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mbti-notes · 3 years

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Anon wrote: INFP with social anxiety here. I have a therapist but we're focusing on some other issues right now. In the meantime, I was wondering if you had some advice for me. I know you're not a professional (you say that multiple times in your posts) and of course I'm not asking you for a fix for my social anxiety with this - I'm just asking your help to understand what part my cognition could be playing in all of this cause I'm really curious.

Basically, my problem is the time frame right BEFORE I meet someone and, sometimes, immediately after. I don't really have problems socializing in the "middle", if you get what I mean; I'm easily adaptable and once I'm relaxed, once I realize no one is there to attack me, my mind starts getting ideas and I kind of know what to say, even though I'm a bit out of practice and I still have problems convincing other people of my emotions (like, mirroring their emotions so that they know I agree with them and stuff like that; for some reason they never ---believe me when I say it with words).

When I make plans, anyway, and I still haven't met the person, I get this anxiety: like I would rather stay home than go there because it's going to be "boring" and I'm probably going to feel like an idiot or make some sort of social gaffe. I mean, I do kinda get bored after a while anyway, but I also know I tend to overestimate that level of "future boredom" to the point it hurts me to even think about showing up and forcing myself to think of stuff I can-- say.

I get anxious because I start thinking about the way people used to treat me in the past (I've always been the black sheep of my family and/or my social circles and I vividly remember some bad things they used to say to me) and I start worrying that, deep down, they still think of me like that and they're never going to forget that "preconception of my identity" and open their eyes to who I am now, or I guess to who I've always been.

I do realize it doesn't make much sense, this "who I ----really am" part - but I've always had the impression that I was a bit different than the "me" they percieved, maybe because after many, many years of being accused of "selfishness" and "inability to tune in with the emotional atmosphere" I learned that in order not to ruin the "social mood" I should've adapted myself to the group - but the problems is that I suppressed "myself" in the meantime (and with myself I mean, like, my real interests, the things I'd like to talk about for ages without-- having to be interrupted or looked down on because, quote unquote, "ok, cool, but we don't really care").

I understand now that if they don't give me hints of actually caring about the subject I should stop rambling like a fool, but this is making me feel like I have nothing "useful" to offer them and therefore bringing the anxiety I'm struggling with. It makes me scared that I'll never be able to be myself around them because of the "social rules" I want to respect to be accepted, & to make----it worse I'm out of practice like I said before and sometimes it just gets too awkward and I want to get out of there.

I bet I'm doing something wrong because friendships and relationships in general are not supposed to be "boring", am I right? And yet until I don't get distracted by the actual conversation, I feel like it's going to be really boring and uncomfortable and sometimes going through it is SO horrible... most of the time I end up making up some excuse to go home earlier and talk----my internet friends instead (thank God for the internet!!!!). Anyway, thank you if you'll answer! And have a good summer vacation c:

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The first thing I notice is that your thought process bears a very striking resemblance to many INFJs who struggle with social anxiety due to poor Fe development (see past posts). As a general rule, if I have good reason to suspect that someone might be mistyped, I won't provide info about function development until they undergo a proper type assessment. Otherwise, they might adopt the wrong method of improvement.

You say you want to understand what part your cognition plays in the social anxiety you experience, so I will mention the aspects of your cognition that seem most significant:

1) No Chill: You overthink things to an extreme, to the point of self-sabotage, perhaps even creating a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e. when expecting the negative actually makes the negative happen). Overthinking means that you're not confronting the real obstacle getting in the way of your socializing. You're constantly trying to envision, imagine, or predict what will happen in a social interaction? WHY? What's the point of that overthinking? It's how you avoid confronting your fear head on.

2) Insecure: Your "predictions" are too often faulty because of being tainted by your underlying insecurities. You're insecure about being attacked, being accused, being misjudged, doing something wrong, being deemed of no value or unworthy of care, not being accepted or acceptable, dying of awkwardness, feeling bored, feeling uncomfortable, and on and on. You've described your thought process in detail. But nowhere do I see you confronting your insecurities, digging deeper into them, in order to understand the root of them. Insecurities are a manifestation of fear.

3) Control: Irrational anxiety is oftentimes about trying to control things that you shouldn't be trying to control or cannot have any control over - it wastes mental energy and leads to futile behavior. As long as you're trying to control social situations and their outcome, you are either trying too hard to make reality match up with your expectations or you're fumbling whenever reality unfolds outside of your expectations - you become rigid and frail. You claim to be "adaptable" but everything you say after that only proves you don't know the meaning of the word. You can't handle unpredictability, hence, the attempt to be in control by trying to "predict" everything. Do your attempts to control actually work? Do they help or hinder you? If they mostly hinder you, then isn't it time to change your strategy? Anxious people often believe that having more knowledge or control is the answer to their fear. But, in your case, the huge cost of being controlling is being incompetent. What's worse, the fear is still right there running the show.

4) Unresolved Trauma: You attribute your troubles to your past. Fair enough. Growing up in a social environment that did not respect and appreciate you is painful, even extremely traumatic for certain personality types. It also makes people too hungry for validation. It's natural that you wouldn't want to feel the pain of it again. However, if that pain remains unexamined and unresolved, you will unconsciously keep seeking to resolve it, which means re-enacting the trauma over and over again throughout life. The proof? Every time you meet someone, your first stance is defensive, because the first thing that comes into your mind is that you don't want to be attacked or invalidated. That old pain is running the whole show because you are deeply afraid of experiencing it again, yet you don't realize that YOU are the one calling it back up and rehashing it. What are you doing to resolve the pain rather than indulge the fear?

5) Self-absorbed: Social anxiety makes people too absorbed in their own thoughts, feelings, hopes, and expectations. They are too preoccupied with what they want, what will happen, how they will be perceived, how they might make a mistake, how they might be attacked, etc. This means they're not truly present with people, so the relationship can't really go far. Driven by fear and insecurity, they are always behind a wall, too difficult to reach.

Even if you happen to meet the right people, do you make it easy for them to befriend you? It seems that you can't open up with ease, you can't go with the flow of the other person when they don't live up to your expectations, you can't keep your emotions in check and misjudge situations, you get bored when it's not about you, you run away instead of making things better. Looking at yourself objectively from the outside, would you want to be friends with someone like that?

If you want to have good friends, you first have to BE a good friend. You want care, love, and validation? We all do. The best way to receive it is to be the first to give it. By being more aware of other people's needs and doing more to show that you care about them, you put them in a better position to care about you and meet your needs in return. This is the difference between actively trying to "make" a friend vs passively wishing for a friend to drop into your lap.

Being a friend isn't about what "value" you have, as though you're some kind of object being appraised and sold. Being a good friend is quite a simple matter of putting out the energy to care and show that you care. When you meet someone who's moved by your care, they will care for you in return. When you meet someone who's unmoved by your care, figure out the real reason why, in order to determine whether you should keep trying or put your energy elsewhere.

You never really know who you'll hit it off with. One of my favorite experiences in life is making a friend in the unlikeliest of places. As an adult, meeting new people is a numbers game. All you can do is keep pushing yourself to meet new people. The more people you meet, the greater the odds of clicking with someone. If you're looking to meet like-minded people, go to places that are likely to have people who share your interests. If you don't hit it off with someone, simply move along. You don't have to be friends with everyone, do you?

Yet, you take every little social interaction so seriously that each step is like life or death - that's what makes socializing tiring, laborious, and unfun. Why not enter into every social interaction with an open mind and an open heart? Why not truly go with the flow, without having to undergo the repetitive ritual of predicting what will happen or fussing over what did happen?

6) Poor Emotional Intelligence: This point is the common thread that runs through the previous points, which is why I keep repeating the word "fear". You have extremely low tolerance for negative feelings and emotions, which means you really need to work on learning how to deal with your emotional life better. Any little sign that things won't turn out the way you want and you start to panic, overthink, blame, or flee. Why do you recoil from yourself and your own feelings and emotions? Why are you so easily shaken by boredom, awkwardness, invalidation, failing, other people's negativity, etc? Why do you react so badly to these things (when others just brush it off and keep going)?

7) Low Self-Awareness: It's not enough to just name the fear ("I'm afraid of____"). Does the label explain why you have this particular fear and not some other fear? It's not enough to blame the past ("It's because of ____"). Why did someone else with a similar past as yours not develop this fear? To get to the root of fear, you have to identify, in exact terms:

what aspect of you has to change to overcome the fear

what aspect of your identity has to "die" (i.e. be let go of) in order to evaporate the fear

Until you answer the fear properly, it won't go away.

#social anxiety #anxiety #fear #emotional intelligence #mental health #ask

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mdawritings · 3 years

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Wanna Be Yours: Ch. 10

I.X

Masterlist

Warnings: None. But it is a long chapter.

Song(s): "killer + the sound" by Phoebe Bridgers & "illicit affairs" by Taylor Swift

"Just a reminder! Your final exam will be this Monday, proctored in this room, by me," Hotch paces at the front of the classroom, but your mind is elsewhere. You watch him, a smile growing on your face as he lectures the whole class. It’s finally your birthday, and Hotch set aside some time late in the day to spend with you. He also mentioned a small surprise and though you’re not usually one to get excited about gifts or surprises, you can’t wait to see what he has planned.

"Miss Y/L/N. Focus," Hotch calls out your name and you sit up straighter, attempting to suppress the grin on your face. "I won’t turn away anyone who shows up late for the exam, but you won’t be given the full time. Do I make myself clear? This exam starts at 11:00 sharp. I can promise you will need the full three hours to complete the whole thing. So I mean it. Don’t be late."

"That seems pretty relaxed for Professor Hard-Ass," Charlie leans forward to mumble into your ear and you bite your lip, suppressing a laugh. You want to tell him to thank you, since you’re the one who convinced Hotch that turning people away is cruel. At least let them try to finish the exam. A 50% is better than an actual zero.

Hotch shoots both you and Charlie a side glance which quickly shuts you up. You struggle to stifle small giggles and see Katie shaking her head off to the side, "You’re both children."

"You can’t be mean to me on my birthday," You protest under your breath, hoping Hotch doesn’t see you two goofing off. It’s your birthday and the last day of classes, he can ease up on you. He can cut the hard-ass, bullshit act for one class. It’s established that you’re not his favorite. Well, at least that’s what the class has been thoroughly convinced is the truth. You know, or at least you hope, the truth is the opposite. The semester has been a whirlwind from start to finish. Although you’re not quite at the end of it, you’ve been fundamentally changed since it started.

"Yeah? Watch me," Katie taunts, "Can’t let you get a big ego, Einstein."

"Assholes," You mutter under your breath, faking anger at your friends, but the large smile never leaves your face.

"I wish you all the best of luck. It was a pleasure to have all of you in this class," Hotch nods, putting down the chalk from the board where he’s written his contact information, "Reach out to me if you require anything like a recommendation letter. No promises I’ll do it though." He teases and flashes a cheeky smile to the whole class, "Class dismissed."

As you start to pack up your stuff, your attention flits over to Hotch a few times as a swarm of students begin to crowd around his desk, already shoving cover letters and resumes and job applications in his face. You shoot him a small apologetic look and mouth a ‘sorry’ before Katie and Charlie hook their arms in yours, pulling you to the door.

"We have a million things to do before the party tonight," Katie starts to ramble off the list of things she has planned. Katie, quite dissimilar to you, loves birthdays and planning parties.

"Party?" You glance at her, "I thought we were going to drink a little and then go out to a bar."

"When have we ever showed up to a bar sober?" Charlie rolls his eyes, "Alcohol is expensive. You’ll buy yourself a shot or something small for the significance. And you can buy the alcohol for the pre-party."

"I’m sorry, are you trying to get my stomach pumped tonight?" You laugh and before you even have a second to breathe Charlie pipes in with a ‘yes.’ to which Katie replies with a soft punch to his arm.

"So what time can we get together to organize everything?" Katie gives you a small knowing look, suspecting that you’ll probably disappear for an hour or two to see Hotch.

"Oh god, please don’t tell me you’re spending your birthday studying," Charlie lets out a strained groan, "It’s bad enough I have to meet with Professor Hard-Ass for missing one too many lectures."

"How is that my fault in any way at all?" You roll your eyes and turn back to Katie, "Let’s all meet at our apartment at like 7:30 pm? Gives us time to run errands, pick up liquor, eat some dinner, get ready and then start the party at 10."

"That works perfectly for me," Katie smiles, wrapping an arm tightly around your shoulders. "My little baby is all grown up," She mocks in a dramatic, teary, weepy tone and pretends to wipe tears from her eyes.

"I hate you all," You shake your head as your best friends drag you off to get lunch.

———————

You pull your knees up to your chest and thumb through the pages of the novel you’re currently reading. It’s not your favorite thing you’ve ever read, but it’s managing to maintain your attention for the time being. You’re sitting on the floor a few doors down from Hotch’s office, as you wait for him to get back from his last class of the day. You’ve managed to go all semester without drawing any suspicion or attention, the only person who’s seen through your guise of secrecy is Katie, but you know she would never tell or do anything to possibly endanger you or ruin this.

You hear his deep voice from the down the hall, your eyes shooting up as soon as it rings out. You attempt to play it off, but you can’t peel our eyes off of him. You already saw him this morning, but just the time you’ve spent waiting to see him again this afternoon has made you forget just how good he looks today.

His black polo shirt strains a little against his arm muscles as he carries his books and papers under his arm, a student trailing behind him as he walks down the hall towards his office. You can see the frustration written all over his face as the girl nags him over and over again. He manages to push past the hordes of people in the hallways, the girl occasionally getting lost in the swarms and needing to run to catch up to him.

You start to stand up from the floor but pause when you see her follow him all the way to his office door. "Listen, the grades you receive are final. End of discussion. You could’ve submitted any paper for a regrade, but that deadline was the end of classes. Which for your seminar, was yesterday."

"But—" She starts to speak up. You see him roll his eyes and turn his back on her, digging around in his pocket for his keys and unlocking the office door. He opens it and begins to step in, the girl eager to follow him. He whirls in place and blocks her from following him inside.

"Miss Hunter," His voice is steely and you slowly make your way to the office, still standing a good distance away as you watch the situation unfold in front of you. "I have made the rules abundantly clear. Now I have meetings with a few students who have actually managed to garner my respect. So please, stop wasting my time."

There’s a moment of silence. The girl tugs her bottom lip between her teeth, and you can tell she’s struggling not to cry in front of Hotch, and his harsh focus is unwavering. He just stares her down, waiting for her to leave. After a few seconds, her attempts to fight tears fail and she turns her back on him, rushing away down the hall before disappearing into the bathroom. You watch and turn back, Hotch finally taking note of you standing in the hallway. He shakes his head, rubbing his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. The worry lines in his face leave creases in his skin even after he’s unfurrowed his brow.

You seem to have forgotten how cruel he can be. Every snide remark, snippy comment, insult he’s thrown at you, it’s clear that they’re part of this whole ruse. You try not to think too hard about the comments, but you wonder just how many of them he means or how many are all part of the act. His tongue is biting. He’s impatient and stubborn. He doesn’t play into social niceties. He sees no need to make others feel comfortable.

Hotch nods his head at you and walks back into his office, expecting you to come follow him. You push the interaction to the back of your mind before rushing to follow Hotch. You step into the doorway and see him, one hand on his hip, the other placed firmly on the edge of his desk. His eyes running over the papers he’s just placed down on the surface.

His head looks up, the corners of his mouth pulling at the sight of you. You barely pay attention to anything but him. You give the door a push to close it and drop your stuff onto one of the chairs, rushing to him with a wide smile.

You press your lips to his, kissing him slow but needy. You grip his shirt in your hands, attempting to press as close to him as possible.

His mouth is hot and heavy on yours but he pulls away for a second, those enchanting eyes of his sweeping over every inch of your body, "Happy birthday, pretty girl," He mumbles, one arm wrapped around your back, holding you close to him, the other hand reaching up to push the hair out of your face so he can really look at you.

He pauses. His eyes stay focused on you for awhile, memorizing the details of your face as if it's the first time he’s seeing it, or like it’ll be the last time he sees it. He studies the curve of your lips as if the memory of you will be all he gets.

He soon breaks the pseudo staring contest, pushing his chair out of the way and lifting you up onto his desk, so he can stand between your legs. You arch your back, pressing your plush breasts against his firm chest. You feel his muscles shift and flex under his shirt. He leans in closer to you, one hand tangled into your hair, the other placed firm on the desk next to your body.

His mouth is so warm against yours. You lose yourself in him. Nothing and no one manages to make you feel the way he does. He’s started a fire within you and every moment spent with him, every look, every touch, every smile is tinder for the flames. The fire of the two of you sucks the oxygen out of the room. You’re breathless around him. Who knew suffocating could feel so good?

There’s something innately beautiful about Aaron Hotchner. He’s sexy, he’s confident, but above all there’s something simply enchantingly beautiful about him. He does everything with such purpose, such ease, but those moments of beauty: the tug at the corners of his lips when you talk to him, the shine in his eyes when he gets to discussing something he’s passionate about. There’s no other way to describe him besides utterly beautiful. At least, that’s how you see him.

You wrap a hand around his bicep, gripping it tightly as his mouth travels down from your mouth to your neck, nipping at the skin. Your head falls back, your own mouth gaping open, soft whines erupting from your swollen lips. "I thought you said you were bad at giving gifts." You tease breathlessly. Aaron pulls away from your neck, looking at you with those warm, intelligent eyes, his lips equally plump. The confusion spreads across his features, "You." You mutter and cup his cheeks, "This. You’re enough of a gift. This time with you." You say softly.

An unreadable expression reaches Aaron’s face. As much as you try to understand the man, he remains mysterious and closed off to you. You worry that you’ve said something to offend him, or scare him away. It’s no secret you enjoy spending time with him. It’s no secret you care about him. You assume that much is clear to him. But then again, for as intelligent and perceptive as he seems to be, you wouldn’t be surprised if your admission comes as a shock to him.

Aaron’s hands move to trail up your bare thighs and up under your skirt, fingers hooking in the waistband of your lacy underwear. "I better make it a worthwhile gift then," He leans in, close enough that you think he will kiss you, but instead he rests his forehead against yours, his lips ghosting over your own. You lean forward to press your lips to his. You want to regain the feeling, the tingles it sends down your spine as his hands roam your body.

He evades your kiss, pulling away and bending down as he pulls your underwear all the way down your legs, tossing it off to the side. You smile and laugh at the action, glancing over at how your underwear has landed, draped across the arm of the chair in the corner.

"Something funny?" He grabs your chin, pulling your attention away from your discarded undergarment and back to him. His tone is serious, but the corners of his mouth are upturned in a slight grin.

"No, nothing at all," You tease and push him back into his chair, taking the opportunity to straddle his waist, grinding against him tauntingly.

"What’s this?" He raises his brows at the shift in power dynamic, but it’s clear he’s not complaining from the way his large hands rest just at the bottom of your ribcage, thumbs circling the skin just to the side of your breasts. The little gesture, the feeling of his fingers so close to where you want yet not quite touching you exactly there, drives you crazy. You lean forward, your hair falling in your face as you kiss him.

"Taking what I want," You moan against his skin. He peels the sweater from your body, your black tank top hugging tightly to every curve. He balls the sweater and tosses it over your shoulder onto the floor.

This time, you can’t suppress the loud laugh, "You going to do that with every article of clothing?"

"I just might," He taunts and pushes your hair out of your face with both hands once again, wanting to see your face. As he kisses you, you reach for his belt undoing it and unzipping his jeans, "You’re in a rush. Don’t you want to savor your birthday gift?"

You roll your eyes, "I’m pretty sure since it’s my birthday, I get to decide what I want." You smirk and plunge a hand deep into his briefs, pulling his hardening cock out of his pants. You take his hot flesh in your hands, pumping it a few times, trailing your fingertips over his tip, eliciting an absolutely sinful groan from him.

He throws his head back, and you watch with pride as the man begins to come undone in front of you. You watch as his neck tenses, his jaw clenching as you continue to pleasure him. His chest rises and falls rapidly. You stop your motions, pulling your skirt up a little, just enough for him to plunge deep into you. You sink onto him with a long and loud groan, gripping his shoulders for support. Your skirt falls down around the two of you, seemingly shielding your actions from the world.

Your actions are agonizingly slow, wanting to savor every moment with him, wanting this feeling to last forever. The pure bliss you feel as his head dips, pushing the collar of your tank top down enough to free your breasts. He sucks a nipple into his mouth, sucking harshly and lightly biting, just the way he knows sends your head into a haze. His hands rest on your hips, but they’re not gripping them, he’s letting you take it at your pace.

You’re so caught up in the lustful trance that you almost miss it. A knock at the door.

"Professor Hotchner?" A familiar voice calls from the other side.

You freeze. "Charlie?" You whisper at Hotch.

"Shit," He curses under his breath. "I’ve double booked myself." He shakes his head, trying to swiftly get you off his lap. "I’ll be with you in one minute!" He calls through the door, glancing down at his watch with a small groan.

Hotch tucks himself back into his pants, struggling to zip them up and tuck his shirt in in a timely manner. You scramble to do the same, readjusting your tank top and scooping your sweater from the ground. You run your fingers through your hair and wipe your mouth, knowing that you must look like a flustered, overheated mess.

Hotch gives you a small sideways glance before sitting at his desk more properly before nodding. "Come in." Just as the door opens and Charlie steps in, you realize you’ve forgotten something vitally important: your underwear. It’s too late. He’s already in the office and you have no idea how you can smoothly pluck your black lace panties from the chair without drawing his attention.

"Einstein?" He glances at you confused.

Your mouth falls open but you can’t seem to come up with anything to say, "Charlie." You smile. You glance at Hotch, "Sorry Professor, I didn’t realize you had meetings today." You stare at him a little too long, hoping he can suddenly read your mind in which you’re screaming at him about the underwear hanging off of the chair.

"Why didn’t you mention your meeting earlier?" Charlie asks you but Hotch clears his throat slightly, saving you from needing to come up with a reasonable answer.

"It was a last minute request on my part," Hotch covers for you two, "I apologize for running over time with Miss Y/L/N and into our meeting time."

"No, no I’ll just wait outside," Charlie turns to leave the office and your heart sinks into your stomach.

"No!" You call out a little too forcefully. But it’s too late. The black lace panties catch his eye.

"On second thought I’ll just…" Charlie turns to look at you, tightening his grip on the strap of his bag, glancing between both you and Hotch, "I’ll just leave you two…" He shakes his head and turns, getting out of the office as fast as possible. You groan frustratedly and look over at Hotch as you rush out after Charlie.

"Charlie wait!" You call out, garnering attention from the few students in the hallway. You catch up to him and grab his hand, "Please."

He turns to you, letting out a sickeningly sinister and bitter laugh, "I am such an idiot. I don’t know how I never saw it."

"Please let me explain myself," You beg him, pulling his hand into yours, but he’s quick to yank it away.

"You just had to be the person to get an A in his class, huh? You couldn’t handle the possibility of being anything less than the best." You wrap your arms around yourself as he shakes his head.

"No… that’s not what this is about." You argue back with him, hoping he’ll understand, the same way Katie seemed to.

"Is this how kid genius got to law school at 20? By sleeping your way to the top?" He lowers his voice so that anyone else in the hallway can’t hear you, but his words are just as venomous and biting.

He takes a few steps towards you, pointing back towards Hotch’s office, "He’s using you. You know that, right? He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t care about you. I can’t believe you’d be so fucking naive, so, so… so stupid."

You open your mouth to speak, but Hotch cuts you off, coming up behind the two of you, "I understand you’ll be discreet about what you saw, Mr. Miller."

Charlie’s eyes narrow at Hotch, his chest puffing up in anger. "And if I’m not?"

"You’ll find that it will greatly benefit you and your success in my class if you are." Hotch’s focus on Charlie is unwavering and the harsh demeanor that seems to be so natural and comfortable for Hotch returns. His voice is hushed, "Now I suggest you turn around and forget what you saw, or take this conversation somewhere more private, for everyone’s sake."

Charlie goes silent. His gaze shifts to you. You can’t read what his face is saying but it’s a mixture of disbelief, anger, and what seems to be disappointment. With a small scoff and shake of his head, Charlie turns and disappears down the hallway.

You take a step forward, hoping to go after him and explain yourself, explain everything, including your feelings for Hotch. You want him to know you haven’t done it to get ahead in life but because you genuinely enjoy spending time with Hotch. That you genuinely enjoy his company, but Hotch reaches and grabs your wrist, pulling you with him.

"You have to let me go after him! I have to talk to him. He could ruin your career," You let out frantically as Hotch pulls you by the arm back into his office, "Or my reputation."

"He won’t," Hotch gives you a small tug, causing you to catch your feet on the rug and trip a little as you get through the doorway of his office. He’s careful to move around you to close and lock the door firmly. He turns to you before turning back to the door, jiggling the handle a few times to test the lock, ensuring that there will be no more unwanted interruptions.

"Aaron, you can’t just give him a good grade to shut him up," You argue, "That’s- that’s immoral, that’s wrong." You bite your lip.

"And what we’ve been doing isn’t?" He rubs his face with both hands.

You have no response to that because he’s right. What the two of you have been doing for the past semester is immoral and unethical on every possible level. "How do you know he won’t report you anyway?"

"Because he cares about you," Hotch clarifies, but you find yourself lost. You’re not sure how that means Charlie will definitely keep his mouth shut, "He knows that reporting this will hurt you just as much as me, and the last thing he wants to do is hurt you. He’s in love with you, isn’t that obvious?"

You shake your head, still not entirely convinced that Hotch’s bribery will work on Charlie. "Aaron… You might lose your job. I can’t be the reason that you—" He places a soft slow kiss on your lips. "You know I hate when you kiss me just to shut me up."

He gives a warm smile, "Don’t worry about it. It’ll be okay, I promise." He rubs his thumb over your cheek comfortingly, "I have something to take your mind off it, off of him." He moves away from you, walking around his desk and opening the bottom drawer. He pulls out something but quickly hides it behind his back.

"Something for me?" You grin and try to look around his back to see what it is.

"It is your birthday, isn’t it?" Hotch holds out a small parcel, wrapped with brown paper, tied up with a small string, "I’m not uh— I’m not great at wrapping things. Or giving gifts." You take the package from him, the warm sensation of happiness spreading throughout your entire body.

"No matter what it is, I’ll love it because you gave it to me," You undo the string, and start to tear at the corner. You open the package delicately, as just the gesture of the wrapped parcel is enough for you. You didn’t expect anything from Hotch. Actually, you just expected birthday sex.

You peel back the paper and smile, feeling waves of emotion wash over you as you pull the nice, leather bound book from the wrapping. "You remembered?" You look up at him and a small sheepish grin spreads across Hotch’s face.

"Open it." He nods.

You look down at the book, running your fingers over the gold lettering on the cover that reads "The Great Gatsby." You open the cover flipping through the pages to see them all full of annotations, highlights and small notes. "Are these your annotations?"

He nods, shoving his hands into his pockets, "I gave it a second chance. Tried to look past my initial perception of it. Tried to see it through your eyes."

"And?" You struggle to tear your eyes away from the pages, looking for your favorite quotations, trying to read his notes alongside them.

"And I loved it." He reaches a hand and turns to the front page for you, where he’s written a small note. The note is barely legible in his scrawl, but to you it’s perfectly clear.

Y/N,

The beauty of life is in the grays. Thanks for being the gray in mine.

— A.H.

Your heart swells at the message and you close the book pressing it firmly to your chest. "This is… the best birthday gift I’ve ever gotten." You reassure him. "I wish I could celebrate with you all day."

He places his forefinger under your chin, tilting it up to place one last soft kiss to your lips, "Go. Have fun with your friends. Stay safe, okay?"

"I will," Your eyes stay on his. There’s so much you want to say to him. So much you want to ask him. You want to reveal everything to him. You want to tell him how much he means to you. You want to share how he’s changed your life. You want to tell him you don’t want to spend time with anyone but him. You want to tell him that you’re falling for him. But you stop yourself. You don’t want to rush it all out here standing in his office. You want to tell him in the right moment.

