytime soon. You’re not going to say that you’re so awestruck by a celebrity that you have no idea what to say, or that he’s intimidating you but your hand shakes just a little as you clutch your fingers around the glass because he’s objectively attractive. Objectively attractive in the way that if he were on a dating app you would swipe yes and then put a lot of pressure on yourself to be funny and relatable even though you know that you don’t need him. 

“What did you think of Dunkirk?” 

“Oh!” You forgot that he acted, “That was before my time. I was working at the LA Times doing the music section then I think.” You know what he’s going to say next, “And before you ask yes there is a piece still posted of me reviewing your debut album. I think I reached out to get an interview with you, but I was suspiciously declined.” He looks embarrassed, “I was like under five years out of college I would’ve declined me too. They only gave me the story because it was the time where people weren’t sure that ex boyband members could make objectively good albums that meant something.” 

He tilts his head to the side for a second, “And? Can they?”

“I’m in no place to make a generalization,” You say, “But I think you did. Admittedly that album was something, very intimate.” 

“I don’t know if I should be taking that as a compliment.”

“I don’t want to give you a compliment because some people have a hard time with them, and this will get very awkward very fast. No shame, personally I have no mechanism to take compliments on my writing.” 

He laughs, “I think I can take it.” 

“Hmm.. okay,” You take another step back, “Okay are you sure you're ready?” 

“Yes.” 

“I think the entire album was very good, very unexpectedly good or at least I didn’t expect it to be. It was very open in that way that songs are vulnerable but still leave enough mystery that your fans don’t think you're a shitty person and I really like meet me in the hallway,” You say quickly, “In fact I listened to it just yesterday when I was working.” 

He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and then fake sighs, “See I don’t think that counts because it was more of a backhanded compliment.” 

“What?”

“You said you didn’t expect it to be good, that’s not really a compliment then-”

“I was saying it pleasantly surprised me,” You say, throwing your hands in the air in mock annoyance. “You surprise me, Harry.” He doesn’t say anything, and for a minute neither do you, but you snap back to life just in time to say, “Is that compliment enough to embarrass you?” 

He shrugs, but you know he’s messing with you. “It’s something but I don’t know if it’s really doing it for me.” 

“You are impossible, just another out of touch celebrity, is nothing ever good enough for you people?” It’s by now that you realize that you inadvertently closed the gap between the two of you, and you’re standing very close. 

He seems to realize this at the same time as you, “I-”

“Are you going to ask me to have sex with you?” You deadpan. 

“What?” He looks offended for a second, “No.” 

“I had to ask,” You tell him, “It’s happened before.” 

“I was going to ask you for your number.”

“See usually when a guy asks me that they’re asking so-” 

“It’s not for that.” 

“Then what’s it for?” 

He looks at you with something in his eyes that you don’t know the meaning of, “In case you want to do an interview, so that they don’t reject you this time.” 

You know that’s not it, but you give it to him anyway because he’s Harry Styles (which yes is not a valid reason but this ‘party’ is very boring and this is the most interesting thing to happen to you in at least the past week). It takes you a minute to remember which one is your real number and which one is the fake number you give off if a guy is asking because he wants a booty call, but you eventually give it to him. Then you scurry off with a quick goodbye when you realize how late it is, and how you do have work to do. There’s a new episode of Big Little Lies out tomorrow and you don’t understand why but people are very into the show, and very into your episode recaps. 

You corner Molly away from some guy you think might have actually been able to get her press access to the Met Gala and remind her that she also has a deadline tomorrow. The two of you go off to look for Fletcher and find him very close to sealing the deal with an objectively pretty girl, but you politely remind him that he has work to do and is very busy. The girl looks sad but let’s him go without much whining. You would’ve understood if she tried to get him to stay with her, he’s a little bit shorter than Molly but to be fair Molly is above averagely tall, and is nice and fit and has brown curly hair which you know from personal experience is sometimes just kryptonite. (you’ve kissed Fletcher before, long story, and can also say he’s on your top list of good kissers as well right up there with a guy you hooked up with in LA only to realize later that he was Robert Pattinson). 

Somehow the three of you are only able to make it back to your apartment. So the night ends with Molly and Fletcher in the living room on the couch and in a sleeping bag respectively, and you are comfortably in your bed. Your phone sits on your nightstand, suspiciously silent. You’re not waiting for Harry Styles to call you, nope, definitely not. 

[greenninjagal-blog]

The Space Between Us

Alien au? Alien au! I have no self control! Please accept this one shot that quickly spiraled into 23 pages of Virgil being a disaster in space. (If you guys enjoy it, let me know because I’m considering making it a series.)

Summary: The cosmos is a Gigantic place and somehow Virgil’s past still catches up to him.

Words: 11400

TW: Human trafficking, Human experimentation, dehumanization, fighting rings, 

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Read on Ao3 || General Writing Masterlist

“Tell me again why this is absolutely necessary?” Virgil asked, watching Logan’s hands dance across the console. On any other day the sight would be comforting. Every time his digits landed on a key, his nerves glowed with sparks of multicolored light through his transparent crystal skin, creating a beautiful firework show right in front of them all. Logan had told him once it was called Lightdancing, an evolutionary adaptation of the Tenkarie people: their bodies were near invisible in dim light, and they could control the pulses of light just enough to attract other cave dwelling creatures to them before striking the killing blow.

Now, though, the sight made Virgil’s stomach churn. Logan’s lights were a calculated system that he had trained to hone better than most of his race: he could make any part of his body glow at a brightness ranging from a flickering candle light to a flood light, he could make his whole body radiate or he could make just the tip of one of his sixteen fingers, he could even change the color of the light with just a thought. Virgil had always been glad that Logan was the only Tenkarie that dared venture from their caves on L0-G1C; Logan’s kind had perfected the use lights and dancing which made all other creatures become so nauseated they couldn’t fight back or become so mesmerized by the swirling motions that they didn’t see the attacks.

(Of course, because Virgil was rather distinctly human, it took longer for either of the effects of Logan’s fighting to work, which had saved both their lives more than once.)

However, in contrast to the usual focus of Logan’s fingertips on the control panel, lights were flickering all over his body, up and down each of his four arms and burning from the notches around his neck. The lack of control was enough to make Virgil’s stomach churn.

“Because its Remus,” Roman replied, although it didn’t help that he said his brother's name the same way he might have said puppy kicker.

“And we care about Remus because....?” Virgil prompted, running his fingers over his satchel again, checking the latches to make sure they were still there, still closed, still containing the supplies within. “If my memory serves me correctly, Remus was the one that set us up to be ambushed by those space pirates the other week. You know, the ones that nearly killed Patton?”

“We care because, in Erefrenian customs, blood bonds are the most sacred of bonds.” Logan supplied distractedly. “And Remus invoked the Oath of Brothers, which means that if Roman were to ignore his call for aid, Roman’s honor would be forever stained which would prevent him from crossing to the planes of heroes after his death according to the religion of his people.”

“Yeah that,” Roman says, even less excited than Logan at the idea. The bone spikes along his spine had been secreting that red poison that usually only happened when he got annoyed or anxious. Virgil had learned quickly to stay away from him when he was like that: touching it merely made Virgil’s limbs feel pins and needles, but the Orlun thief had screamed until unconsciousness.

It was one of the (very) few perks of being a Deathworlder, Virgil supposed. Most of the things that hurt the other species out here usually had a looser effect on humans because humans rarely made it this far. In fact, it was illegal for humans to get this far by at least sixty doctrines (all of which Logan had filed away in his room). 

Humans were juggernauts-- the alien versions of the boogie man told to children to keep them from acting out. Virgil had seen some of the written documents about his kind, and the tales of bloodshed and terror invoked by merely existing were pretty horrifying. Graphic depictions of humans tearing aliens limb from limb, scientific studies on the amounts of chemicals that humans had absorbed and withstood against, an interview with a survivor of a human rampage who revealed the bite marks left by the so-called beast.

Almost every species out here was just as scared of him as he was of them.

The problem came from the ones that weren’t scared. 

Which, of course, was how Virgil had ended up hundreds of literal light-years from Earth, on a ship with three aliens whom he was pretty certain he would end up dying for sometime very soon. Yurinks were crafty, shameless, bold, creatures, and they were notorious for visiting Earth and abducting humans for individual sale. Weslors ran fighting rings and humans were almost always the safest bets for some quick cash. Quitans were a fan of skinwearing, which was not something that Virgil ever wanted to see, based on the name alone. And Pol’turs loved learning how things worked and paid very handsome prices for human subjects on the space black market.

Virgil, himself, had sold for 300 griot. (Which was apparently a lot, based on the way that Patton’s eyes had quite literally bugged out. Virgil was still trying to figure out the conversation ratio of American dollars to griot and getting nowhere with it.)

“I hate him,” Roman said under his breath as he threaded through the spare armored uniforms in the storage, trying to find one to fit over the rigid bone plates along his back. His tail squirmed behind him as he searched, dragging the spikes through the air. “I hate him so much.” His bone claws cut through the fabric and he growled as he tossed the ruined clothes to the floor. “We’re gonna save him and then I’m going to toss him off into space, myself.”

Logan made an affirming noise, using his lower left arm to nudge his visor back up his nose. Virgil had only caught sight of Logan’s eyes once or twice, as most light strained his sensitive eyes. They had paid a pretty griot for a repair and a spare of his light blocking visor after the first time some space smugglers had surprised them and managed to break the lens. Logan’s pained scream was the worst thing that Virgil had ever heard and he had sworn he’d do anything to avoid ever having to hear it again.

(That had been the first time that Roman and him had truly worked together on something, Virgil noted absently. Between Virgil’s uncharacteristic bloodlust and Roman’s furious wrath they had taken out the smugglers in less than five minutes and they hadn't been very nice about it.)

Looking from the back, Roman resembled a stegosaurus to Virgil. If, like....stegosauruses ran around on two legs, flourished a sword, and were prone to acting like every minor occurrence was a slight against them personally. His red-ish skin had the appearance of leather but was twice as thick, his bone plates were slimmer rounded triangles than Virgil remembered from his kindergarten picture books but they ran from the based of his neck all the way down his back and to the tips of his tail which he liked to use as a spike-ball-and-chain attack along with his ridiculous sword. Virgil couldn’t count the number of times that Roman had nearly taken him out along with the enemy. His claws were only a few inches long but Roman whined like a baby when they broke-- which was ridiculous because his bone plates literally grew back overnight, and the ones on his forearms were made to be taken off and thrown. (Logan had indeed informed Virgil that Erefren grow new bones every moon cycle and proceeded to lose the old ones which Virgil had then mentioned that humans did that too sorta! With their baby teeth! And Roman and Logan had both looked unnerved by that information.)

“I’ve got it!” A voice sang from the ceiling, which was about all the warning Virgil got before a child sized figure vaulted down from the rafters of the teleportation deck right onto his shoulders.

“Jesus! Pat!” Virgil yelled as he stumbled swaying to accommodate the new weight that had stuck itself to Virgil’s back and then wrapped around to hug his chest. “Give a guy a warning, will you?”

Patton giggled, hooking his legs around Virgil’s waist so that he could sit comfortably, swinging the two other satchels he had been sent to fetch from his hands. Roman accepted one of them readily.

“What's a Jeeezus?” Patton asked, stressing the syllables as English terms never really fit right in his tongue. As far as Virgil was aware no species were equipped to speak human languages, although Roman’s Erefren dialect involved some rolling syllables. He probably could have picked up Spanish, if Virgil hadn’t barely passed Spanish III with a C minus. 

To be fair though, that year had been bad. Janus had been in his class, and then he hadn’t. And it was hard to focus on conjugation of verbs when the golden student of the entire school who had sat next to him had been declared dead and Virgil had been the prime suspect of it.

That, and Virgil was pretty terrible at picking up new languages. He had only managed to figure out how to communicate with Logan by luck: hands raised with the fingers spread was a symbol of innocence and fear for the Tenkarie, while a sign of rage and fury for Yurink. This, of course, had also been in the middle of an illegal Weslor fighting ring which Logan had been dragged into and essentially sentenced to die in after being separated from Roman and Patton. 

(Virgil tried not to think too much about those days. Alien blood was still blood and it was very not-good to feel dripping from his hands, even if it was him or them, even if it had been his life on the line, even if it wasn’t another human with heterochromic eyes and smug smirk. Virgil had fought nearly six times before Logan had been his opponent, and that was six times too many.)

Regardless, Virgil was lucky that when Roman and Patton had come for Logan, Logan had remembered his reluctance to fight and insisted that Virgil come with them in an escape. Roman and Patton had their hesitations but Logan wouldn’t take no for an answer. 

(And Virgil who did not understand Common, had honestly thought that Logan had come back to kill him officially. Not a good first impression.) 

Logan had made him flashcards to study from and taught him common in the sitting area of their ship. The endless hours of memorization, the drills, the sentences, all of which helped him more than he thought the others knew. They were something to do with his mind and Virgil had been in desperate need of something to do with his mind those first few months that wasn’t thinking about Earth or home or boys who were dead.

“We could go to Earth,” Logan had offered once during one of their sessions.

Virgil had blinked looking up to from the practice reading he had been studying with a bewildered look. “What?” It had taken a moment for him to realize that he had spoken in English rather than Common, but Logan must have picked up on the meaning of the foreign word anyway.

“You were… badly, ah, stolen,” Logan had said, pointing at the flashcards. “We could give you back.” He had used his lower two arms to mimic the motion of handing something off.

It had been so touching, the way that he had scaled down his speech to match Virgil’s progress, had offered despite Earth being the infamous Deathworld, had been looking at Virgil like he was living being and not just some animal. Virgil had cried.

He should have wanted to go back to Earth, should have wanted to go home, but instead he had begged in his broken, garbled Common for Logan to let him stay in space with them. And Logan had glowed nearly blindingly with purple light, a relief light, a content light, a happy light and promised that he wouldn’t have to go back if he didn’t want to.

Perhaps that had been the day the Virgil had realized he’d die for Logan.

And once Virgil had decided that for Logan it wasn’t hard to decide it for Patton too. The Reytin was just so nice. Even back in those first months when Virgil didn’t know how to talk to them and Patton had been so obviously terrified of him, the alien had made sure that Virgil was eating, that he was sleeping, that he had space when he needed it. Though, Virgil really suspected that their friendship had blossomed so quickly because of Patton's rare Reytin ability to see emotions with his frog-like eyes. Once he realized that Virgil was actually terrified of everything, and it wasn’t just ploy to kill them (or maybe despite that….Virgil hadn’t gotten a straight answer from him), Patton had done his best to befriend him back to good health. 

And Virgil liked being on the ship. He liked his room, which was filled with stupid alien plants he had managed to collect and the weird shapes of the bed. He liked being right down the hall from the kitchen so he could smell when Patton was cooking something, and the way that he could always hear Roman singing in his room. He liked slipping out to the observation deck and just seeing Space the way no other human really had. 

(Its stupid really, that sometimes he forgot it had been three years. Its stupid really, that sometimes he still turned to ask a question of someone who was never going to be there. Its stupid really that he could be so happy and still feel the gaping hole where someone used to be.)

“Oh this is so exciting!” Patton said happily, shaking his hands in the air to show his excitement. “Isn’t this exciting, guys?”

“Exciting isn’t the word I would use,” Virgil said hoisting the smaller creature from around his waist to settle him on the floor carefully.

“More like Vexing! Or perhaps burdensome! Irksome! Problematic!” Roman snarled, finally finding the armor that would fit around his plates and slipping it on. “You know what? Let’s forget it! Remus got himself into this mess and he can get himself out!”

“Now kiddo…” Patton warned, and wow, Virgil sometimes forgot that the alien who was half Virgil's height and twice as lively, was also older than all of them combined. Reytin lifespans were literally off the chart. Patton had been around way back when humans were first declared illegal on this side of the cosmos. “You know that we can’t do that! He invoked the Oath of Brothers so we have to!” 

“We don’t have to do anything,” Roman griped. “Worse case, my soul just becomes eternally damned and I’m shamed by the rest of my race until I die a lonely, lonely death on some distant planet!”

“Must you be so dramatic?” Logan asked.

“You won't die alone!” Patton said, “We’ll be right there with you! Probably even die right next to you as well!”

“No offense Pat,” Roman said glumly, “But that makes me feel like I’m gonna be the cause of your death.”

“It’ll be fun!”

Thankfully before Roman could explain exactly there was nothing fun about making all his friends die, Logan cleared his throat and made his upper two palms glow with a soft blue light. Green and pink bulbs flashed up and down his neck. “I have mapped out the perceived trajectory of the enemy ship so we should be able to beam directly into the hold. However because of possible miscalculations I believe that I should be--”

“--The first to beam aboard as I am the only one who is not affected by the lack of gaseous properties and the extreme temperatures of the expanse of space.” Roman, Patton, and Virgil chorused together. 

“Must you all?” Logan asked, with just enough fondness in his tone for Virgil to know that he wasn’t actually bothered.

“Change up your speech sometime, Teach,” Roman suggested, and then he sighed dropping his head. “You guys are really willing to do this for me? These are mercenaries, you know. If this doesn’t go well they’ll likely sell us for parts.”

Virgil really didn’t need the reminder. Just the thought of once again having his arms restrained, having his clothes striped away, being reduced from a person to a thing used for entertainment, was enough to have Virgil eyeing the door back to the rest of the ship. Even on the off chance that they didn’t try to take him apart to see how he ticked, they would still sell him for griot. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, survive being thrust back into the fighting rings. He’d shake himself apart before they managed to drag him into that dust riddled death trap.

Patton reached up and tugged the edge of Virgil’s under armor tunic, drawing his eyes away from the door and down to his friend. Patton, of course, was smiling, imitating the human action of bearing his teeth (something that Logan had explained was incredibly threatening to all other species and you may want to avoid participating in that activity with Roman in the vicinity, Virgil). 

It was silly things like that that make Virgil hopelessly certain that he would do anything to protect his friends. He didn’t need to worry about being caught and sold off because the others wouldn’t let that happen again, and in turn, he wouldn’t allow them to be taken away either. They were a family, for better or worse.

(He wasn’t going to lose someone again. Not like before. Not without a fight, a trace-- not without Virgil doing every single thing he could to get them back first.)

“We’ll be fine!” Patton told Roman brightly.

“Yeah, cheer up, Princey,” Virgil added, hooking his satchel over his shoulder, “Worse case scenarios are my thing.” He offered out a folded fist, palm up and Roman dutifully knocked his own knuckles against it, as an upside down fistbump (a signal of friendship in Erefrenian). 

Patton let out a chittering and jumped up to knock his own knuckles with them. And Logan’s left forearms flickered pastel pink from the wrist up to his neck and he begrudgingly added his own to the pile.

“Everyone remembers their part of the plan, correct?” Logan asked, letting his two lower arms finish typing a final sequence into the control panel.

Patton sprung in the air, jumping Virgil’s entire height, and shook his palms. “I’ve got the emergency pods and the armory, using Virgil’s thingies to shut down the access to the lower rooms and blocking off escapes as I make my way to the medic bay!” 

“I’ve got the crew quarters to where I’ll use Virgil’s thingies--”

“Can we not call them thingies?” Virgil grumbled. “They’re just EMPs. Barely enough to take out the door locks. And it's likely they won’t do much of anything if this group has an emergency system reboot in case of an electrical surge. It’ll buy us five minutes, max.”

“--Virgil’s thingies,” Roman repeated with his tail rattling in that way that said he took pleasure in Virgil’s annoyance. “To lock as many of the doors as I can, before travelling to the cell blocks to get my brother and his crew and move them to the medic bay where Patton will have the necessary supplies ready incase of injuries.”

“I will take the Bridge,” Logan said, “and act as the major distraction, as Tenkarie are very rare and it is likely that they will have never encountered nor have preemptive measures against my Lightdancing. Once I have control of the bridge I will cut off the communications to other ships in the area and start inputting the redirection course. Once I have the new coordinates I will send them to Virgil for him to implement.”

“I’ve got the engineering deck,” Virgil said, finally, “To make sure they don’t try to blow us all up with the warp core and whatever. Then I’ll redirect the teleporting course and get us home while the rest of you take out the bad guys. Piece of cake.”

Logan’s neck notches glowed red, “There should be no stopping for cake--.”

“Idiom,” Virgil interrupted quickly, “Human saying. Means it should be easy.” 

Logan hummed musically, which sent a vibration of multicolored lights off his shoulders and down under his clothes. “Ah, interesting. This should indeed then be a piece of cake.” He picked up one of the teleportation bracelets from their charging pads and fixed it on his upper right wrist. “I’ve already added in the coordinates to the watches, so merely wait for my signal and press the button.”

Virgil would be lying if he said he didn’t have a little bit of anxiety over their plan. It was pretty slapshot compared to the things that they had put together before, but Remus’s transmission had been shoddy, even after Roman and his combined efforts to clean it up. It was hard to remember that Remus was every bit a ship captain as Roman was with how he had appeared in the picture dressed in ripped and tattered clothes, oozing green poison from his forearm plates, and bleeding profusely from a wound on his forehead. He had been leaning heavily on the communication panel, gritting his teeth through the pain, but his tail had been dancing in the air behind him in the same motions that Roman’s did when he saw a new sword to add to his collection. 

Remus had invoked the Oath of Brothers, spit up blood on the console, and then relayed as much information as he could about the attacking ship. They were lucky, in that way. Most of the Pol’tur ships followed the same base model, which meant that the Bridge was always going to be at the bottom, the engines would be at the top and the engine core center would be between them.

If it was possible Virgil was sure they all would have wanted more time to make a better plan, but they all knew that Pol’turs loved to work quickly. They had already lost three days chasing after the ship, and in that time, Pol’turs could cut apart fifty Reytins like Patton.

They were working mostly on the assumption that the Pol’turs would save Remus for near last, and they were going to be absolutely fucked if they had chosen to chop up the other Erefren first.

In addition, their plan had Virgil avoiding most of the fighting. well, as much as he could while being on an enemy ship. Virgil himself wasn’t sure how he would do in a lot of combat, but they had seen what happened when one of the others were in danger (when Logan’s glasses had broken, when the space pirates had almost shot Patton through both his hearts, when the spikes had been pulled from Roman’s spine by the Quitans before the new ones had grown in--). He could fight, and he could fight well, but the cost was a little bit of Virgil’s sanity and his ability to sleep through the night.

Patton plucked his own teleportation watch from the pad and hooked it on, before offering Virgil his. Well it wasn’t really his, the same way that the red one wasn’t Roman’s and Patton didn’t own the blue one. They were all Logan’s pet projects, but he had tailored them to their favorite colors. It felt a bit like coming home when Virgil clicked the locking mechanism into place and the screen lit up with the digital alien symbols.

“I shall see you all soon,” Logan said matter-of-factly, as if he couldn’t see all the ways that their plan could go wrong. Then with barely more than a breath he clicked the activation button and his form flickered out of existence.

Roman made a nervous noise with the back of his throat, which ended up sounding a bit like the first bars of a Disney song Virgil had forgotten. Virgil gently tapped his tail with the toe of his boot, avoiding the glisten poison spikes. Roman startled just enough to laugh.

“Its funny, you know?” He said, glancing towards Virgil. “A year ago Remus told me he had taken in a Deathworlder, and I thought he was crazy. A Deathworlder? But now that I know you guys I can’t believe I didn’t get my own sooner.”

“Remus has a human on his crew?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, I wonder if you know each other!” Patton added.

Virgil bit back his original comment, and let the weight settle in his stomach. If Remus had a human in his crew there was even more of a chance that Remus was dead, because the Pol’turs had chosen to save the mysterious human for last.

“Earth is a big place,” Virgil said instead. “Like really big. They’d probably be from like Russia or something.”

At the blank stares he got, Virgil tried rewording, “We probably never have met before. Or speak the same language.”

"There's more than one human language?"

Virgil breathed through his nose, warding off a memory of rolling Rs and failed pop quizzes. "Yeah," he said, "Humans can't agree on anything."

Roman thoughtfully crossed his arms, but Patton made a chittering again and bounced, “Oh well! Now you guys are gonna meet! All the way out in space! How cool is that?!”

Virgil hid a smile in his shoulder. Trust the Reytin to find the bright side to everything. 

Roman looked like he had more questions (questions that Virgil wasn't exactly enthusiastic to answer; Earth was a sore topic for him) but mercifully each of their watches let out several musical bars from Patton’s favorite song. The alien shook his palms one last time, beaming at each of them.

“Oh this is gonna be so much fun, guys!” He said right before pressing the activation button and disappearing.

“I’m so going to kill Remus for this,” Roman grumbled, one hand on his sword hilt.

And, really, Virgil agreed with him on that. Tossing Remus into the airlock and ejecting him directly into the void sounded like an excellent plan for when they got back to their ship alive and whole and safe.

“Let’s do this,” Virgil said and jabbed his thumb into the activation button.

***

Predictably, their flimsy plan fell apart within seconds of them appearing on the ship. Starting with, exactly, Virgil did not appear in or near the engineering deck. Instead he had landed approximately two feet above a box in the Cargo hold of the Pol’turian ship, which likely meant he was somewhere left of where he needed to be.

It also meant that the Pol’turs in the Cargo Hold had a grand view of his body blitzing into existence, landing on a crate, and then tumbling off it with a lot of English cursing. It was a mere matter of luck that Virgil was able to roll his body to the side just before the first BZZZTTRRRT of their blasters went off.

(There was an actual name for the guns that most aliens used, and Virgil was pretty sure that it started with a hard K sound but he had never been able to remember it. He stuck to calling them blasters in his head, and hoped somewhere back on Earth George Lucas was proud of himself.)

The Polyfurnish of the crate hissed and sizzled as it took the brunt of the attack meant to vaporize Virgil, and the human hissed another curse as his hands dug through his satchel.

One of the Pol’turs-- the deep purple one although Virgil hadn’t truly been able to catch sight of how many there were-- shouted something in its language. Probably something along the lines of “Stop”, “Surrender”, or “Kill him”. Virgil wasn’t exactly a fan of any of those options.

He had heard them before-- too many times. The hundreds of variations of the terms spat and yelled and cheered down at him, and he scrambled away from the edge of a sword, as he tasted nothing by dust and dirt as he dodged another attempt on his life, as he desperately backed away from an opponent who couldn’t understand that Virgil didn’t want to fight, please, stop, please, I’m sorry, please I don’t want to hurt anyone--

Virgil curled up as another gold blast ricocheted off the top of the crate he was cowering behind. The air was cooler here, he told himself, the air was cooler and the floor was slicker, and he was surrounded by shelves of goods. He was not in a colosseum and he was not in a fighting ring and he was not alone.

He had the others to regroup with and no time to panic over the past here and now. Virgil gritted his teeth, remembering the feel of Roman’s knuckles bumping his, the sight of Logan’s excited lights, the sound of Patton’s laughter, and then his hand wrapped around the homemade smoke bombs in his satchel.

He yanked the pins from their sockets, wound back, and launched them over the crate into the mass of where all the shooting was coming from. Almost immediately the shoots veered off course, and the cavernous room echoed with high pitched screams. Virgil ripped his turtleneck up and over his nose and then he grabbed the edges of the nearest shelf and hoisted himself to a higher area, out of the range of the low hanging gas.

It was a pale red, near pink thing: a concoction formed by Logan out of Roman’s poison that had taken them literal years to perfect. Virgil was mostly immune to it, the same way he was mostly immune to most poisons that horrified the other species. Inhaling it made his head dizzy and his limbs a little numb, which was just unpleasant enough that he tried to avoid inhaling anything when he had the chance. Other species though...they weren’t so lucky. According to Logan, inhaling it allowed it directly into the bloodstream where it would swiftly ignite all the pain sensors in the body and could make one feel like they were being stabbed everywhere at once.

(He knew this, Logan admitted, because it had taken him many times to get it right. His scientific journals recorded experiments #1 through #357 as “unpleasant” and “ill-advised” and Virgil had nearly throttled him when he discovered that Logan had used himself as a test subject.)

Using the shelves he boosted himself another level until his head was parallel with a box of what he thought were floating Welsor hearts, before he scanned the ground under him. There were three Pol’turs on the ground writhing in pain, blasters discarded, and pale smoke floating ominous above them. Their usually languid tentacles flopped up and down on the floor like a bunch of fish out of water.

The glass container next to his hip exploded, missing him by mere millimeters. Virgil cursed as he scrambled up another level, eyes darting around to find where the hell that shot came from. His armor took much of the hit but it was sizzling with heat in a way that was decidedly not-comforting. 

“Up there!” Something shouted.

