#now that i’m interested in monster high again it’s too late because she sold the dolls and house in a yard sale

[m0tel6mxzzy]

doll collectors truly live on ebay….id collect monster high dolls alongside porcelain ones but those are way too expensive for my liking since apparently they don’t make gen 1 dolls anymore

[catchmewiddershins]

Hi🥺

if it's too much trouble, could I request a pt. 3 of the ‘overhearing their crush talking about them’ with oikawa, akaashi and yamaguchi?

Thanks in advance and have a nice day!💕

Haikyuu Characters Overhearing their crush talking about them - pt 3:

Includes: Oikawa, Akaashi and Yamaguchi! 💖 SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG 🥺 I’m so glad you asked bcs I needed a reason to write a third part hehe

Oikawa:

He could barely keep his eyes open. Contrary to popular belief, Oikawa wasn’t a monster, he couldn’t keep pushing and pushing and never feel the consequences. Interhigh was approaching again and he was desperate to win, desperate to see the national court just one time before he left high school, desperate to prove that all of the blood, sweat and tears that he had poured into this sport wasn’t futile. So he’d stayed awake, he trained until late at night and woke before the crack of dawn to practice. And now he was feeling the toll, incapable of focusing on the words of the teacher at the front of the class, he let his mind drift, getting shocked out of his skin when the bell rang for lunch.

Floating down the corridors, he almost fell asleep standing up until he walked into a door frame. Then, as he rounded the corner he heard your voice. Oikawa had been harbouring feelings for you for a while now, ever since you’d been kind to him outside of the usual fangirl devotion - you’d helped him hide from a few of them while he was late for practice, and he’d been trying to work up the courage to confess to you. He was just... worried that you’d assume he was asking in a playboy manner, rather than from sincere feelings. Suddenly, he paused, having heard his name in passing from your conversation.

“Why do you want to go to a volleyball match? Like at interhigh?”

“Because Oikawa’s playing and I wanted to cheer him on!” There you were, you sounded so cheerful, it made his heart flutter and heat sprang to his face.

“Isn’t he that guy who’s really pretty? I hear that tons of people are swooning over him, you’ll have a lot of competition if you wanna blend in.”

“I mean yeah... he’s pretty but that’s not why I like him!”

“What, you’re different from the rest? Why do you like him then, if not his looks? They seem to be the only thing of his that are of note.”

His heart sank a little, there it was again, that focus. His hair, his eyes, his face, people complimented him on them left and right and it made him wonder if that was all he was worth - is that all he is? Just a pretty-boy athlete?

You sounded... indignant?

“I like him because of his skills, for one! Have you seen his serve? That thing looks as if it could turn my face into a pancake! And besides that, he’s such a great leader! His team clearly flourishes with him as captain, I saw one match where he couldn’t make it and they were only working at 3/4 max of the potential that Oikawa is able to draw out of them - it’s incredible! I worked on a project with him once and he was both in charge and so considerate! He’s more than his face, you know.” Your hands moved passionately and he could imagine the sparkles in your eyes as you talked, the way you occasionally did about your favourite media or facts.

He was in deep, and your rant at your friend gave him the nudge he needed to confess immediately... or maybe at interhigh.

Akaashi:

He nodded as you spoke, having been asked to help tutor you for the upcoming exam, as you had a few things that you were stuck on. He’d accepted immediately, since he was absolutely smitten with you. Nobody had been told about this, not even Bokuto, because he would tease Akaashi to kingdom come if he found out - or he’d try to set you up, which would be even worse. Gently correcting a mistake you’d made in your work, he took the time to appreciate being so close to you. Akaashi loved to spend time with you, since you’d become tentative friends due to sitting adjacent to each other in Biology, and since you occasionally came to his matches, but only when you had the time.

There was a slight noise as his phone buzzed in his pocket, and, taking it out, he saw a text from Bokuto, saying that he’d forgotten where the bibs for practice were stored and that he was outside the classroom so that Akaashi could point him in the right direction. Stepping outside with a sigh, he showed Bokuto which way the storage cupboard was, and gave him very clear directions on how to get back to the gym from there, along with another, not really that sincere, apology for having to miss practice to tutor you. However, just before he opened the door again to the spare classroom that you were working in, his ears picked up the sound of your voice, on the phone to one of your friends.

“Yes I am getting tutored by Akaashi!” His curiosity was piqued, was your friend interested in him or something? He couldn’t hear the sound from your phone speaker, but your response sent sparks through him.

“No, of course I haven’t confessed to him - It’s not like he likes me back! Besides, we are actually supposed to be working!”

“...”

“Yes, I’m sure I like him! He’s so considerate, and he explains things really well, and he always knows how to help, and he’s gorgeous.”

Oh. Oh Oh Oh! You liked him! He couldn’t stop the beaming smile that shone across his face as your conversation with your friend trailed off, leaning against the wall outside and trying to quell the ache in his cheeks that came with such a wide, lovestruck grin. His ears were pink and his eyes sparkled, and if anyone had walked past him at that moment, they’d say that he’d never looked more alive.

He walked into the classroom, glowing, and sat back down next to you before clearing his throat. He could see redness in your face as well, and mustered all his courage to do what he’d been wanting to for a while.

“Hey... I’ve really enjoyed spending time with you today and... I was wondering if... you’d maybe like to go out with me sometime?” 

Your resounding yes made this the best day ever.

Yamaguchi:

It was a Saturday, sunny, warm, and boring. Yamaguchi had decided to try and pass the time by going for a quick stroll down to his favourite café, passing through a lovely green park on the way, where he walked around, looking at the different species of flower, and the fish in the ponds, throwing a few crumbs of bread to them as he passed. To be honest, the only way for the day to be more perfect would have been a backing soundtrack, then it would have felt like something directly out of a feel-good film. 

Coming to a new street, he wandered past a few shops, until he came to where he’d been meaning to come. The sweets sold here were the best, and getting one, plus a lemonade, to take away while he walked was just an extremely relaxing thing to do. He was planning to go and read a book in the park, to soak up some of the sunlight and enjoy the lovely afternoon.

The bell tinkled as he pushed open the door, and his nose was caressed by the smell of baking bread and sugar. However, as he approached the front to order, he spotted you and a couple of your friends sitting in the corner, near the window, all of you nursing some cold drinks and chatting with one another. His heart jumped into his throat, the sound of it pounding in his ears. The lady at the countertop, who had got to know Yamaguchi relatively well, since he came here so often, leaned over and grinned at him.

“Do you know them?” She asked, a twinkle in her eyes. At his nod, she giggled and said to him, “Whichever of them you like, you should say so! I bet they’d say yes!”

He thanked her, quietly, and smiled, knowing that she only meant well, and waited at the side of the counter for his order to be ready. As he waited, your voice drifted over to him from your seat at the window.

“So, do you like anyone?” One of your friends said with a laugh, you appeared to be having one of those lighthearted discussions that good friends sometimes have about such things.

A blush sprang to your face, and you brought a hand to your eyes, “...Maybe...” Leaning forwards, your friend gestured for you to continue. You sunk further into your chair in embarrassment.

“Ok... so you know... Yamaguchi?”

“Yamaguchi?” Your friend replied excitedly.

“Yeah,” smiling, your gaze drifted a little, as if you were lost in thought. “He’s just the sweetest, honestly, so supportive and kind, he helped me out after I tripped over the other day, and, when I missed one of the maths lessons, he talked me through the material... he’s lovely...”

Grinning, your friend patted your hand, relaxing back into their chair, “Well, he’s definitely not the worst person for you to be crushing on, you’ll need to drop some hints though... want a hand?”

“Stop it!” You whined, bringing your hands up again to cover your tomato-red face as your friend laughed.

Yamaguchi left the café with three things, a pastry, a lemonade, and the resolve to ask you out the next time he saw you. He practically skipped down the lane as he went back to the park, joy filling his heart.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 4

[thethousandyearwitch]

Fatal Taste

“The townspeople believe you’re some kind of evil spirit or monster-” he laughed lightly, not sure if it was because of that ridiculous thought, or because of the soft lips that were caressing the underside of his jaw. “Oh, Ging,” Pariston sighed against his skin in a way that chased goosebumps up his spine. “They are right.” -----------

Ging Freecss has been summoned by his elusive pen-pal Pariston Hill, to examine his claim of a rare and unheard of art collection. Even despite the warnings and difficulties on the way, he was not prepared for what awaited him at the artful mansion.

M-Rated; Vampire!Pariston Hill x Art Appraiser!Ging Freecss.

AO3 Link!

It was the height of summer, as a horse drawn carriage made its way into a small valley village, about 8 miles off the coast, 20 miles from the country’s capital. The sky was mostly clear, and hungry crows on fenceposts watched the carriage pass between grazing fields. The carriage itself didn’t carry a heavy load, just some imported goods from the harbour destined to be sold in the capital, the carriage driver, and a stranger to the country, with messy black hair and rough beard stubble, who had asked for a lift. During the ride he kept mostly quiet, though he introduced himself as “Ging Freecss”.

As they reached the village’s main plaza, the man hopped of the carriage, and bid the driver goodbye with a thanks and some money he had pulled from his trousers, seemingly with no mind paid to how much he was actually giving out.

There wasn’t much to this town, a couple rows of houses with dusted windows, a quaint pub with a few tables decked outside, one of which was occupied by an elderly couple, and a shrine to a local god adorned with candles and food offerings. Ging decided to sit down for a brief rest at the pub, grateful to take refuge in the shade of a sun umbrella next to the tables.

After a short while, a short and stout young woman greeted him and offered him a menu, though he knew well that all he wanted to order was a cold beer. And his wish got fulfilled, as she returned quickly with half a litre of local beer and some trail mix in a bowl. The waitress spoke up with a bubbly voice. “We don’t get many outsiders, sir, you’ve must have had quite a trip. Are you on your way to the capital?”

Ging took a large gulp of his drink before he replied, welcomed the cool chill that chased down his throat. “Ah, No, though I heard it’s a beautiful old city. I’m here to appraise someone’s art collection. Do you think you could help me find an address, actually?” He handed the waitress a neatly folded letter and pointed at the sender’s address. She mustered the handwriting closely before gasping lightly.

“That’s mister Hill’s manor! How do you know him, sir?”

At the same time, the old man at the other table turned around with a stern look. “You must not go there if you value your life, son.”

“I’ve only been in correspondence with him over letters, and though he seems like a weird fellow, I doubt that his antics will cost me my life.” Ging laughed with a rough voice, though the man’s stare didn’t waver.

“He’s a strange and dangerous man. I’ve heard of women visiting him and never returning.”

“Maybe they liked it there so much that they didn’t want to leave! I’ve met him before, he was real polite and friendly, even invited me to his home. But my parents would have killed me if I’d gone out that late in the night.” The waitress sighed wistfully.

“Do you insist to go, young man?” Now the old lady spoke up, her voice sounded sore and stutter-y.

“I’m here to do a job, and if his collection is the real thing, then I’d hate to miss it. But I’ll be quick, probably on my way back to the harbour by the end of the evening.”

The old woman stood up and walked with slow steps over to him, before insistingly grabbing at his hand and pulling him up from his seat. “Come pray then, boy.”

“Ma’am, really, I will be fine, I- I am a grown man- “She pushed him towards the shrine and signalled for him to kneel. “I’m not very religious, y’know- “

“Nonsense, in the face of danger, every man can turn towards any god. Let me pray over you.” Ging rolled his eyes but knew better than to argue with an elderly woman, being beaten with a cane can teach you that lesson. “Dear Gods, watching high above, protect this soul who has strayed from his dedicated path. Guide him to safety and be the shining armour that repels any and all mischievous evils. Assist him in making his judgement, and forgive him for his faults, as we forgive as well. Hold him tight within your hand until he may part which his earthly body to meet you once again.”

Ging waited and listened to the eerie prayer until she removed her hand from his shoulder. “Say, Auntie, a couple rumours don’t turn a man into a monster, do they?”

“People have gone missing in the woods around the mansion. The house itself, it’s always been known to home something evil, for centuries. You youngsters are not in touch anymore with recognizing something malevolent even if it were to spit in your face.”

That cryptic message- or insult- still couldn’t convince Ging not to head towards his destination. Afterall, something like evil spirits couldn’t be real, or else he’d be haunted twice over after disturbing crypts and burial sites, places of worship and sacrifice, the last remains of civilisations long gone. Not once did he think about ghosts or monsters taking revenge.

This ‘Pariston Hill’ was no monster, but most likely just a pretentious man with too much money, feigning interest in art without understanding their purpose and meaning.

Ging asked the waitress again about the address, and she explained a step-by-step on which road he had to hike up to reach the manor. He left her a tip, bid farewell to the old couple, and started to head up the hill road, burlap sack with a few travel belongings over his shoulder.

The road quickly turned from sturdy cobblestone to dirt as he walked, the surrounding forest grew thicker and unkempt around the trail. The woods were quiet except for the occasional crow-cry and wing flutters in the tree crowns. Sweat made his clothes stick uncomfortably to his skin, his hair frizzed due to the humidity. He was an experienced hiker, but he still was sure that anyone who decided to build a mansion only accessible via dirt road was a sadist.

But as much as Ging craved refreshment from the heat again, the subtle static in the air and the increase of tiny insects flying around hinted at something unwelcomed: A summer storm was brewing. It wasn’t unusual for this part of the country, but it could certainly throw him off his schedule.

“Please, anything but- “Ging tried to plead to whatever deity in these parts might be responsible for weather, however he was interrupted by a blinding flash of lighting, followed by booming thunder, and finally cold rain. “Asshole.”

After a half-hearted jog through the rain and mud that would soak him head to toe, dim lights of a fenced in mansion came into view. A lit oil lamp illuminated an unlocked gate, and a gold-plated sign with fancy curled letters that spelled ‘Pariston Hill’. Ging didn’t second guess the open gate and let himself in, eager to get out from under the downpour. As the gate creaked open, he could have sworn he saw a cat that scurried around the corner, but it was gone before he could have been sure. An orange brick path led directly to the main entrance of the house, adorned on either side with well-kept lawn, hedges cut into elaborate shapes, and exotic flowers that Ging had seen in other countries and continents. The entrance was made up of two large solid wood doors, intricate floral carvings, and two iron door knockers that seemed to be decades old but kept in good shape.

But as the rain seeped deeper into his clothes, Ging disregarded the aged architecture and gave the door a few heavy knocks. Through the rain he tried to listen for a response or approaching footsteps, in vain. And yet without any warning, the door clicked, creaked, and slowly opened. Bright light from inside illuminated the outside area of the entrance. In the middle of the light, there he stood.

He seemed a bit taller than Ging, a perfect posture as if practiced. His hair stood out even against the equally golden light, and he wore a vermillion suit, most likely more expensive than the entirety of Gings closet combined. For some reason, the term ‘handsome devil’ came to mind.

For a second, the man looked down on him with a serious, even hostile expression, before he gave a pleasant smile in recognition. “Ging Freecss, I assume? Seems like you had a refreshing journey here.” He leisurely held out a hand, which Ging immediately took for a hearty handshake, subtly making sure that rain splatter from his hand and sleeve would scatter.

“I do enjoy a good hike, and a free shower is a free shower.” He flashed a determined grin, and Pariston removed himself from the man’s cold and clammy grip, still smiling though disgust flashed within his dark eyes. He stepped a bit to the side and made an exaggerated hand motion to invite Ging to step inside the manor.

The entrance hall was lit with a large crystal chandelier and a warm fireplace at the other side of the room, with two red velvet seats facing the fire. Marble floor was covered with a long red carpet, while the walls were adorned with classical paintings. Just at a glance Ging could tell they weren’t imitations.

“Ging- If you allow me to address you so intimately,” Pariston started, though he didn’t wait for an answer before he continued, “Ging, I’ve been anxiously looking forward to your visit. Now, I could have always called a local appraiser to come and do their job, but I sense a sort of passion within you that I’m sure won’t disappoint me.” He flashed another smile, though far from genuine as his stare and tone dripped with mockery.

“Well, usually I would have declined to come such a long way on a shallow request of a pen-pal, but it would be a shame to let the outrageous claim of a complete Ushiromiya portrait collection go unchecked. Where’s the goods?” Ging leisurely started to press out the water that had soaked into his clothes, directly onto the red carpet below. In any other case he may have shown an art collector more respect, but the smug aura of this man, which had already seeped through any and all letters he had ever received of him, pushed Gings buttons in all the wrong ways.

“I’d think a professional appraiser such as yourself wouldn’t want to examine rare paintings in such a condition that you’re in. It would be a shame if you were to get some dirt on them. Why don’t you go ahead and have a shower, while I retrieve the paintings from their safe?”

“I’m pretty confident in my ability to spot a forgery from a safe distance.”

“I’d be a terrible host if you were to catch a cold.”

“Never been sick in my life, now, I insist- “

“This is my humble home, and they are my paintings, Ging. I am the one who insists. And after all, a free shower is a free shower, isn’t it?” Pariston approached him and took clear advantage of his height, looking down at his visitors with an overly polite smile. Ging had never backed down from a challenge, however, his curiosity about the paintings had increased more and more as he looked around the mansion and noticed more authentic art and architecture. If Pariston Hill had truly come into possession of a rare collection, he didn’t want to deprive the world of this discovery just because he refused to take a shower.

“Alright then, but I don’t have a change of clothes.”

“I’ll generously lend you some of my attire, though I won’t make any promises about it fitting someone of your stature.” Pariston laughed lightly as he proceeded to push Ging towards another room down the hall. “Use any towels, soaps, and the likes as you please, be my guest~”

The washroom Ging got ushered into was equipped with a marble sink, a spacious shower, and a white cabinet that held towels of different sizes and colours. It was clean, maybe too clean, as he could find no trace of this room being used…ever. No water stains on the faucet or at the shower tiles, no used toiletries. Most likely it was a washroom just for guests, and he didn’t want to think about the over-the-top luxury that must hide in the master bathroom.

As he pulled his water-heavy clothes off his body, cold air hit his damp skin, there was a knock on the door. “I’ve got your change of clothes~ I’m sure you’ll like these even more than your regular attire.”

“What am I supposed to do about my clothes? I assume you don’t want me to leave them on the floor to rot?” He cautiously pressed one shoulder against the door, just in case his strange host would get any ideas.

“If you insist to keep them, I can hang them to dry by the fire.”

“You mean ‘dry’, and not ‘burn’, right?”

There was a moment of hesitation, before another light laugh echoed through the door. “What kind of person do you take me for?”

“I’ve been told it’s rude to insult a host. Thanks for the clothes!” Ging quickly opened the door just enough that he could fit his arms through, grabbed the neatly folded pile of fresh laundry, and dropped his soaked clothes into Paristons still extended arms, before he shut the door and clicked the lock. He could hear the sound of the clothes hitting the floor with a wet noise and snickered to himself.

.

.

After a long, warm shower, Ging tried his best to towel dry his hair, though in the end he opted to just slick it back. The clothes Pariston had picked out for him were simple, though not necessarily his style: Black slacks, and a white button up that didn’t seem to fit quite right, thus opting to roll up the sleeves just below his elbows and tuck most of the shirt into the pants. He kept the three most top buttons unbuttoned, because he had always hated the stuffy feelings of suits and dress shirts. The faint smell of cologne that wasn’t his stuck to the clothes, but he pretended not to notice. It smelled of cinnamon.

He exited the bathroom, towels discarded in the sink for whoever to clean up, only to find Pariston at the fireplace, Gings clothes neatly folded over the velvet chairs, as he held a small piece of paper. A picture.

“What an adorable baby!”

Ging approached him with quick step and snatched the picture out of his hands at an admirable speed. “Do you usually go through your guests’ belongings or am I a special case?”

“My, I was merely picking up something that fell out of your pockets. Is it your child?”

“What if he was?” Ging glanced over his spread-out clothes, suspicious of any tempering that might have been done.

“He certainly looks like you, if not as, how do you say,” Pariston waved his hand around as if he were to grab a word out of thin air, “bellicose.”

“Whatever that is supposed to mean. He’s my son; since you’re so curious.”

“Well, well~ Congratulations to you and your- “Pariston glanced at Gings hands, before he made eye contact again, prying smile “wife?”

“No such woman exists. Did you invite me here to pry in person about my life, or do I actually get to see the art?”

“Just making casual conversation. But since you are less of a hazard now, I’d love to see you go to work.”

“Don’t throw me out when you have to face the hard truth, though.” He shuffled through his light luggage to retrieve some appraisal tools, then followed Pariston Hill up a wooden staircase that opened to a long hallway of unmarked doors, and the walls here too were lined with paintings. Some were simple landscapes; others elaborate portraits of different eras. A couple of the artists seemed familiar, though most of them seemed to come from absurd sources or lacked an artist’s signature at all. He stopped in front of one particular painting: A painting of this very mansion. It was yellowed with age, and the edges that poked out from its golden frame seemed worn out and somewhat burned. A signature at the very bottom read in cursive ‘P.H.’ and a date around 50 years back. “Huh?”

“Ging~ Here please.” Pariston held a door open, this time with a smile that seemed almost painful with how his teeth were clenched. Ging decided not to question it, and followed his host into a dim room, packed with various dusted boxes and furniture covered in blankets. At the very end stood a row of aged easels holding up paintings.

“Think they will look more genuine in the dark?” he joked dryly, but his eccentric host flicked on a gas lamp in the row with a fool’s confidence, and-

The room lit up and Ging faced four stunning paintings.

He had studied the previously only known Ushiromiya painting painstakingly when he was still just an apprentice. He learned the way the brush strokes had been made in deliberate ways, burned the colour choices into the back of his eyelids, knew the exact curvature of the one-winged eagle that adorned its signature.

These paintings were real. There was no other explanation.

He went up close, examined the texture, searched for any mistakes in disbelief. But each one was flawless.

“And? Did I waste your time?” Pariston stood a couple feet back, arms crossed, and head tilted.

“They are real… Pariston, this is ground-breaking!” Ging spun around, his face a mix of bewilderment and pure joy. This joy only doubled when Pariston clapped his hands together and seemed to be just as elated.

“Wonderful! Simply splendid!”

“We might be some of the only people alive to have ever seen these!” Ging enthusiastically grabbed Parison by the shoulders, his mind was racing with potential studies he could write on these paintings and the way their existence was to alter history. “How did you get these?”

“They were given to my family by the original artists; So I’ve been told.” A mysterious smile, almost melancholy danced on his lips, before he gave another flash of his shining teeth. “I never doubted their authenticity, but I couldn’t keep their existence to myself, could I?”

Ging gave an enthusiastic slap on Paristons shoulder, feeling for the first time like the two of them shared a surprising, genuine connection. “Will you donate them to a museum? Try to contact the family of the Artist? Or the remaining Ushiromiya family members?”

“I will keep them here. Maybe hang them in my study. Now, would you care for a meal, Ging?”

“What?”

Pariston had already walked back to the door and flicked off the light, his silhouette only illuminated by the faint lights in the hallway. “I’ve let my chef prepare us a meal. I assume you don’t get asked for dinner often then.” He chuckled.

“I thought you didn’t want to keep their existence to yourself!”

“And I didn’t. You know about them now. Exciting, isn’t it?” He chuckled once again, before he disappeared into the hallway.

Ging weighed his option if he were to grab the paintings and escape into the night, but the storm still raged on outside, and he couldn’t safely juggle 4 large canvases all the way to the harbour or capital by himself.

For now, all he really could do was to find a way to convince Pariston to change his mind, through persuasion, threats, or force. Maybe if he were to get some outside forces to apply pressure, he recalled his colleague in forensics, Cheadle, owed him a favour.

He stepped into the hallway and quickly fell into step besides Pariston. “Dinner would be lovely, I’m sure, unfortunately I’m on a tight schedule, so I’d rather get going. I could write you a certificate of authenticity for the collection, though I’d need a second appraiser for the process. My good colleague Miss Yorkshire would be thrilled to visit, I’d think.”

Pariston came to a halt, ran his hand through his messy blond streaks of hair with a sigh. “Oh, Ging, I simply can’t let you continue in this weather. No ship will sail under these conditions, and the way to the capital is prone to mudslides. I don’t want to be complicit in your accidental death.” Ging was about to argue before he was cut off once again. “As for your colleague, you can gladly summon miss Cheadle Yorkshire here, though we’ve never been on very good terms.”

“Wh- How do you know her?”

“Let’s discuss it over dinner, shall we?”

.

.

Ging expected to be taken to a large dining hall with a table set for a dozen people, but in the end, they entered a separate room adjacent to it, with a medium scale dining table only decked for two. Unlike the other rooms in the house, this one was lit with multiple candles in elaborate holders -17thcentury bronze, Ging thought – and a phonograph was playing a concert recording. The men took their seats at opposed ends of the table, Ging sat with a natural comfort and slack, as if any seat he claimed was immediately his own with no regard to manners or humility; Pariston sat with seemingly practiced confidence and superiority as he made a show of crossing his legs and resting his chin on his hand. A confidence that irritated Ging to no end.

“Must be lonely to usually eat by yourself in this large, dusty room, huh?”

“I keep company one way or another.” Pariston spread a napkin on his lap, though the twitch of his eyebrow indicated his true annoyance with Gings remark.

Just then the door from the hallway opened, and a tall man in a chef’s uniform entered, as he pushed a small silver cart stacked with dishes. As he stepped closer, Ging noticed strange markings around his eyes, though there was no telling if they were tattoos or merely makeup. “Good evening,” he mumbled, in a voice unlikely for a man of his tall stature, “tonight’s meal is wagyu rump steak with rice and garlic Bok choy, served with a bottle of mister Hills personal wine selection.” After Pariston nodded in approval, the tall man started to serve the plates and poured two glasses of deep red wine.

“Don’t tell me you eat like this every day.”

“Of course not~ I prefer Kobe Fillet. I was trying to be mindful of less acquainted tastes.”

“You’re right, I don’t eat beef a lot. I prefer fish, but I understand that not everyone can get their hands on bluefin tuna.”

“Maybe I will let it be prepared for next time.”

“Is it that lonely up here that you’re already inviting me to another dinner?”