You’ve exposed so much of yourself to him, but to bear your soul in such a rushed manner in his office feels inappropriate and ill-timed. "I’ll see you again this weekend, yeah?" You ask him.

This time, you can tell he’s the one who wants to say more. There’s something bubbling under the surface that he wants to let out to you. You hope that what he is holding inside is the same as what you’re holding back. He hesitates a little before finally nodding.

You don’t want to pull away from him. You don’t want to move out of his grip, out of his warmth, it feels too much like a goodbye. You manage to pull away and grab your bag from the floor, keeping the book close to your heart as you turn and leave his office.

———————

You scan the room for what feels like the hundredth time within an hour, looking for the familiar face in the crowd of people.

"He’ll show up. I’m sure he will," Katie throws her arm around your shoulders, handing you another shot.

"No, K, I don’t think he will," You look around your crowded apartment, filled mostly with faces that you barely recognize from your classes, but there’s one person in particular who has yet to make an appearance: Charlie. You told Katie what had happened, and she was definitely shocked at Hotch’s reaction to the situation, but she hid it well enough, wrapping her arms tightly around your body to comfort you.

"He was so angry, so disappointed in me," You sigh and take a long sip of your beer, "He was so hurt."

"I understand his desire to protect you, I really do, I feel the same way," She nods and settles into the couch right next to you, "But at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own decisions and no one else has a right to tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing with your life."

"I know," You rub your face, "But I don’t want to make decisions that hurt my best friends."

You worry that this signifies the loss of a friendship. The loss of one of the most important people in your life. A loss that you can withstand if Hotch remains in your life but even that is up in the air. You find yourself wondering whether you’ll be forced to choose: a continued relationship with Hotch, if you can even call it a relationship, or your friendship with Charlie.

"Please, don’t let stupid Charlie ruin what should be a super fun night," Katie pulls you up from your seat, reaching for a shot of her own, "To us, to our friendship, and to kid genius no longer being a kid." She teases and clinks her glass against yours, downing her shot. You mimic her actions, the alcohol sliding down a little bit too easily now that you’re indulging your sorrows.

The small get-together at your apartment only lasts a little while longer, just long enough to get everyone plenty tipsy before you all head out to a bar. You play drinking games and a few of your friends indulge you by taking shots with you, sharing drinks, pouring you drinks. Despite the fact that you’re entirely surrounded by people, you feel devoid of love tonight. Katie is pouring over you, hugging you, teasing, attempting to lighten your quickly souring mood, but Charlie probably isn’t coming at all and you can’t invite the person you want most to spend your birthday with.

Within another hour, the whole group has managed to get you drunk enough to forget about the pain in your chest everytime you think about Charlie. They drag you out of your apartment and you all start the long walk in the cold to the best bar in the city.

You look around the neighborhood, recognizing it as Hotch’s, and the pain in your heart comes back harder than ever. You wonder what he’s doing right now. You can picture him perfectly: hunched over his desk, scribbling away some illegible comments on a student’s paper. You can see yourself perched on the edge of his desk, telling him off for grading every student so harshly.

He would roll his eyes but place a comforting hand on your thigh, leaving it there while he works, occasionally squeezing lightly or rubbing circles into the skin. You flash the bouncer your real ID earning a round of cheers from your group of friends and a small smile from the big muscle man at the door, "Congrats kid." He teases, letting you all slip into the crowded bar.

"First round is on me! Everyone make sure Einstein doesn’t have to pay a dime for her own drinks tonight!" Katie cheers as she drags you to the bar for more drinks.

Everytime your mind wanders to either man, Hotch or Charlie, you finish a drink, take a shot, order a new one. Anything to distract you. You check your phone every few minutes, finally deciding to send Charlie a single text.

We’re at the bar now. If you decide to show up. Please come.

You get no response. You decide to pretend he probably hasn’t seen it. He’s asleep or studying. He’s busy. Something came up. That’s why he’s blown off your birthday. He’s one of your best friends. He’ll show.

Along with desperately checking your phone for a reply from Charlie, some part of you is hoping, praying, even, that Aaron will surprise you. You hope that he’ll come walking through the door, walk up to the bar, and buy you a birthday drink. He’ll ignore the fact that most of his students are present and do it for you, because it would make you happy. However, you know that he can’t. He can’t risk it.

So you keep drinking. A lot. You end up drinking a lot.

——

Hotch finishes off his comments on another student’s suboptimal essay, writing a large B in dark green ink at the top of the page before circling it. He rubs his hand over his forehead tiredly. As much as he attempts to direct all his focus on the work in front of him, he can’t stop thinking about you. It seems to be a common problem recently. You invade his every waking thought, hell, you’ve even seemed to invade his dreams as of late.

Everything reminds him of you. He looks over the collection of novels on the walls of his home office, wondering what your opinions of his favorite titles are. He wonders what books would draw your attention. He can picture you in here perfectly, telling him that he should be focused on his work when he can’t take his eyes off of you. You would tell him to focus but do just about a million things that he finds all together way too charming and endearing to ignore.

Your scent invades his mind. It’s utterly intoxicating. The way he can tell when you’ve freshly showered, your shampoo smelling of lavender and vanilla. He thinks about the way his fingers feel all tangled up in that hair of yours.

He thinks of how soft your skin is, in contrast with his rough calloused hands. He thinks about how beautiful you look when you’re focused on something. He wishes you were here with him. He wishes he could give you the birthday you deserve.

He wouldn’t let you leave his clutches all night. He’d keep you tangled up in the sheets of his bed, moaning, laughing, talking, smiling, whatever you wanted to do, he’d do it with you.

It’s a troubling position he’s in. He can’t say he’s ever felt this way about anyone before. He’s been a solitary man most of his life. He had friends throughout schooling, but he always much preferred his own company. He’s never wanted to be around someone as much as you.

You seem to comprehend exactly how his mind works. He questions whether you can truly read minds because you always manage to say exactly the right thing at the right time. He knows he’s gotten himself in too deep. He realized when he found himself speeding through the pages of the Great Gatsby, a novel he had never been fond of, purely because he was picturing the way your face would light up when he handed it to you.

He knows he’s getting too emotionally involved. It’s not a sustainable relationship.

His phone vibrates on the desk next to him and when he picks it up, he’s shocked to see your name on the screen. "Y/N?" He picks up, expecting a drunk dial.

"Professor Hotchner— Aaron," Katie’s voice rings through the phone, "I need… you need to come pick her up." Her words are slurred together.

"Kaitlin?" He asks confused, "Katie," He corrects himself, "Is she okay? What’s wrong?" He stands up grabbing his keys and wallet, shoving them into the pocket of his joggers, rushing to slip his sneakers on.

"She’s had too much to drink and I don’t think I can get her home myself." Katie sighs out and Hotch can faintly hear your voice on the other end, slurring and yelling something about letting Katie take your phone.

"What bar? I’ll be there as fast as I can," Hotch takes note of the address, which, thankfully, is just two blocks away from his apartment. "Get her water. Get her outside into the fresh air. If she gets really bad, don’t hesitate to call 911." He hangs up the phone. What he really wants to do is scold Katie for letting you drink so wildly. Just because it’s your 21st birthday, doesn’t mean that you need to drink yourself to death. At the same time, he feels the deep sting of guilt, knowing that your strained relationship with Charlie probably encouraged more drinking than usual.

He makes his walking pace brisk, rushing the two blocks to get to you. He feels responsible for letting this happen to you. It’s not as if he could’ve been at the bar with you, it would’ve drawn an intense amount of scrutiny and suspicion, but he could've made plans with you, told you to ditch your friends for him.

As soon as Katie catches sight of him from down the street, she struggles to hold you up, trying to walk you over to him, "I’m sorry to call you, I hope I didn’t wake you up, Professor, I just didn’t know who else to call for help. Everyone else is equally drunk and normally I’d trust Charlie with her but—" She glances down at you, as you clutch at her shoulders for support, eyelids half closed, "He isn’t here to help."

"Fuck Charlie. I mean I don’t want to fuck Charlie, I mean like fuck him for not coming," You slur slightly and Katie hoists you up, holding you out for Hotch to help keep you steady.

"No I’m glad you called," Hotch replies with a nod. Katie’s focus lingers on him for a while and he can sense the judgment behind her eyes. She wants to say something to him. The drinking has lowered her inhibitions and he’s sure that as your best friend she probably has a few choice words for him. But right now, he can't take the time to listen to her or even argue with her. Right now, he just wants to get you to his home and get you to safety.

"Take care of her, okay?" Katie finally lets out before digging around in her purse for a pen and grabbing Hotch’s hand. She scribbles her number, a little messily due to her elevated blood alcohol level but legible enough, "Call me if anything happens to her."

Hotch nods, "I will." He turns all his attention onto you and starts to walk you back towards his apartment, knowing that the 5 minutes it took him to jog to the bar will turn into a 10 minute endeavor, carrying you to his apartment.

"I’m sorry, Aaron," You mumble into his shoulder, "I shouldn’t have drank so much I just…"

Hotch shushes you softly, rubbing his hands on your upper arm as he holds your trembling shoulders. "You should’ve brought a jacket." Your foot catches on the pavement, and for a second, it looks as if your face is going to collide with the sidewalk, but Hotch’s grip is so tight that he keeps you from falling.

"Didn’t go with the outfit." You laugh and weakly gesture over your body with your hand.

Seeing you like this, it stirs something inside him. Anger and frustration build like wildfire deep in the pit of his stomach. How could you act so irresponsibly? How could your friends be so careless with you? If he was out with you on your birthday, you never would’ve gotten so dangerously drunk.

"My apartment isn’t far from here, remember?" He’s practically holding up your entire body weight at this point.

"I remember," You nod, "Charlie, he didn’t come."

"I know." He slows down your walking pace as you struggle to keep up, your feet dragging along the ground, "Katie told me."

"Katie is mad at you, you know?" You regain a bit of your balance and strength, walking on your own, but hardly walking in a straight line. "I’m not mad at you. She’s just worried about me. I guess Charlie is worried about me, but he sure has a silly way of showing it, right?"

"It’s important to have people that care about you like they do," He’s choosing his words diplomatically, knowing that he can’t let on how much he’s been thinking about you, how much it angers him to see you so dangerously drunk. He’s not sure why he’s so careful of his words choice, as if you will remember his exact wording tomorrow.

After an eternity of practically carrying you for two blocks, you reach the steps of Hotch’s apartment. The steps are a complete other task. In which Hotch is tempted multiple times to simply pick you up entirely and carry you upstairs, but he worries that will just make you sick and the last thing he wants to do is clean your vomit off of his apartment building’s staircase.

"I’m sorry you have to take care of me," You whine, holding onto his shirt as he helps you into his apartment. "But I’m 21!"

"I know," Hotch’s heart races as you stumble along in your heels. It’s terrifying to see you like this. He realizes just how fragile you are, how easily you can slip through his fingers.

It should make him want to sink his fingers into you, dig his heels into the ground, hold you close and never let you go, but he’s motivated to do the opposite. He wants to run and hide from you. If he sinks himself too deep into you, he can never get out and if he loses you once he’s in too deep, what will happen when you get hurt? What happens when he’s the one to hurt you?

He’ll inevitably disappoint you. He knows you expect a lot from him. He can see it in the way you look at him, with those warm, intelligent eyes, so full of adoration.

"You think you can get yourself up the stairs to bed while I get you water?" Hotch walks you carefully to the bottom of the stairs. You nod, reaching for the wall next to the stairs, to help balance.

Hotch watches you with a close eye, making sure that you make it all the way up before going to the kitchen. He reaches up into the cabinet for a glass and some ibuprofen that you will inevitably need by tomorrow.

He puts both down on the counter, taking a minute to place both palms on the surface firmly, taking a deep, steadying breath. It’s almost the end of the semester. After Monday, he’s no longer your professor. That should be a relief. He doesn’t have to feel this internal conflict. The morality of his actions has never concerned him before. That was before you.

When he’s with you, he’s more conscious of the imbalance of power. He’s aware of what it looks like from the outside. The way Charlie looked at the two of you today was confirmation of that. Confirmation of the perception that he used to never care so much about until he met you. Reducing you to just another student fling feels wrong. But that’s what you are, right? There's been no confession of feelings, no grand gestures, no romantic dates or picture-perfect movie moments.

Despite the lack of relationship structure, everything with you feels different. It feels so intensely genuine. That’s the only way Hotch knows how to describe it to himself. Being with you makes him feel alive.

But if being with you is living, why does he feel this growing dread in the pit of the stomach as he walks up the stairs? He steps into his bedroom expecting to see you draped across his bed or struggling with the zipper on your dress, but he doesn’t see you anywhere, "Einstein?" He calls and then he sees the light coming from under the bathroom door and the distinct sounds of you sick in the bathroom.

He pushes open the door to see your arms on the toilet, your face hovering over the bowl. He lets out a small breath, bending down to your level so he can pull your hair out of your face. He pulls the hair tie off your wrist and messily ties your hair into the best ponytail he can manage. You groan in pain and he rubs your back gently. "Shh, you’re okay. I’ve got you," He presses a small kiss to your temple.

"I don’t want to have to choose," You let out a strangled cry and a small hiccup, lying your head on your forearms on the seat of the toilet. Hotch’s heart sinks at your words, "I can’t choose between falling for you and keeping my friendships."

"You won’t have to," He gets to his feet, reaching for a washcloth and dampening it in the sink. He bends back down to your level, gently lifting your head from your forearms, wiping your face and mouth, "Let’s get you up off the floor, okay?"

"Make the world stop spinning, please," You hold your arms up so he can lift you off the floor.

He sits you down on the edge of the bed, bending down to unzip your heels, placing them on the floor.

"He didn’t come. He’s my best friend and he didn’t come to my birthday," You chew at the skin on your lip, holding back tears, not wanting to turn into a weepy drunk. Especially in front of Hotch. He reaches around unzipping your dress, helping you out of it.

"I’m sorry," The apology is soft but Hotch knows it's partially his fault Charlie never showed. You’re right, you shouldn’t have to choose between him and your friends. He can already tell the way you’re pushing them away for time with him.

He helps pull one of his shirts over your head and pulls back the covers for you to crawl into his bed. "Please hold me," You mutter softly, "At least until the room stops spinning." Looking down at you, the way your eyes are threatening to spill over with tears, the mascara smudged, your hair tied back messily, pieces falling out of the ponytail, you look so helpless, so pure, so innocent and loving. He can’t stop himself from nodding and sitting next to you on the bed. He puts his arm behind your head, wrapping it around your shoulders.

"I don’t want to lose him to keep you," You lay your head against Hotch’s chest, gripping at his shirt tightly. Your tears fall against his dark green shirt, leaving small wet splotches. "I can’t let you go." You sniffle and shut your eyes in an attempt to get some rest and ease the sick feeling in your stomach.

"You won’t lose him." He shushes and gently plays with the ends of your hair, wrapping his other arm around the front of you, holding you tight against him. Your sniffles start to die down as you drift off to sleep, Hotch listening closely to your steady breathing.

He knows he’s not being fair with you. Every affair, every relationship he’s had, has been so simple, so uncomplicated. The semester is coming to an end soon and he knows exactly what he has to do. But sitting here staring down at you, the way your face is scrunched up in your sleep. He doesn’t want to let you go. It’s not just your body, it’s not the sex. It’s your biting wit, your intelligence, your humor.

It’s not how you look. It’s not the way that he knows your body better than he knows himself. It’s your heart and mind that captivate him. He’s so used to being and feeling alone, but you always make sure he never feels that way. It’s not in the obvious things. It’s in the subtleties. It’s in the small smiles you give him in passing. It’s in the way you always ask him about his day. It’s in your reassuring eye contact. When he speaks, he knows you’re listening. And you’re not just listening when he’s teaching or tutoring or sharing new information, you’re listening when he talks about himself.

Like today in his office. There was a palpable difference in the energy between you two. He knows that gift was personal, but he wanted to give it to you, and the way your face lit up when he did, tells him it was worth it. He wants to be selfish and hold onto you forever. He wants to spend every minute with you, but he knows that the more he draws you to him, the more he draws you away from your friends, from the world, from everything you want to achieve in life.

And that’s why, staring down at your sleeping form, he knows this must end.

Chapter 11: I.XI →

#aaron hotchner fanfiction #aaron hotchner x reader #aaron hotchner x y/n #aaron hotchner #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds #wanna be yours fanfic #hotch #hotchner #hotch x reader

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indreamsink · 4 years

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Hello! Sorry if this sounds annoying, but I'm an aspiring writer on AO3 and you're my favorite Dramione author!Do you have any writing advice, specially regarding the pacing of the stories? I feel like I can't balance scenes descriptions and dialogue correctly, but you're amazing at making your stories flow seamlessly!

Well hi, thank you so much! I really appreciate you. <3

Thanks for reaching out, and sorry it’s taken me a few days to get to this ask. I wanted to be sure I had time to actually sit down and go through some old notes and take some time to properly respond (it got a little long, sorry x). Here are a few things I try to keep in mind when I’m writing that I’ve learned over the years - and please note, this is just my own personal opinion on these things, and I’m by no means an expert. <3

I think one of the biggest things about good pacing is to keep the reader engaged. To create and hold tension, the story always needs to be moving forward in some way or another (this doesn’t mean there can’t be setbacks, but that the situation needs to evolve in plot/character development).

Conflict - this lies at the heart of every story, but can take a number of forms. What does your character want, and how will they seek to achieve it? Is the goal internal, external, or both? Do others stand in the way? These are important questions to ask yourself and to understand, even if some of it never makes it to the page. Your implicit knowledge will often embed itself more than you might think.

As the stakes raise, the conflict needs to follow suit or the circumstances could grow dull and incongruent - ie drastic consequences for something that isn’t a big deal.

Conversely, non-stop conflict and tension can become tedious and tiresome to read. Allow your characters a break now and again. Shifts in pace will keep the story feeling fresh.

Keep track of your threads and try to avoid plot holes or noticeable discrepancies, which can jar a reader out of the story.

If your characters are likeable or relatable (not necessarily both) the reader will tend to care more about them and likewise become more invested.

Storytelling - this encompasses a number of things. You can lose a lot by way of pace with too much unnecessary infodumping. Let things unfold naturally, and not everything needs to be shared all at once. A little ambiguity can keep interest in the back of the reader’s mind, so that when information comes out down the road it’s that much more rewarding. The things left unsaid can often add a lot.

Jumping right in on the action can often catch a reader’s attention right away, instead of a bunch of exposition.

Revealing information through dialogue can help to advance the story between characters, without feeling like a heavy block of narrative or description.

Not every scene needs to be fully expanded on. If all the points of consequence have been shared, the scene can cut to the next without any significant loss in plot.

Reflections can be used in place of fully fleshed out scenes to keep things moving.

If you’re jumping between perspectives/POVs, you don’t need to re-tell the same scenes twice from different perspectives unless you’re purposely intending to reveal something that maybe one character missed that’s vital to the progression of the story. Also keep in mind that by splitting POVs the reader will know more than any one character will.

Word choice goes a long way. Short, crisp sentences will keep things moving faster (something I struggle with personally), whereas longer, flowing sentences can slow things down a little. I try to mix it up to keep a good flow. Check you aren’t structuring all your sentences in the same way, and don’t be afraid to break up your paragraphs - large blocks of text can sometimes be tedious.

SHOW, don’t tell. Instead of having a character say something angrily, demonstrate it. Is their hand curled into a fist? Their jaw clenched? Their face flushed? Making reactions visual and visceral can go a long way, not only in keeping the reader emotionally engaged, but also in preventing bland description.

There are so many “rules” of writing, many of which are subjective, and I try to be mindful of a number of them. But I think the biggest thing in writing, like in any craft, is always striving to improve and recognize learning opportunities. I do things in my writing now that I never considered even a year or two ago. The best way to improve, honestly, is just to keep working at it. Read, write, read, write, and so on. If you’re just starting out, stick with fleshing out a short piece to dip your feet in before digging into anything too substantial.

If you haven’t already, try and track down an alpha or beta reader. An alpha is someone who reads at a bigger picture level - plot holes, characterization, storyline, pacing; a beta is the person who goes through to catch the spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sometimes wording/sentence structure. Just having a second, objective set of eyes can go a really long way in determining where you’re doing well and where you could stand to improve. Writing is a neverending pursuit, and you’ll probably never feel like you’re where you want to be, but that’s part of the joy of it (most of the time).

I hope some of this was helpful!! I wish you the best in your writing (and I apologize for this novel of a response). <3

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p-and-p-admin · 4 years

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Interview given to The Severus Snape and Hermione Granger Shipping Fan Group. (sharing here Admin approved)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/199718373383293/

Hello Ciule and welcome to Behind the Quill, thank-you for sitting down with us for a chat.

SS/HG readers might be familiar with your stories “Awkward” and “Headmaster’s Wife”.

Okay, let’s jump right in. What's the story behind your pen name? Well, I sort of took one of my real names, swirled the letters around in the air with my imaginary wand, and I ended up with this. Can’t begin to imagine where I got the idea from... ;-) Later on, I realized that Ciule is actually a name in Romania. I had no idea, but there are people out there carrying this name for real. I guess I’m #sorrynotsorry? Which Harry Potter character do you identify with the most? To be quite frank: No one, really. This is more about the characters I like, than truly identifying with them. I can relate to parts of some of them, but not the whole package. Primarily, I write about Hermione, Voldemort and Severus, and the one common thread between those three is the search for knowledge. That’s a trait I can identify with, but I’m neither an evil bastard, a grumpy protector nor a fretting, intelligent activist. I am, however, a swot. If you had asked who I’d want to be, the answer is clear. I want to be Albus Dumbledore. Though I can’t agree with the things he did, I feel absolutely certain that he’s the one who has the most fun during the books. I want to have that twinkling fun in face of absolute chaos. Do you have a favourite genre to read (not in fic, just in general)? Fantasy! Definitely fantasy. While growing up, I read ‘everything’ in every genre, and in my twenties, I decided I’d spend my time reading what I loved the most. So, fantasy it is. Do you have a favourite "classic" novel? You landed me in an existential crisis right there. I mean, there’s so many to choose from! ‘Wuthering Heights’, I think. It hurts so good. Or maybe ‘Rebecca’, at least, I loved that when I was younger. Or the fairly obscure ‘Lorna Doone.’ When I was a kid, I wanted to be a film director, shooting Lorna Doone into an epic film. Oh well, there might be a theme in this selection of books which reflects in my writing… At what age did you start writing? The creative process has gone on since forever. I’ve told myself thousands of stories in my head, but rarely written anything down. At the age of ten, I had a co-writing project with one of my friends. We created this secret room in her basement, and painstakingly wrote a ‘novel’. It was fun, though the writing ended as it became too cold down in the basement during winter. How did you get into writing fanfiction? In 2009, I became completely obsessed with a TV-show in the last episode. I was watching the entire series, casually enjoying the murder mystery, and in the last episode, the villain said: “I can do the math,” and I was literally gone. That obsession sparked writing my first fanfic stories. Those stories are still on FFnet, but they aren’t any good. *shrugs* What's the best theme you've ever come across in a fic? Is it a theme represented in your own works? Compromise. The world isn’t a perfect place, and will never be. You can, however, make it more to your liking. It may not be perfect, but if you play the cards you are dealt, you might improve something. In Robert Jordan’s “the Wheel of Time”-series, one of the characters goes through a test in a parallel universe of sorts, and she thinks: “The world was not what she wanted, not anywhere near it.” I loved that: trying your best to make things as you want them to be in the face of dangers and difficulties. And then there’s time travel! I love messing with time, and there are so many great Time-travelling fics. Plus, I have to say I have a certain love for the villains... What fandoms are you involved in other than Harry Potter? Currently, I’m not writing for any other fandoms. I read Star Wars, GoT, POTO and LOTR, and in the past I read Smallville. Though it’s more of a type of ship for me, because I only read Reylo, SanSan, Erik/ Christine, Lex/Lana and ….drum roll… the extremely small and quite oddball ship of Eowyn/ Grìma Wormtongue. If you’ve never tried the last one, go search for the fantastic stories by auri_mynonys. If you could make one change to canon, what would it be? Do you have a favourite piece of fanon? One change: duh, that’s easy, isn’t it? Severus lives. Or, maybe Dumbledore acting more rational, not keeping so many secrets. Maybe telling McGonagall that Severus is on the Order’s side… (Interviewer is laughing - ”NOT so easy”) I do write Voldemort wins AUs, but I wouldn’t want canon Voldemort to win. I prefer him to be more sane than in canon. My absolute favourite piece of fanon has to be the Black library. I thought it was canon, but it’s not. This is a thing that really, really should exist in canon! Do you listen to music when you write or do you prefer quiet? I’m very much inspired by music, and sometimes I listen as I write, but not always. Some fics are heavily inspired by music, such as ‘Absence’ and the last epilogue to ‘The Manipulation of Time and Matter’. What are your favourite fanfictions of all time? Definitely ‘Two Steps from Hell,’ by the amazing Ssserpensssotia, but that’s a Volmione. This was such a wild ride, I felt like I was on the edge of my seat, holding my breath the entire time. Those twists and turns were so unpredictable and … Well, I’m in awe. The SS/HG fandom is so massive, there’s a plethora of great stories out there. The unfinished ‘Self-Slain Gods on Strange Altars’ is a wonderful story by scumblackentropy, and I love Slytherpoufs stories, especially the wip ‘Ghosts’, but also ‘Angels to Fly’. And then there’s the one that got away - it means, I can’t find it. In this story, Severus watches the thestrals, befriending one of them, I think, but they’re unpredictable and maybe even dangerous. He’s heartbroken, and knows how it all will go down, having bitterly accepted his role. It made me cry. And then there’s the works by Aurette, and lena1987, Subversa, Kittenshift… Are you a plotter or a pantser? How does that affect your writing process? I need (strike that: want) to draft the entire story before I post, to have some idea on how it goes. That makes it easier to write, but if it’s a long story, I’m happy as long as I know the general direction. This year, I finished a story that was on an unintended hiatus for two years, and I think part of my problem on getting back into writing it up was a too vague idea for the ending. What is your writing genre of choice? Uh. I don’t know? Basically, you could argue that I’m a porn writer, or at least it’s fuelled by sexual tension and angst. So, romance or drama, bordering on erotica might be correct. To be frank, I haven’t really thought about categories after I started posting on AO3. Which of your stories are you most proud of? Why? Hard to say. I might go with “the Manipulation of Time and Matter,” because I think it’s the best plot I’ve created. Besides, I managed to write Hermione having a relationship with both Severus and Voldemort in the same fic. My favourite “clean” SSHG would be the short story ‘Grimmauld’. Did it unfold as you imagined it or did you find the unexpected cropped up as you wrote? What did you learn from writing it? In Grimmauld, the house became a character. That was unexpected, and not something I had planned from the beginning. So the lesson would be “don’t start posting until you know what’s going to happen.” Or else, this story might have turned out very much different. I had to throw in a little made-up lore on how you set blood wards on a house too to make it sentient. That proved to be a quite chilling piece of magic. How personal is the story to you, and do you think that made it harder or easier to write? I love old houses. Exploring abandoned houses, going inside to see what remains of furniture, tapestries and everything is so exciting. (It can also be dangerous, but that’s another matter). Such houses makes me feel .. nostalgic, plus I get those nice little shivers down your spine that is a little like a horror story. So, I wanted to use Grimmauld as a setting to explore that in a fic, to really dig into the aching loneliness of a lost house. The story came very quickly to me, so I guess that helped me. What books or authors have influenced you? How do you think that shows in your writing? Big question there. Hmm, I think … it’s hard to say. I’m a reader, really, and I couldn’t easily pick apart any influences. Though I have to say that one of the things I enjoyed when reading ‘Two Steps From Hell’ was the attention to magic. I think it’s important to include spells, rituals and the use of magic in my fics, because that’s what sets it apart from a Muggle AU, for example. That’s an important part of the world-building. Do people in your everyday life know you write fanfiction? My significant other knows. I didn’t tell him, but he found out for himself, probably by spying on me. When he told me, I almost couldn’t stop laughing, because he… erm, he said he had thought about reenacting a scene in my PWP ‘Twenty Points to Gryffindor’, where Severus shouts the title as he… well… you get the gist. If he had done that, I’d have had a heart attack. I would literally be dead. Instead, I laughed non stop for an hour. How true for you is the notion of "writing for yourself"? Haha, so true. You spend all those hours in front of your laptop - and if I wasn't motivated by doing it for myself, I can’t even see how I’d force myself through all those hours. It’s fun, though. I do this because I love it. How important is it for you to interact with your audience? How do you engage with them? Just at the point of publishing? Through social media? Very important. I'm on the publishing sites (visible interaction is why I prefer AO3 instead of FFnet) and on Facebook, mainly. I love feedback (as all authors do), and when people form theories or make comments, I get an insight into my own writing. I know how it’s going to pan out, but the audience doesn’t, and how they perceive things might be different from how I think it is. At times, it influences how I go forward, mostly because I need to add things, to explain what’s going on. What is the best advice you've received about writing? Don’t post until you know the ending, and remember: the devil on your left shoulder will be at war with the angel on the right side. Listen to the angel telling you to wait a little longer, and not to the devil chanting: ‘Post, post, post!’ In the end, of course, you’ll give in to the devil, regretting it until you’re done. What do you do when you hit writer's block? Read. Read a lot. And read some more. Has anything in real life trickled down into your writing? Certainly. I’m a foodie. For example, everything that Voldemort eats is stuff I love. His food habits are primarily mine, and I love cooking. Do you have any stories in the works? Can you give us a teaser? It’s a short piece, maybe three or four chapters, with the title ‘Transference’. The point of departure from canon is during their time in the tent at DH. Hermione wakes up in a bed, in a room she doesn’t recognize, having no idea where she is, but she spots a large, moving picture on the drawer: Feeling panic rising, she stared hard at the moving and smiling pictures, and her heart leapt into her throat, pulse hammering as she recognized herself in the largest picture. A slightly older Hermione, in a white wedding dress, kissing and laughing at someone who simply had to be a much younger Severus Snape. It had to be him: Long black hair, hooked nose, sallow skin - but then he looked so young, carefree and happy - expressions she had never seen on her dour Professor's face. Beside the picture, there were numerous cards, greetings and well-wishings for their wedding - the date an impossible 21 August 1982, and amongst the cards, the largest one stood out, the black ink showing an elegant handwriting: “Dear Hermione and Severus! Best wishes for your wedding, Lord Voldemort.” Any words of encouragement to other writers? Read and write, in that order. Don’t worry about trolls, because when you contribute something that you created, it makes you so much more than people spending their time just raining on anyone’s parade. You brought something new to the world, they’re just reacting to things. If someone accuses you of a self-insert, go ahead and lecture them on the intentional fallacy. I promise, you won’t regret looking it up. ;-) And please, mind the normal physical limits when you’re writing smut. Unless you give the male a stamina potion or put him under the Imperius, it’s unlikely that his refractory period allows him to come five times in one hour. Realistic smut is so much more sexy, lol. Thanks again for speaking with us Ciule.

