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ryunochie · 4 years ago

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RAY-MMD lighting tips: a translation by ryuu

The following tutorial is an English translation of the original one in Japanese by ngreeed. (WARNING: the website is NSFW)

Let’s get started? If you just landed on this tutorial for advanced MMDers and is wondering what the hell is going on, there are beginner Raycast tutorials in Learn MMD! Also, if you feel like reading more about rendering tips, I suggest taking a look at my other tutorial: advanced MMD rendering tutorial (and why you should care).

Content Index:

Introduction

Lighting: introduction

Lighting: basics

Fog

Other Tips

Final Notes

Introduction to Lighting Content Index:

Directional Light

Rectangle Light

Sphere Light

Point Light

Spot Light

Spot Light IES

Disk Light

Tube Light

Basics of Lighting Content Index:

Ambient

Shadow

Fog

IES

LED

IBL

GIF

Fog Content Index:

Atmospheric Fog

Ground Fog

Volumetric Cube And Sphere

1. INTRODUCTION

This compilation was brought together by the MMD community and contemplates ngreeed’s own experiences with fog and lighting usages. Every picture shown in this translation can be found in the original documentations on Iwara and GitHub.

It was translated from Japanese to English by ryuu with written permission from the author to share it on my blog and add information. The translation was done with the aid of the online translator DeepL and my friends’ help. This tutorial has no intention in replacing the original author’s.

2. LIGHTING: INTRODUCTION

By learning lighting, you’ll have more freedom in directing your videos, but it’s only for those who are confident that they understand how to use Ray-mmd, because it’s a pre-requisite and an additional part of understanding how to use skybox and materials. If you’re unsure about the other two items, start by reading this wiki.

Originally, surface lights in a 3DCG software are characterized by their ability to create soft shadows, but the surface lights used in Ray-MMD are very difficult to handle and don’t provide much benefit, so we recommend using point lights or directional lights.

Translator’s note: for those wondering what lights are available in Raycast, there’s a translation below of the wiki’s list.

2.1 Directional Light

Directional light simulates lighting hitting an object from an infinite distance. The angle of each ray reaching the object is negligible and the rays will always be parallel to each other, so it is also called sunlight.

Directional light doesn’t take into account the coordinates of the light source and won’t affect the lighting effect when placed in any position of the scene. Only the rotation will affect the lighting, because of the nature of directional light requires shading calculations for the whole scene.

Therefore its computational overhead is the largest among all multi-source shadows, and its shadow quality is only suitable for lighting characters at very high quality, which you may use when you want to attach a bone to the main light source.

2.2 Rectangle Light

The light source will shine from a plane towards a fixed range. It’s used to simulate monitors, screens, smartphones, etc.

Since the light source of the area light needs to consider the volume of the light source, the real calculation of its shadow in real time is very difficult to do. It’s recommended to use spot light shadow instead.

2.3 Sphere Light

The light is emitted from the location of the light source to the surrounding area and the volume of the light source is taken into account to illuminate all the objects within the range.

Since the light source of the area light needs to consider the volume of the light source, the real calculation of its shadow in real time is very difficult to do, so the point light source shadow is used instead.

2.4 Point Light

Light source from a point, uniformly emitting light to the surrounding area, all objects within the range of light.

The point light source needs to calculate the shadows of objects within the range and will lead to a large shadow calculation overhead, while its shadow quality isn’t suitable for character lighting.

2.5 Spot Light

Spotlight dosn’t take into account the volume of the light source from a point, in a fixed direction to a certain range of cone angle irradiation object. The brightness of the edges of the ball will gradually fade and the angle of the ball can be controlled by the (Angle +/-) morph.

It’s used to simulate lampshade, flashlight and a car high beam. The quality of shadows is the best of all light sources, so it’s very suitable for irradiating the character on the simulation of stage lighting.

2.6 Spot Light IES

Sampling IES textures simultaneously on the behavior of the spotlight.

IES defines the luminous flux of its light at different angles, so that certain areas will be brighter or darker, thus simulating light coming through certain places and shining around the scene.

2.7 Disk Light

The light source will be irradiated from a plane object towards a fixed range. It’s used to simulate light from afar, because the light source of the area light needs to consider the volume of the light source.

The calculation of its shadow in real time is very difficult to do, so use spotlight shadow instead.

2.8 Tube Light

Uniform illumination of the surrounding objects. It’s used to simulate the light source of a lamp, because the light source of the area light needs to consider its volume

The calculation of its shadow in real time is very difficult to do, so use a point light source shadow instead.

3. LIGHTING: BASICS

Before explaining the parameters, let's start with an explanation of how to use the Lighting folder.

In the Lighting folder of ray-mmd, there are 10 different .pmx's to load into the MMD and their respective folders. Basically, the MME of the light will assign the .pmx's in the Default (Ambient/LED/GIF/IBL) folder of the respective light folder to the light’s .fx. .....lightning.... .fx is assigned to the LightMap tab of MME, and ...fog... .fx is assigned to the FogMap tab of MME.

Translator’s note: a fog .fx can be assigned to LightMap, but it’ll produce only fog.

Once you know this, you can play around with the lights and learn what you can do with them.

This spreadsheet shows the parameters and .fx available for each light, along with a brief explanation. The explanation of the terms is pretty much a translation.

3.1 Ambient

Reference: twitter.com

Assign the .fx in the Default Ambient folder to the LightMap to create a light without reflections or highlights when a material with high parameters such as Specular is lit. It is good to use it when loading multiple lights.

DirectionalLight is located in the Default folder, not in the DefaultAmbient folder.

3.2 Shadow

There are four types of shadow: low, medium, high and very high. If you assign it, when light (or fog) hits the model, it won’t shine on the model beyond it. Rather than increasing the shadow, it’ll stop when the light hits the model. In other words, it isn’t attached to the initial light, the light will be brightened nonetheless.

Default spot light.

The same spot light with shadow (very high).

3.3 Fog

When fog is loaded, light streaks are created at the location of the light emitted by the light. There are also special parameters called MiePhase and MieDensity, but be aware that other parameters aren’t isolated. The godray may or may not be displayed depending on the angle and position of the camera. So be careful.

Godray representation using volumetric fog and disk light.

3.4 IES

Reference: unrealengine.com

Simply put, it’s a light which displays the distortion caused by the reflective surface of the lighting fixture, the shape of the bulb, and the lens effect.

It can express a light closer to the one you have at home than a straight spot light like the ones used on stage. You can think of it as basically spot light with just a little distortion in the shape of the light. A point light IES is also spot light.

3.5 LED

Reference: twitter.com

The light source itself is the same as rectangle light, but it can display AVI images or screen images.

In order to display images on the LED light source, load DummyScreen.x in the Extension folder and set the Background (B) in the upper left corner of MMD to ON mode. You can also load the background AVI and change the mode to display any image.

If you just want to display the image, you can set the material of your favorite model to material_screen, but you can use the LED as a light source for the image.

Translator’s note: in practice, it looks like this. In a more straight forward way to explain this, load the LED light and add main.fx to it. Then, load the dummy and select any AVI file or just enable the capture mode. The LED will start capturing the screen and emit light. You can play with the RBG sliders and all. I added a volumetric cube for the dark room effect and Sugiura-san for you to see how the panel behaves. Whenever there’s a change in the captured screen, the light behaves accordingly i.e. a red screen emits red light; a mostly white screen with green details emits white-ish.

3.6 IBL

This and the GIF sections were writen by the translator, ryuu, as the original author requested information about it.

IBL stands for Image Based Lighting, which is what Raycast does! The image is projected into a sphere and it samples the data to light the objects. All of the skyboxes we use have images in the .dds format for easier rendering.

According to the spreadsheet, the only light capable of using IBL is sphere. To activate it, head to the Default IBL folder instead of the default one that opens when loading light properties. You’ll notice the sphere reacts with weaker lighting, you have to increase the intensity.

The following images are color tests with sphere IBL. The most visible differences are in how RG and RBG react: they produce shades of red and yellow, then white and pink respectively.

Now with disabled IBL, this making the sphere another common light. The default is very strong compared to IBL, Zhao-san hand’s shadow is even huge on the door behind him.

The .dds used was the default one in the Default IBL folder. I haven’t experimented with a different one yet, plus I believe it isn’t any .dds image that’ll work there. If we follow the logic of how custom skydomes are created, a HDR image is needed and you have to “craft” them.

3.7 GIF

A rectangle light can load .gif images and project them on their light, Just load the .fx inside the Default GIF folder to activate it. The default GIF is the following. However, when loaded as light, it doesn’t animate and has some distortions on the edges.

For now, the only advantage I see in using a GIF light is to mimic a projector effect at the cinema. You can use custom images by renaming the default one to rance1 and the new one to rance.

The projection’s size depends on the rectangle’s, so a small rectangle will show a small GIF. Also, keep in mind that the projection is a mirror of the original image.

4. FOG

The fog can be used to create realistic perspective, smoke, and air, and it can also be used in conjunction with fog lights to change the atmosphere. It’s important to note that when the fog is loaded, it’s rarely displayed in Model Edit mode, so be sure to check it in Camera mode. In this case, you may need to tweak the model display order a little to get it to show up.

There are four types of fogs: atmospheric fog, ground fog, volumetric cube and volumetric sphere.

4.1 Atmospheric Fog

If you don't know what you're doing, but want to use a fog, just load this to get a sense of perspective (or rather, fading in the distance). So if you have a stage that extends far into the distance, you can use this to get a certain atmosphere.

Also, only the atmospheric fog has multiple fog maps, which can be found in the AtmosphericFog folder with a godray .fx file. You can apply godray to the lighting (sunlight) in MMD and, by assigning a fog map with ...without sky... .fx, you can disable the fog effect on the skybox.

You can also disable the fog effect for skyboxes by assigning a fog map with ...without sky.... .fx.

The number of parameters is overwhelming and difficult to adjust, but it may be easier if you think that the parameters with Mie are related to the lighting (sunlight) in MMD.

Without fog.

With atmospheric fog and changed density and range values. The farther away the image is, the lower the saturation and lightness become. The perspective is clearer. It’s rare to see much difference, but the atmosphere changes quite a bit with and without the atmospheric fog.

4.2 Ground Fog

When loaded, the fog is displayed based on the ground, and its color and height can be adjusted using morphs. The number of adjustable parameters is small, but if you adjust them, you can use it in the same way as the ground-based atmospheric fog.

Without ground fog.

With ground fog.

4.3 Volumetric Cube And Sphere

Unlike the other fogs, these two are only loaded and not applied to the entire room. At first, they only appear small at the foot of the screen and need to be resized to fit the room. By the way, they are basically the same, just round or square. The advantage is that it can be assigned to a limited space only.

Without light.

With light.

With light and volumetric fog. It might be good for a dusty atmosphere in a closed room.

5. OTHER TIPS

If you feel that your PC can't handle it, you can lower the shadow to low and get by.

The skybox time of day can be used as a second atmospheric fog which is easy to handle since it is built into the skybox. If you turn off EnvLightMap, Main and MaterialMap, it won't interfere with other skyboxes. It's pretty easy to use, but not for everyone.

Turn on Bokeh (DOF effect of Ray-MMD) and pull the MeasureMode morph of ray-controller to the right to bring the ray.x accessory into focus.

It's a good idea to set the SSAOMap of eyes and face to 0.

6. FINAL NOTES

Stages shown in this tutorial: P.T by G_Wuuuuu, warehouse by hiro K, skyscrapper by 化身バレッタ and abandoned city by NOB.

Models by SEGA.

I tried to keep the translation as faithful as possible to the original documentation. Thank you, ngreeed, for allowing me to share your tutorial with non-Japanese speakers.

Also, I absorbed many knowledge from this tutorial and rendered a new image using the improved technique. Only the sphere light had fog. The colors were applied after adjusting all the lights in their black and white counterpart. Retouched in GIMP.

#mmd #MMD Tutorial #MMDC #tutorial #mikuMikuDance #mikumikueffect #raycast #translation

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peopleeeater · 4 years ago

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🎭 smile 4 me is such a good fucking game. I wish more people knew and played it. Like that game feels so comforting and nice and it also somehow feels like a visual form of de-realization?

smile for me is SO SO GOOD and you are SO SO RIGHT. i'm surprised it's not more popular tbh,, it's short and sweet, it has a heavy topic revolving around the main ‘antagonist’ [habit and his struggles in an abusive home], PROPER LGBT REP THAT IS CASUAL INSTEAD OF CHARACTERS BEING STEREOTYPES OR INTENSELY FOCUSING ON THEIR SEXUALITY OR IDENTITY, a GODLY aesthetic, stunning art style, fun characters...

but activity and buzz seems to have fallen over these two years. what the hell happened? ik ppl move on and find different interests, but hey, undertale made it big in 2015 and still has an intensely lively fandom. sure, s4m isn't AS impactful, but my heart doesn't often latch this tightly onto some fictional green russian. the charm of the game is undeniable and it deserves so much more recognition.

... damn it, now i'm gonna ramble. read my bullshit about how i feel abt the visuals under the cut gh.

cw: mentions of derealization

first and foremost, as you mentioned, themes of derealization do in fact appear in this game. however, it only appears in that of visuals of what i assume you've gathered from derealization portrayed in aesthetics, which is correct. the heaviest it gets in this area is in the ending, upon approaching boris while under the influence of laughing gas; a world draped in dark, reality gently swimming into something more unsettling and disoriented... however, i'm quite the fan of it in all honesty. the concept itself of derealization might've been fun to actually explore in this game, but that's just in theory.

however, while this comes off as disturbing at most, it most definitely blankets you in this alluring feeling, drawing you further in. the mixed medias and types of imagery with 3D and 2D assets are genuinely genius, holding an immaculate vibe for this game and setting an atmosphere. what with the popularity of weirdcore and the desire to properly understand derealization nowadays, however, it's kinda hard for me to accept that this game isn't more popular. it'd fit the taste of many, i'm sure.

that's not even getting into the COLORING oh dearest lord o' MIGHTY. the consistency and limited palette the game uses sets up a beautiful pattern; the greens on jerafina's dress are the same as trevor's scarf; the same shade of red can be spotted across designs, that red being the one on parsley's suit, tiff's outfit, & both millie + lulia's features... etc etc etc. it doesn't overwhelm your eyes and creates an atmosphere you can settle in, thus establishing a familiar and comfortable tone to the habiticians. not only that but the colors themselves are so lovely and it's just?? god it's to die for.

the touches and features such as posters and minor to direct references to russian themes to allude to boris' background??? immaculate. speaking of boris, the fuckin DRAWINGS ARROUND THE HABITAT... cries and sobs and screams they're ADORABLE and so nice like what :((.... i adore them and love to imagine him working on those funky paintings on his own before opening the habitat, what with the acception of kamal or wallus being of some assistance on the occasion.

hhoooo boy.

i'm ramblin n ramblin. ty for the ask and ty for. bearing with me GSHDGS

#clownibask #🎭 anon #smile for me #sfm game #sfm #yeaahm #derealization mention

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thewildsophia · 5 years ago

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.Art Project. Clone High//Van Gogh x Reader