“I just assumed you’d appreciate the company, without a significant other and the fact that your child is most likely not under your care.”

The men exchanged challenging looks. Pariston still had a polite smile, though he started to lean forward in his chair like a predator about to pounce, while Ging couldn’t keep an irritated smirk form his lips. The tension was only interrupted by the chef, who cleared his throat and told the men to enjoy their meals. Just then the sweet and savoury smell of the food hit Ging, and he couldn’t deny the hunger that had built itself up.

Pariston lifted his own wine glass up, red liquid sparkled in the candlelight. “To the most interesting guest who has found his way into my home.”

In response, the man in question raised his own glass, though with less bravado and more at leisure. “To the Ushiromiya collection and their questionable owner.”

Both of the men started drink from their wine, though Ging noticed Paristons eyes on him, as if he awaited a reaction. The wine was sweet on Gings tongue, it lacked the usual sting that wine would give him once he swallowed.

“How is it?”

“Could be worse. You’ve got a lot of time on your hands to even make your own wine.”

The blond started to cut off a piece of his meal, and took a small bite, never breaking eye contact. “I am a man that easily gets bored. I need a lot of hobbies.”

“That makes two of us.”

They ate mostly in silence, music from the phonograph kept the atmosphere light. Ging hadn’t realized just how hungry he was, until he finally ate enough and the lingering knot in his stomach loosened. He emptied his plate in what felt like record time, no regard for table manners, and drank more wine while Pariston ate at a patient (and reasonable) pace. After his third glass, he was expecting the normal pleasant buzz that alcohol gave him, in vain.

“You still need to explain to me how you and Cheadle are acquainted.” He poured himself another glass, which Pariston seemed to approve.

“We have met a couple years prior, at a theatre opening in the city, hosted by Sir Netero. A friend of a friend, so to say. Unfortunately, people like us aren’t meant to get along. I offered her a dance out of curtesy, but I felt like she might have mauled me if I insisted.”

Ging laughed lightly, “She does have a temperament. I can’t imagine her being much of a dancer.”

“Saying something like that about a lady isn’t very nice, especially considering the same could be said about you.”

“Bold assumption, with no evidence.”

“You don’t look like you’d have the grace required for dancing.”

“I may not get invited to many balls, but I’ve known myself around a couple dancing events.”

“Are you willing to prove yourself?” Pariston got up from his seat, walked over to Ging, and as the phonograph started to play another orchestra song, he extended his hand to him. “May I have this dance?”

The shorter man hesitated, but unable to admit defeat to the other, he took the hand and immediately got pulled into the starting position for a Viennese Waltz, his right hand in Paristons, his left rested on the others upper arm; Paristons right hand rested on Gings shoulder-blade. As they started to move, Ging had to concentrate hard to not look at his feet, seeing as it would be an admission to not being confident in his steps, though locking eyes with the other man stirred something uncomfortable within him. He couldn’t clearly remember the last time he had danced with someone else, so the closeness of it felt foreign. As the music continued, they waltzed through the room, at first only in the ‘natural box’, though soon Pariston led them to side whisks and natural turns, a steadily increased pace.

“I do have to admit, you’re better at this than I initially thought.” Pariston smiled.

“You shouldn’t judge a book so easily by its cover.”

“You shouldn’t forget who has the lead.” Before Ging could question the statement, he was dipped low as the orchestral music seemed to reach its climax, hands immediately grabbing for more hold before he’d meet the ground. In the end, he clung to Paristons shoulders in a move that lacked grace but not force. The other man meanwhile had let go of his shoulder-blade, and instead had both hands secure at Gings waist. “Afraid I would drop you?”

“It’s what I would have done.”

The two men laughed and stood themselves up straight once again, but their hands remained where they were, whether it was a conscious decision or not. A slower song started, the name of it at the tip of Gings tongue, and as he pondered it, he may not have even noticed that they started a slow dance together. It was a simple three-step, and Pariston would occasionally close his eyes to hum along to the music, uncaring of the closer contact between him and the other man; The longer it went on, so did Ging.

“I didn’t think you’d agree to dance.”

“Maybe the alcohol made me more susceptible to idiocy.”

“There was no alcohol in that wine, Ging. Or at least not enough, to get you anywhere near an inebriated state.” He chuckled.

“A wine without alcohol can barely call itself a wine. What is in it, then?”

“I wonder if you can guess~”

Ging thought about it for a minute, determined to prove himself better once again. “It was very sweet, but too water-y to just be crushed fruit.” This only elicited a humoured ‘Mhm’. “I think it is a process of combining younger wine with some sort of flavoured tea.”

“Incorrect, but a good try~”

“What is it then?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

Ging rolled his eyes, but continued their slow dance, as he got used to the hands on his waist that occasionally tapped their fingers to the music. “Keeping secrets must be another of your hobbies. The wine, the portraits…” He trailed off when he realized that Pariston inched closer; He smiled, self-satisfied, dark eyes focused solely on the other. Suddenly Ging felt the blood in his veins run cold, like faced with a predator in the woods, his heart was beating in this throat. Every nerve in his body started to feel shocked and screamed to run. But he couldn’t. Didn’t want to. And so, he stood still when Paristons ghostly cold hand cradled the side of his face as if another rare piece of art. When Ging didn’t flinch away from the touch, the blond placed a first kiss just on the corner of the others mouth. Then another. And another. Until Ging turned his head just enough to connect their lips.

Paristons lips were soft and faintly tasted of that sweet wine, with each kiss his hold on the others waist would tighten, like he was afraid he’d turn and run. But instead, the shorter man wrapped his arms around the blonds’ neck, even a tad eager to press his tongue between his lips, to be closer, to taste more. Every new connected kiss made his stomach twist in just the right way, he relished that it felt dangerous, maybe even wrong, and yet so satisfying.

After what felt like hours, though realistically it was probably a couple of minutes, their lips parted and Gings head was left spinning as Pariston continued to kiss along his jaw. But there is one thing that pulled at his mind, annoyingly so.

“The townspeople believe you’re some kind of evil spirit or monster-” he laughed lightly, not sure if it was because of that ridiculous thought, or because of the soft lips that were caressing the underside of his jaw.

“Oh, Ging,” Pariston sighed against his skin in a way that chased goosebumps up his spine. “They are right.”

“Wha- “Suddenly a sharp, paralyzing pain shot from Gings neck to the ends of his body. He couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, all he could do was to drive his nails deeper into the others shoulder, and let out quiet gasps. Meanwhile a thumb stroked over his cheekbone as if to soothe, the other hand on the small of his back to keep him from collapsing.

He wondered if he was going to die here, at the hands of a vampire that he’d been warned about. He wondered if he’d been deliberately seduced- did he consider himself seduced? – just to be killed.

He threaded his fingers through the vampire’s hair, with no energy to pull him away from himself, just enough to hold on. Acceptance. He felt cold.

A tongue lapped over the fresh wound on his neck, followed by a few soft kisses. The pain subsided to a dull numbness. His line of sight started to darken. Pariston cradled Gings face in his hands, lips and chin stained red. He pressed another kiss to his lips, so tender as if he had never revealed his true nature, and the shorter man but couldn’t help but huff out a laugh with the last of his strength.

“Tastes like wine.”

“Another secret revealed to you.”

The last thing Ging saw was Paristons smile and dark eyes. Then blackness.

.

.

When Ging came to, the past day felt like a distant dream. He felt no pain, only a comfortable warmth that surrounded him, and someone’s fingers that combed through his hair.

Slowly, he opened his eyes. A dim room he did not recognize, next to him a bedstand with a carafe of water and some medical tools that included gauze, needle, thread, and a dirtied scalpel. He himself was still wearing the clothes he had been presented with after his spontaneous shower. He turned his head to the other side, and there sat Pariston on the same bed, one hand in the man’s hair, the other held an aged book. At the movement, he retracted his hand in shock, before his signature smile flashed once more.

“You’re awake.”

“I’m alive.” It somewhat hurt to talk, and as he reflexively reached for his own throat, he felt a thick bandage at the side of his neck. “You kept me alive. Why?” He started to sit himself up, not wanting to be physically talked down to.

“I don’t want to be bored. You’re the first visitor I’ve had in a while that managed to keep my interest. I guess I am pretty selfish.”

“You are.” Ging reached out to brush a strand of hair from Paristons face, before gently pulling him in for a kiss. “So am I.”

He felt his stomach twist again as they kissed, so sickly sweet, and he wanted more. He deepened the kiss, drank up every relaxed sigh that came from the other, let himself be greedy and reach for more. Even though Pariston almost killed him, still could, he touched Ging like he was something treasured, close enough to not let him escape, but not enough to break him. And maybe that’s what Ging wanted, to be desired, even in a destructive, dangerous sense.

As the feeling returned to all his limbs, he took advantage of it to properly sit himself up, then straddle Paristons lap. He broke their kiss, leaving the other somewhat panting. Again, the blonds’ hand was at the side of his face, not as cold this time, and his thumb traced small circles into his cheek.

“How often have you coerced someone here, just to feed?”

Pariston closed his eyes in thought, “It would be pointless to keep count. But no one has ever made it as far as you have.”

This prompted Ging to claim the vampires’ lips with his own in a possessive kiss. Paristons free hand started to trail up and down the shorter man’s thigh; In response, Ging started to feel his way from Paristons shoulders to his chest, lean but firm muscle.

And no heartbeat.

Of course, there wouldn’t be. He was dead.

Ging thought about how, maybe in a different lifetime, the two of them could have met through different means, both alive and entirely human. He thought about the countless people that have stepped into this mansion, never to return to their families. How even he would one day pass, either through natural means or because Pariston had lost interest in his existence. Would he ever let someone else get this far, after Ging? He felt cold steel in his hand.

This time, Pariston was the first to break the kiss, only for a moan to escape his lips. By now, they had slipped further down the mattress, with Pariston flat on his back while Ging still firmly straddled his hips. He looked so human under Ging, dark eyes half lidded and even the faintest flush on his cheeks.

Ging thought about how long he could stay here. About all the paintings in this mansion and their history he could study. About shared dinners and slow dancing to orchestral music. The image of himself as a corpse, entirely dry, flashed in his mind. A wine bottle with his name written on it.

Ging took Paristons hand from his face and held it over his racing heart. “I don’t think someone else has ever done this to me.” It felt ridiculous to say but it also tasted so bitter with truth to say out loud. His other hand grasped the foreign, cold object harder.

“What an honour~” Pariston purred, and he tried to lean up to unite in another kiss before he got pushed back into the mattress.

“We are both selfish, Paris. I don’t want you to do this to anyone else. And I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

In the vampires’ eyes flashed confusion, irritation, and then the glistening object that Ging had hidden. The scalpel from the bedside table. And in his last moment, he smiled with such honesty, that it felt like it was Ging who would receive that fatal blow to the heart.

It was over in a moment.

The scalpel, with enough force, had swiftly pierced through the ribs all the way to his heart, and after a pained gasp and a bit of twitching, Pariston Hill had died.

Ging remained seated for a while; He did not move, just looked. He wondered if he should cry, if he even could if he wanted to. But in the end, he closed Paristons eyes, gave him a parting kiss on the forehead, and left.

He never told anyone about the paintings.

Never told anyone about what he experienced in the mansion.

He wanted to be selfish and keep this secret just between himself and Pariston. Forever.

[flyingkiki]

The Screaming Bunny (2/?)

A day late, but Happy Halloween. You asked for a Halloween treat, so here it is. Enjoy!

~

Halloween was a terrible time to go out. The streets were packed with people dressed up as drunk monsters, superheroes, sexy costumes of whatever possible, and terrible imitations of the Gotham criminals and their ragtag gangs. Also, sexy Joker costumes, ugh. Petty crimes also saw a spike on this night in Gotham, though it was nothing the GCPD or Batman and Robin couldn’t handle on their own.

Admittedly, Tim should be out on patrol right now or perhaps working on those new business acquisition reports for WE. There are a million other things he should be doing right now – like monitoring criminal activities tonight or keeping an eye out on anyone dressed like an Arkham Criminal. He should be also reading a new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, because Human Resource has been getting on his case to finish the book.

There are honestly a million other things Tim should be doing right now. He definitely should not be squeezing through a packed crowd of sweat, latex, leather, and lace.

But here he was at The Screaming Bunny. In that stupid domino mask. Again.

The private club had sent out an email to all its members of tonight’s “Spooks and Spanks” event. He shouldn’t be here but Tim would be lying if he said that he was not intrigued after the interesting run-in last month.

The club was packed tonight, drawing a crowd dressed in virtually anything or nothing. A couple of bloodied nurses in uniforms too tight to pass hospital standards scurried past Tim and disappeared around the corner. Tim carefully maneuvered his way through the club and towards the bar, hopeful to get a drink.

Soft techno music filled the club and allowed people in the lounge area to either dance or talk to each other. Club policy allowed for alcoholic drinks only by the bar and common area, Tim learned. Alcoholic drinks, and drunk members for that matter, were not allowed in any of the pleasure chambers or dungeons.

Yes, Tim made an effort to go through the club’s policies.

“Hey, what can I get you?” a topless bartender appeared, dressed nothing but a pair of extremely tight police shorts with a pair of handcuffs dangling from his belt.

“Just a scotch,” Tim replied, this time unfazed by the display of nakedness (or the potential violations of health codes by the lack of clothes). He paid for the drink as it slid across the counter and thanked the guy.

Picking up his drink, Tim pushed himself away from the bar and idly surveyed the scene in front of him. Save for the general nakedness, and the occasional grunts and whipping noises that drifted through the room, the club seemed very much like any other Halloween party tonight. A woman dressed in stockings from head to toe walked past him, roughly tugging along a man in nothing but boxers and a latex mask over his head. Tim blinked at the sight and took a sip of his drink, a few stray thoughts flittering through his mind but he quickly squashed these.

There were a couple of tables and lounge chairs in the corners of the room, Tim thought it would be best perhaps to hang out in the back for a while and let the whole party scene sink in. Tonight was the first time he was here as an actual patron and not tailing a criminal. Dodging a couple of plastic horns and demon wings, Tim easily slid through the standing crowd and spotted an empty spot on the couch next to a couple of purple and pink furry monsters (monsters? Tim wasn’t all too sure).

Sliding past a group of men in lingerie, Tim made a beeline for the lounge area. He immediately stopped in his tracks however and quickly spotted why he came tonight. Or why his curiosity peeked in the first place. His grip tightened around his scotch glass and something in his chest fluttered.

Over the crowd of lace, latex, leather, nakedness, and fake blood, purple eyes caught his own. Tim swallowed and felt his breath catch.

From across the room, Raven – Rachel – stared at Tim for a millisecond before turning her attention back to the couple covered in body paint seated across of her.  He watched her chuckle and talk to the couple before her eyes slid back to him and he swore her lips quirked just a little bit. He felt heat rush to his face as he took in her appearance, her pale skin and black hair stood out against the white of her impossibly tight leather corset. And, oh, was that a little halo over her head?

Should he go over? Tim found himself momentarily fumble. Of course he should. Wasn’t this why he came back? Because he was curious? Because he wanted – Tim blinked and caught his thoughts as Raven waved him over.

Oh god.

“You’re back,” Raven said to him once he finally approached their table. She offered him a playful smile and her purple eyes danced in the dim lights. She tilted her head and leaned back just a little bit as she eyed him with that amused smile of hers. “Why don’t you join us?” she asked, scooting down the leather sofa to make room for him in their little corner of the lounge area.

“Sure,” Tim felt a rush of emotions run down his back at the invitation – and that smile – and sat down next to her, leaving respectable room between them. Trying not to focus too much on an intriguingly amused Raven (why was she so amused? He needed to know), he placed his scotch glass on the small glass table and offered the other two women a smile. “Hello.”

“This is Tracy and Lady X,” Raven introduced, pointing at a small redheaded woman in a skimpy Super Mario costume with a dog collar and a blonde woman in complete leopard body paint. Raven gracefully pointed at each woman with her drink in her hand. Tilting her head towards Tim, she eyed him in mild amusement. “And this is…” she trailed off.

“Red,” Tim supplied smoothly and smiled at the two women. “Nice to meet you,”

“Red,” Raven repeated with an amused lilt in her voice before hiding her smile into her mojito glass. She leaned into the sofa, looking impossibly comfortable and blissfully ignoring how surreal everything truly was – Tim and her in club filled with naked people. It just felt surreal. He swallowed.

“So what are you supposed to be?” asked Tracy curiously, leaning forward just a little bit and eyeing Tim’s costume skeptically.

Tim felt his neck and cheeks burn at the attention. He had not put much thought into wearing any particular costume tonight – because what does one wear to a private BDSM club Halloween party really? “Ah, a random biker?” he replied, chuckling softly. He hoped his jeans and the leather vest he was wearing passed those standards.

Tracy chuckled with him and offered him a sympathetic smile. “Good try,”

“Random Biker Red,” Raven hummed next to him barely audible over the noise. He caught her staring at him, that amused smile never really disappearing. Tim swallowed and caught her eye briefly before reaching for his drink.

“How did you guys meet?” asked Lady X curiously. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before,”

“He’s a new bunny,” Raven easily supplied and Tim felt his inside twist lightly at the word bunny. There it was again and he fought every urge not to openly stare at Raven. “I just bumped into him a few weeks ago,” she said.

“Ohh,” Tracy leaned forward just a little bit, her eyes sparkling in clear mischief. “Is he going to be your dom, Rachel?”

Tim coughed loudly into his drink at her words and he was sure Raven felt his spike of emotions as she shot him a quick glance. Dom? As in – holy shit. He blinked and tried to ignore how loudly his heart beat in his ears. He ignored the hot jolt than ran through him. “I – ugh, her what?”

Raven rolled eyes at Tracy and sent Tim an amused smile. “Easy. He’s new, Tracy,”

Ignoring Raven, the woman dressed up like a very sexy Mario brother leaned over their glass table and whispered very loudly. “She’s looking for a dom or a switch, just so you know,”

“Oh,” breathed Tim and his gaze involuntarily turned to Raven, who quirked her lips lightly in response. Well, was that information Tim needed? He wasn’t sure. But will he store this information for later? Yes. He inhaled softy as his stomach flopped and stray thoughts flittered through his head. He silently wondered if Dick knew about all of this – Dick would kick is his ass if he knew he was here with Raven.

“So you were saying about your plans?” Raven turned her attention back to the couple across of them. Crossing her legs, Tim’s heart jumped at the sight of thigh-high white stockings, Raven comfortably leaned back into the sofa and eyed her friends. If she could sense his keyed up emotions, she displayed no indication. “Are you expanding your studio or not?”

“Oh, yeah. Like I said we hit a few snags when we opened one of the old walls and discovered that the piping needed replacing. Most of the pipes are ancient like Gotham,” Tracy made a face and took a hearty swig from her cosmopolitan. “I’m talking to some contractors to see what can be done,”

Raven frowned. “Didn’t they tell you about the piping issue when they sold you the adjacent complex?”

Lady X rolled her eyes and leaned back into her seat with a sigh of exasperation. Some of her silver bracelets clinked as she moved around. “They did but we didn’t expect that it’d be that bad.” She shrugged and sent Tim an annoyed look. “Some of these brokers are just lying assholes, you know,”

Tim blinked trying to catch up with the conversation. Admittedly he was a bit miffed at the normalcy of the conversation on renovation work in the middle of a BDSM club. But then again, what did he expect to hear tonight? “I’m sorry, I’m not following?” he blinked and offered them an apologetic smile.

“Tracy owns an art studio,” Raven explained and took a tiny sip from her mojito. “They’re expanding the studio but hit some snags along the way,”

Tim nodded. “You’re an artist? That’s amazing,” he said. Tracy blushed at the praise while Lady X seemed to beam with pride. Leaning forward over the table just a little bit, she grinned at Tim.

“She painted all of this,” she said and waved a perfectly manicured hand over her body. “Such a talented artist, my little pet is,” she practically purred and sent Tracy a fond smile.

Tim blinked and ignored the pet endearment. Briefly glancing at Raven, he shared an amused smile with her, and looked at the intricate leopard body paint on the woman’s body. He nodded and smiled at them. “That’s really beautiful,” he said.

“Thanks,” Tracy beamed. She fiddled with her empty cosmopolitan glass. “So yeah, I’m trying to get something arranged with a few contractors to fix the old piping. We tore down a few walls to open up the space and discovered the piping was rusty and not up to building code. We need that fixed before we can proceed with expansion renovations of the annex building,”

“You could also go after the guys who sold you the place. If they were not totally upfront with the issues of the complex you’re getting, maybe there’s something that could be done?” suggested Tim. And he immediately went into details of some legal remedies they could take.

“Oh wow. Okay,” Tracy nodded and released a deep breath. “That sounds like something we could do,”

Tim took a sip of the last of his scotch and offered her a smile. “Talk to your lawyer to figure something out,”

Lady X sent Raven a look and her black eyes sparkled mischievously under the dim orange lights. “Looks like your new friend is pretty useful,” she said.

Raven chuckled and shrugged. “Looks like it,” she said playfully and the two shared a smile.

A man dressed in nothing but black appeared next to their table suddenly. The words ‘Dungeon Monitor’ were written across a bright orange sash he wore. “The St. Andrew’s Cross is ready for you, Lady X,” he said before turning around and heading back to the pleasure areas.

“Wonderful,” Lady X clapped her hands and stood up. “Come, my pet,” Tim watched as Lady X bent over just a little bit and hooked one of her fingers through the large silver hoop that hung from Tracy’s collar. She tugged the woman into a standing position and gently pulled her away from their table. “You’ll come watch us?” she asked them over her shoulder.

“Watch?” Tim breathed, his brain catching up with what that truly meant.

Raven smiled and shrugged at the woman. “We’ll try to catch up. Enjoy,”

The woman in leopard body paint shrugged with a smile. “Your loss,” she said before roughly tugging Tracy through the crowd.

Tim watched them disappear around the corner and into one of the pleasure corners, or dungeons, he wasn’t all too sure. They were likely the same – and did they just invite them to watch them? He stared at the corner for a second too long.

“Curious?”

Raven’s voice brought him back from his thoughts and Tim turned back to Raven, and finally, finally¸ got a better look at her as she turned her full attention towards him and shifted in her seat to face him. She was dressed in a plain leather white corset and tiny white booty shorts that really left nothing to the imagination. He was sure he stared a second too long, as Raven tilted her head expectantly and the corners of her eyes crinkled just a little bit in amusement.

“Oh,” Tim breathed and felt his ears ring just a little bit. He watched her shift gracefully in her seat and folded one of her legs under her as she faced him. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. He swallowed nervously and surveyed the crowd of naked people around them. “I’m honestly not sure why I came back,”

Raven shrugged and idly took a sip from her mojito. “That’s okay. It’s a lot to take in,” she said. She offered him a small smile. “It’s nice you’re back though,”

Something stirred inside of him and Tim smiled lightly. “Yeah?”

Raven tilted her head lightly and her eyes shone under the dim lights. They could hear the loud cracks of a whip through the air, and Tim watched her gaze slip over his shoulder. Her lips curled just a tiny bit. He swallowed as a thought crossed his mind – did she want that? He felt heart jump into his throat at the stray thought and watched a languid smile grow on her lips as her attention turned back to him. “How do you like it so far?” she asked as she propped her left elbow on the back of the sofa and dropped her chin into her hand, eyeing him in amusement.

“I got good company,” Tim chuckled as Raven snorted softly. He absently fiddled with his glass before placing it on the table. “I’m surprised how normal conversations are here,”

“What? The building expansions? What did you think we’d talk about here?” Raven asked teasingly. She watched Tim look around briefly and take in the people milling around the lounge area. “I don’t know,” he replied as he turned back to Raven.

Raven smiled assuringly. “Clubs like these are close to any other club. What makes places like these special is the level of trust and respect that goes into these places and among the patrons. You come here as yourself, you can explore and enjoy what you like – with appropriate safety limits – and there’s no judgement. Just as safe space for being yourself. With the level of trust and respect that goes into places like these, you’d be surprised how much safer they are compared to your regular clubs,” she said. She looked around briefly before turning back to Tim. “Consent is important here.”

“I noticed that,” said Tim, nodding his head in agreement. He did see how vastly more respectful the crowd was here compared to any other club he had been too. He turned his attention back to her, taking in how comfortable, and alluring, she looked. “So, I’m a Random Biker, what are you?” he asked playfully.

Raven laughed, a sound he was growing to quite like hearing, and titled her head making the little plastic halo dance over her head. “I thought it’d be funny to dress like an angel, all things considering,” she said.

“You make a pretty impressive angel,” he said before he could really think it through. They both paused, ambient techno music falling over them, and they shared a look. Tim watched as Raven’s lips lifted into a small, pleasant smile.

“Were you able to have a look around?” she asked suddenly.

Tim shook his head. “No, when I saw you three I just about arrived.”

“Well then,” Raven breathed and offered him a mysterious smile. The ambient techno music shifted into a louder dance beat and the crowd cheered. “You’re not busy tonight, finally,” she began and leaned into his space just a little bit. He could faintly smell her lavender perfume. “Let’s go have a look around tonight.”

He watched her gracefully stand up and Tim was sure his breath caught in his throat as she stood before him in nothing but her leather corset. He knew it was impolite to stare, but – she was a sight. It was mindboggling to see such a different side of Raven from all the years he had known her – and he would be lying to say he was thirsty to see this side of her more.

As a muted groan drifted through the air and the two shared a look, and Tim admitted that yes, he was curious. So damn curious – he was Tim Drake after all.

“Sure,” he said. He stood up next to her and Raven beamed, bending over and picking up something discarded on the table. A thin riding crop.

Despite her strappy heels, Raven barely came up to his chin. She tilted her head up just a little bit and Tim watched as the shadows of some of the spider decorations danced across her collarbones and cheeks. He held his breath. She held the riding crop in her hands and smiled. “Great, let’s make sure you have fun tonight,” she told him softly.

Tim desperately wanted to know what that meant.

