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elsanna-shenanigans · 2 years

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April Contest Submission #13: To Build a Home

Words: ca. 8000 Setting: modern AU Lemon: no Content: minor character death mention, angst, brief mention of divorce Song: To Build a Home by The Cinematic Orchestra

It’s only once Anna sees her walking out of the Arrivals gate that she remembers how to breathe again.

“Elsa!” she calls out, waving.

Her sister looks up from her phone and spots her in the crowd, giving the tiniest, barely-even-there wave back in response. She’s dragging behind only a small suitcase, clearly not planning to stay long.

“Hi,” she says when she’s finally close enough for Anna to hear her. “Is everything ready?”

Anna nods, her hands tingling at her sides to throw herself around her in a hug–but Elsa makes no move to even imply she’d like one, so she awkwardly resigns to the situation.

“Are we getting a taxi?”

“No, I rented a car, it’s parked right out.” She points in the direction of the exit, as if Elsa was supposed to know which car to look for. “I think they’re about to slap me with a ticket, so we gotta hurry.”

Elsa doesn’t need to be told twice.

The drive is silent–Anna doesn’t even dare to put the radio on, and Elsa doesn’t ask for it, so they end up sitting in complete silence, safe for the quiet hum of the hybrid engine. They get off the highway at the familiar exit that soon transforms into a smaller collector, before even that gives way to barely patched up local roads.

“How’s Maren?” Anna asks finally when the GPS reads twenty minutes to arrival, not able to take the awkward tension anymore. “Heard she got a new job offer recently.”

Recently meaning roughly half a year ago here, and heard actually referring to the one time she accidentally saw her change her info on Facebook.

Elsa doesn’t respond right away–she’s looking out the window at the snow-covered fields as if they’re the most interesting thing in the whole vast universe right now. “We’ve divorced,” she deadpans at last, right when Anna’s taking a breath to ask another question, still glued to the passenger window. “I had no idea she got a new job offer.”

That implies it happened more than half a year ago, and Anna feels incredibly stupid. “I’m sorry,” she says, her knuckles turning white from her steel grip on the steering wheel.

“You didn’t know.”

It’s simple, it’s stating the obvious, but in Elsa-speech it means she’s absolved of guilt and the conversation is done.

They arrive on the driveway exactly twenty minutes later with no more conversation happening between them.

Strangely enough, it’s Elsa who speaks first. “I didn’t remember it being so big.”

Anna looks over at the house; it is, in fact, bigger than she remembered, which strikes her as odd considering most childhood memories tend to have things appear bigger rather than smaller. Guess they both were so used to it–and gotten unused along the way–the size didn’t even register for them fully.

It’s also dilapidated. The front porch has a pole and part of the railing missing, probably from the strong winds and lack of proper maintenance of the wood. The siding seems to be holding up well on the porch itself, where the roof and elevation protected it from the rain and moisture, but even from this far away she can tell it’s rotting closer to the ground. The bay window of the living room is completely broken, along with some of the windows leading to the basement, and the paint–almost completely gone on the first floor–is peeling off in big flakes from the second floor façade.

No wonder, either, considering the last time anybody was here, truly was here was about fifteen years ago, right until their parents moved out to a smaller apartment in the city.

“It doesn’t look as bad as I thought,” Anna says after a while of neither of them making a move to step out of the car. “I was scared the walls would have crumbled to dust by now.”

Elsa scoffs. “It’s an old building,” she reminds, not that Anna needs to be reminded. “It would take much more than just some years of neglect to bring it down.”

Her hand is on the handle, hesitating to open the door and step out into the muddy, unkempt driveway.

Once they’re inside–which looks so much like Anna remembered it, down to the placement of the few pieces of furniture their parents decided to leave behind–it turns out Anna was right.

Well, not exactly right-right. The walls didn’t crumble to dust, per se, rather were taken down on the South side of the house.

“This complicates things.”

Elsa’s statement, though obvious, resonates with Anna deeply. She was expecting to see a lot, including some wild animals or squatters inside, but she was not prepared for half a tree peeking in through what used to be the bedroom they shared as kids, some of it also tearing into the kitchen downstairs. And yes, it complicates things, because now instead of standing in their parents’ old, but still marketable house it turns out they’re in a ruin.

“You think we won’t be able to sell it?”

Elsa laughs shortly. “Unless you know of someone willing to buy a house in the middle of nowhere that needs an entire room rebuilt, I don’t think it’s gonna work.”

Anna sucks on her teeth. “I mean, wouldn’t it still work? Just for less than we initially thought?”

Elsa takes a seat on one of the kitchen chairs left behind, looking critically at the (comparably much smaller than upstairs) damage on the walls. “It’s not just the walls, Anna. That means the entire electric grid might be messed up, not to mention I think this is where the pipes traveled between the floors…” She sighs. “If the house was anywhere else we might stand a chance of pawing it off to someone, but in Arendelle– I don’t think there’s a living person out there in the world willing to move here for a project house.”

She says it like she’s speaking to a small child, and one not particularly bright at that, not to a woman in her mid-thirties.

“Well, what if we renovate it?”

Elsa turns around to look at her with the most incredulous expression. “You want to sink thousands of dollars into this house? Because I sure as hell don’t.”

Of course she shoots down her ideas. Anna tries to hide the annoyance from her face and voice. “It might turn out with profit.”

“I very much doubt so.”

In the end, they end up calling Mr Bjorgmann, the local jack of all trades in repairs and maintenance their parents’ lawyer pointed them to.

“I’m surprised it’s still standing,” he says, two hours later, looking at their old bedroom upstairs. “It must have amazingly balanced load bearing walls, because the one the tree took out should have definitely had the roof collapse here when it caved in.”

Anna is nodding along as he’s speaking and pointing things out, Elsa now gone back to the kitchen where she’s making some extremely important business-related call.

“Surprisingly though it seems that all the plumbing going here was spared.” He points to a partly exposed pipe disappearing into the floor. “I need to run some more tests in the bathroom and kitchen, and you’ll need someone who can ultrasound the walls to make sure there’s no leakage and mold, but at least for now it seems intact.” He muses, not even speaking directly to Anna, clearly fascinated by what he was looking at. “Obviously you wouldn’t want to stay here now, though, but with proper care there’s still a chance to save it.”

Anna nods again.

“It’s very much a passion project though.” He looks back up at her, then points to the floor. “You and your girlfriend thinking of buying it?”

Anna blushes and clears her throat. “Sister,” she corrects him, and he mouths a ‘my bad’. “And technically we already own it. Well, I own half and she owns half.”

He seems to immediately understand what she means by that and doesn’t pry for more details. “Well, it’s as I said; you’d really need to put a lot of time and work into her, but with some love she’s gonna last you for years.”

It takes her a moment to realize he’s talking about the house.

“Absolutely not.”

“But–”

“Anna, I don’t have time for this.” Elsa pinches the bridge of her nose right over where her glasses rest. “I have work to get back to, I can’t just sit here and watch you try to repair the house just because you’re sentimental.”

Anna bristles at that. “I’m not sentimental,” she protests, though that’s not entirely the truth. “I just want to sell the house for more, but to get more you have to put in some to begin with.”

“Put in what exactly?” Elsa asks, her eyes hard as she stares her down. “Do you have the money to buy off my half and then fix this all by yourself? Cause I’m not putting a fucking dollar in this.”

Anna wants to retort something, but– Elsa’s right. She doesn’t have the money to buy off her half, even if she priced it accordingly to the state of the house. She doesn’t have the money to fix it after that. She probably doesn’t even have the money to cover half of the fixes if Elsa actually wanted to do it with her.

So she just shuts her mouth and picks up her bag.

“Where are you going?” Elsa asks, confused.

“I’m gonna spend the night here,” she answers, already on the way up the stairs. “If you wanna sell it off to the township to have it destroyed, I at least want to spend one last night in mom and dad’s bedroom.”

They left a bed behind, she noticed when she was there, and Anna has some warm clothes with her. She shouldn’t be that cold.

“You can take the car, just come pick me up in the morning.”

Last she sees of her, Elsa is rolling her eyes and muttering something under her breath.

When Elsa pulls up in the driveway the next morning, Anna is cold to the bone and ready to leave the house behind forever.

“I made some calculations,” Elsa says instead of greeting her. “And some calls. We should be able to fix the walls and the grid, maybe the gas pipes if necessary in the kitchen and whatever needs to be done with the floor in the bedroom within about ten grand,” she continues, putting her smartphone up for Anna to see a complicated, color coded Excel sheet. “I’m willing to put down seven if you can cover the rest.”

It’s almost a thinly veiled insult, but not one Anna can really refute or complain about when it’s presented like this.

“What changed your mind?” she asks instead.

Elsa shrugs. “I want to sell the house for more, too.”

Over the next three weeks, Anna visits the house regularly from where she stays in a hotel (that Elsa found for her) just outside Arendelle; they more or less employ Mr Bjorgmann, or Kristoff as he asked her to call him, to coordinate all the repairs between the two floors. He ends up doing much more than that, from offering to fix the electrics himself (‘I’m a certified electrician,’ he says, though Anna’s afraid he wouldn’t be able to actually show her the certificate if she asked for it, but he still does a damn good job at it) to finding them the best teams to do the rest for the lowest price.

Not that it matters much. Elsa, who’s back home for work, calls her every now and then to make sure she doesn’t need to send her more money. With every call like that, Anna grows more accustomed to talking to her again and more resentful of the whole situation.

She does put in whatever money she can scramble to get, feeling too stupid to ask Elsa (who already offered to pay for her hotel stay when Anna said she’s just gonna stay at the house for ‘easier access’) for any more help. After all, they are repairing the house for profit, and it’s going to equally profit both of the theoretical halves of the house they own–in other words, their 70-30 deal will turn to 50-50 profit, and that in itself makes Anna feel like a parasite.

But when one’s a writer, and a writer that hasn’t managed to put out anything new in three years at that, there’s not really much room to complain when it comes to money.

When Elsa finally arrives to visit again, a little under two months into the renovations, her suitcase is a little bigger and she’s carrying a big, heavy laptop bag.

“I’m gonna work remotely,” she says when Anna looks at it questioningly, making her blush for being caught staring. “I know you’ve sent me pics when I asked you, but I do want to see that I’m getting my money’s worth from the repairs.”

The drive is equally as awkward as the last time, even if this time Anna doesn’t ask about her recently (? she’s still not sure about when exactly it happened) divorced ex-wife.

“It’s getting prettier in the area,” Elsa observes, surprising Anna halfway into their journey as she points to a nearby blooming apple tree. “It’s going to look nice on the photos when we take them.”

Anna nods and hums absent-mindedly.

It’s already dark out when they arrive, mostly due to the four-hour delay of Elsa’s plane, and she can already prove Elsa’s ‘getting her money’s worth’ simply by turning on the light.

“The wall upstairs is completely mended, too,” she says, heading for the stairs while Elsa lingers in the kitchen, looking at the freshly plastered outside wall. “We need to repaint them, obviously, but at least we don’t need to share the space with the squirrels anymore.”

Anna catches herself in what she’s saying–though Elsa doesn’t seem to notice, thank God–after it’s already left her mouth, the urge to slap herself so strong she almost does it right in front of her already not-exactly-impressed-with-her sister.

It’s something she’s been catching herself thinking about for close to two weeks now; as she’s been watching the teams work on rebuilding the walls and the floor, then tearing off the tiles in the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen to put down new, uncracked ones (‘It’s not that much of a deal, and will help the house sell,’ Elsa said over the phone), tidy up some of the inside walls that weren’t in the best of shapes and some hardwood flooring that needed leveling, she… felt at home.

What used to be the place where they grew up, where they had no worries, where she and Elsa were best friends and not just people who occasionally managed to exchange more than a few words about their lives over the phone is now slowly peeking through the guise of a moldy, broken down abandoned house.

“They also fixed up the master bedroom,” she says, drowning out the buzz of her thoughts as Elsa’s humming some approval about their old, now tree-free room. “Sorry I didn’t wait for you and just kind of decided it on my own– there wasn’t a lot to do there anyway, and I figured that people tend to look at the master bedroom the most when considering a house, so…”

She trails off, and doesn’t mention that she might have spent a few nights in that bedroom herself over the last week.

“What about the tree?”

Elsa’s question cuts through the silence like an ax as they’re sitting in the kitchen, eating some Chinese food that, surprisingly, delivers to the area.

“What do you mean?” Anna answers with a question, not exactly sure what information Elsa is looking for. “The half that was in the house is in the shed outside, Kristoff cut it up in pieces that can be used as firewood.”

Elsa nods, one of her eyebrows raised in that particular way it always does when she thinks something’s a decent idea. “I meant the actual tree,” she clarifies, pointing to the kitchen window. “The part that’s still rooted in the ground.”

“Oh,” Anna answers, and Elsa’s brows immediately furrow at her sadder tone. “Well, that seems to be dying. Kristoff said he doesn’t think anything could be done to save it.”

“That Kristoff really seems to know everything, huh?”

Anna stops with her chopsticks halfway to her face, completely taken aback by the jealousy in her voice. “Is that a problem?”