#fanfic #fanfiction #snamione #writing

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rosmarinys · 4 years

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touch like a balm .2

it took me way too long to write this chapter i can only apologise um yes my pushing daisies au continues !!

"So, I bring can bring back the dead, but I also run a bakery, and I feel like the latter should get more attention, if I'm completely honest."

or the one where Ash runs a bakery, Dotty is trying to be the world's greatest private eye by cheating, and Iqra just wants to know what's going on.

read on ao3

chapter two – the bend of your knee, i’m undone

Once, when Ash was a kid, she dug her toes into the sand whenever her family went to the beach and spread her arms out the entire length her five year old body would allow her to.

Kheerat had stopped next to her, gangly as he started to enter his teens, and asked what on earth she was doing.

“I’m trying to hug the sky!” she had exclaimed.

“Ok,” he said, in a tone that suggested that he didn’t understand at all but he continued on anyway. “Why are your feet buried in the sand?”

Ash sighed as if the answer was obvious, which to her it was. “The sky is massive, Kheer, I might fall over when she hugs back, so this – ” she gestured to her feet with a broad sweep, “ – is so I don’t.”

There was a lengthy pause in which he just stared at her and she stared right back. He seemed like he was about to shrug and leave her be when he saw something over her shoulder and his face shifted. She turned around and she can see her mother lower her eyebrow before she turned to continue unpacking the towels, Vinny swaddled against her chest with a bright orange fabric. Ash doesn’t mind Vinny, he’s cute and seems to think she’s the most interesting person ever whenever she appears in his view over his cot but he doesn’t know how to use the potty and Ash, rather proud of having been using the potty for years now, just thinks it’s unforgiveable.

“Need some help?” Kheerat asked and Ash whipped around and saw he had buried his feet down to his ankle and was smiling at her and Ash thought she was right when she said he was her best friend in her assignment in class yesterday, this was so much better than just teaching her to ride a bike.

Ash grinned and reached over and clasped his hand in hers and they spread out their arms and caught the sky.

(Years later, Ash visits a beach and digs her toe in the sand and tries to imagine holding Kheerat’s hand again.

She can’t.)

Ash knew that when she came into work after not sleeping at all the previous night, that Keegan was going to notice something was wrong straight away but she’s still annoyed at how transparent she must be.

“Alright,” Keegan says, pulling a stool out from her counter in the middle of the kitchen before sitting on it, arms folded on the counter and eyes trained on Ash’s face, “What’s wrong?”

Ash stubbornly keeps her gaze on the dough she’s kneading rougher than she should. “Nothing,” she intones.

“Bullshit,” Keegan snaps. She’s feels her hands tense on the bag of flour she’s reaching for and forces herself to loosen up, but knows he caught it anyway. “It’s five in the morning and you’re being cruel to that innocent dough.” He cracks a smile, she can see it in her peripheral but she stays silent and it slips away. “Seriously, Ash. We don’t do secrets.”

Ash digs her fingers into her dough, giving up on kneading, distantly noting that it’s ruined and she’ll have to start over, and that’s twenty minutes she’ll be behind schedule and that’ll hold back orders and she might have to tell Old Mrs Kerry that she can’t have her usual and won’t that just be awful and –

“Ash!” Keegan’s voice right next to her ear makes Ash jump and she realises she’s crushed her dough and it’s all wet and so is her face and she’s crying and making an awful keening noise in the back of her throat. “Christ,” Keegan says, aghast and yanks her into a hug and Ash laughs wetly into his shoulder because this feels familiar in an awful way.

Several minutes past and distantly Ash knows they need to get back to work soon but finds that she doesn’t want to leave the comfort of Keegan’s arms. She feels eight again, back when she used to throw her arms around Keegan’s middle all the time and he would catch her every time. How affectionate she used to be, now she feels like she’s never been touched before.

“I brought someone back last night,” Ash blurts out, but she says it like ‘I Brought someone Back last night,’ because there’s significance in the perfectly regular statement and Keegan picks up on it right away.

He tenses with surprise but quickly loosens up again. “Right,” he murmurs. His hand is on the back of her neck, thumb pressed into the nape, just like he always does, his other hand pressed flat on her upper back. “Right,” he whispers again, almost to himself, his fingers twitching. “Who?”

Ash takes a deep breath to steel herself. “Iqra Ahmed.” It feels like a bullet in her mouth.

Keegan’s hands spasm. “Iqra? As in the woman who comes in here once a month? As in the woman our financial advisor? That Iqra?”

Ash pulls out of the hug and takes her hair out of the bun it was in so she can re-tie it tighter, carefully avoiding Keegan’s incredulous look. “Yes, that Iqra,” Ash replies, crossing her arms across her chest defensively when her hair is back up again, the corners of her scalp feeling tighter and finding a strange solace in the sensation.

Keegan half laughs, dragging his hands down his face. “Fuck, ok. Ok, so many questions, um, how did she, uh, die?”

“Hit and run,” Ash replies, trying to sound as clinical as possible.

All the air leaves Keegan’s lungs and he looks away, mirroring Ash’s pose and she sees his jaw work. She suddenly wishes that she had delivered the news gentler, considering this is a mutual friend she’s talking about and suddenly wants to kick herself.

“Fuck,” he murmurs, and Ash can only nod in agreement. “How did she react?”

Ash feels her fingers twitch just like Keegan’s did and spares a moment to reflect on how much they mirror each other. “React?” she echoes.

Keegan turns to look her square in the eye. “To being brought back to life?” he clarifies, and it sounds like a challenge.

Ash glances away as she answers, takes stock of how she left her flour a little too close to the edge of the counter to be completely comfortable. “I don’t know.” A weighted pause as she feels Keegan’s stare burn into the side of her head. She should push the flour further back into the centre of the counter. “I ran away as soon as I touched her.”

“Fuck,” Keegan repeats and looks as if he wants to give her another hug but doesn’t and she could cry with how much he knows her. “Why?”

“A Mitchell killed one of Dotty’s victims. Or at least was involved. I found out maybe an hour earlier,” Ash replies, and looks over at Keegan who looks like he’s ready to stop asking Ash questions now and would actually rather lie down for several hours. “So they’re close by, which also might mean – ”

“-That your family might be close by as well,” Keegan finishes and lets out a big gust of a sigh. He scratches the back of his head, thinking. “I mean, it doesn’t necessarily mean that, the Mitchells work with other people and so does – your family.”

Ash shrugs, the conclusion could be true but it doesn’t feel right, she doesn’t want to say something cheesy like she can sense that her family are close by but something is gnawing at her gut, telling her that she hasn’t seen them in four years; such a record was never going to last. She knows her mother, to let her freedom stretch too far is to let Ash believe she has real control over her life.

Keegan stares at the side of her head for a few moments before shaking his head. “Well, this is a lot to process so I’m going to go to my office and stare at a wall for several hours.”

“Usual day for you then?” Ash snarks, familiarity settling on her shoulders again. This she can do, poke fun at Keegan. It is as natural as hugs were for her at eight.

Keegan rolls his eyes, murmurs, “Yeah, yeah,” but before he leaves, he pushes her flour into the centre of the table.

Ash watches him leave and thinks that her heart is going to break a rib from how full it is.

This is how it is: Keegan is Ash’s witness, just like she’s his.

He’s seen it all, all of her – her crouched over dead bugs with a stopwatch at seven years old, her scuffing her shoe in the dirt while she complained about her mother on the swings at their old local park at fourteen years old, her standing shivering on his doorstep with stiches along her scalp and a broken arm at eighteen years old.

She’s seen all of him – him rolling in the dirt while giggling at her squealing over a worm at five years old, him crying into her shoulder after a week of ignoring her after they had a fight about the rough crowd he started hanging out with at fifteen years old, his hands warm on her cheeks as he cupped her face and told her that they should open a pie shop just like they always talked about at nineteen years old.

It’s hard sometimes, remembering, because so much of it hurts and Ash feels it all like splinters in her skin, sharp memories that dig in. But so much of it is Keegan, Keegan grinning at her, Keegan pressing his hand into the back of her neck and grounding her, Keegan punching her lightly in the shoulder.

(It’s nice, Ash thinks. Remembering when it’s Keegan.)

Ash thinks that the most bizarre friendship she’s ever seen unfold is the one between Dotty and Bobby. Currently, they are sitting in a booth together, Dotty chewing on her strawberry pie (Keegan got Ash more strawberries on time, she informed Dotty and pretended that she didn’t see how soft Dotty’s face had gotten) while Bobby circles something on her newspaper and gestures with her pen while she nods.

Ash remembers when they first met, two years ago, she had disappeared into the back to quickly grab her coat at the beginning of her and Dotty’s situation (Situation with a capital ‘s’ because it was a Thing), and when she had come out, she had seen Dotty frowning at Bobby as he smiled shyly at her, offering his hand while introducing himself.

She came closer and managed to hear the end of their conversation.

“…oh well, but it’s nice to meet you,” Bobby said and with one last slight smile, he had ducked around Ash and started to clean up some dishes.

Ash raised an eyebrow at Dotty, not yet so adept at reading her, and thought that she might have looked thoughtful before she mimicked Ash’s expression.

“Done wasting time? Corpses are getting cold,” was all she said and she turned on her heel and strode from The Pie Hole, leaving Ash to only sigh and follow her.

It wasn’t as hard to get information out of Bobby as it was for Dotty, so he easily told her that he had simply introduced himself and tried to guess what her favourite pie was but she told him he had gotten it wrong and that she didn’t even like pie at all. Ash remembers how he had shrugged bashfully and given her a small smile before he went about his work.

(“You do strawberry pie?” Dotty asked a year into their Situation, sitting on a stool fifteen minutes before Ash shut her shop, twisting her ring around her finger.

Ash grinned and she hadn’t known Dotty as well then but she was starting and she knew not to say anything other than, “Yes,” and watch as Dotty’s lips twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile but was closer than it was before.)

Ash does a mental check and thinks that her apple pie doesn’t need to be taken out of the oven for the next ten minutes so she decides to come stand by Dotty and Bobby.

Bobby looks up and smiles, and Ash thinks that he really is sweet, prone to quietness and has a habit of twisting his fingers in a way that looks borderline painful whenever he gets stressed or nervous, but also looks at people with a child-like wonder. “Hey, Ash,” he greets, and he has a happy flush on his cheeks as he gestures to the newspaper he is holding. “I was telling Dotty some thoughts I had on the cases in the paper today.”

Ash slides in next to Dotty who grumbles as she bumps their hips together but moves up, so Ash takes it as a win. Dotty has taken off her big coat and folded it neatly next to her and Ash can see she’s wearing ripped jeans and button black shirt – a mix of professional and delinquent which Dotty seems most comfortable in – enough to be taken seriously but enough to warn that she will most like say something catty as she works. “And what thoughts were these?” Ash asks.

“Well, a girl was reported missing last night and it says here her family claim she would never run away from home because she’s very shy, yeah?” Bobby seems to gain more momentum as he speaks, tapping the paper with the pen as he speaks, smile slowly inching into something broader which Ash mirrors. “But, parents don’t know what their kids get up to, to it would be foolish to fully ignore that outcome.” He seems to remember himself and his smile dims but still stays on his face as he looks at Dotty.

Dotty nods slightly. “You’re right,” she smirks, black lipstick curving up and twisting at the corner of her mouth. “You planning on taking my business away for yourself there?”

Bobby flushes at the compliment and shakes his head no to reassure her but seems to the absorb the compliment as he seems to glow as he leaves the booth and goes to help another customer. Ash turns to Dotty who steadfastly stares at her pie as she cuts another bite with the side of her fork. “That was nice of you,” Ash says, eventually, unable to help herself.

Dotty scoffs. “You know me, I’m a fucking angel.” Ash snorts and Dotty grins at her and it feel like comradery. Dotty rolls her shoulders back as if to shift the feeling away. “Right, back to business. Looked into this Mitchell guy that Branning sent us towards, had to because we got nothing else,” Dotty rolls her eyes here, annoyed like she usually is whenever a victim gives them little to nothing. (“The whole point of your whole shebang was to spare me trouble, not give me more,” she lamented once as Ash chuckled where she lay on her living room floor, Dotty perched on Ash’s couch, looking pleased with herself for making her laugh, both of them drunk after solving a case.) “And found an entire family who live not far from here, just moved in at the edge of town, so I’m trying to figure out which member of the family we should talk to – wha- why do you look like that?”

Ash can only imagine how pallid she looks as her mind races, spinning around the thought process of, if the Mitchells have just moved in, then maybe her family has as well, maybe they’re just around the corner, maybe they’re going to walk in any second and her mother will smirk at as if to say, you never really left, I didn’t let you. It’s pounding a headache into her temple and already she wants the case gone, to have never touched Jack Branning and read the note he had scribbled for her, she wants it to not have existed.

She fidgets with Dotty’s napkin in order to escape her gaze, but it doesn’t change the way she sees Dotty’s face frown in contemplation. She’s too sharp and she reaches the conclusion far too quickly for Ash to be able to come up with a reasonable lie. “Holy shit, you know the Mitchells, don’t you?”

Ash wants to lie, and feels the denial sit in the back of her throat like bile but she can’t do that to Dotty, Dotty who’s an asshole and always has something cutting to say in the back of her tongue and is always looking for an escape route, but also Dotty who smiles clumsily like she’s never done it without trying to ply drinks out of the person she’s smiling at, and drinks with Ash when they solve a case and sometimes catches her eye and makes Ash feel like they’re in on an inside joke together, just something for the two of them. “Yes,” Ash sighs and pushes back some hair that has fallen out of her ponytail. “They did business with my family from time to time.”

“Business,” Dotty echoes, eyebrows disappearing into her hairline as she realises that Ash has used a kid-friendly word to describe entire families dedicated to committing crimes. “Christ, Ash, are you in the mafia?”

Ash shushes her and tilts her head to see if anyone heard Dotty’s exclamation. “Shut up, no, of course not, I left my family and even then it was just – money laundering and other illegal shit. Barely anyone died.”

Dotty’s eyes almost bug out of her head. “Barely,” she mimics. She looks like she wants to laugh from how insane the whole situation is, and Ash feels the same, it is barely 2pm and she’s had to spill so much to her closest friends and it’s so exhausting, she wants to never tell anyone anything ever again. “God, spoken like a real killer.”

Ash glares at her and Dotty grins at her manically. “This is going to be a thing isn’t it? You’re going to make it a thing.”

Dotty cackles. “Absolutely! I mean, you’re a part of a crime family, that’s hilarious!”

Ash sighs, exhausted but can’t help laughing breathlessly as Dotty swings an arm around her shoulders and tugs her into her side, all while asking if Ash could please get her family on that one officer who keeps giving her tickets around the corner because he’s doing her tits in, all while ignoring Ash pointing out that she should just stop parking on double yellow lines.

Ash smiles and thinks that she’s going to like having this joke with Dotty, no matter how annoying it is, because it will be something that is just theirs.

This is how it is: Bobby had showed up three and a half years ago for a job interview back when The Pie Hole was filled with half opened boxes and pie lids strewn about as Keegan and Ash attempted to wing owning an entire business.

Bobby had sat across from her in a rickety chair looking pale in a loose shirt and tie and Ash had thought how ridiculous the whole set up was considering Bobby was barely eighteen years old and she had only turned nineteen like five months ago and she was meant to be some wise source of authority. Bobby was definitely treating her like one with the way his thin shoulders were so tense she thought he was going to snap in half.

(He was Ian Beale’s son, something Keegan had noticed right away. “We can’t hire him. He’s probably here to spy for him, tell him we’re not positioning our pies at an exact forty-five degree angle and he’s gonna take our loan away as soon as he hears.”

Ash had looked at him exasperated from where they sat across from each other at opposite sides of the coffee table, piles of paperwork between them. “Your hatred for Beale has gone too far, he’s not a supervillain.” She ignored how he muttered close enough. “Besides, what if he’s doing the opposite, what is he’s being, like, rebellious?”

Keegan had given her an incredulous look and rolled his eyes. “If Ian Beale’s progeny, is not a twat in any way then I’ll –“ he struggled for a moment for something insane to do, “I don’t know, something drastic, anyway.”

Ash sighed.)

Bobby didn’t look like Ian. Ash supposed is she squinted, she could see that their eyes were the same shade but all she could see was how Ian entered every space like it belonged to him or would very soon anyway and spoke to people like they were simply there to help him reach his goals, like people were resources to spend in order to gain. Bobby didn’t look like that at all, he looked like he would rather take up no space at all, and spoke quietly in a hushed voice, eyes flickering around the room. Ash had been hit with the comparison of a bird cradling a broken wing, curled in on itself.

“You’re hired,” Ash had blurted at the end of the interview and watched as Bobby stared at and finally made direct eye contact, his hands trembling before he smiled for the first time and Ash decided that she wanted to see it more.

(“See when we get a letter declining our next loan payments, I am going to personally blame you,” Keegan told Ash when Bobby stumbled out after stuttering through several words of gratitude, and barely flinched when Ash punched him in the arm.)

(The loan payments never stopped, and Bobby smiled every day that he worked which Ash took as a personal victory.)

There’s a couple of hours until The Pie Hole shuts, and Ash finds herself wondering if she might just be able to get through the day without confronting what happened last night (Keegan had came out of his office and he looked like he was still processing everything but he had also messed up Dotty’s hair with a grin, so Ash had taken that as a sign that he was feeling more like himself again.). Dotty is sitting in front of her, flicking through a newspaper and scoffing every so often at what’s written, one of Dotty’s hobbies, she has realised, is that she simply enjoys making fun of everything and anything and other people finding this funny seems like a bonus more than anything – Ash didn’t comment on how Dotty decided to sit around here for four hours instead of back in her office, alone, and instead spent most of her time trying to convince her to try different types of pie.

Ash had finally gotten Dotty to try a bite of raspberry when the door chimes as a new customer comes in and Ash feels herself freeze. Iqra Ahmed smiles at her and approaches the front counter she’s standing behind. Ash is pretty sure her knees are about to crumble with the amount of tension she feels running through them. Dotty looks her in confusion just as Iqra smiles in greeting and approaches the front counter where they are.

“Hello,” Iqra greets and is too busy rooting a folder out of her bag as she slides into the seat next to Dotty to notice how Ash squeaks but Dotty didn’t and her eyebrows are steadily rising. “I spoke to Mr Beale and it was difficult but I managed to get a compliment out of him about how your profits are steadily rising,” here, she opens the folder and Ash can see a graph but barely processes it, “So, really, we’ve reached a stage of you being able to start paying back your loans and still be able to pay mortgages and wages and the like, which is good, because you can finally be independent of Mr Beale.” She chuckles at this and smiles up at Ash for a response.

Ash doesn’t respond, too busy thinking about Iqra on the road, splayed out like a broken doll and the spot of blood that had gotten onto her pointer finger after touching her. Dotty stares at her before turning to Iqra and sticking her hand out with what Keegan refers to as a shark-like grin. “We haven’t met properly. I’m Dotty Cotton, Private Eye.”

Iqra shakes her hands and answers professionally but distracted. “Iqra Ahmed, I’m Ash’s and Keegan’s financial advisor,” she turns back to Ash and looks worried, a frown furrowing her brows. “Are you alright, Ash?”

Ash continues to stare at her. She’s wearing a white shirt and black trousers and her blazer is folded over the seat next to her and she looks as pretty as she always does but now Ash is deeply traumatised and unable to fully appreciate like she usually does and life is such a bitch sometimes.

Ash jumps when Dotty clamps her hands on her shoulders and starts to steer her into the back. “Sorry, just remembered we had something very important to discuss, be right back with you!” And Dotty shoves her through the door to the back and turns her into Keegan’s office before Iqra can respond with more than a deeper frown and a hand that jolts up as if to catch Ash and wouldn’t that be another nightmare, for her to drop dead again in the middle of her pie shop after a brief glance of skin contact.

“What the fuck is going on?” Dotty asks Keegan, gesturing to Ash who grinds the heels of her hands into her eyes while she sinks into a seat in front of Keegan’s desk. Keegan sounds like he’s about to answer but Dotty interrupts him. “Ok, you look more confused than I do. Context: your financial advisor came in and she looks like she’s about to have a panic attack.”

“Oh shit,” Keegan says and Ash huffs a laugh from behind her hands, surprised she still has the ability to laugh when she’s too busy trying to figure out how she’s going to wear gloves for the rest of time whenever she has to interact with Iqra because she completely forgot about the fact that she can’t ever touch her again without her literally dying. Again. “Um, our financial advisor may have died last night and Ash touched her and ran away and here we are.”

Dotty’s incredulous silence feels pretty damning. “Jesus Christ, Ash,” is all she says and Ash moans sadly in response. “Right, ok, well it seems like she doesn’t even know she’s dead, she’s acting not deeply traumatised and totally normal. Well, is her normal carrying about boring graphs and wearing pant suits?” Keegan must nod because Dotty continues. “Ok, great, so you don’t need to have a big, confusing talk on being dead and not dead and your powers and blah blah blah, you’ve just gotta be normal too, right?”

Ash pries her hands away and turns to give her a look. Dotty sighs. “I can’t just pretend nothing happened, I keep remembering how she died and it’s –“ she cuts herself off and scrubs a hand down her face.

She glances at Keegan who is looking at her sadly and for a second it feels like Dotty tries to place a comforting hand on her shoulder before it disappears, and she hears her clears her throat. “Do you want me to get rid of her?” Ash whips around in shock and Dotty rolls her eyes. “Not like that, you’re the one in the mafia not me –” (“You told her your family is the mafia?” Keegan says, distantly and is ignored.) “I mean, just like get her to leave today. And for the foreseeable future,” she adds, seeming to take in how pale Ash is and looks thoughtful, probably trying to come with ways to get someone to never return to an establishment that they work with.

Ash sighs deeply and look between Keegan and Dotty, Dotty moving to lean against Keegan’s desk while Keegan has moved to kneel in front of Ash and wrap his fingers around her wrist, squeezing so she can focus on the contact instead of her spiralling thoughts. She loves them incredibly much, she realises. She knew already, but it seems to hit her like an avalanche of pure emotion, like a sucker-punch filled with warm, fuzzy feelings.

“I can do it,” she decides. “I can be normal.”

Dotty snorts but grins at her and it looks less like a shark now but more a slightly evil dolphin, and Keegan squeezes his fingers before he pulls her to her feet.

She can do this, she thinks. She looks at them both for a second and sees Dotty standing, fully ready to force someone to leave for her and Keegan looking ready to tousle her hair and hug her at the time and thinks that they are the most important people in the world.

She opens the door to Keegan’s office and steps out and turns the corner before stopping in front of the front counter where Iqra is looking at her with a worried frown on her face and Ash almost buckles but steels herself and decides that she can do it, so she does.

“Sorry, I realised that some of my strawberries were about to go out of date. Do you want a slice of apple pie, and you can explain this graph to me again? Also, what’s this about Ian complimenting us?”

Iqra smiles at her, eyes bright and Ash thinks she looks really pretty today as she starts talking.

This is how it is: Iqra gestures to the graph and seems to make a joke that makes Ash laugh but keeps a physical distance between them that Iqra doesn’t comment on.

(Unbeknownst to them all, a man watches this all unfold from outside, his expression unreadable as he nods to himself and turns and walks down the street.

He brings his phone out and schedules a family meeting for tomorrow before pocketing it and continuing on his way.)

#eastenders #ash panesar #dotty cotton #keegan baker #iqra ahmed #kheerat panesar #ash x iqra #ballum #pushing daisies au #my writing #ee fanfic #eastenders fanfiction

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untaemedqueen · 5 years

Text

Peregrination > J.JK

Chapter 6.

Yearning (n.) - a feeling of intense longing for something.

It had begun to rain, of course. Jeongguk stands in front of Y/N's house on the outskirts of Seoul, his black hoodie getting soaked as he peers at the one lit window of the home. It was Y/N's bedroom and Jeongguk could see shadows moving in the light. He tried calling Y/N several times on the drive over to her house but she had shut off her phone. Jeongguk pulls at his black face mask, the fabric slack against his skin from the rain. It makes a gross suction noise as he rips it off his face. He and Y/N haven't had a fight in a long time, probably the last fight was about Mina, his ex-girlfriend. How could he make her feel so insignificant? He felt like an asshole for making her hurt. He withheld the information about his secret lover only because he didn't want Y/N to worry or get angry with him. Jeongguk was a nervous wreck as he picks at the skin around his nails trying to gather up the courage to go through this with Y/N one more time. She was going to be livid, but Jeongguk would regret everything even now just picturing how her face would look. Jeongguk approaches the house, the awning shielding him from the current onslaught of rain. He bounces on his toes out of nervousness before clearing his throat. He raises his hand to ring the bell before whining to himself and spinning around. He was always such a proud person, but Y/N broke him out of that. This wasn't about his pride, it was about how Y/N would look when she saw him. Would she start to cry? Or even scream at him? The main question he couldn't even answer for himself was, why was he feeling such a hole in his chest when she was just his best friend?