[autisticpeterparkerheadcanons]

They say if you can’t find content for something, then make it yourself, so here’s autistic!Peter Parker headcanons that literally no one asked for. I’ve seen some, but they all seem to be very similar, and I need MORE and also I have a different take on it, SO. (My brain that needs Categories for Things doesn’t know what to do with this exactly because it seems that a lot of people think the common labels are too ableist and I don’t disagree, so I’m calling this stealth!autism because it’s Not Obvious And Undiagnosed But Still Relevant, AKA me, lol.)

Under a cut because this monster weighs in at just over 2k words. Oops.

Also, ya know, a little bit AU because I hate that Tony sold the Tower. :P

Tony was the first to realize anything was different about the kid, after he started spending more time actively mentoring him after the Vulture fiasco.

It was small things at first. He didn’t think much about it. The first couple of months, most sarcasm went completely over the kid’s head (which, okay, Tony’s brand of humor isn’t really mainstream anymore, he thinks -- he doesn’t speak meme -- and maybe that was the problem because the kid does slowly catch on to it, and fewer and fewer awkward moments ensue as time passes). He stuttered and didn’t often make eye contact, but he wrote that off as more nerves than anything. He rambled about one topic non-stop sometimes, but he wrote it off as anxiety -- a need to fill the silence. His hands were always busy, if not with anything productive, then a constant fidgeting. Once again, probably just nerves.

But as time passed and Peter became decidedly more comfortable around him, none of those things disappeared. Maybe he stutters a little less, but nothing about his mannerisms changed. And the longer he knows Peter, the more little things come to his attention.

Peter has a hard time taking verbal instructions. It’s not that he’s not listening or focusing. It’s more like he just doesn’t...comprehend? process? It just doesn’t always stick. And that’s okay. Tony can work with that. He makes Peter repeat instructions to make sure he’s got it, or he writes it down if he can’t just show the kid himself. Everybody learns differently, after all. (Tony would know.)

Peter often stayed for dinner when he came to the Tower, and Tony noticed the things he liked to eat and the things he wouldn’t. “You don’t like mushrooms? Uncultured!” -- A shrug. “I don’t mind the taste, but I can’t stand the texture. Same goes for shrimp.”

(He files that information away for safe keeping. Do Not Make Shrimp.)

And, really that was just the start. The seemingly ‘little things’ piled up.

One night, after Peter had left, Tony was puzzling everything over. Trying to figure this oddly eccentric kid out. Pepper offered a listening ear.

“It sounds like he could be on the spectrum? It’s a lot of little things, but they add up. It fits.”

And, oh. That made sense actually. But... “Why would he not tell me that?”

“You’re still his hero. He probably doesn’t want you to think any differently of him.”

So Tony doesn’t say anything. There’s no tactful way to ask something like that, after all. Peter will tell him when he’s ready to -- if he ever is -- Tony figures. But until then, he’ll just keep adjusting. Life is probably hard enough to navigate, no need to make the workshop that way, too.

Peter doesn’t know. He’s always been aware that he’s different, sure, but he has Ned and -- more recently -- MJ as friends and (most of) the Decathlon team, so it’s okay. He doesn’t mind, not really.

(He didn’t present in the ‘normal’ ways when he was little, so, just like Tony, all the adults in his life wrote off the ‘little things’ as something else.)

And then everything happens and suddenly he’s spending a lot of time with the Tony Stark and getting to work in his lab with him, and if the Tony Stark does’t mind that he’s kind of weird and awkward, then he must not be that weird or awkward. Tony doesn’t interrupt his rambles or look annoyed by them. He doesn’t comment on the fidgeting or stuttering. Peter doesn’t know when the hero worship ended, but he thinks it probably had something to do with the sheer amount of patience the man has for him and his oddities.

(And, don’t get him wrong, Tony is still his hero, but it’s different now.)

Besides his aunt and Ned, he thinks Tony might just be the most comfortable person to be around.

Second semester starts, and he finds out he needs to take an elective instead of a free period in order to stay on track to graduate. Unfortunately there’s only one class that’ll fit in his schedule as is and he doesn’t really want to mess around with the placements of his other classes, so he ends up taking some sort of health class, but not the fun home-ec ones where you get to cook and eat the stuff you make. He’s not exactly dreading it, but he’s not looking forward to it either.

Instead of having an exam for midterms, they have a project, the topics assigned at random, things like depression and anxiety and ADHD. Peter’s topic is Autism Spectrum Disorder. Like most people his age, he has a vague idea of what that is, but he thinks it’ll be interesting to learn more about, so he’s at least not dreading doing research.

He starts with the basics, what it is and how it works and the ‘markers’ of how you can tell if someone is. Which leaves him vaguely confused. Because some of these things sound like him? But he’s not, so.

He ends up in forums, because he knows that the strictly medical side of things often doesn’t actually do it justice with how it is to actually live with something. On every forum he slogs though there’s always at least one thread about not being formally diagnosed at all or not until adulthood. And he always reads those because how could something like that get missed? But he quickly finds out it’s really pretty common (or, at least, more common than he thinks it should be).

He goes to blogs, too. Between the two, he finds a million and one things that people on the spectrum deal with that ‘official’ sites don’t tell you. Actual people relate what it’s actually like, and suddenly there’s this seed planted in his mind because holy crap does he identify with this and suddenly a lot of things make more sense.

He’s not sure how he gets there, but he ends up on an online AQ test and he takes it. He doesn’t technically score high enough, but he’s borderline (and the higher end of that, even, barely missing the lowest number, and if he’s honest, a couple questions he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer and that may have made a difference), and the site itself says, “89% of those who fall in the borderline category are diagnosed” and...

He doesn’t really know what to do with this information. He’s almost 16 and he’s old enough to understand this kind of stuff so surely if May knew she would have told him. But how the heck do you even ask about something like this? “Hey, May, am I autistic?” just wasn’t going to cut it. And if she didn’t know, that would be even more awkward. So he doesn’t. He buries the thought and ignores it the best he can.

But Tony notices because of course he does. He asks if Peter is alright and spends an awful lot of time staring at him with that expression no matter how many times he says he’s fine. Eventually, Tony does drop it with a quick “I’m always here to listen if you need to talk -- no judgment” and Peter appreciates that more than he’d like to admit, but just like with May, how the heck do you start a conversation like this one? So he still doesn’t.

For a while after, everything is fine. He turns in his project, gets an A on it, and he puts it out of his mind.

Finals pass, and summer vacation starts, which means he has more time to swing around Queens and more time to spend with Tony in the lab. This is going to be the best summer ever he’s pretty darn sure.

It’s late June, and Peter is staying the weekend because May is out of town and any excuse is a good one. AC/DC is playing over the lab’s speakers, just like normal, and he’s rambling about something when he suddenly becomes very aware that that’s what he’s doing, that he’s actually info-dumping, and -- he cuts off mid-sentence. Because he hasn’t thought about this in months, but it’s back again. What if...?

He zones out, he’s not sure for how long, but the music clicks off and suddenly Tony is sitting directly in front him, obviously concerned. Very concerned, because he’s not even trying to hide it. “Peter? What’s wrong?” No nickname? Tony is definitely on to him, and he’s not going to get away with saying ‘nothing’ this time. He stares down at his hands, and he can’t help but rub his fingers together (he doesn’t really have anything else to fidget with at the current moment so).

He’s very aware of the silence and that Tony is still waiting for an answer. But he doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything.

(To Tony’s credit, he doesn’t so much as shift or sigh. He just...sits and waits. He’s not usually such a patient man, but Peter is different. He can be endlessly patient with Peter. Pepper says it’s because Peter is practically his kid, and he’s not so sure about that, but whatever.)

The silence is uncomfortable and he can feel himself starting to panic, but he forces himself to breathe and try to unscramble his thoughts. Because whatever he says, he’s determined to not say it bluntly. There has to be a subtle way of asking...maybe...right? He’s determined to try, anyway.

In the end, he settles on a mumbled, “Mr Stark? Do you think I’m... different?”

(And Tony has to steel himself because he’s known for more than six months at this point and he’s just been waiting for this conversation so you’d better not mess this up, Stark.) “Maybe. But that’s not a bad thing. Normal people don’t accomplish things worth remembering.”

“You don’t think I’m...weird? or awkward?”

“You’re a teenager. ‘Weird’ and ‘awkward’ are kinda part of the job description.”

Peter almost smiles. He knows Tony is joking with him, but... “No, I mean....” He cuts off. He doesn’t know what he means, really, and trying to figure it out is exhausting. “I don’t know. Never mind. It’s not important.”

“If something is bothering you, that makes it important to me.”

Peter isn’t sure what to think of that, and silence drags on again.

For a hot minute, Tony thinks he blew it. But then Peter speaks up again, and when he finally starts, he rambles it all out and doesn’t even try to sort it out. He just...wants it out. “I just... I don’t fit in, Mr Stark, and I’ve always known that and I’ve been okay with that because I’m just me, ya know? And if other people don’t like me, that’s on them not me, or at least that’s what I’ve always been taught and everything, it’s just I’m weird and I know it, and I’m just...” There’s a pause, and he’s not sure Tony even hears what he ends with, “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

(At this point, Tony realizes that Peter probably didn’t have any idea until a couple of months ago. Oh. Well.)

When Tony replies, it’s not how Peter thinks he will. “Does this have something to do with that mid-term project you had to do?” He finally meets Tony’s gaze again, and Tony adds with a smile, “You were acting kinda like this then, too, kid.”

He looks back down at his hands and mumbles. “Autism. That’s what my project was on.”

“And you think you are?”

Peter can’t even find it in him to nod. He just...keeps staring at his hands and waits for the other shoe to drop because surely this is it, this’ll be the thing that’s too much on top of everything else, and Tony will boot him out because he doesn’t want to deal with it.

It’s only quiet for a moment before Tony says casually, “You wanna know who else is on the spectrum? Einstein. Or, I guess I should say was, but that’s irrelevant.”

Peter is looking at him again, because What???

Tony smiles at the look on Peter’s face. “I’m serious. People who know far more about it than I do say he probably was.” He shrugs. “So your brain works a little differently. So what? It just means that you’ll see answers no one else will. So the way I see it, that just means you’re gonna change the world, kid.”

Peter decides maybe he can live with this after all.

(They go back to work, the music clicks back on, and it’s a solid ten minutes before it dawns on Peter. His head snaps up and over to where Tony is working a few feet away, and says, “You already knew, didn’t you?”

Tony just laughs and says, “Pep guessed before I did really, but I guess you could say that. I’ve had a hunch since around Christmastime.”

And that puts him more at ease than anything yet. Tony knew and still treated him exactly the same as before. He decides maybe this is okay.)

(Not a week later, when Peter shows up at the Tower to work on stuff, he finds a box on his workbench. Inside are various fidget toys. All he can do is stare as Tony comes up beside him.

“Try ‘em out. Let me know what you like. That way I can have a stash because God knows you lose things like no one I’ve ever known.” It’s all said with a fond smile, and Peter knows it’s true -- he does lose things like crazy.

Peter decides he likes the cubes, and Tony is true to his word. “This one stays here, on your table. Here’s another one that stays on your desk at home. This one is a spare for your backpack, and this one is to carry around wherever. I also have three more in the drawer over there for when you inevitably lose one.”

They’re all superhero-themed, and he’s pretty sure Tony commissioned the designs especially for him, though he can’t prove it.

At some point a weighted blanket appears in his room in the Tower after a movie night where Tony pulls out his and Peter comments how AMAZING it is. He gets another one for home for his birthday. Both are also custom-made superhero-themed colors.)

[sudoscience]

New In Town Ch 2: Some Things Are Universal

Once again, I suggest reading the original on AO3.

Summary: Rudy's first day working for Asgore, featuring a brief appearance by Kris and special guest star Comedian Dad.

After breakfast, I decide to go down to Flower King and tell Asgore I'll accept his job offer. He is once again watering the flowers, and I begin to wonder if plants really need this much water. Maybe that's why everything I've tried growing dies. Then again, I do know that overwatering is also possible, but that's really about the extent of my knowledge when it comes to plant care. Asgore's the expert here, so I won't question his judgment.

When he turns to greet me, he once again seems caught off guard. This time, however, his look is that of pleasant surprise. "Oh! I take it you've made up your mind?"

Am I that easy to read? Or would he have sounded so hopeful even if I had been coming to tell him I'd found work elsewhere?

"Yes, as a matter of fact," I say. "I've decided I'll take you up on your offer."

"Excellent! Why don't you keep an eye on the store for a bit? I need to go pick up some more supplies."

Really? I haven't even been here 5 minutes, and he's going to leave me by myself? "Wait! I don't even know what to do. I don't really know anything about selling flowers."

"Don't worry! It's usually pretty slow. If anyone comes in, just follow your instincts. Find something you think they'll like, and give them that. If you still need help, here's my cellphone. I shouldn't be gone for very long."

"Okay," I say hesitantly. I guess I should be glad he already trusts me this much. After he leaves, I realize we haven't even discussed my pay. That seems like something better discussed in person, so I decide to wait until he returns.

---

Asgore is right; it's very slow. Several minutes go past, and there doesn't even seem to be anyone outside the store, let alone in it. I decide to sweep up, maybe straighten a few of the displays, when a customer finally enters. It's an older looking, blue and white bird monster.

"Hey! You're new heah! Where's the othah guy?" the bespectacled bird says.

"Oh, Asgore had to get some more supplies. I'm his new... assistant?" I actually have no idea what my title is. I guess that's something else I'll need to ask him about. "How can I help you today?"

"I was lookin' to buy some flowahs for my wife's grave. Whaddya got?"

"Oh, my condolences. Let's see what we can find." I begin to look through the arrangements Asgore has already made, but nothing catches my eye. Suddenly, I notice a bouquet of white and pale blue flowers, with a few light pink carnations mixed in as accents. I think they're carnations, at least. Have I mentioned I don't really know anything about flowers?

If I were to make some sort of abstract flower art of this bird, this bouquet would probably be the result. The colors are a near-perfect match; I actually hope he doesn't find it too vain. The flowers are for his late wife, after all, not him. "How's this?" I ask.

"Oh, those are wondahful. My wife, she would love 'em. I'll take 'em."

Wow, maybe this is easier than I thought. I move over to the register, then I realize I spoke too soon. None of these flowers have prices on them. "One second, please," I tell my first customer. "I'm not sure how much these cost."

"I guess that means they're free, hahaha!" Some things are universal, I suppose.

I stifle myself from sarcastically telling the customer he should be a comedian before I call Asgore, but he there's no response. Well, he has to have a price list somewhere, or at least an invoice or something so I can know if I'm selling them above cost. I decide to look upstairs.

Huh, I didn't realize he actually lived here. He doesn't seem to have much of an office, though. There's really not much to look through, but I do find something. To my shock, however, it's a note from his landlord demanding that Asgore start selling flowers in lieu of giving them away. I push down my feelings of betrayal for now and decide I'll just have to make up a price.

I don't think I've ever even bought flowers before, so I have no idea what they typically cost. "How's, uh, 50G sound?" I ask. Whatever confidence I had has evaporated as quickly as it came.

"50 bucks and the flowahs? Wow, what a bahgain!"

This time, I give him a sarcastic laugh. "No, really. 50G. Does that sound like a fair price?"

"Listen, kid. I know you're new heah, so I'll cut ya some slack, but I've been coming heah a long time. Asgoah, he's a good friend of mine. An old friend. I'm not pullin' your leg when I say he usually gives 'em to me for free."

"I believe you. But, let me tell you a secret. Don't tell him I said this, but money's a little tight right now. Now, I'd think if you really were good friends with Asgore, you'd want to help him out, right? Isn't that what friends do? I know I'm not your friend, not yet, but how about I cut you a deal? What would you say to 40G?"

"I'd say, 'Hey, you look lonesome. How's about movin' into my wallet?'" He laughs uproariously at his own joke. Even though he's really starting to get on my nerves, I give him a little chuckle, too.

"Does that sound like a deal?" I ask.

"35G sounds even bettah," he replies.

I really have no idea what any of this stuff costs, but 35G sounds way too low to me. "Look, I really don't think I can go lower than 40G. Any lower than that, and we're losing money." Is it still lying if you think it might actually be true?

"Okay, okay, you drive a hahd bahgain, kid. 40G it is."

"Thank you, sir! Have a great day!" I say as I put the money into the otherwise empty cash register. I'm really going to have to have a long talk with Asgore when he gets back. When is he getting back, anyway? He said he wouldn't be very long, but it's already been nearly an hour and a half.

"You, too, kid," the widower replies. "You're alright, y'know? For a human." I decide to ignore that last part.

---

Finally, Asgore returns. "I'm sorry, that took much longer than I expected. I trust you didn't run into any trouble while I was away?"

"Well, a little bit, but it was nothing I couldn't handle. Oh, I thought of a few questions for you while you were out."

"Oh? I'm all ears."

"First of all, where are the prices for any of these? I looked around, but I couldn't find anything to help. There was only one customer while you were out, but I had to just make up a price, so I ended up charging him 40G. I hope that's not too low."

Asgore gives me a shocked look. "Too low?" he asks. He sounds calm, but I think I detect a slight tinge of anger in his voice. "Too low? Why, I don't think I could ever charge my friends that high of a price. Did I not set the example by giving you your flowers free of charge? Do you think I should have sold them to you instead?"

"Look, I don't wanna sound ungrateful or anything, but, yeah, I was absolutely expecting to pay for the flowers. Because that's what most businesses do: they sell their products. I didn't realize—again, I really appreciate that you gave me the flowers for free—but I didn't realize you were in the habit of doing so."

"I see..."

"That actually brings me to my next question. When I was looking for the prices, I saw the note. From the landlord."

"Oh..." is all Asgore says.

"If you aren't making any money here, how were you going to pay me? Were you expecting me to work for free?"

"No, no, of course not," he stammers. "I, well, I suppose I kind of rushed into hiring you, didn't I? I've always been a man of my word, doing my best to keep my promises. I believe that's the right thing to do. But what are you supposed to do when a promise you've made contradicts a promise to someone else?" He lets out a sigh before continuing.

"This shop has been a lifelong dream of mine, which is saying something considering how long I've lived. You asked me how much these flowers go for. The truth is, 40G is definitely on the low side. Sure, the grocery stores in Twin Falls might sell flowers for even less, but a shop like mine? I could probably get away with charging five times as much. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to keep giving them away for free, either, but then I developed a reputation for it, and I didn't want to let anyone down. Obviously, I failed.

"I may not have let my customers down, but I let down everyone else. I let down C, but, more importantly, I let down my family. I'm a failure."

"Hey, don't be too hard on yourself," I say. "People love your flowers, don't they? And I just proved that they'll pay for them. And they'll pay for them because they love you. We can figure something out."

"You're right. I just need to stay determined. I shouldn't have any problem coming up with 8000G by the end of the month."

My jaw drops. "8000G? That's with the past months' rent, too, right?"

"No, that's how much I'm supposed to pay each month. It takes a lot of water and electricity to grow all these flowers, and C says this is prime real estate. I guess I will have to pay the past months' rent, as well. Let's see, that'd be about 40,000G altogether. Golly, I sure hope C isn't charging interest on that."

"I hope so, too," I say, weakly.

8000G just for one month. If Asgore's right, and the townspeople are willing to pay 200G for his bouquets, then that means we should only have to sell 40 to cover the rent. That should be no problem in what seems to be a town with a population of 15. (I'm being sarcastic here, if that wasn't obvious.)

---

Around lunchtime, Asgore's child stops by. From what little I can see of their face, they seem faintly surprised to see me, maybe slightly amused, too. "Hey, Kris," I say, awkwardly, "how's it going?"

They give me a terse, "Alright." There's a pause, and I get the sense that neither one of us is terribly great at small talk. "Is Asgore around?" they ask.

"Oh, um, I think he's in the back. Do you want me to get him for you?"

"No, I'll wait."

"Okay," I reply. The silence is nearly palpable. I try to break it. "So, uh, how's... school?"

"Okay." I can tell from their tone that they aren't really interested in talking to me. I would have thought the only two humans in town would have bonded more easily, but that doesn't seem to be the case. "How's not getting paid?"

I bite my tongue while reminding myself that they're a teenager. They're practically purpose-built to get under your skin. I suppose I should see it as a small victory that they're even engaging me in conversation at all, even if it is just to antagonize me. "It's not all it's cracked up to be," I say.

Then, inspiration strikes. "You know, Kris, maybe you could help out. If you're not too busy with school, maybe you could make some flyers for your dad's shop. 'Flowers for any occasion, or no occasion at all!' or something like that."

"Why would you want my help?" they retort. "You should ask my brother, Asriel. He's the perfect one. He's gonna save the world, so why not save a flower shop while he's at it?" Their words drip with hostility. "And I'm busy, anyway."

"Alright, forget I asked," I say. "I'm gonna go find Asgore now."

"Don't bother. I'll see him later." They turn to leave.

Out of customer service habit, I tell them to have a great day, but that strikes me as inappropriate, somehow. Part of me thinks it might be worthwhile to have Asgore reach out to his older son for help, but then I realize that would likely only worsen tensions with Kris.

Another part of me ponders asking Asgore if I can be a delivery driver instead, but I can already see the scenario unfolding: I deliver flowers to that comedian from earlier, and wait patiently for him to give me my tip, only for him to say, "Here's a tip: stay in school," leaving me to meekly tell him I have a bachelor's degree and walk away empty-handed. What was it Asgore told himself? I just need to stay determined. This will work out.

[If you enjoyed reading this, please consider reblogging, or even just replying to say what you liked or didn’t like or what you hope happens next. I’m not promising anything, but it’s really hard to stay motivated to work on this when there’s hardly any feedback.]

[mca-attack21]

Riverdale: Deadly Definitions 5

AN: I don’t know how I feel about this part, but we will see. @l4life

Part 1    Part 2    Part 3    Part 4

Tuesday started off as a good day. You woke up in the Andrews’ home to the smell of pancakes which brought both memories and a smile.

“Good Morning Y/n, I hope I didn’t wake you” Mr. Andrews said as you entered the kitchen.

“You didn’t, the smell of the best pancakes in Riverdale may have though” you laughed.

“So, tell me what you have been up to, I haven’t seen you around much lately.”

“Same old, same old. I go to school, go to the Drive-In, go to Pop’s, hang out with Jughead.” you answer, “Not much has really changed”.

“Have you put any more thought into what you want to do after High School?” he asked stacking pancakes on your plate.

“I don’t know. College would be nice, but it’ll depend on the whole money situation.” 

“Well, it wouldn’t pay a lot, but with Archie doing football and music I could use some help in the office at the site. You’d organize paperwork, answer the phones, that kind of stuff. If you are interested” he offered.

“That sounds amazing Mr. Andrews” you chimed. 

“You can walk over after school and I can give you rides afterwards. Where are you staying nowadays anyways?” he asked.

“Here and there. I don’t like to burden anyone for too long” you laughed.

You could tell that there was more he wanted to say on the subject, but he was interrupted by Archie who came clambering down the stairs. 

“You guys started without me” he acted offended.

“Well maybe if it didn’t take you an hour and a half to do your hair.” you joked.

“What can I say, it’s both a blessing and a curse to look this good” Archie returned.

“Oh, how I have missed this” Mr. Andrews added.

The conversation continued with much laughter. Eventually, you and Archie had to go to school. You wished Archie luck with his conversation with the Sheriff, reminding him that he was doing the right thing. And then you went to join Jughead in Biology, where everything started to go down hill. That is when the Sheriff came in and Cheryl stood up admitting she was guilty. 

Now to be fair, she didn’t admit in front of the class to what she was guilty. And it was very much in character for Cheryl to create drama. Still, it was an interesting turn of events to say the least. But the soon enough the whispers died down and the day went on as normal.

During lunch Veronica was appalled because her date from a few days ago, Chuck, posted a picture with a caption about a sticky maple. Within the hour everyone was slut-shaming her. So she and Betty did some digging, and this had happened to many girls at Riverdale High. It had something to do with a playbook and the football team. The were determined to get proof and revenge.

While they chased answers, you decided to tag along as Jughead went to interrogate Doiley and his scouts. This interrogation would give you both good news and bad news. The good news was that Doiley was the one who shot the gun, and the scouts witnessed that the bullet went into the target. The bad news is that they also saw Miss Grundy's car, which could incriminate Archie.

Speaking of Archie, he did tell the police. Well he told them that he was there, with Vegas… When this got back to his Dad, he was less than pleased as he had been told that Archie went camping with Jughead. Tired of the lies and attitude, Mr. Andrews decided to ground his son for two weeks. Archie groaned but accepted his fate, that is until Josie offered for him to come watch and learn from the Pussycats, this week only. So Archie did what he had done many times before and snuck out.  

He was excited about his music. He was looking at a spot as captain of the football team. He had his friends back. Everything was going well for him. Too bad that in a town like Riverdale, nothing good can last.

Through working on the Blue and Gold with Jughead, Betty had come to find out about Archie and Miss Grundy. And because Betty is the way she is, she pulled Veronica into a full-on investigation. They found out that Miss Grundy didn’t exist before moving to Riverdale. Her real name was Jennifer Gibson. And she had a gun in her car. Betty decided to confront Archie with this information. Partially because she loved him and wanted to look out for him and partially because she was still hurt over the entire situation.

Jughead and you were doing an investigation of your own. The Drive-In was closing. And to say that Jughead was upset was an understatement. He had always considered the drive in like a second home. It had been bought by an anonymous bidder and would be demolished within the week. So you were trying to figure out who bought it in order to save it. But the mayor wouldn’t budge. So then it was about saying goodbye. It was your job to make the last showing the best showing, with American Graffiti. 

You had a surprising turnout, the most tickets sold in one night since the opening. It was bittersweet. Afterwards, you and Jug looked around the office. The two of you had so many memories of working together in that room. It was the place he would crash when he and his Dad were fighting. And the place you would come when you needed to think. It was sad to say goodbye, but you had no choice. So the two of you packed your belongings and a few mementos before shutting and locking the door behind you for the last time.

