#then the message and whole point of leverage would be ruined

[cachow-it]

so unfair I Hab a dream that leverage movei but no leverage movie 😭😭😭😭

[actualtext]

Dec 28, 2022

Potential-Roommate Issues

My future roommates name is Cailee, I've known her loosely for about four years. We recently got closer and then she was gonna move to Indiana and I was gonna go with her once I had enough money.

Back story, she was approved for a three bedroom house in Indiana. One of the rooms has a bunch of windows. I jokingly called dibs. Right before she left, she said she wanted it and I was totally okay with that. After a few nights there, she decided she didn't want that room cause it was "too cold," so I mentioned how I would like to check it out once I moved there. Immediately she began making excuses about how she needed it as a sun room and whatnot. I asked her for just a chance to test it out, and mentioned how I probably would think it was too cold too, and wouldn't end up wanting it anyways, but that I did want a genuine chance to check it out for myself. She agreed. Later she was like "are you gonna pay half of the move in expenses? Cause if you're not, I don't think you should have a choice as to which room you pick" and I responded saying that of course I was gonna cover half of the expenses. It was only fair, but I also mentioned that moving forward, all decisions needed to be discussed between the two of us, and I was still going to check out the window room. Many times up until today, she had tried discouraging me from choosing that room even though I hadn't made a set decision. One of her arguments was that there was extra closet space. So I made the compromise that IF I did end up choosing that room, we could have an open door policy where she could go in and out as she pleased as long as I didn't have a sign up that said I needed privacy. She said she was okay with that. I recently asked for her the measurements of both rooms I had the choice of because I wanted to get some things from IKEA. She messaged me today as we were arriving and I ended up leaving with nothing because she ruined my mood. She brought up the same issue of the window room (which I still haven't made an absolute decision on) trying to dissuade me from wanting it, talking about how much colder it was and how she already had her stuff in there and how she would be really sad if I chose that room. Up to this point, she has made every decision about the house without even asking my opinion. Any decision she's made has been "matter of fact" not like "oh what do you think about this?" But more of "this is what we're doing". Choosing my room was literally the only choice I was given and even at that she was trying to dictate it the whole time. I had been open to compromises and evwrything. All I wanted was the option to choose which room I wanted which sounds trivial but considering I haven't had any other choices, and agreed to pay half of the move in expenses as she tried using as leverage, I felt like I had that right. I just told her how I saw this kind of as a red flag, how my only support system was taking away my decision making opportunities and how it didn't feel like she cared about me or my opinion. I said if she wanted her own space to make her own decisions in completely, that I wouldn't be upset and I would totally understand.

She responded saying that she had a bond with the house since she lived there first and how she can't be responsible for whether or not I liked Indiana. I think she thinks I'm asking her to be my crutch, but that's not what a support system is. Her and I had already agreed and planned to hang out regularly, be each others +1, and have the occasional dinner together to upkeep our relationship and that's really all I wanted from my "support system" considering it's just one person so far, so I'm not sure why she thinks I'm expecting her to be responsible for my happiness. She said she was planning on living alone, so it was up to me if I really wanted to go or not.

She did also respond shortly after saying that her sister convinced her to just compromise, and that's she thought she was right.

I'm worried that this is just the beginning and that Cailee, with out her sisters influence, might not respect decisions I make, or even my opinion which could lead to further issues.

This messaging occurred at like 2pm and I just felt so anxious and sick trying to decide what to respond for like four hours. It made me not want to move north of my support system wasnt necessarily the strongest. Now I'm just confused because she said she would compromise but only because that's what her sister suggested.

I have told a lot of my friends and family that I would be moving so I don't really wanna go back on that.

I'm just kind of lost and overwhelmed now. Unsure of what to do next.

[fizzyxcustard]

Betrayal (8)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Masterlist of fan fiction

Fandom: Crossover of Spooks and Pilgrimage (Modern AU)

Pairings: Lucas North x OC/Raymond de Merville x OC

Warnings: Love triangle. Angst. Language. Sexual references/language. Cheating.

Summary: Amy Holland is Lucas North’s girlfriend of six months. Amy is aware of his job as an MI-5 agent and supports him. However, Lucas’ cousin, Raymond de Merville, has always loved Amy and uses their one night stand together as leverage for something more.

Comments/Notes: If you wish to be tagged in any of my tag lists for fics or characters, please let me know, and stipulate what you want to be tagged in. I’m gradually removing people from my tag lists who do not interact.

I'm sorry for the delay in getting this out. I've had a really bad couple of weeks with my own health, and also a scare with my dad. So, without further ado. Enjoy!

Amy began to make her arrangements for moving back home. A transfer from her current location of office to one in Coventry had been swift, so much more than she was expecting. Her landlord, a gentleman in his mid-seventies, Mr. Harris, had shown sadness upon Amy's notice of termination of tenancy.

"You've been the best tenant I've had for years," he chuckled. "And I mean that. No damage, no late night parties and disturbances."

Contact with Lucas and Raymond had ceased, at least on Amy's part. The two men were still attempting to keep contact open, but Amy had ignored them.

Ten days before Amy's arranged transition back home, when the moving lorry and her dad would begin all the moving, she had a message from Lucas.

Can we please talk?

It was simple and to the point, highlighting his obvious need to talk to her and also his frustration at being practically ghosted for the last fortnight.

I'm moving back to Coventry.

Her response wasn't an exact answer, but it gave Lucas some idea as to where their future was going. Nowhere.

Lucas was sat at his desk, back at the grid, and he stared at the message for a second, re-reading it. He had to go and see her, try and dispel her want to leave.

Raymond was lying on his bed, staring at blank space on the wall. When suddenly his phone rang. He turned over, groaning, and grabbed the ringing nuisance.

"Yeah?" he sighed.

"Did you know she was fucking leaving?!" Lucas spat down the phone.

"Who?" Raymond asked, trying his best to appear none the wiser, but knowing immediately who Lucas was referring to. Of course he knew she was leaving; she'd mentioned it to him, and then stopped answering his messages and even ghosted him at the door when he tried her flat.

"Amy! Who the hell do you think?"

"Look, mate, this whole situation has been a fuck up..."

"Don't you think I know that, Ray?"

Raymond sighed and squeezed his eyes shut. "She mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that she was thinking about it. I saw her in the cafe and went in..."

"You've ruined my life, you bastard!" Lucas growled. His whole voice was loaded with venom, accusation and hatred. "And even now, she's telling you her next move and not me. I thought I was making some headway with her and then she just suddenly stopped contacting me, but has obviously been in touch with you."

"No, she hasn't. That was the last time I saw her. She hasn't contacted me either."

Lucas ended the call, in an absolute rage, and stormed out of the office. Jo and Ruth looked up at the thudding of Lucas' feet across the main floor and then the banging of doors.

Amy was at work, completing a work interview with a claimant, when she noticed Lucas storm into the building and begin arguing with the security man, Royston.

"Alright, alright. I'll wait, but I'm not going anywhere!" Lucas shouted at Royston, a six foot five, heavy built black man, who happened to be a keen boxer.

Amy felt her heart begin to race, thundering in her chest. She said her farewells to the claimant, and then dashed to the back office, begging her co-worker, Debbie, to take her next two appointments.

Once Amy was free of her next two appointments, she approached Lucas. He was sat next to a couple of claimants who seemed to be eyeing him suspiciously after his outburst at the door. "Sorry, Royston," Amy said softly. "What the hell are you doing, Lucas?"

"You tell me," he growled.

Amy and Lucas made it out onto the street, where Amy felt Lucas pull on her arm and take her to the side. "Why are you leaving?"

"I can't stay here. Everything that's happened...I can't stay here, Lucas. It's best I go because I've fucked up the lives of both of you. I came between you both."

Lucas stepped towards Amy and looked down at her, only a foot or so away from her. "Leaving won't magically change all of this. I thought that maybe we could try and..."

"Try what?" Amy asked, folding her arms. "Another go at things? Come on, you'd be stupid to take me back after everything I've done to you."

Lucas sighed. "It's not being stupid. It's called being forgiving."

"But could you trust me? Could you trust Ray?"

"I've never trusted Ray with much," Lucas hissed.

Slowly, the gap began to close and Lucas moved in towards Amy, and kissed her gently. She grabbed his shirt with her small fist and kissed him hard, raising fire between them.

Amy sighed and pulled herself away. "We need to be apart for a bit, Lucas," she whispered. "I'm still going to go back to Coventry..."

"Oh, Aim. Please," Lucas begged, closing his eyes.

"Please, after everything that's happened, let's just see how things go."

Lucas' jaw clenched. "And you'll keep in touch with Ray as well?"

"I need to go," Amy urged.

Lucas reached out and grabbed her arm. "Can I come and see you before you go?"

"If you want to. I'm sorry," Amy said softly, and then disappeared back inside the building where she worked.

***

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[indelibleevidence]

We're in hiatus mode with the rewatch for the next couple of weeks or so, but I have 90 minutes until I can call to make an appointment before I sleep, so here we go with 3x05 - WTF Edition. Really hope this cut works, since we have a) plenty of negativity and b) spoilers right up to 5x11 in this post.

So. The Avery twist technically began in 3x04, but we don't get any fallout until this episode. So I'm going to go into an overview of why Avery bugs me before I get to 3x05 stuff.

Let me just start out by saying Kristina Reyes did really well with the material she had to work with. BUT I object to Avery's existence, because she's only around for one season (and thirty seconds at the end where she doesn't even interact with Jeller), and even though it would have been an angst gold mine to have Remi return and deal with her daughter being back, they didn't go there. And everything they had Avery tell the team about Crawford, they would have been easily able to get from other sources. She just plain didn't need to be there in season 3.

I once saw someone speculating that Jaimie and Kristina had a spat, based on Instagram unfollowing or something. That would make a lot of sense, that one of them refused to work with the other and ruined what the writers had originally planned for season 4 Remi and dying!Jane. But I digress.

Overall, I'm glad they wrote Avery out of the show, because when your ship has a kid, they become really boring. Even their shippy moments revolve around the kid. The things they were worrying about pre-kid are now background for kid-related angst, and there aren't that many ways to make that unique and interesting.

The writers kind of averted that with Kurt and Bethany in season 2-4, because Allie wasn't part of the team, she moved away, you only saw a few moments of 'going to be a dad' and they were buried under all the Sandstorm shenanigans, then Allie and Bethany only pop up a few times afterwards. And of course, every single character forgets about Avery's existence after 4x01. But season 3 parental!Jane and season 5 parental!Kurt were just annoying.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying real-life people shouldn't make their kids the most important thing in their lives. That's good parenting (assuming it's not overbearing). What I'm saying is that watching well-developed characters become the Worried/Protective Parent Trope is like replacing characters with cardboard cutouts, because there's not much to differentiate one worried parent TV character from another. They all just go 'MY BABY MY BABY' and it wastes screen time that could have gone towards fun team moments, or shippy playfulness, or whatever.

So yeah, from the moment I heard 'this says I have a daughter' I was already rolling my eyes. The amnesia angle makes it slightly more interesting, but the faked death plot point, when it was revealed, was just far-fetched. Roman's disregard for the only family he has who's not Jane is weird, given how family obsessed he is. A better revenge on Jane would have been what he said he'd do to get Avery to fake her death - getting her involved in his schemes against Crawford, getting her to break the law and become his permanent ally that way. No death-faking required, and a different plot point for getting Kurt to take tattoo help from him.

Basically, I just don't think there was a convincing enough reason for the whole Jane-has-a-kid storyline. Yes, conflict with Kurt and Roman being able to leverage Kurt were worthwhile plot points, but they could have found something else to make it about, that actually made sense.

But yeah. On to 3x05 discussion:

The absolute last acceptable moment for Kurt to put off telling Jane about Berlin was just before Jane got the envelope from Rossi. I mean, Kurt, you're a great FBI agent, you can't string these clues together and read the writing on the wall? Going into the seconds after Jane reads Rossi's message, he already knows that a) Roman knows about Berlin, b) Roman has promised there is more pain coming, c) Roman knows he can use Berlin to leverage Kurt's cooperation, to some as yet unknown end, and d) Jane now knows she has/had a child. When Jane said, 'I have a daughter', Kurt's response should have been, 'I know.'

The writers do have Jane say some stuff that's supposed to give Kurt an excuse for not telling her, like not wanting to disrupt the child's life, but all of that ignores the fact that they had at least twelve off-screen hours to process and discuss this information. I doubt Jane went 'I have a daughter - oh well, we'll ask Patterson about it in the morning, let's get some sleep.' She would have spent at least a couple of hours awake and stressing, and Kurt would have been talking her through it. So he totally would have had time to come clean before she started with her 'I can't have my sense of who I am ripped away again' stuff. Not cool, Kurt.

Jane reacts exactly as I would expect someone to act in her situation, except for one thing - the moment she says, 'How could I forget I had a child?' Like that's some sacred thing someone should never forget, even when they've had their entire memory wiped. She didn't say, 'How could I forget I was a terrorist?' or 'How could I forget I had a brother?' or 'How could I forget my parents were murdered?' So why should having a kid be any different? It just makes me think the implication was some 'sacred bond between mother and child' bullshit. You'd never get that if the amnesiac character was male.

Also it kinda sucks that they had Jane be processing the child reveal at the same time as the case was dealing with untested rape kits. Sure, Roman says the father was Remi's high school sweetheart, who was a 'nice enough guy', but the show seems to be nudging you into unacknowleged parallel territory up until that point. :/

Okay, I'm done. Sorry for the ramble. XD

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers

It's a zombie economy. For 40 years, we've eroded the wages of workers and transfered their share of profit and productivity to owners of capital. This is a problem, because people need money to buy things, and if they run out of money, they stop buying and profits vanish.

Time and again, capitalism has kicked any reckoning over this down the road. First came the great liquidation: pension cashouts, raided savings, reverse mortgages. Then came consumer borrowing, a tidal wave of unrepayable debt.

That's the zombie part: all the unpayable debt, which has been turned into bonds that enrich debt-holders. As Michael Hudson has told us again and again, debt that can't be paid, won't be paid. Our debt-based economy is the walking dead, a zombie.

We can either stabilize the economy (by forgiving debts, so that producers can pay for necessities and go on producing); or we can stabilize finance (by coercing debtors into destroying their lives in order to keep up on payments):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Think of the loan-shark's arm-breaker: he wants to collect on debt, so he threatens to break your arm. You steal your kid's college fund. You secretly mortgage the house. You sell your wedding-ring. You end up divorced and homeless. You still owe. So he breaks your arm.

Now you're divorced, homeless, and you've lost your ability to earn, and you've got medical bills. He threatens to break your other arm. You start breaking into cars to steal the toll money in the ashtrays. You go to jail. Finally the arm-breaker and his boss are out of luck.

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. But as loan-sharks know, fortunes can be collected by applying the right incentives.

Give debtors the choice of immediate ruin from nonpayment, and making a payment today and ruining their lives tomorrow, and they're pay.

They'll pay...until they can't. Because debts that can't be paid, won't be paid.

The zombie economy is the subprime economy. "Subprime" came into collective consciousness thanks to the great financial crisis, where banks tricked poor homebuyers into predatory loans.

The banks knew that the loans couldn't be repaid - they had "balloon" clauses that jacked up payments beyond the borrowers' ability to repay a few years into the mortgage - but they also knew that threats of homelessness are powerful motivators.

The inscrutable equations used to "guarantee" subprime bonds all shared an unspoken assumption: people who face homelessness will go to extraordinary lengths to pay their mortgages. Behind every subprime loan is an arm-breaker.

