#so we spent a ridiculous amount of time walking the several miles up and down it

[hairtusk]

The Long Causeway, Looking Back to Heptonstall, Yorkshire by Stanley Warburton (1919-2012)

[razrgrl]

Holiday Adventures: Adventure 3

Cici kept the dog outside and walk into the service center of a dealer I had never set foot into. A nice man with a bald head and red beard took my information and told me that it would be two weeks before his guys could even look at it. I made some "eek" noises but this man obviously had a lot of experience with freaked out people worried about their cars and kept his face emotionless.

"I'm sorry, but there is a 2-week line of people ahead of you. I can't do anything. I can get you a ride to a car rental place, but that's about all."

At this point, Cici had come in. Her strength was starting to crack. Gus was hugging the floor again. I was exhausted and we had missed lunch. We were an hour from home.

I decided that my new goal for the day was to just get home.

We unloaded all of our luggage from my treacherous car and I piled it all around Cici in the service center's lobby, handing her Gus' leash. Ten people stared at us. We did not meet any eyes. We just sat there and I waited for my ride to the rental place.

I am so grateful that this didn't happen on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve or something and that this was pretty much a normal day of business for most people.

I was taken in a lovely new Kia something or other that was -- you know -- working down the road several miles to an unimpressive Enterprise in an unimpressive neighborhood in Schenectady. I watched my ride disappear up the road and hoped these people had a car.

The guy in Enterprise popped right up and let me know that I could have, either, a Nissan Versa or a pickup truck.

I thought about all of the luggage piled around Cici and the dog and the rain sputtering down outside. I said a little prayer that it would hold everything and asked for the Versa.

I've rented Versas before. They are very, very little. My concern for the luggage was real.

He dug around in his pile of keys and said "Oh! Wait. We have Sentra."

Oh my God: I could have kissed him.

The Sentra smelled strongly of marijuana but I didn't say a thing. I was just so deeply grateful that the universe saved me from having to jam everything (and everyone) in a Versa.

I got back to the dealership and Cici and I loaded everything into the Sentra's generous trunk. The rest of the trip went without any drama. We got home 6 hours later than we planned and dived into a take-out pizza. I cracked open my bottle of Bourbon. The dog went to his crate and snuggled among his toys.

I spent the rest of the weekend googling my problem and seeing just deep a hole I was in.

I'm 95% sure that my deceitful car's problems will be covered by Kia's warrentee. There is a known issue with the transmissions that is just this side of an official recall. In the meantime, however, I am logging a ridiculous amount of money in car rental fees. I need to spend some serious time on the phone to figure out just how long I will have to wait for even a diagnosis of what is wrong with my traitorous car. Kia might cover my car rental (or, at least, part of it) but they won't even discuss the matter until we have an official diagnosis of the problem.

That's where I am now.

Stay tuned for Adventure 4 -- once I know how it turns out.

[kyopmi]

♡ — "now we're holding hands as not quite friends, but not quite lovers"

cw — mention of alcohol

it is uncharacteristically quiet between you and matsukawa issei as you walk next to him under the darkness of the night sky.

it’s past midnight, so the streets are empty save for the parked, unmoving cars every few metres or so, illuminated by the streetlights lined up on the edge of the sidewalk and the light from several windows on either side of the street. it’s quiet, too; the only audible noise being each other’s familiar footsteps — issei’s are slightly dragged, the soles of his shoes scraping against the pavement at the end of every step, while yours are a softer thudding that manage to fall in sync with his.

you can’t remember the last time you’ve been this silent with issei. no, not just silent — awkward. there’s an air of unspoken tension hanging between the two of you. it’s not a discomfort that makes either of you want to turn tail and flee, but it’s present enough to produce an unwelcome restlessness in your chest.

maybe we’ve just run out of things to say, you try to rationalize, we just spent the whole night together with the rest of our friends, after all. but no matter how many times you repeat it in your head, you can’t bring yourself to believe it. you find it ridiculous — it’s matsukawa issei you’re talking about.

matsukawa issei, who you’ve known for years because he lived two houses down from you and you used to take the same train together to school every morning.

matsukawa issei, who has managed to rope you into the most comical shenanigans with his volleyball buddies more times than you can count.

matsukawa issei, who always has a witty remark to throw into a conversation that makes laughter bubble from your chest.

matsukawa issei, who you regularly stay up with until the sun rises, whether you’re talking over the phone or in person, to confide your worries in each other.

matsukawa issei, who buys you rice porridge whenever you get sick, despite your repeatedly expressed distaste towards the dish, and won’t leave until you finish the entire bowl.

matsukawa issei, who, like tonight, never fails to walk you home whenever your outings get too late, even though you’re no longer neighbours and his house is in the opposite direction.

matsukawa issei, who you shared a kiss too ardent to blame on the alcohol with when you were visiting his apartment the previous week.

matsukawa issei, whose knuckles are lightly brushing against the back of your hand as you’re walking wordlessly with each other at this very moment.

your breath catches in your throat and you try in vain to calm your racing heart whenever your skin comes in contact with his. you nervously swallow, stealing a quick glance at the almost nonexistent space in between the two of you, not quite sure what to do or if you should do anything at all.

the next time your hands touch, it’s a little closer, a little braver, a little longer, as issei’s pinky lingers and eventually — finally, curls around your own. you reciprocate his hold, firm yet delicate at the same time, effectively linking your fingers with each other’s.

at this point, there’s no mantra you can recite and no amount of deep breaths you can regulate to stop your heart from beating a mile a minute. you dare yourself to look at the man next to you again, this time at his face, only to find his head tilted just the smallest degree away from you. it’s dim, but you don’t miss the faintest upward curl on the edge of his lips and a light red blush settling on the tips of his ear.

you can’t say you’re doing a better job at hiding your fluster. just like him, you’re barely fighting back a smile and feeling the warmth climb up the base of your neck to the apples of your cheeks. and when issei playfully swings your hands together back and forth, an amused giggle escapes you which, in turn, makes him chuckle and his smile grow wider.

it is uncharacteristically quiet between you and matsukawa issei — but no words need to be exchanged when the two of you let go of your pinkies and his warm hand fully envelopes your smaller one instead, securely holding onto one another while you continue to walk without missing a beat.

and the both of you know for sure now, drunken kiss or no drunken kiss, you’re not quite just friends anymore.

my fav just dropped a new song today so yk i had to write something about it. if you want to check it out, the song is Before by NIKI! it’s actually a sad song but i picked out this one fluffy lyric for this drabble :,) tempted to write something that’s actually based on the entire song, though

and thank you isa @icedhoneyy for the character suggestions! when you wrote “mattsun (!!)” my brain reciprocated the (!!) too

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: His Name Is Alive

While Warren Defever’s name is perhaps less recognizable than that of his band His Name Is Alive, he’s also been connected with a seemingly endless array of other projects: Princess Dragon-Mom, Elvis Hitler, ESP Beetles, Control Panel, and far more. This doesn’t get into his recording and production credits for the likes of Michael Hurley, Iggy and the Stooges, and Mdou Moctar. Forever associated with Michigan’s weirdo-underground music scene, Defever has recently been issuing a series of long-buried recordings as His Name Is Alive. In February, the Disciples label released Hope Is a Candle, the third and final volume in the "Home Recordings" trilogy exploring Defever's teenage tape experimentation as well as A Silver Thread (Home Recordings 1979 - 1990), a four-volume collection of many of Defever’s solo home recordings prior to His Name Is Alive releasing their debut album Livonia on 4AD in 1990. In his review of A Silver Thread, Tim Clarke writes “For a collection of home recordings, what’s most striking about this music is how fully realized and carefully executed it sounds, comparable at times to contemporary artists such as Grouper, Benoît Pioulard and Tim Hecker. This is not the 1980s that I remember.”

Defever gives us his “What Else Is New” list, a set of personal snapshots, memories of a life spent in music, warning the reader that “the descriptions don’t always have an obvious correlation to the video, but welcome to my nightmare brain.”

In The Line of Fire

I started performing when I was five. My grandfather was a self-taught musician from Saskatchewan in Western Canada and he showed me and my brothers how to play banjo, guitar and fiddle. One of my earliest memories is having a full size 127 lb. accordion placed onto my lap and my grandmother voicing her disappointment when I refused to play. I did learn slide guitar from her later though. I have many, often terrible, memories of performing at square dances with his band and we would play old timey country music, folk songs, polkas and waltzes. There were also gigs at the trailer park, old folks homes and a convent. Although my grandfather believed that popular music died with Hank Williams in 1953, he still found room in his heart for Lawrence Welk and Slim Whitman.

Meet Me By The Water

By age ten I had a tape recorder and was using it to capture the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, and my older brothers LP collection played at the wrong speeds. I recently found the cassette, Echo Lake (1983) which features waves crashing onto the beach on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair but it was recorded right after I got an echo pedal so it’s got a heavy dose of dreamy delay. Tape loops of the next door neighbor raking leaves and shoveling the driveway would be repurposed a few years later as rhythm tracks on the first His Name Is Alive LP, Livonia (4AD, 1990). Detroit in the late 70s and early 80s had totally insane radio and one of the highlights was Met-Ezzthetics, a late night show on WDET hosted by Faruq Z. Bey who also played saxophone in Griot Galaxy. Shortly before his death he played with His Name is Alive and we had a chance to formalize our student-teacher relationship.

Search For Higher Energies

In high school I was studying Bach Chorale harmonization and counterpoint during the day but recording and touring with the band Elvis Hitler at night. The other guys in band were older but at 16 I was a familiar sight at shitty Detroit punk clubs and Hamtramck dive bars, the nerdy teenager reading a book or doing homework sitting at the bar waiting ’til midnight or 1am for our slot to play our hellbilly hits, “It’s A Long Way From Berlin To Memphis,” and “Hot Rod To Hell.” I was still trying to make sense of the post 1953 music scene and when I met the guy with a giant afro and shiny super hero outfit complete with shiny cape I had no idea he was Rob Tyner of the MC5. We released three records before I was twenty one and played shows and toured with Devo, the Dwarves, the Dead Milkmen, Reverend Horton Heat, the Beat Farmers, Helios Creed, Babes In Toyland, the Cro-Mags, Corrosion of Conformity, the Frogs, the Gories, Pussy Galore, the Unsane and way more I can’t remember I was just a kid. It was some kind of education.

You Don’t Have To Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here

When I signed with 4AD I thought I was a composer and they let me write my own bio, so I called His Name Is Alive the work of a “fucked up, irresponsible teenage composer.” I had only been writing music for three years. When I heard “Tom Violence” by Sonic Youth I thought for the first time in my life, “I think I could do that.” In 1988 I made a mixtape with Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, Leadbelly and some of Big Star’s third album and I tried to arrange it like it was an album, then I made my own album in that same shape, it was called I Had Sex With God and I sent it to 4AD. Our first album contained three of the first five pieces of music I had ever written. Within a few years I was playing festivals for contemporary classical composers and new age artists who were thirty or forty years older than me. His Name Is Alive played the Musicas Visuales Festival in Mexico with Harold Budd, Paul Horn and Jorge Reyes. The mayor of the city presented me with a guitar but then dramatically walked out of the theater during our performance realizing he had made a terrible mistake. I remember the surreal moment when from across the room Harold Budd walked in and greeted me as “Mr. Defever.” He had a cold and was sniffling during his set, the audience thought he was crying. I recorded his show and when I got back home to Livonia I added my own guitar to some of his songs and then edited the tapes, looping my favorite parts and editing out the parts I didn’t like, also adding additional layers of reverb and echo. More recently I did a concert in a five hundred year old temple in Japan where the unamplified meditation music never rose above a whisper and the monk had to turn off the furnace because the heat molecules were too loud. The show was recorded and released under the name Mountain Ocean Sun and features Ian Masters and Hitoko Sakai.

Energy Dealer

Both my parents were born in Canada, my mother in Saskatchewan, my father in Ontario. I have dual citizenship as my father was American and my mother had Canadian citizenship. I spent summers, holidays and weekends in a tiny cottage on Lake St. Clair that did not have a telephone and had curtains instead of doors separating the two rooms. Myrt Fortin who lived next door would receive phone calls for my mom, walk over to our place and yell into the window, “Hey wake up your ma, your dad’s on the phone.” My mom took a lot of naps, so she was always asleep when something important was happening. I remember always getting cut on broken glass while swimming in the lake or getting stabbed by one of the neighbors and having to go wake up my mom to take me to the hospital.

Lord I Don’t Believe You Exist

When I was ten my parents sat me down and told me it was time that I got a summer job. There were only two businesses in town, a gas station and a hardware store so I walked up to the hardware store and asked the owner for a job and immediately fell to the ground crying. Completely fell apart. He asked me why I wanted to work in hardware. I didn’t know what to say, I was only ten but I knew not to tell the owner that his store was stupid and I didn’t think he could handle the truth. It turned out he also owned the gas station so that didn’t really work out. Later that summer, I began working for the Pickseed Corporation as corn de-tasseling season was just beginning. All the moms would drop off their kids in the church parking lot in Tecumseh, just outside of Windsor, around 4:30am where an unmarked windowless cargo van was waiting that had cinderblocks and 2'x4' boards instead of benches so they could squeeze in the maximum amount of children. There were three job requirements to work in a cornfield, the child (it was only children, no adults) needed to show up with a baseball hat, a thermos with water and a large black plastic garbage bag. I think this was before sunglasses were invented. Upon arriving at the cornfield, we were separated into pickers and checkers, younger kids each taking a row of corn (a row could extend a mile or more) and a slightly older kid would organize and manage several of the younger kids. In the morning we were instructed to poke two arm holes and a head hole into our garbage bags and put it on like a raincoat because the corn was covered in dew and kids wearing wet clothes would walk slower than dry kids. So almost every day there was a point, usually around 11am when the dew would dry and we would be roasted alive from the summer sun coming down on our ridiculous shiny black plastic outfits. We worked from sun up until sun down. I received three dollars and thirty five cents an hour. For all you city folks, corn is planted in alternating rows of types of corn so that when the top part of the plant is removed, or “de-tasseled,” it can seed or cross-pollinate easily. It’s a terrible job with a high turnover rate and every day I would hear the sound of kids in nearby rows that had given up hope, sat down in the middle of the field and crying for hours. The following year, at age 11, I was promoted from picker to checker, and was put in charge of a group of about ten sixteen year old’s.

Sleep It Off

Mostly I like to record – His Name is Alive has over a hundred releases and I’ve done another fifty records under various names, Control Panel, Warren Michael Defever, ESP BEETLES, ESP SUMMER, Forest People, Infinity People, Jeepers Creepers, Layla al-Akhyaliyya, Mirror Dream, Princess Dragon-Mom, the Dirt Eaters, the Fishcats, the Whales, plus way more I can’t remember probably because the names were so dumb. I’ve recorded about four hundred records for other bands at my house or other studios. I’ve worked on records with Danny Kroha, Ida, Fred Thomas, Elizabeth Mitchell, Wild Belle, Michael Hurley, and when I was a teenager I helped record the first Gories album which was especially unique as I was the junior assistant engineer who helped move their equipment into the dirt floor garage next to the studio where it was decided the acoustics would be way worse. Also, I helped collage about a hundred Destroy All Monsters tapes from the 70s for a couple of their releases which led to remastering a bunch of tapes from the John Sinclair White Panther Party archives. I’ve done remixes for Thurston Moore and Yoko Ono and when Iggy and The Stooges started touring again I got a phone call from Ron Asheton seeing if I would help them record demos for their reunion album with Mike Watt on bass. They wrote the songs together while they were recording in Niagara’s basement sort of simultaneously. Iggy didn’t have a notebook with all his lyric ideas, instead he just sang about whatever happened that day – one song was about the airline losing his luggage, one about ATM machines and another was about reading in a newspaper that Ray Davies of the Kinks had been shot in New Orleans. In the end they weren’t terribly excited by my suggested song titles including “No Shirt” (you know because it’s like “No Fun” plus you know Iggy never wears a shirt) and they didn’t seem to love the mixes that I did that sounded kind of like those crappy Raw Power bootlegs.

Cost Of Living

Two summers ago I recorded an incredible concert by Mdou Moctar live at Third Man Records in Detroit. They’re wild hypnotic Hendrix style jammers who live in the desert. The band didn’t speak much english but I think I was able to communicate to them how excited I was about their amazing fingerpicking and hot guitar solos after the show by screaming and replaying the best solos over and over again and then screaming the word fuzz and pointing at their fingers. It’s insane and having seen them a few times since then with a different drummer and the addition of a bass player, I’m convinced it’s their best album. It’s wild but it’s still not Tchin-tabaraden wedding wild.

Licked By Lions

Jonathan Richman walks into Ethan and Gretchen's studio and asks if I can remove all the rugs, take the acoustic treatments off the walls and strike the baffles which normally separate the instruments, drums and amps, so the room will have the most echo possible, he has also invited about ten friends including Johnny Bee Badanjek the drummer from Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Mary Cobra from the Detroit Cobras to dance, sing and play percussion in the studio while he records. He has two vocal microphones set up at either end of the room and has brought his own microphones for the drums along with his own desired placement for them. He notices a tamboura near the control room and asks if I know how to play it or if I know how to tune it. Within seconds he’s tuned it and proceeds to sing Indian classical music accompanying himself on tamboura drone for about thirty five minutes. It’s beautiful and very surprising. He asks me if I recorded it, I lie and say no. Later he asks me not to play it for anyone. We record for hours. Some songs are quite long – ten and fifteen minutes, some are medleys of oldies or soft rock hits from the seventies segueing into new songs of his. It’s a confusing session as it’s not clear when songs are starting and ending and he often plays guitar and sings nowhere near a microphone. The distance between him and the microphone seems to have some meaning, there’s some formula to when he chooses to walk away in the middle of a verse but I am unable to determine the secret code. At the end of the session three or four songs are deemed usable, edited and mixed, although, sadly, an attempt at a completely insane and unexpected fuzz guitar solo is left unreleased. (The Harold Budd piece is at the opposite end of this spectrum.)

Calling All Believers

Shortly after Tecuciztecatl was released, I received an email from Dr. James Beacham at CERN inviting us to perform at a series of concerts that would combine experimental music with experimental science at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He didn’t contact our booking agent, which would be how we generally receive offers for gigs, instead he sent an email to me, which would be how we generally receive crazy messages from our completely insane fans (murderous, delusional, poetic, threatening messages usually). I assumed the invitation was fake or a prank and replied that we would prefer to wait until they had successfully opened a pathway to interspatial dimensions and we’d play on the other side or that if that was unlikely to happen at a convenient time then perhaps we could set up our equipment right on the edge of a mini-black hole and perform as the Earth is being destroyed so we could release the concert film “Live At The End Of The World.” After a few messages back and forth, it was clear that he was legit and I apologized for being such a jerk. Soon I discovered poetry within the language of particle physics as well as a certain beauty in the idea that these scientists have devoted their lives to dreaming, searching and discovering basic principles that connect all things in existence. The song “Calling All Believers” refers to this devotion. “Energy Acceleration” compares the scientists to monastic life in medieval times and mystics trying to find and define the line between this world and the next and at the same time invoking the incredible amounts of energy needed to create the collisions experiments. The Patterns of Light LP was released in 2016 on London London Records and is about interpreting visions of light, trying to find universal truth with whatever tools available, it’s about the search for how everything works, why it works and how it got that way but also about being inspired on a basic level by the way a thing looks and how all your senses take in a thing. A thousand years ago Hildegard Von Bingen was writing about this same thing in letters, songs, medical texts, and had even developed her own language to use in her mystical writings, similar to Magma drummer Christian Vander using his own language for their concept albums or French black metalists Brenoritvrezorkre and Moëvöt.

The Light Inside You

We get a lot of letters from fans, mostly weirdos though. I think it started when we released Song of Schizophrenia, that sort of connected us to a certain demographic I suspect. Here’s a recent typical message we received. “Growing up in Panama City, Mouth By Mouth and Livonia were like passages to other realms. I drank a ton of cough syrup at the time but those albums helped make life more livable. I was about to go to art school for sculpture and graphic design and the textures I heard on those records had actual shapes to them. Most music I knew at that time was flat or linear. I got them on cassette via mail-order from an ad placed in a bmx magazine. Mouth By Mouth arrived just before going to work at the amusement park and I was able to listen to it twice on the way thanks to the never-ending beach traffic. As luck would have it, I worked on “The Abominable Snowman” ride, basically a tilt-a-whirl inside a dome with lots of fog machine action, blue lights, mirrors, and lots of air conditioning. It took about 10 listens that day before it wasn’t as weird as when I first put it on. Maybe it was my bubblegum flavor/robitussin combo slushie on top of no-doz that pulled it all together, but it was probably a weird ride for a lot of vacationing beach tourists and townies when all they really wanted to hear was “Naughty by Nature” by O.P.P. I had no business running those rides at the age of 17 but I really loved how disorienting that ride could be with all the mirrors, the fog, the cold and for the final 90 seconds the ride would go in reverse. I had a buddy named Kevin that did acid at work and would repeatedly run the mini-train off the tracks and all the riders had to walk back through the woods for about a half mile that summer.”

[brandyovereager]

The Phoenix Effect - pt. 7

This is the longest chapter I have ever posted! The conversations in this chapter were so much fun to write, I hope you have fun reading them ;). Let me know what you think, I love to hear from you guys!!!

On ao3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22195906/chapters/60178285

Summary: Rowan is in Rifthold with Dorian when a strange phenomenon sweeps the land. Those once dead are popping up alive. Everyday, more and more are Reborn. One day Rowan encounters a Reborn young man who refuses to give his name, only asking to know the whereabouts of Celaena Sardothien.

-

Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius lounged on her throne. Her posture was casual in a way that made her appear superior, but the grin on her face betrayed the childlike joy within her.

