ruhsuzdunyam

[dyhardvalentine]

kind of obsessed w the idea that kipperlily didnt think she was tragic enough and in doing so destroyed her own life and closest friend (lucy) all while *still* thinking she wasnt special. girl youve destroyed your own life because no one would do it for you and maybe thats a tragedy in itself.

[estrellami-1]

Never Forgot

Based on this post.

Steve knew something was wrong when she ran out of the room, choking back tears.

He felt bad, felt like there was something missing, but he didn’t remember her. Thinking about it, he realized he didn’t really remember anything.

“Robin?” Dustin asked when she all but ran out of the hospital room.

She stifled a sob and collapsed onto the bench next to him, holding a hand over her mouth. “I think I’m gonna be sick.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Dustin, he… he doesn’t remember me.”

Dustin took a deep breath and very carefully did not freak out. “Okay. You stay here, I’ll go talk to him. See if we can shake it loose or something.” He rolled his eyes at the look she gave him. “Not literally, Buckley, jeez. Keep your pants on.”

He squared his shoulders and walked into the hospital room. Steve looked fine, if tired—hospital lighting never did anyone any favors—but the absent smile he sent Dustin spoke volumes. “Hi,” he said quietly, stilted in a way he never was anymore. Not with Dustin. “Um, can you apologize to her for me? She seemed really upset and I’m not sure what I did but I think it’s my fault.”

Dustin sighed and sat in the chair by Steve’s hospital bed. “You really don’t remember her, huh.” It wasn’t a question, so Steve didn’t answer. “And I’m guessing you don’t remember me, either?”

Steve picked at the blanket on his lap. “I’m sorry.”

“Jesus fuck,” Dustin whispered, screwing his eyes shut. “Don’t apologize, Jesus, it’s not your fault. It just… sucks.”

Steve snorted. “Imagine waking up and only remembering one person.”

Dustin looked up at him sharply. “One person?”

Steve shrugged. “Guess I’d be a pretty shitty boyfriend if I didn’t, yeah.”

“Boyfriend?” Dustin blinked. “Steve, you’re not dating anyone.”

Steve frowned. “I am. Maybe you don’t know him? Eddie? Eddie Munson?”

“Eddie- Christ, Steve, of course I know Eddie, and you two aren’t dating. You’re, like, as straight as they come.”

“No- no, I am, I’m dating him, I’m- we’re-”

“Whoa, okay, hold up, calm down,” Dustin said, holding his hands out. “It’s fine, dude, okay, we’ll figure it out later but I don’t think you should be stressing this hard after just waking up.”

Steve hummed. “What, uh. What actually happened to me?”

Dustin sighed. “The doctors said your body essentially performed a hard reset. You’ve been running on fumes for too long. You collapsed from sheer exhaustion. At least you didn’t hit your head this time, though maybe that would’ve prevented you from losing your memory, so who fuckin’ knows.”

“Language,” Steve chided, then blinked when Dustin looked at him excitedly. “I don’t know where that came from.”

Dustin just laughed. It was only a little forced. “You’re just incapable of not being a mom.”

——————————

Robin went back in next, lightly tapping Dustin’s shoulder as she passed him in the doorway. He shook his head, and her heart sank. “He-” Dustin shook his head, bit his lip. “He thinks he and Eddie are dating. Eddie’s the only person he remembers.”

Robin gave him a little half-smile. “He’s had a crush on Eddie for a while. I didn’t realize it was this bad, but.” She shrugged. “I’ll talk to him. You call everyone else?”

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath and walked into the room. “So,” she started. “You really don’t remember?”

Steve shook his head, eyebrows pinched. “I’m sorry. I wish I did.”

“Dustin said you remember one person?”

“Mhm. Eddie.”

“Right. And you and Eddie? What are you?”

Steve frowned even deeper. “Boyfriends. If we’re this close, shouldn’t you know that?”

Robin shrugged. “I’d like to think so. That’s why Dustin and I aren’t convinced you are dating. Maybe your memories are just… really vivid daydreams.”

“You really think so?”

Robin sighed heavily. “I don’t know what to think, Steve. Hell, I didn’t even know how bad it was until you collapsed. Some soulmate I am.”

“With a capital P,” Steve said, holding up a hand before Robin could say anything. “Sometimes certain memories are triggered. It’s… like a puzzle piece slotting into place. But I’ve got about a million more pieces missing. I can’t see what that specific piece connects to.”

Robin hums. “Okay. So you remember Eddie. And if I say Hellfire..?” Steve just frowned. “Or… Metallica?”

Steve smiled. “Yeah, I know that one.”

“Did you know that before I said it?”

Steve nodded. “Hellfire’s related to Eddie?”

Robin chuckled. “You could say that.”

“What is it?”

She laughed again. “I think I’ll let your boyfriend explain that one.”

“Even though you don’t believe we’re dating.”

Robin spread her hands. “Soulmates with a capital P, Steve. I can’t think of any reason you wouldn’t at least tell me. Especially since you know—err, knew—I’m a lesbian.”

Steve frowned. “Maybe Eddie didn’t want to? Does he know?”

“Yup.”

“Oh.” He frowned again. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

She sighed. “I’m not asking you to have all the answers. Especially now. Just… think about it, yeah?”

“I will,” he promised. “Um. Are you okay?”

“Jesus, Steve.” Robin laughed. It was only mostly hysterical. “Of course you’d still be thinking about everyone else. I’m fine. Or- I will be. You just take care of yourself, dingus.”

He chuckled. “Will do, Robbie.”

She sighed. “Another puzzle piece?” He nodded. “Alright. I’m gonna go track down Dustin and see where he’s at with all the other ankle-biters.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She lingered for a half-second, then sighed again and walked out.

——————————

He was released two days later. Drove himself home, Robin in the passenger seat and Dustin in the back row. Dustin quizzed him about the rest of the Party the whole way home, made sure Steve knew their names forwards, backwards and upside down, as well as what everyone was like. “Max is kickass,” he said. “Like, she’ll absolutely smile in your face as she knees you in the balls. And it’s the kinda smile that strikes fear into a man. She’s awesome. And-”

“Okay,” Steve said, amused. He didn’t know how Dustin could go that long without a breath. “I’ll know what you’re talking about as soon as we get out of the car and get inside, right?”

Dustin yelped when he looked up to see them parked before scrambling out the door and running inside.

Steve grinned at Robin, who grinned back, before they made their way inside, albeit at a slower pace than Dustin had.

Steve vaguely recognized everybody, but his attention focused in on a very specific person. “Eds.”

Eddie smiled, small and soft and sweet, one of Steve’s favorites. “Heya, Stevie.”

Suddenly he couldn’t help himself. He had to be with Eddie, right then, it couldn’t wait, so he didn’t. Practically flung himself at Eddie, like he knew Eddie would catch him (he did). Attaches his mouth to Eddie’s, a silent promise, I never forgot you, flowing between them.

When they pulled back, Eddie stared at him like he’d hung the fucking sun. “You remember?” Eddie asked in a whisper.

“Never forgot,” Steve promised, at the same volume.

“What. The actual. Fuck,” Robin said. Eddie and Steve froze as they turned to face her and the rest of the Party, who were all staring with the same expression.

“Fuck,” Eddie whispered. “We forgot to tell Robin.”

[petratherrock]

Taryn is the kind of character you love to hate because she's Selfish capital S. Jude is someone you'd like to root for despite having killed people because they're for the Good Reasons. She also has pretty bad thoughts about almost everyonee but that's Okay 🆗 because it's backed by her good intention.

Do I like Taryn? Not really. Do I hate her? Nah. She's just a girl trying to survive the way she knows how to. Does that mean she's never betrayed her loved ones? No. It happened when she tried to get what she wanted.

Jude adapts by pissing off the Folks and showing them she belongs there using ways that gives them no choice but agree they gotta agree with her

Taryn adapts by being like those chameleons, she analyzes people just the same as Jude does and she grabs whatever opportunity she can get to get what she wants, exactly like Jude.

The biggest difference is Taryn does it for a boy, which if you replace the boy with a placeholder 'objective' just the way Jude does with 'power to feel like she belongs in Faerie', you get something of uhhh == they're both trying to survive the way they're comfortable with

Does it Piss some people off the way Jude got she wanted? Yh. Who? Cardan, Madoc, Oriana, Randalin, Orlagh, Nicasia, Balekin, etc etc etc. They were betrayed, regardless whether they deserved it or not. They're just tricks to get the upper hand in Jude getting her objectives.

Does it Piss people off too with how Taryn got she want? Yh. Who? Jude and Cardan and eventually Locke. They were betrayed, regardless whether they deserved it or not. They're just tricks to get the upper hand in Taryn getting her objectives, too.

They both played dirty at some points. Another difference is Jude's objectives are power and her free will, which instantly places her in a nobler light, while Taryn's is wanting to belong to the Folk and adapting by not pissing them off, getting her boy, and occasionally backing up Madoc, which instantly puts her in the bad light

Jude's betrayals are viewed in a better light because they don't *all* feel personal, which if you read the books, yknow the politics of Faerie is as much personal as it can get for Jude. She lives for it.

Taryn's betrayals are viewed in a dimmer light because they're for her personal reasons. And long story short, they're the betrayal against our main character, Jude

Consequentially my conclusion is, I don't think Taryn would've been hated as much as she does if she's the main character. I bet people be like, she was just trying to survive! It sucked! But that's the way she knew how to! Yes she betrayed people! But it was bound to happen! She's flawed! We love a flawed queen!

In the same practical vein, Kaz Brekker is a con-man. And we root for him because he's the main character. He's done some pretty shady stuff, they're not all wholesome Inej-hearteyes coded, but because he's the main character, we excuse them and maybe we say, hey he's a flawed character, he's a gray character. We don't want a black and white goody two shoes now, Kaz Brekker embodies someone broken and morally gray who clawed his way out of the Barrel in any which way he can

Listen, i think, i think.....what I'm trying to say is, Taryn is a also a morally gray character. She loves her sisters and Oak, but will she stop that from getting what she wants even if the methods are bad? No.

On a tangent, As a sister of a sister and we're close, but we're not the loving Jo and Beth kind, but leaning more to Jo and Amy,.I've often wondered how this person who's my blood can be so endearing and important to me while at the same time makes me want to bust a vein, and I'm sure I've been in the same line of thoughts in my sisters' minds too

Because humans are multidimensional and we're stupidly prone to wanting what we want no matter what, sometimes going against what the other person, our siblings good opinions of ours

So yh, food for thoughts

Edit: because this bears saying for some reasons, i should've added that i dc abt what you think I'm not looking for a discussion this series is almost a decade old and I'm just tired seeing Taryn hate only because she chose the more discreet path to reach her personal goals, was it annoying? Yes, but she deserved as much thought out discourse as Jude because hey being morally gray doesn't mean being on the right side of the story. It's really not.

Just because you like Jude and her intentions and she's killed people and she's the mc doesn't make her morally gray.

Taryn is.

Bye. I don't need your opinion.

[here2bbtstrash]

real magic (explicit)

genre: smut, fluff, bangin’ your boss, m attempts kidfic - part of a hyung holiday collab !

pairing: namjoon x reader

summary: the holiday season has never meant anything to you beyond suffering long hours for minimum wage and awaiting the collapse of capitalism— but this year, you’d be willing to add making out with your dilf coffee shop boss to the list.

word count: 16.7k 😩

contains: ~*~explicit sexual content (after kind of a slow burn sorry lol)~*~ the "moving back to your hometown" hallmark trope, a nick jonas poster (yes that's a warning), some taekook slander in the beginning because i thought it was funny, namjoon is so buff and so dumb but so wise and so hot, moni is a little shit, namjoon is a dad!, namjoon's kid uses they/them pronouns but it's not like A Focus of the story it's just flavor, reader thinks joon has a dead wife for like one second 💀 mentions of teenage pregnancy and co-parenting, one incredibly stupid asshole customer lmao, mint choco slander (it's what namjoon would want 😌), obviously there is an employee/boss power dynamic but they talk about it and figure it out because this is namjoon and he overthinks everything, namjoon driving (he's a dad i have to assume he would get his license if he had a literal child!!!!!!!!) and a lotta sentimental holiday and life talk. here are ur sex specific warnings: making out/going to second base in a car in a parking lot (what is it with my namjoons and cars in parking lots yo), fingering, semi-drunk sex, and fuckin' rawwwww with a smidge of size and breeding kink lmao (but she's on the pill!!! no more kids!!!!!!)

A/N: hello hello hi merry crisis this damn fic is finally here lmao~ as i have been babbling on about for days i really really (REALLY) love how this namjoon turned out he's just hesjkrgdhtgk such a fucking himbo but a good dad and wise and did i mention hot aaaaaa 🫠 all the love in my gay little heart to @goodsoop for their barista wisdom and real life experiences that went into this one (the cookie story will never not make me laugh) ! and to @sailoryooons for beta reading this 50 million times and encouraging me when i was convinced it sucked ass, and also for making all the gorgeous banners for this collab 😭

which btw - be sure to go check out @gimmethatagustd & @sailoryooons & @nabiolive 's fics tooooo !!! i've loved collabing with them so very much even when we were all hashtag Going Through It, we got the whole damn hyung line you hear meeeeee 🎁🎁🎁🎁

read on AO3!

Rudely awoken by the incessant beep of your alarm, you open your eyes to find Nick Jonas staring back at you, and you sit up with a scream.

Realization washes over your sleep-addled brain in waves: first, that you aren’t actually staring at a real person. He’s just smizing on a hot pink poster, held up by some remarkably durable masking tape you stuck to the wall fifteen years ago. Second, it comes back to you that you are staring at said poster because you’ve woken up in your childhood bedroom. It’s been left untouched since you were a teenager, like a weird time capsule of all your high school obsessions.

After reaching for your phone to silence the alarm, you kick your way out from under the blankets, trying not to make eye contact with Nick, or Justin, or Zayn as you stumble to the bathroom. The circumstances of your grand return to living in your goddamn parents’ house linger like a bad taste in your mouth, one that all the tongue brushing in the world can’t remove.

It still doesn’t feel real. Taehyung, your best friend in the world since freshman year of college, kicked you out. Sure, it may have been phrased more like a gentle request, but as far as your ego is concerned, it still feels like exile. Banishment, even. The person you thought you could never be parted from made his choice, and he chose his fucking boyfriend over you.

Jungkook. You think the name with all the venom your cold, dead heart can manage as you spit toothpaste into the sink.

Jungkook, the weird, bug-eyed kid who put his toe-socked feet on your couch, drank his banana milk out of your favorite mug, and ate up all of your Samyang ramyeon because he ‘thought it was communal’. 

Jungkook, who ruined your sleep schedule nightly, either by fucking Taehyung senseless on the other side of your paper-thin apartment wall, or by blasting the same four Ariana Grande songs over and over on his bluetooth speaker and singing along in an annoyingly good voice. Either activity would go on well into the early hours of the morning, until you had to bang on the wall so hard you nearly put your fist through it.

Jungkook, whose dog once took a shit right on the floor in the middle of the kitchen.

Bam was cute enough to forgive, of course. But you can never forgive Taehyung for his betrayal. Especially when he knew you’d just been fired from your shitty coffee shop job for the stupidest reason ever, and he didn’t let that derail or even delay him. He still went ahead and delivered the killing blow.

Et tu, Taehyung? you think angrily to yourself as you stand in front of the suitcase containing as much of your closet as you could possibly fit. You still need to go back for your bigger furniture, and little things like your plates and your mugs and your silverware, which Jungkook is probably putting his grimy little fingers all over at this very moment. But until you’ve checked out of your indefinite vacation at the Nightmare Parental Hotel, there doesn’t really seem a point.

If you were less upset, you might take consolation in the fact that your parents aren’t actually here, that they’ve jaunted off to their timeshare until the new year, but you’re busy being too swallowed whole by your misery to find an ounce of joy in any piece of your current reality.

You dig through the pile of clothes until you manage to pull out something halfway decent. The first order of business now that you’ve moved back in is simple: acquire another stupid coffee shop job. You have no plans to stick around long, you just need something seasonal that will give you some meager income while you start looking for a real gig, one that is ideally not in your hometown.

Watching yourself in the mirror as you pull on a simple black blouse and your least-stained pair of jeans, you attempt to mentally dust off your interview skills. You conjure up your best fake smile and customer service voice, both of which are second-nature at this point.

Why do you want this job? “I’m just so passionate about coming home sticky and verbally abused by caffeine-addicted assholes every night.”

What’s your biggest weakness? “Clearly it’s the fact that I’m a ray of fucking sunshine.”

Why were you terminated from your last job? “Oh, well, I attempted to get my previous employer to improve their standards of worker treatment. You see, I selfishly requested that they raise the bar a single notch above hell. Certainly won’t happen again!”

This should go well, you tell yourself, and your reflection grimaces back.

With several hours to kill before your job interview and a growing desire to avoid the weird nostalgia of your childhood that seems to lurk in every corner of your parents’ house, you decide to take a walk.

The sky is bright blue and cloudless, and though the air is brisk, it isn’t terribly windy. You tuck in your earbuds as you shut the front door behind you and pick a direction, aimless, letting your mind wander to the soundtrack of your “seasonal depression” playlist.

A whole new crop of families must have moved into your parents’ neighborhood in the years since you moved out, because the streets are more alive with kids than you can ever remember them being, even when you were a kid yourself. Bikes and scooters lay abandoned on the sidewalks between homes, and you can hear the repeated echo of a basketball dribbling on a driveway, punctuated by distant, playful screaming.

Even in the daytime, you can tell these families have spared no expense when it comes to Christmas decor: some homes have every eave outlined in string lights, some have candy cane stakes dug into the perimeter of their perfectly manicured lawns, and some have been seemingly invaded by small armies of inflatable reindeer and snowmen. You can’t help but giggle a little at the inflatable decorations that have been set to turn off during the day, the way the airless material lays limp in the grass, giving the impression of a yard strewn with dead bodies.

But you remember what it looked like when you drove in last night, everything lit up and brought to life.

Your parents definitely didn’t have inflatable lawn decorations when you were a kid, but you’d get so excited every year when your dad would drag the ladder out and spend the day stringing up the simple rainbow lights you did have. You still remember the little spark of joy you’d feel in your chest when the colors would click on after dark, the way you would run outside every night just to see them twinkle, your breath puffing steam clouds in the air, your bare feet freezing on the ice-cold driveway.

It felt like magic then. But somewhere along the way you grew up. And now that feeling’s gone. Even at night, the lights just look like… lights.

Distracted as you are by the music in your ears and thoughts of your childhood that have brought you to a standstill on the sidewalk, you don’t notice what’s happening until it’s too late. 

A blur of red and white is suddenly circling around and between your legs, and you feel something twining over your ankles, then tugging with a force that threatens to knock you off balance. As you lean forward in an attempt to right yourself, the chaos in question slows enough for you to realize it’s a fluffy white dog in a red sweater, who has excitedly tangled you up in his leash.

You manage to find the looped end of the leash and slowly get yourself unwrapped while the dog continues to pant and jump and occasionally yap at you. With your legs freed, you squat down for a proper greeting, laughing to yourself as he lifts up on his hind legs, balancing his paws on your knee to lick an enthusiastic greeting across your cheek.

“Hi, puppy,” you murmur, trying to get him to hold still long enough to read the name on his tag. A voice beats you to it.

“Moni!”

When you glance up to find Moni’s owner jogging up the sidewalk, you have to make a conscious effort to keep your own tongue in your mouth, because good lord, he is fine.

He’s tall, towering over you even once you bring yourself back up to standing, and the black workout tank and athletic shorts he’s wearing do absolutely nothing to hide the thick, well-defined muscles of his arms, chest, and thighs.

Despite his lack of clothing in the cool winter air, you can see his face and neck are slick with sweat, his white-blonde hair damp with it too. There’s even a dark patch that’s soaked his shirt at his sternum, making the firm swell of his pecs that much more apparent. It takes you an extra second to break eye contact with them, but when you do finally manage to drag your gaze up to meet his, you realize his face is just as nice of a view: honey-tan skin, full lips, and cute dimples that pop as he gives a sheepish, appreciative laugh.

“Thank you,” he says, a little breathless; his voice is deep and slightly husky in a way that makes your face grow hot. You blink stupidly at him for a few moments, your mind reeling, and then it occurs to you that you still have his dog’s leash in your hand.

“No problem,” you manage, handing the looped end back over and double-checking to make sure your ankles are still free from their entanglement. Though now that this man is holding the leash, you kind of wish they weren’t.

“Moni’s usually good about not taking off when I stop to do a circuit,” he explains, like you’re the dog owner police. It makes you wonder what kind of Karens must have moved into this neighborhood since you left it. “I don’t know why he ran, maybe he saw a squirrel or something.”

“It’s okay,” you reassure him with a smile, admiring Moni as he stretches and settles into a polite seated pose. “I like his sweater.”

“Thanks,” he laughs again. “C’mon Mon.”

You can’t help focusing on how big this guy’s hands are as he slips his fingers through the end of Moni’s leash, tugging slightly as if to encourage the dog back in the direction he came from.

Moni blinks and stays right where he is.