Jeongguk finally gathered the courage, his finger buzzing the doorbell before biting his lip picking some skin off out of nervousness. The house was silent, Jeongguk puts his ear up to the door hearing Y/N's footsteps as she descends the stairs from her room. She was coming to answer the door! Jeongguk brushes at his wet clothes and pushes his hair back. He sputters his lips nervously before hearing Y/N stop in front of the door. "Go away." Y/N calls and Jeongguk closes his eyes. "Y/N, please. I'm so sorry." Jeongguk puts his forehead again the door and Y/N wipes at her tear stained cheeks. "Go away Kookie. I mean it." Jeongguk smacks his forehead into the door as he hears her footsteps recede through the door. Jeongguk looks around the patio before digging his hand into the letterbox next to the door. He grabs Y/N's spare house key before opening the door. Y/N sits on the stairs as if she was waiting for the door to open. Her hands perched underneath her chin. Jeongguk takes in her apperance and his body almost shuts down. Her face was puffy from crying, her eyes red and seemingly rubbed raw. Her nose was a cherry color as she sniffles in front of him. Jeongguk takes off his soaked sneakers before rushing and sitting on the floor in front of Y/N. Her eyes close and she buries her face in her arms as little sobs escape her throat. Jeongguk furrows his eyebrows and looks down at her feet feeling like death. How could he put her in this state? All he ever wanted to do was see her smile and he made her like this.

You rub at your irritated eyes once more before taking in a deep breath through your mouth, you sniffle before looking at where Jeongguk was stood. He was now sat in front of you his arms hugging his knees as he stares down at your purple painted toes. His eyebrows were knit together and his jaw was taught. He was angry and you knew he was angry with himself. The whole cab ride home you cried, fighting with someone so significant in your life is never fun especially when they knew how much they hurt you. The sorrow was written all over Jeongguk's face. You lift your head up before unfolding your arms. You open your mouth to speak but Jeongguk beats you. "I'm sorry." He whispers, his voice cracking as his eyes begin to fill with tears. He tuts at himself before covering his eyes with his hand. You take in his wet clothing and your heart softens. How long was he standing outside in the pouring rain? His black sweater clinging to his body as small drops of water fall onto your wooden floor. "Take off your sweater. You'll get sick." You whisper before standing, he looks up at you as your hand comes to his cheeks. You wipe his tears and it seems to make him cry more. "Aish." He mumbles before sobbing loudly putting his head back. You sigh before wrapping him into a hug. He holds you close, his arms tight around you as he holds on to you for dear life. "I don't want to ever fight with you. It's the worst feeling in the world." Jeongguk whispers into your hair. Your shirt was now soaked but you didn't care and you didn't notice until Kook pulled away from you. "Let's change your hoodie and then we'll talk." You mumble before ascending the stairs with Jeongguk on your tail.

You sit in the living room with Kookie, a glass of red wine in hand as you face each other. Jeongguk sips his red wine before leaning back into the couch, the lighting was dim and the fire place was now on to warm Jeongguk up from the rain. "God, even when you are mad at me you take such good care of me." You put the long stemmed wine glass to your lips before giving him a lazy smile. To be honest, all that crying had made you exhausted. You swirl the wine around watching the thick legs of the drink mosey down to the bottom of the glass. "Why didn't you tell me?" You ask putting your head against the cream coloured couch cushion. Jeongguk sighs and throws his head back. "The correct answer is I didn't tell you because I'm stupid. But, also I didn't tell you because I don't want you to worry. She means absolutely nothing to me, really. I didn't want you to go into Y/N mode and be nervous about her coming over and exposing me and all that stuff." You hum before drinking some of your wine. "Plus she actually broke it off with me not too long ago. She doesn't have enough time to focus on practicing for debut with me around. She is really serious about it. She's already 22 and hasn't debuted yet." Jeongguk explains further. You are quieter than usual, just even thinking about another girl in that house besides you was a very strange thought and you didn't care for it. "Well, I was hurt when Jin said it, I mean I had no pretense that she existed and I felt like maybe it was the Mina thing all over again." Jeongguk scoffs and sits closer to you. "I will never choose a girl over you ever again. I was a fucking idiot for even thinking that." You go to recall the memory and it was like it never happened. You remember the incident but couldn't put together the details. Like, somehow your brain wiped that memory clean away. You clear your throat before running your fingers through your hair. "What exactly happened with all of that?" You ask, Jeongguk pulls away from his glass before scooting closer to you. "You're going to make me tell the story so I can feel worse, aren't you?" He asks with a frown. "No! No! I just don't really remember everything about it!" You explain making Jeongguk tilt his head. "You don't remember everything? How could you forget such a thing? You sure you're okay? You were bleeding earlier." "I'm fine!" You drink more of your wine before listening to the crackle of the fire. "Well, anyway, I'm not going into the whole Mina thing. It was terrible whether you remember all the details or not.” Jeongguk shivers before finishing off his wine. “You’re still cold?” He shrugs before pulling the throw blanket off the top of the couch and throwing it over his legs. “I’m supposed to be your best friend, I hope you’ll trust me with everything no matter what.” You finish off your wine before pouring more for the both of you. “I do trust you! You are my best friend! I just... I had a mental lapse of judgement and I messed up. I’ll tell you everything from now on whether you wanna hear it or not.” You snort before grabbing your wine glass. “I’ll even tell you when I go to the bathroom.” Jeongguk says with a giggle, you smile at him before sighing loudly. “I’m good on that one, thanks.” Jeongguk smirks before staring at the fire. "I think I'm getting a fever." You go wide eyed as you look over his face as it starts to get a bit pale. You stand up placing your wine glass on the table before moving his hair from his forehead. You press your lips to his forehead before backing up. "Yah! Of course you're getting a fever! You were soaking wet! Why did you stand outside in the rain for so long?!" Jeongguk clears his throat before fixing his hair. "I was embarrassed to come inside! Just thinking of you being so upset with me literally made me not able to move a muscle. I couldn't face it." You sit down next to him with a large sigh, "And who taught you to kiss someone to feel for a fever? Weirdo." You roll your eyes at him before looking over his pale face. “My grandmother did. How does it make any sense to place a hand on your forehead and mine? That won’t tell temperature well. You feel more with your lips since they are sensitive.” Jeongguk’s eyes fall to your lips before clearing his throat again. You look him over once more before the sound of falling rain and crackling fire wood fills your ears. You turn and draw back your curtain checking outside, the rain was coming down hard. The front of your yard filling with water. “Go upstairs and lay down and I’ll get a wet towel for you.” You say letting the curtain go as it falls back into place. Jeongguk looks at you wide-eyed, “I have to get back home, so the guys can come back here.” He presses his hands together underneath the throw blanket. You roll your eyes before standing, “Get upstairs, you aren’t going anywhere in this pouring rain.” Jeongguk’s eyes dance between you and the familiar fireplace. He opens his mouth to say something but you walk away from him grabbing the now empty wine bottle on the table. “If I come back out here and you’re still on this couch, it means you want to die.” You warn your best friend as you walk away through the dining room and into the kitchen.

You walk back into the dark living room with a glass bowl of warm water and two cloths draped over your arm. You eye the now empty couch before snorting. “This kid.” You mutter with a small smile forming on your face. You take a minute to burn out the fireplace before the room becomes pitch black, the sound of rain more prominent as you turn on the hallway light. You advance up the steps before you hear Jeongguk muttering to himself, you tiptoe lightly trying to hear him. “You idiot...” You hear him chanting to himself, you shake your head with a laugh, “How could you look at her like that?” You hear him whisper, you stop at the top of the stairs. You stare at the floor, the light peaks out from the almost closed door. “Get it together.” Jeongguk mutters to himself audibly. You swallow before feeling embarrassed, you shouldn’t be so nosy. You stomp up the last two stairs before opening your bedroom door. Jeongguk lays in bed without a shirt, his skin shining with a feverish sweat making you frown. He really is getting quite sick. You walk into the room as he lays his head back on the pillow. “You’re here.” He whispers before turning his head to look at you. You smile down at him before sitting on the bed next to him. You face him folding in your legs, while placing the bowl in your lap. You wet a cloth before ringing it out, you push back his bangs and place the warm towel on his forehead. Jeongguk shivers before sighing loudly. “This is what I get, y’know.” He mumbles out, “Hmm?” You ask as you run your fingers through his long, soft hair. “I made you so upset that this is what I deserve, God wasn’t please with me so now I’m sick.” You giggle before shaking your head. “I don’t think God works like that. You got sick because you stood out in the rain for a ridiculous amount of time without any concern for your health.” Jeongguk frowns before shivering again. “Try and sleep.” You whisper to him as you wet another cloth getting ready to switch it out. “Come here.” Jeongguk holds his arms out and you raise an eyebrow. His tan skin very pale as you in closer to him, he sighs before putting his arms around you, his feverish skin wetting your shirt. His lips find purchase against the side of your mouth and your eyes go wide. “Yah.” You mumble pushing on his chest. “This makes me feel better.” He whispers, “Jeongguk...” You say pushing on him, “Give me one kiss and I’ll regain my strength.” You smack him in the chest, “Yah, Jeon Jeongguk. That’s not funny.” Jeongguk pulls away putting his fingers underneath your chin. “Do I look like a comedian to you?” He asks taking the cloth off his forehead. He places the cloth in the bowl before taking the bowl out of your lap and placing it on the nightstand next to him. He sits up before shivering once more. “Lay down!” You whine pushing on his chest. His strong arms pull your weight on to him as he falls back, your legs beginning to ache at the strange position they’re in. “Jeongguk.” You whine again making him chuckle. He puts his face into your hair before sighing. “I feel better already.” The aura in the room was changing to something strange and unfamiliar. There was always a sense of flirting with him but above all he was just your best friend. He was Jeon Jeongguk, and yet, why was he so much more while holding you like this. Your heart rate picks up as his fingers card through your hair. “Y/N.” Jeongguk whispers out, you pick your head up and look at him. “Thank you for always being there for me. You’re the best person in my life.” You smile at him before wiping some sweat off his hot forehead. Jeongguk’s eyes glaze over your face before falling on your lips, he licks his lips before smirking. His thumb and index finger clasp your chin, before looking into your eyes. Your heart rate soars making you feel hot all over, the sound of your heartbeat heavy in your ears as you stare back at him dark brown orbs. He pulls your face closer to his and sticks out his lips. “Just one popo.” He mutters before sticking his lips out farther. You clear your throat before looking at his lips. He licks them once, his tongue peaking out making your body go rigid. You’ve never felt this way with him before. Why is he doing this. He pushes you off of him before smiling. “I’m a good comedian, right?” He wrinkles his nose before chuckling. You smack him hard in the chest making him groan loudly. “Yah! Go to sleep.” You yell before laying down in the bed and throwing the comforter over yourself. You turn away from him and stare at the door before putting your hand on your heart. “Asshole.” You mouth to yourself. Jeongguk lays down comfortably before turning his head to look at you. He smirks before smacking his chest into your back. He lays on top of the comforter letting the fabric of the sheet shield you from his bare chest as he throws his arm over you. His mind reeling at being so close to you just seconds ago. “You know I love you, right?” He whispers to you, you pretend to sleep not wanting to answer him as you try to steady your heart beat. “I love you, Y/N. Thanks for always taking such good care of me, my girl.” You close your eyes as Jeongguk gently kisses the back of your head before turning around and facing the window. He smacks his forehead before closing his eyes. Why did he say all of these useless things to his best friend? Did he believe them? And, if he did would he ever truly act on them?

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apparitionism · 5 years

Text

Mercury 13b

And with this VERY long second part of part 13(!), Mercury at last comes to an end. (Preceding parts are findable on my tumblr, via search and/or archive.) Talky, pedantic... there’s a great deal of unresolved thinking here; I’m resentful of how the whole Emily Lake situation requires you to fall back on “well, it’s just artifact-y magic” once you really start pushing to make sense of it. Anyway, previously on Mercury, Helena was remarking on the astonishing coincidence of their having met Emily Lake’s girlfriend at this random county fair. This raised in Myka a significant sense of uh-oh, so she asked Helena if she’d asked the girlfriend why she’d come to the fair in the first place...

Mercury 13b

Helena’s brow wrinkled. “I did not,” she said.

Myka voiced her fear: “What if the Regents set this up?” she asked, and Helena paled... so much for not causing trouble. Myka went on, and as she did, it felt still more plausible, “Manipulate everybody to Nowhere, Wisconsin, sit back, and watch the disaster unfold. I don’t really believe in accidents anymore.”

“Happy or otherwise...” Helena’s voice was resigned, as if Myka articulating the idea had made it not only thinkable, but instantly and obviously true.

Myka couldn’t really disagree. “Our punishment. I keep thinking maybe it’s over, but it isn’t.” She inhaled a painful breath. “If Pete had—if the coin. And then if Emily Lake was all that was left of you? I guess I would have met her girlfriend anyway. Talk about an unfolding disaster... do you think I could have stayed away?”

“Of course I wouldn’t have,” Helena said, oddly offhand.

“Stayed away?”

Still offhand: “Met her. In that case.”

Myka’s gut lurched. No, Helena wouldn’t have met her; Myka had said it herself. You’d be gone. “Appetites,” she said now, self-castigating, “but this one’s sick. I think about what I would’ve done, and it’s sick. Like when people have their pets cloned. I would have kept hoping Emily Lake would turn back into you.”

“Perhaps you would have persuaded her to produce a facsimile. ‘Myka,’ said as I say it.” This was not offhand at all, and having said it, Helena clamped her teeth tight, increasing the jut of her jaw, her cheekbones.

“No,” Myka said, quickly, wishing it were true, but was it? Helena was jabbing back at Myka, as she had with her “Oh Agent Bering” this morning, at the start of this impossible day—and Myka, as the insensitive jerk in the situation, had to acknowledge that these digs were entirely fair. (Pete’s “the fair” echoed at her. Where it all just happened.) “All I know is, the sight of her. Pretending it was the sight of you. Not believing, but pretending. I wouldn’t have been able to give it up. Slippery slope.”

“So regardless of the action taken in that forest clearing, a life sentence for you.” Helena’s words managed to convey resentment both toward Myka and on Myka’s behalf.

“Self-imposed... when the Regents want dirty work done to me, I’m usually the best person for the job,” Myka agreed. “Which brings us back to what we—both of us—do and don’t deserve.”

Helena sat up straight, breathed out emphatically through her nose, and said, “What is an appropriate punishment? To whom does it rightly redound? What part of one’s self must any human insist on the right to retain? What is constitutive? To what extent are violations of that self, of others’ selves, acceptable, tolerable, endurable in the name of justice?” Helena reeled off this list of questions as if her monograph answering them had already been completed, as if she were cracking open the freshly published volume on a lectern before her because this was at last her opportunity to present her findings to Myka and even to the world at large. But what she said next was, “I imagined myself—ha, my self—a philosopher skilled enough to think all these things through. I was wrong.”

Helena had now admitted two times, on this day when it all just happened and kept happening, to being wrong. More than that: both times, she had actually uttered, as a sentence, “I was wrong.” Once in a day was unusual enough—once in a week—but twice? “Nobody here is a philosopher skilled enough to think all of that through,” Myka said. She wasn’t sure the monograph wouldn’t eventually emerge, but Helena seemed to need to believe, right now, in this moment, that she wasn’t the one who could make it happen. “Nobody... well, maybe Pete,” she faux-conceded.

It had the intended effect; Helena’s hard, bleak expression softened. “He was doing very well.”

Myka asked, of that softer face, “If we can’t think our way through it, then what are we left with? Let them win or... I don’t know, ignore it?”

Helena shrugged, still soft. “We prove again and again that we’re incapable of the latter. As for the former, what would it look like, letting them win?”

But Myka suspected Helena knew the answer to that—or rather, knew Myka’s own answer to that. “I let them win once before. I gave up and left. So I’ll say it out loud: You could do that.”

Helena breathed. Not sighs, but noise. “Could I?” she eventually asked, her voice empty. What did that mean?

“You’re not a prisoner. For once, you’re not. As far as I know. And even if you are, you could escape... quit trying to figure out what happened, what was justified. Give up the fight. The fights.”

“The fights,” Helena said, and was that less blank? “Give up the fights with you?”

“I’m being serious,” Myka said, because there was some twitch in the way Helena had just said “you.”

“Hm. The fights with Pete?”

Helena clearly intended that to have an effect similar to what Myka had achieved by mentioning him, so Myka rolled her eyes and lightened her tone. “Didn’t you two just sign the historic Kenosha Accords anyway?”

“And the fights with Artie?”

“You’d both be perfectly happy never speaking to each other again.”

“Even with the hideously bearded Frenchman?”

“Are we going to go through the list of everybody you ever had a beef with? You’re still alive and he isn’t. As you never stop pointing out, you won that one.”

“Not as far as literary scholars are concerned, not yet; thus I continue to argue my position.”

“You should argue it with literary scholars then, and leave me out of it.”

“Which reminds me: you seem once again to be forgetting a quite salient point.”

“What point this time?”

“I don’t want to leave you out of it.” Helena said this with laser-precise intensity, and just like that, they were back in the real conversation. “I don’t want to leave you out of anything. I don’t want to let them win, I don’t want to give up the fights, and, most importantly, I don’t want to leave.”

“I bet some part of you does,” Myka said, because it seemed like she... should. Should make sure Helena knew that leaving really was an option. Because leaving needed to be an option, never mind the philosophy; otherwise, how would Myka ever know that Helena was choosing to stay? “I just bet. I bet if you listened close, it’d work on you like that microphone.”

This time, Helena did not pause. “Then I won’t listen at all. I’ll stop my ears, or I will have you lash me to the mast like Odysseus. Let these words work on you: I would rather be whatever recobbled version of my fractured self I am now, arguing with you today or on any given future day about whatever aspect of our punishment we are being forced to confront, than undertake yet another rebuilding.” She paused for breath. “Do you disagree?”

Myka thought of their yesterday talk of earplugs and the mast, when they were guessing about how they might stay safe at the fair—when they could not have known there would be no way to stay safe at the fair. But then Myka shifted her thoughts from earplugs and the mast, from those things, to Odysseus himself. That exile who at last came home... “When I gave up and left,” Myka said, “it was because I didn’t know who I was anymore. I thought I knew Myka Bering so well, but that turned out to be some name on a badge I surrendered. I guess I didn’t learn any kind of lesson, though, because now, today, I think I know myself pretty well, but then there I am, ready to lick key lime pie off a Pinto. Constitutive? I was sure I was still me. Clearly I have no idea who that is.” A sad truth to learn, on a very educational trip to Wisconsin.

“At the risk of confirming the Wells family’s sentimentality, I will say, you should have some idea that that is someone I love.”

She sounded factual, not sentimental, and under normal circumstances, that would have reassured Myka enormously. I am someone she loves. That is a fact. But that was also a problem, because love did have a factual basis, a factual, bodily basis, one whose inescapability had caused so much of the trouble. “Your body loved someone else,” she said, and as Helena began to shrink into the chair again, she hurried to add, “I’m not saying that like I did before. I’m saying it because I don’t know how to think it through. What it means. What we feel as love, that’s chemicals in the body, and... I have to confess. I did feel it, when I first saw Emily Lake. Those chemicals: My heart leapt. My blood moved. So if anybody—any body—did any betraying, it was me. Not you.”

“Myka,” said as I say it.... what if Emily Lake really had sounded like Helena? What would Myka’s heart have done then? “I’m sorry,” she said to Helena now, as if it were possible to apologize for any of it—what had happened, what might have happened. Part of the punishment, something whispered at her. Betrayal on betrayal.

Helena cleared her throat. “Conversely, I loved you—even, although it sounds strange to say, desired you—when I had no access to my body, to its production of those chemicals. To the way its blood once moved. What does that mean?”

Shaking her head, Myka said, “Sounds like two sides of the same completely incomprehensible coin.” She instantly regretted her terrible choice of simile... she was never going to be able to think clearly about coins again, their sides or their consequences. “Sorry for that too,” she said with a wince. “The same punitive, incomprehensible coin.”

“Would that coins—and one coin in particular—were comprehensible.” Helena said, in grim agreement.

Myka found herself unreasonably grateful that she and Helena would always share such overlapping areas of... inclarity. “I know the only real explanation is that there is none. Artifacts. We shouldn’t even try to think it through. Stupid endless wonder.”

Helena nodded. “Cringeworthy, certainly. But even in the absence of artifactual complication, I don’t believe love is particularly easy to parse.”

“That doesn’t sound very sentimental.”

“It’s not. Charles would hate it.”

“Right now I’m with Charles. Why can’t it be easy?”

“That’s yet another line of philosophical investigation, I suspect.”

“We’ve established that we’re both pretty bad at philosophy. I have to think that extends to the part about love.” When Helena didn’t respond, the moment stretched. Myka felt the onset of, tried to resist, and then gave in to an enormous yawn.

“Hm. You find the philosophy of love dull?” But this was said gentle, not to argue against a yawn, but to cradle it.

Myka now found her fatigue foregrounded, so much that even a chuckle was beyond her. “I wish it were dull. I wish we were, but we’re not. We’re the opposite of dull.”

“The opposite of dull...” Helena quirked a smile. “Thus we shine,” she concluded. Like she believed it.

“So much it hurts my eyes,” Myka said, and she yawned again. “I haven’t said anything to make you want to stay in that chair all night, have I?”

“No.”

“Then please come here.”

Helena spidered her way onto the bed, all thin limbs and caution, moving like she’d been afraid such an invitation would never be issued, plastering herself to Myka as if it might never be issued again. For someone who had acted as if she were testing Zeno’s dichotomy paradox every single time she was in Myka’s vicinity—standing half-closer and half again and half that—Helena had been surprisingly permission-oriented with regard to truly intimate physical contact, the bridging of that final molecular, bodily gap. “Let me,” she had breathed, begged, in the moment before she kissed Myka for the first time, and “Yes,” Myka had breathed back. She could not possibly have said no. In that moment, she had been sure she would never say no.

Last night, Helena should have been able to rely on that license, how it had deepened, expanded. Remorse at denying her the certainty of consolation hit Myka anew.

She would not ever, ever, ever take for granted that they were able to lie in this way that had become customary, with Helena’s head on Myka’s shoulder, her arm across Myka’s midsection, her lithe length wedged tight against Myka’s side, Myka’s arm safe around her slight scapulae. How easy it was to be misled about her small size. How important it was to be reminded of the very real weight of her body, no matter how light that weight.

Helena’s hair, when Myka turned her head, smelled of cotton candy, engine exhaust, and an entire day’s worth of sunshine.

Myka said, “You were right: I was nervous. That we’d keep fighting. Need to. Some things, the daylight fixes them, but I thought not this, even with the PDA and the Ferris wheel and the pie. And I thought you thought it too.”

“I did think it, for a time. I do think we’ll continue to fight about many, many things. But this... in fact Pete said it best.”

“He did?” These historic Kenosha Accords were... mind-boggling.

“I’m tired. Of it all. I need to tell you something.”

Oh god, Myka thought. Here it comes. But what was “it”?

Whatever it was, it was something Helena wouldn’t have been able to say, sitting in the chair. This wasn’t Helena’s at-a-decorous-distance voice; this voice, Myka heard most often in the dark.

“Or perhaps it’s that I need you to tell me something.”

“Okay,” Myka said, hiding behind the word.

“But I don’t know what it is.”

That admission carried a tremolo of frustrated helplessness that Myka didn’t often hear, and it sent a pulse of those well-known chemicals through her body. “I’ll tell you anything you need me to,” she said, trying to sound as sure as if she were being sworn in—truth and nothing but. “Or I’ll try. But you have to at least give me a hint.”

“She wanted a child.”

Now Myka was the one who took a minute to breathe. “Emily Lake wanted a—”

“Or I should say, another child. Because she knew she’d had a child.”

“What?”

“Based on a physical examination, I learned today, but my first thought—my yesterday thought and fear—was that she had kept something of Christina, something that had been mine. I feared, and in fact I still fear, that the coin left in her some memory of my child, some memory that, when she was wiped away, was lost.”

A physical exam. Christina was of Helena’s body; there was bodily evidence. Myka didn’t often think about that, because she had the luxury of not thinking about that, and now she hated herself for indulging in that luxury, and she hated herself even more for last night, for this morning. Why weren’t you a better human? Never mind philosopher... she had heeded only her own small jealousy, when Helena had been terrified by, had been staggering under the weight of, the idea of having lost still more of her already-lost child.

“You still love literature,” she tried, lamely. “They let Emily Lake keep that, but you got it back.”

Helena reared away from Myka’s side to bare her teeth and snarl, “I ‘got it back’? Its quality, its fullness? Who can say? And if some part of that was lost, if in fact some memory of Christina was, then what else essential to myself—constitutive of my self—might now be lost to me?” Now accusation, with a dash of contempt: “Tell me, how sick did you feel, upon realizing what you’d eaten this evening? How very, very sick?”

Something tu quoque–esque from Helena wasn’t unexpected in such a circumstance; it was her version of Myka’s knee-jerk, defensive “I can take care of myself.” But the sudden animal anger stung. Hadn’t Helena just said she was tired of fighting about this? Yet the contours of this were ever-changing, and to have Christina become a part of this would always have made for dangerous ground. Myka said, low, “You’re right. But don’t you think I’d tell you if you were different? If some of what had made you yourself was missing?”

“But what if it isn’t something you would know?” Helena asked, on her back, separate from Myka, talking to the ceiling.

Myka said, because it seemed only logical, “But I thought I was the one person who knows you better than anyone else.”

“You are. The one living person.”

“Oh,” Myka said, and “oh, god,” and she tried not to let those words emerge as the sob they were. Myka had indeed flattered herself with the idea that she knew Helena better than anyone. Another indulgence. She had not bothered to stop on the less-flattering truth that so many long-dead people knew Helena better than Myka did, better than she ever could. Charles, probably... even Christina. And Myka didn’t know Helena with Christina—what constituted Helena with Christina. No living person did.

That vast then-now distance... sometimes Myka felt it in herself, how it estranged her from Helena. But tonight, just as with the idea of shame, her viscera knew the reverse, knew how Helena must feel it as an estrangement from Myka and everyone and everything, an all-consuming difference. She wasn’t like Myka and the rest of them, humans who had lived through history; rather, she was history, an angel flying over time itself: unable to turn away from all the wreckage of the past, yet also unable to keep from being flung violently into the future.

All the wreckage of the past. All that constitutive wreckage to which Helena clung. “I wish,” Myka began. “I wish I had the microphone, because I’m not a philosopher, and I don’t know how to make this make sense.” Groping for words that would make it better, not worse, but she wasn’t a philosopher, not even one as good as Pete... “You need me to tell you something, so I’ll try. Can I—I mean, may I—try to say something—some things—that you might believe?”

“You may,” Helena said, quietly, but she didn’t move closer. She continued lying on her back, staring up, as if the ceiling were frescoed with scenes no living person had painted. As if, should she divert her attention, they would be lost forever.

Myka would have stayed on her back too, but she had to say these words to Helena, not to some expanse that loomed above them both—not even if it had been the sky, but certainly not cheap drywall treated to soak up all sound. She turned on her side again. Regarded Helena’s profile. She’d thought she understood who she was in relation to that profile; then she’d thought she’d been wrong. But then: I believed in you and I was right.

She reached her hand over, let her fingers climb that cliff of cheekbone, let them rest for a moment at the apex. Helena moved her head in a tiny, sharp nestle against Myka’s palm.