Another blast missed his ear and a container of Sblorp fangs shattered and sent the teeth spilling to the floor. Virgil kicked his feet through the lower shelf pushing through a crate and a dozen jars of various indeterminable body parts and squeezed his body in the place of them. The crashes on the next isle were rather satisfying.

He ripped the pin from another smoke bomb with his teeth, and felt his tongue buzz slightly as the proximity to the toxin before he launched it out at the direction of the other shooter. There was another scream and Virgil took the time to roll into the next isle and leap back down to the floor. 

The gas still hadn’t cleared around the original three Pol’turs, but they had gone unconscious from the pain, with a few seizing tentacles here and there. Virgil would feel bad about it, really he would, but the last time he had been in a room of Pol’turs they had been discussing how nicely his skull would look in the centerpieces of their tables and tried to buy him for 270 griot.

 His skin tingled the same way he thought it might right before he would get struck by lightning back on Earth. Virgil ignored the feeling in honor of sliding across the polished flooring to the nearest fallen mercenary and hoisting it up as a shield, while he grabbed its blaster from the floor. 

Two blaster shots sunk into his Pol’tur shield and it dissolved into ashes in his hand. Virgil cursed again, raising the blaster with his other arm and using his ash coated hand to slide the trigger, because this blaster-- like all other blasters-- were not made for human anatomy at all.

The last Pol’tur was a sickly orange color, like some type of invasive evil moss with long arms. Virgil grinned as the blast exploded forth in a dangerous golden ray of death. The heat singed the edge of his fingers, although the mild numbness prevented him from feeling much more than the slight pressure he assumed was warmth. The shot went wide, and the kickback sent Virgil to the floor, but it was enough. 

The blast shattered though several items on the shelves and Pol’tur scrambled back to avoid the avalanche of perishables-- scrambled back right into the pink fog of Virgil's last smoke bomb. It was screaming before Virgil could even sit back up.

Virgil inhaled heavily, sucking as much oxygen into his lung as he could afford and breathing it out through his nose. He squeezed his hand around the handle of the blaster, and tried to pretend like his skin didn’t feel too small. His empty hand-- the one that had held the Pol’tur-- was trembling, shaking, burning.

“I just think you’d be better off spending time with someone else.”

“You’re not fooling anyone, Storm!”

“What was it like, Virgil? When you killed him?” 

His hand was covered in soot, tingling from nerves and poison and the heat of the blast that had annihilated all evidence of the living, breathing alien.  

“It wasn’t….” Virgil breathed heavily, “I didn’t….” 

He sucked in another breath, two, three, seven breaths, until he could feel the masquerading gas in the air turn his face numb, and the voices in his head went back to threatening buzzing. 

“Fuck,” he whispered softly, and pushed himself off the ground.

Virgil took the blaster with him, and made a private note to ask Logan to look into building communicators for times like this. There were an untold number of things that could have happened to get them mixed up: the Pol’tur ship could have barrel rolled at the time of, or before the final teleportation codes were in, it could have slowed or sped up, it could have marginally changed direction. All of which just proved that only stupid people like Virgil, Logan, Roman, and Patton would dare attempt a teleportation on a moving ship. Virgil tried not to think about what would have happened if his coordinates had been a little lower in space, a little closer to the box he had landed on, a little more personal and prompted whatever was inside of the crate merged with whatever was inside of Virgil.

It took him a moment to realize that the lights had started flashing an interspaced red and yellow series: a visual alarm to the crew.

“Fun,” Virgil mumbled, hugging the wall next to the exit, with one last breath, and then punching the exit lock. The hydraulics took a moment to work (probably due to excessive use of the doors and wear on the components), but it opened to reveal a brightly lit, completely empty hallway. Virgil raised his blaster, checking both the direction before he stepped out and punched the door closed behind him. Then he lined the blaster up with the door controls and fired.

You know, for safekeeping. The last thing they needed was the Pol’turs inside to wake up with a vengeance and come after them before they were off the ship. 

(If he was still on the ship by the time that they woke up, Virgil was pretty sure he’d be dead. But hey! Surprising things happened all the time when one lived in fucking space.)

The floor was springy under his feet, some mixture of carpet and flooring that Virgil didn’t know the name of, just that it was weird and he didn’t want it in his Sims House. He could feel the fibers through his shoes as he hugged the wall and sprinted towards where he thought the Engine room would be located.

He could hear the sound of more blasters echoing from the depths of the ship, some yelling, some cursing: all lovely signs that Roman was doing his best to be the most annoying moving target anyone had ever seen. Virgil found his lips curling into a smile as he faintly at the noise.

“Oh come on!” Roman taunted, “I’m a big guy! Surely, you can’t be that bad of a shot!” 

There was deafening BZZZTTRRRT, a clamorous crashing, and an ear splitting series of screams. 

Virgil flung around the last corner but in time to see Roman stand up from a kneeling position over a clump of bodies that had probably been more alive a few seconds ago. There were blaster marks all along the walls, and several had blown through a wall revealing a cozy living quarters with giant sword slices in the beddings and floors.

“Oooh, so close!” Roman said with faux-empathy bordering on smugness which at this point should just be his default to the mass. “Maybe next time you’ll think more before attacking an Erefren!” He spun at the sight of Virgil coming around the corner, pointing his sword and then shaking his tail in a greeting.

“Roman,” Virgil sighed in relief. “You okay?”

“Virgil! It seems like I got a little off course! Checked the prisoner cells but they were all empty. And then a few new friends of mine had some fun things to say about Remus.” Roman looked feral as he bared his teeth. He jabbed his sword down into the corpses and something wheezed painfully. Virgil didn’t look at them, didn’t look at them, didn’t look.

“Do you know where he is?” Virgil asked.

Roman used the edge of his shirt to wipe the blue grey blood from the tip of his blade. “Not yet, but if you give me a few more minutes with these lovely fellows of mine I will!”

It did not take “a few more minutes”. Roman hoisted on still gasping Pol’tur up by its gangly neck and it had already started blubbering in a mix of languages. Virgil watched the halls while Roman took notes from their new best friend. 

Half a minute later Roman dropped their captive to the ground with a fire in his eyes and turned to Virgil with his bone plates clinking, and dripping poison.

“He was on the Bridge.” He said, coldly, “He didn’t know if they had finished with Re or not, but he was up there”

“Okay,” Virgil said.

“The rest of his crew, Virgil,” Roman growled, squeezing the hilt of his sword. “His friends! His family!” He stared down at the shaking cowering alien life. “They..!”

The back of Virgil’s throat tasted like his stomach acids. 

Remus had tried to have them killed, he had sold them out, he had been a thorn in their side since before Virgil had become part of the team.  Between the harrowing escapes and the near deaths, it wasn’t hard for Virgil to absolutely despise him.

But his crew? His entire crew? In three days? 

Just….gone?

Condensed into the memories with a snap, removed from the future in just a blink. The initial attack on them must have been bad and bloody for Remus to call them for help, a surprise ambush type of attack. And for all Virgil hated Remus, he couldn’t help but wonder if Remus had had plans with them-- had they been discussing visiting the bars on L3-012 or shopping on K5-369 or relaxing on C2-276? Had Remus made plans with the people he had been close with and now those plans were meaningless because the people he had made them with were dead and gone and never coming ba--

The Pol’tur on the ground giggled something hysterically, one last brave blubbering comment, and Roman took the toe of his boot right into the creature's soft flesh. Its tentacles flopped on the floor with a plu-plat. 

“Virgil,” Roman hissed, without looking up.

Virgil blinked and swallowed hard, “Right, Engines,” He said, turning to go back to his task but Roman reached out and hooked his claws on Virgil’s shoulder, stopping him there.

“Change of plans,” The Erefren said, “You’re coming with me to the Bridge to get my idiot brother.”

Logan was on the Bridge too. Roman didn’t need to have Virgil come with him-- in fact, Virgil shouldn’t come with him. Too many people, too close to fighting, and Virgil couldn’t wipe away the feeling of grit on his hand. 

His entire crew. In just three days. 

Roman didn’t mention anything about how Virgil was shaking from head to toe, and Virgil didn’t point out the way that Roman’s voice wobbled with silent pleading. He just nodded at the alien and let him lead the way towards where they suspected the examination rooms would be.

Two heads are better than one, and all that. 

It was less of a guessing game when the halls and doors were labeled and Roman was very fluent in Pol’turian. Roman was quick to move, quick to sort his way through the poorly designed areas, quick to move. Virgil kept the pace as well as he could, watching the halls behind them for stragglers attempting to get the drop on them and Roman cut down anything in his way. 

Blue grey blood splattered across their shoes, filling the air with a sickly sour smell that made Virgil want to gag. He settled for squeezing the handle of the balster and counting out his breaths again as he avoided Roman’s tail striking forward at astonishing speeds and squeezing his eyes shut when he thought he saw a pair of mismatching eyes in the reflection of the lights.

There was no way for them to go quietly through the halls, not with Roman stomping hard enough to shake the entire ship and his poison attacks turning every enemy into a screaming, begging, crying puddle.

“Roman!” Virgil yelled as heat billowed around them, and the taller alien stumbled back, hit the wall and fell to his knees.

Virgil snarled at one of the mercenaries and fired three times at them. Between the near misses and the scattered yells of “Deathworlder!” they retreated into nearby rooms and locked the doors after them. Virgil tore one of his EMPs from Roman’s belt and sent it flying down the hall to keep them trapped there for a little bit, before he turned to check on Roman.

His shirt was smoldering, and one of his bone plates were cracked, but he just looked out of breath and angry, “I’m fine.” His claws scraped the floor as he stood up. “Armor took most of it.”

Virgil checked the hallway again. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, like a cancerous lump that he couldn’t get rid off no matter how much he swallowed or coughed. It pulsed to a beat that he wasn’t sure he could replicate: too fast and yet the space between each thud had felt like forever. It was so loud he almost was afraid of missing the sounds of another attack.

(An attack where Roman’s armor wouldn’t be enough, where he wouldn’t be able to wheeze off the pain, where he’d hit the wall then the floor and he wouldn’t be able to get back up and it would be all Virgil’s faul--)

Roman’s claws pricked his shoulder as he looked. With a slightly trembling hand he pointed in the direction they needed to go and Virgil did his best not to let his churning stomach get the better of him. 

“Virgil! Roman!” They both spun at the voice; Roman in particular struck out with his tail, and just narrowly avoided impaling Logan’s crystalline chest on spikes.

Logan didn’t even flinch, not that he could really. His lower arms spread with palms out to signal innocence but his upper arms were busy holding up the profusely bleeding Erefren that was leaning mostly on him. Logan’s arms were flickering with so many colors Virgil couldn’t keep track of them. (Vaguely it reminded him of a disco ball, of party lights, of something so Earthly it would have made him laugh if he wasn’t so busy trying to hold back a panic attack.)

“Remus,” Roman breathed, reaching forward, impossibly gently.

“Ro’mn,” Remus slurred, shifting his head ever so slightly. His blood was pooling down the left half of his face, his eyes were partially glassy, but other than that he looked remarkably like Roman: they shared the same face with a strong jawline, the same dark dark hair curled the same way, and the same long tail with dozens of bone plates. The only real difference was the tinge of white in Remus’s hair, the oozing green poison leaking from his bone structures in place of Roman’s red, and the gaps where someone had torn out his bone plates before Remus had grown new ones in.

“Didn’t think…” Remus’s head lulled to the side, showing off the smile he was desperately forcing on his face, “didn’t think… you were comin’.”

“I’m throwing you out of the airlock,” Roman told him.

“‘ounds fun…” Remus murmured, dropping his head back to Logan’s back, and wincing like each inhale was a battle.

“They had him on the Bridge,” Logan explained, “When I arrived, they were attempting to retrieve information from him through barbaric methods. I may have gone overboard with my retaliation.” Logan shifted Remus’s weight slightly, drawing a groan from the other alien. “I am by no means a medical examiner, however, I suspect that he may have several rib fractures, and a few wounds that need to be looked at and well bandaged.”

Roman nodded, although Virgil didn’t think he actually heard anything. Virgil was an only child himself, but he could guess that even if Remus had been the biggest asshole in the entire cosmos seeing him reduced to this weakened, bloody, broken mess was terrifying. From the stories of their childhood, Virgil had always guessed that Remus was as lively as they came. But this version of him couldn’t even stand by himself.

Roman’s head shot up, “Patton. Where’s Pat? We’ve got Re, now its time to get out of here and get him help--”

“NO!” Remus shouted lunging forward suddenly. Logan stumbled at the change of weight, nearly dropping him to the floor, but it seemed that the movement had taken most of the rest of his power. “I can’t… They have…Jay… I prom’sed…”

Virgil checked the hall for enemies because that was easier than looking at the desperation in Remus’s eyes. His voice was scratched and grated like a glass under the assault of a diamond. He coughed so violently it dragged out a glob of purple blood from him.

“Remus, you can’t--” Roman said.

And despite Remus looking like a simple breeze could end his life, he grabbed at Roman’s outreached arm, above the danger of the forearm spikes.“Me and... my crew,” Remus coughed, weakly. “The oath…” 

“I talked to one of those bastards,” Roman countered, forcibly soft, forcibly strained. “Re, your crew is--”

“Ro…” He pleaded, “Please.” 

Roman made a noise like something in him was physically shredding him apart. Virgil suspected it was his hero complex, which usually manifested the urge to save every living being he saw. Lost wasn’t a good look on Erefrens, Virgil decided right then and there. Hopeless and terrified and sad-- all of them made Roman look wrong. 

“What's wrong, Vee? You look like you want to say something.”

“....It’s nothing.”

“What? Not even a joke? Come on, I know you--”

“Let it go, Ekans.”

Virgil blinked away the unwanted memory.  He sighed out of his nose and reached up to hook on the back of Roman’s armor collar. “Let’s go.” 

“Virge…” Roman murmured.

“If we don’t do this now,” Virgil said, “We’ll regret it.” 

He didn’t wait for the others to catch up with his train of thought, or maybe he wasn’t waiting for his own train of thought to catch up. He tugged Roman back a step and nodded at Logan. “We’ll double back and find any crew that’s left and get Pat. You take Remus to the engine room room and get the codes ready for us to get back.”

“For real?” Roman said.

“Understood, Virgil.” Logan nodded back. He glowed purple softly, around his neck notches as if he had expected this after all. “Don’t be late.”

“Time is a construct.” 

Remus laughed like he was choking on a handful of rusted nails. Roman tensed at the sound, gritted his teeth, and then tightened his grip on his sword. Resolved hardened in his eyes, burning through the lost expression like a lighthouse in the middle of a storm. 

“Right,” Roman said, “Let’s go.” Roman grabbed Virgil’s hand and took off in the direction they had come from. “Any guesses where the guy’s gonna be? Or where Pat is?”

Virgil felt his stomach churn. He closed his eyes and let Roman pull him along as he tried to remember the 3D diagram of a Pol’turian ship. “Well if I was in cargo, you landed near the prisoner blocks, while Logan was on the Bridge...that means that while Logan was doing the calculations the ship probably did a half roll on the longitudinal axis, which he couldn’t have accounted for. Since this ship appears to be the same as the other makes and models of Pol’turs that means that Patton probably ended up in the medical bay. And if I had to guess that’s where any last member of the crew would be as well. Take this left here.”

Roman nearly stumbled over his own feet. “How in the name of the Great God, Disney-- have you memorized all the maps?”

Virgil furrowed his brow at the alien, “Haven’t you?”

“Well yes, but--” Roman’s face flushed with a bit of his purple blood, “Nevermind, Deathworlder.”

The medical wing of the ship was easy to get to compared to the other places. It seemed that either the Pol’turs had wisened up for an ambush or they had fled when they had the chance. Either way they only came across two mercenaries and Roman made quick work of them. 

He knew they had arrived by the buzzing of air, the tingle of his skin that made him feel too big and too small at the same time. The walls were bare and there were four rooms lining them, each with a number engraved in the door and the lock panels glowing red with what Virgil guessed was the Pol’turian symbol for “closed” or “locked” or “dangerous chemical inside do not release”. Virgil reached for another EMP, but his bag was empty. There were scents around them, faint scents: something metallic, something sour, something clean, something, something, something--

Something that smelled like blood. So many different kinds of blood.

Virgil swallowed hard. He hadn’t known a lot about Remus’s crew, but he knew that Remus had had a dozen different species with him. A dozen different species that hadn’t survived the encounter. 

“Pat!” Roman yelled down the hall, brandishing his sword. 

“Roman! In here! Help--” A voice that was most definitely Patton’s yelled out.

Roman didn’t hesitate. He lunged forward to the room the voice had come from, almost feverishly, desperately, and he didn’t bother with the password. With a swift violent motion he jabbed his sword into the locking panel and then pried open the door with his claws and his hands.

Virgil thought that it would have been one hell of a sight: if he had been strapped to a table, a knife jab from death’s door, begging, pleading, crying and knowing that all his friends had been taking to the room before him and had not come back out intact? If Virgil had been bleeding out and clinging to the slippery bit of hope that was a miracle, and then he saw his captain’s brother literally prying open the door with his bare claws to get to him---

Virgil thought it would have been pretty awesome.

Not something that should have warranted a knife being thrown at them.

Roman let out a curse in Erefren and it was one of those don’t-repeat-this-don’t-tell-Patton curses that Roman specialized in. He staggered back, clutching his shoulder where the knife had sunk in all the way to the hilt, Jesus! What the hell! Virgil kicked the rest of the door open, dropping low as scalpel skirted by where his body should have been, and then he sprung back up with his blaster set on that asshole. 

Except.

“Virgil!”

The room was small, almost claustrophobically small. Just standing in the doorway made Virgil’s breath shorten (his cell back at the Welsor fighting rings had been bigger than this--). And it was lit with cold harsh white light, nearly blinding, if it weren’t for the greyed walls and the splashes-- the splashes of faded pink and blue and other colors that Virgil recognized all too well as blood. The table took up most of the room, leaving just enough space for a Pol’tur to sweep around and a small hand tray of twisted instruments.

In fact there was a Pol’tur on the ground right there. Limp and unmoving with an eye scoop so far in it’s skull there was no way it was coming back out.

But Virgil wasn’t staring at the body. 

“Don’t you get tired of being everyone’s favorite person?” 

It couldn’t--

“Just shut up and help me with these conjugations, will you?”

This wasn’t--

“What do you mean no one can find him?” 

He hadn’t--

The detective had looked at him with such a pity that it had made Virgil’s entire body flinch. He squeezed the plastic cup in his hand, crushing it, letting the fragments cut into his skin. He couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything. The man was still talking to him, talking softly like anything louder would shatter the fragile reality around them, talking so quietly Virgil couldn’t hear a single thing he was saying at all over the sound of his own heartbeat.

“You’re wrong,” Virgil had croaked. “He’s not dead.”

But he had been.

He had been for nearly two years now.

And everyone had thought that Virgil had done something to him, had thought that Virgil was the last to see him, had thought that his dark clothes and his eye shadow and a few sneers in the hall had meant that Virgil was suddenly capable of killing Janus Ekans in cold blood.

Except.

Except that Virgil was staring at Janus --fucking-- Ekans right now.

It was unmistakable, the shape of his face, the curve of his lips, the slimness of his nose. The wispy brown hair that turned golden under the summer sun, the mischievous eyes danced with different colors, the flick of his tongue that moved so freely when he let it, the tattoo of two theater masks on his chest that no one was supposed to know about-- Virgil could have spent days naming things, committing them to memory, staring in disbelief at him. This was the same boy who had sat next to him in Spanish. The same Janus who had been convinced he was so completely untouchable up until Virgil had dragged him off his stupid, golden pedastal.

It was the same Janus who was currently wrapped around Patton like a boa constrictor cutting off the alien’s ability to move and had a knife perched ever so closely to one of Patton’s eyes.

“What the hell?” Virgil had said because-- because--

Because Virgil had asked Logan once if there was a race that could pick through minds, pull memories from heads, change the way someone thought. And Logan didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t lie to him. There were no alien types that could break into a mind and drag illusions into reality and there were no races that could bring ghosts back from oblivion.

“Virgil,” Janus said barely a whisper, barely enough to be heard, barely enough to mean anything. The knife was tilting in his hand, tipped like he wasn’t sure what he was saying, wasn’t sure what he was doing. “What-?”

Partially drugged, Virgil thought with absolutely no room to breathe in his chest. Partially drugged, holding a knife to Patton’s weakest point, and alive. 

“Janus,” Virgil said, ”Put down the knife.”

He’s still partially strapped to the table, bound by his left ankle and sporting a lovely series of cuts on the side of his face as if someone had started carving scales into his cheek for funsies. If Virgil had to hazard a guess he would have assumed that Patton had dropped in literally as the Pol’tur was taking Janus-- Janus, alive, breathing, real-- apart one centimeter at a time, then proceeded to win a very cramped fight in the room. Virgil would even say that Patton had started taking the restraints off of Janus when he had gained enough consciousness to realize that he needed to defend himself. 

(The fact that they found something capable of drugging a human, a Deathworlder, was concerning, so concerning, terrifying--)

“Virgil….You are not real,” Janus said, slowly, blood dripping down his neck. “You cannot be real. None of this is real.”

“I’m the one thats not real?” Virgil muttered. “You’re the one that was declared dead.”

He laughed. Virgil’s stomach swooped.

For a second, a brief fleeting second, he could have sworn that this was all a dream. A fever dream in which Virgil would blink himself awake from and find himself on the floor of Janus’s stupid, giant ass room surrounded by a dozen cans of off-brand energy drinks, a half eaten bucket of popcorn, and the credits for a horror movie scrolling on the screen. For a second it felt like he would roll over and bump elbows with Janus who had woken up an hour previously to study for that stupid Spanish test that wasn’t until Monday. For a second it was like he was seventeen again and his biggest worry was figuring out if it was too weird to ask to run his hands through Janus’s silky hair.

“Of course, I was declared fucking dead!” Janus said, like it was the obvious thing that would happen, “I am dead. I have to be, because there’s no other way that the kid who's afraid of going outside made it this far into space.” 

“Janus, put down the knife.” Virgil took a step forward, a half a step, but Janus just squeezed the knife tighter. 

“Why don’t you come and make me?” Janus smiled at him, smiled, smiled, smiled.

Smiled like he knew that this was a dream and nothing he did was going to matter. Smiled like they were back on that balcony of his room with their feet swinging between the bars and two Seagrams gone each and they were going to get in a shit ton of trouble for it. Smiled like he had never been dead and Virgil hadn’t had to bury the thought of him.

Patton made a noise, a small whimper, and Virgil felt it in his chest. The near silence of the room, the soft muted buzzing in his head, the fuzzy dream like quality of reality-- it all shattered at the sound. Shattered like glass, like a mirror, like the concept of “forever”. It shattered and Virgil was suddenly hyperaware of how small the room was, how cold he felt, how metallic the air smelt. 

“Hm, just as I thought,” Janus said softly, smile dropping into something wistful and disappointed, “I really am just seeing thin--”

Virgil didn’t give him the satisfaction of finishing; he surged forward, throwing his blaster to the side, and using his left hand to catch Janus’s wrist millimeters from putting that knife in Patton. He twisted his hand, pining his fingers into the soft flesh of Janus’s nerves until his hand jerked open on reflex and the knife fell into the open air.

Janus froze, inhaling so sharply Virgil was certain that he took all the oxygen in the room away. 

He was warm, Virgil realized absently. He was warm and had a pulse and for some reason both those things made Virgil’s chest hurt. His skin was soft and his breath was sweet and Virgil had gotten punch-drunk stupid on less.

Which probably explained why, how, when, Virgil’s lips ended up on his, pressing firmly, and tasting like something from a past Virgil had thought he had given up on. Virgil had always been stupid, but this was another level of stupid. This was incredibly dumb, unbelievable, ridiculous. 

Janus’s mouth was on his, and Virgil’s hand was tipping his head back ever so slightly, and Patton had managed to scramble out of Janus’s absolutely shocked slacked hold.

“You’ve always been so annoying,” Virgil gasped between breaths, “Always thinking you know everything. Have you ever considered you might be wrong before?”

“You’re--” Janus whispered, “Real? For real?” Then, “Don’t you know what the fuck consent is?”

“Fuck you,” Virgil told him.

Janus grabbed him by his collar and yanked him forward again. “Since you asked so nicely.” 

“Don’t be cute.” 

“Don’t be coy.” Janus shot back because he was still the same asshole who needed to have the last word. He bit at Virgil’s lip, and then pulled back to show off a wolfish grin. 

Virgil was stuck somewhere between wanting to smash his stupid smug face in and wanting to kiss him until he lost all sense of direction. Janus was like that, Virgil remembered suddenly, even when they were kids, when Janus was trapped on that pedestal everyone had put him on, when Virgil couldn’t have cared less about him and somehow had ended up unsure how to live without him.

“Not that this isn’t the fucking cutest shit I’ve ever seen--“ A voice behind them called and Virgil stiffened.

“Language!” Patton interrupted, as Roman grunted through the pain of still having a surgical knife in his shoulder. 

“--But can the two of you save your weird-ass….human…. greeting custom…. for some other time?” The Erefren snarled with one hand clutching the hilt and then yanking it out with a wheeze that Virgil felt physically. His purple blood spouted out from the wound but Roman didn’t seem to care, beyond tossing the knife to the floor.

“That’s an Erefren,” Janus said because he’s just as good at stating the obvious as he is at kissing. “That is not Remus.”

Roman snapped out something in his native tongue, which by the stress on the syllables was probably not nice and definitely not Patton approved. The Reytin even puffed up, shaking his head in a way that normally prefaced an hour long lecture on manners and the reintroduction of a swear jar. 

However, Janus just laughed that pretty stupid little laugh of his but when he opened his mouth the words were all forgein. It took Virgil a moment to catch up, a moment to realize that he hadn’t even fumbled, that Janus had actually spoken Erefrenian and it had been grammatically correct enough that stunned Roman for a whole half second. 

“You speak Erefrenian?” Virgil asked.

Janus blinked up at him a smug looking expression on his face. “You don’t?”

Virgil had a good response, he did. It was a response that had been some-three years in the making and Virgil had been ready to wipe that prideful expression of his face. But before they could do anything the entire ship lurched to the side, taking gravity with it. Virgil let out a yelp and grabbed for Janus and clung for stability.

(Space had done wonders for Janus’s abs, Virgil thought distantly.)

Roman slammed into the door frame and stumbled out into the hall, with all the grace a drunken ballerina, and cursed again when Patton landed on top of him.

“That’s our cue to leave!” Roman growled.

“Ya think?” Virgil shot back. He lunged for the end of the table where Janus’s bare foot was still strapped to the table. He didn’t look at the rusted color on the buckle, at the stiffness of the leather strap, at the rawness of Janus’s skin where it was biting into his ankle. He didn’t, didn’t, didn’t--

His hands shook. Janus reached over and clasped his forearms, the fabric of his tunic, him. 

“Virgil--” Janus said, softly, unsuredly, with no trace of that previous pompous expression on him. “I--”

There was blood on his face, trailing all the way down his neck in scarlet silvers from the cuts. His hair was sweat matted, pressed and tousled in a way that made Virgil feel a certain rage in his chest, like someone had been running fingers through his curls while they sliced him apart. His eyes were still slightly glassy from whatever they put in him. There was an unspoken question on his lips, in his eyes, through his fingers as he clung to Virgil. 

“I’ve got you,” Virgil told him, practically scooping him up. Janus heaved a breath as his feet touched the ground again. “Us humans have to stick together, right?” 

Janus Ekans was alive. 

It sounded surreal even in the moment, because Virgil had been mourning him since they were seventeen and stupid. Everyone else had moved on, had buried his memory, had forgotten about him. But he was not dead, and Virgil had not killed him. Somehow he had ended up in space, ended up with Remus, ended up here on this ship in the several billions of lightyears from anything they had known previously.

There would be no more late-nights-turned-early-mornings study sessions, no more sneaking over the gated walls of the Ekans mansion, and no more scaling the lattice underneath Janus’s balcony. They were never going to go stargazing on the hills outside of town again, never going to ruthlessly text each other under the desk during History class, never going to skip prom together to go trespassing in the woods somewhere to find Mothman. He was never going to butcher Spanish past participles in the cozy corner of the school library after hours and he was never going to get to listen to Janus brag about obtaining his Seal of Biliteracy finally despite his proficiency in about three languages. 

Janus had disappeared right before senior year. And Virgil, who had been the biggest thorn in his side, the biggest instigator of all their fights, the wild and unruly punk kid that lived in detention-- Virgil had stopped looking for him. Because everyone said he had died. Because everyone said that Virgil had killed him.