Elsa huffs. “I just don’t know if I trust him,” she says, and that tinge of jealousy is still there, proving to Anna that she did not just imagine it. “You know what they say about jacks of all trades.”

“He’s a decent guy,” Anna protests, now completely setting her utensils down by the box. “He’s carried this project pretty much on his back.”

Elsa doesn’t answer anything to that, but her expression is still very unamused.

“I’m going to stay here tonight,” she announces as Anna is throwing out the boxes and cans. “I didn’t have the time to arrange for a hotel, and I don’t think they’re gonna have any vacancies left for me at this hour.”

Anna’s about to argue–the hotel has maybe seven rotating guests and some incidental travelers that are stopping there just for one night on the way to something more interesting than Arendelle, and if they really don’t have anything left her room has two beds in it–before realization hits her like a tree through the wall.

Elsa wants to stay at the house. She just doesn’t know how to admit it, so she hides behind a stupid excuse.

“Do you want me to stay with you?”

It’s out in the air before she manages to stop herself–why, why on Earth would she ask this when things were going somewhat smoothly?–and Anna is almost sure she just fucked everything up, when Elsa surprises her again.

“Doesn’t matter to me either way.”

What could be potentially taken as offensive by some people in this case makes Anna’s heart somersault in elation. Doesn’t matter to me either way is Elsa not telling her she needs to stay away. Doesn’t matter to me either way is Elsa not trying to erase her from her life. Doesn’t matter to me either way is them both once again alone in this house.

Without discussing it further, she lets Elsa stay in the master bedroom while she takes the couch in the living room.

It’s a week since Elsa arrived, and they’ve stayed at the house together the entire time.

“What about this wallpaper?” Elsa asks, turning her laptop towards Anna to show her a vivid, floral pattern on a deep emerald background.

Anna grimaces. “It’s a little dark,” she points out, mostly referring to the background. “Besides, I’m not sure how I feel about wallpapers in general. Maybe as an accent wall.”

Elsa takes the laptop back and looks at the pattern critically. “It’s not that dark,” she argues, then sighs. “But I guess you’re right. Maybe if the windows were bigger.”

They’ve so far chosen paint for most of the rooms downstairs, all of them now upgraded with a refreshed plaster and waiting for the dark wood half-siding they ordered a few days ago, but it’s really the bedrooms that are proving the most difficult. Elsa’s spending a good chunk of her days trying to visualize the rooms in some app she found online, and each time Anna looks over her shoulder there’s more details in them.

First it was just the walls. Then some rugs, to match the walls. Then curtains, obviously, to match the rugs. Then some basic furniture, because if they’re getting curtains they might as well sell fully-furnished.

Right now she’s at the stage of adding wall decorations and potted plants, and Anna’s heart is smiling on the inside.

Because the more details Elsa puts in her app, the more she’s excited about the house. Her initial stay of one week has already been prolonged to two weeks (‘Really, I feel like I could do my job remotely all the time and nobody would even notice I’m not there,’ she said, as if she wasn’t the CFO), and the more she’s doing things like this the more Anna feels like they could go back to normal.

She doesn’t say it out loud, of course. She keeps all of these observations to herself, because if she were to point anything out, she risks Elsa noticing what she’s doing before it’s too late and receding back into her shell.

The shell of avoiding her own sister like the plague for almost twenty years.

Anna wipes the sweat off her brow, careful to not smear any more paint on her face. Especially considering they’re doing the dining room now, where Elsa decided to go with a vivid, almost Granny Smith Apple green, which already looks ridiculous on her cheek when contrasted with her hair.

“You’re doing a great job,” Kristoff says, admiring the wall Anna’s been working on. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say a professional painter did this.”

“Gee, thanks,” she says, punching his biceps and laughing at his obviously fake ‘ow.’ “Do you have to get a certificate in this, or can you just bullshit your way through?”

They’ve become somewhat good friends over the few months Kristoff had spent helping them renovate the house. Kristoff’s various certificates–or lack thereof–have become sort of an inside joke between them, especially after Anna assured him she didn’t mind (and wasn’t mad about his ‘certified electrician’ lie, considering he did a great job with it anyway), to the point where she’d sometimes ask him if he had a certificate for the weirdest things (‘do you have a certificate to wear these shoes,’ she’d ask whenever he showed up in a pair of Crocs).

“Actually, yeah,” he answers, scratching his chin. “You could make it without, but it’s definitely much easier for business to have one.”

She laughs and turns away, back to her wall. “Let me just finish this one and then we can have a lunch break,” she says, her stomach immediately rumbling in response. “I’m kinda starving here.”

He hums behind her, picking his paint roller up from the floor. “On that note, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he’s suddenly sounding more nervous–enough to make Anna stop and look around at him, worried. He notices her gaze and quickly looks away, flushed. “Do you, ah– do you maybe wanna go grab a bite to eat later?”

Anna blinks in confusion. “I literally just suggested that,” she says, slowly. “Just let me finish the wall so the paint layer is even.”

“No, I meant– I meant like, later-later.” He’s now full-on red in the face. “Like, evening-later.”

“Oh, sorry,” she says quickly, suddenly feeling real bad, because he’s never asked her to hang out with him before. “I kinda have this whole ‘stay here and cook’ thing planned with Elsa…”

She hopes he can’t tell how fucking excited she is for that, because it was Elsa’s idea–the first time she’s actually suggested they do something like this together.

“Ah,” he answers, dropping his gaze to the floor. “What about tomorrow?”

“We’re seeing a lawyer in the afternoon.”

“Day after tomorrow then?”

“I think I’m free, but what do–”

“I’m asking you out on a date, Anna.”

Her mouth still hangs open mid-sentence when he drops that. Of course. She’s a fucking idiot who ignored all the signs–very much out in the open signs at that, now that she thinks about it–just because she’s–

“I’m sorry, Kris,” she says softly. He’s a great guy, not just as a help in renovations but altogether as well, and the last thing she wants is to break his heart. “I’m not– I don’t really– It’s complicated.”

His face falls. “Do you have someone? Sorry, I should have ask–”

“No, it’s not like that!” she says hurriedly, maybe a tad too hurriedly. “I mean, I’m kind of into someone, but–” she stops and takes a deep breath. Unlike most men she’s met in her life, Kristoff waits patiently for her to continue. “I’m gay, Kris.”

“Oh.” He looks back up at her, his eyes wide. “Oh.” He repeats, literally slapping his forehead. “I’m so dumb.”

Anna gets over to him in a flash to hold his forearm as he’s about to aim for another strike to his own forehead. “You’re not dumb, I just–”

“No, I mean– I mean, when I first saw you I kinda got a vibe, but then I thought that you just wear flannels so much because you don’t wanna ruin your good clothes while renovating–”

She’s about to protest and defend her fashion style, but they get interrupted by the sound of the front door opening.

“I made such a fool out of myself,” he groans, quieter, obviously not wanting Elsa to hear him. “I– I have to go.” He starts heading for the archway leading out the dining room, but he stops before he reaches it. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He says it with a smile–a shy, embarrassed one, but a smile–and she knows they’re okay, he just needs to work some things out. He leaves in a hurry, muttering something about ‘total imbecile’ to himself.

Not two minutes later she hears the front door close again, and not one minute after that Elsa pokes her head into the room.

“Did Kristoff just run away?” she asks, and when Anna nods, she expands the question. “What did you do to him?”

Anna sighs, dropping her still wet paint roller down on the foil-covered floor. “I turned him down.”

Elsa just says a quiet ‘oh’, but Anna can almost swear she sees a glimpse of a smile on her face before her head disappears behind the wall again.

For their cook-together dinner, Elsa decided to get some fresh tiger shrimps from the market, complete with artichoke hearts, some artisan pasta and all the ingredients necessary for bechamel sauce.

“Did you get a promotion or something?” Anna asks as they’re finishing up in the kitchen, looking at the fancy plates Elsa is preparing.

She didn’t even know Elsa was that good of a cook. The whole dinner looks celebratory and expensive, worthy of a freaking Michelin star restaurant, and the only thing Anna really had to do was cook the pasta (and she almost messed that up, too.)

“No,” Elsa says around a bright smile. “I just wanted a nice dinner with my sister. Is that not allowed?”

She’s teasing, but Anna’s heart jumps. Dinner with my sister. It wouldn’t strike any normal (non-Anna) person as anything special, but Elsa’s been almost fully gone from her life for years now. To have dinner with my sister is something Anna used to dream about.

“It is,” she says, shooting her an equally bright smile back, as she watches Elsa finish up the plates.

One other skill she didn’t know Elsa had - she pairs her wine perfectly with a meal.

They’re sitting in the freshly repainted, but otherwise barren living room on the new couch Elsa had delivered less than a week ago, slowly nursing their dry red out of brand new crystal. Elsa’s legs are folded under her, her arm slung nonchalantly over the back of the couch as she rolls the stem of the glass between her fingers.

“To the house,” she says suddenly, raising the glass higher in a small, private toast. “It’s really coming along nicely.”

Anna’s glass meets her to clink, as Anna herself turns around to face her.

“It really does,” she confirms, her face flushed from the wine and emotions. “I’m really starting to love it here.”

Elsa hums appreciatively, taking a longer sip of her wine, before she looks back at her face. “You still have some paint on your cheek,” she points out.

Then, to Anna’s absolute shock, she brings a hand up to stroke– no, caress her cheek right where she tried to scrub the paint off.

“You’re still so clumsy sometimes,” she says softly, and Anna isn’t sure if she’s talking about just the paint or something else. She is, in fact, quite an accident prone person, as she’s sure Elsa noticed over the past few weeks when Anna was actively involved in the renovation process. “I’m kinda glad it’s looking like it’s gonna be done soon and we can sell.” She lets out a huff of laughter, closing her eyes, unable to notice Anna’s face falling into a scowl. “I don’t want you to… I don’t know, fall off a ladder and break all your bones– are you okay?”

Her eyes are finally open again and she immediately spots Anna’s expression.

“Yeah,” Anna says, though she can’t even keep the hurt and anger from her voice. “I just– you still want to sell it?”

Elsa blinks, then takes her hand away from Anna’s face. “That was the plan all along,” she states, a strikingly calm contrast to Anna’s heated voice.

“I thought you might have–” Anna bites her tongue. Her own hand starts to shake, and she puts her wine glass down on the floor before she spills any on the couch. “I thought that maybe you had some second thoughts.”

“I know you’ve put a lot of work into this, but it was all supposed to be for raising the property value.”

“Well, yes, but–” Anna chokes on her words, wine-tipsy, not even sure what exactly she wants to say. “I-I thought you might have wanted to move here…”

With me, she doesn’t add.

Elsa huffs again, but this time it’s annoyance, not laughter. “Why would I? I don’t need a house, Anna,” she deadpans. “I have a perfectly good apartment waiting for me back home.”

Back home. Something Anna was never, ever, able to truly say–not after leaving this house seventeen years ago. “This is home,” she whines, her throat all choked up with emotion. Elsa’s about to protest, but she doesn’t let her speak just yet. “It was home years ago and it can be now, too, Elsa, just please–”

Elsa’s dam finally breaks and her face contorts in anger. “You know damn well why it can’t,” she almost growls this out, like a scared, caged animal. “Not for me. I don’t know if your memory is just all fucked up or there’s something else wrong with you, but if you want to live here so much, feel free to buy my half out.”

She’s watching her, eyes as harsh as her words that still hang and echo in the empty room, piercing Anna’s time every time they come back around.

“Elsa, I–”

It’s so similar. Way too similar to a night so long ago, but one she remembers so clearly, despite what Elsa might think of her memory right now. The way Elsa is looking at her now–the disdain, the fury, the pain in her eyes all so reminiscent of that shocked expression still etched in her memory like a still image left on for too long on a TV screen.

Elsa’s lips tremble now just as they did then, too. “This was all a mistake,” she says, her voice now shifting to an almost distressed tone as she sets the wine glass down on the floor next to the couch. She doesn’t get up right away, she doesn’t run out of the room–she’s grown, and so has Anna, even if Elsa refuses to see it now. “We should have just sold the house right off the bat, it– it’s poisoned something in you again and you–”

She stops and gives her a startled, borderline terrified look when Anna bursts out into laughter. “It’s not the fucking house, Elsa,” she says, and the pure power in her voice surprises even herself. “I want to stay here just because I grew up here and I like the place, but it’s not poisoning my mind or whatever it is you meant to say.”

For once this evening, Elsa doesn’t have anything to say as she just watches Anna apprehensively, trying to gauge her next move.

“I just never stopped.”

That makes her eyes widen; Anna can tell she knows exactly what she means, what those four simple, seemingly harmless words truly convey.

And she does mean it.

She never stopped loving her.

She never stopped yearning for her.

She never stopped, never managed to stop the fucking mess of feelings–not the distance, not the guilt, not even the cut down on contact for years helped her heart heal.

And right now she’s just thrown out any chance of Elsa changing her decision. There was no way she’d move into the house with her after what she’d just heard her say.