“You little shit,” his owner huffs under his breath, and you have to bite down on your bottom lip to keep from laughing. You distantly realize you should probably leave them to it and continue on your walk, but this is too entertaining to turn away from now. Your hot neighbor tries one more futile attempt to get Moni to move, then seems to give up entirely.

He stoops down with a low grunt of effort that makes your core flutter as he grabs the fluffy dog and hoists him up in his arms. You try to force yourself to stop noticing the way his biceps flex, the fact that the muscles of his arms are nearly bigger than your head.

“Thanks again,” he says with a final grateful smile, and your only response is to swallow hard and stand there like an idiot as he turns and carries his spoiled dog back home.

When you arrive for your interview, you’re delighted to discover that Indigo Coffee is nothing like your last job. It’s warm and bright, with large picture windows that flood the space in sunlight, and there’s a cozy personal touch to it, the likes of which you’d certainly never see in your former corporate shell of a workplace. The sitting area is dotted with live edge wood tables and mismatched chairs. There are an array of framed paintings on the walls that look handmade in a good way, simple yet bold brush-stroke lines in a deep blue color scheme. And, you realize as your eyes linger, the shop is absolutely overflowing with plants: in simple clay pots lined up along the windows, free-standing between tables, and tucked into bookshelves placed artfully throughout the space. 

You step closer to inspect one as you wait on your interviewer and are pleased to see that it’s real, that they all are— no waxy fake leaves jammed into a thick block of cement, but real greenery sprouted in real dirt, deep brown soil gone soft from what must have been a recent watering. These are plants someone cares for, coaxed and kept alive by someone’s time and patience and love. The thought makes you smile a little despite yourself.

There’s still fucking Christmas music playing, but you figure that’s inescapable this time of year.

“Are you here for the interview?” someone asks over your shoulder. As you turn away from the plant, you wonder if you’re imagining that the voice in question sounds slightly familiar, and then you find yourself once again staring up at a fine-ass man with white-blonde hair and a sweet pair of dimples.

He’s clearly showered since your last encounter, and is now slightly more covered up in a pair of faded jeans and a gray-green flannel thrown over a black shirt emblazoned with bold white lettering: Protect Trans Kids.

“Oh.” Moni’s owner blinks back at you, and the shock on his face is so apparent that a giggle escapes your lips before you can stop it. “Uh, hi again.”

“Hi,” you echo, equally flustered, before realizing you failed to answer his initial question. “Oh, yeah. Yes. I am. The interview. I’m— that’s me.” So well-spoken, you mentally kick yourself.

One dimple deepens slightly as he extends a hand. “Kim Namjoon. Owner of Indigo Coffee. And the world’s least obedient dog, as you saw earlier.”

You offer your best handshake in return and a smile that you surprisingly don’t have to force as you give Namjoon your name. He gestures to a table in the corner, and you each pull back a chair to have a seat. You try to banish any potential horny thoughts from your brain, but shifting into interview mode proves difficult as he rests his large hands on the table in front of him, drumming idly along to the horribly cheery music.

You manage to tear your gaze away from Namjoon’s fingers when he speaks again. “If it’s cool with you, we can just chat a little? I’m not so good at conducting formal interviews. Too inauthentic.”

It’s like you can feel some of the tension release from your shoulders. “I— yeah. That sounds great.”

“Cool,” he nods, and you try to ignore the rush of heat up your neck at the intensity of his stare. Professional, be professional. “So I saw on your resume that it looks like your last few jobs were out of town. Did you just move here?”

“Moved back,” you say quickly. “Yeah. I grew up here, actually.”

Namjoon’s eyes widen a little in clear interest. “Really? What brings you back?”

You purse your lips as you consider how to phrase it. “My life… kind of fell apart. So. I moved in with my parents for a bit. Like a winner.” His dimples pop when he smiles at your joke, and you drop your gaze to the table. “Just trying to figure out what’s next, and find something seasonal in the meantime.”

“Well, we could certainly use the help,” Namjoon admits. When you chance a glance up, there’s a look on his face like he’s choosing his next words carefully. “I saw in your application that you were terminated from your last position.” He leans in, lowering his voice slightly as he continues. “I’m gonna be honest, I hate that we even ask that question. But can you tell me a bit about what happened?”

You keep your stare fixed on the wood grain in front of you as you try to stay calm. “Well, if I can be honest too...” Squeezing your eyes shut, you tell yourself to just say it. “I was fired for trying to unionize.”

“Oh.” Namjoon sounds surprised, but you can’t manage to look at him. “Really?” You nod slowly, biting down on your bottom lip. “That’s— fucking illegal.”

That makes your gaze snap back up to meet his. His brow is furrowed slightly, a muscle in his jaw pulled tight.

“Yeah,” you say belatedly. “Yeah, I know. They made up a bunch of fake excuses as to why I was fired, but I knew what it really was. It was because I wanted them to actually pay us what we were worth, and hire more workers so we weren’t being scheduled to death. And I was getting everyone else riled up too, and I guess it scared them.”

Namjoon sits back in his chair, folding his arms over his chest. “Huh. Man. Well, I’m sorry that happened to you.”

It takes you a second to process what you’re hearing. Union has always been a scary word for any person in upper management you’ve previously encountered. You hadn’t expected this to be so… easy. For him to understand, or sympathize. “I— yeah. I am too.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Namjoon continues quickly, “I think it’s great, what you tried to do. I’m very pro-union.” He pauses for a moment, his face twisting slightly in thought. “I mean, admittedly, we don’t have one here. Granted, there are only five of us. I should probably ask, though, if they want one.”

You can’t quite hide your smile. “I’m gonna take a guess that you probably treat your employees pretty well as-is.”

“I try,” he says with a shake of his head. His eyes meet yours again. “So, here’s the deal. You have a ton of experience, and with holiday time off and a few people out sick, I’m super understaffed right now. You seem like you have a good head on your shoulders, and hopefully you feel like you can come to me if you have any issues, without fearing retaliation.”

You blink slowly, and he must be able to read the disbelief on your face. “What I’m saying is I’m offering you the seasonal position,” he clarifies. “Is that— do you, uh, accept?”

“Yes.” The word is chased by a dazed laugh, and Namjoon’s dimples resurface around a small smile.

“Cool. I told you I’m bad at interviews,” he huffs, rubbing a hand at the back of his neck. You try to ignore the swell of his bicep, clearly visible even beneath his bulky flannel. “I know this is a lot to ask, but. Is there any chance you can start, like, right now? Because Jimin’s shift ends in…” He tilts a little, fishing his phone from the front pocket of his jeans, and his mouth drops open in surprise when he gets a glimpse at the time.

“Oh, shit,” Namjoon murmurs, and then he raises his voice to call across the mostly empty store. “Jimin-ah! I’m so sorry!”

You turn around, your gaze landing on the barista leaned up against the counter next to the register. His dyed-gray hair dusts over his eyes, which pull into crescent moons as he laughs. “It’s cool. I knew you were almost done. But I’m gonna clock out now, if she’s good?”

“Yeah,” you answer, turning back to Namjoon. “Yeah, I can start now.”

The two of you move behind the counter, and you sweep your hair up out of your face while Namjoon starts to go through a basic run-down of where everything is located. The overhead bell tinkles as Jimin shoulders the front door open, and he lifts a hand over his head in parting.

“See you after the holidays!”

“Alright,” Namjoon says as he waves to Jimin, a little breathless from having rambled on for the better part of several minutes. “That was a lot. Do you want to just start on register? I feel like that should be easy enough, and I can train you on everything as people come in, since it’s pretty dead right now.”

You shrug. “Works for me.”

Within half an hour, there’s a line out the door, and Namjoon has managed to spill espresso grounds all over his shoes for a second time.

“Ah, shit,” he groans, taking a step back. “Sorry. Been a minute since I’ve had to be back here.”

“It’s okay,” you try to reassure him, but you can see from the faces of the customers who have been waiting on their drinks for several minutes— including one who’s had hers remade three times, all of them incorrect— that it is very much not okay. You certainly lack the people skills to smooth over any of Namjoon’s mistakes, and you can feel a stress-induced eye twitch starting to flare up, brought on by Kelly Clarkson’s incessant yuletide belting.

You give your boss five more minutes, wherein he scalds his hand on the milk steamer, forgets about a cookie in the warmer until it’s burnt entirely black, and nearly turns the blender on with the lid off, before you finally intervene.

“Hey, Namjoon?” You do your best to keep your expression pleasant when he glances over at you, wiping at his brow with the back of his hand. “Maybe we should switch?”

“A-are you sure?” he stammers, apparently torn between wanting to be a good boss and a clear desire to just take the L. “I feel bad, this is literally your first shift.”

“I think I can handle it,” you reassure him, lowering your voice a little. “Let me take care of the drinks, and you can do your… endearing golden retriever thing. Keep the people entertained.”

Color blooms in the apples of his cheeks as his dimples make a brief appearance. “Oh, okay. Can do. Just let me know if you need help.”

You can’t imagine a universe where his clumsiness could in any way be considered helpful, but you keep that thought to yourself as you smile at him. At least he’s cute.

Things improve dramatically once your roles are reversed: as you expected, Namjoon is far more charismatic than he is coordinated, and he chats endlessly with the people waiting on their drinks, hardly pausing long enough to take a breath, while you scramble around trying to get your bearings in a new environment. The steady stream of customers doesn’t let up for the rest of the evening, until the last few finally trickle out of the store a few minutes after close, and you waste no time locking the door behind them with a sigh of relief.

You spin around, letting your back thud against the door for a moment as you watch Namjoon fight with a broom and dustpan in a futile attempt to get espresso dust out of the grout between the tiles. There’s a dull ache starting to thud in your skull, and it’s only deepened by the shrill opening notes of another fucking a cappella song.

“Namjoon?” you ask as you cross toward the counter, and his head instantly snaps up. “Do you think we could maybe turn off the Christmas music?”

“Oh, sure.” He’s already fumbling to grab his phone, and he taps a few buttons until the music suddenly switches, a soft voice starting to croon over an old school beat.

“Thanks,” you say, and you can’t help the pity smile that pulls up your mouth when he returns to his useless task. “I think the grout might be a lost cause, but I can go ahead and mop whenever you’re ready.”

He rights himself with a defeated sigh, nodding his head to the storage closet in the back. You follow his lead to retrieve the mop, then set about filling up the bucket with water and cleaning solution. Namjoon’s voice floats in from the front of the shop as he busies himself with his own closing tasks.

“Imagine smokin’ weed in the street without cops harassin’ / Imagine goin’ to court with no trial / Lifestyle cruisin’ blue Bahama waters / No welfare supporters, more conscious of the way we raise our daughters...”

You’re laughing a little as you roll the bucket out, starting at the door to work your way back. “Is this… Nas?”

He glances up, like he’s just remembered other people exist in the world. “Yeah, sorry. I can turn it off.”

“No, no,” you say quickly when he starts to reach for his phone again. “This is good. Much better than Pentatonix. I’m just… you really know every word.”

Namjoon shrugs, clearly embarrassed. “He’s my favorite.”

The revelation surprises you, and you pause to think as you pull the mop back and forth over the tile floor. It didn’t even occur to you that Namjoon would have a favorite kind of music, apart from the soft elevator muzak you imagine must play on a steady loop in his brain, given the way he fumbles through life.

“I actually wanted to be a rapper,” his voice comes back, and you look up again, your interest piqued. “When I was younger. But you know. Life had other plans.”

“Ah yes, the rapper to coffee shop owner pipeline,” you muse, and he barks a laugh that you wish you didn’t find so hot. Shaking your head, you force yourself to look back down at the espresso-studded tile, doing your best to shove your attraction aside and not think about it. He’s your boss, dumbass.

Still, it’s hard to ignore, particularly as he continues to rap along to each song that comes on, his voice deeper and huskier than you’ve heard it thus far in casual conversation. He doesn’t miss a word, and you can’t deny that it’s impressive. And sexy. Fuck.

Once the floor has been successfully mopped and everything else is put back together, you hop up onto the counter to wait for the tile to dry, and your gaze lingers over Namjoon’s large hands as he cashes out the register. He flips through the bills in time to the music, still humming under his breath as he goes, and you do your best to hold in your laugh when he inevitably loses count and has to start over from the beginning. Thankfully the second attempt sticks, and he smiles proudly to himself as he zips everything up into the deposit bag.

“First shift down,” he announces, as if you might have forgotten, and then his eyes find yours and you swear your breath gets stuck in your throat. “How do you feel?”

It only occurs to you now how close he’s standing to you, and with the way your legs are casually dangling over the edge of the counter, it wouldn’t take much for him to step between them. And god, he’s so damn tall, you’re practically eye-to-eye.

“Uh,” you manage, your mouth suddenly gone dry. “Good. I feel good.”

“That’s good,” he answers, his voice dipping into that throaty tone again. You find yourself wondering absentmindedly if maybe Namjoon has a customer service voice, too, and then for the briefest flash of a moment, his gaze flits from your eyes to your lips and back again. It’s so quick, you can’t be sure it even really happened.

You tell yourself it’s just your exhausted post-shift brain seeing things that aren’t there, wanting this fine-ass man to be into you, too.

A sudden bang on the front door makes you flinch so hard, you come dangerously close to kneeing Namjoon in the crotch. He takes a large step back as you whip around to look over your shoulder, only to see a kid’s face pressed to the glass, framed by two small hands. You’ve never been great at telling the age of children on sight, but this one looks like… maybe a middle schooler?

“Whose fucking kid is that?” you say automatically, blinking, dumbfounded. Namjoon’s laugh is a low rumble behind you.

“That would be mine.”

It takes several days for the shock to wear off. Your boss has a kid. Kim “could’ve burnt the building down with a single cookie” Namjoon is at least partially responsible for keeping another human being alive. Which means you have a crush… on a father.

A father who also happens to be your boss.

You try not to think about any of it.

There’d been brief introductions when you left the shop that first night, but all you’d really managed to glean was the kid’s name, Sol, and their pronouns. As someone who is historically terrible with children, you’d excused yourself the minute Namjoon locked the front door, after what felt like an eternity spent watching him pat each of his pockets twice before he finally managed to find his keys.

“I hope it wasn’t weird,” your boss says out of nowhere in the middle of your next shift, during a much-needed moment of peace after the morning rush. “For you to meet Sol like that. It’s just been hard, since their mom, uh…”

Namjoon trails off, leaving the sentence unfinished. You glance up, eyes widening as you put the pieces together.

“Oh my god,” you breathe. “I’m so sorry.”

His gaze meets yours, and it’s like you can see the wheels in his head turning before he catches up. “No, no,” he says quickly, and then he starts to laugh. “Wow, I really did not start that sentence well. She’s not dead. She just got married, and she’s on her honeymoon for most of December. The logistics have been hard, is what I meant.”

An embarrassed heat creeps up your neck, and your elbows thud against the countertop as you press your face into your hands, attempting to muffle your own laughter. “In my defense,” you groan, “you really made it sound like you had a dead wife.”

“Not dead! She’s fine!” Namjoon’s dimples are as prominent as you’ve ever seen them when you peek up at him from your full-body cringe. “Very much alive, very much not my wife.” The muscles in his arms flex as he crosses them over his chest, leaning up against the counter next to the register. “Never was, actually.”

“Really?” you answer automatically, your damned curiosity getting the better of you.

He nods, his voice a little more serious when he continues, rambling on in the way that you’ve already started to suspect is his default setting, talking as if to fill empty space. “We were seventeen when we got pregnant. I knew we were young then, but I don’t think I really realized. Now that I’m almost thirty, I know: seventeen is fucking young.”

The line of his jaw tightens, thoughtful, as his gaze sweeps over the floor. “I thought I wanted to marry her, or at least felt obligated to. Like it was the right thing to do, but. We didn’t have any money, and then it all got so hectic after Sol was born. Didn’t even take a year for us to realize it wasn’t gonna work, not for us.”

You blink, trying to take in all the new information. “That sounds really hard.”

“It was,” Namjoon admits. “But we were both on the same page about it. That no matter what, Sol had to come first.” He glances up with a shrug. “It’s all good now. She’s a great co-parent, and her new husband is really good for her. And… well, I have Indigo.”

The tinkling of the bell at the front door snaps you out of a daze, makes you realize you’ve been staring at him, dumbfounded. You do your best to shoot Namjoon a soft smile, and to ignore the pang in your chest as he turns to greet the customer that’s just wandered in, already starting to babble on about the weather.

You find yourself more grateful for Namjoon’s presence with each passing shift, in a way that you try to convince yourself is thoroughly platonic. Between fairly steady work and his very steady chatter, your time spent in the warm, sunny space of Indigo turns out to be a good distraction from your own miserable excuse for a life. The repetitive motions of making drink after drink are oddly comforting, and you have to admit, Namjoon really is good with the customers.

“Peppermint mocha to go.”

You do your best to follow up the sentence with a polite smile as you set a drink down for the customer who has done nothing but scowl at you the whole time you were making it. The silent prayer you’ve sent out to the universe that he’ll take whatever personal problem he has elsewhere and leave you alone has clearly gone unanswered.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he snaps, and you can feel your shoulders creep up towards your ears in anticipation of nothing good. Here we fucking go.

You blink twice, trying to keep your service persona engaged. “I’m sorry, is that not what you ordered?” It is, you know it is, you heard him say it.

“No, that’s mine,” the man quickly responds, reaching out to snatch the cup in a motion that makes you flinch. “But do you hear this fucking song?”

The honest answer is no: at this point the ever-present Christmas music might as well be white noise, so you have to make a conscious effort to tune back in and listen. It’s a few seconds, and then you pick up on the melody. “…Last Christmas?”

“Uh, yeah,” he continues, explaining like you’re stupid. “The original. Last Christmas by Wham!” When it’s clear you still aren’t putting the pieces together, he scoffs in pure frustration. “You just made me lose Whamageddon! I’ve won every year for the last five years, I can’t believe you would even put this on your fucking playlist!”

Your face pulls into an incredulous grimace before you can think to control it. “Uh, I’m sorry, but I didn’t make the—”

He cuts you off. “First off, I don’t need the fucking attitude. And surely you’re at least capable of checking what songs are on there, right? That’s not too advanced for you to handle?”

You didn’t even hear Namjoon walk up from the back office, but he’s suddenly stepping in front of you, and you’re more than glad to move back and let him handle this dude before you end up in jail. “Woah, woah, alright,” Namjoon interjects, his voice loud enough to carry. “What’s going on?”

The man beats you to it. “I’m trying to file a legitimate complaint and she’s rolling her fucking eyes and getting an attitude with me!”

“It’s the song,” you explain briefly, trying to keep everything about your expression neutral. “He’s mad that we’re… playing Wham.”

Namjoon’s face twists in an expression that you would find funny if you weren’t so fucking livid, one that you’re pretty sure is the mirror image of your own reaction minutes earlier. “The song? Seriously?”

You can see the guy scrambling, clearly starting to get embarrassed at his own dramatics. “Alright, I don’t have time for this. I guess I just need to take my business elsewhere, because this is ridiculous. What ever happened to the customer is always right?”

Namjoon goes silent for a minute, and you try to ignore the way the look on his face makes your pulse quicken, thudding brightly in the hollow of your neck. His voice is deadly serious when he speaks again. “I appreciate that you’re upset, but if you’re going to look my employee in the face, after she just performed a service for you, and disrespect her like that? Over a fucking song? Nah, I’m not gonna tolerate it. Maybe the next time you want someone to make you a toothpaste drink, you should take your ass to Starbucks.”

It takes every ounce of strength you have to keep the reaction off your face until the asshole has stormed out the front door, nasty drink in hand. As the bell finally tinkles to signal his departure, you collapse forward, just barely catching yourself on the counter so you don’t crumple straight down to the floor.

“Oh my god.” Your laugh of disbelief comes out more like a groan, at the ridiculous complaint and your boss’ insanely attractive comeback alike. “I fucking hate this time of year.”

“Hey.” The word is punctuated by Namjoon’s shoulder bumping into yours, and you look back up at him, still laughing a little at your own misery. His eyes search yours, sincere. “Assholes are assholes no matter what season it is. I’m sure that guy finds plenty of things to complain about the other eleven months of the year, too. Don’t let him ruin it for you.”

You can’t help rolling your eyes, if only because you can do it freely now, without a man standing over you and yelling about your ‘bad attitude’. “I guess,” you huff. “And thank you.”

Namjoon shakes his head, like it’s nothing. “Chin up, okay?”

The two of you breeze through closing that night, familiar enough to fall into a steady routine now. You’re wiping everything down behind the counter and humming along to Tupac when Namjoon’s voice drags you back out of your thoughts in a way you’ve already grown accustomed to.

“You know…”

You glance up, only to realize that he’s started to flip chairs on top of tables to clear the floor, and is grabbing them two at a time, one in each hand. The image makes you a little dizzy, and you tell yourself to focus on his words, not his biceps.

“I think we make a pretty good team,” he concludes.

“Yeah,” you breathe, trying to keep your composure at the unexpected compliment. “I was thinking the same thing. And thanks again for, you know. Handling that guy.”

Namjoon shrugs, like it’s nothing. “Hey, you’re doing me a favor, taking this seasonal job. I’m not about to let anyone fuck with you.”