Meanwhile on the other side of town, Alice Cooper was striking again. She found Betty’s diary and because Betty is thorough, she found out everything about Archie and Miss Grundy. So she took it upon herself to drag Fred and her daughter to the school, where they interrupted Archie and Miss Grundy. Little did they know that Archie was just about to do the right thing and cut off all ties to his music teacher. But that didn’t matter now, Alice Cooper was involved. She threatened to go to the police. She had a personal vendetta against Archie Andrews and wanted her daughter to see once and for all what a monster the red headed kid really was. Fortunately, after being called out and blackmailed by Betty, she decided to drop it as long as Miss Grundy quit her job and left town by morning. Archie objected, but his Dad pulled him away. 

Betty sent you a text explaining what happened and asking you to make sure Archie was okay. So for the second night in a row, you found yourself at the Andrews’ house. This time though you climbed a tree and snuck over to Archie’s room where you lightly tapped on his window. 

“Archie” you whisper shouted tapping again. This time you saw movement. Archie came over to the window to see what the noise was. He was surprised to see you and had to fidget with the window for a moment before it opened.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as he helped you into his room.

“Betty told me what happened and I wanted to make sure that you were okay” you answered.

“Honestly? I don’t know what I feel right now”

“I mean that’s understandable, you were ambushed.” 

“Yeah, I wish Betty would have just let me handle it.”

“You know that she was just trying to look out for you”

“Yeah. But she doesn’t know when to stop.” Archie rolled his eyes, “The worst part is that if they were ten minutes later this entire thing would have been over.” 

“What do you mean Arch?”

“The reason I was with Grundy tonight was to tell her that it was over. I was canceling our lessons and wasn’t going to see her anymore.” he answered, “now she is losing her job and having to leave Riverdale because of me”.

“It isn’t your fault Archie, and maybe it is for the best. She can get a fresh start and you can move on.” you try.

“But that is the thing Y/n. She was the only one who believed in me and my music. I needed her help with it. So now I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Well, I can help you with your music. Believe it or not I know my way around a piano, plus I’ve written before,”

“Really? That would be great.”

“Fun fact, I too believe in you Archie Andrews. You deserve the world, and your music matters.”

“Thanks Y/n, that means a lot.”

“Is there anything else on your mind?” you ask not wanting to keep him up.

“No I think I good.” he answered.

“Well then I’m going to sneak out, we can talk about when to do music tomorrow. Keep your head up Archie, things will get better. Goodnight.” you say as you go towards the window. 

“Goodnight Y/n” he called after you.

[that-shamrock-vibe]

TV Review: Crisis on Infinite Earths (Spoilers)

Part Two: Batwoman

Spoiler Warning: I am posting this review the day after the episode airs in the U.S. so if you haven’t yet seen the episode or are waiting to watch the crossover all in on, don’t read on until you have.

Overview:

I was right, and I’m so annoyed they couldn’t keep the high momentum of the first episode here. Where Part One felt like an epic and grand high-stakes crossover opener, Part Two feels more like the typical and somewhat formulaic Arrowverse episode. The problem with that is, it’s supposed to be both! I don’t quite get how the episode that had the most elements I was looking forward to fizzled this much.

But now with the true enemy finally revealing himself, and the promise of more Paragons to find, can Crisis save itself while it destroys the Multiverse?

Avenging the Fallen:

So the episode opens with the three main women of the Arrowverse, Kara, Sara and Kate, drinking in memory of Oliver. I have to say, I know this is a Batwoman episode and these three women in particular do often preach girl power and all that, but the fact Ray isn’t there at least does just make it seem like they wanted this girl power moment, and as Kate said, the Multiverse is still in danger.

As I mentioned when talking about Batwoman in my Elseworlds review, there were problems that fortunately have been fixed by Batwoman the TV series mostly, I still don’t like the fact she’s not a red head, I still don’t like how similar Ruby Rose and Erin Richards look because it’s distracting to me. Even a choppy bob style as Kate has in the comics would differentiate the two more for me.

That being said, Ruby Rose sold the dry cynical humour here as she does in her own series. I loved how she left the drink here but later wished she hadn’t, in that same scene when the Monitor reveals Batman’s secret identity how she demands discretion from the team was funny, Kara finding Earth-99 Luke Fox attractive and Kate finding it weird I thought was hilarious and Ruby Rose sold that very well for me.

Also, for all Kara’s mourning about her lost planet, there was no confirmation on where Alex, Brainy, J’onn, Nia, Kelly or Lena were after the climax of Part One. I know Brainy and I think J’onn are in future parts of this crossover but it would have been good for a side comment saying where they are.

Speaking of mourning, my god Mia goes hard here. It’s funny because in last week’s episode of Arrow, Oliver was all for Diggle finding a way to get Mia and William back to 2040, yet Mia is still around and making understandably emotion-driven but drastic decisions and both Barry and Sara, who are supposed to be older, wiser and more level-headed particularly in this area, are going along with it.

Barry especially, I believe, feels that if he can help Oliver cheat his fate then maybe he can as well considering that Iris has now got the idea that with The Monitor being wrong about how Oliver died maybe Barry won’t die either, that’s just stupid to give someone who has already accepted his fate and has been known to make the stupidest decisions going (Flashpoint) when he feels he can change it. 

Mia decides to use a Lazarus Pit to resurrect Oliver and, like I said, both Barry and Sara agree. Sara does need some convincing I grant you and Caity Lotz does sell that she is never fully on-board with the idea, and why would she be because she knows first hand what the pits do.

I did appreciate the Nyssa mention, I just wish she had been their guide to the pit on Earth-18, instead we get a mini-fight between Mia, Sara and an unaltered Jonah Hex.

I did kind of guess Hex would appear as soon as the location was revealed as North Dakota, and to be fair I didn’t really see where Jonah Hex would fit into this crossover, so I am glad they found a space for him.

I also like that Constantine has something to do finally, because I am tired of just seeing Sara and Ray, as much as I love Sara and tolerate Ray, it’s called Legends of Tomorrow and currently I think has the biggest main cast out of these shows...so why am I being drip-fed Legends with now the addition of Constantine and Mick...again I do enjoy both of them but give me the god damn team.

Barry and Constantine bring Oliver to the Lazarus Pit and, as expected, Oliver emerges as an out of control rage monster that Stephen Amell does not sell quite as well as Caity Lotz or Willa Holland previously have.

I guessed Oliver would somehow be brought back, because while the Arrowverse execs try to say “We killed him off in part one to show no one is safe”, it was an eye-roll for me because you’re not going to kill the original main star of the Arrowverse in the first part.

My only issue with it is it happened so quickly, there was no time really to miss him because he was dead at the end of part one and suddenly they’re talking about bringing him back.

Sara had an entire season between death and resurrection and Thea’s resurrection came with great sacrifice on Oliver’s part joining the League of Assassins. Here, we had Constantine saying that the antimatter was making him lose his magic so he couldn’t bring back Oliver’s soul like he did for Sara, which only makes me wonder why they’re wasting time trying to bring someone back rather than stopping existence from dying.

Paragon Pursuit - Bat of the Future:

Okay so, apparently The Monitor has recently discovered seven Paragons across the Multiverse that can come together to defeat the Anti-Monitor. He knows this from retrieving the Book of Destiny from the timeline which was the McGuffin in Elseworlds last year.

Fortunately four of these paragons are known to The Monitor, the Paragon of Hope is Kara Zor-El and the Paragon of Destiny is Sara Lance. I got why this worked because Supergirl’s main brand is all about hope and she’s from a parallel world while Sara is of Earth-1 tying into the fact these seven Paragons are spread across the multiverse.

The Monitor tells the team that two more Paragons are to be found on different Earths, the first is the Bat of the Future on Earth-99 which Mar-Novu name drops as Bruce Wayne, much to Ray’s surprise and Kate’s annoyance.

Again I am actually enjoying Brandon Routh in this crossover, and cannot understand why he isn’t at this level on his own show.

Kate and Kara go to Earth-99 where they come across a dilapidated Wayne Manor, which looks more dishevelled than the one from the DCEU, and meet Earth-99 Luke Fox...who I had to double-take to ensure it was in fact Camrus Johnson partly because of how different he looks not geeked up and also because he is the only other main character of Batwoman to appear in this Batwoman episode.

Now I get that none of the other supporting players are vigilantes at this point, but not even Earth-1 Luke Fox making an appearance is slightly unfair, and you could argue that during Invasion! None of Supergirl’s supporting players were involved, but Supergirl still had an episode in that week which featured its main cast.

Again also Kate’s reaction to Kara finding this Luke attractive was probably my favourite moment in the episode.

Once forcing their way inside, Kate and Kara meet Earth-99 Batman, Mr. Kevin Conroy. I was so looking forward to seeing this veteran Batman voice actor in live-action and when you don’t see him talking, he sounds a lot like Batman of the DCAU, the only problem is I was promised Kingdom Come Batman and didn’t really get that.

I don’t know Kingdom Come that well but I thought Batman was supposed to be the main force of good left in the world, yet not only is he killing his rogues as displayed in his trophy case, including a Riddler cane which I also own, but he also killed Superman.

It’s at this point that Kate and Kara realise that this Batman is not the Paragon of Courage they were sent to retrieve and at that point Batman turns on Supergirl apparently hating Kryptonians.

Now this is where it gets interesting because before this, there is actually some good character moments for Bruce and Kate where Bruce tries to make Kate see that where he is in his mindset is where she should be, not trusting anyone, not believing in anything, just becoming the night basically.

It echoes similarly to what Lex Luthor tried to install in Lena last season which eventually worked as we know and it apparently maybe worked here because, even though Kate saved Kara from her doppleganger cousin, she still kept that Kryptonite wrist strap of his...what does she plan on doing?

Anyway before the Kryptonite reveal, we see Kate and Kara return to base where they tell The Monitor they failed retrieving the Paragon, but The Monitor reveals that the Bat of the Future and the Paragon of Courage is in fact Kate herself.

I don’t know how to feel about this, I love the fact Batwoman is being spotlighted even though she is the new girl, however, it does seem like the only reason she is the Paragon is because this is her show.

Also to have two Paragons from the same Earth? Not exactly far spread out.

Paragon Pursuit - Reign of the Supermen:

While Kate and Kara are on Earth-99, Earth 38′s Clark and Lois, and Iris for some reason, scourer the Multiverse for the Paragon of Truth, which is revealed to be a Superman...but which Superman.

Well just before they head off a spanner is thrown into the works in the form of Earth-38s Lex Luthor. We knew Jon Cryer would be back, I thought he would have returned in the Supergirl episode but we also see at least three other versions of Superman here so why not.

Anyway Lex steals the Book of Destiny because the Monitor apparently brought him back to be duped by the supervillain, shocker, and Lex travels the Multiverse killing off Supermen.

Clark, Lois and Iris first arrive on Earth-75 where they are too late because Earth-38 Lex has already killed this version of Superman who lies dead on the big screen with his Lois mourning the loss.

Their second attempt sees them arrive on Earth-167, which is the vaguest Easter-Egg reference going as it refers to Smallville co-producer Al Gough’s year of birth 1967...

When Tom Welling said he and Erica Durance were only in one scene they weren’t kidding, however I loved it. I am a massive Smallville fan, it was my proper Superman introduction, these versions of Clark and Lois are my Clark and Lois and that’s not going to change.

The decision for Clark not to have powers here is a weird one because they highlighted the fact that the Smallville Comics which followed the TV series would count as canon, yet aside from returning to the Kent Farm nothing we learn about Clark and Lois here was mentioned in the comics.

Also Clark and Lois have daughters, I’m not sure who they’re supposed to be but I’ve only ever known them to have a son...Jonathan...and since when did all the Supermen need to be Superdaddies anyway?

Anyway Earth-38 Lex shows up and Clark has the great confusion of wondering why Jon Cryer doesn’t look like Michael Rosenbaum, it is again sad that Rosenbaum didn’t reprise the role, but to have a Lex Luthor going up against multiple Supermen was still quite cool.

When Clark reveals he gave up his powers, most likely to be a father and family man, it did just seem like a cheat way for the writers to say “Yeah we have Smallville’s Clark Kent, but he won’t be part of the action”. Which as a Smallville fan is painful because I wanted to see Tom Welling in the tights, flights and action!

Also once Lex and the heroes disappear, Smallville’s Lois arrives and I have to say, she looks exactly the same as she did back in 2011 but different to how she looks as Alura Zor-El. Maybe it’s the choice of farm clothes as opposed to regal dresses but this is Lois Lane I had through my teen years, everything from the fashion to the hair, to the voice. I wasn’t crazy about the laugh because it seemed a bit forced, but she called him Smallville straight after and spoke in her high-energised way so I was happy.

The final stop was on Earth-96 which is a reference to the year the Kingdom Come storyline came out, it was confirmed that Brandon Routh would be Kingdom Come Superman but also the version of Superman from 2006 Superman Returns which Routh starred in.

We meet, or are reacquainted with,Routh’s version of Clark Kent. I have to admit I never much cared for Superman Returns, possibly because Smallville was on at the time and that version had already won me over. But I do know that Brandon Routh drew a lot of inspiration from Christopher Reeves and his portrayal of the character and you can clearly see that in both his fashion and acting.

I want to say it’s sad to see that pretty much all of Superman’s supporting staff at the Daily Planet are dead, Sam Huntington in my opinion was a decent Jimmy Olsen, but if this was Smallville’s Daily Planet staff all killed I’d be distraught.

Again I am comparing a lot but they are literally scenes apart from each other here.

Anyway, just as it’s confirmed that Brandon Routh’s Superman is the Paragon of Truth, Lex Luthor appears and decides he’s fed up with killing Supermen...we’ve only seen him kill one but there you go, and decides to turn Kingdom Come Superman against Earth-38 Superman in order for his now puppet to kill the other one.

I have to say, this was another weak battle sequence, I know it’s really CGI with two Supermen flying around, but neither Brandon Routh or Tyler Hoechlin have really sold flying as Superman to me that well anyway.

Lois finally does something and knocks Lex unconscious while she and Iris, who I cannot understand why she even came along at all, try to use the Book of Destiny to fix Kingdom Come Superman.

Eventually Lois gets through to KCS by appealing to his love for humanity and for his lost Lois. This breaks him free of the book’s control just in time before he snaps Earth-38 Superman’s neck.

With Lex detained, the heroes all return to base where they set up a machine to search for the rest of the Paragons. 

Harbinger’s Headache:

This sounds stupid but genuinely is what happens, since the start of the episode when Mar-Novu reveals the Book of Destiny, Harbinger starts to get headaches, this does alert her to the fact Lex Luthor is stealing the book but also puts her in the pathway of the Anti-Monitor.

Yes we finally see the big bad of the crossover in all his...glory? He looks ridiculous! His concept artwork does make him look like Oscar Isaac’s Apocalypse but the actual thing we get just looks ugly.

I will give a minor positive and say it is better to see him in the show than he looks on the promotional images because I get the feeling lighting is not this guy’s friend and we meet him in what looks like the hallway of S.T.A.R. Labs.

Mick Rory, Baby Whisperer:

Again, this sounds stupid, but I wanted to highlight this for a couple of reasons and to spotlight Legends of Tomorrow because it doesn’t look like this crossover is doing that.

Firstly, this Mick Rory isn’t our Mick Rory, this is in fact the Mick Rory of Earth-74...why is it called Earth-74? I don’t know because originally there were only supposed to be 52 Earths, then Earth-X came about and now we have Earth-167 so I’m making my peace with them making it up as they go along.

Anyway, Dominic Purcell has grown on me since he was first introduced on The Flash. I think once you accept the fact that DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is essentially a piss-take because that is what it’s become then you accept why the characters do what they do, and not only turning a Flash rogue into a hero/legend is understood but also having him be a writer, have a rat as a pet and be good with babies is also understood.

We see that Earth-74 has a Waverider and did have its own version of the Legends before they all disbanded, Mick has taken command of the Waverider as seemingly his home where he is a struggling writer and his only companion is the Waverider’s A.I. Leonard...Wentworth Miller is back! As a disembodied voice, I would have liked to have at least seen his floating blue head but no we get the voice which is fine by me to be honest.

Once Harbinger commandeers the Waverider ad brings it to Earth-1 with Mick on board, he seemingly becomes the only person on board who Jonathan won’t cry for...not his mum, not his dad, not his aunt...a gun wielding alcoholic hot-head...great choice kid.

It is the lowest form of comedy side-story going but it is still nice to see them at least attempt to include the Legends and particularly Wentworth Miller in some form.

Easter-Eggs:

Superman III:

Alright so this is a clever throwback as this version of Superman Brandon Routh is portraying may be repackaged as Kingdom Come Superman, but he is also the same Superman Routh portrayed in 2006′s Superman Returns, who in turn is the same Superman Christopher Reeve played during the 80s, one movie Reeves was in was Superman III where Superman’s human and Kryptonian sides physically fought each other.

This plot point has also been done in Smallville briefly during the opening episode of Season 4 but not to the same degree as here or Superman III.

Smallville:

So many Smallville Easter-Eggs in one small scene, the first was the mention of Smallville’s Lex Luthor being the President of the United States of America. In a vision of the future Lex Luthor was indeed president and during the flashforward epilogue of the Smallville finalé he was running for president.

I also appreciated the time joke that Lois made when she said that it’s taken about a decade for Clark to “make a funny”. In real-time it has been almost a decade since Smallville finished as it was 2011, whereas now it is 2019.

Captain Cold:

Some things never change and whether he’s a doppleganger of the original or an A.I. version of the man, Wentworth Miller’s charm oozes out.

When Harbinger arrives on the Earth-47 Waverider, she notes that she is aware of who the A.I. is and he responds with his classic line “Always pleased to meet a fan”, this he has said a couple of times firstly in Season 1 of The Flash and then again with the Legends.

This was a great episode on reflection but in terms of ramping up the drama and grandeur of the crossover it did need work. Hopefully it’s only a minor bump before tonight’s third part, which promises a sizeable cliffhanger before the Christmas break.

So that’s my review of Crisis on Infinite Earths: Batwoman, what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more DC TV Reviews as well as other TV Reviews and posts.

[iwillgiveyoumyhappiness]

전웅, Jeon Woong

anonymous asked:

Ooo could I request a Woong scenario where you’re a successful solo artist and you’re Woong’s crush, and he ends up meeting you at an award show and you guys become friends? And maybe after a while he confesses on how much he likes you and it’s just fluff? Thank you so much! I also enjoy your other scenarios and I cant wait for future works!

Group: AB6IX

Member: Woong

(A/N) Listen to this with Winter Bear by V 

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Woong watched you perform with admiration-filled eyes. 

When Donghyun had first posed the idea of going to watch a concert of a newly debuted artist, he wasn’t all too sold on the idea. On his day off, he would’ve rather stayed in bed and relaxed, but he was beyond relieved that Donghyun had convinced him. 

“Since she just debuted,” Donghyun had said, “the tickets are super cheap. If she blows up, they’re never gonna be like this again.” 

Woong furrowed his brows contemplatively. “I don’t know...” he trailed off. “I kinda just wanted to pass out today.” 

He crossed his arms and pouted. “Please?” he asked, puppy-eyes prominent. “It’s late, so you can still laze around all day.” 

Finally, Woong had relented. “Fine!” he groaned. “I’ll go with you.” 

And God, was he glad that he did. 

There was something about the way your voice melded with the instrumentals, the way you were able to easily ad-lib when you felt like it, the stability in your tone as you danced, your ability to entrance the whole crowd with a single pointed glance into the camera. 

Donghyun took a break from cheering to playfully nudge the boy beside him. “This is awesome, right?” he laughed. “Aren’t you glad you came? She’s so cool!” He stared at Woong who sat unmoving, his eyes fixed on your performance. 

“Dude, are you okay?” he chuckled. “You look smitten.” 

Woong nodded slowly, just barely registering what he’d said. “I am,” he said, quieter than the music. 

Donghyun leaned in closer, cupping a hand around his ear. “What?” 

He finally tore his eyes away from the stage. “I am!” he shouted. “I think she’s my ideal type.” 

Woong groggily woke from his dream, blinking at the afternoon sun that seeped in through the curtains of the living room. He sat up on the couch, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. 

He looked around drowsily before sighing. He often dreamed of that memory, trying to recall the retails of that night. He had such a flutter in his chest from the concert and his adrenaline and excitement was so high, it was as if it had never happened at all when his high wore off. 

As time went on, it was harder and harder to recall the exact details, everything feeling like a fuzzy blur. “I feel like I’m suffering from early-onset dementia,” he huffed to himself, falling back on the couch. He just wanted to remember a fun concert.

Was that too much to ask?

He was certain that he understood ABNEWs better now. This was the legendary ‘post-concert-depression’ that he’d heard so much about on Twitter. 

It was absolutely terrible. 

All he could think about was the flashing lights and the screams. It was so hard to remember the words that you had spoken or the expressions that you had made. 

He wanted to remember that experience he had at your concert all those months ago, and he wanted to remember it well, but he was having the hardest time doing it. He’d gotten a headache over it once or twice. 

He kept mulling over the fact that he’d been so close to the stage. He’d probably never get a chance to be that close to your stages ever again, ever since your popularity skyrocketed. 

What started out as your simple debut a few months ago had shot you into a flash of cameras, overseas trips, a sizable fan-base and the fitting title of: ‘Newest Global Monster Rookie’.

As a fan, he was proud of you. But as someone who wanted to see you again, he was sulky, because he felt as if he’d never relive that moment of being so close to your passion for the stage. 

Daehwi sprinted into the room, jumping onto the couch next to him. It almost gave poor Woong a heart-attack, but the youngest member decided to ignore that small fact. “You excited?” he asked, an eager enthusiasm glimmering in his eyes.

“For?” Woong asked, taking a deep breath after his scare, via Lee Daehwi.

The youngest nudged him a little. “For tomorrow,” he clarified. “Award Show appearance? Ringing any bells?” he teased. 

A soft smile grew on his face. “Yeah,” he said while nodding. “I’m really excited for it.” He leaned his head back, closing his eyes and trying to envision what it would be like for AB6IX to receive an award... Would it be beautiful? “I hope we do well,” he said honestly.

Daehwi chuckled. “You know, I would’ve thought you would’ve been a lot more excited about this,” he said, settling into the cushions and pulling out his phone to mess around on. 

Woong crack open an eye. “I am excited,” he assured him. “What’re you talking about?” 

“I mean, you’re crush is gonna be there, so I just thought—”

Woong shot up, making the youngest jump. “She’s gonna be there?” he asked, suddenly short of breath. Daehwi nodded. Suddenly, Woong felt very self-conscious about his appearance. He messed with his bangs, trying to pull them down further. “Should I get a haircut?” he asked.

Daehwi raised an amused brow. “Why?”

He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to judge the layers through touch. “I just mean, I don’t want it to look ratty,” he said. “Should I cut it?” He ran his fingers through it again. He nodded to himself. “Yeah, I should cut it.” 

Daehwi laughed. “Oh my gosh—your hair looks fine!” he cackled. “You care an awful lot about this,” he noted, raising a brow. 

The older member sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he huffed. He rubbed his eyes, as if hoping that would wake him up further. “It’s dumb, right?” 

“Just a little bit.”

Woong nodded slowly, staring up at the ceiling. “Yeah... Yeah, it’s dumb,” he said, mostly trying to convince himself. He chuckled. “It’s a big event. Chances of me even actually seeing her anywhere other than on stage is really unlikely.” 

Daehwi tilted his head, staring at him curiously. “You know, I’ve never seen you like this before,” he mentioned. “Why do you like her so much?” 

He shrugged, honestly trying to figure it out himself. “I don’t know, really,” he said. “With the heart of a fan, I can simply say that she makes me happy and I want to support her, but I don’t know what else to say other than that. I guess I’m just so interested in what she’s like on-stage, I’ve gotten really curious about the off-stage aspects of her, too.” 

“You know,” Daehwi started, “she’s probably not exactly the same off-stage, right?” 

Woong scoffed under his breath. “Are any of us, really?” he asked. “We all change little aspects about ourselves that we think people will find unlikable. It’s just how our minds work.” Without realizing it, a small smile formed on his lips. 

“That’s why I think it’d be cool to know her personally,” he continued. “I’d like to know about the flaws that she tries to cover up, and maybe one day, she’d be able to see that flaws aren’t so bad. They’re just unique.” 

Daehwi started laughing. “You’re so whipped,” he said in English. 

His brows furrowed. “Wait—what’d you say?” he asked. The youngest only laughed harder, doubling over and nearly flying off the couch. “Lee Daehwi, what did you say?!” 

The group stepped out of the car with excited butterflies in their stomachs. They’d enviously looked at those able to walk across the red carpet before, and now they’d be the ones doing it.

It was a memory they’d keep with them for a long time.

Woong touched Woojin’s shoulder. “You gonna be okay?” he asked, referring to his ankle. 

Woojin nodded. “I’ll be fine,” he promised. He frowned. “I wish I could perform, though.” 

He gave him a small smile. “You’re doing enough,” he assured him. “You’re cool just by sitting there.” He scanned the crowd of reporters and paparazzi. It was overwhelming, but in the best way possible. 

It was like the thrill he got on stage; making him gain energy rather than fear. 

The inside was even more intimidating. There were so many people in the audience, all eagerly awaiting the upcoming performances. It was finally settling in for Woong that he would be performing on that stage soon. 

Him and his group. 

Those bright lights, cameras and expectant eyes would all be on them in less than an hour. It was a sensation that made shivers creep down his spine, but it was in an exhilarating way. 

He took a deep shaky breath and gave his pale cheek a light smack. “Let’s do well, okay?” he told himself under his breath while he looked up at the massive stage from his seat in between Youngmin and Woojin. 

He felt a light tap on his shoulder. It was so feather-light, he didn’t even jump. 

“I think you’ll do well,” he heard. 

He turned around; he felt his heart lurch when he saw the face of the person talking to him. It was the same face he’d seen months ago, though a new color had been dyed into the hair. 

It was your face. Your face that he’d looked up at as you performed on stage with such an addictive fire in your gaze. 