She sees Elsa shift up from the couch and she moves to reach out for her, catch her before she has a chance to run just like she did back then, hold her down by force if she has to, at least long enough to make her listen to Anna attempt to explain her way out of this clusterfuck–

But Elsa is not running away. Her weight is suddenly in Anna’s lap, and her hands are gripping both sides of her lower jaw, the tips of her manicured nails scratching at the bottom of Anna’s earlobes as she drags her face up, her lips catching Anna’s hungrily, the taste of the wine still lingering on her tongue when it enters Anna’s mouth like an unstoppable force.

Anna’s mind short circuits; all of her thoughts now turn to gibberish, her hands moving up on their own to rest on Elsa’s hips to keep her down, keep her steady, keep her from leaving her in this exact room again.

Elsa moans into her mouth when she feels one of Anna’s hand grip up higher, snake around her waist to rest on her back and pull her closer, the knees on either side of Anna’s hips now hitting the back of the new couch with no way forward but deeper into Anna until they are melded into something that can never be broken apart again.

It’s a beautiful, fairy-tale-like moment that’s going to go into the collection of memories to obsess over once it’s gone–because it will be gone soon. Anna did grow up, and she understands more now.

It doesn’t even surprise her that much when she feels Elsa’s cheeks wet with tears.

When Elsa finally pulls away, her eyes are filled with sadness and guilt, the exact combination Anna expected to see. “I’m sorry,” she says, again, like seventeen years ago, only her tone is just… defeated, not as frightened as then. She looks down at her–also not like then, when it was Anna on top of her–with an apologetic smile, as if she knows exactly what’s going through Anna’s mind now. “I– I think you should have the house. I’m just gonna sign my half over to you, as a gift,” she doesn’t say parting gift, but it’s well implied there. “I’ll be gone by morning.”

And with that simple, last statement, she gets up–slowly, and walks out of the room slowly too, not turning around to give her one last look, not running out of the house in fear of someone finding out what they’ve just done. They’re alone now. They’re much older now.

But Elsa is gone, again, and Anna can’t do anything but watch her climb upstairs to the master bedroom, where she’s going to spend one final night before she’s out of her life–and this time, surely, for good.

It’s only when she hears her phone buzz from the armrest and looks at it to see a message from Kristoff that it all hits her at once.

‘Hey. Sorry for earlier. Hope you had a good time with your sister tonight.’

She hides her face in her hands as the tears begin to spill out.

Just as she said, Elsa is gone by the time Anna wakes up.

The house that she used to love so much as a child and grew to love again over the past few weeks now really feels like a curse. Poison, as Elsa put it. Like something infecting her mind, putting little bits of toxic waste in her brain to see how much she can take before she finally breaks down.

Anna is thirty-six. She’s spent well over half of her life now in love with her sister, and the past fifteen years longing for her while scared to contact her in any way–because if she did, Elsa might just have told her the words she never actually did.

Stay away from me.

I hate you.

You’re nothing to me.

She’d imagined hearing that numerous times, trying to prepare for the inevitable.

To know now that she could have her back, could have a normal, somewhat maybe even close relationship with her as a sister, could see her for Christmas, visit her on her birthday, call her when she needs to talk if she didn’t go and ruin it all again with her stupid, loose tongue–that’s just a low blow she’s not sure she’s going to recover from.

To know that Elsa apparently cares for her enough to give up her part of the inheritance to her, that feels like a stab to the side.

And to know that Elsa might have felt at least similar, if not exactly the same, as her desperate kiss whispered against Anna’s lips–that’s a deep, violent cut straight through her heart.

She calls Kristoff the next morning and tells him she’s sick.

She needs some time alone.

It’s a few weeks later when the summer weather starts visiting the area more consistently that Anna is putting in some finishing touches to the paint-job outside.

The moldy siding and broken porch were the last things remaining to be fixed; Kristoff told her it would be best to wait for a few sunny days in a row before they take off the wood to put in some new boards, and she didn’t fight him on it. She didn’t fight anyone on anything, just going along with whatever people decided because she was clearly not capable of making sound decisions.

Kristoff seemed to notice something was off–he offhandedly asked her where Elsa went off to so suddenly, and she kinda just grumbled in response–but he didn’t pry, and she was really glad for that bit of privacy.

She’s putting on a last layer of fresh, white paint on the renovated railing on the porch when she realizes that for the first time in weeks she is truly alone. No Kristoff, no builders, no plumbers.

No Elsa.

She notices the tear drop ball up on the water and moisture resistant paint before she actually feels her eyes get wet.

It’s beautiful.

A labor of love if she’s ever seen one; the house looks exactly like she remembers from her childhood, if much more vibrant now with the fresh layer of paint.

She’s sitting in the backyard with some tea, listening to the droning of the cicadas in the tall grass behind her and just admiring the work. She’s spent the past few weeks so focused on just getting it done that she’s never stopped to actually appreciate what the house is now.

It’s home again.

Lonely, solitary home.

The sun is setting, the light hitting the new windows of their old room, making them shine like gold. It’s summer now, but the evening breeze can still be quite chilly; Anna wraps herself tighter in the blanket, then curls up more in her seat.

The seat she had to fight Kristoff over when he tried to remove it, because ‘why would you need a piece of garbage like this.’

“He was always so proud of this bench.”

Elsa’s voice catches her off-guard; she almost spills the tea all over herself in panic before she turns around frantically to check if she’s really there.

She is. She must have come around the house from the side Anna couldn’t see from where she was sitting, and she probably rented one of those hybrids again so she couldn’t hear her pull up the driveway.

She catches a glimpse of Anna’s face, and her own turns apologetic. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” she says as she takes a seat next to her, hissing in surprise when her fingers touch the cold metal, before she leans back and relaxes, a small smile on her face again. “Remember how mom would whine at him as he worked on it?”

Anna’s still shocked–Elsa is here–but she nods.

“‘Why can’t you just throw it out’,” Elsa quotes, a perfect impression of their mother’s irritated voice. “‘It’s just going to rust up in there!’”

That finally makes Anna crack a smile, as she responds in the lowest voice she can muster, “‘It’s a damn solid bathtub, it’s gonna be fine.’”

They both laugh softly as Anna puts her cup of tea down in the grass then runs her hand along the cut, welded rim of the leaky bathtub their father stubbornly turned into an outside seat. The white enamel is crumbling off in some places, the tiniest hint of rust poking out along the edge–like their mother predicted, though it did last out here for a good thirty or so years.

Anna’s laughter comes to a halt when Elsa’s fingers reach for her own. She looks up at her, unsure of what her sister is up to anymore.

“I’m sorry,” she says simply, her voice sad, but warm. No trace of anger or disgust for Anna. “I ran away again.”

Anna hums and nods. “You were probably right to.” She looks down at their hands–still touching, but not locked together. “I– I think I’m just broken beyond repair.”

Elsa’s sharp intake of breath makes her look back up. “Don’t say that.” Her voice is so quiet Anna can barely even hear her over the cicadas. “Nothing is ever beyond repair.” She points with her chin to the back of the house, where the freshly built-in wall doesn’t even stand out against the rest. “And it’s not you that’s broken, it’s us.”

Anna raises her brows in question.

“I want to repair us.”

She finally intertwines their hands, and Anna lets herself hope she understands. She then leans in to place the softest, most tender kiss on Anna’s lips, and it’s actually so much better than she hoped.

She hoped to just get her sister back. She never even imagined Elsa could want to–

“I guess I’m poisoned too,” she whispers against her lips as she’s pulling away.

She doesn’t outright use the Big Words, but Anna knows what she means by that. And it’s enough. It’s enough for her to reach out and catch her older sister, the sister she’s almost lost again, by the collar and pull her into herself as she’s both yearned and feared to do for so many years.

When they pull away this time, Elsa’s face is flushed and her hair is pulled out of her loose bun where Anna sank her needy fingers against her scalp, and she looks breathtakingly beautiful against the setting sun.

“Move in with me,” Anna says before she can stop herself, before Elsa can shrink back into her shell, before this all turns out to be a dream or some other cliché catch.

Elsa smiles. “I already brought all of my things.”

They’re standing in front of the broken tree that almost took down their family home.

��That’s what you wanted me to see?” Anna asks, grinning at her older-sister-turned-lover. The summer is now in full swing, and Anna can’t remember a time in her life when she’d ever felt happier than the past two weeks of waking up in the master bedroom with Elsa by her side. “The dead tree?”

Elsa’s quiet for a moment, before she says, “do you remember we planted this tree together?”

Anna’s smile falls a little, and she shakes her head.

“You were probably too young,” Elsa muses. “I was barely six then, so I think that makes you roughly three… father came in one afternoon with a sapling that was maybe five inches big.” She smiles at the memory and closes her eyes as she takes a deep breath through her nose and Anna is so absolutely in love with her. “He wanted to plant it a little further away in the yard, but you were adamant that you wanted to be able to see it from our room.”

Anna laughs, imagining herself standing there with her hands on her hips and all the resolution a three year old can muster.

Elsa opens her eyes again, and this time there’s some lingering sadness in them.

“That’s why you were so worried about the tree,” Anna suddenly realizes, out loud. Then another thought hits her like a freight train. “And I guess it’s my fault it fell into the house.”

“It’s not your fault.” Elsa shakes her head. “That was just an unfortunate accident. But yes,” she stops and reaches out to touch the dry bark peeling off from the broken trunk. “I was really worried about this one. It meant a lot to me.”

Anna reaches out herself, but her hand finds the small of Elsa’s back. “I’m really sorry,” she says quietly, and when Elsa doesn’t protest, she pulls her closer to herself in a half embrace. “I feel stupid I didn’t remember that.”

Elsa nuzzles into her shoulder. “You were three,” she murmurs, then plants a tiny kiss on top of Anna’s freckled skin. “But that’s not all I wanted to show you.”

Anna looks down at her, puzzled, before Elsa points out to one of the higher branches.

There, just barely visible, sits a proud, green bud.

“Nothing is ever beyond repair,” Elsa repeats her own words and lets Anna pull her in for a kiss.

#elsanna #april 2022 contest #prompt: home #submission #cw: angst

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bibliocratic · 4 years

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recovery

non-Apocalypse AU, post S4, jonmartin, hurt/comfort

(please check the tags for warnings regarding content dealing with mental health)

It was easier, Martin thinks sometimes, when he could blame it on the Lonely.

“The Lonely's really got you, hasn't it?”

“You know, I think it always did,” he'd said. It hadn't been a lie, though many things had been, during that time. It hadn't been a lie, and that meant a longevity to the roots of this twisting draining vine tunnelled deep into him; that meant even when Jon pulled its stalks out, vicious and blood-soaked, the weeds of it returned like moon-pulled tide.

It's not the Lonely that grips him these days. There's no fog now, not in that eldritch-touched lessening of himself, sacrificial and closeted, something he could draw power from in his own manipulated way. There's no fog now, but Martin learned its lessons and tricks from earlier more-mundane masters of his will; it's not fog, nor mist, nor a blanching in-gasp of sea air. But it might as well be for how little it differs.

Martin shifts. His body curdling in the heat of the duvet. He's been staring out for a while, one eye blocked by his pillow. He doesn't see the watery promise of a curved horizon past the shoreline. He sees his bedside table, his reading glasses, his untouched book, the glass of water he sipped at to rid his mouth of a cracking, parched dryness, the patch of colour he hasn't quite painted right on the bedroom wall.

No fog, but his head is over-heavy like he's inhaled the muffling waves of it and it's risen in the pores of him like claggy summer air; no fog but his thoughts are dull, scattered, encased in ice too slick for his grasping hands to clutch to, and these things were never just the Lonely, he knows, not in the easy way he wished them to be.

He took the white oval tablet earlier. Jon made tea and gave Martin a kiss over his ear when he'd swallowed a mouthful and the little pill both, asked him if he wanted breakfast. Martin had said not now, that he'd have something later, that he'd get up in a bit, that he was just tired this morning, and it didn't matter if he'd been lying or not because Jon had nodded and kissed him again, and said 'ok', left him with a squeeze to his arm to fall back asleep again.

Martin hasn't gone back to sleep. He's been lying here, his own body insurmountable, watching the fabric of the curtains in the other corner of the room lighten, the thickening knife-slice of illumination slivering the duvet, bold in the dim pall of the room. It's not tiredness in the same way, he knows. He's lived this enough to know that his tired is not Jon's tired, that these words don't translate well but he's no better language to express himself. It's a marrow-thick, gnawed-bone sensation, like being buried in a shallow grave, still able to feel the cruel potential of daylight near above. A flatness to his voice, a weight to the edge of his smile, to the holding up his head. Steel-wire brain and a dimming of him like the light in the room.

He knows one tablet isn't going to pull back the curtains for him. Not today's, yesterday's, the day before's, the day before's. They were trying a new prescription, one that doesn't make Martin feel bloated and thick-mouthed, doesn't give him a tremor in his hands. Jon had sat outside the GP's office as Martin and the doctor had talked, and Martin knows exactly what a picture he would have made; swinging his legs and scuffing his shoes, picking at his nails and fiddling with his engagement ring as he'd waited gracelessly.

He'd nudged a hand against the back of Martin's as they went to go and pick up the prescription. Had diligently filled in the silences when he knew Martin couldn't. When Martin had slid their hands together, the crows feet round Jon's eyes crinkled, and he'd squeezed back, and there hadn't been any more words that would have managed right then.