Aelin had heard about the reborn phenomenon in Adarlan from Rowan’s reports, and knew all the miraculous details of what was happening. It shouldn’t have been as much of a shock as it was for her to hear that reborns were showing up in Terrasen.

The first ones arrived in towns near the border between Terrasen and Adarlan. Within a week there were reborns appearing in Orynth. Luckily, Aelin was a swift and wise leader. She was able to quickly institute a procedure for helping reborns similar to the one in Adarlan.

The whole situation was managing smoothly, her mate would be returning home soon, and just three days ago Aelin found yet another reason to be happy.

It seemed there was no real logic to where the reborns popped up. It didn’t coincide with where they died—or even where they had lived most of their lives—because when Aelin last visited the reborn specialists’ center, she was reunited with a dear friend she thought was lost forever.

Somehow the magical force behind this phenomenon had brought Nehemia Ytger to Orynth, alive and well.

Their reunion was joyous and tearful. Aelin had so much to explain to Nehemia, things she never had the chance to say, but all she could get out were incoherent sobs of delight. Several minutes of heartfelt embrace later, the pair was sat close together and calm enough to delve into their much needed conversation.

The story spilled out of Aelin faster than she could think—along with a stream of pent-up apologies and guilt for what happened to her friend. Aelin had blamed herself for so much after Nehemia died, and all that shame came resurfaced as she sat across from the other young woman.

Nehemia adamantly denied any guilt on Aelin’s part, but made sure Aelin knew that she would be forgiven anyway. After sufficient reassurance and long overdue healing, the two friends jumped right in to all the wonderful updates on Aelin’s life.

The young queen excitedly took her old friend on a tour around her castle and introduced her to her court—most of it, at least. Nehemia and Lysandra hit it off wonderfully, and the three spent many hours together with broad smiles on their faces. It filled Aelin’s heart to see two people she loved get along so well. She couldn’t wait for Nehemia to meet Rowan.

Now, three days after their reunion, Nehemia sat beside her in the throne room while she held her court. The two friends exchanged many secret smiles as various courtiers made their—often ridiculous—remarks.

From outside the throne room, Aelin could hear a commotion begin amongst her guards. The Fae queen sat up straighter in her seat and focused her gaze on the large doors ahead of her. As expected, they soon opened and a servant entered.

“Your Majesty, two new reborns have arrived and wish to speak to you.” That was quite odd. Why would her guard have gotten in a fuss over a couple of reborns?

“Reborns should be sent to the specialists’ center to find help. Why should these two be brought to see me?”

“You know these ones, My Queen, they are your family.” A jumble of feelings rushed through Aelin with the servant’s statement, and the look on his face betrayed his knowledge of her reaction.

“My family? Send them in.” Aelin was tingling and buzzing down to her fingertips. The possibility of her own family being amongst those reborn had always been there, but she hadn’t let herself believe it would happen.

The doors to her throne room opened to reveal a male and female, each with golden hair. The male Aelin recognized immediately, and she leapt from her seat to meet him in an embrace.

“Gavriel.” The golden-haired male held her firmly to him with just as much enthusiasm as Aelin felt herself. She had missed him, and Aedion had too.

Stepping back from the beloved Fae, Aelin turned to look at the female beside him. Her heart jumped for a second before she realized that—despite the many similar features—the woman was not her mother. This was Aedion’s mother. There was no denying it, her face so blatantly Ashryver. It was easy to see why Gavriel had once suspected Aelin to be her child.

“I don’t think we ever met, but I am Aelin Galathynius—Rhoe and Evalin’s daughter—and you are Aedion’s mother.” There was no question in her voice.

“Yes, I am Andelin Ashryver. It is wonderful to finally meet you, Aelin. I loved your mother very much, and I owe her everything. You are her spitting image.” Aelin’s heart both warmed and grew heavy.

“I have been told that a lot,” Aelin smiled lightly, “as I’m sure you have too.” Andelin threw a wry smile back at her.

“The Ashryver genes are strong.” Aelin had to agree.

“Aedion got them as well. He looks very much like you.” Andelin’s face softened at Aelin’s mention of her son. Aelin continued, “You would be proud of him—for many reasons.”

“I am incredibly proud of who he has become, but I’m afraid I can’t take much credit for that.” Aelin recognized clearly the guilt and sadness Andelin felt over her son’s upbringing. “Do you know where he is? I need to speak with him.” Aelin grimaced slightly in response.

“It’s rotten timing but Aedion is actually in Adarlan right now fetching my mate for me.” Aelin reached out to grab the other woman’s arm in reassurance. “You are welcome to stay here as long as you’d like, though. I will have a suite prepared for the both of you immediately, right near Aedion’s.” These two were family, she would not have them be anywhere else.

A servant was promptly summoned and sent to ready their suite. Another servant was directed to find Lysandra, who arrived minutes later. Similar to Aelin’s reaction, Lysandra first recognized Gavriel and rushed to meet him in an embrace.

Aelin watched her friend closely as she finally took in the woman next to Gavriel. She could see the shifter piece things together and widen her eyes slightly in realization. Lysandra’s gaze flickered over to Aelin and the queen nodded in affirmation.

“I should introduce you to my dear friend, Lady Lysandra Ashryver. She is Aedion’s wife. Lysandra—you have met Gavriel—and this is Andelin Ashryver, Aedion’s mother.”

————

The journey back to Terrasen was too gods-damned long.

It wasn’t even that Rowan was sick of walking for hours on end, day after day—though that was certainly part of it. Rowan needed to get back to his mate. He had so much he needed to tell her. So much had happened that she would need time to process, and he would have to be by her side anchoring her as she did.

Even more, though—selfish as it may be—he just missed her. He had been separated from his love for too long. He ached with the knowledge that the other half of his immortal soul was not beside him. It was a challenge every night to lay down in a cold bed by himself and fall asleep without holding her. It was wrong. Mates were not meant to be apart.

For the past week he had been walking the long road back to his love, and it was awful. There were far too many miles between them. He wanted to forget about his traveling companions and just fly back to her as fast as his wings allowed. Surely they didn’t need him walking beside them—after all, Aedion had travelled all the way to Adarlan without Rowan. Terrasen’s royal caravan was more than enough enough manpower if they found themselves in trouble.

He couldn’t leave Aedion alone with Sam, though. The young Ashryver had not taken to the reborn assassin very well. Aedion had no great love for anyone from Aelin’s time as Celaena, often choosing to avoid that part of his cousin’s past. During the seven days they’d been on the road together, the male had only spoken to Sam a handful of times—each in a gruff and unfriendly manner.

Rowan supposed that might be for the best. He didn’t put it past Aedion to spill the truth about Aelin in some attempt to torment the boy. Needless to say, the unlikely trio travelled in a state of unending tension.

Rowan managed to keep himself as a buffer between the other two most of the time, but it was exhausting him. The Fae wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the presence of Sam either. The two had spent a fair amount of time together back when Rowan was helping Sam in his search, but ever since the young man’s identity was revealed it was awkward for Rowan to be near him. They had never spoken much—and that was certainly fine with Rowan—but the silent walking left Rowan alone with his thoughts, and he was a little uncomfortable with the thoughts he had when he knew Sam Cortland was beside him.

He was especially uncomfortable when he considered the thoughts Sam might be having himself as they travelled.

Sam knew nothing about what Aelin’s life was now. He had no idea she was the Queen of Terrasen, that she was an immortal Fae, that she was mated and married. The Aelin he had last known was Celaena, and Sam was in love with her.

Yes, those thoughts didn’t sit well with Rowan.

The three travelers and their caravan were currently surrounded by dense forest. Rowan didn’t mind too much—it shielded them from the hot sun—but it did mean they were farther from lodging and refreshment. They hadn’t encountered many others on their journey so far, and they hadn’t seen any intelligent life this entire day.

A bush about three feet to Rowan’s right rustled and the Fae turned to watch as a deer bolted away, startled at the sight of them. His hand relaxed from where he’d reached for his sword, taking notice of Aedion beside him doing the same. They might both be protected members of Terrasen’s court, but the warrior’s instinct to defend never went away. Rowan was sure the guards in their caravan had instructions to ensure Rowan’s—and Aedion’s—safety first, but if an attack did happen, the male doubted he’d be able to run for cover while others endangered themselves to protect him.

He and Aelin had similar opinions on that matter. They were powerful, immortal warriors. As the leaders of Terrasen, it was their responsibility to serve and protect their people, not the other way around.

For the first time that day, Rowan spotted what looked to be human figures ahead of them on the path. There were two of them, with hoods over their heads, unmoving on the side of the road. Beneath the cloak of one figure was a pair of high boots, and beneath that of the other Rowan could see full skirts, indicating the pair was likely a male and female.

As their caravan neared the two travelers, Rowan started to detect more details about their appearance. Their cloaks were high-quality and made from an expensive-looking hunter green cloth, not typical attire for two lone wanderers. Anyone of money or status traveled with a caravan, like he and Aedion were.

The pair turned slightly more towards the large group approaching them and the woman called out at the sight of Terrasen’s flag on their uniforms.

“Terrasen! The royal caravan!” The woman nudged the man beside her to draw his attention to them. “Are members of the royal family with you?”

The caravan’s head—Captain Algaard—stopped their advance and addressed the woman.

“We are of Terrasen, yes, and this caravan is transporting important members of the court.” The guard kept his answer vague so as not to reveal too much to a stranger. “What do you want of them?”

“We must speak to Aelin Galathynius. We need to warn her.” That was concerning.

“What must you warn Her Majesty about, traveler?”

“It may be difficult to believe, but my husband and I should not be alive. Someone has tampered with death, Captain, and we need to tell her.” Aedion approached the captain and grabbed him by the shoulder.

“We are alright, Algaard. Two reborns don’t pose much threat to His Majesty or myself. They are just confused.” Aedion then turned to the traveler woman. “Do you need help, kind woman? Are you in need of provisions?” The couple seemed to notice Aedion for the first time. The woman’s eyes widened in recognition.

“Aedion?” The Ashryver male paused in surprise—an emotion Rowan shared—before walking closer to the couple. Rowan could see the moment Aedion realized who the woman was because something in his face crumbled.

“Evalin?” Evalin. Even if Evalin were a common name—which Rowan didn’t believe it was—a closer look at the woman was all he needed to confirm that she was, in fact, Evalin Ashryver Galathynius. This woman, reborn to a body not much older than Aelin’s, was the near twin of his mate. It stirred something deep within the Fae to look at her.

Aelin’s mother was one of the dead brought back by this strange phenomenon. From the woman’s statement earlier of her husband, the man beside Evalin was likely Aelin’s father. These were his mate’s parents, ones she had grieved for years and missed every day.

Rowan snapped out of his thoughts to find Aedion in a firm embrace with Evalin and Rhoe. They didn’t appear to be speaking, but he had a feeling emotions were being communicated in other ways. These two were important to Aedion as well as Aelin. They had been his guardians during his early years.

Rowan felt a little intrusive watching such an intimate moment, so he turned to address the rest of their caravan. They would be adding a few more to their party, it would seem. Evalin had said she needed to speak to Aelin, and Rowan very much agreed.

“These are Her Majesty’s parents, Rhoe and Evalin Galathynius. We will be bringing them with us. They are members of Terrasen’s royal family and should be included in your protection the same as Prince Aedion and I.” The news was understandably shocking to the guards, but they remained serious and registered Rowan’s statement as the order it was. He continued, “Someone prepare them refreshment.” That was enough to set the group moving about.

When the king turned back to the reunited trio, he found them more composed than before. Aedion met his eyes and Rowan took that as his cue to approach.

“I am honored to meet you, Your Highnesses. I am Rowan Whitethorn—“ Rhoe cut him off before he could continue.

“The Fae warrior. I have heard many stories about you, Rowan Whitethorn. I have to say I have always admired your skill—the stuff of my childhood legends—but we have no want for Maeve’s presence in Terrasen. Thank you for helping Aedion, however you may have, but we should make the rest of our journey alone.” Rowan couldn’t help but smile slightly at Rhoe’s words.

“I can assure you, Rhoe Galathynius, that I no longer have any ties to Maeve. My allegiance lies solely with Terrasen and its queen, both of which I would protect with my life. You can rest knowing my particular skills will only be used for you, not against.” Rowan spoke firmly to hopefully convey how serious he was, and he would have continued had Rhoe not butted in yet again.

“You are blood sworn to Maeve, don’t think I am unaware, you have no choice where your allegiances lie.”

“That oath was broken by Maeve herself. I am now bound to Aelin completely, by ties even stronger than blood.” Rowan had to admit, witnessing Rhoe Galathynius’ face as he explained the situation was quite amusing. “As I was about to say before, I am Rowan Whitethorn Galathynius, mate and husband of Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius, Queen of Terrasen. I will, in fact, be traveling to Terrasen with you. The whole purpose of this caravan is to bring me back to my mate, but we are more than happy to have you join us.”

The wry look Aedion gave Rowan indicated that he had not hid his satisfaction well. How could he blame him, though? It wasn’t every day you got to tell your mate’s resurrected parents that you were soul bound to their daughter.

@rowaelinforeverworld

@flowersinvegas

@aelin-queen-of-terrasen

@camixd93

@lord-douglas-the-third

@montse121296

@dank-queen7

@slytheringalathynius

@rhyswhitethorn

@jesstargaryenqueen

@trilogiesrule

[the-mandalorian-clone-lover]

Aces in Spaces Chapter 17

Little happy sleepover bit a few days after the last chapter :D

Little note about the posting schedule, I’ll be around family that doesn’t agree with me being Ace for the next weeks because of the holidays. I think I’ll still find small moments to post the usual updates, I just wanted to say they might not be at the same times as normal though I’ll try to stick to the same days.

Anyway! Hope you guys enjoy!

Tags: @sunshinepascal @rentskenobi @maybege @obaby-wan @princessxkenobi @agent-450

Masterlist

2yrs 3 months

It’s Erica’s first night in the penthouse, its only a sleep over she hasn’t started moving in yet, but despite Roman’s offer of the guest room she has decided she wants to share with him for the night. He offered her the bathroom if she wanted to change after dinner, but she’d shrugged, deciding to stay in the clothes she had worn over. It’s that same pair of black jeans that she’s had since they started dating that make her legs look miles longer than they already are, has he mentioned he loves that? A long sleeved t-shirt from one of her various martial arts escapades keeps her warm and he acknowledges she’s probably snug enough for movie night (no, he’s not hoping she opted to do that because she forgot her pajamas and then she has to borrow one of his shirts, that’s ridiculous). He goes to change into sweatpants and an undershirt himself, he prefers to sleep shirtless but he grabs the shirt anyway, the last thing he wants to do is introduce unnecessary nudity if it would make her uncomfortable.

The movie passes in comfortable silence, it’s mostly background noise as they both think so loudly its near impossible for either one to focus. A few minutes in Erica gradually migrates closer to Roman, over the course of the first hour they get more and more wrapped up in each other that by the time the credits roll, Roman almost regrets that they have to come apart to go to bed.

He then realizes he should have spent this whole time contemplating how exactly he was going to ask her if she was ready for bed without it sounding weird.

Even if he is overthinking it, he’s certain he can’t be too careful.

She actually ends up breaking the silence first.

“I want to change before we get in bed, I normally drink some tea, would you like some?”

She’s always so diplomatic, giving them both something to focus on instead of the potential awkwardness and he meets her eyes, nodding. “You know where everything is in the kitchen?”

She laughs softly, “I’ve been around here enough that I can find some mugs lover”

He smiles, nodding again, “I’ll wait for you then.”

She meets him in the bedroom a few moments later both hands occupied with coffee mugs.

“I left my bag by the door; I know you don’t get up early so I’ll be able to find it.” She teases him softly as she walks toward the bed and he spits his tongue at her, squeezing his eyes shut before marking his spot in the book he’s reading and reaching out to take the drinks from her, mumbling out a ‘wouldn’t want you to spill’. She passes them across, her tongue peeking out between her lips in concentration, she breathes a sigh of relief once they’re safely in his hands.

“I can’t stand spilling it, let alone in bed.”

He nods, breathing a chuckle.

“Now don’t you laugh at me Mister, you wouldn’t sleep in a wet bed any more than me!”

He has to give her that, it’s virtually inarguable.

“Do you read before bed too?”

She tilts her hand in a so-so motion as she throws the covers back to sit. “Sometimes I do, I forgot to grab my book this afternoon, so I was going to reach out to a friend.”

He nods, handing her cup back to her, pulling back as she reaches for it, causing them both to laugh before he passes it to her carefully. “Are they far away?”

She nods, settling into the covers. “Over in the UK, she’s a great friend though.”

He hums, settling back against the headboard and pulling the covers up before re-opening his book and together they read for a little longer, sipping their tea. It’s a minty blend, probably a dash of chamomile in it as well, and Roman likes it; wouldn’t mind drinking it every night really. Speaking of night, its getting quite late and he’s faced again with the question of how to get them both to bed without being awkward. He decides it’s his turn to pose a solution.

“Do you want me to turn the lights out?” He supposes it’s safe enough.

Erica looks to him before looking down and frowning at her phone in thought. “At my house, I usually walk through and check the doors before I do, just a last assurance before I fall asleep.”

He understands that, reaching to throw the covers back, “Would you like me to, or would you like to come along?”

She smiles at him before her eyes fall down to her hands again. “Would you mind? I don’t mean to be a bother at all, I—”

He shushes her comfortingly “Not at all not at all, sometimes I call Butch over and he tucks me in and turns on my night light so I don’t get scared.” He winks at her, bringing her head forward to kiss her forehead. “I’ll be back love”

He gets out of the bed then, taking the mugs with him and depositing them in the sink before testing each door and making his way back to his room, turning lights off as he goes. When he turns off the bedroom light and crawls into bed; he feels the awkwardness looming again. They’re both lying on their backs, a full arm’s length between them, and even if they do start off movies like this it feels exceptionally far now.

“This is awkward.”

Erica doesn’t sound awkward, just sounding as if she’s making a statement of fact.

“Yup.”

It’s said in agreement. Roman doesn’t know what else to add to her assessment.

“Well, come on then.” Erica’s sitting up now, pushing the covers back and turning toward him. He copies her movements but is incredibly confused and he figures it shows. She’s reaching for his hands then and he offers them readily, then she’s pulling him to stand.

“We’ll jump on the bed like kids, you know you want to.”

They do. He knows it isn’t long but they’re both laughing loudly enough that he’d worry if he had neighbors and she still looks so beautiful. They collapse on the bed together after awhile, still holding each other’s arms and their legs on top of each other. She leans forward in a flurry to press her lips to his and pulls away to shove him down against the bed.

“Now come on let’s actually get some sleep!”

He laughs, pulling the blankets up over the both of them again, wrapping her up in his arms and brushing his nose against hers before they fall back into a comfortable silence that actually allows for sleep.

“This is better.”

Another statement of fact.

“Yup.”

Another agreement.

 *Next morning*

 He half expected her to already be awake and out of bed by the time he joined the conscious world. However, as he comes to, there’s a suspicious amount of warmth for him to be the only one under the covers. The hands he can feel under his shirt are also suspiciously, not his. He blinks his eyes open, finding the ceiling staring back at him. She’s to his left, head perched on his shoulder, arm wiggled up under his shirt, hand resting in-between his pectorals, leg crossed over one of his. She looks, divine. He’s died and gone to heaven because she’s an absolute vision. The sunlight is leaking through the corners of the shades and its framing her face in a low light that’s enough to make out the features without being enough to wake her.

Wake her. He nearly startles at the thought. She’s always been an early riser, and several of her other habits indicate her being a (practiced) light sleeper as well. The fact that she’s still asleep at this hour (and he wagers its nearly nine at least) feels like a colossal demonstration of trust. She made herself completely vulnerable with him, and if her body did wake up naturally at her normal time (she joked once that was 4am and frankly Roman hasn’t had the guts to determine if she was serious), she’d obviously chosen to go back to sleep. He’s floored. He shouldn’t be, he supposes, two years is more than enough time to cultivate trust, but at the same time, he treasures it. This gift she’s given him.

He brings his hand up to rest on hers over his shirt, trying to be careful not to disturb her. Her face scrunches up anyway and he runs his fingers along hers soothingly in an effort to postpone the inevitable. She breathes in and her eyes open, darting to his chest then out into the room before turning her head to look up to him.

She smiles, “Good morning” her voice is a little deeper than usual, a little scratchy even.

He hums, brushing some hair away from her face “So it seems I’m not the only late sleeper.” He’s sure his own voice doesn’t sound much different than hers.

She spits her tongue at him, and he smiles good naturedly before kissing her forehead and mumbling a soft inquiry about her sleep into it.

She grunts, “Well, there was this extremely large man who kept kicking me around midnight or so but he didn’t snore so I didn’t think I could justify shoving him out of bed.”

Roman scoffs “Well that sounds extremely rude, you must like him if you didn’t throw him out, you’ve never been the type of woman to put up with nonsense. Was it anyone I know?” He tries to be casual, to assume nonchalance despite the fireworks of joy and absolute bliss that are currently exploding inside of him at the sheer domesticity of the whole morning thus far.

She blinks twice then frowns at him. “Is there another man in this bed that I’m unaware of?”

He shakes his head, leaning back to get a better look at her face. “Not unless you have something to confess?”

She laughs then dropping her head down against his chest and he abandons his ministrations on her hand in favor of cradling her head against him.

“I’m in love with you, you know.”

She looks up at him and his hand slides down between them. “That is so wonderful my dear. Do you plan to let me have tea before you keep being adorable or is this strictly a before-conscious-thought thing?”

His grin splits his face.

