#maybe all pain in the world requires poetry

[firstfullmoon]

this 🤝 vievee francis saying the poem won’t be ruined if you let us in

[menalez]

There are many great things about being a woman. Woman have a lot more value than just being weaker men, which is what the media of today seems to be telling us to be, with a few exceptions. But we've actually got something unique and important to offer the world that men do not have, and we can do things that they cannot do or would do very badly.

Femininity is the ability to create nurture life, at least in the vast majority of cases. Femininity exists in the first place to be able to grow something and care for it until it becomes beautiful. This expresses itself in a multitude of ways and not just with women, unless of course you're talking about childbirth. But apart from that femininity is not exclusively a female thing, though there is a heavy correlation.

Before I move onto the next bit of what I want to say, I want to define the word desecration. Desecration is the act of depriving something of its sacred character or the disrespectful contemptuous or destructive treatment of that which is held to be sacred.

The desecration of motherhood and femininity that is common place today is disgusting. It's like the world is spitting at the vulnerability that motherhood and femininity require, calling it weak and silly.

Vulnerability is not the same as weakness. It requires immense courage to be vulnerable because it is terrifying.

Woman are naturally more vulnerable than men for obvious reasons. Sometimes woman have to willingly make themselves vulnerable in a way that men never have to do. Pregnancy would be one of those times, but not the only time.

Vulnerability can be incredibly powerful, it doesn't just require courage to do, it can also be powerful in of itself. It can completely take the wind out of someone's sails in a way approaching them combatively may not have done, and you have to be brave in the first place because you're accepting you might get hurt and just having faith that you won't be.

You can't nurture something without being vulnerable because nurturing requires openness which requires which requires vulnerability which requires courage. It's not weakness because weakness is cowardice. Weakness is useless, vulnerability is not useless, it's necessary, that makes it not weak. The ability to nurture something is valuable, because without it there would be no life without it.

Growing something requires subtlety and intuition, you can't just go hammering at it. That would be silly, which is why femininity is better suited to those purposes.

The ability to create and nurture life is so important because there would be no life without it. Beauty is life and life is beautiful.

Medicine, law, business and engineering. These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. Isn't beauty just life celebrating itself?

You shouldn't feel weak or lesser because you feel you're naturally feminine, and you do not have to become masculine in order to be valuable or worthy or strong. If you don't fit into the masculine idea of strength or success or power, that does not make you lesser.

If you can grow and sustain life and care for things, that is valuable and important and you must treasure it. Being feminine doesn't mean you have to keep your head down and be meek and sweet and let people walk all over you.

Womanhood generally involves a lot of blood and pain even if or before you give birth, and none of that is weakness. Growing things is panful and requires sacrifice and strength as much as softness. You'll grow something weak if you're not strong and you don't have some grit about you. You can't grow a strong upright tree on earth that crumbles

not feeling encouraged by this anon,,, dont even know where to begin. maybe its just semantics but i dont even know why youre dwelling on femininity and praising femininity then going back to biology then femininity??

[radical-revolution]

WHAT ABOUT LOVE?

One might think that not all emotions are suffering — what about love, joy, creative inspiration, devotion, ecstasy, peace, union, fulfillment, relief?

We believe that emotion is necessary for poetry, songs, and art. Our definition of “suffering” isn’t fixed, and it is limited. Siddhartha’s definition of “suffering” is much more vast and yet much more specific and clear.

Some kinds of suffering, such as aggression, jealousy, and headaches, have an obvious negative quality, while others are more subtly painful. For Siddhartha, anything that has a quality of uncertainty and unpredictability is suffering. For instance, love may be pleasant and fulfilling, but it doesn’t spring independently out of the blue. It depends on someone or something, and therefore it is unpredictable.

At the very least, one is dependent on the object of love and, in a sense, always on a leash. And the additional hidden conditions are uncountable. For this reason it is also futile to blame our parents for our unhappy childhood or to blame ourselves for our parents’ disharmony, because we are not aware of the many hidden dependent conditions involved in these situations.

Tibetans use the words rangwang and shenwang to represent “happiness” and “unhappiness.” They are difficult to translate precisely; rang means “self” and wang means “power,” “rights,” or “entitlement,” while shen means “other.” Broadly speaking, as long as one is in control, one is happy, and as long as someone else holds the leash, one is unhappy.

Therefore the definition of “happiness” is when one has full control, freedom, rights, leisure, no obstacles, no leash. That means the freedom to choose and the freedom not to choose, the freedom to be active or to be leisurely.

There are certain things we can do to bend conditions to our advantage, such as taking vitamins to become strong or drinking a cup of coffee to wake up. But we can’t hold the world still so that it won’t stir up another tsunami.

We can’t prevent a pigeon from hitting the windshield of our car. We can’t control the other drivers on the freeway. A big part of our life revolves around trying to make other people cheerful, primarily so that we can feel comfortable. It’s not nice living with someone who sulks all the time.

But we can’t keep another person’s emotions upbeat at all times. We can try, and maybe we’ll even succeed sometimes, but such manipulation requires a great amount of maintenance. It’s not enough to say “I love you” just once in the beginning of a relationship. You have to do the right thing — send flowers, pay attention — until the end.

If you fail even once, everything you have built can fall apart. And sometimes, even if you give undivided attention, the object of your attention may misinterpret, not know how to accept, or not be receptive at all.

A young man anticipates a candlelight dinner with the girl of his dreams, imagining how the night will unfold, how he will woo and charm her. But that’s just his imagination, a guess. Whether it is an educated or an uneducated guess, it’s still just a guess.

Basically we can’t be 100 percent prepared all the time. Therefore our obstacles and opponents need to be successful only 1 percent of the time to do all their damage: a slip of the tongue, accidental expulsion of gas, one casual glance away from the X-ray machine at the airport security checkpoint.

We might think that we aren’t really suffering, and even if we are, it isn’t so terrible. After all, we aren’t living in the gutter or being massacred in Rwanda.

Many people think, I am OK, I am breathing, I am having breakfast, everything is going as well as can be expected, I am not suffering. But what do they mean? Do they mean this 100 percent? Have they stopped preparing for things to get better? Have they dropped all their insecurities? If such an attitude comes from genuine contentment and appreciation for what they already have, this kind of appreciation is what Siddhartha recommended.

But rarely do we ever witness such content; there is always this constant nagging feeling that there is more to life, and this discontent leads to suffering.

Siddhartha’s solution was to develop awareness of the emotions. If you can be aware of emotions as they arise, even a little bit, you restrict their activity; they become like teenagers with a chaperone. Someone is watching, and the power of Mara is weakened.

Siddhartha was not injured by the poison arrows because of his awareness that they were merely illusions. In the same way, our own powerful emotions can become as harmless as flower petals.

And when the apsaras approached Siddhartha, he could see clearly that they were just assembled phenomena, like a fire ring, and therefore they lost their allure. They couldn’t get a rise out of him. Similarly, we break the spell of temptation by seeing that the objects of our desire are actually just assembled phenomena.

When you begin to notice the damage that emotions can do, awareness develops. When you have awareness — for example, if you know that you are on the edge of a cliff — you understand the dangers before you. You can still go ahead and do as you were doing; walking on a cliff with awareness is not so frightening anymore, in fact it is thrilling.

The real source of fear is not knowing. Awareness doesn’t prevent you from living, it makes living that much fuller. If you are enjoying a cup of tea and you understand the bitter and the sweet of temporary things, you will really enjoy the cup of tea.

— Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

[kn1felover]

i can't help being a poet in everything i do

lil storytime for ppl that want it, i was asked what i felt when i listened to my favorite song the first time.

tw for a few dark subjects and implied rape/abusive relationship

the song is Bag of Bones by Mitski, which is pretty much about a toxic, sexual relationship, and this is (word ofr word) what i replied.

"i guess sorrow, and maybe despair, and then a certain smugness at being seen"

and then, i had to write a short essay (literally took me 5 minutes, it required 200 words and i wrote around 300 because i can) and i wrote one of my best poems yet,

"i put people in my heart by force, and when they leave all i have is the imprint of their smile in my veins"

and today i was looking for a cool sentence to scribble in a public bathroom and i wanted to write something silly, and came up with "the violence begins at birth, the moment blood is taken out of my mother's womb"

then again today, i said "i think i like to wait to be hurt, so i can validate my pain to others. i think I'm fucked up because i need the attention, and i worsened myself to have it"

last week i had a dream and when i woke up, i remembered only one sentence, "love is like cherries in a warm summer afternoon. I've been eating the cherries of the tree in my garden for longer than I've known"

and i wrote in my book, whoch has nothing to do with poetry, "how does it feel to betray your own kind? does it tear your insides apart the same way he does at night? or does me knowing all your secrets? "

and in the same book i wrote "someday all we'll be is dirt and our descendants will wark above us, they will run and forget our names as they step on what one was your eye, just as we do nowadays with our ancestors" and the context was *gossip about two celebrities*

and today i didn't even have a context, but i scribbled down "i don't hate being alive, i like the way my body knows me. i don't like the way people don't pry into me as much as i do to them. i dig holes and they barely scratch the surface"

and last Tuesday a friend of mine asked me if I'm mad, and i said "i think there's anger inside of me, but it's under so much sadness, so much apathy, and a thin layer of joy, that when it bubbles up it immediately goes to the bottom where my love lays, and when that too falls to the void, I'm left with pain and become the void myself"

he then asked me why don't i leave, i replied

"he's loved me when i was everything he knew and loved me more when he learned about everything else. i didn't know him when i knew the whole world and now that i know only him, im unsure if i ever knew anything at all"

and i never meant to be the poet i am, i just love it now

[lillesbianthatcould]

a little something to get to know me better

my birthday is august 9th

my signs are leo ☼ pisces ☾ and virgo ↑

i love to write poetry but i don’t share most of it

i love music and have a specific song (sometimes multiple) dedicated to every person in my life who’s meant a great deal to me

i love my family (especially my parents) more than anyone else in the world

my two cats are everything to me and they’ve saved me more times than i can count

i have a tag on here for every person i’ve loved whether that’s platonically or romantically

if you think it’s about you then it probably is

i love driving - i often feel anxious if i’m not the one behind the wheel and maybe that’s a control thing

i have BPD and i struggle with learning & relearning how to manage my ever-changing emotions each day

i spent over a decade wanting to not be alive and only in the last year have i finally felt truly happy to be here

i am terrified of the future and i hate change with a a passion

yet i know it’s inevitable

i’ve lost so many people that i love

i want many tattoos but i can never seem to afford them or frankly feel prepared to handle the physical pain they require to endure

i don’t want kids but if the right person came along and it was a dealbreaker for them i would consider adopting one

i want to get married

i want a big wedding with all my family and closest friends even if it’s cliche and silly to some

i want to feel like i’m someone that some people couldn’t live without

i want to feel like a priority to the one i love most

i have a lot of needs and i’m scared that i’ll always be too much for anyone to handle

i love so hard

i’m terrified that i made too many mistakes in the past to ever feel like a truly good person again

i don’t believe in god but i hope for an afterlife

i want there to be a light after all the darkness i’ve had to crawl through

i miss my grandma every day and it’s been 17 years since i lost her

i like to hope that she would be proud of the person i’m becoming

i truly mean every ‘i love you’ i have ever said

i hope that i will be enough for someone and that they’ll choose to stick around for the long run

i will take pictures and videos often for the rest of my life because i get so happy when i look back at them

i love rollercoasters and bowling and concerts and feeling free and alive

and i never thought i would say that

i am doing better mentally than i ever have before

i hope that lasts

i miss people so much

i think about certain people every single day even if they don’t think about me

if i check up on you often, even just checking your profiles, it means i love you dearly

i am too hard on myself and don’t see my features as something to consider beautiful

i have the hardest time believing that someone could look at me and be infatuated with what they see

i’m trying to do better with that, though

i don’t know if many people will read this all the way through and i don’t mind if they don’t

i just wanted to express who i am for a minute

even if it’s just for myself

[tinseltine]

Tinsel & Tine #MiniMovieReview THE SILENT TWINS Focus Featuress | Director Agnieszka Smoczynska | Screenwriter: Andrea Seigel | Based on 1986 Book by journalist Marjorie Wallace When I was growing up, I always said I’d have twins one day, didn’t have a preference of boys or girls they could even be fraternal. I just felt it would be fascinating to see their bonds develop and witness this unique sibling relationship.  Of course, I wound up not procreating at all, a story for another time. But as I matured, not only did I rethink how much work twins would be, I also thought, what if they’re creepy, too identical and insular?  What parent could handle that sense of separation from your children because they only require each other? 