You bite down on a smile as you head towards the back to grab the mop, and then you hear a loud bang on the front door— it’s another sound you’ve gotten used to in your brief time at Indigo. There’s the click of the deadbolt, chased by the tinkling overhead bell and Namjoon’s chiding voice. “Homie, if you break my door I’m gonna make you get a job to pay me back for it.”

“You think I don’t know about child labor laws?” you hear Sol retort, clearly not intimidated, and the attitude in their voice has you biting back a laugh.

Wheeling the mop bucket out of the storage closet, you glance up to see Namjoon jut his chin toward the large front window, indicating Sol to take a seat on the ledge. “Feet off the floor, she’s tryna clean.”

Sol complies, plopping down in the window with their eyes glued to their phone as Namjoon disappears back toward the office to grab his things. You watch as Sol pulls their knees into their chest so their chunky black boots clear the tile, and you can’t help noticing that said boots are adorned with oversized silver bat-shaped buckles, reflecting the amber streetlight gleam that leaks through the window.

“I like your boots,” you say, more to yourself than Sol, half expecting them to be so engrossed in TikTok that they don’t even hear you.

But to your surprise, Sol looks up.

“Thanks,” they say, glancing at their feet. “I just got them. I’m in my post-hardcore era right now.”

The statement is delivered without a trace of irony, and you do your best to hold in another amused giggle as you respond. “Wow, you are… so much cooler than I was when I was your age.”

Sol seems to consider this for a moment, then shrugs. “I mean, you didn’t have the internet back then, right?”

The question hits you like a train, and you have to pause and press a hand over your heart at the impact. “Okay, ouch, I’m not that old.” They grimace apologetically, and you lean up against the mop handle in thought. “But the internet definitely wasn’t like it is now. The only social media that really existed was Myspace, and my parents wouldn’t let me make one. I mostly just used the internet to, like, play RuneScape.”

“Oh shit,” Sol remarks, sounding remarkably like Namjoon in the process. “You played old school?!”

It’s like you can feel your bones crumbling to dust inside your body, and you wince as you resume dragging the mop over the tile. “Hey, back then it was the only kind of RuneScape we had. But yes, you can consider me a… founding father of that game.”

“That’s cool!” they exclaim, sounding so genuine it makes your head spin. When did RuneScape become cool again? “My friends and I play old school all the time. It’s the best, for real.”

You shake your head in disbelief as you continue to mop, and a long pause settles between you, with Sol’s interest clearly returning to their phone.

Fuck, you think to yourself, what else do kids even talk about? Marvel movies? It’s like your mind has gone totally blank, unable to conjure up a single topic of conversation, and you practically huff out an audible sigh of relief when their voice breaks the silence again.

“I think my dad has been happier since you started working here.”

The mop nearly slips out of your hands entirely, and you glance up, eyes wide. “I— really?”

Sol nods, playing absentmindedly with the strings of their black hoodie, then bringing the end of one up to their mouth to gently chew on. “It’s a theory I have. A game theory. I plan to ask additional follow-up questions tonight.”

At this, you can’t help but laugh. “Well, I’m sure your investigation will be very thorough.”

There’s a flash of a dimple in Sol’s cheek, like the mirror image of their dad. “I can tell you what he says, if you want.”

You wonder how telling your own smile is. “I mean… I can’t say I’m not curious.” You’re distantly aware of the sound of the office door closing, chased by Joon whistling to himself, and you lower your voice conspiratorially as you drop the mop back into the bucket. “I look forward to hearing what you find out.”

Monday morning, when you wake up to the omnipresent smize of Nick Jonas, you can’t help smiling back. 

You made it through your first week of work, and it wasn’t even that torturous. And best of all, Namjoon reminded you the night before that Indigo is closed on Mondays, which gives you an entire day to spend as you please. A real day off, which was truly unheard of at your last job, where you’d spend your non-scheduled days still anticipating an incoming emergency text asking you to cover a shift last-minute. More often than not, you’d end up working after all.

“But not today,” you announce to Nick.

A grand plan has already started to form in your head, one that involves a party size bag of Hot Cheetos and all eight episodes of The Fabulous, and yet. There’s a lingering urge at the back of your brain that you can’t quite ignore. With all the day-off energy you can muster, you drag yourself out of bed and tug on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt, then shuffle into the bathroom to at least make yourself halfway decent.

You’re just going for a quick walk around the block to get some fresh air, you tell yourself. That’s all. Certainly no other reason.

It’s only a few minutes after you step out your front door that a fluffy white blur nearly collides with your shins, and when you stoop down to lift Moni into your arms, you once again can’t keep the smile off your face. Huh, who could’ve seen this coming?

But when you glance up, there’s no hot buff man jogging up the sidewalk after his dog. In fact, you realize as you look back at the ball of fluff in your arms, he isn’t wearing a leash or harness at all, just another cute sweater.

“Are you even supposed to be out here?” you ask Moni. His only answer is to drag his tongue up the side of your face.

You shift him a little in your arms so you can fumble for the tag attached to his collar, and thankfully, there’s an address listed. It takes you a second to get your bearings in the neighborhood, having not lived here for close to a decade, but it eventually comes back to you where the listed street is, and you start to walk. Moni is already blinking sleepily in your arms, clearly enjoying his preferred mode of transportation.

A laugh bubbles up in your chest as you approach the house in question— even if you hadn’t had Moni’s tag to guide you, finding his home would’ve been easy enough as soon as you passed this street, because you can hear old school hip-hop bumping through a speaker despite still being several houses down the block. You suppose Namjoon can get away with it during the day, when all the neighborhood kids are still in school.

As you make your way up the driveway, you realize the music is actually coming from behind the house, and when you follow the path that leads around back, you spot the culprit: a simple wooden-slat fence surrounds the yard, and the gate has been left wide open.

Before you can even make it over the threshold, a familiar voice reaches your ears, sounding much closer than the music. “Ah, shit.”

Namjoon comes barreling through the open gate so fast he practically runs you over, and Moni yaps, like he’s annoyed at being jostled as you quickly try to stumble out of his owner’s path.

“Oh. Uh, hi.”

You wonder if you’ll ever be able to take in how shock looks on Namjoon’s features without giggling a little. Today is certainly not that day. It’s just so endearing, the way his eyes widen and his mouth pulls into a perfect o-shape.

“Hi,” you breathe out around your laughter, trying to ignore the heat that flushes into your face when his dimples appear in return. “I think I found something that belongs to you.”

With a wave of his hand and several profuse thank yous, you follow Namjoon back through the gate, and wait until he firmly shuts it behind you before letting Moni down to trot off across the yard. It’s only now that you take Namjoon in properly: he’s in a gray hoodie under a pair of denim overalls, both of which are splattered artfully with paint in a variety of colors.

“I was just in my studio,” he explains, tipping his head toward the small shed in the yard, which you quickly realize is also the source of the music that led you here. “Doin’ some art. Do you, uh… wanna see?”

“Yeah, okay,” you answer with a nod.

“Fair warning, I’m really bad at it,” he calls over his shoulder as he leads you in the open studio door, raising his voice to be heard over the music. He reaches for his phone, propped up in the windowsill, to turn the volume down a few notches.

There’s an easel up against the far wall holding what must be his current project, a half-finished scene that you realize upon closer inspection is thousands of tiny dots of color, painstakingly blotted onto the canvas to form a mountain landscape at a distance. A few more pieces that he’s already completed have been leaned up against another wall to dry, one featuring an abstract array of featherlight brushstrokes, and another where the paint’s been globbed on in thick layers.

Namjoon is talking a mile a minute as you inspect the canvases. “I thought maybe I’d do cyanotypes today, but it’s not sunny enough, and I’ve made that mistake before. I’m really into texture right now, so I’m trying out some different techniques with paint. I want to get better at pointillism, but it’s a lot harder than you’d think it would be. ‘Cause it’s just dots, right? But you have to be able to see the forest for the trees, too.”

“These are amazing,” you finally manage to murmur, and to your surprise, the compliment actually renders him silent. When you turn back over your shoulder to look at him, he’s glancing down, almost like he’s embarrassed.

“Thanks. But I just do it for fun. ‘Cause I love art.”

“I can tell,” you say, and when he looks up, you offer him a smile you hope reads as encouraging. “Did you make the art at work, too?”

He nods, still sheepish, and that answer also surprises you. You recall thinking on your first day that the paintings hung on the walls looked handmade, but it never crossed your mind that they might have been made by Namjoon’s hands. Maybe because you’ve grown so accustomed to seeing him drop and break things, you haven’t ever considered him as also capable of… creation.

And yet, here he is. Proving you wrong.

“Sorry,” Namjoon’s voice makes you refocus on him, and your brow furrows in confusion at the unexpected apology. “This is literally your one day away from me and here I am, taking up your time. Thanks again for bringing Moni back.”

“It’s okay.” You shrug. “Don’t have much going on today, honestly. I never really know what to do with myself when I’m not working. Which I’m aware is very sad.”

“Well, uh,” Namjoon starts, and when he takes a single step closer, you swear you feel something flutter in your stomach— or maybe lower. “Sol’s got a half-day today, since it’s the last day before break, so I’m picking them up in a bit. And we were gonna go on a hike, probably take Moni too. You’re welcome to join us, if you’d like?”

Your eyes widen at the invitation. “Oh. That sounds great. I mean, if you’re sure I wouldn’t be intruding?”

He shakes his head, the corner of his mouth pulling up just so. “Nah. I actually think Sol really likes you. At least, they wouldn’t stop asking questions about you at dinner last night.”

“Is that right?” You do your best to keep your expression neutral.

Namjoon drives far enough north that there’s actually snow on the ground when you climb out of his front seat. You shove your hands into the pockets of your jacket as you follow him across the gravel parking lot towards the trailhead, a few paces behind Sol and Moni.

Sol shoots an expression of pure mischief at you over their shoulder, and then immediately starts to sprint up the marked path through the woods, Moni easily keeping up.

“Bye, nerds!” you hear them call before they disappear between the trees.

“Stay on the trail!” Namjoon shouts back, sounding as dad-like as you’ve ever heard him, and you can’t help but laugh. The two of you quicken your steps slightly to not fall too far behind, tracking the set of boot and paw-prints they’ve left to mark their trail.

For a moment, it’s silent between you, save the crunching of snow underfoot. It’s nice, being out in nature like this, time spent with Namjoon where you aren’t suffering through Christmas music and ungrateful customers. Where you can just… breathe. It makes you feel a little less sorry for yourself, a little less fixated on your own miserable life.

You glance over at him as that strange seasonal melancholy starts to settle into your bones again. “Are the holidays… better? With a kid?”

Namjoon makes a face, like he’s surprised by the question. “I mean, they’re definitely different. Then again, it’s been a long time since I did the holidays without a kid— not since I was a kid myself. What do you mean by better?”

Self-consciousness washes over you, your gaze drifting down to the path beneath your feet. “I don’t know, there’s just… I can’t shake this weird feeling now that I’m back home. This time of year used to be so exciting for me when I was Sol’s age. Everything felt special. Magical. But now I’m back here, and nothing’s really changed, except me. But I just keep feeling like the magic is gone. It’s… sad.”

He nods, taking a moment before he responds, and he’s chuckling softly to himself when he finally does. “You know, it’s kinda funny. When Sol was younger I actually felt a lot of stress this time of year. I couldn’t really enjoy it, because I was too busy trying to make sure that they had the best holiday I could possibly give them. That they didn’t feel like they were getting any less, since, you know. Their mom and I aren’t together. It’s funny that you bring up the magic, because I put a lot of pressure on myself to make that magic happen. But now that they’re a little older, I don’t know, it’s different.”

“Different how?” you prompt.

A dimple deepens as he hesitates. “It’s gonna sound corny. But really, I realized that the holidays aren’t about the gifts, or the decorations, or every little thing going perfect. You can make yourself sick over that shit, and I did, but kids don’t really care about it.” He pauses, and for a second you think that might be it, but then he keeps going, eyes fixed on the towering pine trees ahead of you.

“The year I opened Indigo, I had sank so much fucking money into it that I was broke. Broke broke. I couldn’t afford a single gift, a tree, not even a turkey. Sol and I sat on the floor of my shitty apartment and ate Chapagetti and watched Friends. And I felt like the biggest fucking failure imaginable. And then you know what happened?”

“What?”

“Sol turned to me, and they said, ‘This is the best Christmas ever, because we get to hang out, just the two of us.’” He blinks a few times, like he’s trying to ward off tears, and his voice comes back slightly less steady than before. “I still don’t know if they said that because they really meant it, or if they could just tell that I needed to hear it. But either way, I thought to myself: how fucking lucky am I, to have such a great kid? Like what did I ever do to deserve them? I still feel that way.”

Namjoon shrugs, as if to shake off the emotion. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s not helpful to you, but. I just see it differently now. It’s not about the what, or the how. It’s about the who. Spending this time of year with the people you care about, and making sure they know you do. That’s the real magic.”

You realize the trail has carried you up the sloping hillside, and is now flattening out at the edge of a clearing, where you can see Moni chasing Sol through the snow, can hear their high-pitched laughter ringing out in the wide-open air.

When you turn back to Namjoon, he’s already looking at you.

“I’m sorry you don’t feel the magic right now. I didn’t either, for a long time. But it does come back, I believe that. It’ll come back for you, too.”

You blink up at him, overwhelmed by his willingness to be so honest, and by the wisdom of his words. “I— thank you,” you finally manage to say.

Namjoon doesn’t answer, just glances up to where Sol and Moni are still playing, and your gaze follows his out over the snow-covered field. Sol is dusting off a sizable stick, and they call out for Moni to fetch before launching it into a dramatic arc, high up in the air.

Moni watches it go, entirely disinterested, then settles onto his haunches in the snow with a yawn.

“You’re so bad at being a dog!” Sol shouts, and that’s enough to make you and Namjoon both dissolve into laughter. They look up at the sound, hands-on-hips, before yelling again, this time in your direction. “My dad said he has a crush on you!”

Your jaw drops open, and Namjoon’s eyes are wide as you’ve ever seen them when you look up at him.

“Damn, dude, you said you were gonna be chill about it!” he exclaims, and you press a hand to your mouth as a fresh wave of giggles overtakes you. Given how long Namjoon’s legs are, it only takes him a few strides to catch up to Sol. You stay a tentative distance behind him, but still close enough to be able to make out their conversation.

“Uncle Hobi says you need to be bolder with women,” Sol chides, matter-of-fact.

“Uncle Hobi says a lot of shit,” Namjoon mutters under his breath.

“He painted my nails,” Sol raises their voice, clearly talking more to you than to their dad, and holds up a hand for you to see, waggling their fingers proudly.

“They look great,” you call out in response.

Namjoon turns back to you as you step in closer, then juts his chin to a bench at the other side of the clearing. “Sit with me for a sec?”

With a nod, you follow him over, and he wipes the metal surface free of snow with his sleeve before gesturing for you to have a seat. For a moment, the two of you sit silently and watch Sol, who is already busying themself with building a snowperson while Moni slow-blinks encouragingly from a distance.

Namjoon’s words chase a heavy sigh. “I’m gonna be real with you, despite the fact that my child just stole my thunder. I like you a lot.”

Your heart swells in your chest, threatening to burst. “I-I like you too,” you stammer back immediately. “Have definitely been harboring my own crush… basically since I started working at Indigo.”

When you turn to look at him, it surprises you a little that he isn’t smiling. You can see a muscle working in his jaw, like he’s nervous.

“That’s the thing,” he finally relents. “Work. I don’t— I hadn’t really planned to tell you how I was feeling, or act on it. Because I’m your boss, and that means, you know. There’s a power dynamic there. And it would be… unethical of me to blur the lines like that, by getting involved with my employee. I wanted you to come out with us today because it was a chance for you and I to be equals, outside of work, but it’s not like that dynamic just goes away, you know? And I feel a little guilty about it now. Because I really like being around you so much, but I just. We can’t. It wouldn’t be right. Not while you’re working for me.”

You stare down at the snow under your boots as you take in his words, and you can’t help it. Try as you might to sit there and take his worries seriously, laughter flutters out of you before you can hold it in.

“What?” Namjoon asks, and you shake your head, trying to compose yourself.

“I really, really appreciate that you gave it so much thought,” you say, willing your voice to stay even. “I mean it.”

“It’s weighed really heavy on me, if I’m honest,” he says solemnly, and you glance over to see him staring into the middle distance, like he’s deep in contemplation.

Before you can stop yourself, you’re reaching out to where his hand rests on the bench between you and covering it with your own.

“Namjoon?” you ask softly, and it seems to snap him out of his trance enough to look back at you.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” you preface. “But if I have to choose between you and my stupid seasonal coffee shop job?” The smile starts to flicker over your face again. “Then I quit. I quit right now.”

“Oh thank god,” Namjoon breathes, and you can only make a soft noise of surprise when all at once, he takes your face in his hands and kisses you. You need a split second for the shock to wear off, and then you’re moving your mouth against his, one hand fisting tight in the fabric of his jacket. His lips are full and warm, and it feels like far too soon that he’s pulling back again, his cheeks flushed with color.

“Will you, uh—” he pauses, like he’s remembering how to form a sentence. “Will you still work tomorrow though? Jimin’s back after Christmas, but I really don’t think I can survive a shift on my own.”

“Yeah,” you murmur, still a little breathless from his kiss. “Yeah, I think you’d burn the place down.”

Unable to deny the claim, he laughs brightly as you untangle from each other, then gets to his feet before offering a hand to help you up. “We should head out, it’s gonna get dark soon.”

It’s true: across the wide clearing you can already see the sun threatening to sink back down between the trees, casting a golden-pink light that gleams off the snow and paints the world in warmth.

Sol leads the way back through the woods to the car, tugging Moni along by their leash, while you and Namjoon bring up the rear. You glance over at him a few times to catch him staring, and you scrape your teeth across your bottom lip, unable to keep the smile off your face, unable to stop yourself from mentally replaying the moment when he kissed you, over and over.

Just as you step under the shadow of a large tree, snow-covered branches stretching up toward the clear sky above you, Namjoon stops in the path. It’s so abrupt that you continue a few more paces before you even realize, and then you stop, too, glancing back towards him.

“Hey Sol,” Namjoon calls. “Think you and Moni can make it all the way back to the car in ten seconds?”

“I know what you’re doing,” comes Sol’s cheeky reply, but when Namjoon starts counting backwards from ten, you can hear the crunch of their boots taking off down the path.

“Eight, seven, six…” You watch as Namjoon cranes his neck until he deems Sol far enough out of sight, taking a step toward you as his counting trails off, and you find yourself pulled into him like a magnet. “Come here,” he murmurs, and then his hands are slipping up your waist and guiding you backwards until your back hits the trunk of the tree.

In true Namjoon fashion, he uses way more strength than is necessary for the task, and though your winter jacket cushions you from the impact, you’re smacked against the bark so hard that it knocks a dusting of snow off the branches above you, covering you both in flakes that stick to your hair and eyelashes. The sudden rush of cold makes you gasp into Namjoon’s mouth, but then he’s rolling his tongue over yours and you can’t think about anything else. A heavy pulse has started to thud between your legs at the heat of his breath in your mouth, the way his hips have you pinned to the tree, his body big enough to cover yours entirely.

“Joon,” you find the air to breathe as his lips trail hungrily down the slope of your neck. You rake a hand through his hair, white-blonde strands studded with snow, to try and pull his attention back, despite very much not wanting him to stop. “Joon, we should go. Before someone steals your kid.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs against your skin, and then his mouth is on yours again for one more kiss, like he can’t get enough. “Okay,” he finally grunts as he pulls away, sounding as begrudgingly responsible as you feel. Your head is still spinning; you want nothing more than to stay here and let him kiss you dizzy.

“Let’s go.”

He takes a step back so you can right yourself, reaching out to dust some snow off your jacket, and then the two of you resume walking up the path, sharing a breathless laugh like confidantes. You assume it’s just his standard clumsiness when Namjoon’s hand knocks into yours, but then his fingers are twining through yours purposefully, until you’re pressed palm to palm.

The rush of heat that blooms in your chest at his touch keeps you warm the rest of the way to the car.

Your last shift at Indigo somehow manages to feel exactly like every shift that’s come before it and completely new at the same time.

The work is the same, the steady stream of customers unchanged, the Christmas music still an aggravating soundtrack. But you no longer feel like you have to ignore the butterflies that flutter in your stomach when Namjoon asks you a question, or meets your gaze across the shop.

The only urges you have to suppress are indecent ones, made worse by Namjoon seemingly taking advantage of every opportunity to touch you: hip-checking you when you’re both standing at the front counter, pressing a hand to the small of your back whenever he has to squeeze behind you, leaning in a little closer than necessary to be heard over the noise of the milk steamer. It’s enough to make your breath hitch each time, and you can’t help but wonder if he feels the same relief at not having to hold back anymore.

Towards the end of the night, it surprises you when the typically consistent flow of customers starts to slow down, until it seems to have ceased entirely. You still have two hours to go, but you find yourself staring at the walls, every table empty, having done all the side work you can think of to distract yourself from boredom.

