#still might fiddle with the margins and image settings

[nerdierholler]

I have a multitude of things I should have been doing lately: checking my dash here, finishing a quilt I promised my dad months ago, working on a cover letter for a full time job that’s due Thursday. Have I done any of those things? Nope. Instead I listened to the recent fansplaining episode on fanbinding and decided I wanted to poke that. Specifically I wanted to do all of the fiddly typesetting bits and spend time really getting into minute details on something because I don’t ever really get to do that and I like it.

I decided on Pride and Prejudice because 3 copies isn’t enough lol Anywho! After taking a big block of html text from project gutenberg, I think I’ve almost wrangled it into a typeset resembling a real book. It’s very satisfying.

[happyandticklish]

Pineapple

Notes: Ayyyy finally making progress, only one more request to go! For the request/commission for @ticklish-sidekick! ^^ This is set after my fic No Secrets In Friendship, and is essentially a sequel of sorts. 

Summary: Felix had thought telling Victor he liked tickling would be the worst part. He hadn’t accounted, however, for the aftermath. 

When Felix had first admitted to Victor that he liked tickling, he had expected the other to reject him, or at the very least avoid him from sheer awkwardness alone. When Victor not only accepted him, but confessed that he didn’t really mind the tickling, he thought it was possible he had died and this was some crazy fantasy his mind had constructed as a consolation prize. When Victor had agreed to let him tickle him, Felix was sure of it.

After their first session, an odd, hesitant silence had fallen over the subject, both of them too shy to bring it up again. The image of Victor squirming and laughing, his nose crinkled in mirth, was stuck in Felix’s brain. There was something oddly satisfying about knowing that it was him that had brought him to that, the simple touch of his own fingers.

Victor had said he would be okay with a repeat of their session at the time, but somehow Felix felt even more awkward broaching the subject now. He still wasn’t used to someone being okay with this interest of his, and he wasn’t sure how much was too much. Once a week? Two weeks? Should he wait a month until another session or was a couple days long enough? He was painfully aware of how vague and fragile their agreement was, and he didn’t want to push it by asking to tickle Victor again so soon after the last time.

It has been about two weeks since Felix had told Victor everything and tied him up, and he was on the verge of just coming out and saying something about it. They were doing homework in Victor’s living room, a bowl of half-eaten chips in the living room—although homework was a loose word for what they were doing. Victor had his phone open in his lap, and Felix was doodling little figures in the margins of his notebook, too distracted to think about math at the current moment—not that he was ever in the mood to think about math.

Every once in a while Victor would laugh at something on his screen, a stunted chuckle that had Felix’s gaze snapping up to him like a moth that’s just spied a flame. He thought he was being subtle about it, but after the fifth time Victor met his gaze, the echo of a smile still lingering over his features.

Felix flushed, quickly glancing back down again and formulating a long, convoluted excuse in his head, when Victor spoke up first.

“Hey, uh, I was wondering… well, I was wondering if we could talk?”

Fuck.

This was it. The long awaited rejected, Victor did think he was weird, and all of their last session had just been out of pity for his friend. Felix’s fingers gripped his pencil a little tighter. “Oh yeah? Is it about this week’s assignment, because if so, I hate to break it to you but I’m just as lost as you are.”

There it was again, that half-formed laugh, only this time it was tense with nerves. “No, no, it’s not about math. It’s about… ah, this is kind of embarrassing. But, you know when you… uh, when you tickled me?”

There was a pause. “Yes. I’m aware.”

Victor wasn’t looking at him, curling his knee to his chest and fiddling with the cuff of his pants anxiously. “I said at the time that I would be okay with doing another session, and I meant it. I mean, last time we kind of got cut off anyway, so it might be nice to have a continuation of that. Only if you want, of course, you don’t have to if you’re not in the mood or—”

“Of course I want to!”

Victor blinked at the enthusiastic response, and Felix coughed, embarrassed. He rubbed the back of his neck, determinedly staring at a spot on the far wall. “I mean, yes, I do. Want to, that is. It’s kind of silly, I was actually gonna bring it up to you, but I thought maybe it was just me and I was being weird or—”

“Hey.” A hand was placed on his knee and Felix reluctantly glanced back into Victor’s understanding gaze. “We’ve been over this, remember? You’re not weird, and your interests aren’t weird either. I mean, I’ve been thinking about it just as much as you have, so if anything, we’re both weird.”

“Oh.” For some reason, the idea that Victor had somehow enjoyed their session just as much as Felix had not occurred to him. He felt like someone had clicked pause on him, and it took him a couple seconds to think of an intelligent answer to that. “Y-You have?”

Victor’s cheeks grew redder and he nodded a bit reluctantly. “Y-Yeah? Is that… I don’t know, weird? Sorry, I’m still new to this whole thing, I’m not really sure what the protocol is.”

Snorting, Felix rolled his eyes. “I don’t think there is protocol, man, it’s tickling. But yeah, I would—I mean, yes, I would definitely be interested in another session, if you wanted.”

Victor smiled, a small, hesitant thing, and suddenly Felix felt a million times better. It was as though a weight had been lifted off of him, his earlier anxiety replaced with different nerves now, the fluttery, excited kind. This was really happening.

They waited a week before they decided to set up a session. Felix spent most of that week stuck in a pit of nerves. It was strange; Victor was supposed to be the vulnerable one here, and yet Felix couldn’t help but feel like he was exposing himself as well. Not in a bad way, though. It felt good to share this secret with someone else.

Victor’s flushed smile on the day of when he sat down on his bed certainly added.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

Victor couldn’t stop smiling. It would disappear for a couple seconds only to reappear, helplessly, a second later. It was honestly kind of endearing, if Felix was being honest. Possibly it wasn’t normal to think about your best friend in those terms, but Felix decided that was a revelation for another day.

“So,” Felix started, smiling too. It was hard not to in face of Victor’s innocent nervousness. “I thought it might be fun to do this session a little differently. If you’re okay with that, of course.” Before Victor could say anything, he slid his backpack off, his motions jerky with anxiety. He started pulling different objects out, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, feathers, a bottle of lotion. Admittedly, it probably hadn’t been the best idea to impulse buy all of it before discussing the idea with Victor, but he had been shopping for groceries anyway, and the items were in his basket before he could think it through.

A quick glance up at Victor presented him with more confusion than the immediate rejection Felix had expected. He picked up the hairbrush skeptically. “Does tickling include personal care now, or am I just behind on the times yet again?”

The comment, filled with such Victor-like normalcy, helped to settle a bit of Felix’s nerves. He snorted, grabbing the hairbrush back. “Trust me, if it did, I would not be the guy to help you out there. No, this is, ah, for tickling, actually.” He looked at Victor for permission before gently taking the other’s hand, and ran the brush over it carefully. Victor jumped a bit, his fingers curling instinctively.

“Oh shit,” he muttered, his grin widening. “That actually does kind of tickle. And all the rest of these are also for…?”

“Tickling, yes,” Felix filled in for him. He scribbled his fingers teasingly over Victor’s palm as he spoke and the other spluttered over a soft laugh, jerking his hand back quickly and rubbing the sensation away on his jeans. 

Felix raised a brow. “You know, if you can’t even handle that, I don’t know how you’re going to make it through an actual session.”

“Oh shut up,” Victor said, shoving his shoulder lightly to hide his clear embarrassment at the teasing. “How do you even know about all this stuff anyway? I don’t suppose there’s some article online for it, is there?”

When Felix didn’t immediatelly deny his statement, Victor’s eyes widened. “Oh my god, there is, isn’t there? Is this…. I mean, well, are there other people with this same interest?”

“A lot of people, actually,” Felix said, rubbing the back of his neck. “There’s writing out there for it, art and videos and stuff. That’s how I know about the hairbrush, and the tools in general. I’m not really involved in any of it myself, but yeah, there’s a whole community out there.”

“Huh.” Victor sat back on the bed, a contemplative look on his face. He didn’t seem disgusted or put off by the idea, which was a good sign in Felix’s opinion. “A whole community of people who like tickling. That’s honestly kind of cute, as a concept.”

Felix flushed a bit, averting his gaze quickly. It was weird. For so long this love of his had been a part of himself he had been forced to keep secret, and yet here Victor was, talking about it casually as though the subject weren’t weird or forbidden. It was kind of nice, albeit flustering.

“Uh, yeah,” Felix agreed quickly. There was an anxious part of him that was still nervous about staying on the subject for too long; as though Victor’s acceptance was a frightened deer Felix didn’t want to scare away. Maybe he would garner the courage to discuss everything one day, but not now, not today. “So. How do you want to do this?”

Fifteen minutes and one awkward, detailed discussion later, Victor shifted a bit on the bed, trying to switch to something comfortable given the current circumstances. He had been curious about the different positions there were to try out, and so Felix had suggested this. He lay on his stomach, his arms pulled behind him, with his wrists and ankles bound together. It was a lazy hogtie of sorts, and they had decided on using old scarves of Felix’s mom instead of rope, to provide an added layer of comfort. Jump rope, they had discovered last time, was not the best when it came to struggling.

“You remember the rules?” Felix asked, coming to sit behind him, near his feet. Victor inhaled sharply, his toes curling.

They had discussed the vaguer details for their session last week. Last time they had kept it fairly simple, not wanting to overdo anything. They were both so new to this, after all. This time, however, Victor wanted a challenge.

Victor nodded, as much as he could, his heart racing with excitement and nerves. “I remember.”

“The safeword is ‘pineapple’. Call it, and everything stops. But—” Felix tossed him a cheeky grin. “If you do, you risk a punishment on the other end.”

It was a loose term, punishment. Two minutes of tickling on a spot of Victor’s choice (in this case, his sides) if he chose to call the safeword. If anything, it was almost a reward. The real punishment would be the loss of pride. Victor tossed him back as confident a look as he could muster, considering the circumstances. “Don’t worry, I think I can take it. It’s just a bit of tickling, after all.”

Felix quirked a brow. “I have a feeling you’re gonna regret those words soon.”

And, as Felix begun, Victor found that he almost hoped he did.

Nails curled against his soles, barely grazing his sock, though Victor could feel it as sharply as though Felix had a direct connection to his nerve endings. It was when they started to move, wiggling and scratching over his arches, that he felt giggles start to build up in his throat. He bit his lip, trying to hold back the uncontrollable noises desperate to escape, but he was finding it more and more difficult as time went on.

“You know laughing isn’t against the rules, right?” Felix teased, dragging a finger in gentle circles over his foot. It wasn’t too bad when compared to the tickling on his other foot, but the persistence of it drilled through Victor’s concentration. “It’s only going to make it easier for me if you try to hold back.”

“S-Shut uhup!” Victor squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to explain that once he started laughing, there would be no way to stop, but there was no way he’d be able to explain all that without breaking. He jumped when curious fingers explored under his toes, a giggle slipping out between his pressed lips.

“See, there you go! Don’t try to hold it in, it’s just going to make it tickle worse.”

Both feet now, nails teasing at that sensitive spot under his toes. He shifted, attempting to protect one foot with the other. Every time, however, Felix would simply tickle the new foot until he was forced to move it away again. It was an impossible system, which was most likely the point. Each second that went by preyed on his resistance, until finally he couldn’t help the stream of laughter that escaped him.

“Fehehelix!” he whined, tugging reflexively against the bonds. In a way, the scarves almost seemed worse than the ropes. There was just enough give to allow Victor the illusion of freedom, but not enough to let him actually escape Felix’s stupidly effective nails. “C-C’mohohon!”

“C’mon on what?” It was clear Felix was loving this, a fact Victor might have been more irritated with if he himself wasn’t loving it just as much. “I don’t know how you expect me to help you if you don’t finish your sentences.”

An annoyed groan slipped out between the giggles. “Ihihi dohohon’t knohohow, juhuhust—F-Fehehelix, plehease, ihit tihickles!”

“Did you expect it not to?”

Despite the innocence to his words, Victor could practically hear the smirk on his face. He was about to attempt a snarky remark in reply when he felt a tug and realized with dread and excitement that his socks were no longer on his feet. “W-Wait, Felix, hold on—”

Felix dragged a finger along his bare soles, an action that tickled far more than it should have and served as an excellent reminder of just how bad this was going to be. “Hmm? Something you wanted to say?”

It was a good question, one Victor wasn’t sure he had the answer to. What did he want? Not for Felix to stop, at least not yet. Instinctually, his body begged him to end this now, give him a reprieve from the tickling before it had even started, but there was a greater part of him that refused to listen.

It was possible he needed this just as much as Felix.

“Just… go easy on me?”

Felix’s gaze softened for a moment, though Victor couldn’t see it from his position. There was the slightest of pauses before he replied, “Well, I don’t think I can when even this—” he scribbled fingers over his soles suddenly and Victor yelped, jerking his foot away from his hand—“is too much for you to handle, but I’ll try my best. Though, if it does get to be too much—”

“Say pineapple,” Victor replied quickly. “I know, I know. Just… get on with it, if you’re going to.”

“And I thought I was supposed to be the one who likes all this tickling stuff,” Felix replied wryly. “You’re almost more eager than me.”

Victor blushed, but didn’t have a chance to protest as Felix held true to his word. He had thought it was bad with the socks on, but this was infinitely worse. It had never occurred to him how long Felix’s nails were before—he had never had a reason to. Now though, he couldn’t stop focusing on it.

“Fahaha, gah—mmmehehehe ahaha Fehehelix! Ohoho shihihit!” He curled his hands into tight fists, trying to think clearly through the electric sparks shooting along his nervous system. He found himself grateful for his position which allowed him to hide the rampant blush spreading like wildfire across his face. His words came out slightly muffled as a result, but the message was still clear. “Ohohoho m-my gahahahad!”

“So this is a good spot,” Felix noted casually, teasing at his arch with a couple fingers. “And clearly here is—”

“NahahAHAT THEhehehe tohohoes, shihihihit—”

“No interruptions, I’m trying to focus here.” Felix dug his thumb lightly into his sole in reprimand and Victor squeaked, his protests breaking off into frantic giggles. “Now, where was I? Ah right. Where else can I try? I wonder…”

Experimentally, Felix placed his thumb and forefinger on either side of his heel, moving them around in gentle circles. There was a surprised choking noise from the squirming mess on the bed, and Victor’s foot jerked quickly out of Felix’s grasp.

“Wait, wait, hohold on,” Victor replied, nervous anticipation rushing his words on. “Not there, c’mon, no—ahAH!”

He jumped when the fingers were back, on both feet this time. Victor had never before considered heels to be a ticklish area on the body, but there was something about the way Felix’s fingers moved, like he massaging his nerve endings, that had him nearly jumping out of his skin. His hands strained fruitlessly to try to push away the cruel touch, but they always stopped just short—the beauty and frustration of this particular form of bondage.

“Felix, Felix, Fehehehelix—ah!” Victor snorted, his face scrunched up in a grin. “Mm, ehehe, plehease, ahaha! Sohohomething ehehelse!”

The fingers paused at his words and then disappeared entirely. Victor’s relief only lasted a second as Felix parroted his words. “ ‘Something else’, huh? Well, if you insist. You may learn to regret your words, though.”

“W-What does that mean?” Victor asked nervously, shifting on the bed. His position made him feel a bit like a worm squirming around on a hook and waiting for his fate—he doubted worms ever had to worry about tickle torture, though. He tried to glance back to see what Felix was doing, and noticed the flash of a label on some kind of tan bottle before it disappeared from his line of sight. “What is that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Felix assured him cheerily. “You asked for something else, and I have delivered.”

“What—”

“You’ll find out soon, don’t worry.”

Something wet and cold pressed against Victor’s feet and he twitched away from it. It felt like some sort of liquid that Felix dutifully massaged onto his feet (Victor would be hard-pressed to admit how much that alone tickled). There was something about the feel and scent of it that was vaguely familiar.

“Is that lotion?”

“Ding, ding, ding, you win a trip to Las Vegas! Thank you for participating on our gameshow, What Common Household Items Can I Use To Tickle My Best Friend Out Of His Mind.” Felix snapped the bottle shut, tossing it dismissively over to the other side of the bed. He pulled his bag over, rummaging around inside for something Victor couldn’t see. “Come back next week to try for a roundtrip!”

Victor rolled his eyes. It was incredible how even now, Felix was still Felix. “You know, you’re not as funny as you think you ahahAHAHARE—SHIHIHIT!”

Nothing could have prepared him for the sensation of bristles sliding across his soles, the lotion unfairly aiding their movement. Victor let out a yelp, bursting into wild and desperate laughter as he attempted to pull his foot away. Felix had anticipated this, however, and held calmly onto his foot, curling his fingers around his toes and pulling them back in the process. There way no way to escape, and Victor faced the consequences.

“Oh really?” Felix asked, raising a brow as he dragged what was apparently a hairbrush over his soles, his arches, the ball of his foot; nowhere was safe it seemed. “If I’m not funny, how come you’re laughing so much? It seems to me that you think I’m hilarious.”

It was impossible to think, let alone form a reply, with this new assault on his nerves sending Victor into grander heights of hysteria. His laughter raised several pitches, and he shook his head back and forth, the only way he could think to deal with such intense sensations.

Hairbrushes, he decided, should really come with a warning on them—“Not to be used on feet under any circumstances”.

“You know, this seems to be a particularly bad spot,” Felix noted, glancing down towards the ball of his foot. “I wonder what would happen if I just…..”

Trailing off, Felix gripped his toes, holding them back and stretching the skin—leaving Victor entirely exposed. He dragged the brush over the spot curiously, barely touching the skin, just to hear Victor’s breath hitch in anticipatory giggles. And then, without warning, he resumed his rapid pace, jerking the brush over his foot in a way that should have hurt. However, due to the lotion’s influence, instead it just tickled, badly, and Victor could feel the safeword on the tip of his tongue. Yet, for some reason, he didn’t use it. Not yet.

“Tickles, huh?” Felix said, the traitor.

“SHIHIHIT OHOHOHO M-MY—”

Victor couldn’t even finish the sentence, his mind entirely stuck on the devastating sensation. No matter how many times the bristles swept over his feet, he was never prepared. His shoulders trembled with laughter and he cackled helplessly into the mattress, his other foot flapping wildly in protest.

Felix continued the devastating method for at least a minute, and Victor was on the brink of ending it when he finally stopped, allowing the other a break. Victor breathed in a sigh of relief, huffing out tired laughs as phantom tickles kept his toes tightly clenched.

“That,” he declared, pointing a finger accusatively back at him. “Was mean. And uncalled for.”

“You didn’t say the safeword,” Felix shot back in return.

Victor glared back at him, mostly because he was right. It wasn’t very convincing with the bright blush spreading across his cheeks, or the silly grin he couldn’t quite shake. “Shut up. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t still mean.”

Felix hummed disbelievingly, but instead of arguing further, he set the brush down, skittering a couple fingers over his soles as he talked. “Well, I assume your lack of protest means you’re ready for the final stage?”

Victor snorted, for much different reasons than before. “ ‘Final stage’, god—you sound ridiculous, you know that?”

“Hey, hey, none of that attitude,” Felix chided, poking under his toes just to hear him yelp. “I don’t think you want to provoke the guy who has you tied down.”

“Maybe that’s what I want,” Victor mumbled shyly, just loud enough for the other to hear.

It was possible he had imagined it, but he could have sworn he saw Felix’s ears tinge pink at the comment. Felix quickly glanced away and towards his feet again, however, focusing himself on the goal. He tugged the bag over to him once more, exchanging the brush for some new mystery tool. “Well, if that’s the case, what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t comply with your wishes?”

There was a click as a rhythmic buzzing sound filled the air, leaving Victor with only a moment to dwell in his confusion before spinning bristles were pressed under his toes, and any and all comprehensive thoughts he might have had before that moment left him.

Though the brush had been bad, the vibrations were intense in an entirely new way than before. It was like shockwaves being sent through his system, some mixture of ticklish and pleasant all at once. He pressed his face into the mattress, attempting to muffle the seemingly endless stream of giggles that wracked him. He attempted to curl his toes, but that only served to trap what he had eventually come to the conclusion was a toothbrush.

“E-Ehehehe Fehehehelix ohohoho m-my gahahahad!” He couldn’t even squirm, too exhausted from earlier. The most he could manage was a helpless twitch every once in a while when the toothbrush skimmed over a new spot. “Ihihihihit tihihihihihickles plehehehehease!”

“You know what to say to get it to stop,” Felix trilled, though there was a soft edge to his teasing. Something about the happy crinkle at the edge of Victor’s eyes and the flushed glow of his smile set butterflies scattering through his stomach. He was so caught up in the feeling that he didn’t notice when Victor’s laughter pitched as the bristles settled on the spot in-between his last two toes, his feet jerking about desperately. The other boy was going crazy, the sensations far too much to bear when combined with everything else, especially on such a bad spot. He managed another minute, before suddenly he couldn’t take it anymore.

“P-Pihihihineapple, pihihineapple, ohoho mihihi gahahad!” he squeaked, frantically trying to push Felix’s hand away with one foot. He had never realized quite how sensitive that particular spot was, but he was discovering it a bit too clearly now.

Immediatelly, Felix stopped, fumbling for the switch and flicking it off. Victor let out a relieved sigh, giggling tiredly into the sheets as he tried to rub one foot with the other to get rid of the leftover tickles. Felix set the brush down, helping to rub the feeling out. “Are you okay?”

Victor quickly nodded, flashing back a grin so cute that Felix’s heart nearly stopped in his chest. “Y-Yeheah, I’m good. That just really tickled, holy shit.”

“The electric toothbrush is an unexpected, but effective contender in the art of tickling,” Felix agreed with an answering grin. The grin turned slightly more devious after a second, a fact Victor was quick to pick up on, tensing nervously.

“What?”

“Remember the punishment for giving in?”

Shit. 

He did, now, and his giggles started back up all over again from anticipation alone. “H-Hold on, wait—”

“If you really don’t want me to, we won’t,” Felix interrupted, reaching over and gripping his hands in reassurance. “It’s totally up to you man.”

Victor considered refusing off principle, but he found that, despite how exhausted he was, despite how intense it had been, he did want to. He squeezed Felix’s hand back.

“Do it.”

And really, who was Felix to say no to that cute smile?

[hajimewhore]

Body Swap 👫 (Iwaizumi Hajime/Reader) ➸Rated T, fem!Reader, 1.9k words   ➷✈Part 1, Part 2   ➷Humor, awkwardness involved, if you’re me and I’m you who’s flying the plane?!   ➷Summary: When you woke up at fuck o’clock on a Sunday morning, you cursed yourself for setting an alarm so early on the weekend. Afterwards, you came to realize a few important things: 1. You didn’t set the alarm. 2. Hajime set the alarm. 3. You were in Hajime’s room. 4. Why? 5. Because you ARE Hajime.

A/N: I’m taking forever on this Akaashi fic so I decided to throw this series out here, I hope you enjoy!🥺 Body swap is a trope I find absolutely chaotic and hilarious, so let’s get it! 

♡ ♡ ♡

Releasing a deep sigh, you pull your warm comforter over your face to hide the light peaking in from your blinds.

You're almost positive you closed the blinds and pulled the curtain over the prior night, but the thought doesn't sit much longer as you're lulled back into your slumber.

Hearing your alarm blare, a groan scratches at your throat as you smack your bedside desk, missing your phone entirely. Was your voice always this deep when you first wake up? You chalk it up to morning grogginess, deciding not to dwell on it any longer due to the obnoxious ringtone.

Also, did you even set an alarm? The thought sits at the back of your mind as you fiddle blindly for the sleep button.

It's Sunday, why would you even set one so early? How did you fuck that up?

Sitting upright, you blink blearily. Something feels off.

This isn't even your phone. These aren't your covers either...

The Godzilla posters decorating the walls definitely aren't yours, and this most certainly is not your room.

‘Hajime?’

You think looking around. This is definitely Hajime’s room. You hadn’t been in it in awhile, but it’s unmistakable.

You wrack your brain for the missing details, unfortunately coming to no result or explanation.

Why are you in Hajime’s room?! You didn’t drink last night, so there's no explanation for the missing details in your memory for how you wound up in his sheets. Also, he isn’t here currently.

What the hell?

Shoving the covers aside, you immediately notice your... significantly more masculine figure.

“What the fu—AH!”

Your surprisingly gruff voice startles you. Though, it’s not so much your voice, but Hajime’s.

Stumbling out of bed, nearly tripping over your tired legs, you barrel into Hajime's bathroom to check the mirror.

And despite all the clues handed to you, you're still completely stunned to see who's staring back at you in the mirror.

Your childhood best friend, Iwaizumi Hajime.

Cupping your hand over your mouth to stifle a scream, you pace back to the bedroom.

'It's a dream haha. A hyper realistic, very detailed, dream.'

You attempt to convince yourself as you slip back into the sheets, still warm, cursing your subconscious for forcing this abnormal dream onto your unwitting self.

Squeezing your eyes shut, twisting and turning, willing away your current situation, you realize... nothing is happening.

‘God damnit.’

You don't know who's fault this is, but it's probably Tooru's.

If you're Hajime then, yes you're starting to accept this fucked up situation, that that must mean Hajime is...

Shooting back up to a sitting position, you curse at the ache in your abdominal region. Jesus, how hard did Hajime go at practice?

Also, you can't believe you have Hajime’s abs right now.

Throwing on a random t-shirt and pair of sweats, decidedly not thinking about his abs, and how he was sleeping in briefs only, you jogs downstairs like a mad man.

Completely forgoing shoes, you cross the street and use the hidden key stuck in a potted plant to open the front door.

You're positive by now your parents have left for work, and Tooru is more than likely sleeping in after staying up late last night (no doubt pouring over tournament videos), so there's no chance for interruption from either party.

Not that your parents would question Hajime's presence, but you really aren't in the mood for doing small talk with your own parents while pretending to be Hajime.

You head straight up the stairs for your room, swinging the door wide open.

“That’s... me.... augh, this is so weird!”

You run a hand through your hair, almost startled by the different texture. This will definitely take some getting used to. 

...Also, was Hajime’s hair always this soft?

You physically dash that train of thought from your mind, shaking your head. You remind yourself of the task at hand and your current dilemma, crossing the threshold of your room.

You shuffle over to the bed, climbing on top of the covers.

If that’s Hajime, he’s no doubt gonna freak out over seeing himself wake himself up.

Well, you might as well have fun with it.

“Hajime!”

You shake... yourself, watching your eyes blink open.

“Wha—?”

The physical-You blinks awake, catching eyes with physical-Hajime.

“What the f—”

You cover presumably Hajime's mouth (you're mildly hoping there hasn't been an awful three-way swap between you two and Tooru),

"Hajime! Confess to your sins!"

"I— What the fuck?! I haven't done anything! You're— How are you me! I'm me! Why is my voice—"

Hajime is quite clearly panicking and word vomiting his stress. And while it was a little funny at first, you're starting to feel a bit bad.

"Alright alright, before you go full panic, look in the mirror. I know this seems like bullshit, but it’s me!”

You lean back, gesturing to the mirror above the dresser.

Hajime’s eyes furrow, following your gesture before locking eyes with... Your eyes in the mirror.

But that’s definitely him moving like that, lifting his arms, tilting his head. Or rather, your arms, your head, fuck, this is confusing.

“Why the fuck am I you?” after a momentary pause, “What did Oikawa do?” 

Hajime snarls, and it sounds odd coming from your tone.

“I was hoping you’d know the answer to that. I came here as soon as I woke up.”

“Well, this all better be a really fucked up, disgustingly realistic dream I’m having.”

Hajime sighs, rubbing his eyes.

“I really don’t think it is. I already went through that crisis.”