The zombie economy shambles on. Obama's loan-shark bailout and the eviction crisis let the architects of subprime buy up whole towns' worth of homes and turn them into hugely profitable slums: high-rent, low-quality deathtraps.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-housing-invitation/

Wall St landlords package rents from subprime rentals into bonds, backed by the loan-shark's guarantee: arm-breakers will evict the shit out of anyone who stops paying.

America-a land where eviction was once a rarity-now faces an eviction epidemic.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

The foreclosure crisis was only possible because Wall St and the courts collaborated to streamline the historically complicated and time-consuming process of taking away someone's home. Same goes for the eviction epidemic.

It's a simple equation: the more loan-sharks spend on arm-breakers, the lower the expected profits.

Improvements to arm-breaking processes - cost-savings on traditional coercion or innovative new forms of terror - are powerful engines for unlocking new debt markets.

When innovation calls, tech answers. Our devices are increasingly "smart," and inside every smart device is a potential arm-breaker. Digital arm-breakers have been around since the first DRM systems, but they really took off in 2008.

That's when subprime car loans boomed. People who lost everything in the GFC still needed to get to work, and thanks to chronic US underinvestment in transit, that means owning a car. So loan-sharks and tech teamed up to deliver a new lost-cost, high-efficiency arm-breaker.

They leveraged the nation's mature wireless network to install cellular killswitches in cars. You could extend an unrepayable loan to a desperate person, and use an unmutable second stereo system to bombard them with earsplitting overdue notices.

https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.html

If they didn't pay, you could remotely cut off the ignition and send a precise location to your repo man.

Smart killswitches let you impose fine-grained control over debtors - say, enforcing a rule against driving over the county line.

https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

Within a decade, the bond-market for payments from subprime car drivers was edging up on $1T; not because borrowers didn't default, but because they defaulted later, and the car could be easily re-leased to another desperate person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

The zombie economy shambled on. Tech built undeletable, always-on kill-switches, lo-jacks, and spyware into an ever-expanding constellation of devices, like laptops.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

Rent-to-own subprime laptops were tepicenter of innovation in digital arm-breaking. Laptops shipped with spyware for covert operation of cameras and mic and access ot files.

That went beyond repoing a laptop! Lenders could make and share covert sex-tapes of their customers!

They spied on children, plundered MP3 collections, stole passwords, read email. It was beyond the wildest dreams of analog loan-sharks.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/09/ftc-halts-computer-spying

To make a good digital arm-breaker, you need always-on network connectivity, a device that people really depend on, and a strong presumption that the device has core software that its owner is never allowed to remove.

Basically, a smartphone.

Mobile carriers were early to this party. They collaborated with device manufacturers to create a "subsidized phone" market. They would "give" you a phone in exchange for a long-term, abusive contract, and then repo it by terminating service if you missed payments.

This was only possible because the manufacturers helped, creating phones that could be locked to a single network, so you couldn't un-repo your phone by sliding in someone else's phone.

They relied on the "anti-circumvention" laws that the music industry lobbied for in the late 90s (like Section 1201 of the DMCA) to make it a felony to unlock these phones. Arm-breaking is a lot easier if it's a felony to evade the arm-breaker.

The smarter the phones got, the more subprime opportunities there were. Remember, there's a new market in every arm-breaking innovation and in every arm-breaking efficiency.

Which brings me to India.

India has a huge subprime market. As one of the world's inequality capitals, whose national government runs on performative culture war bullshit and giveaways to the super-rich, it's a land ripe for subprime innovation.

Phone manufacturers like Samsung are key to India's vast collateralized subprime smartphone market: first-time buyers get their phones on the installment plans at predatory interest rates so high that most will default

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Remember: subprime isn't about debts being repaid in full. It's about making borrowers so desperate that they ruin their lives to make payments before they default.

Samsung's uninstallable arm-breaker app allows lenders to brick a smartphone without help from a carrier.

Writing for Rest of World, Nilesh Christopher describes an "escalating series of annoyances" culminating with a full lockout for failure to repay:

*  audiovisual prompts in regional languages as reminders

* changing the wallpaper on their cellphones

That escalates to coercion based on analysis of the users' device activity:

* For "a prolific selfie-taker," notifications every time the camera is invoked

* frequently used messaging and social apps like Facebook or Instagram are progressively blocked

One step at a time, the phone is made progressively less usable, until it is fully bricked.

It's a fully automated, self-configuring arm-breaker, one that substitutes a thug's unscientific ladder of mounting terror with bloodless, statistical science.

This is probably a good point to mention the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve: any disciplinary technology is tried out on powerless people first, and gradually works its way up the privilege gradient to encompass the whole world.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Debt, after all, is consuming all of us except for the lucky few at the very top of the wealth distribution who have not faced wage stagnation and forced liquidations.

The covid crisis pushed whole countries into subprime status. Pfizer has told poor countries that they can only get access to vaccines if they stake their sovereign assets as collateral to settle claims related to its products:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal

And the shitty-tech adoption curve is putting arm-breaking tech into every kind of device, spreading with alarming speed from the bottom of the social order to its apex.

Miss your Tesla payments and your car will lock itself, summon a repo man, back itself out of the parking lot, honk its horn, and unlock its doors for the repo man.

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

As subprime climbs the shitty tech adoption curve, it gets a new name: "software as a service." In a SaaS world, you cannot own the tools of your profession. Adobe Photoshop becomes Adobe Creative Cloud, and any designer who stops monthly payments becomes economic roadkill.

What's more, software is the ghost in the shell, the animating spirit within physical devices. Remove software from a smart device and you don't have a dumb device, you have a brick.

This lets the arm-breakers exert pressure over larger, more powerful entities...like Hoboken, NJ. Hoboken had a payment dispute with the software vendor for its robotic parking garage, so the vendor bricked the garage and took all the cars hostage.

https://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71554-0.html

The strange mutations of arm-breaker tech bodes ill, especially in light of Chekhov's Law: "A phaser on the bulkhead in Act One will go off by Act Three."

The universal spread of devices *designed* to be remotely repoed - bricked, downgraded, turned into surveillance tools - means that oppressive governments that coerce manufacturers will have the power to reach into our homes, cars and pockets to attack us.

Same goes for unscrupulous insiders - like the subprime laptop jokers making nonconsensual sex-tapes with their customers' webcams - and criminals who can pressure insiders into acting on their behalf.

Nevertheless, subprime arm-breaking is bound to spread, and spread, and spread. Covid forced millions to liquidate everything, left them in precarious, sub-minimum-wage gig work, and there's the millions of evictions waiting for the moratorium to end.

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. And yet, people must participate in the zombie economy: they're not going to dig a hole, climb in, and pull the dirt in on top of themselves. There is strong demand for credit on any terms. Any.

Arm-breaker tech unlocks new markets by delaying defaults on unpayable debts. The zombie economy shambles on.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

Sachab (modified): https://www.flickr.com/photos/sachab/1422847855/

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Kat Northern Lights Man (modified): https://www.flickr.com/photos/orangegreenblue/11375767914/

CC BY-NC: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

[traumatized-motherfuckers]

Friendship Dissolutions; A Lesson in Asshole Trauma Reactions

So this is normally my school day, but I’m feeling the need to dig into something else this morning. The past events of this weekend, annnnd the past nearly two years. Because, if you  hadn’t heard, relationships are hard and I like to embarrass myself by telling you about all my fuck ups.

You know, romantic relationships are a disaster for yours truly, but I always thought I was pretty good at the friendship thing. Since high school I’ve almost always had robust friendly relationships - both in depth and breadth. With the exception of a few difficult points in my life since 16, my phone has never been quiet, my weekends have only been isolating when I’ve been isolating myself, and I’ve always felt like I had humans on my side who were closer to kin than my actual family.

The thing is, there have been periods when this hasn’t been the case. I want to say that it’s generally when I’m in my worst mental health downfalls, but I don’t think that’s universally true. There have been variable reasons for separating myself from other people, or vice versa. Sometimes getting too busy, sometimes naturally growing apart, sometimes getting too obsessed with a romantic partner.

But, taking a more analytical view, underlying my lost friendship events, trauma has often been one of the influences that corrupted my friendships and left me lonely, even if it doesn’t seem like it at face value. The thing is, the trail of breadcrumbs might go back 20 years or so. I might not have been in a full-blown trauma state at the time, but those early life non-learnings about relationships have left their mark. So, yes, I do believe that CPTSD is the prerequisite for interpersonal disruptions and we’re not alone in that.

Anyways, in this Fucker’s life, for the past almost 2 years I’ve been in one of those friendship lulls. I’ve had casual friends, roommates, work-associates, distant relationships, some of those hey-how’s-it-going-every-two-months relations. But I haven’t had those deep, rich, all-encompassing friendships that used to define my existence. The ones that used to make me feel safe enough to have an existence, at all.

It’s all because I lost my core group of friends, I didn’t understand and couldn’t fix the problem, and I had no idea how to move forward.

And this last time when I lost everyone I loved, it was definitely due to trauma. Acute, historical, and recovering trauma, to be specific. It was a horrible period of my life, I was a human wrecking ball, and I had no emotional control… because, partially thanks to said friends, I never had to develop those skills.

Basically, I’ve been on my own since a whole series of mental health related isolation events and relationships dissolutions that have persisted since - I want to say 2019 - but to be more holistic, the ship started sailing earlier than that. Like, when I was born.

This has all come to mind more than usual because, this weekend? I had a strange rush of humans back into my life. For the first time in a long time, I saw my best, closest, most important old friends, who were closer to siblings…. In our natural habitat, with our normal friendship routines, with hundreds of memories from the past decade flying around the room.

And today… or, realistically, since I tried to go to sleep after seeing them each day this weekend… I have the relationship reckoning to deal with. The emotional and cognitive processing of everything that’s happened. The lost years. The sense of abandonment. The feeling of being cast out of a family. The inkling that everyone was talking about me. The realization that I was acting a fool, and maybe they should be talking about me. The sense that all parties were partially responsible, but I was the one to blame. The voice in my head that has called me a crazy, miserable, unlovable mess the entire time I debated this at 6am and 6pm and 3am for the past several years.

And now, in the aftermath, I have to work through the dynamic cocktail of feelings, the sense of waiting for the other shoe, and the big decision - are these relationships that I feel secure pursuing again?

And I don’t think I’m alone in this one.

So, today I thought it would be good to talk about this. The history of losing my favorite people on the planet, how I perceived it at the time, how I see my own trauma-actions fucking shit up in hindsight, how I’ve forgiven myself for being such a wild one, and… well… my hesitancy to have close friendships with humans who hurt me in the past. The ways I realized that being separate was beneficial to my mental health and life progress. The self-sabotaging enablement patterns that I now recognize, ran deep, in our old group of friends. The fear that being around them again will let my trauma brain run away with me.

Woo - it’s a whole personal relationship reckoning over here. Let’s just do this, so I can get to my school work at some point soon.

History

So let me set up this situation. You need the background details, of which, there are many dramatic twists and turns.

Be me, Spring of 2019. My romantic relationship with my ex in Atlanta - the musical narcissist that I followed to the city - is going terribly. Since we moved things have been rocky, but now our relationship has been pumped full of disappointment, unfair expectations, emotional codependency, resentment, horrific fighting, and abuse of all colors. Every day is a battle. We’re rarely ever “happy” together. We’re closer to enemies than friends. And we live under the same roof - the one his parents bought for him, outright in cash - to make matters even more fun.

Other than him, I’m alone in this city. I work at the brewery, where no one really likes me. I have one friend from work, but little time to interact thanks to the demanding schedule of my ex with his gigs and out-of-state child visitation.

Financially, my savings have been depleted by floating my significant other’s horrible decisions for the past 2 years. We can never get ahead. He never pays me back for anything. I’m basically in his pocket, as far as needing resources to survive.

As you can imagine, and as I’ve described previously, my mental health is in THE SHITTER. Maybe worse than it’s ever been, although this is hard to judge against some of my earlier years in my 20’s. I’m definitely ramped up in an aggressive and defensive trauma state more than ever before, thanks to living with my aggressor every day. I feel like I’m surviving against the will of my partner, who seems to legitimately be doing his best to drive me into an early grave every single time the sun rises. He’s moved into the territory of intentionally triggering me for hours on end, upsetting me to the point of mental breakdowns, and then gaslighting me for “acting so crazy.” Things have become dangerous, I have no one to turn to, and no cash to get myself into a better situation… not that I know what a better situation even looks like.

But one day, I left. Packed my two bags, went to work, wound up at that single sort-of-friend’s house, never went back home.

And that’s when the real nightmare started. I mean, my ex was a terror over time as we lived together, but a narcissist scorned is a narcissist determined to ruin your fucking life. He harassed me daily via text, phone call, FB messenger, email, stalkings… whatever you can think of. When I blocked him on everything, he started trying to leverage our therapists against me until they refused to interact anymore. He wouldn’t let me into his house to get my stuff. He tried to have me arrested for attempting to do so, after he made arrangements with me to move that weekend. He suddenly refused to even acknowledge that he owed me a dime, and found a way to tally up venmo transactions to show that I actually owed him. He took my only support - our dog, who was really my dog - away and wouldn’t let me see him. Later, he reported my car stolen, so I had to purchase a new one without warning.

The list goes on and on. Just, assume every pathetic, cruel, desperate attempt at getting under someone’s skin and reminding them that they had the audacity to leave you. That’s what was going on in my world.

Meanwhile, with those financial and social pressures I mentioned earlier. No close friends in the area, no spare cash, an unstable job where I was on the chopping block for the reason of “the CEO didn’t like my personality,” nowhere to live, no idea where to go next or how to start a whole new life.

Annnnnd this is right about when my closely knit friend group back in Illinois sort of, well, dipped.

My bestest, best, most treasured friend in my lifetime had always been there for me. But now, she wasn’t. We had exchanged a handful of phone calls over the past month in the aftermath of this relationship ending, but she had been pretty detached from it. I wasn’t offended, because she had certainly heard enough of the drama in real time… of course she was tired of hearing about it...  but I was feeling especially alone and incapable of handling everything on my own, so the distance was difficult, nevertheless. Then, one day she told me that I was being too much for her. I had too high of expectations. It had been bothering her for a while. She needed me to understand and give her some space.

And this was the completely avoidable beginning of the end of my friendships. Let’s talk about why.

How I perceived it

So, I’m pretty sure you can guess how I took this challenging message from my best friend. Uh, poorly. I was so shocked that in my darkest hour, my comrade would feel like my problems were out of her paygrade. It felt like a stab to the heart and straight down through the gut. Here I was, completely alone and isolated, reaching back to my most trusted companions for a lifeline to keep my head above water, and… nothing. She didn’t want to reel me back into the boat.

I responded with some shitty messages about how I really wasn’t asking that much from her and I didn’t appreciate being blindsided by her sudden decision to get rid of me. I had only taken up a few phone calls to talk things through based on her schedule. I had visited her one weekend as I went to a job interview nearby. I had asked her to come visit me soon, so I could feel less alone for a few days. I didn’t think it was fair that she was responding this way. I couldn’t believe she would turn her back on me at this particular moment.

And so, the rift developed. We stopped speaking. I started sobbing. I was absolutely beside myself, as if I hadn’t already been. This wasn’t what I wanted, at all, but I also felt like I had no control in it.

.......