But Virgil could feel Janus’s pulse, could hear his heartbeat, could see the way his chest moved as they stumbled out of the room. 

Part of him was afraid that if he let go now, later, ever, Janus would disappear again. Shimmer and fade like a mirage in the desert.

“Careful Virgil,” Janus said breathily. “I almost think you missed me.”

“I hate you so much,” Virgil said back, as Roman and Patton led the way toward the engine rooms by blade and alien jujutsu and well-placed pun.

“Somehow, I don’t think you mean that, at all.” Janus said, grinning.

And then he closed that last little bit of space between them again.

[Next installment: Stars Die (But We Don’t)]

[aylinaliens]

May I perhaps ask if you could write something about RamKing‘s first kiss?

thank you so much for sending in this prompt, it gave me an excuse to continue my soft!ramking agenda. i just really love these characters and had a lot of fun writing this. you can also read it on ao3

summary:  He knew that he should reassure Ram, tell him that he deserved the whole entire world, but that’s unfortunately not what he did. “I think I’m in love with the sound of your voice.” King whispered. “Is that weird.” Ram didn’t reply—at least not verbally. He just leaned forward and pressed his lips to King’s forehead. King liked to think that was Ram talk for yes it is, but am I too. Or it was Ram talk for you are the weirdest person I have ever met, here’s a pity kiss. He hoped it was the first one.

just kiss me slow, your heart is all i own (ram/king)

This was definitely not how King envisioned his first kiss with Ram. He was fully planning on taking his sweet time leaning in while maintaining eye contact. Maybe he would hold Ram by his face and place the softest kiss on his lips. Either way he wanted it to be slow and deliberate so that if Ram changed his mind he had enough time to pull back. But rather than doing that he ended up shoving Ram against his door as he fisted both hands in his hair. He practically yanked the poor boy flush against his body and…

...ended up roughly slamming his forehead against Ram's in his haste to kiss him. It was mortifying on so many levels and through a haze of pain he could hear Ram laughing. He was laughing. Any other time it would be like music to King's ears but now it was only a painful reminder of how idiotic he was. How the hell did he manage to miss his lips? Sure, he was incredibly drunk so his spatial awareness was a bit off but that was no excuse for whatever that was. 

This was the opposite of sweet and gentle; it was needy and messy. But it was all Ram's fault. He was the one who dragged him from that bar and let his feelings slip out. Rather than typing them out on his phone he spoke them: I like you. Those three words now had King dragging Ram by his wrist back to his apartment. To talk. He swore it was to talk and King finally, thankfully, admitted his feelings too. Just as Ram was about to open the door and leave (because both were too drunk and needed time to process everything) King's phone buzzed in his pocket.

Cool Boy:

You can kiss me goodnight

Cool Boy:

If you want

God, King really did. So he shoved Ram against the door more rougher than he originally intended. He was simply too intoxicated on both alcohol and happiness that he ended up misjudging the distance.

Groaning in pain and embarrassment, King let his head fall on his boyfriend's shoulder (he couldn't believe he was allowed to call him that) and wished he could disappear. "You can break up with me if you want." His voice was muffled by the fabric of Ram’s shirt. Perhaps Ram should considering he couldn't even kiss him properly. Out of all his friends he was known as the smooth one yet he managed to royally fuck up their first kiss. Damn alcohol. Damn the fact that Ram was slowly turning him to a bigger dork than he already was. 

King wasn't expecting a reply so when Ram spoke he was genuinely surprised. "I don't want to." It was enough to make King lift his head but once he did he felt bad. There was a faint red mark on King's forehead from where they connected and unconsciously he brought his hand up to touch it. Ram winced at first before leaning into the touch, back to his usual silent self. It was who King fell for right? The silent boy with those sad expressive eyes. The boy who was just as weird as King was. Cool Boy. His Cool Boy. Yeah, the alcohol was definitely making him a tad bit over emotional right now. 

He buried his face into Ram’s shoulder again, letting his hand drop back to his side. Stupid. He was stupid. He didn’t deserve someone like Ram. Someone who would still look at you like you hung the goddamn moon after they head-butted you. Apparently his inhibitions were a lot looser than he thought because he ended up saying all that out loud, complete with a hiccup at the end.

Warm hands were suddenly on either side of King’s face, slowly guiding him away from his hiding place. Once they were eye level King tried to look away but Ram was not having it. His hold was firm enough that King had no choice but to look at Ram. He knew that Ram would let him go at the first sign of discomfort—but he wasn’t. No, he was just embarrassed and nervous. Also feeling just a tad bit pathetic. He thought he would love being able to stare into Ram’s eyes like this but it was intimidating. So damn intimidating. His gaze was a mixture of many things—fondness, amusement, heat, sadness, and even shyness. King should look away (King never wanted to look away). Ram’s fingers began to softly stroke King’s cheekbones, lips turned up in the smallest of smiles. “You’re not stupid.” He whispered. “I don’t think I deserve you.” 

He knew that he should reassure Ram, tell him that he deserved the whole entire world, but that’s unfortunately not what he did. “I think I’m in love with the sound of your voice.” King whispered. “Is that weird.” Ram didn’t reply—at least not verbally. He just leaned forward and pressed his lips to King’s forehead. King liked to think that was Ram talk for yes it is, but am I too. Or it was Ram talk for you are the weirdest person I have ever met, here’s a pity kiss. He hoped it was the first one.

Ram leaned back, still gently caressing King’s face again. He did this for what seemed like hours (when in reality it was only a minute) before opening his mouth to speak. “Redo?” It took King a good long moment to process those words. Oh. He was both flabbergasted over the fact that Ram spoke and the fact that he could be so bold. In reply King just rapidly shook his head, causing Ram to lose his hold on King’s face. As much as King wanted to be the one to initiate their first kiss he decided against it. Who knows what else he’ll end up messing up. The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was Ram frowning. He waited. Waited some more. Fidgeting nervously. Puckered up his lips as a way to say c’mon cool boy, right here. After nearly two minutes of doing this, King was about to open his eyes but froze when he felt pressure on his face. Not on his lip but the tip of his nose. His eyes fluttered open to see Ram only centimeters away. This was not what he had in mind when Ram said a redo but...he wasn’t complaining. He felt his heart swell with what could only be described as adoration, feeling a pit in the bottom of his stomach. How could that—not even a proper kiss—leave King feeling as if he was on top of the world? Part of King knew that if he wasn’t this intoxicated he wouldn’t be this mushy, nor would he be this desperate. Actually, he probably would considering the depth of his feelings. The alcohol just brought those feelings to the forefront of his mind rather than attempting to keep them at bay.

“W-what was that for?” Ram didn’t reply (he wasn’t surprised) and instead reached down between them to gently pick up one of King’s wrist. He rubbed his thumb on the underside of, deep in thought. Before King could question what was happening Ram tightened his hold and began to drag him. Toward his bedroom. Confusion and panic shot through him. “Wait,” King yelped, “Cool Boy what are you doing?” 

Just as they were about to reach his bedroom door Ram stopped in his tracks and turned around to give King an incredulous look. “Bed.” As if that answered the question rather than create twenty more. How the hell was King supposed to get a moment of sleep with Ram here? 

                                                        +

King did end up sleeping that night. Not even ten minutes after Ram dragged him to his bed, turning down the bed sheets. All King could do was stare like an idiot as he watched Ram pull the curtains tight, mind running a million miles a minute. After he was satisfied with the state of King’s bedroom he once again took hold of his wrist and dragged him toward the dresser that was at the far corner of the room. He might still be shell shocked from the fact that his boyfriend was in his room and going to sleep in the same bed as him but he had enough brain cells to understand what Ram wanted when he pointed. Clothes. He hastily grabbed two sets of pajamas for them hoping that they would fit Ram.

King was going to be a good person and let Ram change first (actually he was going to go around his room and clean up the various piles of clothes he had strewn on his floor) but turns out Ram was incredibly stubborn. Rather than tugging his wrist, Ram gently took hold of one of King’s hands and pulled him toward the bathroom. This was definitely a new feeling—one that he could get used to. Ram’s hands were rough but his hold was gentle. Too gentle King thought to himself. He gave it a squeeze hoping that it conveyed what he was too scared to say out loud. Thank you. I like you.

After they were both changed King settled into his bed. He tried to scoot over a far as he possibly could so that Ram would have enough room. Except after Ram turned off the lights he did not lay down in the bed. No, instead he made himself comfortable in the chair that was adjacent to the bed. He couldn’t help but send the other boy a quizzical look but all he got in reply was a look that seemed to say I’m not changing my mind. As bad as he felt for making him sleep on that tiny chair he knew that Ram was probably doing this for his own sake rather than for King’s. The last thing he ever wanted was to make Ram uncomfortable so after handing him a spare blanket King laid back on his pillows. He was asleep in less than a minute. 

                                                             +

King was expecting the morning after to be laden with awkward silence—but surprisingly it wasn’t. Ram was still silent but King made sure to make up for it. After eating breakfast King shyly began to pull Ram around to show him his different plants. At first he felt bad, assuming that he was boring the other boy to death, but he quickly got over that fear once he received a series of texts.

Cool Boy:

You can keep on talking.

Cool Boy:

I’m listening.

Cool Boy:

I want to hear about this. 

That was all the encouragement King needed before launching into a discussion over how important humidity was to successfully keep alive a Calathea Lancifolia or the correct type of soil you should buy to grow a Peperomia Ferreyrae. He could have gone on for hours if it wasn’t for Ram sending him an apologetic look before nodding toward the door. King couldn’t find it in himself to be upset and sent the younger boy a smile. “It’s okay. Thanks for last night. I’ll see you later.” Ram nodded once more before slipping on his shoes and gathering up his things. Ram sent one last glance at King before letting himself out, leaving King alone.

After he was one hundred percent sure Ram was gone he let out a groan before dragging a hand through his hair, grimacing in disgust at how sticky it felt. He was just about to walk to his bathroom for a much needed shower when his phone started to vibrate in his pocket. He paused in the hallway and slipped it out, mouth going impossibly dry as he read the message not one but three times. Was it possible that he still had some alcohol left in his system? There had to be right? The message Ram just sent him sounded too good to be true.

Cool Boy:

Can I kiss you? 

He wasn’t sure how long he stood there in shock but he quickly began to move with a purpose when he heard a soft tap on his door. He yanked it open with more force than he needed to find Ram standing in the doorway, beet red. His eyes were wide and King could faintly make out the fact that his hands were trembling. “Yes.” That was all that King could whisper. It came out breathless but he didn’t care—screw his self preservation he needed to show Ram just how much this had an effect on him too. 

Ram didn’t bother to ask twice before reaching over to cradle King’s face in his head. Both seemed to take a deep breathe before leaning in to meet each other halfway. The kiss was soft and slow, so agonizingly soft and slow that if King didn’t grip the other boy's jacket his knees would surely give out from under him. If he felt like he was going to pass out from a simple peck how the hell would he be able to handle doing anything else? 

Ram pulled away after a few seconds when he realized the other didn’t kiss back and King felt a wave of panic shoot through him. There was a brief look of hurt that flashed in his eyes, hands a trembling mess. King could feel Ram start to loosen his hold on his face and knew that he just messed this whole thing up. Again. Before Ram could drop his hands King stopped him. He pressed his hands against Ram’s own before gently rubbing his thumb over his knuckles. He began to lean in, making sure to keep eye contact in case the other changed his mind, but he never did. 

King pressed his lips to Ram’a gently, cautiously. It was similar to how Ram kissed him moments before and he did that for a reason. King wanted Ram to know that he wanted this but he was too wrapped up in his own thoughts the first time. After a few moments of this he felt a sigh against his lips as Ram began to kiss back. Over and over again they kissed, every time one would lean back the other would just capture it in another kiss. It wasn’t heated—not in the typical way you see in movies or read about in books—but damn King was on cloud nine. Ram seemed to be feeling the same because he kept on sighing against King’s lips. This was now his new favorite sound. After a minute or two of lazily kissing (because they had all the time in the world) they broke apart out of breath. Somehow Ram’s face was even more red than it was before and King felt a thrill inside him to know that he was the cause of that. He was sure he looked just as flustered and wanted to desperately run a hand through his hair. It was his nervous tick that he only seemed to do when he was in the vicinity of a certain tattooed covered boy. He forced himself not to do it because that would mean letting go of Ram’s hands so instead he just let his forehead fall against his boyfriends. He had a million things he wanted to say but it seems like that little make out session left him incapable of forming a coherent sentence. “Woah, Cool Boy.” 

Ram laughed and King added it to his list of favorite sounds. Apparently all of his favorite sounds were related to Ram—because of course they would be. King began to laugh too, secretly glad that Ram didn’t speak. He did however lean forward and press a soft peck to the bridge of his nose—this time King was sure that it was Ram talk for woah is right. 

[1zashreena1]

Angst Fluff Whiplash -14

18+, m/f, technically OCxDiego Jimenez [Power]

Summary:  What does an apex predator do after confessing undying love? Princess is about to find out.

WARNINGS: Ridiculous descriptions and ‘the code is more like guidelines’ outlook on grammar. Is it OOC if the character was given essentially zero development in canon???

Non-descriptive sexytimes, the L word, criminal activities glossed over, relationship building, plus size woman+fit man, Anxiety, This one is all feels and

I Am So NOT Sorry. 

THE TIME HAS COME

A/N:  Princess took on a life of her own and has essentially become an OC. There are infrequent mentions of her description (specifically as plus size) and her actual name in later pieces (its Bicki). She started as self-insert so she looks like me (plus size, white, short, blue eyes, curly hair). If that is not your thing, I totally understand. And do not feel obligated to read this, I will not be offended!

I’m not a fan of “plot” so be aware that most of this series is just meandering through their relationship, angst-fluff-smut whiplash style. But with dick jokes.

TAGLIST: @chelsfic​ ​ @symbiont13​ ​ @nicke0115​ ​​ @bunnykjm​ ​ @rosee-sensuelle​ ​ @girlpornparadise​ ​ @mandoplease​ ​ @heresathreebee​ ​ @xxsteph-enrixx​ ​ @jetiikad​ ​ @joalsglasses​ ​ @mutantcookiesecrets​ ​ @demoncatstone​ ​ @squidlywiddly87​ ​ @lockedoutofmyotherblog​ ​ @poeedamerons​ ​

"I don't know, Lisa. He won't tell me. Not until this weekend apparently?  We're supposed to go shopping."

"Honestly, I'm scared. I mean, there's the whole how did he get a passport FOR me dilemma. Then the part where he knows I don't like surprises. And he said he was calling my sister!"

"Oh my God, she could tell him anything! Please don't tell him about the Backstreet Boys phase. I'm going to have a panic attack."

"Of course he would tease me about it for eternity!"

"What? Watch what words? What are you talking about?"

"Do not hang up this phone! Do you even love me?!? Lisa? …. Hello?"

You toss your phone down on the bed and heave a huge sigh. Your very own BFF, abandoning you like that. Luckily its your own phone and not the insane cell Diego got you because it bounces off the other side of the bed and smacks into the wall before admitting total defeat to gravity. 

You stand there staring at your open suitcase. Your typical items are in there already. You don't need any toiletries. Or makeup, now. Or bras. Or underwear. Fucking hell, its like I already moved into the penthouse with him. 

… Could I do that? He already basically asked for it. He keeps telling me to quit my job and let him spoil me for real. You wring your hands together while rubbing your lips against each other and being bombarded with intrusive thoughts. Yeah. Until he's done with me and then I have to start all over. At 35. 

But its been almost a year now that you've been seeing Diego. What does that even mean, "seeing" him? You think about how the last few months have been so… easy. He practically lives in New York now, their territory split. He opted to control the East Coast and let his sister deal with the logistical nightmare of receiving the imports. 

He has been a lot looser since then. Faster to laugh, quicker to goof around, less likely to do anything as hard as he used to do. The distance from Alicia has allowed him to really flourish in every aspect. And he's beautiful with it. The laugh lines and the soft brown eyes wreck you every time.

He says he wants to keep you. Take care of you. You finally believe that he loves you. He has made so many improvements in communication. Hell, he read books on how to be with someone on the spectrum. Do you understand it? Hell no. Are you going to take it and run? Fuck yeah dude. I love him and I want to keep him.

And now he wants to take you on a trip. A surprise destination. Out of the country with a mostly legal passport. You don't doubt that you'll be safe with him. Your parents were a little concerned when you told them since they've never even met him. And they saw him on the national news that time he got arrested by the Feds, so that really inspires confidence. 

Your middle sister Lynne and niece Halley accidentally met him that one afternoon about a month back. And they have not shut up about it since. Diego this, Diego that, blah blah blah, paid the restaurant bill in cash, yadda yadda, took us all shopping to a Coach store and then got Halley some crazy new sold out Nikes. Diego had been delighted to be surrounded by a gaggle of giggling girls enjoying his spoiling attentions. Just like always, Diego went to the max and charmed them silly.

It was like having an out of body experience to see Diego with them. You couldn't really fault them, he swept you off your feet with no problems.  He was grinning and joking the whole time, making raunchy comments with your sister and encouraging your niece to be assertive (unnecessary according to her soccer coach and the 'Most Aggressive' trophy). He fit right in with them. Afterwards he had asked if that was what it was like to have normal siblings and your heart broke thinking about what his childhood had been like with his sister. 

Which brought you back to the here and now. He had mentioned off hand that he was going to call your sister. Maybe you should text her. She might know something.

Maybe you should just pack your bag and trust him. 

Your Diego Cell chirps and you dive for it on the nightstand. Is he okay? Please don't be hurt.

Its a pic of him. In the shower. With his own hand wrapped around himself. You choke on air and have to sit down. 

I miss you Princess

Holy. Shit. Its been almost a year that you have had unrestricted access to that incredible body and your reaction is still the same. Before you can respond another text arrives:

SOON

The attached pic is just from squinty eyes up.

You burst out laughing at him. You love that he is secretly a nerd about internet stuff. His appearance would never give that away. Time to be ridiculous right back.

Don't make me lick your eyeball 

You are a crazy person laughing to yourself alone in your bedroom.

You are so weird

Yet there you are, lusting after this weirdo

You shoot back.

… Am I the weirdo??

No. Still you.

I would threaten to bite it.. but you would like that

Well now you have to

Oh my God. You're fairly certain you could do anything to this man and he would think it was sexy. Its a novel experience.

Can we eat dinner at home tomorrow? I don't feel like wearing a real bra

You know the answer to that. 

YES. NO MORE BRAS EVER AGAIN. BE FREE

… no panties?🙏🥺

You can see the hopeful puppy dog eyes clearly.

A for effort babe. One of these days you might get your wish lol

...Are you panty free right now?

Wow. He is really trying here.

I'm packing. 

Your pic is a heap of tangled thongs dumped on top of Tiny Murder Panther.

💜🔥😛

He would find that hot. Fucking nympho.

Lemme finish this so I can go straight to the airport tomorrow

Fine. But I am pouting 

You do not doubt that.

Don't care. Still love your stupid face

You cannot believe you just sent that. 

Princess. 

Mi amor.

Diego's good little girl.

You shudder with the praise. You can hear it in his voice, as if he were right here with you.

I love you

Dream of me?

Oh baby, if you only knew. You sigh wistfully.

Always, baby

---------------‐---------

The flight is uneventful, thankfully. Your maxidress with a built-in shelf bra is stupidly comfortable and you actually take a nap. 

The plane has barely come to a stop and you already have on your silly lambswool lined Ugg flip flops. You had argued with Diego about these (Why would flip flops need a warm fuzzy lining??) but he had won by sticking one in your face and ordering you to feel. It didn't take a full second for you to snatch them both from him and cuddle them to your chest. His pleased smile full of dimples was worth all the subsequent teasing.

You slip on one of his previously stolen shirts in a metallic lilac color and roll up the sleeves so you have use of your hands. Bending at the waist, you flip your hair over and fluff it back up from the nap. What was that he had said? Oh yes: Wild and thick, just how I like it. The memory makes you bite your bottom lip and smile.

Bastian is waiting for you on the tarmac. He takes your bag and kisses you on the cheek in greeting. "Hey, sweetie. Nice shirt, is that new?"  His knowing grin is infectious. 

You nuzzle into the collar with a laugh. "Thanks! My boyfriend gave it to me." 

Bastian chuckles as he opens the passenger door for you. "Oh, honey. That is not all he is going to give you." He closes the door while you roll your eyes smirkingly. 

The ride to the penthouse is uneventful. Well, as uneventful as Friday evening rush hour traffic can be in New York. 

Bastian waits until the song is over before lowering the stereo volume. "We're supposed to pick up dinner. Any requests?" He drums his fingers on the steering wheel while you sit at the red light.

You ponder the options. "What kind of a day has he had? Meetings? Tours? Disciplinary action?" You ask Bastian thoughtfully. Sometimes when Diego has a bad day he likes comfort food. Mostly a giant heap of rice and beans next to homemade tortillas, he isn't so picky about the variety of meat.

Bastian glances at you out of the corner of his eye before warily answering, "There was a… termination… at a construction site this afternoon that took longer than expected. That's why he didn't come to get you, he wanted to shower first."

You keep your eyes focused forward to look out of the windshield. "Okay. How about Jalisco's then?" Comfort food it is. 

Bastian nods and adjusts course to obtain those tortillas.

‐--------------------

The instant the elevator doors ding open Diego pops up from the sectional and comes straight at you. Your giant sidestep to let Bastian pass is barely completed before Diego is slipping those big hands under his own pilfered shirt to crush your body to him. Your arms go around his neck like a reflex, like this is their natural resting place. He leans his forehead down onto yours and kisses you so very gently.

"Mmmm. Hi." You murmur softly into his beard. Those bottomless brown eyes look over your entire face before coming back to your own. His smile is huge, those dimples make your pulse trip. He blinks slowly down at you, just like the big cat you nicknamed him after. 

"Princess. How was the trip?" He always asks you this. You still aren't sure if its just culturally specific manners or if he is requesting a review of the flight crew's performance. Either way, your answer is always the same.

You pull him back down so you can cuddle into his neck. "Its better now that I'm here." He rubs his cheek against your own and purrs directly into your ear in response. Your body's reaction is immediate and decisive. You shiver in his arms and your nipples peak to full attention.

Except this time is different. With only a bralette and the dress's shelf bra Diego can clearly feel what just happened in real time. His eyes are comically round as he peers down at your cleavage in pleasant wonder.

"Oh. I like this outfit." His hands rise up your back to crush you further into him. You chuckle and rub your chest on his firm pectoral muscles. He watches hungrily as your compressed decolletage rises higher yet from the added pressure. "New rule to match the bedroom pants bar, no bras in the penthouse. Fucking magnificent, bonita." He licks his lips after making this proclamation.

You throw your head back and laugh joyfully.

‐----------------------

As it always does the weekend passes too quickly. Its already 1:00pm on Saturday when you two finally come down from the bedroom.

Diego is delighted to hear that your time-off request was approved for the trip. You had told him not to worry about it, your boss always kept her word about this stuff. 

That’s when he pulls a ridiculous pith hat out from under the couch. It looks like it came straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon about a big game hunt on the African savannah.  You lose your entire shit and laugh until you do that silent clapping seal move.

Diego keeps repeating, "Wait, stop laughing. Stooooop." But he isn't faring much better. You finally wipe the tears and calm down enough to take it from his limp fingers while he chortles a few last times.

"Baby. What. What the fuck. What fucking is this??" You plunk the hat on your own head and Diego collapses facedown into your lap to gigglesnort uproariously. "Stop. Stop laughing. Stoppit!" You smack the back of his head lightly until he comes up for air.

He closes his eyes and composes himself. You take the opportunity to plop the hat on his head.

"Oh my god, that is so sexy!" You declare in high dramatics. 

He grabs your hands and leans in very close to explain. "You need this hat for our trip." Your eyes narrow in suspicion. "You will wear it for our safari quest…" he pauses for dramatic effect and your lips twitch in suppressed amusement. He leans closer yet and captures your stare. His face is hilarious, you can tell he is biting his cheek to keep from laughing. His eyebrows are drawn down in concentration but his eyes are widened in mock excitement. He sucks in a deep breath to exclaim, "To locate palm trees in the wild!"

He laughs as he puts the hat back on you.

You blink a few times in shock. Palm trees? You're going somewhere with palm trees? A tropical locale. Palm trees. Beaches. SWIMSUITS. Your sudden panic must show on your face because Diego's laughter dies off.

You blink furiously, but its too little too late. The tears burn as they well up in your eyes and spill down over your cheeks.

He reaches out to cup your face. "Princess?" His tone is an even mix of concern and fear. "Bicki? What?"

You shake your head 'no' and throw yourself into him. Diego catches you and hauls you into his lap. You curl up against his chest and sob quietly. He pets over your hair, open handed strokes so his fingers don't tangle in the curls, and soothes your back while you shake. Rubbing his nose against your temple, he kisses your cheek and whispers, "Do you want to write?" His gentle care only makes you worse. "...so that is no." He looks crestfallen. He buries his face in your hair and breathes heavily.

Your tears are slowing and your chest is finally beginning to loosen. "Dieg-" you hiccup, wrapping both hands around his forearm. You wheeze a few times before trying again. "I. I. Where? Where are we g-going?" 

He sighs deeply before answering. "Nowhere. I won't take you somewhere you don't want to go. I should have known better. I-" He snaps his jaw shut so fast that his teeth click together. 

Tilting your head back, you try to catch his eyes. Diego won't look at you. "H-hey, please." You cup his jaw and pull him down to you. He comes, but the motions are stilted. "Look. Please, baby. Let me s-see you."

When he finally meets your eyes it breaks your heart. That chocolate gaze is disappointed, hurt, frustrated even. You wiggle around until you're straddling his lap. He just holds his hands out of the way, not hindering you but certainly not helping either. Standing up on your knees to lean your forehead against his, you reach for his hands and bring them to your chest where you lace your fingers together. 

"Baby. I want that." Your nose rubs against his as you speak. "I want to go everywhere with you. I never thought I would ever get a chance like this. To travel? To go somewhere tropical? To have someone who loves me enough to do this for me?" You're crying again. And so is Diego? A little?? 

He brings your joined hands up to tap your chin. His face is adorably conflicted when he speaks, "You… want to go?" You nod slowly. His eyebrows lower as he tries to make sense of this. "Then why do you cry? Are they, the uh, is that 'happy tears' ?"

Your hands shake in his. "Yeah. Happy tears. I just. I was overwhelmed. I'm sorry." He huffs out a sigh. You continue, "Its almost like the super intense emotions short circuit my responses and I guess my default is panic crying? I don't know."

Diego huffs at you again. "Please stop that. I'm going to have a heart attack." There is a hint of real annoyance in his voice but his lips curl up at the corners. 

You free your right hand to reach up and brush his wet lashes. Why did something this little bring him to tears? "Baby, is everything okay?"

He leans into your hand, then turns to kiss your fingers. You giggle, you can't help it, his beard both tickles and delights you. He smirks at you, "It is now, Princess. You should get dressed so we can go." 

But you're not done here yet. "Where are we going on the trip? A place name, not foliage that may or may not be present."

His Cheshire cat grin is intriguing and mildly worrisome. He gives you one word, "Xcalak." And then watches while you access your mental map and pinpoint the exact location. 

It takes you a moment but you find it with a gasp. "Costa Maya? Like Caribbean-sea side of Mexico??"  He nods and you immediately start in with 20 Questions. "Are there cenotes? Is the water really those unreal colors? Is the food amazing there? Can we see ruins?"

Diego cups your face to stop you. "Whatever you like, little girl." With a kiss to your nose and a smack to your ass he ushers you upstairs to get dressed. 

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

The shopping is less traumatic than normal for you thanks to Diego making enthusiastic innuendo nonstop and feeding you between stores. You find sandals, and flip flops, and little slip-on sneakers. All kinds of flowy maxidresses and flouncy skirts paired with new tank tops in buttery soft fabrics. Cover-ups and kimonos and huge airy loose knit sweaters get rung up with linen pants and shorts you actually feel comfortable wearing.

But swimsuits? A disaster. Everything that fits your hips is way too big for your ribcage. Tankinis big enough to go around your middle are about a foot too wide around your chest. You try some maternity stuff… amazingly there isn't any chest support. That confuses both of you for almost 20 minutes while you discuss it over croissants and various iced beverages (coffee for him and some kind of hot chocolate slushie for you).

Then you look across the street and inspiration hits. One of the stores you order bras from is right there and has bra-sized swimwear in the display window. Diego turns to see what stole your undivided attention from him and slaps his hand down on the table in celebration. 

