#same circus. slightly different monkeys

[desperatepleasures]

by the way, i went [checks notes] nine entire days between posting my last horny fic (thus freeing my mind from the prison of Horny Idea) and getting a new horny brainworm

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

[callsignmayhem]

Maverick who is doing his usual (idiotic) shit, also known as running around like headless chicken/causing chaos/making Ice to clean up his messes/also stressing him out/everyone should be worried if at least one thing isn't on fire and completely disarray after hurricane Maverick/Mav needs one of those harness things you put on a kid to stop them from running off/cuz Mav will without a doubt fuck up something that was perfectly fine before/and Ice would have to make some calls again/whilst trying to keep an eye out for whatever the hell Mav will undoubtedly try do next/Mav has this special talent of pissing off people, wreaking havoc and getting away with it/mostly cuz of certain admiral/who just says that let Mav do whatever the hell wants, cuz if you tell him no, he's even more tempted to do it and will do it nevertheless/Ice would sigh and be like: my circus, my monkey, when seeing Mav with a shit-eating grin on his face/before doing something crazy, whatever the crazy might be at the moment/sometimes Ice has to literally drag Mav away (by the ear) cuz he's gonna do some crazy shit once again/and more than likely to endanger something or someone/Ice gets at least one call a day from someone who encountered his crazy pet monkey and that someone is telling Ice to come pick up that said monkey/who has destroyed once again Navy property or something else/when going to pick his hyperactive dumbass of a pilot up, Mav is sitting in a chair, smiling so innocently when seeing Ice, like he's never in his life done anything not-so-innocent, reckless shit/but we all know that he has/multiple times actually/Ice is considering just handcuffing Mav to something in his office, but it wouldn't work for long cuz Mav would find a way to break free the second Ice turns his back/only thing he'd see is Mav slipping out of the room/off to cause chaos for the millionth time/so Ice gets up from his chair, follows Mav along the corridors and corners Mav, hitting him in the back of the head/dragging him back to his office and sitting him down, ordering him to stay put/it's like having two jobs, first is daytime job (navy) and second is 24/7 job (looking after the crackhead also known as Maverick)

The same shit show happens every goddamm day, slightly differently and in different scales but still happens.

Mav: 🙂

Ice:😮‍💨

Everyone else:😅

[nanoa1foryou]

Translation - Yle interview, Käärijä, 30.9.2023

Translations for this interview by Yle

Käärijä opens up about his rough Erovision year - feeling like a circus monkey and the bolero has almost been thrown to the fireplace

The eurovision star shares how his thoughts haven't been able to keep up with all of this runaround.

Käärijä has thrown the green bolero off his shoulders for a moment. In a music studio in Helsinki Jere Pöyhönen from Vantaa is now sitting, wondering what the Eurovision year has brought with it.

It is a good moment for a mid-season account.

After the Eurovision madness Käärijä performed 51 shows in Finland, which is a staggering amount. An equal amount is lined up for the fall, when on top of the homeland shows there is a European tour ahead.

Käärijä has tried to take a holiday in between, but it hasn't fully worked.

Even now he has come in straight from a tv-show set. At the same time he should be working on new music.

The artist knows, that you have to strike while the iron is hot.

Worried people ask Käärijä constantly how he's doing. He doesn't know that himself either.

– At the moment it feels like I would need more time off. I'm honest and not denying that. The shows keep going and I'm slightly scared. Touring has never scared before, but now maybe the fact, that how will I make it through it all.

The Eurovision result frustrates him even still

Käärijä watched the Eurovision Final video just a few days ago.

He still cannot understand, what happened in the arena in liverpool, when the whole hall was chanting Cha Cha Cha.

The Final performance was one of the easiest and most relaxed for Käärijä, because months of work was coming to an end. He also remembers the moment, when he almost ran into a wire that got stuck.

Käärijä placed closely second and took the loss with a heavy heart. It bothers him still.

– Of course it's frustrating at times. But people comfort me a lot and try to find reasons, why it was better I didn't win. At the end of the day life wins and it's not more serious than that.

The artist celebrates, that he got the most votes from the audience. It has bred him a lot of shows.

He will not be going to Eurovision for a second time. The runaround starting from UMK was so hectic, that the human mind can't keep up with it.

–Kind of like if you opened up a christmas present and you get your favourite toy and even still the childish enjoyment is minor. Every day so much happens, that I didn't have time to process it and it was already the next day. Just remember that we went and fast,

Käärijä's golden cage

The phenomenon that started from Käärijä has been exceptional.

Though the fame flatters the artist, he has felt it in his skin.

In his opinion some people don't know how to behave, when for example they take pictures of him with no respect to his privacy.

– Even though I like giving autographs and taking pictures, too much is too much.

At times Käärijä has felt like a circus monkey.

– I get this feeling, like you're a monkey in a travelling circus. You don't get to have feelings and opinions or others decide how things are and I have no say in this.

At the darkest moments the thought has crept into Käärijä's mind, that he should just quit.

– yes there are those moments, that now the bolero is going into the fireplace and the song gets deleted, if that were possible. but at no point has there been anger towards my own product. Maybe at times towards the artist Käärijä comes this feeling, like could you just go hide for a moment and lay down, so that I'd get some peace too, Käärijä laughs.

Despite it all Käärijä's inner animal always comes to life when at a show Cha Cha Cha comes on.

Käärijä says, that the Eurovision year has changed him as a person.

– I can appreciate things very differently. When the success and fame came, I've realized, that happiness is somewhere else in the end.

–I'd like to build a small cabin on some beach somewhere and go there after tour to calm down.

What next, Käärijä?

A few weeks ago Käärijä released his first song since Eurovision.

It's crazy It's party is notably related to Cha Cha Cha and it features Estonian artist Tommy Cash.

Cha Cha Cha has by now amassed over a 100 million streams on Spotify. That is a goal no other Finnish language song has ever reached.

Käärijä admits, that there was a lot of preassure to making new music after the huge hit.

– I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. But I was surprised by how relaxed my mind was when I finally started making new music. Perhaps the biggest preassure was left behind on the Eurovision stage.

Many Finns have hoped that the international attention would bring Käärijä a longer career internationally.

Some have however already deemed him a one hit wonder, when the new song hasn't gotten a lot of plays outside of Finland. Although even it has already over a million plays on Spotify.

– I myself have been a police about other artists like no no no, you shouldn't have done it like that. But with music you have to start from that you're happy with it yourself and if fans are coming in then that's a plus.

Though Käärijä is going on an European tour, he still considers Finland to be his most important market zone. If success comes from elsewhere then that's just a welcome addition.

Despite it all Käärijä is now a part of the eurovision canon and a real Eurovision legend.

He doesn't yet know how to fit the Eurovision legend's cape on his shoulders, because he sees himself as still too young. Käärijä knows though, that him and Cha Cha Cha will be living a life of their own from this point forwards.

But would Käärijä go to perform in Malmö, Sweden next spring on the Eurovision stage after the stinging loss last spring? After all, Eurovision usually gathers performances from the successes of previous years.

– Maybe earlier I had fears that I would become a Eurovision artist. But the world has changed and now we have Blind Channel and other successful artists from other countries. If the invite comes, then I'll gladly go along and experience it a little differently.

[covetyou]

20 questions for fic writers tag game

thanks for the tags bbs 💛 @mermaidgirl30 @whatsnewalycat @sp00kymulderr

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

23 - I cross post to ao3 just before I post anything on Tumblr, so almost everything goes there first. The only thing that isn't there is y2k and two dress up!Joel lore posts that are in fic form.

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

117,356

3. What fandoms do you write for?

almost entirely Pedro - a little bit of general TLOU if we consider honey, you're familiar (tess x reader)

4. Top five fics by kudos

something wretched about this

sleepless

first steps

baubles

just a taste

on Tumblr sleepless is my top fic before the first chapter of something wretched about this - I don't keep track of it after those two!

5. do you respond to comments?

I do! I'm a bit behind right now because May/June have been kicking my ass in every way possible, but usually they get answered within a day or two.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

I don't write much angst! Feelings™ in general is not my thing.

the howler monkey is maybe my angstiest fic, but it ends quite fluffy. same as some good friend.

none of them really end too angsty! I'm all about leaving things vaguely good at the end.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

the most typical happily ever after mush? jack of all trades and freeze-thaw. freeze-thaw's ending is quite cute now that I look back at it.

chaste also has a happy ending, just a very different one to a romantic feelings-y happy ending 💦 but you'll never see someone more thrilled than Dieter in that fic.

all of my fics do tbh, just not big I love you/happy families/grand gesture kind of happy endings.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

I've never even had a slightly mean comment tbh

9. Do you write smut?

predominantly! everything except for y2k (not on ao3!) and my Dieter's PA loose series is smut. Dieter's PA is super fun to write because it often toes the line between almost smut and not smut at all. there's a lot of nudity and references to past sexual events, and it's the perfect place to explore silliness with Dieter.

10. Craziest crossover?

it's gotta be my carnal-val series. it's a circus AU with P-Boys each playing a part - so far we have Dieter as a clown and Whiskey as a ringmaster. I have 4 WIPs currently on the go for it, so hopefully more will be soon.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

thank goodness no. not that I know it.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

nope

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

no! I probably never will - I like to just finish and be done, and collaborating with a fic feels far more involved than my usual "fuck it, that'll do" process! I literally don't even get shit beta read.

14. All time favorite ship?

I genuinely do not have one 😁 I'm very easy to please and generally if you feed it to me I'll have a good time, so no favourite ship has ever really stuck. I generally don't care for romantic ships the same way most do.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I started a Marcus Pike fic over Christmas - I doubt that'll get finished. My OG plan for kinktober still needs to be officially scrapped (I wrote something wretched about this instead)

I also have a Dieter's PA WIP involving a coffee machine that 💀 I'm not sure anyone needs or wants to see.

not all WIPs deserve to see the light of day, and most of the fun is in the process of fucking around with characters for a little bit tbh

16. What are your writing strengths?

anything silly and slightly bizarre while somehow not being too out there. I think I'm decent at dialogue but honestly 🤷‍♀️ some days I'm shit

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

so many! I'm the vaguest amount of descriptive possible, with absolutely everything. not just because I write reader insert either 😅

18. Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

love reading it - will probably never include it in my own fics. I don't know another language well enough to do it alone and I don't want to bother anyone to ask for help. add that to my "fuck it, that'll do" thing and it's just not a recipe for doing another language justice 😁

19. First fandom you wrote in?

h*rry p. I wrote two oneshots as a teen. one involved people getting turned into chickens and pecking someone to death and in the other someone's little toe got stolen and eventually kept in a jar. so if you're wondering if I've always been like this, the answer is yes.

20. Favorite fic you've written?

I still really love best in show and some good friend. both were a little different to my usual way of doing things and I loved the result of both. I also really love the howler monkey - it opened up a lot more depth that I have planned for Dieter's PA, and I'm really excited about it

I have no clue who has and hasn't done this, but consider yourself tagged if you'd like to do it but also @strang3lov3 @beefrobeefcal @bitchesuntitled @corazondebeskar-reads toobif you're ao3 girlies.

[darthwheezely]

i walk the line - f.w. - 1

1950s american carnival! au

Summary: The Weasley Bros. Circus has always been a family affair...until they pick up a highly unusual girl with wicked talents...

Warnings: 1950s America and all the shit that comes with it, NSFW/SMUT MINORS NO INTERACTING :) , alcohol usage, cussing, tw violence (fights), carny folk, contortionist, language and desc of intense circus acts, clowns, sad boy George, GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF BULLYING IN THIS CHAPTER, angst

taglist or people that may like this! DM to be added or removed @cappsikle @lumosandnoxwriting @whizboingies @virgohufflepuff @officialwizardwheezes @amourtentiaa @softlyqoos @breadqueen95 @thehufflepuffwife @george-fabian-weasley @lupinsclassroom @haileymorelikestupid @sarcasticallywitty15 @band--psycho @gcdric @vogueweasley @harrysweasleys @slytherinsunrise @thisismynerdyself @loony-loopy-lupinn @writingsomewrongs @pineapplesandpinas @valwritesx @amxrtentias @theweasleyslut @oh-for-merlins-sake @alyssamalfoy @bisou-doux

“...welcome to our home!”

George listened as the crowd erupted before his father. He had always admired Arthur “Art” Weasley, for many a reason. The way he could walk in and command a room, the way he could silence an entire audience with a simple flick of his wrist of wave of his hand, the way his voice alone could stop his cries in the night, the way he would come up behind him when taking care of the animals was too much and say, “Georgie, go to sleep, son.” but most of all? The way his father noticed him.

Baltimore, Maryland. 1933.

George Weasley was on the run. Again. Charlie Dooley, a boy from his class, and his gang of (as Fred said) “chickenshit babies” had made it a habit of following George home from school and doing one of the following: a) chasing him on bikes, b) cornering him in the bathroom, or c) sprinting after him on foot.

Today, it had been on foot.

“C’mon monkey boy!” Charlie howled, the other boys closing in on him. George sprinted a quick right realizing he dropped his lunch box and thinking a violent but rapid mom’s gonna be so mad, oh no oh no-

George barreled down the street, his house in sight, tears stealing on his cheeks from the sheer speed and necessity to get home. His feet seemed to be operating without him knowing, his body throwing itself backwards and forwards with the blinding need to be home, to hug his dad and say he wasn’t going to school anymore, to ask his mom to stop packing bananas in his lunchbox even though it was his favorite snack because mom don’t you know they call me monkey boy-

“Thought you could really get away from us this time huh, Georgie boy?” Charlie had pinned him to the concrete, George’s heart screaming in his ears. He could barely register that his lip was bleeding, and that maybe if he focused on the sky, his eleven year old shrimp of a body wouldn’t feel-

Pow.

Isn’t that what superheroes say? Pow? Let’s think about superheroes, Georgie, Charlie doesn’t last long with punches anyway just keep lookin’ at the sky, he thought wildly before-

Pow.

Pow.

He vaguely felt his eyes roll back into his head, but he made a very clear rule to himself that he wouldn’t cry, Fred wouldn’t want him to cry, not that Fred was mean, Fred just hates seeing him cry-

Pow.

P-

And suddenly there was something off his body. He could hear punching noises but they were not aimed at George, but rather someone else. When he was able to open his eyes he saw his brother, Fred, landing blow after blow to Charlie Dooley, Charlie mewling under Fred.

“Touch my brother again, and I promise I won’t just break your nose next time, yeah?”

-

Art Weasley sat with his son George in the red chair in his caravan. It was George’s favorite chair, as he learned the word “red” from that chair and then equated “red” to his own hair.

Arthur had known his son would have it harder. It wasn’t his fault the boy was different, he loved him just the same for it if not slightly more so for the way he was a bit quieter, the way he listened and thought and thought and then wanted to make choices. The way he asked his mom if he could pack Fred’s lunches for school because only George knew Fred hated crunchy peanut butter sandwiches with white bread.

But more so for the way George wasn’t afraid to show love. To cry. To feel things Art sometimes couldn’t articulate.

George was curled into his father, tears staining his button up shirt and his body shuddering with every anxiety laden breath. Art put a hand on his son’s back and put his lips to his hair.

“George, you have to breathe for me or you’re gonna get sick.” He rubbed his son’s back soothingly.

“I’m sorry, dad, I promised I did what you said and tried to protect myself and when I couldn’t do anything else I just didn’t look at h-him I p-promise, dad p-please don’t be mad at me...” he took another shudder and released a cry into his father’s shoulder. Art was not a helpless man, but there was something that destroyed and cracked his very soul at the sight of his most vulnerable child, the most angelic of his seven children. The one that everyone protected. And at times like these, sometimes all a father can do is hold his child. So that’s what he did.

“I know, son...I know...”

-

“George?”

George jumped out of his thoughts, his palms sweaty from the inevitable stage fright that always accompanied him before a show. It was no matter how many times he grazed the trapeze with his sister Gin and his brother Ron, the nerves were always the same.

At least this time, no pows would be administered from anyone besides himself.

He heard his name again, the daze breaking as he looked at his oldest brother Bill.

“George. You’ll be fine. You always are, baby brother.” He said softly, placing his hands back on, Cora (short for Corazon) the lion. George gulped and nodded, and Fred patted his back, giving a hearty wink. George smiled a small smile, clapping Fred’s forearm.

“Ready, Fred?”

Fred grinned.

“Ready, George.”

-

George belonged to the trapeze. The way his body seemed to elongate with grace and dexterity when he grabbed his sister, the way he gave flirty winks at the girls in the crowd, the way he never dropped a muscle unplaced-

The way their father always noticed.

Fred saw these things in his younger brother and couldn’t help the fit of jealousy in his stomach. Don’t get your tightrope in a twist, he was possibly the most proud of his brother, and his hand to God if he didn’t say he hooted his name the loudest watching him do his thing.

But he never felt like he could ever match that.

He knew his hands were meant for something greater, same as his mind. Juggling came almost as easy to the older twin as breathing, smoking cigarettes, witty banter, and sex (in no particular order). But George had something Fred didn’t have.

Approval.

Fred was, for all intents and purposes, a good person. A great person. But his habits could’ve said so much otherwise.

Fred had a nasty habit of letting his temper get the best of him. Ever since he could talk, he had taken on the role of protector to not only George, but to Ginny and Ron as well. Frequently, his hands always seemed to have more things to say than he could which says a massive fucking lot. At the ripe age of 20, he’d gotten into more bar fights and straight up blacked out sober more than his own father, and all of his other siblings. He’d been in and out of detention when he did go to school, and in and out of-

Well, you get it.

The one thing that always seemed to follow him? His charm.

Fred Weasley was a charismatic motherfucker.

And he knew it.

It was simple. All he had to do in between acts was make a couple jokes, a few magic tricks, and by the end of his little charade? He’d have at least 3 girls lined up for that night. And if he was in a particularly bad mood?

Well, it could get a little more than that.

On nights like this, he was fine with just two.

I mean...Fred knew what he was doing.

And on a night like this - he was damn proud of it.

Until he saw you...

Last night.

Fred’s dessert was named Candy. He honestly couldn’t remember what her actual name was, but he did remember she said:

“Call me Candy. I taste like it, too.”

And honestly? That was really all he needed.

It didn’t take him long to press her small body against his caravan. She wound her arms around his neck and fisted into his flame colored hair and yanked, his hips rolling as he moaned into her lipstick stained mouth.

Fred always did have a thing for gals in red.

Fred realized his pants had begun to be a tad too tight, as Candy’s tongue licked into his mouth. his hands found their way under her dress, fingers kneading at her thighs and she squeaked. He lifted her legs at her noise and he wrapped them around his body, his bulge pressing into where she needed him the most.