“Well, if you want tea you’ll have to get out of my bed” he traces his fingers up her arm and to her shoulder before brushing them across her cheek. “And I don’t know if I can allow that. For the sake of my health of course.”

“We could just stay in bed then” she muses quietly, eyes never leaving his “Can’t have you risking your health after all”.

He nods, eyes wandering, finding her soft pink lips in the light, swallowing before blinking back up to her golden brown eyes. She starts teasing the small bit of hair that’s within reach under his shirt and he moves his hand to hold her still. She giggles.

“Stop, tickling me.” He chides “I am trying to work up to kissing you”

“Well you have my permission to stop trying and do.”

He does, starting out slowly, bringing his fingers to lift her chin and flattening his other palm against the small of her back. His lips meet hers gently but its only a matter of moments before he wants more, rolling them both so he can lean on the arm that was under her and kiss her deeper. She’s gripping at his shoulders, fisting her hands in his shirt, his lips are warm, and soft; and as she invades his mouth she finds he still tastes like the tea they had last night. She smiles at the memory despite herself, breaking the kiss and laughing softly through her nose before Roman interrupts her by laying swift pecs all over her face. Eyebrows, cheeks, bridge of her nose, hairline, eyelids, jawline, back to her nose, and before he gets in more than two or three, she’s laughing hysterically and halfheartedly begging him to stop. His response is to start tickling her.

Because she’s here, in his bed, and of course he’s going to make her laugh.

******************

Second time she stays over its “We could run through the house after we turn the lights off?” She looks up to him with a brilliant gleam in her eye “To be safe from the monsters?”

His grin splits his face and he grabs both of her hands “Let’s do”

They do just about that, laughing and giggling all the way.

***********************************************

[thecatprince]

Luckier Than Most

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Summary:  A death, a wish, a promise. When Virgil Sanders dies, everyone is distraught. It seems like all of the colour and joy has been stripped from the world. Roman will do anything to get his friend back and heal the pain inside him. When he makes a wish upon a star, he had no idea it would come true. Now, as everyone grieves, Virgil is there making faces at Roman at the most inappropriate times. They are luckier than most.

Warnings: Detailed description of a corpse, heavy thoughts surrounding the death of a friend and heavy emotions, deep angst.

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---

Chapter Two  - Wish Upon a Star

Logan felt numb afterwards. He wanted nothing more than to be able to cry openly, to sob like Patton in his arms and get all of the pain out, but he couldn’t. He felt numb, empty, and hollow, like there was something missing. His eyes felt dry, and for the first time in his life he felt like the robot everyone called him.

Logan was a very stoic person, his emotions were always well controlled and he often hid what he was feeling so that he wouldn’t get ridiculed and so that rash, emotion driven actions wouldn’t ruin his friendships and his reputation. Despite the fact that he never showed any deep emotion, he felt very deeply, so deeply that it hurt sometimes, but he hid all vulnerability behind a mask of indifference. It had taken a while for him to become friends with Patton, Roman, Remus, Virgil and Janus. They had slowly wormed their ways into his life and his heart, through sarcastic comments and crazy experiments and dramatic debates and gentle words. Patton showed him that opening up and being vulnerable isn’t always a bad thing, Roman demonstrated (in a dramatic re-enactment, which was in truly Roman way) that the beauty of performance meant that it didn’t have to be the real you, Janus always offered an insightful take on mundane events, providing a very different point of view for which Logan was grateful for, Remus showed him the joy of chaos and unbounded personality, and Virgil provided a very real, down-to-earth take on the world, even if it was slightly depressing and anxiety inducing, which Logan valued as it gave a balance to the drama and the ideals of the others. Slowly but surely, Logan found himself smiling more often, even laughing when he felt like it, and he started to let himself feel more, knowing that if he fell there would be someone to catch him. Logan was still stoic and calculated when he needed to be, but when it was just him and his friends he felt completely at peace with himself and his emotions.

And now he was feeling nothing. He felt like an ocean that had been sucked of its water and all that was left were the dead plants, animals and miles and miles of sand. He wanted to feel something, anything, no matter how painful, but he felt so so empty. He surveyed the grieving people around him, all of his friends in states of distraught and pain, and their parents comforting the best they could. Logan looked down at Patton sobbing into his chest, and he tightened his grip around the smaller boy. He felt Patton’s dads’ arms around him, bringing a gentle comfort to both him and Patton, and he could feel his mother’s hand in his.

He tried desperately to make himself cry, by leaning into the people around him for comfort and letting himself relax, but no matter how hard he tried and concentrated he couldn’t feel anything. He felt so lost in the numbness, it was like an all-consuming force, enveloping him in a constricting prison and he felt like he would do anything to escape. He thought of all of the happy moments he had with Virgil, all of the times they spent talking about the truths of the universe, all of the times they had shared “the look”, as Patton had so creatively named it, whenever any of their friends was acting ridiculous (which was a very common occurrence) and all of the moments they had shared after Logan had helped him calm down from his panic attacks. He thought of the fact that he would never ever be able to see his friend again, that he was gone forever, that all of those memories are the only thing he had from him. He still felt just as empty and numb as before. He knew that this will take time, and it was probably just shock that made him feel this way. But he just wanted to feel something.

He felt his mother’s hand gently rub his to comfort him and it did help a little to distract from his inner turmoil. He looked at the body of his friend, and his heart gave a twinge. Well, that was something. Virgil looked pretty similar to when he was alive earlier today. His usual eye makeup, consisting of eyeliner and a small amount of eyeshadow, most often in tones of purple and black, had been almost completely washed away by the water, leaving a slightly off colour to the already ghostly pale skin. His foundation had also faded a bit, although not washed off completely, exposing the spattering of freckles that Virgil always hated. He always said it made him look cute, and he took away his thunder. Virgil seemed weirdly exposed, just lying on the hospital bed. Roman was bent over him, shaking as he sobbed, his mum’s hand on his back. Logan tightened his arms around Patton, who had started to calm down a bit and was now just snuffling quietly, and tried to forget the fact that his friend was dead. -- Roman stared out the car window, watching the world go by. Even though the sky was filled with the bright oranges and gentle pinks that often accompanied the setting sun, to Roman the world felt colourless and empty. The sunset seemed to be mocking him, putting on a brilliant display of colours, seeming so happy and warm when Roman felt the complete opposite. He felt like a chunk of him was missing, like there was a gaping hole in his chest. He felt so lost and alone. He looked at all of the people as they drove, and he felt a wave of anger and contempt at the fact that they were just going along with their day, that they were alive and Virgil was not. Roman’s heart twisted with pain at the thought of Virgil. He wondered if it would always be like this, whether he would ever be able to think of Virgil without tears coming to his eyes. Roman wondered if he would ever be able to feel normal again, because the pain seemed almost unbearable. He wanted someone to take his hand, to pull him close and promise that it would all be okay. He wanted to feel like normal again, to be able to look at his phone and see a new message from Virgil pop up, or to be able to go to school and see Virgil standing with the group, laughing at some weird joke or making snarky comments. He just wanted Virgil back. Roman was vaguely aware of the radio being turned on, breaking the otherwise silent car. He knew his mums had that worried and concerned look of their faces and he knew that his twin was just as hurt as he was, and that he wasn’t the only friend Virgil had. Even so, he still felt so alone. Virgil was one of his best friends, and they had grown so much closer in the past two years, and now he was gone. It felt like a huge weight had covered him like a blanket, and was pressing down on him. Roman felt so lost.

The car pulled up in the driveway, and the family silently made their way into the house.

“We are going to order pizza for dinner,” Mama said, putting down the boys stuff. Roman gave a small nod to show that he understood, even though he wasn’t even the slightest bit hungry. Remus didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything since they had found Virgil, which was odd given that Remus was always talking and making noises. Their mums exchanged a glance, but didn’t say anything. Roman walked up the stairs and into his room to get away from everyone.

Roman flopped onto his bed, absolutely exhausted from all of the crying. He stared around the room, everything reminding him of different moments with Virgil. The desk turned vanity where they had given each other countless makeovers, some hysterically bad and some fantastic. The Aladdin poster that Virgil had bought Roman for his birthday that had started the huge collection of Disney posters that covered his walls. Memories of the two of them lying or sitting on Roman’s bed, sometimes joking around, sometimes having serious conversations. Roman remembered everyone hanging out in his room, having pillow fights or dancing around to music or just sitting around talking. He looked out of his window and saw Patton’s house across the street, where Roman and Virgil had sat on the roof last new year’s and talked about life while watching the sunset and waiting for the others to return from the store so they could bomb them with waterballoons. A pang of pain hit his heart as he realised that he would never see Virgil again. It had occurred to him before, but now he actually understood. He would never see Virgil’s snarky yet gentle smile again, never notice the hints of gold in his green eyes when in certain lighting again, never be able to exchange playful insults with him again, never be able to dance to Roman’s Disney music or Virgil’s emo music together again, never be able to even just see his best friend ever again. Tears started to fill his eyes, and he just lay on his bed, tears rolling down his cheeks, staring at the ceiling, the sudden realisation that his friend was gone hitting him like a freight train. -- Remus threw himself headfirst into the pile of pillows and blankets he called a bed. He had been in a perpetual state of confusion and lost-ness ever since the death. Flashes of the body kept appearing in his mind, haunting him. He could remember every last detail of the moment he found it. His mind had conjured several worst case scenarios for what had happened when they realised that Virgil was missing, but he never thought any of them would be true. Yet when his foot brushed against the smooth arm of a body, his whole world had stopped and the absolute horror he had felt at seeing the body of his friend floating in the water, feet tangled in the plants at the bottom, had followed him ever since. Remus had found himself in a state of hysteria, so lost and confused and horrified that he struggled to comprehend much of his surroundings. He found it increasingly difficult to speak, which was odd because he normally talked nonstop, thoughts appearing in his head and out through in his mouth with no filter. Sure, some of his thoughts were gruesome, and yeah, sometimes he lacked tact, but most people had gotten used to his weird comments and didn’t mind. His friends never cared. They found his lack of filter pretty welcome, as it balanced out the way Logan, Patton and Roman tended to repress their emotions and insecurities. Remus was an open book. If he was happy, he would show it, if he was sad, you would know. No matter how bad things got for him, he never bottled anything up, never left anything unsaid.

Which was why everyone found his silence so disturbing. No one could tell what he was thinking, no one could know what he was feeling. And Remus hated it. He wanted to let everything out, he wanted to yell and scream and cry and say everything he was feeling, get all of the emotions out. But he couldn’t. It felt like there was this invisible barrier stopping him. He could feel the emotions, and yet he couldn’t. He had these thoughts, but his mind was blank. He couldn’t express himself because there was nothing to express, and yet he could feel the emotions and turmoil eating at him from the inside. Remus wondered for a moment how Roman could live like this, keeping everything bottled up, hiding all of his insecurities and showing no one what he was really feeling.

Remus buried his head into one of the biggest pillows. He wanted to scream, to kick, to punch the pillow, to yell and cry, to get out all of his emotions and to stop feeling so blank and lost. But he couldn’t. His body seemed so tired and exhausted, his eyes were dry, too dry, and his mind felt blank and full of thoughts at the same time. Images of Virgil’s body kept appearing in his mind, and he wanted to shake his head to get the image out, but his head wouldn’t co-operate. Remus just lay there for what seemed like hours, head in his pillow, body completely still, feeling everything and nothing at the same, the inner conflict eating him up. -- Roman picked at the pizza, nibbling at it occasionally. He was far from hungry, but he knew he needed to eat something, even though every time he tried to swallow a huge lump appeared in his throat. Remus was just picking at the pizza with his fingers, making little dents in the greasy cheese, seeming fully focussed on the task. His mama, Anna, had her arm around his mum, Sylvia, in a gesture of comfort. Looking at his mum’s eyes it was clear that she had been crying.

Roman felt a wave of contempt towards his mum. What right did she have to be upset over Virgil’s death? He was Roman’s friend! Sure, he knew that Virgil was a particular favourite of his mum’s (although she always tried to deny it, even though Roman once caught them jamming to some MCR while they were waiting for him and Remus to come home), but he was ROMAN’s friend! Roman glared at the wall behind his mums, trying to direct his anger somewhere before he took it out on someone. He focussed on the wall. How dare the wall be so blank? Virgil should be standing there, laughing, and potentially mocking Roman for being so ridiculously angry at a wall. There should be photos covering the wall, maybe paintings, or even have that wall a better colour than that weird off white. Roman almost laughed at how stupid his thoughts were, getting so angry at a wall for being blank, but he also felt this burning pain in the pit of his stomach, a reminder of everything that had gone wrong that day.

Roman went back to nibbling at his pizza. The silence that had come over them ever since the hospital was hovering over them, boring into Roman’s mind. It felt so strong it was almost suffocating. He looked towards his twin, hoping that Remus would talk, or make a noise, or just do something to break the silence like he would normally do, but Remus was staring intently at the uneaten slice of pizza on his plate. Roman sat there in the silence for about another ten minutes, before taken his plate into the kitchen and going back up the stairs and into his room.

He flopped back onto his bed, once again alone in the silence and looked at the sky through his window. By now the sun had set, and the full moon lit up the night, the stars around it dotting the sky like pinpricks of light. Roman loved the stars, loved the moon, loved the sky really, from the bright warm sun, fluffy clouds and stretches of pure blue, to the gentle navy darkness of the night, with the cool light of the moon and the gentle stars scattered across the night sky like freckles across a face. Like Virgil’s freckles, which Roman loved more than anything else. His freckles reminded him the stars in the sky, and sprinkles on a cake. Virgil always covered them up with layers of foundation, saying they made him look silly and cute. Or at least he used to, before he died.

Roman wished more than anything for him to be able to see his friend’s face one more time, to see those freckles and the deep brown eyes with flecks of gold, to see his bright purple hair, to see his stupid smirk. Roman could almost hear his voice, snarky yet gentle at the same time. Roman stared at the stars, trying to picture Virgil’s face in the sky. He noticed a shooting star cross the sky, leaving a trail of light behind it. A small amount of hope blossomed in his chest. Roman never believed in wishing upon stars, or upon coins in a well, or by wishing upon eyelashes, but he did it anyway.

“I wish that Virgil was here,” Roman murmured, focussing on the star.

There was a beat of silence, and the small amount of hope that had formed in his chest was crushed into dust. How could he be so stupid? No wishes ever came true, so how could he ever think this one would? Especially because Virgil was dead. Roman saw him dead. No wish could ever bring someone back from the dead. And even if it could, how would it work? Would he come back as a ghost, only visible to a couple of people, or would he come back as a grotesque zombie? Would someone take kindly to being brought back from the dead or- Roman’s thoughts were cut off by a blinding light coming from the corner of his room. Roman sat up and shielded his eyes, as the light grew brighter and then faded. Roman uncovered his eyes, and had to rub his eyes and pinch himself a couple of times to be sure of what he was seeing, hardly believing his eyes.

“Virgil?”

-- 

I know it is super angst at the moment but I promise it gets better. Comments are greatly appreciated.

[whiskynottea]

An Interruption in the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. 

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24, Chapter 25, Chapter 26, Chapter 27,  Chapter 28, Chapter 29, Chapter 30, Chapter 31, Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Chapter 34, Chapter 35,  Chapter 36, Chapter 37, Chapter 38, Chapter 39, Chapter 40, Chapter 41, Chapter 42, Chapter 43, Chapter 44,  Chapter 45, Chapter 46, Chapter 47, Chapter 48 

AO3

This chapter is co-written with @theministerskat, who has also made the banner, knows every little corner of Ann Arbor and has been on this ride as my beta almost from the very beginning! Love you, Kat! ❤️

Also, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for still being here, loving these two goobers and their story!

Chapter 49. Midnight

Michigan. Jamie’s dorm. His new life.

I drew a heart into the condensation that had accumulated on the window overnight. Through the bold, clear lines of my doodle, I could see the fresh layer of snow that had fallen in the early hours of the morning, blanketing the city in white. It was like a clean canvas, impatiently awaiting an artist to make the first stroke.

Like our lives. Everything felt new, and yet familiar at the same time. I didn’t know this place, or the future that awaited us; but I knew him, and myself, and I felt that was enough.

Jamie began stirring in the small bed across the room, and I turned to see him reach a hand out from under the covers, searching for me. I felt my heart constrict at the amount of love that instantaneously engulfed me.

My sweet, ridiculous Scot.

The floor was cold under my feet as I padded back over to the bed and crawled in next to him. I wedged myself into the crook of his arm, trying to steal as much body heat from him as possible.

“Good morning, Sassenach,” he whispered when I finally settled in. He kissed my forehead without opening his eyes, and I could feel the smile playing on his lips as they lingered between my brows.

“Good morning, yourself. I’m cold,” I purred. “Warm me?”

A sigh of contentment escaped him as his other arm came around my waist, pulling me impossibly closer to his body, my living furnace. I felt my own body relax and melt into his, and allowed myself to enjoy a quiet moment with him after so many months apart.

To just be, together.

“What are our plans for today?” I mumbled into his chest after a few minutes.

He didn’t answer right away, and I looked up to make sure he hadn’t fallen back asleep.

As if he were answering my unspoken question, his hand roamed up from my waist and back down, fingertips gracefully gliding over the bare skin of my back. When he reached the swell of my buttocks, he took a firm grip and pulled my hips tight against his.

He was most definitely awake.

His head tilted down slowly towards mine, placing a lingering kiss on my lips before moving to the spot behind my ear.

“Plans?” he whispered between light bites on my ear lobe and kisses just beneath there. “My only plan is to keep ye locked in this room for the rest of yer visit.”

I moaned in response to that suggestion, and felt his reaction to my noises, but just a bit further down.

Trying to not to let him distract me too much, I pushed him a bit more for an answer. “Knowing you, Jamie Fraser, you most certainly have plans for us.”

“Aye, ye’re right. I do.” Another kiss, and then a lick across my collar bone that sent a shiver through me. “But for right now, my only plan is to make ye whimper.” And before I could process what was happening, he dove beneath the covers.

It would never be enough.

--

We eventually untangled ourselves from the sheets of Jamie’s bed around noon, realizing that if we didn’t actually put some effort into getting up, we would stay there forever.

I wanted to see Ann Arbor; it was the city that had enchanted Jamie from the moment he had arrived. I longed to see the things that were a part of his every day, and spend time in his favorite spots.

It was a selfish desire on my part. I wanted to create memories with him so he would still be able to feel my presence wherever he went when I couldn’t be there. I wanted to talk to him on the phone and know exactly what he was seeing, not just imagine the place as a vague picture with fuzzy lines. I wanted Jamie to walk down a street and think of me, how we strolled there together, how he laughed at my jokes.

Stupid, egocentric, overwhelming love. I didn’t want him to forget me.

“Where to first?” I asked as we pushed our way through the front doors of his dorm.

“This way,” he said as he took my mittened hand in his, “I have something special I want to show ye, Sassenach.”

It took us 15 minutes to reach the iron gates of the Nichols Arboretum.

“The locals simply call it The Arb, but I’ve only come here a few times,” Jamie said, letting go of my hand for a moment to pull his beanie back down over his ears. The red curls falling across his forehead were speckled with little snowflakes. “But every time I’m here, I think of you.”

“Only when you’re here?” I asked with a sly smile.

“Always,” he hastened to remedy, “Always! But even more when I’m here. It may sound dumb, but it reminds me of our walks through the parks back in the Edinburgh. Reminds me of home.”

He dropped my hand again and moved a few, wide strides ahead.

I didn’t follow immediately, but turned and took in the bit of wilderness around me, in awe that such a place could exist within a city. It was gorgeous, and the snow covered trees and paths glittered as the sun poked its way through a break in the clouds.

As I completed my circle, a white bomb hit me square in the chest and exploded. I gasped through the cold wetness and wiped at my face.

“But there is never so much snow in Edinburgh!” he said, laughing. He actually dared to laugh.

“You’ll pay for that, Jamie Fraser.” I sneered and ran to him, ready to inflict my revenge on him in any way I could. I tried, with no success, to pull him down into the snow. Before I could realize how, he managed to wrestle me into the air and I ended up with my head against his back, while he fondled my ass, conveniently set upon his shoulder.

“Put me down!” I exclaimed, pounding my fists against his back. He carried me as if I were as light as a feather.

My response released another fit of laughter from him. “Oh I did miss you, my Sassenach,” he murmured, his hand still groping at my butt.

“Me or my arse?” I asked, actually curious.

“Both. I didna ken I could have one and not the other.” He pinched me lightly, then advised me to stop moving before we both fell.

I stopped, and he let me slide down him, slowly, never losing control. His eyes were glinting with happiness and a few unshed tears of joy when I looked at him, standing flush to his body.

When we resumed our walk a few minutes later, I noticed the wooden edges of flowerbeds left to hibernate over the winter. “I guess it will be heavenly here in the spring,” I said, trying to imagine all the colours dancing around me.

“Ah, was it a bad idea to come here?” Jamie asked self-consciously, looking at me with a frown. “It’s only bare trees and snow now, would ye like to go somewhere else, Sassenach?”

I gave him my warmest smile, squeezing his hand. “It’s wonderful, Jamie. It’s so quiet and calm. Everything white, so pure.” I pulled him to me and placed a kiss on his cheek. “I love it.”

Jamie let out a breath, content with himself. “I thought ye would. And there is a river further down!”

He walked in silence, as we had done countless times before, in a life miles away, in a time that felt like years ago.

We neared a lonely wooden bench that was situated under a tree, with thick bark and wide branches.

“I was thinking…” Jamie started, then trailed off. He glanced at the bench, then back to me. “We had our bench on Calton Hill.” He tipped his head in the direction he thought Edinburgh was, although I had no idea which way east was either. “I thought we could have our bench here, as well. Since I’ll be here for--”

I didn’t let him finish his thought. My lips accepted all the love he offered, all the little ways he cherished what we had. I strained to keep the tears from falling, thinking of all the means by which he had already linked this place with me, even before I had set foot here. I showed him my giddy smile though, realizing how stupid I had been, thinking that he’d come to forget me.