Van Gogh x Reader

Word Count: 2564

~~~~~~~~~~

No matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t get the thought of the tiny Dutch artist out of your head. You weren’t even sure what about him it was that caught your attention. Perhaps it was his orange hair that almost looks red in the right lighting, or maybe his pale skin that mirrored the white bandages that you know he changes everyday (you also loved how his face would blossom with this gorgeous shade of orange-pink when he was complimented), or maybe it was just his hands. Yeah that was it. His hands, petite and delicate, that could paint such beautiful, exquisite paintings that told of many different things.

God you felt like such a creep.

But you couldn’t help it. You were absolutely infatuated, -- no, that’s not quite right -- obsessed with him.

And the worst part about it all was that the two of you have barely had any real interactions with each other. The last time the two of you had really talked was when you were assigned an art project with him. It was a collaborative project where you two were given a piece of art and two canvases and you would paint half the artwork on each canvas using styles and colors that were different, but still complimented the other half.

You two had received the artwork The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, with you painting the man and Van Gogh painting the woman. You had used cooler colors -- blues, greens, grays and purples -- while Van Gogh used warmer ones -- reds, yellows, oranges and whites. You had focused most of the detail on the man, leaving the background somewhat barren with Van Gogh doing the opposite, focusing on the background and less on the woman.

It had actually turned out really well and the two of you had received a perfect grade, but what you liked the most about the whole thing was how much time you got to spend with him.

You worked with him for a whole week and when the deadline was coming up he invited you to his dorm to finish it. You actually found it quite funny how much his room looked like The Bedroom, but you weren’t surprised.

If you really thought about it, it was probably the second day when you started to become fascinated by him. The sketches had been completed and you two had just started painting. No matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t focus on your piece, intrigued by his painting. His strokes were quick, decisive, like he knew exactly what he wanted. It was difficult not to stare as he painted and you had barely gotten any work done that day. And he quickly picked up on your distracted state.

“Is something the matter?” God that voice sounded just perfect to you. It was deep, but not too deep, and somewhat raspy, like he had a slight cold. You could listen to that voice for hours.

“Y/N? Are you alright?” You remember him asking.

“Yeah.” You had answered, “I’ve just never seen you paint before. It’s beautiful.” After those words had left your mouth, that beautiful peach color blessed his pale skin and he looked away with a bashful smile.

“I-Thank you.” He had stuttered and it was probably the cutest thing you had ever heard. You wanted to get him to do that more often. After that the two of you continued to work on your project with the occasional chatter between you.

When the two of you had finished, you didn’t really talk to the other. You’d wave to each other in the hallways while transitioning classes or offer a quiet “Hey” when entering Painting II. What you did find a bit strange is that if you show up first, he’ll sit at the same table as you and vice-versa, and neither of you seemed to mind it.

Actually, it kind of worked to your advantage.

You really couldn’t help yourself and often found yourself drawing Van Gogh in your sketchbook, ranging from basic sketches to full on ink pieces (of course you’d ink them when you got back to your dorm). It’s actually gotten so bad lately that you now have completed paintings of him, whether it be acrylic, watercolor, oil, gouache, you name it and you probably have it.

You were actually about half way through painting another piece of him, although you didn’t like this one as much as some of the others since he looked a bit too feminine. While painting, you heard a knock at your dorm’s door. You quickly looked at the clock hanging on the wall opposite of a window.

“It’s almost 10pm, why the hell is someone coming up here?” You thought before getting up and looking out the peephole in your door only to be greeted with nothing. You grumbled to yourself while opening the door just to make sure no one left something for you.

Upon opening the door, you’re greeted with none other than the clone of Vincent Van Gogh himself, canvas and set of acrylics pinned at his side. You felt yourself straighten as you greeted him.

“Oh-Hey. It’s almost 10, are you alright? You need something?” You asked watching him shift his stance before answering,

“Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry for coming by so late, I just needed a bit of help with the portrait project and you’re the only person I really felt comfortable coming to.” He admitted, rubbing the back of his. You felt your heart stutter at hearing that.

“It’s alright, what did you need help with specifically?” You asked leaning onto the door frame.

“I’m having trouble with making a background that works with the subject.” He said. Weird. Backgrounds are usually his speciality. “Um, may I come in?” He asked. Your eyes widen slightly with realization of you forgetting to let him hit you.

“Of course! Sorry.” You apologized sheepishly, moving out of the way to let him in.

“It’s fine.” He said. You closed the door before quickly jogging over to your desk, grabbing the still wet painting and placing it against the wall opposite the door, facing towards said wall. You cleared a spot on your desk for him to place his things.

“Alright, let’s see what you got so far.” You said looking over his painting.

You talked to him for about 15 minutes about how he could improve what he currently had before you got up to grab you painting to show him what you had done.

“That’s Frida Kahlo, right? If I remember correctly she’s from Mexican descent, so I would use brighter colors like greens, pinks and yellows.” You said while rustling with the huge stack of paintings you had looking for it. “I had gotten Aaron Douglas, so I stuck with more desaturated colors and focused less on details and more on the silhouettes of the subjects.” Once grabbing the painting you returned to Van Gogh, placing the painting onto the desk next to his.

Only…That wasn’t the right painting.

Nope, instead it was one of Van Gogh, specifically the one of him you had finished a few weeks ago of him looking at himself in a full-body mirror while painting a self portrait. You grabbed the painting, pressing it against your chest the moment you realized it was the wrong one. You stared at him a moment before turning around and scrounging around in the pile again for the right painting.

“Y/N-” Van Gogh started, but you weren’t gonna let him finish.

“Just! Give me a second.” You said, searching a bit faster. God seemed to be against you that night because when you started to look for it faster the whole stack fell and, of course, with it came the majority of paintings you had made of him. And…the painting of Douglas.

You stood there a moment, feeling the sweat gather at your forehead and back of your neck. You grabbed the painting of Douglas before stacking all the other ones up. You turned back around, slowly walking back over to the desk and putting the right painting next to his.

“So, um, like I was saying earlier…” But your voice died in your throat when you heard him speak.

“Y/N.” He said firmly. You felt yourself swallow thickly before looking over at him. “Come with me.”

And you did. You really didn’t feel like arguing with him after what had just happened. He led you to his dorm room on the 3rd floor, unlocking it and gesturing for you to step in. You did before he closed the door and walked over to the corner of his room. He pulled out a bundle of canvas, separating them from each other.

“You know, for the longest time I felt like such a creep doing this so often, but after seeing what you’ve been doing, I feel a lot less like one.” He said while revealing the paintings to you.

They were of you. They were all of you.

You felt your heart leap out of your chest as your eyes laid on the paintings. They were all different from the last, varying in size, color, style, much like your own.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you ever since we were assigned that project together, ever since…you said that about my painting.” He started, “At first you were just a passing thought, but as time went on, you started to plague my mind more and more often to the point where I couldn’t get you off my mind.” He finished, that stunning peach color returning to his cheeks.

You walked over to where he had the paintings spread out over his bed, running your fingers over the texture in the dried paint.

“Oh, Van Gogh, these are…” You started, still stunned about everything.

“Not my best work, I know.” He said scratching the back of his neck, “It was a bit difficult painting you without having you here to reference.” He admitted.

“No, Van Gogh, these are beautiful.” You said stroking your cheek, “And not just because they’re of me.” You added with a laugh, to which Van Gogh also let out a chuckle.

The room then when quiet, neither of you having the courage to speak up until you decided the silence had lasted enough.

“I don’t know what it is about you,” You started, “But you’ve captured my interest, and ever since I got to watch you paint that day I also haven’t been able to get you out of my head.” You paused, breathing in deeply. Well, it’s now or never you suppose.

“Everytime I think of you, I can physically feel my chest tighten and I feel almost like I’m going to be sick, but in a good way.” You tried to explain, not meeting his light blue eyes once. “I’m not sure if this is what love is supposed to feel like, since I’ve never really been in love before, but…I know that I do like you. Like…really like you and…God, I don’t know what I’m saying; I’ve probably said too much.” You finish with a nervous chuckle.

“No,” You heard him say, “You said just enough.” He grabbed your hand, making you look down at him.

“I’ve…I’ve never really been in love before either, but…I do know that I really enjoy being with you, even if we’re not talking to each other. Just being around you makes me happy. Hell, the whole point of me seeing you this late was just to see you.” Van Gogh looked up at you briefly before looking down at the ground. “Ah, I’m rambling. Look, my point is that I don’t know what it’s like to love someone, but I do know what it’s like to really like someone, and…I really like you.” He finishes, looking back up at you only to notice the glassiness of tears that clouded you e/c eyes.

“Oh, no, wait don’t start crying.” You heard him say, but you couldn’t stop the flow of tears that warmed your cheeks every so slightly. You collapsed onto your knees, embracing Van Gogh, soon feeling his arms wrap around you and the wetness of tears on the back of your shirt. You hugged him harder when you heard a sob rip from his chest, trying your best not to start sobbing yourself. After all, you didn’t look the most elegant when you cried.

The two of you stayed like that for what felt like hours before finally pulling away from the other. You looked him in the eyes, rubbing away some of the stray tears that still remained on his cheeks. He returned the favor.

“All this time,” he started, “I was so scared to tell you how I felt about you. Hell, I was scared to talk to you at all. I was so worried that I would mess things up between us that I decided to just stay silent.” He paused, sighing. “It’s…difficult for me to connect with people so…I don’t have many good friends. I didn’t want to ruin what we had.”

“I was scared too,” You admitted, “In all honesty, I wasn’t sure if you even wanted to talk to me after we finished the project. I like being around you, so I was okay with just sitting near you in art.” You ran your hand through his orange hair, being mindful of his bandages.

“I guess we're both kinda creeps.” You say after a minute. He smiles with a chuckle.

“Yeah.” He whispers, “I guess we are.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Extended Ending:

You let go of Van Gogh, allowing him to clear his bed and put the paintings away. He straightened his bed out, looking over at his own clock that read quarter til midnight. He turned to you, peach dusting his pale cheeks.

“Would you, um…” He stuttered, “Would you like to spend the night? I don’t mean like, you know, but just…sleep. It’s late, we have class in the morning and it’s a bit of a walk to your dorm.” He finished, gesturing to his bed. You blushed before smiling.

“I’d love to.” You answered. He smiled before opening the covers, patting the open space.

“Great! I-Um, I’ll get the lights.” He said, walking past you. You took your shoes off before climbing into his bed, moving all the way over to one side. He turned the light off, the room only being visible because of the moonlight coming through the curtains. You felt the bed shift, assuming Van Gogh had gotten in the bed with you.

For a while, you both laid there stiffly, painfully aware of the other’s presence. You felt his eyes on you for a while before he spoke.

“Um…would it be alright if I…” He said, scooting closer to you. You did the same, until the two of you met in the center. You turned your body towards his and he did the same. The two of you simply stared at the other for a moment before he wrapped his arms around your neck. You, in turn, wrapped your arms around his waist, resting your chin upon his head. He pressed his face into your collar and you shuttered as you felt his breath on your neck.

“This,” he started, “This is…” Leaving you to finish his sentence.

“Nice.”

#clonehigh #clone high #clone high van gogh #vincent van gogh #clone high vincent van gogh #van gogh x reader #clone high x reader #vincent van gogh x reader #clone high van gogh x reader #thewildsophia writes

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melancholic-pigeon · 4 years ago

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Too Short For Ao3 Fic #3? 4?

SO this is the extended edition of the bonus wip I did with Sally's birthday. The overall fic it belongs to is Extremely Smutty, so I went in and revised out the brief references and I'm posting the family-centric g-rated stuff for anyone who wants that but not the smut! Cough.

Also, I felt bad about missing WIP Wednesday again. Lolsob.

Percy rouses at around eleven PM to a sketch of himself on Jason's pillow. There's a note on the other side.

I wanted to wake you up to say goodbye, but you looked so comfy I didn't have the heart to. your mom's presents are in the bag by my desk. say hi to everyone for me. I'll call tomorrow anyway.

love you to the moon and back.

-J. ❤

Complete with a little red heart. He doesn't even care that the doodle of him next to it, burritoed in a pile of blankets, includes a little spot of drool— he can tell by the rest of his cartoony, ballpoint features that Jason put it in because he thinks it's cute.

(And by the fact that he's said so, several times.)

Percy gathers up his junk. The cornflower blue sweatshirt he steals goes halfway down his fingers. He's come to accept that at six foot three and counting, Jason is the taller of them and always will be— barring some sort of horrible wood-chipper accident or curse from a grumpy deity.

Fortunately, there's something about looking up to meet someone's eyes that Percy finds incredibly attractive. He has since Annabeth outgrew him for the first time in eighth grade.

He heads out in his own jeans and the boxers he packed and the sweatshirt that smells like cinnamon. Once he boards the train, he stands with his arm around a pole and the other holding the bag against his chest, and tries to stay casual and keep the grin off his face.

It's almost midnight when he gets home. His mom, of course, is still awake, so he heads into the living room to greet her.

"My other half says hello."

There's a pile of presents on the coffee table. He puts the bag with the rest of them and sits down, kissing her cheek.

"He didn't have to get me anything." She closes her book and eyes the bag with a fond sigh. "How is he?"

Percy's the same way she is, always happy to do favors and give gifts, but feeling pretty awkward about receiving them. Jason's even worse, the three of them in an ongoing and circular competition to never let any of it go reciprocated.

"Working too hard, as always. Pulling As and winning games and barely sleeping to do it. His stepmother's up his ass and his father's a bully, so, you know, news at eleven." He leans his head onto her shoulder. "That's why he gives you stuff. He's trying to show you how much he appreciates you."

She sighs, and Percy knows it's because she's just as frustrated by the whole thing as he is.

"He knows I appreciate him too, I hope."

"Without a doubt." Percy smiles at her, watching as she goes a little pink and smiles back. "You have a talent for making him feel appreciated."

"He treats my baby like a prince," she says softly. "That's why I appreciate him so much in the first place. How could I do anything else?"

Percy turns his face into her shirt collar, another futile attempt to hide his goofy expression,

"He really does, doesn't he?"

Holding doors, pulling out chairs, offering an arm on unsteady streets. Jason's never laid his coat over a puddle, but Percy's pretty sure he would, if the option presented itself.

His mom starts playing with his hair, her fingers light and familiar.

"I'm just happy you're happy, sweetheart."

He knows that feeling too.

Half asleep from the petting, Percy lets himself be a little babyish. It's after midnight now, which means it's her birthday, and he knows that sometimes she misses when he was Estelle's age and little enough to curl up in her lap. He's way too big for that now, obviously, but he can still slide down the couch and rest his head there.