These things take time. To work, to settle, to stop warring with his own unbalanced biology.

It'll take time for Martin to feel like letting the day in.

There's a knock on the door. A steady, deliberately quiet 'tap-tap-tap'.

Martin blinks. Responds in a slowed-down, underwater “yeah?”

Jon comes in. He's showered, dressed like he's going to work even though it's a Saturday. Peeking just under Jon's collar, Martin can see the scarred testament of the Hunt's knife over his throat. Knows the placing of every hurt and sacrifice of skin on the altar of Elias' former Archivist.

Martin's body is markless. He has a paper-cut-slight scar from mishandling a knife trying to cut pizza in his late teens, another one on his upper arm, a ghost of a thing, a meaningless burn from catching himself on the grill of an oven. Senseless, weightless wounds. He has no scars to prove how life has hurt him but they pain him in the same way Jon's skin takes up a phantom itch, they make him fumble in the same way as Jon's burn-strapped palm. They are no less for being invisible.

“How – ?” Jon starts, then frowns, then bites his lip, and Martin's heart, if it could muster anything, would swell at how hard he is trying. “Any better today?”

Martin shakes his head. He's learned, a clawed, dragged-up, hard laboured lesson, that it's ok to do that. That Jon doesn't expect his happiness when it's performative, that Jon won't think any less of him when he has nothing but empty palms to offer.

“Would you – ?” Jon says carefully, creeping further into the room. He's wearing Martin's slippers. Too big for him, slapping a little as he walks, the colours too kitsch for his more sedate tastes. “You don't need to get up, if you can't right now. Would you – would you like company? We don't have to talk.”

It takes a while for the words to dip below cloud clover, under fog bank, beneath the layer of shrouding mist.

Martin isn't sure what he wants. But he thinks he doesn't want to be alone.

“Stay?” he mumbles. Still staring at the poorly painted patch on the wall.

“'Course,” Jon replies. He makes his way over, round to the other side of the bed. There's a heavy flopping sound of Jon kicking off his slippers. The dip and grunt of the bedframe, the whine of springs, the huff of the duvet.

Jon's shirt-covered arms around Martin's pyjama-ed stomach, his forehead rested between Martin's shoulders.

After a minute, Martin reaches up. Holds Jon's hand in his, against his chest, pressing it there. Feeling the heat of it. How easily it was offered.

Martin's not on his own, and in this way, this blanketing all-too-human fog is not like the Lonely. Jon found him like he promised. Keeps finding him however far out across the beach he goes.

That means something. That helps.

“We'll stay here, for a while,” Jon says against his back. Patiently as snowdrift. “Until it's a bit lighter outside. Take as long as you need.”

It's hard to hold onto thoughts at the moment. But Martin can hold onto that.

#tma #the magnus archives #jonmartin #cw mental health #cw depression #depiction of anti-depressants #cw depressive episode #discussion of the side-effects of medication #ask to tag #martin blackwood #jonathan sims

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sciencespies · 4 years

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Tribes Reintroduce Swift Fox to Northern Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation

https://sciencespies.com/history/tribes-reintroduce-swift-fox-to-northern-montanas-fort-belknap-reservation/

Tribes Reintroduce Swift Fox to Northern Montana’s Fort Belknap Reservation

Swift foxes have been absent from the shortgrass prairie of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in northern Montana for more than half a century. But last month, that changed when the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) Tribes of Fort Belknap reintroduced 27 swift foxes to the reservation, restoring a piece of the Great Plains ecosystem and a part of the tribes’ natural heritage.

For the tribes of Fort Belknap, restoring and maintaining their natural environment has been a priority for decades. The tribes reintroduced buffalo to the reservation’s 675,147 acres of prairie in the 1970s and the herd, centered around a 22,000-acre plot at Snake Butte, is now close to 800 strong. Fort Belknap also brought back black-footed ferrets via reintroductions in the 1990s and early 2000s.

But these reintroductions aren’t just about the environment, says Mike “Gopher” Fox, who is part of the Fort Belknap Tribal Council and a member of the Gros Ventre tribe.

“We don’t look at animals as just four legged or winged, we look at them as family,” says Fox. “For us it was like part of our family was missing all those years. Bringing the buffalo, the black-footed ferret and now the swift fox back, bringing those family members back home, connects us to our history with this land. It gives us a lot of pride as Natives.”

youtube

The swift fox weighs just around five pounds and is the smallest wild canine in North America. The animals occupy one main den and several sattelite dens year-round, which they sometimes annex from local prairie dog colonies. The foxes use these burrows and blistering speed—bursts of up to 40 miles-per-hour—to capture prey and escape their main predator, the coyote.

Swift foxes (Vulpes velox) once roamed the Great Plains from Canada all the way to Texas. But in the late 1800s, efforts to exterminate coyotes and wolves with poison and traps hammered the swift fox population, reducing its numbers by more than 90 percent. More recently, successful reintroductions in Canada and elsewhere in Montana beginning in the 1980s have helped these house cat-sized foxes reclaim around 40 percent of their traditional range.

A newly released swift fox races across the shortgrass prairie of the Fort Belknap Reservation in northern Montana. These tiny foxes are barely a foot tall and weigh between five and seven pounds. They depend on the short grasses of this type of prairie, without it they are unable to spot and escape predators like coyotes.

(Wes Overvold)

But these reintroductions to the northern part of the swift fox’s range remain fragile, with just over 1,000 animals living along the Montana-Canada border. These northern foxes are separated from the much larger core population to the south by a gap of roughly 200 miles.

This isolation makes the northern swift fox populations more vulnerable to being snuffed out by disease, drought and other disasters, says Hila Shamon, an ecologist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) who collaborated with the tribes of Fort Belknap on the reintroduction project. Bringing swift fox back to Fort Belknap will help fill in the gap between the northern and southern populations, which is essential for species’ genetic diversity and long-term recovery, according to Shamon.

After two years of planning and research, the reservation’s new foxes were captured in late August and early September in Wyoming’s Albany and Carbon counties. The effort was a collaborative between Fort Belknap, SCBI, Defenders of Wildlife and the World Wildlife Fund, which sent multiple teams to fan out across the prairie, setting metal box traps baited with bacon and sardines.

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Jessica Alexander, owner and biologist at Little Dog Wildlife Inc. who trapped foxes for the initiative, says they caught as many as eight foxes in a single night. For the members of the team who went out to check the traps in the pre-dawn hours, success sounded like the diminutive canine’s throaty growl emanating from inside the metal trap. After giving the foxes a health check and a GPS collar, Alexander and the other team members moved them to Fort Belknap. When the foxes arrived on the reservation, wildlife professionals put the wily critters inside carefully selected patches of fenced-in habitat that featured abandoned prairie dog burrows—a swift fox’s favorite refuge. This release technique, called a soft release, is meant to help the animals acclimate to their new environs and reduce the stress of relocation.

“A number of the foxes tunneled out of the enclosures, but for the ones that stuck around we would just open up the pen,” says Tim Vosburgh, Fort Belknap’s tribal wildlife biologist. “Nearly all the foxes I released didn’t sprint off the way you might expect. They mostly stayed put—they felt comfort in having a burrow nearby.”

The releases occurred between September 12 and 20 as part of a five-year recovery plan. In the second and third years of the project, foxes will come from Colorado and Kansas, respectively, before the cycle starts over again with Wyoming in year four. The goal of the project is to release between 40 and 50 foxes each year. More releases were planned for the fall of 2020 to reach the 40-animal threshold, but a recent surge in cases of COVID-19 on the reservation caused the plan to be postponed until next fall.

Restoring this icon of the prairie to its former glory could help add balance and resilience to the plains ecosystem. “They will help keep their prey species, like rabbits, prairie dogs, birds and even insects, in check,” says Kristy Bly, a conservation biologist with the World Wildlife Fund’s Northern Great Plains Program. “This is a piece of the patchwork quilt of the shortgrass prairie ecosystem being woven back in.”

A swift fox examines its new surroundings as it emerges from its soft release pen at Fort Belknap.

(Wes Overvold)

Significantly, the swift fox is also being woven back into the fabric of Fort Belknap’s Indigenous culture. Most members of the community don’t have any memories of swift fox on the reservation. “Something can be missing even if you don’t know it’s missing,” says George Horse Capture Junior, who serves as the reservation’s tourism director. “Around 100 years ago, we used to have ceremonies around this animal, but before this reintroduction, I’d never seen one on the reservation.”

Horse Capture Jr., whose father helped launch the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, says the ceremony was a celebratory milestone for young men coming into their own as responsible and caring members of the tribal community, adding that the Cheyenne are known to still practice a version of the ceremony.

“Does having these animals back mean one of the young people, maybe trying to figure out who we were prior to the invasion and dislocation, will go down to the Cheyenne and ask for that ceremony back?” Horse Capture Jr. wonders. “Will the swift fox be another part of the jigsaw puzzle to help piece ourselves back together?”

On September 14, the Fort Belknap community held a socially distanced pipe ceremony to commemorate the release of several foxes out onto the prairie. The ceremony included singing, prayers for the well-being of the animals and remarks from tribal leaders. The event was also attended by young people from the nearby tribal college and other community members who came to see the reintroduction.

Even as COVID-19 makes life almost unrecognizable by forcing isolation in a community defined by close relationships, Fox says the reintroduction ceremony was a breath of fresh air. “It was something to take your mind off of COVID and politics, just a relief that something good happened.”

The GPS collars on the released foxes will allow Vosburgh and others to monitor the population, and assess how many of the relocated foxes survive and reproduce. Vosburgh says a successful swift fox reintroduction at Fort Belknap could provide a model for other reservations such as the Crow or Northern Cheyenne in southern Montana, or even someday supply foxes for other relocation projects.

At the release event, Horse Capture Jr. stared at one of the swift foxes, which he admitted were “so cute you wanted to hug the fart out of them,” and thought about the lost ceremony they inspired.

“You helped my ancestors by giving them a ceremony, and now I’m seeing you come back,” says Horse Capture Jr. “Yes, it’s on a reservation, something mandatory we were both put on, but you connect our future to the past—before this was Fort Belknap, before this was Montana or the United States of America. . . Seeing this animal, and seeing the young people who came to watch its return to our land, it gives me hope.”

#History

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silvershoelaces · 4 years

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HPWU: A One Year Retrospective

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite turned one year old last month, and over the past year, it has improved a lot.

This review is looking at HPWU as a standalone game, devoid of the context of the book series, any views of its author, the movies and spinoffs, or any other media associated with the Harry Potter franchise. I have plenty of opinions thereof, but they are not directly relevant to my opinions of the game and how it functions.

The game at its core is not particularly inventive, and at the beginning of its first year, it mostly felt like a reskin of Pokemon Go. Spawns appear on the screen based on a map that a player traverses in real space, and players must tap on the spawns and then attempt to collect them in order to complete their collections. But instead of catching Pokemon to fill the Pokedex, players are rescuing “foundables” from “confoundables” to fill their stamp collections. Unlike Pokemon Go, multiple copies of each foundable must be collected in order to acquire the stamp, and once the entire page of stamps is collected, it can be prestiged in order to start the whole process over again.

Traversing the world, though, can prove to be complicated in anywhere but the most urban of areas. I live in an urban area, close to my local downtown, and at the game’s inception, I had to walk pretty far in order to complete my daily F2P chores each day. See, all of the POIs (points of interest) on the map are auto-generated from the data in Niantic’s original game, Ingress, and each POI is randomly assigned to one of three types. Inns, where players can acquire spell energy, are the most common. Next are greenhouses, where players can acquire potionmaking ingredients and occasionally, more spell energy. And the least common of these POIs is fortresses, which allow players to enter timed dungeons either by themselves or with other players to fight baddies and get prizes for their efforts.

The randomness of assigning each of these three types of POI is a real drag for many players. When the game was first released, I had two greenhouses and one fortress reasonably close to my home. This was enough to play the game, as greenhouses also occasionally awarded spell energy just like inns, except that the dailies explicitly required me to interact with two inns each day in order to get any premium currency. And as I mentioned, the assortment of POIs was completely random! Some players found themselves with nothing but fortresses around, while others had only inns and no fortresses for multiple kilometers. I considered myself relatively fortunate that I only had to walk 1 km to get to a nearby inn!

But unlike Pokemon Go, while the game encourages exploring, the core mechanics are not well suited to walking. In Go, a rare spawn can be easily subdued in 1-2 attempts, and curveballs are quick and easy to throw. In HPWU, the rarer the spawn, the more difficult it is to capture, and the more likely it is to run away. Foundables are captured by tracing patterns on the screen, and they all have a rather low acquisition rate, which means the rare ones are more likely to flee than to stay put unless the player pours consumable items into their capture. And even so, a player having to trace the same pattern multiple times just to capture a single spawn means that there is much more time standing in one place and less time walking. This is not an exercise game.

And this is one of the core flaws that has plagued Wizards Unite since its inception. It’s a clone of Pokemon Go, but every single mechanic that differs from Pokemon Go brings it further away from Go’s vision of an exercise game. Wizards Unite is an augmented reality exploration game, but it’s more about exploring a story and a setting than about racking up burned calories. This is especially apparent in limited-time events that encourage players to spend multiple hours standing still by the same POI, challenging hordes of enemies.

