#obviously ive been playing too much pocket camp

[devnny]

JTHM meets Animal Crossing! 🌿🍁🌷

INFO [x]:

johnny - rabbit; cranky

devi - wolf; uchi

tenna - dog; peppy

squee - cub; lazy

tess - deer; normal

anne gwish - cat; snooty

edgar - goat; smug

jimmy - horse; cranky

[and clearly pepito is a uh... goat... lion, uh, pig... obviously]

i had no particular palette ideas for the bottom row, so they remain traditional JTHM b/w... if you’d like to take a crack at coloring any of them, feel free! :)c [uncolored here]

[medusinestories]

Black Sails, IV (S1, ep 04)

- Silver's horrified face when he finds out he's going to have to roast pigs is a Journey, starting with shock, then fake smiling, and then this horrified shuddery expression. It's just as interesting when they drop the dead pig at his feet and he clearly doesn't know what to do with it and also finds it disgusting. I can absolutely see where all the Jewish John Silver headcanons come from, especially since it's unlikely that a London urchin has never seen a dead pig and raw meat in general before.

- Here we have the first performance of Cassandra DeGroot: he knows that the bay they'd chosen to do the careening was too dangerous, and warns the crew. He's immediately countered by Flint, who has much more persuasive arguments to get the careening done fast but in a risky manner. (this whole thing reminds me of our current COVID/climate situation, where scientists get talked over by politicians, and people prefer listening to the latter because they seem to offer much better prospects than the “catastrophist” former)

- In this episode Billy is now quartermaster and he shows himself to actually be really good at disciplining the crew, something Gates, DeGroot and even Flint recognise. However, he also agreed to do the careening only because he's afraid to say no to Flint and allowed the men to have a fuck tent, which he feared would distract them - and it did, the two men who placed the rope on the wrong tree decided not to follow his orders and go fuck instead. This all weighs on him enormously after the disaster with Randall and Morley, who accuses him minutes before his death of already being in Flint's pocket. It's pretty clear that more responsibility doesn't do Billy's mental state any good.

- Morley's story about the Maria Aleyne gives some idea of a timeline, albeit a faint one. The incident took place "a number of years back", before Billy joined. This means that Billy is a somewhat new addition to the crew. We know that Randall was bosun when Billy joined. This also establishes that Lord Hamilton has been dead for several years, which now begs the question: who is the Lord Proprietor that Richard Guthrie is now in touch with? Did Thomas have a younger brother who inherited the Bahamas? Was someone new appointed? Was there a gap between Proprietors that allowed the pirates to establish themselves even more after Lord Alfred's death?

- I just adore the fact that Miranda actually went to stinking, violent Nassau because she was just too impatient to wait at home and wanted to be there when the Walrus came in and immediately hear the news of Lord Alfred's death. She is that vengeful and angry and I love her <3

- Speaking of which, this episode gives us the Passive-Agressive Sex Scene which makes so many people doubt of Flint's attraction to Miranda. Just look at Flint’s face: this man isn't uncomfortable or sad he is PISSED. He plays starfish and glares at Miranda all through it (while maintaining an erection all the same!). Miranda must be hella frustrated (or determined) because she manages to get off in spite of all of this (also, how uncommon is it for a sex scene to end when the woman climaxes rather than the man?) It's only when it ends that both Flint and Miranda are both shown as vulnerable and sad and reflective, with Flint reaching up to touch her but not quite getting there - imo because he's still angry but knows that she (and he) needs comfort.

- This leads into the argument over Meditations, and Miranda explicitly talking about Thomas and not wanting to forget him. The book hasn't been touched in a long time, confirming the idea that Miranda shared it with Richard Guthrie because Flint refuses to touch it. Her grief, her loneliness, are incredibly poignant in this scene, and we see Flint shift from bristling and stonily glaring at her, to absolutely melting (Toby's facial expression shifts here are just *chef's kiss*) and finally being gentle and tender with her. However, even though he promises to make things better, Miranda clearly doesn't believe him anymore.

- This brings in a big theme in the episode: betrayal from people you care for/trust. Mr Scott asks Eleanor not to do anything rash in order to get the Andromache’s guns, only to discover her Plan B: to kill Bryson if he didn't comply. In the meantime, Richard Guthrie tells (a very sceptical) Miranda that he can only support Eleanor and Flint, because he pretty much has no choice in the matter. He then proceeds to betray his daughter by making a deal with Bryson and with Mr Scott, who’s still smarting from Eleanor’s betrayal and who Guthrie tries to convince by saying that Eleanor's endeavour will lead to her death and Nassau’s destruction (considering what we later find out about Mr Scott, Eleanor’s safety is probably not be the argument that actually compels Mr Scott - but he certainly doesn't want the Navy searching the area and finding Maroon Island, and needs a stable Nassau to continue supplying his island).

- The Undercooked Pig scene and Silver's attempts at communicating with Flint will never not be funny. Silver looks so small when Flint glares him down, but that doesn't last all that long: once Flint has taught him how to cook the pork, Silver seems much more bold, asking Flint how he learned to glaze the pig, insisting that Flint should trust him and not Billy. This is also a moment where Silver shows that, unlike Flint, he is incredibly perceptive: he noticed that Billy is "straining at the seams" because of the lie he told. And while Flint spits a "there is no we" and calls Silver a rodent, it's obvious that Silver's words still have an impact on him. Their collaboration is sealed when Silver hands him the cleaver so that he can save Randall (and himself). When Flint returns the cleaver to Silver, he's ready to accept that Silver is actually on his side (albeit for selfish reasons) and listens to him for the first time.

- Max believed that she could charm Vane's remaining crew into being kind to her - and overall it seems to have worked. While again I hate this plot, it does give an interesting insight into how even the worst pirate crew is portrayed: most of the men are happy to comply with Max and get sexual rewards "for gentle obedience". Most of them, basically, aren't violent monsters deep down. However there's always one, in this case That Big Bastard (I'm sure he has a name, I just can't be bothered to google it), who clearly gets a kick out of torturing/raping people and hates the idea of a woman taking the lead.

- Fuck You Jack is another theme of this episode. Vane is high on opium and booze and has basically lost the will to do anything. Anne has been courted by several other crews, but Jack hasn't received any offers (note there's no loyalty to Vane here, Jack’s ready to leave, but nobody will have him) and nobody is willing to help him after the pearl cock-up. Then Noonan wants Max back, which Jack refuses because she's the only thing keeping the few members of his crew loyal - and Anne isn't on board with that, leading to her telling him to fuck himself. This, btw, might have crossed Jack’s mind considering the position she was in when he found her. I think it’s easy to forget that Jack is portrayed as pretty callous and happily willing to treat people like pawns too.

- When Richard Guthrie talks about Nassau, he describes it as a place "a place where she [Eleanor] matters, a place where you [Mr Scott] matter", and adds that a place like this isn't meant to last. Nassau, then, is currently an utopia where women and black people can have some semblance of power - and he doesn't believe that this will ever be allowed to exist because this kind of story never has a happy ending in their current society. But when Flint talks to Eleanor about their project, he's of the opposite view: people don't believe that it's possible, but when they succeed, they'll say it was inevitable. It seems Flint is firmly in the camp of "winners get to tell the story", and that the story will influence how the rest of the world sees them.

- When the Walrus tilts and squashes Randall, Flint stops Billy from intervening and rushes to rescue Randall himself - even though he knows the ship will be cut loose at any moment. He puts himself into incredible danger in this moment. Why? Theoretically, it could be for a manipulative purpose: to look good to the crew, or to get rid of Morley. But Flint seems genuinely involved in the struggle to save Randall, and he barely had time to think before he ran off. I feel that this is a rare spontaneous moment for Flint, where instead of thinking about his plans or his position as Captain, he just thinks like a person in an emergency who wants to rescue someone else. He absolutely could have died out there. And while Billy seems to suspect him of having killed Morley, I don't find that reading compatible with what we're shown of Flint trying to save Randall. True, he may have kicked/pushed Morley at the very last second, but we’ll never know that for sure.

- Back to the theme of people betraying their loved ones, we have Richard Guthrie getting back to Miranda, telling her he knows who she is and revealing the "Thomas went mad because Miranda and Flint cheated" story which he heard from Lord Alfred himself. So now Miranda knows that her identity has been revealed and that Richard could spread the story to, say, Pastor Lambrick (let's not pretend this didn't cross her mind, she keeps her identity secret for a reason). And then Guthrie offers her a way back to civilisation. This, right after a kid threw a stone at her, calling her a witch. This, after Flint has promised to make things better, even as he goes deeper into reckless/utopian plans of fortifying Nassau. Backed into a corner, was Miranda ever going to refuse, if she could be safe and have him be safe? And obviously, Richard Guthrie isn't doing this out of the kindness of his heart. He apparently figured out that Miranda was a way to get in touch with Pastor Lambrick and that ridding New Providence of Flint and winning over the “good”, normal inhabitants would be a perfect beginning to buying back his influence on the Island - the end goal being named Governor, of course.

- If there was any doubt that Vane’s tough guy thing is part of an act, his opium hallucination of Eleanor makes it crystal clear: "you're alone, you don't have to pretend with me". That is, pretend that he's not afraid and that he's not vulnerable. The hallucination also offers Vane an explanation for why Eleanor is how she is: like him she's afraid of appearing weak. He's actually spot on, a big problem in their relationship is that they're too alike and are struggling for dominance. Which is probably why Vane wants to overcome his fear and weakness, and regain power by confronting his old slave master (btw, nice parallel with Flint haunted by Miranda in S3). The scene where Vane kills Noonan also shows him in a very animalistic light - at first he's cornered and somewhat pathetic, beaten, throwing up, only saved by the fact that a gun misfires. Then he turns violent: quick, instinctive and relentless, deaf to Noonan's plea to leave him alive, even if theoretically it could have been profitable for him.

- I have to say, I snickered quite a bit when Pastor Lambrick sees Richard Guthrie and tells him "God teaches us not to cheer when someone stumbles, in your case I may ask his forgiveness". I mean, I really see his point. He leads a group of Puritans who are trying to make a life for themselves on this island. Historically, people who lived and farmed in New Providence were constant targets for errant pirates, who robbed, raped and killed a lot of them. This is what the Pastor is trying to protect his congregation from (and Miranda, since he doesn't understand why she's with Flint and is likely terrified that a pirate lives so close to his congregation, hence the spies he sends out). There's a bit of a parallel with Billy, where both Lambrick and Billy are presented as being very preoccupied with the well-being of the group they're responsible for, and both are presented as, well, Goody-Two-Shoes - (self-)righteous, loyal, honest, caring. Except they're both human, and sooner or later they falter.

[callmeelle22]

Blue Dream IV

Pairing: Iris West x Barry Alen

Rating: E

Chapter Word Count:

Summary: A series of sporadic dates between Iris and Barry turn into something more, a story in its own making.

Chapter I: Primetime

Chapter II: It's Cool

Chapter III: Anything

Chapter IV: Comfortable; It feels like butterflies fluttering or sparks flying or whatever other cliche Iris could think of. It’s like slow-dancing all alone after dinner in a half-cleaned kitchen, easy and intimate. It feels like warm honey on her tongue, slow and sweet and overwhelming. It’s pillowtalk, baby; lay your head on my pillow, say, "oh-ooh"; way you're touchin' my body, say, "ooh-ooh"; i ain't lovin' nobody but you; you, you, you make me, the kind that starts as whispers in the dark and becomes deep, lazy sex with only the moon there to light the way. (Read below or on AO3 linked on the chapter title.)

Chapter V: The Way

Chapter VI: Can't Take My Eyes Off of You

Chapter VII: I'm in Love with You

Chapter VIII: Blue Dream

Comfortable

Set the tone, when it's just me

And you alone, never lonely

In the room, breathin' slowly

Oh, you know me, yeah

At a quarter to one on the next Sunday afternoon, Iris finds herself sitting in her living room, waiting for Barry. Her week has been a relatively good one. She thinks they might be over the hurdle of a new semester—learning the personalities of each other—and Dr. Jamison had been on top of her own game, which meant Iris had been able to as well. She’d spent her Friday night watching Bridgerton, well, as much as the hazy cloud of blue diesel had allowed her to, and on Saturday, she’d spent several hours at Jitters typing up a new story for What a Life You’ve Lived. This story had featured an older woman who, years before Loving v. Virginia had made her marriage legal, had lived in relative obscurity with her white husband, dating and laughing and loving in secret.

Yeah, she’d shaken her head at that too.

She doesn’t know where they’re going today, so she’s dressed in a casual emerald green wrap dress, with a deep v-neck and long sleeves, that hems just at her knees. She opts for flat sandals just in case. His number is still unused, though she’s taken the steps to lock it into her phone. She can’t tell why she doesn’t call him, can’t make out why she’s, apparently, too afraid to just reach out to the man. She doesn’t know what they’re doing, outside of this date, or what his goal is. Linda would definitely describe her as being too chickenshit to find out. She obviously doesn’t disagree.

She’s decided that it’s casual, because aren’t most situations these days casual? And it makes more sense than the thought that lives in her head; the alternative doesn’t fit as neatly in her mind. The alternative is, is a little chaotic because that would add layers to the way he grins at her, and to the way he oscillates between awkward and bold when he talks to her, and to the way that she can never completely get the feel and taste of him out of her mouth. The sensation makes her think of runny ice cream, sweet and sticky and dripping, so much so that before she knows it, her hands and her face and her heart are all covered in it.

The doorbell rings.

Iris jumps up to answer the door and he’s standing there, in black jeans and a gray t-shirt, and she’s always struck by how good he looks in such casual outfits. His hands are stuffed down into his pockets and a grin is etched onto his face. He leans into the door when it opens, shoulder on the frame.

“Hi, beautiful.”

The compliment is unexpected and she turns away to grab her bag, to hide the blush that warms her cheeks, even if he wouldn’t be able to see it on her skin.

“You ready?” he asks.

She nods. “Yeah, let’s go.”

They are about fifteen minutes away from Lake Lanier when Iris realizes that’s where they’re going. The ride is pleasant. They don’t talk much outside of a few sentences regarding how their weeks were. Instead, they listen to some rock music Iris has never heard before and Iris alternates between staring at the road and staring at the intricate flowers tattooed on his arm. She recognizes some of them, roses and chrysanthemums and sunflowers, but there are far more that she doesn’t, especially when she remembers that the bouquet goes all the way up and over his shoulder. She decides she’ll ask him about it later.

The trail for the lake comes into view and Barry turns his Jeep onto a barely paved road, his pale fingers caressing the wheel as he expertly maneuvers the vehicle. He drives past where Iris and Linda and their classmates spent countless summer afternoons, past the trail that leads to where her dad had taken her and Wally camping when, at 12, Wally had realized that he was the only of his friends who’d never been.

They come to a stop, moments after Iris wonders if this might be where bodies get hidden, next to a towering oak tree. They’d lost the trail about a mile back and Barry’s four-wheel-drive was a match for whatever grass and rock and mud they rolled over.

Iris steps out of the Jeep and looks around, momentarily in awe. Out this far, the lake looks serene in a way she’s never seen before. It’s quiet, but it isn’t. Even in a midsize city like Central City, there is always something happening; there is always lights and noise and music. Here, the sound of nature takes the stage: the clicking buzz of cicadas and the chirping songs of birds and the gentle wave of the lake. The look of it is surreal, the pale blue of the water and the vibrant dark green of the trees, those slowly giving way to the oranges and reds of fall.