“Fred, please” she whined, his mouth attaching to the valley of her breasts, the exposed skin of her dress warm and inviting.

“Please what, doll?” He teased roughly, his free hand sliding to cup her ass and squeezing. She gasped at his rough touch and he bit her collarbone.

“Fred, please, fuck me” she said airily. He smirked before pressing a quick kiss to her mouth.

“Absolutely, baby, see how easy that was?” He licked her bottom lip and bit, before pressing his forehead to hers, the sheer strength of his body pressing her against the van enough to use his hands to pull her panties down enough for her to kick them away. She reached down to unzip his pants when he motioned for her to do so, his hard cock free of his boxers.

“You ready, pretty girl?” He growled against her earlobe. Candy whispered a breathy “please” and Fred slid into her cunt, her wetness echoing sinful noises at the contact. They groaned at connection, and Fred continued to go deeper into her until he bottomed out. He looked at her for confirmation to keep going and she nodded. He pulled out and slammed back into her, beginning to set a rough pace against the van.

“Freddie, fuckfuckfuck you feel s-so good” she sputtered, Candy’s back hitting and arching against the van, causing it to move slightly against her. Fred nipped and sucked at her neck, determined to always leave a map of where he left his treasure behind...

“Look at you, unraveling like a ball of twine. Never had cock this good, doll?” He reached a particularly good angle in her causing her to claw deeper at his back, biting in a scream.

“Thereeee it is, baby. You like that don’t you, c’mon be a good little cock slut and tell me what you want, want everyone in this whole fucking camp to know I’m fucking you so good.” His hand went to her clit, circling it harshly. He wanted her to finish, his dick was twitching all to hard in her and he needed her to release before it was his turn. Her moans and gasps and mini clawings were getting sloppier, losing their tempo.

“Fred-Fred-“

“Yeah, baby, I’ve got you” he groaned against her mouth at her clenching pussy. She gave a final sputter and screamed into his shoulder, a hot electric wave coursing over his cock, with one, two, three harder pumps, he released into her as well. He leaned his forehead against hers and kissed it lightly. But when he looked back at her face, she was already losing interest. Just like the others. But it didn’t bother him...at least not anymore, right?

Just another night.

-

Memories of Candy and Janie and Jessica and Portia and all the other girls seemed to wash away at the sight of you waiting after the show. Your eyes were full of life but somehow had something tired behind them. The way your hair wasn’t perfectly coiffed but still looked like you had tried to, the way your dress was crinkled at the bottom like you didn’t give a shit if it was crumpled in the bottom of your dresser.

And then you looked at him.

Fred Weasley could have sworn time stopped at the way you walked across the hay to him, your body positioned in a way that would’ve given him every reason to hold you. he realized his face began to flush at the sight of you getting closer.

That, he thought, was an alien feeling.

“Hi.” You said warmly to him.

“You’re Fred, right? I loved your act.”

He blinked twice and then returned your smile.

“Yeah. Thank you so much, I...I really try, I am so sorry but what is your name?” His eyes scanned your face. You stuck your tongue in your cheek and returned the search on his face.

“Y/N. Y/L/N. I’m looking for a job.”

[lailannajacobs]

A God’s Plan and A Mortal’s Free Will (Handmade Thieves pt. VII)

Pairing: Loki X Fem!Reader

Summary: Reader unwittingly finds her way onto Asgard and has to deal with all the attention that follows being a mortal in the extravagant realm. To his surprise, Loki finds himself having just as much trouble if not more than reader in dealing with it. 

Warnings: None! 

Word Count: 4.3k

A/N: Hey everyone!! So this part’s a little different from the rest of the chapters, had to edit it a ton to get it to something I liked, so let me know what you think! I’d love to hear it, hope you enjoy!! Happy reading! <3

Previously

You stopped him by grabbing his forearm and stared at him in disbelief, “You’re worried about people looking at me funny? Are you serious right now? What the hell is wrong with you Loki? Did you not just hear what your father said to me about you?” You didn’t give him a chance to answer, not that it looked like he was going to judging by the slow blink he gave you in response. “Do you not care how he treats you? I don’t care that you’re probably plotting some way of getting him back, how could you just stand there and take it?”

He only watched your outburst with vacant eyes as if he wasn’t even listening. Out of breath and annoyed with him and his stupid, royal ass, you spun on your heel and stomped off, ready to be as far away from the throne room as was possible in your stupid prison.

Part Seven: 

Loki shivered at the sound of his name on her lips. He couldn’t know for sure how long he had been waiting to hear it, but the longer she called him “prince” or “wolf," the more curious he became. It had caught him by surprise, in the middle of her rant like that, sounding in some way different to the countless other times he had heard it on Asgard, but he couldn’t pin point why. Something about her being a Midgardian, he supposed.

She kept ranting on and on, hands clenched at her side the same way they were every time she was trying to tame her anger, but it was difficult to know what she was going off about since he had missed the beginning of what she was saying, too caught up in the sound of his own name.

He wanted her to say it again — only out of professional curiosity of course — but the word “prince” broke through his trance and he knew he wouldn’t hear it again for a long time now, if ever. Whatever had made her slip up in that moment was long gone. It was probably for the best. Loki didn’t appreciate feeling so out of focus, caught up in alien thoughts and feelings. If he wanted to keep her alive to help him get out of the mess he was planning, he was going to need to stay alert and three steps ahead of everyone else. He couldn’t do that if he was preoccupied with banal thoughts.

Loki knew she would hate the plan he had in mind but knew she would agree to it because she wanted her freedom more than anything else. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that her freedom was his most valuable bargaining chip. He figured, short of regicide, there wasn’t much she wouldn’t agree to — no matter how begrudgingly — if he guaranteed her freedom. And the freedom of one Midgardian was worth the price of what he had in mind.

If he had any doubts about her ability to play her part in his plan, they had vanished the moment she stood up for him in the throne room. Anyone that mortal who could stand up to Odin and essentially threaten him was either stupid or incredibly brave. And Loki would not have let her out of the dungeon if he had thought she was stupid. After all, she couldn’t have become one of the most infamous thieves by being dumb.

But it hadn’t been her bravery that had surprised him the most. It had been the fact that she had stood up for him, even if he was pretty sure she’d stab him if given the right opportunity. Loki hadn’t been too sure what to make of it, but quickly decided that the only reason acted the way she had was to get some form of revenge on Odin. He understood that all too well. What he didn’t understand was having someone other than his mother, and occasionally Thor, defend him. Which is why it hadn’t taken him long to come to the conclusion that he had just been a means to an end for her to get what she wanted — another thing he understood quite well.

When she turned around and stopped, clearly surprised he wasn’t two steps behind her, Loki realized he had been so lost in his own mind that he had stopped moving all together.

“I’ve found that ignoring him helps.” He offered vaguely, knowing he had to say something at least somewhat related to the rant she had started if he wanted to cover up the fact that he had let his guard down and hadn’t been listening.

In a few quick strides, he caught up and she spun around on her heel like she was grounding an insect into the marble floor. He wondered if she believed she was any good at hiding her anger. Despite how difficult he found it to read her thoughts and emotions most of the time, her anger radiated like a neon sign. And at the moment, it was a massive, colour-changing, flashy sign.

He felt himself smile. Her anger made things much more interesting. And much more fun.  After what he had just gotten away with, he was looking for a way to celebrate his small victory. Annoying her seemed as amusing as any way to do it. Though if Loki was being honest with himself, he would have realized he was also looking for a way to take his mind off of his father for a short while.

“Yeah well, ignoring him would be a lot easier if he stopped summoning me to the throne room like a circus monkey.” She snarled, her stomping echoing down the empty hallway.

“Maybe if you stopped threatening to undress in front of the guards and everyone else in the palace, it wouldn’t happen so often.” He growled back, unable to hold back the wave of anger washing over him.

She stopped, put a hand on her hip, head angled to the side, “It was one time. One time. And it wasn’t like I actually got undressed. And why should I have to explain myself to you anyways? I’m a grown woman capable of making her own damn decisions.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself Midgardian, but I am curious to know what the hell went through your mind.” His voice was low and gruff in the back of his throat, coming from somewhere deep within him.

“If you must know Wolf,” She took a step forward onto her toes so that she came as close to eye level as she could get, “I was a little desperate to get out of that cloth trap.”

“If you were that desperate for relief Midgardian, you should have come to me.” Loki clicked his tongue, punctuating his sentence with an arrogant smirk in an attempt to remind himself that he didn’t actually care what she had done.

She glared at him, taking the bait he had been hoping would rile her up even more, “Not that we’re talking about the same thing, but I tried that remember? You told me to leave you alone because it was too early in the morning.”

“I seem to recall asking you to come in. We could have gotten you out of that trap quite easily. Dresses are much easier to take off with a second person involved.”

She shook her head incredulously. Loki let his eyes wander down the length of the dress, that in no way suited her, and could tell he was doing an exceptional job at pissing her off by the way her breathing became slightly uneven. He couldn’t help but think that if she had come to him with the threat of getting undressed, she would have definitely been going in the wrong direction to scare him off.

Widening his grin, he solidified his veneer so that she couldn’t tell that his mind had gone down a path he knew was far too dangerous. But even so, he couldn’t help voicing some of those thoughts, only because he knew how much it would annoy her.

Dipping his head so that he was practically touching her ear with his lips, he purred, “I could have found something else for you to wear of course. I have many shirts that would fit you quite nicely.”

She bristled and backed down, jaw tight and fist clenched at her side, eyes blazing. It was hard to believe that getting a reaction out of her was this easy.

“You’re an insufferable prick.” She huffed.

“I’ve been called worse. And by you I believe.” Loki winked and righted the fallen strap from her shoulder, her skin warm beneath his fingers.

She swatted his hand away, but he could tell by how hard she hit him that she would have rather rammed one of her daggers clean through his hand instead. “I don’t doubt that. Now. Give me back my clothes.”

“They’re this way.” He motioned for her to follow and set a leisurely pace he knew would drive her crazy. He wasn’t the one stuck in an uncomfortable dress. He had nowhere to be.

She didn’t say anything else and he didn’t realize just how much he had been craving a moment to breathe after what had happened in the throne room. He tried to push it out of his mind and let it go, especially the part about the Midgardian threatening nudity, which, for some annoying reason, seemed to keep pestering him. Loki chalked it up to the fact that he had never been very good at letting things go. Whatever seemed to get to him had a bad habit of festering, and that wasn’t something he could afford to let happen now. Not with what he had planned. And not concerning something that shouldn’t have bothered him in the first place.

Loki knew he could have easily conjured her clothing, but she seemed to have forgotten that it was something he could do. It was strange to him to be looked at, for lack of a better word, like a normal human. He knew he’d be fooling himself if he thought she hadn’t heard the rumours about him, but she looked at him with such unrestrained frustration in her eyes that he was pretty sure she didn’t care who he was or what he had been rumoured to do as long as she got to break his nose before the day was done. It seemed to him that she was the kind of person who would stab anyone who pissed her off, regardless of who they were and what they had done. He respected that. And if he was being honest with himself, Loki might have even admitted that he found the thought comforting. When he looked into her eyes, he didn’t see a menace staring back at him, which surprised him even more after having donned the cruelest and most detached mask he had when they were in the throne room. He knew she had seen it. He had felt her stiffen beside him.

For a moment, Loki thought maybe her indifference was what had made him let her out of the dungeon, but he knew it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. He had done it because he needed a contingency plan, and she was the best way to piss Odin off simultaneously.

Realizing that, once again, he had slowed from being lost in thought, he took in the back of that frayed violet dress and smirked. He hadn’t thought by taking her clothes the night before that she would have resorted to taking her anger out on the dress itself. He found the thought quite amusing until the solution to her plan and who she had done her little act of rebellion with snaked its way back into his mind.

He could feel himself spiraling into a whirlpool of irritation and something else he couldn’t name until she spoke up, pulling him out before he could reach the deepest end of that spiral.

“Pardon?” He asked, the world ebbing away from the darkness and back into focus.

“I asked where your brother was.” He could tell her anger had diminished during their walk and was now replaced by curiosity, which he liked much, much less.

He slid a wary glance at her, “Which brother?”

She raised a brow, “Do you have more than one brother?”

“No.” He grunted, feeling himself getting sucked back down into that dangerous, dark pool, “I don’t have any at all.”

“The Almighty Thor. What does that make him?”

He inhaled sharply, trying to keep his anger in check. “Adopted brother.”

“Still makes him your brother,” she pointed out casually, not balking at the glare he couldn’t help but send her way. He should have known that Thor, being Thor, would find a way to become her center of curiosity, even millions of miles away.

“So where is he then?”

Loki couldn’t help the disgust in his voice when he sneered, “Probably off trying to save some poor hapless realm.”

“And why aren’t you doing the same?” She looked up at him as they walked, no judgement on her face that he could see, only genuine curiosity.

It wasn’t the look he had been expecting to see so instead of leering the words like he had intended, he practically sputtered, “Because I don’t feel the need to pretend to be a hero.”

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice and rolled her eyes, “Sure you don’t.”

He racked his brain for something to say to get her on the defensive. He didn’t know what to do when she looked at him in that unnerving, distracting way of hers, as if she actually wanted to know what was inside of him. Her questions had caught him off guard and had rattled him enough that he was a loss for words. It wasn’t something he was used to. Not at all.

Loki decided to keep silent and focused on steadying his breathing, trying not to think too hard about what she meant. The Midgardian had no idea what she was talking about and he needed to remember that. She didn’t know him or anything about him, no matter how often she looked at him as if she could see beneath his protective mask.

“That was sarcasm you know.” She informed when he didn’t speak up.

“I know what sarcasm is. I’m no stranger to it.” He said indignantly, cursing himself once again for sounding anything other than calm and slightly bored.

She raised a brow, “Then what’s with the weird look on your face?”

“Disbelief that you would believe that I, of all people, wouldn’t know what sarcasm is.” He recovered, picking up the pace so that she would have to work to keep up with his long strides.

“Okay…” She rolled out the word as if it wasn’t what she wanted to say but didn’t want to press the matter any further.

Loki almost sighed with relief.

“Where are we? And how far away are my clothes?” She looked around the plain hallway, busy with maids, cooks and other members of the palace staff.

“Still in the palace. And not far. Though I’m not taking you to them just yet,”

Skidding to a stop, she went to reach for something in her boot but paused with a clenched fist halfway through the motion, glaring at him instead from her half-bent position. If he had to guess, he would have said that she just remembered that she no longer had any of her weapons and wasn’t too pleased about it. That neon sign was getting brighter by the second.

He grinned.

Taking those daggers away was probably the smartest thing he could have done for his personal safety. Not that she posed much of a threat but was still a threat all the same. Despite how tempting it had been to set her lose on all the incompetent socialites for pure entertainment alone, he knew doing so would have interfered with his plans. Even if it would have made his days more interesting to watch her pull a knife on everyone who insulted her.

“Where are you taking me exactly?” She demanded, then recoiled as she asked, “Not another party?”

He gestured to her gown. “Looking like that? Absolutely not.”

She glowered, seeming more than a little fed up about the comments regarding her looks. It made him want to smile.

“If not a party then where Wolf?” Her words came out more like an exasperated sigh than a question.

“You’ll see.” He danced around the answer knowing the longer he did so, the more riled up she would become.

“Do you need really need to be so cryptic?”

“Yes.”

She stopped and gripped his arm, nails digging into the sleeve of his tunic. He paused, focused only on the pressure of her fingers on his arm until her words shook him from his trance. “Remind me to stab you when I get my knives back. Please Wolf. Please remind me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind Midgardian, not that I think you need reminding.” He chuckled, pleased with himself that he had managed to get that look on her face using only a few words and a knowing grin. “But speaking of your knives, we never did set the terms for our little agreement.”

A wary look crossed her face, “What did you have in mind.”

“Nothing horrifying.” He replied disinterestedly, though he had really said it to wipe that look off her face. It was a look that was too close to fear, and though he had never seen her afraid when she looked at him — even the first time she had realized who he was — he didn’t want to see anything even remotely similar there. Fear turned to resentment, and he told himself that the reason he couldn’t have her truly hate him was because he still needed her to properly execute his plan. It was the only reason, he convinced himself. The only reason.

“I wasn’t worried,” she ground out and sized him up in a way that shouldn’t have made him want to let out a breath of relief, “But with that look on your face you can understand why I would be…concerned.”

He cocked his head, “What look?”

“Like a kid that just put a thumb tack on their professor’s chair.” She said, gesturing vaguely at his face. “The wide, Cheshire Cat grin that seems to make the corners of your eyes crinkle and the way those eyes light up like someone set fire to the Emerald City? You know, that look? The trickster look.”

Loki took a moment to mull over her words and decided to focus on the first part of what she said; the part he actually understood, “I can’t say I’ve ever done such a thing.”

She didn’t look like she believed him. “I’m sure that’s only because you’ve done so much worse.”

He chuckled, thinking back to particularly clever trick he had done when he was eight involving Thor and a snake. “It was all in good fun Midgardian.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“It was to me.”

She scoffed.

He grinned.

She squinted at him for a second longer as if wanting to decide that he really wasn’t up to no good then rolled her eyes to the sky in defeat before stalking off, “So, you were saying, terms?”

“Ah, yes. Terms. I believe yours favoured you far too much.”

“And yours won’t do the same for you?” He could hear her steps getting heavier and heavier, pounding into the ground as if it was the one driving her irritation.

He practically flounced beside her, “I can assure you, mine will be fair.”

“You know Wolf, it’s funny, but I don’t trust a word you say.”

Loki forced to keep the smile on his face and further leaned back into the arrogant swagger he had already been laying on thick. He didn’t quite understand why her words bothered him when he knew that he wasn’t trustworthy to begin with. He had come to terms with the fact that that was who he was. That she agreed to the fact shouldn’t have bothered him.

“Normally, you’d be right no to Midgardian, but there is no reason for this little game of ours not to be fair. Reminding you that I can win even when fighting fair will be so much more satisfying.”

Her lips were drawn in a tight angry line but still she looked at him as if she was trying to look past the facade and into his soul. Her body was motionless, like a hunter watching her prey, waiting for the moment he would slip up. The longer her scrutinizing gaze tried to dissect him, the more unnerved he felt. But he didn’t look away. Loki was never one to look away first. He fought the urge to shift his weight and did his best to appear as calm as possible.

Finally, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he somehow managed to lift a brow and drawl, “What? No witty retort Midgardian?”

With one last, long look at him she shook her head and kept walking. “Tell me the terms Wolf.”

He let out a small, barely audible sigh to relieve some of the pressure building inside his chest and reminded himself that he could have easily kept walking despite the fact that she had stopped. He had no idea why he felt the need to stop every time she did.