Monthly Community Day events aside, the regular cycle of in-game events was fun and engaging at first, but it quickly grew dull as players finished the main story quest and found the primary content of the game to be the fortnightly events. This is always a struggle for F2P games, especially games that rely on collections rather than PVP mechanics. The events weren’t even new content, merely recolored versions of content that already existed in the games, spawning much more frequently than other foundables and with featured spawn rates. What was fun in the game’s first few months had quickly become tedious, especially when the featured foundables had low catch rates.

Despite this stagnation, the game has changed over time, and many improvements have been made. The tonic for trace detection, a craftable potion that allows players to summon foundables to wherever they are, was long overdue when it was introduced into the game, allowing players who were less mobile to encounter more foundables when they had time to play. Inns and greenhouses were rebalanced so that inns in less urban areas dropped more spell energy, and greenhouses’ spell energy became guaranteed, rather than a 50% drop rate, which was an important improvement for areas with a low POI density and an active playerbase. Adventure Sync was added, which allows the game to track steps. (Unfortunately, this feature does not function well, as the steps counted toward daily tasks only begin after the player’s daily login bonus, and AdSync requires the game to have access to the player’s GPS while the game is closed, which drains phone battery in the background. Players who already have AdSync enabled for Pokemon Go will not notice much difference.)

The most significant overhaul, of course, came with the onset of coronavirus. In order to allow players to continue playing from their homes, the daily requirement to interact with inns was removed, and the Knight Bus, which allows players to remotely access fortress challenges and even engage with other players remotely, was implemented. I have found that the implementation of the Knight Bus almost single-handedly revived my interest in the game when I had grown completely bored of it, as it was a lot more fun to play fortress challenges with friends, which I had barely been able to do before, than to play the game solo.

But these improvements also serve to highlight the flaws in this game that have not been improved since its release. Trace completion always takes a particular shape, and its right-handed bias is clear the moment one attempts to complete a trace off-handed. The swirl of Ebublio, in particular, which takes an “e” shape, feels much more natural in the counter-clockwise direction in the right hand than in the left. Mirroring traces in a left-handed or “mirror” mode would be an easy fix!

SOS assignments have not been updated since day one of the game, and they have said “new assignments coming soon” since I completed them. In my first few months of playing, that was the real draw of the game for me, finishing the story quest and continuing on to the next page to see what would happen next. Each event feels like filler, while what would have made the most sense would have been to add four or five new pages of story quests every few months or so. And they (and all other events) aren’t replayable, so when WB/Niantic/whoever is responsible finally gets around to adding them, we’ll all have forgotten what happened. I already don’t remember.

Finally, the entire story as a whole, which is told as a haphazard, shoddy, zigzagging extra flavor to the repetitive, bland events, could have been told with just a week or even a day of gameplay in a regular game. “What is causing this calamity?” the characters ask. “I don’t know, but let’s patch the problem and investigate the cause later. Maybe the identity of the next problem that arises will give us a clue.” The game relies on half a dozen characters who show up just to give the player instructions, and it is somewhat over-reliant on the draw of the property to encourage players to invest themselves in the game. This is not good for a game that is mostly divorced from the primary story of its franchise. Assuming I knew nothing about Harry Potter or his universe before playing this game, and even if I do, there are way too many characters, and no documented point of reference for a player to look at for a reminder. The main characters seem to be Constance Pickering and Hermione Granger, with a splash of Harry Potter and a pinch of Ron Weasley thrown in. Their commentary doesn’t add much to my engagement because it’s the same mildly curious “I wonder what’s causing this” speculation we’ve had since the beginning.

Good stuff appears to be coming soon. The strongest aspect of the game is the ability to customize one’s character with an ability tree, which lends more variety to the way players can interact with the fortress challenges. An upcoming update is set to add this customization to the map screen, which may give this game the new life it so sorely needs.

All in all, judging Wizards Unite by its gameplay and content alone, and divorcing it from the source material, I’d rate it a C+. The game isn’t sure what it wants to be. It advertises itself as an exploration game, but punishes walking and rewards standing still. Adventure Sync once again rewards walking, this time when the game is closed, but the player is again punished, this time by severe battery drain. The game leans heavily on its story, but the story falls short due to poor updates and over-reliance on events to tease rather than deliver new story elements.

And of course, if we are to judge the game based primarily on its being an entry into the Harry Potter franchise, then we must begin to judge it on the merits and flaws of the franchise as a whole, which is a discussion for another day. If we don’t measure it against the franchise, there is much in the game that will be confusing to a player unfamiliar with the series. Who are these people, and why are we rescuing them? Why are we rescuing this one man some of the time, and attacking him other times? Four of the six pages of stamps feature characters from the franchise heavily. Players who aren’t invested in the franchise won’t care too much about them.

To someone who isn’t interested in the Harry Potter franchise, or to someone who was previously interested but has become disillusioned with the author of the series, I recommend you pass on this game. However, longtime fans who can still derive pleasure from the series, who separate the creator from the creation, or who view this and other derivative works as their own entries, created by teams rather than by the one who started it all, may enjoy this game.

#harry potter wizards unite #hpwu #mobile games #reviews #long post

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the-numbers-game · 5 years

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life update - long ramble

in less than three weeks, i will have finished my postgrad. it’s been a hecking fast course, and very intense at times. like most things im a bit gutted at myself for not trying as hard as i can. but i’ve done mostly okay considering my efforts. a range of grades. i was gutted last term that i got a c in my criminal litigation class just due to my nerves. all my content was perfect, i was just shit scared of public speaking. i bombed conveyancing cos that class was shit. but i did good in my other two and i’ve got good grades this semester so far. but i’ve also missed more classes, and i think i bombed my oral last week, and i’m bound to bomb my oral this week too.

idk how i will adjust to being not-in-education for the first time since i was 5 (3, if you include preschool). tbh, if i dont get a traineeship i may go back in 2021 or 2022 and do a masters. something on the constitution and human rights. maybe i’ll write about labour again.

i’m gonna chill for a month or so, working my 2.5 days at work whilst i still have my student loan rolling in (LOL, i get hardly anything cos i’m a pg and most of it is gone in the repayment of the personal loan i took out to do this course). then, i’ll increase my days to 4. i can live off 4 days, and it means i can still count this job as not being my life whilst i hunt for a traineeship, and failing one that starts pretty soon, another job. i’m fixed term, and i was lucky in i got a promotion, but the promotion was also for a fixed term position.

i hope my contract is extended, i put my face out there a lot at work primarily for that reason. i go on training courses and sit on committees, partly because i get away from my desk but also because it makes me look like i care about my job. i’ll mainly look at the public sector, as i feel like i belong there, i like flexible working and having an interesting caseload. and then law firms, as maybe if i get an admin job at a firm they will take pity on me and recruit me. failing those two, i will look charities/trade unions/politics before resulting to texting someone at my old work and begging for a job back. or maybe i’ll do agency work. fuck idk. i shouldn’t worry about it. i’ll get a job, right?

i do hear back this week regarding a traineeship. i’m not hopeful. i never am. but the interview did go really well. i didn’t stammer, i spoke freely, we spoke a lot about unions and the labour party and i felt like they liked me. they only interviewed 6% of applicants, so i’m lucky to get through and even if i don’t get it i know i’ll be less anxious about interviewing for traineeships again because i know it can go well(ish). if i do get it i’ll be over the moon, it’s not human rights and it’s not public law but they do a lot of union work and pro bono, and that’s good enough for me.

over the years, the way i experience anxiety has changed, dramatically. for a while, i had quite a good support network of ‘safe adults’. like my friends, past and present, and callum, have all been remarkable, but i think being able to relate to adults/people in authority when you’re not quite an adult yourself is good for validation. it didn’t last long and friendships and ‘drama’ started to consume my life. when i finally moved out of retail into an office environment, a lot of my anxiety, especially the physical stuff, shifted. i shit you not, i would physically throw up before many of my shifts in retail. so again, i thought i was coping as things weren’t as bad as they were back then. especially when it came to depression, as i actively removed myself from the main environmental factor causing me to have low moods.

i was dumb, cos of course i still had sadness and anxiety. it was just different, and because i channeled a lot of stress into uni, being new at my job, and being skint, it felt like there was always an excuse it wasnt anything about me,it was xyz and hey fuck look at least im not barthing and crying every morning yeah?

but 2019, whilst being a year of several incredible highs and generally being a good year was full of anxiety and due to me doing such an intense course with lots of orals, i realised, yes, i may not be taking as many panic attacks as i took when i was 18 but i felt as bad, fuck, even worse socially and internally, than i did back then. so i went to the doctors just before the new year, and got put on drugs.

that was a big step, as i always have a fear about the doctors but i have a really good gp surgery, my main doctor is a bit odd but really helpful. one of the other doctors did a whole law degree and the diploma before deciding it wasnt for her and she wanted to go to med school, so shes a really good person to turn to. the reception staff are kind (and you can book appointments online too, which i find really helpful). i think as well, i always viewed my anxiety as mild, and in a way, it is, but in a lot of ways, it is not. medication has certainly helped. i take antidepressants and beta blockers and whilst im not a super happy confident girl, i can cope a lot better. i’m no longer physically anxious (if you know me irl you know i am a shaky bastard) and my brain doesn’t run through the same STRESS as it did. so im grateful. i know meds dont work for everyone and that it takes people years to find something good for them, esp for people with a lot more complex mental health issues than me and my anxiety but i found ones that seem to be working, at least for now.

this year, i’ve tried to look after myself more. i’m saving for a house after opening a help to buy isa last year. i noticed my vision was being a bit blurry from time to time and that my eyes felt really strained when looking at the computer. so i booked an eye appointment and it turns out im short sighted. wearing glasses, as well as fulfilling 12 year old me’s fantasy, has massively helped my general fatigue. i’m gonna book in for physio at my gp, cos i have a dodgy shoulder, and due to general stress, both the dodgy one and the other are in a lot of pain constantly. i try and do a proper skincare routine in the mornings and at night. i’ve always loved skincare but usually just take what i’ve been gifted but i’ve had fun exploring brands and building a collection. i’ve asked for extensions at uni when i’ve needed them, and took time off when appropriate. i’ve been meeting friends more, and not patching messages.

right okay- i’m falling asleep now but this has been a ramble which probably makes no sense but if we are mutuals or whatever i appreciate you and thanks for dealing with my bs.

tldr - finishing uni soon, probs gonna be looking for a job, doing better in life and with my mh.

#personal #life update #mental health

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sonicranticoot · 5 years

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About CTR, Money, and Both Together

Yeah I know I took a break. Regular types of posts to resume shortly. I haven’t actually ranted in a very long time (”Why does he have rant in his name, and never actually rants?”) but today’s...uh, news about CTR is such a hot topic in the Crash community I want to talk about it.

That being yeah. Microtransactions. How quaint. It’s 2019 and Crash Bandicoot has microtransactions. Absolutely beautiful. Mostly being that, a lot of you already know this but I’m making it even more blatantly clear. They’re not ok, but it goes a bit deeper than “not ok.”

One of my main reasons for being annoyed with them is that simply put, they hurt my trust in the game. Pre-launch, it was confirmed in several interviews there would be no in-game purchases or any of the sort and all content would be available in the game itself. Now it’s always possible Beenox really did mean they didn’t want to put them in and never did and they were forced upon by Activision. Although wouldn’t be the first time it has happened in the industry (as one example, Square Enix similarly forced them into Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at the last minute). publishers being willing to blatantly break promises made by the developers still paints a pretty bad message. Regardless of how it happened, it gives me reason to put less trust into Beenox.

It’s also a bit of a skewed priority here in my opinion that microtransactions are more or less taking priority in development. Of course we don’t know everything about what will be done in the patch that adds the content from the new Grand Prix but no patch notes like the last GP is kind of concerning. There are a lot of things aside from the Wumpa Coin system that are serious issues with the game, like no host migration making it very hard to actually find games at times, long wait times between online matches, invisible items, invisible walls, lack of online options, etc.

I mention online because online is obviously a part of the game Beenox and Activision are encouraging people to play a lot - not just with coins but also the increased Nitro payouts and the incentive of the championship leaderboard that gets you a kart/decal (the latter even for who got the kart in an earlier GP, giving them incentive to make the top 5% again). But simply put, it’s barebones, has difficulty functioning well, and the fact the game uses peer-to-peer instead of its own servers is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

I mentioned coins before, and I know I’m not alone in expressing this fear, but with the already mangled coin handling last GP’s patch (honestly exaggerated, it’s better in some places, worse in others, it has actually encouraged me to vote for different tracks online than pre-patch but that’s just me), and the inclusion of microtransactions and them being explicitly said to help fast track coin collection, there’s...reason to believe that coin payouts are going to suck more than ever. Or they might jack up the prices to get people to grind even more, sucking out lives of people with limited time to play the game, or take the “easy way out” and get them to buy coins. Of course you also have to take into consideration that CTR is a kid friendly game that has this stuff. FIFA, rated E for Everyone, in recent years has cost parents literal thousands of dollars out of their bank accounts. Now I am unsure if CTR would ever get that bad since to my understanding FIFA has gambling and lootboxes which CTR currently lacks, but the real fear of a kid not versed in money spending too much on coins is a real thing. Or, people just wanting to catch up real quick, and with no self control, plunging into buy out the store.