You aren't sure which one of you is more excited to get into the store. But while you run around exclaiming at all the things that come in your size Diego stands in the doorway and gawks. When you circle back to check on him he just points to one display wall.

There is lacy, frilly, corseted lingerie. In. Your. Size.

He demands one of everything that fits you and isn't red, brown, or yellow. You don't even argue.

The store does alterations and makes very good recommendations. The sales clerk is impressed with Diego's input, she comments that he really does seem to know your body well. You flush with it, glad that he isn't close enough to hear that. You leave with three bags and seven personalized swim outfits under construction. One is ready to wear and you keep reaching into the bag to touch it in wonder. 

Diego notices but just gives you a raised eyebrow. 

"This is the first time I've ever felt good about how I look in swimwear." You confess quietly. 

Diego wraps a massive arm around your shoulders and tucks you into his side while you continue down the sidewalk. 

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

Sunday is a mess as you try to make pancakes and Diego tries to remain physically attached to you like an excessively attractive barnacle. The pancakes are either burnt or still batter in the middle. Leftover carnitas and tortillas to the rescue. Diego teases you about the kitchen failure all day because this is the first time he has witnessed such a thing.

You doze on the couch under the pretense of "reading". Diego rotates through his laptop, cell, and the soccer match on ESPN+. 

Until his phone rings. 

You both tense up. Only one person calls him instead of texting. He takes the phone into the office to answer his sister. You wait on the couch to see which Diego you get back: silly tickle fight Diego,  sad puppy dog eyes Diego that requires cuddles, or  angry Diego that needs to fuck you through the nearest horizontal surface. 

The elevator dings and Julio comes in with a tray of coffees. "Ay, Gordita. Buenas tardes. I got you the hibiscus thing you like." He greets you with a big smile, then looks around when he doesn't see Diego on the sectional with you.

Hopping up to help him carry stuff, you point to the office in indication of Diego's location. Julio makes a face, "Hermana perra?" and you simply nod. Julio takes Diego's iced coffee and bites the bullet for you. The door closes softly behind him.

You munch plantain chips and slurp hibiscus lemonade until they come out.  Diego just looks tired when he comes back to you on the couch, coffee in hand. You open your arms in invitation and he plops next to you with a sigh. Cuddly Diego it is.

He doesn't tell you anything and you don't ask. Everyone watches the match mindlessly. Diego snores softly in your lap while you pet his hair.

He rides to the airport with you but you forbid him from coming onto the plane with you. He is already making this harder than it has to be with his big brown eyes and clingy hands.

"Baby." You breathe into his hair while he snuggles into your neck in the backseat of the SUV. "Its only a week. We do this every week." You pet down his bicep and immediately regret it.

"I know." Diego huffs into your skin. "Why don't you just quit? Let me take care of everything." You go through this almost every week now, too. He nuzzles you, the sensation makes you reconsider his proposal. You pull his head up by a fistful of soft hair and look him in the eye. He blinks guilelessly at you.

"Number one: No. Number two: Stoppit." He laughs at your fond exasperation. "Okay. I'm gonna go. You stay on the ground."

"Fine." He whines. "But I am going to send you a dick pic the moment that plane takes off." He crosses his arms as if daring you to tell him no.

You cup his stupidly attractive face in your hands for a kiss. Okay, several kisses and 27 minutes later, you respond, "Send me one every day. Its my favorite dick." His startled laugh makes you feel very pleased with yourself.

He pulls you into his arms again to kiss you one last time. His beard scratches and you sigh into him. Finally that tongue retreats and he rests his forehead on yours. His voice is low and rough, his hands squeeze tight on your hip and thigh, "I love you, Princess."

Will that ever stop hurting? You close your eyes against the burn of tears but smile with happiness. "I love you, Diego." You pop the door handle before you open your eyes to see him watching you, jaw tense. You stick your tongue out and he breaks into a smirk. With a laugh, you slide out of SUV and walk to the plane, determined not to look back.

When you get up the stairs the pilot greets you, but his gaze shifts behind you. Turning around, you see Diego standing outside the SUV, arms crossed and trying to look so not soft. You smile and mouth Bye baby, he gives you a short little wave. You duck into the plane before you can start crying.

The wheels are not, in fact, off the ground when the phone chirps.

‐-----------------------

The trip is a few weeks out and there is some kind of emergency at the San Diego docks the next weekend. So. You don't get your Murder Panther fix. 

And your coworkers notice. They spend all day Monday strolling past your cubicle, straining their necks to see if you're wearing new shoes or some fresh bling. Finally someone has the nerve to ask how your weekend was. 

You find yourself blinking back tears. I miss him so much. This is ridiculous, he just texted you at like six this morning. But its not just the conversation you miss, now is it? You miss that big body crowding you into the corner of the couch. His soft curls under your hands. That beard on literally any inch of your skin. Draping yourself over shoulders wider than your hips and knowing that not only can he take your weight, he likes it.

He says he wants to keep you and you desperately want to keep him. Why do you fear this? Is it just his profession? The risk? Oh god, how do you even go about introducing him to your parents??? Diego can be all kinds of charming but he can be a real asshole, too.

And they know what he is: A criminal.  For your boomer parents he is the living embodiment of Public Enemy Number One. 

Grand Theft. 

Money Laundering.

Arson.

Murder.

International Cocaine Trafficking. 

HE IS A LITERAL DRUG LORD.

You lay your head down on your desk and try to keep it together. 

Your Diego Cell chirps.

Your laughter bubbles up until it comes out of you without your consent. It turns hysterical and you realize you need to leave the office suite. Now. 

In the bathroom you stare down at the phone as it lights up again with another message.

Miss my Princess💔👑

How? How is someone who can do all those illegal things so nauseatingly sweet to me?

And then it hits you. Illegal. You didn't use the word immoral. Illegal. You think back to how everyone you see working directly for him is well into adulthood. No children. There are a few women but they are not being sold by him, they are there by their own free will. And he has never laid a hand on any of them, they're just as comfortable around him as the men are. No sex trafficking.  You saw someone give their resignation last month. The dude walked away with a suitcase of cash for a decade of trustworthy service. Its a better retirement plan than what I have. 

Have you seen him assault people? Yes. You've seen him stab people. Carve off someone's ear because they weren't listening as assigned and it cost the Jimenez Cartel a shipment. You've seen him push an informant down an empty elevator shaft. Choke a man into unconsciousness with his bare hands when you were disrespected. 

And you still love him. Not a single one of those incidents weighs on your conscience. Your morality is a dingy grey 12 year old men's undershirt that you should just throw away but you're definitely going to cut into rags to keep for cleaning when it comes to Diego. 

The cell lights up again.

Mi amor 💞😍🍑🏝✈⏲👙

You don't know what's worse: His excessive and ridiculous usage of emojis or the fact that you understood. 

Look what came

The attached pic is a few pieces of your new swimwear. They look gorgeous, you can't even tell where the alterations were done.

You have to try on all of them. And show me

Of course he wants his own personal show. You feel desire burning low in your belly. Its been a year and not once has he ever shied away from your stomach rolls or hinted at weight loss. He never questions the food you order. And while the two of you have chuckled about shapewear he has never mocked you for using it. Or seemed disappointed when you opted not to wear it. He tosses you around like its nothing and prefers for you to sleep on top of him. Its not that he loves you despite your weight, he loves it as part of you.

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

Its now Thursday and the desk drawer where you keep your purse at work is vibrating. He knows I'm at work. If he calls right back I'll answer him. You try to keep your Diego Cell out of sight at work or you'll never get anything done. Plus your coworkers are always dying to catch a peek of your infamous sugar daddy/boyfriend.

Yeah. Boyfriend. Keep practicing that. It feels good. 

You finish the insurance call and hang up your headset when the vibrating starts again. Your next door cubicle neighbor pops around the divider to advise you to answer that before he comes down here and abducts you.

What deity should I pray to for that??

You snatch Diego Cell and march out to the hall. Poking the green button, you answer the call.

"Baby. You okay?"

"Princess! I… yeah. I'm not hurt."

He sounds odd. There is definitely something going on here.

"What's up? You need me?"

The silence stretches. 

"Yes. Please?"

Diego sounds very uncomfortable. It causes you physical pain.

"Well, you have me. What is it?"

You can hear him swallow and in your mind you picture him looking away, hiding some soft emotion shining in his eyes.

"Baby?"

"Here. I am here. I just. I just wanted to hear you."

Something is very wrong with my Murder Panther, you think.

"Babe," your voice is soft, you're trying to ease him. "Can you tell me what's wrong?"

He huffs and you can hear him scrape a hand down over his face. "I know you are at work. And I should not have called. But."

His voice trembles, even over the phone you can hear it. He's afraid.

"Diego. If you need me, then you have me. Tell me, baby." You try to be reassuring but you also really need to know what is wrong.

"I would like to come down there." His declaration is overly formal. You wonder who he is trying to impress. Its certainly not me.

"You… want to come down here instead of me going up there this weekend?"  You're trying to make sense out of any part of this conversation. 

"I…. grrrrrrrrr."  He growls in frustration. Between English being his second language and your sensory processing issues, this is not an uncommon occurrence. He sucks in a deep breath and charges forward in an emotional rush. "I know you're working, but I want to come down there because I miss seeing your face." Before you have a chance to answer he adds, "Pick me up? At the airport, after work? Please, Bicki." His voice cracks at the end and his inhalation is ragged. Your heart implodes. 

"Diego. Baby. Of course. Of course I will. I can be there by six." You have a mental flash of how dirty your bathroom is, all the clothes you have laying around, and the vacuum you haven't touched in over a month. Diego needing me is more important.

"Good. Good. Yes, I. I will text you. When I land." His voice is raspier than ever, low and gravelly. 

"Sure. I'll be there." I'll always be there.

"Okay. You… you should go." You can hear his determination. You can visualize him squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw, taking on the Jimenez Cartel persona. 

"Hey." He grunts in acknowledgement. "I love you." You blurt it out before you have a chance to talk yourself round in circles. You can hear voices in the background. 

"And you. You as well." The call ends, but you know.

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

You're sitting in your car at the little regional airport second guessing the coffee you got when the phone chirps. 

Here

Springing out of the car, you wave to the security guard as you trot past. "Hey Jim, I just have to grab someone real quick. That's okay, right?" You wave vaguely back toward your car parked in the fire lane. There are only four security guards who work here and they all know you at this point. 

Jim laughs but waves you on. "Go get 'im, sweetie." Jim must be pushing 90 by now, he doesn't care about traffic laws.

You enter one of the two sets of automatic doors on this entire building and cross through the tiny lobby. There. You can see his dark hair and ridiculous shoulders over a completely unnecessary row of potted plants. He must hear your echoing footsteps because his head whips around in alarm, but his face relaxes into a wide smile. He lengthens his strides to come around the stupid plants, hands automatically reaching out for you.

"Diego." You laugh breathily and fling arms around his neck. He smells so good. 

He crushes you to his chest and buries his face in your neck. "Printhesss." He murmurs into you, slurred because he refuses to remove his mouth from your skin. 

Turning your head to kiss his cheek, you moan shamelessly for him. He surges back upward to capture your lips and kiss you with mild desperation. That devious tongue sweeps over the roof of your mouth before curling up behind your top front teeth. 

Your entire world narrows down to Diego. Chocolate. Tastes like the smoothest Belgian chocolate in existence. He smells perfect, clean but definitively male to you. His silky button-down is smooth under your hands, stretched taut over muscle. Those massive hands gather you closer, molding you to that big, solid body. His beard scratches your face in soft tickles when he alters the angle of the kiss just so.

"Goddamn." A woman's voice exclaiming somewhere behind you catapults you back into the here and now. Which is a dinky little regional airport in rural central Pennsylvania. You know, a very public location in a very prudish area of the country. Fuck.

You pull back and Diego's hands shoot up to the back of your head. Holding you in place, he leans his forehead against yours with a contented sigh. He rumbles softly to you, "Take me home."

You feel so silly seeing Diego in the passenger seat of your Corolla, he just seems so out of place. "You can adjust the seat however, nobody really sits there. I just put it all the way back to make sure you can get in without cracking your head." You sound nervous even to your own ears.

Diego turns to you with a response but his attention is captured by the cup holders in the center console, specifically the Dunkin Donuts styrofoam cup. He points to it, then looks up at you with a slow grin. "Princess. Is this for me?"

You flush but can't stop the embarrassed little smile so you cover it with sass, "Well, it sure as hell ain't for me." You start the car and give Jim a little wave. He winks and gives you two thumbs up. Yeah, I'm aware that you saw that kiss too, old man. Everyone saw that shit.

When Diego reaches for the coffee his fingers brush your hip. The contact burns and you suddenly remember that you have not touched this beautiful man for well over two weeks. Apparently he remembers, too, because he wraps that huge hand around your thigh with rather a lot of force. Right hand slapping down to cover his, your heart rate jumps through the roof. Did I take my blood pressure pill this morning?

"Don't." You choke out.

He rumbles softly next to you, purring with conceited pleasure. "Did my Princess miss Diego?" He asks you with an incredibly pornographic voice. 

"Oh, fuck you." Your answering groan is also obscene. So glad the windows are up.

His hoarse chuckle makes your thighs tremble. "You're Diego's good little girl, you will." He's right and you both know it. You would ride him right here in your own damn car if he demanded it. You have a problem.

He lets you redirect his hand to the coffee with only a little resistance. "Focus." You hiss.

"Me or you?" Diego quips.

"Yes." You declare.

Diego's guffaw is contagious and you don't even try to hold back.

Your apartment always seems like an adequate size until Diego is inside. No, bad Bicki. Do not say it like that. His presence just sort of… lounges about in a vaguely threatening but highly attractive manner. Much like the actual man on your couch. You tried to pick up dinner on the way but he just wanted to 'go home'. You are disgustingly happy that your place feels like home to him.

Diego had flopped on your couch immediately and hasn't moved since. Something is very definitely very wrong. There were bursts of your Murder Panther in the car, but he has been just subdued overall. He had turned your stereo up and smiled faintly, watching you sing along. He had also complained that the stereo in your car sucked (Agreed) and this was unacceptable. You're sure he'll do something ridiculously extravagant to remedy this.

You try to give him the remote, he takes it but doesn't do anything with it. You offer him food, both junk and something home-cooked, all you get is a shrug. You putter around for a while, picking things up and sighing before putting them down somewhere else. His dark eyes watch you, unfathomable. 

Finally you disappear to the bedroom only to return in your pajamas. This he likes, perking up and blinking rapidly. "Okay, I know you brought something softer than those jeans, so get comfy so I can order shitty pizza and cuddle you."

His jaw drops in momentary shock. Then he scoffs, "I do not cu--"

You cut him off, "Yes, you do and yes, you're going to. Up. Now." This has to be hilarious. This short little woman in overly long pants barking orders at the massive man who heads an international drug cartel. Well, its either hilarious or fatal. I'm about to find out.

Diego looks around, as if someone else might secretly be here to witness him be a little bit submissive and moderately soft. He raises his chin in a tiny show of defiance. "Fine. But I am showering first." He glares with this proclamation, daring you to contradict him.

You throw your hands up in the air. Why the fuck would I have a problem with that?? His eyes follow your hands, like a cat when you try to point out a bit of food but all it does is rub your finger. You sigh, resigned to your fate. "Of course that's fine, Diego. You know where everything is, have at it."

You watch his butt as he walks away to the bathroom. 

The pizza actually isn't shitty and Diego eats half of it by himself. When you offer him the cinnamon dessert sticks he shoots you a calculating look. You split the contents, pulling two sticks over to yourself and piling up the rest in front of him. His delighted grin is decidedly not calculated and you lose track of time watching him enjoy dessert.

He's beautiful like this. He wears a soft, silky t-shirt that is tight enough to help you get through the nights you spend alone. His hair is a riot of fluffy curls, free of product and clearly trying to break free of gravity, too. He hasn't shaved for at least a few days and that salt and pepper beard is filling in nicely. His face is unguarded, expression open, those laugh lines and dimples you love make frequent appearances.

After dinner you lay all over each other in some weird we-have-intimacy-issues approximation of cuddling. It works so you don't question it. He has his laptop and you have your tablet and together you have sporadic conversation. Its comfortable. 

Until Diego asks you a seemingly innocuous question that you know is very nefarious:

"What color do you like in cars?"

Your eyes narrow so much that you have trouble seeing. "...Why." Your low tone might be frightening to anyone else.

He looks at you over the laptop screen, brown eyes innocently wide. "Just curious. Your car is green. Do you like any other colors?" He slowly pulls the laptop closer to himself to subtly cover the screen with his bulk. 

"Diego." You slowly put down your tablet and start leaning toward him. He has nowhere to go, propped up in the corner of the chaise end of the sofa. "What. Are. You. Doing." 

"Will you let me take care of you? Just in this one way right now?" He licks his lips, brow furrowed in concentration. Building desperation shows in his eyes and you can't fight that. You don't want to win this.

"Let me see, baby." Your sighed acquiescence has an instantaneous effect. Diego drops the tension from his shoulders and opens an arm to you in invitation. You crawl up him to cuddle into his chest, wedged on your side between all those muscles and the back of the sectional. From here you are stationed directly in front of the laptop screen.

He is looking at cars. 

Armored cars. 

Armored, bulletproof, explosive resistant cars. 

What. The. Fuck.

"Diego, what the fuck is going on?!?" Your apprehensive demand sets him right back on edge. You can feel him go tense underneath you. The laptop gets shoved onto an empty cushion as you throw yourself over him. Tiny hands land on those broad shoulders with extreme force as you use all of your deadweight to trap him. Below you, Diego shakes but you can't tell if its from anger or anxiety because his eyes are scrunched closed tightly. "Tell me why I need a fucking bulletproof car!"

He surges up into your face to match your volume, "She knows! Mi hermana perra knows about you! Alicia found out about us!" You lurch back in shock, but the steel hands on your hips stop you from retreating. His voice is hoarse, louder than you've ever heard him, and its terrifying. Your fear must show because he releases his grip on you like it burns. 

"WHAT?" The ramifications here could truly be lethal. Alicia has already tried to set Diego up to take the fall when they were arrested almost four months ago. You know she has scorned Diego's familiarity with his men in the past, that is why he handpicks them personally. To Alicia, everyone is disposable, even her own brother. Her only loyalty is to herself.

Diego's hands come up in an aborted reach for you. You're still too shocked to move. His face crumbles in agony and he blinks furiously, hands balling into fists. "Everything I have ever wanted she has ensured I never got. She, she manipulates me into destroying everything I touch. I will not let her hurt you! I refuse to allow her to break us, mi amor!!" His volume has steadily escalated until he is yelling. 

He's afraid. He is afraid that he will lose me. The realization emboldens you enough to take his hands in your own, bring them to your chest, and press them close to your heart. You trust that he won't hurt you in his rage. You don't fear him, this dangerous, powerful, ruthless man that you love.

His hands open to slide up your shoulders, curl around your neck, and his thumbs glide over the pulse point under your ears. He brings your face to his own, his expression twisted up with fear and anger and possession and love. 

"You are mine! And I will keep you!"

You realize everything that you have been debating with yourself, all of your pro versus con lists, your stupid little dry erase board covered in sticky notes with your fears, your scribbled timeline of events and possible future predictions, none of it matters. All you care about is the man in your arms. Diego is the most important thing in your life and you can't imagine a life without him. If you had to give up everything to keep him, you would do it in a heartbeat. 

Your hands grip tightly around his wrists and you consciously straighten your spine. Expression hardening, your eyes open to meet his anguished gaze.

 "I want black."

The armored 2020 Camry is delivered that Sunday. You thank him for finding something inconspicuous with an upgraded JBL sound system and he compliments your understated color choice of Black Sand Metallic. By the time you drop him off at the airport that evening you've managed to replace the new car smell with something better and you're thankful that the leather seats just wipe clean. Monday morning in the parking lot at work, however, is a literal ordeal.

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

The next two weeks feel like they’re seven months long. You clock out at noon on Thursday to a chorus of your coworkers making vaguely lewd remarks and howling with laughter about your vacation. 'Two whole weeks on a beach in Mexico with an absolutely loaded hottie' is what they've been repeating gleefully all week. 

You turn around and walk backwards to give them finger guns, "Yes," then you reach down to adjust your pants, "And YES." Their squeals are contagious and you're still laughing when you burst out the front doors to drive home. 

You turn the volume waaaay too high in the car so that your teeth vibrate and it feels like you're having heart palpitations. I love this fucking car and I love that man. 

There is a rental Tahoe parked in the grass next to the huge gravel driveway at your farmhouse, but he left the second assigned parking space next to your Corolla open so you can park The Beast (as you have affectionately named your new ride) appropriately while away. When you get out of the car you glance up instinctively, Diego is standing outside your front door on the small third floor balcony laughing. 

"Are you deaf yet, Princess?" He hollers down in amusement. 

You flip him off with the middle finger that wears the gemstone ring he gave you while yelling back, "WHAAAAT??"

His laughter fades as he disappears inside, leaving the door wide open to let out all the cold air. Were you raised in a barn?? Close the door, the electric bill-- You cut off your own thoughts when you suddenly remember that you haven't been paying that electric bill for the last six months. Nevermind.

Before you can start up the stairs, Sara, your first floor neighbor, appears on the porch with their toddler. "Hey stranger!" Sara waves with a big smile and the kid does the same but with some kind of unidentifiable kitchen utensil in hand. "That is your boyfriend, right? He had a key so I didn't think it was your ex but I wanted to make sure. I mean, from what I just saw it is your boyfriend. Also, holy shit, that's your boyfriend?"

If she says the word 'boyfriend' one more time I'm going to spontaneously combust. 

"Uh yeah, definitely not my ex. Sorry, I forget that you guys haven't really seen him before, I meant to tell you he was coming." You can feel your face burning and it isn't from the August sun. Sara fans her own face with a hand while mouthing 'he's hot' like you're somehow unaware. You forge on before she can start gushing aloud. "We're actually leaving on a trip tonight so I'll be gone for the next two weeks."

Now Sara drops the kid and scrambles over to whisper fiercely to you, "Oh my god, seriously? Where are you going? Wait, this is the same guy you've been going to see in New York, right? How long has it been, like a year? Is he taking you on a trip for your anniversary? I don't even know his name. Oh my god, that is so sweet!"

Okay, down girl. You're not sure who you're trying to will into being chill, Sara or yourself. 

"Um, we're going to Mexico. And yeah, he's the guy in New York. It's just a vacation." You don't even touch the relationship questions with a ten foot pole. You glance up but Diego is still inside, Thank fuck. 

Sara hops a little in excitement. "I'm sooo jealous!" She squeals. "You have to take a ton of pictures! I need to see! Oh my god, I bet you guys are such a cute couple!" You nod and start backing away, trying to wave goodbye so you can climb the stairs and then climb Diego. "Ooh ooh, wait, what's his name?" Sara hisses conspiratorially. "Does he speak Mexican? Is he Mexican!?!"

You suddenly remember why you tried to move away from this area. Repeatedly. "Yeah, he's Mexican and yes, he speaks Spanish." You sigh. Sara nods but continues staring at you expectantly. Fine. "His name is Diego."

Sara makes a stupid face like this is a rom-com movie. I cannot take anymore, you must shut the fuck up. "Okay, okay. I won't hold you up. But seriously, we can have a 'pics and wine' girls' night when you come back!" She waves maniacally before snatching up the kid and skipping back inside. 

I can't think of anything I would like less. Oh hell no.

You climb the stairs in record time before she can come back outside and start talking again.

Bastian, Julio, and a third man you don't know are in your living room. You do not care and your vague wave shows it. You can hear Julio's warm 'Gordita!' greeting as you spin around and march to the bedroom.

Diego is standing at your bed, tucking TMP into your small duffel, when you burst through the doorway and continue at full speed directly into him. He laughs breathlessly but holds steady against your weight. "Princess. Are you ready?"

You take overflowing fistfuls of his shirt, bury your face in his chest, suck in a huge lungful of air, and shriek at full volume.

"Uhhh...that is a yes, si?" He mutters uncertainly above you. 

You rear back to look up at him with a smile so wide it hurts.

"Oh good." His hands come to your shoulders while those beautiful brown eyes sparkle. The dimples and laugh lines come out as he absorbs your infectious excitement. Your hands shoot up to his hair to yank him down so you can crash your mouths together with bruising force.

The effect is immediate. He moans loudly and crushes you against him. You dig nails into his neck and you lick your way into his mouth, his hands snake down to your ass to hold tight. Your left leg comes up as you try to wrap it around his hips. With a pained groan he rips those lips off of yours and pulls back. Undeterred, you move on to assaulting his now bared throat, moaning like porn come to life.

"Princess," he gasps, "You have to sto-- uhhh, yes, bonita. Your fucking tongue." You're too busy licking his adam's apple to pay attention to words right now. "Nooo, mi amor, please, lo siento, stopstopstop." You get in one last nip of his collarbone as he pulls your head back via a handful of ringlets. His pupils are blown wide and he's panting hard. You stare longingly at his delectable mouth while making pitiful whines.

"Please, baby, pleeeease. You're all I've thought about for days. I need you!" You try shameless begging, you're certainly not lying. Petting over his shoulders and down that solidly muscled chest, you shudder and try to pull yourself back to him.

He closes his eyes with a grimace. "Flight! Fuck you on the flight!" He croaks, then yanks your hair harder than you like. The pain clears the fog just enough for you to blink back to awareness. You nod jerkily and step back. "Have to leave now to get there before dark." He explains in a rushed huff. You blink as you remember how time works.

"Right. Yeah, right. Okay. Okay." Straightening to attention you yank off the cardigan you wore for the air conditioning at work, leaving you in a tank top and ready to be productive. Focus on not-dick.

Diego shoves your favorite notepad in your face so you can see your packing list and not him. The distraction works. He has checked off every item in each categorized list but left the strike through action for your completion. You lower the notepad until you can make eye contact with him and intensely whisper, "You know I fuckin' love you, right?"  

He laughs so hard he has to sit down on the bed.

You go through every bag, touching each item and crossing it off your list one at a time. He did it. Everything but you.

"You know I don't need TMP, right?"

"Why?" He squints up at you from where he lounges across your bed. 

Your face heats up and you clear your throat. "Well, its, I'm. I have, uh, you. So I don't need anything else." The realization of how true that is in every sense gives both of you pause.

Diego surges upright to cup your face and bonk your foreheads together just a little too hard. You giggle and he huffs. 

"Mi amor…" he sighs for you, eyes closing in pleasure. You 'mmmmm' in response. Then his eyes snap open and he growls an order, "Get changed so we can go!" And punctuates it with a stinging slap to your ass.

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

You spend the flight with your face pressed to the window, vibrating in excitement, except for a brief intermission of seven orgasms in the bathroom.

The unknown third man is Joey, Bastian's boyfriend. Joey is even quieter than Bastian and just as cute. They're not overly demonstrative but clearly comfortable moving around each other. Joey works in "Packaging" and does an admirable job of ignoring his cartel drug lord boss being snuggly. Julio naps. 

The customs agent at the Cancun airport looks you up and down with wide eyes but stamps your passport with no questions. Its a five hour drive to Xcalak but Diego is adamant it can be done in three. You give him an eyebrow question which he dismisses with a vague wave, "They paved the road all the way to the southern border last year."

Uhh, they what now? You understand soon enough. The drive drastically changes outside of Cancun. The scenery is both beautiful and heartbreaking. There are occasional mansions with armed guards, high fences, and SUVs like your own current ride. Mostly though, its shacks and people on foot or riding bicycles, weaving to avoid stray dogs and huge iguanas. Could I handle this as my daily reality?

The first time the road sidles right up to the ocean you have a small meltdown.

 "Is that what I think it is?" Your soft whisper is accompanied by a shaking hand pointing to the left. Diego, crammed into the middle of the backseat between yourself and Julio so you could have an unobstructed view, indicates an order for Bastian to pull over. He reaches across you and pops open your door. You slide out with his hand on your lower back and take about a dozen steps to the lapping water. Diego appears to your right, watching you intently.

 "Its gre-e-e-en!" Your stuttering squeal is accompanied by happy tears and you fling yourself into Diego with joy. He laughs at you, but hugs you back just as tightly.

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

The first week passes in a blur of amazing food, warm green sea, fruity drinks, and shirtless wet Diego. And so many orgasms that you can't keep count. Diego is all over you non-stop, more than he ever has been before (Astonishingly). Its incredible and you feel like the only person in the world. If he's not molesting you then he is at least touching you; keeping you in his lap, holding your hand, cuddling and petting and snuggling like a man obsessed. 