"You too, Mama."

She looks at him, her eyes misty with emotion and almost green in the light.

She's smiling, too.

She smiles a lot, these days.

—

In the morning, Paul makes coffee while Estelle helps unwrap the avalanche of presents. She's at the age where ripping paper makes her squeal with hysterical laughter, which worms its way into Percy's heart and melts it into pudding.

Several of them are from Percy's friends, including a handbound book of original recipes from Leo, a lovely silver bracelet inset with mother-of-pearl that Beckendorf made himself, and a huge sheathed knife with a matching decorative handle from Clarisse. The last one makes his mom snort as she gets up to put it on the bookshelf, out of reach of curious toddler hands.

"Decorative. Sure."

"I bet she'd teach you how to use it if you asked."

"I know how to use a bowie knife, dear. Your father and I used to catch and cook our own fish when we went camping."

"Which reminds me, he still hasn't taken me out," Paul cuts in, frowning. "I've been saving up dad jokes and embarrassing stories for four years."

"I'll bug him about it the next time we talk," Percy promises. "It's probably the ADHD."

"Do you want me to bug you about bugging him?"

"If you haven't set something up by blueback season, yeah."

Percy and Paul went in on a pound of jasmine tea, which his mom reaches for next. She immediately asks for a cup— it's one of two days out of the entire year where she lets other people wait on her, for a change, and even that took a lot of cajoling.

Paul makes the tea, since Percy usually scalds the leaves and it turns out tasting like grass. She probably wouldn't complain anyway, but it's her birthday, and she deserves to have the best tea that can be made in their kitchen.

"Is the last bag from Jason?" Paul sets the mug on a coaster in the middle of the coffee table, and Percy scoops the baby into his lap so she doesn't try to grab it. She mashes her tiny hand against his cheek.

"And Thalia. I'm not sure if they went in on stuff or he just packed them both in one bag to make it easy."

Either is a possibility. He watches as his mom reaches in and pulls out a large wrapped frame, Thalia's spiky handwriting answering the question.

Whatever's inside, it makes her shut her eyes and exhale deeply through her nose.

"Please pass on that I am absolutely furious."

She turns the frame around. An autographed vinyl EP of Sign O' the Times by Prince— one of the albums Percy grew up on, though she skipped a number of the songs when he was little. Thalia must have spent a fortune on it.

"That woman is incredible," Paul breathes, lightly touching the glass. "How does she get this stuff?"

"See!"

"She has friends in high places." Percy grins as Estelle reaches for the album, and holds her over the glass so she can touch it too. "She's also really good at barter chains."

His mother shakes her head, but he can tell how delighted she is— the two of them have spent hours animatedly talking about music, Thalia hanging on every word and groaning with jealousy over the concerts his mom went to in the eighties.

"I know exactly where I'm going to put it."

Thalia got her a turntable for her fortieth birthday last year, as well as a full set of replacements for every worn-out record in their collection— and had the originals framed too, since they had sentimental value. They're currently occupying the better part of two walls of his mom's study.

There's a blank spot by her bookshelf, right underneath the first copy, that the autographed album will fit into perfectly. Percy grins.

"I'll hang it up for you later."

She doesn't argue. There's only Jason's left, his careful print written out across the same paper Thalia used. The crinkling draws Estelle's attention, and she gleefully reaches over to help tear it off.

Their mom gasps at what's inside and puts a hand to her mouth, her eyes going bright.

It's a watercolor portrait of Percy and Estelle, laughing by the shoreline. She's dressed in a little bucket hat, a ruffled swimsuit patterned to look like a clownfish and the coolest shades in the world— sparkly blue frames shaped like seashells that he kind of wishes he could get in his size. He's in a wetsuit, having spent the morning surfing, and he's holding onto her hands so she can jump at the waves. In the distant background is the Montauk lighthouse.

It's beautifully done, like everything else Jason's ever put to paper, but Percy's never choked up like this over one of them.

"You remember that, Beluga? That was on my birthday, when you came and visited me and Jason at the beach."

"Beach?" she asks, expectant. Paul bursts into laughter, sounding as rough-voiced as Percy feels.

"You're your mother's daughter, sweet pea."

"Beach!" Estelle insists. Percy noses her pudgy cheek.

"It's too cold to swim, baby." His mom's eyes are sparkling, still a little teary. He can see Estelle in the smile on her face. "But we could go for a walk and visit."

"Brunch first." Paul kisses her— Percy averts his eyes, wrinkling his nose at his sister to make her giggle again— and gets up, heading back into the kitchen.

It's a lovely way to spend a late morning. Pale blue araucana eggs courtesy of Grover's new hens, a blueberry coffee cake from Nico by a fantastic hole in the wall in Hell's Kitchen, Paul's signature home fries made with blue potatoes and seasoned to perfection; all of it delicious.

Jason calls while Percy's doing the dishes. After his deep, resonant performance of the happy birthday song, the five of them chat on speakerphone for a little while, though he has to excuse himself pretty quickly to keep banging through his reading.

"Maybe next year," Percy sighs. His mom puts her hand on his hip, then crouches down to help Estelle with her light-up sneakers.

"He's always welcome for a rain check."

"He's always welcome, period," Paul adds. For the second time, Percy gets dangerously close to sniffling.

Montauk is a little far for a day trip, so they head to Brighton Beach instead. Estelle's shrimpy legs get tuckered out more quickly than the grownups' do, so Percy ends up carrying her on his hip, snuggled into his jacket to block the chilly breeze. She points at seagulls, shouting triumphantly every time.

"More bird!"

"That's right. A whole flock of 'em."

They watch for a while as the gulls fight over a discarded pizza crust. Then Percy feels an arm around his back and a head against his shoulder.

"I don't know how I got so lucky," his mother murmurs, barely audible over the rushing of the waves.

Percy's eyes sting.

For most of his life, her birthdays had been spent without fanfare. He was rarely actually there for them anyway, and Gabe complained so much it was easier to just ignore the day and focus on survival instead.

She'd been triaging like that since before she even met his dad, keeping herself afloat when nobody seemed to care if she drowned. It would have been easy to lie down and give up. Percy's pretty sure he would have, in her place.

He turns to hug her with the obligatory proclamation of a Stella Sandwich. He catches Paul's eye over her shoulder, and gets a wide, sentimental grin in response.

"Luck's got nothing to do with it," Percy tells her, leaning his cheek against the top of her head while his sister wriggles with delight between them.

"Listen to our son," Paul adds. "He's very wise, as you raised him to be. This is all on you, honey."

Within moments, she's surrounded by her whole family on all sides, and Percy has another arm around his back, and he's getting a little choked up over it all.

When she first started dating Paul, back when Percy was still in middle school, she'd spent weeks all aflutter. It was the happiest he'd ever seen her at the time. They'd sit outside and work on her car together, and she'd slip into song like a grease-stained fairytale princess without even thinking about it.

Seeing them interact is like cool water on a burn, Paul's devoted kindness soothing a lifetime of sitting back and watching people treat her like dirt. He worships her, just like she deserves and long overdue.

"I love you," she says, tearful and muffled in someone's shoulder. "All of you, more than anything."

"Love Mama," Estelle replies, and that's it— Percy's blubbering.

It'll never undo the damage, but it's about time she got a chance to heal and thrive.

-here in our bed, chapter 7, ~6200 words

#wip wednesday #yes I know don't look at me like that #i wrote this #sally jackson #paul blofis #estelle blofis #family fic #oh lord the cheese

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gumnut-logic · 4 years ago

Photo

A little background Pen & Ink in this one.

-o-o-o-

Was it wrong to wish for an emergency in the middle of a brother’s wedding?

John sighed. No, he couldn’t wish that, not in a million years.

He glanced over at the happy couple Gordon was all excited smiles and Penelope was gazing at him with the closest he had ever seen her to displaying astonishment. Her expression had been like that since she said ‘I do’.

He had never seen Gordon smile so much.

It was lovely.

He wished his brother all the happiness in the world. He was due so much.

The gardens of the Creighton-Ward manor were decked out in intertwined yellows and pinks. All the shades of sunshine and pink sunsets. He wouldn’t have thought the two colours would work together, but then who would have thought Gordon and Penelope would work together either.

The pinks covered the spectrum from deep magenta through to candy floss pastels, the yellows ran from sunflowers to lemon ice and the breeze caught the decorations, gently rustling them.

But it wasn’t the colours, his brothers or even Penelope who had him nervous.

It was a wedding.

And a wedding of one of England’s elite.

He was standing some distance from a huge dance floor laid out in the centre of the party. As a brother to the groom, there was no way he was going to get out of the dancing this time around.

As a Tracy, a family of upcoming stature, his father had made sure all his sons of the correct age had taken dancing lessons.

John hated every minute of it.

It wasn’t the dancing itself. He could dance. Music was simple mathematics. A beat was simple to follow and often quite pleasant. His brothers didn’t know it…well, he hoped they didn’t know it, but there had been days on Five where he made full use of the sound system he had wired into the satellite. Some of his favourite movie soundtracks, both cinematic and popular rock had rattled Five’s cahelium hull many times.

His brothers had no need to know.

Alone he could dance to his heart’s content. Express what he wanted to. Feel the music.

At a party like this?

He’d rather shoot himself in the foot.

Because it involved people. People with expectations.

He was aware he was different, didn’t respond necessarily the way people expected. At a distance in space, he was in control. Here surrounded by the need for correct conduct, eyes that followed and stared, impeccable deportment, hell, how he held his fork while eating…it was much harder.

He was a Tracy. He had money and power. People looked up to him like they looked up to all his brothers. But somewhere deep inside the school boy who never quite fit in, who was mocked for his interests by his classmates, who was questioned when he knew too much for his age, who was made aware very clearly by even those who were trying to be kind that he was different.

And apparently different was a bad thing.

He was an adult now. He knew that different was actually a good thing, that different people were the ones who made the actual needed differences in the world, the leaders, the makers and the game changers.

He was a Tracy and they were making the world a better place. He had his confidence; he knew he was doing good.

But here, surrounded by so many people, he reverted. This was why he did his best to avoid these situations.

This was his brother’s wedding and he would do anything for his brothers.

So here he was.

He was dressed to the nines. Black tuxedo, crisp white shirt, Penelope’s boutonnière – Gordon called it a buttonhole bouquet - a yellow and pink Spathoglottis orchid matched with the pinkest Pohutukawa flowers Grandma could find on the Island. He wouldn’t have classified them as quite pink, more a red, but their presence meant a great deal standing here on the other side of the planet. The flowers were matched with a sunflower yellow cummerbund.

The clothing worked, despite the colours. Virgil had muttered something about John’s hair bridging the pinks and the yellows quite nicely.

John stared at his perfectly polished shoes.

God, he hated just standing around.

“John?”

He looked up to find Kayo standing beside him. She was dressed in a figure hugging sunflower yellow gown, glowing satin against the darkening landscape as the sun itself was dipping towards the horizon.

He smiled at her. “You look lovely, Kayo.” She did. Her dark hair was curled over one shoulder and her green eyes were lit up by her dress, her olive skin a beautiful contrast.

She smiled at him. “Thank you.” A glance towards the crowd. “However, I was wondering what you were doing over here all by yourself.”

A shrug and another glance at his shoes. “Seemed like a good place to stand.”

She eyed him a moment before holding out a hand. “Dance with me?”

He straightened. “Umm, aren’t you supposed to dance with the best man?” He stared into the crowd and sure enough, Virgil was peering out at him, Scott standing tall beside him. John sighed. “Did Virgil send you?” To check on his social-klutz of a younger brother.

That earned him an arched eyebrow and a thinned pair of lips. “No. I just wanted to dance with the best dancer in the room.”

“Ah, you’re referring to Virgil, and possibly Scott.”

To his consternation, her smile returned. “You forget, John. I’m your sister. I attended those same classes you did. I know who is the best dancer amongst my brothers. Virgil and Scott say the right things, but you know how to move.”

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You’re elegant, John.” That smile widened and the fairy-lights reflected off her lipstick. She held up her hand again. “Dance with your sister?”

Before he could think his hand was in hers and she was walking him towards the dance floor.

Gordon and Penelope were already well into their first dance. Back straight, feet placed perfectly, his little brother was all eyes for the woman in his arms.

Kayo led him onto the floor without hesitation and suddenly there were eyes on him. He swallowed, but Kayo didn’t give him any time to think, stepping into his personal space in a way that triggered reflexes and before he knew it, he was leading her around the floor in perfectly remembered form.

Numbers, beat and pacing scrolled through his mind as the dance, not a simple one by any description, took up the space in his mind that was usually full of trepidation in this situation. He didn’t have time to think beyond placing his feet in the correct places, arching his back and dipping his sister at the appropriate time.

He extended his arm, rolling Kayo out into a perfect spin.

Yellow satin twirled.

He drew her back and flipped her around into a dip. She smiled at him as their eyes caught.

His bicep contracted and she was looking up at him from his chest level for a split second before the music shifted and they moved into the next step.

John was vaguely aware that other dancers had joined them on the floor. There was a varying level of skill. He glimpsed Virgil with Grandma and his father with Aunt Val. Gordon and Penelope twirled past with a laugh at one point.

To his surprise, he found himself smiling. It was hard not to with Kayo continually smirking at him.

Alan was suddenly spinning around them with Penelope in his arms.

John’s eyes widened, but Alan was grinning fit to bust a blood vessel.

His eyes found Gordon dancing with Mrs Creighton-Ward on the far side of the floor. Penelope’s mother was a handful and John held no envy for his little brother on that front.

But then his brothers and family were swallowed by the crowd. This was a wedding for show. Penelope was a woman of strong standing in the social circuits. The Tracys were surrounded by unknowns.

“John.” A finger reached up and turned his head to look down at his dance partner. “Dance with me.”

She had a challenge in her eyes.

The music increased in tempo and he moved to compensate.

They spun.

They moved.

Her hand on his shoulder.

His hand on her waist.

Their fingers clasped.

They moved with the music.

She kept his attention. She focussed him. This was little more than a workout in the Island gym. Every movement planned. Precise.

A dance.

Kayo was a woman in full control of her body. John, ever so precise in space, ever so crippled by gravity until he adapted back to Earth norm. He had been down from Five in preparation. He was fit. He could move.

And he was elegant.

Awareness of the lack of other people on the dance floor came slowly. The silence below the music only crept up and took him by surprise as the third song came to a slow and final end. He spun Kayo out to the length of his arm, only to draw her back in and dip her to the final notes before bringing her to a smooth stop in his embrace.

The music ended in total silence.

He looked up.

The two of them were ringed by the crowd. They were the centre of attention.

The silence continued until Virgil let out a yell and began clapping like a madman.

Everyone joined in.

The applause was loud. Gordon hooted at the top of his lungs, fist pumping the air. Even his father had a proud grin on his face over his enthusiastically clapping hands.

John flushed, but couldn’t help but grin at the uproar of approval.

How long they had been dancing with an audience, he had no idea, but he was pleasantly buzzed, his heart beating strongly. His family all had love in their eyes and it hit him in the chest.

Kayo nudged him gently with her elbow. “Told you.”

He turned to her, pleasant endorphins making his head spin just a little, and hugged her. It wasn’t his thing, but it was in this moment.

