#single father of hundreds and thousands wanted to take a nap

[agent-octopus]

This is a canon event

[realmeganamram]

THE TESLA BODY

My name is Elon Musk, and I am the C.E.O. of Tesla and the father of approximately one per cent of the current population of Earth and a hundred per cent of the future population of Mars. As you know, the human body has not been substantially updated in nearly forty years. The new Tesla Body will revolutionize, streamline, and vastly modernize the human body as we know it.

Let’s start with walking: it sucks. I will make all bodies self-walking. You will simply set a speed for your feet, and they will walk forward forever until your Body stops when it encounters a hard surface. I, of course, will outfit all buildings and walls in urban areas with cushioning. To reduce drownings, any ravine or body of water will be edged with taut elastic ropes. Currently, we are looking at making Scottsdale, Arizona, ready to be walked in by the year 2045. I can hear the critics now: “What if I need to turn?” First of all, what are you, some sort of king? No one “needs” to turn. But, for those Baryshnikovs among us who want to turn left or right like royalty, there will be optional ski poles available to buy for your Body. They will cost five hundred and ninety-five dollars per pole.

Eyes are very boring. Most of what plays in them is boring content (waking up, taking care of your beta-tier children, etc.). I will make sure that, in your new Tesla Body, the eyes will play only the funniest episodes of “Rick and Morty” all day, every day. If you want to go to sleep, it’s easy as pie—just put on your Tesla noise-cancelling headphones (the sound of “Rick and Morty” comes out of a tiny speaker in your tear ducts) and slide in your Tesla Blackout Sleep Contacts. You should not wear your contacts for more than four hours at a time, for cornea health, which is why we sell a convenient Tesla alarm clock, which will wake you up every four hours so that you can remove your contacts. The alarm clock also plays my favorite episodes of “Rick and Morty.” It costs three thousand and ninety-five dollars, plus twelve ninety-nine for the Hulu subscription that gives you access to the “Rick and Morty” episodes.

Food is so stupid. Oh, look at me, I love having to eat every single day like some sort of livestock or mother of my children! Stupid. The Tesla Body will operate on flavorless protein powder that you can deposit once a day directly into your stomach via a tiny door. The powder will give the Body enough energy to walk exactly six miles. If you do not budget your daily energy carefully, your Body will sit down on the floor and not move until the next morning. But, luckily, a convenient Tesla Emergency Tent is included with every Body. When your Body breaks down, just pull out the tent from your Tesla Bindle, set it up (note: you can’t set it up without energy, so make sure you always travel with a friend or an intelligent St. Bernard that has a barrel on its collar), and press the Roadside Assistance button. While you take a much needed nap, Tesla’s friendly roadside helpers will arrive and put extra powder in your tummy door, and you’re off! The tent is standard equipment. The Roadside Assistance service is nine thousand four hundred and fifteen dollars per month. If you don’t buy it, you go to jail.

I am a feminist and I listen to women, and basically the only thing women talk about is wanting pockets. I hear your shrill voices (I am being ironic!) loud and clear. The Tesla Body will have pockets all the way down the legs, like cargo pants that you can’t take off. You can keep so many important items in your skin pockets: your Tesla Emergency Tent, your Tesla Flare (in case your protein powder runs out in the middle of a road), and your Tesla Map of Scottsdale! The map highlights all of my favorite sites, like N.F.T. galleries and a bar where you can meet blond women who have just moved to America from the Eastern Bloc.

I’m going to say what I’m sure you’re already thinking: no one should have a penis but me. A penis is a luxury and a privilege that only I have proved myself worthy of. The Tesla Body will either have a vagina and ovaries or a convenient cup holder for your favorite South African soda, Iron Brew. I will accordingly have the only sperm on Earth. Thus, anyone who wants to procreate will have to fill out an application and submit it directly to me. But, don’t worry, I always say yes! The application is just a formality so I can see what my future children’s handwriting will look like.

Sometimes, with our hectic modern schedules, it’s easy to misplace things, which is why the Tesla Body will come preloaded with a trusty app that will be able to tell you where your Body is. O.K., sorry, one more thing about the sperm. I have never liked the way that my DNA can be spread only through very old-fashioned means. I will therefore embed pre-fertilized Elon embryos in every Tesla Body. All you have to do is take care of your Body, and, one night, a tiny Elon or Elonia will pop out of its own little door! Then just drop your Baby Elon / Elonia off at the nearest Tesla dealership or factory. They’ll know what to do!

I know you are probably so excited to get the new Tesla Body that you are already preparing to throw your old, terrible human body in the trash. The Body will be on the market soon, and it will be available to almost everyone. It fits women’s sizes 0-8 and any man shorter than me. I am the tallest man in the world!

[wastedyouth-wasteddreams]

Part 3. Whisky and cute. Smutty thoughts.

With one arm still wrapped around her shoulder Vik grabbed the whisky off his desk with his free hand, glove clinking against the glass bottle, and walked her through the back. 

It wasn't much, but he had an old worn in leather couch where he originally thought he would take breaks. But seeing that he usually ate and tinkered at his desk in front of an old fight, the couch was mainly used after closing. It's the kind of couch that's been sat on a thousand times, napped on for hundreds, and was still too comfy to throw out. 

The seats were full of pitts and scrapes from from where he had sat down with something sharp still poking out of a pocket. there was a deep dent on the side that Jackie favoured, all his excited fidgeting had a tendency to leave lasting impressions. One of the arm rests had a strange flat smooth spot where bottles of whisky and beer had been carefully balanced over the years, and the other had a swooping crater where the memory of Viks tired head was left indefinitely. 

It had been a week since she was last in. Since he sat her down and told her he cared for her. In all, that wasn't really a shock, he was warm hearted and she knew he cared, he cared for all his friends. Vik was someone you counted on. The shock to her system was how it was said. He wasn't just handing off information, it almost felt like a proposition. As if he was offering her a reason to look after herself.

 She had definitely been thinking, and over thinking on his words. She couldn't just turn up to say "hey" after that. She didn't want to be over eager and under wanted. His birthday was such a perfect reason to pop by though, it wasn't even an excuse-it was an ACTUAL reason.

"You haven't dropped in all week. I thought you might have been avoiding me?"

As she heard the words, a black hole opened in her chest, sucking her stomach and heart into oblivion for a few seconds. His forearm was resting sluggishly on her shoulder as they walked, which was making it hard for her to concentrate anyway...a smell of hot metal, antiseptic and pheromones mixed with a fresh sweat was evaporating from his arm. She could feel an olfactory memory being created each time she breathed him in.

"Really vik?! You are getting old. You don't remember when I came in and paid you every eddy I've ever owed you? Then you took me to dinner? Bought me flowers?" 

She slunk from under his arm and picked her feet off the floor as she threw herself back and shoulders first onto the couch. Her head firmly nestled into the Vik dent.

"Did everyone ask if I was your Dad?" It was a quick response, because it had been something on his mind before. He was an actual age to be her father. It certainly wasn't the only thing stopping him from acting on his desires, but it was a major one. He watched her hair float up as head hot the couch, as if waves were engulfing her.

"Grandpa!" She responded raising her eye brows and giving him a nod as he picked up a leather pouch from the surgical table in the corner.

Vik mimicked being punched in the gut and let out a growling "Ooft kid!" As he planted himself next to her with an empty thud. When his 200 pound of muscle hit the seat, it dropped a good six inches beneath him, and in turn, her hips cooked and she fell into his thigh. 

She steadied herself by wrapping her hand around his forearm. It shouldn't have been as exciting as it was, but his arms did things to her. She could watch him working all day, when his fingers moved and grabbed the muscles just below his elbow stretched and rippled like a machine. He didn't realise it, but she was tracing the movements over his tattoos.

"Grandpa eh? THAT I would have remembered" he swallowed his words as she stroked his arm with her thumb. He wondered of she knew what she was doing to him right now. Her fingers slightly tugging at his tired and sore arm, whilst her thighs pushed against his leg. He wished to have that thigh in his grasp, and her fingers exploring his chest. He wanted to know exactly how much of her he could hold at once. That sweet spot where her thighs and ass met..she was thickest there, he wanted to cradle her and find out how well she would fit in his hand.

He felt his whole body reacting to the though and he swallowed once more, moving his arm ever so slightly trying to reach his exo glove without breaking the skin to skin contact.

"YOUR BIRTHDAY" Came the squeel from next to his ear. She had the lungs of a whale sometimes.

Her hands grabbed his leg and she jumped on her knees next to him, she didn't realise how far down her hands were going go, but she gave him a little squeeze before she bounded off

"I'm gonna get your box!" 

He would have smiled at her giddied charm if he wasn't too busy trying to will all his blood back to its rightful places. She must have realised where her left hand landed. Her finger tips touched so far into his thigh that they grazed the seam of his pants, and if she would have stretched her pinky out an inch, she would have felt a waking dragon, who he had no doubt, would have been stirred from her touch.

As she returned she watched him folding leather around his exoglove. She was wondering if she had made him uncomfortable with her touch, but that fear faded when he flashed her a big Vik smile. Fear that was replaced with butterflies.

He sat the pouch on the soft bit of the arm rest, and felt his heart race as he waited for her to come close again. He expected her to sit next to him, but she walked in front of him, her shoulders square with his, though much more slender. She looked down at her gift and then at Vik without moving her head as she handed it to him. She gave him big eyes, full of wonder and life.  He took the box from her hands, not breaking eye contact for even a split second. 

"The whisky was enough you know, this better be something shitty and little"

"I'm shitty and little" she sounded proud at this realisation.

"Just open it Vik" she said as she grabbed the bottle of whisky and started to unscrew the lid. 

"Haha" he chuckled deeply "Ok, ok. You can be such a brat sometimes" his smile reflecting his adoration of that quality.

She sat next to him again, ankles tucked under herself and watched him fumble with the ribbon and paper.

She took a huge gulp of whisky as he laid his eyes on her gift.

"V" 

Was all he could muster. 

"C'mere" he said as he wrapped his arm around her. His inner elbow caressed the back of her neck and pulled her head to tuck under his chin.

In his hand he held a whisky glass, with a thick heavy bottom and the letter V etched onto the side in a gothic font. A single boxing glove hung off the thin arm of the V. 

"It's a V. For Viktor....And the other has a V on it as well!"

"For Viktor" he laughed and repeated her.

"No, you gonk" she pulled back and looked at him, her face squished, as if he had completely missed something. 

Maybe the other V is for her. For V.

"For Vektor"

She cupped his left cheek in her hand and pulled his face toward her parted mouth. As their skin touched, she pushed her parted lips gently into his stubble, but hard enough to smoosh the side of his face. Her smooth lips left a wetness on his face that he wished he could fell between his own lips.

"Happy Birthday, Viktor Vektor" 

she cooed to him as she felt the heat radiating from his cheek.

"Where the fuck are you at birthday boy!"

Jackies voice boomed from the front door.

"Viky! V said she would meet us here for a drink" Came Mistys call.

He tilted his head back and bellowed 

"IM BEING SHOWERED WITH BIRTHDAY KISSES. ITS HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE, HELP!"

She gave him a sharp jab in his arm before she ran around to jump onto jackie.

Vik poured himself a whisky. He heard the familiar sound of her body impacting Jackie's chest mid-air.

"AND GET YOUR OWN FUCKING GLASSES" 

[secret-engima]

hamelin-born

@secret-engima

It is. A very grim comfort to take (no pun intended), but Oscar’s sole almost-solace during that terrible time of blood and pain and (literal) soul-wrenching agony was that Salem hadn’t lied when she called his ‘Ozma’s son’. It was a truth that cut into him like barbed wire, a truth that lashed him with pain and grief and sorrow - but a truth that, as you said, he clung to.

He was son to a murdered father, he was a child of the Infinite Man, and it was - it didn’t bring him comfort, it brought him pain, but it kept him from shattering, it gave him the resolve he needed to hang on.

(And oh, but Salem would have laughed as she shifted the aim of her experiments, her torture - because Oscar was Ozma’s son, so Ozma’s son he would be in every way she could devise, ever similarity she could wrench into his body, down to his scars and to his limp - scars that, one day, Ozpin would take one look at and blanch because he recognized those scars from his own past.)

And Salem would. Salem would have poured her own magic into Oscar, not only to see what happened, not only to triumph over the memory of Ozpin one last time, giddy with the victory of finally killing her one-time husband for good. No. Salem would have set out to make Oscar her son as much as Ozpin’s as well, because she would take everything Ozma had, taint even the memory of him that lingered in the world - Ozma’s child would be her child as well, and best of all, to her? It would hurt Oscar so to know it. To be forced to acknowledge it. To have to call her ‘mother’.

Forget thunderstorms. Oscar might, in a panic, summon a full-on cyclone in an attempt to launch whoever’s pressing the issue as far away from him as possible.

...in a slightly fluffier vein (how did this get so dark?!) just. During their first meeting, or maybe a little later. Imagine Oscar hesitantly asking Ozpin if he’s his dad, because She said he was, but - there’s a difference between being a father and being a Dad.

And Ozpin, not hesitating for a single moment as he says ‘yes’. Yes, he’s Oscar’s dad.

(And that - that might just make Oscar break, for more reasons than one. Break, and *hug* Ozpin like there’s no tomorrow. Because he has healed, he’s worked hard at it, he has his family, he has his Torchdad and his friends/siblings and his magic, but this - this is something old and precious, the most tender of old scars, and now - now it’s split open so it can finally, finally heal clean.)

(He breaks, and goes in for a hug).

...also, Ozpin+Team Gremlin are willing accomplices in unceremoniously ejecting  anyone from the room who thinks to ask Oscar about his ‘mom’ or guilt-trip/interrogate him for being ‘Salem’s child’. They will eject the individual at high velocity, preferably from the nearest window - hey, Ozpin is known for dropping people off of cliffs.

Me: Once again plopping this here because the reblog chain was getting super long XD-

It is a very dark comfort indeed, but it was what got him through to the other side in enough coherent pieces to help destroy her once and for all.

(But yessss, oh how she laughed as she shifted her efforts to remaking this child, this remnant, into being the most perfect child copy of Ozma she could make. The perfect *son* in her mind and all that entailed)

Salem wove her magic into Oscar’s and it save his life, but oh what an agonizing price. She took glee in *claiming* one of the few things that could have been once considered solely his and gloried in tainting the last pieces of his legacy (and in the end, isn’t it ironic that her own torments are what undid her, both in the future and in the time rewritten that would come later)

FLUFFY VEIN YES PLEASE. Your comment finally spurred me to actually write that scene btw. And it came out ... angstier than intended but I’m so pleased and I won’t post the whole thing yet but HERE HAVE A SNIP:

...

     “Hey, Sondor,” murmured a voice through the tent fabric and Ozpin’s world crystalized, “Everything alright? You left in a bit of a hurry.” A deep rumble, inhuman and bass and … oddly content sounding. The voice —a child’s voice, a gentle voice, a voice he’d just heard laughing and waxing dramatic for a show of fake magic and real mysteries— laughed faintly, “Checking on someone then? You know everyone has to stay up late on performance nights.”

     If he held on any tighter to his cane, he thought it might shatter, but the feel of it grounded him like it always had, and with the last bit of courage he possessed in this lifetime, he pushed the tent flap open and slipped inside as the voice —his son— finished saying, “We’ll be sure to take long naps in the morning.”

     Ozpin was here. He was standing in the same space as his child, without a crowd to be wary of or a performance to keep them apart. He was standing in some kind of makeshift workshop, with a cot on the floor on the far side and the vast majority of space taken up by a battered, foldable metal table that seemed to be a desk and all the tools of a magician’s trade. Cards and wands and hats, gloves and fanciful outfits and a hundred thousand other things that didn’t matter, because amid all the mess, with his back mostly to the entrance and a massive Grimm lying contentedly next to his feet, was the Ringmaster.

     His child.

     The Grimm raised its head again to stare at him, a low noise he’d never heard the monsters make before rumbling from its chest, and the boy tilted his head toward the tent entrance absently, still not looking away from the Dust gem he was setting in his elaborate cane, “Hey Neo, you’re back early. I thought you were still scoping … out…” he finished setting the Dust in his cane, looked up and saw Ozpin standing there. Neither of them moved. Green-gold eyes in a young face —he looked ten had Qrow really been correct on estimating his age closer to twelve or thirteen?— went wide, and the magic passively swirling through the tent shrunk in on itself until he couldn’t feel it.

     It occurred belatedly to Ozpin that while he had essentially been stalking his son for the last few years in an attempt to meet him and make sure he was okay, the boy wouldn’t know him at all. Or worse, had only heard of him from people who hated him —from Salem herself even—. And now Ozpin had just shown up in the boy’s living space without warning or invitation.

     Terror and nerves tangled up all the words he wanted to say, all the ones he’d longed to say, and instead he found himself folding both of his shaking hands on the pommel of his cane and bleating out the first, most habitual line currently living in his brain, “Hello, I’m Professor Ozpin-.”

     A shout, loud and gutted, and all his words died in his throat again as the boy threw himself off his little camp chair and at Ozpin. Long Memory clattered to the ground unnoticed as Ozpin instinctively raised his hands to wrap around the little body that collided with his waist, slender arms tightening like a vise around him and Ozpin couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe-.

     Had he really said-?

     A hiccuping sob from the child in his arms, a fully body thing that shook him from his tousled black hair to his shoes while that word spun endlessly in Ozpin’s mind, haunting him and confusing him because he couldn’t have heard that right. He couldn’t have heard…

     “Dad.”

     The word echoed between them again, muffled by a young face buried in his suit jacket, and Ozpin felt his own breath start to stammer as he clung tighter to the boy in his arms, sinking down to his knees despite the screaming in his leg and burying his face in flyaway black hair, “I’m here.” He choked out, “I’m right here. I’ve got you. You’re alright. I’m right … I’m right here.”

[boop-le-snoot]

PARTY FAVOURS | CHAPTER 19

First time reader click here

Summary+TWs: We're talking serious feelings here, okay? Reader, you're literally emotionally illiterate. You also have PTSD, which is finally addressed - kinda. Bruce does his best. And he also knows how to kiss... But y'all know that if you read my ramblings about lucid dreaming/shifting/whatever... Chile-, anyways...

My phone kept buzzing and I ignored it until Bruce declared it was time to take a break and review the results. Whilst the man was typing up the data on a nearby StarkPad, I fought the sudden influx of messages that I received from haters and supporters alike after Tony decided on tweeting a reply that could be interpreted in an alarming variety of ways. It was a smart move, I'll admit, but a fucking bother for me nonetheless.

Disabling my DMs and dealing with a follower increase in the thousands wasn't hard; I didn't consider myself a problematic asshole and didn't need to be afraid of "exposure". The parties I went to - I doubted there was any blackmail material in there and the few nudes I'd sent over the years were always face-less. As a gen Z, I knew my internet safety.

The trolls didn't bother me either. It was more sad than annoying, people shitting on others for clout. Iron Man stans were witty, at least, if jealous. I must admit I've never considered the influx of popularity I would experience should I publicly out myself as a friend of Tony's. Girlfriend? Intern? Science child? Whatever cover story he was going to feed the press worked for me, as long as I still got the hugs, the kisses, the dick and the attention.

"Tony..." Bruce groaned, evidently done with the data processing, had to have opened his social media to see his own skyrocketing popularity.

"Yeah, our Tony is being a Tony again," I chuckled, having reset my social media settings so my phone wouldn't constantly beep, vibrate and bother me. School was going to be fun.

Bruce shook his head, fond, coming over to my side of the lab after removing his own hazmat suit. His eyes shiny with newfound knowledge and hair turned adorably fluffy in the confines of the head covering. He was smiling softly. "Food?"

"Sure."

We chewed our sandwiches in silence for a moment, each of us lost in our thoughts.

"I still can't believe Tony told everyone on Twitter you're his girlfriend, usually he keeps this stuff private or schedules a fancy press conference," Bruce's tone was thoughtful.

I raised an eyebrow. "Is that what it was? Seemed ambiguous to me..." I trailed off, confused.

"He worded it like that on purpose, I mean, you're still in high school," The scientist was confident in his words. "But I know Tony. I'm a hundred percent sure that he meant exactly that. Aren't you?"

Shock flooded me. Suddenly, I understood I completely misread the situation. "Um, no? I thought we were, y'know, just fucking. We never defined our relationship and we're definitely not exclusive." I said, chewing on my lip. "You make a valid argument, I'm a high school student and he's a grown ass man that does grown man stuff. Putting aside the fact that he could have anybody in the world so why would he choose me?" I was rambling, thinking out loud. Discussing my feelings has never my strong forte. "It would be stupid to impose monogamy on such a complex man like Tony. Downright idiotic to expect a genius to confine to social norms just because it suits others." I finished with a wave of my hand. Another bubble of thought that had festered within me for the longest time. I felt relieved, finally voicing it out loud. A weight had been lifted off my shoulders, a weight I wasn't previously consciously aware of.

Bruce was watching me intently, with an unreadable expression that held the tiniest bit of awe, admiration perhaps. The silence that followed was unnerving. I fidgeted with my hands, not really knowing where to put them or where to look.

"You know," He took off his glasses, fiddling them in his hands. "I'm not going to sugar coat it. For the longest time, I thought you were going to inadvertently hurt him when you get bored with whatever you've got going on. I respect you, don't misunderstand me, but you are young. Now, I've changed my mind. You've changed my mind," He punctuated his statement with his hand on mine, grasping it. "I think you managed to understand him in a way most people can't. Or don't want to. Understand and accept him in a way that some of us can't even after years of working and living side by side with him." Bruce's gentle fingers skimmed along the top of my palm.

"I don't always understand Tony but I do accept him," I agreed. "Because Tony is a great man."

"I think you're in love with him," Bruce said, absolutely having ignored my previous statement. Just like that, point blank, he pushed to the surface the very feelings I got so good at ignoring. There was no rest for me in this place.

My heart fluttered, picking up the pace. I kept my mouth shut, not trusting it whatsoever. My thoughts became akin to panicked hares, jumping and zigzagging aimlessly in my skull. I didn't see the point in defending myself because the scientist had pointed out the obvious.

Bruce looked at me, softly, warmly. "And don't think we haven't noticed the rise in team morale. The improvement not only in communication, but on the battlefield, too. It's easier to entrust your back to someone with whom you've shared a laugh and a drink the previous night. You're the glue that keeps us together."

Something warm and wet was on my cheeks. I stared at our clasped hands, his words echoing in my head over and over and over. The moment I realized I was crying, I willed myself to stop and failed spectacularly - only more salty fluid streamed down, some of it getting in my nose, on my lips. The sleepless nights were making me unstable.

It took a single sniffle for Bruce to pick me up and wrap up in his kind embrace. I didn't resist, tucking my face into the crook of his neck, holding onto the back of his lab coat, inhaling the smell of his skin and chemicals. It was familiar, calming. Minutes ticked by with me slowly leaking the tension out of my body.