Well, this is what happens to Barbados immigrants to the UK, Aubrey (Treva Etienne) and Gloria Gibbons (Nadine Marshall) the parents of The Silent Twins, June (Letitia Wright) and Jennifer (Tamara Lawrance) Gibbons. They are not neglectful parents, they’re sweet people, but they have no idea what to do with these two troubled souls.The film starts out with warm tones of light playfulness starting with the animated opening credits, to the opening scene of the two girls (Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter play the twins in childhood) pretending to host a talk radio show with great patter and syncopated rhythm.  You feel at first that this is not the movie you came to see.  But soon we see their reality is nothing like their imaginative play. 

Instead, the girls are very somber, withdrawn children who stay completely silent when others are around. The film switches to gray, drab colors.  The mother tells the girl’s teachers and therapist she has no idea why they stopped talking.  But this week I watched a documentary on The Silent Twins, and it was their speech impediment that first made them dummy up. No one was able to understand them. They got so tired of constantly repeating themselves, they decided not to communicate with others at all. 

In the film, once the twins break their silence, Letitia and Tamara try to emulate the weird, clamped jaw, severe lisp of the twins, while still remaining intelligible. But listening to the real life June in the documentary, whatever went wrong with their speech pattern, was very wrong, an apparently incurable.Leah and Eva do a good job portraying the twins growing up, conveying their strangeness and the hold Jennifer seems to have over June when it seems June might break and try to be pleasant or laugh or utter a word.  The effect racism had on their development as the only black children in an all-white school is touched upon only briefly. In fact, I feel their childhood is over too quickly all together. 

Soon we meet the young adult versions of the twins. By this time the family has completely given up trying to communicate, food is left outside their bedroom door and “the twinnies,” as their parents call them, are left alone to write fiction stories, poetry and create macabre dolls and puppets. Much of this world is depicted as stop-motion animation sequences carefully crafted by artist Barbara Rupik. It’s both beautifully creative and horrendously morbid.

I’m still shocked and amazed to see movies featuring black women in mainstream theaters.  When I started writing about films in 2009, I’d have to go to a small black film festival to see "me"as a protagonist. We had Whitney Houston in the 90’s and Tarantino’s "Jackie Brown", a few other exceptions maybe. But a movie like The Silent Twins would not have been green-lighted.

So, it always pains me not to rave about a movie with a black cast and female director.  But Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska ("The Lure", "Fugue") has provided all the ingredients and no seasoning. #TheSilentTwins is great with cinematic flourishes, but I wish we cared more about June and Jennifer. I wish it were gripping and that the scenes at the mental institute held more emotional impact. Still, it may get some awards season attention and I hope it does.

https://tinseltine.com/minimoviereviewextravaganza9/ 

[gremlin-that-commits-arson]

I'm going to post a piece of poetry I've been finished with for months. (Tw for violence, especially of the self-inflicted type.)

I want to press my thumbs

Through my lungs

Coated in blood

To my heart

So full of love

Oh, where to start?

I want to tear through my ears

To hopefully stop the tears

My hearing is gone

It won't be missed when I'm done

Past the sounds

To my brain

The pain abound

As I go against the grain

The pain is surreal

But that's what I wish to feel

My body protests

I wish I were more grotesque

At least, then my body would be right

Would match these twisted up disgusting insides

My thoughts are fleeting

The electrons and braincells fleeing

From my vicious assault.

Gods, I'm supposed to be an adult

I wish I were worthy of all I have

But I'm so tired.

Everything I do is in halves

How in the world can I do what's required?

My body's time is limited

It's leaves and flowers wilted

I wish this flower of pain and gore

'S petals would wilt forever more

I do not wish to die

But there is not enough I can provide

No difference I could make

For this paint not to flake

The saturated hues

Cover the world around me

Some parts so chipped there's nothing I can do

Oh how I wish I couldn't see.

I want to carve out my eyes

And maybe next whittle away my thighs

This body deserves to be no more

Deserving only to be consumed by spores

[immemorymag]

Anna Zelenina ( Russia)

Tarkovsky said "poetry is for me a way of seeing the world, a special way of relating to reality" Anna creates poetry with her images. This is the magnetism of her work. It attracts, pierces and traps.

Today we share an interview we have conducted with her.

1) What would you say about your photography work?

Photography for me is my breath. I am inspired by the process. Most of the time it's an emotional, intuitive process that involves both photographer and model. During the shoot I fall in love with my models, I genuinely admire them. I think a kind of magic happens during this time. I am attracted to everything - the person themself, some body parts or details of clothes, reflections, distortions, some fleeting event or something incongruous or combined, surreal, maybe even something silly or unusual. So I still can't decide on a particular direction in photography. I guess in short, it's like this: what I see, I sing.

2) Do you remember when your interest in photography began?

My interest in photography started in a strange way from the age of 5 or 6, when my cousin and I asked my parents to invite a neighbour who at the time had a film camera to visit us. It was a mystery to me, something I was afraid to touch. But I was very attracted to it. It was an event. Therefore we prepared for the process of shooting thoroughly, we unloaded all the things from cabinets on the floor and chose, as it seemed to us, the most interesting and unusual, even strange and incongruous. I'm not sure if his camera was loaded with film, as we didn't see a single photo, but we trusted him and kept inviting him to take pictures.

I got my first camera, a Kodak film soapbox (by the way, it is still alive and shooting) after the wedding, when my husband offered to buy me a camera with the gift money, as I had been dreaming about it for a long time. The camera was probably a pipe dream for me, so I don't remember it. But we bought a camera. That's how my passion for photography began.

3) Do you prefer to shoot in black and white or colour? What are your requirements when choosing between the two?

The choice between black and white or colour photography is intuitive, sometimes painful. I feel closer and more familiar with black and white photography. Besides, working with colour means that in addition to composition, geometry, light, shade, etc, one has to pay attention to colour, which interacts with the space of the photograph and affects not only the adjacent colours, but also the composition of the frame. As my shoots are spontaneous, without any prior action, and I don't impose a certain choice on my models in terms of clothing, shoes or accessories. Maybe that's why I don't always find the right colour harmony for the shot. But sometimes it happens that everything comes together and the colour stays. But then again, there's a temptation to leave the photo in black and white.

4) Who are your main inspirations?

Oh, my biggest inspiration for creativity is a sense of wonder, admiration and childlike delight. And when you're excited, you can't stop. You want to capture that moment or the person or their eyes, hair, hands, or whatever. I even tried to make a video, but I couldn't because it was the capturing of the moment that completely captivated me.

Of course, I, like everyone else, am inspired by the work of various photographers (Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sarah Moon being my favourites), films and paintings. I'm not afraid to experiment, I'm not afraid to repeat after someone else because it will come out differently anyway, but it's interesting to me.

5) How would you define your photography?

My photography is an emotional, intuitive, joyful still image.

[sambinnie]

Some brief recommendations and thoughts, pals, as we tip more noticeably into the end of summer, post-Lammas.

1. This Rosamond Lehmann book — unfortunately I had the previous Virago edition which was all mushy pinks and oranges and embracing couples, and at first glance at cover and blurb it does seem to be a rather mushy book: women and babies and love, yawn etc. But as with very many of those early twentieth-century women authors, the writing is knife-sharp, aware of everything, and covers not only women and babies and love but also Art, and grief, and friendships, and the deals we make with ourselves and the way we deal with ageing and dying parents. It really is astonishingly — and I say this like it’s a compliment, as if to exist in our own time is the greatest honour of all — but it is staggeringly modern in the depiction of the protagonist, Olivia. By which I suppose I just mean that she is an entirely three-dimensional person.

2. Speaking of blurbs, may I shill a beloved former colleague’s book? I was extremely lucky to read this a few months ago, and beset with that strange mixture of delight and acidic envy that creeps over when reading something brilliant by someone you know. It’s so intelligent, so funny, such an excellent, thoughtful and hilarious window into blurbs and bookselling and publishing, and I know that might not sound like a marvellous pitch but if anyone you know likes reading or words or books, I promise you this is the Christmas present for them. It deserves to do horribly well, at which point I shall have to stop talking to Louise. (Also, all of us blurb-writers wrote blurbs in the back! And we have our names on them! That never happens!)

3. I am almost always thinking about Mad Men at any given hour of the day. Today I am thinking about how many times Bobby Draper was recast, and how that in itself is possibly a comment about the instability of men in Matthew Weiner’s world, and how interchangeable and same-old-same-old they are, in comparison to Betty and Peggy, Joan and Sally.

4. Some good podcast episodes recently, now that I’ve finally been able to stop obsessively listening to the same programme after seven whole months. This Adam Buxton episode with John Higgs is very good — I particularly like the idea that if you take a month-old newspaper, you can suddenly see how meaningless and irrelevant most of the stories are; of course that’s essentially the old chip-wrapper maxim, but I was interested to hear someone so erudite able to verbalise my own instinct to turn away from the news. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast is better than I expected, and Campbell has similar advice to young people wanting to engage with the world: Read books, not newspapers, and listen to music, not the radio. If ever there was proof of that theory it’s right now, with the wall-to-wall coverage of our Prime Minister's election in which only a handful of people can cast a vote. There’s also something somewhere in those episodes, or others I’ve been listening to, about how social media feeds populism, even for us nice folks who will always be on the right side of history!, but I need to chew on it more. A lack of clear external moral codes? Rewards in our brain for when we focus on self over service? The paralysing of choice with all the potential moral potholes? Cynicism rendering democratic engagement seem futile? Not sure. More thought required. 

Two Decoder Ring episodes I enjoyed too: one on Rod McKuen, an American poet I’d never heard of, in which the presenter says, ‘I find [the poems] actively embarrassing… There is something about bad poetry that’s maybe more painful than any other bad art. It’s so open, so deeply sincere and yet so empty. It reveals the yawning banality at the centre of all our souls.’ God, yes. And yet! There is also something there about the surprise of discovering unexpected authenticity and quality at the heart of someone’s work, and also the joys of the unexpected that only hard copies of things — CDs, records, books — allow us to find. The other episode is on the Laff Box, the canned studio laughter that rarely pops on on TV comedies now. They play a YouTube clip where someone had removed the laughter from Friends episodes, and the strange stagey, humourless air it left reminded me so much of a few films I’ve watched recently that came with high praise yet felt as if they’d been made by filmmakers who hadn’t yet experienced human interaction. 