Loki decided the terms to their agreement really would be fair. He didn’t know why he had initially said they would be, it wasn’t like him, but he couldn’t back down now. Maybe he had always wanted a fair fight and realized that he had always been looking in the wrong place to find it. Maybe, for the first time he didn’t want to use his own tricks and follow his own rules because he didn’t want to be unfair to his opponent. No, he thought, it had to be the former.

“I will give you one of your daggers back whenever you correctly guess one of my illusions.” He began to explain, “As long as you don’t use them on me afterwards of course.”

“Can’t promise you anything Wolf.” She grinned, seemingly genuinely amused by the thought of his pain.”

He couldn’t help but get drawn in by her brutal honesty and the smile that lit up her face and found himself doing the same. And when she said, “But you still haven’t told me the catch to your terms yet prince” he couldn’t help but think that maybe she wouldn’t make it as easy as he first thought it would be.

“You’ll have thirty seconds to guess that I’m not truly standing before you if you want one of your daggers. And,” He emphasized the word with a raised finger before she could protest, “Every time you guess wrong, you have to make up for it with another right answer. Only then can you get your precious dagger back. Call it a precaution against you guessing that I’m an illusion every time you see me. Understand, it simply wouldn’t be any fun if you did.”

She let out a sharp breath and crossed her arms, “And you think that’s fair.”

“My life is in danger if you get one back,” He shrugged, though his words weren’t quite true.

She shot him an unimpressed look. “You seem terrified.”

“I’m trembling right now, can’t you tell?” His mocking words broke the scowl on her face, and he noticed the corners of her lips begrudgingly turn up.

“Are you now?”

He nodded, “I am. I can’t barely stand I’m so terrified of the infamous Midgardian and her deadly skills with a blade.”

“Sure, you are,” she laughed, starting to play along, “Is that a slight tremor I hear in your voice?”

He was about to answer but stopped, struck by the look she had on her face. It was one he had rarely seen and didn’t recognize it until it vanished as quickly as it appeared.

“What?” Her brows furrowed, “What’s wrong?”

It took him a moment to realize he’d been staring at her smile. He had only seen the one time when she had torn off the bottom half of her dress and hadn’t realized he had been watching.

He extended his hand, hoping to blow past his small lapse in judgement by getting back to the matter at hand.

“I’m only giving you the time to consider the terms, that’s all. What do you say Midgardian?”

She looked down at his hand with pursed lips and reluctance in her eyes. He couldn’t help but think that she looked at it the same way he had looked at the vegetables on his plate as a child, knowing they were a terrible means to a delicious dessert. Recognizing that look, he no longer doubted that she wouldn’t agree to play along with him. Because if that was, in fact, the same look…well Loki had always gotten dessert.

She sighed, “I don’t have any other options, do I?”

“No.”

“And I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth, “Most likely.”

She sighed. “Well, I guess that settles it then.”

Her hand stayed at her side and she kept staring at his as if it was the only way to persuade her own hand to move.

He raised a brow, not that she could see it she was so focused on his hand and the two-foot gap between their bodies. “Any day now Midgaridan.”

Her eyes lifted to look up at him through her lashes, eyes sparked with irritation. She clenched and unclenched her jaw, then forced her hand to meet his, moving quickly as if afraid she would change her mind.

“Fine. We have a deal, Wolf.” She squeezed his hand a little harder than necessary, “If I guess right within thirty seconds, without having guessed wrong before, you give me back a dagger.”

“Agreed.”

“Okay then.”

She was about to let go but he held on, easily keeping her hand captive in his large one, “Just so you know, I would have agreed to a minute instead to thirty seconds.”

Her nostrils flared, and probably for the millionth time since he met her, she looked like she was about to hit him. It was probably the reason why he shot her the kind of grin he assumed was the reason she kept calling him Wolf.

[rambling-at-midnight]

Ten Years

Request: could I request a Five x Reader, where Reader has a child (the same age as Claire?) and Five comes back from the future to see that, and at first Five thinks she’s found someone else and gets jealous and Reader notices because of how he acts, and then he realises that the Reader and her partner have split up plzzz

I sorta messed up the timeline a bit—in this story, Five jumps to the future and gets stuck when he’s sixteen.

Y/D/N: Your daughter’s name

Pairing: Five x Reader

All the mirrors Five has seen have been smashed or even melted. Save for the reflections he occasionally sees in puddles, he has no idea what he looks like. He knows he looks different; he’s gotten a lot taller, his facial hair is scruffier, and his body leaner, muscles more defined, but he doesn’t really remember what color his eyes are. And what color would his skin be if it wasn’t so caked with dirt and burnt by the relentless, pounding sun? Is his hair really that light, or is that just the dust and bleach from constant sun exposure?

It’s been ten years since he jumped to the future and each day feels like torture. No one to talk to, nothing to do except wander around, looking for food and a fellow survivor, no matter how unlikely the prospect of the latter is. Surely whatever killed the entirety of the human race couldn’t have killed them all; he can’t think of anything that could wipe people out like this.

A sickness, yes, but there would have been quarantines and settlements of people not contaminated. Unless there are people in Africa or another continent that are still alive, sickness is out. Besides, sickness wouldn’t be able to destroy everything and everything, unless everyone goes crazy with it. But even if it is a sickness that makes people go crazy, there has to be a few people that are still suffering from it. If Five got here on the day the apocalypse began, he should have seen people dying from the sickness, but nobody is here.

So sickness is out. Next is natural disaster.

That one seems the most likely. Towers and buildings have toppled, some looking almost scorched. That indicates a wildfire.

A crazy thought occurs to him and a wild laugh bubbles out of his mouth, but he doesn’t care; nobody’s here to judge him for it. Maybe everyone’s left and gone to Mars. That would explain the utter lack of people.

To be honest, he doesn’t even really care anymore. He’s almost given up on ever getting back to his time and stopping the apocalypse.

The only thing that keeps him going is you, Y/N Y/L/N.

You weren’t one of the 43 children, but you lived close to the academy and attended the same secondary school as them. You also worked at Griddy’s, which meant the kids saw you often. To be honest, nobody expected you to get along with any of them except maybe Ben and Vanya.

You were aware of their powers and maybe a little intimidated by them, which meant you were always on your guard around Allison. You never talked much to Luther; you two didn’t have similar interests. Klaus you held in slight contempt, as Five did himself, truthfully; he may be silly but you have little patience, and one requires a lot of that in order to deal with Klaus. You and Diego seemed to respect each other but never found a reason to speak.

You and Ben were reading buddies. You both enjoyed fiction tales and would often talk about them at the lunch table. Vanya you always treated with kindness and respect. You felt a little bad for her, especially because she was so nice.

Five was the one you got along with the best, and everyone had actually expected you to get along with him the worst. You can stick up for yourself but you’re generally soft-spoken and non-confrontational. Nobody expected you to actively want to hang out with the confrontational and sometimes downright cruel Five, but you snicker when he dresses someone down in public, and he was protective of you to the point of people being scared to even look at you wrong for fear of Five hurting them.

You’re also brilliant. You’re above average at school (but not as above-average as Five is, because Five is pretty much Albert Einstein reincarnated). Where he excelled at science and math, you countered with your English, foreign language, and, most importantly, street smarts.

Only Five knows about your screaming household. It’s why you’re so quiet; as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself you’re generally left alone. It’s also the reason you’ve got a vindictive streak a mile wide; after so long of being wronged, who wouldn’t? It’s just perfect Five was just the person to actually carry out the dark thoughts.

You’d made him smile. You knew his coffee order and had it ready for him every time he walked into Griddy’s, and he saved you from the asshole customers you couldn’t tell off. You weren’t his first kiss, but you were the first person that made the cliché butterflies flutter in his stomach. Apart from Vanya, you were the only person he ever wanted to defend. He was almost going to tell that he loved you. The thought had crossed his mind, but he hadn’t gotten around to it before leaving.

Five wasn’t your first crush, but he was your first kiss. He was the first person you ever held hands with. He’s the only person you’ve ever fallen asleep while cuddling with.

Then, almost exactly ten years ago today, Five had been so fed up with Reginald telling him that he couldn’t do this, couldn’t do that, that Five snapped. He jumped to the next winter, and then he jumped to the spring after that.

He tried to jump to the summer after that spring, but he slipped and staggered while jumping, and he ended up fourteen years later in a future no one would have seen coming.

The worst thing wasn’t that he couldn’t get back. The worst thing wasn’t that a lot of people were dead. The worst thing was that Five’s family, and especially you, were dead. He hadn’t recognized his siblings except for the umbrella tattoos on their wrists, but you’d been unmistakable, even fourteen years after the last time Five saw you. Your hair was shorter and your jawline slightly sharper, but your eyes—terrible, open, unseeing eyes that Five still sees when he’s asleep—were the same, and so was the little freckle on your right eyelid that Five loves.

You’d been beautiful, but you’d been dead.

Five had screamed, he’d cried, he’d tried to force himself to jump, but nothing worked. His voice echoed and no birds were startled by it, no one came to check on the screaming, grieving boy, no deer raced for the hills. He was utterly stuck. He is utterly stuck.

The worst thing about his predicament isn’t that he’s wasted ten years of his life in a wasteland. It isn’t that Five might be stuck here forever. It isn’t that he hasn’t heard a single voice apart from his in ten years.

It’s that, even if he gets back, everyone still dies. You still die.

And he can’t even get back, anyway.

Or so he thought.

On the 3,748 day of being stuck in the apocalypse, Five was able to jump. If he was more driven by emotion, he would have stopped, he would have marveled, he would have exclaimed and maybe even missed his chance. He’d been dreaming of this moment for a full decade, so he doesn’t even hesitate; he knows exactly where to go.

2015. Sometime in 2015. That means he’ll be the same age as you and the rest of his siblings.

Sound, glorious sound, assaults his ears the moment he lands, and it’s both terrible and great at the same time. It’s a relief to have something to listen to, after so long of listening to only his voice grow deeper and hoarser from all the dust in the air, and a shock to his ears.

Five lands on the hard stone courtyard of the academy. He’s greeted by Grace, Pogo, and Reginald, all with matching serious looks on their faces. They all look the exact same as they’d looked when he left, all for various reasons (Grace is a robot, Hargreeves is so old Five can’t notice him aging more, and Pogo is a monkey).

“Number Five,” is all Reginald says. He’s not surprised to see him. The old man never lets anything surprise him nowadays, but you’d think being missing for 10 years could dampen someone’s expectations that someone else will return. “How old are you now, exactly?” Down to business already. How does he know that Five could be any age instead of the one he should be? He knew Five was trying to time travel, but he doesn’t know if he actually accomplished it. As far as Hargreeves knew, Five could have simply ran away and joined the circus.

Five doesn’t bother to dignify him with a response. He turns on his heel and jumps. He’d found the book Vanya had written during his time in the apocalypse, and it had mentioned her address.

He goes there.

You’re chatting with Allison happily while Claire and Y/D/N run around on the playground. Thank goodness they get along; you’re thankful for that every day. After Five left, you and Allison became closer, to the point where you don’t know how you’d be able to survive without her. She’s so much more suave than you, and she’s helped you a lot. You’ve helped her, in turn, reconnect a bit with Vanya.

Allison was the first person you went to, still with tear tracks on your face, after learning that Five had disappeared. You’d demanded that she rumor you and say that Five never ran away, and she had, but then you’d only thought Five hadn’t run away. It hadn’t brought him back. Allison un-rumored you, explained to you, and tried not to feel too awkward when your tears began anew. It was the beginning of a close friendship.

Now you’re a screenwriter, a pretty successful one, too, and all but one of your five movies Allison has either starred in or had a large role in. You even add Vanya’s music into the soundtrack. It’s a pretty sweet compromise. After all, in a family filled with boys, don’t the girls have to stick together?

“Patrick’s been trying to get custody of Claire, but his claims that I’ve rumored her are crazy!” Allison exclaims. “Thank god the judge sees that. I mean, god, I’ve been tempted, and that’s when I always call you, you know, but still. I’m just so glad that I haven’t. It would be terrible to be apart from your child, you know?”

“I know,” you say softly, watching Y/D/N run around on the playground. Truth be told, you hadn’t wanted kids. They hadn’t been part of your life’s plan. You’d been worried, too, that you’d turn into your mother. You never want to be anything like that raving lunatic.

You’re grateful for Y/D/N, though. You’ll never tell anyone that Allison had to convince you (thankfully without rumoring you) to keep her. The both of you have agreed to carry the secret to your separate graves. She was an easy baby, thankfully, and a sweet and easygoing child. You don’t want her to feel like she’s unwanted.

God, though, after Five left, you were messed up. You’d really loved him. You just couldn’t understand why he would leave without a word—you still can’t. There’s not a day that goes by where you don’t think of him—is he okay? Where did he go? Why didn’t he say a word to you?

It’s weird. You alternate between worrying about him in a mothering sort of way—you’ll always remember Five as the closed-off teenager that just needed someone to hold his hand and love him unconditionally, and the mother in you comes out—and worrying about him in the way you would your lover. You’ve tried to imagine him as twenty-five years old and you can’t.

At first, life without Five was hell. There was the constant worrying about him, and then your home situation got way worse. There was no one to protect you from bullies at school—Vanya and Ben were too quiet to stand up to anyone, and you were too nervous and ashamed to ask Diego or Luther for help.

You were still messed up when you’d met Y/D/N’s father. He reminded you of Five but he wasn’t smart enough. He didn’t style his hair the same way, and his eyes weren’t the same precise shade of green.

It only lasted a little bit, but that little while was enough. He was long gone before you even knew you were pregnant.

God, you barely even remember his name. What was it… Max? Rick? You’ve no idea.

Your phone rings, cutting Allison off, and you shrug at her. “Sorry, give me a sec.” It’s Vanya that’s calling. “Hey, Vanya,” you say, letting Allison know who it is. “What’s up?”

“There is someone in my apartment,” she whispers. “Where are you?”

“Oh, my God,” you reply, standing up. “I’m—we’re on our way! I’m only about five minutes from you if I run.”

“Thank you,” she whispers, and you can hear in her voice that she’s about to cry.

“Hey, call 911,” you instruct. “Allison and I will be right over.” You may not be superpowered, but you do know how to fight. Diego had insisted when you’d become closer to the family over the years. He even gave you a knife for your 18th birthday. You sneakily take said knife out of your pocket and hide it in your palm. You’ll not hesitate to stab someone if it comes to that.

“What’s going on?” Allison asks with concern. “Y/N?”

“There is someone in Vanya’s apartment,” you reply.

“Oh, my God.” Allison looks around frantically. She grabs the arm of an old lady walking past. “I heard a rumor,” she says quickly, “that you brought our children back to the Umbrella Academy safely and then left and forgot all about this conversation.”

“Y/D/N!” You yell, waving her over. “Claire!”

“Come on, girls,” the old lady says kindly.

“She’s going to take you back to Uncle Luther,” you whisper to the girls. “Me and Aunt Allison have to go see Aunt Vanya, all right?”

“Bye, Mommy!” Y/D/N says cheerfully. She takes the old lady’s hand and they walk away.

“Nice thinking,” you mutter to Allison, barely waiting to see them start walking before breaking into a run yourself.

“Well, powers can be useful at times. As long as I’m not hurting anyone. Besides, it’s urgent,” she says back between pants.

You don’t even want to think about what might happen to Vanya if the intruder finds her. Are they violent? Are they looking for money? Together, you and Allison might be able to get them out, but you don’t want to risk them hurting Vanya when you’re not there.

You almost step on Mr. Puddles, who’s escaped again, when you make it to Vanya’s floor of the apartment building. You can’t hear any loud sounds coming from her apartment, which could be good or bad.

Allison holds one finger to her lips and pulls her key out of her pocket. You wince when the lock creaks as she turns it and prepare yourself to get attacked, shot, or worse.

Allison manages to open the door slightly without making a sound. You peer around it. The person in Vanya’s apartment doesn’t seem to be stealing anything. It’s a he, you’re pretty sure, and he just seems to be looking around.

Allison counts down from three on her fingers. You kick the door open and lunge at the intruder, ready to hold your knife to his throat. Allison’s already trying to rumor him, but he does something neither of you would have expected. It makes you drop the knife in your hands and it stops the words in Allison’s mouth.

The man spacial jumps, complete with the blue light and everything.

Vanya peeks out from around the corner, completely bewildered when she sees all three adults just staring at each other.

You take in the man’s appearance. He’s dirty like he hasn’t taken a shower in weeks or maybe even months. His clothes are torn. His jaw is sharp but messily shaven and his eyes have bags under them like he hasn’t slept for days. He has the tattoo of an umbrella on his wrist.

You suck in a choked breath. It can’t be.

“Tell me it again,” Luther demands.

Five rolls his eyes. “I’ve already told you three times, dumbass. I traveled to the future, got stuck for ten years, and traveled back. That’s it.” He’s bouncing his knee so aggressively he’s shaking the entire table. His stomach rumbles, making Diego flinch, but nobody else moves. It’s too much for everyone to take in, so they just stare at Five.

Five’s eyes are glued to the one person he’s been most excited to see.

You won’t meet his gaze.

“Where in the future did you go?” Klaus asks.

“2019.”

Diego whistles. “Wow.”

“Impressive until you remember you couldn’t travel back,” Reginald says from the back of the room, as always sounding like he thinks of himself as a king, and you stand up abruptly. You can’t stand him, but you also can’t pick a fight with him—he is your friends’ father, after all. You try to avoid him as much as possible. You won’t stand for him insulting Five like that, even if you were thinking the same thing.

“I have to go,” you mutter, standing up. Allison squeezes your hand for a brief moment, smiling at you, but you don’t return the gesture.

Five jerks in his chair, but Allison pins him down with a glare. She knows better than anyone how much his disappearance messed you up, and he thinks he can waltz right back in here?

Well, he can. Allison knows that beneath your overwhelmed exterior, you are bursting with excitement. She hates Five a little bit, for that; the way he captured you and abandoned you, the way you could never let him go, and how you’re going to take him back when he very well might leave again.

“Miss Y/D/N is with Grace in the drawing area,” Pogo speaks up.

Five frowns with confusion. Y/D/N? Who’s that?

“Thanks,” you mutter and hightail it out of the room. This is too much. It’s so much.

Five’s stomach rumbles again and Vanya finally turns around. She grabs bread, peanut butter, and marshmallows and starts to make him a sandwich, and Five just might cry. It’s been so long since he’s seen his favorite sister, and it’s been so long since he’s been in a house that’s not even remotely demolished, and it’s been so long since he’s eaten something that isn’t from a can.

He smiles at her without teeth when she hands it to him and mutters “Thanks”.