Then there were brothers and claps on his back.

“Man, where did you learn how to do that?” Gordon was staring at him in amazement.

“Uh, dance class. You were there.”

“Umm.”

Penelope’s laugh was light and loving as she wrapped her arms around her gobsmacked husband.

Virgil grabbed him in a hug fit to break bones. When he finally escaped, he realised his brother had tears in his eyes.

What?

But he was grinning like a loon.

“It was only a dance, Virgil.”

That earned him another bonecrusher of heavy lifting arms.

Scott eventually dragged him off. John had no idea what had gotten into him. After all, Virgil didn’t try to smush his sister like that and she was half of the equation in this.

“That was quite a show, John.”

Scott was the only one of his brothers who had the height to look him in the eye. There was a pile of approval in that gaze along with a little pride. His brother was proud of him.

It was only a dance!

He’d seen less when he helped save the world. Not that he didn’t feel valued by his family, but he was flummoxed at why this moment was worth so much attention.

“It was only a dance.”

His brother’s expression shifted to one of fondness and a hand landed on his shoulder. “Well, it was a damn good one.” His shoulder was squeezed gently. “Come join us?” He gestured towards one of the tables where Gordon had cornered Virgil and was obviously poking fun at him. There was a chance the groom may be murdered by the frown forming on Virgil’s forehead.

“Sure.”

Scott grinned and his arm shifted to wrap around his shoulders, drawing him towards his brothers and their family banter.

He glanced back at Kayo and found her grinning ever so fondly at him. She made shooing motions with her hands before spinning in a swirl of yellow satin and heading once again off to the bridal table where Penelope was in deep discussion with her mother.

He stared after her a moment.

“John, you owe me fifty bucks. Virgil cried first.”

“I did not cry.”

“You always cry at weddings. It was easy money, even if fleet of foot here hadn’t dazzled us all with his mad dancing skillz, you were clearly all glassy eyed at the altar.”

“So were you.”

That brought Gordon up short and he stopped a moment as if his brain was caught in processing. “Nope, we’re not talking about me. Talking about you. John, hand over the money.”

“Oh, I don’t know. The bet was whether Virgil would be the first. If you were crying on stage, that makes you the loser.”

“I did not cry.”

Virgil piped up from where he was sitting, repeating himself. “Neither did I.”

“Guys, really?” Scott was rolling his eyes.

“My wedding, my rules.”

That prompted a discussion on whether it was Gordon’s or Penelope’s wedding and who was wearing the pants in this relationship.

John sat back and let the banter roll over him. He had to admit that with his brothers it was easier. There were still people staring at him. Hell, they were actually talking and whispering at the moment. But the difference was that if he trained Five on them, the chances were that the discussions weren’t about how bad his differences were, but how good.

He was different and it made these situations hard. But he had a fantastic family and really being different wasn’t so bad. In fact, a lot of the time it was so much better than being just average.

He needed to remember that.

-o-o-o-

FIN.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #John Tracy #kayo kyrano #nuttyfic reblog

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 5 years ago

Text

Eccentricity [Chapter 9: Now I Love Your Shadow And I Love Your Curls]

Series Summary: Joe Mazzello is a nice guy with a weird family. A VERY weird family. They have a secret, and you have a choice to make. Potentially a better love story than Twilight.

Chapter Title Is A Lyric From: “Til I Die” by Parsonsfield.

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to sex, violence, and drug use.

Word Count: 7.6k.

Other Chapters (And All My Writing) Available: HERE

Taglist: @queen-turtle-boiii @bramblesforbreakfast @maggieroseevans @culturefiendtrashqueen @imnotvibingveryguccimrstark @escabell @im-an-adult-ish @queenlover05 @someforeigntragedy @imtheinvisiblequeen @seven-seas-of-ham-on-rhyee @deacyblues @tensecondvacation @brianssixpence @some-major-ishues @haileymorelikestupid @youngpastafanmug @simonedk

Field Trip

“You want to go to Chicago with me?”

I coughed, having almost inhaled a chunk of pineapple off my slice of GrubHubbed pizza. We were sitting on the grass outside Forks And Spoons under the shade of the maple trees, which were turning from jade to ruby to amber to fool’s gold, rejoining the earth they once rose from one fallen leaf at a time. It hadn’t rained in almost four days—was that some kind of record?!—and the leaves littering the ground crunched when I stepped on them, which I did purposefully and often. The breeze was soft and whispery and temperate. I could get used to this whole having actual seasons thing. “What, in like a hypothetical, at some point in my life kind of way?”

Joe smiled. His U Chicago hoodie of the day was black. “No, as in this weekend.”

“Really?”

“The Cubs have a game on Saturday, and it’s supposed to be rainy and overcast the whole time, and I just thought...” He shrugged, toying with a piece of pizza crust before tossing it to the squirrels. He’s nervous, I realized. How the hell do I have the ability to make the sexy undead Italian man nervous? “It might be nice for us to be able to get away for a few days. Away from my family. Away from Charlie. Not that I don’t appreciate the ambient noise of his snoring from the living room couch, it’s super endearing, I seriously consider dating him instead of you at least twice a week.”

“Go for it. Charlie could use a rich husband. His pension is pathetic.”

“You wouldn’t miss me?”

“I am not necessarily opposed to clandestinely seducing my sugar daddy stepdad should the occasion arise.”

Joe crossed himself like a nun passing tattooed, cursing, lip-pierced teenagers on the sidewalk. “Lord, protect me from this harlot.”

A weekend away. No Charlie, no constant and chaotic whirlwind of Lees, no Ben. I hadn’t spoken to Ben since our misadventure in the Lee kitchen; if he wasn’t avoiding me of his own volition, he was following orders to stay away. Joe claimed that they’d talked it out. I wasn’t sure if I believed him. “I accept your invitation. Although, truthfully, I’d rather get hit by a bus than watch an entire real-life, no-commercial-breaks baseball game.”

“I accept your acceptance. And I’ll throw in a visit to the Shedd Aquarium, just for you. They have baby sea otters.”

“Sweet.” I checked my iPhone. “I’m gonna be late for Chemistry.”

“Anything fun planned?”

“We’re doing a lab involving hydrochloric acid. I’m highly concerned that Ben will accidentally spill some on himself. The miraculous instantaneous healing thing might raise a few questions.”

“Hm,” Joe replied. But he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at my bandaged hand. And he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Joe, I’m fine.”

“Yeah.” He took a preoccupied swig of his Dr. Pepper. Solemnity never seemed right on him; it was like he was wearing somebody else’s skin. “You’ve mentioned that.”

“Hey. Mob guy.”

Now his eyes flicked to mine.

“No more sad spaghetti.”

“Okay.” He surrendered, took my face in his hands, gave me a kiss on each cheek and then one quick parting peck on the forehead. “You win. I’m not sad. I’m ecstatic, actually. I’m gonna be eating my weight in hotdogs and mustard-slathered pretzels on Saturday. What’s there not to be ecstatic about?”

“The fact that your license says you’re only twenty and consequently can’t get a beer?”

Joe blinked, remembering. “Fuck.”

I drained my Diet Coke, flung my pizza crust to the skittering grey squirrels—no eerie albino forest friends today—and pulled on my backpack. “See ya. Have an awesome time in Game Theory.”

“Thanks, I probably won’t!” he chimed, waving, grinning compliantly; and yet did I still sense some lingering menace of disquiet, of fear? I suspected I did. Chicago would cure everything.

Ben tensed when I walked into Professor Belvin’s classroom, ran his fingers through his unruly blond hair, peered fixedly down at his notebook and feigned obliviousness. There was already a metal tray of Erlenmeyer flasks, labeled bottles of solutions, burettes, goggles, gloves, and an unassembled ring stand crowding our small table by the open window. Autumn air poured in like seawater through cracks in the hull of a ship.

“Guess who’s gonna see the Cubs play up close and personal this Saturday?” I announced.

He pretended to have just noticed me. “...You...? But that doesn’t sound like you.”

“It was Joe’s idea. I’m acting like I’m not totally thrilled and freaking out about it, but I am. Don’t tell him.”

Now Ben was the one staring at my bandaged hand. His green eyes were large and unfocused.

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

“Sure,” Ben returned noncommittally.

I started skimming through the packet of lab instructions and setting up our titration experiment as Professor Belvin circulated through the classroom, observing, commenting, offering suggestions and critiques. My wounded hand—still sore in the lull between Advil doses and relatively useless—was quite the embarrassing hinderance; I fumbled with a large glass flask and almost dropped it.

Ben shook his head and reached out to stop me. “Here, oh my god, this is so pitiful, sit down. Please sit down. I’ll set it up. It’s the least I can do.”

“Thanks.” I peeked at his notebook. “Your handwriting is atrocious. Haven’t you had like a century to work on that?”

“Penmanship was never at the top of my to-do list, tragically.”

“What language is that, anyway?” The phrases scrawled in black ink in Ben’s notebook definitely weren’t English. Or Italian. “Elvish? Are you a lowkey Lord Of The Rings fan? Magic and self-sacrifice and nearly insurmountable evil, I could see that being your thing.”

He smirked, struggling with the ring stand. “It’s Welsh.”

“Welsh,” I repeated, perplexed. “Welsh...like how Gwil is Welsh?”

“Precisely.”

Professor Belvin checked in on us, nodded in approval, reminded me that I was always welcome to stop by at bowling league activities, and resumed his wandering.

“Gwil still speaks it,” Ben continued. “The rest of them speak it too. At least enough for basic communication.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, fascinated, examining the long, unfamiliar words riddled with Ls and Ws and Cs. “But that must be very useful.”

“It is. Welsh is nearly a dead language at this point. It’s like talking in code. I always refused to learn it on principle...or maybe I was just being difficult. I would study other languages, Arabic, Japanese...but not Welsh. That was always Gwil’s language. Their language. It was a Lee thing. But now...”

“Now you’re sort of a Lee too,” I finished for him, smiling.

“Whatever,” Ben said, hiding behind his bangs.

I watched him as he at last tamed the ring stand, secured the burette, placed the Erlenmeyer flask. Then he began reading the labels on the solution bottles. “Guess what else.”

“What, Baby Swan?”

I grinned, showing off my unremarkable, entirely benign human teeth. “I’ll bring you back your very own U Chicago hoodie.”

That night, after a pleasantly prosaic dinner with Charlie—burgers, one veggie and one of the conventional variety, and milkshakes at Danny’s Diner—I started packing a small, Arizona-sky-blue suitcase as sparse raindrops pattered against the roof and moonlight streamed in through the open window. Then I ticked off my mental inventory.

“Jeans, sweaters, pajamas, socks...”

I pawed through the top drawer of my old, scratched dresser—the same one that had once upon a time been Renee’s—and contemplated the bra and panty options. Would my theme be comfort and practicality, or feral impenitent seductress? Friday and Saturday in Chicago would be our first nights alone together. That had to be significant, right? After some deliberation, I gathered a handful of lacy, transparent, and/or exceptionally skimpy lingerie from Victoria’s Secret that Jessica had more or less forced upon me during a shopping trip in Port Angeles last month. As I dropped them into the open suitcase, I glanced up to see the albino owl outside my open bedroom window.

“You never know,” I told the owl, shrugging.

It leered judgmentally back at me with those gory red eyes.

“Oh shut up. How many eggs have you laid in your lifetime, Casper The Unfriendly Ghost? Probably like a bazillion. Freaking feathery trollop.”

The owl had nothing to offer in its own defense.

“Why don’t you ever come around when Joe’s here? I’m sure he’d love to meet you. He’s pale and weird too. Although I like his eyes a little better than yours. No offense, Snowflake.”

The owl blinked, tilted its gaze at me, ruffled its feathers and sent the raindrops that had gathered there flying in every direction.

I slid my iPhone out of my back pocket, spun around, and snapped a quick selfie with the owl in the background. “Say cheese, Marshmallow!”

The owl immediately unfurled its wings and flapped off into the trees, vanishing.

“Huh. I guess homegirl is camera shy.” I texted my selfie to Archer, typing out with my thumbs: I am the Steve Irwin of Forks. Behold, one of my many forest friends.

Archer replied a few minutes later: WOW! Pasty and mildly disturbing. Exactly your type. :)

“Yours too, apparently,” I murmured, smiling in my empty room.

I went to my full-length mirror with the plastic, teal-colored border, briefly appraised my reflection, felt a dull swell of approval for what I saw there. The version of myself that had once been so consumed by fears of inadequacy seemed impossibly far away, maybe even fictitious, a dream so vivid I could mistake it for truth. Three things were taped across the top of the mirror: Joe’s Official Citation!! No More Sad Spaghetti!! post-it, his Official Whatever You Want Pass, and a photo of us dressed up together and standing in front of the limo in the Lees’ driveway just before the Calawah University Homecoming dance. I peeled off the Official Whatever You Want Pass, carefully folded it into a neat little square, and tucked it into my wallet.

When the rain began to pour and thunder rolled in off the Pacific Ocean, I closed my bedroom window; but I remembered to leave it unlocked for Joe.

Departure

“Got your license?”

“Yes, Dad,” Joe sighed.

“Got your airport snacks?”

Joe held up the gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with pumpkin and white chocolate chip cookies. “We’re ready to rock.”

“Call me when you get there safe,” Mercy fretted, hugging me and then Joe. “And Joseph, sweetheart, you make sure you keep an eye on her. She’s never been to Chicago before, it’s a big city, and O’Hare is an absolute nightmare, it’s so easy to get lost...”

“I don’t think he needs any reminders, love.” Dr. Lee laid a hand on her shoulder, stroked his neatly-trimmed beard with the other, watched us with a vague and wistful smile.

Mercy went back to trimming the flowers she had spread out across the kitchen countertop, white calla lilies that she threaded one by one into a translucent sapphire blue vase. “Now don’t forget to say goodbye to your brother. He’s out back feeding the new ducks. And I expect these ones to stick around for a while, thank you very much.”

“Mom, I don’t need to say goodbye to Rami. I’ll just think it. Really loudly.” Joe rubbed his temples with his fingertips and squeezed his eyes shut. “Peace out, you nosy bastard.”

“Joseph,” Mercy pleaded.

“Okay, okay, I’ll go say goodbye. Don’t get all aggressive. Don’t take it out on the flowers.” Aggressive...what a joke. I doubted that Mercy Eleanor Lee, formerly Martin, had a single aggressive bone in her immortal body; not even the infinitesimal stapes of her inner ears or the sesamoids of her feet.

“They’re calla lilies,” she replied dreamily, tending them like children. “And they symbolize love, and beauty, and fidelity...”

My nostrils itched and burned faintly in dissent. “I think I’m allergic to them.”

“You’re allergic to fidelity?” Joe asked, raising his eyebrows. “That’s it, now you’re definitely not getting my reclaimed virginity. No ma’am. I am not hit-it-and-quit-it material.”

“Oh sweet baby Jesus,” Mercy murmured.

“I’m going,” Joe said, showing his palms in capitulation and disappearing out the back door. I dragged my suitcase to the front one, politely declining Mercy and Gwil’s offers to help.

Lucy—her bleached hair in a high half-ponytail and wearing polka-dotted black tights, combat boots, a plaid miniskirt, and an extremely Octoberish orange sweater—was sitting cross-legged on the roof of Gwil’s Volvo. God, he’s such a dad. “Have a nice time,” she chirped artfully.

I opened the hatch of Joe’s Subaru and threw my suitcase inside. “Why do you sound like you already know I will?”

“I might have some relevant clairvoyant insight.”

“No way.” I stared up at her, stunned, my hands on my waist. “But you can’t see me, right...?”

“True. But this vision wasn’t of you. It was of Joe. You just happened to be there.”

Interesting. Very interesting. “And what transpired in this vision?” A night full of hot, steamy, blissful vampire sex? A girl could dream.

Lucy closed her eyes, recalling it fondly, maybe even cherishing it. “You were sitting in the stands of a professional baseball game. I could hear the crowd roaring, the umpire’s trumpeting interruptions. Blue and white...everyone was wearing blue and white. And you were there together—Joe a vampire, you human, side by side, almost entwined—shouting to each other over the thunderous noise and laughing and pushing nuggets of soft pretzels into each other’s mouths. So happy. I’d never seen Joe so happy.” Her striking pale eyes came open. “And he’s someone who’s already rather prone to happiness, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

“I have,” I agreed.

“He’s never been serious about anybody else. I hope you know that.”

“I know that’s what he tells me.”