Then there’s how the store actually works at the moment with its daily deals stuff that can, to a new player, actually make their cash-earned coins into either a test of luck by buying repeatedly, or just waiting forever. There’s a million ways that microtransactions can ruin people’s experiences with a game I don’t know where to begin.

I’ve heard all the excuses. “It’s all cosmetics.” “It’s optional.” “People need to watch their money.” “It funds the rest of the game!” Well some people would say, those are all pretty valid reasons at first glance, I refute:

Yes. They are cosmetics. That’s always how it starts. What if that’s a skin everyone loves? What if you’re the one person who doesn’t have it? What if that becomes a problem?

Yes. It is optional. Honestly I do think it’s the best argument, because you can do what I intend on doing: not buying into them. Sometimes, though, it’s not that simple; sometimes things feel so excessive they begin to not feel optional.

Sometimes, simply put, it’s not that simple. Today it’s easier than ever for a kid to randomly jack daddy’s credit card. Some people have genuine problems with money and have no control over how they spend it. It’s not that easy for some people. Maybe it is for you. It is for me. But it isn’t for everyone.

You know what else funds development? Game sales. You already paid $40 up front (or $60 if you wanted Robot Crunch that bad, I didn’t) and I don’t think you should be expected to pay more just to ease out of a slog that, depending on purchase date, can take months. Activision (or EA or Ubisoft or 2K or Square Enix or Warner Bros.) isn’t exactly light on money anyway.

Back to the grind for a little bit. Yes. Coin rates for offline players suck. Online sometimes gives you good coins and only does so when it wants to work in the first place. I, however, have a different take on the grind. The grind only becomes a grind if you make it into a grind. If you’re having fun playing the game, honestly? That’s what any good game does, it makes you play the game because you like playing the game. A lot of games have things that take forever to do, but are praised in spite of that because of things like strong game mechanics. CTR has amassed a dedicated community in spite of its well-documented issues because, simply put, this game is great. I’ve put god knows how many hours into it, admittedly sometimes as an active grind (I hate those battle mode challenges for the Grand Prix), but much of the time, it’s because I love playing a great racing game in my favorite gaming series.

Of course, that’s just me. Not everyone thinks a game is just a game, and sometimes the game itself these days gives off that message. Games you buy from a brick and mortar store operated completely differently before mobile phone games got big. Once those did, and devs started putting things into them, it just hasn’t been the same for a lot of people. Today, you have to log in to an account to play Doom, a game released 26 years ago, not on phones but after you pay for it with your own money on consoles current as of 2019. Mobile games and free to play games always operated differently from console games because that’s their whole thing, they generally aren’t console experiences and vice versa.

In summary:

If you love CTR, keep playing it, because without microtransactions, you have a game with a lot of good content and amazing gameplay.

However, actual issues with the game should be prioritized over trying to nickel and dime people, and with any game - not just this one - this message NEEDS to be loud and clear.

It is important for developers and publishers to see on the same terms, so they same message is given to consumers.

You don’t fucking put mobile game mechanics into video games that existed 10 years before Angry Birds and expect people to not talk about them.

Monetization is bad in so many ways it can hurt people and imply things about everything about the game in all kinds of ways. No ifs or buts about it.

Have a good night.

#crash team racing nitro fueled #crash bandicoot #microtransactions #rant

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thesims4blogger · 6 years

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SimGuruKate Addresses Concerns on Alexa Skill Device

After the Sims team revealed skills on the Alexa device during Maxis Monthly live stream on twitch, the community took to social media to express their disappointment. Yesterday, SimGuruKate address these concerns on the official forums.

Ok there are a few things I want to comment on, address, clarify from this thread. First, the comment that the Alexa Skill was developed in partnership with Amazon and that it was paid/sponsored. This is 110% not true. If something is paid or sponsored we legally must disclose that. Amazon did not reach out to us to develop this, nor did we reach out to Amazon to see if they wanted to partner with us. Instead, a single Dev thought of this idea and worked with a few other Devs who were interested to bring it to life and create it outside of their TS4 development responsibilities. Second, the idea that if they had not worked on this new Alexa Skill we would have released a patch in January for TS4 PC/Mac or Console. There was never a patch in January scheduled. Had the Alexa Skill not been in development or on the docket for release this month we still would not have released a patch in January. There are many reasons for this, much of it to do with how our development schedule is laid out, other content we are currently working on (paid and free), and the fact that we (EA) actually shut down the entire office (globally) between Christmas and New Years. Patches are scheduled VERY far in advance (we are talking months) and are done so in a manner that align with the overall development schedule for the year. Third, this sentiment that the Dev Team should remain chained to their desks and only work on in game content, and that passion projects are a waste of time. The Maxis Dev Team is one of the hardest working teams out there, and they are incredibly passionate about TS4, TSM, TSFP, and all past and future projects. One of the coolest things about Maxis is that they actively encourage Devs to work on side projects outside of their time required for primary project development (such as a patch or pack). By providing this opportunity it allows them to remain engaged and excited for what they are working on, thus preventing burnout (which as many know is a very real thing). All of this means that they can continue to create high quality content for the games you are so passionate about. Sometimes a Dev's passion project is something like First Person Camera. Sometimes it's something like a new career or NPC in the game. And yes, sometimes it's creating a fun little Alexa skill for those who have an Alexa and love The Sims. For passion projects Devs are encouraged to work on things they find interesting because when you work on things you enjoy it means you will produce high quality results. Now, Maxis Monthly. When we first announced Maxis Monthly I stated that not every Maxis Monthly would include revealing new content for TS4 (or TSM or TSFP). I also made it very clear from the first Maxis Monthly that new PAID content (that means EPs/GPs/SPs) would not be announced during these streams. There are multiple reasons for this, but basically it comes down to the way we announce new paid content. Now that being said, the goal of Maxis Monthly was to talk ALL things Maxis. This means that sometimes we would have something new to show for every single current game in our portfolio, and sometimes (like this month) we would have nothing. This is simply the nature of how game development works. It's pure luck (or coincidence) that prior to yesterday every Maxis Monthly had included new content reveals for TS4. Yes, I know this meant the community had come to expect certain things in the streams. Yes, I knew that the first MM in which we didn't reveal new content for TS4 would result in dissatisfaction. Though some many not think so, I know this community VERY well. That's why, compared to previous MM, we did not hype this live stream. That's why I called what we were showing "nifty" instead of mind blowing. That's why I sent out gentle reminders to the community that not all streams would show off new in-game content. Short of saying "this is what you will be seeing" I could not have been more clear and forthcoming that the January MM would not be showing off new TS4 content. However all that being said, the level of vitriol seen during yesterday's announcement was beyond what even I expected, and to be honest, was beyond what was appropriate. Do I think it would have been better to not show off Alexa during the stream? Absolutely not. That stream was the perfect place to show off this cool new product. Yes, we could have immediately said up front at the top of the stream that it was not sponsored/paid, and that was a huge learning lesson. So knowing some of the community wouldn't be happy with no new content coming for TS4, why didn't I wait to share Alexa? Because it's coming out next week and the Devs who worked on it wanted to show it off and this was the right time and way to do so. But why didn't I talk about things coming later this year? Because I can't. My hands are literally tied. Due to some interesting legal reasons (it's pretty in depth and complicated) revealing content too early would result in us being in some legal and financial hot water. Additionally doing so would not only result in me likely losing my job, but could put our Development and Marketing Teams in very difficult positions. And remember, though at this point I sound like a broken record, just because we don't explicitly share what the team is working on at the moment (because we can't), doesn't mean we aren't working on multiple packs, free content, and more. We will continue to evaluate how we approach content announcements and whether or not the Maxis Monthly adds value for enough individuals and make changes where/if necessary. Now the final thing I want to address is that passion and frustration never excuses basic human decency in how you interact with others. While everyone, especially a consumer of a product, has a right to express frustration, or be critical of the product, this does not give them the right to hurl insults at the Developers (or creator of the product). And if a person does choose to engage this way (which free will and freedom of speech allows) the individual which they are directing it at is under no obligation to listen or engage with that individual (because free will and all). It does not matter if that person is a Developer, a Customer Service person, or yes, a Community Manager. Yes, we choose these careers, and yes some of us even put ourselves in the public eye, but that does not mean we have to tolerate individuals spewing hate or vitriol. There are many appropriate ways to provide criticism or share your opinion in a way that does not include excessive ongoing negativity or insults. Appropriate: I have zero interest in this new Alexa Skill they announced and I wish it had been something different. I feel they could have used their time differently or developed something different. Unnecessary: This Alexa Skill is so stupid, why are they wasting their time on this? They are so stupid and this is pointless and they never listen to us and the game is doomed. I have seen a number who have stated their thoughts in the first way, but have seen far more communicating in the second manner. And even with the first way of sharing your thoughts, we often wont reply. And not because we don't see it or only want positive feedback, but because not every message needs a response. Oftentimes there is almost nothing one could say to either of the above that would add value or make the individual happy or satisfied. So many times in these situations it is better to say nothing at all. We gather the feedback and we pass it onto those who can impact change. I hope this has helped provide more clarity or insight. Remember, I dont expect every individual to like every single thing that we do, or even like me or the Devs. That's absolutely ok and to be expected. One of the best things (but sometimes the hardest thing to handle) about The Sims community is how varied it is. This is an incredibly diverse community and there are so many different ways to enjoy The Sims. But what I do expect is for people to be respectful.Post edited by SimGuruKate on January 9

#news #the sims 4 #ts4 #sims 4

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boogiewrites · 6 years

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Mae Flowers Ch. 2

Characters: Alfie Solomons x Mae LeBlanc (OFC)

Word Count: 6600+

Summary: A modern, magical Alfie Solomons AU. After a soul awakening of her own, Mae LeBlanc, a natural born witch, as well as a sensitive and kind woman from New Orleans soul finally starts to bloom and calls out to Alfie’s, unbeknownst to her. Not believing in supernatural powers, she finds herself thrown into a new existence that is full of things she never thought possible, including magical powers of her own. Alfie takes her under his wing to teach her about her powers. As she grows and learns, so does he. They navigate her lessons together, come to terms with how lonely their lives have been without the other and face these very human emotions together. With a newfound friendship formed out of necessity, will the idea of a soul mate translate from a mere magical meaning to a romantic one?

Warnings/Tags: Language. Spooky Imagery. Mentions of violence, poor self image. Magic/Supernatural. Soul mates. Lots of environmental descriptors but bare with me.

Positive feedback is MUCH appreciated! Reblogs, likes, asks and comments feed me to write more! Let me know if you’d like tagged in my work.

Click on my screenname then go to Mobile Masterlist in my bio for my other works and chapters. (Had to do this since Tumblr killed links, sorry.)

Alfie drives over to the Westbank into the residential parts of town. Old and new houses, apartment complexes and shotgun homes. He follows the GPS to Mae's house and it looks how he thought it might.

A small colorful front, with a tall wooden fence around the sides and backyard. The door was a deep teal set against a faded yellow exterior. An awning over the front door, with a small porch, a stoop that was painted and worn. Flower pots of all sizes and in the color of gemstones and varied conditions sat on the stairs and around it. Wildflower boxes sat underneath windows with shutters of the same teal color as the door and fencing. It was quaint, comfortable and colorful just like she was, he thought it suited her well. He pulls into the small driveway, in the residential area with houses that look much the same as hers. It homed older houses with older owners that had fallen into a less than pristine condition, newer family homes with landscaped front lawns. But Mae's had a small patch of grass, closer to the road as he suspected the backyard would be where most of the bulk of the grass would be for a garden.

He carries Mae into her house, unlocking her door with a nod of his head. Finding the interior to be as warm and comfortable as she felt in his arms. He walks directly into the far corner of the living room. The large bay window seen from the front of the house is bleeding bright light into the room from behind a large and plush couch. The room is decorated in deep jewel tones, a teal sectional sits against navy walls, with a collection of warmer color throw pillows in bohemian and southwestern styles. A shaggy faux fur blanket was thrown haphazardly over the extended lounge end of the couch. Large potted palms sit in the corners, succulents in tiny decorative pots on the window sills. They carried onto the mantle of the brick painted black fireplace that sat like a huge room divider, sitting in a huge square column in the center of the large space of the living room and kitchen. A flat-screen tv rests on the opposite wall of the couch above the fireplace. A driftwood coffee table containing a large fern in a bright yellow pot, books on plants and herbs stacked with various remotes and cat toys.

He places her gently on the extended section of the couch, careful to place her head on a pillow and make sure none of her limbs are twisted.

He hears and feels his darkness rev and purr and push around inside him. "Yeah I know, me too." he sighs.

-"Been waiting so long."- it moans. "So soft. So much life. She glows like the sun. The companion to our moon."- It starts reciting its own strange poetry for its mate it's waited millennia for. It hadn't been with its light since the dawn of time he assumes, as he knows his darkness is so old that time isn't even relevant to it for the most part.