"He loves you, too, maybe he just doesn't realize it yet." Bruce whispered into my hair. "I've never seen Tony so happy, even with Pepper. You are special and you are loved."

There was something unsaid, I felt it. It hung in the ear, it burned the tips of my ears, stood sharp on the tip of my tongue. "I love you too, Bwucie-bear," I whispered into the space between his ear and his jaw. His arms tightened around me.

The man placed several chaste kisses in my hair, running a palm over my back. In moments like these, the crush for him, the very crush that got out of control, blossomed fully into a deep sense of respect and admiration. He made me feel safe. He said all the right words at the right time.

Drowsiness overtook me. As usual, any worries and anxieties I had evaporated, once Banner had his arms around me, shielding me from the world. I didn't forbid myself this time: delicately, my hand slipped through the man's soft messy curls, eliciting a contented sigh.

"You haven't been sleeping well," He more stated than asked.

I had no choice but to nod. "Clint keeps dying in my dreams. Or even worse, he doesn't, he just suffers, endlessly, painfully." I admitted.

Bruce flinched under me, tensing. My face was in between his hands in a second, the scientist sternly looking into my eyes. "Why didn't you say anything? All of us assumed you were okay after what happened." He looked - angry. Not Hulk-out pissed but Bruce-pissed, which equalled a kicked-puppy look seasoned with a great pinch of disappointment.

"I am okay." I lied, shamelessly. "It's getting better. That's why I want to have a party - relax a little, dance, socialize. I don't think Tony would let me go on my own so I figured I can convince him to throw one here." I looked away. It was better for everyone if I dealt with my own problems - they were superheroes, not babysitters.

Bruce frowned. "Why wouldn't Tony let you go?"

"Because of that one time I snorted coke," I rolled my eyes at Bruce's naiveté, leaving the less obvious parts unsaid. Tony knew exactly what I was going to do once I got free reign, he considered it destructive and told me so himself. Admittedly, he had a point but still... I wished I'd been given a choice.

"I'll talk to him," Bruce nodded firmly. "That's not acceptable. He can't forbid you from making mistakes and learning from them."

He was met with my shrug. No excitement came from me regarding this particular turn of conversation. I was drained, limbs like jello, thoughts sluggish. My face was drooping.

"Let's get you to bed," Banner stood up with me wrapped around him. "You need a nap."

"No," I protested. If I went to sleep now, only Satan knew at what ungodly hour I would wake up.

"Yes, Princess," Bruce smirked. I wiggled uncomfortably - when he went all caretaker like, my ovaries wreaked havoc on my body and brain. My thoughts weren't appropriate if Bruce wanted me to see him as a father figure. The signals he was sending were mixed. People around me did that a lot and I wasn't sure how to act so I usually just went with the flow. I decided to do the very same thing in that particular moment.

Curiosity sparked within me, tightly interwoven with the deep longing that settled below my collarbones whenever Tony or one of the others wasn't sitting next to me or talking my ear off. I've almost forgotten how it was to be alone with my thoughts. The maze of my very own self was becoming unfamiliar territory. Alarming.

I allowed Bruce to help me shed my shoes and outer layer of clothing, shivering in the coolness of my room. Despite being a frequent visitor, I still had a 'guest' room in the tower - I mostly stayed at Tony's or Wanda's anyways. During our sleepovers neither me nor the witch minded sharing her enormous bed, to be fair, we could have fit at least two more people in it besides us. Tony took care of his own - all the tower's residents had their apartments furnished with the best stuff.

"Sleep now, Princess," Bruce chastised, tucking a blanket around me, having noticed an earbud in my ear and my smartphone in my hand. I had hoped to kill some time online, damn well knowing sleep wouldn't come easy.

"I don't think I can fall asleep, Bruce," I admitted, looking away. There was just so much going on. My brain wouldn't shut up and if I couldn't drown out the cacophony by being productive, I'd troll the internet, as usual.

Banner sighed, coming to sit next to me, leaning against the headboard. Gently running his fingers through my hair, brushing the outside of his palm against my cheek. "How do you usually deal with this?"

Involuntarily, my eyelashes fluttered. "Tony does most of the work," I admitted coyly. The engineer had a whole arsenal of tricks up his sleeve - sexy and exhausting tricks.

"I see," Bruce muttered, thoughtfully.

I opened my eyes to see him looking down at me with a look I haven't seen before. The usual mildly absent, slightly anxious face he wore was replaced by something I could only describe as hurt envy, like a kid looking at their schoolmate who had all the newest, coolest toys. I used to be on the receiving end of that look far too often and I hated it.

I hid my face against his leg, rubbing my cheek on the raspy corduroy fabric of his pants. "Got any good ideas of your own?" I wondered lowly, thinking about what in the world possessed Bruce to wear corduroy trousers on a semi-casual day, in the twenty-first century.

"Only bad ideas," He replied in a matching low tone. His soft fingertips relocated to my nape, goosebumps rising down my back.

"Humour me," I grinned against his leg.

Bruce was quiet for a moment, the sound of his thinking screaming louder than any words could have done. Knowing the scientist so closely, I found out he was full of surprises - bolder than he appeared outwardly and competitive to a boot. He thought he had a lot to prove to himself and by extension, to others. The unknown, the mystery dangling in front of my nose was exhilarating, trepidation addictive. It took me away from the chaos in my mind.

A gentle grasp on my chin had me turning to look upwards, Bruce's face flushed and focused on my own, open and trusting. He needed to see the obvious, that I trusted him to take care of me. He pulled and I followed, sitting up on my elbows, coming up to his shoulder level, our faces inches apart, enveloped in the unique, intense scent of his herbal tea. It was a tart, strong smell and it suited his quiet but passionate character.

Once, twice, I caught my eyes sliding to his plump lips. They looked far too appealing in this position. I usually strategically stayed away from positions so compromising, fearing the very thing that I'd already let happen, however this time the atmosphere was different. We stood on ambiguous grounds, waiting for Bruce to make a decision.

The man wasn't stupid, he saw the way I looked at him. The nightmares and inability to take a break from life put a significant dent in my resolve to keep a distance between us, romantically - I could have settled even for a pity kiss, a pity fuck. Anything to put my brain on pause.

His lips were softer than I had imagined. Skilled, too, he easily steered the kiss into the shallow waters of our combined longing.

With Tony, it was like an avalanche. Tony ran hot like Peterbilt engines, hard and fast, almost angry in his race for satisfaction. Tony was a man that was used to getting whatever he wanted and it became plainly obvious when we fucked.

Bruce was the opposite. He savoured the kiss, losing himself in a way that could almost be described as delicate. Bruce was humming, softly, as we tasted each other, holding the left side of my face with careful fingertips. Almost as if he was afraid to break me. The feel of his skin on mine was soothing in a way that made me sigh and relax even further.

"Wanna make you feel good." His voice had dropped, gone husky, but his breathing held even. He must know all about self-control.

"Yeah," I was ready to agree with whatever the fuck he was offering. My eyelids remained shut.

THE TAG LIST IS NOW OPEN! @another-stark-sub ​ @mostly-marvel-musings  @vozit ​ @littlegasps ​ @pilloclock ​ @shereadsinquiet @downeyreads ​ @hermione-grangers-wife ​ @individualistfem ​ @sleep-i-ness @capbrie @lillsxd @agustdowney @dee-vn @justanotherblonde23 @fanngirl19 @persephonehemingway @softie-socks @schemefrenzy @letsby @cutenessloading @romeo-the-cactus @jelly-fishy-babie

PS. Letsby, please don't combust. The underwear is coming off in the next chapter. 😶

[iturbide]

Ever wonder if someone with the wrong crest used a relic meant for a different crest (like Sylvain using Areadbhar) could ever potentially become a Demonic Beast? I sometimes wonder

i mean

mostly i wonder how fast it would kill them

this kind of gets into Part 2 of the Crest Virus so here comes the Science Hat

Now, before we go too far, we’re going to need to talk a little bit about dragons themselves.  As we see from the startling variety of physical forms among them, dragons are a remarkably varied group, but they all share several commonalities, among them the presence of a Creststone.  We can also loosely define three ‘tiers’ of dragon-kind: Sothis, the Progenitor, who according to legend used her blood to create her offspring; Seiros and her siblings, Sothis’ first offspring made with her blood, akin to demigods; and the “Children of the Goddess,” who we could probably refer to as ‘mortal’ dragons.  (Why do we need to differentiate this way?  Because Rhea says in the last chapter of Verdant Wind that she is “the last child of the progenitor god” -- which makes absolutely no sense outside this specific grouping since we know for a fact that Seteth and Flayn both are dragons.)  The major differentiators between the three groups are, above all, lifespan:

Sothis arrived in Fodlan thousands of years ago with enough expertise and technology to engineer offspring from her own genetic material, helped humanity’s rise in technological advancement, ended up going to war with them, and then spent another thousand years trying to clean up from that mess before taking a well-deserved nap.  She was undoubtedly ancient before Nemesis killed her -- and she didn’t even die of natural causes, she was murdered, implying she could have (and likely would have) lived even longer.

Seiros and her siblings were created after Sothis’ arrival in Fodlan, and though we only have one example to go off of here in the form of Rhea, she’s still looking pretty youthful despite being several millennia old, and based on her appearance at Tailtean she’s aged only slightly over the course of the near-thousand years between that battle and the game’s events.  She probably has a finite lifespan, and degeneration is clearly an issue given the events of Silver Snow, but that’s still an incredibly long life.

The last and largest group, the ‘Children of the Goddess,’ have all manner of quirks not seen elsewhere.  This group has the ability to go between a dragon and human form, but can lose that ability in either direction (Macuil and Indech gave up their human forms, Seteth and Flayn gave up their dragon forms -- Seteth remarks in Silver Snow that he can’t transform anymore, but Rhea still can despite not having done so in almost a thousand years).  They also likely have the shortest lifespan and high degeneration risk because of it -- something implied in Sothis’ Red Canyon paralogue, where Flayn and Byleth both have unique dialogues when attacking the “Demonic Beast” (Sothis calls it a “poor, lost soul”).

Generally, though, despite the wide range of body plans and individual Crests, dragons can all be considered part of the same species in that they appear capable of interbreeding with one another and producing viable offspring.  So a not insignificant chunk of their genetic code is technically the same, but different combinations of genes and unique gene expressions lead to individualized traits in dragons.  Meiosis probably plays a big part in this process: pieces of the unique Crest identifiers from both parents are grabbed in the division process, and when they fuse into a complete gene sequence you end up with a brand new Crest rather than two Crests on one individual (so even though canon hasn’t confirmed anything, personally I think Flayn’s mom was also a dragon, hence why she gets a brand new Crest of Cethleann).

Now as discussed in Part 1, dragon blood in human bodies more or less acts like a virus, splicing itself into the human host’s DNA to impart the donor’s Crest.  First-generation Crestbearers end up with extraordinarily long lifespans because of it and invariably have major Crests, as evidenced by Jeralt: Rhea gave him her blood to save him after he protected her, and he’s over a hundred now because of it and hasn’t aged a day in the past 20 years according to Alois (who was effectively raised by the man himself).  Now, from the second generation on, Crestbearers don’t get this lifespan, and inheritance becomes a gamble, especially after a thousand years; meiosis is absolutely bizarre, and what genes do or don’t get included in an individual gamete is completely up to chance, leading to a piecemeal Crest genome scattered throughout the human population incapable of producing brand new Crests the way dragons could.  This scattering of genetic markers on both sides of the genetic equation also leads to variable inheritance in terms of expression strength, with some people wining the proverbial jackpot (like Felix with his Major Crest), getting lucky as carriers (like Ingrid with her Minor Crest), or get the shortest end of the stick (like Miklan).  Invariably, though, they only ever have one Crest.  Even if two people with different Crests have kids together, those children will only have one or the other (if they have a Crest at all). 

What all this is getting at is: Crests don’t want to share a host.  Doesn’t matter if it’s the original dragon or a human, Crests are not things that naturally co-exist with one another.  Pregnancies with Crest-bearers are potentially rife with issues, especially if the parents have different Crests; an embryo with the markers for two different Crests likely self-destructs, leading to miscarriage, while an embryo with the markers for the father’s Crest rather than the mother’s could lead to major health issues for both mother and child should the baby even make it to term, similar to the complications associated with Rh-factor pregnancies where the mother is Rh-negative and the fetus is Rh-positive. (Baby dragons who naturally don’t share their parents’ Crests are technically a nonissue since dragons probably have an easy way out of this: they can lay eggs).

But what happens when you specifically aim to get two Crests on a single host?  Absolutely horrific things.  Lysithea attested that the kids in her extended family suffered and died one by one at the hands of the Twisted conducting the Crest experiments -- which, unfortunately, makes sense when you think about Crests not wanting to share hosts.  After hijacking a host’s systems, a Crest genome also starts producing antibodies to protect the host from infection by other sources; this is still true in second-generation Crestbearers on, who naturally produce antibodies to stave off a new infection -- so if a second Crest ‘donation’ is introduced, the ingrained Crest is going to fight back hard.  The host body’s immune system goes on the attack in an attempt to drive off the invader, destroying cells that have been ‘infected’ by the new genetic material in order to stop the spread of the second virus; in cases like Lysithea, where there was no ingrained Crest, both try to claim a foothold and then start attacking one another in a bid for dominance, trying to root the other out so that only one is left.  Most often, this autoimmune response is fatal, tearing the host apart from the inside as their body’s defenses target their own systems as foreign entities; in cases where it isn’t, and the host miraculously survives the procedure to gain two Crests, the internal fighting leads to significant genetic decay and a drastically reduced lifespan rather than an increased one -- which contributed both to Lysithea’s grave life expectancy and her two Minor Crests, despite likely getting infusions of pure blood.

(As a note, the Crest of Flames plays by entirely different rules because it’s so much stronger than anything else; survival is rare even in humans without Crests, and it’s likely the only Crest with the potential to establish itself at full strength even with a pre-existing Crest trying to fight against it, as in Edelgard’s case.)

And all of this finally leads us to the question of what happens should someone with the wrong Crest bear a particular Relic.  Well, Crests don’t like to share bodies.  There’s a major dissonance between the heart and body vs the blood, and while it’s not likely to do (much) harm in the short term, too long with it and the Relic will probably try to straight-up attack whoever is wielding it, possibly causing recoil-type damage each time it’s used, since that foreign Crest is viewed as a threat to the overall system.  In cases where there is no Crest on the user, the Relic is trying to recreate a system, using the wielder’s body as a crux to build a larger form off of; where the Crest is just wrong, they would probably never go full-on Beast, even if the Creststone does activate enough to overtake the wielder, since the whole intention of overwhelming them is to snuff their life out and eliminate the threat to the body system, at which point it would return to effective dormancy once the ‘infection’ has been taken care of.

[ckret2]

Specimen 1, Specimen 2, Specimen 3, Monster 0

Summary: Your family has bred dorats for centuries, passing the business down from mother to daughter. You do what you must to preserve your business and your family. And when the Xilien military marches in and requests three dorats for a classified experiment, you're unable to refuse.

No matter what kind of monster they make from them.

A King Ghidorah origin story.

Continuity: Godzilla, Monsterverse continuity; borrows from Showa and Heisei Characters: three dorats that are going to become King Ghidorah, a 2nd person perspective Xilien OC, and assorted other Xiliens as necessary. Wordcount: 7500 Notes: This is a blend of King G's Heisei and Showa portrayals. ME-319 (the viewpoint character) is intended to be a Xilien expy for Emmy Kano. "Female Xiliens are parthenogenetic" is an explanation for why they all look the same in Astro-Monster that doesn't depend on them being some sort of mass-produced clones. Pronouns! "She" = "Xilien who identifies as a parthenogenetic woman," "xe" = "non-parthenogenetic Xilien, regardless of sex," "he" = "person/animal from a species with no capacity for parthenogenesis, regardless of sex." Assume that all pronouns, names, terms, and everything else are translated to more familiar references for ease of the human reader's comprehension, ex: "There's a reference to pineapples, are you saying there are pineapples on Planet X?" No. No I'm not, that's a translation. Loosely inspired by this prompt:

Anonymous said: hi! if you're taking prompts, wouuuld you be willing to write another ghidorah x reader insert? i'm especially intrigued by your past idea about how if someone called them by their original names, they'd start bawling lmao i'd just love to see these guys get some of the aDORATion they deserve (i'm so sorry but i had to, this just can't be mere coincidence)

###

You're a dorat breeder.

The breeding bit isn't difficult; for the most part, the dorats are perfectly happy to handle all of that themselves. Dorats have been domesticated since before recorded history, and have no trouble living and mating in indoor aeries as long as the rooms are large enough and the windows are tall and let in plenty of sunlight, natural or otherwise.

Your job is to keep them happy and healthy while they get on with their business: maintaining and cleaning your centuries-old three-story facility and the aeries suspended by chains far above the floor, keeping a close eye out for any dorats that look unwell or radiate sickly emotions to get them to a vet, keeping their food well-stocked, scheduling enough outdoor trips to ensure that the flight morphs get adequate exercise, and eventually selling them off to pet owners or to professionals whose work needs trained dorats.

You're a woman—that is to say, in a more biological sense, you're parthenogenetic—and although you've got distant cousins and a half-sibling who have fathers, you yourself only have a mother. You are the product of a single unbroken matrilineal line stretching back for over three hundred documented generations. And for several centuries, every cloned daughter in that line has been a dorat breeder. Not because you had to be—but because every one of you has wanted to be. You don't know whether it's in your genes, or whether anyone would want to work with dorats after growing up around their indoor aeries. Nature or nurture? It doesn't really matter, you suppose; you're satisfied with your job, whatever reason you chose it.

You like working with dorats. You like the way they rush up to you in a concerned huddle when you arrive for work in a bad mood, threatening to bowl you over by hopping up on their legs and beating their wings for balance because they want to get closer to your face. You like the colors they come in, from pale jade greens to citrine oranges to a thousand different shades of yellow—gold and neon and amber and more—to warm silvers and pearl whites. You like the broad wingspans and commanding presence of the flight morphs, and the acrobatic energy and even the occasional hive mind-induced stampedes of the spinetail morphs. You like their songlike cries, their shiny scales, the comforting weight of their emotions, the way they switch instantly from sinuous grace to floppy wiggling messes.

You like how small and surprisingly soft the babies are, so little you can cradle them in your hands: their teeth like rows of tiny needles when they yawn, their heads a third of their weight, scrunching up their legs and tucking their wings around them to form little balls when they sleep. You like how agile and elegant the adults are, long and serpentine, their wings simultaneously delicate and powerful, smooth scales and sharp horns and spines—you can see why museums the world over are full of ancient artwork of dorats made from precious metals and gems. But you like the adolescents the most: that's when they're long, ridiculous, uncoordinated noodles, just shifting from the infants' mix of slithering and bipedalism to full quadrupedalism, curious and hyperactive and quarrelsome with each other, constantly tripping over their rapidly expanding wings or getting their new tail spines tangled in everything from blankets to bushes to their own legs.

You've got about three dozen adolescents right now. You started with more hatchlings, but several have already been adopted. It's an orangish-gold pack, all things told, although it wasn't when they first hatched. The ones that are more green and white get adopted out fast as hatchlings, since they're comparatively rare; so much so that when you sell them, you make your customers sign a contract stating they're willing to bring them in to breed so that you can keep the colors in your gene pool.

Your current batch of adolescents is just beginning to head through puberty—as usual, at wildly different rates. Some already have horns that could pass for small but fully developed; some look like long babies, their heads and tails smooth and wings tiny. Most are in between. They still all play together, but already they've begun segregating themselves by morph when they're relaxing, the adolescent flight morphs lounging near (but not too near) the adult flight morphs, the adolescent spinetail morphs piled together in a pack right next to the adult spinetail morphs.

As hatchlings, they already gave you solid impressions of their personalities—who's withdrawn, who's outgoing, who's active, who's lazy, who's quarrelsome, who's cooperative. As they enter adolescence and their mating instincts begin to activate, you're starting to see more facets to their personalities.

And right now, you're thinking very hard about the personalities of three specific adolescent dorats—their quirks, their oddities, their likes and dislikes, their talents and flaws, their futures.

You're thinking about them because two soldiers and two scientists, wearing thin black shades and crisp gray uniforms, have dropped three reports on your desk: dossiers about Noodle, Sunshine, and Pineapple, as if they were persons of national interest rather than three baby pets.

###

Noodle has pretty white-ish gold scales, and—like many near-white dorats that are more gold than silver—he also has awful flaky sheds that come off in strips and tend to cling for days, which makes him a far less appealing pet than most dorats as pale as him. (Some breeders try to sell flaky near-white dorats in between sheds and let the buyer deal with the periodic draconic dandruff, since it doesn't count as a health issue that they’re legally required to report; you consider that unethical and always warn your prospective buyers.)

He's sedate almost to the point of lethargy; his best skill is napping. Noodle's definitely destined to be an indoor pet, which limits who you can adopt him out to. Hopefully even with his shedding problem, you'll be able to find someone who wants him for his ability to lounge about looking pretty rather than for an exercise companion. Though he will play enthusiastically and energetically with his peers, he tends to bow out early to watch the others play, passively absorbing their enjoyment via proximity rather than contributing to the empathic cloud of fun himself.

You suspect there's an edge of sly intelligence to Noodle's apparent idleness—perhaps he's realized that by lounging in the right place, where he can empathically benefit from the other hatchlings' entertainment without having to play himself, he can get more rewards with less effort. Would he be more active by himself, you wonder, if he had to work for his own entertainment? You might need to find someone to foster him for a few weeks to see what his personality is like when he's not around dozens of other dorats before letting someone adopt him. But aside from the possibility that he might be a clever little slacker, Noodle's a very unremarkable hatchling, all told.

Now that he's reaching adolescence, though, and the first few spines on his tails are coming in, he's demonstrated a new behavior quirk: when the adolescents separate by morph, rather that sitting with his fellow spinetails, he follows after the flight morphs and flops down amongst them. You wonder why. Does Noodle prefer the lighter psychic load of a crowd of flights? Does he think that if he socializes with them casually, then once they're old enough to start worrying about breeding, his preferred choices in mates will consider him favorably without his having to expend any extra effort wooing them? Or perhaps he wants to be part of the audience when his fellow spinetails come by to make their first childish, halting attempts at mating displays: their heads lowered, small wings tucked away, and tails waving high in what they'll soon have the muscles to develop into the spinetails' signature whip crack/rattle. And if Noodle does want to watch, why—to learn from his peers' techniques, or to admire them?

Broadly speaking, flight morphs tend to be more withdrawn than spinetail morphs—less inclined to socialize, less open with their ambient emotions. (Although there's wide variation, of course, since the reach of a flight's empathy is far broader but also under far more voluntary control than a spinetail's. They can reduce their psychic influence—but they can also choose to cast it across a far greater distance than a spinetail ever could.)