You pout, and Hajime raps you on the forehead.

“Don’t make faces like that with my face, you’re freaking me out!”

“Me? You have the biggest resting bitch face ever! It’s scary on me!”

His expression softens marginally, after a deep frown.

“Well... I guess we should figure out a way to fix this.”

“How’re we gonna do that!?”

You whine, and Hajime cringes at the way it sounded coming out of his mouth.

“No clue. In the mean time, we should try and keep this a secret and attend classes like normal. Also—”

He cuts himself, frowning deeply.

“What?”

“Shittykawa. Volleyball.”

“Aw fuck!”

You groan, falling back into your sheets at the foot of the bed.

“How are we gonna pull that off?!”

“Just talk to Oikawa like I would, and I’m sure I could... do the same.”

You somehow doubt that will work, and you can plainly see Hajime is going to have an issue conversing with Tooru in your mannerisms. Tooru has known the both of you longer than anyone else, and tends to be perceptive in and out of volleyball. Regardless, you have no choice but to have faith in Hajime's plan, even if it is lacking the finer details.

“As far as volleyball...?”

You tilt your head, chewing at your cheek at the thought of club activities in an entirely different body. Hajime rubs his hair, briefly startled by it being... not his hair.

You bring up very valid concerns. He's the ace of his team, you're a middle blocker for the women's team. Neither of you are especially privy to your respective team's plays or teammates.

“I’m sure we’ll catch on fast. We’ll just have to spend today teaching each other everything we need to know. At least we both know how to play, even if it’s different positions.”

He locks eyes with you slumped in the sheets, trying not to picture it as himself laying back in your bed. Realistically, it is him, but it isn't his mind. But now is not the situation whatsoever to be thinking about the suggestiveness of that image, so he shakes the thoughts from his head.

“Mm, guess you’re right. As far as school goes, our class schedule is pretty similar, so we can just study together. How bout we get ready and practice volleyball at the park?”

The unspoken ‘before Tooru wakes up’ hangs off your lips.

“Alright, I’ll get ready.”

He stands from the bed, before freezing and blushing heavily.

“Absolutely not!”

You match his blush, sitting upright in a flash.

“I-I’ll help you get ready! Just keep your eyes closed!”

You cry out, and Hajime turns his nose with a heavy blush.

“Like I’d open them!”

“Better yet—“

You snatch your uniform tie from your bedside table, wrapping it around Hajime’s eyes.

After tying off the makeshift blindfold, you ponder what transgressions you must have committed in your past life to be here undressing yourself as Hajime.

“God, this is so weird.”

You whine, awkwardly tugging your, Hajime’s, clothes off.

“How do you think I feel?!”

He snaps, but there’s less venom in the tone due to the pitch of your voice. There is a classic Hajime ring to it though, and your mildly impressed he pulled that off with your natural voice.

You make quick work of dressing him in athletic wear, not wanting to suffer in the stifling awkwardness any longer than necessary.

He removes the tie from his eyes, averting his gaze with pink still dusting his features.

“...”

“What now?”

You're worried to hear what he’s contemplating, and you certainly don’t like the sheepish, awkward expression stretching across his features.

“I really have to pee.”

“Haaaajiiimeee! Just hold it!”

You turn scarlet, and he glares.

“I can’t hold it forever! And who knows when we’ll be able to turn back. We might as well break the seal now.”

Ordinarily that kind of wording would be humorous, but you can’t find anything funny about the situation you’re currently in. Hajime stomps towards the bathroom, looking not unlike a toddler throwing a tantrum. 

‘Damn, I really look like that?’

♡ ♡ ♡

“I can’t go with you staring at me!”

Hajime growls out, makeshift blindfold back in place. He has an inkling that he’ll be wearing this a lot now, but he can say for certain he never thought he’d be using a blindfold in this manner.

“You can’t even see me!”

“That’s not the point, I know you’re standing there!”

“Ugh, this is so humiliating! Just get it over with!”

You huff, slamming the door shut and flopping unceremoniously onto your bed, shoving your face into the pillows.

You hear the rush of water, good to know he washes his hands, and Hajime steps out of the bathroom feeling.... new, for lack of a better word.

“You’ll have to deal with it too, you know.”

He turns his nose, drying his hands on his pants, cheeks still hot.

“...I already did.”

You huff, and Hajime cries out with indignation at the revelation.

“What the fuck? And you made such a big deal out of—”

“You’re really packing!”

You stick your tongue out, and Hajime moves to legitimately strangle you and make an attempt at your life, not caring if it’s his own body.

“H-Hajime please, I was kidding, I haven’t gone yet, I swear!”

“Whatever!”

Upon closer inspection, you look way less threatening than Hajime ever did, but you hold back the snicker before Hajime can get too pressed about it.

“Let’s just go back to my place and get ready for practice.”

He huffs, trailing out of your room as you follow, relieved he’s calmed a bit.

Your relief is short lived however, and a panic washes over you when you think about how you'll have to go through Hajime forcing his clothes onto you.  

[Masterlist] [✈Part 1, Part 2]

[gentlemancrow]

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

OK so I saw @hey-there-hunter ‘s JMart Wedding Challenge and I pretty much fan ficced immediately??  Like it was an instantaneous plot bunny that stabbed me in the brain and would not let me free until I made it exist.  SO HERE YOU GO!  Read it here or head on over to AO3 below!  And enjoy some unapologetically aggressive fluff with weddings!  Also subtitled someday Crow will stop abusing excessive astral imagery and symbolism for extended metaphors, but today is not that day.

Read on AO3 instead!

Written in the Stars Will Have to Do

Jonathan Sims always thought of himself as a man with a deep appreciation for the great literature of the world.  A passionate turn of phrase, crystalline motes of clear imagery like snowflakes reflecting light in his mental scape, a devastating contemplation on the nature of good and evil in the hearts of all mankind, everything that could express the beauty and tragedy of the world in ways he never could.  Prose was a bright paintbrush on a ragged canvas of the universe he had known from an early age was swathed in shadow and pain and evil, and those words on those pages, for at least a moment, were another world he could hold in his hands, could cradle and protect, could mourn.  He liked the power of them as well, of the tinkling brightness of alliteration, the oaky sophistication of a well-aged metaphor, the evocativeness of the idiosyncrasy in a simple simile, laying bare truths in ways he never could have articulated for himself.

There was one thing he could not abide by in language, however, one cardinal sin liable to besmirch any piece of lush and sparkling verse or prose and taint it forever.  And that was idioms.

Jon loathed idioms and their dismally quirky cliches dressed in familiarity’s tacky clothing almost as much as he hated spiders.  Perhaps it was something about their reliance on common knowledge and repetition.  He couldn’t bear reading the same book twice, or even a book that felt too familiar, it only made sense that hearing a hackneyed phrase repeated in that awful singsong sardonic tone of someone who knows full well they’re saying something asinine that has been repeated ad nauseum for millennia would scrape at the back of his skull and down his spine.  They were too whimsical and blasé, crutch words for when one’s limited lexicon came up empty, or worse, for ill comedic effect.  They reinforced that staunchly English notion of skirting about the true depth and breadth of emotion for clipped niceties and unfeeling banalities.  Idioms to him were mere verbal window boxes, colorful and meaningless, dressings for untold disasters behind the shining windows they peacocked before.  

He hated them all with vaguely equal rancor, but there was one he could definitely single out as the one he hated the most, and that was the one about hanging the moon.  Such and such thinks you hung the moon, to me you hung the moon, and so on.  This particular rhetorical felony attracted his wrath only marginally because any moon symbolism never failed to feel outlandish and infantile, a mawkish image of love and care rampant in nursery rhymes and cheap commercialized slogans for t-shirts and wall art.  That was the least of it.  He hated the idea of hanging the moon mostly because once, another lifetime ago now it seemed, Tim Stoker had lobbed it in his face in a fit of smoldering rage and he had been completely, complacently, ignorant of its magnitude.  

Funny thing was, he couldn’t even remember what the actual fight had been about any longer.  Though he could remember exactly where he was standing, cornered next to the file cabinet for the year 1985, January through February, and the label had been peeling up on the upper left-hand corner.  He remembered he’d discovered a hole in the elbow of his jumper that morning and he had been obsessing over it all day, fussing with the dangling green thread and tugging at the knit as if it might magically close the wound.  He’d put his finger clean through it with his arms crossed haughtily over his chest without even realizing he’d been fiddling with it when something flippant about Martin came out of his mouth.  It hadn’t even been cruel, he couldn’t even remember how Martin had come up in the argument in the first place, he could only remember Tim’s mouth moving like he wanted to say something else, then him forcibly stopping himself before he snarled.

“Yeah well, god knows why, but he thinks you hung the moon, so you might try treating him at the very least like a human being once in a while.”

It was such a small thing.  Small words for a small feeling cloaked in a chintzy veneer of idiomatic dismissal.  A trembling little bird cupped in his scarred and battered hands and smothered.  Or so he thought.  Sometimes trembling little birds turn out to be phoenixes, and those who looked to someone else to hang the comfort of a wise, silvery moon in the sky already have the hammer and the picture wire at the ready.

As far as Jon was concerned, the moon only rose on their Somewhere Else because Martin deigned to pull the strings every night, not him.

It was Martin who brought him tea every morning, set it down on the breakfast table with that little flip of the tag and the deft, one-fingered turn of the handle toward him.  It was Martin who scolded him because whites are a separate load, Jon, were you raised in a barn?  Martin who talked him through every episode of the Doctor Who reruns that were the only thing their ancient aerial could pick up.  Martin who planted flowers in the garden and brought muffins from the sweet old lady at the grocers because they traded baking recipes.  Martin who still looked at him with diaphanous pools of ethereal moonlight in his eyes and his smile like he alone hung it in the sky over his head to wash him in its radiance.

Even after everything.

Even after it had been Martin who had to hold the knife buried in his chest as he lay gasping wetly for breath in an alleyway in Another Chelsea to keep the hemorrhaging at bay.  Martin who had cupped his face in his bloody hands with tears streaming down his and forced him to focus, furious love blazing in his sea mist eyes as they locked with his, screaming at him and him only, heedless of anything else.

“Look at me.  LOOK at me, Jon!  Stay with me!  Stay with me, DAMN YOU!”

Stay with me had not been a plea, it had been a command.  He had never once said please because it was never an option.  Shivering, breathing blood through his teeth, the streetlights a fading, star studded halo in Martin’s strawberry blond curls be damned, he was right.  Against every tangled thread of fate twisted deep into his flesh, or perhaps because they had been the only thing that held his torn innards together, he made it to the part where he awoke a few fractured times to nothingness, and then to fingers he knew every inch of inextricably bound up in his and a fierce whisper in his ear.

“I’m here, Jon.  I’m still here.  I’ve got you.  I’m going to fix this.  I’m going to get us out of here.  We’re going to be okay.”

It had been Martin who orchestrated their clandestine escape from the hospital the moment they both agreed he was well enough to survive under his rudimentary medical care and before the authorities got too invested in an urban ghost story of two men who didn’t exist.  Not to mention one of which should, by all medical and logical law, be dead.  It had been Martin who had stolen the necessary antibiotics, drugs, and wound care supplies, Martin who had picked enough pockets to buy passage on a midnight train to the only place they could think to go, and expressly told Jon not to ask where he learned how, even though he knew full well he would later.  Martin who had fought for everything and kept him hidden and safe while he lay in a dingy hotel room somewhere in Scotland, drifting in and out of consciousness between kisses, cold compresses, spoonfuls of whatever he could get him to swallow and keep down, and desperate ‘I love you’s.

Martin had been the one who hung the moon even on the nights Jon couldn’t see it, just so he knew it was there, that the light might finally guide him home.  Not him.  He could have never done something so selfless and simple and beautiful.  No not him.  Not The Archivist.  How could he have ever known that?  Stupid, myopic, pedantic, all-seeing and blind.  A blustering, sanctimonious Tiresias in a sweater vest and half-moon glasses.  And how important was the moon, anyway that he was expected to hang it too?  Would not night still come and the stars still shine?  The stupid, vapid saying should have been about the sun anyway.  Something that nourished and guided and warmed.  Not the moon.  Not the thing of night and hungry wolves and quiet loneliness.  Not a thing of the darkness they fought and still not won, not exactly, not in a way that mattered.  How could he have known the weight of such a thoughtless, frivolous, meaningless phrase and how far and how long Martin had borne it for him to protect he who hung his moon?  

He could see the weight of it so clearly now.  He could see it especially on the darkest days, which came, in grotesque mockery, the moment they found something like their safehouse and rest at last.  Jon had conned his way into a job at the village library with an ancient head librarian who didn’t care much for too many questions, or background or credit checks, and was more than happy to pay in cash.  With Martin’s help of course.  Martin himself had taken up stocking at the village grocers, and their life had teetered onto something so close to quaint and normal it suddenly laid bare the gravity of the depths of darkness they had escaped.

No longer did they have to run, no longer did they have to fight, they could finally lay down the chase and curl in upon each other to lick their wounds in quiet.  But without the driving, primal instinct to live, to survive, that ushered in the days where all the hurt came back to roost and brood and fester.  The days where he couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed, or the days Martin couldn’t bear the sound of his voice, or the days they shouted themselves hoarse, stormed apart for hours then came back, silent and broken, red-eyed and exhausted to hold each other and weep into the spaces between neck and shoulder where it still smelled like love and home.

He could see so painfully clearly the toll following him to the ends of the cosmos and back had etched its marks into his goodness, his body and soul, see how often he would walk down the road from their cabin, just a little ways, to stand on the heather spotted hills and gaze out into the frigid infinity of the gray sea.  Cold terror would grip him then, incite a desperate want to run after him, to throw his arms around him and bring him home, but also the fear it would only be to have him turn to mist and slip through his fingers forever.  He always had a cup of steaming tea waiting for him when he came back, just in case.

But again, and always.  It was Martin who would pick up Jon’s hands, kiss every slender, scarred finger through his tears and be the first one to utter ‘I’m sorry.’  Martin who told him with just a single scathing flash of stern blue eyes and not a single word uttered that he was certainly coming to bed and not banishing himself to the couch like an idiot.  Martin who wrapped him in his arms and warmth and boundless love and reminded him, “One way or another.  Together.  That was the deal, right?  You don’t get to back out now.  No returns, refunds, or exchanges, I’m afraid.”

And even through the deepest sobs he would find the laugh Jon didn’t think was in him.  Martin sifted through the mire and the muck and held fast to the tiny, shining things so easy to lose in the darkness.  Things Jon was certain were lost forever, only to be reignited and hung in the brightening sky of their story.  Even if they weren’t quite the moon yet.

It had also been Martin who, on a perfectly ordinary day, on a simple walk through the local farmers market, stopped to peruse one of the usual unremarkable stalls filled with crystals and oils and trinkets.  Jon had wandered off to procure the parsnips and the strawberries, unrelated recipes Martin swore, he had been tasked with finding.  When he returned he found him, a radiant monument tall among the faceless locals, rusty curls caressing his face in the salty breeze, carved of marble and rose quartz and gazing down at a pair of hematite rings on a velvet display box.  His eyes were distant, but not in the enthralled, disembodied way they were when he looked at the sea, or the broken way when they weren’t speaking, but in the contemplative, regarding of puzzle pieces way when he would look into the fire during their talks and turn his words in his mind over and over again like a rock tumbler until they were polished just right.

“Getting into crystals now, are we?” Jon had joked, “Surely I’m not so dull to be around that that’s becoming an attractive hobby.”

Martin snorted and shook his head.

“Supposed to mean healing, or grounding, or something.  Aligning your meridians, I think the lady said?  Whatever that means,” he elaborated, reaching out to touch.

They clinked weightily together, thick and glossy and the dark astral gray of a moonless night.  Martin turned over the card that went with them and read.

“’A grounding stone that belongs to the planet Mars.  It strengthens our connections to the earth and aids the warrior on their journey.  It is a stone of invincibility, but also fragility.  It balances yin and yang energies with its magnetic properties for the perfect reflection upon one’s own soul, astral, physical, and spiritual.’”

“Hematite, is it?” Jon asked, “Also more commonly called bloodstone.  You know if you scratch it, it leaves a red mark.  Like it’s bleeding.  Watch.”

He picked up one of the rings and firmly ran it down the corner of the card Martin had been reading from.  Sure enough, the black stone had left a faint, but starkly crimson mark on the yellowed paper.

“It BLEEDS?” Martin exclaimed in horror.

“It’s just a kind of iron oxide, so, rust, basically,” Jon explained with a chuckle, “Kind of weirdly romantic if you think about it?  This intimidating shiny black stone like armor, made of iron to boot, but with a bleeding heart at its core.”

“I just thought it was pretty, I didn’t know it bleeds,” Martin had laughed in that incredulous way he always did when Jon was telling him something he didn’t actually want to know, but appreciated anyway.

“I find that the strongest, prettiest things often do,” Jon had said in reply.  He remembered saying that particularly clearly, waxing poetic, feeling a swell of affection for the hugely beautiful man he leaned against and was adorably aghast at bleeding rocks.

“Yeah, I reckon they do,” Martin murmured back.

And then his cheeks had flushed bright red under his freckles and the stone steps of his shoulders crumbled a bit under the crushing ancientness and vastness of what he had originally been pondering.

“So, I mean, before you spoiled it with the blood thing.  I was thinking… Well, I was just having a browse and I saw these and I thought they were quite fetching, and then the lady told me they meant grounding and healing and a journey, like on the card.  A-And there were two of them, all by themselves, and everything else was so colorful and flashy these were just so… Um.  Maybe the blood and rusty iron thing makes it more poetic now, actually?  I don’t know.  Sorry I-  This sounded so much better in my head.”

It wasn’t his fault, Jon remembered thinking.  Martin couldn’t find the words because there weren’t any.  Not in this universe or any other.  Not for what they’d gone through, and especially not for what they meant to each other.

“I guess I was just thinking.  If… I bought one.  And wore it.  Sort of like.  Um.  You know.  Would… Would you-?” he had asked, his voice trembling.

Jon had never said yes, yes of course he would, faster or with more conviction in his life.  And there was that look again, rising from the ashes, that flooding of golden, unbound love and light, of eyes turned sky blue, of looking at the man who hung his moon in the sky come back to him.  He could still hang Martin’s moon all over again after so many nights of black clouds and darkness, even if it was only paper.  They’d paid for the rings in rumpled bills, exchanged them right then and there, and kissed each other as the crowd of oblivious people in a world they did not belong in flowed like a river around them.  Jon forgot the bag with the parsnips and strawberries.

But it didn’t matter.  It didn’t even matter that Martin’s fit nicely on his ring finger, but Jon had to wear his on his thumb, and even then sometimes on a chain around his neck for fear of losing it.  It didn’t matter that it was the closest thing they were ever going to get to a proposal and a wedding, consigned now forever to the shadows in a borrowed reality with only each other.  Because it was theirs, and they could begin to figure out how their broken pieces fit back together again.

But like most things that don’t matter, it didn’t until it did.

It began as simple things.  Seeing a wedding on some program they weren’t actually paying much attention to and Martin making a flippant, innocuous comment as he combed his fingers lovingly through Jon’s long and silvered chestnut hair in his lap about how he would have loved to have a cake that had a different flavor on every tier at their wedding.  Just so everyone could have something they liked.  And Jon woke up from his half catlike stupor and looked up at him with such aching regret as those words settled into the pit of his heart alongside ‘he thinks you hung the moon.’  

And soon they began to gather a collection of completely innocent remarks that ran the gamut from ‘would they have worn black or white?  Or one of each?  I don’t know… does it really matter?  And were these engagement rings or wedding rings?  I don’t know.  Neither?  both?  And do we say husband instead of boyfriend now?  Fiancé?  Whatever you want, Martin…’ To the heavier, cancerous weights that sank to the bottom of his gut, even below hanging the moon, like ‘I know Tim would have thrown the most amazing bachelor party for both of us, and his mum had always talked about him getting married someday like it was a farfetched pipe dream, but she would be happy for them, he thinks.’

He could never answer those questions.  There was too much at stake, too much finality and familiarity in them, a strange weightlessness in a world that weighed far too much.  The sun and moon continued their eternal dance of time, ignorant, unbothered, but Jon kept collecting those silent debts of normal life, secreting them away in a hidden singularity in his heart that only grew heavier and metastasized farther the more times Martin walked out at night, not him, beaming starlight from his eyes and his fingertips, to hang the moon again.  So soft, so full of wooly cows and pink heather and the smell of tea and sea salt and Martin’s shampoo on the pillow next to him did it become, that it was almost inevitable that one morning Jon awoke absolutely convinced none of it could be real.  

The moment he decided that, everything made so much more sense.  He could breathe again.  There was a reason he could never sit still, never just feel at ease or talk about the future like it was a real thing that could still happen.  He knew why the silence made his brain itch and why he still glanced around corners and glowered at anyone who dared let their gaze linger on his Martin too long.  Why Martin’s ring fit and his didn’t.  There was too much debt to the universe to be paid, too many broken promises, too many corpses in his wake, he had done nothing to deserve this idyllic life of love and peace and smallness and Martin.  It had to be Her doing, It’s doing, some carefully woven torture chamber that would lure them to the apex of their joy, the center of the web, where they would just be devoured over and over to empty husks and set up like chess pieces to fill with love and light just to knock down again.  He wasn’t free after all.

Jon had been halfway into his coat and halfway out the door to do, he didn’t know, something, anything, to go to the library to use their computer and research something he didn’t know he was looking for when Martin had seized his hand and whirled him around.

“Jon.  STOP.  It’s over.”

And he’d stopped.  He’d looked into those baleful blue eyes, fallen into their depths, landed on the precipice of madness, and broken.  It wasn’t over.  Not for him.  He finally understood.  It was still there.  The Eye.  It always had been.  Though not really, he understood slowly as he wept on his knees in their doorway into Martin’s chest, it had indeed closed forever on him, but it lingered as distant static, like a phantom limb, a metaphysical itch that could never be scratched.  Martin had cradled him close and listened, listened so patiently as he ripped the jagged black fear from the deepest, ugliest part of his heart, hauled it up bloody and messy from his throat and finally laid it bare for both of them to see.  And when it was done and he couldn’t cry anymore Martin had locked eyes with him in a way that made him forget any others could have ever existed outside of crystalline blue and filled with moonlight.

“Listen to me.  I know you think you have some cosmic burden to bear.  That you’re still wearing some… some fucked up crown and sitting on a throne of skulls and death and eyeballs or whatever image you want to put there, and that you have to sit and hurt and watch over everything so it doesn’t happen again, but...  Sorry, Jon, but that’s bullshit.  It’s just a scar now.  That’s all.  Just like the rest of them.  Ugly and beautiful and proof that you —Jonathan Sims— are still alive.  And you are not The Archivist anymore.  You’re just mine.  My Jon.”

He’d held his Jon’s stunned face in his hands and peppered kisses over the pock marks in his skin, over the slash on his throat, the burnt fingers that still couldn’t bend quite right, even the one on his chest, the one almost always hidden by fabric but the one he didn’t need to see to find.  His heart and fingers would always remember exactly where it was.  And he’d kept his lips there a moment, then turned his ear to his chest and wrapped his arms around his waist to listen to his heartbeat like a trembling little bird.

“If I can hear it and feel it.  So can you,” he whispered.

Unsteady fingers curled desperately into Martin’s silky locks, hematite loop cool against his scalp, “Thank you…”

Martin stayed for the kiss on top of his head he knew was coming and smiled.

“Okay, so it’s simple to fix if you think about it,” he murmured into Jon’s chest, “We just need that thing, you know?  The thing that makes you feel like you’re still doing the thing, but you’re not.  What was the word for it again?  A placeholder?  Like when you quit smoking and you hold a pencil or a straw or something that’s not actually a cigarette so you can wean yourself off the ritual?”

Jon blinked owlishly down at him as he dried his eyes.

“A… placebo?  Are you talking about a placebo?”

“Yeah!  That’s it!  We just need to find you a placebo for Knowing things!  That’s all.  Like… reality shows, or-or zoo cams or something!  We’ll figure it out together.  Alright, love?  I promise you.  It’ll be okay.”

Jon was skeptical, so very skeptical, but if Martin was determined to find a balm to soothe his jagged, ontological scars he would happily play the part of lab rat for him.  They’d tried a myriad things to replicate the feeling of Knowing and looking something deep within him still craved.  The zoo and animal livestreams were a bust, cute and entertaining as they were, but animals weren’t ever the purview of The Eye and the camera itself was barely a scrap.  Reality shows came closer, the more salacious the better, but even that temporary fix wore off when Jon’s disgust with the overall content and participants outweighed any benefit.  Martin was just happy to have finally converted him to Bake Off, at least.  They tried people watching in the square in the village, but it made Jon far too self-conscious and guilty.  He used the binoculars exactly once, and that was to look at the cows in the fields, and the choose-your-own-adventure books Martin had been certain would strike a sagacious chord wound up in the donation bin at the library.  But that was when he was struck with a bolt of genius.

Unbeknownst to Jon, which brought him no small measure of glee, Martin ordered, received, and then set up with a literal bow in their back garden the finest telescope he could afford on his meager savings.  He’d researched for days, asked on every amateur astronomer forum he could find, and had it delivered to the grocers so he could make it a proper surprise.  He’d even gone so far as to attack and blindfold a hapless Jon the moment he made it home from work on the day it was ready, and stood behind him giddily bouncing as he tore the tea towel away from his eyes.

“A… Telescope?” he’d blurted dumbly.

“Yes!  It’s perfect, right?  I asked around to find the one that had all the best features, and this one has the best overall magnification and the most lenses, but it doesn’t have the little satellite positioning thing?  I figured you wouldn’t want that anyway, you always like figuring things out and finding things on your own better.”

Martin had been positively radiant.  Jon had just stared at the gawping black tube and chewed the inside of his cheek as he processed what to say.

“I mean… thank you, Martin, really.  It was a sweet thought, but if the binoculars didn’t-“

“Screw the binoculars!  This is different!” Martin happily insisted, “You can look at so much more!  Stars and planets and galaxies and what have you, and it can maybe be sort of like you’re looking for other worlds?  Wormholes or whatever?  Or signs of The Fears and where they’ve gone?  Or even if the stars are the same here as they were back before?  Space literally has so many things to LOOK at we can’t even count them!  This has got to be it!”

Jon tried to smile and laugh and agree to try it out, at the very least, if only because Martin was beaming so sweetly with pride and hope.  Though that first night he didn’t, ushering them back in with promises of tomorrow, Martin, I promise tomorrow.  Tomorrow had been a lie.  As had been the next night.  In fact, it took Jon a full week to even remember they even had a telescope, and that was only after getting the smuggest, Cheshire grin out of Martin after casually mentioning there would be a visible, if partial, lunar eclipse that night.  He’d relented, only because he’d entrapped himself, and they’d both bundled up, looked in the manual for the best size lens to view the moon with, poured a few glasses of wine, and turned their eyes to the stars.

Martin had gone first, gripping the eyepiece and adjusting the focus all the while gasping in awe.  It was so beautiful he’d burst into poetry with a crooked grin.

“Art thou pale for weariness?  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, wandering companionless among the stars that have a different birth, and ever changing, like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy?  Sounds a little familiar, eh?” he joked, casting a wry look over his shoulder.

Jon rolled his eyes fondly.

“Gross.  Keats again?”

“Nope, Shelley this time, and even he thinks you ought to have a look at the moon.  I think you’ll find you have a lot in common.”