5. I am sorry I’ve only just discovered this Larkin poem, I like it very much; I find myself thinking of my father quite a lot recently, and wonder if most people feel that they don’t truly know anything of their father; back to these medium-difficulty cryptic crosswords for the summer holidays — can I recommend these? There is so little as satisfying as feeling one’s comprehension around them gradually improve.

6. In Waterstone’s behind a customer the other day, listening in only fully when they say they are a local author and the bookseller whoops with delight and tells them how much they love their book and they must come and do an event. I meet the eyes of my housemate and remember my own approaches to the same bookseller last summer, and I am so grateful my housemate has the exact same face on that I am pulling in my head. How we laughed.

7. Two more things, quickly: Boys State is great. Crushing and blackly comic and bro-ishly romantic, and don’t read this until you’ve watched it, but also hope. Lastly, rewatching the Juice Box episode of Mythic Quest with another housemate, who piped up at the rendition of The Rainbow Connection, ‘Isn’t that that song from La La Land?’ YES IT IS, my friend. Good lord.  

[firstfullmoon]

you know, absolutely

[rphelperblog]

The Night Circus Quote Rp Meme

“The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.”

“People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.”

“The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on your fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it’s still there, the events and things that pushed you to where you are now.”

"This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it. Look around you,

“Is magic not enough to live for?"

“People are naive about such things, and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.” 

“Trespassers Will Be Exsanguinated.” 

“I believe you have my umbrella"

“Better to have a single perfect diamond than a sack of flawed stones.”

"You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?”

“You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.” 

'There may be decisions to make and surprises in store. Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that

“That's the beauty of it. Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, I am simply a bird in their midst.” 

“This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it.” 

“Wine is bottled poetry.”

“I suggest you keep your distance from her and concentrate on your own work.” 

“I cannot let a place that is so important to so many people fade away. Something that is wonder and comfort and mystery all together that they have nowhere else. If you had that, wouldn't you want to keep it?”

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held.” 

“...have a theory that she is in love with the dream of someone and not an actual person.” 

“Nothing's impossible,"

“It will make the challenge a great deal more difficult for you.”

“And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.” 

“Timing is a sensitive thing.” 

"Love is fickle and fleeting.It is rarely a solid foundation for decisions to be made upon, in any game.”

“Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.”

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

“Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that.” 

“We lead strange lives, chasing our dreams around from place to place.” 

“But dreams have ways of turning into nightmares.” 

“I have tried to let you go and I cannot. I cannot stop thinking of you. I cannot stop dreaming about you.” 

“You're in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that's enough.” 

“I would have written you, myself, if I could put down in words everything I want to say to you. A sea of ink would not be enough.' 'But you built me dreams instead.”

“The most difficult thing to read is time. Maybe because it changes so many things.” 

“Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon . . . is not the dragon the hero of his own story?” 

People don’t pay much attention to anything unless you give them reason to” 

“I made a wish on this tree years ago,"

“I couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what I wanted to be real.” 

"But I remember the people who look at me the way you do."

"As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me."

“I have been surrounded by love letters you two have built each other for years, encased in tents.”

“Everything I have done, every change I have made to that circus, every impossible feat and astounding sight, I have done for her.” 

“The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are.”

“I think looking forward will be better than looking back.”

“I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.” 

“We must put effort and energy into anything we wish to change.” 

“I am haunted by the ghost of my father, I think that should allow me to quote Hamlet as much as I please.” 

“But you built me dreams instead.”

“I mean only that I hope they find darkness or paradise without fear of it, if they can.

“I don't think there's anything wrong being a dreamer.” 

"I think I made an analogy about cake."

"Who doesn't like a good cake analogy?” 

"you are not destined or chosen. I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it is not true. You are in the right place, at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that is enough.” 

“It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it,It is too familiar. Too comfortable.” 

“You prefer not to see the gears of the clock, as to better tell time.” 

“You need to understand your limitations so you can overcome them.”

“And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.” 

“Once they were librarians, but that is a subject they will only discuss if heavily intoxicated.” 

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world”

“Each of them always gravitating toward the other. Yet still they do not touch.” 

“All empires fall eventually. It is the way of things.

“Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of your mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds.”

“It is destroying me that I cannot ask you to dance.” 

“This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit.” 

“It is likely to make us think we are not caged. We cannot feel the bars unless we push against them.” 

“So it’s really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours.” 

“A woman I should like to think I know rather well and a woman I had always considered a mystery, are in fact the same person.” 

“Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink.” 

“Like stepping into a fairy tale under a curtain of stars.”

“You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Rêves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.” 

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.” 

“If she were gone I would be nothing. You should think better of yourself than to settle for that.” 

Unusual yet beautiful. Provocative while remaining elegant.”

“I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do”

“Perhaps it is controlling the chaos within more than the chaos without.” 

“The rain increases and umbrellas sprout like mushrooms amongst the graves.” 

“Striving for uniqueness in a world of sameness” 

"It is a long and complicated story."

“How are you managing to keep everyone from aging?”

“The sensation reminds him of the first snow of winter, for those first few hours when everything is blanketed in white, soft and quiet.

“Are we going to discuss whatever it is you are here to discuss instead of dancing around it?”

“I didn't know your identity, but I had an impression of who my opponent was, being surrounded by things you made.” 

[burnedbyshoto]

I wanted to make myself like the ravine

— There are plenty of things that Hawks knows about, but there are few he knows none about. A journey of how Hawks navigates the meaning of the word love. 

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pairing: hawks (takami keigo) x fem!reader

warnings: recent manga spoilers, future!au, alcohol consumption, fem!reader

word count: 6,819

a/n: this is for the pocuties valentines day collab! rhank you for letting me join! inspired by the poem to the title of this fic!

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

A G A P E

—

Hawks is one of the fastest men in the world.

It’s not a brag; it’s the truth.

A cold, hard, damning truth.

Hawks is a Pro Hero with the power, skill, and finesse required to take the fall for the entire country. He is someone who is loved by all, who thrives off of the appreciation and the cheers, but he knows — he understands — he’s expendable. He’s a tool—an object seconds from being put to rest.

There are many things that Hawks knows; he’s been training to be a hero since he was in his very childhood. Blindfolded, tested and conditioned to be the ideal hero, the perfect pawn.

Hawks is no idiot, and he will never deny that often times that he isn’t sure what he is feeling.

Emotions are weird for him. Feelings are oversimplified in everything he was taught, yet disgustingly really and oddly interfering the second he had set foot into the spotlight. He was used to the cold, the people who would view him as a specimen, experiment 20493, codenamed: Fierce Winged Hawks. The only emotions he understood was apathy, seriousness, anger, resentment, bitterness, disappointment, and relief. When finally, finally, the Hero Commission broke his wings, his spine, and his mind, the small boy so eager to be a Hero ultimately nothing but a soldier, ready to follow commands to the T.

Hawks has only heard of love from the blurry, unclear memories of his childhood. His mother muttering how she had no love for him to be taking care of him as he did, or his father saying he could never love him. Love was foreign, strange, alien to him. Even when he was eighteen and finally given a bit of freedom from the chains the Hero Commission bound him in was expressed out of love. But he was put into the cage that granted him the ability to spread his stiff wings; love made no sense.

He saw lovers making out in alleyways, and he furrowed his eyebrows, wondering just why anyone would want to kiss in the smelly, dark, virus-infected areas. He saw his colleagues come in looking dazed, refreshed, reborn, yelling loudly, and singing poetry about their love for some other person they met just yesterday. He also couldn’t ignore the days, weeks, months later when they would rearrive with red-rimmed eyes, swollen eyes, and a tremor to their voice.

Love seemed… awful to Hawks.

Love was a deception of brain chemicals. Nothing more than your mind bending, flipping, and twisting to make something that made absolutely no sense make sense. 

Hawks had expressed that one day to a sidekick of his, his barriers and walls crumbling away because he had been on a stakeout for five days straight now. The world that could never keep up with him was numbing his brain.

“Well, that’s romantic and flirtatious love for ya,” his sidekick explained with a halfhearted shrug. It seemed that he both agreed and disagreed with what Hawks had to say. “They’re amazing loves, don’t get it wrong, and they definitely don’t make sense, but they’re loves not meant to last.”

Hawks blinked.

“What?”

His sidekick chuckled, hands rubbing at his eyes as he peered out the window again, his sullen eyes looking even more tired.

“Have you never learned the different types of love before, Hawks?” the sidekick teased as much as he was curious. “I figured a pro as popular and smart as you are would know the different types of love.”

Hawks feathers fluttered in his inability to keep his lack of knowledge to himself.

“I don’t.”

“Wow, finally something Hawks isn’t aware of!” the sidekick laughed, and his hand opened his phone, fingers hitting the screen before shoving the device into Hawks’ chest. “I’m sure you’ll find that you can understand at least one love.”

Hawks grabbed the phone, head cocking to the side in his curiosity as he scrolled down through the phone.

There were eight different types.

Eight different ones that he could have experienced within his then twenty-one years, and he found himself unable to look away from one.

Agape: universal, selfless love

“Hawks, they’re moving!” the sidekick squawked, and Hawks handed over the phone, and with nothing on his mind, burst out the window, ready to take down this organization.

Hawks had to admit that later that night, when he was finally able to sleep in his own bed, he felt selfless love. It was for the people of Japan. The many citizens who needed his help and the heroes of the country who rose to the demands of the job. Maybe it wasn’t the type of love depicted in anything he’s ever read or watched before, but that was okay. It was love.

The love he has for the citizens is enough to keep his head afloat.

This is the only love he needs in his life right now, the only love that matters.

But he’s no longer twenty-one, he’s twenty-five, and the wings on his back that feel practically invisible to him, are hurting. His back is in pain, his quirk almost gone, save for the smallest, insignificant feathers perching from the stumps of what was his beginnings of a wingspan. It still burns, phantom singes and phantom heat whenever he thinks about his nearly gone, never to be grown again, wings.

“Well, Hawks, you already know that this is going to happen,” comes the cold voice of one of the board members of the Hero Commission. A man who had practically raised (see managed) him. 

Today was the end of Hawks life, more or less.

“AFO, Shigaraki Tomura, and the well-known former members of the League of Villains were finally stopped,” Hawks speaks with a nod. He knows, even though he could not be a soldier, he had been around to see the young UA students, Endeavors Interns, bring them to justice.

The biggest names of evil were dead, and Hawks already knew he was over.

To be fair, he was glad it was over.

But still, it hurt to hear the indifference in his voice, the apathy, the tedium.

“Operation: Fierce Wings - Hawks is officially over.”

“I could’ve figured that one out pretty easily,” Hawks jests, unable to show the way his heart twisted and withered under the knowledge that he was no longer a hero. His love, his agape, for the people were still there. Still, just as he recognized in his colleagues who were experiencing the different forms of love, it didn’t matter how much love you held for someone, something, for the innocent, helpless people…

Life takes, it destroys, and love doesn’t seem to have a chance.

“Thank you for your twenty years of service. I hope you find the freedom you had been looking for.”

P H I L A U T I A

It’s been a week.