He recalls the dark horrors of primordial ooze and black endless voids and abyss when it had come upon him. He was impressed it was behaving itself. For so long he'd had to fight so hard to control it, making him do evil, terrible things. Deeds so bad he'd exiled himself for years away from civilization. But in her presence it was calmed, it rippled like water, it was happy and he'd never known his darkness to feel happy about anything. Except when he was digging through the insides of innocents. He shakes the old thoughts from his head, still feeling guilty even almost a century later and trying to make amends ever since.

He traces his fingers over her face and whispers calming words to help ease her anxious nature he sensed. He stands and takes in the room. Her house is very quiet. He moves soundlessly around the fireplace and sees a quaint little kitchen. Driftwood light fixtures, colorfully painted window and door frames in the same jewel tones that carry throughout the house. The kitchen is white-walled, sunlight from a window over the sink pouring in against the far wall. But the majority of light came from the two patio doors that led to her garden. A closed-door sits off to the left next to an open archway that goes down into a sunroom. He looks over the open shelves on the kitchen walls and is very excited to find tins of various teas lining them. Old jars of pantry staples sit across the wooden countertops, some he'd say were from his time possibly, he wonders if she inherited them or if she simply had classic taste. He finds a small, dinky metal kettle and starts on making her some tea. He figured he needed something to calm her, finding her windowsill full of herbs he could easily use to make something to soothe her.

He senses something alive in the house, something besides the plants. He turns, seeing a large white long haired cat staring at him from a short hallway between two doorways to his right. It swishes its tail and they both narrow their eyes at each other.

"Who are you, lad?" Alfie asks as the cat continues to sit and stare at him. "You must be with Mae." he says with a nod, going back to searching through the cabinets. "Not much for talkin' to strangers, eh?" he chuckles. "Must mean there's a little more to ya than being a common house cat."

Percival lets out a noisy huff of air, taking offense to the term common house cat. He lets out a low growl at Alfie. He could sense his dark energy and he didn't trust him. Although why he had brought Mae home and was now making her tea was a bit confusing if he wished her ill.

"I'm not here to hurt your girl." Alfie says, still not looking back to him. "I'm here to help her. You know she has powers, yeah? I'm here to teach her how to use them. I have similar powers, although I'm not a witch like her." he shakes his head, his fingers digging into a small tea tin.

Percy knew he wasn't a witch, he didn't feel like a witch, didn't have the aura. He lets out a typical meow.

"You can say somefin' better 'an at mate." Alfie grins.

He lets out another meow of the same tone.

"Fine, fine. You're protective, I understand. She seems like a sweet, soft girl I can understand your concern." he remarks as he looks at him with a sympathetic expression.

Percy moves to jump up on the kitchen island to get a better look at this new person that'd come into their lives.

"'Ello." he says, leaning back against the counter while the kettle fills.

Percy says nothing and continues to sit and stare as he had been.

"I'm Alfie Solomons. You're probably sensing my darkness. But I've had it for a very, very long time, yeah? We're in control, we're not gonna hurt Mae." he states again. "We're here because of her lightness. She's our mate, right? We've been lookin' for her since me 'n this darkness got together. So the last fing I wanna do is cause her harm, 'right?"

Percy tilts his head, content for now with his explanation. But he wasn't so sure what Mae, who had no knowledge of anything of their world was going to think about this.

Mae's eyes blink open and then widen as she finds herself at her home, which is not where she remembered last being. She sits up slowly, her head feeling a bit swimmy but she's quickly aware of that strange feeling in her stomach acting up again. This time it felt different, it was what she imagined a jolt of electricity might feel like. A humming in her ears she hadn't heard before, a warm tingling in her limbs. She wonders if she has a concussion. Her attention is drawn towards the kitchen. She hears the clang of something metal and the sounds of someone clearing their throat. Her eyes are the size of saucers again.

"Oh, shit." she whispers, eyes darting around the room, hearing movement and now humming and in a distinctly male tone coming from the kitchen. She moves slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible, feeling that vibration inside her intensifying and she reads it as anxiety. She sees her shoes have been taken off as they rest by the couch, which makes her brow furrowed in question. She peeks around the corner of the fireplace, see's the same man from her dreams in the kitchen, now recalling the man walking into her shop. Then she recalls fainting and rubs her head where she's guessing she hit the ground as if it might give her some answers. Why was he in her dreams? Was she having prophetic dreams now? Great, that's just what a weirdo like her needed, more weirdness stacked on top of everything else strange about her. Was she being kidnapped? Why was she at home is she was being kidnapped? Is this a hostage situation perhaps? Holding her for ransom in her own home. She recalls reading about Stockholm syndrome and makes a quick pact with herself not to fall into that sort of mess in her manic rush of thoughts.

She eyes the large cast iron skillet on the counter in front of her, and if Saturday morning cartoons had taught her anything, is that when you needed to knock someone out, that's the way to go. So she grasps the grainy handle in both hands, holding it to her chest because of its heavy weight as she tries to sneak up on him. Little does she know he knew she was awake the moment her eyes popped open. But as is in his nature, he wants to learn about how she reacts to the unknown, taking this as a learning experience about her. He can sense she's scared and he understands that much. But her reaction with violence surprises him. Perhaps it was his darkness being near that made her so bold and go for that method first. Maybe it was trying to mingle with her to even her out, make her less passive and more reactive.

So as he hears her deep inhale as she's about the bring the pan across the back of his head, he turns and stops it, putting his hand over hers as she's about to swing on him.

"Fuckin' 'ell girl." he frowns down at her short frame.

Her bottom lip juts up, her brow going low in surprise for his hearing her and being so calm about her attempt at murdering him.

"I ain't here to hurt ya." he says with that thick accent she heard in her dreams. "If I was would I be makin' bloody tea and layin' ya down all nice and comfy while you'd passed out?" he asks, his gingery beard jutting towards her as he spoke to drive his point forward.

Her large hazel eyes blink rapidly, taking in the new information, still wild and large and full of questions he could sense. Her mouth opens and her lips twitch but no words come out. He had a point.

"Now let's put this down, eh?" he says, taking the large black pan and setting it on the counter behind her. "I know you got a lot of questions, yeah?" he nods, his lips pouted out as he moves closer to her. "I know you've been dreamin' 'bout me 'cause I've been dreamin' 'bout you." his voice dips lower, but not in a threatening way. "Do you think there might be a reason for that?" he tilts his head and their eyes connect fully for a few seconds, that flame inside her makes her take a sharp inhale. What was this feeling? He reached out with tentative hands, putting them on her shoulders to ground her, depart a bit of calm energy into her. She feels it immediately, not understanding the source. Her muscles loosen, her heart rate slows and it's like the best anxiety medication she's ever taken. "Let's just breathe... calm down..." he says nodding slowly and she mirrors the gesture without thinking much about it, their eyes still fixated together.

She gives a quick but still unsure nod.

"We don't want ya gettin' all excited and burnin' down the place now do we?" he says with a smile that tugs back the corner of his mouth. Her eyes go wide again and he feels that spark of fear come back. She recalls being angry a few weeks ago. The flames in the fireplace lapping out wildly for a moment, catching one of the plants on the rug on fire, the singed piece of rug still black despite her scrubbing it. "Yeah, I know all about that sweetie, come now." he says, putting a hand on her back, moving her towards the round kitchen table that sat in the space between the bar top and the sunroom. "Try some proper tea made by a real Englishmen and have a sit down with me, hmmm?" he suggests with a kind smile and a nod of his shaggy head.

She still doesn't speak but another series of quick nods as she places her hands flat on the table top and stares with those big enticing eyes as he moves about her kitchen. He pours the tea from the kettle in such a delicate way it takes her by surprise. He'd chosen her favorite mug somehow, an old one of Bessie's, textured like tree bark and cream, a funky green and orange mushroom on the side that she liked to run her fingers over as she drank. He sits next to her, pulling the chair closer to her, taking a sip and motioning with the steaming mug for her to do the same. She was taught not to take drinks from strangers but what is proper etiquette for a stranger, but not really a stranger, who brings you home after passing out then tells you secrets you've not told anyone else? Where was the after-school special on that when she was a kid?

"It ain't poison." he says with a chuckle into his mug. "See? I'm drinkin' it too. No worries, love." he says in a soothing even tone.

Once again she responds in a nod, taking the mug into her hands and taking a sip. It was nice, she had to give him that.

"Best start with the basics, yeah?" he says with a quirked brow, taking a deep breath and setting the mug back own. "My name is Alfie Solomons," he says with an authoritative tone. "I've been tryin' to find ya for weeks but I think you know that." his eyes narrow almost playfully at her. "I know Cordelia and Fiona-"

"I'm not going to that stupid academy." Are the first words out of her mouth to him and he smirks at her stubbornness. She was going to need that.

"Now sit on back, darlin' I ain't here to try to get ya to go." he dismisses the thought with a sweep of his hand. "I just know 'em and they know you eh? I'm tryin' to create some familiarity here understand?" She nods and keeps her face harder than it had been. "I'm not a Salem witch, I'm not a voodoo priest or nuffin' of the sort like Maria who does your hair."

"What are ya then?" she blurts out, her brow lower and her eyes more curious than frightened now.

"Someone that has been lookin' for you for a very long time, love." he says with a softer expression, his hand resting out of the table. "There are some things I'm gonna tell you about yourself, yeah? And I need you to believe I ain't here to lie to you because you're not gonna believe it. I know enough about you just by how you've reacted to me bein' here to know you aren't naive."

Her lips purse at the compliment, her eyes finally leaving him and watching Percy jump up onto the table and join them. He seemed calmed as their eyes met, a slow lazy blink as he laid down. She took this a sign to proceed. "I'll listen." she says softly.

"You are a very powerful woman Mae." he begins, a finger tapping the space on the table between them.

Her face scrunches and he can tell she's already not believing him.

"I'm not on about no modern feminist rant here, love, just hear me out, please," he adds. "You're very powerful and you need to be guided by someone who knows what it's like. You and I are very similar, contrary to what our appearances might indicate. I'm here to help you understand that power." he pauses, watching her face and she's still listening, even if shes' taking everything with a grain of salt. "You are a natural born witch. But beyond that, you were born with a very special soul. A very rare and powerful thing, yeah? I happen to have the same sort of soul. You might understand it best as a...yin and yang situation. Your soul balances out mine you see. Your powers are complementary to mine."

His face is very serious, she can tell at least he doesn't think he's lying. But crazy people believed their own lies so of course, he would.

"I ain't crazy, sweetheart." he gruffs out, furrowing his brow and taking a sip of tea.

Her eyes shoot over to him and she stiffens. Can you read my mind? She thinks with a tilted head.

"Yes." he nods. "But only to prove a point." he shakes his head and looks up at her from under a heavy brow. She gulps noisily. "You can do it too. But you've not had any discipline, no one to explain the strange things that happen to...and that's why I'm here." he says with a sweet soft voice as his hand touches her knee for just a moment, trying to show her he meant her no harm. He wishes she could read his mind so she would understand how entirely the opposite was his intention.

"To help me with my..." her face frowns. "Powers?" she says with a solid nod of her head.

"Precisely," he says with a large nod. "You see, every so often there is a soul created that takes a bit of ancient power with them into creation, into this world, this...plane of existence if you will." he begins speaking with his hands. "You are one of these souls. I think the term white witch might be easiest for you to relate it to. You've been denying these power and they keep manifesting in inconvenient ways, yeah?"

He sees the realization come over her face as she hides her uncertainty with a long sip of tea.

"Things explodin' when you're angry, your wonderful gift with plants. How you speak to them and they flourish. How every full moon you find yourself almost uncontrollably amourous." he says with a cheeky tone and looking away with a quirk of his brow.

She lowers the mug and frowns at him, giving him a warning glance. There's no way he could've known that.

"I'm not tryin' to start trouble, love, I'm simply trying to ease your mind that I'm insane." he explains with another low swing of his voice, back to seriousness. "I'm here to mentor you. It's how this system works. Our souls need each other to balance the other out. And that normal, part of how the universe keeps it's balance, yeah?" he nods and looks to see her processing the information.

Something fluttering inside her tells her to trust him, even though anything she'd ever been taught should be telling her otherwise. She studies him, thinking he looks perfectly human, but so did she, and if she, in fact, did have these powers then he wouldn't look any abnormal than she did. "I...I don't know why but... against my better judgment I'm inclined to believe ya." she says with a sigh that slumps her shoulders. As her nerves ease, her southern accent comes out a bit more, her throat not feeling so tight and it causes a little smirk to come across his face. "But I ain't really sold on it." she adds with a furrowed brow.

"Right." he drags out the word, looking around the room for a moment, trying to think of how to prove it to her. "Ah." he says, grabbing a tiny succulent that sat in a homemade planter that resembled Percy, he waves his hand over and it withers and died immediately.

"NO!" she cries out, taking it in her hands as her breathing picks up and she stares at the plant. "Poor little thing..." she whines, her face entirely distraught, her mouth hanging open. She glares at him while stroking the plant and without her noticing, it starts to plump back up again. As she looks back down she drops it against the table, but only by a few inches and it thuds as a tiny flower that hadn't existed before starts to bud on it as it goes back to how it had been. "Oh," she says with a straight face, only her eyes moving over to him. "I...I've never done that before." she states quietly, her face still in shock.

