#they all seem so complicated to me but that's partly because i never bothered learning

[youcouldbeit]

I've gotta make this place prettier...

[imagineyourworld]

The Wife

Wolffe x Fem!Padawan!Reader

Summary: When visiting a backwards village Plo Koon’s Padawan has to pretend to be married to Commander Wolffe in order to get the residents to back off

Warnings: Misogyny, a bit of nudity, a bit spicy making out

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-------

You had been walking for what felt like hours when your Master, Plo Koon, received a message and asked you to join him at the front of the train of walking soldiers.

“(Y/N), my dear, I have some unfortunate news”, he started.

You looked at your Master expectically. Unfortunate news could mean basically anything and you could only hope that it wasn’t anything that would massively complicate your relief mission.

“As you know we’re going to deliver supplies to the Gonchee people here, and we don’t know much about them.” You simply nodded, not wanting to interrupt your Master, who continued just a moment later. “Master Yoda just forwarded me recent information we gained about the Gonchee. It seems they see human women as nothing more than, for a lack of a better word, prices or trophies to be won or taken.”

Your curious expression morphed into one of shock and disgust. Of course you knew that not every planet had the same standards when it came to equality between the sexes, but this level of misogyny was something you hadn’t expected to be confronted with.

“If I had known earlier I would have offered to let you stay on Coruscant or accompany another battalion”, Plo tried to apologize. But you just shook your head.

“It’s quite alright, Master. If I am to be a Jedi knight soon I will have to learn to handle situations such as this one, though I cannot say I am happy.”

Plo put a heavy hand on your shoulder and gave it an affectionate squeeze. He knew you were capable of handling yourself and could fight off a couple of Gonchee if necessary, but as your Master he still felt responsible and worried for your safety and wellbeing.

“Master Yoda also said that the Gonchee usually don’t bother married women, they consider them to be claimed by their husband.”

You looked up to your Master, expecting him to continue, but he just stared straight ahead, his expression never betraying his thoughts.

“I am not married, though”, you finally said.

“No, you’re not. You’re a Jedi and shouldn’t have attachments”, he answered. 

Part of you wanted to correct him. You were not a Jedi, not yet at least. But the other, bigger, part was overjoyed your Master considered you a Jedi and not just a Padawan.

“I suppose I could ask Commander Wolffe to pretend to be your husband. Just for your safety, of course”, Plo continued. 

For a fraction of a second you lost your balance, but quickly managed to catch your footing again. He couldn’t know about your crush on Wolffe, could he? Sure, your Master was a great Jedi, strong in the force, and he knew you better than anyone, having raised you like his own daughter, but you have been so careful to hide your feelings for your commander. 

“Only if that’s what you want, of course.” 

You took a moment to consider the proposition. Feelings aside, it was a good idea. If being ‘married’ would make sure the Gonchee wouldn’t bother you and ensure you could do your job that was a good thing, the rational thing to do. 

Finally you nodded. “Only if Wolffe wants to, though. Otherwise I’ll ask Sinker.” 

-------

-------

Wolffe hasn’t been watching you and the General, that would be ridiculous. And of course he hasn’t noticed how your hair shines in the sun or how you smile at your Master with love and trust in your eyes. And when Plo Koon asked to talk to him a while later he wasn’t hoping to find out more about your conversation with him, that thought never crossed his mind. 

“Wolffe, I have a favour to ask you.” 

Wolffe simply nodded. He would to anything for the kind Jedi who treated him and his brothers like actual people, who never showed them anything other than respect. 

“Of course, General. What is it?” 

“I want you to be married to (Y/N).” 

It took all the self control Wolffe could gather not to look at the Jedi, not to blush and not to let his feelings show. 

“Is this a test?”, he asked. Though it seemed out of character for Plo, maybe he was trying to get Wolffe to confess his feelings for you. Feelings he had spent months and months trying to deny and repress, feelings that would get him in more trouble than he could ever imagine if anyone were to find out. 

“No, no”, the General reassured his Commander. He then told Wolffe about the situation and why he was asking this of him. 

Wolffe nodded along with the explanation before finally daring to look at Plo. 

“Did (Y/N) suggest me as her fake husband?”, he asked, trying his best to keep his voice even and steady. He knew it was a arisky question that might tell the Jedi more about his feelings than he should know, but he couldn’t help but wonder and he wouldn’t agree if you would rather be fake married to one of his brothers instead of him. 

“It was my idea, though she seemed to be quite happy with you as her ‘husband’“, Plo answered in a tone that told Wolffe the Jedi had to be smiling under his mask. “I just thought you were the obvious choice, considering how close the two of you are.” 

Wolffe nodded, not knowing what to say. 

“That makes sense”, he finally said. 

Plo looked at the young man next to him. Though Wolffe’s expression was usually stoic, now it was even more so. It seemed forced, as if he was trying his best not to let any feelings show. The General couldn’t help but realize just how similar the clone’s expression was to yours just a bit earlier. 

“Maybe you should go to (Y/N) to discuss how you’re going to handle the situation. I’ll inform the others to play along”, Plo suggested after a few moments of awkward silence and with a quick “Yes, sir” Wolffe turned around to find you amidst the soldiers. 

-------

By the time you were nearing the village, you and Wolffe had just finished your plan. 

“Let’s go over it one last time”, he suggested. 

You opted not to tell him that that would be the third ‘one last time’, partly because you knew he didn’t like being corrected and would not hesitate so snap at you, partly because going over this plan like any other mission made it easier for you to let it sink in that this was just that, a plan, a mission, pretend. You were not married to Wolffe, nor would you ever be. The two of you were friends, nothing more. Because no matter how you felt, how you’ve been feeling for quite some time now, you could never be together, even on the off chance that Wolffe reciprocated your feelings. 

“The Gonchee don’t know anything about Jedi, other than that we’re here to help, so they won’t find our ‘marriage’ suspicious. We’ll them we met at the beginning of the war and have been married for a couple of months. Really, Wolffe, it’s not that complicated, I’m sure we’ll both be able to remember to play the part.” 

The snark reply you had been expecting didn’t come. Instead Wolffe simply nodded and stared straight ahead. 

“Just remember to keep physical contact to a minimum”, he reminded you for the fifth time. 

You rolled your eyes. Sure, Wolffe had never been one for hugs and cuddling, unlike many of his brothers, who often seeked you out for a comforting hug, but he really didn’t have to tell you to keep your hands to yourself every couple of minutes, you were not some hormonal teenager. 

“Will do, Commander.” 

Without another word, or even so much as a nod, Wolffe speeded up his steps to join Master Plo at the front. 

“What’s gotten into your husband?”

You turned around to find Sinker looking at you with an amused expression, Boost right beside him sporting a smug grin. 

“Guess he’s just not too thrilled about being fake married to me”, you tried to joke, even though just the thought hurt more than you cared to admit. Of course you knew nothing could ever happen between you, but you’d be lying if you said that you hadn’t hoped that this mission would allow you to pretend for just a little while, to maybe get closer to him. 

“If he really didn’t want to do it, he wouldn’t do it. I heard him talking to the General, Plo asked him, he didn’t order him. Wolffe could have stepped down and let one of us take his place. And I’m sure most of us would have happily done so”, Boost claimed, laying a hand on your shoulder and sending you a warm smile. 

Maybe it would have been better to do this with someone else, someone who would put his arms around you to really sell the story and who you could laugh about the whole affair with afterwards. And yet you knew that being in a ‘relationship’ with anyone other than Wolffe would have been worse than Wolffe’s obvious dislike of the whole situation. 

“It’s fine. Wolffe’s just being Wolffe, he’ll come around once we arrive at the village”, you tried to reassure both the troopers and yourself. 

-------

Wolffe had, in fact, not come around by the time you reached the village. He had spent the rest of the way talking to your Master and completely ignoring you. It was moments like this that made you question why you even had feelings for him, he was so hot and cold, sending you gentle smiles and sharing inside jokes one moment and acting like you didn’t even know each other the next. But it was those few moments when his gentler side, which you alway thought was more his true self, showed, that kept you hooked. 

It was Plo Koon who interrupted your thoughts by asking you to join him and Wolffe at the front to greet the Gonchee. 

The small creatures were no bigger than Jawas, had greenish fur and ears that reminded you of Loth cats, other than that they looked pretty human. 

“Good evening. I am General Plo Koon, these are Commander (Y/N) (Y/L/N), Commander Wolffe and the 104th. We were sent by the Republic to deliver supplies and help you reset your village.”

The Gonchee at the front, who seemed to be an older man, bowed his head slightly, the others, all male you realized, followed suit. 

“Welcome, Jedi Koon. I see you have brought a female with you, I don’t suppose she’s here to stay with us?” 

The way he licked his lips with his yellow tongue made you shudder. You could sense resentment practically rolling off your master at the Gonchee’s words, but more than that it was Wolffe’s arm around your shoulder that calmed you. 

“My wife will most certainly not stay with you, she’ll be by my side, always.” 

Maybe you imagined that his arm tightened around you as you leaned into him, but you certainly didn’t imagine the growl coming from his throat as the Gonchee looked you up and down. 

“Such a shame. Having a human woman is an honor to us, you know and this one seems to be a fine specimen. You’re lucky to have her.” 

Though his words sounded as if he was buying your lie and letting go of the thought of having you, whatever that meant, you couldn’t bring yourself to believe that he, or any other male Gonchee, would leave you alone. Not even Wolffe looking at you from the side, a small smile on his lips, could relief you of your anxiety. 

“I feel like the luckiest man in the galaxy every minute I have her next to me.” 

His words were directed at the Gonchee, but somehow they felt like more. Like something one would whisper to a lover in private. 

It was only when Plo spoke up again that you could tear your eyes away from Wolffe, from his warm gaze and full lips. 

“The men will bring in the supplies now, if you’ll allow, and then we’ll settle for the night.” 

The Gonchee at the front nodded. 

“Of course, of course. Though the lady should stay with the other women. You see, we don’t allow women to do any physical labour. 

-------

Several Gonchee had offered to accompany you to the hut the women of the village spend most of their time in, but you had declined. That didn’t mean you could go alone, however. The entire 104th seemed to have noticed the glances the male Gonchee shot you and had silently agreed to never let you out of their sight while you were in the village. Which is how you found yourself with your hand in the crook of Wolffe’s elbow, being lead to the ‘women’s hut’ as it was called. 

“I’ve been to many planets and have met people of many cultures, but none of them were as backwards as the Gonchee. If they could see you in action they would know not to look at you like that”, your companion grumbled. 

You swallowed down the urge to tell him that quite a few shinies have made their moves on you in the past, though you had shot all of them down and had to admit that none of them reduced you to your body the way the Gonchee did. 

“It’s only for a couple of days. It’ll be like a mini vacation for me, not having to do any work.” 

You could feel Wolffe eying you from the side but refused to look his way. 

“I wish I could stay with you”, he said, more to himself than to you. “I mean someone. I wish someone, one of us, could stay with you.” 

You chuckled. It was rare to see this side of Wolffe, the side that corrected his words, that stuttered and almost seemed nervous. 

“I’d like you to stay. But you have a job to do and I can defend myself, should anything happen.” 

You placed a hand on his arm, and though you were sure he couldn’t feel it through the plastoid armor, he seemed to relax just a little bit. 

“We both know that I can take care of myself. Besides, it’s only for a couple of hours, I’ll be with you again before you know it.” 

He nodded, but the frown never left his face entirely. 

“I’ll have someone come in and check on you every now and then. It’s not without reason that we have to pretend to be married, we cannot be careful enough.” 

Wolffe’s tone told you that there was no use in arguing. And maybe he was right, if even your Master, who you knew would never disregard your ability to fend for yourself, thought it would be safe to always have a man, to always have Wolffe, with you, it couldn’t hurt to be safe rather than sorry. 

“Sounds reasonable.” 

Just as soon as the words left your mouth you stopped in front of the the small building the Gonchee had told you to go to. It looked ancient and primitive compared to the skyscrapers on Coruscant and shining starships you were used to, but through the open door you could spot pillows and blankets and a roaring fire inside. At least you’d be comfortable.

The women inside seemed to have heard you approaching, because most of them stopped their work and conversations to catch a glance at you and Wolffe. 

“I guess this is it”, you said more to yourself than your fellow Commander. He nodded nonetheless. 

“Be careful. Don’t do anything reckless.” 

You tried your best to swallow any remark since your usual answer to something like that would be exactly what Wolffe would describe as “reckless”. 

“I’ll see you soon”; you replied instead. And because you could still feel the eyes of the Gonchee women on you, you lifted yourself up on your tiptoes and pressed a gentle kiss to Wolffe’s cheek. After all, you had to make your marriage believable. 

The low noise Wolffe made shocked you for a split moment. It was a mixture between a grunt and a sigh that didn’t speak of surprise as much as... disbelief? You couldn’t quite place it. Though you tried not to think about it too much as your turned away from him and entered to hut, where the women started questioning you immediately. 

-------

True to his word Wolffe had sent someone of the pack to check in on you every ten minutes or so, but despite their reports that you were perfectly fine and just talking to the women of the village, Wolffe only felt a sense of relief when he saw you again himself. 

You were sitting next to Sinker on one of the many logs surrounding the fireplace. The rest of the pack as well as Plo Koon were either on logs or the ground nearby while the Gonchee, mostly the men but a few women as well, sat on the other side of the fire. 

As Wolffe stepped closer you lifted your head, and as always he couldn’t tell whether you had heard his footsteps or felt his force signature. 

The old Gonchee who had greeted you was the first to speak up. 

“Ah, the husband returns. Such a shame, I had thought I might have a chance with that lovely woman of yours after all.”

Wolffe knew that the polite thing to do would be to answer him, but one of the first things General Koon taught his men was that it was better to say nothing at all if you didn’t have anything nice to say. So he simply walked over to where you were sitting and squeezed himself into the space between you and the end of the log, which resulted in you being squished between him and Sinker. A scenario Wolffe, being the overly protective man he is, usually wasn’t too fond of, but in this the more of the Wolfpack were around you, the better. 

It was only when he felt you moving impossibly closer to him, when he smelled the last clinging bit of your sweet perfume, that had somehow endured the walk to the village and your time in the women's’ hut, that he was finally able to relax. You’d be right next to him, or at least one of his brothers or the General, for the rest of the night, meaning you were safe from the Gonchee for now. 

Suddenly he felt your lips right next to his ear, your breath hitting his skin. 

“If we wanna sell this marriage you cannot just sit there like a droid, Wolffe.” 

The way you whispered, almost purred, his name made shivers run down his spine. And though he tried to suppress it, your soft giggle told him that you’d noticed. 

With a small sigh he put his arm around your waist and pulled you even closer to him. So close that he could practically feel your body melting into his, though he tried not to think about how right it felt to have you in his arms, how your body seemed to perfectly fit right next to his. 

“Is this better?”, he whispered in your ear. Out of the corner of his eye he could see you biting your lip and even pressing your thighs together. He shook his head, he must have imagined that. It was probably just you trying to get comfortable in this new position. 

“How long have to two of you been married?”, one of the younger Gonchee asked. 

For just a moment you tensed beneath Wolffe’s arm before relaxing again. 

“Just a couple of months”, you replied. Your smooth lie impressed Wolffe, being raised by Plo Koon you were usually a fan of telling the truth and he couldn’t help but wonder where you learned to lie like that. 

“And you let your wife fight?”, another Gonchee asked, the disbelief clear in his voice. 

Wolffe sneaked a glance at you. How could anyone look at you and not see a warrior? Sure, your appearance might not be the most threatening, but wasn’t it obvious that the way you pressed your lips together spoke of determination? That you eyes told anyone who looked into them how much you’ve been through and how deeply you cared? That your hands were calloused from holding a lightsaber and yet soft enough to comfort a clone in distress? 

“It’s not up to me whether she fights or not.” 

A grumble of disagreement was heard from the assembled Gonchee, or at least from the men. 

“We are very fortunate to have a warrior as great as (Y/N) fighting besides us every day”, the General said after a while. For anyone who knew him it was obvious that he was trying to end the subject while defending you at the same time, but the Gonchee seemed to think of his statement as a challenge. 

“But what about children? How will she carry children if she is fighting? 

From the way your shoulders tensed underneath Wolffe’s arm he could tell that you were close to telling the Gonchee of once and for all, and apparently SInker on your other side could tell as well, because now he jumped into the conversation. 

“They’re still newly weds, children can wait until the honeymoon phase is over, don’t you agree?” 

The oldest Gonchee leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. 

“We do not care for such sentiments. Our women cook our food, sow our clothes, take care of our children and warm our beds, believe me, it’s easier that way. Perhaps you should try it, Commander.” 

For what felt like the thousandth time that day Wolffe looked at you. Of course you knew that you had to represent the Republic wherever you went, but usually that didn’t stop you from speaking up for what’s right. He wasn’t sure whether he should be impressed by or concerned about your self restraint. 

“It’s very different in our culture. We marry for love, most of the time at least”, you finally said. And if he hadn’t been staring at you already Wolffe would never have noticed the way your eyes flitted over to him when you said “love”. 

Several of the Gonchee opened their mouth to argue, but lucky for the entire 104th a few women carrying trays with various foods and drinks appeared and rendered the men silent. 

-------

Shortly after a near silent meal your Master stood up. 

“I suppose it would be best for us to call it a night. We will have to be up early tomorrow if we want to reach out ship again before nightfall.” 

The Gonchee leader stood up as well and slightly bowed his head before the Jedi. 

“Very well. We have prepared our assembly hut for you, I will show you the way.” He stopped for a moment and looked over to where you were still sitting between Wolffe and Sinker. “Though I know you follow different customs, we Gonchee do not allow women to sleep in a room with people they’re not related or married to, which is why we have also prepared an empty hut for the Commander and his wife. And I suppose they will need privacy so she can perform her marital duties. My son will show them the way” 

You were quite certain that at one point throughout the day your own rank as Commander had been mentioned, but even though you really wanted to correct the old Gonchee, you were tired of dealing with them all day and decided against it. Though the same could not be said for the Wolfpack. Several of them, including Wolffe and Sinker next to you as well as Boost next to Sinker, spoke up to correct him. 

A younger Gonchee, who you assumed was said son, stood up and looked at you with a twinkle in his eyes. 

“Alright, Commanders”, he said. The ironic way in which he pronounced the word made Wolffe roll his eyes, which by now you could tell even if you weren’t looking at him. “Follow me.” 

The two of you bid goodnight to the others and did as the Gonchee had said. The thought of probably having to share a bed with Wolffe crossed your mind for a moment, but it was gone as soon as it came. Though as soon as the son opened the door to a small hut, smaller than any you had seen before, it returned. 

The ceiling was low, the room was small and the only pieces of furniture were a small bed and a single bedside table. 

“It’s not much but it’ll do for the night”, the Gonchee said. Though the words were probably supposed to be apologetic, his tone was anything but. 

Wolffe, bowing his head due to the low ceiling, stepped into the hut while you remained outside. That, however, proved to be a mistake just a moment later, because the Gonchee stepped closer, closer than you would have wanted, and looked up at you. 

“You might rather spend the night in my room, it’s bigger and more comfortable and I could really use someone in my bed, especially a pretty human woman such as yourself.” 

Due to his words and the way he eyed you, especially with your private parts almost in his eyeline because of his short height, you wanted nothing more than to punch him. Maybe kick him. Maybe cut off something of his with your lightsaber. And if it hadn’t been for Wolffe you would have, and ruined your mission within a split second. 

But there was Wolffe, knight in plastoid armour protecting you from any rash decisions. He had left the hut and was now standing behind you, from where he put his arms around your middle and, you were sure, glared daggers at the Gonchee. 

“I suggest you leave my wife alone”, he growled and tightened his grip on you even more. 

