#there isn’t anything wrong with having ms like in a real way. it’s just when it chose to present itself is so upsetting to me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sevikasmainwhore · 2 years

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now please solve the one sided love thing-- please, my heart will not rest until i read it being fixed

It was bound to happen. (one sided love request pt 2)

Requested ⇢ Yes/No

Type ⇢ Headcanons ❥

❤️ It’s time for you to just stop. Maybe Vi was tired of you. You had gotten used to sleeping in the bed alone. She wasn’t coming back. You went to sleep believing that. Vi had came into the room, tiptoeing to your side of the bed making sure not to wake you. She fucked up. She let stress and whatever was clouding her mind get the best of her. Here she sat at the edge of the bed, staring at you, admiring all your features. For the past two weeks she had made you believe that she didn’t love you anymore. She caresses your cheek, going over them. You had dried tears stains on them and Vi’s hearty could’ve broke right then and there. “I’m sorry Y/n” You didn’t do anything wrong. You never have. But Vi had made you think that, made you think it was your fault but through all of it you never stopped loving her. “I don’t deserve you” She whispered. It must’ve not been a good whisper because you’re tossing awake. “Vi…?” Your wiping the sleep away from your eyes. “Hey sweetheart, it’s okay…I’m here..” Everything just came crashing down and the tears started flowing. “Vi…I thought you didn’t love me…” She brings you in for a hug. “I’m sorry Y/n…I swear I never meant any of it..” You bury your face in her neck while shes hugging you like she wouldn’t get this chance ever again. For the rest of night Vi whispered sweet nothings and apologies all over again until you fell asleep in her arms. She loved you with everything in her and she needed to remind you, even if takes all of time, she was gonna make sure you know she loved you.

💙 You didn’t want to be with her anymore. It was exhausting trying to keep up with her. You kept telling yourself “It’s just her job, maybe someone told her something” If that was the case you didn’t want to be around her anymore so that was the plan. You had packed your bags and planned on staying with a friend for a few weeks until you got everything right. You went to bad with that plan, mindset, everything locked in but Cait had different plans. She knew she wasn’t gonna be able to talk you out of leaving so it best if she just showed you how much she really loved you, showed you that you never did anything wrong and it was her. The next morning you woke up you were ready to walk out the door, bags and every thing but when you stepped out of your bedroom you were met with the hallway floor covered in rose petals, the living had pictures of you caitlyn on date nights, pictures from balls Ms. Kiramann had land even off guard pictures you had know idea existed. There were gifts all over the couch and bouquets of all your favorite flowers on the coffee table. “W-what is this..?” You look around the room, your bags long forgotten. Your eyes started welling up with tears. The room was filled with memories and gifts but where was Caitlyn? “Y/n?” You turn around to see Caitlyn coming from the kitchen with your favorite dessert. Your eyes widen in shock. “Caitlyn..” “No, don’t talk.” Caitlyn has been acting like a real bitch and it’s time for her to apologize or at least try to. “Y/n…what I was doing wasn’t right. I know i want to spend the rest of my life with you but whatever I was doing isn’t gonna help that.” Caitlyn continued her apology with a bunch of “I don’t know what I would do if I lost you” It was gonna take a while because Caitlyn made you feel as if you were less than but she was working on getting everything back to the way it was. She loved you from the moon and back.

💛 Mel had made it clear she didn’t want to be with you anymore. It was a constant thought that replayed in your head. It really fucked up your trust with her that you both had worked on together. That thought alone made you toss and turn in your sleep, you’d wake up in cold sweats for reasons you weren’t sure about. Mel took notice of this and rethought everything. Thought about all your past dates, all the unforgettable nights you spent together in each other arms, all the dinners you both laughed over. She didn’t regret anything, she wanted to give you the world and she did, so why was she acting the way she was? She had been played. Mission gone bad that had Mel fooled into thinking she had to me right where she wanted them only for her to be duked and she couldn’t handle it. The thought of her being manipulated instead tore her apart and you figured she was just taking it out on you. You couldn’t live like that so it was best to leave. You had written a note to Mel apologizing for whatever you could’ve done and left it on her night stand but it was no point in it since she caught you in the hallway of her building. “Mel?” You asked. Mel was at a lost at what you were doing with your bags packed, she knew it was bound to happen but didn’t think it would come so fast. She needed to apologize. “Y/n…” She started, her eyes kept going back from you to your bags. “I…I know I’ve been distant” she started but you weren’t sure what to think. She went on about how her mind kept playing tricks on her and how she couldn’t bare the thought of losing you because of some stupid mind game. It was a lot for you, but it was time you said something. “Mel, please” You stopped her. “I love you Mel, but I need more than an apology” The look Mel had in her eyes could’ve made you cry right there. “If this is what it’s like to be with you I don’t know if I can do it” Your voice cracked, your tears just ran down your face. “You need time for yourself to truly figure out what you want Mel.” This wasn’t what you wanted but it’s what was needed. “Y/n…” Her voice was shaking. It was time to let her figure things out on her own. “I’m sorry…” You stopped her. “Say sorry, when you figure things out. Let me leave Mel” You were full blown crying at this point, but after a moment of silence you took your leave, leaving Mel alone in that huge golden bedroom she had. She’ll come around, you both just needed to be alone.

🧡 Grayson didn’t think she was wrong. You could tell from the way she’d avoid you. It made you sick, made you feel unwanted. You couldn’t live like this. It would drive you crazy overthinking the littlest things, trying to convince yourself that she still loved you. It was time you faced the facts and realized that it was over. No one had told her anything, She didn’t come home one day just say she didn’t love you anymore even if it felt like she did. Grayson didn’t love you anymore, and she wasn’t gonna leave so it was probably best you did. The process was slow and grilling but packing up your things you decided it would be best to leave the next day. Maybe give Grayson some time to realize what you were planning. That night as you were getting ready for bed Grayson was in the kitchen doing who knows what. What if you talked to her. Would she answer you? She wasn’t talking to you to begin with so it would’ve been a waste. But then again, it was your last night with her. Maybe a little “I’m going to bed” wouldn’t hurt. Fuck it. You walked out of the bedroom in your Pj’s to Grayson who was having a drink on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t a talk to fix things, just to see where you two stood. Don’t cry Y/n. “Grayson, I need to talk to you” You said. Grayson wasn’t an immature person, not at all, but she did things that made you think twice about that fact. Like now. She didn’t give you a straight answer, only a grumble as an answer for you to keep going. You exhale, holding back tears. Don’t cry. “Grayson…please….listen to me” She finally looked back at you. It was just too much in that moment. You couldn’t do it anymore. “Grayson…I can’t live like this anymore. I don’t want you to keep doing this…” You sobbed in between sentences “It’s obvious you don’t love me anymore. You could’ve done this sooner but you didn’t and I just can’t” By the end of it all you were in full blow tears. You didn’t know the look on her face was but you didn’t care. She probably didn’t care. If that was the case you couldn’t sleep in the same bed as her, you need to leave now. And so you did, or at least you tried to. You made your back to the room, eyes full of tears. You got your bags and was ready to leave but was only met with Grayson staring at you in the door way. You couldn’t tell what she was feeling but it didn’t really matter. “Y/n…” She was speechless. She knew it was bound to happen but it was like she wanted you to stay for a little longer. She reached up to your face to wipe away some tears. She had hurt you bad, real bad and you needed to be left alone.

🤎 Ambessa most likely only kept you around because she got tired of just sleeping around with different escorts. She wasn’t sure what she found in you but you seemed different from everyone else so she decided to just keep you around. The falling in love thing was an accident and she didn’t know how to tell you. Ignoring you and making you feel like you weren’t anything to her was probably her best bet, it wasn’t her first option but she didn’t know how to let you down so easily. She didn’t take your feelings into consideration at all until it was too late. When you finally realized that things weren’t going back to normal, when things weren’t gonna feel like a love story, when Ambessa stopped saying ‘I love you’ you made the decision that it was best to leave on your own sense she had no intentions of doing it on her own. Which brings us here, Ambessa was in her study going over a few war strategies when yoh strolled your way into her room, holding yourself with a worried but sad look on your face. Ambessa didn’t take note of it or more likely just ignored it and went ahead and asked you what you were doing in there. “Um…I’m leaving Ambessa…” You said. Ambessa didn’t respond. Maybe she didn’t hear you. You spoke up again. “I’ll be leaving now…” This time she looked at you as if you were silly. Did she think this was a joke? “Would you like for me to walk you out?” Ouch. That Hurt. Maybe she really didn’t care about you. Maybe she really did only see you as an object of her attraction. That only meant that everything you both had gone through was a lie. The late night talks, The dinners you’d both share, everything you both did together was a lie. Everything just came crashing down on you but you didn’t want to cry in front of her. You bid her a goodbye in a shaken voice and walk away, not knowing where you were going but you knew you needed to get away. Get away from this palace, away from the kingdom and away from her.

💜 When Sevika got home it was like a bomb went off. You were a mix of emotions and she comes home late, smelling like cheap perfume?? It was everything you dreaded. You thought your relationship with her was going well. You both had been on good terms, both had told each other things you’d never tell anyone only for one day it to be thrown all down the drain, to be washed away in some dingy perfume bottle. You yelled at her, you were crying. You were angry at her, angry at yourself for letting this one sided love thing go on for too long. She must’ve known that too because throughout your whole ramble she hadn’t said a thing. She knew what she was doing, she knew what she did was wrong but couldn’t think of a reason why she did it. The yelling and crying went in for a good 25 minutes until you were tired and all you could do was cry. You were at her feet crying, trying to further how could this happen. Sevika couldn’t do anything but look at you at, trying to think of where it went wrong, why did it have to be like this. So full of misery. The next day Sevika woke up to note in her nightstand. “You and I both know we can’t do this anymore.” Sevika didn’t know what to feel. She knew she had lost you, lost your body, your spirit, lost everything. She didn’t want that, but it was her choice.

🤍 Cassandra was always a tough lover. You knew that from the start. So her acting that way was avoidable. I mean it was your fault really, thinking you could change her, even get her to open up to you more. Did she even really love you?? Was this some sort of joke she was playing on you for shits and giggles. It really made you overthink the littlest things. You couldn’t live like that, wondering if everything she did was on purpose or not. You needed to leave. You didn’t know how to feel about it all really. You kept looking back memories of when you both were extremely happy, enjoying each other’s presence and just being the couple you’ve always wanted to be. On the other half you kept remembering all the arguments you had with whenever you tried to speak your peace. She’d get so angry with you and say things that you knew she never meant. That should’ve been a deal breaker right there, but you had more good memories than you did bad. Everything was going good, she would make up for those things until she started being distant. You figured it was just her being her usual self. Until she came to you about sleeping in separate rooms, which broke you. That’s when you knew you had to leave. It would be deadly to stay in a relationship like this. You had already packed your thing and left them at the door so all that was left was to talk to Cassandra, who was in her study. You were to tired to argue with her so just a simple conversation would have to do. “Cassandra…I’m leaving…” You said, Cassandra doesn’t even bother to look up but ask “Where are you going Y/n?” She asked. You said again. “Cassandra…I need to leave…” With that she looks up at you with a confused look. “Y/n…” It finally hits her once she noticed your bags by the door. She started “Y/n…please…we can work something out. We can sleep in the same bed again” She went on, thinking of ways to get you to not leave, which were a waste, you knew she only wanted you there for her reputation. You shook your head “Cass, no…I’m not your accessory. I wanted you to love me like I loved you, but it was just too much for you. And I’m sorry.” With that you made your way to the door. You could hear her trying to get you to come back but it was no point. You and her both knew that she needed to figure things out on her own. She didn’t need love.

💟 You’d always had thoughts that the relationship was never going to last. You two were just different and Renata was never that good with relationships. You always doubted her words of affection and just thought they were out of pity. You should’ve left when you had that first thought now that you think about it. You couldn’t think of what it was that stopped you. Maybe it was the gifts, the late night cuddle sessions you’d both have if she ever had a hard day at work. It could’ve been anything, but never her words. But the time was at its end, you needed to pack up your things and leave. You were nervous of how Renata would react. Would she try to get you to stay? Would she say okay and let you walk out? You debated on leaving. It was actually in the middle of you packing your bags when you heard Renata come in. “What’s all this?” She asked from the doorway, motioning to your bags. The look on your face must’ve caught her off guard because her tense posture cooled down a bit. Until she spoke up again. “Are you leaving?” You weren’t sure what it was you heard in her voice, but you decided to say something. “Ren…” You didn’t know what to say. You wanted to leave, to not feel like this, but how could you tell her that when she’s right here? You didn’t think it would be this hard. A note probably would’ve been better. “I…” “Y/n…Look at me” You didn’t realize you were looking at the ground until she said something. She came over to you, grabbing both your hands. When you made eye contact you could see a bit of hurt in her eyes. It was then you made it final. You had to tell her. “I can’t do this Ren…I just can’t do it anymore…” The dam behind your eyes broke and the tears just came through as spilled your entire heart out. “You don’t love me anymore, you know you don’t. We can’t keep living like this Renata. If you won’t leave then I have too.” Renata didn’t want that, she didn’t know what she wanted. She shouldn’t have put you through any of this if she knew it was gonna be this way. Throughout your whole spill she didn’t say a word. She was just so lost in thought. Too lost to notice you letting go of her. It was all so much and happened in such a span of time, the next thing she knew you were already out the door. She knew she fucked up, but the real question was Did she regret it? It was her choice to act the way she did.

note: with the way things are set up now, i have some fluff coming up next c: also i did not expect this to be that long 😭. i really feel like most of y’all don’t even read these anymore . for starters my girlfriend found my tumblr….

#❥ arcane hc’s #☞ shhhh #arcane #league of legends #vi x reader #arcane caitlyn x reader #mel x reader #enforcer grayson x reader #ambessa x reader #sevika x reader #cassandra x reader #renata glasc x reader

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mlwritingprompts · 10 months

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Submitted Prompt: A wish for Solitude

This is the special-text version of this prompt.

The accessible version can be found here.

- - -

Hi Rjalker, I’m kinda back! So after who knows how long since I wrote my prompt about Serrah, and the show’s ending of the fifth season being a dumpster fire like always (actually, even worse than usual, I seriously miss the finales like the ones of the first and second seasons), I decided to write this because… something. I myself aren’t sure, but I guess I will just write something different than cosmic entities trying to fix the universe (or doom it because their existence requires the universe’s own oblivion) because I’m not planning to rewrite the entire plot of this idiotic show.

I will be honest and say that this is a completely new territory for me, so if you spot mistakes and see something that needs to be changed, please do so.

So, have fun?

Occurs after Strikeback (season 4 finale).

My try at an Akumanette prompt.

Pronouns: lon/lones/lones/loneself (same as she/her/hers/herself)

TW: mention of sexual harassment, and a character experiencing touch revulsion —–

—–

It was so hard.

It was so hard for her.

Marinette thought as time kept moving too fast, yet it felt like everything was crawling to a halt.

Everything was becoming too hard, too difficult, too unbearable.

It was so painful, dealing with it. Being Marinette. Being Ladybug. Being the Guardian.

“Marinette, how did you forget to go to our planned party?”

Because Ladybug’s job is too important than Marinette.

“Marinette, is there something bothering you? I heard you’ve been skipping classes.”

Forgive me mama, papa, I can’t schedule for when an Akuma strikes. That’s the sacrifice I must make.

“Marinette, cheer up! We will defeat Hawkmoth in the end!”

Yes, Tikki, in the end. And what about my life?

“Marinette, I know that Chloe is a bit too much but…”

I know, Ms. Bustier, I must forgive her, for I am Marinette and I am nice, forgiving, no matter how many times I and others get hurt by her.

“Meowch Bugaboo! You know that you always have me!”

Leave me alone. Don’t call me by that. Don’t come closer to me. Don’t flirt with me. Don’t touch me. Don’t try to kiss me. Leave. Me. Alone!

“You still are in denial about Adrien, Marinette?”

I didn’t want this, Alya. Your question isn’t funny. I don’t love this. I don’t want these feelings. I hate them. I despise them. They were why I lost the other kwamies. Love only hurt me.

“You must be responsible, Marinette!”

It’s difficult to be responsible. It hurts to be responsible. I don’t like this. It’s so painful. So suffocating. So tiring. So dark. So cruel. I don’t want more even if I have to take more. I want to be alone. I want to be left alone. Alone. Only alone. No one to nag on me about something. No one to have me deal with their problems. No one to guilt trip me and shame me for not doing what they want.

I want to be alone, with only myself being the only company I need.

“Hello, Solitude. I am Hawkmoth. I will give you the power to be alone, free from responsibility, at the price of giving me the Ladybug and Black Cat miraculouses.”

It was so wrong to accept. She knew it. It would be admitting defeat, admitting that evil had won in a way. But why bother? She was so tired. So exhausted of fighting, fighting when everything she tried to do backfired on her.

What’s the worst to happen if the accepted? Surely, Alya and that harasser Chat Noir can deal with it. They seemed to never run into real problems or face truly permanant consequences.

Oh how jealous she was.

“Yes, Hawkmoth.”

And Marinette ceased to be.—-When lon opened lones eyes, Solitude felt it, the desire burning from lones being.

“I want to be alone. I don’t want anyone else with me.”

That was it. Simple, yet clear. To be alone on lones own. Lon only wanted to be alone with loneself. No one to bother lones with anything.

No responsibility, no demands, nothing but simple, and sweet solitude.

Yet it just wasn’t so easy.

“What is this?” lones expression looked repulsed.

Something was wrong, something was feeling off.

Solitude’s body felt something uncomfortable, disgusting, hateful.

Something that just felt like something was touching lones body. Something that just refused to leave lones alone.

What is this? Lones body feels heavy. Breathing and moving feels difficult.

Nothing was touching Solitude, yet the feeling only grew stronger, the repulsion and hate for this thing that was seemingly crawling all over lones, seemingly invading lones blood and skin only continued.

Solitude hated this. It felt so wrong, so awful, so utterly-

“Marinette!”

A voice screamed as lon saw… a girl closing towards lones. Rose? That was her name, right?

Immediately, lon jumped away, as if burned by her presence, almost screaming and attacking her and the others that came alongside her.

How dare they come so close? How dare they call lones Marinette? How dare they try to touch lones?

“Leave me alone!”

Solitude ignored their pleas to come, to wait for Ladybug to help her, to fix her, to heal her.

There’s nothing to heal or fix. Nothing wrong with Solitude. Solitude isn’t Marinette. There’s no need for Ladybug to heal lones.

The awful feeling seemed to diminish, it wasn’t as bad as before. So this sensation of pure disgust relates to lones presence with others? Or when others enter lones comfort zone without permission?

Solitude felt that this was the correct answer.

Then, Solitude might go to a place far away.—-Lon was on the top of the Eiffel tower for nearly half an hour now.

It was a calm area, and there was no one around lones from what Solitude can feel.

Yet…

The sensation of something surrounding lones body still persisted.

Solitude couldn’t comprehend it. Nor did lon like it one bit.

What’s going on? Why doesn’t this feeling leave lones alone?

Lon could feel it, something was seemingly demanding for lones to do something. Something that Solitude doesn’t want to do, and it is getting almost physically painful to deal with.

What is this? Why is this happening? Solitude wanted to be alone. Is that really so much? What is causing this? Who? Why?

Lon would like it if they stop continuously touching and crawling all over lones bod-

“Hello, mademoiselle!”

A voice that feels extremely, horribly familiar resounds, and Solitude feels all sensations go overdrive.

Chat Noir was so close-

So close, too close, that repulsive smirk, that leering look, that uncaring posture, too dirty, too repulsive, too hateful.

Lon hates it. Hates him. Hates that person. He will touch me, he will ignore my boundaries, he will torment me, will not leave me alone.

For just a moment, Marinette’s memories resurfaced, and nothing but pure rage and hatred consumed lon vision.

A blast of pure, unbridled energy of repulsion and exclusion consumed the part of the Eiffel tower they were in, practically erasing it from existence, and that hero harasser being thrown away, far away so he couldn’t violate lones boundaries anymore.

Solitude’s body shook from the sheer disgust lon felt, lones mind already making possible connections to why lon felt so much worse with that guy around.

“Is it because Marinette suffered the most due to him?” Solitude thought in rage.

Is that why? It made sense, right?

But before lon could fully calm down, the sensation returned once more.

Why? Why? Why don’t they leave lones alone!?