He stood up hurriedly, clumsily pushing his chair back with his knees. Luckily, you caught it and shoved it back upright before it could fall to the floor. He bowed a full 90 degree angle, his cheeks flushed red. “Thank you for saying that,” he choked out. “I’ll try my best!”

His words felt like vomit slipping uncontrollably out of his mouth and he was completely embarrassed (it especially didn’t help that his members were quietly laughing at him and silently judging him), but he was still grateful, down at the core of everything. 

He managed to say something at least. 

He had originally thought that if he finally got to speak to you, he’d be utterly tongue-tied, unable to say anything of true substance, but at least something came out. It was better than an awkward nod or a series of ‘um’s and ‘er’s. 

You laughed at him. “Why’re you being so formal?” you asked, tilting your head. “I debuted after you.”

He stood up straight, his cheeks burning. He couldn’t bring himself to meet your eyes, so he just stared at the floor. “That’s true,” he stuttered, “but...” 

Daehwi turned back in his chair, looking at you. He beckoned you closer, making sure that Woong was still busy searching his brain for decent words. Once you’d leaned close enough, he whispered (not so subtly), “He’s a fan.”

Woong’s eyes widened. “Lee Daehwi!” he snapped, feeling the sudden need to smack the youngest in the face. 

He saw you cover your mouth, holding in a screech. “I’m a fan, too!” you blurted out. His jaw dropped. “That’s one of the reasons I was so surprised when I saw that I got to sit behind you!” 

He watched you stomp your feet with cute excitement. “I’ve been an AB6IX fan since pre-debut!” You looked to Woojin. “How’s your condition, by the way? I saw in an article that you weren’t doing so well.”

Woong supposed that was how his friendship with you began. After that small interaction, Daehwi and Donghyun kept forcing small-talk with you throughout the night. 

A simple ‘how are you enjoying the show so far?’ turned into a congratulations when you won an award, and then one for them when they won, and then exchanged phone-numbers. Fans of both you and AB6IX had gone crazy over the interactions, thinking it was the most endearing thing ever caught on camera.

Woong didn’t really know why, but he was incredibly grateful that his fans liked you as much as he did. There was a certain comfort in it. A feeling like, “Oh. I can openly be friends with you without upsetting the fans that I love”. 

It felt like having a never-ending army of support, and it made him feel warm.

He had always thought that if he kept his heart warm, a person with a warm heart would appear. He’d found himself wondering often nowadays if that warmhearted person was you. 

True enough, his first thoughts about you had been only platonic. He had a school-boy crush on you and he accepted that. He knew you’d be the person that made his heart flutter childishly, but he also expected it to fade quickly once he got to know you. 

He figured he would realize that you were both good friends, but nothing more.

Unfortunately for his busy heart and mind, that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t the case at all. 

In recent weeks, he’d started to find everything you did unbelievably endearing. Even the things he hated—like when you came up behind him and tickled under his arms—he found himself not being able to get enough of it. 

He wanted to be annoyed by you more. He wanted to be teased by you more. He wanted to marvel at you more. He wanted to laugh at your dumb jokes. He wanted to make fun of you for your ugly expressions (which he thought were cute, not ugly).

He wanted to sing with you more. He wanted to learn more choreography together and complain about things with you. He wanted you to stay his friend for a long time. He wanted for you to grow into his best friend. He wanted the both of you to continue to grow from there. 

He wanted your permission to love you fully.

He’d steeled himself in his mind. If he didn’t have your permission, he would give up. It would be slow and painful, but he would do it for your sake. If he couldn’t have you as lover, he refused to lose you as a friend. 

You’d grown too precious to him. 

That’s the reason why he was so hesitant to look at you as you both looked out the window, watching the sunset. 

You glanced at him, a chuckle creeping up the back of your throat. “Why aren’t you looking at me?” you asked quietly, not wanting to disturb the nice atmosphere that was floating around.

He shrugged. “You look ugly,” he said simply. 

You faked a gasp. “I think you mean: gorgeous!” you said, flipping your hair sassily over your shoulder. 

He started laughing. You had a way of putting him at ease. “Fine,” he sighed, finally looking at you. “Gorgeous.” It might’ve just been the color of the sky seeping through the glass, but it looked like your cheeks had flushed red. 

He scanned your features. 

Everyone on the earth has two eyes, a nose, and pair of lips. Overall, nobody is that different from the other... So, why did you look so ethereal to him in this moment? Why did you make his heart hurt so much he felt like crying?

Why did his eyes actually well up?

You looked at him with such concern, it made him grateful for you all over again. “Woongie?” you asked, shuffling closer to him. “Are you okay?” You put a hand on his shoulder. A small show of affection, but greatly appreciated. 

He gave a watery smile, shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I honestly don’t know.” He threw his head back and breathed deeply, trying to keep his tears from spilling out. “I guess I just fully realized that you’re actually beautiful,” he sighed out, his voice raspy. He felt your hand tense on his shoulder. “Like, in that indescribable way you hear about in stories.”

You tittered nervously. “What’re you talking about?” you asked. “You’re acting weird.” 

Once he was sure that his tears would stay in (at least for the time being), he looked to you, trying to gauge your expression. You didn’t look like you would pull away from him. He could trust that much. “Can I ask you something?” he wondered out loud.

You nodded slowly. “Of course you can,” you said. “Anything.” 

“Do you think I deserve to be happy?” he asked with an underlying hesitation in his tone. He didn’t want it to sound like he was guilt-tripping you. 

You looked shocked at the question, your eyes widening. You nodded without hesitation. “Of course I do!” you said. “There’s no one in this world I know that deserves more blessings than you.” Your hand fell from his shoulder, resting unwittingly on his thigh. “All I wish for you is a hopeful life,” you admitted. 

He nibbled his bottom lip thoughtfully, contemplating whether or not he should actually say what he was thinking. With a shaky breath, he made the decision to do so. He didn’t want to live with the regret of never saying this to you. 

“You know...” he started nervously, his palms becoming sweaty and the tips of his ears turning red. He shifted in his seat, not meeting your eyes. He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I’d be really happy... with you,” he finally said. 

He could sense your silence. Your lack of response. It scared him. 

“I’m not saying this to make you feel like you have to return my feelings,” he blurted out, forcing himself to meet your shaking eyes. “I’m saying this because I just wanted you to know how I felt, but I’m putting no pressure on you whatsoever.” 

He stood up, taking a deep breath. “So,” he started, “we can make a decision right now, and you can change your mind whenever you want; no strings attached.” He stood straight and closed his eyes tightly. “If you want things to stay the way they are now, stay seated. If you want... something more,” he said, the scarlet of his ears darkening, “then you can take a step closer to me.” 

He waited with bated breath to hear anything from you. 

A word. A breath. A slight ruffling of clothes, but he heard nothing. 

After what felt like an hour of deafening silence, he finally heard you say something. “On the count of three?” you said in a small voice. Dare he say, shyly. 

He nodded vigorously—reminiscent of a child—his eyes still shut tight. “One,” he started.

“Two,” you continued.

His heart was beating out of his chest. He would guiltily admit to looking forward to hearing you step toward him. He knew it was wrong, but he was left hoping and wanting. He was hoping so much. 

“Three,” he said, barely above a whisper. 

He waiting, his hands shaking. 

Nothing. Not even a noise. 

He chuckled at himself, trying to mask his disappointment. He started opening his eyes. “So, I guess you don’t feel the—?” He was cut off by your arms wrapping around his middle. 

“I’m sorry,” you said, muffled by his chest. “I was zoned out, so I didn’t hear the ‘three’.” You nuzzled farther into him. “I like you, too...” 

He blinked in surprise, not even able to hug you back. Instead, his arms just hung awkwardly in the air, stiff and unmoving. “You... do?” he stuttered. He shook his head, as if trying to wake himself from this unrealistic dream. “For real? No jokes? No feeling obligated to like me back?” 

You laughed at him, pulling away just slightly to meet his eyes. You grabbed his wrists and pulled his arms down farther so that they could snake around your waist. “I’m not kidding,” you said, your eyes turning damp. “I like you,” you whispered. “I really like you.” 

Woong felt a smile spread across his face, growing uncontrollably larger as the second ticked by. “I really like you, too,” he said, a light, fluttery feeling in his chest. “Like... A lot!”

What did people call that feeling?

Affection? Fondness?

Ah, right!

Love.

.

.

.

Hmm.... Mayhaps I am a little fond of this boy. J u s t maybe. 

Thanks for the request, Anon! I had a lot of fun writing it. I hope you enjoyed it a lot and I hope it met expectations. Have a good day/afternoon/evening!

Feel free to stop by again. ^-^

[ginnyzero]

My Fashion Connection

I’ve been trying to pin down lately why I love fashion and fashion design. Because I don’t love clothes and designing clothes and the choosing of fabrics because of the glitz and glam of high end runway shows and the glossy pages of Vogue magazine and adulation of famous design houses. Most of that I didn’t even know about until I went to school. I didn’t choose fashion because of any of those things. I really wanted to go into Computer Game Design because of games like Myst.

Growing up in a very small town in the middle of the southern tier of New York, fashion wasn’t anything that anyone in our town was interested in except the town pageant queen who had a ‘reputation.’ It’s dairy country. My town was and is much more interested in dirt bikes, hunting and fishing and kegger beer parties. There were a couple of families that were more well to do and worked at Cornell or IBM and thus wore nicer clothes but out of a town of say 50 to 100 people, there were more cows and farmers and retirees. It’s the type of town when two of the young people marry each other, the entire town becomes related.

My mother is a home sewer. I hate the term sewer in professional capacity because it has the connotations of a house wife sitting at home making amateur garments. My mother made a lot of my sister’s clothes growing up and when she started sending me to Christian schools with dress codes, she also made clothes for me. (Mostly jumpers.) Eventually she either got tired of sewing or felt that we needed to buy things to keep up appearances and she stopped. (This ended up with us shopping in budget discount overrun boutique shops. Yes. A thing. Family Dollar and Dollar General didn’t exist yet! And mother hadn’t discovered the “joys” of the Salvation Army and second hand or they simply weren’t close enough to shop at.)

In a tiny town, you have to drive almost an hour in every direction to get to anything that remotely resembles a fabric shop. Except, between our tiny town and the city of Ithaca we got lucky, because out in a nowhere more nowhere than our nowhere was a tiny fabric shop run by a petite old woman named Leona.

To get to Leona’s shop, you took this very twisty road over and through the hills and turned right when you finally hit another ‘major’ road. And then off to the left less than a mile was a huge stand of pine trees and in the middle of these pines was a dirt drive. You’d drive up the hill between these tall pines the rocks in the dirt crunching under your tires that opened onto a clearing on top of a hill that held a farm. Leona ran her shop out of her home, a one story mixture of a red roofed, white trailer with an add on to make it an L shape. The barn hadn’t been kept up and the red stain was fading and the barn was falling apart. You parked on the edge of the drive, hoped it hadn’t rained lately and it wasn’t pure mud so you could get back out. (If you got stuck, there was always the local farmer with a tractor and chains to pull you out.) You had to park on the edge because despite the fact the farm wasn’t an active farm, she rented out the land and your cars needed to be out of the way for the tractors to get through.

She had the shop in the add on built on the back of the trailer. Firewood piled up next to the screen door and cats lounged everywhere. Leona liked hoarding things so the walkway had gnomes, garden statues and benches and wheelbarrows and yes, there was a tiny garden windmill in the middle of the circular drive. If it was winter, salt crunched under your boots and you had to walk carefully across the ice covered mud slush. If it was spring or summer, there were flowers peeping up among the grass.

And once you crossed the threshold, warmth, Leona smiling with her curly short white hair and the measuring tape around her neck behind the measuring counter. Bolts and bolts of colorful and textured fabrics lined the walls and the blank spaces of walls over tables were old fashioned wall paper in dark red with ducks or cream and pink rose prints and warm golden colored wood panels. Painted sawblades provided decoration. The clock might have been a novelty item, a cow or a cat or even something with shears for the hands. I can’t remember. (There might have been all three.) It smelled mostly of sawdust, dust and in the winter, the sharp smell of a burning fire from the potbelly stoves. Leona’s help were also middle aged or older ladies like her and they weren’t quite as friendly, but they were helpful.

Leona stocked her shop by going down to NYC and buying overruns from the warehouses. (Overruns are fabrics that designers don't end up using and fabrics manufacturers make too much of because they predict more sales than they make. Most fabric retail stores are stocked by overruns.) She mostly had colorful cotton prints and upholstery fabric. There was a little fashion fabric and by the time I hit high school, she had things like stretch velvet. She mostly sold to quilters and people like my mother. Cornell doesn’t have a fashion design program, only a science textiles program, but she’d occasionally get students. Her hours were irregular. I don’t know if she ever turned a profit. She encouraged touching the fabric. (Though she didn’t like children taking bolts out of the shelves for good reason.) She didn’t mind that I wandered about away from my mother. She always remembered me no matter how much time had passed.

But every time I go into a fabric shop, there is still that bit of magic from going to Leona’s. When I returned from college, I wanted to go and show Leona some of my projects. She died before I got the chance and I still regret that.

Professional shops like Mood, Britex, B&J’s and to an extent the discount fabric warehouse that I used during college in San Francisco make me shake my head because the workers don’t always feel helpful. They don’t make you feel like every customer is important. They aren’t like Leona, as frail as she was, with her sunny smiles and slightly raspy voice, glasses, and cheerful attitude and love of textiles.

I also had Barbie. I’ve talked about Barbie and my love of Barbie. I would play with Barbie rather than with baby dolls. (My baby dolls took lots of naps according to my mother.) And I loved the clothing packs. I loved dressing and undressing her and trying new outfits out of the outfits I had. Barbie was a safe present to buy for me when I was growing up, because a) that meant my group of Barbie’s got new clothes and b) if this Barbie had different color hair or skin then I got more variety in my Barbies. (My favorite was the long red headed mermaid with the teal outfit. This was back when the tail was a “Skirt” you could take on and off.) I had maybe one Ken and I inherited a lot of clothes from my older sister who grew out of Barbie about the time I started getting interested. Some of them were homemade but I couldn’t get my mother to make more and she wouldn’t teach me how to sew to make them myself. (In fact, she said it was too hard and downright discouraged it. Guess who doesn’t really like sewing? Me.)

Today, I love Monster High and Ever After High, but if they’d existed when I was a child, I wouldn’t have gotten them because of my parents’ extreme dislike of anything related to monsters, ghosts or Halloween. (I am a November child people. This is ridiculous. Come on, I share a birthday with Bram Stoker. OKAY.)

And somewhere in that time, (1992 apparently, man, I was younger than I thought) when I was getting a pittance of an allowance and had saved money from Christmas, I had enough money to buy a new Barbie or a Crayola Fashion Design stencil/tracing kit. This was before Project Runway. This was before the idea that these Fashion Drawing kits were thought to be remotely popular. No one thought that little girls might like drawing clothes! (Go figure.) The Easy Bake Oven was still the biggest and most innovative thing for a girl’s toy. But Crayola came out with a stencil kit with a bunch of papers that had design outlines, and pattern rubbing plates and a light box. Everything in the kit was meant to fit in the light box. The light box was plastic, pink and ran on D batteries (not included bummer.) And I had just enough money to buy it or a new Barbie. (I think my only other difficult choice that compares to this was the Star Craft Battle Chest and something else and I chose the Battle Chest.)

(I can't believe I found a picture of that, someone is selling one on ebay.) Because, I mean, a new Barbie would only give me one set of new clothes, with this fashion design kit I could draw clothes, lots and lots and lots of clothes. I had always been an artistic child. I liked drawing. This had never really been encouraged except in the “here, have another set of colored pencils, pastels, watercolors, no lessons included.” So, here was Barbie in paper form! I didn’t have to take the clothes on and off. I could just trace what they had on the sheets or try to come up with stuff myself.

Pages of my Fashion Design Kit Now

I’m not going to say I was very good at it. The point was, I had fun, this was something to do that didn’t involve playing a game on the computer or reading a book or practicing my piano and I hadn’t gotten into writing at this age. So, from using this stencil, I started with encouragement of one of my friends, to try and make it more real life proportion and draw the figures myself (once again without any sort of drawing classes. The art classes at my school were a joke.) I bought sketchbooks and took them to school with me. I started writing because of this same friend.

It was frankly an escape. My allowance never grew bigger. So, it went towards buying new books to read, sketchbooks and replenishing my Crayola colored pencils. (Though Imperial ones were better but I only got those out of the colored pencil color by number kits.) I didn’t buy fashion magazines. The idea of fashion as a career wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t have a career on my radar. College was one of those, “I’ll think about it later,” things.

The girls at my school who were cheerleaders and liked fashion weren’t precisely my friends and felt like complete foreigners and strangers to me. I didn’t ‘get’ them. We had our groups and we stuck to them. Having arrived to this school after the groups were formed, I fit nowhere and living so far away from everyone else, there was no way that I could feasibly see to hang out with them after school in order to get to know them well enough to fit into one of the groups at all.

Magazines were a luxury in our house. Vogue never made it into the house ever. It took until after 7th grade and a major fight that we even got the newspaper. So by the time I hit eleventh and twelfth grade and college was ‘mandatory’ and I had a list of requirements for what college I could go to, I had to look through what the colleges offered versus what I was interested in and thought I could be good at. (Let me say that writing wasn’t considered because my mother was very anxious about me being able to have a ‘real job.’) And the practice test for the ACT in 10th grade came with this odd employment aptitude test thing to help you find the job that would be the right fit. (Goodness knows if it was remotely accurate.) Fashion design was in my “right fit” category. And between all the majors, there was a tiny college in Ohio that happened to have a Fashion Design degree under their Health and Human Services Major. And since the only computer graphics and gaming major I could find was at a Calvinist college in Michigan, I thought the Mennonite College in Ohio was probably a better idea.

I didn’t read fashion magazines. I didn’t know really how to sew. (Sewing lessons with my mother were a complete disaster.) I couldn’t make a pattern. I had absolutely no portfolio. There were three things I liked, writing, computer games and drawing clothes. And let’s be clear, I wasn’t that great at drawing clothes and my designs at the time probably weren’t that innovative. I had to make a choice and what very little information I could glean from the Ithaca Public Library (seriously, you’d think having Ithaca College and Cornell, the library would be better,) fashion seemed the way to go. It was a massive industry. It had to have work available after I attained my degree.

Oh to be that young and naïve again. Probably sheltered is the better term.

I was over a year and a half into my fashion degree at this tiny college when someone finally thought to clue me in that “to get a design degree you have to have an art minor.” Realizing that this was utterly ridiculous and that making patterns in ¼ of the size wasn’t really going to get me anywhere after trying to talk with one of the other students about whether or not we could really get work after going to this school, (I’m sorry, sweetie, I hope you realized I was trying to convince myself as well as you,) I transferred out and into the Academy of Art. (And this took another large fight.)

Where, I had a lot of credits but I essentially had to start from the beginning. So, having those credits wasn’t actually to my advantage because the numbers of credit hours earned made it appear that I had more experience than I did. This got me more scrutiny and really a worse college experience.

Let’s understand something, I grew up in New York. The Fashion Institute of Technology is part of the SUNY system of colleges. I was a New York resident. It would have been fairly cheap for me to go to FIT. My parents didn’t want me in NYC or at a secular school. Parsons was always out of the question because it’s as costly as Cornell and I understood that. FIT would have been an extremely LOGICAL CHOICE.

Oh well, I loved San Francisco. I loved the big city/small town feel of it and the ability to walk most places and the public transit. If it wasn’t so expensive to live there, I might still be there.

So, schooling wore away at me, but it didn’t dim my love of creating clothes. My love of creating clothes was never founded or predicated upon the idea that success was a runway show and a big fancy store and my name in lights. I didn’t want to be the next Coco Chanel. I didn’t know who she was and at the time I started drawing clothes, I frankly didn’t care. My going into fashion was me going “here is something I love and enjoy doing, can I make a job out of it? Yes. Yes. I can.”

No one can take that from me. I might get bored or tired, but you can’t take the love of creating away from me.

And by the way, I still don’t read Vogue. It’s out of date before it’s printed and 75% advertisements. I also still don’t care about a runway show or seeing my name in lights as a “name” of a brand. That’s not the fashion price point I do or understand. And that’s okay, despite the push by fashion schools to design for that price point and that should be your goal, there is a lot more to fashion than ready to wear. Maybe that gives me an advantage, maybe it doesn't. That's not my connection to fashion. Magical fabric shops, Barbie, Crayola, the joy of creating, those are my fashion connections. And those are a lot more tangible than a runway or a name in lights by my account.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #388

Top Ten Things Tim Burton’s Batman Films Did Right

Thirty years ago, give or take, the first Tim Burton Batman movie was released in cinemas (according to Google, its UK release date was 11th August 1989). Everyone knows the story; it was a phenomenon, a marketing juggernaut, a hit probably beyond what anyone was reasonably expecting. I was too young to understand or appreciate what was going on, but for twenty years or more the image of Batman in the public consciousness was intertwined with Adam West and pop-art frivolity. Suddenly superheroes were “dark” and “grown-up”; suddenly we had multi-million-dollar-grossing properties, franchises, and studios rummaging through their back catalogues of acquired IPs to land the next four-quadrant hit. Throughout the rest of the nineties we got a slew of pulp comic adaptations – The Spirit, The Phantom, Dick Tracy – before the tangled web of Marvel licenses became slightly easier to unpick, and we segued into the millennium on the backs of Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Flash-forward to a super-successful Batman reboot, then we hit the MCU with Iron Man, and we all know where that goes. And it all began with Batman!

Except, of course, that’s not quite the whole story. Studios were trying to adapt superheroes and comic books for a number of years, not least because Richard Donner’s Superman had been such a huge hit a decade before Batman. And the Batman films themselves began to deteriorate in quality pretty rapidly. Plus, when viewed from the distance of a couple of decades or more, the supposed dark, gritty, adult storytelling in Burton’s films quickly evaporates. They’re just as camp, silly, and nonsensical as the 1960s show, they’re just visually darker and with more dry ice. Characters strut around in PVC bodysuits; the plots make little to no sense; characterisation is secondary to archetype; and Batman himself is quite divorced from his comic incarnation, killing enemies often capriciously and being much less of a martial artist or detective than he appeared on the page (in fact, Adam West’s Batman does a lot more old-school deducing than any of the cinematic Batmen).

I think a lot of people of my generation, who grew up with Adam West, went through a period of disowning the series because it was light, bright, campy and, essentially, for children; then we grow up and appreciate it all the more for being those things, and also for being a pure and delightful distillation of one aspect of the comics (seriously, there’s nothing in the series that’s not plausibly from a 1950s Batman comic). And I think the same is true of Burton’s films. for all their importance in terms of “legitimising” superhero movies, they have come in for a lot of legitimate criticism, and in the aftermath of Christopher Nolan’s superlative trilogy they began to look very old-fashioned and a much poorer representation of the character. But then, again, we all grow up a little bit and can look back on them as a version of Batman that’s just as valid; they don’t have to be perfect, they don’t have to be definitive, but we can enjoy them for what they are: macabre delights, camp gothic comedies, delightfully stylised adventure stories. They might lack the visual pizazz of a Nolan fight scene or, well, anything in any MCU movie, but they’re very much of a type, even if that type was aped, imitated, and parodied for a full decade following Batman’s release. There’s much to love about Burton’s two bites of the Bat-cherry, and here – at last – I will list my ten favourite aspects of the films (that’s both films, Batman and Batman Returns).

Tim Burton’s Batman isn’t quite my Batman (but, for the record, neither is Christopher Nolan’s), but whatever other criticisms I may have of the films, here are ten things that Burton and his collaborators got absolutely right.

Great Design: seriously, from an aesthetic point of view, they’re gorgeous. The beautiful Anton Furst Gotham, all gothic towers and industrial pipework, is a thing of beauty, and in terms of live-action the design of all of Batman’s vehicles and gadgets has never been bettered. It gives Batman, and his world, a gorgeously distinctive style all its own.

Wonderful Toys: it’s not just the design of the Batmobile and Batwing that impresses (big, bulbous round bits, sweeping curves, spiky wings); its how they’re used. Burton really revels in the gadgets, making Batman a serious tech-head with all manner of grappling hooks, hidden bombs, and secret doo-dahs to give him an upper hand in a fight. It makes up for the wooden combat (a ninja Michael Keaton is not), suggesting this Batman is a smarter fighter than a physical one. Plus all those gadgets could get turned into literal wonderful toys. Ker-ching.

He is the Night: Adam West’s Batman ran around during the day, in light grey spandex with a bright blue cape. Michael Keaton’s Batman only ever came out at night, dressed entirely in thick black body armour, and usually managed to be enveloped in smoke. From his first appearance, beating up two muggers on a Gotham rooftop, he is a threatening, scary, sinister presence. It totally sold the idea of Batman as part-urban legend, part-monster. Burton is fascinated with freaks, and in making his Batman freaky, he made him iconic.

You Wanna Get Nuts?: added to this was Michael Keaton’s performance as Bruce Wayne. Controversial casting due to his comedy background and, frankly, lack of an intimidating physique, he nevertheless utterly convinced. Grimly robotic as Batman, he presented a charming but secretive Bruce Wayne, one who was kind and heartfelt in private, but also serious, determined, and very, very smart. But he also excellently portrayed a dark anger beneath the surface, a mania that Bruce clearly had under control, but which he used to fuel his campaign, and which he allowed out in the divisive but (in my opinion) utterly brilliant “Let’s get nuts!” scene. To this date, the definitive screen Bruce Wayne.

Dance with the Devil: The counterpoint to this was Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Cashing a phenomenal cheque for his troubles, he nevertheless delivered; his Joker is wild, over-the-top, cartoonish but also terrifying. In my late teens I was turned off by the performance, feeling it a pantomime and not reflective of the quiet menace and casual cruelty of, say, Mark Hamill’s Joker; but now I see the majesty of it. You need someone this big to be a believable threat to Batman. No wonder that, with Joker dead, they essentially had to have three villains to replace him in the sequel.