You weren’t sure whether it was his words, the growl or his arms around you and your back to his chest, but something about his behaviour did something to you. Something that would make it a million times harder to share a room, share a bed, with him tonight. As if your crush on the Commander wasn’t already bad enough...

“I thought in your culture you love the one you marry and if you love this woman you wouldn’t want her to miss out on spending a night with a real man, would you?” 

If the situation wasn’t so tense you would have laughed. A real man? He was covered in fur! 

“Wolffe gives me everything I need and more. I wouldn’t leave him for any man in the entire galaxy.” 

It was only when the words left your mouth that you realized just how true they were. You really had to get that under control, having a crush on your fellow Commander was bad enough, you would not allow yourself to actually fall in love with him. You couldn’t jeopardize your friendship, your future as a Jedi knight, everything and everyone you’ve ever known for a man who you knew thought of you as a friend. 

The Gonchee looked you up and down one last time before glaring at Wolffe. 

“Then I suppose I should bid the two of you good night.”

And without another word he turned around and left the two of you alone. 

As soon as he was gone Wolffe let go of you and put some distance between you. 

“You should lie down, you must be tired after dealing with those idiots all day.” 

His words made you turn around to face him. Once again you just couldn’t read him. One moment he made your heart beat faster by actually acting like your husband and the next he pretended like you were nothing more than acquaintances. But for once you grew tired of this behaviour and refused to oblige, instead you stepped closer to him again and put a hand on one of the arm he had crossed across his chest. 

“I’m sure you’re just as tired, if not more. Let’s both go to bed.” 

He raised one eyebrow, but other than that he didn’t make a move to break contact with you again. 

“There’s only one bed.” 

Now it was your turn to roll your eyes, a gesture you had often copied from Wolffe himself. 

“I know that. But we’re old enough and trust each other enough to sleep in the same bed for one night”, you argued. You didn’t know what made you do it, but you couldn’t resist the urge to lean even closer, stand up on your tiptoes and whisper into his ear. “You’re my husband, after all. And husband and wife usually sleep in the same bed. And how else are you supposed to protect me from the Gonchee?” 

You were too close to his ear to actually see his face, but you were sure he was smirking as he scoffed. 

“I thought you were plenty capable of handling the Gonchee yourself, Commander.” 

The way he said your title did something to you you’d rather not investigate any further. He was teasing, of course he was, but though two could play that game you were simply too tired.

“Just join me in bed when you’re ready. Otherwise you’ll have to sleep on the cold floor and I’ll have to explain to Master Plo why his Commander is sore all over tomorrow.” You could have left it at that, you should have, but you just had to add one more sentence. “And I can think of more pleasant ways to make you sore.” 

As you left him standing and entered the hut you could hear a choked noise coming from him. 

-------

“Finally decided to join me?”, you teased when Wolffe slipped underneath the cover. 

Wolffe didn’t answer. He couldn’t think of an answer, couldn’t think at all. Not with you so close, laying beside him, trusting him to sleep next to you, to defend you if any of the Gonchee were to try something while you were in your most defenseless state. 

“Wolffe”, you whispered after a moment of silence. 

Now he had no choice but to answer. 

“What is it?”, he grunted. And instantly regretted his gruff reply. This was his one chance to have you close, to forget that there was no way the two of you could ever be more than friends. 

“Thank you, for today. And tonight. I’m glad you’re my ‘husband’.” 

Wolffe wasn’t good with words, but in that moment he really had no idea what to say. 

“It really showed us what we’re missing, didn’t it? The chance to be in love, to be married and not have to hide your feelings”, you continued. 

For a second Wolffe’s heart stopped beating. Could you be talking about him not having to hide your feelings or was is just a general statement? Or did you maybe mean that you... No, that was impossible. 

“Anyways, we should get some sleep now, we have an early start tomorrow”, you concluded. 

From then on it only took a few seconds for your breathing to even out and just was Wolffe was about to sigh in relief that he no longer had to pretend that being near you wasn’t affecting him, you rolled over from your back onto your side and were now pressed up against Wolffe. 

It wasn’t just his heart that stopped now, his breathing did as well. How could he move even to take another breath with you so close, with your head resting underneath his chin, your legs intertwined with his and your arm lazily thrown over his torso. 

“Damn it”, he mumbled, though he instantly came to regret having made a sound. Luckily you were still fast asleep, if anything you cuddled up even closer to Wolffe. 

Slowly, more careful than he had ever been, he lifted his own arm to wrap it around your waist and pull you even closer. He let out a content sigh, breathing in the scent of your shampoo in the process. 

Wolffe knew for a fact that he wouldn’t get any sleep that night. This was his one chance to share a bed with you, and even though he would have loved to fall asleep and wake up next to you, he preferred cherishing every second of the night. 

-------

The next morning you were woken up not by the sun shining directly in your face, nor Wolffe’s sort snoring or the birds chirping outside, but by the unfamiliar voices speaking in what you recognized as the language of the Gonchee. 

You decided that it might be best to pretend to still be asleep, which is why you moved even closer to Wolffe and buried your head underneath his chin. In turn he pulled you closer to him, which made you realize that he had had one arm around you the entire time. You were almost too distracted by the warm and comforting presence of Wolffe next to you and the safety his arm around your waist guaranteed to notice that his breathing changed as he slowly woke up. Though like you Wolffe must have decided not to make it known that he was awake, it was only the more uneven breaths and the stiffening of his body that made it obvious. 

“Might I ask why you have invaded my commanders’ privacy?”, a familiar voice cut through the Gonchees’ conversation. And though you knew that it was safe to ‘wake up’ not that Plo Koon was here, both you and Wolffe still pretended to be fast asleep. Which had nothing to do with the fact that you simply didn’t want to face a reality where you weren’t cuddling in bed with Wolffe, nothing at all.  

“We... I....”, one of the Gonchee stammered. 

“We were here to wake them up”, another voice, who you recognized as the leader’s son, tried to explain. 

You both heard and sensed you master coming closer, and though part of you was worried what he may say, or worse think, about the position you and Wolffe were in, the bigger part was comforted by the fact that the Gonchee were either afraid enough or had enough respect for the Jedi to hurry out of the hut within seconds. 

“I know you’re awake.” Your Plo’s voice sounded amused rather than mad, though to be fair, in all your years of being his Padawan you had only seen him angry a handful of times, and almost never at you. 

It took a lot of self-restraint to fight the urge to cuddle closer to Wolffe for one last second before opening your eyes, but you managed. In moments like these you really wished Plo wouldn’t have to wear a mask, it would make it worlds easier to guess his feelings if you could just see his face. 

“I take it the two of you slept well?”, he asked. “The Gonchee certainly seemed to think so.” 

You didn’t know what to say. Was there anything you could say without letting either Wolffe or Plo Koon know just how well you slept with your fellow commander by your side? How much you never wanted to go to sleep without him in your arms again and how much you already missed him, now that he was just a few centimeters away? 

“Did you understand them, sir?”, Wolffe asked. It didn’t escape your notice that he didn’t answer the question either, though that could simply be due to the fact that Wolffe despised small talk, even with the man who was like a father to him. 

“I understood enough to know that they believe the two of you to be very much in love. As well as a few comments I’d rather not repeat, or think  about ever again”, Plo replied. As he spoke his eyes shifted between you and Wolffe, though you tried your best not to meet his gaze. You knew that he could already tell more than enough about your emotions through your force connection, if he saw your face, saw the love and admiration that must be visible in your eyes, he would know just how much you cared for Wolffe. 

“I’ll let you get ready then. Be outside in 10 minutes, we’re leaving in 20.” With those words Master Plo turned around, left the hut and left the two of you alone. 

You looked over at Wolffe, who, same as you, was leaning against the wobbly headboard. 

“For what it’s worth, I really did sleep well. Better than I had in a long time”, you said with a slight smile on your lips. Maybe this was overstepping a boundary, but right now you didn’t care. 

All Wolffe, in a very characteristic yet disappointing, fashion did was nod before standing up and starting to put on the first pieces of his armour. Other than you, who had actually changed into a pyjama while Wolffe had still been outside the hut last night, he had slept in his blacks and didn’t really have to change, or rather undress. 

You, however, did. At first you glanced around the hut, looking for some sort of privacy you knew you wouldn’t find. Then you considered your options: You could ask Wolffe to leave, or to simply turn around, while you would change and he’d do it with probably only an amused smile, or you could just change real quick while he was still busy with his armour. In the blink of an eye you decided on the second option, partly because Wolffe, as well as the other clones in the 104th, had seen you bloody and sweaty, with torn clothes and in various states of undress before, either in the medbay or when you had been in a particular hurry, but mostly you just didn’t want to send Wolffe away, not after having spent the night together. 

It was only when you had already changed into your regular trousers and just put on your bra when you came to regret your decision. 

“What the kriff do you think you’re doing?”, Wolffe asked, his tone mostly shocked, though there was an emotion in there you couldn’t quite decipher. 

“What does it look like? I’m changing.” 

You had previously had your back turned to Wolffe, but his question, or rather the way in which he asked, gave you the confidence boost needed to turn around and face him. 

“Would you rather I went out in my pyjama?” 

This trip really was proving to be most unusual, since Wolffe seemed to be speechless. 

“Of course not”, he finally said, though his voice did sound a bit off. “But you could have asked me to leave.” 

By now you really didn’t know where your confidence was coming from, but as if an autopilot you stepped closer to him, close enough to see the way his eyes, as well as his pupils, widened. 

“Maybe I didn’t want you to leave.” 

It was a bold statement, and maybe not entirely true, but it seemed to do the trick, since a smirk found its way to Wolffe’s lips. His eyes, previously focused on your eyes, flitted down to your chest for a moment before going back up again. 

“Then what is it you wanted me to do?”, he asked. “What do you want?” A clear challenge to either back down or take a leap. A challenge you shouldn’t accept, but found yourself really wanting to. 

“I want you to be here, with me. I want you to be with me wherever I go. I want you next to me in bed when I go to sleep at night and when I wake up the next morning. I want you to always look at me the way you’re doing right now. I want you to touch me and kiss me and make me yours. Maker, Wolffe, I want you!” 

The words were out of your mouth without thinking. Just like that, you had voiced every thought running through your brain, made yourself vulnerable to Wolffe’s reaction, whatever it might be. Though you had never expected it to be an arm, already covered in plastoid, to wrap around your waist and a hand, warm and steady, on the back of your neck.   

“You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for you to say that”, he mumbled before crashing his lips against yours. 

Though you didn’t have much experience, you knew that this was what a kiss was supposed to be. It was not a clashing of teeth, like your first kiss, nor hesitant and barely there, like your second, but a perfect mixture. Wolffe wasn’t rough, though there was just enough force to tell you that he could be if that’s what you wanted. His lips worked against yours as if they were made to, teeth softly grazing your bottom lip a few times before biting down. He nibbled on your lip, then caressed it with his tongue before giving the same treatment to your top lip. Some time during the kiss your hands had found their way into his hair, pulling it and pulling him closer at the same time, finally feeling the soft strands between your fingers and causing Wolffe to moan at the sensation. By the time his tongue made its way into your mouth you could have sworn that your legs were made of jelly, that you had moved on to whatever came after this life, that this was a dream. 

Even when Wolffe pulled away to catch his breath you didn’t dare to open your eyes, afraid of the reality you would find if you did. 

You heard Wolffe’s low chuckle before his lips were on you again. This time he gently kissed your cheeks, the corners of your lips, before making his way down. He spread small bites on your jaw and then followed his teeth with his tongue, soothing the slight sting. Though it was a spot high up on your neck, just beneath your jaw, that finally got a reaction from you. You tightened your grip on his hair as his lips ghosted over the spot and moaned when they pressed harder. 

“So needy”, Wolffe chuckled.

All you did to reply was pull his head up again for another kiss, one that was faster and more heated than the last. Though as soon as you pulled away his lips found their way to the same spot again. He began to suck while at the same time pulling you back to the bed. You wondered how he had enough sense to sit down and pull you into his lap, all your thinking had abandoned you the moment his lips first met yours. 

“Wolffe, I - kriff, stop -”, you panted. 

As soon as you said the word he pulled away, though his hands still had a grip on you, it loosened and he looked at you with nothing but love and lust in his eyes. 

“What is it, mesh’la?” 

For a moment you leaned your forehead against his shoulder before straightening up again and looking at him. 

“As much as I’d love for you to leave hickeys all over, we both know that you can’t. No one can know this ever happened”, you told him, making sure to put just enough authority in your voice to make him take you seriously. 

A sly grin was on his lips as soon as the words left your mouth. 

“I know, cyare”, he reassured you. He leaned closer again, though this time his lips didn’t move to your neck, but to your ear. “But later I’ll mark you in places where no one but me will see.” 

The thought alone send shivers down your spine and heat to your core, but it also placed a smile on your face. 

“Looking forward to it”, you said and placed a quick peck on his lips. Though you should have known that Wolffe wouldn’t leave it at that. He pulled you closer once again, the hand on your waist now moving upwards and to the front until it cupped your breast. Gently, in stark contrast to the way he bit down on your lip, he squeezed and massaged in before moving on to the other one. 

Another moan escaped your lips, this one even louder. 

“Careful, we don’t want anyone to hear you, do we?” 

You were about to nod in agreement when an idea popped into your head. 

“I bet hearing me would make the Gonchee really believe that we’re married.” 

Wolffe chuckled as he once again moved his hands to your waist. 

“I think they already believe us, cyare.” 

-------

It had taken the two of you a while to finally separate and make yourselves look presentable, and only when you heard Sinker calling for the last men to hurry up did you finally leave the hut. 

Now, on your way back to the ship, the two of you were finally together again after you had talked to Plo Koon and Wolffe to the other clones for a while. 

“You know, I’m really glad it was you I was fake married to”, you confessed in a whisper. 

Wolffe’s hand brushed against yours for a second while he chuckled. 

“You know, maybe one day we can scratch the ‘fake’.” 

He saw the surprise in your eyes as you looked up to him. Truth be told, he hadn’t meant to say that in that moment, but he knew he wanted it to be true. Some day, when the war was over, if you would still want him by your side by then. 

“I’d like that. I’d like that very much”, you said with a smile. “But first, I think there’s something else we need to do, once we have some time and privacy.” 

Wolffe knew exactly what you were talking about, and though he couldn’t wait to feel you, to hear you and touch you again, he also couldn’t wait for the day he would get to call you his wife for real. Maybe, after such a long time of denying his feelings and then refusing to act on them, this trip to the Gonchee village and pretending to be married had been good for something after all. 

I tried to put a little bit of everything (and by ‘everything’ I mean some of my favourite tropes) into this story, I hope you enjoyed it. 

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated. <3

[redphlox]

So with the recent chapter with AFO revealing who the traitor is to the LOV… do you think Dabi would recognize him? Especially when AFO compares Aoyama to a lighter to be forgotten, it seems like a call out to Dabi’s history and it makes me wonder if he sympathizes with him. Or, if we get a scene by himself again with his thoughts, if Dabi will reflect in that moment of mercy. I mean, he doesn’t look to impressed this chapter with Potato head 😂

I'm a little confused. If you mean do I think AFO sympathizes with Aoyama or Dabi then no, because AFO doesn't empathize with anyone or anything.

Dabi is a different story. It's complicated.

So, I don't think Dabi is in the mental headspace to empathize with people. He's so buried in self-destruction, his own pain, trauma and mission that he probably doesn't spare too much mental energy thinking too deeply about how other people feel. That's not to demonize him, though. Dabi not taking others into consideration is just to show how bad off he is, how isolated he has made himself.

Also, empathizing with people hasn't been Dabi's MO at all, like, ever in the story. He barely sympathizes with the LOV members. He's always saying that he's not like them in some way by calling Toga a freak or saying he has his own mission and that he's bothered to help them. Of course that's a defense mechanism, but it's also partly due to the trauma of Endeavor telling him there isn't a place for him in the world. The hero world didn't have a place for him because he was "defective", but when he went to school he didn't have a place amongst his peers either because they all wanted to be heroes and looked up to them while he cried every night wondering why he was alive if he wasn't good enough for his hero dad. Like, Dabi has never felt like he fit in since he was 4 so even if he found a place that he belongs he just... can't see it because he's learned he's worthless.

Basically, Dabi can't empathize with people because no one has empathized with him.

BUT, it's also a great set up for Shouto to break through to him and relate to him. Who else was cold and unempathetic to others at the beginning of the story before confronting his trauma? Shouto. Right now Dabi doesn't need someone to empathize with, he needs someone TO SEE HIM. To show him empathy first. Once Shouto sees him and his pain, Dabi will probably see himself in Shouto too: just someone who needs an identity and unconditional acceptance and love from his family.

I think Dabi will see Aoyama and be like, "Ugh this kid. Oh well." The face he's making at AFO is HILARIOUS though because you know he's thinking, "Well DUMBASS if the traitor doesn't work out that could be bad for us and that kid is friends with those kids so... it's gonna be bad for us. Can't you see he'll probably help them and not us?"

[jetaime-jespere]

Prompt #29/116

#29- Look at me/# 116. This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

Aaron crossed the line of objectivity somewhere between Morgan screaming his name through the bullpen, and listening to Benjamin Cyrus unleash his wrath on Emily two days later. He clenched a set of headphones with shaking hands and a surge of rage coiling deep in his chest and coursing through his veins. He can’t bring himself to think of it, knowing it’s partly his fault in the first damn place for sending her and Reid there.

It wouldn’t be the only line that’s been crossed in the months since his divorce papers were finalized, and what happened before and after the disaster that was New York City. It happened once, until it happened twice, and before long it was happening whenever they could sneak a few hurried moments. It was never supposed to happen but it did, and it adds an entirely different layer of complications. Despite their best intentions, those complications are now starting to creep into their work on what seems like an all too regular basis. It can’t happen, but it keeps happening.

The aftermath of New York left him uncomfortably vulnerable like never before. Kate’s death rocked him, and it was Emily’s patience and quiet concern that kept him from spiraling out of control. He blamed himself; he felt responsible for not being able to save her from bleeding out on a Midtown street. It was Emily’s quiet whispers in the dark in the days after that reminded him sometimes, we can’t win them all.

Now it’s his turn in a game they never asked to play, a turning of the tables.

“We gotta go in,” he’d said to Dave, trying and failing to conceal the anger in his tone. It’s the only option while not being an option at all; one that will only bring a negative outcome. He knows that, but objectivity is a myth at this point.

“We’d be risking the lives of everybody in there.” Dave had been annoyingly rational and the picture of calm throughout the entire hellish experience. His suspicions are abundantly clear, even if he’s tight lipped and completely neutral. He’d seen what happened shortly after New York and in Ohio, and Dave has been around long enough to know how these things go. So he stays close to Aaron, leads the hostage negotiation response and never wavers once over the course of the few days that seemingly never end.

With whatever degree of composure Aaron has left - the rest of it waned as the time in Colorado dragged on - he blindly follows Dave across the grounds towards the explosion and flames. Swarms of people emerge from the burning building in varying states of duress. The Colorado police attempt to triage survivors and maintain some semblance of order. Aaron barely hears them, because as the space between them closes, he has to pull himself together.

They’re okay, thank God, despite being bruised, dirty, and exhausted. The extent of their injuries will be confirmed in the coming hours, but his initial inspection is one of immediate relief. “Are you alright?” He asks, and both nod even as though his question is directed at her, a secret they’re both all too aware of.

“Yeah,” Emily manages, dazed and confused, her face a canvas of purple and red splotches in the shape of angry fists. Up close, it’s clear whatever she suffered at the hands of Benjamin Cyrus will remain for awhile, on the inside and out. Aaron swallows, and resists the urge to move closer to her. Hugging her would make all of this too real, a confirmation of their closely guarded secret. So he settles on a quick nod of his head before turning back to Reid, who looks just a little more shaken up than Aaron is comfortable with. Sooner rather than later they’ll have to give their statements; he’ll learn the rest of the details in due time. For now, there are other concerns. “Everyone from the compound is accounted for?”