Seven days, twenty-one hours, sixteen minutes, and thirty-four seconds since Hawks was fired (see Honorably Discharged) as a Pro Hero.

Hawks has always felt that the world moved oh so slowly behind him. It had been his wish that heroes be able to relax, laze around because society had evolved enough that criminals knew better, were treated better, and could integrate into a truly peaceful society.

It had been his dream.

But right now, he was bored.

B o r e d.

“Fuck, I don’t care,” Hawks grumbled, face smooshing into a pillow as he watched the Netflix Series Bridgerton drone on the screen. “Dump his ass.”

His apartment, it was safe to say, was a mess. There were cups, bowls, plates, and chopsticks everywhere. His hair was ruffled, stringy, held back by a hair clip he had stolen from Miruko. His beard was nearly fully grown in, and there were bags under his eyes despite the fact he was sleeping for more hours of the day than staying awake. He was sore, tired, bored.

So bored.

He didn’t think being bored was going to suck this much, going to hurt him like this.

Fuck.

“Open the damn door, bird boy!” came a sharp scream and powerful kick from the front door.

Hawks glared at the door, the tiniest of feathers he had been able to regrow, trying to pathetically open the lock on the door. A sheen layer of sweat pushed against his forehead, and Hawks grunted, trying to lift the heavy lock.

BAM.

The door swung open, forcefully kicked open by none other than Pro Hero Miruko.

“Yo!” Miruko waved, lips pulled in a fierce grin as she entered through the broken doorway with nothing but a bag of unknown items. “I figured you were here!”

“...you broke my door,” Hawks pointed out, eyes narrowed as dust and destruction danced within the air.

“You took too long,” Miruko breezed, slamming her plastic bag on the kitchen island. “It’s a fucking rats nest in here, birdbrain; I thought you were somewhat organized?”

Hawks groaned loudly, sinking further into his couch as Miruko began reorganizing his kitchen area — dumping the dirty dishes into the sink and throwing things away in fast, practiced skill. “Life is too boring, and I’m too bored to do anything about all of the mess,” Hawks exaggerates partially, hand twisting and dancing as he speaks. “Thanks for cleaning up the mess.”

“I’m not cleaning up your damn mess, birdbrain,” Miruko barks out a laugh, her hands slamming against the now, somehow, clean surface. “I’m just making my life easier!”

Hawks looked over the top of the couch with a semi impressed, semi uncaring look and shrugged.

“You seem to have a great handle over those robot limbs now,” he points out.

Sure enough, Miruko had two bionic limbs, limbs that she had finally managed to work into a fighting career. After spending two years on the sideline, relearning how to walk and then fight, she was back on the field.

She was a hero again, despite it all, unlike him.

“Damn right, I’m amazing!” Miruko preened, chest puffed, and bunny tail wagging excitedly. “But anyway, I figured your dumbass would be depressed, so I brought you some shit.”

Hawks watched with a curious gaze as Miruko quickly hopped once from where she was in the kitchen to a place on his couch, landing on Hawks' legs unintentionally.

“OW!”

“Look at what Rumi brought you,” Miruko laughed, slapping Hawks on the back as he cradled his legs. “And yes, I just referred to myself in the third person, so shush.”

Hawks grumbled, lips in a half pout, half frown.

Taking the opaque bag from Miruko, Hawks pulled out the many items in the bag.

Carrots, a KFC gift card, Korean skincare products, a movie about Miruko’s recovery process, and a 1001 Things to Do (A Book on Finding Self Love).

Hawks stares at the book.

“The perfect items for a self-care, self-love spa day,” Miruko nods, once again slapping Hawks on the back. “Some old sidekick of yours told me that you don’t know what love is, so I figured that I would help teach you the most important one! Self-love! Truly the hardest one to master, in my opinion, but damn if it isn’t a good one.”

Hawks feels transfixed almost, unable to look away from the book as Miruko slaps him on the back yet again as she moves to leave. He hears her yelling about forwarding the bill to fix his door to her, her agency would pay for the damage, and how she’s off to train with some bunny hopping boy from UA.

Opening the book, Hawks looked at the number one thing to do on the book and sighed.

#1: Look in a mirror and name five things you LOVE about yourself.

Well, it’s not like he has anything better to do.

-

Hawks is on number thirteen (Stand at a bridge and scream into the void about the things you love at dusk) when he realizes that maybe… he doesn’t love himself. 

It is without saying that he loves people; agape, after all, is the only love type that made sense to him, but philautia, self-love, was way lost on him. Objectives 2 - 12 on the book were entertaining to do! They had Hawks going outside of his house much more than his week trapped indoors, and for the first time since the day his wings had been burnt off, his house was spotless.

But it was clear to Hawks that he didn’t feel love for himself.

Whenever he tried to convince himself that he should love himself, that there were terrific qualities in himself, he thought back to the dirty, burnt room. 

“I still gotta protect their happiness!” the phantom in his mind screamed, the broken sob collected in his throat.

Hawks shivered, unable to let himself recognize the pain and hurt in the phantom's eyes, or the way that he now wished he had never done that… why had he done that?

What a mess…

The small chirping of Hawks phone interrupts his morose thoughts. He looks at the screen, eyebrows raising in slight mirth and caution as none other than his former intern was currently calling him.

“Tsukuyomi-kun!” Hawks laughs into the receiver, the weight of his past for a moment forgotten. “How are ya?!”

“Hello, Hawks-sensei,” Tokoyami’s calm tone fills Hawks' ears. “I was calling because I have a request to make.”

“Name it,” Hawks spoke immediately, slouching against the cold bars of the bridge, eyes closing as he tried to relax. “You need a letter of rec or something?”

“Nothing of the sort, actually,” Tokoyami says. “We third-year students are graduating in a few days; I was inquiring if you would attend on my behalf.”

“Wow, Tsukuyomi-kun, no need to be so formal with me!” Hawks laughed delightedly, his hands carting through his feather-like hair, “I’d love to come and watch you guys graduate! Is it true that the finger-smashing boy is the valedictorian?”

“That would be false, Midoriya-kun has nothing on Yaoyorozu-san.”

“What a bummer, you’d think he’d be first after how he helped win the war for us, huh?”

“You’ll find that Yaoyorozu-san is highly gifted and undeterred by most things,” Tokoyami sighed. For a moment, Hawks chuckled at the melancholy tone to his old intern's voice. It sounded as if he had been striving with great difficulty to reach the highest marks as well. 

Hawks began speaking to his rather odd ex-intern with great curiosity with the blanket of the night surrounding him. His defenses and thoughts whittling away the more they spoke, the later it got in the morning.

“Ne, Tokoyami-kun, I have a question?”

“Concerning what?”

Hawks pauses, his brows furrowing as he looks up into the still dark sky, “Do you know how to love yourself?”

Silence.

Had it been anyone else, Hawks would have panicked at the lack of noise. Still, his already less than chatty intern typically took to not speaking much to begin with.

“Self-love is difficult,” Tokoyami finally spoke, his words slow, carefully chosen. “We humans are flawed; we all have demons. Most of the time, we only recognize and see our demons, oftentimes forgetting that being human also means being weak and at times immoral. Loving oneself is a hard task because we know ourselves better than any other. It’s a work in progress for everyone to love oneself, it's a type of love by the Ancient Greeks, but it’s not always everpresent. One must accept all flaws to love oneself, and remember that flaws don’t make you less, even if you believe otherwise.”

“...wow, I asked for a sentence answer, and you gave me a speech. Who would’ve known you were so in check with your emotions, Tokoyami!”

“You knew, I’ve already revealed this side of me before. You laughed last time too.”

Hawks finds himself home thirty minutes later, and he stares up at the ceiling, fingers drumming against his chest.

Self-love… it seems like an ever-evolving type of love, but it’s there. He knows that even if he has regrets and hardships and things he hates about himself, deep down, self-love exists and that it will exist. 

Patience.

Even the fastest man in the world could demonstrate patience.

L U D U S

“What can I get for ya?”

“I have no idea honestly, do you have any recommendations?”

Hawks could say with complete honesty that he felt entirely out of place.

He was at a local bar. The bar was semi-busy today. Most young adults dressed in an arrangement of clothes, each on a different level of soberness as they cheered to this and that. 

Why was he at a bar even though he was slightly uncomfortable? Well, you can blame #73 in the book for that.

(#73: Enter the first bar you find, order a drink, and flirt!)

“What type of liquor do you like? Hard or soft?”

Hawks blinked; he didn’t know.

“Hard?”

The bartender looked a bit unsure of him for a bit before nodding and turning his back to him.

Did hard liquor mean he was going to get an iced drink? He’s never consumed alcohol before.

“Here you go!” the bartender sang, slamming two shot glasses before him. “Two shots of Bacardi.”

“Oh, thank you?” Hawks tilted his head as a small cup of OJ was placed in front of him (“That’s your chaser,” the bartender had laughed). Bringing the small glass shot glass up, Hawks looked around at the throngs of people surrounding the bar and looked at you. You were cheering loudly as you raised your own shot glass in the air with a whoop and, in a fast, fluid motion, brought the shot glass to your mouth and took the liquid down easily. Hawks was definitely unimpressed now; that looked entirely too easy. “Here we go, cheers to me.”

Imitating your own actions, Hawks shot back the liquid in his shot glass, and immediately his entire body tensed.

EW.

NO.

EW.

OH GOD, NO!

Spitting out the sour, bitter, disgusting — dear god, how do you even describe this taste?! — liquid, Hawks, chugged the OJ, his lungs and throat and tongue burning from the shot.

“That was disgusting!” Hawks spat to absolutely no one, his hands covering his mouth as he stared at the other awaiting shot of ‘Bacardi.’ “Why would anyone drink that?!”

“Only madmen drink Bacardi while sober,” a voice joined in on Hawks' one-sided conversation. “Or bitches who are self-sabotagers. Never trust a hoe who says Bacardi is their favorite drink.”

Hawks turned around to see you, the girl he had regrettably underestimated for taking the shot, smiling at him with a not entirely sober look to your face. 

“You look like neither. That and the way you took the shot obviously means that you had no idea what you were drinking.” Hawks continued to stare at you, completely perplexed by your casual conversation, the dress on your body that was twisted a bit, screaming wonders about your level of sobriety. You took to the empty barstool beside him with a grin and a calculating look, “You’re Hawks, right?”

“Yeah, Hawks,” he spoke, his tongue feeling weird in his mouth as he bowed stiffly in his chair. You were beautiful, fuck.

“I’m y/l/n, nice to meet you!” you speak easily, fingers grabbing at his other filled shot glass with a concerned look. “I have a feeling you shouldn’t try to take this other shot.”

“Dying of alcohol definitely isn’t in my vision of ways to go out,” Hawks grins. Pushing through his haze of awkwardness as you shift in the barstool so that you’re now facing him entirely, knees pressed to his thigh. “I’ve never actually drunk before?”

You inhale sharply, your eyes going wide as you break all levels of personal contact that’s acceptable of strangers in Japan and grab his cheeks.

“Alcohol virgin?!” you gasp, the sweet smell of some liquid drafting from your breath. “I’ll teach you everything that I know, don’t worry!”

You let go of his face, neck turning away from him, looking for the bartender to flag him down.

“Don’t you have—?”

“They can wait,” you wave at the bartender before turning back to Hawks with a confident grin on your face. “I have my favorite Pro Hero right beside me; I think they’ll understand.”