“It’s the truth,” Lucy insisted. “I would know if it wasn’t. Rami would know, Ben would know. Joe...he’s kind of the opposite of you. He’s always been the easiest to read. He’s the one Rami hears most loudly, the one who shows up most often in my visions. He’s clear, you know? Uncomplicated. Authentic. And what you mean to him...it’s something everybody sees. It’s a contagious sort of lightness, of joy. So thank you for that.”

And if whatever mysterious genetic switch that renders me immune to your talents wasn’t flipped, I’m pretty sure I’d look the same way. “I should definitely be thanking you,” I said. “You guys have a pretty cool existence going on here. And I’m so grateful to be invited into it.” For however long this lasts, anyway.

“None of us really invited you,” Lucy demurred. “We just let it happen.”

“So everyone knew I was coming? Because you saw it?”

“Everyone but Joe.”

“You never told him?”

“No. Not even now.” Lucy turned sharply towards the trees, as if she heard something in the soaring western hemlocks that swayed drunkenly in the wind. After a moment, she continued. “I’m not sure if I can even explain why. It wasn’t that I feared changing the timeline or something...my visions always come true regardless. Always. But I guess...” She tugged on her short half-ponytail, pondering. “I guess I didn’t want to cloud any of his decision-making, any of his emotions with the specter of the inevitable. I wanted whatever he felt for you to be completely organic. And it is.”

I considered her. “You are extremely thoughtful for someone who spends as much time shopping as you do.”

Lucy laughed in a high-pitched, almost juvenile trill, netting her fingers beneath her chin, her elbows resting on her bent knees. “I do like to shop. I didn’t always though.” She peered off into the trees again, this time pensively. “Did Joe tell you anything about my life before Gwil saved me?”

“Aside from the copious hippie jokes, not really.”

She nodded, her eyes far-away and still lost in the forest. “Gwil and Mercy are inordinately wonderful people. My biological father and mother, unfortunately, were not. And maybe they couldn’t help it, because from what I understand their parents were monsters too. I don’t think of them very often now, not even to resent them. But when I was alive I burned with it, with all that hatred, with all that bitterness. Every bruise was another log on the fire. Every screaming match or hurled plate was a splash of gasoline. So I ran away and found what I fancied to be a new family, and I lived on basement couches and out of vans and in abandoned buildings, and I explored increasingly inventive ways of putting that fire out.”

The October breeze cascaded through the trees, carrying echoes of birdsong and disembodied distant voices and the scent of pine. It reminded me of Joe.

“Chemically speaking,” Lucy said, “that first hit of heroin, that first high...it’s the best you’ll ever feel in your entire life. Nothing else will ever compare. Not skydiving, not backpacking through Southeast Asia on some Pulitzer-prize-winning journey of self-discovery, not winning the lottery, not the births of your children, not falling in love. And once you accept that, what’s the point in stopping? Everything you ever experience will live in the shadow of that needle. You’re twenty-five and you’ve already seen the endgame. You’re born, you suffer, you catch a glimpse of paradise, you pay bills and push shopping carts down the aisles of grocery stores and insipidly smile your way through your husband’s work parties until you die. What’s the fucking point? So I didn’t stop shooting heroin. And the whole time, I knew it was killing me. That’s what they don’t tell kids when they force them to make those idiotic classroom promises to never do drugs. You know it’s killing you, but you don’t care. Because it feels so goddamn good. Because it becomes the only sliver of your existence that doesn’t cut like glass beneath your skin. Sometimes you love things so much you let them kill you, isn’t that ridiculous?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer her; still, I heard my own voice: “Yes, it is.”

“It took dying for me to see that life is worth living. That there’s magic in the mundane and the frivolous. And that there’s beauty everywhere if you bother to look for it.” Lucy uncrossed her trim legs, leapt gracefully off the Volvo, and—with definite but not unkind scrutiny—pulled at the collar of my thrift shop sweater. “Even in your very, very, very misguided fashion preferences.”

The front door of the Lee house swung open, and Joe jogged out, carrying his suitcase. Gwil, Mercy, Scarlett, Rami, and Ben appeared on the porch to wave us off.

“What’d you do?!” Joe demanded, pointing at Lucy.

“Nothing,” she quipped.

“You guys gotta stop doing this!” Joe exclaimed. “You know what you’re doing, you know exactly what you’re doing, you gotta stop cornering people and forcing them to listen to your creepy tragic backstories! Nobody freaking asked!”

Lucy chuckled patiently and stood on her tiptoes to hug him goodbye. “Have fun.”

“You know it.” Joe tossed his suitcase into the Subaru and opened the driver’s door. “Ready, Baby Swan?”

“Almost.”

I walked to the wrap-around porch, climbed the steps, held my hand out to Ben. My stitches had almost completely dissolved over the past week, and the clunky impediment of bandages was no more. Joe crossed his arms and watched from beside the Subaru with an uneasy frown, but he didn’t try to stop me. He nodded to Rami, so subtly I almost didn’t notice. Rami nodded back.

“I will miss your melodramatic brooding immensely,” I told Ben. “Please do some fun family stuff while we’re gone. I’ll see you soon. Dan eich bendith.”

“Dan eich bendith,” he replied, taken aback. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, he ignored my outstretched hand and embraced me, his grasp so strong and yet so careful. His scent like crisp leaves and salted caramel and autumn sieved into a bottle unfolded in my lungs like an opened book.

“I Googled that especially for you,” I whispered. “You’re welcome.”

“I’m in awe.” His words were characteristically sardonic, but I heard warmth in them as well. When Ben pulled away, I saw that everyone else was smiling. Mercy had tears in her eyes.

I retreated back down the porch steps and met Joe by the Subaru. “Okay, mob guy. I’m good.”

He slid on his sunglasses, shook his head, flashed a proud and toothy grin. “You definitely are.”

All the way down Route 101 to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, we listened to Joe’s classic rock mixtapes and my NOAA Ocean Podcast episodes, reviewed the weekend itinerary, ran through the bare essentials for me to understand an MLB game (“Which I am totally not excited about whatsoever,” I informed Joe, who knew enough not to believe me).

When the Boeing 747 ascended above the clouds and unimpeded sunlight poured in from the other passengers’ windows, Joe put on a black sleeping mask over his sunglasses and reclined his seat, tried to nap, passed the time until he would be safe beneath the curtains of the sky again.

Somewhere over the Dakotas, as I leafed through a book about the Great Barrier Reef for my Marine Botany class, Joe’s hand bumped mine. “Hey,” he said drowsily, seriously; and I braced myself for some emotional declaration, some dire warning, some grave realization of the futility of what we agreed—almost always wordlessly, and yet unfailingly—was love.

“Yeah?”

“It’s an emergency.”

“Uh oh,” I replied, smiling now.

“Flag down the flight attendant and get some more of those honey roasted peanut packets,” Joe said. “I’m starving myself back to death over here.”

The Windy City

The bat cracked deafeningly against the baseball pitched at nearly a hundred miles per hour. It was a home run. The crowd erupted into mindless, primal shrieks of conquest; and when Joe jumped to his feet, clapping and cheering and nearly spilling his blue-and-white bucket of popcorn, I found that I did as well. I screamed for the team of a city I’d never lived in, sank back into my seat beside Joe, nestled against his chest as his right arm closed around my waist and hauled me in closer, as his left hand teased me with a soft pretzel nugget hovering just out of reach. And in that moment, I felt like Lucy, snatching Polaroids out of the space-time continuum of the present and the future and the past. There was where Joe and I were right now, of course; the day we had met each other in the nonfiction section of the Calawah University library; the dance floor at Homecoming; the first night he snuck soundlessly into my bedroom window; all those years we still had left to spend together. Not forever, but perhaps long enough.

“I like this baseball thing,” I told him over the roar of the crowd, twirling my fingers around the curling locks of dark hair that stuck out from under his Cubs cap. Or maybe I just like you.

“Whew, thank god.” Joe wiped his forehead with the back of his hand in mock relief. “Now I don’t have to break up with you.”

After the game—a 5-3 Cubs victory, close enough to keep the spectators’ blood pumping throughout—we boarded the L, held onto the metal railings as the packed train car bumped and swerved along, and disembarked in Little Italy. Historic brownstones were interrupted by a freckling of pizzerias, Italian ice stands, and sports bars spilling out shouts of triumph and despair. We were staying in the Four Seasons with a view of Lake Michigan; but we had an hour of daylight—albeit chilled, dreary, and forever threatening rain—left in our Saturday. Tomorrow would be the aquarium, and then dinner before catching our flight back to Seattle, back to the greenery and fog and eternal dampness that I was beginning to think of as my home. Had I really only left Phoenix two months ago? Had I ever really lived there at all?

“So,” Joe said as we walked under shedding green ash and black cherry trees, his arm draped across my shoulders. “Guess what the University of Chicago has. In addition to a killer Economics PhD program, which yours truly will be graduating from in approximately 2027, astonishingly aged not a single day. Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.”

“Hideous sweatshirts?” I guessed.

“One of the best Marine Biology departments in the world. And the affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory up in Massachusetts, where they send their PhDs to do research.”

“Wait, seriously?” I stopped abruptly, the heels of my boots squealing against the sidewalk. “You mean...for me?”

He rolled his eyes. “No, for my other girlfriend who is also inexplicably super obsessed with the ocean. I clearly have a type.”

“You want me...to come to Chicago...with you...after graduation? For like...a five to seven year commitment?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, that just sounds...serious.”

“Huh. What do you know. I guess we’re serious after all.” He took my hand and pulled me gently forward, leading me down West Taylor Street. He seemed to have a destination in mind.

“How is this going to work for you, anyway?” I asked, beaming uncontrollably now, trotting along beside him. “Living in a place that isn’t Washington or Scotland or Alaska?” Chicago was cold and cloudy for a lot of the year, true, but few cities were Forks-level wet and sunless. Forks-level tyrannically depressing, I would have said two months ago.

He shrugged, unphased. “Night classes. Sunglasses. Faking a chronic illness so I don’t have to leave our house. I’m really good at that one. Plus I can get a doctor’s note any time I want one. I’ve got connections, you know.”

Our house. He said OUR house.

Joe came to halt in front of a stately yet plain brownstone which now operated as a trendy bookstore, the kind that sold six dollar lattes and hosted anarchist poetry slams on Friday nights.

“Is this where we’re going to crack hipsters’ kneecaps as a bonding activity?” I asked.

“This is where I grew up.”

I looked again, studying the earth-colored stone quarried over a century ago, the wrought iron railings that framed the front steps, the rectangular windows revealing the illumination and shadows of other families’ lives. “Joe,” I said softly, leaning into him, searching for my words.

“There were eight Mazzello kids: Joseph, Charles, Mimi, Salvador, Donna, Lucia, Bianca, and Giuliano.” He rattled them off like a jingle from a fast food commercial. “And I was the oldest. So when my dad dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of his shift at the Zenith Radio factory, it was my job to step up and figure out how to keep everyone fed. I was seventeen and completely hopeless at school back then; Sal was always the smart one, the disciplined one, he ended up as a math professor at Loyola University. I was just some directionless, grieving kid who never shut up. But there was a place for boys like me in Chicago in the 1920s. The mob could get you money. The mob could turn that same incessant chatter that got you bruised at school into something useful. And the mob could give you a family.”

Joe watched the brownstone solemnly, meditatively, his hands in his pockets.

“My mom sobbed for an hour the first time I brought home an envelope full of bills with Hamilton’s face on them. She knew how I got it. But how could she say no, how could she tell me to stop? We’d never seen money like that. All my siblings could finish school. My sisters could have new dresses on days that weren’t Christmas and Easter, my brothers new shoes, Sal the glasses he needed so badly. My mother always had something to put in the offering plate at church. And once you were in the mob, it wasn’t exactly easy to leave. But they took care of their own. After I died, they sent my mother money for years, until her own children were established enough to support her. That’s when I learned that money wasn’t just something that put food on the dinner table or kept the lights on. It’s a way of showing loyalty, of giving people peace and comfort and meaningful choices in their lives. It’s how I’ve been taught to give back to the world. So I guess I shouldn’t have disparaged my fellow vampires back in Forks, because there’s a slice of my tragic backstory, Baby Swan. Now you know. And you should know everything, since we’re in this thing together. Or maybe I just want you to.”

I laid my palm against his cool and flawless face, ran my thumb lightly across his cheek. “You really are serious about me.”

“I am alarmingly serious about you.”

“Even though this thing of ours has an expiration date?” Since I can never become a vampire. Since I will never have the distinction of being a permanent fixture of the Lee coven.

“That’s not a problem for today. That’s a problem for ten or fifteen years from now, whenever you decide you want to settle down and have kids and do the whole Great American Dream bit. You’ll be sick of me by then anyway. You’ll be dying to get away from us. Hahaha, get it? It’s a pun. Dying to get away from the vampires.”

I couldn’t imagine ever being sick of Joseph Francis Mazzello. Still, ten or fifteen years felt almost as good as forever to me. Fifteen autumns, fifteen Christmases, fifteen journeys around the sun that he avoided so deftly. “Why me, Joe?” I asked, incredulous. “You could have anyone. Any human, any vampire. Why me?”

“Because you’re you,” he said simply. And his mystified dark eyes added: What kind of a question is that? “You’re smart and you’re hilarious and you actually care about the world, about where it came from, about where it’s going, about people and places and animals that you’ll never meet. You’re indomitable. You’re fearless almost to the point of recklessness. And yet you’re so kind. You’re even nice to Ben, and humans are never nice to him...they’re either horrified or confused, or they’re too busy fantasizing about him to remember that he’s a real fucking person. But you’ve always tried to see the good in him. Even when he didn’t deserve it.” Joe shook his head, marveling. “And yeah, I’ve...I’ve screwed around, full disclosure. I’ve done the hookup thing. And it was great for what it was. But I never wanted more. I never felt some gnawing, sentimental, Hallmark-channel need for connection, to understand who they were as people. And then I met you, and...I want to know every single goddamn thing about you. I want to know your favorite color, what books you read, what the hell is so appealing about pineapple pizza, what you dream of. I feel like I could never get tired of trying to understand you.”

A refrain circled through my mind like a whirlpool, dragging every other thought down into oblivion: I love him, I love him, I love him. “Blue,” I said at last.

“What?”

“Turquoise blue, like the sky in Arizona. That’s my favorite color.”

The smile, slow and wonderous, rippled across his face. He took my hand again. “Come on.”

Joe led me onwards, down a few blocks and around a corner, as the muted sun receded from the sky and the first stars took its place, pinpricks of celestial light in a blanket of violet, azure, amber, rust. He stopped in front of the Church of Saint Lawrence, established in 1902 according to the sign mounted on the brick wall that faced the street, perhaps the same church that he had once visited with his family as an impatient child, snickering with his brothers and sisters and kicking the back of the pew in front of him with shoes that never fit quite right. There was a fountain bubbling with transparent water, a statue of the Virgin Mary at the center, coins made of copper and nickel and zinc glinting through the water under corridors of silvery luminance cast by the streetlights.

“I lied about not having my own superpower,” Joe informed me mischievously, not at all serious.

“Oh, did you now?”

“Absolutely.” He opened his wallet, rooted around, pulled out a penny and handed it to me. “I can make wishes come true. So go ahead.” He nodded towards the fountain. “Make your wish.”

The penny was worn and nearly indecipherable, but I was just barely able to read that it had been minted in 1928. The same year Joe was turned. “Joe...I can’t just throw this away!”

“You’re not throwing it away. You’re exchanging it for a wish. Now wish.”