“Why were you stuck?” Luther asks without prompt.

“If I knew, I would have gotten unstuck a whole lot earlier,” Five hisses, but the effect is slightly ruined when he takes a big bite out of the sandwich.

It’s going to be a long day.

He’s waiting for you when you get home from Y/D/N’s dance lessons. You walk into the house and jump when you see him there, browsing through the family photos like he hadn’t just broke into your house. Your daughter follows you in and screams.

“Mommy, there’s someone in our house!”

“I know, honey,” you say soothingly. “That’s just Five. Do you remember all the stories I told you about Five?”

“You’re Five?” Y/D/N asks, staring at him with undisguised curiosity. “Where have you been?”

“I went to the future,” Five replies, staring at her with a look you can’t quite read on his face. You’re nervous; what will he think about Y/D/N? What will she think about him? “I just got back today.”

In your most secret fantasies, you’ve dreampt about him coming back and being like a father to Y/D/N. You remember, though, his disdain for children when you were younger. You’d shared the disdain, truly, and though you’ve changed, you don’t know how much he’s changed.

“The future?” Y/D/N’s face screws up with confusion. “You can do that?”

“Y/D/N, Five is special just like Aunt Allison and Uncle Luther—”

“And Uncle Diego!” she adds. She really, really loves Diego, and it might have something to do with the way you’ve caught him multiple times trying to teach her how to throw knives. “You know, you should be my daddy,” she continues, and you choke.

“Y/D/N!” you exclaim, coloring. To his credit, Five only blinks at her. You get the feeling he’s more curious about her than he is put-off or annoyed.

When his gaze transfers to you, however, it changes. His eyes narrow and you see the way they zero in on your left hand and the lack of a ring on your finger. “Yeah? And what happened to your daddy?”

“He left, just like you,” Y/D/N says, and Five flinches.

“I think that’s enough, honey,” you say softly. “It’s time for bed, yeah?”

“Mommy, is Five gonna be my daddy?” she asks while you carry her upstairs. It takes her a little bit longer to go to bed than usual because she’s so excited about the newcomer in your house, but when you come down the stairs Five is still milling around the living room, the ultimate missing puzzle piece. Except the puzzle he’s missing from is your past, and now that he’s been forced into the future it all doesn’t look quite right.

“You have a daughter,” he says immediately and unnecessarily.

“Obviously.” You cross your arms and chew on your lip. There’s an unspoken tension between you two that you almost don’t want to confront.

It never used to be awkward to talk to Five.

“And I’ll take it her father is… out of the picture?”

“Why, are you jealous?” you tease. It just slips out. You haven’t been able to tease Five for so long.

Ten goddamn years.

“I mean…” He looks away from you and shrugs. “I guess I don’t really have any right to be, but…”

“What was the future like?” you ask, genuinely curious.

He lets out a long breath. “Goddamn terrible. So lonely.” He hunches his shoulders and stares at the ground. You’ve never seen Five look so defeated. It kills you a little bit.

“I get that you’ve only been back for a little while—”

“Two hours,” he corrects.

“Two hours,” you concede, almost unable to keep yourself from smiling. “I get it if your feelings have changed. But Y/D/N was right. She does need a father figure.”

He looks up at you, a little incredulous that you’d just accept him back like that. “Seriously?”

“I mean, god, I’m going to kill you for leaving,” you say, shaking your head and laughing a little bit. “But I’m just so happy you’re okay, you know? And I missed you. Every day for ten years.”

Five wraps his arms around you, and if he’s crying you don’t ask why. You get the feeling he went through more than he’s letting on in the future, and you’ll be damned if you don’t get it out of him later, but right now you’re content to comfort him. God knows you need a hug. It seems like he needs one too.

Five years later, you and Allison go together to Leonard’s cabin to talk to Vanya. She tries to stop Allison from rumoring her, but you jump in front of her and it’s your throat Vanya slices instead. Allison calls Five, who’d been working out equations in your shared bedroom while watching Y/D/N, and he jumps to you immediately. He doesn’t even take Allison with him when he jumps back to the Academy, where Reginald watches all the processings with a stern eye. He’d never had to drink poison to get all the kids back together; you and Five did that all on your own.

He doesn’t leave your side the entire time you’re unconscious. Nobody tells Y/D/N about what’s going on and just say instead that you’ve gone on a vacation and drop her off at the park with a trusted friend.

Luther has to knock Five out at one point when nobody’s sure if he’s going to stick to the plan of trying to talk to Vanya. The way he’s vibrating with energy and won’t put down his favorite gun doesn’t give them a lot of hope.

He’s  the one to greet Vanya when she comes to the Academy just after waking up. Everyone else had left to try to find Vanya and also so Five could cool down so he wouldn’t try to kill Luther on sight.

“Is Y/N… is Y/N okay?” she asks timidly.

“She will be, thanks to Grace,” he says coldly.

“Can I… see her?”

“No!” Five snaps immediately. “God, no. First of all, she’s resting right now. Second of all, you need a good grip on your powers and your emotions before I let you see her.” He glares at Vanya, arms crossed and hackles raised. He doesn’t offer the comfort she so desperately needs, but then again, she knows she doesn’t deserve it.

The truth may hurt, but it’s better than being locked away, like Luther had threatened to do, so Vanya nods, tells Five she’ll be in her room, and leaves to feel guilty in private.

You can’t talk when you wake up.

“Ssh, don’t try to talk,” Five comforts, wiping your hair away from your face. “Do you know what happened?”

You nod, one hand going to your sore neck.

“She’s here but I can make her leave if you want,” Five explains calmly. “She wants to see you, but I told her I wouldn’t let that happen until she’s under control.”

You close your eyes and a tear leaks out from beneath your right eyelid.

“I—here.” Five hands you a pad of paper and a Sharpie. “There you go.”

When you ask if you’ll ever be able to talk again, Five’s at a loss.

April 1, 2019 passes and nothing happens. Reginald and Vanya have an explosive fight, of course, about him hiding her powers, but she does have to admit that her slicing your neck open not two days after learning about her powers don’t exactly help her case. Everyone, even Vanya, can see Reginald’s logic.

Doesn’t mean she likes it, but she understands.

When you first see Vanya, you hold Five’s hand so tightly he loses feeling in his fingers, and he glares at Vanya the whole time, waiting for the moment he needs to jump as far away from her as possible. He’s got mixed feelings about her; on the one hand, she couldn’t control her feelings and threw a temper tantrum so huge she nearly killed you, and on the other hand, it is pretty shitty that Reginald kept her powers a secret from her for so long.

He’s already lost you before. He’s not about to do it again.

I’m fine, you’d written to Vanya. I’m glad everyone’s okay. You’d given her a small smile but made no move to hug her.

It’s going to take a long time before any trust is built back up.

At least the world hasn’t ended.

You and Five don’t have enough children, but that’s okay. He probably would have gotten annoyed if there were too many running around. You and Y/D/N are enough.

Every now and then, he just stares at you. The memory of your dead body has faded, and now the memory of this new, older Y/N is fresh in his memory. Yes, you’ve changed; you have a child and you’re more forgiving now, but he’s also changed. He may not want a huge family, but he’ll fight like hell for the one he has now. His time in the apocalypse changed him in ways you’ll not even begin to understand, mostly because he won’t tell you that the apocalypse had ever been an option, but you do know that he had been lonely.

Thank goodness you somehow changed in the same ways so you could still fit into the puzzle together.

Different puzzle, different pieces, but you still click, and that’s all you need.

Umbrella Academy Taglist:

@fentanvl @deathswretch @lightningidiot @five-hg @iamsnek666@ameliatrh @ihatecheesyusernames @dora-the-grownup @emilyt0314 @idklol707

Five x Reader Taglist:

@statsvitenskap

Forever Taglist:

@lemirabitur @annymcervantes

I’m taking requests for Stranger Things, Umbrella Academy, Supernatural, and Marvel. Send in some!

Take a look at my prompt page if you need inspiration!

[ducktracy]

129. plane dippy (1936)

release date: april 30th, 1936

series: looney tunes

director: tex avery

starring: joe dougherty (porky), billy bletcher (sergeant, professor blotz), bernice hansen (kitty)

the first cartoon to proudly display “featuring porky”—a trend that would continue on for years and years (my favorites are cartoons that explicitly have daffy in the title, yet the title card still says something like the daffy doc featuring porky or tom turk and daffy featuring porky.) beans makes his last ever appearance for real this time, reduced to cameo, kitty also bids goodbye by possessing a small role, and a glasses wearing dog with an overbite makes an appearance and would reappear once more in shanghaied shipmates. ham and/or ex are the last to survive, making a small cameo in porky’s pet. porky’s time has finally arrived. our hero wishes to enlist in the air force, but quickly discovers he isn’t much good at it. instead, he’s sent to clean a voice operated airplane, and things quickly turn sour—and destructive.

we begin with our hero strolling down the street. he comes across a poster: JOIN THE ARMY — INFANTRY DIVISION. porky thinks it over with careful decision, yet decides it’s not for him. another: SEE THE WORLD — JOIN THE NAVY. the same thoughtful mulling, the same rejection. and finally: LEARN TO FLY — JOIN THE AIR CORPS. the perfect job. porky gives his affirmation with a dutiful salute, and marches inside to speak about the job.

right away, he approaches a burly (and surly) general, who is scribbling away at his desk. porky wordlessly salutes at attention, and is blown back from the impact as the sarge growls “WELL?” porkys says “i wanna learn to f-fl—i wanna learn to f-f-f—“ he can’t quite get it out, and instead resorts to making airplane noises while imitating a plane with his arms.

the sergeant grunts “what’s your name, bud?” and once more porky gets tripped up in his words. the sarge instead hands him a slate and some chalk and instructs him to write his name. a gag too good for words as porky physically writes out “P-P-P-P-P-“ as he continues to stutter his name. to get him to spit it out, the sarge whistles—a common dougherty era gag as i mentioned previously—and porky gives us his easy to remember, alliterative name that rolls so easily off the tongue: “porky cornelius washington otis lincoln abner aloysius casper jefferson filbert horatius narcissus pig.” a fantastic joke that hits really well with the timing. i wonder how many takes that took dougherty—he only stutters a few times. i don’t even have a stutter and i certainly couldn’t spit that out to save my life.

instead, the sarge drags porky by the arm and throws a uniform in his arms. he tosses porky into the changing room and waits patiently for a few seconds. out comes a giant lump of clothes, much to the sarge’s surprise. to assert he’s dealing with the same stuttering pig from before, the sergeant pokes his head inside the oversized collar, and a “hello!” responds from the abyss of fabric. porky’s “hello!” is hysterically out of place and sounds nothing like him, and was likely used for that reason. it’s incoherent, and slightly confusing at first, but it also enhances the gag. to remedy the situation, the sergeant picks up the mass of clothes and dunks it in a nearby barrel of water. the clothes gradually shrink, and we’re reunited with porky as he now dons a suitable uniform.

tex’s love of typography gags is prominently displayed as we get white text on a black background: DIZZINESS TEST. the words whirl around in a circle as we transition to the next scene, the sergeant winding porky up like a top with some duct tape. with a whip of the tape (or ribbon, up to interpretation), porky whirls around the room tasmanian devil style. the sarge stops him and picks him up, just in time for beans to make a cameo by drawing a straight line on the floor. the sarge places porky back down on the line, and he zips uncontrollably around the room.

bullets spell out our next test: TARGET PRACTICE. porky and the sarge are in a different room, both positioned behind a gun on a tripod. the sarge provides a demo by propelling a toy plane into the air and shooting the gun at the plane, hitting it in one go. he grins at his handiwork and offers porky the gun to do the same. the sarge tosses another toy plane in the air, and porky attempts to shoot it. instead, he has great difficulty controlling the gun, shooting everywhere BUT the plane and nearly taking out the sergeant himself. a cloud of smoke fills the scene. once the smoke clears, porky’s left standing on a wooden floor, now finding him outside as the entire building is reduced to debris and bricks around him. the gun and the plane survive the wreckage, and porky gives the gun a frustrated kick. to his befuddlement, the kick prompts the gun to shoot, and it hits the plane perfectly.

READY FOR DUTY. now, the sergeant tosses rifles into the hands of aspiring soldiers, the force of the throw so strong that they each stumble backwards (fittingly accompanied by a gunshot sound effect.) dutiful porky prepares to receive his honor... and a duster is thrust into his possession (still hilariously accompanied by the gunshot sound.) as porky ogles at the duster, the sarge thrusts a paper that merely reads “ORDERS” into his grip and points to a nearby shed. outside of the shed reads a sign: “ROBOT PLANE — KEEP OUT!” perfect for porky to wander into.

porky obeys captain’s orders, and meanders into the shed. he gives a few whistles to alert his presence, and he’s met with nothing. suddenly, a monkey whips a cloth off of a covered object, spinning porky around like a top from the impact. thusly uncovers said robotic plane as the monkey inquires “well?” porky hands him the orders with a loyal solute. “to professor blotz — this helper O.K. for your robot plane tests.”

professor blotz wastes no time interrogating porky, instead showing him his new invention. he drags over a radio and microphone, ordering “get ready!” into the microphone. a signal is sent directly to the robot plane, the propellor whirring to life. “take off!” porky runs out of the way as the plane zooms into the air. professor blotz shows off his fancy voice activated plane, much to the fascination of porky. loops, nosedives, ascensions... there’s nothing the plane can’t do.

now the professor offers the microphone to porky, coercing him with “try it!” porky struggles to get his command out, and the plane comically shudders and jitters in conjunction with porky’s stuttering. the plane does an uncertain l-l-lo-loop d-de l-lo-loo-lo-loop and hastily g-go-goes u-u-up. the plane inches closer and closer to a nearby hot air balloon, and porky manages to order it down just in time. professor blotz yanks the microphone out of porky’s grip as the plane parks itself outside, growling “ooooh, get to work!” and thrusting the feather duster in porky’s hands.

while porky starts his cleaning duties, the professor haughtily places his radio in the window of the shed. out come little kitty, a puppy, and the unnamed dog with an overbite from i haven’t got a hat. kitty giggles as the puppy licks her and asks the dog (a goofy and pluto situation going on it seems) “does he do tricks?” of course! the dog orders his pup to sit up. of course, the microphone picks up on his voice, and porky, who’s dutifully dusting the plane, now finds himself clinging onto the plane which is now sitting on its hind legs.

“wag your tail!” the plane shakes its rear wings to the befuddlement of porky. now kitty tries, armed with a balloon. “get the balloon!” she tosses her balloon and giggles as the puppy chases it. and, of course, porky is thrown into the seat of the plane as it takes off at frightening speeds and immediately pops the hot air balloon, the gag made even more amusing with the detail of two figures floating with parachutes after the accident.

porky is now stuck in a shanghaied plane. kitty orders the pup to chase his tail, and the plane spirals towards the ground in an attempt to chase its own tail. in the midst of the game gone horrible wrong, porky reduces a clock tower to debris as he rams into each “level”. he finds himself flying through a nearby circus. he pops out of the other side of the tent, acrobats performing their routine as they hang from the bottom of the plane.

now led towards the ocean, porky’s plane serves as a speedboat as the acrobats transition into water skiers. the timing of all of these scenes is very well done. just the right sense of urgency conveyed, yet executed so the gags have time to settle in as well. a swordfish leaps out of the waters and cuts the line connecting the acrobats to the plane, and they’re left behind as porky is sent underwater, desperately trying not to cut the fish into sushi. some nice camera angles as porky chases a fish in and out of the foreground.

the plane leaps in and out of the waves like a dolphin, chasing the hapless victim fish. eventually, porky resurfaces with an intimidatingly huge whale hot on his tail. elsewhere, the dog overbite orders his pup to chase a cat (“sick ‘im!”), and porky is sent hurtling straight towards an innocent victim flying in his own plane. the two planes tussle, the poor pilot clinging onto a lone propellor as he sinks towards the sea below. porky tears into a blimp. once advertising “SMOKE ROPO CIGARS”, the blimp is cleverly reduced to “SOS” thanks to porky cutting up half of said blimp.

even the clouds fear porky, taking form of an anthropomorphic human running away from the destructive blades of the plane’s propellor. the cloud man seeks refuge in his cloud house, slamming the door on porky. porky is then launched into a nosedive, shredding a farmer’s stack of hay into a shower of already made straw hats. a group of planes zip out of frame so as to avoid porky and zip right back up into their leisurely positions, the timing spot on and making a seemingly pointless gag much funnier.

a whole crowd of children have congregated around the pup causing so much trouble. all of the kids shout various conflicting commands, all picked up by the receiver. porky’s plane is all but in control, at one point doing back hand springs and zigzagging all throughout the screen. the little puppy has tired itself out, and his owner coos “you’ve had enough”, summoning him home.

good news for porky as the microphone picks up the “come on home” command. the plane skids to an uneasy halt, animation light, delicate, and floaty as the wings scrape the grass. the plane skids right through the shed, and porky is launched out as it crashes into the window. and, with amazing speeds, porky propels himself to the registration office. a sign on the outside advertises the army as porky declares “i wanna learn to march!”

finally, our happy little soldier gets the ending he’s always wanted. bob clampett animates an eager porky marching in the infantry, intermittently flashing hilariously ecstatic grins at the audience. perhaps even funnier is that he isn’t even in time with everyone else’s march, doing a much more hurried speed walk (speed waddle?) slightly out of time. a happy end as we iris out.

while this isn’t my favorite tex porky short, it’s undoubtedly entertaining. speed is a big factor to tex’s cartoons, and it certainly plays a big role in this one, conveying the urgency and out of control nature of porky’s shanghaied plane. the opening almost feels a little TOO fast, with porky getting registered right away and doing all his tests one after the other. it’s a minor complaint, and it isn’t even that noticeable. my ADHD would much rather prefer too fast than too slow. also amazing how, for lack of a better word, relevant this cartoon is today, where voice control becomes more and more popular. not in a durrr technology bad way, but just in a comical way that makes you draw comparisons. a highly amusing short that’s worth a watch, just because.

link!

[sweetheartjeongguk]

twitchy witchy girl

pairing: jimin x reader

genre: kiki’s delivery service au, fluff, minor angst

rating: pg

warning(s): oc is mean to jimin but makes up for it in the end, slight public humiliation

word count: 3.3k+

summary: maybe human boys aren’t so bad after all. 

a/n: here’s a late birthday gift to the loml park jimin 

masterlist | studio ghibli masterlist

“He’s here to see you again.”

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“Honey, stop slamming your head against the counter. You’re going to give yourself a concussion.”

“Sounds like a fun way to go.”

“He’s been waiting outside for quite some time.” The older woman hums, one hand on her pregnant belly and the other resting on top of your shoulder.