You love it. You love him. You love this life.

On Saturday he lets you lead him through the tiny town, your Spanish improving by leaps and bounds as you try to navigate the streets and alleys and shops. The four years of high school Spanish actually prove useful as you manage to complete a purchase all by yourself. Your playful mock smugness evaporates under the blazing desire in his eyes. 

He drags you back to the casita in a much shorter and more direct route than you took upon earlier departure. You're marched directly to the bed and he puts one massive hand in the middle of your chest to gently push you down onto your back. There is something different about this, something important in his eyes. Your voice is high and soft, "Diego?"

He climbs up between your legs and leans down to kiss you senseless. It goes on forever; soft lips, scratchy beard, silky tongue, and nothing but the taste of Diego. Your moans and sighs are mixed together, there are moments when you can't tell who is making what noise. His hands are shaking as he strokes every inch of newly bared and sunburnt sensitive skin while undressing you. 

It takes repeated attempts, but you finally get him naked, too. The sight never fails to take your breath away. All that soft, and now freshly tanned, skin is like velvet to your touch. You're mesmerized by his muscles flexing and then evening out as he moves above you. He finally gets your linen pants untangled off your left foot and flings them across the room with unnecessary force. Your soft peals of laughter light up his face and it brings tears to your eyes. You reach a hand out to him, "Diego. Baby."

He comes up over you, threading fingers into your hair, kissing you slowly and thoroughly. You can feel him against you, fire hot and mouth wateringly hard, but he makes no move to take you. Your eyes open in hazy confusion as the kiss ends. Diego is watching your face, blinking back tears. 

He is holding your head still, hands like steel. Whatever this is, he needs it. And you want to give him everything he needs. Forever.

You're captured by his eyes, bottomless, soulful, and hungry. His raspy voice is soft and trembling with desire. "I love you, Bicki. I want everything. Forever, Princess?" 

Your chest compresses and your heart implodes. Scalding tears escape when you blink and you're nodding before you even know it. "Yes, Diego. Yes, baby, I'm yours." 

Your back arches off the bed as he comes home and brings you with him.

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

You wake up crushed under Diego. The sun is still up so you might be able to talk him into going out for dinner. You rub your cheek on the huge bicep doubling as your pillow and Diego sighs directly into your ear from where he is spooned up behind you. Oh yeah, we should have done this waaaay sooner.

He nuzzles your neck just to incite squirmy giggles and you don't even fight it. "I have something for you, Princess. Stay here." He pulls away and you whine about the loss of your pillow. His low chuckle burns you alive with want. "Stay like that. Do not move." You obey while you listen to him rummage around behind you.

He comes around to your side of the bed, still completely and unabashedly nude. Hell. Fucking. Yes. You love it. He hands your glasses over and you slide them on to take in the now high definition view of naked Murder Panther. The view disappears as he kneels down next to the bed so you're on eye level. His expression is very peculiar. 

His hands slowly come up to reveal a small box of black velvet. Time slows to a halt as he opens the box and presents it to you. 

Inside is a ring. Gleaming in platinum and sparkling with three tastefully large princess cut diamonds. 

Its an engagement ring.

Diego is proposing. 

He swallows hard and rumbles gruffly, "Now remember, you already said y--"

You cut him off with a shriek. "YES! YESYESYES!!"

In the time it takes him to blink twice with surprise you're on him. Arms around his neck, you throw yourself into his lap. He topples backwards and you ride him to the floor, already bawling hysterically. 

He stares up at you in shock as you nod furiously and cry all over him. "Princess. You… you are certain?" If this were any other time you would be howling with laughter at his huge eyes and lax jaw. 

Your answer is stuttery but determined. "Y-y-yeah. Put it-t-t-t on me already!" 

He laughs in delight at your order and the imperious presentation of your shaking left hand. The ring glides on easily, a perfect fit. It gleams up at you blindingly. After a moment of admiration you lace your fingers with his and sigh at the union. His other hand comes up to roughly brush away your tears. "I know you do not like labels so much… but, you will be my, my married... Person. Thing?" 

You stroke his bearded cheek in return, thumb lingering on that dimple. With a hard gulp you dive in head first. Fuck it.

"Yes, Diego. I will be your wife."

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

The next time you wake it is dark out. You reach for a phone on the nightstand to your left and jump when you find one with a loud crack. Diego pops upright behind you, instantly on high alert. "Princess?" He hisses while covering your body with his own.

You gigglesnort, then meekly answer him, "I forgot about the ring and whacked a phone. Everything's okay, baby."

He sighs so deeply that his breath ruffles your hair. "Jesus fucking christ, woman. You are a menace."  He flops down on top of you and snuggles back into your warmth. 

You reach back with your left hand and grope blindly for his face. He licks your fingers as soon as they're in reach and you stuff them into his mouth as retaliation. He just sucks languidly. 

"Mmmmmm, I'm your menace, baby. And I have to pee." He nips your fingers but rolls over to free you. You slide out of the bed and stretch your arms high while arching your back. Diego groans painfully. "What?"

Diego rises to all fours on the bed while the sheet slithers off of him. "You forget that other people can see without glasses, huh?" You cock your head and realize that you have a shadow.

It's a full moon. And I just stretched naked in front of a sliding glass door. "Oh. Huh. I guess I do forget. Oops. I'll be sure to keep that in mind now." Your seemingly tame answer is directly contradicted by the exaggerated roll of your hips that makes your butt bounce when you walk off. 

"Fucking menace, woman." Diego growls as you push the bathroom door shut with a trill of laughter.

You never do go back to bed but you do wind up on the beach in front of the casita to watch the sunrise. Julio finds you both snuggled together late the next morning, still asleep on the covered daybed under the palms while the rising tide comes ever closer. At least Julio has the decency to cover your bare ass with a beach towel.

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

By the time you think to check your phone gallery you have… 1,792 pictures. WHAT THE FUCK. 

You scroll through the pics, there are a lot you do not remember taking. Was I that drunk or did Diego take some of these? One is a close up of your ass from below wearing a string bikini, I knew I wasn't that drunk. The next pic is Diego asleep on a lounge chair, one arm curled up above his head, muscles glistening in the sun, and swim trunks so low on his hips that it's almost obscene. Immediately following that is the same pic but with your own face photobombing about three inches away from the camera and giving a thumbs up with your left hand so your engagement ring is prominently visible. Oh yeah, I remember that one. 

There are videos, too. The first one is Diego making lewd comments while you twerk in the ocean for about ten seconds. Okay, that's par for the course with us. Next is you successfully backflipping off of Diego's shoulders into the green water to everyone freaking out. Shit, even I'm impressed with myself. After that is video of you gagging through a dish of octopus at some restaurant. Both of you are clearly visible in the shot so Julio must have had the phone. Betrayal. 

There are tens of dozens of the two of you in various poses and outfits, both disgustingly happy and blatantly in love. There's even a role reversal shot of Diego sprawled across your lap, one enormous arm wrapped around your neck and his knees over your own arm while you grimace and he laughs hysterically. The table to your right is covered in empty bottles and mostly finished drinks. An entire subsection depicts you asleep like you have a stalker. You count no less than 29 of you two trying on increasingly ridiculous hats in random stores.

You can't even keep count of all the close ups of a smoldering Murder Panther. You feel no guilt.  Aren't you supposed to be ridiculously attracted to your fiancé??

Fiancé.

You have a fiancé. Your fiancé is Diego. You are engaged to Diego Rafael Jimenez. 

I have to explain this ring to everyone. They'll have questions about him. People will want pictures. How do I explain what he does?? Oh my god, there's no closet here. I have to… find somewhere. And I can't I can't. Its-

Your head jerks upright when something touches your hair. Its Diego. Kneeling on the floor in front of you, he has unfurled a sheet over you to block out everything, and he waits there, watching you. Before you realize it your hands are reaching for his shoulders, just the feel of him, warm and solid under your hands, calms you. 

Slowly, his right hand comes up to cover your left. "No closet, Princess." His huge fingers grip yours tightly. You nod a little. He just watches you, eyes guarded. 

"Ask. Go ahead." You mutter. You can tell from his posture that he is uneasy, apprehensive. 

He locks eyes with you and his gaze is intense. He curls all of his fingers around your left ring finger. "Still yes?" 

The fear in his eyes breaks your heart. Your voice is shaky but determined, "No. You can't get rid of me. I'm your problem now, baby."  His expression would make a meeker woman cower in fear, you laugh weakly. 

He settles down on the tile floor in front of you, with the sheet over both of you. Its like four in the afternoon and I am sharing a blanket fort with my cartel boss fiancé while on vacation in Mexico. What even is my life? His elbows are on his knees, chin in hand. He studies you for a minute, you stare right back. He raises one eyebrow and you sigh in capitulation. 

"I don't know how to just be happy. I suck at it."  You shrug but reach for his face. Diego nuzzles into your hand while you stroke your thumb over his beard. 

"Habby isz nawt a berb." He slurs into your palm with a soft kiss.

The epiphany is like a cinder block to the brain. 

He's right. I don't have to 'do' anything. I'm happy right now. I've been happy every time I'm with him. And no one had to exert any effort.

People can define themselves. People can define their relationships. Why can't they define their own normal? I can make my own rules. Especially with someone like Diego as my partner.

His one eyebrow slowly rises as he watches your thoughts play out across your face. "You back?" He asks with a hidden smirk, you know its there from the way his eyes crinkle with laugh lines.

"Yup!" Is your decisive answer. Diego licks your palm. "I got better places you can lick, baby." You answer his smirk with a waggling eyebrow. 

The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur of play wrestling and inappropriate noises.

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

You do, in fact, go on a safari. Of sorts. Tours of ruins and jungle and cenotes, lots of side quests because the both of you are easily distracted by pretty colors. You probably added another thousand pictures of various palm trees to your gallery. The hat makes multiple appearances. 

Diego has to ship a crate home to New York because he bought you too many souvenirs. You laugh and tease him when he wants to pick out things for your middle sister and niece, until you hear his logic. 

"They were nice to me." He murmurs with a little half-shrug, "It was like being in a real family for a little bit." He studies the bins of painted shells on display in the little store with way too much focus.

You spend a moment deliberating before you decide to reach out and touch his elbow.

 "Hey," your soft voice brings his gaze your way momentarily before he goes back to ceramic turtle magnets. You take his hand with your own right and rest your left hand on his chest. Diego looks down where your ring glints in the light, then up to your face. "You know you're going to be part of that 'real' family, right?"

Diego's boyish little smile is heartbreakingly adorable. 

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

The flight home is much shorter than you want it to be and you spend most of it asleep on Diego. At one point you wake up to see Bastian and Joey cuddled up together napping. When you look up from where your head is resting in Diego's lap he is already looking down at you with an unreadable expression.

"What?" You whisper softly. You stifle a yawn and blink repeatedly. 

Diego strokes one big hand over your hair and grips your jaw firmly. With a huge toothy grin he answers, "Mine." 

"Uh huh. How many times you need me to say yes, baby?" You smirk up at him with an arched brow. He seems to be reveling in hearing you readily admit your commitment to him.

He considers your question carefully while his other hand trails down the front of your body under a blanket. I don't remember having a blanket earlier. Finally, Diego settles on "Every day. At least seven times. Seven is a good number, right Princess?" 

Your body jerks as his fingers press between your thighs with steady determination. Your eyes flick over to Bastian and Joey, still out cold. You make a show of wiggling around to get comfortable, and, surprisingly, that involves spreading your legs. "Yessss." You hiss up at him.

Julio reclines his seat and exaggeratedly covers his face with a new hat. 

Seven is a very good number.

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

Your first day back to work is a circus. You don't think twice about your normal greeting as you enter the office suite. You swipe your badge with your right hand and pop the door, then wave 'hi' to everyone. Like usual. With your left hand. 

There is an excessive amount of squealing that makes you second guess going into a female dominated field. The whole day is a wash because you have a steady stream of people passing through your cubicle. You're glad you had the forethought to curate a photo album of appropriate images to show your coworkers despite Diego's repeated attempts to sneak a dick pic in there somewhere. You most definitely included the glistening swim trunks lounge chair picture. Squealing intensifies.

Everyone comments on the hat and you're forced to tell the story of the hat. How you once told Diego that you wanted to see palm trees, 'But like, in the wild.' And Diego had laughed so hard that he fell off the bed only to pop back up wheezing about a 'Palm Tree Safari' until you smacked him in the face with a pillow. Your coworkers think it is just disgustingly adorable that he never let you live that down. 

Your coworkers have questions:

When is the wedding? 

Where are you having it?

What kind of dress do you want?

What are your colors?

Are you going to do flowers?

What about the cake?

Who is your maid of honor?

How did your family take the news?

What about his family?

Are you going to New York?

Will you take his name?

Oh shit. I forgot about the whole 'wedding' part of this.

[eeveevie]

dirty wastelander phrasebook

Madelyn and Deacon find themselves in quite the predicament after being captured by Gunners and must rely on an old Railroad secret Deacon bullshit—the Dirty Wasteland Phrasebook.

For them, it was just a regular ol’ Tuesday.

x - x

This was so not prompted, and is completely self-indulgent and full of all the things I have always wanted to write for myself lately and that makes me the happiest. I hope you enjoy, even if you don’t go here. Also, if you aren’t familiar with Monty Python, please watch this sketch or a lot of the references made here will not make any sense. 

Deacon x Agent Charmer (Madelyn Hardy)

1713 words (under a cut) | Ao3

The last thing Madelyn expected to happen to her that Tuesday—was it a Tuesday? One could hardly tell anymore post apocalypse—was to be abducted. Stowed away in some dingy storage room with her hands behind her back, blindfolded by what was likely the most dust infested piece of cloth possible. At least Deacon was there with her—though she wasn’t so sure of that being a positive, considering their circumstances.

All she remembered was stalking Boston Commons, heading south towards the hospital—in hindsight a terrible idea. The entire street had been flooded with Gunners, crazed and ready to protect their territory from anybody who crossed into it. Deacon had been yelling, taunting them with his battle-cries as he ran towards them, Madelyn scrambling to reload her laser rifle as fast as she could. All for what? So they could scale the old medical center and install one of Tinker Tom’s sensors on the dilapidated roof? That would all be a tad difficult now—one gas grenade and rifle stock to the temple and it was lights out.

From what she could tell when she readjusted to the waking world, Deacon was tied to the opposite chair against her back, their chest, arms and wrists occupying the same binds. When she shifted, she felt him resist, tugging her a little too sharply so her spine hit the uncomfortable plastic backing of the seat she occupied.

“Ow,” she hissed. Matter of fact, everything in her body ached. One look at her Pip-Boy would likely tell her she was in desperate need of a stimpak and probably some RadAway too. That is, if she knew where her Pip-Boy was.

Deacon shifted, one of his fingers sneaking through the gap in the chairs to poke at her back. “Oh good, you’re alive.”

“I think I’d rather be dead,” Madelyn groaned, still wincing as she raised her head to get a better look at their surroundings. It was the standard ‘bad guy’ holding room—tools on a workbench, junk and trash, and the most awful lingering scent of flesh and blood.

“With a hit to the cranium like that, I’m surprised you aren’t,” he muttered. She felt his head tilt against hers with a gentle bump, a difficult task for him with their height difference, even when sitting and restrained. “You alright though Charmer?”

She sighed, pushing back in her own little gesture. “A massive headache but…yeah,” she smiled and despite it all, almost wanted to laugh. “Thanks Dee. Some shit we’ve found ourselves in, huh?”

He decided it was the perfect opportunity to chuckle. “I’ve been tied up under worse situations,” he stated. “Come to think of it, under much better ones too.”

The nearby door slammed open, two Gunners making their way in. A woman dressed in an old military jumpsuit, and a shirtless man with a bandolier strapped across his chest, the two clearly sent for guard duty.

“Oh will the two of you shut up?!” The one with the bandana shouted, clearly tweaking on some kind of drug—jet, psycho—Madelyn could see it in the wild way he was waving his plasma pistol around. But she also noted the glint of green on his wrist and narrowed her eyes—her Pip-Boy. Now she was alert and her blood got pumping.

Deacon couldn’t resist taunting the man, even though they were woefully unmatched. “Why don’t you make me?”

The male Gunner grumbled while the woman laughed. “Where’d that damn gag go?”

Madelyn stifled her own laughter, wondering if they had actually had to silence Deacon at some point—and if he had found a way to remove it even with his hands behind his back. “You’ll have to find a different way to gag me, big guy.”

“Fuck you!”

Deacon hummed. “Something like that.”

At that, she couldn’t resist and choked back a laugh, pursing her lips so the Gunners wouldn’t take out their frustration on her. Even though she couldn’t see him, she could tell Deacon was beaming. He curled a few of his fingers around hers as the Gunner guards began to pace.

“Come on man,” the rugged military woman urged the other man to back off. “The boss man wants these two alive for ransom. Something about this one,” she gestured to Madelyn. “Being valuable or sumthin’”

“What am I, canned cram?” Deacon mumbled under his breath. As the Gunners fussed over something frivolous, he squeezed his grip around her hand. “This is the part where we escape,” he spoke in a soft whisper, head craned towards her.

Madelyn turned but all she could see was the glimmer of his sunglasses out of the corner of her eyes. “Please enlighten me on how we are going to that.”

Deacon snickered as if she had just cracked a good joke—he seemed to find comfort in her dreary, cynical tone. “It’s time for us to use a Railroad classic. The Dirty Wastelander Phrasebook.”

Even though she knew that it is was more or less one of Deacon’s bullshit creations, she also knew it was sometimes best to humor him. She had learnt his ways, knowing that one day one of his lessons would come in handy—that Tuesday would be that day.

“Operation Cramalot?” she inquired, feeling him excitedly grip her hand. “Or do we want to skip the musical numbers this time?”

He was chuckling, shaking the both of them with his laughter. “Charmer, you know—”

Whatever he was about to say was cut off by the male guard stomping over again with a snarl, smacking Deacon across the face with an echoing slap. After quickly rebounding, his only reaction was to stay amused, accentuating his words. “Do you have a cigarette? My hovercraft is full of eels.”

“What?” the Gunner growled. “The fuck you talkin’ about cigarettes for?”

While the woman in the corner howled, entertained by it all, Deacon took the time to nudge one of his fingers against the small of her back, signaling her. Madelyn focused her attention on the female Gunner, watching her every movement while she felt her partner nimbly pull at the cords at their wrists.

“Do you want to come back to my place?” Deacon asked, voice high-pitched and full of sarcasm. The restraints came looser still. “Bouncy-bouncy?”

The Gunner shook her head, holding her stomach as she continued to laugh. “I think the boss hit this one too hard—he’s lost it!”

Madelyn decided it was her turn. “If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” she eyed the female guard, batting her eyelashes, knowing she was laying it on much thicker than she ever would—but at this point she was well aware the other woman was under some kind of influence and wouldn’t notice. Plus, she had a codename to live up to.

Deacon, meanwhile, had loosened their ties enough to the point that they could make their move, but they would need to time it right. He tapped her once more, this time finding the teeniest sliver of skin where her shirt had ridden up—that was definitely on purpose, the flirt. “You have beautiful thighs.”

Finally, the other Gunner moved towards them with her arms crossed, obviously suspicious of the two. Madelyn stayed focused, steadying her breath and responding to Deacon’s signal. “Drop your panties, Dee, I cannot wait till lunchtime.”

With that, the two jumped up, scream-laughing as they tackled their perspective guards to the ground, not stopping until the sound of energy blasts signified their gruesome ends. All in another day for a wastelander just trying to survive, Madelyn supposed. Though, she wasn’t just another wastelander, but dwelling too much on those thoughts never did her any good. Instead, she wiped the blood and sweat from her brow, sighing as she pushed herself up from the ground.

She turned around just in time to find Deacon already standing with a satisfied smile. “I believe this belongs to you?”

Madelyn was all too pleased as she snatched the Pip-Boy—her Pip-Boy from him, quickly securing it back into place on her left wrist. She dusted off the grime and dust from the screen, sighing when the mechanism recognized its true owner, swiftly alerting her to her many injuries and her location. At least they weren’t too far away from Goodneighbor where they could rest up and get proper medical attention.

“Please fondle my bum—am I using that one right?” she asked.  

Deacon chuckled, nodding as he readjusted his sunglasses and pompadour wig. “You do the Railroad—me proud Charmer. I could—”

She eyed him, tilting her head slightly at his pause. “You could…what?”

Come to think of it, he been cut off earlier too. But Deacon wasn’t that easy of a nut to crack and his smile hardly faltered. He gave a little inconspicuous shrug and she suddenly felt a surge of adrenaline and all sense of sensibility fly out the broken storage room windows. She could only hope she was reading the moment and perhaps his signals correctly.

Without much of a second thought, Madelyn reached out to grab him by the shirt collar, yanking him down and closing the distance between them. He was still smirking when their mouths met, lips threatening to stretch into a grin before they finally responded to her kiss instead. She slid one of her hands and hooked it around his shoulder, bracing herself against him as his arms wrapped around her waist, the two clumsily bumping into the nearest wall.

Only then did she pull away with a small gasp of air, staring up at him in surprise—she had acted on impulse, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t wanted to do that, been thinking about doing that for months. They were still staring at each other with somewhat agape expressions, tangled in each other’s arms when he breathed out, the goofiest smile on his lips.

“My nipples explode with delight!” Deacon exclaimed—not quite using the handbook phrase correctly.

Madelyn snickered, tears of laughter prickling at the corners of her eyes at the hilarity of it all before pressing up on her toes so that she might kiss him again. “I figured you might say that.”

leave a 💙 

[gamerwoo]

Seonghwa: Facade (Part 6)

Characters: Seonghwa x female reader (featuring Ateez)

Genre/warnings: royalty au, sorta arranged marriage au, slowburn, fluff, angst

Word count: 2,140

Summary: Being an assassin, you’ll do anything for anybody as long as they can pay for it. However, you might’ve met your match after meeting your next target, Park Seonghwa, the prince of the kingdom. It’s not that his fighting skills match yours or that he’s even a little suspicious of you – it’s how he has a heart of gold, cares so deeply for his kingdom, and would do anything for you despite the fact he has only just met you. So now you have to make a choice: fail your orders and accept death…or kill the man you’ve fallen in love with.

Previous | Next

Day 50; 00:02 -- 40 days until deadline.

Mingi looked up from the knife he was sharpening when he heard your voice call out into the small house. You were calling for him, and it sounded urgent. He dropped what he was doing and stood up from his work bench, rushing out of the room and to the living room to meet you.

“What? What is it?” he asked breathlessly as he looked you over. You seemed to be fine, and you weren’t urgently rushing him out of the house or anything, so he wasn’t sure what the danger was. “What’s going on?”

You shook your head frantically, “I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“I can’t kill Prince Seonghwa,” you admitted, a defeated tone to your voice.

You expected the smirk that began to grow on your brothers face. You knew he was going to assume you’d fallen in love with the prince, and you knew you’d have to admit that you did even if it meant endless amounts of teasing.

“And why not?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

You sighed, “Don’t make me say it.”

“You don’t have to,” he shrugged, “Hongjoong knows everything and already told me. I’ve just never seen you admit defeat before.”

“Hongjoong?” you exclaimed.

“He’s a spy, remember? He knows everything that goes on in that place, but he tells me all the juicy stuff about you and Prince Seonghwa.”

You groaned, letting your knees give so you could fall back on the couch, “Mingi, this is serious!”

“Trust me, I’m well aware,” he nodded, sitting down beside you. “I’ve never seen a target break you like this before. You’ve never once given up on something.”

“Honestly, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t care that his stupid uncle was going to kill me,” you admitted.

Your brother was the only reason you valued your own life. You wouldn’t care about the threat of death dangling over your head had you not had somebody at home that you cared about. You always did your best to complete a job to come back home and watch out for Mingi, and you didn’t want to give in now because you loved Seonghwa. But you also couldn’t kill Seonghwa, either. You were stuck between two people you cared about. It was a catch 22 -- you couldn’t and wouldn’t win.

“Nobody’s dying,” Mingi stated, a harshness to his tone you weren’t expecting. His jaw was clenched when you looked at him. “_____, you know I hate when you talk about dying.”

“Sorry…” you mumbled.

“We’ll come up with something,” he promised. “There’s always a loophole, isn’t there?”

“No, there’s only two possible outcomes: he dies or I die.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Sorry…”

Mingi stood and paced the room for a while, mumbling to himself. You couldn’t hear what he was saying, but you were too lost in your own thoughts anyway. Telling Mingi meant accepting your feelings for Seonghwa once and for all, so you’d at least gotten passed that hurtle. But now, you had to do something about those feelings. You had to save Seonghwa, and that wasn’t anything that could be guaranteed.

Mingi suddenly stopped, turning sharply on his heel to face you, “Let’s kidnap him!”

You almost snorted at how excited he sounded with the idea, “What?”

“We’ll just take Seonghwa away,” he said before slapping the heel of his palm to his forehead. “The answer was so obvious!”

“But his uncle will know it was me who took him, and he’ll come find us,” you reminded him. “We don’t have the money to leave the kingdom, either.”

“I’ll make the money,” Mingi immediately promised without hesitation.

You frowned, giving him a look to show you didn’t believe him, “Yeah? How? We’re broke now, remember?”

“I’ll do it, _____. I’m not letting you die, alright? And I’m not gonna sit here while you’re forced to kill the person you love. You worry about getting Seonghwa out, and I’ll worry about the money.”

You sighed, pushing yourself to stand up on your feet, “Okay, but we only have 40 days until the wedding.”

Mingi nodded, “I’ll get it done on time, don’t worry. Just keep acting like you’re in cahoots with his uncle.”

You nodded as well, running a hand through your hair that was still a little knotted from the up-do you had to wear that day.

You knew Seonghwa wouldn’t want to leave his kingdom in charge of somebody else, and you knew his uncle would do a horrible job of being king. But at this point, you only cared about Seonghwa’s safety and him keeping his life. If that meant sacrificing the happiness of an entire kingdom, you’d do it. You loved Seonghwa, and you wouldn’t consider anything else other than what would save him.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

Day 53; 01:21 -- 37 days until deadline.

Your arm was looped through Seonghwa’s as you strolled deeper into the garden, your head dropped back so you could look up at the stars in the night sky. You were starting to feel better about letting yourself fall deeper in love with the boy whose arm you were hanging onto now that you knew Mingi was going to help you get him and yourself out of this alive. Why not let yourself indulge in the fantasy of the two of you a little more? So when Seonghwa offered a late night stroll after spending a little while alone in his bedroom, you accepted.

“My _____,” he began now that your previous conversation had died off, “can I ask why you prefer pants to dresses? Most women I know don’t typically wear pants.”

You shrugged, moving your eyes back to him rather than the sky, “I feel less constricted. I just feel more myself.”

“Would you prefer I have you fitted for some pants?” he offered. “You can wear them around the castle instead of the dresses. Or I could have more looser dresses like your nightgown made for you to wear during the day.”

“Wouldn’t your uncle throw a fit?”

“And?”

You laughed, lightly swatting at his upper arm with your other hand, “Come on, I’ve gotten you into enough trouble these last couple months, haven’t I? You weren’t allowed to see me for a few days.”

“Mmm, but as long as they don’t find out what we do after hours now, who cares?” he smirked, his voice dropping lower as his face slowly inched closer to yours, only to press a kiss to your temple before he returned to normal. “If my uncle knew we’d already been intimate with each other before our wedding, he’d surely have a conniption. As happy and thankful I am that he chose you as my bride, I’m very surprised considering how frustrated he seems to always be with you.”

As days went by, you were looking for more opportunities to reveal a little more of your true self to Seonghwa. You didn’t plan on telling him you were actually assassin yet, but you at least wanted to start being a bit more honest with him when he’d worn his heart on his sleeve with you this whole time. Now seemed like the perfect opportunity.

“Well, Seonghwa…” you began nervously, unsure how this would go. He’d been fine with most of your little ‘lies’ like with your name, but what you planned to unload on him would be a bit bigger, “I may have...not been completely truthful with him when he met me.”

Seonghwa’s brows knitted together as he looked at you, “What do you mean, darling?”

You took a deep breath, stopping where you were and turning to face Seonghwa, “I’m not...anything your uncle told you I am. I’m actually not even from the Seventh Kingdom. He was there while I was visiting, and I got nervous and said I was from there.”

It wasn’t true, but you couldn’t tell him his uncle tracked you down and hired you to murder him, now could you?

“Where are you from, then?”

“Here. Your kingdom.”