The sound of the front door’s lock clicking shut makes you glance up, only to see Namjoon flipping the open sign over.

“What are you doing?” you ask, blinking dumbfounded, and he looks over his shoulder at you with a shrug.

“It’s Christmas Eve Eve, and I’m the owner, so. We’re closing early. Effective immediately.” The decree makes you laugh a little, and his dimples wink back. “Let’s finish cleaning, I wanna show you something.”

In record time, you find yourself standing outside the front door of Indigo as Namjoon locks up, only tonight your hands are kept warm by the hot chocolates he’d made for the two of you as you closed. He takes his cup back once his hands are free, and you try a tentative sip from yours, now cool enough to drink without burning your mouth. Given what you witnessed of his barista abilities on your first day, you brace yourself for the worst, but your eyes widen in pleasant surprise when the liquid hits your tongue.

“Being a dad means getting really good at a few specific things,” he says by way of explanation as he unlocks his car doors, and you smile as you slip into the passenger seat.

It occurs to you as Namjoon starts to drive that you don’t actually know where he’s taking you, but when you open your mouth to ask at the next red light, he leans over you to fumble open the glovebox and you lose your train of thought. He fishes inside for a few seconds before retrieving a CD case, then makes quick work of prying it open and sliding the disc into the slot on the dash. You attempt to hide your giggle behind the rim of your cup.

“No wonder you like ‘90s music so much. You’re still living there,” you say, nodding to his antiquated stereo, and he smirks as he turns up the volume. 

“This is A Tribe Called Quest,” he remarks, quirking an eyebrow when he looks back at you. “You better show some respect.”

“Yes, sir,” you tease in response, and you don’t miss the color that flushes his cheeks.

The light turns green and he accelerates through the intersection, one hand on the steering wheel, the other reaching across the center console to grip playfully at your leg, a few inches above your knee. You can see his tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek, like he’s considering saying something, but when he finally opens his mouth, it’s just to rap along to the music.

It’s only a few songs later that he’s turning off the main road and following a barely-lit gravel path up to a large grassy parking lot, where he pulls into a space and kills the engine. You squint through the windshield, tucking your now-empty drink into the cupholder, but you can’t make out much except dusk and some vague lights over a hill in the distance.

“Was this crush thing just a ploy to murder me?” you quip, and Namjoon looks a little nervous when you glance over, like he took the question to heart. “I’m kidding,” you clarify quickly.

His voice comes out surprisingly soft. “This is one of my favorite things to do during the holidays. Thought it might help with, you know. The magic.”

Something cracks open inside you as you look back at him. “That’s… really sweet.”

“Ah,” he says, as if to dismiss the compliment. “You haven’t seen it yet. Maybe you’ll hate it. Come on.”

The two of you climb out of his car to start your trek to whatever he has in store, heading in the direction of the lights, and Namjoon’s hand slips into yours, like it’s already second nature. Easy and sweet. You grip tight to him, the night air colder now than it was when you left work, but then you finally crest over the hill, and the temperature is suddenly the furthest thing from your mind.

It takes you a moment to even understand what you’re looking at. The place is clearly some kind of arboretum, as the path ahead of you snakes through a perfectly manicured garden of various plants, but the only thing you can focus on are the lights. Every tree, bush, shrub, and other kind of greenery that lines the walkway has been intricately strung up with lights, each one boasting a different hue. The end result is nothing short of dazzling— a veritable rainbow of light and life and color, glittering diamond-bright against the deep-set night around you.

“Namjoon,” you breathe. “This is beautiful.”

There’s a dimple flickering at the corner of his mouth when you look up at him. “Thought you might like it.”

“I can’t believe I never knew this was here,” you remark, your eyes wide and blinking as you try to take it all in.

“Hey,” he answers with a shrug. “Maybe your hometown still has a few good surprises left in it.” You exhale a laugh as you lean into his side and he squeezes your joined hands; you can’t help feeling like you’ve already found the greatest surprise of them all.

After an hour spent wandering through the displays, each one more breathtaking than the last, Namjoon diverts you toward a small food stand. He comes away from the counter with a paper carton filled to the brim with long ropes of twisted, fried dough, warm enough to release steam into the air when you tear one apart to share, and dusted with cinnamon sugar that sticks to your fingertips.

The two of you take a few steps back down the path until you’re under an archway of glowing golden lights, then eventually come to a standstill, too hungry to do anything except devour your food.

Namjoon speaks first, mid-chew. “Can I ask you a question?”

“What’s up?” you answer as you reach for another piece.

He swallows, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth before he continues. “At your interview, you said your life fell apart. What happened?”

“Oh.” You smirk as you rip the braided dough in two, then in two again, before popping it into your mouth. “It seems a little silly now, but. I got fired from that last job, like I told you. And the same day, my roommate pretty much kicked me out of the apartment, because he wanted his boyfriend to move in. He was also my best friend, so. It stung a little. A lot. Moving back in with your parents at this age is humbling, to say the least. Feels a lot like starting over.”

Namjoon hums, like he understands. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Eh,” you respond noncommittally. “I should probably be happy for him. The timing just… wasn’t amazing.”

“You know,” he murmurs, thoughtful. “I thought my life was over when my ex and I got pregnant. Not even eighteen and about to be a dad. I really felt like… I don’t know, like that was it for me.” You nod slowly, unable to even fathom what that must’ve been like.

“But, here I am. Still alive.” Namjoon flashes you a grin, and you find yourself smiling back. “Still figuring it out. I actually feel like I’ve learned a lot from watching Sol grow up. They’re like—” He shakes his head, as if at a momentary loss for words. “They’re like a different person every month, I swear. What they’re into, how they dress. Who they wanna be. It makes me feel, I don’t know. Like it’s okay. Like I can change too.” He shrugs. “That’s the thing about life. It’s long. And even when you feel like it’s ended… it keeps going anyway.”

His words wash over you, and you’re so in awe that you can’t help but laugh.

“Ah, sorry.” He grimaces, suddenly self-conscious. “I know that was corny.”

“No, no,” you interject, trying to keep your composure. “I just think you are like, literally the wisest person I’ve ever met.”

The lights glimmering overhead aren’t enough to hide the way Namjoon blushes at the compliment, and then he pauses, as if recalling something. “Didn’t I nearly run the blender with the lid off on your first day?”

You double-over at the memory, and he’s laughing now, too. “Okay, okay. Fair point.” 

The thought keeps circling around in your brain as you dust cinnamon sugar from each other’s jackets and continue your way around the rest of the gardens, occasionally pausing to trade sticky-sweet kisses in the twinkling glow: you don’t want the night to end. You keep glancing over at Namjoon, wondering if he’s feeling the same way as he drives you back into town, the heat in his car on full blast, the CD player still underscoring your conversation.

“So, what do your Christmas plans look like?” he asks, eyes flitting briefly from the road to meet your gaze.

You fiddle with a button on your coat, wishing you had a less depressing answer. “I was just gonna spend it by myself. My parents already had a vacation in Hawaii planned, so I’m gonna do what I always do: hole up with booze and snacks and wait for it all to be over.”

He chuckles, tapping his fingertips absentmindedly against the steering wheel. “Well, I have about a hundred presents to wrap tomorrow night while Sol’s at their mom’s. Why don’t you come over and help? I can even provide the booze.” There’s a pause, and his voice comes back softer before you can respond. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

The corner of your mouth tugs up at his sincerity, the way he gently cares for you, has since day one. “Yeah, okay. I mean, you had me at free alcohol.”

Just like that, Namjoon is already turning back into the Indigo parking lot, where your car sits waiting for you. The two of you shrug off your seatbelts once he’s pulled into a space and parked, and he reaches to turn down the music before shifting in his seat to get a better look at you.

“So,” he starts, clearing his throat a little. “You are officially no longer my employee.”

“And you are no longer my boss,” you answer back, and a thrill buzzes in your chest at the statement.

“Which means,” he continues, doing his best to lean over the center console, “I can do this.” He barely finishes getting the words out before his mouth is on yours, your eyes fluttering closed, his kisses far less chaste than the ones you shared earlier. They’re open-mouthed and urgent this time, with Namjoon slipping his tongue into the heat of your mouth like he’s been waiting all night for it.

“Uh-huh,” you murmur between kisses, and then he dips his head lower, until his lips find the join of your neck and shoulder.

“And this,” he purrs before kissing you just as hungrily there, tongue-first. You can’t hold back the soft noise his mouth pulls out of you.

“Fuck,” you breathe as he sucks gently over the same spot, with just enough pressure to make you writhe in your seat. A shiver rolls up your spine when he hums against your skin, clearly pleased at your reaction.

“And, uh…” You slowly blink your eyes open when you feel the warmth of his breath dissipate, and he’s looking at you with his brow furrowed, as if attempting some difficult mental math. “Actually—” He reaches down for the lever to adjust his seat, and it drops all the way back with a graceless thud that makes a laugh flutter out of you. “Maybe you could take your jacket off and come over here?”

You don’t need him to ask you twice, and you’re moving quickly as you peel out of the thick material and scramble across the console to straddle him. You both groan a little when you duck down to press your mouth to his again, all of this suddenly feeling much more real now that you’re basically horizontal. His hands alight on your hips, tentative, like he isn’t quite sure what to do with them, and you smile against his lips.

“Touch me, Joon,” you instruct, and he does as he’s told.

His hands are warm as he slips them beneath the hem of your shirt, trailing over your skin until he reaches the band of your bra. When you hum encouragingly into his mouth, he keeps going, pushing the fabric up your chest so your tits spill free from their confinement. He cups one in each hand, and though you might’ve expected him to be clumsy or rough, given everything you’ve seen of him thus far, you’re surprised to instead find that he’s gentle, thumbs circling your nipples with just the right amount of pressure to tighten them into stiff peaks.

Unable to bite back your whimper at the heat that blossoms through you at his touch, at how much more of him you need, you pull away just enough to break your kiss, glancing up through the back window of his car to confirm the parking lot is still empty.

Namjoon groans low in his throat when you reach down to tug up the hem of your shirt, shifting a little on top of him to give him better access. He doesn’t hesitate, thumb still working at one nipple while he takes the other into his mouth, and your sigh of relief comes edged with a soft moan when he swirls his tongue over the bud of your breast.

“Shit,” you gasp. “Feels so fucking good.”

He pulls off with a wet pop to switch sides, and the slick heat of his mouth sends bolt after bolt of arousal through you until there’s a dull ache of need thudding between your legs. As you roll your hips in desperate search of friction, you can feel him beneath you, straining hard against the fabric of his jeans.

Namjoon pulls his mouth off your breast, letting out a hoarse laugh when you shift to drop your forehead against his collarbone with a groan, horny enough to practically be delirious. “I hate that I’m even saying this,” he rasps, “but I really can’t have sex in a car. I’m too—”

“Big?” you offer, and there’s a smile on his lips as he presses a kiss to your temple.

“I was going to say old.”

You can’t help giggling as you lean up to find his mouth with yours again. Namjoon kisses you a little while longer, lazily, his hands still kneading gently at your tits, until he finally tips his head back, heaving a sigh up to the roof of his car. “Okay, okay. You should go.” His tone is reluctant, like it’s the last thing he wants. “It’s late. And my jeans fucking hurt.”

There’s a self-satisfied smirk toying at your mouth as you sit up, tugging your bra and shirt back into place and not missing the bulge in Namjoon’s pants where your hips meet his. “I will take the blame for that one.”

He folds his hands behind his head, biceps and dimples on full display. “Damn straight.”

You lean down for one more kiss, letting it linger before you make your way back over the center console to retrieve your jacket. “Have a good night, Joon,” you murmur as you reach for the door handle, and when you glance back, his eyes are fixed on you, still heavy-lidded with lust.

“Get home safe. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I have booze, as promised.” Namjoon’s voice echoes in from the kitchen as you kick off your boots and hang your coat up at his front door come Christmas Eve. The aroma hits your nose as your socked feet pad down the hall to follow him: the spice of cinnamon and clove, paired with a hint of citrus. It smells like the holidays, like home.

“Mulled wine?” you wager a guess, and he nods, turning away from the stove to retrieve two mugs from a cabinet.

“I halved the recipe, since it’s just us,” he explains, mouth pulling down at the corners as he starts to ladle out servings from the pot full of deep red liquid. “Still made a lot, though.”

Your eyes drift across the kitchen until they land on the two empty bottles of red sitting next to the sink, and that makes you pause for a moment to consider. “So the original recipe called for four bottles?”

Namjoon’s brow is furrowed when he glances up, and then he follows your gaze, and a look of delayed understanding washes over him. “Oh, fuck.”

Your elbows dig into the kitchen island as you press your hands to your mouth, as if to physically hold in your laughter. “Did you… halve everything in the recipe except the wine?”

His eyes drop closed as he nods, his answer a resigned sigh. “Yeah. Yes, I did.”

You can’t help yourself: all at once, you’re circling around to join Namjoon behind the stove, so you can take his face in your hands and pull his mouth down to yours. He makes a soft noise of surprise, but then his lips fall into rhythm, kissing you hard enough to knock the air out of your lungs. Even through the fabric of your shirt, his large hands are warm when they slide over the small of your back, and then they keep going, until you finally break the kiss with another laugh when he reaches his final target and outright grabs your ass.

“Not the reaction I anticipated,” Namjoon admits, paired with a teasing squeeze. “But I’ll take it.”

You look up at him through your lashes, pressing your palms flat to the firm plane of his chest. “A very wise friend of mine once told me that the holidays aren’t about every little thing going perfect. I thought maybe you needed a reminder.”

His dimples deepen as his eyes search yours, and his voice is lower in his throat when he responds. “I think that fool was just sayin’ words because a pretty girl asked him a question.”

Heat flushes your face as you smile back. “Well, they were very good words.” You drop your gaze to the pot on the stove. “Come on, I bet we can salvage this.”

Determined to save Christmas, you throw in another handful of spices, chased with a few glugs from a bottle of orange juice Namjoon heroically digs out of the back of the fridge. After a few more minutes of simmering, you take a tentative sip of the mixture to find it perfectly adequate.

“I guess we just have to drink twice as much now,” Namjoon quips, filling up two fresh mugs with the remedied wine. You raise an eyebrow back at him, as if to accept the challenge, while you tap your drinks together in a cheers.

By the time you realize that a double-batch of mulled wine and gift-wrapping don’t exactly go together, it’s already too late. The booze makes Namjoon’s big hands go even clumsier, the few presents he attempts an absolute disaster, and you can’t stop laughing long enough to be of any help. At one point he reaches up to cup your jaw for a kiss, but completely misjudges the distance, deftly knocking into his half-drunk mug and spilling the contents all over a tube of wrapping paper and the crotch of your jeans.

You dissolve into giggles until you can scarcely breathe, scooting your chair a few inches back from the table as he jumps up to grab something to soak up the mess. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” you manage to gasp when he returns, immediately focused on cleaning you up first. You wave him away as you get to your feet. “Seriously, it’s not that bad, it’s mostly the table.”

“Jesus,” Namjoon groans as he drops the kitchen towels in his hands onto the wooden surface, doing his best to soak up the puddle, though there’s no saving the ruined gift-wrap.

“It’s not a big deal,” you murmur as he turns back, once again examining the extent of the damage done to your clothes. A shiver rolls through you as his thumb brushes over the waistband of your jeans, and he grimaces a little.

“This is probably gonna stain.”

“I mean…” Your pulse starts to quicken as his fingertips linger where they are, and Namjoon’s gaze flits up to meet yours when you speak, clearly hearing a shift in your tone of voice. “I could just… take them off.”

A smile teases at the corner of your mouth when his eyes widen. “Yeah,” he breathes, then seems to self-correct. “I mean, uh. If-if that’s something you would feel comfortable doing.”

You’re already reaching to undo the button, and then Namjoon takes over to tug open the zipper and push the fabric down your legs, and your nipples tighten beneath your bra at the reminder of how gentle his large hands can be. His lips find yours again and you don’t hesitate to lick into his mouth, jostling slightly as you try to make out with him and kick your pants the rest of the way off at the same time. It’s graceless, but you manage to make it work, and then he pulls away from you to glance back down.

“It looks like a little got on your shirt, too.”

He’s right, you realize: there are faint purple marks splattered just above the hem of your long-sleeve, and you smirk as you look up at him.

“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you did this on purpose,” you tease, and then in one swift move you pull your shirt over your head, letting it drop to the kitchen floor next to your discarded jeans.

Namjoon’s hands are instantly on your bare skin, trailing heat as they trace the curve from your hip to your waist, and your breath hitches as he ducks down to brush his lips over your collarbone. The low tone of his voice reverberates through you when he speaks against your skin. “I like to think I could’ve gotten you naked tonight even without being an accident-prone idiot.”

You run a hand along the line of his jaw, tipping his head up to seek a kiss, before leaning back to murmur, “I guess we’ll never know.”

He kisses you again, and the two of you stumble across the threshold into the living room, pausing along the way to peel off his sweater and then his jeans, laughing into each other’s mouths, just drunk enough to lack any semblance of coordination you might have otherwise had.

When you drop down to lay back on his sofa, you’re both stripped to your underwear, and you can feel the thick bulge of him, pressing firm-heavy heat into your thigh as he settles his hips between your spread legs.

Namjoon’s eyes roam over your body beneath him, and then he’s tugging the lace of your panties to the side to slip a finger into your drenched center, beckoning it up to rub you just right. Your mouth drops open as he traces slow circles against your front wall, and when he adds a second digit, you can’t help but whimper softly at the stretch. It thrums through you like your lingering red wine buzz, hot and thick and good enough to get lost in, your head dropping back on the couch cushions as your hips rock up into his touch.

“Goddamn,” Namjoon groans, and your eyes flutter open again to take him in, his gaze heavy-lidded as he watches his fingers disappear up into you, coaxing slick sounds out with each pump of his hand. “I had a whole plan,” he rasps. “To take my time. But, fuck, I really want to fuck you.”

“It’s okay, Joon,” you breathe, not sure how much longer you could stand the torturous feeling of his clothed cock grinding into your thigh, so close to where you want him. An ache throbs in your cunt, needy, plugged up with two fingers but still begging for more. “Just fuck me.”

Realization flashes over his face, and then he suddenly heaves a sigh, looking defeated. You have to bite back a noise at the loss as he withdraws his fingers. “I— there’s an obvious joke here, but. I don’t have any condoms. Or if I do, they’re definitely expired.”

It takes you a second to process the revelation, and then you reach up to pull him down to you, smiling when he hums surprise into your mouth at the unexpected response. Your lips linger on his, and then you tip your head to press a kiss to the slope of his neck, not quite able to maintain eye contact as you murmur, “I mean. I’m on the pill, and I’m clean. So.”

“Yeah?” he replies, and your nose bumps against his shoulder as you nod. “Me too. Well, I-I’m clean, I mean. I’m not on the pill.”

You can’t help the giggle that slips out as you look up at him. “Right, no, I get it.”

“Sorry,” Namjoon huffs a laugh in return, his face flushing a little. “I talk a lot, when I’m nervous.”

“I just thought it was an all-the-time thing,” you admit, and the color in his cheeks deepens.

“I’m just always nervous around you.”

Your mouth seeks his out for a kiss sweeter than the last, slower for his shy honesty and the hummingbird thrum of your heartbeat behind your ribs. The heat of his breath ghosts over your lips when you tip back to answer, “You don’t have to be.”

“So, you’re okay?” he asks, almost reverent with his question. “If we—if I don’t—”

“Please,” you insist, and it’s all the encouragement he needs.

With remarkably little fumbling, he drags the lace of your panties down your legs, letting you kick them the rest of the way off while he moves up to unclasp your bra. You slip the straps off your shoulders and drop it over the edge of the couch, then watch as he shifts to strip out of his boxers, freeing his cock with enough force that it smacks against his abdomen with a hefty thud.

You swallow hard as you take him in: long and thick, flushed dark. Big, and fuck, you want all of him; you can feel how drenched you already are between your legs at the thought of all that cock filling you up.

When you tear your gaze away to meet his, Namjoon is staring at you just as hungrily, and he brings a hand to pump himself a few times, to coat his shaft in the wetness that’s started to drool from the head of his dick.

“Come here,” he grunts, his voice rough-edged, and you waste no time straddling yourself over his hips.

Given his considerable size, you figured it might take you a second to adjust, but you want him so bad, the feeling of his cock stretching you open is all white-hot pleasure. Your fingertips dig into his shoulders as you slowly lower yourself down on him, inch by overwhelming inch, until your ass is flush with thighs.

Namjoon’s head drops back against the couch as you slowly grind your hips into him, his hands gripping at your waist to guide the movement. You can’t help the soft sound that flutters out of you: he just looks so good like this, white-blonde hair swept off his forehead, beads of sweat trailing down his temples and glistening at his collarbones, his parted lips full and kiss-bitten.

“Baby,” he groans as you start to move a little more intentionally. “Fuck, I’m not gonna last long. Tell me what to do.”

“Touch me,” you breathe, and you close a hand over one of his, guiding him down to your clit. 