So astute, that movement. It gave Myka enough push to start, “You said you don’t have my memory, and that’s true. Most people forget things all the time, things constitutive of different versions of themselves. You’re saying you’re terrified that one of those versions of you might have loved, might have valued Christina in a way deeper—better—than this version of you does. Right?”

“That is...” Helena angled her face, minutely, toward Myka. “Uncomfortably right.”

Keep going. “So I’ll ask you: can you imagine valuing her more than you do right now? As you sit and think about her, because I know you do that, like breathing. I don’t know what it feels like to you, breathing like that, but I know it feels like something.”

Helena put her right hand to her forehead, as if pressure would yield the right simile. “Like... something wrapped around me. A straitjacket? Or a full-body bridle. A steady, clothing presence—but then it yanks tight, and I can’t breathe at all.”

“No one memory’s going to change that,” Myka said, and she tried to say it with conviction, but Helena didn’t move. Of course not; it was a cliché. Myka put her own hand to her own forehead, as pressure to think, pressure to get this right... all she found was another cliché. Still, she had to try something. “Okay, how about this: memories are like rosary beads, that’s what they say.” Helena still didn’t move, but Myka forged on, “I know you’re not religious. But let’s say you were. What if the Regents took your rosary and stole one of your Hail Mary beads or made you skip over a Glory Be? Even if they never let you touch your rosary again... what could that ever do to faith?” Myka thought she knew the answer. Not for certain, not for Helena, but Myka had felt the warmth—had suffered the violence—of a full-body bridle of her own.

The exhale, the inhale. Finally, on yet another exhale: “When you say it that way.”

“I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Yes you do. Yes you do, philosopher.” Helena moved herself to Myka, fit their bodies together once more.

Myka didn’t understand how her heart withstood it all: how it kept on beating, given how full it was, given how full of chemicals her entire body was, chemicals explaining to her exactly what this feeling was. Its right name. She kept on breathing, too, feeling how her older-than-science respiration now pushed Helena’s body up, where it lay upon her; now let it fall.

“The part about love,” she eventually said. “I’ll never know what we can and can’t get past. How hard it’ll be.”

Helena, still in time-taking mode, said, “Nor will I. But the part about love. If you could... bear it in mind?”

“Well, if you could too. I’m no picnic.”

“Compared to myself, you are surely the most relaxing of holidays.”

She was dry, she was herself—the self Myka knew so well, the self Myka did know better than any other living person knew. We can get past it. She scoffed, “I’m a relaxing holiday? That is objectively not the case and also ridiculous, because we’re both stupidly difficult. Punishment aside. I don’t think even the Regents had toothpaste-cap-etiquette-based consequences in mind.” She reconsidered. “Sure as I say that, though...” And sure as she said it, she did see that there would be no knowing. Ever.

“Perhaps...” Helena began; Myka felt a shake in her body, and was that more danger? No: Helena was laughing. “Perhaps the conflict, even over toothpaste caps, will draw viewers to the Bering-and-Wells television program.”

Instead of laughing, Myka yawned again, this time from relief. “On which we’re shipped, I guess? This isn’t my area of expertise.”

“It is,” Helena insisted. “It is both of ours.” To Myka’s raised eyebrow, she continued, “When it comes to yourself and myself romantically paired.”

“Once again, objectively ridiculous. Expertise? We both keep proving how incompetent we are.” Myka followed this with yet another yawn.

“Incompetent at the part about love? Let’s see. You know, ‘inspissate’ is a very good word.”

Myka knew that musing, yet goal-directed, tone. Was Helena right to be using it here, now, in this aftermath? Was Myka right to let it work on her? “Is it,” she said, as neutrally as possible.

“Yes.” Helena levered herself above Myka, brought their faces very close together. “For what happens to the air just before I kiss you. As I make you wait just one inspissating instant more.”

“You shouldn’t make me wait,” Myka said, helpless under that pressure, “inspissation aside,” but her words were a prolongation too, a thickening, a proof that the air between them could thicken, could take on such perfect unctuous molecularity.

This kiss, every kiss, was better—sweeter—than key lime pie. And better still, because Myka was fully herself (she thought so, at least, and that had to be enough), enjoying it so much. Enjoying the bodily, real, uncoerced nature of it. The way the muscles of lips and tongues worked, relaxed. Breath moved out, breath moved in.

But breath, and its movement, brought Myka to an unpleasant physical awareness. She turned her head away.

Helena pulled back; then she sighed with exaggerated grievance. “So much for voracious. Your soul can stand only so much appetite in one day?” Her tone was lighthearted, but Myka heard in it a spindle of tension.

“It’s not about my soul,” Myka told her. “I just realized I desperately need to brush my teeth.”

Helena laughed, as if she really had been joking after all. Myka was not fooled. “Given your devotion to dental hygiene, I believe it is about your soul. It’s true I like your teeth.” Helena paused. “I also like the fights about toothpaste caps.”

“Do you.”

“Small fights. They seem like ours.”

“Just ours? Not our punishment?”

“Just ours. Truly, the Regents could not possibly know with the intimacy I do the extent to which the capping of toothpaste containers matters to you.”

“It’s representative,” Myka said, “of all the things,” and she pushed herself off the bed, heading for the bathroom and her toothbrush, hoping that could be the last word on the topic—but Helena followed her, would not leave her alone, narrated the toothbrushing (narrated in recalled detail the reason for it, including “and then it was at your feet—and then it was not at your feet because it was in your mouth,” the whole idea of which was another thing Myka would have been happy to Eternal-Sunshine away), such that Myka was indeed getting wound up, ready to stop Helena’s mouth by any means necessary. Which was clearly Helena’s goal, but: “You ate pie too, you know,” Myka said. “Not to mention a corndog. And you have a toothbrush of your own.”

Helena gave a very adolescent eyeroll. “You are overweeningly fastidious,” she said, but she complied, still narrating; her next pronouncement, around a mouthful of mint, was, “And despite your consumption of an unsanitary, sugar-saturated bite, you had no access to your toothbrush.”

Myka did find it appalling, in retrospect. She’d had no access even to a breath mint. “Please stop,” she said, with no real hope that Helena would.

“No,” Helena confirmed. She sounded surprisingly—and then, as Myka thought about it more, unsurprisingly—Pete-like.

“If this is a fight,” Myka said, “it isn’t about a toothpaste cap.”

“No, but it is small and ours. Even if the Regents did engineer this Kenosha misadventure to toy with us, they could not have imagined that Pete would induce you, artifactually, to eat key lime pie, nor how violently you would eventually react to having done so.”

“Still feels like part of the toy-with-us misadventure to me.”

“I know. Is it all right if I find that precious? In both senses of the word?”

Instead of answering, Myka pushed Helena against the wall of the bathroom, waited until she smiled in triumph, then kissed her smiling, clean mouth. Enjoyed it so much, and yet so much more, that clean mouth. “Voracious?” Helena eventually teased.

“Desperate,” Myka corrected. Helena began to raise an eyebrow, so Myka added, “To get you to stop talking.”

Helena smirked at that, because of course she would. “A distinction without a difference.”

“I really don’t think—” Myka began, but she immediately forgot how she intended to end that sentence, because Helena said an authoritative “Hush,” and now she was the one pushing, demanding.

“Peace?” Myka proposed, when she could breathe.

That won her an intimate smile, one that could have been wicked but was instead happy. Straightforward. “Perhaps not quite yet.”

The part about love would never be the part about peace. The build and release of tension, physical and otherwise, was not peace; it would bring them to rest, but it was not peace.

Not peace, and they were physically proving it: this hand, this press, this thigh, this rise—this fight to bodily get somewhere. That they could have this fight, this small-and-theirs fight, was a dispensation Myka had tried, for such a long time, to train herself out of wanting...she had so, so longed to gather hologram-Helena into her arms after Pittsburgh, and that had obviously been an absurdity, and just as obviously, it had been part of the punishment: that the very idea of holding Helena was made absurd. Absurd and unthinkable.

Tonight Myka found her attention, and thus her lips and her breath, drawn repeatedly to a tiny, fresh mosquito-bite sore right where Helena’s shoulder met her neck. An imperfection, a wound, inflicted on this breathing body today. This now-gasping body, this one that Myka could touch—could make gasp—today. The Regents had tried to punish such present joy away; they had tried to bequeath it to Emily Lake, but Myka and Helena had got it back. Myka had believed it back, and Helena had nobled it back. Belief and nobility: they lent something solemn, something like dignity, to even the most basic, pleasurable gasps and where they led.

Meant to be deprived of this, they had refused to be deprived of this.

In the quiet before sleep, Myka touched the proud little bite-swell with what she hoped was a gentle finger. “Does it itch?” she asked, and in response to Helena’s drowsy “somewhat,” she couldn’t hold back an equally sleepy, yet softly outraged, “How dare any creature bite you.”

“You reserve the privilege?”

“You did say you like my teeth.” She dipped her head to scrape them gently against Helena’s temple. “But I meant: damage you at all.”

Equally soft, yet indulgent, Helena said, “You reserve that privilege too?”

Myka couldn’t quite laugh. “Maybe. If you ask the Regents, it’s probably in my job description. But for now? I just want your body intact. I’d like to say nobody gets to touch you but me. That privilege.”

“Claudia would object. She is a hugger.”

“Yeah. And then there’s Pete, who’s also a high-fiver, a back-slapper, and a drops-his-head-like-a-rock-against-your-shoulder-on-an-airplane snorer.”

“You are none of those things,” Helena said, factually. She followed it with a soft but insistent, “What would you say you are?”

Myka took a moment to think. What this feeling was... its right name. “A lover,” she said at last. “Yours, in fact.”

An accurate statement, for they were close in bed, pressed against each other, their limbs nakedly, solidly together. An accurate statement, yet Helena said, just as accurately, “You never say things like that.”

Myka didn’t say things like that. She didn’t think she was good at saying things like that. But now, tonight, because there had been so much saying but maybe not quite enough, not quite yet, she said, “I thought maybe that was part of what you needed me to tell you.”

Helena breathed at Myka. She had breathed like this in the past, when moments were at their most enormous. “I told you I didn’t know what,” she said, when she had apparently had enough of meaningful breathing.

“I know.”

“But that was, after all. Part. Please never stop telling me things.” A dulcet nestle, now against Myka’s neck. “For example tell me what is canasta.” Helena’s turn to yawn: not with vigor, just a little open-close of mouth. Small, sleepy animal.

Myka wanted to celebrate. She settled for placing a kiss where her teeth had lately scraped. “A card game. I’ll google the particulars and explain it tomorrow, I promise. And I’ll tell you why I brought it up.”

This was not the way Myka had ever expected to say “I love you”: vowing to speak about canasta when the day was new. But this was not the way Myka had ever expected to find happiness, either—constantly subjected to endless wonder/torment, never at peace—and yet here she was, happy. At rest, and happy.

“Don’t forget,” Helena said in a slow slur. “I know you won’t... but don’t.”

“Never,” Myka said. Had Helena heard her? It didn’t matter, not as they became sleep-ballast against each other.

The Regents did still mean to punish them; even Myka’s dreams were certain of that. Within the deserved and undeserved punishments, though, the consolations—the sleep, the dreams, the dreams that came true—were worth it.

****

Back at home, Pete gleefully informed Claudia about the basics of the duck bet—including what she was not going to have to “be some word cop about.” Upon receiving this information, Claudia proclaimed, with a pat of Myka’s shoulder that she apparently intended to be comforting (Myka added “shoulder-patter” to “hugger” on Claudia’s list), “Poor Myka. You win some, you Pete some.”

“It’s even worse than that,” Myka reminded her, “artifact-wise.” She jerked her thumb at Helena.

“Ooh, that’s right. Artifact-wise, you win some, you Pete-and-H.G. some. Rare, but true.”

“Worse than that,” Myka went on, “you win some, you have to travel home with two gloating gloaters some. My advice to you is, don’t ever enjoy eating pie around these two, or you will never hear the end of it.”

Helena produced her most typical smirk, but then she softened it. “Two gloating gloaters,” she said, “each of whom, in her or his own way, loves you very much indeed. And each of whom is both astounded and transported when you are willing to show that something is making you happy—a pie, let us say. Or a peace accord.” Then she whispered, directly into Myka’s ear, “Even a closed toothpaste cap.” Because Helena had indeed snapped the travel-size-toothpaste cap closed that morning, and Myka had indeed shown her, immediately and fervently, how happy she was about that rare occurrence.

“Are you using that microphone?” Myka asked, remembering the morning, remembering the joy that had accompanied its complete lack of peace. “Because I actually believe you.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah. Do you believe me?”

“I do. And I would like to add, we’ll play canasta one day.”

Because Myka had not forgotten.

“A very exclusive party,” Helena added. “I find the word ‘meld’ quite inspirational.”

“How do you feel about the extra jokers?” Myka asked her.

“Hey, don’t call us jokers!” Pete protested.

“We’re super extra, though,” Claudia assured him, and now she was patting his shoulder.

Myka stood very still and reminded herself it was usually better not to say words out loud around Pete and Claudia... she hadn’t, in fact, fully got through the canasta rules with Helena, because canasta information had been part of the post-toothpaste-capping portion of the early daylight... but the game did involve decks with extra jokers, and, yes, something called a meld. “I honestly don’t care if we ever play it,” Myka told Helena now. “All joking, and jokers, aside.”

“Neither do I,” Helena said, “but with regard to exclusive parties, we—”

She might have been about to say something extra inappropriate, but Pete headed that off with, “Enough with the la-la. C’mon, H.G., let’s go.”

“Where are you going?” Myka asked.

“Driving lesson,” Pete said, and Helena supplemented, “I am to have drummed into me the difference between derbies and day-to-day.” Pete finished up with, “We worked it out on the plane, when you got so tired of us gloating that you took that nap.”

Claudia reached out to pat Myka’s shoulder again, but she changed her mind mid-gesture—Myka shot her a once is enough squint, which Claudia, surprisingly, heeded. Instead, she huffed and said, “Once again, Myka gets herself Pete-and-H.G.’ed. Lemme get me shoes on. No way I’m missing this ‘driving lesson.’”

Myka saw a look pass between Pete and Helena.

“Sure you wanna take your life in your hands like that?” Pete asked.

“Good point. Myka, you’re coming too.”

“Why? Because it’s better if we’re all in the emergency room at once?”

“Don’t you ever pay attention to the ‘loves you very much indeed’ business?” Claudia demanded. “If you’re in the car, she’ll be more careful.”

“Experience does not bear that out,” Myka said.

“Myka! That is untrue!”

That Helena would express such shock at a statement of fact was more than a little ridiculous. Myka noted, “Just because you say something’s untrue doesn’t make it untrue.”

“It would if I had that microphone,” Helena grumbled.

“No...” Pete said. “It’d make Myka believe it was untrue. Wouldn’t make it really untrue.”

“You may stop doing philosophy now,” Helena grumbled deeper.

“No, I kinda like it. It ticks you off, plus I get pizza afterwards because of all my hard work.” Was that a wink he’d just sent in Helena’s direction? “Which reminds me, hey, Claud, remember the part about the ginormous rabbits?”

“That’s with me like I’ve got a case of the Bering eidetics, Anya.”

“Don’t call me Anya!” Pete protested. Was that another wink?

“You’re the one scared of bunnies,” Claudia said. “Anya.”

“Only when they’re ginormous,” he whined, with a wound in his voice, and that was definitely a wink now.

Helena went into the bit about the pizza, Pete took even greater offense, and Claudia howled.

Believing in things didn’t make them true. But Myka was particularly happy to find that sometimes... sometimes, it made them real.

END

****

A few thoughts:

This is not an epilogue, because I’m trying to break my addiction to those, but I think what most likely happens at some point in the future is they work it out so that Pete, Helena, and Claudia all drive in a demo derby in some fair in South Dakota, because all three of them would be entirely down, in their own peculiar ways, with modifying the cars as they would need to for competition (demo derby car regulations are abstruse and fabulous)... and Myka and Steve and Leena would go and spectate at the big battle, and Steve and Leena would find it just this side of too violent for a recreational activity, and Myka would have pie-eating flashbacks, and I have no idea whether Helena, Claudia, or Pete could actually win, but all three of them would end up totally exhilarated by the experience. And covered in mud. And Myka would take one look at elated, mud-spattered Helena, and she would give thanks that this impossibly material, muddy body stood before her, and she would fall in love all over again (as she would of course do regularly). And then she would say “Don’t touch me until you take a shower.” And Helena would very deliberately raise an index finger and paint a line of motor oil and mud down Myka’s cheek and say “There, I’ve touched you. What do you intend to do about it?” And I suspect Myka would feign outrage—another small fight, because Helena wouldn’t believe the feigned outrage, so Myka would feign it even harder—but inside, she would continue to give fervent, prayerful thanks.

Speaking of things prayerful, I know Myka talking about praying the Rosary is a little off. I was pretty sure the example needed to be faith-related, and everything else I was coming up with was even worse than this, plus it seemed to fit with her needing to confess the sin of her first-sight-of-Emily-Lake bodily reaction. Also I figured that even though Myka isn’t Catholic—she isn’t, right? as far as we know?—I bet she took a comparative religion class or several, and the Rosary isn’t too obscure.

(Also: Bering-and-Wells-ers are a pretty erudite bunch, so probably some will have recognized the image of the angel of history from Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History; it’s become somewhat hackneyed to refer to now, certainly in an academic sense, so I semi-apologize for shoehorning it in. Nevertheless, I find show!Helena to be a strangely literal fulfillment, or maybe I mean expression, of a lot of Frankfurt School thinking about history, particularly how it detonates and reverberates. I can’t not think of her when I read Adorno, and if you take the step back to poets like Hölderlin, there’s resonance there too. Anyway, here’s Benjamin’s passage about the angel:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

I can’t do philosophy at all. But I’m always waiting and listening for the chimes of concepts and articulations that rhyme and echo. I’m waiting for lots of things, some in a messianic-time sense. Hence the shoehorning mentioned above.)

Anyway, Mercury may have at last ended, but I’m not going anywhere. If nothing else, I’ve got Ballet AU’s Propagator to finish up, and of course I’ll keep struggling with my white whale, Sound. I gotta stay alive for that. Plus Christmas! Even if there isn’t an actual B&W gift exchange this year (though I hope there is), I’m going to try to do something for the holiday. Plus several additional ideas are clamoring to be expressed... hang around if you care to.

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Mercury #part 13b

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yougotthatbilly · 6 years

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Dangerously, You’re Beautiful | 01

→ member: lee taeyong → genre: fluff | angst → au: best friends to lovers!au | love triangle!au ↳ summary: ❝If you love two people at the same time, choose the second. Because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn’t have fallen for the second.❞ -Johnny Depp

chapters: 00 , 01

“Stop that.”

You lazily look to your right, shooting Taeyong a questioning look. “Stop what?”

“You’re gonna have permanent wrinkles in your forehead if you don’t relax. Your shoulders are up to your ears and even your ass is clenched.”

You almost make a comment on the fact he looked at your ass long enough to notice, but then you realize that yes, your body is extremely tensed up. Your shoulders drop and the muscles throughout your body gradually loosen as you lean into the podium in front of you.

The store is dead when it was expected to be a lot busier, but that’s what happens when festivals are in town during sales. You barely got any sleep last night (honestly this time) and you’re seconds away from slumping forward or hiding in the break-room and letting Taeyong handle things for the next few hours. Taeil wouldn’t mind. He loves you.

“Want a massage?”

“Huh?” you ask, once again glancing at him because you barely heard him over your thoughts of sweet talking him into being the only manager on the floor for some hours. Taeyong lifts his hands up and wiggles them suggestively. The words no, it’s fine are on the tip of your tongue but who are you to say no to a free massage?

“You know I’m not gonna press you on why you’ve been weird,” he starts after finding his way behind you, his fingertips softly digging into your shoulders, “but you also know I’m here if you need to talk, right?”

Of course you do. He’s always there for you, even when you don't realize you need someone to be. Only a couple of months into your friendship, he was there for you when you thought you were completely fine on your own. Being the observant and kind hearted person he is, when he saw how your feet were dragging and your smile was too fake when interacting with customers he tried to talk about topics that would normally spark your interest and pick up your mood. Months later you don’t even remember why you were feeling so glum that day, but even with him barely knowing you, he knew exactly how to make you feel better. The two of you coincidentally had overlapping breaks and Taeyong stepped behind your slouched form as you were leaned over the counter in the break room, wrapping his arms around your middle in an unexpected hug. And when you straightened up a bit in shock, he only slouched more, rearranging his hold on you so he could hook his chin over your shoulder and hold you tighter. He didn’t ask what was wrong, didn’t force you to speak. The way he felt against you, the feeling of his heartbeat against your back, you remember it all so vividly. Sometimes your mind goes back to that very moment when you’re left alone with your thoughts at night.

His cheeks had a coral hue to them when he apologized after your shifts ended, explaining his actions as a good hug usually brings his mood up because the comfort lets him know people actually care and they aren’t just asking what’s wrong because they feel obligated to. Taeyong asked if he crossed any boundaries or if it possibly made you feel uncomfortable. You felt the complete opposite. You didn’t want him to let go. You wanted to turn around and return the embrace, but in the moment you were too stunned, too overwhelmed yet too comfortable in his hold, enjoying how secure you felt wrapped in his arms. You assured him it was fine, that you realized you really needed it. Then when he, still embarrassed by such an impulsive move, asked if there was a significant other in the picture, seeing that the conversation had never been brought up between the two of you, the sirens sounded in your head.

You shouldn’t have felt the way you did when there should only be one person to have that effect on you.

Taeyong apologized profusely when you answered in affirmative and it took a couple of days for you to convince him everything was fine. He didn’t have any other intention than cheering you up, so he did nothing wrong. He just wanted to be there for you. You were in the wrong with how all rational thoughts about being in a relationship and how Johnny would’ve felt if he saw the scene unfold before him didn’t cross your mind.

Taeyong’s consideration is just another characteristic on the list you deny you’ve made.

You nod. You know.

If you’re in a shitty mood around Doyoung he doesn’t want to be around you because you kill his vibe (maybe you should reconsider the friendship, but then again you’re not even that close). Yuta isn’t the best person to run to when you’re sad unless it’s simply for comfort and not actual advice. Taeyong is the only male aside from Johnny that gives you his full attention and doesn’t come to you with his problems without even checking to see how you’re feeling. When you asked about it, asking why he always asks about you when he’s the one in need of a shoulder to lean on or advice, his response was that friends are not therapists so you should always ask how they’re feeling, too. His maturity and way with words are on that nonexistent list as well.

Maybe it’s just in his nature to care about others (plausible seeing he’s a Cancer), but you can’t help but love the fact that he’s always there and think that maybe you just have a little special spot in his heart like the one that’s found its way inside of your own recently. But then again, there’s a good possibility it’s been there for months but you hadn’t realized it’s existence until recently.

“There’s just been a lot on my mind lately and I’m just trying to figure things out by myself for now.”

“Take your time. Don’t stress too much over whatever it is, okay?” His thumbs work in between your shoulder blades and your eyes drift shut, head falling forward. “Everything will fall into place eventually. You just gotta be patient.”

Another lazy nod.

It’s the typical thing to say to someone in this situation, the only thing he really can say with how vague you’re being, but his words still make you feel a little better.

“In times like this, I drink Jasmine or green tea and it helps a lot,” Taeyong softly suggests. His focus moves to the small of your back, almost making you completely melt into the podium beneath you.

The feeling of a presence in front of you stops your response, Taeyong’s scripted greeting opening your eyes. The holy shit he lets out and his body warmth leaving you lift them. Taeyong is excitedly walking over to a surprised looking Donghyuck, pulling him into a hug.

“Feels like I haven’t seen you in years, kid.” Taeyong sounds excited, like he’s been reunited with his long-lost brother and it’s pulls at your heartstrings. “Why are you here and not in class or something?”

“Winter break,” Donghyuck supplies, Taeyong making a sound in remembrance, “and I’m actually here to see somebody but—”

“But I don’t exist anymore?” you finally cut in, playfully scoffing. Donghyuck’s eyes go wide in your direction, words trying to leave his mouth but all that comes out is stuttering and the boyish smile you’ve grown fond of over the last several years. Taeyong steps back when you make your way around the podium to bring Donghyuck into an even tighter hug than the one Taeyong gave him.

“I didn’t recognize you with your head down and then,” he gestures Taeyong, who’s watching the two of you similarly to how you watched them only moments ago.

You release him to hold him at arms distance by his shoulders, examining him from head to toe. “You’ve gotten taller.” His cheek is warm when you lift a hand to cup it, swiping your thumb against the smooth skin a few times. “And you’ve gotten skinnier. Are you not eating?”

“Yes, I’m eating. I’m just dropping my baby fat,” Donghyuck shrugs sheepishly.

A flash of a memory of his chubby cheeks make you pout exaggeratedly. And then the pout turns into a down curve of disgust when your eyes travel further up.

“What the hell happened to your hair?”

Donghyuck’s left offended and is the one pouting now as you move your finger back and forth between the too big gap between his bangs and his eyebrows. Who the hell got scissor happy with the poor kid?

“I tried to trim my bangs but I got distracted,” he grumbles, glaring at Taeyong when the latter snorts. Taeyong puts his hands up and slowly back-steps into another part of the store.

At least the vibrant red his hair has been dyed is pretty.

“Anyway,” You make your way back behind the podium and return to your previous position leaning against it, “what’s up? And how’d you even know I was here?”

“Well, the semester ended and I figured seeing my precious face would make your week a thousand times better. So here I am.” He gestures himself with a grin.

You squint at him. “Why are you really here, kid?”

“I’m on break and I wanted to see my favorite sister.” Donghyuck shrugs.

“Donghyuck.”

“Okay, fine!” He lifts his hands up. “Mark asked me to visit you since he won’t be back until the end of break, so here I am.”

Donghyuck’s a great actor with a great poker face but you’ve known him since he was seven. “And?” you press once more.

“And I’m here to ask if I can crash at yours for a couple weeks,” he gives you an awkwardly endearing smile.

“I mean, I guess.” You shrug. “But seriously, how’d you know I was here?”

Donghyuck lifts up his phone and wiggles it a little. “We still share locations, dummy.”

Oh, how you missed that mouth of his.

“And your parents don’t care?”

Donghyuck scoffs. “I’m eighte—no they don’t. They trust you with my life.”

Your retort is cut off when an older guy comes into the room with a few shirts and a pair of jeans, you do your job and walk him to a fitting room.

“Where did Taeyong go?” Donghyuck asks when you’re back.

“Probably went to help out in the front.” You shrug. But on the topic of the brunet, the question that was repeating in your mind earlier resurfaces. “How do you two know each other, anyway?”

“Remember Jeno?” You’ve heard name a few times in the last years but you can hardly put a face to it, and it must show because Donghyuck continues. “The kid with the smile,” he deadpans.

“Oh.” The kid from that soccer game your mom forced you to take Mark and Donghyuck to that kept smiling and blushing whenever you said anything to him. “Aw, how is he?”

“Great.” The red-head waves off. “Anyway, Taeyong’s his older brother. If it wasn’t me and Mark, it was me and Jeno. Tae’s like my big bro.”

Huh. With this new information you wonder if you and Taeyong went to the same middle or high school and never crossed paths since the two of you only lived a neighborhood away from each other back then. What would’ve happened if the two of you officially met sooner? Would you have gotten along back then? Would you have clicked so fast and effortlessly all those years ago like you did last year?

Would you be w—

“Talking about me while I’m gone?”

Taeyong’s voice isn’t loud nor is it harsh, but it still startles you out of your thoughts, and your body jerks in alert. Both males laugh at your reaction, only laughing harder when you pretend to buck up at them.

He takes his place back next to you and hands you a warm, large cup before reaching forward to ruffle the red hair on the younger male’s head. Dumbly, you look down at the cup in your hand, bringing it up to your nose to sniff the content inside through the small horizontal hole in the lid. Jasmine and honey. “How did you even…?” A quick glance with a wink leaves you puzzled, and the warm feeling in your insides has nothing to do with the sip you take.