Like it? Well I’m too lazy to post the whole thing here. Check t-mfrs.com for the full blog AND the podcast recorded version. Yawelcome. 

www.t-mfrs.com 

(Traumatized Motherfuckers)

[anemonenemerosa]

The Spare- Chapter 13

Hello fellow people, I’m sorry for the delay (The chapter has been posted on AO3 for ages and I don’t know what took me so long)

Credit for the Sweater-verse goes to the wonderful @lumosinlove​

Chapter 13

TW: Violence, a bit of blood, forced outing, abusive families

In calls and texts: Reg is normal Ben is bold-italic Mateo is italic Jo is bold

When Reg got from the airport to the hotel to change into his suit, he learned that his mother had, indeed, tricked him again. The contacts on his phone were mostly deleted and he had to share a room with Severus, who was less than thrilled at the prospect.

"I have to share a room with you to make sure you stay mommies little boy! Rookie, I tell you, get close to that faggot and I rip you apart. I'm not getting shit from Riddle or your mother because you don't stay at the sight side." He growled at Reg and combined with the cold glare of his deep-set eyes, Reg was convinced that he could -and would- actually do that.

"Your mother will be here tomorrow to have a look herself." They had him... he could not escape... his happy family idea was gone; The universe had hit back. He thought of losing his Hobbits, as he named Jo, Ben and Mateo and it pained him too much to let it dwell. Reg closed his eyes with a sigh and a resigned nod.

Of course, they had to arrive at that damn Red Carpet together with Sirius and Tremblay. Walking behind Sirius was bad, walking there with Severus eyeing his every movement was worse but the worst was when Reg saw the look on Sirius' face. Tired, lonely, hurt. He heard bits of the questions his brother was asked and hurt with him. Hockey is about hockey, not what a player does in his spare time.

And there was nothing he could do. He had to re-watch the introduction with a proudly sniggering Severus four times this evening without a chance to sneak out and find Sirius. Reg considered drowning himself in the bathtub. He really ruined it for his brother ...and Remus. That poor guy who had probably lived a peaceful live until now, that he was accused of fucking his way up. What Regulus heard on the phone that dreadful night did not sound like he took advantage of his brother's fame.

The next morning, he briefly met his mother, who dismissed him curtly, her eyes scanning the players for his brother.

"Regulus, do what you are told. No missteps! You really thought I would let you roam freely, disgracing the name of Black even more?" her long nails were digging though his armour, her voice calm but freezingly cold. They would not let him go and stay with Ben and Mateo. He was stuck with his actual family. Although completely unhelpful, Regulus felt the abandonment by Sirius cut in his chest. He left me with them... he knew how they were, even then.

But determined as always, he tried to help Sirius. He came here to talk to him, to -hopefully- mend fences and become brothers again.

How do I even get to him secretly? Regulus was still finalising his tactic as he noticed Severus and his mother glaring daggers at Sirius, looking much better than yesterday and signing stuff for people covered in rainbow-flags. He made an uncommonly rash decision.

Regulus quickly skated over to his brother, almost knocking him over and tried to warn him without being obvious. If he looked angry, he could play it off as scolding, if his mother inquired. But Sirius didn't understand that he tried to warn him, not to berate him. Reg allowed himself his internal eye-roll as he had nothing else going for him. Connard stupide.

That damn Tremblay wouldn't go away either and there was not much he could explain without him overhearing. Il est trop relou. He's annoying.

And before Regulus had conveyed the, rather important, message that their mother was coming for him, Snape called him over. After the skills-competitions, which he lost (much to the disdain and disappointment of his mother), he was ushered into the hotel room, petulantly supervised by Severus until the next day.

During the games, Snape couldn't hover around him and Regulus was paired to play with Sirius. He was not sure whether he should be glad or upset about this. He missed his few days of peace with his Hobbits, missed the easy conversations with Jo, missed being Reg.

Regulus felt miserable. Sirius had made it clear that he did not want him anymore and he dreaded going back to the prison that was his life. He rubbed over the butterfly stitches, closing the cut at his thigh and somewhat cursed meeting Ben at all. Without him, he wouldn't have known how lousy his life actually was. He was not in the mood anymore to get through to Sirius although the All-Star people all but shoved him into his face. He wanted to be left alone.

That was, until Sirius spoke, really spoke to him. Made clear that he did not hate Regulus, called him Reg, told him that he would help him get out if he wanted to.

His thoughts were twirling in his brain. There was a rapid shift in their estranged relationship, one that Reg loved. But they hadn't talked about the outing-thing and he grew more and more terrified of losing it all over again when he opened up. But Sirius seemed quite happy with the prospect of sorting things out. Alors, because he has no idea of the shit-show on the horizon.

Reg was happy, too. His brother really stayed with him. He did not go after the interviews, where he found the courage to openly support his brother, not just quietly in his mind.  But he was also scared out of said mind by the prospect of returning to Slytherin, especially after that public statement.

Sirius turned to him. “Come back to Gryffindor with me. Minnie got you a seat with me and Logan. Tomorrow.”

There was an out? Relieve beyond belief soared though Reg as his brother pulled him into a hug. They hadn't done that in years. But the embrace triggered a chain of thoughts that yanked him out of his comfort. Ben. He thought there was an out before, but Ben and Mateo were not in the position to really help him, as much as they wanted to. Sirius, on the other hand had quite a bit of leverage.

Reg felt ungrateful.

That weird guy who found him bleeding and crying in the shower, hugged him, took him home and just made him part of the family in three days.

 "You know what, I’m your mom now!”

 “I’m talking now as your fried -or co-mom, apparently..."

Both, Ben and Mateo said that after Reg confessed what he had done. Even then, they wanted him to be there, to stay with them. He wanted to be with them, too but not with everything else waiting in Slytherin. His throat was tight. Reg wanted both. He wanted to keep this new-found people and be with his brother. And he felt like shit for assuming Sirius gave him a better chance for an escape.

But Reg and Sirius hadn’t talked yet. His brother new nothing. Would he still be so inclined to take Reg with him if he knew who turned his life inside-out? He needed to talk to him before they boarded the plane. And he needed to talk to Ben and Mateo. And Jo. Wonderful, funny Jo, who was open, honest and kind. Who cared for him and liked him as person, not as hockey player. And Jo, who he would probably leave behind just like Ben and Mateo for his brother. If Sirius still wanted him.

The fear of losing so much nearly overwhelmed him. He needed an out.

“Okay,” Regulus said into Sirius’ neck, voice thick. “Okay."

They would meet at Sirius room in about an hour. Time for Reg to sneak into his own room and gather his things, hopefully without running into Severus.

Thank all the deities whose existence I doubt that Severus is anywhere but in there. Reg thought relieved after closing the door behind him. He felt a bit calmer now that he made a plan. He would call the Hobbits from a telephone booth he saw on his way (Apparently, they still existed).

A small piece of paper with the number was shoved into his pocket by Mateo before he went to the airport in Slytherin.

"Just in case."

                                                       oOo

"Hello?"

"Ben?"

"Reg? Hi! Is everything OK? What kind of number is this?"

"We watched All Star all day, you did great!!!"  Jo's voice drifted in from the off

"Erm... yes, well... um...I call from a telephone booth and I- I kind of need to talk to you guys."

"Okaay... I didn't know these things still exist. Anyway, do you want me to put you on speaker?"

"OK." Reg felt so nervous, his voice was tight, his gut clenched.

 "Hello there, Reg! What's up?" Mateo.

"Erm..." The Reg of question had no idea how to approach the issue, but time was pressing.

"Come on, it's us. What's bothering you?"

"I- I talked to Sirius and he wants to take me with him home but he doesn't know it's all my fault and Maman will not let me stay with you she will find a way and if I don't leave with Sirius I might never get out of there but I do not want to leave you guys and I do not want to be ungrateful but I feel like this but I really want out of there but maybe Sirius doesn't want be with him once he finds out and please don't hate me." Once the floodgates opened it all came out in a stumbled, confused word-vomit.

Smooth and collected.

"Whoa, whoa Okay. Keep calm, everything's okay. Just let us go through that one at a time. Do you have enough coins?"

"Yes." He choked out.

“Good. So, we try to repeat to what you have told me in some kind of order, and you tell me if we got that right, OK?”

"OK."

"You talked to your brother and he wants to help you out of your abusive situation. You think that he can really help you, but you are afraid he doesn't what once he learns how he got outed, right?"

Reg couldn't answer. That was on point. Instead, he let out a deep sigh. "Mhm."

"Okay. Well, we do not know Sirius. So, we don't know how he might react but at least on the screen he seemed to be getting more confident with this. Talk to him. I'm sure he sees that, while you accidentally started the whole thing, the reaction of the people is not your fault."

"But-" Reg all but choked out. He was so fucking afraid. “But what if not?”

"I know. Maybe you have to trust him a little there."

"I- I try. There is not much else I can do anyway, is there?" A bitter laugh escaped his lips.

"Well, you could also come back to us. I know you said your mother wouldn't let you." Ben said quickly before Reg could tell him exactly that.

"But if everything else fails, rebook your flight to another time and we get you directly from the airport. Please keep that in mind. Our door is open for you. We're your moms, after all."

"None of us is mad because you want to get out. We want you to get out, too. You are not ungrateful. It's not that you walk out on us or anything."

"Also, phones and stuff exist, obviously. Or did you plan to say goodbye now and never call again?"

Jo hadn't said anything so far and Reg ached with the slight insecurity in her voice. But then all the other things they said seeped through his mind, followed by warmth. They did not hate him; They were not angry. He hadn't messed up, so far.

"I- No. No, this is not a goodbye. I just wanted to talk to you, let you know what changed."

"And that was very nice of you, my son. Now, better go and talk to Sirius, yeah? And please give us a short call or send a message later. So that we know whether we have to kidnap you on Slytherin airport, or not." Ben sounded like he was joking but practically ushered him from the phone.

For the last five minutes, any unsuspecting hotel guest on floor three would have had the opportunity to observe one Regulus Black attempting to knock on a door and failing repeatedly.

Alors, Regulus Arcturus Black. Where are your metaphorical balls? Knock on that fucking door already!

The moment he did, he regretted it a little. Sirius flung the door open, phone at his ear, grinning.  Hey. He mouthed and jerked his head to beckon Reg inside. Once the door was closed, Sirius looked at him again, still grinning and gesturing at his phone. Remus. Want to say hi?

Reg was very sure that he did not want to say hi. He still dreaded the wrath of both of them and shook his head no, looking pained.

                                                      oOo

Looking at the frantic shaking head of his brother, Sirius felt his stomach knot. What if he's not as accepting as he told the media? Does he hate me after all?

After saying goodbye to Remus and hanging up, there were a few eternities of awkward silence. They hadn't been alone in a room together since... a long time ago.

"Alors... Reg, erm" Sirius switched to French now. It felt more comfortable, like they were children again. "Would you like to tell me about what ha-"

"I'd rather not talk about that right now." Reg fidgeted nervously at the frayed cuffs of his sweater.

"Yeah, yeah. Sure." His brother looked like he'd rather just go to bed and never talk again but Sirius really had to ask before taking him to Gryffindor.

"Did you mean it? You really support me?"

"What do you mean?" Reg just glanced up from intensely memorising the pattern of the carpet.

"I suppose you followed twitter" At his dry tone, an eyebrow of Reg moved upwards.

"Yes, I did... But who you spend your free-time with and what you choose to do with them is indifferent to your hockey play."

"Warm words as always, loving brother."  Now, the second eyebrow followed.

"Okay well, fuck you! You left me there, with our parents expecting me to outdo your every move! I know they are horrible, but you went and got better without me. You promised, to always be my brother, to be there for me. And then, you weren't. You abandoned me! Do you know how much I envied you for having friends, a team that supports you and genuinely likes you as a person, not just your play?”

"Reg..." Sirius tried to reach out to his brother, but Reg backed away.

"S-Sorry, that's not what I came here for. I wanted to tell you..." but the sentence just trailed off into tense silence.

"What is it?"

"I..."

"Come on, spit it out"

"I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry about the situation."

"For what? Me being gay?" baffled, Sirius could only stare at his brother.

"No... for getting you into that situation... I did not want to hurt you or Remus"

"Well- Wait what?" Something awful was dawning in Sirius mind.

"I overheard your call on thanksgiving, you weren't exactly quiet... and please believe me I did not want this to happen... I-" Sirius felt suddenly cold all over.

"What. Did. You. Do?" his voice was barely above a whisper.

"It was at the Snake's Christmas... I- I was so lonely because of that Interview I was basically grounded and under constant observation... and I thought you hated me after that and... and I didn't want to - it just kinda slipped. I thought they all were too drunk to notice but-"

"Regulus." Crashing headfirst into the boards was pleasant compared to what Sirius felt right now. "Really I'm so-" Reg stammered, voice thick and eyes fixed on his shoes.

And next Sirius' fist crashed into his brother's face, sending him to the floor.

Sirius took a few ragged breaths, ready to succumb into a fit of rage but looking into his brother's face, almost a mirror of his own, eyes wide and blood tickling from his nose, not even trying to defend himself, he realised that this was not Regs fault… Sirius knew how their parents could get, knew the Snakes, knew that feeling of loneliness from when he was that young. His brother did not want to harm him but most importantly, it was not Regs fault how the public reacted and that he run away from Remus at the airport… Long ago, he promised himself to never hurt his baby brother, to protect him…. Sirius eyes welled up as he yanked him off the floor and pressed him to his chest. I'm sorry. Je suis désolé, je suis désolé... I'm sorry... I left you there, all alone... I'm sorry...

Regulus looked up into his face, tears streaking his face, too while both realised that although there is so much work to do between them after hall they lived through and did to each other, that they still have each other.

                                                         oOo

"Do you love him?" The brothers were sitting opposite each other on Sirius' bed, legs stretched out between them, both a cup of tea in their hands, Reg still pressing a tissue to his nose. Sirius was telling Reg about the general situation in Gryffindor.

"Yes", Sirius didn't even hesitate for a heartbeat.

"Have you actually put in the effort to tell him?" He leaned back against the headboard, crossing his legs.

"Reg, stop smart-assing."

"I see." Reg smirked a bit, " Then maybe, you know, mention it sometime. Or is he psychic?"

"You are a git."

"You like me."

"I ldo" Sirius snorted. " but I am still mad at you."

"As you have every right to be."

"Reg, ...why did you not speak to me first?"

"You mean because talking about feelings was exactly the sole centre of our upbringing?"

"You are not helping your cause."

"Je le sais. Je suis désolé mon frère... je suis sérieux." I know. I'm sorry... I really am.

                                                        oOo

After a few beats of a little more comfortable silence, a sudden reminder pinged through Reg's thoughts.

"Oh. I almost forgot. Can I take your phone to send a text? Mine is still spied at." He piped up rather automatically, then saw his brother's eyes narrow.

"Who would you want to text?"

"Erm..." Reg felt his cheeks heat, no idea how to explain this fever-dream-situation but the raised eyebrow with the expectant look on Sirius' face made him spill something. Reg thought it was a rather messily told story, but his brother seemed to follow.

"So, you had a meltdown after the tweed outing me and ...the guy that, cleans the stadium put you back together, had you checked by his EMP boyfriend and then took you home with the boyfriend to ...feed you soup and hug you good-night after telling you their life-stories?

"Yes."

"And then you came back to them two days later and told them about our family and they just offered you to live with them and -and announced themselves your mom and co-mom, while you refer to them as the Hobbits because they are short and friendy?"

"Yes."

"You are aware of just how absurd that sounds?"

"Mhm." Reg was gnawing at his bottom lip. He had not mentioned Jo so far. This was odd enough already.

"Just checking... Well, then go on." Sirius threw his phone across the bed, thinking of how lucky Reg got with these people but also looking for a catch.

This is Sirius' phone. I survived and will accompany him to Gryffindor tomorrow. Hugs, Reg. he quickly typed the message and sent it on its way.