I closed my eyes, chose my wish, tossed the penny into the fountain. The plink it made when it hit the water was bright and yet mournful somehow, like windchimes, like flickering candlelight.

“Outstanding job,” Joe complimented.

He was so visibly proud, so content, so faultless. The streetlights threw shadows across the sidewalk, the fountain, the whole world it seemed. I laced my fingers behind his neck, gazing up at him. “What are we doing tonight, mob guy?”

“I’m so glad you asked. You see, we have options.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“Door Number One,” Joe began. “It’s been a long day, and you’re exhausted from the illustrious honor of witnessing a Cubs victory firsthand. So we go back to the hotel, find some shark documentary on tv, order room service, shower, and drift off into a peaceful slumber. Just like last night.”

“Not bad. How about Door Number Two?”

“Door Number Two. You’re tired, but not that tired. We go back to the hotel, find that same aforementioned shark documentary, but totally ignore it and make out instead. Maybe we even round second base, in the spirit of the Cubs. Whatever you’re up for. Then we shower and drift off into a peaceful slumber.”

“Even better,” I said, and I meant it. “And what’s Door Number Three?”

Now Joe became jittery; his eyes darted to the fountain, the church, the cars that rolled lazily by. He was so desperate to conceal his hope, to not impose any undue influence upon me. I felt infinitesimal, almost weightless drops of rain against my cheeks, my collarbones, the downy undersides of my arms. “Well, uh, Door Number Three is...it’s...well...uh...it’s...”

Door Number Three is a home fucking run. “I want Door Number Three.”

“Really? Because you don’t have to say that, you can say no, that’s completely fine, it’s more than fine actually, it’s awesome, it’s totally cool, I’m seriously fine either way, and you can obviously change your mind whenever—”

“Wait.” I broke away from him, yanked my own wallet out of my purse, found the Official Whatever You Want Pass, hastily unfolded it, and presented it to Joe. “I want Door Number Three.”

He barked out a shocked laugh, accepted the pass, studied it in disbelief. “You are full of surprises, ma’am. It took me a hundred years to find a woman like you. And I don’t think I ever will again. Makes one wonder if this whole eternity thing is all it’s cracked up to be.” He tucked the pass into his pocket and kissed me beneath the streetlights, beneath the stars. “So there’s one tiny caveat to my wish-granting superpower.”

“Yeah?”

He smiled impishly, nudging the tip of my nose with his. “You have to tell me what you wished for.” He was joking, as he almost always was; I didn’t have to tell him anything. He wouldn’t press the issue. I doubted that he was really expecting me to answer at all. And yet I wanted to tell Joe; I yearned, for once, to be as clear as Lucy had said he was.

“For you and me,” I replied in little more than a whisper. “And for forever.”

Home

The only thing that startled me was how profoundly unstartling it all was, how wholly uncomplicated, how effortless.

I didn’t feel like a different person afterwards. I didn’t feel that some latent spark of lust, of carnality had been ignited, had singed through me, had left me forever marked like the heights of children ticked off on a doorframe over decades; I felt neither ruined nor awakened, no wiser, no older, no more enlightened as to the incalculable eccentricities of the vast and enigmatic universe. I felt only happiness, and exhausted satisfaction, and a deep, dreamless peace that engulfed me like frothy fingertips of waves dragging pebbles and shells back into the sea. I felt only a homecoming that was measured not in miles but in soul.

We slept in as the morning sun rose over Lake Michigan, bought Ben a hoodie (black, of course, per his usual aesthetic) from the University of Chicago gift shop, strolled unhurriedly through the dimly-lit, relentlessly blue pathways of the Shedd Aquarium. As I stood in the glass tunnel and watched sawfish and blacktip reef sharks soar by overhead, Joe linked his arms around my waist, tucked his chin into the dip of my collarbone, kissed the slope of my jaw.

“What do you think?” he asked, perhaps a touch apprehensively. “Could you get used to the Chicago life for a few years?”

“I would be tempted to kidnap some of these guys and bring them home to live in our bathtub. But yes.”

And Joe murmured, smiling, his lips to my temple: “That’s illegal, ma’am.”

Our flight back to the West Coast took off after dusk, and there was no blinding sunlight for Joe to avoid; only immense glooms of clouds and gleaming distant stars and the unfathomable void of space, cursed with crushing pressure and darkness like the cervices of the ocean floor.

Fifteen years might not be enough, I thought, resting my forehead against the cold airplane window as the city lights died behind us, as Joe’s hand weaved through mine on the armrest. But forever sounds just about right.

Larkin

There once was a boy born in a stone cottage with a dirt floor in a vanishingly inconsequential village just west of Clifden, Ireland. It was February 9th, 1672, bitterly cold, miserably wet, and the sea was murderous with storms. His mother was illiterate, as her mother had been, and as her mother had been as well, all the way back to people who painted mammoths on cave walls with their fingers; she was thirty-three and already exhausted with living, her seven children forever underfoot, her full and ruddy cheeks perpetually smudged with dirt from the field and ashes from the fire. Her husband was a failure and a drunk, but half a day’s worth of work once or twice a week was better than none at all; and as much as she never would have admitted it, he was a tether for her in a world that was often, as she had learned, both lonely and cruel.

She gave the baby boy a name—a strong Irish name, none of that audacious English rubbish—that meant rough or fierce, just like the sea that rose and ruptured against the rocky cliffs outside. He would need to be rough to survive in this world. He would need to be fierce.

He began like all the other children had been: sweet and yet anonymous, yielding, needful, worryingly small. She rocked him absently with one arm as she stirred the stew pot with the other. She sang to him, told him stories long before he could comprehend them, tales of the Lord and the saints and all their malevolent adversaries: serpents, pestilence, demons, dragons. She tossed stray sticks to him so he could carve pictures into the dirt floor and keep out of the way as she labored with the laundry or the sewing. And he grew, and he grew; and there was nothing remarkable about him at all, that boy speckled with mud and soot and the perpetual bruises of children mostly left to their own devices, that boy with pallid skin like his mother’s and black hair like his father’s and eyes so light and vibrant a brown they were nearly gold.

The boy was a baby, and then a child, and then a young man. And his mother realized one day—all at once, as a mother does when their attention is divided among so many other lives, when the children’s analogous faces bleed into each other and even their names sometimes escape her, even those names that she had chosen herself from the stories her own mother once passed to her through threadbare whispers—that people had a habit of following him, of listening to him. That there was an ether of allure that hovered around him like the mists that clung to the precarious, crumbling cliffs that touched the sea; that there was something like what the heathens called magic. And when the war came, that boy who was no longer a boy left his mother’s stone cottage and enlisted in Clifden, lied about his age, signed his name with an X because that was all he knew how to spell. But he was sure to tell the man who handled the ledger that he did have a real name, a good Irish name, a name apt for a soldier, a name that his mother had told him meant rough or fierce: Larkin.

There are men who join wars out of loyalty, principle, love for their homes; and then there are men who join to escape their homes, perhaps to forget them entirely. If you were to consult that ledger signed in a pub in Clifden, Ireland in 1688, you would read that I fought for Ireland, for the Catholics, for Christ the Lord and all his saints. But what I really fought for was my own resurrection: to take that boy stained with dirt and ignorance, drown him in the blood of other mothers’ trivial sons, and dredge up some greater version of myself that I had always known existed, that was hidden somewhere in the netlike darkness of the marrow of my bones.

People follow me, and they always have. I couldn’t tell you why. When I called them to enlist, when I thrusted swords and pikes into their calloused farmers’ fists, when I told them they could fight and live to see their wretched homes again, they believed me. I climbed the ranks like a ladder, like a mountain made of bones. And all those other mothers’ sons laid down for me so I could walk across the bridge of their spines to what I mistakenly assumed was invincibility.

At the Battle Of The Boyne, my horse was shot out from under me. A Williamite caught me beneath the ribs with his dagger. And as I bled out, staring up at the sky and impatiently waiting for the pain to vanish as my consciousness withdrew like low tide, I became aware that someone was lifting me, holding me, spiriting me through the battlefield and then the wilderness; and that my pain, in a disconcerting turn of events, had swelled to a vicious and unrelenting inferno.

Three days later, I woke to find that I was resurrected again, this time as something more than human. The man who turned me was blond-haired, light-eyed, agile and yet gentle, ancient and yet ever-changing.

“I thought you’d survive,” Nikolai said in a thick Slavic accent, standing over me with a kind smile. Then he helped me to my feet. “You have greatness in you. It sweats out of your pores, it’s in every word you speak. What a shame it would be for all of that to go to waste.”

He taught me everything: how to read and write, how to hunt, how to dodge the sunlight, how to survive an existence that was both theoretically endless and yet forever on the precipice of being cut short. He introduced me to the Draghi, to vampires who were remarkable for their ferocity, or their creativity, or their curiosity, or their cleverness, or all those things at once: Victorien, Honora, Elizabeth, Kestrel, Zhang, Sergei, Ana, Gwilym. And most crucially, Nikolai showed me that my human talents were magnified several times over, that his own followers were not immune to them, that there was power in collecting exceptional individuals like pieces of china stacked in a locked cabinet; and that if I could learn to climb immortal bones, the ladder never needed to end.

You never quite get used to the power, to the invincibility, to the promise of eternity. You never take it for granted. It hits you, again and again, in ceaseless and victorious waves. Once I was a barefoot toddler who sketched dragons and Catholic saints from the stories my mother told me into the dirt floor of our drafty stone cottage. Now I live in palaces with marble floors, with spiral staircases and libraries and gold-dripping ballrooms, with unobstructed views of any sea I choose. Now I am the dragon.

My phone rang, and I checked the name on the screen. Then I answered. “Hello, beauty. How’s the other side of the Pacific treating you?”

And Liesl answered, in a soft and astonished voice: “I don’t think Lucy can read her. I don’t think any of them can.”

I could feel it again. Another wave, crashing through me like the ocean, like the unstoppable rolling of time: power and insatiability and exhilaration. I smiled in my twilight-lit study as long-dead stars rose outside and the wind howled like wolves over the East Sea. “You know what to do.”

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eraserdude6226 · 4 years ago

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Fiddler’s Green

I recently posted a post about some of my Cavalry buddies that had gone on to Fiddler’s Green. I just thought that some of you would like to know what Fiddler’s Green is. I went to the 1st Cavalry Association and pulled this off of their website.

Background

Fiddler’s Green is a legendary imagined afterlife, where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing, and dancers who never tire. Its origins are obscure, although some point to the Greek myth of the “Elysian Fields” as a potential inspiration. In general, historical data, referencing Fiddler’s Green refers to both the sailor’s and cavalry’s paradise. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition (OED2) has a citation from 1825 as the sailor’s paradise. Since the 19th century, British sailors have called the traditional heaven of mariners Fiddler’s Green, “a place of unlimited rum and tobacco.”

Many believe that the origin and author of Fiddler’s Green may have originated by the 5th Royal Irish Lancers who trace their origin back to 1689 when a cavalry formation known as Wynne’s Regiment of Enniskillen Dragoons was formed by the then governor James Wynne. Although there no evidence that the Irish Lancers appropriated the paradise and incorporated it into a poem that emigrated to the US with its members, or whether the paradise and poem are of US origin.

The cavalry paradise reference seems to be associated with the 7th US Cavalry from the post Civil War era and the Indian Wars period (circa 1860-1870). Now, there is a link between the 7th US Cavalry and Ireland. Many Troopers of the 7th Cavalry were of Irish origin, and the 7th Cavalry’s own insignia has the phrase “Garryowen” on it. “Garryowen” is a derivative of the Irish Gaelic Garraí Eóin which means Owen’s Garden. Owen’s Garden was a commons (open field) in Limerick, Ireland that gave rise to a drinking ballad of the same name. The 5th Royal Irish Lances, an Irish cavalry unit, used that drinking ballad.

The story of Fiddler’s Green was first published in the 1923 volume of the Cavalry Journal. According to this article, it was inspired by a story told by Captain “Sammy” Pearson at a campfire in the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming. Common usage also seems to hold this view. as included in John Connally’s (Ireland) song from circa 1960 and the Stereophonic’s (Welsh Band) song from late 1990’s. Fiddler’s Green is listed sometimes as a poem and other times as a cavalry prayer.

It is still used by modern cavalry units to memorialize the deceased. The name has had other military uses. Fiddler’s Green was an artillery Fire Support Base in Military Region III in Vietnam in 1972 occupied principally by elements of 2nd Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry. More recently, in the heart of the Helmand River Valley, in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, the US Marine Corps operated a firebase (FB) named Fiddler’s Green.

There’s also a poem that goes with this as well:

Halfway down the trail to Hell, In a shady meadow green Are the Souls of all dead Troopers camped, Near a good old-time canteen. And this eternal resting place Is known as Fiddlers’ Green.

Marching past, straight through to Hell The Infantry are seen. Accompanied by the Engineers, Artillery and Marines, For none but the shades of Cavalrymen Dismount at Fiddlers’ Green.

Though some go curving down the trail To seek a warmer scene. No Trooper ever gets to Hell Ere he’s emptied his canteen. And so rides back to drink again With friends at Fiddlers’ Green.

And so when man and horse go down Beneath a saber keen, Or in a roaring charge of fierce melee You stop a bullet clean, And the hostiles come to get your scalp, Just empty your canteen, And put your pistol to your head And go to Fiddlers’ Green.

Thanks for reading this far (if you have)

#fiddler's green #Cavalry #107th ACR

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wispandwhispers · 5 years ago

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Welcome to Monochromia!

Words: 2048

Previous | Next

Tw(s) : Cursing, Implied torture, getting disturbing commissions, talked about murder (Tell me if there is any to add)

Pairing(s) : Eventually Logicality, Dukeceit, Eventually Prinxiety.

Notes : I’ve had this idea on the back burner for so long and its finally here

"Zynx, how do you plan to secure the vote in the Fumi sector?"

"No comment."

"Zynx, how are you planning to make a comeback after Foster destroyed your chances of getting the majority ?"

"No comment."

"Zynx, is the rumours of you and Crownford sleeping together true?"

"I'm sorry but I'm not sure what you're talking about."

A limousine pulled up in front of the city hall and the chauffeur rolled down the window. A simple eye signal and he knew it was time to go.

"No more questions."

"Zynx a moment of your t-"

The chauffeur slammed the door of the limousine and started the planned safety-checked drive back to his boss' residence.

He looked in the mirror at his employer which a cheeky grin.

"I have a good feeling your sick of this question but how in fuck's name are you going to win this election? "

The passenger glared at his employee, clearly pissed.

"Do not test my patience Remy."

"Holy shit, you didn't say my full name, who are you and what have you done with Logan Zynx?"

"Just pass my yarn bag, I'm so fucking stressed."

Remy opened the compartment and chucked the medium sized light- blue pouch to the back.

"I don't understand why you don't you just go around firing people, snort crack, hate sex or whatever rich people do the wind down."

"I don't really know, this brings me peace for some reason."

The conversation died down and Logan got to work on stress knitting a new scarf/sock/ thing while Remy took the back route to his estate in the Prime sector with the sound of the radio in the background.

The usual daily announcements, the signal time, the weather update, the tired host annoying the news-

-Roman Crownford made headlines tonight when he was caught carrying election candidate, Logan Zynx in the bridal position . Rumours have emerged that the two are in a relationship and-