“Good job, Solitude! You’ve lured Chat Noir! Now go and take away his miraculous and Ladybug’s!”

Lones heart raced with pure rage as Solitude felt the connection linking lones with Hawkmoth.

It’s this guy…

Lones eyes seemed to look somewhere, what Solitude felt to be Hawkmoth’s direction.

This guy was who was crawling over lones body using that link…

Hate and energy, already twisted due to the corrupted magic, twisted even further as it followed Solitude’s desires.

If only he didn’t exist… if only he and Chat Noir didn’t exist…

Then Solitude would be already happy, alone with nothing bothering lones…

Solitude must destroy them first… And make sure not even a shadow of them remains…

—

End?

Or at least until I might write a sequel.

Hope you liked it.

(From Rjalker: I love it!!!)

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invisiblegarters · 1 year

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GAP Ep 8 & 9

Episode 8

Sam is so thirsty and I love that for her. Although damn her for quitting and leaving both Mon and me very frustrated. Woman. You don't just rile someone up like that and then go to sleep!

I also really love that she's clearly gone out to buy Mon jammies in her color.

Eh, I think that Mon is more than capable of asking for what she wants, though. I mean, yes, Sam started it and then didn't finish, but Mon is also allowed to ask for what she wants.

KIRK I'm starting to not like you stop interrupting.

LOL oh the work brain trust. Putting two and two together and getting forty five (okay that's not fair. They're on the right track they just have the entirely wrong person). Literally the only reason Kirk wants her back is because she knows about the whole Ms. Sexy Smirk thing (okay, okay, her name is Nita, but Ms. Sexy Smirk fits her).

I have to say, I appreciate Sam's sense of drama. And I did get a kick out of Mon continuously thwarting her attempts at a Lady and the Tramp moment. Aw, "I watched web dramas and they do the same things." I love her.

And we're getting down to business! Finally! Get it, girls!

*insert a few moments later pic*

OH COME ON.

Although I have to say them calling their friends to tell them how initiate sex is hilarious, as was Jim showing up with a giant bottle of alcohol to be like "just get drunk and your hormones will do the rest."

Nail advice is smart but also, you guys had to know that already, right? Right?

And then, finally. Get it girls! For real, this time.

HA oh my GOD, Sam. It's good that she only has four facebook friends but dear lord.

Okay this whole Kirk thing is a mess. I get that Mon feels like she's stuck in between a rock and a hard place, but honestly, this could very easily be resolved if people would just open their damn mouths and talk. And Kirk needs to stop dragging Mon into completely open areas and grabbing her hands.

I don't mean to laugh at Kirk thinking that Sam is jealous over him, but I am. I really, really am.

Damn, Sam isn't pulling any punches. I want to be mad at her but well, she's hurt and angry and NO ONE IS TELLING HER ANYTHING.

Basically this all Kirk's fault and he's officially on my shit list.

Episode 9

Aw, Mon. She's such a sweetheart that I hate to see her so sad. I do think that she's being a bit dramatic, but I get it. Sam always goes straight for the throat when she's hurt. Hopefully Mon gets her to work on that in that gentle way that she has.

Also, okay, the way everyone in this wakes up with perfect hair amuses me. But did Mon sleep in her clothes?

Pfft, does Kirk still think that Sam is jealous over him? Honey, no.

Mon's parents are so sweet.

I sometimes forget that Sam is supposed to be royalty then they do things like sitting on the floor because she is and I remember.

Sam stop being a dog for Mon it's giving me ideas.

Good on Sam for admitting that she was jealous. But seriously, she really really needs to work on that temper of hers. I say this as someone with a nasty temper myself.

Aw, couple bracelets.

Oooh, Mon taking charge of sexy time. Get it, girl! I absolutely love the frenetic piano during this scene. And ha, I love how much it shook Sam. Just enjoy it, girl.

Ms. Sexy Smirk is back! And throwing down the pink gauntlet. Pink is Mon's color, Ms. Sexy Smirk. And uh oh, she's clocked the couple bracelets. I just do not trust that woman - I mean, clearly I am not supposed to, not with that smirk, but still.

She even talks like a supervillain lol. Those pauses midsentence to smirk smirkily at Sam. Is it wrong that I do like her? I know she's gonna cause trouble but I do. She's just clearly having a great time.

I knew this betrayal was gonna bite Kirk though - pretty sure he did too, on some level, even if he convinced himself that Sam would see the good of it.

GO SAM. I honestly thought she'd use Kirk going to Ms. Sexy Smirk as an excuse to break up with him and not mention the whole thing with Mon, but nope. I do think she was kind of using it as a bludgeon but also…well. I never thought she'd do the thing at all. And Kirk has no right to look at Mon like that, lol. I guess he is genuinely into Sam but my dude, how you missed that she doesn't feel the same is beyond me.

Is this where his villain arc begins? Because I could be here for that.

I knew Ms. Sexy Smirk wanted in Sam's pants. Knew it. I mean, not that I blame her, but Sam already has the pink that she wants or needs in her life. Ms. Sexy Smirk is gonna be trouuuuuble, though, and I'm kind of here for it.

Okay, okay, love Sam walking in on Chin and Yha going at it and just walked right back out like "excuse me, just looking for my bracelet, pretend I was never here." It's hilarious and I know that the fear of being fired is real but I also know that Sam isn't going to do it - either Mon will talk her out of it or she'll realize what a hypocrite it makes her.

Oh Chin is married? I didn't know that. Messy.

Getting it on at work. This is exactly why you can't punish Yha and Chin, Sam. But I do like that in the end she chose not to. I need Mon to quit like yesterday, though.

Pfft at Sam locking the door. I do like that these two can't keep their hands off of each other, but also, work is work! Stop doing this at work!

SEE? THIS IS EXACTLY WHY. Also pfft, Yha can make all the uncomfortable expressions she likes but she's the one who kept listening. I do love how delighted she is with the whole thing. "Plot twist" indeed. But Mon should still quit, probably. Go work with Tee. Then come bang Sam on your lunch break.

Okay the destroyed office is pretty hilarious though.

I cheer a little every time a same sex couple is or gets married in one of these dramas, especially in a country where same sex marriage isn’t legalized. I like to think it’s a push for marriage equality. Keep pushing, dramas!

Sam. Sam. What are you doing? You know you can't marry Mon, not really. Unless you want The Worst Grandmother to cut you off, too. I dislike Mon's "I'm not good enough for you (and ha at Cher being like "does she fly? I see her feet right there on the ground")," but she's making good points. I'm betting in the end Sam probably won't have to give up everything but they don't know that, and it's fully possible she will have to. I don't know if she's thinking that part through.

And I can see that episode ten is going to be ramping up to the ep 11 separation, sigh. Time to see how Mon's backbone handles The Worst Grandmother, I guess. Kirk, you are such a little weenie.

#gap the series #episode 8 #episode 9 #officially annoyed with kirk now

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antiloreolympus · 1 year

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5 Anti LO Asks

(Note: All of these asks are before episode 206 (Season 2 finale) so some may be dated.) 1. to me if the narrative was just honest hades is a shitty person then id probably love how awful he is, but no instead it's rachel insisting he's actually this perfect romantic lead and everything he does is good and just when thats not true?? like I don't think she means it to be this way, but it (hopefully accidentally) comes across as her excusing/romanticizing a predatory, abusive man who borderline gr//ms persephone into being his "perfect' bride and we're just not supposed to notice.

2. I would think, bc Persephone wanted to use the trial to distract from her crimes to instead be like "look! i'll be the white savior and free the good slaves!" I have thought Hades, in the 10+ years she'd been away would have, maybe, implemented that system? To make the place more equal and see her plan come to fruition? But I guess he would rather make the slaves work even MORE and make everyone else miserable than even do ONE decent thing for once. He's literally so awful it's insane.

3. I don’t know if I’ll be able to articulate this, but Zeus and Minthe are more “enjoyable” antagonists than Persphone and Hades as protagonist.

With Minthe and Zeus, I feel like their characters are more well rounded? Minthe hates Persephone, but stands up to Thetis when she needed to and broke it off with Thanatos when Hades agreed to be more serious committed relationship. But also her goals and motives are clear, and recognizes her flaws even if it doesn’t always push her to be better (but honestly the way hades forced her out, I too would lose my shit) Zeus is a cheating, scum bag husband, paranoid king. But he does love (most) his family, like his new relationship with Artemis I adore because of what Artemis has been through and I love how she’s not even fully comfortable with him either. Zeus isn’t even half wrong to be paranoid about Persephone, he now know he has an air plotting against him (with reason for his mother getting banished) and Zeus knew that Persephone and Apollo are somewhat associated with each other.

Zeus and Minthe have done some terrible things BUT they’ve stayed true to their character and have even had better development. And it too less time too compared to Persephone and Hades.

Persephone-I don’t know where to begin with her character. At first we believe she didn’t have real friends because all the nymphs were lowkey spies of Demeter and Artemis was her real female friend (was she being classist because she’s a goddess?) (she also seems to heavily favor Hermes) but season two she did have 2 friends that were murdered and at the end of season two these two friends didn’t have names. Nor did we learn anything about them personally other than Persephone made them (what were they like? How could we tell them apart from Persephone and each other, they’re both highlighter pink). Persephone is first semester into school and is studying biology I think. After hanging out with Hades for like 3 weeks or something she wants a law major and become a citizen of the underworld (EVEN THO SHE JUST MOVED IN WITH ARTEMIS) she has HUNDREDS OF YEARS TO LIVE JUST FINISH THE FIRST DEGREE YOUVE BEEN IN CLASS FOR 2 weeks. And then Persephone doesn’t fully realize her actions on situations even when characters point them out to her. Her class mates “are you sleeping to the top” Minthe “my ex will spoil you like he did me” Zeus “you can’t get what you want just like my brother use to do with you.” Hades literally shielded Persephone from the law for a long ass time, they shared a bed, Persephone is the first paid intern, she has new clothes, tried take out, bunch of pens, lingerie (gross coming from an old man), all thanks to Hades! And are those characters wrong? NO! Sure the context of each comment wasn’t good, but they’re not wrong.

AND THEN HADES? WHAT IS HE SUPPOSE TO BE, tragic oldest lonely sibling past, beginning of the story misunderstood/bad man/lonely, to mess, to groomer predator, to obsessive “I will burn the world down if I can’t get my barely legal wife sorry I mean gf” What I can’t get behind his character is we’re never shown him enjoying Minthe as a partner, yet he picked her, and apparently has begged her to stay, but we never see him actually enjoying her company which makes it so hard for me to take his part of the relationship seriously. I’m sorry RS if you want to sell me their relationship I gotta see them actually happy where he’s not fantasying about a pink highlighter. And then his relationship with his family, I don’t like him as a Hera/cheater even tho Leuce is also in Greek mythology (if there was a first love route) how does he feel fine being around Zeus?How do Hera and him not look at each other in disgust and further more Persephone is Hera’s niece who is still hella young by their standards . Hades is also dick as a boss and king. He’s literally giving special treatment to the hot young (unqualified) intern. And treated his (assume older than Persephone) foster son like shit. BUT WERE SUPPOSE TO ROOT FOR THIS CHARACTER???

4. Regardless of what her intentions are (and for the life of me I don't get how Rachel thinks making Hades OWNING SLAVES is a good idea) slavery to even non-Americans is tied to the subjugation and abuse of BIPOC people, especially Africans. I'm not saying she is racist, but can you really blame anyone for thinking so when she writes and glorifies stuff like this? Donating once to a BLM charity when it was popular to do so two years ago doesn't change the fact she's doing this in 20-goddamn-22.

5. I think one of the issues with Lore Olympus is that it started (well as an original anyway) 4 years ago and like. Not much has happened at all??? Like no wonder people get tired and stop reading this comic

#anti lore olympus #anti lo #lore olympus critical #lo critical

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menalez · 8 months

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"^_^ but thank u for taking the time to use that to actually defend actual lesbophobia that was expressed'

first of all I'm literally not defending it I agree she's lesbophobic and I've never liked ms-revived-frogs tbh she says so much shit off the cuff and then completely doubles down unreasonably. she's just a contrarian that think she's the only one that really understands anything. maybe a symptom of her age but im still not gonna give her a pass or then she'll just continue to b like that.

second of all I literally wasn't the anon that sent any of those original asks but I did know wtf they are talking about w piqued. idk about the rest im only talking about the piqued thing. i just think its crazy how radblr can correctly recognize those comparisons are lesbophobic and wrong, but when people call us dick worshipers or spread essays on how we're identical to men, suddenly thats no biggie and the only evil is that the bihets think they have the right to complain. piqued was the least bad person to reblog that shit essay bcoz she at least partly acknowledged some bits were bad, but she still thinks that the "bad" parts like comparing our sexual assaults to TIM completely fake murder stats or saying we're dick worshipers or the premise of the essay on how we're identical to men are completely acceptable to pass around even if their 'bad' if she decides she thinks its worth it, and us rape victims are pathetic if we take offense at her choice. and thats the thing even when u all say that harassment or abuse against bi women is "bad", a lot of ppl on here just treat it as like a fart in the room at most nothing real and nothing realated to real pain or oppression just annoying whining. ppl oppose it in theory but in practice they completely let ppl like that off the hook and show way more anger at any bisexuals that bring up the topic of how ppl harass us treating us like we're complaining over nothing. no ones gonna call desisapphic, ornitomoltorinco, like-a-ruby, eliminatedmighty, angrylesbianatwork, and dozens others that passed that shit around homophobes for making light of our rape and using it as a gotcha or misogynists for how they call us dick worshippers. no one's ever gonna spare any anger for them even if they mildly criticize, it all goes only into insisting that bi "male worshipers" exagerate everything and can be believed. And I'm not talking about you but rad spaces as a whole. I actually don't think ur that bad about bi women at all, u at least call bullshit bullshit when its direct, but you seem completely unable to call out sussy shit thats in between the lines, and the thing is i know u can coz ur smart and you do it all the time with other shit. but unfort a lot of people are alot shittier about bi women than u, i don't get why you have to pretend theyre not and bis are just making everything up.

“i just think its crazy how radblr can correctly recognize those comparisons are lesbophobic and wrong”

the idea that radblr is collectively recognising this as lesbophobic & wrong is laughable to me. i’m seeing more ppl outright justifying her lesbophobia n demonising me for criticising it than i am seeing ppl saying it was lesbophobic. and of the ppl calling it lesbophobic, almost every single one is a lesbian.

ur paragraph about piqued is.. literally nothing she even said. “TIM completely fake murder stats” is bizarre to say bc like.

the rate of transwomen of colour being murdered isn’t a myth. the myth is acting like trans women are the most vulnerable group, which overall they are not. however black or latam trans women are absolutely at high risk of being murdered:

and almost everything u took issue with is stuff she mentioned as an issue as well:

like idk i find it absolutely insane that of all the ppl u could have gone after, u specifically chose the lesbian who agreed with ur takes here and chose to demonise her. there’s also the fact that youre expecting *others* to go after what *you* find problematic *on your behalf* instead of just.. doing it urself? i mean none of u did shit when tagai/tonguehurt was harassing me and even happily grouped us together and acted like we were besties when she left. none of u cared when that general circle was being awful to me. and most of u directed not even 1/20th of the attacks directed at me towards the ppl u named above. and then on top of that ur like “hey why don’t u go after these ppl i disagree with harder? even tho we won’t call out the lesbophobia within our circles or call the ppl we disagree with out ourselves or anything else” .. just bizarre frankly

also i actually had no issue with ms-revived-frogs before ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i disagreed with some things but the lesbians are unempathetic stuff she said was shocking to me bc i didn’t expect it from her. her inability to take any accountability and readiness to demonise me despite me giving her the benefit of the doubt n simply politely explaining how she was lesbophobic was also shocking to me considering she made it seem like she was an ally to lesbians. so how u felt about her prior to that doesn’t matter to me tbh, no one needs to dislike or hate her or anyone else. but that lesbophobia should be criticised

btw never heard of eliminatedmighty, i did criticise angrylesbianatwork but she’s inactive now anyways, don’t know what ornito did, and at most i disagree with like-a-ruby and desisapphic on some things but i’ve seen ppl go after those two and literally no one else you’ve mentioned which.. again i do find it interesting that the women who say they want front row seats to see a woman being abused by her bf/husband and called women misogynistic terms such as bulldyke-rider or others in her direct circle aren’t ppl that y’all go after nearly as much as ppl like desisapphic

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bi-leth-eisner · 1 year

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I know this ain't a discourse place but there's a trend I've noticed in the 3..H fandom that I think needs a bit of a vent/discussion.

We've seen how the fandom engages in bi-erasure by claiming bisexual characters like YKB, Dorothea, Mercedes, etc are lesbians, but there's another uncomfortable bi-erasure that I've noticed: the bi-racial erasure.

I've seen this when it comes to Byleth and Claude especially: people supporting Byleth rejecting their Nabatean/Goddess heritage and embracing humanity in C///////F and then framing it as them "rejecting their destiny". And likewise people wishing Claude would reject their Fodlan side and fully embrace their Almyran heritage or even wish that he was full Almryan along with wanting to change his eye color.

It goes without saying this type of mindset is disgusting and to see the fandom embrace this almost unironically is just sad.

the bisexual erasure just makes me sad, don’t get me wrong. like, as a bisexual person, it just sorta hurts after a while. but the more pressing issue, to me at least... the race stuff. (i’d just like to preface that i am not mixed - fully Inuk, rather - but holy shit it’s still fucking racist to say “i wish this character wasn’t mixed race” even if they would go from half-poc-half-white to fully a poc)

i’ve said it already, but i won’t stop until it’s heard: i’m just gonna assume you’re actually straight up just racist if you think the Nabateans need to die because they aren’t seen as human, or aren’t human enough for you.

Byleth being half mortal, half Nabatean, but not “fully human” until they’re rid of their Nabatean half according to these See Eff people really discomforts me. why is someone of the race that founded the Empire, which split off into the entire continent of Fódlan (and therefore has been there from the very start,) only seen as a heartless beast? and why are people who are even just associated with her to blame as well? they’ve gone into hiding (their identities at least) so their bones wouldn’t be harvested like the rest of their race, their home was essentially made entirely unsafe for them for a thousand years. put yourself in their shoes. imagine having to hide who you really are so you wouldn’t be killed like your loved ones were. imagine never being able to see them again and being constantly reminded of their deaths because of the Crests - which is their blood - and the Relics - their bones, which are STILL MOVING. they’re just trying to survive after tragedy after tragedy that befell them. their goal isn’t to Rule Over Humanity, they want their goddess back, because maybe she’ll be able to make everything better. their world fell to ruin as she was killed, after all. i won’t go into why this is important for me (i’ve done so once already,) but i’m tired of people seeing Ms. Emperor dehumanising the Nabateans as a “good thing, actually.” it’s fucking not. it can make real life people who relate to them for whatever reason feel unsafe.

which brings us to Byleth “defying their destiny.” Sothis is gone after she fuses with Byleth and there’s no way to ever get her back again. the story cannot progress until Sothis is gone for good. Sothis was never meant to come back. Byleth’s destiny to be the goddess reincarnated was broken right then and there, since they’re unable to do much other than do what Sothis granted them: turning back time, of which use is very limited. they do not have the power to raise or entirely tear apart land or sea or sky or anything of the sort. so what they do afterwards is wholly up to them. (i’m of the firm belief that See Eff isn’t canon at all here.)

Rhea comes to accept that Byleth isn’t Sothis, nor will they ever be (in Silver Snow, which i see as the most canon route.) she knows then that Byleth is their own person. so their life is up to them, not some destiny.

and some people wanting Claude to be fully Almyran is something i can certainly understand, however... forgive me, i’m not a Claude expert by any means, but... isn’t him being mixed race a huge and important part of his character and route? him wanting everyone on BOTH sides of his family to accept each other instead of needlessly fighting each other? wanting to fix relations with each other and everyone else? his Fódlan half is just as important, for lack of a better word, as his Almyran half...

#asks #getting really tired of the Rhea hate #...technically?#also! my blog is a safe place to vent about this stuff! don’t worry!

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rphelperblog · 2 years

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American Royals Quote Rp Meme

Book by Katharine Mcgee- feel free to edit or change pronouns for rp purposes

“Who said anything about forgetting? The point of forgiveness is to recognize that someone has hurt you, and to still love them in spite of it.”