When you first arrived in the new beachside town, you had high hopes of being incredibly popular and staying in a fabulous mansion where you practically drown in luxury. Instead, you’re stuck living in a one-room apartment with your cat familiar, Mochi, and working for Lee Eunji and her husband as their very first delivery witch.    

While most of the townspeople saw witches as nothing but troublemakers, Eunji saw a new opportunity.

“Tell him I’m dead.” You rub at your forehead once the throbbing became too much.

“He said he’d buy a Ouija board.”

“Tell him I moved away.”

“He can literally see you.” Eunji scoffs, waving a hand towards the front of the store.

With a disgruntled huff, you lift your head to follow Eunji’s line of sight.

Park Jimin stands with his hands tucked in his front pockets and an exasperated look on his face. He paces in front of the doorway, muttering something to himself while glancing into the store from the corner of his eye. When he notices your staring, he skids to a stop.

To this day, you have no clue why he’s interested in you. Sure, you’re a witch who can do all types of magic and fly on a broomstick which is enough to entertain the grumpiest of fiends. But one thing’s for sure – you and Park Jimin are two different people heading down two different paths. He’s the stereotypical rich boy who’s loved and admired by all simply for breathing air. Meanwhile, you’re the scary girl who can’t hold a decent conversation with another person without them sputtering something about magic and witchcraft.

“See?” Eunji chuckles at your obvious discomfort. “Can’t back out of this one, bud. Just go see what he wants.”

“Do you think you can bail me out of jail after I charm him into a cockroach and squish him with my foot?” You lean your cheek against the crook of your elbow in thought.  

“How about…” Eunji brushes back the strands of hair that fall across your face. “…you not resort to murder and just talk to him like a normal human being?”

“You’re just saying that because you think he’s pretty. He’s cast a spell on you too.” You roll your eyes as Eunji motions for Jimin to come inside.

“You’re the only witch here, sweetheart.” Eunji winks before going to check on the freshly baked loaves of bread resting in the kitchen.  

Jimin glows brighter than usual, his swept-back blond hair hidden underneath a red beret that makes him look like a stereotypical French boy. You snort to yourself when you take in the rest of his outfit – black-and-white striped shirt tucked into slim-fitting slacks with sleek black dress shoes.

Talk about Mr. Goody-Two-Shoes.

“Why, hello there, Mr. Park! What can we do for you today?” Eunji peeps her head through the kitchen doorway.  

“Hi, Mrs. Lee.” Jimin replies smoothly, hands crossed behind his back in an innocent manner. “I was wondering if I could grab Y/N for a second.”

You could barely hold back your disgust when you notice Eunji melting under Jimin’s sweet façade. He has virtually everyone in town wrapped around his stupid chubby pinky finger, and you refuse to let yourself fall for one of his tricks. 

“Y/N’s not here right now.” You grit your teeth. “Please leave a message after the fuc—"

“Y/N! Be nice.”

You push off of the stool you were sitting in behind the counter with a grunt. Your muscles are still sore from your delivery yesterday. Thankfully, there aren’t any major deliveries that afternoon so you’re free to stuff your face with as many as chocolate pastries as your heart desires.

Jimin draws in a small breath as you approach, mentally preparing his little speech he wrote on his way to the bakery that afternoon. He starts to open his mouth but only lets out a pathetic squeak as you roughly brush past him on your way to the pastry tray on the other side of the room.  

“Y/N!” Eunji scolds before turning to Jimin with an apologetic pout. “I’m so sorry about her, she’s still trying to get used to everything.”

“Oh no, I understand!” Jimin chuckles awkwardly, a hand reaching behind to rub the back of his neck. “Anyways…Y/N, there’s s-something I wanted to ask you.”

You hum absentmindedly as you stuff a large creampuff into your mouth. You wonder if you could cast a spell to speed up his spiel so that you’ll still have time to catch the new episode of your favorite television show that’s scheduled to air in a half hour.

“My aviation club at school is hosting a party this Saturday.” Jimin announces, his voice wavering from subtle nerves. “I was wondering if you would like to come.”

You silently scold your heart for thumping a little harder than usual. Attending a party with Jimin as his…date. The word should have sent a disgusted shiver down your spine, but all you get is a flood of butterflies in your stomach.

For some reason, the thought of Jimin in a tuxedo didn’t seem so bad.

“Oh, that sounds lovely!” Eunji claps her hands excitedly. “It’ll be a great chance for you to make some friends, Y/N!”

“Oh yeah, definitely!” Jimin blurts out. “The rest of the guys are just dying to meet a witch. They’re really curious to learn more about how your broom works!”

Just like that, the mood dies. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t just die. It comes barreling towards the earth in a frenzy of fire and heat, striking the ground with tremendous force and destroying everything in its path.

He didn’t want you to go with him – he just wants to show you off like some circus act to his friends.

In that moment, you’re reminded of why you didn’t trust him. He might have Eunji and everyone else fooled, but you know better. Park Jimin’s just like everyone else, and you curse yourself for nearly falling into his trap.

Eunji watches inquisitively as you make your way towards the boy holding the invitation in both hands. There’s a tight grin that stretches across your face in a Cheshire Cat-like manner. The sight is quite unsettling to Eunji, but Jimin still beams at you as if he’s found the answers to his prayers.

“An invitation just for me?” You grab the invitation, ignoring the pleasant sensation of his soft skin brushing against yours.

“Yup! I saved one just for you.” Jimin nods excitedly.

“Oh really?”

“Yes! We’re really interested in learn—”

Rrrrip.

Jimin’s smile breaks as you tear the card in half. You barely hear Eunji gasping in the background as you shred the invitation into several jagged pieces. With a snap of your fingers, the slivers of paper burst into flames and float pathetically to the linoleum floor in a burnt crisp.

In an instant, your crazed smile transforms into a disgusted scowl. “Thanks for the invite, but I’d prefer company with people who don’t use me as their personal flying monkey.”

“Y/N!” Eunji hisses sharply.

You ignore her. “I know you think that you’re being cute and funny, but honestly, you’re just annoying and pathetic.”

Jimin stands frozen in the middle of the bakery, his bleary eyes fixated on the burnt strips scattered across the floor. Eunji rushes over from the kitchen to collect the mess with a broom and dustpan, glancing up when she notices your figure escape through the backdoor towards your living quarters.

“Jimin, I am so sorry about her.” Eunji sighs in exasperation. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

Jimin nods stiffly. “It’s n-no problem. I understand…”

Eunji opens her mouth at another attempt of a worthless apology, but Jimin’s already turning on his heel and heading out of the door, the tiniest sniffle betraying his quiet composure. Eunji watches in pity as Jimin disappears down the street with his shoulders slumped forward and his hands tucked into his front pockets once more.

He’s lucky that his route continues straight down the road. That way, Eunji doesn’t notice the tears dribbling down his cheeks reddened from embarrassment.  

Ever since you burned his invitation in his face, Eunji hasn’t spoken to you. After you escaped the bakery and hid in your room to watch tv with Mochi, she barged in with the pile of ashes in her hands. She promptly tosses the charred papers on top of your nightstand, turning on her heel with a repulsed sneer.  

“I’m disappointed in you. Honestly.”

Whether you like it or not, your chest twinges with guilt. Apart from being like a second mother to you, Eunji’s your best friend. When you faced the threat of living out on the streets with no food or money, she was the one who took you under her wing and offered you not only a job but a place to sleep and eat.  

Now, it’s as if the sight of you makes her sick to her stomach. This time, you couldn’t even blame Park Jimin for it.

“If he just left me alone like I told him millions of times before, we wouldn’t be having this issue.”

“That may be,” Mochi purrs. “But you did embarrass him by burning his invitation in his face. The very same invitation he had kept specifically for you and only you.”

“So?” You grumble. “He only invited me because he wanted me to entertain his dumb friends.”

The gentle evening breeze soars in through your open window, chilling you to the bone. You slightly curse at yourself for not dressing in warmer pajamas, but your earnings for the month wouldn’t give you much. You’d borrow from Eunji, but 1) most of her wardrobe right now are maternity clothes and 2) she currently refuses to speak with you.

You let out a long whine, sounding exactly like your five-year-old self who cried when a wave toppled her over during a family vacation to the beach. “Do I have to?”

Mochi stares at you without a word.  

“What if I fake my death?”

“Y/N…”

“Okay, fine…but if he doesn’t accept my apology, then can I fake my death?”

You feel silly.

Dressed in a white dress that molds tightly against your waist and puffs out at the skirt, you look and feel like a creampuff. After begging for her forgiveness for two hours straight, Eunji goes to work on preparing your party outfit. You pout about the centimeter-thick layer of foundation and powder, but Eunji shrugs off your complaints with an uncaring smirk. Perhaps it’s your punishment for not listening to her in the first place.

“It’s itchy.” You whine as the lace fabric continues to scratch against your skin.

Eunji holds in her laughter as you shift uncomfortably in your seat. “If only you focused on your special magic training and not on hurting the feelings of people who like you, you could have learned how to cast an anti-itching spell.”

“Spells are hard…” You pout. “And he doesn’t like me, he just wants to pretend to get to know me so that he can tell people that he knows a witch. It’s exploitation at its finest.”

Eunji shakes her head in disbelief. “I’d think you witches would have some type of clairvoyance about you, but you’re completely dense.”

“I’m not a psychic.” You roll your eyes. “I’m starting to think that no one in this town cares enough to educate themselves on witch culture.”

“Well, if you weren’t such a grumpy old troll, then maybe you could educate those people about witches.” Eunji pokes your nose with the end of a concealer brush as she finishes up the last touch-ups to your makeup.

“I shouldn’t have to.” You try to cross your arms, but you find it almost impossible considering how tight the chest of the dress was. “For once, I want someone to learn for themselves for once instead of using me for laughs and giggles.”

Eunji sighs in defeat. While the makeup and fancy dress did wonders to brighten your usual gloomy appearance, the frown marring your brow seems to remain there permanently.  

“Honey…” Eunji says quietly. “I might not be a witch, but I know a thing or two about love. That boy definitely likes you for you, not because he wants to cross ‘Meet a witch’ off his bucket list.”

You continue to fiddle with the lace of the skirt, nearly ripping out a stray thread before laying your palms flat in your lap.

“I’ve never seen a boy so adamant about visiting a girl everyday even if he can just get one sentence in.” Eunji laughs softly. “Reminds me of my husband when we were first dating. He wouldn’t let me go for one second.”

You try to laugh, but you end up looking like you swallowed something inedible.  

“I’m not saying that you need to date him or anything.” Eunji shakes her head. “I’m just saying that you should give Jimin a chance. You’d do good with some friends in this town, even if it’s just him.”

With that, Eunji holds out a clenched fist. You’re quick to grab whatever’s in her hands, but you instantly blanch when the substance fills your palms. While most of the invitation’s burnt to a crisp, one part of the paper remains semi-readable.

“Ms. Witch…”

A couple days ago, you’d be rolling your eyes and threatening to shove your broomstick where the sun won’t shine if Jimin had called you by that nickname. Now, all you could feel is a delightful warmth that spreads from your face down to your toes.  

You’re screwed. You’re definitely screwed.

“You might want to head off now!” Eunji yells. You lift your head in surprise when you notice that she’s already escaped into the kitchen. “It looks like it’s going to rain! Better not be late!”

Desperately shoving the remnants of the invitation into your bra, you barely spare a coherent farewell as you dash into the street and kicking off the ground with your broomstick between your legs. As you head southwest towards the party, you force several deep breaths as you settle the anxiety that plagues your veins and kickstarts your heart into overdrive.

“This better work.” You whisper to yourself, ignoring the tiny droplets of water that begin to fall from the cluster of clouds above.

Your jaw drops at the vast size of the house. Classical music plays on repeat as the guests mingle around the dining room that looks as though it could fit an entire country and a half inside. You observe from the outside, completely unbothered as the rain soaks through your clothes and streaks your makeup. While you take a moment to admire the decorations strung across the walls and on the ceiling, your eyes wander in search of one individual in particular.

“Excuse me.” Someone coughs.

Behind you, a boy watches you with a dirty look, almost as if he wishes to say, “You obviously look like you don’t belong here”. While he isn’t far from the truth, you couldn’t help but mirror his unimpressed glare.

“I’m sorry, but this party is reserved for members only.” He retorts snootily. “I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to leave.”

“Jokes on you, asshole, I have an invitation…” You answer quickly.

“Is that so?” He asks with a pretentious scoff. “Where is it?”

You choke on your words. You almost forgot that the evidence is literally shoved inside your cleavage. “U-Um…well the thing is…”

“Y/N?”

You, along with Mr. Stick-Stuck-High-Up-In-My-Ass, turn towards the new visitor. Your heart prickles with something foreign at the sight of Park Jimin in a suit and tie and a cute flower tucked inside his pocket.

“Hi…” You reply meekly, eyes fixated on the growing puddle on the edge of the sidewalk.

You completely miss the elated glint in Jimin’s eyes.

“She’s your guest, Park?” The boy asks warily, still viewing you as some kind of creature who escaped from the Black Lagoon.  

You’ll be sure to add a little something extra to his hors d’oeuvres when you get the chance.

“Yeah, she’s my plus-one.” Jimin answers confidently. “I didn’t get to give her the invitation, but her name’s on the list if you want to check.”

The boy watches Jimin carefully before rolling his eyes. “I’ll be sure to check the list. Be sure that next time, everyone has an invite before they just show up unannounced and unwanted.”

Oh, how you wish you could use your magic for bad just once. Sure, you might face lifelong consequences that could inevitably affect your future…but would one time really make a difference?

“Sorry about him.” Jimin scratches the back of his neck. “Jihyun can be pretty uptight sometimes…”

“I can handle uptight just fine.” You shrug awkwardly. “T-Thanks though.”

Jimin clears his throat. “Yeah, of course! Anytime…”

There’s a brief moment of silence that you wish you could break without looking like a complete fool. Thankfully, Jimin takes the initiative from you.  

“Y-You look really pretty.”

Thankfully, the foundation that Eunji caked onto your cheeks covers any sign of redness. Unfortunately, it did make you look like you took a dip into a giant frosting container.

“Thanks, you don’t look so bad yourself.” You force yourself to playfully nudge at his shoulder. “You clean up rather nicely.”

“T-Thanks, my mom picked it out.” Jimin immediately clamps his mouth shut. You smile at the obvious embarrassment that floods his features and purses his lips into a demure pout.

It’s cute. In fact, it’s the type of cute that makes you want to drop everything and bring him back home to introduce to your entire family.

If only Eunji were here, she’d be getting a kick out of your emotional turmoil.

“Uh, a-anyways,” Jimin stammers nervously. “Why did you come tonight?”

You raise an eyebrow, making Jimin quickly backpedal on his words.

“N-Not that you’re not allowed to come! You’re totally allowed to come, it’s totally fine by me. I j-just thought you didn’t want to…you know, after you…burned the invitation to a crisp.”

“Oh yeah! That reminds me…”

Jimin pales as you dig inside to collect the blackened scraps, your tongue poking through the side of your mouth in concentration. He quickly diverts his attention towards the large oak tree hanging overhead, trying hard not to think about how your breasts are half a foot away from his face.

“There we are!”

Hesitantly craning his neck towards you once more, Jimin meets your upturned hands that cradle the destroyed scraps of the invitation. He cocks an eyebrow at this – what’s he supposed to do with that?

Jimin swallows his retort when suddenly, the papers swirl around almost like in a mini tornado, fusing back together. With a poof, the paper transforms from a charcoal black to its original eggshell white, complete with the original detailing and “Dear Ms. Witch…” at the very top of the card. As a special treat, you add an extra touch that Jimin can’t help but crack a smile at.

There’s a crude stick figure drawing of the two of you sitting side-by-side with a tiny pink heart floating above your heads. It may have been a trick of the light, but Jimin could swear that your little stick figure presses a kiss to stick figure Jimin’s cheek.

“Ta-da…” You smile shyly as you slip the paper into Jimin’s hand. “It’s corny, I know, but…”

“W-What changed your mind?” Jimin asks bashfully as he presses the card to his chest.

You shrug teasingly. “You’re not as bad as I thought you were. Also, it helps that you’re a little cute.”

“And the truth?”

“Eunji threatened to steal my broomstick and sell it in next week’s yard sale if I didn’t show up.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

[hirohamadugh]

THE ENHANCED

 Part 1 | Part 2! | Part 3 | Visual of Issac

Suddenly, everything was happening at once. The capsule doors slid open to reveal Issac to the world, and to reveal the world to Issac. His eyes flew open as he urgently gasped his first breaths, ripped out of his peaceful stasis and thrust into being. Chris and Liv caught Issac’s body as he stumbled out of the chamber in a gangly and uncoordinated way, well-versed in the symptoms of sudden life before.

“Breathe,” Liv coerced, as the boy was still sucking in air frantically and posed himself the risk of hyperventilation. He’d only been alive for less than a minute, and it had already been so overwhelming that he passed out. She tore her gaze away from her newest creature, making eye contact with Chris to obtain his attention. “Lower him to the ground. Let the overstimulation pass before we try to teach him anything.”

The two gently dropped Issac’s body until he laid flat on his back, breaths finally starting to teeter into the heavy-but-unthreatening phase. He may have been a newborn, but Issac was no infant: all subjects of the Living Immunity Vectors program were born as fully formed young adults.

“Help me dress him,” the blonde woman ordered, tossing a pair of gray joggers to her assistant as she wrestled the boy into a perfectly color-matched crewneck with the Sycorax double-stranded helix logo embossed on the chest. Kneeling beside him on the ground now, Liv began checking over his physical attributes to see if anything had gone obviously wrong in the altered genetic coding, but was pleased to find no anomalies. Chris was silent once he’d finished his part as well, staring at the boy whose eyes dazedly opened and began to search every little aspect of the room. Looking between the two men, it was clear they were related somehow, but not to any great length. They had the same physical build, hair texture, and facial structure, but that seemed to be where the similarities stopped. Chris’s complexion was much fairer than Issac’s, Issac’s eye color was brown vs. Chris’s hazel, the older boy’s hair was blonder and shorter… The list went on and on, and the more Chris stared, the more differences he noticed.

“Issac,” Liv spoke, very eager to see if her latest trials proved a success or not.  “Can you understand me?”

The tanned boy just stared blankly back at her as she spoke, a lack of concentration obvious as his attention easily sidetracked to the control panels quietly beeping and flashing as always. “Issac!”