When he woke up the next morning, around five, he found himself curled up on his side, head at the foot of the bed. Lifting said head, he caught a sight of his brother, mirroring his position so that their calves were at the back of the other.

"Just as we used to." He mumbled before carefully getting up and heading for the bathroom, getting ready for his flight.

[bellemorte180]

The First Miss Mystic Falls

Caroline Forbes had not been back to Mystic Falls in over a century. When she got wind of a living doppelgänger, Klaus sends her to check the credibility of their information. Seeing the doppelgänger for herself, Caroline creates a scheme to not only get a missing item back for the Original Family, but to ensure that Klaus and Elijah put aside a decades old feud, all in time for the sacrifice that would break Klaus's curse.

It just so happens that the doppelgänger is a contestant in the Miss Mystic Pageant and Caroline always did have a fondness for it.

She was the first Miss Mystic Falls, after all.

Follow up to - The Madness of Jonathan Gilbert

June 2020 Bingo- Prompt "Miss Mystic Falls" @klaroline-events

Mystic Falls 2010

Caroline sat in the black, nondescript Sedan. The tinted windows prevented her from being seen and people of Mystic Falls bypassed the car as though it was nothing out of the ordinary. Caroline ensured that it had a Virginia’s license plate just to be thorough. She did not want to be noticed nor did she want to make a scene. For now, she was watching and checking on the information Anna re-laid to her and that was easier done if she had no one in her way.

It had been one hundred and forty-six years since she last step foot in this god forsaken town. It had changed over the century and a half; modernized as most of the world was. Gone where the carriages pulled by horses down a dirt road. Gone were the corsets and dresses and southern manners. Yet, the differences Caroline found that the town still remained the same in some ways before she was run out of it.

The founding families, one of them she had once belonged to, still held the counsel against vampires. The only downside is almost everyone on the council did not realize that the Salvatore brothers were vampires, except for one member, and Damon somehow found a way to gain a seat on it. She was surprised; Damon she knew was not exactly one for forward thinking. Then there was Stefan, falling all over the Katherine look-a-like once again; Damon sending longing looks her way as well.

Elena Gilbert. The whole reason she stepped foot in Mystic Falls again. Two weeks ago, Caroline was enjoying a nice blood infused bottle of wine on yacht in the Caribbean when she got the call. Klaus was trailing his tongue down her flat stomach and she almost didn’t answer Anna’s call.

Almost; but she was glad she did.

Now she sat in a hot car staring at a more boring version of Katherine. At least Katherine had been interesting when Caroline had known her as a human. Granted they were not close, for the old vampire was too involved with Damon and Stefan to really get close to Caroline. Not that she cared; her relationship with Damon and Stefan was nothing more than polite smiles and maybe a dance at a formal event when they were human. Neither knew that Caroline had been turned mere weeks after they themselves left Mystic Falls.

Elena was sitting on a bench across the street talking to a young woman Caroline realized was Emily’s descendent. Caroline made a note to stay away from that one. As far as Caroline can tell, Elena was not at all remarkable other than being a Gilbert; a family Caroline decided she hated; seeing that it was Jonathan Gilbert who smothered her with a pillow and ruined all of her and Klaus’s plans for a smooth transition in New Orleans. Fucking Gilberts.

Caroline pulled out her smart phone and raised it in order to take a photo of Elena. She saved it to her phone and quickly typed out a message. She attached the photo and hit send. She did not have to wait long before her phone started to ring. Klaus’s name flashed on the screen and Caroline smiled.

“Hello Love.” Caroline purred into the phone. Her eyes were still on Elena who was laughing at something the witch said. “Receive any interesting pictures?”

“So, it is true then? There is another doppelgänger?” Klaus’s voice was smoldering, and Caroline knew him well enough that she could hear the excitement in his tone. Her smile grew wide, knowing that he was happy. He had all but lost hope on ever breaking his curse long before she met him. She knew it tore at him, having that part of him locked away and Caroline wanted nothing more than to set him free. “I didn’t think it possible.”

“Katherine had to have had a child at some point. Probably before she was tossed out of Bulgaria.”

“Clearly.” Klaus replied. “Well, I suppose I can drive up from New Orleans and be there by morning. The full moon isn’t for another three weeks so there is no rush. I’ll have Greta and Maddox fly in as well.” Caroline bit her lip, a thought passing through her head. “We will have to keep this quiet. The last thing we need is my brother getting wind of this.” Caroline said nothing and by the sigh on the other end of the line, Klaus knew that she had an ulterior plan. “Sweetheart? What is it?”

“What if we asked him, for you know. Help.” Caroline stated and pushed forward before Klaus could reply. “I know things are rocky for the two of you and frankly, I love you, but it was all your doing. Yes. Elijah pushed your buttons, but you really did not need to tell him you dumped the coffins in the ocean. So, I get why he is mad at you.”

“Caroline-“

“Please Klaus?” Caroline all but begged him. While the relationship between Caroline and Elijah had always been frosty since she was turned. However, he accepted that Klaus loved Caroline and therefore they were a package deal. Since the massive argument between Elijah and Klaus in 1933, neither brother had spoken to the other; no matter how hard Caroline pushed Klaus to reach out to his brother. “For me.”

“Fine.”

*

Two days later Caroline found herself walking down the street heading towards the Mystic Grill. Her heels echoed off the pavement. It was in the middle of the day and she knew that the doppelgänger would be attending classes at the high school, along with Stefan. Caroline scoffed at the idea of going to high school; no thank you. She saw no appeal in the concept, especially when there were finer things in life than mundane lessons from humans who had no real concept of what they spoke.

Caroline paused when she reached the entrance of the Grill; her eyes scanning the only decent establishment in town. Her eyes landed on a flyer that was pinned to a corkboard near the entrance. She pulled it down and smiled; adding a new layer to her plan. She folded the flyer and stuck it in her bag before looking around for her target.

Bingo. Sitting in a booth in the far corner all alone. Perfect.

Caroline strolled over at a leisurely pace, his back was towards her and he did not hear her coming. When she reached him, she placed her hand on his shoulder and quickly moved it down his arm; gracing his hand with her fingertips, removing his ring without notice.

“Hello John.” John Gilbert startled and looked at her with wide eyes. He looked nothing like his ancestor and that pleased Caroline; the last thing she wanted was a Jonathan Gilbert look-a-like. He looked her over and she could see him visibly swallow. He knew who she was and that made her very happy. Caroline sat down across from him and tossed him her favorite Miss Mystic Fall smile; she was the first one after all. “Where you expecting company? No? Perfect.”

“I didn’t realize you had returned. I thought it was just the Salvatore boys.” John replied stiffly, not taking his eyes from her. She reached over and picked up a French fry, popping it into her mouth. “Does Liz know you’re here?”

“My cousin? No. She does not.” Caroline told him. She eyed him and she could see a series of plans calculating behind his eyes. “And she isn’t going to know John. By your reaction, you know who I am affiliated with.”

“The Original Family.”

“Yes.” Caroline leaned forwarded, tossing him a predatory look. “When Klaus and I fled this town over a century ago, we were forced to leave something behind. Something valuable. Now, I‘ve made it my business to study up on the founding families and I know that a certain ancestor of yours passed it down through your family.” John just looked at Caroline, unmoving and unblinking. “Very good, you know exactly to what I am referring.”

“I’m not giving it to you.” John told her and she was expecting that answer. Caroline planned for it and adjugated her plans accordingly. No good plans worked without leverage, so she ensured that she had multiple layers of leverage planned; forcing John to bend to her will. “I would be a fool to give it to you.”

“Then I suppose you will never see this again.” Caroline raised her hand to show John the ring that was no longer on his finger. He tried to reach across the table and take it from her, but she was faster; laughing at his failed attempt. “Interesting things, these rings. Making it so the person who wears it will come back to life if they die a supernatural death. I can understand why it would be very valuable to you. If you want it back, I suggest giving me what I want. And if this isn’t enough of leverage, I understand that you’re rather close to that nephew of yours. I wonder how he tastes.”

“Stay away from Jeremy.”

“Do we have a deal?” Caroline asked pleasantly and John glared at her as though he was contemplating her offer. He wasn’t foolish enough to think she was bluffing; and she wasn’t. If he was not willing to bed to her rules, Jeremy would be dead before the week was out.

“When?”

“Knew you would come around.” Caroline tossed him a wide smile and pulled out the flyer that she had plucked from the corkboard at the entrance out of her purse; sliding it over to him. “The Miss Mystic Falls pageant. Did you know that I was the first ever Miss Mystic Falls? It would be poetic to have our exchange there, don’t you think.” John didn’t respond, his eyes glued to her purse, where she had casually tossed the ring into it. Knowing that her job was done, Caroline stood to leave; pausing just slightly to look at John. “Oh, and if the council gets winds of this and they try and dispose of me. Just imagine the havoc Klaus will wreck if I do not return. Blood will flow and everyone in this godforsaken town will burn.”

Caroline did not have to look back to know that John believed her.

*

The Miss Mystic Falls pageant was scheduled for the end of the week and Caroline kept a low profile till then. She watched the Salvatore brothers continue to fawn over Elena and how everything seemed right as rain. She looked in on her distance cousin, Liz, who was the sheriff and noticed that she seemed none the wiser about her reappearance in town; for Caroline was the Forbes’s family’s dirty little secret. John kept his word and Caroline was almost feeling charitable enough to give him a gift. She wouldn’t kill him; or at least not permanently.

She bought a skintight, short green dress that enhanced her curves. The black lacey lingerie she wore underneath her dress was so scandalous, that she snapped a photo of her partly naked body and sent to Klaus; ensuring that he would be waiting for her when she returned from the pageant. She smiled. It had been over a week since she had been in his bed and it was far too long for either of them. That and if their eventual plans came to fruition, it would be important for him to come to Mystic Falls.

He would come.

Klaus was not a man who could turn down Caroline in lingerie.

Caroline pulled up to the Lockwood manner in a flashier car, a sleep black Maserati, compared to the Sedan she had been driving previously. She no longer cared about blending in or hiding the fact that she was in town. Soon enough, it will be irrelevant and the entire town; or at least in the supernatural ‘know’, will shake with Klaus’s arrival.

As Caroline stepped out of the sports car, she saw Anna standing in front of the porch with her arms crossed and her head shaking. Caroline had run into Anna a few times over the last century. The two had an understanding. Klaus and Caroline let Anna do what she will in exchange for information. If Caroline’s plan worked and Klaus broke his curse, then Anna, nor her mother, would never have to fear anything at all.

“I thought you wanted to keep a low profile.” Anna asked, her dark eyes raising in question towards the car.

“There is no point in hiding now. Klaus is coming.” Caroline told her and the two vampires strolled up the stairs of the Lockwood manner. The mayor was standing by the door, willing to greet any and all to the Miss Mystic Falls pageant. Gaining an invitation into the home was easy and Caroline rolled her eyes. For a town who knew about vampires, one would think that they would not be so cavalier with their invitations.

Caroline was ready to part from Anna, but the latter grabbed ahold of her wrist. Caroline narrowed her eyes at Anna. The other vampire was older and could easily kill Caroline if she wanted but she would not be so thoughtless. Anna knew that killing the blonde was an automatic death sentence for herself and her mother….and anyone else she cared for.

“Our deal?”

“Stands.” Caroline flashed her a smile. “I promise you that if you and your mother stay out of our way, we will let you build this little idealic life you and your mother want.” Anna wasn’t convinced. “If Klaus disagrees with the deals I have made, then I have many ways of persuading him.” A movement from up the stair got her eye and she saw Damon Salvatore go into a room that she assumed belonged to the contestants. Caroline pulled out her phone and shot two separate text messages out. “I have to go.”

“Caroline! Wait, Elena’s brother-“

Tuning out Anna’s plea, Caroline grabbed a champagne glass and walked up the marble stairwell. Not a single person stopped her, and it was too easy to follow Damon into the room. She listened closely enough to hear the conversation brewing between Damon and the latest doppelganger. Apparently, they thought Stefan was missing, probably off on a blood binge and that was something Caroline found interesting. A note to use later down the line. She missed Ripper Stefan. He was more fun as a murderous bloodaholic than he had been human; or this broody version she had been watching for days.

No longer willing to wait, Caroline pushed open the door to Elena’s changing room and strolled right in. Elena jumped in surprise, her brown curled hair bouncing and bright brown eyes bulging. Damon’s jaw dropped in a comical manner, as though he could not process what and who he was seeing.

“Damon! How are you? It has been an age.”

“What?! How? What?”

Caroline ignored him and strolled over to Elena, taking in her appearance. It was one thing to see her from afar and through photos but to be up close and personal was another story. She did not just resemble Katherine; it was as though she was a carbon copy of her. No wonder Stefan and Damon were in love with her.

“They said the doppelgangers were flawless copies of one another, but this is uncanny.” Caroline cocked her head, studying Elena who she could tell was becoming uncomfortable under her scrutiny. Caroline held out her hand, gripping Elena’s in greeting. “Caroline Forbes. I grew up with Damon and Stefan.”

“You’re a vampire?”

“Obviously.”

“Who the hell would turn you?” Damon’s voice cut in and Caroline turned her head to him. The surprise was still written on his face. He was completely taken aback at her sudden appearance and Caroline would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy it. “You were an annoying little twit as a human. If anyone would fail at being a vampire, it would be you.”

“Ouch.” Caroline said in mock hurt, her hand messaging her chest over the place her heart was. “I will have you know that I excel at being a vampire. All those controling tendencies I had as a human were magnified. I mastered being a vampire within a week. Can’t say that for either of you, now can I? Oh, where is Stefan?”

“How are you a vampire?” Damon asked again. Caroline smirked at him, noticing that he was not willing to speak of his brother. Stefan was not important at the moment, but he could come in use later, especially if he was going off the rails.

“I died with vampire blood in my system. That is how vampires are made. Did you not know that?” Caroline tossed him a winning smile. Damon was growing frustrated and Caroline rolled her eyes. “Short version? After Stefan murdered his father...” Elena gapped at her in surprise. “He bit his head off, right from his shoulders, literally. Quite the brut, your boyfriend is.”

“Caroline...” Damon warned her, his eyes full of concern for Elena who was processing the knowledge of news of the man she loved killing his own father. Elena sat down on the sofa, questions running through her mind.

“Still no fun I see.” Caroline drank a sip of her champagne. “The town held the first Miss Mystic Falls pageant after the two of you fled town. I won, of course.” Caroline turned to Elena and did a small curtsy. “The first Miss Mystic Falls at your service.” Caroline turned her head back to Damon, sensing the presences of someone new heading up the stairs. “There were two men in attendance that were not from Mystic Falls. They claimed to be wealthy merchants from Louisiana interested in trading with the town. However, they were not merchants…. where you Elijah?”

Damon, Elena and Caroline turned their heads to see a tall man who was dressed impeccably. He had brown hair, dark eyes and wore a suit that cost more than everything the room combined. He was fixing his cufflinks and appearing bored. He stepped through the door, closing it behind him, his eyes bypassing Caroline and landing on Elena.

“No. We were not.” Elijah moved to stand directly in front of Elena; eyeing her. “My brother and I came to see if Katerina had really locked herself in tomb. Quickly we realized she had not. My brother took a fancy to Ms. Forbes.”

“Who is Katerina? And who are you?” Elena asked, in a small voice. Elijah’s eyes looked at her and Caroline could see a flicker of something behind them. Caroline bit back the urge to groan; especially since Damon noticed Elijah’s focus.