“Tell no one your secrets but make them think that you have. It creates the illusion of intimacy.”

“Relationships never make sense from the outside; the only people qualified to weigh in on them are the people in them.”

“Sorry isn't a magic eraser that undoes whatever wrong thing you did! You can't just say sorry and expect everything to be the way it was, not when people have been hurt!”

“The only people free from censure are people who’ve never taken a stand.”

“I think you're too clever for your own good”

“Everything seemed to go luscious, and slow, and still.”

“Despite how progressive America claimed to be, there was still a sexist double standard quietly underpinning everything.”

“Only you would daydream about a library meet-cute.”

“I wish I had someone I could turn to for guidance. But all I can do is pray.”

“I’m a commoner.”

“It was so much easier to break an arm than to break your heart. Hearts didn’t heal themselves. Hearts didn’t remake themselves stronger than before.”

“Only by engaging with the past can we avoid repeating it.”

“Yes, exactly, because you’re a woman, and the world will make everything exponentially more difficult for you. It isn’t right, or fair, but it is the truth.”

"It kills me that I don't have more to offer you,"

“Real love comes from creating a family together, from facing life together -- with all its messes and surprises and joys.”

“Writers got to pick the endings of their novels, but she wasn’t living a story. She was living history, and history went on forever.”

"I have no lands, no fortune, no title. All I can give you is my honor, and my heart. Which already belongs to you."

"I'm sorry it isn't a real ring, but I'm improvising here."

“That was the thing about success, it could be even more draining than failure.”

That was the only word for it: known. Not hoped to marry, or dreamed of marrying, or even felt destined to marry. Those words involved an element of chance, of uncertainty.”

“to the people, go out begging for votes—that could only end in disaster. That structure would attract the wrong sort of people: power-hungry people with twisted agendas.”

“It feels like half my internal monologue has suddenly switched off.”

“I came in here to seduce you,“and then I cried all over you instead.”

“You’re going to be an amazing first queen. If this was a world where people could, I don’t know, vote for their monarch, I know that America would still pick you. I would pick you.”

“a good queen learns from her mistakes, but a great one learns from the mistakes of others.”

“There was something too immediate about her face, the way all her emotions played themselves out over her features like the shadows of clouds on water.”

“Coatroom, five minutes”

“All I’ve ever done for America is give and give and give, and still America wants more! When will it ever be enough?”

“woman. Or maybe it would have been better if America had never been a monarchy at all, and had some other form of government.”

criticism is a good thing. It means you've fought for something.”

Our nation’s history is woven from their errors in judgment, their wrong decisions, as much as it is from their achievements.”

“All I know is that when I need to eat my feelings, my feelings taste like Wawa milkshakes with extra M&Ms.”

She, too, was bound by a sacred oath.”

“There was a nebulous, infectious energy to her, as if she were somehow more *alive* than everyone else. As if all her nerves were sparking at once, just below the surface.”

“Say you want to make things right, to build a better future. But erasing the past—or worse, trying to rewrite it—is the tool of despots. Only by engaging with the past can we avoid repeating it.”

Just because she'd been brought up to keep her emotions hidden didn't mean that she never experienced those emotions.”

They were being reckless and foolish; they were tempting fate; they were breaking the rules; they were falling in love.But they both knew that last wasn't true. They had already fallen in love, a long time ago.”

“I’m America’s Sweetheart,”

“She hated resorting to this—planting deliberate, self-promotional stories—but she wasn’t sure what else to do.”

She had long ago resolved that if she couldn't be beautiful, she should at the very least be interesting.”

“This was how a kiss was supposed to feel—electric and pulsing and smoky all at once, like you'd discovered a new source of fuel that could warm you from within.”

“They were living fragments of history. Each time she put one on, Sam felt the ghosts of her ancestors whispering to her across the fabric of centuries. The rings made her feel more confident, even majestic.”

“But sometimes—when newspapers accused her of “getting emotional,” whatever that meant, or when the media spent more time critiquing her outfits than her policies—she wished she could act with a little less grace and a little more aggression.”

“I expect you to give her your support when she's earned it and your criticism when she deserves it. That's what siblings are for, after all.”

“All she knew was that one day she woke up and her love for him was simply there, like newly fallen snow. Maybe it had been there all along.”

she had been trained to smile through anything.Even through her own heartbreak.”

#open to all #open to anyone #open rp #ask meme #open meme #open to anybody #rp meme #ask prompt #roleplay meme #memes #american royals #open starter #open fantasy roleplay #open fantasy starter #open fantasy rp #open historical roleplay #open historical starter #open historical rp #katharine mcgee

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secretgamergirl · 1 year

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Lazy Uprezzed Paintovers Drive Me Up the Wall

So I just randomly saw a trailer for the PC and Switch ports of the first 3 Etrian Odyssey games, and like... I understand why people keep doing this, but seriously WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP DOING THIS!?

This is a really crude comparison I just slapped up in MS Paint. I just hunted up the original resolution art for this monster, pasted it over a screenshot, ended up with a black background eating the tail and all but one leg because... that’s what happens when you paste a .webp into MS Paint, and I freehand scaled it up at possibly a slightly wrong aspect ratio, but see my point here is that even with the sloppiest distorting-est lazy job I could have done here, just scaling up the orginal pixel art by 500% looks a hell of a lot better than doing that then using it as a base for someone to quickly trace over the line work then hitting it with a couple gradient fills, or whatever the hell it is people keep doing.

I’m going to move on to some other examples, but just humor me with a couple key details here. Look at that corner of that cheek. In the original art we’ve got this ragged little notch in there like a chunk got cut out and these big thick warts kinda falling into the gap. In the redraw that detail is just completely gone. Above that we have another nasty scar, all gouged out under the eye and healing up weird. Which in the redraw just becomes this thin vague X. Is that even still supposed to be a scar? I could just see it as a cheek line now. We have eyes going from this real intense glare to just kinda dopy and vacant. A shadowed mout where we can only see a couple teeth to... those specific 7 visible teeth in clear vew and alot of exposed gum suggesting it doesn’t have any others, nor a tongue. The other visible scars, which are already kinda cartoonishly implied on what I’m not going to deny was always kind of just a big tomato-y blob of a body are really de-emphasized and the one on the leg I didn’t lose in the black loses some three dimensionality as we just do whatever with the line weights.

You can really see this sort of thing though with ports of the Ace Attorney games. Here’s someone else’s griping example of what they did to my poor boy Edgeworth here.

Apologies again as that old shot seems to have been through a ringer of resizes and format conversions, but do I even need to say anything here? Now LOOK AT THE FREAKING JUDGE!

You tend not to see so much of this with 8 and 16 bit games getting modern updates. With older pixel art, people seem to have it sort of enshrined in their memories, so you either get nice straight upscales of original art, or you get some kind of effort to recapture the vibe with actually new reimaginings of the characters, either hand-drawn or rendered.

(Yeah I know this isn’t a remake, it’s still a great example of updating classic sprite art for a higher resolution, shush.)

I don’t know if it’s the color depth, the actual size of the screen in the player’s hands, or the games being more recent, but I feel like in people’s rosy memories of GBA and DS games, there’s way more detail than the actual 256x192 pixels they were working with in reality, so it must feel like blowing it up and doing a little smoothing is going to work out, but it’s still low resolution pixel art. The stuff that looks real good is the stuff where someone hand-editing each individual bit of visual information is applying techniques to imply more detail than can actually be displayed on the screen. If you up the resolution, and you don’t go in and actually add that detail in the denser pixels you’re then working with, it’s always going to look just awful. Stop doing it. Please.

#pixel art #hd ports #corner cutting #3DS art

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batfam-horror-au · 2 years

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This post is dedicated to @wesavegotham! They inspired me to go further in depth on this topic, and it’s helped me get out of my writers block! Or I suppose you could say post block. Either way, feel free to send me more questions, I’ll always be happy to answer!

Anyway, Tim Drake was absolutely abused. But I didn’t necessarily say it was his parents.

He was on some levels neglected by them, of course. I think it might’ve been later in life that it happened, but Tim was still a child whose parents were gone way too often. I won’t say I know the timeline for Tim’s childhood, nor do I know how bad the Drake’s neglect was. He did have Ms. Mac, but again I don’t know that much about her cannon behavior to tell you anything. I also think he was in a boarding school for awhile, but I don’t know when that happened. But I do think there was a level of emotional neglect that led him to seek out Bruce as a mentor and parental figure.

And on the topic of Bruce, he was definitely abusive towards Tim.

1. He let a minor be a vigilante. Of course this is popular in superhero culture. If we are looking at it from a purely fictional standpoint than it would, kinda, be fine. But since we are talking specifics here, Bruce brought a kid into his shit. The fourth kid, actually. Barbra got shot, Dick flew the coop as soon as possible, and Jason died. Which, if I am recalling correctly, was mostly because he was Robin. A child died because of that suit, and Bruce brings another into the fold?

2. Tim might’ve chosen Robin, but it sure as hell wasn’t something he could’ve consented to. He was a minor when he made that decision. I’ve seen many variations of what age he was when he took up the Robin mantle. 11-14 years old is the usually ages, and let’s be real, if you got the chance to help your hero wouldn’t you take it? Especially as a kid who has little concept of how bad the world is.

3. I have to say this again, Tim was a minor!!! If he had the choice, he probably wouldn’t go to school for the rest of his life!!! But Batman, the adult in the situation, let a minor be Robin again. He has an emotional reliance on Robin (both as a concept and as a person) that is genuinely frightening. This codependency is unhealthy. He might’ve said no time and time again, but that doesn’t matter because he was the adult in the situation. He had the ability to stop Tim, or at least try his hardest to keep him from going out. There’s a million things he could have done to stop him (namely being him not taking minors into dangerous situations in the first place (actions have consequences)) but he didn’t.

4. Batman has actually hit Tim on multiple occasions. And hard too. I’m not talking about just training either, though I have heard that Bruce has definitely hit hard enough during these so called spars to bruise. Not that Bruce would ever know about easing into training. But no, I’m talking about when he punched Tim in the face. In the Batman comic book titled “The Fall and the Fallen: Part 2” Batman slugs Tim across the face. Hard enough to send his head reeling back, and we all know Batman punches hard. We also know this isn’t a first time thing either. He has hit his kids over and over in the comics, who’s to say this will be the last time he’ll hit Tim? And I’m not saying he got the worst of it- Jason got his throat sliced open and Damian was practically handed over to Dick for him to raise. But Tim definitely didn’t get win the lottery with that man.

5. Take a good look at what these vigilantes do practically every single night. They run out and beat up bad guys right? Bad guys who have no qualms about killing this little slip of a boy in bright ass colors with a gun. And Batman dressed him in that, and I do not care what you say to try to make it okay, it is very much a not okay thing to do. It’s like he wants them to get shot.

6. He is dependent on a child. He literally goes crazy if he does not have a literal child telling him what’s right and wrong. Tim felt the need to save these people because he knew Batman’s secret. He chose that life to save Batman and be his moral compass. Maybe he did want to be Robin, sure, but the only reason why he even told him he knew was because Batman was beating the shit out of purse snatchers and nearly killing them. Tim, a child, felt like he had to make Batman need a Robin. If Bruce had half the emotional regulation of a bloody child all of that could have been avoided.

There’s definitely more I can say on this subject but I’ll leave it for later. I feel like this is good enough for now. I have a few other posts in the line but, but this one was at the forefront of my mind! And don’t worry folks, this is only the beginning.

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waningheart · 2 years

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@maiden-after-dark

"Oh my, oh my. Do you really want to know such a thing as that~? So lewd. . .~" After she said those words she couldn't help but giggle as if she was simply teasing him.

"I wouldn't think too hard about that, honestly. I find you cute and attractive. Besides being in that kind of moment leaves both parties at their most venerable. A ritual of trust and connection can be referred to, not just for the sake of carnal pleasure. I even have other personal reasons for why but-"

". . .I'm not sure why I'm like this in the first place now that you asked such a question. Deep down, it feels normal to me, especially for those I've known. It's a tad odd I'm so. . . needy sexually. What a freak compared to others."

Oh, he can definitely lean into the teasing momentarily at least! No harm in entertaining her, a flush of red covering his cheeks. Eyes avert away briefly rubbing at the nape of his neck almost seemingly skittish. He definitely fibbing it to some extent, but it’s all harmless play at the end of the day. Still it’s such a simple reason that he IS embarrassed for overthinking. it.

“I hadn’t realized it’s that simple. Now I do feel a tad bit silly about pondering on it for that long. Unfortunately Ms. Seria I’m not a particularly easy lay. I mean I wasn’t joking when I said someone here might be an assassin. I’m not after your head though or anything. At least, not in that kind of context.~” A cheeky wink. Is he teasing back now? Oh most certainly. Flirting is definitely fun, even if he holds less interest in the part the comes afterwards. Still, he’s not down for all the negative energy. Never has been.

“Come now dear, why would you call yourself a freak? Nothing wrong with feeling comfortable when getting to know someone intimately in that context. Everyone has their own types of love language right? It’s just the way you’re most comfortable with expressing yourself. ‘Sides, I’ve heard worst reasons and I’m sure you’re an absolute stunner regardless. I can’t really tell until you get real close though.~” He’s relentless with it tonight isn’t he?

#ϟ{Flowing like a tide: Current}ϟ

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sockich · 3 years

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Because I still have shit to say, apparently.

The thing that’s been really frustrating me about how the Adam/Eric break-up played out and how people have been reacting to it, is that I think there are two entirely different things at play here, and conflating them creates confusion.

The first thing is Eric feeling the need to break up with Adam because he feels like he can’t be his true self with him. And this might be controversial, but I think Eric had every right to do that. No matter what, everyone always has the right to break up with someone if the relationship doesn’t work for them.

The second thing is that, for the moment (we’ll see how a potential season 4 deals with this), I get the sense the show wants me to believe that objectively speaking, Eric was correct in thinking he couldn’t be himself with Adam, that he was losing himself because of Adam. And that’s the thing I have a problem with.

People have already talked about how Adam never once tried to get Eric to be anything but his true self as far as Eric’s behaviour and style goes. And while, yes, he wasn’t out to his mum yet, he was out to literally everyone else in their lives—and all he was asking for was a little time to gather the courage to come out to his mum too. But the thing I want to talk about is how, after a whole season of Adam going out of his comfort zone in various ways (and not just for Eric, but for his own sake too, like asking Ms Sands for help in getting better with school), Adam says he didn’t think putting make up on and going to a gay club would be his thing, and Eric immediately, without even talking to him about it, decided that was a fixed point of Adam’s character and that meant Adam wasn’t the guy for him.

And again, I’m not actually saying Eric was wrong to feel that. I’m just saying that, based on Adam’s pattern of behaviour, I wish the show wouldn’t act as if it was an objective truth.

Because the thing is, Adam doesn’t like poetry. That’s not his thing either. And the second Eric actually used his words and told him that he liked it, Adam went and not only read a poetry book, but actually put real, impressive effort into writing poetry himself. All because Eric told him he liked it.

What I’m saying is, the idea that Adam wouldn’t agree to go to a gay club with Eric (with or without putting make-up on himself), if Eric actually expressed that it mattered to him, just doesn’t work for me.

So, yeah, Eric broke up with Adam because he wanted to fly while Adam’s still learning to walk and, you know what, that’s fair enough. But it seems to me that the only reason Eric didn’t think Adam was ready to fly is because he never actually paid all that much attention to Adam, and all the ways in which he already wasn’t the person Eric thought he was. (See also Eric’s dismissive laughter at the idea Adam could ever write him poetry, when in fact, that’s exactly what Adam then did.)

Also, I really could have gone without the idea that not wanting to go out to a gay club while wearing make-up means Adam isn’t ready to fly. It probably means he and Eric aren’t compatible, sure, but it’s not actually a sign that Adam isn’t on Eric’s evolved level of queerness yet. Shockingly enough, it’s possible to be a fully realized queer without enjoying the club scene!

Idk, I just wish the break-up happened because Eric realized they weren’t compatible because they enjoy different things. Presenting it as an issue of Adam not being on Eric’s level of queerness yet really left a bad taste in my mouth, especially as it was used as a way to sort of excuse Eric cheating.

And I know Adam loves Eric and is devastated by the break-up, but the main reason I’m okay with it is because he deserves better than someone who not only constantly pushes him out of his comfort zone, but then completely fails to even see the progress he’s making.

#adam groff #eric effiong #adam x eric #sex education #sex education meta #my posts

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cloudteawrites · 3 years

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chapter: six ( 15.5k ) rating: mature (death, past abuse, eventual smut) genre: mystery | romance | hurt/comfort tags: bts x reader | ot7 x reader | hybrid | poly summary: when an estranged uncle leaves you his massive fortune you wonder if the universe is playing a joke on you. when that fortune comes with seven hybrids, you know for sure that it is. << first < previous | next > last >>

what is hybrid marking

8.2 million results.

While scent mixing (heretofore referred to as ‘scenting’) is temporary and lasts a maximum of twelve hours if left undisturbed, scent marking (‘marking’ in common parlance) is semi-permanent. A ‘mark’ is created when the pheromones present in a hybrid’s bodily fluids are applied directly to their markee’s skin. When said chemical compounds seep below the epidermis and bond to the sweat glands found within the dermal layer of the skin, the target has been officially ‘marked’. Between domesticated hybrids and their human caretakers, this is most commonly done by applying hybrid saliva to the skin of the neck, where a human’s scent tends to be strongest. While the behavior involved in marking resembles some aspects of human foreplay, it is a non-sexual expression of mutual trust and affection. It is important to note that most hybrids of age are able to mitigate the oral secretion of pheromones and cannot mark accidentally-

“How do I look?”

The sound of Jimin’s voice makes you jump. You fumble with your phone, trying to exit out of the website, shove it in your pocket and look at the leopard hybrid’s outfit at the same time.

“You look great!” You tell him once the device is safely tucked away.

He rolls his eyes at you. “You’ve said that about everything I’ve shown you.”

You had, but only because it was true. No matter what the trio of hybrids tried on, they all looked great. You weren’t sure what it was, but seeing them in something other than neutral sweat suits made them look even better than they already had. You were discovering they all had unique senses of fashion too. Taehyung preferred earth tones, soft fabrics and slouchy cardigans, Yoongi tended toward plaid overshirts and dark denim and Jimin had just come out of the dressing room in his sixth button down and second pair of chelsea boots.

When the four of you had arrived at the mall that afternoon, you’d told them to go wild and call you when they were ready to check out. There was an entire section of the shopping center that catered specifically to hybrids and you were certain they’d be able to find everything they needed and more. You’d been all set to sequester yourself in a booth in the food court and indulge your hybrid research habit, but Taehyung had fixed you with a forlorn look the moment you tried to part with them and Jimin had insisted that you personally review every piece of clothing he put on. You wouldn’t deny that you were having fun, but surreptitiously trying to google what every little thing they did meant without getting caught was getting harder and harder.

Jimin breezes past you to the semi-circle of mirrors on the far end of the fitting rooms, brushing his tail against your shins as he passes. That was another thing that had changed. Since the talk you’d had with the boys last night, it seemed like they were always finding some excuse to touch you or brush up against you . You didn’t know if it was a manifestation of their cat genes or them just wanting physical reassurance that you were there, but it seemed like every time you turned around there was a tail curling around your calf or a nose tip against your ear or a shoulder brushing your own. You were practically wreathed in them. Even Yoongi hadn’t seemed to mind when your fingertips had brushed against each other at breakfast when you’d passed him the juice. You didn’t know if you should count that as progress, but you want to.

You’re not entirely used to physical contact and nearly every time Taehyung rubs his cheek on the top of your head or Jimin reaches out to link your fingers together, you jump. It feels strange, to have people be so blatantly physically affectionate with you. It’s not like you dislike it, exactly, it’ll just take some getting used to. Whatever adjustments you need to make, you know you’ll need to make them quickly. You don’t think the hybrids will give up on friendly hugs just because you never initiate them first.

“Y/N-ah,”Jimin calls, catching your attention. He’s twisting this way and that on the platform, trying to catch his reflection in every possible angle. He hums in disappointment as he turns back to the front, tail waving behind him. “This collar,” he says, tugging on the offending band of bright green plastic around his neck, “-is ruining my outfit. We’ll need to get real ones today.”