The driver's neck snapped back to stare at the person in the back seat.

"Spill."

"I don't speak slang."

"Fine, explain."

"I decided to go out for a drink, someone decided to spike it, woke up in my bed with this guy staring at me. That's what I can remember at least."

"Sounds like the start to some shitty rom-com."

-Footage can be seen of the actor carefully helping the politician get to his car to supposedly drive him home.

"Please turn that down, If I listen to that anymore I'll get a headache from the bullshit they are spewing. And I already have one from the debate so please."

Remy turn the dial anti-clockwise.

"Anyway, you need to be focusing on which is the best assassin in the area, I personally recommend Remus-"

In the mirror, the driver could see his employer's eyes sharpen in annoyance.

"I plan to win the election without murdering someone and even if I was to kill Patton, I would probably get caught anyway."

The limousine came to a halt.

"You better get inside, three minutes 'til the signal goes live."

Logan let himself out of the vehicle and faced the other

"I'm aware. That's why I wear a watch if you weren't aware."

Remy just shook his head.

"You're still the fucking antisocial nerd you were as a teen."

"And you were the same shade of black and white since you were twelve but I don't comment about it." Logan retorted as he started to walk to his door.

"Don't come for my kneecaps bitch, I'm being a queen in the colours I can see and I'm fucking proud of my basic bitch style."

"God you're so egotistical. Why am I friend with you again?"

"Your bad life decisions, not mine."

Logan heard the limousine drive off into the distance. He would assume the Remy would just listen to the signal in the car. And then promptly go and get a coffee to fuel his caffeine addiction that can never satisfied.

Logan walked into his house and sat down on his armchair. Cathrine climbed onto his lap but he's shooed her away. She always seemed to meow louder during the signal.

Your daily broadcast is about to begin, remember you can always t̙̰̖̲͔͈͚̱̞͙̐̇͋́̅̊̀̅̕͝ų̺̺̟͇͈͎̝̫̱̳̝͈̬͔̩̠̞̙͑̍͒̌̅͗̔͑̿̋̔͘̕̕̚̕͠͠͠r̡̧̧̛̟̺͍̘̘͉̞͔͇̭͍̮̒̋͆́̎̿̀̉́̏̊͘͘͜͠͡n̡̢̛̥̺̱̫͖̹̩̲̝̪͊̊̊͂̔̇͆̓̄̋̓̓ͅ i̢̱͕̮͎̺͓͂̒̊͂͒̏̍t̨̨̥̦̙̭̦̀̄̾̂̽̄͘ o̧̥̗͚̮͇̬̠̥̼̮̫͕̞̪̭̝̼̍͒̇̀̐̌̊͆́̐͂͒̀̋͌̌͐̕̚͜f̡̢̨̢̥̬̳͓̺̖͍͐͒̍̄̋̂̏͂̍̊̏̅͜f̛̹̱̜̥͇̜̥̙͇̻͍̙͈̱̈́̎͋̏̑̑͊́̌̓̓͗́́͟ ȧ̢̧̢̞̙̦͉̪͇̇̾̄̑̽̓̈́̾̓̌͟͜͝ͅẗ̜͎̖̰͖͉͇̦̥́̍̑̄̚͘͞͡͞ ä̡̫̰̪̰̖͕̲͙̲̝̘̤͎́̂̏̇̓̃̍̽̐́̚͘͢͞͡͡ǹ̢͇̙͇̙̯͎̬̟͖̪̥̹͔̙̿́̓̍̽̊͆̈̓̍̎̀̏͌͌͜͞ͅy͓̪̟̲̩̙͚̗̫͚̰̘̫͈͌̍̊̃̎̓͒̄̔͑͆̈̄͠ -

It cackled unholy sound, like the type static made but way worse and the device proceeded to go radio silent (no pun intended). Logan walked over to see if Cathrine had chewed through the wires again but she was curled up in a ball on the heater.

"I got this fixed not even a week ago, It can't be broken already.."

The box suddenly flickered back to life akin to a car engine. Logan sighed in relief, returning to his chair waiting for the-

Good evening lucky citizen, I am proud to interrupt your daily brainwashing in the hopes that you will heed my warning. Stop listening to the fucking signal or broadcast or wave or whatever you call it in your sector.This is probably the most idiotic thing that you have ever heard. I am fully aware. But also was that story our caregivers told us so we wouldn't cover our ears. So you listened through the hidden circle of hell that was the sound you heard. But you don't remember the pain and only the calm when it ended, don't you? In the very likely case you are currently at your mobile trying to report me., let me save you the hassle of trying to find a name. Call me-

Logan promptly ripped the radio cord out of the socket.

Pacing around his study slowly, trying to mentally recall a fact, he pulled out his phone and checked the time. The broadcast had ended the second he had pulled out the plug. He couldn't dwell on that. He typed in a number and let the waiting sound become his background noise until someone picked up.

"Patton, can I stay at yours for the night?"

*****

" Q.Quill. A twenty year old woman who grew up in godforsaken dump that is Fumi, clawed her way to the top and started to biggest drug empire in the city, who always has four weapons on her person at all times, the person whose body has never gotten more than a scratch before the person who dared to hurt her died was killed by her own hands and you killed her sneaking an acid bomb into her Big Mac. I'm surprised Duke. It's less creative than how you usually murder your target."

"You wound me Pip, when I joined this company I swore to myself that every single job I do , I would pour my hearty and soul into. There is no was in-"

"Let me guess, the acid is more than acid."

'Duke' gave a slick grin. "Wanna know what was in it?"

"Nah, I'm still traumatised from the hat job."

She passed a bag to the assassin.

"You know where to pick up your pay check from. Get the fuck out of my office..

Grabbing the sack, moonwalking on his hellys that Pip was convinced he was not wearing before, 'Duke' went to collect his earnings.

He rolled to the Shed, pick up the cash, stuffed a red hot poker into the eye of a guy who tried to mug him and continued on with his daily rout-

"Thomas!" Duke ran up to the named person and lifted him into the air. Then he slapped his face.

"Ow, what the fuck was that Re...," A frantic head shake for 'not the right time. "Duke .."

Thomas narrowed his eyebrows and pulled the Duke to the nearby alleyway. Thomas was going to speak but the other beat him to it.

"I slapped you, partially because I wanted to and because it's not safe to be around me at the moment because I kinda killed someone off duty so the Shed is probably after me and your dad will kill me if I get blood on your shirt and Janus is terrifying when pissed."

Thomas just stood back, taking a good moment to process the information.

"How did you get chosen to be an assassin?"

"Do you think I know?"

Duke perked his ears up. Footsteps. Very light and carefully planned ones as well.

"Ok Thomas, I'm got to play with people's intestines now, say hi to Janus for me and rennet that's nothing is illegal if you don't get caught!"Duke took out a sewing needle out of his pocket than had green thread.

Thomas felt sorry for the victims ,already starting to back out of the future crime scene.

"Sure!"

*********

Virgil stepped back from from his computer, questioning why he even decided to take commissions in the first place. And seeming from the email, this wasn't someone trying to fuck with him.

Time to get some moral support.

i'llburnifigointothesun: What would you do if a guy offered you one fucking million for a piece of fanart of them living out their romantic fantasies

FosterDawg: You don't need to do nsfw pieces. You're not a broke college student

i'llburnifigointothesun:Yeah, I've upgraded to a broke adult.

FosterDawg : So...Why are you nervous about this? You've drawn kisses before albeit it wasn't normally the most light hearted work but this isn't one of your triggers.

i'llburnifigointothesun: the condition is I have to hand paint this and they want it 'hyper-realistic'. i kinda don't want my hands to die.

FosterDawg : Kiddo, at the end of the day, it's your call if you want to do this or not.

i'llburnifigointothesun: it was such a dad thing to end that with an exclamation mark.

Virgil put down his phone, listened to the broadcast ,stared long and hard at his paintbrushes. After about half an hour he got out a canvas and pulled up reference images.

He gritted his teeth. "If they're lying, I'm about to going to sue."

*******

"Dad, I'm home!"

Thomas flung his backpack onto the floor, walking to the kitchen to partially look for his dad and partially to get the leftover pizza.

"Okay, he's still at work which means time for-"

"Thomas you can't watch Steven Universe re-runs until five in the morning again, you have your revision that you'll procrastinate and then panic a month before you the exam date in guilt of not studying."

The father had seemed to just manifest out of thin air, standing behind his son and the other couldn't tell if he had been there for an hour or two minutes.He rarely wore his emotions on his sleeve.

"Dad, I didn't ask you to peer into my soul.Also Remus says hi." He fiddled with the remote control, deciding what cartoon to binge watch .

The parent rushed to his son ,checking his face to see if was hurt. "Shit, you didn't see him kill or hurt anyone, right?"

"Yep!"

Janus let out a breath he wasn't aware he was holding. "Thank fuck, you can't be used as a witness."

Thomas walked over to the front door to retrieve his discarded backpack and took out his music theory notes. He scanned through the notes and then lowered his head in frustration."Why did I pick this class?"

"It seemed like a good decision at the time, for you and you just started your Hamilton phase." Janus saw his son staring over what he assumed was the homework. The due date was in a weeks time. He had an internal debate with himself and came to a decision.

"You know what, fuck that!," He chucked Thomas homework to the side. "Do what makes you happy tonight, you seem stressed and you should take time for yourself."

Thomas started at his dad for a few seconds and gave him a big hug. " Thanks, I kinda needed that.. This maybe a bad time but I kinda threw my tie-dye pride flag with your yellow dress shirts.

Janus stared at the other with a glare that could be sarcasm or could be anger. "Well, everything could be gayer."

The dad finally put down his hat on the coat stand and started to walk upstairs. "Remember to keep it down, I'll be live."

"Kay.."Thomas started his self care routine by microwaving the leftover pizza.

Taglist( Ask me if you want to be added):

@katlikethesword, @crinklesnuff

#logicality #wisp writes #i fucking did it #thank you cat #so much #anyway #dukeceit #demus #prinxiety #logan sanders #patton sanders #remus sanders #roman sanders #janus sanders #virgil sanders

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mooooooosicals · 5 years ago

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Some fun little facts about some of my artwork

(Basically I like adding small details and whenever someone points them out I become extremely happy because someone actually bothered to look)

"Do you believe in ghosts?" You'll notice that in the center of Paul's eye is a music note. That has remained consistent for all of my tgwdlm artwork whenever a character is infected

In the back of this you can see glowing eyes peering out.

The set for this is in fact the tgwdlm set, however this is the lighting for the opening number, simply because I wanted it to be creepier.

"Am I crazy? I don't think so." Infected Paul's colors are blue, regular Paul's are yellow-orange

Something that bothers me about this picture is the anatomy, Paul's chin looks like it's going on for an eternity

Both Pauls have the exact same injuries, however they're different colors for what I think are obvious reasons

For both of my let it out pieces, Paul has the Exact Same Injuries because Consistency ™

"Should I Never Have Wanted?" The characters' fingertips, knees, elbows, noses, etc. are blue. This is consistent with every infected character, it's just sometimes hard to notice

I never actually use white for Paul and Emma's clothing, nor black. However, Paul and Emma's colors are exactly the same every time I draw them. I literally use the Exact Same colors. The only time I didn't do this is in "Do You Believe In Ghosts?"

Paul and Emma's eyes are completely blue, with the music notes being larger. There is no shine in their eyes

"Paul! You Made It!" There's a lot of things to notice in this one

First, Infected Paul has his fingers crossed behind his back

Emma is hunched over because of her leg

Shading and lighting has no effect on Ghost!Paul

Emma is wearing a "Welcome to Clivesdale" shirt simply because it bothered me that she was wearing the Exact Same Clothes as 2 weeks prior

Ghost!Paul is in a light blue hue.

The squares in the back are similar to "Am I crazy? I don't think so?" They're more rainbow because that's how the beginning of Inevitable is lit.

"Now you're Califor M.I.A." the shine in Lex's eyes are broken hearts

Ghost!Ethan is in a light green hue

"At least they're happy now" both Paul and Emma have hearts in their eyes

The background is the bisexual colors. That was intentional ;)

"Am I dead? I'm comin' apart at the seams" (this one is my favorite) you'll notice blue veins creeping up Paul's arms and neck

If you zoom into Paul's right eye (our left), you'll notice it's actually cracking, with blue peering through

His left eye is infected but there's also blue rings in it. Interpret this how you want ;)

A detail I've started to add in is that there's a lot of purple and blue under Paul's eyes, because he's basically dead y'know?

He's also crying. He's in a LOT of pain

Would this also be a good time to point out that yes the infected do have sharp teeth?

"Scream all you want, she can't hear you, no one can" Ghost!Paul has actually managed to make a crack in the mirror

"You will NEVER win." Infected Paul's eyes are even bluer in this one

The blue veins have even reached his face

The bruises on his neck are from McNamara choking him.

Infected!Paul is in a blue hue

Regular Paul has some internal bleeding going on

You cannot see his nose or his eyes

He is in a red hue

You'll also notice an injury on his chest

If you look at Wiggly!Paul, you'll notice he's holding a box cutter, implying he made that injury

Wiggly!Paul has several green patches, on his fingertips, in his hair, on his neck

There's also tentacles that have sprouted out of his stomach

Ouch

His eyes are green as hell with red in the center. This is actually different from being under the influence of Wiggly. Refer to my eye chart if you're confused (possessed by wiggly eyes are not on there but influenced by wiggly are)

There's blood coming out of his eyes

Yet his blood is also green

Confusing I know

Wiggly!Paul is in a green hue

There is a difference in expression between the two corrupted Pauls. Wiggly's is more evil and Infected's more manic

#tgwdlm #black friday #art #starkid #jocelyn saying random things

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thisyearingaming · 5 years ago

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1997 - This Year in Gaming

Muggins here was born in ‘97, and can’t really remember much of it, natch. But there were some good things released this year - I’ve played every one of these, and have missed so many more.

Diablo - Windows, January 3rd

We start with dungeon-crawl-em-up and well-loved out of season April Fool’s Joke, Diablo. I’ll be totally honest - I don’t like Diablo that much. It’s absolutely fine, I just can’t get into it. The writing, setting and characters are all very good especially since this year only marks the beginning of games being seen as a bit more adult and intelligent. Check out this gameplay from Hour of Oblivion on YouTube, and marvel at the faux-Scottish accent on Griswold the blacksmith.

youtube

Mario Kart 64 - Nintendo 64, February 10th

Compared to its more recent versions, Mario Kart 64 is a veritable bloody relic of the past - solid controls and a quirky style mean it’s still a crowd pleaser to this day, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone right now that would die on the hill of it being their favourite single-player racing experience. It’s also got some of the deepest, impenetrable lore in any medium known to the human race - why exactly is Marty the Thwomp locked up here?

Blast Corps - Nintendo 64, February 28th

February’s position as most boring month of the year is shaken up a bit by having a uniquely designed Rare game slammed into its 28-day long face. Blast Corps is the puzzle-action game where you take control of several vehicles to destroy homes and buildings in order to prevent a nuclear warhead exploding in the coolest incarnation of Cold War politicking ever seen in a video game. Calling Blast Corps a “hidden gem” these days is like calling Celeste a hidden gem - it impresses nobody and makes you look like a dick.

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter - Nintendo 64, March 4th

The N64 was home to a surprisingly large number of above-average shooters despite its muddy graphics and small cartridge space - Turok is one of these, a great FPS game where you shoot the SHIT out of dinosaurs. Brett Atwood of Billboard said it was like Doom and Tomb Raider mixed - Doom Raider, if you will. I say it isn’t - there’s no demons, and there’s no polygonal breasts to poke dinosaurs’ eyes out with!

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - Sony PlayStation, March 20th

What is a retrospective? A miserable little pile of opinions. I’ve only recently played through SotN for the very first time on a TOTALLY LEGITIMATE copy with a CRT filter. Bloody good (geddit?) game, that takes the repetition of its predecessors, improves on it in basically every conceivable way, and combines it with special effects and graphics that even 23 years later had me going “ooh, that looks quite good!” Symphony’s music and audio design are wonderfully paired with a deeply enjoyable experience that’ll have you saying “mm, maybe just one more room?”

Tekken 3 - Sony PlayStation, March 20th

Also releasing from the Land of the Rising Sun that day was Tekken 3, which many believe is still one of the best fighters ever made. Tekken 3′s combat is so fast and responsive that it’s better than some games made today. T3 is also the best and easiest way to knock seven shades of absolute shite out of your friends without risking a massive head injury or a trip to the headmaster’s office... where you could also challenge him, but only if he plays as my favourite Not-Guile-or-Ken character in gaming, Paul.

Sonic Jam - Sega Saturn, June 20th