“You know her as Katherine Peirce, but her real name was Katerina Petrova.” Elijah told Elena in a gentle tone. “I’m told that Mr. Salvatore is familiar with her?”

“Unfortunately.” Damon muttered and Caroline heard the distinct sounds of the words lying bitch reach her ears.

“As charming as Katherine is, shall I continue? I do hate being interrupted. Elijah’s brother and I began having an affair. We had planned to marry and leave town before he turned me, but Jonathan Gilbert discovered that I was having sex with a vampire and smothered me in my sleep. I had vampire blood in my system and here we are. Official story is that I ran off and eloped. Truth is I was run out of town when my father, who was the sheriff at the time, learned I was a vampire.” Caroline drank from her glass again, watching as Elijah gaze at Elena who was becoming uncomfortable under his scrutiny. “She looks like her. Doesn’t she? What was the one you loved named? Tatia? Is it unnerving to see the face of the woman you love but it not be her at all?”

“Do not speak of things you do not understand Ms. Forbes.”

“A hundred and forty-six years with Klaus and I understand a great deal.”

“Do you have what you promised me?”

“Not yet; but it will be here soon.” Elijah turned to look at Caroline, as though to retort but a knock sounded at the door and the imagine of Carol Lockwood appeared. She was wearing a nice dress and her hair was done in a fashioned that gave off the aura of a wealthy wife.

“Elena honey... oh, I did not realize you were not alone. You really should not have guest up here. The pageant is just about to start.” Carol told her, giving a false smile at the guest. “I think it would be best if you wait downstairs with the rest of the guests.”

“I’m sorry Mrs. Lockwood.” Caroline moved towards the older woman. “We just wanted to come up and wish Elena good luck. We will be out of your hair.” With a flash, Caroline was upon Carol, tiling her neck to the side and savagely biting into her neck. Her hand was pressed against Carol’s mouth; preventing her from screaming. Elena screamed out and Damon moved to stop Caroline, but Elijah gripped the young man by the neck; stopping him from moving forward. When Caroline was done feeding, she let Carol’s body drop to the floor. Caroline turned back to the others and smiled. “Damon, put the body in the closet please.”

Elijah dropped Damon as Caroline made her way over to the vanity. She sat down and cleaned her lips in the mirror. Elena was staring at her and Caroline caught her eye. Caroline refused to break the gaze between them in their reflection as she cleaned her lips of Carol’s blood. Damon dragged the body and stuffed her into the closet.

“Must you make a mess everywhere you go?” Elijah asked, giving her an insufferable sigh. Caroline spun around on the stool and crossed her legs. “My brother seems to have corrupted you even further.”

“That is just your bitterness talking Elijah.” Caroline pulled out her phone and began typing; she pulled up a series of photos. She handed the phone over to Elijah and waited. Elijah scrolled through each of the photos, his eyes growing wider. “If you look at the date on the newspaper, you will see that they were taken just this morning.”

“He said-“

“The two of you were fighting and you know how he likes to lash out. He would have said anything to get under your skin. I swear I have never seen brothers fight the way the two of you do and I grew up with them.” Caroline snapped, pointing at Damon; who looked as though he wanted to be affronted. However, Caroline did not allow him the chance. “Do you honestly think he would drop them in the ocean? That I would allow him to?”

“Niklaus does what he wants.”

“Klaus does what I want if he ever wants sex again.” Caroline snapped at him. She aimed to continue but stopped when she heard the creaking of the stairs. A knock sounded a few moments later and the door pushed open. John Gilbert stood in the doorway with a box in his hand, viewing every single person in the room. “Right on time John. Do you have what I want?”

“Uncle John?” Elena muttered in a small tone, fear still etched on her face. John looked at her and then back to Caroline; knowing that she had Elena there for a reason. He took in the rest of the room and stiffened at the sight of Elijah.

“Do you have my ring?” John replied before looking at Elijah. “Who is your friend?” John asked, seizing Elijah up. There was a flicker of understanding in John’s eyes and a healthy dose of fear echoing in them. Sensing it made Caroline smile. She gazed at the box and stood from her seat, walking towards John in an almost seductive manner.

“Do you honestly think that I would not show up without back up?” Caroline taunted. “Show it to me.” John did not move, and Caroline rolled her eyes. She pulled at the chain around her neck, revealing the ring that was resting in her cleavage. She removed the chain from her neck and dangled it in front of him. “One ring that will bring you back from the dead. Now open the box.” John did as he was told and opened the wooden box. Nestled inside was a silver dagger and a small bottle of white oak ash. “Elijah. Is this it?”

“You have seen the others. You know that answer Caroline.”

“Very well.” Caroline took the box from John and tossed the ring at him. If she wasn’t so focused on the silver dagger, she might have laughed at seeing John scramble for it. “Although, I would be careful John, those rings are dangerous.”

“You’re only saying that because my ancestor was the one who killed you.” John replied, feeling braver now that his ring was firmly back on his finger. Caroline turned to him and glared. She did not like being reminded of her death. The end result was the same, but it ruined her perfectly laid plans. Not only that, she wanted Klaus to be the one to take her life, not Jonathan Gilbert’s “Maybe I’ll have the same pleasure.”

“Doubtful.” Caroline reached out and stroked his cheek before gripping his chin and snapping his neck. John’s body fell to the ground and Caroline had to give Elena credit; she did not shriek this time. Instead she just jumped into Damon’s arms; who did not seem put off by it. It was not like John’s death would be permanent.

“You’re a monster.” Elena hissed out through clenched teeth.

“Oh honey, I’m the queen of the monsters.” Caroline gave her a smile before turning back to Elijah. She handed the box to him and he took it easily. “It’s yours. We will never ask for it back nor will it be used again, unless you use it one someone else.” Elijah smirked at that and she is winning him over, she can see it. “Will you help us?”

“The others?”

“I’ll try and convince him to pull them out.”

“I thought you said Klaus did as you commanded.”

“Mostly. I might have embellished a little bit.” Caroline smiled at him, fluttering her eyes; knowing that it would not work on him. She was never able to get what she wanted completely from him like she could from Klaus. “Pretty please.”

“When is the full moon?”

“Two weeks. Klaus will be arriving tonight. I sent him an incentive.” Caroline smiled. “I have a feeling Katherine will be in town soon. She is never one to ignore the chance at freedom. Klaus will be willing to consider it in exchange for the stone. Once we have that, everything will be in place.”

“Very well. I will come and speak with my brother in the morning. I’m sure the two of you will be occupied tonight.” Elijah told her but sounded grave. He turned to both Damon and Elena. “It was a pleasure making your acquaintance. I’m sure we will be seeing each other soon. Caroline?”

“Coming.” Elijah extended his elbow and Caroline happily looped through it. “Elena, I’m sure you will win the pageant. I do hope you enjoy wearing the crown. I most certainly did.”

“Wait!” Damon called out, still baffled at the exchange and the two dead bodies in the room. Neither Caroline nor Elijah paid him any mind; choosing to ignore his outburst. “Who the fuck is Klaus!?”

[something-tofightfor]

I just finished WestWorld season 2... there are so many parallels it makes my head spin and you do so well addressing the different sides of how people can interact with the Hosts. Can I ask you to help me think through some things?

I love how the show asks questions - should the Hosts have been created? was it vanity or grief that brought them to life. And then, what kind of responses do people have to things they brought to life??

Maeve is my favorite character, Maeve and her friendly human pets ahaaa, but this season was really important for Logan as well although we don't see much of him.

He doesn't survive to see the Hosts develop some sort of sentience but I also don't think he's ever quite fooled into thinking theyre human, especially once the demonstration gives the game up. I get the sense Logan is really perceptive - he's a savvy businessman and you write him that way and I love it!! But he's also something of a dreamer and he's gentle in a way that leaves him so painfully vulnerable when the line he sees between safety of the park and the care he probably has to use in his daily life is blown apart. I don't quite understand why he sleeps with... all the Hosts at the demonstration though? Do you think it's to show he's already playing a game? Or just that he's too human (vs Maeve saying to one of the techs that the tech "makes a terrible human... that's a compliment")

I get your point from the other ask that he's probably not a jackass in the real world. At least no more than the next businessman. He comes off as sort of a gamer-bro in S1. I know if I were in Westworld I probably wouldn't be eager to shoot just because the Hosts are meant to look so lifelike I wouldn't feel comfortable stepping into that uncanny valley... but I also know and love people who get waaay too invested in their video game lives so I don't think park Logan is that bad. He just knows something is off with William but sees it too late. Doo you think, had he lived, Logan would have maybe believed in the Hosts' sentience eventually? I'm also not sure what it would have taken, another path besides rehab, for him to survive William and his father. Most of the people in his life seem immeasurably cruel or careless. And while my sympathy for him is definitely colored by my adoration for Ben's work, there is something deeply sad about Logan that Ben gets across and that makes Logan believable and sympathetic. I also loved your head canon that he is meticulous about not lying.

I don't think "he" has an opinion at the end of S2, he's just a face narrating a tragedy but I like to think he'd have loved Maeve too - he willingness to do anything for her daughter (But maybe that's just projecting.) Who do you think his favorite host would be? Sorry for the long message!

Hey, Anon! You bring up a lot of really good points here. (Under a cut for people that don’t want a block of text.)

I think at first, it was a combination of things that brought them to life. Ford’s got the opinion that he’s smarter and “ahead” of everyone else - and I think Bernard really just wanted to prove that the capability existed. Bernard always looked at them as a learning experience; Ford thought of the Hosts and the park as something he could control, something that he could use.  Without the Delos investment, Argos wouldn’t have been able to survive. They wouldn’t have had the money to expand, or to create the narratives or to invest in the tech ... but once Delos was there, it became even more money focused. 

Logan, I believe, had a genuine interest in the technology - what the Hosts meant for the world at large, what getting in on the ground floor would do. But with Jim - and William? It quickly turned into what, exactly that money could be leveraged for. Was it meant to be a place for the super wealthy to go and let themselves be free? Yes. But it was also more than that - information collection, Guest monitoring ... testing ... there was so much we learned in S2 (and S3) that were going on behind the scenes ... In the 25-30 years after Logan died, the whole aim of the park changed - to suit Delos. (And William... and to some extent Jim). So whatever the case was when the idea of fthe Hosts and the park was conceived wasn’t the end result. And that’s sad to me. 

Maeve is my favorite too. I wanted to throw Dolores off of a cliff for most of season 2 and most of season 3. I did really like how each of them had a favorite - Dolores was Arnold’s, Maeve was Ford’s.... they were two complely different builds, two completely different personalities ... and we see how that turned out.  That’s the thing about Logan: he doesn’t ever think they’re human or treat them like it. He’s seduced by the park and what it offers, by the ability to use the Hosts to his liking, but they’re not humans. They’re robots. And I don’t think that would have changed even if he’d been around to see what they became by the time William was old. That’s why he’s such a good businesman. He always sees the truth of the situation, can pull out the bullshit. He missed the mark with William - sort of - but only in that he underestimated William’s desire to live for himself when there was something that he truly wanted.  He never wanted Juliet in the same way that he wanted Dolores. I really and truly feel that he used Juliet to get a foothold into Delos, whatever that might have accomplished for him. I think that it took that snap - that moment when Logan pushed him over the edge in the park - for him to realize what he was capable of, and because Logan was so deep in the game, he wasn’t quite able to see when someone else (William) wasn’t quite playing it. It’s sad.  Because he was just doing what he always did, and it ended up being his downfall. At that point, Dolores wasn’t sentient. (Or at least she wasn’t highly sentient. Her actual memory of William no matter how many times she was reprogrammed is proof that there was something just beneth the surface ... but not to the extent that William believed.) He sleeps with the Hosts at the party because they’re there for him. To him, it’s not different than going to a party and blowing through different men and women in one night. If he’s going to invest, he needs to know what he’s investing in. He needs to be able to sell the fact that these are the real deal - that they will fool others. And Logan knows sex. He knows decadence, and he likely knows what it’s like to be with someone that is less than focused ... so if they can pass his test, they can pass anyone’s. There’s no consequences to sleeping with these Hosts. No pregnancies, no STDs no worry that a literal orgy is going to get leaked to the press ... partially, he’s playing the game. Partially he’s just being himself.  And that’s not my headcanon - Ben Barnes said that that’s one of the core characteristics he FOUGHT for on set and with the scripts. As Logan, Ben did not once lie. Everything he said was true - and important - when it came out of his mouth. Everyone expects a character like Logan to lie, but he doesn’t. And it shows who he really is as a person even when his actions might point otherwise. That’s probably one of the reasons why he butted heads with his father so much; he could bullshit for work or whatever, but when it mattered, he wouldn’t lie.  I think I would 100% be able to blackhat in the park. Maybe not a shooting spree or a murderous rampage or anything like that, but I’m not paying that much money per day to ride around on a horse and have conversations with robots. Give me more.  He would have needed to go no-contact with his entire family in order to survive his father. I think that eventually, if Juliet hadn’t been so broken by the loss of her mother and brother that she would have seen through William’s BS - so she might have come around to Logan’s side, but I also believe that with William in the picture, she would have had to be completely cut off, too.  He has an addictive personality - power, money, status, drugs, the park, freedom ... and that wouldn’t have changed, even if William hadn’t left him there to die. That scene where he’s at the Delos party and Dolores is there, and he calls her “pretty girl”? She ruined his fucking life, and he’s so broken and out of it that he can’t even remember her name. William did that to him. Dolores did that to him ... and he has no one. 

Ben’s portayal of Logan is one of the reasons that I’m so mad he’s wasting his time with YA bullshit. He can do so much. SO MUCH. With his talent and his facial expressions and his attention to detail ... but he’s fucking clapping shadows into existence instead. It’s infuriating.  I think he would have appreciated Maeve’s focus. I think he would have loved Hector. (He probably did love Hector at least once or twice). I think he probably would have liked to give Teddy a hard time. I think he really would have liked Bernard.  Don’t ever apologize for a long message; I love talking about Logan! 

[jeanjauthor]

Hello I came from the ask on waoiaf. I’m a different anon but I thought your answer was pretty cool. Hope you do not mind me asking but I am in a similar boat with merging two cultures. I am making a female prevelant book with five female POV’s and most are in the merchant world which I took inspired from the late mediveal- Renaissance Italian era, I have two that are in the nobility which takes more after 16th century France and partakes in Salic law. Do you have any worldbuilding fem tips?

I don’t mind being asked, no worries!  My thoughts & ideas might work, or might not, but then that’s true for any answer I’d give, lol.  It all depends on the situation.

Okay...so if I understand correctly, it’s not real-world history, but you’ve got a created world culture with some late medieval Italian renaissance flair and some age of exploration French aristocracy with Salic law issues.  Had to look up Salic law, lol (for those curious, the wiki article is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salic_law ), but yeah...basically criminal laws that evolved to include inheritance laws & patriarchal/misogyny based issues as well, predominantly the “women cannot inherit titles /powers /duties /property” bs for royalty & nobility...

Mkay, first question, and this is a genuine one:  Is it necessary to have misogyny imposed by law for inheritances?  If so, is it part of the story, driving either the plot or the character’s struggles and growth?  If so for either of those, remembering that you’re writing for a modern audience (and that readers’ tastes have shifted quite a bit in the last 10 years alone!), are these issues going to be addressed in the story and overcome in a meaningful way?

These questions are predicated on the basis that you’re not writing real-world history, but rather a created world based upon, but not dependent on, these incorporated influences.