“Kid.”

“Hm?” Donghyuck asks half-heartedly, eyes still glued to the screen of his phone. He doesn’t look up even after you’ve made your way in front of him, hovering. He just raises an eyebrow in acknowledgment, thumbs flying across his screen.

You kick his shin.

Donghyuck lets out a dramatic sigh before locking his phone and looking up and you with an attitude. “Yes?”

“You wanna eat or keep being gross with Mark?”

The ‘tude is wiped off instantly and he’s now blushing. “W-what are you talking about? He’s just updating me on how Cana— how’d you know I was talking to him?”

You open your mouth to let him know he’s only that attentive and smiles that much when he’s speaking to your younger brother, how it’s been like this for years, but three knocks on your front door cut you off, and the quirk of Donghyuck’s lips confuses you.

“I got us some food since you like to starve people,” he winks as he stands up and lightly pushes you out the way to get the door.

The door opens to reveal Taeyong with bags of fast food in one hand and deadpan expression on his face. You can tell even from the distance you’re at that Taeyong’s trying to keep a straight, almost annoyed face at the younger, but you also see the exact moment his eyes change emotions, a defeated smile pulling his lips up with an eye roll.

The power of Lee Donghyuck, basically.

“You’re lucky you caught me when I was about to pass by,” he grunts when Donghyuck hugs him. You’ve never really seen Donghyuck openly initiate any kind of affection with anyone other than yourself and Mark, then Taeyong’s smile gets wider and wow your heart. Just like any other day, Taeyong’s eyes drift to where you’re standing, and he nods in acknowledgment before beckoning you over. “Here,” he passes the bags to Donghyuck when he lets go. “Go eat. I gotta talk to her real quick.”

The smile on his lips transitions into a thin line when Donghyuck is gone and he flicks the side of your head just hard enough for you to flinch and pout. “How are you gonna say the kid can stay with you but have no food and have him starving all day?” he deadpans, tilting his head when you don’t respond quick enough.

“I forgot I needed to go grocery shopping, dad.” The last couple of days you’ve been snacking on whatever and kind of forgot there was a growing teenage boy (man?) in your apartment now. “I was actually just about to take him out. If I would’ve known he reached out to you, I would’ve told him to ask you to get some real food and not—” Taeyong squints and his tongue pokes the inside of his cheek, challenging you to finish that sentence. “I mean, thanks for the food?” You smile cutely.

“Right. Enjoy your food.”

“Aw you got me food, too?”

His glare is back but it only makes you childishly stick your tongue out at him.

“Anyway, I might swing by later to get him on my way back from Jae’s. So if you don’t have plans, you should come along.”

His phone makes a noise, gaining his attention before he squeezes your shoulder gently in lieu of goodbye, then he leans forward until he’s right by your ear to yell his goodbye to Donghyuck. You flinch and swat at his gut because you know it was his intention to burst your eardrum and Taeyong just laughs as he turns on his heels and walks away.

Donghyuck’s food is halfway done and you’d feel bad if you didn’t know he’s always been a really fast eater.

“So are you coming?”

You shake your head, unraveling your food. It’s date night. You’re meeting up with Johnny at the movie theatre to watch that new scary movie he’s been dying to see. You haven’t had a proper date in weeks when you used to have one every Saturday night and you’re excited because this is what you need. The last time you saw Johnny you weren’t in your right state of mind, not thinking of what you should’ve been. Tonight is going to be about to two of you and your relationship with no outside factors clouding your thoughts. You miss Johnny’s big hand and the heat it transfers to your thigh when watching movies, his fingers tensing and squeezing when there’s a jump scare.

“It’s date night.”

“Date… night?”

His confused tone lifts your eyes away from your fries and onto his equally confused facial expression.

“Yes?”

“You’re still with Johnny?”

You nod, still not understanding his tone.

“Really?”

“What do you mean ‘really?’”

“I don’t know, I thought you and Taeyong were a thing,” he shrugs and goes back to his fries.

Your jaw works slowly as his words echo in your mind. “... what made you think that?”

He shrugs again. “Your interactions, your body language.”

“As in our body language towards each other is more intimate than what friends usually have?”

He snaps and sends finger guns your way. “Exactly. Figured you were together or fucking at the very least.”

The last assumption chokes you. “Donghyuck.”

He just smiles and stuffs the last of his fries into his mouth.

The rest of your meal is silent, your mind running wild with the thoughts of how often you lean into Taeyong’s touch, how often you crave it, and just how obvious you might be if Donghyuck noticed within the span of a couple of days.

With your teeth digging into your bottom lip, you pace in front of your bed, phone in one hand while the other scrubs at your eye in mild frustration to save the base makeup you have on. You’ve gotten dressed for your movie date and you were in the middle of adding a touch of highlighter to your high-points when you heard Donghyuck’s phone ring, the latter answering it with a greeting followed by Taeyong’s name. You felt childish pressing your ear against your closed bedroom door to hear his side of the conversation better. He hummed a few times, then told Taeyong that you already had plans and wouldn’t be joining them, and all of a sudden you wanted to join them.

Well, you haven’t seen Donghyuck in close to a year. You’ve barely spent time with him since he temporarily moved in, having been at work earlier and only saying your greetings with a ruffle of his hair while on your way to your room when you got back in. You were exhausted and needed to fall face first onto your bed asap. You should definitely spend some time with him, and now would definitely be the perfect time to do so. You don’t have to plan anything because you’re sure Taeyong has gotten everything planned out already, and then the latter being there is just a little bonus.

You unlock your phone with your thumb, go to your call log, and tap the third contact from the top.

“Hello?”

“Hey, babe. What are you doing?”

“Trying to decide if I want to wear jeans or joggers tonight,” Johnny chuckles.

“About tonight…” you say after a beat, teeth back in your bottom lip. You hope he hasn’t done his hair already.

“Uh oh. What’s wrong?”

“I was wondering if we could possibly reschedule for next weekend?”

It’s silent on the other line for a few seconds, so you move the phone away from your ear to see if he hung up (which you know he wouldn’t do but there’s a guilty conscious for you) or lost connection.

“Yeah,” Johnny sounds unsure once the phone is back on your ear. “Is there a reason?”

You’re going to break skin if you bite any harder.

“Remember Donghyuck?” He hums. “He just came back in town and I’m letting him crash here for a little. It’s been a while so I wanted to take him out tonight, also as an apology for starving him all day,” you chuckle, voice even and believable to your own ears.

Well, it’s not a complete lie.

The tone of Johnny’s voice changes immediately. “Of course, baby. Don’t sound so guilty. I’m sure Donghyuck really wants to spend time with you after not seeing you for so long.” He laughs softly. You can practically see him waving a dismissive hand in the air. “We can just go Friday or Saturday night.”

A small relieved smile tugs at your mouth as a sigh leaves it. “Thanks for not hating me. I’ll make it up to you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” You can hear the smile in his voice, envisioning an eye roll. “Call me when you get back in, ‘kay?”

“Alright. I love you.”

“I love you, too. I’ll talk to you later.”

He’s so understanding it breaks your heart but you’re doing your best to delude yourself into believing you’re really going to this outing just for Donghyuck.

As soon as you hang up the same three knocks from earlier pound against the wood of your front door, startling you. A glance as your reflection in the mirror connected to your dresser makes you grimace, the sight of your half done face and hair not so pretty. Speed walking to the door that connects your room to the bathroom, you push it open and do the quickest winged liner you’ve done and quickly yet carefully put some mascara on. You put and misplaced strands of hair where they belong and barely remember to grab your jacket before exiting the bathroom using the other door that leads into your hallway. You’re just in time to see Donghyuck slipping his shoes on and Taeyong leaning against the door, stopping in the middle of his sentence when he spots you coming towards them.

“Well don’t you look like a snack.” Taeyong wiggles his eyebrows at you, eyes raking up and down your body. “Hyuck told me you had plans so I’m guessing you’re going out with J—”

“With the two of you? Yep,” you cut him off, giving him a quick smile and diverting your attention from his face to your shoes as you slip them on. Your heart is beating loudly from a combination of the rising guilt you feel from cancelling on Johnny and the guilt you feel from being happy you get to see Taeyong again and spend time with him outside of work today.

He eyes you suspiciously, making eye contact with Donghyuck with a brow arched in confusion. The latter just shrugs.

“So where are we going?”

“To the dessert shop that just opened by my place,” he says unsurely, opening the door. “My car or yours?”

“Can I drive?”

You and Taeyong immediately shut down Donghyuck’s request. His lip curls up in offense, but he gets over it and links his arm with yours as you all make your way down the wooden stairs.

“Try this.”

You bring your fork up to Donghyuck’s mouth, feeding him some of your cake. Taeyong opens his mouth and makes a noise expectedly.

A bit of icing gets on the corner of his mouth at the forkful your feed him, so you swipe at the small glob with your thumb then lick it off.

Donghyuck clears his throat. “What happened to your date?”

“Yeah, what changed?” Taeyong ask, attention back on his plastic fork, licking a clump of icing off of it.

You’re momentarily distracted by the way his pink tongue laps at the icing, but then Donghyuck’s shifting body beside you snap you out of your trance. “Oh,” you wave a dismissive hand. “He’s beat from the long shift he worked. And it worked out perfectly because now I can bond with Hyuck,” you smile, pinching the youngest’s cheek as his face goes from confused to a fake scowl.

“Damn, well I’m glad you could be here with us.” Taeyong smiles, reaching forward to steal more of your cake.

“Me, too,” you nod, biting your lip at the thought of if Taeyong was anticipating your company. When he invited you, was he just doing it to be nice since he was picking Donghyuck up from your place? Or did he genuinely want you to come? You shake your head slightly, knocking the unnecessary thoughts out. You shouldn’t be thinking so hard over an invitation to get dessert with a couple of the closest people to you. It’s not that deep.

You and Taeyong tease Donghyuck and ask questions about how college life is, and when things go quiet and everyone’s doing their own thing for a while on their phones, it’s hard not to stare at the male sitting in front of you as he runs a hand through his hair and slumps in his seat, licking his lips as he focuses on whatever is on his screen. He’s just so effortlessly attractive.

It’s also hard to not notice Donghyuck’s intense gaze on the side of your face.

Donghyuck’s eyes either translate to he’s trying to read you, or that he knows something, and when you raise an eyebrow to silently question him, he just shakes his head before asking Taeyong a question, starting up another conversation.

#taeyong scenario #taeyong scenarios #nct scenario #nct scenarios #back at it again with shitty endings #i hope this version is okay rip

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Dollhouse season two full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (thirteen of thirteen).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

44.96%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Eleven, six of which had a cast of 50%+.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Eighteen. Twelve who appeared in more than one episode, five who appeared in at least half the episodes, and two who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-three. Twelve who appeared in more than one episode, four who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Rubbish. As with the first season, the show suffers seriously for having no moral compass, it indulges in misogynistic violence and voyeuristic sex crimes as a mainstay, and any attempts to critique its own content are marred by hypocrisy and excuses (average rating of 2.76).

General Season Quality:

Also rubbish. While the majority of the cast are doing a fantastic job despite flimsy, problematic material, and there are a bare few episodes that could be considered good, altogether there’s no cohesion to the story, it lurches and fast-tracks and skips over anything that seems like it would have been a good concept to explore, and in the process it manages to lose any semblance of being about something. It’s just an excuse to stretch some acting chops on different kinds of character templates, and even that, it did badly.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

...so. I guess it’s a ‘nevermind, then’ on the exploration of any of the show’s own invoked themes re: personhood et al. I really thought they did more in that arena, but outside of a handful of single scenes sprinkled across the series, they really never did dig in to their existential concepts or anything that could approximate a broader narrative purpose beyond ‘let’s get Eliza Dushku to embody common sexual fantasies’. It’s ok to do some prompting of meta discussions for the audience and then leave them to fill in the blanks with their own musings, but not at the expense of bothering to say anything about your own subject matter. If you don’t have anything to say, then don’t ask people to listen to you. Keep your gross rape fantasies to yourself (or share with your therapist, damn), and leave the storytelling to people with a story to tell.

Everything that was wrong with season one is still entirely intact in season two, they fixed zero of their problems - they’re still fetishising and excusing rape, shamelessly objectifying and brutalising women, steeping the series in misogyny for no discernible reason, failing to achieve a basic moral underpinning to their content, underusing their quality acting assets while over-using their worst ones, and of course - as above - completely ignoring the need for a cohesive purpose to their own story or even just a ground-level sense that they knew what they were doing (or at least what they WANTED to be doing) with the arc of the narrative. Indeed, not only were all of the first season’s flaws intact, but season two even managed to make many of them worse! Off the top of my head, I’m not sure they made a single good character decision in the entire season, but I’m gonna save that conversation for the full series review so that I can properly compare the changes from one season to the next; there are plenty of other sins in season two to keep me busy for now. The lack of a moral anything (compass, backbone, compunction, whatever you want to call it) became a much bigger problem as the show attempted to escalate the scope of conflict with outside forces - largely, the Rossum corporation who runs the Dollhouses in service of their E-vil Plans - despite its own characters having committed all the same atrocities variously and knowingly, and the sketchy characterisation did a poor job of convincing that some magical moral something-or-other had taken hold between the seasons to give these characters new ethical dimensions that aren’t just blind hypocrisy. But, the biggest flaw of the season - relevant to all other issues but most especially to the lack of a central narrative theme or sense of meaning behind it - was the arc of the...’story’ that the season told. It was a Goddamn disaster, kids.

Pro tip: if you happen to, say, make a tv show that performs badly in the ratings in its first season, but you score a second season anyway, and you’re not confident that you’ll ever get a third...don’t try to jam all of the possible plot you imagined for a long-term series down into one season. It’s also probably a good idea to NOT end your first season with an ambitious flash-forward to an apocalyptic future which you are now irrevocably committed to bringing about in your regular narrative in spite of having only thirteen episodes to do it; a problem compounded by the inclusion of ‘flashbacks’ within that flash-forward, depicting events that you have now made canon only to turn around and nullify your own story by changing your mind about how to have it unfold (in the course of insisting on trying to make the whole thing unfold immediately, with plot that should have taken at least half a season to be explicated instead being fast-tracked into the subplot of a single episode). Don’t do that. Especially, don’t do that if you’re gonna ditch any kind of meaningful character arcs or thematic discussions or anything which would give your story a sense of purpose or cohesion or a mission statement of any kind (have I mentioned that yet? It’s mildly important to storytelling). Choosing to roll out a series of rapidly-accelerated plot events with all the nuance removed for streamlining is patently useless - you’ve removed everything that would make those plot events have value. That’s assuming that there were character beats (beats! Not beatings! This show has an excess of the latter; criminally few of the former) or narrative explorations or conceptual deliberations or somesuch in the original plan, anyway, and the first season did not do a great job of suggesting that there were (just...a better job than season two did). At any rate, better that you spend your time well and sadly never get to conclude the story like you wanted, rather than screwing over your own idea trying to just deliver the cliff notes. Cui bono?

Let’s consider what we got this season: thirteen episodes, and the first three are total Imprint of the Week fodder. A certain amount of episodic adventuring is expected, yes, but it’s a good idea to actually inject some useful plot machinations in there at the same time, and the first three episodes were very weak on both the one-off plot and the inclusion of significant long-term detail. The first two episodes are especially bad for being boring, inconsequential, and failing to capitalise on any interest drummed up by the end of the previous season; both also include teensy extra scenes of Senator Perrin pursuing his investigation into the Dollhouse, though neither creates any tension or interest around it, they literally just amount to ‘here is a guy, he’s gathering evidence’. It’s not exactly a thrilling or detailed introduction to the ‘Dollhouse plant in the government’ plot which comes to a head in a two-parter a few episodes later and then never impacts the story ever again. The story has no chance to build before it’s over: it’s introduced, it escalates, it’s nonsense, and then it’s done (the fact that the entire plot turns out illogical in the extreme really, really steps on any attempt at relevance or use). If you’re not gonna try and make the plot thread at least functional, why waste two whole episodes on it? You’ve only got thirteen, and you already wasted the first three!

I say they wasted the first three episodes, but arguably, it’s more than that: episode four was ‘Belonging’, with the unfortunate decision to explain how Sierra came to be in the Dollhouse by expanding on the existing rape narrative with her abuser, Nolan, and while the episode in itself mostly works (in spite of itself, really), it’s not of any long-term importance outside of some character building/expansion, which is not a complete waste of time but, also, is not turned to a particular purpose. We didn’t need to lose an entire episode on this; we could have built and expanded upon character while dealing with some meaningful plot content, instead of indulging that ol’ rape obsession some more. Similar flaws exist for most of the other episodes of the season - though not entirely useless, spending an episode on an unfocused and largely meaningless Alpha visit in ‘A Love Supreme’ or fast-tracking through Victor’s backstory with the overly-ambitious and ultimately irrelevant military tech in ‘Stop-Loss’ is not a good use of the limited time the series had left to tell its story. And then there was the terrible ‘Meet Jane Doe’, which gave us a time-skip and a bunch of rushed plot to do with Echo learning to master the many personalities composing her identity while Topher mocked up a doomsday device out of thin air back at the Dollhouse: the single most excessively stupid example of what should have been at least a half-season’s worth of plot, instead crammed down into a ridiculously contrived subplot in a single episode. If you’re gonna try and tell several season’s worth of plot in thirteen episodes, you gotta COMMIT, man: hard plot, every episode is essential, every one of them advances your central narrative in some significant way even when it appears you’ve just done an episodic plot, it’s all vital to the endgame. Don’t think you’re gonna tell a few years of story in three episodes, and spend the rest of the time on fetish fantasies. Don’t be that stupid.

As I noted when it happened, ‘The Attic’ is the only genuinely good episode of the season, and not least because it’s the only episode that does a passable job of making it seem like the plot has actually been going somewhere, for a reason, and with intention. It’s still very much a too-little-too-late situation, and the episode does all the heavy-lifting on introducing the puzzle pieces to complete the plot at the last minute, rather than having any of those pieces seeded at an earlier point in the series (the way that pre-planned things in a story that is going somewhere for a reason usually are). It gives us a last minute mystery to solve - who is Rossum’s shadowy founder? - though that turns out to be a very ill-advised mystery (for the calibre of the reveal, for the stupid convenience of having a shadowy founder to rail at, and for the obvious pointlessness of pretending that there’s a singular Boss Battle to be had that will magically dissolve the power of the corporation and its various pre-established players (Harding, Ambrose, and now the addition of Clyde 2.0 as well as ‘the founder’)). It also gives us a final mission - to take out Rossum’s mainframe - though that turns out similarly ill-advised in a more low-key way, since ‘we took down their computers’ is a patently idiotic way to ‘win’ (it’s laughable to pretend that any of the characters could be fooled into thinking that blowing up the Tucson facility would be anything more than an inconvenience to a global medical research corporation with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in resources and a trillion opportunities to store information on non-networked computers or on paper or in any of their numerous potential ‘legit’ published scientific proofs, etc, to say nothing of the fact that the physical tech and the people who built and used it are all still there, and yep, so are all those other Rossum higher-ups and probably even the founder himself, waiting on a harddrive to be put back into play). It all makes for an incredibly weak finisher to the ‘main’ plot, and that’s before we pointlessly bounce into the future again to show that, oh yeah, it WAS all meaningless and our characters are fucking morons who made no difference to anything with that explosion-y mainframe bullshit! The potentially-clever game-changer idea of including the flash-forward to the Thoughtpocalypse at the end of season one becomes a mistake now, when it calls for the waste of the finale on concluding a whole wild story development that the show never got a chance to actually develop at all. Eek. This is not how you storytelling, y’all.

Heavy sigh. Honestly, I really, really thought this show would give me more to talk about, because at first glance it looks complex and stocked with conversation starters and potentially polarising content. Upon analysis, however, the complexity is a sham, the show itself starts no conversations, and the content lacks the nuance necessary to create oppositional interpretations. Ironically, it turns out as empty as the dolls are, simplistic, lacking the self-awareness to reflect on itself and the basic comprehension to fathom morality. It has no personality, no drive, and though at times it shows glimmers of understanding that there could be more to its existence than catering to shallow pleasures, ultimately it never focuses well enough to follow that anywhere. Even its transgressions are bland and predictable, worth calling out - as aggressive misogyny and rape fetishisation always is - but not worth picking apart in detail (because - shock horror - it’s not morally complicated and full of shades of grey, it’s just bad and wrong: it’s very simple and easy to follow, Whedon. Get therapy). If the Dollhouse is all about giving people what they need, well, I think I know what Joss Whedon needs: to shut up, and leave the show-creating to someone who hates women less, and knows how to string an idea into an actual story, more.

#Dollhouse #Dollhouse season two #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review

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kabane52 · 6 years

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The Priestly and the Prophetic

If I recall correctly, James Jordan presents King->Priest->Prophet as a sequence of less->more glorious. Given that women participated in the prophetic ministry (e.g. Anna the Prophetess, Joel 2:28), what is your argument that they would be excluded from the less glorious priestly ministry? What do you think the significant difference between priest and prophet are in this case?

Good question. This is a useful opportunity to develop the theology and logic of this triple distinction- so please bear with me!

A short answer would be that it is the Old Testament itself which attests to women prophets (it is Huldah the prophetess who identifies the authenticity of the Book of Deuteronomy) and yet the Old Testament retains an all-male priesthood as well as a normatively male royalty. In both cases the priestly and royal orders in society operate according to regularities and specific principles of succession. The prophet, however, only comes in virtue of a direct call from God. You don’t become a prophet by being the son of a prophet. You can’t be a prophet simply because you are from a specific tribe. God fills you with the Holy Spirit and acts with and through you to carry out His divine will. One of the reasons for this is that priestly and royal orders are part of the regular structure of a civilization that perpetuate its continuity. Those specifically called as prophets, though exist to disrupt that continuity, to speak into the world, shattering and remaking it. Thus the call is directly from God rather than by succession- since succession in its very nature perpetuates a preexisting order. Both priests and kings are spoken of as manifesting the Lord’s marriage to Israel. The bridegroom is called to feed and teach the bride, guarding her from those who would violate her. This is why Adam’s relation to Eve structures St. Paul’s argument for the male episcopate and priesthood in 1 Timothy 2.

This male-female, bridegroom-bride dynamic is part of the structural integrity of the society and is its regular form. The occupants of an office which is defined by its relationship as bridegroom to the Church-Bride must, as a matter of necessity, be male- only men can be husbands.

But let’s dig into this a bit more and take a look at the underlying structure of this threefold development and social structure.

The order is more specifically priest-king-prophet. Nevertheless, keep in mind that this order of development is related to the actual biblical priestly and prophetic ministries without being identified with it of necessity. When one refers to priestly ministry in the context of an order of development, one refers to the period wherein a person or nation is a spiritual child, simply hearing the words of God directly and following them to the precise letter. In the order of anointing, therefore, the oil first falls upon the ear.

The royal order is one of wisdom, where one does not have direct and immediate answers, but must meditate upon the words of God and make creative applications. Having become wise, a person takes action to manage one’s kingdom. This action is very concrete. A king will enforce his will through the magistrate with the right to use the sword. Construction of a city will be implemented with one’s hands. Thus, the oil second falls upon the hand.

The prophetic order is glorification. It is where one, having been filled with the Spirit, is deified and, like God, changes the world by uttering one’s voice. Jesus in His prophetic ministry shatters the old covenant order by His preaching. Samuel’s prophetic ministry smashes the old order and transforms Israel into a kingdom, something new. Moses exercises his prophetic ministry by speaking to Pharaoh and then proclaiming the words of God to Israel.

The Lord Jesus, speaking of the prophetic aspect of man (to be a prophet is to be indwelt by the Spirit), says that the one born of the Spirit “blows where he wishes” so that others cannot go and find him. Jesus in the Gospel of John is the model prophet born of the Spirit, and the Jews repeatedly try to grab and stone Him- but He disappears and slips away. The man born blind can’t find Him. And Ezekiel, having been born of the Spirit, flies around. The prophetic aspect thus involves travel, moving from place to place, as did Elijah, Elisha, and Jonah during their prophetic ministries as the prophetic period of Israel’s history was kicked off. The Spirit goes and dwells with the exiles, so that the Jews are from then on called the “four winds of heaven” witnessing to the Gentiles. The oil of anointing therefore falls third upon the foot, for travel.

Notice that this symbolism is manifested in the priestly anointing. Because these are periods in history but also distinct aspects of the human person. A priest in Israel is principally a priest but also has prophetic and royal aspects. He must teach the word of God and he renders judgments to be enforced by the civil magistrate. The priestly, royal, and prophetic categories are also Trinitarian. Priestly corresponds to the Father, as priesthood signifies obedience as a young son. Royal corresponds to the Son, through whom God rules the world and who is incarnate as ruler of the nations and heir of David. Prophetic corresponds to the Holy Spirit, who energizes in the world to creatively shatter and remake it. I argue that this corresponds on a real level with St. Maximus’ threefold order of salvation, which are purification, illumination, divinization.

As a spiritual child one is prepared for glory in being first cleaned up and purified. Then one is illumined as we habituate a life of grace and learn wisdom thereby. Finally, one is deified or glorified as one enters directly into the glory and presence of God so that one’s whole person is utterly transfigured. Importantly, each successive stage includes the former stages. In being illumined one is also being purified at a higher level. And in being deified one is being purified and illumined at exalted levels. As the three divine persons of the Holy Trinity mutually indwell one another, so also these three stages of transfiguration include and entail one another.

So also for any society. The movement from a confederation of tribes or city-states with a common culture (the priestly period) towards an integrated kingdom perfects the priestly aspect of the society and brings it to a new level. In David’s kingdom the priests are not abolished, but glorified- they are given musical instruments with which to praise God and manifest the unity of the kingdom through song, which is what we are told in 2 Chronicles 5. And in the prophetic age the royal aspect is placed in a new context as it is, in a sense, expanded to incorporate the whole people. It is in the period after the return from Babylon that the nation Israel is called for the first time “Jews”- all returned exiles (this includes, by the way, the northern tribes- Anna is from the tribe of Asher) are called “Judah-ites” which is what Jew means. Cyrus speaks of the returning exiles in 2 Chronicles 36 in terms taken from the covenant with David. All Israelites now participate in a manner in the royal tribe.

So in the Church, how does this function? What are these three “orders”? The priestly order is the apostolically ordained episcopate and priesthood. This operates according to the regular principle of apostolic succession. Jesus Christ wishes to remake and reintegrate the entirety of the human race, integrating all nations, in their beautiful distinctness, into the one Church which glorified her Heavenly Father in many languages. It is not a remnant. The Church is not supposed to be a remnant. It began with the remnant of Israel and God sometimes whittles His people down to a remnant. But the Church’s destiny is to embrace all nations, the entirety of creation. The remnant is the seed for that embrace. The Lord does this in the unfolding of historical time, and His purpose is realized according to the increasing manifestation of eschatological glory in historical time, through the realization of the eschatological Church in the historical Church. This Church is meant to be the source and root of the life of the civilization. And in view of its historical placedness, the order of the Church Catholic has a regular structure and succession by which it is perpetuated in continuity through time.

When those perpetual structures are not in place, society shatters as it falls apart every generation. It used to be that all people were part of specific families which could be traced through time and had ongoing identities. Hence your actions were properly viewed in light of the honor of one’s family through time. You wished to leave an inheritance for your sons and daughters. This is a stabilizing force. Today, by contrast, it is every man for himself. Divorce shatters even the nuclear family, and the person understands himself only in reference to himself- not to his family history or destiny, not in relation to the bonds of obligation with which he was born. Only the truest of true believers can pretend that we are not seeing the debilitating impact of this long corrosion today. So the church has a regular structure perpetuated through apostolic succession. The same is true for the kings, according to the traditional model rather than the ideological dogma of democracy we have been force-fed today.