“Torres said all but one,” Morgan says ruefully with a heaviness in his voice. “Nothing we could have done.”

Watching Emily limp toward the girl’s grieving mother is enough to make his stomach churn. It’s a minimal loss, but a loss nonetheless - one they were never going to win at all, and the rest of them avert their eyes as the woman wails in Emily’s arms. From over Mrs. Evanson’s shoulder, Aaron meets her gaze, not even bothering to hide the relief spreading on his face.

With the scene almost cleared and his standard level of gravitas fully returned, Aaron demands they be taken to the hospital. It’s the tone of his voice that tells them both not to argue; it’s not a request but an order. There’s a passing glance between Emily and Reid, one that tells him everything he needs to know - that whatever happened in that compound - the things he didn’t hear, is something they’ll always carry, some twisted bond between then. It’s a sobering reminder of how lucky they got, how different this could have turned out, one that keeps him all but silent as he follows the ambulances to the hospital. There’s still work to be done and calls to make - all of that can be done from the waiting room and on the flight home.

It’s the first time he’s been in a hospital since New York; it’s an experience he could have done without. Aaron is grateful it’s relatively quiet at 4:30 AM; luckily Emily and Reid are seen by doctors almost immediately. But there’s nothing quite like the eerie stillness of a hospital, with nothing but the occasional alarm or PA announcement for company, and he finds himself staring at his watch and then the clock on the wall with a frustrated sigh.

“It’s only been a half hour, Hotch” Morgan reminds him patiently without even looking up from the three day old newspaper in his hands. “It’s gonna be awhile.”

Morgan is right, he thinks, holding the pen in his hand a little tighter.

...

Almost two hours after she disappeared with the exhausted but kind nurse, Aaron cautiously pushes open the door of the exam room, not knowing what he’ll find. She’s perched uncomfortably on the rickety bed, all bandaged and stitched, the dirt cleaned off her face. Still, it doesn’t quite hide the damage; the blood still stains her clothes and the pungent odor of smoke still lingers in the air.

“Well?” He asks expectantly, resisting the urge to reach for the discharge papers that sit on the small tray next to the bed.

“A broken cheekbone, bruised eye, some bruised rib and some stitches.” Emily runs through the list of her injuries as if reading a grocery list or something equally casual. The wince on her face when she moves a little too quickly is her giveaway that it’s a bit more than that.

“Bruised?” He challenges with a lifted eyebrow. No fucking way.

“Fine,” she concedes, biting her bottom lip. “Two fractured. Several bruised. All sore.”

The look on his face must give him away, because she smiles warily, as if she doesn’t quite believe her own words. “It looks a lot worse than it is, Aaron.” She’s putting on a brave front he can see right through, no matter how much she tries to hide it.

“Bullshit,” Aaron snaps back, just a little too harshly. “If I knew -”

“I heard you almost took out the Colorado Attorney General.” Emily says under her breath, even though they’re out of earshot. “When did that happen?” She looks almost amused, and it feels like a distant memory after the endless drag of the previous hours.

“When he was threatening to obstruct a federal investigation.”

“Sounds like I missed a lot,” she quips with a slightly wry grin, one that emphasizes the swelling of her face. “You’ll have to fill me in.”

“I’d rather not,” he says, and for the first time since their rescue, he brushes his knuckles across a small stripe of untouched skin on her cheek.

“Not here, Aaron,” Emily’s face reddens. “Please.”

“I wanted to go in,” he says a little too quickly. “To get you both. I couldn’t … listening to what -“

“I’m glad you didn’t.” Emily picks at the seam of the bandage on her arm, effectively cutting him off. “That would have compromised the whole operation.”

“I know.” He doesn’t care.

She folds her arms stubbornly and looks away, as if disappointed by his confession, his lack of objectivity. He takes it as a cue to leave, turning on his heel with a scrape of his shoe. “I’ll go check on Reid. I’m … it’s … “ he searches for words but they don’t quite materialize.

“Me too,” Emily says quietly before falling silent.

There will be time for talking later.

...

He shows up at her hotel room door, and even though she’s expecting him (she has been for awhile now),and she almost laughs at the irony of how the tables have turned in just weeks. It sends an ache through her chest, one that she’ll soon be used to. According to the ER doctor, it’ll take weeks for her ribs to heal. Now she sees the full extent of the burden of the last few days - the slight droop of his shoulders, the shadow of exhaustion leaving a pallor on his face.

“What’s so funny?” Aaron snaps, his jaw clenched tightly as he pushes past her, closing the door on his way. “Two of my agents almost got killed today.”  He doesn’t remind her that she is one of the two.

Well, okay then, Emily thinks with a huff, taking note of the fact he’s still wearing his button down shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. How long has he been in these clothes?  “Did you show up to chastise me, Aaron, or is there a point?” She can’t hide the annoyance in her own voice. She’s just as cranky as he is, desperately in need of some food, and something tells her this hotel bed won’t be kind to her throbbing ribs.

He’s studying her, assessing the damage he can see, and what he can’t. “Show me,” he says, his voice simultaneously soft and firm. It’s not a request but not quite a demand, as if he’s not prepared to see what’s there. And yet, she knows he won’t leave until he gets what he came for.

“You already- “ she attempts.

“Emily.” This time his voice cracks just a little. “Please.”

With a soft sigh and roll of her eyes, she lifts the hem of the oversized shirt she’s wearing. It’s one of his - he notices for the first time - and peels away the wraps and bandages she’s acquired, like some kind of fucked up armor. Aaron takes it all in - every bruise, scrape, and stitch - each a reminder of his self-imposed culpability. His touch is gentle, overwhelmingly so, as he surveys each wound with defeat.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” His face is lined with unrelenting guilt, all consuming and real. “I shouldn’t have ever signed off on this. None of this would have happened.”

No, she thinks. “Look at me, Aaron” Emily says calmly, her voice steady with reason and logic as she shakes her head resoundingly. “I’m fine.” She pauses, running a hand through her hair. “Reid is fine too. It’ll take him a little while … to forgive himself,” she adds. “He blames himself. He shouldn’t, but he does.” Her assessment of him succinctly accurate, laced with compassion for him. She knows his mind like she knows her own. “But he got lucky today. We both did. You did all the right things. Sometimes … it just doesn’t go our way.”

“Hasn’t been going our way as of late , has it?”

He’s right. It’s been a shitty few months to say the least. Emily laughs softly, and when he wraps her into his embrace, carefully, she rests her weary head against his chest, it finally feels as if this whole miserable experience is over.

“There’s always tomorrow,” she says, voice muffled by his shirt. She doesn’t have to ask if he’s staying the night; it’s all but a given.

“When we get back,” Aaron murmurs, his chin tucked protectively over her head. “You still owe me that dinner you promised.”

She smiles even though he can’t see it. “Deal.”

[chipsandcoffee]

CLARA’S HERO. (Part 1 of 4) (Sorry that this is in parts. I’m not deeply familiar with tumblr, so this was the only way I could send my whole message to you.) There is a moment from Robot of Sherwood which bothered me for ages until recently. The Doctor asks Clara when she began believing in impossible heroes, and she replies, “don’t you know?” The implication being that the Doctor is Clara’s hero. At a surface level, this idea is quite sweet. But, I’ve never liked its deeper implications.

Hi Anon, thanks so much for sending these terrific ideas my way! Not surprisingly, I have some/many thoughts on them!

I totally get where you're coming from regarding the above scene. Personally, it doesn't really trouble me - okay, partly because I find Clara's reaction adorable lol, but also because I never saw it as Twelve being Clara's hero so much as Clara seeing Twelve as being a heroic figure, a hero to people in need. (Mind you, my point is slightly undermined by Robin Hood telling Twelve "You are her hero," but I think that was an oversimplification on his part.)

Having said all that, I totally agree that Clara's heroic view of Twelve took a heavy hit in Kill the Moon, and again to a lesser extent in MOTOE. During their conversation on the beach near the end of MOTOE, we see Clara reach a true understanding of Twelve - he's not an infallible hero, but he's also not a heartless jerk - he's a complicated man who lives a morally complicated life, who's doing his best in some impossible situations. I love this look between them - I think this is the moment that Clara really sees Twelve for the first time (and he definitely notices it) - to me, that's the moment that their relationship as we know it truly begins.

I also agree with you, Anon, that this leads directly to Clara's "I love you" at the end of MOTOE - I think for Clara, Twelve at that moment goes from being her black & white sometimes-heroic, sometimes-scary friend to being the man she loves for all that he is.

It's interesting to me that it isn't until Death in Heaven that Twelve himself seems to fully accept what kind of man he is, as evidenced in his brilliant speech in the graveyard:

"I am not a good man. I am not a bad man. I am not a hero. And I'm definitely not a president. And no, I'm not an officer. Do you know what I am? I am an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver. Just passing through, helping out, learning."

It took Twelve a while to figure out what kind of man he was, but Clara knew right from MOTOE, and she loved him for it.

[octupus-on-the-moon]

A deal

《 Previous -- Masterlist -- Next 》

Fifth part of a nightmare

Word count: 1322

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Warnings: Mental health issues

“You can stay in my apartment” At the moment Bucky realized what he proposed. His eyes widened. “Only if you want of course. I know it´s weird because I almost… The Winter Soldier almost killed you. And I may be intimidating or even a threat for you. But I kind of … I wasn´t really conscious as the Winter Soldier. I would never hurt you…. or anyone who doesn´t deserve it and…” Barnes stopped the stuttering. Y/n shaked her head in refusal.

“That´s kind of you, but I can take a Hotel room.” She tried in vain to dry her tears with a dripping wet handkerchief “I don´t want to intrude in your life just like that. You´re probably Sstill getting used to everything and I´m just being overly dramatic” she looked down to the lump of paper.

“Believe it or not, I´m used to overly dramatic” Barnes replied. Lost in thoughts, about a little guy in Brooklyn, he took a paper from the dispenser and passed it to her. “Actually, my therapist has been complaining about me being lonely and needing people around me. You know make some history of your own, nurture friendships, have a family some day and stuff” She looked up to him at the sudden change of his tone. A broken smile on his face. “And I could help you out with your father”

“Are you trying to convince me to stay as a ‘friend’ or are you trying to propose a deal?” Y/n inquired, getting rid of the last tears, with a sly grin.

“Maybe a little of both. Maybe a little more” Something new appeared on his face. The melancholic smile turned into mischievous smirk. Was James flirting with her? “You´ll get your revenge. I´ll get to please my therapist” With a rush of energy, she stood up, reaching a hand towards Barnes.

“Deal” They shook hands. Then she went to the sink, to wash the evidence of her breakdown away. “But what´s exactly the plan?” Bucky leaned against the door to the diner. His gaze absent. Thinking.

“I need access to your father´s documents. They are probably in your house don´t?”

“Yep” she responded, while drying her face with a paper towel.

“So, we need to break in”

“What? No. Why do men always make everything so complicated? I can just bring you with me, as a friend or something. It´s my house too, after all.” Y/n threw the soaked papers away. Checking herself in the mirror, making sure that she did not seem to have cried.

“That will not work.” He pushed himself away from the door.

“Why?”

“He knows who I am, maybe from his time in S.H.I.E.L.D. Maybe because he invested a lot of money to keep me alive. He must have seen at least a picture” Barnes offered her his arm, nodding towards the door “Shall we?”

“Yes” shyly she took his arm “If that doesn´t work, then I´ll steal the documents for you” He opened the door. Again, everyone was staring at them, but this time slightly discreet.  

“I will regret saying this but, isn´t it dangerous? I mean. If he hid it away from you that long?” Bucky started to dissimulate an unsuspicious conversation. Whispering side ways and forcing a smile, that really did not fit him well. Y/n followed him, making it look more natural.    

“Oh, but breaking in the high secured house of a man with many resources and influences, to unravel his secret identity, which he successfully buried for years, isn´t” she countered. The waitress had already left their drinks on the table.

“In case something happens, it will only happen to me” he tried to oppose to y/n poorly. Both sat down next to each other. The wall on their backs.  

“You know. I´m not a fragile damsel in distress, if someone can take my father down it´s me. I don´t even need you to do it” she stated keenly, raising her chin, like a little kid would do it to prove himself. For the second time that day, a genuine little smile appeared on Bucky´s face.

“If you insist.”  

“What about the other part of the deal?” 

Y/n didn´t get an answer right away. The waitress came to take their order. And Bucky was not particularly fond about it, so he played it off. But she did not give up.

“So, what about part B of the deal?” Barnes took a long deep breath.

“I don´t really know. She said that I´m old and lonely, which is evident... partly evident. That I don´t trust people, because I don´t reply massages or call anyone and that I´m finally free to do what I want”

“Okey. Then we´ll start with your communication skills. Answer Sam´s last message. Without that file, we wouldn´t be sitting here”

“We don´t get along pretty good”

“Hypocrisy isn´t my thing either, but if you want to move on with your therapy and survive in this world you´ll need to learn it”

“But I don´t know what to write.”

“It´s easy, just thank him for the file and if you want to earn an extra point, just tell him that your doing good and thank him for asking” Bucky grunted, while taking out his phone.

“Okey. Okey. But I will only thank him for the file” he muttered, making the face of a kid who´s mom just told him to apologize for being rude.

“That´s great, really and if you are already on it, you can save my number too” y/n indicated. You couldn´t see anything of the little incident before, she was smiling and full of energy. “We could fake a conversation. In messages or we could call each other and fake a conversation”

“Did you read a book about how to cheat on your therapist or something?” Barnes teased her not looking up from the phone.

“No, but I was, what someone would call, a problem teen and therapists work like not-that-emotional-involved-parents. I´m only applying stuff I learned along the way” y/n explained. Bucky started to asked himself, why he always ended up working with little angry rebels?

After sending the message to Sam, saving y/n´s number and eating a passable, but very needed lunch. Talking about trivial things, making jokes. Both went out, the way they came in. Arm in arm. Comfortable with each other’s closeness.  

“Thank you for inviting me after I actually invited you” Bucky recognized slightly ashamed, while approaching the entrance.

“It´s a pleasure. The government probably doesn´t pay veterans so well. And you saved me today…” she got interrupted by an elderly woman. She was sitting with who seemed to be her husband.

“I am sorry to bother you two. But we wanted to tell you, that you make a lovely couple” The gentleman on her side nodded

“You have a wonderful woman there, young man. Take good care of her” he added. Bucky started to blush looking for words.

“Thank you, but we are just friends” Y/n clarified calmly, taking a little step aside to create space between her and Barnes.

“In that case I wouldn´t let her go if I were you” referred the man to Bucky.

“Will see” he said eluding the obvious.

 “See, you’re still a young man in the eyes of strangers” y/n laughed. They were standing outside the diner.

“If I had lived a normal life, I would look just like him right now.”

“You´re pretty optimistic. The average human just lives 80 years and he´s like what 75? You´re like 20 years older”

“I´m 106 years old.”

“He´s 31 years younger than you. Dear lord, what would the people say if we were a couple? The gossip would be unbearable”

“I really liked you more, when you didn’t speak that much”

“Oh, come on. Your life was probably boring without me”

Barnes started to cross the street, trying to hide a smile. Yes, it was.

All rights reserved.

《 Previous -- Masterlist -- Next 》

[lifeofkaze]

An Art of Balance #15

 Word Count: ~ 3.100

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Chapter 15: Midnight Conversations

 Later that night, Lizzie was lying awake in her bed, staring at the yellow canopy above her head. She listened to the regular breathing and occasional rustle of sheets as one of her friends turned, unable to fall asleep herself.

She kept thinking about Skye’s odd behaviour. Although she had followed her friend almost immediately after she had left the rest of the team in such a hurry, Lizzie hadn’t been able to find her. She had only briefly seen her after dinner in the Common Room, but even then, Skye had made some bad excuses to not spend time with any of them.

It puzzled Lizzie; it wasn’t like their fight a few weeks ago, when she had known exactly why Skye was angry at her. She actually didn’t seem to be angry at all; she avoided everyone, sitting by herself brooding. There was an almost haunted look about her, her nose buried in her battered copy of Quidditch Throughout the Ages, scanning the pages intently as if looking for an answer Lizzie didn’t know the question to.

Lizzie turned in her bed, hugging her pillow. She wished Rowan was here to talk her through her sleepless spell like she often did. But her friend was on prefect patrol tonight and it would be quite some time before she returned.

And truth be told, Rowan didn’t care much about Skye’s antics; few people did. Lizzie often wondered herself why she put up with Skye’s attitude over and over again. She couldn’t say it for sure; maybe because she saw behind the brusque façade Skye chose to display. She knew how pressured she felt by her family’s legacy.

Lizzie understood that sentiment. Although a fair troublemaker in his time, her brother had been an outrageously gifted student. In her first year, most of the teachers had often referred to her as ‘Jacob Jameson’s sister’ until they had gotten around to learning her name. Filling someone’s shoes was never easy.

She drifted off into an uneasy sleep. She couldn’t have been asleep for long when she suddenly awoke with a jolt. She blinked into the blinding light of the wand pointed into her face, unable to see who was the disturber of her nightly peace.

“Oops, wrong bed,” a familiar voice giggled.

“Tulip?” Lizzie mumbled sleepily, rubbing her eyes. “Is that you?”

“No, Lizzie Jameson, it is not. Tulip Karasu would certainly never sneak into your dorm while your prefect watch dog is away. Go back to sleep now, there’s nothing to see here.”

The light moved away from her and over to where Tonks was snoring in her bed. She heard a muffled cry as Tulip poked her awake, then a quick set of excitedly exchanged whispers and snickering.

Tonks jumped out of her bed and the two of them tiptoed to the door of the dormitory.

“If someone asks, you’ve never seen us!” Tonks chuckled. “And don’t go anywhere near the Slytherin Common Room tomorrow morning.”

“Whatever,” Lizzie muttered in response, closing her eyes in a futile attempt to go back to sleep. But it was no use, she was fully awake by now.

Mouse, who had been sleeping snuggled against the back of Lizzie’s knees, seemed to share that sentiment. She got up and stretched lavishly before hopping off the bed. She padded to the door the two pranksters had just left through and looked back at her expectantly.

Lizzie scowled at the animal. “You have your own door.”

She pointed at the small hole in the masonry hidden behind a drawer. It lead to a complicated network of passageways traversing the whole of the castle; it allowed the numerous animals inhabiting Hogwarts to move around undisturbed if they wished to do so.

But Mouse was clearly not in the mood to take the exit designated for her. Her tail was twitching impatiently when she saw Lizzie had no intent of getting up and opening the door for her anytime soon. She opened her mouth and let out a demanding cry that seemed to echo across the silence of the room.

Penny and Skye were stirring in their sleep and Lizzie quickly hurried over to the cat, quietly muttering curses under her breath, as Mouse opened her mouth a second time.

She picked her up and carried the now contentedly purring animal down the stairs to the Common Room. Setting her down on the fluffy carpet at the base of the stairs, Lizzie wanted to turn around and head back to bed, but Mouse had already tippled over to the round door that concealed the passageway to the dungeons, waiting for Lizzie to open it for her.

“Sometimes I really hate you, you know,” she declared as she walked over to the exit of the Common Room on her bare feet.

“There’s quite the traffic in the Common Room tonight, it seems.”

Lizzie jumped in shock at the unexpected sound of a voice coming from the sofa in front of the fireplace. She took a deep breath to calm her racing heart.

Orion’s was watching her from the back of the couch where he had apparently been lying in front of the fire. His voice was calm as always, but amusement sparkled in his eyes and he looked at her curiously.

Lizzie gave him a shaky laugh. “For Godric’s sake Orion, do you want to kill me?”