Family: Bruce’s relationship with Alfred is one of the cornerstones of the comic, but really only existed in that capacity since the mid-80s and Year One (which established Alfred as having raised Bruce following his parents’ deaths). So in many ways the very close familial relationship in Batman is a watershed, and certainly the first time many people would have seen that depicted. Michael Gough’s Alfred is benign, charming, very witty, and utterly capable as a co-conspirator. One of the few people to stick around through the Schumacher years, he maintained stability even when everything else was going (rubber) tits up.

Meow: I’ve mostly focussed on Batman here, but by jeebies Batman Returns has a lot going for it too. Max Shreck, the Penguin, “mistletoe is deadly if you eat it”… but pride of place goes to Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. An utterly bonkers origin but a perfectly pitched character, she was a credible threat, a believable love interest, and an anti-hero worth rooting for, in a tour-de-force performance. Also came along at just the right time for me to experience puberty. If you’re interested. Plus – and this can’t be overstated – she put a live bird into her mouth. For real. I mean, Christ.

Believably Unreal: I used to criticise Batman for being unrealistic, just as campy in its own way as the ‘60s show. But that’s missing the point. It’s a stylised world, clearly not our own thanks to the Furst-stylings. And Burton uses that to his advantage. The gothic stylings help sell the idea of a retro-futuristic rocket-car barrelling through city streets; the mishmash of 80s technology and 40s aesthetics gives us carte blanche for a zoot-suited Joker and his tracksuited henchmen to tear up a museum to a Prince soundtrack. It’s a world where Max Shreck, looking like Christopher Walken was electrocuted in a flour factory, can believably run a campaign to get Penguin elected mayor, even after he nearly bites someone’s nose off. It’s crazy but it works.

Believably Corrupt: despite the craziness and unreality, the first Batman at least does have a strong dose of realism running through it. The gangsters may be straight out of the 40s but they’ve adopted the gritty grimness of the intervening decades, with slobby cop Eckhart representing corrupt law enforcement. Basically, despite the surrealism on display, the sense of Gotham as a criminal cesspool is very well realised, and extends to such a high level that the only realistic way to combat any of it is for a sad rich man to dress up as Dracula and drive a rocket-car at a clown.

The Score: I’ve saved this for last because, despite everything, Danny Elfman’s Batman theme is clearly the greatest and strongest legacy of the Burton era. Don’t come at me with your “dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner-Batman” nonsense. Elfman’s Batman score is sublime. Like John Williams’ Superman theme, it’s iconic, it’s distinctive, and as far as I’m concerned it’s what the character should sound like. I have absolutely no time for directors who think you should ever make a Batman film with different music. It’s as intrinsically linked with the character as the Star Wars theme is with, well, Star Wars. It’s perfect and beautiful and the love-love-love the fact that they stuck it in the Animated Series too.

Whelp, there we are. The ten best things about Burton’s two Batman movies. I barely spoke about the subsequent films because, well, they’re both crap. No, seriously, they’re bad films. Even Batman Forever. Don’t start.

[tumblunni]

Aaaaagh i feel so sad that i'm too late to the yokai watch fandom... Like man i had NO CLUE that its popularity was declining?? I finally got into the thing and now its dying and maybe i could have helped if i bought all the things back when it first came out??

And it sucks that apparantly its declining popularity is ALMOST ENTIRELY due to badly handled localization efforts. Not the translation itself, but more about the PR stuff behind it. The really long delays between games being released and localized, features being removed in the localization, awkwardly timed release dates, giving an innacurate impression of what youre gonna get, lack of merchandise beibg sold anywhere except america, even america getting barely anything compared to japan, putting the anime on a bad timeslot on unpopular channels, not dubbing spinoff games, dubbing spinoff games and then cancelling them as soon as they started getting a goddamn fandom, a bad downloadable demo of the first game that contained zero sassy humour despite that being the whole point of the series, and still going ahead with selling yw2 in two versions even though that strategy only works in an atmosphere of high fandom and turns people away when its a new growing fandom.

Aaaand it all sucks cos yokai watch is already like.. Pre-biased against Western audiences. I mean the whole premise is a cute version of local mythology, and when they decided to add "american appeal" in the third game they just made up a bunch of monsters based on american food and stuff instead of having even one based on a real american cryptid/mythology/folk hero/etc..

AND it sucks that the goddamn response to the decline has been really realy stupid, in my opinion. They decided to cancel the goddamn anime aka the most popular part of the series, and replace it with a Dark And Edgy Sequel that bombed completely. This was their response to people asking for more story driven stuff like in the games, and how all the story driven movies were the most successful thing ever. Why didnt you just adapt the goddamn stories from the games and/or continue doing story stuff with the existing anime characters!! And now despite yokai watch 3 being super fuckin awesome and finally perfecting the awkward battle system, theyre gonna throw it all out and take a giant risk with a whole new battle system on nintendo switch. TAKING RISKS WHEN THINGS ARE ALREADY RISKY IS BAD, YO

And not to mention how badly they handled the female characters as soon as things got risky! Like wtf why were they the thing that had to go first?? Removing the katie option on yw3 was universally hated by everyone, and biased audiences against the new character hailey cos the way the game was framed made it seem like she was the reason katie is gone. And the damage control they tried was really stupid and pointless?? Now there's just ONE SIDEQUEST very late in the game where you get to go thru a mirror to an alternate world where katie is the protagonist. Which only cements the whole 'she is not canon' thing and doesnt do anything but rub it in that we cant play as her. And i mean you do technically play as her during that segment, so if they had all the models and animations and shit done then why not just actually make a katie mode??? Even if it had less features than the usual option and was just an appearance switch with no changed dialogue aside from pronouns, thats basically what the gender option is in pokemon so its better than nothing. Even if yeah the lil bit of different personality in older games was neat and gave me an actual reason to wanna play again with Nate. AND THEN even more annoying is the fact they also threw Hailey under the bus, removing her shortly after she appeared in the anime and doing the whole sequel reboot where she doesnt exist. And she gets basically no merchandise and its like theyre trying to forget her. Which SUCKS because she is POPULAR! She was only preemptively hated before the game came out, for replacing katie. But then everyone loved her when they saw how hilarious awesome she is, and ESPECIALLY she was super popular in america aka the exact thing they were trying to do with making yw3. Which they friggin didnt dub for 4 years!! The america game for america!! Delayed in america!! Seriously so many bad decisions!!

And whats super extra weird is that apparantly europe saved it so that yw3 actually came out? Yw1 and yw2 had better sales over here despite being less promoted, having less merchandise, and it being awkward to catch new episodes of the show unless you can stream american tv. Apparantly the third version of yw2 straight up wasnt released in america except as digital download, so thats why id never heard of it until i saw it in the shops. And what does nintendo do with this knowledge? Continue focusing on america! Aaaagh i feel so sad cos its clearly not the team actually making the damn game thats making these shitty decisions, its just pr businessmen ruining their hard work at the last minute...

Seriously every yokai watch game is a labour of love, filled with so much damn STUFF and CHARM and EMOTION and SILLY LIL MONSTER DUDES and friggin OPEN WORLD MONSTER HUNTING IN TRASHCANS which is still the best goddamn idea ever. Oh and DR MADDIMAN'S INCREDIBLY TEARFUL PLOT AND INCREDIBLY HUGGABLE FACE

So yeah man im so sad im only getting here when the damn franchise is dying and i hope my fandom rambling maybe helps some of you guys get interested too! You can pick up the first game suuuuper cheap now! Please embrace the cute ghosts with me!!! DONT PASS ON TO THE AFTERLIFE, YOKAI WATCH

[mnemememory]

flatline

It’s like clockwork – like Nott’s crossbow, like the autonomation they had hacked to pieces to long ago (how long ago?). Spinning gears and so many blades.

(or; fjord and jester and yasha, alone in a house of monsters)

Hollow stillness bleaches the air, cut with the occasional burst of hysterical screaming.

It’s late, though – Fjord assumes that it is late – and things have died down to a blessed monotone. He leans against the bars of his cage and tries to ignore the painful stoop of the ceiling, the awkward slope that his shoulders have been forced into. Fjord stretches out as best he is able and makes himself comfortable amidst blisters and bruises and blood.

His eyes track lazily across the room; there’s a glow just beyond the bend, a forge of some kind. Fjord’s chest aches with sympathetic pain as he stares into the dim light, knots of bloody tissue stretching in time with his breathing. The room is a suffocation of silence and heat.

Tearing his eyes away from the impossibly distant hallway, Fjord lets himself glance off to the side. There’s a bit of a routine to it, now; a pattern. He doesn’t know how long they’ve been here, but there are blank periods in his head that would have been panic-inducing if the inside of his skull hadn’t hurt so much.

Jester looks so small.

Pins and needles scuttle down Fjord’s skin as he tries to make out the narrow lines of her back, but it’s hard to see past their separate bars. Their cages are close enough that, if he tried, he could probably scratch at the metal. Get her attention. He’d certainly tried that at first – when they hadn’t been watching.

(When he thought they hadn’t been watching).

The longer he stares, the more he can see. Jester is curled up towards the wall, glaring mutinously out at the hallway light. Her tail lies limp on the ground, the tip bent at an awkward angle outside the bars. It occasionally twitches, and she muffles the sounds that come out of her mouth by biting down on her wrist.

The echo of her scream revibrates in Fjord’s ears. He’s going to hear that sound for the rest of his life.

Jester clutches at her knees and shivers, blue skin a mess of – of things that Fjord doesn’t want to think about. It’s worse, in a way, that they had touched her. Not Jester, he thought (thinks), over and over – How could anyone hurt –?

But they had. They had hurt her, again and again and again. They had hurt Fjord as well, but Fjord’s been expecting pain for as long as he can remember. Maybe not to this extreme, but it’s only one mental adjustment away from being frighteningly familiar. His mouth aches with the weight of his tusks as they try to grow themselves out, eagre to take advantage of the unexpected interruption to his grooming schedule.

The first time someone – he thinks it was a man – had dragged a hot length of iron down the centre of Fjord’s chest, he had been remarkable chatty. “You’re a nice one,” he had said, tapping the red-ripped end against Fjord’s collarbone in an almost amicable gesture. Fjord locks his jaw to muffle a scream. “Big and strong. Someone’ll be paying good money for you, once we’ve finished.”

Fjord hates this – he hates this, that he had been caught off guard, that they had all been caught off guard, that they’re trapped here and swearing blood and trying not to die long enough to be sold for slaughter.

Fjord wants to talk to Jester. So, so desperately, Fjord wants to talk to Jester. To say, It’s going to be okay. To say, We’re going to get out of this. To say, They’re going to come after us. They will. It’s okay.

He can’t. He can’t, because they will hear him. He can’t, because they will take the words and twist them, barb them, shove them back inside and leave them to cut. Already, with a sting of vomit curling in the back of his throat, he can just imagine how badly they could hurt the both of them – the three of them – if he broke his silence.

Jester glances over at him, and her face is. Her face is. Fjord wants to look away, but he won’t (he can’t), won’t let her see how bad it is reflected in his expression.

“It will be okay,” she says, because Jester has always been a braver person than Fjord will ever be. “We are going to get out of this. Do not worry, Fjord. Everything will be okay.”

Yasha is in a different room.

Fjord only sees her when she’s being dragged towards the forge – it’s happened a few times, now, and he’s learning to judge the time between as a kind of morbid hour-count. She’s always spitting and hissing and swearing, breaking bones and splitting lips and coming out all the worse for it. Fjord wants to tell her to stop, because if they’re going to get out of here (they’re going to get out of here), they have to be smart about this.

But it’s hard not to envy her in her unbridled fury. Fjord looks at the dim glow and flinches away, mind whirling with desperate plans. Yasha looks forward and tries to rip it apart with her teeth.

They’re dragging her forward now, bare feet digging bloody grooves into the stone floorwork, arms bound to tightly behind her back it’s a wonder they’re still attached. She’s been flayed raw, strips of skin hanging in ribbons off her arms, and Fjord can hardly recognise her shy, awkward smile in the cruel snap of her teeth. They’re going to muzzle her, soon.

Fjord feels sick.

Jester is on her feet and clutching at the bars in seconds, fingers clenched white as she stares at Yasha’s frenzied form. Yasha looks over to them for a heartbeat of a second, panic flashing in her mismatched eyes, before she’s pulled further on. After a few minutes of standing there on splintering toes, Jester lets herself collapse onto the bottom of the cage and sob angrily.

There’s no one else in the room. Hesitating, and hating himself for it, Fjord presses his palm through the bars and knocks on Jester’s cage. Once. Twice.

Jester looks up, and she tries to smile, and it’s the most awful thing that Fjord has ever seen.

It’s like clockwork – like Nott’s crossbow, like the autonomation they had hacked to pieces to long ago (how long ago?). Spinning gears and so many blades.

Yasha goes in and comes out. They come for Fjord next.

He’s waiting. And maybe he’s too tired to play it up, or maybe he’s finally lost it. (Or maybe he’s angry, as angry as Yasha, as angry as he’s ever been – because they’ve got him locked down, and he’s watching as people he cares about are being torn apart, and he’s so useless).

When they open the cages, he pushes out against the back of his cage and uses the momentum to force himself out. He slams his head up, into the underside of his captor’s jaw. She gives and shout and stumbles back, and Fjord locks his arm around one of the cage bars and uses it to leverage himself to his feet.

“Fjord!” Jester shouts, high and panicked. She jams her forearm through the bars and loses a good three layers of skin as she tries to grab the woman in a headlock. She misses, and their captor begins to yell for reinforcements. Fjord kicks her in the ribs, but his knee throbs something fierce, and he has to give up his momentary advantage to keep from collapsing prone onto the ground.

“Nice try,” the woman says, as the rest of the group swarms.

“You know,” Jester says. “I don’t think I like this very much.

Don’t get me wrong! I am very glad I left. Or, you know, had to leave. But it was a lot of fun for ages because even if you were the only person I could talk to, you’re amazing so it doesn’t really matter that no one else can see you.

“But I…

“You can’t tell anyone, but at the moment, I’m a little scared. I’m trying really hard not to be, but Fjord hasn’t woken up, and I haven’t seen Yasha, and. And. I know the others are coming. I know it. They won’t leave us here.

“But these guys are, like, super strong. Strong enough to take out both Fjord and Yasha and me, and we didn’t even get to fight back. And, to be honest, we’re probably the smartest ones here.

Well, aside from Nott. And Caleb! Maybe. But since he doesn’t really bathe much, he can’t be that smart. Smart people takes bathes! My Mama takes bathes all the time, and she’s the smartest person I know, and also the richest, so she’s probably right.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been drawing you anything interesting in my sketchbook. Is that why you haven’t been talking back? I left it behind at the campsite, but if you’re angry because I haven’t been drawing, when I get it back I’m going to draw you so many pictures. Seriously, so many.

“Just…

“Please don’t leave me alone here in the dark.”

Fjord wakes up slowly, to the blistering heartbeat of a headache.

There’s a loud noise coming from a distance away, but Fjord can’t seem to concentrate. Something cold and sticky is sealing his eyelids closed, and it takes a few minutes to muster up to muster up the energy to rub it away. He moves his arm, and –

Fjord wheezes and tries to keep as still as possible, pain ratchetting along his ribcage. He lets out a half-choked howl before collapsing boneless against the side of the cage, throat raw.

“Oh, good,” Jester says, voice coming from somewhere close to his ear. “You’re awake!”

Fjord groans, but doesn’t answer.

“I was getting a little bit worried,” Jester says. “You haven’t woken up for ages, and something really big just started happening, and the walls keep shaking, and I think we’re going to be buried alive.”

Fjord forces his eyes open through a thick layer of bloody sludge; he tries to focus on Jester’s face, but all he can see is a blue smudge that keeps bobbing around, broken tail anxiously twitching.

“Good morning,” he croaks out, and wishes he hadn’t.

“Good morning, Fjord,” Jester says. “I think we need to get out of here very soon.”

“I think we already tried that,” Fjord says.

The entire right wall of their cell explodes.

Fjord and Jester jerk their heads around in time to see a blackened, cracked forge spill out hot coals onto the ground, creating a pathway of glowing embers. In the distance, they hear: “I’M SO GLAD WE FOUND THAT LAST STICK OF DYNAMITE!”

Jester laughs. Fjord clears his throat, closes his eyes, and shouts: “What took you so long?”

[nishi-key]

evergreen (G; for the middle blocker kindaichi yuutarou)

my piece for the middle blocker zine, which i only bothered to post now because i completely forgot that my blog is my portfolio. i received my copy of the book recently. thanks to everyone who made it possible! it’s absolutely gorgeous!!

rest of the fic under the cut. it’s...a bit of a read.

The plant is a young purple shamrock, for now nothing but clumps of tiny triangular leaves sprouting out from the soil in an overly-large pot.

It’s a present to Yuutarou for his thirteenth birthday, and though it’s not exactly on his wish list, he takes and looks at it as though it’s the vast, fragile universe—and it is, in its own special way, he figures. It’s a life smaller than he’ll ever be. He now holds its existence like he holds his food or homework or volleyball, and for a boy without much of a concept of what life is beyond these things, it feels incredible.

His mother names the flower with a bright grin on her face. “I got it for you because it’s one of the easiest plants to keep at home,” she tells him, “but the woman who sold it to me said it’s magical.”

Yuutarou raises an eyebrow.

“No, it’s true! It’s a magical shamrock that’ll watch over you, and everything you do. Take care of it well enough and it might just have something to say about your luck and successes.” She winks.

He knows better than to believe her; he’s not a baby, and he’s not about to get manipulated into poring over a bunch of leaves under the impression that it’ll give him a better life. He does thank her for the thoughtful present, though, listens to her drone on about how to keep it alive and promises to try his best with it as he takes it to his room and places it on his desk. Not a bad spot, he thinks, and makes a mental note to water it for the first time. Maybe later.

The plant is doing fairly well, from the looks of it.

It’s like owning a pet, having a plant under his wing, only not as cute and cuddly. It’s more of a new, relatively simple chore he carries out without the need to get nagged. It’s nothing special, nothing remotely interesting, so when his friends find out on the first day they come over, it’s anything but momentous.

"Wait, your mom said it was magic?" Kunimi asks once he finishes relaying the story, now months old.

"Yeah. I guess she was just trying to find a way to get me to give it lots of attention. Dunno why she bothered; it’s not really that needy." Yuutarou shrugs.

Kageyama stares at it with more wonder in his eyes than Yuutarou had when he’d received it. "You should take care of it, magical or not," he says, gingerly touching the tips of the flourishing dark purple leaves. "It’s pretty big, having to keep something alive like this."

"I know. I will," Yuutarou assures him, and relishes in his small smile and nod—not a sliver of doubt in the back of his mind, though there should be, about how well both he and Kageyama’ll be able to keep the important things alive as the years go by.

The plant is generally satisfied, and gradually gains more color, the pinkish white of flowers beautiful amidst the purple.

He doesn’t become a popular guy by any means. He’s easily the tallest kid in the volleyball club but his attacks don’t make the crowd go wild, and they never defeat Shiratorizawa. He’s pretty good at English and Science but his Math teacher always tells him he should do better. He’s welcoming and conversational but his circle of friends is small, his confidence and complete trust concentrated only on two in the bunch.

He wishes for more, as anyone would, and sometimes he finds himself looking at his plant (which beams along with him at every compliment Mom gives), thinking of the magic, but he instantly feels ridiculous, knows that wishes are for people who don’t know how to take action.

So he tries to stay content instead, and like this—with his friends’ bravery and Mom’s cooking and Dad’s advice—the years fly on by.

The plant was fine yesterday. It was.

In their third year, unexpectedly and out of nowhere, Kageyama gets mad at him.

"What the hell? That sucked," he says, eyebrows already knitted, after Yuutarou spikes one of his tosses and lands it out of bounds. "Did you slack off over break or something?"  

"Huh?" Yuutarou blinks at him. It’s three thirty and barely anyone on the court has jumped, let alone found a reason to get frustrated. "No? I—we both just miscalculate sometimes, or do something wrong without meaning to. It happens.”

"Try again,” Kageyama instructs, or maybe orders, but Yuutarou doesn’t want to think of it like that. “And make it score this time.”

"I will, I swear."

The image of the calm, collected Kageyama’s deepest scowl to date unwarrantedly plasters itself onto the forefront of Yuutarou’s memory, stays there all the way home. Maybe it was a bad day, he thinks, tells himself that everyone has the right to lose their cool when things don’t go their way—and right at that moment loses his own when he sees his plant sagging.

It isn’t even that bad; the flower stems are only a little bent and the leaves a little wrinkled, but his breath hitches and he drops everything and sprints downstairs so urgently that Mom has to sprint back up with him to make sure he doesn’t trip on his own feet and die trying to bring a plant back to life.

"It’s not the end of the world, Yuu," she tells him, caressing his back as he attempts to rejuvenate his charge. “These types of plants can look under the weather when the temperature isn’t quite right. It happens."

He drinks her words in the way he wishes the plant drinks the water, feels himself cooling down in its place. A little too cool perhaps, when he stares at the moist leaves and sees a poorly-spiked ball and glaring blue eyes and realizes that it isn’t hot at all, but he shuts his eyes, listens to the soft echoes in his mind:

“It happens.”

The plant is healthy again. It just needed a little water.

A 500-yen coin greets him on the floor of the hallway the next day and he picks it up, turns it in his fingers, stares at it for long enough that a still-sleepy Kunimi somehow finds time to join him.

“Find that on the floor?” he asks. “Keep it. Looking around for the owner and the Lost and Found are too much work.”

“Is that really okay?”

“Think of it as a reward for all the effort you’ve been putting into Math lately.”

Yuutarou, unable to argue with the logic and his desire for a reward, pockets the money.

Right before lunch, they’re handed back their tests, Yuutarou’s sporting a high 95 circled in red right beside his name. He grins from ear to ear when he sees it, offers the paper to those who ask to see, and practically brandishes the thing in Kunimi’s face when they meet up to eat.

Kunimi smiles in earnest, says, "Looks like today’s a good day for you," and it’s the best thing Yuutarou has ever seen.

At practice, he runs faster and jumps higher than ever before. His teammates clap him on the back, tell him he’s doing good today, and he makes conversation about Nationals because it feels right. His grin is almost permanent on his face, until a serve hits Kageyama’s and all hell breaks loose, the livid setter grabbing a trembling wing spiker, several inches taller, by the shirt.

"You have the nerve to talk about Nationals," Kageyama demands, above the litany of apologies, "with a serve like that?"

"Kageyama, calm down!" Yuutarou cries as others yank Kageyama’s hands away. "It was an accident, okay? He said he’s sorry."

"That’s not the point!"

"We’re going to get better," Yuutarou continues. "That’s why we’re here at practice. To improve. Better to make all the mistakes here and correct them so we don’t repeat them when it matters."

It comes out of nowhere, but it works. Kageyama pauses, his balled fists relax, and he averts his gaze, clicks his tongue and mutters an apology before turning away. Yuutarou supposes it’s good enough, but his stomach twists in not-so-subtle knots when their captain sets a hand on his shoulder and tells him he did well, and the rest of practice feels like floating on air.

When he gets home that evening, his shamrock is thriving. He isn’t sure why that scares him, ever so slightly.

The plant is fluctuating from bright and beautiful to complete garbage.

"You don’t think it’s actually magical, do you?"

They eye the plant on the desk, still and harmless, like it’s a monster on top of Yuutarou’s desk.

"What makes you think it could be?" Kunimi asks.

"Whenever something good happens to me, I get home home and see it perfectly fine. But whenever something bad happens, it looks dry and sad,” Yuutarou explains. “I can’t figure out if it reacts to what happens to me or if my day is determined by how it’s feeling."

"That’s dumb," Kageyama says immediately, like Yuutarou hadn’t just finished honestly speaking his mind. "There’s no way a plant can be magic. You probably just pay more attention to it on your good days and end up neglecting it on your bad ones so it reacts to how you treat it. Simple enough."

Yuutarou frowns. "These types of plants don’t need to be watered all the time. They’re really easy to keep alive."

"Then why’s yours dying every other day?"

"It’s not dying!"

"Why are you yelling?"

"Because—" Yuutarou yells until he realizes he is, and he pinches his mouth shut, because arguing is too much work. He exchanges glances with Kunimi instead, thinks maybe they won’t be inviting Kageyama over next time.

He sees the both of them out half an hour later, silently eats his dinner and washes up, and when he once again steps inside his bedroom, his shamrock’s flowers and leaves are falling.

The internet is packed with good reads on effective plant care, he finds, and he stays up after doing his homework to go through them. At practice, he messes up the timing for the block and brings the other team to match point. He hears his teammates sigh.

I’m a terrible blocker, he thinks, and he doesn’t look them in the eye for the rest of the day.

Online sources are limited and inconsistent, he decides, so sometimes he spends his breaks in the library, reading up on plants and how they work, the effects of temperature on their consistency and growth, the effects of anything at all to their resilience. In the hall, two sprinting boys knock him aside in their haste, and he apologizes to their retreating backs.

I’m such a pushover, he thinks, and in class he shrinks in his seat.

Science tells him nothing, so he scours for reliable material on the unexplainable, because that’s what his plant is. It follows no rules, it’s unpredictable, and it’s ruining his life. If he can’t control the magic, he cries in his mind, he can’t control his life.

"Yuu, it’s getting really late. You can do that tomorrow. Go to bed," says the person who brought this magic to him, standing by his doorway minutes before midnight. "If you don’t sleep early, you’re not gonna reach six feet."

Yuutarou has nothing to say to that; he buries his face in his book.

"Yuu. Can you hear me?"

He frowns.

Mom does too. "Okay, well, if you feel like talking tomorrow, I’ll be here. Get some rest, okay?"

She closes the door as quietly as she can, and the click of the lock shatters Yuutarou’s cold facade as well as his heart. I’m an awful son, he thinks, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

At practice, Kageyama’s mood only plunges, and Yuutarou doesn’t know what to do with him either. He sends tosses that are too fast and complains when no one can get them. He talks about getting faster, where’s the improvement, we have to win, we have to win—until the we’s become I’s, what used to be fun and challenging now a mere test of strength against what’s apparently a beast, a monster.