“Alright, what is it that I need to know?”

“My full name,” you breeze with a wink. “Y/l/n y/n.”

“A beautiful name.”

“I am a beautiful woman.”

Hawks chuckled good-naturedly, his head nodding in agreement, “I think we were talking about the alcohol, though, not your attraction as a female.”

“All in good time, all in good time,” you laugh, taking to the bartender and ordering two drinks, both of which were entirely foreign to Hawks.

Hawks would not consider himself to be an expert at flirting. He was attractive, a great conversationalist, and did have a type of edge to his words that often seemed playful or a warning, depending on how you looked at it. But it appeared that his natural way of speaking was more than enough to make him flirtatious enough to match the way you spoke to him.

You had introduced him to a single mixed drink, telling him that getting drunk by yourself at a bar typically wasn’t a smart thing, so keep to something with a low alcohol percentage. Just enough to make you loosen up, but not enough that you were incapable of getting home. Hawks liked the way your hand rested on his forearm. How you smiled and laughed at something to show your interest but not at everything to show that you weren’t faking your amusement at what he was saying.

You matched his every word, not backing down from his bluffs. Soon enough, Hawks felt his cheeks warm when he finally looked directly at your smiling face (he wasn’t sure if it was from the alcohol or not). 

Eventually, though, the night ended, and you shimmied off the bar stool as your friends had come to collect you to leave.

“Can I get your number?” you ask, eyes mostly entirely sober as you handed him your phone. “I know you were the man who was just a bit too fast, but I think I can handle that.”

Hawks snorts, his eyes rolling in his amusement, “That was horrible.”

“I’m drunk, I have an excuse!” you exclaim with a pout that quickly turns into a giddy smile as Hawks enters his number to your phone. “Don’t worry though, once I’m sober, I’ll flirt your eyebrows clean off!”

“That sounds painful!” Hawks yells as you wave goodbye, your arms linked with a line of other girls as you leave the bar with teasing laughter and undecipherable words.

It was with you that Hawks realized that he had come to find a new type of love.

Ludus, the love of flirtation and playfulness.

Damn, who would’ve known.

P H I L I A

Hawks was having a pretty bad day.

It wasn’t anything super terrible happening, all things considered. It was a lovely day out; the sun was warm, the sky so blue, and the birds chirping. Nothing on the news to be concerned about and all his precious people were safe.

But it was still a bad day because instead of being out and about with you, his now borderline best friend/girlfriend, who he was stupidly having a crush on, he was stuck at home.

Hawks was sick.

Deliriously, stuffy nose, goopy eyed, chapped lips, and feverish sick.

You: Are you sure you’re fine????

Hawks: Im perfectly okay. Ill go with you to the park next time sorry

You: Thats not what im concerned about stupid!!!!!

Hawks: Bye have fun!

You: I knoW YOURE SICK ASSHOLE

Hawks chuckled, rereading his messages with you.

Blowing his nose for what felt like the umpteenth time, Hawks resumed the movie on the screen that you had recommended him to watch — Disney’s Chicken Little — because it reminded you of him, or something like that. The TV droned on with the movie, and Hawks found it hard to keep focused as the Sandman danced on his head and whispered in his ear.

He hadn’t noticed he had fallen asleep until a loud banging was heard on his door.

Shuffling towards the door, Hawks opened the still slightly broken door with bleary eyes and a stuffy nose.

In front of him was none other than you.

You… with a basket full of things.

“Hi!” you greeted him, pushing past Hawks easily and walking into his apartment. “You look worse than I thought you would be!”

“That's hurtful,” Hawks pouted, closing the door behind you, sneezing, then following after you. “Why are you here? I thought you w-were — achoo — going to the park?”

“I was, but we were supposed to go together to check off number 184, and I wasn’t about to go alone to complete a list meant for you!” you exclaimed, dumping the overfilled basket on the kitchen counter.

“Mm,” Hawks hummed, his voice dry and cracking as he pulled the blanket closer around him. “What’s this?”

“A get well care basket,” you say in an unmistakable like tone; you glance at him, smiling widely, and gesture dramatically to the basket. “Follow along, if you can.”

“Pfft.”

“So first, I have some sleepytime tea; I swear to the gods and back that this tea will cure you and knock you the fuck out,” you say, pulling out the thing on top of the basket and putting it to the side. “Next, we have some tissues because you obviously need them.”

“Hey!”

Hawks watched through red-rimmed eyes as you carefully and thoroughly explained what and why you had brought him. Fuzzy socks, a blanket, his favorite snacks and drinks, medicine, DVD’s to more movies you told him he had to watch, an embarrassing childhood picture of you that he had been wanting and swore he would never expose least he wants to die, more oils for his diffuser, and a signed Endeavor poster he had been wanting.

Safe to say that after he had been drugged up, eating some soup and drinking some tea on the couch, wrapped up in the blanket you had bought him, laying between your legs, Hawks was feeling much, much better. It had been hours since Hawks had coughed or sneezed, and he was talking with you about how Disney movies were being produced less and getting sort of worse with each one. The movie titan slowly losing its ground.

“Okay, it’s almost eleven pm; I have work tomorrow, you are still sick, let's pack it up!” you eventually say during a moment of comfortable silence.

“I can’t believe you have to work,” Hawks sniffled, standing up off the couch so that you could get up. “Seems like a crime.”

“It’s not so bad! Being a celebrity PR manager is a million times easier than a hero PR manager. At least we can help decide what's seen!” you laugh, helping to clean up his living room of the bags of chips and drinks.

“Sure, sure,” Hawks grins, keeping the trashcan open for you so that you could place the trash in. “Thank you.”

Walking you towards the front door, Hawks comes to the sudden and almost alarming realization that he doesn’t want you to leave. He wants you to stay. He thought this was a friendship, and it was one, a good one at that! For about a month now, he had known that there was a type of love he had for you, one of friendship.

It was called philia. 

So why did he want to keep you wrapped up in a hug, to pull you close and press a gentle kiss to your forehead, to your cheek, to your lips?

“—I’ll be back tomorrow to check up on you during my lunch break,” you say, slipping on your shoes as you pull on your jacket. “If you need anything at all, call or text—”

The words on your tongue die immediately when Hawks still slightly chapped lips press against yours. The sick must that was present earlier on the day is no longer there, and you can feel heat and fire bursting from your cells as Hawks pulls away from you.

“I’m sorry,” Hawks breathes out, a small smile on his face, a daze in his eyes that tells you he definitely was not completely sorry. “I couldn’t resist anymore?”

“W-We will talk about that later!” your voice squeaks, your heart hammering in your throat because fucking Hawks kissed you. “If I-I get sick, I’ll rip out your eyebrows!”

“Will you go out with me? On a date?” Hawks continues on, leaning on the doorframe you’ve yet to pass.

“...I hate you, yes,” you warble, hands pressing against your burning face as Hawks grin grows.

“Perfect, I’ll text you,” he allows you to pass through the doorway where you feel both entirely light and giddy yet awkward and mechanical.

“Hawks, I swear, if your stupid kiss got me sick!”

“You’ll rip out my eyebrows,” Hawks laughs, waving a hand. “If you rip out my eyebrows, I demand a kiss for every hair you pluck out.”

He laughs at how he can basically see the heat rising from your ears as you squawk and run away.

Looking at #184 of his book, Hawks smiles as he crosses it out (#184: Ask out your crush!) and sighs. Philia was love between friends, but it was also, if he remembered correctly, one of affection. And it was without saying that he held a deep affection for you.

E R O S

As much as Hawks claimed he knew about the world, he was as clueless as a newborn baby when it came to the topic of love. Reasoning? Well, today marked a year of being together. It had been a year since Hawks had kissed you when he was snot-nosed kissed (you did get sick, by the way, and while you didn’t rip out his eyebrows, Hawks had kissed you plenty in apology), and then took you on a date where you went to a trampoline palace.

He was clumsily romantic. More often than not, he wasn’t actually romantic. Still, the sincere thought and emotions he put into it made his actions seem so thoughtful and sweet.

You’re not sure why you actually believed that on your year anniversary, he was going to plan something for the two of you. So the reaction he had when you showed up on the year anniversary, armed with a bouquet of flowers and a small personal gift for him, Hawks looked deeply confused.

“This is still not bad!” you exclaim, watching as Hawks attempts to redecorate his apartment from the messy bachelor vibe into something of romance. It was easier said than done, especially as your boyfriend had no decorations in his house that wasn’t fanboy or bird material.

“I didn’t realize that one year anniversaries were meant to be out and about!” Hawks yelled back, failing to nail the fairy lights onto the ceilings. “I knew you wanted to do something, but I thought it was going to be like ‘let’s go get some KFC!’ sort of thing!”

“Definitely not,” you laugh, sitting on his couch with the take out food sitting on the table. It had just arrived, and Hawks was still not accepting the lack of romance in his apartment. “But it’s okay, really Hawks! I didn’t tell you, which is entirely my fault! Come on, let's watch something together, eat, and relax!”

Hawks sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

He should have known that one year anniversaries were a big thing in dating too. They sure were in businesses; what a rookie mistake. Not satisfied with the lack of romance in his apartment but also unable to do anything more to it, Hawks sulked over to the couch and sat beside you, grabbing his dinner plate.

“Thanks, dove.”

“You’re most welcome, baby vulture. Thank you for the food!” you grin, breaking the chopsticks and digging in.

The food is eaten with a mirthful conversation, the TV playing the 100 Funniest Hero Fails playing on Youtube. Eventually, the purples and pinks of the sky became dark.

Night is here.

Hawks went from sitting right beside you to lying on the couch and having you snuggled into his stomach at some point in the night. YouTube is no longer playing Hero Compilation videos. Still, it is now instead showing a chef with a giraffe quirk demonstrating how to make your very own pancake treehouse, no clickbait!

Hawks is transfixed on you, watching the way your eyes sparkle and shine as you stare up at the screen, your lips moving as you give your side commentary, but he can’t hear a thing.

Five weeks ago, on this day, was the day that Hawks realized that the philia love he had for you had evolved once again. It had become one of eros. Romantic, passionate love. He loved you; he loves you. Anything you wanted or needed in the world, Hawks would do anything to give it to you. He had yet to tell you said realization; after all, he needed to make sure it wasn’t some fluke but found himself chickening out each time he wanted to confess.

Gliding his thumb against your cheekbone, Hawks stared adoringly at you, head tilted as you laughed at the video before glancing up at him. It was evident that you hadn’t been expecting him to be staring at you so intensely. As soon as you glanced back at the TV, you snapped right back, curiosity blazing off your gaze.

“What’s up?” you asked, hands pressing to his chest as you lift up a bit. “Do I have something on my face?”

“I love you,” Hawks whispered, the words coming out so much easier than he thought it would. “Y/l/n y/n, I love you.”

Your eyes widen significantly, your jaw dropping as your eyes grow just a bit watery.

Hawks smiles softly, knowing that for so long you had told him you loved him without a single moment where he returned the affection. It hadn’t bothered you. Obviously, you knew why he didn’t say it, but finally hearing him say it seemed to break you just a bit in the best of ways. He kisses you softly, fingers wiping away the single tear that fell.

“I love you,” he repeats.

“I love you too, Hawks,” you blubber, your smile so bright yet wobbling with your heartfelt emotions.

“Takami Keigo,” Hawks corrects. “My name is Takami Keigo.”