But even taking into consideration flight morphs' inclination toward tucking their emotions away to themselves, Sunshine—named for scales so bright yellow they're almost fluorescent—is one of the most withdrawn flights you've ever seen. You actually took him to a veterinary neurologist to ensure he doesn't have any kind of brain damage. The conclusion was he doesn't, he just keeps his emotions clamped up tight inside his little head.

However, aside from that, Sunshine's not skittish or sullen, and he doesn't act like he's being bullied or neglected by other dorats. He's more violent than most, which along with the clamped up emotions is a warning sign for trauma or high stress. But he keeps his violence to play fighting, has never done real damage, and always stops when his playmate cries for mercy; so you think he's just fond of fighting rather than lashing out due to anger. So you concluded that he's just remarkably introverted and left him to it.

With the onset of puberty, though, Sunshine's started to come out of his shell. He's one of the most rapidly-developing dorats in this batch, both physically and emotionally. He's already developed a couple of horns and a massive wingspan. He might have reached his adult wingspan, even, although the rest of his body hasn't quite caught up with his wings yet; he looks terribly awkward strutting around, wings akimbo and chest lifted too high when he walks.

Sunshine was also among the first flights to take an interest in showing off for the spinetails; he's been galumphing over to rear up on his legs and show off his wings since before they grew in. Now that they have grown in, he's attracting a lot more attention. (You wonder if the fact that his wingspan is disproportionate to the rest of his body makes spinetails think they look larger than they really are.) Some are flirting back, trotting up to rattle their tails or clap them on the floor if they don't have spines yet, at which point Sunshine rebuffs them and galumphs back over to the flights' company.

You wonder if he wants to flirt but not be flirted with because he doesn't yet understand the purpose of the displays he's practicing, or because he isn't yet pleased with the quality of respondents. Showing off wings doubles as a mating display and a threat display, depending on who it's directed at, so maybe he's just doing it on instinct without having quite figured out the nuances of how to use it. Or maybe he’s hoping to stir up more play fights.

However, you suspect that Sunshine is deliberately flirting. You've seen him off by himself, loner that he is, practicing popping—the mating display used mainly by flights, but sometimes by spinetails, where they stretch their wings as high as possible and then snap them down, producing a sharp pop of air and simultaneously shooting up. (You suspect that this display—and its effect on ceilings and light fixtures—is probably the leading cause behind most pet owners' decisions to spay their flight dorats.) You don't think he'd be training so diligently if he wasn't aware of what he was doing. 

Conversely, among the spinetail morphs, the most physically developed so far is Pineapple—named for his unusually rough brownish-gold scales and their faint undertone of green. (In your opinion, he has the most interesting scales out of this batch of hatchings, which makes him your favorite, appearance-wise. The jades and pearls might be a hit with pet owners; but they're easy to breed for with the right parents, while you don't know if you could recreate Pineapple's scales if you tried. Your pictures of him are a hit in breeders' circles.)

He's incredibly observant, and he's strong-minded for a spinetail, able to break out of a strong emotional hive mind with next to no effort and inject new emotions without thinking. You've seen games stumble to a stop because Pineapple noticed a prospective buyer come in, or someone trip and fall out of a nest, or a kerfuffle break out across the room, and whatever new emotion the sight inspired in him was enough to disrupt everyone else's concentration. You've had far fewer spinetail stampedes while he was here, at least among the hatchlings.

His capacity for inflicting emotions on his peers is almost on par with flight morphs', except that as far as you've seen he can't consciously regulate its effect. You think that Pineapple's unique talent could make him a useful asset if he received professional training, although you don't know of a specific field that would need a spinetail dorat with that kind of ability.

Pineapple is already larger than most of the other adolescents, has developed an impressive set of horns, and has a more even coverage of spines on his tail than any of the other spinetail morphs. They already rattle, which he seems to do involuntarily as he wiggles around in play, although he hasn't made any whip cracks with his tail yet. However, emotionally he's one of the slower developers. He’s practically still a hatchling in his behavior. He plays like he's half his age. He bounces back and forth between flights and spinetails with seeming no recognition of how they've segregated themselves—although once he calms down he inevitably settles down amongst his fellow spinetails, so evidently he's got some recognition of their new social division. He neither joins the spinetails that go over to show off for the flights, nor acknowledges the flights that come to show off for them with anything more than vaguely curious disinterest.

Pineapple's one of the last adolescents for whom you've developed some sense of whether he's likely to be an active or reactive partner—the one who approaches the opposite morph to put on mating displays, or the one who waits to be approached so that he can judge the display he's presented with. It's only in the last few days that you've seen Pineapple begin to watch the flirting flights more keenly, which suggests—but doesn't guarantee—that he'll be a reactive partner.

Noodle, Sunshine, and Pineapple. You don't see their personalities in the dossiers on your desk. The photos on each cover sheet have them posed awkwardly and uncomfortably, heads raised and tails flat on the ground, just like all the photos of the adolescent dorats that the four military representatives took during their first visit weeks ago. In their photos, they look withdrawn and tense.

They're listed by number rather than name.

###

Most of the dorats you breed become pets. But quite a few are taken to be trained to perform public services. Spinetail morphs are the most common service animal on X, and flight morphs are commonly used in counseling and psychological therapy. Many are trained as search and rescue animals: after fires, bombings, or natural disasters, when buried people can't be found with sight, sound, smell, infrared, sonar, or x-ray, often dorats can still detect their minds. Dorats are absurdly adaptable to different environments and atmospheres; they're often sent to new colonies to carry mail, pull heavy loads, and defend Xilien colonists from aliens. Low-empathy dorats can have the last of their empathy trained out of them or chemically suppressed and be used by the police or military.

You've never bred dorats for specific functions—hunting or therapy or what have you. You maintain thorough records of each dorat's family tree, and some of their trees go back dozens of generations—calling on records kept by your mother and her mother and her mother et cetera—but none of them are what anybody would call "thoroughbreds." All the same, plenty of your dorats have been snapped up for professional services before. Thoroughbreds have a higher chance of having the physical, psychic, and personality traits a job called for, yes, but also a higher chance of carrying detrimental genetic conditions. Many people who work regularly with dorats recognize the downsides of thoroughbreds and try to find the traits they need in aeries like yours.

So you were apprehensive, but not surprised, when four representatives of the military came in and asked to speak with you about your current selection of dorats.

In the style mandatory for all soldiers, police, and public officials interacting with civilians, they didn't present you with so much as their ID numbers, much less their personal names. They instructed you to refer to them as Soldier 1, Scientist 2, Scientist 3, and Soldier 4. They referred to you by your matrilineal ID number, ME-319, which felt slightly more personal than calling you by your national ID number, but not by a lot.

"We are conducting a medical experiment with potential military applications that involves dorats," Soldier 1 said. "Controller 0 has authorized very few details to be shared with civilians. We can tell you that we need three in early adolescence. We can tell you that this will be our seventh trial, and the first six concluded in a 100% fatality rate for our dorats specimens. We do not tell you this so that you will think that we are carelessly killing off dorats, but so that you will understand that we are frustrated and vexed every time another experiment fails and recognize that we are taking the utmost care with the dorats." (You can tell that xe's repeating something Controller 0 told xem to say—or, if not, at least that xe must work closely enough with Controller 0 to have picked up its mannerisms. The computer has a tendency to instruct the populace on how they should feel about its pronouncements and decisions; the inside of a Xilien mind is one of the few things it can't control directly, and so it puts the onus on its citizens to control their minds for it.) "We are not, as you can tell, testing them en masse in hopes that one or two will survive, but testing only two and three at a time, and pouring our every resource into ensuring their survival in each trial. Their deaths are incompatible with our objectives."

Despite yourself, you did find yourself thinking that they must be exercising a great deal of caution with the dorats, 100% fatality rate notwithstanding. Still, though, you had to ask— "Why are you testing two and three at a time, then? Why not one?"

Soldier 1 was silent for a moment, and you suspected xe had a direct link to Controller 0 and was waiting for it to provide xem an answer that xe was allowed to share. "Because the very purpose of the experiment requires multiple test subjects," xe finally said. "Our first four tests used only two dorats each. We found two insufficient for stable results. Our results improved when we began using three."

So what was it, you wondered. Was the experiment about dorats' empathic capabilities? Something else concerning their brains? Some new breeding experiments? What could require multiple dorats?

You suspected you'd never find out.

"What qualities are you looking for?" you asked them, with no further questions about the nature of the experiment; because, ultimately, it didn't matter what they told you and whether or not you liked it. No matter what, you were going to comply. You have to comply when Controller 0 comes knocking. Your only recourse for objection is if Controller 0 asks you for something and you know something it doesn't that will help it get what it wants more expediently.

Shortly, Soldier 1 answered, "Compatibility with each other."

"In what sense?" you asked. "Dorats that play together well? Genetic similarity?"

"Not genetic similarity," Soldier 1 said. "Our initial tests were conducted with dorats of the same breed, to poor effect." Xe grimaced almost immediately after speaking, and the next statement came from Scientist 2: "We have our own criteria by which we'll determine compatibility. Once you have presented your pool of available dorats, we will monitor them ourselves until we have made a selection." From the switch in speakers, you suspected that Soldier 1 had overstepped xir bounds and Controller 0 had revoked xir permission to lead the conversation.

"Monitor?" you asked. "In person? Or will you be setting up recording equipment?" You didn't like the sound of either option.

"Both, most likely," Scientist 2 said.

And so it was. Cameras designed to pick up visible light and heat energy were set up around the aeries. Most days, at least one of the four from the military was there—usually either Scientist 2 or Scientist 3—watching keenly while the adolescent dorats played, relaxed, and interacted; taking notes; and recording even more footage from various angles. After a few weeks, all four came in again, asked to speak with you in your office, and presented you with the three dossiers.

And here you are.

###

Here you are.

Looking down at the military's records on Noodle, Sunshine, and Pineapple. Here you are.

"Why?" you ask. You wouldn't have pegged the three of them for any sort of compatibility. You don't know that you've ever seen any of them interact one-on-one with each other, much less all together.

There's a pause as they wait for instructions from Controller 0; and then, with grim solemnity, Scientist 2 takes out a translucent badge and hands it to you. Congratulations: you're now one clearance level above the average civilian.

Scientist 3 speaks. "These two, because Specimen 2—" xe taps on Sunshine's dossier, "is sexually attracted to Specimen 3." And then Pineapple's. Something squeezes inside you. These are adolescents. They're only playing around with flirting—when a flight and spinetail at this age do pair off, they tussle and cuddle. Who was this army biologist with only a few weeks' worth of footage to say that this awkward little thing with disproportionately large wings was anywhere near anything like sexual attraction?

You don't say any of that. You say, very evenly, "Oh?"

"You've seen, no doubt, that he's been putting on mating displays for the spinetail morphs," Scientist 3 says. "We've analyzed multiple displays from multiple angles, and are absolutely certain that Specimen 3 is the only spinetail morph whom Specimen 2 is always facing when he displays. His brain activity and body temperature elevate when Specimen 3 takes note of his displays, but not when any other spinetail morphs do."

Specimens 2, Specimen 3. They've already been numbered.

"Specimen 3 does not appear to reciprocate Specimen 2's sexual attraction," Scientist 3 goes on. "But this is irrelevant. As long as Specimen 2 views Specimen 3 as an object of desire, he will remain invested in both protecting and impressing him—which should yield the behavior we want to see from them."

You think of Sunshine off by himself, getting used to his new wingspan, practicing launching himself higher and higher into the air each time he snaps his wings; and wonder what it is the military plans to use that young enthusiasm to train him to do.

You think of Pineapple, tail rattling accidentally as he wiggles in play or suddenly stopping to stare in fascination at an odd sunbeam or an aerie swinging on its chain; and mentally recoil at the thought of him being an object of desire—a prize to manipulate quiet little Sunshine into doing what they want.

You think of Noodle. Curling up to snooze, or scratching at his flaking scales, or flopping down between the flight morphs with his little wings curled tight around his chest. "Why Specimen 1, then?"

"Because he has demonstrated homosexual inclinations." The way Scientist 3 says the words is so clinically precise it almost sounds pathologizing. It feels like a slap on the face. (Even if hearing the word "homosexual" applied to a dorat is momentarily disorienting, when it's so natural to assume that's the default in non-parthenogenetic species. It's easy to forget that, by a biologist's definition of the term, they do have two sexes, not just two body shapes.)

"How do you know that?" You would have noticed if any of your dorats had progressed past practicing their mating displays, and Noodle doesn't even do that much.

"I'm sure you've noticed that he lounges with the flight morphs. When he watches spinetail morphs present their mating displays, his heart rate increases and eyes dilate in a manner indicating arousal, and his—"

"Okay." You don't want to hear more. You feel like you're peering in someone's bedroom window with night vision goggles. "But, what—what does that have to do with anything?"

"Had we chosen a heterosexual flight morph or spinetail morph, it could develop a sexual rivalry with the other two specimens," Scientist 3 says. "A heterosexual spinetail morph could perceive Specimen 3 as an obstacle to obtaining Specimen 2's attention; whereas Specimen 2 might perceive a heterosexual flight morph as a potential threat to his chances of wooing Specimen 3. However, a heterosexual flight morph will not demonstrate attraction to a homosexual spinetail morph, and a homosexual spinetail morph will not demonstrate attraction to a heterosexual spinetail morph, so neither Specimen 2 nor Specimen 3 will see Specimen 1 as a rival or vice versa. We can reap the benefits of Specimen 2's attraction to Specimen 3 without concern that it will produce a schism with Specimen 1."

You almost laugh at their bizarre, mating-obsessed logic. What are they going to do if one of the spinetails is bisexual, but hasn't "demonstrated" his "inclinations" yet? What are they going to do if it turns out that Noodle likes lounging with the flights because he has as yet unrecognized intersex traits, and he suddenly sprouts a set of wings to rival Sunshine's? What then?

But you can't ask. You're silent with horror.

Because dorats don't act like that. They don't develop sexual rivalries. If two set their eyes on the same mate, their competitions don't escalate past wrapping their tails around each other and rolling around, or battering each other ineffectively with their wings and hissing until someone gives up. Often, the competition stops early when the potential mate demonstrates a willingness to produce an egg with each. Two competing over one would never escalate to the point where it would pose a threat to their ability to healthily cohabitate or cooperate.

Unless the dorats are in miserable, confined, stressed conditions. So stressed their natural empathy shuts down so they don't have to feel their peers' suffering, so miserable that losing a chance to mate means losing a chance at what may be the only pleasurable activity they're allowed, so confined that they can't flee from an infuriated rival or an unwanted mate. The kind of conditions found in illegal doratfighting pits or unlicensed breeding mills.

What the hell is the military putting their dorats through that they have to be concerned about sexual rivalries?

How the hell did their previous sets of dorats die, for this "compatibility" to be their top criteria?

What the hell are they going to do to Noodle, Sunshine, and Pineapple?

You look through the window in your office door, where you can see your dorats. You spot Pineapple first, trying to climb one of the chains anchoring an aerie to the ground by twisting about it and inching himself up. Noodle is sleeping in a pile of flights, one leg sticking up inelegantly. Sunshine you finally spot high above, peering over the side of an aerie, watching Pineapple climb. There is nothing you want more than to run out there, scoop the three of them up, and carry them somewhere far away.

But you can't defy Controller 0. The best you could hope to do, now that you understand the military's criteria, is try to suggest a better trio; but each and every little dorat out there is just as precious as Noodle, Sunshine, or Pineapple. You can't sacrifice any of them in their stead.

The military representatives give you a moment. Then Scientist 2 takes back the dossiers. Soldier 1 says, "If you have no objections, we are prepared to take them now."

You say nothing.

"Very well."

###

You'd like to think that you're putting on a good show of stoicism for the military representatives. But the moment you step outside your office, you're swarmed by concerned dorats desperate to comfort you. Under the circumstances, it only makes you more miserable.

You reassure them as well as you can, push them off, and begin collecting the three... specimens.

Noodle flails when you scoop him up, but once it's clear you plan to drape him over one shoulder, he clambers around to position himself: head draped over your chest, tail tip dangling past your butt, claws curled into your chain mail shirt for stability. He flicks his tongue at your chin in concern a couple of times, then droops down and almost immediately falls back asleep.

You have to shake the chain Pineapple's climbing to get his attention, but he sees how Noodle's laying and copies him on your other shoulder. He covers your head with one wing as he scrambles onto you, but once he's settled he nuzzles against your cheek, attempting to cheer you up. You feel his confusion as he presses his head against yours.

You don't even need to whistle to get Sunshine's attention. He's already watching you—or maybe watching Pineapple on your shoulder. You point at the ground and stamp a foot, and Sunshine, well-trained, glides down off his perch and flops at your feet. You don't have any shoulders left for him, but he stays close, rubbing his head between your shins. Smaller dorats sometimes weave between their owners' legs when they want their attention or want to comfort them; when they get too big for that, sometimes they do this instead. You rub him just behind his jaw, partially to thank him for the attention and partially to coax him out from between your legs so you can walk, and you take all three of them to the door where the military representatives are waiting.

Their ship is just outside. A compartment in the back is already open. At least the dorats aren't going to be in separate cages. You pat inside the compartment, and Sunshine jumps up and in, followed by Pineapple slithering off your shoulder. Sunshine immediately huddles in a back corner, watching as Pineapple explores the space. You have to slide Noodle off yourself, and he stirs and sits up as you set him down.

"You three are getting adopted by the military," you tell them. You feel guilty, like you're lying to them, even though it's not technically untrue and even if it was they wouldn't understand you. "Be good for them, okay? The future of X depends on its soldiers."

"Make your farewell quick," Soldier 1 says stiffly. You're probably lucky that you get to say farewell at all.

You force a smile, lean into the ship, and tug them close one by one to press your forehead against theirs. You focus your entire mind on your love for them instead of your worry. "Noodle. Sunshine. Pineapple." You say their names as you're touching them; this will probably be the last time they ever hear them. You pull back from Pineapple before he can pick up on your sudden sadness. "Stay safe."

You step back and Soldier 4 closes the compartment.

You watch from the door as the ship takes off and disappears into the sky.

###

You never see them again.

###

That's not true. If it was true, it would be less painful.

Years pass. You have a daughter; she grows, takes over the family business, and has a daughter and a child of her own. You start giving talks about dorat behavior.

After one of your talks, a soldier waits in the back while the chairs empty and the people who lingered behind speak to you. Only when they're gone does xe approach you. A generation has passed since you last saw xem, and xe looks far older; but you still recognize xir face instantly. An ache that you haven't felt in years stirs in your chest again. "Soldier 1," you say, nodding.

Xe nods back. "Specialist 8." And before you can question the title, xe offers you a new clearance badge.

###

There's a heavy, oppressive feel in the lab, although you can't tell why. It's clean, well-lit. There's no signs of suffering. But the air weighs down on you anyway.

Maybe it's because you're on a moon. You've never been on a world with a sky that's always black. You feel like you're clinging to the side of a marble hurtling alone through the void.

Something about the oppressive feeling is familiar.

"At this point, we doubt the fact that you raised our specimens will give you any particular insight into them," Specialist 3 tells you as xe escorts you down the hall. "We have, after all, been working with them for far longer than you knew them. But we're very impressed with your expertise on dorat psychology."

You've already been told that they're still working with the three "specimens" you gave them. You're relieved they've survived this long. They'll be getting near old age by now. You wonder if they were ever allowed to interact with any other dorats. You wonder if the three of them were enough company for each other. Dorats that aren't pets usually live in groups with at least a dozen adults, and pets benefit from regular opportunities to socialize with other dorats. Did they ever get those opportunities? Did they ever go outside? Did they give their flight morph enough chances to fly?

You suspect not. You don't know why you suspect not. Something about the heaviness in the air.

As Specialist 3 approaches a massive set of double doors and slows down, you realize what about the heaviness is familiar: it feels like entering a doratfighting pit to rescue the captive dorats. This is what it feels like when dozens of dorats' empathy have collapsed and crumpled in, forming a dense despairing ball of shut down and suppressed emotions. They can't cope with their own misery, much less their peers', and so they close in on themselves. Your hand flutters up to your head, pressing your temple where you can feel the psychic weight.

But this is so much heavier than you've ever felt before. There must be hundreds, thousands—"How many dorats are kept in this facility?"

Specialist 3 hesitates. "Just the three," xe says. "Maybe some of the scientists have personal pets in their quarters, but I doubt it. They wouldn't want to bring their pets to this environment."

You don't think xe's talking about the airless moon. Xir gaze flicks to your hand pressed to your temple, and xe says, "You see what I mean."

"This can't be just three. How?"

"You'll see. This is what you're here to address." Specialist 3's hand hovers over the door controls. "Moment of truth," xe says. "From here on out, everything you see is absolutely classified. Controller 0 values the secrecy of this information more than your life. If you tell anyone..."

You nod. You know. It was spelled out to you very explicitly. Any intel leaks that can be traced to you mean the execution of ME-319, ME-320, and ME-321: you, your daughter, your granddaughter. The termination of the ME matrilineage. Of course, you'll never tell—but you're terrified that someday, someone else might, and the blame will accidentally fall on your family. You would have refused to take this assignment if you could have; but you have to comply when Controller 0 comes knocking.

Specialist 3 nods and opens the door.

You step through and the weight closes in on your mind so heavily it feels like your vision is going black around the edges.

For a moment, you can't understand what you're looking at. The room resembles a ship hangar, but directly in front of you is what looks like a mountain of gold coins. No, not coins. Scales?

The mountain shifts.

You fall to your knees.

It's a massive, monstrous mutant. Ugly knotted scars thicker than your torso run between its necks and down its chest. It's all spines, and claws, and horns, and fangs—its fangs alone are half the length of your body. You didn't know creatures this large could survive outside the vacuum of space. You can tell, just from looking at it, that it's nothing but a weapon of mass destruction.

And it has three heads. And it has the broad wings of one flight morph and the long tails of two spinetail morphs. And it has numb, delirious despair in its eyes.

There are massive collars around each of its necks and cuffs around its ankles and tails; chains anchor each collar and cuff to the ground. In a grotesque parody of rings on fingers, piercings jab through its wing membranes and wrap around each of its phalanges; short chains connect the piercings to each other, forcing it to keep its phalanges together and its wings closed. It spasms and growls—its growl is so loud you can feel the floor beneath you vibrate—and then goes limp on the floor; and then spasms again; and whimpers; and goes limp again.

You try to ask a question, but all you can do is mouth the word, "What," silently.

"Meet Monster 0," Specialist 3 says. "Codename: King, if you prefer."

You want to be sick. Of all the things you feared, never in your worst nightmares...

"You can see the problem," xe goes on. "He's totally shut down emotionally. We can make him move—we've got the technology to force him to move—but we can't force him to feel again. The experiment is only a partial success as long as his empathic abilities are turned off. If we have to, we can move forward with this alone. But I've seen your writing on rehabilitating doratfighting rescues; if there's any way you can... Hey, where—?"