He sat down and pulled me onto his lap, and we watched stray snowflakes fall, looking at each other every few moments, trying to take in our new way of life. When I started shivering, Jamie motioned for me to stand, and we resumed our walk.

“Cold already,” he said and shook his head disapprovingly. “I had told ye that first day,” he stopped, and gave me a small smile, “That ye’re a blue-nosed Sassenach.”

I laughed, thinking of the day I discovered how warm Jamie’s hands always were. “Mmmm, you did.”

“I had gone back home and spent the rest of the night thinking if you might have taken offense. But then, you’d given me yer number, so it couldna been that bad.”

“No, not that bad,” I agreed, feeling the warmth of his hand through my gloves. “Not bad at all.”

We followed a path along the river, and when my limbs became sufficiently cold to complain about, Jamie agreed to go to a coffee shop for a little break.

He suggested at least ten different options with great coffee and tea, but we settled for the one closest to central campus, that he frequented every morning before class. On our way there, Jamie greeted several students that passed by us, and I started wondering just how popular he had become here, and in such a small amount of time. It seemed that the tall, redheaded Scot had made quite an impression.

Jamie told me all about the swim team as we neared our destination. He went on about their training, the new coach and the facilities at the university. Everything had surpassed his expectations. He was enraptured, and I felt my heart swell for him. He had made the best choice, and I took a little pride in the fact that I had helped him do so.

“When will I meet John?” I asked when he finally stopped to take a breath from his rambling.

Jamie hesitated for a moment as he held the door open to corner coffee shop for me, but finally continued once we took our spot in line.

“He texted me this morning, Sassenach. Hector is having a party at his place tonight, and John asked if we wanted to go.” He looked at me, uncharacteristically indecisive. “I would rather have ye all to myself, but I don’t think I’ll be able to, now.”

“We could go,” I shrugged. “We’ve had all day to ourselves, and it’s not like I’m leaving tomorrow.” Jamie made a sad face, and I pulled him down to me for a kiss. “We still have plenty of time! Plus, I want to meet John.”

“Aye, he wants to meet ye, too. Even though I dinna ken whether the combination of the two of ye will turn out well for me.”

I snorted and looked at him cunningly. “Maybe I’ll make him tell me your secrets.” I wiggled my eyebrows and he laughed.

“I think ye already ken all my secrets, mo chridhe,” he whispered in my ear and pulled me closer. The older women behind us coughed loudly just as our lips met again, and we apologized, stepping up to the counter to order.

We sat at a table near the wide glass windows, looking out at the street. I felt warmth finally seeping into my body, and with the hot coffee between my hands, the tall Scot sitting across from me, I couldn’t hold my smile back.

We talked about Edinburgh, about Jenny and Ian who were trying to persuade Brian into producing cider as well, and of Rupert and Angus, who had returned to Edinburgh and started a shop fixing bikes, in a forgotten basement close to the city centre. We talked about Oxford, and about my next visit before more obligations would start on my part. It felt wonderful, talking to him again, feeling his hand holding mine, reaching out and touching him. So simple. So perfect.

After several refills we were ready to face the cold again, and left the small cafe. Jamie had a whole list of things we could do, but our late start to the day severely limited our options now.

“We could browse the art museum for a bit. It’d be warm in there,” he suggested as he tightened the scarf around my neck.

“I’d like that,” I told him and we set off.

The museum itself was small in comparison to others, but still held a number of intriguing installations that we found ourselves discussing quietly. Belatedly, we realized that we’d never perused a museum together, and agreed on visiting more of the collections in the following days. On our way out, I noticed a display advertising the museum’s African art gallery and made a mental note to make sure we made it to that one.

The sun had already set when we left the museum and both of our stomachs had begun rumbling for food. After grabbing a quick bite to eat at the student union, Jamie texted John asking for Hector’s address.

“What kind of party will this be, exactly?” I asked while we waited for John’s reply.

“What d’ye mean, Sassenach?”

“Do we need to dress up?” I raised an eyebrow, then raised my arms, indicating that my huge, puffy coat may not be proper party attire.

“Och, no.” Jamie shrugged. “I dinna think it will be anything fancy.” In an instant his arm was around my waist, pulling me to him. “Ye’re beautiful, babe,” his said in a most sincere, mellow voice. “So beautiful that I’m thinking of texting John we willna make it.”

I smiled against his lips and took them in mine.

Later that night, nestled between Jamie’s body and the arm of Hector’s sofa, I closed my eyes, listening to the soft notes of the guitar. It was dreamy.

“D’ye like it, Sassenach?” I heard Jamie’s whisper, his arm pulling me closer to him.

“Mmmm… I envy John.”

That startled him, and he moved back to look at me. “Why on earth would you envy John?”

“Well…” I chuckled. “Hector is tall, handsome, kind, clever, with his own apartment, and he plays the guitar. Isn’t that obvious?” Jamie made a sound I couldn’t characterize, but I was sure it wasn’t amusement. “What?”

“Nothing,” he murmured, turning his eyes away.

“Hey,” I crooned and pinched his side. “Are you really jealous of Hector?”

“I’m not jealous!” he exclaimed a bit louder than he meant to be, and John scowled at us, his gaze leaving Hector for the first time since his boyfriend had started playing.

“Oh, come here, you…” I paused, grinning, but Jamie didn’t look at me. “Chippy Scot!” I finished, bringing my hand around his neck, and lowering his face to me until I could capture his lips in mine.

I didn’t pay attention to the rest of the song. When Jamie pulled back to look at me again, he had a crooked smile on his face.

“So, ye like me more?” he asked, and I rolled my eyes.

“I love you, stupid--” I didn’t get to finish my sentence, his teeth taking hold of my bottom lip.

Hector continued strumming soft tunes on his guitar, now with John sitting next to him, when Jamie’s eyes went wide with panic.

“Where is your coat?” he asked, springing from the couch.

“In a room, somewhere.” I looked at him puzzled, unable to understand what had gotten into him all of a sudden.

A minute later he was back, with our coats, scarves and gloves in his arms. We said a hasty goodnight to the rest of the group and took our leave, Jamie practically dragging me out onto the street.

“Jamie, what’s going on? What’s the matter?” The cold felt like an attack on my body, and I struggled as I tried to put on my gloves, while fixing my scarf tighter around my neck.

“What time is it, Sassenach?”

“What? What does it-”

“Claire! The time!”

Giving up hope of getting words out of him that made any sense, I dug into the pocket of my coat for my phone. I held it up to my face and the screen lit immediately.

“It’s 11:48. Why does it matter? Will your carriage turn into a pumpkin come midnight?” He chuckled at my stupid joke, but took my free hand in his and led me down the snowy walkway.

“Aye, I’ll make sure I leave my glass slipper behind.” I looked down at his long feet, laughing at the notion of Jamie in slippers. “Come on,” he said, tugging at my hand. “It’s a ten-minute walk in the best conditions. We have to hurry.”

And with no more explanation than that, he began walking, pulling me along behind him as I nearly ran to keep up with his long strides.

Even properly secured against the wind the night air was cold against my cheeks, and I knew they’d be a deep pink by the time we got to where we were going.Jamie didn’t slow his pace, but he kept glancing back to me to make sure I was alright, a large sly smile spreading wide across his face.

After what seemed like the longest street block in history, Jamie turned and I saw the coffee shop from that afternoon on the corner. He kept moving towards an archway ahead of us, and I knew it led into the diagonal yard he had shown me on my tour of the campus earlier in the day.

Unsure where exactly we were going, I was surprised when Jamie suddenly stopped in the middle of the archway. Not expecting such a sudden halt, I crashed into the back of him and felt my feet go out from underneath me on a rogue patch of ice.

I braced myself for impact with the pavement, but Jamie caught me before I went down. He held tight to my arms as I steadied myself and I glared up at him.

“What in God’s name is going on, Jamie Fraser? Why the sudden rush out into the cold?”

“What time is it?”

I glowered at him, but didn’t protest this time and looked to my phone once again.

“11:57.” The smile I had seen on his face during our walk reappeared, this time even bigger.

“This is the West Hall Engineering Arch.” He raised his hands and gestured to the brick archway all around us. “It was built in 1904. A long time ago, the female students lived way up in that direction,” he pointed towards one end of the arch, “And the men lived down here on central campus.”

He closed the distance between us, hands coming to a rest on my hips.

“After a date, the lasses and laddies,” I giggled at his put on heavy Scots accent, but he ignored me and continued, “Would part ways for the night right here and say their goodbyes. Legend has it, that if ye kiss someone at midnight under this arch, ye’ll marry ‘em. So, Sassenach, I’ll ask ye once more, what time is it?”

My brained stopped. My pulse quickened and I felt my heart flutter as I looked down to my phone a final time.

“Midnight,” I whispered, but his lips were on mine before I could get the entire word out.

Chapter 50

[chimchimsauce]

Advent Calendar

YN looks at the large box in a mixture of confusion and amusement.

“Really? An advent calendar?” she says, glancing at her beaming boyfriend. “Yes, really! It’ll be fun!” Leaning over and kissing her cheek, her boyfriend stands, brushing off his jacket. “Don’t open anything early!” He says, waving goodbye as he climbs back into Bangtan’s large bus. “I won’t!” She calls, heart clenching at the thought of him leaving again.

Taehyung had only been back in town to see her for two days, and even then he spent most of his time with his bandmates, all of them having to squeeze in some extra practice due to a scheduling issue. Bangtan’s MAMA performance originally had backup dancers from a different company, but for whatever reason, they had pulled out of the job, forcing BigHit to have to rehire and retrain the new dancers. So their five-day break was whittled down to two days, Tae still having to run and go practice with the new crew on his off days as well.

YN sighs, slight disappointment welling up in her, which she promptly squishes down. She’d known what she was getting into when she began dating Taehyung two years ago; An idol’s life was never simple, never allowing for long periods of rest.

The girl glances at the oversized box he hauled onto her kitchen table. The whole thing is covered in shiny wrapping paper and sparkles, the obviously homemade calendar warming her heart. Out of curiosity, she pulls open the drawer marked with a number one. Inside, nestled in wrapping paper and fluff sits a singular Hershey’s Kiss. A string is tied gently around the tip, connecting the piece of chocolate to a small note.

Since I can’t be here to give you a kiss myself, I thought I’d leave one behind ;)

YN lets out a chuckle, unwrapping the candy and popping it on her tongue. As the candy begins to melt, she gently places the note back into the box, wanting to keep it safe.

Taehyung is known to buy and give ridiculously expensive gifts, which she appreciates, but all of his homemade presents are her favorite. It’s these gifts she pulls out in the middle of the night when she misses him, when it feels like he’s a million miles away.

Some days it’s harder than she’d like to admit, some days she misses him so much her stomach ties itself into endless knots as she cries herself to sleep. Others, she watches proudly through her phone screen as he and his members - his closest friends - make their way through the world, leaving a blazing trail of successes and awards behind them. But the best days are spent with Kim Taehyung (not V) cuddled underneath the covers, watching stupid movies and messing with each other. The best days are spent walking through small parks and talking about the most important unnecessary things in the world. The best days are spent just being with the love of her life.

Day Two and Three pass quickly, Taehyung managing to dial his girlfriend for a few minutes as they travel, eagerness resonating in his voice as he impatiently urges YN to open the small drawers. Day Two's gift consists of a gift card to her restaurant, the amount large enough to treat herself to a good meal or two.

“I'll wait for you to come back. Then we can eat there together,” YN says hopefully, phone wedged between her cheek and lifted shoulder, hands occupied with the small piece of blue plastic.

“Nah, you enjoy yourself, babydoll. I got it for you to use sometime while I'm gone, so you don't survive on instant dinners,” he says amused.

His concerns are valid. YN never was a particularly good cook.

“Okay, fair,” she replies, grinning softly.

A noise is heard in the background and her boyfriend lets out a sigh.

“I have to go,”

The line goes dead.

Day Three is a small bracelet, one Tae explains over the phone he picked up because he thought it would suit her. It's a simple thing, but incredibly elegant, a small butterfly charm dangling from the chain. He rushes off of the phone even quicker than before.

Day Four, Five, and Six, she receives a boatload of coins for the arcade nearby (It was running a Christmas special, apparently. How he'd known, YN is unsure), a couple of pieces of saltwater taffy he'd been gifted in Europe, and a pair of earrings he himself owns as well. She thanks Tae via texts, unable to get him on the phone.

It’s only on Day Seven where she starts to miss him, unable to pretend everything was okay. She doesn’t even want to open the advent calendar, looking at the box with a heavy heart, it a happy reminder of her boyfriend’s absence.

You’d think the girl would get used to it eventually, that him leaving wouldn’t impact her as much, but every time he leaves she aches inside, a piece of herself off dancing across the world.

But remembering her promise to Tae, YN opens Day Seven’s door. Inside, she can’t believe it because it’s so bizarre, is a small glass figure of a puppy, the small creature’s front paw lifted up into the air, almost as if he’d been turned into glass during a happy stroll down a merry lane. There’s a note this time as well.

I saw this in one of the vintage stores in America. I’m not sure why, but I thought you’d enjoy this little dog. It seems so jolly, doesn’t it?

Day Eight is more candy, a couple of peppermints with a corny Christmas joke stuffed into the box as well.

When I told you I love you I peppermint it ; )

YN can’t help but chuckle. Seokjin is rubbing off on him.

Day Nine is a silky blue scarf, rolled and tied up delicately with a silver ribbon. The material is so soft, it nearly tickling the girl’s skin when she wraps it around her neck. She takes a photo of it, sending it to Taehyung.

He doesn’t reply.

Day Ten is a matching hat, still tied with ribbon, and Day Eleven completes the set with a pair of furry mittens.

Taehyung knows she despises gloves, her fingers always feeling a chill no matter how thick they are. She only wears mittens.

Day Twelve is a small jar of peach-flavored lip balm which YN finds incredibly smoothing, the faint scent of fresh fruit lingering on her soft lips. She knows it’s more of a gift to himself than to her, Taehyung always loving when she wears flavored chapstick. It gave him an excuse to kiss her even though he didn’t need one.

Day Thirteen (still no word from Tae, but YN saw the boys had won several awards overseas), YN pulls out a small ornament, a photo of the two of them hugging glazed perfectly in the middle of the bell-shaped decoration. She hangs it immediately, smiling.

She remembers that day fondly. Taehyung had a rare day off, a day completely to himself, and he had spent it with her, exploring the woods that back her house. The couple had discovered a small and half-rotted treehouse suspended from one of the bigger trees. Taehyung had been fascinated by it, climbing it despite YN’s warnings of possible danger. He hadn’t cared. To him, that was the best discovery he’d ever had.

Day Fourteen was a fortune cookie that promises eternal happiness; Day Fifteen was filled with colorful stickers. They were random, hearts and puppies and cakes and octopi.

With Taehyung, you never knew what you were going to get.

Day Sixteen was a pair of designer sunglasses, the same pair she’d been mooning over since she saw them in the store. She hardly remembers mentioning them to Taehyung, but he never missed anything. He’d never once forgot her birthday or a date, never once forgot to pick up milk before he came over. It’s one of the things she loves most about him.

Day Seventeen held a couple of brightly colored pens, which she used in conjunction with her stickers. She couldn’t say she wasn’t amused, YN spending a few hours working on a drawing and tossing some stickers in wherever she saw fit.

Day Eighteen was a pretty lipstick, the perfect shade for her skin tone. Nineteen was more candy (He’s trying to make her fat, she feels it) and Twenty was a few bags of Christmas themed tea.

YN still hadn’t heard from Tae at all. He wasn’t even answering her messages, except once to say he wouldn’t be able to make it back home for Christmas. She was disappointed, but not particularly surprised.

Day Twenty - One was a keychain, pressed flowers stuffed between two circles of glass. It’s gorgeous, and YN places it on her bag immediately.

Twenty - Two was a small bottle of perfume in a scent Tae thought she’d enjoy. She did. It smelled of sunshine and fresh daisies.

Twenty - Three was a Christmas card, a photo of Taehyung and the boys grinning in silly holiday hats wedged in between. After reading it, YN places the card on her mantle.

Day Twenty - Four, Christmas Eve and the last day of the calendar, YN opens the drawer only to find it empty. She checks once again, even circling the box to see if she had somehow bumped it off the table.

But she found nothing. YN is about to give up, thinking he’d forgotten to add the very last day in his haste to put the gift together, when her phone dings, a text message grabbing her attention.

Her heart warms when she realizes it’s from her boyfriend, but her happiness is replaced with confusion when she reads the message.

Come outside

Curious, YN throws on a coat and follows the instructions, exiting out her front door only to see her walkway decorated with lit candles, the flames flickering gently in the cold. Soft music is playing from behind her house and YN walks towards it through the walkway of candles and into the woods, tears coming to her eyes when she sees Taehyung dressed handsomely and standing in the treehouse.

What had once been little more than a safety hazard has been transformed into a comfy area, the structure decorated with strings of fairy lights and fluffy pillows.

“Tae,” she says, breathless, looking up at him.

He’s smiling widely, an excited look on his face.

“Come on up!”

YN quickly climbs the new ladder, joining Tae in the refreshed treehouse. Immediately, she wraps her arms around him, squeezing him tightly.

“I thought you weren’t coming for Christmas!” she exclaims, hitting him gently on the shoulder.

“I wanted it to be a surprise!” he replies, kissing her on the forehead, “I missed you so much while I was gone,”

“Not as much as I missed you, Tae! I’m so glad you’re back. Did you enjoy yourself?”

Taehyung then launches himself into a fluffy of stories about his travels, breath coming out in white puffs of air. YN listens with rapt attention, hanging onto every word. When he’s done relaying his adventures, the two of them cuddle up under a blanket, looking up into the night sky.

“I enjoyed your calendar, by the way. It made me miss you a little bit less. But you know, Tae, there was nothing in today’s drawer. Did you forget it?” she asks him, chuckling.

“Nope, I didn’t,” he says.

“Are you the present? Because I’m not complaining,”

He laughs, a bright, cheerful sound.

“No, I’m not the gift. This is,”

With those words, Taehyung sits up, pushing his girlfriend up as well.

“YN,” he says, suddenly nervous and taking her hand, pressing something cold in it.

Looking in her eyes, he opens her palm, a ring glittering in the moonlight.

“Will you marry me?”

[whimsicallyenchantedrose]

Taking Back Neverland--Chapter 8 of 10

Pairing:  Captain Swan

Rating:  G or a soft T

Summary: AU. After actress Emma Swan’s lead role in a popular TV show is at an end, she is offered the leading role in the Regina Mills film, Taking Back Neverland, a fresh retelling of the Peter Pan story.  It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.  Only problem?  She’ll be starring opposite Killian Jones, who she positively can’t stand.  (Originally part of my Fluffy Fridays collection.)

Previous chapters: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

Notes:  So this is an old story, originally written about 3 years ago as part of my Fluffy Fridays collection, but @kmomof4 made the amazing above pic-set for it as a birthday gift, (Thanks Krystal!  It’s perfect!), and I decided it was time for a reissue.   Enjoy!

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Emma took a long sip from her bottle of water, pausing to push a damp, sweaty lock of hair behind her ear before sipping again. It had been a demanding day on set.  They’d spent long hours filming action scenes—the heroes finally discovering Pan’s ultimate goal and then rushing to Skull Rock to stop him from taking Henry’s heart.

It wasn’t merely the physical demands that left her exhausted and thoroughly drained; there were the emotions as well. She figured only an actor could truly appreciate how exhausting it was to work yourself into a state of high emotion—and stay there for hours on end.

But if Emma was being thoroughly honest with herself, it wasn’t merely the exhaustion of portraying strong emotions that was tiring her, it was…how very close to home those emotions hit. In the movie, she was reacting to losing her son, to watching as he gave his heart to Pan, naively believing he was saving magic, to watching him crumple to the ground unconscious.

Emma knew what it was like to lose her son. Granted, her boy hadn’t died—that she knew of, at least—but she’d lost him all the same.  She’d lost him before she’d ever been able to see him.  She doubted she’d ever forget the sound of those strong little cries as the nurses cleaned him up after his birth.  She’d turned her head aside, determined not to even look at him, because if she did, she knew she’d break.  Her arms that ached to hold him would take him and she’d never, never be able to let him go.

She blinked the tears back, sniffing lightly. She’d been emotional enough today—even if it was just acting—she wasn’t going to break down again.  She wasn’t!  That time, no matter how painful, was over.  She’d moved on with her life, and if she occasionally thought about her son, her little boy, wondered where he was and what he was doing, if he was happy….well, she tried to keep those times to a minimum.  She’d done what she had to to give him his best chance, and she just had to trust it had worked out for him.

“Alright there, Swan?”

Her heart stuttered and then began to race at the warm, concerned sound in Killian’s accented voice. It was a good voice; a soothing voice.  Something like…smooth hot chocolate with a hint of spice…cinnamon, maybe.

She took a deep breath, surprised (and maybe a little dismayed) at her reaction. They hadn’t filmed together today and it was the first time she’d so much as seen him since their last scene together two days ago. 

“Yeah,” she said, pasting on a smile. “Just one of those days where it’s all emotional scenes all the time.”

He nodded sympathetically. “Ah yes,” he said.  “Hard to turn off the emotion after hours of ginning it up, aye?”

“Something like that,” she answered, having the sudden desire to talk to him, to let him know how very close to home the scene had truly come, to bare to him all her heartache over that worst day of her life.

But things were weird between them now, had been ever since the kiss scene a week and a half ago. The friendship, easy camaraderie they’d had when they first started filming together was just…gone.