When he failed once again to respond, Liv rolled her eyes, annoyed that her hope had been squashed. “Whatever,” she huffed, very rapidly losing interest now that he was just another in vitro case study, no better than her last improvement. “Chris, carry him to his room with Hailey and prep the first coordinated movement lesson for in an hour. I want Elliot keeping an eye on him to ensure he doesn’t enter a state of panic, and to let me know if there’s any sort of worry whatsoever.”

“Wait, what do you mean my room with me?”

Both Liv and Chris froze, as the boy who was born less than five minutes ago just asked a fully functional and correct syntax sentence in a language he was never taught. Their gazes bore deep into Issac’s soul, as he propped himself up into a sitting position. “What??” He asked, knitting his eyebrows down in confusion on why they were looking at him as if he were a ghost.

“Hailey,” Chris said, making the connection.

“Yes??”

“Of course he would respond to Hailey!! It worked!” The blonde woman hugged her assistant out of glee, while Issac pushed himself off the ground and up into a standing position.

“Is there something I’m missing here, Ms. Amara?”

Liv was near tears, and turned to place her hands on Issac’s shoulders in an almost loving way. “You’re not Hailey,” she breathed out quietly, which was met with a face of extreme confusion from the newborn. “You’re Issac. You’ll understand soon enough.” The tender moment over, she turned to her assistant: “Make sure his acclimatization finds him well, will you? Get him caught up on everything she’s learned since upload so they can be taught together. I want his baseline vitals recorded tonight as well. I’m going to go record this in his file.”

Chris took the other male’s forearm and began to redirect him towards the living quarters. Somewhere deep inside himself, Issac knew where he was going, but he couldn’t quite visualize it completely. “What does she mean, I’m Issac?”

The blonde man smiled sympathetically, stealing a glance over as he continued to walk. “You probably don’t have complete access to all your memories yet. Hailey,” Issac’s head instinctively popped up at the girl’s name, still failing to dissociate her from himself, “She’s the one who was born before you. She’s a couple months old now. She’s learned how to walk, how to talk, how to behave in general, some basic biology concepts…” Chris trailed off, before stopping and putting his hand on Issac’s shoulder. “It’s taken her all this time just to learn that, you know? Despite the fact we all learn incredibly fast for humans, it still takes a long while.” He touched his own temple, a small gesture for any normal-grown adult, but incredibly advanced of a social nuance for someone who’s less than 2 years old like himself.  “She allowed us to extract, replicate, and upload her consciousness into you so we didn’t have to waste all that time and energy teaching you the basics.” Chris turned and began his brisk pace once more, leading the other boy around a bend as he continued to explain. “Maybe you’ll get them all, maybe you won’t, but the fact you’re talking and walking and understanding… That’s all really promising.”

           Issac stared at his hands as he listened to the older boy, fixated on the minor details. While what Chris was explaining sounded ridiculous, he did have a sense of Déjà vu while the assistant had been describing it. In addition, his fingers were thicker than he remembered them being, plus his body was more boxy in general; this would add up if Chris was telling the truth, and he really was a new person in a new body. “So my memories… aren’t mine?”

           “Not exactly. But from here on out they are!” Chris smiled oh-so-cheerily as he dexterously input his biometrics on the reader that disabled the semi-transparent gate into what would become Issac’s new home. Inside he saw a girl sitting on her bed, she was wearing the exact same outfit as he and reading from a tablet. Issac instantly recognized her. That’s me. I mean Hailey. I guess not me.

           As soon as the cell was disabled, the girl’s attention immediately fixated on the two men, and she smiled slightly. Jumping down from her bed, Hailey tossed the tech haphazardly onto it and walked right up to her new roommate, as everyone but Chris lived in pairs. “So, you’re Issac,” she stated matter-of-factly, tilting her head slightly in examination of the new boy’s facial features.

           “So I’ve been told,” he replied, having a minor out-of-body experience due to seeing what he thought was himself standing and talking right in front of him. “Thought I was you, but I’m not.”

           Hailey cracked a small laugh, and her smile instinctively made him show one in return. “So I see the uploading-thing worked! Very exciting…” She pursed her lips, kicking one foot lightly before refocusing on Chris. “And… Very sorry for all those involved that there will now be two of me!”

           The blonde boy chuckled, and Issac didn’t fully understand why, but nevertheless he felt the need to do the same as if he got the joke. “Should make it easy to get along,” Chris mentioned, before crossing the room to the other, neatly made bed that lay opposite of Hailey’s. “Issac, this is your bed, your wardrobe is,”

           “Over there,” Issac interrupted, pointing to the sliding door that conjoined he and Hailey’s closets, which were both unsurprisingly filled with more grey outfits like the ones they wore. “I’m remembering,” he stated bluntly, walking to the back of the room where the restricted-access CPU and medical recording instruments were set up. “Ms. Amara said she needed my vitals, right? Are you taking them, or is…” Issac pinched the bridge of his nose, tongue peeking out from the corner of his mouth as he desperately tried to grasp at a taunting memory of Hailey’s morning check-ins for the name of the man who performed them.

           “Elliot?” Hailey offered, pleased to see he was already remembering details from her life.

           “Yes!” Issac exclaimed, to which Chris nodded.

           “I’ll go get him to take your baseline stats. Be right back.” The blonde man walked out of the room, and thanks to the floor sensors detecting his biosignature leaving, the honeycomb-esque field was secured once more, keeping the two subjects where they were supposed to be.

           “How are you feeling?” Hailey broke the silence between them, walking over to where Issac was inspecting the sphygmomanometer cuff. “I can remember it was… Scary, when I was born. Not knowing where or what anything is. Just seeing Ms. Amara and Chris staring down at me, like I was a circus monkey and they wanted me to do a trick or something.”

           “It was very strange to see things you’ve never seen before… Yet remember them.” Issac turned to look at her, noticing she must’ve been pretty buff to look so strong despite all their loose clothing.

           “I know,” she confessed, shoving her hands in her pockets due to not knowing what to do with them. “I was one of the failed attempts to do this to. They tried with Gabriel, the guy born before me, tried uploading him to me, but I only ever got small bits and pieces, so it was hard with a sense of both familiarity and newness to get adjusted.” She averted her gaze for a moment, feigning to check if the older boys had returned. “Chris was the first one of us ever, although sorry if I’m just repeating what you already recall. I wonder what it was like for him.” She refocused on the new boy, pressing her lips together slightly in thought. “He was never really like the rest of us, though. He’s always been allowed upstairs.”

           “And what’s upstairs?” Issac asked, genetic predisposition to curiosity and answering questions making themselves prominent.

           “The world,” Hailey replied, a small and almost sad smile across her face. “If we work hard enough and prove ourselves like he has, we can start actually working for Sycorax up there too.” She fiddled with her umber colored braid to avoid overthinking the possibilities, knowing very well she was way ahead of herself in thinking about those kinds of things. “It’s a biology place, though, so we need to get really good at that first before anything happens. Do you remember anything I’ve learned about biology?”

           “I know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.”

           Hailey let out a breathy laugh, shaking her head just a bit at his first jumped-to fact. “You’ll do fine, I’m sure of it. I’m glad you were at least able to be the protégé that I was not!”

           “Not to sound rude, since I’ve had probably a whole 35 minutes of socialization practice-so bear with me, but why do you care?” Issac mirrored the pose she had taken earlier, with his hands in his own pockets now. “Why do you want me to succeed? Why me?”

           The girl looked away, afraid to open up Pandora’s box of voids she was trying to fill. “You… After they asked me about possibly doing the upload, I peeked into your ongoing file and cross-compared it to my own. You and I share 72.18% of our DNA.” Hailey looked at him now, and he could see the sense of hope and longing in her eyes. “Look,” she said, bending over to the restricted database beside them and shutting off the monitor, leaving just a reflective black screen staring back at them. “Do you see how much we look alike?”

           Leaning over to peer into the haphazard mirror as well, Issac saw it. He and Hailey had the same exact eyes, the same hair color, the same complexion, it was almost uncanny. He had a slightly more robust stature, she had a teensy bit thinner eyebrows, but besides minor details the two looked like they were copied and pasted onto each other. “The closest relatedness of anyone else of the enhanced is Elliot and Faye, and even that is only about 54%. The rest of us range from mid 20s to early 40s.” She placed her hand atop his on the back of the chair, her dark eyes piercing him with a sense of utter care and a bit sense of self as well. “Issac, I care because… well, you’re the closest thing to a brother I will ever have. And there’s nothing more important to me than my family.”

[sophocused]

situations at work that let me know that the internet is truly the only safe space for me, as a queer, mid-sized, SE Asian woman. also I'm from Canada, and a pretty liberal city at that, and yet the ignorance and covert discrimination is still much the same.

#1

can I say a little how spineless some of my co-workers can be when it comes to actively thinking about pride, and reducing the comp-het that kids learn from majority of media and family?

yesterday, one of the 11 yr old boys was trying to make a gay joke, where the punchline is to "trick" one of us daycare teachers into saying we're gay.

my other two coworkers, just saying, "no, I'm straight. what are you trying to say?" like it almost sounded like they were offended to be presumed to be gay.

I said, as half-jokingly as I could but with full determination to shut this mess down, I said, "I mean, would it be so bad?"

And finally one other co-worker said "Yeah, would it be so bad?".

And I said, "And during pride month too!"

Needless to say, I will never stop making kids slightly uncomfortable for making jokes that they were taught is supposed to be acceptable.

I got non-binary kids coming out to me, gay, lesbian, and kids as young as 9-11 years old telling me they're bi or pan or don't know.

It fills me with joy, that I could be there, an adult who is supposed to be the responsible one, the anchor, to be there to validate their emotions and experiences.

#2

During her break, my coworker A (cis woman) was talking shit about our coworker B (cis man) which at first was just the reasonable kind.

"He acts like he's the boss of us when we're at the same level," and other simple coworker complaints like that.

Then, coworker A got too comfortable with me. She started saying things like, "He acts more like a girl like me," or "I usually get along with gay people, but I don't know why he's so different."

Coworker B has never confirmed their sexuality or I believe is not comfortable disclosing it, but anyway that was all sorts of messed up.

I was taken aback and honestly feeling an internal, "The gay was too stunned to speak". (Using gay as an umbrella term)

#3

Coworker A goes to the gym at 5am every other morning. She is on a strict diet that involves her feeling guilty even for having a donut or a cookie provided by work.

I showed her one of my old pictures from 2020 when I was 20-30 lbs lighter and she exclaimed so loud that I should join the gym and workout with her and "get that body back."

Breh just let me be fat and pretty in peace.

#4

I was working while Coworker A and Coworker D (she works in a different room) were talking in a sort of open conversation again.

They started talking about Coworker B again and some presumed BL they saw in his YouTube search history, and gossiped that it's scandalous bc he works as a Catholic Sunday School teacher.

Coworker D also exclaimed with shock and disgust, "I can't believe this girl into a boy and boy into a girl stuff. Or that girls can know if they like girls already. They're so young to be thinking about that stuff!"

She said it with such bravado like she was used to the people in the room agreeing with her when she spoke like that.

Coworker A, who acted like she's an "Ally" and that "love is love" just said, "Yeah well, they're seeing a lot more because of tiktok these days."

Coworker D proceeded to talk Iike it's the exposure to LGBT+ content that is "turning" the kids gay or trans.

I was fuming, I did not speak, not my circus not my monkeys, esp bc Coworker D was quitting that day so she's thankfully no longer working with kids.

I hate it here.

I need to talk a gay person of colour, who's maybe also neurodivergent, and also mid to plus size.

[beforedawnmuses]

Coul you write a Garcy fic based off the song Emily by Mika? It just reminds me so much of Flynn's relationship with Lucy

Here ya go! I’m not sure I got the whole song in it, but I chose a part and went with it? I’d actually never heard the song before and I loved it so thanks for that.

Also this fic is based on the comment that if a team member was erased from history but are on the trip, they are slowly forgotten and the assumption that the Time Team are not aware of this. 

Anyways, hope you enjoy!   

Emily, see the price I have to payI would give my life awayIf I knew that I could reach yaEmily, why you make this hard to meIt’s not the way it’s meant to beI don’t never wanna hate ya

-          Emily, MIKA

“It’s a good plan!”

“It’s an awful plan!”

Garcia turned away from her, gripping the dresser until his knuckles turned white in an effort to gather his thoughts. After saving Rufus, Lucy had quite frankly had enough of this Rittenhouse bullshit as she put it and wanted to end it all. She had tracked down where David Rittenhouse was in his early twenties and end Rittenhouse before its even an idea in his head.

If she’d presented this idea two weeks ago, Garcia would have been all for it -hell, he’d probably even try pilot the mothership himself. But then it’d been revealed that Lucy was directly descended from the man himself, so if they took him out, Lucy would disappear or maybe even something worse if she was with him when it happened. He felt awful, he’d hardly spoken to her in the past weeks because he was trying to process the fact that she wasn’t only Rittenhouse, she was the heir to the whole damn circus and that was a lot.

But then she’d gone and proposed this idea over breakfast, casually like she was talking about neighbourhood gossip. He’d barely even let her finish before he’d grabbed her arm and dragged her back here, yelling at her about how stupid she was.

He turned to face her again and took her in. Her face was flushed with anger, she was wearing his sweater which was several sizes too big and went all the way down to her knees, her hair was wet and tousled from the towel she had just run through it and her face was void of any makeup. She was beautiful.

She took a step towards him, tears brimming in her eyes as she desperately tried to argue her case. “Flynn, it’s okay. You’ll have your family back, Wyatt will be able to raise his child with his wife without having to constantly look over his shoulder for Rittenhouse, Rufus and Jiya will be free from all this. It’s just me. It’s okay.”

There’s that casual tone again, the one he can’t understand in this type of situation – it’s like she’s speaking another language that he can’t understand. Garcia didn’t think there’s anything that he wanted more than his wife and child back on this earth, there’s not, but there is something that he wants just as much; Lucy Preston. The thought of losing her makes him feel like he can’t breathe and he’s not sure if he’ll survive it. She has to survive, she’s too good not to. He wished it was his life that they were talking about, he’d give up his for hers in a heartbeat.

He steps forward and leans down until his forehead rests against hers, his hands coming up to cup her cheeks. He clothes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths in another attempt to collect his thoughts. “We’ll find another way. Promise me you won’t do this, that we’ll find another way,” she nods mutely and presses a kiss onto his palm.

Three days later, they find David Rittenhouse and try to set him on a different path. They fail. Lucy shoots him in the head.

Garcia Flynn watches his daughter play in the park. He did what he’d planned, embraced his wife and child for the last time before walking out the door. He keeps a safe distance so that he is not noticed by her - his chest bursts with joy at seeing Iris and feels weighted down by being so close yet so far away at the same time. She’s older now and he watches with pride as she successfully crosses the monkey bars from one end to the other.

“She’s beautiful.” Startled, Garcia turns slightly to see a young woman has appeared at his elbow. Dark hair falls around an angular face with full lips. She’s striking he thinks, and a little familiar. Her name sits on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t quite figure out what it’s supposed to be.

“Do I know you?” He asks, tilting his head to the side as he tries to place the woman that stands before him. She chuckles, but its hollow and void of humour. “Not in this life.”

He frowns and goes to say something else, but she gently shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it,” she tells him, folding her arms across her chest, “but you should be with them, you’re not nearly as bad as you think you are.”

Garcia freezes at her words, wondering how on earth she could know something like that, but she’s walking away before he can answer. He glances towards his wife and daughter before looking back towards her retreating form, something ugly forms in the pits of his stomach because watching her walk away strangely feels like he is losing a part of himself. Which is insane because he doesn’t even know who that woman is.

It’s not the way its meant to be.

[clownsgobeepbeep]

Dress to Impress(Robert Gray x Reader)True Pennywise AU

This is my first fic with the True Pennywise Robert, so my apologies if it's horrible. I can only write hc's for this poor boy >_< This AU belongs to @my-gunpowder

Words:2365

"How about this one,Robert?"

"Hmm...I don't know. I don't think yellow is really my color."the young man commented as the older man held up a mustard yellow cloth before his free hand looked through a nearby box, then pulling out a costume that was quite a small size.

"But your original costume was yellow! It looked so well on you Penny!"

"It looked well Mr. Green, but I think a different color would fit much better this time. Maybe something like,red?"

Mr. Green huffed to himself as he gently put down the yellow cloth he was holding back into the box he pulled it out from, then taking a moment to hold the small clown costume in his hands to admire it. He remembered when Robert used to wear the outfit, and how it initially fit him loosely and he had long sleeves that dangled when he moved.

"But we already have a red clown my boy."the man mentioned which then made Robert let out a somewhat irritated sigh, then digging through more boxes that contained a variety of colored rolls of cloths.

"Then...then...I don't know,maybe we can create a custom color? I'd like to incorporate some red into the costume as well."

Mr. Green let out a warm smile and then chuckled as he saw his adopted son rummage through the boxes, repeatedly grabbing the rolls of fabric to see which of the colors would combine well in a costume, but he always released a deep breath when he was not content with any of the mixtures.

"How about...you go out and look for a color you like? Buy whichever ones you want and come back so that I can help you decide on which ones you should add into the costume. Meanwhile, I could work on your design, yes?"

Robert set down the objects he held,then letting out a small smile after so much time of having his eyebrows furrowed with his former desperate frown.  He nodded to Mr. Green who grinned in returned, both of the males getting off their knees and onto their feet and carefully placing the rolls back inside the boxes. Robert nodded once more, then turning to leave before he felt mr. Green place a hand on his shoulder from behind him.

"And,Penny?'Robert craned his head to glance at the man who had a face with obvious worry that was being masked with his smile. "Be careful out there...with all the people, you know."

The young man lifted his hand to show a thumbs up, then having Mr. Green slip his hand off of his to then pat his back before Robert turned back to the front and walked away.

Once Robert had exited the circus tent after receiving the usual glares from his co-workers, he slowly took a few steps whilst looking around the area to check that nobody was in sight. Once he noticed that there were only a few people around, he let out a small smile and began to casually walk along the dirt filled road that would lead him to the main square of Derry.

He tucked his hands into his pants’ pockets as he let out a quiet whistle that went to the tune of the song that was constantly played on the calliope Mr. Green had in the circus. The little song being the one he usually danced to when in his clown outfit and makeup, though it was quite obvious that he was in need of something new which was why he and Mr. Green had been looking through different cloths that would be used to make his new outfit.

As he walked through the small town, he thought of the colors he could use for his new costume which came to be a difficult task since he wasn’t much for designing and the only color he kept thinking of was red. And in addition to that, he realized that nearby there was a group of young me lurking as they stared at him intensely, almost as if he were their prey.

Unfortunately under those circumstances, Robert really was the prey they were after, and this wasn’t the first time in which the situation had acted out in this way. He noticed this and slightly turned his head to the side, pretending to look around with curiosity when he was instead taking a rain check on the males.