Mouse had suddenly lost all interest in prowling the nightly castle. Instead she walked over to Orion and jumped onto his lap; she curled herself up against him and started purring as his fingers raked through her long fur.

Lizzie only stared in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?” she muttered, glaring at the perfectly innocent looking animal.

“I thought the cats have their own means of coming and going.”

Lizzie snorted. “They do. But Her Majesty wanted a special treatment tonight.”

She contemplated returning to her room now, but she knew full well she wouldn’t be able to sleep any time soon. So she walked over to the fireplace, careful not to step on the cold stone floor. Orion moved his legs from the couch to make room for her and Lizzie sat down facing him with her legs crossed underneath her; her feet were tucked under the plaited fabric of her pyjama pants for a bit of warmth.

She noticed Orion watching her and was suddenly glad her shirt hid the necklace she hadn’t bothered taking off earlier. Giving her fingers something to do, her hands went to the ends of the loose braid that hung over her shoulder, already partly undone from tossing her head around on her pillow.

“Were you finally converted to the Wanderers, Chaser?” Orion asked suddenly, laughing lightly.

Lizzie looked at him in confusion before she grasped his meaning. She looked down at her sleeping shirt. It was the dark red jersey Skye had given her for Christmas; the logo of the Wigtown Wanderers, two white cleavers forming a W, was displayed on the front.

Smiling, she shook her head. “No way, Captain, you should know that I’m a Catapults girl through and through,” she stated matter-of-factly. “But you have to give the Wanderers that, their jerseys are really nice quality.” She nodded at him. “Why are you still awake?”

“Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. Then I come down here, just to think; during the day the Common Room can be so loud you can’t even hear your own thoughts.” He held up Skye’s copy of Quidditch Throughout the Ages; she must have forgotten it downstairs. “I had a little read on tactics; it’s one of my favourites.”

Lizzie nodded in affirmation. “Mine too; it’s a classic.”

Orion noticed the very slight lisp in Lizzie’s voice; it wasn’t something she usually did while speaking.

“Are you wearing braces?” he asked amusedly.

Her hand went to her mouth but stopped halfway and he saw her cheeks flush the slightest bit.

“No, it’s a dental splint,” she answered, fingers twirling the ends of her hair again. “I grind my teeth in my sleep when something’s bothering me.”

“And what is bothering you?”

As if regretting that she had brought it up, she let go of her braid and turned away from him; she suddenly looked very shy. Orion cursed himself inwardly; just as he had feared, he had been approaching her too brashly. He hoped that he hadn’t rushed too fast over the ground that had separated them for weeks now and broken the fragile connection that had just started rebuilding itself.

Lizzie shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong, but I really cannot tell you that.”

Orion would never have admitted it, but it stung that she wasn’t trusting him enough to share her worries. Lizzie had never been hesitant to talk to him before; if he had just taken a moment to think when she had been dancing with him, maybe he would have been able to ease her pain now.

“Don’t bother yourself; everyone has their own innermost way of dealing with their burdens.” He smiled ironically to himself. If anyone knew, it was him. His voice grew softer as he continued. “But you can always talk to me if you feel like yours a is burden you wish to share.”

Lizzie had now fully turned towards the fire that was burning low in the fireplace. It was still emitting warmth, but the Common Room had cooled noticeably. Orion saw her shiver slightly; she must be very cold, being barefoot and only in a thin, short-sleeved shirt.

She didn’t seem to notice though; she had leaned forward, supporting her arms on her knees and was staring into the lowly burning flames. She was so deeply lost in her thoughts that Orion wasn’t sure she had even been listening to him.

“Tell me,” she suddenly said slowly, her eyes still fixed on the fire. She sounded as if she was struggling with herself. “What would you do if you had lied to a very good friend out of good intentions, and all would be starting to get terribly out of hand?”

He blinked in surprise. “Have you?”

“Hypothetically,” Lizzie added quickly, wringing her hands.

“Well, hypothetically,” he echoed her words, “I’d say lying never leads to something good. The ends do not justify the means, however noble they might be. If you had lied to a very good friend,” he saw her smiling sardonically, “I would advise you to tell your friend the truth. The lies we tell have a way of building up on themselves, until the mountain we have put in our wake is too high for us to overcome on our own. Nothing breaks trust like lying and trust is the most important foundation any kind of relationship is built upon. If there is no trust, there is nothing saving us from falling freely.”

Lizzie hung her head in resignation, the humourless smile fading from her face. She rubbed her eyes with her hands and sighed “I had a feeling you might say that.”

“And does it help?”

“No, not really.”

The ghost of her remaining smile turned into a short, resigned laugh that made Orion want to reach out to her to show her some comfort. He restrained himself, however.

She made no sign to continue with the topic and Orion couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in her mind. He had never thought Lizzie would be the kind of person to lie to anyone, especially her friends. But apparently, he had misjudged her; whatever situation she had gotten herself into seemed to weigh her down immensely.

“Like I said before, you can always come to me if you wish to share your burden; may it be by talking or in silence.”

She finally looked up at him. Her eyes were swimming with emotions he couldn’t place and before he had the chance to think on it any further, her guard went back up again, the expression in her blue eyes now level, but not unkind.

“Thank you, I really appreciate this.” She reached out to stroke Mouse, who was still lying on his lap, now fast asleep. “It’s just... Sometimes I wonder why everything I do seems to be leading me into a wrong direction.”

“But is the direction necessarily wrong, only because you can’t see the end of the path?”

“How can the direction be right when it leads me to the same point over and over again?” Lizzie retorted.

“Then maybe you are exactly where you are meant to be,” he pointed out. He watched her closely as he thought about her answer. “May I ask if this is about Skye?”

Her eyes flickered towards him momentarily, showing a mix of surprise and what he thought looked oddly like relief. It was gone too fast to pinpoint it for certain.

“I don’t know what got into her.” Lizzie seemed to grasp onto the topic almost eagerly all of a sudden.

“Don’t let your mind be troubled by worries about Skye; she will be fine, like she always is. Your friendship has never failed to guide her back into a balanced set of mind. She is shaped by her ambition and her unconditional desire to win; sometimes it lets her forget about the things that are surrounding her.”

“I believe she’s so set on winning this year because she wasn’t part of the team when we last won the Cup,” Lizzie confirmed.

“She was always part of team,” Orion corrected her gently, “but I agree, it is not the same to watch from the side lines when others do what your heart desires most.”

Lizzie only hummed as she let his words sink in. She was still stroking the soft fur of the cat who had her tail wrapped around Orion’s wrist. Mouse let out a sleepy sigh as she snuggled up closer to him to get into a more comfortable position. The sudden movement let Lizzie’s fingers brush lightly against his. Orion went completely still, fully expecting her to draw away, but to his surprise she didn’t. She just watched the cat purr peacefully, the tips of her fingers resting on the back of his hand. Just as he had thought before, her hand was very cold, a stark contrast to the warm fur of the animal beneath his palm.

“How is it you always see straight to the core of everyone?” she asked quietly, not looking at him but at her hand on top of his own. His breath hitched slightly as she moved the tiniest bit, the tip of her fingers slowly tracing the line of his knuckles. They weren’t soft as could be expected, but rather rough like his own, hardened from the countless hours they had spent together on the pitch. A shiver ran down his spine but Lizzie didn’t seem to notice. She was completely consumed by her own thoughts.

“I listen,” Orion answered her question levelly, glad he was able to keep his voice clear of the adrenaline flooding his body from her touch. “If you listen closely to more than the words that are spoken, you can hear all the things people don’t say out loud.”

The gentle movement of her fingers stopped. He looked up at her, she suddenly seemed uneasy. She drew a shaky breath to say something when Mouse’s ears propped up all of a sudden, her green eyes staring at the round entrance door to the Common Room.

A moment later it swung open and Rowan stepped inside. Mouse immediately hopped off Orion’s lap and ran over to her, wrapping herself around Rowan’s leg. Rowan looked down at her in surprise. She pushed her glasses up her nose before she bent down to pet her.

“Mousey, what are you doing down here? Were you locked out of the bedroom?”

She raised her eyes and saw Orion and Lizzie sitting on the sofa together. Lizzie’s movements had frozen instantly as her friend had entered the room, her whole body language suddenly tense as a coiled feather. She quickly withdrew her hand as if she had burnt herself.

“Lizzie? What are you doing down here?”

“Nothing,” she answered quickly, getting off the sofa and into a standing position. “Mouse didn’t want to take her usual way out and I found Orion down here. We had a little chat about the upcoming match.”

Orion tried not so show his surprise. Why was Lizzie lying to Rowan? Hadn’t she been talking about Skye after all?

“Oh,” Rowan only responded. She seemed unsure whether or not to believe her friend’s explanation. They looked at each other, silently communicating in a way Orion couldn’t comprehend. He did notice Lizzie clenching her fists at her sides, however. They were hidden by the backrest of the sofa between the girls, so Rowan wouldn’t have seen it.

“It is well past bed time, you know?” Rowan finally said and gave her friend a pointed look. “It would be better if you came back to the dorm with me, don’t you think? You should go to bed as well,” she addressed Orion.

He inclined his head. “Of course.”

Lizzie moved around the couch and followed her friend up the flight of stairs to the girls’ dormitories; she was looking almost intimidated. Orion watched them go, the strain apparent between the two of them. Neither turned around again.

After they had disappeared, he got up and headed for his own dormitory. His mind was reeling once again and he tried to align his steps with his pattern of breathing to get it back in check.

The sudden shift in Lizzie’s body language as Rowan had entered the scene had been peculiar; he had never known her to feel uncomfortable around her friend. On the contrary, as far as he was aware, she had rather helped Rowan adjust whenever she had felt out of place in social situations.

Then again, he would never have expected someone as open and honest as Lizzie to get herself into a situation that had her keeping secrets and actively lying to her friends. It was a side of her he had never known before.

But still, the feeling of her hand brushing against his was strongly present in his mind. He felt his heart rate pick up as he remembered how tender her touch had felt as she had run her fingers over the back of his hand. He took another deep breath to centre himself before he silently entered his dorm, careful not to wake anyone as he made his way over to his bed.

Staying on the path he had set himself onto would maybe be a lot harder than he had initially thought.

[skeletorific]

(Sorry if it’s already been asked)what’s your interpretation/view of the quadrants? What in your mind makes an healthy and unhealthy quadrantship?

*distant drumbeat* I’ve been WAITING for this one! Turn it up!!!!

So, a few general notes about quadrants before getting into a breakdown. First, I don’t think there’s a hard and fast definition of what makes, say, a healthy kismessitude, any more than there’s a hard and fast definition of a healthy human relationship. What would be toxic and terrible for one couple may be exactly what keeps a different relationship together. Meowrails is very different from pale Vrisrezi, because Equius and Nepeta are different people with different wants and needs in a relationship than Vriska and Terezi. As with all bonds, it’s important to look at a broader trend of behavior and the individual mental health levels before you can say “this is unhealthy”. I DO think there are certain things to watch out for, but ultimately I probably have ships in that quadrant that may violate one or more of those “no-nos” just because of how those characters bounce off each other. 

Second, I think there’s more fluidity in quadrants than the fandom typically allows for, because human relationships are also by their nature fluid. We’ve all seen a set of best friends who act like a couple even if they aren’t romantically interested, and we’ve seen couples who bicker and squabble despite being deeply in love. How you choose to identify your relationship is ultimately nobody’s business but your own, even if red love for you looks like pale love to someone else. Alternian troll culture is romance obsessed and this can lend itself to an obsession with defining the attraction, but this doesn’t mean that’s necessarily how it HAS to be.

Finally, I’ll be listing ALL confirmed canon examples of each quadrant to provide a context for what I’m referencing. This should not be taken as necessary endorsement for any of these ships, or even that I think they were a “good example”, simply that how they chose to identify influenced my own definition of these quadrants. I will also be leaving out a lot of ships that would seem to fit a particular quadrant (noteably Rosemary and Arasol) because their own status is complicated in-text (Rose explicitly refers to wanting to be in all of Kanaya’s quadrants and their relationship has tended explicitly pitch at points, Sollux is referred to as Aradia’s “boyfriend” and yet there is apparently no issue between either of them when his flush quadrant becomes occupied)

With that, let’s dig in

Matespritship:

Successful/Actually Date(d) Examples: Dad/Mom, Latula/Mituna, Meulin/Kurloz, Aranea/Porrim, Mindfang/Summoner, Meenah/Vriska, Sollux/Feferi, Konyyl/Azdaja (currently vacillating), Stelsa/Tyzias

Crushes (unrequited, vacillating, or thwarted): Eridan/Feferi, Kanaya/Vriska, Nepeta/Karkat, Equius/Aradia, Tavros/Jade, Gamzee/Tavros, Sollux/Gamzee, Jack/PM, Lynera/Bronya

What it means to me: Matespritship tends to be an opt-out quadrant for a lot of people, I think. Most seem to stop reading at “closely analogous to human conceptions of romance” and turn off their brains. However, as with all things troll culture, I think there’s more to it the deeper you go, especially considering the fact that your moirail is expected to do a LOT of what we would consider standard s/o stuff: caretaking, comfort, intimate knowledge, closeness. I absolutely refuse to buy that the only thing distinguishing the two is that matesprits have sex, especially since that stumble into some VERY UNCOMFORTABLE territory in regards to troll asexuality. So then, if it’s not that, then what is it?

Ultimately I keep coming back to the idea of passion. Your matesprit I think is the person who you genuinely see in the best possible light. Unusual for Alternian society, you’re unable to ignore the depths of your admiration of them, or to let their flaws filter into your perception. Moiraillegiance is about total honesty and unflinching recognition, but matespritship to me is about that kind of fairy tale passion. Its a person who, even if you know on an intellectual level they are not perfect, that you genuinely have a harder time seeing the darker side of because you are so consumed by this passion for what you see in them, your unfiltered awe and appreciation for who they are. 

Additionally, I see matespritship as on some level inherently possessive. You not only admire that person, but you fundamentally crave their attention in a way that is probably a bit on the selfish side. Its not enough to want good for them, it has to be good alongside you. This is typically where it’s more prone to flipping caliginous. 

Warning signs: Matespritships seemed to vacillate pitch FREQUENTLY on Alternia. This is not necessarily a sign that something is wrong. As Karkat says, it’s often a matter of communication and timing. However, it does have the potential to explode in everyone’s face if not carefully managed, in no small part due to the passionate emotions involved. Some things that tend to go bad fast:

-Admiration is key to an effective matespritship, but pedestalling your flushed partner too much can be dangerous. Once the flaws do become apparent (as they will in any relationship) they can become increasingly hard to ignore, and that can be SHATTERING if you don’t prepare.

-Especially on Alternia, matesprits are the quadrant I see as most likely to neglect the communication aspect of their relationship. Safety isn’t a factor for them like it is for more caliginous quadrants, and the expectation is usually that feelings jams are for moirails. Especially for younger trolls, there’s an idea that we’re in love and thus should just know what the other person needs/wants. If you don’t pick up on it, then maybe we aren’t meant to be. This is a trap. ALL relationships need communication in order to function on a day to day basis. Opening up to your matesprit about something that’s bothering you isn’t a sign of fading passion, but of maturity and your own changing needs.

-Despite a fondness for fate pairings I think matespritships are usually expected to fade out, in no small part because they’re founded on a level of passion that can be hard to keep up long-term. This is actually fine. Not all relationships are meant to last eternally. However, if you know your matesprit is a person you want in your life long-term, part of that is learning how to cope with periods of low passion. Its normal to not always feel an all-consuming desire to keep your matesprit in arms reach. It’s normal to need space. What’s important is that YOU know that you still love them, and that they have the confidence to know that’s true even when you can’t always express it.

Moirallegiance

Successful/Actually Date(d) Examples: Kanaya/Vriska, Eridan/Feferi, Gamzee/Karkat, Nepeta/Equius, Kurloz/Mituna, Meulin/Horuss, Terezi/Vriska, Kuprum/Folykl, MSPAR/Polypa, Xefros/Dammek

Crushes (unrequited, vacillating, or thwarted): Eridan/Karkat, MSPAR/Chixie, MSPAR/Stelsa, Tegiri/Polypa

What it means to me: To start out with, I haaaaaaaate hate hate the perception that moirails are just BFFs. To me, there’s too much evidence to suggest otherwise, not the least of which being that after Feferi ends their moirallegiance she tells Eridan she still wants to be friends with him. How many of you break up with your best friend and then tell them you can still be friends after?

To me, moirallegiance on Alternia is as much a coping mechanism at it is a romantic entanglement. In a society where there’s no such thing as therapy, your moirail ideally functions as a release valve for you, to help you exercise softer feelings in a safe, sanctioned environment. Two things are key in that dynamic: honesty, and selflessness.

There’s no pretense in a moirallegiance, but an unflinching embrace. The successful moirails we’ve seen (Meowrails, KupFol, arguably GamKar) have always been rooted in banter that may come off as pitch at first glance. This is partly due to general Alternian socialization practice, but I think it also stems from the fact that pale love is founded in knowing every inch of your partner. You know what they are, body and soul, the flaws and the highlights, and while you do not uncritically accept it like a matesprit might, some part of you fundamentally identifies with. Your moirail is that person who you feel like you’ve known for years after talking for a few hours, because something about how they’re wired clicks with you in a way most don’t. As such, there’s less need for posturing. A feelings jam is one of the few places on Alternia where you are allowed to admit to vulnerability, to fear, to frustration, because you know that the other person will have your back unquestioningly without letting you get away with bullshit.

This mutual support stems from the other half of pale love: the desire to see the other person flourish, no matter what. If the matesprit wants you to be happy at their side, the moirail wants you to flourish even if they do not stand to benefit. You experience your moirail’s success like it was your own, and want as good for them or better than you want for yourself.

Some warning signs:

-Burnout. We see this in most clearly in Eridan and Feferi’s case (and a bit in Gamzee and Karkat’s case), but its a genuine risk in moirallegiance. The caretaking HAS to go both ways or the relationship is doomed to fail. More often than not, burnout indicates a failure within the relationship. Your moirail has not been caring for you to the degree you need, and quite possibly you have not been communicating HOW you would like that behavior to change. As I said, honesty is essential, and things ideally should never reach the point of burnout because you are in constant complete openness with your moirail about how you need taking care of.

-Fucked expectations. Romance is a dominating subject on Alternia, for obvious reasons, and one of the biggest hits a moirallegiance can take is a person questioning too far into pale desire until they mistake it for something else. The two are very close, but they are not exactly the same thing and often times the relationship can be sunk by one person getting in their head about that intimacy until they try to make it something it isn’t. Moiraillegiance is not a stepping stone for matesprit or kismesis, and most importantly it is not a consolation prize quadrant. You should never “settle” for moirail, or pale date someone who will accept you as a moirail only if they can’t get you as anything else. You need to want a moirail for a moirails sake, or its just a crush with extra levels of fuckery and expected free therapy.

Kismessitude

Successful/Actually Date(d) Examples: Spades Slick/Sn0wman, Jack Noir/Black Queen, Eridan/Vriska (now broken up), Karkat/Karkat, Mindfang/Dualscar, Terezi/Gamzee, Tagora/Galekh, Bronya/Elwurd.

Crushes (unrequited, thwarted, vacillating): Eridan/Rose, Vriska/Tavros,  Karkat/John, Gamzee/Dave, Sollux/Gamzee, Eridan/Sollux, PM/Bec Noir, Terezi/Vriska, John/Terezi, Konyyl/Skylla, Daraya/Lynera

What it means to me:

I want to structure this as a dismantling of two very common misconceptions I see for this quadrant. One, kismesis is NOT the inherent abuse quadrant. This I believe is working with a faulty definition of what abuse is. Abuse is not simply being mean or engaging in a physical manner with somebody. As has become something of a mantra for this essay, its about expectations. Abuse requires someone to be taking advantage, exploiting a particular vulnerability (or creating it if none inherently exists). What makes a relationship abusive is a situation where someone you SHOULD be able to trust or care for uses those expectations to hurt you, either for personal gain or simply to make themselves feel better. A kismesis is not that, because a healthy kismesis goes in with the expectation of rivalry. For some kismeses, this looks like basic sniping, insults, and jabs. For others, it looks like actual fighting. In either case, its the difference between a boxing match and assault. As long as the rules are being respected, both parties are consented, and someone is checking in to ensure that no one is hurting themselves (sometimes your partner, sometimes your moirail, sometimes your auspitice), then there is nothing inherently wrong with having a circumstance in which you are allowed to work through some nastier feelings without fear of consequence or hurting someone who can’t take it.