“Wow,” Iris murmurs.

“It’s great, right?” Barry says.

She turns and finds him with his trunk open. She walks around back to see him gathering picnic supplies, a woven picnic basket, a thick red gingham picnic blanket, and a cooler. There’s also another blanket to stem the feel of the wind so close to the lake. She grabs the picnic basket as he handles everything else and she follows him as they set up a few feet away from the bank, on a soft patch of grass to cushion them.

“I wasn’t expecting a picnic,” Iris tells Barry as she settles on the blanket, taking off her shoes and setting them on the edge.

“No?” He grins over at her before resuming his task. He’s unpacking the basket, pulling out saran-wrapped sandwiches, containers of fruit and vegetables with dip, and ziplock bags full of popcorn. A look in the cooler shows her some waters, several beers, and an equal number of mini wine bottles.

“Where’d you think I was taking you?” he wonders.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Like a movie or something.”

He grins, this time slower; and it shouldn’t, but it makes Iris think of the last time she’d seen him, slow and heated on her living room couch.

“That can be our next date,” he says.

“Who says you’re getting another date?”

He looks up at her and it’s the same one he’d given her when he asked her why she didn’t call, the expression a touch calculating. His head is tilted and his eyes are darting all over her face. She wants to turn her head, turn away from his gaze, but she can’t. Because she thinks that she’s hoping he does find what he’s looking for her, that he can help her to find it too.

“You didn’t say that we were going on another date” he says, finally. “But I have fun when we're together, Iris, and I, I think that you do too."

He goes back to pulling items out of the basket, this time a container full of cookies, and Iris starts grappling with whether or not she can take what he says at face value. It’s a flaw, she knows, the doubt that seems to come far too automatically. She wishes that she could blame it on something tangible—on parents who hadn’t been there or boyfriends who’d lied or friends who didn’t have her best interests at heart. That isn’t the case, though. Her mom had been there as much as she could and she had never had enough boyfriends for it to really make a dent. Linda has never even thought about doing her wrong, and her family might be the very best part of her.

But everything in her body catches at the thought of this man being someone she likes, someone she adds to the rotation of people in her life, people who’ve only become occasional brunches and too quick phone calls. What would it feel like for this man—and his smile and his touch and the way that she feels like she knows him when she doesn’t—to become a part of that rotation, until the discomfort of the entire situation makes him taper off altogether?

“Iris?”

She blinks out of her daze at the sound of Barry’s voice, looking down to see him holding out two bottles in front of her, one a lager from a local brewery, the other a chilled bottle of Chardonnay.

“Hey, are you alright?”

“Yes,” she answers him quickly. “Just thinking.”

“About me?” he asks, his grin wide, cheeks faintly pink, and the look of him is so adorable that Iris shakes her head as she grabs the wine from him, failing to curb the smile that lifts the corner of her mouth, failing to keep the thoughts, the whenever i get around you, i lose it; lose it, from seeping in.

“Let’s play twenty questions.”

Iris is halfway into her mini-wine bottle when Barry voices the suggestion. For the time being, they’ve been merely sitting, drinking, basking in the day. The weather is gorgeous and Iris likes that the only thing to distract her is the constant tweeting of the birds, or the soft splashes of the fish in the lake, or the steady sound of Barry’s breathing.

“Okay,” Iris agrees, “but twenty is a lot.”

“Ten, then?” he hurries to say. “Five each?”

He shifts on the blanket so that he’s lying down on his side facing her, head propped in his hand. Her own back is propped against the tree, her legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle.

“You first.”

“Alright.” He pauses, looks up towards the sky as if he’s thinking, and then asks, “What’s your favorite book?”

She is surprised by the question, though she isn’t sure what she thought he might ask.

“I’ve got a lot of favorites,” she says, because it’s true. Books, stories, became an escape early on, from a home that had been too fragile, that had felt like it’d come crumbling down with only a mere gust of wind. “But one that still sits with me is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I read it for the first time in high school.”

He smiles at her. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s about a woman named Janie, who was raised by her grandmother who’d been enslaved. Janie’s a romantic; she wants freedom and love. But her grandmother wants her to have security. She’s got a series of suitors: an old man who treats her like the help, essentially; a man who becomes mayor of this all-black town, who only props her up as this thing, this ornament that must look and act like he wants her to; and Tea Cake, a younger man who’s passionate and selfish and possessive. And in all of it, Janie is discovering herself, exploring what she does and doesn’t want. She steps up and she fights back and she learns to dismiss what others have to say about here.”

Barry hums. “She reminds me of you,” he says, “this Janie woman.”

He catches her gaze, holds it. Iris catches the way his eyes track the features of her face. She can never find it in her to shrink away, almost like she’s beholden to the force of him.

“Why?”

“She seems passionate; fanciful. Alluring.”

She’s never wanted to blush as much as she does around him and her face feels warm, tight. She swallows from her wine bottle, still looking at him.

“You are,” she starts, and then shakes her head.

“I am…?” he urges, mouth grinning, eyes wide with mirth. He reaches out and grabs at her ankle, fingers grazing her skin. Her skin tingles beneath his fingers, a slow rush of heat flooding through her. Apparently, Barry has discovered a new erogenous zone.

“Something else,” she answers, finally.

“Somehow I don’t think that’s what you meant.”

She looks out at the lake for a brief moment. “It’s not, but I haven’t figured out what I do mean yet.”

He’s silent for a beat. “Okay. Your turn,” he says and Iris is grateful for the reprieve.

“What’s a country you’ve never been to that you’d like to visit?”

A wistful smile curves his pretty mouth. “That’s easy. Ireland.”

“Yeah?” she asks softly.

“It’s where my mom's family is from,” he continues, touching at her ankle even as he looks away from her. She wonders if he realizes he’s even doing it, tracing along her ankle and then up the length of her calf and back down again.

“My mom was born here in Central City,” he explains, “but her parents were born and raised in Ireland, moving here when they were a couple of months pregnant with her.” She knows she doesn’t mistake the melancholy in his voice. “We’d been planning for a trip after I graduated high school. Since dad was gone, it wasn’t as easy to save up for a long summer trip like that, but we were working on it, before she was killed. I’m still working on it.”

He gives her another smile, this one tinged with hope, and the urge to comfort him is strong. But she knows that there is no real comfort for missing a mother, so instead, she moves from her spot against the tree. The movement confuses Barry, who has to move his hand away from her ankle, but his frown clears when she lies beside him, her head on his shoulder.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Italy,” she tells him. “My best friend Linda’s parents live in a large immigrant community. People from all over live there. It was like heaven for me when I really started getting into writing; so many stories. Obviously, not everyone wanted to tell their business to a 15-year-old, but Mrs. Bianco had no qualms about it.

“Mrs. Bianco has three sons, relatively the same age as me and Linda, one right after the other, but no daughters. So for much of high school, we were her surrogates. My dad worked a lot and so did Linda’s parents, getting their restaurant off the ground. So we’d go over to Mrs. Bianco’s after school to do homework and she’d feed us all these baked goods, cannolis and these things called bombolinis, which are like doughnuts but better. And she’d tell us all these stories about growing up in the Italian countryside and going to college and meeting her husband before they came here, the excitement of it all. She made it sound so beautiful.”

Barry reaches over and touches her, long fingers touching lightly at her arm before they wrap around her wrist. He rubs at the skin on the inside of her wrist. The move feels like a deliberate way for Barry to maintain contact, but also like more. Like the last time he’d come to her apartment, and she’d felt the touch to her ankles at the very core of her, she feels so now. It’s subtle, but it’s there, in the slight clench of her belly, in the low throb of her pussy. It’s been a long time since she’s been with anyone like this — cause I feel so comfortable with you; you make me comfortable with you—easily aroused and just as easily comforted. Her last relationship had been with a man named Eddie, a graduate student she had met early in her senior year of undergrad. He had been sweet, but they had both been so busy all the time that they had felt like work too. With Barry, there’s the newness that comes with a relationship, the giddiness at talking to him, being near him. But this seems like something else, something greater, something that tells of why she can’t stop thinking about this man.

“Why did you invite me over,” Barry asks, “that Friday night?”

She exhales shakily, a little unnerved by him. “Well, you asked me to dance?”

“You invited me over because I asked you to dance?” His tone is incredulous and she laughs.

“No, I mean. It’s the club. People just dance, right? And here you come, rocking those hips unlike any white boy I’ve seen, and then you walk up and ask me if you could dance with me. I thought it was polite.”

Barry rolls over so that he’s long against her side. He moves his hand from her wrist to press on her belly, rubbing his thumb lightly. He plants his mouth right next to her ear. “If you think I’m polite, I’m doing something wrong.”

She catches his eyes. “I don’t know,” she says, smirking at him. “Maybe you are. Maybe you need to work on that.”

She lets the taunt hang, for just a moment, and then she rolls over to kiss him. She licks at his mouth, turning the kiss more passionate in seconds. Their positions change, Barry rolling her onto her back.

“I think I can make you beg,” Barry whispers against her mouth. “I was always told that was impolite.”

Iris doesn’t get a chance to say much else because suddenly, Barry is between her legs, his head dipping down under her dress.

“Barry what?”

As is his annoying habit, he doesn’t respond to her right away. He pushes her dress higher, exposing her belly and the bright yellow lace of her panties. She inhales sharply at the feel of his breath on her belly before he plants a kiss there.

“Ask for it.”

She catches onto his game immediately and her eyes flash. “No.”

His answer is a grin and then, without much preamble, he dips his tongue into her belly button. The action makes her hips raise automatically, and he brings her back down by gripping her hips. He continues down, tongue laving at her skin, fingers running up her torso and down again until they hook in the top of her panties and he starts to pull them down.

Iris can’t describe what it is she’s feeling at the moment. He’s only just touched her, only just planted a few sloppy kisses on her stomach. But her skin is tight with anticipation, her breathing deeper as she waits to see what he’ll do. She wonders, rather absently, if they’re currently being watched by any of the animals she hears living out here by the lake; but then Barry widens her legs and opens her up with the tips of his index and middle finger and she stops thinking altogether.

He holds her open for a long moment, just looking, just breathing against her, and she tries to hold still until she can’t, wiggling her hips a little, hoping it makes a finger slip inside of her.

“Barry…”

“You’re ready to ask for it?”

He drags his gaze away from her sex in order to meet her eyes. They’re the glassy that lets her know that he isn’t as unaffected as he’s pretending to be. That momentarily strengthens her resolve, knowing that maybe he really does feel like this too, that she’s not the only one losing her head in this sexual haze that seems to be moving way too fast and way past normal.

She shakes her head at him.

“No?” he questions. “Not even if I do this?”

Fingers still holding her, he licks her, a long swipe of his tongue. She inhales again at the feel of his wet tongue, lets it go in a noisy exhale when he does it again. And then again and then again, and Iris starts to rock against him, trying to get more of his tongue or his fingers or something. She quivers above him, her thighs opening and closing, and she feels like a butterfly, fluttering and alight, hovering over a precipice.

“Shit, ” she moans.

And then, he stops. He fucking stops.

“Barry…”

“Or this?” he continues, and pushes his fingers in. It’s harder than she likes, more like a stab, and she jerks her hips.

“Softer,” she tells him, and he obliges, moving slower, caressing instead of fucking into her. “ Yes, like that.”

Barry hums around her. The vibration makes her hips rock up, and he circles her clit with the tip of his tongue, sucking on it. He looks up at her again. This is the face she wants to remember for the rest of her days: his dazed eyes, his flushed cheeks, his wet mouth.

“Ask me for what you want, Iris,” Barry licks his lips. “Beg me, baby, please.”

Her heart is pounding and she wonders how a game of question and answer got her here. But they are here, she’s here, quivering with the need to come, with the fact that Barry looking up at her like this, begging her like this, makes her feel more desirable than she’s ever known she could.

“Can you eat me, Barry? Please? ”

Iris has never seen a dirtier smile. “With pleasure.”

He really starts to eat her, then. He kisses at her lips, tongues her down in a sloppy, wet tongue kiss that makes her cream drip out of her, drip down her thighs. She rocks against him, closing her knees around his head when the touch of his tongue to her clit gets to be too much, opening herself wider when wants his tongue back in her, licking and tasting and fucking her. Needing something to do with her hands, she grabs at his hair, pulling at the strands, scratching at scalp, at the back of his neck. That is how she comes, she doesn’t know how much later. But it’s like that: with Barry holding on to her hips, face buried in her slick; with her knees opening and closing, with her hips bucking, with her begging him, “please, Barry, fuck, yes, please, Barry. ”

It takes her a while to come down and when she does, she says the first thing that she can think of. “God, you’re so goddamn annoying.”

Barry bursts out laughing into her stomach, arms wrapped around her.

“What is something that you want out of a relationship?”

They’re sitting up and eating now, Iris several feet away from him so she’s not tempted to wrap her thighs around his face again. She’s chosen the turkey sandwich on wheat bread and a handful of grapes. The sandwich is really good and Barry must think so of his own handiwork because he’s already done with one and unwrapping another. Although, Iris thinks, he likely did work up an appetite.

She can’t say what makes her throw out the question. The skepticism of starting something with him is still there, but laughing after sex like that, coming from sex like that, well. Iris can name that she might be a little whipped by this smooth-talking, world-class fucking white boy.

He chews a bite of his sandwich and swallows before he turns to her with an answer.

“I’m a simple guy, I think. I work a lot; crimes wait for no one so I would want someone who understands that. But in my time off, I like to do things like this, and festivals and running too, so someone who likes that too.” He wipes at his mouth with a crumpled napkin. “But out of a relationship in general, I guess I want companionship, laughing. Communication and patience. Fidelity.” He shoots her a grin. “Good sex.”

Iris rolls her eyes, but she returns the smile. “Did you have that in your last relationship?”

“Ah,” he interrupts, “it’s my turn for a question, Iris.”

She throws her own balled up napkin at him. “Fine. Shoot.”

“What do you look for in a relationship?”

She shoots him a glare.

“What?” he laughs. “It was a good question and I want to know.”

“Okay. Um,” she takes a swig from her newly opened wine. “Whew. I don’t know that I’ve thought about this in a while.” She bites at her bottom lip and lets out a long breath. “A lot of the same things you said, I think. I do love laughing, even if I can get lost in my own head angst sometimes and I’d like someone who realizes that. I’m pretty busy, between school and work and What a Life You’ve Lived, but I make time for the people I want to make time for and I would wish my partner would do the same. Fidelity is also important to me too; communication. I love music and dancing and movies so someone who’d want to do those things with me.”

Barry wriggles his eyebrows. “Good sex?”

“A plus, for sure,” she agrees.

That gets her to thinking about another question she has, one she’s more hesitant to voice. She could get an answer she likes, one that keeps the mood they’ve got going here. And the vibe right now is so good. She can’t remember a date like this, one so simple. Eddie had been courting careers in law and so much of their time together had been spent out at fancy dinners while he’d tried to smooze whoever he needed to that week. It’d been fun sometimes, to see what stories she could get out of the politicians and law officers, but that’s not a date, at least it wasn't to her. During undergrad, dates meant studying together in the corner of a library until one or both of them got the urge to make out behind a shelf of books. And high school shouldn’t even really count. But here, today, this feels like a date. It feels like butterflies fluttering or sparks flying or whatever other cliche Iris could think of. It’s like slow-dancing all alone after dinner in a half-cleaned kitchen, easy and intimate. It feels like warm honey on her tongue, slow and sweet and overwhelming. It’s pillow talk, baby; lay your head on my pillow, say, "oh-ooh"; way you're touchin' my body, say, "ooh-ooh"; i ain't lovin' nobody but you; you, you, you make me, the kind that starts as whispers in the dark and becomes deep, lazy sex with only the moon there to light the way.