It was her fault; she knew it was. The first day on set after her conversation with Mary Margaret, Killian had come up to her after they wrapped for the day.

“Swan,” he said, fidgeting slightly, his thumb and fingers tapping against each other. “If you’ve a moment, I have something I’d like to speak to you about.”

He was nervous; that much was plain, and his nerves naturally put her a little on edge. Whatever he wanted to say to her was big, important, and…she just wasn’t sure she was ready for it yet; didn’t know if she’d ever be.

“I’ve got dinner plans with Ruby,” she said shortly, “so make it quick.”

He sighed, glanced at the ground for a moment, and reached up to scratch behind his ear. After a moment, he seemed to get ahold of himself, straightening, looking her firmly in the eye, and swaying toward her slightly.

“Swan,” he began again, in a voice firm with resolve, “it’s perhaps time we discuss the elephant in the room.”

Oh this wasn’t starting well. This wasn’t starting well at all.  Emma didn’t talk about elephants in the room.  She ignored them, avoided them at all costs, going so far as to run away from the room if necessary, and let the gigantic creatures trumpet their unnaturally long trunks to their hearts’ content.

But something about the way Killian was looking at her, with gentleness as well as resolve, with care for her as well as nervousness for himself, left her rooted to place.

“Emma…” he began again, “you cannot be unaware that that kiss we shot…it was not merely acting for me. You know I’ve developed feelings for you.”

Her heart started racing. “Killian…it was just a kiss!  It wasn’t…”

He stopped her with a raised hand. “I know love; please let me finish.”

She sighed, but nodded.

“I know you’re not ready, you’re still tentative because you had your heart broken, but you know what? I’m glad for it.”

She crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes at him. “You’re glad I got my heart broken?”

“Aye,” he said, stepping closer to her, “because if it’s broken, it means it still works.”

“Killian…”

He stopped her again. “I need you to know, Emma, that I’m in this for the long haul, I’d follow you to the end of the world or time, but I have no desire, none at all, to pressure you or make you uneasy.  To that end, I’m going to back off.  Just know if you ever need anything, anything at all, you’ve but to let me know.”

And then he was gone, leaving so abruptly she didn’t even have time to respond. Not that she could have formed coherent sentences after a speech like that delivered with Killian’s particular brand of intensity.

And over the last week and a little more, he’d carefully kept his promise. They barely spoke, save for what their characters said to each other on screen.  Whereas before, they’d often head to the break room together during on-set breaks, content to sit in companionable silence, now…well, she went to the break room, but he nodded politely to her and headed in the opposite direction.

She wouldn’t admit it, least of all to him, but she missed him.

“Yeah,” she said, bringing her mind back to the conversation at present. “There’s nothing about watching your onscreen son give his heart to a psychopath and then collapse over and over and over again that isn’t rough emotionally speaking.”

His eyes became even more concerned, and he reached his hand out as though to grasp her arm but pulled it back at the last moment. “Well at least that should be one of the last scenes of such negative emotion.  Tomorrow we film you and your sister retrieving the lad’s heart and then restoring him to life.”

“Yeah,” she said smiling. “Can you believe we only have a few more scenes to shoot?  Seems like these few months have flown by.”

“Indeed they have.”

“So,” she said casually, “you got plans for tonight? I thought I’d see if David and Mary Margaret and some of the rest wanted to go out for drinks later.  Well, I suppose Mary Margaret wouldn’t be up for drinks—at least not the fun kind—in her current condition, but it’s always good to have a designated driver, right?”

She was starting to babble, and her face reddened more with every ridiculous word she said. What was the big deal?  She was just asking a co-worker to hang out with her—and several others—after work.  Not like she was asking for a date or anything. 

She knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. The slightly pained look in his eyes gave it away.  “I’d love to join you, Swan, but I’m afraid I already have plans.”

At that moment, his lively, blonde agent walked in and walked their way. “You have plans with Tink?  Wait…are you two…?”

“No!” the lady in question said quickly.

“Perhaps,” Killian said, hand going to his belt buckle, leaning back with a ridiculous amount of swagger, tongue doing positively indecent things to the corner of his mouth. “Jealous, Swan?”

She scoffed. “You wish!”

She turned, ready to stalk off, when he stopped her with a hand to her arm. “Wait, love.  The lady is right.  There’s nothing of a personal nature going on here.  We’ve merely scheduled a business dinner to suggest potential projects once this film wraps.”

Emma felt a swift and immediate rush of relief…which, of course, annoyed the crap out of her. What the hell did she care if he was dating Tink or not?  He could date all the women within a twenty mile radius for all she cared!

“Well, have fun,” she said, turning away. “See you…whenever we film again.”

He looked like he wished to speak again, but contented himself with a mere nod before heading off with his bubbly agent.

“You know, he really likes you,” Emma heard from behind her. She turned around to find herself face to face with her “son” Henry.

“I don’t know, Henry,” she said, skeptically.

“Well I do,” Henry said earnestly.

“Sometimes things are…more complicated…than they look,” Emma hedged. “I know it’s probably hard to understand, but things can be kind of…messy…with adults.”

Henry rolled his eyes and sighed. “You know, Emma, grown-ups never think kids know things.  They always say we can’t understand!  I understand things.”

Emma smiled, in spite of herself. There was something so earnest and open about this kid.  She couldn’t help but be drawn to him.  “Guess you’re right.  Maybe we aren’t fair all the time.”

He grinned up at her, and for a moment her breath caught. That grin was so familiar.  Reminded her a bit of Neal…back before he’d revealed himself to be a total crap person.  He had that same kind of…joyful carefree spirit.

Emma had gotten to know Henry quite a bit over the last week or two. With things being so…weird between her and Killian, Emma spent more time in between takes hanging out around set, watching other scenes being filmed.  The kid was really a pretty good little actor.  She bought what he was selling.

Then they’d filmed a few scenes that Anna and Henry had together, and Emma got to know the kid even more. He was smart and idealistic.  Always saw the best in everyone.  Had more faith in…everything…than Emma had ever seen.

Regina couldn’t have possibly cast a better person for the “truest believer”.

Emma felt a quick pang as she thought about how very close they were coming to the end of filming. The thought of wrapping for good…and maybe never seeing Henry again, never getting to work this closely with him, well it didn’t set well.  They’d really become close, and she’d miss the little guy.

“I know you’ve been kind of sad lately,” Henry said, looking up at her with serious brown eyes. “And I know you and Killian haven’t been such good friends.  I just…I think he misses you as much as you miss him.”

“I don’t…” she began.

He stopped her with another groan. “Yes you do, Emma!” he said.  “I can see the way you look at him…and the way he looks at you.  All gross and mushy and stuff.  Maybe you should talk to him.  Tell him you like him…”

Emma felt the nerves kick in. She didn’t want to like him.  She didn’t want these feelings she could no longer deny to herself she felt.  Falling for someone—it was making yourself vulnerable, and she didn’t do vulnerable.

But what good was protecting your heart if you ended up miserable anyway? Yeah, maybe he’d break her heart, but, well, maybe not.  Maybe this fire between them would settle into something really, really good.  Something that had forever written all over it.  And if things went south later, at least she’d have the good memories they made together.

Maybe…and Emma couldn’t believe she was even thinking this…maybe it was time to take a leap of faith.

“Maybe you’re right, kid,” she said, ruffling his hair.

“Of course I am,” he said with that same sunny grin. “And, Emma…I think you’re really cool.  I think you should be happy, and I think Killian would make you happy.”

“Alright, Henry, you convinced me,” she finally said, the butterflies going crazy in her stomach at the decision she was making. “I’ll ask him out next time I see him.”

[dwarven-beard-spores]

26 from the quote ask thingy with nanny Crowley and gardener Aziraphale because I neeeeeeed

Why thank you! I feel as though this one got a bit out of hand, but I made it to the smooches eventually, and I think it all works out.

The rest of the series, can be found together as Make A Life Worth Living on AO3

Every Thursday morning, before the sun was up, Brother Francis would step out into the Dowling’s garden, nod as though he’d done something, and leave a note to remind the rest of the staff that it was his day off. For some reason, no one could ever remember his schedule. He would leave through the front gate and walk quietly down the road to the bus stop, a mile or so away. It was time to think, he said, on the rare occasion when someone offered him a lift. He just wanted to walk through the sunrise and think.

About an hour later, every Thursday, Nanny Ashtoreth would wake inside the house, check on sleeping Warlock, and hiss quiet advice to Ms. Dowling as to how the child had been getting on. Then she would pick up her umbrella and carpetbag and walk out the front gate and down the road away from town, in the opposite direction of the bus stop. She was an ominous blot on the vaguely pastoral, somewhat developed area, and her shoes clacked loudly whether she was walking on concrete, or a dirt road, or on the grass. In the year and a half she’d been with the family, no one had managed to find out where she went. No one had felt inclined to try very hard. 

By this time, Brother Francis would be standing beside the bus stop, waving away each of the two busses that came by at this time on a Thursday. He entertained himself by doing small acts of kindness for the driver and the passengers, because that was the sort of person he was, and small acts of malice, because Nanny Ashtoreth rarely encountered anyone on such mornings and it was good to keep things balanced.

About half an hour after Nanny Ashtoreth had left the Dowling’s house, an old black Bentley drove past the front drive. It shone like new despite having spent the past week hidden in a conveniently large shrub, and no one knew who it belonged to. Not that they’d tried very hard to find out.

Ten minutes after that, the Bentley pulled up to the bus stop, the passenger door cracked open, and Crowley said “get in, Angel,” as Aziraphale said “good morning, Dear.”

This particular Thursday happened to be in early of August, and it was already uncomfortably warm. Aziraphale wiped a bead of sweat off his neck. He preferred to sweat, on principle, though if the summer kept on the way it had been going he would be sorely tempted to change his mind. Crowley did not sweat, and Aziraphale was unsure if that was because she chose not to, or it hadn’t occurred to her, or perhaps, being a serpent, she was physically unable to. He didn’t ask.

“Breakfast?” Crowley asked, as always. As always, the answer was yes, and Crowley adjusted course for an outdoor café that served marvelous scones.

“Have you noticed anything, you know, occult about the boy?” Aziraphale asked, thinking it better to get the worst out of the way first. As always, the answer was no.

For all its features, the one thing the Bentley didn’t have was a strong air conditioning system. Aziraphale rolled down the window partway, but had to roll it up again when Crowley picked up speed. He miracled the air around him a few degrees cooler and turned slightly to watch Crowley as she drove. Everything about her was sort of desperately severe, from the tight bun of her hair to the furrow in her forehead to the purse of her mouth and the tight stillness of her hands on the steering wheel. He thought about putting one of his hands over hers, for comfort or to reassure himself of… something, but wasn’t sure if she’d allow it. She’d been particularly aloof recently.

Accounts of Warlock’s weekly developments carried them the rest of the way to the café and halfway through breakfast, with both beings trying to focus so that they might spend the afternoon and evening really enjoying themselves. 

Then, “we’re going to the zoo on Tuesday,” Crowley said, pushing things forward a bit. She sipped her tea primly. The cup gave a sharp clink when she set it back in its saucer. “You ought to meet us there.” 

Aziraphale ate a scone. “Why the zoo?” he asked, though he was distracted by the subtle way Crowley rolled her shoulders and winced. 

For millennia, Crowley’s spine had naturally assumed a snakey, almost boneless quality that, when she was relaxed, manifested in all manner of slouching, slinking, and draping herself over furniture. Now, Crowley normally held it to nearly human standards until it was time to get comfortable, but Nanny Ashtoreth was perpetually rigid as though she’d been built around a ruler. It looked… uncomfortable.

“It’s the sort of thing one does with children,” Crowley said. “Mr. Dowling is hosting a luncheon for some very important people, and it has been suggested that Warlock and I make ourselves scarce.” The lift of her eyebrows indicated that it was a bit more than a suggestion, and also that she found the whole thing rather ridiculous. “I don’t know what he’s worried about. He hardly sees either of us as it is, and children make excellent conversation pieces.”

“Mmm,” said Aziraphale. He ate another scone and decided now was not the time to address Crowley’s issues with the Dowlings’ parenting strategy. He was not particularly partial to zoos, but it would be nice to get out for the day, and having the particulars of his work schedule slip people’s minds was very easy indeed. “Shall I meet you at the bus stop, then?”

“I don’t think so,” Crowley said. “You’d better meet us there. By the giraffes, perhaps? They’d be a bad example for the boy. They’re selfish and malicious, you can see it in their eyes.”

“That’s hardly true, Dear. They’re kind and—”

“And absurd.”

“Ineffable,” Aziraphale said, holding back his smile until Crowley scoffed. “But what do you mean I ought to meet you there? We’re coming from the same place, aren’t we? The Dowlings won’t be any the wiser, and it’s not as though Warlock will mind. He’s quite fond of me you know.”

Meeting at the bus stop on their days off had been Crowley’s idea, because she didn’t fancy the Dowlings thinking that Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis were working together, or being intimate together, or even knew each other beyond the limits of their jobs. Aziraphale had agreed because it was more practical to play it safe than to alter the family’s memories if they got upset, and because it reminded him, in a way, of the care they’d taken in the days when the Arrangement was young and seemed far riskier than it had turned out to be.

“It’s not about what he minds,” Crowley said. “It’s about what he thinks. And Ms. Ashtoreth is not the sort of woman who picks up male company in secret. She might accept chance companionship during an outing, though, which is why you’ve got to meet us there and pretend you knew nothing about it.”

Aziraphale mulled over this as he finished his tea. “But surely,” he said. “Warlock won’t know the difference.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” Crowley said. “And at any rate, I will. Ms. Ashtoreth is not a reckless woman. Nor is she a friendly one.”

“No,” Aziraphale agreed.

“She carries the secret sadness of family estrangement and heartbreak, which have made her bitter,” Crowley explained, sounding more and more like Ms. Ashtoreth with every word. “She trusts only herself to protect and corrupt the child in her care. It doesn’t matter if she thinks Francis is resoundingly homosexual, she doesn’t trust him enough to scoop him off the side of the road.”

“Dear, it’s really just you and me,” Aziraphale said weakly, wondering when that had stopped being true.

“It’s just you,” Crowley corrected, her voice sharp, brittle, and suddenly her own again. “You always manage to just be yourself, but with roses instead of books and disappearing around the side of the house instead of closing your shop, and they believe you.”

“That’s not entirely accurate,” Aziraphale protested, this being easier to address then the vague unease Crowley’s plan had sparked in him. “I’ve spent rather a lot of effort on the details of appearing human, the hobbies and the sweat and so forth. I just don’t bother to completely change my character every time.”

“You see, that wouldn’t work for me,” Crowley said. “And it’s too late to change it now, anyway.” 

They finished their breakfast in silence. Crowley was very stiff and controlled, and Aziraphale felt as though she were very far away. Without warning, she stood and placed a neatly folded stack of money on the table to pay their bill. Aziraphale tucked the last scone in his pocket then followed her to the car. 

Before she opened the door, Aziraphale finally chanced it and put a hand on her shoulder. Crowley stiffened, then let out a breath. A small amount of her tension went with it, and she placed her own hand over Aziraphale’s.

“Crowley,” he said. “I can play along. But I wonder if you’re…. getting lost, rather.”

“I can let it down with you,” she said. “Sort of. But around any of them, even Warlock, especially Warlock… I can’t.”

“You’ve barely let it down today at all,” Aziraphale pointed out. “Hardly for the past month.”

“Oh,” said Crowley. She licked her lips in a very Crowley way, forked tongue and everything.

“I think I understand if it’s easier that way,” Aziraphale said. “Pretending you don’t know me. Especially if Ashtoreth doesn’t know about, well, you know, but, er.”

“Angel.”

“You’re the one who talked me into this, after all, and if you must stay in character, then perhaps we could at least—”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, turning to face him. She hesitated a moment. “Just shut up and kiss me.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale, surprised. “Are you sure?”

Crowley nodded, so he did.

Crowley’s lips were tense and tasted like lavender tea and Aziraphale kissed them gently once, twice, again, before Crowley stuck her hand in his hair and pulled him into something deeper with a lot more tongue. There was something desperate in the way she kissed, both delighted and frantic. It had been a long time since they’d kissed like this, but both of them remembered the way.

Aziraphale’s hands drifted to her back, holding her close as her rigid posture relaxed into a curve that used every one of her many vertebrae. He continued to hold her as they broke out of the kiss and she rested her forehead on his shoulder.

Aziraphale couldn’t hold back his smile. “I thought Ms. Ashtoreth wasn’t the sort who did things like that,” he murmured.

Crowley sighed into his shoulder. “That wasn’t her.”

Aziraphale chuckled and ran his hands down her back. “Good morning, my dear.”

He held her a moment longer, before Crowley stepped away and leaned back on the car, crossing her arms and looking very much not a proper nanny. “I’m glad we got to do that again before. Ah. You know.”

“Ah. Yes. Quite.” Aziraphale found he had nothing to do with his hands, and also that they were sweaty. He wiped them on his trousers.

For several minutes, nobody did anything. Aziraphale turned over thoughts about potentially kissing Crowley again, before he decided it was too soon to ask.

“I’ll meet you at the zoo,” he said at last. “No trouble, really. By the giraffes, you said?”

“Tuesday,” Crowley agreed. She stood up and opened the Bentley door. “Where was it you wanted to go today? Art gallery?”

“Anywhere besides the zoo,” Aziraphale said as he climbed in the other side of the car. 

When Crowley pulled away, only one hand was tight around the wheel. Aziraphale was holding the other.

[lichlover]

some soft ipre-era blupjeans for your soul

Barry isn’t quite used to the ocean.

Part of it is, of course, that it isn’t his world’s ocean. This one ebbs and curls along the coast in shimmering, turquoise peaks, leaving its imprint behind in miles of black sand. When he steps down from the porch and stands on the beach, looking outwards to a pale horizon, the sand shifts and glitters at his feet. He can’t begin to imagine the minerals that comprise every granule, turning the ground beneath him into a fluid, shifting landscape of light and shadow.

Geology isn’t his area of focus, but it is, he will admit, welcome reprieve from the ocean. There isn’t a scientific principle in any planar system he can apply to the ocean. The locals here call it a benevolent god, who’d long ago struck a deal with the three pillars of existence. Fate, Death, and Time had all conceded to the power of the ocean, and together, they’d agreed to watch over the people under their jurisdiction. Its generosity is vast, the people say, but its temper volatile. When the ocean is angered, as the cautionary tales go, its ferocity knows no bounds.

Of course, Barry’s never been a person of faith, but he sits at the window, watching waves lash the beach and surge up into the downpour, and he can’t help but think that the locals might’ve gotten something right.

“Hey, you.”

Someone flops into the chair opposite him, pushing it back a good few inches, and Barry’s startled out of his reverie. It serves him right, honestly, because he’s committed the most grievous error a scientist is capable of. He’s let himself get distracted, and even worse, he’s been staring out a window all the time. The view in front of him is impressive, granted: their villa is right on the shore, courtesy of the locals, and he couldn’t imagine a better vantage point. But their residency here isn’t meant for sightseeing. It’s meant for research, which he isn’t accustomed to forgetting so easily. The ocean, it seems, is a terrible influence.

Speaking of terrible influences. The coffee mug pushed towards him is filled to the brim, steaming and topped with a heap of whipped cream, but he catches something distinctly sharp and vaguely gasoline-scented. “Is that…?”

Lup rests her feet atop the table, stretches back, and snatches up a bundle of papers. “People ’round here call it hurricane extract. Kickass name, right? It’s s’posed to be good for a buzz. Like alcohol, but a stimulant instead of a depressant. I think this world might be my favorite one yet.”

She takes a long sip from her own mug, and Barry watches her, wanting to generate some sort of comeback but failing miserably at his own game. Lup tends to inspire speechlessness in him. Even now, when they’ve been working together for cycles, exploring each new world together and conducting painstaking experiments to verify their discoveries, he can’t bring himself to feel comfortable around her. It’s her larger-than-life presence, he thinks. The way she doesn’t just occupy a room; she owns it, fills it to the brim and pushes at the corners. Her voice is full and loud; her gestures are wide; her expressions theatrical and glazed with emotion. Even now, sitting across from him and scanning over sheets of their handiwork, she looks more at home than he could ever imagine.

This year they’ve charged themselves with understanding the laws of physics and arcane interaction in this world, formulating a primer with which to study other worlds. Davenport had said it was the closest they’ve ever been to home, but Barry can’t fathom it—not with the ocean at their doorstep. Logically, he knows the readings align well enough with data from their plane of origin; he’s reviewed the IPRE’s reports a thousand times over. But this place and its tumultuous, fickle waters are too alien for his liking. Staring at them is starting to turn his stomach.

He’s gone back to staring.

Barry shakes himself out of it just in time to hear Lup snort into a pile of whipped cream. “Holy shit,” she says, taking a bite out of the top. “You’re really out of it today, huh?”

Maybe—no, most likely, she’s right, and coffee with a frightening local stimulant is exactly what he needs. “Yeah,” he mumbles, and tries a sip of the brew. Of course, it hardly tastes like anything, but it burns like acid, and the sharp scent of gasoline fills his nostrils as he chokes it down. Lup watches him over her mug, arching an eyebrow.

It only takes her a couple seconds to crack a tiny, nondescript grin. “That bad, huh?”

“No, it’s—” He inhales sharply, forgets about the gasoline, and breaks into a wretched cough. “It’s—it’s fine!”

Lup actually does snicker, then, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head. “I know,” she says through a bout of giggles. “Trust me, I know, but it works like a charm. In a couple minutes you’ll be back in it and ready to go.”