You feel like a stone has settled in your stomach. Your shoulders sag, but if the leopard hybrid notices, he doesn’t say anything. “Yeah,” you reply. “Yeah, you’re right.” In truth, you’d hoped to put it off for a little while longer. Collaring and leashing a hybrid had always seemed odd to you. After all, weren’t they people too? The law was the law, you knew, but something about publicly and visibly marking someone as property...well, the morality of it was gray at best. The temporary collars had provided you with a stay from the inevitable, but there was no avoiding it any longer, you supposed. They’d have to get collars.

“I saw a store for them a couple shops down,” Taehyung supplies as he steps out of his dressing room in a white linen shirt and cream drawstring pants. “We could go there?”

“That works for me...Taehyung, one of your buttons is in the wrong hole.”

The tiger hybrid squints down at his shirt, feels blindly for the hole he missed, but can’t seem to find it.

“No,” you tell him. “Not that one, the other- do you just want me to fix it?”

He pauses and looks up at you for a solid three seconds before giving a single, slow nod.

You come to stand in front of him and start undoing the buttons from the top. There’s only four of them but each one you pop open reveals more and more of his honey brown skin and prominent collar bones. Your fingers brush his skin accidentally and he chuffs happily, one hand resting on your lower back as you start buttoning him up again. Heat starts crawling up your neck unbidden. Even through the fabric of your t-shirt, you can feel the warmth of his palm, how long his fingers are. He presses you closer until your arms are nearly flat against your chest as you try to finish buttoning him up. It’s hard to move squished between the insistent pressure of his hand and the- surprisingly- hard line of his body, but you make do. “There!” You pat him gently on the chest as you finish the last button. “All done.”

He dips forward and rubs his cheek against your forehead, rumbling so deep in his chest that the vibrations pass into you. “Thank you.” He releases you and pulls away, but as he does, his lips brush against your hairline. You try not to read too deep into it.

The tiger hybrid sidles over to his friend in the mirror, wrapping his arms around the smaller man’s waist and dipping his head into his neck. Jimin reaches back and scratches behind one of his ears and your heart swells in your chest. It was nice to see them be so openly affectionate with each other. They’re so close in a way you can’t even begin to understand. It’s beautiful.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket and you thumb the screen to life. An incoming call from Mr. Seo. “You guys keep trying stuff on,” you tell the pair, already standing to make your way out of the dressing room. “I’ve gotta take this.” They both call at you to hurry back and you give them a shout of assent as you rush away.

The second you’re outside the store, you answer. “Hello?”

“Ms. L/N,” Mr. Seo’s voice crackles on the other end of the line. “I trust you’ve settled in well.” It isn’t a question and the tone of his voice makes it clear that he doesn’t wish to spend what precious time he has exchanging pleasantries with you.

“Yeah, everything’s okay.” Everything had most certainly not been okay when you’d emergency dialed him two days ago about the tiger on your couch. The text he’d sent you back six hours later had told you to figure it out. You had and you knew you weren’t his responsibility, but him tossing you in the deep end was still a sore spot for you.

“There’s been a change of plans.”

You grimace. Straight to it, then. “What’s going on?”

“Black Mountain Canines- the company your uncle purchased two of the hybrids from- changed their pick-up date. They want you to come get them in person today.”

“Pick-up?” You frown. “No, they were supposed to drop them off.”

“They were,” Mr. Seo confirms, “But it’s apparently no longer profitable for them to drive all the way into Seoul to hand-deliver two of their charges. They also claim they’re incurring additional expenses by feeding and housing two hybrids who’ve already been purchased, but we’ll see about that when we arrive.”

Your anxiety spikes and your fingers wrap tighter around your phone. You’d promised the boys a whole day out. All you’d done so far was get them phones of their own and furniture for their room. There was still so much to do, so much to see. “What about Yoongi and Jimin and Taehyung?” You blurt out.

Mr. Seo sighs and his breath crackles over the receiver. “Those are the cats, I assume? I suggest you let them know sooner rather than later that they’ll have to share their space.” There’s a flurry of movement on his end of the line, the sound of someone calling his name and papers shuffling. “I have to go; they need me to look over some case files.” He tells you. “I’ll be at Haneul Tower to pick you up in three hours. Be downstairs waiting.”And the line clicks off.

You sigh and hang up. What were you going to tell the boys? Day one of your new friendship and you were already breaking promises.

“Trouble?” Yoongi’s voice right behind you makes you flinch and whirl on him. His ears press back against his head and he takes a step back at your sudden movements.

“Sorry!” You tell him, forcing your spine to relax. “Sorry, I didn’t notice you there; I thought you were still shopping. ”

“I can tell,” he snarks, but there’s no heat behind it. His eyes trace the line of your shoulders, still tense and flick to the phone in your hand. “I dropped my stuff at the register. What’s going on?”

You gnaw on the inside of your cheek, nerves making your stomach ache. “C’mon,” you tell him, walking back into the store. “Let’s pay and grab some lunch. I’ll tell you when we sit down.” He follows after you a few paces behind, trying not to let worry prick in him at the anxious shift in your scent. Something was about to change, he was sure, and not entirely for the better.

Twenty minutes later, the four of you are sitting in the food court, a mess of shopping bags at your feet and a bowl of tteokbokki between you. Yoongi and Jimin had picked out all the fish cakes first and were bickering good-naturedly over who the last one should go to, but Taehyung seemed content to just gnaw at his rice cakes. You’d hardly touched anything, your eyes flicking back to the time on your phone. 1:20 P.M. Two hours and forty minutes ‘til Mr. Seo would be at your apartment to pick you up and bring you to get two more of the hybrids your uncle had bought. You push a rice cake around on your paper plate with the end of your chopstick. Well, no point delaying the inevitable.

“Hey, guys?” You call softly. Three pairs of ears swivel toward you immediately. The words die in your throat and your tongue feels like lead as they look at you, all their eyes focused and expectant. You clear your throat and force yourself to continue. “So...you know how I…” You search for the right word, but there’s really no other way to say it. “...inherited you guys from my uncle?”

Taehyung’s eyes flick toward Jimin and the leopard hybrid brushes his tail against the tiger’s. Silent communication you couldn’t even begin to decipher. “Yeah,” Yoongi says, tossing his chopsticks down and leaning back in his chair. “I told them.”

That was right. What you’d blurted out at Yoongi yesterday on the street you had yet to disclose to his juniors. “Thanks, Yoongi,” You tell him, meaning every word of it. He’d spared you from yet another uncomfortable conversation.

“...For what it’s worth, we’re glad it’s you,” Taehyung tells you, his tail twining around your ankle under the table. He looks at his hyungs for confirmation and when neither of them deny it, he settles his amber gaze back on you. “We like being here with you, even if you didn’t pick us. It’s...It’s nice.”

You can’t help the smile that tugs at your lips at his words. He beams at you, his boxy smile soft despite the sharp incisors poking his bottom lip. “I like having you guys around, too,” you admit, taking the time to meet each of their eyes. Jimin purrs as you look at him, the corners of his mouth curling. When your gaze meets Yoongi’s, his ears twitch but he doesn’t look away. He doesn’t blink either, just holds your stare with an intensity that makes heat crawl up your neck. You suddenly remember the warm stretch of his body over your’s, the sensation of his lips against your neck. You snatch your eyes away and cough to cover your lapse in speech. “It would’ve been scary, I think, if I had to deal with all this alone.”

You couldn’t even imagine it.That clinically clean apartment with its blank white walls and its imposing emptiness would have driven you down until you couldn’t stand it anymore. You’d always had a little pit of loneliness inside you. You didn’t know how long it’d been there. Maybe it always had been, a seed of something sad and dark at the core of your soul. You’d done well keeping it contained. You felt it in your goshiwon, but your room was small. It couldn’t grow beyond your keeping. In Oliver’s penthouse, it would’ve had endless room to sprawl and with no one to clip it back, you would’ve choked to death on vines of doubt.

“There are others,” you tell them, before you can down spiral into the mire of your own thoughts. “He bought other hybrids before he died. They weren’t supposed to be coming until next week but their company wants me to come get them today.”

The mood at the table shifts almost immediately. Taehyung’s ears and tail sag, Jimin’s smile goes sharp at the edges and Yoongi’s lip curls. “How many others?” He asks, crossing his arms over his chest. You notice he does that when he’s nervous or uncomfortable. It’s a defense mechanism, no matter how at ease it makes him seem.

“Four,” you answer and the bobcat hybrid’s ears tilt back in irritation. “Two are coming home today and the other two toward the end of next week.” Jimin doesn’t say anything, but you see the tip of his tail flicking back and forth. He’s annoyed. Taehyung drops a hand onto the smaller hybrid’s back and rubs circles in it, trying to soothe him.

“Maybe it’ll be okay?” The tiger hybrid offers. He’s trying his best to be diplomatic, but you hear the strain in the deep timbre of his voice. “Having other cats around again might be nice. We used to live with a lot back at the center…”

You wince. “...they’re canines.” Almost immediately, all of their ears go flat against their skulls and they hiss in unison. Yoongi stifles himself the quickest, setting a hand on Jimin’s knee and squeezing to get the leopard hybrid to get a hold of himself.

“Hybrids of different species don’t play well together,” he explains. “Especially not when our animals are solitary in the wild. The only reason Jimin, Tae and I are able to stand sharing the same territory is because we’ve known each other since we were kids and we’ve had to do it before.”

Before? A question forms in the back of your mind, but now isn’t the time to ask it.

“We don’t like sharing what’s ours,” Jimin continues for his hyung, interlocking his fingers with yours on the plastic table top. “It’s instinctual.”

“I know, I know.” You squeeze his hand lightly, trying to reassure him. “But the apartment is big; can’t you avoid each other starting out?”

All three of them give you a strange look and Jimin’s lips curl in a way that isn’t quite a smile. “...right,” he purrs, a little delayed. “The apartment.”

You chew on the inside of your cheek, anxiety sinking its claws into you. “I’m really sorry to spring this on you guys, I know it’s not great, but…” Your shoulders sag. “I don’t want to have promised someone a home and rip the rug out from under them, you know?” You knew what that felt like. You wouldn’t wish that feeling on your worst enemy. “I’m just...I’m worried that they’re not being treated well.”

“They were up for sale,” Yoongi drawls. “They definitely aren’t.”

The taxi ride back to Haneul Tower is uncomfortably quiet. Jimin still holds your hand and Taehyung still leans on your shoulder, but nobody says a word. You help them carry their bags upstairs and drop them off in the master bedroom. You’d told them they could have separate rooms if they wanted, but they’d insisted on sharing, so you thought it was only fair that they get the largest room in the penthouse. Clothes went onto hangars and into closets and before you knew it, there were only ten minutes until Mr. Seo’s arrival.

“You don’t have to go,” Taehyung huffs. He’s got you wrapped in a bear- well, you suppose a tiger hug and his cheek is mashed against the top of your head. You don’t even think he’s actively scenting you at this point, just keeping you from leaving. “Send your assistant instead and stay here with us.”

You let out a puff of laughter and pat the hybrid on the back in a way you hope is soothing. “Mr. Seo isn’t my assistant, buddy, he’s my uncle’s attorney.” You give a little tug away from him and he lets you go, albeit with a sad little mrow that makes him sound just like a disappointed cat. “I couldn’t ask him to do that. The only reason he’s coming is because they broke the contract. And I can’t drive.”

The look Taehyung gives you is so downtrodden that you toy with the idea of calling the whole day off and staying with them- but no. You can’t bail out now, especially not with what you’d put Mr. Seo through when the first group of hybrids were delivered. “I’ll be back before you know it,” You tell him with a steadfast smile.

“You’d better,” Jimin says, nudging the taller hybrid out of the way. Taehyung gives a half-hearted growl, but settles as Yoongi squeezes his shoulder. “The longer you’re away, the longer you’ll have to sit in the stench of those mutts.”

You frown. “Jimin-”

“Only joking,” He soothes, bringing both of your hands up to his cheeks. You don’t believe him, but you don’t press it. The leopard hybrid nuzzles into your palms, purring happily at the feeling of your skin against his. Your palms nearly burn from how warm he is. You feel a warm puff of air against your fingers and tense as Jimin presses all ten of them against his lips.

“Jimin.” Yoongi’s voice is hard, but his junior’s lips curl up in a satisfied smile, one of his incisors pricking at the pad of your index finger.

“Hurry back,” he murmurs. You try not to shiver at the feeling of his plush lips moving against your oversensitive fingertips.

“I’ll do my best!” You say, a pained smile tugging your lips apart. He hums in response and drops your hands, his fingers trailing across yours as he lets you go.

“Hyung,” he calls over his shoulder. “Is there anything you’d like to say to Y/N-ah?”

“Don’t let them scent you.” Is all Yoongi says as he breezes toward the stairs. “You know better now.”

It’s as much as you were expecting. “I’ll see you guys later,” You tell them as you head out the door. “Finish setting your phones up and text me if you need anything!”

True to his word, Mr. Seo is parked out front at 4 o’clock on the dot. You haven’t seen him in a little over a week and you’d almost forgotten how imposing he was. He cuts a sharp figure against the backdrop of the bustling street, dressed in all black and leaning against a brand new Buick Enclave. The poor valet stationed at the front door looks like he’s been trying to work up the courage to ask to park his car for the past twenty minutes and sags in relief as you start heading over.

The lawyer dips his head in acknowledgement at you and checks his watch. “Miracle of miracles,” he says, popping open the passenger side door for you. “You’re on time.”

“I was late one time,” you huff, sliding past him and into your seat.

“And that was enough,” he snips back, closing your door before you can come up with a retort. You grumble to yourself, but don’t press him. You know he’s right. He’d gone out of his way to help you and you’d put him out.

“I’m sorry,” you tell him as he settles into his seat and reaches for his seatbelt. “It won’t happen again; I know you’ve got other things to do.”

He stills and looks at you over the gold frames of his glasses. For a long moment he holds your gaze, unblinking. You gnaw on the inside of your cheek. Had you done something wrong?

Finally Mr. Seo blinks and finishes buckling himself in. “I apologize for staring, I wasn’t sure if I’d heard you correctly.” He push starts his car and pulls away from the curb. “I never thought I’d see the day a L/N would apologize to me.” He edges the car into the steady stream of Seoul traffic and you’re off, zooming toward the freeway.

Silence fills the car again, but as Mr. Seo takes on-ramp, you work up the courage to ask your question. “Did Oliver never apologize to you?”

Mr. Seo snorts and it’s such an undignified sound that you almost can’t believe it comes from him. “You could tell your uncle the sky was blue and he’d argue that it was red until he was. And your grandfather-” He seems to catch himself, reigning back whatever meager bits of his personality had managed to slip through the cracks in his normally flawless veneer. You’re all ears.

Up until a week and a half ago, you hadn’t known you had any family, much less an uncle who owned buildings and bugattis. Now you were finding out that you had a grandfather too. “What about my grandfather?” The word feels strange in your mouth. It’d been years since you’d followed the word ‘my’ up with any type of familial relation.

Mr. Seo cuts his eyes at you, and flicks them back to the front. “Nothing,” he replies, clearly done talking about him. “I spoke out of turn.” He reaches forward and turns on the radio, the sound of national news filling the silence.

You pout and slouch in your seat, disappointment setting in as the promise of new information slipped out of your grasp.

The rest of the drive is easy. Mr. Seo takes the highway out of Seoul and up into the foothills but you’re asleep before he even finds the exit. You’d slept more in the past two days than you had in the previous three weeks, but it seemed like years of bad habits were catching up to you.

Last night, you’d passed out halfway through the second movie snuggled up between Jimin and Taehyung. They’d been so warm and soft and the quiet thrumming of their heartbeats had lulled you to sleep before you knew what was happening.You’d woken up with them still curled around you and -maybe most surprising of all- Yoongi plating breakfast in the kitchen.

Still, it seemed even twelve hours of the best sleep you’d gotten in years and a peaceful morning devoid of stress -for the most part- hadn’t been enough.

You wake up just as the asphalt transitions into gravel, the sound of it crunching under the tires and the car’s shaking waking you up. You’re bleary-eyed and confused, but a sign up ahead snaps you to wakefulness. Standing like a guardian over a chain link fence topped with barbed wire is a metal sign, imposing as it is tall: Black Mountain K-9s, written in stark font.

“We’re here,” Mr. Seo says, as if it’s not obvious. He kills the engine and without its purring to distract you, you feel nerves starting to boil in your belly. What kind of place was this? You half expect sinister organ music to kick on and lightning to start flashing from black clouds. Neither of those things happen, though. The sky remains startlingly clear and the only things you can pick up are the sounds of whistles being blown, dozens of people doing call and response, and one voice, louder than all the others screaming for people to ‘Run faster! Get those knees up!’

You pop the door and step out of the car before Mr. Seo can open it for you and head around to the nose of the car, taking in the compound.

“This facility produces some of the highest caliber bodyguards in the country,” He says, coming to stand beside you. The attorney rebuttons his suit jacket and flicks his sleeves up before settling his arms over his chest. “Politicians, celebrities, even a few former presidents all have hybrids from this training center.”

“It looks more like a prison,” You remark, nodding toward the barbed wire. “First big cat hybrids, now this...Why didn’t Oliver just get regular pets if he was lonely? Was he worried someone was after him?”

“Anything I can tell you would be pure speculation,” He replies, walking away from you and heading for the callbox. “Your uncle very rarely confided in me.”

“But you were his attorney.”

For just a second, the tight grip Mr. Seo has on his composure slips. His lips press together and his shoulders sag- but just as quickly as it’d lapsed, his mask is in place again. “Yes,” he says after a beat. “I was.” And he presses the button on the call box before you can pester him with any more questions about the dead men he’d known.

The call box crackles to life, speakers squealing with feedback. You flinch and slap your hands over your ears to protect them from the splitting sound. Mr. Seo doesn’t react at all and you’re stunned, wondering how he can stand it.

“Seo Seunghan and Y/N L/N for Lim Hangyeol.”

The person on the other end doesn’t respond. The speaker cuts and a second later, the metal gate before you starts rolling to the side, pushed by invisible hands. It’s like a curtain going up at the theater.

Before you lies a wide, dusty yard, devoid of any plant life. The thick-trunked trees and lush grasses of the surrounding mountainside had been stripped down to the roots here. All that remains are a few weeds poking out around the base of the long metal buildings that ring the fence, and even those seem like an intrusion. People are making use of the space in whatever way they can. A group of people with matching cropped black ears and docked tails run past you in four straight lines, all perfectly in step with each other. Over to your right, there’s a pack of teenagers working in pairs to scale a ten-foot tall sheer wooden wall and in the center of the field, twenty kids are running through taekwondo forms, supervised by a widely smiling instructor.

You’re in awe of it all. Every single person is like a cog in a well-oiled machine, all in the same black tactical pants and compression shirt. You’d never seen so many hybrids in one place before and certainly not all of the same breed.

Mr. Seo places a hand in the center of your back, steering you away from staring and toward a squat cement building.You let him lead you.

“When we get inside,” the lawyer begins, his voice quieter than you’ve ever heard it. “Let me speak first. If we can get him to admit to breaching the contract right away, it’ll be much easier to get him to agree to a settlement.”

You frown at that. “Why would we settle?” You ask him. “It’s not like I need the money.”

“It’s a matter of principle, Ms. L/N.” He sighs, pulling open the heavy metal door and ushering you into the building. “He did something wrong, and it’s most easy for him to bear the brunt of atonement financially. Without requiring damages be paid for breaches, contract law would collapse.”

“Can’t you just have him apologize?”

Mr. Seo’s mouth twists up like he’s just tasted something unpleasant. “As you attorney, it is my duty to advise you against accepting restitution in the form of an apology. You’ll get a reputation for being a pushover.”

You wanted to be anything but. “Alright, alright,” you concede, “Do whatever you think is best.”

The building you’ve ducked into seems to be an office. Along one wall are a set of metal folding chairs doing their best impression of a waiting room. Along the other is a metal door covered in peeling paint and one suspicious dent bearing a plaque that reads ‘DIRECTOR LIM’. Set between you and it is a desk covered in a mess of paperwork. An old desktop stands among it like an island in the ocean and middle aged hybrid woman in coke bottle glasses is hunched before it, tapping away at the keyboard at a mind-boggling speed. One of her ears twitches as the pair of you approach.

“Take a seat,” she orders in a reedy voice, not bothering to look up from her work. “The Director will be with you shortly.”