But she steels herself and risks asking anyway. “Barry, do you, uh, have a lot of sex, then? A lot of one-night stands?”

Barry’s eyes are wide when he looks at her. He’d been cleaning up their trash, putting napkins and wrappers and empty bottles in a small grocery bag and the question makes him look up sharply. It makes her want to retreat, but she’s already put it out there and she’s extremely curious if she happens to just be one in a line of girls that this surprisingly suave man has beguiled with easy laughs and mind-blowing sex.

“I'm asking because you are, you’re good,” she mumbles, (but, understatement), “and of course, you don’t have to answer me but I just… I'm wondering if…”

She trails off when he stops what he’s doing and crawls over to her. He hovers, making her lean back a little in order to see all of his face. It’s a pretty face, the dark eyebrows over those eyes, the lips that she knows get even pinker when they’re dripping with her juices, the faint moles along his cheeks and jaw that doesn’t detract.

“There are no other girls, Iris,” he tells her, and he seems so sincere as he looks straight into her eyes, as he places a hand on the side of her so she’s clouded in the clean, citrusy smell of him. “I know that we’re just hanging out and obviously, you do what you want, but no, I… I’m a one woman kinda guy. Going home with you was an anomaly, one I certainly don’t regret. But it’s not a thing I do. I haven’t been with anyone else since my last relationship months ago.”

She stares at him, hoping that she can believe him. “Alright.”

“Okay?”

She nods again, this time with a little smile. “Yeah, okay.”

Neither of them asks their final two questions. Barry says that it’ll give them something to talk about when he sees her again. Iris just thinks that today’s been a whirlwind of a day and it’d be nice not to be on the spot anymore. The ride back to town is just as easy as the ride down. Easy listening plays from the radio—'cause I feel so comfortable with you; you make me comfortable with you; i feel so comfortable with you; you make me comfortable with you; you make me—and Iris settles into her seat for the half-hour drive, full and sated and comfortable. She must doze off because before she knows it, Barry is pulling into the parking space next to her Kia and he’s opening the door for her.

“Come on, sleepyhead,” he says, smiling down at her as he grabs her hand to pull her out of the seat.

“I’m sorry for falling asleep on you.” She stumbles a little as she follows him up the stairs and he grips her hand tighter.

“Don’t worry about it,” he tells her. “I take pride in the fact that I’ve put you to sleep every night we’ve been together.”

She doesn’t even pause as she yanks her hand away and slides past him to her door. “You’re such a dick.”

Barry chuckles, sidling up behind her as she sticks her key into the lock. He gives her a soft kiss on the skin between her neck and shoulder.

“I thought you said I was polite,” he breathes, before nipping at her skin. She closes her eyes at the feel of his mouth on her, the light nips of his teeth, the slick glide of his tongue behind it. He pulls up all the way behind her and wraps both of his arms around her waist.

“You are,” she moans when one of his hands glides down and settles hard over her crotch. “Even when you’re telling me to beg, you say please.”

He licks a longer stripe across her skin, pulls a larger patch into his mouth, cups her pussy in the palm of his hand.

“Barry…”

“But you called me a dick, Iris. Am I polite or a dick?”

She arches into him. “You’re a polite dick.”

He stills against her and it takes a moment for Iris to realize that he’s laughing again. He’s got such a nice laugh, deep and bright. “Damn, Iris.” He turns her around, still with a wide grin on his face. He leans down and kisses her, pecks her lips once, and then twice, and then a longer one that curls her fingers around his neck. He doesn’t immediately let go when he pulls back.

“I want to ask one of my last questions.”

She licks her lips, chasing the taste of him. “Okay.”

“Am I in the running?” He asks the question clearly, though in a voice just above a whisper. “Am I someone that you could want to be..”

She doesn’t need him to finish the sentence to say what she’s feeling, even if she’s terrified of what it might eventually mean for her. “I really think that you might be.”

“It’s a might I’ll take.” He nods at her door. “Good night, beautiful.”

She turns to go into the apartment. “Good night, Barry.”

The door is almost closed when he calls back. “Hey, Iris?”

“Yeah?”

“Call me this time.”

You make me

Baby

You make me

You make me

[bangtans-peaceful-piegon]

My Cup of Tea: Prologue

My Cup Of Tea: Prologue | YoongixReader

Warnings for this Chapter: none, just a post-breakup suffering OC who is saved by a whole Min Yoongi

“Coffee is bitter, so people add a little bit of sugar or creamer until it suits their taste. However, once it’s added it can’t be separated. It’s also addictive, it’s your choice to keep it as your poison or to control how much you take. Some people need it, some people don’t...In that case, it really isn’t their cup of tea.”

A/N: im finally deciding to post this after who knows how long sajkdfhd,, tysm for beta reading this for me @jtrbluv !!! again u were a huge help because the tag game you tagged me in gave me the final push to actually post this fic thats been collecting dust in my drafts. ily boo !!! <3 it also took a while because i wanted to do more research for this fic. i dont think ive read about or drank so much tea in my life for the past few months. pls enjoy the prologue everyone!

Word Count: 1,600+

You sat in the worn out leather booth, eyes trained on the steaming mug in front of you.

What just happened?

Something that took five years to grow ended in mere seconds.

Five years of dedication.

Five years of convincing yourself it would work out, that it could be fixed.

Five years spent on a relationship that should’ve ended before it began.

You mindlessly took a sip of your coffee hissing as the hot brew burnt your tongue, mind drifting back to the argument that occurred hours ago...

“You’re never here!”

“Was I not enough for you?”

“Where’s the old Y/N that I knew and loved?”

You weren’t sure about what was said after that except for... “I’m seeing someone else.”

The bruising pain on your tongue began to throb and you couldn’t help the tears that formed.

You never liked coffee, but the café was your favorite place. 

Perhaps it was the enticing aroma that attracted you every time you walked in, or maybe it was the cleverly thought out name that was in the form of childlike puns: Bearly Awake Brew.

Either way, you couldn’t despise coffee any more than you already did in this moment.

“Are you alright?”

You whipped your head up to see a man standing above you.

Through your bleary eyes you could make out a set of kind brown ones shielded by black frames which rested atop a boopable nose. On his head, a black mop of neatly trimmed hair along with soft cheeks paired with a soft jawline.

The man was dressed in a black turtle-neck and long-coat as if returning from a meeting discussing the newest stocks and bonds of business.

After a small, possibly noticeable, ogling of the stranger, you shook your head ‘no.’

He motioned to the seat across from you raising his brows inquisitively, “May I?” 

This time you slowly nodded.

He seemed harmless enough, and even if he tried anything there was pepper spray in your purse.

You sniffled as he took a seat.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No y-you wouldn’t understand.” He leaned forward onto his elbows—a determined furrow in his brow.        

“Try me.”

Who was this guy? He didn’t come off as threatening but somewhat… familiar.

You couldn’t quite place his face or remember his name.

“Not yet, right now I just need a good cry,” you replied sinking further into your seat.

“Alright.” He said, shrugging and not saying much, or really, nothing.

He sat across from you— not making eye contact but quietly observing the café.

Several questions raised in your mind: Where did he come from? Why is he here of all places? Did someone send him with the intention to make you feel even more like a fool than you already did?

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” you asked when the silence became a little too long.

“No, not really...” he replied slowly. “Would you like me to leave?”

“No, I mean, it’s just-“ you hesitated, “You’re fine,”

“Ok then.”

Silence.

One look at him and it’d be hard to believe women find him approachable, but the man came up to you.

Much less, while you were on the verge of outright bawling in the middle of a café.

“What’s your name?” you asked, initiating conversation. You might as well since he was there.

“Yoongi. Yours?” You hesitated knowing it wasn’t fair to not give him your name.

“I’ll reassure you I’m not a stalker, at least not the bad kind.”

You let out an amused scoff, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He chuckles and you couldn’t help but enjoy the sound.

Were you really that joy deprived?

“Ok then, I’m Min Yoongi, and I’m a stocker. As in I distribute and track merchandise in stores.” he reaches a hand out to shake and you can’t help but stare at it.

“Well go on I won’t bite,” you huffed a laugh, taking his hand and shaking it.

He smiles and you can’t help but return it.

Who is this guy?

“Why don’t we go for a walk?”

You contemplate his offer.

You had just met him but you hadn’t had casual conversation in a while… or hung out with friends for that matter. So maybe it’d be good for you after-

“Sure let’s go,” You replied immediately while standing up, maybe a little too quickly— your chair scratching the wooden floors and making a startling sound as you headed to the door.

He raised his brows in surprise at the sudden burst of energy before trailing behind you, ignoring the stares of café patrons.

“Hey wait up!”

-

This was another reason why you visited the quaint coffee shop often.

The park outside was always bustling with life and energy.

There was a little pond where ducks would glide across its surface diving from time to time, scavenging for the weeds at the bottom, maybe even getting sustenance from people who were ignorant of the ‘Do not feed the ducks’ sign.

It also had an open field where locals and families would enjoy the hot summer days by setting up little camps with blankets and food or even play small games of football or soccer.

While children played in the vast expanse of green, parents would sit back and converse with strangers forming new friendships. It was a place of change and growth and you loved it.

“So,” Yoongi continued as you both walked down the dirt path, “other than your name, and why you were crying in my café, is there anything about you I have yet to know?” Your cheeks flushed red as you shifted your sight to the ground.

“There’s nothing much really,” you replied with a shrug before backtracking his sentence, “Wait, your café?”

“Don’t change the subject. There’s got to be one thing about you… how about your favorite color?”

You purse your lips at the dodging of the question, albeit a basic one, but it was a start. “I guess Rainbow,”

He nodded with a hum, “Wise choice,”

You let out a huff of amusement, “Alright wise guy, what’s yours?”

He pondered for a moment before affirmatively replying, “Black,”

You hummed. “Kind of... dark, isn’t it?”

He turned around and shrugged, “I’d say the rainbow but you took it already,”

You scoffed, resuming your place beside him.

He continued asking basic questions to which you replied and vice versa.

You liked dogs, but him on the other hand didn’t have a favorite animal, at least until he adopted a poodle which made him keen on the creatures, more specifically one named Holly.

You were allergic to bees and he was allergic to cats.

You both enjoyed a variation of music from rap to classical piano music, but the question also led to a debate on what artist is the most superior to all.

Neither of you won, and concluded neither lost with valid points made during said argument.

It only felt like minutes had gone by but wasn’t until you looked at the time that you realized how late it was.

The crowd at the park had begun to thin out while shops surrounding the area were beginning to close for the day.

The once bright sunlight began to fade behind clouds as it began its descent to the horizon.

“I should probably be heading home,” you cut in politely before he could delve into the topic of what they would do in a post-apocalyptic world.

“Oh,” he replied, obviously disappointed.

He rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “Well could I ask you one more thing?”

You nodded expecting it to be another ‘get to know you’ question or something along the lines of ‘if you had to would cut your arm or leg off?’ but it was something much more complicated.

“Can I get your number?”

You stiffened, unsure how to respond.

You weren’t sure if he was asking as a friend or a man with an ulterior motive.

Could you really do it?

Especially after you had just-

“I’m sorry that came out wrong,” He quickly mended, fumbling his words, realizing your distress.

“I think you’re really great, and I’d like us to continue talking. Just two people who enjoy each other’s company, you know?”

You looked up at him and saw he was offering to be friends that would be nothing more.

You couldn’t deny: you had fun.

For the first time in a long time.

Maybe it wasn’t a relationship you needed, but a friendship.

You smiled, “I’d like that,”

You reached into your pocket pulling out your phone, “Here.”

You both swapped devices, putting in the respective numbers. Once the contact was added, you returned each device to the rightful owner.

He grinned, holding up his phone, “How about a contact photo?” 

You smiled, nodding as you  stood beside him while  he took a selfie of you side-by-side. Once the picture was taken he slid his phone into his pocket. “Thanks,” he glanced down at the phone, that darn smile growing on his face, “Y/N. I’ll talk to you soon?” 

You nodded and finally split ways.

As you began the trek toward your apartment a dopey smile remained plastered on your face.

Maybe everything would be alright.

[druid-for-hire]

UNSWAYED PT. IV

(pt. i) (pt. ii) (pt. iii) (pt. v) (epilogue) (askblog)

this update consists of a bit of the trek back to hadestown and the workers’ revolution that lasts the summer until persephone’s return in the fall, and being granted the chance to leave at last--to leave for real.

thank you so so much to all my friends @supercantaloupe​, @unholy-boi​ (who helped write the Riots sect), @damondaunnodyke​, & @s-aint-elmo

persephone has left again and sets to repairing the world up Top after the hurricane, now that she’s helped the lovers.

orpheus and eurydice are... on the exodus from the Beyond. it’s a long road--it’s a long walk. takes a week or two.

kampê slinks into the shadows and hides, bitter, among the smokestacks. she hurts and she fears. hades will come for her, she knows, but she knows this place far better than he--that man barely checks up (hence how her grip on the place has gotten out of control), hasn’t been there for all of the rearrangements and updates in centuries. she knows where to hide. he will not find her in her domain. this is her darkness.

the imagery of the Exodus is very much akin to/inspired by the same Exodus of the movie Prince of Egypt. u kno that one?

looks like this, yeah, but like... obviously without the fish, because the walls aren’t made of ocean in this au, they’re just rock

and orpheus and eurydice leading the pack, shadowed looks of determination on their faces

again: this is where Promises (But Sadder) happens

as eurydice takes orpheus back to the main parts of hadestown, she notices too many things: his legs tremble, his hands shake, he breathes just barely too hard and clears his throat and coughs too much; and as they talk about the small things to fill some of the quiet, orpheus asks “what’d you say?” too often

(it’s hearing damage babey!)

of course, no one is spared from the hardships of hadestown. but she... does not like seeing those scars on orpheus

this long walk is also the time they tell each other everything that happened to them since they last saw each other

reminder: orpheus is still weak & kinda sick! and it’s a long walking journey. and everyone’s tired. sometimes they all sit down and camp for the “night” or something. 

the beyond’s not been kind to him; he’s pale as a corpse, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, looks as dead as he feels

(really, all the other workers from the Beyond don’t look much better)

it’s kind of a spooky sight when they stop for a few hours and he lays down to take a rest. the state he’s in...

and eurydice is a fairly good singer--nowhere near on orpheus’ (former) level, but good, and she probably sings him small tunes here and there just for the two of them, to relax and comfort and what have you

@axolotlbeans: at some point they stop for the “night” and orpheus collapses; eurydice, who’d been singing, gathers him in her arms and says, "Orpheus, you're shivering; is it cold or fear?"

and he interrupts her, burying his face into her neck and softly rasps "Just keep singing" in the smallest, weakest voice 

when they arrive. it is... a lot.

the long train of people is... heavily distracting. and they seem to come out of nowhere--a lot of hadestown wasn’t even aware there was a Beyond ‘till orpheus got banished, and then they didn’t know the name or what it was, just that he got banished somewhere. even the foremen turn to see; everyone’s sort of like. uh. what the hell is going on? and work sort of stalls out a little bit

eurydice and orpheus go straight to hades and present their demands to let them go. let them all go. blah blah blah some other stuff it probably sounds fairer than that, i don’t have the brain energy to outline all their demands specifically

by the slightly edited words of my good friend supercanteloupe:

let us go, eurydice demands, and hades just laughs, jailbirds like themselves don’t get their freedom so easily. get back to work, songbird, and don’t let the foreman know you’ve been slacking. and all of the rest of you... you’d better return before you’re made to return.

they go, but they’re not done, not by a long shot.

they don’t go back to work.

orpheus cannot sing, but he is still a poet, and the workers have their voices too

the bristling unrest of Hadestown begins to develop into protests, and the protests turn into riots.

orpheus can craft all the words eurydice needs to say with her spirited and powerful voice, to hit every point to cause uprisings and to stab every point to whittle hades down

hades notices things are beginning to go wrong. machine malfunctions, damaged, outright broken; strikes, sit-ins. rolling blackouts. eurydice and orpheus come back and back, with more and more workers, the ones they led out from the beyond and the ones from the factories and mines, always to demand: let us go. 

and hades grows only more calloused and bitter. you failed your test, you don't get second chances. Players who break the rules are banned from play. 

and every time they turn back, back to their increased workloads and their stricter overseers and their hope now stretching thin, and their anger growing more

ok back to me writing: but enough pushing, and even the overseers are beginning to turn.

the furies, infamous guardswomen and union busters, are doing their best to do damage control. and they are fierce. they are vicious, nearly (but not quite) as bad as kampê, and there are three of them--but then there are only three of them, and they cannot possibly control every single instance of revolt when the ball gets rolling

eurydice and orpheus are now the leaders of rebellion, and both of them are marked for banishment. they have to run from god-king hades and stay out of the unrelenting sights of the Furies.