Each person is an integral part of a web of relations. These relations unfold through both space and time. I discussed the temporal aspect of this above, and the royal family, perpetuated by birth and sonship, must be understood in the spatial aspect of this web. Traditionally, the nuclear family is not separated from its role in the social structure more broadly. Each nuclear family is a node whose head is the father-husband. It is linked in close bonds with a cluster of families with whom it is related- and the family is also linked with other persons and families who are its clients. The patron-client bond links persons together in bonds of mutual benefit and obligation. The “nobility” or “aristocracy”, in view of their wealth and power, have therefore a greater responsibility and are linked to the well-being of the whole civilization in their patronizing of those who are less wealthy.

The royal family is the immediate patron of the aristocracy. But don’t take this as the king being obligated to solely seek the good of the aristocracy. Rather, the patron, in virtue of being the source, in large part, of his client’s well being, has the responsibility to wisely set conditions on his continued patronage. If a man loans you money and each time you cast it away with no wisdom and no care for the debt you owe, the flow of lending will stop, and you may well be required to work off your debt. This is a good thing and it cultivates virtue. Such a structure, when properly operating, will develop the unwise client in wisdom through incentivizing wisdom and developing it through labor where it is lacked. And likewise, the patron is integrally linked to the health of the whole society and to its culture, thereby avoiding the natural tendency of isolated aristocrats towards conflict with the rest of society.

The king is the head of state which means that he manages not just the government (a means by which the headship of the king is concretely manifested in action) but is the ontological head of the nation. He is a living symbol of its distinctive character, culture, and identity. He is the integrative principle giving the whole organism its form and shape. And in diplomatic relations, he is summoned to cultivate constructive relations with other national families, and particularly those which are part of the local cluster of nations (i.e. the nations of Europe form, at a certain level, a pan-European character and cluster of civilizations). In his relations with the aristocracy, he orients them towards a common purpose in the development of the national good. In that wealth naturally carries with it an increase of political power, that his power is independent of private wealth is a check on the excessive power of the aristocracy, thus placing it in its right context and orienting it to the common good.

Thus, the particularity and continuity of offices in a political system serve to perpetuate its structure and preserve its stability and organic development.

In both the priestly and royal aspects of any society, then, they are structured in order to create continuity over time and interrelations in space. This is why there is an absolutely male priesthood and a normatively male political office. The family is the most basic unit of structure and continuity, creating certain relations among persons which are predictable and orderly. Hence these two aspects of any civilization are marked out by their male holders in office- this is not of course to say that females are irrelevant to their quality, no more than the bride is irrelevant to the family! On the contrary, the queen of the kingdom plays an absolutely crucial role in the nature of the royal family, occupying a distinct role in the court. And where there are married priests, their wives are called presbytera. In a certain fashion, they share in their husband’s priestly ministry.

The priestly comes first because it is the structure endowed by God from which civilization flows. The period of the judges is defined by the preeminence of the priesthood, as they are the one truly “national” institution, there being no central political structure. The liturgical life of Israel, with three festivals per year to which men and women from all cross the land would gather at the tabernacle, forges links, bonds and a common identity among the twelve tribes. Crucially, there are certain developments in Joshua, Judges, and Samuel which retard the organic realization of national identity, thereby wounding the capacity of Israel to properly be transfigured into a kingdom- hence the rupture between Israel and Judah. Moreover, the church is the root of civilization as its web of relations, canonically speaking, must be free. By the will of God, the state is not permitted to impose its policy on the churches. As such, in God’s purpose to create a single, gloriously united-in-diversity human family, the foundation of that family must be churches networked together and freely in communion.

The freely willed communion, with every act of humility that practically requires, binds peoples together. Examine how the schism between East and West has very concretely led to political strife. The Serbs and the Croats are one people- except that the two are bitter rivals, the Serbs being Orthodox and the Croats Roman Catholic. That is why the priestly order comes first but continues in perpetuity when the kingdom comes.

The prophetic order, however, is distinct. In the age to come when the creation is fully realized in all of its potency, we will remain who we are in terms of our family relations and our liturgical ministry. Bishops will be resurrected bishops. Deacons will be resurrected deacons. After I am raised from the dead, I remain irrevocably the son of my two parents. These aspects are perpetuated eternally. But there is no permanent prophetic order in the age to come, where the whole Church, being perfectly glorified, is filled with the Spirit and constituted as exalted prophets.

In view of the eschatological nature of the historical Church, the Holy Spirit indwells all baptized Christians. We are all, therefore, prophets of a sense. Joel 2, in prophesying the Day of Pentecost, echoes Numbers 11-12 where Moses spoke of dreaming dreams and seeing visions- and in this context Moses prayed that “all the Lord’s people be prophets.” In my view, as the Church develops and matures into the fullness of the stature of Christ, the exercise of the prophetic gifts entrusted to the Church by the Holy Spirit will become more common. In this process, the Church becomes more eschatological as the prophetic gift is held by all.

So, how does this manifest in the historical and contemporary Church as we have seen it?

Let us consider the two aspects of the Holy Spirit’s magisterial role, as I discussed the other day in my post about tradition under the new covenant. The Holy Spirit exercises His authority in the Church both its 1) hierarchical and 2) charismatic aspects. The bishops have, especially when speaking in Local and Ecumenical Councils, a teaching authority from Christ, exercised through the Holy Spirit. The specific conditions for the exercise of this authority are a matter for further doctrinal development, as we see that in the Seventh Ecumenical Council the Council Fathers were not fully clear as to what constituted a Council as definitive and authoritative. As elegant as the Roman Catholic theory of papal ratification might appear, it does not have the clear witness of history on its side- the Council Fathers appealed to the necessary presence and consent of the patriarchal churches as well as that of the chief Church, the blessed Pope of the Apostolic See, called to “preside in love.” As in the Trinity, there is unity realized in diversity. Primacy in conciliarity. The two are not opposites requiring a middle way, but necessary for each other’s realization.

The way this works out must be discussed in more detail at another time, though I would refer readers to look up my discussion of the teaching of St. Vincent of Lerins on the discernment of the Catholic and Apostolic tradition.

We see the Lord Jesus Christ instituting this authority, promising the gift of the Spirit of Truth who will gather His disciples into one and lead them into all Truth- Christ being the Hypostatic Truth- and then conferring the Spirit of Truth on the Apostles in John 20. This is the gift of apostolic priesthood, Pentecost coming after the Lord ascends. Hence the Apostles and their successors exercise magisterial authority through the Holy Spirit, fulfilling the priestly character of the Church.

But there is another manifestation of the Spirit’s authority in its charismatic aspect. This is why Maximus the Confessor, a mere monk, is an authoritative and definitive witness to the catholic faith of the Church. More broadly, this authority encompasses the Fathers as a whole. Concretely, we see the Church’s charismatic aspect in the phenomenon of God-bearing elders and eldresses, possessing the prayer of the heart and the gift of clairvoyance, teaching their disciples with a teaching that comes from God directly. When these people (whether they are apostolically ordained or not) are gifted in theology as a rational discipline, the Holy Spirit accentuates and glorifies these gifts to produce the Church Fathers who are authoritative witnesses to the theology of the Church. The prophetic and charismatic gifts given to the Church are exercised by men and women as one.

The prophetic ministry in the Church is essential to the Church’s living being, its being preserved from “fossilization”, the perpetuation of dead formalities without participating in God’s work of bringing it from “glory to glory” and unfolding through history.

For while it is possible to be a Bishop with no faith, passing along the formal succession to modernist fools, the joining of the Apostolic ministry of the priesthood to a Church vivified by the Spirit who manifests the Divine Will according to the divine initiative and move, those tendencies be shattered in the operation of God’s will through His deified saints. This is the role that St. Maximus fundamentally played. In a time when the formal hierarchy of the Church, being the perpetuation of the Church in history, failed almost entirely to profess and proclaim that faith intrinsic and essential to her character, it was Maximus, operative in the life of the Holy Spirit, who continued to shout (so much that his tongue was cut out!) and shatter what would otherwise have been a stable descent into heresy.

And that, to summarize what was discussed above, is why the prophetic ministry belongs to women as much as it does to men. The maleness of the priestly and royal offices belongs to the character of these offices as a structuring principle perpetuating the integrity of social organisms through time. The prophetic ministry exists in view of God’s will to constantly make all things new, to pres history in new and unexpected directions, and, insofar as it is necessary, to shatter existing orders. As it has no intrinsic relation to perpetuating an order but to developing and glorifying it according to the sometimes unexpected will of God, its character has no intrinsic relation to maleness or femaleness, whose distinctness exists in relation to these orders- important in themselves but given life when joined to the vivifying activity of the Holy Spirit.

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mtraki · 6 years

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Prompto/Ignis, 8.

“Are you awake?”

“Certainly moresonow.”

Prompto sat up,wincing at the creaking of the mattress before deciding to climb out of the bedaltogether—where he winced at the creaking of the floor.

Noctis slept onregardless, could probably sleep through a behemoth moving around the room,which was part of the reason he shared a bed with the restless Prompto, and sothe blond wasn’t too worried about him. It was the other bed and the couch occupants he might disturb.

Gladio had won theevening’s contest for the bed, and since Lestallum was always sultry warm, even in the small hours of the morning, Ignishad settled for the couch instead of attempting to share. The Shield of the King was a big man and putout a lot of body heat—welcome on cool rainy nights in a tent, less so now. He continued to snore softly, worn out fromthe exertions of the day.

Ignis was sitting more upright, reaching for his glasseswhich had been placed on the coffee table next to his phone and unfolding themto slide them into their usual place, “Trouble sleeping?” was his whisperedinquiry.

“Same old same,” Prompto murmured ruefully, ruffling hishair and gesturing to the slatted door leading out onto the balcony, “Gonna getsome air.”

“With your camera?”

“Uh… yeah. Look oversome stuff. Light shouldn’t botheranyone out there.”

Outside there was a very faint breeze that actually managedto be a few degrees cooler than the heavy heat lingering in the air andradiating off the concrete. Prompto toldhimself it was for that reason Ignishad come to join him after a few minutes of solitude. He had to tell himself these things becauseotherwise his rebellious mind would invent crazy stories that’d tease him withthe idea that maybe Ignis liked him back,and then he’d get his hopes up. Then he’dimmediately feel stupid anddisappointed for jumping to crazy conclusions like a little kid.

The tall, lean figure made a striking silhouette—as always—andPrompto resisted his first instinct, which was to turn and take a photo. Instead he remained leaned over the balconyrailing, tapping through the digital photos he’d taken that day. After a moment of watching the square below, Igniscame to stand beside him.

“May I join you?”

“Sure, I mean there’s plenty of balcony—“

“Pardon, I meant… reviewing your photos…”

“Oh.” The blond felt something in his chest—heart? Lungs?—give a jolt before dropping downaround his knees to knock around there, racing fast, kicking his stomach intoknots on the way.

The silence lingered, too long and heavy with awkwardness.

“… I didn’t mean to—“

“—No, it’s… It’s cool. Yeah. Sure.” Prompto shoved thecamera into his gloved hands, glad it was dark enough that the sharp-eyedAdvisor wouldn’t be able to see him blushing.

Ignis said nothing, but adopted the blond’s earlier posture—thoughsomewhat more straight-backed and poised, forcing Prompto to resist the urge todig out his phone and take a photo—andconsidered the photo currently on the screen before giving a side-glance in theglow gleaming off his glasses.

Prompto could read the silent question in the arched brow,so he hesitantly moved to stand closer beside him, shoving his hands in his hippockets to look through the photos withIgnis like had been originally proposed. He was only slightly more comfortable looking over Ignis’s shoulder thanhe would have been with Ignis looking over his. Ignis’s hands were steady, and Prompto’swould have been shaking with nerves and…

Worse than nerves.

This silence was somewhat more comfortable, too, than theprevious one had been. Ignis went throughthe photos swiftly, but Prompto could see his eyes move around the screen andrecognized that particular pinching at the corner of his lips—it was the sameone he wore when reading through his phone emails with mind-meltingswiftness. Ignis was taking in all thedetails, and he could do it remarkably quickly, which Prompto found simplyincredible. A lot of things about Igniswere incredible.

“This one.” And the camera was tilted more for hisview. It was the photo he’d taken theother day of a dualhorn tossing its head, pivoting to turn and charge at them.

Swallowing, Prompto managed to stammer, “Wh-what about it?”

“What is the significance of this shot?”

It wasn’t very well-framed—he’d been in a hurry taking it,after all, blood thundering with nervous energy like always before a fight—butPrompto didn’t think that was what Ignis was commenting on. Not with the gleam of intent investigation inhis eyes. Prompto resisted the urge toshrivel up under that look.

“Uh… It’s kind of… dumb?”

“The significance of this shot is that… it ‘is kind of dumb’…?”

“No… I mean the significance—the reason is kind of dumb… You sure you want to know?”

Ignis blinked, “It is why I asked.”

Sighing, Prompto looked out into the square, at thefountain, “… I was thinking ‘I wish this moment could last forever’. So… I took the photo. So it would.”

Ignis was staring at him, then said in a voice as empty ofemotion as humanly possible, effectively conveying all his incredulity, “Youwanted this moment to last forever…”

“Yeah.”

“This moment.”

Prompto shifted uneasily, “Yeah. The moment beforeeverything goes to hell? The last bit of…I don’t know… calm before the fight? Like… if it lasted forever then we wouldn’t have to fight. I toldyou it was dumb!”

Ignis made a low, nasally sound, “You keep saying that as ifexpecting me to agree. I assure you, I’mnot going to. It’s an interestingperspective.”

“Huh?”

Shrugging, the taller man clicked to the next photo again,and then the next, “You always have the most interesting perspective, Prompto.”

The blond knew people used ‘interesting’ to mean weird. A lot of people did. He did not think Ignis was one of them. His hands darted forward, turning the cameraaround in the gloved hands and pressing the manual shutter, blinking in theflash. Ignis was startled, but made nonoise.

Until his eyes met Prompto’s again and he laughed.

Prompto almost took anotherphoto of him.

I wish this momentcould last forever…

#asks answered #pairing and a number #promnis #ffxv ignis #ffxv prompto #they're kind of cute #prowlingthunder

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seventyfiveapples · 6 years

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In Transit - Chapter 6

Previous Chapters: ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE

Or: The whole enchilada on AO3

Summary: When Officers Jakoby and Ward are hand-picked by the Magic Task Force to transport a dangerous convicted murderer, they must stay a few steps ahead as various enemies, forces of magic, and mistakes from the past complicate their path.

Notes: This was one of my favorite chapters to write, so I hope people like it. If there is anyone following along with this story, I’d love to hear if there are any questions, etc. (the flashbacks: are they confusing? etc.) Next chapter shall contain smut so get ready...

As Nick drove down the highway, Leigh kept trying to loosen her bracelet without anyone noticing. Agent Kandomere just stared out the window. He was trying to think through the call he’d have to make to his agency once they arrived at the safe house. This really wasn’t going as planned.

After a while, he stole a glance at the orc in the driver’s seat, who seemed to be frowning and gripping the wheel a bit too tightly as he drove.

“Something on your mind, Officer?”

Nick nearly jumped. The elf hadn’t spoken since they’d gotten in the car twenty minutes ago.

“Yes, actually. A lot is on my mind.”

“Is any of it relevant to me or this mission?”

“Agent Kandomere,” Nick started, lowering his voice so that Leigh couldn’t hear, “I don’t believe that this prisoner is guilty.”

“Ah.”

“She doesn’t deserve to be…” He seemed to have a hard time finishing his sentence. “executed for what happened back in L.A. It was an accident.”

“That’s really not your call, Officer. A jury of her peers felt otherwise.”

“I realize that. But if she’s in MTF custody now, can’t you-”

“I can’t. Whatever you are trying to ask me, I can’t. Listen, are you sure you aren’t a bit biased here, because of your history?”

Nick slowly turned to face the elf. He felt color rise in his cheeks. “You… knew about that?”

“Of course. We did our homework. We’ve been following her for years. I picked you two for this mission because of your discretion and professionalism with the wand incident, and because of that same professionalism, I thought you’d be able to set certain things aside. If this was the wrong call, well, it’s a little late now. Was this a mistake?” The agent’s tone made it clear that there was no more room for discussion. Nick missed Daryl: at least when his partner was in a mood, he was funny.

“No.” Nick told him through gritted teeth.

“But… you’re right,” Kandomere continued, speaking as quietly as he could. “She is innocent. That obnoxious elf she studied with - Chad - was recruited by the Inferni to turn Leigh to their cause. I don’t know exactly what happened, but he’s the one who killed all of those people on the bus. He made it look like it was her, like she was unable to control her power. He wanted to isolate her, inflame public fear of magic, and get her to lose confidence in her own abilities. That way, she’d have nowhere to turn but him and the Inferni” He shrugged. “For the most part, it worked.”

Nick was speechless. Not only was she truly innocent, she’d been framed, and the MTF apparently knew about everything.

“So… if you knew, why didn’t you testify, help during her trial?”

“Because eventually, she’s going to lead us straight to the Inferni. Right now, they are going to keep coming after her until we get her to a secure facility, but after that, we have options. Sentences can be commuted. But again, that’s down the road.” He glanced at her through the rear view mirror. “She’s very powerful. Even more than most Brights. They’re going to keep coming for her. By the way,” the agent concluded, unfolding a newspaper to read, “she was never even tempted by anything the Inferni - or Chad - promised. The only thing that worked on her was manipulating the people around her.”

Nick grimaced. It was hard to tell if the agent had meant that as a dig, but Nick felt it as one. He drove on in silence.

[TWO YEARS EARLIER]

Leigh adjusted her grip on the wand. It still vibrated in a way that she doubted she could fully control. Chad stood behind her, brandishing his own wand.

“That’s it, you’re so close. Just-” He breathed in and out loudly, “Just remember to breathe when you say the spell words.”

She tried as he said, but she had no confidence in her magic. The first time she’d lifted a chair at school it had flown through the roof, causing significant enough damage that class was held outside for a few weeks.. After that, she couldn’t get the chair to levitate more than an inch. Her powers seemed to be all or nothing.

She tried to put that all out of her head and stay in the moment. Slowly, the chair lifted off the floor and rose… and kept rising… until it hit the ceiling.

“It didn’t fly through the roof, oh my gods. It’s working,” she whispered with her eyes fixed on the chair.

“Breathe, Leigh. Keep your focus on the spell.”

As she did, she heard Nick’s keys in the front door. He came in, saw the chair on the ceiling, and froze. He knew her magic had been a bit unpredictable, and he didn’t want to distract her.

It was too late.

“Hi, baby! Look, I- oh crap!” When she started talking to him, the chair had begun to rotate slowly. It was now picking up speed, moving faster and faster. She used the spell words again, but she couldn’t stop it.

“Okay, I’ve got you,” said Chad, rushing up behind Leigh and wrapping his hands around hers. Slowly the chair slowed its rotation and sank back to the floor. From behind Leigh, Chad made eye contact with Nick and winked. “Us Brights have to stick together, don’t we?”

Nick glowered at him from the doorway.

“Thank you, Chad,” she told him. “Ugh, we worked hard today- I’m wiped out! I’m gonna grab some water. You guys want any?” The guys shook their heads no and Leigh went to the kitchen.

“I thought you were going to wrap up early today,” said Nick in a chilly tone.

“We were but, well, things were going well. We lost track of time. You know Leigh when she gets excited about something.”

“Yes,” Nick said, stepping closer to the elf without breaking eye contact. “I do know Leigh.”

“What’s wrong?” Chad said, feigning confusion. ‘You’re not jealous, are you? I thought your relationship was rock solid.” He finished with a smirk.

“Our relationship,” Nick growled, “is none of your business. And I think it’s time for you to leave. Magic practice is over. Why don’t you gather your things and get out of here?”

“Nick!” yelled Leigh from the doorway. “Chad, I’m sorry, he didn’t mean-”

“Nah, it’s fine Leigh. I was leaving anyway. See you in class tomorrow.” He grabbed a ratty backpack and headed out the door. Once he was out of earshot, she whipped around and glared at Nick.

“Leigh-”

“I don’t want to hear it, Nick! He came here to help me, on his own time. You’re always awful to him.”

“Leigh, he’s not who you think he is. He’s lying to you. He has some whole plan that includes getting you injured. I told you what he said at your party last month.”

“You did, Nick, and it didn’t make any sense. You must have heard wrong. If he wants to hurt me, why would he go out of his way to help me with my magic?”

“Please just listen-”

“You know what? I’m done listening. It’s always the same shit. I’m going out for a while. Don’t wait up.” The door slammed and Nick just stared, feeling helpless.

She would never believe him. That hurt. Worse, there were people around her who meant her harm… and he didn’t know how to protect her.

[present day]

Per Agent Kandomere’s directions, Nick pulled down a narrow gravel road that had forked off from a pitted asphalt one. He was about to ask if the elf was sure they were heading in the right direction, when around a corner, a large rustic farmhouse came into view. It would have been almost a postcard if it hadn’t been enclosed by an eight-foot barbed wire fence and an imposing mechanical gate.

“Cozy,” remarked Leigh to herself, forgetting that both elves and orcs had much stronger hearing than humans. Nick snickered a little.

“It doesn’t have to be cozy,” replied Kandomere. “It has to be secure. And it is.”

“Remind me about this place if I ever need somewhere to churn some really top secret butter,” Leigh said.

This safehouse, the elf explained, was created as a magic “dead zone,” and was used in various ways by the MTF: for trainings, as a remote office, a venue for high-level meetings. It was one of the most secure facilities owned by the MTF. Kandomere was glad it had been available.

“From here, we’ve only got a six-hour drive tomorrow to the MTF prison facility.”

Leigh fell silent. While they were driving, it felt so far in the future, but now her reality was catching up to her. She felt a heavy weight settle in her gut.

---

The house was tucked away from view faced some hills dotted with scraggly desert trees. After they’d settled in, Nick walked out to the house’s front porch and sat on a wide cushioned bench. After the past two days, his head was spinning and he welcomed the quiet. He wondered what Leigh was feeling. He wondered how he would keep his promise to her. He wondered if he’d made a mistake in their relationship, and how things might be different today if he’d done things another way back then.

Back then. He found himself going back to those memories over and over… He wondered if she was starting to feel the same things he was.

“Hey, tomatoes.” He was so lost in thought that he hadn’t even heard Leigh join him on the porch. The night was a little chilly and she stood wrapped in a fluffy blanket. He startled a little at her voice. “Can I join you?” He nodded and patted the bench next to him.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m tired. Scared. Kinda sad. I’m kind of enjoying being able to stretch my arms, though.” Secure inside the fence’s perimeter, Agent Kandomere had given clearance for her to remove her handcuffs. “And I’m really glad you’re here.” Nick wasn’t sure what to say to that. He stretched one arm along the back of the bench.

“Come here, Leigh,” he said softly. She scooted a little closer to him and leaned into his chest. He let his arm drop down from the back of the bench, pulling her into an embrace. The sturdy shape of him was instantly familiar. How many times had they sat this way when they were together? She closed her eyes and breathed him in. For the briefest moment, everything felt just like it had then.

“Nick- I want to tell you how sorry I am. I mean, about… us. Before. You tried to warn me about Chad so many times, and I just… I never heard you. But you were right. About everything.”

“I wanted to say the same thing. I’m sorry, Leigh. I clearly went about things the wrong way back then. I was trying to help but I just pushed you away. I’m so sorry.”

Leigh took the blanket she was wearing and draped it over both of them before relaxing back into him. She drew her legs up beside her and draped her arm across his waist.

“I really loved you, Nick. I loved you so much.”

He didn’t know what to do in that moment but be there for her, but for whatever it was worth, he was ready to do that. He felt her body relax and her muscles go slack against him.

Just as he was certain she was asleep, he craned his neck down to kiss the top of her head, whispering:

“I never stopped.”

---

“Gods dammit!” Chad yelled. He’d lost the signal again. Sarah rolled her eyes. This guy was an idiot and yet somehow her fate was tied to his.

“Pull over. You’re not going to crash this car with me in it.” she told him.

“They went down a small road - here - and then nothing. I think something’s blocking her signal again.”

“You’re sure it’s this road?” She pointed on the map.

“I’m sure.”

“Well, that’s no problem. It’s a dead end- see? We know this isn’t their final destination. We’ll just go down the road until the last place you saw the signal… and wait.”

Next chapter: https://seventyfiveapples.tumblr.com/post/174613881520/in-transit-chapter-7

tags: @itshidingthere

#bright movie #bright fanfiction #nick jakoby #nick jakoby fanfiction #nick jakoby x oc #daryl ward #kandomere #orc #orcs #elves

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marta-bee · 6 years

Text

More Infinity War Blathering: On Death and Stuff

(Cross-posted from LJ.)

Let’s talk some more about Infinity Wars. I mentioned earlier tonight at Tumblr I had Theories with a capital T, revolving around the concept of Chekhov’s gun, which just means you don’t put a revolver on the table in the first act unless you mean on using it in the fifth.

Before I go further, the usual warning: spoilers.

I’m not the first person who watched this movie and noted more than a few plot holes. In my first-flush reaction I focused on perceived points of departures from how favorite characters were built up in earlier films (another warning: I am a film-only fan and am approaching them without much if any reference to the comics). M’Baku, for instance, who I felt became “brother” with T’Challa a little too quickly; or Peter Parker’s embracing being part of the Avengers. But what really struck me this time made very little sense but were set up very particularly and precisely in that non-sense. These don’t add up, but it’s not because the film-runners are being careless.

Starting with the opening scene, which incidentally seemed much better suited to a DCU than a Marvel movie, it’s just so dark. (It helped me enjoy the movie a lot more this second time, that I knew it was coming so wasn’t thrown for a loop. It’s also very out of character that Heimdall would open the Bifrost to save the Hulk, of all people. He’s so defined by his devotion not just to Asgard and Asgardians, but to the rightful sons of Odin in particular. Well, there’s two of them very much in need of rescue. The only conclusion I can draw is that Banner is in danger in a way the other people aren’t. Or perhaps -- because that still doesn’t explain why Heimdall would care about Banner in the face of so much Asgardian loss -- Hulk’s survival is crucial to those refugees’ salvation in a way that’s not immediately clear. Understandable, really, given the dark tone: hope is not an emotion easily accessible in the moment.

And where does Heimdall send Banner? Literally crashing into the entry way of the Sanctum Sanctorum. Remember, Heimdall is defined by his sightedness. He’s supposed to see everything that happens in all the realms, which if you know much about temporal mechanics seems rather similar to being able to see into the future, or perhaps even multiple alternate futures. And he sends him right into the lap of the only Marvel characters we’ve come across who’s even more sighted than Heimdall.

Let me make a brief digression into my other pet theory. I’ll be upfront in y biases: I love Loki. I hate the thought he’s permanently dead. But if we’re looking at things that are made oddly explicit -- things that only really need to be clear if that necessity is significant, plot-wise -- consider a few facts:

Asgardians can fake their death quite effectively -- Heimdall revealed he was alive when he summoned the Bifrost.

Asgardians can survive without breathable atmosphere (only way Thor can survive until the Guardians’ arrival), which also suggests the possibility they can survive without breath full-stop.

Loki is a trickster-god. I mean, obviously, but he makes a point of emphasizing that fact with a man whose trust he’s trying to preserve.

Loki is also Odin’s son and Thor’s loyal brother (as loyal as he’s capable of), he chokes up over that fact. He chooses Thor’s life over the tesseract, which he was so captivated by.

All of which suggests to me that, first, Loki probably could survive, and second, his attempt to get close to Thanos is shrouded in trickery. I don’t think Loki actually intended to die or thought he would because for all his growth since Avengers I still don’t see him as the self-sacrificing sort.

As I said, I have a soft spot for Loki and I fully admit this could be me deluding myself. But it gives me hope, and as I think about it, it does have a kind of clever logic to it that I’d like to see play out.