Jon had sighed obligingly and shuffled to the telescope, fully expecting to look at something bright and round with a bit of a shadow on it that was distinctly unremarkable, have another glass of wine, and then go back inside to snuggle by the fire.  What he saw in that tiny pinhole of light pierced straight through the hazel brown of his eye and plunged him into another world entirely.

The sands of the moon glowed the purest white in the refracted light of the distant sun with which it waltzed.  He could see in crisp, shadowy relief the innumerable scars she bore, the depth and breadth of Ptolemaeus, the boundless lonely flatness of the maria, named for the oceans they were once thought to be, an insult to the rock plains forged a millennia ago in birth by cataclysmic fire.  Every crater remained wrought in perfect, frozen detail with no erosion or foliage to slowly heal them over, and she beamed them proudly, ostentatiously in her heavenly light.  A hulking, ancient protectorate, hung by the hands of creation at the dawn of time for a fledgling planet, hundreds of thousands of miles away, and yet so crystal clear and unafraid as he perused her millions of years of cosmic sentinel through a lens.  It was dwarfing, humbling, viscerally awe inspiring in a way he dared not voice for fear of snuffing out the fragile glow of wonder and excitement welling in his chest he had been so certain was gone forever.

Astronomy had never been something that had particularly interested Jon, back when his entire reality from the moment his childish hands had touched a single book was spent peering into shadows and watching his own back.  There was no point in wondering what lay among the stars when danger and death lurked so close behind with slavering jaws ever poised at his throat on terra firma, but now.  Now, he had been living in an alternate world, dimension, reality, somewhere, he couldn’t even say for sure.  He’d been hurled potentially through the very stars that twinkled coquettishly above, flashed through their nebulous veils and curtains under their indifferent gaseous gazes, but seen nothing.  Here was a vast expanse of complete chaotic indefiniteness inviting him in to see what few had ever seen, to guess and hypothesize and gesture wildly at secrets only the stars could keep.  To Know.

Jon had jerked back so suddenly from the telescope to survey the entirety of the astral dome above them that Martin had choked on his wine.

“Jon?  Are you quite alright?”

“Yes, I…” he’d murmured, only even half hearing that Martin had said anything at all, stars reflected in his wondering dark eyes, “I’m fine, I just… How… How much more can this see?  How deep does it go?”

Jon hadn’t seen the victorious smirk on Martin’s face as he set down his wine glass and picked up the instruction manual and lens guide.  They’d watched the rest of the eclipse, of course, marveling through the lens at the inky trickle of shadow over craggy white, but then they’d changed the lens to the strongest one, according to the guide, and spent the rest of the evening triangulating their position beneath their slice of the universe and plotting out the various stars, planets, and constellations above.  Jon had even dashed inside to grab a mostly blank notebook and had filled several pages with notes and observations and things to research later, all while Martin held back tears watching him come so alive over a project he didn’t even know he needed.  Eventually though, sleepiness and cold claimed him, and he kissed his beloved goodnight and left him, more than gladly, to ride out the intellectual flare up until it burnt both him and itself out.  

Martin had no clue what time it was when he finally returned, and it didn’t even matter.  All that mattered was at some point, a practically frozen Jon had climbed into bed, snuggled up close behind and wrapped his arms around him to kiss the back of his neck so softly like the wings of a butterfly and whisper.

“Thank you.”

Another victorious smirk and a loving murmur.

“Told you so.”

Where there had been nothing but an Eye shaped hole in him, scarred around the edges and aching in its vacuum, Jon had filled it with the names of nebulas and quasars, of the myth of Andromeda, and Orion, and Castor and Pollux, or Hercules, and why they had all been hung in the stars for eternity.  The stories were much the same as he remembered, but he’d found slight eccentricities, tiny irregularities in the sky which fascinated him even more so.  Night after night he would look at a different astral body, chart it down in his notebook, then come bounding in with starlight beaming from his eyes and his fingertips with some cry of eureka.

“Martin!  Did you know here Polaris is in the south and Sirius is in the north?”

“Martin!  Did you know the Andromeda Galaxy is actually a little closer to the Milky Way here?”

“Martin, you have to come see this!  Oh, no it’s not weird this time, it’s just I finally got Saturn in the telescope and you can actually see the rings!”

His nightly herald would always be different, but Martin would always rise from the comfort of the couch, put his slippers on, and let Jon talk as long as he needed to about his latest discovery, watching him smile again while he, too, watched the matching smile it never failed to ignite illuminate Martin’s face and they lit each other up in the fused brilliance of a binary star.

Martin no longer hung the moon for Jon, he’d finally just up and quite literally given it to him, and there was no mortal way to repay him for that.  Or so he’d thought.  It came to him, as most flashes of brilliance do, on a night he hadn’t even been thinking about it at all.  All he had been doing was sitting in a lawn chair with his telescope long after Martin had gone to bed, chewing his pencil idly, vaguely missing a cigarette and pondering notes on Vega and Lyra between watching it through his lens.  He’d been stuck for days on Vega and its potentiality for another solar system and what that could imply for their new Earth and their new sun, as well as Lyra and the tragic tale of Orpheus and his doomed love.  Even in their new reality he still turned back at the end of the story, still could not contain the roiling, effusive adoration to his own downfall.

Bitterness had risen like bile in the back of Jon’s throat as he replayed the myth again in his head, unsure why it was vexing him and rewinding in his brain so torturously.  “Stupid, stupid man, if he’d only just…” he’d thought again and again, each time giving the star-crossed musician a different decision, a different choice, urging him down another path somewhere, anywhere along his journey, but in the end, he’d always looped back around to the original.  It was the point of the story, after all.  Not so much the love itself or even the loss of it, but the power of it over one man and the creation born from his mourning and eventual destruction.  Patently Greek.  But the chorus would always begin again in Jon’s head.  If he’d kept his Eurydice, if his songs had been happy, if he hadn’t spent the rest of his life mourning so intensely he was eventually destroyed for it, would he have become the paragon of healing he was, the oracle, the lynchpin of the fate of the world he had eventually become?  Which of them was the stupider man?

Jon was only mortal now, he was no longer all-seeing oracle and dark savior, he had no authority to say, but it was a trifle easier to ponder the hubris of Orpheus instead of his own.  He couldn’t help but think, achingly, sometimes the heroes just deserved to pull their beloved from the pit of Tartarus, promise to love them for eternity, and then simply get married, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after.  A story wasn’t a story if it didn’t write itself upon the very bones and sinews of its heroes, that was the law of the universe, but when the story was done and the cracks and fissures in their tissues had faded to myth and legend, what became of the heroes who did not die a tragic or heroic death and were not hung in the stars?  What happened to heroes left behind?  Twisting his bloodstone ring on his thumb idly as it caught the shivering fire of those stars in its dark mirrored surface, the musical arrow of the muses pierced his heart, wide-eyed in wonder.  He’d asked the universe, but he already knew the answer.  He’d always known.  He knew, and he knew it with such clarion joy as he had never known anything before.

He could no longer be the man who hung Martin’s moon, he hadn’t been for a long time.  That much was clear to him, but he could certainly do something else.  Perhaps they had grown past the need for moon hangings in the first place.  He knew how their story ended.

It took months of saving, secreting, preparation, and then finally just simply waiting for the perfect, clear night.  The moment it came, the moment he knew it was the night, Jon struck without hesitation.  Poor Martin wanted nothing more than to collapse onto the couch, into Jon, when he returned from a late shift at the grocers, but found himself instead stuffed right back into his coat with a picnic basket in hand and hauled out into the frigid night in a flurry of Jon with little time to protest.  He bounded up the hill behind their little cottage beneath a perfect blanket of stars flaming coldly overhead, trailing Martin’s hand in his behind with his breath coming in silvery puffs of clouds, and paying no heed to the whining.

“Jon, whatever it is, does it have to be NOW?” Martin panted, “I am absolutely knackered and it’s beyond freezing and wouldn’t it be nicer just to curl up with a cuppa and fall asleep in front of Star Wars or something?  Doesn’t that have enough stars and space in it?”

Dauntless, Jon only tugged harder.

“There’s tea in the basket, and I’ve seen Star Wars.  And yes, it has to be tonight, it’s really important, I promise.”

“Look.  I love you.  So much.  You know this, and please know it is with the utmost love and deepest affection in my heart that I point out that you say that every time, and you’ve still shown me Pluto like, a hundred separate times.  While I quite like it, and I still feel sorry for it being bumped out of the solar system and all, it’s just a dot?  How many times can you look at a dot?” Martin sighed.

His words finally threw a caltrop into Jon’s warpath, and he paused, turning over his shoulder woundedly.

“What?  No, it’s not Pluto, I swear just- Please, Martin?  I’ll never ask again if you don’t want to, but just for tonight, please?” he pleaded.

Martin winced, and immediately folded under the onslaught of doleful honeyed brown eyes under a nimbus of stars.

“Oh, lord there you go with the puppy dog eyes.  Okay, okay fine, but there better be a nip of whiskey in this,” he chided lovingly with a gesture at the thermos in the basket.

The smile flared back to life brightly on Jon’s face as he turned back up the craggy little footpath to the top of the hill.

“Of course, hot toddy with tea.”

“Ooh, lovely, you do know me.”

The rest of the way was trivially short to the small, flat hilltop surrounded by heather where Jon had already set up a blanket and the telescope over a pristine vista of the dark line where the stars sank into the sea.  He ushered Martin to sit down first, then perched on his hip beside him and poured him a generous helping of tea and whiskey from the thermos before pouring his own.

“Thanks, much.  Right then, what exactly are we up here to look at that we couldn’t see from our garden?” Martin asked, accepting his cup of potent hot toddy and sipping it gratefully around the lemony steam that billowed up.

Taken aback by the sudden logic lobbed into the center of his romantic posturing, Jon looked momentarily stunned, as if someone had slapped him upside the head.

“Oh!  Oh, um, well-!  Ahah, that is to say- Uh.  There is a reason for all this.  It’s not that we couldn’t see it from our garden, we very much could have.  B-But it’s so beautiful up here, and you can kind of hear the sea?  And it’s nice and peaceful, and the heather is still blooming a bit and um…” he trailed off, cheeks burning.

“Okay…?” Martin probed, frowning a little.

“Er, actually...  It’s less about the stars than it is- W-Well it is about the stars.  Let’s get that clear.  But to be completely honest I mostly just… I-I well.  There’s something I need to tell you?”

Jon was ill-prepared for the look of abject horror on Martin’s face as he went paler than the moon overhead.

“Shit, what is it?  Did you find something?  You saw something?  There’s been a sign of The Fears?  Oh god it’s not HER is it?” he asked frantically, nearly slopping hot toddy all over his lap.

“What?  No!  No, none of that!” Jon spluttered, aghast.

Martin regained a modicum of color in his face and breathed in measuredly.

“Okay, so then what is it?  Oh god, you’re not… Jon you’re not ill, or something, are you?  Please, you can just tell me if-“

“No, I am not ill either, damn it, Martin!  If you would just listen to me!  I-!” Jon moaned exasperatedly, “I just wanted to do something… nice.  Something nice for you.  And nicer than I normally would because I am apparently much worse at crafting romantic moments than I thought and-“

“Wait…” Martin cut in, eyes gleaming with realization, “Jonathan Sims… Are you grand gesturing?”

“Well I am certainly trying but you are making it exceedingly difficult!” he retorted, red in the face and breathless.

“Oh my god, you are!  I’m so sorry!” Martin laughed brightly, “Oh god Jon you poor thing I’m so sorry, I’m awful, I’m the absolute worst!  No please!  Don’t let me spoil it.  Please go on.”

Grinding the heel of his palm into his forehead, Jon tried to summon the words again, only for Martin’s strong, warm hands to take it from him and tip his chin up to gaze into his eyes.

“Hey.  Hey, Jon.  Look at me,” he breathed, looking into his eyes idolatrously, “I’m sorry.  I love you.  You can tell me.”

Taking the steadiness from those clear blue depths he needed, Jon focused on them, on the strawberry blond curls tossing in the icy breeze, of the kiss of chilled pink under his freckles, and that eternal, sunshine smile.

“Okay,” he finally answered, smiling softly.

With a deep, shuddering breath, and a long swig of whiskey laced tea for good measure, Jon drew himself up and fished deep in his soul for the words he had waited a millennium to say.

“Okay… So here it is.  Um… I’ve um, I’ve had a lot of time alone lately with my new hobby, as it were.  So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  A lot of it is overly complicated and ridiculous and doesn’t deserve to live outside of my head but… a lot of it has been about you, about us.  And I know we don’t need to-to put a label on us or put us into a… a box or anything like that.  But every time I look at this ring on my finger, I can’t help but remember we never actually talked about what they meant,” he began, holding out his left hand and fidgeting with the loose band around his thumb.

“Oh Jon, don’t worry about that.  It was just me being a big sappy, sentimental dork.  And if I recall correctly, we’d had a pretty awful row a night or two before, and I just wanted to feel close to you again, I guess?  We both know what they mean to us.  It doesn’t matter,” Martin assured him sweetly.

“Except that it does!” Jon insisted passionately, “That’s the point!  You are a big sappy, sentimental dork, Martin.  I bet you were the kid that had a dream wedding all planned in a notebook with pictures cut out of magazines and everything.  I adore that about you, but big sappy sentimental dorks should have big sappy, sentimental moments like huge, expensive seaside weddings with three-flavor cakes and all your friends and family and rose petals and dove releases and whatever else your heart could dream up.”

Martin snickered and shook his head, charmed at least by the mental image of kissing Jon on a seaside cliff at sunset while doves flew in glorious formation around them and everyone they had ever known and loved cheered.

“Pfft, I don’t need a grand wedding and all that, I just need-”

“Me.  I know,” Jon finished for him with a smirk, “I knew you’d say that.  Maybe not.  But you deserve one.  And I know I don’t use that word lightly, but it’s necessary in this case.  You deserve it.  All of it.  Me on one knee with a ring in a box, you deserve us picking out flowers and tuxedos and arguing over the font on the invitations.  You deserve Tim’s awful bachelor party and laughing at me at the altar because I had to read my vows off a card and they’re still so stiff and awkward and they pale in comparison to the beautiful poem you wrote about me.  You deserve smiling so hard your cheeks hurt and crying as we exchange rings.  All of it.”

Martin weighed his words carefully on his tongue with a sip of his boozy tea to chase away ghosts of things that never even were.

“I mean, sure, not going to say I never wanted that.  And I did have that stupid wedding notebook, by the way.  But all that became a pipe dream the minute we wound up here, right?  No use being upset about something that can never be.”

“That may be so, but the crux of it is… you also contented yourself with the idea of it never coming true not because we’re here, but because you didn’t think I wanted it,” Jon answered, his unspoken truth hanging heavy in the chill night air between them, “Every time you tried to tell me you wanted to be with me forever, I brushed it off and painted it gray and tucked it away and carried on the way we always were like nothing happened and it didn’t matter.  Because it was alright, really, you were just so happy to have what we have, that I didn’t die in your arms that night, that we were still together after everything.  That I at least kept that promise after I’d broken so many.  You were so grateful just for what you were gifted after we thought we would end with nothing you didn’t dare think to ask the universe for more and I am so, so sorry it took me so long to see that, Martin.  I’m so sorry.”

His voice broke.  The breath caught in Martin’s chest as he reached out to touch his wrist comfortingly.

“Jon, I-“

“No, please.  Please let me finish I… I can’t give you any of those things.  I can’t give you our friends back, I can’t give you cake and doves and the sunset and crying through vows in front of the vicar.  I can’t even give you an elopement at the register office because we still don’t legally exist.  And I guess for a long time I resented myself for that.  For all of it.  For stealing that from you, for dragging you through literal hell only to give you a shadow of a life stuck here with me because I betrayed you.  But- no stop, don’t say anything yet I’m not done.  B-But now I finally realize.  You’re right, Martin.  You were always right.  It doesn’t matter.  Those things are all just… things.  I said to you once, a long time ago, and I’m still not even sure if you really heard me, that I didn’t want to just survive.  It was true then, and maybe it wasn’t true for a while, but it’s certainly true again.  We did not fight tooth and nail to just survive.  We fought to live, and live together.  So what I’m saying is… I know now I don’t have to give you tuxedos and white roses as long as I give you something… Something to prove to you that you are my everything, my entire world, something to show you that I love you more than I have loved anything in my entire life.  That I want forever with you.  S-So I…” he trailed off, sucking in his breath to give his gesture of undying love the ardor and grandeur it deserved, “I bought us a star.”

The proclamation rang out like the toll of a bell, its gravity sonorous and quaking.  Martin blinked.

“You… I’m sorry?” he squeaked.

Jon set his empty thermos cup aside, flailed his hands in the air and shook his head frantically

“I-I know, I know it sounds mental just hear me out!” he protested, “Technically I didn’t buy the star, if we want to get picky about it.  I mean obviously no one can own a star.  Just the rights to name it?  It’s a thing you can do online.  I was a bit gobsmacked it was real to be honest.  I just had this silly idea when I was out looking at the stars.  I was looking at Lyra and thinking about you and Orpheus, and I… W-Well I just typed it in, ‘can you name a star?’ and it came right up.  Right then and there.  It um… comes with… hold on.”

Remembrance placed a gentle bookmark down on Jon’s fluttering thoughts, and he rummaged in the picnic basket for a moment before pulling out a navy-blue manila folder covered in stars and full of the paperwork and certificates that had come with registering theirs.  He handed it to Martin, who took it in place of his own empty cup, numb, muscles quivering under his jaw, and opened it to the glittering gold typeface that proclaimed ‘Congratulations!’.

“It comes with paperwork, too!  See?  So, it’s official, at least?  The Jon-Martin star.  Not a marriage license I know, but at least our names are together on something legal?  Our real names?  I figured even if we manage the fake identity thing we’d have to get married as not us.  Not really.  So…  I-It could be like our marriage certificate?” Jon explained, chewing his lower lip.

Martin said nothing as his hand turned the pages of the documentation, his eyes distant in a way Jon had never seen before.  Not disembodied and enthralled, not broken, not even regarding puzzle pieces.

“Oh!  Um, also I-I got us a binary star.  I forgot to mention that bit,” he went on, filling the sudden void, “It’s, ah- What a binary star is- It’s technically two?  But they’re caught up in each other’s gravity and they orbit each other so tightly they look like one star together, one that just shines a little brighter.  They’re bound together forever by the most powerful cosmic force in the universe.  Just like us.”

Only silence answered, punctuated by one last crisp whisper of paper, and then the folder closing with Martin’s spread fingers atop it, bloodstone gleaming in the vivid pale light of the night.  Jon’s heart pitched frantically in his chest, and desperate, stranded tears pricked at his eyes.

“I uh… I would have rather gotten us a whole constellation.  Heh, you know?  But they don’t do that, obviously,” he tried softly, his fingers barely brushing Martin’s knuckles, “They record heroes in constellations, after all.  Great deeds, doomed romances, lovers who can be together no other way… That would have been a better way to honor us, I think.  Our story.  A-And who knows?  Maybe back on our world there are a few new stars to remember what we did, to mark the place we left it, so that everyone we left behind can look up and remember us.  They don’t know how the story really ended, and they probably never will, but we do.  We do, and I want to end it right here, right now.  With our star shining above us ‘and they lived happily ever after.’”

Martin still said nothing, but his head bowed, casting a slice of shadow over his eyes, and his shoulders quivered as a thin, bright line of wet silver trickled down his cheek.  Jon felt the very sky shatter above and begin to crumble around him.

“Please… M-Make no mistake, Martin.  P-Perhaps the gesture is silly and meaningless, but it was all I could think to do to go with everything I’ve said tonight.  Martin… Martin, don’t you see?  These are my wedding vows to you.  This is me saying ‘I do’ and also ‘Martin K. Blackwood would you do me the honor of making me the happiest man in the universe?’  All at once.  This is me saying I swear to you I will be yours, through everything, until the end of time.  M-Maybe I wasn’t before.  Maybe I was still punishing myself, but I’m telling you, I’m ready now to have my happily ever after.  With you, Martin.  If you’ll have me.  If I haven’t-“

He would never finish.  In a dizzying blur of blue folder, flashing hematite, and a wreath of golden curls, Martin kissed the words off his lips.  He kissed him so hard and so fierce, through wracking sobs with his hands woven so raptly into his long, wavy locks he thought his lips would bruise and his fragile soul would finally shatter to pieces in Martin’s arms.  Undone, all Jon could do was surrender and kiss him back with equal passion, thumbing away the hot tears as they spilled freely down his cheeks and anointed them both with their cleansing, hoary heat.  Their lips parted and they panted softly against each other in the space between, each afraid to break the sacred, pulsing silence.

“You’re crying,” Jon whispered at length, “I’ve said something wrong. Martin, darling I’m so sorry.  I never meant to-”

Martin laughed, raspy with tears, but ethereal, sparkling, like stardust floating on the breeze.

“People are allowed to cry when they’re happy you stupid, silly man,” he murmured in between kissing him again, and again.

“Oh.  Oh.”

He kissed him one last time, that idiot man who always burnt the toast and always knew the facts but never knew what to say, who finally figured it out and bought him a star, and threw his arms around him, enveloping his slight, fragile form protectively in his embrace.

“I love you.  I love you so much.”

Jon sank into that warm, familiar comfort and buried his face in his shoulder.

“I love you, too, Martin.  I want to be yours for the rest of my life.  I want to be me, I want to be us.”

“I know.  I’ve always known.  Oh god, you do know that right?  I know that you love me, it’s written in everything you do and say.  I have never, ever once doubted you love me with everything you are.  Even in the moments I was afraid that… that maybe we just weren’t meant to be together, I still knew it wouldn’t be because you didn’t love me.  Never because you didn’t love me.  Just maybe that we didn’t fit together anymore,” Martin replied in a small voice through his tears as they spilled down his cheeks.

As much as he wanted to vehemently deny there was ever a chance they might have not fit back together again after they had both been so shattered, to kiss him and tell him not in a million years would there ever have been a future where they weren’t Jon and Martin against the world, Jon knew it to be inescapably true.

“I’m so sorry you ever had to be afraid of that,” he swore, digging his fingers into Martin’s back pointedly, “After everything.  After we fought so hard to escape fear itself.  That I almost let it truly win in the end.  That I couldn’t just let go… Because… Because this was never about The Eye, was it?”

A heave of breath and its shuddering exhale shook Martin’s body free of lifetimes of grief, and fear, of ugliness carried far beyond the borders of their souls.  His fingers curled tighter in unspoken reply.

“No Jon, no it wasn’t, but I’m so very glad you finally figured that out.”

“Me, too…” he whispered.

They held each other in the quiet wake of being a moment and let the astral plane wheel calmly overhead.  An impatient star twinkled.

“Wait… you never answered me,” Jon finally said as he pulled back, sliding his elegant fingers down Martin’s strong arms.

“Huh?” Martin blurted, scrubbing under his eyes with the sleeve of his coat.

“About marrying me tonight.  You never actually said yes, so…”

A twinkle in his eye and a slight mischief to his grin, Jon dove back into the picnic basket and emerged with a velvet ring box.  Martin’s hands flew to his mouth.

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I did!  Nothing fancy, but I thought it was high time to retire the blood rings,” he explained rising from his former perch on his hip to kneel properly.

The box cracked neatly open, and inside lay a simple, white gold band with a tiny circle of milky moonstone embedded in it on a midnight-blue satin cushion, blindingly bright against the dark.  Martin sobbed joyfully all over again.

“So, uh… I suppose if it had just been us, if we’d just been together, without everything, and we’d arrived at this moment.  I would have done much the same.  I would have brought you somewhere beautiful, somewhere I could teach you some inane fact you didn’t actually care about, but liked because it came from me.  Emulsifiers in ice cream and rum raisin…” they both snickered, “And I would have tried my best to make it into some sort of romantic metaphor but completely bunged it up and you would be laughing as I got down on one knee, just like this.  And it would have just been simple.  To the point.  Just… Will you marry me?  So…”

Jon assumed the traditional position, on one knee, arms outstretched, his every slender point a star in a perfect constellation of love.

“Will you marry me?”

Their eyes met, across a thousand different realities, across a thousand different worlds, carried on celestial winds to fall hopelessly, inexorably, into each other’s orbit.

“Yes, yes I do believe I will.”

With one last farewell kiss upon it for what it had meant for them both, Jon slipped the bloodstone ring from Martin’s finger and replaced it with the delicate band made of starlight.  It took its place radiantly, and shone as Martin drew his hand back to admire it with an equally radiant grin before it dimmed with concern.

“But what about you?” he asked worriedly as he watched the old ring entombed lovingly in the box.

Jon only smirked and produced a second box from the basket, which he offered on his open palm out to Martin.

“Naturally, I got one for myself.  Couldn’t pass up a chance to get a wedding ring that actually fits, could I?  It’s just… Don’t you think you deserve to give it to me the way you would want?” he urged.

Martin took the box eagerly, biting his lower lip in thought.

“Not sure you want to give me that freedom.  I had about five different ways of asking you in my head and all of them you would have hated so, so much.  But I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t kind of the point,” he answered wryly.

Jon chortled.

“Sorry I, the unromantic one, sprung this on you, the romantic one.  But I did want to surprise you.  I-I mean you can still write me a vows poem later?  If you want to, of course.  I’d love to have it, even if I don’t actually get to hear it at our wedding.”

Martin’s face flushed immediate crimson and his eyes darted coyly away as he toyed with the wedding band box in his lap.

“Oh that?  A-Actually I… I have it memorized, i-if you really wanted to hear it.”

“You- WHAT?” gasped Jon, his cheeks flushing in tandem.

“Oh yeah, I wrote my vows poem for you ages ago and I’ve gone over it so many times I know it by heart.  It was comforting, okay?  I-I’d read it again when times were good and I thought maybe you’d actually- um… a-and when times were not so good, when you were gone, in your own head, when I was afraid we were broken for good, whenever I needed it.  I’ve read it over a thousand times and never changed a thing from the first time I penned it.  Never needed to.  I’m surprised I haven’t recited it in my sleep at this point,” Martin admitted sheepishly.

Jon’s entire body flushed with a solar heat that melted his joints and his heart into a swirling flare of adulation.

“I can think of no better way, then, to receive my ring,” he breathed, reaching out to cup Martin’s cheek in his hand, “I’ve had my turn, now it’s yours.”

In mirror ballets of love exchanges, Martin cradled Jon’s hand against his cheek as he spoke the first lines of the vows etched ever on his being softly into his palm.

“Let he who, shadow dwelling, must In paper, pen, and book be bound Shake off the chains of dark and rust And chart his own bright fate unfound.

Let he with lifelong burdens borne Cut paper wings with thread of gold And hand in hand, the sky forsworn Flit clouds and sun in laughter bold.

Let he whose blood and soldier’s ken The world did shield from dark and fear Heal fast those wounds, be whole again And sleep at last, held close and dear.

Bring him to me with spirit free With stars in eyes and music sung From lips a joyful promise be One soul conjoined, one fate’s thread strung.

Two hearts rejoice in love renowned. We lift our heads, alive, uncrowned.”

He waited until the last couplet to pull the ring from the box and slide it onto Jon’s finger where it too, fit perfectly, like it had always been there, and shone defiantly bright in the moonlight.  Jon wept.  He had been weeping since the first words of verse left his beloved’s lips, but seeing that ring like a piece of his missing soul returned to him undammed the tears effusively.

“God that was… Martin, I don’t have words.  I-It was… so beautiful.  You’re so beautiful.  Thank you,” he cried fervently, “I wish I could tell you properly how much that meant, but I just-“

“Hey… That’s alright.  I’m the words guy.  You’re the emulsifiers guy.  Making you cry is all I need to see to know how you feel,” Martin assured him warmly, reaching out to brush his tears away as he chuckled.