The second misconception: kismesis is not just a relationship with some bitchier dialogue. As we’ve seen, being a little bit rude is not restricted to pitch feelings. We have many examples of it in relationships that would be considered unequivocally red or pale on Alternia (KupFol, MeenVris). I go back to the Karkat dialogue constantly. Your kismesis is not just a person you make fun of, but something closer to your true rival (in the shonen anime sense). Its a person who you see so much good (or potential for good in), but who is brought down by some kind of fatal flaw that just grates at you. And so, you fixate on the idea of pushing them out of that flaw, through whatever means necessary.

Its from this fatal flaw that I believe the benefits of kismesis come out. Your kismesis, like your matesprit, has intense passion for you, but doesn’t idealize you. In fact, at points your kismesis may be incredibly aware of the WORST possible version of you. What distinguishes it from platonic hate, though, is the fact that you at your worst doesn’t make them flinch. It makes them want to provoke you, to see how you can change. Kismeses sharpen each other, which is something that rarely feels good but is so often necessary. You should never let your kismesis sit back too far on their laurels, because it is your job to be consciously aware of their faults and call them out on it. 

Additionally, while the hatefucking aspect is often overestimated, I think its not surprising that passion in these kinds of relationships tend to get intense, which is part of why it so often requires some kind of ashen intervention. Once harnessed, though, that passion can be turned to powerful ends for both yourselves and the world around you. 

Some things to watch out for (unsurprisingly there’s a LOT for this one but I’ve distilled it into two broad ones because this thing will be long enough):

Power imbalance: As I said, kismesis is not inherently abusive. However, it DECIDEDLY has the potential to become so, in particular in a society like Alternia where the power strafes are often so significant. This is particularly the case in pitch relationships involving a highblood and a lowblood, especially when the highblood is “steering the ship”. Vriska/Tavros is a good example. If summarized, her feelings for Tavros pre-Sgrub are very straightforward and healthy pitch ones. She admires his potential and envies his kinder relationships while despising his indecisiveness. All fine enough groundwork. However, three factors collaborate to make it a hot disaster: Tavros’s disinterest in her (meaning the pitch advances are unwelcome and in some real sense nonconsensual), Vriska’s own lack of restraint (meaning she takes things too far even for a kismesis), and the inherent caste imbalance (meaning Tavros has no meaningful way of fighting back and nothing in Vriska’s rearing has taught her to care if a lowblood gets hurt by her actions). This isn’t to say a highblood-lowblood (or any humanly imbalanced relationship) can NEVER work, but it requires both parties to put the work in to even the playing field. The highblood needs to actively show restraint, both physically and situationally. This is also where an auspitice generally comes in handy, ensuring things never get to a point where the action becomes one-sided.

Misdirected Rage: As I said, kismessitude is a Space, much like moiraillegiance, that gives you the opportunity to work through some less-than-palatable emotions. Using a pitch date as a way to burn off stress is not inherently invalid; in fact, its often expected and as long as your partner is willing can be one of the better ways to cope with something without having to address it directly. However, this CANNOT be built into the foundation of the relationship. Your kismesis is not a punching bag, but their own person, and the focus always needs to eventually return to that. You cannot effectively sharpen someone else if your anger is never about them, and it is ultimately unfair to constantly ask someone else to consistently bear the brunt of your bad days. This is (debatably) where pitch Gamrezi went wrong. Ultimately that kismesis was never really about each other, but about both of them projecting their self-loathing onto the other person when they were both at incredibly low place, thus making their anger unproductive and meaningless for both of them. As such, any kind of empathy was impossible and they were not able to self-regulate. 

Auspiticism

Succesful/Actually Date(d): Vriska/Kanaya/Tavros, Karkat/Jade/Karkat, Spades Slick/Doc Scratch/Sn0wman, Liv Tyler/Courtyard Droll/Wizardly Vassal, PM/Jade/Bec Noir, Kanaya/Vriska/Rose

Crushes (unrequited, thwarted, vacillating): Vriska/Kanaya/Eridan, Gamzee/Rose/Terezi (look I know this one is practically canon but Rose kind of implies she never really used those auspiticism lessons), Rose/Kanaya/Horrorterrors, Eridan/Feferi/Sollux, Gamzee/Kanaya/Karkat, Dave/Kanaya/Karkat, Konyyl/MSPA Reader/Azdaja.

What it means to me: Ahh the bastard child of quadrants. I’ve got a lot of unpopular opinions on auspiticism (most notably that Kanaya isn’t actually that good at it), but let’s start with defining some things. I believe there are two kinds of auspitices. 

One is the “breakup” auspitice. This is the version described in the infamous romance pages of Homestuck. This version is meant to prevent a black romance from breaking out where one shouldn’t occur, either because one or both parties already has a kismesis or because there is some other mitigating factor that means neither can afford to get bogged down in this crush. A breakup auspitice should ideally be a figure that both parties trust, even in the midst of heated feelings. They should also have the strength of will to continually interfere, and a clear enough head to cut to the root of the issue. Its a thankless task, often, but a very vital one, and most importantly, short-lived. This auspitice’s job only lasts as long as the feelings last. Once both parties have had the chance to cool down (or the circumstances creating the rivalry are at an end), their job is considered over.

The other kind is the version that we arguably see more of in canon, what I call the Third Leaf. This is less an intercessary party and more the third member of a particularly tempestuous kismesis, who will act to ensure the other two leaves don’t cause serious harm to themselves or each other. This relationship is far more long-term, and thus has more requirements. To me, your auspitice is someone who has pale potential with both you AND your kismesis. They know and care about you both on a very deep level, to the point that they are willing to put themselves in the middle of your bullshit very consistently. This means that you trust them enough to call it quits even in the heat of your anger, and you also believe what they tell you about your own pitch partner when their actions need greater contextualization to keep things on the level. This task is often equally challenging, but (hopefully) not as thankless or as pragmatic.

I’ve previously referred to the auspitice as a personified safeword, and I believe that’s very emblematic of the Third Leaf. Even healthy kismeses may reach a point where one needs a day off, or something hits in the wrong way. In a rivalry, though, admitting that isn’t necessarily easy, as its both breaking kayfabe and has the potential to read as more weakness that needs to be excised (”it hurts because its working”). The auspitice is privileged to go between and be believed every time. If your auspitice says its a no go then you better have a pretty damn good reason to ignore them. For some kismeses, overriding the auspitice is grounds to break up once and for all. 

Some warning signs:

Burnout: As is the case with the previously discussed concilliatory quadrant, caretaking can be exhausting. This is especially the case in auspiticism, where the care is often expected to be very one sided, and usually involves dealing with a lot of vitriol, anger, and even physical violence. Obviously its more prevalent in Third Leaf dynamics, but even breakup auspitices can reach a breaking point if they’re not careful. Its important as the ashenmate to understand your own limits. For better or for worse, the focus will not be on you. If you are reaching a low point, then you need to be vocal about this with your other two leaves, or disaster is almost inevitable. The trade-off for this is that (according to my headcanons at least), your ashenmates are expected to drop everything to care for you if you need it. The kismesis will not be safe to proceed until you are back in fighting shape, and as such a truce is declared until they have both done “aftercare” of a sort for you. What this looks like is different for every auspiticism. For some, its alone time. For others, its blanket burritos, movies, and forehead kisses. No matter what, though its IMPERATIVE that you find a method that works for you, because the relationship crumbles without self-care.

Doormatting: As I said, auspiticism is a concilliatory quadrant. As such, there can be a tendency to over-forgive or overwork, especially if your other two leaves have stronger personalities. In particular, ausptices who are closer with one leaf over the other need to be vigilant for favoritism or bowing down. It is your job to contextualize the actions of your ashenmates. It is not your job to do apologetics for them or atone for their actions. Hold them all accountable. They need to be putting in at least as much work as you do to make their relationship work and not just offset the emotional repair to you.

Controlling: The inverse of this is the power-tripping auspitice. This seems unlikely, but its more of a threat than one might think, in my view. Because of the trust auspitices command by virtue of their position and their relationship with the other two leaves, their word is in some sense law. This can be addictive to some people, and lead to an abuse of power that can be just as toxic as in any other quadrant. It can look like scolding your ashenmates far too much, placing yourself at the center of their issues, or even punishing them for annoying you when what they’re doing is perfectly acceptable within the context of a kismessitude. As I said, self-care is important for an auspitice, but selflessness needs to be at the core of concilliatory dynamics. You are here because you genuinely want good for the people you are mediating for. If the relationship has become all about you, then something has gone horribly wrong. Avoid the urge to power trip just because the role is sometimes a Lot. 

[profoundsheepbarbarian]

A Beginner's Guide To Acoustic Treatment

An account of an acoustic newbie's journey from bare walls to a well‑balanced, sonically pleasant space.

The physics of the propagation of sound is immensely complicated, and when the assortment of materials that make up the walls, floors and ceiling (plus any windows, doors and furniture) are added to the equation, it's very difficult to predict what will happen to sound waves once they've left their source. What's more, every room is different, and it's not just the dimensions that will dictate how the room will sound... Imagine two rooms of the same shape and size. One has two‑metre-thick concrete walls, and the other a single‑layer plasterboard stud-wall. Even with those brief, albeit extreme descriptions, you probably know already that the two rooms will sound very different. Add in the multitude of room shapes, sizes, wall‑construction methods and surfaces found in home studios, and it becomes impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all guide to acoustic panel treatment.

The subject of acoustics is regularly discussed in SOS, but plenty of readers still ask for the subject to be covered from a much more basic starting point. What follows is a look at installing acoustic treatment from a complete beginner's perspective: some basic, essential information, along with a bit of advice from acoustics professionals that should give you the confidence to get started. I'll follow this up by taking you step by step through my own recent experience of treating a room.

Why Bother With Acoustic Treatment?

Untreated rooms have an uneven frequency response, which means that any mixing decisions you make are being based on a sound that is 'coloured', because you can't accurately hear what's being played. In short, you can't possibly tell how your mix will sound when played back anywhere else. It isn't just an issue for mixing, though, because any recordings you make of acoustic instruments will bear all the hallmarks of the space in which you record them. That may be a good thing if the space in question is Ocean Way or SARM West, but probably preposterously bad if it's your living room or bedroom. So, if you want your mixes to transfer well, and your recordings to be free of room 'honk', you need to pay attention to the acoustic properties of your environment — no matter how good the gear you're using.

First Things First

The first thing to grasp is the outcome you want to achieve. It's a common misconception that acoustic treatment with acoustic ceilings or acoustic baffles should kill all reverberation, and that you want a room covered floor‑to‑ceiling with foam tiles: this isn't what you're aiming for. You also need to bear in mind the limitations imposed by space and budget: most home studios are small in comparison with the Abbey Roads and AIR Lyndhursts of this world, and many home‑studio owners simply don't have the funds for bespoke treatment solutions.

So what is the aim? Andy Munro, acoustic design specialist, remarks, "acoustic design is the science that restores a neutral sound balance”. Applying that science means interfering with the path of sound to control the sound energy. Jorge Castro, chief acoustician at Vicoustic, says that "in the case of affordable treatment, we need to control the energy of the sound first. Then we can take care of the sound quality. With small spaces, bass frequencies are always a problem, and we should control the low frequencies as much as we can.” In fact, he continues, "In small rooms, I've never heard people saying they have too much absorption of low frequencies.”

Absorption & Diffusion: What, Where, Why?

To achieve the right balance, there are two main approaches: absorption and diffusion. Products that have absorptive properties include foam and rigid mineral-wool (see the 'DIY & Rockwool' box), and they 'soak up' the sound energy, turning it into heat, through friction. Most effective on high‑frequencies, absorption is essential for reducing flutter echoes and for taming bright‑sounding or 'ringy' rooms. Bass trapping is also a type of absorption, but is specifically designed to absorb low‑frequency energy. A clever combination of soft, hard, thick and thin materials, including air, is used to make the most efficient bass trap, and an empty gap between the wall and the back of the trap helps to make it even more effective.

Diffusion is the scattering of sound energy using multi‑faceted surfaces. Diffusers are commonly made of wood, plastic, or even polystyrene. Jorge Castro explains: "diffusion helps in energy control and improves the sound quality in frequencies throughout the middle and high range of the spectrum, and also improves sweet‑spot image.” The 'sweet spot' is the place between the speakers where you should be sitting to get the best stereo image (imagine that your head and the two speakers form an equilateral triangle). That pretty much concludes the theory: now for the practice!

Getting Started

Before undertaking this project, I'd read plenty about acoustics, but had never attempted to properly treat a room myself: the nearest I'd come was propping foam panels against the walls to tame flutter in the spare‑room‑cum‑studio of my rented house. I hadn't been able to glue or screw anything to the walls, for fear of incurring my landlord's wrath, and the thought of retouching the paintwork after tearing strips of self‑adhesive velcro pained me too! So this was very much a learning experience.

The space in question included an area that would provide a reasonable‑sized live room, and another that would serve as a small control room, and although both were important, I really wanted to get the performance space right. I decided that I'd buy commercially available panels, because I simply didn't have the time, space or inclination for the DIY option. Most manufacturers of acoustic products also offer a consultation service, and they often have free on‑line calculators to help you decide on a suitable treatment option, too, so even if you choose the DIY route this can be a sensible place to start, and fabric acoustic panels are also available.

I chose to get my treatment from Vicoustic, a company relatively new to the UK acoustic‑treatment market who make a range of products for studios and home theatres. I told them that, as this was the only live room for a small project studio, it needed to be quite versatile, with both a 'dead' corner for dry recordings and a more ambient space to liven up acoustic recordings where needed. I'd expected a solution with almost complete wall coverage, foam panels and diffusers covering every square inch, but Vicoustic came back with a plan that surprised me, which suggested that total coverage wasn't necessary.

In fact, Jorge says that the typical home studio needs only between 30 and 40 percent coverage to adequately treat it. So don't go over the top: remember that we're trying to control the energy, or "restore the natural sound balance,” and not to kill the sound completely.

As for the proportion of diffusion to absorption, Jorge says, "some believe it should be 50 percent absorption and 50 percent diffusion. In the home studio, because of budget and space constraints, the actual proportion can vary considerably.”

Planning

So, you've decided on your acoustic foam treatment, you've had it delivered, and it's piled in the middle of the room. The next step is sticking it up on the walls, right? Well yes... but you also want to make sure that it goes in the right place, partly to optimise its acoustic performance, and partly because you don't want it to look like it's been put up by a two‑year old! As a first‑timer, I found it useful to have the 3D drawings Vicoustic had supplied, as they enabled me to plan precisely where each panel would go. You can create a computer‑generated version of your room yourself using a freeware 3D drawing programme such as Google Sketchup (http://sketchup.google.com). This may seem a bit over the top (sketches on the back of an envelope would do the job), but it can provide a useful guide to print out and use like a map during installation. What's more, you can plan the look of a room, moving tiles and panels around on the computer instead of having to rip them off the wall if they look silly.

Measure Twice, Stick Once

With my 'map' in hand, it was time to mark up the walls. The Vicoustic plans showed the panels equally spaced along the walls, but without any dimensions or measurements to indicate how to space the tiles, so I measured the whole room and planned the position of all the panels supplied. A quick and easy formula for plotting the position of a row of equally spaced panels soon emerged. To calculate the distance between each panel, and between the end panels and the walls, you just measure the length of the wall, subtract the total width of all the panels to be fixed to it, then divide that figure by the number of gaps between panels (or by the number of panels plus one). Marking up is then a cinch, but to get things looking good, you'll need to mark the corner points and will require a spirit level and a spare pair of hands. Once plotted and marked, it's also a good idea to double‑check that you have the same number of actual panels as you have on your plan!

Stick 'Em Up!

With the planning done, it's time to stick the panels to the walls and ceiling. The way you do this depends on the type of treatment you're applying. Large, framed panels will come with brackets and (hopefully) sturdy fixings, whereas foam‑based tiles will need to be glued, using an aerosol‑based product or a tube of paste‑like glue that needs a skeleton gun. Spray‑mounting can often give less than satisfactory results, so I was glad to discover that the Vicoustic delivery included the tube variety. With just two tubes supplied, though, I soon had to resort to alternatives, and found that the sticky gunk used to fix mirrors to walls worked exceptionally well.

To prevent the glue squidging out from the sides of the panels, I piped the glue on no less than an inch from the guide line on the wall and on the back of the panel itself, in different patterns, to increase the adhesion. With this kind of glue, I found that it would begin to set in about a minute, allowing just enough time to pull the panel off and turn it if it was the wrong way up. When sticking panels to the ceiling, I took the same approach. It was a textured ceiling, which called for lots of glue and a firm hand to seat the panels: again, it's useful if you can get a friend to lend a hand.

Hearing The Result

Once in place, the Vicoustic treatment worked very well. The main part of the room is now nicely controlled, if a bit on the 'live' side, and the diffusers ensure excellent intelligibility of speech: a sure‑fire sign of good acoustic control. I had a few spare corner traps, which were put into the dry corner, to make it even more 'dead', and it will be easy to add a few smaller foam tiles to dampen the sound further if it's found to be too 'roomy' further down the line.

Having tried some recordings in the room, I'm happy to say that excellent sound barrier can be achieved between acoustic instruments and vocals by using the different areas of the room. Because the sound inside the room is controlled, the ambience can be used to good effect if a roomy sound is desired on the recording.

Ultimate Control

So far, I've only addressed the dedicated live/recording space, and most home studios are single rooms, with both the monitoring and performance areas in the same space, so I asked Andy Munro to explain how to approach treating such a space. "The best approach,” he said, "is to sketch the room out, then divide each dimension into thirds. If the mixing position is on a third ratio, and so are the speakers, they will not stand on any of the half or quarter 'standing' wavelengths that cause a peak or trough in the bass [see the 'Standing Waves' box for more information]. The result will be a smoother sound, with fewer problems when the acoustic absorption and sound barrier is added. Ironically, most professional rooms are set up about the centre line, which tends to result in a 'hole' at certain frequencies.”

Also important in monitoring rooms is the control of early reflections. When a speaker cone is driven, it disperses acoustic energy to the listener's ears directly, and also to the walls and ceiling of the room, and the best example may be acoustic diffuser. Uncontrolled, these early reflections bounce back into the room and reach the listener a few milliseconds later than the direct sounds, because of the additional distance they've had to travel. Unless in a large room, this delay is not perceivable as a different sound; instead it disturbs the phase, and therefore the clarity, of the sound. To keep early reflections on a tight leash, the 'mirror points' of the room should be identified and treated. To do this, sit in the listening position and 'guesstimate' where a mirror would have to be placed to enable you to see each monitor cone from the sweet spot. Then apply absorption to these points. A 'ceiling cloud' can be positioned in a similar way, to control vertical reflections.

Conclusion

No matter how much you spend on instruments, amps, speakers and recording gear, you still need to pay attention to the space in which you use them. The treatment of home studios is tricky, because of their size and the construction materials used, not to mention the budget of the average home‑studio owner. It's impossible to get a 'pro-studio sound' from a space that's built as a spare bedroom, mainly due to the laws of physics, but also because 'proper' studios might have big bucks spent on acoustic design with soundproof materials. But if you can get your head around what you're trying to achieve, you can still make such a space perfectly usable, with only a small amount of money, some forward planning and a little bit of knowledge.