One of the reasons why patriarchy & misogyny are so heavily incorporated into European history is because of the patriarchal & misogynistic influences of the Christian Church after around 300 CE, iirc; my memory of the exact dates is fuzzy, but that’s about when it gets going--prior to this point, the Christian Church was a lot more egalitarian.  So egalitarian, in fact, that many major early Church leaders were women, to the point that it actually started to overshadow the standards of Roman custom, culture, & law of the day--Roman women could own property and run businesses, even if they couldn’t vote...but the Christians! *le gasp!* They were letting women vote on how their cultural government should be run??

Yeah, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, not in a widespread way...but at some point, male leaders in positions of power (secular and/or religious) decided to NOPE women out of positions of power, to make them second class citizens, and even nope them all the way down into being barefoot preggers in the kitchen, etc, chattel.  They used the Christian religion as their vehicle to gain power, influence, and dominance over society, warping the original Christian culture and its values away from egalitarianism.

But that is the real world.  So does your created world have that kind of religious /historical /cultural influence?  This is important because we know that in our world’s history, Salic law remained pretty firmly in place for well over a thousand years...and we’re still fighting to change it for the better today.  Your world is different.

If the inherent misogyny, etc, in a Salic law system is going to be an issue for your characters, can they overcome it in meaningful ways?  Are there going to be changes to the customs, whether local or regional?  Are there going to be changes to the laws, whether local, regional, or national?--This particular plot setup & payoff would be absolutely lovely to see in a fantasy / historical-esque world setting, to see actual changes happening, and not merely token-esque changes or an “exception made for this one (1) character.”  A meaningful change is one that affects not just the main characters, but secondary and tertiary characters’ lives as well.

You may have to bring some A-Game arguments into the story for these females arguing for their rights to inherit land, property, businesses, to run said businesses, to not have to be married or under the domination of their fathers, husbands, brothers, etc.  And it would be great if some of the males in these ladies’ lives showed some open support for them...and absolutely smashing for males in positions of power & authority who can change the laws to do so in a publicly acknowledging way. 

Literally, if the ladies campaign for the right to own property and run businesses and be inheritors for their fathers & mothers, then have the King or whoever show it by publicly decreeing or announcing,  “We have labored for far too long under the assumptions of misogyny, and have been held back by the weight of these pointless chains, which shall now be removed...”

or “I was wrong to assume that Lady Allania could only have brought her family’s merchant business to absolute ruin.  Instead, she has created alliances with former enemies and prospered our kingdom...and I must admit that she is not the only woman so gifted and capable.  When any female is given the same respect, training, education, and opportunity as a male, they, too, can do just as many wonderful things, and it is time this kingdom’s laws reflected this great, untapped potential, thus I am revoking or altering the following laws (blah blah blah)...”  or at least something along those lines.

It’d be some hard work, but if you go this route, a lot of readers will love your story all the more for it, since it genuinely will be something different.  If you don’t...a lot of readers will do the *eyeroll* thing and go “ho hum, another standard ‘fantasy world based on Europe’ and all its historical problems... Next?”  Not all by any means, but it is something to consider.

...Now with all that said, the next question is, which part of Italy in the Renaissance is being copied?  Because if it’s Venetian, you’ve got the Doge Era for hundreds of years, which was pretty much a mix of royalty, arosticracy, republic, and democracy ruling the city, all of which helped to spread the strength and wealth of the merchant class.  But if it’s based on Milan, that was a centralized monarchy.  And Rome, of course, was ruled by the papacy, which, hoo boy, was misogynistic AF as well as hypocritical in how it sent out a LOT of mixed messages, lots of bribery and usury, plenty of power-grabbing maneuverings, plus most high-ranking members kept mistresses, etc, while decrying sex out of marriage, blah blah blah...

From the way you mention merchant classes, I’m presuming it’s much more of a Venetian (or possibly Genoese) influence.  Running with that idea as the main cultural influence...how deeply involved are women in the merchanting and crafting businesses?  The fact that these women are engaged in business means that they could theoretically be interacting not only with men, but with a lot of women--the workers of these industries, even if the vast majority of them are not allowed to be owners or decision-makers.

Skipping up to England, in London in Tudor times, there was a whole guild of women who specifically made thread-of-gold for export.  They were pretty much the only ones doing this (because it’s expensive to make, for the first part), and doing it of such fine quality that they could command hefty prices for their skills.  They had influence on the textiles industry, demanding the best materials for thread, and influence on the goldsmithing industry, in their demands for the perfect type of gold foil, just the right thickness and plibility for wrapping around threads. 

It was a small corner of the textiles industry in England, but it was a commodity highly valued by nobles & royals across the length and breadth of Europe, including all the way down to Venice & beyond...because Venetian merchants would trade in this thread-of-gold and cloth-of-gold that these English women were making.

You can see the power and influence that the crafting trades and merchant classes could have.  One of the strengths of females throughout history has been our ability to bring together communities to work for the betterment of that community.  Are these women leading or otherwise involved in a revolution (peaceful or otherwise) that will pressure changes to these Salic style laws?  Who are they working with? And are they working with the noble-born women you mentioned to try to leverage the powers-that-be into granting women their rights in areas of inheritance, property, and commerce?

This will depend upon the overall plot, of course, but if you want to have a strong female presence in your story, then consider how daily life runs for females, how constrictive the culture and its laws are, how much these women can and will push at those constrictive boundaries (because we all do that; it’s just a fact of humanity), and how both the other females and the males around them will react.

Being only scandalized /outraged /reactionary to such things is definitely an overdone reaction, but you can get rid of that tired trope by having those who are scandalized or reactionary eventually getting over it, coming to accept it, or even be enthused by it.  Also, there will always a number of people who will be intrigued and even excited by these proposed or attempted changes.  You can build some of these struggles into a popular movement--and you don’t even have to show all of it “on screen” as it were. 

Maybe your characters in their struggle to maintain control over the family pottery business talked with other female potters about their problems, their demands, and asked for solidarity in the face of misogyny.  Maybe these others carried the news to other towns, and suddenly Altraltia, a city a few days’ travel away, center of the finest porcelains being produced in the known land, is experiencing a high revolution by the women who do most of the actual work with the ceramics, demanding that they be given rights and powers equal with the men, or they will not make any more porcelain.

Since the men of Altraltia were depending on their women to do all the fancy stuff (women tending to have modestly better fine motor skills), now that the women are on strike, these men can’t fulfill all these orders that the nobles have commissioned.  The city is in chaos, word has come back to your main characters that the strikers are demanding that the king change the laws--and maybe the next thing you know, women in other fields, basketmaking, weaving, etc, are also demanding the right to have their jobs and skills and capacities for running businesses and receiving inheritances respected... All while your main characters are shocked, and maybe even doing their equivalent of the Steve Urkel thing of *blinkblink* Did I do thaaaaat?  (And then celebrating, of course, when the king does change the laws for the better.)

Sweeping social movements and cultural changes don’t have to happen just during the era of social media.  People will travel, people will talk, people will write letters or communicate in various ways.  And those who know how to bring communities together, to instill senses of injustice, demands for change, expressions of how to change for the better...these communities united in these ways will cause those changes.

And because it’s not based on Earth’s history...you can get these types of Salic laws changed, presenting a pro-fem story in your own created world.

...Again, it’ll depend upon your plot, but for sure, women will lean in toward other women for advice, for help, for change.  Throw in some men who genuinely want to support these changes that will better their lives and their world, and you’ll have a powerful story that can inspire readers in this world to lean in, work together, and change our world for the better, too.

Hope at least some of that gives you some ideas!

(*The trope of women fighting each other, ruining each other’s chances of advancement, is also another tired old trope that can be flipped or tossed aside. Watch Legally Blonde to witness how the main female rival reacts to the main character, toward the end, to see how this is done believably.)

[darlinrogue]

His chest aches, his cheekbone throbs with the imminent development of a bruise. (How? He doesn't remember, as faint as he is. Adam had fought, and he fought hard.) But Kenny is the one victorious. Victorious, but all he's able to do is kneel, half collapsed, his hands against the canvas for support. He doesn't know why. He doesn't know why, but he kisses him, lips to the forehead of the man he—. He kisses him. He walks away. He touches the bruise on his cheekbone, and he smiles. It still hurts.

Kenny Fucking Omega 

w/ the sad yeehaw man

He didn’t hook the leg. 

Adam rolled through the snapdragon and countered with a firm elbow to Kenny’s jaw. He put Kenny on his feet and then lifted the other man by the thighs, over his shoulders. Deadeye, right to the back of the head, a knock-out for a lesser man. Except Kenny Omega was Kenny Fucking Omega, and he kicked-out. The match rolled on, Adam lost, he’d seen the ending twenty-thousand times. The One-Wing Angel was a punctuation point at the end of a statement. Yet, each time he watched through the recording he paused on that one pin after the Deadeye. Adam had Kenny stacked, his full weight on his shoulders. The bell should’ve rung. Except Adam only hooked the left leg. He only hooked the left leg on Kenny Omega. He only hooked the left leg on Kenny Fucking Omega. The best pin he got the whole match. Right after Omega ate: a half-dozen elbows, too many chops to count, a starching power bomb on the ramp, three boots to the face, and got dropped on his head from four feet in the air. The planets aligned, the Scorpio was in Aquarius or whatever, and Adam only hooked one leg. 

“It was the-- it was the right leg!” 

Tony’s voice shuttered through the phone in Adam’s lap. The screen paused on the collapsed forms of the combatants in the ring. Adam face down in the fore-ground and Kenny clutching his leg not far behind. In that moment he hadn’t thought about the right leg. Kenny had kicked out by some miracle but it wasn’t sheer luck. Kenny exploited Adam’s error.  Of course, unbeknownst to Adam the comms were carefully picking-apart Adam’s critical mistake. The legs weren’t neutralized. Kenny could swing his right leg and leverage his weight-out. If Adam had hooked both legs the match would be over, he’d be facing Mox. Instead, he made a stupid mistake so obvious even Tony Schiavone, who would break his hand before he could throw a good punch, pointed it out. 

A headache formed behind Adam’s eyes. He tore his gaze from the screen and glanced-out the window. The dark night streaked black, reflecting back his hotel room and his bedraggled body propped-up in bed. A limp hand fluttered out to find his bourbon on the night stand. He lifted the glass to his lips and found no relief for his parched throat. Adam scowled and returned the glass to where he found it. The bottle was empty too. He couldn’t tell if he was buzzed, drunk, or hungover. Just a dullness, settling in with the ache and exhaustion. Adam used the tip of his finger to edge the glass away from him. A final statement that he was done for the night. He slid down from his upright position against the pillows and sprawled out the bed covers The fan swirled in lazy circles above him. After months of blistering heat Florida had cooled to a tolerable temperature but this room was cooking him alive. His hair was still damp from the shower. He glanced at the clock, 1:43. No phone calls, no texts, no twitter updates, he put his phone on airplane mode hours ago. It was just him, the recording of his life’s greatest failure, and an empty bottle of bourbon. 

Adam lifted his phone from his side. He turned onto his cheek to glance at it again. He hit the play button and the recording rolled. The two men recovered, Adam was up first. He set-up for the buckshot but Kenny anticipated it and rolled him into a crucifix. He was so fucking predictable. Adam used a boot between the ropes to stuff Kenny’s charge three times that night. No wonder he had his leg well scouted. That twisting move on his knee obliterated his chance in the match. Can’t stand, can’t fight. Oh, Adam had a couple more signs of life in him but two knees to the face, well. He was up on Kenny’s shoulders now. Kenny caught the head and Humpty Dumpty took a great fall. The leg hook was a formality. Adam wasn’t even sure he was conscious for this part.  One, two, three, and Adam paused the video again. He haphazardly tossed the phone and it clattered off the edge of the bed. Adam had a life proof case for a reason. 

There was no point in watching any further. 

For a head-spinning minute, Hangman Adam Page was somebody. He was the tag team champion, alongside Kenny Fucking Omega. He was on top of the world. It was all so good. Training with Kenny, fighting with Kenny, sometimes, fighting with Kenny. Getting distracted by another tag-team-- No, Kenny literally dropping Adam like a sack of potatoes was inevitable. He had held Kenny back, made stupid fucking mistakes, hit his partner on accident, got drunk and wandered around arenas like a moron. Bickering with the bucks and ruining his friendships. Adam was an arsonist, he only burned down bridges and never built them. Now he was alone on his Island, just like he always wanted. And he had a lost tournament to prove how ‘accomplished’ Adam Page truly is. Matt and Nick were right about him. For all his bluster, all his big talk, believing in himself when no one else would. Empty words, Adam could talk the talk, but he couldn’t walk the walk. Because he ran-up against someone like Kenny Fucking Omega. 

And he forgot to hook the left leg. 

He didn’t need the video for the next part. Kenny’s head and hand lifted high. Kenny, haloed like an angel of death by the Dally Place lights. Kenny, knelt above him like a prayer at the altar. Cheeks blushed in rose, breath spilling from his chapped, pink lips. Curls like spun gold, framing his sculptured features. Like something out of a renaissance art painting. Out of a great tragedy, Lucifer, Achilles, Gabriel. His lips against his forehead in a kiss as delicate as a flower petal. Paul Turner helping Adam limp out of the arena. Fuck Hangman, and then taking the Uber back to his hotel alone, in utter silence with the guy working the graveyard shift. Alcohol, shower, alcohol, video self-pity marathon, alcohol. He wished his dog was here. Wait, what was that last bit?

Adam lunged across the bed. Kicked into action as if bitten by a Hell Hound. Belly against the comforter his hands searched the floor until he found his phone lodged by the head board. Half-his chest off the bed he hit the play button. Adam slammed against the ring mat. The fall-out, the replay, the play-by-play, the comms chattering, (”Kenny came out the better man”), blah, blah, blah. Paul Turner helped Kenny up. Then he was back down, knelt over Adam, and with great reverence, Kenny stooped to kiss Adam’s forehead. The he rolled out of the ring. Adam paused the video. Then he played it back. Then he paused the video and then he played it back. he paused the video, he played it back. Inch-by-inch Adam slid off the mattress until he was slumped against the floor, legs hooked on the bed above him. He watched that little end sequence on loop until it was emblazoned against his memory. It was so quick the comms didn’t even mention it. 

 A kiss. Kenny kissed him. Kenny Fucking Omega kissed him. Adam laid his hand over his sternum. His heart shuttered in his chest, pounding, tight, and agonizing. Pure pain, looking at the blurred pixels on his phone screen. It wasn’t near enough, the taste of it was like a morsel of food for a starving man. Kenny lingered over Adam in nothing but obscure pixels. What was his expression like? What did he do with his hands? And most important, something the phone could never tell him, why? 

Adam and Kenny were out. Now that his obligations to the tag title were done, Kenny returned to the single arena. Tired of dragging dead weight, tired of the noose around his throat. Kenny walked out on the tag team Adam prayed to stay in. Adam screwed over the Bucks. He spitefully entered a tournament to prove he didn’t need Kenny anyway. Adam didn’t even shake his hand at the start of the match. Not just because he was angry --Adam was pissed in that unshakable focused way-- but because he was afraid. Taking Kenny’s hand, never letting go, too tempting a possibility. The longer he stared at the screen the longer this shameless act of devotion eluded him. 

For the first time in hours Adam turned his phone off airplane mode. He shuffled through the deluge of notifications by dismissing all of them without reading any. He pulled-up Kenny’s contact, drafted a text message.

“Hey, man, good fight today-- well, yesterday, I guess. I just wanted to ask, out of curiosity, did you kiss me at the end? I mean, it’s no big deal. I was just wondering is all like i thought it was a little odd is all. Are you ok? You know you can always count on me, no matter what. I’m sorry i’ve been such an ass. I need to start drinking less, much less. It’s just that everything, the tournament, the belts, it’s been getting to me, I only wanted to prove to you guys I could keep up. I want you to know, I feel the same.”