Just like the night before in his car, his touch is so gentle when he begins to trace circles into the sensitive nub with his thumb. You can feel the slow-hum build of an orgasm in your core, drawn up by the steady rub of his hand, and you lean back to allow him better access, bracing yourself on his thighs as you rock along his length.

A moan rips through you as the new angle drags the head of his dick just right against your front wall, and it’s good enough to make your eyes roll back. Chasing the feeling, you shove your hips down harder, driving his cock into that spot over and over until your thighs have started to tremble.

“That’s it,” Namjoon grunts encouragingly, his voice husky. “Use me, baby. Look so good when you bounce on my cock like that.”

The words set every last one of your nerve endings alight, and you dig your nails into his skin as your spine arches from the pleasure. His thumb is still working steadily at your clit, and the heavy stretch of his cock has you so wet, you can feel arousal starting to leak down your thighs. Your pussy clings to him like a vice, a throbbing-tight heat, taking him to the hilt every time.

“Oh my god, Joon,” you groan, “I’m gonna come.”

His touch doesn’t let up, and you can feel yourself teetering right on the precipice of it, only able to manage little gasps as you drop yourself down onto his cock again and again and again, with enough force that there’s an audible sound of your skin slapping against his.

Your legs are outright shaking from the effort now, from how close you are, and then Namjoon ducks his head, using his free hand to guide your tit into his mouth. The swirl of his tongue laved across the tight bud of your nipple is just what you need to push you over the edge.

With a moan that’s more like a sob, you drop forward against Namjoon’s chest, sinking all the way down to bury him in your pulsing cunt as you come. He continues to rub you through the waves of your orgasm, breathing ragged in your ear while your pussy gushes around him, until you grab his wrist with a soft whimper of overstimulation, and he relents.

Too gone to get any words out, all you can do is take his face in your hands and kiss him. He rolls his tongue over yours, decadent, as his palms slip down to cup your ass. You groan a little into his mouth when he begins to shift you, your cunt still fluttering-sensitive at every little motion, but he manages to maneuver you onto your back while still keeping himself sheathed in you.

His hands move to your thighs, encouraging your legs to hook over his hips, and his mouth trails kisses down the valley between your breasts before he breathes against your skin, “Can I keep going?”

“Please,” you murmur, and it’s chased with a moan when he starts to rock his hips into you. You feel so full, so swollen from your climax that it’s like your walls were molded to take him, the crown of his cock stroking deep-deep over the place that lights you up inside, shooting sparks of pleasure all the way down to your toes.

Namjoon’s breath stutters on a laugh. “Shit, I’m already close.”

You tilt up to brush your lips against his, humming encouragingly into his mouth, and then he pulls back again, one dimple teasing at the corner of his smile. “God, I— wanna hear you say it.”

Somehow, you know exactly what he means. “Come in me, Joon,” you beg, fucked so good that you’re shameless for it, and you gasp when he bottoms out in you with his next thrust. “Fill me up. Fuck me full of your cum, baby, please.”

It’s like the words send him into overdrive, and he practically growls as he starts to fuck his cock into you forcefully, hard enough to make your tits bounce. Each snap of his hips punches a heady groan from your lungs, and you reach up to drag your nails across the skin of his back as he chases his own end.

“Gonna fucking— give it to you,” he hisses, rolling his hips one, two, three more times, and then you feel his cock twitching, shoved in as deep as you can take him. He heaves a final strangled groan as he comes, rope after rope of his release pumping into you to paint your walls, until you can feel it beginning to spill back down your thighs.

You kiss through the comedown, inhaling shaky breaths into each other’s mouths, your bodies still fitted together like puzzle pieces, sweat starting to cool in the places where skin is pressed to skin. Namjoon finally moves first, giving a grunt of effort as he rolls off the couch, and you throw an arm over your face while the world slowly settles into focus around you.

When he returns, it’s with a towel in hand, and you can’t help smiling as he cleans you up, trailing soft kisses along your collarbone in tandem.

His voice is soft, too, when he finally speaks. “Will you stay here tonight?”

You prop yourself up on your forearms to look at him, and a little glimmer of something lights up in your chest that you can’t ignore. The first spark of an ember, just enough to reignite a flame you’d long since believed to be entirely extinguished. But now he’s shown you: it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to be alone.

“Of course. We still have presents to wrap,” you say simply, and he huffs a laugh as he leans in to press a kiss to your forehead.

“Joon?” you murmur into the crook of his neck, unable to keep your voice entirely steady.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you,” you breathe. “For the magic.”

[princessmisery666]

Retirement Plan

Summary: After Six rescues Claire, there are no mission details to follow, no designated escape route, and no arranged extraction. However, Donald planned for the day Six would learn there is more to the Sierra Program than dangerous operations and battle scars.

Warnings/Genres/Troupes: angst, drink spiking, canon-type violence, flirting, murder, flashbacks. 

W/C: 8.5k

Characters: Sierra Six, OFC, Claire Fitzroy, Lloyd Hansen, Donald Fitzroy. 

Pairing: none. Platonic friendships. 

A/N: first time writing for this fandom, please be kind. I know this is long but I didn't feel there was no good place to split it. I had to post before I lost the courage and decided I hated the whole thing.

Beta(s): @deanwinchesterswitch

Graphics: made by me on Canva// @slytherkins created the OFC image.

Master Lists: Main // Other Fandoms

2021

The multiple yellow warning triangles that line the road should be redundant after the big, bold, capitalized lettering warning of RADIATION RISK. PRIVATE PROPERTY. DO NOT ENTER. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT THEN PROSECUTED (if you survive). Yet Six continues to drive. He hopes the warnings are an attempt to keep people out because he has little in the way of choices. It’s either risk radiation poisoning or…well, he doesn’t know what other option they have at the moment.

The alarm sounds, pulling Carmen’s attention from her task of scrubbing the internet of any trace of the man who just trespassed on her land. The screen switches from the split view to track the vehicle as it crosses the property line. Shit. 

Six wonders if Claire got the coordinates wrong. He’s been driving on an uneven dirt road for well over a mile, surrounded by nothing but trees to the right and chest-high grass to the left. He can’t blame the kid, Donald made her memorize coordinates and a random password during a stressful situation. He’d understand if she got confused or misheard him. But Six is not about to wake her to check the intel for the hundredth time.

The car isn’t speeding, so it’s not an emergency, but its occupant still shouldn’t be here. She rushes up the basement stairs, unclipping the safety button on the sheath holding the knife on her hip. The stairs lead directly into the sitting room, and she grabs the gun from under the couch, checking the magazine as she walks toward the front door. Before stepping outside, she plucks the baseball cap off the hook in the entryway. The car is on the horizon, a quarter mile out, and she tucks the gun into the back waistband of her jeans, making sure her oversized shirt covers it.

The sun is quickly descending, and Six doesn’t want to drive this uneven path in the dark. The dirt road finally gives way to gravel, and Six sees the house. A figure steps out onto the porch, watching his arrival. He didn’t see any cameras, but there must be surveillance because how else would they know he was coming? 

Gravel crunches beneath the tire, kicking up a cloud of white dust as the car pulls to a stop a little too close to the porch steps. 

The engine cuts off, and Carmen cautiously waits for the occupier to step out, wondering how he knows about this place. Fitz would have called if there was trouble because no one else knew of her existence here. 

Six looks at the woman through the window. Her long brunette hair fans out from under a navy blue baseball cap, concealing most of the right side of her face. Suspicious in itself but not cause for concern. Yet.

The tall blond man, who she knows only as Six, steps out of the car and eyes her suspiciously before uttering, “Password: Portal to another world.”

Fuck. Her throat tightens, and her chest constricts, feeling heavy with pain. The spoken words mean one thing. But still, she asks, “Fitz is dead?” 

She sucks in a deep breath and waits for his reply. That she had a relationship with Donald is apparent from her reaction. He hates being the bearer of bad news, but he has to deliver it and nods once. 

She knew this day was coming. It was only a matter of time. Fitz got too close to the kid - well, man now - and it wasn’t ever going to end well. She’d told Fitz as much on one of their many - almost daily - phone calls, and he always told her to stop worrying so much. Maybe she was too close to Fitz, too, because she constantly worried about the man. 

A fat lot of good that did. He’s dead. And his protege/son/weapon is staring at her. She lets him stare. Everyone does. It’s human nature. She pushes back her shoulders, slipping off her baseball cap, and shakes her hair off her face as best she can without lifting her hands to aid the process. He’ll see that as a threat. 

Six keeps his eyes on hers for a second, beautiful amber eyes that wouldn’t look out of place on a Hollywood star. His eyes fall to her nose and trace the deep scar, made by a sharp blade, running from the bridge of her nose, curling around her right cheek and up into her bottom lip.

He traces it twice before meeting her eyes again, and she returns the cap to her head. “Got somewhere for the kid?”

“Claire?” she asks, dipping to look into the car's window.

He nods again.

“Through the living room, upstairs, second door on the left.”

Carmen watches him gently rouse the girl, enough to get her to release the seat belt and allow him to scoop her up. Six winces as he stands, but he doesn’t let whatever pain it is stop him from carrying her into the house.

The walk to the stairs is painful. He’s probably popped some stitches by carrying her, but he doesn’t care. He grunts and groans as he climbs each step and pauses to catch his breath at the top. Thankfully, the corridor is short, and the door to the room is slightly ajar, allowing him to kick it open and shuffle in sideways.

“Six,” Claire groggily says as he places her on the bed. “Where’re we?” 

He wants to let her rest some more, so he tells a white lie, “We’re safe,” because he’ll be damned if anything happens to her. He waits for her to settle again, rolling onto her side. To back up his statement, he does a bit of recon.

Carmen hears Six moving around while she waits for the coffee to brew. She can’t blame him for checking out the place. He’s never been here, doesn’t know her, and now Donald is gone. There’s one less person on the planet that he trusts. He’ll fall back on his extensive training and try to use whatever he can to his advantage. 

Six doesn’t care about manners today. He doesn’t know this scarred woman even though she apparently knows Donald, so he searches the house and is not quiet about it either. There are weapons stashed in obvious places, and the hum of computers draws him down the open door at the bottom of the stairs. Eight steps lead to a concrete floor. Cautiously he walks down, and if he weren’t so damn tired, he’d probably have let out an appreciative whistle. 

The place looks like a NASA command center, with four monitors, multiple tower systems, a large-screen TV, and Six’s photo on the middle screen. A program is running at speed, a jumble of white numbers and letters scrolling over a black box, and occasionally, images of the mess in Berlin pop up and then disappear. Why is she looking for him? 

Carmen knows Six will find all of her weapon’s stashes. They aren’t that hard to find, and if he’s bold enough - which he is - he’ll walk down the stairs disguised as a linen closet that leads to the basement and see her computer system. He’ll make his own assumptions as to who she is. 

Apparently, having decided to switch tactics, he sneaks up on her. She hears him just before he reaches for the gun in her waistband. As he pulls it free, she turns to face him. Using his lower body to pin her between him and the edge of the counter, he wraps a hand around her throat, cutting off her air. She hadn’t expected his assumption that she’s an enemy to hurt as much as it does, but he’s had a shitty few days, so she forgives his behavior. Although, she’s not going to go down without defending herself. 

Raising the gun to her temple, his deceptively calm voice demands, “Who are you? Why is my face streaming on your monitors?” 

Carmen doesn’t fight back, though she could if she wanted to. She’s as skilled as he is. One arm is trapped between their bodies, and the other rests on the marble countertop near the coffee pot. While he obviously doesn’t feel it, the small knife she pulled from the sheath as she turned is resting on the inside of his thigh.

When she doesn’t attempt to answer, he forces the heel of his palm into her larynx, compelling her to bend further backward to keep from passing out. She could grab the carafe and drench his face in scalding hot coffee, but it would only escalate the situation. Instead, her solution is to tap the hand wrapped around her throat three times, conceding.

He loosens his grip but doesn’t move. She gasps, sucking in much-needed air, and he allows her three deep breaths before he asks again. 

“I just told that girl she’s safe. Are you gonna make me a liar?! Who are you?” 

“I’m Sierra.” the pressure on her neck lightens further but doesn’t disappear. “Donald gave me strict instructions: if he doesn’t check in every two days, I’m to scrub the internet of any mention of you or anyone matching your description.” she pauses, giving him a second to process, but he’s still as a stone. “The agency has done their part, the news outlets have stopped running the story, but your little escapade in Berlin is still doing the rounds on the internet.”

Six remains in place, gun grinding into her temple, strained muscles fighting against the burn of fatigue, as he debates what to believe. It’s plausible but still doesn't answer his question. 

“Do you work for the agency?”

“No. I work for Fitz. Off the books. Or at least I did.”

The coffee finishes brewing, and their labored breathing is the only sound for a tense moment. “Six,” she says, as softly as she can with his hand so close to being able to crush her windpipe.

He does not react, so she taps the blade resting on the inside of his thigh, dangerously close to his femoral artery, to make him aware of its presence. 

“Let me go,” she demands. 

He’s not ready to trust her or at least be calm enough for a rational conversation, so he keeps her pressed against the countertop.

As best she can, in her most professional voice, she utters the sentence she hopes will make him recognize her. “Oscar One to Sierra Six. Safe to talk.”

“Star,” he murmurs, letting his hand fall away and taking a half step back after putting the gun on the countertop beside her. 

Cautiously eyeing him, she rubs her neck, greedily inhaling the oxygen he deprived her of. “Star?”

He’s not willing to explain and instead apologizes. “Sorry. I always imagined you as a short, rotund woman with glasses on the tip of her nose like a librarian.”

That’s a lie. He had never seen a picture of her, so all he had was imagination, and though librarians often came up, she was never short and rotund in his vision. 

Carmen chuckles, rolling her eyes, “Yet you still flirted with me.”

He did flirt, and not because it gained him perks; fancier hotels, restaurant recommendations, a rush on an evac team when needed, but because it was nice to have someone to talk to who knew the job and, in a way, knew him. He shrugs with the smallest of smirks, denying nothing.

“Disappointed?” She asks, gesturing up and down her body.

His eyes travel the length of her body and back up to her eyes. “No. I’ve always had a thing for librarians.”

She laughs out loud, shying away from his gaze and turning back to pour the coffee. She’s not so sure he’d have flirted had he known what she looked like. “Are you hungry? I can make you a sandwich.”

“Starving,” he says. The danger has passed, and now Six understands why Donald sent them here. Oscar One is a friend. Donald trusted her, and Six does, too. 

The enormity of the realization hits him hard, and suddenly, his whole body aches. “Got somewhere I can freshen up?”

“Yeah, bathroom upstairs. Everything you need is in the closet in the bedroom, third door on the left.”

He leans around her, picks up the fresh mug of coffee, and smiles, but she doesn’t see it. Stirring sugar into her coffee, she uses it as a pretense to keep her face averted, but he senses it’s because he’s on the side with her scar. “Thank you.”

2019

The park had been relatively empty, but it’s growing in popularity as the proverbial lunch bell sounds at the bordering businesses. The benches surrounding the central attraction, a lake containing a large floating fountain, quickly become occupied with people reading newspapers, eating lunch, meeting friends, and scrolling their phones. Ducks, swans, a few geese, and greedy seagulls all vie for the spoils of the humans offering bread and seeds. 

Six leisurely jogs laps around the lake. He’s not working on his cardio, which is good because he keeps having to slow down and dodge around people, but he is working. 

The women, with babies in strollers, track his movement, whispering to one another and giggling whenever he passes and nods a polite greeting. They think he can’t hear their lewd comments and salacious musings, but the AirPods aren’t piping music. They’re providing a connection to his operation specialist. 

At a safe distance from prying ears, he pulls his phone from his pocket. Pretending to press the screen as if making a call, he says, “Sierra Six to Oscar One, safe to talk.”

The voice comes back almost immediately. “Oscar One to Sierra Six confirmed, safe to talk.”

Translation: secure line. No one else, including top brass, is listening. 

He heads toward a tree, making the most of the shade to unnecessarily stretch because he’s barely broken a sweat. He looks up at the blue sky, with no clouds in sight, and knows Oscar One can see him via satellite and the cameras located around the park. Though he has no idea as to her location, she is his eyes and ears. Essentially, she holds his life in her hands. If he needs a quick escape, he relies on her to provide the safest route.

“What’re you doing after this?” 

She sighs dreamily, “There’s a bottle of red cooling in the fridge and a pizza with my name on it somewhere.” 

“Want some company?”

“I’d love some,” she says wistfully, then chuckles it away, “but it might take you a while to get here.”

He sighs at the thought. Wine and pizza sound like a fun night to him, and it’d be nice to put a face to the name Oscar One. He knows that’s not her name, just like Six isn’t his name, though he much prefers Six to the name his father gave him.

He starts up a light jog again, going in the opposite direction around the lake, just to change things up a bit. “Where is here?”

“If I could tell you, I would.” 

She means it, too. It would be nice to have company. She’s been alone for so long she’s acclimatized to the solace, but she was supposed to be a field agent and craves to be where the action is. But she lives vicariously through Six and makes the most of being able to take control of cameras around the globe to see what’s going on in the world.

Six believes her. They’ve established a good relationship over the sixteen years she’s been his Northern Star, as he likes to think of her. She’s helped him out of multiple sticky situations - she’s smart, calm in a crisis, and possesses great communication and observational skills - she’d be excellent in the field. Still, he’s glad she isn’t because he relies on her to be a guiding light to safety when he needs it. 

Fitz speaks highly of her, sometimes too much, and Six believes him to be the reason they are paired together more often than not. It’s rare that he gets an assignment where she is not his partner, and he questions it whenever she isn’t. However, he still finds it inequitable that he has no idea what she looks like, yet she can probably see the mole below his left temple.

“It is unfair, you know.” he swerves around a businessman shouting into his phone. “That you know what I look like and where I am at any given moment.”

“It’s part of the job,” she reminds him, not for the first time. “I promise, one day, we’ll meet and share a pizza.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

Six continues his jog and listens to One tapping keys and humming along to the radio. He contemplates asking her real name, but a part of him likes the mystery of it. The story and images of her he creates in his mind are far more fanciable than the truth. Their stories are morbidly similar.

The lunch crowd dissipates, and Six completes twelve more laps before One pipes up again. 

“Target identified,” One says at the same time Six spots him. “Southwest entrance, heading your way.”

With a light tone, “Bad guy identified,” Six confirms, returning to the tree to do some stretches, a little necessary this time.

The target doesn’t look like a typical bad guy. He’s clean-shaven with slicked-back hair and wearing an immaculately tailored suit and expensive shoes. He looks like a banker. Arguably, he’s probably as much of a crook as any easily identified ‘bad guy’.

“Is he a bad guy?” One wonders ruefully. “He’s just a whistleblower.”

Six isn’t one to get mixed up in feelings or emotions. He’s here to do a job. The assignment is basic: collect a document dropped ‘anonymously’ and then follow the mark. 

One is accustomed to Six’s indifference when the conversation gets deeper or potentially contentious, so she provides her own answer. “It helps me to think of them as bad guys that deserve whatever the agency is going to do to them rather than potential good guys that are in the way of someone's agenda.”

Six understands the logic, but he’s never had much of a problem with it because whatever he’s tasked with is better than the alternative. 

“He’s made the drop,” One informs him. “On the bench a hundred yards…” 

A loud pop echoes around the park, and the smartly dressed man is no longer so well put together. A red dot blooms on his chest, and he falls to his knees. Someone screams, and Six takes a step to go after the file to complete the mission. 

“HOLD!” One yells in his ear. It’s as frantic as he’s ever heard her, and he freezes. “I can’t see the shooter. I don’t have eyes.”

The first echo dies down, but another quickly follows. The already downed whistleblower takes a kill shot to his head. People begin to scatter in every direction except Six. He waits under the tree, hopefully out of sight of the killer, deciding on his next move. 

“Six,” One impassively states. “I need you to be a civilian. Run.” 

“The file.” 

“Forget the file,” she grits. “Do you trust me?” 

“Yes.”

“I need you to run, please,” she begs. “If you ever want to meet me for that pizza and wine, I need you to run.”

His Northern Star has never steered him wrong, so he doesn’t protest. He turns away from the bloody murder and runs in the opposite direction, following the crowd of scared civilians.

One is strictly professional, but the relief is in her tone. “I’m hacking the target’s phone. He took photos. I have the files.” 

“Thanks for the save.” 

“Always.”

2021

Carmen sits on the porch, wrapped in a blanket, listening to the running water upstairs. It’s odd to have a guest, let alone two, but she’s thankful for the company. She figures that now that Donald is gone, like Six and Claire, she doesn’t really have anybody left. Tears prick the corner of her eyes, but she dilutes them with a sip of scotch. It’s horrible stuff, something Fitz left behind, but she’s drinking it in his honor.

As Oscar One said he would, Six finds all he needs in the bedroom next door to where he set Claire down, including clothes and bandages. It’s been a long, stressful couple of days, and it’s not until he steps into the shower that he realizes he hasn’t asked her real name. Once he’s ready, in clean sweatpants that fit and a fresh white tee thrown over his shoulder that’s also his size, he seeks to remedy that situation. 

The half-nakedness isn’t to show off his physique or to reassure Oscar One that they both have scars. It’s to let his freshly dressed wounds air dry. Luckily, he didn’t pull any stitches while carrying Claire.