“Send them in, Eunjung!” Someone shouts from behind the metal door just as she’s finished. She doesn’t look up or stop typing or even acknowledge you two again. Mr. Seo takes it upon himself to breeze past her desk and open the door for you.

The office is militaristically organized, all right angles and bare metal surfaces. There’s a black leather couch that’d seen better days to your left as you enter, a half empty water cooler to your right. Bookshelves lined with trophies and textbooks dominate the western wall. You scan the titles as you pass: Predatory Instinct: The Teaching and Training Canines, The Utility of Force, On Raising Hybrids, The Art of War, all dangerous and daunting as the man they belonged to.

Lim Hangyeol is the most grizzled man you’ve ever seen and the only other human besides yourself and Mr. Seo in the compound, it seems. He looks like a drill sergeant from an old action movie, his salt and pepper hair buzzed short and his face craggy with frown lines. There’s a semicircle of pockmark scars marring the skin of his right cheek and as you get closer, you realize they’re teeth marks. You shoot a concerned look to Mr. Seo, but he’s more focused on giving the director a shallow bow than allaying any of your fears.

“Director,” He says, straightening back up. “Thank you for having us-”

“Spare me the bullshit,” The older man orders, kicking back his office chair and sinking back into it. “Take a seat. Let’s talk business.”

A cold smile settles on your attorney’s lips and you see a cord twitching in his jaw, but he merely nods and replies in a breezy voice, “Of course.”

The two of you do as you told, settling into two metal chairs in front of his desk. These ones are nicer than the folding ones in the waiting room, but no more comfortable. You try to slide yours forward only to find that it’s bolted to the floor.

“Stops the dogs from throwin’ em when they get bad news,” Director Lim tells you as you uselessly tug at the legs. “Got tired of replacing windows.”

You grimace. If the awards on the bookshelf, what Mr. Seo had told you and the dozens of hybrids running boot camp drills outside were any indication, the man before you must’ve had some idea what he was doing. You didn’t end up providing security for high profile public figures without a smidge of credibility, you knew, but the bite marks on his cheek, the little crack about people throwing chairs at him and the way he’d referred to them as ‘dogs’ didn’t inspire confidence in you.

This was your first time visiting a place that produced hybrids, you realized. You’d never even been into a shelter before and certainly not a breeding center. Were they all like this? Devoid of anything soft or comforting, rigid with rules and regulations? Had Yoongi, Jimin and Taehyung come from a place like this? You don’t know and you’re not sure you’d like the answer if you did.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with us on such short notice,” Mr. Seo starts, popping open the hinges on his briefcase and pulling out a few sheaves of paper. “After the sudden cancellation of your company’s contract with Ms. L/N, I was concerned for the state of our business relationship.” He slides one of the packets across the desk to the director.

“If I remember correctly,” Director Lim says, scanning the lines of ink and unintelligible legalese, “Me and your boss signed for delivery, not me and whoever this little girl is you brought.”

Your eyes narrow and your lips curl, but before you can give voice to the nasty thing crawling up your throat, Mr. Seo gives a subtle shake of his head and taps you twice on the knee, out of eyeshot of the director. You grumble, but cage it behind your teeth.

“See?” The man jabs one gnarled finger at the page, right over your late uncle’s flourishing signature. “It says it right there: L/N Oliver. Last I checked, he was dead. I’m not holding on to a dead man’s dogs. ”

That same muscle tenses in Mr. Seo’s jaw. “The contract states that Black Mountain Canines would deliver the hybrids my client purchased to his residence on December the eighteenth and that they would be received by a proxy if he was unavailable. You were made aware of the fact that he was unavailable, as well as the fact that he now has a proxy-

“I’ll pay the goddamn fine!” The Director barks, throwing his hands up in the air. “Christ above, I don’t know why he wanted those two fuck-ups in the first place, but I don’t want them on my property a second longer.”

You shoot Mr. Seo a look of confusion, but he just watches, blasé, as the Director rifles through his desk drawers. The man finds what he’s looking for and drops two manila folders on top of the contract. “The pair of them are useless. If it weren’t for my reputation, I’d’ve had them both sent to shelters years ago. Or put down, but you know how touchy the law is about that.”

“I don’t.” You say, your voice edging dangerously close to a snarl. It slips out before you can stop it. Mr. Seo shoots you a warning look and you ball your fists up in your sweater sleeves, fingernails biting crescent moons into your palms with the effort of keeping your mouth shut.

You can’t stand this man, you decide. He’s awful. You should’ve known that from the moment you saw elementary school aged hybrids stumbling through taekwondo drills with their ears taped and bandages on their tails. You’re going to take whatever hybrids Oliver bought, get them the fuck out of there and never look back.

If Director Lim had heard you growl at him, he gives no sign of it, just flips open the folders. “To be honest, I should be paying you to take them off my hands. They’ve been nothing but a pain in my ass since they aged out of training. I told your uncle he could have his pick of the litter for what he was paying, but he wanted a wide-eyed buffoon and a mutt who’d rip your hand off soon as look at you.” Clipped to the insides are photos of two men, staring back at you in black and white.

One has the same black and tan cropped ears as every other hybrid you’ve seen thus far. Unlike them, he’s smiling. His eyes are little upturned crescent moons and he beams at you through the photo paper. There’s so much light in his face it’s nearly blinding.

The other is not nearly as inviting. The photo is taken at an odd angle and it’s blurry at the edges, like whoever took it was much shorter than the subject and had to zoom in to even get the shot. His ears, larger than any of the other hybrids and longer furred, are pinned back against his head. His jaw is clenched and he glowers down into the lens, one eye soot black and the other piercing blue.

There are stats listed on the pages behind their photos: height, weight, shot records and the like. Among them, you see their call signs, highlighted in yellow: Hope and Monster.

“I don’t know where I went wrong with him,” the director says, tapping Hope’s photo. “He went through all the training, passed all the tests, but when it comes down to it, he just doesn’t have the instinct.” He gives a single shake of his head, clicks the tip of his tongue against his teeth. “No one wants a guard dog that’d sooner talk an intruder’s ear off than actually guard what he’s supposed to. He’s not good for much but nannying the pups, but he’s too soft on them too.”

A light bulb clicks on and you realize the hybrid in question had been the one instructing the kids outside in the center of the yard, his tail wagging a mile a minute as they completed another form correctly.

“Now this bastard…” the director continues, jamming a finger onto the second photo with so much force, it rattled the cup of pens on his desk. “Is my biggest failure.” He crosses his arms and kicks back in his chair, his dislike of the hybrid in question obvious. “His mother was the cornerstone of this facility for nearly a decade. I sold her pups to assemblymen and actors alike. Centers around the country wanted pups with her genetics. If it weren’t for her, we’d never have grown to this size.” He sounds wistful as he spreads his hands out, gesturing around himself like a king taking in his holdings. “But all good things come to an end,” He sighs. “A pack of wild hybrids settled a little higher up on the mountain.” His face darkens and his lips twist. “Wolves,” he snarls with all the disdain he can muster.

“All that about them being noble and self-sacrificing? Complete and utter bullshit,” He scoffs. “They’re transient lowlifes who’d slit your throat as soon as look at you. At first I didn’t care. They stayed on their side of the mountain and I stayed on mine, but then they started sneaking down here at night to steal my food and fuck my dogs. By the time I managed to get the cops out here, they’d cleared out and my top breeder had gone with them.”

He let out a low chuckle and shook his head. “I tell you, I thought I was ruined. But wouldn’t you know it, she came stumbling back here six months later, barefoot and howling to be let in and heavy with some wild thing’s pup.” Director Lim snaps both the folders shut and slides them to you across the desk. “The thing about breeding hybrids is, the money’s all in the bloodlines. No one wants a dog with mystery genetics. The only way to solve that problem is to cut it off at the root- but it was already too late by the time she got here.”

You feel sick to your stomach. You hope he isn’t implying what you think he is- that hybrid children he hadn’t planned out himself were mistakes in need of correction- but you know he is. Deep in your gut you know.

“And she spoiled him. She let him run roughshod over everyone and everybody in this compound. I tried telling her wild hybrids need a firmer hand- he certainly did if we were gonna break that wolf he’s got inside him, but she wouldn’t hear it. I tried to crop him with the other pups his age, he gave me these,” he said, gesturing to the teeth marks in his cheeks. “We keep him shut up away from the others, now, in the back when he can’t bother anyone. He gets his meals delivered but we don’t ever let him out.” The grizzled man shakes his head. “A drain on resources is what he is.”

“And his mother?” You ask, quietly.

“Eunjung?” he questions. “You met her on the way in.” The director stands and unclips a ring of keys from his belt buckle, making his way around the desk and gesturing for you and Mr. Seo to follow. “I’ve got her doing desk work now. Gotta keep her close so she doesn’t cause any more trouble.” He pushes open the door to his office, barks something at his secretary and steps outside, not looking back to see if you two are following.

You shoot Mr. Seo a look before you stand and he meets it, evenly. “We’ll discuss this in the car,” he says, stuffing papers back into his briefcase and flicking the clasps shut. Oh, you most certainly will discuss ‘it’ in the car.

You don’t really know what it is or where to even begin. The kids with bandaged ears? The fact that Director Lim seemingly decided who was allowed to see the sun and who wasn’t? You think back to the conversation you’d had with Jimin, Taehyung and Yoongi last night. Right now, it seems years away, in some unreachable, idyllic past before you knew how breeding centers worked and how security hybrids were made. You feel foolish. Who were you to try to get them to let go of their pain and their hurt? If what they’d been through was even a little like what was going on here, they wouldn’t be able to for a long time. You’re angry. You’re disgusted. You are unquantifiably fucking sad.

You pass Eunjung on your way out. In your time in the director’s office, she’s pulled her ash brown hair into a low ponytail at the nape of her neck. Peeking out of the collar of her sweatshirt you can see a faded scar in the shape of a ring, little puncture marks pale and glossy. It looked similar to the one on the director’s cheek, but this one was a complete circle and not ragged at all, like she’d stayed completely still while it was given. Teeth marks.

You swallow. You want to do something, to give her some words of encouragement, but you have no idea what to say. You still don’t as you slow to a stop beside her desk, but you open your mouth to speak anyway. “I’m sorry,” You tell her, with all the sincerity in your heart.

She doesn’t answer, but one cropped ear flicks toward you and her fingers slow in their incessant race across her keyboard.

You turn to go. Mr. Seo was holding the door open for you and you can hear the director barking orders at a group of trainees to run an obstacle course faster. Just as you set foot over the threshold, she speaks. Her voice is so quiet, you have to strain to hear her over the steady clack-click-clack of her nails on the keys.

“He likes green things,” she says, not looking up from her work. “And old books.”

You look over your shoulder at her. Her face is a mask of neutrality, her eyes clear and her mouth set in a relaxed line. She looks fine, but there’s an ocean of meaning behind her words. You see her, just for a moment, as she’d been all those years ago, barefoot in the snow and begging for shelter, her stomach full with one of the moon’s own children. You commit the sight of her to memory. Then you turn and you go.

The director is waiting outside, shielding his eyes from the sun and regaling Mr. Seo with some long-winded explanation on the best way to treat hip dysplasia in Doberman hybrids. “Where to?” you ask, effectively cutting him off mid-sentence.

The man gives you a disgruntled look but despite the anxiety you feel spiking in your belly, you meet it evenly. Once upon a time, anyone in a position of authority looking at you the way he was would’ve sent you into a tailspin of self-doubt and nerves, leaving you shivering as your heartbeat thrummed in your ears, warning you of non-existent danger. If you were honest, it still did- but you didn’t have the luxury of running away and hiding anymore, not when there were people who needed you.

“Hope’s bags are in the barracks. He just needs to grab them, and he can be on his merry way,” The direction grunts. “Monster’s still locked up, so I’ll-”

“I’ll go.” You can feel Mr. Seo stiffen beside you.

“Ms. Y/N-”

“If he’s really that aggressive,” you start, your eyes not leaving the director’s for a moment. “Wouldn’t it be better for me to meet him now instead of when we’re packed into a car on a two hour car ride?” Director Lim narrows his eyes at you, but you don’t falter. You hold your hand out for the key. Your boldness surprises you. He drops the key ring into your open palm and you wrap your fingers around it, stuffing it in your pocket before he can snatch them back. You turn on your heels and march off in the direction he tilts his head in, nothing but a hiss of your name from Mr. Seo’s lips to accompany you.

You walk quickly, eyes straight and willing your legs to go faster with every stride. It’s a long way across the compound but the less time you spend walking, the less time you have to stew in anxiety. None of the hybrids training in little packs spread across the yard pay you any mind- except for Hope.

Your path takes you directly behind the group of kids he’s working with. You give them a wide berth, not wanting to disturb them, but you get a little distracted. Your steps slow for just a moment as you drink him in. He’s tall- the same height as Taehyung, if you’re judging it right, but there’s an ease about him the tiger hybrid hasn’t yet mastered. Everything about Taehyung is pulled in. He’s always coiled tight, like he’s preparing to spring forward at any moment, all his energy drawn into the center of his being. Even last night, when you’d been cuddled up with him on the couch, he’d pulled you tight against his side, shifting and rearranging himself til you both fit on one cushion. He’d held you tight through both films, his tail curled around the both of you and his spine tight, like if he let himself relax for a moment, you’d both turn to dust on the wind.

Hope has no such fear. Everything about him is spread wide open, from the heart-shaped smile on his lips to his arms as he demonstrates a series of punches to his little pack of students. They all watch him with rapt attention, ears perked up and bandaged tails wagging. One of them asks him a question and he laughs, ruffles their hair. He laughs in a way you’ve never seen before, shoulders shaking like he can’t contain the force of it alone. It makes your heart flip.

His ears twitch, picking up the change in the cadence of your footsteps. He looks up and your eyes meet for the first time. He looks surprised to see you, for a moment, face blank- but then it melts into a soft smile, brimming with affection you’ve done nothing to earn. You snatch your gaze away and fix it to the dirt in front of you, embarrassed at being caught. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see him cock his head to the side in confusion, but he doesn’t go after you. All the better, you’re all but running away from him now.

You shuffle across the compound in a blur of scuffed sneakers and frayed nerves. You barely give yourself time to look up at the small cinder block building before you, shoving the key in the padlock before you can lose what unearned confidence you have left. You twist it, yank the rusted thing open, take a deep breath and enter.

You don’t know what you’d been expecting, but it’s certainly not what you find. The way Director Lim had spoken about him and this place, you’d been expecting cobwebs on the ceiling, blood spatters on the wall and rusty nails on the floor. What’s before you is almost entirely the opposite.

The room is a veritable Eden.

There are vines climbing every available wall, wrapping around structural posts and digging their way between concrete blocks. Every surface is crammed full of flowering plants in makeshift pots: lilies in old water jugs, violets in a worn out boot, black-eyed susans dripping orange petals from an upturned helmet. The floor is in a similar state, ferns and foxgloves turning what little space around his bed there is into a meadow. It’s beautiful.

“He likes green things,” you marvel, stepping into the room and pushing the door shut behind you. It seemed every living thing that’d been uprooted to expand the compound had found a second life here, sheltered from the Director’s violence. Maybe the hybrid who lived here had too.

A plant different from all the others catches your eye. It’s set up on the cardboard box serving as his bedside table and it’s the only one in a real pot from what you can tell. It looks just like a miniature tree, complete with knobs on it’s trunk and tiny leaves. You let out a little sound of wonder and crouch in front of it, your fingers reaching out on their own to trail across the delicate branches-

A massive hand wraps around your wrist, stopping you cold. “Don’t touch that.”

You hadn’t heard him approach, but now you knew he was there. You could feel his presence behind you, heavy and warm. He’s looming over you. You swallow and make your arm go limp in his grip. No need to give him a reason. “I won’t,” You tell him. “Will you please let go of my wrist?”

He drops your arm without protest and relief floods your body. You weren’t sure if there was a hybrid version of lockjaw and you certainly weren’t itching to find out. You sit back on your heels and struggle to your feet, still hyper aware of the person behind you, his eyes boring holes into the back of your head. By the time you turn around, he’s back where he came from, standing in the entrance for a bathroom you hadn’t seen, half hidden behind a curtain of vines.

He looks different than the others. You’d been expecting that, but the full-length fluffy tail held stiffly behind his back and the long-furred ears pointed away from you are still a surprise. His fur, instead of being in rigid black and tan points, is marked by whorls of black, brown and gray. Instead of the lean musculature all the other hybrids had -all trim waists and narrow ankles- he’s sturdier, his shoulders broad and the veins in his forearms popping as he clenches his fists. He’s looking at you with that mismatched glare, his chin tilted toward his chest and his eyes shining aquamarine and obsidian.

“If you’re new,” he starts, voice raspy. “They should’ve told you: you’re supposed to knock before you come in.”

“No, I’m not-”

“You can leave the food over there.” He nods toward a little plastic folding table jammed into one corner. It’s the one surface in his room that’s devoid of plants and there’s nothing on it besides a metal cafeteria tray, licked clean. “I won’t move when your back is turned.”

“I’m not here to deliver your food.”

He frowns, brows drawing together as his shoulders tense. “Then why are you…?”

You ball your hands up in your sweater sleeves and turn to face him full on. “I’m here to take you home with me.” You tell him. “They didn’t tell you?”

He laughs, but it’s a cold sound, devoid of joy. “Nobody tells me anything.”

Based on the short conversation you’d had with Director Lim, his sudden cancellation of contracts and the way he seemed ready to bulldoze over anything and everyone that didn’t fit his agenda, he didn’t seem the sharing type. Still it was hard to believe he hadn’t told him he’d be leaving the compound that’s been his home for over twenty years.

“You don’t have to come with me,” you add, softly. “If you don’t want to. I know I’m a stranger. But you can leave-”

“I can’t go anywhere.” He taps the collar around his neck. At first, you’d thought it was the same as the ones every other hybrid had been wearing. You can see now that it isn’t. Theirs had all been leather with thin silver buckles holding them in place. His was leather too, but the band was broader and double-layered. There’s a little box on the side with hinges and a small drawing of a lighting bolt. A shock collar.

Your stomach turns.

You take a slow step toward him, but the second you do, his ears go flat against his head and he pulls his lips back, revealing sharp teeth. You freeze, hands held up and the keys dangling from your thumb. “I have the keys,” you say, extending them toward him.

His eyes flick from your face, to the keys in your hand and back again, like he doesn’t believe what’s happening, like he can’t believe you’d actually want him free. The silence drags out into a little eternity before he speaks again. “If I try to unlock it, it’ll shock me.”

You blink up at him and risk another slow step forward, hoping you’ve caught his meaning correctly. This time, he doesn’t growl but his ears stay pinned back as he watches you through narrowed eyes. You close the distance between the two of you.

When you were six, your mom scraped together enough money to take you to Busan for your birthday. You’d spent the day down at the beach, building sand castles with sea shell windows and wading through tide pools. After the sun had set, someone had set off fireworks and you’d watched them cuddled up in your mom’s arms, eyes wide and filled with a riot of colors you had no name for. It’s strange, you know. The ocean is miles away, but that’s what he smells like: the sea and the sand, and the last curls of smoke from homemade bottle rockets. He smells like that day.

You lift your hands to the clasp on his neck and slide the key home. You twist it and the collar falls to the ground, a monster that can’t hurt him anymore. His skin is warm under your fingers, but puckered with scar tissue. There’s a ring of it around his neck, branching with whatever current had run through him in different directions. There’s no way this was legal, no way anyone with half a heart could treat another person like this. Your fingers trail one of the splits over his adam’s apple and he swallows beneath your touch, snatching your wrist again.

“Dont.” His voice is cold. You blink, shaking off whatever spell you’d been under and shuffle back quickly, eager to give him space. He cradles his throat with one long-fingered hand, massaging the skin. He rolls his neck and you look away. You shouldn’t stare; the last thing you want is to make him uncomfortable. “I’ll go with you,” he rasps, answering the question before you can ask it again.

You gape for a second. You really hadn’t expected it to be that easy. “Really?” You can’t stop a note of relief from creeping into your voice.

“Anywhere’s better than here.” He answers back. So, you were a means to an end. It doesn’t bother you. You’ll be whatever you need to be to get him away from this place and that man who seemed to only want to drive him down.

“Do you need time to pack, or-?”