Adam paused, his thumb hovering over the send button. The last line stained in black font against his vision. He then selected the entire text, cut it, and pasted it into a note’s app. Adam sighed and turned off his phone. His arm slung over his eyes. Five minutes later he was passed-out cold, still on the floor, snoring, and with the lights on. 

[elysiumwaits]

Leverage Not!Fic - Accidental Baby Acquisition

Also on AO3 with a deeper explanation of where this came from: You’re So Precious to Me (Baby Mine) - Roughly 2500 words of baby and working through thoughts about children and childhoods. Heavily influenced by some internal turmoil I got going on about parenthood vs choosing not to have children.

I want to see Eliot - big, tough, punch his way out before he talks his way out Eliot - with a kid around 1 or 2. 

Nate, of course, knows how handle a kid, but it’s painful, digs at wounds he’d rather not reopen, and while Sophie’s not the best with children, she can get by - they’re just not her forte at that age. They offer to come by and help out, fly in from wherever they are this week, but Eliot comes in and tells them that he’s got it.

Hardison has to Google everything about taking care of such a small child, Parker has no clue about children that small and is, frankly, very perturbed by the fact that a 1 year old is basically helpless.

So you have Eliot, who does have experience with kids and babies, and, more importantly, a strong protective and nurturing instinct. They’re pretty much stuck with the kid until the end of the con for one reason or another, and Eliot is officially appointed babysitter. Eliot, who understands that a child at this age has a pretty intense fear of strangers and works to soothe and distract and appear trustworthy. Eliot (thanks to his culinary and nutrition skills) knows what a kid actually eats and how to serve it, instead of the bulk barrel of Goldfish that Hardison was going to panic-buy off Amazon along with a massive delivery of milk, toys, furniture, and other baby-related items. He keeps the order for some of the furniture, clothes, and toys, and adds a metric ton of diapers just in case.

And eventually Hardison becomes Eliot’s assistant in their brief stint as caretakers - Parker is good for entertainment, but she really has no desire to be left responsible for the baby. If Hardison or Eliot is around, she’ll turn the place into an impromptu jungle gym, but the crippling fear of something happening to someone so vulnerable on her watch is too much for her to deal with (she remembers the bicycle, after all, and the last time she was any kind of mentor to a kid). She’s got a protective streak a mile wide too, though, especially with kids, so she’s the one who kid-proofs the apartment, to an almost ridiculous extent.

(”Parker, is this a pool noodle on the table leg?” Eliot pokes it - it does look like she’s butchered a pool noodle in the name of safety. There’s another one across the edge of the table, and on all the corners.

“Yeah, kid can barely walk, he could fall and crack his head on the table. I also stole a helmet. Do you think he needs a helmet?” Parker gestures at a backpack by the door, outside of the baby gate they’re using to block off the living room from the kitchen. Eliot can probably safely assume that’s where the stolen helmet is.

He looks back at Parker, who’s sitting in front of the bookshelf with books on the floor around her in stacks. He notices belatedly she’s got a drill in one hand, one of his. “Are you screwing that into the wall?”

Parker throws up her hands, glares at him like he’s said something horribly offensive. “What if it falls, Eliot?! He’s tiny! The hysterical strength response doesn’t happen in toddlers!”

There’s two packs of those outlet covers on the coffee table too, and Eliot decides then and there that the apartment has probably seen worse. He’ll let Parker do as she pleases.)

Hardison is also really good at entertainment, and can do high chairs and naptime and playing while Eliot’s out doing Eliot-things that only Eliot can do. He can put the kid to sleep, but he can’t transfer him, meaning that he’s pretty well stuck under him in a rocking chair for an hour and a half to two hours. He gripes about it, but he doesn’t mind, not really - he likes the feeling of something small and practically helpless trusting him enough to use him as a pillow, relaxes in the calm of the gentle scientifically-proven-to-be-relaxing lullabies playing through the speaker, remembers doing this with a couple of the other kids that Nana fostered for a short time. He usually ends up falling into a light sleep, too. He knows how to be a caretaker in theory, and could easily work up the ability to be a parent - he studied early childhood development, after all - and now that the initial panic of surprise baby acquisition is over, he can handle this.

Parker, quiet as ever, doesn’t know how to feel about Hardison holding a baby, gentle and sweet - she doesn’t want kids, but she wants Hardison to have everything he wants out of life, and she worries that maybe being with her is denying him something.

They talk about it, later, of course. Hardison easily figures out that something’s bugging her, and she comes clean about her insecurities and how she knows that she’s not the type of person that can raise a child and have that child come out healthy, whole, and normal.

(“I don’t even think I want to try.”

Hardison turns in his chair. She loves that about him, the way that he gives her his full attention every chance he gets, even when he’s in the middle of a game. “That’s okay. I’m not gonna ask you to.”

“Do you want kids?” Parker asks, and listens with one ear to the distant, almost-unintelligible sounds of Eliot singing Journey and walking across the floor of the guest bedroom that’s serving as a nursery.

Hardison blows out a soft sigh - it’s not his annoyed one, she’s learned, it’s his thinking sigh. “I don’t… know. Maybe? I don’t know. We don’t exactly lead a stable kind of life.” He gestures at his computer, presumably to encompass all of his illegal activities.

Parker’s quiet for a moment. “I’m not a mom, Hardison. I never even had a mom. I could be an aunt, maybe? What do aunts do? Archie worked for me, but not every kid needs an Archie.”

“Parker,” Hardison says, in that gentle and loving tone, “Being a parent is all about loving them and doing your best. There are books and stuff out there. If you ever decide you want to, and if you don’t want to, that’s okay, too. Hell, someday we might adopt baby grifters just like Nate and Sophie did.” He reaches, grabs her hand where it rests on the desk. “You’re… you and Eliot are enough for me, okay? So, if you ever decide that having a kid is something you want, then I’ll be here. He’ll be here. And if you never want a kid, then I’ll still be here, and he will too.” 

Parker can breathe a little easier after that, but it makes her think.)

Hardison knows she could do it if she wanted to - thinks about how much she wants to do the right thing, about Serbian orphans, about a kid stealing cars to survive, making sure kids didn’t get their Christmas ruined by arrests. He knows that Parker can do anything she wants to, learns new skills and concepts with an intense, single-minded focus. Any child she chose to have would be the best-protected kid in the world. 

Growing up with the three of them would probably end up in a strangely competent and paranoid kid, but ultimately a pretty well-adjusted one. He wonders briefly about what a baby of theirs would look like, if it would be a little girl wreaking havoc at a computer or a little boy climbing through vents. Maybe more straight-and-legal with tech summer camps and ballet or gymnastics.

He thinks about it, lets himself want it for a moment while he gently rocks a sleeping baby that isn’t theirs, one that they’re protecting just long enough to get home. Hardison adds it to the “maybe someday” list, the “pretzel” list, where it’s there if Parker wants it, and only if Parker wants it.

But it’s Eliot who is good at walking the kid to sleep and actually getting him into a crib/bed, Eliot singing classic rock and country songs as lullabies, Eliot who patiently sits through overtired tantrums, Eliot who can understand and respond to the baby babble interspersed with random words. After a few days, Eliot is the one that the baby cries and reaches for. He’s the one getting up with him at four in the morning, long past his not-safe-enough-to-sleep days where he only slept 90 minutes a night. Now he tries valiantly to listen to the baby play on the floor (completely safely thanks to Parker’s intense baby-proofing) while laying on the couch with his eyes closed.

And so it goes, for about a week and a half, maybe two. They manage to run the con and balance pseudo-parenting - Hardison does most of his work from the van, after all, and he’s not above handing the kid an iPad with a YouTube playlist of Mother Goose Club in the name of keeping his family safe (Eliot, even in the middle of fighting off hired guns, bitches mightily about screen time and child development). At one point, Parker spends a terrifying (to her) hour alone with a baby that is fast asleep, while Hardison does some intense hacking and Eliot does some good old-fashioned B&E to send a message. 

The day comes that the con works. The mother is freed and can return to her life, now that she’s not being hunted or threatened. Eliot, Parker, and Hardison have to say goodbye to this tiny human that they’ve grown super attached to. No one cries - not even the baby. It’s part of the job, never mind that they have an apartment full of baby stuff now and a year’s worth of diapers they don’t need. They hug the baby, they hug the mom. Eliot holds on a little tighter and longer than Hardison, and Parker holds the baby just for a moment, just long enough, before passing him back. 

And then they walk away - job is done, after all. 

Hardison’s gonna miss the kid, but in that way where he got attached but he can let go easily enough. It wasn’t his kid, it was never his kid, and he made himself remember that so he didn’t get too attached. 

Parker is quiet. The baby had reached for her, just once, and she’d given him the hug he wanted. She doesn’t know how to feel about any of this, so she makes the choice to stuff it in a box in her mind, where she can open it slowly and pick things out one-by-one.

Eliot, though, Eliot doesn’t look like he’s processing it well, which is actually pretty expected - Hardison knows a lot about psychology and even more about Eliot, after all, and Eliot in another life was a family man, Eliot in another life was a strict but fun dad, Eliot in another life made PB&J sandwiches and played soccer in the mud in the backyard. 

Eliot in this life, though, isn’t the marrying kind - he’s made a promise, after all, “‘til my dying day,” and that’s probably as close to commitment as Eliot Spencer will ever get. He’s chosen his path, walked it since he was 18 and signing up for the army, has spent close to fifteen years choosing it again and again. This is where he stands his ground, with Parker and Hardison, and there’s no room for some suburban house with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids. He’d wanted that back in another life, with Aimee, thought about it again with Kaye Lynn in their passing moment together. It was never even on the table with Mikel. He can’t drag some poor woman into his life, into what he’s done - he can’t have a relationship with a “civilian,” not without unintentionally grifting. He doesn’t want to build something on lies, doesn’t want to bring a kid into the world and expose it to the ghosts that haunt him from the past.

Besides, he doesn’t think he could even begin to fall in love with, let alone trust, someone that isn’t Parker and Hardison. In another life, where he’d never met them, maybe he could have had that. But here he is, for better or for worse, ‘til his dying day, just as good as any official wedding vow he’s ever heard.

(“It’s not something we can do,” Hardison says later, in the quiet of a closed bar. Parker is somewhere, dangling off of roofs and recovering from the overwhelming sensation of emotions. “It just isn’t. We can’t… you’re wanted in like five countries-”

“Seven,” Eliot corrects automatically. “Well, maybe eight.”

“Parker’s wanted in nine, and I’m just… wanted. In a lot of places.” Hardison taps the table. “It wouldn’t be… we’d be giving a kid a life of crime from the very beginning. And if certain people found out, the kid would be in danger literally all the time.”

Eliot nods and doesn’t say anything. “You and I know that, but…” 

A beat. They think of Parker and Serbian orphans, Parker and Christmas, Parker and a look of astonishment and joy for a split second as a baby reaches for her to say goodbye.

“If she decides it’s something she wants,” Eliot says slowly, softly. “And only if she decides it’s something she wants, we’ll make it work.”

“I got lots of identities,” Hardison agrees. “We could go straight if we wanted to.”

Eliot takes a drink of his beer. “We’ll donate what we’ve got upstairs,” he says - the furniture, the diapers, the sippy cups, the toys, all of it can be used by another kid. “And if she brings it up, we’ll deal with it then.”

“Pretzels,” Hardison agrees.)

Somewhere on a rooftop in Portland, in the gray and the misting rain of the Pacific Northwest, Parker dangles her feet over the edge and allows herself to think. She thinks of foster homes and stuffed bunnies, of bicycles and Haagen Dazs. She wonders how many other kids there are out there like her, picking pockets and surviving day-by-day, waiting for an Archie if they’re lucky. She remembers wanting a “real family” at one point, remembers the bone-deep longing of it back when she was young and alone, back when she was stealing cars, back when she wasn’t rich and wasn’t a master thief and wasn’t one of the good guys.

There’s potential, there, she thinks, in the same analytical way that she processes cons and jobs and plans. She’d have to shift her plans, that’s for sure. It’s all hypothetical anyway - it can sit with her awhile, and she can figure out if she’d like this particular bowl of pretzels or not in as much as time as she wants to take.

Potential, though. Daydreams. What has been, what could have been, and what still might be.

[soulvomit]

I’ve reinvented myself several times, but there’s one reinvention that could never “take.”

I was in some groups that had traditional-adjacent viewpoints a long time ago. I hoped that somehow I could learn to be socially “normal.” I thought that what I was learning in these groups could map to same-gender relationships as well since I’d gotten about half of the same critiques and policing from LGBT culture with the main difference being the hair and clothing styles they preferred women to have. The idea of having to pick one specific gender expression uniform and wear that same look day in and day out, is something I ran into in BOTH settings. LGBT culture gave me a few different ones to choose from where mainstream cookie cutter Stepford Wife culture gave me only one, but it still felt like prescriptivism. I’d already gotten a lot of “bad woman” messaging from homosocial LGBT environments so figured that at least the hetero version of “bad woman” programming would be something I could be resigned to and get the majority of the culture’s support. (I wonder if this is what’s going on sometimes with ex-LUG women who suddenly go whole hog into really conventional hetero culture. “I’m a bad woman anyway and will always be a bad woman, at least I can still have hetero passing privilege since my basic badness can never be fixed.” Yet performing “good woman” didn’t get me any of that. It just made me feel worse about myself. I wasn’t trying to date men, or really trying to date *anyone* at that time - I was just trying to feel “normal,” and figured that this performance would make me more “normal,” because they sure did represent themselves as normal.   It was initially about being part of a singles culture that could teach me how to perform Womanhood(tm), whatever Womanhood(tm) was. It was before these groups started to really radicalize, it was during a really fucked up point in my life, and I wasn’t involved that long (about six months?). Both groups were some of the most toxic groups of women I’ve ever been in, but they internalized their toxicity as “we are the NORM, and learning to be part of the NORM is painful.”  I wondered at one point if my dating preferences (toward women) were because I was “performing womanhood wrong” and if only I performed it RIGHT, then more men would like me, and I could just choose one of them, right? (The irony is that I got about 50% of the same messages in homosocial LGBT culture, with some minor changes in flavor!) Here are some of the things I learned: * always fake more social capital than you have because social capital is 100% of why men marry some women but only date or sleep with other women. (These women believed this.) * Only one style of dress is acceptable. There is a “look” that books like The Rules and quasi-trad matchmakers like the Millionaire Matchmaker, tell women to wear. There was practically a branded Rules look and it consisted of a blouse with a pencil skirt, flat ironed hair, ALWAYS going out with makeup on (in case you meet Mr. Right in the produce aisle). Later, I learned that this dovetails into traditionalist men expressing that they do not like trendy or “fashionable” clothing on women (but don’t like single women to look like prudes, either). So basically that left me doing a once over of “too sexy? not sexy enough?” every time I left the house even though I wasn’t really interested in dating anyone. * Don’t talk about your own aspirations or interests. * Don’t be too excited about anything of your own.   * You have to always be dating whether you want to or not, because you have until 30 to lock someone down who will be a good provider (which is what you should always and only be looking for), and if you’re over 30 then you have to look even harder. You should be dating two different people a week and not commit to monogamy until you get a marriage proposal. * Men do not like trendy or “fashionable” clothing on women unless it adds to the man’s level of social capital.  * Men don’t respect you once they know you have a sexual history * What other women in a room are wearing, REALLY REALLY MATTERS. Be sure to wear a skirt and heels everywhere, and if other women in the environment are wearing jeans then it just brings down the environment somehow. * If the other women in the room are somehow not doing all these rules then it drags the entire environment down and you should move somewhere else, because the men won’t treat you right. * The slut-shaminess of it all! There was a real belief that relationships and sex had some kind of market rate and that women were in a bidding war.  In this framework, other women’s sexual preferences and habits and history really, really matter and have anything to do with whether or not *you* will find love. If you’re being treated like shit, it’s not men who ruined it for you, it’s other women, for setting their standards too low.