Robert looked up and let out a sigh of relief when he instantly saw that the fabric shop was just ahead of him, and that safety would soon have him wrapped in its arms hidden from the men that obviously meant harm. He quickened his pace and did not dare turn back so that they would not be able to sense his fear, feeling his heart’s pace increase with every step that he took.

He realized that the building was just a few steps away, and he would eventually reach it in no time which brought a comforted grin to his expression, right before it was immediately wiped away when he felt himself get pulled to the side quite harshly.

“Oi Bobby, where do ya think you’re going?”one of the males said as the other two held him roughly against a wall, laughing as he struggled to escape their grasp.

"I-I'm just going to...the fabric shop, t-to get something for m-m-m-"

"Oh, poor B-B-Bobby boy!He can't even talk and let's the stutter get to him!"another of the men said before they all laughed to themselves, then laughing even louder when one of them threw a punch at Robert's side which took out all his air.

As they continued to hurt Robert, none of them had realized that their laughter and Robert's whimpers had lead to somebody to hear them as they walked by.

"Come on Bobby, tell us a joke and we'll let you go!"

"No,no,no!Make him dance instead Bowers!"

"Yeah!Make the wall eyed monkey do his dance!"

"What are you boys doing?"they all heard behind them, then turning to the back before their eyes caught sight of a young woman, you , who that glared at the tormentors with deadly eyes.

"Ey there pretty lady, shouldn't ya be with your chaperone?"one of the men called out which caused the you to slightly look around, but you then cleared you throat and stood your ground.

"That is none of your concern, now back away from the boy."you demanded which merely emitted chuckles from the men who did as they were told, but with new intentions in mind. "Thank you..."

"Oh no,thank you darling."

"What for?"you whispered as they begun to approach you,each one of them with smirks as your eyes landed on the other male that held his stomach and did his best to stand up. You realized that the man had been easily saved, but there was currently a newfound problem:who would save you?

"Get away from her..."a whisper said, and you realized that it was let out by the man who now leaned against the stone wall, doing his best to near the men to keep them away from you.

"Shut yer trap Robert, we're taking something today which is gonna be you or her."

"Yeah, and from what we can tell, it'll be much better if we take the little lady."

Your eyes widened when you noticed that their current mindset was not a good one, so you backed away while you still kept your eyes on 'Robert'. There was a moment in which you nearly tripped because of your heeled, but then caught yourself and looked back to see if there was anything blocking your path.

"You better stay back,or else!"The other men only let out snickers as they slowly and teasingly walked towards you like the predators they were, and right before you could take another step back and they one forwards, they immediately stopped in their tracks with eyes wider than your own.

Rather than wondering what it is changed their mind again or standing in confusion, you stood firmly once again before straightening your back and crossing your arms against your chest.

"Now,are you going to stay back?"you asked before a tall man stepped in front of you, obviously towering above you and the men excluding Robert who you could tell was very tall. Thankfully, it just happened to be your chaperone.

"Are you alright?"you asked as you stepped over to Robert who was still leaned against the wall with obvious discomfort, and you soon had one of his eyes look up at you before he straightened himself with both eyes widened.

"Y-y-yes!No need to w-worry about me miss!"he stuttered out as he realized he could not think to himself too properly, especially when you chaperone approached you from behind and glared at Robert.

"Are you sure?I think it would be best that we walk with you for the time being so that you aren't bothered by anybody sir."

"No,miss...it's alright really, it happens quite often."he mentioned with a cough that only made you squint your eyes, then shaking your head before you gently tugged on his arm and began to walk which had him shocked, though a bit happy. At the same time, he felt strange and warm in his stomach which brought no ease to the situation he was currently in.

"What were those foolish men doing to you?"you asked as you walked by Robert's side, already having handled the men from before with you chaperone who easily drove them off. You both entered the fabric store as your chaperone stood behind you, mainly watching out for any other person who planned on doing anything to you.

"They were just, playing around as always...They're,um...my friends?"You turned to look at him with a glare as he winced in pain, then causing you to shake your head.

"Friends don't hurt friends, just how they don't lie nor insult each other seriously. Those men are not your friends, um-"

"Robert,my name is Robert Gray."he smiled at you as one of his hands remained at his side holding where he most likely had a bruise forming, then letting out a breath to breathe a bit more properly when he was finally able to have a much better view of your features. "A-and you,miss?"

"Oh,my name is (Y/N) (L/N), and this here is my chaperone (C/N)."

Robert glanced at the man who shared a similar height to him, then glancing his eyes back to the front to make sure that they never landed on you, in fear of what your chaperone could do.

"So Mr. Gray, why are you here in the fabrics? Shouldn't you be in the circus being a clown?"you laughed out before he shyly scratched behind his head, then giving a shrug.

"I-I was supposed to look for some fabrics f-for my new c-costume..."he whispered as he looked around. "I don't really k-know which one to choose though..."

For a moment, you shut your eyes before opening them to scan the area,and soon enough your orbs landed on a box containing dark colors which brought an idea to your mind, thus creating a smile on your face.

"Hey...Gray!"

"Yes?"

"No,gray!You should use a gray color scheme!"you exclaimed when you tugged on the cloth and revealed fabric of that color, though it leaned more towards the silver side due to its slight shine.

"Gray?When have you ever seen a clown with such a dull color?"he asked with some confusion, but you shook your head in a bit of disagreement.

"Exactly! When have you see a clown with a color that's not bright? And besides, it goes with your last name perfectly!"

"It...it actually does..."Robert whispered, then sighed to himself in the most discreet way possible before he heard you speak again.

"I think you should use some red though, it would look really nice since it would stand out perfectly from the rest of the suit."

"Really?"he asked in an obviously hopeful voice before he saw you nod your head in response with a smile. You grinned and once you opened your mouth to reply to him, you shut it when your chaperone cleared his throat to speak up.

"Miss (L/N), it's about time that we leave. Your parents are waiting your arrival at this moment, they expect you to clean yourself before din-"

"Oh (C/N),they can wait another while longer. Right now we're helping Mr. Gray with his new clown costume!"

"Miss (L/N)?"you heard Robert say, and you turned to him before he too cleared his throat. "You don't have to worry about me at all, I can take care of myself just fine and it would be best that you head home already. It would be best to not upset your parents over a clown."

You stared at Robert with an unsure expression, not knowing if you really wanted to go home after meeting a person who was in clear need of friends, especially because he appeared to be a very kind person. Rather than speaking again, you let out a sigh before smiling and nodding your head.

"Well, alright Mr. Gray."you finalized before turning around to leave, then taking one final glance at him with the smile he knew he was going to keep in mind for the longest of time. "I sure do hope to see you around."

"A-as do I!"he called out before you gave him a wave and had your chaperon usher you out as he too looked at Robert, but with a look that none of the other men of Derry received. Robert held his breath until he saw the both of you exit the shop, then letting it all go to turn and examine the cloths you had been previously looking at.

"Gray...and red...I like it."

[voltron-fanfiction]

Anastasia!Klance AU: Chapter 6

Read Prologue here!

The boat glided smoothly over the water, and the company felt a weight lift off their shoulders knowing their next destination was Paris.  As the sun was setting on their first day out at sea, Lance approached Keith in their bunk, a bunch of fabric in his hands.

“Here.” He handed the bundle to Keith. “I bought you a suit.”  Keith picked it up and inspected it. It was nice, no doubt about that. The shirt was a button-down and was a nice soft blue color. The pants were straight legged khaki’s. But it was definitely not Keith’s style. 

“You bought me... a monkey suit...” he mused. Keith continued to stare at it while Pidge laughed at the exchange. 

Lance was mildly annoyed, and it seeped into his voice as he said, “What are you looking for?”

Keith snorted, “I’m trying to understand why you want me to dress like I’m joining the Russian circus?”

“Ugh, come on.” Lance tossed the suit at his companion. “Just put it on.” He turned, grumbling, and stomped up the stairs towards the main deck.

Once he was gone, Keith felt slightly bad for being mean. He glanced at the suit again. Ok, maybe it was really nice. 

“Go on,” Pidge encouraged. “Put it on. I want to see.” 

Keith smiled at his friend, then closed the door of the suite to get changed.

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While Keith was changing, Pidge joined Lance and Hunk on the main deck. The two lifelong friends were in the middle of a game of chess, but it wasn’t long until Hunk knocked down Lance’s queen with a firm, “Checkmate.”

Lance groaned and started replaying the game in his mind, trying to figure out where he went wrong. Hunk leaned back in satisfaction, but it was at that moment that Keith appeared, dressed in his new suit. 

Both Pidge and Hunk’s eyes widened. Now that he wasn’t dressed it rags, it wasn’t impossible to picture the orphan as royalty. 

“Hey, Keith!” Hunk laughed out of happiness. He got up and made his way over. “You clean up nice!”

Lance was pulled out of his thoughts by Hunk’s shouting, and when his eyes landed on Keith, his jaw dropped slightly. The suit fit him perfectly. It wasn’t skin-tight, but you could just make out Keith’s athletic build underneath... Lance shook his head. Now was not the time.

But Hunk had other ideas in mind. “Now that you look like you’re ready for a ball,” he said, “You’ll learn how to dance for one. Lance, come practice with Keith.”

Lance went as if to protest, but Pidge pushed him forward. He stumbled over to Hunk and Keith. “I’m... I’m not very good at it,” he managed to get out.

Keith jokingly raised an eyebrow. “The illustrious Lance isn’t good at something? That’s got to be a first.”

Lance felt himself relax. Something about Keith joking with him just made the whole situation easier. He joked back, “I’m gonna make you eat your words.”

But Lance’s cockiness suddenly vanished when he placed his hand in Keith’s and wrapped a hand around his waist. He felt the breath leave his body, and he was suddenly very preoccupied with how the floor looked.

Keith was no better. He felt his cheeks warm and hoped that it wasn’t noticeable. 

Hunk gave them a count off to a waltz, and they began to dance. But it was very obvious that something was wrong. Both were out of step and neither were looking at each other. 

“No, no, no,” interrupted Hunk. “You need to switch. Lance, let Keith lead. And quit acting like the other has the plague!” 

The two stepped apart, but when they came back together, it felt different. Keith placed his hand gently, but firmly on Lance’s waist, and this time, Lance took Keith’s hand confidently. 

Hunk gave the count off again, and this time, the two took off across the deck. Now that they’d gotten past some of their hesitation, the two moved together in harmony. Keith took command, but Lance was right there backing him up. Both boys were surprised that they were actually enjoying themselves.

As they danced, Lance tried to make conversation. “That, uh... Suit looks really good.”

Keith brought Lance out into a spin, then brought him back in. “Do you think so?” he asked.

“Yes,” Lance answered. “I mean it was nice on the hanger, but it looks even better on you. You- you should wear it.”

Keith chuckled slightly, “I am wearing it.”

“Oh right, of course. Of course you. I-I’m just trying to give you a... Uh...”

“A compliment?” Keith filled in the hole. He had to admit it was kind of cute watching Lance trip over his words for once. He was much more attractive when he wasn’t pulling the whole know-it-all act.

“Of course, yes,” Lance stuttered. After that, he decided to just stick to dancing, but him and Keith still floated gracefully across the boat.

From the sidelines, Pidge and Hunk had been observing the whole exchange.

“Keith’s really come into his own, hasn’t he?” said Hunk.

Pidge nodded. “I haven’t known him for that long, but he seems happier. More confident. I think that’s something he could definitely use.”

They watched the two dance for a moment longer before Pidge asked, “And Lance?”

“I’ve known Lance my whole life,” said Hunk. “I’ve seen him constantly flirt with women. Unsuccessfully, of course, but I know how he is. But I’ve never seen him look at someone the way he looks at Keith.”

The pair glanced back at their friends. To any passerby, Lance and Keith looked like lovers, dancing in the last light of the day.

“Hunk?” Pidge’s brow furrowed. “What happens if Keith is Prince Kityl? What would that mean for Lance and him?” 

Hunk’s face fell too as he thought about Pidge’s words. After a moment of hesitation, he turned to his friend and sighed, “We never should have let them dance.”

Night was beginning to creep up on the companions, and Keith and Lance’s dance was coming to a close. As they slowed, Keith’s gaze was locked on Lance’s. “I’m feeling a little dizzy,” he confessed. 

Lance’s lip quirked up at the corner. “Kind of light-headed,” he added.

“Yeah.”

They came to a complete stop, but continued to stare at each other.

“Me too.” Keith wasn’t that much taller, but Lance still had to look up a little at him. “It’s probably from all the spinning. Maybe we should stop.”

Keith’s grip barely tightened on his dance partner, but it felt like an electric shock to Lance.

“We have stopped,” Keith said softly, his purple eyes burning with everything he was leaving unsaid.

Lance couldn’t deny he felt the same. “Keith, I-” 

He stopped, but Keith pushed, “Yes?”

The two had steadily been moving closer and closer together. Keith let his eyes slip close. Lance’s breath caught in his throat. If he leaned forward, just slightly... Then he could...

ACHOO!

From behind, Pidge sneezed loud enough to startle everyone on board. The moment was gone. Lance moved away from Keith. “You’re doing fine,” was the last thing he said before he patted Keith on the shoulder, then disappeared into the bowels of the ship.

Keith gazed forlornly at the place where Lance had vanished. Even Pidge and Hunk were surprised at the turn the night had taken. But there was nothing they could do about it now.

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About halfway through the trip, the waters turned choppy and the sky turned grey. Night had fallen, and a nasty storm was rolling in. The four companions were cooped away in their bunk. Pidge, Keith, and Hunk sat on the floor while Lance was stretched out, fast asleep on the other side of the room.

The boat swayed as it crossed the roiling sea, and Hunk was beginning to turn a suspicious shade of green.

“Are you all right?” Keith asked him.

“Uhhhh... Maybe,” Hunk muttered. “I get really motion sick. I have ever since I wa- ughhhhhh!” His words were cut off as the ship hit a particularly rough patch. 

Pidge whispered in Keith’s ear, “We might need to get him a bucket.” Keith located a metal pail in the corner and passed it to his friend. Hunk took it graciously. He glared at Lance passed out on the floor.

“Look at him,” he grumbled, voice laced with jealousy. “He can sleep through anything.”

Pidge got a mischievous glint to their eyes. “Anything?” They raised an eyebrow. Then very conspicuously, they picked up Lance’s bag from the floor and began rifling through it. “What secrets could our dear Lance be keeping?”

As they searched, they pulled out things at random. The bit of money Lance had went straight into Pidge’s pocket. They pulled out a hand-held mirror; that went back in the bag once everyone had laughed at it. Finally, Pidge pulled out a small jade and gold box.

“What is Lance doing carrying around a jewelry box?” they chuckled. “A place to store his earrings?”

Keith laughed along, but there was something familiar about that box. “Can I see it?” he asked. Pidge nodded and tossed it to him. Keith held the box in the palm of his hand and stared at the intricate carvings. “Are you sure it’s a jewelry box?”

Pidge shrugged. “What else could it be?”

But the more Keith inspected it, the greater his sense of deja vu grew. He was reminded of the lullaby that he had randomly remembered in the palace. “Well... Something else,” he said. “Something... Special. Something to do with a secret.”

Pidge laughed again, “Maybe Lance is actually a jewel thief and the Kogane royal jewels are hidden in there.”

Keith looked back up at his friends, and the weird feeling started to fade. “I think it’s time for bed,” he muttered as he tossed the box back in Lance’s bag. 

Hunk climbed up into his top bunk while Keith and Pidge settled into the bottom bunk.

“Hunk?” Keith called when he couldn’t see the Samoan anymore.

“Yeah?” he heard in response.

“Do you think it’s really possible that I could be the Prince?”

Hunk poked his head over the side of the bed, so he could address Keith directly. “I think that anything’s possible. You taught Lance how to waltz didn’t you?”

Keith nodded, smiling at the memory. 

Hunk’s head disappeared, but not without a final, “Sleep well, your majesty.”

The bed creaked under the weight of all three of them, earning a sarcastic remark from Pidge. “What do you think will kill us first? This storm or the bed?” Keith laughed and ruffled their hair. “Sweet dreams, Pidge.”

“Goodnight, Keith.”

Keith sighed and closed his eyes. This whole trip was exhausting and the rock of the boat was lulling him into unconciousness. Within a few moments, he was fast asleep.

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Zarkon and Varkon both watched the sleeping Prince’s face through a portal Zarkon had conjured. 

“There he is, Master,” said Varkon. “Sound asleep in his bed.”

“Pleasant dreams to you, Prince,” Zarkon growled. “I’ll get inside your mind where you can’t escape me.”

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Back on the boat, dark purple smoke demons oozed their way under the door frame and began fanning out across the room. It wasn’t long before they found their target. The sleeping Prince Kogane.

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The sun was warm on Keith’s skin, and he found himself thinking that he could stay on this hillside forever. The sky was a brilliant shade of blue above him, and the field of daisies he was lying in swayed gently in the light breeze.

He sighed in contentment, but it was then that he heard someone calling his name. He sat up only to see Lance standing a few feet away from him. “Lance?” he asked, confused. The boy didn’t say anything else, he just smiled and shook his head. But then he motioned for Keith to follow him, turned, and disappeared down the hill. 

After a moments hesitation, Keith got up and followed him.

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Unbeknownst to Keith, every move he made in his dream translated into a move in real life. When he thought he was following Lance, he was actually climbing out of bed and exiting the cabin.

Pidge was disturbed by the movement, but only really snapped awake when they heard the door slam shut. They shot up, instantly noticing the Keith-sized pile of warmth that was missing from the bed. They jumped again as a huge crack of thunder sounded overhead. Just like on the train, Pidge had this awful feeling in their gut that something was horribly wrong. 

They got up and reached for the door, but no matter how hard they pulled or pushed, the door was locked tight. They had no chance of getting it open by themselves, so they turned to the next likely person to succeed.

But Hunk was dead asleep and still a sickly shade of green, so that left Pidge only one option. They began calling Lance’s name and shoving his shoulder, but he just rolled over and continued to snore. Pidge groaned, but kept trying.

The full severity of the storm couldn’t really be detected from underneath, but up on the deck, the wind and rain battered at the boat, instantly soaking Keith to the bone.  Thunder and lightning crashed almost simultaneously, and the boat rocked precariously over every single wave. Not that Keith had any clue.

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In his dream, it was still beautiful out, and he was still following Lance. Lance turned to make sure Keith was still following, then stopped at what looked like the edge of a cliff.

Hunk and Pidge suddenly appeared from no where, dressed in swimming suits, but Keith couldn’t have found anything off about the situation even if he had tried. He was in a fairly pleasant mood; to be honest, he was feeling pretty happy.