He gives a firm shake of his head. “There’s nothing from this place I want to keep.” And that’s the end of it. You push open the door and stride back out into the cold mountain air, trying your best to exude the confidence you know you lack. The hybrid slinks behind you, head hunched between his shoulders and every step stiff. He hesitates at the threshold and looks up at you, uncertainty written in the rigid line of his spine. He’s nervous. He has every right to be.

How long had he spent in that little cinderblock room, shut away from every living thing? How long had he spent being told that he was a monster? You didn’t believe it, not for one second. No one who was as violent as the director had painted him out to be could’ve raised that garden.

He leans out of the door frame, sniffs the air and lurches forward, out of the shadow of his room, His shoulders bunch up even higher around his head and he goes stiff like he’s waiting for a shock or a shot or a shout- but none comes. The sun is still shining and he’s barefoot in the sand, standing for the first time in years under the open sky. He exhales in a short puff and it looks like he’s going to walk beside you- but he turns on his heels on goes back inside.

You make a little noise of distress in the back of your throat. Had he changed his mind? Did he not want to come with you anymore? You go to call his name out of concern- but realize you don’t know it. All you have is the call sign he’d been given and you sure as fuck aren’t calling him ‘Monster’. You don’t have to flounder for long. He comes back out two seconds later, cradling the bonsai that’d caught your attention to his chest.

“I’ll take this,” he mutters, shuffling into place behind you. You can’t smother the smile that starts tugging at your lips. Yeah, no one hateful would hold a little tree with as much tenderness as an infant.

You give him a little nod. “There’s a terrace where I live,” you tell him, starting your trek across the yard once again. “It’s got a garden and a little greenhouse on it. It’s not very big, and it’s not as pretty as your’s, but you could grow new things there, if you wanted.”

His ears twitch in response, but he keeps his glower firmly focused on the plant in his arms as he shuffles along beside you. It’s then you notice he’s barefoot. “Do you wanna go back and get your shoes?” You ask, trying to make the question sound as innocuous as possible.

“Don’t have any,” he grumbles back. “Don’t need them; I never go outside.”

Alright, that was understandable. Your first stop when you got back into the city would be a shoe store to get him a pair to wear- or maybe not with the way he kept flinching every time a whistle blew and his ears were swivelling like satellites at each new sound that reached them. You chew the inside of your lip. You don’t want to ask, but you know you should. Better to rip the bandaid off now, than get surprised later. “How long were you shut in for?”

“Fourteen.” He bites out.

“...weeks?” You venture. There's a hopeful uptick at the end of your words. Even that would’ve been horrible, even that would be worthy of the litany of profanity you’re mentally lobbing at Director Lim- but it’s still better than the truth.

The hybrid cuts a flat look at you out of the corner of his eyes. “Years.”

A wall of your scent hits him like a freight train, vacillating between the thick, cloying odor of sadness and the burn of anger. His nose wrinkles at it, brows drawing together in confusion.

However little you might’ve known about hybrids, however limited your view of them was, you knew they weren’t supposed to be locked up. Domesticated hybrids like hamsters and cats might’ve been fine inside a house all day, assuming they still had regular interaction with people- but dogs weren’t. And he was half wolf. Wild, he’d have had dozens of square miles to roam over, and he’d been limited to a four-by-four yard room for fourteen years. Your goshiwon was a similar size, but it hadn’t been your whole world. All he’d had was one tiny window and what narrow view he’d managed to glimpse in the doorway when his meals were delivered.

You open your mouth to say something, anything, but you’re cut off by a scream of delight and a snarl keying up in the hybrid next to you’s chest. Your jaw snaps shut with a click.

A few yards ahead, there’s a group of kids wrestling in a massive pile. They’re all giggling and rolling over each other, tails wagging a mile a minute as they play bite and make grabs for the person at the center of their puppy pile. A head of black hair and a pair of cropped ears pop up and you see that it’s Hope, smiling bright as the sun as his students try to pin him.

“You can’t leave!” One particularly determined kid yips, adamantly pushing his shoulder back to the sand. “Who’s gonna teach us?”

Hope just laughs.”Lisa is gonna teach you with the older kids-“

A chorus of disappointed barks and howls breaks out. “Ms. Lisa’s classes are too hard!” A little girl complains.

“Yeah!” Someone else chimes in. “And she’s strict!”

The hybrid ruffles both kid’s hair affectionately, careful of their bandaged ears. “Just because she won’t let you get away with skipping night practice doesn’t mean she’s strict,” he laughs. He’s only met with more grumbles and complaints.

It warms your heart to see. Even if these kids were at the mercy of their director -for now, at least- it was good that they had him to rely on. Your eyes meet and the sheer force of light in his face makes your own heat up. You look away, but he’s spotted you. He disentangles himself from the mess of kids and draws himself up to his full height. He’s in the same uniform he was in before, albeit with a black tactical bag now strapped to his back. He takes a step toward you and the wolfdog hybrid's ears go flat against his skull. He’s not deterred. “Joonie?” It takes you a second to realize he’s talking to the hybrid next to you. “Kim Namjoon, is that you?” Hope takes one step forward and the hybrid - Namjoon - takes a step back to counter him. Hope looks like he’s going to advance again, but a small pair of hands wrapped around one of his own stops him.

A little girl is holding on to him. She can’t be more than six years old. Her tail is still long and her ears are still floppy and she looks so small in her child-sized boots and cargo pants. “Mr. Hobi,” she whines, her head craned back to look up at him. “Please don’t go.”

He falters. His eyes flick from the pair of you back down to her, then he crouches, holds both of her hands in his. “I have to, Sowon-ah,” he says softly.

She sniffles pitifully and juts out her lower lip.”But why?”

It’s a fair question. You’re about to tell him that he doesn’t have to come with you if he doesn’t want to, but he beats you to the punch. “Because it’s my job, sweetheart,” he tells her, smiling softly.

“Y-your job is to teach us,” she hiccups back, face growing blotchy as tears well up in her eyes. Hope swipes one of them away with his thumbs.

“I teach you so you can grow up well and protect your person, right?” She nods, little hands balling the fabric of her cargo pants up in her fists. “Right. Well this,” he continues, turning and looking at you with a soft smile. “Is my person. And I’ve gotta go make sure she stays safe.”

You feel your heart jump into your throat. He’s looking at you like you hung the stars in the sky and you don’t deserve it. You’ve done nothing to warrant that much unearned loyalty. Sowon rubs at her eyes with the back of her hands and Hope pulls her into a tight hug.

“Ah, don’t cry, Sowon! You’ve gotta make sure you get stronger so someone takes you home, okay? You don’t wanna get old and still be here like me, right?” He squeezes her and goes to stand, but gets mobbed by his students again, all wanting their own hugs and making him swear to write them letters. It takes another five minutes of tearful goodbyes and Director Lim approaching for them to turn him loose.

“Get back to your training, all of you!” He barks, stomping out of the office and slamming the door, Mr. Seo on his heels. The kids scatter to the four winds almost instantly, not wanting to be underfoot for whatever scolding the director was about to deal out. Hope’s face remains the same but you catch his ears droop just a little as his students leave him. The wolfdog hybrid- Namjoon, you remind yourself- on the other hand has his ears flat against his skull. A growl bubbles up in his chest and rips past his lips. It’s a dark, full bodied thing that has you taking a step back and Hope shrinking with a whine.

“Joonie-” he pleads.

“Don’t fucking call me that.” All the fur on Namjoon’s body is standing on end, from the points of his ears to the tip of his tail. Even his hair has fluffed out. His mismatched eyes are narrowed, lips pulled back in a snarl that reveals his incisors and all that fury, all that rage, is leveled on Director Lim.

To his credit, the grizzled man doesn’t shrink back an inch before the enraged hybrid. His lips twist and he yanks a little remote out of his pocket, mashing a red button in the center. Namjoon flinches, his hands fly to his neck- but nothing happens. The shock collar is gone and the director has no power over him anymore.

The man in question’s eyes widen, flicking between the remote to the column of Namjoon’s throat, now devoid of his one element of control. “Where’s his collar?” He demands. “How the hell did you get your collar off?” He advances on the tall hybrid, his hand in the air and though he doesn’t stop snarling, Namjoon ducks his head, anticipating the blow.

You don’t know what moves you. Maybe it’s Hope pleading for it all to ‘stop, just stop!’. Maybit’s how Namjoon knows exactly how to move when he’s about to get hit. Maybe it’s your own lack of self-preservation. Whatever it is, you blink and you’re in front of Namjoon, your hand up and clutching the director’s forearm, stopping him from striking the hybrid behind you. You’re not strong enough to stop him, not fully. Your elbow buckles in and you stumble back, your back pressing into the wolfdog hybrid’s chest.

The director yells something at you, red flooding his face. You can’t hear him over the rushing of blood in your ears, the pounding of your heart. You force a dry swallow down your throat, put on your bravest face and glare up at him. “Don’t hurt him anymore.”

He reaches out with his free hand to tug you out of the way, but before he can touch you, Hope is there. He presses close to your side and holds the director’s wrist firm, his eyes on the sand and his shoulders hunched up by his ears.

Director Lim looks angry enough to spit. “Hell of a time for you to grow a backbone,” he snarls at Hope, making the doberman hybrid flinch. “I want all four of you off my property now.” He snatched his arms free and you don’t miss the nasty glare he casts at Namjoon. “And if this mutt ever shows his face around here again, I’ll-”

“Director Lim,” Mr. Seo cuts in, his voice cool. “You’ve made yourself clear; we’ll leave. You needn’t make threats.” There’s an underlying warning in the attorney’s voice. The director locks his jaw.

“Get out.” He breathes. Hope ducks around him, his head low and his docked tail pressed close to his back. If he could tuck it, you think he would. You follow after him, eyes fixed straight ahead and your back ramrod straight. He might’ve scared the shit out of you, but you weren’t going to let him see that. Mr. Seo fixes you with a hard look and the second you’re within arms reach, he presses a hand to your back and ushers you toward the gate. The only one who remains is Namjoon.

He looks like his anger has rooted him to the spot. His ears are still flat against his head, his lip still curled.

“Do it, boy,” the director taunts. “Give me a reason-”

“Namjoon.” At the sound of his name, his ears prick up and you turn around. It’d come not from Hope- which you’d expected, seeing as he seemed to be the only one who actually knew his fellow hybrid’s name- but from the open door of the office building where Eunjung stood. She looks at him, her expression unreadable and he stares back. All the tension in his body has shifted and for a moment, you think he’s going to spring toward her and fall into her arms- but she gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head and his face hardens. His arms tighten around his bonsai. You think you know, now, why it was the only plant in his room that had a pot.

“Go,” she says and all the tension leaves him. His shoulders curve in and he drags himself past the director, out from the fence and toward Mr. Seo’s car. There’s something final about the way the gate rolls shut after him. If you hadn’t known better, you’d’ve sworn you heard him whine as it locked.

The car ride down the mountain is...interesting to say the least. Hope insists that the seating arrangements inside the Buick be done to his specifications,( “You’ve gotta sit in the middle,” he tells you, pointing to the narrow center seat. “And Joonie and I will sit on either side of you to protect you in case we crash!” His tail is wagging a mile a minute behind him. You’re surprised it can move that much, given how short it is. Mr. Seo looks affronted at the unintentional jab at his driving and Namjoon just looks irritated. “I told you to stop calling me that.”) and he keeps throwing an arm across your middle everytime the car hits a bump. You’re going down the side of a mountain. There are a lot of bumps. He also keeps pressing his nose against the glass of his window, ears pricked up and trying to take in every tree that passes by. Namjoon, on the other hand, slouches back in his seat, his body curved around his plant and ever so slightly away from you. He still watches the world pass by, but he doesn’t acknowledge any of you or speak- which would be fine if anyone else would. Hope seems to be doing his best to appear stoic and alert every time you look at him and Mr. Seo seems comfortable with the quiet. So, you’re left to ride the two hours back to Seoul in silence.

You almost cry with relief when your phone buzzes with an incoming text. You fish the device out of your pocket, thumb it to life and scan your notifications.

Unknown Sender [7:13 PM] where are you

You frown. Very few people had your number or any reason to text you. You’re about to chalk it up to a wrong number when the second text rolls in.

Unknown Sender [7:14 PM] it’s yoongi

Now that’s a surprise. When you’d hurriedly told the boys to text you, you’d been expecting Jimin to urge you to hurry or for Taehyung to ask for updates, not for their hyung to check your progress. A little smile pricks at your lips as you rush to reply

You [7:14 PM] We’re on the way back now!

Unknown Sender has been changed to Yoongi

Yoongi [7:14 PM] can i call

You bite the inside of your lip, suddenly nervous. You know there’s no reason to be. After all, you tell yourself, what’s scary about a pair of roommates talking on the phone? You give him the go ahead and not three seconds after the delivered notification pops up, you get a call. You answer it on speaker.

“...Hello?”

“Did you just start driving?” Yoongi’s voice is thick with sleep, like he’s just woken up. It’s different than normal, his usual smooth drawl gone gravelly.

“Y-yeah,” you reply, trying to ignore the way Hope is watching you out of the corner of his eyes and Namjoon’s ears have swiveled back toward you. “It’s gonna be awhile, still. Are Taehyung and Jimin-”

“They’re fine; They ate dinner earlier and they’ll be asleep til you get back.” He yawns and you picture him slouched on the couch, his hair mashed up on one side and his face puffy. “Why do you sound nervous?”

“I’m not,” you counter. It’s a blatant lie and he knows it. He hums in doubt, but doesn’t press you.

“I’ll see you when you get back.”

“Do you want me to text you when we’re close?” It’s an innocuous question. There’s no reason you can see for him to pause as long as he does. For a second you think you’ve lost him- after all, mountains aren’t known for having great reception- but then you hear his breath fan over the receiver.

“...Yeah.”

You give a little nod you know he can’t see. “Okay.” He makes a little noise of assent and then his line clicks off. You hang up. Just as you do, another text comes through.

Yoongi [7:16 PM] don’t let them scent you

“Who was that?” Hope asks in a small voice, pulling you away from your phone screen and Yoongi’s insistence that you remain scent-free. His tone is open, but you can tell by the way his knee is bouncing that he really, really wants to know. “Is that your husband?”

The bark of laughter that rips past your lips is out before you can think to stop it. Namjoon flinches and you wince at him in apology, your hand flying up to cover your mouth. Hope is frowning at you in confusion, his head cocked slightly to the side. You force yourself to calm and answer him. “No, Yoongi is not my husband.” You weren’t sure if you even really qualified as friends at this point. “He’s another hybrid that lives with me.”

Hope perks up in his seat. “You have another hybrid? Director Lim always told us that once we left the center, we’d be alone.” Your expression sours at the mention of the ill-tempered man and you shake your head.

“No, there’s a lot of hybrids in Seoul,” you tell him, eager to dispel some of his misconceptions. “The three that live with me are named Yoongi, Jimin and Taehyung. Yoongi’s around your age, I think. Jimin and Taehyung are younger.” The doberman hybrid sits at rapt attention, soaking up every bit of information you give him and waiting eagerly for more. What else could you tell him about them? You remember the boys’ reaction that morning when you told them you’d be bringing dog hybrids home. “...They’re all felines,” you say, slowly, trying to gauge their reactions.

“So that’s why you smell like that.” It’s the first words Namjoon’s spoken since you all piled into the car. You turn to him, but he’s not looking at you.

“What do you-?”

“You smell like other hybrids,” Hope says, covering for him. “But I’ve never smelled any that weren’t other dogs before.” He leans closer, his seatbelt stretching. You tense and lean away from him, but he’s not deterred. The tip of his nose brushes your neck and you have to fight off a shiver as he breathes you in. “They smell the same…” he starts, his breath fanning over your throat. “...but different? And one of them isn’t as strong as the others-” He presses closer, trying to catch the scent that’s eluding him. You make a noise of mild distress and lean further back, pressing into the solid wall that is Namjoon.

“Hoseok, let it go .” Hoseok. That was his real name then. To your surprise, the dog hybrid pulls back as instructed, settling back into his seat without so much as a whine.

“I’ve never met a cat before,” he muses, turning his attention back to the window. “I hope they’re nice.”

You think about the chorus of hisses you’d been met with when you told the boys they’d have to share their space. You hope so too.

It’s 9:30 by the time Mr. Seo drops you off back in front of your building. He wishes you a good night and promises to call later in the week to discuss Black Mountain Canines. You’re not sure if there’s anyone to report him to or anything you can do, but you want to try. What you’d seen at the compound was wrong any way you looked at it. It made you sick to leave anyone there knowing how the director treated Namjoon and Hoseok. No one was useless. No one deserved to be locked away for years at a time for the sheer crime of existing. You’d make them see that.

The moment you step out of the car, Hoseok is all wide smiles and exclamations. “Woah, you live here?” he asks, tilting his head back to take in all fifty-one floors of Haneul Tower in their sparkling, glass-paned glory.

“Yeah,” you tell him, handing him his bag. In his excitement to get out of the car, he’d abandoned it and Mr. Seo had nearly driven away with it. “But I just moved in a couple days ago, so it’s still pretty empty.”

Hoseok nods, scanning the windows like he’ll be able to pick out which one’s your’s. Behind you, Namjoon is lingering on the sidewalk.

He’s still got his bonsai clutched close to his chest and he’s hunched down around it like he’s trying to stop unseen hands from picking at it. His shoulders are bunched up by his ears, and he flinches with every car horn, every siren that comes to you on the wind. He’d grown up in the mountains and spent the better part of his life indoors. It only made sense that he’d be sensitive to the sounds of the city.

“Is there a security system?” Hoseok asks, still enamored with the building. “How many entrances does your apartment have?”

“Just one second,” you tell him, forehead wrinkling as you take in Namjoon. You slide slowly toward the wolfdog, not wanting to startle him. “Namjoon?” He flinches when you call his name, head whipping toward you. “Do you wanna go inside? I know it’s new, but it’ll be quieter, I think.”

His mismatched eyes flick from you, to Hoseok, to the building and back to you before settling firmly on the concrete at his feet. He seems different than he had in the mountains. He’s smaller, quieter, less sure of himself. Was it because this is all new territory for him? Or had the snarling hybrid in the mountains just been a roll he was forced to play, the mythic monster to the director’s tyrant king.

“You don’t have to go inside if you don’t want to,” you tell him, in a voice you hope is reassuring. “We can wait, if you need to.”

“I’ll wait with you, Joonie,” Hope chimes in, giving the larger hybrid the same soft smile he’d given his students earlier.

He swallows, adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “It...it’s fine,” he mutters, “We can go in, I just…” He takes a few hesitant steps forward and huddles closer to you. There’s still an inch between you, but it’s closer than you’d thought he’d come.

You peer up at him. “Okay?” You ask. He gives a single nod and your little group moves through the double doors and into the lobby.

It’s quieter at this time of night. You don’t recognize the woman standing behind the reception desk. There’s no one really around except one man, pacing the width of the lobby looking thoroughly put out. You can’t really see his face, but there’s something familiar about the slant of his body. He whirls around as the glass doors click shut and you catch sight of a fringe of gray hair, pointed ears, narrowed yellow eyes and an all too familiar pout.

Yoongi.

“Fuck.” You’d completely forgotten to text him. Judging by the look on his face as he stalks toward you, he wasn’t happy about it. To his credit, Hoseok does his best to guard you, sliding in front of you and pushing you behind him. You can’t see Yoongi’s ears beneath the hat he’s wearing but if his curled lip and narrowed eyes are any indicator, they’re pinned straight back.

“Move.” He snarls at the doberman hybrid. Hoseok is taller than he is, but the closer Yoongi gets to him, the smaller he seems to shrink. There’s fire in the bobcat hybrid’s eyes. Hope whimpers and slinks out of his way, ears low.

You wince. “Heeeeey, Yoongi. I’m sorry I forg-“ before you can even finish the sentence, he tugs you toward him by the shoulders. His face roves your neck, sniffing in earnest as he tries to pick up the scent of the other hybrids on you. All is well until he reaches the right side of your throat and grazes over the exact spot Hoseok had nosed earlier. He pulls away slowly, his shoulders tight. His head turns slowly to the doberman hybrid, mechanical.

“You.” He hisses at the other hybrid with so much virulence it makes your blood run cold. He takes one step toward him, teeth bared in a snarl, but Namjoon slides in front of him bumping him back. A growl bubbles in the bobcat hybrid’s chest and the wolfdog matches it, both their ears pinned flat against their skulls.