“If I don’t die of chemical poisoning first.” Barry indulges himself in one last cough, and gets another laugh out of Lup for his dramatics. He goes to reach for one of their several documents, straining forward from where he sits, and catches the ocean out of the corner of his eye again. The water is significantly darker and swirling, and he surveys them with a slight furrow in his brow.

A stack of paper lands heavily on the table. He jumps and swivels to see Lup, who’s scrutinizing him even more heavily than before. “What’s your deal?”

“My—my deal?”

“You keep starin’ out the window, babe.” Lup points the toe of her dark, chunky heel at him. “See somethin’ out there you like?”

Barry rolls his eyes, but his gaze lands somewhere off to the side, in the smooth wood that makes up their wall. “Nothing. Just… the ocean, that’s all.”

She shifts forward, and it catches him off guard, because she actually looks intrigued. “What about the ocean?”

“Like I said, it’s—it’s nothing.”

“Wouldn’t be starin’ so much if it was nothing.”

He exhales and focuses on the collar of Lup’s vest. It’s light and made of fleece and pops outward, framing her neck and the fine cut of her jawline. “The ocean’s just… weird, okay? I never saw it before we left, only in pictures, and seeing it in a completely different world is even weirder. I—I shouldn’t be getting this distracted over the fuckin’ ocean, but… well, I guess that’s where I’m at today, huh?”

She’s going to ridicule him for sure. Barry won’t even feel bad about it. He’s practically setting himself up to be made fun of, and besides, Lup’s jibes never do any real harm. Absently, he takes another sip from his mug; waiting for the joke, the critique, the casual snark. His throat starts to burn again, but he doesn’t much care.

The joke doesn’t come. Lup makes it through another sip of coffee and says, “It is pretty weird, isn’t it?”

Barry looks up a little too quickly. “Uh—uh, yeah, it is.”

“I mean, I dunno if it takes the contender for weirdest world so far… remember the flesh-eating forest?” She shudders. “Glad I didn’t have to learn that one the hard way.”

“Or the civilization that lived upside-down.”

“Oh, fuck, that one was completely bizarre. I was getting vertigo just trying to talk to them.” Lup pinches the bridge of her nose and makes a face Barry recognizes instantly as Yikes. “Although I guess to them, we were the upside-down ones, hm?”

“Huh. I mean, you’re right.”

She cups a hand to her ear. “Yes, do say that again. I can never get enough of it.”

“Oh, please.” He rolls his eyes again, and Lup pins him with a good-natured smirk. No matter how much time they’ve spent together, there’s something about her gaze that makes him feel like a specimen under a surgical lamp. “I—uh, I didn’t mean to space out so much. Sorry.”

Lup shrugs. “Hey, it’s cool. We’re all exhausted. Every intrepid scientist needs their second wind from somewhere—that’s what that’s for,” she says, nodding to the mug. “It’s horrible, but…”

“Fuck,” says Barry, and he can’t resist a chuckle. “It’s so horrible.”

“So horrible.” She tips her head back and grins at the ceiling, and the mug wavers precariously in her hands. “I mean, it actually doesn’t taste that bad to me, but I think that’s because I’ve been holed up with you in here for so long that I’ve forgotten what food is supposed to taste like. And that it isn’t supposed to, y’know, scorch your esophagus going down. Pretty sure that’s not a normal thing, right? It’s not a normal thing?”

He gives her a shrug right back, rolling his shoulders and wincing at the sheer amount of joints that pop along his spine. “How would I know?”

“Fair point.” A gust of wind rattles the window, and Lup glances towards the glass, rain-spattered but holding fast. “Good gods. We sure picked a good day for a research sesh, didn’t we?”

“Definitely.” This time, Barry forces his stare away from the water. He pulls a document lazily towards him, then says, “This is… really domestic, y’know?”

Lup’s ears twitch. “Domestic?”

The ocean swallowing him up sounds pretty good right about now. “I just meant, uh… this probably wasn’t what everybody back at home had in mind when the IPRE sent us off on our big grand quest. Sitting in some seaside cabin, reviewing data, drinking godsawful coffee. It’s just… just kinda funny, that’s all.”

There is a very terrible, mortifying beat of silence, during which Barry considers walking out the door and straight into the water. He’s still heavily thinking it over when Lup smiles, far softer and more genuine than he’s used to. It’s a shock to his system, to say the least. He knows she can be sincere—he’s seen her compassion, her advocacy, her resilience in the face of their stubbornness—but this is a remarkably private setting, and she’s smiling at him like he’s just said something wonderful. (Maybe he has. After all this time, he doesn’t know her well enough to tell.)

“It is,” she says. “It’s hilarious. We’re scientists and explorers, taking samples and writing reports and drinking the worst coffee in any planar system just to keep ourselves awake. We’re never gonna be those brilliant, shining heroes in their storybooks. Never gonna be conventional, y’know?”

Lup tilts her head to peer out into the storm, and Barry watches her. He watches the dark, roiling waters of the ocean reflected in her eyes and the way her feathery undercut splays out across her cheek. He doesn’t have a clue what she’s going to say next. She’s always been like that—unpredictable, he thinks. Powerful and forceful and dormant because she chooses to be, but only because she chooses to be. She has more potential energy than a springloaded hammer, than a raindrop on the verge of falling, than a wave at its peak and cresting. And she’s sitting across from him with that soft, cryptic smile, cupping her hands around a pastel-tinted coffee mug, with the research they’ve compiled in front of her.

Because she chooses to.

“But you know something?” says Lup. “Heroes ain’t shit. We don’t need to be heroes, babe.”

She smiles. Into the heart of the tempest and the raging, broken shore; staring down the ocean. Challenging it as an equal.

“We’re gonna be legends.”

[shazyloren]

The Room: Chapter 51 - Daenerys the Strong

Link:

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Prefect meetings were long and tedious to get through some times. Daenerys always had a list that she and Jon would come up with that needed to be discussed and everyone, including Jon (although she found that more adorable than anything), would get sidetracked and talk about scenarios that would never happen and how they were suppose to tackle them. Today in particular, hippogriffs were the thing being discussed as a new flock had been spotted a mile north of Hogwarts.

Of course, all the prefects were asking what they were to do if this band of Hippogriffs were to set upon them during their patrol of the Hogwarts grounds and none of them were exercising rational thought. Daenerys had been sitting with her arms folded for seven minutes now as she waited for them all to get their Hippogriff questions out of their system and she could move forwards with topic that were actually important such as student travel arrangements for the Second task. Now knowing it had something to do with Dragons and the area where the task was being held, Daenerys had been asked by Professor Lannister not two hours before this meeting that she was in charge of transporting all the students of Hogwarts to the task safely.

"So if this band of Hippogriffs are to come along, I think we need to use our Care of Magical Creatures training and show them respect. I've never seen a real one but they're proud creatures and I for one wouldn't like to be supper for the big birds" Gendry Baratheon spoke. Daenerys thought Gendry wasn't as bad as she'd initially thought of him, but sometimes he could be very dramatic and incredibly stupid. Yes, he's punched Joffrey (who deserved it) and yes he'd been nice enough to ask her to the ball, but he really did say some stupid stuff.

Of course you should remember your Care of Magical Creatures training...

Sensing that Daenerys was incredibly bored of this topic of conversation, Jon stepped in and spoke to them all. "Look, let's leave this for another time in which we don't have other things to be doing with our lives. If you come across one, bow. But the school has protection, the likelihood of it noticing us all here is low"

Daenerys wanted to thank Jon but she refused to look at him as not two minutes ago he was making comments on what he'd read in certain textbooks about Hippogriffs. And next to that, she'd be telling him off later then they got to the Room. This morning, after she made the realisation of her Dragon-glass relic (thanks to the observations of Missandei), she'd flirted with Jon in the school hall, tried to get all her homework done and gave four third year Ravenclaw students detention for throwing dung bombs in the trophy room.

"Thank you, Jon" She said a little snootily as she tried to regain order in the room. "As you all know, it's five weeks until the Second task and we as prefects are bound by duty to protect the students. Our main priority is getting the little ones safely too and from the task with escort. With everything that's happened across the seas it's only fair that we are vigilante in doing so. So seventh year will be buddying up with a first year or two to escort them over. Once they're at the task zone you can go off separately but once the task is finished, you must pair up once again and return to the school together"

"This is a little bit ridiculous, isn't it?" Zazzie asked as she yawned out of boredom.

"First years are not going to be able to protect themselves as well as a seventh year would if they get attacked" Daenerys countered, her voice strong and clear through the room. "I want to avoid any unnecessary complications and possible student death with this system. People are disappearing and going missing across Europe, I don't want any of our student body to be next!"

There was an uneasy tension in the room as she spoke, people were not happy about this but they had to deal. If they were first year and being attacked, would they not want to be saved by someone, or at least helped? Daenerys thought they were all being ridiculous on the subject matter. "I think it's needed" Jon spoke then, backing her up. "We've seen it ourselves with the first task, there were reports of some dodgy activities that could've been avoided, lets make sure we keep the little ones safe"

"Thank you, Jon" Daenerys felt colour flood her cheeks as he winked and grinned at her like a foolish dog. She just sighed in return and glanced back to her notes once more. "So as I was saying, Seventh year will buddy up with first years, sixth years will buddy up with seconds years and fifth years will buddy up with third and fourth years. This way, no one is travelling to and from the task zone, which is just outside our main Hogwarts boundaries-"

Daenerys was interrupted by the creaking of their Prefect meeting room door opening and the intrusion of the Deputy headteacher Professor Lys. He was fully bald now, these days. He'd had a rather precarious situation with an old sorcerer when he was young according to rumours which had led too all his hair falling out. He wasn't a chubby man by all means but he was large, draped in fine gold wizarding robes and tassels. Daenerys was shocked to see his sudden appearance at the door.

"Forgive the intrusion Miss. Targaryen. Professor Lannister wishes to speak with you urgently, certain... matters have arisen and they need your full co-operation" Daenerys felt sweat build on her brow and her tongue grow numb in her throat. She knew he was trying to be discreet about the matter at hand, yet Jon would fully gather what was happening.

"O...Okay" Daenerys mumbled as she gathered her stuff up. She apologised to the other prefects for walking out on them and they all mumbled a 'it's fine' back. She handed the rains over to Jon who said he'd come find her later near Barny and she nodded in agreement. Feeling like she was walking to her own trial, her feet dragged a little as she exited the room to leave Jon and the prefects behind.

Daenerys' mind swirled. What had gone wrong? Had he caught wind of the arrest? Had he escaped and was now on the run from the Ministry? All of these questions and more flooded her brain and confused the crap out of her. Was she in danger now? Was he specifically coming after her to try and get revenge? Would he go after Rhaegar and his fiance? Everything was heightened suddenly by her being pulled out of this meeting.

"You look nervous" Professor Lys stated blatantly. "I wouldn't worry, everything is going to be fine"

"Yeah, usually when an adult says everything is going to be fine their lying to make you feel better. Never works" Daenerys grumbled as they reached the end of the corridor to take the stairs. Professor Lys didn't reply to her, they walked in silence to the statue of the Gargoyle in the headmaster Tower. The password activated and the stairs began to spun, so they got on and waited on the familiar ride to the top.

Daenerys was beginning to feel annoyed at the amount of time she'd spent in the Headmaster's office this year, even for a Head Girl it was beyond ridiculous and she'd just wished this case was over and everything was all said and done. She knew the path to the door from any point in the castle more so than to the Slytherin Common Room. To be honest, she hadn't even been in the Slytherin Common Room for three nights. She'd been in Hufflepuff Basement with Missandei for two of them and another sh'd slept in the room.

When they reached the door, a sharp knock by Professor Lys signified they were here and the door swung open. Daenerys stepped through and suddenly the heat of the fireplace hit her. Daenerys looked around and was shocked to see Minister Lannister stood by the fireplace, his authority clear in the room as Headmaster Lannister sat at his desk. "Ah, Professor Lys you've returned. Welcome, Miss. Targaryen, do take a seat we will keep this short"

"Minister Lannister" Daenerys nodded her head as she took a spare seat by the fireplace. Her bag slumped off of her shoulder and hit the ground with a low thud. She linked her fingers together and tried to calm her nerves. He's going to have gotten away, he's going to have gotten away, he's going to have gotten away... Feeling her own expectations weigh her down as the room felt heavy, she croaked a little as she spoke again. "Is everything fine?"

"More than fine" Headmaster Lannister started. The room held it's breath as tension tinged and fizzled in the room. "Your memories were all correctly checked and verified, Minister Lannister was informed several hours ago. He assembled the Aurors from the Kingsguard" Kingsguard? That's the elite squad within the Auror Department... "The arrest has been made, he is in our custody"

Relief washed over Daenerys skin like a wave of salty sea water, engulfing her in positive energy and thought. It was done, it was over... No longer would he be able to rape her, defile her body and taunt her like he had done for the past four years. No longer will he be able to do so to other women, no longer will he exist. He will die in jail where he belongs. Daenerys almost wanted him to die now, but that was an easy path out for him. She wanted him to suffer like she had, to hate himself so much and contemplate the choices he's made.

Then, the tears came. Years of abuse spilling out of her eyes as the relief enveloped her once again. Professor Lannister handed her tissues and she gladly took them. He's a waste of space and he'll never hurt you or anyone else again... He's a paedophile and he is a serial rapist and he will suffer... Daenerys found her thoughts were very divisive on what it was suppose to be thinking. The relief and the anger mixed together and gave her such power she never knew was inside her. She couldn't believe after all the waiting and the wondering, it was finally done.

"There is some complications, however" Minister Lannister spoke. This was what Daenerys had been nervous for, she knew there had been something that had gone wrong. "The editor of the daily prophet has somehow got hold of it already. The papers and magazines will eat the story up and soon everyone will know. We wanted to keep this under-wraps until the trial at least but it seems not to be the way, at least they think that"

"If the press have interest and the case is now in the public domain... the trial will be a full wizengamot!" Daenerys sighed, of course there had to be a complication to this thing that had seemed so simple to her. He'd raped her, he'd forced himself onto her. It was simple in her eyes. But the press were like vultures and once the story gets out there will be all matter of things that could go wrong with the case. "Will the trial be delayed?"

"I am hoping not. I've spoken to the editor of the daily prophet, it's a very delicate case and he's agreed to not print names for now until we agree a time and a date for you to make a statement. No one under his charge does know thankfully and he had his reporter who informed him wiped of the memory so as he does not blab. Or should I say he told me the reporters name and I questioned him before wiping his memory" He spoke with his head high and his voice smooth. Daenerys was wide-eyed. "Do not take this as a favour to you; this is purely so we can proceed with the charging and trial without press interference"

"The trial will be April, that's all we know" Headmaster Lannister assured Dany.

"That's three months away! For a full Wizengamot trial that's got overwhelming evidence?" Daenerys snapped bitterly.

"It won't just be a wizengamot issue, as you've been on holiday to Egypt as a family when it once occurred, it's an international trial. We have to set up port-keys for representatives to come in from across the globe" Professor Lannister tried to assure her. "Miss. Targaryen, I know you're frustrated and hurt right now, but it will be worth it. He will go away for his life and you'll be free to live your own life in peace"

Daenerys knew he was right, it was just so infuriating to have to wait so long to finally feel like she was moving on. Even if she distracted herself with Head duties and studying and the second task, there was always a part of her that was feeling dread and fear. The unknown did that to you, she wondered if he ended up getting away with it what would happen then, but the evidence was so overwhelming something severely would have to go wrong for that to happen.

It will all be fine, just breathe...

"Okay, fine, sorry!" She bumbled. "Just wanting it all to be over, thank you all for everything you've done. I appreciate it"

"It's what we're here for" Professor Lannister assured her.

After that, they went through some missing paperwork which needed to be filled in and how everything was going to play out now. There would be a lot off paperwork filling and statement taking before the trial and so they tried to get as much done as possible. Around six in the evening, the Minister for Magic had to leave due to a meeting with Commander Selmy, the Head of the Magical Law Enforcement department so he said his goodbyes and flooed back to London.

Daenerys was there for another two hours after that before she was fine to leave, her hand cramped from paperwork and his eyes heavy in sleep. She thanked Professor Lannister and Professor Lys once again for their continued work in helping her with the case not before noticing that the book she'd gotten Professor Lannister for Christmas was on his desk with a bookmark in.

She smiled to herself before bidding goodnight. She really was exhausted, but she couldn't go back to the dorm yet, she and Jon had an appointment in their room to attend.

[sending-the-message]

What Lies Beneath - Chapter 1 by JadeThorne

The year was 1997.

I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

I was two years out of my second round of grad school, having finished a doctorate as an oceanographer. I already had a doctorate in marine biology, and wanted to have oceanography under my belt as well.

It’s tough being a woman in a man’s world.

I was working at Scripp’s, in San Diego. It made sense to accept their offer of a job as a researcher once I’d finished my doctorate there, and within two years I was bumped up to the title “research professional.” It was a well-paying job, if not a particularly exciting one. The hours were sometimes long, but I was content.

My office had a large window that overlooked the Pacific, year-round. On days I had spare time, I found myself standing at the window and staring out at the great vastness of it. There was so much life in those waters. Life we didn’t quite understand, or hadn’t discovered just yet.

Much to my husband’s good-natured amusement, I spent a great deal of my off-time at the ocean as well. I would walk the beach, my eyes scanning those sometimes-turbulent waters along with the shoreline and my ears tuning in to every last sound. The smell of the salty air was like perfume to me.

If you were to ask my parents, they might smile and joke that I’d been born in the water and a Selkie had brought me to their door.

The ocean … the ocean was my calling. It was in my blood.

A knock came at the door to my office late one afternoon, right as I was finishing up notes for Dr. Brame. Curious, I called for them to enter. A young man in faded jeans and a blue shirt entered, smiling.

“Dr. Masume, I presume?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes, how may I help you?”

“I’m Todd Blevins,” he introduced, extending his hand to me. “I just had a conversation with Dr. Brame, and he suggested I come to you with my proposal.”

Now my interest was piqued. I raised my eyebrow, indicating that he continued.

“I work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” he began, setting into a chair at my desk. “Recently we picked up some noises that we aren’t sure what they are. Now, Dr. Fox doesn’t think it’s a living creature, but some of us aren’t so sure. So, we’re planning to make a couple of dives, to see if we find anything. We need a good, competent marine biologist-slash-oceanographer to round out our team of six, and so here I am.”

“Doesn’t NOAA already have marine biologists and oceanographers working there, though?” I asked, skeptical.

“They do, but … well most of them think our little excursion is a waste of time and aren’t interested in going along,” he answered. “Dr. Masume, you will be very well-compensated. My team will pay you fifty thousand for your time, even if we only dive once.”

Fifty thousand dollars was a hell of a lot of money to offer on a gamble – that much I knew. “Why so much?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me, Mr. Blevins?”

“Todd, please,” he offered. “There’s a good chance we may have to dive the Trench, Dr. Masume.”

The Mariana Trench was a crescent-shaped scar on the ocean floor, some one hundred twenty-odd miles from the Mariana Islands. It had been dived before, but the thought of experiencing it first-hand left me feeling torn between excitement and unease. It would take hours to reach the bottom, and the pressure was unbelievable – over fifteen thousand PSI. It would take one hell of a strong submersible to withstand the pressure.

“Do you actually have a sub strong enough to make that dive without killing us all?” I asked bluntly.

He nodded immediately. “We do, Dr. Masume. I would not ask you to go on a suicide mission.”

I turned to the ocean beyond my office, mulling his words over. “I will need to discuss this with my husband,” I said, though I had already made the decision silently.

I was going, whether my husband approved or not.

Todd nodded and rose to his feet, fishing a card from his pocket. “I can be reached directly at that number,” he told me. “If we don’t hear from you by this time tomorrow, we’ll understand.”

I thanked him and saw him out, and then sat down at my desk in a mild state of shock. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. But why had Dr. Brame suggested me? I owed him my notes anyhow, so I picked them up and walked to his office.

After getting the assent to enter, I walked in to find him smiling at me.

“Lily,” he greeted. “Have a seat, please.”

I sat down, placing the research notes on his desk.

“You’re wondering why I picked you,” he said, matter-of-factly. “The truth is fairly simple – your youth and your knowledge. You are the youngest double-major we have here at current, and your mind is as sharp as a tack. You don’t miss anything, Lily.” He smiled again. “Besides, I can hear the sea, my girl. I know it’s been whispering for you. You need to do this.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard Dr. Brame hint at anything vaguely Otherworldly, and it caught me off. “You hear … the sea,” I echoed.

“Everything has a voice, if you listen long enough,” he said, nodding slowly. “Whether you go or not, there’s an opening for an on-hands professor coming up in a couple of weeks. Means you’ll be spending your time out there instead. But I really hope you go. Opportunity like this, it doesn’t come around too often.”

“I’m going,” I heard myself say. “I may find myself divorced over this, but I’m going.”

Dr. Brame smiled broadly. “Good choice,” he murmured. “I think that husband of yours will be more understanding than you think. I like him. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I expressed. “For everything you’ve done for me. This … You’re right. I can’t pass this up. It’s not about the money, either.”

“What did they offer you, out of curiosity?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

I blew out a breath. “A ridiculous amount – fifty thousand, whether we dived once or a dozen times.”

He whistled. “Hell of a lot of money for an expedition,” he remarked. “Well, go on. Go home and tell him what fell in your lap today. And call that boy so he doesn’t have time to talk to anyone else about this.”

My husband was, as Dr. Brame predicted, a lot more agreeable about my going than I expected.

Of course, it could have been the nice bonus I was going to get at the end of it, but I didn’t want to think the man I’d married might be a bit more materialistic than I thought.

When I made the call to Todd, I could hear him hopping up and down over the phone that I had agreed to go.

“Oh, that’s excellent, Dr. Masume!” he exclaimed.