(and this also means they can’t work or the foremen still on hades’ side might turn em in. so they catch a break and a nap, finally, jesus christ)

but.

there is trouble (For hades) in the fact that kampê has practically gone missing. no matter how many are sent to the Beyond, now there is no one to stop them from just... making the trip back. sure. it takes a long time. about a week or so of walking, but they just... come back.

hades takes notice. hades visits the Beyond for the first time in so long and tries to find her, to no avail. the Beyond is far changed than when he last saw it and he does not have the time to spend to find her--he cannot step away from his children for more than a few hours, lest something go wrong again. this is just another inconvenience on his long, long list.

@lookoutitsregan: “they're legally allowed to leave after 15 minutes”

orpheus and eurydice will be dealt with by himself, and so they run--avoid him as much as they can, hide under his radar

by the words of unholy-boi: hades will not let go of his empire so easily. the building pressure only makes him clench his fists tighter, bend his back further, push further to his own breaking point (and towards everyone else’s). 

he’s more likely to go down screaming that he isn’t, more likely to cling hard and furious to his city, push his workers into the dirt and further lose persephone in the process, the further this goes, the more against him, the more likely he is to furiously, dangerously fight back. 

as summer turns late, hadestown doesn’t soften like hades may have had it for persephone in years long since past, hadestown turns from city to warzone

ok back to me again

for the songbirds: there’s the riots and them narrowly escaping hades like all the damn time while he pushes everyone else to their limits

and yet they refuse to be pushed and usurp their foremen as fast as he reinstates things

revolutions usually have unifying symbols of a sort, and the many isolated revolts do eventually coalesce into this all being an outright revolution--a workers’ movement, if you will.

the red carnation. though they don’t have it, they all remember seeing in orpheus’ hand before he was banished--the one solid sliver of the aboveground anyone saw in a long time

@s-aint-elmo: the red carnation becomes their symbol--though they don’t have it, they paint it in hidden alleyways and abandoned factory walls. they have red paper flowers and red cloth tucked into pockets and tool belts

or the red of some banner that waves in the acrid smoke-wind of hadestown’s false air fronts

flowers, painted and made and substituted, are cropping up all over hadestown, and in increasingly more obvious spots. life is blooming in the underground for the first time in so long

OH ALSO, another fun layer of symbolism with the red cloths:

in the staging of actual hadestown, when orpheus sings "and they're gonna bend their branches down and lay their fruit upon the ground; the almond and the apple, the sugar and the maple" the ensemble is on the tables, reaching over eurydice like tree branches in a sort of ^ formation; on "almond" and "apple," the first two layers pull out and dangle white cloth, but on "sugar from the maple," the dude at the top dangles a red one and drops it into eurydice's hands

so there’s that!

also being the bounty of spring above...... rejecting the underworld. some shit like that

in a musical there’d definitely be a sort of revolution song

like uhhh... Why We Build the Wall II. it’s Different this time. it’s not about the circular logic of the wall, it’s about rebelling against the order hades has set for them

There’s so many lines that can be drawn from elsewhere in the musical to be inserted into this

Why do we build the wall, my brothers, my sisters?

He said the wall would bring us peace, the wall would keep out the enemy.

mister hades set us free to work ourselves into the ground. a lot of souls have gotta die to make the underworld go round.

why are we digging out own graves for a living, if we're free tell me why we can't even stand upright?

some sort of rebellion/callback against “who are you to think that you can hold your head up higher than your fellow man?”

i’m gonna count to three, and then i’ll raise my head, singin’, one, two--!

(except they probably finish the count in this one)

also, because i am weak for really great chords being belted out by a big chorus and hearing every voice part slot together, because this is a revolution song with lots of people i think it should have that

everybody 👏knows 👏the 👏walls 👏have 👏ears 👏

thank u supercanteloupe & s-aint-elmo for ur additions on this

the fates’ voices still carry on the wind, hadestown’s false air fronts of stale and acrid air, but orpheus and eurydice have since learned to turn their backs to it

ALSO? Flags

with the revolution coming to span A Really Big Chunk of hadestown, most likely more than half, there’d probably be people putting up flags and banners

i’m just like, inspired by the imagery of the flag raisings in wwii and post-9/11, and also i’m thinking of les mis/french revolution in general not gonna lie

sure, the Furies are union-busters and come after any sign of revolution, but every revolution is a fight against something. there’s always blood spilled, what different is this one?

they can’t be everywhere at once and they’re not like the Fates--they get tired, they’re not omnipresent and omniscient, the people are not powerless

the flag is supposed to attract attention, the point is to be loud

and by god, they are screaming

this is what a steel mill looks like at night. hadestown was sort of already in a hazy blaze, but combo this with a revolution in its midst, with fighting and fire, and... well, it’s a mess

and through all the flames are the carnations blooming, painted and carved on walls and smokestacks and pathways

(it’s very poetic)

(tumblr will kill this post if i link to the source directly, so. photo taken by DragonWolfACe @ deviantart)

hermes still ferries on the train, but the schedule is all out of whack thanks to the strikes and riots turning the systems upside down. he witnesses plenty of the mess that hadestown has fallen into, and the fight the songbirds are fighting

he relays as much news as he can to persephone

(thanks @damondaunnodyke​ for helping write this bit w/ seph)

persephone... worries

she already snuck underground to help them once and a hurricane ravaged the Top for her absence. the songbirds have escaped, and now have to fight this fight for themselves--she can’t go back down to help them, because she has to bring the summertime to the Top, and she refuses to be the cause of another storm

so she’s stuck aboveground. 

and she’s uhh. stressing. drinking. worrying.

everyone can tell there’s something off, but she doesn’t want to dwell on it, insisting that everyone else should just focus on the good times. let me tell ya something that my mama said to me...

she tries to not stress--there’s nothing she can do right now, why worry, you know? unless she wants to get more gray hairs than she’s already got

but during one of those celebrations she almost says “let the poet bless this round!” before catching herself, remembering that she’s... not there

a lot of people give her a glance; why’d she stop?

but she picks herself back up again, only a moment's falter, and just toasts to life and summer

the end of summer.

the revolution rages on. it’s not calmed down--the very opposite, in fact, more ferocious than ever

(and thanks unholy-boi for basically writing this bit for me HBGFHG)

persephone knows something is wrong when the train isn’t early--isn’t on time, but in fact late to pick her up. the summer has stretched on longer than it should, and in some ways, that is just as dangerous as the winter going on for too long

hades has been getting ready to bring her home. it takes browbeating and strongarming to get the trains running, far too late for his liking.

at last the train comes for her, and when it is hermes who offers his hand to bring her onboard, she knows that things in the underworld are bad--an inferno, dangerous if not dire, and she wonders if the songbirds are still alive, or if they’ve gone and the revolution still rages without them

hades aches for his wife, but he dares not step away from hadestown for a moment. he’s become obsessed and absolutely determined to quell, to crush this rebellion

hades is breaking, but refuses to bend, hades has refrains where he refuses to sing but slips into poetry and catches himself halfway through, hades is breaking, he puts in people he believes he can trust and they turn on him out of desperation, hades is running out of places to desperately hold and he is breaking. hadestown is oblivion. hades is wearing a crown that mangled his head.

persephone steps off of the train, and is taken aback by the state hadestown is in

 the people feel her breeze in, and it is some relief, but the can’t tell how this will change things. if it’ll make things worse, if it’ll make it better

people ask for her aid; but she’s too busy looking around, trying to find the songbirds (after getting confirmation that they’re still alive) who are still hiding

and she finds them. she sees orpheus and eurydice (orpheus, who hades so clearly saw himself in, and eurydice, who she sees herself in) still fighting, still in love.

she sees hades’ mercilessness to the boy he sees himself in. she sees eurydice’s unending determination (in contrast to her own grown apathy) 

and she’s reminded of times before. song or no song.

she decides that this cannot keep going, and hades will keep going farther and farther until he fucking self-destructs at the end of his fall and she wants to catch him before that happens

hades raises his fist against his people, persephone takes his hand and she starts singing. the old song. holding his hand. protecting the people. 

la, la la la, la la la 

and he realizes what he’s doing, as music swells, as the rest of hadestown, quietly, starts to join her in singing. as her warmth, her natural warmth, surrounds him, and he smells flowers and feels pollen and sunlight, and he--

well, the ice around his heart starts to crack, and the iron starts to melt

she catches him before he breaks

His Kiss, the Riot is... different

more emotionally charged, i think, because of the fight he’s been fighting for so long, so fiercely and ardently. he’s much more emotionally compromised, stressed and strung out and now everything’s been turned on his head

he can’t just let them go, but he can’t make them stay. he definitely cannot make them stay. and if the songbirds leave, they will take almost all of hadestown with them

it’s not like... Hellfire Notre Dame levels of dramatic. it’s still quiet, dark, and brooding, but hades is. more of a mess, really

but he comes to his conclusion all the same

that’s about all i got on this. i just wanted to make a note. i thought it was important

the task is given: they can walk, but eurydice must walk in front, and orpheus must follow behind. she must not turn behind to see if orpheus is following--if he has not collapsed, and she will not be able to hear if he has. if she turns, she may return above, but her lover will return to hadestown. 

it’s given to eurydice instead because while she might be harder to instill doubt in, she’s as much susceptible to loneliness as any other. she may have been alone for so long, but she is desperate to not be alone again. and orpheus is still weak--still sick, and she fears he might give out before they reach the top, as much as he assures her he’ll be fine

and if they fail, well, they keep the poet, who was damned to hell anyway--a sentence is stronger than a contract

(Also, this is now Wait For Me III (the first being Orpheus on the way to Hadestown; second being Eurydice trying to find Orpheus; this is the third) and it is HUGE and GRAND, as the climax of the revolution. just as big, if not bigger than the bway version’s

(tho as per usual it’s tinged with sadness because of the circumstances, and the fact that, if this were staged, orpheus would be the only one not singing)

and then... doubt comes in

eurydice walks the path to the surface

hermes' warnings echo in her head, all the same he gave to orpheus in the normal timeline

it's cold

the fates badger her and bleed into her thoughts, systematically unwinding her confidence as she marches on through the dark

one foot after the other, she tells herself

after so long of turning her back to the wind, to the fates, she has learned to keep her head on straight

orpheus is not sturdy, especially now, but he is not so weak to fail on a walk like this--long, but simple, and upon even ground

he is there, she tells herself. he is strong enough to keep up.

his heart is strong enough. it has to be.

hades lied to everyone in the underground--hades lied to make hadestown, she thinks

hades...

just this once--

she chooses to believe he didn't lie to her.

(pt. i) (pt. ii) (pt. iii) (pt. v) (epilogue) (askblog)

bonus:

[ertrunkenerwassergeist]

Dreams of Our Past - Chapter 27

*flails around* The chapter is done! It’s the second longest so far and the second half was fighting me until the end. But I prevailed! Here’s the Link to AO3.

In which Gladio invites Ignis to dinner and he finds a dearly missed person because of Iris.

Featuring: Ignis' brand of awkwardness, the starscourge, the tempers of Gladio and Hiemi, Noctis being so very close to a mental breakdown and Somnus and Bahamut being dicks through history

Warning: vomiting, mentioned child murder

Gladio IV

8.5.755 ME

Insomnia, Ghetto

Kingdom of Lucis

The days since their meeting at the Black Saffron had been nerve wrecking and uneventful. It grated on him like nothing else. He had thought, after they had all finally decided – more or less, he was aware enough to admit – on a course of action, things would start to move again. They hadn't. And Gladio didn't like it. At all.

He stood near the door to the pitiful office of Camp No. 5 and watched the people mingling about. More specifically was he watching Prompto, who sat grinning like a loon on a camping bed, a laptop in his lap and... did something while a group of people watched over his shoulder. Gladio really hoped the blond didn't play some kind of game. He was supposed to search through the pictures he had taken over the last few days and upload them on a dummy account by the end of the day.

Here was to hoping the whole crazy plan was going to work. It was a shame Pelna wasn't here right now, but he had finally found the time to talk to his contacts, and had gone to get the ball rolling on that whole facial recognition thing.

It wasn't that things weren't being done, really, it was just that they were moving along so slowly.

Gladio felt like he was treading on the spot, not moving forward no matter how much he wished to. It was frustrating beyond belief.

Before he realized what he was doing, he had fished his phone out of he pocket and weighted it in his hand. It couldn't hurt to call Ignis, making sure the man didn't overwork himself like he was prone to do. Maybe he had managed to find something that would help Gladio figure out what he could be doing in this stinking mess. Not that is was very likely, but a man could hope.

The phone rang once, twice, then a click sounded and a cultured voice drifted through the speaker: “Good morning Gladio. Was there something you needed?”

“Barely morning anymore, Ignis”, the older snorted.

A non-committal hum could be heard. The former advisor could be very peculiar about his greetings. A voice sounded in the background on Ignis' side. It was decidedly feminine, even if Gladio couldn't make out any words.

“Oh no, it's perfectly alright, Miss Aster. I am talking to a friend. Thank you for your wonderful help”, Ignis said.

Gladio couldn't help the grin blooming on his face. “Should I call you later, lover boy?”

Ignis gave an undignified snort. “I am at work, Gladio”, he said, stressing the word work like that was the important part. “Miss Aster is a secretary within the Ministry for Civic Affairs and Immigration. I met her yesterday, when I was looking into how far along they are with evaluating the houses in the Immigration District for damages. Apparently there seems to be a filing issue of some sort. Miss Aster has been looking into it since it came to her attention. She says it goes against her pride to have messy paperwork.”

“Tampering?” Gladio couldn't help but ask.

“Very likely.”

“Damn.”