Yuutarou’s patience plunges too. No matter what, he thinks, I’ll never be worse than this guy. And he feels better about himself.

The plant has recovered.

Everything on the court gets worse the louder Kageyama yells, and when tournaments roll around, he’s the only thing Yuutarou’s sure he can block out. He hates that he has to; he still tries to treat Kageyama the same as before, but the minute he hears that sharp voice demanding he move faster jump higher match my pace, he cracks just a little bit more, and he’s well past breaking point.

He has been for a long time; he’s known that since he and Kunimi first spoke privately with their coach.

Their final match of the year, as a team, is no different. He tries and he tries but there’s nothing he can do about the monstrous toss. His jumps are futile, his words don’t go through. The time-outs don’t clear any of their heads. Kageyama never listens, never slows, and Yuutarou’s tired of moving too slow for him.

So he doesn’t move at all.

He stops in his tracks, keeps his eyes on Kageyama’s focused ones and watches them change—wide in anticipation, wider in surprise, even wider in confusion—as the alarmingly-fast ball rises and falls for the last time. Kageyama is benched, and the glare he used to direct at Yuutarou and the rest disappears under the shadow of his fringe, and that’s the last that Yuutarou needs to know about that.

They lose, of course. But the defeated look on Kageyama’s face convinces Yuutarou he’s won something. He feels stronger as he heads home, like he’s conquered a heavy weight on his shoulders, like he’s done something right for the first time in his life. The night sky is dark but it’s as though the clouds are making way for a bright sun overhead, one that tells of a future where nothing will ever make him feel so small again.

He heads up to his room in high spirits, but in the moment he opens his door he also reels back, drops all of his things, and tries to blink himself out of what he hopes is a cruel dream.

The plant is dead.

“It had to be a pest or something,” Mom says. “I can’t imagine how else this could have happened.”

The once-beautiful leaves of his shamrock are curled in on themselves, shrunken and weak, holes drilled into them like they’d been set ablaze. It makes Yuutarou feel sick but he can’t tear his eyes away, only blinks the wetness out of them as his chest grows heavy and his stomach sinks.

"We’ll do a little more research on this, okay? I remember reading that these kinds of plants can resurrect, or something like that. Maybe it still has a chance."

"Please throw it out."

Mom seems to stop breathing. "What?"

Yuutarou sucks in all the air he can find. "Let’s just throw it out."

"Ah—but—" She pauses, then gently rubs his shoulders. They’re higher than hers already. "Okay. Okay. Let’s just get a new one, yeah?"

"No."

"No? You don’t want to replace it?"

"I don’t."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

He feels her gaze on him, piercing and studious, but she doesn’t say anything he doesn’t want to hear. She sighs, takes the pot, and moves to head out the door. "I’ll bring this to the yard for you, all right? Dinner’ll be ready soon. Oh! And how was your game?"

The question sets his skin on fire, punctures his heart like it’s a dying purple leaf. "We lost," he mumbles, turning away. "We lost."

The plant has been buried underground for quite some time.

“Okay, Kindaichi, your turn!”

He steps to the front of the line and grabs a ball from the cart, tries to calm himself down even in the face of Oikawa’s toothy grin. It isn’t Yuutarou’s first time hitting his sets but the nerves never leave, and every run-up for a spike is like the moment of truth, make or break, match point.

He knows it shouldn’t be, and it makes a difference, but when he runs and swings and ultimately misses, he still clams up, turns to Oikawa with a barrage of excuses and apologies ready to leave his mouth, and the only thing that stops him is Oikawa’s still-smiling face.

"Your timing’s a little slow, huh?" he says. "Think you can go a little faster than that?"

The word ‘slow’ makes him want to shrink. But he looks at Oikawa’s patient gaze and reminds himself this isn’t middle school anymore. This isn’t Kageyama anymore, and Yuutarou is six feet tall, has a voice he’s used only a few times before, a voice that might as well wilt and die with his shamrock if he doesn’t ever use it again.

"Maybe," he says, but before Oikawa can beam too much, nervously adds, "but right now, can I not?”

Oikawa’s smile vanishes for the first time, and Yuutarou has to conceal his cringe for the better part of a minute before it comes back, wider than ever. "Well. I appreciate your being straightforward," he says, clapping a hand on Yuutarou’s shoulder, and Yuutarou has to work on controlling his gape instead. "I’ll accept that answer for now. Practice with me so I can get your timing right, okay?"

The yes that escapes from Yuutarou’s smiling lips is as loud as it is elated.

The plant is doing wonders for the garden soil it’s buried in.

Somehow he finds himself standing in front of Kageyama again one day, his own team fresh from a loss in their practice match. It’s odd to see him clad in black, but that’s the least of Yuutarou’s problems, now that the King of the Court stands before him wearing a different kind of crown.

He hadn’t come up with that nickname but he’d embraced it all the same, and when he’d heard that Kageyama’s school was coming over, he’d been intrigued rather than enraged. It would make for good entertainment, he figured, getting to watch Kageyama yelling at people he isn’t required to care about, and a good way to know for sure that where he is and where Kageyama is truly are meant to be different.

But that’s not what he sees, and ultimately, he ends up here, yelling at Kageyama and not the other way around, because Kageyama is different—from his faces on the court all the way up to the lightning-quick toss he now manages to score with. It has Yuutarou’s fists trembling as he screams, "Don’t apologize!" in front of a bashful King’s face, and he honestly can’t believe he has to.

What other things come out of his mouth, he doesn’t remember. They might be a little cruel, a little untrue, a little overconfident of him, but it helps him hold his head up high, and look Kageyama straight in the eye as he nods in agreement with everything Yuutarou had gotten off his chest, and says:

“Next time we fight, we’re going to win again.”

The we is a shot right through the heart. The way Kageyama leaves with his new partner is a dagger to his back. But as he looks to the ceiling, despite the feeling of defeat, he can neither help his smile nor understand why. He retreats to his own team with Kunimi, thinks about how Kageyama has changed, and how he isn’t the only one who has.

The plant is a dwarf lemon cypress, a fair height and vibrant green, and it’s been growing in a pot inside one of the second story bedrooms for the better part of a year now.

He finds it after another devastating loss to Shiratorizawa, and the first thing he thinks is it’s so beautiful. His eyes are still a little puffy from the tears but he stares at the bright leaves all shaped like miniature trees, gently runs his fingers through them, feels his heart swell.

“Oh, you found it.”

Mom stands by the doorway, leaning against the frame and smiling at him. Yuutarou shouldn’t be surprised—it’s her room, after all—but his mouth can’t make words and his eyes are wide, only able to stare at her.

“Purple was pretty, but also pretty depressing, so I figured you could use something green this time. The color of life, environment, renewal, and growth,” she says, like that stare had demanded an explanation. “And I thought it might be nice to get something taller, so you can get taller and tower over everyone on the court.”

The smile on her lips and in her eyes is so warm, and Yuutarou sniffles, breathes out a laugh. The first thing he thinks to say is incomprehensible, something he never would have asked three years ago. “So it’s magic too?”

“Hmm. The saleslady didn’t say it was magical this time.” Mom stands beside him and rests a hand between his shoulder blades. “But I’d say that the plants never had the magic from the start. It’s the amount of love and care you give it to keep it alive despite everything that happens in your life, good or bad, that makes it magic. Agree or agree?”

This time, Yuutarou’s laughter finds its voice. “Agree.”

“Do you want to move it to your room and take over now?”

“I’m fine with keeping it here for a while.”

“Okay. But only until you turn twenty; that’s when I’m legally allowed to stop caring about you so much.”

“Aww, make it thirty.”

“Too much! Twenty-one.”

“Twenty-nine! I’ll help you with it anyway.”

Mom’s shoulders shake with her giggling. “Fine,” she says, and Yuutarou leans on the shoulder he used to cry on as a child.

The plant has thrived even more since its discovery, basking in the heat, surviving in the cold.

“Captain Kindaichi sure handled that arrogant first year pretty well earlier, huh?”

Yuutarou snaps to attention and raises an eyebrow at the grinning teammates that surround him. “What?”

“The first year who yelled because our play wasn’t ‘the best we could’ve done’. You pulled him aside during the time-out and talked to him, right? Nice, nice.”

“It wasn’t much,” Yuutarou says, hunching over and pulling ahead of rest of the group leisurely strolling on the lamp-lit sidewalk. “And it’s not entirely new either. Kyoutani-san was like that to the third years back then, and Yahaba-san learned to deal with him, so I should be able to do something like this.”

“Yeah, we know, we’re just complimenting you, dumbass. Where’s our thanks for thinking you’re the best captain we could’ve hoped to have this year?”

“Well, thanks,” Yuutarou deadpans, but he doesn’t walk any faster. “I never asked for compliments, though. A captain’s only as good as his team, anyway; I lead, but we all do our best together. And when I inevitably screw up, you’re all there to pick up the pieces.”

“Or,” Kunimi interjects, sending a slap to his arm, “you could stop being all mature for a second and learn to take a compliment.”

The rabble erupts in a chorus of laughter and haphazardly-thrown punches, and he makes a face at them, glues their grins to his memory, and announces that they’re making a stop at a nearby store for some snacks, captain’s treat. Only for a while though, he emphasizes once the cheering dies down, so he can still get home in time to help Mom with dinner.

The plant has seen bad days and better days, but it grows. And it’ll keep on growing; Yuutarou will make sure of it.

[katekyo-hitman-aus]

au where Skull, Fong, and Reborn know each other beforehand

It was a tiny little baby in Fong’s arms. It was cute. And it was a monster, Fong decided as he tossed the baby to it’s mother. A high pitched shriek sounded from all the surrounding females of his life. Fong realized women were the most dangerous and could probably kill him by accident.

He sweated when he felt his mother’s stare behind him, her naturally long nails almost clawing Fong’s neck. Where was his father????

Yi-Sheng clicked her teeth in disapproval at Fong’s actions. Fong received many fan smacks the moment the purple baby was here.

Hours later, Fong was stuck with Changying, a girl who was only 11 months old and somehow liked him unlike other people.

The boy was pretty sure Changying was mad at him-as mad as a purple baby could get. But then when she saw Fong play with the other cousins, she cooed and banged her arms on the high chair for Fong. She could barely say anything in chinese except for Fong and fried dumplings. But she grew to be even more adorable, much to Fong’s horror. He didn’t need his friends picking on his little sister! He and Changying were considered the closest pair of cousins and doted on each other.

For example, they’d fall asleep over stupid shows and try to explore the streets of the city only for Fong to get wrecked by his own father and Changying quickly wailed when Fong got a bashing or two from their family.

Fong has never been so thankful for Changying. She was the one who’d always cry over her big Brother aka him, it literally changed his life. Life in this shitty shack never seemed better. And he’d eventually got the chance to learn martial arts for his crybaby cousin. Changying cried even more and he panicked.

But turns out it was tears of joy because Changying could actually defend herself. She couldn’t really fight though aside from knocking people out in one blow so Fong got even more tough training.

As years passed by, Fong and Changying both grew more subdued as a result of all the politics surrounding their family and eventually separated. Both still managed to find each other without saying anything though. 10 years later, Changying is back home with a wilted look in her pink jade eyes and dark hair that is roughly cut up to her shoulder blades.

Fong is wincing from all the deep bruising he’s received from his masters. Fong is now 14 years old.

He doesn’t notice her due to all the stinging cuts on his hands until a broken cry screams in rage. Fong’s eyes widen and all is not okay. Fong slumps his way to hug Changying, his rage boiling as he realizes that she is even more malnourished than he was at the age of 10 and that was when he was surviving on scraps.

“Big Brother! Who did this to you?” She cries, her head still pounding from the Man.

Fong grimly smiles and gently rubs off the dirt of her hands. Changying looks at him with narrowed eyes, a bit puffy from all the crying in the rain she did.

“No one but me.” “Bu-but-” “No one.”

That was the most scary Fong has been. Changying sniffles and buries her face into his stomach. Her stomach growled as she looks away.

“You seem hungry. Sit down.” He smiles. She knows that was a command.

She looks at the table, trying not to frown but does it when Fong gives her a warm bowl of soup. She smiles weakly at Fong and Fong scolds her for eating too fast.

“All you do after that is throw it back up Ying. Your stomach isn’t that prepared to eat a lot of food like you used to.” Fong spoonfeeds her the herbal soup, hands shaking.

Absentmindedly, she knows this isn’t right– it’s all messed up, she nearly chokes on the soup. But the China she knew years ago is forever gone. Fong puts down the spoon in order to feed himself too. Both siblings are suffering and they each tell their tale.

Changying’s been sold by her school teacher in order to make dues to the Chinese trade of slaves. Her owner let her loose when she couldn’t do anything within the first month and beat her. She had a friend but he died and had been fed to the wolves. Changying watched in a gilded cage in horror, tryng to break free and save him.

Her fingers burned as the wolves ate their last dinner and got shot with a short pistol. Nothing went right until she freed herself due to newbie guards. One of them pitied her enough to have 5 minutes of freedom. She went back to her house but she couldn’t find anything. The new residents just glared at her in fury and scorn.

She lowered her head into her knees and listened to Fong. Fong didn’t know how to start it but eventually, he told her everything.

“Mom and dad were killed. And then I joined the Underworld.” Changying looked at him, mortified for Fong and clung on to him as he reapplied his wrappings on his knees and patted Changying on the head.

“Fong! What happened to them?” She couldn’t believe it.

“Ying, they were pulled into some mafioso territory and got shot to death. No one even attended their funeral thanks to some threats I heard on the streets. But then I got thrown out onto the streets and started working for some Triad member. He’s dead now…” His voice got slightly distant. “Now I’m up to par with the spoiled brats that have more muscle mass and food. Of course I can kick their ass, I’m the disciple of one of the strictest tutors and this is him going easy.”

Changying’s eyes widened but she still furrowed her brows. “But what if they make you do something dangerous??? Like a suicide mission.” Her heart skipped a beat when she imagined it.

No home. Cue her hyperventilation.

A few hours later, she peacefully slept on the dirty mattress as Fong put on his slightly damp clothes on with a pair of new shoes (3 months??? He cleaned it everyday) and new socks that help him feel warmer at the speed he usually goes at in order to attend each Trial.

“Good night, Ying.” He gently placed a western coat over her shoulders.

On this foggy night, Fong could see a bonfire and drugs placed everywhere. He blanched when one of the newbies showed up with a bunch of illegal firecrackers in his pants.

The man bursts into sparks, howling in joy from the adrenaline. Fong angrily curses him out and everyone stares at Fong in amazement until Fong gets his face all bloodied by knuckledusters.

The other cronies laugh in a hypocritical way, stepping away from the leader with rapid steps and almost pissing their pants in one way or another. Fong tries to retaliate and happens to catch both arms but then Changying’s name is shouted. He slowly turns back-

He’s taken off guard and his face is buried into the dirt with 3 pairs on hands on his shoulders and hands.

Fong grit his teeth to stop himself from lashing against Triad members who caught word of his cousin’s arrival.

They jeer at him til morning comes and he is so tired, his braid isn’t even held in place anymore and it’s the one thing he thought they couldn’t mess up.

Changying opens the door the next morning to goad Fong into sleeping as she roughly rubs off the dark spots of dirt off his face and chest.

Changying pauses to get a new towel when she looks closer near his collarbone and sees a branding.

The world shakes even more as she finds more markings. Not her big Brother. Her fingernails grow exponentially longer with a tint of purple in the roots of her fingers.

She’s gone in an instant, stomping all around town to find the nearest Triad newbies; they slunk towards her, smelling like her previous…owner. She quickly scratches their eyes out, smiling when they cry as soon as her claws reach their collarbones and sets their shirt on fire.

That’s not much. By the end of everything, they’re curled up on the ground in pain, some even slowly rotting and the leader of it all is just sobbing and she could see his snot as he begs for her to stop everything.

Changying stops and he cries gratefully, spitting at those dying. But then it’s too late to save him as she strangles him slowly and throws him into the lid of an abandoned trash can. Most of the survivors are in a mess of blood and hide as soon as Fong smiles at them coldly when they recover in the hospital.

The Triads are pissed and instantly confront Fong about this for a large amount of time. Each time Fong smiles and says no, something always tackling the main confronter, mainly a few girls that grew fond of Changying’s skittish behaviour but eager affection when caught off guard. The butchers on the corner spit on the Triad’s fancy coats and Fong all welcomes them with poison dripping needles. 

Fong instantly gains more power and Changying is thankful for all the towels and hygiene products they own and can trade with the other neighbourhoods for.

Changying eventually learns how to shop on her own when Fong is busy on a mission with the girls in a human trafficking ring. It’s a bit scary but the grumpy Italian man helps her. Her pink eyes flash a thank you in morse code.

He insists on showing her how to haggle with the perm haired ladies and balding grandfathers and shitty people. Changying grins and bows, her bag of goods in his hand.

“Want me to walk you home??”

Changying hopes Big Brother isn’t home yet and agrees. Ying doesn’t learn much besides he’s from South Italy but she barely knows where Italy is and just comments on how interesting he was. And she was telling the truth for once.

“It was nice meeting you, Renato!”

Renato tips his hat as a good bye and shoves the bags into her arms while he holds the rusty door open for her. “No problem little miss-” he dodges the incoming fist that is from a darkly smiling Fong.

“Renato.” “Fong.”

They both dance in the air, Renato cursing as he left all his weapons behind save for a smokescreen and Renato is backed into the corner but sweeps Fong’s knee with his right leg.

Fong is taken over for a few seconds and instantly stable once again when Changying screams bloody murder and throws the goddamn teacups at both males like she was a profession at shotput or something.

“Get in here.” She calmly smiles at the two. They both glance at each other, dubious. She glares once again.

They have no choice and they’re pushed into the tiny house. She inhales, smile twitching like her left eyebrow.

“Why the hell are YOU TWO FUCKING FIGHTING? FOR FUCKS SAKE FONG YOU JUST FOUGHT THE MAN THAT HELPED ME SHOP FOR OUR FOOD AND RENATO THATS MY COUSIN GOD DAMMIT. You’re all pissing me off.” Changying sighs and stabs her juice box so hard it nearly exploded.

…well then.

Fong and Renato both glance at each other, slightly disturbed by an angry Changying. Two bowls of fish land on their heads as she laughs her ass off.

“Considering I’m 14 and both of you are like what… 18-20?? Shouldn’t you guys be mature? You sound like you’ve met each other anyways. Tell me how you met.”

Renato and Fong never tell her that they were both assassinating a corrupt tea house lady that had a flesh eating chihuahua with 3 heads….

They hope Ying never finds out and 2 weeks later Renato visits yet again for the nth time.

Fong tries to shut him out but Ying’s broom gets in the way and she has a saucer of black coffee for him and white tea for her and Fong. Not much happens aside from jabs at each other and dark glares while Changying isn’t looking.

She usually gets used to it unless they ruin her books or any type of curtains. That shit is expensive my friend and she refuses to use Fong’s money. Changying is a bit stingy about that and insistent incase something bad happens in general and they needed the money.

Then it became worse when Renato started handing over wads of cash and Fong smirked at the exchange as Changying grew more done with her two big brother figures.

“Renato! Stop giving me money! I have enough so you should stop handing over your money or else you’ll go broke!”

“Darling, this is nothing compared to what my clients give me after my missions.”

“Missions?”

“Fong didn’t tell you?? I’m an independent hitman who has a decent footing with the people. I get brownie points too, you doof.”

Changying pouts but nods in agreement. “I’ve heard of the Triads doing that. Are you Mafia??”

“Si.”

“That’s yes right?”

“Yes, little one.” Reborn smiles in amusement before his phone goes off. He groans and kisses her on the forehead.

“Yes?” Reborn places his hand on his hip. Changying muffles her giggle into her mouth as Renato continues to sigh dramatically and swing his hips.

“Sorry little one, I gotta go thanks to a personal client.”

“Renato!” “Yeah?”

“You may be a killer, but at least you have more morals than some of the civilians I’ve met. Stay safe.. big brother!” She kisses his chin because she’s too short but still. It’s the thought that counts.

Renato walks out, inwardly realizing how adorable Changying is with her light pink eyes and a row of yellow or blue flowers in her purple flowy hair. And it’s natural.

Fong nods in understanding as Renato breaks down in the middle of the road, screaming obscurities to himself while everyone’s at the market. The locals at the shop laugh behind their backs, nodding in approval at Changying’s choices. The old ladies babble about how good of a boyfriend Renato would be. The old men grumble and pout as they scale the fish.

“We have to protect Changying….I understand why you ended up almost murdering me the first time I saw her. She’s a lot more innocent than most girls.”

Thus the protect Changying squad was formed.

Both of them were gone for a year. That was when Changying got into the most troublesome job, in Fong and Renato’s opinion.

Changying finished all her chores and hummed to herself, taking a decorative knife with her. She glanced at the mirror, covering it up with a striped piece of clothing. The house is so dark that you can barely spot the trap wires and she maneuvers herself around the colorful wires and jump over the round rug right below the ceiling.

“Morning Ying!” A boyish girl laughs at her as she squeals and the door shuts loudly. Changying glares at her.

“Jia!”

Jia laughed again, tightly gripping Changying’s bicep, successfully dragging her all the way in the middle of town. Changying sighed and took a seat next to an old lady. Pink eyes met playful dark blue eyes.

The brunette smiled at Changying, her slanted bangs covering one of her eyes, “Hey! Hey! Did you hear about the local Chinese folks tryna make a circus?”

Changying perks up at the unfamiliar word. Circus?

“Ehhhh?? Chanyi, you’ve never heard of a circus before??”

“Haha, no.” Changying blushes and smiles sheepishly. “I never really did anything really fun with people and I couldn’t do much by myself. I get lost easily haha.”

Jia frowns thoughtfully and decides, “I’m going to take you to it now! They’ve been practicing for a bit now. Maybe you can take some inspiration from it for your traps.”

Changying hums happily as she is once again, dragged for a while, mind racing to a certain time.

(Jia was her new friend she met by accident. She was Russian and Chinese, new in the town. Changying wouldn’t know what to do without Jia. Changying was a recluse after her brother figures left her. At first she refused but Jia dodged her traps. Now they work together to make things a lot harder for her asshole brother figures and thieves. Changying was so amazed by Jia’s enthusiam that they both did actual research on optical illusions and traps.)

Changying yelped as Jia hopped forward, lifting her legs up in a bridal style, dodging all the people screaming at them and 5 minutes later, she was able to focus on all the Chinese music bouncing off the streets and a red lantern floating over her. Children screaming around her ears,

Changying sighed and avoided all the people running all over the roads. Soon, an overwhelming sight greeted her as she pushed through the crowds of people and paper curtains everywhere. Her eyes widened when she saw the tent of circus performers. They looked so pretty!

Her eyes sparkled and Jia covered her eyes, trying not to get blinded.

A few days later; Changying slowly warmed up to the people, albeit shyly, and the others welcomed her.

A few weeks later, Changying was already part of the circus tent, slowly crawling onto a Liger. Her back arched slightly as she put the crown of bells on the Liger. She whimpered when the Liger growled, slightly shaking its body but Changying was immediately off the liger.

She smirked and took the sack of money from grumbling man in the back of the room. The liger didn’t care about them and just stared at Changying. She quickened her pace before anything else happene-

The door slammed, an angry dark skinned woman stomping her way over to the area, screaming for no reason and then the Liger ate her.

Everyone screamed bloody murder.

Well.

That was a thing, Changying smiled nervously. One of the acrobats patted her on the shoulder, replacing her blood stained sweater with a black and red cloak while smiling at her casually.

“Don’t worry about anything! Our animals eat a lot more flesh than normal people. But they recognize people’s behaviour and are designed to eat those who get in the way. We’re probably one of the most dangerous but safest in the area.”

Changying sighed, thinking to herself as they dressed her in accessories.

Of course Jia has to choose the most dangerous circus… I might as well join the chaos. Changying snapped back to reality and grinned with shark teeth.

Jia yelped, dropping her whip and red flats. She looked at the strange aura her friend emitted and tiptoed away with her belongs to the backstage.

“Jia~”

“YING WHAT THE FUC-” Jia got slapped

“Language!” Changying wagged her finger at Jia, who was fucking terrified. Who knew her best friend could travel 40 yards within the blink of an eye?

After Jia’s slight heart attack, they both got ready and Changying tightened her and Jia’s hairbuns and stuck in tiny pins.

Later that night, it was a successful show. Changying was a stunt performer who dabbled in fire acrobatics and Jia introduced everyone and was one of the many people who pulled out volunteers for several events.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Thank you for the show and we’d like to give out one more prize for 2 volunteers!” A huge amount of hands instantly waved to Jia, wanting something.

Jia grinned and yanked out an Italian man and the other man in a pure red chinese top. The Italian was fluent in Chinese and talked with the other man. Jia’s smile was a bit strained since they ignored her but then she yelped as Changying kicked her ribs softly.

“Changyi!!!” Jia whined, rubbing her sore stomach.

“Jiaaaaaa!” Changying giggled, secretly glaring at the two volunteers, as she hugged Jia. Jia blinked.

“You know them two?”

“Of course! They’re the big brother figures I talked about! The one in red is Fong and the one in black is Renato.”

Jia just gave the giant box of mooncakes and coin chocolate to both of them and announced the show’s end. Most people didn’t want to leave but then Jia swung her whip at the stubborn Triad members. Jia smirked as they squealed like babies.

“Jiaaa. Was it that neccessary?? Besides, I think they were flirting with the wrong girl.”

The brunette stared at her in disbelief, slowly twitching. “You’re the only girl who’s shorter than most people and you have purple hair and glow in the dark flower crowns….. I’m pretty sure they knew it waas you.”

Fong and Renato gave the trio of Triad members a death stare. They all shivered. Changying just smiled mysteriously.

“I’m sure there’s another girl!” She reasoned. “Maybe they thought I was new and wanted to help me…???”