“Yeah… add this one to the running tally.”

“Oh, I have,” Martin snickered, “Speaking of!  Now we’ve done the crying through vows bit.  Shouldn’t we say the ‘I do’ bit, as well?”

Jon pursed his lips with a shrug as he reached out with his left hand to take Martin’s left as well, twining their fingers together

“Yes, I suppose we should.  I don’t see why not.  Well then, Martin, do you?”

“I do.  And Jon, do you?”

“I do.”

“You may now soundly snog the groom.”

“Martin…”

The emphatic drawl of his name the way Jon only called it when he was frustratingly enamored of him perished gently against Martin’s velvet lips as they caressed his.  They kissed slowly and reverently, sealing a pact ordained by the heavens long before either of them had seen the stars in the other’s eyes, lighting with white flame the torch to guide them for the first time, forward.  They broke it only to punctuate it with two more featherlight kisses and a breathless laugh, bowing their foreheads together in deference to the forces of fate and the universe.

“I know this isn’t the wedding either of us ever dreamed of, but as far as I’m concerned, it was perfect,” Jon murmured, nuzzling closer into his husband, swaddling the new, fledgling and beautiful word in his heart.

“Well, hey, what is a wedding really other than just a formal declaration that this is it?  This is us, we’re forever, no matter what.  We did it.  And you did it for me, in the STARS, Jon… Can we just remember that again?  You put us in the actual stars.  I am so writing a ballad for our constellation later, you do know this.”

“Oh lord.  Of course you are.  But really, it was the least I could do, after you’ve done so much for me, sacrificed everything for me.  Waited for me for so long.”

“And you came back to me,” Martin reminded him passionately, “And I don’t just mean back to life, here, in this world.  I mean you came back, Jon, MY Jon, the Jon I was in love with the moment I laid eyes on him.  The fidgety and obstinate Jon who can’t make a decent cup of tea to save his life, who puts on two different socks in the morning because his nose is already in the paper or a book, who teaches me about bleeding rocks and binary stars and still reacts to the simplest acts of kindness like a warm cranberry orange scone without asking for one like they’re divine miracles he is undeserving of, who looks at me like I hung the moon or something every time.  Even when I thought I was a complete and total waste of a human being, you, Jonathan Sims, the most beautiful, amazing, brilliant man to ever walk the Earth, looked at me like I hung the moon.  And that was… Still is… everything to me.”

The heavens shifted, the stars wheeled, the last piece clicked smartly, smugly into place.

“W-What did you say…?” Jon asked with such urgency, grabbing his hands so fiercely, Martin startled.

“Wh-I-I don’t-?  Which part?  The moon hanging part?” he stuttered, rolling his eyes fondly as he realized mid-sentence, “Oh, right.  Ugh, Jon are you seriously going to get after me about your weird vendetta against idioms at our wedding?  Because if you are that would be annoyingly adorable and so intensely you and kind of perfect, but also can you not on THIS particular occasion?”

The laugh that tore from Jon’s throat was half mad, half euphoric as the weight of the moon lifted from his shoulders and became naught but an indifferent sentinel disc in the sky once more.

“No no no, it’s just… It’s funny, I had more than a few things very, very wrong for a very, very long time.  That’s all.  Don’t worry about it,” he explained, leaning in and pressing a delicate kiss to Martin’s forehead, “If you’re the one who hung the moon after all, then I suppose ‘written in the stars’ will have to do for me.”

Martin lit up with literary glee.

“Oh ho!  Two space related idioms in one go?  What a rare treat!  Maybe this is your gateway drug into puns…” he teased impishly.

“Absolutely no chance in hell.”

They both laughed, laughed with the billowing icy breath that reached with victorious fingers up to the heavens.  They laughed, messily sniffing back the pesky drip of tears and cold.  They laughed with lightness of the encumbrance of hematite armor shed, its bloody protections no longer needed to cage wounded hearts and keep them safe and close.  They laughed in breath and also in the dancing points of light in their eyes as they fell into one another free from gravity.

“So uh… Do I get to see my star tonight, or don’t I?” Martin finally remembered, relishing the utterly horrified yelp from Jon.

“Oh god I completely-!  Y-Yes!  Yes of course, it’s already set up at the proper coordinates!” he had already sprung to his feet, “Oh, though, hang on, it took longer to get to the star viewing part than I anticipated, so I might need to adjust it a bit.  Oh!  And I have a little strawberries and champagne, if you like?”

“I do like, please and thank you!”

Jon set to readjusting the telescope to the proper ascension and declination while Martin poured them two glasses of crisply bubbling champagne.  They twined their arms to drink a toast from each other’s glass, ‘to us’ or ‘to happily ever afters’, or to several other messily rambled toast worthy sentiments.  They couldn’t decide and toasted to all of it.  They ate plump red strawberries and licked the juice from each other’s fingers as they looked at their star, which was, after everything, just a dot, just like Pluto, but Martin had to admit that he rather liked looking at dots after all.  And that one was their dot.  The warm intoxication of love and champagne begged for music, and someone fumbled in the cold for a wedding playlist on some app, somewhere, it didn’t matter, just as long as they could join hands, gaze into each other’s eyes and dance inelegantly, stepping on each other’s toes, under the umbrella of stars in a gentle rain of moonlight.

“I don’t see your problem with cliches, idioms and all that, really…” Martin mused at length, laying his head on Jon’s shoulder as they slowly spun to the rhythm of a longing ballad and the song of the sea, “Like this stupid, great song.  They’re familiar and cozy and everyone knows them.  They’re like… like old friends.  Always there to rely on when we can’t come up with the words ourselves, because sometimes we can’t.  And if something trite and silly sums up the way you feel, why not just let it be?  Sometimes things are said over and over again because some truths are universal, you know?  They’re just… human.”

Jon pressed a kiss into the mop of curls that tickled his nose and smelled faintly of toasted sugar and lavender and mused on all of the romantic cliches that had just passed through his mind unbidden.  Who was he to deny he was but one star in the sky, a single gear in the grand mortal mechanism of the universe.  If he had handed himself over to the humanity of it all instead of rusting, stopping, looking outside where there was never anything to see, perhaps he could have had this dance much sooner.  It didn’t matter though, until it did, because that night Martin took his breath away, made his world go round, he was head over heels for his match made in heaven, and better than heaven, they were written in the stars.

“You know what, Martin?” Jon laughed in reply, “Tonight, being what it is, I am willing to concede.  You are absolutely right.”

“I’m glad…” came the tender acceptance, followed by a distinctly puckish beat of silence, “Then does this mean I can I start saying love you to the moon and back?”

“Don’t push your luck...”

[itsafanficthing]

The Paper Boy - Chapter Six

Un-Beta'd, spell-checked (which doesn't particularly like the Scottish accent) and ready for reading. Enjoy! (also your comments inspire me to write more, so thank you for that!)

A03 is here

Jamie shifted uncomfortably next to Claire. He was bound to run into Laoghaire eventually. The school wasn’t that big.

“Hi Jamie,” Laoghaire greeted airily. She’d tucked up her skirt to a length Jamie was sure was going to get her in trouble. Her tie was loose around her neck and her shirt- she’d definitely filled out over the summer and Jamie could see some of the buttons on her blouse being held together by a breath.

“Alright, Laoghaire, Megan, Liz.” Jamie nodded at the three girls. He saw Laoghaire’s friends look over at Claire with curiosity.

“How’s yer first day of school going, Claire?” Laoghaire asked, but Jamie noticed that she was still looking at him as the words left her mouth.

“Very well, thank you Laoghaire. Jamie’s been a big help.”

“Aye, told ye he was a gentleman, did I not?”

“You did.”

Jamie smiled at Claire. It was only brief but Jamie saw Claire’s eyebrow twitch as she spoke to Laoghaire. It could have been nothing. Just a muscle moving in her forehead as she spoke but Jamie had a very clear memory of his own mother’s eyebrows doing the exact same thing when she was annoyed with his father. Jenny told Jamie that he did the same twitch when he wanted to thump her and that’s when she knew to get away from him when he was a bairn.

Curious that he should see it on Claire now but perhaps he was reading into things and it was just a perfectly natural facial movement. Still Jamie couldn’t get the image of his mothers eyes narrowing the exact same way.

“Jamie?” Laoghaire repeated his name impatiently and he looked back up at her.

“Sorry, what?”

“I was askin’ if ye are goin’ to eat lunch in the usual spot,” Laoghaire repeated what Jamie had missed when he was stuck in his thoughts of his mother.

“I hadn’t thought about it. Probably,” He shrugged nonchalantly.

“I might stop by on the way to dance- If I have time.”

“Sure,” Jamie shrugged again, he didn’t care. Laoghaire could have lunch wherever she liked.

“Dance?” Claire asked curiously. “You have dance here?”

Megan and Liz both snorted in laughter as Claire spoke and Jamie frowned at them as Laoghaire nudged them with an elbow while smiling.

“Aye, we have tryouts first day of school. There’s competitions throughout the summer. Do ye dance, Claire?” Laoghaire explained and it was then that Jamie realised what had made Liz and Megan laugh as Laoghaire exaggerated the word “dance”.

“Oh, no, not at all. I’m far too clumsy.” Claire immediately started blushing and shifted (unconsciously) closer to Jamie.

Laoghaire saw the shift that brought Claire closer to Jamie and she grimaced.

“Ye should come and have a try. Ye dinna need to have experience.”

“I don’t think so, but thank you for the invitation,” Claire answered politely.

“Nay bother.” Laoghaire was watching Claire carefully now and Jamie couldn’t help but feel like there was something sinister there. He cleared his throat as the bell rang.

“Weel, I suppose I’ll see ye at lunch, Jamie.” Laoghaire’s tone immediately changed as Jamie stood up from the bench, pulling Claire up with him. He grunted in response, turning his back on the gaggle of girls to fetch his things from his bag. “It’s a date, then,” Laoghaire continued, taking his reply as acceptance.

Jamie didn’t turn back around until he was sure that Laoghaire and her friends were gone. Claire was silent beside him as she took out her own books.

Jamie wasn’t sure what it was he was feeling, he just knew that he didn’t like the way that Laoghaire was looking at Claire. It was brief and he could be reading into things, but something just didn’t feel right. He wasn’t sure that Claire had picked up on it and he wasn’t about to tell her about what he was thinking.

He felt protective over Claire. She was new to the school, to the town, to Scotland and the last thing she needed was a silly school girl with a chip on her shoulder. Jamie would need to say something to Laoghaire about how she acted around him and Claire.

Him and Claire. Not that they were a “thing”. But they were friends and Jamie always stood up for his friends. He would do the same for Rupert. Or at least - that’s what he told himself.

Jamie let Claire take the lead into the classroom. She seemed unsure of where she should sit and looked back at him for help. Jamie smiled at her and swept his arm over the many empty desks in a “wherever you like” action and she laughed before rolling her eyes at him and plonking herself down at the set of desks directly in the middle of the room. Not the seat that Jamie would have chosen, but he sat next to her anyway. He would have sat next to her if she had chosen the teachers desk if he was honest.

“I wasn’t sure if you had a specific spot you liked to sit,” Claire explained as the rest of the class started to file in.

“Aye, next to you,” Jamie said before his brain caught up with him and he spluttered as Claire’s eyebrows rose into her hairline. “I mean, that I, I mean, I said I would’na leave ye, if I could help it. Just keepin’ my promise, to ye. That’s what I meant.”

Claire hummed as she grinned at him- there was a faint blush on her cheeks and Jamie was sure that his were bright red. Thankfully Mr Sandringham walked in at that moment and started the class and Jamie didn’t have another chance to stick his foot in his mouth.

—

It was only a single period class, mostly introductions to the new year and what they were going to be learning over the coming term. Claire took studicious notes while Jamie doodled in the margins of his page. He wasn’t sure what Claire was writing about- Sandringham wasn’t really saying anything of substance.

Mr Sandringham was an older teacher, but new to the school. He’d arrived in the last term of Jamie’s previous year when Miss Wellington had taken maternity leave. The town gossips had had a field day with that one. The supposedly single math teacher with a sudden pregnancy. Accusations were flying left, right and centre of who could possibly be the father. Miss Wellington had taken a leave of absence before anyone could find the answer and her small cottage had been on the market the week after she’d gone.

Jamie was absentmindedly fiddling with his pen, thinking about the circumstances of Mr Sandringham coming to the school, wondering if he thought that it would be a temporary assignment, only to then move permanently into the town, when Claire knocked his elbow and looked pointedly at her page.

Jame sat up quickly sat up straighter and read the note in the top right corner.

“Why aren’t you taking any notes?”

Jamie grinned as he pulled her book toward him and scrawled a response.

“What notes are there to take?”

Pushing the book back to his desk-mate, he stifled a laugh as she rolled her eyes when she read his reply.

“He’s giving us the course outline.” - the paper pushed back over to his side of the desk as her fingers tapped impatiently on the desk.

“Then I suppose I’ll take some notes when we’re learning something.”

He heard Claire sniff as she read as he wrote his response.

Sandringham turned towards the whiteboard and started to write dates of upcoming exams (not due for at least two months). Claire feverishly grabbed back her book and copied down everything that he wrote.

Jamie stifled another laugh before looking back at his book and also copying the dates.

—

The bell rang and Claire quickly packed up her desk.

“Ye like to take a lot of notes then?” Jamie asked as led her toward her next class.

“I don’t like missing details or not knowing things,” Claire answered quickly.

“Aye, so ye’ve said.”

“When?”

“Last week. When ye were worried about school. Ye said that ye dinna like to be behind.”

“Oh,” Claire breathed, “well, yes. I like to be on top of things.”

“Did ye learn anythin’ from yer obsessive note taking?” Jamie asked as they arrived outside her next classroom.

“I learned when our exams are and what the syllabus is going to include,” she answered as she removed her backpack and started to get out her books.

“Aye, so did I, but I still have an empty book,” Jamie laughed- laughing harder as her eyebrows narrowed at him.

“Well,” Claire huffed with annoyance, “what are you going to do when you forget and need to know what we’re studying next or when an exam is?”

“I’ll ask ye, Sassenach,” Jamie smirked at her. He could see the annoyance building behind her eyes before it broke and she laughed at him.

“Good luck with that. I’m not sharing my notes with you for anything.”

“Ye cut me!” Jamie exclaimed dramatically clutching his heart. “Here I thought that we were friends.”

“Hmm, friends.” Claire arched a single eyebrow at him and Jamie couldn’t help but smile at her.

“Truly, though, I appreciate yer work ethic. I think ye’ll be a good influence on me,” Jamie said seriously. “At least that’s what my Da and Jen will say if I start taking notes the way ye do.”

“He thinks I’ll rub off on you?” Claire asked as she grinned at him and Jamie tried to ignore the fact that her saying “rub off” made his body have a physical reaction to her.

“Somethin’ like that,” he grunted as he shifted away from her.

“Who’re ye rubbing off on?” The loud voice of Gellis sounded from behind Jamie as she threw her bag next to Claire’s.

“No one,” Jamie answered quickly as Claire looked between them with a sort of curious amusement. “And this is where I leave ye, in the safe hands of Gellis for Biology.”

“What?” The amusement immediately fell from Claire’s face and Jamie saw her grip her textbook a little tighter.

“Aye, I have Physics now. But ye’ll be with Gellis, so not totally alone,” he explained as he adjusted his bag straps.

“You’re not in Biology?” Claire repeated faintly.

“Not smart enough,” Geillis inputted helpfully as Jamie made a face at her.

“Because Physics is so easy.”

“Shoo,” Geillis laughed turning away from him. “Leave us to learn.”

“Ye’ll be fine, Claire. I’ll be right here waiting for ye when the bell rings again.” Jamie almost reached out to her- nearly squeezed her hand in comfort or brushed the curl off her cheek, but he could feel Geillis studying him so he didn’t dare.

“Mr Fraser.” The voice if Mrs Loboscar sounded from behind him. “I dinnae remember seein’ yer name on ma roll call.”

“Aye, Miss. I’ll be on my way.” Jamie nodded once more to Claire before he was off and running to his class.

—

Jamie arrived to his class, panting and throwing his bag on the racks. It was only a single period, then he would run back to Claire to make sure she made it through biology. At least she had Gellis in the class with her. She had a double of history that afternoon and Jamie couldn’t think of any of his friends that were in that class. Not close friends anyway. He was sure that Rachel and Denzel Hunter were in it, but he didn’t know them well. There was Frank Randall, of course, but again, Jamie didn’t really know much about the lad.

Jamie tried to shake the worry from his mind as Mr MacWeather started to speak to the class about the coming term. Claire would be fine. It wasn’t like she’d never been to school before.

—

Mr MacWeather didn’t believe in taking things easy. He didn’t believe in a slow warm up and introduction into the year.

“Physics.” He said before he repeated the word several times. “Let’s get to it.” And then his back was turned to the class and he was sprouting off information and writing things on the whiteboard and Jamie was barely keeping up.

As soon as the bell rang for lunch, Jamie was up and out of his seat, grabbing his bag and tearing across the grounds back to where he had left Claire.

He arrived just as Claire was packing her bag. She was listening to something Geillis was saying and laughing as Geillis shook her head. Jamie tried to stand casually, dropping his bag at his feet, as if he hadn’t just sprinted across half the school to wait for her. He saw the moment that she noticed him and her shoulders seemed to relax slightly as her face broke into a wider smile. Jamie also saw Geillis look quickly between them before grinning smugly, but he chose to ignore that.

“Hi,” Claire said somewhat breathlessly as she approached and Jamie picked up his bag again.

“How did it go?” He asked as Geillis fell into step with them.

“Fine,” Geillis answered before Claire had the chance.

“How was physics?” Claire asked quietly.

“Physiciky,” Jamie answered with a shrug. “I took notes, ye’ll be proud of me.”

Claire snorted with laughter as they saw Mary, Rupert and Angus waving at them over.

“Did ye bring lunch?” Jamie asked, sensing a fresh wave of nerves run through Claire.

“Yes, I just erm…”

“Go ahead, Geillis. We’ll be there in a sec.” Jamie stopped as Geillis waved her hand in acknowledgement before yelling something absurd to Angus.

“Are ye alright?” Jamie asked quietly, stooping slightly to meet her eyes.

“I’m fine. I’m just… I just got very anxious all of a sudden. I’m not normally an anxious person,” Claire said quickly.

“It’s the first day of school, makin’ new friends and all new lessons. It would be overwhelmin’ for anyone. It’s no’ so strange to be a bit worried.”

“I know. I know.” Claire nodded. He could see her fingers wringing together as her gaze shifted around the quad quickly. “It’s just that. It’s my first day of my last year of high school and you just… you have in your mind how it’s going to go…”

“Is it no’ goin’ how ye thought?” Jamie asked. He’d tried to make it as easy as possible on her. He couldn’t help that they had different classes. “Did something happen’ in Bio?”

“No, not at all. It’s fine. I’m fine. Truly. I’m alright.”

Claire suddenly stood up straighter, squared her shoulders and strode away from Jamie, leaving him confused. He watched her walk toward his group of friends, trying to figure out what could have suddenly upset her, only for her to shake it off so quickly. Jamie didn’t understand what was going on, but as Rupert called out his name Jamie decided that it was a worry for another day.

—

True to her word, Laoghaire and her friends stopped by Jamie on their way to dance auditions (was her skirt shorter?) to say hello- that was all they really said.

Laoghaire said hello. Claire wished her good luck. Laoghaire smiled at her. Megan looked at Rupert. Liz looked at Jamie and Claire. And then they were gone. It didn’t really seem worth the trouble, auditions were over the other side of the school.

—

“What class do you have after lunch?” Claire asked as she tossed her rubbish in the nearby bin.

“PE,” Jamie answered through a mouthful of his lunch. “What about you?” He asked after swallowing several times (though he already knew the answer).

“History,” Claire seemed to huff. Dare he hope that she was disappointed that they didn’t have another class together? “I thought that they made you stop doing PE after ninth year.”

“Aye, this is Advanced Physical Education.” Jamie wiped the crumbs from his mouth as Angus picked up his soccer ball. “It’s more ‘an just runnin’ laps- It’s sports physiology.”

“Isn’t that biology?” Claire asked as Jamie stood up from the grass and brushed himself off.

“Biology is plants and things. This is about the human body and movement. Sporting injuries, cardio, muscular training- stuff like that,” Jamie said as Angus and Ruper spread out on the field to start kicking the call.

“Do you still run laps?” Claire asked as she picked some grass absentmindedly.

“Aye, more often than no’, we do,” Jamie grinned before he ran out into the field with his friends.

—

A few other lads came out onto the field to kick the ball with them and soon they had an impromptu game of football. Jamie looked back to Claire constantly and was pleased to see her chatting with Geillis and Mary. Louise de La Tour had joined the trio after a while and had engaged Claire in a conversation that seemed to centre around the boys on the field. Jamie didn’t know Louise that well, only that she had drama with Geillis and Mary.

Claire was looking over at Jamie and smiling shyly at him. He waved in acknowledgement before he tore after the ball, stealing it from Angus and tripping Adam McLean in the process. Jamie ran down the field (jogged was more accurate. Jamie was very fit but this was just a fun scrimmage) and quickly scored against the other team. Rupert thumped him on the back, breathing heavily as Angus swore loudly at Adam for getting in his way.

Jamie jogged off the field to wear the girls were sitting.

“Show off.” Geillis was grinning as she glanced up at him from her phone.

“Canna help it that Adam was’na looking where he was goin’,” Jamie grinned as he dug through his bag looking for his water bottle.

“You’re very quick,” Claire commented as Jamie took a long drink.

“Jamie here is on the track, rugby, football and swim team. There is’nae much he canna do,” Geillis answered before Jamie could reply.

“So I’ve heard,” Claire said quietly and Jamie looked at her curiously. They’d spoke about the sports Jamie was in, he was sure that they had, still he was curious to know what she had heard about him.

“Jamie!” Ruperts voice called from across the field and Jamie pushed the second puzzling thing about Claire Beauchamp of that day to the back of his mind as he ran back into the field.

—

They didn’t have much longer to play. The bell was about to ring, Jamie knew it- but he also couldn’t help it. He just wanted to impress Claire. Show that he could score another goal, or at least assist on one.

The ball was high in the air, right in front of the goals. He could head it in. Impressive alright- he’d have to jump for it. Unfortunately for Jamie, Simon Gibbons had the except idea, except to defend the ball from the goals.

Jamie jumped. Simon jumped. Jamie hit the ball. It soared into the goal. Rupert cheered. Simon had jumped late. Jamie was landing. Simon was arching forward. Simons forehead connected with Jamie’s right eye, throwing him off balance. Jamie landed on his back- hard- and the air was forced from his lungs in a powerful whoosh. Jamie was winded and coughed, trying to catch his breath.

He might have had a rock solid head, burn holy cow, that had hurt. Simon has stumbled with the collision but Jamie could see that he was still standing. Jamie rolled onto his side, trying to catch his breath and feeling a pulsing ache radiating from above his eyebrow.

“Ouch,” he breathed as he tried to sit up, before strong bony fingers were forcing him back to lying down.

“Stay down,” the voice of Claire Beauchamp commanded. “You might be concussed.”

“Where’d ye come from?” Jamie asked stupidly, his eyes blinking from the blinding of the midday sun above them, before it was blocked out by the face of Claire. She looked like an angel, or at least what Jamie assumed angels looked like. The sun was casting a halo around her wild curls. Although, Jamie assumed that angels looked far less concerned in heaven, and Claire’s forehead was wrinkled as she studied him.

“I ran over when you both cracked skulls. I swear the sound echoed around the school. Are you alright?” Claire was checking his pulse, though Jamie had no idea why. One of her hands was on his cheek and she was directing his eyes to look at her own.

Whisky. She had whisky eyes. Caramel but lighter. And swimming with life. Like molten lava, swirling depths that someone (Jamie) could get lost in.

“I’m fine, Sassenach. I’ve had worse. Can I sit up?”

Claire reluctantly sat back and let Jamie sit up slowly. The initial pain was subsiding, all that was left was a throbbing where he was sure a bump was forming.

“Are you okay?” The concern in Claire’s voice was evident and he hoped that none of the lads surrounding them would pick up on it.

“Aye- Just a bump. Is Simon alright?” Jamie asked, looking around.

“Aye Jamie, I’mnae hurt, ye went down like a sack o’ tatties though,” Simon replied from beside him.

“Yer head’s like a pound o’ rocks, no surprise I went down. Can ye no’ aim for the ball next time?” Jamie laughed as he stood up, Claire’s hawk eyes watching him carefully.

“Yer head’s sae round, ye cannae blame me for the mix up.”

“'Haud yer wheesht,” Jamie shook his head at Simon as the bell rang and the crowd that had surrounded Jamie when he fell started to disperse.

“I have no idea what both of you just said to each other,” Claire said as they left the field together to collect their bags.

“Och, it was nothin’, just banter.”

“It was like you were speaking another language,” Claire grinned as she swung her bag over her shoulders.

“Aye- Scottish. Ye’ll have to get used to it around here, given yer proximity to the Scottish… in Scotland.”

--

Jamie dropped Claire to her history class, (he could see her getting more and more nervous as they approached) before he left for his double PE Class.

He’d located the Hunter Twins and introduced Claire to them before he’d left, so hopefully they would help her out and introduce her to a few more students.

Mr Langford, similar to the other teachers, had written the course outline on the whiteboard and was waiting for his students to take their seats.

The first of the double period was spent outlining the coming term (sports injuries) as well as deciding on the sport they would play for the physical aspect of their class (football). As always, their double period would be split between theoretical and physical. The first period being the theoretical. Jamie felt on edge, maybe it was getting hit in the head or maybe it was being away from Claire but as soon as the bell rang for the last period of the day, Jamie was up and out of his chair ready to let loose on the field.

He chuckled to himself as Mr Langford had them run two laps of the oval as a warm up- Claire’s voice echoed in his head about PE being just about running laps. Jamie still had more nervous energy bubbling in his system, the warm-up hardly making a dent in his pent up adrenaline and so when they actually started some training drills, Jamie threw his all into it.

He was lucky. He certainly had good genes that helped him with a lot of his sport, but working on a farm and having a paper route afforded Jamie the ability to keep in extremely good shape. Many of the other students in the class couldn’t keep up with him, except for one lad who had clearly been training over the summer - Tom Christie.

Jamie and Tom had grown up together and there was a sort of friendly rivalry between them. Both very intelligent and also skilled sportsmen, they should have been best friends, the only major difference between them came down to money. Jamie’s family weren’t exactly rolling around in wealth, but they were comfortable. Sure there had been occasions where Jamie had had a smaller birthday or Christmas than he would have liked, but he was never wanting for anything.

Tom however, came from extreme wealth. Jamie was sure that he had never “wanted” for anything in his life, though he seemed to “want” everything. He always came to school with the newest, most expensive shoes that one could buy. He spent his weekends either at his family’s elite horse riding club, or flaunting his exorbitant wealth. Jamie was sure that Tom wasn’t aware that he had a lot of money. One of the perks of growing up around a lot of money was that people that did never really recognised that they had it. Things that Tom took for granted (a lunch from the school canteen, new clothes) Jamie saved and scrounged to have (home packed lunches of leftovers from the night before and sometimes his father’s hand-me-downs). Where Tom trained in his family’s private gym and rode only the most expensive pure-bred horses from a championship race winner, Jamie hauled bales of hay on the farm and jumped on the back of demon horses to try and train them. Both were effective methods of getting fit and training, there was no question, however arguably one was significantly better than the other.