You're not listening to xem anymore. You've found your feet and you're rushing down the stairs so fast you miss a few steps and almost fall, heading for the main floor of the hangar—hangar? kennel? prison? You sprint for the heads of the mangled creatures. The other soldiers and scientists on the floor, seeing you approach—wearing a jingling chainmail tunic and a look of fury the likes of which Controller 0's perfectly emotionally repressed soldiers would never display—dive out of your way.

You head straight for Monster 0's faces.

Each face towers above you. Their heads are lying on the ground and you still have to look up to meet their eyes. They don't look anything like themselves anymore. Their distinctive scales—the flaky white gold, the electric yellow, the spiky green-tinged brownish gold—all gone, replaced by a uniform dull, pallid brass. The heads, distorted and altered as they were forced to this unnatural size, could have come from triplets. If you hadn't been told they were your dorats, you wouldn't have recognized them.

The head on the monster's right growls as you approach, bearing his fangs threateningly, but his eyes are glazed. The one in the middle flinches and squeezes his already shut eyes tighter closed, as if he can dream his way through this and wake up somewhere else. Only the one on the monster's left manages to focus, looking at you tiredly, studying you.

You know then. You know.

"Oh, my babies." You look up at them, between each of their faces, throat tight. "This isn't you."

The one on the left slowly leans in—does he recognize you? The right one's eyes are beginning to clear.

You reach out to touch the left one's snout, then the middle one. "I'm so sorry they did this to you. This isn't who you are."

Slowly, the right one drags his head toward you as well. The middle one's eyes crack open tiredly. You can feel their exhalations washing over you in gusts; you hear their lungs roaring like wind through a canyon.

"Do you remember who you're supposed to be?" You don't hide any of your emotions from them this time. Love pours out along with pity and grief. You lean against them, one at a time, pressing your forehead to their snouts: Specimen 1, 2, then 3; middle, right, and left; and you tell them their names: "Noodle. Sunshine. Pineapple."

Their eyes shoot wide open. An electric wave snaps over their skin, jolting you hard enough that you stumble back.

Two soldiers rush up to take your arms and tug you back, and for a moment you're so disoriented you can't tell if you're being rescued or arrested. The vision-blackening pressure on your mind has lifted all at once, so fast you feel lightheaded. The three dorats lift their heads as high as their chains will allow them, looking at each other as though they've only noticed each other for the first time; or perhaps looking at themselves through each other's eyes?

And then the rage hits you—like stepping outside at the most deathly hot peak of summer and walking into a wall of heat. Rage so thick it's like a tangible force, rage so overbearing you immediately break out in a sweat.

Then they raise their heads, and they sing.

That's the only word you have for it. It's a sound like you've never heard before. Dorats coo, or croon, or caterwaul; but this is singing. Three notes, high and quivering; a discordant chord, tremolo, in clear soprano voices; a wail that nearly sounds Xilien.

Something in the chord pierces straight into your psyche. You can feel your heart break, your future vanish, your every reason for living shrivel up and dissolve. You lose everything in a second. All that's left is keen, soul-throttling despair. Nothing matters. Everything is over.

From somewhere far outside the black hole in your mind, you hear soldiers who might not have expressed a single emotion in decades break down in sobs.

And still the dorats are singing like they're trying to end the world. Their necks raised, their back arched, their legs straining, their wings trembling. One by one, the chains pinning their left wing shut begin to snap.

You sink past despair into apathy.

###

Your spirits are still low when you wake up in the med bay, but at least you're no longer ready to die.

You remember what it felt like, though. You'll always remember what it felt like.

You're being tended to by Nurse 4. Once xe's established that you're of sound mind, xe places a call, and a couple of minutes later Soldier 1 and Specialist 3 come in.

They both look haggard. Soldier 1 has superficial scratches high on the side of xir neck where public officials in direct contact with Controller 0 get their implants. "Well done," xe says wearily. "Controller 0 finds your technique questionable, but approves of your fast results. You'll be sent home with high commendations—but don't expect to be called in to do that again."

Somewhere far away, you think you can feel anger, throbbing. Like the beginning of a pounding headache.

You process Soldier 1's statement backwards and in pieces. "Again?" How many more were they going to put through that torture? And then: "Fast results? You—you knew? You wanted this? This...?"

You gesture at your own head, trying to somehow indicate the feeling of your entire life falling to pieces.

Specialist 3 clears xir throat. Soldier 1 glances away. "Among other things, our experiments aimed to enhance Monster 0's inborn capacity to project emotions. Weaponize it, if you will."

You can only gape at xem.

Specialist 3 says, "We had no idea he'd develop a means to project them vocally." Xir voice is hoarse. "This is a... fascinating side effect of his modifications."

"Although one that reduces his usefulness in vacuums," Soldier 1 says.

Usefulness for what? What are they going to use them for?

You feel despair creep over you again.

###

As promised, you're awarded a slew of high commendations from Controller 0 before you go home. You never speak of them again.

Controller 0 also assigns you a therapist with a clearance level high enough for you to speak freely about your experience. You only visit xem a few times. Once you pass Soldier 4 in the waiting room. You didn't realize xe lives nearby. You didn't realize xe had been on the moon.

It's three more years before you, along with everyone else, see the news of the first planet conquered by X's new living weapon, "King." You tune out the hollow military propaganda singing their new weapon's praises as you watch the footage brought back from that distant world. All you can see in the dorats' eyes is hatred.

In another few years, your granddaughter becomes the first of your matrilineage in centuries not to take over the family dorat breeding business. Instead, she joins the military. Science branch. She received an invitation directly from Controller 0 itself.

She gushes about the opportunity to use your family's dorat expertise to work with the famous Monster 0—and perhaps to help make and train more monsters. After all, "0" is the number reserved for prototypes. Rumors have been swirling for years.

Before she leaves for basic training, you pull her aside, take a risk that could endanger your whole family, and whisper Monster 0's true names to her.

###

To the end of your life, you will fear that your meeting with your three dorats—your meeting with the thing they became—only made things worse for them.

You will never know that, years after your natural death, what you reawakened in them will give them the strength to escape.

#####

(Replies/reblogs are welcome & encouraged! Check the “source” link below for my masterlist of KOTM fics, as well as my AO3 and Ko-fi links.)

[raisingsupergirl]

The Value of Value

Kids these days. AmIright? No respect. No appreciation for how good they've got it. Take my daughter… please! Okay, sorry. I think Rodney Dangerfield possessed me there for a minute. But anyway, back to my daughter. I lamented last summer (and again in the winter) about her demeanor on the soccer field. She' was a jogger. She was a walker. She was a half-hearted gawker. In short, she had zero competitive spirit, but she loved being there with her friends (#facepalm). We made it through both outdoor and indoor soccer without much progress, but I was hopeful that t-ball would be different because it's not a contact sport. Maybe she wouldn't be intimidated so much, and thus she would get into it a little more. Wrooong. She's had two games so far, and both times she's been the kid throwing dirt on everyone else the whole time. And her daddy has never been closer to having a stroke. I'll finish that story in a minute, but I should really get on with the point of this blog first: self-therapy. That's all it is. God's showing me things from a different angle. My daughter loved soccer, and now she loves t-ball. But she refuses to actually play either of them when she's there. Everyone assigns value differently, and it's time that I learned that. So here goes.

Hard work and dedication. If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing right. Life is so awesome that it's a crime to waste a single moment. These are the things that define me. I'm not a perfectionist, but I try to be. I love creating and learning new things. And I love the payoff—the sense of accomplishment from completing a challenge or goal—and I'm a huge fan of the reward system. As I've said before, 2019 has been an insane year for me. I put way too much on my plate. There hasn't been a week yet that I didn't work at least sixty hours between my "day job" (physical therapy), my editorial jobs (both at Havok Publishing and with freelance editing), and my writing career. There have been times when I've wanted to quit or at least just take a weekend off, but one thing (aside from the thrill of the challenge) has kept me going: the payoff. July 21st. That's the day when it will all be worth it. It's the day after my last writing conference of the summer, and everything's leading up to it. I've edited dozens of stories and hundreds of thousands of words so far this year, and I have many more to go. But by that day, I'll be done with my own book, as well as with the culmination of six months of stories for Havok. I'll be able to sit back and take a breath… an entire weekend away from any real work. And most importantly, I'll be able to enjoy the ultimate guilty pleasures prize package that I've amassed for myself:

1 bottle of Ole Nassau Dark (rum that can only be purchased in the Bahamas)

1 bottle of Tawny Port wine (aged ten years)

1 Romeo y Juliette Churchill cigar (Cuban)

1 farm-raised sirloin steak literally the size of my head

So here's the thing. Everything on my reward list is bad for me. If I enjoyed them for every little occasion, they would turn to ash in my mouth (some more literally than others), and they would eventually kill me. But as a one-time reward for a seven-month sprint, they'll be heavenly. I put value in working hard and enjoying all of what life has to offer, but some people would call me naïve. Where I say life is too short to waste a day, others say it's too short to work all the time (and honestly, they'd be right… until stopping to smell the roses becomes a permanent nap in the poppies). Some four year olds place value on training to be the next Nolan Ryan (you know who you are, kid), and some just like to fill their shoes with as much of the infield as possible before the inning is over.

"If you keep playing in the dirt, you're getting a spanking when we get home."

 Quite a dugout pep talk, right? Well, hear me out. Before the game, my daughter had promised me that she wouldn't play in the dirt. Before she walked onto the field, I made her promise again. But within a minute, she was already throwing the stuff everywhere. She was piling it up and packing it in her shoes. I tried to get her to stop. Her coaches tried to get her to stop. Even one of the other kids told her to stop. But apparently she puts some serious value in dirt (I can only assume that she's going to make an amazing excavator someday). And after my dugout threat, she went right back to the dirt. On the way home, I informed her that she would be getting the aforementioned spanking (not because she misbehaved but because she lied. She only gets spankings for lying, though, in this case, there was definitely some interpretation of the law needed to justify the punishment), and I took it one further.

"If you even look at the dirt during your next game, you're never playing t-ball again."

"Okay…" she said in her sweet little voice. "But why?"

$#@&#*$!!! Are you kidding me?! "Because it's t-ball, not dirt-ball!"

And that's when I realized that she really didn't get it. She was playing t-ball. She was out there with all the other kids having a blast. She's even a great hitter (about a .250 batting average with the coach pitching and 100% off the T) even though her mother and I haven't practiced with her nearly as much as we should. Maybe she'll eventually develop a love for some actual sport, or maybe she'll always be a butterfly chaser. Either way, these experiences (and her memories) will go one of two ways, and I'm sure as heck not going to be the father who ruins them. If that means chewing a hole through my lip at every game to keep from yelling at her, so be it. If she throws dirt on other kids or doesn't listen to her coaches, there will be repercussions, but if she's intent on digging her own infield grave, I'm going to have to be okay with that. At least for now. Why? Because she's assigning value in her own way. She's growing and learning where she fits in. And in the end, she's still four years old, and it's just intermural t-ball, not the World Series.

And hey, if I need to uncork that Ole Nassau rum a little early to get me through this season, I don't think anyone would blame me.

[dreamboytranscripts-blog]

Ep. 1- Goodbye, Esmerelda Part 1

DANE: The milky way galaxy. Planet Earth. Cleveland, Ohio. Twelve-year-old Esmerelda looks out the window of her father single-engine airplane.

All of Cleveland is rolling underneath her. The trees look just like broccoli, she thinks. And the lake looks like one of her mom’s silver plates and it’s getting bigger in her eyes. And she smiles.

Now, little Esmerelda doesn’t know this probably, but a hundred years ago or so her great great grandfather John Stonefall, the oil tycoon, bought all the land currently rolling under her for a suspiciously small sum. But rather than build on the land like everyone expected, he instead had it all dug up. Leaving mounds of dirt everywhere, much to the chagrin of the locals. Petitions were signed, ladies groups had lunches. Finally, as a compromise, Stonefall filled most of the holes, built a summer home on a small piece of the land, and donated the rest of the city of Cleveland for parks.

The Stonefalls ended up liking it in Cleveland. Despite the controversy, they were happy there and they breed like rabbits becoming more and more cousins with cleaner and cleaner money. And that money eventually thinned and settled, becoming locked up in foundations, orchestras, zoos. Many of these cousins left Cleveland, but a few stayed. Their lives buoyed by the steady pumping of old trusts.

And it was one of these cousins, a guy named Roger Parring. A man made foggy from a life of never having had to know that he had never really had, who took his little daughter, Esmerelda Parring, for a ride in their single-engine airplane. Now, later on that night they will show their flight path on the news. A single red line that ends abruptly in the solid blue section at the top of the map graphic. Apparently, their engine began to malfunction as they were right over Pepper Heights and people on the news later will say they could hear it.

A sound like a saw in the sky.

But while that plane was still in the air above Pepper Heights, I didn’t hear it. I was far below, sleeping late in an old bed in my friend’s guest room. Huge white clouds were racing through the sky, making the light in my bedroom change from bright to dim to bright to dim. But I didn’t notice that either. I was deep in a dark dream.

Now, my dreams are pretty fucked up usually. Like me and my mom are astronauts and she’s floating away and I can’t do anything about it. Or like the train car I’m on is full of a thousand big, fat slow black flies landing on everybody's face and lips and they don’t notice because everyone is reading their Kindles that sort of thing. And I don’t dream about sex that often but, when I do it’s always something really awful. Like I’m at the deli and the guy behind the counter is making me fuck my cousin, Bryan, in front of a line of old ladies waiting for their hams and I can’t get hard and everybody is waiting.

Anyway, ever since I got to Cleveland I’ve been having this strange recurring dream. It always starts the same. I’m in the water. Hanging suspended and it’s deep water. And it’s dark, I can’t see anything. The water is the same temperature as my body. It feels pleasant. My hair’s just gently swaying. And then I feel a little bit of cold on my legs. And at first, I think it feels sort of nice. And then a little bit more cold and then slowly I realize, that’s something huge is moving underneath me.

I start to freak out and I start to try to get away but I can’t get anywhere. The water isn’t moving and I feel the coldness coming up more and more cold like the thing is getting closer. So I start to crash and I open my mouth to scream but the icy water rushes in. It hits the back of my throat and zooms down into my stomach. I feel it fill me up. And then it zigzags it’s way through my intestines like a cold knife and just before it gets to the back of my asshole, I wake up.

And I throw off the covers and I look down. And my dick is rock hard. Like so hard that it’s actually like bobbing up and- oh fuck I am late for work. I jump out of bed, I throw on my faded red Zenarc Corporations t-shirt and I tuck my boner into my shorts as best I can. I run downstairs and grab a pop tart and I dump a glass of water on the counter somewhere near the plants and then boom I’m out the door.

I usually walk through the neighborhood, Woodshire to York to Willowbrook to Cedar Ridge and then I cut through the woods. But not I have to run right down the main street area of Pepper Heights, Rivington Road, because I’m running late.

I get to the four-way stop and people in Ohio are way too polite for four-way stops so everyone just of sort sits there going:

“No, you go first” “Nah you go first” “No please I insist” “No please”

So I just run diagonally right across screaming. [sounds of screaming and honking cars] Now the thing about Rivington Road is that it’s a busy little street. There’s all these different kinds of food: Indian, Ethiopian, a Ramen place, a Sushi place, a Chinese food place, a toy shop, an independent bookshop, records, second-hand clothes, Peruvian imports, A head shop, a couple of bars, and even a gay bar. All in like a few blocks and it’s always crowded.  And there are so many different types of people and outside of New York, I’ve never ever seen anything like Pepper Heights. It was such a mix of people. People from every country, every income bracket. All living in the same neighborhood. It felt like some sort of lefty public tv fantasy. All these different kinds of lovely humans right here on Rivington but not a single fucking one of them knows how to walk at the right speed. “MOVE!”

I turn the corner right by the mirror store and boom. I see a truck, I almost run into it. Some sort of utility truck. It’s like parked half on the grass and half in the street. And I hear cussing coming from somewhere close.

“Cock sucker motherfucker son of a bitch”

And it sounds like it coming from above me so I look up. And there is a sort of crane coming up from the utility truck to bucket and there is a man in the bucket fiddling with the light pole but I can’t really see him because he is silhouetted by the sun but he’s just cussing up a storm. I have never heard some cuss so blatantly and out in the open and I mean this is a neighborhood. There’s like old ladies and like little kids-

[child's voice] “Move fucker!"

DANE: “Hey!”

A little girl comes out of no where she almost runs me over on her bike. Jesus. Okay, just a few more blocks. And I don’t have to run anymore I think I can just walk briskly, I don’t want to be a complete sweaty mess when I get there. And I’m only…..13 minutes late that’s not so bad. That’s close to ten minutes, it's almost ten minutes late. Okay.

I get to the side entrance, this big metal building and above the door, there is a sign that says “Zenarc Corporation: Shuttle Bay Five.” I stop for a minute. I take a breath. And then I open the big metal door. The cold air instantly hits me. The security guard gets up from his chair and blocks the hallway. He crosses his arms and stands in front of me. His eyes narrow as he demands to see my id badge.

“Really I’ve worked here for three weeks and I’m late.”

After a ridiculous amount of looking at me up and down, looking at my badge then looking back at me looking at my badge again, he lets me pass. Four more heavy metal doors and finally, I’m in the shuttle bay.

VOICE FROM OVERHEAD: “Mission Log 10182135 - Project Objective: To survey the 69 known moons of Jupiter for possible helium2 deposits. You are to report any signs of helium2 directly to your superiors at Zenarc Corporations upon debriefing. All 69 target moons are classified as lifeless but nonetheless, you are advised to keep your scanners on. Be safe and happy hunting miners.”

DANE: Okay, hold on for a second. I know what you are thinking.

Cleveland? Why Cleveland? Why did I go to Cleveland?

Well, I went to Cleveland… because I was tired. Tired in- tired in like a cosmic sense. Like a big sense. Not like a day to day tired. Not like ‘I need a nap tired’ but like ‘I need a 6-month soul nap’ tired. And my friend Emily was going to be gone for 6 weeks so she said ‘Come stay in my house, water my plants, and you can be alone’ and I thought ‘Alone. Alone time. That sounds great. What a gift to somebody who's been living in New York, especially a musician.’ So I thought ‘I’ll write an album.’ And so I went. I took my keyboard, I set it up in her living room, I turned it on, I sat on the bench and Grindr-ed. And ate my way through an Amazon shipping error of Doritos but every once in a while my free hand would reach out blindly and finger a random cord.

Grindr for some people, I think, is fun. Like they can just pop into it and then pop right back out of it whenever they’re done. But for me, I’ve never been able to stop having fun. But not in like a- not in like a ‘I’m always having fun’ kind of way. But in like a- like ‘There’s so much fun that it hurts’ kind of way. Uh, it just eats all of my time, obsessively. But after three days, I still hadn’t gotten laid and all of my white keys were orange. So I deleted Grindr again, and started looking for a job. But after literally walking into a mirror while dropping off my application at the American Apparel and being given what I thought was a rather gosh but nonetheless classic runaround by the assistant manager at the Chipotle, I was running out of options within walking distance. But I finally scored a late season job working at this tiny little neighborhood amusement park. It’s called the Pepper Heights Zoo. This place has been a risk free tax haven since before plastic was invented. It was like a nursing home for the old oil money and the zoo part was a motley collection of creatures gotten cheap for various reasons. But the most popular attraction by far, the animal on all the lunch boxes, the star, was an elderly zebra named Zoe.

Now, I don’t have any experience with animals myself so they gave me a job as a ride attendant on one of the few rides. This large indoor roller coaster called ‘Jupiter’s Lifeless Moons.’ It was right next to Zoe’s exhibit. Everyone just referred to it as ‘The Moons.’ It was a pretty tame ride actually, with a rider minimum height of only 48 inches. 44 if you had an adult. The whole idea was that it was a space shuttle that took space prospectors out to the moons of Jupiter to look for helium2 deposits. My job as an employee of the fake space prospecting company, the Zenarc Corporation, was to unload the kids, instruct them them to report any helium2 deposits during their debriefing in the next room and I had to use my most official sounding voice. And the park did a pretty good job making it all seem spacey and fun, there were flashing lights and space props. And in line, you heard a robot voice saying the mission objective on loop.

[Overhead voice plays again]

There was even, like, space adventure music playing from hidden speakers during the ride itself. That was the cool thing about the Pepper Heights Zoo. They piped in music all over the park like specifically made for the park. A lot of it was recorded years ago by these three ladies. They were sisters. The sherggeburg- the something sisters. I- I don’t know but you can buy their CD in the gift shop.

[Music fades in]

Dreamboy

Dreamboy

You’re my only dream boy

Dreamboy

Dreamboy

You’re my only dream boy

Dream fade into the night

But rather than die away

Why don’t you stay

Dreamboy

Dreamboy

You’re my only dream

Dream

[Music end]

But they also recorded a theme song for Zoe

[Upbeat(Kind of crazy) music starts]

[Sisters laughing]

Zoe, Zoe

The most amazing zebra

Zoe, Zoe

She’s our favorite friend!

La la la la..

[Music fades to background]

And since the ride shares it’s huge metal building with part of Zoe’s exhibit I did have to listen to that on loop for my entire shift. Other than that it was a pretty easy gig though, I just had to stand behind my podium and say my one line into this rank microphone that jesus smelled like a hundred summer’s worth of spit.

“Attention all miners aboard Shuttle Five. Please report your helium2 findings in the debriefing room.”

The lap bars clank open and the kids scramble out. They all run into the next room, the debriefing room but one girl lags behind. She stands there beside the track. I realise slowly that I recognize her. She has ridden the ride several times this week and she’s dressed like a Catholic school or-or I don’t know what I think they dress like. The lap bars slam down automatically on the coaster behind her but she doesn’t jump. The empty car disappears into the dark tunnel to pick up another batch of kids in the next room, leaving us alone.

“Are you okay?”

GIRL: “I’m perfectly fine.”

DANE: “O-Okay. Um, you need to report to debriefing.”

GIRL: “Please. I’m nearly 60 inches tall.

DANE: “O-oh um…”

GIRL: “I know it’s all pretend.”

DANE: “Okay, well you still have to leave before the shuttle comes back though okay?”

GIRL: “I know. I just thought I’d wait till they clear out a little. The other kids.”

DANE: She nodded towards the debriefing room but she wasn’t really looking at it. She wasn't looking at me either and she spoke like a small adult.from the 1960’s in that creepy way that kids who are raised by their grandparents sound. Her eyes settle on a far door. I instinctively step out from behind podium. Then another door opens and a man enters. He walks quickly towards me. His nice suit makes him look completely out of place but he stops when he notices the little girl.

MAN: “Oh! Hello there!”

DANE: He winks at me as he walks over to her and bends down to her eye level.

MAN: “So, tell me. Do you have any helium deposits to report?”