Speaking of self-sacrifice, there’s another time we see someone summon an infinity stone out of thin air and offer it up to save his friends: Doctor Strange with the time-stone. Why, especially after saying specifically if he had to sacrifice Peter or Tony(and we can presume the Guardians wouldn’t get a free pass) to save the stone he’d do it. The cuddly crowd-pleasing read of that scene is Strange has changed his ways, he now realizes it’s wrong to sacrifice people to fulfill his oath/purpose or save the stone. But I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here. He knows they can’t fight Thanos and win. Going toward him or fleeing him, Thanos will find the stones. The story about Gamora only shows how driven he is, and how skilled.

Let’s step back a moment and ask: why is Strange so devoted to protecting the time-stone. It predates Thanos and the practical good of keeping the gauntlet incomplete. Sure, he’d prefer half the universe’s population not die, but I think at a more basic level, he recognizes the danger in changing time. That’s what the time-stone lets you do. And that’s his motivation: not getting to the best possible outcome in this timeline, but preventing cosmos-destroying consequences of manipulating time into a fundamental contradiction.

Thanos is uneducated on this point, which I think makes him very vulnerable. He can clearly sense when a stone isn’t real, and he’s already suspicious Strange is trying to fool him. He can’t just conjure up a fake. But are we really so sure Thanos would know if the stone had been altered, not enough to keep it from completing the gauntlet, but perhaps not giving him control over the full range of time.

Let’s work with a bit of a hypothesis here. Doctor Strange, master of time, in his showdown with Thanos where he creates all those emanations of himself, isn’t actually just projecting trickery; he’s calling multiple versions of himself from multiple timelines to fight against Thanos. So when Thanos forces Strange back into “alignment,” he’s not identifying the “real” Strange so much as committing himself to a single timeline. Then when he takes the time-stone he’s actually operating within a much more constrained field of reality (for lack of a better term),and he’s just too blinded to see it. Then when Thanos uses the time-stone to manipulate time in Wakanda, he thinks he’s controlling the only timeline that will unfold, but it’s actually only applying to a certain subset of reality.

It’s late, and I’m not well enough versed in theories of time to dig into this. But think of it this way. There are multiple possible realities we could have, different timelines like different lanes going down the same road. Strange essentially creates a crisis point in the time continuum by bringing all of his different selves together, and Thanos forces them back into one reality -- maybe the one he started in, maybe not, but the important point is when he tries to manipulate time, he only has control over a portion of them and he’s too unlearned to realize that. So maybe there are a thousand lanes on this road, and once he’s committed himself to a fraction of the timelines that are really possible, he may be able to choose which of ten different lanes the universe will proceed along; but he’s clueless to the fact he’s only choosing between those ten lanes, and the other 990 are proceeding without his notice.

At its most basic, this might mean Thanos thinks he’s manipulating time and mastering it, but in reality there’s this whole realm of possibility he’s not touching, not controlling, because he’s thinking (wrongly) everything is already under his own power. So when Thanos manipulates time to prevent Wanda from destroying the mind-stone, he’s convinced that means in actuality she can’t destroy it, that he’s handled that possibility, but he’s really being fooled.

Because when people of unknown loyalty summon infinity stones out of thin air,there’s usually some trickery involved. Also a plan to survive.

@vulgarweed pointed out (and I agree) that “we’re pretty much flat out told that Dr Strange gave Thanos the time stone because of a future he had seen.” Right -- he saw the one future where Thanos is defeated, which means he knows what necessarily has to happen to defeat him. I don’t see any possible way to keep Thanos from taking the stone, once they reach endgame, so that future would have to keep Thanos from using the time-stone or some of the other stones (but time-stone is the one Strange has experience with) in as disastrous as a way as he might want to.

Giving Thanos the time-stone, letting him think he’s using It properly but really constraining his field of operation is a pretty effective way to delay if not flat-out defeat him. To pull it off, Strange has to trick him into thinking he actually did beat him and now has the correct stone. All the drama with Tony accomplishes that pretty neatly, particularly if Thanos is making the same mistake Ebony Maw did in assuming Strange and Tony were actually close. So Strange really is sacrificing Peter to save the time-stone, or at least to protect the universe from its misuse. He can’t possess it, which means he damn well better make sure whoever does possess it doesn’t end up blowing up the (or all the) timelines once they take it.

That’s loyalty to his stated mission, I think, but it has the added bonus that once Thanos starts manipulating time (which he does before he completes and uses the gauntlet), getting killed doesn’t preclude other timelines where you’re not dead. After all, remember in the Marvel universe(s), no one really stays dead except Uncle Ben.

One last thing: I find it really interesting that Eitri (the giant dwarf smith) tells us his forge is capable of reopening the Bifrost. If I’m right and the Bifrost is a way not just of moving between space in the same timeline, but between different timelines/realities, that could be a really cool way to undo some of Thanos’s damage.

#marvel #meta #infinity wars #loki #doctor strange #spoilers #my meta

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meier-zbinden · 4 years

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Labyrinth of Virtue

“Does this elegance serve a purpose beyond itself?[1] Beauty cannot be its sole purpose. [2] Every form has its practical purpose.”[3]

“No one knows for sure, although we may safely attribute these structures to inheritance. [4] She had given the simple explanation that she "did not believe in the institution of private inheritance.[5] Gone is the incentive to pass on property in the form of an inheritance to offspring of marriage—the purpose for which the male dominated institution of monogamy was ultimately created, and without which there is no more reason for the continuation of [6] an internal heritage. It’s my heritage.[7] But it shall be an external heritage, not an internal one.[8] A more democratic and egalitarian form of legitimacy. [9] Therefore my inheritance will be shared with any who are worthy."

“Utilizing the concept of earthly fame in order to honour a specific figure or family. [10] I guess the most amazing philanthropists are people who are actually making a significant sacrifice. [11] But for what purpose?[12]”

“Its purpose is not to create a false belief but to undermine established beliefs and convictions.[13] Its driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is therefore exchange value.[14] Though inheritance used to be the most widely criticized source of inequality, it is today probably no longer so. [15] On that day she proclaimed:”What is the devil’s treasure? [16] You may ask: What have I done to deserve such a gift? [17] I do not deserve it. [18] I do believe that we make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering. [19] Compassion is the greatest virtue.[20] But not just anyone will be granted my patronage. Boldness and tenacity attain the most difficult goals.[21] There is no problem so difficult that study and persistence cannot overcome it. [22] By effort man's ingenuity learned to conquer all. [23] The different degrees of hardship endured, and of ingenuity exercised, must be taken into account. [24] Both equally deserve applause if successful.[25]” After that she became ethereal and vanished, reappearing only to men of great virtue. [26]”

“What do you think the inside is like?”

“The overseer sleeps near the main entrance, the labourers in the places that are close to their duties. [27]“

“You’ve been inside?” [28]

“Yes. First I entered a singular corridor. There was no one in the corridor.[29] Shortly, The corridor took a turn and became dark.[30] Sometimes I heard the sound of passing cars, but they were always in the next corridor, and however fast I rushed the corridors were always empty. [31] You see, there are two types of skin, the inner and the outer.[32] The outer skin is a labyrinth. The labyrinth raises its walls, digs its tunnels, lays down its corridors.[33] It is monodromic and unicursal, universal, and does not turn back on itself. [34] If the unicursal labyrinth were to be “unrolled,” we would find we had a single thread in our hands—the thread of Ariadne which the legend presents as the means of extricating oneself from the labyrinth, whereas in fact all it is is the labyrinth itself. [35] A terrestrial labyrinth, it is also a spiritual labyrinth. [36] It serves as an architecture metaphor for serene self meditation: the primal intersection of sky, earth, water, and human limitation. [37] The Labyrinth cannot be dominated.[38]

After making it through the labyrinth I reached a dining hall of all things. Into this Hall I entered through a handsome Vestibule, fronting to the South, from which I passed into another smaller Vestibule or Lobby, and so into the great Hall. [39] The Dining Hall was turned towards the East, to the end, I assume, that being covered from the great force the Sun hath when it is near Setting, it may be cooler about the time it is to be made use of. [40] It is difficult to imagine a more picturesque spot.[41] On the pavement of the dining hall is a labyrinth, indicated by the arrangement of black and white stones which compose it. [42] It is said to be a league, measured along all its folds; a countryman applied to me to know if this was true.[43] Sadly i had not measured it.

From the dining hall several corridors led further in, unfolding into more Labyrinths. In short, both exterior and interior are interior to the stratum.[44]”

“Are they differentiated only by their function or use?”[45]

“I’m not sure, I investigated further but soon found myself trapped in a great labyrinth where I had to ponder how far [46] I could go on. How was I to find my bearings in that black labyrinth? [47] I tried learning the proper pathway through the labyrinth to some food supply,[48] back to the dining hall, but I lost my way by the twists and turns of the labyrinth.[49] I do not know how long I wandered but when I woke up I was back outside the entrance and no pleading would persuade them to let me back in.

As for what’s further inside, at the end of the labyrinth or labyrinths, there are rumors. There is, too, a very general rumor, which many have verified by their own experience, or which trustworthy persons who have heard the experience of others corroborate, that [50] at a small square there is a fountain centered in a plot of lawn.[51] the plants are green and have probably never felt drought. [52] They say the water shines like the light of a thunderbolt and, if you put in it a salted fish, the fish would return to life and dart off, a sign that this is the fountain of eternal youth.[53] Though doubtful, one thing however is for sure, one can always drink from the fountain of youth, plentiful and irreversible, its level never goes down. [54]

Although, the biggest mystery, the one most speculated about, still remains unsolved. What is at the center of the labyrinth? As soon as it was built the Mystery began. [55] No matter how many tried, they did not penetrate.[56] The labyrinth will always evade full apprehension, will always hold in its depths inexhaustible mystery.[57] Down there infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.[58] In some circles, the maze is rumored to be the sum of a man’s life. At its center lies a man who has been killed over and over—only to come back to life. To keep out his oppressors, he built the maze.[59]”

“Thank you.”

“I neither want any thanks, nor merit any.”[60]

[1] Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture Vol 2

[2],[3] Frankl, The Gothic

[4] Darwin, On the Origin of Species

[5],[20],[56] Rand, The Fountainhead

[6] Teige, The Minimum Dwelling

[7],[8],[12],[28],[31],[48],[51],[52] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

[9] Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

[10] Whitehead, Castles of the Mind

[11],[19] Bill Gates

[13],[35] Eco, From the Tree to the Labyrinth

[14] Marx, Capital Volume One

[15] Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

[16],[29],[30],[47] Hugo, Les Miserables

[17] Borges, Collected Fictions

[18] Austen, Pride And Prejudice

[21],[25] Harrison Wood Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648 1815

[22] Lovejoy Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity

[23] Holt, Literary Sources of Art History

[24] Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

[26] Barber, A Companion To World Mythology

[27] Williams, Daniele Barbaros Vitruvius of 1567

[32] Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books 1988

[33],[49],[54] Serres, The Five Senses

[34] Serres, The Birth of Physics

[36] Eco, The Name of the Rose

[37] Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory

[38] Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968

[39] Alberti, 10 books of architecture 1755

[40] Perrault, An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius 1692

[41] Humboldt, Equinoctial Regions of America

[42],[43] Woods, Letters of an Architect from France Italy and Greece 1

[44] Deleuze Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

[45] Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy

[46],[58] Mallgrave, Architectural Theory

[50] Augustine, The City of God

[53] Eco, Baudolino

[55] Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris

[57] Braidotti Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary

[59] Westworld

[60] Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

#text #meteopowerhs

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eris0330 · 7 years

Text

Chrysanthemum

☽Pairing☾ ; Hoseok!Demi-God | Reader

☽Genre☾ ; Angst | Fluff

☽Word Count☾ ; 3.9k

☽Summary☾ ; Years of repairing your heart after Hoseok’s leave to Heaven, you are given a second chance after picking up the famous White Chrysanthemums. Met with your lost lover and his companion, they bring you news that will change everything.

☽Notes☾ ; Sequel to Myosotis.

“Y/N! Good to see you again, the same as usual?” Opening the door to the neighbourhood flower boutique, a familiar lady with curly black hair and a brightening smile fondly raised her arms seeing your face appear. Recognising the obvious scent of diverse types of beautiful flowers and plants, assembled in the areas of the small store.

“Yeah, the others have had their full time of being loved” You chuckled, walking up front to the desk where the lady handed you another bouquet of White Chrysanthemums. Your nose digging into the pure colour and scent dragging you to heavens above, giving her the paid receipt of money. “-Thank you, I can’t imagine what my house would be like without these”

“We got a lot of those in store, especially for you. No one else had come as a regular, always wanting the same. I’ll make sure there are always some left~” The lady chimed, giving you the smile you wished were only for your eyes. But you knew better, walking out of the store after taken care of the day’s list.

Walking by the broken pavement, as to be seen with hurricane of people walking by with their outfits from different offices around town. It was the type of the day that they would finally get to come home, and embrace the free time that was in store for them. The breezy air of any autumn day and the Halloween decorations come to display in the window’s store. You were reminded by the time, you spent with the most perfect man in the world. His glorious smile, hair and that dammed contagious laugh that only brought you joy. The symbolic of his love and Myosotis ring glistering at the sunlight, was enough to send you back in time. To when he embraced and loved, only you. The night he disappeared out of your sight, was foggy as how that went. Where he went, why he left, was nothing more than unanswered questions. You knew after waking up that late afternoon, that he used his powers. A forbidden promise, that you were supposed to be angry and upset about, but you couldn’t. You missed him, so god damn much. Every day, going by with a glimpse of his words of confession.

“Hoseok…?” You mumbled in surprise arriving at your still standing house by the empty quiet street, watching the man who poured his heart out before leaving you in vain. His facial features glowing as you remembered, while the smile grew larger at the sight of your form coming closer. Steady and quiet steps, with your hands shaking at the feel of nostalgia.

“Y/N…” The bouquet of flowers falling to the floor, as you embraced his broad chest. Your nose digging into the crook of his neck, feeling the joy overflow your body. He was there, real as ever.

“I missed you so much…” You whispered into his skin, letting your tears fall on his warm shoulder. His arms finding their home around your waist, clutching harder to finally have found you. “I missed you too… so fucking much…” Time disappeared being in his arms once more, letting your heart connect as if it was the first time.

“You held your promise Y/N… you didn’t forget me…” He spoke into your temples, planting the kisses of love and remorse into the skin. “How could I? Where did you go? Why did you-?” Your words interrupted by the soft warm bliss of his kiss, that sent just the right electricity through your body. For once, in years you felt whole again. You couldn’t help, but melt into it like a sweltering summer day, watching his eyes glow brighter.

“You have a lot of questions… but I think it’s best to sit inside to talk about that, yeah?” He suggested, planting his last peppering before taking your hand in his. The flowers in the other, walking together inside the familiar living room.

“Mommy!” A tiny voice in the distance coming from the lonely pink room, as she speeded her way in to your arms. Another silhouette of a man coming after, with his golden hair framing the sharp features.

“Hey baby! How’s your day been?” You questioned, taking her up in your arms. Her mahogany brown silky hair swaying to the side, and the white sweater dress framing her feminine style. “Chim has been so fun to play with, he promised to be my prince when I grow older” She spoke ecstatically, while the mentioned man came to view.

“Y/N you’re home! I was thinking we- Who’s this?” Jimin spoke with his smile faltering at the sight of Hoseok by your side, frozen at the unfamiliar face.

“An old friend, Jimin. Don’t worry about it.” You spoke with a tiny smile, glancing back and forth between the two men. “Alright. Well my little princess, your prince has some urgent matters to take care of. Protect your mother while I’m gone, okay?” Jimin responded, bringing back his significant smile and warm cheeks. The little girl in your arms, held out her pinkie and nodded with her head filled with delight.

“I promise!” She chimed, as Jimin folded his own little pinkie with hers. Another nod, before letting go and passing by your shoulder, giving you the eyes that you knew so well. “Thanks for keeping an eye out for her, it means a lot” You commented, as you set your daughter down on the ground as she sprinted towards her bedroom.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m only a call away, right?” He chuckled, giving one last glance at the frozen Hoseok. Jimin’s silhouette disappeared out of the exit, leaving you with the speechless man on the side.

“Mother? Does that mean… Jimin is..?” Hoseok choked, trying to pry out the sentence to surprise. Seeing the little girl come back with a bright smile, that only melted his heart.

“Mommy, who’s this?” She questioned, as Hoseok kneeled to be at eye-level. Your eyes watching the scene unfold, as the chills ran up your spine answering her question. “Sweetie… Meet your Daddy, Hoseok….”

Hoseok’s eyes grew larger at the sound of his name and title, given to him like a present. The resemblance of her personality and bright smile, could be seen in himself. “You’re home!! Mommy told me you were on a field trip faraway” She chimed, giving the man, she just met a few minutes ago, a hug. The feel of her heartbeat against his collarbones, was enough to embrace her too. He felt connected, and wanted to cry of his irresponsible choice of leaving.

“Eunji, how about you go play with the new dollhouse Jimin bought you? I need to talk to your Dad a bit” You spoke, patting her soft hair before she smiled and ran towards her bedroom filled with toys. Hoseok watched the little child, feeling the memories that could have been there, falter in the sight of nothing.

“How old is she?” He questioned, watching your body crash on the same couch he lived on, when meeting you. The same old worn out cuts on the edge, and mellow pillows. “She’s four, soon five” You looked into his eyes, as he sat in confusion and surprise over the scene. His fingers shaking at the touch, of his own being. “She’s really mine…? Since when did you kno-“

“I found out after you left… actually the same day you left. I thought it was because you were using your powers on me, but it turned to something more…” You trailed off, watching a pictured frame of Eunji.

“I-I- don’t know what to say…” Hoseok replied, comforted by your glorious smile in the light from the windows. “I thought Jimin was the father...” He finished, along with a defeated chuckle. Why did he feel so useless?

“Jimin is one of my neighbours. I introduced him to Eunji, as her new caretaker and babysitter. He’s been there since birth, and is a big part of her life…”

“I’m so sorry… I-I didn’t know-“ Your finger pressed upon his plump lips, stopping him from continuing. “What has happened, is done. Don’t apologise anymore, it’s not your fault.” You claimed, sensing his tense muscles fall to release.

“It was hard, at first. But watching her, was like you still were with me. I couldn’t let go of that… I loved you too much and I still do…” You confessed, retreating your hand to fiddle with the hem of your shirt. His eyes softening at the sound of your quivering voice, gave into kiss you already. The lips that were sealed with foolish romance and loyalty, returned in a single movement.

“I love you too…Don’t forget that…” He whispered against your pink shaded lips, feeling his own heart pound harder than expected at the feel of you, so close.

“Why now…? Of all times, to come back?” Your voice so low, not trying to disturb Eunji playing in her room. His fingers stroking at the bare skin of your arms, watching his guilt rise on his shoulders.

“There is something you need to know…” Before Hoseok could protect your hand in his, a knock on the door stopped him from proceeding. Your body moving towards the sound in a natural manner, as he closed his eyes.

“Yes?” You spoke, watching an older male with pure white hair and pale skin, with his eyes glistering in the dim shadow. “This is Yoongi. A companion.” Hoseok spoke, standing behind you to open the door further. Without another word, Yoongi walked inside remembering the features as if it was yesterday he came to pick up Hoseok.

“What is this? Who are you?” You questioned, closing the door to sit back on the couch. Hoseok sitting on your side, while Yoongi planted himself in a lounge hair on the other side of the sofa table. His boots so clean and dark, that his appearance seemed intimidating and the dead face of no emotions.

“Did you tell her yet?” The quiet man finally spoke, breaking the silence that lingered in the air. Hoseok gulped, and only confusion bought up in your mind. Clutching your hand to the worn-out couch, you felt uneasy about his ways of speaking.

“Not yet…” Hoseok replied, watching your frame back away. Your brow knitted and he could only hold your hand in his, making sure there is nothing dangerous coming your way. Yoongi shook his head, sensing that this couldn’t go any slower.

“Y/N, there is something you should know, but before we can continue, I need to know if you have felt ‘strange’ since Hoseok has been here?” Yoongi questioned, with his eyes dark as ever, pointed at your shaking frame. Hoseok’s thumb rubbed lightly against the back of your palm, assuring you that he will always be there.

“I was pregnant? But I wouldn’t call it strange” You muttered an answer, getting him to relax against the lounge chair. The amount of confusion building inside of you, there was something that snapped. “What do you mean strange? Why are you in my house? What is going on??” The questioned poured out of your mouth, as if a waterfall has grown in your throat. Hoseok seemed surprised, and didn’t know how to tell you the truth.

“Your daughter is a Demi-God.” Yoongi confessed, folding his hands together while watching your facials change. “A… Demi-God..? Like Hoseok?” It seemed unreal, sensing the air change for the worse.

“Indeed, like Hoseok. And you-“

“Stop. It’s not logical, for a Demigod to breed with a human, with a high chance of giving birth to a Demigod” You replied, with a stern answer clutching harder on Hoseok’s hand.

“That’s because you aren’t a human… at least not a full fleshed one.” Hoseok claimed, trying to pull a smile wondering what you were thinking. In reality, there was no logical thought inside yourself, getting these information’s thrown your way. “T-That’s not possible!” You spoke with a louder voice, feeling the anger linger on your limbs of the absurd statement.

“You’re a rejected Demigod of Shadows, in heaven. Hoseok didn’t know, until he put Myosotis ring on your finger. Only Demigod’s can be remembered with it.” Yoongi continued to explain, that only made your brain roll over. Hoseok couldn’t get himself to mention that he sensed other god’s walking on earth, to not disturb you. He continued to think, it was just a friend trying to find him. He was right, Yoongi did find him. But everything fell into place, when he returned to heaven. The sound of your name, and the history of your mistakes unfolding in his brain and for the ones around him. The forgotten Demigod, that was thrown away from heaven. Other Gods were frightened, of the power that layered in your hands as the shadow itself.

“They threw me out of Heaven…?” You whispered, not finding every remembrance of the things they mentioned. You never knew who your parents were, and was nothing more than an orphan.

“You’re one of the most dangerous Demigods amongst us.” Yoongi finished, biting on his lower lip, feeling the child in the bedroom talk to herself in a manner of a play.

“Then Eunji..?”

“Eunji is not a dangerous Demigod. She’s a deity of the Light.” Hoseok confessed, giving you his soft eyes at the thought of your surroundings. You never tried to use your powers, no one allowed you to try out of fear. Something relaxed inside of you, knowing that Eunji was safe and to no danger. But wrapping your head around the idea, that you’re not who you thought you were, was scary enough in itself.

“The ones above us…. Wants us to take Eunji to Heaven. To teach her the ways of a Demigod.” Hoseok mumbled, while you pried away from his touch. “Take her?” You spoke in shock.

“She’s not human, Y/N. She will never learn how to give earth the balance it needs, if she stays here, with someone who can’t teach her.” Yoongi continued, watching your frame stand from the couch. Your eyes burning and the anger lingering in your body, while everything made no sense. Or maybe, it was just something you didn’t want to believe.

“Then don’t teach her! She’s a child for god’s sake! You can’t come here, and take away the things I love…. Not again…” Hoseok’s noticed your cries of pleas, feeling the pain come from your words. He was the one at fault, and now he’s here to take more away. His fast movements got him up to take you in his embrace, your tears falling on his shoulder as he continued to comfort your pain. The pain, that he had left.

“We have gotten orders, Y/N. As a protector and warrior of Heaven, we need to fulfil our request.” Yoongi sounded so cold hearted, that everything felt like lightning hitting. You couldn’t imagine, the scene of your child going away, away from your embrace. The anger grew, your throat was dry and everything was shaking. It became dark, so dark outside. Hoseok was frightened, but continued to stay at your side. Yoongi couldn’t help, but feel regretful of his quest.

“Y/N… Look outside.” An order from the eldest, making you glance at the darkened windows. You were now scared, seeing the sun disappearing and only eternal horror could stay. “This, is what you can do.” He finished, standing up to stand on your side. Hoseok’s hand warming up your chilling back, feeling every heart beat that ran through your vessels.

“Mommy? Why is everything so dark?” The smallest of them all, standing to hide behind the corner of a wall. Drying away the sacred tears, you let go of Hoseok to meet Eunji. “It’s okay sweetie, it will go away again” You stroked her soft hair, denying that the outside world shined once again. The yellow hues brushing through the windows, as you planted a kiss on her forehead.

“Y/N…. Eunji is special. She can keep away the dark shadows, empowering yours.” Yoongi sternly spoke, looking at the child clinging to your leg. “That doesn’t mean you can take her away from me. I’m NOT letting you take my child.” You replied, letting your hand fall upon Eunji’s head. She didn’t know anything, that she was going to be taken away. The fear, of not understanding anything.

“Hoseok, do it.” Another command, making Hoseok turn to bite on his bottom lip. He was conflicted, if Heaven’s laws were just as right, as human nature. “Hoseok.” Another call. Yoongi wanted to make Hoseok use his Energy power, to take away Eunji. But, that’s something Hoseok couldn’t do. Eunji was his own creation, and a true memory of the best part of his life. This pain, is nothing he would ever want to inflict again.

“No. I’m not going to do it.” He replied, walking over to stand beside you. His arm planted around your waist, tugging you into his warm chest. The fire in his eyes, showing he wasn’t going to give up again.

“What do you think the ones above us will think?? They are going to take the child sooner or later.” Yoongi spoke again, feeling the tiredness run along his shoulders. “Then don’t tell them. Don’t give them any information, that we’re here.” Hoseok suggested, watching the anger build inside of Yoongi’s eyes. Your grip around Eunji tightened, afraid what was going to happen.

“Are you sure, you want to do this?” Yoongi questioned, seeming to calm down from the building tension. His shoulder falling, seeing Eunji’s face and big eyes of the space look into his soul. “I’m sure.” Hoseok replied again, walking over to stand in front of Yoongi. A look between men, that there was nothing more than a deal in their eyes. “I’m risking my ass for you, you know that, right?” The blonde-haired man commented, before sighing in annoyance. Hoseok nodded along as an answer, before they sealed the deal in a handshake. Yoongi’s appearance disappearing into the blink of an eye, leaving just you, Eunji and Hoseok alone.

“Where did the angel go??” Eunji questioned in surprise, walking over to Hoseok with fondness. He kneeled to watch her features, from his lover and himself. “He went back to heaven” He replied with a smile, making Eunji giggle.

“What about you, Daddy? Will you go to heaven too?” She asked yet again, making Hoseok look in your direction and back to Eunji. “I’m going to stay here, there is a lot of things we need to catch up on” He chuckled, pinching her puffy cheek while she hugged him in surprise. His arms finding their way around her small body, to scent the smell of flowers.

“Will you come play house with me???” She suggested in excitement, waiting for a nod as an answer. “Sure, but I need to talk to your mother first. I’ll be there in a sec” He blinked, making Eunji laugh and run towards the bedroom again. His eyes finding way to yours, watching your body stand still in amazement. His own exhausted body coming close to embrace you, watch and feel you against him. He missed it, so fucking much. You melted into him, as a magnet and your heart synching.

“What about the ones above?” You whispered a question, letting his forehead fall against yours. The warmth of his feelings grown upon yours, stroking your cheek as the way you liked it. “Yoongi will keep them away for some time. He will come back, if they decide to do anything. Trust him, he wishes Eunji to have a normal life, with her mother and father, even though it didn’t look like it.” He chuckled, making you smile of the idea. It meant, Hoseok wasn’t going back and stayed within your company. Starting a new life together, was enough to start a new relationship. The one, you tried to let go years ago, but happy not letting yourself do it.

“I love you” He whispered, letting his lips brush against yours, sending the warmth from your head to your feet. Everything was floating, and felt like a fairy tale. “I love you too…” Whispering words in between kisses, of assurance of your love.

“I’ll stay forever.” He confessed, making you laugh at his words. You missed it, you missed him. Even with the powers of true darkness, there is one person who would anything to prevent it. Hoseok.

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