Hawks watches as you process his name, and a wet laugh bubbles from your throat as you nod your head, hands reaching behind his neck to pull him close for the first soul-consuming, fiery kiss of the night.

“I love you, Keigo.”

If this wasn’t eros, well, then, Hawks didn’t know what it was.

P R A G M A

two years later, valentines day

Keigo sits on the bed, fingers adjusting the tie around his neck as he stares at you doing your makeup in the bathroom. Your eyes intensely concentrated on your reflection as you painted dark red lips on yourself.

To sum up the last two years in a single, simple phrase, Keigo would say that love now made even less sense to him.

It wasn’t precisely that it made perfect sense before. Some days he still argued and wondered about how love could exist in specific scenarios. Or why, after you stole his final KFC chicken leg he was saving, he could always love you after such betrayal. It made no sense to him, but also made perfect sense, hence the complete confusion.

But it was without saying that as you twirled in your outfit in front of him, a grin plastered so large and lovingly on your features, that it made sense.

How could he not love when he had someone like you.

The walk to the restaurant was perfect; he had even taken a moment to slow dance with you when you came across some performers. Your sweet smile meant just for him made Keigo hum contently as he kissed you gently.

Dinner was amazing. The food rich and luscious, entirely to die for that had the both of you moaning about how great it was before laughing because the waitress definitely heard that. After dinner was over, you and Keigo were now waiting on desserts when he simply grabbed your left hand and slid a simple ring over a very important finger before placing a kiss on your palm.

“I know I was at one point too fast, and maybe I think I was too slow to ask this, but would you like to wake up and have chicken with me every day?” Keigo asked, watching as your face went through a million stages of understanding, processing, internalizing, accepting, and pure emotions.

The kiss was sloppy and wet, the tears streaming down your face beautifully, like diamonds in the dark sky.

It was today that Keigo unlocked the last love he ever thought he would have.

Pragma: committed, enduring love.

[rosy-cheekx]

for the soulmate prompts! 5: you have a colorful mark where your soulmate will first touch you

This definitely isn’t like my usual fics, but it was a ton of fun to write!! I hope you enjoy it! I am here for the Martin angst.

Fingerprints on the Soul

Martin has never believed in soulmates. Or, rightly, he has never believed he has one. He has a mark, sure, an opalite shimmer in the shape of a hand, small and slender, circling his wrist. It grows with him, and Martin assumes, this alleged soulmate.

But it doesn’t feel right for him to have a soulmate. He’s never had time for it. Leaving school at 16, his mother has been his world, the only point of connection in his life. And regardless of how they get on (or rather, didn’t), he couldn’t see himself having room for another person to care for. He barely had time for himself.

When he was 8, his best friend was named Rachel. They got married in the playpark one day; Martin’s jump rope and Rachel’s Raggedy Ann the witnesses to their elopement. They didn’t kiss, gross, but they pressed their hands to each other’s soulmate marks. Rachel’s hand was too chubby for the kid-sized hand on Martin’s wrist, and she couldn’t quite get the angle right. Rachel’s mark was on her hip, five delicate purple spots her mum told her were probably fingerprints. “Someone very gentle,” she repeated her mother’s words with pride. Martin wondered what a whole hand on the wrist meant. Probably bad. His mother grabbed his wrist when he was in trouble, dragging him to the timeout corner. That never felt like true love, what Rachel said soulmates were supposed to be.

When Martin was 19, he watched Terry, a Northern boy with shaggy hair dyed a black so dark it was almost blue, grab his wrist and pull him into the stockroom of the Tesco’s, and for a moment his heart lifted. But as a boy who smelled like deli meat and tasted like cigarettes kissed him, hands on his waist, he realized it was the wrong hand. He kissed back, of course, though he knew it wouldn’t last.

Martin was 21 when he decided not to think about a soulmate anymore. There are plenty of dating apps, people sending pictures of marks to see if they match in color or trying to string together a narrative that rationalizes any sort of reason their touches could be each other’s. He’s always wondered if it’s all self-imposed, someone you like touches you in the right spot and your brain convinces you it’s been them all along. It’s naïve, Martin thinks, Childish.

His mark is hard to hide; the wrist is fairly conspicuous. Martin has taken to wearing long sleeves, watches, bracelets, even a very brief leather cuff stage, anything to minimize the glaring brilliance of an opalescent handprint, radiating against his freckles skin. Sometimes when Martin is in his flat, in the quiet and the dark, he traces the fingertips with his own, trying to imagine a scenario in which his wrist is held in such a manner, the fingers at such a strange angle. The rainbow of color shimmers in light, hypnotizing to behold.

Martin was 24 when he joined The Magnus Institute, though he said he was 30. He wasn’t sure why that lie had slipped out, but it had felt right to give himself a boost in years, if nothing else to make sure there was sufficient time for all his “degree work” to have been completed. Elias seemed to believe him. Made him seem more professional too, to be a 30-year-old looking for a job, rather than a measly 24. Silly, really. His actual age wouldn’t have made a lick of difference in the things that mattered.

Being 28 years old when he is moved to the Archives wouldn’t have changed the way Jon treated him, for one. Martin was a pro in being accommodating, especially to the people that held power in his life, but damn if Jonathan Sims didn’t make it difficult. The harsh criticism, the sneering glances, the biting words he thinks Martin doesn’t hear every time he listens through a statement for details to research. It all hurts.

(Sasha hugged him warmly, in that first week working in the archives, promising it would get better; he saw the light blue mark on her palm. Tim had one to match, he noticed the following day, when he had handed him a Chinese takeaway. He had laughed at Martin’s sputtered realization, flipping his hand over for Martin to see and loudly declaring it “the most boring sign of love,” grinning at Sasha’s desk as he said so. He didn’t ask about Martin’s.)

His age wouldn’t have changed, he doesn’t think, his insistent motivation to make Jon proud. To prove that he is not a waste of space, the way everyone seemed to think of him; that he is clever and capable and he earned that fake degree, godammit. It certainly wouldn’t have changed his choices that night, he’s certain of that. No matter what age he could have been (granted, young enough to climb/fall through a window), Martin is fairly certain he would have always gone back to that flat that night, seen the form of Jane Prentiss for real, in the flesh…or what was left of it. Being 28 or 45 or 30 wouldn’t have changed the viscerally terrifying two weeks he spent locked in his flat, stuffing towels under his door and checking his skin compulsively. His mark was a ridiculously glamorous beacon through it all, like a diamond necklace on a corpse.

Initially, Martin wasn’t sure Jon had a mark. That would require him caring for another living soul and, besides the warm banter he seemed to exchange on occasion with Tim and Sasha, he didn’t seem to be an affectionate man. He wasn’t sure, at least, until he was back in the Archives, trying not to shake as he told Jon what had happened, and he listened. Not only did Jon listen, but he believed him, cared fiercely, making him a cup of tea, buying him takeaway, and demanding to Elias that Martin be able to stay in the archives. One night, when Jon was working late and Martin was sitting on the floor with him in flannel, caught up in a debate on whether or not all things could be classified as “bowls” and “soups,” (“a file is a bowl for statement soup!” Martin had insisted, unable to hold back the grin) he felt that delightful, horrible twinge deep in his gut, and shit. Of course he would develop a crush on Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, His Boss. But how could he not? Jon’s face was a delightful mix of irritation, erudition, and humor as he tried to entertain Martin’s inane theory. And being there so late all the time had taught Martin to notice little quirks about Jon: his insistence to please others, especially Elias; his stubborn refusal to take care of himself (Oedipus complex much, Martin?); how adorably squished his face looked when he fell asleep on his desk, lips parted in a pout.

Martin let it sit. It didn’t matter. Hard to take someone on a date when you’re living in the basement of your workplace. And besides, he knew Jon didn’t like him, so what was the point? It was great poetry fodder, anyways.

God, but then it happened, like he knew it would. The worms and the screaming and Jon and Sasha. He had been frozen in a moment of fear and confusion, unable to make out the words Jon was saying as he grabbed Martin’s wrist and pulled him to safety, tugging the larger man along behind him. And then they were running and the worms were leaping and oh god they were everywhere. Martin faintly registered the ever-growing circular patches on Jon’s trousers, the glimpses of blood-slicked silver like a bullseye.

And then they were safe for the moment and Martin had his corkscrew and cuts open Jon’s trouser and all he could say was I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I know it hurts as he carves into the flesh of Jon’s leg, wishing he could block out Jon’s whimpering cries of pain. It’s not until he and Sasha can wipe away the blood soaked into Jon’s leg that Martin sees it, underneath his crimson-slick fingertips, precisely under them: iridescent fingertips and a distinct heel of a palm, under and around the first wormhole, where Martin had braced the skin for the first incision. He sits back on his heels and glances down at his own wrist again, where Jon had pulled him along behind, and realized that, even as they were running for their lives, something had slotted into place in his mind, a sense of peace and knowing and yes. He hadn’t noticed it, what with all the death. Jon must have sensed it too. How was that the first time Jon had touched him? 

Martin didn’t say anything, and tentatively lined up his hand with the mark again and still. It fit. Even with the strip of Martin’s shirt they’ve tied around Jon’s leg to stem the weeping wound. Martin sighed, in relief and exhaustion and fear, and Jon weakly held out a hand for Martin to take. They watched Sasha peer through the window in the door and squeezed the hand of the other tightly, a message of hello, and I know, and I’m here. If they ever got out of here, they would discuss it. Figure things out.

Maybe even get a coffee. 

[rpmemesbyarat]

RP Meme from “What’s Your Favorite Movie Quote?” thread on Reddit, Part Six

“Well, let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet.” "Some men just want to watch the world burn." "I can get a good look at a steak by sticking my head up a bull’s ass, but I'd rather take the butcher's word for it." ‘I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into you brain! This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.” “Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.” "Whatcha gonna need the stupid fuckin rope for?" “ This job would be great, if it wasn’t for the fuckin’ customers” “When the fuck did we get ice cream?“ "You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake." “You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like.” ‘You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” “Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.” “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” “I didn’t know you could read” “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” "I really thought that one was going to explode" "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt." "Go ahead. Make my day." "Maybe I'll just sit here and bleed at you" “If you’re nothing without the suit, then you didn’t deserve it in the first place” “I don’t like bullies” ‘If it bleeds, we can kill it.“ “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” "You're not so tough without your car, are ya?" “Come quietly, or there will be trouble.” “You’ll get nothing and like it!” “If you shined a blacklight in here, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting“ “True love is hard to find, sometimes you think you have true love and then you catch the early flight home from San Diego and a couple of nude people jump out of your bathroom blindfolded like a goddamn magic show ready to double team your girlfriend” “Look at the time. I gotta get to bed. I still gotta brush my teeth, feed the hog, still got some homework to do, still got those bills to pay, wash the car.“ “Get on your knees and tell me you love me.” “To love another person is to see the face of god” “If I don’t get some good leads soon you’re all going to be demoted to something that’s gonna require touching shit with your hands.” “It’s easy to grin, when your ships come in, and you’ve got the stock market beat. But the man worthwhile, is a man who can smile, when his parts are too tight for his seat.“ “I got two things in this world, my word and my balls, and I don’t break ‘em for nobody.” “You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity." “I ain’t got time to bleed” “ When you are a man, sometimes you wear stretchy pants in your room. It's for fun." "Boy, the next word that comes out of your mouth better be some brilliant fuckin Mark Twain shit, 'cause it's definitely getting chiseled on your tombstone." "Did we just become best friends?" "When I'm around you, I kind of feel like I'm on drugs. Not that I do drugs. Unless you do drugs, in which case I do them all the time." “If you ride like lightning you’re gonna crash like thunder” “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” “I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.” “We’re all prostitutes. We’re just selling different parts of ourselves” “Hold on to your butts.” "Did you ever notice how in the Bible, when ever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?" “Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” "Shut your fucking face uncle fucker.” “ You're gonna have to call the fucking United Nations and get a fucking binding resolution to keep me from fucking destroying you. I'm talking about a scorched earth, motherfucker! I will massacre you! I WILL FUCK YOU UP!” “This is your life, and it’s ending one moment at a time.” "I feel like a little worm on a big fucking hook." “We have no great war. No great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.” "What's the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" “Back, you weird fucker” “ The illusions of division threatens our very existence. “ “Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time. It's just not worth it.“ “You want sympathy - look in the dictionary between shit and syphilis, that’s where you’ll find my sympathy.” “I’ll see you in another life when we are both cats.” “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.” "I guess I'm just looking for a meaningful relationship with someone special" “I’m not crazy, I just don’t give a fuck.”