DANE: She says nothing. She just glares at him. It’s the kind of glare that stays anchored on his face as she walks around him and disappears into the debriefing room behind him.

MAN: “Awww. That’s a great age.”

DANE: This man is Eli Critch, the director of the Pepper Heights Zoo.

ELI: “Hello Dwayne.”

DANE: “It’s um..it’s Dane, actually.”

ELI: “Oh yes of course. I’m sorry, Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane.Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane. Dane. I knew that! Dane. Dane. How are you liking it over here at the moons?”

DANE: “Um, it’s fine.”

Somewhere else in the building the old roller coaster car makes a turn and the whole building responds with a soft metallic groan.

[Kind of a aggressive groan from the building]

ELI: “Okay. Well, I just wanted to give you an updated set of keys. Changed the locks last night. Can’t be too careful. What with the current...rigamarole situation.”

DANE: He sets a key ring on the podium. Two shiny new keys on it.

ELI: “That’s the broom closet, that’s the front of the ride and that should do ya’”

DANE: Then he smiles and there is an awkward moment where he is just smiling at me. And then the smile turns off like a neon sign and he walks away. But he stops short in the middle of the Shuttle Bay and turns back around. That green shuttle approaching light flashing on his nice suit.

ELI: “Oh, indeed. You do know that door leads to Zoe’s night time enclosure, yes?”

DANE: He points at the far door. I nod slowly.

[music change to softs casual music]

Now I’ve always loved the grocery store at night. Like a 24-hour grocery store is like my church. And it’s mostly because there are no people, yeah sure but, also because everything has been restocked and straightened and it’s perfectly neat. There’s just row upon row of brightly colored boxes with little cartoon faces all peeking out the same way. And I think it’s because everything is so neat and there are no people moving around and there’s this bouncy music playing, that if you look for it you can really glimpse the shape of a terrible screaming skull behind the gorgeous face that the grocery store. And it hits you. You are standing in a warehouse of death. A plant and animal morgue.

Tonight I want a pie. But the bakery section of the store is dark. Like the lights were out in just that corner and also the pie case, I know exactly where it’s at, I can see it from here, but it has a shorted light tonight. And it’s blinking randomly. Giving the whole bakery section sorta bad part of town feel. Now… I’m maybe a bad boy, maybe not a bad boy, depends on who you ask, but I’m certainly not afraid of the dark and I mean… sort of a rebel. I even have the cart with a squeaky wheel. So, I like squeak right over to that bakery section.

CART: “Squeaky. Squeaky. Squeaky. Squeaky. Squeaky. Squeaky. Squeak.”

Dane: And as soon as I cross the threshold, I see them. Sitting in shadow. Three little girls. Girl Scouts maybe, behind a table. About 12 years old, give or take. They had doll eyes. Over thin smiles.

GIRL: “Good morning.”

DANE: “Oh! Go-But it’s just after midnight.”

GIRL: “Technically morning.”

DANE: “Oh. That’s uh… That’s pretty by the book.”

GIRL 2: “There are enough lies.”

DANE: They’re all wearing matching uniforms? And they all have different patches and I recognize the one girl from the ride easier. It’s the girl that lagged behind and she recognizes me. And the other two are twins but with, different hair.

“Uh… Are you selling something?”

GIRL:“No. But if you would like to donate we would be most appreciative.”

[gwynne-fics]

31 Days of AUs: Apocalypse

Requested by @mrshobbes

Marriage not Dating -- Jang-Mi

one. Jang-Mi thought that the end of the world would be a lot more chaotic than it turned out. When plant-life unexpectedly exploded, both on land and at sea, she and Gi-Tae watched the television with furrowed brows. There was some panic, especially when the army was called up to try and combat the growth that felt aimed at the cities.

“I want you and So-Hee to go to my family’s vacation home out in the country,” he said. “I’m going to pack up my office and transport all of my medical equipment out there. My mother had solar panels installed so it is off the grid.”

Jang-Mi looked at their three month old daughter with a sick feeling to her stomach. She didn’t want to be separated. “What about Yeo-Rim? His cell phone is off.”

Gi-Tae didn’t have an answer for her until she was getting into a car with his grandmother, his mother, his aunt, and their daughter. Her parents were going to join them in a few days. Traffic out of Seoul had already started to build. She’d closed down her restaurant and left Yeo-Rim a message on the counters, just in case he stopped by.

Gi-Tae did the same at his office but no one had seen Yeo-Rim.

They are driving away from everything they know when an emergency announcement calls up all former military men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five to resume their military experience. Jang-Mi started crying and couldn’t stop. It took them six hours to get to the vacation home. Traffic was slow and painful.

Mother-in-law took So-Hee from her and it was a relief.

two. Mother-in-law let her cry and avoid everything but breastfeeding for the first day. Jang-Mi wondered how long she could avoid her responsibilities until her natural inner drive took over. The vacation home had a lovely garden that, like a lot of places in Seoul with plants, exploded and overgrew.

The water feature broke and turned into a natural spring of clean, pure water. Jang-Mi sat by the edge and looked into it with a sad smile. Until the government figured out what was going on and life could return to normal, she needed to help her family survive. Survival was something she was good at.

She stood up and needed to occupy her mind and body or she would go crazy from loneliness. She wasn’t alone. She had her in-laws and her parents were coming soon. The world had changed and she needed to anticipate it.

They had power and the internet but she didn’t know for how long. She found Mother-in-law in the kitchen. Auntie held So-Hee. Jang-Mi went to her laptop and opened a blank document.

“I want to walk around this town after breakfast,” she said. “We need to know what our resources are and make long term plans. We should expect to become a target for needy people because this property is large and we are wealthier than most. Until Gi-Tae is released from the military and my father gets here, we are four women alone. We need to be realistic about that.”

“There is an old rifle in the basement. I don’t know how much ammunition we’ve got.” Mother-in-law’s eyes brighten and Jang-Mi knows she needs a project, too. Auntie isn’t as sure but that doesn’t matter.

“Can either of you shoot? I can’t. My father can but he’s not here yet.”

“Not in years,” she admitted.

“Alright. I’ll put it on the list. Let’s get to work.” It only took two days, but Jang-Mi had a survival plan to take to the small community. She didn’t expect it, but the older generation, once they saw she was serious about protecting everyone and most importantly, feeding, everyone, they made her mayor. Her parents arrived safely with as much nonperishable food as they could fit into their car.

Every night they watched the news and every night it seemed to get a little worse. Jang-Mi didn’t understand why so many people were having problems with their plants. Once they started working with the strange, new plants, instead of trying to cut them back or destroy them, they hadn’t gone hungry.

Jang-Mi made sure to accept everyone who came to their area. The only people she wouldn’t accept were the military deserters. The town council supported her. Nearly every family had someone who went back when called.

She had a month to implement her plan before things abruptly changed. Then she got a surprise text message from Gi-Tae. She aching loneliness stuck in her chest reminded her it was still there, waiting for her to let down her guard.

There is a plague in the big cities. Here are the symptoms to look for. I’m sending Se-Ah with my equipment and vaccines. I can’t leave Seoul. Still no sign of Yeo-Rim. I love you. Kiss So-Hee for me.

I love you.

three. “We need to build a quarantine,” Se-Ah said. “The illness looks like the flu and it is spread the same way. It moves quickly and if we don’t have something to contain it, we will be very dead. We have a vaccine but...production is slow. Gi-Tae figured it out and gave me the formula. He put it online, along with a video on how to make it safely. Where is So-Hee?”

“Napping. What is the survival rate for this flu?” One thing they’d found at the single drug store was plenty of face masks. When news of the plague broke on television, Jang-Mi made sure everyone had one. They’d had no evidence of the sickness in their town but Jang-Mi started construction on a hospital anyway.

She didn’t want to admit they might have to build a wall to protect them at some point. She wanted an open community, ready to take in refugees, but as her mother pointed out--they also needed to be realistic about outside threats.

“One in fifty, if you are a healthy, strong person over twenty and under fifty. I have a hundred vaccines with me.”

“I have about two hundred people. How many can you make over the next few months?”

Se-Ah smiled tightly. “It’s a matter of finding all the parts. Gi-Tae had a better background in traditional medicine and that’s why he was able to be creative.” She paused and gently touched Jang-Mi’s shoulder. “He is doing important work.”

“I know.” Her eyes stung. “What about Richard?”

Se-Ah looked away. “He allowed us to test the first vaccine on him. It didn’t work.”

Jang-Mi gave her a hug. “I’m glad you’re here. We need a doctor who can help us protect this little community. Let’s get to work.”

She was glad to have Se-Ah for the second month of the end of the world. Her one time rival worked tirelessly to inoculate their community while Jang-Mi put the old men to work building simple traps and some genius young women designed a collapsible wall that was both sturdy and defensible.

Everyone came together to build anything they might need and Jang-Mi considered a kind of...side effect that came from talking to her fresh spring.

The overgrowth that destroyed their civilization gave them the resources they needed past just food and water. Because at the end of month two, a warning went out on the one news station holding the fort in Seoul.

Several military platoons have abandoned their posts. They are going to small, successful communities, especially those still with electrical power, and taking over. Beware. The government has not released them or given them the mandate to protect citizens from the Overgrowth.

It was the last message they received from Seoul. The next night, the news did not return.

four. Jang-Mi knew it wouldn’t be long until all communication between little places like hers would cease. So she pulled out her cell phone and had Mother-in-law help her film a brief message to put up.

She ended it with what she felt was the most important thing she learned. “You should have several fresh springs in close proximity to your Overgrowth. Nurture these as best you can. Protect the water and use it to care for your Overgrowth and your Overgrowth will care for you.”

It felt a little ridiculous that other people hadn’t figured that out. She didn’t like the tone in her voice but she put it up on the internet anyway. Before the internet disappeared, her silly video had over a million views and thousands of comments telling her how much easier survival had gotten once they took care of the phenomena that put them in this difficult position.

Two weeks after the news’ warning, a bulldozer was sited in the outer growth that formed a protective circle around her town. They’d started call it the Ring. The bulldozer caused a stir among her people. The Ring was rich in small, easy to hunt, prey animals and was a major source of their protein. Jang-Mi narrowed her eyes and curled her hands into fists as a military unit came out of the forest and down the only road that led into town.

“Raise the wall. I’m going down to meet them.” Jang-Mi ignored the protests and went down to the main road. Mother pushed a mask into her hands and she put it on, just in case these men carried the flu with them. She didn’t want them to think they had the vaccine. She crossed the threshold and the wall snapped up into place, startling the soldiers. She heard a nervous murmur go through them until their leader stopped in front of her. “I am Joo Jang-Mi, the Mayor of this community.”

“That’s impressive but you’re in violation of the law.”

“No, I’m not. There is no centralized government anymore. We haven’t had contact with Seoul or an official news source for two weeks now. We know we’re on our own. Deserters are not welcome here. We only accept veterans with discharge papers. If you’re looking for a place to rest, you can do so outside the gates.”

“We’re here to put you in compliance with the law. In order to control the land, we need to destroy the source of its power. I believe you have four illegal springs. Open the gate.”

She had ten, as of this morning.

“No. Those springs are the reason we’re alive.” She didn’t flinch when he pulled out a handgun and aimed it at her head. “I will not be intimidated. They won’t open the gates if you kill me or take me hostage.”

“You’re the Goddess of the Valley. I can subdue them so easily if I kill you.”

She wasn’t a goddess of anything and she almost laughed in his face. She took off her mask, mostly because she wanted to keep control over this situation, and hiding her face wouldn’t do that. “Killing me would be a mistake. You aren’t that stupid.”

He put his finger on the trigger and two things happened at once: the ground beneath him gave way and someone shot him. The soldier fell into mud, quickly sank, and the ground solidified over him. He was gone. All of the men that followed him threw down their weapons and the ground swallowed them, too.

Well, that was interesting. And a little scary.

“We don’t have discharge papers. They didn’t bother to give them to us.”

It was such a huge risk but…Jang-Mi sighed. Goddess of the Valley was such a ridiculous title. “I want you to get rid of that bulldozer and spend the night in the patch protecting our town. If you survive that, you will go into our quarantine. If you survive quarantine and our doctor clears you of communicable diseases then you can try and find a place in our community. Don’t come near the wall. It is trapped.”

She went back inside and was rushed by concerned people. “Did you see where the shot came from? I thought it went through his temple, not his back.”

The consensus was that it came from the Ring. Jang-Mi decided it wasn’t important. The idea that she had some sort of connection to the Overgrowth scared her.

“I need to feed my baby,” she said. It was one of the few times she wasn’t the Mayor and she could have a few minutes to herself. Feeding So-Hee near the first spring she found was one of her few solaces. Today, it allowed her to calm down and cry, just a little. Mother and Mother-in-law joined her but didn’t push for conversation. “I miss my husbands,” she whispered. They didn’t comment on her use of a plural. “I don’t even know if Yeo-Rim and Gi-Tae are still alive. Yeo-Rim doesn’t even know to come here.”

“If they are alive, they will come here. Everyone knows that you are the Goddess of this Valley.” Mother-in-law said it with a wry grin and her own mother snorted in amusement.

“Don’t tease me. I didn’t ask to be our destruction’s avatar.”

five. Nothing big happened in the next few months. Jang-Mi thought they would get more soldiers but they didn’t and it made her concerned about whatever happened in Seoul. Every once in awhile she would turn on her phone and show So-Hee pictures of her fathers. She would point to both of them and quietly reinforce Appa over and over even though she was only seven months.

And if no one but her knew was checking for text messages on a dead network, that was her business.

Se-Ah became her deputy. The older generation was content to let them run things. She was glad to have a friend to lean on when disputes got difficult or she had to stare down some man who thought he could come in and do it better.

Thankfully, those were few and far between, but the rumors she could control the Overgrowth were out of control.

A mail system was set up and Jang-Mi started a family search effort. She found out Hyun-Hee and Dong-Hoon escaped Seoul with their baby boy and she is relieved to know they are alive. They hadn’t seen Gi-Tae or Yeo-Rim.

Jang-Mi tells herself they are alive and making their way home as soon as they can. She will see them again. They wouldn’t dare leave her alone in this new world.

As the community started running itself, she had less to do, and the whole reason she started such an intense project in the first place, came rushing back. She woke up crying more often than she would care to admit to anyone.

She is alone in that tiny house with glass and blood on the floor.

It was nearly six months since she and her family came to this odd little vacation home when Auntie and Mother ran into the garden where she was feeding So-Hee fruit from one of the new trees that appeared that week. They are out of breath as they talk over each other. “You need to go to the quarantine right now. Go! Go! Go!”

Jang-Mi doesn’t think. She just leaves her daughter with them and hurries out to the quarantine. There were two men standing just outside the gates with Se-Ah. Their backs were to her but she would recognize them anywhere.

Yeo-Rim noticed her first. He turned just enough she could see he was missing an eye but when he smiled and nudged Gi-Tae, she didn’t linger on the eyepatch. She ran to them and flung herself at both of them. Gi-Tae’s left arm was in a sling but he still hugged her tightly.

“It took me too long to find him,” Gi-Tae whispered into her hair. “I’m sorry we kept you waiting.”

“You turned into a goddess,” Yeo-Rim teased after he kissed her. “I hear the Overgrowth obeys your every word.”

“Only because I ask nicely.” She cried and clung to both of them. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t alone. “Welcome home.”

[gurguliare]

Ok I’m typing up the entire story of Cao Cao’s Feud At Yang Xiu because... I love it. That’s why. Mostly for my own reference, may be of use to any NIF fic writers who want #insp for #waystokilloffmeichangsu

As his troops moved through Tong Pass, Cao Cao sighted a flourishing wood in the distance. “What place is that?” he asked an attendant. “Indigo Field,” was the reply. “Cai Yong’s manor is somewhere in there. His daughter Yan and her husband, Dong Si, occupy it now.” Cao Cao had always been on good terms with Cai Yong. In earlier days his daughter Yan had been the wife of Wei Zhongdao. Later, she was taken captive by the northern tribes and bore two sons while among them. Her poems, “Eighteen Tunes for Foreign Flute,” circulated in northern China. Cao Cao himself sympathized with her and had someone ransom her for one thousand ounces of gold. The Xiongnu chief, worthy king of the Left, fearful of Cao’s power, sent Cai Yan back to the land of Han, and Cao Cao gave her in marriage to Dong Si.

Standing before the manor, Cao Cao was reminded of the Cai Yong incident. He ordered his army to go on ahead while he dismounted, accompanied by a hundred guards. Dong Si had left to take up an official post; Cai Yan was at home. She rushed to welcome the visitor. When Cao reached the upper hall, Cai Yan stood to one side after completing the customary ritual reception. Cao Cao happened to notice a stone rubbing and went over to examine the text. He questioned Cai Yan about it.

“It’s taken from the tablet of Cao E,” she explained to him. “During the time of Emperor He in Shangyu there was a shaman named Cao Xu whose whirling dances could have entertained the gods. On the fifth day of the fifth month, while performing on a boat, he fell, drunk, into the river and drowned. His daughter, fourteen at the time, went along the river weeping and wailing for seven days and seven nights, then jumped to her death herself. Five days later she surfaced bearing her father’s body. The local folk buried them beside the water. Du Shang, prefect of Shangyu, notified the court and hailed the daughter’s filial devotion. The prefect had Handan Chun compose this text to mark the event and then had it inscribed on the tablet. Though Handan Chun was only thirteen at the time, he wrote it in one sitting without revising. His monument was set beside the grave and attracted great interest.

“My father, Cai Yong, went to look at it. The sun had already set that day, but he was able to feel the characters in the darkness with his hands. Then he found a brush and wrote eight large characters on the back of the stone. An engraver who recut the stone also cut these eight words.” Cao Cao read the words: “Yellow spun silk --- a young woman; a distaff grandchild --- mortar and pestle.”

“Can you explain this?” Cao asked Cai Yan. “Though it’s by my own father, I’m afraid I cannot,” she replied. Cao turned to his counselors and repeated his request. But none of them could unriddle it, either. Then Yang Xiu, his first secretary, stepped forward and offered to interpret the writing, but Cao Cao asked for more time to think about it. He bid Cai Yan good-bye and left the manor with his retinue.

Cao Cao had ridden three li when the answer came to him. Laughing, he said to Yang Xiu, “Now, try and explain it.”

“It is a cryptic saying,” Yang Xiu began. “Yellow silk is colored silk; and the graph silk (丝) beside the graph color (色) makes the graph superb (绝). A young woman is a junior miss; and junior (少) beside miss (女) makes the graph exquisite (妙). A distaff grandchild is a daughter’s son; and daughter (女) beside son (子) makes the graph excellent (好). Mortar and pestle are tools that can be held to crush the five spicy herbs; and hold (受) beside spicy (辛) forms the graph words (辭). In short, we have four words, ‘superbly exquisite, excellent words.’” Cao Cao was amazed and said, “Exactly my own thought!” Everyone present sighed in admiration at Yang Xiu’s quick mind.

---ONE FULL CHAPTER OF UNRELATED INCIDENT LATER---

...Cao Cao held his forces at the gorge for many days, unable to advance for fear of Ma Chao, unwilling to retreat for fear of exciting the scorn of the western army. Cao Cao was in a state of indecision. At this moment the chief cook brought in chicken broth for Cao Cao, who noticed pieces of ribs in the bowl. The sight gave rise to a thought. As he was musing, Xiahou Dun entered his tent to ask what the password would be that night. “Chicken ribs. Chicken ribs,” Cao replied unthinkingly. Xiahou Dun passed the information to the officers. First Secretary Yang Xiu heard the words and instructed the soldiers assigned to him to pack up and prepare for the journey home. This was reported to Xiahou Dun, who in amazement invited Yang Xiu to his tent and asked why he was preparing to leave. Yang Xiu replied, “I knew by the night signal that the king of Wei would be returning in a few days. You see, chicken ribs have no meat on them, yet one relishes them for the flavor. If we advance, we cannot prevail. Retreat will earn us men’s contempt. There’s no advantage either way, so a quick return home is the best choice. Tomorrow His Highness will order us home to the capital; I thought I’d better put my things in order and avoid a last-minute rush.”

“How well you know His Lordship’s innermost thoughts,” Xiahou Dun said and began arranging his own affairs. Soon all the commanders had begun to do the same.

During the night Cao Cao, agitated and unable to sleep, armed himself and made a private tour of the camp. He was astonished to find Xiahou Dun’s men packing up and summoned Dun for an explanation. Dun told him that First Secretary Yang had anticipated Cao’s wish to return. Next, Cao Cao summoned Yang Xiu, who attributed his interpretation to the chicken ribs. Cao Cao was enraged and said, “You dare concoct statements like this and ruin my men’s morale!” He shouted for his guards to remove and execute the secretary and to post his head at the main gate as a warning to all.

Now Secretary Yang Xiu --- a free spirit who presumed on his talent --- had crossed Cao Cao more than once. One time, Cao Cao had a garden built. When it was ready, he went to inspect it. Without uttering a word of praise or blame, Cao Cao took a brush and wrote a single word, “Alive,” on the gate to the garden, then departed. No one could interpret what this meant, but Yang Xiu said, “The graph alive (活) inside the graph gate (门) makes the graph broad (阔). His Excellency was simply saying that the gate is too wide.” The result was that the workmen rebuilt the surrounding wall, thus changing it to suit their lord. They then invited him to make another visit. Cao Cao came and was delighted. “Who guessed my meaning?” he asked. “Yang Xiu,” they all responded; Cao Cao, though he voiced his admiration, secretly resented the man. Another time, a box of kumiss was sent to Cao Cao from north of the border. Cao Cao wrote three words on the box, “One box cream (一合酥),” and placed it in his cabinet. When Yang Xiu entered and happened to see it, he opened the cabinet and distributed the treat. Cao Cao later asked him why had done it, and Yang Xiu replied, “You wrote quite plainly on the box, ‘per man, one mouthful cream (一人一口酥).’ How could I deviate from Your Excellency’s command?” [Ed. note: ‘mouthful’ = 一口, lit. ‘one mouth.’ 人一口 an uncalled-for deconstruction of 合, which my mother claims might be better translated as “family size.”] Cao Cao smiled with pleasure at the play on words, but in his heart he felt hatred.

Cao Cao lived with a constant fear of assassination and was forever warning his attendants: “I like to kill people in my dreams, so when I fall asleep, be sure not to come too close.” Once while napping during the day, his blanket slipped to the ground and a guard hastened to cover him again. But Cao Cao leaped up, drew his sword and slew the man, then went back to sleep. When he arose a little later, he feigned surprise and said, “Who has killed my man?” When the other attendants told him the truth, he wept sorely and ordered a funeral with full honors. Everyone believed that he had done the killing in his dream --- except Yang Xiu, who had read Cao Cao’s mind. At the time of the burial Yang Xiu pointed at the dead man and said, “His Excellency was not dreaming; only you were!” These words were reported to Cao Cao, whose hatred of Yang Xiu only increased.