Jamie didn’t begrudge Tom for having money, that was none of Jamie’s business, it was just that Tom was so obtusely unaware of how privileged he was. They got along fine, but Jamie knew that they would never be friends. They were friendly enough with each other, but no, they would never be friends.

It was because they were so evenly matched that Mr Langford always put them on opposing teams. Jamie was competitive- he liked to win, but there was something so satisfying in winning against Tom. For all of Tom’s money, he couldn’t buy Jamie’s talent. Yes, Tom was quick on the field, and he could maneuver the ball without much trouble but Tom had really only been intensely training for the past few years. Jamie had been in training since he could walk and hold a pitchfork. There was something to be said about someone's agility being built over the fear of being kicked by a horse rather than strategically jumping over cones.

Mr Langford blew the whistle and Angus kicked the ball backward to Jamie who tore down the field before passing it back to Angus. Tom stood back at centre staring dumbly at the place Jamie had been a moment ago before he shook his head and ran after the ball.

--

Jamie had been running constantly for the past 20 minutes, trying to pass the ball to as many of his players as possible. The other issue with Tom, that Jamie had studied over the years, was that he liked to do things himself- often to his own detriment. Tom assumed that Jamie was the same way and continually came at him for attack, only to be caught off guard when Jamie would pass the ball to one of his team mates. It didn’t always work out in his favour- the ball would be stolen by the other team and Jamie would have to work hard to get possession of the ball back to his team, but there was no denying that Jamie’s team had dominated Tom’s.

Jamie could see the frustration rising in Tom as Angus stole the ball, passed it to Phillip Wylie, who missed it entirely, to then be picked up by Jamie and passed back to Phillip. No one expected Phillip to score a goal, but with Jamie and Angus’s help, he did and Phillip nearly collapsed with relief. Mr Langford called the game to a halt and gathered his students.

“Alright. Ye certainly ken how to play well enough. I’m seein’ a lot of good things oot there, but ye are’na playin’ as a team.” Mr Langford looked directly at Tom as he spoke and Jamie couldn’t help but smirk as Angus nudged him in his ribs. “Right, we’re gonna finish off the day with some drills. Jamie, be a lad and run these cones out for me.”

--

After a painful session of drills (of which the competition between Tom and Jamie seemed to intensify) Jamie was well and truly pooped. He collected the cones and balls for Mr Langford with Rupert and Angus in tow, dumping the gear in the equipment sheds as the bell rang, signalling the end of their first day.

Jamie picked up his school bag and swung it onto his back as Rupert and Angus gave a play by play of the competition between Jamie and Tom.

“And then when ye overtook him at the final cones, I thought he was goin’ tae explode. Ye should’ha seen the face he gave ye,” Angus laughed loudly.

“I’m goin’ tae ask tae be on yer team next time we play. Tom does’na pass the ball tae anyone, it’s infuriatin’. Ye ken I would’ha scored if he passed it to me before Langford blew the whistle,” Rupert complained.

“Competition is certainly on between the two of ye- I thought it might’a died down after last year,” Angus hummed in contemplation as the trio walked together.

“‘Cause I’m so much older and wiser?” Jamie laughed as they rounded the corner.

“Yer aff yer heid if ye think that they will’na try tae kill each other in e’ery class,” Rupert snorted as he shook his head.

“Ah umnae tryin’ to kill the lad, truly. It’s just pure dead brillian’ seein’ him lose at somethin’ he thinks he ought tae win,” Jamie replied, his voice softening at the end as he saw Claire walking toward him.

“Och, it’s his girlfrien’, best leave him be,” Rupert commented seeing the reason for Jamie’s sudden change in tone.

“She is’na my girlfriend,” Jamie bit back, smacking Rupert over the back of the head as Angus started to sing ‘Claire and Jamie, Sitting in a Tree’. “Haud yer wheesht!” Jamie yelled as Angus ducked out of the way of Jamie’s fists, cackling with laughter with Rupert as they left him alone to face Claire.

“Hi,” Claire greeted happily as Jamie saw both Rupert and Angus make kissing faces at him behind Claire’s back.

“How was history?” Jamie asked as they fell into stride with each other and out of the school gates.

“Rachel and Denzel were nice, they sat with each other, which was fine. I sat next to a girl, Emma I think her name was. She didn’t say much. Mr Randall was the teacher again, he recognised me from English, but didn’t make me introduce myself to the class, which was good. You’re right, I didn’t really have anything to be nervous about. You know when you were a kid and they made you introduce yourself to the class and it would be like, say your name and something about yourself starting with the first letter of your name. I always hated that game. Thank goodness we’ve moved on from doing things like that. Anyway, I also met Frank Randall, the guy you told me about, his Dad is Mr Randall. Imagine having your father as your teacher. I can’t imagine anything worse.” Claire spoke quickly and happily.

Jamie relaxed. When they had hung out (however briefly it was) over the summer, Jamie had noticed that when Claire was particularly excited over something she spoke rapidly. It brought Jamie a sense of comfort that her first day at a new school hadn’t been a total train wreck.

“I could see you in your PE class out of the windows,” she continued on, not waiting for Jamie’s acknowledgement. “You did laps,” she said smugly.

“Aye, for warm up.” Jamie grinned.

“You’re very fast out there. I saw you running. Of course I was a fair way away, but it looked fast. Who was the blonde guy that was trailing you?”

“The blonde guy?” Jamie repeated feeling his heart thump heavily in his chest, though he wasn’t sure why. “Oh, that’s Tom.”

“He was right on your heels the whole time. Even in some of the… you know the things you were doing at the end. The back and forth thing,” Claire said using her hands to try and illustrate her point.

“The drills? Aye, we keep on top of each other most of the time.”

“Are you friends? Do you train together?”

Jamie let out a chuckle as he shook his head. “No, I would’na say that we were particularly close. There’s always been a bit of competition between us. We just like to get the best of one another as much as we can.”

“Oh,” Claire hummed, “why?”

Jamie paused as he thought it over. It was just what they had always done, for as long as he could remember. “I dinnae ken to be honest wi’ ye,” he said as he rubbed the back of his neck. “We just always have.”

“Is there a definitive winner?”

“No’ always. I’m a faster runner than Tom, but he’s got better footwork for football. He just needs to learn to share the ball. We’re pretty evenly matched in the pool, I think. It’s been a while since we’ve raced,” Jamie shrugged trying to think if there was something that truly separated them in their skills.

“Do you get along at all?” Claire asked curiously.

“Och aye, we’re fine. It’s all in good sport,” Jamie smiled over at her. “It’s just something we’ve always done since we were wee bairns.”

“It sounds exhausting.”

“It’s truly all in good fun, we all have our strengths and weaknesses.”

“What’s yours then?” Claire asked as she stopped and made Jamie face her.

“What’s my weakness?” Jamie clarified as Claire nodded. “You” he nearly answered before he stopped himself. “If I told ye that lass, I’d have to kill ye.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Claire laughed before she started walking again.

—

“So the first day of school was’na too bad then?” Jamie asked as they approached her front gate.

“Not nearly as terrifying as I thought it would be. I think I can thank my guide for that,” Claire answered as she made her way to her front door.

“Yer welcome, Sassenach. Happy to be at yer service.”

“My service, hey? Could you come in and make me some dinner while I relax in a bath?” Claire joked as she unlocked the front door.

Jamie tried to ignore the immediate visual that came to his mind of Claire slippery and covered in bubbles as she had a bath and he cleared his throat to try and stop the inevitable break that would come when he tried to use his voice to reply.

“Unfortunately this is where my services stop. I have to get home and finish my chores.”

“Didn’t you have chores this morning?” Claire asked in surprise.

“Aye, that’s the joy of livin’ on a farm. The work ne’er stops. I’ll be here tomorrow mornin’ same time to pick ye up,” Jamie said as he picked up his bike from where he had parked it that morning.

“Oh, okay then. I will see you tomorrow.” Claire sounded slightly disappointed and Jamie couldn’t help the smile that came to his face.

“Bye Claire.” Jamie wheeled his bike back out of the front gate and started pedaling away, sure that he had heard a faint “bye Jamie” in return from Claire.

[thesnadger]

Quiet Hours

(It was inevitable I’d write something for The Magnus Archives. A small conversation set during the weeks Jon and Martin were in Scotland before everything went sideways.)

Ao3

When Martin woke up, Jon was already gone.

As soon as he saw the empty room around him, Martin knew he wouldn’t find Jon anywhere in the safehouse. He looked anyway, checking what rooms there were and walking a slow circle around the outside. He moved slowly, taking his time not out of any sense of thoroughness but to delay the inevitable moment when expectation became certainty, when what he’d sensed the moment he woke up was confirmed.

Jon had left. And he’d taken any trace that he’d ever been there. The bag he’d been living out of, the scattered papers on the kitchen table. Even the empty cigarette package that he’d left crumpled on the floor next to the wastebasket, all were gone. He hadn’t stepped out temporarily, he’d taken his things with him and he wouldn’t be returning.

Martin found he didn’t feel any need to speculate on why Jon would have left so suddenly, without a word or even a note. There was a logic to it all. Jon had a history of going off on his own, following some plan of his to its natural, likely dangerous conclusion. And Martin had known in the back of his head that those plans probably wouldn’t involve him for long. Eventually, Jon would leave him behind.

He had only hurt himself by entertaining any other possibilities. He had no one to blame for the dull ache in his chest but Martin Blackwood.

A quiet unease crept through him, as if there was someone standing behind him. He didn’t want to look, not because he feared there would be someone there, but because he knew that there was nothing and no one, and that was so much worse. It made him uncomfortable in the safehouse, and he went outside.

The sky was dim and overcast and a mist dampened his skin as he walked out. The air had a numbing chill to it, but he didn’t shiver. He was focused on the view. In some ways it was the same as always, green hills dotted with rocks stretching out in all directions. But today there were no animals outside, and a dense fog had gathered on the horizon, obscuring the village from his view. Somehow, Martin knew that even if he walked to the end of the road and pushed through that fog there would be nothing on the other side. Just more empty green. More mist and overcast skies.

It was better this way. Or, no. Not better. Definitely not better. But this was the way it was meant to be. Martin closed his eyes and let the mist gather around him, until he couldn’t feel anything at all.

Then he woke with a start, disoriented, eyes darting around the room. It was night and he was indoors. A sliver of a moon shone through the window. The sky was free of mist. A dream. It had been a dream. Just a nightmare.

Martin kicked free from the tangle of blankets and dragged himself off the futon. He didn’t want to fall back asleep where the dream might still be waiting, ready to take him back to the mist and the quiet and the numbing cold. He’d stretch his legs a little, maybe get a glass of water. Anything that might clear his head.

He was surprised to find Jon in the kitchen. He was slouched in one of the chairs, staring out the window and fiddling with a pen. It was only when he saw Jon there that Martin realized he should have been surprised to not see him in the room where they’d been sleeping.

A floorboard creaked and Jon started, turning in Martin’s direction with an intense stare that softened as he realized who it was.

“Just me.” Martin said, raising a hand for a wave and trying to smile. He was still re-orienting himself to the waking world.

“Ah. Yes. I see that.” Jon nodded. “Sorry. Startled, that’s all.”

“Have you not been to bed?” Martin asked.

“Not yet, no. I’m, er, getting some work done.” He gestured vaguely to the table in front of him. “Trying to see if I can work out what we should be worrying about, I suppose. Where the next danger is coming from."  

Martin glanced down. There was a pile of old statements that looked untouched--Jon always lost interest after recording, thought for whatever reason he refused to throw them away. Next to them was a yellow legal pad that had barely been marked. A small list of names, question marks and one or two scribbled words were in one corner. That was it, aside from a spot in the margin where something had been scratched out and scribbled over so thoroughly that it was nothing but a dense black square. Martin couldn’t guess what was underneath it. Jon saw him staring and flipped the page over.

“You look like hell, you know.” Martin said. “You shouldn’t burn the candle at both ends. It’ll catch up to you if it hasn’t already.”

“It probably has.” Jon sighed. “What about you? What are you doing awake at this hour?”

“Oh. You know. . . .” Martin shifted, standing in the doorway. “Nightmares . . . trauma. The usual.”

“. . . Ah.” Jon replied. “Right. Of course.”

He looked uncomfortable at that, and Martin shrugged dismissively, hoping to clear the air. “Well, we’ve all been through a lot.”

“Still. That doesn’t make your troubles any less important.” Jon said. His voice was soft and serious, and something about it put a twinge in Martin’s chest.

“. . . It’s only a dream.” Martin said. “Can only do so much about it. Just thought I’d clear my head before trying to sleep again.”

“I see.” Jon gestured towards the chair across from his.

Martin sat down, then gestured at the notepad. “So. . . what exactly are you working on? Any leads?”

“Oh. . . no, not really.” Jon shook his head. “Just trying to, sort of. . . .” He trailed off, looking at the blank page. “Nothing. Honestly, nothing at all.”

“. . .Oh.” Martin smiled a little. “Well. It isn’t as if you’ve got to worry about being fired.”

Jon smirked at that. “Suppose not.”

“Don’t imagine there’s much to do but wait.”

“Yes.” Jon sighed. “Just keeping myself busy, really. Well, trying to. I, ah . . . .” he glanced off to the side, lowering his voice to a mutter. “I know what my dreams will be like.”

So that was it. Martin knew what he meant, of course. He’d heard the tape Jonah recorded while Jon was dead to the world.

“I don’t know.” Jon continued, “maybe. . .maybe if I don’t sleep I can . . . give everyone a night off?”  

“Is that how it works?” Martin asked.

“I’ve no idea.” Jon sighed. “It might?”

Martin considered this. “Well. Even if it does, never sleeping again isn’t really a solution.”

“I know, I know,” he reached up and rubbed his eyes. “I suppose I still need sleep as much as anyone else does.”

“Bet that drives you crazy.” 

"At least we’ll both be alert if there’s a midnight attack from some paranormal creature. One that’s fond of the Scottish countryside.”

“Sure. Evil bagpipes, probably.” Martin said. Then he saw the expression on Jon’s face. “No. No. You’re kidding me.”

“Statement #9931907.” Jon nodded. “A manifestation of the Slaughter in Lancraig.”

“ Bagpipes though?”

“The sound of them, anyway. Not some sort of. . . homicidal wind instrument scuttling along on pipe legs, if that’s what you’re imagining.”

“That was exactly what I was imagining, yes.”

“Mmm. The man who witnessed it mentioned how much sheep sound like people pretending to be sheep. I can’t help thinking about that every time I hear one out here.”

“What?” Martin laughed, “that’s ridiculous. Sheep sound like sheep.”

“I suppose I haven’t had enough exposure to tell yet.”

“Well, neither have I. Still.” He shook his head. “Suppose we’ll have plenty chances to hear them out here. Might be holed up for a while, until some other monster or something forces us out.”

“To be honest, Martin, I think it’ll be a relief when something does.” Jon said. “At least we won’t be waiting anymore.”

Something about Jon’s tone made images from Martin’s dream come creeping back into him, and he frowned. The feeling of the vacant safehouse still lingered. The emptiness in it that had been. . . deeper than a room that simply had no one in it. It was a palpable absence, like the silence after a question or a vacant hospice bed. He found himself focusing on it in a way that he didn’t want to.

Jon must have noticed something, because he cleared his throat. “Not that the waiting’s been all that bad,” he added. “It’s quiet at least. And both of us were in need of a holiday.”

“Are you--” Martin hesitated. “I still think you should get some sleep. For the record. But if you’re not going to, would you mind if I stayed up with you? I. . . .” He paused a moment, then decided to be blunt. “I really, really don’t want to be alone right now.”

”. . .Of course.” Jon hesitated, but when he spoke his voice was gentle and sounded sincere. “That’s. . . completely understandable. Given everything. I, ah, I wouldn’t mind the company either.”

Martin let out his breath, surprised at the relief he suddenly felt. Some tension he’d been holding since waking up eased, and he sagged forwards in the chair. “Right. I mean, thanks.”

Jon nodded and stretched, checking his watch. “Sunrise is at 6:27 am today. Just a few hours from now. The world should feel a bit safer in the daylight.”

“Yeah. That’ll be nice.” Martin didn’t ask Jon if he’d looked the time up or just Known it. It didn’t seem worth pressing.

By the time sunrise actually came, they’d fallen asleep in their chairs. Slumped forward on the kitchen table, unconsciously pressing against each other for warmth.

(Note: @squeeneyart made this beautiful image based on this idea as I yelled about it in Discord to them.)

[ennergetics]

FILLED REQUEST: the manual, a young love! park jihoon au

(image credit)

pairing: park jihoon x reader genre: fluff, angst wordcount: 2779 summary: Park Jihoon has always done things by the book. When your life intertwines with his, he finds himself wishing there were a manual for love. warnings: none (as per the request, this is vaguely inspired by eddy kim’s the manual! cross-posted on ao3.) 

The first time Park Jihoon really notices you is when you leave a note in his locker, asking to see him in your classroom after class hours. You’re both freshmen at Seoul’s premium performing arts high school, and barely two months of the school year have passed. Jihoon already dreads the awkward confrontation, but is too polite—and too unwilling to make enemies—to turn you down.

“Park Jihoon,” you say, your ears blazing red, “I like you.”

He asked around about you before coming here, finding the typical background: kid from the provinces, looking for a company to enter as a trainee, multi-talented. Unlike most of the others, however, you take your studies seriously, and naturally attract the other academically inclined students in your class. Bossy, blunt, and forward—not really words to describe an idol personality.

“Um,” he says, trying to find the words to say. You’re watching him with a calculating look on your face, and he swears you can see right through the bullshit consoling words he’s about to spout. Instead, he says, “I think we’d be great friends.”

And you shrug, closing your eyes before smiling at him. “It was worth a shot. You mean it?” Jihoon is surprised to find he does, that in a school full of fake smiles and soulless civility, your honesty is refreshing. When he nods, you come closer and shake his hand to seal the deal.

It’s awkward at first, especially when you join Jihoon at the lunch table where he normally eats alone. “Why’d you confess to me when we’ve barely said two words to each other?” Jihoon says, tact thrown to the wind. You don’t seem to mind, shrugging as if you hadn’t been a blushing mess the day before.

“You’re driven, charming, and cute,” you say. “What’s not to like?”

“And this isn’t weird for you?” he says carefully, poking at his food. While he's well-liked, he doesn't really have anyone whom he can trust. 

You laugh, reaching out to pat his hand. “It’d be a loss to me if we weren’t friends just because of a little crush. You’re sweet, Jihoonie. Don’t worry; I’m over it.”

As the year goes on, you end up partnering together for most of your projects, since both of you are taking the same major. By far, the two of you are the most competent at your majors in your year—Jihoon helps you with your acting classes, and you’re a stricter vocal coach than the one the school provides.

It’s easy for the two of you to slip into a routine, your training calendars syncing complementarily. It helps that you’re still in the audition process at a lot of different companies, so you can pick up his slack as a trainee. With a joint set of online notes, keeping up with different class material is simple, and any time you spend preparing for practical tests are moments for you to tutor him in math or for him to explain chemical reactions to you.

Both of you live at the school’s dorms, your roommates out often to do promotions. Jihoon’s room becomes your favourite study place, particularly because it’s big enough for you to practice dance routines. By your second term, you’ve practically moved in, the late nights cramming for yet another project ending with you asleep in his absent roommate’s bed.

Jihoon slips in and out of classes more often, the company he’s with telling him he’s likely to debut with a new group. You’re constantly texting him encouragement, taking pictures of the whiteboard in classes and the black bean noodles you’ll both eat as soon as he’s back from training. He finds himself missing you, though he never says so. Jihoon’s never been good at finding the right words to say, not the type to express emotions unless it’s necessary.

One day, he enters his room with a grim expression on his face. Immediately, you ask what’s wrong, and he hands you an envelope with x-rays of his knee.

“I can’t debut,” he says, his fists clenched tightly at his side. Without a word, you hug him, and for the first time since his short stint as an actor, Jihoon lets someone else see him cry, ugly sobs wracking his body as he pulls you close. The smell of your cucumber melon shampoo is comforting, and later, when he calms down, you hold his face in your hands.

“Not yet, you hear? ‘Can’t debut’ yet,” you say fiercely, looking into his eyes.

After that, something changes between you two, a subtle shift he can’t really identify. Your friendship becomes more tactile, you leaning on him whenever you’re on his bed watching choreography videos on your laptop, him resting his chin on your shoulder when you’re catching him up on what he’s missed.

It’s after a good day for both of you—he’s just signed with Maroo Entertainment, and you’ve gotten shortlisted as a trainee at two companies—that you decide to go out. You’re both done with your homework for the next day, and the guards are fond of you and unlikely to rat you out. You leave during study period right after lunch, and both of you rent out bikes for the afternoon, a welcome break from the tedium of school and work life.

You’re at a field near the school, the sun about to set, when you look over at him with a grin. “I’m grateful for the excellent chicken at lunch, the scenery we just saw, the companies who might be willing to accept my talents, and you,” you say, stretching your hands in the air. “What are you thankful for, Jihoonie?”

He considers for a moment before responding. “For Maroo and the chicken, yeah.” You push him playfully. “And you, I guess,” he says, smirking. As you bike back to school, Jihoon feels like he could fly.

It becomes a ritual for the two of you, and you end every night with a short list of what you’re grateful for. Not every day is as pleasant—both companies ultimately reject you, and you grow frustrated at having to start the search all over again. Jihoon’s fate is still in limbo at Maroo, as they’re unable to find a group that fits him. Somehow, though, saying thank you for something every day keeps him positive. Jihoon tells himself you’re only marginally to do with it, but he can’t help how much space you’ve carved for yourself in his heart.

Soon it’s your second year, and Jihoon begins to have a reputation at school, rejecting confessions left and right with a polite smile. With you, he expresses his frustration that they all see him as this perfect prince. You shrug, saying, “You’re building that image and it comes with it, Jihoonie. Only I know how much of a bastard you really are.”

You laugh and he groans, but he feels pleasantly warm. Jihoon takes comfort in that, that there’s someone who remembers he’s still a teenager, someone who’ll let him be awkward, who’ll critique him when he’s trying to come up with a memorable concept for himself and laugh in his face when he says something cringe-worthy. He almost dreads the day you’ll have less time for him, selfishly wanting to keep you to himself.

Jihoon thinks he’s jinxed it because soon you’re coming to him with a bright grin on your face, talking a mile a minute about how you’ve been signed at a hip-hop company like you’ve dreamed. They’ve made you sign a non-disclosure agreement about the details, but he can tell it’s a company that’ll take care of you. You’re out more often, and Jihoon sees you less and less because you’re always at trainings.

You come back with stories about the other trainees. “They’re really so amazing,” you say breathlessly, “like I’ve never seen so much talent condensed in so little space.” There’s a light in your eyes as you describe a particular one. “He was really shy at first, but he’s hilarious and so, so talented, especially when he dances!”

And Jihoon knows that look; it’s the same one you’d shot at him right before you confessed to him, hopeful and sweet. He can’t help but feel jealous, and it’s ridiculous because you’re much better friends now. He’s deeply involved in your life, as you are in his, and he knows he’s your best friend, the one who rejected your feelings at the beginning of it all.

But over the year he’s known you, Jihoon’s grown attached to the sound of your voice, to the warmth of your embrace, to the casual finger hearts you send his way when you feel him looking at you. You’re dear to him, he knows, and he might even like you that way. The problem, he knows, is that he’s not like you—he’s not a risk-taker. The thought of what might happen to your friendship if he says anything to change the balance you have now, the thought of not seeing you in his room at the end of every grueling day: these thoughts scare him.

You’re at your typical Saturday night haunt, a small coffeeshop that’s often empty besides the two of you, when Jihoon tells you the news that he’s been struggling to keep a secret from you. “There’s this show that I’ll be joining,” he says, his voice muffled by the mask he’s wearing. “It’s a popularity competition that’ll form a group of eleven at the end.”

“Is this Produce101?” you say quietly, looking at him. When he nods, your face breaks into a smile, and you reach out to take his hand. “That’s an amazing opportunity, Jihoon! I’ll be voting for you every day! When does it start?”

He fiddles with your fingers, his face apologetic. “Filming starts tomorrow. That’s why I really wanted to meet you today. Are you mad?”

“A little bit,” you say with a frown. “Now I can’t send you off with a cake or anything. Have you packed? We’re going to my house and I’m making you a care package with the snacks you’ve filled my fridge with!”

You spend the rest of the night in your room, talking about everything and nothing. Jihoon feels the ball of nerves in his stomach loosen a little in your presence, and he can’t help but stay out a little later than he’d promised the agency. Too soon, he asks for permission to leave, and you walk with him to your main door.

“Jihoon,” you say, pulling him close. In the dim light of your hallway, he can barely make out your features, but he looks anyway, trying to memorize the face he won’t be seeing for months. “You’ll kill it, okay? I have absolute faith in you.” You kiss him lightly on the cheek. “A good luck charm from the wicked witch of the School of Performing Arts,” you murmur, and Jihoon is glad that you can’t see him blush.

The next few weeks go by like a blur. Jihoon dives into it whole-heartedly, trying not to check his phone except in the shower, where there are no cameras. He knows exactly what the stakes are, what kind of image he needs to protect. Still, your silly texts and encouraging words are like quick moments that let him be himself.

[7:42 am] wow my best friend is a visual I CALLED IT FIRST

[9:05 pm] jihoonie let the kkukkukkakka die wat were u thinkin

[4:32 pm] VOTING FOR U!!!!!! u were the best in ur team obvs

Distance from you is more difficult than he thought it would be. You’ve wormed your way into his life deeper than he expected, and he misses the way you roll your eyes whenever someone says something awful, the random cute post-its you’d leave on his bed when you wouldn’t be at your shared room. 

You’re in the crowd somewhere during finale night, a presence to comfort Jihoon even as he feels disappointed that he’s second place. He never lets it show on his face, and he wonders if you’ll know. When the cameras are off, he calls you first.

“Hey,” you say, “you’ve made it, winkboy! I’m so proud!” Jihoon says nothing, smiling at the sound of the voice he hadn’t heard in so long.

“Are you bitter you’re not first?” you say shrewdly. Jihoon makes a non-committal noise, hating and loving how easily you read his mind. “You’ve done a great job, Jihoon.” Your tone is soft, a comforting hug through the phone line, and it soothes some of the frustration in his heart. “What’s important is what follows, yeah?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” he says, the first thing he’s muttered since you picked up the line. “They’re giving me the weekend off.”

“Sunday,” you say, “I have stuff to take care of tomorrow.” There’s a guardedness to your tone that makes Jihoon nervous. “I love you, Jihoonie! See you!” His heart skips a beat at your words, and the reality of everything comes crashing down on him. The call ends before he can respond, and all the better.

Park Jihoon plans the Sunday meticulously. Maybe everything didn’t go as planned at Produce101, but your date with him will be perfect. It’ll lead up to his confession, with Jihoon finally admitting to the feelings he’s kept at bay forever.

You spend the first hour at the café, him sitting on the couch beside you as he whispers the things that weren’t caught on camera. You’re more radiant than he remembered, and each smile and laugh you send his way feeds the flame.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” you say, uncharacteristically shy. Warning bells go off in Jihoon’s head, and he’s glad for the mask because it means you can’t see him frown. “Someone from my company asked me out.”

He looks down for a minute, at a loss for words with you for the first time since you’d confessed, all those months ago.

“Don’t be mad,” you say, reading his confusion as anger. Jihoon can tell you’re really nervous about telling him this because normally you can tell exactly what he’s feeling. “I’m sorry I kept it from you.”

“It’s okay,” he says, with a calmness he doesn’t really feel. “When do I get to meet this guy?”