“Whoever did it was very careful. The papers are listed as filed, they obviously went over all the right desks, but they aren't where they should be. I have never seen this amount of misfiling in my entire life.” Ignis' obvious indignation would be funny, if the situation wasn't so serious. “Mrs. Custodela cannot help us with this. She has her hands already full trying to keep abreast with the camps she is looking over. After this, would you please call Camp 7 for me? Mrs. Custodela has found a plumber who is free and can take a look at their showers.”

Something in the pipes in the showers of Camp 7 had broken and now the water there had turned a muddy brown. It couldn't be very healthy.

“That's good. I'll do that. Anything else?”

“Make sure to note down who is using the vehicles you got provided with, and where they drove and how long it took to get there. Certain people have been making noise about rationing petrol. Records of the use of the vans you have at your disposal would go a long way to work against this”, said Ignis after a few moments of consideration.

Gladio jerked in disbelief. “Rationing petrol? That's bullshit! The oil production in Leide is still under Insomnian control.”

“I know, Gladio. Believe me, I know.”

“Fuck, this whole situation is a stinking mess”, he complained and carded a hand through his hair.

I need a shower, he thought with a grimace. Ignis didn't answer. He didn't need to. Somewhere in the hall a baby started to cry, followed shortly by a second. Gladio sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. He needed to get out of here. At least for an evening. Breath some air that didn't smell of exhaust fumes or like too many sweaty people cramped into a place too small.

“How... how is Iris doing?” Ignis sounded like he wasn't sure at all, if he should even ask.

“She's not doing worse for now”, he choked out, his stomach plummeting like it was suddenly filled with lead.

“Gladio. I am- I'm so sorry.”

That sentence sounded heavy. Full of hidden meanings and implications and Gladio didn't want to hear any of it.

“Don't you dare talk like she's dead already! Because she's still very much alive”, he snapped.

A tightly controlled intake of breath sounded over the speaker. Gladio couldn't muster the will to feel bad about it. Iris wasn't dead and she wouldn't die. He was her older brother and he would protect her, damn it!She was barely fourteen, for Bahamut's sake.

“You are right, Gladio. I apologize”, Ignis said after a maybe too long pause.

“It's alright”, he sighed and deflated.

No, it wasn't alright, not at all. But Ignis was a friend – or had been a friend once – and he didn't deserve this. Pitioss, Iris didn't deserve this most of all. Why ever were the Gods punishing her like that? It had to stop.

He cleared his throat and asked awkwardly: “I'm going back home for the night to spend some time with her. Do you want to come over for dinner? Iris would love to see you again.”

“If you are sure.”

Ignis sounded so high-strung that Gladio just knew he was feeling as awkward as he himself was.

“Don't worry. I wouldn't ask, if I wasn't.”

“Then I will gladly come. Which time would be most convenient?”

“We normally eat around six since Iris gets tired early”, Gladio shrugged.

Ignis hummed in thought. “Five thirty then.”

“Fine by me”, he answered after mentally running through his to-do list again. “Just... be gentle with her, alright?”

“Of course, Gladio”, agreed Ignis. “I need to go back to work.”

“Ah, yes. Yes, of course. I'll see you later.”

“Until later.”

The call disconnected. Gladio listened to the silence of his phone for a few seconds before he sighed and lowered it from his ear to stare at it. Social graces and impulse control. He needed to work on his temper more. But for now he had a few calls to make. First Camp 7 about that plumber and then Jared to tell him that he and Ignis would be there for dinner. He had been trying to come every evening since the earthquake happened, but he hadn't always managed it.

On his first call he managed to reach Libertus who sounded just as grouchy as he had expected the man to be. Gladio had to bite the inside of his cheek as to not snap back. Instead he managed to make his way through the conversation with all the grace of a garula in a china store. Luckily Libertus didn't seem to notice. Something about two feuding Clans in one room, he had heard Crowe and Pelna say.

His second call went a bit better. He could practically hear the retainer smile as he announced his and Ignis' presence for dinner.

Now he could go outside and see how far along Tredd and Crowe were with checking over the newest delivery. Then there would be another round of phone calls between Centres 4 through 8 to see who was lacking what and to pool their resources. After lunch he would write out new timetables for those who had volunteered for various duties around here. And he would need to find someone who had experience with the whole giving birth thing, since one of the women here looked just about ready to pop.

Dinner could have been definitely worse. It had been decidedly awkward, but between Ignis practically doting on Iris within the first few minutes of his arrival and Jared's efforts to keep the conversation flowing, it had been a very pleasant meal. Everything had been fine, Iris had been laughing and moving around more than she had in weeks and Ignis had been sharing recipes with Jared.

He should have known that this wasn't going to last. Nothing good had for a long time now.

The screaming woke Gladio in the middle of the night. It took his sleep addled brain long precious seconds to realize that they were coming from his sister's room. He practically leapt out of bed and ran into her room that thankfully was right next to his. Light spilled into the dark room and for a moment his sister's shadow seemed to froth and seethe, but Gladio ignored it in search of any attackers that he could painfully eviscerate.

No one was there. No one but Iris and him.

Her screaming stopped once she saw him.

“Gladdy”, she whimpered and reached out towards him.

The sleeves of her pyjama slid back and exposed dark splotched on her skin that hadn't been there during dinner. A thin line of blood trickled down from the corner of her mouth. It was black.

“Iris!” he cried and lunged towards her, cradling her small form carefully against his muscled chest.

“Gladdy, it hurts. It hurts so much.”

She grasped weakly at his arms, sobbing. Then she went limp, her breath coming in nothing but weak bursts that ghosted over the naked skin above his collar bone.

“No”, he breathed. Desperation roared in his chest like a wild beast and stole his breath. “No, no, no, no, no.”

What should he do? No doctor or hospital they had visited since she had first gotten sick, had been able to help. There was no one here that could help her.

Oh, by the Gods, she was going to die.

The realization hit him like a slap in the face. His little sister would die before morning came, because there was no one in this damned city that...

Gladio's breath stuttered in his chest when he remembered what the innkeeper of the Black Saffron had said about his son and the woman that had come by during the meeting, when he remembered what that prostitute had told him last week.

Without stopping to consider what a colossally stupid idea this was – he could not afford to think about it, not now when his little sister was dying – he wrapped her blanket tightly around her frail body and lifted her up in his arms. She was so light he barely noticed her weight.

Why was it getting so much worse? Why now, of all times? She had been fine! Or at last not worse than the last time he had taken her to a doctor.

He didn't even stop to get dressed in something other than his sleeping trousers or to put on some shoes, and instead ran right out of the door, into the dark streets of Insomnia. In the privacy of her bed, the prostitute had described to him how he could get to this Healer, if he ever needed to.

Sweat ran down his face and back the further he ran, his breath burned in his lungs, but he didn't dare to stop. He didn't dare to do so as he ran past buildings the earthquake had destroyed, deeper and deeper into the city, through neighbourhoods that were getting more and more run down.

Iris began to shiver, despite the warm summer night. Gladio only tightened his grip and hastened his steps.

Despite the growing lack of functioning street lamps, he could see the great, broken pillar. It rose out of the shadows like a great, stony needle as he hurried past it and then turned left into a narrow alleyway. It didn't take long to reach the other side. It was nearly pitch black now. Only a few weakly glowing lanterns showed him the way, forcing him to slow down, lest he stumble and fall. He found the staircase Viti had talked about through sheer luck. There weren't any handrails, so he had to be extra careful. He did not dare hurry since some of the metal stairs creaked ominously.

Follow the lights, Viti had said, and so he started to run again towards the nearest light he could see. It was a single lantern glowing like a lonely star at the first house on the right. It hung from the ceiling in a room that was entirely open on one side and illuminated a group of chairs, metal drawers and a long table. In a corner there was a part of the wall that looked like it could possibly be a door. He just about kicked it in.

“Hello! I need help!” he bellowed into the darkness of the house, honestly not caring who he might wake.

Not a second later hasty footsteps sounded to his left. It was a teenager, his skin paler than he had ever seen a human being be, with big blue eyes so light they looked white near the pupil. In his hand he carried a lantern, its light cast a cheerful glow on everything it touched.

The teenagers eyes grew even larger when he saw the bundle in Gladio's arms, then his eyes dropped to his feet and back up again.

“My sister needs help”, Gladio repeated, pleading.

That seemed to do the trick, as the teenager gestured towards a staircase with a hasty “Follow me!” and practically leapt up the stairs.

“Healer! Healer wake up! There's an emergency. Quick!”

Gladio followed the teen down the hallway to his right until they came to the last door. Behind it was a small room with a rickety bed, a bedside table, a stool and a chest of drawers. Another lantern, it had been hanging from a hook next to the door, was lit and the teenager motioned for Gladio to lay his sister on the bed before he vanished down the hallway again, calling for Healer.

Now here, where he could finally focus on something other than running, running, running, he noticed he was trembling like a leaf in the wind. His heart beat like a fast paced drum and his breath shuddered with each intake of air.

His gaze settled on Iris. Her skin was a pasty, unhealthy white and the dark splotches had spread up her neck and onto her cheeks. Each laboured breath sounded wet and rattled within her chest. Carefully, as to not hurt her any further, he settled her down on the lumpy mattress of the bed. The frame gave a high pitched sound as her weight was added.

From outside the room he could hear doors opening and closing, sleepy voices were asking questions and hasty steps were making their way towards them. A young man appeared in the doorway. He had clearly just woken up, his startling violet eyes squinting against the light of the lantern and his long black hair a mess that hung in his face.

When the man – he couldn't be older than 20 – saw him he froze. His eyes grew large in surprise and fear, his mouth opened and closed like he was a fish on land. Gladio glowered. If he had only come to stare, he was going to beat him within an inch of his life.

“Help her!” he bellowed.

The man jerked. His gaze fell on Iris and all expression vanished from his face. One moment he stood by the door and the next he was next to the bed, leaning over his sister and looking intently at her gaunt face.

“Casto, get me a bucket and take the bedsheets for winter out of the closet. Go to Hiemi and tell her I need some of her purging tea, and bring me a bowl of hot water and a washrag”, he said with an air that made it clear he was used to be listened to and obeyed.

Not bothering to turn around and see if the teenager was listening – which he did; he ran out of the room like the Infernian himself was after him – the young man started to gently unwrap the blanket. She had grown even paler and the black splotches covered large parts of her visible skin.

Gladio would love to ask who this guy even was and what he was doing as he released a hissing breath and started cussing quite creatively, but his voice refused to work. Each new gulp of air took more effort than the last and slowly he began to realize that everything hurt. From his muscles to his feet. Especially his feet. They felt like two big, raw lumps of meat that did nothing but hurt. He ignored it as best as he could for now.

A thin hand with long, elegant fingers was lain on Iris' forehead, golden-violet sparks danced across the digits and over her skin.

Wait, this was the famous Healer?

“For how long has she been sick?”

Gladio's tired mind barely registered the question. “What?” he managed to utter after his second attempt at articulating.

“How long, Gladio”, Healer barked.

How...? That wasn't important right now.

“Nearly two months”, he managed to say around the lump in his throat.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit. By all the sulphurous fires of Ifrit's den. By all rights, she should be dead by now.”

That made Gladio's tired brain pay attention again. “Excuse me?”

Healer shook his head and reached for the bucket a huffing and puffing Casto held out towards him, bedsheets under his other arm.

“No time for that.”

He gently sat her upright, her weight lying awkwardly in his arms, and sent a wave of softly glowing magic through her. The golden and violet light washed over her like water. Without warning her upper body jerked forward and she vomited her dinner mixed with black blood into the bucket. It stank sickeningly.

Iris took big, heaving breaths, occasionally dispelling mouthfuls of junky black sludge. After nothing new came up, Healer set the bucket down beside the bed. He didn't seem to care for the splatters that had hit the naked skin of his arms and torso. They slowly turned into wispy smoke and then vanished entirely. Her eyes fluttered feverishly without seeming to notice her surroundings.

“Yeah, that's it. Everything's alright now. In and out, in and out. Yah're doing great, Iris. Everything's gonna be alright.”

While Healer was gently coaxing his barely lucid sister into regaining her breath and Casto put a garish monstrosity of a pillow beneath her head, Gladio leaned against the wall to ease the pain in his feet and to regain some kind of equilibrium. Because this Healer knew his sister's name. Gladio knew he hadn't told him and he had known his name, too, without needing an introduction. Just who was he?

“Tata?”

All eyes turned towards the door. There stood a girl. She looked to be around seven with wild, sleep mussed red hair and honey coloured eyes that gleamed golden. She looked drowsily at them and yawned.

“Solaris? What're yah doing out of bed?” asked Healer without taking his glowing hand from Iris' forehead even once.

“It's loud”, the girl complained.

Gladio's gaze wandered from one to the other and he wondered.

Healer nodded. “Ah know, little sun, but Iris needs mah help for now. If yah can't sleep anymore, could yah go down and ask yahr mati for a big glass of water? Casto, could yah look after Astra, please? Ah don't wanna've him running 'round alone and in the dark.”

Both nodded and left the room, the girl taking the teenager's hand. Gladio stared after them. He had heard this accent before, he knew he had. If he could just place where. He felt like he was missing some very crucial things right about now. Sleep. What he needed now was sleep and for Iris to not die.

His gaze settled back on her. A flittering net of golden-violet magic covered her from head to toe. It looked more like mist than a tangible thread. How was such a thing possible? Only the royal family should be the one harbouring powerful magic in this city, even the whole continent. And now here was this Healer, whose magic prickled against his skin like a Lucis Caelum's did. It would probably be more upsetting, if he was fully awake.

“What does she have?” he asked instead of all the other questions burning on his tongue.

Healer blinked at him, as if he had forgotten that Gladio was also in the room. He made a passable impression of a bowstring drawn tight. In an obvious nervous tick, Healer tugged at his hair and wet his lips.

“She's scourge sick”, he said at last, his voice barely more than a quiet whisper.

“Scourge sick”, Gladio repeated tonelessly. “You mean the black plague, curse of the Gods, the starscourge? That kind of scourge sick?”

“Yes”, came the careful confirmation.

Gladio felt his fingers flex like they wanted to hit something, if he had just a bit more energy left. “That's a load of chocobo shit”, he rasped. “The starscourge does not reach within the Wall. Everybody knows that.”

Near glowing, violet eyes shot him a deadpan stare that felt achingly familiar. He suppressed a shudder creeping up his spine. Damn, those eyes were eerie.

“Two months ago yah said? Has she been anywhere near the old crypts at tha' time?”

The broken shield opened his mouth to instinctively deny the question, but he hesitated. “I... I don't know”, he admitted at last. He tried to remember, but his head started to feel like it was packed in wool.

“Doesn't matter anymore. It's good that yah came now, but yah were cuttin' it very close. She wouldn't 'a' made it through the night. Ah can barely believe tha' she made it this long.”

With a shuddering breath Gladio leaned more of his weight against the wall. The rough plaster dug uncomfortably into his shoulders.

Steps sounded from the hallway and shortly thereafter the girl was back, two cups in her hands. One was steaming and emanated a strong smell that made him wrinkle his nose. She gave the one with the foul smelling liquid Healer, the other one she cradled between her hands.

“Thank yah, little sun”, the young man smiled. “Now, yah remember what ah taught yah? Reach for the power resting in yahr bones. No more than a spark. Take it and guide it, it knows what it's got tah do.”

The girl's face scrunched up in concentration, in a way Gladio had seen a hundred times before, in the way Noctis had looked when he had wanted something to go exactly right. What Gladio hadn't seen before was the reddish glow of her hands.

“Not so much, little sun”, corrected Healer gently.