[soyforramen]

Whoops, I slipped into a follow up of this prompt.

--

“How’s the wrist?”

Such an innocuous question. It rings flat in the sharp crags that line the chasm between them, echoing hollowly between them. But it’s still more than he’d said Saturday night. More than he thought he’d say.

Betty, never one to let any pain shine through, smiles at him. Her face morphs into that perfect Cooper mask, no crack or wrinkle to suggest anything was out of the ordinary. It pierces his soul to realize that he doesn’t know how to read her anymore.

To him, she looks just as happy and carefree as the first day they’d met in third grade.

“Still sore, but no lasting damage,” she says, rolling her wrist as proof. Even her voice is peppy and varnished to perfection. “How’s your head?”

His hand moves without thought to his forehead, his fingertips grazing the ugly red mess. Jughead jerks his head to the right, a move practiced in the mirror this morning to ensure his hair covered the welt.

“Nothing an aspirin can’t take care of,” he mutters.

He raises his coffee cup to his lips to keep from mentioning the whisky and rye he’d fallen headfirst into, a palliative cure after she’d disappeared up the stairs, leaving nothing but confusion and nadir in her wake. The lingering hangover was still a symphony of banging pots and pans along his temples, a never-ending reminder of his regret (relief?) of doing nothing.

They sip their coffee in silence, waiting for the meeting to begin. The artificial bridge he’d thrown across the chasm between them frays, its tethers loosening. In less than a minute, it’s fallen into the yawning black hole that now lies between them.

Betty's words… no. Not that. It was his inaction. His confusion. His uncertainty that created this false rift between them. The gravity of it tugging and pulling at every second between them, every atom, every conceivable future between them, each a warped, stretched snapshot of a future never to be.

It was enough to make him want to crawl back into the bottle and never come out again. His hand shakes, an aftereffect of the late night drinking, and he shoves it deep into his pocket. Betty’s eyebrows draw too close together, too close to concern for his tastes.

Toni claps her hands together, and Betty shoots him one last curious look. He refuses to look at her, turning to refill his mug. When he turns back around, Betty is in her usual seat next to Archie, a plastic smile on her face. Jughead slouches against the counter, too lost in his own morbid thoughts to pay much attention to the upcoming game to notice the increasingly concerned glances Betty sends his way.

Jughead watches as his students shuffle in, the twins he affectionately calls Bill and Ted the only two showing any trace of life. The bell rings, a clanging, offensive noise that makes everyone wince. It’s doubtful he’s the only one nursing a hangover.

“How many of you did the reading?” he asks when they settle in.

A collective groan ripples throughout the room. He can’t blame them; he’d never been able to finish The Odyssey in high school either.

“Pop quiz time,” he says.

Another groan, this time with a rousing argument against it, echoes through his already pounding head. Jughead holds his hands up in a conciliatory gesture.

“I want you to write about betrayal.”

The class quiets, some exchanging glances. It’s a sharp turn, a quick 180 that throws all off them off balance. Jughead has been ruthless so far, both in his grading and in his push to get them to learn critical thinking skills. Even he’s surprised at this course of action.

“Any kind of betrayal you can think of. You can talk about personal betrayal, family betrayal. Maybe one of your friends kissed your girlfriend, or maybe your mother chose your sister’s side over yours. Or maybe you write about a fictional betrayal. Hamlet and Ophelia, Brutus and Julius Caesar, Edward Pensieve and the Turkish delight.”

Wynnie’s hand shoots up, and Jughead inwardly winces. She’s always been the one to push back against any assignment, the one who questions everything he expects from them and makes class ten times longer.

“Can we write about a made up betrayal? With characters on, like, TV or something?”

Breathing a sigh of relief, he nods. “Anything is fair game, as long as you write it in a way that someone not familiar with the show, or book, or whatever, can understand what’s going on.”

“What about poetry?” another student asks.

“So long as you put the effort in, poetry is fine. Text threads, short stories, poems, letters, anything written.”

“Can we work together?” one of the twins asks.

“Sure, as long as you don’t bother the other students,” Jughead says with a shrug.

Bill and Ted high five before dragging their desks together.

Jughead is surprised at how well they’re taking this assignment. Every last thing has been a fight with them, from getting their attention to taking a test. Betrayal, though, seems to be something everyone can relate to.

As the class begins to write, Jughead sits down at his own desk. For a moment, he watches his students, kids in the same position he was once in, and wonders why he’s even here. Riverdale offered him little more than characters he could mold into his own, a setting for the decline of small town America.

Today, though, his mind wanders along words and phrases, glimpses into a different sort of reality. One ravaged by decay and rot, left to perish alone. And yet, he can’t help but see the small, green shoots of the future poke out of the ashes, tiny hints of hope for what’s to come. Perhaps nothing is ever static and unchanging. Perhaps things can turn around.

Jughead reaches into his bag for his own blank notebook.

He’s sitting on the porch that afternoon, struggling with the illegibly written translation. It’s a shame the state requires them to teach only the recommended books; Jughead would love to see how the story unfolds when thrown onto a fire.

“Hey.”

Jughead starts. When he sees it’s only Betty (only?), he stands abruptly, his entire body on fire, his legs jittery and ready to run.

“Hey,” he repeats. “Archie’s not here, but –“

Betty shakes her head and shoves her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “Can we talk?”

He swallows. Stupid of him to think he’d get away from this conversation. Jughead waves to the chair next to him. As Betty passes, her perfume tickles his nose. Long gone is the strawberry body spray she used in high school, a sweet, cloying smell. Now it’s a perfume, one that tickles his nose and clogs his sinuses.

They sit there quietly, neither willing to speak first. He’s lost for words, unable to start.

She sits patiently, calmly. Betty seems as if she hasn’t a care in the world, as if they were there to talk about the weather. Part of her training, he realizes. She’s no longer as impulsive as she once was, reaching and grasping and desperate for an immediate answer. This Betty Cooper is a reminder of the past, but only that.

“I’m sorry,” he manages, starting with the simplest of things.

Next to him, Betty shifts. He thinks he hears her sniffle (crying? allergies? derision at his lame start?), and he has to quash his immediately reaction. All he wants to do is reach out to her, to comfort her, to promise her the world to keep her from suffering.

But he’d done that before, long ago, in a completely different world. And he’d been trod upon, brushed aside in favor of her own cruel form of betrayal. Nothing he could have done after would have fixed the wound she’d carved in his soul. Even now, seven years distanced from the teenage woes, it lay between them, still raw and sore and bleeding from the continued betrayals of his life.

He wonders how he would have responded to her if he hadn’t known. If he hadn’t come home one night early to hear her and Archie upstairs. If he hadn’t turned to the Wyrm and listened to Sweet Peas acidic sniping just to get lost among the agave pinas and the juniper berries.

“It’s not,” he stutters, trying to find his footing, unsure of what he wants to say. “I couldn’t stop loving the Betty Cooper I knew. But I also never stopped hating what she did to me.”

The admission is the first emotionally honest thing he’s said in years. It’s painful to realize how deep it lay inside him, how long it took to finally cut out this festering, putrid thing that burrowed into him. Like a tumor, it could only grow, fed by hate and anger and depression. Hate and anger for both of them. It hadn’t turned out like it was supposed to.

Now that it lay out in the open between them, he felt different. Heavier, in some ways. But there was also a release. The pressure that had been building for so long was slowly lowering, as if he’d finally found the valve that would bring things back to normal.

“And I don’t know you,” he said, the words pouring out now. “Seven years, and only a handful of texts, a few voicemails. You’re not the person I remember. Hell, everyone is different from who they were, who I thought they were.”

He pauses to run a hand through his hair. He can feel Betty’s bright eyes staring at him, pleading with him for something, anything, that will make this better.

“We’re both different now, and there’s no way you can still love me. You don’t know me, you know who I was. We can’t just pick up where we left off, even if we wanted to. There’s too much between… Even if we were stupid enough to try,” he trails off, his words meandering as they try to find footing in the rocky space between them.

“We didn’t leave things in a good place,” Betty murmurs in agreement.

She shifts, and he looks at her for the first time since they sat down. Her legs are tucked up against her body, arms wrapped around them. It’s a protective stance. Against him, perhaps, or against the bare truth that he’s put in the open. He can’t blame her, not since he’s protected himself against most of his own life in other, less healthy ways.

Jughead sighs, empty of anything else to say. He stares at the fading light glowing through the leaves. It’s the perfect, picturesque scene of two high school sweethearts reuniting. At least, it was supposed to be. He didn’t know if he ever could do that to himself again.

Archie’s old truck chugs up the street, and Jughead stands. He scrapes the palms of his free hand along his pants, the other hand gripping his book. Archie waves through the windshield with a bright grin, and Jughead gives a half-hearted wave back before going inside.

He’s exhausted; after being mad for so long, it’s strange to be so empty of feeling. He’d give the world to be able to retreat back to Alphabet City and it’s various loan sharks. There, at least, he’d know the pain was no one’s fault but his own.

Jughead closes the bedroom door behind him, shutting out the rest of the world. It wasn’t his business what Betty did despite her attempts to bring him back into her life. He didn’t know if he was ready for that, or if he’d ever be. Ever since he’d been back, her presence gnaws at him, chipping away at the walls he’d built up over the years against her presence, and it frightens him that she’s stepped back into his thoughts so quickly and easily.

Thoughts and ideas collide and churn violently in his head. He throws himself down on his bed, determined to fall asleep despite the chaos.

But this time, sleep doesn’t come as easily as it always has. Words and feelings and phrases splatter against the back of his eyelids, graffiti tattooing images of a world never known. He pushes back against the cacophony until he can stand it no longer. Desperate to empty his thoughts, Jughead turns on the bedside lamp, pulls his laptop out from under the bed, and begins to write more than he’s been able to for years.