You’re still not looking at him. Jihoon realizes with a start that it’s because you’re feeling guilty. “You know him already,” you say softly.

Jihoon connects the dots—hip-hop company, dancer—and figures it out right before you say it.

“I’m sorry I asked Woojinie to keep it from you!” you say, looking at him with your brows furrowed, biting at your lower lip. “I didn’t want to distract you while you were there.”

“Hey,” Jihoon says, “it’s okay. It’s okay. Let me walk you home?”

You’re both quiet as you walk the familiar path. He takes your hand to reassure you that he’s not mad at you, and soon he sees you relax in the corner of his eye. In no time, you’re at your front door, hidden from the world’s prying eyes by your gate.

Jihoon pulls off the mask and smiles at you. “What are you thankful for today?” he says lightly, reminding you of the game you used to play.

“I’m thankful I got to see you today,” you say, listing things out on your fingers, “thankful I got to catch up with you, and thankful you won.” You pause for a bit before saying, “What about you?”

“I’m thankful for you,” Jihoon says simply. You pull him close, and Jihoon closes his eyes, overwhelmed by emotions he can’t describe. He wants to laugh—he never expected you to matter this much to him. The two of you have terrible timing; you were too early, and now he’s too late. He wishes there were some kind of manual, that there were a clean-cut guide on how to fall in love. Instead, there was you, your quips and grins and this warm embrace, invading the carefully protected nooks of his heart.

Still, he knows he wants you in his life, in whatever capacity. Surrounded by your clean scent, Jihoon gathers up the courage to tell you how he feels, whispering into your hair, unsure whether you hear him.

You pull back too soon. “I love you too,” you say, your eyes bright. “I’ll see you next week?”

“Yeah,” he says, and you kiss his cheek before closing the door with a smile. Jihoon keeps his grin on until you’ve closed the door, and only then does he start to think about what he’s lost.

[artclusters]

Short story under the theme “nature” for a college magazine.

“The meaning”

The boat drifted across the pristine lake, framed by lush earth and lodgepole pine trees in the distance. A sweet damp scent was ever-present and water-lilies lazily floated by. Shams has finished casting with a faint whizz that sliced the air, while Luke adjusted his camera settings. It was mostly quiet, aside from the occasional plops and ripples in the water, the far-off chatter of water-birds and the rustling of dragonflies. All they had to do now was to wait and bask in the radiating warmth from the clear late-morning sky, as Fairuz played tenderly from Luke’s phone…

“Why is fishing so romanticized when it’s actually just ridiculously boring?” Luke piped up, slightly irritated and bouncing his leg.

“Maybe we’ll catch something…until then, RELISH this dude. You’re just upset because you’re not getting instant gratification,” Shams mused.

“Yes. That’s exactly it. You’re right. Okay, I’m trying. I know how much you wanted to visit this park.” It was not unusual for Luke to feel restless whenever he was doing “nothing”. He twiddled his short beard as he tried to hold himself back from checking the line every 30 seconds on-the-dot. He felt that the boat will somehow break and drown them if he doesn’t do so.

Shams moved out of view and sat next to him. Luke carefully held his camera and took a photo, aiming to depict the glimmering silver fishing rod perched against the yellow boat’s edge in the center, the sky-blue lake clinging to the sides and with a tinge of greenery at the corners. He inspected it afterwards for what seemed like an eternity.

“It’s trash.”

“What! Why? Let me see.”

Luke defeatedly passed the camera to him. It was a fairly decent photo, in terms of artistry or aesthetic. The colors complemented each other well and it portrayed a pleasing natural scene.

“It’s nice dude,” Shams said frankly.

“No, it’s not,” Luke stood up and frantically flung his arms and turned in circles. “THIS is nice. EVERYTHING here is nice, VERY nice, but THIS-” he pointed harshly at the camera screen, “THIS is not nice. Do you see my problem? I am unable to CAPTURE the beauty around me! It’s not…right! I am a FAILURE!” He turned away in embarrassment, at both his vulnerable outburst and almost losing his balance.  

“…You’re being hard on yourself again…” Shams handed him back the camera. “Just take other photos, okay?”

After several Fairuz songs, camera clicks and releasing a small gasping trout, they set off to the trees trail.

[---]

They strolled through the path, occasionally stepping on fallen leaves and small pine-cones scattered about, emitting a satisfying crunch. The air was even more refreshing than the previous area, and the crisp fragrance of pine-oil replaced the dampness. This trail was a haven of abundance; white pines, red and white fir and ponderosa flourished all around. The red and yellow sugar and big-leaf maple trees were a splendid interruption to the green palette. Shams (being the enthusiast that he is) learned about all of them; Luke listened intently to his little presentations. Luke would also occasionally go back and forth to retrace his steps whenever he lost count, simultaneously making sure not to step over wooden panels. Shams was used to showing up late with him whenever they went somewhere and planning a route with the least human contact. They took their time - this was a goldmine for a photographer as well. Alas, Luke would pause extensively after every photo, only to sigh, curse and glare.

“I can honestly say I’ve never seen anyone stare so angrily at a camera,” Shams teased, to which Luke retaliated by snapping an off-guard photo of him.

They reached the center of the trail, where brown beckoning giant sequoia trees resided, and a gorgeous meadow clothed the rich soil. Lively song-bird chirps resounded from every tree-top, like an orchestrated melody. Shams did not waste the opportunity to share his knowledge with Luke about them (his favorite is the Steller’s jay).

“…This here is the finest ASMR you can experience dude,” Shams concluded, with a theatrical appraising hand motion. 

Luke wandered off to check out the meadow; it was identical to stepping onto a very soft carpet, and the dense grass brushed against his thin legs. Elegant dandelions and purple cress peeked between the blades in full bloom.

“Shams, aren’t you going to generously tell me about this meadow?” Luke knelt and pointed randomly, “why, I must know the exact conditions this flower will thrive in!”

“Nope, I’m not working for free no more! ... And by the way that’s a spring beauty.” Shams found an empty space and lied down, almost sinking in. He patted the ground motioning for Luke to rest for a bit.

Luke plopped alongside him. Looking up to the giants, it felt like being cradled as wise beings watched over them, holding up the immense sky. He tried to fight off the disturbing thought of being crushed by a swiftly collapsing tree – out of nowhere - and clenched his fists several times. He turned to face Shams, who was gleefully double-checking trivia about the park on his phone. Luke was overcome with a strong - yet familiar – feeling that he couldn’t find the words to describe. He quickly sat up.

“I was joking, you know. I can tell you about the meadow,” Shams said, a little too late.

“No, I’m- I’m good. Do you want to move on?” Luke asked, feeling flustered, and wiped his black flannel and grey Bermuda pants. 

“Sure. Help me up dude,” Shams put away his phone as Luke grabbed his wrists.

They went off for a bathroom break and came across a friendly park ranger clad in teal and beige; she directed them to amateur hikes that provide an elevated view.

[---]

The smooth path ended, and a craggy unruly path began. Luke stopped to drink some water (and snap photos that will end up in self-beratement) while Shams looked at a diagram, absorbing it in his memory. Luke thought of how he always admired his reliability in such matters. To their side was a charming, rocky creek, it’s comforting trickling constant in the background. Pink mountain laurels, white-bark pines and prickly cob-web thistles started to appear as they hiked upwards. They were careful not to trip over thick roots embedded in the moist ground, and to take notice of any wild-life around. Luke regretted his decision to wear rainbow-laced black sneakers just because they match his outfit. Non-threatening hissing, swishing and rushing sounds echoed from every nook and cranny. The afternoon sky was turning slightly darker, and the temperature somewhat colder.

“So, Luke, are you like, thinking of this as a career? Or is it more like a hobby?”

“I mean…maybe? I mean…it could be…I don’t…I don’t know, really.”

“Hm. Well, I don’t want to sound preachy, but I think… once you figure out what photography means to you, your feelings about your work might change…you- you get what I mean?”

“…No, no, yeah, yeah I get it! You don’t sound preachy dude don’t worry…thanks, Shams.”

“Alright, because you don’t have to monetize it or whatever, you can do things just because,” Shams was about to disparage capitalism again but decided to let it go.

They smiled with silent appreciation of their mutual understanding. The conversation bounced from their typical lighthearted stuff, like discussing the inspiring animated French film The Rabbi’s Cat they’ve seen the other day, to more serious venting about their troubles back home.

They eventually reached the top of a rock, mountain hemlocks and foliage sprawling and hanging along the sides. They were welcomed with a stunning vastness of vivid olive-green, blending with the hazy azure horizon of the golden glorious sky. Shams approached the edge while Luke hastily whipped out the tripod (Shams urged him to not rush through it).

Luke tried to sit still and fiddled with his earrings. An intrusive, gory image of carelessly falling and hurting himself played repeatedly in his head.

Shams gently put his arm around him, “I hope you’re enjoying this as much as I am.”

Luke hesitated before resting against his shoulder, “I just want to feel good about my work, but I haven’t been able to…for a long time…I don’t know why exactly.”

The breeze caressed them as they idly gazed ahead, anticipating that fiery combination of orange, red and yellow as they collide together, the sun nesting beneath the sparse clouds.

“…You were my first subject, Shams,” Luke recalled suddenly.

“…Huh, yeah, didn’t it take you like ages to settle on a concept?”

“That…does sound like something I would do.”

Shams smiled fondly, “but once we finally started, time just flew by. We were having so much fun. Ah, I looked quite…different back then.”

“…Yeah.” There was that powerful and familiar feeling again, bordering on a pang of nagging longing, the words to phrase it drowned in the back of his mind.

“Hey, I’ll help you set up.”

Luke counted down from 10 seconds and took several shots to construct in a panorama later. Fortunately, there were only a few people around. He attempted to hide his profound, inexplicable disappointment. Maybe he didn’t take it at the perfect moment. Maybe it was too late, or too early, sort of blurry or the angle was marginally off…he can conjure up endless criticisms if he thought about it for too long.

“Let’s go Shams, before it gets too dark.”

They soon packed up and went back using a shortcut to the paved lodges area. The pathway was calmly lit with rose-colored rope lights. They found a wooden bench, with a lime-green recycling bin and an oval table on the sides. The park was much quieter now, save for the movement of other visitors.

“Hey Luke, I’ll go get us drinks. Just um, sit here and look through today’s photos again. I’m sure you’ll find one you like, and we’ll call it a good day!” Shams reassured.

Luke drummed his fingers as he waited. He decided he might as well…

[---]

To Shams, photography simply meant one of the many wonderful ways to spend time with his dearest. Gradually, Luke spiraled with the obsession of honing and perfecting it – it was akin to a curse. Maybe it was the praise and expectations of other people; maybe it was the expectations he set for himself. Maybe it’s his destructive compulsive nature; maybe it’s the post-graduation emptiness. Maybe it’s his over-bearing parents who incessantly mock and belittle anything he enjoys. For whatever reason, Luke would tragically end up consumed by his passions until he has nothing left to give, evolving into loathing and ultimately abandonment.

“Hi there, what can I get you?” the worker cheerfully popped out from the small lodge square window. A sugary, mellow aroma wafted from inside.

Today has been a lovely yet heavy sensory experience for Shams, which gave him a moderate headache from having to process everything at once.

“Hello there…” Shams squinted at their name tag, “…Robin!” 

“Would you like some fresh apple juice?” They looked reminiscent of a brand mascot, wearing big white gloves, navy blue overalls and an oversized cap.

“…Sure. Two, please.” Shams hoped for a moment that they would’ve somehow sensed his worries and gave him advice or some encouraging anecdote that tells him exactly what he needs to hear. Of course, that’s only in fiction, or drama shows like This Is Us, it would be very awkward otherwise.

“Here you go, dear,” they handed him the drinks with a clink.

“Thank you.” He studied the menu, thinking if there’s anything Luke’s unpredictable taste would like. “Um, I’ll just have a popover, for now.” 

[---]

Luke scrolled down to the gallery beginning; he glanced at it with a lack of interest at first, then he realized there are photos he had completely skipped over.

A photo of Shams towards the boat’s edge, pretending to reel in a heavy catch, puffing out his chest and arms with a radiant, hearty smile.

The surprise photo he took of Shams at the tree trail, his huge curly hair a black blur, his endearing, contagious laugh displaying his tooth-gap. His ankh and many colorful stimming necklaces were tangled and swinging.

A photo of Shams looking keenly at the tree-tops, his cartoonish round glasses taking up half of his chubby face. He pushed back his curls and scrunched his bushy eyebrows, immersed in spotting any birds. He was wearing his beige outdoor vest and the Woody Woodpecker t-shirt that Luke gifted him, that has since gotten tighter.

The unrehearsed photo of Shams during their climb, when he interjected in Luke’s low-perspective shot attempt, which they giggled about right after. He was crouched down in his camouflage shorts and black hiking boots, his lone braid dangled over his shoulder, his hands twisted in a spontaneous vogue pose, showing off his purple-painted nails.

A photo of Shams living his intricate fantasy of an explorer; he emulated a triumphant demeanor, one hand on his waist (a rectangular scar on his forearm in view) and the other pensively placed on his chin. His kind hazel eyes glowed with awe and delight, as he contemplated towards nowhere in particular. There was a hint of strain on his serious face, most likely from trying not to laugh and break character. The pre-sunset sky formed a magnificent backdrop against his dark brown skin.

Luke held tightly onto the camera, almost as if it was in threat of suddenly disappearing. These photos (belonging to a bigger unexamined collection) were taken in jest after all- thus unimportant, right? No…these candid photos of Shams ignited beautiful feelings within him, feelings that he was looking for all along in his work, feelings that have continuously lived yearning to be acknowledged, feelings that he cannot begin to explain. But he will try, he had to, he must.

[---]

“Got the drinks!” Shams passed one to him, “oh and…three ice cubes! Just how you like it.” 

Luke absentmindedly set it aside and said nothing.

“Not in the mood for apple?”

“What? No, no, it’s great, Shams, listen,” Luke took a deep breath, “um, remember when you asked me earlier today what photography means to me?”

“Uh-huh, sort of,” Shams uttered between sips. He waved the delicious wrapped popover towards Luke’s face to try it, but he quickly shook his head.

“I don’t know if this is about to be one of my weird confusing ramblings, but I don’t care. Shams, in my pursuit for a pointless and meaningless and subjective notion of perfection I’ve lost track of WHY I enjoy this- why I even DO this in the first place, I mean, how it all started.” He tapped the camera rather forcefully, “this right here was for you and me, US. An…an- an outlet for two outcast high-schoolers, expressing themselves and- and discovering who we were. Shams, in the simplest terms, I…love photography, and what photography is - means - to me is…you.” He looked away, “I’m sorry that I forgot such an important thing, and I’m sorry if I sound like I’ve come across such an obvious epiphany…” He let out a pained chuckle, his cheeks flushed. “I don’t know if I’m making sense…”

Shams took a long sip and stayed quiet for a bit, in case he had something more to say. He knows how Luke agonizes when he loses his train of thought. He reached out his hand and tidied Luke’s bob-cut, his hair that he always ruins with his non-stop gestures.

“I love you too, Luke,” he requited with utmost sincerity.

They smiled. Then they broke into laughs.

Time stood still, a palpable aura of relief and exhilaration embracing them. Cascading shadows of tree leaves swayed gracefully nearby.

“…Hey, is the camera still on?” Shams finally asked.

Luke, still in a daze, checked the battery meter. “Yeah.”

“…Would you join me in one last photo today?”

“…”

[---]

Luke set up the tripod and selected a timed photo with a flash.

10…9…8…7…6

They turned to face each other as they sat back on the bench.

Shams softly placed his hands over Luke’s and leaned closer.

5…4…3…2…1

[End] ---

[bussanbaby]

Some late mornings feel like they belong in romantic stories, full of dramatic confessions, heartache and breath-taking conclusions. This is not one of those mornings; instead, it’s a halcyon thing set on the summer cusp. While the air is warm and humid, the rain softly pattering over rooftops still holds a certain chill. A film of water makes the world look clean, windows and cars shimmering in the sun peeking in and out from behind clouds, golden rays reflecting against puddles nested in the cracks of New York streets.

  The clock is nearing the 10 a.m. mark, when Alec transfers the last pancake onto the already high-stacked, indulgent plate. There’s also freshly cut strawberries and maple syrup alongside a French press full of freshly brewed coffee. The muted music from the radio melts into his skin as Alec hums along to random notes, bare feet quiet on the kitchen floor, his hair mussed up and his face a home to dark stubble that he didn’t bother with shaving.

  As Alec pours the bitter-sweet coffee into two mugs, there are steps near the door, then a warm hand at his lower back and even warmer lips pressed into his shoulder. A shiver runs through his skin, leaving behind goosebumps all the way down his arms and his bare chest; previous hours come back to mind, images hazy like half-developed polaroid pictures.

  It was much earlier when they woke up, skin against skin, tangled in thin sheets and in each other, a want thrumming in their veins. There was no rush – at first kisses slow and wet and deep, kisses that lit fires along Alec’s spine and made Magnus hum with delight, kisses that left their mouths tingling and red. Then, hands pressed against hipbones and heavy breathing laced with laughter as Alec shifted himself into Magnus’ lap; it felt so good, to have Magnus so close, to have his arms around his waist as they moved together, a slow and steady trickle of heady pleasure rolling through their bodies.

 Afterwards, they stayed in bed a little longer, a little more sweaty and with bones heavy with satisfaction. They talked in pieces, words substituted by fingers dancing across skin and noises, nothing substantial, silence just as comfortable as words. Yet, they couldn’t bum around all day, so when Magnus had to pick up a work-related call that popped their post-sex bubble, Alec occupied the shower, leaving Magnus to do the same while he went to prepare them breakfast.

  Magnus’ hair is swept messily to the side and slightly damp when Alec cards his fingers through it and presses in for another kiss, a close-mouthed little thing tasting of peppermint . The goatee tickles against the ridge of his upper lip and when Alec pulls back, he stares for a moment, as there’s something so homely about Magnus sans his dark make up, something that makes him look softer and much more human, something that makes Alec want to kiss him again and he does exactly that. It never feels enough, to press his mouth against every centimeter of skin on Magnus’ body and still be starved for more.

  “Those for me?” Magnus asks, tilting his head towards the steaming pancakes with a mirthful smile tucked into the corner of his mouth, his nose bumping against Alec’s as they stand close, pulled together like magnets and unable to leave each other’s space.

  Alec lifts himself onto the counter island and sits cross-legged, a grin settled across his face.  “I might share if you’ll be nice.” He pushes the large plate towards Magnus and they both pick their portions, piling on enough pancakes for half an army.

  “I’m always nice.” Magnus says as he takes his first bite and after a moment of silence and a pointed eyebrow raise from Alec, he purses his lips in consideration, stern in contrast with his stuffed cheek. They share a glance, resulting in laughter and a roll of brown eyes. “Okay, I’m nice most of the time.”

  Alec has his plate resting dangerously on his knee and Magnus sits at the edge of a stool with his ankles crossed.  They don’t bother with full cutlery, instead picking at the food with forks sticky with syrup while they talk about work and exchange previously heard gossip. While Magnus animatedly tells the story of Catarina’s last funny patient encounter, Alec’s mind drifts, only half-registering the words.

  The rain keeps falling, Alec is warm and sated, his mind hazy at the edges and his body feeling full even without the food that coats his tongue with a sugar-sweet gauze. There’s spots of gold light dancing across Magnus’ sternum as he shifts to rest his elbow against the cabinet top, before swiping his fingers across his lower lip. Alec sighs, sips his coffee, just shy of burning his tongue.

  He’s been thinking lately, snagging his attention on daydreams and details that he never noticed before. When they work at home, Magnus in his favorite armchair with his feet up on an ottoman and books floating all around him, Alec curled into the couch surrounded by papers, he looks up, just to admire Magnus for a moment, take in his focused expression and the way he fiddles with the jewelry on his fingers, especially the one on his ring finger, twisting and turning it relentlessly to the tune of his thoughts. It draws attention, makes Alec consider how a gold band would look against Magnus’ skin.

  In boring meetings at the Institute, he doodles – it starts off with flowers, roses and gardenias, something mindless just to pass time, shapes and lines and words that don’t make much sense, but before he knows it, there are cat eyes staring up at him from the page and Alexander Lightwood-Bane is scribbled in the margin in his own handwriting. He keeps that page tucked into the back of his notebook, strangely sentimental.

  It gets worse – the idea never leaves him, but instead accompanies his every day, strangely pleasant and comforting. It makes him pull the golden suit jacket out from the back of his closet, the bitter memories lingering along the edges of the sleeves, but there’s something else now. Alec starts to understand why Shadowhunters wear gold at weddings.

  When he first realizes he wants to marry Magnus, it startles him, only for different reasons than most people, probably. Not because it’s a lifelong commitment and a huge milestone, but because he never thought he’d be allowed to see it as a possibility, of being with a man - out in the world, proud and present. But it is real, it is visceral, it is on the horizon, because they are in love that feels like a bottomless sea. A couple of years back, he would’ve thought that since Shadowhunters die young why bother, that he’s not allowed to have love, that it’s going to bring more grief than anything worthwhile. A couple of years back, he would’ve ran from himself and settled for a loveless life, a marriage that was nothing but a lie to keep other people happy.

  Now, he’s eating breakfast on a Saturday morning with the man he would give his life for, a man he would go down on one knee for this very moment if only he had a ring in his pocket, a man that is his future, no matter what life brings. He’s found his home and he’s found his heart and finally, he belongs somewhere, with someone.

  “Alec? Are you with me?”

  At the sound of Magnus’ voice, Alec blinks rapidly, bringing the world back into focus. Everything is muted, like his head’s underwater and he’s just surfacing; the coffee he’s holding is dangerously close to spilling over his lap until he tips it back straight with a sheepish smile and fingers dancing over the chipped ridge of the mug. There’s no pretending he wasn’t listening. “Sorry.”

  Even without picking his head up from where he’s watching the frayed threads at the bottom of his sweatpants,  Alec knows he’s being studied – there are careful and attentive eyes dancing across his face, over his chest and down to his fidgeting hands. Then, the clink of a fork set down, a quiet sigh, the scrape of wood against tile, a tender touch of warmth over Alec’s wrist.

  “You’re overthinking something, aren’t you?”

  Alec lifts up his head, tangling their fingers together, absentmindedly running the pad of his thumb over the smooth polish covering Magnus’ nails. He fights a smile, his upper lip twitching.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You’re just easy to read sometimes.” Magnus shrugs, doesn’t push for the answer, instead just picks up his mugful of coffee and takes a large gulp, patient and understanding and too good for Alec.

  Even if sometimes a question is bright and sharp at the edges, it’s hard to get it out, something keeping the air in his lungs. So instead of talking for a moment, Alec takes in the different jars lined along the shelves, watches raindrops race down the glass, focuses on the feel of Magnus’ skin against his.

  “Have you ever… um- you’ve lived for a long time, so have you thought about marriage? Have you ever wanted to get married?”

  The saying goes – expect the unexpected; judging by the way Magnus’ eyebrows go up, that wasn’t a question he was ready for, his lips parted around silence before slowly shifting into a curious smile. He wets his lips before he speaks, fingers tightening their grip on Alec’s. “Of course I’ve wanted it. I thought, Camille and I, that it would be with her, but she quickly shut me down, cynical as always.”

  There’s a wrinkle between Magnus’ eyebrows, his faced pulled tight with memories and Alec shifts, stretches out his legs to let them hang off the counter at Magnus’ sides;  closer, closer, until he’s able to rest his forehead against Magnus’, who sighs from the bottom of his lungs. Things like these never come easy, even after decades.

  “She told me marriage would just be a ball and chain at my feet. That I should just be free, because nobody will want to marry a warlock anyway.”

  Alec doesn’t resist the urge to roll his eyes, as he lifts their hands closer, presses his coffee-warmed mouth against Magnus’ palms, over his knuckles to where the wedding ring usually sits.

  “I want to.”

  At the words, Magnus pulls back, the expression on his face unreadable for a moment before he shakes his head minutely. It’s something Alec notices pretty early on – any show of affection, whether by words or actions, results in the subtle gesture of disbelief, as if it is new, as if Magnus has to get used to reverence again. It makes sense, in a way: to isolate himself from hurt and to sever the ties with his past is often to forget.

  Still, soon the initial surprise melts into a fond smile with a playful edge; Magnus keeps looking, eyes brighter than before. “Did you just propose to me, Alexander?”

  The significance of Alec’s own words finally kicks in and a wave of warmth rushes out of his chest, reaching to color his cheeks and neck ruddy, not with embarrassment, but pleasure, a giddy spark deep in his heart. He’s not afraid anymore to reach for a happy ending.

  “If I did, would you say yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s a promise.”

[suzanneshannon]

Fluid Images in a Variable Proportion Layout

Creating fluid images when they stand alone in a layout is easy enough nowadays. However, with more sophisticated interfaces we often have to place images inside responsive elements, like this card:

For now, let’s say this image is not semantic content, but only decoration. That’s a good use for background-image. And because in this context the image contains an object, we can’t allow any parts to be cropped out when it’s responsive, so we’d pick background-size: contain.

Here’s where it starts to get tricky: on mobile devices, this card shifts direction and becomes vertical, with the image on top. We can make that happen with any sort of CSS layout technique, and probably best handled with CSS grid or flexbox.

But as we test for smaller screens, because of the contain property, this is what we get:

Hey, get back up there!

That’s not very nice. The image resizes to maintain its aspect ratio without cutting off any details, and if the image is important content and should not be cropped, we can’t change background-size to cover.

At this point, our next attempt might be familiar to you: placing the image inline, instead the background. 

On desktop, this works fine:

It’s not bad on mobile either:

But on smaller screens, because of all the fixed sizes, the image’s proportions get distorted.

Hmm, those strawberries are not as appetizing when stretched.

We could spend hours fiddling with the image, the card, the flex properties, going back and forth. Or, we could…

Separate main content from the background

This is the base for obtaining much more flexibility and resilience when it comes to responsive images. It might not be possible 100% of the time but, in many cases, it can be achieved with a little effort on the design side of things, especially if this approach is planned beforehand.

For our next iteration, we’re placing our strawberries image on a transparent background and setting what was the blue color in the raster image with CSS instead. Go ahead and play with viewport sizes in this demo by adjusting the size of the sample space!

CodePen Embed Fallback

Looking deeper at the styles, notice that we’ve also added padding to the div that holds the image, so the strawberries don’t come too close to the edges. We have full control of how close or distant we want them to be, through this padding.

Note how we’re also using negative margins to compensate for the padding on our outer card wrapper, otherwise we’d get white space all around the image.

Use the object-fit property for inline images

As much as the previous demo works, we can still improve the approach. Up to now, we’ve assumed that the image was un-semantical content — but with this layout, it’s also likely that the image illustration could be more than decoration.

If that’s the case, we definitely don’t want the image to get cut off because that would essentially amount to data loss. It’s semantically better to put the image inline instead of a background to prevent that, and we can use the object-fit property to make it happen.

CodePen Embed Fallback

We’ve extracted the strawberries from the background and it’s now an inline <img> element, but we kept the background color in that same image div. 

Finally, combining the object-fit: contain with a 100% width makes it possible to resize the window and keep the aspect ratio of the strawberries. The caveat of this approach, however, is that we need to set a fixed height for the image on the desktop version — otherwise it’s going to follow the proportion of the set width (and reducing it will alter the layout). That might make things too constrained if we need to generate these cards with a variable amount of text that breaks into several lines.