“Just don’t.” Fong, Jia, and Renato’s voices deadpanned at Changying. When the brothers came home earlier, they were surprised by a bunch of pressure tile traps and etc. The whole house looked like a mess until Changying arrived and set the house on purple fire.

“How are you doing that??” Renato and Fong gaped.

“Oh uh…I may have almost died and apparently I have dying will flames…. Jia told me. She’s also part of the mafia like you two.”

Renato rolled his eyes and hugged Changying tightly. Fong waited for his turn.

They were all tired as fucK.

(notes: Skull is obviously Changying and she’s cousins with Fong. She’s an acrobat and that is a heart attack inducing occupation but as long as she’s happy and not dead, Renato and Fong are okay with it.Changying(skull)’s parents were dosed with mist flames when Changying got sold. They themselves have forgotten they had a family and the both split up, feeling distorted in their relationship. Renato is the 2nd heir to a mafioso family but ensures that he won’t become the head due to heavy security provided by his allies that he asked (blackmailed). He’s made it his goal to become a famous hitman. His old teacher used to be one of the best even if he was a spartan tutor. Renato has the personality of a brother who gives no shits about what he says in front of old ladies.Fong and Renato often meet each other by accident and they hate each other so much until Changying(skull) makes them get along due to existing :)Jia is just a random background character that’s a very sneaky lady. She’s slightly older than Changying and has an obsession for cute things. Changying doesn’t know this thankfully. Jia may or may not keep every article that Changying has given her throughout the year. Jia is a scholar and went here on a whim. She’s very rich but very cheap about many things excluding food or necessities.and Changying is very very innocent as stated in this au fic. Not much to say about the cinnamon roll except that she could kill people if she wanted to but she has too much self restraint and would have the strength of a marshmallow if not for her acrobatics regime along with helping everyone in her neighbourhood out. She stronk lmao. Only bends over for people she really likes. Knows like people who see her everyday and won’t remember the time she accidentally saved an important man’s life and got a bunch of raises in her old job. Has the best luck in the world when it comes to shoot outs in China. She nearly died thanks to a bullet and that’s how she ended up activating purple flames. thank you for readingggggggg :DDDDD)ps: idk why I do this lmaooo. Fem skull is one of my aesthetics :)

[zeroviraluniverse-blog]

33 Fun Facts About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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33 Fun Facts About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

On the genre-busting television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the heroine saved the world—a lot—over the course of seven seasons. Buffy premiered on the WB 21 years ago today; here are a few things you should know about the show. (And this is just the tip of the stake.)

1. THE SHOW IS A SEQUEL OF SORTS TO A MOVIE.

In the late ‘80s, writer Joss Whedon had an idea for a movie that would subvert the horror genre. “I had seen a lot of horror movies, which I love very much, with blond girls getting killed in dark alleys, and I just germinated this idea about how much I would like to see a blond girl go into a dark alley, get attacked by a monster and then kill it,” he said. “And that was sorta the genesis for the movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The movie, penned by Whedon and directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, hit theaters in 1992. It starred Kristy Swanson as Buffy, Donald Sutherland as her watcher Merrick, and Luke Perry as her love interest, Pike (David Arquette also starred as Pike’s best friend-turned-vampire Benny). But the film was different from what Whedon had originally intended. “My original script for the movie was kind of dark and scary and it was comedic, but the final product was much more a broad comedy,” he said.

A few years later, the rights holders approached Whedon about making a TV show out of his creation. He wasn’t sure it would work, but “I started to think about it and I came up with the notion of playing all sorts of horror movies in high school and making them metaphors for how frightening and horrible high school is,” he said. “With the show, I kinda wanted to get back to the roots of genuine horror, but with a lot of comedy and a lot of edge and a lot of self reflective sort of examination of horror. But at the same time, get genuinely creepy and hopefully genuinely moving.” And the TV version of Buffy was born.

2. KATIE HOLMES AND RYAN REYNOLDS COULD HAVE STARRED ON THE SHOW.

Could you imagine Katie Holmes as Buffy and Ryan Reynolds as Xander? According to a 2000 biography, before she was Dawson’s Creek’s Joey Potter, Holmes was offered the role of the slayer, but turned it down to go to high school. Reynolds refused the role of Buffy’s wisecracking sidekick. “I love that show and I loved Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, but my biggest concern was that I didn’t want to play a guy in high school,” Reynolds told The Star in 2008. “I had just come out of high school and it was f***ing awful.”

3. GILES WAS THE FIRST ROLE CAST.

According to casting director Marsha Shulman, “Anthony Stewart [Head] was the first person that got cast on the first day we started casting. He was just it.”

Many other actors who read for the part, Whedon said, made Giles too stuffy, but Head’s take was a little sexier. “Tony Head was one of the few people that we saw and instantly knew right away that nobody else was going to play that part,” Whedon said. “He embodied it perfectly.”

4. SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR AND CHARISMA CARPENTER SWAPPED ROLES.

Gellar auditioned for the role of Sunnydale High queen bee Cordelia Chase before eventually being cast as Buffy. “At the time, we were all trying to find our way to make the show something, its own thing apart from the film,” Schulman said in The Watchers Guide. “We didn’t think of Sarah as Buffy because we thought she was too smart and too grounded and not enough of a misfit in a sense, because Buffy was this outsider. How could Sarah be an outsider? She’s so lovely. So we brought her in as Cordelia, and she was fantastic as Cordelia. Then we went to the network, they knew that Sarah was a star from her previous work, and that she could be Buffy, and that we could do that Buffy.”

Carpenter, meanwhile, auditioned for Buffy before being cast as Cordelia. “I think that the way it turned out is the way it was meant to have turned out,” Carpenter told the BBC. “I’m extremely pleased that I wound up with the character that I have for a myriad of reasons. … I don’t know that I would have been ready for that kind of fame if I’d gotten Buffy. So, I think [Buffy] went to the right person.”

5. WILLOW WAS RECAST AFTER THE PILOT WAS SHOT.

Willow, science geek and Buffy’s best friend, was an exceptionally tough part to cast. “We had actually cast someone else in the pilot. It just didn’t work,” Shulman said. “When we got picked up, we always felt that we were going to start again and look for another Willow.”

“I was determined that we wouldn’t have the supermodel in horn rims that you usually see on a TV show,” Whedon said. “I wanted somebody who really had their own shy quirkiness. While the network and I were looking for people, Alyson Hannigan slipped under our radar. She came in and we didn’t really know that she was going to be the guy, and then when she read for the network we were just blown away. She brings so much light and so much tenderness to the role, it’s kind of extraordinary.”

6. DAVID BOREANAZ WAS DISCOVERED BY THE CASTING DIRECTOR’S FRIEND.

Whedon, the network, and the casting director saw a number of guys read for Buffy’s eventual boyfriend (and vampire!) Angel before David Boreanaz auditioned. “The breakdown said the most gorgeous, mysterious, fantastic, the most incredible man on the face of the earth,” Shulman said. “I think I saw every guy in town. It was the day before shooting, and a friend of mine and called me and said to me ‘You know, there’s this guy that lives on my street who walks his dog every day and I don’t know what he does but he has all the things you’re describing.’ And the minute he walked in the room, I wrote down on my notes: This is the guy.”

Still, despite the fact that Boreanaz gave “very good read,” Whedon wasn’t sold on him. “He wasn’t exactly my type,” he said. “I wasn’t sure we necessarily had the guy here until I asked the women in the room, who had turned into puddles the moment he walked in. I had to defer to them—they seemed to know better than me, and thank god I did, because David turned into a great star and a very solid actor.”

7. THE FIRST VERSION OF THE THEME SONG WAS A DUD.

Whedon wanted the credits sequence—which begins with “this scary organ and then devolves instantly into rock ‘n roll”—to spell out for viewers exactly what the show was about: “Here’s a girl who has no patience for a horror movie, who is not going to be the victim, is not going to be in the scary organ horror movie,” he said. “She’s going to bring her own youth and rocking attitude to it.”

Dissatisfied with an early version of the theme, Whedon opened it up in a contest of sorts to local indie bands. It was Hannigan who suggested Nerf Herder; the band ultimately wrote and recorded the show’s theme. “They created the show and were filming the first season and the people there … hired some fancy pants Hollywood guy to write the theme song and they didn’t like it; they wanted something more rocking, I guess,” Nerf Herder’s lead singer, Parry Gripp, said. “So they asked a bunch of local, small time bands who they could pay very little money to come up with some ideas and they liked our idea and they used it. And the rest is history!”

The band rerecorded the theme in the second or third season because the first recording was a hasty affair, and the song went off-tempo in the middle, Whedon said.

8. THE SHOW SHOT IN A WAREHOUSE—AND AT ACTUAL SCHOOLS.

In the beginning, Buffy didn’t have much of a budget, so instead of shooting on a soundstage, the crew used a huge warehouse in Santa Monica, California. “We were very much on a tight budget,” Whedon said. “This hall you’ll see a lot of in the first 12 episodes. It is the entire school. We only had the one hall, so we use it over and over again. It’s really kind of sad, actually.” The outside of the warehouse also doubled as the entrance to Sunnydale’s only club, The Bronze. “When we designed the club, we put the door to the club on the outside of the actual warehouse so that we could go in from the outside because that would give it real life and make it very realistic,” Whedon said. “And of course we did it just once, and then once more in the third season, because you have to wait until night to shoot, go in and out and light it, and it’s just enormously complicated.”

Torrance High School in Los Angeles subbed in for the exterior of fictional Sunnydale High. It’s a popular spot for film and TV; you might also recognize it from Beverly Hills, 90210, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, 90210, She’s All That, Not Another Teen Movie, and more. And when Buffy went to college, most of Sunnydale University was shot in the warehouse, but some parts of the first episode of the fourth season were shot at UCLA.

9. THERE WAS A REASON FOR THE VAMPIRES’ CREEPY FACES—AND THE “DUSTING.”

In the Buffy movie, the vampires looked like regular people with sharper teeth and paler skin. But for the show, Whedon wanted to increase the sense of paranoia by making the vampires resemble normal people until it’s time to feed—at which point, they transform into monsters. But there was another reason, too. “I didn’t think I really wanted to put a show on the air about a high school girl who was stabbing normal-looking people in the heart,” Whedon said. “I thought somehow that might send the wrong message, but when they are clearly monsters, it takes it to a level of fantasy that is safer.”

Getting into vamp mode—which required a prosthetic that fit from the forehead down to the bottom of the nose—took about an hour and 20 minutes. “It can be tedious,” David Boreanaz said in 1998, “and taking it off is the worst part, because you have to sit there and you just want to rip the damn thing off—but you can’t, because you’ll take a piece of your skin with you. It has to be removed very delicately. But the end result is definitely worth it.”

The film also had vampire bodies lay where they fell after they were staked. But Whedon had different ideas for the show. “It was a very conscious decision to have [the vampires] turn to dust, clothes and all, because I didn’t think it would be fun to have 15 minutes of let’s clean up the bodies after every episode,” he said. The show’s visual effects artists worked on and refined the technique over the seasons.

10. THE CREATORS DREW ON EXISTING VAMPIRE LORE FOR THE SHOW.

But they didn’t use everything. Vampires don’t fly on Buffy or turn into bats  because the show didn’t have the money and Whedon thought it looked silly. Other elements of vampire lore, however, were used: Vampires don’t have reflections; they can’t enter a house unless they’re invited; they’re vulnerable to garlic, crosses, sunlight, fire, and holy water; and they can be killed by beheading or via a stake through the heart.

11. GELLAR HAD SOME PROBLEMS WITH THE DIALOGUE.

The show was famous for its “Buffyspeak,” which was partially inspired by California Valleygirl-isms and how Whedon and the other writers spoke. For Gellar, though, that dialogue sometimes was an issue. “Joss has his own sort of language that’s difficult for us mere mortals to understand,” she said in 1998. “I grew up in New York. We didn’t have Valley girls, and constantly, I’m asking him ‘What does this mean? I’m not quite sure.’ There’s a very funny story about [my audition] where the first line is ‘What’s the sitch?’ And there I go walking in, and my first ‘What does this mean?’ No idea it meant situation. Talk about blowing a job instantly.”

12. HERE’S WHERE YOU’VE SEEN SEASON ONE’S BIG VILLAIN BEFORE.

Underneath all of the Master’s vampy makeup is actor Mark Metcalf, who has appeared in Animal House (he played Doug Neidermeyer) and Seinfeld (he played The Maestro), among many other films and television shows. “Most of the guys we read came in and gave us villain villain villain in a very unimaginative way,” Whedon said. “Mark’s not that character, he’s just sly. He undercut all of the villainousness with real charm.”

13. THE CAST AND CREW HATED THE LIBRARY SCENES.

Head delivered much of the show’s expository dialogue in the library—and cast and crew alike came to dread those scenes. “He’s brought so much to all these really tough speeches, giving them life where they had very little because they’re full of so much information,” Whedon said. “When we finally blew up the school at the end of season three and were in the library for the last time, everybody breathed a great sigh of relief because these became the bane for us when we were filming, to go back into this space and talk yet again about what the peril was going to be.”

14. DARLA WAS SUPPOSED TO DIE IN THE SECOND EPISODE.

The vampire (played by Julie Benz) was supposed to expire at the end of “The Harvest” after Willow doused her with holy water, but Whedon kept her alive because he thought Buffy and Angel’s romance would be more interesting if it was a triangle; Darla, of course, was Angel’s sire. She was eventually killed in episode seven, but would continue to pop up in other episodes—and in the spin-off show, Angel—from time to time.

15. GELLAR AND BOREANAZ WOULD EAT GROSS STUFF BEFORE KISSING SCENES.

In a 2002 interview with The Independent, Gellar called love scenes “the unsexiest thing in the world.” What she and Boreanaz did beforehand couldn’t have made it any sexier. “[We] were the worst,” she said. “We would do horrible things to each other. Like eat tuna fish and pickle before we kissed. If he had to unbutton my shirt or trousers I would pin them or sew them together to make it as hard as I could. Once I even dropped ice cream on him.”

16. THE SHOW BUILT ITS OWN GRAVEYARD.

In the first season, Buffy shot in a graveyard in Hollywood. “It meant going out all night, until sunrise, a lot of times,” Whedon said. “That was back when we had the energy for that kind of thing.” Starting in the second season, they created their own graveyard in the warehouse’s parking lot. “It made our lives a whole lot easier, but it doesn’t give you the scope that you get from [the Hollywood graveyard],” Whedon said. “It’s a really beautiful place. Looks great.”

“We poured in kerb, back-filled it with dirt and planted grass and lots of trees and stuff and that’s our graveyard set,” production designer Carey Meyer told the BBC. “The majority of our cemetery stuff actually takes place in that little tiny parking lot. At night, with a couple of headstones in the background with all the trees and such, you can really cheat to make it look quite large.”

17. WHEDON HAD AN INTERESTING NICKNAME FOR GELLAR.

At a cast reunion in 2008, Whedon revealed—to Gellar’s surprise—an odd nickname for her, borne from the fact that she dealt with so much pain on screen. “David [Greenwalt] and I used to crow, when we realized what Sarah could do,” he said. “We used to call her Jimmy Stewart, because he was the greatest American in pain in the history of film.” Gellar laughed and said “I never knew that!”

18. AT LEAST TWO ACTORS PLAYED MORE THAN ONE VILLAIN.

Brian Thompson, who played vampire Luke in the first two episodes, returned in the second season to play The Judge. “Quite frankly, we were in a hurry,” Whedon said. “We already had his face cast and we knew he could put makeup on and give us a good performance.” Camden Toy, meanwhile, played a number of villains, including one of the Gentlemen in “Hush” (season four), a skin-eating demon called Gnarl in “Same Time, Same Place” (season seven), and Ubervamp Turok-Han (throughout season seven).

19. THE WRITERS HAD THEIR OWN TERM FOR PLOT-MOVING DEVICES.

It was coined by writer David Greenwalt. “A lot of this stuff is based on myth and horror movies, and a lot of it made up for our convenience,” Whedon says. “At one point, when we were trying to figure out exactly what Buffy would be trying to do [in the first episode], Greenwalt just shouted out ‘For God’s sake, don’t touch the phlebotnum in Jar C!’ We have no idea to this day what it was supposed to mean, but it became our word for the vague mystical thing—such as the master’s cork in the bottle theory—so phlebotnum is our constant on the show.”

20. WHEDON WROTE THE LARGELY DIALOGUE-FREE EPISODE “HUSH” TO CHALLENGE HIMSELF.

Season four’s tenth episode, “Hush,” features creepy villains called The Gentlemen, who come to Sunnydale and steal the residents’ voices … so that no one can scream when the monsters cut out their hearts. There are only 17 minutes of spoken dialogue in the 44 minute episode. Whedon wanted to do a largely silent episode because he felt like he was phoning it in. “I had fallen into the ‘people a-yakkin, I can sort of do this without really thinking about it’ style of directing, and I wanted to curtail that in myself,” he said. “On a practical level, the idea of doing an episode where everybody loses their voice presented itself as a great big challenge because I knew that I would literally have to tell the story only visually, and that would mean that I couldn’t fall back on tricks. I wanted to do something harder.” Though Whedon was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to pull off the episode, it was well received by critics, and is a favorite of fans and the series’ stars alike.

21. THE GENTLEMEN WERE INSPIRED BY A DREAM.

A version of Buffy’s creepiest villains first appeared in a dream of Whedon’s; they floated toward him while he was in bed. “What I was going for was very specifically a very Victorian kind of feel, because that to me is very creepy and fairytale-like,” Whedon said. He created a drawing, which he delivered to makeup supervisor Todd McIntosh and John Vulich at Optic Nerve, the special effects house that created the prosthetics for the show. “I was drawing on everything that had ever frightened me, including the fellow from my dream, Nosferatu, pinhead, Mr. Burns—anything that gave that creepy feel,” Whedon said. “We get into a lot of reptilian monsters and things that look kind of like aliens, and what I wanted from these guys was, very specifically, fairy tales. I wanted guys who would remind people of what would they were scared of when they were children.”

Whedon’s ultimate hope was that kids of a certain generation would be as traumatized by the Gentlemen as he was by the Zuni Doll from Trilogy of Terror. The team cast mimes and actors who had done creature work—like Doug Jones—to play the Gentlemen.

22. THE HARDEST CHARACTER FOR WHEDON TO KILL OFF WAS BUFFY’S MOM.

One of Buffy‘s most critically acclaimed episodes is season five’s “The Body,” in which the slayer’s mom, played by Kristine Sutherland, dies of natural causes. Whedon said in a 2012 Reddit AMA that Joyce was the toughest character for him to kill. He did the episode, he said in DVD commentary, because “I wanted to show not the meaning or catharsis or the beauty of life or any of the things that are often associated with loss, or even extreme grief, which we do get in the episode. But what I did want to capture was the extreme physicality, the almost boredom of the very first few hours. I wanted to be very specific about what it felt like the moment you discover you’ve lost someone. And so what appears to many people as a formal exercise—no music, scenes that take up almost the entire act, if not the entire act, without end—is all done for a very specific purpose, which is to put you in that moment of dumbfounded shock, that airlessness of losing somebody.”

The moments after Buffy discovers her mother dead on the couch were done in a single take, which Whedon had Gellar perform seven times (the actress has called the episode one of her favorites). “The cameraman had the camera on his shoulder the whole time and was running around,” Whedon said. “It wasn’t a steadicam—he had no harness because I wanted that urgency of handheld, that you’re in the moment of it. It’s an extraordinary piece of acting from Sarah … to go from the extremity of first finding her, the helplessness of not knowing what to do. All the things that Sarah had to go through in this, she had to go through many, many times. And every take was extraordinary.”

23. ONE SHOT IN “THE BODY” WAS INSPIRED BY DIRECTOR PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON.

One shot in “The Body” follows the coroner after he examines Joyce’s body out to where Buffy waits with her friends in another single take. “I am a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan,” Whedon said, “and I had been watching Magnolia excessively before I shot this. So these endless tracking shots probably owe something to that. What can I say, I’m a hack. But what I was really trying to get at here was, again, the reality of the space. I wanted to see Joyce very clearly, and then I wanted to walk all the way over to where Buffy was, where her loved ones were, so that you understood she was down the hall, she was really there. We weren’t on a different set.” Whedon gave kudos to production designer Carey Meyer for building sets that would let him get those long takes.

24. GELLAR KNEW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IN SEASON FIVE WELL IN ADVANCE.

Several moments in the final episode of season three foreshadowed two major events in season five: Namely, that Buffy would get a sister (Dawn, played by Michelle Trachtenberg) and that the slayer would die at the end of season five. “I’ve actually known the [plot of the] entire last season for about three years,” she told the BBC. “There was a dream sequence that Buffy had with Faith. Faith had a riddle, and it was something like ‘Little Miss Muffet, sitting on her tuffet,’ counting down from whatever the numbers were, and I went to Joss to ask what it meant. That’s when he explained to me that I was going to have a sister, that Dawn, the character of Dawn, would be coming on the show. I think that’s exactly when I became aware also of what the future plans were.”

Why manufacture a sister out of thin air? “Part of the mission statement was, let’s have a really important, intense emotional relationship for Buffy that is not a boyfriend,” he told Salon. “Because let’s not have her be defined by her boyfriend every time out of the bat. So, Season 5, she’s as intense as she was in Season 2 with Angelus, but it’s about her sister. To me that was really beautiful.”

25. SEASON SIX WAS THE TOUGHEST FOR GELLAR.

After the fifth season, Buffy moved from the WB to UPN and resurrected its heroine for the sixth season—which was darker in tone (and more controversial) than any season before it. “It was definitely tough for me,” Gellar said at a Paley Center event in 2008. “It’s so hard to separate myself from her, so it was tough for me to see these situations and say ‘But Buffy wouldn’t do this.’ … I know Joss and Marti both had to talk me off a ledge a couple of times because it just felt so far removed from me at the time, and maybe that was the point. Maybe I was struggling the same way she was struggling to find out who she was. It just felt so foreign to me. … We love her, and I think it was hard for all of us to watch her suffer. … It was a tough time. And I think that’s what came through in the end, and that was great. When Buffy herself resurfaced, we sort of found our voice again.”

26. WRITER/PRODUCER MARTI NOXON HAS A CAMEO.

She’s the lady with the parking ticket in “Once More, With Feeling.”

27. GELLAR CALLED THE MUSICAL EPISODE “DAUNTING.”

“I’m a perfectionist, I come from a long line of lots of preparation, and certainly that was not the case with this,” she said. “If I had my druthers, we would have gotten it about two years ago and been in classes for a year and a half, maybe six weeks of rehearsals? Instead of four days.” At a Paley Center event in 2008, Gellar admitted to “begging” to be let out of it. “I begged for Buffy the rat,” she said. “I kept thinking, ‘Bring the rat back.’”

28. STONE TEMPLE PILOTS’ LEAD SINGER WAS A FAN.

Scott Weiland reportedly became a fan while watching the show in prison. Gellar, who later appeared in the band’s music video for “Sour Girl,” had a theory about why the show was so popular among prison inmates: “Hot chicks doing battle. It’s like acceptable porn.”

29. GELLAR KNEW THE SHOW WAS OVER BEFORE THE REST OF THE CAST.

In the March 7, 2003 Entertainment Weekly cover story, Gellar announced that Buffy was coming to an end after seven seasons. “I love this job, I love the fans,” she said. “I love telling the stories we tell. This isn’t about leaving for a career in movies, or in theater—it’s more of a personal decision. I need a rest. Teachers get sabbaticals. Actors don’t.” The rest of the cast found out the day the story hit stands. “I was devastated,” Hannigan said in 2013. “I was just very shocked.”

30. BUFFY’S ADVENTURES CONTINUE IN COMIC BOOKS.

A number of writers who worked on the TV show have also worked on the comics. Even James Marsters, who played vampire Spike on the show, wrote a comic about his character. “I was at the San Diego Comic Con and I was describing an idea that had been kicking around my head for a long time to [artist] George Jeanty, who draws a lot of the Buffy comic books,” Marsters told io9. “And he thought that it was a fabulous idea and that I should definitely get in touch with [Dark Horse editor] Scott Allie. He made the phone call and then I pitched it to Scott over the phone and Scott liked it a lot. It’s a story that was going to try to be made into a Spike movie years and years ago.”

31. THERE WAS TALK OF AN ANIMATED SERIES.

Whedon and the show’s other writers produced seven scripts for an animated Buffy series, which would have taken place during the show’s first three seasons and been voiced by the cast. Sadly, no one wanted the show. “They were really fun to write,” Whedon said. “We could not sell the show. We could not sell an animated Buffy, which I still find incomprehensible.”

32. THE SHOW SPAWNED ACADEMIC COURSES…

A number of colleges and universities offer courses on the show; they’re called “Buffy Studies.” People have written books and held conferences dedicated to discussing the themes of the show and presenting papers on it. According to the Los Angeles Times, attendees at a 2004 Buffy conference “were presenting 190 papers on topics ranging from ‘slayer slang’ to ‘postmodern reflections on the culture of consumption’ to ‘Buffy and the new American Buddhism.’ There was even a self-conscious talk by David Lavery, an English professor at Middle Tennessee State University, on Buffy studies ‘as an academic cult.'”

An informal study conducted by Slate in 2012 showed that, when it comes to pop culture in academia, Buffy is number one: “More than twice as many papers, essays, and books have been devoted to the vampire drama than any of our other choices—so many that we stopped counting when we hit 200.”

33. … AND A BOOK OF SLANG.

Publisher’s Weekly called Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon “a strange marriage of a fan guide and a linguistics textbook.” Said The Kansas City Star: “If you’re curious about the word ‘ubersuck,’ or just want to remember which episode you first heard it in, this is the place to look. As Buffy would say, it is not uncool.”

BONUS: RARE BEHIND-THE-SCENES FOOTAGE

During the second season, Pruitt filmed behind-the-scenes footage of the cast goofing off and getting into makeup, the stunt crew at work, and some of the show’s most iconic sequences. You can watch it above.

Additional sources: DVD commentary; The Watcher’s Guide.

All images courtesy of Getty Images unless otherwise noted.

This piece originally ran in 2014.