Cao Cao’s third son, Zhi, was a great admirer of Yang Xiu’s ability and often had him over for discussions which lasted all night. When Cao Cao had proposed naming Cao Zhi his heir apparent, Cao Pi, the eldest, secretly requested the elder of Zhaoge, Wu Zhi, to come and advise him. To prevent detection, he had Wu Zhi brought in a large box made to hold bolts of silk. Yang Xiu found out the truth, however, and reported it directly to Cao Cao, who put Cao Pi’s quarters under surveillance. Pi nervously informed Wu Zhi, who advised Pi to bring in another container with real bolts of silk to deceive the investigators. Cao Pi did so the next day, and after searching, Cao Cao’s men had to report that silk was all they had found. Cao Cao therefore came to believe that Yang Xiu had intended harm to Cao Pi and hated him the more for it.

Cao Cao then decided to put Cao Pi and Cao Zhi to a test. One day he asked his two sons to appear outside the city gate of Ye, but he told the guards not to let them out. Cao Pi arrived first and was turned back. Cao Zhi heard what had happened at the gate and asked Yang Xiu about it. “When you go forth on the king’s command,” Xiu said, “it is appropriate to cut down anyone who tries to stop you.” Cao Zhi thought this right. And so when he was stopped at the gate, he cried out, “I bear a royal command. Who dares prevent me?” and immediately had the guard cut down. The result was that Cao Cao regarded Zhi as the more capable. Later, however, he was told that Yang Xiu had coached Cao Zhi; he became so angry that he subsequently lost his preference for Cao Zhi.

Yang Xiu had prepared a special primer on state affairs for Cao Zhi’s use. As a result, whenever Cao Cao posed questions about state affairs, Zhi responded so eloquently that Cao Cao eventually became suspicious. Later, Cao Pi bribed a few of Zhi’s followers, who secretly showed Cao Cao the special primer. In a fury Cao Cao said, “How dare this fellow make a fool of me!” It was at this time that he conceived of the idea of killing Yang Xiu. Now, using the “chicken ribs” incident as his pretext, he carried it out. Yang Xiu was thirty-four years old.

[and postscript]

Suddenly a body of men came straight at Cao Cao. The leader shouted, “Wei Yan, here!” He took his bow and fitted an arrow to the string; the shot struck Cao Cao, who tumbled to the ground. Dropping his bow and raising his sword, Wei Yan charged up the slope to kill Cao Cao. But a general cut athwart him, shouting, “Don’t touch our lord!” It was Pang De. With a burst of energy De advanced, drove Wei Yan off, and protected Cao Cao. Ma Chao had already retreated, and so Cao Cao was brought safely back to camp.

Wei Yan’s bolt had struck Cao Cao’s upper lip, knocking out his two front teeth. A physician was called, and while being treated, Cao Cao remembered what Yang Xiu had said about marching home. He had the scholar’s body recovered and given an honorable burial.

[ladystylestores]

India’s coronavirus lockdown: One man’s agonizing 1,250-mile journey home … on foot

But he didn’t stop walking. He couldn’t.

The 26-year-old migrant worker was in the heart of India and only halfway home.

With no way to survive in the cities, and India’s vast railway network mostly shut down, many made the extraordinary decision to walk thousands of miles back to their families.

Many didn’t make it. In one incident, 16 laborers were run over by a freight train as they slept on rail tracks. Roadside accidents took the lives of others. Some died from exhaustion, dehydration or hunger. Those picked up by police were often sent back to the cities they had tried to leave.

Chouhan knew the risks. But on May 12, he decided to defy India’s strict lockdown laws and begin the 1,250-mile (2,000-kilometer) walk from the tech hub of Bengaluru, formerly known as Bangalore, to his village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

He’d hoped to hitchhike much of the way, but with police checking trucks for stowaways, drivers were demanding fees beyond Chouhan’s budget. For 10 days, he’d have to dodge police check points, survive on tea and biscuits, and walk on aching feet.

“I don’t think I can forget this journey through my life,” he says. “It’ll always carry memories of sadness and anxiety.”

A 3 a.m. getaway

Chouhan moved to Bengaluru last December to work as a mason on a construction site.

In his home village of Tribhuvan Nagar, on India’s border with Nepal, he earned 250 rupees ($3.30) a day. In Bengaluru, he could double that.

He and his brother, who worked in another state, sent home about 14,000 rupees ($185) a month — enough to sustain their family of 11, including Chouhan’s two young children and his elderly parents, living in a thatched roof house set amid sugarcane and wheat fields. His nephew Arvind Thakur joined Chouhan in the city as soon as he turned 14, the legal age to work in India.

A video of Rajesh Chouhan’s house. 11 people share this space. “When it rains, we get wet even inside the house”

By the time Chouhan, his nephew and nine other migrants from their hometown had decided to leave Bengaluru, the country had been shut down for weeks. Some rail services resumed on May 3, allowing interstate travel — but only subject to a laborious approval process.

Migrants were told to register their travel plans at police stations. By May 5, more than 214,000 people had registered to leave Karnataka state, of which Bengaluru is the capital. However, barely 10,000 people got tickets as there was limited train service.

Normally Chouhan pays 300 rupees ($4) for the 48-hour trip home in the lowest carriage class, but during the pandemic that price soared to 1,200 rupees ($15.90). State police were assigned to sell tickets and keep order at police stations packed with travelers desperate to get home.

Police in Bengalore told CNN they resorted to using batons to clear the crowds when sales for the day ended. “We were beaten many times. Just because we are poor, doesn’t mean we can’t feel pain,” says Chouhan.

After spending five days outside a police station trying to get a ticket, Chouhan and his fellow villagers decided to walk. They didn’t dare tell their families.

“We were beaten many times. Just because we are poor, doesn’t mean we can’t feel pain.”Rajesh Chouhan

“My father is severely diabetic and it would take a toll on him and my mother if they found out that we were walking home with no money,” Chouhan says. “They’d cry until our return. All of us decided to tell our families that we were waiting for a train.”

He packed four shirts, a towel and a bed sheet in his backpack, along with a couple of water bottles. In his wallet was 170 rupees ($2.25).

At 3 a.m. on May 12, Chouhan slipped out of the single-room tin shed he shared with 10 other people and took his first step towards home.

Getting out

By the time Chouhan left, police checkpoints had been erected across the city. Authorities had not anticipated the rush of migrants wanting to leave and clarified that registration applied only to those “stranded” — not migrant workers. Unauthorized interstate travel was banned.

As Chouhan’s group walked across the city, they were picked up by police and taken to the station where their boss — who never wanted them to leave — would pick them up. While migrant workers have rights under Indian law, often they are unaware of them and exploited by employers.

At noon, police officers changed shifts and the group was left unattended. “We ran out of there,” Chouhan says. “We ran for two kilometers or so until we felt we were safe.”

Following railway tracks to avoid police on the roads, the group walked through the night, with other migrants, until they entered Andhra Pradesh at 1 a.m.

After 46 hours, they had crossed the first of the five state borders they would encounter. They had traveled just 74 miles (120 kilometers).

Hope, solidarity and hunger

Chouhan’s group of 11 migrants had nine smartphones between them, and they used Google Maps to navigate their route. They used the flashing blue dot to see if they were roughly walking in the right direction.

To conserve battery power, only one person would have their phone switched on at a time, and they took turns sharing GPS. There were few places along the way where they could charge their phones.

The first part of their journey traced National Highway 44 — a long, open road that slices India neatly in two, running the length of the country from Tamil Nadu in the south to Srinagar in the north.

This road would take them to Hyderabad, the city of 10 million people that was to be the first big landmark of their journey — and where they’d heard it would be possible to hitchhike the rest of the way home.

As temperatures topped 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), Chouhan walked about 5 miles (8 kilometers) an hour, taking a brief rest every two hours. He aimed to complete about 68 miles (110 kilometers) a day. “There was temptation to rest or to nap,” he says. “But we were aware that it became more difficult to walk each time we sat down.”

Along the way, they’d see other groups of migrants heading for the impoverished western states of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which supply India’s cities with much of their migrant labor force.

On the road, Chouhan says traditional divisions of caste and religion — deeply entrenched fault lines in India’s rural hinterlands — disappeared. His group of 11 spanned various castes from the same village. There were Brahmins and Thakurs, who are considered upper castes, and Chamars, who are among the lowest. On the long walk home, it didn’t make a difference.

When Chouhan’s slipper broke on the second day, the group pooled their funds to buy him a new shoe.

Rajesh Chouhan and his friends wait on the divider hoping for a truck to drop them across the border.

After asking locals about ways to bypass the upcoming police checkpost, Rajesh’s 11-member group heading to Gonda join a 17-member group heading to Chattisgarh state. The group peeled off the highway and walked through fields and forests to avoid the police.

But by day three, they had not had a full meal since they left Bengaluru. Each person had started out with between 150 rupees ($2) and 300 rupees ($4). Instead, they’d buy 20 biscuits for 100 rupees ($1.32) and ration them through the day. “We had to save every rupee in case we needed it later during the journey,” says Chouhan.

“Our stomachs would rumble. We’d eat a biscuit to keep it quiet. We were hungry, but we had no choice. We had to save every rupee in case of an emergency.”

Around 8 a.m. that day, they stopped on the side of National Highway 44, thinking they’d rest for an hour. They slept for eight, oblivious to the din of highway noises and blaring trucks.

When they woke up at 4 p.m. Hyderabad was 250 miles (400 kilometers) and one state border away.

Crossing borders

With Hyderabad in his sights, Chouhan walked through the night. But when his group reached the town of Kurnool at about 10 a.m. on day four, a police checkpoint blocked the bridge they had to cross to reach the city.

Chouhan saw a stream of migrants following a winding path along the river and followed them. About 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away, hundreds were crossing the river on foot.

Chouhan and the others hesitated — they didn’t know how to swim. “Men, women, children, the elderly were crossing the river,” he says. “(We thought) if they can do it, why can’t we.”

After a long, hot summer, the river was only 3 feet (1 meter) deep. Chouhan held his bag over his head, and one of the tallest men in their group carried his 14-year-old nephew.

“We were so scared we’d be washed away. But we kept telling ourselves this was the only way home. This 100-meter stretch was perhaps the most scared we’ve been on this journey,” says Chouhan.

Back on the highway, truckers were asking as much as 2,500 rupees ($33) per person to take them towards Uttar Pradesh. “They told us that if the police caught them, they would have to pay big penalties. They didn’t want to take the risk without getting paid in return. We had no option but to walk,” says Chouhan.

But others were more charitable. One old man offered them their first full meal in four days. A truck driver took pity on their blistered feet and offered them a lift. He was transporting rice across the border and they slept between the gunny sacks, as he drove them around the outskirts of Hyderabad.

After they passed the Telangana-Maharashtra border, they had another stroke of luck — a villager took them to a school where NGOs were giving food and water to migrant workers.

More than 300 migrants were eating when the police arrived.

“They started to abuse us,” Chouhan says. “They said we were not following social distancing and we should sit 10 feet from each other. They attempted to disperse the crowd and told the organizers to stop giving out food.”

But the migrants outnumbered the police. “We started to shout back. Some migrant workers even started to push the police, and the police retreated towards their jeep,” he says. “We were angry. They (police) don’t help us at all — they don’t help people help us.”

Pandemic and death on roads

When Chouhan was in Bengaluru, he had heard about the pandemic that had brought India to a halt. But he says his understanding of it was poor. When he left on May 12, Bengaluru had just 186 confirmed cases. As he walked home, Chouhan chatted to other migrants, huddled in trucks and tractors, and ate meals in close quarters, breaking social distancing regulations.

There is little data on how the migration of urban workers has impacted the spread of coronavirus in India. Returning migrants have tested positive for the disease in large numbers in many states, but it is not known if they contracted Covid-19 in the city or picked it up along the way.

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, more than 807,000 interstate migrants were being quarantined by May 24. Of the more than 50,000 tested, 1,569 were diagnosed with Covid-19.

On day five of their journey, the group had a health scare as they approached the central Indian city of Nagpur.

Rajesh’s nephew Arvind Thakur had a fever. “I did get scared,” Thakur says. “I do not understand anything about coronavirus. But the adults told me it cannot be coronavirus as it comes first as a cold and cough. I only had fever. They gave me tablets and I felt better.”

On the highway, the pandemic was a low priority — there were more pressing health concerns: hunger, thirst, exhaustion and pain.

There is no official data on deaths due to India’s lockdown, but a volunteer-driven database set up by a group of Indian academics has been tracking local media reports of fatalities as a consequence of the policy.

By May 24, it had recorded 667 deaths, of which 244 were migrant workers who died while walking home: either through starvation, exhaustion or in rail and road accidents.

“In Bengaluru, I was scared of this illness,” says Chouhan. “Now, all we wanted to do was go home. It was not in our hands if we fell sick during this journey.

“The moment we left Bengaluru, we’d left our fate to the gods.”

The home run

Under the black night sky and thick canopies of the forested areas of Central India that once inspired Rudyard Kipling to write “The Jungle Book,” Chouhan crossed the Maharasthra-Madhya Pradesh border. It was day six.

In Madhya Pradesh, tractors, buses and trucks helped the group along during the day, and hillside villagers provided them with food and even a tanker to bathe in.

Two days later, they reached the border of their home state, Uttar Pradesh. Home was just 217 miles (350 kilometers) away. “We forgot our pain. It felt like we were already home,” says Chouhan.

As they passed Prayagraj, a site central to Hindu spiritualism where the rivers Ganges, Yamuna and Sarasvati converge, Chouhan allowed himself a rare moment of joy.

Joining thousands of Hindus, he took a dip in the cool waters, and said a prayer for the group to reach home early.

One day later, their ninth of walking, they reached the state capital, Lucknow.

Home was just 80 miles (128 kilometers) away. Chouhan bought a meal for the first time since their journey began and called his family. “We told them we had come by train to Uttar Pradesh. We would be home in a day,” he says.

The closer they came home, the more tired Chouhan says they felt.

On day 10, at Gonda, 18 miles (30 kilometers) from their village, Thakur’s body gave up. He fell face first into the asphalt. The group revived him by pouring water on his face.

Then, just 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from home, they ran into the police. Too weak to run, they allowed officers to place them quarantine.

Finally, they were home.

Home and scarred

The scars of walking up the spine of India took its toll on their bodies.

Chouhan says he has lost 10 kilograms (22 pounds) throughout the journey. He says his feet have swollen so much it’s a struggle to walk to the bathroom in the school where he is meant to be quarantined for 14 days.

However, in Uttar Pradesh the quarantine is badly enforced.

On May 24, Chouhan says his family was allowed to visit him in quarantine.

His children lunged towards him. And when they hugged tightly, Chouhan says he forgot his pain. He has been allowed to visit his family at their home, and go to the pharmacy to buy medicine, which he took out loans to pay for.

Seeing his thatched-roof house, where his big family sleeps, he says, reminds him how his work in Bengaluru has sustained his family.

Yet on May 25, tragedy struck. Thirty-year-old Salman, one of the 11 who walked from Bengaluru, was bitten by a snake just days after arriving home and leaving quarantine.

He died on the way to the hospital.

More than 45,000 people die of snake bites in India annually. More than 200 people attended Salman’s funeral, including some of the group Chouhan walked with, who were meant to be in quarantine.

Chouhan is mourning the tragedy. Yet he realizes that the poverty in his village, the hunger of his family, and the mounting debt from their medical treatment mean he must eventually return to the city to work.

“When I left Bengaluru, I resolved never to return,” he says. “The best I can do is wait for a few weeks to see if the lockdown is relaxed before heading out again for work.”

Design and graphics by Jason Kwok. Edited by Jenni Marsh and Hilary Whiteman.

Source link

قالب وردپرس

from World Wide News https://ift.tt/2AmAnWa

[bigyack-com]

Modern Black Friday Work Force: Postal Clerk, Influencer, Robot

A postal employee who processes one Amazon return after another. A part-time stockroom clerk who works spotty hours for minimum wage and no health benefits. A social media influencer who pitches products to her 83,000 Instagram followers. A robot that scans the shelves at Walmart. Meet America’s retail work force in 2019. Nearly five million people are employed in traditional retail jobs. Many still work in stores, selling stuff, but the reality is that today’s retail industry is powered by a variety of staff employees, gig workers and artificial intelligence. The changes reflect shifts in what shoppers want — lower prices and more convenience. Shopping, even in stores, now involves technology that is altering the way we interact with the sales staff. Here are six stories of modern-day retail work. — The Luggage Salesman — Sterling Lewis, Macy’s, Manhattan There are not many retail workers left like Mr. Lewis. He started at Macy’s 37 years ago and he’s still selling luggage in the Herald Square store. Retailing was not the career Mr. Lewis expected to pursue when he moved to Brooklyn from Trinidad at age 13. He attended college briefly, but dropped out when his son was born and he needed a job. He went to work in the Macy’s stockroom, racking up overtime to support his family. “You do what you have to do,” he said. Today, Mr. Lewis earns about $70,000 a year, which includes wages and 2 percent commissions on each item he sells. It can be tempting, he says, to immediately steer shoppers to a Tumi bag that costs $1,000, but that only leads to more returns. “I start low and come up,” he said. “I want the customer to say ‘show me something better.’” Mr. Lewis, 63, met his wife while she was working in the shoe department. Together, the couple saved up enough money for a down payment on a house in Jackson Heights on a corner lot with a backyard big enough for three fig trees, a grape arbor and vegetable beds with sweet peppers, garlic, collard greens and strawberries. Mr. Lewis wears a gold hoop earring in each ear and a blue lanyard around his neck to show off his membership in the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which he credits with providing him and his colleagues with financial security. Would he ever encourage his 3-year-old grandson to work in a store one day? “Hell no,” Mr. Lewis says. “You can’t grow in retail anymore.” — The Robot — Wall-E, Walmart, Phillipsburg, N.J. Wall-E starts the day at 4 a.m., rolling through the aisles, scanning the shelves and looking for “outs” — any item that needs restocking. The robot has a long white neck, bright spotlights and 15 cameras that snap thousands of photos, which are transmitted directly to its colleagues’ hand-held devices telling them exactly which shelves need restocking. After it finishes scanning, Wall-E parks itself in a remote corner of the store, next to a bright blue sign that says “Our People Make the Difference,” and takes a “nap” to recharge its batteries. Wall-E works two shifts, seven days a week, in the Walmart supercenter in Phillipsburg, a former railroad and industrial hub on the Delaware River. Designed by the robotics company Bossa Nova, Wall-E is one of 350 robots at Walmart stores across the country. Their purpose is to free up employees to interact with customers or focus on other initiatives like Walmart’s push to deliver groceries to customers ordering online. This month, the store in Phillipsburg hired 22 employees and it is looking to hire 25 more. Employees have embraced the robot, said Tom McGowan, the store manager, because it performs a tedious task no one likes — cataloging out-of-stock items. (Walmart allows store employees to name each robot. Wall-E wears a name badge like every other worker.) Customers have different reactions: A few children have tried to ride the robots, while many adults ignore the devices and keep shopping. Some ask whether robots are taking jobs away from humans. “I tell them ‘No, I actually have openings,’” Mr. McGowan said. “‘Would you like to apply?’” — The Stockroom Worker Nevin Muni, T.J. Maxx, Queens For Ms. Muni, life as a part-time worker in a stockroom in Astoria can be unpredictable. Most weeks, Ms. Muni is scheduled to work either 12 or 16 hours, but she is often asked to come in on her days off. Ms. Muni, who earns the local minimum wage of $15 an hour, never turns down work. “I have to make ends meet,” she said. “Whatever job I find, I take.” An immigrant from Turkey, Ms. Muni, 52, takes multiple train lines to reach the store, leaving her house in Elmhurst, Queens, and her husband, who is recovering from a stroke, before 6 a.m. Hoping to save money one recent month, Ms. Muni bought a 30-day MetroCard instead of paying for single rides. But she ended up losing money on the card because the extra shifts never materialized that month. She has no health insurance, but manages to be resourceful. She recently had a cavity filled by dental students at New York University. Ms. Muni moved to New York eight years ago and recently joined the Retail Action Project, a worker group and job training program affiliated with the retail employees union. She has degrees in media economics and human resources management from a university in Turkey. But those skills are not needed in the cramped, windowless stockroom on the third floor of the T.J. Maxx., behind the men’s underwear rack and the bin of Christmas-themed pillows. Ms. Muni unpacks boxes from delivery trucks and arranges last season’s pajamas and dress shirts on hangers, for display in the store. Her co-workers in the stockroom include women from Peru, Ecuador, Morocco and the Dominican Republic. “We laugh. We talk about family,” she said. “My job is hard, but I love these friends.” — The Postal Employee — Eric. C. Wilson, post office, Greenwich, Conn. Mr. Wilson has watched the internet upend how Americans shop and communicate from a unique vantage point: the service window of the post office where he has worked for more than 30 years. When Mr. Wilson, 58, started in the business, his job revolved around processing letters, cards and flat parcels. But those have fallen off in the age of email and text messages, he said. Now, his window is bustling with a specific type of package: returns of online purchases, which have become an enormous part of his days. “We get hundreds and hundreds of those, especially this time of year,” Mr. Wilson, a father of two, said in a telephone interview as he drove to his home in Stamford, Conn. The change is a side effect of the boom in online shopping, which results in far more returns than purchases made at brick-and-mortar stores. It has been a boon for post offices and employees like Mr. Wilson. “At one time, they thought the internet was actually going to kill the Postal Service, but it’s been very helpful because of the way people order packages online now,” he said. Mr. Wilson’s post office will operate four or five service windows — up from its typical two — between Thanksgiving weekend and Dec. 24, he said. Sending packages to Amazon is a shift from handling letters but Mr. Wilson is not sentimental about it. “I don’t really miss it at all,” he said. “You just adjust to what the change is.” — The Influencer — While Ms. Johnson doesn’t technically work in retailing, she’s one of the many social media mavens who have become central to the industry by making product pitches to her roughly 83,000 Instagram followers and 355,000 YouTube subscribers. Throughout November — which Ms. Johnson, 37, calls “Black Friday month” — she estimates that she will participate in about 20 sponsored campaigns, in which brands pay her for certain promotional posts. She also earns commissions from retailers like Best Buy and Target when her followers click on a link she provides and buy an item. “At this point, what I’ve created has turned into a media and marketing company,” said Ms. Johnson, who lives outside Salt Lake City. “I’ve talked to multiple brands who said they don’t spend as much money on TV ads and have put it all into marketing with influencers or online marketing because they just get a bigger return.” Ms. Johnson, whose posts sometimes feature her 10-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, started blogging about bargains a decade ago on a site, now sold, called Freebies 2 Deals, as a way to work from home. On Instagram, her calls to buy cardigans on Amazon and toys at Target are interspersed with date night selfies and relatable fare about parenting. “The people who follow me or watch my stories feel like we’re best friends,” she said. When she recommends a great deal or product they love, “it builds another layer of trust.” — The Quasi-Fulfillment Worker — Sherika McGibbon, Zara, Manhattan When Ms. McGibbon started working at Zara six years ago, customers seemed to have far more patience. “Today many people are in a hurry,” Ms. McGibbon said. “They don’t take time to touch and feel the material. They just want to buy it and leave.” Ms. McGibbon, who has worked all over the retail industry, including at the Gap and the now-defunct Daffy’s, attributes the change to online shopping, which prioritizes convenience over the experience. E-commerce has also altered Ms. McGibbon’s daily routine and turned her Zara near Union Square into a miniature fulfillment center. Ms. McGibbon, who earns about $16 an hour, spends the first part of the morning on the sales floor interacting with customers. After lunch, she reports to the stockroom and packs FedEx boxes until her shift ends at 5 p.m. The delivery service picks up online orders twice a day. Ms. McGibbon, 31, usually packs about 50 such orders a day. During the Black Friday weekend, her store expects to ship 2,000 orders. A single mother raising a 12-year-old son, Ms. McGibbon says she still enjoys the challenge of helping customers put together an outfit. As a hobby, she advises friends and family how to dress. “Stylin’ by Sherika,” she calls her consultancy. She would like to turn it into a business someday. “Retail is fast,” she said over the throbbing music at the Fifth Avenue store. “There is a lot of adrenaline. But if it ever gets slow, I got to go.” Source link Read the full article

[bevioletskies]

20 questions [11/20]

characters: peter/gamora, guardians-centric

fandom: avengers academy/marvel cinematic universe

summary: wasp has a new competition in store for the students of avengers academy, and there’s money involved. so obviously, peter and gamora have to pretend to be a couple in order to win. wait, what?

chapter preview: peter and gamora arrive at the wrong conclusion, nebula offers some surprising perspective, and new plans are made.

word count: 5338 | total word count: 118k

a/n: just a little reminder that while these guys are heavily based on the mcu guardians, they're still a lot younger (think like 20 - 24?) and therefore are a little more insecure than their movie counterparts, if that makes sense. That's my justification for why peter and gamora are so bad at this sometimes, oh god

ao3 | previously | next | masterpost

Gamora wished she could say she had done more after that moment. She wished that she could have told Peter about her confusing feelings about him lately, about the things Mantis had said about them being together for real, or at the very least, say that she had missed him (because she did, god, did she miss him).