Coming soon: aspect-ratio

The solution for the concern above might be just around the corner with the upcoming aspect-ratio property. This will enable setting a fixed ratio for an element, like this:

.el {   aspect-ratio: 16 / 9; }

This means we’ll be able to eliminate fixed height and replace it with our calculated aspect ratio. For example, the dimensions in the desktop breakpoint of our last example looked like this:

.image { /* ... */   height: 184px;   width: 318px; }

With aspect-ratio, we could remove the height declaration and do the math to get the closest ratio that amounts to 184:

.image {   /* ... */   width: 318px; /*  Base width */   height: unset; /* Resets the height that was set outside the media query */   aspect-ratio: 159 / 92; /* Amounts close to a 184px height */ }

The upcoming property is better explored in this article, if you want to learn more about it.

In the end, there are multiple ways to achieve reliably responsive images in a variable proportion layout. However, the trick to make this job easier — and better — does not necessarily lie with CSS; it can be as simple as adapting your images, whether that’s by separating the foreground from background (like we did) or selecting specific images that will still work if a fair portion of the edges get cropped.

The post Fluid Images in a Variable Proportion Layout appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Fluid Images in a Variable Proportion Layout published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[chariflare]

assignments (2018 sem 1)

from creative writing last semester! i'm not satisfied with any of these, but if i don’t post them i know it’ll niggle at my brain forever. i’ve put everything in one post, and included both a (freshly-written) preamble and a summary of the marker’s comments. for the record, this was a first-year subject

short fiction - sabbath (“horrid jimmy”, 26/3/18) cw: alcohol, questionable writing technique

this got a lower mark than any of my other pieces, but it was also the one i spent the most time on (by a wide margin). it’s also not very good. fiction is hard.

i used a dramatic metaphor - perhaps too much so for the events of the story. it’s explained more below. according to my statement of intent: “i tried to address this with a more personal, “impressionist” narration - clearly the feelings of the narrator, not objective judgement.” unfortunately, i don’t think it worked? “silly” teenage actions committed without thought can have major consequences, is the point, but there’s still tonal dissonance there. frankly, i sound like a mum

it didn’t occur to me that it’s a coming-of-age story until i read the comments afterwards! whoops!

short fiction

The leaves crackled underfoot as the other boys sauntered into the woods, chuckling and jibing amongst themselves, with me trailing behind.

Caught by a sudden chill, I shoved my hands deeper into my parka pockets. Coming had been a stupid idea. It was probably going to be boring as all hell. I suppose I knew that when they asked me. I’d only been invited out of polite necessity, but I had nothing better to do.

One of them – a boy from my class – lingered to wait for me to catch up.

“So have you already met the new guy?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t.

“I heard he beat someone up, that’s why he had to move here,” he whispered conspiratorially.

I shrugged. What he had or hadn’t done wasn’t really any of my business. Curiosity was why I was here, sure, but I wasn’t going to judge based on what he might or might not have done at his last school.

The conversation died as weakly as it started. We trudged on beside each other, silently, out of obligation.

The path opened up to a clearing. Another boy was already standing there, leaning against the edge of a table, fiddling with something. The bench behind him was stacked with beer boxes. A grin settled in on his face as he saw us approaching.

“Jimmy!” the leader called, greeting him with a hug. “How are you, man?”

Jimmy smirked, although I couldn’t hear his reply.

“You’ll love him, guys. He’s a riot.”

We were all welcomed over, given a rant about Jimmy. Nothing I hadn’t heard before – transfer student, rich kid, dad was the police chief. It’d all been in the invitation spiel. The other boys chattered amongst themselves.

Jimmy watched it all with a sort of lazy self-assuredness. He was still tossing around that object – for some reason, an outdated cell phone – and his shirt lounged half-tucked against his jeans. A slimy mop of brown hair, skin-care and fashion taste, non-existent. He could be mistaken for half the people in my class. He’d fit in, sure. Be adored even. But besides the cockiness he looked almost bland. What an uninspiring idea of a “riot”.

The boy trailed off into silence. Relieved clapping emerged from the crowd. Jimmy clapped too, weightily. “Drinks are on me,” he smiled.

My classmate used the hubbub to slip away to his actual friends. Good for him. He was barely more interesting than Jimmy anyway.

The leaves scattered as I dragged my sneakers across the litter, hauling myself over to the line that had formed from the crowd, coating the heels with mud. I hadn’t really drunk before. To be honest, given how “riotous” the party was, I didn’t really want to. Home was looking real good right now. I wondered if it’d seem like copping out to turn down the offer.

Before I could make up my mind, a can was jabbed in my direction.

Jimmy and I stared at each other awkwardly.

"I, uh -"

Eyes glared into mine from between the greasy strands of his bangs. They glowed with the sunset, dyed a deep orange, flowing with a wavering, shifting surface of flame. Sparks spun and danced, swirling trails into his irises. But as the flames parted all I could see underneath was dark. In contrast to his boyish smirk those eyes betrayed no kindness towards me. Only cruel amusement.

He stared down at my arms, stiffly encased in my jacket.

“Wussy, huh?” Jimmy laughed. The sparks circled me.

I chuckled uncomfortably. Extracting my arms out of the parka, I plucked the can from his hands.

I didn’t want to hang around him again.

* * *

The sun had truly set now. Someone had lit a fire in one of the rusted oil drums. It smelled rank. The clearing became saturated with laughter which boiled, diffused out over the trees.

I had tried the beer a little while ago, but – barely managed to hold back a grimace. It was warm. And frankly tasted like piss. The can had only grown warmer in my hands, I wasn’t going to try it again.

Jimmy sat in centre of a circle of rotten school-chairs that had sprung up around him. That laddish grin never left his face as he fed out scraps of appreciation to each of his admirers.

I cursed my stupidity for not talking to my classmate. I could’ve at least pretended to care and then I’d have had somebody to stand with who didn’t creep me out. Every other group was just too tight.

I wanted to go home. I really wanted to now. But as I had trudged around looking for a place to stay I could feel as eyes flicked over to me, conspicuous and alone. I was “wussy”. I’d had to go back to the middle of the glade.

The haze of spirits was stronger here. More bottles lay empty in the mud. The boys leaned in, commanded fully by Jimmy’s attention, eagerly offering up questions.

“What school was it you went to?” one asked.

“Brighton Boy’s Private. Too stuffy.”

“Got any girlfriends?”

He laughed. “More than you, Jacob.”

“Was it true- you bashed that guy’s head in?”

I felt my stomach drop. There was a dead pause. Not quiet – there was still chattering and the sadistic crackling of the flames – but from Jimmy, murderous.

Jimmy chuckled, sharply.

“Well, what’s to say everything was my fault? It’s in the past.”

“So you did it, then?”

Jimmy stayed silent.

No-one in the circle spoke as he tossed the mobile in his hands, testing us. The following question sat unspoken in the air. It grew heavier with each thwap of the phone hitting his palms. Please, don’t say it.

“What else?”

My stomach turned.

Jimmy grinned. They had invited in the spell.

Sins poured from his mouth. Tales of smashed windows, defiled property, past conquests. Never caught. Never paid for.

The flames jumped through the air as he acted out terrible heresies, conjuring images of his deeds as he slashed the air with his hands. The thumping of my own heart provided a drumbeat to the ritual. His charisma bewitched them. He was strong, beholden to no-one. He knew exactly what they wanted to hear and played into it until they were all stolen, taken in by his witchcraft. Hypnotised by the alcohol and adoration they couldn’t help but fall under his spell.

The crowd had grown larger. My classmate was here too now. I gripped the rim of the seat in front of me, like it would anchor me to reality. This wasn’t like us. We were meant to be normal. None of this was a joke.

The tale continued on and the heat melted the pack into a single mass, roaring, sickly orange in the firelight. All under Jimmy’s control. Slouching in his chair he observed it, a smirk growing on his face.

He stopped gesturing with the cell phone now, dropping it gently to his knee.

The sparks whirled through the air and into his eyes. He didn’t have a beer, only the phone. Foreboding weighed down so hard in my stomach that I flinched from the pain. I wanted to scream, warn everyone what was going to happen, but fumes filled my nose and throat and choked down the words.

Jimmy held up a finger to his lips, drawn in a wolfish grin.

“Just watch.”

The mass hushed in anticipation, snickering, as he dialled. Three numbers.  

A female voice crackled onto the line. “Hello, what is your emergency?”

“An- an ambulance,” he gasped.

The forest blurred away. I couldn’t hear anything anymore. The only thing in focus was my brain, screaming at me to stop this as the conversation moving in slow motion around me. But my body wouldn’t move.

Snickering rolled through the glade and pushed through the haze.

“You know, I’m sick of kids like you. Someone could have died. Someone is dying right now.”

“Someone could have died,” he mocked, laughing, the pack laughing with him. “Someone is dying right now,”

“I hope one day you understand how much your actions hurt others,” the voice snarled as it transformed into the beep of a hung-up call.

There was a rush of raucous cackling. It ripped through the night sky, stabbing through the madness. We were all just boys again. The magic was broken. I could do something.

He was just a boy. I could do something.

I levered myself against the chair. I stood up straight. I forced myself to stare at the witch and boy sitting across from me.

��You’re a horrible person, Jimmy.”

Jimmy simply laughed. The sparks in his eyes taunted me, goading me to try anything to stop him.

I whipped my eyes across the crowd. Where was my classmate? Blinded by the firelight I could barely make out any faces. Boys in the same clothes with the same face laughed and laughed and egged each other on, blurring together through my tears. Why couldn’t I recognise him? Why was it that I couldn’t name a single one of them?

Suddenly I was aware that no-one was looking at me. No-one even noticed me. The harsh truth of it crumpled my insides until I could barely breathe.

I turned and ran away.

That mocking laughter hounded me as I dashed back through the woods, away from the fires and boys that had tonight become terrifyingly beyond me.

If only I had tried.

comments:

calling it “Sabbath” is on the nose, the metaphor is already evident from the content and/or the metaphor is unnecessary (my note: I didn’t actually want to call it “Sabbath”; I just didn’t have any other ideas. originally jimmy had more wolf imagery/language associated with him, but i had trouble taking the metaphor very far. i also thought it was Ironic, for a toxic masculine peer pressure teenage boy to be described as a witch, but i’m not sure i got the machismo across well…)

the prose needs to be tighter

jimmy needs to be given the chance to speak in his own voice, to make him come across as more threatening, and to allow him to be his own character (links into the above)

the “he only had the phone” paragraph was the best bit

monologue

i did one of these. it was not submitted. we will not speak of it.

poetry – transmutation (7/5/18) cw: body horror, blood, etc.

might as well just rename it gertrauda! mili’s new album had come out recently (~2 weeks beforehand) and i’d spent the whole time playing the song (an acapella arrangement of carol of the bells) on repeat. i was also very stressed! in general!

influenced by mili’s aesthetic in general, but namely gertrauda, ga1ahad and mirror mirror. the heart imagery was taken from the millennium mother album trailer, where a human heart was used to represent it. i did NOT like poetry, but the alternative (a monologue) was conceptually too difficult to do well. this got a higher mark than jimbo. i thought it was kind of on the nose!

poem

my heart beats a sickly rhythm

each throb pumping the arteries

with bubbling potion that fuels my body, flowing through the flesh

levers and pulleys, a soundless organ

 the skin contains me

a rotting sack to protect me, my mechanism

from the world outside, my true self too weak for it

how long can I keep living

this way?

 no,

why

am I living this way?

 the thought like a knife

stabs through the film of pus and pores through oily skin

a cut.

an obvious puncture

 i can’t let anyone see

the world

(pistons pump out of tempo)

 licks hot rotten on fleshy wound.

i’m fine

 but the smog floods in

it poisons corrupts poisoned

my skin is leaking ink pouring black blood

the flesh melted dark rotten

bones grinding down to a pulp

running too fast the veins the pistons

flesh writhing against the bag of skin embracing it against it

transmuting transforming being consumed consuming

 the heart bursts

disintegrating

only the skin is

left

a husk

piled on the floor

 I know.

I can’t

ever

be free.

comments:

enjambment could’ve been used more / earlier

get rid of punctuation, it holds up the flow

repetition of “living this way” is effective

dislikes the “the flesh … pulp” segment, feels a bit done before

polarity/repeats of the transmuting segment are effective

non-fiction

contained descriptions of the exact town in hungary my family lived; for privacy I won’t be posting it. it got the highest mark, but i wasn’t satisfied with the level of nuance

in general i think the marking for this subject was lenient! i did decently, though.

[eddiejpoplar]

First Drive: 2019 Audi A6

DUORO VALLEY, PORTUGAL — When I was first given the assignment to attend the Audi A6 press launch, I was feeling more than a little cynical, paradisiacal location notwithstanding. (Seriously, globetrotters, you need to put Porto, Portugal on your bucket list. It’s movie-set Europe come to life.) There was a time when the A6 was one of Audi’s best sellers, but for the last couple of years it’s been gathering cobwebs. I knew Audi had great things planned for the 2019 A6, but however good it might prove to be—and it turned out to be quite good—it would still lack the prestige of the A8, the practicality of the A4, the appeal of the A5, and the raw sexiness of the A7. The A6 would always be a large-ish luxury sedan, and in today’s market, large-ish luxury sedans are on the outs.

So my hopes for the A6 weren’t high and yet, as you can probably guess from this insufferably long setup, I found myself mysteriously won over, even if I didn’t quite understand the attraction.

Let’s back up and cover the preliminaries: The A6 is all-new for 2019, though the pattern is relatively unchanged. The new A6 is roughly the same size as the old one on the outside, but slightly larger on the inside and bears a stiffer structure. Styling-wise, there are no big surprises, except perhaps for the big ugly radar sensors that interrupt the chrome lines of the grille and the fake exhaust ports out back. (Seriously, Audi? Fake exhaust ports? You had to go there?)

On the powertrain side, the 2.0-liter turbo-four has been dropped, though Audi hints that it may return, possibly with a hybrid drivetrain. When US-market A6s go on sale this fall, all will get the familiar 3.0-liter turbocharged V-6 plus a standard “mild hybrid” system. Horsepower is unchanged at 340, but the 369 lb-ft of torque represents a noteworthy 44 lb-ft increase. A seven-speed twin-clutch automatic transmission replaces last year’s eight-speed conventional automatic, and Quattro all-wheel-drive distributes power all four corners.

The delightfully twisty and distressingly narrow roads around Portugal’s Duoro Valley proved to be a good place to test out the A6’s agility. The V-6 had no problem with the steep hills; after the obligatory pause for the turbo to wake up, the engine delivers a broad brand of largely silent thrust. Upshifts and downshifts are prompt and smooth, even at take-off—so much so that I had to double-check the spec sheet to verify that this was, indeed, a twin-clutch transmission and not a traditional torque-converter automatic.

Steering is nearly one-finger light and doesn’t get much heavier when Dynamic driving mode is selected. If I was writing this review five years ago—which, I suppose, would require a time machine—I would have dinged the A6 for that, but the older I get, the more I appreciate light steering. Feedback isn’t a strong suit, but as I tossed the A6 through the near-constant string of bends, I felt like I was in perfect control. I was also grinning like the proverbial idiot.

Audi only had German-spec cars for us to drive, though they tried their best to keep them as close to US-spec as possible. One place where they failed was the suspension: They teased us with both air- and steel-sprung cars, though the air suspension reportedly won’t make it to the US. I am a huge fan of air springs, as they provide the best possible mix of comfort and handling, but after sampling both setups on the same roads, I can honestly say we aren’t missing out on much. The air suspension did a slightly better job of damping out small bumps and seemed to transmit less road noise into the cabin, but handling was pretty darn near a toss-up.

Speaking of road noise, that’s another big change for the A6: It’s incredibly quiet on the open road. Part of that is down to the lightweight hybrid system, which allows the engine to shut down for a few minutes at a time at highway speeds. I never noticed the tach dropping to zero, but I may have been too busy marveling at the scenery with my drive partner. Still, even with the engine online, the A6 is as quiet as a Buick, thanks largely to double-pane glass and improved door seals that block out wind and road noise.

I’ve yet to touch on what may be the biggest news in A6-land: A tech package to beat the band. The 2019 A6 will (finally!) offer Audi’s Virtual Cockpit as an option. VC is a wide-screen dash panel that, among other tricks, allows you to shrink the gauges and display a full-width moving map with Google Earth imagery. This remains the coolest dashboard I have ever seen.

I’m not quite so enamored of the new Multimedia Interface (MMI), also found in the 2019 A7 and 2019 A8. It uses two touch-screen monitors, a 10.1” panel up top and an 8.6” screen below for the climate controls. (Low-end A6s will get a slightly smaller screen up top.) This is Audi’s first touch-screen display, and it responds to touches with haptic feedback (a slight vibration of the screen) along with a muted click from the speakers. Basic navigation functions are no more complex than any other German car; one nifty addition is that you can write out letters or even entire words on the lower screen (say, for programming a destination), as you used to do on the Audi’s old touch-pad.

But aside from its use as a writing tablet, I’m less fond of the lower climate-control screen. I must interject that I think the new A4 and A5’s climate controls—which use dials for the temperature, metal toggle switches, and monochrome display icons that enlarges as your fingers get near the buttons—are the pinnacle of perfection. The A6’s touch panel requires a long glance away from the steering wheel to find the right spot, and while it’s supposed to let you tap or swipe to change temperature or fan speed, it’s way more finicky than it ought to be.

It also adds additional layers of complexity. Let’s say you want to fiddle with the rear A/C. First, press one of the icons on the lower screen, which brings up a menu on the upper screen. Next, press “REAR”, which brings up the rear A/C controls on the lower screen. Now you can make all the adjustments you want, but you also need to manually close the menu on the upper screen. And if you think my explanation is needlessly complex, try using it while darting down narrow, curvy roads and dodging oncoming Renault panel vans driven by young men more interested in their phones than avoiding head-on collisions.

Audi has a great system in the A4, so why make it more complex? Audi’s answer is that they expect most buyers to use their voice-response system, not just for the A/C but for all secondary controls. At one staffer’s urging, I tried pressing the voice button and saying “I’m cold”—but instead of turning up the heater as he expected, it attempted to give me directions to the nearest courthouse.

That said, the plethora of screens all go dark when the car is shut off, and the effect is exceptionally cool. This brings me to another nifty A6 feature: The ambient lighting package, which includes light-piping on the doors and center console and a backlit Quattro badge on the passenger’s side of the dash. The colors can be changed, and if you select Dynamic mode, the lights on the center console go red or blue as you turn the temperature up or down—a feature almost cool enough to make me want to use the A6’s overly-complex A/C controls.

As a guy who spent years writing for car-consumer pubs, I always liked the old A6’s value-for-money equation. Audi hasn’t announced pricing, but they did tell us that the A6 will get genuine leather upholstery as standard (as opposed to the leatherette used in entry-level Bimmers and Benzes) as well as a panoramic sunroof. It’s early days for speculation, but I’d be surprised if the A6 doesn’t undercut similarly-equipped 5s and E-Classes by a significant margin.

That said, I don’t expect the A6 to be a particularly strong seller. SUVs are where the action is, and Audi buyers seem perfectly content to spend the extra dough for the similarly-sized and significantly sexier A7. If the expected gas-price Armageddon comes to fruition, it’s likely the strong-selling Q5 and A5 Sportback will be the beneficiaries. The 2019 Audi A6 is a car whose time, in the US at least, has come and gone. Still, this new version is compelling enough to make me care about it—and considering how little I expected when I first set out on this adventure, that’s saying a lot.

2019 Audi A6 Specifications

ON SALE Fall 2018 PRICE $56,000 (est) ENGINE 3.0L turbocharged DOHC 24-valve V-6/340 hp@5,000-6,400 RPM, 368.8 lb-ft@1,370-4,500 RPM TRANSMISSION 7-speed automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE N/A L x W x H 194.4 x 74.2 x 57.3 in WHEELBASE 115.1 in WEIGHT 3880 lb 0-60 MPH 5.1 sec (est) TOP SPEED 155 MPH

IFTTT

[domain-of-friendship-blog]

02: Seeing Stars

The first thing Sunset Shimmer noticed as she awoke was the dull ache that seemed to permeate every muscle in her body. Flat on her back and eyes still closed, she wrestled with her frazzled brain to take stock of the situation.

A cool breeze blowing by and the texture of earth beneath her suggested she was very likely outside. With a grunt of effort, Sunset propped herself up on her elbows and opened her eyes, which spent several seconds focusing in the dim light. A cursory glance around revealed that it was night, briefly giving her pause to wonder how long she had been unconscious after getting dragged into the portal.

The portal...

She shuddered as the memories came flooding back all at once. It happened so quickly, too quickly for her to process, and thinking about it was making her already aching head hurt even more. What made it go berserk like that? Why didn't it send her to Equestria like usual? Where were -

"Twilight!" Sunset scrambled to her feet, blood going cold as the realization hit her. "Rarity! Pinkie! Applejack!"

Her cries were met with silence.

Sunset's mind raced. If she was alive, the rest of them must be too, right? Granted, that was assuming this wasn't some sort of afterlife, but she certainly felt alive if the soreness was anything to go by; it felt like she had run a marathon right after bench-pressing twice her weight.

In an effort to stay calm, she distracted herself with taking a moment to properly examine her surroundings. She had awoken in what looked like a small impact crater several feet wide, loose dirt scattered about its edge. Beyond it was a field of tall grasses stretching as far as the dim light let her see, interspersed with the occasional cluster of trees. High above, set in a sky dotted with stars, an object that looked something like a glowing white ring cast a gentle light over the landscape. In one direction, she could just barely make out the outline of a jagged mountain range on the horizon; in the other sat a plain dirt road on which tire tracks were visible.

A road! Her heart leapt - that meant this place was inhabited! With any luck, she could find a way to get the locals to help her find her friends, assuming they had a way to communicate; it seemed unlikely she would be able to just talk to them. Perhaps Fluttershy's ability would help? Assuming Sunset could find her, that is...

She shivered suddenly, her train of thought derailed as the strangest sensation struck her. It was subtle but still distracting, like the fusion of a pinched nerve and a spine chill, causing her mind to concoct the image of a bug carrying an ice cube up her back.

Before she could deduce the origin of the sensation, however, it faded just in time for her to catch a glimpse of headlights from an oncoming car somewhere down the road. Her heart skipped a beat - should she hide? Wave to get the driver's attention? Hold her ground and wait to see what happens?

The car slowed to a stop on the far side of the road, giving her a better look at it - it reminded her of military vehicles she had seen in documentaries of an old war from over half a century ago, but it bore no obvious insignia. A moment passed before the door opened, a humanoid figure barely visible within.

Sunset stood still, watching the figure suspiciously. Even as they leaned out of the door, only their outline was visible in the shadow of the car; despite this, she could easily tell they were paying her rapt attention. The figure hesitated for several seconds before fiddling with a small object in their hands: a flashlight, judging by the audible click and the beam of light now aimed directly at her.

Sunset squinted at the sudden brightness, shielding her eyes with her hand. "You want to point that somewhere else, maybe?"

The figure lowered the flashlight beam... and spoke.

"Well, I dunno what I expected, but I don't think this was it."

The figure climbed the rest of the way out of the car and approached slowly, finally giving Sunset a better look at him. He stood marginally taller than her, with dark hair, light skin, and a strange-looking scar covering his cheek, but what stood out the most was his outfit: a tunic of medieval-looking armor covered in metal scales, with accompanying gloves, boots, and even a cape. It contrasted rather bizarrely with the car behind him, giving her the impression that he had just left some sort of Middle Ages reenactment.

Sunset shook her head to get her thoughts back on track. "Expected from what?"

"A red light visible from the next town over just shot out of the mountains and landed... well, probably about here," the man explained, gesturing at the shallow crater in which Sunset now stood. "Wouldn't have guessed it was gonna turn out to be a teenage girl with furry ears and weird clothes. That's a new one on me," he added with a smirk.

"Furry - ? Wait..."

Sunset reflexively reached atop her head, where sure enough, her pony ears sat proud and true. A quick check over her shoulder confirmed that her hair was now past knee-length, tied at the end in a cute little ponytail. "But... how did I pony up while I was out cold? I didn't know that was possible... and how has it not worn off yet...?"

"Uh. 'Pony up'?" the man echoed. "Yeah, I feel like I'm missing some context here."

Sunset gave an impatient huff. "Sorry, I don't have time to explain. My name is Sunset Shimmer, and I need to find my friends as quickly as possible. Have you seen anyone else around here?"

"Uh... right." The man stared a moment longer as if to process this. "Alexander Abrams. Call me 'Tank' though; it's easier." He put a hand on his hip and leaned slightly. "As for your question, there's no one out here at the moment but us as far as I'm aware. Are there supposed to be more of you?"

Sunset sighed. "Yeah... yeah, there are. I guess I should've figured the portal would separate us just to make things more difficult..."

"Wait, so you did come through the portal?" Tank's eyes widened as he glanced backward. "You know, if that's true..."

"I mean, more accurately we got pulled through it against our will, but yeah." Sunset leaned to one side, looking over Tank's shoulder suspiciously. "Does that mean something to you?"

Tank turned back to face her and jerked his thumb at the car. "It means I know someone who just might be able to help you, if you'll trust me."

Sunset hesitated. Could she trust him? It didn't take long for her to recall a way to know for sure. "Take off your glove and give me your hand for a minute."

Tank looked perplexed for several seconds, but shrugged as he pulled off one of his gloves and held out his hand toward Sunset, who stepped forward to take it in hers with no particular ceremony. As she did, her eyes took on a magical white glow.

"..."

The spell lasted for only a moment, but it was all Sunset needed. Satisfied, she let go of Tank's hand. "Well, it doesn't seem like you have any ulterior motives, so I guess it's safe enough to believe you."

"Uh." Tank scratched at his scarred cheek with his ungloved hand. "So was that a spell just now, or what? What did it even do?"

"Oh, not much." Sunset crossed her arms. "Although now I know that you're talking about a girl named Penny Richter and her uncle Darian Mobius who work at a research facility called Event Horizon specializing in portal study and extradimensional theory that's about an eight-hour drive from here, but you don't really mind because you were on your way back to your home town anyway to visit your folks and say hi to an old friend, and this place is only a short detour."

For several seconds, all Tank could do was stare incredulously at the bizarre girl before him. "...Uhh?"

"My magic lets me read people's memories," Sunset explained. "It's pretty handy for knowing when they're telling the truth."

"...Huh." Tank continued looking entirely unsure of how to react. "Okay, so. 'Sunset,' was it?"

"Yeah?"

"Let me be real with you for a minute here. This whole thing is pretty compelling so far, but I'm still not totally convinced it's not some kind of prank." He scratched at his scar again. "That said? Whether this 'mind reading' thing of yours..." He wiggled his fingers to emphasize the point. "...is real or fake? It was pretty impressive either way. Like, credit where it's due and all."

Sunset smirked, chuckling to herself. "Well, the honesty's nice, at least. Reminds me of - !"

Stopping mid-sentence, Sunset's heart tripped on a beat as a familiar tingling-chilling sensation struck her... and this time, she knew instinctively what it meant.

"Uh. You feeling alright there?" Tank quirked an eyebrow. "I'm no expert on alien teenager biology, so..."

Sunset's voice was barely above a whisper. "We're being watched."

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

[devils-gatemedia]

Not only is it the weekend, it’s a bank holiday weekend. It’s also pay-day weekend, and there’s only one band to provide the soundtrack for the impending chaos – Hayseed Dixie. Tonight’s gig took place in the band’s “favourite venue in the world” (as declared on the official Hayseed Dixie facebook page). The same venue that I saw Dolph Lundgren in Masters Of The Universe when it was a multiplex! 