[whereflowersbloom]

Meet me at the horizon

Damian has spent nearly three hours inside the meeting room of one of the biggest companies of the Eastern Coast, Wayne Enterprises, the silence was strong after several hours discussing the approval of new projects, majority of them Proposed by Timothy Drake. Tim was a genius in Computer Engineering and Technologies, currently working with Lucious Fox. He just graduated and was already making money developing enterprise digital assistance apps and what not for the company. Unfortunately the silence lasted less than two deep breaths as the board directors, shareholders, his siblings and even his own father were exchanging goodbyes and handshakes, scheduling the next meeting already. His father had promised to take Helena shopping with Selina. His adoptive siblings stayed in the meeting room, deciding to have a much-deserved break, to catch up with their daily activities.

Damian frowned unconsciously, his head was throbbing with the surge of scenes in his head. The scenes he was so used to see in his dreams for the last nine months, but the last three months have been assaulting him any moment of the day, especially close to his eldest brother Richard. The meeting seemed to have opened a door to these dreams and this talk about opening an office in Jump city was making it worse. Jump City. He had the vague sensation he’d been there before...

Tim, Richard and Duke seemed to be too busy speaking about the next big game of Gotham Knights, the hockey team, to notice his troubled expression. They mumbled something about asking Jason to slow down from his intense sportbike racer life and watch the game all together. Damian didn’t bother listening to the rest, he was attacked by images of that younger version of himself in some kind of flashy vigilante costume fighting criminals.

“We should go to the game this weekend. The girl I’m seeing now, Kori said she was interested in learning about traditional sports. She’s been in Gotham for six months now. She’s very enthusiastic about cultural learning.” Richard suggested with a wide smile to his siblings completely excited. Eyes like wildfire lit with the spark of life. He hadn’t met Dick’s girlfriend but he looked happier than he’s ever seen him in years.

“Are you joining, D or you’ve got a date?” Duke asked with a teasing tone in his sardonic voice.

Damian did not retribute the smile his adoptive brother gave him, trying to mask his still throbbing head. He looked at him, threatening gaze was a subtle warning. He didn’t know why this was happening that day, but the talk about Jump City and Dick’s new girlfriend were just bringing more of those images. Most of them weren’t good ones. Gory, brutal, bloody. He liked more the ones that seemed to joyful. The ones with that girl.

“He barely seem to have time to meet someone. He’s a workaholic.” it was Tim who answered with an amused smile on his lips, masking an exhausted mien.

“At this pace he’s close enough to become a celibate monk.” Duke joked elbowing Tim lightly, who laughed in response.

“I tried to set him up with some girls, but I almost end up with a broken jaw.” Dick shrugged slightly as he told them with details how Damian had turned down Kara Danvers, Tim’s girlfriend’s best friend. Admittedly she was a nice-looking woman but not the one he desired.

Damian decided to ignore the moronic comments about his love life from his siblings.

Storming out of the meeting room without uttering a single word. They knew nothing about his romantic life. Tsk. A breath of fresh is what he required, lost in consuming thoughts about the girl.

People form the company knew him as the extremely professional boss that run his department with an almost iron fist, he was fair though, accepting the situation of people that worked under him, but he didn’t accept people trying to take advantages or lacking in his services. And he was indeed workaholic.

The media knew him as the ‘Ice Prince of Gotham’, the young heir that was always looking serious, with a cold aura around him, with no type of relationships or scandals so far. He didn’t have the bad boy aura like Jason, ‘chicks’ seemed to dig it as Duke would crudely express. He appeared distant of people out of his inner circle. However, women followed him like bees to flowers in order to collect nectar.

It was just his Wayne charm he couldn’t turn off, regardless of the situation. Like his father, Damian just attracted female attention like a magnet. But no girlfriend. He's had the odd fling here and there but nobody has ever really caught his eye and he's incredibly busy he hasn't the time to feel that maybe he's missing out. Until he saw her.

All his time, attention and passion have been poured into his work. Not that he loved it exactly but he's never been one to do things by halves. Of course he made time to spend quality time with his family, after all, little Helena was barely ten years old. Perky and tireless, too smart for her age if he added. EHis youngest sister.

He was also known in the sports world as one of the most skilled people on the art of the traditional sword fighting and martial arts. He didn’t know where this passion for sword fighting began, although he would bet all his money that it had something to do with his strange recurrent dreams.

 Although his life was satisfactory in his personal view, he always felt as if something was missing. He felt as lonely as the teenager in his dreams when the girl was not around him. She was missing.

Why this bothered him so much, he couldn’t find a logical reason that made any sense. It was just a simple dream, and that girl wasn’t much more than that. A dream. But why he felt that way? That need to look around every time he was in a place full of people hoping to get a glimpse of those shinning amethyst eyes looking at him like she did in his dreams with such profound emotion. Or his necessity to look for her around the world as if he was sure he could find her. She was etched in his bones, buried in down his bronze skin, burning in his chest leaving him out of breath. The images were flooding his mind again. More than absurd dreams, they were a recollection of memories...from a different lifetime perhaps.

They had something briefly, he gathered from the persistent dreams. It was intense, passionate. It was only something he could describe as love. But suddenly they parted ways, forced to be away from the other. They lost contact. The images were so vivid. They felt so real. A first last kiss filled with sorrow, powerlessness, genuine affection. It was carved into his mind until he memorized it. That moment. The warmth and scent of her breath put him in an hypnotic daze. Her lips parted softly, and he could taste faint traces salt from her tears when her soft lips pressed against his. He could feel lightning coursing through his veins, as if his entire world had been set ablaze only lasting seconds. Then it was gone. The ghost of a promise of a second chance. He’d grown tired of waiting for her to appear before his eyes. Every damn second felt like an eternity in itself. With every passing moment, his patience waned a little more and his heart sank a little further.

The haunting pain, endless longing, fear of losing her, the regret of leaving her behind first. They were all real. It was a silent torture.

At first, foolishly he believed these feelings would eventually fade and he would no longer be haunted by her phantom presence. Only memories he thought as he closed his emerald eyes. And her pale, heart-shaped, beautiful face flitted across his mind. Damian had spent his entire life being in control. But every time he met her in his dreams, he seemed to lose his grasp on his emotions, his life, and sometimes, even his destiny. He had to find her.

The wind howling through halls of old memories, piercing through solitude, skin and bone until there’s nothing but heavy emotions and melancholy. Walking with a heart that’s taken too many hits, never too fragile but refusing to be held in the hands of another’s that don’t belong to hers. In his chest remained an ache, a longing for what was or could have been. What he let slip.

“I am sorry we did not have time, Raven.” He mumbled almost in a whisper to nothingness. It felt like a heartfelt apology a thousand years too late. Maybe more or less. A lifetime too late. If their hearts and destiny were entwined surely they would find their back to each other no matter what. Damian carried that hope in his heart, always his constant companion. If He were to walk to the ends of the earth and waited for her on the horizon after the sun has set, would she be there? At the point where the land and sky meets. Could they be together once again?

Raven. The girl. He thought of her during the long hours between dusk and dawn, as he ate dinner alone or read next to the window. She was an ever present fixture in his mind and never more so than today. He considered what he might say to her once he found her, but what rational excuse could he offer to a stranger? He doubted she would find comfort in the ridiculous phrases he might string together about meeting in a past lifetime or those dreams. What if she had them too? If it wasn’t some breathtakingly realistic illusion and she was so where in this city or Jump City or anywhere else looking for him. It was silly to entertain such notions, he knew it well. But that didn’t stop his mind from wandering from time to time when he found a poignant passage of poetry that tugged at his heart, or a new book that fascinated him. She loved books how he knew that, he was not sure. What he wouldn’t give to have long days spent indulging their mutual passion for literature, poetry, history and ancient languages.

He’s been walking around for longer than he imagined, looking at his watch it’s last 6:00 pm. It was out of instinct or some magnetic pull forcing his body to look at the flower shop, whatever universal spirit or energy did it. He was thankful. The shop was tiny, a sliver of space between a cafe and bookstore, and would have disappeared into the surrounding stone and woodwork had it not been for the white and lavender exterior. Eyes quickly scanning surroundings. It was exquisite and untamed, thorny blackberry brambles mingle with fresh citrusy kumquats wrapped languidly around overhanging light fixtures for a wild, yet utterly magnificent and unique look. It had a three-panel glass window boasting an avant-garde display of blush dahlias, blizzard hydrangeas, soft purple lilacs, a mixture of green stems and leaves that balanced everything out. He had been here before but never spotted the shop. The shop was definitely new and if Damian hadn’t known this neighborhood so well, the faint smell of fresh paint would have given it away.

Her hair was a deep navy blue sprinkled with white, like starlight in winter. Her heart-shaped had matured beautifully, moonlight skin. She was a flashing star born with striking surreal violet orbs. She was holding astilbe flowers in white and soft pink. She set the flowers on the counter carefully, her fingers hovering in the space around them, like she wanted to guard them, to protect every petal from the possibility of being crushed. As if they were more than blooms of colour, like there were uniquely cherishable aspects to each one that is not present in the next. He could see that type of caring in her. This was his Raven. This can’t be real, Right? The world wouldn’t be this cruel to him, playing mind tricks on him. She was here. O

Damian thought of every slow-motion, heart-stopping, head-spinning scene in every romance movie or show or novel and how he’d always assumed they were stupid, nothing but rubbish. But here he was standing astonished literally staring at the woman of his dreams. Speak with her. Just hear her low and calming voice. That was all his mind would permit him to focus on, the single-minded determination to see her again.

He moved with driving purpose, his legs propelling him to go inside the little store and tell her everything about his dreams, recollection of old memories. The thought crossed his mind so briefly he scarcely dwelt on it, but that was how it had been for him in the months since dreaming of Raven. His pace slowed as he was stopped by the entrance door, opening it slowly, willing his heart to steady the gallop rhythm of its beats. The sun was shining brightly through the shop’s windows, soft classical music played through the serene and scented atmosphere.

The anticipation rushing through his veins felt like burning his tongue on Earl Grey too hot-tea a chilly rainy day, a dry mouth after sleepless night tossing and turning because other side of his bed looked too empty, trees in the park swayed and shuddered by the afternoon air before lighting fractures the sky and shakes earth, like he’s been waiting a million of breaths for this moment. In his twenty-one years of existence never experienced this wild and frantic emotion.

He swallowed around a very dry throat when he let the door swing shut behind him as his short, hesitant strides brought him directly up to the counter. Now they were face to face. Mustering the courage to say anything. Anything that dint make her think he was insane. But when his gaze met hers. Damian found himself awe-struck by the intensity behind familiar amethyst eyes. The stars couldn’t compare. The world and moon would crumble away. The sun would collapse into itself at this dazzling and glorious constellation that she was. Lilac pools hiding something mystic and ancient in their depth.

She leaned in closer to him in such a natural way, raising her head just to meet his. Her smile was sincere and expectant, pupils blown wide, but they’re focused, dark and determined, nearly drowning out the violet glint of her irises. His lips ached to reach for hers in a hungry kiss but refrained. Speechless, heart pounding in chest, peculiar fluttering sensation in his stomach, waiting for her to speak. Finally she took a deep and long breath before whispering. “Hello Damian. It’s been quite a long time.”

I rewrote this and hope you all like it. I can’t find it in me to update stories right now but have this short prompt. Specially written for @chromium7sky @ravenfan1242 @xaphrin @alerialblu @niahti and all my friends and readers. I’m so sorry some of you have been getting hate but we stand strong and together. 💜❤️❤️🥺🥺

@deep-in-mind67 @kallura-juniblade @bourniebna @timid-soot-sprite @deepbreadlover @tweepunkgrl @srose-foxfire