“Lily, Todd,” I offered. “If we’re going to be working together like this, call me Lily.”

“Lily, then,” he said. “We were thinking of starting the expedition on Monday, if that’s acceptable to you. I can make arrangements with Dr. Brame, if you want.”

I smiled. “Monday sounds fine, and Dr. Brame won’t be an issue,” I admitted. “He expects me to go, so I think he won’t mind my starting on Monday.”

“Excellent,” Todd said. “We’ll plan on seeing you Monday at eight am, then.”

“Oh, where am I meeting you at?” I asked, realizing he hadn’t given me a location.

“We’ll pick you up,” he told me. “You aren’t that far from our facility, so it’s not a problem.”

That was Thursday night.

Monday morning saw me ready to go by seven forty-five, and a somewhat battered Wrangler pulled into the drive at five till. I walked out, locking up behind me, and couldn’t help the smile at Todd’s excited face behind the wheel. I couldn’t resist teasing him as I got into the Jeep, though. “Fifty grand, and you’re driving this?”

“Hey, now,” he said, smirking. “I’ve had her since I was eighteen. She’s been good to me, so why trade her in for something new?”

I nodded. “I can understand that.”

“The plan is to go out with our sub to an approximate location the sound was heard from and dive there,” he told me as he navigated the early morning traffic. “Stuart’s gonna stay on the ship, along with Rob and the rest of their team. You’ll be diving with myself, Pat, and Yoshi.”

“Yoshi Nakagachi?” I asked, curious. When he nodded, I raised an eyebrow. “I remember reading some of his work when I was working on my thesis for my marine biology degree.”

Todd nodded. “Yoshi’s a cool guy – I’m glad he agreed to go with us. Pat’s pretty cool too – he’s an older dude. Well, not that Yoshi isn’t, but Pat’s more like the adopted uncle of the group.” He made a turn down a road that I could see led to docks. “Stuart and Rob are nice, but they don’t talk much. They’ll be keeping track of us while we’re down, and recording the data topside. Our sub has two pretty decent underwater cameras attached, so I’m hoping for some photos to send up to them.”

“Tell me about the sub we’re diving in,” I prompted.

“Well, she’s about twenty feet long, and around ten to twelve feet wide,” he began. “We used nine-centimeter ceramic spheres inside the hull for the pressure down there. There’s probably close to a thousand of them in each hull compartment, I estimate. She’ll be tethered to the research ship with a steel cable along with wires to transmit the data. She’s got a joystick to steer her around with, and an oxygen supply for six hours. She’s heated too, because it’s cold down that far.”

I nodded, tucking the information away as he pulled up alongside several other vehicles by the docks.

“Well, let’s go meet everyone and get this show on the road,” he said, smiling as he got out of the Jeep.

Stuart and Rob seemed a bit surprised that I was a woman, but Yoshi and Pat took it all in stride. We made our introductions, I answered questions about my background, and they outlined what they wanted to accomplish that day. It was as Todd said – we’d ride out on the research ship to the site, then dive down in the submersible and see what was what.

I wasn’t nervous at all, not even when we boarded the ship and headed out to sea. I was comfortable with the ocean, with the vastness of it. When we reached the site, and Stuart put the anchor down, I was a bit surprised to feel this little hint of unease. Chiding myself silently, I gathered up the necessary equipment and climbed into the bright-yellow submersible behind Pat.

“Piece of cake,” the older man said, winking at me as he took his station in the submersible.

“Done this before, have you?” I asked.

He grinned at me. “Been down in this girl plenty of times. I was one of the testers when she was built, to ensure she could withstand the pressure. She’s safe.”

“You’ve been in the Trench?” I pushed.

An odd look crossed his face briefly, and he covered it up with another grin. “Sure,” he replied. “Kind of eerie, but nothing to it. Course, we didn’t go all the way to the bottom that day.”

I found his wording somehow less than comforting, and remembered that Todd had told me he wouldn’t invite me along on a suicide mission. Maybe Pat’s odd look was from me asking if he’d been down there after he’d just said he was one of the testers on the sub. Somehow, though, I didn’t really believe that.

And then we were diving.

Yoshi turned the cameras on so we could see what was outside the sub. The quality was better than I expected, and it showed more than I thought it would as well. I watched the monitors, mentally ticking off the different species of fish that swam past.

Then I saw the top of the trench come into view, and that tiny thread of unease came back. “We’re going down today, then?” I asked.

“Sure,” Todd replied.

Gradually, the blue ambient light darkened as we descended, and the lights the cameras were equipped with came on. But even those lights weren’t quite enough to penetrate the darkness in that trench.

“So, tell me, Dr. Masume,” Yoshi began, “what do you see here?”

I focused on the screens, waiting to see something I recognized.

And then we heard something very strange.

If I had to describe the sound, I would have said it was like an enormous bubble leaving to go to the surface. Only, there was no bubble.

“That’s it – that’s the noise?” I asked, forgetting about identifying life for Yoshi.

“Yep,” Pat answered, not looking at me. The big man seemed uneasy, almost like he knew what it was.

“Hey, we need to bring you back up,” Stuart called over the radio. “Got a surprise squall, and she’s moving in fast.”

“Roger that,” Pat radioed back.

“So, what do you think?” Todd asked, grinning.

“I think we’re going to have to dive again, to have a hope of identifying what made that sound,” I replied.

My dreams were strange that night.

I was back in the trench, but it seemed a lot darker than I remembered. I wasn’t in the submersible either – I was swimming, without a mask or oxygen tank. Just ahead of where I was swimming, I could make out a large rock formation that was darker than the rest of the trench. Intrigued, I swam up to it … and an enormous eye snapped open in the formation.

I woke suddenly, sitting straight up in bed and gasping for breath. What the hell was that?

“Babe … you alright?” Luke asked softly, sitting up in concern.

“Yeah,” I told him, still vividly remembering that eye. “Yeah, just a weird dream.”

I didn’t sleep very well after that, and so I was up two hours before I normally would have been. Needing something to do, I got on the computer and started researching the denizens of the trench in hopes of maybe finding a source for my sudden unease. Surely, I had glimpsed one of the more unusual forms of life and forgotten about it, and it had resurfaced in a dream.

But I found nothing. Nothing that came close to explaining what I saw in my dream. And somehow, I didn’t really believe it was just a dream.

When Todd picked me up at eight, I was still subdued.

“You okay, Lily?” he asked, looking at me.

“Todd, what’s down in that trench?” I asked bluntly. “Pat’s uneasy about it, Stuart seems put off by it as well, and the rest of you are too eager to get down there.”

He sighed. “We caught a glimpse of something in camera about six months ago,” he finally said. “I don’t know what it was, but it was big. Scared the shit out of Pat and Stuart both, hell even Rob ain’t too keen on the trench now. Pat’s in the sub because the three of them drew straws and he lost.”

I felt my hair stand on end at those words from him. They saw it, my mind echoed. “I’m going to tell you something, though I’m not sure why,” I heard myself say. “Understand that I am not and have never been prone to strange dreams or nightmares. I don’t do any drugs, not even aspirin, and I’m not a heavy drinker either. Last night, I saw something in my dream. It was huge, blacker than the trench itself, and it looked at me.”

“Holy shit,” Todd muttered, clearly shaken by that. “That’s way too close to what we saw on the camera.” He paused, glancing over at me. “Do you have any ideas, any at all no matter how far-fetched, as to what it may be?”

I thought about that eye, and the formation I’d seen that wasn’t a formation at all. I made myself recall every last detail. “Dragon,” I finally said. “What was in my dream … was a dragon.”

We didn’t talk any more about it on the drive to the research ship. Logically, it wasn’t possible. Dragons did not exist, nor had they ever. It had to just be a dream, and as far as the object their camera picked up, that could have been a fluke. Cameras weren’t perfect – maybe a shark had gotten too close, or some other large variety of fish, and the camera had glitched, so it made it look bigger than it was.

That and dragons, according to the mythos surrounding them, were land creatures. It made no sense that I would dream about one in the trench.

Pushing those thoughts out of my head, I boarded the research ship and noticed that I wasn’t the only one looking under the weather today.

Everyone, even Yoshi, wore almost identical expressions. They looked shell-shocked, with that thousand-yard stare.

What the hell had happened in between when we left and today?

We made the journey out to the dive site in silence, and I couldn’t help wondering what was going to happen this time. An involuntary shiver went through me, catching Pat’s eye.

“Yoshi, I don’t think today’s a good day to go down there,” Pat announced, looking to the lead scientist of the group.

“We must go down today,” Yoshi said, something in his voice sounding obsessive. “Today might be the day we find the source.”

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Pat mumbled.

“We will be fine,” Yoshi stated, pushing his glasses further up on his nose. “Our submersible is well-constructed. Our cameras are the best NOAA has to offer. We will be fine.”

Stuart put out the anchor and his team set about making ready to lower us down into the ocean … into the trench itself this time. The thick steel cable that kept us tied to the ship had been inspected twice, and all the wires that transmitted data had been gone over as well. Their team had done their best to ensure our dive was successful, in short.

Yoshi, Pat, Todd and I boarded the submersible, and took our seats. The hatch was sealed, and then we were lowered into the waiting water. This time as we dove down, I didn’t watch the monitors for sea life.

I was afraid of what I might see now.

Down we went, into the Mariana Trench. A counter notified us of how deep we were at any given time. Another machine told us what the pressure was on the sub. Yet another one displayed how much battery life we had to run the equipment, including our precious oxygen and heat. The last one displayed how much oxygen was in the tanks.

I watched those numbers increase, the deeper we descended, and felt suddenly ill. This was a fool’s mission I was on – I was suddenly sure of it, but Yoshi had been quite adamant about going down today so there would be no talking him out of it.

Nearly two hours later, we reached the bottom, oblivious to the very real danger we were in.

Topside, Stuart, Rob, and the entire team watched as our live feed went black.

“What the hell?” Rob muttered, and picked up the radio. “Hey, Yoshi – are you guys alright down there?”

Radio silence. Nothing.

“Yoshi, Todd, Pat, anyone – can you hear me?” he tried again.

But only silence met his ears from the other end.

“Fuck!” he swore, punching the desk. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”

Everyone moved to the enormous winch to start hauling us back up, while Stuart and Rob looked on in worry. The winch moved too freely – it should have been reeling in a lot slower than it was. Then, quite suddenly, the end of the steel cable came out of the water.

Our lifeline had been severed. We were stuck at the bottom of the trench until NOAA came to rescue us.

[everythingisgayandnothinghurts]

Five Times Jace didn’t kiss Alec and one time he finally did

Hey all!! This was prompted to me by @dahdarios and it took me so long to get it done.  First Jalec fic here so go easy on me guys haha.  Hope you all enjoy it and happy reading :)

~~~

Jace paces back and forth across his bedroom, glaring at the book laying innocently on his bed like it had personally offended him.  He had laid up reading it all night long, trying to find some loophole that made this sick feeling in his stomach leave him alone.  He curses aloud softly and runs his hands through his hair, pulling slightly at the ends.  The sky outside is darkening quickly and he needs to get his clothes on for the ceremony and stop torturing himself.  They had decided to do this months ago, the parabatai ceremony.  Alec is his best friend without question.  He’s also his only friend, but that was another thing altogether.  He keeps telling himself that’s the reason for these feelings he couldn’t explain or control.  It is the reason his palms have started to sweat every time he’s around Alec, and also why he’s dropped the staff three times this week while sparring.  

He didn’t realize what was happening until some boys had been visiting from the L.A. Institute two weeks ago.  They were all tall, tan, and full of muscle over every inch of their bodies.  They also tended to spar with their shirts off altogether, and that had been one hell of a distraction.  Hodge had left them to spar amongst themselves while he had to train these visiting strangers.  Jace had attempted to follow his orders by sparring with Isabelle, but that had proved to be a futile effort.  He beat her without the slightest bit of effort since she was too busy looking over at their visitors.  She kept smiling every time one of them glanced their way and was too distracted to be of any real competition.  He wanted to whack her upside the head and ask her what had gotten into her when Alec stepped in and told Jace to just spar with him instead.  

“Come on Jace, she’s too busy having a crush on those stupid boys to actually work.”  He had rolled his eyes and snatched the blade from his sister’s hand, who for once didn’t even protest at being left out of something.  They had spent the afternoon sparring pleasantly enough and it wasn’t until he was in bed that night that he had realized Izzy was the same amount of distracted that he was these days and that the cause was likely the same reason.

In short, he realized he was fucked.

“Hey,” Alec slips in his room easily with practiced ease, as they had been doing this for months.  Being close friends and slipping through doors in late hours when they were supposed to be doing something else, normally sleeping.  

“Hey Alec,” Jace says, the knowledge eating at him slowly like some kind of parasite.  He thought about telling Alec nearly all the time, of this feeling that had taken residence in his heart and just wouldn’t leave.  Then he has to think about what that would honestly help.  He would hurt Alec by telling him and not becoming his parabatai, since anything not platonic would be absolutely forbidden.  Chances are Alec would never feel the same way about him anyways, so the whole thing would be a moot point.

“Jace, are you okay?” Alec asks, his voice low and comforting the way it was after Jace woke up shaking and crying tears he couldn’t control.  Alec had seen him at his lowest so many times and Jace trusted him with everything...just not this.  “If you have any doubts about this….just tell me.  This is as big as getting married.  Well, in a way.”  Jace glances up to see a bright blush on Alec’s cheeks and it melts his heart.  “Jace, I know I’m not the best fighter yet.  I’m improving and I’m practicing and I will live up to-”

“Stop, Alec, stop,” Jace says quietly with a hand on his arm.  “I don’t have doubts.  I am lucky to be your parabatai.  The luckiest Shadowhunter in the world.  I want to do this, absolutely.”

“Thanks Jace,’ Alec mumbles as his eyes lock on Jace’s hand on his arm.  “I guess nerves got to me.”

“I’ll see you in there,” Jace tells him with an encouraging smile.  “Tonight Maryse brought out all the stops for dinner.  We can celebrate later and everything will be great.  You could even stay over tonight in my room….if you wanted.”

“Yes,” Alec says without hesitation.  What the hell was he thinking?  Inviting Alec to his bed when he felt this way?  Was he some kind of masochist?  When the ceremony was complete there was no backing out and changing his mind.  There would be no chances after this.  Alec would have to be his friend and his brother with no other ties between them.  

Jace didn’t kiss Alec that night, but he did bind his soul to him, and that would have to be enough.

~~

“Alright ladies and gentlemen, we are not yet done for the day,” Hodge’s voice booms across the the training room where Jace lays with Alec and Isabelle, trying to recover from the last set of burpees they had had to endure.  He loved being a Shadowhunter, but training was always going to be a pain in the ass.  

“Hodge, please, I’m going to die,” Isabelle begs with her large eyes peering up at their tutor.

“When you can successfully outrun a demon for six miles you’ll thank me,” Hodge says wryly as he helps her to her feet once again.  Jace doesn’t know if he’s this tired all on his own or if he is feeling some of it from Alec, who looks far more exhausted than his sister but he hasn’t said a word in complaint.  He strips his shirt off and Jace feels his eyes lingering, no matter how much he wishes they wouldn’t .  Alec was gorgeous with firm muscle all over his body bulking up by the day.  

“While I train our miss here on her birthday present why don’t you two go back to some basics with hand to hand combat?” Hodge suggests as Isabelle immediately lights up and runs to the cupboard on the far side of the room where her new whip is held safely in its velvet box.  

“Yes sir,” Alec says obediently as he trudges to the open space used for sparring.

“Can you at least admit to me you’re tired so I don’t feel like an idiot?” Jace hisses to him as he walks closely behind him.  

“You can’t feel it?  I’m surprised,” Alec says with a smirk in Jace’s direction.  “We’ve run four miles today on top of every other torture Hodge can think of.  Not to mention we were up until two last night.  Of course I’m fucking exhausted.”

“You’re sick,” Jace says suddenly, realizing why he feels so off today without a real cause.  “Your throat hurts and yoru body aches.  You’re sick.  Why didn’t you tell Hodge?  I wondered why you weren’t miles ahead of me during laps today.”

“Shut up,” Alec says lowly, even though Hodge wasn’t anywhere near them.  “It’s just a cold.  I’ll be fine.  This whole you reading my emotions thing is annoying.”

“Not like I’m good at it,” Jace sighs as he takes his place across the circle from Alec.  “You ready for this? I’ll go easy on your sickly ass.”

“Sick or not I can still whoop your ass,” Alec says confidently and if he smirked one more time Jacee was going to have to kill him, or himself.  Alec silently counted down and then they were going at it with everything they had.  Jace lived for the sparring and the physical, tangible way of touching Alec as much as he wanted without needing an excuse of any kind.  He loved the way he cound anticipate Alec’s moves as easily as his parabatai anticipated his.  They were the only two that could truly challenge one another in this way.  Jace had beaten Hodge soundly last week, and then promptly Alec had pinned him only moments later.  

Over the last half an hour they were going at it Jace only pinned Alec once to the mat while Alec slammed him for the third time into the mat.  Jace beat Alec at everything else, but hand to hand combat was his weakness.  It was probably at least partly because Jace is incredibly distracted with Alec pressed against him like that.  He looks up into Alec’s hazel eyes and for the millionth time thought about how beautiful he was.  His eyes darted to Alec’s lips several times and that was when Jace realized they were actaully alone in the training room.  He has no idea where Hodge had stolen Izzy off to, but the room was empty and Alec wasn’t moving from his position on top of him.  His hand was on Jace’s chest while the other held both his wrists.  Their legs and hips were pressed together snugly and he couldn’t stop looking at Alec’s full lips inches from his own.  Alec is panting above him and Jace can feel his breath on his face and for some reason it was driving him crazy.  They were both sweating profusely with Alec’s knee between his thighs and this position was actually quite ridiculous.  

“You let me win,” Alec says lowly as he licks his lips a few times.  Jace seriously wants to strangle him.  

“I was distracted,” Jace replies, not even remotely lying.  “I didn’t exactly let you win.”

“What the fuck could have distracted you?” Alec asks with a tiny smile.  “We’re literally alone in a room full of mats.”

Damn Alec Lightwood and his gorgeous….everything.

“My shoulder is starting to ache,” Jace replies instead of answering, feeling the twinge start to matter.  Alec seems to come back to himself and lets him up.  His parabatai still sits close enough to touch as they catch their breath.  Jace hates him and hates how his heart won’t stop racing since Alec is so close still and he can smell him so vividly, his aftershave permanently etched in his brain as the best smell in the world.  

“You okay?” Alec asks, likely getting mixed emotions through their bond and Jace never thought about how annoying it would be to have someone have an open book to his emotions.

“I’m good,” Jace says.  It isn’t the full truth, but he can’t say it’s exactly a lie either.  He is good as long as Alec is next to him, but the torture lies in that he can never be as close as Jace wants him to be.  “Do we dare go shower?  I don’ t know if I can do anything else today.”

“Pretty sure Izzy charmed him to let her out of training, so I”m gonna say let’s go for it.”  Alec reaches a hand out to help him up and once again they end up with their faces inchest apart.  Jace’s lips ache from how much he wants to kiss Alec in this moment.  He wants to feel Alec’s heart beating under his hands and feel his breath on his face for an entirely different reason.  

He doesn’t kiss Alec in the training room, even if his body is aching with the effort of holding back.  He doesn’t , but by the Angel does he want to.

~~

Five years go by and Jace wishes he could say his feelings were under control, but instead they grew by leaps and bounds.  They were eighteen and their lives were crazy.  Alec barely spoke to anyone these days, including him.  He had saved a mundane girl, turned Shadowhunter, and for some reason Alec wouldn’t even speak to him beyond their duties and during hunts.  Clary was spunky, fun, and fed his reckless side but she wasn’t Alec.  She didn’t bring him the peace he needed in his life.  Now that Valentine had reared his head all over again his nightmares were back once again.  He woke up alone and instead of someone coaxing him back to sleep he now went out to train before anyone else was up.  Alec always arrived shortly after he did, no doubt feeling him through the rune, but he never said a word to him about it.  

“Why are you sitting here cleaning blades with me?” Clary asks one night as they sit in the weapons room cleaning arrows and seraph blades.  Jace doesn’t let Clary touch Alec’s bow or his arrows as he cleans them meticulously, like somehow that would make their rift smaller.  “Isn’t this grunt work?  You’re the elite around here.”

“Nothing wrong with going back to the basics,” Jace says dully, hoping the rhythmic motions of cleaning will help his mind clear.  “Plus, you might do it wrong.”

“Did Alec send you in here to watch me clean things?  Seriously?” Clary asks with outrage in her voice.  “Does he really think I’m that much of an idiot? I can’t believe you two share a soul.  At least you’re decent to me.”

“Watch your mouth” Jace warns, voice low and menacing.  He only ever lost patience with Clary when she spoke poorly of Alec, and it happened more and more often the more awful his parabatai was to her.  

“Alec hates me,” Clary pouts, looking like a spoiled toddler in the moment and Jace could scarcely grasp just how much she had left to learn.  

“Alec hates everyone right now.” Jace responds.  “If he’s barely talking to me, then he isn’t talking to anyone else.”

“Just because he’s emotionally stunted and doesn’t know how to deal with a crush,” Clary scoffs as she sets another blade carefully where it belongs.  

“Alec doesn’t have a crush,” Jace says dismissively as he carefully finishes the last of his brother’s arrows and places them exactly where Alec likes them.  

“Wait, you don’t know?” Clary sounds impatient and her green eyes were fixed on him and wide in shock.  “You share a bond through your soul and you don’t know he’s in love with you?”

Jace sits there reeling, his head a complete mess and his heartbeat pounding in his ears.  She wasn’t right, couldn’t be.  There was no way she could know something that intricate about his parabatai when he didn’t.  Alec didn’t love him, couldn’t love him.  He made this oath with Alec to tie their souls together because he would never feel that way.  It was the only way he lived with himself the last six years every time he’s in Alec’s arms and never wants to let go.  The love he felt for Alec was destroying him slowly, and in a fucked up way that’s how he knew it was actually real.  It was the way Valentine taught him.  If it was something that destroyed you in a way you thought you would die, well that was love.  

“Alec doesn’t like men,” Jace says and only by careful self control did he control his hands from shaking as he finished up the last blades.  “You shouldn’t talk about stuff like that around here.  That’s dangerous with how the Clave is.”

“He may not like men, but he does like you.” Clary says confidently as she tossed the towel to the side and stood up.  “That’s why he’s been so moody probably.  You’re spending a lot of time with me.  SInce you assume he likes girls, I’m sure he assumes the same about you.”  She goes back to her rooms with a wave and a goodnight, hardly knowing that she had turned his world around.  

The next day Jace convinces himself to just tell Alec how he feels.  That maybe telling him will end this rift between them.  They can both stop being jealous of things that don’t exist.  He joins his brother and Izzy in the training room and before he can say a word Lydia Bramwell appears and they are announcing their marriage.  Jace once again is left with his heart breaking as he tries to read Alec as easily as he once had.  He can’t of course because they haven’t really spoken in days and everything is off with them and mostly awful.  

“You were supposed to tell them no,” Izzy snaps at their brother before turning away and stalking off.  Jace has no idea what slips between his numb lips before he follows her.  They end up in her room and he pulls his knees up to his chest on her bed.  

“He is such an idiot,” Izzy rants with hands on her slender hips, walking between the bed and the window.  

“What did you mean?  Who was he supposed to say no to?” Jace asks her, and is impressed that his voice stays so even when inside he is a falling apart mess.  If Clary just didn’t say anything last night he would have coped with this, but now the doubt in his mind won’t leave his heart alone.  

“Mom and Dad want him to marry someone the Clave has a high opinion of so we can keep the Institute in the family,” Izzy says in a heavy voice.  “He is an idiot and going along with their stupid plans.”

“He…” Jace clears his throat which causes Isabelle to give him a look.  “He might like her Iz.  She’s beautiful and smart and good at her job.  They seem to be friends.”

“Except she’s the fucking wrong gender,’ Izzy says with a roll of her eyes.  Jace’s heart stops for the third time in the last twenty-four hours and there’s no way that can be healthy.  That was the second person to say that Alec didn’t like girls, without even the slightest hesitation.  He may not trust Clary’s opinion of Alec, but he did trust Izzy.  

“I need to go,” Jace mutters as he darted out of her bedroom.  Isabelle was too angry to really even notice his hasty exit.  He walks quickly through the halls he calls home and tries to lock away the part of his brain screaming at him to go find Alec and tell him already.  Tell him the things he’s kept in his heart for six years.  Tell him that he can’t live without him, and that it has nothing to do with the rune on his hip.  He went to his usual spot to brood and he found Alec already there.  They did freakishly share a brain sometimes.  

Jace wanted to kiss him so bad….but not like this.

Not with Alec looking like the world is on his shoulders and has beaten him until he’s given up completely.  He knows that nobody except their totalitarian mother approved of this engagement and that Alec craves approval from others like air, even when he certainly never needs it.  Jace walks closer slowly and Alec’s bright hazel eyes caught his own and Jace quickly sat next to him and pulled him into a hug.  Alec isn’t crying, and maybe that makes it worse somehow.  This wasn’t fair, and if he didn’t like women then this marriage would do nothing but torture him the rest of his life.  

“You don’t have to do this,” Jace whispers him as he strokes his hair gently, away from any prying eyes of the Institute.  “But if you do, then I will treat her like she’s the love of your life.  I’m here for you Alec, no matter what.”

“Thank you Jace,” Alec says hoarsely as he hangs onto him tightly.  “I have to do this for the Institute, for our family.  If we lose the Institute we lose the only home we’ve ever known.  I’m not going to let that happen.”

“Do you love her?” Jace asks, if only to torture himself a bit more.  He knows this won’t do anything except hurt him either way the cookie crumbles.  If Alec says yes then it will feel like a stab to his already tender heart, and if Alec says no then it will feel like drowning in water so thick he can hardly move.

“No,” Alec says with his eyes closed and his lower lip between his teeth.  Jace rubs his back and hopes he can do something to make this not so torturous.  

“If you decide to do something for yourself this time, I”m here for that too.”  Jace hates how much he loves Alec’s muscles under his hands and he had started dreaming of bare skin under his hands and those runes under his tongue, tracing intricate patterns into his skin.  He bites his own lip harshly and forces his mind to forget those late night fantasies.  He couldn’t kiss Alec until he was sure.  Until they both were absolutely sure this was what they wanted.  

~~

Jace keeps himself busy the morning of Alec’s wedding to Lydia by making sure everything was getting done and he was everywhere but where Alec was.  He didn’t know how he was about to feel watching Alec on that altar with someone else, but he really didn’t want to find out until it was happening and hopefully the sight of Maryse and Robert would help keep him the fuck together.  He was avoiding Izzy as well, in case she had learned to read him as well as she read Alec.  Nobody knew his feelings, and he would do his best to keep it that way.  The one thing Valentine had taught him to a fault was how to hide his feelings from everyone else.  

Before he knew it Alec was in front of him standing by the altar and Jace was straightening the lapels of his jacket somewhat unnecessarily.  The crowd was already gathered and even though they had made up from their feud last night, Jace feels like things are off with his parabatai.  .

“Alright, you ready for this?” Jace asks as he hides his shaking hands behind his back.  Alec is getting married today and then that will be the end of chances.  He will be a married man and if Jace were to do anything it would not only break his parabatai bonds and oaths, they would break marriage ones as well.  He feels a knot in his stomach and it aches like nothing he’s ever felt before.

“As ready as I’m gonna be.” Alec replies, looking a bit nervous but nothing like the torture Jace was going through.  Alec may like men, but that didn’t mean he felt anything for a man in particular.  He tries to smile, but it falls a tad short.   “I’m glad you’re here with me.”

“Wouldn’t be anywhere else.” Jace squeezes his arms for a second before letting go and taking his dutiful place behind his parabatai to wait for his bride to show up.  He feels absolutely sick to his stomach as he watches this unfold in front of him.  He feels tears spring to his eyes and he hopes everyone will just take it that he’s so happy for his parabatai on the biggest day of his life.  

Then, Magnus Bane bursts in the room just as the rune to finalize everything is about to be placed on Alec by Lydia’s delicate hand.

Jace wishes that he would have been the one Alec was grabbing and kissing like that.  It’s a kiss that looks full of unspoken passion and longing.  It lasts what feels like an eternity as Jace is fixed to the spot.  He wonders what he ever did to deserve this form of torture.  

He didn’t kiss Alec, and Magnus Bane beat him to it.