Taking to the stage in front of a paltry amount of people made no difference to French power trio Datcha Mandala. One they plugged in, they could’ve been playing in front of a full room for all they cared. It’s been a long time since I caught a live band that looked so joyous at being on stage in front of an audience totally unfamiliar with them. Singer and bassist extraordinaire, Nicolas Sauvey, is a whirlwind as he spins around the stage during the short set. Even when he’s singing, he’s restless, never restricted by having to stand still in front of the mic stand. He ends the set on his knees, singing and battering the hell out of his bass, as the mic stand gets lower and lower with every passing second. His compadre on guitar, Jeremy Saigne, is even more animated. He’s everywhere… on top of the monitors, on top of the drum kit. It’s dizzying watching the fella. They can play as well. A heavy, expansive mix of blues and psychedelic rock that goes down well with those that chose to bypass the bar. Sauvey has a fairly unique voice. Think of a young Geddy Lee during Rush’s formative years, and you won’t be too far off the mark. Very accomplished on the four strings, he also gets full marks for whipping out a harmonica on the stunning ‘Mojoy’. I loved it when he used the harmonica on the bass like a six stringer would use a bottleneck for some slide guitar action. What an incredible noise. Special mention must go to Romain Arnault, who was called into action when the band’s drummer fractured his wrist, ruling him out of the tour. Two weeks to learn the songs? Nailed it! Datcha Mandala have opened for acts such as Blues Pills and The Temperance Movement. Throw in some Zeppelin influences, and you have a starting point for what they sound like. I look forward to catching these guys again, that’s for sure.  

How can you not like a band that clears the drum riser, places down two hollowed out monitors and then puts two beer buckets inside? A Hayseed Dixie gig isn’t like any other gig though, it’s a congregation, a celebration of songs about “drinking, cheating, killing and hell”. Check your inhibitions at the door, and get a drink in your hand. Prepare to get wet as drinks are thrown in the air, and prepare to feel sorry for the guy who’s rather worse for the wear, getting carried out by his mates. It’s going to take more than a fry-up to cure that hangover in the morning! It’s all about having fun at a Hayseed Dixie gig. Where else can you hear Motörhead and Black Sabbath mixed with Michael Jackson and The Bangles… all played on the banjo…?

It was, of course, “A Hillbilly Tribute To AC/DC” that introduced Hayseed Dixie to the world in 2001, and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” opens the show in readiness for their headlining set, just 48 hours later, at this years Bon Fest in Kirriemuir, Bon Scott’s birthplace. Barley Scotch aka John Wheeler is in fine fettle as he launches into his sermon about how they realised so many years ago that “the “Lost Highway” of Hank Williams and the “Highway To Hell” of AC/DC were the same damned road”. Necking “white trash” prosecco from a paper cup, he is on good form as he tells the tale of how even after 17 years, his mother still tells him “It’s not too late to go back to school to be a lawyer…“. Cue a hilarious rant about lawyers. “Any lawyers in the audience? Go get a better job… deliver meals to old people, plant flowers by the road… anything.” The more alcohol that gets consumed, the more boisterous the crowd gets. The banjo intro to “Ace Of Spades” sets off a pit, well maybe ‘pit’ is the wrong description. How about a violent barn dance? There are four ladies enjoying a good old hoedown together, when some dude breaks the cardinal rule of never trying to split up ladies dancing. They don’t even speak to him, they just ignore him, rendering him impotent, as he does the walk of shame back to his baying mates. Dude, c’mon man, that’s one thats been handed down generation to generation!

All joking aside, Hayseed Dixie are accomplished players, the standard on display throughout the 90 minute set is staggering. Not only a master of the guitar and possessor of a fine voice, Wheeler also plays a mean fiddle. Banjo player Tim Carter, and bassist Jake Byers, could turn a wake into a raucous party, while mandolin player Joe Hymashy would probably miss the party as his probation was refused… again. His jokey persona on stage might be a mix of a park bench tramp and a BBC DJ from the 80’s, but behind the hairy façade, there is indeed an incredible musician, best highlighted during the intro to ‘Duelling Banjos’, where Wheeler snaps a string on his guitar. After uttering “Motherfucker“, he tells the other three to “play something” as he re-strings and re-tunes the guitar. Without missing a beat, the three other members launch into  an almighty jam that starts up the pit/violent barn dance again. Hymashy’s fingers are a blur as they fly across the strings during an incredible impromptu few moments. He also gets cries of laughter as he tries to play the mandolin with a wine bottle. Throughout Glasgow, dogs were howling in agony!

The latest album, ‘Free Your Mind And Your Grass Will Follow’ is a protest album of sorts. Wheeler shines on ‘Ain’t No Country Big Enough’, which allows him to get serious for a few moments. Travelling the world for 17 years, and meeting people from different races and backgrounds, has brought him experiences that so many of his countrymen will never have. Currently residing in Cambridge “for now, but we’ll see how that goes…“, Wheeler has an incredible way with his words, and the song has many thought-provoking and relevant lyrics. Do check it out for another aspect to the Hayseed Dixie sound.

The party came to an end in the same way that it started, with AC/DC. What else but ‘Highway To Hell’ could finish such a joyous evening? If you can go to a Hayseed Dixie gig and come away without a massive smile on your face, then you need to check your pulse. Either that, or you are a lawyer!

Hayseed Dixie are on tour throughout May, finishing off in Yorkshire on the 12th. They then head over to mainland Europe for more shows.

Review: Dave Stott

Images: Dave Jamieson

  Follow Hayseed Dixie on Facebook

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Review: Hayseed Dixie – ABC, Glasgow Not only is it the weekend, it’s a bank holiday weekend. It’s also pay-day weekend, and there's only one band to provide the soundtrack for the impending chaos - Hayseed Dixie.

[porchenclose10019]

Juggling with one hand: Leica M10 shooting experience

A slightly blurry jet-lagged elevator selfie, which - yes - I could have taken on an iPhone. At least I didn't add a fake film rebate...

Rangefinders are weird. The idea that superimposing a small ghostly image in the middle of a tunnel-type optical viewfinder is in any way superior to focusing with an SLR, (let alone using autofocus) is frankly bizarre, in this day and age.

In the digital world, a lot of people use the word 'rangefinder' rather lazily, to mean anything with a viewfinder positioned on the upper left of its back, but real rangefinders are uncommon. So uncommon, in fact, that Leica (the company which arguably perfected the technology) has made only ten substantially new cameras of this type since the mid 1950s.1

Grabbed quickly on my way back to my hotel on the new 35mm Summilux, this F2 snapshot isn't pin sharp but by the time I'd nailed focus, the dog had moved.

I've always had a soft spot for the M-series, but if I'm being honest, their appeal has always been at least as much romantic as practical. They're finely constructed, some of my favorite photographers used them, and they look beautiful. More so the film models, admittedly, but the M10 still retains a lot of the same aesthetic appeal as my all-time camera crush, the M6. Maybe I'm just shallow.

I also collect vinyl. Not because I believe it sounds better than CD or MP3 (it doesn't), but because I've always been a pops and crackles kind of guy, and when it comes down to it, I don't trust music that doesn't weigh something. If that makes me a hipster, I'll save you the bother of leaving a snarky comment and just admit it now.2

Speaking of music, I've heard it said that if you write a song on a banjo, and the song works, then it's probably a good song. The point of course being that because the banjo is so simple, and so limited an instrument compared to (say) the electric guitar, it forces the composer to focus on the essentials of structure and melody.

One of relatively few examples of successful zone focusing from my trip. I estimated subject distance at a little over 6 feet (one an a bit me's) and shot waist-level on the 35mm Summilux at F5.6 to give a small margin for focus error. 

I can't play the banjo, but I feel much the same way about shooting with a rangefinder, compared to (say) a modern DSLR. It's a substantially less versatile tool, which forces me to slow down and think more about the photographs I take (and what kind of photographs I take). A day of shooting with the M10 can be very rewarding for this reason, but it can also be hugely frustrating. I've been spoiled by zoom lenses, autofocus and multi-zone metering for the better part of 20 years. At this point, shooting with a rangefinder, even a relatively sophisticated digital rangefinder like the M10, can feel a bit like trying to juggle with only one hand, and frequently did, on this trip.

"Who needs autofocus when you've got zone focusing?"

'Who needs autofocus when you've got zone focusing?' That's a comment I just read on the Internet. Who needs autofocus, you ask? I do, apparently, judging by the miserable hit-rate I achieved during my first experiments with zone focusing. To my credit, I did get better, but accurately estimating distance by eye is tricky, and takes practice.

A less successful example of zone focus, also taken with the 35mm Summilux. I like this shot, and on film I'd probably call it acceptably sharp, but it's not sharp enough for a DPReview sample gallery. My distance estimate was a bit off (the wall behind my subject is where the plane of focus has ended up) and it looks like a touch of camera-shake has crept in, too. 

Here's a tip though - using their own height as a reference, most people can estimate distance roughly by imagining themselves lying down, and asking 'How many me's away is that person/thing?'

Try it now - it's OK, I'll wait.

See what I mean? Fortunately, I'm a simple, easy-to-visualize, boringly average, already-engraved-on-the-focus-ring 6ft in height, and that's about the right distance away for a lot of candid street portraits. Shooting in this way, I'd position the focus ring at 6ft, set a conservative aperture of around F5.6-8 to account for some slop, and bingo - things would usually end up more or less in focus.

Note my use of the word 'usually' and the term 'more or less'...

Nailed it. A successfully zone-focused F4 shot, taken in the same indoor market as the previous image. The small size and unobtrusive appearance of the M10 (once the ostentatious red dot has been taped over) tends not to draw much attention. 

The last time I shot with a rangefinder for any length of time I was using an M3, usually loaded with black and white film. Truly accurate focus didn't bother me much, back then. Aside from anything else, being a 3-dimensional medium, film is very forgiving of minor focus errors. Not so the perfectly flat sensors inside digital cameras. And let me tell you, 10 years' subsequent training as a professional pixel-peeper (try saying that when you've been moderating comments all day) is hard to shake. 

Working with the M10, one of the first things I had to get over was the learned fallacy that a shot is only worth keeping if the subject is exactly in focus. Maybe one day I'll be able to judge distance and framing with 100% accuracy when shooting from the waist, but I'm certainly not there yet. Until then, and for the sake of my own sanity, I'm trying to to concentrate a little more on caring a bit less. 

Small and discreet

The M10 is small and discreet enough that often, you can snap quick moments without getting in anyone's way or attracting too much attention. But in order to do this, you've got to be quick. You can't standing there dumbly for ages like a second-rate living statue, fiddling with focus or exposure with the camera to your eye, or fretting over exact framing.

Often during my shooting, if the light was reasonably consistent I'd check accurate exposure using the built-in meter from time to time, but keep aperture, shutter speed and ISO locked. At this point, with the lens set to the hyperfocal distance for whatever aperture, taking a picture became a simple matter of raising the camera to my eye, and pressing the button. 

One thing I've greatly enjoyed doing with the M10 is shooting with some classic lenses. This F4 portrait of my friend and frequent tour-guide Emi was shot on my 1950s Nikon 5cm F1.4 S.C., (still my all-time best junk shop find). While it's not in the same league as more modern optical designs, it's lovely for portraits. Just be aware of curvature of field...

The transition to pre-setting exposure and focus wasn't natural, (I'm a control freak, I suppose), but I found shooting like this with a 28mm Elmarit at F8, and either focusing hyperfocally or guestimating focus using the 'how many me's?' method to be quite freeing. It certainly made me much more agile.

In fact, sacrilegious as this might sound to some readers, I think that the M10 is at its best when used essentially as a point and shoot camera - for street photography at any rate.  

Taken at F8 (possibly F11...) on the 28mm F2.8 Elmarit, this shot is one of a sequence of images taken at the lens's hyperfocal distance. Used in this way, the M10 basically becomes a point-and-shoot camera. 

Speaking of 28mm, while I'm normally more of a 35mm fan, I found myself reaching into my bag for the wideangle frequently when shooting with the M10. Partly for the luxury of a bit more depth of field when shooting street scenes, and partly because I enjoyed being able to live inside the entire area of the M10's viewfinder. Although slightly improved compared to the Typ 240, it's still hard to see all four of the the 28mm framelines in a single glance, but given that the finder itself covers roughly a 28mm field of view, for the most part you can just ignore the framelines completely.

Another hyperfocal shot taken with the Elmarit 28mm, I waited as this group of people descended the staircase, and took a series of images. This one is my favorite. 

When the M10 is used like this, photography becomes a very immersive experience. The finder is brighter and more natural than an SLR's ground-glass projection, and much more immediate than even the best electronic viewfinder. The 28mm F2.8 Elmarit is tiny, too, and without a hood attached, it does not occlude the finder. Even the premium 35mm F1.4 Summilux is a small lens by DSLR standards. Having that kind of quality in a compact, unobtrusive full-frame package happens to be one of the few unequivocal arguments in favor of rangefinder cameras in the 21st Century, and one that is made loudly (and justifiably) by Leica fans today.

One of the reasons I enjoyed shooting with the M10 so much when traveling is that I'm getting old, and I really don't like having a lot of weight hanging around my neck when I'm out and about. I walked almost 70 miles in 3 days in Tokyo and Kyoto, and that would have been miserable with a full-frame DSLR and equivalent lens outfit. My back hurts enough already.

Some observations:

When I was in Kyoto, the M10 got pretty soaked, repeatedly, and continued to work perfectly. Your experience may vary.

Battery life is fine. It's not something you need to worry about. You can easily get 500 shots on a single charge if you're not using live view all the time.

Connecting a Leica rangefinder to my phone to view and upload images felt very odd, somehow, but worked well enough.

If nothing else, I sincerely wish the M10 had some kind of horizon level guide. I swear I have one leg longer than the other.

The M10's long startup time had less practical effect on my photography than I expected, but I did miss a few shots.

Aspherics aren't everything. The Minolta M-Rokkor 40mm F2 is a superb little lens, if you can live with the inaccurate frame-lines in the M10's viewfinder.

Someone commented on my gallery of samples recently to the effect that 'in Japan you can't miss', but I assure you, you can miss. And I know that because I did miss - a lot.

Several times I raised the M10 to my eye and tried to take a shot, forgetting the camera was turned off, and in the ~1.5 seconds it takes to power up, the scene had changed and the moment had passed. One day, it seemed as if I had the wrong lens mounted the entire day. Every time I switched lenses I'd see a shot that would have worked perfectly with the previous lens, and by the time I'd changed back, once again the moment had gone.

On a murky day in Kyoto3 I apparently forgot everything I'd ever learned about metering, and had to push each of my Raw files by at least +1EV in Lightroom to even see what it was I had tried to capture. A humbling experience, to say the least. 

Rangefinder focusing is tricky, but newer Leica lenses (like the 35mm F1.4 Summilux) have impressively little curvature of field. What this means in practical terms is that provided your subject doesn't move, it is possible - with practise - to focus and recompose, even at wide apertures. This portrait (which I've cropped a little) was shot in a moving train at F2.8.

Despite offering automatic exposure, live view and all the rest, the M10 doesn't make life easy for a photographer who's not used to rangefinder shooting. It definitely provides the smoothest operational experience of any digital M-series I've used to date (although our sample does have a habit of crashing from time to time during image review) but the simple fact of the matter is that as I said in the first sentence of this article, rangefinders are weird.

"I would have come back from Japan with more in-focus, correctly-framed shots had I traveled with a DSLR"

Off-center focusing is tricky (there's a reason why a lot of well-known shallow dof images captured on Leicas have their main subject positioned in the center of the frame) and when shooting using the optical finder, framing might charitably be described as 'approximate' 4. Off-the-curtain center-weighted metering takes some mastering, too.

Without question, I would have come back from Japan with more in-focus, correctly-framed shots had I traveled with a DSLR. I'm not afraid to admit it. But at the end of the day, would I have had as much fun? I doubt it - and I certainly wouldn't have thought as much about my process. 

1 I'm being pretty strict about omitting sub-variants in that total. The M6 spawned a bazillion special editions for example, most of which I can only assume still languish unused in dentists' safes, and given that it's essentially just a (slightly) modernised M3, I'm hesitant to call the fully-mechanical M-A a 'substantially new camera'. An argument could be made that the Monochroms deserve their own appellation but I'll leave that to the pedants to decide.

2 Although I would like to lobby for a general Internet policy whereby terms can only be used as insults when the thrower of the insult understands what the term means, and - ideally - when the term itself actually means something to start with. Who's with me?

3 This article was actually called 'The Kyoto Photo-call' for about five minutes, before Allison made me change it.

4 Personally, I find shooting with anything longer than 50mm on a rangefinder to be very frustrating, for this reason.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mn0Y8C

[rtawngs20815]

Juggling with one hand: Leica M10 shooting experience

A slightly blurry jet-lagged elevator selfie, which - yes - I could have taken on an iPhone. At least I didn't add a fake film rebate...

Rangefinders are weird. The idea that superimposing a small ghostly image in the middle of a tunnel-type optical viewfinder is in any way superior to focusing with an SLR, (let alone using autofocus) is frankly bizarre, in this day and age.

In the digital world, a lot of people use the word 'rangefinder' rather lazily, to mean anything with a viewfinder positioned on the upper left of its back, but real rangefinders are uncommon. So uncommon, in fact, that Leica (the company which arguably perfected the technology) has made only ten substantially new cameras of this type since the mid 1950s.1

Grabbed quickly on my way back to my hotel on the new 35mm Summilux, this F2 snapshot isn't pin sharp but by the time I'd nailed focus, the dog had moved.

I've always had a soft spot for the M-series, but if I'm being honest, their appeal has always been at least as much romantic as practical. They're finely constructed, some of my favorite photographers used them, and they look beautiful. More so the film models, admittedly, but the M10 still retains a lot of the same aesthetic appeal as my all-time camera crush, the M6. Maybe I'm just shallow.

I also collect vinyl. Not because I believe it sounds better than CD or MP3 (it doesn't), but because I've always been a pops and crackles kind of guy, and when it comes down to it, I don't trust music that doesn't weigh something. If that makes me a hipster, I'll save you the bother of leaving a snarky comment and just admit it now.2

Speaking of music, I've heard it said that if you write a song on a banjo, and the song works, then it's probably a good song. The point of course being that because the banjo is so simple, and so limited an instrument compared to (say) the electric guitar, it forces the composer to focus on the essentials of structure and melody.

One of relatively few examples of successful zone focusing from my trip. I estimated subject distance at a little over 6 feet (one an a bit me's) and shot waist-level on the 35mm Summilux at F5.6 to give a small margin for focus error. 

I can't play the banjo, but I feel much the same way about shooting with a rangefinder, compared to (say) a modern DSLR. It's a substantially less versatile tool, which forces me to slow down and think more about the photographs I take (and what kind of photographs I take). A day of shooting with the M10 can be very rewarding for this reason, but it can also be hugely frustrating. I've been spoiled by zoom lenses, autofocus and multi-zone metering for the better part of 20 years. At this point, shooting with a rangefinder, even a relatively sophisticated digital rangefinder like the M10, can feel a bit like trying to juggle with only one hand, and frequently did, on this trip.

"Who needs autofocus when you've got zone focusing?"

'Who needs autofocus when you've got zone focusing?' That's a comment I just read on the Internet. Who needs autofocus, you ask? I do, apparently, judging by the miserable hit-rate I achieved during my first experiments with zone focusing. To my credit, I did get better, but accurately estimating distance by eye is tricky, and takes practice.

A less successful example of zone focus, also taken with the 35mm Summilux. I like this shot, and on film I'd probably call it acceptably sharp, but it's not sharp enough for a DPReview sample gallery. My distance estimate was a bit off (the wall behind my subject is where the plane of focus has ended up) and it looks like a touch of camera-shake has crept in, too. 

Here's a tip though - using their own height as a reference, most people can estimate distance roughly by imagining themselves lying down, and asking 'How many me's away is that person/thing?'

Try it now - it's OK, I'll wait.

See what I mean? Fortunately, I'm a simple, easy-to-visualize, boringly average, already-engraved-on-the-focus-ring 6ft in height, and that's about the right distance away for a lot of candid street portraits. Shooting in this way, I'd position the focus ring at 6ft, set a conservative aperture of around F5.6-8 to account for some slop, and bingo - things would usually end up more or less in focus.

Note my use of the word 'usually' and the term 'more or less'...

Nailed it. A successfully zone-focused F4 shot, taken in the same indoor market as the previous image. The small size and unobtrusive appearance of the M10 (once the ostentatious red dot has been taped over) tends not to draw much attention. 

The last time I shot with a rangefinder for any length of time I was using an M3, usually loaded with black and white film. Truly accurate focus didn't bother me much, back then. Aside from anything else, being a 3-dimensional medium, film is very forgiving of minor focus errors. Not so the perfectly flat sensors inside digital cameras. And let me tell you, 10 years' subsequent training as a professional pixel-peeper (try saying that when you've been moderating comments all day) is hard to shake. 

Working with the M10, one of the first things I had to get over was the learned fallacy that a shot is only worth keeping if the subject is exactly in focus. Maybe one day I'll be able to judge distance and framing with 100% accuracy when shooting from the waist, but I'm certainly not there yet. Until then, and for the sake of my own sanity, I'm trying to to concentrate a little more on caring a bit less. 

Small and discreet

The M10 is small and discreet enough that often, you can snap quick moments without getting in anyone's way or attracting too much attention. But in order to do this, you've got to be quick. You can't standing there dumbly for ages like a second-rate living statue, fiddling with focus or exposure with the camera to your eye, or fretting over exact framing.

Often during my shooting, if the light was reasonably consistent I'd check accurate exposure using the built-in meter from time to time, but keep aperture, shutter speed and ISO locked. At this point, with the lens set to the hyperfocal distance for whatever aperture, taking a picture became a simple matter of raising the camera to my eye, and pressing the button. 

One thing I've greatly enjoyed doing with the M10 is shooting with some classic lenses. This F4 portrait of my friend and frequent tour-guide Emi was shot on my 1950s Nikon 5cm F1.4 S.C., (still my all-time best junk shop find). While it's not in the same league as more modern optical designs, it's lovely for portraits. Just be aware of curvature of field...

The transition to pre-setting exposure and focus wasn't natural, (I'm a control freak, I suppose), but I found shooting like this with a 28mm Elmarit at F8, and either focusing hyperfocally or guestimating focus using the 'how many me's?' method to be quite freeing. It certainly made me much more agile.

In fact, sacrilegious as this might sound to some readers, I think that the M10 is at its best when used essentially as a point and shoot camera - for street photography at any rate.  

Taken at F8 (possibly F11...) on the 28mm F2.8 Elmarit, this shot is one of a sequence of images taken at the lens's hyperfocal distance. Used in this way, the M10 basically becomes a point-and-shoot camera. 

Speaking of 28mm, while I'm normally more of a 35mm fan, I found myself reaching into my bag for the wideangle frequently when shooting with the M10. Partly for the luxury of a bit more depth of field when shooting street scenes, and partly because I enjoyed being able to live inside the entire area of the M10's viewfinder. Although slightly improved compared to the Typ 240, it's still hard to see all four of the the 28mm framelines in a single glance, but given that the finder itself covers roughly a 28mm field of view, for the most part you can just ignore the framelines completely.

Another hyperfocal shot taken with the Elmarit 28mm, I waited as this group of people descended the staircase, and took a series of images. This one is my favorite. 

When the M10 is used like this, photography becomes a very immersive experience. The finder is brighter and more natural than an SLR's ground-glass projection, and much more immediate than even the best electronic viewfinder. The 28mm F2.8 Elmarit is tiny, too, and without a hood attached, it does not occlude the finder. Even the premium 35mm F1.4 Summilux is a small lens by DSLR standards. Having that kind of quality in a compact, unobtrusive full-frame package happens to be one of the few unequivocal arguments in favor of rangefinder cameras in the 21st Century, and one that is made loudly (and justifiably) by Leica fans today.

One of the reasons I enjoyed shooting with the M10 so much when traveling is that I'm getting old, and I really don't like having a lot of weight hanging around my neck when I'm out and about. I walked almost 70 miles in 3 days in Tokyo and Kyoto, and that would have been miserable with a full-frame DSLR and equivalent lens outfit. My back hurts enough already.

Some observations:

When I was in Kyoto, the M10 got pretty soaked, repeatedly, and continued to work perfectly. Your experience may vary.

Battery life is fine. It's not something you need to worry about. You can easily get 500 shots on a single charge if you're not using live view all the time.

Connecting a Leica rangefinder to my phone to view and upload images felt very odd, somehow, but worked well enough.

If nothing else, I sincerely wish the M10 had some kind of horizon level guide. I swear I have one leg longer than the other.

The M10's long startup time had less practical effect on my photography than I expected, but I did miss a few shots.

Aspherics aren't everything. The Minolta M-Rokkor 40mm F2 is a superb little lens, if you can live with the inaccurate frame-lines in the M10's viewfinder.

Someone commented on my gallery of samples recently to the effect that 'in Japan you can't miss', but I assure you, you can miss. And I know that because I did miss - a lot.

Several times I raised the M10 to my eye and tried to take a shot, forgetting the camera was turned off, and in the ~1.5 seconds it takes to power up, the scene had changed and the moment had passed. One day, it seemed as if I had the wrong lens mounted the entire day. Every time I switched lenses I'd see a shot that would have worked perfectly with the previous lens, and by the time I'd changed back, once again the moment had gone.

On a murky day in Kyoto3 I apparently forgot everything I'd ever learned about metering, and had to push each of my Raw files by at least +1EV in Lightroom to even see what it was I had tried to capture. A humbling experience, to say the least. 

Rangefinder focusing is tricky, but newer Leica lenses (like the 35mm F1.4 Summilux) have impressively little curvature of field. What this means in practical terms is that provided your subject doesn't move, it is possible - with practise - to focus and recompose, even at wide apertures. This portrait (which I've cropped a little) was shot in a moving train at F2.8.

Despite offering automatic exposure, live view and all the rest, the M10 doesn't make life easy for a photographer who's not used to rangefinder shooting. It definitely provides the smoothest operational experience of any digital M-series I've used to date (although our sample does have a habit of crashing from time to time during image review) but the simple fact of the matter is that as I said in the first sentence of this article, rangefinders are weird.

"I would have come back from Japan with more in-focus, correctly-framed shots had I traveled with a DSLR"

Off-center focusing is tricky (there's a reason why a lot of well-known shallow dof images captured on Leicas have their main subject positioned in the center of the frame) and when shooting using the optical finder, framing might charitably be described as 'approximate' 4. Off-the-curtain center-weighted metering takes some mastering, too.

Without question, I would have come back from Japan with more in-focus, correctly-framed shots had I traveled with a DSLR. I'm not afraid to admit it. But at the end of the day, would I have had as much fun? I doubt it - and I certainly wouldn't have thought as much about my process. 

1 I'm being pretty strict about omitting sub-variants in that total. The M6 spawned a bazillion special editions for example, most of which I can only assume still languish unused in dentists' safes, and given that it's essentially just a (slightly) modernised M3, I'm hesitant to call the fully-mechanical M-A a 'substantially new camera'. An argument could be made that the Monochroms deserve their own appellation but I'll leave that to the pedants to decide.

2 Although I would like to lobby for a general Internet policy whereby terms can only be used as insults when the thrower of the insult understands what the term means, and - ideally - when the term itself actually means something to start with. Who's with me?

3 This article was actually called 'The Kyoto Photo-call' for about five minutes, before Allison made me change it.

4 Personally, I find shooting with anything longer than 50mm on a rangefinder to be very frustrating, for this reason.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2mn0Y8C