Solaris' brow furrowed even more and after a few seconds the glow dimmed until there was only the barest sheen of it left. It seeped into the cup and the liquid it contained, until it glowed, too.

“Very good”, praised the young man and Solaris beamed. “Would yah be a dear and give it tah Gladio over there?”

“Yes, tata”s she said dutifully and held the cup out to him, standing as far away as she could manage while doing so. She was clearly skittish around strangers.

“No, thank you”, he said while looking at the glowing cup in healthy scepticism. As long as he had no idea what it was he wouldn't drink it. He swallowed, and that made his parched throat just more noticeable.

Healer clucked his tongue in disapproval. “It's jus' water with a bit of healin' magic. Sit down and drink tha'. Yah look like yahr abou' tah keel over. 'Specially with yahr feet.”

Gladio made a face, but in the end he took the cup from the girl. The liquid in it looked like plain water hit by sunlight during noon. It was kind of fascinating, he had to admit. The little girl scampered off towards the bucket and glanced into it, curiosity clear on her face. She clamped her hands over her nose and mouth with a disgusted sound. Gladio frowned. A child as young as her shouldn't see these kind of things. Healer seemed to be of a similar mindset.

“Solaris, would yah please go and get Ardyn? And after tha' ah need yah tah do somethin' very important. Can yah do tha' for me?” Healer looked at her with serious eyes. The girl nodded, face solemn. “Yah need tah go tah the other patients and tell them tha' everything's alrigh'. They don't need tah worry.”

“Ah will, tata”, she said and carefully stepped closer to give Healer a kiss on the cheek before she left the room.

“What happens now?” asked Gladio and took a tiny sip of the mystery water, as he had dubbed it in his mind.

At once he could feel some of his exhaustion leave and the soreness of his muscles easing off just a bit. He blinked in surprise. This was a bit like the potions he knew, just far more gentle in the way the soothed things. Potions and ethers made by Lucis Caelum magic were always accompanied by an unpleasant burn.

Healer answered while he carefully, drop by drop, made Iris drink that foul smelling tea. “Now ah'll start tah heal her. The scourge has been burrowed in her body for too long for me tah heal it all at once, but ah can do it. Yah needn't worry.”

“You can really heal her? How long will it take? There is supposed to be only one person who is able to heal the starscourge, and I kind of doubt that you are the Oracle in disguise.”

The deeply buried seeds of hope started to grow into a warm feeling pooling in his stomach. Or maybe that was just the mystery water.

“Yeah, but like ah said, it'll take me some time. A week at least. Ah don't just need tah rid her of the scourge, but also repair the damage it caused and tha's the truly tricky part.”

Gladio became light headed in relief. If he hadn't been sitting on the floor already, he would certainly do so now. But he couldn't help but wonder how it was even possible. The Fleurets had been blessed by the Astrals with the power to cleanse the scourge from its victims. There were no others.

“My, my, nephew. You have all of the clinic in a right tizzy.”

A man stood in the doorway with wild reddish hair that had an odd violet sheen and golden eyes. He leaned on a cane the same way King Regis did, and Gladio didn't know why, but he found that quite disturbing. Despite the stuffy and hot air he wore a long pair of trousers and a high collared tunic with sleeves that fell down over his wrists.

“She is scourge sick”, the man stated. His eyes bore a strange glint that Gladio didn't like.

Healer nodded. “Yes”, he affirmed and motioned towards the bucket sitting at the end of the bed. “Could yah get rid of tha'? Ah made her drink some of Hiemi's purging tea, so she'll need tha' bucket 'gain soon.”

“Of course, dear nephew. But if you don't mind, I would like to see how you handle this one. It's the first time I see you treat someone afflicted with starscourge, after all. Not to worry, I'll keep myself well out of the way.”

Healer's answering shrug clearly said suit yourself.

Gladio watched as the man – who was most likely this Ardyn the little girl had gone to fetch – gathered the bucket, keeping a straight face at the sickening smell, and retreated back towards the door.

“I'm ready”, the man announced with a grin.

Healer huffed, but he turned his full attention back to Iris who now looked like she had gone back to sleep. He gently rested his free hand on her stomach, right over her navel, the other still being on her forehead, and closed his eyes, his brows furrowed in obvious concentration. For a moment there was absolute silence. Then the glittering net over his sister's body retreated, leaving the room strangely dim. Not a moment later however, Healer's whole body started to glow in a golden light. It looked like a sun was trapped under his skin.

The black lines on his skin, that Gladio had thought were tattoos, started to crack open and released a burning violet light. It looked utterly otherworldly. Suddenly Gladio could believe every story Viti had told him about Healer. That he was a fallen star or an Astral, forgotten by humanity and time. There was so much power. It made his skin prickle and the fine hairs on his arms stand on end. And it seemed like Healer himself could barely contain it, he looked like his human shell was going to shatter at any moment.

Magic pulsed in time of an invisible heart, lapping over Iris and through the air like it was water breaking on a shore. The light seeped into Iris' skin, concentrating where the black splotches marred her, and with each new wave that washed over her they grew a tiny bit smaller. A fine black mist rose and dissipated within seconds.

Gladio couldn't do anything other than stare at the spectacle in front of him, even as it made his eyes burn to look directly into the pulsing light. He didn't even look away when he heard a violent hiss from where the red haired man was watching.

An especially large wave made the air shudder, caressed his skin like the softest silk and eased the pain in his bloody feet. There were quite a few cuts and a broken toe nail. He hadn't even felt it as he had been running to get his sister the help she needed. He couldn't help the sigh of relief that escaped him. The magic teased over him like a long lost friend. It made something in him that had been sleeping for a long time, suddenly sit up and pay attention. He knew the feeling of this magic, had felt it quite often when Noctis had been made to practice his elemancy, even if he had never been connected to it like a proper Shield should be...

He jerked upwards. By now the magic had turned into a bright supernova with the young man and his sister at its centre. It couldn't be.

“Noctis”, he breathed, stunned.

He stood there, frozen and having no idea what he should do. This couldn't be possible. He had searched for his prince high and low and the Crownsguard and the Kingsglaive both had searched outside of Insomnia. If Noctis was still in the city and not dead they should have heard something by now. Shouldn't they?

On the other hand there clearly were people down here. Gladio hadn't even known that this place existed, and it was part of his job to know about the city's layout. It would also explain how Healer had magic. But why hadn't he recognized him then? He knew what the prince looked like! Then again, Healer had long hair and what he had thought were tattoos covering a large part of his body, including his face. And even if it turned out that Healer wasn't Noctis – which became more and more likely the longer he thought about it – this was a place he could potentially be, because no one had ever thought to look.

Had Noctis hidden here this whole time?

Why?

As if he had been heard, Healer opened his eyes. Even in the bright light of the magic they glowed like a pair of newborn stars. Gladio had to look away. White spots danced in front of his eyes. A high pitched whine sounded from where the door was located.

Slowly, oh so slowly, the pulsing light became weaker, the pressure of powerful magic in the air grew lighter. With each new wave it retreated further and further, like the changing of the tides until it was mostly gone.

The black splotches on Iris' skin had turned into mere shadows beneath skin still pale from sickness. There was a bit of colour in her cheeks now.

Healer's hands retreated and the last of the glow died, leaving the room in a strange half light until Gladio's eyes had adjusted again. Only the black lines on Healer's skin still gave off a dim iridescence, and Gladio swore there was a new one slashing across his cheek close to the nose. It made the impression that the man's humanity was nothing but a thin veil that could be ripped away to show what really lay beneath at any time. And wasn't that disconcerting?

Reluctantly, like he needed to remind himself how to move his limbs, he stood up and carelessly let the blanket Gladio had carried Iris in, fall to the floor, before taking up the one the teenager had brought in and spread it over Iris' still sleeping form. His breath came in quick bursts and he was covered in sweat like he had just completed a taxing workout. With a quiet groan he stood up straight. Finally the shimmer beneath his skin was completely gone.

“Fuck. Ah think ah overdid it”, he mumbled barely loud enough for Gladio to hear.

“You can say that again, my dear nephew. Please warn an old man the next time you want to set off the magical equivalent to a Nifasi firebomb. It would be much appreciated. You can never be sure of the consequences otherwise”, stated the red haired man before Gladio could even think to open his mouth.

There was a caution in Healer's gaze as he nodded, that set Gladio's teeth on edge and made him want to punch something. Or someone. Preferably the guy who used a cane exactly the same way his King did but moved like a was an actor playing out a drama.

“Now, go downstairs to your wife, eat something and drink some of her truly amazing tea. You look like someone who dearly needs a break and some extra energy. I dare say, it's too early already to go back to sleep again. I will look after the girl for the time being. Do not worry, I have some experience in looking after the scourge sick and know what I'm doing”, he continued as if he hadn't seen Gladio's glower.

Which he clearly had.

Healer – who was quite possibly Noctis and Gladio wasn't really sure if he wanted him to be or not – just rolled his eyes, but he took a step towards the door before he stopped and turned towards him, a guarded look on his face.

“Come”, he mumbled. “We need tah talk, and best do it now.”

Gladio didn't say anything as he followed Healer through the still mostly dark house. To be honest, he had no idea what to say. For all the questions tumbling through his mind in a never ending whirlwind since he had first seen the young man.

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to rage.

He wanted to shake the answers out of the man leading him down dark stairs.

But he didn't. If this whole mess had taught him one thing, it was that raging at it all didn't help a thing. So he swallowed the anger hissing in his mind down and sat in the chair in the warmly lit kitchen he had been indicated to.

The kitchen was a large room that was clearly well lived in and cared for with a loving hand, if cluttered to a point where there was nearly no free space left. Despite the warm summer night there was a new fire burning in the hearth that was old enough to belong in a museum. It made the air near uncomfortable hot.

Most of the kitchen appliances looked like they belonged into the 5th century ME at least. Well, there was an electric tea kettle and a few other bibs and bobs that clearly belonged into the modern age of electricity. How could anybody live like that?

As he examined the kitchen he noticed the woman standing at the counter. She wasn't very tall with a thin face and very pale skin that contrasted heavily with her long black hair. Her big eyes were of a green that reminded him of shadowy forests outside Insomnia. The long and thin tunic she wore was of a russet colour and looked more like a nightgown to his eyes.

He knew her. It was the woman that he had met at the Black Saffron the day before yesterday. Well, three days ago by now, he supposed. What was her name again? Hiemi? Wait, so the little girl had been...

She came over towards the table with a tray in her hands upon which were three cups and a large pot that wouldn't be out of place in one of the historical romances he liked to read sometimes. Now that she stood next to Healer, who had been awkwardly hovering next to an empty chair, Gladio could see that she was a few centimetres taller than him. The woman gave Healer a chiding glance that lost its bite with the fondly exasperated tilt of her smile.

“Yah overdid it”, she stated.

“Ah know”, he murmured and gave her a chaste kiss on the mouth. “Ah'm sorry.”

“No, yah're not. Now sit down and introduce me so tha' we can have this talk b'fore we've gotta go t' work.”

And Healer did just that.

He gave her hip a gentle squeeze and sat down on the chair across from Gladio while the woman served the tea and then sat down herself. There were a few beats of awkward silence before Healer cleared his throat and introduced the woman next to him.

“Gladio, may ah introduce to yah Hiemi, Dame of this household and mah wife. Hiemi, this's Gladio.” He hesitated, as if he wasn't quite sure how to continue.

Before he could make up his mind about it, Gladio interrupted him: “What in the name of Pitioss' cursed depths were you thinking, Noctis?!”

The young man flinched, his fingers dug into the wooed tabletop until his knuckles turned white and his mouth fell open with no sound escaping him.

In the warm light of the kitchen it had become very clear to Gladio that this Healer was in fact Noctis, despite all the changes. The facial structure practically screamed Lucis Caelum. There was also the magic – magic he had never seen or heard of before – and the fact that he knew his and Iris' name.

“Where the fuck have you been? Do you know how worried your father was? Still is, to this day? Do you know how the nobles are hounding him to produce another heir? He keeps refusing out of love for you and the late Queen and you sit here, healthy and alive, and play house! The King still hopes that you're alive and well, that you're coming home one day. Do you know what your actions did to Ignis? To Iris? To me? Do you-”

By the end he had been nearly screaming, ready to lunge across the table and beat some sense into his prince. If he even deserved that title anymore. But suddenly he was frozen in place. The words tumbling out of his mouth, halted on his tongue and his muscles refused to move. It was like time around him had been halted but everywhere else it moved forward like it always did. He couldn't even blink as he looked at the two people across from him.

Noctis had grown even paler than he already was, hunching his shoulders and shrinking into himself. Hiemi, the woman he had introduced as his wife – and wasn't that a whole other can of worms – was another story. Her eyes were blazing in fury as she rose from her chair, one arm held out in his direction. Around her wrist and along her forearm danced smoky grey chains. Sparks of green and yellow jumped between the individual links.

“Don't yah dare.” She hissed, her face contorted into a sneer. “Don't yah think he knows tha'? Mah husband knows the consequences of his actions quite well, knave Gladiolus. Yah bet there's a damn good reason for it, do yah understand me?”

“Hiemi”, Noctis said in a tone that was barely more than a whisper. At once her attention was on him. “Let him go, please. It's fine.”

“It damn well isn't, and yah know it! Shield or not, friend or not, he can't jus' walk in here and treat yah like this. Healer. Noctis. It's not yahr fault. Yah couldn't 've done anything different. Not with Him watching.”

Gladio listened with growing concern. What was she talking about? Who was this Him? The way he said it he couldn't be a nice guy. Noctis made a keening noise so full of old hurt and fear and guilt that Galdio would have recoiled, if he were able. The prince pressed his face into her abdomen, his hands grasped at the cloth of her tunic and his shoulders shook as if he was crying. She didn't say anything but carded her hands through his long, tangled hair with a tender expression on her face. Gladio dearly wanted to look away, shaken to his core at the scene before him.

“Ssshhhh”, made Hiemi and continued to pet Noctis' hair until he pulled away.

The prince's eyes were thankfully dry and he didn't look quite as much as an anak caught in the headlights anymore. His wife pressed his cup of tea into his hands and he took a sip. And then another, the action calming him down further.

“Now”, she said, her tone brooking no argument, “we're all going tah sit down and talk like the adults we all are. Am ah clear?”

Here she looked sternly at Gladio who still couldn't move. He wished he could point that out to her.

“Mah life, yah need tah take off the spell first”, Noctis reminded her with an amused twitch at the corner of his mouth.

Due to her pale skin, the redness in her cheeks was very noticeable as she cancelled whatever she had done with one last warning look towards him. The chains around her forearm vanished. He carefully flexed his fingers and shifted his weight, to see if everything was back in working order, but he wisely kept his mouth shut and waited for either of the two to speak first. Their short exchange had made it clear that there was more going on than he had thought – than anyone had thought – and he wanted to know what it was.

It was Noctis who started the conversation again.

“Tha' night in tha' alleyway ah was scared shitless, Gladio, and it wasn't because of tha' old drunk with the broken bottle.”

“What in the name of Bahamut's blades happened to you?” asked Gladio and watched uncomprehending, as both of them flinched slightly.

“Please, don't say His name. Down here, He can't see me”, Noctis pleaded.

“What do you mean, down here He can't see you? Wait, the He you were referring to is-?”

Gladio swallowed down the name Bahamut, but the other two knew exactly who he meant. They nodded in unison.

“But why?”

He didn't understand this at all.