“Hey-” If either of them hear you, they don’t react. They’re too focused on having a staring contest. “Hey!” You push between them, a hand on either of their chests. Namjoon snarls as you touch him and Yoongi looks ready to skin him alive for that alone. He pushes against your hand, trying to get closer to the taller hybrid. You ball your hand up in the fabric of his shirt. “Stop it!” The receptionist already has the lobby phone in her hand. She’s whispering earnestly into it and you’re sure security will be on the way any second. You exhale and squeeze your eyes shut. “Everybody, elevator.”

Yoongi hurls an accusatory finger in Hoseok’s direction. “These fucking-”

“Yoongi, please,” you plead. That gets him to stop. His arm falls to his side and he glowers down at you for a few seconds before stalking over to the elevators and slamming the up button. “I’m sorry,” you murmur to Hoseok and Namjoon. The smaller of the two hybrids is still hunched in on himself and the taller has Yoongi fixed in his mismatched gaze, his lips curled in anger.

This was not the way you wanted this to go. You’d wanted them to have time to settle before you discussed next steps and gave them the same talk you’d given the felines, but it didn’t look like that was in the cards. You don’t know what’s gotten into Yoongi. You’d thought the bobcat hybrid was calm, cool and collected, completely unflappable in the face of anything. Apparently not. He seemed upset that some of Hoseok’s scent had gotten on you, but there’d been no way to help that. You’d been packed in a car with him and Namjoon for two hours. It was inevitable, wasn’t it?

“It’s not okay,” you tell them, wanting them to know you didn’t condone the way Yoongi had acted. “I don’t...I don’t know why he’s acting like this; he doesn’t normally. Do you wanna go up separately?”

It’s Hoseok who answers. “No, we’ll go up together,” he assures you with a small nod. “If...maybe if we get used to each other, it’ll be okay?”

You’re not optimistic, but you give him a pained smile you hope is reassuring. “Yeah, maybe?” You cast a look back over your shoulders. Yoongi is waiting by the elevators, his arms crossed over his chest and his tail flicking in irritation. The elevator dings and the doors slide open. Well, there was no avoiding it. “Come on,” you tell them. “Just...keep to the other side, for now. I’ll stand between you and him.”

The four of you pile into the elevator, all tucked into your own corners. It’s strange, you think. It’s never seemed small until now. Hoseok keeps casting worried looks over at you, Namjoon keeps subtly shifting closer and Yoongi is still glowering at the both of them, angry for a reason you can’t quantify.

“If it helps,” Hoseok starts softly, his voice an intrusion in the awkward silence. “I really didn’t mean to, honestly-”

“Don’t apologize.” Namjoon counters. “If it bothers him that much, he can speak up”

You don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s too late that you realize the canines aren’t addressing you. Suddenly, Yoongi’s fingers are hooked through one of your belt loops. He yanks you backwards and you stumble, falling against the length of his body. “My bad,” You shoot out, before the hybrid can hiss at you. “I just lost my bala-” The words die on your tongue as Yoongi fixes his mouth to the soft skin of your throat. The elevator goes quiet.

The canine hybrids avert their eyes almost instantaneously, instinct telling them they’re witnessing something they shouldn’t be. Yoongi keeps them fixed firmly in his sights, a dark growl bubbling in his throat.

Your fingers flex uselessly at your sides, hands clenching unclenching as the hybrid works over the sensitive skin of your neck with his teeth and tongue. ‘Don’t make a noise,’ you plead with yourself. ‘This isn’t what it feels like. Don’t make a noise, don’t make a noise, don’t make a noise-’ Yoongi’s incisors graze over a vein and a little whimper slips past your lips before you can stop it. The grip he has on your hips becomes bruising. You feel your legs turning to jelly beneath you. Any more of what he was doing, and they’d have to mop you up off the elevator floor. You force your throat to swallow. “Y-Yoongi, I think that’s enough-” You don’t know if he hears you over the noise he’s making, so you lace your fingers through his and untangle them from your hips. He releases you with a wet pop and you slap a hand over the skin he’d marked. Heat floods your face and a smirk spreads across Yoongi’s, his teeth flashing at the canines. He leans in again to rub his nose against the mark he’d made- but a hand on his chest stops him.

“Can you stop?” You ask in a small voice. Honestly, you’re embarrassed. Regardless of what the articles said about mark-making being platonic, it doesn’t feel friendly. It feels possessive and mean and you don’t like it. “I’m sorry I didn’t text you like you asked, but what is with you today?” Yoongi’s expression changes from smug satisfaction to confusion and then surprise, like he hadn’t expected you to protest. “I know what I said about you being ready but…” You rub a hand over the mark, wiping away saliva and your sweat. The bobcat hybrid visibly deflates. The elevator chimes for the fiftieth floor and the doors roll open slowly. You rush out before any of them can and start punching the code in your door with shaky fingers. You don’t know what to say. You’re tired and stressed and you don’t know what’s going on. Was this about the apartment? You knew the felines wouldn’t be happy about sharing their space, but why had Yoongi gone this far?

“Y/N…” He trails after you, his ears drooping. You shake your head, You can’t talk to him right now.

“In the morning,” you tell him as the door swings open. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” You can’t deal with everything that’s happened today, and Yoongi flipping out and getting the canines settled. You weren’t that good at juggling.

By the grace of all that’s merciful, Taehyung and Jimin are still asleep when you walk in. You’d need to have an extended meet and greet tomorrow, you decide. Maybe do some icebreakers or team building exercises. If they reacted anything like their hyung did, you were in for one hell of an adjustment period.

Hoseok and Namjoon trail you into the penthouse warily, sniffing the air. You want to give them time to explore and get their bearings, they deserve that, but with the way Yoongi still seems agitated when they venture anywhere but exactly in your steps, that’ll need to be saved until tomorrow morning too. You give them the most spartan tour you can muster up and show them each to a guest room, promising to order them furniture and get them the things they need tomorrow.

By the time you collapse into your own bed, it’s damn near 11. You groan and drag a pillow over your face as you ask the universe for the thousandth time why it had decided to continuously kick your ass. Having three hybrids had been hard enough. Having five of all different species was likely to prove impossible and having seven was going to be a sisyphean task you’d had no training for. You groan and kick your feet in the air, allowing yourself the brief respite of a temper tantrum before crawling under your covers and flicking the lamp off. Maybe in your dreams there’d be no stress and no snarling hybrids with behavior you couldn’t explain.

#thebtswritersclub #hybridbtsnetwork #bts fic #bts x reader #bts x y/n #hybrid!bts #ot7 x reader #seokjin x reader #namjoon x reader #jhope x reader #yoongi x reader #jungkook x reader #jimin x reader #taehyung x reader

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Happy random Saturday to those who celebrate! This is a one-shot bit of slightly serious, mostly silly Bering & Wells holiday nonsense, set in a fantasy timeline in which the Warehouse didn’t explode, Leena didn’t die, and Helena actually managed to face up to, and come to terms with, the fact that she’s head over heels in love with Myka (and vice versa). Not that that would have solved all their problems... it might, in fact, have led to some new ones.

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Pete doesn’t like to confront Myka. He tries to do it only when it seems absolutely necessary... but right now it does seem like that. Overwhelmingly like that.

So when they’re walking the aisles one December afternoon, taking inventory, he asks, “Are you okay?”

Myka turns to look at him—not even with the skeptical neck-thing. This is just a normal look. “Why?” she asks. “Don’t I seem okay?”

Pete nods. “You seem totally okay.”

Again with the normal look. “Then okay, right?”

“Wrong,” he declares. “Because that’s what’s not okay.”

“You’re great with clarification,” she mutters.

That sounded better... almost the right level of annoyed, because they’re heading to check up on a bunch of bells, then on the misfit toys from Rudolph, which are all things he might be tempted to touch, because: “It’s almost Christmas,” he reminds her.

“Also very reliable with a calendar,” she says. “Are we done now?”

“Not even close. Why aren’t you being all tense and shouty?”

“Why would I be?”

“Because you always are. Like, where’s your ‘Don’t touch anything, Pete!’ red alerts?”

Myka shrugs, like nothing has ever been a big deal. “Touch what you want.”

It’s a sentence that doesn’t make any sense, so Pete says the most sense-making thing he can think of: “You’ve been whammied.”

“Have not.”

Usually she’d say something like that sassy, like a challenge. Instead she’s laid-back. He thinks “whammied” again, but then another possibility occurs to him: maybe she’s just... happy? She’s swoony-moony in love, and H.G. seems to feel the same way, even though they both keep trying not to be obvious about it. It’s sweet and silly, and usually that’s great. But being happy with H.G. hasn’t ever meant she leans off the gas when it comes to being Ms. Hands-Off-The-Merchandise around artifacts.

At least, not until now. Pete realizes he himself is feeling kinda not-okay, so he shakes his head, shimmies his shoulders. The shake and shimmy tell him this is definitely not Myka being happy—this is a vibe. From her. There’s something strange about it though, even for a vibe, and he doesn’t get it. “Are you really okay?” he asks.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks back.

Pete’s done plenty of interrogations in his time, and that was federal-criminal-level unresponsive. Now, with the vibe, he’s feeling like he needs real answers.

He considers going to Steve for truth-o-meter help, but that’s a last resort. So that evening he tries his second-to-last resort: H.G.

She’s in the kitchen eating something bready with icing... cinnamon roll. It smells fantastic, and for a second he forgets what he’s there for, wondering whether she’s got another one hidden somewhere and if he can talk her into giving it to him.

She and Myka have a little agreement about sweets—she doesn’t eat them when Myka’s around. It’s the reverse of how nobody drinks when he’s around because they’re worried about tempting him: it’s not like Myka would be tempted by sugar; instead, she’s grossed out. And weirdly, H.G. has a real sweet tooth. He isn’t sure what their signal is, like if H.G. has to put a sock on the kitchen door handle or what, but it seems to work.

Thinking about Myka, and how far away from this situation she’s likely to be, makes him think about the vibe. He asks, “Is Myka okay?”

H.G. chews her bite of cinnamon roll. She can be really slow when she feels like it... and she is obviously really feeling like it. He’s wondering if he should just give up by the time she swallows and says, “Define ‘okay.’”

Pete finds that surprisingly hard to do. As far as Myka’s concerned, anyway. “Well, not giving me a vibe, to start with. It’s all weird, a vibe but like she knows it and she’s trying to butter it. As a disguise.”

“What is the ‘all weird’ she is attempting to disguise with butter?” H.G. asks. She gets that sly look—and then she takes the butter out of the fridge, slathers some on her cinnamon roll, and puts it in the microwave. He sighs. She’s making fun of him, but also, this is another episode of H.G. and the Microwave: A Love Story. Not quite as epic as hers and Myka’s, but it was definitely love at first nuke. Then again he’s not sure there’s any kind of technology she wouldn’t fall for.

He ignores the butter. And how it’s melting as the carousel turns. And how the smell of buttered cinnamon and sugar and bread is filling the kitchen and—yep, he’s totally ignoring that. “I don’t know what the weird is,” he says. “What’s different?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” says H.G. She’s cheerful. Always dangerous. “We’ve been invited to visit her parents for Christmas.”

“Oh my god,” Pete says. No wonder she was hiding it. “She wants me to ruin Christmas. ‘Touch what you want,’ she said. She wants a disaster.”

“There is a simple solution,” H.G. says, still cheerful. Still dangerous. Pete waits for the hammer to fall, and it does: “Don’t give her one.”

“See, but I have this Christmas problem,” he tells her. This won’t go well.

“Don’t have it.” That sounded a little less cheerful.

“But if I don’t... does that mean you want to visit her parents? I’d’ve figured you’d go for Myka being happy on Christmas.”

“Happiness is often relative.”

“I see what you did there! Relative! Relatives!”

She gives him a snooty look. “I did not intend to do that there.” That wasn’t cheerful at all.

“So is your Christmas plan some compare-and-contrast deal, to make her understand how good she’s got it with you? Happiness-wise?”

Now she squints. “I always hope, ‘happiness-wise,’ she believes that to be true. Separate and apart from whatever her relationship with her parents is, or might otherwise be.”

“Might otherwise... oh, I get it. You think you’re the special sauce. Trust me, you’re not. I’ve met that family.”

H.G. doesn’t say anything. She’s looking at him like she doesn’t understand what he said, but wasn’t that pretty clear? Then he gets it: she’s caught on “special sauce.”

He helps her out: “What I mean is, you won’t make a difference.”

Her face clears, and she recovers enough to say, “I always make a difference.”

“Right. I’m not sure if I should give Myka the disaster she wants or let you be the disaster.”

“Perhaps I’m the disaster she wants.”

Pete snorts. “If that was it, she’d be dragging you into that Bering bookstore by your pretty, pretty hair.”

“Thank you for the compliment. I confess to being somewhat vain about my hair.”

“It’ll be on fire when you realize how fast you gotta get out of Colorado to save Myka from her family.”

“You’re failing to consider one as-yet-unknown quantity.”

Well, no real surprise there. “And that’s?”

“Perhaps I am the special sauce.”

Yeah, disaster. Pete sighs again. This Christmas is gonna be difficult. “I’ll try to keep my hands in my pockets.”

H.G. nods a serious nod. Then she gets out another plate, cuts a large chunk off her cinnamon roll, plops it over, and hands him the result.

Bribery. Pete respects that. “I’ll try really hard,” he tells her, which is about the best he can do, this time of year.

She looks at her plate. She dumps what’s left of it onto Pete’s, then looks up at him.

“Super hard,” he offers.

She nods. “I believe everyone will appreciate that,” she says, “but, I hope, Myka most of all. And with that, I leave you to your sugar high.” She H.G.s her way out of the kitchen, like there’s some invention he was keeping her from finishing, like he hadn’t interrupted her chasing her own sugar high.

Pete resolves to have a cinnamon roll, a plate of Christmas cookies, or an entire candy store ready to hand to H.G. when she and Myka roll back in from Colorado, because she’ll probably have to be satisfied with non-Myka sugar for a good long time. Plus Myka’s likely to be avoiding her completely, if things go like Pete thinks they will, so she’ll have lots of free sugar-eating time on her hands.

In the meantime, he focuses on what’s most important: eating a cinnamon roll.

****

Claudia loves the Warehouse database. It’s an amazing record, an infinitude of records, and the wonder of it really truly is endless. The looking and then the finding: being rewarded, surprised, overcome.

But there’s always a downside, and with the database, that’s the updating. Which is also endless. And if there’s one thing Claudia finds more boring even than a lecture from Artie about whatever offensive thing young people are doing today (or, usually, months and months ago that he’s just heard of), it’s data entry. It’s just typing stuff, not even thinking about it. She tries to find any excuse she can not to do it, so she’s thrilled when, as she’s sitting in the Warehouse office trying to figure out a good one for getting out of this day’s tappity-tap-tap, Myka walks up behind her and says, “I need your help.”

Unusual. Kinda cool. Best of all, Myka’s a pretty good typist, so it won’t be that. “I’m Claudia and I’ll be your server today,” she says. “What can I get you started with? Some jalapeño poppers? Mozzarella sticks?”

“I need a crisis.”

“Blooming onion it is.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“An artifact crisis.”

“Maybe still works.”

“Come on,” Myka groans. “Humor me, okay?”

“I thought that’s what I was doing.” Myka can sometimes be... less fun than Claudia wishes she would be. She’s always awesome, but sometimes Claudia thinks they’re just playing, and then it turns out that’s wrong, so—

“Look,” Myka says, short and sharp, and she is not playing. “I would like you to find something artifacty that really really needs to be taken care of. By me.”

“If it’s a crisis, the mission might end up taking more than a couple days, and remember, Christmas is sneaking up on us all, so if you—”

More short and sharp: “That’s fine.” She stops and slows down. “I’m more than happy to be your server.”

Myka is very, very bad at pretending to be less serious than she actually is. “That wasn’t funny,” Claudia informs her. “But look at me still humoring you.”

“Thank you. Probably. But again: crisis.”

“One problem with that though.”

“Fine. I bet I can solve one problem.”

“I can’t actually make a blooming onion.”

Myka crosses her arms and frowns. “You’re not humoring me anymore.”

“Not really, no,” Claudia admits. Because why, honestly, would anyone manufacture a crisis? Even to get out of data entry.

Myka makes a strangled noise that she’s clearly trying to keep from being a growl. Then she stalks off.

Claudia would be worried and/or scared, but she’s learned that H.G. is amazingly good at taking this particular sort of Myka-configuration and defusing her... so she puts that higher on the priority list than boring typing (formulating her case to Artie in her head) and goes looking for H.G. She finds her in her room—it isn’t her bedroom anymore; the bed got moved out to make space for a workbench, because she doesn’t sleep in there except when she falls asleep at the bench. Right now, she seems to be taking apart a space heater, or maybe she’s putting it back together? Sometimes with H.G. it’s hard to tell the difference. “Okay, give,” she says. “What’s up with Myka?”

“Define ‘up.’” H.G. doesn’t look at Claudia as she says this.

“She wants a crisis. Why does she want a crisis?”

H.G. sighs a little, like she really does know why—but of course she knows; she’s H.G. She knows everything. Everything in general, but particularly when it comes to Myka. Now she does look. It’s her pointy-focus look. “I suspect she subscribes to the belief that every crisis is an opportunity.”

“An opportunity to what? Save the world? Bank karma points? Show off?”

“Admirable guesses all,” H.G. says, “and most likely all more or less accurate. But overriding them all, I fear, is the opportunity to avoid visiting her parents for Christmas. With me in tow.”

Claudia gasps. “This is the big ‘here’s the lady of my life’ reveal? Making your whole thingy-thing that much more official?”

“Not if Myka has her way.”

“Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll put a stop to... wait.”

H.G.’s face hardens, and she blows out a sharp breath. “I’m quite practiced at that.”

Which brings Claudia to a screeching halt. She cringes and says a heartfelt “sorry,” trying to make clear she’s cringing for the right reason: I should have known better. Not very long ago, Myka had, in a rare moment of what seemed like real honesty about what being with H.G. was like, said the word “minefield.” Claudia told her that was real for all of them, but Myka had said the number and placement of mines was probably a bit different for her than for everyone else. As was the blast radius.

Moments like now, Claudia’s not so sure that’s true, and so she’s relieved, outsize relieved, when H.G. says, “No, no. You did nothing wrong. The apology is mine—my response was oversensitive. Vestigial. You were saying?”

“I was... I was! You want to meet the parents?”

“Now seems as reasonable a time as any.”

“But you could put it off. Maybe forever. Like Myka wants?” Why does H.G. not want that?

“I suspect Myka also subscribes to the belief that every opportunity, particularly in this context, is a crisis. But must that be so?”

“I kind of see your point,” Claudia says, because opportunity. “I kind of don’t,” she follows, because crisis, but H.G. seems to have some plan, so: “Anyway I won’t crisis her up. Not intentionally.”

“Thank you,” H.G. says. “Now, help me with this surveillance device.”

Claudia squints. The view doesn’t change. “That’s a space heater.”

“It may have departed a factory as a space heater, but you of all people should know that one’s origins do not determine one’s destiny.”

She turns back to the former heater, leaving Claudia to contemplate origins and destiny... and to begin to realize why H.G. might want to meet Myka’s parents after all.

****

Steve is gulping a cup of coffee before heading back to the Warehouse. He sets his mug in the sink and turns around to find Myka leaning against the kitchen doorway, contemplating him. It’s a Mrs. Frederic move. Disconcerting.

“You look like you need a vacation,” she says.

He probably does look like that. They probably all look like that. But vacations are hard to come by, and he’s had probably more than his share. “I’m supposed to be holding the fort over Christmas,” he reminds her.

“I’d be happy to take your place.”

“In exchange for...”

“Nothing. I don’t need a vacation.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Completely.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

“Oh come on. Just say yes.”

“Not until I think through the repercussions,” he insists.

“I just said, in exchange for nothing. What repercussions?”

“Around here, there are always repercussions.”

“Repercussions!” she barks out, then exhales like he’s being unreasonably frustrating. “Honestly, I had legitimately hoped to do this in one of what I thought were several easy ways.”

“Do ‘this’? What’s ‘this’?”

“Never mind. Harder ways, here I come.” She stomps off, heavy-footed and rigid, in a way that doesn’t at all resemble a Mrs. Frederic move.

The exchange leaves Steve completely, unsettlingly baffled. He goes to see H.G., who’s putting together... a space heater? Or taking it apart? Best not to ask questions. About that, anyway. “Does Myka need a vacation?”