[rosethornewrites]

Fic: Never Let It Fade Away

Relationship: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug

Characters: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug

Tags: Sexual Harassment, Light Angst, Talking, difficult conversations, Friendship, Platonic Relationships, Sad Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Honesty, Types of love, actual Very Good Friends Ladybug and Chat Noir, he's her idiot little brother, They’re messes but at least they're messes together, Brother-Sister Relationships, Moving On, Partnership, Salt, Sugar, THEY’RE DOING THEIR BEST, Post-Episode: s03 Miracle Queen (The Battle of the Miraculous Part 2), Adrien salt, but only a tinge

Summary: Ladybug notices Chat seems withdrawn in the weeks following Miracle Queen, and they have a much-needed talk. Directly connected to "Catch a Falling Star."

Notes: Been meaning to write this for a while, as a follow-up to the conversation between Chat and Marinette in “Catch a Falling Star.” This conversation is what Kagami was referencing in “Love Language,” though she doesn’t know everything about it. No, there’s not Adrienette or Ladynoir endgame in this fic series, but Marigami/Kagaminette. There may be more one-shots between this one and “Love Language” that pop up to show the movement toward that.

AO3 link

Part of the Catch a Falling Star series | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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She was embarrassed to admit how long it took her to notice Chat seemed withdrawn, even pensive. Everything had happened all at once—the expulsion, giving up on Adrien, Miracle Queen, the loss of Fu… Chat was her partner and she’d failed to even think about him.

The realization hit her on patrol one night; it felt like he was looking through her, his smile similar to Adrien’s model smile in its falseness.

“Chat, are you doing okay?” she asked when they reached the Eiffel Tower, their last stop of the night.

He started, looking at her wide-eyed for a moment.

“A lot has happened,” she continued, “and I’ve been so focused on the changes, I haven’t checked to see how you’re doing. You seem… withdrawn.”

He looked away, up at the stars winking above them, partly drowned out by the light pollution of the city. The sigh he let out was almost resigned.

“I’ve… been thinking a lot,” he said after nearly thirty seconds of uncomfortable silence had passed between them. “A while back, I had a conversation with Marinette Dupain-Cheng; you know her, right?”

Ladybug nodded, feeling awkward to have him talk about her true self like that.

“I saw her crying on her balcony, stopped to check on her. She was going through some things at school. And one of the things she mentioned was a friend being sexually harassed.”

Her mouth went dry at that; his body language, hunched in slightly, his faux tail curled around his leg… She wasn’t sure where he was going with this. Had he been harassed? As Chat? As his civilian self? Was he hurt?

“I… after what that one Félix kid pulled—the one you punched?—I just…”

He looked up then, and she was startled to see tears in his eyes.

“I’ve harassed you. And I am so so sorry I put you through that. I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable, and if you want to punch me too, I know I deserve it.”

Her mind whirled, relief at the fact that he wasn’t a victim, shock at his belief he’d victimized her. She’d been irritated with his flirting, sure, but she’d never considered it sexual harassment.

When she reached forward, he flinched slightly, as though expecting that punch. Instead she grasped his shoulder.

“Chat, I punched him because he tried to kiss me and I didn’t trust him to stop when I told him no. You’ve always given me time to say no, and you’ve always respected my answer. You’ve never tried to force yourself on me. I trust you.”

His body tremored under her hand.

“I looked up sexual harassment, though,” he said. “And I kept asking, kept bothering you to go out on a date, kept flirting when you when you said to stop, and I keep making you say no when once should be enough. I’m horrible.”

“No, you’re not. Don’t talk about my partner that way.”

She sighed softly when he looked away.

“You… Look, I’ve been irritated at times. Like when you do it while we’re fighting Akumas. And, well, it’s hard. You’re one of my best friends, and I know how you feel, and I wish I felt the same. But I’ve never felt sexually harassed by you. Ever.”

Chat glanced up again, his gaze uncertain. “Really?”

“Really. I won’t deny that it sucks to have to turn you down, because I hate hurting you. I do love you, just not like how you want me to.” She squeezed his shoulder. “I want you to be happy, Chaton. And I worry that being stuck on me, you’ll miss out on someone wonderful.”

He quirked a wry smile, the meaning obvious.

Ladybug sighed softly. “I’m not as wonderful as you think I am, you know. I’m a mess, especially outside the mask. But your friendship has meant so much to me; I’d be a much bigger mess in the mask if not for you.”

She was glad to see his smile turn more genuine at that.

“Until this year, I didn’t really have friends,” she continued. “I was actually bullied pretty badly. And I almost quit being Ladybug in the beginning. I would have, if not for you. You, and this, helped me gain confidence.”

“I didn’t have friends until this year, either.” There was wonderment in Chat’s voice at finding they had this in common. “I don’t have a lot of social experience. It’s really made it hard to make friends—and you were one of my first real ones, too. My only friend before that was… well, she’s pretty awful. I used to watch movies and TV and imagine I was friends with the characters.”

Though that information was new, Ladybug also wasn’t surprised.

“That’s where you got your ideas about romance, isn’t it?”

At his nod, she sighed again. She gestured at the beam they were standing on, and was glad when Chat took a seat, letting one of his legs hang over. She sat beside him, crossing her legs, getting comfortable.

“Chat, so many of the relationships portrayed in TV and movies are super toxic or even abusive.”

His ears flicked back, and he looked chagrined. “Yeah, I learned that when I was looking up sexual harassment.”

It had clearly been an upsetting realization for him. Probably it had really challenged what he thought he knew about the world.

“It’s not really your fault,” she told him. “A lot of people our age don’t know. We’re young and we live in a society that normalizes that stuff. I’ve been… not great myself at it. I’ve engaged in toxic behavior myself. Toward the person I had a crush on.”

“You did? But you’re so professional, LB.”

His surprise made her wince.

“Yeah, but I’m human, too. And we’re both, what? Fourteen? Fifteen? I’ve done things I’m not proud of. Like stalkery things, a lot worse than what you’ve done flirting with me. And I ultimately decided I needed to let my crush go.”

Chat’s mouth opened, then closed. “Why?” he finally asked.

That was a complicated question to answer.

“Well, who’s to say I wouldn’t be just as toxic in a relationship with him, for one,” she said softly. “But also… I’ve been through a lot in my real life lately. And the crush started to fade as a result. A friend was growing closer to him so… I let him go. I don’t even know if I’m ready for a romantic relationship at all right now. Things as a civilian are difficult right now. And maybe I need time to figure myself out first, you know?”

After a short pause, Chat nodded. “I understand. A friend… In my life, a friend of mine has expressed interest in dating me. And I’m just not sure. I don’t know if I feel that way about her, and I’m afraid of hurting her. And…” He glanced at her. “Well, you’re not wrong. I’ve been holding out for you, which hasn’t been fair to you.”

“To either of us,” Ladybug amended. “Chat, you’re one of my first friends, my most important friend, my partner. I’m an only child, and it’s like through you I’ve gained a brother.” She quirked a smile. “A dorky, pun-loving little brother.”

He laughed. “Hey, maybe I’m older than you! You don’t know!”

“You act younger, so my headcanon has you as the little brother,” she retorted with a giggle.

It was nice to see him laugh. Hangdog looks had no place on a cat. But Ladybug knew there was more that needed to be said, that they needed to get out. None of this was easy, but she’d learned that the necessary conversations rarely were. She was glad it wasn’t a school night, that they had time for it.

“Sometimes… I was worried you didn’t want to be my friend,” she confessed. “Because you wanted more. And I’m not really good with self-confidence.”

“No…” The look on Chat’s face was one of horror. “I absolutely value your friendship, and I’m so glad I met you. It’s…” He looked down for a moment. “This is dumb, but I like this trope in movies and shows and anime, the friends to lovers one?”

He seemed to be struggling for words, but Ladybug knew the one he was talking about.

“Oh, so like superhero partners and friends, like the idea of destiny sort of thing?”

“Yeah, that. Dumb, right?”

She shoved his shoulder with her fist, a fake punch, much different from the one Félix had gotten—and for good reason, as Chat was nothing like that horrible brat.

“Maybe a little, but only because real life is way different from that, you ridiculous weeaboo.”

Chat actually giggle-snorted, sending Ladybug into a giggle-fit that left her wheezing.

When they had recovered, Chat offered a sad smile.

“You know, I wonder if I’m in love with ideas more than anything,” he said softly. “Like… this isn’t how I act in real life. I’d share more, but identity stuff. I’m able to be me as Chat more than anywhere else. And I guess I’m scared people in my real life love the idea of me instead of who I am. But I’ve been doing that to you, too, haven’t I?”

She smiled back. “Probably. As I said, I’m a total spacey mess in my real life. Can’t share more, same reason. And I think I did that to the boy I liked, too. So you’re not alone there, either.”

“We’re both messes, LB. We can be messes together. In, you know, a platonic way.”

“Thanks, minou.”

They sat in companionable silence for a while. Eventually, she lay back on the beam to stargaze, and he mirrored her movement from the other side, until their heads were beside each other.

“Do you really hate it when I call you Bugaboo? And m’lady?” he finally asked.

Ladybug hesitated for a moment. “Well, hate is a strong word… Friends make up nicknames for each other, after all. It just felt like you were calling me those like as a potential girlfriend.”

“Well… kind of. But more because they’re pretty awesome puns on Ladybug.”

She turned and stared at him. He was smirking.

“You know how much I love those, right?”

“Oh my god you are an idiot.”

“But I’m your idiot little brother.”

Ladybug groaned, almost sorry she mentioned that. But at the same time, it seemed they could turn over a new leaf, create the partnership and friendship they both needed.

“Thanks for checking in on me, Bugs. I don’t think I’d have ever gotten the courage to apologize otherwise.”

She snorted at the new nickname, reaching up to awkwardly ruffle his hair. She was rewarded with a purr. “No problem, mon petit frérot. We both needed to talk.”

She relaxed, watching the moon slice across the stars as time passed them by, relieved that at least this part of her life was in the process of being healed.

[comradesummers]

For the preference ask: Cordelia, Drusilla, Darla, Lilah and Fred?

Hey, thanks for asking! Sorry I took a while to respond (Zoom college is somehow even more stressful and time-consuming than regular college). Also, keep in mind that I’ve only seen all of Angel once, so some of this is going to be based on somewhat vague memories.

5. Darla

I feel so bad for this, because she really is a good character, and Julie Benz gives an incredible performance, but she’s just not my favorite? Partly because of my personal bias, in that I have a hard time connecting with soulless characters in general, and I feel like most of her time as a human was about Lindsey for some reason. 

But that ties into my real problem with her character, which is that despite being absolutely fascinating in theory, I felt like she was not explored as much as she should have been, and that she was used more as a prop to further other people’s (read: men’s) stories. Like, it always felt like her story was about Lindsay’s pain and Angel’s pain but rarely about her own. And especially the way she dies, where her pregnancy somehow makes her good all of the sudden, and then she like kills herself for her baby, which pissed me off so much. Like heroic death according to the Angel writers apparently amounts to a woman deciding that the life of a fetus is more important than her own? And moreover, she was, again, sacrificed in the name of the story of a man. Anyway, I think I’m getting a little off track here, but the point is, I feel like Darla is a complex and beautifully acted character that the writers consistently wasted and she deserved better.

4. Drusilla

Drusilla is another excellent and amazingly acted character that I feel could have been so much more if the writers had actually cared to focus on her. Needless to say, a lot of my feelings about Darla are also applicable to Drusilla. Again, there’s the part of me that just doesn’t connect to the soulless characters like a lot of you all do, and that’s on me. But even though Drusilla is not nearly as screwed over as Darla is (I mean, hey, at least she doesn’t magically turn good and kill herself for an unborn baby), of the original family of vampires, Spike and Angel got all of the character development, whereas Drusilla and Darla were constantly sidelined. I really wish we could have gotten more insight about her mindset regarding her fucked up relationship with Angel. There’s a little of that in season 2 of Buffy, but after that it’s mostly about Spike and Angel’s pissing contest. And even though Angel builds on her backstory, I still kind of felt like it was more about Angel’s guilt than anything else.

Anyway, despite all my complaints, I still love Drusilla a lot, and she does get extra points for being the only character on this list that actually survives AtS (I mean, I know the Lilah situation is complicated, but she is technically dead). God this show treated women abysmally.

3. Fred Burkle

I love Fred. Amy Acker is great, the character is super interesting, and she actually gets some of her own character development for a change (until she dies in the name of manpain, but if I start complaining about Angel’s treatment of women again I’ll never stop). My one problem with Fred is that she feels kind of exemplary of Whedon’s signature “cutesy hot female nerd” characters, without any subversion like we get with Willow. And that’s not inherently a problem, because Fred is a great character, but I personally am somewhat uncomfortable with how it sometimes seems like, fetishistic? Like maybe it’s just me, and I’m not sure I’m explaining this right, but as much as I do love Fred, this is something that’s always bothered me about her characterization.

2. Lilah Morgan

I really don’t think I need to explain this one. Lilah is one of the best characters the AtS writers ever came up with. She’s such a great villain, thoroughly evil and thoroughly likable and so much fun. She’s even sympathetic at times, without ever becoming suddenly good or dying for a fetus or some bullshit like that (I’ll never get over that). She’s honestly such an amazing character that it’s hard for me to even dissect what it is that makes her so great. Like, her brilliance transcends my ability to analyze anything and I just end up repeating myself about how awesome and hot and funny she is.

1. Cordelia Chase

Was it ever going anyone else? Cordelia is by far the best character on Angel. Her character arc is so beautifully done (until it isn’t, but I’m not going to get into that). I love how as much as she changes and evolves and becomes a true hero, she’s still always recognizably Cordelia. She doesn’t need to lose who she is in order to become a better person, because her empathy and love and heroism where always a part of her. She was hiding those parts of herself, and she just needed the right circumstances to bring them out of her. And I just love that so much. Like, that the story isn’t about Cordelia changing exactly, but about her coming to realize who she really is and always has been and coming into her own and learning to love and respect herself and define herself outside of how others see her. It’s so lovely and I made myself really emotional by writing about it just now. I just love Cordelia Chase so fucking much.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

Lover is the Queliot Soundtrack!!

this is 100% true and i have hyena yelled about it at length before and continue to think about it really a bizarre amount... i had a lot of weird feelings about lover when it came out ANYWAY because i have a lot of weird feelings about taylor swift which i like to attribute to the fact that we are astrological mirror twins of a kind (cap sun sag stellium vs. sag sun cap stellium) because honestly i am truly powerless to explain through logic why it is that i think about her so often and in such depth given that my reaction to most of her work is pretty muted in either direction. but like, the thing between me and being really into her as a musician had always been this overall hollowness i felt in her writing, like she has from the beginning definitely had her consistent strengths and her moments of total brilliance, but so much of her lyrical material feels like it was made by a martian whose exposure to humanity was watching a bunch of CW dramas, or whatever (which itself also isn’t necessarily like awful but i always bristled more about it because people tended to praise her specifically for her eye for detail and her emotional insight and i was like ??? that’s the part you like? but where... is it?) (this is all also happening in a context where i encounter her first at age 19 so i’m old enough to think teenagers are children but too young to understand that i’m only very barely not a child and way too young to empathize forgivingly with my teenage self much less take that healing and use it to fuel an expansion of empathy for others and a general diminishment of kneejerk reactivity, also my journey of taylor swift opinions is inextricable from the internet contexts of feminist blogging/tumblr pop talk, and the evolving conversations there and my own shifting ideas about them, i hung around in for a long time... anyway.) (CAP SUN SAG STELLIUM VS. SAG SUN CAP STELLIUM I AM DOOMED TO DISPROPORTIONATE FASCINATION)

the thing she tuned into earliest, the subject matter on which she found her voice first, was heartbreak, right, and it never bothered me the way it did some that to public appearances she’d never had a relationship longer than 3 months; you can get your heart broken in 3 months. artists in general tend to be people who experience feelings strongly, i think less because you need to feel things strongly to make art (which i’m not sure is true) than the other way around: people who experience feelings strongly need to find a way to deal with that, and art, making or experiencing it, is one of the more socially acceptable and productive coping mechanisms around. a certain inner grandiosity can be useful for artists, which is why melodrama is a perfect album. (melodrama manages this very neat balancing act of being wry and self-aware enough to let you know it’s on purpose but also being full-throatedly committed to the affective grandeur of being 19 and on fire; i mention that mostly because another shade of my doomed fixation with taylor swift is she’s a proxy for my issues around sincerity & jadedness & shame &, yeah, where the hell into all of that art fits.) i think this is probably especially true for artists working in a form like music, like pop music, that succeeds viscerally or not at all, that can include an intellectual dimension but can’t rest solely on matters of thought, can be analyzed but not wholly appreciated primarily through the analytical mind. music like emotions is a bodily experience and you can’t instruct your body into what may appear a more proportionate response, so there’s relief in watching someone else skywrite commonplace heartbreaks as big as they always feel inside us. megaphone to my chest: broadcast the boom, boom, boom.

it was her descriptions of love that left me colder, and as her career went on there was something to—i don’t really want to get into the question around her celebrity self and a narrative of victimhood, except i think it’s more complicated than people on either side of the issue tend to acknowledge, but it was a difficult narrative to escape, and it did intertwine for me in noticing in her work a certain... i don’t even know what to call it. “lack of introspection” comes to mind, but obviously taylor swift is no stranger to her own thoughts; the way people talked about it tended to hinge on this idea that she never took responsibility in her music, that it’s alway someone else’s fault, which, see above re: it’s complicated. i don’t think that narrative about her music would have taken hold without the narrative about her public persona, and it’s a weird thing where i see resonance in that critique with the thing i’m trying to name but also think that on its own it doesn’t mean much. there are plenty of great break-up songs that take no responsibility. part of the joy for me of pop (used in one of the broader senses) is precisely that because songs exists as 3.5 minute bursts of sensation it’s a realm particularly suited to indulging pleasurably in the less evolved areas of our psyche. the role of the artist is not to meticulous address across their body of work every emotion a human being can have. it’s never bob dylan’s fault either but who wants to hear that song?

i keep talking about the narrative around her persona and again: complicated. i’m not going to detail the factors, because it’s not 2015. but it’s not like at times she didn’t lean in, right? i mean she can be so annoying. and i think what i was reacting to was not so much her insistence on positioning herself as a victim (i mean, after the initial shock i kind of fell in love with look what you made me do, not despite but because of the fact that it’s so dumb and nasty) but simply that the repeated act of self-positioning over time near inevitably invites a certain calcification. there’s a line between shaping your memories into narrative to make use of the meaning you can find there, and attaching to the story of yourself so strongly that you lose sight of your actual self, which is unfixed and fluid and ever-changing. it’s possible to begin scrambling subconsciously to match your self to your story, rather than the other way around. and a public self, a self which exists in lopsided unrelationship with people you will never meet, exacerbates this tendency for all but the most secure in their true identity. there’s spiritual danger in becoming a brand. there were a lot of reasons i deleted my not even very popular personal blog but one of them was this: i had started to worry that i might be ready to outgrow the self i had built there and not be able to see or actualize it. years ago i read a book about the ancient celts and the only thing i remember was the suggestion that the religion of the druids retained a degree of spiritual potency and mysticism lost to the ancient greeks because the druids didn’t write anything down. i don’t know if that’s true but it stuck with me.