Pidge and Hunk waved excitedly at him, then turned and jumped over the edge of the cliff. A splash of water indicated there was a pool waiting just out of sight. Keith hurried to meet Lance and his friends.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back in the cabin, Pidge was still desperately trying to wake Lance. Finally, Lance had had enough and he sat up angrily, pushing Pidge away.

“What? What, what what what what?” he grumbled, glaring sleepily at Pidge. “What is it, Pidge?”

The youngest companion was in full out panic mode, and the only word they could get out was, “Keith.”

Confusion washed over Lance’s face, but his eyes snapped open as he realized the mullet was missing and that the storm was still raging overhead. Lance instantly bolted up, all signs of exhaustion immediately gone. When he encountered the locked door, instead of pausing, he simply threw all his weight on it, causing it to come crashing down. Then he was taking off up the stairs, Pidge right on his heels.

Keith had now climbed up on one of the rails of the ship, eyes closed and smiling blissfully.

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 In the dream, he had finally caught up with Lance and glanced down into the pool below. Pidge and Hunk were there like he expected, but there was a third someone who was new to him.

He had black hair with a tuft of white at his forehead, and he had a long scar running across the bridge of his nose. The rational part of Keith knew he had no idea who this person was, but the dream part of Keith instantly felt comforted by this person’s presence. They were friends, he knew that much.

The moment the stranger laid eyes on Keith, a wide smile spread across his face. He waved excitedly. “Jump on in!” he shouted. Pidge and Hunk chorused his shouts, all motioning for Keith to jump in.

“Come on!” Keith turned as Lance spoke. Lance leaped into the air, formed a cannonball, then landed in the pool, creating a giant splash that soaked the other three. Keith laughed, making up his mind to jump into the pool. It just looked like so much fun!

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Up on the deck, Lance searched frantically, constantly shouting Keith’s name, but with the rain, lightning, and thunder, it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. 

Just then a huge wave washed up over the side of the boat, almost taking Lance overboard. He gasped for air. Keith was going to die out here if he didn’t find him soon! Higher ground. He needed higher ground.

He began scaling one of the larger metal structures on deck. Lots of ropes hung off it, holding the sails upright. Up here Lance could see the whole deck. His eyes swept the surface. Keith wasn’t at the front of the boat, he wasn’t at the back of the boat... 

There! He was quite a few feet in front of Lance, balanced up on the railing of the boat, about to jump off!

“Keith, no!” Lance shouted, but Keith didn’t respond. Lance had to think fast; by the time he climbed back down and got over there it would be too late. His eyes landed on the ropes, particularly a loose rope draped over the side, but still attached to the rigging above.

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The air had turned sour. The hairs on the back of Keith’s neck had begun to stand up, and he could swear he heard someone calling his name. The moment Keith’s attention was diverted, the dream turned into a nightmare. The figures of his friends all turned into dark, winged demons, who began trying to grab at Keith.

“Jump!” they shouted. “The Kogane curse! Jump!”

Keith struggled as best as he could. But they were pulling from all angles. Even from behind him...

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Lance had grabbed the rope and literally swung to the rescue, grabbing Keith from behind and pulling him back to the safety of the boat. But Keith kept fighting him; squirming in his arms, trying to punch and kick him.

Lance turned him around and shook him, calling his friends name until Keith’s eyes snapped open.

Keith’s eyes flashed around the deck, trying to get a bearing of his surroundings. Not only was he soaked with rain and sea water, but he was also covered in sweat. 

“The... The Kogane curse...” he panted, still not completely back to normal.

“The Kogane what?” Lance couldn’t make sense of Keith’s ramblings.

“Curse, a curse...” Lance was surprised to see tears in Keith’s eyes. Whatever he had been through, it must have been bad.

“What are you talking about?” Lance asked gently.

Instead of answering, Keith just collapsed into Lance, wrapping his arms around him.

“I... I don’t know,” he murmured. 

Lance hesitated for a moment, but then securely put his arms around Keith as well.

“It was a nightmare,” he soothed, his hand coming up to stroke the back of Keith’s head. “It’s all right. You’re safe now.”

As Keith and Lance stood wrapped in each other’s embrace, the rain began to let up and the sky began to lighten. The storm was finally over.

Read Chapter 7 Here!

[mirkwoodshewolf]

Never mess with our Lilly; Avengers (mostly Bucky and Loki) x teen reader

This was one of the first few oneshots that I did when I first signed up onto Wattpad.  I really enjoyed writing this so I hope you guys enjoy reading it. Be warned for mentions of being stood up but our favorite God of Mischief and Lovable and dorkable Soldier will make it better for you all in the end *spoilers* ;) I do NOT own the gifs they belong to their original owners, I merely just using them for this oneshot. Any other names that I mention are just coincidences nothing more, again just picked the first reasonable name that came to my head, so if your name is Jason or Phillips just change it into a different boy’s full name.

Taglist:

@evyiione

__________________________________________________________

Well I guess I should first introduce myself first of all, my name is Lily Carter and yes I am related to the one and only Peggy Carter, she's my great grandmother while Agent 13 is my mother so I am a younger SHIELD agent as well as the youngest Avengers member. My 'powers' are that I am a point blank master assassin like Clint and Natasha who were actually my teachers.

I also know how to get inside people's minds and figure them out whether it's interrogation or rehabilitation (like when I had to help Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier remember his past, and also interrogate the God of Mischief himself to find out whether he was trustworthy since he has to be here for his sentence and join in our little band of circus monkey's).

Both of which had passed and are official Avengers members.

Anyway since I'm only 18 I still have to have an education so I go to a special school for SHIELD agents/young superheroes. Even though I had a brain even more smarter than Stark, my mom insists that I still attend and graduate only then could I officially become an agent in her eyes, even though I have the badge and ID to show her.

And I'll tell you this, this school is just like any other school minus what you would find in a normal school. We had normal activities like any other school speaking of which with it being close to the end of the year, there was big talk of what was coming up, the one thing I'm never prepared for and fear the most.

Prom night.

Natasha, Pepper, Jane and Darcy all put down their work and forced me from shop to shop looking for a dress, planning my makeup, spending hours in the salon to get my hair and nails done and it probably wouldn't have been such a big deal if I had told them I had been asked out by a boy.

But sadly it did.

Finally the hellish night arrived.Darcy was doing the last final touches of my makeup while Pepper did the last curl of my hair and pinned the last braid I needed. Once I was done, I walked down the stairs slowly in my 3 inch silver heels and saw all the guys staring at me with gaped mouths.

"Well boys, what do you think of our youngest Avenger now?" Natasha stated.

"Whoa baby!" They all chorused together. I looked down at muttered.

"Gee thanks, that makes me feel even more better knowing you all think I'm a frilly flower now".

"No, no, no Lilly not at all, you look-beautiful". Steve said the first one to be modest. Tony then came up and surprised me by twirling me around to get a good look at me and playfully dipped me and brought me back up as he said.

"Miss Carter you look absolutely gorgeous, though you might wanna cover up, you're showing too much".

"Oh so it's okay for other women to show too much but when it's with me you flip out?" I sassed at him as everyone exclaimed and laughed.

"She got you there Stark". Clint said as he twirled a drumstick between his fingers.

"Hey, I'm just trying to make sure that no boys have ill intentions against my little niece".

"Oh so you mean boys like you".

"Damn she's on fire". Clint muttered to Thor as the God of thunder nodded in agreement.

"Alright, alright enough sassy remarks Lills, it's time for Prom pics!" Darcy exclaimed as she took out her phone and I could hear the snap of her phone camera. I blushed and turned away trying to avoid prom pics but it was too late.

So I sucked it up and got a pic with everyone and sometimes even more than one pic with the same people (mainly Tony, and my two counterparts/old patients Bucky and Loki).

The Avengers are like family to me in more ways than one. Steve was like the sweet, slightly awkward but loyal father even though he would've been my great-grandfather if he and Peggy had started a life together. Tony was the overly funny, party hard but protective uncle. Bruce the shy, smart and loving second uncle.

Clint the funny, sweet and overprotective big brother. Thor the over-enthusiastic but loving and sweet uncle. Natasha the sarcastic, loving but badass big sister. Sam the amazing, brave and smart cousin.

And then there were Bucky and Loki.

Those two guys were more special to me more than the others most of the time due to their past experiences and torments they've been through. They became not only my bestest friends but the big brother's I've always dreamed of having due to their protectiveness, loyalty, and loving nature.

Most people thought it to be impossible to rehabilitate the Winter Soldier due to his red ledger against SHIELD, and trusting the God of Mischief after he had tried to enslave the human race just to get 'daddy's attention', way beyond possible not even thinking about being likely probable. But somehow I managed it and here they are now.

Finally I managed to usher them out because I didn't want them to interrogate my date Jason Phillips before I even left for the meeting place, that and they needed to leave for their brief meeting with Fury about their next mission that they were about to go to in about a week. Once all the Avengers were out, and Pepper, Jane and Darcy went out to girls night, I left the tower to go and wait by the Starbucks just a couple of blocks away from the tower.

I got there and grabbed a Latte and took a seat by the window and waited for Jason to come by and pick me up so that way we could head to the school and get this over with.

5 Minutes ticked by. Okay maybe he's still adjusting his suit.

20 minutes passed by. Maybe he's stuck in traffic with it being rush hour and all.

An hour and a half later. I'm starting to fear the worse of what's really going on but my stupid mind tells me I should keep waiting.

2 hours later. I'm calling it, because I'm starting to get sick and tired of people looking at me in a prom dress and taking notice I hadn't been picked up yet.

I got stood up.

I went outside and just my luck it started to rain. I lowered my head and took the walk back to the tower in the cold and rain. Once I got back into the tower I got into the elevator and said trying not to sob hysterically.

"JARVIS. Are the Avengers home yet?"

"No Miss Carter, not yet. Is there a problem?"

"No, just checking, what about Jane, Pepper and Darcy, are they here?"

"No, Miss Carter should I phone in Mr. Barnes or Mr. Laufeyson for you?"

"No JARVIS thank you though, I much rather be alone for a bit".

"Understood Miss Carter". The elevator dinged at the gathering room. I took off my heels, trying to dry myself off as best as I could and got out my secret stash of emergency Chocolate and ice cream.

Another hour passed as I sat in silence on the couch I heard the elevator ding and in came in the Avengers themselves. Natasha was the first one to notice me so she backed the guys away first to have a little girl talk with me first.

"Hey Lills, where have you been? We all tried to call you any chance we could get, we're you too busy with Jason?"

"He stood me up". I answered solemnly.

"What?" She asked.

"I sat at Starbucks waiting for two hours, then I had to walk back to the tower in the rain by myself". Nat leaned her head against my shoulder as the boys soon came in and took notice of my broken-hearted state.

"Hey Lills, what happened to you?" Tony asked.

"The douche Jason stood her up". Nat answered for me.If hell were to freeze over and the universe go into Ragnarok then and there, it would be due to the faces that all eight guys were making at that very moment Natasha had told them.

"Lilly-" Bruce started.

"Just forget it guys! I'm not in the mood!" I choked out as I took off running as fast as I could up the stairs to my room. I slammed it shut and ordered JARVIS to bolt it shut as I ran to my bed and sobbed hysterically.

I then heard a knock at my door and I whimpered out.

"Go away! I-I don't want to see anybody!"

"Lilly, it's us". Loki said. I knew that it would only be Bucky and Loki at the door this very moment but I didn't want them to see me like this. It's just humiliating.

"Lilly, come on kid open up". Bucky said.

"No please just go away!" I begged them but that's when I caught a shimmer of green and gold light and there stood the two devils themselves. "I hate the fact you can still do that Loki".

"What can I say? I'm gifted". He sassed. He and Bucky both then got the sympathy aura around them as they now sat on either side of me. "Come on Lilly, talk to us". Loki softly demanded. I knew I couldn't lie because they both know me too well to know when I'm telling the truth or telling a lie (that and it's hard to out-lie the God of Lies himself).

"It's humiliating to talk about-and I thought I had just said it. I wasted a whole month to try and impress some boy only to be stood up. Now I don't think I can show my face at school on Monday, everyone will make fun of me, and then I'll-"

"That guy wasn't even worth your breath, nor is he worth your tears". Bucky said as he gently wiped my tears away with his normal hand while his metallic one was rubbing soothing circles on my back. "He didn't even deserve you and do you know why? Because you are way out of his league". Bucky continued trying to cheer me up and make me feel good about myself. I softly lifted the right corner of my mouth in a slight smile as I stood up from my bed and walked towards my window as I said.

"Well you got me to smile a bit but there's still no way I'm ever gonna forget this night nor will I ever feel better about it". It was then I felt my prom dress change into my comfortable kitty PJ's thanks to a certain magic God.

"We know there's no amount of words that can comfort you at the moment, but we still would like you to at least enjoy your prom night". He got up and my room suddenly became a ballroom and soft music began playing.

Loki came up to me first and bowed as he held out his hand and asked in a gentlemanly tone.

"May I have this dance, my lady?"

"If I'm going to dance at my 'prom' shouldn't I at least have my prom dress back on?"

"My dear, you don't need to fluff up like a flower trying to impress everyone. You could be in these pajamas and still look like the Queen of the Ball, and I speak no lies when I say that my dear". I smiled softly then graciously took Loki's hand and he lead me in a gentle waltz.

When Bucky's turn came, the music seemed to change as did the room. The room was now set in a 1940's club with a slow 40's song playing in the background. Bucky held me close to his chest as we both swayed side to side as the music seemed to also lull me to sleep.

After Bucky's dance, he seemed to notice that I was getting sleepy so he gently picked me up bridal style and the 40's pub disappeared and my room was now back to normal as Loki untucked my sheets and Bucky set me down gently on my bed. Both my boys tucked me in and kissed my cheeks but before they left, I grabbed their hands and begged them to stay at least until I fell asleep, I didn't want to be alone.

And sweet as they were (at least to me) they accepted and laid on either side of me stroking my hair gingerly out of my face (Bucky) or softly humming lullabies to help me fall asleep (Loki).

Finally I fell into a deep sleep in the barrier of my two favorite Avengers/ex-criminals.

Bucky and Loki looked at each other with their dark and evil glares as they were thinking the same thing as I was finally in my deep sleep state.

Loki and Bucky then disappeared in a glimmer of gold and green light.

*Extended ending*

At Jason's house he was just preparing for bed when he felt like something or someone had broken into his house. He quietly took out his gun ready to fight off the intruder who had come into his house. He cautiously walked around his hallway when he suddenly felt something cold and hard knock him across the head and he fell unconscious.

When he awoke, he took notice of himself bound up very tightly against a chair. He tried to struggle to get out but everytime he struggled, the ropes would just get tighter and tighter like a python killing it's prey to make it stop breathing before swallowing it whole.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you". A voice sneered.

Out of the shadows came Loki in full armor including his helmet and scepter.

"That there is Asgardian wire rope. The more you struggle to free yourself, the tighter it'll bind around you".

"What do you want you psychotic God?!" Jason snarled.

"Well that is quite a foolish question to ask, but I'll enlighten your foolish Midgardian mind, I'm here on a special mission of my own doing".

"I'll have you know I'm a SHIELD agent, I can easily call and report you've gone back to being evil quicker than you can do your parlor tricks".

"Indeed you can, but let me say that number one, you're currently tied up at the moment and unable to call for back up. And number two-I'm not alone". Loki chuckled sinisterly as his smirk widened as he laughed. Jason was about to question when he suddenly felt a gun at his head as a metal hand choke him cutting off his airways. His head was forced back and looking down at him was the Winter Soldier.

Uniform and mask and all.

"Now then Jason was it? Let's discuss business, man to man to boy, shall we?" Loki sneered cunningly. Bucky released his grip on Jason's throat as soon as he nodded and Jason choked and coughed much needed air. "As you well know we've been redeemed into your society as members of the Avengers, for 2 years we've been under their supervision and have almost wiped our red ledgers clean off-however," Jason gulped as Loki's scepter was turned upward so that the point was now under his chin ready to pierce his skin if Loki deemed worthy of doing it. "You have hurt someone, very near and dear to the Winter Soldier and I".

"I don't know what you mean? I don't know anyone that would have connections with two of the most insane, psychopaths like you two".

"But you do. You ruined her night of happiness, you've humiliated her and now you claim that you didn't do anything to her". Loki removed his scepter away from Jason's throat and used his magic to release his bonds but before Jason thought he was in the clear, the Winter Soldier tackled him and forced him down on his knees and pressed a knife to his throat (shortly after intentionally breaking both of his arms while he tackled Jason to the floor)."Tell us now Jason, does the name Lilly Carter ring a bell to you? And don't lie to me, for I am known as the God of Lies and I'll easily know if you lie to me or not. For after all I am a patient man, my counterpart soldier however," at that cue, Jason felt the knife almost dig deeper into his skin as Jason finally cracked open.

"OKAY! OKAY YES! YES! YES I DO KNOW HER!! IT WAS ALL A BET!!! A BET TO SEE WHO COULD SCORE AGENT 13'S DAUGHTER AND GET CLOSER TO THE AVENGERS!!!"

Loki and Bucky looked at each other with pure hate.

"You filthy Midgardian men always make me sick. To gain a woman's heart and trust just so you can betray her and humiliate her just as she feels like she's won true happiness." Bucky released Jason so that Loki could grab Jason by the throat and lift him up as high as Loki could lift him (which ended up having Loki's arm fully extended). "I could have the given right to defend my Lilly's honor by ending your life right here right now for ruining her special night. The Soldier and I have no problem going back and spilling blood when it comes to her and anyone who hurts her-"

But then Loki released him allowing Jason to squirm and writhe at Loki's feet.

"It's a good thing for you though I'm playing nice for once, you even mention your bet to humiliate Agent Carter at your school come Monday, the Soldier and I won't be so nice when next we meet, and next time don't ever let me hear you've been messing with our little flower. Now take your pathetic form and get out of my sight".

Jason then crawled upstairs back to his room like a dog with his tail tucked between his legs.

"You let him off easy".

"It was worth seeing him writhe beneath me, and I think a threat is more promising than murder. Besides I'd hate to turn on Lilly like that after we had both promised to keep our ledgers clean".

"True". Loki and Bucky then illuminated into gold and green light and found themselves back in my room still sleeping.

They quietly came up to me and laid on either side of me and wrapped their arms around me like a barrier and their bodies giving mine warmth and protection. They knew they had done the right thing because I saw the good in them and helped them through their tough times, and now they believed they did the same for me.

Just goes to show, you never want to mess with the God of Mischief's and the Winter Soldier's little Lilly, or there will be hell to pay.