The moment Sega realised that re-packaging old Mega Drive games would net them serious cash - although unlike later collections, this is a strictly Sonic affair, and has a neat little 3D world to run around in as a sort of hub world. Sonic X-Treme proved that Sonic Team would have to work hard at getting the fastest thing alive into 3D space properly: Jam is the sort of test ground for it too. It features some genuinely good emulation work for 1997, although it’s basically the gaming equivalent of going round to your grandparents at Christmas only for them to give you the exact same gifts you got in 1991, 1992 and 1994 but wrapped in a bow to make you think it’s different. What are you lookin’ at, you little blue devil?

Star Fox 64 - Nintendo 64, June 30th

So there’s this German company, right, called StarVox. Nintendo look at Europe and say “shit, we don’t want another lawsuit... after all, we’ve done three this year!”. So they give us in the PAL region the exciting title of Lylat Wars which as far as I know means absolutely fucking nothing in the context of the game. They’re still called Star Fox in-game too so what was the point? Anyway, fun 3D shooter with graphics that’ll make you do a barrel roll off the sofa and onto the power button to make the brown and green blurs a little easier on the eyes. Hello 2007, I’ve come back to make old references with you!

Carmageddon - Windows, July 30th

The game so scary it was BANNED in the UK! More like the game so fucking shit it was banned. Carmageddon is so deeply boring to play on PC that I can only imagine that Stainless Games made it tasteless by 90s standards simply to ramp up demand - much like another game we’ll be covering soon.

Herc’s Adventures - Sony PlayStation, July 31st

“And they said Kratos was the best hero? Shish... they got it wrong, sister! Hercules is clearly better... he even has a coconut weapon.” A surprisingly fun overhead action game that most people only know for... well, I’ll just embed it.

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Mega Man X4 - Sony Playstation, August 1st

A few years ago I tried playing every Mega Man game there is - I gave up at X3 because I was getting bored. Even still, Mega Man bores me - but at least the level design is good. Stay away from the Windows port. Pictured: me in the background yawning.

GoldenEye 007 - Nintendo 64, August 25th

The name’s Intro. Overused intro which I also managed to fuck up twice through the deeply editable medium of text. GoldenEye is like the Seinfeld of console shooters - playing it nowadays you’re unlikely to be amazed but holy shit there’s some absolute greatness in this game. Every sound and every piece of music in GoldenEye is permanently seared into my brain - sometimes I’ll just hear Facility or Frigate in my head alongside the door opening sound and the gentle PEW of the PP7. I mean come on, fucking listen to this and tell me Grant Kirkhope isn’t cool as all hell.

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LEGO Island - Windows, September 26th

The first open world experience I ever had was LEGO Island. It’s still quite good today, utterly deranged animation from the likes of the Infomaniac and Brickster - a cautionary tale for children that giving pizza to high-profile criminals is disastrous for the human LEGO race.

Fallout - Windows, October 10th

War never changes, but franchises do. Fallout’s legendary status in the industry is exemplified in how different it feels. Yes, we had the game Wasteland nine years prior, but until September 97 there was nothing quite like Fallout. From the chilling introduction sequence showing the ruins of the United States to the tragic ending, Fallout is an exercise in pure human misery with the brightest spots of hope it can possibly muster thrown in for good measure. What begins as a tedious isometric point-and-click RPG ends as a minigun-wielding power fantasy, before your entire worth is stripped from you at the finish line. You have 500 days to find a water chip before it’s too late, but you’re constantly being fought by terrifying Super Mutants, irradiated animals, and the biggest monster of all - humanity. See what I did there? If anything, humanity in Fallout’s setting would be the greatest unifying force possible against the horror of the outside world. But how is it? It’s dull, it’s sluggish, and it’s really hard to get into even if you’re already a fan - but push through that and it’s worthwhile to see exactly how far the series got before Todd Howard said “eh fuck it” and had the whole thing dipped into an FEV vat.

Grand Theft Auto - Sony PlayStation, October 21st

To put it simply, the first in the GTA series is now nothing but a novelty. It has an irritating camera, wonky controls, poor graphics and deeply repetitive gameplay. But thank fuck it exists, because without it the Rockstar story may have been very different indeed. It’s quintessential cops and robbers gameplay, spanning across Liberty City, Vice City and San Andreas in one game, but with maps so far removed from their modern incarnations they may as well be named “Not New York, Possibly Bristol and Orange Town”. People really fucking hated Hare Krishnas in the 20th Century, didn’t they?

Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back - Sony PlayStation, October 31

A hard one to talk about, honestly - it’s more Crash and better than the first one. It looks great, and Crash controls so well compared to his first outing. It’ll also keep you playing for 100%, fiendishly addictive and unashamedly difficult. Had a weird cover that moved with your head.

PaRappa the Rapper - Sony PlayStation, November 17th

Type type type the words into the box! (Type, type, type - uh oh - the box?)

PaRappa is a gorgeously stylised rhythm game about rapping to steal the heart of the girl of your dreams - which involves learning karate, getting your driver’s license, selling bottle caps and frogs, making a cake, desperately trying not to shit yourself, and finally performing live on stage. Every one of its segments is so well-produced that they’d genuinely sell like ghost cookies in this era of shite rap. Notable for producing the greatest Jay-Z backing track ever made.

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Sonic R - Sega Saturn, November 18th

Sonic R is absolutely FINE with vibrant textures, interesting levels, neat gimmicks and decent controls. But I’m gonna talk about its fucking AWESOME soundtrack by Richard Jacques and T.J. Davis, an eclectic mix of Europop and New Jack Swing - even thinking about it is bringing tears of absolute joy to my eyes hearing Super Sonic Racing in my head. You’ve got the main theme, Living in the City, Can You Feel the Sunshine, Back in Time, Diamond in the Sky, Work It Out and Number One - all of these are absolute club bangers and genuinely wouldn’t be out of place in a 90s disco.

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Tomb Raider II - Sony PlayStation, November 18th

Lara Croft returns to single-handedly endanger every species on Earth. TR2 is really good, the exploration and puzzle-solving aspects of the first game expanded upon here and the gunplay remaining just as punchy. Lara’s got a fully-functioning ponytail which absolutely boggles the fucking mind - a lot of work went into Lara’s hair for the 2013 reboot, so I can’t imagine the amount of man hours it took to get fluid(ish, come on, it’s the PS1 we’re talking about) hair movements in 1997.

And really, that’s all I played from 1997. I’ve left out big hitters like Quake II, Gran Turismo and Diddy Kong Racing, but I simply haven’t formed an opinion on them yet. Maybe in a future post.

Thanks for reading.

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tearapline · 6 years ago

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BTS ' blood sweat & Tears Japanese ver mv ' Colours meanings/Code theory

No one can ignore the strong Colours shifting through BS&T jap ver MV! & of course it’s not Random (BH Do Everything For A Reason)!There are Already so many Great theories regarding symbolism, So Here I will just Write about colours as the title Sets.

I know it’s too late to write about this, But I didn’t find anyone Do a separated article So Why Not? (I’m a New ‘April019’ ARMY HeHe)

Sorry for the long Intro (•^•) …. LET’S START. READY? SET, GO: (its long, brainstorming & All; so Bring snacks)

Colours that keep appearing on the mv are Blue, Red, Green, Purple & somehow Yellow. let me explain each one of them shortly & then Clarify How do they together interfere with the symbolism!! (let's assume there two personifications of each member adult persona immature one)

First: BLUE:

Blue represents the Wisdom & stability of being Mature.

Suga & jhope Aura (adulthood)

JHope dancing on a Blue background:

Young jimin looking around feeling unfamiliarity towards adulthood (blue room)

Second: RED:

Red refers to Juvenile joy & pure Passion of youth.

Here is young jimin

-Young jin Gazing at ‘The crash of the fallen Angels’ painting & His sight is all red (being on pure realm realizing the existence of dark)

The painting actually depicts the rebellious angels dragging Down other angels to Hell.

Young jungkook aura

Even V :

Jimin dancing on a RED background :

THIRED: PURPLE

Purple is the colour of mystery, symbolizing The unknown complex Feeling of Meeting the devil & Facing maturity Pain! The cruelty of realizing the existence of the Dark realm. Mixing Red (childhood) + Blue (adulthood) → Purple (Between them: Youth)

-J-Hope’s Legend ’ Wings comeback trailer: BOY MEETS EVIL ’ aura portrays it perfectly. Clearly the whole MV is on Purple background:

Jungkook awakes finding purple Blood mark (maturity pain) showing wings (maybe his wings are protruding?)

Jimin eating an Apple (apple symbolizes temptation sin forbidden apple of garden eden)

The scene of Jin suffering

V dazing, as if he is Drunk?

GREEN:

One of Green colour meanings is ’ Rebirth’. Reminding me of ‘DEMIAN’s Breaking the Egg concept (Demain: a novel by Hermann Hesse the inspiration of Wings album entirely I’m sure you know about this) Green is to Shake Hands with the Devil, to Sin! This colour meaning is the most obvious on the MV & Even clearer on the Original ver (Korean one):

Jimin Here is literally mixing the apple with the juice then it turns into green

Let’s talk about the most interesting scene (ladies & gentlemen Fasten your Belts!!)

Okay ehm ehm we have a residence on blue light & RM siting so manly on the left side (adulthood) (the residence represents stability)

A Hotel on Red light & jungkook siting so politely on the Right side (youth) (the motel represents uneasiness of the young)

In the Frame we got a green light as RM is about to offer a liquor to jk (SIN, ruining purity).

(As you see the scene proves my whole theory.)

What happens after jk is forced to drink the liquor?

His surroundings become BLUE & he Looks dazed cause The maturity is hitting him so hard.

Then a yellow light!

(I will explain it further Below)

YELLOW:

yellow = Enlightenment !! the exact moment of noticing the wickedness.

the painting jin looking at is on yellow (the actual painting is colourful) (enlightenment) even the Binocular is Golden LOL

getting back to the very start: jk waking up looking surprised inside a ’ mainly ’ yellow room, even the light above him is yellow!(enlightenment) other colours are green & purple (the pain of realizing the evil is reason he astonished)

On the wall Colours are painted in a way looks as they’re jk’s wings woow!!

-Jhope sits in front of ‘Pietà ’: (a subject in Christian art depicting the virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus) pointing an arrow (if we consider it as pointing to his left symbolizes warding off evil if right protection. both meanings interfere with being on motherhood realm) the lights are purple + yellow

Keep reading if you Don’t wanna miss the real joy! (bring a cup of coffee it’s deepening)

Further Explanation:

Young jimin (Red lighted) looks at His maturing-self in the way reaching Adulthood (the one inside Blue room) & suga quickly covers his eyes as he looks Hesitant to eat the apple (to accept his fate going through maturity). (What if jimin is just a visitor on Suga own world (as suga is his mentor, showing him the way toendure maturity)? I mean in the mv beginning there is a piano (suga first love) who knows!! (yall lets appreciate how the walls looks like piano inside)

jk entering a restroom in a red light to spit out the Green liquor (going back to his pure young side refusing maturity) suga is trying to stop Him (encouraging jk to handle maturity soreness move on) feels like the same thing suga did with jimin when he closed jimins eyes preventing him from yearning & longing to his pure young-self. but jk pushed him away!!

lights changed to purple jk fainted + black smoke spreads

jhope pulling an arrow (pulling an arrow back symbolizes conflict tension life struggle facing maturity releasing it from the bow represents positive transition in one moving forward mature)colours meanings of Yellow & purple interfere.

Is jhope pulling the arrow towards V? Does He want to Help V breaking His world? (OH! Does it sounds strange? Then let me quote the most famous line of the novel DEMIAN: ‘the bird fight its way out of the egg. the egg is the world. who would be born should first destroy a world’ I’m Gonna use this concept a lot so please put it on mind.)

-V is Suffering inside a blue veil, trying to be out to the Red surroundings but couldn’t(v agonizes maturity pain desires his youth back)

What Do you see?

On a purple light Jimin & jungook holding V, V looks worried & scared, Jhopes hand aiming something Green towards him (not sure what is it, Green small arrow?) (the point is jhope about to ruin v pure youth)

If you gonna argue how on earth I know it’s jhope’s hand then:

Same shirt!! yeah .

As jhope ruins V purity the arrow is pulled, it hits white bringing in green & red (hitting purity: youth been ruined)

Jhope on a blue room wearing half Blue half red T-shirt (mature jhope is aware about adulthood youth) throwing pills into a yellow can while smiling (jhope is no longer suffering letting go of his past struggles he throws pain away) (jhope’s facial expressions says it All

Look at this again (oc I didn’t take this screenshot to convince u about jhope t-shirt sleeve only haha)

On this scene it Seems like all members are already matured (the way they sit) leaving the pain behind them as they watch jhope throwing the pills. jk with a blue lollipop (matured) (I couldn’t point out all but) suga’s piano, Rm mirrors, curtains (jin) all behind. Also there’re so many small palms all around the room (palms symbolize victory triumph peace as they overcome the struggle)

RM’s room is Red & green: on green light there’re so many red items ‘roses, curtains’ even the walls painting is red-green scratches! but How?

(I know what’re you thinking now: like ‘why isn’t it purple you’re manipulating.’ Just keep reading)

first Look at the very left, the surrounding of the room is Red (the director could cut it to directly show the inside but bighit is leaving clues) or simply mirror’s reflection shows Red. So Rm is actually on his young realm which is starting to be ruined. this scene timing comes with jk being forced to drink (which are very interfering with youth being ruined concept). Red roses symbolize romance love + in front of Rm there’s the same cup of Green liquor he offers to jk (both ruins purity) the existence of the dressing partition & the mirror support the idea of RM being his young-self (changing cloths symbolizes personality changing the reflection refers to self-reflecting ego shows instability of youth)

Still not convinced? What if this whole scene is made to prove Yellow meaning? (green and red mixture makes yellow: pure youth being ruined so one be enlightened)

Rm looking at his reflection the light changes to yellow while the lyrics goes ‘the wings resemble the Devil’(rm acknowledges what looks devil to him is makes mature gives wings fly) (his facial expression be like I know it all now)

you see now? it’s a state of enlightenment not suffering this is why there’s no purple. What happens after that?

The mirror breaks into pieces & the Blue rays shine (as rm breaks his egg finding way out to maturity concept)

¬ Mixing specific shades of Green & Red doesn’t give yellow but Brown. on the mv Brown appears on some scenes giving the same meaning of yellow:

-Jin’s scarf before it gets purple lighted:

-The lamp

The painting

Curtains & the sofa

& here, HERE!!

¬ what’s going on here?

Blue lighted V is scratching a Green wall walking up stairs (mature v is rebelling he wants to go back his young-self) (look at the thing he’s scratching by it is Red.)

The colours gradually change ‘Green, purple, then Red’ from down to up, as V is trying to return to his pure youth BUT!…

V finds out there is no way back, he is already trapped as the whole sky is ruined green & his world is changing.

- The fact that youth & adulthood are unseparated is expressed a lot through the mv specially at the ending:

What bangtan is telling us is that “it’s alright!” Maturing is hard, painful, storming & makes you feel not yourself but “it’s alright!” Sensing the existence of the evil, passing by it or even commiting it- doesn’t mean that’s who you are. You’re just maturing. Forgive yourself Learn & move on.

Jin young world falling apart:

The room jk awakes in breaks down (it Goes from yellow to green then into blue/ a galaxy of Red, blue, yellow & purple interfere)

Scares on Rm hands left after the mirror breaks, the room is no longer Red but green & yellow. (the paint that Revealed on the wall is “the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel: Icarus fell from flying too close to the sun. Allegory of pride, youth & the dangers of going to extremes) see? very interfering.

Look here(Red through blue/ Green through blue):

Green & Blue crossing:

Bonus:

The station RM works on (you can see the Red though everything is black & white):

Jin gives RM a Green lighter!!!

Trivia: I’m sorry if anything sounds wired or clingy I’m not native, I truly tried my best wording this theory but English isn’t my first language after all. Please support me.

#bts #bts mv theory #bts theory #bangtan #bts senarios #bts world #bts wings #bs&t #japanese version #boy meets evil #bts japan

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