“The Bladed One's still one of the Six, one of the Astrals, but His standing, from what ah understand of what Healer told me, is more tha' of the Infernian up there”, answered Hiemi and motioned towards the ceiling.

Ignis would love this.

The sudden thought made Gladio realize that he needed to get the advisor in on this. Gladio himself was in over his head. But that was for later. Now...

“So Ba- the Bladed One is some kind of traitor, a malevolent deity? What does that have to do with why you're hiding in this dump?”

Both of them bristled at his words and Hiemi opened her mouth, clearly prepared to argue, but Noctis' hand on her shoulder held her back. She leaned backwards, still glaring at Gladio like he had insulted her personally.

“It's got everything tah do with it”, said Noctis. “Do yah know the stories of the Lucis Caelums tha' had a magic different from wha' was expected of them?”

Gladio hesitated. He tried to think of the old stories Noctis had liked to read in the archives, when he had been allowed down there, but none came to mind. It was strange, since this was the main reason he had started to like reading historical romance. Try as he might, he couldn't remember a single of those stories the young prince had liked to ramble about on occasion.

“I... cannot say I do, no”, he admitted, feeling strangely ashamed of it.

Noctis just sighed. “Tha's alrigh'. They've always ended violently, with the death of the Lucis Caelum in question, and more often than not with innocent bystanders dead. There're records of Kings killing their own children tah minimize the inevitable damage they'd cause if left tah live. Dad told me the last one left to live died when he collapsed a house on top of him, also killing the people within the building and most of the bystanders. Ah managed tah find records from the Founder's time, where King Somnus decreed in the Bladed One's name tha' every child not of black magic was Bad Faith.”

Gladio gave a quiet curse. He remembered now, the sordid stories Noctis had told and had given him a sour taste in his mouth every single time. The prince seemed to have noticed his discomfort at his retellings and had stopped them after some time. It hadn't stopped him from going into the archives, however.

All of a sudden he had a very bad feeling about this.

“Please tell me you aren't one of those cases, Noctis”, he all but begged, already knowing the answer to this.

Ruefully, the prince in hiding shook his head. “If he finds me it's only a question of time before something happens. Do yah understand? Ah can't go Up because for some reason we can't figure out, He can't find me here. As long as ah'm here nothing'll happen.”

“And what of the rest of Lucis? Should it fall into chaos, conquered by Nifelheim, because you were too much of a coward?”

Noctis pressed his lips into a thin line in displeasure. “And what would you have me do, Gladio? Wait for the dragon to kill me? I've wanted to just march up to the Citadel so many times, I've lost count. You have no idea how much it hurt to stay away from all of you.”

In his ire he was starting to lose that damn accent that had been starting to grate on Gladio.

“Stop!” thundered Hiemi before the argument could escalate any further, her presence backed up by the feeling of powerful magic. “We've been talking abou' contacting His Royal Majesty for some time now. 'Specially in the last few days. The children've been excited ever since they heard we've been considering it. Healer, ah think it's abou' time we finally did it.”

“I... yes”, he relented after a few moments of silence. “It's abou' time.”

[not-just-any-fangirl]

Days Of Summer Ch 6

A/N; Hey yall sorry for the wait! With school and some personal things we kinda lost track of his fic <3<3 feel free to come and talk to @hannah-nobody or myself about this fic tho, we love ti!

Here’s the updated playlist!

Summer has arrived, and with it the start of the two month long music camp; Fairy Tail! Full of new songs, friends, and adventures, the campers learn things they never knew about themselves and one another. And just how easy it is to sneak booze and a full sized karaoke machine out into the middle of the woods.

Camp Rock!AU

Pairing: Nalu, Gajevy, Gruvia, others mentioned; Fairy Tail

Words: 5379

Rating: T

Parts: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven

Chapter Six: Misery Hates Company

I don't belong to my mistakes

Tired of sleeping wide awake

It's killing me slowly

It's crowded and lonely

Natsu woke up staring at the ceiling of his bunk, unsure how he got there and surrounded by darkness.

Then he remembered.

And then he rolled over and tried to smother himself with his pillow.

“What the fuck did I do ?” Natsu wailed. The song. He sang that fucking song to Lucy. He'd made a giant fool of himself on stage. He was going to be sick, and not just from the leftover whiskey in his stomach.

“Well, you sent Lucy into a mini panic attack, then asked Cana if she could give her the trick she shared with you to calm down, then passed out when Gray here punched you in the face.” Loke drawled, unperturbed at Natsu waking up screaming past midnight. “Overall it was a hell of a first performance. Really scene stealing.”

Natsu moaned in a rather pathetic sound as he went back to trying to kill himself with his bedding. Maybe he'd just stay in the cabin for the rest of camp. His dad would probably miss the final performance anyway so no big loss.

“Oi, at least she proves the point you weren't hallucinating,” Gajeel supplied from under Natsu, like an awkward and sleep deprived troll under a bridge.

“But that's the worst possible thing that could happen!” Natsu spat. He was not feeling tears prick his eyes and he was not so pathetic to continue to have his emotions on display for his dickhead bunkmates.

“Why the fuck not?” Gajeel spat back, jostling Natsu as he probably kicked the plank under Natsu’s mattress. Loke too was confused, Natsu forcing himself not to tear apart his pillow when he spoke up as well.

“I mean, isn't it better to have everything out in the open?”

“Of course it's not, you fuckwit.” Gray finally snapped. Natsu looked over, Gray curled in his blanket and facing firmly away from him. “Lucy would have been much happier without ever knowing that her first kiss was with a fucking perverted scene wannabe like him .”

Natsu curled in on himself before throwing off the covers. He needed air. He needed to be alone.

“Fuck off already, what is your fuckin’ problem with my cousin?” Gajeel snarled. Natsu froze, caught off guard by Gajeel’s words. He never called Natsu his cousin, said he didn't want anyone to affiliate them with each other when Gajeel went big. “Ever since we got here you've been nothin’ but an ass. Not even Natsu deserves that bullshit twenty-four seven.”

Natsu blinked at his cousin’s defence.

“He took advantage of her when she was drunk-”

“Holy hell Gray. If you really believe that Natsu could take advantage of a drunk girl then come down here and look me in the eye when you say it. Natsu doesn't have a fucking malicious bone in his body and I understand that your fragile masculinity took a hit from failing to ‘protect’ Lucy or whatever but it's time you stop blaming Natsu for that shit. And yourself. Just accept that shit happens and there's nothing you can do but move on.” Loke huffed when he finished, rustling sounds of fabric indicating that he rolled over.

Natsu was pretty sure he was still drunk because nothing was making any sort of damn sense. Maybe he was having a whiskey dream.

He was still going to take that walk.

“Oi,” Gajeel grunted, freakishly good eyesight catching Natsu making his way down the ladder, “whad’ya think you’re doin’?”

“Getting some air,” Natsu said back. He grabbed his hoodie from where it had been thrown in the corner, by him or Gajeel he couldn’t remember. Happy mrawed at him as his bed was moved, jumping onto Gajeel’s bed and cuddling with Lily instead. Natsu mentally apologized to his cat, but was more thankful to feel his iPod in his pocket. Hopefully the charge wasn’t completely dead.

“You... you don’t have to go, dipshit,” Gray made more shuffling noises in his bunk, obviously uncomfortable.

“Aww, scared I’m going to get lost before you have the chance to apologize properly?” Natsu teased, unsure what to do at Gray’s olive branch and his defense swatting it away before he could stop his mouth from moving.

“On second thought I hope you drown in the lake. Bye.”

Natsu snorted, rolling his eyes as he walked around the suitcases that hadn’t made their way back under the bunks. He’d rather have this rivalry with Gray than try to unpack whatever the fuck was going on in either of their heads. He needed to focus all his energy of reliving every terrible moment and fantasizing about how much Lucy probably hated him.

God he was so fucked.

He threw in his headphones, praying as he pressed the button on his right earbud to play his music that his battery was still alive.

He left out a breath of relief as he exited the cabin before recognizing the song that was playing.  

When you were here before

Couldn't look you in the eye.

You're just like an angel.

Your skin makes me cry.

Fuck.

He continued walking, debating changing the song or accepting his fate. The chorus rang in his ears as he reached the edge of where the cabins were tucked away, haunting and painful and true.

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo.

What the hell am I doing here?

I don't belong here.

Natsu decided to let it play.

Loke woke up to his phone buzzing.

He frowned not remembering setting an alarm last night. He felt beside his pillow, hand splayed as he searched for the source of irritating buzzing. He finally found it, half shoved under his pillow. He squinted at the screen, bringing it so close it almost brushed his nose, blind without his contacts or glasses. Loke blinked in surprise when he saw that the vibrating was a steady stream of texts coming in from Lucy and Cana. He looked at the time. 7:13 AM.

This wouldn’t be good.

He unlocked the screen, deciding to start with Cana’s texts.

Alcoholic Princess - 6:59 AM: so Lucy’s awake

Alcoholic Princess - 6:59 AM: she’s not happy

Alcoholic Princess - 7:01 AM: Correction: She is Very Not Happy

Alcoholic Princess - 7:02 AM: Loke you’re the best at calming her she is yelling at me through text and not talking to me.

Alcoholic Princess - 7:04 AM: Loke I think I might have fucked up a little bit last night.

Alcoholic Princess - 7:04 AM: just a little

Alcoholic Princess - 7:06 AM: don’t tell her I said that

Alcoholic Princess - 7:10 AM: fuck

“Just a little bit,” Loke snorted under his breath. Hey, how were they supposed to know Natsu would be such a light weight? That wasn’t Loke’s fault, and it certainly wasn’t Natsu’s. Loke looked at the bunk diagonal to his, frowning at the unpleasant twist in his gut seeing it empty. A small meow took his attention from the phone vibrating in his hand and the empty bunk, Loke looking down to see Natsu’s blue cat sitting by the foot of his bed and staring at him with sad eyes.

“Do you know where he is?” Loke asked Happy. He sighed when the cat made a sad sound, slinking onto the bed as it took Loke speaking to it as invitation onto his bed. Loke decided it was probably best to deal with Lucy now before she stewed too long.

My Sunshine - 7:00 AM: Did you know?

My Sunshine - 7:00 AM: Loke I swear to god

My Sunshine - 7:01 AM: Get your ass up I know you’re a morning person

My Sunshine - 7:01 AM: As if you’d miss your skincare routine

My Sunshine - 7:03 AM: Answer me you coward

My Sunshine - 7:04 AM: Okay so you didn’t know but what did Natsu ever do to you that you decided it’d be funny to get him drunk?

My Sunshine - 7:06: AM Oh my god is Natsu okay

My Sunshine - 7:07 AM: Why didn’t he tell me? Loke ask him why he didn’t tell me

Loke looked at the empty bed again. How did he end up in the middle of this?

My Sunshine - 7:10 AM: Loke

My Sunshine - 7:11 AM: Oh my god Loke I kissed Natsu

My Sunshine - 7:11 AM: I’ve had my first kiss

My Sunshine - 7:11 AM: LOKE

My Sunshine - 7:11 AM: LOKE IVE KISSED A BOY

My Sunshine - 7:13 AM: AND GRAY KNEW ABOUT IT

My Sunshine - 7:14 AM: the stupid emo’s not responding to my texts

My Sunshine - 7:14 AM: tell Gray to get his ass to my cabin

My Sunshine - 7:14 AM: we

My Sunshine - 7:14 AM: are

My Sunshine - 7:14 AM: going

My Sunshine - 7:14 AM: to

My Sunshine - 7:14 AM: talk

Loke rolled over, groaning into his pillow.

This was so not good. And it was all Gray’s stupid fault.

Me - 7:15 AM: Be there in a minute bae

My Sunshine - 7:15 AM: I haven’t decided if you can call me bae yet or if I’m still angry at you.

Me - 7:16 AM: My everescent and wonderful star, I promise this was entirely Gray’s fuck up

My Sunshine - 7:16 AM: You can call me bae

My Sunshine - 7:16 AM: For now

Loke grinned at his phone before lifting his leg and kicking the bottom of Gray’s bunk. Hopefully by his dumb head.

“We’re going to Lucy’s cabin and she’s pissed so if you say anything stupid that makes her cry I’m throwing you in the lake myself.” Loke called, grabbing his glasses from under his bunk. He’d deal with the contacts when the birds weren’t still asleep.

“Fuck no,” drifted from Gray’s pillow, and Loke was utterly done with his best friend’s bullshit.

“Fuck yes. You got yourself in this mess by keeping it from her and bae, it’s time you reap what you sow.” Loke said flatly, getting dressed quickly. He’d do his skincare routine later. Gray grunted, jumping from the bed in only his boxers, hair messed and glare deadly if not for Loke’s done-ness with him so early in the morning. The got ready in silence, neither giving a farewell to the lump of blanket that was Gajeel. He’d really have to get Natsu’s and his other bunkmate’s numbers, that is if Natsu hadn’t gotten eaten by a fucking wild cat.

Not that Loke was still harbouring ill wishes for the two furballs that he was being forced to live with.

Even if the blue one was adorable.

Loke contemplated if he was growing into a cat person during the otherwise painfully quiet walk to Lucy and Cana’s cabin. Soft tapping sounds made Loke’s left eye twitch, knowing the sound of Gray’s growing anxiety and how close he was to either punching something or grabbing a smoke. Loke spoke when the sound of tapping and crunching of gravel grew to be too much, already pissed at having to skip his moisturizing routine. If he even saw so much as one wrinkle or the hint of bags under his eyes he would smother Gray the first chance he got. “For someone who almost died from asthma you think filling your lungs with toxic tar smoke would be less appealing.”

“You’d think with how blind you are without your glasses you’d keep your nose out of your damn phone more. But I guess we’re both dumbasses,” Gray snapped, drumming out a quick and syncopated rhythm on his thigh. Like rolled his eyes, pulling out his phone to spite Gray. He tapped in the passcode, Freddie Mercury's birthday. There was no other bi icon that was as flamboyant and dazzling and talented, all aspects that Loke aspired to be. He scrolled through Twitter, keeping updated on all the gossip that had happened on a weeknight with the people from his school, music writing group, model agency. He was bored quickly, closing the app and flicking on Instagram. A message popped up on the top of his screen just as he double tapped a video of a pair of lion cubs playing, Loke smiling slightly when he saw who it was. He tucked the phone closer, glaring at Gray’s half used cigarette in his mouth, red glow quick as it burned down the white stick.

Fluffball - 7:36 AM: Good morning :3

Me - 7:36 AM: It is truly a good morning now that you have graced my phone with your attention. How did my heart sleep?

Fluffball - 7:37 AM: Your flirting is much less convincing when I see you hit on anything that smiles at you, love

Me - 7:38 AM: You wound me muffin.

Me - 7:38 AM: You know my eye may wander but my heart never will

Fluffball - 7:40 AM: Uh huh. We’ve been best friends since we were two. I know when you full of poo

Fluffball - 7:41 AM: But I love you anyway <3

Fluffball - 7:41 AM: I have to go, those costumes won’t fix themselves!

Me - 7:42 AM: I’ll see you at lunch?

Fluffball - 7:43 AM: When have I ever missed a date?

Loke smiled, fingers tapping along the side of his case as he read through their messages.

“God, I really don’t want to die a virgin,” Gray groaned. Loke lifted his head, brow raising as he watched his ‘friend’ twitch and grind the cigarette out with his heel, frozen in front of Lucy and Cana’s cabin. He said ‘friend’ because real friends wouldn’t drag Loke into this kind of bullshit before one PM, instead falling on his own sword gallantly and with grace.