"You need to start believin' in yourself before you believe in me, love, see? Ya powers work. They're charged with your emotions right now because they're not trained. I can help you with that. You might be hesitant to my being here, but clearly, your powers aren't, eh? We can feed off each other in that way." he explains, taking the plant and studying her handiwork before placing it back where it had been.

He sees her eyes going cross before they squeeze shut and she lets out a little moan, reaching up to touch her head.

"Right," he says with a wrinkling of his face in concern. "That'll happen at first." he says in an unintentionally condescending way. It'd been so long since he'd thought about what it was like to only be learning of powers that he'd forgotten how draining it could be.

She moans and he holds her shoulders as she slumps forward. "So tired." she rasps out, her eyes looking a bit sunken, as they look up at him like a little, injured kitten.

"You're learnin' but you're weak, love." he nods, rubbing her shoulder. "We can make ya stronger, but now let's get some food in ya and get ya to bed, eh?" he says with a caring tone again, patting her head before pushing her back in the chair as she rests her weight on the table.

He rises and moves to the fridge, angling himself so she isn't out of his sight. His darkness is already impatient to get back to touching her, letting Alfie know of its greed to connect with her. But Alfie feels the sadness that's coming from her that it's choosing to ignore in its selfishness.

As her head spins, the frown on her face is not only from the uncomfortable feeling she has. She'd never thought she could be special. Only Bessie and Charles had even told her she could be but she'd never believed it. So it turns out she actually was special and that felt like it should feel better than it did. If she was different, then that explained a lot but it also meant she could never fully blend in and disappear like she'd always tried to. So she had to form a new approach to how she lived, which felt incredibly daunting and made her head throb. Percy senses her pain and walks over and purrs, rubbing against her face.

Alfie leans against the counter with his hips as he mindlessly put together a sandwich for her. He sees the deep blues around her, can feel the confusion and sadness and he wishes he could take it away but it's all part of the process. It physically hurts him to feel her pain, he hopes he can show her what a gift these powers can be. How it can make her life easier and all the perks that come along with it. She had so much love to give inside her and no suitable outlets for all that life to escape and flourish. She must be so unhappy with all that confusion and pain from a source of love and life only needing to be properly expelled, used and focused. He takes solace in knowing he can help her. They've found each other now and the wait was over. His darkness does it's equivalent of wiggling in excitement at the thought. She seemed so very sweet and kind, a real ray of sunshine in human form and he supposes she very well could be. He swears to himself no matter how this goes he'll do everything within his own enormous powers to help her figure herself out, learn how to flourish on her own. Only that would lead to a better life for them both.

Her favorite comfort sandwich, bologna and cheese with lots of mustard and pickles appears before her. He refills her tea and sits next to her wordlessly.

"So..." she begins, forcing her eyes open and taking a bite. "Ya gonna be teachin' he, huh?" her face winces as she turns it towards his.

"That is the plan, yes." he nods.

"You said you were lookin' for me. That means you're not from here, right?"

"Right. I'm not from anywhere really, just got into town last week."

"Where are you stayin'"? she asks

"I've been at the Academy while I've been lookin' for you."

"Ah." she nods, taking a bigger bite, her strength starting to come back. She weighs the next thought that pops into her head before she expresses it out loud. "I can..." she tilts her head back and forth in uncertainty, "I can trust you right?" she asks with a weaker voice than she intends to.

"Of course, love. I said I'd never hurt you and I mean that. Hurting you is hurting myself and that'd be rather daft of me seein' as I've waited so long for ya and my soul has waited even longer than either of us could fathom." he says with an expressive face.

She nods and looks at the table as she chews another bite. "So you would like.. protect me basically? Teach me how to use this and keep me from hurting myself?"

"Yes, of course," he says earnestly again. "I know you can be a little clumsy." he chuckles and she smirks because he's right. "Not gonna let ya hurt yourself." he gives her a smile that feels genuine, the hesitation and instructional tone in his voice now gone and only that charm of his handsome face and accent remain as she feels an unfamiliar warmness spread through her body. She wondered if it was the light she was told about. Should I ask him to stay here? She asks herself, her eyes studying his. And as if she was hearing a voice that was carried downwind by a breeze, the faintest lightest 'yes' she hears.

"I have a spare room," she says, her head motioning to the closed door by the sunroom. "If ya... wanted to stay." she says blinking and looking away from him. "I mean... would that help? Make things easier for..." she motions her hand back and forth between them. "Whatever this is." she lets out a huff of a laugh with raised brows, her face no longer looking sad and he's thankful.

"It would make it immeasurably easier." he says with a grateful nod and another dashing smile that she's not used to receiving from men that look like him.

"I don't want you to have to stay with those witches anyway." she shakes her head and looks away again, taking another bite. "And it's not like I live that close to them," she adds. "Would hate for you to have to do that every day." she shrugs. "Plus this way when I blow up a cauldron or whatever you'll be here to help." she smiles and takes another bite.

He knows she's making excuses now but he doesn't mind. Her capacity for kindness is showing already, inviting to share her home with him. He wasn't going to ask to stay with her but this was the ideal situation. "I can help with that, yeah." he nods and lets out a little chuckle, much like the one she'd heard in her dream, she feels that warm feeling again, like walking into the sunlight after being inside in the air conditioning. It felt good and something was telling her this was right and it certainly wasn't her common sense.

She finishes her sandwich, still feeling extremely drained but no longer dizzy or in pain. She shows him to the room, switching the light on and revealing yet another cozy space. The walls were white, it was filled with plants. A shelf full of ivy rests the length of the wall over a soft looking bed with dark colored and mismatched pillowcases, blankets and sheets. A southwestern style rug in pinks, yellows and burnt orange rests across the floor at an angle, a blanket of the same color scheme but different pattern rest across the lower half of the bed. A worn wooden dresser rests under the window, plants in pots, an old metal fan, and an incense holder sit atop it. A nightstand with a lamp sits against the wall next to the bed. He sees a fireplace on the wall opposite the bed, giving a thankful nod as it would make his spellwork much easier to have it so close and with such privacy. Boxes with the names of her foster parents sit stacked in the corner.

"I can move some of the plants if you need me to." she offers. "This room gets really good light during the day so I put a bunch in here." she moves towards the window. "I'm sure I've got some darker curtains if you need them. This doesn't shield you at all from the sun." she shakes her head as her fingers tug on the sheer fabric. "I'll get the boxes out of your way tomorrow." she says with a kind but tired smile as she turns back around to look at him surveying the room.

"You can leave them, love, no problem at all. I get some curtains if it turns out I need them," he says with a dismissive wave of his hand. "No rush on the boxes either." he adds with a smile that reads as thankful. "It's a very cozy room." he nods with pouted lips.

"The bathroom is on the other side of house." she says walking out of the room and he follows. He sees the rectangular space. His eyes are first drawn to the old and large claw foot tub that had been painted yellow and hooked up to also function as a shower. The same navy paint on the walls as the living room, with white tile on the floor. A sink with a cabinet underneath, various toiletries rest on top of the small counter space. A large worn mirror hung above it with a golden frame that showed it's age. As was with the rest of the house, the plants had made their way in here as well. Leaves of eucalyptus hung from the silver hardware shower head, plants rest atop the makeshift wooden stands the fit snug around the tub, some of the leaves and branches falling down into it slightly. The shower curtain was shoved back and out of the tub, he took this to mean she took baths more often. A window with a bright paisley fabric cover keeps the view of the outside blocked. And old work of embroidery of a bouquet of flowers is framed and rests above the toilet. "I'll bring in a basket from my room for you to put your stuff in, there's not much room left under here." she says with her foot tapping the door to the cabinet under the sink.

"Much appreciated, love." he says, eyes still scanning the busy space. There was so much to look at in her home. She turns to open the other door, different from the rest as it was painted lavender.

"And this is my room." she says almost timidly. He feels the magic wafting out of the room as soon as she opens the door. The walls were a deep teal, a paisley purple rug covered the worn hardwood floor. A thick and plush mustard yellow comforter cover the bed, another faux fur, shaggy throw in strewn over the bed like the one on the couch. Her pillows are all mismatched, some with floral prints, some shades of purple. A fireplace rests in this room as well and he can feel the age in the house as he enters the room. The mantle is painted the same shiny black as the other fireplaces and pillar candles of all colors, widths, and sizes rest atop the mantle. Some in tiny silver platters, some melting down onto the wooden surface.

The room smelled deeply of lavender and seeing an incense burner next to a flat screen tv on her purple dresser he knew the source. A closet door of the same lavender color rests in the corner. A large chair next to a bookshelf sat next to it in front of a window with flowing jewel-toned fabrics and sheer panels create a blanket around the chair. A wicker clothes hamper and a stained glass lamp on the nightstand all fall within the same color scheme, the room full of all sorts of energy. A small table pushed into the corner with a runner across it, a worn little pink stool pushed under it with a laptop on top. Framed pictures of all sorts, from all time periods and mediums, cover the far wall, some she'd inherited, some from her weekend trips to the flea market. Of course, the room was not complete without a large palm overgrowing in the corner next to a standing mirror.

He felt his insides quiver. This was her nest, he thought. This was her safe space and her sanctuary and his darkness knew it too. The space wasn't as well lit as he imagined but it was night and he hoped he'd get to see it in the morning light, anxious to know what else it would reveal about her. She felt a bit exposed and vulnerable suddenly, there'd never been a man in this room before with her. But he took in everything with a look of awe on his face, she watched his thoughts pass over his face, eyes tensing, lips twitching.

She tried to read his thoughts, but of course, she had no real clue as to how to do it, but she still felt no maliciousness in him towards her. There was something under the surface, she could tell. Something about him was timeless in a way. He had said their souls were ancient, perhaps that's where the term old soul came from? Without the new explanation of there actually being souls at all, and now knowing they could, in fact, be old, she thought the descriptor on a more lamen's terms still made sense about him. He had an ease about him, the bohemian sort of casual and comfortable style to him. The messy hair, the beard, and jewelry. It would seem their aesthetics matched well, which she hoped was a good sign. for

"If you need anything, feel free to knock." she says turning to leave the room before looking back at him. "But knock first." she says with a stern nod of her head and he flashes another smile, happy to see her giving him boundaries. The lightness in her could make her too giving, too compassionate to the point of harm to herself and he was hopeful that this wasn't the case with her as she gave him a look that told him not to push it with her. "I guess we'll get ya a key tomorrow..." she says rubbing the back of her neck. "You have stuff with you or...?" her face contorts in question.

"I got stuff in me car, yeah." he nods looking towards the door. "I'll try to be quiet bringin' it in. You need to get some rest now though," he says with a wag of his finger at her. "Very important you take very good care of yourself while you're learnin', love. You can drain yourself and your health will suffer and we can't have that." he says with a clap of his hands. "So I will get my things, settle in, and we can convene in the mornin', eh?"

"That sounds good. I get up between seven and eight usually." she says, moving back towards her room. "So uh...goodnight?" she asks with a soft laugh for the unique nature of the very unusual situation.

"Goodnight Mae." he says with a nod and smile. "If you need anyfing, you come knock as well, yeah?"

"Yeah, no problem... uh...." he looks at the floor realizing she doesn't even remember his name. She lets out a laugh and rubs her head. "I'm sorry but I don't remember your name." she admits with a bitten lip and an apologetic glance.

"It's Alfie, love." he grins. "Alfie Solomons." he nods again. "You've 'ad a lot coming at you today Mae, I take no offense." he says with a hand to his chest.

"Thanks for that." she nods. "Movin' in and I don't even know your name. What a weird ass day." she shakes her head but she's smiling as her eyes shift around, trying to process everything.

"Things'll start to feel more normal again once we establish a routine, you'll see. It'll be fuckin' weird at first, I won't lie." he laughs and she's hit that warm feeling again, recalling her dream and the same sound she'd heard then as he moves towards her. "But we'll get through it together, yeah?" he responds supportively with a hand on her shoulder.

"I appreciate the honesty." she says sheepishly with a smile that reflects the tone.

"Ain't got no reason to lie to ya, sweetheart. Now you get on in bed. I can tell you're fadin' on me." his eyes almost twinkle at her as he motions to her door.

"Lock the door before you go to bed, please."

"I will. But if anyfing came in here, believe me, it'd regret it as soon as it met me." he chuckles again.

"Also good to know." she nods."Night Alfie." she says with a wave from her doorway.

"Night, Mae. Don't worry 'bout a fing!" he says loudly as he walks towards the door.

She lies in bed wondering what the fuck she was doing. There was a man in her house. Not just that but an attractive magical one that was apparently lethal and her... soul mate? She groans and rolls over to her stomach. Yeah, the term fit didn't it? She had too many questions but she knew she'd get answers as he'd already been very helpful so far. Well, helpful in the sense of turning her life upside down. But at least he was sticking around to help clean up the mess and make sense of it. She couldn't say she'd ever known any man to do that before for her. She decides to go to sleep on that hopeful note, wondering what she would dream about now that he had found her.

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