But that would’ve required confidence, and for some reason, for maybe the first time in her life, confidence had left her hanging.

She wasn’t even sure what it was that left her so weirdly, emotionally numb, the second she was back in his arms. Maybe it was the exhaustion of the mission, the whirlwind of emotions that swirled about in her brain from having to rescue Nebula from the brink of no turning back. Or maybe it was just the warmth of Peter’s smile, perhaps too calming for once, washing away every conflicting thought she had been having.

Peter, despite being an open book of emotions himself, seemed unaware of Gamora’s internal plight, bending to kiss her forehead and hold her for a while longer. The moment was ruined when Rocket hollered for them to get a room (“or just go back to the ship already, don’t make out in front of everyone like a buncha losers!”). Groot also insisted on squeezing himself between their heads so he could snuggle Gamora’s face and chatter to her nonsensically, his mouth running a mile a minute.

Eventually, Peter walked Gamora back to the Milano, mostly in silence, their hands tangled together. He insisted that she needed a nap, promising that they could catch up over dinner with the rest of the group. Part of her wanted to ask him to come to bed with her, maybe chat there, alone, but it strangely felt too forward. Instead, she could only smile and nod in agreement, having done enough fighting for the past month to leave her craving deep sleep, in a bed so uncomfortable that she knew it had to be home.

Once she’d buried herself in her sheets, the rustle of cheap cotton nearly as comforting as the smell of ship’s constant stench of machine oil, she decided she’d talk to Peter about her feelings after dinner. After all, she could play it off as part of their game, maybe find some indirect way of asking if he felt similarly, without saying anything herself. That could work, right?

Problem number one - she slept through dinner, though she could vaguely remember Peter kneeling near her head, pulling her duvet back over her after it’d slipped during her restless slumber, whispering softly that he could bring her a plate later.

Problem number two - she slept through the rest of the night.

Problem number three - she didn’t wake until she had five minutes to get ready before her first class started, and had to sprint across campus before the All-Father could get mad.

Classes didn’t end until 3 PM, and even then, Gamora had to go to the gym for sparring practice with Natasha. “We can cancel if you want to,” Natasha had said. “I mean, you’ve been gone for four weeks, we can miss one more session if it means you rest longer.” But strangely, Gamora had found herself insisting. Her plan seemed less and less of a good idea, the more she thought about it. If she put it off just a little bit longer, maybe it wouldn’t be a conversation she’d want to have after all.

“It feels weird being back,” she said the moment she had arrived, watching Natasha’s reflection as the other girl stretched in the mirror. “I must admit, I wasn’t sure I would make it out alive. Nebula was able to coerce an entire military unit into shooting us down.”

“I'm glad you were able to convince her otherwise,” Natasha said, turning to smile gently at her. “Would've been devastating if any of you had died.”

“You really think I'm that cared for,” Gamora said. It wasn't a question. “I imagine Quill, for example, would be much more of a loss.”

“You’re a valuable person to a lot of people here, including me, by the way, and not just because you’re an incredible fighter,” Natasha said, passing her a practice sword. “And speaking of Quill, imagine how he'd react if he lost you. He'd probably lose his mind.”

Gamora settled into her starting stance, though she hesitated to move. “We’ve become like family. I’d imagine any of us getting killed would hurt him,” she commented. “We haven't actually talked since I returned. But he seems to have made new friends in my absence.”

Natasha smirked, teasing. “Silk especially seems to have made a connection with him. You jealous?”

“I trust him. And from what I could tell, she seems to share a lot of similar personality...quirks...as well,” Gamora returned as diplomatically as possible. “Now, let us fight.”

She returned to the Milano mere minutes before dinner was ready, feeling rather desperate to see everyone’s faces again. Drax and Mantis were busying themselves in the kitchen as always, while Yondu and Nebula seemed to be having a competition on who could take up the most leg room on the coffee table, resulting in them kicking each other like bratty children. Groot was sleeping on Rocket’s head, who seemed unperturbed by this as he reloaded some of his BFGs with fuel.

“Hello, Gamora,” Mantis said happily, looking up from her chopping board. “You are just in time for dinner! Maybe you could go get Peter? He is in his room.”

Gamora narrowed her eyes in suspicion. Mantis’s pushiness, as unusually persistent as it was, was something to come back to another time, so she obliged and went to knock on Peter’s door. “Come in,” he called.

He was sprawled on his bed, surrounded by books and a mess of papers, his Walkman by his side. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. She felt weirdly uneasy, the corner of her mouth twitching as if to dare her to tell him what she’d been thinking about.

Peter rolled onto his side to look at her properly, smiling. “We got time to chat before then?” He patted the spot next to him, and Gamora settled in, realizing she could put this off no longer. To her surprise, the first thing Peter did was reach for her, cupping her jaw in his hands. His eyes roamed her face, searching for something. “Didn’t get a chance to ask you yesterday - are you doing okay?”

“Physically, I’m alright. All of my minor injuries have already healed,” she said carefully, wondering how long he was planning on holding her this way. “As for my mental state...I guess I’m just not used to subduing someone with words. How do you do it so easily?”

“Sheer dumb luck,” he said cheerfully. “Doesn’t always work, though. I mean, most of the weird scars on my body come from girls who weren’t so happy with me.”

“Well, I’m mildly irritated by you all the time, and I don’t think I’ve left any marks on your body yet,” Gamora teased. Peter released her very suddenly, an odd expression passing over him as he considered her words. “What happened on campus while we were away? Those new students, who were they?”

He shrugged, nonchalant, finally tearing his eyes away from her. “Other Peter’s got a rogues gallery that would make anyone’s head explode. More enemies, friends, sort-of girlfriends. Something about Symbiotes, I don’t know, Janet would know better than me. I was just a tour guide.”

“They enjoyed your company,” she said, twisting her rings slowly. “Especially that girl, Cindy.”

“Turns out we have a lot in common,” he replied.

Gamora hummed in response, turning onto her back to look at the ceiling. To her surprise, Peter appeared to have printed off polaroid versions of the selfies they had taken on their weekend trip and stuck them up there, including the kiss in Shakespeare Park. It felt so simple back then, Gamora thought. Now I’m acting like a jealous girlfriend to someone I’m not even dating. What is wrong with me?

“Maybe that’s worth exploring,” she suggested. She hoped her voice didn’t sound as tumultuous as she felt, her stomach threatening to turn as she spoke. She’d only briefly introduced herself to Cindy, spoke to her for all of thirty seconds, but it was clear that she had a sweet, energetic nature, upbeat to a fault. Seeing Peter talk to her only made it clearer that Gamora was right, as much as she didn’t want to be - he would be compatible with someone that wasn’t her.

So now, new plan. Instead of telling Peter how she felt, help him find someone else. Someone who didn’t have to babysit her homicidal sister, someone who didn’t have a kill count in the hundreds and nightmares about bloodied bodies in the thousands. Someone who would actually know how to be a good girlfriend, not whatever it was that Gamora was attempting right now. Someone who could make him happy.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’re going to ‘break up’ eventually,” Gamora said, her voice steady. “And knowing you, you’re not going to stay single forever, right? If you and Cindy share commonalities, maybe she could be your next girlfriend. Your real girlfriend.”

Peter stared at her quizzically, as if she had grown a second head. What? In the time that she’d been gone, he had come to realize that he liked her, more than he ever thought he would have (and no, he wasn’t going to break out the other “L” word yet, it made everything feel too real). He’d hoped that after Gamora had recovered from her grueling mission, had settled back into her life as it was, they would be able to talk things out. After all, they’d been sharing so many secrets now, conversations he would’ve never dreamed of having with someone as private as her, and maybe, one day, he would have the courage to tell her his biggest secret yet. After all, there was always the chance she felt the same, even if their near-kiss had been an impulsive accident. Now, she seemed almost too confident about him dating someone after they were “broken up”.

Finally, he said, “Cindy seems pretty cool, but I’m not interested in dating her or anything. Just a new friend.”

Despite Peter’s best efforts, Gamora seemed oddly evasive, refusing to meet his gaze. His fingers twitched, wanting to touch her face again, tip her chin upwards so he could read her expression, but he wasn’t about to risk it, not when she seemed so withdrawn. “Oh, well, I guess that makes sense. After all, having two ‘serious’ relationships in a row isn’t really in your purview, is it? I think people would be surprised to see you committing to another person so soon. It would be smart to wait.”

“You really think I care about that?” He shot straight up to a sitting position, eyes cold as they fixated on her face, now staring up at him tentatively. His voice was dangerously low, making Gamora shiver. It was unlike anything she’d ever heard. “You know me better than that, Gamora. Or at least I thought you did. But now I guess I know what you really think of me, hey?” He stood, moving towards the door as if to leave, before turning on his heel. “Could’ve sworn we had this conversation already. I care about being a good leader, a good brother, a good friend. Why would I give a shit about being seen as a guy who plays with other people’s feelings? Maybe that’s what I was like back then, but wow, really, good to know you still see me like that now.”

Sitting up slowly, Gamora finally lifted her chin to look at him, her eyes glassy. “I...apologize,” she mumbled, unusually timid. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just as bad as that man, aren’t I?”

He sighed, reaching over to put a hand on her shoulder. To his alarm, Gamora flinched away from his touch, scrambling to her feet and pushing past him towards the door. “Gamora, hey, I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that, you’re not like that guy, I just…” She ignored him in favour of practically running out of his room, a choked sound escaping her throat before she could stop herself. Shit, Peter thought. I really hurt her feelings.

In hindsight, it wasn’t as if her perspective on their increasingly messy fake relationship situation was that far off. Students had been more surprised about him being in a relationship than her being in a relationship, despite him having more experience with people.  He did flirt, constantly and consistently, with many of the people he came into contact with. For the most part, it was just a personality quirk as with all of the oddities that others came to expect of him - the dancing, the impulsiveness, the odd solutions he’d come up with when he improvised. He didn’t expect much to evolve from the flirting, in all honesty. As a Ravager, he charmed people into giving information or goods. As a Conservatory student, he used it as a coping mechanism. Now, as an Academy student, he was surrounded by a lot of powerful, talented women who were much more Peter’s type than some of the girls from his old days. It was natural, wanting to impress them as much as they impressed him.

So yes, maybe Gamora was onto something. He shouldn’t have gotten so angry, but Peter didn’t like the implications of her words - like this relationship was just a checkpoint before leading to something else, a precursor to a “real” relationship. Because after all, this one was starting to feel too realistic. Holding her and kissing her, exchanging text messages late into the night, telling her things he’d never told anyone before. Laughing, dancing, singing words in her ear that he was too afraid to speak aloud...all for this long con, and for what? Ten thousand units. That was all this was about, wasn’t it?

Shaking himself, Peter walked out of his room slowly, head spinning. “Get a grip, dude,” he whispered to himself sternly. “It’s not real.”

Dinner was tense, unusually so. It was normal at first, with everyone fighting over the dishes, arguing over who was supposed to be in charge of cutting up Groot’s portion into smaller pieces, and disagreeing about whatever they’d learned in class that day, but with Peter and Gamora being so withdrawn, the others started to take notice.

“Who pissed in your stew, Quill?” Yondu said, slapping him heartily on the back. “Eat up or else - ”

“Yeah, I got it,” Peter said, shoveling his food hastily into his mouth and nearly choking in the process. As ridiculous as they were, he didn’t really want to hear another one of Yondu’s weird, albeit empty threats.

“You are stressed,” Mantis said sadly, setting her plate down. “What is wrong, Peter?”

He put down his food as well, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m, uh, not really hungry right now. Think I’m coming down with something. I’m gonna go back to my room and sleep it off.”

He could feel everyone’s eyes following him in worry, but it didn’t matter. He knew Gamora hadn’t even looked up.

______

For the rest of the week, it was as if they had given up on the pretense of their relationship altogether. They sat together in classes but said almost nothing to each other, didn’t hold hands or kiss once, and their classmates were starting to wonder.

“If you’re having relationship problems, you can talk to me, Gamora,” Janet had said to her in the girls’ locker room before combat training. “I’d hate to see you and Peter fall apart.”

“We’re just having a bit of a rough time,” Gamora had told her, though she didn’t sound too convinced of her own words. She and Peter had fought plenty of times before, on a near daily basis, in fact, screamed until their throats were dry. But something about that one thing she said, something that she had thought to be so trivial, mere passing commentary, had tipped the scale for Peter, and in all honesty, it scared her. Not Peter himself, but the fact she had even said such a thing about him, had made him feel so low.

Outside of class, the two of them avoided each other like it was a sickness, their tension unlike anything the Guardians had seen before. Groot looked quite crestfallen when Peter didn’t show up to dinner three nights in a row, letting out a sad little “I am Groot” in an attempt not to cry at his missing “father”. Rocket had to hum him to sleep as a means of distracting him.

“Sister, I refuse to talk to you about Quill,” Nebula said loudly on Thursday night, as she plopped herself down, uninvited, on Gamora’s bed. “But your sad nature is even making me appear cheerful, so stop it.”

“Because that’s how it works. You ask me to stop being sad, and it just happens,” Gamora retorted dryly, setting her book aside. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

“I’m bored,” Nebula shrugged. “I’ve finished all the catch-up work that the Director insisted upon giving me in my absence.”

“And you think I need a distraction,” Gamora said, a smile beginning to grow on her face. “How kind.”

“Shut up,” Nebula shot back, although she was starting to smirk in return. “I have an idea. You are going to come with me.”

______

An hour later, the sisters were sitting on the roof of the Avengers Hall, observing the students that were still roaming around campus that had plunged into darkness, only letting the dim lights of the streetlamps guide their way. Nebula was holding what Gamora suspected were binoculars she’d stolen from Jessica Jones (the “JJ <3 LC” scratched into the side certainly confirmed it), searching for something.

“Look at them,” Nebula said, after a few minutes of silence. “I wonder what it’s like to be normal.”

“Our classmates aren’t exactly the best examples of ‘normal’,” Gamora pointed out. “When the most normal students are super spies, your threshold is notably higher.”

“Picky, picky,” Nebula sighed. “I only meant that many of them haven’t endured the things that we have. Tortured and torn apart - myself more than you, but I’ll admit that you were hurt as well.”

“Not everyone requires tragedy to spur them into being a hero,” Gamora said, leaning forward to rest her forearms against the railing, fingernails tapping idly on the metal. “People choose to be good because they are good. I wonder what that’s like.”

“Your moral compass is on the straight and narrow,” Nebula said, “so I don’t know why you’re acting like you’re fallen from grace.”

“We have both done things we aren’t proud of, as much as you hate to admit it,” Gamora replied. “We have killed far too many innocent beings to be truly absolved of our sins. But we’re here regardless, being forgiven by people we do not deserve. That has to count for something.”

“Which is why we should protect our ‘new friends’ by slaughtering our father.” Nebula put the binoculars down on her lap. Gamora squinted to see what Nebula had been observing - it was the Young Avengers, sprawled out on the lawn. Billy was casting some light spell in the air above them, making the light swirl into shapes, causing the others to laugh. Teddy was snuggled into his side, casually draping an arm across Billy’s stomach, and Cassie, Kate, and America were doubled over with giggles. “They do not deserve what we have suffered through. We can suffer a little bit longer if it means we can put an end to his terror.”

Gamora was, frankly, astonished by Nebula’s words. For so long, Nebula’s single-mindedness about killing Thanos seemed like a one-woman revenge story, fueled by the uncontrollable rage of one person against their abuser. To hear her speak fondly (for Nebula, that is) of people who never gave her a second glance, it was...incredible.

“We can’t start with Thanos, you know that,” Gamora said gently. “We have to work our way up his chain of command, strip him of his supporters until he has no one by his side anymore.”

“So, the Black Order,” Nebula nodded. “When do we start?”

“When we have an actual plan, Nebula,” Gamora said, chuckling despite herself. “But I’m glad you’re enthusiastic about something for once in your life.”

Nebula didn’t respond, though she inched marginally closer so their legs were pressed together. It might’ve been the first physical contact she’d ever initiated that didn’t result in grievous bodily harm. “Do you remember that night on Sanctuary when we played a trick on Korath?”

“Of course I do,” Gamora said, smiling wider now. “We were just little girls, and to us, he was a big, mean teenager. We fashioned small picks out of rock and put them in his implants while he slept.”

“I quite literally expected his head to explode,” Nebula admitted, and Gamora laughed, leaning forward to bury her face in her arms to hide her giggles. “He never did realize it was us.”

“He suspected it, though,” Gamora said, still chuckling. “We were the stealthiest of all of Thanos’s children.”

“We cannot be the only ones left,” Nebula said, suddenly clutching Gamora’s wrist. “There must be others who would also be willing to take him down.”

“They may not have gone through the same training as us. We cannot ask that of complete strangers,” Gamora said sadly. “Knowing Thanos, he could have hundreds of ‘children’ out there, abandoned because they were not strong enough. But we will be.”

“We have to be,” Nebula agreed, releasing Gamora’s hand. They glanced back over at the quad, where the Defenders were sneaking in, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Clearly, a mission in Hell’s Kitchen had gone well - Elektra was practically skipping with glee, and Luke and Jessica were practically attached at the hip, Jessica grinning up at Luke with a rare softness in her eyes.

“For them,” Gamora said quietly, nodding.

______

In a moment of weakness, Peter had made a list. Granted, it wasn’t the best use of his time, but when had he ever claimed to be the most productive of students? Besides, writing it all out might clear his head of the fog he’d been experiencing all week, or hell, the whole time Gamora had been gone.

Things I want in a girlfriend.

Peter supposed the title sounded somewhat misogynistic, like a laundry list of shallow characteristics that frat boys talked about when they were both drunk and sober. For all of Peter’s peacocking tendencies, he wasn’t that guy, never wanted to be that guy, and yet, he found himself questioning what he was looking for. After all, what with Gamora’s insistence on him pursuing a relationship after they were “broken up”, she had clearly removed herself as an option. As much as it hurt, maybe it was time to step back and think about how to move on. There were seven weeks remaining in this ruse of theirs, seven incredibly long weeks before the yearbooks were out, and only then, could he try to get over her.

Not that he wanted to. God, he did not want to. He could still feel her whispering in his ear, moving ever so slowly, her impossibly long eyelashes fluttering closed as they closed the gap. Almost closed the gap. What would’ve happened if they had?

Funny. Thinks I’m funny. Likes music and movies. Can quote movies. Dances. Strong. Powerful. Beautiful. Wields a giant sword. Gorgeous red hair. Scolds me for leaving dirty towels on the bathroom floor -

Alright, that was enough. He hastily scribbled out the last three and threw the list aside. Maybe this wasn’t going to help at all. If anything, it was making it worse, reminding himself of all the things he lo - liked - about her. Knock, knock. “Who is it?” he snapped, making no attempt to hide his frustration.

“It’s, uh, Peter. Parker. You knew that, you’re the other Peter - ”

“I’m not really in the mood to do you more favours, Parker,” Peter retorted. After all, the last one had landed him in more of a mess than he could have ever anticipated.

“It’s not that, it’s just, your girlfriend’s been standing here for like, twenty minutes, but she hasn’t knocked, and I thought if she’s not knocking, maybe I should knock for her, because you two are clearly having problems and I just wanna help, and I’m gonna go now because she looks like she wants to kill me, and she can, so, bye!” His voice faded very suddenly with his last few words. Peter suspected Parker had taken off in a sprint.

He opened the door to see Gamora standing there in her pajamas, her hair in a topknot, looking rather morose. “Quill,” she said softly. “I know it’s late, but can I come in?” He stepped aside and shut the door behind her. Gamora paused for a moment, considering where to sit, until she finally chose his desk chair, deciding it was a comfortable distance. “We really shouldn’t avoid each other like this,” she said. “It’s not good for the team, and it’s not good for our friendship, either. I…” She took a deep breath. “I miss you.”

Peter wasn’t sure what she was going to say, but he certainly hadn’t expected that. He moved to sit on his bed, wishing he had his Walkman on when she’d arrived. At least it would give him something to do with his hands. “I miss you, too. And I’m so incredibly sorry that I snapped at you like that. You didn’t deserve it.”

“But I shouldn’t have said it,” Gamora exclaimed, shuffling closer to grasp his hands in hers. “That might’ve been what I thought about you before, but I don’t think of you that way now. You are...not the frivolous playboy I thought you were when we first met. You’re a good leader, and a good friend. My best friend. And I don’t like this...this thing, where we stop talking to each other.”