“Shoulda taken up that red head’s offer last May then,” Loke said flatly. He knocked on the door, slipping his phone into his pocket and crossing his arms as he waited. Gray whined, and Loke sighed loudly, grabbing his collar. As if he’d let him run away.

Loke refused to face the wrath of Lucy alone.

The door flew open and revealed Lucy in all of her pajama and messy haired glory. She grabbed the front of Gray’s collar, dragging him into the cabin with a deadly glare. Gray squeaked like a five year old girl. Loke wished he had recorded it. He sighed as he step into the cabin, identical to his own aside from girls clothes strewn on the railings of the bunks and several suitcases thrown open with make-up and hair products spilling from them. He lingered as he passed a small blue one that held some of the highest quality foundation he had seen, scowling when he recognized it as Ivory rather than the Nude or Flawless Natural, much too dark to pass for such a white colour. But maybe when he found the girl with this bag he could ask about her highlighters...

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”

Oh, right, Lucy’s world rocking revelation.

“I didn’t think it was that important,” Gray shrugged off. His hands were shoved in his pockets, face turned down and away from Lucy as he glared at a bright pink and polkadotted duffel bag. Loke snorted as he leaned against the bunk that Levy was sitting on top of. He shared a tired look with the short haired girl, hey eye bags looking as exhausted as Loke felt.

This was going to be the fucking opposite of fun.  

“You didn’t think my first kiss was important?” Lucy shrieked. She paced several feet, hands switching from crossing and folding behind her back. He wondered if she’d gotten any sleep, which was a dumb thing to think about considering he knew how she got when something bothered her. Either it needed to be solved or destroyed, and Lucy would never cut of a friendship with someone. “Gray what the hell?”

“You were drunk!” He shouted, finally looking at her. “It wasn’t your first kiss if you can’t remember it, and I didn’t think you two would ever see each other again.”

“That was not your decision to make,” Lucy hissed.

“I know I ain’t exactly the queen of good decisions, but even I know that was fucked up dude,” Cana interjected from where she sat on the bunk across from Loke, holding one of Lucy’s plushies to her chest and resting her chin between the pink cat ears.

“And how would she have reacted if I’d told her she’d made out with a random stranger at a music festival while drunk off one of your special concoctions?” Gray asked sarcastically. Cana made a face at him and he growled, running both hands through his hair before fisting at the sides of it. “Lucy, you would have freaked out and been horrified. You’d have been miserable all through your exams and that would make you even more stressed to shit. It wouldn’t have been worth it.”

“But it wasn’t your decision to make.” Lucy said back, pushing each word through her teeth with emphasis. “And now he’s here, and obviously Natsu remembered our kiss.”

“He wasn’t supposed to be here!” Gray growled, tugging on his hair again before shoving his hands back into his jean pockets.

“Well he is! And so am I! And he must think I’m the worst for forgetting him! Or worse, what if he thought I was just ignoring him? What if he hates me now?” Lucy asked, voice growing smaller with each question, less yelling at Gray and more worrying out loud. She hugged herself, flannel sleep shirt pulling on the sleeves as it was stretched. Lucy buried her face in her hands, Loke pushing off his standing post in distress.

“O-oi,” Gray called, hands hovering over her shoulders and all tense defensiveness leaving him. If anyone hated it more when Lucy cried than herself it would be Gray. The poor bastard could barely handle his own emotions, much less deal with someone so close’s.

“Way to go dickface!” Cana called, glaring from her spot on Lucy’s bed and shuffling over for the blonde to cuddle with her. “You made her cry!”

“I’m n-not crying,” Lucy sniffled.

Loke shot the nastiest glare that he could at Gray, not even satisfied when he watched him pale and duck his head in shame. He returned to leaning on his post when Gray grabbed Lucy’s arms and pulled her into a tight hug, Lucy pushing back for a second before hugging him fiercely. Loke smirked at Grays sharp grunt, Lucy punching him in the gut once before returning to holding him.

“No offence, Luce, but why are you so upset about a guy you barely know?” Gray asked, petting her head in the most natural way Loke had seen Gray show affection, went meant it was still stiff as fuck and somehow both awkward and endearing to watch happen.

“I’m more upset that you didn’t tell me.” Lucy mumbled, squeezing Gray tight enough to pull a grunt of pain from him. Her head twisted on his chest, Loke feeling ice crawl through his blood at her flat glare and watery gaze as she looked at him. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you lack of response to finding out I’ve had my first kiss either.”

“Bae, it wasn’t my place to butt in.” Loke felt his smile falter the longer Lucy leveled him with her unconvinced glare.

“You mean you were waiting for it to blow up in Gray’s face.”

“Yes.”

Loke shared a smirk with Cana, his other best friend cackling at his easy admittance.

“Thanks bae ,” Gray growled, setting his chin on top of Lucy’s head. She’d pretend to be upset for the first few weeks Gray had realized he was tall enough to do that know, but everyone saw how much she smiled when he did it. Or rested his elbow on her shoulder. Lucy got back at him by painting his nails, either a nice colourful black or if Gray was in a good enough mood a deep, deep , blue.

“He said it! Lucy, Gray said bae! Did you feel his heart thaw? Did it begin to beat like a normal human’s again? Gray, tell me, how does it feel to live ?”

Lucy snorted, burying her face in Gray’s chest as he grumbled insults into her hair. He tensed suddenly, scowling down at Lucy when she turned her face back to Loke. “Nope, he’s still our Tin Man.”

“Juvia could check for Gray’s pulse,” Juvia squeaked, burying her face back into her blanket when Gray looked at her.

“I think we’ve got it covered Juvi, though I’m sure Gray here wouldn’t mind getting a physic-”

“Cana,” Levy sighed. Loke grinned up at her, pleased to see her standing up to the other girl. While friendly and awesome, Cana had a tendency to steamroll things, and Loke was relieved that it wouldn’t just be Lucy having to keep her in check, God knew he and Gray were useless at corralling her.

Lucy sighed, tightness from her shoulders melting away as she continued to speak again, voice smaller than before and making Loke intently aware that easiness they’d brought back to the cabin was gone. “I guess I’m also upset that I forgot my first kiss. And he seems like such a nice guy too, to remember a random girl he met at a concert? I probably wasn’t even his best kiss, all drunk and gross. I can’t believe he’d even want to talk to me after I made such a fool out of myself in front of him.”

“It is alright Lucy, your’s and Natsu’s kiss was Natsu’s first kiss as well. Gajie was very concerned for his cousin that he had started to hallucinate such an event.” Juvia said, smile kind and encouraging. Lucy wailed, turning into Gray’s startled arms.

“That’s worse!”

“That’s what Natsu said,” Loke grumbled. He didn’t understand how any of this was a bad thing, they were obviously into one another, why not just get on with the fun part of dating and skip all the awkwardness?

“Lucy, it’ll be fine,” Cana soothed, staying in her spot on the bed and trusting Gray to not make things worse. “I’m sure he understands you were drunk, and didn’t mean to not recognize him. The dork doesn’t seem the to type to hold grudges.”

“I know what it’s like to be forgotten. I never thought I’d turn out like my dad.” Lucy mumbled, voice sounding tight again as she muffled it in Gray’s -miraculously- clothed chest. Cana sobered instantly, sharing a heavy look with Loke as he pushed off from his leaning post.

“You’re nothing like him, Lucy,” Gray hissed. “Absolutely nothing.”

She gave a weak laugh, and Loke’s mouth twisted sourly at her disbelief of his words. Lucy was friendly and compassionate and outgoing, nothing like her prestige focused father. While they all knew he loved her, they knew Jude loved the idea of what he could turn Lucy into more. Another business person to lead the company, his little puppet and yes-man as he made more deals and gained more power. A pretty face to show to the outside world.

“A guy like Natsu wouldn’t kiss ya if you were anything like Jude,” Loke said, forcing a grin on as he continued speaking. “Too much mustache.”

“What was he like this morning?”

Loke’s heart lept to his throat the same time Gray whimpered, his joke passed unnoticed as Lucy turned the conversation back to the present. Neither were keen on telling Lucy they had lost the pink haired boy around midnight and he hadn’t returned when they woke up. Cana had grown attached to the shy nerd, and Loke had to admit he had too, if not to the same extent as his alcoholic friend. There was just something about his bright smile and the impish glint he got in his eye when he laughed or made a snide comment, his fluffy hair reminding Loke of a duckling when he got rid of that damn beanie.

Loke didn’t feel up to dealing with the man-hunt Cana would lead looking for the idiot.

“Uh,” Loke drew out, ignoring Gray’s panicked shaking of his head over Lucy’s shoulder. “He wasn’t exactly there when we got up...”

“Does Loke or Gray know where Natsu is?” A light and musical voice asked. Loke looked up at Juvia, her hair piled in a messy bun over her head, blankets pulled her to chin and making her a giant lump of ugly-washed-out-baby-blue that was the camp supplied blanket.

“Uhhhh,” Gray said, helpfully.

“He’s on the grounds?” Loke followed up. He tried to smile at end, cowering slightly under Lucy’s loud squawk and Cana’s glower.

“How do you lose a sixteen year old boy?” Levy asked. Loke looked at her, betrayed. They were literally on the same side of the room, how dare she turn on their unagreed alliance and bonding of sharing a look while Gray was an ass.

“We ain’t his keepers,” Gray mumbled, resting his chin on Lucy’s head despite her trying to pull back to yell at them. “The bastard can walk around at midnight without us keepin’ tabs on him.”

“You let him wander around a camp in the middle of the woods at midnight while he was drunk ?” Lucy shrieked.

“Gray punched Natsu so hard he has a bruise!”

“What the fuck dude?”

Loke shrugged at Gray’s aghast look. He wasn’t going down without throwing a few friends under the bus. All was fair in love and not dying before legally going to a bar. Besides, he had a lunch date he couldn’t miss.

“Gray!”

“Loke and Cana got him drunk, why aren’t you yelling at them?” Gray barked. Loke brought a hand to his chest, offended that Gray would would do such a thing to him. Just because Loke would use him as a scapegoat doesn’t mean Gray had to sink to the same level.

“Speaking of that,” Lucy whirled on Loke. He held his hands up, paralyzed under her sharp look. “What did Natsu ever do to you for you to be so mean?”

“I was helping him!” Loke gaped at her, looking at Cana for support. “He’s just a major light weight! Gray said he hoped Natsu drowned when he left the cabin!”

Gray whined again as Lucy pulled from his arms, hands fisted on her hips as she glared at him like a mother might glare at a five year old she had caught drawing on the walls.

“I didn’t mean it,” he defended sourly, pulling at the neck of his shirt. And then throwing it onto Lucy’s bed. “He was being a prick! He just- that scene bastard gets under my skin with his stupid questions and dye job and stupid laugh.”

“Natsu’s hair is naturally rose,” Juvia said. Loke sputtered, everyone twisting to look at Juvia in shock.

“How the fuck did that happen?” Cana asked, smiling in disbelief at the bottom of the bunk above her. Juvia shrugged, pulling the blanket up to cover her nose as all eyes remained trained on her. Loke wondered what her talent was if she was so stage shy. “I wonder if the curtain matches the drapes.”

“ Cana!”

Cana grinned and shrugged under the shouts by the rest of the room, reminding Loke of the time he had caught Gajeel’s cat eating a kiwi of all things on Loke’s bed. Pleased with themself and uncaring of Loke’s outrage.

“Juvia would appreciate not talking about Gajie’s cousin’s genitals, please,” Juvia said shyly, face bright red as she peeked above her blanket.

“I’m with Juvia,” Levy said. “It’s too early in the morning to talk about dicks.”

“We’re talking about Gray.”

“Dude!”

Loke grinned at Gray’s offended bark, smile brightening when he saw Lucy grin and giggle into her hand at Loke’s insult of Gray. Being mean to Gray always made Lucy laugh if it wasn’t too harsh, especially because Gray always gave as good as he got. He was glad she was starting to calm down. He hated seeing her stressed.

“Does anyone have his number?” Lucy asked, hands fiddling in front of her and her gaze flicking anxiously between everyone.

“The boy’s lost and you’re trying to wheel him? Naughty naughty,” Cana cooed. She squeezed the stuffed cat pillow to her in glee, eyes sparkling as she grinned at Lucy.

Lucy sputtered, pink coating her cheeks in a way Loke had to bite his tongue to stop himself from calling cute, knowing Lucy was not above stealing his phone and deleting all his selfies in this kind of mood. Not that Loke couldn’t just take more, but sometimes the light was just right and who was he to deny a hint of divine intervention?

“I- I’m just worried about him! Shut up!”

Loke sighed and walked over to Cana, laying on Lucy’s bed and claiming her lap with his head.

“I don’t know bae, you seem pretty keen,” Loke teased.

“You seem pretty keen!” Lucy shot back, her arms crossed over her chest and her leg twitching in way it did when Lucy wanted to stomp her foot. Loke, Cana, and Gray had a running competition to see who could get Lucy to stomp her foot the most, and whoever won by the beginning of September got twenty bucks from the other two, each. And bragging rights.

“Great come back Lulu,” Levy called. She smirked as Lucy turned her glare-slash-pout on her, blowing her a kiss and wink. Loke silently forgave Levy for the earlier betrayal.

“Juvia has texted Natsu, and he says he’s fine aside from craving the sweet release of death. Or a nap. Natsu is undecided as of yet and says that it will be decided by if they’re serving pancakes for breakfast and how much Love Rival remembers about last night. Oh, Natsu said not tell you that. Forget what Juvia just said, please!”

Loke looked around, confused.

“Who’s ‘Love Rival’?”

“It’s what Juvi here calls Luce ‘cus she thinks Lucy wants to jump Gray despite clearly having a thing for natural pink-ettes or whatever the fuck his hair colour is called.” Cana pet Loke’s head as she talked, nodding sagely at his incredulous look.

“Those two are as likely to hook up as you and Bacchus.” Loke laughed, Cana grinning widely at his comparison.

“What! No! Gross! I mean, Lucy’s hot but like in a sister way where you ignore it and punch anyone who says it out loud! Not like... that! Just... I mean... no.” Gray spoke over himself, vehement in his denial while also trying not to insult Lucy. Loke wished he had got it on video, the raven haired boy’s face darkening with heat the longer he stumbled on his words.

His hands twitched at his belt, and Loke was not in the mood for an 8 AM peep show.

“C’mon, lets go get some pancakes from the mess hall before they’re all gone. And then I am heading back to my cabin to moisturize.” Loke grunted as he sat up, throwing Gray’s shirt at him. “Then we can all go and be awkwardly silent because Natsu and Lucy will refuse to make eye contact or resolve their love as we see who’s been paired on the announcements board. I hope whoever I’m paired with is cute.”

Lucy looked away, not denying Loke’s comment as she kicked at a green slipper on the floor. Gray re-dressed. Juvia watched from between her fingers. Levy looked both amused and fed up with all the yelling in her cabin.

“Juvia hopes they have blackberry.”

“You and me both sister,” Cana said, clinking her favourite flask to the side of the bed before taking a heavy sip.

Well, at least the day looked like it was going to be a lot more fun than the morning had promised.

Playlist:

Misery Hates Company - The Colour Morale Creep - Radiohead Hard Times - Paramore Find ‘Em, Fool ‘Em and Forget ‘Em - Anderson East With A Little Help From My Friends - Joe Crocker