The smell of bacon hits Six as he steps into the kitchen, mouth watering at the sight of the film-wrapped sandwich on the countertop. The whole thing is about two inches deep. Fluffy white bread holds chunks of white chicken mixed with salty bacon, sliced tomato, and the greenest lettuce he’s ever seen. Once he unwraps it and lifts a corner of the bread, he finds a healthy serving of mayonnaise.

Living alone is something Carmen is used to. Sometimes, she thinks the solitude surrounding her has helped fine-tune her hearing because she hears Six remove the film wrap from the sandwich and sniff it. “There’s chips in the pantry,” she calls from the porch.

The sandwich looks plentiful, so he takes it out to the porch sans chips. Crickets chirp, a distant bird sings as the night draws in, and Six walks to the edge of the porch, taking time to appreciate the spectacular view — trees and green as far as the eye can see. The world could end, and they’d never know.

“Find everything you need?” she asks.

“Yeah, thanks. How’d you know my size?”

“Donald Fitzroy,” she says, fondness and grief coating his name as she raises a glass of mahogany liquid to the fading sun. “He’d visit every couple of months, always had a suitcase of crap with him.” 

Six walks across the porch, hoisting himself and his sandwich, to sit on the wide brick wall. “He knew I’d come here,” he concludes, looking out at the forest and the dirt road he drove up. 

“He had a plan for everything.” She explains, “That was part of my deal, to stay on this side of the bars.”

Six turns to look at her again. Although she said she was Sierra, it hadn't occurred to him that Fitzroy could have found her the same way he found Six, on the wrong side of the law, rotting in a jail cell. 

She continues, “I had to take you in if you ever needed it,” motioning with her half-empty glass to indicate all of his wounds and bruises, “and it definitely looks like you need it.”

She’s right. He had no plan other than rescuing Claire. After that, he had no idea what he was going to do. They drove as far as a full tank of gas took them, and when Claire fearfully asked him what they were going to do next, he had no answer. Claire was the one to offer the solution, and honestly, they had nothing to lose.

“I’m guessing you know my story,” Six states rather than asks, and she gives a slight nod. “How did Fitz recruit you?” He takes a huge bite of the sandwich and hums appreciatively around a half smile. 

2000

Carmen shuffles inside the interrogation room, cuffs on her ankles and wrists. She understands the precaution, but it's ridiculous. Despite her crime, which she has never denied, she has no ill intentions against anyone.

Donald sits at the desk, laptop open, an official brown document folder beside it. He nods to the guard, who then backs out, closing the door behind him once she’s taken her seat.

“Hi,” he says with a gentle smile. “I’m Donald Fitzroy. I’m going to cut right to the chase.” He turns the laptop around, pulls a slip of paper out of the document wallet, and slides them both over to her. He watches her eyes flick over the instructions on the page and expects the cocked brow she gives him. “I need you to get me access to that.”

She doesn’t ask why. It’s not the first time an unidentified or lettered government agency has asked her to do such a thing, and she doubts it’ll be the last. She taps a few keys and bypasses the government’s supposed firewall - they really should find someone better equipped to build the thing - in forty-five seconds. If her hands weren’t cuffed, she’d pat herself on the back. It’s nice to know she hasn’t lost her touch during her incarceration. “What kind of access do you need?”

“View only is fine.” 

Donald waits for her to ask what’s in it for her or why he wants it done. But she taps away at the keys. His eyes flick to the clock, and he waits a full five minutes before interrupting her concentration.

“It’s a tough one, huh?”

She shrugs, “Not really. I got in three minutes ago. I’ve been playing solitaire.” She turns the computer back to him with a playful smirk.

The screen shows him exactly what he expected it to show him, but regardless, he smiles. He knows he has the right person for the job and loves being right. He opens the document folder again. “Carmody, initial H, born nineteen eighty. Got your first taste of the correctional system in nineteen ninety-four, juvenile prison for cybercrimes, before we really understood what cybercrime was and hit the big leagues in nineteen ninety-eight, life without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder.” 

She rolls her hands as best she can and bows her head as if thanking the audience. “At your service.” 

“You're wasted here.”

“I do my part,” she argues, “I teach women who wouldn’t otherwise have a chance how to use a computer and software to give them better options when they get out. But seeing as you addressed me by my surname leads me to believe you know I take great offense to being called by my given name, which means you know more than you’d like me to know that you know, and all this,” the chains rattle as she motions toward the computer, “was a test.” 

“Like I said, wasted.” Donald smiles. “You're two years in and never appealed the decision.”

She looks decidedly bored. After all, he’s only telling her things she already knows. She was there, she lived it, and she suspects he knows she didn’t appeal because it would have been a waste of everyone’s time and money.

Though, there is one thing he doesn’t know, so he asks, “Still think it was worth it?” 

“Every goddamn day. I go to bed with a smile on my face and sleep like a baby.”

“Fair enough,” Donald nods, “I’d be the same. He deserved everything he got.”

“Actually, he deserved a slow, agonizingly painful death, but y’know,” she shrugs, “I was pressed for time.”

She’s deathly serious - excuse the pun - and Donald sees why the judge threw the proverbial book at her. She has no remorse, and in his opinion, rightfully so, but life imprisonment is a waste of her talent, talents of which he thinks can be adapted and grown.

“What would you say if I told you I could get you out of here and you wouldn’t be pressed for time should you encounter a similar monster?”

“I’d say tell me what I have to do.”

2021

It feels like a lifetime ago, the day Donald changed her life, and while Carmen talks about it, she gets lost in the memory. It’s bittersweet. She owes a lot to Donald Fitzroy and will do all she can to pay it back. 

“I was in the field for just over a year before this,” she points at her face. Her pause is born of grief, a reminder of the life before she was mutilated.

There is and will forever be a before and after, like how people treated her or how she felt about herself. Society treats beautiful people differently. It isn’t, nor has it ever been right, but it was the way of the world, and as Sierra, she used it to her advantage. She’d never been exceptionally vain, but still, some days, she found it hard to look at herself. Even now, she has days when she’s bitterly angry about it. 

Six recognizes her beauty, scars and all. She doesn’t strike him as a vain person, but he can understand how it must have affected her life. Sometimes, he’d get a glimpse of himself, passing a window or the stupid front-facing camera on his phone, and it’d take his breath away because he’d see his father. 

Mirthlessly, she smiles, and a hint of bitterness seeps into her tone. “Can’t be inconspicuous with such a recognizable face, and I, for sure, thought they’d dump me back inside.”

“But Fitz kept you on.”

“I don’t know what story he fed the agency, but for all intents and purposes, I was gone, wiped off the grid. He set me up here, checked in almost every day, visited once every couple of months, and now I think I understand why.”

Six nods, agreeing with her line of thought. “He was building his retirement plan.”

“Not his,” Carmen corrects. 

The scenery is no longer interesting and Six pulls his attention away from it to look at her because now he doesn’t understand her thought process. 

“He was ensuring your retirement,” she says softly as if that will make the realization sting less. “There’s nothing in those wardrobes,” she points back inside the house, "that would fit Donald. They are all in your and Claire’s sizes. He’s been doing it for years, bringing new stuff and taking stuff that would be too small for her as she grew. Donald was never going to retire here, Six, or he never thought he’d get the chance, but he planned for you to be here.”

Sierras aren’t known for riding off into the sunset or surviving to the point of retirement age, but her assumptions and the evidence to back up her claims seem correct. 

Six scoffs, the idea almost laughable. He doesn’t quite believe it was a plan, more of a fail-safe, to keep Claire protected should Donald ever meet his maker. Then again, why would Fitz bring clothes for Six if he didn’t expect Six to be Claire’s savior or perhaps guardian?

Contemplative silence lingers for a while, and the birds fall silent as the sun disappears and the nocturnal creatures begin to wake. 

As with most Sierra operations, there’s never a paper trail. Most of it gets swept under the rug, so Carmen isn’t aware of the circumstances surrounding Donald’s death. Perhaps she’s better off not knowing. Ignorance is bliss, so they say. Six won’t offer the information without prompting, but in the twilight, she decides she’s not ready to hear it. 

Eventually, the questions and quest for knowledge interrupt the thoughtful reminiscing, and Six has to ask, “How do you survive out here?” 

“There’s a Walmart a couple of hours from here and a small town with a Farmer’s Market not too far from that. I do a monthly run, two if I can stretch it.”

“And no one knows you're here?” he questions skeptically. 

“As far as I know, only Fitz,” she says, sipping her drink to douse the grief in her tone. “The only people who know I’m here now are you and Claire. There’s no family or friends.” She’s not bitter about the fact. Carmen smirks, “So if you want to off me and seize the place, it’s yours for the taking.”

“Maybe when I’m feeling better,” Six deadpans.

All joking aside, she looks somber. He's hiding it well, but there’s a slight wince to every movement, a noticeable slower pace for a man his size. “Last couple of days are starting to take their toll, huh?”

It’s a segue to, hopefully, get him to tell her what happened, but he’s not easily swayed.

He grumbles as he slowly pulls himself to the edge of the wall and takes his time to stand up. He stretches his arms high above his head, and Carmen watches until she realizes it could be misconstrued as checking him out and averts her eyes. 

“Last couple of days or years,” he says, mid-stretch adding, “and Lloyd fucking Hansen.” as he drops his arms again. 

Carmen's reaction is immediate. She shoots to the edge of her seat, distaste and hatred sneering at her lips. “Wait, Hansen was involved?”

The reaction isn’t surprising. Lloyd usually has that effect on people, but Six recognizes that it’s something deeper than having a run-in with the guy. “Yes,” Six tells her.

“Of course he was,” she snaps, lips tight with agitation. “I should have known, this shitshow has his fingerprints all over it!” 

Her chest heaves with simmering anger while she fits the pieces together in her head. The CIA keeps Sierra-involved missions close to their chest, strictly off-book, so she hadn’t been able to garner sufficient information to understand precisely what happened. 

“Was it…. Was he….” she can’t find the words because she already knows the answer. She’d always thought it inevitable that Lloyd would be involved in her grief again someday. “Donald,” she starts again, clearing her throat of emotion, “it was Hansen, wasn’t it?”

Six nods and chews his bottom lip before elaborating, “Fitz got shot in the escape. He wasn’t going to make it. He knew he was slowing us down. He cornered Hansen and some of his guys, then pulled a pin off a grenade.”

The anger yields to a mild hopefulness. “So Hansen is dead?”

Six nods, “The trash ‘stache is no more.”

Carmen smiles, satisfied. “That was too quick a death, but I’m glad it was Donald.”

“That’s not how he died,” Six explains. 

The anger returns in the form of her hand gripping the chair's arm tightly, knuckles turning white. “What happened?”

Six recounts events from the takedown of Four to his rescue of Claire and Donald from the house in Croatia, taking them through a quarter bottle of scotch and three beers each. Carmen asks questions, and he answers them as best he can. She fills in some blanks on the Carmichael side, and it all helps to get Six’s thoughts in order and clarify a few murky details. 

“Clarie blew off a few of Lloyd’s fingers. He burnt her face with a flare gun, and of course, if you know Lloyd and from your reaction, I assume you're acquainted, he tried to prove he was better than me. I beat him pretty good, but then Suzanne Brewer put one in his chest.”

“Fuck,” Carmen gripes, “he should have fucking suffered.”

“So you’ve definitely met the guy,” Six notes flatly.

She meets his gaze with a heavy sigh. “I had the displeasure a few times.” 

Six isn’t one to pry, but he’s shared details about himself, okay, more so about the mission he was involved in, but he put everything on the line to save Claire and Donald, though he failed the latter. He knows that tells Carmen a lot about him, more than he’d willingly share with most people.

He isn’t staring at her scar. He’s mesmerized by her eyes, momentarily lost in trying to figure out if they are amber in color or if the orange-tinged sky reflects in them. She gives him little time to decide, shying away, but he uses a gentle finger beneath her chin to bring her gaze back to his. “Is Hansen the one who did that?” 

She doesn’t need to answer. The wriggling out of his grip and avoiding eye contact to look at her fidgeting hands in her lap is enough confirmation, but she takes a deep breath and gives him a half smile. “If you wanna hear about it, we’re gonna need more booze.” 

2003 

Being a cog in the Sierra machine has its perks. Not being stuck in an eight-by-eight cell is an obvious one, but seeing different corners of the world, having fun pretending to be someone else, fine dining, and luxury hotels were top of the list. There were drawbacks, too. Having to be incognito and traveling to distant places usually meant cargo planes, which weren’t exactly first-class service, but Carmen never complained. Donald had given her a second chance, and she’d never take it for granted.

Except when she had to team up with Lloyd Hansen.

“Fitz, c’mon! Why am I here?” she whines into the phone. The fact that she’s lying in the middle of a queen-size bed staring up at a half-million dollar chandelier in the penthouse suite of a hotel in Dubai isn’t lost on her. She’s grateful for the opportunity but sick of being Lloyd’s maid. 

“He asked for you.”

“He asked for me? That means he’s already screwed it up, and I’m here to clean up his mess. Again! Isn’t it about time you locked him up and threw away the key?” she asks, already knowing the answer. He’s a sociopath, psychotic at times, but nine times out of ten, he’s effective - until he isn’t. “This is the third time I’m cleaning up his mess, and the last time he almost blew my cover acting like a petulant child ‘cause he didn’t get his own way.”

“He’s a petulant child because he likes you,” Fitzroy tells her, not for the first time.

The idea of having Lloyd’s affection makes her skin crawl. He’s all mustache and sharp edges. “That’s not a compliment,” she says. 

Fitzroy sighs, and she imagines him running a hand down his face. “Don’t worry, this will be the last time, I swear. I have his replacement ready to go,” he explains in a hushed whisper, not wanting to be overheard from his office.

Curiosity peeks, and though she knows he won’t give her concrete details, she asks, “Sierra?” Lloyd isn’t technically part of the Sierra program. He was kicked out pretty early during the process, but he has friends high on the food chain. 

“Uh-huh,” he confirms. “Six. He’s excelling in the program. Almost better than you.” The teasing smile filters into his tone. “I just need to get him on a few smaller missions before I set him loose. And he has a full beard, like a real man.”

Carmen chuckles. She forgets how much Donald pays attention. She’s complained about the mustache before, so he knows that's ten percent of her issue with Hansen. “Fine, he better be cute,” she concedes. “And if Hansen happens to be collateral damage during this mission, there’s to be no questions asked.”

Fitz heartily laughs, “Deal.”

The mission is a success, despite Lloyd’s involvement, and unfortunately, for Carmen at least, he survives without a scratch.

“Come on, one drink,” Lloyd insists. “We’ve got the night to ourselves. Fitzroy put you up in this beautiful hotel…” 

Yes, Fitzroy did put her in a different hotel from him, on purpose, to avoid this very situation. 

“...What’re you gonna do instead,” he snarks, “go crochet a sweater for Donald?” His declared, “Boring!” echoes around the marble reception area, and she silently apologizes to the few guests who turn to look. 

The implication of a close relationship with her handler is nothing new, so she doesn’t bother responding. But Lloyd isn’t a man who gives up easily.

“One drink,” he repeats, walking beside her toward the elevators. 

The last thing she wants is to spend any time with him and his molester-esque mustache on a professional or a social level, but Lloyd is a persistent fuck, and she has no doubt he’d likely follow her to her room and push his way inside. At least if she sits at the bar with him, she’ll have somewhere to escape.

“Fine,” she sighs, rolling her eyes, “I’m going to the bathroom. Get me a Cosmo.”

“What room number? I’ll put it on the tab.” 

She rolls her eyes. He asks her to go for a drink, but apparently, the agency is paying for it. Such a gentleman. “Penthouse.”

His positively disgruntled scowl makes her day, and she kind of wishes she’d invited him up to see it. She manages to hide her laugh until she’s in the bathroom.

The Cosmo is one of the best she’s ever had, and if she doesn’t look directly at him, he’s not that bad of a conversationalist. Unless that’s the booze talking. She’s only had two, yet her head is swimming. Something’s not right. Was there something in the drink? Is their cover blown?

Lloyd seems fine, but she’s having trouble focusing, so it’s hard to tell. He’s droning on about some ‘dipshit’ he had to deal with on his last mission, so she eyes the bartender. He doesn’t appear interested in them. There are no surreptitious glances their way or feigned ignorance of their conversation. He probably can’t even hear them as he’s at the other end of the bar, slicing lemons and restocking his condiment tray.

“I don’t feel too good.” she twists the stool to face away from the bar, needing to see who’s around.

Two other couples are in the bar, but they are too far away for drink spiking to be an effective plan. She looks back to Lloyd, and his twisted smile makes her realize the error she made in trusting him.

The floor seems to be getting awfully close. “Woooo, there,” Lloyd says, wrapping an arm around her to keep her from face-planting on the tile. Her head lulls against his shoulder, tilted far enough to see the bartender is now across from them.

 “Sir, is everything okay?” The bartender asks, but it sounds so far away. She tries to form words to ask for help, but her tongue feels heavy and thick. “Please-"

Lloyd preempts any further response from her. “Everything’s fine. We’re celebrating our engagement. A little too much excitement and too much alcohol… Put the drinks on the penthouse tab, please.”

She’d never heard him be so polite or sound so…human. That’s the last thought she has before her world goes black. 

Carmen’s eyes flutter open, adjusting to the dusky light of the room. They focus on the ridiculously priced chandelier above her. She wonders how the hotel installed it. It’s big and looks heavy. It must be a bitch to clean! 

Her thought process is murky, and she tries to lift her arm to push the hair off her face. It’s tickling her cheek, but her limb doesn’t move. She tries to sit up, but none of her limbs respond. Her chest rises and falls, but she only knows that from the panic-filled breaths she hears exiting her lips.

“Finally,” Lloyd huffs from somewhere in the room. “I thought you were never going to wake up.”

She turns her head, and to her surprise, it moves. Lloyd sits on a plush chair beside the bed, looking bored and agitated at having to wait for her to come around.

“There she is,” he sighs, almost wistfully, and if it weren’t for the flick knife he’s expertly twirling in his hand, she might have thought he was genuinely concerned. 

“Lloyd,” she mumbles, “what’s going on?” 

He continues to expertly twirl the knife, ignoring her question. “You know I really did like you. You’re smart, formidable, and a pleasure to work with when you aren’t being a complete bitch.” Venom laces the word, but he keeps his face void of emotion. “You are beautiful. It’s almost sickening that they locked up such beauty. Maybe that’s why Fitzroy recruited you. Too wasteful to spend your youthful years in a cell and not seducing people for your country's benefit.”

“Geez, you like the sound of your own voice.” It’s too slurred to portray her boredom as effectively as she’d like. 

“Because I’m the only one that makes sense,” he shrugs, smiling smugly, underlining the arrogance of his belief in that statement. 

Carmen rolls her eyes, along with her head, to look away from him. She’s bored of this already. The disrespect angers him, and he reaches over, grabs her chin, and violently jerks her head to face him again. “Those eyes,” he grits his teeth, “those damn fuckin’ eyes that do nothing but look at me with repulsion.” Elation and admiration cement his tone, “WOW, mesmerizing!”

She could get whiplash from listening to him. “Just do whatever you're going to do,” she growls, wincing when he pinches harder, putting almost unbearable pressure on her jaw and teeth. “Save me the monologuing.”

“Fine,” he leers, sinister and taunting. “Carmichael showed me the report from the last mission. What was I? Unhinged, chaotic, reckless, and dangerous.”

Through gritted teeth, she snarls, “There’s only so many professional ways to say bat shit crazy.” She manages to wriggle her face free and turns away, looking back up at the ceiling. 

Before her mind wanders back to the chandelier because it's way more interesting than Lloyd, the bed bounces, and he's on top of her, straddling her hips. If she weren’t numb from the neck down, she’d feel where his knees crush her hands against the bed. “We could have been a team.”

She scoffs, using the fear as fake bravado, “I’d rather go back to prison.” Tears spill, and she feels them drip down her ears. Instinctively, she tries to lift her arm to wipe them away but it’s as unresponsive as the first time she tried. 

“Oh, that’s where they’ll send you,” Lloyd smiles, genuinely happy, “because you’ll be no good to the agency anymore.”

“Whatever you do to me will be the end for you.” 

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” he admits, “I’m so sick of Fitzroy and all his bullshit. But what you fail to realize is that Fitzroy won’t be in charge forever!” Gently running the cold blade down around her cheek, almost like a lover’s caress. He continues, “Don’t worry. I’m gonna spare your eyes. I want you to see how everyone reacts to your new face.”

“You're proving I was right, Lloyd!” Carmen snarls and works up a wad of saliva to spit it in his face. 

The consequence of the action is immediate, and Lloyd doesn’t bother wiping it away. He presses the blade to the bridge of her nose, “every time you look in the mirror, you’ll remember me.” 

2021

Carmen wipes away a tear, and Six is polite enough to look away to give her a little privacy to reign in her emotions.

It’s funny that she didn’t cry or scream when it happened. She wouldn’t give Lloyd the satisfaction, but now, whenever she recounts the event, she can’t stop the tears from falling. She’s never really processed it, at least not in a healthy way, and having to relive it every time she looks in the mirror, as Lloyd promised, she feels it all over again. 