“Define ‘vacation.’”

“Um. Time away from here?”

“I might ask you to define ‘need’ as well.”

“This was the problem I had talking to her. I think she was holding her definitions hazy, so truth versus lies couldn’t come into focus.”

“I am not surprised. Myka’s definitions can be self-serving.”

“So what’s this about?”

“The dryly factual, and most legibly truthful, answer is that she is attempting to avoid seeing her parents, and showing me to them, this Christmas.”

“Wow. Big step. Is there another answer?”

“‘This’ is also ‘about’ whatever is motivating her attempted avoidance. But I’ve yet to determine where that truth lies.”

Steve enjoys talking to H.G.—and more specifically, he enjoys listening to her talk. The timbre of her voice soothes him, and he’s able to relax into it doubly, because she never lies. And on top of that, what she says often carries an extra layer of truth, or maybe he means an insight into truth? Like what she’s just said, which he comments on: “It’s weird how we say ‘truth lies.’

She smiles. “I don’t disagree.”

“So what are you putting together here?”

“Truth and lies,” she tells him.

“On the bench.”

“Oh. I’m dismantling a surveillance device. It didn’t work as intended.”

“I thought it was a space heater,” Steve admits.

“So does it, apparently. Sometimes origins do seem to be destiny... or rather, sometimes recognizing and accepting origins seems to be the better part of valor.”

“Are you talking about the space heater or Myka?”

She smiles again, this time mysteriously. “We’ll see,” she says, and it’s the truth.

****

Leena is regretting having taken Pete up on his offer, last January, to pack up the Christmas lights for her... she’s opened the first box to find wires snarled in a way that she finds hard to believe could have happened accidentally. Not that Pete sat and tangled them all up together, but Leena wonders if there might be some knotting artifact that he, in his inimitable Pete fashion, got himself entwined with.

She sits down next to the box and pulls experimentally on a twisted green strand. The entire clump of lights, vaguely cube-shaped, emerges, and she wonders whether there might be decorative Christmas value in setting a blinking green block in a corner somewhere... but she shakes her head and starts poking through the jumble, trying to find at least one beginning or end.

A throat-clear makes her raise her head. Myka’s standing there, looming, a little fidgety, shifting from foot to foot. “I really apologize for bothering you,” she says, “but could you give me a quick aura check?”

“You hate it when I say anything about your aura. I’m pretty sure you hate that I can even see it, so I try to ignore it as much as I can.”

Myka blinks. “That’s... considerate. I didn’t know you could do that.”

“I focus on other people’s, and yours fades out.” Leena shrugs. “Cocktail party effect.”

“Thank you. As a general rule, I appreciate it. But right now, I need some data.”

“Reading your aura has nothing to do with data,” Leena objects.

“I need a data point.”

“Why?”

“Because if nothing else works, I need to make a case. And I think it would help to have data points.”

Data points. About her aura. Absurd; not even a thinkable thing... but that’s quintessential Myka: trying to make the mysteries that surround her fit her paradigm, rather than the other way around. “Your aura right now is a mess,” Leena tells her truthfully.

“That helps. Thank you. ‘Leena says my aura’s a mess.’ I can work with that.”

“It’s hard to read at all. Kaleidoscopic?”

“That might be a little less helpful. Somebody might think it was artful.”

Leena has no idea what to make of that. “Seriously. How many planes do you exist on? Or how many are you trying to exist on?”

Myka gestures into the air. “Uncountable.”

Leena finds this an insufficient answer. So once Myka has long-legged herself away, she abandons the light-tangle block and finds H.G., who’s straightening out some wires of her own (smaller, no lightbulbs, attached at various points to a small ceramic heater). “Why does Myka needs data points to make a case?” she asks.

“I would ask you to define one or more of the words you’ve uttered, but I suspect I still wouldn’t understand what you’ve said.”

“I don’t either,” Leena admits. “What’s going on?”

“Myka is attempting to stave off an inevitability,” Helena intones.

Leena ignores the portentous intent. “Which is?”

At that, Helena drops the grandiose pose. She says, like a genuinely normal, if somewhat befuddled, person, “I’ve had to explain the situation several times. Does no one gossip in this Warehouse?”

As if this bunch could manage to do something as conventional as that. “There isn’t even a group text.”

“Again, I’d ask you to define, but this time I gather your meaning. That nonexistent ‘group text’ would have informed you that Myka and I are visiting her parents for Christmas.”

“Are you?”

“Unless Myka’s efforts to the contrary prevail.”

“How serious is she about those efforts? She’s really not acting like herself.”

“Pete said the same thing,” Helena tells her. “She was willing to let him touch artifacts. Eager for it, in fact.”

Leena gasps, and she’s not really kidding. “Oh please no. I’m struggling right now with what I’m really afraid are the results of that.”

“Struggling? I’ll assist if you like.”

“See, this is what I mean. Myka didn’t even notice... didn’t offer to help. That’s not like her at all.”

“She’s a bit preoccupied. And I must admit that my own reasons are partially selfish: a shift to a different problem may encourage the emergence of a solution to my current one.”

“You mean Myka’s efforts to the contrary about visiting the parents?”

H.G. looks down at her crossed wires. “In a way,” she says.

****

Artie doesn’t enjoy being ambushed, particularly not in his own office—but that’s the sense he gets from the way Myka approaches him when he’s alone, as if she’s trying to be cagey, trying to catch him out somehow.

Then she says, “Help me, Artie—you’re my only hope.”

“That sounds like something I’ve heard Pete say. And Claudia. Is it some reference?”

“Maybe. But right now, it’s a serious request. I need you to help me.”

He also doesn’t enjoy being suspicious of Myka’s motives. “How?”

“I need more work. And I need it right now. Now, and extending through the holidays.”

All suspicions flee his mind—instead, he would send up a prayer of thanksgiving, if he believed that that were the right direction to send it. “I... am more than happy to accommodate that request.”

“At last,” Myka says.

She’s speaking for them both, Artie feels.

He feels also, now, an obligation, and he seeks out H.G. Wells to discharge it. His trek takes him to the B&B’s upstairs, which disturbs him. He traditionally avoids calling on any of the agents in their own spaces; there’s too much overlap between personal and professional lives in the Warehouse as it is, and he has no interest in worsening that off-putting intimacy. Yet here he is, regarding H.G.’s... workroom? When did this cease to be a bedroom? He consoles himself with the thought that at least that function should be restored soon.

“I just want to... thank you,” he says. These are words unfamiliar in his mouth—particularly as said to H.G. Wells. He knows he has several reasons to thank her. But distinct discomfort accompanies even the thought of articulating them... well, in any case, just one today.

“Words fail me,” she says. Clearly, she understands how strange the circumstance is. “Thank me for...?”

He doesn’t bother trying to keep a gleeful, satisfied note out of his voice as he says, “For lifting whatever spell you put on Myka. She’s herself again—wanting more work. Right now, during the holidays. I can only assume that the two of you have given up your... association.”

H.G. raises her hands—fast, like the weapons they are—then lowers them slowly. “I have withstood as much as a human could,” she says, low and heartfelt.

Her words surprise Artie. “That seems overly disparaging. Even if you and Myka didn’t make a success of your... endeavor, and I do thank heaven for that, I find it hard to believe that you had to withstand much of—”

Now she makes a strangled noise, her hands rising again, this time to be clenched into fists of... what? Rage? She says, in that same low and heartfelt way, “Anything disparaging I might say has to do with Myka’s failure to be direct. With me. And your assumption, alas—that is, alas for you but not for me—is invalid. Our association, endeavor, liaison, relationship”—the emphasis on that contemporary word is a needle, an “I have made progress in terminology for a reason that you despise” dig—“is ongoing.” The wicked smile that follows is yet another dig.

Artie wishes he could wave a magic wand and keep the two of them apart. Life was simpler when Myka was dedicated, particularly when she was rededicated, and H.G. was... gone. The idea that he’d been transported to that simpler time once again, via some sort of seasonal miracle, had been a comfort. He’s hardly surprised that H.G. would be the one to yank that comfort away. He knows it was his own fault, for jumping to a conclusion...

...but he’d based that jump on evidence. What, then, had Myka’s request for more work actually been evidence of? He’s sufficiently perplexed that he asks that very question of H.G., who says, “I’ve recently been educated regarding the concept and functions of the ‘group text.’ I believe I should start one and issue periodic updates.”

Nonsensical. “Updates on what?”

H.G. smiles. “The ongoing relationship that pains you so. And mark my words, if you give Myka more work for the holidays, those updates will include information on your foibles.”

“What do you know about my foibles?”

“Less than I might. But I may yet prove that origins are not destiny. Isn’t your office in the Warehouse rather chilly?”

Artie tries to formulate something to say to that, other than “yes?” But H.G. Wells talks a lot of non-sequitur nonsense, so he persuades himself a response isn’t necessary. He hopes that keeps being true.

****

The day after Christmas is when Myka and H.G. are supposed to get home from Colorado. Pete’s been expecting them to stalk back into the B&B since, honestly, a couple hours after they left, late on Christmas Eve, because things had seemed pret-ty frosty then, never mind the weather... but they actually stick to the schedule.

They walk in and don’t say anything. They shake snow off, set their bags down.

Things might still be frosty—or worse. Pete glances around at everybody—Claudia, Steve, Leena—with raised eyebrows. They shrug at him.

Leena, the brave one, says, “Myka! H.G.! Did you eat yet? I just put the dinner remnants away.”

“I’m not hungry,” H.G. says, walking into the living room. “Myka?”

Myka follows her in, looking weirdly smug, though also massively strung out. “I’m fine,” she starts with. Then: “And what is it you need to tell Pete?” she says to H.G.

H.G. sighs, like she’s in pain. “Pete, you were correct. I am not the special sauce.” She raises an eyebrow at Myka, though, which makes Pete pretty sure they’ve been talking about somebody being special, and saucy, in hey-hey situations too. Then H.G. drops the eyebrow and says, “However: Myka, what is it you need to tell everyone?”

Now Myka sighs. She says, “Happiness is relative, I shouldn’t seek out crises, I sometimes need a vacation, and data points don’t help if the overall argument is invalid. And Artie isn’t here, but I guess part of what I should say out loud is that I really don’t need more work.” She turns to H.G. and says, “Are you happy now?” It’s fake-annoyed. And it’s a huge relief to Pete, because there’s no vibe at all.

“Relatively,” H.G. says. Not a purr, but close.

Pete points at her. “I see what you did there. Again!”

“I again did not intend to do that there. And I assure you I am not happy in that sense. They hate me.” Like she’s almost proud of that.

Myka smirks, like she’s proud of it too.

“Even your pretty, pretty hair?” Pete asks.

“My hair was not a topic of attention. Alas. Had they focused on that... but here we are.”

Myka says, “It’s true that it might have gone better if I’d just taken your hair with me.”

Steve laughs at that. “Leaving her with my cut?”

H.G.’s clearly trying to hide something like horror at the idea as she says, “No thank you. It’s charming on you, but I don’t have the necessary bone structure.”

“Please,” Claudia says with a snort, “the rest of us are jellyfish compared to you. Besides, nobody hates you.”

“I invite you to take that up with Artie,” H.G. says. “And if you do so in his office, you might consider first remarking on the draftiness of that cavern.”

****

As a child, Helena consistently failed to heed her parents when they admonished her about speaking only when spoken to. As an adult, however, Helena had become quite practiced at meeting silence with silence—or rather, at recognizing when silence was a meet response, to silence or any other proffer.

Myka had initially said, with a conspicuous lack of affect, “My parents want us to come to Colorado Springs for Christmas. They want to meet you. On Christmas.”

“All right,” Helena agreed.

But then Myka said nothing more, leaving Helena to infer the contours of the situation, and to tread exceptionally lightly while doing so.

She inferred that Myka did not want to go to Colorado Springs. That she did not share her parents’ desire that they and Helena meet. That she did not want this to happen on Christmas—or any other day, apparently, but particularly not on Christmas.

But Myka’s increasingly ridiculous machinations notwithstanding, to Colorado Springs they went, utilizing airplane tickets that Helena had bought, staying in a hotel room Helena had reserved. Helena half expected Myka to refuse to exit the plane or, once in the hotel, to reject Helena’s suggestion that she pilot their rented car to wherever it was her parents lived... yet she did everything that “visiting her parents” required, including introducing Helena to her parents and several other relatives, papering over her parents’ and those other relatives’ strangely smooth hostility, making conversation that included reminiscences about her own childhood—“yes, that was when I was going through my gloomy poetry phase,” she said—and Helena wanted further details but did not want to bring even that small bit of pressure to bear.

Myka even covered for Helena’s momentary dudgeon in response to her father’s statement that H.G. Wells’s work suffered due to the shadow of Verne. “And of course parts of both hold up poorly,” he said, in response to which Helena could not properly school her face. But she did not leap to strangle him. A small victory in this impossible circumstance: Helena tried to be charming, volunteered to help in the kitchen, made every effort to engage, to be respectful, to show them why. Nothing connected. Nothing worked.

Through it all, Myka was not herself, not even noticeably sparking at the Verne-Wells conflict. The only hint Helena received that her Myka had not been replaced by a passively pleasant stranger was her facial expression when her mother brought to the table several pies as the conclusion to the day’s celebratory meal: pumpkin, pecan, cherry, and apple. Myka’s extended family expressed pleasure at them all, their presence and appearance, and Helena agreed, privately, with them. The apple in particular looked delectable.

Before the pie consumption began, however, Helena said, “I think Myka and I should take our leave. While this day has been lovely, we’ll be traveling early tomorrow.” She could certainly spare Myka any further discomfort, and she could take on the burden of departure-impetus as well—the Berings would not be sad to see her leave, and they could blame her for spiriting Myka away.

Silence ensued on the drive back to the hotel, and Helena now felt it right to wait until they reached the room, until Myka might feel the “visit” was truly complete, to attempt to speak. When the door closed behind them, Myka took the few steps to the bed and sat, slumping. She closed her eyes.

Helena opened her mouth to say... something, but Myka preempted her. “Thank you for diving on the pie to save me from it.” She grimaced, then opened her eyes. “The whole thing. Not my finest hour.”

Helena offered, gently, “You could have simply said ‘I don’t want to introduce you to my family.’ And refused to go.”

“You would have taken that the wrong way.”

Joining her on the bed’s edge, Helena said, “Would there have been a right way to take it?”

“Yes. I would have explained, but I didn’t have the words then.”

“And do you have them now?”

“Not really, but something like, ‘I don’t want to introduce you to my family because my family has no idea who I am and you will complicate that to a truly unimaginable degree.’”

To a truly unimaginable degree. Helena bowed her head. “It’s been some time since I dealt with a family. I was nonchalant, and I apologize for allowing myself to exaggerate the power I might have had to alter the situation. The situation upon which I did not and still do not have purchase.”

“I wish you really did have that power.” Myka shrugged once, then again with exaggeration. “I recognize that I let myself pretend I was finding an adult way out of it when really it was just a kid way in an untailored adult suit. ‘Find me an excuse!’ To everybody.”

“I remain unsure as to why there had to be some excuse. Why you didn’t simply decline.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“I won’t pretend to understand.”

“Better that way. It’s not your fight.”

“Must it be anyone’s?”

“Yes and no.”

“I couldn’t present as smooth a surface as you, but I did try not to fight... they do hate me.”

“They don’t hate you. They don’t know you. They aren’t bothering to know you, because what they really hate is that you make me happy. I mean, not that I was demonstrating that, and I’m sorry I couldn’t. But the fact that I brought you at all.”

“I’m fairly certain I brought you. But I find their stance more than a bit perverse.”

“Not totally,” Myka said, a touch defensive. “To break it down some more, they hate that what makes me happy isn’t what they think should make me happy.”

“And what is to be done about that? Anything?”

Myka shook her head. She smoothed the bed’s coverlet.

Helena said, “My intention is to continue attempting to make you happy. Do with that what you will.”

The smoothing continued as Myka said, “It’s a relief.”

“Is it?”

“This’ll sound weird, but: that I have to factor you in. I can start to do that now.”

“Would that we could reverse the situation. I would love to show you to Charles, to shock him: see this woman, how she shines. How he never envisioned a woman might. I can picture it so, so easily.”

“Imaginary, though,” Myka noted.

A valuable corrective, and Helena nodded. “While your family’s response is real. I know. They do hate me, or whatever happiness I bring you. Does that color your response to me? Be honest.”

“Yes,” Myka said, with no hesitation.

Helena had asked the question; she had to accept the answer. “All right,” she said.

But then Myka went on: “It increases my distance from them. They hate you—or the idea of you—and I don’t.” She paused, and her mouth formed something not quite a smile. “So it makes me love you more.”

This twisted Helena’s heart in a way she had not expected. She should have expected Myka to twist her heart, but she always anticipated poorly when and how the wrench would come. “And in turn,” she said, knowing it was too formal, yet that was her response to being caught so severely off guard, “I suppose it colors my response to you. For I must love anything that makes you love me more.”

Myka offered in response to that a full, yet quiet, smile.

“Your origins do matter,” Helena said.

“I know.” Myka sighed. “It’s not going to get any easier, though. And I can’t promise to quit being a kid about it.”

“Well. In future we can keep these conflicts from the others, can’t we?”

“That, I’m not sure about. I heard we’re starting a group text.”

“Oh, now there’s gossip.”

“What there is, is everyone coming back at me, being concerned about what going to Colorado Springs would mean—more for you than for me. Leena said you were frustrated that nobody knew anything about anything, and she seemed to think some kind of chat might be helpful. Just as a time-saver. Going forward.”

“Going forward, everyone could simply gather around the Warehouse office space heater.”

Myka laughed, an easy, restful sound. “You don’t make any sense,” she said, and there she was at last, fully herself, dry and affectionate and the shining, shining sun.

“But I do,” Helena told her. “Or I will. In time.”

“In time,” Myka said. “That’s when everything happens, isn’t it.”

“I hope so.” Helena hoped also that she would be welcomed if she leaned to kiss Myka—kiss her for the first time in some days, and did Myka know, had she intended, to provoke a period of anticipation, and then to end it as a reward?

Initially seeming to lean in as well, Myka suddenly stood up, leaving Helena to very nearly pitch sideways onto the bed. “Hold that thought,” she said, “just for a second. I got you a present. Kind of impromptu, but I think you’ll like it.”

“More than kissing you?” Helena asked, and she felt comfortable enough, now, to pout. Felt immensely glad to feel comfortable enough to pout.

“Differently than kissing me,” Myka said, rummaging in the satchel she’d taken to her parents’ house—she’d delivered to her father a first edition of O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings, which he had accepted somewhat grudgingly—and produced an item swaddled in plastic film.

Helena took it into her hands: a slice of apple pie.

“Saw you eying it,” Myka said. “And I should point out that it actually does come with a secret, or I guess I mean special, sauce.”

“Pete told you,” Helena said, heavily.

“Of course he did. You having a high opinion of yourself? Particularly when it’s likely to be proved wrong? He lives to spread that around. Anyway, this secret sauce is butter rum. The recipe’s been in the family for generations. I’d tell you how to make it, but I don’t actually know... that distance thing. I tried really hard not to learn.”

“I suppose it does involve sugar.” Helena stood up herself, now, to put the pie somewhere safe. Even through plastic, it still looked delectable. “I’ll save this for later.”

“No, go ahead. I’m told it’s best right after it’s made,” Myka said. To Helena’s skeptical eyebrow, she said, “I need a shower. You eat the pie, I’ll wash everything off, and we’ll start fresh.”

“I’m going to kiss you now,” Helena informed her. “You unwashed, myself unsugared.”

She did that. An affirmation: slow and sure, sweet and clean.

They shared the shower.

****

Helena gives the slice of pie, which has traveled back to South Dakota with her, to Pete. “Secret sauce,” she tells him, conspiratorially.

He regards the crushed package in his hand. “Want to split it?” he asks, and Helena considers saying yes. Even mangled, it continues to look delectable.

But she declines, because: “Myka and I have plans. We are extremely happy to be home.”

END

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Home #holidays can be so strange #and families add several layers of difficulty #particularly in situations that involve some level of estrangement (in all senses of that word)#congratulations to anyone whose family relationships are easy #I hear that can sometimes be the case?#anyway #people who aren't interior to a difficulty often think they know how to make it better #and sometimes they're partially right

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