~~~

Life is not destined to be kind to him it would seem as months fly by and the only thing that happens is getting kidnapped by Valentine and tortured for a few months.  He’s grateful he has been banished from the Institute, but not so grateful he’s wound up staying with Magnus.  He has no idea  what has been happening between the warlock and his parabatai the last few months, but he wasn’t ready to find out.  

Jace slowly sits up from bed and grits his teeth against the pain that radiated from his ribs that have so far been the slowest to heal.  He was mostly just exhausted all of the time and if he ever ventured out of this room he laid on the couch to watch a movie with Magnus.  He didn’t want to like Magnus, he really didn’t.  For all he knew Alec was in love with him and they were close to the marriage step themselves.  Shadowhunters fell fast and normally for good.  He was about to hobble out since he hears Magnus in the kitchen when he hears a knock on the door.  It was probably some client and Jace was not in the mood to deal with strangers  He pauses with a hand on the doorjamb and the other on the knob to see if whoever had come was here to stay.  

“Magnus,” Alec’s voice was piercing to him and Jace felt a flash of joy through his rune and his knees were threatening to buckle.  It would seem that the kiss at the wedding had lasted all these weeks and now Alec was here at his loft.  He didn’t pay close attention to their words, but he listened to the tones of their voices and wanted to die.  They both sounded so damn happy and warm towards one another as they talked quietly in the direction of the couches.  Once the voices stop Jace lets himself flop back on the bed and tries to ignore the pain in his heart and throbbing through his body.  The pain won’t let up and he rolls carefully on his side to bury his face in the plush pillows and lets the tears finally come that he never wants to let fall.  He cries for the way his heart keeps being broken over and over again.  He cries because of the pain he can’t escape asleep or awake.  He cries for the confusion and pain of the last few weeks that won’t stop assaulting him.  For the first time since he’d been a child he lets himself sob openly where nobody would hear him.  

He’s crying so hard that he doesn’t hear the door open or the quiet footsteps of the warlock over to his bed. He doesn’t hear Alec at the door, asking if he’s alright or Magnus telling him to give him space.  Jace only notices he isn’t alone when Magnus touches his shoulder gently.  He flinches away from the soft touch at first before relaxing a bit even though his cheeks heat up.  

“I brought you something for pain,” Magnus says softly as he hands him a vial of a purple potion that Jace vaguely recognizes as what he’s been taking the last few days.  He takes it with a shaking hand and downs it in one gulp, trying to keep a straight face at the awful taste.  Magnus swings his feet up on the bed and reclines against the pillows.

“What are you doing?” Jace asks in confusion.  “Alec is waiting for you out there.”

“Actually he’s here to see you,” Magnus corrects him mildly as he clicks his fingers to make a television appear at the foot of the bed, rising from the dresser effortlessly.  “I told him you needed some space for a while.  He’ll come back in the morning.”

“He isn’t living here yet?” Jace asks with a touch of bitterness as he curls into himself.  He really wants to be alone so he can feel this pain and have it be over with.  He feels the sobs wanting to rise again as he thinks about Alec living here with the warlock.  Kissing him and loving him and showing him the smile he had only ever shown himself and Izzy in the past.  

“Why would he be living here?” Magnus asks with his brows furrowing and confusion on his face.  “Blondie, what do you think is between your brother and I?”

“He’s in love with you.” Jace tries not to choke on the words, but the tears were still pressing and they slipped down his nose as he ducked his head and tried to make them stop before Magnus saw how weak he was.  

“Oh Jace,” Magnus says softly and the sheets rustle as he lays a hand on Jace’s bare back and guides him to lay down.  Jace isn’t strong enough yet to fight him off but he lets out a whine as Magnus shuffles closer and puts his arms around him.  He likes Magnus well enough, but only Alec had ever held him.  Only Alec had ever seen him cry.  He wants to tell Magnus to tell Alec to come back, but at the same time he isn’t ready to see Alec yet.  He doesn’t know how to be around Alec yet, when thoughts of him were the only thing keeping him sane on Valentine’s torture ship.  Magnus is rubbing his back softly and it all felt so wrong that all he wanted was Alec, but he couldn’t very well tell Alec what was causing his sobs and he hated lying to his parabatai.  “Jace, darling, I’m not dating your brother.”

“What?” Jace hiccuped softly as he was trying to stop crying, honestly he was.  His body just didn’t want to cooperate.  The medicine always worked quickly to make him quite out of it and his body quickly relaxed into Magnus’s warmth.  

“I’m not dating your brother,’ Magnus says again, but it didn’t make any more sense than the first time he said it.  

“You kissed himi at the wedding.  You.. you two like each other?” Jace says, though he wasn’t so sure this time.  

“I did kiss him,” Magnus agrees, seemingly happier now that he was calm and laying against him.  “That doesn’t mean we’re in love.  Alexander is a surprisngly good actor.”  Jace felt his own face contort in confusion.  “Jace, your brother and I became friends months ago, good friends rather quickly.  I am attracted to your brother, but he only has eyes for you.  It was quickly obvious that he was crazy about you and that’s what the memory demon told him as well.  He was confused and upset, but never attracted to me.  I couldn’t let him marry Lydia like that when he didn’t love her.  I showed up to stop the wedding, without much of a plan in mind if I’m being honest.  Your brother took it from there and kissed me quite thoroughly.  You’re a lucky man Mr. Herondale.”

“Alec loves me?” Jace mumbles as the medicine was taking over his will to stay awake and participate in this conversation fully.  “He really loves me?”

“He really does,” Magnus agrees as he turns on the TV, but didn’t move from holding Jace close.  Unfortunate Jace slips into sleep before he can think too much on that conversation.

~~

Jace hasn’t brought himself to talk to Alec still, even after he knows how Alec feels.  The fact that he returns his feelings is great, truly great.  There was still so many things to consider before they got a happily ever after.  There was the parabatai part of it which made it forbidden, and the fact that the Clave was not as progressive as they all may be.  Nobody would accept it and it would be an uphill battle from the very start.  Magnus keeps giving him disapproving looks for not so much as talking to Alec yet after weeks since they had spoken in the guest bedroom.  They were back to business as usual at the Institute, and Jace lets himself be comforted by routine.  

He never expects to see Alec up on the roof about to jump off.

He knows Alec has been hurting and confused thanks to the rune on his hip, but not to this extent.  Not enough to end his life.  Magnus told them it was all only due to a spell, but Jace didn’t believe it for a second as he sees Alec sitting on the floor crying and hiding his face in his hands with Magnus sitting at his side.  Jace feels unbelievable guilt as Magnus dismisses his sister, Clary, and his mother easily by saying Alec was having some emotional reaction to the spell.  Jace finds he can’t move, not with Alec in this state.  

“Shh, darling, you’re okay,’ Magnus says soothingly and Jace wonders how the hell he is so good at that.  How can be be better at comforting Alec than he is?  Alec was the other half of his soul and still Jace can’t find words to say.  

“I can’t anymore Magnus,’ Alec sobs softly and the words break Jace’s heart further.  “I can’t feel like this anymore.  I can’t feel this for him.”

“You won’t forever,” Magnus promises him with a kiss to his head.  Jace shifts awkwardly and the glare was unmatched by anything he’d seen before as Magnus looked over at him.   “I thought I told everyone that Alec and I needed a moment alone.”

“I can’t leave,’ Jace says in a voice barely above a whisper as he hugs his arms around himself.  “I can’t leave him like this.  I...  I want to talk to him.”

“Oh, now you want to talk to him?” Magnus asks scathingly, and it’s no less than what he absolutely deserves

“It’s okay,” Alec says.  His face was now dry of tears but the look in his hazel eyes told Jace this was far from the first time Alec had cried over this.  He bites at his lips and slowly walks forward so he can sit next to Alec against the low wall that Alec was standing on just a minute ago.  “Magnus, it’s okay.  Let me talk to Jace.”

“I’ll be right outside,’ Magnus squeezed his arm gently before gracefully and smoothly getting to his feet and leaving them alone on the roof.  The silence is a heavy one as they sit for a minute and let the wind be the only noise between them.

“This isn’t about the spell,” Jace says quietly as he feels the ache through his bond worsen a little as they sit here.  He has no idea if touching Alec will hurt or help in this situation.  They had been avoiding this moment for over six years and now it was here.  Jace has to just tell him how he feels, has to let him know that Alec isn’t alone in this.  He needs to stop holding them both back from what they want.  

“It isn’t,” Alec agrees quietly, his voice hitching on sobs still in his throat.  “I… I haven’t been okay for a while.”

“I know,” Jace says quietly.  He’s felt Alec’s anguish and decided to ignore it.  It was easier than trying to confront all these feelings between them that neither of them asked to feel, but had attacked them relentlessly anyways.   “I should have….well, I should have done something.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Alec says miserably as he stares at his knees again.  “I… I have to figure out how to live with this.  I’m sorry that I feel like this.  It isn’t right or normal and I know it’s forbidden.  I can’t lose you, not like my father lost his parabatai-”

“Alec, come on, I”m not like your asshole of a father,’ Jace cut in and he stopped the barriers that they both put up to grip his arm and letting his hand trail down to Alec’s to squeeze it tightly.  “I’m nothing like that and you’re never going to lose me.  Not even if the rumors about me and Clary were true and I was madly in love with her.”  They shared a grin at the ridiculous thought that Clary could be with him when she was so obsessed with their sister.  “Alec… You’re my parabatai.  You’re the most important person in the world to me.  I.  Alec, you’re not alone in this.  You will never be alone, but you aren’t the only one who feels this way.”

“What?” Alec was staring at him with a blank expression and with tentative hope in his eyes.  “Jace… do you know what you’re-”

“I’ve known for over six years,’ Jace says and his heart is pounding in his ears.  He looks at Alec and instead of the nerves getting worse they slowly calmed.  This was Alec, his best friend.  This was the person he had come to trust with all his secrets and all his fears.  Alec had never let him be alone, even when he deserved it.  Magnus had told him weeks ago that Alec was in love with him and right now Jace has no idea what had taken him so long to just sit here and look at Alec exactly like this.  Look at Alec the way he deserved to be looked at the rest of his life, as if he had hung the moon.  “I’m in love with you Alexander Lightwood.  I don’t care if it destroys me, but you would never do that.”

“I never would,’ Alec agrees as he places a hand on Jace’s cheek and the blonde can feel it trembling against his skin.  “I love you Jace, i”m in love with you.  I have been for what feels like forever.”

“I should have done this so fucking long ago,” Jace mumbles as he finally lets his lips crash on Alec’s like some kind of tidal wave.  He kisses Alec like that boy has always deserved to be kissed.  It’s rough and hurried and messy and somehow perfect.  Alec smells like home and Jace can feel their hearts beat as one as one hand rests on the side of Alec’s neck and the other is on his waist.  

He finally kisses Alec Lightwood, and nothing has ever felt so right.  

[mubal4]

Murphy’s Law

 We have all heard it, maybe experienced it, or at least felt that, “everything can go wrong, will go wrong, and the most inconvenient time.” It has a most negative connotation to it but, I don’t believe it isn’t realistic in some way.  Now, “everything & most inconvenient time?” I think that may be a bit much because there is that other saying, “it can always be worse.”  Of course, there can be those times that we are just in a rut and it feels like we aren’t enough, we may be inadequate, or, we just can’t get things to go the way we want them to; and, there may be a number of things at the same time that may be piling on to it.  It can also just me are perspective is way off!!  There is that silver lining, first off, it is okay, we all have those experiences, days, weeks, or lengths of time that we feel like things just aren’t going are way.  Secondly, I know it may seem like it sucks right now but it will get better.  Lastly, there are different ways we can view these feelings, we can see it different……if we look at it different; from a different perspective.  I know, I understand – easier said than done; but possible with practice.  

 I am coming off of these moments.  I was in a valley for a couple of days then came out and then seem to get popped in the nose a few times with some career stuff.  Then, being transparent, we had some challenges in the family but in both situations, we worked through them and learned from them. As those experiences were being overcome, although the work stuff still has its peaks and valleys, the injury bug started to hit.  Initially, I had felt some weird aches appearing in my lower abdomen.  I say weird because it wasn’t something, I had ever experienced before.  Then, left knee trouble, lower back seized up, and caught some type of cold to top it off; all in the span of about 3 days &, about 10 days before I was to be starting my training block for my next race.  Two nuggets of good news, 1) the work bullshit took a back seat and 2) the injuries didn’t seem too serious, just inconveniences.  The knee and back were things I have experienced before and have been fortunate to know a number of good Physical Therapists that have provided me with some exercises to do.  After a few days of working on them I saw improvement and the knee and back began to feel better.  However, the stomach wasn’t improving; actually, it was getting worse and I hadn’t even been training long distance or intensely.  So, I decided to back down my miles and pace and see how that felt; still no real relief.  In my mind, I was trying to figure out what happened, how it happened, when it happened. I was also playing out scenarios on the training, the race is early December, if I back down now at least I will still have some time to ramp up, depending on the severity….blah, blah, blah, blah. All ridiculousness really.  After the 3rd or 4th attempt to head out for a run, still experiencing tenderness I called the doctor; unfortunately, he wasn’t going to be able to see me for another week. Okay, I could have gone to their walk-in clinic but as I said, it wasn’t really painful, just uncomfortable and no where near intolerable.  So, I decided to wait it out but also, change things up a bit.  It was bothering me to run, but not hike or climb.  So, the whole mentality of having to “get out and do miles, get out and be intense, train, train, train, train……” – I let that go.  I slowed my pace to a hike and, when there were some flats, I decided to jog, take it slow, and, something I always think about while out on runs, soak in the experience.  That is something I needed to get better at and really be grateful for the time out in the fresh air; specially since it is finally getting out of the triple digits. 😊  So, over the last week or so, I’ve spent a good amount of time on feet, hiking hills, climbing the mountains around Phoenix/Scottsdale and yes, getting in some jogging when and if the body feels good.  The shots in this blog are from last Friday where I took the morning to have to myself in the mountains.  Over the weekend I also go out and did trail work and then hiked afterward and took another slow jog/hike on Sunday.  I have to be honest, by slowing down, stepping back and letting go of the “I have to get these miles in and have to do it in this time……” has been really helping me appreciate being out.  I’ve noticed it makes me start my days better or, if I do it in the middle of the day, helps the evening with the family.  I am calmer and more at ease, more at peace, I guess.  I don’t feel rushed; I am just going out to spend time in the mountains and be present.  

 That all said, am I still wondering when I can run faster and more miles, and when am I going to be at 100%?  Sure, those thoughts have been entering but my self-talk is getting better because I am telling myself to be patience and enjoy this experience.  I told Robin the other day I believe the Universe is conspiring all this to happen to lead up to a big race in 2020 😊.  Maybe I am just being a knucklehead but it sure beats me feeling sorry for myself and not getting out.  Getting out without being rushed provides me, as I said, with peace, joy, and calmness.  

 Here is the question though, why do I need to be hurt/injured for me to slow it down?