“Sorry,” she apologizes to Six, who’s clearly uncomfortable at the show of emotion. 

There’s nothing to be sorry for, so Six doesn’t acknowledge the apology, and Carmen doesn’t really know why she offered it.

As the conversation and drinks flow, so does the night. It doesn’t feel like they have been talking all that long, but when Six checks his watch, he realizes it’s been a long while.  “Sun will be up soon.” 

“You should get some rest,” she says. “Can’t imagine you’ve slept much lately.”

That is the understatement of the century. Except for his drug-addled sleep in Miranda’s trunk, he doesn’t remember his last full night's sleep. He stands and stretches his arms over his head, feeling his muscles and bones pop.

Six thinks of wishing her a good night but realizes he didn’t remedy the situation as he had set out to do earlier. He’d been distracted by the delicious sandwich. “This is awkward. We’ve been talking for a few hours, but what’s your name?”

She looks up at him, the porch light highlighting her amusement. “It’s not Oscar One.” She chuckles, “It’s Carmody. But Carmen is fine.”

“Carmody,” he repeats, “sounds more like a surname.”

“It is. My first name is Haven.”

He stares for twenty seconds, waiting for her to laugh or deliver a punchline, but she stares back. It isn’t a joke. 

“I wish I were making it up,” she says finally. “It’s stupid and ironic, and I hate it because of who gave it to me. So I’d appreciate it if you don’t use it.”

He nods solemnly. He understands more than she realizes. He hates his name simply because of the man who gave it to him. He much prefers Six and the man who gave it to him.

To be a good guest, he collects their empty beer bottles and takes them inside. Following Carmen’s instructions on where to put them, Six deposits them in a bin labeled ‘Glass’. She does her part to help the environment, so her monthly supply run includes disposing of any recyclable materials.

Six notices the wine glass turned upside down on the drainer, and he remembers a conversation from long ago.

“Carmen,” he calls softly through the house, knowing the breeze will take it to her through the open doors and windows. 

A few short seconds later, she steps through the backdoor, a crease of concern in her brow that he may need something. “Yeah.” 

“What’re you doing after this?” he asks, unable to keep from smiling.

It takes her a half second to remember. She shrugs, matching his joyful smile. “There’s a bottle of red cooling in the fridge and a pizza with my name on it somewhere.”

“Want some company?”

“I’d love some.” She shies away for a millisecond before her smile turns to a devilish grin, and she jokes, “But I never said I’d share either.”

Six huffs a laugh through his nose, slowly continuing his path through the house. “Goodnight, Carmen.”

A/N (2): okay, I read it through again before clicking post and I absolutely love it and if you made it this far I hope you did too.💜

Feedback is soul food and I appreciate it more than you will ever know 💜

Master Lists: Main // Other Fandoms

[sombrashe]

Alicia and your naturally long nails

alicia clark x reader

note(s) i lied anon i did come up with an idea for her 🫶🏻 can be read as platonic or romantic

jealous with a capital J

if she finds any nail polish out on scavengers she immediately pockets it and presents it to you as a gift

came to you one evening after a particularly bad mission. Troy and her going at it before being ambushed by a small horde. But she comes to you with a genuine smile gracing her face. Smooth lips pulled back to show off her front teeth, never her bottom. Just something you noticed. She's holding something behind her back and when she presents it to you she's practically giggling. Nothing but giddy as she present to you the small half empty bottle of cuticle oil.

"Had to get it for you, like immediately."

Asks you, and only you, to scratch at her back whenever she has an itch

Loves it when you detangle her hair with your nails. The feeling of your nails scratching at her scalp and how your fingers yank at her strands has her relaxing into your grip not even ten seconds in

Loves, loves, loves painting your nails. It gives her some semblance of normality within the world. Like she's back in high-school gossiping with her friends about boys

"So... what made you grow your nails out so long?"

"Oh. Well, I mean I used to bite them a lot, but I ended up wanting to have natural prom ready nails."

"Well?"

"Oh! No. They were short and stubby, i had to get fake nails. They sucked. But, I did stop biting my nails."

you wiggle them in her direction and she softly holds your hand in her own. Intimate in the way she uses her full palm to hold up yours. Intimate in the way she ghosts her thumb over the bumpy keratin. Her soft voice a whisp, "you need to relieve some stress." Ypu feel heat flood your cheeks, blue heat burning your blood vessels. Purple. What an intimate color. The last color you had before everything went to shit.

"I always wanted nails like this. Thought they were, like, the hottest thing."

Her calloused fingertip makes its way from one finger to the other. Gentle scratching as her pointer finger feels your softer skin right above your cuticles.

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[bitterrobin]

3, 9 and 12 for the hater ask game <3

3. a screenshot of the worst take you've seen on Tumblr -- ooh I have a screenshot, hold on.

yeah. Granted, its an old post back when the Tim/Damian conflict was more recent (I think 2013/2014-ish) but it's still very emblematic of those kinds of Tim fans. The kind of fans who treat Damian (a child) as an abomination who will never change while still excusing Jason (a young adult/current adult). I still laugh at this, its so egregious. "Jason never tried to kill me" sure man. sure. "--in no way suggests he's changed his goals at all" uh huh. "im not coming back to the manor" okay. goodbye. I swear some people treat this era like Damian was trying to alien assimilate into the family and destroy only Tim's life on purpose. Because of course everything's about Tim, nothing can be nuanced enough to include the 10 year old's trauma and everyone's else's grief into account, and if you excuse the child's actions then you're advocating for bullying/bad parenting/sibling abuse /s.

9. worst part of canon -- simple answer, how writers will always rehash arcs and the same "explorations of a character." More complicated answer, I'm not a fan of the way supporting characters have been erased in current/modern comics. I don't like when those characters explicitly created to support the main character's plot lines and expand their world are either completely gone or so sanded down they're practically splinters of wood. Some examples, I see mentions of Tim's wider supporting cast that are gone (idk Ives sounds interesting), theres the fact Maya Ducard hasn't shown up until very very recently, Harold Allnut and Leslie Thompkins vanished into the aether, Waller got super-butchered etc.

12. the unpopular character you actually like/why you should like them -- hmm. Kind of hard to answer since I can't gauge the unpopular ones in wider fandom. Technically, every character has their haters- ah wait. hold on i'm receiving a vision. ITS THE PARENTS. No matter which side of the fandom its always the parents (TM) that get disparaged and raked through the coals. Willis and Catherine Todd, Janet and Jack Drake, Crystal Brown, Talia al Ghul, I could go on probably. Yes, I do actually like all of them. Willis's abusive nature was a retcon and even if it wasn't, its still rooted in classist ideas of "Poor man will inevitably abuse wife/child because he is poor and unsatisfied, something something he didn't work hard enough for capitalism." Willis can be a subpar father, but hitting his child shouldn't be the only aspect to explore. Jason tried getting revenge for his dad's death, he loved him, what you do with that is more interesting to me than "Willis sucked and Jason hates him and Bruce is better/Bruce is equally as bad and Jason also hates him." Catherine and Crystals addictions are often portrayed as "absent and not nearly there enough to provide their child protection." Catherine's sickness/addiction was super up to interpretation until it was retconned to "full blown drug addict". Crystal was being abused and trying. Children can resent their parents over this, but sometimes you need to look past the character and at the actual writer who wrote this into canon. Did they or did they not hold their own bigoted views and insert them into the comics because that's what they wanted and no one stopped them? Janet was dead before she could meaningfully warp Tim and by all accounts she was loving to Tim even when she wasn't always there. All of Jack's flaws are so utterly banal and human and a clear signifier of the 90's/2000's ideas of parenting that making him more than a slightly pathetic and macho-oriented man just...doesn't make sense to me. And I won't get into Talia because we'll be here for hours. I will say that Talia is truly in a lose/lose situation because people will hate her whether she actually has a hand in Damian's childhood or not. To me all of these parents can be nuanced and interesting to explore, especially in situations without their children. I like writing about Willis and Catherine's childhoods. I like exploring Talia's relationship with her father. I like thinking about Jack being hopeless and still having redeeming qualities and Janet being so loved by him it destroys him when she dies. I just think the idea of "parents before they were parents" is neat! I love thinking about the people they used to be before a child, because having children is so changing. Was Willis affected by his own parents? Did Willis actually know Lady Shiva as friends or was there some crazy backstory we'll never get? Did Catherine have her own hobbies and dreams, did she always want a child and accepted Jason as her own so readily because it haunted her for years? Did Janet go into archaeology for a specific reason, was it a family passion? Did Jack meet Janet and covet her intelligence and independence? Did Talia dream of becoming a world-renowned surgeon and having that be accepted by her father wholeheartedly, having her successes be her own successes?

Disclaimer: If you vent using DC characters then thats entirely valid! I'm just weirdly neurotic about accurate portrayals and in no way am I an authority on any of the above.

[castellla]

ok but fr kikuri is my fave because

1: same hat - i too, am 30something and on substances For Reasons.

the audience is basically handed a diagram that says: why does kikuri drink so much? :( -> oh right, yeah. Capital-and-Other-Isms

2: audience stand in - thank you for laughing at bocchi-chan's faces. wipes tear from eye they are funny

3: best damn mentor for a non-sober person award - look, seika can have the 'responsible person' stuff. who doesn't appreciate a distant, yet loving manager? the kind of person who secretly makes her kid sisters dumb friends 401k's and starts dumping whatever she can in there cause you think they're gonna do it? compounding interest compounds.

not this scrungly oneechan. come to kikuri's awesome boozehouse of fun and mistakes for the 'oh, you're pretty fucked up too! nice lol. like sux actually but Nice throws bocchi-chan a life-saving liferaft like it was nothing (come back here bitch i said i Owe you my Life)

and, well, she's so salazzled all the time that she's running Default Kikuri.OS which seems to be: just a happy lil guy. just here 2 have a good time and help other people have a good time also. if there's swears to be said, she might do it. if there's horny flirty things to be said, or perhaps, senpais to get handsy with...

will there be property damage: yes & it's why i'm worried she's Without a Home :sob: but it's worth noticing none of the property damage was damaged in anger - just like, drunken childlike joy/lack of impulse control. christ, you put a hole in the wall that easy? do you work out? are you on the straight dude workout regimen? ...o-or the not straight girl workout regimen? ...anyway, this does not negate the fact that shit did get broken.

will vomit be vomited: yeah, but in anime it's really funny and i can't smell it. i mean her throat probably hurts like fuck and shes gotta be nauseous tho

will thoughtless comments be commented: yes, but i feel like a villain for saying so!!!! oh well.

but i ask the Perceivers among us to consider what kind of things they last said when drunk - stupid? embarrassing? overly horny? - and remember that she's drunk basically All the fucking time. like all the time. the fact that she manages to say anything BUT the worst shit anyone's ever said out loud is a testament to her character as a human.

seems like the drunker + more rejected feeling she gets = sometimes, the harder in she leans to "keep tapping the skinner box of love until love come out"

Various Content makes her do a brock eyes opening thing to indicate shit's hitting a little different for ol kikuri-neechan

e12 -- bocchi-chan is gonna have a fucking panic attack at the worst possible moment; the dutch angle is kind enough to let us know kikuri saw that happen and gets it. i mean, wtf is she supposed to do from even the front for her, other than hope she'll be okay? thankfully, kita wanted to be a constellation so bad she watched her, saw it about to happen, and shredded to saved bocchi's hide. s-stupid femme beautiful rock princess i love her to death

consider her past; she started drinking to overcome the overwhelming anxiety of stage fright because she had no choice but to play music live for people. bocchi had nicobicobouga (assumed name) because the internet was around - but people older than her just didn't. if you wanted to play, and for people to listen, they'd have to be standing in front of you. yeah, shit sucks, actually. if you perhaps... suffer from social anxiety so badly you couldn't speak to your classmates, but wanted to play music soooo fucking bad because you couldn't imagine a life with you in it otherwise?... what other options did she have? booze is easy to get. especially in japan, and i imagine especially in a music setting. (i am a loser with sensitive ears so have no firsthand knowledge, however.) frankly i want kikuri to get a weed card slash dealer but that's just for me personally as a stoner dyke

she is lightly pushy about offering bocchi - who is of course, underage - alcohol. however, i really doubt it's her intention to do a hey bocchers. wanna WEED? at her: she is probably literally not able to cognitively remember the previous conversation(s) they had about it. she's never taken her 'no im too babey to alcalahol :(' and gone 'lol, sure. PEER PRESSURE, WOOO!' and kegstanded the poor little dweeb against her will.

given how just literally drunk she is and the level of impulse control that typically affords, i have to imagine: in the second in front of her: all she sees is - hey, look who it is! it's ol' bocchi-chan! bocchi-chan who is clearly having a Hard Time Coping. wonder if she wants a drink to chill out! better offer her some so she can have it. hey bocchers wanna Weed

...but the hardest thing about alcohol if you're underage is getting it! so, she offers, but hitori gotoh has the moral compass of a (insert competently-written metaphor - we'll definitely fix it in post!), so she truly seems content with not touching it until she's Of Age. uh, okay, "content" might not be the right word. aside from her own cynical, but not inaccurate mind palace excursions into the possible future that awaits her if she were to start drinking. plenty of people drink underage and don't become alcoholics - bocchi herself just has too much physical anxiety to cope with the thought of something that could have such enormous stakes. for her, the stakes of 'drinking' are social more than anything - she's paralyzed with worry about becoming a disappointment and burden to her loved ones. and she doesn't trust future bocchi to not do that. she sees every road as yet another slippery slope to humiliation and rejection. it is an utterly miserable way to live.

the human brain is wired to comprehend 'social rejection' with 'the threat of death.' for our evolutionary ancestors, not being able to fit in with the group meant getting ditched out in the middle of nowhere, literally left to starve and die alone. this is partly because one of our evolutionary legs-up was our ability to communicate with others, form groups, and cooperate. this is hunter-gatherer level lizard brain shit. it's important because we have to all understand: one way or another, we're all wired this way. it's more complex now, because society and technology have become more complex. but brain-wise? 'oh god, am i saying too much about LIZARDS and CAVEMEN' feels the same to bocchi as 'i was so annoying, even my own family would leave me alone to starve, because i was that permanently, irredeemably loathsome.'

a caveman bocchi-chan would be interesting. unga bunga

on a brain level, this is the fight-flight-freeze response bocchi is experiencing when she has her very funnily animated episodes. is it funny she's doing that? well, sort of... her face is pretty funny. her reaction is pretty funny. her internal experience is that of someone so absolutely petrified with the thought of being 'annoying' that she cannot proceed with her life.

no, she can't make an instagram - haven't you ever seen someone attention whoring so bad, you wanted them to die alone? no? ah, well. what if you thought they deserved to die for the sin of wanting attention? - she has an entire mind palace about it and screams like a broken speaker and all her friends are like 'shit! sorry! won't ask again. we cool?' and shes like 'oh yeah. my bad' and that WORKS, MAN, FOR SOME REASON.

it's nijika. nijika is the key. nijika's the reason kessoku exists. she's so fucking reasonable and normal and responsible and caring and kind. she goes, "excellent slapstick, chums. i shan't blame you all for being Such Big Lesbians All The Time, because i love you for it, but perhaps let's get out of the direct line of public sight, where harmful misunderstandings can occur, and wrap things up as cleanly as we can? no need for shame or angst; i don't need those apologies! ayamaru ga iranai! (would she yoko kanno/maaya sakamoto? huh. not very roccku...) she has her priorities straight.

we know who raised her, so nijika-chan is nijika-chan, but it's silly to pretend there'd be no influence. 'you're suddenly my only family and it's my responsibility to step up and Protect and Raise you right' is a hell of a drug. (seika i starts crying ALSO OWE YOU MY LIFE)

4 hot anime woman - they are free to obsess over without being a lil freak, so that's nice. okay maybe scratch the freak part ive been typing this for way too long for that qualification anymor

5 WHAT DO THOSE SHARK TEETH DO FOR REAL

6 "shinjuku, i LOVE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!" if not the point i fell in love with her, the point i definitely fell more in love with her

[livvyofthelake]

reading an ODD book at work. imagine being like hm i liked the one episode of this tv show i watched i should read the book (or. the first of the several books) it was based on because i don’t have time to watch a whole tv show (literally 2 seasons. there are 2 seasons and they aren’t even long seasons) and then the book is weird and the entire first half isn’t even about the titular guy from the tv show. i mean we finally got to him but this is literally halfway through

ok i typed all of that at work and then bestie coworker manager (she’s technically my manager but like not really so i’m not about to call her bestie manager she’s not that far above me. it’s complex) anyway she was getting stressed out about all the shit we had to get done so i got off my phone because like it really is that serious if we don’t do this stuff it’s not getting done and then the deeply annoying district people come and get mad even though it’s really not that serious it’s literally clothes. anyway. i know no one notices when i’m hashtag offline but just so you know i have been irregularly offline lately. for like the past month idk. because work is making me tireddd i’m literally about to morph into the hypothetical person from all those posts where people did marvel discourse like “well actually capitalism makes us so tired after work it’s only possible to consume media that doesn’t require the use of brain cells so actually you’re ableist and against the proletariat if you hate marvel” that’s about to be me if this continues. i’d actually choose something better than the mcu though. whatever the point is that work sucks and they don’t pay me enough but there are not enough jobs out there i find more tolerable that would pay much more so it’s hard to be motivated to get a Real Job. in this fucking economy 🙄. anyway i know no one has noticed or cared about me not posting but that’s my explanation. yes i was posting yesterday and the day before. i didn’t have work yesterday or the day before i was watching tv. also i’ve been Posting less because frankly lately all i want to talk or think about is those fucking shadowhunters and i don’t really like Posting about those fucking shadowhunters. i genuinely don’t like talking about things i really like to an audience of people that Don’t Get It. i also stopped posting about once upon a time when i realized there were people in my midst that knew what i was talking about. you might have watched three seasons of the same show as me and then given up when it got too cringe but you did NOT watch it the same way i did. which is the objectively correct way. and that’s all there is to say on the matter.

anyway yeah the book. there’s three parts each focused on a different character relevant to the story and part one was honestly confusing and bad and i considered quitting. the guy part one is about was genuinely just unlikeable which is not necessarily inherently bad i mean books can have unlikeable narrators and still be good but this guy was just not hitting and thank god his part was the shortest. and then part two was weird and disturbing but somewhat intriguing so i kept at it. the narrator of this part was a guy who just got out of prison after like 12 years for the rape and murder of a 15 year old girl. which sounds AWFUL but he didn’t do it and the facts of the case are misrepresented and it was like. deeply interesting to read his part even though i didn’t particularly enjoy it. might have enjoyed it more if i had thought this book would be about him and not my buddy will trent from the tv. do you guys watch will trent? neither do i. i saw one episode this spring and liked it so here we are. it’s sort of like a cop show if a cop show was kind of odd. it has all the markers of a cop show but something about it stops my brain from recognizing it as such idk. i am actually confused about why this michael character is in the show when um. the character in the book is like. a pedophile. and probably a serial killer. why does the guy from quantico play him in the show if he’s supposed to be a pedophile and serial killer? to be fair i do not know how this book ends. maybe the guy who just got out of prison really did do it all idk why should i know. anyway. part three just started and THIS part is finally about will and angie (my friends from the tv… from the one singular episode…) and they’re slayinggggg and EVERYTHING is coming together… the pieces are falling into place this could be huge!

[ikeameatballspoisonedme]

Thoughts on Fallout show...

It's good! I really liked the Moldaver twist, I liked that she was actually part of NCR. But girl just build your settlement on top of the old Shady Sands no one is stopping you LMAO. I soyjaked when I saw the NCR Veteran Ranger outfit you guys are SO COOLLLLLLLL even tho those people weren't the rangers.. sigh

The capitalism commentary... I mean I've played Disco Elysium. Hell even Fallout New Vegas. Lol. I'd say this is on The Menu tier of commentary. It's fine! I just find it to be regular! FNV offered interesting perspective on anarchy with Followers and come on dude, Hegelian dialectics waow.... Disco Elysium is fucking Disco Elysium. It certainly identified that monopoly in capitalism is bad as shown in Vault Tec, but I wish I could've seen an alternative ideology for a better world like FNV and DE did. Where's the hopeeee

His ass is NOT Robert House !! Unironically like as many have said this contradicted House in FNV. Many mentioned that he actually wanted to stop the bombs, hence why he wanted the platinum chip but he wouldn't cave in to Vault Tec, he wants his own little monopoly his ass is NOT collaborating !! Maybe he actually didn't want it after the meeting idk lol

I do NAWT like the ghoul sorry I am a certified ghoul fucker, as you've known I am a Harland enjoyer and Dean Domino liker but the whole feral ghoul inevitability is just so stupid and sucks because it drove his whole asshole-ish survivalist instinct to do dirty deeds to get the ghoul vials. It's stupid!!!!! We could've got a perspective of someone who has to live forever but nooooo ghoul vials n shit. Also he just sucks sorry lol most overrated Fallout character of all time RAUL SWEEPS!!!!!