“So we hail from the same place,” he hummed with a warm smile, “that makes me happy. I should’ve known you were one of my people -- you’re too perfect to come from anywhere else.”

You laughed, shaking your head as he smiled proudly, “I’m sure the Seventh Kingdom is fine, too.”

Once Seonghwa and you had stopped your giggling, he sat you down on a stone bench nearby, holding both of your hands in his, “So who are you then, _____? I want to know.”

“...Do you remember San and Mingi?” you asked. “The baker that came in with the injured man?”

Seonghwa nodded. You raised your eyebrows, trying to get him to remember the comment he had made after the two had left the throne room. When he recalled it, his eyes widened.

“I knew it!” he gasped with a smile. “And you teased me for thinking so.”

You shrugged, “What can I say? Mingi and I have wonderful genes, apparently.”

“Wait,” Seonghwa paused, his eyes looking at your hands that were together as he thought the whole scenario over, “so… D-did I save your brother’s life?”

You nodded with a grateful smile.

“Oh…” was all Seonghwa knew to say.

“I wanted to run over to him when I saw him come in,” you confessed sheepishly, staring down at your own lap now, “but I knew I’d give myself away. Awaiting your response, though it was a short time, was torture. But when you said you’d help, I almost cried. I couldn’t be more thankful for what you did for him.”

“Is he recovering well?”

“He can walk on his own again. I’m not sure if the sutures have been removed yet or not, but he is recovering.”

“Well,” Seonghwa smiled as he rubbed the pad of his thumb at the top of your cheekbone, coaxing you to look up at him, “I’m glad I could help, my love.”

You grinned, leaning into his warm touch, “So you’re not mad at me?”

He shook his head, leaning in toward you, “I love you for who you are, not what you are, _____.”

His lips pressed softly to yours, but there was still some passion to the kiss. You melted into it easily, letting yourself slip further and further into your little world with Seonghwa, unaware that from one of the windows of your room where you were expected to be, Seonghwa’s uncle was watching it all.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

Day 60; 23:53 -- 30 days until deadline.

“Look who’s late again,” Wooyoung sighed, taking a swig from his beer before placing the cup back on the counter.

The rest of the boys turned their heads to see Hongjoong enter the pub, nodding his head toward the usual patrons he saw there. He made his way over to his friends, sitting down on the empty stool at the end next to Mingi. He let out a sigh as he ordered his beer while his friends teased him for being the last to show up yet again.

“Why are you always late lately?” Yunho wondered.

“I’m a guard for the prince,” Hongjoong reminded them as his drink was placed in front of him on the counter, “I can’t just up and leave whenever I feel like it.”

Mingi looked at the older boy beside him, “You’re still doing that mission there?”

Hongjoong shook his head, “No, it’s completed. But I’m sticking around to keep an eye on _____ and Prince Seonghwa.”

By now, all of Mingi’s friends had heard about you being the new princess to rule by Seonghwa’s side when he became king. They all knew it was for a job, but Mingi hadn’t told them yet how you were now in love with Seonghwa and couldn’t go through with killing him. He knew they would react fine, he just didn’t want to worry them since they knew your life would be taken if his wasn’t.

“Since when does she of all people need some knight in shining armor to keep an eye on her?” Yeosang scoffed, glancing away as he slowly lifted his beer to his lips.

While the rest of the men began teasing you for ‘marrying’ a prince, Mingi looked over at Hongjoong and spoke softly so nobody else would hear.

“She is safe,” Mingi promised, “you know that, right? You can go home whenever you want.”

Hongjoong shook his head, keeping his stare straight forward as he wrapped his hand around his mug and began bringing it up to his mouth, “I have a bad feeling, Mingi. There are people in that castle who know too much.”

Mingi’s eyes widened, “Who?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hongjoong told him before he took a sip of his beer, “I’ll take care of it.”

[8osbabe]

okay so this will sound dumb, but like the reader is dating two-bit and she is super badass, like she fought 5 socs at once and beat them all but she has an identical twin sister who acts the same, and the gang calls them the terror twins.

a/n : okay here’s the thing. i need to stop.

these genuinely take me long because i

go into my google doc, thinking, “oh

this will be a short drabble, then i’ll

move onto the next one!” and then i

lose all self control and write a

2000+ word fic. also your idea isn’t dumb,

I was actually really inspired and writing

this just kind of flowed out of me.

____________

it’s one of those unbearably hot days in tulsa, and the windows of your bedroom are cracked open to let in a draft, though it doesn’t help much.

standing in front of your closet, trying to decide what to wear, you already know it’s going to be a god-awful day.

why? well, to begin with, summer days like these call for more breathable, or skimpier, clothing.

thing is, the hot weather seems to aggravate every dirty, skeevy greaser in this neighborhood. fights happened more often, and their advances were far more aggressive

so it didn’t help that you were stuck with wearing less clothing for the next month or so.

finally, you pull out one of your looser, linen blouses, opting for an old skirt that was a little small on you, but at least didn’t heat up much.

you’re halfway slipping it on as your sister pushes the door of your shared room open, falling onto her bed with an exhausted sigh.

“you know, i really didn’t think i could get any hotter.”

you roll your eyes, turning to face her and smoothing down your hair.

“—hey, i have that blouse, too! we should match,” she says sitting up.

“we aren’t five anymore. we don’t have to dress the same just ‘cause we’re twins.”

“well, whatever we’re wearing, dad’s making us run down to the market. ‘says he’s out of smokes, we’re out of bleach, and we need more eggs.”

your expression turns sour as you survey your looks in the mirror. “what, he’s too drunk to do it himself?”

he did that a lot lately. the simple fact that you had to buy bleach on a consistent basis to clean up the aftermath of his drunk spells, was nauseating.

you can see your sister from her reflection in the mirror, biting her lip and staring at the ground, her somber expression almost making you feel bad. yeah, she was the nice one.

“alright, let’s go, grease,” you smile at her and reach out a hand to help her off the bed as a sort of apology for snapping.

taking it, she jumps off the bed and you head outside.

the walk to get groceries wasn’t particularly long, but your house was tucked in the very deep end of the neighborhood, forcing you to walk past every other house on your way.

the actual market was conveniently close to your house, mostly because this was the one with the clerk who didn’t really care about selling smokes to minors, and would even sell you a six pack or two if he was in a good mood.

you manage to make it through unscathed, though, and you suppose it’s because it’s early, and most greasers are hungover or sleeping.

you walk out of the store with your purchases tucked into a paper bag that you’re holding across your chest with your arms.

your sister’s going on about some soc she scammed, overcharging them for grass, which was a good business to be in, considering the drug was blowing up with socs who could afford it by the minute.

your sister didn’t smoke at all, in fact, she’s pretty sickly, so she avoids almost everything that could get her sick. when you’re a greaser, you can’t afford much antibiotics, which means that sitting out the flu, sucks.

but, money doesn’t grow on trees, at least not these trees, so you did what you had to, to keep moving. it was a risk, but your sister was willing to take it. you wouldn’t stop her.

you’re laughing with her when she reminds you of the time she got beaten to a pulp by a soc when she first started selling, though it hadn’t been funny at the time.

at first, the idea of being a real pusher, made her feel guilty. instead, she raided the old spice cabinet in your kitchen, where bottles full of seasoning were gathering dust.

so she put them to use, stuffing the tiny bags and making a quick buck off of dumb socs.

then, word got around about the scam, and they hand come to find her outside the drive-in, slapping her around and demanding the real thing.

you’re so lost in your thoughts that you only become aware of your surroundings when you near two boys, greasers, leaning on the fence outside of an old-looking house.

your expression turns stone cold, but it doesn’t stop them from calling out to you as you close in on them.

“will you look at that, two-bit. one for me and one for you,” one of them snickers. he’s smoking, wearing a leather jacket, nearly the same color as his dark hair.

he looks like the hood type. the other, a blonde in a mickey mouse muscle shirt, not so much.

the hood had called him two-bit.

you’re just starting to walk past them, both of you ignoring them.

“— aw girls, don’t be mean.”

you inhale sharply, trying so hard to keep your cool.

then, the hood sticks a foot out abruptly in front of you, and he’s too quick for you to react. he sends you, and the bag of groceries, flying to the ground.

your sister stops short, and jerks the hood forward by his jacket.

“piss off, dallas.” oh, she knows him. cool.

“stop,” you call out to her, slowly moving to your feet. “lets just take the stuff home before dad freaks. we’ll see to this later.

your twin gives dallas one last menacing glare, before releasing him and grabbing the paper bag from the floor.

you grab the small bottle of bleach from where it rolled out of the bag.

“what’s that for, ‘you use it to keep the boys away?” two-bit laughs. eye roll.

“actually, it’s just my favorite summer beverage.” you offer him an excruciatingly fake smile, and take off after your sister.

you’re already far and don’t hear them when they speak again.

“those girls were weird, man.” dallas smirks and takes a drag from his cigarette.

two-bit smiles. “i don’t know. i liked the mouthy one.”

you’re crossing the street when a silver camaro nearly runs you down, screeching to a stop beside your sister.

“you. you’re the chick who sold my little brother some spice,” he snarls from out the window of his car.

“i am?” she answers smugly.

“you know, he didn’t stop coughing for an hour. ‘drank two gallons of water that day.”

“really?” she’s trying to contain her laughter, but isn’t doing a very good job of it.

this doesn’t appease the socs, who turns off his car just as fast as he, and four of his friends, jump out of the car.

now, as far as the odds go, they were pretty screwed up.

you look at the bottle of bleach you’re armed with, though, and decide this will be fun.

best case scenario, they leave ashamed and with mild chemical burns. the worst, well, at least you stain their madras permanently.

the driver, who had some score to settle with you sister, pounced her first, but sweeps his legs, sending him to the ground.

it was a good strategy. they were easier to fight when you could pin them.

one takes after your sister, trying to help out his buddy, but the other three rush you.

you unscrew that cap of the bleach and launch some of the liquid onto the exposed skin of the assailant’s chest.

he hisses, and falls back, and two of his friends take off. it was the wise thing to do.

with the remaining one down for the count while he nurses his chest, you look toward you sister, who’s digging her thumbs into the driver’s eyes.

not enough to blind him, because that was surely a lawsuit, but enough to keep him down.

another tries to pry her off of him, his back turned to you. it gives you the perfect opportunity to kick him where you know it hurts best, and punch his nose when he turns to face you.

“let’s go,” you call to your sister. you feel winded.

you walk quickly in the opposite of your original direction, opting to walk a different way home, and leaving the remaining socs to climb back into their car.

the new route takes you back to the house with the greasers, only this time they’ve moved from their spot on the fence to look towards you as you walked closer, confusion and smugness radiating off of them.

“we, uh, thought we’d help, but-,” two-bit starts.

“but we didn’t need it.” it was your turn to be smug. you loved the look of bewilderment when people saw how resourceful you could be in a fight. girls who could hold their own were hot.

“your girls want to come in for a beer?”

you hate to give in, but dallas’ offer of free beer on a hot day after you just spent all your energy fighting, was too tempting not to take.

you close in on two-bit, cupping his cheek.

“my hero,” you say sarcastically, with the faux smile to match.

then you slap him.

“don’t touch my ass.” he laughs, and you suppress a smile as you walk past them toward the house.

—

you’re sprawled out on the curtis couch, lying across two-bit as he sits up, attentively watching the mickey cartoon that was playing on tv.

you were spaced out, thinking about how you met him, how you got here, apart of this gang of sorts.

it was easy to lose interest in the mickey mouse cartoon, because you didn’t really care for it, though you would never tell keith because you knew it’d be a deal breaker.

you do like to tease him, though, by pretending not to understand it and ask a lot of questions.

“—but they’re both dogs? but only that one talks?”

“you’re looking at it wrong, babe—,”

you tune out his long speech about the history of canine domestication in the mickey mouse universe.

you watch your sister mediate an arm wrestle between soda and steve across the room, when ponyboy, the youngest curtis, walks into the house smirking.

“pony, where you been?” soda asks, still managing not to lose focus on the arm wrestling match.

“i ran into a couple of socs outside the movies, i almost had to fight ‘em, until one of them recognized me as a member of the gang with the terror twins,” he smiled. “i didn’t know it was that easy.”

you smile at him. “it’s got a ring to it, huh?”

“i’m or sure if they left me alone ‘cause they were scared,” he looks at you. “— or maybe they just didn’t want to lose their dealer,” he says, now glaring at your sister, who laughs vibrantly.

“you? terrifying?” two-bit laughs.

“what’d you mean? i am scary.”

you stare at him, daring him to prove you otherwise. he takes you up in that offer, and pins you against the couch, catching you off guard.

“who’s scared now?” he almost whispers into your ear, and you know what’s coming.

“two, stop!” you squeal, but you really don’t want him to. he’s kissing wildly at your neck, his hands roaming your sides and hitting all your sensitive spots, the tickling feels causing you to laugh loudly.

“get a room, you two,” steve growls from where he’s almost winning the arm wrestle.

you snicker. “steve, your neck is a little red. i could almost swear that it’s every shade of evie’s lipstick!” you snicker, and you can see his cheeks burn.

“i win!” soda calls, your comment having caused steve to lose focus and throw the win to soda.

you settle back into a comfortable position on the couch, watching as soda and steve break into an argument about why that wasn’t fair, thinking about yourself, your sister, and your relentless reign of terror.

[purplebenjy]

2005-Part 2

There’s six patients at his next session. Then nine. Then twelve. Dorcas has stopped participating to give up her spot to the thirteenth member, new today, a girl with nails that are bloody stumps and a smile that doesn’t reach her glazed over eyes. She gets her long dirty red hair in the paint and Dorcas has to gently help her tie it back.

RJ had missed last week’s but was back again, sitting determinedly next to a boy who looked maybe a year or two older than him, and twice as nervous. Katie, ever the faithful student, was still remarkably skinny, though Benjy could see a noticeable difference in five weeks of classes. Deena was in her usual spot in the back, but Benjy noticed she was quieter than usual that day, only heckling Benjy twice through his muddled lesson. Their sessions have extended to an hour and a half, so all of them spend the first sixty minutes putting paint on paper. He makes the rounds after that, pausing and smiling big when Rj tugs on his flannel to show him what he’s made. 

“You uh, get it?”

Benjy laughs delightedly. It was a painting of a young boy with the head of a cow, floating in space. 

“Space Cow Boy. Amazing and really well done. Rj you’re really talented.” He blushes, the tips of his ears turning bright pink. The boy next to him smiles shyly at RJ when he looks down.

“I’m glad you came back.”

“Me too. Vance told me I should.”

Benjy introduces himself to Vance and tries not read into the shy, borderline flirty smiles the boys are exchanging. Katie and her friend also from the ED program, Shawna, have both painted sunflowers. Her strokes are finally looser, slightly less perfect, though Benjy knows she’s got a long battle ahead of her. 

When he finally makes his way back to Deena, he’s surprised. Every session after their first one had depicted some sort of flying penis motif, but not this time. She’s painted a field, with mountains in the background. Her talent is obvious, it’s a semi-photo realistic style that Benjy has never even really been able to master himself. In the field there are all sorts of wildflowers and walking through them are a little girl with unruly tangled hair and a woman with slightly less wild curls. They’re facing the mountains, only the backs of them visible, their blue dresses picked up by a breeze Benjy can almost feel. Deena’s coloring in the raised arm of the mother, and she glances up at Benjy when he sits down beside her. 

“Deena...”

“I’m more than just flying dicks you know.”

She’s studying him now, Benjy can feel it. Waiting for his approval-a feeling he knows all too well, he can feel it coming off of her almost in waves. It’s bizarre to be in this position, to be on the other side of the canvas as it were, but he’s here, and Deena’s eyes are boring into him. 

“I know. I just didn’t know...you’re incredible.”

She scoffs. Without thinking, Benjy grabs her hand. “I mean it.”

She smiles, a real smile. A rare smile. She squeezes his hand once and lets it go.

“Thank you. I was..I mean I’m going to be again, in a program for art. It was just...a lot. My parents are splitting up and I...”

She trails off, glancing around the room. It’s alive with chatter and activity of the other patients and the two other nurses Dorcas rounded up to help her. No one’s hearing her, so Deena lets the wall down, just a little.

“It’s been hard. But I’m-I go home tomorrow, Benjy.”

He hears the excitement and fear in her voice as pride swoops through his heart.

“D, that’s great.”

“I’m terrified.”

“That’s a good thing.”

Deena snorts. “Oh yeah? When was the last time you were terrified?”

“When was my first session here again?”

That makes her smile again. 

“I hope it’s a good thing. I’m uh...” She drops her gaze to the painting. “I’m gonna miss you.”

The pride turns into affection.

“I’m gonna miss you too. But I can talk to Bernie about an outpatient program maybe...”

Deena shakes her head.

“No uh, other people need you more than me.”

“I mean, clearly.” Benjy says, nodding at her painting. “I can’t do that shit. You’re remarkable.”

“Not like you are.” She says, looking at him again. She clears her throat.

“You know how whenever you talk about your mom, you say she’s the best person in the world?”

“I talk about my mom that much?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow, I’m really cool.”

Deena laughs.

“Well, uh, my mom’s the best person in the world too. She got me in here, came to visit as much as they let her and...well after you came the first time, I finally could talk to her. It was just about the session at first but then…” She smiles. 

“I told her about you. About what you do. She asked me what your name was and she uh, knew you?”

Wildly, for a second that doesn’t make sense, Benjy wonders if Deena is one of Forest’s daughters. He shakes himself. At most they were middle schoolers right now, barely if that. Still, his chuckle is nervous when he speaks. 

“Um, how?”

“Her name’s Donna-uh, Donna Pierce?” 

Deena keeps talking but Benjy feels a little piece of him die. Donna Pierce was arguably one of the most influential art agents in not only the Bay Area, but the whole fucking state. She’d been at his showcase. She’d shaken his hand and taken a sample of his portfolio-he found out later he was one of only two she’d done that with. And she was one of the agents’ whose assistants had told him they’d call him, but he hadn’t heard anything.

“She saw me at school.” He says dumbly. Deena laughs.

“That’s what I just said. Anyway we’ve sort of just...talked about you and painting and stuff when talking about the other stuff was too hard. She wants to meet you again-she left her personal card for you at the front desk. I hope uh-I hope that’s okay. You obviously don’t have to call her if you don’t want to.”

“I think I’m going into shock.”

Deena laughs.

“Yeah uh, she’s a pretty big deal. That’s part of why all of this was just….like I’m her kid and if I fuck up it’s twice as bad, you know?”

Benjy softens, snapping out of his surprise for a moment.

“I doubt she’d ever see you as a fuck-up.”

Deena grins.

“That’s what she said too.”

~~

Cass glances nervously towards the corner booth. He’s been cleaning the same mug for the past 20 minutes, which happens to be about as long as Benjy has been having a conversation with Donna Pierce. She’d almost look out of place in the Spacey KC’s if it weren’t for her wild collection of curls. Her sharp red blazer stands out  aggressively against the seafoam green of the wall she sits in front of. Cass smiles to himself when Benjy says something that makes her laugh, the sound crossing the cafe and hitting him at the  rainbow bar. She’s got black cat eye glasses and light green eyes that look like they could easily turn cold, but they look like they’re at least entertained by his boyfriend as he sits across from her. He can only see the back of Benjy’s head but he studies it all the same, a smile crosses his face for a moment when he notices the blue streak is fading back to the almost white bleach they’d put in it. He’s not messing with his hair too much, which either means he’s not nervous at all or too nervous to do it. Benjy’s jean clad leg is bouncing under the table but it always was. He’d worn the “Kinda Gay” shirt today after almost 20 minutes of debating with himself. He’d finally decided on it, not wanting to hide himself, even if it meant risking what this opportunity could be. Cass was proud of him either way, and of course he knew Benjy knew that. He knew Benjy was talented and if things didn’t work out with Donna, they’d work out with someone else. But still-he’d been lower than either of them had really realized before he’d started volunteering to do the therapy sessions. Cass had watched Benjy come back to life after each of them, his self assurance blooming again, his confidence rising, wounds that were still painful healing a little more each time. If Benjy could get an agent...well, when he does get an agent, Cass was sure he’d be completely unstoppable. He already was of course, but he needed something to remind him, to fully light that fire again-

“Shit.”

Cass quickly averts his eyes as Benjy turns around to look at the counter, grinning like an idiot at the too clean mug in his hands when a snippet of what Benjy is saying drifts over to him.

“That beautiful tall one? Who doesn’t fit in at all with the Rainbow Brite thing that’s going on? That’s the love of my life.”

“Um, hello?”

Cass whips his attention to cash register and smiles sheepishly at the customer. Well, not customer. It’s Carly-one of the co-owners and his boss.

“Hey, hey, Car. Sorry.”

“Is that her?”

Everyone at work knew about Benjy’s meeting today, mostly because he couldn’t stop nervous babbling about it to anyone who would listen, and whenever Cass was at KC’s, Benjy wasn’t far away. Cass just nods, playing it cool and Carly, mercifully, picks up on the hint. Kat, her wife, was far less subtle, and probably would’ve gone over to also introduce herself. Cass makes Carly the weird herbal tea she stocks for pretty much only for her own use and she settles at the robin egg blue part of the bar, close to the register-doing the books but also listening in. 

When Cass goes back to his mug, Donna and Benjy stand up. They shake hands, and then, in something that appears to surprise them both, Donna pulls Benjy in for a quick, maternal hug. She laughs a little sheepishly, but Benjy says something to her that makes her instantly relax. They speak in low voices, probably because Benjy was highly aware of eavesdroppers. Donna Pierce straightens her blazer and with a nod to Cass, who doesn’t even pretend to not be staring, she leaves the cafe.

His eyes find Benjy’s as he walks over to the counter, hands in his pockets, body language casual.

“Hi baby.” 

“Hi…”

Benjy smiles at him in a way that really shouldn’t be legal and Cass can barely resist the urge to reach over the bar and pull him in for a kiss.

“Do I look different?”

Benjy cocks his head to the side slightly when he asks, the small gold earring in his ear catching the light. Cass’s eyebrows come together; that wasn’t what he was expecting him to say.

But he should know by now; Benjy Fenwick is anything but what’s expected of him. 

“Uh, no? Not really? Should you?”

“Well I thought you know, landing an agent, therefore making me an official professional artise would make me a bit more-”

Benjy doesn’t get to finish his thought because Cass lets out a cry of delight and gives into temptation, grabbing the sides of his face and bending ¾ of his body over the bar to kiss Benjy victoriously, swallowing his laughter and breaking away in astonished giggles.

“Shut the fuck up!”

“I’m guessing it’s good news?” Carly says dryly, glancing up from her books with a smile that betrays her. Benjy’s grinning almost manically and he nods so fast Cass actually sees a blur.

“Congratulations, Benj. You deserve it.” She jerks her head to the door as her eyes find Cass.

“Go. Celebrate. I can start half an hour early.”

“Are you sure?” Cass asks, already untying his apron. Carly nods, her smile growing.

“Your lives just fucking changed, of course I’m sure. You only get to celebrate this once.” 

Cass doesn’t even bother to properly walk around the counter, opting instead to clamor over it to get to Benjy as fast as possible, squeezing him in a bone crushing hug that lifts him slightly off of the ground.

“I knew you’d get it.” He tells his hair, Benjy just grins back at him. They leave the shop and start walking home, their hands firmly together, safe in their own neck of the city. Benjy breaks the contact soon, energy pouring out of him as he recaps everything for Cass, practically dancing as he walks backwards on the sidewalk.

“So she said she remembered me from school, even before Deena mentioned me-and I was honestly already in her ‘possibilities pile’ which is just...I want one of those. How fucking bad ass. But anyway, she remembered my name since it’s you know, ridiculous. And then she said uh, she remembered me because of my talent, but she was giving me a shot because of my compassion, which you know...pretty cool.”

Cass knew it was a lot more than ‘pretty cool’. He could see it on Benjy’s face, the way he spoke, how his eyes danced right along with him-he didn’t need to explain himself further.

“And we talked about Deena for a long time and just...god Cass, she’s such a cool kid and just, like, even if her mom had been like a dentist or something, I still would’ve loved meeting her like this, you know? But she’s not a dentist and now…”

His smile kind of fades and Benjy stops, Cass watches it all sink in right in front of him. When Benjy meets his eyes again, galaxies are forming.

“I’m real.”

Cass closes the distance between them and kisses him sweetly. He wants to tell Benjy that he’s always been real, that he would’ve been real no matter what had happened, but he knows what Benjy  means. And he doesn’t want to take even a fraction of any of this away from him. 

“You’re real.” He says, taking his hand again and giving it a squeeze. Benjy tells him all about logistics, the next steps, how he made sure he could still do the program at the hospital-answering Cass’s questions as best as he can. When they get to their building, Cass starts to unlock the door as Benjy balances on the top of the railing like always.

“You know what one was her favorite?”

Warmth is already spreading to Cass’s cheeks, instincts and the way Benjy’s voice has gone impossibly soft giving him a hint.

“What one?”

Benjy hops off the railing and stands on his tip toes to reach Cass’s lips fully.

“You, your highness. Your photograph. My favorite too.” 

Their fingers are locked together as they climb the stairs. Benjy pauses when they get to their landing.

“Do you think Carly was right? Is everything about to change?”

Someone not fluent in Benjy would’ve missed the tiny hint of doubt in his voice, but not Cass. He pushes some of Benjy’s hair out of his face and smiles at him.

“I think so, Star Eyes. But you know what?”

“What?”

“So far, every change with you has been a good one.”

[belleterrecountryclub]

Can Meditation Make You A Better Golfer?

An experiment with three golfers revealed the practice can make a difference. Just not the one you might expect

By Sam Weinman

few months ago Golf Digest set out to answer a question almost as old as the game itself: does alcohol make you play better, or worse? The experiment and resulting video with three too-eager participants, was illuminating, comical, and fairly conclusive: a little bit of “swing oil” has some residual benefits owing to a decrease in tension and inhibition. Too much, however, leads to deteriorating focus and coordination, and then you just stop caring about advancing the ball at all. A subsequent experiment with marijuana yielded similar results: some weed might take the edge off and loosen up your swing, but anything more than a little becomes counterproductive.

That brings us to our recent experiment exploring the effects of meditation, structured like the first two, but also plenty unique. Here, too, we submitted three golfers of varying playing ability to a series of golf tests while interspersing the influence of an outside element—beers and tokes became 15 minutes of meditation. The difference is that while meditation does induce some immediate physiological effects and boasts several long-term health benefits, we’re still talking about a rather nuanced exercise that is difficult to quantify. And if you really wanted to measure it well, best to do it over a few months instead of a couple of hours. Still, a few hours is what we started with one day this summer, and I, along with colleagues Keely Levins and Ben Walton, was selected as one of three golfers who would spend the day hitting golf shots and meditating to see what type of difference we’d see. Although Keely and Ben had limited experience with meditation, I’d recently begun dabbling in no small part because mindfulness, as it’s also known, has been hailed as perhaps the best way to temper the freneticism of our modern lives. And no doubt I was a worthy candidate: a digital editor who spends his days tethered to one electronic device or another, a father of two high-energy boys, and someone who can overthink everything from family dynamics to what club to hit off the tee. As I said in the video, I first told my wife that I thought meditation would help because, “I run pretty hot during the day.” “No,” she corrected me. “You run hot all the time.”

So in terms of how a few minutes of meditation a day can calm the mind and harness focus, I was already sold. What I hadn’t explored, and what we sought to discover that day, was how it might affect one’s performance on the golf course. Plus, we saw it as an opportunity to debunk misconceptions about meditation — what exactly it is, what you do, and why it might mesh well with the mental and emotional demands of golf.

The day was broken into segments of three different golf challenges—driving for distance, approach shot accuracy, and putting—followed by brief sessions with meditation teacher Jonni Pollard. Pollard is the founder of a meditation app, 1 Giant Mind, and a personal mentor to a roster of clients that includes corporate executives and professional golfers. With a clean-shaven head, an Australian accent, and an affable manner, he spent the day convincing us of the ways meditation can not only help us think clearer on the golf course, but at work and home as well.

Among Pollard’s central arguments is that for all our technological progress, the human body has remained virtually unchanged from man’s earliest days fending off regular physical threats, which is why we process stress the same whether it’s an unpleasant email or a bear attack. This disconnect between how we live now, and the biological constraints of our bodies and brains, can explain why we often feel scattered so much of the time, and why even the mundane stresses of everyday life can elicit profound physical reactions.

“This is the little glitch in our system,” Pollard said. “We are entrenched in a dysfunctional state of defensive living because the way we’re living now is so far removed from how we’ve biologically evolved.”