anyway. when reputation came out i called new year’s day the first song she’d ever written as an adult specifically because of how it located the self in the verb of loving—don’t read the last page, but i stay—which felt to me like the first true thing she’d said about love. and then after hammering us with the one-two punch of the two most heinous songs of her career, because whatever else taylor swift she also is a dummy with terrible taste, it turned out that lover was after all an album that mostly lived there too. it was an album where she did cop to bad behavior, no winking or cuteness, and more than that where she named regrets in a way that had weight; i still kind of can’t believe taylor swift came out with something as real as “i never grew up / it’s getting so old.” and it was also the album where she first sounded convincingly besotted, uncomplicatedly joyful; the album where she finally learned years after crossing over how to write a pop song that was actually fun. there was an ease to it, a refreshing and novel sense of not having anything to prove. and it just really fucked me up listening to it and thinking inescapably that these might be linked: that it really seemed like what happened, partly, was taylor swift fell in actual love and it let her give up on some of the frantic posturing that was choking her art. that something really good happened and it made space in her head and therefore in her songs for the beauty and the ache, the ugliness and the joy. i recognize that this has long since passed unhinged territory regarding speculation onto the spiritual journey of a famous stranger. i really don’t get like this about anyone else, including any of the many artists i like a lot more. blame it on the stars.

anyway, so that’s all a dementedly long way of saying that even beyond which the fact that nearly every track on this 18-track behemoth is undeniably Queliot Content, i have these preexisting bizarre and unreasonable feelings about the like meta-statement of lover as an album in taylor swift’s body of work, what it means not just as a collection of songs but as this album coming from this artist, which........... are also, now, Queliot Content???? because that’s all the quentin/eliot thing, right: these are two people who are very, very afraid of their own darkness. they latch onto these narratives of self partly to try to escape the parts of themselves they don’t want to look at. and it’s not even that those narratives are totally wrong: quentin really is brave and loyal and caring and all that hero stuff; eliot really is funny and sharp and fond of the finer things in life. (there’s nothing about lover that is not deeply, absolutely a taylor swift album.) but they’re incomplete. they’re archetypes. they don’t have room for the fullness of their hearts and their lives, the bad stuff and the good. they’re so afraid of their flaws and their pain that they can’t see their strengths or feel their joys. quentin in season 1 can’t see that really and truly alice doesn’t give a shit that he’s not as good a magician as she is, and that will only ever be an issue as long as he makes it one. eliot can’t see the depths of his own enormous heart, or trust margo’s love enough to follow up on her emotion-bottles plea to save their friendship. and this sucks for them, and also for the people around them! they do a lot of bad things in their attempts to protect themselves.

and the very lovely thing the show unbelievably seems to have well and truly done by accident and had no interest in exploring but which remains nonetheless delightful to consider rly is this exact idea of, like: together they find something good and it doesn’t fix anything but it makes space for everything. bleep blorp, beauty of all life. the bad and the good. they find something good and it helps them be brave. it helps them let go of who they’re “supposed” to be, not to reject every piece of it out of hand but to pick and choose: what here serves me still? what reflects who i am today? pruning away the defenses you just don’t need anymore. i used to think “i forgot that you existed” felt like a rep-overgrowth taylor mistakenly thought she needed, over-narrativized context-setting for an album that really stood on its own, and, i mean, it is that, a little bit. she’s still taylor; her version of chilling out is still most people’s frighteningly intense. but i like how weightless it is, how sonically it recaptures the kind of quiet elation of that feeling. how “i thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t” is about the strange distance of that past self so convinced she could never let go, which is to say it’s also about healing. about recognizing your own enough-ness so that you can see what it is you really need. quentin and eliot are both constantly asking this question: what is the thing that is going to fill up the space inside of me where i should have something else? is it school, magic, clothes, wine, a girl, a boy, a crown, a quest? and the answer is—it’s not “each other.” the answer is nothing. but their kind of open-hearted love is the thing they need to see that’s true.

[jamaisjoons]

(1/7) I'm sorry this is going to be super long, so if you actually answer this I'll be so thankful lol... idk how much experience you have in relationships and sexuality and whatnot but I just really need to ask someone about this and you seem super friendly and nice so I wanted to ask you, and if anyone else reading this ask wants to give me advice I'd love and appreciate that as well - I'll keep an eye on the comments 💜 So I've been in a relationship for over 5 years now. I want to preface

this ask is incredibly long and if therefore the rest, along with my response, is under the read more!

(2/7) this with saying that I'm not unhappy with my relationship overall. And I honestly do prioritize emotional connection over physical, but this is something that's been on my mind recently, especially since I started getting into reading fanfics and learning more about how diverse and explorative someone can be with sexuality. My current boyfriend was my first serious relationship so I never experienced anyone else sexually. And I know stories romanticize, dramatize, and exaggerate things

(3/7) so I don't expect that I should be able to experience my sex life exactly as its portrayed in the fictions I read. I've been generally content with my sex life with my boyfriend, while maybe not fully satisfied but content. But lately its been bothering me. I've always had a higher drive than him so I don't mind needing to... take care of myself most days and just have sex whenever he's up for it. (Although he gets whiny if I'm not up for it the day he is, which I guess is partly fair

(4/7) since there's only like 2 days a month I'm not horny lol). And I do tend to take quite a bit longer to uh... well, cum, than he does as well so I've never really taken any offense to him not trying super hard to get me there. Lately it has been bothering me though... he does give effort to it most of the time but gives up because he has trouble getting the right spots and/or it takes a long time (and yeah I chalk that up to female anatomy being more complicated than male so while it is

(5/7) disappointing, I excuse it because of that) But it bothers me because I feel like I try to push myself more to figure out what he likes and try different things out of my comfort zone more than he does for me. (i.e. I've recently started trying to get used to anal even though so far its painful and I haven't found pleasure in it yet because it's something he's always wanted to do). He also loves blow jobs and always wants one - kind of expects it and gets disappointed if I tell him I don't

(6/7) want to that day and sometimes (most of the time) tries to push it, even though I don't push him if he doesn't want to go down on me. I've more or less given up on trying to cum when we have sex, just kind of settled on enjoying it for a while and helping him and then finishing myself off after. I'll sometimes ask him to help afterwards, and he'll help with some stimulation like nipple play and stuff for a bit, but if he's already gotten his release I feel like he treats it like a chore.

(7/7) It's just been bothering me more and more lately. I'm worried about talking to him about it because idk if I'm just being needy or if he'll be offended or upset. And I don't really know how to fix it anyway so idk how to bring it up or any solutions to offer but since its been bothering me more I don't want to just leave it as it is. Do you have any advice for me? Also I'm SO SORRY for the novel and going probably too detailed into my sex life... I hope this wasn't bothersome or annoying!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

i’m gonna preface this with im not a professional and any advice i give is based on my own feelings and thoughts and based on experiences of my own and they won’t be the same as yours! please take caution reading/heeding any of my advice because really i’m not any different to you and i have no real qualifications for giving out sexual advice.

so honestly speaking, i have a fear of commitment and trust issues and as a result i don’t very often partake in committed relationships (i’ve been willingly and happily single for YEARS) - and my previous ones weren’t all that good either (my last two ended with cheating rip). but i’m happy to help in any way possible and it means a lot that you feel like you can speak to me about this!

Okay so, my first point is that sex is honestly diverse and yes its always mindblowing in fics, but in reality its not always the case. sometimes sex is bland, sometimes its really good, and sometimes you don’t really enjoy yourself (not in a bad or nonconsensual way, but more it doesn’t leave you as fulfilled as it could and it just feels,,,, meh for a lack of better word for it). that being said, considering you’ve been in a relationship for a long time and it’s your first and (i assume only? sexual partner) i can potentially see why its just been a case of contentment and not real fulfilment - especially, since it seems you haven’t really been communicating and taking each other’s feelings into consideration? well him more so than you.

Side point, he really shouldn’t be whining if you don’t want to have sex but as long as he’s not pressuring you into anything its fine - people tend to whine (i know i do sometimes too)

Okay so in terms of cumming, not everyone takes the same amount of time to cum. some really need lots of stimulation and stuff in order to really cum and others cum really quickly. its an individual thing - but you definitely seem like the former. That being said, just because you take longer to cum and the female anatomy is more complex (really its not t H A T hard) doesn’t mean he should give up - you work hard for him to make him cum and he should do the same for you. especially since you’ve been together for so long.

A lot of this seems that you’re actively trying more than he is (you’re not obligated to give him oral, especially if he doesn’t reciprocate and he definitely shouldn’t push it). In terms of anal, the human body is different from person to person and not everyone is wired the same. just because someone else enjoys anal doesn’t mean you will, and if it’s painful and you’re not enjoying it, perhaps it’s best to tell him to stop because you get nothing out of it. if he loves you, he’ll make the sacrifice even if he enjoys it (like you’ve been doing for him this entire time). If he’s cummed and he’s not actively wanting to make you cum - you need to call him out on it because it's not fair for him to orgasm and for you to work for it yourself. it’s downright selfish and bad sexual practices and more than anything its not okay and its not a healthy sex life.

I think my best advice right now is to actually talk and communicate with him. A good, healthy sexual relationship that satisfies both parties, can only and will only ever be possible through open communication. you’ve been together five years and you’ve said you’re happy with your relationship overall - which means that you’ve known each other long enough to openly communicate with each other about your likes/dislikes/things you want to try/how they can help. Thats the blanket one, but here are some things you can talk to him about:

In terms of making you cum - you know your body better than anyone else, so perhaps showing him what places are your erogenous zones may be an effective way. If you feel comfortable, sit in front of him and masturbate - show him what gets you off. Sometimes even have him participate - direct his hands to where you want him, tell him when something feels good, when something doesn’t feel so good. but communicate

Tell him that you always try for him and it’s upsetting and makes you feel unsatisfied when he doesn’t put in the same enthusiasm. in sexual relationships, there is compromise and sometimes you do things you don’t necessarily enjoy just as an act of love and care (one of my irls hated giving her boyfriend blowjobs but she used to do it because he enjoyed them and that's okay because she was willing to do it out of love. there were also things he compromised for her like how he never enjoyed wearing condoms because it didn’t feel as good but she didn’t want to go on birth control so he accepted it). There are clearly things you are willing to compromise on (anal) and so he should be doing the same for you

You’re both different people and have different sexual interests and what feels good for you. You should both put in effort to explore these together. Have an actual conversation with him - and if he doesn’t take your feelings, if he starts getting upset or offended, then that speaks more for him. but if he loves you, if he’s a good partner and boyfriend, he will actively listen to you and your feelings and try and understand them. without communication sex and relationships are nothing and you cannot be afraid to speak to him or not speak to him for fear of him reacting negatively.

also if he does reactively, maybe it’s worth considering if this relationship is worth going on with. sometimes people stay with each other because it’s all they know, because they’ve been together for a long time and they fear starting fresh. but that is not healthy. if something isn’t working, no matter how much time and effort you’ve put into it, it’s not worth staying and being unhappy and the best thing you can do is gather the courage to get up, leave and move on and find happiness somewhere else.

i think ? i’ve got most of my points across, but if there’s anything you need clarification on, please do feel free to message me again! but please remember my earlier disclaimer: i am in no way shape or form a professional and i have no qualifications in order to give you advice. these are just my thoughts/opinions/how i see things!!

anyway, i hope this helped! i’m so sorry it took so long to get back to you!

[leejihoonownsmyheart]

Click, Click

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4 , 5 , 6 , 7, 8 , 9 , 10 , 11, 12, 13

Chapter Fourteen:

Your friends had been pretty mad when you finally showed back up at the hotel. While you had the forethought to text your teacher sometime in the night that you were out and safe, you didn’t say anything at all to your friends.

When you finally drug yourself back over to your room, still in the same clothes from the night before looking pretty disheveled and unable to stop smiling you were greeted by a handful of frowning adults.

“And where have you been all night?” Julia demanded, crossing her arms over her chest. You closed the door silently behind you.

“Just…  Sightseeing,” you stated softly.

“Yeah, but with who?” Caitlin insisted. Your cheeks reddened, betraying almost immediately who you had been out with. You still tried to deny it.

“Who even says-”

“Have you not seen the post yet?” Julia interrupted before you could speak. She rolled her eyes. “How is it we see all the stuff about her boyfriend before she does?”

Your eyebrows raised in a way that must have seemed a little comedic because it made Paige- who was also in the room for some reason- giggle. You pointed at her.

“Did you guys tell her?” You exclaimed accusatorily, your brain doing a mental 360. While you trusted Paige not to tell anybody or make a big deal out of this, you worried what would happen if too many people knew about this. You didn’t want anyone to find out and get mad at Jihoon, especially since the two of you weren’t even sure exactly what you two were.

“Oh they didn’t have to tell me anything,” Paige stated in response, putting her hands on her hips. “All I had to do was look to my left to see him kissing you.”

Your face turned beet red.

“Wha-”

“How could you two be so careless, you idiot?” Julia asked, sharply hitting you over the head. You pouted again.

“I told him not to,” you mumbled softly, but no one in the room seemed to care. Caitlin just shook her head slowly and reached forward as if she were about to hit you too. “Don’t do that! You should be hitting him!”

“How long have you two been a thing?” Paige practically squealed, rushing over to you and grabbing your hands. You were surprised by the action but forced a laugh from your lips instead of showing your discomfort.

“Oh, we aren’t a thing,” you mumbled. “Uh, just friends I guess.”

“Friends who are with each other for the first time in weeks for ten seconds and he is already dramatically pulling you into a kdrama worthy kiss?” Paige asked, raising her eyebrows. “Seems plausible.”

You scoffed and dropped your bag to the ground, sliding your shoes off your feet.

“It’s complicated,” you mumbled softly. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”

Before anyone could say anything else you shuffled past them and fell face forward on your bed, glad to be back in your hotel, but already missing the time you had spent with Jihoon.

-

Once you got back to Korea from Japan, the first thing you did was start working again.

You picked up more hours at the little store than you ever had before and started spending all your free time there. You studied on breaks or between gaps in shifts and did your homework in-between sleeping and everything else.

Your friends were giving you space, even though you didn’t really need it. They had just assumed you were trying to consume yourself into as much as possible to help you forget about the fact that Jihoon was still in Japan.

But you weren’t upset really, you were fine.

Happy even.

You finally felt like you were in the groove of things again. Like you had control over your life again.

You had just gotten through a short rush at work and were turning to grab some supplies to restock when the bell to the store dinged sweetly.

“Hi! Welcome! If you have any questions! You can just ask me!” Instead of a grunt in response, you heard the sound of something falling and a sharp gasp.

“Y/n, you’re back.”

You turned around in surprise and found yourself staring at a boy your age. He was in a black shirt that was a little long on him, and he had on dark jeans and colorful shoes. You vaguely recognized him, but you had to think of…

“Jongin?” You asked hesitantly. He broke out into a large smile.

“You were in Japan for so long!” He blurted.

“It was only a week,” you mumbled back.

“A week too long, I’ve been itching to hang out with you.”

He strolled over to the front counter and rested his elbows on it staring at you with a strange expression on his face. It made you frown a bit. You hated to be scrutinized like this, especially by someone you didn’t know. And even more so, you were confused with his excitement at seeing you. The two of you had only ever met once. There was no reason for him to have missed you at all.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you knew that he hung out with Caitlin and Julia and that he had been asking you guys if you would all ever hang out all together, but you had a habit of canceling on those plans, insisting you had homework or work itself.

Eventually, they stopped asking you to come, but they always told you when they were hanging out with him.

“So when do you get off today? You’re not doing anything afterwards are you?” He asked you. You wrinkled your nose.

“Well-”

“Don’t say you have homework, I swear all you ever do is study and work. Hang out with me y/n!”

You stared at him silently for a long moment, wondering what his angle could possibly be.

He didn’t know you, but he was clearly intent on hanging out with you. It was honestly hard for you to tell someone no once, much less multiple times in one sitting. You didn’t want to hang out with him. That much you knew for sure. But you also didn’t want to disappoint the oddly excited guy.

All you wanted to do, to be entirely honest, was to go home and see what Seventeen had been up to. Their promotions in Japan should be coming to an end soon. You would surely see Jihoon again soon. He could be back in Korea today for all you knew and if you went out you might run into him.

“When does your shift end,” Jongin repeated. “I know you want to say no, but you aren’t giving me a chance! Hang out this one time with me, and if you don’t have a good time you never have to again.”

Before you could respond Jongin wrinkled his nose.

“God, I sound like such an atypical nice guy,” he mumbled, partly to himself. “I just really want the chance to get to know you!”

He still seemed bothered by his own words, so he kept rambling, leaning back away from the counter a little bit as he did, silently putting space between you too.

“It’s just your friends talk about you so much and you seem so cool and I just really want to get to know you and they said I have to be assertive, but I don’t want to make you uncomfortable and-”

You cut him off with a small giggle, one that startled you and him. You didn’t want to admit it, but quite honestly it was pretty cute the way he was tripping over his words just to convince you to come hang out with him. You hardly ever met anyone who was this willing to put in the effort to hang out with you one on one.

You liked to cancel plans with people if it seemed like other people might not go, and while you thought it could come off pretty evident when you didn’t want to be alone in a room with someone, your message didn’t ever really come clear with some people even when you didn’t budge. It meant you being stuck in some situations that left you wildly uncomfortable.

His eyes lit up as he looked at you.

“So?”

“I get off in an hour,” you replied with a roll of your eyes. “I mean, if you really want to hang out that badly-”

“I’ll just stay right here,” Jeongin replied, hopping up on the counter of the little store. You stared at him in surprise, which just made him roll his eyes. “There’s no one here, join me up here.”

You squinted at him, so he patted the space next to him.

“Come on now, don’t be such a stick in the mud,” he mumbled. You sighed and crawled up onto the counter next to him, scooting over so that you had plenty of space in-between you had him. He laughed at the action. “So it’s true then.”

“What’s true?”

“You’re always an anxious mess,” he replied. “I’m not going to bite, you know?”

You hated the way that specific choice of words ripped yourself from your current situation. You thought back to that warm day with Jihoon. You thought about the park, and the sun in your eyes as you looked at the other boy wondering why on Earth he was so insistent on spending time with you.

“Come closer, I only bite when people want me to.”

You remembered the way Jihoon would laugh when you said something that amused him. The cute little way that his fingers would hesitantly prod at you, hoping to get you closer to him, hoping to make you more comfortable in his presence.

You thought about the pictures the two of you had taken that day. You didn’t think that you appreciated them enough. You had gotten to be that close to him and take a picture right there next to him. Even though you had been confused at the time, looking back on it all you could do was wish to be in that situation again.

“Why do guys always say that?” You mumbled back. “I don’t think you are going to bite me.”

“You sure act like it,” Jongin commented. “But you sure shake a lot less now.”

Your eyebrows furrowed as you looked at the boy next to you.

“What do you mean?” You mumbled. He reached his hand out, waiting for you to put your hand in his. Normally you wouldn’t do it. Normally you wouldn’t bother even humoring a guy like him. Someone who thought they knew you at a glance. But even so, something about this whole situation- being out of your comfort zone so radically like this- it made you think of Jihoon.

If you were going to be a better… Whatever you were to Jihoon then you would have to learn to be more social with him, more trusting of other people. More like you used to be once upon a time.

You put your hand in his, and after only a mere second his fingers prodded at your hand. He traced his fingers along the lines on your palm and flipped your hand palm up, palm down, palm up, and palm down a few times before pausing to just hold your hand.

“When I first met you, you were shaking like crazy, but today you’re just normal,” he replied. You looked at your hand in his and shrugged offhandedly.

“Yeah, I have been shaking a lot less I suppose,” you mumbled.

You thought back to when Jihoon had mentioned your shaking hands, frowning a little deeper.

“Is it really that obvious?” You asked softly. Jongin pondered the question.

“Not to most people I don’t think. I always just paid more attention because of how your friends talk about you.”

You pulled your hand away from Jongin’s, an action which he didn’t seem to find too troubling as he just looked at his own hand, glanced at yours and then slid his hands under his legs.