I do wish we see the kinder side of Brotherhood, in all 3 games they're not all bad people if you finally became part of them. We love Veronica! But outside of her McNamara is known to be kind, also Vree is awesome, etc etc... but this BoS is not out of character either. They're not kind on defectors as we've seen with Veronica

I liked Maximus :-) wait he's actually Maximus right I didn't misremember but I swear Lucy called him Titus?? But anyway. He's cool! I didn't know Lucy and Maximus actually ended up together because I've only seen her paired with the ghoul. I mean you do you but I do not sense any chemistry between them because uh, they barely spent time together???? He sold her to the organ harvesting guy and then left. Like that's it. I get that people want their Discord x Fluttershy nachos but Lucy and Maximus are cute lol let them be

Oh my god the constant flashback scenes.... They're stealing Persona 5's nachos. USELESS?????????

I have mixed feelings on the whole Vault Tec stuff. Yeah commentary on amazon cool! But viewing it on the context of 1/2/NV... it's just too glaring to ignore. Fallout was all about post-apocalyptic settlement! It's why we remember Shady Sands, Junktown, The Hub, Vault City, New Reno, Broken Hills, Necropolis, Goodsprings, Primm, Novac, Freeside, arghhhh so much more... is Vault Tec gonna bomb literally every single one of them?????????? Perhaps it's because NCR is the biggest settlement but idk I'd say Vault City is doing great. Goodsprings was fine, it's small but people have homes and farms and happy there outside of the Powder Gangers problem. It just missed the core of Fallout and took the "war never changes" motto on face value. Society will rebuild itself! We're not just gonna stay in the empty desert wasteland, it's all gonna be rebuilt with new ideology and it's up to us to decide which is more content to our heart to stay and help...

And speaking of settlement.... man why are every settlement so Not Normal. People on 1/2/NV talks normally even if their homes are not in the best conditions. Every single non-Vault 33 people in this show acted like No Barks lol. The thing with Fallout is that people we've meet are normal people like us in the present, even the ghouls, it's just that they are trying to live in the post apocalyptic conditions. They don't become stereotypical western hillbillies lol

Anyway. God fucking dammit leave FNV alone. I just feel like this show doesn't have the vernacular that it thinks it possesses... It missed the whole appeal of the OG Fallout and thinks Fallout is all about post apocalyptic wacky destruction and madness n shit. Even if it has a commentary on pre-war capitalism it still missed what makes Fallout settlements so interesting. And since NV is all about those settlements... begging you to leave them alone. Do not fucking destroy them because you think the point of Fallout is that humanity is doomed. Make your own fucking settlements.

I promise I don't hate this show I was actually invested throughout of it. Really amazing props and set design. It's just a show that is really good in a vacuum, but when viewed in the context of OG Fallout it fell apart. I'd give it a 6-7/10

[skaruresonic]

The more I watch Breaking Bad, the more I stan Skyler White. It's clear she's the shrewder of the two and Walter absolutely cannot stand that shit lmao

Even the wiki describes him as feeling "emasculated," which, well, kind of ties into the overall point BB makes about the corrosive influence of toxic masculinity on men's psyches (Hank suffers a blow to his pride after becoming traumatized and later disabled and takes his frustrations out on Marie by berating her, so it's not just uniquely a Walter thing) and the effect the glorification of violence and capitalism have on the family.

The framing of Skyler as "controlling," the head of the household, being something that inherently "emasculates" Walter just makes the mischaracterization of Skyler as this unreasonable, all-domineering bitch out to bust her husband's balls even more alarming.

On a first watch, we all go "aw ain't it sad that Walter won't be able to provide for his family after his death," which is part of the Saw trap. Why does Walter need to be the provider? Why does the onus lie on him when he is literally terminally ill? Because he's the man, and The Husband(tm)'s role is to provide for the family (in order to reinforce his masculinity)? Why do we particularly think that? Furthermore, as The Wife(tm), why do so many then abide by the follow-up assumption that Skyler needs to shut up and support him in whatever he does, up to and including manufacturing meth? Especially after he basically put himself in a precarious situation by refusing to suck up his pride and accept Elliot and Gretchen's help?

I feel like something seriously got lost in translation if you watched six straight seasons of Walter emotionally blackmailing his wife and came away with "yeah but she didn't support Marie through her kleptomania though so she's just as bad." bruh

I'm not saying Skyler is perfect or hasn't done morally dubious things like smoking while pregnant, but I mean, come the fuck on, man. You're really gonna read her for filth for "not supporting her sister" when all she wanted was an apology Marie refused to give? Meanwhile, Walter the Lying Liar who Lies over here cannot go two seconds without flexing his ego or mentally scarring those around him

[kahvilahuhut]

wip questions tag

thank you @sunset-a-story for tagging me!!!!!!! (and sorry it took me a while sjfjfjfjfj)

tagging @void-botanist @avi-why @televisionjester and anyone else who wants to do this :3

1. What was the first part of your WIP that you created?

Worldbuilding!!! I've always loved Mars (influenced by Doom probably? i just think it's neat :]) and the idea of a whole society on Mars is just very cool for me. All the possibilities and things that can go wrong. And the political debates.......

2. If your story was a TV show, what would the intro song be?

HMMMMM this one is hard bc i absolutely su k at picking music for story playlists and this is waaaaaay harder. I think I would love it to be instrumental or smth tho!

That said I would soooo much rather have it become a video game, and and if I were to pick a song for a trailer I'd go with either Black Mambo by Glass Animals or something from Depeche Mode. My brain is currently telling me to go with "Pain That I'm Used To" but I wouldn't say it fits Cynosure that well KFKKFFKFKFK

3. Who are your favourite character(s) and why?

Tobyyyyyyy <3 I love him so much he is such a...guy. He's some guy. A chemist who has spent a bit too much reading his dad's books about social theory and stuff since he was a child. All he wants is that people would be happy and he has so much love to give for the world, which mostly means him helping people a lot (people pleaser guy). Tobias isn't really that special, he wants to do something he likes, he's scared of guns (for a reason) and just wants a calm new life. Too bad that's not happening for a while.

To think he started as a copy of Nathan I made for a The Outer Worlds playthrough and then it all kinda turned into a bigger thing and he became his own self and I just decided to pull him + Klara & others out of being fandom ocs and put them into Cynosure.

putting the rest of questions under read more <3

4. What other pieces of media could share a fan base with your WIP?

HMMMM I'd say basically any kind of scifi book that has some societal themes in it + has some comedy and stuff. Same for video games maybe?

5. What has been your biggest struggle while writing your WIP?

I'm going to be honest I haven't really started writing Cynosure yet JFBBFBFFKF

My biggest struggle is having a job and being a master's student basically hehe

6. Are there any animals in your story?

Haven't really figured out if I'd want to showcase Mars wildlife in it + what kind of wildlife would it be, BUUUUT!!! There's definitely Klara & Toby's cat, Melody. She's a lil tabby cat :3

7. How do your characters get around?

I'm a public transport fan so I'm putting public transport into my wip!!!! I'd say Mars has lots of fancy trains and the ocean area has ships. Buses, too, though probably not what Cynosure characters will end up using.

There's also cars and motorcycles, though they're hovering instead of having wheels. Mars terrain sucks for wheels.

8. What part of your WIP are you working on right now?

Figuring out the plot + finishing up worldbuilding <3

9. What aspects of your WIP do you think will draw people in?

Hmmmm! I'd love to say worldbuilding or like, whatever is going on in Mars power struggles. Making fun of capitalism too (i'm a social scientist), maybe even the characters? Who knows :^)

[eclipsecrowned]

⋆ NAME?: Kadi! Kadian if you wanna do the internet equivalent of using 'first name middle name' like you're my mother.

⋆ PRONOUNS?: she/they

⋆ MOST ACTIVE MUSE(S)?: hel has been here since 2017 and she has no intention of going anywhere, near as i can tell. gale and cyra have also been quite loud of late, and crane pops up his head like a whackamole perennially.

⋆ RP PET PEEVES?: lotta misogyny and biphobia in the community masquerading as diversity. no that doesn't mean saying your muse is gay. i'm talking canonically bi/pan characters getting their important or romantic dynamics with women totally devalued or stripped, or even having across the board m/f relationship bans on the belief it's 'het.' i'm not even bi and i'm sick of that shit. don't even get me started on 'girlboss' and 'team mom' and 'too good for the boys' being the new pedestal installed over 'ew why would a sexy seme/uke-kun ever touch a nasty vageena, women suck.'

⋆ EXPERIENCE / HOW MANY YEARS?: it's been 11 or 12 years on tumblr alone. before that, lot of gaiaonline. before that, deviantart. before that, lots of chatrooms and forums. before that, larping lotr on the playground with the few kids that could stand my maladjusted ass.

⋆ FLUFF, ANGST, OR S.MUT?: fluff and angst all day every day. i'm so bad at smut. every time i have done a smut meme on this blog it's largely foreplay or afterglow. it's not even like i'm embarrassed or repressed, i just know when to fold em as an author, and smut is it. i can do angst or fluff all day though so long as it's compelling/serves characters or narrative.

⋆ LONG OR SHORT REPLIES?: start short and work my way up. genuinely cannot start with multipara but boy howdy i can be there as early as reply 3.

⋆ TIME TO WRITE?: whenever the cold unfeeling grip of capitalism releases its hold on me that i might sit down and churn something out. it used to be daily but that was several jobs ago.

Tagged by: @melpomeneprose

Tagging: the mutual reading this <3

[the-personiftranslator]

more btiw incorrect quotes because i cant find my ipad (ft. natalia nielsen)

zerzura, to gudridarstrond: I promise the only reason I’m friends with her is that she told me she was the HIGH Kingdom of Andolont.

haraldr: how many children do you have? andolont: biologically, legally, or emotionally? because there IS a difference.

apisia: you know what? apisia: when i joined this friend group, i thought you guys would be dealing with my bullshit. *zerzura, gudridarstrond, and andolont continue screaming about mold water* apisia: not the other way around. zerzura: I DUNNO, IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU NEED TO DRINK THE MOLD WATER!

andolont: if i fall… haraldr: i’ll be there to catch you. rowmansland: *looks at hakensaqi* what if i fall? hakensaqi: then i’ll fall with you, never leaving your side. apisia: *watches these two interactions* apisia, to zerzura: and what if i fall? zerzura: i’ll be the one who pushed you.

haraldr: you drink too much, swear too much, and your morals are highly questionable. andolont: … haraldr: you are everything i’ve ever wanted in a wife.

apisia: we need a plan to beat the reptilians. zerzura: okay, listen up. first, we fill their shoes with wet cat food. apisia: zerzura: judge me all you want, i get results.

qiqiqtaq, wearing shades and a tank top: Rule one of destroying the world. qiqiqtaq: does finger guns You gotta look good while doing it.

ny norgrimark: I am ny norgrimark, I speak for the trees. Chop mine down and I snap your knees.

varholt: Dinosaurs aren't extinct. I mean, kuft-alum is walking in this room. kuft-alum: wheeze

Shapeshifter: transforms to look like Andolont Andolont: Okay, are you like BLIND? You look nothing like me. First off, I'm way taller. Secondly, I DO NOT look so sleep deprived and lastly, if you could drag a comb through that hair you're like a 7 on a good day and Haraldr tells me I'm a constant 10.

natalia: I see the red flags, I acknowledge that they're there, and then I completely ignore them.

gudridarstrond: I spy with my little eye something that begins with the letter “s”. ny norgrimark: looks over at apisia and zerzura ny norgrimark: Is it “sexual tension”?

fauchaïte: Isn't it amazing how I can feel so bad and still look so good?

natalia: I tried to write ‘I'm a functional adult’ but my phone changed it to ‘fictional adult’ and i feel like that’s more accurate.

Computer: Please enter a password. haraldr: types in andolont Computer: Your password is too weak. haraldr: How fucking DARE YOU-

ny norgrimark: Where's Haraldr? natalia: Don't worry, I'll find him. natalia, shouting: Andolont sucks! haraldr, distantly: Andolont is the best country ever! Fuck you! natalia: Found him.

zerzura: Fuck capitalism. It's a rigged system that keeps us poor and it isn't fair. You shouldn't need to work three jobs to afford basic necessities. apisia, playing Monopoly: Sorry, if you wanted to win you should have tried not being poor.

natalia: shoves her hand in the slot of a toaster andolont: … natalia: …I get confused sometimes. andolont: Me too.

andolont: I wasn’t that drunk. haraldr: You colored my face with a highlighter because you said I was important. andolont: BECAUSE YOU ARE!

natalia: I was put on this earth to do one thing. natalia: Luckily I forgot what it was so I can do whatever I want.

andolont: What is wrong with you? varholt: Many, many things… varholt: And most of them are your fucking fault.

andolont: I’m the sexiest bitch in this therapy waiting room.

[starlight-tea-writing]

Ask games! Loves these things.

Anyway, 4, 34, 35, and/or 64! Take your pick on how many lol

sorry that this sat for, like, two days...but thank you for the asks!

4. what is the plot bunny you've been carrying around the longest? optional bonus question: do you ever wonder why you haven't written it yet and experience deep existential dread?

I have many. many. many ideas. and not just for ATLA. but I think these are my favorites:

for ATLA

a. book 2, Iroh and Zuko are in Ba Sing Se. I say "screw you" to canon a bit and extend their time there. during that time, Zuko and Jin start actually dating, they become friends with the Jet, Smellerbee, and Longshot. with that friendship, they slowly relax into being teens and having fun (in part because they're committing Blue and Green Spirit shenanigans together). Zuko kinda forgets he was Zuko and really starts to embrace Lee. and then, Jet sees a poster about Appa and drags Lee with them, he sees the Gaang, and Zuko come crashing back to reality. they retrieve Ty Lee and Mai from the Palace (by accident, cause they think Suki is there), and then it's a trek of a dozen teens across the Earth Kingdom to take down Ozai. oh, and also, Jin is a secret (but very bad) earthbender.

I've written about half of it. maybe I'll finish and post it one day. there's also a GREAT scene where Zuko (as Lee) goes to Jin's for dinner and to meet her parents and younger sister (that I added for funsies). it's so awkward and fun and I love it so much.

b. I got permission to write a story based on @gemgirl28's idea. I have yet to write it yet, but it is outlined. that delay just makes me feel bad, because I want to do the story justice.

Spy X Family

a. like many others, I have been sucked into the Spy X Family world. it's three years ahead of where the story is now, and it starts with Donovan Desmond dying in a plane crash. and then it's just sort of how the cold war grows from there, Loid has to fake his death, Yuri evacuates Yor and Anya, it's a whole thing. a whole, very messy, very chaotic...thing. :)

I've already started writing it. I'm maybe a chapter into it.

34. how do you name characters and places?

characters: baby name lists. so many baby name lists. the targeted ads I get make my mother-in-law VERY curious and happy.

places: I tend to come up with a connecting theme for a place. so like, for the Earth Kingdom: a lot of actual real-life Chinese towns/cities are named sort-of based on their location (Bei Jing: Northern Capital). so, in Eight Years Later, the few smaller EK towns I created are named after the location they're at. however, for the Fire Nation in EYL, because I kind of view the cultural side of the Fire Nation as a pan-Asian country made up of a whole collection of cultures, each island I've "named" is just a "firebender associated" word from different Southeast Asian languages. so like, in EYL, Araw Island is "Day" in Filipino/Tagalog (don't remember exactly which one, sorry!), Moesashi Island is "Embers" in Japanese, and so on.

(fun fact: Mosu actually has MANY meanings...such as "ember" and "humble"...he's kinda the only character in EYL, at least, that I didn't find from a baby name list and instead went the language route - but it is an actual name, also, I think...I'm pretty sure I found it somewhere...it's been years at this point, apologies)

35. tell us about a character who's very different than you who you love a whole lot.

Ty Lee. I am not that bubbly and positive. I wish I could be. I know she's hiding mountains of hurt, which honestly, aren't we all? but she's able to put on a very compelling facade to get through her day, and I'm not sure if that's admirable or even more depressing. but I like to think that post-canon Ty Lee is very happy and doesn't have to fake it.

64. what is your favorite title for a fic you've read?

people can be real clever with their titles, and I wish I had that skill. I really like goofy, silly titles. little jokes and what not. I don't have any immediately in mind, I tend to forget details like that, but scrolling through my Ao3 history, I found this one and it made me chuckle:

Mission Impossible: Loid teaches Yor to cook

(^ pretty much all I read at the moment are cute little domestic one-shots, so...this is cute and silly and sweet)

thanks for the asks! in true starlight fashion, I wrote WAY too much, haha

[fantasyinvader]

I’ve been wondering if there’s more to Edelgard’s Napoleon allusion than meets the eye. I mean, sure, Edelgard has Amyr adorned with the “Crest of the Beast,” suggesting she’s an antichrist figure much like how Napoleon was seen in the past over his ability to wage war (see War and Peace). Likewise, Edelgard is a villain while Napoleon was considered THE villain back in the day. Just look at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hyping up Sherlock’s supposed last opponent Moriarty as “the Napoleon of crime” to see what I mean.

But what I’m thinking is how Edelgard is an absolute monarch (autocrat) whose rule is backed by the army. We see this in her Japanese ending, how Claude refers to her rule as “military rule” and her being identified as a hegemon in both Flower and Moon routes. But this rule comes after an insurrection that was meant to limit the power of the crown.

People tend to forget that feudalism isn’t just simply obeying what your king says. Titles such as dukes, counts, barons, knights are all granted with privileges, but those privileges must be respected by the monarch. It’s transactional, and if the monarch doesn’t honor his/her side of the bargain they’re liable to face uprisings. That’s why these things are backed by laws, traditions or customs. It’s not just “God says to follow this guy, so do it.” If the monarch simply tries to impose their will, it could very well lead to a civil war.

And in France, King Louis XIV/The Great/The Sun King went about weakening the nobility in this regard by centralizing power. He didn’t appoint someone as his prime minister, he did that work himself while at the same time using his charisma to get nobles to want to support him. The French nobility were too busy partying at his court, keeping them in Versailles rather than in their own lands where they ruled in his name. And while the nobles were busy, Louis XIV and his ministers went about overhauling France, taking power out of the hands of the nobility and instead putting it in the hands of selected intendents who were dependent on the king for their position.

In this context, Versailles sounds like Enbarr in how all the Imperial nobility are supposed to work out of the capital rather than their feifs. This also sounds a lot like how Edelgard frames her reforms. But if you know your history, it’s these reforms by Louis XIV that planted the seeds of the French Revolution. After all, he fed the decadence of the nobility in a time when things were good, decadence they refused to give up when times got bad. His successors also didn’t have the charisma to make this work for them.

The parallel here is Ionius, trying to consolidate power for himself and take it from the nobility. However, he appears to have lacked the charisma of the Sun King, leading to the Insurrection of the Seven. After all, he wasn’t performing his duties to his nobles and presumably his parties fucking sucked. Reforms are made to limit the powers of the monarch by corrupt individuals, each seeking to empower themselves rather than the people. Hell, these same nobles would want to join with Edelgard’s intended conquest of Fodlan in order to further their own authority, see Caspapa joining her in Houses in exchange for control of the former Alliance territories.

Sadly, this reflects how the French Revolution became corrupt, not living up to it’s own ideals and giving way to the Reign of Terror. We don’t really get much of a RoT in Fodlan, at least until Edelgard, the Napoleon figure, takes over. And of course, we can argue the hypocrisies of Napoleon and Edelgard. Whatever lofty ideals they talked about spreading didn’t really gel with their actions.

Patricia fleeing the Empire with Cornelia’s help calls to mind the Scarlet Pimpernel.

There’s also the Enlightenment angle. We have the whole Enlightenment/Nirvana symbolism with regards to Buddhism, but there’s also the European Age of Enlightenment. We have technological clues to suggest Fodlan is around the 1700’s in terms of development comparative to our world, such as the fact there’s children’s literature, with opera being from the 1600’s as well as the discovery of the speed of light. We have John Locke, believing that humans are inherently good and would work in the interest of society in opposition to the Church’s stance that people are naturally sinful and need guidance. There’s also the belief if we did away with the old order it would lead to a new golden age.

Those last two points remind anyone else of Edelgard? Bonus points, the end of the Napoleonic wars is said to be the end of the Age of Enlightenment.

Edelgard also restores the Church under her control after it was kicked out of the Empire over a hundred years prior. Reminds me of Napoleon bringing back the Catholic Church after the revolution tried to replace it with their Cult of Reason/Cult of the Supreme Being, but did so in a way he wouldn’t be under their control.

But it is known that when Napoleon was defeated, the people of the capital opened their doors to their enemies. They were sick of him and his endless wars. With regards to Edelgard, reach Enbarr and you can recruit a battalion of civilians to oppose her with Dorothea and Manuela. You don’t get that for any other lord. It’s meant to show that even her own people think she’s a tyrant, just like Napoleon was considered the first modern dictator. Both are also skilled at using propaganda, both ran police states (see Hubert about that one).

Invading a frozen country only for their capital to be set on fire as you take it?

Really feels like there was this effort to link Edelgard to a real person, one greatly debated by history, when you look at stuff like this. Too bad Fodlan didn't have a Horatio Hornblower, but to be fair he is a fictional character.