What does this have to do with our ability to hit a drive in the fairway? Plenty, actually, because the same forces that leave us feeling frequently disjointed also factor into our performance on the course.

Almost every golfer has to negotiate the chasm between the shots he’s capable of producing, and the those he actually hits. We’re too quick, we’re too distracted, we’re worried about the pond on the left—when the result falls short of our potential, it often emanates from somewhere between the ears. By contrast think about the time you mindlessly hit a shot on the range and it soars perfectly off the clubface; or when you rake in a conceded putt from afar without even trying, and it rolls straight into the hole. It’s precisely because you “weren’t thinking” that it worked out so well.

This, Pollard said, this is where meditation can make a difference.

“What it does is it hits factory restart and restores our natural capability,” Pollard said. “Our natural capability is there and we need to allow it to be there, so what is the thing that’s inhibiting it? From my perspective it’s the hyper stimulation of the thinking mind.”

Which is not to say that each meditation session sets you on a path to a truer golf swing. Not exactly at least. As the afternoon unfolded, my driver carry improved, but my approach shots were looser, and my putting stayed about the same. To think of meditation as some type of performance enhancer in deep-breathing form is to misinterpret the underlying machinations at work. As Pollard said, when you meditate for 20 minutes, focusing on your breath or a mantra and allowing outside elements to recede into the background, it’s similar to doing a set of bench presses at the gym. The act itself may make you stronger, but it’s really repetition and time that allows the effects to take hold

“The conversations I like to have when talking about meditation is one, it’s really wonderful to alleviate short term the symptoms of stress,” Pollard says. “But also it creates the internal infrastructure for us to be able to become resilient in this life, rather than feel like life is taxing you.”

Beyond technical improvement, what we really detected was an underlying sense of calm, noteworthy on what could have been a stressful day. Although Keely played college golf, Ben and I were not used to the strain of having every shot measured so precisely. Throw a handful of cameras and a crew of about 10 into the equation, and under normal circumstances I’d question if I could even draw the club back. But after each session with Pollard we began to mind the attention less, and distractions subsided. “It became easier to be over the shot,” said Keely. “I had this odd sense of detachment to where it was going, like I didn’t want to look at the result. Not every shot was great, but there was some freedom and ease in not feeling painfully invested in how straight my drives were flying.”

This is what Pollard means when he describes the “infrastructure” meditation helps construct. Scientific studies of meditation have shown that the practice strengthens the pre-frontal cortex portion of the brain responsible for concentration, focus and problem solving while shrinking the amygdala section that triggers our panicky “fight or flight” response. So even though I didn’t hit the ball markedly better that day, the ingredients were all there to do so—I was more focused, less fatigued, not nearly as wrapped up in the shot I just hit or the one still to come.

And therein lies the real breakthrough, because golf is nothing if not an opportunity for self-sabotage. You start a round poorly, you stress over wanting to play better. You start out playing well, you wonder how long it will last. Pollard and other meditation experts like to say that the practice improves “present moment awareness,” which is a variation of the old golf cliche of “taking it one shot at a time.” Roll your eyes if you must, but think about how much easier the game would be if your mind were free of competing narratives and you just played.

Our Max Adler played a round of golf last year with Sadghuru Jaggi Vasudev, a spiritual leader with millions of followers and a surprising affection for golf. Adler attended one of the guru’s workshops to better understand how Eastern practices like meditation can translate to athletic performance. Sadghuru, too, emphasized the value of getting out of your head.

“People trip on their own minds,” Sadghuru said. “They need to create a little distance between what they think and what they do.” So, to get back to the original question: Does meditation help you become a better golfer? The short answer is yes. The longer answer might be encapsulated by an experience from a few weeks after our session with Pollard, when I developed a wicked case of the shanks.

For about 10 days in the heart of the golf season, I had a hard time hitting an iron or wedge without the ball screaming off the hosel right into some unspeakable place. Golfers who’ve experienced the dynamic know no more maddening affliction, and in the grips of it, I couldn’t hit a simple 30-yard pitch without panicking. Then I recalled an exercise we learned with Pollard for right before address. We’d stand behind the ball, place both hands on the grip of the club, and take in a deep breath before proceeding. For an entire round, I did this over every shot —a mini-meditation session that attempted Pollard’s version of “factory restart.” My head clearer, my breath slower, the panic receded, and solid contact soon returned.

So if you’re asking, no, I don’t think you can measure the efficacy of mediation by saying it will drop this number of strokes from your score. But what I have noticed is that it can work to flush out our worst instincts—both on the course and everywhere else. I, for one, need all the help I can get.

Source: golfdigest.com

The post Can Meditation Make You A Better Golfer? appeared first on Belle Terre.

[tilltheendwilliwrite]

Canadian Girl

Chapter Twelve

Previous Chapter

Pairing: Steve Rogers x OFC  |  Word Count:4515 Warnings: Swearing, mild violence, implied abusive former relationship, stereotyping of Canadians (I'm allowed, I am one)

A/N: For those who are familiar with, or have been to the Canadian Finals Rodeo please note, I have taken artistic license on a few things. I am aware that not everything portrayed is correct. That's why it's called Fiction.

Jonas was still reeling a few days later as he watched the two Americans unload the three bulls from the trailer into the pens. Matt, Natasha, and Kennedy were dealing with the horses, but watching Steve and Bucky was both amusing and amazing.

The two men knew absolutely nothing when it came to bulls. They were decent with the horses, but the bulls were completely new.

He’d warned them to watch out for the Brahma.

Cyclone had a wicked temper, wasn’t afraid to gore you through the fence if he could, and of course, he’d tried, but Bucky with that metal arm had simply grabbed the animal by the horn and given it a shove which had skidded the big bull backwards, nearly bowling him right over. Every day since Cyclone kept a wary eye on Bucky, and Bucky kept one on the bull.

Steve had had his own run-in with one of the old males, a breeding bull by the name of Jacks All In. It had charged him in the paddock, but Cap had only turned around and punched him square between the eyes. The massive black bull had toppled over stunned, gotten up, shaken himself off, and followed Steve docile as a kitten around the pen afterwards.

Thank the good lord the bull wasn’t one he needed to buck anymore, cause he doubted he would. Cap had punched the ornery right out of him.

They definitely did things differently, but, after the second day, he’d worried less about the men and more about his livestock. Long as neither of them punched one of his prize bulls, the rank ones no one could ride, they’d be okay.

They both sat a horse reasonably well. Diamond was quite taken with Bucky, and Steve had gotten up on Rocky.

He was struck with the fact that they would have used horses on occasion back during the war. After spending half a week with the two men, it was hard to remember they’d come from a different era.

Now, Natasha, on the other hand, was a little ball of fire. She really knew nothing about livestock, but Kennedy had taken her under her wing, and the two had bonded fairly quickly, much to his daughter’s surprise. It was no secret Kennedy was self-conscious, but between Steve’s constant attention – something he was so not ready to see – Bucky’s brand of teasing, and Natasha’s boundless enthusiasm, they were dragging her back out of the shell she’d hidden in.

Kennedy’s relationship with Carl stuck in his craw something fierce.

He’d known something was wrong there, had for months, hell, years before she’d finally come home after graduation looking like death.

She was a completely different person.

His exuberant, outgoing Kennedy had become a shadow of herself.

They’d had to practically force her to eat, and it had taken weeks for Mary to convince her to confide in what had gone down. All Kennedy had said when she’d come home was that it was over, she had broken up with Carl. Even now he was sure there were things she’d told Mary, Mary had never told him, likely to keep him from up and killing Carl.

But now she had Steve. Captain freaking America. Dear lord! If the man married his daughter, he was going to be related to a superhero! Hell, the wedding they’d have to throw because, holy jumpin’s, just how many other superheroes would show up?

Shaking his head, he pushed those thoughts away as too much, too soon. He refused to giggle like a fangirl at the prospect of getting to meet Thor! He clenched his fists to hold back the excited ‘eee’ which wanted to slip out.

Clearing his throat, he glanced around to make sure everything was still under control and turned his thoughts to Fury’s proposal.

The man had been one scary S.O.B. Between the black clothes and the eye patch, Jonas had taken one look at the man stomping his way towards the door and stiffened his spine. Yet, here too, he’d found a completely different person than what he’d expected, kind of like Stark, in that though he was gruff and a bit intimidating, Fury had a good head on his shoulders and had come offering them what seemed like an interesting idea.

With the size of the land and house, would they be interested in allowing the newly reformed SHIELD program to use their property as a base of operations. Nothing big, mind you, but a place to do wilderness training for the newer recruits, as well as possibly housing those agents who needed a place to recover after a severe traumatic event.  They’d build a small training facility away from the house and barns but wondered if the Canadians would extend their hospitality to those who were injured, allowing them a comfortable and completely normal environment to spend their recuperation. Of course, SHIELD would pay them for their cooperation, stay as much out of their way as possible, and provide needed security for their family.

Mary had always wanted to run a bed and breakfast, and the boys had both been making plans to build their own homes on the property now that they had growing families, so the big house would have been sitting empty. He’d asked to think about it, talk it over with his family, but he was leaning towards saying yes. Hydra was a threat to all of them now.

At dinner a few nights back when all the family had gathered, they’d finally convinced Joan and Daniel it was time they moved out with them. While Joan’s medical was covered, it was getting harder for her to get around and Daniel worked from home more often than not. It wouldn’t be a hardship to transform a chunk of the house into their space, and this way all of the family was safe and the worry he saw in Kennedy’s eyes would disappear.

A clang had him snapping his eyes to the boys as Bucky shut the gates and Steve closed up the trailer. Matt, Kenny, and Nat were doing the same, and he clapped his hands together, turning toward George Malin, this year’s organizer of all things CFR. “There we go.”

George opened and closed his mouth a few times before peering at Jonas. “Jones is that… are those… are they…the Avengers?”

“Hm?” He glanced at the boys as Steve helped Kennedy down off the fence. “Nah! That would be crazy!”

The only one who could wear a cowboy hat with any confidence was Natasha, so Steve and Bucky had stuck to ball caps. Bucky’s long sleeved shirt hid the metal of his arm, as did the leather gloves he wore, while Steve had popped on a pair of thick-framed glasses.

He’d heard his daughter whisper something about how he’d made being a nerd sexy. He’d didn’t even want to know. Just like how he didn’t want to know Steve spent every night in his daughter’s room, or how he was staying in her hotel room either. Those were things no daddy needed to know about.

“Ha… yeah… what was I thinking?” George murmured. “What would the Avengers be doing at CFR, right?”

***

Kennedy’s hair was braided into two pigtails which stuck out the bottom of her hat.

Steve gave one a gentle tug. “Pretty cute, Doc.”

She had her hands tucked into the pockets of her jeans, a belt with more glitter on it than he’d ever expected to see her wear, and a pink and white gingham shirt tied beneath her breasts over her white tank top. She was the epitome of a cowgirl right down to her sexy white hat.

He wanted nothing more than to squeeze her ass in those tight jeans but resigned himself to hands on her waist. “There’s my cowgirl.”

“You call me a filly, Steven, and I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.” She smiled and batted her eyelashes while Natasha laughed.

“I would never dream of it, doll.” He grinned down at her before ducking beneath her hat and kissing her mouth.

She’d made them all go shopping, a rather… interesting experience, kitting them out at a western apparel store, so they didn’t stick out quite so badly behind the chutes.

All three had gotten a crash course in rodeo 101, and with Nat’s talents, she’d blended in beautifully. It wouldn’t surprise him in the least if she got on a horse and ran the barrels.

He and Bucky were doing an adequate job of blending in, though they’d both refused the cowboy boots she’d wanted to put them in. The bottoms were just too slick to make for decent footing if something went wrong, and they had stuck to their combat boots. Both pairs were so worn down, so comfortable, Jonas didn’t think it would matter. Steel toes to work with the bulls wasn’t a farfetched story.

They’d be here most of a week, and Steve was finding the looser fit of the button down shirt he was in kind of nice. Currently, his was navy, Bucky’s was black, both had names of rodeo-related sponsors down the arms and across the shoulders. They’d been given jeans Kennedy said they were a necessity.

Apparently, if his ass didn’t say Wrangler, it would be some kind of rodeo faux pas.

Considering Kennedy had swallowed really hard when he’d walked out of the dressing room and couldn’t pull her eyes from his butt, he wasn’t averse to having his clothes changed.

“What now, doll?” he asked softly.

***

They were later in their arrival on that Tuesday evening thanks to the snow they’d come through, but the events weren’t due to start till the next day.

“Dad will want to visit with the other stock contractors and Matt while likely stay with him but…” She bit her lip and glanced at Nat and Bucky. “You guys want to hit the Roadhouse?”

The rodeo’s after-party bar would likely be up and running already for the competitors, even a day early, and they could go have some fun. It wasn’t all work when you came to these things after all.

“Roadhouse? Like the movie?” Bucky asked his grin a tad cheeky.

Laughing, Kennedy shook her head. “I guess it depends on how drunk everyone is.” As a girl, she’d adored Patrick Swayze, so she knew that title well. “It will be fun.”

“You do know we can’t get drunk, right?” Steve smirked down at her.

“But I can! I’m in!” Nat whooped and jumped up beside Jonas. “Hey, Uncle Jonas, Kenny’s going to take us to the Roadhouse!” Sweeping her hat from her head, she bussed him a kiss on his cheek and slipped a panic button in his pocket. “Push that if you need us,” she whispered in his ear, before giggling and looking up at Matt. “You comin’, cuz?”

Why she’d ever thought Nat was intimidating, Kennedy couldn’t remember. Formidable. Strong willed. Tough. Those were words which fit the redhead best. It was Nat’s confidence in herself which made her intimidating, and the woman had been more than willing to help Kennedy find hers again. Natasha was just… awesome, and had become an inspiration to Kenny in a lot of ways. She liked Nat, had found a friend, and the two of them were a bit more alike than she would have ever guessed. They liked to tease and joke and had quick tongues

Matt blinked down at Nat once and slowly shook his head. “My wife would kill me. I’ll stay with dad.” He glanced at Steve and nodded. “Do not let her drink tequila.”

“Hey!” Kennedy huffed.

“Do not make me remind you what happened last time.” Matt pointed his finger at her. “The words from that song suit you just fine, Kenny!”  

“Rude!” she huffed.

Nat giggled, evidently having heard the song Tequila makes her clothes come off,  but Steve and Bucky looked confused.

She was of no mind to enlighten them.

Chuckling, George tugged six passes from his bag. “Here’s your passes. Get you in where you need to go.”

Taking them from him, Nat smiled as she plucked out four, passing the rest to Matt. “Let’s go!” She jumped down and handed them off to the others.

“We’ll move this trailer and take the truck, dad. See you in the morning!” Kennedy chirped and waved, bounding around the front, climbing in to drive. The other’s followed suit and twenty minutes later, and one very cold walk through the parking lot, she was dragging them through the door of the loud and noisy dance hall. “I haven’t been here in years!”

Nat grinned at Kennedy and took her hand. “There’s a mechanical bull!”

Laughing, Kennedy nodded. “You should try it!”

Smacking her hand into Bucky’s abs, Nat snickered, “He should try it… and use the left arm.”

“That would be cheatin’, doll,” Bucky smirked.

“Besides, he’d pick up so many buckle bunnies we’d need to de-fluff him to take him home,” Kennedy chuckled.

“Explain buckle bunny?” Bucky asked, his grin smug.

Kennedy only looked at him. “No.”

“Ah, doll. That’s mean.” He pouted.

She only narrowed her eyes. “No skanks, Bucky. That’s just… ew.” She shivered in disgust. “We’d have to delouse you before you could get back in the truck.”

Natasha burst out laughing and made her smile.

“Don’t worry, baby. He’s just teasing.” Steve murmured in her ear and grinned at Buck.

She smiled back at Steven.

Late one night, he’d explained a bit about Bucky. How his friend had had his share of women over the years, but Bucky wasn’t like that anymore. He may joke and laugh about it, but the nature of Bucky’s time with Hydra had ingrained in him too many scars for the man to be comfortable letting just anyone crawl between his sheets. It was why he flirted and joked so easily with her.

She was, apparently, safe because she would scoff at him and wave him off as being ridiculous. She was safe for Buck to flirt with because nothing would ever come of it, but it gave him a sense of normality, a link to his past self. She’d silently vowed, then and there, to always be Bucky’s friend, and if that meant suffering his teasing ways, so be it.

“Guess you’ll just have to buy me a beer, doll face,” Bucky smirked at her and caught the keys when she tossed them at him. “What are these for?”

“Someone’s got to be sober enough to drive. As neither of you can get drunk…” She let the ending hang and dashed into the party hand in hand with Nat.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, Buck?”

“This could be a really long night,” Bucky sighed softly, stalking after the two giggling reds.

***

It was more fun than she’d had in… Kennedy couldn’t remember how long. Being out of the lab, her project finished and not having selected a new one, gave her a freedom she hadn’t had in years. She drank, she laughed, she dragged Steven out to dance with her, both fast songs and slow. She’d taught Bucky to line dance, went through a line of shots with Natasha – a very bad idea – and managed to get Steven on the mechanical bull.

It was cake for the super soldier in the hat and glasses, but man. His muscles had been all flexy in his arms and legs. And that ass. So hot. Of course, when he’d dismounted like he’d been bull riding all his life, landing lightly on his feet, he’d been instantly surrounded by a host of fluffy women.

How shocked they were when he walked through them, up to her, and had taken her mouth in a possessive, nearly brutal, kiss. It was glorious!

She’d watched Natasha flirt her way through a line of cowboys, dance, drink, and she was nearly sure she’d heard her conversing with Bucky in Russian at one point. Not that she knew Russian, but Kennedy was pretty sure it hadn’t been English.

She’d dragged Bucky out on the dance floor too, learning his smooth, debonair included fancy footwork as well. It made her laugh when he’d dipped her, spun her, and two-stepped her around the room with ease. After, he’d had a host of dance partner’s offer, but he’d stuck to mainly her and Natasha. It wasn’t exactly difficult to feel the difference in his two hands.

A couple of times people came up and casually made mention they sure looked like Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and Natasha Romanoff.

All three just played it off like it happened all the time. After all, what would the Avengers be doing at the Canadian Finals Rodeo?

It made people chuckle and continue on their way.

Now, a few hours in, she was hot, sweaty, and damn did she have to pee. Seeing Natasha heading that way as well, Kennedy was quick to catch up. “Well?”

“Okay. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun when it didn’t include guns, torture, or kicking a little ass!” Nat laughed happily, linking arms with Kennedy.

Taken only a little aback, Kennedy chuckled. “You’re kind of scary when you just throw that stuff out there, you know.”

“Meh.” Nat shrugged. “You’ll get used to it.”

Snickering softly, they rounded the corner to where the washrooms were when Kennedy jerked Nat to a stop so quickly it had the former assassin reaching for the knife hidden in her belt.

“Kennedy?” Nat asked.

She knew she’d paled to a ghostly white. All because of the man striding towards them. “Carl…” Kennedy whispered.

***

Natasha was quick to step between Kennedy and Carl, the whisper from her friend one of intense fear. Old fear. A fear which still plagued the doc.

“Well, if it isn’t Kennedy Jones.”

The man walked like a used car salesman, all rolling gate and slick smile. His cowboy hat was tilted back so she could see the eyes which assessed first her, then flicked past to latch on Kennedy.

She could say with honesty he was handsome. He had a chiselled face, square jaw with high cheekbones, and dark eyes which seemed to see right through you. Dark brown hair curled around the edge of his hat, a black one – fitting for a villain or so Nat thought.

Raking her eyes down his form, she smirked a little. Lean, strong with it, but no match for her.

Steve would break him in half.

It wasn’t a wonder why Kennedy had been sucked in by his pretty face, but he made Natasha’s skin crawl.

Unlike Steve, she knew a bit more about Carl and what the man had done to make Kennedy pull away from the world. Women talked to other women who’d experienced similar things with a lot more freedom than they would their lover.

This was a man who needed an ass-kicking.

Natasha was more than happy to give it to him. “Walk away, Kennedy.”

“Nat…” Kennedy crossed her arms, holding her elbows, shaking with each step he took toward them.

“Oh but Kennedy and I need to catch up, don’t we, Kenny?” He glared at her, but Natasha wasn’t about to move out of the way.

“There’s nothing to say, Carl,” Kennedy murmured, voice much weaker than Nat would have liked.

Sneering, he snarled, “But there’s so much to talk about, darling.” He made to reach past her.

Nat just smacked his hand away.

“Excuse me? Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Kennedy’s friend and right now your worst nightmare if you don’t back the fuck up, buddy!” She could smell the booze on him. It wasn’t all courtesy of the bottle in his hand.

“Nat... don’t,” Kennedy said. “I’m not your darling, Carl. Not anymore. Not in five years.”

“And whose choice was that, darling? I sure didn’t say we were through. And just look at you. How you’ve let yourself go.” He tsked softly, taking his eyes over her body.

Natasha could almost feel her withdrawing, Kennedy pulling inside herself with each nasty word. “You do not listen to him, Kennedy! You’re perfect just the way you are. Just the way Steve loves you!”

“Steve!?” Carl looked shocked and betrayed. “You’re cheating now, too, Kenny? Whatever were you thinking? I’ll have to reprimand you for it.” His hand dropped to the big buckle on his belt and ran his fingers over it.

The implications had her seeing red. “Touch her, and it will be the last mistake you ever make,” Natasha growled.

***

That move would have once thrown her into a panic, but Kennedy wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

Instead, she took a deep breath and thought about Steven.

He was so much more than Carl. Brave, strong, kind. He was a man she was proud to call her lover, and Captain America or not, he was a good man. He was nothing like Carl. He showed her every night just how much he loved her. He liked her soft and a little squishy. He liked how she was a little aggressive in bed and would feed his kink. He liked that she had sass and a smart mouth. And most of all... he loved her.

Straightening up, Kennedy let a shit-eating grin cross her face while placing a hand on Natasha's shoulder. “You should go, Carl, before you embarrass yourself. You’re nothing to me anymore. I have a man who loves me for me and isn’t afraid to show it. He’s so much more than you ever were.” Smirking, she made to walk past him because man did she have to pee.

Nat’s smirk was so proud it made Kennedy blush. Still, the redhead kept her body between them.

“Bitch! You always were a fat fuck, dead fish lay! I bet you found another fat fuck to hump you at night,” Carl snarled, stalking after them.

Turning her head, Natasha smiled. It was a look so potent, so clearly flirtatious, but so evil at the same time, it made Carl falter. It was her widow smile. The one that said she’d eat him alive for the fun of it. “Oh, I wouldn’t say Steve was fat, would you... Bucky?”

Kennedy froze before turning slowly around.

Standing behind Carl only a few feet away was Bucky, grinning madly, and a furious Steve.

“Steven...”

He was practically seething, his jaw was so tightly clenched it had a muscle ticking in it. “What did you just say about my girl?” Steve's knuckles cracked when he flexed them.

Carl’s eyes nearly bugged out when he caught sight of the two super soldiers who had appeared silently behind him. “I...”

“You’re going to want to walk away, right the fuck now,” Bucky said, his smile never faltering.

Glaring at the idiot, Steve stalked past him to pull her in close and cup her cheek. “Are you alright, baby?”

Nat’s miracle bruise cream had done wonders for the shiner she had sported, and makeup had done the rest, so she knew she looked okay, even if his eyes lingered.

“I’m fine, Steven.” She smiled shyly up at him. “Carl can’t get to me anymore. I’ve seen him for what he truly is.” She glanced at Carl, looking small in comparison to the two soldiers with her. “A small, pathetic excuse for a man. He's nothing compared to you. Nothing.”

The pride on his face was evident when he leaned down and kissed her. “Perfect, doll face. That’s my Canadian girl.”

Anger twisted Carl’s features as he lunged toward them. “Get your hands off her!”

Bucky plucked the bottle Carl had raised out of his hand, but it was Natasha who kicked him. Once in the gut and a second time square in the chest, knocking Carl into the wall.

“You want us to hand him off to security, Cap? Or should we just toss his stupid ass out in the snow?” Nat asked.

***

Steve had seen it coming a mile away, hadn’t even bothered to flinch because Bucky and Nat always had his back, but Kennedy had recoiled in a way which had his jaw clenching again. Just what hadn't she told him about Carl? “He never laid a hand on her, so the snow is your best option. Other than being drunk and stupid there is nothing to charge him with.”

“I’m on it,” Bucky said, grabbing the stunned idiot by the back of his shirt.

“Steven?” Kennedy whispered as Bucky dragged the protesting Carl away.

“Yeah, baby?” He gently stroked his fingers over her cheek, so proud of how she’d stood up to her ex.

“I really need to use the ladies room.”

He snickered before letting her go. “I’ll wait right here for both of you.” He nodded to Natasha, more grateful than he could currently express as Kennedy darted through the door.

***

Bucky thrust open the exit and dumped dumbass outside. Keeping his foot in the doorway so he could get back in, he crouched down beside the man who was clearly hurting from the power of Nat's kicks.

She sure hadn't been inclined to pull her punches with this one.

“You’re a lucky fellow, you know that?” he said to Carl, slowly beginning to peel the glove from his hand.

“Fuck... you,” Carl wheezed.

“How do I figure, you ask? Well, let me explain something to you. You see, Kennedy is a special girl, and my best friend loves her a hell of a lot. So much so that he wasn’t  about to take away her victory over the abuser she escaped by taking matters into his own hands and beating you bloody.”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out Carl had hurt Kennedy. Maybe not physically, but he'd scarred her emotionally for sure. Although, with the way she’d recoiled it was a fair guess the fucker had hit her at some point.

“Now me, on the other hand, if Kenny was my girl and I heard someone call her a... what was it? Fat fuck, dead fish lay... I’d a snapped his neck.” Flexing the fingers of his vibranium hand, he picked up the bottle Carl had tried to swing at Steve, turned it to pour what beer remained into the snow, and crushed it, grinding it down to little more than dust. “This will be your only warning. Come near Kennedy again, and it will be the last mistake you make. I am very, very good at my job.” Dusting his hand off on Carl’s shoulder, Bucky squeezed it tightly until the bones ground together and the man hollered. “You have a good night. Best you don't come back inside.”

Getting to his feet, Bucky tugged the glove back on and returned inside, making sure the door snicked shut behind him.

Carl’s pass had read rodeo doctor.

He’d be making damn sure to keep an eye out for Dr. Carl Stephenson. The man reeked of trouble.

Next Chapter

[putthison]

How To Do Business Casual Without Looking Like a Schmuck

It’s never been harder to figure out how to dress for work. A generation ago, the average office uniform was simple: a dark suit worn with a white shirt, dark tie, and pair of leather dress shoes. If you were in London, those shoes were black; if you were in the US or Continental Europe, they may have been brown. Self-expression those days was limited to the pattern on your tie. 

Today, things are different. Ostensibly, men can wear whatever they want to work thanks to decades of “casual Fridays.” At the same time, just because HR departments no longer regulate what we wear, that doesn’t mean most of us don’t feel social pressure to dress according to softly coded norms. In most offices, that means polos with khaki chinos, or perhaps t-shirts with jeans. Not as interesting as casualwear could be; not as sharp as the traditional coat-and-tie. It’s just vanilla bland.

So, if you care about how you dress, you probably find yourself in a bind. What do you wear if your office doesn’t do suits, but you also don’t like the typical business casual uniform?

There’s no easy answer, partly because there’s no such thing generic office (and thus, no generic worker). Dressing well requires a bit of situational awareness, and everyone has different needs. So, I thought I’d lay out eight suggestions for how to do business casual -- moving from the most formal to the least. The idea is how you can dress a little sharper and feel good about yourself, without breaking out a three-piece. Hopefully there’s something in here that works for you. 

THE TRADITIONAL COAT-AND-TIE LOOK

Most offices today don’t require suits, but a good number will allow sport coats with ties. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’re probably familiar with the basics. Certain details will make a jacket look more casual, even to people who aren’t necessarily acquainted with these things. Think: a softer shoulder line, patterned fabric, or patch pockets. See our guide on how to read formality in tailored clothing. 

Navy sport coats here will be your workhorses. They have a professional sensibility, recalling the days with the color signified something about “city dress.” Gray jackets can also work, but they’re less versatile than those in brown. That’s because most of your trousers should be light- to mid-shades of gray, making it hard to pair the two. (Don’t try to build a trouser wardrobe without gray pants; it’s a bad idea). 

Charcoal trousers can also be good if you have light-colored jackets, but they’re otherwise hard to wear (same goes for navy, which will look a little more modern than dark gray). On the other hand, tan is very useful, particularly in cotton or wool. 