You decided he was a little weird. A different weird from everyone else that you had met here in Korea. While Jihoon was weird, he was weirder because he was an idol who had actually developed some sort of interest in you. He paid attention to your mannerisms, more so than most people at least. He seemed to care about how you felt, liked your company, actually wanted to kiss you. It was more than you could say for most people you met.

Jongin seemed to kinda want to get to know you, but even right now you couldn’t understand why. He kept saying that it was because of what your friends would say, but you couldn’t imagine that they were saying such great things that it would make him this interested in you.

A finger flicked you in the forehead, which startled you into looking over at Jongin, he had an amused expression on his face.

“What are you thinking about?” He asked. Then he furrowed his eyebrows. “Your boyfriend? How’s he?”

Your eyebrows rose slightly.

“What boyfriend?” You blurted despite yourself. He laughed.

“Don’t be embarrassed about it, I won’t tell anyone,” he insisted. “It’s that idol right? Lee Jihoon?”

“I’m not dating Lee Jihoon,” you argued back, hitting him lightly on his arm.

“Ah, are you guys not using labels?” He asked. This time you weren’t nearly as gentle. You put both of your hands on his shoulder and pushed him off of the counter. He laughed as he almost stumbled into a display of food, just barely catching himself.

“Seriously, though you must miss him. He’s in Japan right now, right? Did you see him while you were there?” He asked. He hopped back up on the counter and gave you a sincere smile.

Normally you wouldn’t say anything to him, but you couldn’t help it at this point. He looked like he really wanted to know and you honestly really wanted to talk to someone about it. You felt like trying to hold in all of your feelings towards Jihoon was driving you crazy.

“Yeah,” you admitted softly, looking away from him to look at the palms of your hands. “We like kinda went on this huge date cause he said I should get out and see the city, and he kissed me like… Everywhere we went.”

The smile that spread across Jongin’s lips was borderline addictive. It made a smile cross your lips too.

“Shut up,” you mumbled.

“You really kissed all that much?” He teased lightly. “What else did you guys do?”

“Nothing crazy. Talked,” you replied. “But it was the most time we have ever spent together. We were together the entire night. He said that we did good for our performance, and reassured me-”

You cut yourself off, hating the way you sounded- like some stupid school girl who liked a boy for the first time and knew nothing at all, but it just made Jongin smile harder.

“Have you ever dated someone before?” He asked. Before you could answer him, he sighed. “Wait, I know this you haven’t.”

“And I still haven’t,” you repeated. “Jihoon just sees me as…”

You weren’t sure how to finish that which made Jongin chuckle.

“It’s so cute how clueless you are,” he mumbled. “Jihoon definitely likes you. He’s not the type of idol to go around just kissing fans.”

“Oh cause you know him so well,” you replied with a roll of your eyes. He shrugged.

“I know you don’t want to get your hopes up or get too excited over something that could very well amount to nothing,” he said softly. “I’m the same way honestly.”

He began to fiddle with his own fingers, seeming to get a little nervous to just talk about it.

“I kinda have a crush on…” He trailed off uncertainly and then shook his head. “Look, just- You gotta stop acting like this relationship with Jihoon is life or death. Just enjoy it! It’s your first relationship and Jihoon likes you. It’s that simple.”

The word made you completely drop the topic of who Jongin had a crush on. Instead, you just stared at your lap.

Simple.

Another reason that you couldn’t believe that Jihoon liked you. This situation was anything but simple. For crying out loud you were an international exchange student, who would only be in town for another handful of months. You two hardly got to talk or see each other, and when you did you had to be careful about who saw and you couldn’t just take pictures with him and go on dates because he was an idol and if the fans knew who knew what they would do.

So how come when you were with him it was like all of that went out the window?

You didn’t think about your time left here, or how unlikely it would be for you guys to stay together forever, or even think about how careful you had to be to make sure no one would find out about you two. All you thought about was Jihoon’s smile when you looked at him. The soft tone his voice took when you two were together.

You pressed your lips together.

“Just enjoy it, huh?”

“I mean look at yourself, your spending your time in Korea, what? Studying and working? That’s all?” He asked. “You need to have some fun. Live a little.”

“Yeah? Live and what? Go hang out with you tonight?”

Jongin’s eyes gleamed with light.

“Well, I mean…”

“Shift ends soon,” you replied with a sigh. “After that, I’m all yours.”

Chapter Fifteen

[katedoesfics]

Honey & Vinegar: Chapter 7

“Thanks for talking to them today.”

A warm breeze greeted them as Penny and Pip stepped outside of the library. The air smelled fresh and inviting in comparison to the quiet, slightly stuffy library, though Pip didn’t mind it. It seemed hardly anyone frequented the library except for Penny and the children.

“Sure,” Pip said with a shrug.

“Did you mean what you said?” Penny asked. “About you teaching them about the farm and stuff?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess. Sure.”

Penny met their gaze and smiled, her eyes closing. “That would mean the world to them,” she said happily. “And to me.” She let out a light sigh. “I can tell they get bored with their usual lessons sometimes. They’re just kids, afterall. I’m always looking for new ways to help them learn while holding their attention.”

Pip’s cheeks warmed slightly. “I’m happy to help,” they said softly. “They seem like good kids. And you’re a good person for trying to give them the best experience you can.”

“Ah, well,” Penny started. She pulled her gaze away, but smiled. “I do what I can.” She hesitated, turning her gaze to the river. “Can I ask you something?”

“I guess.”

“Why did you leave the valley?” When Pip did not respond right away, Penny spoke quickly in hopes of easing any tension. “I mean, you just said that fairies live here and don’t generally like to be bothered. So, I just… I wondered…”

“It’s okay,” Pip started reassuringly. “I guess… I just didn’t really feel like I fit in with the other fairies. I’m not particularly good at… being a fairy. And I felt reminded of that every day. Like I was an outcast. I thought maybe I would fit in better in the city, but…”

“Yeah,” Penny said softly. “People can be cruel.”

Silence fell between them for a moment, and Pip shifted uneasily on their feet.

“Why come back to the valley?” Penny asked.

“Rasmodious asked me to,” Pip admitted. “The wizard that lives in the forest.”

Penny turned to them curiously, her brows furrowed slightly. “Why?”

Pip hesitated. “I don’t know.”

Penny held her gaze on them for a moment. “Is it because of what’s been going on lately?”

Pip turned to meet Penny’s gaze. “What do you mean?”

Penny’s gaze moved to her feet. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “There have been… a lot of changes in the valley over the last year. Little things, mostly. Most people don’t seem to notice. But, with JoJa Mart being here now and all, I just… have a bad feeling about everything. I’m afraid we’re going to lose the valley and all the magic that it has. It seems people have been forgetting about what makes this place so special.” Her lips pressed together and she turned back to Pip. “The Imps you talked about… there are some here, aren’t there?”

Pip nodded. “Seems to be, though I haven’t seen any yet.”

“What will happen?”

Pip hesitated, unwilling to scare Penny. But, maybe someone needed to know the truth. “Depends on how bad it gets,” they said. “In small numbers, they’re generally harmless. An annoyance, really. But as they grow in numbers and in power, they can do some real damage. The changes you’ve noticed could be partly due to the Imps.”

“Can’t the fairies stop them?”

“It’s complicated,” Pip started. “Imps often start as fairies. Fairies that have been turned for one reason or another. Fairies that we consider friends; family, even. Comrades. There’s a bond shared between us, especially those who have shared Birth Flowers, or Birth Gardens. When they turn, it weakens us. And it all happens so quickly sometimes that it’s out of our control. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We’re already dying out as it is. The environment is changing and it affects everything; our entire way of life. Every year, fewer and fewer fairies are born, and more and more Imps are appearing.”

“That’s awful,” Penny said, her voice soft and pained, truly disturbed by all that has befallen the fairies. “Everyone should know about this,” she continued, her voice turning fierce. “If we all know, then maybe there’s something we can do to help.”

“What do you think you can do about it?” Their tone came out rather snarky, but Pip didn’t intend it to. Still, Penny sensed it, and her cheeks flushed slightly as she averted her gaze.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought, if there was something, we would help.”

“I don’t know what can be done about it,” Pip said.

“Maybe that’s why Rasmodious asked you to come back,” Penny said, brightening. She turned and met Pip’s gaze. “There must be some way you can help.” Pip’s mouth opened to inform Penny of how wrong she was, but Penny continued on excitedly. “And I’ll help you, too, in any way I can!”

Pip’s lips pulled into a smile. Penny wasn’t like the other people they had met over the years. She was sweet, kind, caring, genuine. And it was contagious. “Maybe,” they said. “If there’s anything, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Can I ask you one more thing?”

Pip held back an exasperated sigh. “Okay.”

“You said fairies are hardly ever born in the winter,” she said. “Does that mean that sometimes there are some born in winter?”

Nothing got passed her. “Sometimes,” Pip admitted.

“How is that possible?” Penny pressed. “Does that make those fairies any different?”

Pip averted their gaze. “There is a flower that can actually thrive in winter,” they started. “Though it’s very rare. And more often than not, winter born fairies end up as Imps.”

Penny frowned. “How come?”

“Fairies are very much in tune with nature and with their relationships. Even before birth, we are connected with the other unborn fairies around us. Those we share flowers with and gardens with. Winterborn fairies have no such luxuries. The Elders care for all unborn fairies and raise them and train them, but it’s harder to raise and protect winterborn fairies. The flowers can come up anywhere and cannot always be contained in our gardens, so fairies born from them are often left unguided and on their own. We have Elders who dedicate their lives to seeking out winterborn fairies in hopes of saving them from turning to Imps, but it’s impossible to find them all before it’s too late.”

Penny grew quiet. Her brows furrowed as she processed what Pip had said. “That’s awful,” she said after a moment. She glanced at Pip. “They don’t all end up like that, do they?”

“No,” Pip said softly. “No, not all of them.”

“To be isolated like that must be very difficult,” she said. “If I can help in any way with that, I want to. I don’t want them to be alone.”

“That’s… really kind.”

“Is it?” Penny asked, meeting their gaze. “I mean, they shouldn’t be treated like outcasts just because they’re different. Everyone deserves a chance. Caring about another being shouldn’t be kind, it should just be natural.”

“Not everyone thinks that way,” Pip said.

“The fairies… they haven’t given up on the winterborn ones, have they?”

“No,” Pip said slowly. “But I think their resentment has started to grow for them.”

Penny shook her head and sighed. “I need to make sure the kids aren’t pestering Gunther,” she said quickly, turning back to the library. She paused and pointed a finger at Pip. “But I will help you in any way I can, if you will let me. Okay?” She offered them a smile. “Thanks for today.”

*****

Pip found comfort in the forest, away from the hustle and bustle of the people in town. Being with Penny and the children was more tiring than Pip expected, still, they felt glad for their budding friendship. But that wasn’t why they were hiding out in the cover of the trees. Penny’s words struck a chord in Pip. Unbeknownst to her, Pip was exactly the fairy Penny was talking about. The winterborn outcast fairy. It was true that Pip had not turned into an Imp. Pip was raised by the Elders just as all the other fairies were raised. And when they thought back to their childhood, they were just as accepted as any other fairy.

Perhaps, then, it was Pip who made themselves an outcast. It was Pip who saw them grow and excel and felt badly at their own abilities. And the more they learned about the world around them, Pip was the only one that thought badly about themselves. Sure, the Elders did pay closer attention to them at times; Pip couldn’t blame them for being cautious. But they only wanted to keep Pip from turning. They cared for Pip as they cared for every other fairy. It was Pip who assumed the worst of them. It was Pip who feared being turned to an Imp. It was Pip who left their home in the forest, left family and friends, to escape who they were.

Pip’s stomach knotted in shame. They had been so cold to everyone around them since their return to the valley. And in truth, everyone - humans and fairies alike - had been warm and welcoming, even excited to see them. People were eager to learn from them and, with the small exception of Liv, the fairies were grateful for their return. And the truth was, Liv was right; Pip only thought about themselves. Still, it didn’t seem like they had a particularly important presence on the colony. They never contributed much in the first place, which only made them feel more useless once more.

“Wallowing in self pity, I see?”

Pip stopped walking, but did not turn toward Rem.

“I heard you talking to Penny,” Rem continued. There was a hint of sadness in their voice. “Is that why you left?”

“Why do you think I left?” Pip asked carefully.

“You think we resent you,” Rem said. “You think we’re afraid that you will turn.”

Pip glanced at Rem over their shoulder. “Is it true?”

“Of course not,” Rem said, their voice hardening. “I never thought that for a second. I’m good at what I do, Pip. I’ve never raised no Imps, and I sure as the sun shines wasn’t going to let you turn.”

“You must be real proud,” Pip said, growing bitter with the pixie. “Perhaps you would be prouder if I had any reputable skills. You wanted to groom me, is that it? Make me into one of the best fairies you ever raised? Show me off like a trophy?”

“Pip -”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Pip snapped. “But you’ve got it all wrong. I left because I don’t belong here.”

“You are a fairy -”

“That doesn’t define me,” Pip hissed. “Just because I’m a fairy doesn’t mean I have to live and die by your rules. I don’t owe anyone anything, and I certainly don’t have to stay somewhere where I don’t belong.”

Rem was quiet for a moment, and when they spoke, their voice was soft. “We’re family.”

Pip immediately regretted their outburst. But in that moment, they couldn’t stand to be in Rem’s presence any longer. “We are,” Pip said softly. “And I’m grateful for you, Rem. But I’m not going to pretend to be something I’m not. If you’re so accepting of the winterborn fairy that I am, then you can accept that I’ve chosen a different path in life. It doesn’t mean I hate you, or anyone else. I just can’t be here any longer.” And with that, Pip turned away from Rem, leaving them alone in the forest.

[eponymous-rose]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E53 (March 5, 2019)

The DnDBeyond overlay has too much power in this realm.

This week’s guests are Matt Mercer and Sam Riegel.

Announcements: Talks Machina is now a podcast, published with a one-week delay. Starting tomorrow morning, TM will be re-broadcast each Wednesday morning at 9 AM Pacific. The Legend of Vox Machina Animated Special Kickstarter is through the roof at $4.7 million! More stretch goals to be added. Sam: "Every dollar that gets puts into this just goes into more animation, longer programming, more episodes.” (Also, Matt’s Twitter currently links several threads of smaller content creators’ Kickstarters, with special love for the #FundDiverseGames hashtag on Twitter.)

Time for episode 53: Cornered!

Stats: Matt has whispered to individual players 21 times this campaign, in addition to 3 reverse whispers. Sam realizes he’s not sure if he’s gotten a whisper in this campaign. Sam: “Maybe ever! DANI!” Dani: “...what do you think is my job?” Stats comes through: Sam’s gotten 5 whispers in total. Matt: “You should come play sometime.” Nott has used Mage Hand 34 times. Nott has also stolen 123 items so far.

Sam, tragically not that out of context: “What, I defiled the table by finger-banging it?”

Matt talks about the “contract of trust” between players and DMs in collaborating on backstory-centric PCs. It can be a great way to bring a player into the creative process. Matt tries to keep in mind the player’s intent while also considering unique and interesting ways to surprise them with it and have it be part of their character’s heroic journey.

Sam: “Nott is a sexual woman who can recognize a beautiful specimen, be it her species or another, and when that minotaur strutted by, with his... I don’t know, shanks? What does he ha-- what are his-- His gams? Hindquarters?” Matt: “Thirst away, guys. Apparently I know your types.” That reaction was partly Nott and partly Sam.

The “several kobolds in a trenchcoat” character was Matt having fun with breaking tropes with the “monstrous” races. He had the idea of a character who seemed like an ominous hag but had something else going on, then realized there were a lot of kobolds in the area. “What if the kobolds work for her? ...what if the kobolds are her?” Five kobolds, all with names in Matt’s notes.

If something happened to Nott, who would she consider the leader? Caduceus, probably. “Anyone but Fjord.”

The enchantment that Dairon was using was closer to Alter Self, so if she’d been unconscious, it would have faded (an illusion wouldn’t have held up as well to scrutiny for a spy). She wasn’t planning on joining the fight until Beau jumped in.

Gif of the Week: Travis getting scared by the kobolds. Matt: “I genuinely forget how much of a scaredy-cat Travis is.” They make him go first every time at haunted houses.

Nott’s given her impending reunion with Yeza a lot of thought; “it’s something she’s terrified about. There’s definitely a push-pull there.” She wants to rescue him, but she doesn’t want him to see her or have to have that painful conversation, because she’s not sure how he would react.

Matt really enjoyed being able to use Stunning Strike in the fight. He also liked the idea of having a mentor character for Beau that occasionally linked into the story; this happened to be a really good chance for an overlap, even though it was earlier than expected.

Nott still gets the “itch”, especially now that they’re back in a city. Getting the diamond back was just “It’s a shiny diamond! It’s valuable and shiny.” He points out that Nott probably doesn’t know that Jester needs that diamond for a spell, just that it seems important.

Dairon jumping into the fight was a lot of “what the fuck is Beau doing here”, along with worry for Beau getting into a big fight with dangerous people (she didn’t realize that Beau had allies with her). She didn’t have any way to communicate to Beau that Dairon losing consciousness would be so dangerous, so she realized she had to win and sort it out later.

Nott’s opinion on goblins has definitely shifted, especially after meeting Zorth. “I think she’s still anti-goblin, but is learning there is a spectrum of goblins from bad to not-so-bad. No good ones yet.”

Fan Art of the Week: The M9 with flowers everywhere.

Matt hadn’t practiced Madame Musk’s character voice in advance, and... that happened based on his notes. Sam points out that Matt’s been on fire with his NPCs lately. Matt: “Yeah, man, monster city. This is a good place to get weird.”

Sam: “I think, deep down, that Nott thinks she and Fjord aren’t that different, and that bothers her. I think she and Fjord are too similar.”

Search for Grog Spoilers Follow!!!

What’s Matt missed most about DMing for Vox Machina? “I miss how deeply steeped the camaraderie was.” He points out that the Mighty Nein are starting to get into that territory, just as VM did early on. “By the end of the campaign of Vox Machina, they were such a deep-rooted family. There’s something so beautiful about that, warm and comfort food-esque.” Brian points out that this kind of closeness really raises the stakes.

Matt emphatically did not miss the level 20 combat after being out of practice for a year. Fun, but definitely complicated. “Levels 3-15 are my golden levels in D&D.”

Matt comments on Sam and the mug: “Jesus Christ, Sam, what the fuck were you thinking?!” It had been sitting on the set since campaign one ended. Brian points out that they had to move it because it smelled so bad. There were solid pieces in there. 

The Scotch Incident is brought up again. Matt dies a little inside.

Matt still marvels at the Deck of Many Things pull. “We were just stepping into the sunsetting of the campaign, and that motherfucker...” 

“The more I was prepping it, the more I was like, ‘Travis, what the fuck did you do?’”

The Search for Bob is now a thing that’s happening. Matt has a lot that he had to trim from the one-shot for time. Sam: “I’m excited to, along the Search for Bob, trigger something else.”

Brian: “Just one Vox Machina one-shot a month, that’s all we ask.” Matt, strained: “You’re going to kill me.”

Sam missed singing the inspirations so much. “Maybe next campaign I’ll be some other sort of singer or something. The whole night felt like going back home.”

Sam goes on a tangent about what a great singer Matt is. “If he could sing every episode, that would make me happy.”

Matt decided on Percy actually losing his arm weeks before the show. “It’s fun to fuck with them, and because it was already established in a joking matter, I wanted to make them eat their words.”

Sam points out that he’s never seen Matt do anything like that before. “Does not fit in this world. But he’s doing this anyway. He’s just a goofball like us!”

It was always Matt’s plan to take away spell components as a unique challenge, but part of him just wanted a bit of a chance for Travis to play as Grog for a bit once they woke him up.

Sam: “Scanlan’s gotta Scan. Put that on a... t-shirt?” Brian: “Put it on a thong.”