* If you’re over 35 then you are only attracting people who are settling for you, and no one will ever REALLY have strong sexual feelings for you unless it’s somebody horribly broken in some way. (This is the one big thing that LGBT culture didn’t have, it’s ageist, but not ageist in the same way that hetero culture is.) * Men who aren’t sleeping in their mother’s basement only want women who meet these really narrow requirements (the irony being that after I left the groups, the opposite proved true over and over.) * If you attract someone *into you* and you’re "undesirable” (not having an ideal body, not being white enough, not being “normal” enough, being a nerd) then it means anyone attracted to you, is also “undesirable” in some way. If a man likes a woman who doesn’t meet these women’s standards of social capital then it’s open season to mock the couple, and it’s open season to try to find something wrong with him.  (This REALLY fucked me up. It played into a lot of fucked up self image issues I already had.) * Faking a whole personality is okay. * The moment you start dating someone, there’s a timeline you have to abide until you get married. If the other person doesn’t propose to you in a year (you are NEVER supposed to bring up engagement or marriage) then you should dump them. * NEVER bring up your own wants, never bring up marriage or your future plans. Date the person who “surprises” you with what you actually want. * One group consisted mostly of professional women who seemed to be engaged in perpetual class warfare with other women. This group seemed to be more about women describing their dates and the clothes they wore with an obsessive focus on how they looked, and how many compliments they got. * Meeting people in friend groups is never okay because they will never “value” you the way they “value” a total stranger they’re chasing. This is a weird belief I’ve seen in the dating world for decades, going as far back as my teen years, and I bought it myself for a while. And then when I finally got into a GOOD relationship, that DID have mutual “valuing” as the groups expressed it but also had passion, which the groups expressed wasn’t supposed to exist in “good” relationships - it was somebody I’d been friends with for years, where we knew each other really well. * Strong sexual attraction to your partner in the beginning is taken as a red flag that he’s probably “bad”  * Get with someone who is far more attracted to you than you are to them so that you can leverage their feelings to get what you want * Getting commitment is about negotiating  * If a woman dates men who don’t propose marriage, it’s the woman’s fault somehow, and the assumption is that ALL WOMEN want to get married  * If you end up in a relationship with someone of another race, or with someone who is a smidge younger, or with someone who has basically normal middle class levels of social capital, it must mean something is wrong with you. (There are a lot of women in these groups who considered being an average person who gets with an average person, to be settling horribly - it’s practically a mirror assumption to those that male incels often have.) And according to these groups, this is NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. Yet when I was in the *real world* talking to *real people* away from internet groups, most people seemed to have good relationships. There was also an undercurrent of racism in one of the groups (not the other, which was pretty diverse) and that’s the reason I finally left one group and that’s when I learned that traditionalism and fascism are often fellow travelers. Which started the whole unravelling of a lot of American traditionalism for me. Also, women’s actual feelings about anyone - like my feelings about women vs men - were completely irrelevant because women were supposed to just respond to men’s feelings anyway and not have feelings of our own. (With that in mind, a lot of these women couldn’t wrap their mind around women being lesbians, because women aren’t supposed to have those kinds of feelings toward either men OR women, amirite?)  What I noticed after I left the group is that most relationships I knew in real life, did NOT form the way that any of these groups thought they formed.  I also noticed that if you do all the things these groups asked you to do, then it actually attracted the WORST men - it was practically a step by step how-to on how to attract the most misogynist, controlling men. It was easy to fall into this kind of thinking because it’s what my mom’s always believed, and the complaints these women had about other women were the same ones that my mom often had about me, and their assumptions were the same ones my mom has. So I thought that “fixing myself” to fit my mom’s rules and having a support group to do it in, would fix the rest of my life. I didn’t go very far with my “trying to walk away from being LGBT” because at some point during this, I developed intense feelings for a woman friend that lasted for some time. (We didn’t get together, but this did break me out of wanting to do a whole personality reinvention and makeover.) The funny thing is that once I walked away, I stopped seeing the world that way. I noticed that in real life, most people’s relationships did not meet the standards of these women’s. They were taking ideas that really only apply to the culture of very rich white men, and trying to map that to the rest of the world, when it’s really only how the very most entitled, privileged men see the world, and you don’t have to be a Barbie doll if you’re not looking for someone who’s looking for that. The Rules DID teach me how to pull off a more polished look and more polished behavior in professional settings, for what it’s worth. This is something I’d had a problem with for a long time, because I got into work that expected professional standards of women yet I’d never really known how to look and act the part. (The gender-prescriptive part of “being professional” is especially bad. Especially now that I’m middle aged with chronic pain and just don’t want to do heels, girdles, and nylons. There isn’t a single traditionally female shoe style that I can wear anymore. If I can’t be professional in pants and walking shoes then fuck it.) But if this was the NORM, then why did MOST people I knew, manage to be happy enough without doing ANY of these things? And these ideas seemed calibrated to only a particular type of ideal romantic partner (the “high type clean cut” as old school employment ads used to call him) as if no other people even existed.

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[unabulwer]

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[taekookismylifeline]

(yoonseok) - trust my heart when it beats for you

ao3: (x)

Summary: Jung Hoseok has had an awkward Thing for Min Yoongi for four years of his school life. He is certain that the only thing that gets in the way of them and everlasting love is the fact that Min Yoongi doesn't know he exists, but that all changes due to one drunken text message: a pick-up line. Ready to flee to another country under a false identity in mortification, he finds himself ruining their blossoming friendship and confessing when Yoongi asks why Hoseok had tried to flirt with him. However, things take a turn after his confession when Yoongi starts to (awkwardly) flirt back.

Pairings: Yoonseok, Taekook and Namjin

Chapters: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10), (11), (12), (13), (14), (15), (16), (17), (18), (19), (20)

Chapter Twenty-One -  hello, you funny boy. you're mine

“I like you. A lot. It’s terrifying.”

Oh.

Well, now it all made sense.

The sadness in Yoongi’s voice when he had agreed to being friends which Hoseok had put down to sympathy that he didn’t want; the pauses in their conversation where Yoongi would look at his eyes more than his whole face; the times in History when Hoseok would be writing something down only to look up and find that Yoongi was watching him before turning back to the laptop; the fact that Yoongi had been staring at his lips.

Yoongi liked him. He liked Yoongi.

“Oh,” Hoseok said aloud, clearing his throat. Yoongi was determined on staring hard at his lap. “So... Before – what we did – you wanted that?” Hoseok murmured, suddenly feeling increasingly shy and aware of Yoongi’s proximity. He barely saw Yoongi nod in his peripheral vision. “Oh...” He trailed off, unsure of how to respond. So, Yoongi had been a willing participator, maybe even wanting it more than how Hoseok had done.

“Should I... Should I not have said anything?”

Hoseok looked up in shock, Yoongi had his lips tightened but his eyes looked blank. Hoseok shot over to him, sitting by his side uncertainly before curling his arms around Yoongi’s neck. “No, no – I mean yes!” He realised how ridiculous he was being, clinging to Yoongi like a monkey and snorted into Yoongi’s hair. “I’m sorry, I’m making a mess of it. I just – I’m in shock. I didn’t know, didn’t think for one minute that you would feel the same. I... Don’t really know what to do with myself,” he admitted, Yoongi’s hair tickled his mouth with every word.

“I can tell,” Yoongi said, but raised an arm to place his hand on Hoseok’s arm, allowing him to stay with his arms wrapped around Yoongi.

Hoseok smiled blissfully, his mind still coming to terms with the reality that Yoongi wanted to be his. His dream of seven years had finally come true. Energy raced through his veins, and he felt like he could do anything with Yoongi in his arms. So he did. He buried his nose in Yoongi’s hair and took a deep whiff, closing his eyes and sinking downwards. Yoongi smelt like heaven, and strawberries. Strawberry heaven.

Yoongi turned to him, his expression incredulous with his nose scrunched up. “Did you just sniff me?”

Hoseok nodded his confirmation, still savouring the scent of Yoongi. He hadn’t smelt anything quite like it before, just like how he hadn’t met anybody like Yoongi. “Is that okay?” He came to his senses and realised that it probably wasn’t a very sensible thing to do, it was kind of creepy actually. “I’ll never do it again if you don’t want me to!”

Yoongi was laughing at him. “No, it’s fine. Just... don’t do it so enthusiastically.” Hoseok laughed with him, using his leverage on Yoongi to pull him down onto the bed. The two laid there, side by side, until their giggles dissolved. Hoseok was focussed on Yoongi’s hand. He wanted to hold it, feel the warmth in his palm and on his fingers. “So, what now?” Yoongi asked, his head resting on Hoseok’s shoulder. It didn’t feel strange at all, it felt like they should have been doing this the whole time.

“Now?” Hoseok repeated vaguely, completely out of touch from the world around him when Yoongi seemed to read his mind and reached for his hand, entwining their fingers together. It wasn’t alien at all to see their skin tones fade into each other like an ombré pattern. Their hands ensnared together looked natural, like it was meant to be. He snapped back into reality when Yoongi pinched his arm slightly. “Oh, right - now!” Yoongi laughed at him, butting his head into Hoseok’s chest. Hoseok pondered this question and then came to a conclusion.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Yoongi said slowly, peering up at him with a bewildered stare, his eyebrows knotted together in disbelief.

“Yeah,” Hoseok affirmed, tightening his grasp on Yoongi’s hand. “We’re still friends, aren’t we? That part doesn’t change. We can have distance whenever and talk whenever, we don’t have to be together all the time, not unless you want. We can talk, we can text, we can call, whatever. The only difference is our feelings.” Yoongi was scanning his face, not grasping what he was talking about. It made perfect sense, Yoongi probably suspected that there would be a catastrophic change in their relationship and that Yoongi would have to confide his whole life story to Hoseok.

He smiled reassuringly, then found he couldn’t resist and kissed Yoongi’s forehead through his hair. And then, not so sneakily, he took another big whiff. Yoongi laughed and pushed him away slightly, but then brought himself back like an elastic band. “I like you, and you like me, so we get to kiss whenever we want. Anything really, as long as we both consent to it. We get to go on dates, get to take swing dance lessons, you name it!” Hoseok was getting too far into it, realising that so many opportunities had opened up to them. “In fact, there is one thing I’d like to do together,” he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and watched in amusement as Yoongi raised one of his.

“Oh, really now?” Yoongi refused to take the bait, showing a teasing smile.

“Yeah! I want you to teach me piano,” Hoseok admitted, glancing at the case in the corner of the room. Yoongi looked over to it as well, apparently having forgotten that it was there.

“Oh,” Yoongi made a noise of surprise, turning back to face Hoseok. “I didn’t know you were interested. I haven’t played in forever.”

“Why is that?” Hoseok asked, genuinely curious. He remembered when Yoongi had played in the first year music performance, it had been incredible. Yoongi was incredible.

Yoongi shrugged, leaning his head back on Hoseok’s chest. “I didn’t see the point, I guess. I got told that I should be revising instead of wasting time practising by this one teacher, it stayed with me, so I stopped and then I just forgot about it.”

“But it’s still in your room,” Hoseok pointed out, laying his head on the pillow so that Yoongi had to look up at him. “What the teacher said to you was awful, maybe subconsciously you were just waiting until school finished to start again.” Yoongi said nothing. “I don’t think it’s a waste of time. I think you’ve got a gift, and anyone who wants to stop you is jealous that they’re stuck in a dead-end job with loads of kids who will achieve more than they ever did.”

He heard Yoongi swallow, felt the grip on his hand tighten. He saw Yoongi open his mouth and then promptly shut it again. He looked up at Hoseok through his fringe, used his elbow to sit up and then kissed him. Inhaling sharply through his nose, Hoseok blinked in surprise before smiling into Yoongi’s lips. He cradled one side of Yoongi’s head with his spare hand that had woven around the back of Yoongi’s neck, pulling him in for a deeper kiss.

He loved the feeling of Yoongi’s lips against his, not too smooth and not too chapped. Textured, magnetising, hypnotic. He lost himself when he kissed Yoongi. He pried Yoongi’s lips open with his own, but this time it was Yoongi’s tongue that met his, and the heat radiating from Yoongi rippled through Hoseok’s entire body. He urged himself to pull away, tracing Yoongi’s lips with his thumb before he settled back onto the pillow.

“Thank you, Hoseok,” Yoongi had dropped his head back onto Hoseok’s chest. Hoseok kissed Yoongi’s crown, his thick, yet feather light, hair felt smooth under his lips.

“Call me ‘Seok, that’s what my friends call me, but you can also call me ‘Hobi’, my family calls me that. It’s up to you,” Hoseok spoke into Yoongi’s hair, his fingers lingering on the skin of Yoongi’s collarbone that his shirt exposed.

“Okay,” Yoongi breathed out. “You call me ‘Yoongs’.”

Hoseok hummed in agreement, feeling Yoongi shiver. He was sure that Yoongi had just felt his chest rumble underneath Yoongi’s head. A wild thrill shot through him and he hid a wide smile in Yoongi’s hair. “So, Yoongs,” he tested, liking the intimacy between them. Yoongi peered up at him, then scowled and twisted out of Hoseok’s grasp. Yoongi lifted himself a few inches upwards and turned sideways so that he was facing Hoseok. Had Yoongi felt self-conscious?

Yoongi’s action was so unexpected and so adorable that Hoseok laughed directly into Yoongi’s face before clamping a hand over his mouth. “Oh no, I’m sorry – you were just so cute – I couldn’t-”

“‘Cute’?” Yoongi interrupted, a smile making its way onto his face.

Hoseok tried to backtrack, “no – no! I meant so manly! Grr!” He growled to impersonate either an angry stereotypical wrestler or a livid lion. Yoongi watched him with eyes that were softening, and then he let out a happy burst of laughter. Hoseok’s pulse sky-rocketed and a smile stretched across his mouth upon hearing Yoongi’s enjoyment.

Yoongi leant towards him again, aiming for his mouth and pulled him in for a kiss. It wasn’t slow neither was it passion-filled, it was a kiss of comfort. To Hoseok it felt like he had come home. Yoongi lingered before moving away and practically jumping off of the bed. Hoseok lay there, immobilised with ecstasy and the feeling of Yoongi on his lips.

“‘Seok, I hope you’re ready for your first piano lesson,” Yoongi called to him, unzipping the case. “‘Cause I’m sure not,” he heard Yoongi mutter under his breath as he stared helplessly at the keys and tested them out before remembering he had forgotten to plug the keyboard in.

Hoseok let out a belly laugh that resonated around the room, he laughed into Yoongi’s pillow and forgot to breathe. When he next did he inhaled a scent he had never smelt before, a scent that smelled remarkably like Yoongi’s natural scent of home and lemons, along with something else, something barely there. Maybe it was his own scent. Them, entwined together.

When he next looked over, Yoongi was watching him with a warm smile lingered on his face, his eyes soft and searching. Hoseok was certain that this was how it was supposed to be. Him and Yoongi, happiness at last.

Park Jimin: hey seok Park Jimin: u with yoongs? hes not answering his phone Park Jimin: i need to talk w/ him Park Jimin: ive tried everyone Park Jimin: tell him plz