“We’ve been pretty good about talking things out in the past,” Peter said, smiling weakly at her. “I don’t even know why what you said got to me so badly, I just know it did. So...let’s just call it water under the bridge?”

She stared at him. “Your Terran idioms confuse me. But if that means that we can move past this, the things we’ve said to each other that we both regret...I’d...really appreciate that.”

Feeling brave, he gently tugged on her hands, pulling her to her feet. She walked closer towards him until she was standing between his legs. Looking up at her, that signature spark in his eyes, he murmured, “Then let’s do that. And maybe we can start with another question? Haven’t done that in a while.”

Gamora couldn’t contain the grin spreading over her face, relieved. She bent to wrap her arms around him, burying her face in his neck. As his arms immediately moved to pull her in tight, his entire body warm, steady, strong beneath hers, she paused to let the exhilaration of feeling at home again settle into her bones. “I guess I can’t help but be curious...have you had any relationships other than Carol?”

He finally released her, settling her down next to him on the bed. His head was bowed slightly, but not out of fear, more out of unusual shyness. “No, I haven’t. I guess I shouldn't be surprised you thought otherwise, though. I do talk the big talk, don’t I?”

“Considering you've been able to charm people into or out of anything, I'm honestly curious about why you haven't.”

“I never had anyone I was that interested in,” he admitted. “People I found attractive, people I slept with. But I didn’t know what I was looking for in a relationship, so I never bothered looking.”

“But you know now,” she prompted, causing his heart to skip a beat. “You told me.”

“Made a list, too,” Peter said before he could stop himself. At her raised eyebrow, he grabbed the piece of paper from his desk and passed it to her, hoping she couldn't read through the scribbles. To his dismay, Gamora’s keen eye never failed her, as she pointed to them immediately.

“What happened here?”

“Changed my mind,” he said easily, taking it back. “Didn't think it through. So, while we're on the topic of relationships - do you feel like you're ready for a real one? Or is it something that's not on your mind right now?”

“A year ago, I would've said they were impossible, but I think now I’d be open to one.” Gamora’s eyes flickered around the room, taking it in. It was unfamiliar to her in comparison to his space on the Milano, but still sang of Peter’s personality in every decoration, every book on his desk and every bit of dirty laundry strewn across the floor. Typical Quill, she thought fondly. Never very neat. Always did leave towels all over the bathroom floor.

“What changed?” he said quietly. Peter was genuinely curious. He couldn’t imagine someone with her upbringing being comfortable with romantic relationships, but then again, he never would have imagined her being comfortable with anyone, considering how skittish and angry she’d been when they first talked.

“Me, I guess. Turns out letting people into my life wasn’t such a bad idea after all.” She smiled, shifting a little closer, causing the mattress to dip. She bounced a little, frowning as she glanced down as if it had offended her. “Quill, why is your bed so much nicer than mine?”

“Pepper set me up with a better mattress.” He watched as Gamora laid down on her side, pulling her hair out of her topknot and letting it fan out across the pillow. After looking around, considering, she pulled the sheets around her body, turning to hide her face underneath the silky duvet. He hoped she couldn't hear his breath hitch at the sight. “Sure are getting comfortable there.”

“It's been a long day,” she admitted. “Nebula and I had a really nice talk before I came here, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what you - you guys mean to me. And maybe I don’t want to spend the rest of my night alone with my thoughts. Is that silly?”

“Not at all. You're welcome to stay,” Peter said, his voice cracking slightly. “It's probably better, too. If you tried to sneak out of my room now, Hill would probably see and report you to Fury.” She hummed in response, her eyes already fluttering closed.

He turned off the light and got in next to her, realizing too late that a double bed meant they were basically pressed up against each other, much closer than they had been in the hotel room’s king-sized mattress. She was warm, her body temperature running a little hotter than a Terran’s, and she felt too familiar already - the sharpness of her elbows, the slope of her shoulders, the curve of her hips, neatly slotted against his torso. He could smell the toothpaste and chocolate (Mantis wasn't the only one with a sweet tooth) on her breath, see the silver markings on her face glinting from the moonlight that streamed in through the window. The rigid tension of the week had left her face, and Peter once again was overwhelmed by the desire to kiss her.

“Good night, Quill,” she said, her voice barely above a breath.

“Night,” he murmured.

a/n: well, i did say this was slow burn, didn't I? trust me, i'm bashing their heads together myself, and i'm the one writing this haha

i know this kind of seems like it's heading downhill from here, but they might surprise you from this point forward ;) next chapter is a fluff fest!

[firephox]

Why are you reblogging mental illness posts, you of all privileged people don't know what real mental illness is.

I don’t know where you are getting I am “privileged” from, and mental illness comes in all forms. I drove myself fucking insane and still contemplate suicide to this day. I’m going to share my story with you, Anon, in hopes that you are listening. I’m going to add a “read more” because it’s going to be a long one. I’m only sharing this so people like you will understand that mental illness is a struggle. 

My parents were very mentally abusive and strict, preventing me from doing any normal teenage activities and even going so far as to monitor my texts. I had to delete my facebook app whenever they asked to check my phone. They wouldn’t let me leave the house from the ages of 10-17 unless I was going to school. I never got to experience normal teenage life which caused me to develop severe anxiety, depression and dissociative disorder.I couldn’t even do extra curricular activities because my mother wouldn’t let me stay after school. My mother wouldn’t even let me take the city bus, which was quicker, so I had to take the school bus with a bunch of middle schoolers. I wasn’t even allowed to get my drivers license. I don’t know why, she just kept saying I wasn’t allowed. She stayed up really late at night too so I couldn’t even sneak out or escape. 

My mother was ByPolar, and had PTSD, and refused to get treatment. When she was in her “bad” moments, she would get extremely angry over the littlest things. Like once I forgot to refill the ice trays and she got so mad that she threw them across the kitchen into the sink and started going on about “how she does so much for us and that we were ungrateful brats”. That was just one of the hundreds of incidents living with my ByPolar parent. Now that I am an adult I am too afraid to do anything on my own and always fear if my mother will be mad if I do something. Her issues began ruining her marriage, and she became so bitter that she drove my father away, and into the arms of another woman. My mother was very mentally abusive and drove him insane. My parents fought a lot, sometimes until 6 AM and my father had to get up for work at 7. I could never sleep because of the fighting half the time. I never really liked my father because he was barely around, but I felt so bad for him. My mother also favored my little sister a lot more and never ever disciplined my little brother. he has since become a spoiled brat. I used to always get in trouble if anything happened to him and he would always rat me out for every single thing I did. I never had a good relationship with my siblings. It was always a battle for who could be the best child and get all the attention. 

We grew up poor, and lived in a mobile home in the “shitty” part of town. The drywall on my ceiling caved in once and we found mold everywhere in the insulation. Every year during the spring I had a massive leak in my wall so the water would stream down like a waterfall. It would have costed too much to fix so we just dealt with a shitty house. My highschool was all the way on the other side of town and was a 20 minute drive every morning and afternoon. During the 11th grade, I wasn’t allowed to take the school bus anymore and she had to drive me to school, but she hated mornings and half the time she slept in so I missed a lot of school. Which led to a lot of missed classes and a lot of homework. My mother never answered the phone to numbers she didn’t know, and she never ever went to my parent teacher interviews, so when the school would call it didn’t matter. 

I started making friends in the 9th grade, a single friend who I miss very dearly. Lets call her… Julie. We both loved anime and art, I learned a lot of my techniques from her. One time she texted me saying she was going to the movies and really wanted me to go see Divergent with her, but my mother was taking a nap and I would have gotten in shit if I woke her up to ask. So I didn’t bother. I cried. Julie was such a good friend and threw a massive sleepover party during that summer with some other friends, and really wanted me to come, but yet again, I had to make an excuse because my mother would never let me stay at “strangers” house. They posted pictures on facebook of them hanging out at the waterpark and camping in their backyard. I cried because of that too. Those were just a couple incidents with Julie. I hung out with her at school a lot though. We had some good times during lunch and art class. 

The 10th grade was… okay, I had a great English teacher (Mrs. B) who really liked me and told me my writing was amazing. She even offered to publish a short story I had written, but I declined. She was the only teacher I had ever had that praised me for something. My science teacher (Mr. S) on the other hand was a prick. If I came to class 2 minutes late he would kick me out and tell me I was never going to succeed in life and that I would be homeless or living in my mother’s basement. He never believed you if you said you had learning disabilities or couldn’t understand something. If you got an answer wrong, he would make fun of you in front of the whole class. He also did not believe that art was a job and would degrade students who enjoyed it. I was finishing a sketch for art class in my science class once and he actually took my sketch book from me and locked it in his desk. I never got it back. I worked really hard on it too. I failed his class and was forced to enter a science class for “slow” children. That crushed my self esteem 100%. I also failed Mrs. M’s Math class that year because I literally cannot even comprehend times tables. I’m so stupid. 

During the late end of the 10th grade, I got a friend request on Facebook from a guy. His name can be… James. He began messaging me and apparently he was a student in the same English class as me and we had the same interests. We were also mutual friends. We became friends and slowly he introduced me to his group of friends who all sat at the same table during lunch. They played Magic, D&D, and other card games, and I felt so happy because I finally knew some people who also played these games. I didn’t realize that slowly I was leaving my old friend Julie for these new kids. I think that really hurt her and I am sorry. So James and I began talking more and more on FB messenger and at lunch. 

Over the summer we sent each other thousands of messages. Probably hitting the 11,000 mark. I began to depend on his messages because they gave me comfort when my parent’s were fighting or when I felt like dying. Soon I began to feel very stir crazy locked in my own house because I was not allowed to go anywhere unless my mother was with me. I became so depressed that I would curl into a fetal position on my floor and cry until my lungs hurt. Quietly however, as I was terrified to think what would have happened if my mother heard me crying. The only time away I got from myself was when I would take my dog for a walk. That was the only time I was allowed to leave the house. I rescued my dog, and my mom hated the dog because she barked and was too big. That dog probably saved my life countless times, she would snuggle with me every time I wanted to kill myself. She was a big 120 pound akita mix, who was very protective of me, but she was not friendly so I would have to hike for an hour into the deep woods just to let her off the leash. She was always attached to me and would whine and bark when I got into arguments with my mom. I remember once just hiking until I was lost, flopping down in the snow, and looking up at the evening sky with my dog sitting beside me. My dissociative disorder was so bad then it always felt like nothing was real and that I was in a dream. The trees didn’t even look real, but I knew they were trees. The snowflakes falling didn’t even feel like they were coming near me. 

James began asking if we could hang out, and I would always have to come up with excuses. When the 11th grade picked up, I found out I was in James’ History class and started to like him. I became so attached to him that I actively depended on him. I fell so hard for him that I literally couldn’t even look at him. This was bad. Art class that year I became friends with a punk, rebelious girl named Shelly. She was hot and influenced me very badly. She had a boyfriend and would actually message me selfies with condoms every time she was going to have sex. I was only friends with her because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying I didn’t want to hang out. This, paired with what was going on at home was bullshit. She would cut her wrists and legs for attention and tell everyone about it and make it seem like she was so emo. She was never really depressed, she did it for show and actually told me that. 

She negatively influenced my life so much, I began skipping my science and math classes just to hang out with her around town. I only did this because my mother would never have caught me since our house was all the way on the other side of town. she even forced me to try smoking weed once and I don’t know what the hell it was laced with but my heart began palpitating so much I could see it on my chest and I had a severe panic attack. I don’t even remember what the fuck happened after that I just remember coming to in my English class. 

I got a job working at a fast food restaraunt and bought myself a cheap laptop and wacom tablet. I would skip my lunch and 3rd period class just to hang out with James, he ended up manipulating me into things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to miss my art classes, but it was the period that James had a free block so he would usually walk home. I began going with him. I really hate talking about this part, since it’s really what hurt me the most. His parents worked during the day, so when I would skip class to go home with him, the house would be empty. It was friendly at first, and we would just watch tv or play games. He wasn’t the nicest person either, he would make fun of me sometimes. I told him I wanted to be a Journalist but he said they never made any money and I should pick a job that society really needs. Those weren’t the only times he was a dick. 

Eventually it led to things happening that I wasn’t ready for. I went along with it because I was afraid of losing him, and that security. I felt awful. So far as to lose my virginity to him. I didn’t want to and it was very painful. I even said no, but he insisted. This is so cringey and awkward to explain. He was like 6′1″ and heavily build, and I was 5′1″ and maybe 120 at the time. It was so awkward to walk back to school after that and then get picked up by my mother haha. After that time we messaged on facebook for another week and suddenly we stopped talking. It was nearly the end of the school year and he would avoid me every time I saw him. He was so ahead in History class that he didn’t even need to go so I never saw him again. I wondered if it was something I did or said that made him hate me. Ugh… I regret it to this day and I still haven’t told anyone. My mother makes me feel so bad about it and highly degrades women who have sex before marriage. I was 16 and lonely! 

Over the summer after the 11th grade, I fell into a dark place. Like really dark. I had all these emotions and no one to talk to. My mother would just judge me and punish me for it. Oh my god I’m even terrified of writing this in fear she will find it. I began bursting out in tears for no reason, staying awake all night and going a week without showering. I would get out of breath just walking and I was always tired. Deeply emotionally exhausted. I would begin making food and give up because It wasn’t worth it, I would look at a sharp object and picture myself stabbing it into my body. I wondered if it really hurt. I even found some baneberries growing in our yard and really thought about eating them since they were highly toxic as stupid as that sounds. I couldn’t even get help for my severe depression and still can’t because that would mean therapy and my mother would need to know why. 

So I ended up dropping out of highschool. I couldn’t face going back to that highschool because I was pretty sure he had spread rumors about me. My “friends” just never looked at me the same. I was out of school for a while and my mother got very, very mentally abusive. She would tell me I was ungrateful and explode over every little slip up that I did. She would freak out and say things like “You don’t want to go to school and you don’t want to work so what the fuck do you want”. Which it was those types of things she would do that really hurt me. I never once raised my voice to my mother, we had some arguments but they were pretty one sided, I wasn’t allowed to say anything to her or disagree with her. I was out of school for a few weeks into grade 12 as well, until I heard about a 2nd chance highschool for troubled students. It was right across the road from my old highschool, and everyone always made fun of it and said it was a school for dumb kids. I decided to check it out and I ended up signing up. It was weird at first, since it was set up like a group home, but the school work was a lot easier and I actually understood the math. I felt at ease for once. I was getting a lot done. Until the end of the year rolled around and everyone at the regular highschools were getting ready for grad. No one understands the pain you feel when you see pictures on top of pictures on facebook of your old classmates and friends with their grad dresses and accepting their diplomas and you didn’t get to. I wanted to walk on that stage and prove to the teachers that I was better than they said. I wanted to have fun trying on grad dresses. I wanted to show them that I beat mental illness as I accepted my diploma, but unfortunately I didn’t. It is still very relevant and some of us can’t get help until our situations change. I fucking cried my eyes out when I saw pictures of them having fun at grad. I wish I could go back and redo my entire highschool life. I’m legal age now, so I can’t even go back and get my highschool education without paying a hefty price for it. Lesson learned people, don’t give up on education. It really is important. 

I didn’t want to write this but eh, it made me feel a little better. That was my story of how mental illness ruined my life, and how I let it. Anon, if you are reading this, fuck off. 

[handsome-photographer]

day, night | juminvweek day 3

a/n: this one is much shorter than my last fic for @juminvweek, but nonetheless i hope you all enjoy it! pure fluff, this one. (i suppose this counts as AU and also first meeting? lololol)

It was mostly an accident; the sun had painted the sky a warm shade of orange and pink, with the moon somewhere up there, and the blue haired boy was more than content to watch the twilight clouds roll by as he sat leaning against the most comfortable tree he had ever encountered. Jihyun never intended to take a nap, nor did he expect to be woken up by a very irritated looking boy about his age.

“Oy.” The boy poked him, not caring to be gentle. His face was close, examining every inch of detail on Jihyun’s bleary eyed expression. “You’re out late. Shouldn’t you be home by now?”

Jihyun rubbed his eyes as he took in the darkness around him. The only source of light was the sunflower pendant he wore, the shades of yellow painting the boy across from him in an interesting contrast of shadow and highlights. Based on what little he could make out, Jihyun would venture a guess that the boy before him was rich. Very rich. His garment showed wealth even bigger than Jihyun’s, that much was obvious.

What Jihyun would give to save this picture in his mind. The boy tilted his head, brushing back his black hair out of his black eyes – except for his pale face tinted yellow, the boy’s features were as dark as the night sky above.

“Um,” Jihyun asked groggily as he finally found his voice. He sat up, the boy opposite of him pulling away so as to not bump into Jihyun. “I fell asleep.”

“Evidently,” the boy said, huffing. “It’s very irresponsible of you. What if I wasn’t the one to find you? Something bad could have happened to you.”

“What are you doing here?” Jihyun asked in return. It was only now that it occurred to him to ask. "You’re out late, too.”

“No, I’m not,” the boy denied with crossed arms. “I have every right to be outside at this hour!”

Jihyun squinted so that he could make out the boy’s already prominent features even more – the light of his pendant finally reflected off of something sparkling on the boy’s forehead, previously covered by his hair. A small crown? When he realised Jihyun’s eyes trained on it, he crossed his arms, glancing away.

“What’s your name?” Jihyun asked, offering a smile.

“I’m Prince Jumin, belonging to the House of Han,” the boy – Jumin – replied, meeting Jihyun’s eyes as he straightened up with pride. He pointed at the sky. “It’s my duty to make sure that nights during the moon’s crescent phase are safe. Please don’t make my job any more difficult.”

Jihyun giggled, even though he was certain Jumin never meant to make a joke. “A prince? That makes two of us.”

Jumin raised an eyebrow, almost in disbelief, but he didn’t say anything about his doubt when he regarded Jihyun’s pendant – not something to come by so easily – and the golden flower crown on his head, not rustled in the slightest during Jihyun’s nap.

“My name is Jihyun Kim,” he said, extending a hand to Jumin. “I don’t really have a certain phase to work in; I just… make sure the sun shines.”

Jumin took Jihyun’s hand and – rather than shaking it – he only pulled up, which forced Jihyun off his resting place, almost losing his balance as he stood. Jumin only seemed to enjoy watching Jihyun stumble, smirking with his arms crossed once more. “I know what the Kim family is responsible of. Were you enjoying my little brother’s work, then, with his twilight sky?”

Jihyun grinned sheepishly. “Perhaps.”

“Well, you enjoyed it far too much. He’s not very good.” Jumin sighed and looked around. “Shall I take you somewhere we can get you back home to the sun?”

It was an offer Jihyun couldn’t refuse; the journey to reach the sun during nighttime was a very lonely one. In the end he nodded, though when Jumin set a brisk pace for them, he wished they could slow down to just... talk. It had been centuries that a prince of day and a prince of night could meet like this, not set up during some grand astronomical event, like when the planets aligned.

It certainly felt like it, Jihyun thought. It felt like fate had brought them together like this.

“Do you have brothers?” Jumin asked conversationally, a few minutes before they took a small break – nighttime was still a long way from over, and it would be a while until they can reach somewhere with the sun shining.

“Only one sister,” Jihyun answered. “Usually if I’m not home she’ll look over the sun.”

“Well, I’m sorry we can’t wait for dawn to break,” Jumin said with a small bow. “I still need to make my rounds, so being on the move like this is best.”

Jihyun smiled at him. “I’m glad for the company.”

In the near darkness, Jumin’s eyes widened. If Jihyun had been paying more attention he would’ve noticed the small blush creeping up on the fellow prince’s cheeks. “You enjoy being with me?”

He answered with an enthusiastic nod. “Besides, we never got to meet each other before this, so isn’t this a nice turn of events?”

“That I found you asleep against a tree?” Jumin asked, returning to his rather cold, sarcastic way of speaking – but even that was a nice change from the bright, sunny dispositions Jihyun was used to hearing from everybody at the sun. Jumin was different, but that wasn’t a bad thing. “Yes, I suppose meeting you had been interesting, but… try not to make a habit of doing things unbefitting a prince.”

“You sound exactly like my father,” Jihyun remarked, glancing up at the moon.

“Aren’t they concerned that you aren’t back on the sun yet?” Jumin asked.

Jihyun looked down again, not answering. It took several seconds, but Jumin then nodded and cleared his throat.

“We should be on our way again,” Jumin said. “We’ll probably find somewhere in dawn break soon.”

Jihyun followed where the prince of night lead them, trusting him to know the way best. All the while, he tried to keep Jumin speaking more about the nocturnal world, since Jihyun could only ever observe it from afar. Jumin described the moon and her many faces, the light she reflected from the sun, the eclipses – in return, Jihyun told him of sunshine and the daytime, of humans living their daily lives, of summers where he could never seem to catch a break from his princely responsibilities.

The first one to point out a streak of orange in the sky was Jumin, who grabbed Jihyun’s hand and ran towards it. Heart racing, the boys stopped when their surroundings looked just a bit more visible to their naked eye, and Jihyun’s sunflower pendant became redundant.

“We’ve reached it,” Jumin announced needlessly, his breath returned. “Dawn. You’ll find your way back easily from here, won’t you?”

Jihyun took a single step away from Jumin’s side, looking up at the sky. The sun wasn’t for a few hundred thousand miles away – more or less – and yet he wanted it to never come any nearer. He turned to Jumin and said, “I don’t want to leave you.”

For the second time in their short night together, Jumin’s eyes widened – only now, Jihyun can see his blush. “You don’t have a choice. We live in different worlds, and we each have our responsibilities.”

“Then – ” The thought came to him suddenly, since more sunlight was showing in between the clouds above. Deftly, Jihyun untied his pendant and held it towards Jumin. “Please take this.”

“I – I can’t possibly – ”

“Take it,” Jihyun said, shoving it into Jumin’s hands. “So that you have to meet me again to give it back.”

Jumin glanced up at Jihyun, still surprised, but at last his scrunched up expression smoothed out to form a smile. “Alright, Prince Jihyun. I’m not responsible if you ignite a war between our families.”

With a laugh, Jihyun shook his head. “Then give me something of yours to make it even.”

By the second, more light was bathing on them. Soon, they had to leave each other, and who knows when they can meet again. If this was the last night under the crescent moon... Jihyun would have to wait for another month. His heart began beating fast again, but Jumin was still digging in his jacket pocket before finding a piece of square cloth.

“A handkerchief,” he explained needlessly, putting it in Jihyun’s already opened palms. “With gold embroidered stripes, so I think we’re even.”

Jihyun blinked down at his hands and then tied the cloth around his wrist. “I’ll return to you.”

“And so will I,” Jumin said, tying the pendant around his neck. With a small grin, he added, “Hopefully you won’t be sleeping against a tree the next time we meet.”

Before Jihyun could say anything, the boy had faded as bright light consumed the prince of day, and he was no longer walking through the night. But he tried to hold onto the thought that at the end of the day, nighttime will surely come around.