For shirts, stick to a foundation of whites and light blues. Stripes and checks can be OK, so long as they’re simple. Remember these will serve as the background for your tie, and the more complicated the shirt, the more likely you’ll walk out the door with a clashing combination. 

Ties are often best in dark colors, such as navy, chocolate brown, and burgundy. I particularly like grenadines and simple rep stripes. The second is an all-American look; the first allows you to add visual interest to solid-colored jackets, but also not clash with anything patterned. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consider picking up a few pairs of dark brown derbies. Too many men go for tan as their second pair of shoes, but they’re considerably harder to wear. Dark brown, on the other hand, goes with everything, and derbies play better with sport coats given their slightly more informal nature (as compared to oxfords). I particularly like Norwegian split toes, but you can also choose wingtips, cap toes, or plain toes. 

(photos above via Men in this Town and Voxsartoria)

SPORT COATS WITHOUT A TIE

If you, like me, work in a more casual office, you may be wondering how you can wear a sport coat without seeming too stiff. The answer is easy: ditch the tie. An open collar conveys a certain kind of ease that even the most casual tie won’t. 

Once you lose the tie, all sorts of shirt options become available. It’s easier to wear busier shirts, such as wider butcher stripes, or even dark colors (although, please never wear black dress shirts unless you’re DJ-ing a high-school prom). For something even more casual, consider dressier chambrays or long-sleeved polos. I particularly like this washed denim shirt I bought last year from Proper Cloth, an advertiser on this site. It’s sold out at the moment, but they bring it back every now and again. 

Same with the section above, you’ll want to review our guide on how to read formality in tailored clothing. And if you’re going to work without a tie, sport coats in the most casual materials will probably be fine as well. 

Also worth noting: while it’s perfectly acceptable to wear a sport coat without a tie, you should never wear a tie without a tailored jacket. That is, unless you work in a cell phone store. 

(photos via Mark Cho, Coccinella, and GQ)

SWAPPING IN CASUAL PANTS

It can be trickier to dress things down further from here, but entirely possible if you pay attention to certain principles. 

The most obvious solution is to swap our your gray flannel trousers for some blue jeans -- the modern symbol of casualwear. The trick is to get the right combination. Most men make the mistake of wearing suit jackets with denim (don’t do this). Instead, pick a more casual sport coat and a dressier pair of jeans. This makes it easier to bridge the gap in formality

For jackets, consider more casual fabrics: tweed, cotton, or corduroy. Navy hopsack also works, simply because it’s an old American look at this point. Just choose navy jackets with more texture (again, stay away from smoother, silkier wools that make you look like you’re wearing an orphaned suit jacket). 

For jeans, stay with dark denim, ideally built with a slightly higher rise. I really like this pair from Drake’s, which has a slim, slightly tapered leg line. Our friends Gus and David, both excellent at this denim-on-tailoring thing, also wear various models from Levi’s. 

Alternatively, you can get a dressier pair of chinos. Something made from a finer cotton, and doesn’t have any puckering along the side seams, will seem dressier than what you’ll find at J. Crew (and thus easier to wear with sport coats). The downside: dressier chinos are expensive. If you can stomach the prices, I like the ones from Rota and Ring Jacket. 

Nine times out of ten, these combinations do better without a tie. Or frankly even a pocket square. Remember, you want to keep these as casual as possible. Ties in these cases will often look affected. 

(photos above via Wired and P. Johnson Tailors)

SNEAKERS WITH TAILORING

To dress things down even further, swap out your traditional shoes for sneakers. Plain, simple designs, such as Common Projects Achilles (a more affordable version available at our advertiser Gustin) or Supergas (particularly the plainer 1705s), are good. Leave chunkier, more colorful sport sneakers at home. 

Much like jeans, you’ll have a better chance of knocking this out the park when everything else in your outfit is a little more casual. That means: softer sport coats, no tie, and casual pants. See Mark Cho from The Armoury above in his jeans, or George Wang of BRIO in his chinos. Change either of these out for gray flannel trousers and the incongruity can be jarring. 

One downside to this look: sneakers often work best when they’re clean, not ratty (the opposite of casualwear, where beat-up sneakers have a certain charm). If you need a good cleaner, I recommend Jason Markk. The stuff works wonders. 

(Photo above via Mark Cho and George Wang)

THE MODERN OVERCOAT

Here’s one of the sad realities of modern life: for some guys, it’s just hard to wear tailored clothing, no matter how casual the jacket. Sad because tailoring flatters like nothing else. Judicious wadding can extend the shoulders, making the waist look smaller by comparison; good canvas and haircloth can build up the chest, making the wearer look more athletic. That’s not true for casualwear, which is almost always unstructured. 

One way to get around this is to wear a tailored overcoat. Most overcoats have some kind of structure in the chest, and you can use it to dress up even the simplest sweater and jean combination. 

There are two ways of wearing an overcoat. The first is to get something that contrasts with the rest of your outfit (e.g. a brown topcoat worn over a cream sweater and light gray pants). The other is to match colors, but play within the textures, patterns, weaves, and sheen. Alessandro Squarzi’s black wool topcoat above, for example, looks different from his black jeans simply because it’s made from different fibers. These low-contrast moves can be hard to pull off, but look great when they’re done well. 

Unfortunately, most overcoats these days are short, thanks to the shrunken-fit trend. I personally think most guys look better in longer, looser-fitting coats. When sized big enough to be worn over a tailored jacket, it has a charming sense of ease when thrown over a sweater. Plus, when the coat is long, it’ll sway nicely as you walk. 

(photos above via Mr. Porter)

THE WIDE WORLD OF CASUALWEAR

Of course, more casual still is just casualwear. There’s no way to cover all the variations here, but even for more conservative offices, you could do well in a classic duffle coat or field jacket. Our friend Graeme in Sydney, Australia was great at this sort of “classic casualwear” look back when he was still posting. 

Pete’s everyday uniform is also a good starting point -- light blue OCBDs, which could double as your dress shirts when you need, worn with raw denim jeans, field jackets, and sneakers. If you need to dress it up a little, swap the sneakers out for chukkas. I particularly like chukkas in brown suede or pebble grain leather. The added texture breaks up what would otherwise be a plain expanse of leather. If you’re looking for a good guide to field jackets, we have two. If you want something a bit “dressier” than a field jacket, try a waxed cotton Barbour (we have a full Barbour buying guide here).

(photos above via J. Crew and GuidoWongolini)

BETTER KNITWEAR

At its best, the typical, modern office uniform goes something like this: a pair of well-fitted jeans, some OK shoes, a button-down shirt, and a v-neck sweater. It’s the kind of outfit your mom would be proud to see you in if you were a 12 year old boy going to church. 

Plain, merino v-necks and crewnecks can look great under sport coats, but for more casual outfits, I think sweaters do better when they have a bit texture or pattern. Think: prickly Shetlands, Fair Isle knits, cabled Arans, or chunky shawl collar cardigans (which, if thick enough, can be worn in lieu of a jacket). 

It’s not that plain merinos are wrong; it’s just that on their own, they’re a bit boring. Save those for when you need something to layer under tailored jackets. For all other situations, go for something with a little more personality. A chunky, interesting ribbed knit can be a great way to dress down a grey pair of wool trousers, allowing you to wearing something a little nicer than jeans without looking overly formal. 

(photos above via A Kind of Guise and Mr. Porter)

WELL-FITTING BASICS

If nothing above works for you, take heart. If your clothes fit well, you can dress simply and still look great. See our friend Graeme, again, in his chinos and dress shirt. 

A lot of this will be about buying the best fitting clothes you can off-the-rack, and then learning what can be altered (as most clothes have to be tweaked here and there). We have guides on how shirts and trousers should fit. Most shirts will need to have the sides slimmed up and/ or darts put into the back. Just be careful not to go too slim (we recommend employing the “sit test”). Trousers should also be hemmed to a single or no break. You can decide on whether or not you want cuffs. 

You’ll also want to upgrade your shoes. Jesse has a nice post on what he calls “in-between footwear” -- something better than your average pair of New Balances, but isn’t as formal as laced-up oxfords. We have guides on where you can find good, affordable shoes; how to tell quality in leather uppers; and how much you might want to consider spending. Jesse even has a video on how to take care of your purchases so that that they age well over time. 

In the end, you probably won’t look as good as Graeme above (he’s a handsome dude), but you’d be surprised at how much better you’ll look in properly tailored clothing. Even if your office doesn’t allow for anything but the most vanilla-bland of clothes, there are still good kinds of vanilla. 

(photo above via GuidoWongolini)

[back-to-louis]

Omg I agree with you SO HARD on your reasoning of Louis being a bit awkward as why a lot of his photos with Danielle (or Eleanor) looked awkward. I literally never see anyone say it but you're so right, he has a bit of an "act" when he's out being Louis Tomlinson™, not to say that he's fake, I think he's terribly genuine, but I think over the years all the boys have learned to put up barriers, so like for example Harry's is pretty much just withdrawing from social media completely and his -1

entirely neutral fan photo face. I think Louis knows people expect the exuberance from him that we saw in the early years, except I think as he's matured he's grown a bit quieter and more reserved, especially with his personal life, so he puts that Public Persona on with the middle fingers and the point and all that with fans, and I think that all leads to his photo persona with paps to be more uncomfortable than it used to be. He's acutely aware of them when he used to be looser. (2)

my first anon returned with:

Thank you to your kind answer! But what do you mean by "awkward"? English is my my second language, so... I have heard a lot that Louis is very loud and flamboyant (not in gay meaning) he loves to be in center of attention, and comfortable with being leader. Sorry for me being stupid just want to understand you correctly:(

and I want to bundle it in with this other response since it touches on the same content.

So, awkward. I'm going to take definition 4b. from Merriam-Webster here:

lacking ease or grace (as of movement or expression)

That is to say, larries say louis looks uncomfortable or "lacks ease" when he's with his girlfriends and my argument would be that Louis "lacks ease" IN GENERAL and we perceive him at ease mostly when he's either not aware of being perceived or because he is performing ease as part of his celebrity persona.

I'm going to tie it back in with the comments above about the boys' "fan acts" and I agree with you, first anon! And I don't even think it's necessarily a "barrier" being put up. I don't know how much larries refer back to or acknowledge Louis' old Bebo days, but in non-larrie fandom we do a lot, and none of Louis' alleged "laddy lad" style or his friends from Donny, or the way he is with his friends, is a surprise if you know what he used to look like and how he used to pose for photos when he was 15.

Now, yes, it's clear he underwent a shift in image after he became a theater kid, and one could speculate this was when he became at ease with his sexuality, or exploring his sexuality, but I offer one other alternative explanation: he became a theater kid. I became one, too, at 16. I've seen 'em. And yes, a lot of those boys are gay, and yes, there's a lot of exploration that goes on, but not all of the theater boys are gay. Some of them are just.... theater kids.

And what you learn as a theater kid is: what makes you look good. You learn to move with confidence. You learn how to grab attention, you LEARN "flamboyance." You learn how to find your role if no one has assigned one to you. And that is something we watched Louis do with some difficulty during their season of the X Factor, isn't it? And a little less painfully later on, when he dove into the creative/writing role.

Now, as for what we might see as Louis' increasing reservedness, I see that as a combination of maturity and -- yes-- EASE with himself. He no longer has to be the loudest one (although he is still loud) because he knows who he is and what he's capable of. He no longer has to be the funniest one (although he is still funny) because he knows that people see him, and are capable of seeing him, as more than that. What Larries see as a suppression of his natural personality I see as a refining. What we might see as a discomfort with being externally scrutinized by fans or paparazzi (which might well be a factor), I also can imagine as an all-too human tendency towards self-preservation.

I really challenge the idea that Larries have that merely having a persona makes a person fake. We all have personas, don't lie. I hate people, but when I go to parties I make it a point to be gregarious and charming and funny. I'm not the same person I am when I'm slouched on our futon in my pjs, tumblring with one hand on my boob. I'm BOTH of those people. They're both fully me! We all have faces we put on that represent the best side of us for the purpose or the moment, and Larries take the fact that celebrities have two or three more of those faces due to the nature of their work, and determine that it means we can disregard everything they tell us about themselves because "everything is a lie, everything is fake."

It's completely unfair and particularly when applied to Louis (because I am a louie) it drives me mad because if you actually know humans in the world it is really clear to me that Louis can be all of those faces, and still grow, and still refine, and it doesn't mean he's ever stopped being true to himself, or to his relationships.

[khalilhumam]

More Harm Than Good? The Net Impact of COVID-19 Policies Is What Matters for Health

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More Harm Than Good? The Net Impact of COVID-19 Policies Is What Matters for Health

Several groups have modeled the impact of COVID-19, and strategies to slow or halt its spread, on infections and deaths, including Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. While their specific predictions vary based on data, policy assumptions, and modeling scenarios, they all paint a grim picture on the number of COVID-19 deaths ahead. And yet, deaths of COVID-19 patients are not the only deaths to consider when weighing up the impact of this disease, nor when assessing prospective policies or the success or failure of mitigation and suppression responses. This is the first in a series of blogs in which we’ll focus on non-COVID-19 excess deaths caused by the response to COVID-19, part of a larger project at CGD to help policymakers minimize the indirect health impacts of the pandemic.

A major gap in current models

The modeling team at Imperial predicted that an unmitigated, worst-case scenario in Africa could lead to 2,483,000 deaths, compared to 298,000 deaths in their best-case, early and sustained suppression scenario; thus 2,185,000 COVID-19 deaths could be avoided according to their predictions. This week the medical journal BMJ Global Health published a paper authored by a team from WHO’s Regional Office for Africa. Based on more and better data, and after most countries in Africa have introduced stringent policy responses, this report predicts that between 83,000-190,000 people could die of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic if containment measures fail. While these new predictions are over ten times less than the Imperial projections, 190,000 excess COVID-19 deaths is a substantial toll. Still, what’s missing from these numbers are the people who will die from the many indirect impacts of the COVID-19 response.

Indirect consequences of the pandemic – specific disease areas

Many groups have recently begun publishing predictions of non-COVID-19 excess mortality—or what some commentators call “lockdown victims” or “collateral.” Some of their findings include:

Using the Lives Saved Tool, Johns Hopkins University reported that across 118 low- and middle-income countries, the increase in child and maternal deaths will be devasting. Based on a range of plausible scenarios, the authors estimate that there could be as many as 2,300,000 additional child deaths and 133,000 additional maternal deaths in this first year of the pandemic as a result of unavoidable shocks, health system collapse, or intentional choices made in responding to the pandemic.

A report by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that for every one excess COVID-19 death attributable to infections acquired during routine vaccination clinic visits, there could be up to 549 deaths in children prevented by sustaining routine childhood immunization in Africa.  Unfortunately there are countless reports of the various ways in which the ongoing pandemic is disrupting both routine immunization and immunization campaigns.

An HIV modelling report, convened by the WHO and UNAIDS, used five models of HIV epidemics to estimate the effect of various potential disruptions to HIV prevention and treatment services on HIV-related deaths and new infections in sub-Saharan Africa over one- and five-year periods. It found that a six-month full interruption of antiretroviral therapy (ART) supply would be expected to lead to excess deaths over a year which are more than the total current annual number of HIV deaths. In sub-Saharan Africa this amounts to possibly over additional 500,000 HIV deaths. Similar disruption would also lead to a doubling in the number of children born with HIV.

The WHO’s Global Malaria Program considered nine scenarios for potential disruptions in access to critical malaria interventions in 41 countries. Under the worst-case scenario, in which all insecticide-treated net campaigns are suspended and there is a 75% reduction in access to effective antimalarial medicines, they reported that excess malaria deaths could approach 400,000, a more than 100 percent increase in the deaths reported in 2018.

The Stop TB Partnership, in collaboration with the Imperial College, Avenir Health and Johns Hopkins University, estimated that a three-month lockdown and a protracted 10-month restoration could lead to an additional 1.4 million TB deaths during this time between 2020-2025.

The broader impact of COVID-19 on health systems

While these studies are useful—and we have not listed them all here—they are issue-based, with no attempt to look across the full range of essential health services that are being disrupted. Furthermore, adding up such standalone disease- and population-specific analyses could result in double-counting of excess non-COVID-19 deaths (for example maternal and child health and malaria, or child health and immunization). There has also been a conspicuous absence of modeled estimates for non-communicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries. This no doubt reflects the absence of a funded modeling consortium. By contrast, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation currently supports modeling consortia for HIV, TB, malaria, neglected tropical diseases, vaccines, and nutrition. However, in high-income countries such as the UK, early estimates of the cost of the policy response are emerging and seem equally devastating: a six month delay in diagnosis for new cancers could match almost half of the life-years lost due to COVID-19. In 2017, the Global Burden of Disease project estimates that there were around 7,700,000 deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. Of these, 400,000 were from transport and other unintentional injuries. Lockdowns will result in fewer deaths from traffic accidents. Less outdoor pollution should similarly lead to less deaths, but those gains may be offset by greater exposure to indoor air pollution. But an increase of just 1-3 percent in all-cause mortality (excluding injury deaths), attributable to disruptions in the delivery of routine health services, over the course of a year, gets us to the new WHO AFRO estimates published this week: 73,000-219,000 non-COVID-19 deaths vs. 83,000-190,000 COVID-19 deaths. This back-of-an-envelope calculation should offer pause for thought, particularly as it does not consider the inevitable health effects of the global recession. Nor the effects on human capital in combination with school closures. “An increase of just 1-3 percent in all-cause mortality (excluding injury deaths), attributable to disruptions in routine health services, would lead to the same number of non-COVID19 deaths as the new predictions of COVID-19 deaths published by WHO AFRO. This back-of-an-envelope calculation should offer us pause for thought.”

What are the alternatives?

We recognize that an unmitigated outbreak across LMICs would result in excess non-COVID-19 deaths across the whole of health due to a combination of factors including reductions in seeking care, illness and death among scarce health care workers, and overwhelming the few secondary and tertiary care facilities (a failure to “flatten the curve”). Lockdown policies will have similar consequences through disrupting supply chains, redirecting people and money to the COVID-19 response, and preventing people from seeking and accessing care. But it should not be a choice between doing nothing and lockdowns. It should be about appraising different policy options using a more holistic approach. Characterizing such excess deaths alongside lives saved from a reduction in COVID-19 transmission seems therefore to be of the essence. However, we are not aware of any attempt to date to look across these issues to take a broader health system’s perspective. Doing so would enable us to ask, “Are stringent COVID-19 policy measures in LMICs doing more harm than good?”

What is needed now

We believe that the appropriate response to this pandemic calls for nuanced, evidence-informed, and continuously refined policies. The widely modelled choice of do-nothing vs. complete shut-down is a dichotomy unhelpful to policymakers as it is both impractical in many contexts and potentially harmful, as studies are beginning to highlight. We need commonsense, context sensitive policies which openly consider the inevitable trade-offs between COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 deaths. These have been proposed and should be considered as governments plot a course through this pandemic. We list some of the suggestions in the box below, but note this list is not exhaustive.

Alternatives to total lockdown:

Self-isolation of symptomatic people

General physical distancing (to reduce probability of transmission per contact)

“Looser lockdown” coupled with scaling up of COVID-19 treatment and testing capacities

Shielding of high-risk groups (including resettlement or quarantine with limited contact and basic needs support)

Informational interventions using phones and local/national broadcast

Public health promotion in communities (work with local influencers, community health workers promotion of hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette)

Special measures in informal settlements (handwashing stations, quarantine spaces)

Regulation of high-density markets to promote physical distancing

Local approaches to mobility restrictions (limit large scale movement, require face masks when travelling, adopt local approaches to containment)

Sources: Van Zandvoort et al., Khan and Roy, Adam et al., Inter-Agency Standing Committee

Excess deaths during the pandemic are an unintended consequences of the response to COVID-19, but they are entirely predictable based on past pandemics and other natural disasters. Estimates of the net health effects and trade-offs of non-pharmaceutical interventions ought to have informed governments’ responses including, in many countries, some of the strictest limits on movement ever seen. They are as important today to inform governments as they consider the range of policy course correction and exit options as well as responses to future waves of virus transmission. Over the coming weeks we will share the findings of a scoping review (see here our call for resources and here for a teaser of what we’re finding) that maps data and evidence to a conceptual framework to help understand the multifaceted nature of the indirect health effects. We will also share a simple tool to support the estimation of indirect health effects, in terms of excess non-COVID-19 mortality (and also reductions in non-COVID mortality, e.g. road traffic deaths). The tool will allow users to estimate the indirect health impact across different services, and compare excess non-COVID-19 deaths as a result of COVID-19 public health measures and COVID-19 deaths averted under different scenarios. It can therefore be used to identify which non-COVID-19 services are most essential to maintain during COVID-19 to mitigate excess non-COVID-19 mortality and inform relevant policy responses. Finally, we will be launching a series of country case studies in order to document these trade-offs and will provide updates throughout this series.

[chenowethgolf]

Can meditation make you a better golfer? Yes . . . eventually

By Sam Weinman

An experiment with three golfers revealed the practice can make a difference. Just not the one you might expect.

  A few months ago Golf Digest set out to answer a question almost as old as the game itself: does alcohol make you play better, or worse? The experiment and resulting video with three too-eager participants, was illuminating, comical, and fairly conclusive: a little bit of “swing oil” has some residual benefits owing to a decrease in tension and inhibition. Too much, however, leads to deteriorating focus and coordination, and then you just stop caring about advancing the ball at all.

  A subsequent experiment with marijuana yielded similar results: some weed might take the edge off and loosen up your swing, but anything more than a little becomes counterproductive. That brings us to our recent experiment exploring the effects of meditation, structured like the first two, but also plenty unique. Here, too, we submitted three golfers of varying playing ability to a series of golf tests while interspersing the influence of an outside element–beers and tokes became 15 minutes of meditation. The difference is that while meditation does induce some immediate physiological effects and boasts several long-term health benefits, we’re still talking about a rather nuanced exercise that is difficult to quantify. And if you really wanted to measure it well, best to do it over a few months instead of a couple of hours.

  Still, a few hours is what we started with one day this summer, and I, along with colleagues Keely Levins and Ben Walton, was selected as one of three golfers who would spend the day hitting golf shots and meditating to see what type of difference we’d see. Although Keely and Ben had limited experience with meditation, I’d recently begun dabbling in no small part because mindfulness, as it’s also known, has been hailed as perhaps the best way to temper the freneticism of our modern lives. And no doubt I was a worthy candidate: a digital editor who spends his days tethered to one electronic device or another, a father of two high-energy boys, and someone who can overthink everything from family dynamics to what club to hit off the tee. As I said in the video, I first told my wife that I thought meditation would help because, “I run pretty hot during the day.”

  “No,” she corrected me. “You run hot all the time.”

  So in terms of how a few minutes of meditation a day can calm the mind and harness focus, I was already sold. What I hadn’t explored, and what we sought to discover that day, was how it might affect one’s performance on the golf course. Plus, we saw it as an opportunity to debunk misconceptions about meditation — what exactly it is, what you do, and why it might mesh well with the mental and emotional demands of golf.

  The day was broken into segments of three different golf challenges–driving for distance, approach shot accuracy, and putting–followed by brief sessions with meditation teacher Jonni Pollard. Pollard is the founder of a meditation app, 1 Giant Mind, and a personal mentor to a roster of clients that includes corporate executives and professional golfers. With a clean-shaven head, an Australian accent, and an affable manner, he spent the day convincing us of the ways meditation can not only help us think clearer on the golf course, but at work and home as well.

  Among Pollard’s central arguments is that for all our technological progress, the human body has remained virtually unchanged from man’s earliest days fending off regular physical threats, which is why we process stress the same whether it’s an unpleasant email or a bear attack. This disconnect between how we live now, and the biological constraints of our bodies and brains, can explain why we often feel scattered so much of the time, and why even the mundane stresses of everyday life can elicit profound physical reactions.

  “This is the little glitch in our system,” Pollard said. “We are entrenched in a dysfunctional state of defensive living because the way we’re living now is so far removed from how we’ve biologically evolved.”

  What does this have to do with our ability to hit a drive in the fairway? Plenty, actually, because the same forces that leave us feeling frequently disjointed also factor into our performance on the course.

  Almost every golfer has to negotiate the chasm between the shots he’s capable of producing, and the those he actually hits. We’re too quick, we’re too distracted, we’re worried about the pond on the left–when the result falls short of our potential, it often emanates from somewhere between the ears. By contrast think about the time you mindlessly hit a shot on the range and it soars perfectly off the clubface; or when you rake in a conceded putt from afar without even trying, and it rolls straight into the hole. It’s precisely because you “weren’t thinking” that it worked out so well.

  This, Pollard said, this is where meditation can make a difference.

  “What it does is it hits factory restart and restores our natural capability,” Pollard said. “Our natural capability is there and we need to allow it to be there, so what is the thing that’s inhibiting it? From my perspective it’s the hyper stimulation of the thinking mind.”

  Which is not to say that each meditation session sets you on a path to a truer golf swing. Not exactly at least. As the afternoon unfolded, my driver carry improved, but my approach shots were looser, and my putting stayed about the same. To think of meditation as some type of performance enhancer in deep-breathing form is to misinterpret the underlying machinations at work. As Pollard said, when you meditate for 20 minutes, focusing on your breath or a mantra and allowing outside elements to recede into the background, it’s similar to doing a set of bench presses at the gym. The act itself may make you stronger, but it’s really repetition and time that allows the effects to take hold.

  “The conversations I like to have when talking about meditation is one, it’s really wonderful to alleviate short term the symptoms of stress,” Pollard says. “But also it creates the internal infrastructure for us to be able to become resilient in this life, rather than feel like life is taxing you.”

  Beyond technical improvement, what we really detected was an underlying sense of calm, noteworthy on what could have been a stressful day. Although Keely played college golf, Ben and I were not used to the strain of having every shot measured so precisely. Throw a handful of cameras and a crew of about 10 into the equation, and under normal circumstances I’d question if I could even draw the club back. But after each session with Pollard we began to mind the attention less, and distractions subsided.

  “It became easier to be over the shot,” said Keely. “I had this odd sense of detachment to where it was going, like I didn’t want to look at the result. Not every shot was great, but there was some freedom and ease in not feeling painfully invested in how straight my drives were flying.”

  This is what Pollard means when he describes the “infrastructure” meditation helps construct. Scientific studies of meditation have shown that the practice strengthens the pre-frontal cortex portion of the brain responsible for concentration, focus and problem solving while shrinking the amygdala section that triggers our panicky “fight or flight” response. So even though I didn’t hit the ball markedly better that day, the ingredients were all there to do so–I was more focused, less fatigued, not nearly as wrapped up in the shot I just hit or the one still to come.

  And therein lies the real breakthrough, because golf is nothing if not an opportunity for self-sabotage. You start a round poorly, you stress over wanting to play better. You start out playing well, you wonder how long it will last. Pollard and other meditation experts like to say that the practice improves “present moment awareness,” which is a variation of the old golf cliche of “taking it one shot at a time.” Roll your eyes if you must, but think about how much easier the game would be if your mind were free of competing narratives and you just played.

  Our Max Adler played a round of golf last year with Sadghuru Jaggi Vasudev, a spiritual leader with millions of followers and a surprising affection for golf. Adler attended one of the guru’s workshops to better understand how Eastern practices like meditation can translate to athletic performance. Sadghuru, too, emphasized the value of getting out of your head.

  “People trip on their own minds,” Sadghuru said. “They need to create a little distance between what they think and what they do.”

  So, to get back to the original question: Does meditation help you become a better golfer? The short answer is yes. The longer answer might be encapsulated by an experience from a few weeks after our session with Pollard, when I developed a wicked case of the shanks.

  For about 10 days in the heart of the golf season, I had a hard time hitting an iron or wedge without the ball screaming off the hosel right into some unspeakable place. Golfers who’ve experienced the dynamic know no more maddening affliction, and in the grips of it, I couldn’t hit a simple 30-yard pitch without panicking. Then I recalled an exercise we learned with Pollard for right before address. We’d stand behind the ball, place both hands on the grip of the club, and take in a deep breath before proceeding. For an entire round, I did this over every shot –a mini-meditation session that attempted Pollard’s version of “factory restart.” My head clearer, my breath slower, the panic receded, and solid contact soon returned.

  So if you’re asking, no, I don’t think you can measure the efficacy of mediation by saying it will drop this number of strokes from your score. But what I have noticed is that it can work to flush out our worst instincts–both on the course and everywhere else. I, for one, need all the help I can get.

  Original Source: GolfDigest

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